She was disgusted with them, talking about her body as though it were a bicycle, seeing who went first. They did not view her as human, they saw her as an object, one they felt obligated to provide them with satisfaction. Watching them fuss over what they intended, she saw them like hogs, filthy creatures that were only fit for slaughter. She decided to make for the gun, shoot them, and flee while she could. To get the gun, she would need to accept that she had to do whatever it took to get it into her hands. Angela turned to them, her mind clouded by fog, unstable from the medicine.
“Hey, no need to fight boys. I’m into it. Both of you can have me.”
She smiled as she lifted her gown slightly up her thighs, and licked her lips. Her tongue felt along the many scabbed over splits. Larry held onto her arm while he watched her. He was not convinced. She brushed Andy’s cheek with the back of her right hand.
“Would it be so bad,” she said. Her voice was as sweet as she could give. “If I could, maybe, wash up first?”
Larry smiled at her. “What you playing at? Thinking I’m stupid?”
Angela shook her head. She said, “No. Just don’t see why you have to be so rough. I’d be willing to give it to you if you asked for it.”
Andy continued to unbutton his pants. Angela made a pouting face as she watched him.
“Not going to let me clean up first? You like it dirty?”
Andy laughed as Larry grabbed his shirt. They held a tense stare for several seconds.
“Why don’t you go and get us some more drink?” Larry said. “We need some more, and she needs to taste some too.”
Andy buttoned his pants back. He said, “Yeah, well, just don’t do anything until I get back. You hear?”
“I’ll wait.”
Angela watched as Andy hurried away to get the booze. She looked at the unwavering scrutiny of Larry’s greedy eyes. He pushed against her with his groin, smiled with an open mouth, and let his tongue hang past his bottom lip.
“You going to let me clean up first?”
He shook his head and pulled her gown off her left shoulder. His breath escaped his throat in deep pants. Larry herded her into the middle of the shower room, away from the door. He had a vicious look to his menacing smile, his tongue flicked in the air.
She put her hands on his chest, tears formed in her eyes, and her reactions became cumbersome and numbed. She knew she could not fight him off, anxiety swelled inside her over what came next.
“Please,” she whimpered. “Let me wash up.”
“Why?”
She sighed. “Because it’s been rough on me. I just want to relax, get my body cleaned up. I’ll make it special for you afterward. Would you like that? I just need to bathe first is all. No one likes to be dirty. You wouldn’t want me dirty, now would you?”
“Who says I don’t?”
“I’m not quite sure how to say this,” she said. “There are things I need to do, womanly things. You understand right?”
“Like what?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and gave her a questioning stare. She leaned closer to him and whispered into his ear. Fighting the impulse to bite his neck and rip out a part of his throat, she instead went into a graphic description of why she needed to bathe. Angela depicted in detail her reasons, told him of various fluids, and the conditions of skin in certain areas. When it seemed appropriate, she embellished to gratuitous levels on topics men could not understand about female anatomy. Her lurid descriptions worked by the look on his face. There was little doubt the repulsion he felt at her explanation to him. He nodded his head and pointed to the shower, and tossed a bar of soap onto the floor. She watched as he turned his back and lit a cigarette.
She turned on the water and let it start over her body. Her head felt like it was bobbing along in a wavy ocean. It was then she realized that hot water fell on her skin. They had purposely showered her in freezing water before, no doubt getting their kicks out of it.
She spied past the shower partition to see the back of his head. With the syringe pulled out and ready, she had to find her vein. It was difficult to locate, but she used the holes left by the doctor’s previous injections. She took a deep breath, pushed the needle in, and winced as it tore a hole in her skin. When she felt it was inside her vein, she emptied all of it, with one steady push into her arm. She had not a clue if it was too much or not enough. Only a second passed before she felt it, like electricity inside her body.
Angela cut the water off and stepped from the shower. The water dripped from her body. She made a come-hither motion with her finger, and Larry walked toward her. He grabbed her around the waist, tried to turn her around, she resisted and grabbed at his belt buckle.
“What’s the rush?” she asked.
She unzipped his pants, kissed his neck, and worked him with her right hand. She fought back every instinct, every impulse to punish him, as she touched his revolting flesh. Waiting. Biding her time.
He groaned and moved against her manual efforts. She reached for the baton at his side, waiting until he was far enough into the motions before she lifted it. Larry leaned his head back with a lustful smile on his face. She could tell he was close, and she started to remove the baton.
As he breathed harder and pushed against her hand more, she kept pulling upward on the metal baton. When she thought he was almost to climax, he grabbed her left hand. She looked down at her gripped wrist and saw she had the baton free of the metal loop.
“Oh,” he said. He laughed and offered her a sly grin. “You are in some trouble now.”
With no other choice, her right hand went to his face, and she shoved her thumb into his left eye. As he stepped backward, she kicked his exposed groin. It made him lean forward while he covered his face. She shoved downward on his back and grabbed his baton. Angela pulled it out of the little loop that held it and stepped out of his reach. He waved his hands in front of him trying to grab hold of her.
