Born To Bleed (The Roger Huntington Saga, Book 2)

by Ryan C. Thomas

  The drapes fell back in place but left a crack of visibility for me. I felt a chill watching the two people wrestling on the ground. The sounds of knuckles smashing into flesh smacked through the air. And even though I could only make out part of the scene--a wild snapshot of cartwheeling legs--it was obvious this was a real fight. Not two friends goofing around. There was going to be blood involved. Bones were going to break and muscles would tear. But then Wifebeater got an advantage, punched his nemesis in the face, and knocked him out cold.

  “Got ’im,” he yelled. “Ow. Motherfucker. Hurt my hand.”

  From another room: “Tie ’em up good this time, you retard.”

  A third voice joined in from somewhere else as well: “Hurry up, I’m almost done!”

  Wifebeater picked up his catch under the arms and began dragging the guy across the floor. Just before they disappeared through an archway, I saw the unconscious man’s face.

  Gabe.

  My stomach dropped out from under me and my knees went weak. It was happening again. The violence, the pain. Random acts of hatred by a sick world.

  The muffled screaming, still playing in the background somewhere, became agonizing sobs of pain and terror. Someone was grunting, something was banging against something else, a repetitious slapping filled with human shame. I knew exactly what it sounded like.

  I knew what they were doing to Victoria.

  “I’m next,” someone declared. “Hurry up. I want her ass. Don’t mess that up for me. I want it tight!”

  Bile rose in my throat. It was all I could do to keep breathing.

  “Almost . . . nhhh . . . done. Oh man, I’m gonna cum. Yeah! Wake that kid up, I want him to watch. I want him to see me fill his bitch’s mouth.”

  “Wake up, punk. Come on, your girlie’s about to take it on the chin, no pun intended.”

  All three men were laughing now, one of them between grunts. It was a party to them, a cheap thrill at the expense of a human being.

  “He’s awake now. He’s awake. Hey, boy! Hey, watch this! I’m gonna CUM!”

  Victoria cried. The type of cry I’d never heard before, not even in Skinny Man’s basement. If I’d been present at Jesus’ crucifixion, I imagine his followers would have cried this way. A complete loss of faith in anything good, a complete acceptance of the absolute horror that rules the Earth.

  Gabe said something but I couldn’t make it out because it was mostly a howling cry of horror, hatred and shame.

  I closed my eyes and saw Skinny Man. He was laughing, waving at me. The world around him was raining blood and he was curling his finger at me in a come hither gesture.

  Walk back into your world of death, Roger. You belong here. Just break the window and jump inside. Rule your world as only you know how. Show them how you deal with bad people. Show them your gift for drawing blood. No. Not. Yet.

  I opened my eyes.

  My gun was in my trunk. I needed to get it now and call the cops. But I couldn’t move. Not out of fear, but out of indecision. I did want to break the window and throw myself inside, but I doubted I could take all three guys by myself; if I went for my gun, it might be enough time for them to kill Victoria.

  From inside: “Done. She’s all yours.”

  “What the hell, man, I thought you were gonna do it on her face. It’s all leaking out across her asshole now. I don’t want to fuck your jizz.”

  “Quit complaining, you fucking homo. What’s it matter if you’re just gonna fuck her shitter anyway. Just flip her over and do her that way. Hurry up, Bob’s up next. And hey, missy, quit crying. You know you like it. C’mon, wipe those tears away.”

  There was a smack that echoed throughout the house. Victoria went silent for a second, then yelped. Then cried again. Gabe was out of his mind, a blathering stooge forced to watch his one true love ripped to pieces and destroyed forever.

  I made up my mind. Gun. Now.

  I took one step back the way I’d come when my phone rang.

  “Shit,” I whispered. I plucked the phone from my back pocket and flipped it open. It was Teddy.

  “What was that?” It was one of the rapists inside. “I heard something outside. Bob, go check it out. Now!”

  I spoke quickly as I raced back toward the driveway: “Teddy, trace my cell.”

  “What? Roger, you okay?”

  I rounded the garage. Passed the window with the boxes stacked inside. My car in sight at the end of the drive.

