Gooseland

Trailing behind me, Missy was still trying to look through the file in the dying light.

I stopped short when I realized the overcoat was a blanket and it was draped completely over the figure.

Missy looked up from the file and stared, almost hypnotized while I moved slowly forward.

The iron smell of blood hanging in the air was a pretty clear sign that whatever was under the blanket wasn't something we wanted to see.

Against my better judgement, I reached up, grabbed the blanket and gave a slight tug. It caught for second then dropped away.

Missy stifled an involuntary scream with both hands and a mass of files, then backed away slowly until she was stopped by the wall. She blew out a breath. "Holy shit."

Cash was cuffed to the chair, blood soaking his clothes and dripping slowly and sluggishly into the pool under the chair. His eyes were open and dull, a cloth gag still firmly in his mouth.

The huge gash across his throat made a second, repulsive mouth, a nasty humorless ear to ear smile.

I stated the obvious. "Okay, this is really bad."

Missy nodded. "Time to make a new plan...."

"Yeah, new plan. Run like hell."

"Too late." Caroline's voice cut through the air. But there was something wrong with it. Too high. Quavery and manic sounding.

Worst of all, the voice was coming from the hallway just outside the classroom. Caroline shuffled slowly into sight. Her head was hanging forward at an odd angle, her hair almost covering her face. A butcher knife hung from one hand and a gun in her other.

Missy jumped away from the wall and scurried behind me, recoiling as she brushed Cash's hanging hand. "Oh God."

Caroline slowly looked up from the floor to look in my eyes. Her gaze was unfocused, staring right through me. "Too late...too late...toooo late." A weird childish rhythm in her voice made my stomach flip.

I held a hand up trying to figure out what to say. "Caroline...?"

She blinked and slowly pointed the knife at me. "You cheated. You shouldn't have peeked. That's not how we play this game. You'll take aaaaaalll the fun out it."

"Holy Fuck!" Missy flung the files at Caroline, blinding her with a blizzard of paper. "Run!"

Missy shoved me and we both bolted for the side door to the classroom, a shot boomed deafeningly as we turned down the hall and headed for a door that had to be an emergency exit.

We launched ourselves into the bright moonlight, damn near running into the giant decaying apocalypse goose sculpture.

As we raced across the weed-and-gravel parking lot to the car, I took a quick, terrified look over my shoulder.

Nothing.

Where I expected Caroline to be racing after us, the fire door hung open, the black yawning darkness just empty. I slowed to a jog and Missy looked at me wildly. "What are you doing, she..." Her voice trailed off as she saw what I was looking at. "Where is she? I thought she'd be chasing us..."

"Yeah, so did I."

"Why would she just let us... This probably isn't good, is it?"

I looked around the abandoned lot. Maybe just a bit frantically. As far as I could tell, Missy and I were alone, but the moonlight falling through the trees left shadows so stark and black we could be surrounded by an army of Carolines. "I don't think so."

We headed back for the car.

"Shit." As soon as we saw the car I knew we were screwed. The hood was open and I could see wires hanging out. It was probably nothing I couldn't fix if I had time, but I didn't really have the feeling that I was going to get that time.

"Didn't you lock it?" Missy stared at me in disbelief.

"Sure I did, But you know she has keys to it, right?"

"Sorry. I didn't think of that." Missy reached over and gave Cash's door handle a half-hearted tug. Of course it was locked.

The front door to the school creaked slowly open.

"Isn't this game fun?" Caroline's voice sent a spike of cold up my spine. Without so much as a word, Missy and I bolted around toward the back of the school.

Missy stumbled as we rounded the corner. I caught her hand and kept her from falling. "Be careful."

She fixed me with a glare. "Easy for you say. If I'd known what was gonna happen I wouldn't be dressed like the dumb-ass bimbo who dies five minutes into the damn movie."

"Really?"

She gave me an exasperated look. "I'd at least have worn running shoes."

I'd have laughed if I didn't think it would have made us both fall apart. Missy was doing what Missy always did when things got bad. Make worse jokes.

We worked our way around a sign declaring the heap of rotting boards and metal behind it to be the "Gooseland 4H Greenhouse for a Better, Greener America" and began working our way through it.

"Where are we going?"

"Hell if I know. The last gas station I saw was almost twenty miles back."

"Did you know she had a gun?" Missy gingerly stepped over piles of debris.

