Chapter Nine: Caden

Shit. He was back. Part of me had been hoping he had crashed his car or gotten shot or something. Sure, if he magically died we would likely all starve to death or something of that general ilk, but at least we would die with dignity. Or at least as much dignity as we could after being kidnapped by a psycho.

I willed myself to forget about my dream with Brie. I needed to focus on the situation at hand, as much as I didn’t want to. There were footsteps coming down the hallway.

I attempted to comb through my tangled, knotty hair with my fingers. The footsteps got louder, and louder, and louder, until I was sure they were right outside the bedroom door -

Then they stopped.

The sound of keys jangling replaced the noise.

A key entered the lock and turned.

The door opened.

Once again, that nagging feeling of wanting to run, run through that door and get far, far away from this place whispered in the back of my sore head. But, I saw the gun, still faithfully at the man’s side like a guard dog.

And I couldn’t leave Elena and CJ here. It was stupid, I knew it, but according to Brie, I was a sweetheart. Plus, my hyperactive imagination plus my hypersensitivity wouldn’t stop showing me all the horrible things that might happen to them. We had all been gathered here by this man, be it his psychotic mind or the powers of some higher being working through him. If they were to suffer, I were to suffer with them. But more importantly, if I could help get them out, then I would.

However, less admirably, I had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be that easy to get out of this perfume-reeking farmhouse. Especially with that stupid ankle of mine.

I peeled my eyes away from the gun, then gasped when I saw the man’s face.

He wore no mask.

It became real to me then. It wasn’t me jumping to conclusions that said that our kidnapper was the chief of police. It was no longer speculation. It was true.

We would never be found.

Because the people keeping us were the ones that were supposed to be looking for us.

“Hello,” Porter said.

Elena started crying. Shivers crawled up my spine.

“It’s all right,” he said. I bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood. “I’m just here to look at Caden.”

I thought up a few choice words for him that translated to basically, “Leave me alone.” He slowly entered the room and Elena and I both flinched. He stopped walking.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said, the same way one would speak to a child. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just need to look at Caden. She got hurt.”

More mental choice words here. As much as I didn’t want to let the man even get me, I decided it would be better for that to happen than to try to stop him and face whatever consequences might become of that. Be smart, I reminded myself.

I nodded slowly, and the man came towards me as Elena backed herself into a corner. I would have done the same thing if I were her.

The police officer knelt down in front of where I was sitting on the bed. Much to my surprise, he was gentle with me, which I think terrified me more than he if had been mistreating me. With a considerate touch he moved my head around and lightly brushed his fingers over the painful spot on my head.

“It should be all right,” he said. “You hurt your ankle too, right?”

He must have noticed me limping. Slowly, I nodded.

“May I?” he asked.

No. I nodded again.

With the same gentle touch, he grabbed my bare foot.

Holy motherfucker- It hurt. But as much as it hurt, he was obviously trying to be careful. I watched in pain and in fascination as he closely examined my now more swollen ankle.

After a moment, he stopped looking. “I think it’s just twisted,” he said. “It should heal just fine as long as you stay off it and keep it iced. I’ll get you an ice pack at dinner.”

Great. Looking forward to it.

He stood up, then looked at Elena and I together. “Can either of you cook?”

Suffice to say, the causal question took me off guard. Neither Elena nor I said anything. He nodded. “Yeah, me neither. CJ!” he called, louder. He obviously knew about the thin walls. “Can you cook?”

I could feel CJ’s nervousness in the other room. Answer him, I mentally told him. Even if it’s a no.

“Not really,” CJ answered light-heartedly enough, but I could hear the tension in his voice. He was a good actor.

“Alright,” Porter said. “I hope you don’t mind bad cooking.”

He walked back out of the room, closing it behind him.

“What the hell was that?” Elena asked. I didn’t know what to say. “Is the door locked?”

I hadn’t heard it lock. She cautiously walked to the door and ever so slowly turned the knob. I could hear my heart pounding in my throat. “Elena…” I whispered. She looked at me with wide eyes. I didn’t feel great about this. “Be careful.”

She nodded and pulled the door open.

It took a second, then she gasped. “We can leave.” I don’t think she meant the comment for me. It was rather out of shock.

