"Fee, Fee wake up!" Fili rolled blearily onto his back, looking up into the concerned face of his brother.
"What?" he groaned.
"Billie is gone!" Kili looked scared, but that could all be an act, Fili sat up and rubbed his eyes.
"She's what?"
"She's gone!" Kili practically shouted, "The front door was open when I woke up and there are tire tracks in the gravel, but our car is still here!"
Fili sighed, "Kee she probably went out for breakfast with that Lizzy friend of hers. Calm down."
"No, she was supposed to go out to go out to breakfast with me, to tell me what happened in New York." Lizzy said, coming up behind Kili, "when she didn't show and didn't pick up her phone I came here to look for her." Fili looked over at the cot Billie had slept on, her phone was on the floor next to it. He got out of bed and picked it up, it was on silent which explained why he hadn't heard any of Lizzie's 12 missed calls. A tiny bit of anxiety started to churn in his gut.
"Okay, let's think." He said as calmly as he could, "where else would she go?"
"Dori and Balin haven't seen her," Kili said, holding out his own phone to illustrate that he'd called them, "neither has Bombor, at least since last night."
"Did anyone try the hospital?"
"I did," Lizzy said, "She's not there." The tiny bit of anxiety grew larger.
"We should call Uncle Thorin," Fili decieded, "Maybe he knows where she is?"
"And if he doesn't?" Kili asked. Fili frowned as he waited for Thorin to pick up.
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." He said.
(…And Then)
"What do you mean she's gone?" Thorin started pacing around the piles of paperwork he'd created in his father's study. "Where would she go?"
"We don't know," Fili said, "What should we do? Should we call the police?"
"Yes," Thorin headed to the stairs, he was packing and catching the first flight out of here. Billie could be in trouble. How could he have sent her home alone? They had never caught the crazy that kept trying to hurt them. What had he been thinking? "Call them and then everyone we know, ask if they've seen her. I'm getting on a plane as soon as possible. Call me if you find out anything!"
"Okay bye." Fili hung up. Thorin started throwing his clothes into his bag, silently berating himself.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," he thought. "Why do you never think? You sent her into danger without a backwards glance!" He picked up his phone again, scrolling through his contacts and started calling anybody and everybody who might have seen his lost love in the last eight hours. All the responses were negative, no one had seen the girl. Finally, he reached the I's.
"Dess," he said frantically into the phone, "Look I know you probably never want to hear from me again, but you haven't seen Billie have you?"
(…Meanwhile)
Billie woke to complete blackness. The back of her head throbbed in unison with her heartbeat, bile rose in her throat, she made herself swallow it back down.
She tried to sit up, but there was a wall directly above her head, "Okay," she said out loud, fighting down the urge to panic, "Okay." Exploration with her arms and legs showed walls on every side of her, she was in a box of some sort. Twisting her neck as far as it would go she discovered a pin prick of light coming from the corner. She wriggled until she could shove her eye up against the hole it streamed from.
Asphalt moving steadily beneath her, a road, she was in a car. In the trunk it would seem.
"Shit," Billie muttered. Anxiety was making it hard to think, what should she do? One thing for sure she wasn't about to just lay here and wait for her kidnappers to open the trunk. What was it her mom used to tell her to do if a person ever snatched her at the mall again?
Kick out the headlights.
Getting in the right position took more wriggling and several sweaty, minutes but finally she was able to aim her bare foot at the hole and lash out as hard as she could.
"Ow!" she whispered as the reverberations ran up her shin. She kicked again harder this time, "Ow! Ow!" she rained blows down on the light and slowly but surely it began to pull free of its holdings. "Ow! Ow! Ow!" Pieces of heavy duty plastic splintered off and stuck in her ankle as the headlight popped out and shattered against the road. Billie wiggled some more to be able to stick her hand out of the hole, so she could start waving frantically.
Inside the car she heard a voice speaking, it sounded vaguely familiar. She increased her waving as random and useless facts rolled through her brain. Eighty percent of people know their killers. Only a quarter of people who are shot actually survive. The person speaking inside the vehicle said her name, she heard it over the frantic beating of her heart.
"Billie…" She stuck her whole arm out of the hole and flapped it up and down. This proved to be a bad plan.
The car screeched to a halt and Billie was sent rolling against the far side wall. The driver must have seen her arm. Footsteps in the gravel outside, and then blinding light as the trunk was thrown open. Billie squinted against the glare.
