Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,62

of her weary muscles. Her eyelids drooped, batted, then closed. She wondered if any of those spiders that had spun the webs above her might crawl into her hair or her ears while she slept. However, she didn’t really care one way or another. She was too tired, too comfortable. She would wake in the morning and it would be bright and sunny and warm outside. She would find her way to the highway. She would wave down a passing car. She would find everyone waiting for her at the police station or the hospital. The cops would have arrested Cleavon and his brothers during the night, and Mandy and Jeff and the others would return to New York City, and everything would be back to how it had been before. They would joke about what happened, laughing at how Cleavon had said he was as country as a baked bean sandwich. They would joke and laugh at all of this because it would be behind them.

Mandy heard a scuffling noise outside the bus. She wanted to ignore it, she likely would have, if she didn’t hear it a second time. It sounded very close. It sounded like footsteps—

Mandy hauled herself out of the black pool of sleep she had been sinking into. Wide awake, she lay on the floor of the school bus, unmoving, listening. She heard nothing. Had she imagined the scuffling noise? Or had Cleavon and his brothers found her?

Pulse pounding in her ears, she eased herself into a crouch. She wanted to run, bolt out of the bus, into the trees. But she was too afraid to do that, too afraid Cleavon would be waiting for her in the night.

Maybe they didn’t know she was there? she thought. Maybe if she remained quiet, they would move on, leave her alone?

Mandy raised her head to peek out the nearest window. A strong wind was blowing, bending the saplings and rattling the branches of the larger trees. She didn’t see anyone. Nevertheless, that didn’t mean she was alone. It was dark, she couldn’t see far—

Footsteps again, now on the other side of the bus.

Mandy yelped in surprise and fear and bumped backward into the bus’s wall panel. A commotion sounded outside. She shot to her feet, ready to run, even as she glimpsed the powerful hindquarters of a deer bounding away into the darkness.

Mandy’s hand went to her chest, and she forced the trapped breath from her lungs. “My God,” she whispered to herself.

She sat back down, pulled her knees to her chest once more, and rocked back and forth, wanting the night to be over, wanting morning to arrive, wanting to leave the miserable forest.

Reluctantly she glanced at her wristwatch and discovered it was still as early as she’d dreaded, 11:42 p.m., leaving her another six or seven hours until dawn broke.

CHAPTER 20

“Wanna play?”

Childs Play (1988)

Cherry lay in the corner of the smelly room, hot, dizzy, nauseous, her hands and ankles bound with coarse rope. The giant named Earl kept guard less than ten feet away, lounging in a ratty upholstered armchair, farting and burping and mumbling to himself as he drank beer and watched television. He didn’t know she was conscious, and she wanted to keep it that way. Who knew what he would do to her? He and his brothers were monsters. He had nearly killed her.

Everything that had followed her beating in the forest was blurry and muddled in her mind, like a long-ago memory, or a vague dream. Earl had carried her back to where Jeff and Austin both lay unconscious on the ground. Shouting followed, then talking, then nothing for a while, then a vehicle arrived, and there was more talking. Then Earl was carrying her once again. She was flung over one shoulder, Austin over the other.

Finally she lost consciousness, and when she came around a few minutes ago, she was dumped here in the corner of the smelly room, bound by rope, in more pain than she’d ever been in her life.

She didn’t remember Earl kicking her in the face, but he must have, because her jaw was swollen. Her probing tongue had found several gummy gaps where her teeth had once been. And her chest, God, that’s where she hurt the most. Each breath was torturous, as if her lungs were encased in an iron maiden with nowhere to expand but into razor-sharp points.

Cherry couldn’t know for certain why Cleavon and his brothers had attacked them, but she had