Count to Ten

by Mark Ayre

  “I’m glad you asked,” said Gina. Taking his uncuffed hand, she made him hold the peas, then stepped back. Because the initial shock of cold had passed and was now soothing his pain, he kept them in place.

  He asked, “Why?”

  “Because my new friend Heidi is on her way. When she arrives, she will seduce you, and the two of you will make love.”

  “We won’t. You’ve broken my heart, but I don’t believe you’re in your right mind. Something’s happened to you. Even if it hadn’t, even if you were a bored housewife engaged in a cheap tryst, I wouldn’t do the same to you.”

  “You must.”

  “But I won’t. Not until we’re divorced. So long as we’re married, I’ll be faithful. Of that, you can be sure.”

  Gina said, “I’m going to murder Paul. That’s why I’m here.”

  Due to the shock of her words, the bag of peas slipped. Will managed to tighten his grip before they collapsed into his lap, repositioning them for maximum pain alleviation.

  For the first time, he got the impression that Gina wasn’t just different; she was trapped. Cold, impassionate, he realised these traits showed she needed saving. From what, he could not yet tell.

  Despite her attitude and recent actions suggesting otherwise, he said, “You couldn’t kill anyone.”

  “Wrong,” she said. “For the Gods, I would kill anyone with only two exceptions: Edie, and you. I would sooner kill myself.”

  “If that’s true, there’s still some of the Gina I love in there.”

  Choosing not to comment on this, Gina said, “When Heidi arrives, you’ll allow her to take you to bed. Your reward will be to experience a level of bliss you cannot imagine.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “Your punishment, if you refuse, will be execution.”

  “Then she can execute me.”

  “In the end,” said Gina, “she will. I’m here because Paul was in your position and made the mistake of insulting Heidi. Tonight, he dies.”

  “Talk about unable to take rejection.”

  “As with Paul, Heidi will ask me to end your life. When I am unable, she’ll kill me before executing you.”

  “She’s not a benevolent God, then?”

  Gina continued, “Before she executes you, she may kill our daughter.”

  This time, the peas did slip from his hand to his lap. Hardly noticing, he tried to stand and fell back. With pickaxes, grief and panic chipped at his heart. From somewhere deeper, anger built.

  “If you believe that, how can you work for her?” Will asked of his wife. “If you think there’s a chance this Heidi might murder our daughter, you should murder Heidi first.”

  “How could I? She’s a God.”

  “Except she isn’t. If Gods walked among us, would they go around murdering people who wouldn’t sleep with them?”

  In Gina’s eyes burned a look that suggested she thought Will hopelessly naïve. It was impossible to believe how completely she had changed. Yet she still claimed to love Will and Edie. Somehow, that did not mesh.

  There were tears in her eyes.

  “Will,” she said. “Please, please sleep with her. I don’t want to lose you.”

  Though it broke his heart, he said, “I think you already have.”

  This Gina greeted with a roar of frustration. Grabbing her hair in fists on either side of her head, she screamed, turned away, and stormed into the kitchen. When she returned, there were tears in her eyes. When her hands came from her hair, she stepped forward as though to strangle him, but stopped short, unable to do so. Will could not tell what was wrong with her.

  “If you don’t want me to die,” he said, “Let me go. If our daughter is truly in danger, I’ll take her away. Protect the people you claim to love. Set us free.”

  Turmoil disfigured her beauty. This once decisive creature had no idea what to do. Brushing the peas aside, Will held out his hand, letting the chain clink against the radiator.

  “Let me go,” he said. “The demise of your daughter and husband is the alternative because I will never sleep with Heidi.”

  She said, “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “Mine has already shattered,” he said. “Let me go.”

  For several more seconds, she hung in indecision. With no more words to persuade her, Will stayed silent.

  An approaching engine decided her. “Fine.”

  Turning to leave, presumably to rush upstairs and collect the key, she met Paul, awake and furious.

