Doll Face Page 3

  Breathing hard, Ramona crouched there on all fours looking at the remains.

  A very rational sort of voice in her head told her that the very idea of this doll-like thing actually being alive, actually moving after it was broken apart, was ludicrous. It wasn’t a person. It was some sort of machine and now it was broken. Just like the man, it was broken.

  Oh, what kind of fucked-up nightmare is this anyway?

  And why the hell weren’t the police here by now? What the hell were they doing for godsake? Didn’t they realize this was a fucking emergency?

  She stood up, feeling dizzy and disoriented.

  She dug in the pocket of her leather coat and pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a lighter. The cigarette tasted good. Besides, Chazz wasn’t here to chide her about smoking and when she saw that piece of shit again, she was going to flick her ash at him and butt her cigarette right in his fucking eye.

  Where the hell were the others?

  Christ, the idea of being alone in this place was just too much.

  She stepped away from the shadow of the van and got up on the sidewalk. She took out her iPhone and called 911 again. It took her precious seconds to get through and all the while, she felt nervous. She had the most awful feeling she was not alone.

  “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on but I called for an ambulance, for the police, over here in Stokes, and nobody has shown up. Yes, I know you don’t know where it is. Can’t you track my signal or something?”

  “Ma’am,” the operator said. “We’re having trouble with our equipment.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re sure you haven’t made a mistake?”

  “Yes, I’m sure! C’mon, get somebody here!”

  There was silence for a moment or two. “Ma’am, could you give me your exact whereabouts again?”

  Un-fucking-believable. “Stokes. S-T-O-K-E-S. I’m not from here and I don’t see any street signs. I’m just inside the town, just off Highway 8. If they come in on Highway 8, they’ll be right on top of me.”

  More silence. “Ma’am, there must be some kind of mistake.”

  “There’s no mistake! I can see the highway from where I’m standing and—”

  What the fuck?

  The highway was not there.

  She knew they had come in on it. They had just entered the outskirts of Stokes when Chazz hit that guy or whatever the hell he was. There was no doubt of that. She had seen the highway leading out when she was backing away from the broken man.

  But now there was no highway.

  The road led off to a dead end, two streets intersecting it. She saw nothing but a solid wall of houses down there. It was impossible. Her knees felt weak and her heart skipped in her chest. This couldn’t be happening. It just wasn’t possible. The van was still there. She could see the skid marks. Everything was the same except the highway had disappeared.

  “Ma’am? Ma’am?” the operator was saying over the line.

  “Please…please hurry,” Ramona said. “I’m in Stokes and I’m in danger, I’m in terrible danger.”

  “Ma’am, please listen to me, okay? The only Stokes on Highway 8 burned to the ground back in the 1960s, I’m told,” the operator said with a curious dread beneath her words. “So you must be mistaken.”

  Ramona found that she could barely breathe. “Please…please just come after me. Oh, dear God…I know I’m in danger.”

  And she was. This was a nightmare. The highway brought them in, now it was gone. Mannequins walked. Reality was turned upside down and inside out. It would have been extremely easy to have a nervous breakdown and give up. Far too easy.

  She heard a clattering sound behind her.

  Her skin went cold, a needling fear spreading in waves from her belly to her chest. She turned around, breathless with terror.

  The mannequin woman…or her parts…were moving.

  The torso stood up, hovering there in midair, swinging back and forth as if it was connected to fine invisible wires high overhead. It balanced on one leg. As Ramona watched, the rest of it began to come together. The broken hand crawled over to the torso. The other leg followed suit, inching its way along as did the arm. The head rolled like a ball. And when they were near, they were drawn in place, again, as if unseen wires manipulated them.

  But even so, the mannequin woman was not whole.

  Not entirely.

  Her broken arm hung from its socket by cords as did her hand and leg, her head slumped forward on her neck.

  Ramona screamed.

