Reunion by Meli Raine Page B

jagged molar where the tooth broke. It’s sensitive, but just the white tooth. The root isn’t exposed. The inside of my mouth has the texture of raw hamburger. I wonder what I look like. The gunk from hiding in the tube is drying on me. I haven’t showered in two days. Heck, I haven’t cleaned up from having sex by the beach. I am, in every possible way, a complete mess.
    And if Mark or Allie don’t get here soon, I’ll be a dead mess.
    I shuffle over to the phone and look down, wincing. My eyes are open just millimeters , the one Frenchie hit swelling closed anyhow.
    I can’t look. If I broke the phone, my one lifeline, then—
    I make myself look.
    It’s broken.
    I don’t even react. I am dead inside. El Brujo and Frenchie might as well finish the job and make it official. Make my exterior match my interior. What possible brutality inflicted on my bo dy could be worse than what they’ve done to my mind?
    I begin to pace. The storage room looks so weird with full light. Blood streaks the floor where Amy was. My own blood mottles my hands, my clothes, the backs of my hands. The stain from whoever was in the coffee bean bag makes a strange sort of smear on the unpainted concrete floor.
    Boxes are on their sides, upended from my time shoving everything off the shelves to get to the hole in the wall. Papers scatter on the shelving, the floor, and litter the space.
    It looks like someone’s ransacked the place. Normally, criminals do that. Not truth seekers.
    Chase must be texting me. He has no idea why I’m not replying. Is Mark with him now? I close my eyes. I t’s not hard with one of them so swollen. I imagine Mark. I conjure his face. I remember those muscled arms, dusted with light brown hair. How his eyes warmed when I talked to him about dogs at the shelter. The way he was so quick to comfort me.
    How he waited three years for me.
    “Carrie!” Allie’s voice is so faint I wonder if I’m dreaming it.
    I pause. I hold my breath.
    I wait.
    “Carrie!” Her voice is more urgent. Slushy noises, like suction in a cup of pudding, come from the hole in the wall. “ It’s raining outside and I need you to get here, now!”  
    I scurry over to the wall and look in. A thin line of water is drip drip dripping into the room, running down the cinderblock wall, making a dark, nasty stain.
    Nothing as bad as the blood by the stairs, though.
    Her face appears at the opening, shoulders tight in there. I slide my hands under her armpits. She looks up, her nose almost bumping mine.
    “What happened to you r face?” she gasps in horror.
    I yank her. She spills out, slithering like a snake through mollasses. Allie falls clumsily to the concrete floor.
    She looks around and blinks, over and over.
    “You found the light switch.”
    “Not exactly,” I say, my words a little slurred. I can’t quite focus on her any more. My eyes aren’t able to work together.
    She stands. A rope is around her waist. She looks at me, the whites of her eyes sticking out in a filthy face. “What happened?”
    “Frenchie.”
    All I have to say is his name. She grabs my shoulders and peers into my e yes. Well— my one eye that’s functional .
    “Did he hurt you? I mean, other than your face?”
    I know what she’s really asking.
    “He didn’t rape me.” Mentioning the nipple grab and the groping won’t help right now. I can tell her later.
    “Thank God.” She looks around, her eyes pausing on the broken phone. “He broke it?”
    “No.” I hold up my bloody hands. “I fat fingered it.”
    She frowns. “Okay. We need to go.”
    “El Brujo was with him.”
    As I say the words, the live rat that bit me earlier in the pipe, when I hid in there, begins to lick the blood stain where the coffee bean bag was.
    Allie looks down and lets out a shriek.
    I scream.
    We both stand there, screaming as if we were being electrocuted.
    A phone rings. I t breaks through our freakout. Allie digs into her mud-covered ass and pulls out a phone