by Jeff Strand
Barry took another swing. Missed completely. This time, because his hands were so damn cold, he lost his grip and the tray flew against one of the shelves, clattering to the floor.
Ethan thrust the knife at him. Barry dodged, mostly. The blade wasn't buried hilt-deep in his gut, but it did make a really nasty slice in his side. Barry cried out.
There wasn't enough light for him to truly see the severity of the wound, but it hurt like crazy and it was spilling blood down his jeans. And he wet himself, so he had two streams of warm liquid running down his body.
This was it. He wasn't going to win this fight. The only strategy was to retreat.
He stumbled backwards, holding up his hands in surrender, not that he expected Ethan to say, "Oh, well, if you don't want to fight anymore, that's your right; it's a free country."
He was vaguely aware that by doing this, he was probably leading Ethan toward the four other innocent people in the freezer, and on a conscious level he knew he didn't want to do that, but his "survival at all costs" instinct had kicked in and he just needed to get away from that blade. He might not bleed out from this wound, necessarily, but one more good stab and he'd be finished.
Ethan giggled. "Hurt ya, did I? Didn't like my knife? Didn't enjoy that experience? I don't know why. Looks like fun to me."
Barry pressed his hand tight against his side. Oh, yeah, this wound was horrible. It was more important than ever that the cops break into the freezer, subdue Ethan, and drag him off to be hanged at dawn.
Ethan began to swing the knife through the air again, grinning. He took a step toward the others. "Anybody else want some? He's not saying so, but I think he did like it. I think it turned him on. Maybe we should do a boner check, huh?"
"Just leave," said Dana. "Just walk out of the freezer and go back to your friends."
"Oh, I will," said Ethan. "You people are too boring to hang out with for too much longer. I may leave one or two of you alive, just so you can tell the story. Or I might not. Might kill all of you. Might carve the story into one of your chests. Haven't decided yet."
"I volunteer to tell the story," said Trevor.
Ethan pointed the knife at him. "I like you, old man. I bet you're good at telling stories. Yeah, you can live, and one of the chicks can live—I haven't decided if it's the fat one or the skinny one yet. The little kid dies, though. Dies next. Hey, kid?"
Pete pressed himself against Dana, who put a protective arm around him.
"I'm talking to you. Kid, have you ever been to the doctor and had a shot?"
Pete said nothing.
"Answer me. It's an easy question. Has a doctor ever given you a shot?"
Pete nodded.
"Did it hurt?"
Pete nodded.
"But it didn't hurt much, right? Shots sound all scary, but it's really just a little pinch that's over in a second. And then you get a lollipop. If I gave you a shot, it wouldn't be such a big deal, would it?"
Pete shook his head.
"Unfortunately, I'm not going to give you a shot. I'm going to stab you with this knife. It's a lot bigger than a hypodermic needle, don't you think? It's going to hurt way more. I mean, way more. And I'm going to do it over and over and over until you're crying and dead. That sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?"
Pete pressed his face into Dana's side.
"Hey, when an adult asks you a question, it's rude not to answer. Respect your goddamn elders. I asked you if being stabbed to death with this knife sounded bad. What's your answer?"
Dana pulled her arm away from Pete and stepped in front of him.
"I still haven't made my decision about which chick to kill," said Ethan. "Could be you. It'll take more stabs, but I can do it. That what you want?"
"No," said Dana. "But when you threaten a child, you force me to be braver than I'd like."
"All right," said Ethan. "Be brave, then. Let's see how this plays out."
Dana walked toward him, moving in a fearless, no-nonsense manner. Barry would not have wanted to be her target, even if he was wielding a long bloody knife.
It was possibly just the cell phone illumination that made her so intimidating, but Barry was kind of worried that Ethan might detonate his vest just to avoid going one-on-one with her.
She swung the tray at his head, bashing him in the temple. Ethan smacked against the door, striking the back of his skull, and his eyes crossed in an almost cartoonish manner.
