Kenneth fumbled with his goggles and put them on.
“Are you able to see?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see any of your women right now?”
“No.”
“Good. We’ve wasted enough time because of you. Let’s move.”
But as they did, from behind a tree, Kenneth saw the outstretched leg of Maria Fuentes, who started to laugh at him as they passed.
CHAPTER TWE
NTY-SIX
When they arrived at the wetlands, it was pitch dark, but because of their goggles, they could see everything in harsh, bright greenish hues enhanced by the light of the moon.
Along the way, they came upon a few small animals―the skunk Ted mentioned they might see, a cat with a mouse in its jaws, and also a fox, which slinked past them in a blurry flurry of red due to the heat the animal gave off.
This is what Kenneth liked about the goggles. Because they were armed with infrared technology, they could look around and seek out heat sources at long distances. It gave him a sense of hope. Spotting the shape of an animal was as easy as spotting the shape of a human. When they came upon Cheryl, he felt they would be alerted of her presence dozens of yards before they actually were upon her. Then, they could become stealth and hopefully remain quiet enough that when they did approach her, she wouldn’t hear them until it was too late. And even if she did hear them and chose to run, which she would, she’d be running blindly in the dark, unlike them.
Either way, it was a win for them. They just needed to find her.
“But you won’t find her,” Maria said. “I told you. You’re going to fail.”
Kenneth stopped for a moment and looked behind him. What he saw wasn’t just Maria’s body, outlined in green because it conducted no heat, but dozens of other women standing behind her, most of whom he recognized, some of whom he didn’t, all of whom he was certain had been sent to hell by him and Ted.
He steeled himself against them and blocked out their cacophony of ridiculing voices. He couldn’t let them in, regardless of how close they were to his back. He turned back to Ted, who now was several feet ahead of him, working his way through the woods, and quickened his step to catch up with him.
Ted was his elder. He was in control of the situation and he needed to honor that. It was how He planned it. Ted said he was having hallucinations, but he didn’t agree. The dead were with them. They’d always be with them because they were responsible for their passing. For whatever reason, Ted couldn’t see them, but Kenneth could
(because I’m the Chosen One),
which was good because they were conspiring against them. They said that they already had reached out to Cheryl Dunning and were there to protect her. What that meant, he didn’t know. But he knew he had to act as if they weren’t there. He knew he had to press on. He knew he could disrupt what was happening now or he would just anger Ted. So, he shunned them even as they cackled at his back.
“You’re going to lose, Kenneth.”
“Both of you are.”
“You may have taken us out, but we’re about to take you down.”
“You raped me, and then you put an ax in my head. You did it alone. You set me up. Do you think I’d ever forgive you for that? I’m going to haunt you forever, Kenneth. And I’m going to make sure that you either die or go to the chair for what you’ve done to all of us. You think you’ll find Cheryl Dunning? You’re wrong. You won’t find her. We’re ready with a plan to get her out of here alive.”
But ahead of them, in the far distance, emerged an orange horizontal blob, as if someone or something was lying on its side. He reached out and touched Ted’s arm.
“Do you see that?” he whispered.
Ted nodded.
“That’s no animal.”
“Doesn’t appear to be.”
“It’s her.”
“No, it isn’t,” Maria hissed. “You’re wrong. That’s something else.”
“Tell him what it is!”
“Tell the freak!”
“It’s a serpent,” Maria said. “It’s the devil. Right there. Curled up and waiting to strike the moment you disturb it. That’s the end of you. That’s your death. Go forward and welcome it. Then you can be where we’re not―in hell. You’ll rot there.”
“He’ll burn there.”
But Kenneth knew that hell was the last place he’d go. Confident, he removed his cell from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” Ted asked.
“I’m sending her a text,” he said. “We’ll see if she moves. Get your gun ready. Because if she does move when I hit the button, we’ll know it’s her. If it is, we’ll need to act fast.”
CHAPTER TW
ENTY-SEVEN
“There you are, Cheryl,” the text message said. “Now, what are you going to do?”
The moment she read the message, Cheryl turned off the phone and plunged herself back into darkness. The phone cast light, which she couldn’t have. She shoved it back in her pocket and listened. She held tight onto the sharp stick and waited. Though a breeze was starting to pick up, she heard no movement, which unnerved her. Was he waiting for her to move?
Think.
How could he see in the dark? If you were from these parts, it was well known that poachers used night vision goggles. It was in the paper all the time. Was he using them? He must be using something like that, which meant if she ran, he’d see her trying to make her way through a forest concealed by the cover of night.
Sitting duck.
She was beginning to feel panicky, which her father and grandfather would tell her was the worst thing she should feel. She needed to keep a level head. She needed to strategize. She needed to think like him, if that was even possible. She wasn’t stupid, but there was no question that she was at the losing end of the stick.
What were her options?
