Blood Mountain

by J. T. Warren

  “You buuuuiiiiiissssshhhh!” Caleb screamed not far behind her, but far enough to offer hope.

  The trail steepened. She bent forward as she ran and let her feet try to dig into the mountain for leverage. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realized she wasn’t wearing her boots. She had taken them off before entering the tent. Victor must have smiled at that. Even if she runs, dumb bitch will break all her toes, maybe even an ankle.

  There was pain there, in her feet, but not so great as to block out the burning fire pokers in her groin. She could weep over her mangled feet later. If she survived.

  That if, the great and only if that ever mattered, injected her with the extra adrenaline to keep scaling the mountain, keep moving up and up toward some distant plateau where the only escape was off a steep edge or down into the soil.

  With the flashlight nearly useless and branches scratching at her face and arms, Mercy began to form a plan. It wouldn’t be anything miraculous or impressive, but if it worked maybe it could be considered both. Victor was coming after her, she knew that, but Caleb was the immediate threat. He was enraged and hollering out all his pain at her in a pledge of vengeance, but he was also injured and that made him vulnerable.

  She clutched the trees lining the path and launched herself up the mountain, propelling herself ever forward. How long would it take to get to the top? Might it take hours? If so, how the hell could she maintain this pace? She would collapse well short of the top and then Caleb would be on her and even if she managed to stop him, Victor would be close behind.

  She couldn’t think about that. Those were the worries of her cynical voice, which had gone quiet for once in her life. That’s because it doesn’t need to say anything, she thought. You know you’re fucked.

  She wouldn’t accept that. No. She would not surrender. Not fall at the hands of two deranged men. Cancer had taken her mother but she had fought to the terrible end. She had, several weeks before that day of final gasps that dragged out interminably told Mercy that she would keep fighting. This cancer isn’t going to get the best of me, she said. I’m going to show it how tough a bitch I can be.

  Mercy had fought tears when her mother said that to her but the memory now was like a glorious pre-game speech from a coach who truly believed that if the team took the field with all the confidence of winners there was no way they could leave it as anything but.

  How tough a bitch can I be? Mercy wondered.

  Grinding her teeth against the pain radiating from below her waist and still throwing herself up this damn mountain, Mercy felt the hard strength of complete confidence empower her.

  “Tough as you want,” she said.

  FORTY-ONE

  Victor’s fingers hurt like hell. His balls had calmed from raging pain to a dull, almost detached sensation of numbed hurt, but the two fingers Mercy had bit throbbed like they were engorged to the size of plump diner sausages. Luckily they were the first two fingers on his left hand. He could make do without them. He could make do without the whole hand if necessary, but the pain was impressive. He had suffered many indignities of pain throughout his life but in only a few seconds, that bitch had trumped them all with a simple bite. The pain had been too great to carry both the flashlight and the knife. The blade with the carefully polished wooden handle joined the other blades along his belt.

  Walking up the path at a quick, though not frantic, pace, Victor dared to shine the light on his injured hand. The fingers were swollen like they had been injected with some kind of filling that stretched the skin to the breaking point. His knuckles were faded creases in tubes of flesh and would not bend no matter how hard he strained. As if the joints had fused together.

  Her teeth had broken through the skin just beneath the middle knuckles and ripped the flesh into a jagged, bleeding mess. The bones shone impossibly white against the fresh blood. If he wanted, Victor might be able to slide the flesh right off the bones as easily as removing a glove.

  Fucking bitch. Before he sliced her throat, he would cut off all her fingers. Stuff them in her mouth and up her broken nose. Then he’d piss on her. Maybe even rape her again before finally destroying her.

  He stopped. Caleb was screaming up ahead. His yells rolled through the quiet night with greater and greater insanity as if the trees were coming alive and hollering for blood. Victor could not let himself become another shouting madman. He had to remain calm, keep his crazed fantasies in check. Mercy had been clever and determined enough to escape into the woods and if let rage boil his mind, she might gain the upper hand once more. That once more might be all it would take.

  The name of the game was calm, not crazy. She was probably launching herself up the mountain as fast as she could. She’d run out of steam pretty quickly. The mountain’s summit was a fair distance off with many steep sections that required patience to scale. She was not going to make it very far.

  Even if she stopped at the cutout overlooking the town below, there was still nowhere to hide. The scenic lookout was a three-sided cliff with jagged rocks marking the drop all the way to the bottom.

  He knew this place and she was just a stupid woman.

  Victor took several deep breaths and continued up the mountain.

  FORTY-TWO

  Even tough bitches felt pain and that pain knew no bounds. The agony in her crotch had been the lead horse in the race of pain but her thighs were gaining on that horse and now her nose, a long-trailing contender, was galloping harder and harder, vying for the coveted lead position and right along with it was the race-fatigued head pain, always a participant, seldom a winner’s circle celebrant.

  Every breath she dared take through her nose lit her nostrils on fire and that burning flared through her head as if electric shocks were zipping across the surface of her brain. She grunted against these shocks and screamed strength into her arm muscles to keep grabbing the trees but those muscles were burning and shaking and deteriorating to Jell-O. On top of it all, finally here came the misery of her poor feet. A big toe broken against a rock. A deep gash through the sole of her foot that could have been a giant carving knife laid as a trap.

