Gone

CHAPTER 31

Wednesday, 12:03 a.m. PST

“SEE THAT LIGHT UP THERE? ” Rainie said to Dougie. “Let’s break it.”

“Break it?”

“Bust it to bits.”

“Okay,” Dougie said.

The light in question was two long fluorescent bulbs encased behind an open metal cage. It was mounted just above the basement door, dimly visible in the door’s glowing halo. Best Rainie could tell, it was the only light in the basement. Break it, and their abductor would have no choice but to join them in the gloom.

Rainie liked that idea. She wanted the man to descend those darkened stairs. She wanted to watch him bump around their damp, fetid prison, banging against the workbench, slipping on the wet cement floor. She wanted to reduce him to their level with a feral rage that made her impervious to the throbbing in her temples, the strange, painful currents running up and down her left side, and the pangs of hunger now cramping her belly.

One problem: They couldn’t reach the high-mounted light. One solution: Any old rock or piece of debris chucked through the metal grate would do. She and Dougie had skipped some stones in their day. She thought they could do it.

So she and Dougie started scouring the shallow puddles covering the floor. In Dougie’s world, looking for rocks was always a good idea.

Dougie had given up on his tied wrists. Chewing didn’t work and neither did sawing the plastic band ties against the corner of the wooden workbench. Instead, he worked like Rainie, back bent, hands dangling in front of him.

She could feel him shivering from the cold, and her own body responded with a teeth-rattling tremor. She couldn’t feel her fingers or toes anymore. Her nose had gone numb, and bit by bit, she was losing the rest of her face. Her core body temperature continued to drop. Dougie’s, too. Soon their legs would feel sluggish, their eyes heavy. It would be easy to just sit on the stairs, maybe curl up on the workbench.

Their overworked hearts would slow. Their systems would shut down, circulating less blood, pumping less oxygen, and that would be that. They would close their eyes and never have to worry about anything again.

It would be peaceful, Rainie found herself thinking, which only made her disgusted with herself. If she was going to die, she wanted a shot at taking Super Jerk with her. She stomped her feet, wiggled her fingers, then, purely on impulse, curled her arms in front of her and trumpeted like an elephant.

Dougie giggled.

So Rainie trumpeted again.

“I’m the elephant king!” Dougie shouted. He stampeded across the basement floor, splashing water and emitting a ferocious elephant roar. Rainie followed in his wake. They hit the wall, trumpeted together this time, then turned and ran the other way. Rainie’s lungs heaved. Her heart pounded. She felt the best she had in days.

They slowed, gasping for breath. Being an elephant was much harder than it looked, and it didn’t provide them with any ammunition. So they resumed running their fingers through the shallow pool covering the basement floor, searching for rocks.

“How’s your head?” Rainie asked, now that the moment felt right and Dougie seemed to hate her a little less.

Dougie merely shrugged. That was his answer to most things. On one of their outings, he’d fallen five feet while scrambling up a tree. Rainie had immediately run to him, expecting tears, or at least a bravely contained hiccup. Dougie had merely brushed himself off, the mud, the leaves, the blood, then returned to the tree. She’d watched him do the same thing on numerous other occasions.

Dougie seemed indifferent to the physical realm. Pain, cold, heat, hunger. Nothing bothered him. When Rainie mentioned it to Quincy, he’d dug up a research study on how some children, in situations of chronic abuse, learned to disconnect themselves from their own bodies. It was a form of coping, he told her: Their abusers hit them, and the children literally didn’t feel a thing.

That was the first time Rainie had begun to wonder about Stanley Carpenter, to think that perhaps Dougie really was telling the truth. The lack of physical evidence remained puzzling, however. If Stanley was beating his foster son, shouldn’t Dougie have bruises?

A few weeks ago, however, she’d had a startling insight into that riddle. It was shortly thereafter that Dougie had started to hate her in earnest.

“I can’t find any rocks,” she said now. “You?”

“Nope.” Dougie started splashing around the wet floor instead. It kept him distracted and, hopefully, warm.

“Seems odd,” Rainie murmured. “In a basement, you’d think you’d find all sorts of stuff. Discarded tools, old toys, forgotten debris. Guess our friend did his housekeeping.”

Dougie stopped splashing. Across the dim space, she could see him scowl.

“Dougie,” Rainie said quietly, “you know I used to be a police officer, right? I’m trained for these kinds of situations. I’m going to get us out.”

“You’re hurt.”

“You don’t need hair to escape from a basement,” Rainie said lightly.

