"No," she whispered, unable to take her gaze off the young man, who looked on the verge of passing out. They were going to kill him. And then they were going to kill her for seeing them kill him. "I—1—I—"
"Get the blinds down, you idiot," the other man said. "Do you want anyone passing down Main Street to see what's going on?"
"I—," Kerry said as, behind her, she heard the blinds crash down, one after the other, then the doors being locked, both front and back. "I—"
The one holding her pulled her in for a closer look. He was a black man, the only one of the group who was. He was also about twice the size of anybody else there. Taller. Broader. Kerry's arm, even padded by her jacket, was lost in the massiveness of his hand. "She's just a kid," the big guy said, which sounded encouraging, except for the fact that he was practically breaking her arm.
Kerry nodded emphatically.
"This other one's barely more than a kid. They make 'em when they're still kids?"
Nobody said anything, and Kerry wasn't sure what was the right answer. She didn't even understand the question.
No,
she suspected. Under the circumstances,
no
to everything except the suggestion that they send her home.
Before she could get her voice working again, one of the other two grabbed a handful of hair, and her head was forced around to face him. "I didn't do anything," she managed, which seemed an even safer answer. "Please don't hurt me."
The black man, still holding her arm, used his free hand to feel over her arm.
Kerry felt her knees start to buckle.
Better to be passed out for this anyway,
she thought.
But the man was moving down her arm, which was an unexpected direction, to her hand, which he jiggled as though to see how well it was attached. Then he crunched her fingers together; but when she winced, he stopped. "I don't think she's one of them," he said.
"I don't think I'm one of them either," Kerry agreed.
"Shut up," said the man who was still holding her hair.
"Why are you here?" the third man asked, the one who'd been in charge of tying their prisoner.
And it was only when Kerry shifted her gaze to him that she recognized him: the little guy who ran the place. Mr. Quick-Clean himself, who sat there all day reading the Bible and trying to get people to read his religious pamphlets.
"Why are you here?" he repeated, sounding even more menacing than before.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I just came to get my little brother's bear." She tried to indicate Footy, but he was in the hand whose arm was being slowly pulled out of its socket.
Footy dropped and landed with a soft plop.
"You've seen me here before," she continued.
What's he doing?
she thought all the while.
Drug dealers and gang members don't encourage people to read the Bible.
"You know me," she insisted. "My name is Kerry Nowicki I come here with my father, Stephen, and my brother, Ian. My father always buys a helium balloon at the Lift Bridge Book Shop before we come here, and he ties it to Ian's wrist so that we don't lose track of him because he's shorter than the machines." She couldn't tell from the man's face whether he recognized her or not. "We were in this evening after dinner. Ian forgot his bear under the counter near the door. But you must have found him, or somebody did, because when I came in, he was up here by the cash register."
The man looked from her to the bear. Finally,
finally,
he nodded. "Yeah." He nodded again. He told the others, "They come in once or twice a week."
"Always after dinner?" asked the one with his hand still in her hair.
Whatever the significance of that question, the laundry owner looked straight into his eyes. "No. Saturdays, too, sometimes. Saturdays, it's mornings or afternoons."
The one loosened his grip on her arm, still holding on though she no longer had to stand on tiptoe; and the other let go of her hair entirely. That one said, "Bad timing now, though."
You can say that again,
Kerry thought.
Instead, he said, "She could've become one of them since last Saturday."
Kerry's heart sank at the look this possibility brought to the owner's face.
"Maybe," he said.
"One way or the other," said the one who still had her arm, "we can't let her go, not till this is over."
"This" had to be their prisoner. "This" probably meant killing him. She saw that he hadn't lost consciousness after all. She was tempted to promise that if they let her go she wouldn't go to the police, she wouldn't tell anybody what she'd seen. But she couldn't do that with him looking right at her. And they wouldn't believe her anyway.
"Don't be afraid," the owner told her. "Not if you're what you say you are."
