It takes every ounce of restraint Ethan has to resist turning away. He can’t make any sudden movements. Can’t give this man any excuse to harm him further.
Ethan’s skin crawls under the man’s attention. Does this gruff biker even have a sexual interest in men—or is the sexual harassment just a convenient means to terrorize a victim? Either way, it’s completely fucked up and Ethan has a sudden, dangerous urge to struggle.
And he does, almost involuntary at first, like a spasm he can’t control.
Ricky responds with a violent grip on his body
Fueled with a rush of instinct, Ethan lunges forward and sinks his teeth in the first visible strip of sweaty flesh he can see—the man’s neck. The sound of his blunt teeth breaking skin fills his ears, it’s a soft, unsatisfying sound, like biting slowly into an apple. Ethan clamps his jaw so tight that when Ricky jerks away with alarm, Ethan is jerked along with him until he lets go, afraid his teeth won’t withstand the abuse.
A slight, coppery taste stains Ethan’s mouth, but it’s well worth seeing the angry red that blooms on Ricky’s neck, splotched with the beginnings of a purple bruise.
Ricky curses heavily, hand flying to cover the bite mark on his neck, expression snarled and murderous. But he’s stumbling away from Ethan as if he’s been burned.
Good.
Ricky’s companions laugh, which only fuels Ricky’s rage. Their mirth also serves to make Ethan feel small and insignificant. Like his feeble attempt at self-defense was merely akin to a mouse nipping a cat.
As if to prove his strength, Ricky fists Ethan’s hair and holds him steady for the punch that comes next.
Ethan’s jaw bursts with pain, and his vision sparks a frightening white before fading back to normal. He’s released to cower on the scorching pavement, his whole body hugging towards it like a lifeline. The ground isn’t going to save him. Closing his eyes and wishing it all away isn’t going to save him. And he sure as hell can’t save himself. Not from this many men.
Ethan’s whole body gives up in the form of tense muscles, bracing for more beating. He succumbs to his fate—he just has to endure. Endure and pray that they leave him bloody but alive on the side of the road. Pray they don’t beat him to death.
Some cruel words are exchanged. Shadows pass over him as he’s surrounded by the four men on all sides. Someone nudges him with the toe of their boot. The next thing that comes is a kick, and then several. Ethan shields his face with his arms, tries to ignore the scrape of his face on the pavement as his body is jostled with every blow.
Muffled laughter tries to penetrate the cocoon of Ethan’s trembling body. The pain is sharp, and then aching, and almost fades just as another kick lands.
He’s not going to make it through this, is he?
He thinks of his family. His friends he left behind for the summer.
His roommate the first year of college.
He thinks these men aren’t going to let him live.
He’s seen their faces, after all. Seen their bikes. Seen too much.
Another barrage of kicks land and then something else.
The whirr of a motorcycle engine?
No. Louder than that, more gurgling, gas-powered roughness than even the loudest motorcycle can manage.
A chainsaw. It sounds like a chainsaw.
He’s going to die. Right here. On the side of the road. For what? For the pathetic contents of his wallet? For the amusement of these men?
Ethan’s eyes fly open, and he frantically searches for an opening, some sort of space between these men to heave his body through. To make a run for it.
The blows have stopped. The men are four tall dark-clad figures hovering over him, but their attention isn’t on him at all anymore, it’s on something else, something over one of their shoulders.
The growl of the sputtering noise grows louder, and Ethan instinctively scrambles away from it, past the legs of the men. Somehow, impossibly, they move away from him instead of stopping him. Behind him, there’s a gut-curdling scream. The engine noise muffles and strains. A warm spray of liquid hits the back of Ethan’s neck, slips down his shirt in thick drips aided by the sheen of sweat on his skin.
Horrified, confused, Ethan whips around and…
Red. He sees red.
2
Blood flies off the teeth of the revving chainsaw like liquid poured into fan blades. Droplets splash hot on Ethan’s face. His brain screams at him to slam his eyes shut, to shield them from the spray of blood, but he can’t move, can’t even blink.
