Crossing the Line

by Bobe, Jordan

  Brute pulled the axe free of his gut and swung it wildly at his attacker. It missed Quentin completely and smashed through the sliding glass doors. Quentin capitalized on the missed attack and kicked the huge man directly in the throat. Brute’s eyes grew wide with the sudden lack of oxygen pumping to his brain. He fell backwards, losing his grip on the axe.

  Quentin picked the axe up and raised it above his head, planning a blow directly between Brute’s eyes. The big man was too quick, though. He kicked Quentin in the knee, shattering it and folding the leg in half. Quentin fell backward with a loud scream of pain. The axe slipped from his grasp and slid away a full yard from his reach.

  Brute got to his feet and looked at the wound in his gut. It was deep and bleeding profusely, but it had not been placed where it would threaten any of his vital organs. Still, it hurt like hell.

  He walked out onto the patio and stomped on Quentin’s good knee three times to ensure that it was broken. Once satisfied he limped over to the axe and picked it up. Quentin held out his hands and shook his head. “Please, man, I won’t tell anyone what happened up here. I won’t even mention that I was here. Just let me go and we can both act like none of this ever happened.”

  Brute stomped on Quentin’s stomach, knocking the wind out of him. Next Brute used the axe head as a bludgeoning tool. He smashed Quentin’s sternum and most of his ribs with driving blows. Once finished with the man’s chest he turned his attention to his crotch. He brought the axe down ten times, each time causing Quentin to cry out a little louder. The pelvic bone shattered first, then the tail bone. A bloody, broken ruin was all that remained of Quentin’s crotch once Brute had finished with him.

  He slammed one end of the axe head into the deck. Quentin’s eyes grew wide with terror and realization as he was picked up off of the porch and raised above the blade. He attempted to speak, to beg and plead, but nothing came out. His body was far too damaged for him to speak anymore.

  Brute released him and the man fell onto the blade of the axe. The sharp edge had nothing to do with Quentin’s instantaneous death. When the axe connected with his falling body the broken pieces of his sternum drove through Quentin’s lungs and heart. His life ended then. The axe blade slid into his dead chest and cut his burst heart in half. Brute stepped on his back, driving the axe the rest of the way through Quentin’s body.

  He went back to the kitchen and selected a large butcher’s knife from the block. His injuries made it a slower process, but he still managed to skin Quentin’s face and sever the face of his skull. He took the new mask back to the kitchen and rinsed it off in the skin until the bone was clean of blood and gore.

  Satisfied he used the band from his previous mask to convert the skull in his hand. He grabbed Quentin by the collar and seat of his pants and lifted him into the air. The axe came out of the deck and remained lodged in Quentin’s chest. Most of the tissue of Quentin’s brains had fallen out while Brute was cleaning the skull.

  He looked curiously at the empty brain cavern for a moment before tossing the body down on its back. He stomped on Quentin’s belly and pulled the axe free with a loud crunch and pop. He put the weapon back onto his back and limped off of the porch and toward the lake.

  23

  The “ambulance” was crude to say the very least. There weren’t any medical supplies or gurneys. It was just a hollowed out Chevy van’s rear end. A large piece of welded sheet metal kept the paramedics from sight. As they bounced down the road the women knew that they were in trouble still. The entire encounter with the authorities and EMTs was… off. They hadn’t acted or spoken like paramedics or police officers. They had come across as the opposite actually.

  The ambulance came to a screaming halt and swung around. A series of beeps started as the driver backed up. After what seemed like an eternity of traveling in reverse the van came to a halt. The engine turned off a moment later and the sound of the front doors opening and closing echoed through whatever structure they were in.

  All of the girls had been stuffed into the same ambulance. The other had followed after them, but had no one inside. This came across as odd, too. But the weirdest thing of all was how they had not inspected any of them. Surely it was in their job description to at least attempt to find any injuries that needed attention.

