The only thing consistent was pain. Every inch of her body was in agony. She felt like she had been flayed, and she looked like she had been dragged down a gravel road for miles behind a pickup truck.
She woke to discover it was nighttime. Her mouth and throat were so dry it hurt to try and swallow. Her tongue was swollen and it felt rough, and stuck to the inside of her mouth. She needed water.
She noticed that in her haze of pain, she had used the bed and the small table to barricade the door. She couldn't remember doing it, although it would have seemed reasonable if there was anything heavy enough to actually keep anyone out - the door had no lock.
She pushed aside the bed as quietly as she could and stood at the door, listening. She heard nothing. It was a good sign in a house where everything echoed like a cavern. She crept down the hall and entered the bathroom. She shut the door behind her and saw her clothes were still in a pile on the floor. She also couldn't help but notice the bathtub was still streaked with pink and there were small, bloody footprints on the tile floor leading out of the bathroom, but she didn’t want to think about that right now.
The faucet. That was why she had come in here. She stuck her mouth around the nozzle and twisted the knob full blast. The walls groaned for a second before the deluge filled her mouth. The faucet churned out something that was probably a deep brown in color and tasted like metal, but her body refused to let her spit it out. She sucked the water down until she felt bloated, until her stomach swelled and felt like it would bust like a too-full water balloon.
When she was done she came up gasping and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She picked her clothes up off the floor and pulled them on. She tried to ignore the pain. Every place the clothing touched her skin throbbed like the hum of cicadas. She felt something else too. It was a different kind of hum, like a pulse of excitement, an exhilaration at the prospect of escape. Alene felt around in her front pocket and the buzz swelled inside of her as her hand touched the money the old man had given her back in Iowa. She had almost forgotten about it, but really, where would it have gone? She'd never had an opportunity to spend it. Without even counting it, she already knew it would be enough to get her so far away that those two crazy fucks would never find her. All she needed to do was get to a bus station and that was only as easy as stopping a car and- Shit! She saw her reflection in the mirror, She was covered in scabs from head to toe. How was she going to flag down a car looking like something out of Hellraiser? One look at her would be enough to send the best Samaritan peeling rubber in the opposite direction. Fuck it, she thought. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
She walked through the darkness of the house, came downstairs and found the front door. It'll be locked, a voice inside of her insisted. It'll be locked and so will the others. The doors won't open and you'll be here forever. But the knob turned when she twisted it, and she stepped outside. She walked out onto the porch, down the steps and into the garden. The garden was different at night. All the pretty flowers and topiary had turned black and menacing, all the vines grew thorns to wrap around her and pull her back into the house. And the statues... They walk around, you know, the voice told her. They walk around and follow you. They won't let you leave either. They like you right here.
But, of course, the statues didn't move or follow her around, although they were more awful to look at night than in the daylight. She neared the edge of the garden and started to run. She passed through the hedgerow and felt like a great weight had been lifted off of her. She ran up the drive that led to the road. Now the big iron gate was coming into view and she slowed down. She had forgotten about the gate.
There's no way in hell that thing is going to be unlocked, you know, the voice teased her as she came up to the gate. But even if it is unlocked, it's going to be wired with motion sensors, or something. Move it an inch and alarms are going to go off in the house. Then Paulo will be out here so fast to take you back. He'll take you back to the house and what he does to you is going to be so much worse than giving you a bath with a hard brush. He's gonna-
“SHUT UP!” She screamed into the darkness. “Just shut the fuck up already.” Her voice echoed in the night and she clasp a hand over her mouth. There's no way they didn't hear that. She turned to look back at the house, but she could only see the dark blanket of night.
She stood in front of the gate. It didn't have any wires or any devices she could see. She reached out a hand to push the gate and it swung easily a few inches. She waited, listening for a siren, waiting to see a light switch on in the house, waiting for Paulo to come running down the walkway. No one came. There was no alarm, or floodlights, or anything. She pushed the gate open the rest of the way and stepped through. And just like that, she was free.
Just like that.
Something seemed wrong about how easy it was to walk away from all this. How can this be so simple? It's like they don't even care if I leave or not. Fuck, maybe they don't. Maybe ignorant girls like me are so easy to come by it's not worth the hassle to confine them. Maybe.
She looked down the long, narrow road, first one way then the other. Which way had she come when the car dropped them off? It seemed so long ago she couldn't remember. Really she hadn't been paying much attention. She thought left, but it could just as easily have been right. Just pick a direction and start walking, all roads have to lead somewhere, right? They don't just end. She turned right and started walking.
The plan was to flag down a car, get a ride to, well anywhere really; just as long as it was far. Preferably, somewhere near a bus station. She hadn't noticed how oppressively humid it was when she had first stepped outside; she had been too nervous and focused on her escape. But now she was starting to feel the air like a hot, soggy blanket wrapped around her. She was pouring sweat and it dribbled into every cut and scab on her body.
Salt. Paper cuts and lemon juice. Too much chlorine in the pool. Pulling little flecks of gravel out of a skinned knee. Bee stings. Earaches. Migraines. She thought to herself as she walked along the unmarked blacktop. Only mild discomfort. This isn't real pain. Stinging sweat in abrasions that cover my entire body. Just mild discomfort. Mild discomfort you can't do a damned thing about; so keep walking. One foot in front of the other.
