Blood Mountain

by J. T. Warren

  “Please!”

  Why the hell were they just standing there, gaping at her like she was some bizarre display in a freak show?

  She didn’t need to really ask that though, now did she?

  “Please!”

  The baggy-clothed kid squinted at her for a moment. “Wait. Didn’t we see this bitch somewhere? Oh, shit. She was at the diner.”

  “Oh, yeah,” skinny jeans said. “She looked a hell of a lot better then. Fucking looks like she got raped by a gang of gorillas.”

  The other kid chuckled. “Maybe she did.”

  “That what happen to you?” Skinny jeans asked.

  “Fuck!” Mercy yelled. “Help me!”

  She expected some kind of humiliating comment about how they wouldn’t fuck her if she begged, maybe she should go fuck a dog or something, but the boys were silent.

  “Please!”

  The boys exchanged another glance and then they were running past her deeper into the big lot. She watched them disappear through a collapsed chain fence at the far end. She almost surrendered then. Maybe she could find a way inside this building and hide into some long-forgotten corner until the sun came up and she dared to go outside again. Giving up would feel so wonderful.

  But there was a car parked off to the side. A newer car, not one abandoned years ago along with the rusted heaps that were once garbage trucks. Someone was still here.

  She ran to it as fast as she could without falling and crashed against the driver’s window. She screamed and pounded her fists on the glass. Maybe there were kids in there, other teenagers who had come here to drink and fuck.

  No response. She cupped her hands and peered in. Empty other than scattered sheets of paper on the passenger seat.

  She tried the handle and almost fell over when the door opened. The courtesy light was a tiny sun that blinded her. She could hide in here, maybe. Victor wouldn’t find her. Hell, he was probably dead.

  You don’t really believe that, Miss Cynical said. This is probably his car.

  “Holy shit,” she said.

  It was his car. She had seen it parked outside Rune Books several times. She recognized the long dent in the hood as if something heavy had fallen on it. If Victor survived the stabbing, he would come back to his car. It definitely wasn’t safe.

  But he wouldn’t suspect she’d hide in it, either. She could crawl into the back and wait for him. Once he got into the driver’s seat, she could kill him.

  That thought filled her with complete confidence and joy for a fraction of a second before completely dissolving. She couldn’t kill him. Stabbing him had been bad enough and she didn’t even have a weapon anymore. She’d have to strangle him with her bare hands. She could feel his skin against her own, his pointed Adam's apple bobbing against her palm as he choked and struggled.

  She couldn’t do it.

  So, what the hell are you going to do? Mom this time. Because cancer tried to run me down and I didn’t just lie down and take it.

  Mercy got into the car. The light hurt her eyes. She opened the compartment between the seats. It was stuffed with tissues crusted with mucus. No, not mucus. It was semen.

  She almost vomited. Instead, she turned to the glove compartment.

  She could hardly believe what she found.

  SIXTY-THREE

  The keys were stashed in the glove compartments of each car for just-in-case scenarios. Victor firmly believed that the universe would protect him, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t take intelligent precautions. If everything went to hell, he needed an easy escape. He didn’t care what happened to Caleb. He had told him that Victor’s car would be in the HIKERS ONLY lot, too.

  Victor pulled the car out of the lot and stopped in the middle of the road as if he were staging a blockade. He glanced down the road in both directions. He would run her over first. Then slice her throat. Maybe he’d even rape her once more. He could baptize her in the blood from his injury. Smear it all over her face. Make her drink it.

  She was either running down the side of the road where brush provided some coverage and obscured the the light of the moon or she was hiding.

  There was only one place to hide that she could have reached so quickly.

  He turned left and stomped on the gas.

  She had probably found the way in through the back of the building. Thought she was safe in there. Stupid bitch. Other than Blood Mountain, Victor knew the insides of the former headquarters of Murray Waste Co. as if he had designed them in his dreams.

  The car didn’t even reach forty miles-per-hour before the building was upon him. He slowed and started to turn off the road when another car rumbled out of the darkness and clipped his front bumper.

  The car spun and came to a stop half on the road.

  The other car stopped too. His car.

  “You fucking bitch!” Victor yelled.

  He crushed the accelerator. The wheels spun on the dirt and the back end fishtailed for a moment before the tires caught and the car lunged forward.

  He crashed into the back of his own car. It jumped forward and then spun its wheels for moment before screeching down the road.

  He followed. The main center of Stone Creek was several minutes away. She wasn’t going to chance going all the way to the police station. There was only one place she was headed.

  Victor should have known from the very beginning.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  The engine screamed and Mercy screamed right along with it. She had wasted time and now he was right behind her. It was Caleb’s car but Caleb was dead or paralyzed somewhere while crows pecked at his eyes. It was Victor in the car. She couldn’t escape. He had devised his psychotic scheme and no matter what she tried, he had thought of it before.

  She could drive all the way into town, go to the police station and the lone officer on duty would be off on some call Victor had paid someone to make. He’d kill her right in the lobby of the police station. He’d know which way to turn his back so the cameras couldn’t catch a clear shot of his face. He was going to kill her and get away with it.

