by Rod Kackley
This one could turn out to be a problem.
Bree could tell that this kid knew how to fight and he probably loved combat at least as much as she did.
There was no doubt in Bree’s mind that he wanted to hurt her. She had seen that look on Steven’s face.
She knew that this boy wanted to hurt her as much as she wanted to hurt him.
Bree was in for the fight of her life.
There would be pain. She was sure of that. This boy was going to hurt her. Bree had learned how to take a punch. She knew the taste of blood in her mouth after getting hit or kicked in the face. The difference this time was that this boy would love it. If she was going to come out of this alive, Bree had to be willing to kill him.
That wouldn’t be a problem.
She looked up at his face about a foot above hers. His shoulders stretched his blue t-shirt to its limit. Bree could see the outline of his pecs through the shirt and couldn’t help but notice he had a nice ass. Any other time she would have lusted after all of the above. Bree didn’t have time for love, but lust was very high on her priority list. Just because she didn’t give it away didn’t mean she wouldn’t do some give and take.
This was different. This time the guy’s build was trouble. The shoulders and chest didn’t interest Bree as much as the boy’s ass. It meant he had some strength in his legs and that is where his real power would come from, especially if they started wrestling. If he was able to grab her, it might all end too quickly.
Yeah, well, I’ve got a nice ass too.
His forearms and wrists were thick for a high school kid. More trouble. If he grabbed hold of Bree, she was never going to get free. Not until she was bloody or worse.
Bree knew there was only one way to bring this prick down. His shins. Funny how the human shin bone was perfect to deliver a quick kick to the nuts. It was strong that way, the perfect weapon. But for some reason it could also snap like a number-two pencil at final exam time if it got hit just right.
Bree had never done it, but she had seen it happen. She remembered the sound. She would never forget the look of pain on the face of the kid whose leg had broken.
Two more potential targets were his knees. They looked kind of bony as he bounced on the balls of his feet, left foot forward, right foot to the back, weight evenly balanced between the two.
Bree almost froze when she saw the look of a predator in his eyes. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
Neither was she.
They were equals in combat.
The kids circled around them chanting quietly for blood. They wanted a fight. They wanted to see blood. They loved the pain, not receiving or even giving, but watching was another story. Some identified with the victim, some with the victor. For all of them there was an incredible fascination with pain and adrenalin.
Bree bounced on the balls of her feet keeping them shoulder width apart, not locking into a boxer’s stance yet, unwilling to show him which hand, foot, elbow, or knee would be her lead weapon.
She bounced about an inch off the ground, nodding her head from the left to the right and back again, breathing deeply, getting ready for the combat. Getting ready for the pain. Getting ready to hurt and be hurt.
Bree wasn’t sure if he felt that way, but he sure looked like he did.
The boy took a shuffle step forward, sliding his left foot, stabbing at Bree with his left fist. This is where her size helped. Bree was so short she easily moved back and under the left jab, pivoting on the ball of her right foot, she kicked with her left, and hit his shin perfectly.
Only ninety-eight pounds of fury true, but it was all directed in one spot. Bree got his right shin. The leg that was locked. The shin that broke. The leg that snapped.
He shrieked. The kids stopped breathing. They had expected broken, bloody noses, faces purple with bruises, wet with tears and snot, flushed with humiliation and pain.
This was different.
However, this was still Bree. So, this was just the beginning.
The instant the prick hit the ground, saliva drooled out of his mouth, his face rippled with pain. He held on to his broken, dangling, compound-fractured leg with both hands, his eyes pleading for mercy.
Mercy.
That word was not in Bree’s vocabulary.
She jumped on his chest, each of her knees holding down an arm, and started punching down with both fists, one after the other.
Bree kept her wrists straight. She didn’t work too hard. She let gravity do the heavy punching.
Bree realized this prick didn’t know where he was anymore. She kept punching. She could tell when he lost consciousness. Somewhere along the way of this beating he lost control of his bladder. Then his bowels cut loose.
She was beating him to death.
His mind was gone. It was in a place of happiness, at least a place of nothingness.
Bree didn’t know where she was anymore, either. Totally consumed by the moment. Her knuckles felt like they were being pushed back into her wrists. Then she couldn’t feel her hands anymore, just her wrists and her forearms, and her shoulders, she was putting everything she had into this beating.
She saw the prick’s face. It switched to Steven’s face at some point. And that is when she totally lost control.
Someone pulled her up and off. Maybe a couple of people. On her way off the bloody mess that she had left in the parking lot, Bree kicked and connected, once, twice, and three times.
Her victim was feeling no pain anymore. He wouldn’t feel a thing for three weeks. Such was the blessing of a coma.
It was a hushed crowd that walked slowly away that night. It was sometime after midnight. Nobody bothered checking. Nobody would be parking for a quick piece that evening. Nobody would sleep well that night.
Bree, on the other hand, would sleep fine. She would load up with ludes and valium and slept as peacefully as she could remember. The adrenalin had been like nothing she had ever felt.