What?
Kerry wanted to scream at him.
I haven't
SAID
I'm anything. What do you
THINK
I am?
But it was probably best not to say anything that might be construed as argument.
The owner said, "Nobody wants to hurt you."
She had serious doubts about that, but she forced herself to nod.
"We're just going to keep you here till morning. Then we'll bring you home ourselves."
"What are you going to do to me between now and morning?" she asked, her voice quavering uncontrollably.
"Nothing," the owner assured her. "Sit here quietly and don't give us any trouble, and we won't even have to tie you up."
Her voice got even more quavery as she looked at their prisoner "What are you going to do to
him?
"
The one who'd been pulling her hair answered, "That's none of your damn business."
The owner gave him a be-quiet look. To Kerry, he said, "If he behaves himself, we won't lay a finger on him either."
"We won't need to," the hair puller said.
"Let her go, Roth," the owner said to the man still holding her arm.
And slowly, as though ready to grab again if she even thought of trying to escape, the big black man, Roth, loosened his grip.
"See," the owner said. "We can be calm and reasonable. Sit down"—she sat immediately, on the floor, right where she'd been standing—"don't talk, don't interfere. There's more to this than you could ever understand."
Kerry nodded. She was sitting facing the young man. There was a ghastly smear of blood on the floor where they had dragged him backward, indicating an injury to his leg, though she couldn't see anything because he had his legs under him, which had to hurt. And there was more blood running down the side of his face from a cut she could, thankfully, barely glimpse under his dark hair. His eyes were blue—she'd noticed that when he'd first looked at her. Dark hair, blue eyes, fair skin. His coloring emphasized the redness of the blood that had spattered his white SUNY Brockport sweatshirt Of course, the shirt wasn't proof that he actually went to the college.
But he looked like he might Probably a freshman—she guessed he wasn't that much older than she, maybe nineteen, which would put him at about half the age of the two men Kerry had never seen before: Roth, who looked like a football player, and the hair puller, who had the football jacket. N
EW
Y
ORK
G
IANTS
, it read. The laundry owner had to be in his fifties.
And none of them—
none
of them—fit Kerry's picture of gang members or drug lords or international terrorists.
The owner went to the pay phone on the wall behind the desk, where he dialed a number without having to look it up. Whoever he was calling must have been asleep or away from the phone, for it took the interval of several rings before he said, "Marcia?...Yeah We've got one of them....At the laundry. Ken's dead I'll explain later.... Marcia, there's no time for that now. Come around the back—the doors're locked." There was a longer pause, during which Kerry thought she was going to faint from fear: somebody was dead already. Then the owner sighed "Of all the ... Well, hurry up about it.... Yeah, I know." He hung up.
"What now?" the man named Roth asked.
"She needs to stop for batteries for the video camera."
"Dimwit." Roth said it with resigned lack of enthusiasm, as though they were used to this Marcia—whoever she was—being a dimwit.
On the other hand, judging by the look the laundry owner gave Roth, maybe Marcia was Mrs. Quick-Clean.
"I think," said the New York Giants fan, "we don't need the camera to get started."
Everybody turned to look at the prisoner.
Kerry thought he was holding up a lot better than she would have. His eyes, above the gag, looked scared but defiant. She would have been crying and trying to let them know that she was willing to do or say whatever it was they wanted of her. Of course, she thought, that was easier for her to think, since she didn't know
what
they wanted of him.
"Take the gag off," Roth said.
"He isn't going to cooperate," New York Giants said. Despite what they'd said earlier, he sounded like he was looking forward to the prisoner not cooperating.
"I think we should wait for Marcia," the owner suggested "Maybe closer to dawn he'll be more reasonable."
New York Giants took the gag off anyway.
He's waiting for him to say something,
Kerry thought,
something like "butthead" or "asshole," and then he's going to beat the hell out of him.
