Merciless

by Bryan Smith

  Then he stood and stared evenly at Lindsey. “What now?”

  The change in his demeanor fascinated her. There was little trace of the overwhelming fear gripping him earlier. What she heard now was resignation. Acceptance. Perhaps he was expecting a quick end to his suffering. Maybe that made it easier for him to face it now with some kind of dignity.

  Poor little shit.

  She had no interest in letting him off that easy.

  The tranquilizer gun was still gripped in her right hand. She held it low, pointed to the ground. The knife was in her left hand. Having no use for it just now, she allowed the tranquilizer gun to slip from her fingers and fall to the ground. After kicking it aside, she shifted the knife to her right hand. Her dominant hand. Which felt apt, because she was about to use the blade as an instrument of especially brutal domination.

  She waved the knife at him. “Come a little closer.”

  After hesitating briefly again, he took a tentative, shaky step in her direction. Then another. And another.

  “That’s good. Stop right there.”

  The boy stopped moving forward. He was short for a boy in his mid-teens. He had to stare up at her through his red-rimmed, puffy eyes. His expression conveyed fear mixed with some vague form of expectation.

  Lindsey smiled. “Very good. You’re cooperating nicely. I’m sure on some level your baby brother appreciates the sacrifice you’re making for him. Now get on your knees.”

  The boy frowned, suddenly wary again. “But—”

  Lindsey’s face twisted in a snarl. “Shut the fuck up! Didn’t I say to do exactly what the fuck I said!?”

  The boy flinched in the face of her enraged outburst, jawline quivering badly as he mumbled a pitiful apology.

  She waved the knife again. “That’s right, you’re fucking sorry. You’re about the sorriest little shit on the planet, matter of fact. No more fucking around, kid. I get anything less than instant, total obedience from you this time, I may have to break that promise I made about not hurting your brother.”

  The kid started blubbering again when she said this. “Don’t. Please . . . please don’t.”

  Lindsey’s thin smile was pitiless. “On your knees. Now.”

  The boy dropped to his knees.

  Lindsey let out a slow exhalation of breath and allowed herself a moment to luxuriate in the anticipation of what she was about to do. While those moments of intense euphoria she’d experienced when murdering this boy’s father had been amazing, it’d happened so suddenly and was over almost as soon as it began. This was different. The situation back at the cabin was contained, under control. There were no other complications here to deal with. She could do whatever she wanted at this point. There was no one around to see what she was doing or intervene.

  She approached the kneeling boy and held the blade up to his face. “See that? That’s your father’s blood, like I said. I want you to lick up as much of that blood as you can.”

  She turned the knife, holding it so a side of the blade was almost pressed to his lips. Fat tears started spilling from the boy’s eyes again. He sniffled and whined. Behind him, the baby cried and squirmed around on the ground.

  “Do it, you pathetic piece of shit. You already know the price of disobedience. You’ve got about five seconds to start licking before I punt that brother of yours into the fucking valley.”

  Still sniffling, the boy stuck out his tongue and tentatively began licking at the coagulating blood coating the blade. Lindsey shivered in sudden arousal. This was the first time she’d ever gotten to do this kind of thing to someone she actually intended to kill. It was sort of similar to some of the more aggressive BDSM scenarios she acted out with Grant in their basement dungeon, but doing it for real with an actual victim got her juices flowing like nothing else ever had before. She still figured she’d be done with Grant one way or another after this was over, but maybe they could have one last good hard fuck later tonight. Maybe she’d even kill him at his moment of orgasm.

  Wouldn’t that be a kick?

  Apparently sensing her drifting attention, the boy surprised her by making a grab for the knife. She yelped and ripped it away from him when he tried twisting it out of her hand. The blade sliced deep across his fingers, cutting nearly to the bone. In the next instant, he surged to his feet and made a second grab for the knife while she was still somewhat startled. She spun away and his bleeding fingers missed grabbing onto her wrist by a small fraction of an inch. He tackled her from behind and they spent some moments rolling around on the ground and thrashing at each other. The boy was scrawny, but his strength surprised her. At one point he managed to land a punch to her jaw that made her teeth clamp together. She squealed in pain as she bit her tongue and felt blood in her mouth. In that moment, she felt afraid for the first time since her bathroom struggle with Grant.

