Whirlwind Read online

  “I don’t hear anything,” she said.

  He held his hand up to silence her.

  There it was again: a quiet, sustained scream. Toria’s eyes widened.

  “See?” he said.

  She nodded slowly. Her eyes slid to their right edges as she listened. “Somebody’s screaming!” she said, hopping up. She ran into the main hall, out of his sight.

  “Hey,” he said. “Wait!”

  But she had already hit the stairs, heading to the first floor.

  Keal jumped off the ladder and swerved around the corner. He was on the stairs when she opened the front door and disappeared. He found her on the porch, her head cocked sideways.

  “Can’t hear it out here,” she whispered. She came back to the foyer.

  Keal stepped in and shut the door. Immediately the scream reached his ears, still muffled—as though from a great distance—but louder and clearer. It was hideous, a screech of such pain and rage, it made him think of a banshee, the mythical spirit that came for the souls of the dying. He felt a cold shiver shoot up his spine.

  Toria swung her face toward him. Her eyes were wide and scared. She said, “I know what it is!”

  CHAPTER

  six

  THURSDAY, 6:37 P.M.

  Dad wasn’t moving. Through the shattered glass, Xander couldn’t tell if he was even breathing.

  But he was bleeding.

  He pounded his palm against the window. “Dad!” He tried the door handle. The button depressed, but the door wouldn’t budge. It was crinkled and appeared to be pushed back into the metal behind it.

  Xander ran around the front to the driver’s side. Dad was still in the same position, his head leaning forward onto the wheel, but Xander noticed movement: a blink. Then another.

  He rapped on the glass. “Dad!”

  Dad lifted his head. He touched his head, winced, looked at his bloody finger. He peered out the window at Xander.

  Xander tried to open the door, but that one was jammed shut as well. He yelled through the glass, “Are you all right?”

  Dad rubbed his forehead, smearing blood. He nodded. He glanced around, as if trying to find his bearings. He fumbled with the ignition key and turned off the engine.

  “Is there danger?” he said, just loud enough for Xander to hear. “Where’s Taksidian?”

  “I don’t know,” Xander said, looking toward the door. “I think he left, but he could be waiting to ambush us. He—” Xander hitched in a breath, surprised by the realization he was on the brink of tears. He didn’t know if he wanted to cry because he had been so scared, so certain he was going to die, or because he hadn’t died. Maybe it was seeing Dad like that. Then he decided it was all of the above.

  Dad tried the door: no go. He unsnapped his seat belt and thumped his shoulder against the door: it didn’t budge.

  “The other side’s the same,” Xander said.

  Dad smeared blood out of his right eye socket, then his left. He leaned back, pulled his legs up from the footwell, and kicked at the windshield. It rattled, bulged, but held firm. He kicked again. Little rectangles of glass tinked against sheet metal, then the windshield levered out, flopping onto the hood like the discarded hide of a crystal alligator.

  Dad pulled his upper body out through the opening, turned, and sat on the hood. He said, “Taksidian’s gone?”

  “I think so,” Xander said. “He wanted to kill me. He was so casual about it, like it was no big deal.”

  Dad tugged his shirt up, wiped his eyes, and dabbed at his forehead. When his face was exposed again, Xander saw that the gash traveled from one temple to the other. It arced across his forehead, matching the arc of the steering wheel perfectly.

  “Are you all right?” Xander asked again.

  “Yeah.” Dad’s head swiveled to take in the room. “Where’s David?”

  “I don’t know. We have to find him,” Xander said.

  “Find him? Where—?” He hopped to the floor.

  “We got separated when Taksidian came home,” Xander said. “I think he went through the window and ran away. I—”

  He turned toward the room’s open door and yelled, “David!”

  They were quiet for a few seconds. Xander held his breath, wanting so badly to hear his brother’s voice. Not hearing it felt like being underwater, needing to breathe, and knowing the surface was way, way above him. He looked to his father, hoping for reassurance, but he saw only worry.

  Xander said, “Maybe he’s in the forest.”

  Dad frowned and yelled, “David!” He headed for the door, then stopped and returned to Xander. He put his hand on Xander’s cheek. “You okay?” Without waiting for an answer, he pulled him in and hugged him. When he let go, he said, “Let’s find him.” His gaze bore into Xander’s eyes. “Quickly, in case he didn’t get away.”

  Outside, a car started up.

  “Taksidian,” Dad said. He moved toward the partially disintegrated outer wall. His foot came down on something that moved under it. He flew back, arms flailing, and Xander caught him. The Mercedes reversed off the pad in front of the garage, braked, and whipped forward down the dirt-road drive.

