Galt. Mark. The dean. Frenchie. The interception of fifty plus women. Mikey. My mind races to process it all.
Mark is out. He’s free and he will find me. By now, Chase has explained where I am and what’s happening—
Bzzzzz.
Allie’s phone. I reach back into my pocket and grab it. My hands are slick with my own blood and the phone rises up in the air, arcing high across the room, crashing down near the hole in the wall and the sound of glass breaking feels like my heart shattering into dust.
No.
NO.
I open my mouth and realize there’s something in it. As my jaw pops from being opened, I reach between my lips and worry out the irritation.
It’s a piece of my own tooth. Frenchie really did a number on me.
My tongue finds the jagged molar where the tooth broke. It’s sensitive, but just the white tooth. The root isn’t exposed. The inside of my mouth has the texture of raw hamburger. I wonder what I look like. The gunk from hiding in the tube is drying on me. I haven’t showered in two days. Heck, I haven’t cleaned up from having sex by the beach. I am, in every possible way, a complete mess.
And if Mark or Allie don’t get here soon, I’ll be a dead mess.
I shuffle over to the phone and look down, wincing. My eyes are open just millimeters, the one Frenchie hit swelling closed anyhow.
I can’t look. If I broke the phone, my one lifeline, then—
I make myself look.
It’s broken.
I don’t even react. I am dead inside. El Brujo and Frenchie might as well finish the job and make it official. Make my exterior match my interior. What possible brutality inflicted on my body could be worse than what they’ve done to my mind?
I begin to pace. The storage room looks so weird with full light. Blood streaks the floor where Amy was. My own blood mottles my hands, my clothes, the backs of my hands. The stain from whoever was in the coffee bean bag makes a strange sort of smear on the unpainted concrete floor.
Boxes are on their sides, upended from my time shoving everything off the shelves to get to the hole in the wall. Papers scatter on the shelving, the floor, and litter the space.
It looks like someone’s ransacked the place. Normally, criminals do that. Not truth seekers.
Chase must be texting me. He has no idea why I’m not replying. Is Mark with him now? I close my eyes. It’s not hard with one of them so swollen. I imagine Mark. I conjure his face. I remember those muscled arms, dusted with light brown hair. How his eyes warmed when I talked to him about dogs at the shelter. The way he was so quick to comfort me.
How he waited three years for me.
“Carrie!” Allie’s voice is so faint I wonder if I’m dreaming it.
I pause. I hold my breath.
I wait.
“Carrie!” Her voice is more urgent. Slushy noises, like suction in a cup of pudding, come from the hole in the wall. “It’s raining outside and I need you to get here, now!”
I scurry over to the wall and look in. A thin line of water is drip drip dripping into the room, running down the cinderblock wall, making a dark, nasty stain.
Nothing as bad as the blood by the stairs, though.
Her face appears at the opening, shoulders tight in there. I slide my hands under her armpits. She looks up, her nose almost bumping mine.
“What happened to your face?” she gasps in horror.
I yank her. She spills out, slithering like a snake through molasses. Allie falls clumsily to the concrete floor.
She looks around and blinks, over and over.
“You found the light switch.”
“Not exactly,” I say, my words a little slurred. I can’t quite focus on her any more. My eyes aren’t able to work together.
She stands. A rope is around her waist. She looks at me, the whites of her eyes sticking out in a filthy face. “What happened?”
“Frenchie.”
All I have to say is his name. She grabs my shoulders and peers into my eyes. Well—my one eye that’s functional.
“Did he hurt you? I mean, other than your face?”
I know what she’s really asking.
“He didn’t rape me.” Mentioning the nipple grab and the groping won’t help right now. I can tell her later.
“Thank God.” She looks around, her eyes pausing on the broken phone. “He broke it?”
“No.” I hold up my bloody hands. “I fat fingered it.”
She frowns. “Okay. We need to go.”
“El Brujo was with him.”
As I say the words, the live rat that bit me earlier in the pipe, when I hid in there, begins to lick the blood stain where the coffee bean bag was.
Allie looks down and lets out a shriek.
I scream.
We both stand there, screaming as if we were being electrocuted.
A phone rings. It breaks through our freakout. Allie digs into her mud-covered ass and pulls out a phone I’ve never seen before.
“Yeah,” she says breathlessly. “In here. She’s fine. We’re—what? What? Oh, fuck.”
I’ve never heard Allie curse, so….
