Chapter 16
Eric
J umping up from my phone going off, I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and balked at the several missed calls. What the fuck? My body must have given up on keeping me awake, but it meant someone was trying to get through to me urgently and I missed it. Pissed at myself, I answered the phone with my lungs throbbing.
"Yes?" My eyes were wide open and I was sitting up as straight as a board.
"Hi, Eric. Calling from the search and rescue team. We thought you should be the first to know, before we put it on the news..." My heart stopped. Good news, bad news, I couldn't deduce it from the soldier's tone. I was a mixture of hope and foreboding.
"What is it?" I screamed these words inside my head but when they left my mouth, it was a low murmur.
"Lily has been spotted at a hospital in Virginia..." The soldier continued.
When I tell you that the light in my room appeared brighter and sounds became crisper, I'm not lying. I hopped out of the bed and ran down the hallway, shouting, "Lily's been found". The guys' room doors banged open and they all met me outside.
"What?! When is she coming home?" Ryan asked.
"Why isn't she home yet?" Matt pondered.
Ethan was silent, gripping his door frame, air caught in his lungs.
"Do you need us to come and pick her up?" My heart started beating again and the force with which it pumped made me realize how asleep and dead it had been lately.
"Mr. Fletcher, I'm sorry. I wasn't done." The soldier maintained her unreadable tone.
"I don't understand..." Cramping rushed to the forefront of my brain as I raised my head to look at my best friends, impatient and waiting for me to say something.
"Well, I'm sorry Mr. Fletcher..." She began.
Starting with an apology? That couldn't be good. A gasp coming from the depths of my soul escaped and my knees went weak.
"It's not horrible news." She offered just as my body began to lose feeling. "It's just that as soon as the nurse reported it and returned to the room, they had vanished."
My brain was on fire and my head wobbled on my neck like a bobblehead. Her words picked me up and tossed me around in an emotional rollercoaster.
"They don't have her." I mouthed to my friends, before turning my back to them, as if that would make me hear the soldier better. And because I couldn't look at their disappointment or their eyes begging me for answers I didn't have.
"Why didn't she restrain them?" I asked, ridiculously.
But Lily was almost home, damn it.
"Don't worry. This is still good news. At least we know not to keep looking in North Carolina. The report will go live all over the news a little later, but in the meantime, we have a team on the ground in Virginia. Both the military and the police force are involved in the search. There's no way we won't find her."
With that, she hung up and I was left in an emotional limbo, my hand with the phone going limp at my side.
"What did they say?" Ethan blared from behind me.
"I guess they have it under control?" I turned to face them. "So, I guess now we just sit tight and wait until we get the call to pick her up."
"Like that'll be easy." Ryan walked up and down the hallway, shaking his head.
"Yeah, but at least we know she's still alive, right?" Matt swallowed.
"Yeah, but what was she doing at the hospital?" I swiped my hand over my face. The pulse beneath my cold-to-the-touch skin was a mere echo.
"The point is she's alive. We don't have to sit around and do nothing. If they say they're onto it, we should assume she'll be home soon, right? So we need to prepare the house for her." Ethan's voice shook a little with his attempt to be in high spirits. "We should go to her house and get some of her stuff, you know her clothes and shoes? She must be dying for some fresh clothes. Or do you think she'd prefer brand new clothes? There's no way she's going back to that house to live. We could get her favorite foods. She might need to go back to the hospital for a check-up though." I think Ethan had forgotten we were all still standing in front of him.
He was lost in his rambling and we were hanging on to his every word, because what else were we supposed to do?
"That's a good idea." Ryan took a deep breath and nodded. "I'll head over to her house right away." He started setting off when all of our phones pinged.
It was that unknown number again, and we all froze. In silence, we clicked on the message. There was a dull pounding in my head. It was another video, and from the still image, our hearts dropped. It was Lily. His grimy hand was in her hair, pulling her head back. She was on her knees, crying and surrounded by trees. We hit play, bile making a bitter stew in my stomach. Her cries were gut-wrenching.
"No, please!" she screamed.
A handgun entered the frame, pressed up against her skull.