by Bryan Smith
To further complicate matters, Pierce had not come alone. That voice out there on the porch wasn’t one he recognized, but it clearly belonged to a young person. His daughter, probably. Grant’s stomach knotted painfully as he realized what would have to happen next. This whole situation was spiraling rapidly out of control. His only hope now was that no one else had accompanied Pierce on his trip up to the cabin.
Pierce lurched away from Lindsey and staggered as he began to turn about, his hand still clamped to the spurting neck wound as he made it a few feet closer to the door before collapsing. He hit the floor with a heavy thump and didn’t move again.
Through the open door, Grant saw the girl standing out there on the porch with a stricken look on her face. She was young and pretty, somewhere in her late teens, probably. He’d seen her before, he realized, but she’d been a small child then. The cell phone held loosely in her trembling fingers slipped from her grip and landed with a clatter on the porch. She stared at her father’s unmoving body and screamed. Her gaze shifted to Lindsey and she screamed again.
Lindsey’s head snapped toward Grant. “Get that bitch! Now!”
Grant glanced at his wife.
Her face and the front of her shirt were covered in blood. The savage twist of those blood-spattered features made her look like a raving lunatic. She screamed at him when he did not instantly obey her command. The sound was so ear-splittingly shrill and filled with such apocalyptic fury it compelled him to action.
He started moving quickly toward the door.
The girl shrieked in fright.
She turned and ran.
Grant picked up the pace and ran after her, following her down the steps and out into the clearing in front of the cabin. She gave the camper a wide berth and headed for a steel-blue minivan parked near it. The sick feeling in Grant’s gut worsened as he discerned dim shapes of other people inside the minivan. Doors on the vehicle opened when the girl neared it, but by then he’d about caught up to her. He heard voices calling out to her from inside the vehicle. The voices were tinged with alarm and confusion, but they did not communicate actual terror quite yet.
That was about to change.
The first scream to emanate from the minivan came immediately after he summoned an extra reserve of strength and leaped forward to tackle the girl. He hit her square in the back and she instantly collapsed beneath him as he drove her hard to the ground. She screamed and squirmed beneath him, but because she was face-down on the ground, he was able to easily hold her in place. How long that might last was another question entirely. Without assistance, he wouldn’t be able to keep her pinned down indefinitely. Even if she wasn’t able to get loose, at some point these other people would come to her aid. He couldn’t hold off all of them. He wasn’t Superman, after all.
Almost immediately after this thought flashed through his mind, he felt someone kicking him in the side while screaming at him to get off the girl. Actually, what she was repeatedly screaming was, “Get off my daughter!”
So this was Pierce’s wife. The girl’s mother.
He couldn’t remember the woman’s name but recalled liking her considerably less than Pierce. She’d come off as cold and snooty back in the day. Sexy, though. He dimly recalled her featuring in some of his masturbation fantasies back then.
He heard another voice. Some other kid. A boy, from the sound of it.
Then the cry of a baby stirring from sleep.
Fuck.
Did these old assholes have a fucking newborn, too? He would’ve thought the wife was too long in the tooth to still be birthing children at this point. Bitch had to be at least forty.
The kicks to his side landed harder and harder, the girl’s mother becoming more frantic and determined to dislodge him by the moment. He was on the verge of attempting to grab her by an ankle when he heard a soft pop. She kicked him one more time and then stopped. Seconds later, he heard her drop to the ground a few feet away. The boy shrieked, but did not immediately run away or rush over to help his fallen mother. From the sound of it, he was struggling with something inside the car. The baby’s cries grew louder.
Grant twisted his head around for a better look at what was happening. The first thing he saw was the mother’s glazed eyes staring blankly at him from where she’d dropped to the ground. A feathered tranquilizer dart protruded from her slender neck. His gaze went higher and he saw the boy leaning into the minivan’s back seat through the open door. Grant hoped like hell he wasn’t trying to dig a hidden gun out of a glove compartment or travel bag. That would spell instant disaster, assuming the kid could summon the nerve to shoot his family’s assailants.
Meanwhile, the girl was still struggling ferociously beneath him. She was screaming at him in a way that communicated terror and defiance, spewing profanities and promising to kill him as soon as she got the chance. The crux of his most pressing problem was simple—he couldn’t go after the boy without letting the girl up, at which point she’d become a thousand times more dangerous. He could think of only one solution.
He had to kill the girl.
The thought made him queasy. Standing aside while Lindsey murdered Pierce was one thing. That had been bad enough. The prospect of killing another blood relation with his bare hands made him almost physically sick. She was a total innocent, barely more than a child. Her only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
No part of him wanted to do it, but the brutal reality of the situation was simple. Any slim chance he still had of returning to his normal life was dependent on the girl dying. With a continually deepening sense of horror, it hit him that they’d all have to die. The girl, the mother, the boy, even the baby. The whole fucking family. He felt like screaming as the sheer enormity of it swept over him. This was a genuine atrocity he was contemplating. The kind of thing monsters did.
