CHAPTER 40 HANNAH

40

Hannah

HANNAH WOKE IN A dark place.

Nothing but buzzing around her. There was a vibration, too, a rumble, and she realized she was moving. She was in the trunk of a car. Her hands and feet were bound and there was something oily in her mouth, some type of cloth or rag, sealed there with a piece of tape. She could feel the tape pull against her skin when she twisted her head.

I originally planned to snatch you off the sidewalk, 'bout four months ago. Had duct tape in my car …

Malcolm Mitchell's car, had to be.

Hannah had no idea what he drove, but it had to be something old—she smelled exhaust and caught glimpses of daylight through rusty cracks in the walls of the trunk.

Something landed on Hannah's cheek, skittered across her face, then took off when she shook her head. The buzzing increased, like a frenzy.

She thought of the flies in Danny's car. The one that had crawled into Malcolm's ear.

When another landed on her forehead, she screamed and nearly choked on the oily rag in her mouth.

Hannah shook her head again, but this time the fly didn't leave, it only crossed from her forehead to the side of her temple where the insect paused only long enough for another fly to land, this one so close to her ear the buzz sounded like a freight train for a brief second before it went silent and there was nothing but the tickle of its tiny feet on her earlobe.

Hannah shook her head again, rolled over in the tight space, and smashed the side of her head against the floor of the trunk as hard as she dared, hoping to crush one or both flies, but she felt them leap off in the last second only to land on her head again when she went still. More were in her hair, on her arms and legs. The car rolled over a bump or through a pothole, and while the jar of that surprised them and caused them to take flight, they seemed to land again in larger numbers, their buzz so loud it drowned out nearly all else.

Hannah shuddered, an involuntary ripple through her entire body.

They might have driven for ten minutes or ten hours. The concept of time was lost on her. There was nothing but that buzz, the flies. She only noticed that the car stopped moving because the flies seemed to notice they'd stopped, too—all at once, they ceased angrily bouncing around. And in the blackness, Hannah could only imagine them perching around the interior of the trunk, their tiny legs gripping metal and filthy carpet, silencing themselves in wait, ready to pounce.

The car stuttered as the motor choked and died. Then there was silence.

Hannah heard the soft click as the lock disengaged. The trunk opened slowly, and a slice of harsh light blinded her, spilling in from around Malcolm's silhouette. He was holding a flathead screwdriver, the sharp blade pointed at her.

"You make a sound, you try to scream or get away, and I'll have to hurt you. Do you understand?"

Oh, she wanted to scream.

As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw several of the flies rise from the trunk and land on his head. One crawled up and into his nose, vanished inside. Malcolm gave a soft snort, but otherwise didn't seem to notice or care. The grin on his face was unbearable. The tight skin around his left eye was moving, writhing with whatever lived beneath.

How could he not feel that?

The panic raced up her throat, and she gagged on the oily rag again before pinching her eyes shut.

There's nothing in his head.

There's nothing in his head.

Because there couldn't be.

Had he drugged her?

Maybe that was it. But she hadn't eaten or had anything to drink since breakfast. Maybe when she was unconscious. Or maybe something on the rag; every swallow was tinged with something oily.

Hannah started to whimper, didn't mean to, it just slipped out; some self-defense mechanism running on autopilot, and Malcolm moved fast—he slapped her. Not hard, but hard enough to stun her back into silence.

He brought the tip of the screwdriver close to her eye. "Things will go much smoother for you if you cooperate, but I'm okay if you don't. Sometimes that's fun, too. Think you can behave?"

The words came at her in slow motion, as if they traveled through molasses. Something was very wrong

with her, with him, with both

Hannah managed to bob her head and winced with pain, feeling for the first time the blow to the back of her skull that had knocked her unconscious.

Malcolm rolled his eyes, as if her discomfort were some kind of nuisance. "Lean forward. Let me see your head."

Hannah hesitated for a second, then did as he asked.

Malcolm moved some of her hair aside, touched the spot where it was tender, then straightened back up. "You've got a nasty bump, but the bleeding stopped. There's not much blood at all, really." He held the screwdriver back up to her face and let out a soft sigh. "I need you to get out of the trunk, Hannah. Slowly."

Hannah tried not to look at his face, couldn't. She knew his skin was nothing but a bag of flies. Small, large, larva, maggots, eating him from the inside out. She didn't know what happened to all the flies that had been in the trunk. Surely there had been more. Some voice told her that if she moved they'd pounce, they'd dart out from wherever they were hiding and swarm her mouth, her nose, her ears, her—

Malcolm grabbed her shoulder and yanked her forward, wrestled her into a sitting position. "Will you move already?!"

With a yelp, Hannah waited for the buzz, waited for tiny feet to squirm across her skin, but nothing happened. She wanted to believe they were gone, but she knew that wasn't true, they were just patient.

