The Girls She Left Behind (26 page)

She glanced at Dylan again as fire's hot breath gusted in her face. “Is Tara still alive?”

A kick to the thigh rewarded her question; she stumbled and nearly fell. But it was worth it; while Jane focused on Lizzie, Dylan crouched swiftly, managing to snatch something up in his fingers even with his hands still tied behind him.

Whatever it was, he'd been lying atop it to hide it, Lizzie realized as a nearby cedar tree went up with a dazzling whoosh.

Lizzie hesitated. “What about him?” Chevrier lay motionless.

“Leave him.” Down on the main road, the whirl of a dashboard beacon mingled confusingly with the fire's glow.

That backup call Chevrier had made, Lizzie realized. She bent to Chevrier. A cold touch of metal on her neck froze her.

“Alive? Or is he…?”

“No. He's dead,” Lizzie said flatly. A rush of fury fueled her sudden spring upward, her weight automatically shifting onto her left foot and her right kicking back hard.

She spun to deliver a head-butt but Jane danced away. Dylan lunged but she avoided him too, and she had that damn gun.

Soon this whole area would be ablaze, all the remaining unburnt fuel fully primed by heat to go up in another, even more annihilating wave of flames. And the squad's headlights were still only halfway up the ridge.

Jane's gun thrust hard into Lizzie's ribs. Another cedar tree flamed up like a torch and for an instant it seemed that all the oxygen had been sucked out of the world; then came the new rush of heat.

“Walk,” ordered Jane. “Or stay here if you want.” She jammed the gun into Lizzie's side again. “
Is
that what you want?”

But Lizzie couldn't answer. A sharp, unexpected pain knocked the breath out of her suddenly. The squad car topped the hill, the driver raking the area with his vehicle's spotlight but unable to see the Blazer from his position.

Slowly, the car turned. A trickle of panic went through Lizzie as it moved away. She sucked in a breath. With the air came another thrilling jolt of pain, as if that last hard shove with the gun had cracked a rib.

“Like I said, you can stay,” Jane repeated unpleasantly. “But I'll have to shoot you first.”

“Come on, Lizzie,” said Dylan resignedly, and if she hadn't known him so well she'd have thought he'd given up.

But Dylan never gave up, and now she glimpsed what was hidden behind his back. The gun stabbed Lizzie's ribs again, and this time through the agony she could feel the tension in Jane's hand, the way just one extra twitch would jerk the trigger through its pressure point, discharging the weapon.

“Now
walk.
” Another shove, bringing with it another crashing thunderbolt of pain, nearly dropped Lizzie to her knees.

“Don't you get any dumb ideas, either,” Jane added to Dylan. “You rush me, I'll shoot her. Get it?”

Dylan nodded slowly as the flames cavorted nearer, sucking in oxygen, exhaling fiery death. The cop car that Lizzie had set her hopes on was now stopped entirely, maybe while the driver called in for help on the location.

No point, Lizzie decided, in trying to yell to the cop, even if she could draw enough breath to do it. Just getting any air in at all was a struggle.

Pierced my lung,
she realized with dawning horror,
a broken rib has a sharp end on it and when she jabbed me—

And when a lung got pierced, it didn't heal up by itself. It collapsed, and if you didn't get quick medical help…But with that gun suddenly in her side again, she had no options left.

“Come on, Lizzie,” said Dylan again. “We'd better just do as she says.”

In the glow of the relentlessly approaching flames, his gaze met hers. It was a look she'd seen before, perhaps over a couple of wineglasses late at night.

Or in her bed. And he'd been lying then, too. Only this time it wasn't Lizzie that he was lying to.

The thought got Lizzie moving, her breath coming in short, agonized gulps. The squad car reversed and slowly turned back toward them.

“Hurry up,” Jane ordered. They reached a narrow trail, well used and seemingly without tripping hazards.

Still, almost at once Dylan stumbled.

Jane spun toward him. “I'll shoot her, I swear—”

She would, too. It was in Jane's voice, strained nearly to the breaking point. No matter that a gunshot would alert that cop down there; Jane wasn't making clear decisions now, only reacting to her own distress.

