The chick behind the bar appraised her openly as she handed her the drink, exuding sensuality, running her eyes up and down Carrie’s body and wetting her lips lasciviously with her tongue. It was obvious what she was after, Stevie Wonder could have seen it, but Carrie wasn’t interested.
She accepted her drink with a smile, tipped the bartender well, as always, and sipped slowly as she made her way toward the rear of the club. She always headed to the back when she was hunting. Standing against the wall, Carrie pretended to enjoy the music like everyone else while her eyes surveyed the crowded club, concentrating especially hard on the dance floor. She figured the dance floor would be where her target would make a move on his unsuspecting female victim if he was here.
Carrie Carstens would much rather have been home asleep in bed than listening to music she could barely tolerate in the middle of the night, wedged in among people she didn’t know, looking for someone she was unlikely to find, but again—she had no choice. She had suffered through the dream once more last night and it had been a doozey. Of course, it was always a doozey, because it was always the same.
Some nights the dream ended earlier than others; it all depended upon the amount of time it took for Carrie to wake up screaming, drenched in sweat, shaking and begging for mercy, but the dream itself always took the same form. The man looming above her, his hand clamped over her mouth so she could not scream and could barely breathe. The man ripping her clothing off, tugging her panties down her legs, roughly, over her hips and off, forcing her legs apart and lowering his disgusting body onto and then into hers. The man doing vile, nasty things to her; things that made her literally sick to her stomach to think about, even now, years later.
So Carrie didn’t have any choice; not really. She had to enter these places, these plastic, artificial techno-rock dance club places. She didn’t care about the music; didn’t care about anything, really, she just wanted to watch the crowd. Because Carrie Carstens clung to the hope that one of these days against all odds she would get lucky and find the man who had done those horrible things to her.
She was certain she would eventually find him. She had to. She had a score to settle.
Halfway through her second drink—another club soda, of course—Carrie caught a glimpse of a young man who made her skin crawl and her stomach clench in instinctive fear and immediately she knew. The terrifying visceral reaction made it clear. This might be the guy. Tall, close-cropped brown hair, snappy dresser. Good with the ladies. Great dancer. She felt a jolt of panicky electricity surge through her body as she jostled her way through the shifting crowd for a closer look. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him.
Her drink sloshed over the sides of the glass; she didn’t care. Men and women glared at her as she elbowed her way past and she didn’t care about that either. She had to get a better look at the tall guy with the close-cropped brown hair, because if it was who she thought it was—
Carrie’s breath caught in her throat. Her eyes widened. Her stomach tried to evacuate its contents but she choked down the nausea, swallowing hard.
It was the guy.
***
The room was dank and stuffy and the man—his name was Burton Daniels and he was a twenty-three year old investment banker trainee with a high-powered firm uptown—began to stir in his chair. Carrie waited patiently for him to awaken. He would have one hell of a massive headache when he finally came around, but otherwise would be fine, relatively speaking.
At least for the time being.
While she waited for Daniels to regain consciousness, Carrie thought about tonight and how she would finally lay the past to rest. The man would never haunt her dreams again. She would finally be able to sleep. She could stop haunting those disgusting clubs with the disgusting people who looked at her in ways that made her skin crawl. She could stay home.
It had been even easier to lure him away from the club than she had expected. Carrie slinked up to him on the dance floor, rubbing her body against his by way of introduction—curvy parts against curvy parts—ensuring she had his full and undivided attention. She had worn a platinum blonde wig, cut in a style completely unlike her own, so there was no way Burton Daniels would ever recognize her, she had been sure of that.
And he hadn’t. Plus, it had been quite a long time since he forced himself upon her, doing all those horrible things to her; he probably had forgotten all about it, but she most certainly had not.
After getting him interested—it was so easy to do—Carrie had taken control of the situation immediately, grabbing Burton Daniels’s hand and pulling him to the relative privacy of a back corner table, miraculously empty, as soon as the song ended. What song it was, she had no idea. They all sounded alike to her anyway, so what did it matter?
Carrie had purred and pouted and postured and batted her eyes, oozing slinky sexuality and pretending to hang on Daniels’s every word, something she knew men loved; they were so self-involved and egomaniacal, impressed with their own perceived importance. She knew she could ensure his interest by feigning undivided attention to whatever senseless drivel came out of his mouth.
She asked him his name and what he did for a living and then oohed and ahhed over his answers, as if she thought being an investment banker trainee was the coolest thing ever instead of what it really was—a lame attempt by a perverted weasel to gain acceptance in the real world by his ability to make a lot of money.
From there it had been simple. She closed the deal by pretending to be drunk and easy and horny; ready to go someplace “private and cozy.” Before they left, however, Carrie insisted on buying Burton Daniels one last drink, which she purchased from the same purple-headed bartender, who again came on to her while she waited, again without saying a word—at least not out loud—and again without any luck.
Burton Daniels had waited at the table in the back corner of the club while Carrie got his drink, undoubtedly congratulating himself on being the luckiest fucking scumbag in a gigantic room full of fucking scumbags, and undoubtedly passed the time waiting for his drink by picturing the nasty, vile things he was going to do to this beautiful, hot-to-trot young thing who had been smart enough to choose him to take home over all the other men in the meat market.