  There was time enough for a gasp of shock. Then Paul brought upon Gina’s head the same doorstop doggie with which she had felled Will.

  As she crumpled, Paul turned to Will and sighed.

  “Hate to say it mate, but your wife is a bitch.”

  Nineteen

  Heidi said, “It’s been lovely to speak with you. Now count to ten, and it’ll all be over.” She turned to the door from living room to hall. “Leon, Samuel, it’s time.”

  Face split in a broad beam, Heidi sat, and the film froze, caught on that smug expression until returned to the beginning, played again.

  In the hall, someone stumbled, then threw open the living room door.

  Sensing this urgency had purpose, Mercury dived from the sofa, grabbing Heidi’s wine glass as she went. Somehow, she avoided shredding her knee on the shards of her deceased glass, while keeping Heidi’s whole as she slid towards the mantle.

  Sammy’s father, presumably Leon, bombed into the room, faced the chair and said “Oh.” His face transforming into the sound’s shape as the prongs of his taser, already fired, hit leather, perhaps paralysing the sofa, but having no effect on their intended target.

  Rising, Mercury held out Heidi’s glass and smiled. “May I have another drink?”

  Confused, Leon only stared. Placing the glass safely on the mantlepiece, beside the downturned photograph, Mercury approached the child and wife killer.

  “Stay back,” he said, twisting. Still outstretched, he pointed the expended taser in her direction. Its prongs flipped off the sofa onto the floor as the wires whipped. Either he was an idiot and didn’t understand how the taser worked, or hoped she was.

  He was afraid.

  Until Mercury reached out, gripped the taser, and squeezed, she could not quite understand why.

  Held in a sturdy plastic casing, had an ordinary human grabbed the taser and squeezed, it might have creaked, but little more. Mercury had forgotten possession imbued her with superhuman strength. When she compressed her fingers around the taser, it cracked then crumpled.

  Two of Leon’s fingers had been between the casing and Mercury. These snapped like twigs, drawing a scream from their owner. His night worsened when Mercury put a hand to his chest. A simple playground shove which resulted in him hitting a wall, his back cracking, his head smacking the plaster.

  On the floor, in a heap, he groaned. With his uninjured hand, he reached to his head and flinched, touching the spot where the skull had met the wall.

  “That’s going to bruise,” he whined.

  Ignoring his pathetic protest, Mercury returned to the wine glass and placed the forefinger and thumb of each hand on either side. With ease, she snapped it in two. One piece kept the stem. This she replaced on the mantle, leaving her with a single rounded shard of glass, ending in a glinting point.

  “A bruise is the least of your worries,” she said. “Do you know what happens when you bleed?”

  He didn’t need to answer. Widened eyes and a goldfish mouth revealed Leon knew his blood was acidic. Were she to slice his cheek, the spilt blood would disintegrate his jaw, his chest, and anything else with which it came into contact. With only three or four well-placed slices, she could watch Leon boil and melt.

  Despite his despicable actions, Mercury could never go so far. Her conscience wouldn’t permit such a brutal execution of an unharmed, heap of a human. Even in self-defence, against a demon, it had been difficult.

  None of this did Leon k
now. Perhaps because he held others to his low standards, his eyes indicated total conviction that Mercury would follow through with her implied threat.

  “Where’s your son?” she asked.

  Without hesitation, Leon answered. “Heidi got a text while you were watching the video. Another of her followers has an issue. She wanted you, uh, Heidi to help, to bring the follower’s husband into the fold.”

  “Why would Sammy go on Heidi’s behalf?” Mercury said. “You can’t infect others, can you? That power belongs only to demons.”

  “There’s a daughter,” said Leon. “Couple of years younger than Sam. I think he has a thing for her. If Heidi brings in her father, someone will need to get the girl. Sammy has taken the job.”

  A couple of years younger than Sammy. 12 or 13. An innocent girl confronted by a boy who had helped murder his sister and mother. If, before his infection, Sammy had been fond of the girl, that didn’t make her safer. Quite the opposite.