As Lizzie thought this, the emergency flare that Dylan had been clutching behind his back—from the go-bag that Chevrier had told Dylan to take, Lizzie recalled suddenly—erupted with a yellow-white sizzle of brilliance. At once the distant squad car's lights glared on, static from its radio crackling through the night.
“All units…”

“Bastard,”
Jane snarled, letting go of Lizzie long enough to get off a single shot.

Dylan's low grunt of pain said he'd been hit; in the flare's Day-Glo brightness—
Careful, you'll start a forest fire,
Lizzie thought, woozy and in terror—he staggered and fell.

No!
she thought, not realizing she'd sobbed it aloud until the gun savaged her ribs again. She felt a sharp pain and a terrifying popping sensation, and her shortness of breath got worse.

Much worse. “I can't,” she managed as the brightness flaring around her faded blessedly to black, velvety and welcoming…

She felt herself being hauled to her feet.

Around her the world burst into flame.

“W
hat do you want?” Lizzie gasped it out. Only a few minutes had gone by since Jane Crimmins had appeared out of the darkness.

Now at Jane's grim order Lizzie trudged forward, her eyes streaming with smoke, her chest heaving as she sucked in gulps of air that seemed suddenly to be in desperately short supply.

The trail curved sharply between cedar trees and up a steep slope. Jane switched on a flashlight she'd taken from Dylan, which gave Lizzie hope until she realized the beam was weakening, so dim that it wouldn't be spotted through the smoke from the blazes now blowing up patchily all around them.

“Stop,” Jane uttered flatly. The flashlight's yellowish beam picked out the rough boards of a small shed with a slanted roof and a dark, rectangular door opening. A few feet in front of it stood an old claw-footed bathtub, the water in it reflecting the orange-tinted sky.

At Jane's gesture Lizzie ducked through the shed's doorway. The interior smelled of hay and of something less pleasant.

“Why?” She dropped to the wooden floor, thickly covered with straw. “What's this all about?”

Her back found the shed's rough wall and she sighed in relief until it occurred to her what the other smell was: fear-sweat, not her own. She peered into the shed's far corners.

In one of them lay Tara Wylie, her eyes wide with terror in the reflected glow of Jane Crimmins's flashlight. Lizzie crept toward the girl. “Hey.”

The girl shrank back. Her thin wrists were bound by multiple wrappings of twine tethered to an old iron loop driven into the wooden floor. Her lips were bloody and swollen, the skin on the backs of her hands torn and purple with bruises. By the look of it, she'd tried pulling her wrists out of their restraints and when that hadn't worked she'd tried chewing through the twine.

But she hadn't been able to do either; now her wavering gaze lit briefly on Lizzie before her eyes drifted shut.

“What do you want?” Lizzie asked again. But Jane didn't reply as beyond the shed's low opening the night filled with smoke and flame. Then Lizzie saw what else was happening out there:

The fire's sudden resurgence had apparently summoned fresh emergency crews, just now arriving; lights flared and faded in the billows of steam rising from half-doused blazes. Down on the main road a red flashing beacon sped away, its siren a thin whine.
Dylan…
Lizzie yanked her thoughts back with an effort of will as fiery light seeped threateningly between the boards at the rear of the structure, outlining the girl's shape.

“Hot,” Tara moaned fretfully.

Lizzie struggled up, then jumped forward at a sharp stabbing pain in her arm, followed by a trickle of blood.

Interesting,
she thought
,
then leaned back again cautiously, edging her bound wrists up toward where the sharp thing had been: broken glass, perhaps, or the tip of a nail poking through one of the old boards.

Lit by the glow of the fires creeping nearer, Jane's eyes were pools of misery hollowed by rage. Lizzie stretched on tiptoe, ignoring the jolt of pain it cost her.

Her rib's broken end was probably raking through some new, even more vital bit of tissue inside her. But she had to keep Jane talking, keep her preoccupied.
Don't let her see…

“Well,” Lizzie managed, tasting blood and shoving aside the new jolt of fright it caused, “if I'm going to die here…”

A cough, deep and agonizing, cut her words off; she spat and went on. “I'd like to know why,” she finished.

“Oh, you would, huh?” Jane laughed unpleasantly, sounding as if what she really wanted to do was weep. But the gun in her hand was steady.