“I don’t think so, Elena, something seems-”

But she was already gone.

Dammit.

“What’s goin’ on?” CJ asked.

“Check if your door is locked,” I told him. There were creaking noises as he obviously got up. A few seconds later, I saw him through the open door.

“I guess not,” he said, and I could see the excitement in his eyes. It wasn’t nearly as much as Elena’s, but it was there.

Once again, something didn’t feel right here.

My feelings are usually right.

Damn it all, I thought, hobbling to my one good foot. But Porter had left the doors unlocked on purpose. If he didn’t want us walking around he would have locked them. That wasn’t what I was concerned about. What I was concerned about was the fact the Elena - emotionally unstable, scared, and nervous Elena - was now running around.

“Elena,” I told CJ. He looked confused for a second. Normally I would have explained more, but my lungs were more busy heaving huge painful breaths past my lips due to my ankle hurts, holy shit, too bad I didn’t pay attention in health class than they were on speaking. He nodded, though, so the two of us made our way through the creepy hallway that we had been lead to. Up ahead, there were lights turned on in what appeared to be kitchen. As CJ and I slowly made our way down the hallway, he being gentleman enough to lend me a helping hand, I noticed a quiet creaking sound from in front of us. CJ didn’t seem to notice it, though, because he kept walking.

“C-” A hand covered my mouth, muffling me. My heart burst in my chest as adrenaline caused all the pain in my body to be washed away and replaced with fight-or-flight reaction. The person yanked me to the side, and I flailed my arms around. My hand grabbed a lock of soft hair and I knew that I’d made a mistake even before Elena hissed an “Ow! Calm down, it’s just me!”

I’d been ready to bite her hand. For a second I considered still doing it, but she removed her hand, leaving me panting heavily and with my heart still racing. I was getting scarily used to the feeling of fear and adrenaline making anxiety crackle through my veins. It felt like an electric shock.

“Elena!” CJ whisper-yelled back. “What the hell are you doing?!”

“Trying to find a way out, what the fuck do you think I’m doing? Now help me!”

The two of them kept walking down the hallway, but I stayed behind.

This isn’t right, I was sure. Porder wouldn’t it go through all this and then mess up by keeping a door unlocked. And wait... he only went into the room where Elena and I were to go and check on me…

He never went into CJ's room. That means he purposely unlocked CJ's door.

“Guys…” I whispered as I walked into the pitch black hallway Elena just pulled us into. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness and I could just barely make out an outline of what I thought was the door we were brought through.

“There’s a door,” Elena whispered in awe.

I noticed it too late. The other two didn't notice it at all. It was a thin dark wire that ran across the wall that led to the door. I struggled to open my mouth. “Elena!” I screamed.

But it was too late. She grabbed the doorknob and for a second I thought I smelled ozone.

I also thought I saw the world ending. As it turns out, it was just a life ending. Time slowed and kept me frozen in its grasp.

Elena screamed like a dying animal, her cry cutting through the air like a jagged knife blade.

She’s dying, dying, dying, my mind screamed with her. I don’t think my voice followed suit.

CJ’s did, though. He screamed “Elena!” and went running towards her.

CJ-

“No!” I yelled, and time released my body from its clutches to allow me to lunge forward and grab him, clawing at his clothes and tumbling us both to the hardwood floor to try to stop him.

Another one of the infinite ways all humans are alike: their bodies are great conductors of electricity.

In my own weakness, I clenched my eyes shut as Elena screamed for what felt like hours more, but they couldn’t have been, because someone can only die for so long. I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to look. I could feel her pain rattling through my bones and I could hear the electrified blood running through her veins.

When she stopped screaming, I heard the death cry in my head even louder. CJ began screaming again, this time out of horror. He yanked himself out of my grasp and ran to what was just a few minutes ago Elena Maria Lopez and now was a corpse. Maybe he thought she was still alive; I don’t know. I knew she was dead, though.

And I should have known she was going to die.

Shouldn’t I’ve?

Brie, I sobbed silently.

Another surprised cry ran through the air, and it was one that I was not expecting. It was a man’s voice. “Elena!” Porter yelled, running past me and pulling CJ off of Elena. “Elena, no, no, no, why!?” he yelled. He sounded distraught, which I couldn’t make sense of. It was obviously his contraption that killed her.