It wasn’t the fighting, or the hand-to-hand combat that got Bree off, it was the winning.
Victory really was better than sex.
But this time, this time with the plastic shrunk around her face and sucked into her mouth, this time she was in real trouble.
This was worse than Steven in the shower or in her bed at home. Those times Bree gave a little to get a lot.
But, suddenly Bree was not winning. Bree was losing. And even worse, this time Bree was thinking something that had never before crossed her mind.
This time Bree was thinking she just might give up.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bree had style. She had swagger. She never lost it.
It was the kind of hot, sticky St. Isidore night that pushed any memory of the heavy December snows out of mind and even rolled back the imminent possibility of autumn.
Bree was covered with a thin sheen of perspiration that made her nipples stand out through her white t-shirt and glistened on the cheeks of her butt that peeked out under her shorts.
Bree felt hot. She felt erotic. She had never had full-bore, legs in the air, “I am so in love with you, lose all inhibitions, break-the-bed, sex,” that she dreamed of in her weaker moments.
To Bree, sex was just a tool to be used to control others. But Bree couldn’t imagine it would feel any better than how she felt that night.
The buzz. The rush. The death.
Life’s a bitch, then you die, Bree would think with a shrug of her shoulders.
And now, with the plastic bag over her head, that cliche was becoming reality.
The instant that plastic bag went over her head, Bree had to make up her mind. Did she want to live, or did she want to die?
She could have either. She could accept one. She could fight for the other.
Bree chose life. She had never wanted life so much. She chose the fight, the battle, the combat. This is what Bree lived for.
Elbows jabbed back and found soft flesh. She saw the feet on the outside of hers and brought her right heel
down as hard as she could where the toes of the stranger’s foot had to be.
“Fighting for your life, there must be nothing like it. It must be like the smell of napalm in the morning that the guy in that movie about the Vietnam War was talking about,” Bree told a friend.
The kids were there again, drawn by the shrieks of combat, the sound of bone on flesh, the sound of battle. Every kid who watched the first fight was watching the second. Every kid who hung with Bree watched. Two fights in one night. The best free entertainment they could get in St. Isidore.
Every kid who used Bree when she thought she was using them stood and watched.
Not one kid lifted a finger to help Bree.
There was something about watching the King get knocked off the top of the hill they liked.
Not one kid felt her pain without enjoying it.
Bree’s head turned into a weapon. She snapped it back and hit something hard, something that felt so good to her that Bree did it again. The second time she felt something break. She heard a crack. She felt wetness. Something damp on the back of her neck.
Bree had chosen life. She was fighting for her life. This was better than punching out some nerd in the parking lot. This was life and death. She howled into the night. Not from pain. Not from fear, but from joy.
Bree was also afraid she had finally gotten into a fight that she couldn’t win. That was part of the thrill, too. This was a new thrill.
The boys were always as much afraid of hurting her as they were of getting hurt, all except the kid earlier that night.
But even that boy was different from this guy who had jerked her up off her feet and was threatening to throttle the air out of her lungs.
Bree knew she could be knocking on death’s door with this guy.
There was a bag over her head, but nothing holding back her arms and legs, her hands and feet. Bree was able to reach back up over her head and scrape his dry bald scalp as deep as she could with her fingernails. There were no limits. She would scrape, scratch and claw.
“It doesn’t matter what you bite off, as long as you can spit it out,” Bree said over the lunch table in school one day. Not too many boys wanted to fight her after that.
But this wasn’t a boy she was fighting.
This was a man.
Bree hadn’t seen this guy’s face. But she who it was and she knew he was an ugly man with nothing left to lose. That couldn’t be a good thing.
“Bitch. You fucking bitch,” the voice screamed as his spit and blood hit the back of her head and slid down her neck.
The voice threw a left arm around her neck and pulled back to keep her in check and enact a little choking punishment.
“Quiet down. Nobody wants to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want you to break.”
“Fuck you,” Bree managed to choke out as her world started to spin again.
She could see the kids standing in a circle. She saw her friends. None of them were even thinking about helping Bree. Some were shocked. Some were scared. None were repulsed. Some seemed to be enjoying it. Bree realized her mother had been right.
The guy who put the bag over her head realized it too. He didn’t have a thing to worry about. There were witnesses, but there was no one who cared.
Bree realized that too, and she surrendered. She saw little bright pinpoints of light behind her eyelids which were closed tight.
The last things she saw were the looks on the faces around her. The last thing she thought was, they really don’t care.
Bree woke up enough to hear the trunk of a car open. Bree knew if she got shoved into it and the lid went down, she would never get home alive.
Suddenly, it didn’t matter whether those kids were friends.It didn’t matter that she hated her mother and Steven. Nothing mattered except life.
Bree didn’t have to think about it.
It was in her nature, her DNA. Bree fought like a wildcat. Every inch of her being was alive, with very ounce of her strength and energy going into her arms, legs, feet and hands.