"I'm pretty sure that was Cash's gun."

We finally reached the other side of the greenhouse and Missy started to turn to me to say something.

Caroline stepped out from shadow of the building right in front of us. She'd obviously just gone back through the school. Her voice had a bizarre child-like lilt. "You know, you aren't very good at this game. It would probably be harder for me if you would, you know, just stop talking."

Missy made a sound, something suspiciously like "meep!" and bolted away to the right, but Caroline drifted into my path, giving me no choices. I spun and stomped back through the mess as fast as I could. Eerie laughter floating through the darkness behind me.

As soon as I was clear of the wreckage of the greenhouse, I caught sight of a door hanging partly open. Ducking in, I stopped to let my eyes adjust. Pitch black with slashes of silver-white moonlight knifing down from where the rotting ceiling had surrendered to the elements.

I picked my way through the nightmarish hallways looking for a way out. Collapsed ceilings and gaping, apparently, bottomless holes in the floor seemed to be everywhere.

A glaring square of moonlight showed me an opening to the outside, but it turned out to a bad choice. The opening was blocked by some kind of heavy wire fencing that I had no hope of getting through. I turned back.

"No way out, is there?" The voice was odd, arhythmic, the emphasis on all the wrong words. Caroline was watching me with unconcealed amusement as I stepped back into the hall. I backed away slowly...

"Look, Caroline..."

She just stepped forward, slowly and purposefully, shifting her grip on the knife, silver moonlight flashed off the blade.

I started to say something else, but the blank, almost puzzled look in her eyes made it obvious she wasn't hearing anything. The gun levelled at me convinced me that I wasn't going to be able to take her down.

Taking off down the nearest hallway, I was stumbling over debris. I kept expecting her to simply shoot me, but a shot didn't come. I fell flat on my face, then scrambled to my feet looking back in near panic.

Nothing.

No movement. No sound.

Nothing.

Feeling my way along the wall, I tried to stay in the pitch-black shadows as much as possible. Every scape of my foot seemed to sound like an avalanche. My own heartbeat pounded in my ears, nearly drowning out the crashing-wave sound of my breathing.

I felt a doorframe and leaned around it, finding a giant space walled with slashes of light and blackness.

Maybe it had been a gymnasium, maybe it had been the cafeteria; with the ceiling collapsed in and the floor apparently ripped out, I couldn't be sure. What I did know was that moving from floor support beam to floor support beam, clinging to debris took every bit of concentration I had.

Too much, as it turned out.

After nearly losing my grip and slipping off a beam, I paused to breath and steady myself. A low, soft laugh came from ahead of me.

It took a moment to pick her out of the darkness. A flicker of motion, she was slipping toward me much faster than I could even dream of moving. She was practically skipping from beam to beam, moonlight flashing off the blade of her knife.

She stopped ten feet away, balanced easily on a fractured beam I wouldn't have even considered putting my weight on.

I thought she was saying something, but she was just humming, tuneless, almost random notes.

"Caroline, let's talk about this..."

Something twitched in her face, like a bug crawling under the skin. "But that's not how it's supposed to be done. You have to hush, we can't let anyone hear, remember?"

With that, she jumped lightly to the beam I was on. She had a corpse-like rictus of a smile on her face. Moving slowly, like a cat with a trapped mouse, she stepped closer.

And then she was gone and I was falling.

The beam had given way, almost soundlessly dropping her into the blackness below. Followed by a crash of sound as wreckage from the room followed her down.

I caught myself on heavy loop wire of some kind and held on for all I was worth. Despite the sharp pain in my head from cracking against a beam end, I could just make out one of her hands, still gripping the knife, sticking out from beneath some of the rubble.

It took everything I had, but I managed to get to the next beam, then the next.

I tried to look back once I reached the other side, but the shadows had shifted with the moon and I couldn't pick her hand out anymore.

*****

Limping through the hallways, I finally managed to break out into the outside.

"Missy?"

I was sure there was no way Caroline could have caught up with Missy before our encounter in the school.

"Missy?"

A figure lurched out from around the corner of the building, and I sighed in relief that Missy was okay.

Then the figure stepped out into the light grinning madly and I broke for the parking lot.

Caroline followed after me relentlessly as I dodged past the concrete mascot and bolted toward the parking lot.