"Well, well, well," said her captor, "look who finally woke up. Trying to escape were you?" Billie blinked in confusion, she swore she knew that voice and then Iradessa was shoving a gun against her chest.
"Get. Out." The blonde said, pressing the weapon hard against the space just above her heart. Billie swallowed her fear and made her legs move, she was in her pajamas and had no shoes on, the pavement was boiling hot beneath her bare feet. She ignored the pain, better to have blisters than a bullet hole.
"Get in the passenger's seat," Iradessa ordered. Billie obeyed, sliding into the air conditioned car exterior. Iradessa kept the gun trained on her as she walked to the other side and settled behind the wheel.
"We have a few more miles to go," Dessa explained, holding the gun in her lap as she put the car back into drive, with it still pointed firmly at Billie's torso, "before you can have your "accident"." Billie's mouth went dry.
"Why are you doing this?" She managed to ask.
"Why?!" Iradessa cackled with laughter, exactly like a cartoon supervillain, " Come on Shirley Temple you know why!"
"Um, no I don't" Iradessa spared her a disgusted glance.
"Oh please," she said, turning down an even more deserted country road than the one they were already driving on. "Like you didn't take Thorin away from me on purpose? I may be blonde but I'm not stupid you know."
Billie had her doubts about this statement but kept her mouth shut, Crazy looked like she meant business. Iradessa caught her eyeing the weapon in her hand.
"Wondering if I actually know how to use this thing?" she guessed. Actually Billie had been wondering if she could wrestle it away from her before she had time to pull the trigger, but again she kept her mouth shut. "I'm Texas born and bred Shirl, I've been shooting since I was big enough to lift a gun." She rolled down the window, aiming the gun as a passing telephone pole. "Watch." The gun went off, the transformer on the top of the pole let off a bang and a shower of sparks.
"That's while going 60 miles an hour and driving," she said, pointing the gun back at Billie, "just think what I could do to you if you try to run." She smiled at Billie's frightened expression.
"Once you're out of the picture I'm moving Thorin to a real city," she went on conversationally, like they were out for coffee or something, instead of in a hostage situation. "I am so sick of cotton fields and cows."
"Even if I am gone, Thorin isn't going to get back together with you." Billie told her. Iradessa snarled at her, moving the gun so it jammed against her ribs.
"I could just kill you right now," she warned. Billie kept her head held high, not letting the other woman see her fear.
"And ride with a smelly corpse to wherever your disposing of my body?" she asked. Iradessa squished her eyebrows together, thinking and then moved the gun back to its original threatening position.
"You have a point," she begrudgingly admitted, "plus this is a rental. I don't want them charging me for having to scrub your life blood off the dash."
"How thoughtful of you," Billie managed, her heart rate slowly coming down from 200.
"Anyways, you're wrong." Iradessa went on, "Thorin and I are meant to be together its destiny. He'll come back to me and we'll get rid of those obnoxious nephews of his. Then we'll move to a nice little apartment in New York, he'll take over his father's company and I'll live the rest of my life in luxury."
"You do know he was cut off right?" Billie said, "he's not the heir anymore – she stopped mid-fib, Iradessa was cackling again.
"You idiot," the psychopath giggled, "do you think I left any of this to chance? I know all about that, which is why I manipulated his fathers will to read otherwise, to make it look like he never took his son and daughter out of it." Billie felt her throat freeze up as she realized Dessa's whole new level of crazy.
"I've been working this for a very long time," Iradessa continued, "when I learned his father had a heart attack I knew it was finally my moment. The only thing I couldn't control and didn't expect was you." She stopped monologueing to shoot Billie a glare. "I've been trying to get rid of you since I met you. I knew Thorin had a certain, weakness for you, and that just wouldn't do. You however, have proved obnoxiously hard to kill."
"It was you?!" Billie exclaimed, "with the support beams and the snake?"
"And the brake line," the blonde said proudly.
"Why?"
"I already told you why!" maybe it was just Billie's terrified brain, but the white parts of Iradessa's eyes were starting to turn red. "You messed with my destiny! And I did not work this hard to watch a white-trash moocher like you steal my future away from me! Now -." She gave the girl a little jab in her side with the gun, "no more questions, your voice irritates me."
