The Biker (Nightmare Hall) (5 page)

Echo fought to keep her disappointment from spoiling the ride. It
had
been wonderful. She should be savoring it instead of hungering for more.

That’s your problem, she scolded as she walked slowly back to the dorm. You always want more. You want more from people than they’re willing to give, and you want more from life than it’s ever going to provide. If you don’t change, you are always, always, going to be disappointed.

She was almost to Lester when she heard, coming toward her from the rear, the familiar animal-like roar of the bike’s engine. She recognized it immediately, knew it wasn’t a car with a bad muffler, or a power mower, or a train on distant tracks. It was the motorcycle, no question.

She whirled, peering into the darkness. Here it came, light on, black-gloved hands on the handlebars. As it reached her and stopped, one snakeskin-booted foot hit the pavement. The helmet she’d worn earlier was thrust at her sheepishly.

Echo laughed with delight. “You changed your mind!” she cried.

He nodded and shrugged carelessly. She had a feeling he might be grinning under the face shield. “Get on!” he shouted over the engine’s impatient grumbling.

Echo couldn’t obey fast enough. She hopped on behind him, stuffing her hair up underneath the helmet and fastening the strap. She wrapped her arms around his waist again. “Thanks!” she called as he stomped down on the pedal. “Thanks for changing your mind!”

He nodded, and off they went.

But this time, he didn’t head for the state park. Nor did he aim for the river road. Instead, she found herself on the back of a motorcycle racing toward town.

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea!” she shouted as they passed Nightingale Hall, a huge, brick, off-campus dorm sitting high on a hill overlooking the highway a short distance from campus. The house had been nicknamed “Nightmare Hall” because of strange occurrences there, including at least one mysterious death. It was a gloomy, dark, dreary old place, and because she knew there had been trouble there, the sight of the house reminded Echo that trouble could also be awaiting them in town. “Maybe we should turn around now and go back!”

Pruitt didn’t answer, didn’t even shake his head. And he didn’t turn the bike around. They kept going in the same direction.

No uniformed police officers were lying in wait for them when they reached Twin Falls. Late on Saturday night, everyone who was going somewhere had already arrived and the main street, lined with banks and shops and restaurants, was deserted, although the store display windows and the restaurants and the clubs were bright with lights.

Echo breathed a sigh of relief as they stopped at a red light at the bridge in the center of town. If no one saw them, if Pruitt drove on for just a few more minutes and then raced back to campus, it would be all right. Nothing horrible would happen.

The light turned green, and he was off, heading deeper into town, toward the area housing several nightclubs where Salem students went to dance.

Someone might see us, Echo thought. And then what?

“Pruitt!” Echo called over the engine’s deafening roar. “I think we should go back! Please, let’s go back now!”

He ignored her. Didn’t even slow down.

They were approaching a club Echo had heard of, called Johnny’s Place, one of the most popular clubs in town. She could see a small group of people gathered on the sidewalk under a green canvas canopy. There were two couples, laughing and talking. It was too early for them to be calling it a night, so Echo decided they must have come outside for a breath of fresh air. She couldn’t see them well enough to tell who they were, but she probably didn’t know them, anyway. They were “fun” people who went dancing on Saturday nights.

Maybe it was because no one had ever asked her to go dancing on a Saturday night or any other night that Echo decided she might wave as they whizzed by the group. Or maybe it was a perverse streak in her that asked her what good it did for her to take a ride with the Mad Biker if no one ever knew about it? They wouldn’t know her identity, because the helmet and face shield protected that. But they’d know
someone
was on the back of the bike, and
she’d
know it was her. That would have to be enough.

But she never got the chance to wave.

With a sudden, startling twist of the handlebars, the bike left the road and roared up onto the sidewalk.

It was aiming straight at the group.

Its speed never lessened as it plowed into them.

Echo, all of her senses frozen in shock, saw it all in slow motion, and would see it again, over and over, for a long time to come.

A girl in a bright red dress was tossed through the glass front door of the club, shattering it into a thousand pieces.