Her legs were being duct taped together. Her arms were already taped behind her back. But she squirmed, twisted and kicked out with both legs like one of those Asian carps that were bigger than Kate and Mary Olsen. Bree was fighting in a different weight class. Asian carp were so big and ugly that anyone who hooked one learned a real life lesson.
Never hook an ugly fish. They’ve got nothing left to lose, either.
It was time for Bree to get ugly. She had nothing left to lose. Except her life. She decided that would not be taken easily.
Bree twisted, squirmed and wriggled with such force that the guy who had turned this into the worst night of her life dropped her.
She hit the concrete hard, and her head bounced off the car’s bumper on the way down.
The impact of skull, first on steel then on concrete, took the fight out of Bree, again. This time it wasn’t up to her. She went in and out of a blessedly peaceful, warm place. So quiet. So perfect.
Heaven for a split second. Then back inside the trunk of the car that was suffocatingly hot and humid.
Motor oil, old rags, a spare tire in the middle of her back, the putrid smell of exhaust and then slamming and banging over every pothole in St. Isidore.
Bree prayed for relief. Bree prayed for escape. Bree prayed for entry into that blessed place where all was right with her world. Bree knew what it was to be able to escape to a happier place in her mind.
She had to do it most nights when she was lying alone in bed holding her breath, after giving up to another assault by Steven. Sometimes he would make it even worse by kissing her good night.
It was after the kiss and hearing his heavy steps in the hallway back to her mom’s bedroom that Bree would have to choke back tears.
She never cried, though. Not once.
But now, Bree heard an unfamiliar sound in the trunk of that car. A sound that Bree only remembered from a long, long time ago. It was the sound of her crying. Bree was crying, which made the plastic only stick tighter to her face, her nose and her mouth.
Bree wanted that plastic to get sucked right down into her throat. She wanted the pain to end forever. No more “good nights” from Steven after he asked her if it was good for her, too. No more wondering if anyone really liked her or loved her.
No more.
Ever.
This is the time, Bree thought to herself, that I get to choose.
This is the time she had to choose. What would it be? This life as she knew it, and she knew it sucked. Or something else?
The car hit a huge pothole. The rear of the car flew into the air. Bree’s head snapped up and hit the trunk lid, then back down to hit the bottom of the trunk.
The stars and pinpoints of light were back. Bree knew she was losing consciousness. Bree welcomed it. But, Bree also chose life.
She had never let any of the bastards win. She was not going to let this bastard win.
She would fight.
She would live.
Bree was ready to create a new life.
CHAPTER NINE
Tim had enough tokens to last until noon. Like most days, he was able to get up by the crack of ten and went right to the MacBook Air, his gateway to the wonderful world of Jennifer.com, his favorite peep show of the twenty-first century.
He always picked the Teen Girls tab. They looked so fresh. There was not a single one who could be over nineteen. Tim figured some were illegal, but also assumed the company’s full disclosure that all were eighteen or over would protect him in court if it ever came to that.
Right. Like I am worried, he keyed on to a Jennifer message board.
Until the world wide web opened a whole new world of pornography to Tim, he had been relegated to a dirty, grungy, you don’t even want to know what that sticky stuff on the floor is, porno shop on the wrong side of St.Isidore.
His quarters had been dropped into those peep show slots and spray-painting his soo
n-to-die little baby sperm on the booth walls for years.
Tim had grown up in those cubicles, dreaming of girls. Remembering the one girl that he really loved. The one girl he knew he could never have again. A girl no one could have again, ever.
Whether it was a 1970s peepshow or a 2013 internet show, the experience was never as good as the real thing. But since Tim had trouble remembering the real thing, it came really close to good enough.
Tim never stopped looking for the real thing. He couldn’t live on the Web. He knew that. There was no replacing the real thing.
Besides who wanted to do that? Tim lusted for more.
So Tim had taken to staking out St. Isidore High School, “My former place of employment,” he told his friend Paul.
“I know. You don’t have to tell me that. I won’t forget.”
“I still can’t believe they booted me out,” said Tim. “No trial. No hearing. No nothing.”
“They railroaded you,” Paul said. “Everyone just believed that girl. They really didn’t have any evidence.”
“No, they didn’t. They only knew what the bitch told them,” Tim said. “Those fuckers believed it. How could they be so stupid?”
Paul nodded in agreement, but he was getting really tired of this conversation. They seemed to have it every two days. Tim always railed against the injustice of the charges against him. One woman in her twenties accused him of nearly raping her when she was a student of his in high school.
Tim was right. There had not been any real evidence. It was his word against her word. Yet, Tim caved. He took an early retirement with a half-pension.
Discretion became the better part of his perversion.
What more did he want? Paul wondered. No court and no jail.
There was no penalty, except he couldn’t teach high school biology — which Tim always hated, anyway. But Paul knew what really hurt was that Tim didn’t get to coach the girls’ basketball team. No more helping the girls in the weight room. No more helping the girls who suffered strained muscles with massages. No more girls being surprised in the showers.