(…And Then)
"We're heeere," Iradessa sang, still wearing her Cheshire Cat smile. She pulled the car up alongside a barn, even with the windows closed the smell was overpowering. She got out of the car, keeping her barrel pointed at Billie through the windshield as she came around to the passenger's side. She opened the door and gestured for the smaller woman to get out. Billie complied, scanning around desperately for an escape. She was not about to die at the hands of this woman, she was not leaving Thorin in her French-tipped clutches. Iradessa grabbed her firmly by the upper arm.
"Move," she said, propelling her forward. They walked towards the barn, hot dust swirled in clouds around Billie's bare feet. With every step the smell became stronger, mud mixed with feces and rotting garbage, and…something else that Billie couldn't quite put her finger on. Then they walked through the barn doors and it all made sense.
Pigs, thousands of them, all crowded together in pens. Some slurping up slops, some lying in the dust, some just standing around oinking. Billie had heard somewhere that if you feed a body to a bunch of pigs not even the bones will be left. Iradessa had obviously heard the same thing because there she stood looking supremely pleased with her genius.
"Well," she said, stopping by a pen halfway down the row. "I wish I could say it's been fun, Shirley, but it hasn't." she cocked her weapon, Billie felt frozen with fear, "Any last words?"
"Hey!" shouted a voice, both women turned, a man in rubber boots and overalls was advancing towards them. "What are you doing in here?" Iradessa transferred her gun point to him and fired. In the same moment, Billie pulled her arm free and started sprinting for the barns far door. Her ears were ringing with the sound of the shot, so she never heard the second one go off, but she felt it as it punched through her calf. A red hot pain lanced up and down her leg and she went sprawling into the dirt.
With a cry she was back on her feet, moving as quickly as she could, her leg practically dragging behind her. There! A field, of wheat…or…something tall and wavy, Billie plunged herself between its stalks. Behind her Iradessa let out a scream.
"You can't hide from me you little gutter rat!" she shouted. Billie kept limping forwards, her leg felt like it was going to fall off, tears were streaming down her cheeks like twin waterfalls. Silence from Iradessa's end, nothing, but the singing of cicadas and then there was a roar.
Billie watched in horror as the front bumper of Iradessa's car busted through the wheat behind her, she dove to the side as the blonde drove into the field, firing shots at random and leaving a flattened lane of grain in her path. Billie crawled back out into the open and then limped back into the barn, searching frantically for a place to hide. The body of the dead pig farmer lay in the aisle, blood clotting in the dust. Billie turned in circle, but she couldn't see anything that would make a decent hiding spot, blood dripped from her leg leaving an obvious trail. Gritting her teeth, she scooped a handful of dust, spit in it and plastered it to her wound. It burned like fire, but it was preferable to dying.
There! A tool shed, hiding in the shadows, she forced her way inside it, among the rakes and shovels and shut the door, curling herself into a ball in the back. Just as Iradessa's car burst out of the field and sped down the aisle of pens. She could hear the blonde cursing as she stopped before the dead pig farmer.
"I hope you appreciate everything I'm doing for us Thorin," she mumbled to herself, "These shoes were new you know and I am never going to be able to get the stains out of them now." There was a thump, she must have dumped the body in a pen because the pigs started squealing like no tomorrow.
Billie tried her hardest not to breath, she could hear Iradessa mumbling to herself just outside the door.
"Where'd you go Shirley? Come on out. You see Thorin, you see how annoying she is? You are so lucky you are going to be with me instead." Footsteps as she moved away and then silence. Billie dared to open the door, the pig yard was empty. She left the safety of the closet and started limping towards the field across the road. She could use it as cover while she got the hell out of here.
"There you are Shirley!" Iradessa said, Billie's blood ran cold and she took off in a hobbling run, zigging and zagging as best she could. Iradessa fired again, and again. The first shot missed, the second grazed Billie's side as it went by. Billie cried out in pain, but kept running, she made the field and bolted inside. Sharp rocks dug into the soles of her feet, the stalks whiplashed against her face and arms. She pushed further in, ignoring the pain, letting only one thought in her mind. She had to keep moving!
(…And Then)
Iradessa stomped her foot in frustration, the little bitch was fast, she'd give her that. She got back into her car and drove into the other field, confident she'd come across the girl sooner rather than later.
But she didn't.
With each passing minute Iradessa's frustration grew. This was unacceptable! This was not how the plan was supposed to go! And if Shirley Temple messed it up further, if she called the police or worse, Thorin. Well. Hell hath, no fury like a Stone Woman scorned.
