“You let them torture me. You allowed me to die.”
Daryl felt as if a fissure cracked through his skull and everything that had been building up gushed out into the open. The force made him spring to his feet and his voice bellowed through the darkened basement as spittle flew from the snarl that distorted his face.
“No! I was a little boy, you fuckin’ bitch! A little fuckin’ boy that you were s’posed to love and cherish and protect! I was your son but it was never fuckin’ good enough, was it? Never good enough for anything!”
Mama’s voice laughed and Daryl’s hand shot into the darkness, scrambling over the mounds of junk until it felt cold metal beneath its fingers. He snatched the object with a rattling clink that caused the image of a pipe wrench to flare in his mind.
“You were s’posed to love me, you miserable fucking cunt!”
Daryl launched the wrench toward Mama’s laughter with the flick of the wrist. It tumbled through the air and then there was a sharp crack followed by the shattering of glass. The windowpane tinkled to the ground and sunlight streamed into the basement as if it had been pressed against the blackened glass and waiting to save him all along.
Dust motes churned in the wide shafts that fell across the boxes and junk, but the light also revealed something else: Mona.
She was so close that Daryl could see his own reflection in her dark eyes. He could see the contortions of rage on his face, the way the veins in temples throbbed and pulsed, and how his mustache almost looked as bristly as the scruff of a riled curr.
She, however, looked as calm as if she’d walked into a tea party. She smiled graciously and toyed with the hem of her shirt as she shifted her weight from foot to foot.
The two simply stood there for a moment as if time had come to a grinding halt. But then she parted her lips and an old, leathery voice croaked out from a head two-thirds its age.
“Looks like the naughty boy finally grew a pair.”
With a roar, Daryl launched himself at the dark-haired woman, his hands forming into claws before him as his focus narrowed upon her slender throat. Mona’s hand balled into a fist and she jabbed quickly, rolling her shoulder forward as her knuckles connected with Daryl’s nose with a wet smack. Blood stained the pores of her fist as it gushed from Daryl’s nostrils, but it wasn’t enough to stop the force of his attack.
His body slammed into hers and the two toppled backward. She seemed to fall almost in slow motion and, if it hadn’t been for the old woman’s corpse, her head would have bounced off the edge of the old freezer.
Daryl scrambled over Mona as his hands snatched an ice pick that had rolled across the floor almost as if it had wanted him to find it. She thrashed and kicked, but he was beyond pain now, beyond feeling the tread of her boots as they planted rows of red ridges on the side of his face.
Instead, he clung to her pants with one hand as if he were trying to claw his way along her body. With the other, he slammed the pick into the meat of her thigh, burying the slim shaft of metal into her flesh almost entirely up to the red handle.
When he jerked it out, blood spurted through the perfectly circular hole in her jeans like the waters of a fountain. The sight of the crimson arc made his breath catch in his throat and his pulse quicken and he stabbed again as she twisted in pain.
Now, it was her turn to scream. Her turn to feel the agony and fear.
He stabbed again and again, bringing down the ice pick and creating constellations of wounds within a crimson nebula that crept up her leg.
Stabbing at the hip now: his elbow jarred as if he’d knocked his funny bone when the pick slammed into her pelvis. She was screaming so loudly that it seemed to fill his head with its rattling timbre and her hands punched and scratched and pulled uselessly at his hair.
Daryl was focused and hard and wanted nothing more than to sink the ice pick into the soft mounds of flesh on her chest. To drive it into her wicked heart like the needle on Mama’s sewing machine and shove his tongue down her throat as the last breath of life wheezed from her butchered body. He would inhale her soul and take her like she had never been taken before.
For he was in full control now. He was no longer a bad boy. He was a man. And it was time for this bitch to die.
