Blood Mountain

by J. T. Warren

  He’s dead. You’re wasting time. That was good old Miss Cynical finally speaking up again.

  She dropped next to him. He was sprawled on his stomach the way Victor had been only he wasn’t making any noise.

  “Dad?”

  She shook him and tried to turn him over. His body dropped from her grip and hit the ground with a sickening thump.

  He was dead. Miss Cynical was right. Her father was dead and she could weep over him all she wanted but that wouldn’t bring him back to life. Worse, it would allow Victor to track her back here and kill her just as he promised he would: right next to her father.

  His eyes opened to reveal shining, silver orbs and he coughed himself into a strained, heavy pattern of breathing. She helped raise him off the ground, but he couldn’t help and she had to set him back down.

  “Daddy?” Tears blurred her vision. This was no time to cry but she couldn’t help it. Besides, if this wasn’t the time to cry when would she finally get the chance?

  When you’re dead.

  He groped at her shoulders as if he had lost the ability to use his hands correctly and he tried to speak but managed only a croaking whisper. Blood stained his lips. She almost said that at least they were both choking up blood but it didn’t seem as funny after a moment as it first had.

  “I’ll get help,” she said. “I have to get out of here before he comes back.” She sounded much more confident than she felt: how could she simply abandon her father and run herself to safety?

  His face squeezed into creases of strained flesh and he managed one hoarse word: “Two.”

  She shook her head. “I killed Caleb. Knocked him off the mountain.”

  He smiled. More blood dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. “Run,” he said.

  She glanced back over her shoulder--nothing yet--and told her father that she was going to get off this fucking mountain and find help and come back for him. He had to be strong, be tough, and not die. She would be back. She promised.

  Even as she made that promise and assured herself that no matter what she would come back to rescue her father, she knew it was not a promise she had any control over. If her fate was to die at the hands of Victor the Psycho, her only hope was that her father would die soon and not suffer up here for hours or even days.

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  His eyes opened again. Little moons in his face. “Keys,” he said.

  She didn’t have to waste any time questioning. Like a good father, he had already sketched out her plan of escape. Down the mountain to his car and then off to the police. Or even someplace closer. If any place was actually open.

  “I will come back for you.” She kissed his forehead and didn’t like how cold his skin had gotten. How long could he possibly last?

  She couldn’t dwell on that right now.

  The keys to the car were in his front right pocket where he always placed them. A small metal heart hung from the key ring on a chain. She didn’t need to look at it to know what it was. After Mom died, he bought the heart and had it engraved with her birthdate and day of passing. Between the two dates was her name and the following, Together, we live forever.

  “I’m so sorry, Daddy,” she said.

  He opened his mouth, breathed in as much as he could, and said, “Go.”

  Tears streaming down her face to dilute the blood still coming from her nose and out of her mouth, Mercy Higgins got to her feet and continued down the trail.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Victor knew how to separate himself from almost anything. He could have conversations in which his body was a robot and his mouth said whatever was appropriate while his mind cavorted in more interesting places. He could suffer physical injury and, for short periods, keep his mind as something separate from the nerves registering pain in his body.

  This had been especially useful those nights when his mother came to him and he was too drugged or disgusted to fight her off. She could have her way with his body, but she would not get into his head. She had, of course. She had burrowed deeply into his grey matter. There were moments when she was getting what she wanted from his body and his mind was completely separate. Those times he was able to protect himself. Yet the pleasure of his sex inside hers always threatened to crack this shield. He forbade himself from enjoying what was happening, but sometimes he couldn’t help it. Sometimes it just felt too good and he would thrust back, roll his hips against hers and let her moans carry him to the brink.

  For those times, in particular, he hated her and had to kill her.

  “That bitch,” Victor said as he finally got to his feet again.

  His legs wobbled but he didn’t not fall. He would not let himself fall again. She had gotten the advantage over him somehow, pure timing and luck no doubt, but it was still his fault. The same way he tolerated years of his mother’s naked flesh against his own. If he didn’t assert his power, he would forever be a victim. Even worse, he would never be able to embrace his position in the coming New Times. He would be another weakling, wandering from place to place like a lost mouse, waiting for the moment he was cleansed off the planet.

  That would not happen. He had not spent hours training his mind and readying his body to give up now, to allow someone else his rightful place. The universe wanted him to conquer this mountain. This was to be his refuge. But the wishes of the universe were not the same as fate. If Victor failed to rise to the demands of the occasion, the path of some other person would be crossed with his own. That person would be given the opportunity to embrace the coming darkness.

  It started with Mercy. He could not let her get away. He had to kill her before she got off the mountain.

  As long as his body didn’t give up on him, he would get her. She was obviously heading down the trail toward the parking lot below. It was a fast, direct route. But Victor knew this mountain. Knew the paths that only he had trod. He could get her. It would be a race and it would be close, but Victor was going to kill Mercy Higgins before she escaped Blood Mountain.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Mercy glanced back into the woods several times and was lucky each time that she didn’t fall. It was stupid to keep looking, but she had to know because every few seconds she was sure he was right behind her, sure his hand was about to clamp on her shoulder or seize her hair and yank her to the ground.