He hated it with every fiber of his being.
But it had to be done.
He searched the ground nearby for a rock of ample size, one with enough heft to it to efficiently bash in her skull. There was no sign of anything nearly large enough, only pebbles. Contemplating alternative approaches, he imagined simply snapping her neck. He saw that done in movies a lot and it always looked so easy. He doubted that would be the case in real life, at least for someone who wasn’t a trained killer. Like himself, for instance. What might work best was strangulation. He could wrap his hands around her neck and bear down until she stopped squirming beneath him.
A strange and unexpected thing happened as he vividly envisioned this in his head. His cock began to stiffen. As that happened, all moral considerations flew out of his head, vanishing like a handful of fairy dust, as if they’d never been real at all. And maybe they hadn’t been.
His right hand was closing around her throat when he heard Lindsey’s voice from almost directly above him. “Get off the little bitch, Grant. I’ve got this.”
He angled his head around to peer up at Lindsey. The tranquilizer gun was aimed at his back and for a fleeting second he feared she would shoot him with one of those darts, sending him into unconsciousness within a few seconds. The darts were loaded with an illegally-acquired heavy-duty horse tranquilizer. Once that stuff started moving through his system, he’d be utterly helpless and at her mercy. Fortunately for his sake, he knew she needed him conscious and alive long enough to help her get this situation under control.
He scowled. “I’m handling her. I don’t need your help.”
There was movement from the direction of the minivan. They both glanced that way and saw a scrawny teenage boy in khaki shorts and a pale blue golf shirt backpedaling away from the minivan. Cradled in his arms was the crying baby. The boy looked terrified but determined.
He turned away from them and began to run.
Lindsey stepped forward a few feet and lifted the tranquilizer gun, squinting as she aimed down the barrel at the boy’s retreating back. She squeezed the trigger, sending a dart hurtling into the darkness. The dart we
nt stray of the mark. Grant knew this not because he saw it happen—it was impossible to track the dart’s trajectory in the evening gloom—but rather because a few seconds later the boy was still on his feet and running. In a few more seconds, he would be out of the clearing and starting down the long private drive.
Lindsey lowered the tranquilizer gun. “Shit. I’m gonna have to go after them.” She glanced at Grant. “Choke the bitch out, but try not to kill her. I don’t want any of them dead just yet.”
“Why not?”
Instead of answering his question, she took off running.
Grant watched her go for a moment, her swiftly moving long legs flashing in the moonlight. She would catch up to the boy. He had no doubt of that. He was a gangly kid struggling to hold on to a squalling infant while running for his life. She was a superbly-conditioned marathon runner. It wouldn’t even be a fair contest, really.
Confident there was no need to worry about that part of the equation, he returned his full attention to the still-struggling girl. Struggling, but not making as many threats now. Her new tactic was crying and pleading, which had the unexpected effect of turning him on even more.
Grant thrust himself against her, making sure she felt his now fully erect cock. He had both hands locked around her throat now and began to steadily increase the pressure. He put his face against the side of her head and whispered in her ear. “Tell me something. Are you a virgin?”
The girl sputtered and wheezed, but no words emerged. His grip on her throat was too strong.
Grant laughed softly. “Never mind. I know you can’t really talk right now. I’ll tell you this, though. It’s gonna be fun finding out the answer to that question.”
More laughter.
He continued increasing the pressure on her throat.
It wasn’t long before her struggles ceased entirely.
15
THE BOY TEMPORARILY DISAPPEARED FROM sight as he reached the edge of the clearing, obscured by trees as he went around that first wide bend in the road. This did not overly concern Lindsey. She was already closing the gap between them at a rapid rate. The only thing that worried her at all was the prospect of charging down the insanely dangerous stretch of road in the dark. One wrong step along the crazily twisting passage could send her tumbling to her death, but not going after the boy wasn’t an option.
The kid was an obstacle standing in the way of everything she wanted, including a return to an outwardly normal life once she was clear of this rapidly unraveling nightmare situation. He was by no means the only thing in the way of a restoration of normality, but capturing him was her current top priority. The boy could not be allowed to reach the street, where he might theoretically flag down a ride from someone willing to take him to the nearest town. It was highly unlikely he’d be able to do that at night on a mountain road that was lightly traveled even in daylight hours, but even the slimmest possibility of it happening was an unacceptable risk. If things went that way, nothing else would matter. Her life as she’d known it would be over.
She reached the edge of the clearing and zagged right with the sharp curvature of the road, increasing her speed rather than slowing down for the sake of caution. This was a calculated risk. She sensed it was the opposite of what the boy would do. He was scared out of his mind and would be overly conscious of trying to protect the baby and not go running off the side of the road. The darkness was deeper here on this first curving stretch of the passage, which was shrouded by trees to either side. She was forced to rely partly on memory to take her in the right direction. She’d made the harrowing journey up the drive the one and only time today, but her sense of it was surprisingly clear in her mind.
