Don't have much to say this time around. Just a big thanks to all of you guys for still showing up!
Chapter 12:
Outside, Quinn continues to pace frantically back and forth up and down the driveway.
She goes as far as the street, which is probably a quarter mile away from the house before turning around and making her way back. Her actions have two benefits. First, it keeps her mind off of her own stupidity, which she seems to be reminded of often when it comes to Rachel. Second, it keeps her warm. The cold is starting to feel blistering. Her fingers are tingling painfully with it and as she comes back up to the darkened house, she flexes them a couple of times, trying to regain feeling.
When even that fails, Quinn stops pacing and instead, retreats back to that stupid truck she wishes she had never gotten inside of in the first place. The thing is a piece of garbage, but it is still warmer in there then it is outside, even if only by a miniscule fraction.
Quinn grips the door handle and rips the car door open hyper-aggressively in her anger. She feels angry at a lot of things at the moment. She is angry at herself for being so stupid as to have ever brought up her plans with Beth to Rachel at all. She is angry at herself for not stopping Rachel from going inside of that house on her own. She is angry at herself for not speaking up the moment she sensed a bad vibe from this house and from Peter …
Quinn sits in the passenger seat of the truck and stares up at the house, silently praying that Rachel comes back soon.
She slams the truck door closed, so hard in her anger that the entire frame rattles. For a moment, Quinn thinks that this ratty old truck is going to fall to pieces right here. The last thing that she needs is to get blamed on destroying Peter's personal property on top of everything else.
Luckily, the only thing that happens is that the glove compartment springs open, striking the ball of her knee in just the right spot to make her yelp with pain.
Rubbing her knee, Quinn blinks into the dull light that illuminates the compartment. Her eyes have become so adjusted to the dark that it takes a moment for them to focus. Even when they finally do, it takes her another moment to realize exactly what she is looking at.
It is not the usual contents of a glove compartment. Inside of Quinn's is a registration and an insurance card, a manual that she has never looked at, and about a thousand napkins that she stores inside of there, just in case. Inside of Peter's is only what looks like a hundred little plastic baggies, all about half full of the same exact thing.
Swallowing, Quinn picks up one of the bags and holds it to the light, studying it.
There is a fine powder inside of it. Quinn can't tell underneath the poor lighting, but it is either white or a light gray color. Either way, she is not foolish enough to believe that it is anything other than what she thinks it is. Her blood feels like it has just been injected with ice water. She may have been spending the last couple of weeks trying to build a reputation with The Skanks, but heroin was out of her league. Hell, it was out of their league.
Quinn throws the baggie back into the pile with its matching brothers, afraid to be caught so much as holding it. She slams the glove compartment closed again and scrambles to pull herself out of the truck. She doesn't even feel the cold anymore. Her heart is pounding, flooding her body with the warmth of adrenaline. The only thing that she can focus on now is getting into that house and getting Rachel out.
Should they have been anticipating something like this? Quinn knew that something seemed off about Peter the moment that she laid eyes on him. Should she really be expected, as a seventeen-year-old high school student from the suburbs, to identify a drug addled dealer when confronted with one? In retrospect, it seems obvious. I guess that both her and Rachel are guilty of wanting to only see the best of people.
The blonde runs up to the front of the house. For a moment, she considers barging right through the front door, grabbing Rachel, and dragging her out, no matter what kind of a fight the brunette puts up against her.
She stops herself just at the base of the stairs. She has no idea what is going on inside of that house. Did Rachel know the kind of danger she was in? Did she know just what kind of business that Peter was involved in? What would he do to them if he found out that they were onto him?
She has already screwed up so much. This time, the consequences would be to put Rachel in even more danger than what she was already in. She couldn't risk it.
With that thought in mind, Quinn slinks off into the shadows, scaling the side of the house. She peers through open windows, searching for signs of movement from inside, trying to read the room so that she might come up with a productive plan to get Rachel out. Even if they do escape this house unscathed, where will they go next? They are in the middle of nowhere. She had no idea where the nearest person, let alone house is. It is dark outside and freezing cold. In the Midwest, there aren't even any trees to hide behind. Plus, Peter has his truck. If they tried to escape on foot, they would be caught in a heartbeat…
Quinn is really starting to wish that she hadn't thrown Rachel's cell phone out of the window on the ride over here. It had been a rash decision made in the heat of emotion. Now, it only felt like poor planning, especially considering the fact that Quinn had been anticipating this meeting to turn in all the wrong directions.
Quinn sees her first sign of activity from inside of the house at the third window she looks inside of. She peers through the slightly open curtains and a shadow encompasses her so close that she is afraid that she has been caught before she could even really get started.
Gasping, Quinn ducks underneath the window sill. Crouching in mud so wet that it soaks through her shoes, the blonde presses herself hard into the siding so that should anybody look out the window, they will not see her and hopefully think that whatever they saw was just a trick of the light.
She stays like this for a couple moments, breathing heavily. Her lungs sting as the cold air filters in and out of them with a heaving force. When nothing happens after a full minute or two, she risks looking up again.
This time, she sticks to the shadows, clinging to the window's corners. She realizes immediately that the shadow had come from Peter. Luckily, his back is turned to the window. He doesn't seem to have noticed her standing there at all. She stays where she is though. Quinn knows that it is unlikely that she will get so lucky a second time.
