“WAKE UP.” A hand slapped Ryan’s face. “Wake up.”
He blinked and opened his eyes. A man dressed in a clean cotton shirt with a close-shaved jaw leaned over him. His mind was trying to tell him who this was, what was happening, where he was, why he was on his back, how long he’d…
BoneMan.
Ryan blinked again and the details of the last week flooded his mind. He’d come to save Bethany and landed in hell.
She’d pushed him away. She’d swung the hammer. She couldn’t possibly be in her right mind, but she had rejected him and this should have been no surprise to him because they’d never been close.
“Stand up,” BoneMan, who was named Alvin Finch, said.
The smell of gasoline stung Ryan’s nostrils.
“Stand up.”
Ryan struggled to his knees, wincing. His right heel throbbed and he saw that the man had wrapped bandages around his ankle for support.
“Stand up.”
He pushed himself up on his left leg and stood, carefully applying weight to his right leg. The smell of gasoline was thick in the air. A heavy layer of clouds shut out the sun. Not a sound from the compound that he could hear. He’d been able to see the place when BoneMan had brought him, and he knew they were far from the nearest town because he’d paid attention to the sounds as they drove. But standing at the edge of the deathly still compound now, he felt utterly abandoned.
BoneMan had a machete in his right hand. He glanced down the gravel road, then returned his bright blue eyes to Ryan.
“In a mile the road runs into a paved road. I’m going to give you twenty minutes to reach it. Then my daughter and I will burn this place to the ground and drive out. If you’re not gone, we’ll kill you. Don’t bother calling the police, we’ll be long gone before they can get here.”
Ryan couldn’t think straight. They were setting him free and would then vanish.
“Why didn’t you pay more attention to her when she was yours?” Alvin asked, but there wasn’t a hint of curiosity in his voice. He was only inflicting more pain by pouring salt into Ryan’s wound.
“You’re dead to her. She killed you. This is your hell now. Wander around and regret every breath, but if you come back for her, I will break every bone in her body and I will begin by snapping off her teeth, one by one. Then I will burn both of you and go find myself another daughter. Do you doubt me?”
Ryan made no attempt to push back the fear that spread through his bones. He’d lost. He could either lie down here at BoneMan’s feet and die or he could run.
Run as fast as his bruised heel would carry him into the hell that would be his life.
“Are you deaf now?”
“No,” Ryan croaked.
“Do you doubt me?”
“No.”
“Then leave. And if you try to find us later, I will find you and break your bones in your bed while you sleep. Do you doubt me?”
“No.”
“Then leave,” he said again. “Go.”
Ryan limped the first step and then another, unsure.
Alvin Finch landed a loud blow on his back with the machete’s broad side.
“Run!”
BoneMan’s voice echoed across the compound.
Ryan ran. More precisely he stumbled forward, jaw set, holding back tears. And with each step he found the pain in his leg less bothersome and the barrenness in his heart less confusing and then he did begin to run, albeit a jerky, limping run.
He was like a dog, chased out of the house with a whip. He was not wanted here. He’d come for his daughter and was leaving without his daughter or his heart.
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to end. How could she turn away from her own father who’d come to save her?
You’re not her father, Ryan. They’re right, you never really were her father.
No. No, but I want to be. I came here to be her father and to take her away from this monster and to hold her tight and to chase away all of her fear. To cherish her and lavish her with gifts.
He cast a quick look over his shoulder. Alvin Finch stood on the edge of the compound, staring at him like a watchdog. To think that he could still go back and do anything but demolish any last hope was utterly foolish. The worst kind of denial.
Ryan put his head down and plunged down the road, ignoring the pain in his foot now, pushed forward by a flash of anger. Gravel crunched with each footfall.
One mile. In one mile he would come to the road and flag down a car and call Ricki Valentine. But Bethany would be gone long before any help could arrive. He pushed on, breathing hard through his nostrils now.
Bethany’s captivity was a terrible tragedy that had filled him with fear, the kind of horror most refused to even consider for all of its pain. But her rejection of him was even worse.
His mind was numb with rage.
He pushed himself faster, clenching his teeth to push back the pain in his heel. The gray ground passed by underfoot, but it was only an abstraction behind the raw emotions now throbbing through his mind. The paved road stretched across the horizon and he would reach that line in the sand. He would go on with his life, he had to, he had no other choice but to die and he was tempted, so tempted to run off the road and throw himself into the ditch.
But that was impossible. Killing himself wasn’t in his psyche. No, instead he would cut her off from his emotions.
Ryan was panting now, gasping for reason as much as air. Thumping down the road in an uneven gait, like a wounded horse headed for slaughter. He’d made it halfway to the road ahead, and he could see a truck shimmering along the blacktop.