Dougie’s gaze dropped to her arms. He had felt the cuts, then, and he had understood.

“This is what we’re going to do,” Rainie declared briskly. “We’re going to break those lightbulbs. Then, we’re going to bang real hard on that door and demand food and water and some warm clothes. We’re going to make such a fuss, he’ll have no choice but to open the door. And then, we’re going to play a little game of hide-and-seek.”

“I don’t like hide-and-seek.”

“But this is a good game, Dougie. The man is going to come looking for us, and we’re going to run away from him. We’ll be ghosts, flitting back and forth, quicker than the eye. Before he knows it, you’ll go dashing up the stairs, boom, boom, boom. Once you’re at the top, I want you to run as fast as you can. Out of this house, to the closest neighbor you can find. Then all you have to do is ask them to call the police, and they’ll take it from there.”

Dougie was not an idiot. “If I were the man, I’d bring a gun,” he declared. “Definitely, I’d have at least one gun. And maybe a snake.”

“The man and his gun-and his snake-are my problem, Dougie. You, I just want focused on running up the stairs.”

“I like snakes.”

“All right, here’s the deal: If he brings a snake, you can tackle the snake. But if he brings a gun, then you run for the stairs. Swear it?”

Dougie considered her offer. Finally, he nodded. He spit on his palms, rubbed them together. Rainie spit on her palms, rubbed them together. They shook, Dougie’s version of a solemn vow. They had done it once before, when Dougie had offered to show her his stash of secret treasures and she had sworn never to tell anyone its location.

She still remembered that afternoon. The gray mist shrouding the moss-covered trees. The gnarled old oak with a hollowed-out knot just the right size for a metal lunch box. The impassive look on Dougie’s face as he took out his mother’s charred photo, her soot-covered rosary.

“My mom’s dead,” Dougie had said, the only time he’d ever spoken of her in Rainie’s presence. “So I live with other families. Until I burn things. People don’t like that.”

“Why did you set fire to your mother’s photo, Dougie? I think that would make her very sad.”

“My mother’s dead,” Dougie repeated, as if Rainie didn’t understand. “Dead people don’t feel anything. Dead people aren’t sad.”

Then he looked Rainie right in the eye and tore his mother’s picture in half. Rainie got the message: In Dougie’s world, dead people were the lucky ones. But she was willing to bet that if she snuck back to his treasure trove later in the week, she’d find the battered photo taped back together. Because Dougie still belonged to the land of the living, and he still felt things, no matter how much he hated it.

Now, she and Dougie retreated to the staircase. With no ammunition to throw at the light, there was only one other thing she could think to do.

“Dougie, if you sat on my shoulders, do you think you could reach those bulbs?”

Dougie’s eyes lit up in the dark. “Yes!”

“We’ll take the cotton strips,” Rainie decided, “and wrap them around your hands. You get on my shoulders, and then with your fists, see if you can either break the bulbs or wiggle them out of there.”

“Yes!”

Of course, without use of their hands, getting Dougie on her shoulders was easier said than done. Dougie balanced on the top step. She stood three steps beneath him. He spread his legs. She leaned down and eased him back onto her shoulders.

Very slowly, she straightened. With her arms bent at the elbow, she could just grab his ankles. Her bound wrists, however, limited her movement, making it impossible to counter every motion he made. She had an image of Dougie leaning back too far and both of them crashing down the flight of stairs.

She almost said something, but at the last minute held her tongue. Dougie was unpredictable during the best of times; she didn’t want to give him any ideas.

He shimmied a bit from side to side on her shoulders, trying to get comfortable.

“Okay,” he called down.

Very carefully, she climbed to the top. “Well?” she asked breathlessly, neck aching, legs wobbling.

“I can touch them!” Dougie reported triumphantly.

“Then let’s do it.”

She could feel him stretching up, his body reaching into the black void above them. For a moment, the weight eased off her shoulders and she realized he must be half hanging from the metal grill. She heard creaking, then a load of dust wafted down. Rainie bit her bottom lip to fight the sneeze.

“It’s… stuck,” Dougie gasped.

“Then break the bulbs. Just smash them with your fingers. It doesn’t have to be pretty. But, Dougie… hurry up.”

The strange, painful sensation was returning to her left side, as if electrical currents were ping-ponging madly down her leg. Her left knee spasmed, and for a moment, she feared it would buckle, her entire leg collapsing. She gritted her teeth, fought through the pain. Just this once, for God’s sake. Just this once…

She could feel moisture on her arms. The knife wounds had opened; she’d started to bleed.

