CHAPTER 12 AN UNEXPECTED GUEST #2
Above me, there’s a loud thud and I think I hear my mom’s muffled voice. I stare at the phone in my hand. The call has ended. Whoever it was hung up. A sudden and overwhelming sense of terror washes over me. I move toward the back stairs but I feel like my body is moving in slow motion.
“Mom?” I call out as I reach the top of the stairs and go down the hall to her room. “Mom, we gotta get out of here. Something is happening! Somebody just called me from Noah’s number and—”
I’m stopped short as I enter my mom’s room and stand just outside her bathroom. She is standing by her sink, her hand still wrapped in a towel—and a man is standing in front of her with his back to me.
He’s dressed in dark clothing and is holding something in his hand.
A knife. Not the fake plastic kind Mr. Lions had threatened Rachel with in Kate’s.
This one looks like something a hunter would use to carve up a wild animal.
The curved blade is as long as my forearm and serrated on one edge.
It glints in the glaring white light of the bathroom as the man looms over my mom.
“It’s all over,” the man says. “This is all done now.”
I look to my mom, expecting to find her terrified but she is stoic.
“Get out of my house,” she says firmly.
“No,” the man says. “No one is going anywhere.”
He takes a step toward her and without thinking, I launch myself directly at him.
I wrap my arms around his head and neck, squeezing as tight as I can, clawing at his face.
My finger finds something soft and I press into it.
I think it’s his eye. He screams and thrashes around wildly, slamming his back against the bathroom door, knocking the wind out of me.
I tumble to the floor and roll onto my back gasping for air.
The man glowers at me. His eyes are a piercing blue and his messy blond hair hangs over his forehead.
I know him.
“You—you were there at the movie theater,” I stammer.
“I don’t want to have to kill you too,” he says.
I scramble to my feet and retreat toward the bedroom door as the man advances on me.
“Just leave!” I scream at him. “We won’t tell anybody! Just go! Please!”
The man says nothing as he takes another step toward me and raises the knife.
“Mom!” I scream. “Run!”
I brace myself. This is going to hurt.
From behind me, somewhere down the hall, there is the pounding of footsteps—running.
Someone in a black coat with the hood up pushes past me, sending me careening into the wall.
They slam into the guy with the hunting knife and they both tumble into the bathroom.
My mom shrieks as I struggle to regain my footing.
I rush to the bathroom. The stranger has the man with the knife by the back of his coat and they are grappling on the floor as my mom tries to get out of the way.
I reach in to grab her, when suddenly the man with the knife wriggles out of his coat, delivering a swift kick to the stranger’s ribs, before turning on my mom. I get another good look at him and something is off . . . he is all wrong.
His arms are different lengths and his right forearm below the elbow is a different color and texture than the skin of his bicep on that same side. A row of thick black stitching encircles his arm just below the elbow joint. The right hand is bigger and is missing its middle digit.
The man raises his arm and brings the knife down into my mom’s left shoulder. He grips the handle with both hands, dragging it down with the full weight of his body, separating the skin from the bone.
I scream but my mom doesn’t. She just stands there looking down at the wound, her mouth hanging open.
The person in the black jacket hops up and grabs the man with the knife in a bear hug.
The knife dislodges from my mom’s shoulder and the man wielding it flips it around in his palm and plants it in the upper thigh of the man in the black coat.
The room feels like it’s tilting. My vision goes double, then refocuses. The knife-wielding man yanks the weapon from the other guy’s thigh and looks at the blade.
“More secrets,” the man says. He suddenly turns and with a closed fist punches me directly in the face.
I fall back and my head smacks against the hardwood floor. I lie there as the man steps over me and then sprints out of the room. I hear him on the stairs and a few seconds later, the front door bangs open. Then my mother’s voice sounds and the room around me fades in and out.
“Meka!” she shouts. She leans over me, her face a mask of concern.
She should be crying, right? She’s gotta be in pain. I look at her shoulder and see that it is almost completely separated at the joint. The tendons, muscle, and bone are visible.
“Mom,” I say, but it doesn’t come out right. The pain flashing in the back of my head blurs every thought, every word. “Put—put pressure on—on your shoulder.”
“Do you need to?” another voice asks.
“No,” my mom says.
“Oh, right,” says the other voice. “No . . . blood.”
No blood.
I’m missing something. Of course there’s blood.
It’s everywhere. I’m probably lying in a pool of it.
My mom’s shoulder is hanging off and this other person got stabbed in the leg so there must be blood.
I look at the bathroom floor. No. Not there.
Maybe in the bedroom? I twist my neck to try and see if there is blood in my mom’s room but no, there isn’t any there either.
I try to sit up but the person in the black jacket holds me still.
“Don’t move, Meeks,” they say. “You hit your head.”
I—I know this voice. My brain doesn’t work right so the word that comes out can’t be true but it comes out all the same.
“Noah.”
The figure reaches up and pulls the hood away from their head.
Noah stares down at me.
Everything goes black.