“My God, my boys!” Ezra wailed, his pain and anger echoing through the cellar.
Anna crouched behind the gruesome table, ignoring the gore as best she could, and tugged on the bolt handle. She’d seen this done in movies dozens of times, why couldn’t she get it open? Of course, the fact she was still in the damn handcuffs didn’t help. And her wrist was stinging like hell, probably sprained.
In the other room Ezra was sobbing. She almost felt sorry for the old bastard. Almost, but not really. And not so much his sons, either. It had been their lives or hers, and they’d set the rules of the game. Had they just left her alone, Jeb and Ezekiel would still be alive. On the upside, who could say how many innocent people she’d saved by taking out those two cannibalistic mouth-breathers.
Now to deal with their evil progenitor.
Surprisingly the bolt handle suddenly slipped back, discharging a spent shell casing which tinkled like a bell when it bounced off the cellar floor. Her hands had unwittingly discovered how to open the bolt. Now to close it again…She fumbled with it, suppressing a curse.
“Is that you, you dirty little whore?” Ezra asked. He stood beside the refrigerators, the naked bulb backlighting his shape and casting a long shadow across the floor that made Anna tremble. As if the shadow wasn’t human. “You gonna regret what you done, little whore.” The shadow moved and vanished in the surrounding darkness.
Where the hell did he go?
She fought with the bolt handle. How had she got it to open? She should have been paying better attention.
“Oh, I am gonna make you suffer for what you done to my boys.” His disembodied voice felt as if it surrounded her. She was afraid to poke her head out to look for him, lest she give away her hiding place.
A new chill swept over her in a wave. Her intuition urged her to run, forget the gun.
As she rose from her crouch, inching forward, she felt something graze the skin below her shoulder. She jumped away, a tugging sensation retarding her flight, and her top fell away.
Ahead of her––mostly obscured by shadow––stood old Ezra, holding the red fabric by its string, a lunatic grin stretched across his face.
Anna trained the rifle on him. “Stay away from me,” she warned.
“Oh no. I guarantee that won’t happen.” Ezra reached out and yanked the cleaver out of the butcher block. As he dragged the heavy blade across the block, shards of the shattered light bulb flew and sounded like wind chimes as they struck the concrete floor. “First I’m gonna cut your little titties right off, then I’m gonna feed’em to––”
“I’m serious, stay away!”
As if her desperation became skill, the bolt slid closed in her trembling hands.
“Show me what you got, bitch.” Ezra was undaunted. His dead sons were apparently forgotten in the midst of his crazed blood lust. And plain old lust.
Closing her eyes, she squeezed the trigger. The blast might have been a stick of dynamite exploding in the enclosed space. It was instantaneously followed by loud metallic ping. Once again the recoil and her weak grip ripped the rifle out of her hands. Down the gun went, into the shadows. Anna stared. Ezra’s mouth hung open, his eyes wide. He was shocked. Slowly, he looked down and even though Anna needed to run, she couldn’t help but follow his gaze.
On the floor lay the broad-bladed butcher’s cleaver. In the half-light she was sure she saw a divot or crater marring its flat surface.
A twisted smile grew on Ezra’s features as he patted himself down, making sure he was still in one piece.
Anna blinked, getting it. I shot the cleaver out of his hand!
And lost the gun, again.
Ezra barked a wicked laugh. Then he lunged for her.
She turned and ran. Leaping over the spreading crimson pool that still leaked out of Ezekiel’s prone corpse, she sped her way through the room to the staircase. Behind her there was a thump followed by Ezra’s angry cursing. “Goddamned son of a bitch whore!”
She figured he’d slipped in the puddle of his evil son’s blood.
Head start. Head start. Keep running!
She shot up the stairs, slamming the door at the top of the stairwell and looking for any sort of latch or lock. Nothing!
Damn it, didn’t they ever lock victims in the basement?
Ezra yelled up: “I’m coming for you, whore!”
His reedy voice was followed by the rhythmic thud of his boots.
