Patrick Adams was standing on his front porch breathing the night’s cold air – he needed a moment to calm down before he returned to the nightmare inside. The living room floor was a litter of empty beer cans and poppers, and already two antique serving dishes had been broken.
It was New Year’s Eve and his niece was allowed to invite a few friends over to celebrate – but the entire neighbourhood wasn’t what he or his wife Grace was expecting.
‘Don’t worry – I’ll have them out of here in an hour,’ his niece had called, struggling to compete with the blaring music that was likely to tear the house in half.
Patrick scanned the street for police officers who’d promised to keep watch on the community over the holiday weekend, but there were no patrol cars in sight. He walked down to his own car opening the driver side door, and, without the faintest idea where he would go, started the engine.
It was only a few minutes until midnight and he was unsure whether anything would be open. He crossed the toll bridge into the next town and mazed through the back roads to avoid the gatherings that had advanced to the middles of the streets. The drive should have taken a quarter of an hour but Patrick’s meandering had nearly doubled that.
He pulled into an empty shopping centre parking lot and, through the darkness, barely made out a convenience store in the distance. It was empty save for the woman behind the counter as the automatic doors opened to let him inside. He moved from aisle to aisle doubtful that he really wanted anything. Cigarettes were tempting, but he’d caught a head start on that resolution and quit early Christmas morning. He grabbed some gum for his cravings and a box of aspirin for the morning, putting them up on the counter to be scanned. The woman was slouched and almost certainly caught between wake and sleep, eyeing Patrick like he was somehow adding to her misery.
‘That all?’ she groaned.
Patrick nodded, taking the plastic bag, and headed for the door.
‘WAIT!’ she said after him with a sudden ignition in her voice. ‘It’s after midnight – Happy New Year.’
His mouth formed a weak smile. ‘You too I suppose,’ Patrick said turning to leave.
He put a piece of gum in his mouth and stepped into the dark, headed toward his car. The sound of a cough, slight but overt, stopped him dead: Patrick could swear it belonged to a woman. He looked around but the lot was empty – there was no one other than himself.
He reached his car and turned the key until the lock clicked undone. Patrick pulled the handle as something hard hit into the back of his head. He dropped to the rough bitumen. Blood puddled in his hair. He tried to draw himself onto his knees but was woozy and fell forward. Fingers – or at least he was certain they were fingers – gripped his throat and starved Patrick of air. He wanted to throw the weight away, but all he could do was lie still struggling for breath … lie still while somebody strangled him …
The hands grasped tighter almost crushing his oesophagus. Patrick gave up fighting, and finally his life had ended. The hold of his throat slackened as his killer got up from the ground. Left in the darkness of the parking lot, Patrick’s lifeless body lay still as the rest of the world celebrated the first day of a brilliant year to come.
*
It was morning. Soon the convenience store morning staff would face the horror of finding Patrick’s body; soon the travesty would reach local media sending waves of panic and alarm through the community.
Only a few miles from the parking lot, Riley Miller sat up and
looked around blankly with a panicky feeling in his stomach. It was not his bed, or even his room, and it most definitely wasn’t his empty tampon box on the dresser table by the door. Where on earth was he and how did he get here?
He pulled back the covers and glanced around for any clues. The floor was a mess of sweet wrappers and old bus passes, and there were a few empty boxes but that was it! There were no windows and the walls were a dull white … it was more like a storage facility than someone’s bedroom.
Riley knelt down to retie the laces of his joggers.
‘Where were you last night,’ he said to himself desperately. He could remember loud music, a bar and people laughing. He was approaching the door and there was a girl – he was leaving with her.
The harder Riley concentrated, the quicker the scene faded to a blur. Why couldn’t he remember something more – where they were going or what the girl looked like perhaps?
He took a deep breath and moved closer to the door, hesitant as to what he would find on the other side. It could be someone’s house he was about to walk through, or a warehouse where someone was holding him.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Riley thought putting the absurdness from his mind. He was confident with just a touch of nerves, and forced out his hand to turn the handle. The door clicked open.
Gathering every bit of courage he had, Riley
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