A boy in jeans and a blue shirt was thrown up against a tan station wagon parked at the curb, and Echo felt, rather than heard, his bones breaking.

Another boy whom Echo recognized as Liam McCullough sailed straight up into the air on impact, somersaulting into the soft canvas canopy.

It all happened so fast, in less time than it would have taken her to lift her hand and wiggle her fingers in a triumphant, in-your-face kind of wave. Forever after, the scene would blur in her mind like a watercolor left out in the rain.

She came to her senses then and began clawing at the black leather jacket, pounding on Pruitt’s shoulders, screaming, screaming at him to stop. “Stop, stop it!” she shrieked. “What are you doing? Oh, God, what are you
doing?”

The fourth person in the group, a small, slender girl in a bright blue dress and heels, had seen the bike coming and broken into a run. She was still running, high heels impeding her progress, her head repeatedly swiveling over her shoulder to display eyes wide with terror as she checked to see if she had escaped.

She hadn’t.

Although Echo continued to claw at the leather-clad shoulders in front of her, to pound with both fists on the back, to scream and shout at Pruitt to stop, please stop, he bore down upon the girl with a vengeance.

There was nowhere for her to go, nowhere she could hide.

The front wheel of the bike hit her in the back. She wasn’t very heavy. The impact lifted her up, out of her heels and sent her, in her stocking feet, up into the air like an oversized, bright blue bird trying to outrace the motorcycle.

The bike slowed, and even in her state of shock, Echo realized why. Pruitt didn’t
want
to outrace the girl. He wanted to see her fall back to earth.

Sickened, Echo used her nails to dig viciously into the back of Pruitt’s neck, just below the helmet, drawing blood.

He didn’t seem to notice.

The girl landed on the sidewalk just ahead of them with an awful, splatting sound.

Voices and running footsteps behind them told Echo that patrons had heard the commotion, left the club, and were pursuing the bike on foot.

Pruitt heard the sounds of pursuit, too.

He gunned the engine and sped away, running over the girl’s limp, outstretched legs.

T
HE SHOCK OF THE
horrifying events took its toll on Echo. She couldn’t speak as they raced away from the scene. All of the screaming she had done back there had been in vain, wasted cries that left her throat raw and four people injured, perhaps dead. But even if she could have spoken, that, too, would have been wasted effort. Her brain had been so severely assaulted by what she had seen that no clear thought was possible. Fragments of sentences flew around in her mind like bats in a cave, but she was too stunned to gather them together.

Because her senses were still numbed by the horror of what had happened, the tears she needed to shed, the screams she needed to scream, the fury she needed to give vent to, all remained locked inside of her, churning around until she became physically ill.

By the time they reached Nightmare Hall, she was reeling with nausea and knew she was about to topple off the bike.

Once again she pounded on the back of Pruitt’s jacket.

This time he stopped, coming to a screeching halt at the end of the gravel driveway leading up to the spooky old house.

Echo threw herself off the bike, ripped the helmet off her head, and lurched toward a narrow strip of grass beside a drainage ditch where, on her hands and knees, she lost her sandwich and coffee. Then she collapsed sideways, lying on her back on the grass, breathless and dizzy and weak.

“C’mon, we gotta go,” Pruitt called over the loud sputtering of the engine.

“No.”

“What?”

Echo covered her eyes with one hand in an effort to shut out the sight of the bike and its rider. “I’m not going anywhere with you. After what you did. …”

“Don’t you mean what
we
did?”

The question penetrated Echo’s consciousness like a wash of acid. We?
We?

Now she was alert. Yes, there
had
been a we. Whenever more than one person was involved in something, you had a “we,” wasn’t that right? And Echo Glenn, all by herself, had turned this nightmare into a “we” situation, as in a “couple,” as in “he and I,” as in “us.” There were
two
people on that bike when it smashed into those people, and I was one of the two, she thought. That thought made her sick again.