  “Where did they take us?” Lynne asked in a soft whisper. “We didn’t drive far enough to get to a hospital, did we?”

  “No, no fucking way,” Anna responded. She shook her head adamantly. “We’re nowhere near a hospital and these guys definitely aren’t really paramedics.”

  “Fuck!” Lynne groaned. “Will this bullshit night ever end?”

  The beeping of the second ambulance broke the silence outside the van. They heard it back in next to their vehicle prison. A moment after they heard the sound of a second set of tires pulling in on their opposite side.

  “What do we do now?” one of the EMTs asked.

  “The fuck if I know. This entire operation has been fucked since the beginning. It’s that stupid dog’s fault,” the second EMT said.

  “Hey, man, he’s your brother not mine.”

  “Just make sure nothing else goes wrong, okay? We’re up to our knees in shit right now because of that fucking moron. The last thing we need is one of these girls making a run for it while you’re jerking off. Don’t fuck up or I swear to God it won’t even be Deloris that you have to worry about,” a third EMT said.

  “Fine by us. Do you suppose Deloris might let us have a go at them before we feed them to the dogs?”

  “Don’t assume we’re feeding them to the dogs. I have no idea what mama is going to want to do about this cluster fuck. As for your question, no, you know how Deloris feels about rape. She would just as soon shoot you in the head than let you get off with an unwilling partner.”

  “I know, I was just funning.”

  “Well it wasn’t funny at all, Carey. Keep your mouth shut about shit like that. She would probably shoot you just for making such a stupid ass joke.”

  “Something seriously fucked up is happening,” Marcy whispered.

  “You don’t have to state the obvious,” Anna said. There was an edge to her voice, but she tried to conceal it. She didn’t want to lash out at her friends. She was tired and sore in more ways than she would have ever thought imaginable. “It wouldn’t have been a proper ending to our fantastic vacation if we really got out of this without getting fucked a couple more times.”

  “Next time we go to Cancun,” Lynne said.

  “Totally,” Marcy said.

  There was commotion outside. It sounded like the paramedics were tearing the walls down around their poorly disguised vans. The girls huddled together to keep themselves from screaming. After five solid minutes of the terrifying racket there were absolutely no sounds. Not so much as a cricket. This was somehow even scarier.

  “They soundproofed us,” Lynne said. “They were sound proofing the building. They’re going to kill us and no one will be able to hear us scream.”

  “No, why would they go through all that trouble? We’re already in the middle of nowhere. The only people that might hear us scream are the same fucked up fuckers that would be torturing us, right? No, they must have done something else.”

  Anna looked at Marcy and after a moment of trying to keep it down she let out a loud burst of laughter. “You seriously just said fucked up fuckers,” she said. She slammed her head into the side of the van. “How crazy is this? We’re all educated, beautiful women and all of the sudden we’re trapped and speaking with the vernacular skills of a stoned teenager.”

  “I don’t give a shit how old or sober you are if you’ve spent the entire day being beaten and raped you can pretty much throw your usual vocabulary out the fucking window. In fact, I’m proud none of us have been reduced to babble yet.”

  “Babble would almost be more acceptable from the lips of a JAP.”

  Marcy looked genuinely hurt by the tasteless joke. Anna reached out and
gave her a light hug. “I didn’t mean anything by it, babe. You know I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Man, I wish this was all over, though.”

  “It will be soon. One way or the other,” Lynne said. She was crawling around in the pitch darkness. After a moment she stopped and a squeal of excitement escaped her. “Hell yeah!” she whispered.

  “What?” Marcy asked.

  “Say hello to my little friend,” Lynne giggled. She handed over the item she had found. It was a foot-long, six-inch in diameter, piece of piping of some kind. Lynne dug around for another moment and came up with another, similar item. She handed it over. This time the piece of metal was closer to two feet long. After just a little more investigating she found something else.