  The red and yellow neon sign for Alexis Diner hovered in the dark sky. They were open 24-hours, but who would actually be there? How much staff was really needed at three in the morning on a Sunday? There would be at least one waitress and a cook. The cook would have knives. That would have to be good enough.

  She came upon the diner in only seconds and had to slam the breaks and turn the wheel hard to make the entrance. The back tires skidded and jumped the curb but the car made the turn and she straightened it out in time to avoid crashing into a parked black mini-van.

  The car turned around behind the diner. In the rearview, the beat-up Toyota made the turn off Route 51 into the parking lot with less success: the whole car rode up and over the curb and barreled straight into the mini-van. The sound of the collision was a dinosaur growl of vengeance.

  I hope it killed you, she thought without any real hope that it had.

  She turned back to the windshield in time to see the white cadillac parked behind the kitchen where a door was propped open with a plastic crate.

  Then she crashed into the cadillac and hoped she wouldn’t survive either.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Victor was mildly aware of the hot liquid sensation growing in his crotch. He hadn’t pissed himself. There was too much liquid, too much weight, for that. He reached into the puddle of blood and raised his arm. Red streaks sluiced off his hand.

  The car bounced over something and he rocketed into the back of a mini-van. The collision threw him against the steering wheel and he was sure a few ribs broke. His left hand, with the mutilated fingers flopped off the dashboard and it seemed like such an innocent, harmless thing as if his was a Gumby limb, but the flash of pain said he had broken the rest of those fingers and probably the wrist, too, if not also his forearm.

  He stumbled free of the car and dropped to one knee. Blood fell freely from his injury to splatter on the concrete. It looke
d like a giant ink blot as it pooled across the diagonal blue lines of the handicapped space.

  He had lost his weapons. Even the brass knuckles had come off. They were in the car but he couldn’t go back. He might pass out and he wasn’t going to surrender so close to the end. It didn’t matter. There were plenty of things he could use in the diner. Not to mention the set of knives in the kitchen or the scalding griddle.

  He got to his feet, one hand over his wound, and ascended the steps into Alexis Diner where the bright lights burned his eyes.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Mercy Higgins didn’t die. She came to with her head resting on the top of the steering wheel and a terrific pain radiating through her chest. Hadn’t had time for a seatbelt, she thought and tried to straighten.

  The windshield was a dense spiderweb of cracks that sagged toward her. A fist-sized hole in the glass revealed the crumpled front end of the car. It had fused into the driver’s side of the white cadillac. The windows had crinkled or shattered, the door dented.

  Something made an animal noise next to her. A crow was on the passenger seat. Tiny pieces of glass speckled its head like sparkles.

  It cocked its head at her and cawed again. Maybe it had come to escort her soul to the afterlife. Or eat her eyes.

  The inside of its beak was a hollow void. As if the thing weren’t real, only some specter from another realm come to gape and taunt.

  “Fuck you want?” Mercy said. Her voice sounded like her throat had been stuffed with pebbles.

  The bird made its signature sound again and another crow flapped down on the hood, peered in from the hole in the windshield. It appreciated her for a moment before three more landed on the car.

  Above her and getting louder and louder, the industrial-fan whup-whup sound of hundreds of crows filled her ears.

  Supper time, she thought.

  She tried the door handle but the door wouldn’t open. The window had shattered. A man in a white cook’s uniform with grease blotches on it that sort of resembled little hearts peered in at her.

  She started to say something and then his hand grabbed the back of her head and flung her forward into the steering wheel.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Before his father walked out of the room to leave his young son to tend to his own injuries, he said one final thing. It came out almost as an afterthought, but it was the thing that Victor would come back to again and again over the following years. The thing that would reveal the path the universe had chosen for him. The thing that would connect him with others who were preparing for the Dark Time.

  “It’s time to cleanse the world,” Victor’s father said.

  He then drove to the diner out on Route 51 and shot four people to death, injuring fourteen, before putting the gun in his mouth and blowing off the back of his skull.

  It was almost exactly what Hugo Herrera would do twenty-five years later.

  And it was what Victor would do right now if he had a gun. He did have his gun; it was in the trunk of his car.

  Inside the diner, there was only a chubby waitress with short hair and a single customer at the counter, head down on his forearms, bottle of beer and cup of coffee before him.

  He walked right toward the far end of the counter where the partition was flipped up to allow access to the kitchen behind. He stepped with heavy, wet squeaks as if he had trudged through marshland. He didn’t have to check behind him to know he was leaving a trail of bloody boot prints.

  The waitress had started to approach him but as he got closer, she backed off. “Sir? Are you okay?” She glanced at the sole customer. No help there. “I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “Fuck off,” Victor said.