Then, the light tinkle of shattering glass.

“I got ’em!” Dougie punched through the first bulb, then the second.

“Oh, thank God.” She eased down one step, then another, collapsing forward and depositing the boy above her. “Good work! Now we just need to-”

The basement door opened. Rainie had an instant impression of dazzling light, haloing a figure in black. She squinted reflexively, throwing up her arms to shield her eyes.

“Holy shit!” the man said.

And Rainie heard herself scream, “Dougie, run!”

She threw herself up the stairs, shoulder connecting with the door just as the man came to his senses and moved to slam it shut. For an agonizing moment, she was suspended on the top step, leaning precariously forward as the door weighed against her. Her eyes were shut, retinas burning from the sudden brightness after living for so long in the dark. She could feel movement against her legs, Dougie scrambling forward.

The weight behind the door suddenly disappeared. She crashed, staggering forward.

As swiftly as it came, the light was gone. The man flipped off the switch and fled down the hall.

“Dougie,” Rainie called out urgently. But there was no answer.

She groped her way to the wall, trying to get her bearings. When she opened her eyes, her vision was studded with white dots.

No lights, she thought. At this stage of the game, light was not her friend.

Instead, she once more embraced the dark, starting to pick out the rectangular shape of a window, two box appliances. A washer and dryer, she determined. She was in a tiny laundry room, with a door that led down to the basement. And Dougie?

She strained her ears, but still didn’t hear a sound. All she could do was pray that he remembered their game plan, that he was bolting out the front door. He was young, fast, resourceful. If he could get out of the house, he would be okay.

She moved around the room, finding another door. Locked. She searched for the deadbolt, but couldn’t find one. She didn’t know what that meant.

Only one way out then, and that was down the hall.

She got down on her knees and crawled.

Galley kitchen, she determined. Narrow, with one long window above the sink. No moonlight. Instead, she could hear the steady drum of more rain. Slinking by the stove, she caught a digital display of the time and was momentarily startled. 12:30 a.m. Had she been gone one day? Or two?

She needed to call Quincy. To tell him she was all right. She would get out of this.

And then it came to her. What she needed was a knife.

She wrenched open the nearest cabinet, hands scurrying through the glass contents, and was immediately pinned by a beam of light.

“Well, well, well. Would you look at this?”

Rainie turned slowly, her hands already curling around the only weapon she could find. She was staring straight into the beam of a flashlight. Behind it, she could just make out the dark silhouette of the man. At his side, he held a squirming Dougie in place.

“It’s like I told you, boy,” the man drawled softly. “Woman’s nothing but a drunk.”

Belatedly, Rainie followed the light, only to discover that she’d stumbled upon the liquor cabinet, and right at this moment, her hand was curled around a bottle of Jim Beam.

Rainie swallowed hard. She didn’t know what to say. It had been purely accidental. Except, in some small part of her brain, she was terrified that it wasn’t.

She took a better grip on the bottle. “Let him go,” she said roughly.

“I don’t think you’re in a position to negotiate.”

“Sure I am.” Rainie raised the bottle and flung it. The bottle shattered against the flashlight. She heard the man’s enraged roar. She tasted whiskey sprayed across her lips, and it really was sweet and she really did want more.

She sprang forward, grabbed Dougie’s startled form, and bolted for the door. She made it two steps, and the man’s foot connected with her left knee. She went down hard, feeling something twist, then tear. Frantically her hands swept across the floor, searching for a weapon, a handhold, anything. She found only shattered glass.

“Dougie, run!”

But once again, it was over before it began. The man grabbed Dougie’s arms and jerked him up short. Dougie protested savagely, beating at their attacker. He was only fifty pounds, however, no match for an adult.

“Let me go!” Dougie howled.

The man belted Dougie in the side of the face. The boy crumpled. Then it was just the man, smiling down at Rainie.

She dragged herself up to all fours. She didn’t know why. Her knee was wrecked, her running days were over. But she could still crawl. She got her head up. She lurched forward.

The man kicked her in the chin.

And Rainie dropped like a rock, tasting the blood and booze. Get up, get up, she thought frantically. Do something.

But her head felt too heavy. Her leg throbbed. She had nothing left.

The man dropped to one knee beside her.

“Rainie,” he whispered in her ear, “I’m really, really going to enjoy this.”

He yanked her to her feet. Pain tore through her leg. She had one final thought and it made her smile-she was going to have the last laugh after all.

Then she passed out cold, leaving the man furious and all alone.