  Fuck this.

  She jerked her head to the side in time to avoid another bone-crunching punch to the jaw and lashed out blindly with the knife, driving the tip of the blade into one of the boy’s eyes. He screamed in shrill agony and rolled quickly away from her.

  Breathing heavily, she summoned all her strength and sat up. Then she got to her feet and spun about until she saw the boy. He was on his knees about six feet away, facing away from her. He had his hands to his face and was screaming ceaselessly. Apparently it hurt like hell to have steel slammed into your eyeball. Lindsey’s fear drained away in an instant. The boy had taken a shot and lost. She couldn’t blame him. It was what anyone who wasn’t a total pussy would do. He’d probably even been playing along to a certain extent, hoping for just the kind of opportunity he’d gotten. Fair play, but it was over now, and her interest in dragging this out was gone.

  She walked up to him and kicked him hard in the small of the back. He yelped and pitched forward, landing face-down in the dirt. She dropped to her knees beside him, raised the knife high over her head, and brought it down fast, slamming it into his back up to the hilt. He screamed and screamed again when she ripped the blade out. He braced his hands on the ground and shakily tried to push himself up.

  She smiled. “You’re not going anywhere, fucker.”

  The big blade punched into his back again and this time she kept it there a minute, twisting it as she listened to him unleash several of the loudest screams she’d ever heard. When she finally took it out again, she rolled him over and dragged the blade across his throat. This was a much deeper throat wound than the one she’d inflicted on the boy’s father. A great gout of blood leaped out of the hole in his flesh, adding to the drenching she’d already taken. She sat there next to the boy a while longer, watching the blood flow slow to a gurgle and then stop altogether.

  She sighed. “You were a tough one, kid. I’ll give you that. Fuck.”

  Getting to her feet again, she took hold of the dead boy’s wrists and dragged him over to a side of the ridge. Then she pushed at him with her foot and sent him rolling down into the darkness of the valley below. She stood there a moment and listened to his body roll and crash against outcroppings of rock and tree stumps.

  When the tumbling corpse ceased making any discernible noise, she walked over to the baby and stared down at it. The infant stared up at her with tiny eyes that looked glassy in the moonlight. Eyes devoid of true comprehension. There was no way it could grasp what had happened here. That part of what she’d told the teenager hadn’t been a lie. She had no interest in murdering the little one. Not because she had any kind of hangup about going one step too far. Instead, she simply couldn’t be bothered. She didn’t want to carry it up to the cabin and have to listen to its squalling all night. In truth, she didn’t have to do a damned thing. She could just leave it right here. Sooner or later, nature would take its course. The road was too distant to worry about it crawling out that way. It would either die on the spot or an animal would snag it and carry it away. She was fine with either outcome.

  After retrieving the tranquilizer gun, she gave the crying
baby one last glance, then started the journey back up to the cabin. She’d gone about fifty feet in that direction when a dirty, scraggly-haired hermit in his tattered rags came scrambling up over the side of the ridge and onto the road.

  The hermit took a cautious look around with his darting, crazy-looking eyes.

  Then he snatched up the baby and went back over the side.

  16

  THE MAN AND WOMAN WHO’D abducted Jorge barely took note of him as they came racing down the stairs. The woman did cast one quick glance in his direction as they went rushing by, but she appeared unconcerned he’d managed to make the chair topple over. This was unsurprising. His hope of snapping a leg of the chair by causing it to fall backward at an angle had gone unfulfilled. The chair remained intact and his bindings as secure as ever. As far as he could tell, they hadn’t loosened at all in the fall.

