Crossing the Line

by Bobe, Jordan

  A twig snapped behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw Tracy crouched down with her stolen rifle in her hands. The other girl didn’t have to tell her that she was going to attempt to provide cover.

  The sound stopped the footsteps dead in their tracks. Their stalker was close and Ivy was sure that he was now considering changing his course toward the movement. “I think they’re in here!” he called back out of the trees.

  Ivy sprang into action, not wanting to attempt to take more than one man on at a time. She rushed to the voice, whose owner turned around shocked when he heard her approach. Her first swing knocked the man’s ball cap off of his head and sent him sprawling.

  Ivy raised the mace above her head and brought it down solidly between his shoulders, missing her intended target of his skull. He yelped with pain and tried to scramble away. The barbed wire tore through the fabric of his flannel shirt and left tiny gashes along his spine. Ivy had hoped the damage would have been much worse. She began thinking that she may have miscalculated her actions.

  She withheld the urge to scream with rage as she swung the club a second time. This time it hit the man solidly in the back of the head. There was enough force behind the blow that his head bounced off of the ground. The barbed wire did more of the desired effect this time. It came away from the skull with bits of hair and flesh clinging to its rusted spikes.

  The man seemed knocked out by the blow, but that was not good enough. Ivy knew she could not leave any survivors. She rolled the big man over, grunting at the strength it took to move his dead weight. She was preparing to stand so that she could strike him in his bloodied face when his eyes popped open and his hand wrapped around her throat.

  Ivy let out a shrill shriek despite herself as the fingers tightened around her esophagus. She fought back her hysteria and kept the club out of the reach of the man’s other arm as he attempted to grab it.

  One of the man’s eyes was full of blood from some internal hemorrhage. Ivy focused on this for a moment, transfixed on the way the blood seemed to be sloshing about beneath his iris. As the fingers tightened around her thin neck she lashed out her free hand and drove her thumb into the blood-filled eye.

  There wasn’t a satisfying pop like she would have imagined. As her filthy fingernail penetrated the eyeball the optic fluid oozed out more like the innards of a squeezed grape. Her thumb pushed deep into his head, shoving the deflated eye back against the nest of its optic nerves.

  The man’s hold on her neck loosened as he let out a loud cry of pain. Ivy pulled her thumb out of the eye socket and scrambled back away from her wounded victim as air once again rushed into her lungs. She began hacking despite herself. It felt as if the inside of her throat had been scraped by steel wool. She knew it wasn’t actually bleeding in her windpipe, but it sure as hell felt like it was.

  More footsteps approached now. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the forest or not, but it sounded like at least three separate pairs of feet rushing toward her. She forced herself to stand and ran back to her hiding place, clutching the club to her chest as if it could protect her if she was shot at from behind.

  She dashed back behind the tree and knelt down. In the darkness she felt around the ground until her hand fell on the muzzle of her set aside pistol. She held her breath and closed her eyes against the sweat that ran from her brow.

  “Bitch poked out my eye!” the man screamed.

  “Keep your voice down,” the second man said. “She’s got to be around here somewhere.”

  A deep growl came from the area of the men. Ivy felt relief sweep through her. She knew Brute would have no problem killing the men.

  “Sic ’er, Zeus,” the second man said. The growl turned into a loud snarl.

  Ivy’s heart plummeted in her chest. It wasn’t Brute with the men, but another member of his “pack”. From the sounds of it the dog had not gone feral.

  Sudden, rushing footsteps came in her direction. She stilled her shaking body against the tree and raised the pistol. If the dog was following her trail it would come face to face with her and she would capitalize on the close-range.

  “Shit, she really did put it out,” the second man said. Ivy could barely hear him over the sound over the approaching footsteps and the thumping of her heart. She finally released her breath and tried to calm herself.

  Remembering that Tracy had been covering her, she looked for her friend, but found no sign. She crawled back a few more feet and used a slightly smaller tree to brace herself. More sweat ran down from her forehead. She wiped it away with the hand holding the club and waited for the dog to appear in her range of attack.

