Dead Last, Vol. 3

by Quaranta, Marc

  I was going to be on the security team. The security task force. He even mentioned that Kendrick was in charge and that his position was now open. I was overwhelmed with excitement that morning and was ready to start my new life as a new man, as a respectable man.

  I was worried about how the others might react, though. The people of District 7-1 would have no worries. Sure, maybe they’d be unsure of me being thrust into that position, but after a few short weeks, they’d begin to trust me and see that I could do a good job. I got to know a couple of them last night after the drinks starting pouring. They liked me. They’d trust me.

  It was the rest of the group that came with me from WTIX that I was worried about. How would they react to me being in a position of security and authority? I knew they would never look past the rape. Not only that, but they would then judge Glen and the rest of this place for putting me in that position and they’d probably leave and abandon any hope that District 7-1 was safe. I could handle that, though. I didn’t need them anymore. Maybe life would be better off if they all did leave anyway.

  They were doing me no favors being here and carrying my past around for me. I didn’t need any of them anymore. I didn’t need Jack, or Emily, or Kurt, or Haylea. Most of all, I would be more comfortable being myself around District 7-1 if Elyse wasn’t in it.

  I was all but ready to put on my shoes and leave for the meeting before there were four or five knocks on my door. These were not relaxed knocks. Whoever it was needed to see me. I could only hope it was Sarah and she was playing an erotic game of “got to have you now.” I giggled to myself thinking that I had met the perfect woman for me.

  I opened the door and was saddened and shocked that it wasn’t my perfect woman. In fact, it was the woman that had started all of the nightmares for me. Elyse was on the other side of the door frantically waiting to get into my place. Before I could say anything to her, or better yet close the door on her face, she jetted right by me and was standing in the center of the apartment. I exhaled deeply and shut the door.

  “Elyse, what are you doing here?” I turned back around and opened the door. I left it opened and walked away. I didn’t want to be alone with her and I didn’t want her accusing me of doing something behind a closed door.

  I walked over to the kitchen and stood far away from her.

  “This is a pretty nice place. You got lucky.”

  “How’s that?” I was baited into normal small talk.

  “You got your own place. I have to live with my mom. Do you believe that? I’m a grown woman and I’m living with my mom.”

  “You’re just a kid, Elyse,” I said.

  “Scott. You made me a woman.” She smiled at me and I could see the smirk of the devil behind her eyes. “You are such a little bitch.” She walked back to the door and closed it. She was an entirely different person than the one I’d known back at WTIX. She blamed me, I knew. And she wasn’t wrong.

  “What are you doing here, Elyse? I think you should leave.”

  “I think you need to hear me out. You owe me that much, Scott. Is that okay? Or would you hear me any better if I were lying on the floor with my pants off?”

  I looked away from her. Every second our eyes connected I felt lost and less like I was rediscovering my true self.

  “I’m sorry, okay? What I did…” Was an apology going to do anything?

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” she cut me off. “I’m not here for a God damn apology. I think we’re past that big boy.”

  “Then what do you want? Seriously? Can’t you just leave me alone?”

  “Awe, you poor little man. Try begging for it. Try crying a little bit. Try telling me no. See if that works.”

  “Elyse, stop.”

  “No.” She stepped over to the bed and sat down. “No,” she said again. She widened her feet and spread her legs.

  “Elyse.”

  “No!!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. I could have reacted and screamed back, but I didn’t. I remained quiet. “No doesn’t work, does it?”

  “I have a meeting that I need to get to. You can hang around here if you want. I don’t care anymore. But as long as you’re here, I won’t be.”

  “Scott, okay. Listen to me, please,” she said. I stopped in my tracks and turned back to her. “A meeting, huh? Big boy is big man on campus already!”

  She was back to speaking with a psychotic tone in her voice. I turned again and reached out for the door.

  “You took something from me!” she shouted.

  I stopped again and dropped my hand. I was positive that when I turned around, she was going to stab me or kill me or, worse, jump my bones and this time she was going to rape me. I swallowed and turned to her. She wasn’t sitting on the bed anymore, but she wasn’t any closer to me.

  “What, Elyse? What do you want?”

  “I gave you everything, Scott. In one brief moment of time, I gave you everything inside of me and will never be that innocent girl ever again. And now I need something from you. You are going to do something for me.”

  “Elyse, I’m not doing anything for you. If you need something done, go talk to your mom.”

  “If you don’t do this one teeny tiny little thing, I’ll beat the shit out of myself right now and tell everyone you raped me again.”

  She was fucking nuts. I was trapped. I should have looked through the peephole and locked the door. I was so excited that Sarah might possibly have been coming back to see me so soon and I opened the door with no worry what, or who was on the other side. She was a real, living nightmare and was about to ruin my life all over again.

  “Do I have your attention now? Would you like that sexy piece of ass that just walked out of here to know you’ve raped me not only once, but twice? That you couldn’t get enough of my tight little ass? That’s your call.”

  “What?” My voice was soft and nonexistent.

  “I can’t hear you, Scotty?” she said mockingly.

  “What do you want?” I said a little louder and with a grizzly tone.

