Emily hurried after her. She slowed a bit as she came up alongside Zoe, matching her stride for stride. “Remember that night in the hotel room?”
Zoe didn’t say anything.
Emily laughed. “You sure didn’t have any inhibitions that night. I guess the coke helped loosen you up. I’ve still got some, you know.”
“I don’t care.”
“Liar.”
The dune and the little bridge beyond were coming up fast. Anxious to be back inside and away from Emily’s discomforting insinuations, she picked up her pace to trudge up the grassy dune.
Emily gave her a little sideways shove as they reached the bridge and moved into the narrow space ahead of her.
Zoe glared at her as she followed her onto the bridge. “Hey! What the fuck was that?”
Emily laughed and kept moving. She didn’t respond.
Zoe’s anger surged. “Seriously, that was really fucking rude. What’s your problem?”
Even as she asked the question, Zoe figured she knew the answer. Emily wasn’t used to having her advances spurned. She was very self-centered and couldn’t abide rejection in any form. Some of Zoe’s anger subsided as she realized it was at least partly her fault. A lot of her recent behavior had laid the groundwork for situations like this. If she’d always rejected Emily’s amorous overtures, this wouldn’t be happening now.
“I’m sorry.”
Emily stopped at the far end of the bridge and turned to face her. She had moved fast and was some twenty yards ahead of where Zoe stood. Her figure was a dark outline in the dim moonlight. “Really?”
Zoe stopped five feet away from her. “Yeah.”
Emily smiled. “Wanna go back down to the beach?”
“No.”
Emily’s smile vanished. “Whatever.”
She turned away from her again and stepped off the bridge, but she moved slower as she continued down the dune to the gate at the back of the fence. Emily opened it and they stepped inside. Zoe paused inside the gate to wash the sand off her feet with the hose. Emily lingered, waiting for her. It struck her as passing strange. She sensed their conversation was over. There was no more to say on the subject of their endangered friendship until later. But Emily seemed to want to stick close anyway. Whatever. It didn’t matter. She’d head back to her own room once they were back inside. No way she’d want to hang around upstairs with Chuck, not after this afternoon’s debacle.
Zoe shut the hose off and started across the deck, angling toward the staircase leading up to the balcony.
Emily followed, hanging close, almost on her heels.
Zoe glanced over her shoulder at the other girl.
She frowned.
Emily was smiling, but her eyes looked hard, malevolent.
Weird.
She started up the stairs and heard the slap of Emily’s sandals on the stairs beneath her. The first little flutter of alarm hit her as she glanced down and again saw that same vaguely evil expression. But that was forgotten as they reached the balcony and Zoe saw the broken shards of glass sprayed across the wooden beams. An accident, she assumed. But why hadn’t someone cleaned it up? This could be dangerous. She wasn’t wearing shoes or sandals and would have to-
“zoe! run!”
Zoe frowned again.
Chuck?
She heard pain in that voice. And terror. Something was horribly wrong here. She heard something else in the house. A whimper. A female sound. More evidence of something very bad happening. Then terrible, gleeful laughter. The laughter of a sadist. Followed by a scream.
Zoe moved back a step.
And she felt a hand at the small of her back.
The hand shoved her forward. She cried out as broken glass slashed at the soles of her bare feet. Emily grabbed her by an arm and wrenched her toward the space formerly occupied by a large pane of glass.
A glimpse of hell made her weak in the knees.
Emily shoved her again. Shards of glass still embedded in the door frame ripped at her flesh as she flew through the empty space and crashed to the hardwood floor. She rolled onto her side and stared straight up at Chuck. His face was streaked with tears. His mouth moved as he tried to speak, but he couldn’t force the words out.
Oh, Chuck…
She felt a foot on her shoulder. It pressed down, forcing her to lie flat on her back again. She looked up and saw a familiar face above her. Familiar, but not the face of someone she knew. It was her. She looked different, but it was definitely her. The girl Chuck had picked on at the coffee shop.
The killer.
Missy Wallace grinned. “Glad you could join us, Zoe. Now we can finally get this party started.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
March 27
Julie held her hand a few inches over the burner. Heat warmed her palm as the metal coil began to glow a bright red. The kitchen was spacious and modern, with an island and lots of gleaming fixtures. To the left of the stove was a counter crowded with various snack foods. Bags of chips and boxes of cookies, among other things. She reached into an open bag of tortilla chips and plucked one out, popping it in her mouth and savoring the salty taste. She was tempted to gobble down the whole bag. There hadn’t been a lot of opportunities to eat since yesterday. The pantry and fridge in that old guy’s home had been pretty bare. She’d been kind of irritated about that and hadn’t felt at all bad about sawing his ear off.
Her palm was hot now.
The big hunting knife was on the counter. She picked it up and placed the blade across the glowing burner coil. Someone screamed in the living room. A sound of unimaginable agony. Missy was probably doing something pretty interesting to one of the college kids. It wouldn’t be Rob. He never participated. She turned away from the stove and saw him standing several feet away from the action.
He sure looked nervous.
Maybe she could calm him down.
Leaving the knife on the burner, she walked into the living room. “Hey, uh…Missy?”
Missy paused in the act of torturing the one called Joe with a pair of pliers and looked at her. “Yeah?”
“Can I borrow Rob for a few minutes?”
Rob stopped staring at the floor long enough to look up and frown.
Missy clamped the pliers around one of Joe’s fingers again. “Sure.”
Julie took Rob by the hand and began to drag him out of the living room and down the hallway toward the master bedroom. Once they were in the room, she removed her clothes and stretched her naked body across the luxuriant bed.
“Fuck me, Rob.”
Rob glanced at the open door. Julie could see the backs of the people tied to the chairs from her vantage point. Rob wiped his mouth with a trembling hand and looked at her. “Shouldn’t we close that?”
“No.”
Rob sighed.
“I want to hear the screams clear as a bell. It’ll make it hotter.”
The look on Rob’s face was priceless. She saw horror and disgust. And fear. He was afraid of her. But not too afraid, apparently.
He began to unbutton his shirt.
The orgasmic screams emerging from the master bedroom disturbed Annalisa almost as much as anything else that had happened so far. How could anyone sane pause in the midst of committing atrocities to screw?
The answer to that was obvious.
These people weren’t sane. They were vicious and cruel. They derived great pleasure from acts of sadism. Well, the two girls did. Their behavior bothered the guy, she could tell. But his presence made him equally complicit. And maybe he wasn’t a sadist, but he was clearly twisted in his own way. He was screwing a young girl’s brains out while listening to people out here scream and cry. He was just as sick as his female companions. The only real difference was his apparent cowardice.
These people meant to kill them all. She had no illusions about that. This was the last night of her life. It scared her. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to hurt like Joe was hurting now. Her only comfort now was her firm belief in an afterlife. She was smarter than the average person. Her grades and IQ scores confirmed that. A lot of smart people didn’t believe there was anything beyond this life, but her faith in something bigger was strong and came from a place of calm, even in the face of all this horror. She would exist somewhere else in some form after her life here was over. She only hoped Sean would be there with her.