The Last Time I Saw Her (16 page)

The rope had been thrown over the side again, and she saw that this end of it was wrapped around one of the sturdier tree trunks for ballast and that the two men who hadn't been helping her out of her harness were anchoring it. As she pulled Hughes's jacket tight around herself again, a sideways glance found Fleenor's body sprawled near the cliff face. At some point it would be transported down the mountain, but probably not until the medical examiner could look at it, she assumed. The night was so dark she couldn't see anything much beyond the shape of it, but the angle at which the head was attached to the neck precluded the body being alive, and she hastily averted her gaze. Fleenor's spirit was nowhere in evidence, and for that she could only be thankful. If he was still experiencing the loop, she was glad to have missed an up-close-and-personal viewing of it.

“There's an ambulance standing by for you at the foot of the mountain and a truck waiting to take you there,” Trent told her. “Can you walk to the road? It isn't far, just up that path. If you can't, we can get you there.”

The truth was, her legs felt about as sturdy as cooked spaghetti, and what she really wanted to do was sit down. She was cold with the wind still swirling around her, and she thrust her hands deep into the pockets of Hughes's jacket for warmth. The men around her were scarcely more than shadows. The pines crowding the ledge were black as ink, and every sound—rustling trees, moaning wind, the crunch of the rescue team's footsteps—made her tense. She realized that she was listening for any sign of the other hostages, but there was nothing.

“I can walk, and I don't need an ambulance,” Charlie responded, watching as Michael, climbing up under his own steam, hoisted himself onto the ledge. He stood up and started to untie the rope around his waist while two of the deputies, inches shorter and far less physically impressive than he was, tried to steady him. Remembering that he'd climbed down to her tethered to a rope, she assumed he had tied himself to it for both descent and ascent as a sensible safety precaution, because, as she had learned, under the right circumstances he could be a surprisingly careful man. Summoning her inner fortitude, she squared her shoulders, looked away from Michael, and got right down to what was important, saying to Trent, who seemed to be in charge, “The escapees were heading for a barn large enough to hide a school bus in. It should be within fifteen miles of here. They have a pickup truck waiting inside. You have to find that barn. I think they're planning to kill at least some of the remaining hostages once they get there.” Taking a breath, she tried to calculate the amount of time that had already passed and felt her chest tighten. “There may not be much time.”

“I told them all that. It's taken care of, you don't have to worry.” Michael joined her. She wanted to rest against him, to have him wrap his arms around her and take her weight for a little while, but she didn't. She was exhausted and sore and emotionally wrung out and practically jumping out of her skin with anxiety, and none of that mattered. What mattered was getting the rest of the hostages back safely. But staying on her feet and keeping her concentration where it needed to be if she was going to be of any help to anyone was getting harder. Always able to read her expression too easily, Michael frowned down at her.

“You okay?” he asked quietly.

She said “Yes” and looked at Trent, who hovered nearby. She asked him, “Have any of the other hostages been rescued?”

“I don't know, ma'am,” he replied. “We got a big operation going on here. Hard to know what the other hand's doing, if you know what I mean.”

“The Sheriff's Department thinks they know what barn it is,” one of the other deputies told her. “Only one up here that size. They've got people on the way there now.”

“That's good,” Charlie said, although she was horribly afraid that it might already be too late.

“If you're ready, ma'am…” Trent said and gestured. Charlie nodded and started walking back up the path Fleenor had chased her down what felt like a lifetime ago.

While three of the men stayed behind, Trent escorted her and Michael up to the top of the trail, where a small truck with a closed bed waited. Its lights were off, and when Trent opened the door for her to slide in along the one bench seat no interior light came on.

As the driver got out and went around to talk to Trent, Charlie clambered in out of the wind with relief and scooched over to make room for Michael. He got in beside her. The warmth he radiated was welcome, and the feel of his big body against hers was instantly comforting.

“Hughes have military training?” Michael asked under his breath.

“No, why?” Charlie replied, looking at him with a frown. He was almost impossible to see in the dark, so she guessed her frown was lost on him.

“Couple of broken necks to account for,” Michael said, as the driver, a strapping man who looked to be in his early twenties, got in behind the wheel, introducing himself as Lieutenant Tim Brown, National Guard.

