Chapter 14
Why hadn’t I answered? What was I doing that made me so busy as not to even check who might’ve contacted me?
I swallowed hard, looking at the last time he called.
Yesterday at 7:53 p.m.
That was when I had been driving back from the mall. There was something odd about the pattern in which he had called. All of the times read 1:15 a.m., 12:05 a.m., 11:45 p.m.
They were all indicating night times. He calls at night.
I had the strongest urge to call him back. To find out where he was at this exact moment and rescue him.
But I stopped myself.
I had to think this through. What if he’s been doing his calling in secret, though I know, without a doubt, is probably true. What if I call at a bad time and his captor takes his only lifeline away? Then yet a bigger question.
Why had he called me?
Me of all people? Why not the police or his mom?
Was Carson the one who has been trying to reach me and I’m unable to listen?
Wait! Carson’s alive! I jumped up and down and smiled as the boy fixing the carnival ride gave me a weird stare.
Or . . .maybe he isn’t and his captor has been playing with his contacts. Yet, would they call the same person over and over again? Maybe the one who is holding Carson hostage is my stalker. I’d have to ask everybody if they got a call from him too.
No, I couldn’t. They can’t know. The three people I trust the most in the whole entire universe and I have to keep a secret from them.
As much as I didn’t want to do it I put my phone back in my pocket.
All I knew was that if he called again . . .
I would answer.
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The following Thursday I felt sick from head to toe. My head ached, my throat was swollen and no matter how many blankets were on top of me I wasn’t ever warm enough.
“Oh dear, looks like someone needs to pay a visit to the doctor.” Said Rita, placing a hand on my forehead. “Sweet baby Jesus, you’re burning up, jellybean.”
I sniffled and coughed in return. “Ugh . . .I feel like I’m dying.” My voice sounded like thick molasses as it streamed out.
“Possibly the E.R.” My dad replied. “Danny, you want me to stay home with you, today?”
This might have been the first time he offered that suggestion. “-Cause you know I have Judy on speed dial.”
Judy being his personal assistant.
“Nah . . .” I pushed at him, “you go bring home the bacon. I’ll survive.” Then I added more to myself, “One way or another . . .”
“Alright, hon, but if Rita calls me at lunch and gives me any bit of bad-“
“It’s fine, dad, really.” I sneezed into my elbow and fell back on to pillows.
“Mom will be out and in all day. I’ll have her check up on you as well.”
I nodded as he walked out the door.
Rita pulled out her cell phone and dialed a number, “Doctor Brown’s office.”
She was clearly on hold. “Rita, do I really need to go to the doctor?”
If there was a place I hated more than a spa. It was the doctor. It’s cold and it smells too clean. And you have that odd feeling that everything that can go wrong with you is wrong with you.
“I’m sorry, but you’re not going to get better by laying around in bed all day. You need medicine.” Rita and I argued all the way to the doctor.
“Well, why don’t we get some Tylenol at the mini mart up the street, instead?” I offered, but Rita declined and shook her head.
“Not for this type of illness.” She pointed to a quilt I had wrapped around me so tight it looked like a cocoon.
I sighed and gave up. It’s no use. We were half way there already.
“Something seems like it’s on your mind.”
“It’s nothing.” I knew I was lying to myself with that one. Everything was on my mind. “Rita . . .do you believe in things you can’t see?” I didn’t really know where this was going.
Rita honked at a slow moving car in front of us. “What do you mean?”
I itched my knee, staring out the window. “I don’t know . . . like fairy tales?”
She giggled. “Danny, where’s this coming from?”
“Nothing . . .I . . .I was just wondering.”
“I think that things happen for a reason, but other than that . . .other than God, himself, no . . .I don’t.” She then glanced toward me. “I wish they were real, though.”
“You do?”
“Well, don’t you?”
“I guess so, but . . .doesn’t it scare you that maybe the world you know isn’t the world you see?”
“Thinking outside the box, are we?” Rita looked a little shaken.
“Only lately. I kind of feel like, I’ve woken up from some dream I was in, you know?”
“We all feel like that sometimes, Danny.” Even then her empathy seemed not as understanding as usual. Like she had a hard time perceiving what I was saying.
All of a sudden the Land Rover came to a noisy halt. Rita grew tense as she pressed down on the gas pedal. She took a sharp breath as the car didn’t move. “Come on!”
The light was green and even though it was seven in the morning cars were on the road and now at least five could be seen in the distance in my side view mirror.
My stomach lurched with unease as they approached faster and became bigger.
Rita honked the horn involuntarily, fretting with anything to make the car move. But it didn’t. “Oh my god!” She yelled hysterically, grasping for my seatbelt.
I wasn’t about to jump out of the car with her still strapped inside and she knew it.
I gulped and closed my eyes, preparing for a squeal and a big crash, but it never came. Instead there was silence and a very frightened Rita taking irregular breaths.
We were moving again and just in time too.
Rita started to get her breath back and smiled pensively. “Gee . . .” She put her hand to her heart, trying to calm herself, “we could’ve been goners.” She then turned to me, still focusing on the road a head. “Danny, don’t trust this car. It’s been acting weird lately. Take the Mercedes from now on, you hear me?” Her maternal voice was drawn out extensively, her eyes blistering with pure protection.
“I promise.” I assured her.
She heaved one final panicked breath and said, “What do ya’ll say if I pick you up some popsicles on our way back?”
I laughed then coughed, “Sounds like a plan.”
When we got back, I decided on a short nap, but found myself hibernating for the winter.
