I let my left hand go limp and Tabor inched it up his thigh. That was where I stabbed him.
“You bitch!” he screamed.
He was up and out the door before I could react and wedge something in it. It didn’t snap closed automatically, because of the drift of the snow. But it was on some kind of spring, and it began rapidly to eat the column of paler darkness. Shucking my remaining ski, I jumped to my feet and tried to jam it into the door. I pushed my shoulder against it. It must have been six inches thick. I could hear Tabor outside, swearing and muttering as he made for the car I’d evidently missed.
He couldn’t have been hurt too badly, not unless I got lucky and hit an artery.
I kneeled near the doorway trying to get my hands around the edge of the door before it slammed. But I was too slow, and I fell away in defeat. At least Tabor hadn’t been able to turn on some engine or propane or whatever he’d said he had. Maybe he never had anything at all.
All I had to do was bundle up … and wait. I collapsed back, pushing myself away from the door that was colder than the meadow outside.
Then I heard the clank and slither, behind me. I smelled the foulness in the air—an animal smell that had nothing to do with cars or gas.
It was quicker than I was.
I stood, but before I could jump to one side, it sprang and jerked me down, by my shoulder and my hair.
24
ZOMBIE ANGEL
“Bear? Did I hurt you? I couldn’t let you leave without me. I should have let you go …”
I was crying before I could speak. I reached out with both hands to pull her to me. In the darkness, we fell on some kind of thin rug. I held my Juliet, what there was left of her. For minutes, that was enough. She stank of dirty hair and wounds and messes that had never been cleaned.
I’m a pristine person. I held her closer. I wouldn’t have cared if she were radioactive.
Finally I whispered “Is it really you?”
“It’s really me. Bear, I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry. No. Don’t be sorry. Did he hurt you?”
“I’m not hurt. I did everything wrong. I did everything wrong.”
“You’ve been here all this time?”
“Since the night I threw boiling water on him in his penthouse. I convinced him I wanted to make tea … he thought I still believed him, about Bolivia. If I didn’t go, he said he would wait until you were out driving with Angela, and then—”
“I know.”
“So I took a hot shower … and I let the towel fall off around me …” She breathed in, and I could hear the rattling in her chest. She was sick. But she would get better. I willed it so. “That makes me want to throw up now. Oh, Allie!”
“It’s okay, Juliet. It’s okay! I promise. I’m here now.”
“He was always going to bring me here. He had it all fitted out for me. My mattress where he rapes me. The hole in the pipe where I have to hang onto a strap while I pee. The bowls for the water and soup he pushes in here with a pole I can’t grab. Just bowls of water and soup. Like a dog. No spoons. No … toothbrush. I used soap on a rag to wash my mouth. And this.” She put my hand around the slender length of steel links around her waist. It was fitted with a harness of padded leather, so that the chain wouldn’t hurt her. Or ever let her go beyond its length.
I reached up for my headlamp. No luck. It was somewhere on the ground outside.
But I had my Maglite. Throwing the pack on the floor, I rummaged for it, and pulled it out. My heart galloping, I turned it on. Juliet blinked and shied. Her blonde hair had grown out, chin length, with rusty maroon tips where the dye job had been. No one had ever given her a comb. Her face was covered with scrapes. There were sores above her upper lip. She was unspeakably befouled, grimy and emaciated. But it was Juliet, the real Juliet. I wished I could send my thoughts to Juliet’s mother. Be at peace. Hold on. I’m bringing her home. Juliet smiled. All her perfect teeth, undamaged by more than two months in this prison, gleamed. That body was never hers. Whose was it? Dr. Stephen had lied. Somehow, someone had matched samples of Juliet’s tissue with a girl who died, another way. Dr. Stephen knew about his son.
Rage boiled inside me, overcoming fear. He knew, and he knew this place was here. Dr. Stephen Tabor, the Iron County Medical Examiner, and with Dr. Andrew the leading authority of XP research in the world, knew that the body we buried wasn’t the daughter of the Iron County Sheriff.