  She kept running, however, recalling the one season of cross country she had tried her junior year in high school because girls said that running was great for toning the butt. Mercy was the girl who, during gym class, walked the track by herself, book in hand. Girls like that didn’t get in very good shape, nor did they garner anything but bizarre glances from boys. So, she had joined the track team and endured one of the most torturous experiences of her life (got that one topped now) but she’d come away with a few important realizations about herself as well as a much firmer butt and thighs that looked damn good in really short shorts.

  One thing she learned about herself was that she had a vast reservoir of endurance. Coach Phillips, who taught Social Studies to the low-functioning students, told her early on that running cross country was about unleashing the potential of the human body. Her first run, Mercy lasted a mere fifteen minutes before she had to stop. Phillips knelt next to her on the path in the middle of the woods behind the school and she thought he was going to tell her that maybe track wasn’t for her, but he’d said something else instead. Something that meant a whole hell of a lot to her now.

  You’re only beaten, he said, if you surrender. This is a sport of the mind as much as the body. If you can focus on the finish line, you can push yourself to it.

  His motivation was cliche and corny but it had worked. She had gotten up and run another twenty minutes before hitting the fabled wall. When she walked across the finish line, which was a stick the kids had jammed into the ground, she was exhausted and shaking all over but she was proud. And determined.

  A month later, she was finishing the runs in above-average times. She
never improved her speed much more than that, but her endurance kept getting better. She could run and run and run. When races ended where other kids collapsed or even vomited, she would still be jogging in place, asking Phillips if she could run it again, only half joking. She powered through violent cramps in her sides and overcame the pain in her ankle when she twisted it halfway through a competition.

  You’re not a speed racer, Phillips told her after one race, but you are a marathon runner. Might not get you in the Olympics, but it may come in handy when you really need it.

  Mercy stopped running that summer when her mother received the first diagnosis. God, that was so long ago. The cancer battle could be swift or it could be protracted. Her mother had waged a war. She knew she should run, knew it would help her deal with the stress, but she could never find the energy. Running felt too much like running away and she couldn’t do that. She’d tried a few brief runs during college but it never really came back to her.

  If you don’t keep the endurance strong, Phillips warned her after she quit, you’ll lose it.

  If only Phillips could see her now. Body aflame with pain, blood puddles dried on her shirt, bare feet mangled and torn as if they had been passed through a shredder, and still she ran. If ever there was a time for her inner marathon runner to strut her stuff it was right now. Endurance was the name of the game and anything but first place meant death.

  Like when she was in the zone back in high school, Mercy ran with a very clear image of the finish line in her mind. She saw her father’s car perfectly. The slightly deflated front right tire that Dad pumped back up every week or so while commenting that he had to get new tires one of these days. The multiple gashes on the rear passenger door like grooves from a giant claw that Mercy had added to the car the first time she ever tried to back it into the garage. Finally, the vintage license plate with the tiny Statue of Liberty on it that he wasn’t legally supposed to have anymore but cops had never pulled him over for it.

  She saw the car as well as if it were a high-resolution digital photo. She could even see the way the gravel crested in front of each of the tires like little mountains. And the way shadows contorted over the surface of the boulders set around the parking lot that, on a different day, children would use for an improvised playground.

  She even remembered the other car in the lot: a beater relic from the eighties that--

  That Caleb had been driving. She had even thought he was attractive with his broad shoulders, thought maybe they’d meet up somewhere on the mountain.

  Good thinking, Mercy.

  With any luck, he was getting his eyes pecked out right now.

  Her feet slipped down the face of a rock that long ago split in half and she had to grope at the trees to stay on her feet. The small outcropping where she had stopped with her father earlier (what felt like much, much earlier) was around her somewhere. She thought. Or she might have passed it. Or it might still be ahead.

  “Focus,” she told herself.

  The major threat, Coach Phillips told the team before a particularly grueling practice, is not physical strain. It is mental torment. If you let your mind wander, if you lose focus, so too will your body. Then it’s all over. When you run, you run.

  She blocked out any thoughts of that outcropping and kept her concentration on the path ahead of her. She was running and that was all that mattered. That and the car waiting in the parking lot.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Even without a flashlight, Victor saw the trees and all the debris on the ground in brilliant lucidity. He was becoming the best of his primal self. He moved so fast that for several feet at a time he wasn’t even touching the ground. That might only be an illusory byproduct of his speed and adrenaline, but he embraced the sensation. The universe wanted him to track her down, get her under his knife.

  He found one of his many side trails and paused only the briefest of seconds before continuing down the mountain. This way was much riskier than the well-beaten trail thousands of people had traversed before him, but it was Victor’s destiny to forge those new paths, to carve out of this world what would become the New Way.

