The Biker (Nightmare Hall) by Diane Hoh Read Free Book Online Page B

Echo knew what that meant. It meant that Lily D’Agostino might not make it, after all. She could die at any moment.
    Why was that such a shock? Why was she trembling violently again? How could she have expected anything else after seeing, with her own eyes, that poor girl struck in the back by the bike, tossed up into the air and flung back down to the sidewalk, only to be run over by the wheels of the bike?
    It was a miracle that Lily D’Agostino wasn’t already dead.
    “Police in Twin Falls have released a statement reading, in part, that a concentrated effort to find the perpetrators of this vicious crime has begun, and that anyone having any information about the motorcycle or the bikers in question should contact the police station immediately.”
    Use of the plural was not lost on Echo. “Perpetrators,” he had said. “Bikers in question.”
    They were, now, looking for two people.
    She turned off the radio and buried her face in her pillow.
    She was one of those people.
    Still, the police didn’t know that. Or they’d be knocking on her door right now.
    No one in that group could possibly have recognized her. She’d been wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Nothing distinctive there. Everyone wore that kind of clothing on campus. And she’d had the helmet on, her hair tucked up underneath it. The face shield had hidden her features.
    Besides, none of the four knew her that well. The only person in that group she’d ever talked to, up close, was Liam McCullough, and he’d been so angry at her the day she’d run into him on the river path, he probably hadn’t been paying all that much attention to what she looked like. He couldn’t possibly have recognized her tonight.
    Echo rolled over on her side, facing the wall. Unlike Trixie, who had plastered every square inch of the wall beside her bed with high school photos, posters of movie stars and rock groups and magazine articles on how to accentuate your best features or how to do your makeup so it looked “natural,” the wall beside Echo’s bed was bare. She could stare at it and be distracted by nothing. She had, in the past, found that soothing.
    But not tonight, not now, because the bare white wall was the perfect screen for images of the destruction wrought on Tenth Street in Twin Falls earlier that night. Once, twice, three times, the event played itself out in front of Echo’s eyes, as if she were watching a movie. She saw every detail, far more clearly than she had when it actually happened. And she heard sounds that hadn’t registered then, like teeth clicking violently together when the boy was thrown up against the station wagon, and the scream of the girl who had been tossed through the glass door of Johnny’s Place.
    But she’s still alive, Echo told herself, she is, the radio said so. Doesn’t that mean that it wasn’t as bad as it looked?
    It couldn’t have been. Couldn’t have been as bad as it looked.
    Unable to bear the sight replaying itself on her wall, Echo threw herself over on her stomach.
    But the sights were in her mind, not on the wall itself, and, like a defective VCR stuck on “replay,” the scene played itself over and over again, all through the long, long night, adding new and more gruesome details each time.
    Echo never slept at all.

Chapter 6
    E CHO CRAWLED OUT OF bed on Sunday morning after the longest night of her life with a headache and swollen eyes. She had cried, after all, when the images replaying themselves in her mind had finally overwhelmed her. The tears spilling out of her felt strange and unsettling, as if she were being drained of a part of herself. Frightened by that feeling, she had stopped and wiped her eyes. But every now and then during the night, the tears had come again.
    It was the first time she had really cried since her mother left her at her grandparents’ house, saying, “You be a good girl now. Don’t give Nana and Papa any trouble.”
    But I did, Echo thought with sudden clarity. I