Was that it? Had Dana really won already? Barry was in too much pain to worry about feeling sheepish and inadequate, but...
Ethan lunged forward and plunged the knife into Dana's belly.
She let out a loud gasp, but didn't back down. She slammed the tray into his head again.
When Ethan stabbed her a second time, she dropped the tray.
She took a half-hearted swing at him with her fist, then fell to the floor.
Pete let out a shriek of horror.
"Let's get the son of a bitch!" said Trevor. "Why are we standing around? Let's get him!"
Barry was terrified and losing way too much blood, but screw it, Trevor was right. They'd been treating Ethan like the hero in a martial arts flick; going after him one at a time.
Barry and Trevor strode toward him. Vanessa followed. And, somehow, Dana was trying to get back up.
Ethan's sadistic smile faded. He still had his knife, but if the others wanted to beat him to death with metal trays, they were probably going to be able to do it.
He reached for the detonation trigger.
"I'll do it!" he warned. "I'll kill all of us!"
Barry, Trevor, and Vanessa hesitated. Dana did not. She got back up to her feet and reached for him.
Ethan pressed the trigger.
Nothing exploded.
His eyes widened and he frantically pressed it again and again.
"Shit," he whispered. "Shit, shit, shit."
Dana lunged at him and he moved out of the way. She spun around, revealing a blouse that was completely drenched with blood, and grabbed for him again, missing.
Ethan continued pulling the trigger, clearly in a complete panic.
Dana fell again.
"Stay away from me," said Ethan, as Barry, Trevor, and Vanessa resumed their forward movement. Ethan still had a knife, so they remained cautious, coming after him slowly, each of them sort of hoping that one of the other two would make the actual attack. (At least that's what Barry hoped; he supposed he couldn't speak for Trevor and Vanessa, but that's what their body language seemed to indicate.)
"I said, stay back!" Click, click, click. "You wanna die? You wanna die? I'll make that shit happen!"
Click, click, click, click...
And then the vest exploded.
FIVE
It was unclear how large of an area Ethan had intended to blow up if forced to enact Plan B. Presumably enough to take out a room full of cops if they rushed him. Barry's knowledge of explosives didn't go beyond lighting off bottle rockets on the Fourth of July and New Year's Eve, so seeing Ethan's vest of explosives really gave him no idea of the explosive power contained within.
What he did know, based on common sense, was that Ethan had intended for the vest to do a hell of a lot more damage than that.
Most likely only one stick of whatever he was using had actually exploded. Because though there was destructive power when the detonator finally kicked in, enough to rattle the freezer door, the only recipient was Ethan.
It blew off his right arm and the front half of his face. A shower of blood hit the door. Ethan stood there for a moment. His head tilted toward the spurting stump of his arm, though since neither of his eyes remained available, he could not have actually been checking out the severity of the injury.
A little bit of his jaw remained. He may or may not have been using it to try to speak, but there was certainly no sound coming forth, and a moment later he dropped to the floor.
Barry's ears were ringing so loudly that he could barely hear everybody else scre
aming. Yes, it was a good thing that Ethan was dead, but it had been a gruesome thing to witness, and he didn't blame the others for reacting with horror.
He stepped over some small bloody chunks of Ethan and knelt down beside Dana. He let her scream for a few more seconds, then put his hand over her mouth to encourage her to stop. She did.
"You okay?" he asked. It sounded like his voice was coming from twenty feet away.
Dana shook her head. "No."
"Me, either. But we'll live."
Vanessa walked over to the freezer door, her shoes squishing, and pulled down on the handle. It didn't budge.
"What the hell?" she asked, tugging on the handle several times.
"Let me try," said Trevor. He couldn't get the door open either.
"It seriously won't open?" Barry asked.
"Oh, it'll open," said Trevor. "We're just playing a very amusing joke on you."
"Who would've locked it?"
"Minnie?"
"Why?"
"To keep us safe? To keep Mr. No-More-Head here from getting out?"
"That doesn't make any sense."