  She wasn’t and had never been a screamer, but what she saw was like ice water thrown in her face and everything inside her vented itself.

  The mannequin woman dangled there, loose and boneless like some limp marionette…and then she jumped away into the darkness above. Or was towed away.

  Regardless, she was just gone.

  That’s when Ramona heard the van start up.

  Chazz?

  The headlights came on, spearing into her. They were so bright that she had to squint her eyes and hold her hand up. The engine was revved again and again. Slowly, cautiously, she walked over in its direction, stepping very carefully and expecting trouble. She could see a shape in the driver’s seat.

  A shape with a broken neck, head drooping limply to one shoulder.

  Shit!

  The van roared forward, laying rubber. It came right at her, picking up momentum. It was going to run her down. As it vaulted forward, jumping the curb, she threw herself to the side and it missed her by inches, plowing right through the plate glass windows of a little barbershop in a spray of glass. The engine revved again. The driver—and she knew very fucking well who or what that was—was trying to pull back out. The rear wheels were spinning and smoking. The van was lodged on something.

  She broke into a run, heading in the direction she thought Lex and the others had gone.

  Behind her, the van pulled free and squealed out into the street.

  Headlights framed her again as it bore down on her.

  8

  “Now what?” Creep said when they finally came to a stop and caught their breath. “Now what the hell do we do?”

  “We just try and mellow out,” Lex told him.

  “Oh, wonderful plan.”

  Soo-Lee shook her head. “Just shut up. We need to get a grip here and quit panicking so we can figure things out.”

  “I just want to go home,” Danielle said.

  Which was about the tenth time now that she had said that. The sound of her voice was starting to go right up Creep’s spine. He had a mad desire to slap her right across the face. He would never do such a thing, at least he didn’t think so, but he wanted to real bad. And that was partially out of rage, frustration, and annoyance, but mostly because her insipid weakness reminded him so much of his own.

  They had taken off in a blind run after that shit came down with the crazy man. Creep still wasn’t sure what to make of that. Had he really seen it? Yes, yes, of course he had. It had taken something real ugly to get them all running in the first place and it had been ugly all right. But where were they now? He wasn’t even sure. They had run down the street and around the corner and kept running. They were two or three streets away from the van now.

  Away from Chazz. No loss there.

  But also away from Ramona and Creep had a real thing for her. He hadn’t known her before tonight. He knew Chazz. Christ, he was the guy who fixed Chazz’s laptop after the idiot locked it up downloading porn. Creep did a lot of work for the boys on the team and that’s how he had hooked up with Chazz. Ramona was Chazz’s squeeze, but they barely tolerated each other and he knew for a fact that Chazz was sleeping with at least three other girls. And he was almost sure that Ramona knew it, too.

  What was her thing? Did she dig abusive relationships? Maybe. Some girls were like that.

  Chazz had thrown the whole thing together. Lex and Soo-Lee, he and Ramona, and Creep. They caught Green Day at the
Garden. Danielle was some chick Ramona knew, so they brought her along as Creep’s blind date. It hadn’t worked so well. She gave him the cold shoulder and he thought she was an idiot. She was strictly the girly cheerleader type that you had to treat like a princess just to get a freaking hand-job on the fifth date.

  Not like Ramona.

  Ramona was petite with long black hair, great cheekbones and big dark eyes. Kind of olive-skinned like a Native American. And fierce. God, she was fierce and smart and in-charge. She made his blood boil.

  “Let’s just wait here a bit,” Lex said. “If things are cool, we’ll go back and look for Ramona and Chazz. My guess is that they’re hiding out, though. They probably won’t come up for air until the police get here.”

  “Shouldn’t they have been here by now?” Danielle said.

  Score one for the dizzy blonde, Creep thought.

  “Soon,” Lex said.

  “Sure,” Soo-Lee agreed, although it was obvious she didn’t believe it for a minute.

  “They’re not here because they don’t know where here is,” Creep said, which only got him stony silence.