  It didn’t matter what she did. Victor would be dead before any cops arrived. He knew that. There was no longer any doubt. His father had died in this very place and he would die here, too. His father’s cleansing had marked this place, made it special. It was why Hugo came here to kill, an offering to Victor’s father, a veritable hero in certain circles. It was why Victor believed having Mercy was his destiny when he followed her here yesterday. It was why he thought the mountain towering over the place was his to conquer. He would die here and that was good--he would be a martyr too--but not before he killed that fucking bitch.

  Victor pushed open the door to the kitchen and entered. His hand left a smeared splotch of blood.

  The kitchen was small with only a large flat griddle and a set of six individual burners. The smell of ground beef was heavy and, despite the gushing wound in his gut, Victor was suddenly hungry, ravenous.

  Victor clutched at the island in the middle of the kitchen where plates were stacked. With every step, his legs were losing strength.

  The backdoor was open and from outside came the grunting sounds of strenuous labor.

  A row of knives were stuck to a magnetic strip on the wall. Victor lurched to the wall and chose the butcher knife. Big enough to cut a whole chicken in half with one, vicious swipe. He would see what it could do to her skull.

  He went to the back door. The cook had Mercy Higgins halfway out of the destroyed driver’s window. The car was covered in crows.

  “Lionel,” Victor managed to say.

  Lionel glanced over his shoulder. He was smiling like a little boy who had found the greatest toy. The smile wavered. “She really fucked you up, huh?”

  Victor leaned against the doorframe. More crows were landing around the car, and on Lionel’s ruined Cadillac and across the parking lot. A few cawed but most were silent.

  A sign if ever there was one.

  Victor raised the butcher knife. His hand shook. “We just have to kill her.”

  “We will,” Lionel said. “But I can’t just let her go to waste without a little fun first.”

  Victor said “No,” and what he meant was no, they had to kill her right now before he died and his life as a cleanser ended with nothing grander than one dead molester mommy under his belt, but the ‘No’ could have been a warning, too, when Lionel turned back to Mercy to drag her all the way out of the window and she came alive in his arms and buried something in his neck.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  There was no time for Mercy to register that the cook had knocked her out against the steering wheel and was now pulling her out of the window over pebbles of broken glass so he could rape her and then let Victor finish her off. She came out of unconsciousness as if she had been zapped with something, grabbed the first thing she could and jammed it into the guy’s neck.

  Cars were made with glass that crumbled in tiny pieces so people wouldn’t be eviscerated during an accident. The glass from the driver’s side window was nothing but harmless little fragments without even a sharp point, but the broken windshield, where something had crashed through it, could be shattered into jagged pieces.

  At first she thought she had been lucky enough to find such a dangerous shard but as the man stumbled back from the car screaming, she saw the frantic flapping wings of the crow beating against the man’s head is if it were birthing free from his skull. Its beak was imbedded in the flesh of the man’s neck.

  She had time to think how what she was seeing was impossible before gravity dropped her free from the window. She pulled her head up in time to save a skull fracture. Upside down, Mercy watched the man beat at the crow.

  He tripped on the concrete steps leading into the kitchen and sat with a thump. Again, she wondered how the crow could have broken through her windshield right as she crashed. It was an impossible thing.

  No more impossible than cancer, her mother said. No more impossible than a psychotic stranger raping you on a mountain. No more impossible than you surviving all this.

  The cook was screaming and finally got his hands around the frantic crow and yanked it free. He threw it and the bird spread its wings to glide across the parking lot where it settled among the growing gathering of crows. A few cawed in response.

  Blood bubbled from the man’s neck, quickly saturated the shoulder
of his white uniform. He tried to stop the bleeding but the blood overwhelmed his hands. Some spurted on his face. His scream now was one of desperation and disbelief.

  She had a moment to realize that this guy, this nighttime cook at the Alexis Diner, was in collusion with Victor Dolor before Victor stepped behind the man and swung a huge butcher knife down into the top of his head. THWAP! The sound was heavy and final.

  The man fell over, still.

  Victor hobbled down the last step and paused. He was leaning heavily to the side. His pants were soaked with blood. I did that to him, she thought.

  He spread his hands wide and tried to speak but nothing came out. It didn’t matter. He wanted her to come at him. He was out of weapons and bleeding profusely. She could run away and he would be dead before police ever arrived, but he was daring her to finish him off. The man who had raped her and would have killed her, was daring her to be a killer, too.

  She got her feet under her, leaned against the car.

  This will define who you are for the rest of your life. She wasn’t sure whose voice that was. It didn’t matter.

  That voice didn’t understand that Mercy was no longer herself. She had broken. There was the Old Mercy who lived a quiet, reclusive life and loved books and daydreamed that a handsome guy would walk into her life. And then there was the New Mercy, a woman scarred from a horror that seemed interminable and yet had finally ended.

  Almost, she thought. The last move is mine.

  The split did not happen when Victor forced himself upon her or even when he hunted her through the woods. That was still the Old Mercy, fleeing for her life, praying for rescue. The Old Mercy had the chance to end this back on the mountain but she had pulled her grip at the last minute. She should have gutted him. Strewn his entrails for the animals to eat.

  Sometime between then and the car crash, a new Mercy was born.