Shit.
She studied the hallway. The front door was straight ahead, wasn’t it? Down the hall and straight ahead? Damn it, the details were fuzzy, but she couldn’t stay here and wonder. She took off down the hall, looking for her exit.
Doors flanked both sides, but nothing seemed familiar. Or maybe everything looked familiar. So much so that it clouded her recollection of the details of the house. Had they drugged her somehow? She didn’t think so. Maybe it was delayed shock and trauma. Maybe she’d had a stroke...
Behind her, the door to the cellar of horrors burst open with a crash. Anna ducked through the nearest open doorway.
As Ezra’s heavy footfalls grew closer, she drew herself tightly against the shadows on the wall in this dark room. Too late to close the door. She held her breath and listened to the steps approaching while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. What now? She needed to think. Even if she made it outside she probably wouldn’t make it far. He knew the surrounding area. He had a truck, a flashlight, and guns at his disposal. And he was crazy with anger and lust, not necessarily in that order.
She needed a better plan.
Ezra’s pace slowed when he neared the entrance to the room where she’d holed up. Maybe he hadn’t seen her slip inside. Maybe he wasn’t interested anymore.
Yeah, and maybe the Easter Bunny would rescue her.
She bit her lip hard, half-hoping it would wake her from this nightmare out of a bad movie. But everything’s based on real life, isn’t it? Even when it’s crazy? She closed her eyes, willing it all to disappear. She opened her eyes.
It wasn’t working.
She almost choked on her held breath, but Ezra moved on, his footfalls receding from her doorway. Anna gave herself a few seconds to breathe regularly. She was in what looked like some kind of sitting room, with a couch, armchair, some small end tables with dusty lamps, a curio cabinet, and a staircase set against the wall heading to the second floor. Even here there were piles of papers and junk giving the room a filled look with no clear path.
What she really needed was the handcuff key and the keys for the truck. She wasn’t sure about the cuffs, but she knew who had the truck keys. If she could somehow get back down to the basement she could turn the tables. But how? Try to sneak down to the basement while Ezra searched for her up here? Seemed too risky. She didn’t know her way around the piles of hoarded stuff. She’d be better off finding an exit and taking her chances outside. She could attempt to relocate the front door––or find a back door––but it might be easier and more convenient to just slip out a window. Even that would be hard while the old pervert was lurking around. What if she bought herself more time by sneaking up the stairs to the second floor and gliding out a second floor window? She seemed to remember seeing a couple right above the decrepit porch. It would be perfect. She could climb out onto the gabled porch roof and jump down to the ground from there. To hell with the cuffs, she’d worry about them later.
Stealthily––never turning her back on the doorway into the hall––she tip-toed to the staircase and avoided the newspaper and book clutter piled up on both ends of each step, slipping as silently as she could up to the second floor. Moonlight seeped in through the window panes at the end of the upstairs hall, staining the dusty floor runner and cobweb-coated walls with squares of fuzzy white light. It was exactly what she was looking for. She crept forward quietly, one slow step at a time. Doors were set at regular intervals along the corridor, but they were all closed. Halfway between the top of the staircase and the window, the floorboards groaned
as Anna shifted her weight. Just what she’d been afraid of!
She froze. And waited.
In the silence of the dark hall, the protesting floor had seemed as loud as a cannon.
Only a few more steps and she’d be clear of this hell-house. Slowly she lifted her offending foot. The groaning board called attention to her again, as if the house itself were trying to thwart her. And now she heard footsteps on the stairs behind her.
Desperately she tried the nearest door. The knob spun worthlessly in her hand, the latch refusing to catch. In blind panic, she sprinted to the next door, twisted the handle, her fear causing her to lean in. The door swung open suddenly and she fell into the room. She sprang to her feet and closed the door behind her.
In the dark, she felt along the door jamb hoping to find a lock or latch. Having no such luck she backed away from the door and turned to find another window brightening the room with moonbeams. In the glow a table sat, its top littered with more unrecognizable clutter. Anna approached, hoping to find something to use as a weapon among that crap.
