Page 55 of Confessions of the Dead

How could he not feel that?

The panic raced up her throat, and she gagged on the oily rag again before pinching her eyes shut.

There’s nothing in his head.

There’s nothing in his head.

Because there couldn’t be.

Had he drugged her?

Maybe that was it. But she hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since breakfast. Maybe when she was unconscious. Or maybe something on the rag; every swallow was tinged with something oily.

Hannah started to whimper, didn’t mean to, it just slipped out; some self-defense mechanism running on autopilot, and Malcolm moved fast—he slapped her. Not hard, but hard enough to stun her back into silence.

He brought the tip of the screwdriver close to her eye. “Things will go much smoother for you if you cooperate, but I’m okay if you don’t. Sometimes that’s fun, too. Think you can behave?”

The words came at her in slow motion, as if they traveled through molasses. Something was very wrong

with her, with him, with both

Hannah managed to bob her head and winced with pain,feeling for the first time the blow to the back of her skull that had knocked her unconscious.

Malcolm rolled his eyes, as if her discomfort were some kind of nuisance. “Lean forward. Let me see your head.”

Hannah hesitated for a second, then did as he asked.

Malcolm moved some of her hair aside, touched the spot where it was tender, then straightened back up. “You’ve got a nasty bump, but the bleeding stopped. There’s not much blood at all, really.” He held the screwdriver back up to her face and let out a soft sigh. “I need you to get out of the trunk, Hannah. Slowly.”

Hannah tried not to look at his face, couldn’t. She knew his skin was nothing but a bag of flies. Small, large, larva, maggots, eating him from the inside out. She didn’t know what happened to all the flies that had been in the trunk. Surely there had been more. Some voice told her that if she moved they’d pounce, they’d dart out from wherever they were hiding and swarm her mouth, her nose, her ears, her—

Malcolm grabbed her shoulder and yanked her forward, wrestled her into a sitting position. “Will you move already?!”

With a yelp, Hannah waited for the buzz, waited for tiny feet to squirm across her skin, but nothing happened. She wanted to believe they were gone, but she knew that wasn’t true, they were just patient.

Malcolm grabbed her ankles and swung her legs over the lip of the trunk. When she finally got a good look around, she realized where they were—he’d taken her to the old Pickerton place. The decrepit old house up on Mount Washington where that family died years back. The place where Danny and some of the other guys on the basketball team sometimes went to party.

A lump formed in her throat at the thought of Danny. Had Malcolm just left him there? Dead in the car? Oh, God, was Danny really dead?!

Malcolm cut the tape from her ankles with the blade of thescrewdriver, got her feet on the ground, and tugged her toward the house. “Come on.”

When they reached the porch, she tried to dig her heels in, but that barely slowed him down. He was wiry, but all muscle. He kicked the front door open, yanked her forward, and pulled her inside.

The windows were all boarded up, and the gloom struck her with nearly the same force as the bright light had when he opened the trunk. Her eyes were still adjusting when he dragged her across the dusty floor and forced her to sit at the mouth of a hallway between an old grandfather clock and a heavy oak side table. He crouched down next to her, tore a length of duct tape from the roll, and secured her hands to the table.

She couldn’t look at him. His head was crawling with flies. His shoulders, chest, his filthy clothing. When he spoke, she pictured them rattling around in his lungs, crawling up his windpipe, and—

Malcolm smacked her cheek again. “I don’t know where you keep going, Hannah, but you need to focus. What I’m about to tell you is important.” He twisted the screwdriver between his fingers, the light seeping around the boarded windows glistening across the blade. “You know where we are, right? The old Pickerton place. There’s nobody around for miles. Nobody saw us come up here.”

Hannah swallowed.

Malcolm took her phone from his pocket, held it up, and inserted what looked like a small USB drive in the port. A red light came on and began to flash. “You’re going to like this.” A second later, the red light turned to green and the lock screen on her phone vanished, replaced by her home screen. Malcolm licked his yellow teeth. “Best thirty-nine bucks I ever spent. It takes longer if the phone’s operating system is current, but it looks like you’re a few versions behind. You really should stay on that.”

He brought up Hannah’s messaging app, clicked on the conversation with her mother, and turned the screen so she could read it. Not that it mattered. She knew what it said. Her heart sank.

“You told your mom you were going over to Sandra Horner’s house to study. No mention of Danny or whatever you really had planned today.” Her mother’s reply was right below—

K sweetie. Have fun.

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