She struck him with his own baton with heavy repeated blows. The first one knocked him down, the second silenced him, the third fractured his skull, the fourth one split his skin open, the fifth one caused blood to spray on the floor, the sixth one made his bowels release, the seventh to eleventh was because she hated him. She left the cold metal rod stuck inside his head, parting the pink mass of his brains, as she stumbled backward. The blood spray left splatters all along the floor and the walls. She smelled the fluids as they leaked from him, it caused her gut to quiver and made her throat contract. The urge to vomit passed as quick as it came.
She backed from him to pick up her hospital gown and pull it over her body. With the water turned back on in the shower, she washed her bloody hands clean. Angela was startled by the sound of boots advancing toward her. She had forgotten about Andy. As Angela rushed to grab the baton, he came racing in. He was in a furious haste.
“Larry,” he said. “Something is going on—”
He tried to stop when he saw Larry on the floor, but the blood was too slick, and he slipped. His head bounced off the tile. She pulled the baton free from his friend’s skull and raised it over her head as he held his hands up. That was when she realized he did not know he was wearing a gun at all. He was untrained in its use, and it probably was not loaded.
She did not hesitate. Her arms brought the metal rod down onto his hands. His fingers snapped, bones shattered, and the thick skin of his palms tore free. Angela moved her swings onto his skull. He pissed himself when she worked the metal into his hard boned head. She kept swinging until he stopped moving. His head was a pounded mash of bone and bloody bits of brain matter. She successfully knocked both of his eyes from their sockets. They remaining splayed and hung over each cheek.
When she felt he was no longer a threat, she reached down and grabbed the gun. Angela managed to pull the magazine free to see it was indeed empty, and she tossed it into the corner. Angela rolled him over, searched his belt, and found another magazine with five rounds in it. It would have to do. She pulle
d Andy’s boots off, they were the smallest of the two pair, and she slipped them on. Angela grew frustrated struggling to loop the laces around her legs. She tucked them down the insides instead.
Angela walked from the shower room listening to loud commotions that came from the other end of the hall. She had wanted to use the stairwell past her room, but she would find another way. Angela turned to her left and trotted down the hallway, and searched for a way down. Freedom was within her grasp. The disappointment from not burning them alive was short-lived, she enjoyed bludgeoning them to death, it was more satisfying to her in the end.
39
Frank sighed as his right hand was freed, he used it to wipe his wet eyes. The sniffling and the crying was done with, and his body almost liberated from the chair. He waited with quiet calm for the doctor to remove the final buckle on his leg.
“There,” Doctor Wilson said. He stood upright and patted Frank’s shoulder. “Feel free to stretch your arms and legs. I’m almost finished here.”
With the flip of a switch the room flooded with a bright fluorescent light, a wavy fluttering of the bulbs, and the dull white of the walls appeared. Frank squinted at the brightness at first. When his eyes adjusted, he scanned the room and looked for the way out.
The doctor made small scratching noises on the paper. Frank listened to them while he sat at the edge of the chair. He grasped the end of the table with his hands and squeezed it, and tried to work them to get his feeling back. The doctor at the other end, immersed in his work, grinned as his lips twitched and his tongue worked in and out. There was no denying his sheer joy of his supposed accomplishment.
Frank sat and counted off seconds in his head. He counted to sixty and started over while he flexed his legs muscles. His eyes focused on the smooth wood of the table and saw the grains of dark mixed in between the lighter streaks. He flexed his back muscles to free them from tension.
It was not long before he decided he would kill the doctor. No escape was necessary, not any longer, he did not care if he ever saw the daylight again. He wanted to know the sadistic, twisted psychopath, void of any form of compassion, was dead. The secrets taken from inside his mind were far too precious to him. No one, not even the god in the heavens, was allowed to have his secrets.
Frank stood and moved his arms and legs to stretch out the cramps. He locked his eyes on the doctor’s hand and watched it twitch along the notepad. Little lines of black ink appeared on the otherwise blank white sheets. He stepped from beside the table to the empty floor and worked his legs as he paced around the border of the room. His eyes never left the doctor’s head.
When he left his burning house that day, when he stepped into the street, people were running to help. He pushed them away, even with the threat of the virus, they still came to help a neighbor in trouble. But they would never understand, not with what he had done to her, or what she had done to them. They would ask those questions, ones he never wanted to answer. It was in itself too hard to know it happened. He stumbled from the driveway and walked nonstop for hours, not knowing where he headed, he just simply walked. There were noises around him, people crying, horns blowing, the sound of gunshots and mournful screams. He kept walking on and on, oblivious to the world around him, until he found himself staring at a sign. The sign was simple, it pointed in two directions, black arrows on yellow painted metal.
He had no idea how long he stared at that sign. When the sun reflected off the surface, he turned to the left and headed east. Always he headed east or southeast. He walked for miles and miles before he stopped. He stole water from a hose in a beautiful rose garden and tried not to look at the dead body that lay pulled open and rearranged over the three-tier water fountain. His mind felt as if it had been pulled apart like the body on the fountain, but instead of pieced together again, it remained fragmented. The longer he walked, the less like himself he felt. His life, his place in the old world was dying. Someone else was replacing him, a man who did not care about the old world, a man who was tougher than he was and just as spiteful as the new world. When he, at last, saw his haggard reflection in the glass of an abandoned bank, he knew. Deep down he knew the man he had become, forever replaced the man he once was.