A few seconds later, I slammed face-first into the gravel. Low brush had hidden the parking blocks. I started crawling past the rusted hulk of the school bus.

"Hop on the bus!" The hissed command sure didn't sound like Caroline, and I was fresh out of options.

I scrambled up the steps into the abandoned bus; something slimy stuck to my left hand. I came up nose to nose with Missy crouched in the main aisle.

"What are you doing in here, why didn't you run away?"

"There's a big-ass fence around everything with that giant-slinky looking barb wire on top and the gate is shut now. There's nowhere else to go."

"Exactly how does this help?"

Missy shrugged, wide-eyed. "It has to better than being out there with her. Right?"

An odd sound, something dragging on gravel, grated from near the front of the bus making us both freeze.

I reached over and silently pushed Missy toward the emergency exit, it was barely hanging open. She paused and I leaned forward until I could whisper into her ear. "If she starts to come in, just slip out the back."

We crawled toward the back. Missy's short skirt might have been very distracting under different circumstances, but flashes of memory of Cash's body had me extremely focused.

A metallic scraping somewhere off the front of the bus set my teeth on edge. "Lee...eee..eee... I know you're in there. You and your little skank."

Missy stiffened and glared in the direction of the voice. I could see her mouth twist in anger, but I made a motion for her to stay quiet. I was pretty sure a little name-calling was the least of our problems.

A sharp metal-on-metal clank rang out, closer and louder. "There's always a little skank, isn't there?"

She obviously knew where we were. I needed to stall for time until I could think of something to do. "Caroline. You know I wouldn't do that to you. Missy is just trying to help. We're worried about you."

A harsh laugh like the call of a jay sounded. "I'll bet. I've been watching you. That's how I knew about Richard. I'm always watching you. I know you haven't done anything. But you will." Her voice faded away, then came back harsher and somehow childish. "You always do, Frank."

"Caroline. Listen, this is Lee..."

An inhuman shriek, like metal tearing, sounded from very near the door. "Shut Up! Shut Up! Shut Up! Shut UP! I KNOW who you are, Frank. I KNOW!"

Missy's eyes were wide open in shock at the tirade. Before she could say anything though, Caroline's head came up the stairwell from the bus door. Her eyes were white all around, clearly visible in the bright moonlight, despite the hair hanging like Spanish moss across her face. The grin though... it was too wide, too lurid to be remotely human. A broken glass giggle skittered across the floor as her knife came up to point at us. "I...see...you!"

"Go!"

Missy hit the back door as hard as she could, knocking it just far enough open to drop the ground and run, I sprinted after her, trying to reach the school building and get under cover.

With the crack of a gunshot behind me, something slammed into my hip and knocked me forward, the impact nearly driving me down. I tried to stumble on, but my legs weren't working right and my foot caught on another curb block, pitching me forward to the feet of the half-crumbled concrete goose sculpture.

I caught myself, weirdly pleased that I hadn't hit my head again, until I realized my right hand was impaled on one of the spikes of rebar jutting up from the base of the sculpture.

Pushing off, the horrific feeling of rebar vibrating along the bones in my hand as I pulled away from it twisted my guts in a sickening wrench. I retched a little as I rolled away, my legs were simply refusing to cooperate.

Somewhere in the back of my head, a little voice told me that the hand and the bullet in the hip were going to hurt like hell later.

A louder, less pleasant voice pointed out that it wasn't going to be a problem. There wasn't going to be a "later."

Caroline shuffled toward me across the parking lot, mumbling to herself, an odd sing-song of jumbled phrases, humming and what sounded like bits and pieces of nursery rhymes.

She puzzled over me for a second as if she didn't even recognize me at all. An unbalanced smile slowly grew. "Lee. It grieves me so to see you in such pain. But I can fix it." Her face darkened and the smile faded into a dark humorless line. "Can't I? I can always make you better." Her voice cracked and shook.

Caroline shook her head and slowly slid the gun into the back pocket of her jeans. She lifted the knife and watched the moonlight glimmer along the edge of the blade. "This is more appropriate, don't you think? More ...intimate? After all we've done to each other? I don't know why you won't just stay dead, Frank. Wouldn't that be easier?"

"Hey, Bitch!"

Caroline looked up sharply and I managed to follow her gaze. Missy was standing in the doorway to the school. She was obviously terrified, but despite that, despite her shaking voice, she was standing defiantly, flipping Caroline off with both hands.