In another couple moments, she zigged to the left as the road curved sharply again. The boy still wasn’t in sight, but she could hear the baby crying. The sound was much closer than a few seconds ago. The trees to either side of the passage thinned out and soon disappeared entirely now that she was racing along the narrower part of the ridge. Without the trees obstructing the moonlight, she had a much clearer view of those vertigo-inducing steep drop-offs. The road went into a relatively straighter stretch and in another few seconds she saw the boy up ahead, no more than twenty feet away.
She dug down deep and found another gear. The soles of her shoes loudly slapped the hard ground as her speed increased significantly, sweat beading on her brow as her arms and legs pumped harder than ever. A few seconds later, the boy was less than ten feet in front of her. Her nostrils flared and the anticipatory grin of a hungry predator spread across her face. She flashed back to a few moments earlier back at the cabin, reliving the elation she’d felt upon driving the big blade deep into the stomach of the one Grant had called Pierce. She’d looked into his face in that moment of puncture. The memory of the way his eyes had widened as the pain registered sent a shiver of pleasure through her. It had finally happened, the thing she’d yearned for since tossing that girl off that nightclub rooftop back in college—her second kill. That it had come about in a completely unexpected way didn’t matter. It had been every bit as glorious and intoxicating as she’d ever imagined, proof positive this was the right path for her.
And now she was about to bag kill number three. Another shiver of anticipatory pleasure rippled through her at the thought. She was even tempted to slow her pace ever slow slightly. By dragging this out a little longer, she’d get to savor her next victim’s dread of what was about to happen to him that much more. She no longer feared him getting away. The mountain road beyond the private drive was too far away. Even now, he was almost within grabbing distance. He could probably feel her breath on the back of his neck.
She laughed. “I’m going to gut you like a pig, boy. Gonna open you all the way up and see what you look like on the fucking inside. What do you think about that?”
The boy squealed in terror.
Lindsey laughed again and reached out, scraping a long fingernail across the back of his neck. This elicited a loud shriek from the boy, who then started running harder and faster for a few moments before slowing down again. He was almost out of gas. She could tell by how wobbly his legs were. He looked like a drunkard awkwardly trying to make his way home after a long night of boozing. The baby wailed louder than ever as the boy began to stumble without quite losing his footing yet.
She slowed her pace, letting the boy get about ten feet out in front of her again. Then closer to fifteen. This would’ve struck her as too risky at the outset of the chase, but not now. The kid was barely running now, his loping stride more of a slow jog. He was winded and scared. In another few seconds, he’d be reduced to walking. Even a dumb kid like him had to know that would amount to surrender.
“If you stop right now, I won’t kill you right away. I might even decide not to kill you at all if you cooperate and behave until I figure out what else to do with you.”
The boy was walking now, but still had his back to her as he kept moving sluggishly forward. “You’re lying,” he said, sniffling with a quaver in his voice. “I can hear it in your . . . in your voice. You’re toying with me.”
Lindsey smiled. “You’re smarter than the average cookie, kid. I’ll give you that much at least. Of course I’m lying to you. You know what else? I’ve still got the knife I used to kill your father. His blood is fucking all over it. It’s still warm, even. How’s that for a kick?”
The boy’s shoulders shook as he sobbed. He said nothing.
“I get why you’re so broken up about it. I mean, the guy looked like a typical middle-aged douchebag with an MBA. Still, he was your dad. You loved him, right?”
The loudest sob yet came from the boy as he abruptly stopped in his tracks. After that, he heaved a big breath and said a single word in a quiet, thoroughly broken voice. “Yes.”
Lindsey came to a stop about five feet behind him. “Okay, kid, here’s the situation. You tried your damnedest and it wasn’t good enough. Still, you tried. I can admire that. Doesn’t change the fact
you’re about to get your ticket punched, but there is one thing I can do for you. One little act of mercy.”
Still with his back to her, the boy sniffled again and said in that same defeated tone, “What’s that?”
Lindsey smiled. “If you cooperate and do exactly as I tell you, I promise I won’t hurt the baby.”
The boy said nothing for a moment, then turned to face her. His tear-streaked face looked chalky pale in the moonlight. The baby squirmed and cried in his trembling arms. “You’re lying again.”
Lindsey summoned the most sincere-looking expression she could manage and gave her head a single emphatic shake. “I’m not. Cross my heart and hope to die.” She giggled for a second, but quickly stifled the sound. “Seriously. I’m kind of a bad person by normal standards, I guess. Like, really fucking bad. But even I’ve got no interest in murdering an infant. What’s the point? It’s not like it’d be able to testify against me in court. Unlike you. You’ve got to see the logic in that, right?”
He heaved another big breath. “I guess so.”
Lindsey nodded. “Damn straight. It’s settled, then. Put the baby on the ground and get ready to do what you’re told.”
After a final brief hesitation, the boy knelt and set the baby gently on the ground. Before getting up again, he gave the still-squalling infant a soft kiss on the forehead, whispering his love for his little brother.