Then she shoved the cell phone back in her pocket and simply ran, right out of the door and then up the side of the building after the figure she saw racing away from her in the darkness.
He was too far ahead to catch now. She cursed in her head as he turned the corner far ahead of her, needing to conserve her breath too much to do it out loud. She put on as much of a burst of speed as she could while still keeping hold of her gun in one hand, slowing down to be more cautious just as she went around the corner, just in time to see him racing back inside the warehouse via the back door.
And she knew, in her gut, exactly how this was going to play out.
She knew what she was about to see before she saw it.
Somehow, for a moment, the fear dropped away completely. She was only walking into a vision, that was all. Walking into something she had already seen. She knew where he would be. She knew where she had to stand. Everything was all preordained. Why be scared about that?
But she stepped into the large warehouse space one more time and looked up to see the whole army of mannequins facing her, and there was the fear. So many of them. Arranged perfectly in their neat rows, unmoving, unchanging. And they were his creatures – his tools. He knew everything about them. How to position and move them, how to clean them right down to the inside of every single possible joint or crack, how to remove every trace of where they had come from.
How to kill with them.
She knew, now, that she’d been wrong before. It hadn’t been Dan she’d seen in her vision. It had been a man emerging from the darkness in the rows of mannequins. Not running from her.
Running at her.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Laura took her place, standing there in front of the mannequins, waiting for it to happen. Waiting for her eyes to adjust. Waiting for him to make his move.
But this wasn’t a vision. She wasn’t trapped here. She had full autonomy. She could make her own choices to change the way all of this was going to turn out.
She pointed her gun at the place where she knew he would emerge, and called out. “You must have been so lonely,” she said, and there was no response.
In her view, no response was good. No response meant he was frozen there still, standing among the mannequins, not moving. No response meant more time for Nate and the rest of the backup to arrive before he made his move.
Meant maybe more time for them to try and save her if he did manage to get his blow in, after all.
“No one ever notices you, do they?” Laura tried. She’d seen it, hadn’t she? How lonely this job must be. And now she could see what he was doing with the mannequins. The story he was telling. Those faceless, nameless bodies – they were him.
Him, offering a shoulder to cry on to a so-called friend who never even knew he existed. Him, sleeping with a woman who never would have given him a second glance. Him, eating popcorn and watching a movie with a man who would never have allowed him inside the house.
She wanted to sympathize with him. To make him feel seen, heard. But…
If he felt like she was sympathizing too much, maybe he would just kill her to get it done with. To fulfil her role in his twisted fantasy, instead of actually having to put in the effort.
No, it was too risky. And she was still none the wiser as to what he was thinking, what he was doing out there in the dark. If she was going to survive and get help for the security guard, she needed to lure him out.
She needed to capture him – one way or another.
“It’s pathetic,” she said, letting the word hit the air like a slap, changing tactic entirely. As far as she knew, he only had a blunt weapon. She had a gun. And her eyes were adjusting more and more with each moment. “They didn’t know you at all, did they? They had no idea you even existed. And if they had, why would they have wasted their time by spending it with you?”
She strained, and she thought she heard something – just the edge of something, not enough to identify it fully yet. It was in the vague area that she knew he had to be in, because of what she had seen in the vision. As though he’d made a small, involuntary noise.
She was getting to him.
“You don’t really think it gives you any kind of connection, do you?” she asked, turning her voice as nasty as she could make it, belittling and mocking. “You’re nothing to them. Even now. They didn’t care about you when you were alive, and they still have no idea who you are now. Just some random guy that ended their lives for your own petty enjoyment. Just a loser.”
There was a movement ahead at her last word, as though it was the last blow – as though he couldn’t take it anymore. She knew this – she had seen this. He would step out and rush towards her, ready to attack. She didn’t waste a single moment. She fired.
There was a moment of confusion, something shattering into pieces. Laura processed it a moment later: a mannequin head, exploding into shards of plastic shrapnel. She’d hit a mannequin head. Not the killer. And the shot was ringing in her ear…
She spun, turning from one side of the group of mannequins to the other, trying to identify movement, her gun kept up ahead at all times, ready to fire again. She just had to see him one more time and then she could –
Something hit the back of her head, hard, so hard –
She was spinning, dropping, hitting the floor but trying to keep her gun up –
She was down, her elbow taking the impact, another shot firing off and deafening her –