SCENE EIGHTEEN
The snow fell so heavily that the world almost looked as though it had been overtaken by static. The trees were nothing more than indistinct, dark blurs behind an ever-shifting veil of white and visibility was so getting so bad that a cliff could have loomed just ahead and Matt never would have known until he was practically upon it. To make matters worse, the wind whipped through the pines like an escaped beast. Its prolonged howl devoured the sound of Mona screaming in the distance and it shoved at the man who, stooped before its might, tried to push his way forward. His feet felt as if they’d been encased in fifty pound blocks of ice and his face was as dry and chafed as a worn-out saddle despite that fur-lined hood that encircled it.
He knew he had to keep going, that this battle against nature was one he couldn’t afford to lose; somewhere on the other side of the forest, his new wife screamed as if her flesh were being rendered from bone. Even if he couldn’t hear it over the fury of the wind, he knew it was there. And it haunted him with every step, every panicked twinge of his heart . . . .
“I’m coming, baby, hang on, I’m coming.”
The elements, however, had other plans. When the snow had first begun falling again, his tracks were as distinct as the green boughs overhead. As the blizzard gathered its muster, the prints filled in so rapidly that it almost seemed like the packed snow within them were being forced up and Matt tumbled through the drifts as he tried to run. Now, they were nothing more than vague indentations that barely resembled the shape of a human foot. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the wind drove stinging flakes of snow into his eyes, forcing him to bow his head and concentrate only upon the tracks just in front of him. If he didn’t make it out of this forest soon, he could be left wandering aimlessly for hours. If not days. By the time he found his way back to the farmhouse, it could very well be too late.
Matt tried to push the thought out of his mind, but this proved as difficult as walking against the wind. Again and again, an image of Mona formed in his mind. Never of what was actually happening to her. That was simply too much to even begin to imagine. But he did see her eyes, wide and glazed with pain, as that precious mouth of hers yawned in a scream loud enough to shatter windows. She was pale, bloody, and . . . .
No. Anything was better than thinking about that. He tried counting his steps, whispering her name through blue tinged lips, and even singing. Sleepwalking by The Ravonettes. He and Mona had always considered it to be their song and she would squeeze his hand affectionately every time it got to the part about something evil in the heart.
But the lyrics offered no comfort this time. In fact, it almost felt more like a dirge. Like a final goodbye to the only thing this maggot infested carcass of a world had produced that was every really worth a damn.
“Hang in there, sweetie.”
Raising his head, Matt hoped to see the farmhouse like a mirage in the distance. But the storm was so fierce that it was if he’d walked into a swirling wall of white. Even the trees five feet away were hidden in the maelstrom now and the trail he followed had disappeared as thoroughly as if it never existed.
“Mona!”
Though Matt shouted so loudly that his voice choked on her name, his desperate tone sounded flat and muffled, even to his own ears.
“I shouldn’t have left her alone. What the fuck was I thinking?”
It’d seemed like a simple enough plan at first: him leading one of the brothers into the forest while Mona finished off the other one. But he’d forgotten how quickly squalls could form in these parts. Sometimes, the change was so abrupt that it was like someone had thrown a switch on the control panels of reality. He and his father had once spent an afternoon of extracurricular activities with one of their living
toys only to find, mere hours later, that snow had fallen so quickly that the cabin door wouldn’t so much as budge.
He could still remember the girl, curled up on blood spattered sheets, naked and trembling, as she pleaded between sobs for them to just let her go. To let her live. When they had done nothing more than ignore her, her pleas turned into a single repeated word: why?
She’d reminded Matt at the time of a wounded pixie: short hair, pointy ears, smears of blood on her back that very well could have come from having the wings plucked out of her spine. But now, in his memory, the face began to morph. The cheekbones seemed to raise as the face became less angular and the ears rounded as her hair lengthened like time-lapse footage. The thin lips become fuller, the eyes a little less round, and the skin tone lightened subtly. No longer was she the hitchhiker with disproportionately long legs and willowy arms. Now it was Mona that he saw, cowering against the log walls as his father approached with Bowie knife in hand. But her eyes looked past his old man, past the flannel shirt and gleaming blade; she stared directly into Matt’s soul as she parted her lips and formed that single question: why?