The only way to survive was to accept the fact that Bethany was dead to him. It was the only way. It was the only way to live with this pain.
She’d rejected him. Crushed his heart. Destroyed him. He would return her favor by searing his emotions and putting what was left of his love in a box, never to be opened.
Ryan came to an abrupt stop, panting, terrified by the thought. An image of the broken children in the desert ran through his mind. Of Bethany standing over him with the sledgehammer while Alvin Finch held the rope and screamed for her to swing it.
How could he dare to think of shutting her out of his mind? How could he feel even a moment of bitterness toward her? How could he leave his one and only daughter in the hands of that monster? How could he take even one more step toward the safety of the road? How could he live with the pain now spreading from his bones into his chest and heart and mind? He would rather be dead.
He stood immobilized in the middle of the dirt road as the world tipped crazily around him.
But he didn’t dare go back so that BoneMan could break her teeth off. So that he could take that sledgehammer to her frail bones. So that he could brutally murder her and leave them both for dead!
So then what?
He could do nothing. Nothing! Nothing!
Panic overtook him. His limbs felt like they were on fire.
Nothing…
The trembles hit him suddenly, his whole body at once, and he knew that he was going to have a nervous breakdown right here in the middle of the road. A groan broke from his parted lips because he didn’t know what else he could do but stand and shake and groan.
His daughter was alive but now she was dead. His daughter was alive and now she was going to die. She was dead already, not at BoneMan’s hand, but in her own mind. She was becoming him, sick with deception, wallowing in her own desperation to live, even if it meant the death of herself. She needed to be saved from herself now as much as from him!
Before he fully realized any implications of what he was doing, Ryan was screaming, full-throated, at the sky.
The moment he realized he could be heard back at the house even from this distance he shut his mouth. But in that moment, screaming at the sky, Ryan knew something.
He knew that he could not survive alone in BoneMan’s hell. He could not live in this walking death.
Ryan turned around and faced the distant compound now hidden by trees. BoneMan had left the road. He’d gone back in for his daughter.
A slow calm settled over Ryan’s body. No, he could not live in BoneMan’s hell. And so he would not.
Ryan began to run. Back to the house.
Back into hell.
FIVE DAYS HAD passed since Ryan Evans had vanished. Two days since Celine Evans had been found floating in her pool. And Ricki had turned up nothing that seemed to lead the investigation closer to stopping whatever was happening in BoneMan’s world.
She sat at her desk, twirling a pencil, watching Greta Van Susteren on Fox News break down the case with a retired profiler from the FBI, Marybeth Arnolds. The media had been dancing around all kinds of speculation, but they were slowly putting together the pieces with the public.
Evans most likely wasn’t the BoneMan.
BoneMan had Bethany and she was probably alive.
BoneMan might have Evans in captivity as well.
If Evans wasn’t the BoneMan, he had gone to great lengths to save his daughter and had been used as a pawn when he took Welsh captive and broke his arm. If so, and they kept repeating the word if, Ryan Evans might be one of the bravest fathers who’d made the news in a very long time. They should give him a medal.
The toolshed drawings of crucified skeletons had been withheld from the public, and they had shed some light on the killer’s motive—this reasoning that BoneMan justified everything he did as a natural part of a worldview that rotated around God, Satan, and their battle over the children. Typical pattern-killer psychosis.
Psychotics often believed the rest of the world was twisted, when in reality it was they who were tied up in knots. But there was always enough truth in their worldview to support reason.
Case in point: Kahlid, the terrorist who’d emulated BoneMan and thrown Ryan into his psychological tailspin to begin with. That Kahlid would equate the death of so many of his country’s wives and children to a few children he was willing to sacrifice to make his case could be at least understood on some broad scale.
BoneMan was doing the same thing in his world. He was inflicting perfectly reasonable punishment on a segment of society to make a point. In the broadest possible terms, what was the death of a few Philistines to save a nation of Israelites?
What was the death of the world in a flood to teach the world that it had strayed? What was a few in hell to save those willing to embrace salvation?
If they were all going to hell anyway, what was a few broken bones and the death of eight young women if it woke up the nation and set it on the straight and narrow?
BoneMan clearly had a God complex. Or worse, he thought he was the devil.
“Anything?”
Ricki lifted her head and looked at Mark, who had just poked his head in. “Nothing.”
“Nothing. The world is screaming for answers and all we can tell them is nothing.”
“Tell them they created BoneMan. Then tell them that it’s out of our hands now.”
“I wasn’t aware that we were giving up. Who’s going to save the world from BoneMan?”
She tapped the pencil eraser on her desk and nodded. “The father,” she said. “Ryan Evans.”