  “I need you to kill Jack for me.”

  She said it so calmly like killing someone was as simple as waving to them in the streets.

  “What did you just say?”

  “You heard me.” She started walking closer to me. Slowly. “I’m going to cut myself and hit myself in the face and I’m going to rip my panties. I’m going to bleed on your floor and roll around the sheets of your bed. I’m going to grab your hands and drag your fingernails down my thighs. Everyone is going to know you raped me again. It was harder. Angrier. You liked it more the second time. You were more aggressive with me because you wanted to feel more superior. You fucked me like a rag doll.”

  “You’re fucking crazy.”

  At this point, she was backing me up to the wall of the apartment. She leaned in and smiled ear to ear.

  “I’m going to ruin your fucking life, Scotty. Unless you kill Jack.”

  She was out of her mind. She could ruin me in a matter of minutes. People would come for me. Jack and Emily would kill me. Glen would banish me from District 7-1. I had no choice but to listen to her and give in.

  I was going to have to kill Jack.

  18

  Kurt Elkins

  W aking up after being hit in the head and knocked out was a struggle. It wasn’t like waking up after a nap or even after surgery. Anesthesia was a powerful tool and caused some people to wake up after surgery in pain and with a groggy feeling. Being knocked out was similar to that, but the drugs lessen the pain of a surgery. I woke up with a terrible amount of pain on the front of my face. My eye was swollen and I could taste the blood that had dripped from my head.

  I couldn’t reach out, though. I couldn’t get my hand to the spot of the pain to check just how bad it was.

  As I began slowly coming to and realizing where I was, I realized that I had never seen the room I was in before. It was a shed of some sort. It was old, dirty, dusty, and messy. There were tools and broken, r
usty pieces of equipment all over.

  I couldn’t move and when I scanned my eyes up as to why that was, I saw my hands tied together and hanging on a hook from the ceiling. My feet were barely touching the ground and after a few shakes of my head, I was finally fully conscious and able to see what was going on.

  Zach was next to me in the same position. He was moaning and groaning just as I had been. His face was bleeding just like mine was, as far as I could tell my face was bleeding. His chin was against his chest and then rolled over to the side as he started waking up.

  I kicked him once to jerk him awake, but it took a second and a third kick to the leg before his eyes were open and he was looking around.

  “Zach,” I whispered. “Zach, wake the fuck up!”

  “Where the hell are we?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I have no fucking idea.”

  “Oh my God,” he said looking right past me.

  “What?”

  Bryce was lying on a big wooden table over to the side of us near the wall. He was unconscious and covered with a heavy wool blanket. He had bruises on his face, blood dripping from his ears, and his shirt was off and he had cuts on his chest.

  “Bryce!” Zach shouted in a loud whisper.

  “Bryce, wake up,” I repeated. I reached my leg out to try and get close to him, but he was more than ten feet away from me and I shouldn’t have even tried to reach him.

  “Bryce!” Zach shouted. We looked around the room and at the back door, but nobody was coming. There weren’t any noises coming from outside. We hoped that we were alone.

  Finally, Bryce’s head rolled to the side toward us. He wasn’t awake, yet, but was beginning to come to.

  “Bryce! Wake the fuck up!” Zach screamed, again. We both looked around. Sooner or later, if we kept screaming, somebody was going to come in. Somebody put us there.

  Bryce leaned his head forward and finally his eyes slowly rolled open. He dropped his head, pretty firmly onto the table and that woke him up.

  “Bryce,” I whispered. “Bryce, can you get up?”

  “What’s going on? Where am I?” His mouth opened and closed and he licked his lips like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “What’s…What?”

  “Bryce, look over here.”

  He turned his head slowly to me, but his eyes were not focusing on me. I called his name again and he looked over to me.

  “Bryce, can you get up? We need to get out of here.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We need to leave.”

  “Bryce, get the fuck up and get us out of here.” Zach pulled at the ropes around his wrists, but he couldn’t get anywhere.

  Slowly, Bryce lifted his arm, which was cut and bloodied as well, and pulled the blanket back. He swung his body over the edge of the table.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Zach.”

  Zach looked over and saw what I saw. Our mouths hung open.

  The people that captured us, whoever the hell they were, had cut off one of Bryce’s legs. Only one foot hung over the edge of the table. The other was sawed off above the kneecap and it was not in a clean, sterile cut. The bone was jagged and sticking out from his flesh and blood was continuing to pour out at the rate of a small waterfall.

  Bryce hopped off the table as we called for him to stay where he was. He didn’t realize what had happened. He jumped off as if he had two strong legs, and when his one foot hit the floor, he toppled over and fell into a shelf of tools, jars, and other loud metal stuff.

  He fell down and rolled off onto the floor. Jars fell and broke. Tools dropped on him and metal clinked together on the way down. It sounded like somebody had tossed a toolbox full of huge metal tools down the stairs. It clinked and clanked and banged on the way down.

  The noise was loud enough to finally get the attention of whoever had taken us. The back door swung open and two young men walked through and into the shed. They were younger than I was. They were in decent shape physically, but they were not decent by any means hygienically.