Pruitt stayed on the bike. He didn’t turn off the engine. She could barely hear his voice. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting just a little?” he said. “If you’re worried about getting caught, don’t. Nobody but me knows who you are. And I’m not telling. And, of course, you won’t be telling about me, either.”

Oh, God. Echo rolled over and hid her face in her hands. She couldn’t think clearly. But this much her stunned, sick mind grasped: he would use that against her. He
would.

“Go away,” she muttered from behind her hands. “Just go away and leave me alone. You’re sick, you’re crazy! You have to be to do something so awful. Get away from me!” She struggled upright just long enough to toss the helmet at him, then she collapsed again onto the grass.

He laughed as he caught the helmet. The sound was laden with satisfaction. “I’ll go. But don’t forget, I was not alone out there tonight. Later.”

The bike roared away, and Echo thought, Forget? Forget? How could I ever forget?

She lay on the grass until her legs felt as if they might be willing to hold her upright, then got up slowly. She still felt weak and sick, but she was afraid that someone who lived at Nightmare Hall would come home from a Saturday night date, find her there and ask difficult questions. That fear moved her feet along the berm of the highway toward campus.

As she walked, she couldn’t help imagining the scene in town: the bodies strewn everywhere, the shocked patrons of Johnny’s Place standing around, watching in horror as ambulances arrived and the victims were loaded into them. Were they all still alive? How could the girl who had tried to outrace the bike possibly still have a breath left in her?

I should have stayed there, Echo told herself in misery as she plodded along the dark road toward campus. I should have jumped off the bike somehow and stayed to help.

But Pruitt hadn’t slowed down long enough. Maybe he’d somehow sensed that doing so would have given her the opportunity to desert him. And he didn’t want that, did he?

He wasn’t going to leave her alone now. She was as sure of that as she was that her arms and legs were trembling violently. She fought to steady them. If anyone came along now and saw her stumbling along the highway, they might stop to help her. What possible explanation could she give for being out here alone late on a Saturday night?

Instead of going straight to the dorm and hiding in her bed, which was what she wanted to do more than anything, she headed for the infirmary. The victims had probably been taken to the hospital in town, but on the off chance that the less seriously injured (if there were any) might have been brought to campus, she turned her steps in that direction.

She knew even before she went inside that a patient from Twin Falls had arrived, because there was a Twin Falls EMS truck parked sideways in front of the low, brick building. Had to be a student, or it wouldn’t have been brought to campus.

The patient being treated in one of the emergency cubicles, she was told by the student volunteer manning the reception desk, was “that tall, cute guy with the name everyone mispronounces. You know … everyone says Lie-am, but it’s really Lee-am. Liam McCullough.” A tall, heavyset brunette, she leaned across the desk and almost whispered, “There was another biker attack in town tonight. A really bad one this time. He hit
a whole bunch of people!”
She said this with such awe, and her eyes were so round with fascination that Echo felt sick again.

“Liam was one of the people who got hit,” the girl, whose plastic black and white name tag read “ANNETTE” said, her tone conversational now. “I think he’s got a broken wrist. He was holding his left arm funny. And he had a big lump on his forehead, so maybe he’s got a concussion, too.”

“What about the others?” Echo had to ask.

“They’re at the hospital.” Annette’s expression sobered. “I heard someone say that Lily D’Agostino might not live.” Her eyes widened again. “He hit her, and then he ran right over her, can you believe that? I mean, isn’t it just too horrible?”

Yes, Echo thought, clutching the edge of the desk, it is just too horrible. But … the girl, the bluebird in flight, hadn’t died. Yet. She was still alive. Barely, maybe, but alive.

Echo turned to leave. There wasn’t anything she could do here. Might as well go back to the dorm and crawl into bed. If she was really, really lucky, she might even sleep a little.

The first thing she did in her room was switch on the radio. She had missed the initial story, but because the victims were students, the campus radio station would present updates every fifteen minutes.

While she waited, she took off her shoes and socks and flopped down on the bed. There was a huge, hollow space inside of her that she knew would fill up with pain and terror and regret and guilt the very second that shock left her. If it ever did.