  The beast that came into view did not look like what she had pictured. He was nowhere near as big as Brute. In fact, he looked like a normal sized teenage boy save for his dreadlocked hair and sharpened teeth. A long scar ran down from his hairline all the way down to the tip of his nose. His fingernails and toenails were long enough to be called claws. And when he set eyes on Ivy pure hatred filled his eyes.

  He crouched down lower to the ground, staying on all fours. He began moving toward her cautiously, feeling her out. His eyes narrowed and his chapped lips pulled back to bear his sharpened teeth. He snarled and lashed out a hand at her though she was still far from arm’s length.

  Ivy forced her hands to stop shaking as she trained the gun on the young man. She hoped that she would not have to shoot him. He seemed as much a victim as she was.

  Without making a nose Brute burst from the forest between them. He dropped to all fours and snarled at the young man. “No kill,” Brute said.

  “Brute,” the young man said. He rose to his hind feet and Brute followed suit. “You come home.”

  “We no kill girls,” Brute said. “We kill bad men. We kill masters.”

  “Bad, Brute.”

  “No, good.”

  The younger dog seemed to consider it and then snorted. “Kill masters.”

  A gunshot rang out in the forest. Ivy jumped and both dogs turned toward the sound. They dashed through the forest without seeming to care for their own safety. Ivy followed after them, holding the pistol with her finger just outside the trigger guard. The men were incredibly fast and seemed to know exactly where they are going.

  Even at their quick pace four more shots were fired before they reached the gunfight.

  Both men were lying on the ground now. Tracy was crouched at the base of the tree with the smoking barrel of the thirty-ought-six trained on the unmoving men. Ivy rushed over to her friend and knelt down next to her. Tracy looked over at her and she instantly noticed the change in her eyes. She had lost even more of her former jovial personality when she gunned the men down. The longer the night drew on the more animal she became.

  Brute walked over to the unmoving men and picked them up as if neither of them weighed anything. The one that had choked Ivy out flinched involuntarily. The other man remained completely still and when a beam of light fell on his face Ivy was more than convinced than he was dead. An enormous hole that had spread from the side of his eye to his ear and his eyeball was dangling out from socket. As the man spun around lifelessly in Brute’s hold Ivy saw the back of his head had an even more enormous hole spanned most of the back of his cranium.

  Brute tossed the dead man aside. He hoisted the other man higher off of the ground, lifting him to the full extent of his arm. He growled in the man’s face and grabbed the man’s lower jaw with his free hand and pulled it off with seemingly no effort. The man thrashed wildly in his grasp. Blood poured down the man’s face.

  He dropped the man to the ground and stomped on his head. He applied his full weight and there was an audible crack as the skull was smashed.

  Brute looked at the girls and said, “You stay with Brute.”

  “Okay,” Ivy nodded her head.

  “Brute go get the rest of the dogs.”

  34

  The door to the garage hadn’t been locked to Anna’s surprise. She stepped out into th
e darkness of the night and was surprised again by the lack of lighting around the garage. The sudden flood of artificial light coming from the open door cut a line through the thickness of the dark night. After she was sure it was all clear she motioned for Lynne to follow her out.

  No sooner than they had closed the door behind themselves did they realize their mistake. From either side of the garage came men. In their panicked state it seemed like an entire army, but it was actually closer to a half dozen. Lynne raised the rifle and trained it on the men, but when she pulled the trigger it didn’t fire. She tried to cock the weapon, but did not have enough time to chamber another round.

  The men were on them in what seemed like an instant. There were far too many arms grabbing them for the young women to do any substantial damage, but they swung their weapons to the best of their abilities and left a couple of the ambushers with superficial wounds.

