a power drill… or a screw gun.
She pushed up again and again, straining every muscle, but the cover wouldn’t give.
Silence enveloped her, broken only by her labored breathing.
She had to stop, had to calm down before she used up all her air.
Her mind hunted for a way to break free, but the more she thought about it, the worse her predicament appeared. She didn’t have her gun, so she couldn’t shoot an air hole through the cover. How long would the air last: ten, fifteen minutes? Sandwiched atop the dead body, with the freezer door at her back, she obviously didn’t have enough leverage to break whatever appliance her attacker had sealed her in with. Her only other hope, her phone, had died. No one would even know she was missing until she failed to show up for work the next morning.
The deepening cold embraced her, triggering a shiver, and she bit down on her lower lip to keep from screaming.
She couldn’t afford to waste the air.
CHAPTER 29
Lori sat on the Wiesses’ living room couch, a protective pillow held across her chest while she used the television remote to flip through the cable channels. Upstairs, she hadn’t heard a word from BJ since putting him to bed, which she took to mean he’d sleep peacefully through the night.
Their talk about creatures lurking in the darkness had gotten to her more so than she’d known, however. With the kid in bed, sitting there alone, the house seemed eerily large and unsafe. There were so many rooms, so many windows for a prowler to sneak in through. She kept thinking about the noise she’d heard earlier, behind the attic door, and she imagined that whatever made it had slipped out of sight before she turned on the light, slinking within the walls to emerge somewhere else in the house.
“Some hero,” she thought aloud, thinking of the bravery she’d tried to display earlier.
She stopped channel-surfing and looked to the ceiling.
Lori sprang to her feet. The muffled noise came again, the sound of a door slamming shut.
Clicking off the television, she hurried to the foyer and looked up from the foot of the stairs to the second floor landing. She should’ve been able to see the glow of BJ’s lamp from where she stood, but the hallway appeared dark.
The only light where Lori stood came from the outside lamp over the front steps. Its whitish gleam shone in through the sectioned windows lining each side of the main door and cast bar-like shadows over the floor and steps. In this strange setting, the entry seemed murky and uninviting, specifically designed to repel guests rather than to welcome them. She flipped on the entry light to dispel the mood.
“BJ? Are you all right up there?”
When no answer came, she mounted the steps two at a time, now fearing that what she’d heard could’ve been the sound of the boy falling out of bed, possibly injuring himself and breaking the lamp in the process.
“BJ?”
From the landing she could see through the crack in BJ’s door, and even in the dark she could tell he wasn’t in bed. The noise thumped again, closer this time. She spun to face the other half of the hallway.
Stepping into the lesser gloom below one of the hallway’s two skylights, she said, “For someone who was so afraid of going to bed earlier, you sure don’t seem too scared of playing hide-and-seek in the dark.”
He didn’t answer.
She sighed and began moving from room to room, flipping on lights along the way. She reached BJ’s sister’s room at the opposite end of the hall with no sign of the boy.
“Come on, BJ,” she said, adding force to her tone. “Enough is enough.”
Every light on the second floor went out with a snap.
Lori backed up and groped for the nearest light switch, sweeping the wall with her hand faster and faster with each unsuccessful pass. Then she had it.
“Shit.”
“Lori,” the boy called from his room.
She stumbled into the hall and took three steps toward the boy’s door, ready for an explanation, when that heavy thump came yet again, this time much louder. She stopped in her tracks.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the window in Mr. Wiesses’ study slammed shut. Before she had a chance to question what closed it, the air darkened around her. She snapped her head up, looking to the skylight overhead.
And saw the silhouette of man peering down at her.
CHAPTER 30
Melissa shook her head in the darkness of the box freezer, casting off another bout of weariness that strove to drag her into sleep.
Her teeth clattered together.
She shivered uncontrollably.
Numbness had changed to pain in the bare portions of her skin that contacted the frozen corpse beneath her and no matter how often she shifted position she couldn’t escape it.
Death seemed inevitable now, and the realization came to her with a greater measure of acceptance than panic. She wondered how long it would be before anyone discovered her body, what speculations the papers would report on her disappearance.
Her head dipped down when she began to nod off again, and it took a few seconds to comprehend that she’d laid one cheek upon the dead person’s parted mouth.
She jerked away, hitting her head on the freezer’s cover.
Was her life meant to end this way? It didn’t seem right, not after a lifetime of striving to protect others. And with that thought in mind, she began praying for the first time since childhood, begging for God’s assistance with her hopeless situation.
At any other time she would’ve argued the question of why God should spare her when so many others died daily, from soldiers in battle, to the innocent bystanders killed in high school shootings, to the victims of accidents and natural disasters. In her line of work the contemplation of death followed her like a shadow, but she’d always avoided discussing it with fellow officers, much the same way she’d avoided the consideration of whatever came next, if anything. Now, however, with her end in sight, she let go of her disbelief and pleaded for her life and soul.
Her head was floating down toward the corpse’s mouth again when a ticking sound guided her back from sleep. She perked up and listened, hearing what could’ve been somebody testing the freezer’s door handle.
“Help,” she shouted. “If someone’s there, help me!”
After a short pause, there came the muffled reply of, “Hang on. I’ll get you out.”
Melissa exhaled a breath of shock, accompanied by an inner shiver of wonderment.
Metal grated on metal, chased by a piercing snap and the
“Frank!”