But the young prisoner didn't lash out at his captors. He spoke, all in a rush, to Kerry: "My name's Ethan Bryne. When you get out of this, tell the police—"
New York Giants kicked him, hard, in the stomach.
He doubled over, gasping for breath.
"Don't give her any of that bull," New York Giants said. "You don't want the police in this any more than we do. Less, even."
"Tell them—"
He kicked the boy again, this time in the ribs, since he couldn't get to the stomach. Then he drove his elbow into the kid's back, between his shoulders.
Kerry put her arms up over her head to avoid seeing. And for protection. "Stop it or I'll scream!" Though she recognized the safest course was not to get involved, Kerry was screaming already—or as close to it as she could get, with her throat constricted by terror. "
Stop it, stop it, stop—
"
She was expecting that they would kick her, too, and she was expecting it to be in the face, because she'd just finished with her retainers after two and a half years of braces, and getting her teeth broken was close to the worst thing she could imagine after all that.
But Roth was yelling at New York Giants, "Geez, not in front of the kid," and—even though New York Giants was yelling back, "See, I told you she was one of them"—the laundry owner did nothing worse than clap his hand over her mouth to muffle her noise. He started dragging her backward, which she took to mean that they would continue to beat their prisoner but they wouldn't force her to watch.
She tried to bite the owner's hand, but it was sweaty and slippery, and she did little more than pinch him.
"Sidowski!" the owner hissed—another name to remember, along with Roth and Ethan Bryne, if she ever
did
make it to the police. "Knock it off!"
Kerry stopped struggling when Sidowski stepped reluctantly back from their prisoner. Kerry was amazed that she had accomplished even that.
"She tried to bite me," the owner told the others, holding up his hand.
Sidowski took a step toward Kerry, looking ready to yank her head off, but the owner held him back with his other hand on his chest, still holding the bitten hand up. "Look," he said. "Look."
What's he complaining about?
Kerry thought. She hadn't even broken the skin or drawn blood.
But perhaps that was the point, for Sidowski backed off.
"See," the laundry owner said. "Just a kid." He grabbed hold of Kerry's shoulders and shook her. "You don't understand," he said to her. "He isn't human He isn't alive."
"What?"
Kerry was still looking at Sidowski, but the owner said, "
Him,
" nodding toward Ethan Bryne.
"What?" she repeated.
"He's a vampire," the owner answered. "One of the living dead. He kills people to feed on their blood."
Their prisoner shook his head, wearing an expression of horror that probably mirrored her own.
Roth took him roughly by the jaw, forcing back his lips to reveal canine teeth that were slightly longer and sharper than normal but certainly nothing to get alarmed about.
A vampire,
Kerry thought.
They think he's a vampire, and they're hoping very hard that I'm not one, too.
It wasn't enough to step into the middle of what looked to be a ritual execution between rival gangs or druggies or international terrorists. She had to fall into a nest of grade-A crazies.
H
E'S A VAMPIRE
," Kerry repeated in a noncommittal tone. Best not to let on that she knew they were out of their minds.
Roth and the owner of the Quick-Clean Laundry both nodded. Sidowski was watching her closely, waiting—she could tell—for her to slip up and prove that she, too, was one. Ethan, their bruised and bloodied vampire, was looking at her with an expression of dazed desperation. Kerry wondered if he had a concussion and how likely he was to go into shock from his injuries. Somehow, despite the mind-numbing panic, she remembered that they kept talking about morning, and that they had called for a video camera. Things began to fall into place.
"You're going to keep him here till dawn," she said. "See if the rising sun ... What? Causes him to melt? Burst into flame?
What?
"
Perhaps they thought she was making fun of their beliefs. They just looked at her with those appraising expressions.
She didn't dare vocalize the other. She didn't dare ask, Or
do you plan to put a stake through his heart?
"Whatever you think he's done—," she started, then quickly amended it to the less judgmental, "whatever he
has
done, is there any reason we can't do something to try to stop him from bleeding to death between now and morning?"