"You're gonna let the "skank" get away?"

"I have all night to hunt you down, Missy. Besides, this isn't about you. It's never been about the skanks. It's about him. It's about...MAKING. THIS. STOP."

"Jesus Christ, you're fucking crazy." Missy half stepped out into the moonlight.

Caroline twitched oddly and stared fixedly at her. "Stop."

"Batshit."

"I said Stop!"

"Loony Tunes." Missy gave Caroline a deliberate eye roll.

"Stop!"

"Whackjob. No wonder you can't keep a man."

Caroline's face twisted in anger. "I said STOP."

"Coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs. You're a nutjob. Freak." Missy childishly stuck her tongue out.

Maybe it was the name calling. Maybe it was the tongue; either way, I could almost hear Caroline snap.

She screamed incoherently and yanked the handgun out of her pocket, blasting mindlessly at where Missy had been standing.

I groped around for a handhold, but found nothing but loose rock. Just as the gun clicked empty, I managed to grab a chunk of sculpture the size of a softball.

Panting in rage and frustration, Caroline tore her gaze away from the now empty doorway and focused back on me. She shifted the knife in her hand and stepped toward me, half-mumbling, half-growling under her breath.

She snarled and raised the knife just as I slammed the chunk of concrete down on her foot. I couldn't get away, but maybe Missy could if I managed to hurt Caroline's foot enough.

Caroline howled in anguish, hopped and twisted away. Loose chunks of concrete rolled under her feet and she pitched backward, landing flat right beside me, suddenly still.

I tried to crawl, but my legs still felt wrong, and my skewered hand was screaming in pain.

She twitched and her right heel drummed on the ground for a second, but she didn't get up.

Maybe she'd gotten a concussion. Weakly, I pulled myself over to her with my one good arm, dragging my legs behind me. I wasn't sure what I was going to do, but I had to end this, stop her no matter what. She'd just keep killing and killing.

Three spears of rebar jutted up from the center of her chest. I couldn't tell if she could see me or not, her eyes were unfocused and glassy. She made a sad, pained sound and for just a second, I could sense the Caroline that I knew and loved. I managed to put my good arm under her head.

Then she shuddered and it was over. The life drained from her and I was holding dead weight.

I was weak and starting to black out. So maybe it was just a last breath that caught in her throat as her eyes finally dulled over. But I was sure she whispered one last word. One last word that I strained to hear

"Daddy?"

*****

Six Weeks Later

*****

"Ready to go home?"

I gingerly pulled myself into the passenger seat. After the economy class airline seat, my hip was aching. "Yeah, thanks for the ride."

Missy nodded, fussing with the air conditioner for a moment. The bruises she'd been covered with at Cash's funeral were mostly gone. "I figured you might want a hand getting home."

"You could have just dropped off the key at the service desk."

"That'd be depressing. Besides, your car still reeks. You need to get that passenger seat replaced or it will never smell right. You lost about a quart of blood into it while I was driving you out of there."

I sighed ruefully. "No detailing is that good."

"You still owe me for the skirt and crop top, you know."

I snorted. Missy had used the only thing she had to stop the bleeding. "I'll buy you five of each. Totally worth it. Get dragged into the Emergency Room by a hot naked chick and you get to go right to the front of the line."

"I ended up with phone numbers for three paramedics, two nurses and an anesthesiologist." She gave a self-satisfied smile.

"I'm not surprised, even as out of it as I was, I saw how much attention you were getting from the guys there."

"They did seem a little slow getting me a robe. Three of the phone numbers were from women, though."

"Really."

Missy gave a dismissive wave. "Hey, don't judge. It doubles my chances of a date on a Friday night."

We sat silent for a long moment until she got us out of the parking lot. "You know the police probably left your place a mess."

"It was a mess already. They had it torn apart in the four days I was in the hospital. Then searched it again after they figured out Cash was probably right about her trips. It's a complete disaster."

"How many guys do they think she killed?"

"They seem to be sure of at least fifteen victims, but they're trying to use her to clear every missing guy in the region between twenty and fifty."

Missy shuddered. "I heard they found all kinds of video cameras in your house."

"Ten of them. They even found a GPS tracker in my car, along with an app on my phone that relayed all my texts to her, and recorded all my phone calls. She was watching me all the time."