Claire’s trembling thighs.
He lifted his disbelieving stare and trapped Claire in his freezing emerald eyes once more. ‘What the fuck’s this?’ he snapped. ‘Where’s your fucking dick?’
Claire tried to answer him but couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say. What in the fuck could she say at this point? The boy was clearly insane, and all she could do now was pray. In her mind, the religious mantra she’d spent countless hours repeating in catechism class echoed over and over again:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deaths.
‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ the boy said after a long moment, dropping his stare between Claire’s thighs again and continuing to study her genitalia with great interest. ‘I guess you’re not a boy after all, huh? I guess you were telling me the truth.’
Shaking his head in confusion, the boy slid Claire’s shorts back up over her naked lower half before he turned away and teetered on his three-inch heels over to the side of beef into which he’d flung the cleaver a moment earlier. Working out the blade with a few hard back-and-forth tugs, he then walked back over to Claire and slipped the sharp metal through the thin ropes restraining her wrists and ankles. Then he put his dress back on and went over into the corner of the room.
He tossed Claire a brand-new T-shirt from a cardboard box full of them and kicked her socks and shoes over to her feet. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. ‘Just get dressed and get the fuck out of here. I need some time to think. This wasn’t what I was expecting at all.’
Claire did as she was told, hastily pulling the T-shirt over her head and balling up her socks in an effort to save time. Cramming her bare feet into her beat-up Keds, she was halfway out of the freezer when the boy suddenly sprang forward and yanked her backward by her hair, jerking forcefully enough to temporarily lift her newly re-sneakered feet off the slippery metal floor. The roots of her hair screamed as though they were on fire. More tears of pain and fear flooded into her eyes.
‘Wait just one goddamn minute, there,’ the boy said, still holding Claire backward by her hair and staring down hard into her eyes. ‘You’re not going to tell anybody about this, are you? You can never tell.’
Claire looked up at the boy and shook her head the best she could in his viselike grip, too terrified to even whimper the wrong way, much less provide him with an incorrect answer. And it was the truth. Jaded as she was, Claire Bishop wasn’t the only one who life owed. Apparently, there were some fates in this life worse than death. Some fates in this life worse than living in a shitty third-floor walk-up with an uncaring mother and an alcoholic child molester who was constantly copping ‘accidental’ feels whenever your mother was away at work.
‘No, I’m not,’ Claire said; choking out the words around the jagged lump of fear lodged in her throat. ‘I’ll never tell anyone, I swear it.’
And Claire Bishop never did tell anybody – not even when she grew up and got married and had kids of her own. At that exact moment, she didn’t know she’d live to regret that decision one day. Regret it with her whole heart and mind and body and soul. Because the decision Claire made in the freezer that day would wind up costing more than half a dozen innocent people their lives.
Still – selfish as it sounded – at least she hadn’t been one of them.
CHAPTER 5
The overwhelming blackness of Dana’s nightmare morphed first into a hazy gray, then pure white, and finally a blinding flash of vibrant colours that hurt her brain so badly it threatened to bring on a seizure.
Dana squinted hard against the disorienting visual onslaught, feeling more confused than she’d ever felt in her entire life. Nothing made sense to her. Nothing had ever made sense to her. Nothing would ever make sense to her again.
As she gradually established her bearings, a soul-freezing chill passed through her body, directly through her heart. Shocked, she watched as the colours in her world transformed again into a grainy black-and-white, like an old-time newsreel where everything jumped around and flickered, as