Malcolm grabbed her ankles and swung her legs over the lip of the trunk. When she finally got a good look around, she realized where they were—he'd taken her to the old Pickerton place. The decrepit old house up on Mount Washington where that family died years back. The place where Danny and some of the other guys on the basketball team sometimes went to party.

A lump formed in her throat at the thought of Danny. Had Malcolm just left him there? Dead in the car? Oh, God, was Danny really dead?!

Malcolm cut the tape from her ankles with the blade of the screwdriver, got her feet on the ground, and tugged her toward the house. "Come on."

When they reached the porch, she tried to dig her heels in, but that barely slowed him down. He was wiry, but all muscle. He kicked the front door open, yanked her forward, and pulled her inside.

The windows were all boarded up, and the gloom struck her with nearly the same force as the bright light had when he opened the trunk. Her eyes were still adjusting when he dragged her across the dusty floor and forced her to sit at the mouth of a hallway between an old grandfather clock and a heavy oak side table. He crouched down next to her, tore a length of duct tape from the roll, and secured her hands to the table.

She couldn't look at him. His head was crawling with flies. His shoulders, chest, his filthy clothing. When he spoke, she pictured them rattling around in his lungs, crawling up his windpipe, and—

Malcolm smacked her cheek again. "I don't know where you keep going, Hannah, but you need to focus. What I'm about to tell you is important." He twisted the screwdriver between his fingers, the light seeping around the boarded windows glistening across the blade. "You know where we are, right? The old Pickerton place. There's nobody around for miles. Nobody saw us come up here."

Hannah swallowed.

Malcolm took her phone from his pocket, held it up, and inserted what looked like a small USB drive in the port. A red light came on and began to flash. "You're going to like this." A second later, the red light turned to green and the lock screen on her phone vanished, replaced by her home screen. Malcolm licked his yellow teeth. "Best thirty-nine bucks I ever spent. It takes longer if the phone's operating system is current, but it looks like you're a few versions behind. You really should stay on that."

He brought up Hannah's messaging app, clicked on the conversation with her mother, and turned the screen so she could read it. Not that it mattered. She knew what it said. Her heart sank.

"You told your mom you were going over to Sandra Horner's house to study. No mention of Danny or whatever you really had planned today." Her mother's reply was right below— K sweetie. Have fun.

Malcolm thumbed through a few more messages and found the thread with Sandra. Hannah knew what those said, too. She told Sandra she was going to Boston with Danny for the day and needed her to run interference with her mom. There were a few after that, but Malcolm didn't need to read them all, the last was enough— Got you covered!

His toothy grin widened when he got to it. A large fly hopped from the corner of his mouth to his chin and circled around to the back of his neck. Hannah barely saw him. Her gaze was locked on her phone, what Malcolm did next. He opened a new message to Hannah's mom and typed— Hey mom, when you suck cock do you think it's better to spit or swallow?

His thumb hovered over the Send button but he didn't press it. Instead, he pressed the Back button and deleted the text one character at a time. "If I have to, I can send messages to your mom, to Sandra, whoever. I already turned off your location services, did that before we started driving, so nobody can track you. You need to listen to me very carefully. What happens next is completely up to you." He set her phone aside and reached for the tape on her mouth. "If I take this off, you promise not to scream?"

Hannah nodded.

"Nobody knows you're here," Malcolm repeated, slower this time, as he peeled away the tape.

"I won't tell anyone!" Hannah managed when he pulled the rag out. "I'll tell them I didn't see who shot Danny. Drop me out on Route 112 somewhere. I'll tell them I woke up out there and I don't remember anything after banging my head. We can still fix this. We can—"

"Shhhh." Malcolm pressed a grimy finger to her lips. "There's no easy way to say this, so I'm just going to put it out there. You're number seven, Hannah. You're the seventh girl I've brought out here. You haven't heard of any of them for the same reason you haven't read about me or seen me on TV … I'm very good at what I do. Each of those girls—"

A floorboard squeaked somewhere behind him, and Malcolm spun around, squeezing the handle of the screwdriver.

His movement stirred the dust, but there was nobody.

"Who's there?" Malcolm called out.

There was no response.

Had he checked the house? Probably not. He'd opened the trunk right after they stopped moving. There were no other cars outside. The place was far too remote for someone to walk.

Several flies had perched on the wall behind Malcolm's head, watching them.

Hannah let out a soft whimper.

"Shhh." Malcolm growled. "Shut the hell up."

At least a minute slipped by without another sound.

With all the windows boarded up, Hannah couldn't see much. Thin streams of light shone through between the cracks, sliced up the dark. She caught glimpses of old rotten furniture, discarded cans and bottles, snippets of graffiti on the walls. No movement, though. That didn't mean they were alone.

Still holding Hannah's phone, Malcolm switched on the flashlight. He teased the light over the dilapidated interior, rolling over the walls and floor. When he played the light over the floor of the hallway leading deeper into the house, a breath caught in his throat.