  The ground slanted to keep his feet moving and branches propelled him forward with skeletal fingers on his back. He filled his lungs to capacity in mid-stride inhalations that were like injections of superhuman power that coursed through him as hot, pulsating energy.

  He had felt like this once before. A few days after what would be his mother’s last visit to his bedroom, Victor went to her room in the middle of the night, walked to the edge of her bed, and stood there for a while watching her sleep before raising the carving knife high over his head where some faint light reflected off it for a moment, and then stabbed his mother thirteen times. He stabbed her in both breasts, in the throat, which geysered out blood like a busted water pipe, and in her crotch. Her eyes opened after the first hit but she didn’t make a noise until he pierced between her legs and when he did, she moaned the way she always did when she was on his thing and telling him what a good little boy he was. He pushed the knife as far inside her as he could and when he removed it, his hand and most of his forearm were soaked in blood and strands of internal tissue. She died with her eyes on him. She was no longer breathing but life resided still in those eyes. They shone through the darkness like ghost lights. He stabbed each of them and then went about the messy business of cleanup.

  There were a million things he could do wrong but he he was content. No, he was much more than content: he was liberated and empowered. He wrapped her body in her bloody bed sheets and dragged her down to the garage. Even after he cleaned up the blood trail he made down the stairs, he knew there would still be microscopic traces of blood, perhaps something more substantial than mere invisible specs; there would be plenty for cops to find and use against him. Hell, after he finished chopping her body into foot-long pieces, the concrete garage floor was so stained that he would have to paint the floor to cover it and that subterfuge would be easily surmounted during an investigation. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to get caught. This is what the universe wanted. This was his destiny.

  He was so assured that he would never be caught that he simply toted a garbage bag worth of severed body parts into the woods behind the house and scattered them as he sauntered on a three-hour hike. He made sure to mark the tree where he placed her decapitated head. Three weeks later, he tracked back into the woods but the head was gone. Some animal had carried it off. That made Victor smile. In fact, he found only a small section of bone, either from her arm or leg, that had been stripped clean of flesh. He kept it. It currently sat on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink.

  He could have brought her up here. Scattered her across the mountain. But that would be an insult to the sanctuary of these woods and the trees that steadily bled a deep red sap. He had done the right thing. Killed her and cast her away.

  All of that had been years ago and Victor hadn’t so much as spoken to a cop about his mother. She hadn’t had any friends, just on-line perverts. People who knew her, avoided her, so her absence meant very little. If anyone bothered to wonder about it for more than a few seconds he or she would conclude that if something had happened to Mrs. Dolor, her son Victor would have reported it. Thinking any more darkly than that was out of most people’s capabilities.

  Victor had gotten away with murder. He thought of that now as he ran through woods that he had traversed thousands of times. Gotten away with murder. It was his initial kill, his initiation into his future. He had not hesitated to do what the universe asked of him and for it he would be rewarded. He would get to Mercy. Track her down. Kill her. He would not fail.

  Like Daddy.

  He would not think about that. He would not let such things weigh him down. Daddy’s failure was cast down into the darkest pit in Victor’s mind and he was not about to exhume it so it could destroy him too.

  But you knew this might happen. That’s why you went there. The universe called you there.

>   “Bullshit,” he said through clenched teeth.

  You can’t escape your fate. Your destiny is not what you think.

  “Fuck you!” he screamed and that’s what broke his focus.

  His feet tangled on something, perhaps a branch or root or simply each other, and he fell. The world blurred while he fell and he thought in a flash that he was going to keep falling down, down, down, straight to Hell.

  Daddy will be there.

  Before he could retort, his face hit the ground and the world went black.

  FIFTY-SIX

  When you run, you run. Coach Phillips stayed with her. He pushed her to run faster, dig deeper, find that strength and run, run, run. He was a song stuck on repeat and that’s exactly what Mercy needed.

  She slipped many times but did not fall. Her balance threatened to topple her but she powered through the runner’s vertigo. Sweat slipped into her eyes and she wiped it away without missing a beat. Her legs cramped and invisible knives stabbed at her sides but she breathed deeply and found the other side of pain where the hurt was dull and harmless.

  Crickets made their noise seemingly all around her and two owls hooted back and forth. Perhaps they were talking about her. She was the nighttime entertainment. Maybe they would place bets. She saw owls wearing green, plastic visors exchanging money with wings as adept as hands.

  When you run, you run.

  Yes, coach.

  “Focus, Mercy,” she said. “You want to die?”

  Hoot! Hoot!

  With every deep breath, the heavy aroma of rotting compost filled her nose. If she fell and Victor caught her, she would add to that compost. Bugs would eat her flesh. Worms would breed in her guts. In a few short weeks, fungus and plants would grow out of her back. She would be part of the glorious rebirthing of the mountain in springtime.