Last Seen: A gripping edge-of-your-seat thriller that you won’t be able to put down. Rick Mofina
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Название: Last Seen: A gripping edge-of-your-seat thriller that you won’t be able to put down
Автор: Rick Mofina
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Приключения: прочее
isbn: 9781474074780
isbn:
“The executioner is coming for you and there’s no escape!”
Struggling to distinguish the entrance to the next scene, Faith, Cal and Gage searched the cemetery for an exit in vain before they were motivated to look again by the sudden rattle of a revving chain saw.
“There, by the crooked tree!” Gage shouted.
The lid of an upright coffin had opened, inviting an escape just as the executioner materialized from across the graveyard. A huge man, face wrapped in a ragged, grotesque mask, held the saw high over his head, gunning the motor as he approached them.
“Let’s go!”
Gage ran through the coffin door, his parents behind him with the chain-saw maniac pursuing them.
They entered the final chamber where the floor was akin to a big plate, a flat, spinning wheel, large enough to hold a car. The room went pitch-black. Faith couldn’t see her hand in front of her face as the floor rotated. She couldn’t see Gage or Cal as the air exploded. Earsplitting, menacing metal music thudded in time with the sudden hyperflash of strobe lights, creating confusion and terror. In the chaos, Faith now glimpsed Gage and Cal—was that them?—moving on the far side of the spinning wheel.
Or was she seeing other people?
“Gage! Cal!”
The music roared and she failed to hear a response—if there was one—as the floor turned and turned, disorienting her. Through the strobes, she spotted half a dozen curtained portals just as the chain saw’s whine grew louder, alerting her to the fact the lunatic was in the room.
“Save yourself!” a recorded demonic voice boomed. “Choose your exit now, or perish!”
Faith sensed that the saw-wielding lunatic had stepped onto the wheel and had her in his sights. That saw better not be real, she thought before jumping to one of the curtained portals. Her heart skipped as the floor beneath her gave way and she fell onto a cushioned rubber slide that dropped in darkness for a few seconds before gently delivering her to the lighted, safe world outside.
Catching her breath, Faith stood, stepping aside as a teenage girl slid down the chute behind her. Blinking in the sunlight, regaining her composure, Faith looked around the landing zone of half a dozen chutes that webbed out to deliver visitors on a large air mattress.
“Hey!” Faith spotted and joined Cal, who’d exited at the farthest chute. “That was wild! Where’s Gage?”
Cal’s grin began melting as he looked at her, then around.
“He’s not with you?”
“No, I thought you had him?”
“No, I saw him with you.”
“Cal, where’s Gage?”
Faith and Cal searched the chutes delivering a thrilled survivor every few seconds. Gage would be next. He had to be next. The seconds grew to one minute as their hearts continued to pound. Two minutes passed, then three.
Time ticked by with no sign of Gage.
“I can’t believe this,” Cal said as he and Faith walked the perimeter of the chutes, searching the slides and the clusters of people shuffling along the exit barricades for Gage.
He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.
“Maybe he got out ahead of us and ran to another ride?” Faith said. “Maybe he went to a food stand?”
“I doubt it, but wait here for him and I’ll check.”
Cal shouldered his way through the exit lines, battling frustration and unease while searching the rivers of people that were flowing into the midway crowds. Gage wouldn’t have left the chutes without us, he thought. He knows better. Unless he was confused and figured we’d got out first and left without him? Maybe he rushed to the next ride. No. No way. He’d wait. He’s a good kid—he’s sharp, like his mother. No matter how tempting the midway would be he’d wait for us.
Come on, Gage, come on. Where is he?
Cal continued, turning full circle, bumping into people, scanning faces of boys Gage’s age until they began blurring. Cal scoured the Polar Express—nothing there. Then he stopped in front of the Zipper where Bob Seger’s Hollywood Nights was throbbing amid the grind of the thrill ride’s diesel and roaring crowds.
No sign of Gage.
Quickly, he circled food stands that were selling burgers and fries, pizza, ice cream, nuts, pretzels and cotton candy, scanning the people ordering, waiting or those eating at the small tables nearby.
No sign of Gage.
Cal thought it unlikely Gage would travel down this way alone in such a short amount of time, and trotted back to Faith at the Chambers of Dread.
Her hope that he’d have Gage with him died on her face as they exchanged sobering looks.
“He hasn’t come out here,” Faith said, turning to the chutes. “Do something, Cal!”
Near them, they saw a man in his thirties wearing a work shirt with an embroidered Ultra-Fun Amusement Corp roller-coaster logo above his left pocket, a ball cap and Ray-Ban sunglasses. Obviously a midway worker, he was helping women recover at the slides, his rolled sleeves displaying tattoo-laced biceps.
“Our son hasn’t come out yet,” Cal said. “Can you help us?”
The man was unshaven; his long hair curled from his cap, the toothpick in the corner of his mouth punctuated an expression that told Cal he’d been everywhere, seen everything, heard it all and was bored.
“People get hung up in there. Take it easy, pal, he’ll be out.”
“He’s only nine!” Faith interjected. “He was right at the exit curtains with us and he’s not here. It’s been more than five minutes!”
Cal saw Faith’s body reflected in the man’s mirrored glasses as he assessed her summer top and shorts. His toothpick shifted and he nodded to the Chambers.
“Did you see him on the spinner?”
“Yes, if that’s what you call the last thing before these slides, yes,” she said.
“Hang on.” The man unclipped a walkie-talkie from his studded belt, turned and spoke into it. “Alma, it’s Sid. We got a straggler in the spinner.” He turned to Faith. “What’s he wearing?”
“A Cubs T-shirt, ball cap and sand-colored shorts, khakis,” Faith said.
“Got a lotta kids wearing that same stuff,” he said.
“A blue Cubs shirt СКАЧАТЬ