Garrett Tabor could not let us out of here.
What was he going to do?
I had her, here, alive.
For how long?
An odd disconnect between the real and the movie version billowed forth in the room.
My best friend, my heart, my other soul—and more, the key to the ultimate proof of all Garrett Tabor’s concealed atrocities, to Dr. Stephen’s lies about the poor nameless girl whose ashes we scattered as Juliet’s—was right here. Trapped. I was dumbfounded, numb. How could we escape? The ghost of me, the younger me, the Allie-Bear-me, leaped from my Alexis-planful-body and back again. She needed me now. I needed to think of a way out.
“Here is hot tea with honey,” I said. I watched as Juliet’s filthy hands grasped the thermos. Greedily, she drank. “Probably not so fast.”
“Can’t help it,” she gasped. “He starved me. His plan was my periods would stop, but he didn’t want to kill me.” She turned her big, upside-down blue eyes on me. “Allie. Is my mother …?”
“She’s okay, Juliet. She’s not okay. But she can get better. Tommy, too.” I paused, about to unwrap the sandwich. “Can you hear what’s going on out there?”
“You can. If he started his truck, we would have heard it.”
“So he’s coming back?”
“How bad did you hurt him?”
I thought for a moment. My knife slid deep into his flesh, but had I been able to damage muscle? Vein?
“He could be doing first aid on himself,” Juliet said softly. “He’s not worried that we’ll get out of here. There’s no way out of here. That door is flush in the wall. If I lie down on my stomach, I can almost touch the door. But not completely.”
“How could a nurse let you get so sick?”
“He likes me this way. He likes me to depend on him. He would wash me before he did things to me. And there’s a medical box in here. He would sometimes fix them up after he raped them. He brought them here, and he set up a light, so they could see me.”
“Who?”
“The girls.”
I shuddered. I forced myself to repeat the word. “Girls.”
“Not little girls. Not like Angela, but like us. Or a little younger. Or a little older.” Scuttling back, Juliet began to pull small bits of paper from a crack in the wall. “He left a pencil here once. I wrote everything down. I don’t know if anyone can ever read it. I made marks for every day. I thought of you every day. And every time I knew there was a girl. Five of them. One of them had a baby of her own. She told me when he left us here alone here in the dark. When he wanted me to sleep, he fed me pudding with drugs in it. I ate it because I was too hungry to refuse, even though I could smell something in it. I didn’t care if he was poisoning me, even. When I woke up, that woman with the baby, she was gone.”
“Where were they from?”
“He picked them up in nightclubs in the Twin Cities. He picked them up at ski resorts. The woman with the baby was the oldest, almost his age. She … they’re dead, Bear.”
“How do you know?”
“I said, I can hear things from upstairs and outside. A little. Too much.” Juliet breathed in. Again, that horrible rattling. She had pneumonia. “Do you think you hurt him bad?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat quietly. I swung the light around the room. There was a steel sink and a pile of clean rags. I walked over and stuffed one against the faucet, but when I turned it on, there was an enormous banging in the pipes as the water burst out.
“What if he hears that?” I whispered,
leaping across the room to huddle with Juliet.
“There’s nothing we can do. He’ll either come back or he won’t.”
“What was he talking about, gas?”
Juliet pointed to a propane cylinder, lying on its side, and a plastic red jug of gasoline.
“He said he would turn that on, and we’d die from the fumes. I didn’t believe him because the cold gets in here. It’s not airtight in here. If he set fire to it, he’d burn down his whole place. So I didn’t believe him.” She lifted a trembling torn nail to her lip. I pulled it down and began gently to wash her face. “I hope you hurt him enough that he doesn’t come back.”
I remembered then that I had the big flat-head screwdriver.
