Fear: 13 Stories of Suspense and Horror (18 page)

“Yeah?” Clown Mask sounded amused. “Who do you suggest I take instead? One of your friends from inside the bank?”

Nina shook her head, her heart pounding. Not Katie. She had that new baby. And not Rick, either. He had a heart condition and kids at home, too.

“What about your friend in the dress shop there, huh?” Clown Mask breathed. He was pushing her as he spoke . . . pushing her down the concourse, past Overton's, where she could see the top of Angela's head, peeking out over the counter, the telephone still clutched to one ear. “Should we go in there and swap you for her? Would you like that better, huh?”

“No,” Nina said, sullenly. Whatever Clown Mask had planned for her—and Nina didn't kid herself that it was going to be anything too pleasant—Angela wouldn't last a minute. And if she herself happened to live through it—and Nina wasn't betting she was going to—it would scar her way less than it would Angela.

Because Angela—whose loving parents only made her work this single weekend shift at their shop to teach her responsibility—had never known hardship in her life. Except the hardship of having not been invited to Lauren van der Waals's party.

Nina hoped Angela would have a very nice time there without her.

“I didn't think so,” Clown Mask said, with a low sound in his throat that Nina could only assume was a chuckle. He continued to push her along past the waterfall, toward the side exits.

They burst through the twin doors together, and Nina was greeted with a blast of cold night air in her face—air that was only going to get colder since she didn't have a coat on—and the welcome relief of no more fire alarm sound.

She was also greeted by the wail of a police siren as a squad car skidded to a halt in the parking lot in front of them.
Someone
had gotten through to emergency services, at least.

Clown Mask, who'd loosened his grip on her throat only slightly, now tightened it. A young police officer flung himself out from behind the wheel and, using the car as a shield, pointed his service revolver at them.

“Stay where you are,” he yelled, his voice strangely soft after the loudness of the alarm inside. “Put down your weapon, nice and slow.”

“I have a better idea,” Clown Mask said to the police officer. “You put down
your
weapon, or I'll blow a hole in this girl's head. How about that?”

The police officer, who looked barely old enough to have graduated from high school, let alone the academy, seemed confused. Nina could hear other sirens in the distance, but it sounded like it would be a while before they got anywhere close.

“That's what I thought,” Clown Mask said, sounding smug. “Now, this young lady and I are going to walk over to my car, real slow, and you're going to let us. Or like I said, I'll splatter her brains all over the front doors of Calder Mall. And I don't think your chief would like it if I did that. Do you?”

The cop said nothing. He continued to keep his gun pointed at them, however, as Clown Mask dragged her toward his getaway car, a beat-up four-door sedan parked illegally along the curb right next to where they'd been standing. If there'd actually been a cop patrolling the mall's parking lot, he'd have gotten a ticket and been towed.

But all the cops were busy on the far side of town, trying to stop real crimes—the kind of crimes the Night Hunter had finally gotten so sick of reading about in the paper, he'd put on a mask and decided to go and fight them himself.

And now look what was happening over at the mall.

“Listen,” Nina said in a low voice to her captor. “Let me go now. He won't shoot you. He's too scared. And you'll make better time without me.”

“Nice try, sweetie,” Clown Mask said with a chuckle. “Now get in the car.”

Nina knew the last thing she ought to do was get inside that car.

But from the way she'd seen him push Katie down back in the bank, she also knew that he wasn't going to be shy about using that gun . . . even with a cop standing a few dozen yards away.

She let him shove her into the passenger seat of the sedan.
It's all right
, she told herself.
I'll jump out when we slow down to take a corner.

It would hurt, but it would be better than whatever waited for her at the end of this.

Then Clown Mask was in the driver's seat, one hand on the wheel while the other continued to point the gun at her head. As they took off, his tires spun in the bits of sand left over from a recent snowfall. Nina barely had time to buckle her seat belt before he accelerated. He laughed bitterly at this, as if to say she had more important things to worry about than being in a car crash, which she supposed was true.

Then, with a spray of sand and gravel, the sedan careened from the parking lot, heading down 95 and away from the mall, the lights of which grew faint in the distance. Nina held on to her seat belt, conscious of the gun still pointed to her temple.
Not yet,
she told herself.
Soon. He has to slow down sometime
. And then she'd jump. And run for all she was worth.

“You're never going to make it,” she told Clown Mask as he swerved to merge into evening traffic. She was sure no one suspected that they were slowing down for a psychotic bank robber.

Clown Mask just chuckled. “In this town? With these cops? Watch me.”

He had a point. Eastport's police department was stretched to the limit, with barely enough men and women to cover routine patrols, let alone any additional emergencies that might occur. The city was bankrupt, and the mayor, in his infinite wisdom, had cut back on city workers first. The police department had been the first to see major layoffs.

“I'll be home counting my payoff before
Jeopardy!”
Clown Mask said, with a sneer.

“And what about me?” Nina asked, in a tight voice. She knew she wasn't going to like his answer. Still, she was hoping he'd lie to her.

He didn't.

“You?” He used the mouth of the pistol to push back some of her dark hair so he could get a better look at her face. “You, I'm starting to like.”

Oh, no,
thought Nina. They were going eighty miles an hour down the fast lane. There was no way she could jump out at this speed and survive. And death, to Nina, did not seem preferable to the alternative at this point. There still might be opportunities for escape when they got to his house, or wherever they were going. There was still hope. He liked her—or thought she was pretty, or whatever. She could get out of this, if she played her cards right. She could still get out of this.

There was still a chance she might live.

“What the hell?” Clown Mask asked a second later, abruptly removing the gun from her hair and glancing urgently into the rearview mirror.

