Free Charmed I'm Sure by Elliott James Page A

thorns had grabbed hold of him, but I didn’t see any large bites or obvious bone breaks. There were a lot of scars on his back. Evenly spaced, they looked like they had been left behind by long fingernails—the sheer number and various degrees of healing suggested rough sex or rape scars made by a woman or women who had been beneath him repeatedly.
    I had a hard time picturing him holding someone else in captivity. He was probably suffering from starvation and malnourishment.
    Mostly, though, the thing that was really messed up about him, at least on that surface of things that I don’t trust, were those feet. The more I cleaned them, the worse they looked. The feet hadn’t just been cut, they had been…eroded.
    We talked a little more. He sat sideways in the passenger seat of my car, his feet dangling out the open doorway while I cleaned and bandaged them. He seemed to be focusing a little better. When another car drove by and some idiot yelled “Faggots” out a window, he grimaced and muttered something about jackasses under his breath.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” I asked.
    â€œDustin Seavers,” he said automatically. “What’s yours?”
    â€œTom Morris,” I lied. The last thing I wanted was my current alias popping up on some police report later. It really would have been smart to keep on driving. Unfortunately, I’m not any better at being smart than I am at being trusting. It’s an awkward combination. “Are you from around here?”
    He looked around him then as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. His voice was mildly alarmed. “I don’t think so. Where’s the snow? How far are we from Hershey?”
    I focused on him, shutting out the background noise until I could hear his heartbeat. It was too fast, but it was steady. “Do you mean Hershey, Pennsylvania?”
    He swore then. “Am I across the state line?”
    â€œYou’re across a lot of state lines, Dustin,” I informed him bluntly. “We’re in Tennessee.”
    He tried to jump to his feet and I pushed him back down in the seat easily. The moment my palm touched his chest he went still, though he didn’t stop cursing. It reminded me of a horse—the way they’ll still at your touch, but you can still feel their muscles trembling beneath your hand.
    â€œSettle down. I’m not bandaging up your feet twice,” I told him.
    The lack of sympathy seemed to calm him.
    â€œWhat’s the last thing you remember, Dustin?” I kept my voice even.
    â€œI don’t know,” he groaned. “I was at the cabin.”
    â€œIn Hershey?” I prodded.
    â€œBetween Hershey and Gettysburg,” he elaborated. “It’s family land. I wanted to spend a few days there just in case.”
    That sounded promising. “In case of what?”
    He looked at me like I was an idiot. “You know. Y2K, man. The Millennium Bug.”
    I’ve had a lot of practice not looking surprised. “You’re talking about the big Internet panic? People scared of computers crashing and taking down civilization in the year 2000?”
    He was getting angry now. “Yeah. Where have you been?”
    The anger was what made me decide to go ahead and tell him. If he had to get a good meltdown out of his system, I could choke him out pretty easily if I had to, and I wouldn’t have to use a Taser or sedatives or pepper spray or a nightstick to do it. I wouldn’t use it as an excuse to lock him away in a cell where he could become somebody else’s problem either, the first stop in a long series of temporary confinements, bureaucrats, and checked boxes until Dustin wound up in some institutional version of the “Island of Misfit Toys.”
    Sorry. I have some authority issues.
    â€œIt’s not 1999 anymore, Dustin,” I told him. “That was a long time ago.”
    At first he was silent. Then his cursing