“Keep it down over there,” a man shouted, amongst assorted whistles and laughter. “We’re trying to concentrate.”
Christian put a hand over Lauren’s mouth before she could retort. “Lauren, don’t!”
Lauren pushed his hand away defiantly and shoved him into the stockade wall. She gritted her teeth, able to infer what was about to take place. “Why the hell aren’t we doing something?”
Christian’s reply was delayed, his voice resigned. “Because there’s nothing we can do.”
One of the men began punching Fred in his face and in his stomach. In between rounds of punches, he kicked at him mercilessly while others threw buckets of cold, dirty water on him to keep him awake.
One of the men in the group stepped forward, presenting what appeared to be a length of thick, stranded electrical wire, and handed it to the man who’d been throwing the punches. The man took the wire and flung it forward, causing the tip to crack loudly as it broke the sound barrier.
Lauren was outraged. She inhaled and exhaled heavily while pushing and pulling on the wooden poles holding her hostage, only they didn’t budge. She shuddered when she heard the whip hit Fred’s defeated body the first time.
The sound was bloodcurdling. Then it happened again.
Lauren’s body quaked, and a feeling of nausea struck her. She fell away from the wall, unable to bear watching any longer while the snaps commenced.
SNAP. SNAP.
Fred had noticeably fallen unconscious but suddenly awoke due to a sudden rush of adrenaline. He began frantically, desperately yelling obscenities in between screams as more agonizing snaps of the whip came his way.
Lauren couldn’t take it anymore. She had never been known for keeping her mouth shut when something needed to be said, and this time, she’d had enough. She was boiling over. She grabbed the wooden poles and pushed into them, exclaiming, “Stop it!” at the top of her lungs. “Stop hitting him!” Then she repeated herself at twice the volume.
Her voice was as piercing as it was animated, and it carried above a break in the crowd noise, easily grabbing the attention of the men flagrantly torturing her neighbor.
The man holding the wire whip turned to her and stepped away from the crowd while the noise behind him dissipated. “You want to be next? Or do you wanna take his place?”
Lauren didn’t respond. She would do nearly anything to stop the attack on her friend Megan’s dad, but she most definitely didn’t desire to take his place.
“That’s what I thought,” the man said, pointing to her. “Don’t worry, though. We got your number. I have a feeling you’ll be in some pain of your own before long.” He turned to the others. “Cut that piece of monkey shit down. Put him back in the pigpen with the rest of the swine. We’ll finish him off later if he doesn’t keel over and die on us.”
The men cut Fred’s bonds and dragged his limp, unresponsive body through the gravel and through piles of scattered trash, returning him to what they presumed would be his final resting place. They dropped him irreverently on the ground just inside the gate, and spun around and exited, securing the gate without so much as a word, their pupils fixed straight ahead as if they’d been hypnotized.
Lauren rushed over and was the first to arrive at Fred’s side, with Christian and Norman only seconds behind.
Fred’s warrior spirit had vanished. His face was nearly unrecognizable. Bubbles fizzed between his blood-covered, chapped and busted lips, and he was covered by a surplus of fresh wounds all over his body, most of which seeped blood through his shredded clothing.
Lauren threw off her jacket and pulled hard, tearing and ripping shards of material from the lower portion of the base layer she had on underneath her shirt. She placed them over Fred’s wounds, applying pressure, and when they didn’t prove enough to stop the bleeding, Lauren started tearing remnants from a second layer. “Who does this? What kind of person does this?” She trembled, almost in tears, while frantically applying pressure on the seemingly insignificant improvised wound dressings on Fred’s broken body.
Christian reached for the jacket Lauren had removed and covered Fred with it, tucking it beneath his shoulders. He looked up when he heard whistling. “That’s him,” he said, tapping on Lauren’s shoulder. “That’s the leader. Do you recognize the tune?”
Wiping her eyes, Lauren spent a few seconds scrutinizing the jingle. “Yeah. I do.” She listened intently to the man’s whistling as the volume increased. She could tell he was getting closer.