The man is swaying back and forth gently. His arms are crossed over his front, but he is so thin that his hands reach all the way behind him. Quinn can see his bony fingers twitching. She cannot see his face, but she doesn't need to read his expression to know that he is nervous. Or maybe he's just high. Quinn reasons that this is a reasonable assumption for a man with a hoard of heroin sitting inside of his truck.
She wonders what he is on. Quinn doesn't know a lot about drugs, but she did know that heroin is certainly not supposed to make you look like you'd just downed a carton of Red Bull. Quinn wishes he was taking something that would just make him pass out. It would make it a lot easier for her to get into that house and grab Rachel.
The man is swaying back and forth on unsteady feet. He seems to be staring at something intently. Quinn wants to know what it is. She is trying her hardest to catch a glimpse over his shoulder while simultaneously remaining hidden. The task is proving to be enormously difficult.
Then she finally does see it and she almost wishes that she hadn't.
The first thing that Quinn notices when she sees Rachel is that the brunette is crying. Somebody had hurt her. A primordial instinct rips through the blonde's stomach in a way that Quinn knows only happens when someone you love is in danger and there is nothing that you can do about it. It doesn't help that Quinn knows that the only reason that Rachel is in this position right now is because of her.
Quinn bears her teeth. For a moment, she feels angry enough to dive through the window, kill Peter with her bare hands, and pull Rachel to safety. Then, the man moves a little bit more and Quinn realizes that the situation is even more dire than it originally looked.
The blonde lets out a sharp gasp before she can stop herself.
She closes her eyes tight, hoping that when she opens them again, she will not see Rachel sitting in a chair with a gun pointed at her chest, but her eyes open and the scene remains the same.
Quinn pulls herself away from the window and presses herself into the house, trying to buy herself time. Her head is swarming. She is having a hard time concentrating when she is half expecting to hear a gunshot ring out through the darkness at any second.
She forces herself to calm down and closes her eyes again. She doesn't make any noise, not even to breathe. Going back to the truck would be worthless. There is nothing in there that can help her. No phone, no weapons, not even the keys to drive to go get help. Running off on foot to find help would be a pointless task as well. Quinn knows that by the time she finds somebody, Rachel may very well be hurt by then, or worse…
Quinn shakes her head hard. She doesn't want to think like that. She can't.
The blonde realizes that if she is going to get Rachel out of there, she is going to have to do it herself. She had been stupid enough to get Rachel into this mess. She thought that it was a good idea. They could kill two birds with one stone and find the answers that Rachel was looking for while simultaneously avoiding The Skanks' revenge back at school. Quinn realizes now that she would rather face one hundred Skanks at the same time than have to face this.
Quinn tip-toes silently towards the back of the house. She knows that going through the front door is not an option. The best that she can do now is hope that there is a back way into this home.
She peers through the windows as she goes, searching for signs that there is anybody else aside from Peter, Rachel, and the woman who seems to be holding Rachel hostage. She sees no one. Outside of that dining room, the house is as silent as the vast fields around her.
Utilizing the sparse light in the backyard, Quinn starts to search through the pile of junk in the yard for an object she might be able to defend herself and Rachel with. She settles to pick up a piece of pipe that she finds near a rotting shed. It is small but solid. One good swing should get the job done if it came down to it. Then again, she wonders if it is stupid to think she will have any success bringing a rusty pipe to a gun fight…
The back door looks loose and rusty, and Quinn doesn't want to press her luck by risking opening it. It looks like it would squeak as loud as a trumpet blast. Instead, she finds an open window that, upon first glance, appears to lead into a kitchen. The room is completely empty. To add to her luck, there is also a phone connected to the far wall. She can hear voices drifting in from the dining room, and can even recognize Rachel's cries, but she forces herself to block that noise out.
I'll get you out of here soon, she thinks to herself, hoping that Rachel can somehow pick up on the message telepathically as she hoists herself steadily and silently through the window. She lands on two feet, silent like a cat. Never in her life has she been more grateful for Sue Sylvester and her years of Cheerios experience for making her so nimble.
Quinn goes straight to the phone. With trembling hands, she picks it up out of its cradle. It is an old-school type phone complete with rotary dial and a long, looping chord that keeps the receiver permanently attached to the wall.
Her first instinct is to dial 911, but it takes longer than usual because she first has to figure out how to use a rotary dial and second, because she has to move slowly. Every time she churns the gear to dial a number, it produces a mechanical whirring sound that seems to echo throughout the entire house.
Cringing, Quinn keeps her eye on the hallway leading towards the front of the house the entire time, searching for signs of movement. She is ready to hide at a moment's notice, but the need to do so never comes. She finishes dialing and holds the receiver up to her ear, patiently waiting for the sound of an operator on the other line only to hear… a busy signal?
What kind of Hills Have Eyes town is this? The thought crosses the blonde's mind as she actively works to suppress a groan of frustration. Quietly, she hangs the phone back up before attempting the emergency number again, only to be greeted with the same response.
