Chapter 25
It was Brian.
He was indeed in the basement, just as Leighanne had hoped. But the situation he was in was worse than
she had expected.
He lay flat on his back on a twin bed with a bare mattress on it,
his arms and legs stretched out from his body, his wrists and ankles tied, his
whole body bound down. His skin was
pasty white, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His body looked bonier than she remembered,
and his cheekbones jutted out from his gaunt face, making him look more like a
skeleton than a flesh-and-blood human.
His hair was plastered to his head with grease and perspiration, and his
skin was soiled with dirt, sweat, and tears.
Leighanne choked back a sob as she ran to him. Her first thought was that he was dead. But as she got closer, she saw that it was
not so, and her knees went weak with relief.
His slow, ragged breathing told her that he was alive, but barely.
“Oh, Brian,” Leighanne sobbed, reaching a shaking hand out towards
her husband. But she drew it back, too
fearful to even touch him in his weakened condition. He looked fragile enough to break.
“Ambulance,” Leighanne muttered subconsciously, looking around for
a phone. She saw none.
“Brian, I need to go find a phone upstairs. I’ll be right back,” she told him, even
though Brian was unconscious and could not hear her.
Scared to leave him, but even more terrified of not getting help
in time, she turned and raced up the stairs to the main floor of the
house. She found a phone in the
kitchen, but to her despair, it was dead.
Struggling to keep from crying, she raced out to her car, knowing
she had a cell phone in her purse. She
got to the car, flung open the door, and grabbed her purse from the front seat. She dug through it blindly, tossing Kleenex,
makeup, and mints every which way as she scavenged for her phone. She found it finally, yanked it out, and
turned it on. Her heart sank as she saw
that it was not charged up. The phone
was dead.
“No!” she cried. “Please,
don’t do this to me!” Bursting into
tears, she hurled the phone down and started to run back into the house.
But something lying in the driveway caught her eye and made her
stop and turn back to look. It was a
little pair of scissors that she kept in her purse, one of the things she had
tossed out while looking for the phone.
But they would help her out now more than the phone could. Picking them up and running into the house,
she felt a new sense of hope come over her.
She could do this. She could get
Brian out herself.
Blinking back her panicked tears, Leighanne hurried down the steps
to the basement and over to the bed.
With the scissors, she sawed away at the cords that tied Brian down and
managed to slice them away from Brian’s wrists and ankles. Then she cut the cord going across his torso
so that his body was free.
“Okay,” Leighanne said breathlessly, surveying the situation. She was going to have to get her unconscious
husband off of the bed, across the room, up the stairs, and all the way out to
her car. She swallowed nervously. It was going to be tough. But she could do it. She had to. It was either that, or Brian was going to
die.
Ignoring the sweat, the dirt, and the smell surrounding Brian,
Leighanne slid her hand under his back and pulled him up into a sitting
position. His head hung forward limply,
and she had to hold onto him to keep him from collapsing back down again. Breathing hard, she held him up with one arm
and slid the other under his legs.
Then, grunting with exertion, she hoisted him up from the bed.
Brian was heavy, but not as heavy as she had imagined. She wasn’t sure if it was because he had
lost so much weight or because of the adrenaline surging through her body, but
somehow, she managed to carry him.
Her back and arms aching with each step, she carried him to the
stairs and painstakingly went up, taking each step slowly. When she made it to the top of the stairs,
she let out a breath of relief; the worst was over. Then, at the high of her adrenaline rush,
she carried him through the kitchen, through the living room, and out the front
door.
When she finally made it to the car, she nearly collapsed with
relief. She let Brian’s lower half
down, still supporting his back with her right arm, and used her left to open
the back door of the car. Then she
carefully slid Brian into the car so that he was lying across the backseat. She slammed the door shut and hurried around
to the driver’s side. She got in, shut
the door, started the car, and headed for the nearest hospital.
***
The heart monitor beeped in a constant, rhythmic pattern, sending
a thin green line peaking and falling steadily across the screen. The respirator hissed over and over
again. The IV dripped slowly. And Kevin, staring at the pale man in the
bed, cried.
Why AJ? he asked himself over and over
again. Why not me instead? Kevin would have given anything to trade
places with his younger friend, putting himself in that hospital bed instead of
AJ. But he could not. He could only sit there. And wait.
And pray.
It had been hours since he and Nick had called the police. Brendan had been rushed to the hospital, and
he, Nick, and Howie had been briefly questioned. As it turned out, Nick had heard Kevin and
Brendan yelling at each other and had known something was very wrong. He had gotten a key to the room from
downstairs and come up to see what was going on.
Now Nick, Howie, and Kevin were at the hospital, with AJ. They had spoken to AJ’s surgeon, who had
informed them that although AJ’s surgery had gone well, he was not out of the
woods yet. He had been stabbed twice,
and both times, the knife had missed his spinal cord by centimeters. One stab had punctured his lung though,
causing him to go into respiratory arrest.
There had been other internal damage done, but the doctors hoped they
had fixed it all. Still, they were
uncertain as to whether he would make it or not.
“Kevin?”
Kevin turned around suddenly to see that Howie had come into the
room.
“Sorry to bother you, but Leighanne just called,” Howie said,
shifting nervously.
Kevin bit his lip. He
could tell just by the expression in Howie’s big brown eyes that something was
wrong. And he had a good idea of what
that something was.
“Brian?” he asked, his voice hoarse and shaky from crying.
Howie nodded.
“Is it bad?” Kevin asked worriedly.
Howie pressed his lips together grimly. And he nodded again.
***