  He peered down the street and saw only darkness.

  The glass fronts of shops reflected back cool moonlight. Shadows spilled out over the walk in murky puddles. He had no reason to believe there was any immediate danger down there, hiding and waiting to leap out at them…yet, he was certain of it. He could feel that dread certainty crawling inside his guts like looping worms.

  They were in danger.

  Incredible danger.

  He could feel it moving around them in the darkness like the cold coils of a snake. It was circling them, pressing in ever closer, grinning with long white teeth and watching them with hungry, ebon eyes.

  Just stop it. Just stop that shit.

  He swallowed it down before he lost it, before he really lost it, and did something stupid like running again.

  But Christ, whatever was out there—and he figured the broken man was but a finger of it—it was almost like he could feel it reaching out for him, wanting to wrap bony digits around his throat.

  “I don’t like this shit,” he said. “We’re like sitting targets or something.”

  Soo-Lee sighed. “Calm down. We called 911. The police and ambulance should be here soon. We should be hearing their sirens anytime now.”

  Creep just rolled his eyes.

  He didn’t like this shit.

  Soo-Lee was easy on the eyes, exotic and Asian and all that, but she was like some extension of Lex and he didn’t like that at all. They could pretend there wasn’t something very messed-up about this situation, but they were wrong. They could try and rationalize it all they wanted, but Creep’s fucking Spidey-Sense was tingling. In fact, it felt positively electrical. His stomach was hollow and his scalp felt like it wanted to crawl right off the back of his head. He had the most disturbing feeling that they had now entered the Twilight Zone.

  And if he needed more evidence, then that man…that mannequin…that thing they had run down pretty much clinched it.

  Danielle had pressed herself up against the plate glass windows of a coffee shop now like a spider flattening itself on a brick to suck up some heat.

  Her entire body was shaking.

  She isn’t goddamn helping, he thought. She isn’t helping at all.

  And again, he knew it was because she was acting on the outside the way he was feeling on the inside.

  “Danielle,” Soo-Lee said in a very relaxed, calming voice. “It’s going to be okay. The police will be coming soon. Then we can get out of here. Just try to take it easy.”

  But she wasn’t taking it easy.

  She was shaking so bad she was rattling the window.

  “It’s gonna come for us. It’s gonna find us. It’s gonna kill us,” she said, her voice high and squeaking like she was eight years old again. And maybe she was at that.

  Lex walked down to the corner and Creep followed him. Soo-Lee made to join them, but Danielle gripped her arm like a little girl who was afraid of the dark.

  Creep looked down the street. “I think someone should go take a look for Ramona and Chazz. What if they’re hurt or something?”

  Lex nodded. “I’ll flip you for it. I don’t want us both going. I want one of us to stay with the girls.”

  Creep liked that. It was the kind of thing a hero said in an old movie. One of those silly Hollywood clichés. But he was okay with it. He swallowed down his fear. “You stay, Lex. I’ll go. You’re a cooler head than I am. I’ll just make them more nervous.”

  Lex didn’t argue the fact; it was obvious.

  “I’ll take a quick run down there and run right back.”

  “Okay. Be careful.”

  Creep took off. He was surprised he had the guts to do this at all. Was it Ramona? Yeah, he figured it was. He had an adolescent fantasy brewing in the back of his mind where he rescued her and she was grateful.

  Very, very grateful.

  He went down to the block where they’d turned the corner. God, the shadows were everywhere, so black, so reaching. They were strung like knitted yarn. He got to the last storefront, some sort of bank with gold leaf lettering in the windows. Nice and archaic. He peered around the corner.

  His heart was pounding and his knees felt weak.

  He could see the van down there. Moonlight glimmered off the windshield. One of the doors was open. There was nothing between but glistening wet pavement.

  No sign of Chazz or Ramona.

  Nothing at all moved down there.