They started off, pulling away without turning on the headlights.

“Um, lights?” Charlie said, alarmed. She couldn't even see Michael, who was squeezed in beside her, let alone the road in front of them.

“Trying to keep a clandestine presence, ma'am,” Brown replied, which did nothing to calm Charlie's misgivings about navigating the steep, twisty road in the pitch dark. The sheer drop-off she'd just ascended, along with similar ones she'd seen on the drive up, was vivid in her memory.

“He's wearing night-vision goggles,” Michael said in her ear, clearly having once again read her thoughts, or more likely her body language, because she'd gone rigid and had grabbed hold of his leg.

Charlie darted a glance at the driver. Now that Michael had alerted her to their presence, she could just see their shiny blackness against the paler skin of his face.

The ride down the mountain proved uneventful, although Charlie continued to experience spasms of unease over negotiating hairpin turns in the dark. She kept scanning the dense woods lining the road, hoping against hope that she would see one or more of the hostages who might have escaped the bus emerging from the woods. The blackness beneath the trees was impenetrable, however, and all she saw was an occasional gleaming pair of animal's eyes tracking the truck as it passed. She tried not to picture anything horrible that might have happened or might be happening in that dark forest. Upsetting herself did no one any good. Despite Hughes's jacket, which she kept wrapped tightly around her, and the fact that she was sandwiched between Michael and the driver, she was still freezing. The temperature outside had dropped to what felt like the upper forties and she'd gotten thoroughly chilled on the ledge, but it was warm enough in the truck that she knew the reason she was still so cold had little to do with the weather. A digital clock on the dashboard read 10:43. In the course of the seven-plus hours since she and Hughes had evacuated her office, so much had changed that she could barely wrap her mind around it. On the one hand, Michael was back, which filled her heart with so much lightness and joy it could have floated away like a helium balloon. On the other hand, in that same span of time at least five and possibly six people had died either in front of her or in her near proximity, all but two of them good men who hadn't deserved what had been done to them, and the lives of nine more, seven of them teenagers, were currently at risk. Charlie braced herself to pass the bodies of the guards who had been killed and thrown from the bus, but the road was empty. The bodies had already been removed. They did pass a convoy of Jeeplike vehicles heading up the mountain, all running without lights just as they were. It was hard to be sure in the dark, but Charlie assumed they were crammed full of law enforcement officers.

“Virginia State Police SWAT,” Brown said, in reply to Charlie's question. “They're heading up to Bob Prager's barn. Word is the bus is holed up in there.”

Charlie's heart beat faster.

“Abell and Torres—two of the escapees—will die rather than surrender, and will kill every hostage rather than surrender,” she said. “Ware might be persuaded to give himself up, but he's heavily influenced by Abell and Torres. I don't know the other three men.” Charlie took a breath and looked at Brown. “I know you're not the person who should be given that information. I need to talk to whoever is in charge of what's getting ready to happen at the barn.”

Brown said, “I'm not sure who that is. I can take you to the operations center when we get down to where they're set up. Somebody there'll be able to put you in touch with the right person.”

“You need to get checked out by an EMT,” Michael told her quietly. “Remember getting thrown out of a moving bus?”

“I will,” Charlie promised, slanting a look up at him. His face was close: taking advantage of the darkness, she'd been leaning against him for most of the way down, and at some point her hand had crept into his. Now their fingers were entwined, and the feel of his warm, strong hand holding hers made her both happy and sad. Happy because, miracle of miracles, he was there; sad because having him with her in a physical incarnation couldn't last. “As soon as I talk to whoever's in charge. And I'm really not hurt.”

Brown's words had prepared Charlie for a base of operations having been set up, but when they passed through a National Guard–manned roadblock and reached the foot of the mountain, the scope of what they encountered was astounding. The four-lane highway that skirted the mountain had been blocked off, and a large and motley collection of vehicles ranging from patrol cars to ambulances to firetrucks to big green army trucks were parked in and alongside the road for as far as she could see in either direction. There were a number of people moving around inside the cordoned-off area, but it was too dark for her to see much detail. Low-level lanterns had been strung up on ropes stretched between tree trunks along the area's perimeter. Two large military-style tents had been erected in the middle of the road, and these were lit by electricity powered by portable generators. Charlie knew the squat black boxes were generators because she could hear them rumbling as the truck stopped and Michael opened the door and got out. With their flaps closed, the tents glowed as brightly as paper lanterns in the dark.