  “Teddy, just trace--”

  He came out of nowhere, a big burly man with a wiry beard and long, greasy hair. I just had enough time to make out the Budweiser T-shirt he wore before I saw the shovel coming right at me. It swung into my face with the force of a fucking Cruz missile. Stars exploded behind my eyes. The bones in my face shifted, cracked, slid around under my skin. I felt the shock all the way down to my feet. The pain was too intense to even scream. I merely fought to breathe, to stay conscious. The excruciating fire in my skull then jumped a level as my nerves registered everything they were feeling and I was suddenly falling, hitting cement, lying flat on my back and twitching. Thick blood gushed down my throat, threatening to suffocate me, dribbling down across my cheeks and dripping off my earlobes to the ground.

  My eyes wouldn’t open, or maybe I was just dead, seeing the blackness of a disappointing afterlife. I sure as shit felt dead.

  “Gotcha, you dumb motherfucker.” It was Mr. Budweiser, Mr. Grand Slam Hitter, standing above me. He called back to his friends. “I got ’im. That kid from the park. The one they were with.”

  A voice in the darkness: “Bring him in here.”

  The phone was still in my hand and faintly I could hear Teddy calling my name. Didn’t matter though, I couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but fight the insane pressure building up in my face. Couldn’t even moan.

  Mr. Budweiser grabbed my arm and began to drag me, and again I felt my face slide across an infinite field of agony. That’s when I realized my nose was broken. Mashed into a thousand shards of bone.

  My body was hauled up some small steps and into the house, and yanked through a couple of rooms I couldn’t make out because my eyes were now swelling up. Maybe I saw a refrigerator, some beer cans, a light above me. Not sure.

  Then, into the room with Victoria and Gabe. I could hear them now--Victoria crying through a gag, Gabe sobbing and shaking somewhere to my right. I was dropped on the ground in the middle of the room.

  “Take his phone.”

  Someone grabbed my cell phone and spoke into it: “He’ll call you back.” Then it was thrown to the ground in front of me. What looked like a boot came down and crushed it.

  “Holy shit. What the fuck did you hit him with?”

  “Shovel.”

  “Fuckin-A, he looks like roadkill. Hey, Bob, hurry up and finish with that bitch. We have a new problem to take care of.”

  I forced my eyes open despite the pain it caused. Through narrow slits I could make out the scene more clearly: Victoria was bent over a weight bench, her arms tied to the barbell rests with some nylon cord. A large man was behind her, thrusting forward with enough velocity to break through a concrete wall. Gabe was next to them, tied to a chair. His face was bloody and his shirt was torn. Wide-eyed, he watched the horror show in front of him.

  A third man stood over me as well, but from the floor I couldn’t see his face.

  With a primal grunt Bob finished what he was doing and pulled himself out of Victoria. He moved aside as he zipped up his pants and I could see Victoria’s naked bottom. Her pants had been ripped off and her ass was beet red. I saw everything between her legs, and what they’d done to it in their fits of power. A day ago I’d have given anything to see Victoria naked. But not like this. Not with the blood and semen and bruises. She was no longer a human being, they’d taken that from her. She was just a piece of used up meat now, sagging slowly off the weight bench.

  I looked away.

  I tried to tell them what
I was going to do to them. “Kill you,” I muttered.

  Mr. Budweiser leaned down in front of me. “What’s that?”

  “Kill you.”

  “Oh, I think not, pussyboy.” He kicked me in the gut and I went fetal. My insides felt like they were swelling up inside of me.

  Bob slicked his messed-up hair back, flicked open a jackknife and cut Victoria’s binds. She finally fell all the way to the ground in front of me. Our eyes met, but she was not seeing me. Just staring through me. Unlike myself and Gabe, these rapists had not messed up her face. It was red from enduring her torture, and slick with tears and running mascara, but her beauty was unmistakable--angelic features, adorable small nose, intense green eyes. I died a bit right there. All over again. Just like ten years ago when I watched Tooth go; like when I found Jamie. Ten years of rebuilding my sense of humanity gone in a flash. I felt nothing but hatred. Sheer, focused hatred of a type that wraps around you like a shield. I welcomed this hatred, because it was something I knew very well. It was my old friend come back to say hi.

  That’s right, Roger, use that hatred. Spill their blood all over the place.

  In his chair, Gabe began to shout furiously, shocking me out of my daze.

  “No! No! Victoria!”

