Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

For a second, I just looked at Rhonda Jean’s pale face, seeing the pain and exhaustion etched there. Maybe I should have felt surprised. I didn’t know. I only knew that I bypassed surprise and felt things I didn’t know existed click in my brain at those words.

I’m sorry.

He’s coming.

“April?” This was Eddie in the driver’s seat. His voice sounded stern, army stern. He knew something was wrong.

“Rhonda Jean is injured,” I told him, still turned around in my seat and looking at the girl. “Really bad. Under her coat. She’s bleeding everywhere.”

Eddie swore, just the one harsh word, and the car sped up. “She said there’s a hospital up ahead in Coldlake Falls.”

My gaze moved past Rhonda Jean to the back window again. The headlights were still there. They were getting bigger, as if the car behind us had accelerated. “Eddie, go faster.”

“The car behind us?”

“Yes.”

We sped up even more, Eddie fast and careful in the pitch dark, looking for the signs for Coldlake Falls. The blood on Rhonda’s chest and stomach was moving, soaking thickly into the fabric of her shirt and downward. I could see it staining her jeans.

None of this was real. It shouldn’t be real. But I knew it was.

I’d been in the passenger seat of a car once before, begging the driver to go faster. Please, faster. A long, long time ago.

“Who is he?” I asked Rhonda Jean.

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice a rasp.

“How did you get to the side of the road?”

“I walked.”

“From where?”

She seemed to fade out a little, then back in again before she answered. “I don’t know.”

“He found you somewhere?” I asked her. I gestured to her body. “And he did this?”

Rhonda Jean shook her head, but I wasn’t sure if that was a response to my question. “It doesn’t even hurt,” she said. “Is that weird?”

The headlights behind us had receded, then come forward again. As if the car had seen us accelerate and had accelerated to match us. We were already speeding through the black, empty night, but Eddie must have seen what I saw in the rearview mirror, because I heard the Pontiac’s engine open more as we went faster.

I reached back and grasped Rhonda Jean’s hand. It was ice-cold, slick with blood. “We’re taking you to the hospital,” I said.

Her expression didn’t flicker. “Sure, okay.”

“But tell me what happened to you. Stay awake and tell me.”

Her hand moved faintly in mine, but I gripped harder and didn’t let her go. “He’s following us,” she whispered, as if someone could overhear. “He knows I’m in this car.”

“Who? Who is he?”

“Coldlake Falls,” Eddie said from the front seat as a sign flashed past our speeding car. “Five minutes, tops.”

Rhonda Jean’s hand twitched in mine again, and her chest moved up and down. Breath gasped from her throat, and I realized she was starting to panic. “Calm down, baby,” I said to her, the term of endearment springing from my lips out of nowhere. “Just be calm. We’re ahead of him. We’re getting to the hospital. We’re going to win.”

She didn’t believe me. Part of her wanted to, but she didn’t. “I’m not going to make it,” she said, gasping.

“You are. It’s just a little blood. They’ll sew you up, good as new. Hold on and tell me what happened.”

But she shook her head. There was something inside her mind, something immense that cast a giant shadow over everything, like a monster in a horror movie.

“Is this real?” she asked.

“It’s real, baby,” I said. “It’s real, and we’re going to get through it. Just hold on.”

Incredibly, the headlights behind us were gaining on us, their brightness beginning to flood the car. “Jesus, this guy is fast,” Eddie said.

The headlights got brighter, brighter. I squinted into them, trying to see the vehicle or the man behind the wheel. All I saw was light and part of a grille—he was in a truck of some kind, high off the ground.

“Eddie,” I said.

“I know. The turnoff’s up ahead.”

Another sign flashed past us—coldlake falls—and without dropping speed Eddie took the turn, flying us off the two-lane road. He glanced back at the truck and swore before turning back to the road again. For the first time, he looked shaken, pale. I’d never seen him look like that before.

Still gripping Rhonda Jean’s hand, I turned and watched through the back window as the truck—it was some kind of large, dark thing, gleaming like a beetle—sped past the turnoff and into the night. Then it was gone.

Seconds later we were bathed in light again, this time from the streetlights of Coldlake Falls.

He was avoiding the light, I thought. He let us go because he didn’t want to be seen in the light. What did Eddie see?

I gripped the cold, bloody hand in mine. “We’re almost at the hospital, Rhonda Jean. Hang on.”

There was no answer. The girl in the back seat had passed out.

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—The hospital was small, a four-story brown brick building lit with fluorescents beneath a concrete overhang. I ran inside and begged the person at the emergency desk to send someone out as Eddie pulled Rhonda Jean’s unconscious body from the car. He picked her up beneath the shoulders and the knees, like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. When the EMTs took Rhonda Jean from him and put her on a stretcher, the front of his T-shirt was smeared with gore.

I was bloody, too. The hand that had gripped Rhonda Jean’s was covered in blood, and in my haste I’d smeared it on my olive green shorts and my white tee. The bloody handprints looked like I’d wrestled someone to the ground. I had blood darkening and drying under my fingernails. My flip-flops were still on the floor of the front passenger seat somewhere, and my feet were bare.

Through the glass doors we could see a nurse behind the emergency desk, staring at us. She picked up the large brown handset of her desk phone and started to dial, her gaze never leaving us.

That was when I realized: Eddie and I looked like murderers.

“Shit,” Eddie said, looking down at himself. He glanced at the car, which was still running, then looked at me. “April, should we run?”

“What?” The shock must have shown on my face. Not because of what he’d said, but because I was thinking the same thing.

We could get into the Pontiac and drive away as fast as we could. We could floor it. Who would come after us, and how long would it take before they started? How far away could we be by then?

“Forget it,” Eddie said, misreading my expression. “Forget I said anything.”

“It’s fine,” I said, but my mind was ticking over. We could drive farther up the peninsula, then double back down to Ann Arbor. We could be home by the time the sun was up. No one here knew our names. We’d have to clean the car, or better yet, get rid of it altogether.

That would be wrong, I told myself. Because someone had killed that girl, Rhonda Jean. The person in the truck had killed her. I was sure of it.

But all my panicked body knew was that the killer wasn’t me.

I looked at Eddie again. He was watching me, his gaze intent, and I had no idea what he was thinking. I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know what I was going to say.

It didn’t matter, because it was already too late. The police were pulling in.