“No!”
Matt pounded on the side of his head as if his palm could somehow dislodge this faulty memory from his imagination. But the image clung tenaciously to tangled synapses, growing more and more vivid with every step he took. Now he could see the puffiness beneath the left eye that, if she’d been allowed to live, eventually would have turned to swelling. The chip in the front incisor from where she’d bit the iron railings of the bed to keep from screaming. The glossiness of fear in eyes that seemed to both beg and condemn in a single glance.
“She’s okay.” He tried to tell himself. “She’s tough. Whatever’s going on, she’ll get out of it. She always gets out of it. She has to.”
What the hell had happened anyway? When Matt saw that it was the larger of the two men who’d ran into the woods after him, he’d expected it to all be over quickly. The little one would be no match for his Mona. He had the timid mannerisms of fodder, of someone who’d stumbled into an abattoir and only became a butcher because the others who worked there assumed he was one of their own. He’d fooled them into thinking he was worthy of a the white apron and cleaver when, in fact, he was actually destined for the hook.
But Mona’s screams . . . the pain that trembled her voice even from such a great distance: what the fuck had went wrong?
Even though the question plagued his mind, Matt instinctively knew the answer. In a lot of ways, Mona was like a cat. The thrill of the hunt wasn’t enough for her. She needed to draw the game out, to psychologically bat her prey back and forth before plunging her teeth into its jugular. She needed to play. Only this time, she’d apparently taken it too far . . . and was now paying the price.
Lifting his head, Matt fully expected to see nothing more than the same vortex of snow that had swirled around him for the last ten minutes. But there, in the distance, he could just make it out: a large, dark blob that was shaped vaguely like a house. Like a phantom in the storm, it faded in and out of existence. One moment he could see it so clearly that he could almost make out the shape of the chimney on the slanted roof; the next, there was nothing but flakes of snow whirling on eddies of wind.
But those brief glimpses were enough. Matt felt warmth flood through his chest as his pulse quickened. He bounded through the snow like a lumbering bear, adjusting his trajectory every time the farmhouse manifested through the blizzard so that he was heading straight for it. Leafless brambles snagged his clothes as if they were the fingers of the forest trying to pull him back into its depths and hidden rocks sent him flailing into deep drifts; snow had become packed into his boots so tightly that it felt as if his ankles had been wrapped in cold packs and the tears in his eyes seemed to be on the verge of freezing his lashes together: but none of that mattered. He was close now, so very close that the house’s periods of invisibility were becoming less and less frequent. As if it were pulling itself into existence from the tightly clustered flakes of now.
He couldn’t hear Mona screaming anymore. But maybe he was still too far away. Maybe the wind was still masking her cries with its incessant wail . . . maybe she was still alive.
“She could’ve killed him.” He tried to tell himself as he scrambled closer to the house in the distance. “She could be sitting on the couch right now, looking at that catalog, and waiting for me to come back.”
Of course, there also could have been another reason that she wasn’t yelling anymore. But that was an alternative that Matt refused to entertain. His wife was alive and he’d be with her shortly: that was the only possible outcome he could accept.
For a while, it seemed as if the farmhouse always stayed the same distance away. As if it were running away from him as quickly as he stumbled toward it, mocking him with a distance he could never hope to close.
“I’m coming, baby. I’m coming . . . .”
But then details began to present themselves. The corrugated, tin roof. The brick chimney wrapped in chicken wire, weathered clapboard walls, and windows that looked slightly askew. And then, just like that, the trees that surrounded him were gone.
Matt stepped out of the woods and, without the protective barrier of the pines to buffer it, the wind slammed into him so hard that he staggered backwards. As he struggled to retain his balance, his eyes peered through the snow, searching for even the smallest sign of the woman he loved. And that was when he noticed the car.
