Page 114 of The Morning After (Savannah 2)

No, no, not this.

“Help me, oh, God, help me,” she screamed, her mind running in a crazy, wild kaleidoscope of jagged images. Torturing her while the feel of rotting flesh made her skin crawl. She had to get out. Had to!

Surely someone would hear her.

Certainly someone would come to her rescue.

“You have to do it yourself!” she said aloud, or was it the other person in the grave with her. Oh, God, did she feel him moving beneath her? Touching her. Running a bony, rotten finger up her spine.

Her shriek was the keening wail of an inmate in an asylum, the desperate, psychotic howl of a person whose mind was jagged and torn.

Think, Simone…think. Don’t lose it. As bad as the air was, it still existed and she thought—oh, Jesus, was she imagining it—that there was the hint of fresh oxygen mingling with the sour, malodorous stench of decay. Again, she thought she felt something move—a worm or beetle that had bored into the coffin, or the ghost of whoever it was she was entombed with, touching her, breathing against the back of her neck?

She screamed and clawed, swearing and crying, feeling claustrophobia grip her, knowing her mind was fragmenting. Hold on, for God’s sake hold on…someone will save you…or will they?

If she ever got out of here alive, she’d kill the bastard with her bare hands.

You’ll never get out, Simone…

Did someone say that? Or was it her own terrorized mind.

You’re going to suffer the same fate as the others and die slowly and miserably.

She heard it then, the spray and rattle of dirt and pebbles falling upon the lid of the coffin. She wasn’t yet buried. There was a chance.

“Let me out!” Again she pounded, her wrist throbbing, panic spurring her. “Please, please, let me go. I won’t tell anyone, oh, please, don’t do this!”

More clattering as another scoop of dirt rained upon her tomb. But if she wasn’t yet buried, someone besides the sick bastard might hear her. She screamed wildly, kicking, pounding, scraping, pleading. “Help me! Oh, God, someone, help me!” But still the dirt thudded above her and the smell of fresh air seemed to fade with each mind-dulling shovelful. He was going to kill her slowly. There was no escape.

The darkness seemed more complete. The air so thin it burned. The stench unbearable and the corpse beneath her seemed to move…to touch her in the most unimaginable places.

That was impossible, she thought for a fleeting second, but that bit of sanity was soon destroyed as the voice in her mind jeered ba

ck at her. You’re doomed, Simone. Just like the others.

Her shrieks were muffled, her pleadings muted as he filled the yawning hole, but The Survivor was hearing Simone Everly’s pitiful cries in stereo, not only listening to her screams from the coffin itself, but also hearing very clearly her every breath from the earpiece he’d lodged in one ear. He couldn’t resist. Though it would have been safer to fill the hole and listen to her recorded cries later, the temptation to hear her as she was actually experiencing her fate was too great. Usually his victims didn’t awaken until he was well away from the scene, but Simone Everly had been stronger than he’d anticipated and the drug he’d used to control her had worn off early.

Which was just as well, he thought as he scooped the damp earth. There was something purely sensual about knowing she was just below him, lying in the coffin beneath a few inches of earth, pleading with him to free her. Oh, she would plead and cry and offer him sexual favors, but even the thought of actually fucking her wasn’t as thrilling as what he was experiencing now, the adrenaline rush of hearing her plead and gasp and cry.

A soft rain was falling, offering a veil for his actions should anyone climb the locked gates of the cemetery. He was alone, aside for a creature or two that scuttled through the foliage. If he looked through his night-vision goggles, he saw them, raccoons, skunks and opossums, huddled beneath the shrubs on the edge of the graveyard, peering at him with wide suspicious eyes.

Go ahead and watch, he thought of the furry witnesses to his crime. He was sweating as he threw the dirt into the grave, her voice fading in the damp cloud-covered night. He had to work fast, just in case some teenagers or vagrants showed up, but for now, they were alone.

He and Simone.

She was crying now, babbling incoherently, shrieking occasionally, prattling on about someone touching her and breathing on her—as if she were in the coffin with a ghost.

Man, she was really losing it.

Which was perfect.

Let her fears drive her crazy in the last few minutes of her life, let her think that there is no way out, that no matter how hard she struggles, pleads and fights, she’s doomed.

See how it feels, you rich bitch.

CHAPTER 25

“I tell you, the creep hasn’t been around for a couple of days.” Dan Oliver, the manager of Chevalier’s apartment building, was more than eager to let them inside. He looked to be around fifty and wore the bitter, I’ve-never-caught-a-break-in-my-life expression of a man who had lost his youthful dreams years before. Beneath the brim of a dirty baseball cap, his small eyes glittered in a face that carried too much flesh, and he’d barely cast a glance at the search warrant Reed and Morrisette had managed to procure. It seemed that Danny Boy had been anticipating them as he led them down a crumbling brick path and down a few steps to a basement. The apartment was nearly subterranean, a small space that had obviously been the work of a handyman hoping to make some extra bucks by taking in a tenant.

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