by J. T. Warren
From far away, Mercy’s father was yelling. “Baby! Baby!”
Oh, yeah, baby, Victor thought and screamed against the last fluid fleeing from his body. He knew this was the most vulnerable he could be and that he had to be prepared for her to strike back but he couldn’t keep up his cognitive or physical acuteness. Not after such an amazing orgasm. His muscles went lax, his jaw dropped from her nose, and his mind entered that hazy grey world where thoughts were amorphous blobs that flooded in an empty vastness like clouds in an eternal sky.
Mercy’s hands slipped under his shirt and gripped his chest. For a moment, he thought she wanted more and he felt himself start to grow hard again but then her fingers morphed into claws that pierced his flesh in the gaps between his ribs. She didn’t have long fingernails--he had seen those fingers and the close-cropped, smoothed ends of her nails up close--but the pain that rolled out from her attack like a flood engulfing his lungs could have been from the talons of some long-clawed feline predator.
Fire pokers scorched from raging flames pushed deeper into his skin and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get even the smallest gasp of air down into his burning lungs. His dick went limp and fell from the warmth of Mercy’s sweet hole and that loss of connection was almost worse than the burning in his chest for a moment because it was a complete detachment from what was his and it rang of defeat and embarrassment, of all the times he had tried and failed, the times he had been ridiculed and belittled.
Then the pain blanked out everything in his mind and he was the primal beast once more. He smacked her across the face and her hands dropped from his chest. He smacked her again and laughed at how her head snapped from one side to the next.
“You dumb bitch,” he said through panting breath. “We could have been so great together.”
Mercy started to say something, some variation of “Fuck off,” no doubt, but he punched her in the face again and this time broke her nose. Blood pumped from her nostrils and Victor smeared it across her lips. “Taste it, you bitch,” he said.
Her father was at the tent, ripping at the fabric like an animal confused how to get inside, and yelling “Baby! Baby!”
Victor couldn’t help but laugh.
Mercy Higgins clamped her mouth around two of Victor’s fingers and yanked her head viciously side to side like a wild beast trying to tear chunks of meat off a carcass. He swung at her face again but the hit went wide and one of her legs had somehow gotten between his own and he had just enough time to register the danger before her knee came right up into his balls.
THIRTY-SIX
Mercy had once read a story in Reader’s Digest about a woman who had been attacked and raped in a parking lot and had thought she could simply endure it and be thankful it didn’t get any worse but when the rapist put a knife to her throat and said he was done with her and now she was done with her life, the woman fought back and tore out one of the assailant’s eyes. The article, entitled, “Eye for an Eye: A Survivor’s Tale” had seemed so fantastic that Mercy thought it must be exaggerated. No woman could be so tough after something so horrendous.
The strength that raged through her body was not born of anger or disgrace or fear. It was something far more basic, something that stretched back to the very beginning of humanity when the earliest cavemen tried to drag the earliest rape victims to their caves and those first feminists had fought back and discovered that man might be bigger and stronger but, if hit in just the right place, far more vulnerable than any woman.
Victor recoiled from the smack of her knee but he couldn’t pull completely away because she wouldn’t let up on his fingers. If some woman had gouged out a man’s eye, she could rip off this guy’s fingers. Then she’d get on top of him while he cried like a little baby and yank his ball sack right off his body. She could dangle it over his face, stuff it down his throat.
Those courageous thoughts vanished in another direct punch and she could no longer keep her bite on his fingers. He fell off to the side, however, and she had a chance to crawl out, run away, get to daddy and then she’d be safe. She heard him outside the tent, yelling for her. Why wasn’t he in here? Why wasn’t he saving his daughter?
She got to her knees and dizziness nearly toppled her. The opening of the tent was only a few feet away but the world in here was a swirling mess of dark blobs like she was dropping into a black hole. Her head felt like it had detached from her neck and was floating off into another dimension.
The flashlight was somewhere to her right. She threw herself in that direction and thought for sure she would tumble endlessly into a bottomless black pit. Instead, the hard earth stung her knees but that was okay, hell, that was great, and so much preferable to the warbling pain in her head and the throbbing misery between her legs. When she finally got to check herself down there, she feared it might be destroyed.
Her hands found the flashlight. The plastic casing was cold and fragile but solid enough. She turned it on and the beam blinded her for a moment. She spun around and there was Victor grinning at her, blood on his chin. My blood, she thought, from my fucking nose. And there was his dick, dangling between his hairy legs and getting hard again. No, please, dear Jesus, how could he be ready to go again? She had just kneed him as hard as she could. He was supposed to be disabled, unable to breathe, helpless.
She screamed or groaned or something and lunged toward the entrance to the tent. Her hands tangled in something and she thought wildly that Victor had set a trap and that there was no escape, no escape from this madman, and then she realized it was her jeans. She grabbed them.
The end of the tent flung open and there was daddy with a stronger flashlight. His whole face was wide with fear and confusion. His head whipped side to side as if the tent were huge rather than a mere few feet wide. He saw her, she knew he did, and then he looked away as if he couldn’t process what he was seeing.