  Also, in that moment, they had bigger things to worry about. More people had arrived at the cabin. That they hadn’t been expecting these new arrivals was apparent in their panicked demeanors. A middle-aged, white-haired man opened the front door and stepped into the cabin before they could block his entrance. Within seconds, it was clear the white-haired man was related to his abductors. It was also clear he was shocked by what he discovered upon entering the cabin. Jorge saw right away the man was, unlike his younger relations, possessed of some level of actual integrity. He was the kind of man who would have no interest in being a party to things like torture and murder.

  For a few fleeting moments, Jorge had allowed his hopes to soar, believing this man represented his best chance of deliverance from this horrendous situation. He’d even attempted to alert the man to the deadly nature of the circumstances he’d stepped into by shouting indignantly every time the one named Grant lied about the situation, which was virtually every time he opened his mouth.

  Hope soon gave way to despair, however, when the female abductor rushed at the older man with a big-ass knife and started ripping his stomach open. From his position on the floor, Jorge had shuddered in revulsion. He’d never seen anyone killed right in front of him like that. It was beyond unsettling. He felt bile rise into his throat multiple times. This triggered a new fear. The woman’s panties were still lodged in his throat, the strips of duct tape still in place over his mouth. He couldn’t allow himself to vomit, regardless of how sickened he was by the bloody events he was witnessing. He didn’t want to go out like that, choking on his own puke like some hopeless heroin addict. Hell, he didn’t want to go out at all, but especially not like that, completely helpless to do anything about it.

  Then Jorge heard other voices even as the white-haired man’s body collapsed to the floor. A young girl’s voice, most prominently. The man’s family had made the journey up to the cabin with him. Jorge had mixed feelings about that. The idea of children out there was horrifying, because the demented couple who’d taken him had already shown there were no lengths to which they would not go to contain the situation. That would definitely include murdering an entire family of people related to them, if necessary.

  On the other hand, more people out there meant a greater chance of at least one of them getting away and alerting the cops. One of them might even be able to get on a phone and call 911, providing they were able to react quickly enough.

  All hell broke loose as the couple rushed outside and started grappling with the rest of the dead man’s family. Jorge heard shouts, screams, and other sounds of struggle. There were definitely multiple other people out there. And, judging from the cries he heard, one baby. His soul experienced despair again when he heard those cries.

  He started yanking at his bonds again as he listened to the horrific sounds of struggle from outside, working himself into a frenzy but accomplishing little as the chair rocked around a bit on the floor. Despite his lack of progress, he didn’t allow himself to stop or give up. If the couple managed to subdue or kill the dead man’s other family members, they would be back in here to deal with him before long. He had to try to get loose while he had the opportunity, even if his chances of success seemed remote verging on impossible.

  As he struggled, he again thought about what his father called the Mendez family curse, that awful string of bad luck incidents stretching back over decades and generations. Unlike his father, he’d never been a slave to superstition. He didn’t believe in curses or black magic or any of that kind of nonsense. By allowing himself to perish here, some of his living relations would see what had befallen him as the strongest possible proof the curse was real. Not wanting that to happen drove him nearly as much as his basic desire to keep on living.

  He kept at it even as the sounds of struggle outside died down. There were no more shouts or screams, just some animalistic grunting that struck him as vaguely sexual. Not even wanting to think about what that implied, he redoubled his efforts yet again and, for the first time, felt the tiniest increment of give around his left ankle. His heart started racing as he twisted his foot and heard the wood creak. That leg of the chair was ever so slightly damaged.

  Then he heard footsteps on the porch and felt despair yet again. All that effort had finally started paying off in a very small way. It was something, though. A start. What he’d been hoping so desperately for all along. He hadn’t gotten it done quite fast enough.

  There was another sound from the porch. Heavy thumps. Someone was dragging something into the cabin. Jorge craned his head around in time to see Grant dragging a dead or unconscious teenage girl inside. Her arms were limp and her head lolled around as he pulled her across the floor.