As far as she saw it, if that was him she was hearing outside, she had only one option. But she hadn’t planned on using it so soon. She wanted to wait for enough time to pass for her to be formally announced a missing person before she went there. She figured that would take a couple of days. She wanted the sheriff’s department and the state police searching for her before she went to such an extreme. She wanted a buzz of activity on the streets first, so they could see it when it happened, but she felt that now, it was just too soon.
But what choice do I have? I’ve got nothing. Nothing but that, if I can even make that happen.
Outside, there was movement again and this time, she was certain it was footsteps. Even though they still were some ways from her, they sounded different.
More like two sets of footsteps.
She listened carefully to the soft rustling of leaves and pine needles being stepped on, and felt a chill when a gust of wind cut through her shelter. She drew her arms around her body for warmth and was struck by another gust.
Please, don’t let it rain, she thought.
She looked up through one of the holes in the shelter, saw moonlight and felt relieved, even if it was only for a moment.
She had to do something.
The footsteps were coming closer.
They’d kill her if they found her here.
She had no choice.
Quickly, she went to work.
CHAPTER TWE
N TY-EIGHT
“Did you see that?” Kenneth whispered. “She moved. I texted her and she moved.”
“I saw it. How far are we from her?”
“Hundred yards? Maybe more? It’s tough to tell with the goggles on.”
“Move forward with me. Keep your gun at the ready. Be as quiet as possible. She’ll hear us at some point and she’ll probably run. But she won’t get far. She’ll likely slam into a tree or something because she won’t be able to see, so don’t worry about it if she runs. OK?”
“I want her to slam into a tree, Ted.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“We don’t ha
ve time for you to rape her, Kenneth. Just keep low and keep focused. I need you focused.”
“I can’t focus. I’m starting to feel different.”
“You’re acting different, that’s for sure.”
“I wanted to eat those men back there, Ted. I wasn’t joking. I’ve never felt like that before.”
“I need you to be quiet.”
“But I’m worried. What does that mean? Why did I want to eat them? Part of me thinks that if I eat them and after they go through my body, they’ll be purified of their sins. If you hadn’t been there, I would have eaten the fat one. I would have started with his face.”
Ted turned to him. He put his hands on Kenneth’s shoulders and held him steady for a moment before he embraced him. “You’ve been under a lot of stress.”
“I don’t think it’s that.”
“It is that.”
“My head hurts.”
“Then it’s the stress.”
“I think that I’m changing.”
“Into what?”
“I feel like I’m being lifted onto a higher plane.”
“By whom?”
“By God.”
“Kenneth, you’re already on a higher plane.”
“No. Not like this. You can’t see those women. I can. Explain that to me.”
“I can’t. But then I never could. I think they’re hallucinations.”
“They are not hallucinations.”
“Do you see them now?”
“No. But I will. They’ll show themselves again. And they’ll taunt me. They’ll ridicule me. They’ll try to throw me off, but I won’t let them. I’ve been chosen.” His body relaxed against Ted’s. “For what, I don’t know, but there’s been a shift. Physically, I feel weak, which is not right for me. You know how strong I am. But there it is. My body feels drained on one level, and euphoric on another.”
“You haven’t eaten today.”
“It’s not that.”
“I think it is that. I think it’s the reason you wanted to eat those men.”
“I disagree.”
Ted parted from the embrace and on his face, Kenneth saw irritation. “What’s the matter?”
“If you’ve been lifted to a higher plane, then why haven’t I? I’m your elder. Why would I be passed over?”
“Maybe you haven’t.”
“I think I have.”
“I don’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we’re a team.”
“Then why don’t I feel different?”
“Maybe you will.”
“Whatever,” Ted said. “It doesn’t matter. Apparently, as you see it, you’re the Chosen One. Big deal. We have work to do. This is a conversation for another time―certainly not here, where she probably just heard most of our conversation. Focus, OK? I just need you to focus so we can finish this and get out of here. If we don’t, they will find us, Kenneth. Do you hear me? If we don’t leave the state soon, they will find us and they will bring us to their own sort of justice.”
“I won’t let you down.”
“You already have. Don’t do it again.”
They started to move forward. The earth was soft and gave beneath their feet. The air was crisp and smelled of summer’s death―earthy smells that weren’t unpleasant in spite of their decomposing state.
The orange blob ahead of them now was at a right angle. She was sitting upright. Was she listening to them? Could she hear them? After that conversation, she probably had. She also knew she’d been spotted―he told her so in the text.
So, what was she thinking now? Was she doing what she should be doing? Was she repenting her sins? Kenneth doubted it. After the way they watched her behave at that bar, drinking and laughing and dancing like the whore she was, and smoking outside when they left the bar, he doubted whether she even knew what a sin was. But she would now. The Lord would show her her sins, and then cast her away to hell, where she’d roast along with all the others who had failed Him.