  “He might have Dae!” Dad said. He pushed off Xander and squeezed between the Bug and the broken wall. He ran across the yard and stopped. The Mercedes was already at the first bend, a good hundred yards away. It turned and was gone. Dad tossed up his hands. He turned, his eyes dancing over the house, the woods around it. He made a megaphone out of his hands and yelled, “David!” He waited, listening, then called again.

  As Dad strode back to the shattered wall and squeezed through, Xander called for David in the house.

  “He’d answer if he was inside,” Xander said, keeping his eyes on the open bedroom door. “I don’t think Taksidian got him. He didn’t have time.”

  When his father didn’t respond, Xander turned.

  Dad was staring at the thing he’d stepped on: a severed leg, white and oozing. His gaze darted from it to an arm . . . another leg . . . He covered his mouth with his hand. “What—?” he said, the word coming out muffled.

  Xander said, “Taksidian had them stacked up, like some kind of art. I found . . .” He looked for the metal table, saw it twisted against the opposite wall. “I think I found Jesse’s finger.”

  Dad’s eyes widened. He went back through the opening, turned toward the garage, and started calling for David. His voice was panicked now, high pitched and frantic.

  Xander felt an icy finger touch his heart. What if he was wrong? What if Taksidian did have David? The thought of his brother with the man who killed people and took parts from them drove him through the wall opening so fast, he knocked his head on a protruding brick and scraped his shoulder on a broken stud.

  He went the other direction, passing the front door and bay window, yelling . . . screaming for David.

  CHAPTER

  seven

  THURSDAY, 6:42 P.M.

  David now understood what it meant to scream your head off. His brain was throbbing; his throat felt like he’d swallowed glass. He had stopped pounding on the wall when his hand started bleeding. Of course, he hadn’t seen the blood, but the pain told him he’d done some damage, and when a splatter struck his face, he had licked his hand and tasted blood.

  He let loose with one more ear-piercing holler. It echoed around the chamber, as they all had. He stumbled back and sat hard on the ground—on the bones. He didn’t care anymore.

  He was too tired, too scared, too sore in too many places. He dropped his face into his cupped hands and began crying, loud, uncontrollable sobs.

  The darkness spoke his name.

  He tried to stop bawling, but he couldn’t. He lifted his head, breathed wet sobs into the air. He prayed he would not hear his name again, mumbled perhaps by the ghosts of the people who had already died in the room. Or worse: he had imagined it.

  The darkness and fear were getting to him. He was losing it.

  And if he could hallucin
ate his name, then he could hallucinate anything: grabbing hands, monsters, whole skeletons reassembled from the broken bones around him.

  He dropped his face into his hands again, shook it back and forth.

  No! No! No!

  The chamber was bad enough as it was. He couldn’t share it with monsters, even if they were only tricks created by his own mind. What did it matter if they were real or imagined?

  They could still get him. His craziness would get so bad, he would probably start scratching at himself, believing his hands were some other creature’s talons.

  He cried harder.

  After everything he’d gone through, all the things he thought he might go through looking for Mom, of course he had pondered the possibility of his own death. Stabbed/shot/ blown up by some soldier who mistook him for the enemy. Eaten by creatures who had been extinct for a million years. Portaling into some natural disaster. He knew there were a thousand ways to die—but like this? Alone in some nothing room? He wouldn’t even know when in history or where in the world he had died until his spirit drifted up out of his dead body and finally out of here, way out of here. Come on!

  He supposed if he didn’t gouge out his own eyes or do something else completely insane, then it would be starvation that would get him. Now that was a death he had never considered. He’d been hungry, really hungry, a time or two. But there had always been a Snickers or a sandwich or something nearby. He doubted he had ever actually been starving, but he sure didn’t like the pain in his stomach when he needed to eat. He imagined that pain doubled, tripled . . . What a terrible way to go. Would he resort to eating his own foot, pretending it was a hamburger? He’d read a short story about a guy who did that. The need to eat was that bad.

  Stop it! he told himself. You’re not there yet, not even close.

  He remembered not eating his lunch at school.

  Stupid. Should have eaten something, even that nasty pizza I gave Marcus or that slop that was probably rice pudding.

  Stop!

  He concentrated on crying, just crying. He listened to himself, and felt glad for the distraction from his thoughts.

  Again the darkness whispered his name. “David . . .”

  He stopped sobbing and tried to listen over his jittery breathing.

  “David?”

  He scrambled to his feet and slapped the wall. “Here! I’m here! Help!”

  Something rapped against stone—behind him. He spun, staring into the blackness. It came again: Rap! Rap!

  He stepped across to the wall, pounded on it. “I hear you!

  I’m here! Please!”

  “David! What are you doing in there?”

  It was Keal. He recognized the deep voice.

  “How’d you get in there?” the man yelled, and struck the wall with something. Rap! “Can you get out?”

  David laughed. He laughed so hard, a stitch of pain poked his side. He bent over, his palm on the wall, still laughing.