She looks at me with alarm. “Frenchie and Galt are here. Just pulled into the driveway on their bikes. They’re waiting in the parking lot. Drew’s watching. He was about to come in and get us, but he can’t now without creating a bloodbath, and we could get hit in the crossfire. Chase doesn’t know where Mark is.”
“Shit!”
“I know,” she snaps. She listens urgently to Chase, then adds, “We need to get out of here.”
“We can’t,” I point out. “If Frenchie comes back and sees only me, then it’s safer than if he finds us both.”
She shudders. “He’d love to get his hands on me.”
“He’d love to get his hands on anything with a vagina, Allie.”
We both grimace.
“Look. You hide in the pipe. I’ll put a box over you. Wait until they leave.”
“You don’t know what Galt and Frenchie are like, Carrie,” she says in a cold voice. “Galt wants Chase dead. He’d rather see his own son dead than have left the motorcycle club. If he gets his hands on me, Chase will come find me, and then…” Her voice trails off.
“So don’t. Don’t be here. Go in the pipe and crawl back to Chase.”
She puts the phone to her ear and says something quietly to Chase.
“NO FUCKING WAY!” the phone explodes. Chase can be definitive.
“Yes!” she yells back. “It’s the only way.”
“I AM COMING DOWN THAT PIPE!” he bellows through the phone.
“Only if you have a shrinking machine,” she says back, angry. “I am not leaving Carrie here.” Her auburn-dyed hair is filled with clumps of greasy mud. The trickle of water coming from the pipe has halted. I’m guessing that means it’s stopped raining.
I haven’t been outside in over a day. Who knew you could take fresh air for granted? A flash of my dad flies through my thoughts, of being cooped up in a prison cell for three years with one hour a day outside.
My heart squeezes.
I grab the phone out of her hand and say into it, “I’m telling her to hide in the pipe. Are Frenchie and your dad still outside?”
Chase goes silent. Three beats later he’s back. “Yes. Just sitting and waiting. Drew’s behind a car in the lot. He’s probably two hundred feet from you, damn it.”
“Where’s Mark?”
“No fucking clue.” Chase sounds like he’s chewing on rusty nails. “Look, I gotta get you two out of there. I’ll storm the fucking door if I have to.”
“That’s a death sentence. For you, then for me and Allie.” And, eventually, Mark, I think. But I don’t say it.
“Fuck,” he snaps. “Then get her to hide in the pipe. Face toward you, feet toward me. Tell her to tie the rope around her waist. She needs to have her gun out in case she’s surprised. You got that? Tell her I’ll start yanking if I have to. Shit.” He makes a sound of frustration. “Maybe you two should just start crawling. Now.”
“If Frenchie gets down here and finds the pipe, he’ll start shooting. Or if he carries hand grenades…” I can’t believe the words coming out of my mouth.
“No,” Chase grunts. “But he’ll have no problem unloading all his ammo into that pipe, and it’s a straight shot most of the way. Fuck.”
“Maybe I should take the gun?” I ask, tentative. “I could…”
“You ever shoot anything?”
“Other than in a video game? No.”
“Then hell no. Allie’s been to the shooting range with me most of this year. She’s got one hell of an aim and she knows how to use a gun. You’d be a liability.” His voice is rigid and firm, but not judgmental. He’s being smart and rational about this.
He’s right.
And he is so Mark’s brother.
“You shine on Frenchie and my dad. Try to stall. Drew’s out there and we’re working on reinforcements. Once Mark shows up, this’ll all go down fast. You hear me, Carrie?”
The room starts to waver, like air on a super-hot day. I can see ripples in the air.
“Carrie?” Chase asks.
Allie carefully pries the phone from my fingers and speaks into it softly. I hear some assurances. A few I Love Yous. Mostly the sound of Chase fighting against himself to let Allie do what he knows she needs to do.
We’re cornered. She should just scramble up that pipe and leave me to my fate. I make my decision.
“Allie, just go. You can crawl up and—”
“Like hell I will.” She’s off the phone with Chase and staring at the scars on her arm. Her other hand reaches up to stroke her hairline.
Ah. I see.
I’m not the only one out for revenge. She can’t let the dean—El Brujo—win.
All the swirling bits of myself that can’t stop turning in a cyclone inside my body come together. With an energy I haven’t felt since being trapped down here, I stand tall.
I look at her.
And I say, “You’re right. Let’s make this fucker pay.”
The grin spreads across her face like pure, hard-core goodness.
Attagirl.