His feet never stopped moving forward as he tried to outrun what he left behind him. And when the nights came, when he needed to rest, they would come, those callous men who taunted him. They laughed at him, mocked his weakness, his inability to protect his own family. Emasculated by their ridicule, there was truth in the vile things they shouted while dancing around his curled body. He cried the dark hours as they tormented his mind. He cried the hours of light as the memories flowed in his brain. But then one morning, just as the sun rose, when the first yellow rays punched a hole in the dark clouds on the horizon, he heard it. It broke the silent morning air. That laugh, that sharp sneering laugh. Somewhere in the distance was that damned crow, cawing at his failure, jeering at his worthlessness.
It was then that Frank stood up from the ground. He lifted a stone in his hand and threw it blindly into the trees. The crow became silent. Frank was now the one who walked forward into the world. Frank was the man who lit the fires that kept the chasing bastards at bay. Frank hunted for food and hunted for whiskey. Frank provided what Frank needed. But Frank did not like to lose things, especially precious things, secret things. And Frank was willing to kill for them.
40
Charlie hunted for some food in the room but could not find anything. His belly ached. There was no telling how long he had been without food. He snuck from the room, went into the stairwell, and went down the concrete steps. Charlie hesitated at the landing of the first door. He debated if it was wise to open it, for fear they might discover him.
But what if they have a room for food storage?
He took the chance and opened the door without a sound. It was well past midnight, and the hallway was dead silent. His bare feet moved across the cold floor as he snuck down the hall. He stayed close to the walls, stopping several times to listen for noises. He opened windowless doors to peek inside the rooms. Several were empty, more were locked, and it became apparent to him the floor was for the storage of medical supplies.
He stopped sneaking about. Instead, he opened the doors and flicked the light switches. Sometimes the lights would spring to life, other times the darkness would remain. His luck turned when he discovered a box of packaged crackers. He sat and ate the dry salty squares one by one until he was full. The bottle of water did not have more than a swallow in it after the small meal. He needed to refill it before he escaped.
Charlie felt cheated. He thought he would find a large cache of weapons. All he found thus far was a room full of cleaning supplies. He contemplated how to use them to cause mischief, but could not come up with any ideas. With his hopes dashed, he walked back toward the stairwell. He was almost inside the door when he happened to glance at a red box that hung on the wall farther down the hallway.
Inside the glass case was a short ax, the same as the ones he always saw on the television shows. He saw the painted writing on the glass plate, but he did not need to break the glass. Charlie unhooked a small brass latch at the side and swung the front open. The feeling of the ax in his hand was a strange comfort. He lifted it above his head, practicing with it, getting familiar with how he should wield it.
A monstrous deafening noise startled him. His face frozen with the wide-eyed look of astonishment, he could not force his body to move. It was so loud, the rumbling echoed across everything, yet no guards came running. There were no sirens and yelling voices, he heard only the sound of a motor running in the distance.
He moved forward, tracking the noise, and tried to spy where it came from. His bare feet stepped over broken glass and busted wood. He had come to an old nurse’s station, a curved desk that made half of the wall. It was unused and littered with trash. Bullet holes riddled the wooden desk and the wall beyond it. Someone once used the nurse’s station for target practice,
wasting good rounds on worthless wood and glass.
The sound of the engine was louder when he turned the last right and made it to the main corridor. He could see the other stairwell door from where he stood. Charlie made his way with hesitant steps forward as he slid along the wall. His shoulder rubbed the aging paint. He saw it in the room next to the stairwell, a medium sized generator that sat on the floor running. He looked at the tall shelves full of batteries with wires hanging tangled across one another. It appeared as if a giant spider tried to weave a thick black web over them, gave up, and left a chaotic mess behind.
He squatted down to the floor and studied the generator. They had attached a long flexible metal tube to the exhaust pipe and fed it out a small open window. His eyes became interested in another surprise, a delightful little surprise.
He lifted the small fuel can, smelled it, and got a good lungful of petroleum fumes. A wicked grin spread on Charlie’s face. He would find the fuel storage, even if he had to look all night. As he stepped from the room, he glanced back over his shoulder, in a small alcove just beyond the doorway sat a man in a metal folding chair.
At first, he was startled, and he held his breath. It did not take long before he realized the man slumped in the chair was sleeping. The man’s head hung forward as the sound of his snores competed with the running generator. Charlie laughed to himself, he wanted the man’s boots, and he would take them.
The man’s body twitched for a split second. The ax handle stood from his head like a wooden horn. Charlie watched the blood dribble into a small pool under the chair while he pulled off the boots and put them on his own feet. He chuckled to himself again, the poor bastard never knew he had been killed.
As he tied the laces, he noticed the stains on the floor. There were filthy black smeared boot tracks on the light colored tile. He stood and followed them with his eyes, they led from where he was and into the generator room. More tracks led straight across from the stairwell door. He shook his head.
The Wretched Page 28