  Their hair was both long and dirty. One guy had his pulled back in a ponytail and the others swung around his shoulders, but it looked like neither one of them had washed it in years. Their clothes were brown and yellow as if they’d rolled around in mud, shit, and piss all afternoon. Their skin was covered in the same colors, and spots of pale white were spotted through the dirt.

  They walked over to Bryce and grabbed him under the arms.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!” Zach shouted. “Leave him alone! Fuck you!”

  The one with the ponytail looked over at Zach as they dragged Bryce back to the table. He was smiling at Zach. They tossed Bryce back up onto the table and the noise that came from Bryce broke my heart. He was filled with pain and fear. The guy picked up the small bit of leg that he had left and looked at the wound.

  They started saying a bunch of stuff to each other, but I couldn’t make out what it was. They were speaking English, but it was muddled and they spoke so fast.

  Zach started pulling at his wrists and flailing around like a hung-up fish. I tried to tell him to relax or else something worse was going to happen, but he didn’t stop. I kept pulling and shaking and trying to jump the large hook we were on, but he couldn’t get over it.

  I looked back to Bryce and he was crying. He was hysterical, but he just laid there as if to give up on the world. They might have had him drugged up. A part of me actually hoped that he was. How horrible do people have to be to cut off someone’s leg and not even give them any medicine or drugs for the pain? I guess the better question is just, how horrible do people have to be to cut off someone’s leg?

  The two were finishing up their conversation and the one with his hair down started nodding. He turned his back to Bryce and started looking across the workbench and the shelves. The ponytail continued to mumble something and pointed around the bench. As if he was hearing orders being barked out to him, he picked up an overly large metal, hard-headed mallet.

  He turned back to his friend or brother or whoever and held up the mallet to get approval. The ponytail smiled, nodded, and laughed in one motion and seemed to be really excited. The long-haired guy did the same thing. He walked over to the side of Bryce and drove the mallet straight down on Bryce’s face.

  Bryce didn’t even scream. He moaned. His head rolled to the side and I could see his face straight on. His left eye was caved in, his cheek smashed, and his nose was broken off to the side. His mouth hung open and blood fell out onto the table he lay on.

  His one good eye looked at me and blinked slowly. Again, he made no noise. We stared at each other one last moment as if he was saying goodbye. I hoped at that moment that he knew how sorry I was to let that happen to him.

  “You sons of bitches! I’m going to fucking kill you!” Zach screamed.

  A second blow to the head caved in the side of his skull and I think at that moment, Bryce was gone. The long-haired devil landed a third blow. And then a fourth. I was in such shock that I couldn’t look away, but at the same time, I don’t think I consciously was watching what they did to him. He slammed the mallet down a few more times onto the remains of Bryce’s head before finally dropping it off to the side.

  Before I realized what was going on, Zach was able to take all of his adrenaline and anger and pull his body up and slingshot his arms over the hook. He landed on the ground with a little bit of amazement that he was able to get out. He was free.

  The two guys screamed low, gargling screams. The ponytail charged at Zach, which was a bad idea. I didn’t care what kind of mental or physical state Zach was in, he wasn’t the guy to charge at in a fight.

  Zach, at some point in the two seconds I looked away, had managed to grab a piece of wood. It looked like a club or half of a baseball bat. He reached back and swung so hard the ponytail dropped to his knees and was deeply cut on the face. He swung again going the other direction. Most batters weren’t switch hitters. They were comfort
able swinging right to left or left to right. It was hard to make both directions a smooth swing. Zach had no trouble.

  He was flinging that thing around in every direction and knocking each guy back onto his ass.

  A scream came from behind me. I turned my head as best as I could with my chin pressed up against the inside of my hanging arm. A third guy had just come in. He was older than the other two. I made up my mind in that instant that this was a family of three sick, twisted individuals.

  I watched this third, fatter man grab a small hatchet off to the side and charge. He wasn’t charging at Zach, he was running at me. I was done for. I couldn’t protect myself. He was going to jam that thing right between my eyes and I was going to end up like Bryce. There was nothing I could do about it.

  I watched him get closer and closer and then shut my eyes because I didn’t want the last thing I saw before I died to be that fat man shoving an ax into my face. I thought of Haylea and that I would have given anything to be with her. I said the fastest prayer I’d ever said in my life to one day let me see her and kiss her again.

  The bang the sound made was loud and echoed off of the shed’s walls and rang through my ears and into my brain.

  The bang wasn’t that of the ax cracking my skull, though. I opened my eyes and the third man was lying face down on the ground with a hole in the back of his neck.

  My eyes moved up and Frank was standing in the doorway with a gun. He moved in closer to me and then around me to see Zach. I couldn’t believe my eyes, but it was no time to stare in shock.

  I turned my body toward Zach and felt the stress and tension run off my shoulders to see that Zach was already finished. He sat on the floor and leaned back up against the table that Bryce was lying on. Both the ponytail and his hellish brother were lying on the ground dead. Their heads were smashed in just as they had done to Bryce.

  Zach’s face and hands were covered with blood, but it wasn’t his. And it didn’t seem to bother him too much.