  “Shut him up,” Mr. Budweiser said. Bob, who I now saw was bald and had a tattoo of an eagle on his scalp, punched Gabe in the ear. Gabe’s head slammed into his own shoulder and he went silent, but he never once took his eyes off his fiancée.

  The third man, the largest of the three, knelt down in front of me. Like Mr. Budweiser he had a big beard and a tattoo of a sparrow on his neck. He wore a big jean jacket with biker patches on them. A crucifix hung around his neck next to an Iron Cross. “Who’d you call?”

  I said nothing.

  “You call the cops? Answer me.” He grabbed my nose and squeezed. White-hot electricity coursed through my entire body. Now, for the first time, I screamed. There are some pains you can’t fight.

  “Shut up! Shut up! You don’t and I squeeze even harder, got me?”

  With effort, I stopped screaming and he let go of my nose.

  “You called the cops, didn’t you?”

  “Kill you.”

  “Yeah yeah, I heard that one already.”

  Mr. Budweiser grabbed my hair. “What’d you tell them? Are they on the way? Did you even get to speak to anyone?”

  “Kill you.”

  “Dipshit, you’re not going to kill anyone. But depending on what you tell me, I may or may not put the bullet in your head as opposed to your stomach. Get me? Now, who did you speak to?”

  I decided to bluff them. “Cops. On the way here now. Ten seconds or so.”

  Mr. Budweiser picked up the broken phone. “He’s lying. The number on it wasn’t a local area code. Wasn’t 911 neither. I don’t think it was the cops.”

  Bob stepped forward. “Shit, Walt, we gotta get outta here. What if it was, like, the FBI or something. Don’t they do kidnappings?”

  Walt, the guy with the sparrow on his neck, stood up and snatched Bob by the throat, pulled him close. “Use my name again and I’ll put a bullet in your head. Second, we can’t leave yet. We gotta clean her up first.” He pointed down to Victoria.

  “We don’t have time.” Bob looked to Mr. Budweiser for help. Clearly Mr. Budweiser knew better than to cross Walt because he just shrugged. Bob forged on by himself. “We gotta get outta here and burn this place. I ain’t going back to the joint, man. I like real pussy too much. I like real steak, too. We need to go.”

  Walt shook his head. “Not yet. Goldilocks specifically said not to touch the girl. Remember? And we did. Our gunk is all over her. So we got to clean her first.”

  Bob pointed to Gabe. “So just say she was fucking that douchebag when we found them. Let’s go.”

  “Listen, you dumb mongoloid, they won’t buy that. We drop her off in this condition they’ll know we had fun with her and that’ll be the end of us. This is a good gig and I ain’t losing it because you’re hasty. So we need to fix her up first.” He finally let go of Bob and knelt down in front of me again. As he spoke he reached over and slid his hand up Victoria’s shirt and played with her breasts. She began to shake and whimper. “Besides, couldn’t have been calling the cops anyway. It was his phone that rang. My guess is” --he played his hand around my nose, now speaking to me--“you got a call from a friend. That’s it, isn’t it? Not cops. Just some lame friend. But did you tell this friend where you were is the question?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying. I can see it in your black eyes.” He tapped my nose and the pain flushed across my vision. “Yeah, I know I’m right. Ain’t no cops coming.”

  That settled that. Walt seemed satisfied he had time to kill and went into leader mode. He grabbed Victoria by her ankle and dragged her over to Mr. Budweiser. “Take her in the bathroom and clean her up. Make her look nice. Get all the shit outta her ass and stuff.”

  “What? Didn’t say nothing about giving her an enema before!”

  “Not an enema, you inbred freakfest, just clean all of the jizz outta her. Then wipe that running makeup off her face.” He turned to Bob. “You, get this place ready to blaze. Make sure it goes up fast so there’s no chance of DNA evidence. Oil rags in every corner. And give me that shovel.”

  Mr. Budweiser nodded and handed the shovel to Walt. Bob picked up Victoria and made her walk to a bathroom just off of the room we were in. Her legs barely worked and gravity made a mess of pink goo slide down her inner thighs. For the first time I saw the gun in the back of Bob’s waistband and I put two and two together and realized they all had guns on them somewhere. No doubt that’s how they got Gabe to cooperate.