Quickly, I studied the way the door opened … in, and from left to right. There would be plenty of room for me behind the door if Tabor opened it. He wouldn’t expect me to have another weapon. The screwdriver was actually a screwdriver set, with a bunch of different heads in the handle. The handle probably weighed three pounds. “Don’t worry,” I said. “If he opens the door …” I held up the screwdriver. “I won’t stop hitting him.” Juliet nodded. I saw her eyes swivel toward the door. “Were the phone messages from you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “The first night.”
“You screamed.”
“When I screamed, it was because he burned me.” She pulled up the loose cuffs of the hospital scrubs she wore over waffle cloth long underwear that must once have been light blue. Then, she held out her arms. There, I could see two identical scars striped along her biceps. “He used an art tool. Like you have when you’re a little kid with a wood-burning set.”
I winced. Juliet lay against me, her breathing a loud wheeze, and began to talk. She talked about hearing music and laughter and the snap of high heels on the floors above. Then thumps too loud to be anything except someone falling. Sharp and broken screams. Muffled sounds of something striking flesh. She told me about Garrett Tabor’s hammer, a special mallet covered in padded leather: he never liked a mess. I broke my sandwich up into bits and fed her small chunks until she said she couldn’t hold anymore. Juliet couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds: at her biggest, Juliet, who was only five foot two, weighed a hundred and five. Without realizing I was doing it, I was rocking her, as I once rocked Angela.
“It’s okay now. We’re going to get out. Either way and whatever happens, we’re going to get out. Gideon gave me his truck. That’s how I got here.”
“How did you find it?”
“Gid sold him this land. He talked about seeing him here with girls. Last night, I didn’t think I would find you …” Had I? Had I thought I would find at least proof that she was truly dead or alive? “I thought I could find something that would nail him forever. So I was going to pull Gid’s truck off the road, but it got stuck. I skied up. He grabbed me.”
“So Gideon knows you’re here.”
“Not that I’m here. He knows I have his truck.”
“So … sometime. Soon.”
A thought was pinwheeling around the back of my head. What if Tabor just didn’t care? What if he got a bandage on and was ready to take off? What if he came back in here and didn’t give a damn what happened to this house? What if he planned to spread the gas around and throw a match in? He’d be on a plane by the time the fire was out. Juliet and I wouldn’t live through it. If he was as smart as I thought he was, if he had that nearly supernatural ability to derive the scene and to plan ahead, he probably had money cached in places. He probably had other identities, passports. It wasn’t hard to get another passport, if you got the birth certificate of a baby who had been born around the time you were born. It didn’t even matter if the baby had died. You could go to a cemetery and pick out a new person to be. I would have to fight him with whatever I had, but he already knew I had a knife. I walked over and picked up the propane cylinder. A piece of that in the face and he’d go down. I would use whatever it took. All I needed was a little warning. And a whole lifetime’s worth of courage.
“It would be better if we got out of here fast.”
“Look,” Juliet said. “It’s morning. You can see a line of light.” She was right. There was a seam at the edge of the door that wasn’t quite tight. If the “chalet” was under the brow of the mountain, on the south slope, then the sun was already up on the other side. I pulled out my non-viable phone. It was shortly before seven in the morning. How long had I been in this place? Three hours or more?
“If he hasn’t come back by now …”
At that moment, a big motor roared. There was a sharp shout, then a babble of voices, all shouting. We heard the muffled sound of running. Something smacked hard against the door. Backing against the far wall, Juliet and I took refuge under my blanket. I inhaled the smell of Jackie’s chlorine-free, corrosive-chemical-free detergent, as though it could bring my mother to me through the molecules on the fabric she had touched.
Then there was an amplified shout. I heard the word “Stop!” and then again, “Stop!”
Then shots.
Three shots.
Someone was banging on the door.
“Open up! Open up! Federal officers!”
“We can’t open the door!” Throwing off the blanket, I ran to the other side of the thick metal barrier. “This is Allie Kim. I am in here, and you can’t open this door without warning me. I have XP. Juliet Sirocco is alive. She is in here with me. She has XP.”
“Allie?” said a familiar voice, a woman’s voice. “Hang on. Hang on.”