  Maybe Victor had set up traps. What if she was headed right where he wanted her to go? What if she made it all the way to the top of this mountain only to fall into some pit he had dug or step right into a bear trap? She would have to gnaw off her own foot.

  That image released a flutter of cackles.

  Now, you sound mad, she thought. Mad woman Mercy.

  She could be a superhero like Wonder Woman only slightly crazed and out to castrate every male in the world. She’d wear a red cape and her weapon of choice would be a giant pair of gardening shears.

  More laughter and her muscles nearly gave out in collective capitulation. No, no, no. She had to keep her wits and find that strength buried deep within her. She had to make it to the top of this fucking mountain and once there she could . . . could what?

  “Chop some fucking balls,” she said and that did it.

  As a child she had loved laughing so hard at jokes that the laughter constricted her breathing and pain radiated through her lungs with intense pleasure. She’d fall into those fits at some joke and then forget why she was laughing but her emphatic tear-inducing peals of joy were self-propagating and she could laugh at nothing but her own laughter for several minutes before her lungs insisted that they needed air. In such throes, she was helpless, vulnerable.

  When new cackles morphed into all-out laughter, she did not reminisce on her hilarious laughing fits of childhood with fondness but focused on the vulnerability it presented and that brought fear. Tough bitches didn’t laugh. Tough bitches didn’t let themselves be vulnerable. Yet, somehow, the intense certainty that Caleb was going to jump out of the darkness and stomp her head into the ground like it was a watermelon only made her laugh harder.

  “Bitch!” Caleb yelled, much closer now. “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!”

  Bring those balls, she wanted to yell. Bring them here because I�
��ve got my shears!

  She fell onto her side laughing and rolled against a lush evergreen tree that seemed to vibrate in the night as if it were an angel. An angel tree come to watch the great Mad Woman Mercy chop some balls.

  Her laughter was a torrential deluge on The Kentucky Derby of Pain. All the horses had gone back to their stables and just as Head Pain was about to pull off the upset of the season.

  In her rolling fit of laughter, Mercy knew this apparent lunacy was panic borne from exhaustion and genuine fear. Even so, it was kind of funny to be laughing when you were about to die. People probably wouldn’t accept such a reaction as genuine but not everybody knew what it was like to be raped and hunted like an animal. Laughter might be the sanest response.

  For a quitter maybe, a new voice said in her mind. Not just any voice, though. It was Mommy again. I never had a chance, she said. But I still fought. If you give up, I might as well have never fought to live as long as I did. I should have just killed myself.

  That stopped the laughter as if it were water flowing from a spigot that had finally been shut off. She could laugh about this all she wanted. But not until later. Perhaps in some psychiatric ward. So be it.

  “Fuckers,” she hissed and got back to her feet.

  The horses were coming out of their stables again.

  She started back up the path and stopped. The evergreen was glowing like a cutout set before a flood light. Not a floodlight, though. It was the moon.

  She went to the tree and then pushed through its branches into a luminescent world where angels might actually tread.

  FORTY-THREE

  Victor’s mother loved playing hide and seek. It is the earliest memory he has of his mother. She would sit in the big red chair in the living room, the chair she called ‘Your Highness’ because it looked like something a Queen might use, and count to thirty. He would run around the house until there were five seconds left and then he’d jump into the bathtub or squirm under the bed or cram himself in the back corner of his closet. Then she’d come find him.

  She would stand right where he hid, on the other side of the shower curtain, beside the bed, or right outside the closet and wonder aloud where her little man had gone. He’d start giggling and then she’d reach in with her long arms and drag him out and he would be laughing hysterically even before the tickling began.

  This went on for years. Sometimes she would hide and he’d have to find her. He found her once in the bathroom, completely naked, her body pale and spotted with red blots as if she were allergic to something. When he ran away, she called him back but he didn’t want to see his mother like that. He couldn’t help his eyes from taking in her drooping breasts and the dark patch of hair between her legs. The image would be with him forever.

  Yet that was only the beginning.

  She went after him. Found him in his closet, reached in with her sinewy arms and pulled him out, one hand gripped in his hair, the other on his wrist. Face to face with his naked mother, he kept his eyes shut and begged her to let him go. “First you have to do something for mommy,” she said. “Then you can go hide again.”

  Then she started her lessons on the importance of being charming. Of seduction.

  For years afterward, hide and seek meant Mommy needed something only her darling little boy could give her. By the time Victor was a teenager, he could give her what she wanted without trying to run away and hide. He knew how to send his mind somewhere else, off into a place he thought of as Elsewhere, while his body did what had to be done. While he gave Mommy her “prize.”

  Mommy had been a bitch but he’d been too cowardly to do anything about it. Eventually he’d wizened up. Now, Mommy was playing a game of hide and seek where no one was ever going to find her.

  Mercy was playing the same game, only she didn’t know it. But when he found her, Victor would not need to go to Elsewhere to do what had to be done. He would stay right here in this world and let that stupid bitch get what she had coming.