The thought terrifies her. If this town doesn't even have enough people fielding their emergency calls, how many police officers will be available to rescue them if they are busy responding to another call? Quinn remembers Peter mentioning something about the nearest police station being forty five minutes away. Quinn wonders if that's at normal speed, or if they really put their foot on the gas, will they be able to get here sooner?
She wishes that she knew the regular number to get straight to the police station and ask for help, but she doesn't. She doesn't even know the phone number for the Lima Police Station. In fact, Quinn can only think of one other number off of the top of her head that might be useful…
Figuring that she has nothing left to lose, Quinn turns back to the phone, prays for a miracle, and slowly dials.
Shelby Corcoran is driving down a desolate highway at breakneck speeds. She can tell that she is quickly advancing on her destination, because the number of cars on the road is getting scarcer, and in the last hour, she is certain that she has seen more cows than she has people.
She has been driving for almost twelve straight hours. According to her GPS, she has been speeding consistently enough to have knocked an hour out of her drive time, but she'd had to stop twice for gas and to grab a little bit of food and water for herself. She almost didn't but reasoned that she would not be much help to Quinn and Rachel if she was on the verge of passing out from dehydration once she finally did get to them.
The woman's eyes are heavy and wild from spending so many hours staring straight out of a windshield. The lines on the highway are starting to look like optical illusions. She passes it off as exhaustion and takes another sip of the black coffee that she had grabbed at her last stop, although that had been more than four hours ago, and the bitter liquid is now freezing cold on top of not even being prepared the way Shelby usually takes it.
Shelby is so concentrated on the road ahead that when her cell phone starts to ring, it frightens her.
It is the first sound that she has heard in hours aside from the highway blowing past her. She hadn't even had the radio on.
Shelby shakes her head out of her daze and forces herself to look down at her phone. The number is unfamiliar, but the small banner below it tells her that it is coming from a Nebraska area code and that is enough to convince Shelby to answer.
"Hello?" she gasps into the phone, praying that it is Quinn or Rachel calling to apologize for their foolish behavior, calling to beg Shelby's forgiveness, to tell her to come swoop in and save them, which she will graciously do. Then, once Shelby has them safely back in her car and her blood pressure has returned to normal, she would spend the next twelve hours back to Lima screaming at them for their foolishness.
"Shelby?"
The voice is whispering. That is the first thing that Shelby notices. It is so quiet, that Shelby can't even place it. She is so busy trying to figure out who she is talking to that she doesn't immediately pick up on how unusual the volume is.
"Quinn?" Shelby breathes, finally placing the voice to the familiar blonde. "Is that you?"
"It's me."
Why is she whispering? Shelby asks herself. She is having a hard time hearing the blonde, but that doesn't mean that she hasn't noticed how unnaturally high-pitched her voice sounds. Even through the phone, Shelby can tell that she is panting. Shelby can tell that it is not because she is tired, it is because she's scared.
"Quinn, what's wrong?" Shelby asks into the phone. Her grip on the steering wheel tightens as she forces herself to fight through the fear and keep concentrating on the road.
She can feel her heart pounding inside of her throat. She tries her hardest not to think about all the possible answers to her question. She tries her hardest not to think about why it is Quinn calling her and not Rachel, or why the blonde sounds so frightened. Finally, she tries her hardest to tell Quinn that everything is going to be alright, but she can't. The only thing that she can do is pray that the girls are able to hold on until she can get there.
The attic bedroom of Shelby's parent's house is stifling in late July.
She has lived in this room her entire life and she has never noticed how hot it can get. Then again, her sensitivity to heat has been unforgiving these days. Shelby wonders how much more this pregnancy is going to affect her body as she flips absently through the yellow pages that she had stolen out of her parent's junk drawer.
It is a Saturday night in July. While all of Shelby's friends were bouncing back and forth between endless graduation parties, Shelby finds that she has lost her appetite for such events. Not that she gets invited to very many things like that anymore, anyway.
She has to pretend that it doesn't bother her. She has to pretend like she is in no condition to go to a party, anyway. Her feet are so swollen that she barely wears shoes anymore. The child inside of her performed somersaults at all hours of the day, leaving her with morning, afternoon, and night sickness. It would be at least another five months before she could so much as think about sipping alcohol, or even caffeine from the sodas the most naïve of her friend's parents still left out at parites. Nothing about that screamed party-type. Still, it hurt that all of her friends had turned on her so suddenly.
Trying not to think about that, Shelby reminds herself that she has more important things to do right now, anyway.
With school being out, avoiding Peter has gotten increasingly easier. His absence was a blessing, but Shelby wasn't foolish enough to believe that it wasn't up to her to ensure that it was permanent. Five months might feel like forever away, but she knew that as much as it didn't feel like it most days, the day that her child would be born was right around the corner, and Shelby had to be prepared for when that day came.
Shelby has always been a preparer. She is organized and ambitious and has an uncanny ability to anticipate every mile before it happened. Then, Peter Gabbanelli had walked into her life, and now, she couldn't anticipate a thing. All she knows is that she is no longer safe here in Lima. Neither is her unborn child. She has gotten lucky so far this summer but refused to be caught off guard by Peter again.
She finds the section in the Yellow Pages for family lawyers and begins to skim the list with her finger, jotting down the number of every lawyer outside of the immediate vicinity of her home, and more importantly, Peter's.