  The girl’s father would be in trouble too. Hopefully, the wife would await Heidi, however long that took. Given how devoted the infected tended to be to the possessors, this was not an unreasonable assumption. In any case, youth took priority.

  “Will Sammy bring the girl here?”

  “I don’t know,” said Leon. “Maybe.”

  “Will he hurt her?”

  To this, Leon said nothing. Using only the glass shard threat, Mercury could have made him talk. As his silence said as much as could his words, she let it pass. She forced him to tell her the girl’s address, then asked if he had a car.

  “Yes.”

  “Will Sammy have taken it?”

  “No. Sam’s too young for a license. We’re supposed to keep a low profile. He’ll have cycled.”

  “Where are the car keys?”

  Under Mercury’s strict guidance, Leon rooted through drawers, searching for car keys not recently used. Keeping an eye on him, in case he was pretending to search while locating a weapon, she tried to decide what to do both with him, and the bodies.

  Upset though it made her to consider leaving the bodies as they were, dumped unceremoniously, callously, on the bed, she had no choice. Not only could touching the women be considered as evidence tampering, impeding any case which the police might attempt to build against the murderers, it was also not the right allocation of her most precious resource: time. Over those who had already died, she had to prioritise the living.

  Leon was simpler. Because she didn’t fancy him tagging along, but could not face killing him, he would need to be disabled.

  “Keys. Got ‘em.”

  Under threat of sharp edge, Mercury led him to the entrance hall where they had first met and insisted he hand over his and her mobiles.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “For what you did to your wife and daughter, I should kill you.”

  To his credit, he didn’t try to defend the murders, nor make a glib comment, as had his son. He didn’t apologise, either, and it took much for Mercury not to slice at least his arm with the glass shard.

  In this hallway, Mercury had been asked a question by Sammy. Through her inability to answer, Mercury had revealed her identity.

  “How do you want it?” she recalled for Leon. “How would Heidi have answered that question?”

  Voice trembling, he said, “I’m not supposed to say.” His intent gaze into her eyes told Mercury he was not looking at her, but for Heidi.

  “She can’t see or hear you,” Mercury said. “She’ll never know what you reveal. If you don’t give me what I need, I’ll slit your throat.”

  Mercury thought her voice trembled partway through. If it did, and if Leon noticed, he didn’t take it as a sign she didn’t mean to follow through the threat.

  “She says ‘any way you do, baby.’”

  Suitably repulsed, Mercury nodded and told Leon to turn. Paralysed by the glint of the glass shard, he was unable. To ease his fear and move things along, she chucked the glass into the living room. Used her twirling finger to indicate the movement she wished to see.

  The glass gone, Leon still lacked the stomach to rush Mercury. On his heel, he twisted, putting his back to her.

  No sooner was he in position, Mercury had her arm around his throat. With her inordinate strength, she had to be careful not to crush his windpipe. Nailing the pressure, she cut off his air supply until he flopped in her arms, then dropped him before he could suffocate to death.

  Trying not to think about the women and the girl who deserved more but were being left dumped on the child’s bed, Mercury left the house, closed the door, and went in pursuit of Sammy.

  Twenty

  An hour ago, Will had agonised over the possibility of his wife engaging in an affair with an unknown man. Supposedly unwilling to entertain this fear, he had none the less followed an ex-colleague’s phone call to a stranger’s house, suspicion defeating trust.

  His wife had not been cheating but had cheated. Now she lay unconscious on the living room of the stranger’s home, with William chained to the radiator. Even if he had thoroughly examined the possibility of infidelity, no imagined scenarios would have ended like this.

  Paul, still rubbing his aching head with one hand, had grabbed his phone with the other. Keeping a wary eye on Gina, he began to type.

  “What are you doing?” said Will.

  “Bitch tried to kill me,” said Paul. “I’m calling the cops.”