After buying the drink, as she made her way back to her prey—Carrie couldn’t help but picture him as a fish thrashing about on the hook she had so masterfully baited—she had dropped a couple of roofies into the glass, where they had fizzed for a moment and then disappeared as she stirred with her finger. Two tabs was probably overdoing it, considering the slightness of Burton Daniels’ physique, but Carrie was not inclined to be particularly merciful, considering his sins of so long ago.
She rushed him through his spiked drink and then hurried him around the dance floor and out the door of Klub Elektro—no problem navigating the three carpeted steps to the doorway, her mind was sober and crystal-clear—with the truthful and utterly sincere promise of a night he would never forget. She wanted to be sure he was safely packed away in her little car before the full effect of the drugs worked their way through his system.
It had all gone off without a hitch, as she had known that it would.
A prolonged groan behind her told Carrie that Burton Daniels would soon be regaining consciousness—finally—and then the main event could begin. The inside of the aluminum storage unit, lit by the soft glow of a battery-powered portable lantern, thrummed with the sound of heavy rain pounding the roof. The effect was almost hypnotic, and Carrie found herself remembering bits and pieces of the horror Burton Daniels had inflicted upon her so many years ago.
Visions of utter, unrelenting terror flashed through her memory, unwanted and unstoppable: The sour smell of Daniels as he forced himself upon her, sodomized her, humiliated her, damaged her, transforming her from a sweet, trusting young girl into the obsessed, single-minded vengeance-seeker she had become. Tonight at last it would all end. She had finally caught up with him and would extract the pound of flesh, so
to speak, she had dreamt about for so long.
“Wh—where am I? Who the hell are you?” The question was whispered hesitantly but might as well have been shouted. Burton Daniels had finally awakened. Carrie smiled and turned to face the man who had ruined her.
“You’re in a place where we have complete privacy. Isn’t that nice?”
Daniels was strapped into some sort of customized rig that looked a bit like a dentist’s chair. Sturdy leather straps, one firmly fastened at each wrist and one at each elbow, along with a similar strap wound around the man’s neck—placed loosely enough so that he could breathe normally, tightly enough so that he was forced to hold his head more or less motionless or risk choking himself to death—held his upper body captive while allowing him close to a full range of motion with his head.
Similar straps around the man’s knees and ankles immobilized his lower body, naked from the waist down. Carrie watched with something resembling amusement as he desperately tested the bindings, flexing his arms and legs and bucking in the chair until he realized he was cutting off his air supply by doing so. The confusion in his face began to be replaced by a clear sense of horror. He was trapped and he knew it.
Carrie reached up and pulled off her blonde wig, releasing her mane of auburn hair. It tumbled down to her shoulders. “Remember me now?”
Daniels shook his head vigorously, choking himself and spluttering as he did so. “N-no, I don’t remember you! What the hell are you doing? Are you fucking crazy?”
Carrie Carstens’ eyes hardened. “After everything you did to me, you’re going to sit there and tell me you don’t even remember me?”
“What are you talking about, ya crazy bitch? We just met a couple of hours ago!”
“I’m not talking about tonight. You raped me and destroyed my life ten years ago, and I’ve been looking for you ever since. I knew I’d find you eventually. And now that I have, I plan on making sure that you pay for what you did to me.”
“I never raped anybody,” the man shouted, panicked. “Ten years ago I was thirteen, for chrissakes! You’ve got the wrong guy, I never hurt anybody, just let me go and we’ll pretend this never happened, please just let me go . . .”
Carrie watched in smug satisfaction as the words tumbled out of the mouth of the man who had broken her. She let him go on and on, begging until he finally realized it would do no good. Of course he would deny his actions; he was a rapist, was it such a stretch to imagine he would be a liar, too?
By the time he finished, red-faced and panting, Carrie had begun readying the next phase of her vengeance. She lifted a circular saw from a table in the corner of the storage room and used four C-clamps to fasten it securely it to a complicated system of steel rods positioned directly above the modified dentist’s chair holding Burton Daniels. When she finished, the saw hung inches above his waist, suspended in the air and angled inward, the blade glittering in the soft light, razor-sharp and deadly.
He had been so busy begging to be released and claiming that she had the wrong man (Yeah, right, sure, did he really think she could forget his miserable face for one goddamned second?) that he didn’t seem to notice what she was doing until she had finished. Now he looked at the positioning of the electric power tool, at his own nakedness, at the thick acoustic insulation lining the walls of his prison, and his eyes bulged in mushrooming terror.
“What are you doing?” he whispered, even though by now it had to have been obvious.
Carrie said nothing, preferring to let him wallow in his fear like she had wallowed in hers for so long.
Then he screamed. Burton Daniels, investment banker trainee and one-time rapist, let loose a bellow that was something between a cry for help and a plea for mercy. He screamed loud and long, the leather strap around his neck preventing him from putting much body language into it, but still, Carrie thought, managing a pretty impressive effort, nevertheless.