One of the bikers.
One Ethan didn’t even learn the name of through the gang’s jeering.
His…
His body. The man's body looks like it’s pulling apart. Like string cheese meticulously peeled from the top. His shoulder is no longer connected. His collarbone must be halved. A chainsaw still whirrs while thrust through his abdomen.
The chainsaw. It started at the shoulder, Ethan realizes. And it was forced down. It’s scrambling the man’s body now, chunks of flesh torn to shreds. Hanging. Flying through the air. Slopping wetly on the hot pavement.
Ethan’s brain struggles to make sense of what he’s seeing. Flashes of memory startle him: his mother beating a whisk through the slimy contents of an egg, the combined yellow of yolk and whites sizzling gently on the black surface of the frying pan.
Can he hear the shreds of sloppy flesh sizzling on the black of the scorching road now? Cooked by the heat of the blazing sun?
Ethan doesn’t know. It’s impossible. He must be imagining it.
What he definitely isn’t imagining is the hulking giant of a man standing behind the biker's ruined body. He wields the heavy chainsaw as if it weighs nothing. Where did he come from? Who is he?
Gravel pierces Ethan’s palms as he scrambles backwards on his hands and knees so hard he’s sure he gets the asphalt equivalent of rug burn.
The remaining three bikers are scattering, their attention no longer on Ethan at all. He seems to be the last thing on their minds. One of them, Jed, pulls a pistol from the holster on his hip. Ricky and the other biker don’t seem to have guns because they pull knives from their pockets instead.
Ethan almost laughs at the absurdity of his assailants trying to fight a chainsaw with three-inch blades.
A deafening pop, pop, pop, surrounds Ethan as Jed fires again and again at the giant man with the chainsaw. Ethan’s heart sinks immediately—whoever this giant is, he saved Ethan from a brutal beating. Still, his heart flies in terror at what he’s seeing, at the biker’s body going limp on the chainsaw’s blade, spilling blood and soft organ chunks at his feet
The biker’s body is no longer held up by his own consciousness, but by the man behind him.
It’s then Ethan realizes two things: one, the biker is surely dead—and two, none of the bullets Jed fired hit the giant man, he was shielded by the torn body hanging from his chainsaw.
Ethan hadn’t been counting the shots, but he knows from TV that only a handful of bullets fit inside guns that small. Jed keeps pulling the trigger long after the gun clicks to indicate its empty chamber.
Jed, Ricky, and their third accomplice start to back away, slowly, bracing for sudden movements. Their faces are cemented in terror, as though they have never witnessed violence as visceral as this. As if the only sort of violence they’ve ever seen comes in the form of beatings and bullet wounds and picking on the weak.
The giant man shakes the limp body of the biker free of his chainsaw. It falls to the ground with a thud.
Ethan should run. Scramble to his feet and run. But he’s frozen. And where would he run, anyway? He’s trapped between this hulking man who saved his life and the bikers that beat him into the pavement. Above all else, he has the pathetic urge to crawl underneath his van, squeeze into the tiny space and will all of this away.
With the body out of the way, it becomes even more apparent just how imposing this giant man is. It’s not just his towering height—hi
s bare, sweaty chest is visible beneath the straps of his denim overalls. His muscles in his chest and arms bulge and curve like a fit man just after a workout. His jaw is strong, expression stony and unreadable.
It’s not the face of a man who just came to a stranger’s rescue.
No, it’s the face of someone who just brutalized another human being and doesn’t feel much about it.
Ethan’s breath catches in fear. The man’s eyes aren’t trained on the retreating bikers, they’re trained on Ethan still sprawled on the pavement.
Still, despite the man’s demeanor, Ethan feels grateful. He stopped the beating. Ethan wants to thank him. Can’t manage to open his mouth.
Nothing about this man is weak or hesitant. A monstrous strength boils beneath the calm surface. His heaving chest is the only part of him that gives any sign of life.