Assigning the slightly off-key notes of his whistles to the lyrics of the Disney tune “It’s a Small World,” Lauren sang along in her mind, following the man’s strangely unhurried tempo.
Then, the whistling stopped.
Lauren glanced over to see the bald man standing at the gate, his hand motioning for her to draw near.
She rose just as Christian grabbed hold of her arm.
“Don’t,” he said, his head shaking with disapproval. “Don’t go over there.”
“I’m not afraid of him, Christian,” she said, casting a blank stare. “I’m not scared of any of these people. Not anymore.”
Lauren pulled away from him and strolled to the gate opposite the bald man. To his side stood Gus, the burly, grinning, unspeaking man whom she was certain had been the one who had blindsided her on the mountain.
The man with glasses bearing no lenses pursed his lips and bobbed his head like a magpie as Lauren grew near. One of his eyes was half-closed and twitched irregularly. He half smiled and spoke discreetly, yet eerily coarse. “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
The leader’s eyes fell on Lauren’s tattered attire. “Your gown is very much asunder, my lady. Shall I fetch the modiste and have it mended?”
Lauren huffed. “What do you want?”
The leader put his middle finger to the bridge of his eyeglass frames, pushing them over a larger-than-usual dorsal hump on his nose. “Answers. I seek answers to questions—questions that materialize within my consciousness from time to time.” The man squinted, the reflection in Lauren’s eyes of the raging fire behind him having stolen his focus for a moment. “Tell me—doth thee knoweth from wh’re the line I reciteth cameth?”
“It’s from Macbeth.”
The leader nodded. “Correct,” he said, his eye twitching. “Most impressive. Would you happen to be an admirer or perhaps an aficionada of Shakespeare, by chance?”
“No.”
“No?” the man repeated, seemingly taken aback.
Lauren reiterated, gesturing her body language to solidify her answer. “No, I’m not a fan. Not in the least.”
“I see. And why would that be?”
“Sure you want to hear this? It might hurt your feelings.”
The bald man held his arms out to his sides. “I’m sure we would all like to hear it. Please, child. Do your worst.”
“There’s several reasons,” Lauren said, her posture strengthening, her expression becoming stone. “The most prevailing one I can think of is he treats the women in his plays like insignificant pieces of shit. He’s brazen—and he’s notorious for it. Women always get the short end of the stick, no matter who they are or what role they fulfill. He makes them out to be laughingstocks. He cracks jokes about them, portrays them as brainless, and most of them wind up dead. Juliet, Ophelia, Cleopatra, and Cordelia, to name a few. All of them—ridiculous examples of idiotic, expendable characters who, uncoincidentally, just so happen to be female. It’s unrealistic, pathetic, and revolting.”
The bald man turned, lifting an eyebrow to his towering companion. “Did you hear that, Gus? The young lady here isn’t fond of our national poet. Can you believe it so?”
Gus didn’t move or even gesture that he understood what was being said to him. He only grunted. His hands remained in his front pockets, and his face remained frozen in time with that foolish grin of his.
As if gauging a response that Lauren hadn’t seen, the leader shifted hi
s gaze and said, “Gus wasn’t a fan at first, but he’s grown to like Shakespeare. I’ve recited all of William’s most notable plays to him from memory—Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, and yes, even Macbeth—all in their entirety. It took a great deal of time to do so, but admittedly, before we became…absolved of our transgressions, time was something we possessed in mutual abundance.”
“Back to my question,” Lauren asserted, her voice becoming caustic. “What do you want?”
The leader’s expression fell flat. His brows drew together and, as his facial muscles tensed, countless hidden wrinkles elevated on his skin’s surface. “You are wicked, indeed,” he hissed. “You see, child, it has come to my attention that you…assassinated five of my men yesterday.”
Lauren nodded and widened her stance. “Yes, I know, I was there. And I regret what happened.”
“What’s this? The murderer feels compunction?” the man asked, his facial features twisted in marvel. “You now regret taking their lives?”
“I do.” Lauren hesitated almost dramatically while cutting her eyes at Gus. “I should’ve killed all six.”