Even from a distance she could clearly make out the plethora of unlit candles of various sizes and varieties standing at the table’s edges, their wax now dry, frozen in strange dripping shapes like landscapes on some tiny alien world. But she couldn’t make out what the candles surrounded. There was something stringy. Hair maybe? And a wrinkled lump of some sort. A pile of blankets, or sheets?
She was close now.
Her breath caught in her throat as her mind put the puzzle pieces together. What she saw in front of her, even after the horrors of the cellar, turned her sweat cold and clammy. It was a body––at least part of one––dry and mummified.
A head? Yes, but there was more...
Skin pulled taught, covered in tight creases and wrinkles. Lips stretched back exposing stained, cracked teeth. Eyes gone––empty sockets with crisp-looking lids sewn open with black thread. A thin, wattled neck like wrinkled bedsheets. And then...The deflated breasts indicated to Anna that it was the body––or just the torso––of a woman. Her second clue was the body’s bare genitalia. The dried labial lips were pried open in a frozen gape as if they had been…used?
Oh my God! She almost snorted: no God here! Not today!
It must have been Ezra’s wife––the boys’ mother. Maybe it was a sick-ass shrine or even more sick-ass sex toy. Or...both?
Crash.
The door behind her flew open. Startled, Anna stumbled forward––bumping the table and overturning it. The mummified torso and half-burned candles spilled to the floor, disappearing in the room’s shadows. She glimpsed a mantle of dark hair covering the torso’s parchment-like skin before her attention shifted to the new threat behind her.
Like a gorilla’s, her mind tossed out at her. But she had no time to process the thought.
“Jesus Christ!” Ezra shrieked. “What have you done, whore?” His hands went to cover the top of his head as if he were trying to keep it from exploding.
Enraged, he rushed her like a bull, all arms and legs.
The terror and disgust clutching at her heart gave her what seemed to be superhuman agility.
She reacted, twisting to sidestep the full force of Ezra’s charge. Dodging his crazy onslaught, she ducked out of the way at the last moment.
Maybe the old man’s fury at her destruction of his bizarre trophy had made him careless. Missing Anna, the power of his rush crashed him headlong into the window. Glass shattered and termite-eaten wood splintered.
Seizing her chance, Anna used Ezra’s momentum to her advantage and gave him a hard shove in the back at the right moment. The old man’s body continued on, flying out the jagged opening and taking out most of the wood around it. With a short scream he plummeted to the ground.
She watched him fall. The gable roof didn’t extend all the way across the front of the house, and the old man caught the edge of it with his shoulder. He hit the ground with a dull thud.
She leaned out, careful to avoid the jagged glass knives, and stared at his still form for a full minute. No motion. He might have a broken back or neck, or maybe some serious internal damage. Even if he was alive, that second story fall had to slow him down a little. She had to find the truck and handcuff keys!
Anna rushed out of the room and raced down the hall. She bounded down the stairs, nearly tripping on the junk and tumbling to the bottom before sprinting to the cellar door and down into the cold damp basement once again. The whole time she was screaming in her mind, forcing herself to go back down there in the butcher shop that had almost claimed her. She shivered but swallowed her fear.
Panting by the time she made her way into the room with the freezer and work bench, she saw the brothers. Ezekiel, face down in a pool of his own blood on the far side of the room––she could see where Ezra had slipped on the blood, smearing it all around the floor. To her right Jeb lay sprawled out on his back, some blood beneath him too but much of it had soaked through his shirt and overalls, staining his entire torso crimson.
Anna sucked in a deep, calming breath through her nose. The stench of blood and spoiled meat and worse soured the air. Her hands still trembling, she stepped over Jeb’s corpse.
You need the keys, she told herself. He can’t hurt you.
She crouched, pulled open the right front pocket of his denim overalls with a cuffed hand and reached inside with the other hand. She found a full keyring and pulled it out, trying to avoid the blood and not snag his pocket.