She had called a few lawyers already, but all of them had given her outrageous quotes. If she blew all of the money that she has been saving up for New York on a lawyer, then it wouldn't matter what the outcome was. Peter would get to her if she stayed in Lima, no matter what a judge ruled.
It is nearly an hour of grueling research when a firm kick to her ribs snaps her back into reality.
"Ouch!" the expecting mother gasps, cradling her right side where her child had just landed a vicious punch. Or maybe it was a kick. Shelby had read somewhere that a pregnant mother should be able to tell which, but she hasn't grown that familiar with the child growing inside her yet, and wonders if everybody is right when they say that she is out of her league with this.
Ever since she had crossed that four month threshold, the idea that there is a tiny human growing inside of her is a fact that is getting harder for Shelby to ignore.
In the beginning, she merely had a nuisance. She had a problem that felt like the size of a galaxy, even though her OB told her that it was more like the size of a chickpea. She tried to keep her mind off of it as much as possible.
Then, she started running off to throw up every hour. A few weeks later, her stomach started puffing out so obviously, that she couldn't look down without being reminded of what was happening inside of her. She would be lying down, trying to fall asleep when a kick or a punch or a series of hiccups would jolt her awake. When both mother and child finally settled down, Shelby would roll over to go to sleep, and her baby would do the same, lodging itself in that same spot under her diaphragm every night, where Shelby pretended that she could feel both of their heartbeats, blending together and lulling the other to sleep.
If she could, Shelby would keep that baby safely inside of her for the rest of her life. Here, she felt like she could protect it. On the outside, who knew what could happen. But she couldn't. Shelby knew that. That is why she was spending her Saturday night looking up family law attorneys.
"Getting restless in there?" Shelby speaks to her stomach as she feels another violent lurch from the inside. She sighs and rests her hands against her stomach. Come to think of it, she is getting quite sick of all of this work herself.
"Me too," she sighs, and pulls on her sneakers, resolving to go for a walk around the block before the walls of her bedroom drive her crazy.
The city of Lima is busy on a Saturday night in the middle of the summer.
People pack the streets. She sees large groups of teenagers rolling their bikes recklessly through the streets, couples holding hands, college students, home for break on their way to the bar… Then there is Shelby, alone save for the child inside of her keeping her company.
She gets a couple blocks before she sees a familiar Rolls Royce on the corner up ahead. Shelby freezes. The car is obvious. Nobody else in town drives anything even like it. For a moment, Shelby stares like a deer caught in the headlights, then she scrambles to duck into the alleyway of the restaurant she had been walking past.
She peers around the corner, watching the car idle at a red light. She spots Peter sitting in the passenger seat. His father is driving the car. Shelby swallows and wonders if this is what the Gabbanelli family will reduce her to for the rest of her life.
Shelby isn't sure if she just didn't want to see the truth about Peter and his family, or if she was really as clueless as she made herself out to be. Either way, she noticed the change in her ex gradually. He had proudly announced that he had been taken on at his father's business, and immediately, they were given free meals at restaurants. They didn't have to wait in line at the movies anymore. One time, Peter had been pulled over on the way home from a party going 60 in a 35 with an open beer in his hand, and the cop had just let him go.
Shelby didn't think that things like what Peter's family was involved in existed in Lima. They were only things that she saw in the movies. She waited too long to realize that Peter wasn't being treated the way he was because people liked him. He had power and he had money and although nobody ever came outright and said it, Shelby doubted very much that he had acquired these things in a construction business that Peter always insisted his father owned.
Shelby stays hidden in that alleyway until the light finally turns green again and the Rolls Royce peels off down the road. There is no indication that either Peter or his father had seen Shelby. The girl chalks it off as a close call and decides to head back home before she could push her luck any further.
When she finally gets back to her house, her parents still aren't home. They were celebrating their twentieth anniversary, although Shelby thinks that it is a miracle that they made it that far. Twenty years of marriage, and Shelby is almost certain that they have hated each other for at least nineteen and a half of those years.
Chucking the thought aside, Shelby settles herself onto the couch and grabs the remote. The best part about being home alone is that she is finally able to watch what she wants on television for a change.
An hour into her binge, her pregnancy cravings start to get the better of her.
Luckily, Shelby has become used to such things and has since learned to keep emergency snacks within arm's reach at all times.
Her mother has always been a stickler for health food, but Shelby learned a long time ago that if she hides a pint of ice cream in the back corner of the freezer underneath a frozen bag of broccoli that she is pretty sure has been in there since she was in elementary school, her mother would never notice. As expected, she dives into the freezer and there it is waiting for her.
She doesn't even bother to put it in a bowl. Instead, she peels off the lid, sticks a spoon straight into the heart of the ice cream, and makes her way back to her sitcoms. She is halfway to the couch when the doorbell rings.
Shelby places her ice cream down on the table with a sigh of longing and approaches the door. People haven't exactly been rushing to visit her since word of her pregnancy got out. She is fully expecting to find one of her parent's friends on the other side of the door, where she would be forced to tell them her parents are not home through their patronizing stares, but when she opens the door, it is not one of her parent's friends standing there at all.