The leader took a step backward and adjusted his eyeglass frames again. “I see,” he said, with more of an edge to his voice. “Perhaps had you done so, you wouldn’t have ended up here. In my realm. Restricted and bound. Incarcerated, locked in a cage like an animal, awaiting your sentencing.” The leader turned away slightly, but his eyes remained transfixed on her. “I have a feeling your life is about to find a bit of…retrogression before long.”
Lauren pressed her forehead against the poles. “I am not afraid of you.”
“Oh? Well, my dear, you might want to work on that. Because you should be. You most assuredly should be. For…I fear that I am not in my…perfect mind.” He turned to Gus again. “Isn’t that right, my old companion?”
Gus wiggled his nose and grunted once more.
The leader smiled faintly. “There are other items that need tending this eve, so I must bid you adieu. But rest assured, you and I will have an opportunity to chat more tomorrow. I promise.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Lauren challenged.
“Oh, dearest Cordelia, you think you do. But I reason, you’ll find otherwise,” he said, his eyes finding Lauren’s, his expression and tone becoming acidic. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…is the day. It’s your day—your day of reckoning.”
The leader strolled away, humming the same tune he’d whistled earlier, while leaving his human gorilla to stand by his lonesome.
Lauren glared at Gus as the leader disappeared into the crowd. “What’s the matter, puppy dog? Aren’t you going to go along with your master?”
Gus shuffled-stepped over and put his face between the poles. He snorted, inhaled, and made strange noises in his gut, throat, and mouth. And then his lips parted, and he spit a huge wad of saliva, mucus, and phlegm into Lauren’s face.
Lauren swayed backward, reeling from the blow, and started to gag while fighting the urge to vomit.
Gus giggled out of his nose at her reaction. He adjusted his pants at the waistband and ran off like a child who had gotten away with breaking another kid’s favorite toy.
Lauren held her breath, forced closed her eyes and mouth, and began anxiously wiping the brawny man-child’s bodily fluids from her face.
Christian was there in an instant to offer her aid, using the cleanest portion of his shirt he could find. He pulled off his jacket and separated the outer shell from the fleece liner, helping Lauren guide her arms into the furry sleeves. “You’re crazy, do you know that? You are absolutely out of your mind.”
Lauren coughed and spit onto the ground, the putrid odor on her skin causing bile to rise into the base of her throat. “Jesus Christ—talk about rude wind being blown in your face. Doesn’t anyone brush their teeth anymore?”
“I don’t think that sasquatch even has teeth,” Christian said while continuing to assist her in cleaning up. “Help me out here—just guide me through this a second. What has them so pissed off with you?”
Lauren hesitated, zipping up her newly acquired outerwear. “Probably the five bodies they had to leave behind on the mountain.”
Christian halted briefly. “What five bodies?”
“The ones that didn’t make it.”
“Because of you?”
Lauren reluctantly nodded. “Because of me.”
“Okay. I suppose that’s…understandable. But why did he call you Cordelia?”
“It’s Shakespeare. From King Lear. Cordelia was his favorite daughter until her sisters drove him mad. Long story short, she ultimately ends up in prison—and she’s hanged there.”
Christian stammered, his face turning a shade of pale. “Jesus. So we’re dealing with a whistling, humming lunatic infatuated with Elizabethan theater. That’s lovely. And you just ambled up to him, knowing full well what you did, knowing he had a reason to be pissed with you—or worse. And you went straight for the jugular anyway.” Christian sighed. “You know, Lauren, we haven’t exactly taken the high ground here. Right now, the enemy has the advantage. Aren’t you even the least bit afraid of what he might do?”
“Fuck him,” Lauren barked, gnashing her teeth. “I don’t care what he does or intends to do. He’s no different than that sadistic biker asshole at the cabin or that evil wench who murdered her daughter right in front of me…or even the scumbag neighbor who attacked my mom. That sonnet-quoting maniac and every one of his wannabe bards all deserve to die. And he that dies, pays all debts.”
Christian scratched his head, taking a quick look around to see if any of their captors were nearby. “You gotta give me something to go by here, Lauren. Something solid. I’m worried about you. I’m seeing a side of you I never expected to see. What exactly is going on with you?”