He skin was throbbing, (one foot...) and the road and the darkness stretched in front of her forever (...in front of the other). Her clothes were soaked and they clung to her (one foot...) and seemed to weigh her down (...in front of the other). In the vast and empty blackness there was no horizon, the land was flat and there (one foot...) was nothing to judge the distance. There was (...in front of the other) nothing to walk towards or away from, there was only the merciless night.
And on she walked, farther into the heat, into her discomfort. After a while she felt so miserable, and her face was so slick with sweat she could not tell if she was crying or not. She was giving serious consideration to lying in the middle of the road, letting the cars come to her, letting someone find her sprawled across the blacktop and come to a screeching halt- and if they didn't stop, if they didn't see her and just rolled on over her, well, hey, that didn't sound too bad either- she was seriously considering this when she saw them.
Headlights! splashing over the road, lighting up the night, growing brighter as they approached. Alene stepped into the median and waited for the light to wash over her. The car slowed to a stop without pulling over, and she put one hand in front of her face to block the light while her shadow grew immense and disproportionate behind her.
She walked around to the passenger side. The glare from the headlights had made her blind. She could no longer make out the car, but she heard the electric whir of a motor as the window came down.
“Umm.... hello?” she said into the darkness.
“Well, hello to you too, sugar,” a voice answered back. A man's voice. It had a southern twang to it, maybe from Texas or someplace. “Did you know you was standing in the middle of the goddamned road? Do you unders
tand the concept of a road? Hard thing that cars drive on? Now a car, you see, is a very fast and heavy thing made out of metal, or at least they used to be made out of metal, you might have seen one before and not realized what it was. The point is, here, that cars, in conjunction with a road, very often accelerate to such speeds that if they was to hit a person it could very likely leave little more than a slick red streak in the road. You understand?”
Her vision was returning, but so far she could only make out vague, blurry shapes and the peripheral dark surrounding everything. She could see that the car was big and white. It seemed to contain only one passenger. “Yeah,” Alene laughed, “that's really cute. Listen, I'm in sort of a jam here. Do you think you could help me out?”
“Well, I figured you was in some kind of trouble, standing smack dab in the middle of the road like you was. Goddamn, sugar, do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”
“Pretty dangerous, I guess. But I really just need-” Everything snapped back into focus and she now saw she had been talking to a policeman sitting in a big white police cruiser. He was fat,with food stains all over his uniform, grinning at her beneath a handlebar mustache. His teeth looked like little brown, jagged stones someone pulled up from a stagnant pond. Alene felt like the ground had suddenly fallen away beneath her. “You know what? I completely forgot what I needed you for. It must not have been that important.” She wrapped her knuckles twice against the cruiser's door. “Well, it was nice chatting with you, but I guess I'll be on my way now. So, bye-bye.” She started to walk away.
“Hold up,” the officer called from inside the car. “You just wait a damned minute now. You just told me you was in a jam, little girl. And besides your apparent desire to be jam in the middle of my road, I’m curious as to what that jam would be. So come back around here and tell me all about it, why don't you.”
She came back to the passenger side window, sucked in a deep breath and thought of a lie. “Well, it's like this: I was out for a jog, you know, a little run at night. Anyway, I was running along, on the shoulder, when I thought I saw a fucking wolf, can you believe it? A huge wolf. It just came out of nowhere, and it's snarling at me and it starts to chase me and I can't tell but it may have been foaming at the mouth. I'm running, scared to death, I look behind me and this motherfucker's gaining on me with every step. Relentless, you know? So I run into the middle of the road to try and flag down a car, try to get some help, and that's when you came along. But the instant you pull up- and this is the part you're going to laugh at- as soon as I see your headlights come, they shine on the wolf and I see it ain’t a fucking wolf at all, it's just some mongrel dog. I've been running for my life from some idiot dog, probably just lost or something. Anyway the damn thing runs away as soon as you show up, and here we are. It's really the goddamnedest thing, isn't it?”
The cop gave her a long slow look and pulled out a Dr Pepper bottle he had wedged between his fat thighs and the steering wheel and raised it to his face. A little brown runlet of tobacco juice squeezed out from between his lips and slid down the inside of the bottle. The sound of him spitting made a hollow echo against the opening. “Wolf, huh?”
Alene nodded, trying to look convincing. “A wolf. Or I thought it was. The dog was big as hell, though. Scared the shit out of me, but he's gone now. He just lit out when he saw you coming. Thanks for that by the way.”
“Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. Wolf. Don't get a lot of wolves out here, no we don't. Can't say I ever seen one myself.”
“Well, like I said, it wasn't really a-”
“Where did y’all say you was coming from, again? Must have missed it the first time you said it.”
Alene held out her hands and shrugged, “Town.”
“Which town is that?”
“Uh, the closest one. Can't remember the name.”
“And you ran all the way from there? That's a hell of a marathon, honey. You must be give out.”