"Peter…" Shelby gasps, unable to mask the surprise and slight tone of fear in her voice. "What are you doing here?"
"I saw you out walking," he tells her. Shelby swallows. So, he had seen her. She supposed that it was foolish for her to think that she could slink away from him unnoticed.
"Oh?" Shelby asks trying and failing to pretend like she has no idea what he is talking about. She risks a glance up, taking him all in. His hair has grown longer since she had last seen him at graduation. Loose curls dangle down and hug his smooth jawline. It fits him, Shelby notices, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't remember what he is capable of.
"Were you trying to hide from me, Shelby?" he smiles at her again, but there is a cruel calculation behind the gesture that makes Shelby uneasy. She takes pause and he takes advantage. He steps into her house without an invitation. Without particularly meaning to, Shelby takes a step away, inadvertently giving him further access inside.
"I… I don't know what you're talking about," the girl stutters, unconvincing.
"I've been trying to get a hold of you for weeks." He ignores her comment. They both know it is a lie. Instead, he establishes himself. He is looking around like he is trying to make a mental map of her home. Shelby catches him eyeing up some family pictures on the wall and has to suppress a shudder.
"I went down to Cincinnati to spend some time with my aunt," Shelby informs him. It is not a lie. Her aunt had some temporary work that she could do. It was labor intensive, and Shelby did as much as she could before her aunt found out about her condition and sent her back home. The job had been helpful while it had lasted. Not only had Shelby been able to stay far away from Peter, she also managed to save a little bit of money to help her once she finally did make it to New York, away from Lima, and away from the Gabbanelli family forever.
"I get it," Peter shrugs. He turns back towards Shelby and shoves his hands deep inside of his pockets. "I've been working with my father these last couple of months, too. He's got a lot of good opportunities for me."
"Oh?" Shelby breathes, pretending to be interested. She doesn't know what to say. Everybody in town is now familiar with the Gabbanelli family and what they do. She doesn't know what Peter is implying by making her privy to this information, but she certainly doesn't like it.
"Yup," Peter nods. He walks slowly further into the house. Shelby doesn't even realize that he is backing her into a corner until her back hits the wall. "He's been pretty adamant about keeping a low profile lately. Especially since we had to leave New York so… suddenly. He's been using me to do some of the jobs that he can't do anymore."
A moment too late, Shelby realizes that Peter isn't here to simply make small talk and catch up with her. He is threatening her. He is using his power and his position to do what he is best at, manipulation and intimidation. And while Shelby doesn't know exactly what Peter has been doing for his father, she isn't stupid enough to think that it is anything that makes him above hurting her.
Shelby feels her heart begin to pound as Peter's eyes slide down towards her stomach. The girl is glad that she is wearing a particularly baggy sweatshirt that covers the protrusion, but she gets the impression that Peter hadn't come all this way without knowing what was under there.
Shelby doesn't say anything. Peter has backed her all the way into her kitchen. She closes her eyes. She wishes that she had never answered that doorbell. She could have just pretended not to be home. Then, she would be eating ice cream and watching mindless television instead of fearing for her safety, her child's…
"There's a lot of rumors going around, Shelby." Peter presses the girl tight into the wall. His face is directly in front of hers. Shelby can smell the mint on his breath from his gum. "Some people think that you already went to New York, got yourself knocked up like a little slut, and came crawling back. Of course, most of them are talking about me."
His hand flies out. Shelby feels him press a palm against the center of her stomach. His touch is soft, but a maternal instinct she has yet to experience rips through her like fire. She rips herself out of Peter's grip and stumbles to get out of the corner, to get away from him.
"I thought I told you to get rid of it," Peter sneers. His entire face changes as he turns back to face Shelby and for the first time, the girl feels truly afraid.
"Please, Peter, you don't understand," she begs. She doesn't know how to tell Peter that she doesn't know how to let go of this baby. She doesn't know how to convince him that she will make it hers and hers alone. He doesn't need to have any involvement. No one needs to know.
How is she supposed to just walk away? Now that she has known that she is capable of creating something so perfect, how can she be expected to forget?
Peter however, doesn't seem to care about what she feels. He is back on top of her in a flash. Shelby just has time to watch his hand rear backwards. She doesn't see it coming when she feels the back of his hand snap hard against her lip.
Her head snaps sideways. The fear grips her much more than the pain does, and she feels a sob escape from her throat despite the fact that she knows that that is what he is looking for.
"I gave you the opportunity to do something about this on your own, Shelby," Peter tells her. He is placing all of the blame on her. Shelby reasons to bite her tongue against reminding him that she didn't get pregnant by herself. "God, my father warned me about this. He told me that woman are too sensitive, that they can never be trusted with things like this. It is up to the men to take matters into their own hands."
"What do you mean?" Shelby stutters despite the fact that she is not sure she wants the answer. She takes a step backwards, towards the basement stairs. The door locks from the inside. If she can get past him and lock herself in, she can use the cellar door to escape and then go to a neighbors to call for help…
Her cardinal mistake lies in the fact that she had waited on an answer. The only one that he gives her is a tiny smirk that is immediately followed by a hard shove.
Shelby feels herself stumble backwards into the open doorway leading towards the basement. Her stomach gives a mighty whoosh as she tips backwards on her heels and allows gravity to take her, with nothing behind her to catch her fall.