Waking up just before dinner and dazedly falling back a sleep.
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I opened my eyes to see a bright blue sky and the silver lining between clouds as the Heavens’ light warmed my whole body. I smiled at it, breathing deeply the richly pollinated fresh air. I was in a meadow of some kind.
I lay in the high grassy fields, feeling the green blades softly tickle my skin when I moved my arms and legs like a snow angel.
I sat up to see nothing, but nature and myself. I ran through the meadow carelessly, not even wondering why I was here.
Birds squawked in the horizon as a flock started to fly away. To the south, I assumed.
I stopped running to see the most beautiful, plump, red rose. Its petals portraying love, itself. It barely swayed in the wind.
I looked around for more roses, but there was only one.
It wouldn’t be missed, I thought hazily. I plucked it from the ground and sniffed it. The scent so enduring, like sedation I became uncontrollably sleepy, but its red rays engulfed me, increasing the fog surrounding my vision.
Unexpectedly, I felt a twinge of soreness in my palm escalating in pain. I opened it to see fine streaks of blood trailing out from the roses thorns. Then as if the whole world were standing still everything became motionless.
The trees leaves stopped falling and brushing together in the wind along with the grass and flowers. And I myself was rather stagnant. I watched as the once romantic red rose began to lose its color before my eyes.
The long, green stem grew dark, followed by its delicate leaves and pointy thorns and slowly the petals’ veins commenced into a pitch black. It took over the whole flower with a type of indescribable mourning. A wrong illness about the black rose I held, saturated with my blood.
I could sense the uncanny building of something as I viewed a storm cloud that moved over the meadow, cracking with thunder and a sweltering bolt striking a tree only yards away.
I had never seen lightening that close before. A nightmare was starting to unfold itself in front of me. I was caught in the middle and there was nothing I could do, but sit back and watch it happen. And soon enough a sporadic gust of wind blew my way, ripping the petals clean of the stem.
I was horrified as I dropped what was left of the rose to the ground and ran restlessly to anywhere, but here.
If only I could get to the top of the hill, I thought irrationally, but I kept going.
Rain was soaking me head to toe, it was hard to tell where you were going, but I knew that the storm was chasing me. I could feel it. Feel its rage whip in the sky and boil under my shoes.
I was there. I made it. But when I looked over the hill my hope was yanked as I fell to my knees in surrender.
There before me shown an entire landscape, acres of millions of black roses weathering as best as they could with a flood as red as blood.
The truth was numbing as the rusty, iron smell lingered in the air from the red rain.
It was blood. And I was drenched in it.
Just then a flare of lightening beat down with a smack and white light so intense I lost my sight completely.
The storm had caught up with me.
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I woke up on the floor, my comforter draped around me. And even though I couldn’t actually look into a mirror it didn’t take a genius to know I had the biggest bruise. That the smack was my forehead colliding with hard wood.
I groped for the ice pack I had on the end table and held it to the purple spot, pressing on it as softly as I could manage.
I held onto the bedpost to steady myself and climbed back into bed.
Just then, a buzzing sound was coming from under my pillow. I removed it to show my cell phone all lit up. My nerves became painfully noticeable.
I turned to my alarm clock, but the red, blocked lettering read 6:30. Could Carson call this early?
But as I looked more closely, Wendy’s rosy face had shown on the screen.
I sighed and answered.
“Hello?”
“Hey, is this Danielle?”
“Who else would it be? It’s my cell phone.”
“Oh, you didn’t sound like yourself.”
“I didn’t?”
“No, you sounded a little shaken. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. I just have a bad cold.”
“Ugh,” I could hear her lip curl, “well, in case it makes you feel better. Your boyfriend asked about you today.”
“Boyfriend? Oh . . .Nick? He’s not my boyfriend. He’s just a friend who is . . .a guy, that’s all.” I made sure she knew. That’s the last thing I needed to be going around school.
“Nick is it now? No more Nicholas? M’okay . . .I understand. I guess if he’s just a friend, you could care less about what he said.”
I tapped my finger angrily on my thigh, as there was a long silence. I cleared my voice. “Of course. Yeah, I need to move on to homework anyway.”
I could tell Wendy was disappointed. “Why are you afraid to admit you like him?”
“I do not like him, Wendy.” I said defensively.
“Sure you don’t . . .” Her voice trailed off in sarcasm.
“I don’t.”
She hesitated than added, “He was just wondering where you were today. And I told him and he said to get well.”
I was about to ask, “Are you happy now?” But what came out was, “That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She confirmed.
“Oh.”
“You seem a bit let down, if you ask me.” She justified.
“Did I ask you?”
“Woah now! No need to get snippy with me. I’m just telling you what I heard.”
I felt cross and decided I wasn’t going to answer her back.
“Fine, be that way. I don’t care. I’m going to talk if you like it or not.”
Silence.
“Go on.” I said irritated.
“You know Misty Davis? Lightening struck her car last night and it started a fire. It blew up, Danny!”
“What?” I stood up without realizing it. Remembering the lightening in my dream.
“Yeah, she’s fine though. Good thing Robert was with her and got her out in time.”
“Robert?”
“You know, Robert Moore? He’s like the school’s best offense player? I guess they’re an item now. Can you believe it? And you want to hear the oddest thing about it?” She waited for a reply then went on anyway. “While he was rescuing her from death, his own house got broken into. Luckily no one was home, but the window to his room was open and everything was messed up.”
I leaned on the wall for support.
“Danny, you still there? Danny?” I dropped my phone.
I saved them from death. From going missing.
But how? How did I know?