“Me? No. That's my thing. I run from town to town, all over the country. It's inspirational, you know? Like that movie where that retard did it.”
“A retard did it? They just set him loose, huh? I'd love to seen that. So where are you headed, then?”
“I'm actually headed back into town. Get a bit of sleep, you know, get a fresh start tomorrow.”
“Not the way you're going you ain’t.”
“I'm not?”
“Hell nah, sugar. That road don't take you nowhere.”
“It doesn't? I mean, it's got to take you somewhere. You're coming from that direction. You must have come from somewhere, right?”
“I ain't bullshitting you, girl. That road don't take you nowhere. But I'll tell you what, why don't you hop in and I'll take you back to town. How does that sound, huh?” he flashed those little brown teeth at her, making him look anything but reassuring.
“Uh, that's really kind of you to offer, but-”
The big cop leaned in across the seat, “Girl, you're getting in this car, one way or the other. Now I'll let you decide whether you want to ride in the front with me or in the back. Choice is yours, now what do you say?”
Alene moved her head to look down the road at the nothing swallowed by darkness. She really didn’t have much of a choice. She reached out to open the car door. “When you put it that way, I think I could use a break from running.”
She got in, slid into the passenger seat and shut the door. The floor on her side of the car was covered in trash, Taco Bell wrappers, empty Skoal cans and plastic bottles so deep her legs were buried to the shins. The cop took one last look at her, nodded, then put the car into gear and sped off.
Alene kicked at the garbage in the floorboard as the car ate up the miles she had been killing herself to put between her and that fucking house. “So you'll just take me back to town, drop me off then?” she asked, trying to keep the terror and uncertainty out of her voice. “Right?”
The fat cop ignored her, just kept driving with both hands on the wheel. He turned to look at her for an uncomfortably long time; longer than she would have liked him to be without his eyes on the road. “What the fuck happened to you?” he asked finally.
Alene could only stare back at him, unsure of what he meant exactly or where she would begin.
The cop reached across the seat and she flinched, but he didn't touch her. He pulled down the visor in front of her and flipped open the little vanity mirror attached to it so she could see her reflection.
“Your skin, girl. What the hell peeled you up like that?” he asked again.
“Oh, that,” said Alene, closing the mirror and flipping the visor back up. “Uh... discount dermabrasion.”
“Dermabrasion? What the hell's that?”
Alene rolled her eyes, “It's when they remove a layer of your skin. It's supposed to make you look younger.”
“Hell, you don't look that old to me.”
“Well, I guess it worked then.”
The cop went on. “When I first seen you I thought maybe you's in a motorcycle accident. You wasn't though,” he said, sounding more than a little disappointed. “Thought maybe you laid one down on the pavement. That'll take your skin off like a fuckin' belt sander. It's nasty. Skin grafts.” He shook his head.
“I don't ride a motorcycle, so I guess I'll be alright.”
“I see it all the time. Death all up and down the road. Animals mostly, dog, cat, foxes, armadillo. A'course the city ain't paying no one to clean 'em up either, so guess who gets to scrape up flattened critters off the road? Yeah, I got me a flat shovel and a whole trunk full of roadkill. I'll let you take a look later if you want.” The cop laughed like he just said something funny.
“You just drive around with dead animals in your car?”
The cop looked at her like she was an idiot, “Well, yeah, sure I do. Till I can find a better place to put 'em. Can't just leave 'em there. Goddamn, there wouldn't be any road to be seen for all the carcasses.”
Alene stared straight ahead
, looking out into the black night beyond the beam of the headlights. The flat land flew by them in a continuous reel of featureless landscape.
“It ain't just animals, either,” the cop continued. “That's what you'd call the fascinating part of the job; the people. Keeps things interesting seeing a body slung through a windshield, all cut up and covered in glass. I've seen people been crushed by their engines coming through their dashboards, people burned up so their backs are melted into vinyl seats. One time, I shit you not, one time I pulled over this drunk. He's just driving along, he don't even know why he's pulled over. So I take him out of his car, have him step around to the front, what do you think he sees? A goddamn head! A goddamn child's head stuck in his grille, just starin' back at 'em. How do you like that? A fuckin' head-on collision!” the cop bellowed laughter and actually slapped his knee.
Alene shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “How much farther is it? Till we get to town?”
The cop quieted down, cleared his throat, “It's on up here a ways.”
They road on in mostly silence, punctuated only by the hollow sound of the cop spitting tobacco into his Dr Pepper bottle. Alene absently shifted through the garbage piled around her with her shoe. She looked out the window, it seemed sort of familiar to her. She thought this was near where she had started walking, just outside the big iron gate. And just as she thought about it, they came up on the gate, it was swinging wide, the way she had left it earlier.
The car began to slow, red brake lights blazing behind them, lighting up the night like a warning.
“Look at that,” the cop said.
Alene felt her pulse start to pick up. “Look at what? I don't see anything.”
The cop pointed, “That gate. It's open. I know the two fellas that lives there, some old coot and his gardener. They woulda pulled that gate to when they went in. I guess I better go and check and see if everything's alright.” He turned the wheel and pointed the car toward the drive.
Flyblown and Blood-Spattered Page 4