  He pulled out his Nokia and called Chazz’s cell. He got his voice mail. He texted him, but got nothing in reply. Either he didn’t have his phone with him or it was dead or he was—

  Don’t get going with that shit.

  They could have been behind the van, he supposed. That was possible.

  No. He wasn’t going to go down there. Too risky. He’d checked on them and that’s all he’d intended on doing. Lex was probably right: they were hiding. Yet…his stomach felt light and fluttery. If it had wings, it could have flown right out of his belly.

  The doll man was nowhere to be seen.

  Weird. It was all so damn weird.

  He peered back around the corner to make sure Lex and the others were still there, they were, then looked back toward the van…except there was no van. It was gone. The moonlight was shining off the pavement where it had been.

  Creep blinked his eyes like they did in movies when they couldn’t trust what they were seeing, but the van was still gone. He was confused, disoriented. Reality seemed to be unwinding like a ball of twine. He peered back around the corner, thinking of calling out to Lex, then turned and looked again.

  The van was there.

  What kind of fucked-up shit is this?

  He ran back down until he reached Lex. He leaned up against a building, panting. “They’re not down there. I don’t see anything but the van.”

  And maybe I don’t even see that.

  Lex sighed. “Well, we can’t wait for ‘em. We have to find some place to hide or a vehicle to get us out of here…unless we chance the van.”

  Creep swallowed. “I don’t like that idea.”

  “Then we need a car.”

  “Man, have you seen a single car? A truck? A bicycle for that matter?”

  “No.”

  Creep was going to elaborate further on that but Soo-Lee called, “Lex!”

  They ran back to her, expecting trouble. Expecting at the very least that Danielle was really losing it or having a breakdown or something. But that wasn’t it at all.

  “Look,” Soo-Lee said.

  At the end of the block across the street, lights had come on.

  9

  It took Chazz a good twenty minutes to calm down, to get his heart to stop racing and his skin to stop crawling and that god-awful clamminess out of his bones. But even so, he wasn’t in the best of shape. He was still shaking, his eyes still darting about madly, and his teeth
given to strange bouts of chattering. He felt feverish and sick in his belly and he was certain he was going crazy.

  After the mannequin woman, he had run and run and run.

  He had eaten up some serious yardage out on the gridiron in his time, but he had never, ever run like this. But never before had he run out of complete irrational fear either. He had known fear once or twice in his life, but it was usually mild and fleeting. The time he thought he had knocked up Megan Mundy in high school was a good example.

  This was different.

  This was Grade-A USDA prime fucking terror.

  This was animal terror.

  This was the sort of thing rabbits knew when owls swooped overhead or gazelles felt out on the savannah as lions stalked them. Yes, animal terror. The fear of the hunted, the terror of prey.

  Don’t-don’t-don’t think about it, he told himself in the vast emptiness of his skull. Worry about explanations and stuff later. For now…for now…just-just worry about getting out of here.

  Jesus, his thoughts were stuttering. Was that even possible?

  He didn’t know. He didn’t seem to know anything anymore. He was crouched in the shadows in the backyard of a looming dark house. Every house on the block was looming and dark. None of them had any lights on. There had to be people in them, though. And cars in garages. Yet, he had not seen a single one since they arrived.

  And that was weird.

  No cars, no people…what did that mean?

  He waited there, chewing at his nails until they bled.

  He knew he had to come up with some sort of plan but, God, he was afraid to move. He wished Ramona was here. She would know what to do. She always seemed to know what to do.

  But you left her out there.

  No, he didn’t leave her. It wasn’t like that. He’d just run and he thought maybe she was running with him. The fear had gotten the best of him. He knew part of that was true and part of it was a dirty lie, but it went down easier that way because cowardice was something he despised in other people and could not tolerate in himself. That’s why it was better not to think about it, to shove it aside where he didn’t have to look at it or think about it or consider the kind of person he truly was now that his black roots were showing.