Even though it was practically buried in accumulation, the outline was distinctive. It was a cop car.
“Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
In a way, Matt would have almost preferred Mona to be dead than arrested. The knowledge that she was still out there somewhere, separated from him by bars and razor-wire coiled walls, would have been too much. To know that he could feel the warm touch of her hand, feel her lips brush his own: it would be like torture. At least in death he would be able to join her. At least there would be a chance they could be together again.
As he shambled closer to the parked cruiser, he realized that tracks led away from the passenger-side door. They couldn’t have been very old or else they would have already filled in like his own had. And the tracks seemed to be making a beeline directly into the forest. They disappeared into the woods almost at a forty-five degree angle from where he’d emerged. If the snow hadn’t been falling so heavily, there was a good chance that the cop would have even been close enough to see him out there in the pines.
Still . . . there was something about the tracks which bothered Matt. Something that didn’t quite seem right. His eyes followed the trail again and again, trying to discern exactly what was wrong with them as he hobbled closer to the car.
Now he could see that some of the snow had fallen off the roof of the cruiser when the door had been opened. It lay on the ground in a small mound with tracks cutting a solid trench through its center. But even something about that felt wrong.
He glanced into the forest again and tried to imagine the cop bolting from the car and running across the lawn. His feet would have kicked out clouds of snow in front of him as he ran and . . . .
The snow. It should have been piled up in the opposite direction. The little dunes scattered by running legs would have been heading toward the forest if the cop had truly ran there. But they weren’t. Instead, they seemed to be leading to the car. And, now that he was closer, Matt could also see that the snow was discolored with dark splotches. As if something had dripped down and splattered against the drifts.
Blood.
At the same time this thought crossed his mind, the door of the cruiser swung open. He hadn’t been able to see the behemoth of a man through the frost-covered windows, but Earl Gruber lurched out of the car almost as if he’d been thrown off balance. His clothes were crusted with icy blood and the arrow shafts still jutted from his body; only the feathered tips were missing. He must have snapped them off to keep them from getting caught in the
undergrowth as he took a more direct route back to the house. And then, realizing that Matt would return there, waited in the car as his blood slowly clotted and froze.
The large man’s face was so pale that his skin almost blended with the falling snow and he staggered forward as if nothing more than sheer willpower was keeping him alive. Bobbing and weaving, his feet crossed in front of one another and, for all intents and purposes, it looked as if he were about to fall flat on his face at any given moment.
Instead, the bearded man lifted his arm as slowly as someone who’d been hypnotized into believing it was weightless. His lips moved as he said something, but his voice was too weak to compete with the wind’s hollow moan.
But words weren’t necessary. The unsteady muzzle of the pistol pointed directly at Matt spoke volumes.
SCENE NINETEEN
Every time the ice pick plunged into Mona’s flesh, the slobbering beast scrambling on top of her groaned as if in the throes of a miniature orgasm; her screams seemed to fan the fires of excitement in his eyes and his hand trembled visibly. This caused the tip of the pick to wiggle inside each new wound and the pain flared along her body as if trying to escape the point of impact. It shot through her leg and raced up her side, causing her to intuitively want to pull her body into a fetal position. But he’d clawed his way on top of her to the point that his knees pressed into the wounds on her hips now; no matter how hard she struggled, she couldn’t even roll on to her side, much less curl into a tight ball.
Panting almost as heavily as her attacker, but for entirely different reasons, Mona fought to keep the waves of darkness that threatened to overtake her at bay. It would’ve been so easy just to let them wash over her, to allow the searing agony to melt into the void of unconsciousness. Free from the pain of Daryl’s furious assault, she would bleed out eventually and slip into the cold embrace of death, leaving him to do whatever he pleased with her lifeless body. But that was precisely what gave her the strength to resist the undertow’s seductive pull.
Shut The Fuck Up And Die! Page 16