“Daddy!” she cried.
“Mercy?” he said like he had forgotten what she looked like.
“Help!”
The other guy, Caleb, with the broad shoulders, was behind Daddy, almost towering over him and that was great because Victor stood no chance against both men. He might be able to fight her father but not both. They would tackle him, tie him up with bungee cords and then drag him down the mountain and call the police. She could relax now. Everything was going to be okay.
Caleb’s arm came around her father’s neck as if Caleb were trying to stop Daddy from doing something stupid and she figured that was probably smart. They couldn’t kill Victor. If they did, this would turn into some kind of update of Deliverance with the three of them burying Victor’s body and then trying to control their paranoia that the cops were going to find out, find out and lock them all away for the rest of their lives. All for killing some shit head rapist.
“Mercy!” Daddy yelled.
Caleb’s arm tightened over his throat. “Whoa there, Hoss,” Caleb said like he was some fucking cowboy.
“Please!” Mercy said in a voice on the verge of hysteria.
Her father realized what Caleb was doing and grabbed his arm. “Get off of me,” he yelled.
“Afraid I can’t do that,” Caleb said. His body jerked forward and Daddy screamed, his own body slumping forward at the hips as if his back had given out.
“Daddy!”
He dropped to his knees, Caleb maintaining his wrap around the throat. Daddy ground his teeth against some intense, unseen pain. His eyes rolled frantically in all directions as if looking for some escape hatch from this sudden trap of pain.
“Mercy,” he said, only now it was less her name than the desperate plea of an injured, vulnerable man.
He reached for her but she couldn’t move. This was too much to process. It wasn’t happening, that was all. Victor was still on top of her, having his way with her, and she was off in some other now where the horror continued to unfold in the sinister corners of her mind where nightmares reigned.
When her father fell forward on
to the ground, Caleb held the knife so the body slid free. Light glinted off the blade in the small gaps that blood hadn’t obscured.
“What an annoying fuck,” Caleb said and stared at Mercy. “Is it my turn yet?” His smile was the most horrifying thing she had ever seen.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Victor wished Mercy could appreciate the moment from his point of view. If fear and panic hadn’t destroyed her mind, she might be able to admire how well this plan had progressed. Instead, she was in the clutches of white hot fear, nothing more than a cornered animal desperate to escape.
He could push aside the pain emanating through him; he had learned to do that many years ago. Later he would suffer the crippling spasms and full-body seizures, but not now, not with the adrenaline flushing his veins. Even so, he knew how to keep control, to harness that primal strength, to not be rash and do something stupid.
Caleb stepped into the tent and got to his knees. He was completely focused on Mercy but his brain was flooded with the fantasy of rape, so he didn’t register the flashlight clutched in the girl’s hand as a weapon. Its light flickered on his face, distorting his features like a facade in a dream, but it was Caleb who was in the dream. He was overcommitting out of desperate longing.
Victor was not surprised when Mercy brought the flashlight straight up into Caleb’s chin in a quick, powerful arc. Caleb’s jaw snapped shut on a sliver of tongue and his head rocked back as if he had slammed it against a wall. It had been too easy for her to catch him off guard, too easy for her to disable him and scramble on her knees for the exit.
“You fucking idiot,” Victor said without surprise.
Caleb responded in single-syllable moans while he clutched his face and rocked back and forth on the ground like a traumatized child.
Mercy’s white ass glowed in the tent doorway for a moment, a small moon just for his pleasure, and then she was gone.
Victor pulled up his pants, secured the belt and went after her.
He made it halfway out before the girl’s father screamed to life and grabbed him around the waist. His fingers latched onto Victor’s belt and pulled him back inside the tent. Victor tried to yank free of his grip but the old man’s last gasp was a mighty one.
“My daughter,” he said through clenched teeth. “My baby.”
Victor rolled onto his back and kicked the man across the face with his bare foot. The grip came loose and Victor could reposition above him. He punched him across the face twice and waited for another retaliation.
“My baby,” he said as if in a dream.
“No,” Victor said. “Mine.”
With that, he punched the man again, knocking him into unconsciousness.
Caleb was still groaning like a pathetic puppy that had been kicked against a wall. “If you want her, you better get your ass out here and help,” Victor said.
The nighttime air was a cool blast that gave him renewed strength as if something potent had been injected into his blood.
Mercy had run to the far end of the camp where the trail continued up to the summit. She’d stopped to put on her jeans. She was fumbling with the second leg, trying not to fall. Victor did not run after her.
He had the upper hand. The key was to not lose it.
THIRTY-EIGHT
In fourth grade, firemen had visited Mercy’s school to give a presentation on fire safety. Most of the kids slept through the lecture on what to do in the case of a fire emergency and then came alive when it was time to investigate the truck like a piece of playground equipment and then stand back in awe at the awesome power of the fire hose. For Mercy, however, the notes on safety in an emergency held her rapt. She didn’t want Mommy and Daddy to burn to death in their own home. She created mapped-out escape routes in crayon on construction paper. Her parents humored her until she tried to have a fire drill at one in the morning. “But the fireman said we need to be prepared,” Mercy told her mother who looked like she had been beaten with a stick, one eye partially closed and twitching with sleep. “We have to practice what we’d do in an emergency. The fireman said--” but her mother hadn’t cared what the fireman said. If there was a fire, they’d get out. She didn’t need any early morning drills to know how to escape her own home.