"I'm not trying to work out a plausible motive. All I'm saying is that the damn door won't open."
Barry tried as well. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Maybe when the bomb went off, it messed up something in the locking mechanism," said Vanessa.
"No, no, no," said Barry. "I don't accept this. This is not okay with me."
He almost let out a scream of frustration, but no. He had to stay strong.
The freezer motor began to hum again and the lights came back on.
It hurt Barry's eyes for a moment, and he put a bloody hand over them to shield them. When his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he realized that the mess left by Ethan's demise was quite a bit worse than he'd thought. The guy had flat-out splattered. Barry slapped his hand over his mouth, and successfully resisted the urge to vomit. Vanessa was not as successful.
Barry's pants were covered with blood. Both the blood and urine were cold now, and he hoped that the blood would hide the fact that he'd pissed his pants.
"Did you pee yourself?" asked Pete. The first time the kid talked all day, and that's what he had to contribute to the conversation.
"No, it's blood," Barry told him.
"Why do you think the lights came on?" asked Trevor. "Is this good or bad?"
"I don't know," said Barry.
"Could be good, if somebody was concerned about us being frightened in the dark. Could be bad, if somebody wants us to freeze to death."
"It's probably bad," said Barry.
"I thought you were the one scolding Syllabus for his negative attitude."
"Well, I've become more cynical since getting stabbed with a hunting knife." Blood was trickling through Barry's fingers, but he wasn't feeling dizzy yet.
"Unless somebody objects," said Trevor, "I'm going to pound on the door."
"Be my guest."
Trevor pounded on the door with his fists a few times, then began to kick it. If the door really was just messed up from the explosion, they could probably pull it open if everybody worked together, but at the moment Barry felt like an intestine would pop out if he exerted himself.
"Dana, you still with us?" Barry asked.
She tried unsuccessfully to sit up. "Yeah." Her breathing was rapid, but a knife to the gut was a slow, lingering death, so though the clock was ticking on them getting out of here and receiving professional medical attention, they could wait this out a little bit longer. Of course, Dana had been stabbed in the gut twice. Maybe that death wasn't as slow.
"If somebody helpful had turned the freezer back on, they'd have opened the door already," said Barry. "Or we'd, you know, at least hear them trying to open it, if the lock is messed up like Vanessa said. I can't think of any reason that Minnie or Syllabus would turn it back on and not try to get inside, so we have to assume that it's one of the psychos."
"Or something automated," said Trevor.
"Yes. Something automated is actually a much better answer. Hopefully that's what it is instead of a psycho." Now Barry was starting to feel a bit dizzy. He shook it off. "I understand respecting the dead and stuff, but we need to borrow some clothes if Dana and I are going to stop ourselves from bleeding to death."
Ethan's clothes were the most accessible, but they were drenched in gore. Chad's clothes were still clean, except for blood around the collar.
"I'll help you," Trevor offered, as Barry went over to the shelf that contained Chad's corpse.
While Vanessa tapped away at her cell phone and Dana lay there bleeding, they got Psycho #1's body off the shelf without too much difficulty. It made Barry feel bad about how little manual labor he accomplished during the times in his life when he hadn't been stabbed in the side and had his arm slashed up with a broken bottle. His living room desperately needed new carpet. What was his excuse?
Stripping off Chad's clothes was a challenge, because his arms were already hard to move. Barry picked up the knife and sliced the shirt off instead. As he did so, Vanessa gave them a report. "They made it!"
"For real?" Barry asked.
"All of them! No, almost all of them. Minnie and Syllabus, they rushed into the main part of the grocery and they shot one of the attackers! There aren't any pictures but it says they shot him in the throat. They got out and they took four of the five hostages with them."
"Well, that is some surprisingly good news right there," said Trevor.
"Yeah," said Barry. "That's amazing! I can't believe it!"
Vanessa frowned.
"You're about to steal away our moment of happiness, aren't you?" asked Trevor.
