The Lonely Mile(49)

She kept her eyes closed and began turning over in her bed, ever so slowly, moving onto her left side. Sometimes, curling up in the fetal position with her arm covering her eyes helped block out the light, and with this massive headache attacking her, she was ready to try anything. But as she pulled her right arm to place it over her head, she realized she was unable to move it. Her arm was stuck.

She pulled harder, but something was grabbing it. She could hear a clanking, like the creepy noise of the chains poor Marley was forced to tote around in A Christmas Carol, except not as loud. What would chains be doing in her bedroom? Carli tried to open her eyes, and the reality of her situation finally penetrated her consciousness. She groaned, partly out of fear and frustration and partly from the pain pounding through her head.

She was here, wherever “here” was, in the basement of the lunatic’s house. She had grabbed the grimy knife off the kitchen table in a desperate attempt to slice open the kidnapper and escape and had actually, for just a moment, thought she might manage it. She had even sliced open his arm. Then he overpowered her and grabbed the knife and—what? Did he cut her with it? In the head?

She didn’t think she would still be alive if he had used the business end of the steak knife on her head, or anywhere else for that matter. Plus, the almost unbearable pain thundering through her head led her to believe she was, in fact, still alive. Either that or Hell was a real drag.

Whatever Martin had done to her was definitely effective, she had to give him that. She reached her left hand, the one not handcuffed to the bed frame, tentatively up to the right side of her head and gasped in pain when her fingertips touched the open wound.

The skin on her skull was torn and raw, and blood oozed sluggishly from the gash. The blood had seeped into her hair, making it messy and sticky. Then it had dried, clumping great tufts of hair together until it felt matted and disgusting. One eye was sealed shut. She touched it with her fingers and felt dried blood crusted all over it. She lifted her head and peered around her with her usable eye. The pillow and threadbare sheet were stained with both dried and newer blood. It seemed like a lot of blood; a frightening amount of blood to have all come out of her head. Fortunately, the flow of it seemed mostly to have stopped, at least for now.

What would happen when she tried to get up was anybody’s guess, but with her head pounding and throbbing the way it was, she knew she was more helpless than before. If that was even possible.

Then she realized that she had peed herself sometime during the night. Half-dried, sticky wetness covered her butt and the insides of both thighs. And the worst part was that she needed to go again. Note to self, she thought groggily: Wait until after your kidnapper allows you to go to the bathroom to attack him with a dirty steak knife. This sort of information is invaluable, she thought to herself, and will really come in handy the next time you’re kidnapped at gunpoint off the school bus by a stark raving mad lunatic.

Carli eased her good eye closed again, grateful for the resulting darkness as the pounding in her head seemed to lessen slightly. She wondered what time it was, how long she had been unconscious, and most importantly, where the crazy pervert with the knife had gone and when he would be coming back.

Weak, watery daylight struggled through the dirty basement window, so she knew she had been lying unconscious on the bed for quite some time. It had been the middle of the night when she tried to play ninja with her kidnapper, and now it was daytime.

Without fully realizing it, Carli drifted back into an uneasy half-slumber.

*

Martin sat on the bottom step of the basement stairs and watched his angel quietly as she fidgeted on the bed. She explored her head wound, which had bled like crazy as head wounds always do, but which Martin still figured was not too serious. He was something of an expert on inflicting damage on teenage girls, and he figured she may have suffered a slight concussion and probably had a doozy of a headache, but that was likely the extent of it.

The skin he had torn open with the butt end of the knife had more or less stopped bleeding. It probably required nothing more than a few stitches, not that he was about to bring her to the hospital. The scar would be almost invisible under her luxurious mane of blonde hair, so his contact would not be too upset, and the wound might serve as a handy reminder to her of what would happen if she tried to rebel against him or her next owner again.

He would let her suffer for a while with her bloody face and pissed pants—it was exactly what she deserved after her treachery last night—and later, after she had had a chance to meditate on her foolishness, he would bring her upstairs to clean the cut on her head and allow her to shower. While he watched, of course, as a security measure.

Clean clothes wouldn’t be a problem. After hosting more than a dozen girls, all roughly her exact dimensions, for anywhere from a few hours in the beginning to seven days more recently, Martin had built up a pretty fair collection of stylish clothing favored by the twenty-first century teen girl. All the hot brands—t-shirts, sweat shirts, jeans, skirts, tank tops, and, of course, pretty underwear—he had it all, stacked in piles in the back of his closet, all waiting for the perfect girl to wear them.

Carli would be the one. She was perfect.

Eventually, he would do all that. For now, though, he was content to sit unobserved and watch his little angel as she began the process of adjusting to her new way station and her new situation. As angry as he had been at the moment of the attack last night, Martin now realized he had brought it upon himself. He never should have trusted her. It was just so hard not to.