When Ethan’s lungs finally manage to regain function, he’s overcome with the overwhelming urge to beg for his life.
So he does.
“I—I—” he tries, voice trembling harder than it would have if he had attempted to plead with those bikers. He strains to shout over the noise of the chainsaw. “I’m not with them—those bikers, I—they just, I was just going to stop for gas and they started attacking me.”
The man’s unnerving, heated stare doesn’t falter.
A fraction of a moment passes before Ethan realizes he said the wrong thing.
The man lunges forward, heaving the whirring chainsaw as if in preparation to bring it down right on Ethan’s face.
Ethan sucks in a terrified breath that is more sob and confusion than anything else. He shouldn’t have babbled about not being with the gang of bikers—that probably only made him sound suspicious.
What should he have done—what should he have done?
He should have done what he wanted to do in the first place.
Now is his last chance.
“Thank you!” he blurts, just as the chainsaw swings towards him. His frantic volume diminishes the sincerity that should accompany the gratitude. “For saving me!”
If those are the last words Ethan ever says before his skull is split by the chainsaw’s teeth… well. They aren’t the worst words.
Ethan closes his eyes, braces for the split second of pain he’s sure to feel before his death.
But nothing comes.
Somehow, he forces his eyes open again.
The chainsaw blade is hovering just inches from his face, so close that Ethan can feel the air created by its spin ghosting his face. The man is still staring at him.
Mechanically, Ethan raises his head, eyes bleary with tears, to look the man in the eye.
The man responds with a slow, almost innocently curious tilt of his head.
Ethan doesn’t know what to make of that. Doesn’t know what to make of the chainsaw paused inches from his face.
He almost died. This man, this stranger who saved him, almost killed him, just now.
Fuck.
A commotion from the gas station snaps the man’s attention away from Ethan.
Without a word, the man steps around Ethan, chainsaw blade maneuvered precariously over Ethan as the man moves past. Ethan ducks down, lets the man trudge away from him with heavy steps.
For the first time since the bikers sped past him down the road, Ethan feels like he can breathe again. With no small amount of effort, Ethan manages to pull himself to his feet with the help of his open car door. There are so many tiny slivers of glass from the broken window embedded in his hands. Pain prickles through his palms, protesting the pressure on them as he heaves himself up.
Ethan tentatively sucks his throbbing bottom lip into his mouth. It’s swollen. His tongue laps at partially crusted blood. His own blood. Maybe some of that biker’s blood, too. The thought makes him splutter and gag.
Over at the gas station, the bikers are in a flurry of panic. There’s something wrong with their bikes—all four motorcycles are knocked over and brutalized, as Ethan had been knocked over and brutalized only moments before. Who tampered with their motorcycles?
Across the road, Jed tries futilely to right his damaged bike, but even when he manages to get it standing, it won’t start.
“What the hell did you people do?” Jed roars so loud that Ethan can hear it, even at a distance, even with his ears ringing.
That’s when Jed notices him—the man with the chainsaw barreling across the street towards him.
“Fuck!” Ricky yells.
“Fucking run,” Jed commands, already taking off down the road.
There’s nowhere to run. It’s all desolate road for miles, both ways.
The bikers must realize this, because they quickly veer off into the cornfield, hoping to lose the giant man’s pursuit amidst the tall crop.
The man crashes into the field right after them, chainsaw slicing right through the corn stalks.
Ethan needs to get out of here. Now.
But his keys are lost somewhere in the field. The same field a towering stranger is currently in, hunting the bikers with a chainsaw.
Ethan’s only other option is the smartphone buried in the bottom of his luggage. He reaches through the broken window and unlocks all the doors. Then he hobbles around his van, holding onto the scorching hood for support as he makes his way to the side door and drags it open. Inside, he tosses several bags aside until he finds the one containing his phone. The zipper tears open, and he flings the neatly folded clothes all over the back seat until he finds the glossy black of his phone screen.