Nina looked back but couldn't see what was alarming him. She'd hoped to see the red glare of police sirens, but instead she saw only the single headlight of a motorcycle. True, it seemed to be tailgating them. But that wasn't anything to get upset about.

Then she remembered:

The Night Hunter was rumored to ride a motorcycle sometimes. Other times—at least according to eyewitnesses, who swore they weren't making it up—he drove some kind of armored vehicle, like an SUV tank.

But it was too much to hope that the Night Hunter had somehow managed to find them—out of all the cars on the interstate—when even the cops hadn't been able to. Nina swallowed down the sudden hope that had swelled inside her. She had experienced far too much disappointment in recent months to allow her spirits to be crushed that way again. There was only one person in this life, she knew, who you could count on . . . one. And that was yourself. If she was going to get out of this, she would have to do it on her own.

“This guy's riding my ass,” Clown Mask muttered, switching lanes abruptly.

But Nina could tell by the high beam in the rearview mirror and the loud roar behind them that the move had done no good.

“What's with this guy?” Clown Mask demanded, and switched lanes again.

The motorcycle stayed right behind him, the roar from its engine seeming to envelop them, reverberating in Nina's chest.

Nina couldn't help it. She began to feel hopeful. It was an emotion she hadn't allowed herself to feel in a long, long time.

“Maybe,” she said, “it's the Night Hunter.”

“What?” Clown Mask asked distractedly as he tried to make his way back to the passing lane.

“You know,” Nina said. “The Night Hunter. That vigilante who's been making citizen's arrests of criminals the cops haven't been able—or had time—to arrest. He left that crime boss Vincent Gamboni tied up in his own car by the docks last week, along with a boatload of seven hundred thousand dollars' worth of stolen goods. You're kind of small potatoes,” Nina added, “compared to him. But then, you are adding kidnapping to grand larceny, which are both felonies.”

“Shut the hell up,” Clown Mask said, pushing a button to bring the driver's side window down.

“I'm just saying,” Nina said, “a known drug dealer who's been wanted for murder and aggravated assault and on the run for three years? The Night Hunter found him and brought him in with no shots fired. He's that good. And you think you're going to get away? In your little clown mask?” Nina laughed. She couldn't help it.

Which was when Clown Mask leaned out the driver's side window and fired a shot behind them, in the direction of the relentlessly pursuing motorcycle.

The sound of the report was so loud that Nina screamed and flung both hands over her ears.

“What are you doing?” she shrieked. “Are you trying to get us both killed?”

“Drive,” Clown Mask said. Only he'd ripped off his mask in order to take better aim at his prey, and now Nina could see his irregular features: the badly reset broken nose; the too-small, beady eyes, blinking at her with a glint of desperation. “I'm going to kill this bastard. Take the wheel.”

Before Nina had time to regret what she'd said—she'd only meant to scare him, after all—her captor had slithered halfway out the driver's side window and was unloading his pistol in the direction of the man on the motorcycle.

If she didn't want them to careen into the cars on either side of them, Nina had no choice but to seize the wheel of the car and slam her foot on the gas.

But since she could no more allow him to kill the Night Hunter than she could allow him to kill her, she yanked violently on the wheel, swerving right. And then, praying to a God she wasn't entirely sure she believed in anymore, she cut across three lanes of traffic. Horns blared as cars veered out of their way, barely missing them.

“What the hell are you doing?” her captor slithered back inside the car to shout at her. He seized the wheel, wrestling it from her grasp.

But Nina wouldn't give up. She gave it another violent tug while pressing down with all her might on the gas, aiming the car for a copse of trees she could see rushing toward them from the darkness alongside the road. All the while she was praying,
Please don't let me die, please don't let me die, please don't let me die. . . .

Clown Mask responded by striking her hard against the side of her head with the butt of his gun. Instinctively, she released the wheel and let go of the gas, seizing the side of her face and recoiling in pain and confusion as her vision swam in blackness.

When her eyesight cleared a split second later, she experienced several agonizingly long moments of clarity as the car zoomed off the highway, bounced over the shoulder, and dove into the trees toward which she'd aimed it. She only had time to fling up both arms in a useless attempt to protect her head before the car landed with a stunningly hard force, a deafening crunch of metal, and a splinter of shattering glass.

And this time when the blackness came, it consumed her.

 

 

When Nina opened her eyes, she heard the sound of cars passing in the distance, and somewhere closer by, the gentle cascade of running water. Her head ached, and it took a few seconds for her vision to focus. When it finally did, the first thing she saw was a pair of blue eyes staring at her from a field of darkness. At first she thought she must be in a cave, or a movie theater. Why else would it be so dark?

Then she realized that it was nighttime, and she was outside. There was something warm over her body, but her face felt the chill, and so did the places where her body connected with the cold, hard ground.

She also realized that the reason the blue eyes appeared to be looking at her from a field of darkness was that they were peering at her from behind two holes. The man kneeling beside her was wearing a black rubber mask.

She gave a start, and the man—who, she realized, was cradling her upper body, trying to keep her head supported—said, in a low voice that was more rasp than whisper, “An ambulance is on the way. You're going to be all right. Just keep still.”

Nina wasn't sure she believed him. She hurt all over. She tried moving her legs—it would be just her luck if she turned out to be paralyzed—and was relieved to find that she could bend both her knees with some effort.

“Hey,” the man with the black mask rasped, sounding as if he were laughing a little. “I thought I said to keep still.”

Which was all well and good for him to say. But he hadn't been in that car with a gun pointed to his head a few minutes (had it only been minutes?) ago.

“Wh-where is he?” Nina demanded, turning her head. Big mistake. Waves of pain shot through it.

“He's gone,” the man in the mask said. Another man in a mask, Nina thought, with a groan. Too many masks for one night. “Don't worry about him. You're safe now.”