  A second later water ran and Bob made lewd remarks to Victoria as he washed her up. Gabe was trying to look over his shoulder to make sure she was okay but she was out of sight. Hearing her small moans was worse, because it let our imaginations go wild. Was Bob just cleaning her up, or was he doing something else? Was he violating her with his fingers?

  Don’t dwell on that, I told myself. You know how that whole thing goes. Just ignore it. Focus on Walt and his two rapist retard minions.

  I scanned the room for weapons, anything the might help in a fight. Only thing I found was the barbell for the weight set. It was leaning up against the far wall but I’d have to rush past Walt to get it. Maybe if I caught him off guard, confused him somehow, I might make it there. It was the only option I had.

  Walt approached me, shovel still in his hand, and pulled a gun from the back of his waistband. He bent down and tapped me in the nose with it. Again, my face lit up with heat and pressure.

  “Okay, bitch, roll over.”

  I sneered. “Why, you gonna rape me, too?”

  “Nah. Well, maybe with the shovel if you don’t shut up. But not right now. Roll over.” He jabbed me with the shovel and forced me to turn away from him. I felt his hands going into my back pocket and realized he was pulling out my wallet. When he stood up, he removed my license. Memories of Skinny Man doing the same thing danced in my head. I rolled back over and looked up at him, eyeing the barbell behind him every couple of seconds. He put my wallet in his own back pocket. “Roger. That’s a gay name. You must really hate your parents. Giving you a gay name and all.”

  “Well, they were gonna go with Walt, but they wanted to give me a chance.”

  “Oh, you’re a tough guy. Bet you would like this shovel in your ass.”

  “Seems more like you’re just dying to get up in my blowhole. Puts a real smile on your face. So who’s the one with the real homosexual issues?”

  “Hardy har. Here, smell this.” He let the blade of the shovel swing leisurely into my face. Yeah, it hurt, but I was getting real pissed now and it helped me push any hope of surviving out of my head. Sometimes that’s better, you know, to know you’re going to die. Then you just don’t care about the stupidity of fighting back. You just do it.

  “I’m not afra
id of you, Walt.” I could still hear Victoria’s moans from the back room.

  “You know what?” He pointed the gun at my face. “I don’t really care. Get up and stand over there.” He indicated the wall behind me with his gun and I followed suit, happy to be on my feet again. As I moved he kept his gun trained on me. Now I was even farther from the barbell.

  Mr. Budweiser came back from wherever he’d been, carrying an empty gasoline container. “All set, Walt. Place will flare up in seconds.”

  Walt nodded. “Good.” He yelled over his shoulder: “Bob, get that bitch in the truck. We’re gonna get going. Time to get paid.”

  A second later Bob and Victoria returned. Her face was blank, and I could see she was having difficulty walking. They shuffled past us and out of the room, presumably to the garage.

  “What about these two?” Mr. Budweiser looked back and forth at me and Gabe.

  Walt scratched his nose with his gun, then hefted his shovel. “You untie the boyfriend. I’ll take this other one. We’ll do it out back. C’mon. And no funny moves, Roger, or I will follow through on my promise of showing this shovel your intestines first.”

  Mr. Budweiser took out his own gun and untied Gabe. As soon as the last binding was off Gabe threw a punch. It connected with Mr. Budweiser’s chin and dazed him. Here’s my chance, I thought, and took a step toward Walt, planning on kicking him in the groin. But that didn’t happen; Walt saw my movement and backhanded me with the gun, catching me in the mouth. As I stumbled back, feeling my tongue swell and mouth fill with blood, I saw him bring the shovel around and whack Gabe in the stomach. Gabe doubled over and fought for breath. It was enough time for Mr. Budweiser to get a kick in to Gabe’s head for good measure. And that was that. The match was over.

  “Hopalong fucking Cassidy, the balls on these two!” Walt yelled. “I am losing my patience. Now everybody get outside or I will put a bullet in that bitch’s head.”

  We walked out through the kitchen, me and Gabe in front, and Walt and his crony behind us with their guns at our backs. We entered the garage through a door off the kitchen and passed by the white SUV. Victoria was inside, looking out the rear side window at us; I couldn’t tell if she saw us or not. It was pretty dark in the garage, and she still looked out of her head, in some kind of safe spot in her mind.