"One attacker, the guy with the axe, is still in the grocery. And he still has the pregnant woman with him."
Barry sighed. "Well, if I were in his position, I'd keep the pregnant woman, too. Kudos to him for strong decision making." The joke was a little too much for Barry, and he coughed. He couldn't tell if he coughed up blood or not since there was so much already in his hand. "Does that mean we can leave? It's awful for her, but he's not really in a position to stop us from getting out of here, right? Not if we can get the door open."
"He's right outside."
"Oh. But we can still..." Barry trailed off.
Crap. It would be nice to think that the door was jammed, not locked, and that the freezer had turned itself back on as part of an automated system, but no, if there was a psycho outside with a pregnant hostage, it was way too much to hope that the other things were just coincidence.
"Do we know this for sure?" Barry asked.
"He tweeted a selfie with her."
"Are you kidding me?"
She held up her phone. It was a bad, blurry picture of a grinning creep holding a meat cleaver to a blonde woman's neck.
"That's the axe guy?" Barry asked.
"Yeah. Gary Planton."
"How do you tweet and keep a hostage?"
"It's not hard to tweet with one hand. He probably made a pretty convincing argument that she shouldn't try anything while he had the meat cleaver to her neck."
Barry realized that he'd been distracted from the task at hand. He wadded up Chad's shirt, then pressed it against the worse of Dana's two stab wounds, making her wince. "Hold that as tight as you can," he said. "I'll get you another one."
Dana nodded.
"He can't keep this up," said Barry. "Maybe if you're in a bank, and you've got a machine gun and a room full of hostages, sure, you can draw something like this out, but you can't hold a meat cleaver to a lady's neck and not get shot down."
"I don't know," said Trevor. "No matter how much good the cops do in this whole mess, if their sniper misses and a pregnant woman dies, they've got a PR nightmare."
"They've got a PR nightmare if they don't do anything and he murders her."
"It's bad either way, but it's worse if she dies as a direct consequence of their actions. I don't envy the poor bastard who has to make th
at call."
"So, essentially, he could hold her there and just wait for us to freeze to death. Rack up a higher body count by flipping a switch."
"That could be his intention," said Trevor. "The libtards sure won't outlaw walk-in freezers."
"Do you know what I came into the store for today?" asked Barry. "An avocado. One fucking avocado for one fucking BLT. I'm going to die because of an avocado."
"Worse things to die for."
Instead of tugging down Chad's pants, Barry cut them down each seam. Once this was over, there'd probably be some kind of headline on the Internet saying Deviant Hostage Caught In Sex Games With Deceased Captor, but he'd worry about that later.
He wadded up one of the pant legs and pressed it against Dana's other wound. He wondered if this was like those oxygen masks in airplanes, where you were supposed to put on your own mask before helping others, and that he should be taking care of his own injuries so he didn't die before he could assist Dana. He also wondered if planes actually had the oxygen masks. Who would ever know if they didn't? The corpses strewn around the crash site would never tell.
It was becoming harder to focus.
"You're doing great," he told Dana.
"Thank you."
"Seriously, I'm impressed." He didn't mind being her cheerleader. Kept his mind off his own horrific wounds.
Dana coughed and some flecks of blood appeared on her lips. "Patch yourself up," she told him.
Barry wrapped what remained of Chad's pants around his waist, making a simple knot and pulling it tight. This was a sad excuse for a bandage, but since they were locked in the freezer and not the pharmacy, it was the best he was going to get.
"We need more clothes," said Trevor.
It felt more disrespectful to cut away Mrs. Anderson's clothes than her husband's, so even though they had to take out Mrs. Anderson's body first to get to his, they decided it was worth it.
"Cold in there?" asked Vanessa.
"What?"
"That's what he tweeted. 'Cold in there?'"
"What a dick."
"It's that kind of sadistic little touch that's going to make it so hard for people to get on their side," said Trevor.
"Hold on," said Vanessa to Barry. "You're injured. You shouldn't be lifting anything. Let me do it."