The door opened onto blackness. As far as she could tell, there were no windows ahead of her. Maybe it was only a supply closet or a bathroom. She stepped across the threshold, closed the door behind her to prevent light from leaking into the store, felt along the wall to her left, found a switch, and risked turning on the lights.
She was in a cramped office. On the desk was another shattered telephone.
Directly across the room from the door that she had just used was another door. No obvious lock. That would be a bathroom.
To her left, in the back wall of the building, a metal door featured a pair of over-and-under deadbolts with thumb-turns. She disengaged the locks and opened the door, and a flood tide of cold wind washed into the office.
Behind the store spread a twenty-foot-wide paved area, and then a steep hillside rose with serried trees that were black in the night and restless in the wind. A security light in a wire cage revealed two parked cars, which probably belonged to the clerks.
Cursing the killer, Chyna turned to the right and sprinted along the shorter length of the building, around the corner, past public rest rooms. She had never caused anyone physical harm, not once in her life, but she was ready to kill now, and she knew that she could do it without hesitation, with no thought of mercy, with a vengeance, because he had empowered her to do it. This was what he had reduced her to—this blind, animal fury—and the worst thing was that it felt good, this rage, so good in comparison to the fear and helplessness she had endured, a sweet singing of rushing blood in the veins and an exhilarating sense of savage strength. She should have been appalled at the lust for blood that seized her, but she liked it, and she knew that she would like it even more when she caught up with the motor home and shot him through the driver’s-side window, pulled open the door and shot him again where he sat bleeding, dragged him out and let him sprawl on the pavement and emptied the revolver into him until he could never again go hunting.
She rounded the second corner and reached the front of the building.
The motor home was pulling away from the pumps. She raced after it, faster than she had ever run in her life, cleaving a resistant wind that stung new tears from her eyes, shoes pounding noisily on the blacktop.
Now it was Dear Lord, let me catch him instead of Dear Lord, let me get away from him, and now it was Dear Lord, let me kill him instead of Dear Lord, don’t let him kill me.
The motor home picked up speed. It was already out of the service area, entering the eighth-of-a-mile lane that would take it back onto the highway.
She would never be able to catch it.
He was getting away.
She halted and planted her feet wide apart. The revolver was in her right hand. She raised it, gripped it with both hands, arms extended, elbows locked. Shooter’s stance. Every good girl should know it, come the revolution.
Her heart didn’t merely beat, it crashed, and every explosive pump shook her arms, so she couldn’t hold the revolver on target. The motor home was too distant anyway. She’d miss it by yards. And even if she got lucky and put one round in the back wall, it would be nowhere near the driver. He was out of her reach, beyond harm, cruising away.
It was over. She could go for help, find the nearest working phone, call the local police, and try to cut his lead time as short as possible but for now and here, it was over.
Except that it wasn’t over, and she knew it wasn’t, no matter how much she wanted to be finished with it, because she said aloud, “Ariel.”
Sixteen. Prettiest thing this side of paradise. Pure angel. Porcelain skin. Breathtaking. Locked in the basement for a year. Never touched her—that way. Waiting for her to ripen, get just a little sweeter.