The Victim

by Aaron Gales

  His breathing was heavy. He knew which room she was staying in. He gave it five minutes, then opened the door, checking that the corridor was deserted. He made his way down and knocked lightly on the hotel room door.

  He heard muffled voices coming from inside. She had company. This could make things more difficult than he had anticipated.

  Not that he had any plan in particular. He just wanted to talk to her.

  Footsteps made their way to the door. There was no peephole which significantly helped his chances.

  The door pulled back and his heart nearly exploded out of his chest. It was his wife that answered.

  What the fuck.

  She looked at him in horror and tried to close the door. He was too quick for her and forced his way inside. She started to scream, but he put his hand into the back of his trousers and pulled out a gun.

  “Fucking be quiet. Make another sound and I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

  That shut them both up.

  “Nobody is going to leave this room until someone tells me why my life has been ripped apart and what the hell you two are doing here together.”

  They both sat down, his ex-wife now perched protectively in front of the pregnant girl.

  “I have two bullets in this gun. You two have taken everything from me. Now tell me exactly what has happened or I will have no hesitation in putting a bullet between both of your eyes.”

  “David, please calm down, she’s pregnant.”

  “I can see that perfectly well. I won’t let that influence my decision.”

  “It’s your baby.”

  “How the fuck is it my baby? Biologically it might be, but I’m nothing more than a sperm donor. Now start talking.”

  This time it wasn’t his wife that spoke but the girl.

  “We met each other a year ago. I started at the college and Ruth was my tutor. I hadn’t completed my degree when I had first gone to college and I had always wanted to finish it. I struggled at first, but Ruth helped me and we started to become close.”

  He pulled up a chair and slumped in it. Was it really going to be as grimly predictable as this?

  His wife continued.

  “After three months we started to fall in love. There was no denying it. David, you’ve always made me happy but this was something more. You had never made me feel this way. We were at a difficult point in our lives. Kids seemed like it was never going to happen for us and retirement seemed such a long way away. We were drifting and Anna helped me out of the slump.”

  “Then what happened,” he asked.

  She looked at him angrily.

  “Don’t give me that fucking look,” she snapped at him. “I know all about your office flirtations over the years. I stayed with you because the relationship suited us both, but when something better came along I decided to grasp it with both hands.”

  “I’ve never cheated on you,” David retorted angrily.

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  Could she know more? He had always been so careful with his dalliances. They had always been women he hadn’t known. In his earlier career he had had to attend a lot of conferences. He had always managed to convince himself that these one night stands weren’t affairs and so he had never confessed what he had done and had managed to convince himself that nothing had ever happened.

  Had she known all along?

  It would seem so.

  “I wanted revenge,” she said.

  “And I wanted your money. I had no proof that you had ever done anything wrong so I needed a plan. It was Anna who came up with the idea to seduce you. I knew that a rape victim would appeal to your empathetic nature.”

  He looked at them both disgusted.

  “I asked all the right questions when I knew Anna had been to see you. I knew you would open up eventually. It was my job to try and coerce you into her seeing again. Anna volunteered for the unfortunate job of having sex with you.”

  Her words were cutting through him. No matter what they had been through or the secrets she knew about him surely he didn’t deserve this?

  “I thought you would take more persuading than you eventually did. I would have been hurt how quickly you eventually agreed to sleep with her if it hadn’t all been part of the bigger plan. When you came to that hotel room we had everything we needed to get we wanted.”

  She looked at him icily.

  “The rest is history. And now here we are. What are you going to do?”

  David looked at Anna.

  “Is it really my child?”

  “Well she hasn’t been fucking any other men in the last six months,” Ruth snapped at him angrily.

  David stood up calmly.

  “Get up both of you.”

  Neither of them moved.

  He raised the gun slowly.

  “Get up now,” he said calmly. “Or you die.”

  Something in his face must have scared them, as they slowly got up.

  “Now, you are going to walk calmly out of this hotel. If either of you make a sound I will kill you both and take my punishment. Do you understand?”

  They nodded their heads.

  “When you get to my car, I’m going to blindfold you and handcuff the pair of you.”

  “And if we do anything you’ll shoot us,” said Anna.

  “Correct,” David replied.

  They left the hotel room. They did as they were told. The receptionist even smiled at them as they left the building.

  When they got to his car, he removed the handcuffs from the front seat and instructed them to put them on each other. They did so. He walked round to the back of the car and opened the boot and gestured towards his wife.

  “You can’t expect us to get in there,” she replied. “She’s pregnant.”

  David considered his options before agreeing to her request.

  “Fine, get in the back.”

  They both clambered in and buckled their seatbelts. He climbed in the front seat and started driving.

  “Where are you taking us?” his wife asked.

  “No talking,” David said.

  They were quiet, though he could hear them whispering to each other a couple of times. A warning glance in the rear-view mirror was enough to shut them up.

  Two hours into the drive and they approached a large forest, just as the sun was beginning to set.

  “David please tell me where you’re taking us,” Ruth asked.

  He pulled off the main road and started driving down a rough path. He could see their heads bobbing up and down as the terrain shook the car.

  “Well as you so aptly put in that hotel room, I’ve always had secrets,” David said. “I’m taking you to my old family lodge that passed into my hands when my Great Uncle died last year. I kept it quiet until I’d decided what to do with it. It could have been our retirement home, or we could have sold it and travelled the world together.”

