#Wattys2015 The Ghost of James Fitzpatrick

Chapter 45

His massive hand grabbed her wrist and Sarah saw the phone make a long, slow drop to the kitchen floor where it crashed and spit out its battery which she watched slide under the kitchen table. Sarah cried out, but Zwicki's hand immediately covered her mouth, and it wasn't just his hand, it was tape; a long swath of sticky gray duct tape. Her arm felt as if it were going to snap like a pencil. She saw the red box on the counter, grabbed it quickly with her free hand and smashed it into the side of Zwicki's face with a CLANG sound.

Sarah dropped the box, but Zwicki didn't care. He was focused on the kill, like the cheetahs on the Nature Channel. He was on her again and Sarah felt him slap tape on her wrist as if he were trying to bind them together. She began to run toward the stairs that led to her father's sock drawer. She felt him right behind her again until he hit the throw rug in the foyer and his feet went out from under him.

Sarah looked up at the stairs and its railing above which at the moment seemed as insurmountable a climb as the Eifel Tower, but she again heard her father: always be moving - so she did.

Zwicki had regained his footing and began to scramble after her up the stairs, a game she and Josh had so much fun with in the past. She thought of her little brother for a split second.

At the top of the stairs Sarah knew how close he was and she heard herself scream loudly into the duct tape she had nearly forgotten sealed her mouth. Zwicki had little trouble overtaking her.

He grabbed her right ankle and Sarah felt herself dropping to the carpet at what seemed like a mile from her dad's sock drawer. She had felt certain she would reach the gun. That had been her plan. Was it possible she had masterminded and executed such an epic fail? A fail that would come at the ultimate price. Her now short life that had ended with ridiculously dumb choices.

She landed on her shoulder near her bedroom door, still two doors away from her parent's room. She saw her glasses hit the wall and fall under Zwicki's loafer. He stepped on them without even noticing. He was focused. As she had thought, Nature Channel.

Zwicki landed on top of her and went straight for her neck. She grabbed at his arms and the sleeves of his dress shirt she had seen him in earlier today, behaving spectacularly civilized, with his arms neatly folded at his desk in his wood paneled office. She smelled his cologne.

She grabbed further down at his wrists and they were like no other limbs she had felt on a body. They were as strong as the old roots of the oaks in the front yard. His chest  was a wall made of stacked and staggered cinder block, filled with steel reinforcement bars and wet cement and his hands were at her neck.

Sarah thought about her family. She imagined how destroyed her mother would be to find her this way, she could even picture her mother weeping and nagging over her lifeless body saying, "I told you to wait for your father, you idiot." She imagined how the discovery of her dead body would devastate her father and Josh for the rest of their lives.

The pressure on her throat was crushing and unforgiving. She squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath, and almost welcomed the arriving scene before her. Stars or lights that reminded her of snow coming toward the car windshield at night on the highway, and she opened her eyes and noticed above her something that brought her immediate peace amidst her violent struggle.

She saw above her James.

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