With a thank-you to Brown, Charlie got out, too, and looked at the closest tent, which he had pointed out as the operations center. It was busy, with uniformed law enforcement personnel, the National Guard, and others in civilian clothes flitting in and out. She could see tables set up inside through the opening created by one tent flap that had been pulled back and secured in place. A group of uniformed cops were clustered around a large chalkboard near the entrance. While Michael closed the door of the Jeep and Brown drove off, Charlie shook off her exhaustion one more time and headed purposefully toward that tent. She'd gone only a few steps when her eye was caught by a short, stocky man with buzzed blond hair who'd just emerged from the second tent, which was maybe some fifty feet away. He was wearing the blue uniform of a prison guard, and what had attracted her attention in the first place was that he had walked out right through the canvas covering the closed side of the tent.

Charlie recognized him with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Oh,” she said, and only realized that she'd stopped walking when Michael, who'd been behind her, caught up and stopped, too. It didn't take more than a glance at her for him to follow the direction of her gaze.

“Shit,” Michael said. From that, Charlie knew that despite being in Hughes's body Michael was still able to see the same spirits she did, and that he'd also recognized the second of the two prison guards who'd been shot on the bus. The guard was in spirit form now.

“…need a ride home,” the guard called plaintively. “Can anybody give me a ride home?”

He looked around without appearing to see anyone, then turned and walked back through the closed canvas wall of the tent.

The back of his head was missing. From the neck up there was nothing but a mass of bloody red pulp.

Charlie's stomach churned. Her fists clenched as she fought the rush of sorrow that hit her as she remembered the man pleading that he had a wife, children. He would never see them again, never go home. The instant nausea, the deep pity for the victim—they were what happened to her in the close presence of spirits, her crappy life as usual. Her face must have given away some of what she was experiencing, because Michael muttered “Shit” again and pulled her into his arms. Clutching at his shirtfront, she rested her forehead against his chest, shut her eyes, and breathed.

For a moment, just a moment, she let herself be weak.

A sharp sound popped her eyes open again, and she looked up to see the tent flap being thrown back and a man in a white coat stepping out. From his attire, Charlie guessed that he was either the medical examiner or the county coroner or an assistant to one or the other. Beyond him, through the now open flap, she saw gurneys with sheet-covered corpses on them neatly lined up in a row. Grimacing, she realized she was looking at a makeshift morgue. Probably one of the generators was providing refrigeration.

“That must be where they're keeping the bodies until they're taken away to wherever they'll be autopsied,” she said, careful to keep her voice even. Inside the tent, as she watched, another spirit sat upright, rising through the sheet covering his gurney as if it wasn't there. Charlie recognized the police officer Abell had shot.

“Come on, babe, you don't need to see this.” Michael's arms tightened around her, and he half turned with her as though he would walk her away from the scene. Charlie didn't resist: there was nothing she could do for the dead. Before they could move away, another of the small trucks purred past them and stopped in front of the tent. It was parked so close that Charlie could smell the exhaust wafting toward them.

Two National Guard officers got out of the truck, said something to the man in the white coat, and walked toward the rear of the vehicle. Even before they opened the closed bed and started to remove the blue-tarp-wrapped bundle in the back, Charlie's stomach turned inside out.

“…shot me in the back!” the kid who sprang out of the truck bed screamed. It was the tall, skinny boy with the stringy brown hair and black hoodie who'd gotten hit in the face for talking to Bree, Charlie saw with a burst of horror. And the horror was because what was screaming at her was the kid's spirit. His body was wrapped in the tarp: he was no longer alive. Usually the dead couldn't see the living, but this boy could. Charlie realized that he saw her even before he came rushing toward her, his eyes wild. “I went out the window just like you said, but they shot me! I was running away and I got hit! It hurts! It hurts!”

He started to scream.

“Holy hell,” Michael growled, taking in the hair-raising scene. He whirled with Charlie so that his back was between her and the spirit as the kid reached them, but the spirit, shrieking, ran right through both of them before vanishing.