The breeze rose against his back and rustled the limbs surrounding him. He looked above him and saw a canopy of stars, the moon off to his right, but no clouds, no pending storm. The breeze became a short gust of wind, which he welcomed in spite of how cool it was. The sound would help to muffle their footsteps.
“She’s doing something,” Ted said quietly.
“She’s moving around.”
“It looks like she made herself some kind of shelter.”
“How did she do that?”
“She’s a Maine girl,” Ted said. “She learned it along the way. This isn’t her first time in the woods.”
“Maybe so. But it’s her last time in them,” Kenneth Berkowitz said. “Let’s get her. Pull her out. And let me have some fun, will you? I want to have my way with her first.”
CHAPTER TW
ENTY-NINE
The forest floor in her shelter might be damp, but Cheryl Dunning knew better than to build the shelter out of damp wood.
She built it with dry branches, twigs that were close to the tree trunks and low to the base. Those always were the driest. The pine needles on which she sat had sapwood and fatwood running through them. They were filled with oils and they would burn when lit, regardless of whether they were wet or dry, so she was lucky that she was sitting on tens of thousands of them.
During all those hunting trips she once took with her father and grandfather, she was fastidious in learning the ways of the woods. Even at that young age, she could feel her father’s disappointment that his wife had given him three daughters and not one son. It was nothing he ever made known to her―her father loved her deeply. Instead, it was just something she sensed. It couldn’t have been easy for him to live in a house filled with women, including his own mother, who moved in with them when her husband died of pancreatic cancer.
And so she set out to become that son.
She hunted. She played sports in school and she learned how to fish, a pastime she still loved, especially when the family went to their camp on Moosehead Lake. She sat and watched the Red Sox games with her father during the season and the Pats games when their season began. Her mother wouldn’t allow her to swear at the television set as he did, but when she wasn’t around, her father almost encouraged it. Sometimes, they’d holler at the screen in such frustration or joy, he once said they’d make a fine couple of sailors.
When her body began to change and her interest turned more and more to boys, the time she spent with her father began its slow but inevitable decline as she began the ascent into her teen years and finally into adulthood. To this day, they still were close, but she realized now, perhaps more than ever, just how instrumental those days had been with him. He taught her what his father had taught him.
And that just might save my life.
She worked quickly. If she was going to torch this motherfucker, then she had to build a fire that would burn hot and high, hopefully setting fire to the woods around her so that people would take note―if there were any people around here to do so―when the tall pines caught and started to rage as they became engulfed in flames. She didn’t know where he had taken her, but if she could set these woods on fire, there was a good chance that someone would see it, fire departments would be called, and she just might get out of here alive.
If he doesn’t shoot me when I set the fire.
She couldn’t think that way. Instead, she started to move about the shelter. She gathered a handful of dry leaves and placed them in a mound. Then, she plucked sticks from the shelter itself and created a tight layer of insulation on top of the leaves, thus separating the sticks from the damp forest floor. She sprinkled the top of the sticks with pine needles and more leaves, and then gathered from the shelter a host of other branches, all the time worrying that with each one she pulled out, he could hear her. Would he know what she was doing? Probably not. Did it matter? Probably not. His aim was to kill her. Period. And he was coming this way.
I can’
t let him win.
The fire would take time to catch and grow and overwhelm the shelter, which would fuel it and turn it into a kind of pyre, but the time it would take for that to happen was another strike against her.
But not if the breeze remains steady.
The breeze, which was increasingly becoming sharp gusts of cold wind, was the best friend she had right now. That and her Bic lighter. Oxygen is what she needed to make this shelter ignite quickly and right now, the universe was cooperating with her in ways that it hadn’t since she was left alone at The Grind the night before.
“You go through stretches of misery and stretches of fortune,” her grandmother used to say. Living on the farm, her grandmother never had an easy life, but like her grandfather, she knew it could have been worse. Back then, living on the land is what they had and while the land often gave its fruits easily because the land was fertile, sometimes it didn’t because either the weather was off or blight ruined the crop.
“You go through stretches of misery and stretches of fortune.”
She was fairly sure that she was on the side of misery right now, but at least she had a plan, and that was better than being without one.
When she was finished, she stopped and listened, expecting the worst and finding it. A rustling of leaves. The sound of footsteps. He wasn’t alone. She was sure of it now. He had someone with him.
Another psycho.
She wanted to cry at that moment because she knew that with them so close to her, she didn’t stand a chance. Before the moose attacked, she saw him. She also saw his gun. Naturally, his partner would also have a gun.
I’m going to die.
No, I’m not.
You’re in a stretch of misery.
I’m not. I still have a chance.
But her thoughts held no conviction, only a whiff of desperation.
She lit the base of the leaves and blew on them as a breeze sucked air into the shelter. She stood back, surprised, as a fire, bright and sturdy, bloomed. And then it quickly grew. And then it sparked toward the shelter’s shallow ceiling, where it tasted the branches and twigs. When it decided it rather liked them, it devoured them with a fervor that stunned her.
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