Carrie let him do it. She wasn’t worried about anyone hearing and coming to investigate. For one thing, she had rented a storage unit in this location specifically for its isolation. For another, it was now three-thirty a.m. and she felt confident she was the only person awake within a three mile radius. Finally, Carrie had spent considerable time and effort, not to mention money, outfitting this little room with the highest-quality acoustic insulation she could get her hands on, and lots of it.
A cop could be standing right outside with his ear pressed to the door and he would never hear a thing. Carrie knew that for a fact. She had tested the effectiveness of her modifications by blaring a stereo at full volume—some rap shit—and standing on the other side of the door, listening hard. She had heard nothing, not so much as a single bass thump or Eminem whine.
So she didn’t bother trying to deter Burton Daniels from his fruitless attempt at attracting the attention of a potential rescuer. She well knew what it was like to scream until your throat was raw and you couldn’t catch your breath. That might be the only thing she had in common with Burton Daniels, now that she thought about it.
Eventually he recognized that all the yelling was getting him nowhere, or maybe he just exhausted himself. In either case, he abruptly stopped screaming and stared at Carrie, tears streaming down his formerly handsome face, now red and blotchy and ugly, his true nature showing through. “This is insane,” he said, his voice hoarse and scratchy. “I swear I don’t know you. I swear. Please.”
Carrie ignored his pathetic attempt at gaining her sympathy. Where had his sympathy been when she cried herself to sleep only to scream herself awake, night after night after agonizing night, for years and years on end?
She walked to an electrical outlet built into the side wall and plugged in the circular saw, then returned to her captive and pressed the red trigger on the handle. The saw buzzed to life. She forced the trigger open with the plastic lock—great idea, very handy—so her finger wouldn’t get tired. The saw whirred quietly, the sound drowned out by the renewed emphatic screaming of Burton Daniels. He may have been a rapist and a liar but he had one hell of a strong let of lungs.
Taking three steps and placing herself directly in front of her tormentor’s disbelieving eyes, Carrie Carstens began undressing, performing an erotic striptease for an audience of one. It was a small audience, but a captive one, she thought. Inches above Daniels’s waist, the electric saw hummed on smoothly, ready and willing to perform the task for which it was designed.
Carrie saw a terrible understanding dawn in the man’s eyes as she undulated in front of him, slowly unbuttoning her blouse and letting it fall to the floor. She had practiced endlessly at home in her tiny apartment until she was the rival of any exotic dancer in the city, hoping against hope she would someday be able to use her newfound talent on the one person for whom she had learned it. Tonight was the night.
She unsnapped her skintight jeans and slid the zipper down, pushing them over her hips. They fell down her legs as Burton Daniels squeezed his eyes closed with a ferocity that would have been comical under different circumstances, but Carrie was prepared for that.
Smiling widely now, eyes burning with a lust that had nothing to do with sex, Carrie moved to Burton Daniels and began kissing his naked belly, inches from the saw, repulsed by him but determined to force his arousal. The breeze generated by the blade blew her hair into the man’s face. And it worked. It worked. Burton Daniels began getting aroused.
Carrie continued until the last possible moment, licking and kissing, then deftly stepped away, grabbing her blouse off the floor and moving to the door of the storage unit, yanking up her jeans and zipping them as she went. She shrugged into her blouse as Burton Daniels continued to scream, now in agony as well as terror. Blood spurted in great arcs across the room in time with the beating of the man’s heart as the electric saw finally had something to slice.
She stood at the doorway drinking the scene in, determined not to miss a moment of the retribution she had waited so long to extract. Daniels’ screaming continued unabated
, his shouts becoming more and more frantic and unintelligible, before eventually blacking out, whether from blood loss or simply from fear and shock Carrie did not know, nor did she care. Not long after he lost consciousness, Burton Daniels died from the blood loss and Carrie knew she was finally free.
Stepping quietly out the entrance to her little storage unit, Carrie pulled the door closed and triple-locked it, checking and then re-checking to be sure no one could get inside. When she was satisfied that her fortress was secure, she crossed the cool, damp parking lot to her waiting car and drove home, anxious to enjoy her first evening of truly nightmare-free rest in years.
She left the cleanup for tomorrow. Carrie Carstens was exhausted.
***
Again the nightmare came and when it did it was the same; it was always the same. The man entered her little-girl’s bedroom in the pitch-black stillness of the night and she pretended to be asleep, hoping against all odds and the man’s past history that he would go away; that he would for once just leave her alone and go away. But of course he didn’t. He never did.
He crossed the room to where she lay, her breathing slow and controlled in her desperate effort to convince him she was sleeping. He pulled the covers off of her and began fondling her, infecting her with his sickness once again, as he did nearly every night.
He smelled of alcohol and sweat and hopelessness and every time he abused her he swore it would be the last. She begged and pleaded to be left alone—“Daddy, how can you hurt me?”—but it was to no avail, as the twisted man continued to satisfy his twisted desires. It would never end. She awoke screaming and screaming and screaming.
Postcards from the Apocalypse Page 11