The girl's arms circle a couple of times, looking for something to try to catch her, but they find nothing but air. There is a terrible handful of seconds that appear to happen in slow-motion. Shelby knows that she is in trouble. She knows that she is about to get hurt very, very badly. And her baby? The fragile being that she was supposed to be protecting didn't stand a chance.
She catches a glimpse of Peter mid-fall. He is staring at her from the top of the stairwell as she plunges down. There seems to be a sick sense of satisfaction in his eyes, with no sense of urgency to try to help her. That is the last thing that Shelby notices before she feels her back land on the old, wooden stairs with a crunch that sends a pain like a bolt of lightning shooting up her spine.
She tries her hardest to cry out for help, but her body is performing a remarkable series of backwards somersaults down the final handful of stairs. She feels every blow until finally, she lands on the cool, concrete floor, flat on her back, the back of her head smacking so hard against it that she sees stars.
Surprisingly, there is no pain in that moment. Instead, she feels only a remarkable amount of dizziness, shrouded with a surprising warmth. She wonders if this means that the fall maybe wasn't as bad as she initially suspected, but then, she tries to stand up and her body refuses to follow the instructions her brain is setting for it. Then, she realizes if maybe the fall had actually been worse.
Her vision is fuzzy. When she blinks, her eyes refuse to focus. The only thing that she can see is a shadow standing at the top of the stairs. For a second, she thinks to call for help, but then, her injured brain reminds her that it is Peter standing there, and that he is the one who had pushed her in the first place. If she asked him for help, he might just come down here and finish her off for good.
She keeps her mouth shut, and a moment later, she watches the shadow of Peter Gabbanelli turn away from the doorway and walk calmly from her home. She hears the front door open and shut with a sound that she processes like she is underwater, and then, Shelby realizes that she is all alone, laying on her basement floor, trying to find the strength to move.
She is still for a couple of minutes. The immediate aftermath of the fall had been calm, but now that her body is starting to process her injuries, everything hurts. She can feel a cut that has opened up in the back of her head. She feels the blood pooling underneath her and wonders how bad it is.
When she tries to lift her arm to prod at the cut, an explosion of pain erupts inside of her mid-section and travels straight up her spine and into her brain. She is unable to hold back the cry of pain. Using all of her effort, Shelby turns onto her side and cradles her pregnant stomach. On a normal day, she is begging her child to stop moving. Now, she doesn't feel a thing and she finds herself begging for a sign of life from inside of there. A kick, a punch, hell she would take a sneeze. Anything.
"Come on…" the mother whispers to the growing child inside of her. "Come on, move. Please, move."
Still, she gets nothing.
Sobbing, Shelby forces herself to her knees. Her vision gets blurry immediately, and she has to take a break, but she cannot very well lay on this basement floor forever. She needs to get help. Her child needs help, and increasingly, she seems to be the only one in the world willing to provide it.
"Hang on," she begs the child, grabbing onto one of the support beams, using it to force herself to her feet as she begins the daunting task of walking back up the stairs she had just made a dramatic plunge down. "I'll get you help. You'll be okay. I promise, you'll be just fine."
Something is terribly wrong. Quinn doesn't have to say anything for Shelby to understand this.
The mother's natural instinct is roaring at her. She thinks about Beth, hundreds of miles behind her, and she thinks about Rachel, just a handful in front, and she silently prays that she will make it in time to save Rachel while still being able to turn around and get back to Beth.
She has never hated somebody as much as she hates Peter Gabbanelli in this moment. She hates him for ever putting her in a position where she has to question her daughters' futures. Mostly, she hates him for allowing her to go all these years thinking that she didn't still have reason to be afraid of him.
"Listen to me, Quinn. I know where you are, and I am on my way to get you." Shelby speaks only when the blonde can't seem to find her voice. She is determined to get the words out, should something happen that might cut them off. Even if it is a lie, Shelby wants to give something for the blonde to hold onto. Her GPS tells her that she is thirty minutes away. If she pushes, she could probably make it in twenty. Would that be too long? "I'll be there soon. Until I get there, I need you to find some place safe and stay there. Can you do that? Are you somewhere safe?"
"N-no," Quinn hiccups, and although it is the answer that Shelby is expecting, it sucks the air out of the woman's lungs anyway. "Shelby, we're not where you think we are. We're not at Peter's house."
"What do you mean?" Shelby's heart seizes. The girls had been so strategic in their bid for information. Is it possible that after they had gotten Peter's address, they had anticipated Shelby going to Genesis for answers? Had they paid the girl to give Shelby a fake address? Had they gone into this knowing they would be sending their parents on a wild goose chase to nowhere?
"Peter took us somewhere," Quinn explains. "A friend's house."
"A friend's house?" Shelby sounds suspicious. She has no idea what Quinn is trying to imply. She doesn't even know if she is driving in the right direction anymore. The only thing she does know for sure is that she does not like the way that the blonde hesitates.
"Quinn, where are you?" she demands. Her voice is no-nonsense. Coach Corcoran is seeping out of her in her fear, but if that is what it takes to get what she needs from Quinn, then so be it. "Where's Rachel?"