  After dumping the girl somewhere on the other side of the table, Grant started back toward the door, but stopped and glanced over at Jorge, who was still trying to twist his ankle against the weakened leg of the chair. “Stop doing that,” he said, frowning. “I mean it, hombre. Hear me?”

  Jorge stopped twisting his ankle and sighed.

  He nodded.

  Grant pointed a finger at him. “I’m serious. You don’t want to die yet, do you?”

  Jorge shook his head.

  “Good.” His abductor grinned. “Stay right there.”

  He laughed as he walked back out the door, sounding in surprisingly good spirits for a man embroiled in a situation spiraling out of control.

  A few seconds later, Jorge heard more thumps from the porch. This time Grant dragged in an unconscious grown woman. A feathered tranquilizer dart protruded from her neck. She was older than the girl by maybe twenty years. The distinct familial resemblance told Jorge she was likely the girl’s mother.

  There was no sign yet of Lindsey, nor had he heard Grant talking with her these last couple times he’d gone in and out of the cabin. Perhaps she was chasing down yet another family member. Come to think of it, it’d been a while since he’d last heard the baby’s cries. Her absence might have something to do with that. Thinking about what that might imply brought another of those trickles of nausea to the back of his throat.

  Grant deposited the mother on the floor alongside her daughter. He moved back a few steps and stared at them a moment, frowning as he scratched the back of his head. Jorge’s view of the woman and girl was impeded slightly by the table and other chairs, but he did see the fingers of the daughter’s outstretched right hand twitch one time.

  Still alive, then.

  For now.

  Grant took a roll of duct tape from the table and went to work wrapping it around the wrists and ankles of his female captives. He worked fast, clearly interested in securing them only in a basic way before they could regain consciousness. Perhaps when Lindsey returned—if she did—they would work together at getting them into chairs and bound in a more elaborate way.

  But what if Lindsey wasn’t coming back? Maybe she’d died in the struggle out there. It didn’t seem likely, but it was possible. Never in his life had Jorge actively wished for the death of another person. His mind flashed back to the moment when that evil woman aimed the tranquilizer gun at him and pulled the
trigger. That smugly superior look on her face. She and her husband were obviously both dangerous, but if he had his pick of one to eliminate from the equation, he’d pick her in a heartbeat. He sensed she was the catalyst behind all of this. The most cunning and calculating of the two by a mile. Against only Grant, he might yet stand a chance of surviving. It’d still be a bleakly slim chance, but it’d be better than nothing.

  Grant dropped the depleted roll of duct tape on the table and retrieved something else from its surface. A moment later, he was kneeling next to the teenager. Then came some kind of cutting sound. It took Jorge a moment to recognize it as the tearing of fabric. He struggled to crane his head around still farther. Doing this caused a painful crick in his neck, but he was soon able to see that Grant was sinking to yet another level of depravity. It shouldn’t have surprised him. These people were clearly capable of anything. Yet he still felt intensely disgusted when he saw Grant cutting away the younger girl’s clothes and tossing aside the shredded pieces of fabric. Getting it all removed required a fair amount of work, including lifting her up and turning her side to side multiple times. Soon he had her down to her underwear.

  She began to stir slightly as Grant cut away her bra. Her eyes remained shut as he flicked the bra away and, in an oddly tentative way, lowered a hand to one of her breasts and began to gently squeeze it. He groaned in arousal and squeezed her other breast, harder this time.

  Then Jorge heard footsteps on the porch outside.

  Lindsey came back into the cabin.

  Jorge felt like crying when he turned his head and saw her. Her return signaled a massive blow to the faint and dying hopes of survival to which he’d still been clinging. Not only that, but she had a lot more blood on her now. Her arms, face, and shirt were drenched in red. Someone else had died out there at her hands tonight. Some other member of this poor family. Maybe the baby, but not just the baby. Someone else, some brave young soul, had tried to carry the infant away from this nightmare. Had tried to be a hero.