  “No!” he yelled. “I’m stuck.”

  Another voice called through, quieter, daintier—Toria: “Are you all right, Dae?”

  “I am now! Get me out of here!”

  CHAPTER

  eight

  THURSDAY, 6:46 P.M.

  Xander returned to the front of the house and joined Dad, and together they called for David.

  Dad stopped at a spigot and cranked on the water. He splashed his face, spending extra time on his forehead. He pulled off his sport coat and dried himself. He pressed a sleeve against his forehead and started for the woods, aiming for the spot where the three of them had hidden earlier to watch the house. He yelled David’s name.

  He had just pushed through the bushes when his phone began chirping. The sound came from the house.

  “Dad,” Xander yelled. “Your phone’s ringing. Where is it?”

  Dad appeared puzzled for a moment. He said, “The car.”

  Xander started for it, then stopped. “Dad,” he said, “Taksidian has been bugging our phones.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how he knew we were following him.” Xander’s face tightened. “It’s how he was able to set us up, to get David and me alone.”

  “It could be Taksidian calling,” Dad said, pointing at the VW. “Maybe he does have David.”

  Xander hurried through the opening in the wall. He climbed onto the hood, crawled over the collapsed windshield, and slipped through the opening. He followed the chirping to the passenger footwell, where he pushed aside a pile of garbage and snatched up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “David’s here,” the deep voice rumbled through the tiny speaker.

  Taksidian! Xander’s breath stuck in his throat.

  “Xander, that you? You hear me?” Taksidian said, but then Xander realized his mistake.

  “Keal?”

  “Yes! David’s here, in the house. I thought he was with you.”

  “He was,” Xander said. “But—” His mind couldn’t get a grip on the idea that David was home. If Keal had said that Toria had turned into a pterodactyl and flown away, Xander wouldn’t have been more baffled. Their home was a couple of miles east of town; Taksidian’s, a couple of miles west of town— an hour’s walk, at least. But barely twenty minutes had passed since Taksidian came home and the boys scrambled to hide.

  An image came to mind, and Xander smiled: David so scared by Taksidian, his legs became pinwheels that carried him home so fast he left a path of burning footprints behind him. Roadrunner in blue jeans and Reeboks. At heart, though, Xander didn’t care how David had gotten away, only that he had.

  Keal spoke away from the phone: “Toria, get back up here. He can’t hear you, sweetie. We’ll go back down in a minute.”

  Dad stomped over the debris beside the car. “Keal, hold on,” Xander said into the phone. Through the shattered glass of a side window, his father looked like a photograph that had been cut into strips and glued imperfectly back together. Xander tapped the phone against the window. “Dad! David’s home!”

  Ten years fell away from his father’s face as his expression shifted instantly from worry to joy. “How?” He stumbled toward the windshield opening.

  “How?” Xander repeated into the phone. “How’d he get there?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you,” Keal said. “But what’s weird is—”

  “Xander,” Dad said. He was reaching into the car. “Let me talk to him.”

  Xander handed him the phone. “It’s Keal.”

  “Keal, put David on,” Dad said. “Please.” As he listened, his forehead became more and more wrinkled. The cut, which was starting to scab, drizzled out two fresh threads of blood.

  He lifted his coat to dab at them. Finally he said, “He’s all right? You’re sure?”

  “What is it?” Xander said. “What happened?”

  Dad said into the phone, “Uh . . . there’s a pile of old tools out back, next to the porch steps. There might be a sledgehammer.” “A sledgehammer?” Xander said, pushing himself up out of the car. “Why—”

  But Dad turned around and took a step away. He said, “Okay, we’ll get there as soon as we can. Call us if . . . call us when you get him out.” He punched a button and dropped the phone into his shirt pocket. He turned around slowly, thinking.

  “Well?” Xander said, going nuts. “What happened? Where is he? Why do they need a sledgehammer? Get him out of where?”

  “David’s in the basement,” Dad said. “Keal heard screaming and followed it. David’s stuck behind a wall. Come on, we have to get back . . . make sure he gets out . . . make sure he’s not hurt.” He slipped outside.

  “A wall?” Xander said. “Wait. How?”

  Dad was speedwalking out of the yard and onto the drive.

  “Hey,” Xander said, “call my phone!”

  “Hurry, Xander!” Dad said without looking back.

  A Fistful of Dollars started up. Xander located the phone among the rubble, resting in the palm of on
e of Taksidian’s trophies. He picked it up, scrubbed it against his jeans, and shoved it into his back pocket. He took a last look around: at the body parts, the demolished wall, the totaled car—the car! Dan, the kid who had lent it to him, was going to kill him.

  As he slipped outside and started jogging toward Dad, he reconsidered his choice of words. Taksidian was going to kill him, if he had his way. Dan was just going to make Xander wish he were dead.