I knew she was dead, but apparently Porter wasn’t sure, as he checked for a pulse in the darkness.

“I told you to stay away from the doors and windows!” he shouted at us. I could hear his heart racing in his chest, just slightly slower than my own was. “I told you!”

The next several minutes went by a blur. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the floor of the bedroom with my back to the wall. I knew that CJ was doing the same on the other side of the wall. Shivers racked my entire body, causing my ankle to throb. There was a paper plate with some sort of food on it. The smell made my stomach churn, but I’d just thrown up a few minutes ago so I had nothing left inside me to vomit. Briefly, I thought back to the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, when Vonnegut quickly inserts himself into the story to say that the man crying out that he was throwing up his guts had been him. For once, I understood what he had meant.

I’d just seen a human being die.

It wasn’t the first time I had seen something die. I had seen it once before.

But never like that. Not screaming in pain.

Why didn’t you listen to me, Elena?

Through the metal-covered window, I could hear the wind howling. That was right, it was supposed to be really cold tonight. I wondered if I ought to be thankful that I wasn’t still sitting in that damn barn. For some reason, I couldn’t work up the nerve to be grateful for anything.

“Hey,” CJ’s muffled voice said tiredly. It was the first time he’d said something since Elena died.

I sniffled.

“If my parents were here, they’d be talking about the kogarashi,” he said.

“The what?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and thick from screaming and crying.

He coughed. “It’s one of the few Japanese words that I know. It basically means the cold wind that signals the arrival of winter.”

I cleared my throat in an attempt to sound less like I was dying - ha. It didn’t work. “Both of your parents are from Japan but you don’t speak the language?”

A moment of silence went by. “No,” he said, this time quieter. Remorseful. “Growing up, I was always embarrassed when my parents would speak Japanese around my friends.” He seemed to chuckle self-deprecatingly at that. “Once.... in fourth grade, w-when I got onto the basketball team and they were really proud of me, they came to the last game of the season. I got the winning shot and they looked…” his voice cracked, “they looked so proud. Then they started congratulating me in Japanese, an’ I-”

He stuttered. I didn’t say anything, I wanted to let him get it out by himself. Sometimes, that’s what a person really needs.

“-I told them to stop and speak in English like normal people.” He coughed again. “They looked so sad, an’ I-

“I realized too late that I was being a fucking idiot, but I never apologized to them for it.”

I thought about my parents. About Brie. About all the things I should have said, and will likely never have the chance to.

“I guess I’ll have to tell them when I get home,” CJ said, this time with less tears choking him.

He was optimistic. Optimistic in the way I couldn’t be. I had seen Death. I had seen her as she took away Elena. I had seen her before; but she has never seen me.

She has now.

When she took Elena, I saw her dark green eyes flash over all of us.

As I thought of those eyes, my heart began beating painfully fast, threatening to pull apart my chest. Blood rushed through my head like a torrent. Pain, pain, pain. I was suffocating. “CJ,” I gasped.

“Yeah?” he sounded panicked. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Brie, I sobbed silently. Mom? Dad?

I clenched my eyes shut and tried to focus on my breathing, like the psychologist had always told me to do.

The problem was, when I had trouble breathing, there was always someone there that would help drag the water from my lungs and lead me to the air. When I was born, it was my family. When I met Brie, it was her. They kept my head above the water when my legs were too weak to keep swimming.

That’s what love is, isn’t it?

None of them were there as I sat on the floor unable to breathe.

My shoulders heaved with my attempts to take in oxygen. I could slightly hear the sounds of CJ shouting to me. I closed my eyes and for just a second, saw a flash of blonde hair.

I took in one small breath.

I heard my mother’s timid voice.

Another small breath.

I felt my father’s hand lightly brush my shoulder.

My lungs filled with air and my eyes flew open. My heart was still beating fast due to adrenaline, but I wasn’t suffocating. I had been pulled out of the water.

“CJ,” I said again.

“Yes?” his voice was high-pitched.

I looked straight ahead and saw another picture of the two sisters. They were smiling. “Just tell them that you love them.”