  “Ah shit,” she said. She brought it over to the others and handed it to Anna. It was about a foot and a half long and ended with a steel sheathed set of wheels. “It’s the leg of a gurney, isn’t it?”

  “Most likely,” Anna said. “But the pieces are pretty solid. We’ll have the element of surprise, too. When they come to drag us out of here we’ll let them think we’re still terrified and then we’ll bash their heads in.”

  “I am still terrified,” Marcy said. “I don’t know if I could bash someone’s head in. I mean, I want to hurt these bastards, but I don’t know if I am capable. It’s against my nature, you know?”

  “Fuck who we are and who we were before all of this started. When we get out of this cluster fuck we’ll go right back to being who we used to be. For right now, though, we’ve got to get out of this situation,” Anna said.

  Marcy was silent for a moment and then she giggled. “There’s a song that says something like I want to go to Heaven, but I don’t want to go right now. I’m pretty sure I won’t have a problem fighting back tonight.”

  “Okay, then it’s settled. We wait for them to open the doors, or slip up somehow, and then we catch them off guard.”

  “And we bash their heads in,” Lynne said. She nodded her head. “We owe them a lot worse than a caved-in forehead.”

  “Once we start fighting back we don’t stop until we’re sure the piece of shit isn’t getting back up,” Anna said. She clenched her broken piece of the gurney’s legs so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

  Marcy unfolded one hand and spit directly into her palm. “Shake on it.”

  Lynne nodded and spit in her own palm. They shook hands vigorously. Anna watched the exchange with disgust. When they turned their open palms toward her she swallowed back the urge to puke and spit in her own palm. The sensation was enough to make her queasy. By the end of the night she was sure that something so small as a little spit wasn’t going to bother her anymore, though.

  The women looked wild-eyed at the doors. Lynne stripped off her shirt and tore the sleeves off of the shoulders. She wrapped the fabric around her hands and pulled the shirt back over her head. After a moment’s consideration the others followed suit. Once their hands were protected they picked back up their weapons.

  They sat crouched, staring at the doors. They had no idea how long it would take, but their minds were too absorbed in the ideas of revenge for any of them to care.

  24

  Clarence and Forester were growing impatient when the front door to the lake house opened and Brute emerged. He was carrying the lifeless corpses of two of the women. One of their heads had been blown half off at the neck. The other looked as if she had been raped to death. Each corpse was thrown over one of his enormous shoulders. He set them down when he was a few feet away from the police officers.

  “What the hell took you so long, Brute? That’s a bad dog!” Clarence asked.

  “No kill…” Brute said. He brushed the hair from the tiny woman’s face and looked up at Clarence. “Brute no kill…”

  “No shit, you didn’t kill any of the girls. And who the hell gave you permission to speak?” Forester said. He pulled his stun gun from his pocket and aimed it at Brute. “Who do you think you are?”

  “Brute no kill…”

  “Brute, you are being a very bad dog,” Clarence snapped.

  Brute rose to his feet and looked at the police men. He snarled, all of his muscles flexing. He pulled the skull from his face and let it drop to the ground. “Brute no kill the girls…” he snarled. “You bad boy.”

  Forester shot Brute directly in the throat with the stun gun. The big man did not seem to notice even as the one-million volts of electricity pumped into him. His muscles tightened and loosened, but nothing else came of the shot. His lips curled in a snarl as he pulled the darts out of his flesh and tossed them to the ground.

  “Fucking dog has gone feral,” Forester said. He pulled his sidearm and fired a round without hesitation. The round tore through Brute’s shoulder. Blood sprayed from the wound, but he barely lost a step. The big man snarled as a second round hit him in the thigh.

  Clarence reached for his gun, but was taken off guard by a blow to the side of his head. He stumbled back a step and turned to his attacker. Tracy lifted the enormous log over her head and brought it down between his eyes. His head bounced back off of the roof of the patrol car and the world went dark around him. The flesh on his forehead split open wide and blood ran down into his rolled back eyes.