  The flashlight dangled in his good hand. The white spotlight was a ghost orb keeping pace with him over uneven terrain. He didn’t need the light to find his way up the trail. The moonlight tinged the treetops silver and revealed much of the path, but he could track her on a cloudy night. This was his mountain, his refuge, his sanctuary. She had no hope. Just as Mommy knew every corner of the house and every place little Victor could hide, he knew this mountain and every dark corner where trees or bushes might lend her some comfort.

  How surprised she would be when his arms emerged from the dark and seized her. She would think the very night had come alive to kill her.

  FORTY-FOUR

  People stranded in the desert, dying from thirst, suffered the most vivid hallucinations of distant water-filled paradises. Such a far off oasis galvanized the person ever forward until they sapped the last of their strength and collapsed into the sand, arm outstretched toward a magical world where all their ills could be healed. A world that they would never reach, regardless of whether it existed or not.

  Mercy thought of a man dying in the desert with the impossible heat boiling on him not because she was thirsty (she was) or because she was exhausted (she was) but because what she was seeing could not possibly be real. It had to be a mirage, her personal version of an oasis in this forest of hell.

  Past the evergreen tree was a small clearing not much larger than her bedroom. Trees ringed it on three sides like a wall to rest against when you stared off the side of the mountain into an enormous world where the moon was a gigantic, floating orb, an almost magical power hovering almost within reach. Even from the far end of this cliff, the view far surpassed the lookout where her father and she had stopped earlier, what seemed like days ago.

  The small town lay farther away. Its miniature, twinkling lights were a minor pulsation on a heavy black curtain. A tractor trailer was traveling the road that went past the diner. Mercy almost laughed at how fragile it looked, as if it were nothing more than a toy.

  While this view was more than enough to take away her breath, it was not why she at first felt like she had stepped into a mirage, perhaps even a dreamworld her traumatized mind had manufactured to save her sanity.

  The white moonlight vibrated along the tips of every outstretched evergreen branch and as the branches swayed in a breeze she could not feel, the light flickered like thousands of candles. Thick, lush grass filled the clearing.

  But she could hardly see that grass because of the crows.

  It had seemed at first that the cliff began immediately and if she dared take one step, she would slip right off the edge and plummet into darkness. That darkness was not the distant ground, but tons of black crows picking at the evening ground. There could be as many as a hundred of them, maybe more, jammed into this little clearing, each one pecking at the soil with the smallest of intrusive noises.

  The few closest to her flapped their wings briefly as if in annoyance at her presence. The rest, however, paid her no attention. There was no where to walk that wouldn’t put a crow, or her foot in harm’s way. She could try to skate the edge but the birds were pushed all the way to the wide trunks of the surrounding evergreens.

  Forget about this, her mind spoke up. There’s a pair of psychos right behind you and you’re here cavorting with a bunch of birds.

  Not exactly cavorting, more like witnessing, but she understood the concern. This place was a sight and sort of magical, too, but how the hell was that going to help her?

  You need to run. Get to the summit.

  No, she didn’t. Even from here, Mercy could tell that the cliff at the far end was plenty steep enough to accomplish what she wanted on the top of this mountain. And what had been that grand plan, exactly?

  She stared at the flashlight in her hand. The bulb had dimmed to a barely perceptible glow like a match at the far end of a cave.

  Like your hope for getting out of this mess alive.

  From behind her, not far at all down the trail, Caleb’s convoluted s
cream added the exclamation to her mind’s warning.

  Last chance to run.

  But she couldn’t. Aside from her ailing body, from the hard truth that if she dared to continue up this mountain there was no way she would make it to the top before Caleb caught her, she simply didn’t want to leave this spot. This oasis in the woods.

  Slowly and carefully, she began to walk around the edge of the clearing. Most of the birds hopped out of her way before her bare feet (what had happened to her socks?) could even touch them, but a few more obstinate crows had to be encouraged out of her way with a gentle tap. Their feathers were smooth like silk.

  Evergreen branches poked at her with thousands of needle fingers and tugged at her clothes like claws. The most amazing aroma of freshness filled her nostrils. At first she thought it was simply the smell of the trees, that bouquet of Christmas time, but there was something more to it, some other, unidentifiable smell like clean clothes right out of the dryer, or a spring morning where the sky is clear and the sun full of warmth and promise.

  Or maybe you’re going out of your mind.

  “Anything’s possible,” she said.

  A few crows flapped their wings as if in agreement.

  “I’ll get you, you bitch!”

  Mercy froze.

  Caleb was just beyond the border of the trees, mere feet away.

  A few crows offered a momentary glance in that direction but most simply went on foraging.

  The evergreen at the far end shook. He was trying to find his way through it as she had. How did he know she was there?

  He can smell you, she thought. Like a wild beast.

  She gripped the flashlight in both hands, squeezing it until her hands hurt. If he barged in, she would run to the edge, lure him right to the cusp, and when he barreled after her, she would slam him in the face with the plastic flashlight and push him over the edge to his death.