She shook her head as if in regret. “Well, if you must know, it's because of a girl named Cam and a creep named Henry Gemerle.”

She began to weep quietly. “I thought she got free, but Cam was never really free.”

“I see,” said Lizzie, not seeing at all. But that wasn't the point.

The point was keeping Jane Crimmins distracted. “That must have been disappointing. Where's Cam now?”

As she spoke, Lizzie lifted her bound wrists up behind her yet again, hooking the plastic bags tied around them over the nail's sharp end. Finally the nail end, or whatever it was, caught on the plastic and tore it…but only a little.

Not enough. “She never came back to me! It was always
him,
” Jane sobbed. “Even after he took her baby away from her. She still forgave him. But she never forgave
me.
”

Fifty yards distant, a flaming tree crashed to the earth in an explosion of fire.

“She chose him,” Jane said bitterly, “not me. Right up until the end, and then…”

Lizzie stopped working her bound wrists against the nail. “Oh,” she said, understanding. Not all the details, maybe, but the reason; the heart of the matter.

“You loved her. And she betrayed you. Is that it?”

Jane nodded mutely. “All she really wanted was to get back to him. She just used me. But—”

She stopped, biting her lip anxiously. But in the end she couldn't resist saying it aloud:

“But at the end, she knew I was the one who cared about her. The only one.”

“The end?” Lizzie inquired, more to keep Jane talking than anything else. After all, the New Haven apartment had been a slaughterhouse according to the cops reporting from there; Cam's body would no doubt be found sooner or later.

She jerked her wrists upward again, more blood running warmly over her hand. She hoped it was washing the nail wounds clean, at least. Tetanus, blood poisoning…the list of stuff you could get from a rusty nail was long and terrifying. But none was as bad as burning to death, and now the flames outside leapt eagerly, ever nearer.

“Never mind about Cam.” Jane evaded Lizzie's question. “Now all I've got to do is get away from here.”

Lizzie hooked the plastic-bag wrist restraint over the nail again and it held there this time. “So how will you do that?” she asked, very short of breath again suddenly.

But before Jane could answer a cedar torch outside ignited with a vicious roar. A shred of the plastic around Lizzie's wrists gave way just as a shower of orange sparks erupted only a few feet from the shed's low doorway.

“I'm waiting until I know the fire will burn everything,” Jane said as the roar faded to a steady crackle. “You, both your buddies down there, this place…”

So there'd be no evidence, Lizzie figured, an assumption she thought was incorrect despite the fire's fury. It took a lot to incinerate teeth, for instance. And it seemed the emergency crews might've found Dylan; she prayed they had.

But despite her struggles the plastic around her wrists hung on stubbornly. And now not only were the bindings that held her refusing to tear any farther, they were stuck on that damn nail.

Around her, the air thickened like poisoned syrup. Pain-sweat prickled her armpits, blackness creeping at the edges of her vision. She couldn't even tell if Tara was still breathing.

And any minute now I won't be, either.
Yanking against the nail only rocketed another thrilling jolt of torment through her, so intense this time she felt her eyes roll back for an instant.

“So you killed Gemerle,” she gritted out, sawing desperately back and forth with no result. “You got him out, got him to come here, somehow.”

The wind swept the flames sideways, whipping them up for a final assault. “And then you killed him?”

As she'd hoped, Jane couldn't resist. “Of course I did,” she declared proudly. “Someone had to,” she added, and seemed about to go on.

But Lizzie wasn't listening anymore, all thought suddenly dissolved in a vat of pain. One whole side of her chest felt like an animal was in there, chewing its way out, as she went on sawing desperately at the ties still restraining her.

A wind gust sucked the smoke from the shed briefly. In the blessedly clear interval she breathed shallowly through her own blood, the salt taste sickening her. Then:

“What's that?” Jane demanded, and stepped outside just as Lizzie's wrist wraps gave way abruptly, one last ferocious yank bringing on a jackhammer of agony.

Jane's dark shape loomed in the doorway, silhouetted by fire, as Lizzie hit the floor hard and rolled away from the acrid smoke gushing in at the shed's opposite corner. The blaze
screamed…
but it wasn't the fire this time.