Then his gnarled hand grasped her wrist.
She’d been crouched over him, flipping through the keys, when he came back to life.
She dropped the keys as she leaped up, trying to wrench her arm away.
Jeb was still alive, but just barely. He raised his head and looked through her with his lachrymose, piteous eyes. His lower lip quivered as he struggled to say something, but lacked the energy.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
“Let me go, you fucking sicko!”
She pried his twisted fingers off her wrist, grabbed up the keys again, looking for freedom from her shackles. Jeb’s head dropped back to the floor with a sickening wet smack. His body twitched convulsively as the last of his lifeforce evaporated.
With a yelp! of joy and released tension she found the key and freed herself, tossing the cuffs onto Jeb’s still chest. Then she strode into the butcher-shop, trying hard to ignore the carnage. It wasn’t easy. Searching in the dark she finally found her red top, but it was slick and greasy––maybe from the film of fat and flesh that saturated every surface of the room. “I am not wearing this!” she said, dropping it as if it were cursed.
Shit. She shrugged. She knew clothing was the least of her problems but she willed herself to remain sane by focusing on the familiar, not the evidence of gruesome death all around her.
She spotted the rifle again. Should she should take it? Was she going to call the police? Yes! She probably should. But what if they didn’t believe her? She’d just killed three people! And her fingerprints were likely all over this place. She’d seen plenty of unbelieving small-town cops railroading innocent people on TV and in movies. On the other hand, how could they not believe her? There were two butchered hunters here––no way she could have done that. And wouldn’t DNA determine that she hadn’t? If she took the gun, wouldn’t they shoot her by mistake?
She shook her head. Can’t deal with all this now. She just had to get out of this house of horrors. She’d figure it out after a shower and maybe twelve or fifteen hours’ sleep.
Yeah, right. Like she could ever sleep again.
With Jeb’s keys in hand she left the butcher-shop behind and headed up the stairs. Making her way down the first floor hallway by stepping around the piles of papers and strange junk, she recognized the room where she’d tried to use the old fashioned phone. It was much easier to put it all together now that she wasn’t worried about being murdered and chopped into little pieces. Before long she had worked her way t
hrough the mazes and stood staring at the front door. It was at the end of the hall after all, but the junk piles had hidden it.
Or maybe it had moved around on her, like in the movies.
The door was unlocked. She swung it open and took a deep breath of the fresh night air.
But...her nose wrinkled. There was that stench again, worse even than what permeated the basement butcher shop.
Maybe these backwoods assholes did raise hogs or something? Anna remembered those troughs she’d seen when she first got here, a lifetime ago. The insulting haze was a mix of spoiled meat, spoiled vegetables, body odor, flatulence, and something else. Musky, like a wild animal. But the spoiled meat part, that was easy to understand, thinking back to that active crime scene in the basement. She’d seen a Criminal Minds where body parts were fed to hogs. The meat stank, the hogs stank...presto, one fine stench.
Before stepping out into the foul-smelling dark she looked over the keys, singling out the one with the old Ford logo. A cooling breeze made her shiver as it teased her bare skin, but it also made her gag because it was so...disgusting.
However she knew how close she’d come to never again feeling a breeze, so she couldn’t help but smile tentatively. No matter how bad the hogs or cows or whatever it was stank, she was free.
Leaving the front door hanging open, she jogged down the rickety steps and headed for Jeb’s truck.
For a moment she thought about checking on Ezra. He could be seriously hurt, dying in a heap of broken bones at the side of the porch. She grinned. That’s what the gross perverted murderer deserves! But what if he wasn’t there? Then what? She hastened her pace.
She covered the short distance without incident. She tried the driver’s door. Unlocked. Of course, who would lock their doors in the middle of nowhere?
Anna hopped into the cab and fumbled around, finally slipping the key into the very old school ignition. She settled into the sprung seat and went to turn the key…
Splatterpunk Fighting Back Page 15