  A hard forearm to Anna’s temple sent the world out of focus. She fell back against the side of the garage and groaned in agony. She was thrown to the ground and her arms and legs were pulled savagely. When she regained her wits she realized she had been hogtied. She looked through the mass of legs and saw that Lynne had been bound in the same way.

  The men used a log to lift them simultaneously from the ground and began carrying them through the night. The bumpiness of the ride combined with the agonies of their previous battles and made both young women start sobbing with pain. Their ruthless captors paid no attention as they made their way toward their destination.

  “Ain’t never had a black one before,” one of the men said. “I betcha that Deloris decides to keep her as a bitch.”

  “Ain’t none of my concern. We got the girls now we just gotta hope that Brute is dumb enough to come for them. Juggernaut will be waiting,” another man said.

  Anna closed her eyes tightly and prayed that it would all be over soon. She still couldn’t shake the numb feeling that had come over her when she murdered Greg. She had expected killing someone to make her break down completely, but it hadn’t happened. She was beginning to wonder if killing was actually a part of her nature. And, if so, was she any different than the men that held her captive now? Sure, it had taken a lot of pushing to get her to kill, but that didn’t mean that she wouldn’t continue now that she had acquired a taste for it. In fact, a dark part of her hoped that she would have a chance to torture and kill every one of the men carrying them. She would spend extra time on the one that had cracked her in the head. His death would come dreadfully slow, so slow that he would piss himself and beg to die before she finally let him. It was this newfound darkness that terrified her now. She no longer cared if she survived the night or not, just so long as the darkness was kept at bay. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if this alter ego were ever to become the primary personality.

  Lynne wasn’t thinking of anything of the sort. Her mind was adrift in memories that seemed to come from long ago, but were actually just fragments from the last year or so of her life. The memories of her friends brought such a deep sadness to her heart that she felt as if she was crumbling apart. The friend she was going to miss the most, she realized, was Gabby. Gabby had always been there to pick her up when she fell. Gabby had been her backbone while she was adjusting to college life. She had always found it amazing that such a small young woman was able to carry such inner strength. Just knowing that Gabby had died at the hands of some punk frat boy made her sick to her stomach.

  Their passage through the darkness came to a sudden end with a motion detecting flood light coming to life above their heads. They were set on the ground gently and the log was moved away from their bindings.

  “That’s right, you bring them pretty little things up here so we can have ourselves a talk,” a woman’s voice demanded.

  The girls were carried up onto a screened-in porch and set down on the hard, uncomfortable carpet fashioned to look like grass. The rope keep their hands and feet tied together were cut and they were sat upright. Strong hands forced them to face the woman sitting in the mobile chair.

  “Welcome to my home,” the obese woman said. A warm smile spread across her face. “I am Deloris, and I’m sure you’ve already met many of my boys.”

  Neither Anna nor Lynne spoke. Their pain kept them silent. They knew that they were looking at the woman that had orchestrated their kidnapping. Her name had come up dozens of times since they had been abducted. They hated her already.

  “Now you seem like educated young women with good etiquette, when someone introduces themselves in a polite fashion as I have it is customary for you to return the favor, isn’t it?”

  After the woman chided them they were each punched across the face by the man closest to them. Neither of them cried out. Deloris snorted and motioned for them to repeat the action. Still, neither of them cried out. Deloris snorted and thumped her hands roughly on the arms of her chair.

  “I guess I was wrong about you two. You haven’t got any idea what proper etiquette is. A young woman should obey their elders. When a man strikes you it makes him feel impotent if you don’t sob. You’re not purposely trying to make my boys feel impotent, are you?”

  “I don’t give a fuck if your boys are impotent, they can take their limp dick asses on home if they are expecting some kind of rise out of me,” Lynne snarled. “And you, you filthy old bitch, don’t scare me at all.”

  “You should be scared, cunt, you should be fucking terrified. I’m the only thing standing between you having a nice easy death or being kept around to be fucked over and over again. You should consider playing nice whore for a minute.”

  “You should consider liposuction before your neck swallows your head.”