  Tracy did not stop the attack just because he fell to the ground unconscious. She brought the log down on the top of his head, cracking open his scalp. Blood sprayed up the side of the cruiser. She swung as if going for a homerun and the side of his face caved in as his skull was smashed in.

  Brute snarled as the third round hit him a few inches from where the first had torn through his shoulder. He launched himself forward and grabbed the police officer around the throat. Forester’s breath caught in his throat as the huge hand wrapped around his esophagus. His eyes opened wide as he was lifted through the air.

  Brute smashed him down onto the hood of the cruiser and the steel crumpled around his broken frame.

  Brute dragged the man from the crushed cruiser. Clarence wheezed and blood slipped from the corners of his mouth. He had no way of telling how many of his bones had shattered, but he knew the injuries were severe.

  Brute pulled him through the gravel by the ankle and lifted him from the ground. He felt blood running quickly up into his mouth from whatever had been torn during the brutal body slam. There was a moment of confusion in which he thought he might survive, but then pain sounded in his gut. Brute shook his head from side to side, tearing the flesh over his stomach. He howled with agony and tried to wiggle his way free.

  The pain receded as Brute pulled his face away from the man’s belly. The next instant even more pain sounded in his midsection. He felt the flesh rip away as Brute’s sharp claws dug deep into the muscle.

  “Brute no kill girls…” Brute snarled. His claws punched through the last layer of muscle and stabbed into Clarence’s innards. Brute ripped the intestines out of the hole and twisted them around his hand. Brute released his hold on the man and pulled until the tissue snapped apart.

  Tracy turned back to the gory mess that had become of Forester’s head. With a scream of satisfaction she bashed the man in the forehead six times. His head bounced off of the cruiser again and again. After the skull collapsed completely the skin tore away. By the time she relented there was nothing left of his face except for blood and gore.

  A huge hand fell on her shoulder. She turned around quickly and the second hand grabbed the log. Terror filled her when she looked up at the enormous beast. His lips closed, covering his sharpened teeth. The fury seemed to completely vanish from his face.

  “Brute no hurt…” he said.

  “Do you know where they took my friends?” Tracy asked.

  Brute nodded.

  “Show me.”

  Tracy pushed aside the corpse and opened the passenger door. Brute cocked his head to the side and frowned. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re friends.”

  Brute shook his head. He patted his hand on his chest. �
��You dog…”

  “Yes, we’re dogs. Will you show me where my friends are?”

  Brute nodded his head. He climbed into the car. He didn’t seem to notice that the car sank down so far that it nearly scraped the curb.

  25

  Ivy’s unease reached an all new level when Aaron pulled off the road and turned off the SUV’s engine. He tapped at the steering wheel a dozen times, his jaw clenching visibly. When he turned to speak to her she let out a small yelp of fear involuntarily.

  “Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was wondering if I confide in you. It won’t take but a couple of minutes, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, I don’t see why not,” Ivy said. She hoped her unease wasn’t apparent in her voice.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three, almost twenty-four.”

  “Goddamn. I knew it! I’ve been doing this same shit for longer than you’ve been alive. How terrible is that? This same routine over and over again since before you were born. If that doesn’t make me a loser, what does?”

  “I don’t think it makes you a loser. I think it proves you like your job. You seem pretty good at it, too.”

  Aaron smirked at her. “You’re a terrible fucking liar, Ivy. You are just another one of the rich people that come up here and rent the lake house. You think all of us locals are retarded inbreds, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, little girl, I wasn’t born in this town, I moved here when Deloris offered me the job. And at first I thought I was going to be working as a legitimate police officer, I really did. It wasn’t until she spelled it all out for me that I realized why she sought me.”

  Aaron ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “I should have known that there wasn’t any respectable police force that would hire me after what the LAPD put on my record. That little shit deserved what was coming to him, and I wasn’t the only one that did something to him, but I was the one that took the fall. But if you can’t trust your own aunt, who can you trust?”