He looked at Roxie.
Saw her watching him, face devoid of even a hint of a smile.
No.
Probably not.
He closed his eyes and tried-without much success-to make his mind blank. But he couldn’t stop thinking. About all of it. The terror. The disconnection from his own life. All those dead bodies. So he opened his eyes again and watched the road ahead. Because he knew the truth.
There would never be any escaping the horror surrounding him.
It was too late to turn away.
Too late to run or make a different choice.
Too fucking late all around.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
March 20
Zeb tied the girl to the motel-room bed and went into the bathroom. He shut the door, went over to the toilet, and flipped the seat up. Moments later he had his cock out and was pumping the engorged organ furiously with his fist. He closed his eyes and imagined it was the girl’s mouth on him. The vivid image made him groan and inside of a minute he was shooting thick ropes of come into the toilet water. He stood there panting for a time and stared at the floating discharge. The ejaculate looked like strands of cheap pearls drifting in water. He groaned again and a feeling of intense relief flooded through him.
Never in his adult life had he experienced a level of frustration even close to what he had been dealing with the past few days, not even during his years in the institution, locked up for so long in that little room. That had been easy compared to the effort required to keep his hands off the girl.
He flipped the toilet seat down, letting it bang shut, and pushed the flush handle. A gurgle of rushing water carried his spilled seed away. He shuffled over to the sink and stared at his reflection in the mirror mounted above it. His long hair was gone. The girl had cut it for him last night, after they’d cut her hair into that bob style and dyed it an unnatural shade of bright red. He had been wary of trusting the task to her, but Lulu had insisted. The scissors were long and sharp, a potentially very effective weapon. He had felt vulnerable, another unfamiliar and unpleasant experience. But he wasn’t in the habit of disobeying Lulu, and, as usual, she had been right. The girl did not attack him. And that was a hard thing to figure out. She could easily have inflicted a very severe wound, perhaps even killed him. So why hadn’t she?
“I told you, Zeb. She’s like you. Deep down, she knows it.”
There was a new image in the mirror. Lulu had materialized and was standing a few feet directly behind him. He turned and faced her, folding his arms across his chest and leaning his butt against the edge of the sink. “Yeah, you keep saying that. But so far I haven’t seen any proof.”
Lulu smiled. “You will, soon enough.”
This was another thing he was having some trouble accepting. Until yesterday, Lulu had always been a disembodied voice in his head. Completely real, he knew, but there had never been any hint of a physical component to her existence. Until she appeared out of thin air last night, after the girl had drifted off to sleep. That had spooked him. Zeb had never been genuinely scared of anything in his entire adult life, but that had done it. One moment he was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette and just thinking, and then-poof!-there she was.
Lulu was a dead ringer for Adrienne Barbeau, an actress he remembered from low-budget movies he’d seen on cable when he was young. She wore a tiny blue bikini and a necklace of withered human ears. The attire was bizarre, but it was her uncanny resemblance to the actress that initially made him think she was a hallucination. So, acting on the theory that no hallucination would have physical substance, he’d grabbed one of her large breasts. It had felt real enough-and pleasingly pliable-beneath his probing fingers. The subsequent stinging slap across his face had felt just as real.
She looked exactly the same as she had last night, except now she wore a red bikini instead of a blue one.
“You really think she wants to kill?”
“She killed Clyde, didn’t she?”
Zeb’s expression darkened. “Yeah. In self-defense. Ain’t the same thing as what you’re sayin’. I gave her a chance to prove herself and she couldn’t do it.”
Lulu made a clucking sound and shook her head. “It’s because you picked the wrong kind of victim. Find her someone she’d like to kill and she’ll do it. She’ll do it and she’ll love it. You’ll see. And then you’ll have a new partner, a better one.”
Zeb frowned. “Wasn’t nothin’ wrong with Clyde. He was my friend.”
“He was a nasty, disgusting piece of shit.”
“So? Most folks would say the same about me.”
Lulu laughed. “And they’d be right. You fuck corpses and eat human flesh. You are the very definition of disgusting, Zeb. But there’s a difference. Clyde wasn’t special. You are. And so is that girl.”
“That’s another thing you keep saying that I don’t get. Special how?”
Lulu smiled again. “That’s not for me to say yet. Some things you need to figure out on your own. It’ll all become clear in time.”
“I really want to fuck her.”
Lulu’s smile vanished. “You can’t.”
“Why not?”
She approached him and jabbed a finger against his chest, the long nail pricking his skin. “Shut up about this, Zebulon. The girl is special. That’s all you need to know. You will not force yourself on her.”
“What if I just can’t help myself?”
Lulu reached up and clamped her hand around his throat. She forced him to his knees with astonishing ease and bent down close to him. Her hand was like a band of iron around his throat, and he struggled for breath as she spoke. “If you violate her, I will punish you. And then I’ll leave you. You will never see me or hear my voice again. I’ll be gone forever and you will never be the same.”
She let go of his throat.
Zeb gagged and struggled to draw in breath. He got to his feet and managed to croak out an apology: “I’m…sorry.”
Lulu’s expression remained dark. “Not as sorry as you will be if you disobey me.”
Then she was gone, the space where she’d been occupied only by air now. He thought about what she’d said and tried to imagine life without Lulu. The prospect terrified him.
So that was that. The girl was off-limits. Permanently.
Christ. He hoped like hell Lulu was telling the truth about her.
Hoped she was worth all this struggle and pain.
The crazy man was talking to himself again. Well, talking to Lulu. Which amounted to the same thing, as Lulu clearly originated from somewhere inside his fucked-up brain. She had almost gotten used to the strange one-sided conversations, but this time there was a new wrinkle. She was hearing both sides of the exchange. One part of it was in his usual gruff speaking voice, which normally was the only part she would hear, with Lulu’s replies presumably only being audible inside his head. But now she was hearing the other side of the conversation too, a higher-pitched, almost squeaky voice. It was Zeb talking, but he was trying to make Lulu’s contributions sound like they were actually being uttered by a woman. Upon hearing this, Julie had to suppress a giggle fit. It was so incredibly absurd. But then he said something that removed any trace of humor from the situation.
I really want to fuck her.
By which he meant rape. Fucking was something you did with a willing partner. And while she might well be open to engaging in a lot of twisted activities, she knew for a fact she would never give herself to the creepy old necrophiliac willingly. The way he looked at her most of the time never failed to chill her. Those dead eyes made her feel like she had a million invisible bugs crawling all over her body. Especially when he’d undress her and stare at her for a while, as he’d done prior to going into the bathroom. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out what he’d been doing in there prior to Lulu’s arrival.