This memory came back to her now and she almost laughed at the silly girl she had been and then started crying for her poor mother, who had only another ten years left to live, just ten and of those ten, how many restful nights would she have? And young Mercy had ruined one with her stupid drill. But it had been for a good reason. As the fireman said,
“In the event of an emergency, don’t think--respond.”
Mercy pulled on one leg of her jeans but her foot tangled in the opposite leg.
Drills conditioned the mind to respond to disaster. Schools had fire drills and tornado drills and lockout drills and lockdown drills, but they had never told her what to do if the event of a rape. Especially not when it happened on some damn mountain late at night.
Victor had come out of the tent but he’d gone to where they had been sitting before. At first she thought he was confused and that maybe he would wander right off into the woods searching for her, but then the flickering flames of the fire cast his hands in orange as they snatched up his hiking bag.
The two small fires in this large clearing conjured images of Satanic ceremonies. She could almost see the robe-clad worshippers circling the fires and chanting and a pair of pale arms raising a naked baby into the air as if the hand of God should come down and retrieve it.
You’re drifting, her mind scolded. You should be responding.
She should be fucking running.
She jammed her second leg through the pant leg and yanked up her jeans. The course fabric scratched her ass like sandpaper and ignited a fresh wave of pain in her crotch as if a lit firework had been crammed up there.
Might as well have been, she thought.
She turned to the trail before her and the distant peak of the mountain that was now a black splotch in a dark sea of sky but before she could take that first lunge of freedom, Caleb emerged from the tent and screamed something jumbled and distorted, something people wouldn’t quite catch unless they knew what was going on.
“Buuuuuiiiiiiiissssshhhhh!” Caleb screamed, by which he meant, bitch!
This monstrous cry held her in place as if hypnotizing her. Caleb lunged toward her in a haphazard stagger and at first it seemed like he might fall and maybe she’d get lucky and he’d knock himself out, but then his gait evened out and he evolved from ambling zombie to determined sprinter.
“YOU BITCH!” This time his words were much clearer.
She ran.
THIRTY-NINE
Victor might have laughed if there wasn’t a risk that Caleb might royally fuck this up. Caleb stumbled into a run, screaming like a wild man full of injured pride and bestial rage. Mercy watched him for a second and it almost seemed like she might wait for him, take him on face to face, but then she fled. It was the wiser move. But it made no difference to Victor. He had everything he needed.
He slipped two knives into his belt and kept another, the eight-inch work knife with the serrated inside edge and VD carved on the handle, in hand. The black, brass knuckles were cold against his skin. There were two flashlights in the bag: a Maglite and a flood. He chose the Maglite, the type Troopers carried for peering into cars in the dead of night. He had once purchased night vision goggles that, priced under a hundred dollars, had seemed too good to be true, and they had cracked in half the second time he used them. It would have been an unfair advantage, anyway. Primitive man did not have the luxury of technology. His eyes were getting better in the dark, anyway. Eventually, he wouldn’t need the flashlight. Although the flashlight offered other advantages.
Caleb vanished into the woods after Mercy. He was still screaming that she was a bitch and he was going to kill her. The sound echoed through the night like the distant call of some nocturnal beast.
Victor put on his
boots. His feet were accustomed to this mountain and soon boots would be completely unnecessary. The soles of his feet were already thick pads of flesh that could withstand rocks and branches but boots gave him the extra protection he needed for what could become a prolonged hunt through the woods. And they were an excellent weapon, too.
He once found an injured crow on this mountain. One of its wings was cocked at a weird angle and wouldn’t fully extend. The bird tried desperately to get airborne with its sole-working wing but managed only to hop in circles. Victor stepped to it and the bird beat that single wing even more frantically. He watched it flap harder and harder until it ceased the struggle and appreciated Victor as if he might be its salvation.
The first stomp of his boot broke its neck. The second burst open the bird’s chest with a spew of guts.
He laughed at that.
Soon he’d be laughing in much the same way.
Victor Dolor headed across the open field to the path that wormed its way up the mountain and toward the black sky.
FORTY
The beam of her flashlight faded by degrees with every hard-footed lunge. The path ahead was clear but far from straight and the naked arms of branches protruded into the path, growing more imposing and sinister as the light dimmed. They were the skeletal arms of all the victims Victor had raped and murdered up here. They had come alive and instead of trying to save her, they wanted to seize her with their barbed arms and keep her in place so they could watch as Victor raped her again and then beat her to death. They’ll be laughing when he does it, she thought.
Mercy ran up the trail, grunting at the pain in her legs and crotch. The dying light wobbled before her like a psychotic vision before a patient collapsing into a seizure.