It seems like an eternity, holding his phone in shaky hands while he waits for it to power on. The upbeat tune the phone plays at its startup sends a shiver down his spine, with how normal and wrong it is, to hear something so cheerful while the shouts of the bikers still echo in the distance.
Blood smears across the sleek screen as he swipes the phone, opens the calling app, and dials the police. He can tell right away something is wrong. The call immediately drops. He pulls the phone away from his ear and scans the icons at the top of the screen.
No service.
No fucking service.
Of course.
Dropping the useless phone back in his bag, Ethan staggers back into the road. Whips around. The gas station. His only option is the gas station. Why hadn’t he thought of that first? They’re sure to have a landline.
Pain shoots through Ethan’s body as he forces himself to limp across the road, past the brutalized remains of the biker’s motorcycles. The windows on the storefront are so desperately in need of cleaning that Ethan can’t make out what’s inside through the thick dust and grime caked on both sides of the glass. Something about that is foreboding, but Ethan can’t fault the poor people of this declining area for not keeping up appearances.
So he heaves open the door despite the prickle on the back of his neck warning him to turn back.
A bell above the door rattles, chiming angrily to alert his presence.
The interior of the gas station is just as desolate as the exterior. Scant products are scattered across the rows of shelves that contain more empty space than items for sale. A visible layer of dust coats the packaging of all the products in sight, plastic old and peeling away from paper. The checkered linoleum floor is dull and unswept, cracked and peeling up in geometric chunks.
If it wasn’t for the woman sitting behind the counter, holding a young child in her lap, Ethan would have assumed this place was abandoned and had been so for years, the glowing OPEN sign in the window simply left switched on and forgotten, like the rest of this property, this town.
Ethan tries to calm his breath as he approaches the counter. The woman working the counter is old, mousy gray hair falling in clumped strands around her face, greasy and unwashed. Her sun-leathered skin is smudged with grime as if she has just gotten done doing hard labor on a farm. There’s a little girl sitting in her lap, probably about six years old, pale skin perfectly clean and hair brushed to perfection. They both stare at Ethan
’s approach with vacant, bored expressions.
Ethan refuses to judge a book by its cover, but the woman creeps him out—and then a horrible thought strikes him: he just walked in through the unlocked front door. Despite the roar of a chainsaw and the shouts of the biker’s panic that must have been audible to this woman just minutes before.
She hadn’t locked the door, holed herself in here to avoid the violence outside? Why? If the door doesn’t lock, why hadn’t she run, or hidden? Why is she just sitting at the counter like she’s completely oblivious to the chaos outside her shop?
“There’s,” Ethan starts against his better judgement, still trying to catch his breath. “There’s something happening outside. Something bad. Do you have a landline phone?”
“No phone,” the woman says, cold and unbothered.
Ethan physically recoils, taken aback by the woman’s tone, which gives Ethan the feeling she wouldn’t let him use the phone even if she did have one.
“I—uh,” he continues, faltering under the weight of this woman’s uninterested stare. “I was traveling through, needed to stop to buy some gas, but that biker gang jumped me—”
“What do you expect?” the woman asks, shifting the weight of the little girl in her arms. “Dangerous types like those all over these parts. Think they own the place, just because there ain’t no one around to teach them otherwise. The weaker families already moved away.”
Ethan opens his mouth, a syllable dying on his lips. Closes his mouth. What can he say to that? This lady acts like the kind of terror and violence he experienced outside her shop front is simply commonplace.
“Ain’t no law enforcement in the town no more. Not for miles,” the woman offers. She lights up a cigarette, smoke uncomfortably close to the little girl's face. “Town’s dead. Whole county’s a ghost. Gangs run through here all the time to pillage what’s left of the carcass. Shouldn’t be here if you can’t protect your own. That’s why the weak ones left.”
For the second time since he entered the gas station, Ethan feels slapped. It’s like this woman—and apparently, the whole area—lives in their own little world completely detached from the reality Ethan’s used to. He didn’t think forgotten and dangerous places like this existed outside of cinema.
Dangerous Savior Page 2