Kiss the Girls

out of here now!
    Kate McTiernan staggered and weaved out through the heavy wooden door he had left open behind him.
    She didn’t know how badly Casanova was hurt. Escape was her only thought.
Go now! Get away from him while you can.
    Her mind was playing tricks on her. Confusing images came and went, without making the proper connections. The drug, whatever it was, was taking its full toll. She was disoriented.
    Kate touched her face, and realized her cheeks were wet. Was she crying? She couldn’t even tell that for sure.
    She was barely able to climb a steep wooden stairway outside her door. Was it heading to another floor? Had she just come up these stairs?
She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember anything.
    She was hopelessly bewildered and confused now. Had she really knocked Casanova down, or was she hallucinating?
    Was he coming after her? Was he racing up the stairs behind her right now? Blood was roaring in her ears. She felt dizzy enough to fall down.
    Naomi, Melissa Stanfield, Christa Akers.
Where were they being held?
    Kate was having tremendous difficulty navigating her way through the house. She weaved like a drunken person down the long hallway. What kind of strange structure was she in? It
looked
like a house. The walls were new, freshly built, but what kind of house was this?
    “Naomi!” she called out, but her voice barely made a sound. She couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t focus for more than a few seconds.
Who was Naomi?
She couldn’t remember exactly.
    She stopped and pulled hard on a doorknob. The door wouldn’t open for her. Why was the door locked? What on earth was she looking for? What was she doing here? The drugs wouldn’t allow her to think in straight lines.
    I’m going into shock, trauma,
she thought. She felt so cold and numb now. Everything that could gallop was galloping out of control inside her head.
    He’s coming to kill me. He’s coming from behind!
    Escape!
she commanded herself. Find the way out. Focus on that! Bring back help.
    She came to another flight of wooden stairs that looked ancient, almost from another era. Dirt was caked on the stairway. Soil. Little rocks and glass fragments. These were really old stairs. Not like the new wood inside.
    Kate couldn’t keep her balance any longer. She pitched forward suddenly and almost hit her chin on the second stair. She kept crawling, scrabbling, up the stairs. She was on her knees. Climbing stairs. Toward what? An attic? Where would she end up? Would he be there, waiting for her with the paralyzing stun gun and the syringe?
    Suddenly she was
outside!
She was actually out of the house! She had made it somehow.
    Kate McTiernan was half blinded by the streaming bands of sunlight, but the world had never looked so beautiful. She breathed in the sweet smell of the gums of trees: oaks, sycamores, towering Carolina pines, with no limbs except at the very top. Kate looked at the woods and the sky, high, high above, and she cried. Tears washed down her face.
    Kate stared up at the tall, tall pines. Scuppernongs reached from treetop to treetop. She’d grown up in woods like these.
    Escape;
she suddenly thought of Casanova again. Kate tried to run a few steps. She fell again. She did the hands-and-knees waltz. She lurched back to her feet.
Run! Get away from here!
    Kate turned around in a full, sweeping circle. She kept on turning—once, twice, three times—until she almost fell again.
    No, no, no!
The voice inside her head was loud, screaming at her. She couldn’t believe her eyes, couldn’t trust any of her senses.
    This was the weirdest, craziest thing yet. It was the scariest daydream. There was no house! There was no house anywhere Kate looked as she whirled and turned in circles under the towering pines.
    The house, wherever she had been kept, had completely
disappeared.

Chapter 45

    R UN! MOVE
your damn legs fast, one after the other. Faster! Faster than that, girl. Run away from him.
    She tried to concentrate on finding her way out of the dark, dense forest. The tall Carolina pines were like umbrellas that filtered light onto the hardwoods that grew beneath them. There wasn’t enough light for the young saplings, and they stood like uptight tree skeletons.
    He would be coming after her now. He
had
to try to catch her, and he’d
kill
her if he did. She was pretty sure she hadn’t hurt him very badly, though God knows she had tried.
    Kate settled into a herky-jerky rhythm of running and stumbling forward.