We heard the approach of the sirens, then booted running feet. Many dozens of feet.
“I’m going to come in, Allie. With the firefighters. You stay covered. They’re going to use a blowtorch on this lock. I’ll bring in protective gear for you and Juliet, and the ambulances will have blackouts for you.” The voice said, “Move him.”
I fumbled for my sunglasses and wrapped my scarf around my face. I pulled my hat and gloves on over my hair, reaching out to cover Juliet with her filthy sleeping bag and the blanket I’d brought from my house.
When the door fell open, in the small seconds it took before the paramedics covered me, I saw the black glisten of blood on the dusting of snow outside the door and Garrett Tabor, facedown a few feet away against the wall. The back of his parka was pristine, but the ground below his was soaked.
In the other direction, medics were bent over a second still form. Jeans. The orange and blue of a Chicago Bears caped throwback jacket.
The doors slapped shut
“Where is he?”
“He won’t ever hurt you again,” said my doctor, Bonnie. What the hell was Bonnie doing in the ambulance with me? “He won’t ever hurt anyone again, Allie. He’s dead.”
“Where’s Rob?” I said then. “I meant, was that Rob?”
“The medics have him, honey.”
I screamed, “It’s light outside!”
Bonnie tapped the window between the back and the driver. She said, “Go.”
25
IN THE END
Why people at the hospital insisted on examining me, I had no idea.
I was fine. I was never better.
All I wanted was to get to Rob, to make sure he wasn’t burned, and to find out about Juliet. I wanted to make sure that my mother called Tommy and Ginny.
What I didn’t get was that there was something much larger going on all around me, something I couldn’t quite make sense of.
My mother was waiting for the ambulance and ran next to the rolling cot they insisted on putting me on. “Mom, I’m not hurt!” I said.
“I know.”
“I’m not even cold.”
“I know,” she said. “You were right all along. Allie, you were right and you didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me about him.”
“He threatened you and Angie.”
My mother held me close against her. “He threatened my little girl. You. I’m glad he’s dead, Allie. He might have gotten a
way. He might have gotten out of prison. I’m glad he’s dead and in Hell. Oh, Allie. I can’t believe you went through this alone.”
With my mother beside me, a doctor and two nurses whisked me into a darkroom.
I said, “Does Tommy know?”
“Yes,” Jackie said, smoothing my hair. “Yes. Tommy knows. Ginny and Tommy are here with her.”
“Is she dying?”
“No,” Jackie said. “I looked at her myself, sweetheart. She’s malnourished and she might have bronchitis. She’s fine, Allie. She’s fine. You saved her. Rob …”
“Rob?”
“Rob saved her,” my mom said.
“Where is Rob now? Mom?”
Bonnie entered the examining room. She exchanged a glance with my mother. I frowned. She was dressed in a long, dark green padded coat, brown boots, and an olive-green suit.
“Who killed Garrett Tabor?” I said to her.
“I did,” Bonnie told me quietly.
“Where’s your gun?” I said.
“In my locker. I don’t carry it in the hospital.”
“I thought you always had to be ready. Semper fi.”
“I’m not a Marine, Allie.”
“You’re something.”
Her face softened. “I’m retired from the Air Force. I went to medical school in the Air Force. I was recruited by the bureau, by the FBI, while I was in the Air Force. Willingly. I wanted to go after guys like Tabor. I trained in psychiatry as well as general medicine. And I was an abused wife. My husband was a good dad. He was a horrible husband.”
As to the answer to the big question—why Bonnie hadn’t told me—of course, I knew. I wasn’t a Navy Seal. If I had known that Bonnie was an FBI agent, and Garrett Tabor had threatened me, or Rob, I’d have sung like a canary, the way they say in the old movies.
“You were safer not knowing. Allie, I had no idea what would happen tonight. I’d been trying to track Tabor to wherever he hid things for a long time. That was why I came to Iron Harbor from Chicago last year. That was why I came to work at the clinic, and at the medical examiner’s office.”