There are so many things that the blonde is not saying. She is upset, that much is clear, and she seems to be in trouble, judging by the way she refuses to allow her voice to go above a soft whisper, but where is she? And where is Rachel? Shelby feels herself grip the steering wheel a little bit tighter. She is not so sure that she wants to hear the answer to her own question.
"I think… I think that we're in some kind of drug house."
Shelby nearly swerves off of the road. She has spent the last twelve hours trying to convince herself that she would find Rachel and Quinn, and that when she did, they would be just fine. She told herself that they were smart girls, that maybe Peter has changed in all of the years it's been since she's seen them. Now, she realizes that she was only fooling herself.
The last time she had seen Peter, he had been a desperate boy, fighting through a fall from grace. As rumors about him and Shelby circulated, he fought desperately to impress his father, even if it meant pushing a pregnant teenager down the stairs or robbing a gas station… In the end, she should have known that this is where he would have ended up, hiding in a small town like Foster, Nebraska, left only as the shell of the man he once was, forced to utilize his skills as a small-time player in a sleazy drug ring.
It is a tragic bookmark to the man's already tragic life, but Shelby is having a hard time feeling bad for him. Rachel might have been the one to show up to his door tonight, but he is the one who has been putting her in danger since before she was born. Shelby had been content letting the man live out the remainder of his days miserable and alone. She should have known that Rachel was too good of a person at her core to ever let that happen. Looking at herself, and at Peter, Shelby wonders where the girl had gotten that caring nature from. She is wondering only now, far too late, if she hadn't been doing Rachel any favors by withholding the truth like her and the Berry men had thought.
"Rachel went inside with him and I… I found some of the drugs in his car and I panicked and… and…" Quinn's breath is increasing inside of her chest as she struggles to get her story out. Shelby reasons that she can get the details later. For now, she wants to know what she can do from all the way over here to keep the girls safe. "I think that Rachel is in serious trouble, Shelby."
The mother's face pales so suddenly that she can literally feel the blood draining from her face and down into her feet. She forgets to take her next breath. She knew it. She just knew that this is how this trip was going to end.
"What kind of trouble?" the woman forces.
"I-I don't know. I can't really explain right now." Quinn is still whispering, but her voice sounds rushed, like she is afraid that she is running out of time. "Please hurry."
"Where are you, Quinn?"
She hears the blonde take a deep breath before quickly stuttering out a series of instructions to the best of her ability. The good news is that Genesis hadn't given Shelby a fake address. The better news is that the blonde's navigational skills are exceptional. She had been staring out the window the entire time Peter had been driving, taking it all in.
Shelby tries her hardest to commit the instructions to her long term memory. She closes her eyes and tries to repeat the directions back to herself, but her sense of direction is subpar compared to Quinn's. Make a left out of Peter's driveway and another left at the farm silo. Cross the main street into the other side of town and make the first right. Or was it a left?
"Quinn, can you say that one more time?" Shelby is yelling into the phone now, because in her distress, she is having a hard time concentrating on remembering anything. Suddenly, she can't even remember which way Quinn told her to turn out of Peter's driveway. And what about the house? Quinn had informed her that they were in a white house at the end of a long driveway with a house number spray painted on a sign out front, but Quinn hadn't noticed a street name, and was the number 1567, or was it 1483? She knows that they are not nearly close, but her head is spinning, and she feels suddenly worthless.
"Quinn!" Shelby shouts again, because the blonde seems to have gone temporarily deaf and is no longer responding to her.
Shelby strains her ears hard, searching for any indication that Quinn is still there, but she hears nothing, not even the blonde's hushed breathing. A moment later, a frantic beeping fills Shelby's ears, indicating that the line has gone dead.
"Dammit!" the woman screams, slamming her fist into the steering wheel so hard that the car swerves into the next lane over. Luckily, she is the only one on the road.
Slowly, she manages to regain control through a series of deep, steady breaths. Panicking wasn't going to help. It wasn't going to help her, and it certainly wasn't going to help Rachel and Quinn. If she was going to help the girls, first she would have to get to them in one piece.
She tries her hardest not to focus on the girls, on what they might be going through or what state they will be in when Shelby finally does get to them. She forces herself to think productively. She picks her cell phone back up, she dials 911, and she presses her foot even harder against the gas pedal than she did before, determined to get to Rachel and Quinn before it is too late.
It had taken Shelby longer than what she was comfortable with to make it all the way up the stairs to get to the phone and dial 911, but she had done it, and the accomplishment was something she felt proud of, even if the reason she needed help in the first place was not.
Now, she is sitting nervously by herself on a cot in the ER, waiting for a technician to tell her whether or not she needed stitches on the cut on the back of her head.
The doctor had already been in to see her. Remarkably, he told her that she had no broken bones. He wanted an X-Ray of her ribs just in case, but Shelby had refused, citing the fact that her child had been through enough. Instead, she had endured an agonizing physical assessment of her rib cage. The doctor had pressed his hands into each and every one, not gently, Shelby might add, searching for signs of cracks or fractures. He had found nothing but some heavy bruising and told her while she was bound to be very sore for the next couple of days, she was very lucky otherwise.
The news is great and all, but it is not her that she is concerned about.