  “Luckily for me your lawyers never uncovered it otherwise I’m sure you would have taken half of that as well.”

  Ruth started at him in disbelief. Anna was starting to cry silently now. They were both quiet then. Eventually they came to a small clearing where the lodge came into view. It really was beautiful, which was just as well as he was going to be spending a lot of time here in the future.

  When they pulled to a stop, he picked up the gun from the passenger seat. He moved around to the rear door and helped Anna out of the car, Ruth managing to get herself out.

  “David what are we doing here?”

  “Your journey ends here Ruth,” he replied. Her eyes opened wide in fear. He pulled the gun from his waistband and shot her ruthlessly in the forehead.

  Anna released a blood curdling scream and dropped to her knees, cradling Ruth’s lifeless body in her arms.

  Part of him couldn’t believe what he had done. He had just snuffed out the life of the woman that he had spent the last twenty years almost completely devoted to. And he felt nothing.


  He turned the gun towards Anna then and she looked up at him, terror etched across her face.

  “The only thing keeping you alive is that baby in your belly.”

  He dragged her to her feet and pulled her in the house. There was a basement room that would do very nicely for her. He pushed her in the room, locked the door behind him and went to dig his wife’s grave.

  Chapter Ten

  It was early in the morning three months later when her waters broke. It had been a strange time. For the first month he had kept her locked away in the basement. He gave her three square meals a day and took her outside for an hour in the morning and in the evening to make sure that she got enough sunshine and fresh air to keep her well.

  It had always been his intention to kill her as soon as the baby came. But as the days and weeks had passed he had started to warm towards her and she had reciprocated. He had allowed her more time out of the basement, they had taken longer walks together and he had let her eat dinner with him in the evening in front of the television.

  A couple of times while they had been together he had found himself wanting to replay that night they had had together which had started all of this.

  He hadn’t had sex in months and the temptation was undoubtedly there. He had no doubt that she would have bowed to his demands, but he would remind himself that he wasn’t that person.

  Before all of this had happened he had been a good, respectable man. He had sunk to incredible lows, killing his wife but that bitch had deserved it.

  This woman had carried his child. Maybe once the baby was here they could try and build some sort of life together.

  The labour was a difficult one but he knew he wouldn’t be able to take her to a hospital. There was the potential for too many awkward questions. The pressure was on him. After 15 hours they were both exhausted. She was completely naked and her body glistened in sweat. He too had removed most of his clothes as the sheer physical exertion had taken its toll. The gun that he had carried with him for the last six months also lay discarded.

  Eventually after a titanic effort from both of them a tiny screaming baby was delivered. They were both in tears. He handed her the baby and watched them together. After some time passed she motioned to him and she passed him the baby.

  It was a little girl.

  He couldn’t believe what he was holding. A daughter. It made everything he had been through worth it.

  “Stand up you snivelling piece of shit.”

  Like the first time he met her he didn’t comprehend the words she said. He looked around at her confused.

  That was when he saw her. Standing over him, blood running between her legs. With his gun in her hands, pointing directly at him.

  “Fucking stand up.”

  “Stay calm,” he said. “I’ve got our baby in my hands.”

  “Put her down.”

  He placed the baby gently on the floor. Poppy. He would call her Poppy.

  “Please think about this,” he said to her calmly. “If you make that decision to take a life it’s not something you can ever take back. Trust me on that one.”

  “You’ve treated me like a dog,” she spat back at him. “I know what we did to you was wrong but you shouldn’t have killed her. I’m going to make you pay.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  She looked at him strangely, clearly surprised by how calm he was looking down the barrel of a gun.

  She hesitated slightly then, as if she had expected him to put up more of a fight and hadn’t actually considered the prospect of pulling the trigger.

  Then she steeled herself, screamed loudly and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. She looked down at the gun in horror and confusion pulling the trigger repeatedly, desperately hoping for an explosion.

  “It’s not loaded,” he said calmly.

  “I haven’t had it loaded for months. I left that gun on show to test you. To see if I could trust you. You’ve given me the answer.”

  She looked at him terrified now. She looked desperately at the baby lying on the floor, then turned for the door and ran.

  He took after her. He knew she wouldn’t get far, after what she had just been through.

  He gave chase and caught up with her as she tried to make for the road. He rugby tackled her to the floor. She screamed and tried to struggle but he soon had her restrained.

  She spat in his face then. That was her mistake. Until that point he hadn’t decided what he was going to do with her.

  She knew she had made a mistake. He took his hands off her arms then and moved them round her throat and tightened his grip. He felt the air go out of her. Her face started to go red and she kicked him and tore at his back. He felt her draw blood and a stinging pain but the adrenaline meant that nothing she did stopped him.

  She became most violent in the last few seconds before she died, but no matter what she tried it made no difference. Eventually the last breath of oxygen left her body, she twitched violently, then went still, her eyes glassy.

  He rolled off her, breathing hard. He had just taken his second life. What had become of him?

  He was rescued from his thoughts by the sound of his daughter crying.

  She was all that mattered now. He picked himself off the floor, dusted himself down and went back into the house ready to start his new life.

  The End

  About the Author

  Aaron Gales is an author from Newcastle, England. He currently lives near Manchester where he works as a Communications Officer for British Cycling. ‘The Victim’ is his third short story. He published ‘The Watchers’ in early 2015 and ‘The Sinner’ in 2014.