Taken Read Online Free PDF

she canted her head upwards toward the ceiling. Jack thought she looked as though she was praying.
    Then she looked into Jack's eyes deeply, as though she was searching for something there. Once it was clear that she had found what she was looking for in them, she held the tip of the guttering flame against Dianne's hair.
    An immense whooshing sound filled the dining room, accompanied by the heat and intense light of an instantaneous blaze. Dianne was wholly devoured in the sudden eruption of flame; she burned fiercely.
    The waitress walked away from the burning pyre and stood before Jack.
    “How could you love that thing, you idiot?”
    Jack watched with growing confusion as Dianne’s body melted in front of him, black smoke pouring from it upward toward the ceiling. She never moved once, not even a twitch, as she sat there burning.
    Jack’s vision was now almost back to normal. He was helpless to do anything but sit and watch as his beloved burned. What he saw was more than enough to make him wish he was still blind. She had been so beautiful, and now she had become a charred and melting blob, sagging and guttering in front of him.
    Jack was lost; he still could not understand this. It was incomprehensible to him that his Goddess was dying right here, right now, melting in front of his burning eyes.
    What kind of cruel trick is this? He thought. That isn’t Dianne, it couldn’t be.
    The waitress tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned to look at her, she doused him with the remaining gasoline. As the gas sluiced down his body, he watched as she poured a swath along the counter tops and along the floor all the way to the front door.
    She was going to light it like a fuse, he realized. The pepper spray had burned, but he knew nothing could ever prepare him for the pure agony he was about to experience.
    “I need help, Rayne.” he said desperately. “You know I do. I'm not right, and I need help. You can’t burn me up like this. You can’t just kill me.”
    She stared at him coldly, unmoved by his pleas for mercy.
    “I told you not to ever say my name again, freak.”
    Across from Jack, the remnants of the department store mannequin were settling, bits of melted plastic dropped to the dining room floor as the flames began to weaken.
    “There was something I wanted to tell you last night, after you gave me this,” she said, and held the Zippo lighter out in front of her.
    “But you never gave me a chance, did you, Jack? You think I’m just some piece of trash no one would ever miss – a random victim, right, Jack? Well, you fucked with the wrong bitch.”
    The waitress was shaking now, her voice cracking with panic. It was at that moment Jack knew he was going to die.
    “Anyway, Jack,” she spat at him, “I have my chance to say now what I wanted to say then: Thanks for the light, mother fucker.”
    Then Rayne struck the flint, dropped the lighter into his lap, and walked out of the house into the cool night air, leaving his screams behind her.

 
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