The OB takes a long time to come down to see her. She had been delivering twins in a ward somewhere upstairs where Shelby imagined that she would be one day. Now, she only hopes.
"How old are you, hon?" the woman asks her, only after she has taken all of her vitals and listened to Shelby deny her request to call her parents. Shelby wonders if they were home from dinner yet. If they were, her nosy neighbors probably would have already informed them that there had been an ambulance at the front of their house earlier, whisking their pregnant daughter away. The lack of their presence yet indicated to Shelby that either they weren't home yet, or they just didn't care. It hurts her heart to realize that she doesn't know which one it is.
"I'm eighteen."
"Eighteen, wow, I thought you were much older than that."
Shelby blushes although she knows that the comment was meant to be a compliment. She has always presented herself with a certain aura of confidence. It was part of her persona. Ever since she had gotten pregnant, that characteristic has worked even more in her favor. People pitied her less if they thought she was in her mid-twenties rather than being a teenager. Usually, they only gave her those judgmental glances when they noticed she wasn't wearing a ring on her finger.
"That was quite the fall you took earlier," the woman continues, peeling a pair of gloves onto her skinny hands. "The ER doctor said you fell down some stairs?"
Shelby pulls her bottom lip in between her teeth but nods vigorously. She couldn't very well tell the doctors the truth about what happened. Peter had thrown her down a flight of stairs just because he found out that she hadn't had an abortion. If she opened up to them about his behavior, he would kill her. She had no doubt about this.
"I haven't felt the baby move since the fall," Shelby tells the doctor. Her voice is quiet, terrified. She watches the doctor's face fall sympathetically.
"How about we take a look quick, then," she offers. Shelby swallows her tears and her fear and forces herself to nod as the doctor pulls an ultrasound machine close to the bed.
Shelby settles onto her back. At this point, she is more than familiar with the process. She raises her shirt over the small bump in her stomach without prompting and doesn't even flinch when the doctor squeezes the cool gel all over it.
"How many weeks along are you?" the woman asks, gathering the transducer inside of her hands. Shelby feels her heart pounding with nervous anticipation.
"Eighteen weeks on Thursday," she answers in a quiet voice.
"Do you know the sex yet?" she asks, making small talk as she waves the wand over Shelby's stomach, searching for a clear picture.
"It doesn't matter," Shelby sighs. "I'm not keeping the baby."
"Alright," the doctor nods, continuing her work. She does not pass judgment. It is not her job to do so. It comes across almost as a relief to Shelby, who has felt the judgmental glares of everybody around her ever since the day she had taken that damn pregnancy test. She has to resist the urge to reach out and touch the woman in front of her, just to ask if she is real. "What options are you considering?"
Shelby swallows. She knows that at eighteen weeks, her timeline for an abortion is waning rapidly. She had made the appointment after Peter first threatened her, but she had missed it. Twice. Did it matter anymore? Peter had told her right before he pushed her that he would have to take matters into his own hands and he had. Was it already too late? What a failure of a mother she turned out to be.
Before Shelby could gather the strength to answer the question, a soft, fast-paced thumping fills the room with a breath of relief that Shelby didn't even realize she was holding. Her baby's heartbeat. It is the most beautiful sound she has ever heard. The baby is still in there. Her baby was okay.
"Heartbeat is strong," the doctor smiles, but Shelby barely hears her. She is concentrating instead on letting the pulse fill her ears. Her eyes close against the sound. She has heard a lot of music in her life, but this is the best by far. "There's the heart right there, do you want to see it?"
Shelby looks over her shoulder at the screen and follows the doctor's finger as she points to a tiny spot on the grainy, black and white image, a tiny drum pumping frantically. Shelby stares at the image, captivated. During her last ultrasound, the child inside of her hardly looked like a person. The technician at the time told her that her child was about the size of a kumquat, and roughly the same shape as well. Now, it actually looked like a baby, tiny and oddly shaped, yet perfect all the same.
"You said that you can tell the sex?" Shelby asks before she can stop herself. She looks up at the doctor with wide, pleading eyes, and watches as the woman nods.
"Would you like to know?"
"Please," Shelby begs, ignoring the tear streaking down her cheek.
"Okay," the nurse breathes as she repositions the wand of the ultrasound, moving it around for a couple of minutes, searching for a good image.
"Congratulations, Ms. Corcoran," the woman smiles brightly the moment she finds what she is looking for. "It's a girl."
Quinn notices the sound of the phone line going dead before she notices the shadow hovering over her.
"Hello?" she whispers into the phone. "Shelby? Hello?"
The only thing that plays back to her is the continuous ring of the dial tone. She recognizes the defeat and feels her concentration sway back to her surroundings where she finally notices a shadow hovering above her.
She swallows and counts to three, waiting for the shadow to disappear, but it never does. From her position squatting against the kitchen wall, she tilts her eyes up. There is a man that she doesn't recognize standing above her. His finger is holding down the hook switch of the phone, which explains her lost connection with Shelby. She feels too afraid to even move.
The two stare at each other for a long moment. The man is wearing a slimy grin. Quinn is caught, and they both know it.
"Well, well…" the man clicks his tongue with an expression on his tone like he has just struck gold. "What do we have here?"