“Nothing you don’t already know,” she said, shrugging. “I’m just…tired, Christian. I’m tired of feeling besieged—and constantly running into certain archetypes of the human race every time I turn around.” She ran her fingers through the tangles in her hair, taking care to avoid the tender knot on her head. “Have you ever felt like you were marked by someone?”
“Marked?”
“Yeah. Targeted. You cross paths with a person and for some reason they’re just drawn to you…like gravity, only not in a good way.”
Christian shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe once or twice before, now that you mention it. Nothing to write home about.”
“Count yourself lucky. It’s been like a curse for me,” Lauren said. “I’ve had run-ins with malicious people who were drawn to me hundreds of times—I’ll never forget the first time, though.”
Lauren broke off for a moment as Christian watched her with concern.
“When I was nine years old, I had to go to an afterschool program because of how late my mom and dad worked in the evenings. It doubled as a martial arts school, and it’s where I first started learning karate. Most of the teachers and leadership there were genuinely good people, except there was this one guy—this strange guy. He was a supervisor, and it was like he had it out for me ever since day one. To this day, I don’t know why.
“He’d made it his business to single me out—always finding something I was doing to be improper or in violation of some rule he made up. He also had a tendency to get too close, if you catch my drift. I was a kid then. I didn’t understand much about people, or the world, evil, or bad people—or that they even existed. But I could sense something about him…something wicked. He was an aggressor—a threat—and he chose me as his target, forsaking the rest.
“He went out of his way to humiliate me more times than I care to remember. I didn’t tell my parents about it because I didn’t want to rat him out. I just kept going there after school and did my best to be diligent and mind my own business. It didn’t matter what I did or what attitude I took with him, though. He would always end up in my face, staring me down, trying to make me feel like l
ess of a person. He’d make fun of my clothes or poke fun at the way I said a particular word, or say something snide about the way I walked. He was…horridly mean to me. I knew there was something wrong with him. I kept going in there, and I kept being myself. I could’ve cried. I could’ve told on him. I could’ve given up. I could’ve wimped out and submitted, just like he wanted, just as he suspected I’d do if he pushed hard enough. But I didn’t. I pushed back, and I pushed back harder than he thought I could.” Lauren looked to Christian, her lower eyelids welling up. “You know why?”
Christian gestured his interest and for her to continue.
“Because fuck him. That’s why.” Lauren looked away in silence for a moment. “I remember during my sophomore year, my trigonometry teacher tried pulling similar stunts. He was young, successful, and idealistic, and…incredibly cute. Most of the girls were pretty much smitten with him. But he had something for me—or against me, something I’ve never been able to put my finger on. Maybe it was because math came easier to me than him. Maybe it was because I didn’t pay him any mind like all the other girls did. He used to write my name contrarily on the smartboard specifically to antagonize me. He’d type Lori, or Laura, or other names similar to mine, but never my name. If I complained, he’d get this sinister grin on his face and tell me to stop whining. He tried everything to get a rise out of me, tormented me for the entire year. But I refused to allow him the satisfaction, and he hated me for it.” Her eyes met Christian’s. “You know why I didn’t yield? Why I didn’t withdraw and give him what he wanted?”
Christian nodded. “Because fuck him.”
“Yeah,” Lauren said, turning away again. “Ever since I was a little girl I’ve been conscious of this subspecies of people who make it their life’s work—their personal mission to hurt others. Dad used to tell me they couldn’t help it—they were born without a conscience, unable to tell the difference between right and wrong, but I never agreed with him. I think they do know the difference. I think they know it well—and they just don’t give a shit.”
Lauren paused, peering over at Christian again, her eyes a shade darker. “There’s only one way to deal with people like that. If they push you, you push them back. If they knock you down, you get up. If they hold you down, you fight them, and no matter what, you get back up. You rise. Because they can only tear you down if you let them.”
We Won't Go Quietly_A Family's Struggle to Survive in a World Devolved_Book Three of the What's Left of My World Series Page 33