  The boom made Anna jump and scream involuntarily. The close proximity to her head made the world go silent until a high pitch hum started up softly and quickly grew. She looked over and saw Lynne’s headless corpse being held by two men while a third man stood in front of her with smoke still coming from the twin barrels of his shotgun. She had been deafened before the second shot had even been fired.

  Smoke was rising from the flaps of flesh that remained of Lynne’s head. Blood jettisoned from a deep cavern that must have once been her lower jaw. Anna screamed as loud as she could, and she heard it in her head, but not with her ears. She tried to move to clutch at the sides of her head, but her captors held her fast.

  Anna’s chin was grabbed by a strong hand and she was forced to face the obese woman again. The woman mouthed, “Don’t move, sweetheart.”

  Anna nodded her head, knowing that there was nothing else she could do. She would simply agree to whatever the woman said until she found a way to escape— even if it meant taking her own life.

  35

  The dogs “kennels” were set up in a barn near the back edge of the property. The building stank of filth and sweat. As Ivy and Tracy followed the dogs into the barn they held their breath against the rank aromas.

  Growls and yelps came from a dozen horse stalls that had been converted into cells. At the far end of the barn there were three small wooden boxes with barbed wire holding the captives inside. Tracy looked at the faces staring out at them and heartache filled her. The men ranged in age from small boys to teenagers. Brute appeared to be the oldest of the dogs.

  Ivy did not feel the same empathy. She was terrified by the haunted looks she received from the animalized humans. They looked like they wanted to eat her or fuck her, or do both at the same time. Though she was comfortable with Brute she was not comfortable with the idea of the rest of the dogs being set free.

  Brute silenced all of the pack with a single loud bark. He snarled as he looked at the hungry faces. “No kill girls,” he said. “We kill masters. No more kill for them. We kill them.”

  The dogs cried out in excitement and threw themselves against the doors of the stalls. Brute walked to back of the barn and knelt down in front of the boxes. “We kill for you,” he said. He grabbed the barbed wire as if it were nothi
ng and pulled it free from the first box. From within came a woman with a ball gag in her mouth. Brute gently removed the gag and the tethers that had kept her bound.

  From the other cages emerged four more women. They had been bound more securely, presumably so they wouldn’t release their cellmates. All of the women looked to have been kept in the tiny boxes for years.

  Brute turned to his new friends and a tear ran out of his eye. “They no dogs. They bitches. They kept for making puppies. Girl puppies no become dogs. Girl puppies go to sleep.”

  Ivy realized the weight of his words and her breath caught in her throat. Brute moved forward and began pulling down the cell doors as if they weighed nothing. The dogs came out of their kennels and followed behind their alpha. As the last cell was pried open Brute snarled louder than ever. Ivy jumped and screamed.

  “No more listen! No more care! We kill masters!” Brute growled. He slammed his hand into his chest loud enough that the sound echoed in the barn. “We free dogs!”

  The dogs howled in agreement. Brute went to the doors of the barn and threw them open. The dogs rushed out into freedom. The hunt for their former masters seemed to have elated them all.

  “Come,” Brute said. He touched Ivy’s arm, shaking her from her spell. Tracy followed after them out of the barn. He led them around a short trail from the back of the barn leading to a clear patch of land. Here little pink crosses had been set up in a senseless pattern.

  Brute walked over to one of the crosses and a fresh looking mound of dirt. He knelt down and touched the earth and tears spilled from his eyes. “They put the girl puppies to sleep,” he said.

  Ivy walked over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Jesus loves me, this I know, for somebody told me so, peace on earth and we move on, they was weak but I is strong,” Brute sang.

  The lyrics were wrong, but Ivy understood his meaning. It was probably the closest Brute knew to a prayer. She got down on her knees next to him and tears ran freely from her eyes, too. She hugged Brute as best as she could. His body was far too broad for her arms to wrap around him completely. Tracy came to his other side and hugged him.