  Though she had cheated, though she had bashed his skull and chained him to a radiator, Will experienced a flare of anger as Paul, for the second time, called his wife a bitch. More irrationally, he realised he could not let the authorities know what Gina had done.

  “There’s no proof,” he said.

  The phone was to Paul’s ear. “You what?”

  Desperate, Will said, “Your handcuffs chain me to your radiator. My wife and I have been attacked with your doorstop. What are the police going to think when they arrive?”

  Face purpling with anger; Paul hung up.

  “You in on this?” he said. “Sitting outside when Gina comes to kill me. Rolling in as backup to help her finish the job.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Will. “While you were unconscious, Gina decided the only way to kill you was by chaining me to a radiator, waiting until you woke and attacked. It’s all part of an elaborate plan which will come to fruition any minute. Watch out.”

  For some time, Paul stared at Will. At last, he slid the phone in his pocket.

  “That was a lot of sarcasm.”

  “Sorry,” said Will. “I’m a little pent up.”

  “Just found out your wife’s a bitch?”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  Paul rolled his eyes, as though this were an unreasonable request. On the floor, Gina groaned. Paul grabbed his dog, but Gina soon fell still.

  “She came here to kill me,” he said. “She’s part of some cult. Her leader tried to get it on with me last night. When I refused, she tried to kill me. Grabbed me by the collar and threw me across a room.”

  “Bodybuilder, is she?”

  Paul looked as though he wanted to use the dog to hit Will.

  “Your wife make a habit of running around trying to kill people, does she?”

  Will said nothing. Paul shook his head.

  “Didn’t think so. A mate of mine invited me to a party but was acting proper weird. Got me talking to this Heidi bird and she was right fit, yeah, no argument. But there was something wrong. So, I decides to duck out, and she tries to grab my hand. Instead, she gets a bottle, and it shatters.”

  With his hands, he indicated an explosion, as though the glass had been packed with dynamite, detonated at Heidi’s touch.

  “She ain’t big, yeah. Don’t look as though she could snap a twig, let alone shatter a bottle. I called her something she didn’t like.”

  “A bitch?”

  “And more. She grabbed my collar and threw me across the room, and, mate, that ain’t no exaggeratio
n. Across the room. When I get up, I go to my mate, ready to whack him for setting me up with Superwoman, only he grabs me, tries to drag me back to her. She’s up and coming our way, and I freak. Bust my mate’s nose with an elbow.”

  He shook his head, deflated. Went and sat on the sofa, still watching Gina.

  “We been mates since we was kids. No way he lays a hand on me for nothing. Especially not some bird. But there was something different about him. Knew it as soon as we met. I should have pressed him. Just assumed he was high. But, nah, something had changed him. Sound like anyone you know?”

  Will couldn’t help but look at Gina, which told Paul all he needed to know. Will expected him to go on. He left his seat, leaving the doorstop at the sofa’s foot, and went into the kitchen. Returning with a sharp knife with a two-inch blade, he went to Gina.

  “Hey,” called Will, panicked. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Chained to the radiator, both Gina and Paul were out of Will’s reach. There was nothing he could do to stop the latter slicing the former’s throat. Despite this, Paul paused at Will’s words, placed the knife on the arm of the sofa and dropped his jacket over his shoulders, taking it off.

  “I told you I popped my mate’s nose with my elbow, yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well his blood, it got all over my elbow, over my shirt. At first, I didn’t notice anything. He let go, and I bolted fast as I could because that Heidi bitch was coming at me.”

  Elbow exposed, Paul shoved it in Will’s face. Fresh scars crisscrossed over the skin. As though someone had forced the joint into boiling water.

  “Once I got clear, I noticed the elbow of my shirt was burnt through. That’s when it started to hurt like bananas.”

  “Like what?”

  “Bananas, like hell, like shit, like nobody’s business.”

  Will stared at the crisscrossed scars, then at Paul’s fearful eyes.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What’s not to get?” said Paul. “His blood, man. He weren’t just changed as a person. His blood was acid. I reckon your missus will be the same.”