by J. T. Warren
She ran harder. Breathed deeper. The cold air burned at her throat. Her body was flush with heat and sweat but the night had gotten colder and colder. She was removed from the night as if it were a backdrop and she was running through some other space, some other vast existence like outer space where it seemed like she was moving but she was really pumping her legs on some invisible treadmill.
Branches clawed at her face and rocks scraped the bottom of her feet. She clutched the keys in her hand. They would keep her focused and grounded, not let her drift into space.
Her hands closed against empty palms.
She glanced down at her open hands and thought, The keys! Where the fuck are the keys? before moonlight glinted off the silver key ring and then she tripped on something and fell forward. Her hands saved her face but the keys had come loose.
This time her palms really were empty.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Victor came back to consciousness like a hard slap across the face and knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. He got to his feet and stopped in mid-crouch, hands out before him like spider arms. Something was under his right hand. Something cold and flat. It could have been a rock or even the ground, but he knew better.
He wrapped his hand around it and didn’t even flinch when the blade of the knife pierced the insides of his knuckles.
He had lost this knife so long ago. Before he had killed his mother. Before he had truly embraced his calling. He had thrown it at a deer and never found it. He had discovered how his trail intersected with the main path and he had met Caleb, just standing there with camping gear on his back like some dumb tourist, but Victor always wanted his knife back.
Hours of retracing his steps, of stalking a blood trail. All in vain.
Until now.
And that was all Victor Dolor needed to get back to his feet and run as hard as he could. The universe wanted him to do this. He would be rewarded. He dropped the Maglite and the work knife. No longer needed. He didn’t worry about tracking that knife. This mountain was a magical place. It took and it gave. He merely had to trust it.
The wooden handle of the knife against his palm assured him that he would catch up to Mercy and have the chance to slice the bitch’s throat. He was barely aware that the two fingers Mercy had almost torn off were clenched around the handle too, as if the knife had healed them. Maybe it had.
The cold air whistled between his broken front teeth and the pain was immense but not enough to slow him from his prey. If the knife could heal his fingers then the mountain could heal his teeth, too. He just had to give it what it wanted.
Victor ran the rest of the way down the mountain without falling. He would not risk losing this blood trail.
FIFTY-EIGHT
She was crying and screaming and throwing her hands in every direction but the ground was a black shadow and everything she grabbed was rock or earth. This was not happening. There was no way. She couldn’t have dropped the keys. But she did. She had hallucinated dropping them, tripped, and then really lost them. They could have been launched several feet in any direction.
“Pleasepleasepleaseplease,” she said continuously.
She was going to die if she didn’t run, but without the keys, what the hell was she going to do? Where would she go?
Her father was going to die because she dropped the keys. She was going to die. A bloody finish to the Higgins family. Her mother was watching all of this from wherever people went when they died and she was shaking her head. Her daughter hadn’t been a tough bitch at all. Just a stupid one.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
She leaped at anything that might be the keys and ran her hands over the ground like someone with poor vision hunting for fallen glasses. She lurched over the ground and screamed and begged for the keys to appear. She pleaded for God to have some fucking mercy (haha) for once, just once, but the keys had slipped off into some other where. God was twirling them around His almighty finger.
The heavy tramping over the terrain behind her coincided with her certainty that Victor was going to burst out of the darkness and kill her right here. His breathing was faint at first and then louder and louder, and here was the maniac huffing like a racehorse breaking free from the tangle of branches and barreling right at her and there was a precious second where silver light played off the blade in his hand and then he was toppling over her, tumbling further down the mountain as if he had planned the gymnastic maneuver.
She froze as if he were a bear that might mistake her for an abnormal rock formation. She had to run. Had to go now. But she couldn’t. Victor had landed on his back and now slowly sat up and turned to her. Dark streaks pattered his face like tread marks. His head tilted slightly as if he didn’t recognize what he was seeing. This was Death and not just a madman with a knife but Death with the capital “D.” When he stood, that knife would morph into a giant, cartoonish scythe and a heavy black robe would drape around him. He would glide toward her and reach out with one huge skeletal hand.
“NO!” Her scream tore her throat but gave her the needed shock to run right at him.
He crouched from her attack, raised his arms and there, finally, was some luck. He had dropped his knife.
She crashed into him and her hands snapped his head to the side. He fell over easily. Her bare feet trampled over his legs and she hoped she had scored another crotch hit.
His hands slid down her jeans, latched onto her right heel, and with the next step, her left knee buckled and she fell forward again. Her hands saved her once more but one of her fingers snapped and when she slid several feet before stopping, something sliced into her midsection like a scalpel.
She looked up and thought of mirages again.
She was almost at the bottom of the trail. There was the back of the dented metal sign that read HIKERS ONLY on the opposite side. There was Caleb’s elderly Toyota and beyond it, her father’s car. The hope that flooded her was as all-consuming as jumping into a freezing pool on a torturously hot day. Then she remembered the lost keys and brutal despair made her go completely limp. She was going to die mere feet from what should have been her salvation.
“Hello, bitch,” Victor Dolor said as if through a mouth of rocks.
FIFTY-NINE
The mountain had been so giving that he hadn’t even believed he’d tripped right over Mercy. It had to be an illusion. But then she was clawing at the ground and crying and begging for help.
Victor’s legs were steady, solid. He had dropped the knife but that was okay. There were two more tucked against his belt. One had the gut hook. But they were gone, too. No problem. The brass knuckles were all he needed right now.
“Did you really think you were going to get away?” he asked. His voice sounded strange, deeper and raspy. As if he were morphing into something else, some other Victor.
“Please,” she said, sounding like a little girl.
“Try screaming,” Victor said. “Scream as loud as you want. Who’s going to hear you?”
She was on her stomach, hands beneath her, head twisted back over her shoulder at him. Her eyes flickered like silver dollars. Beyond her was the start of the hiker’s trail and the small gravel lot where two cars waited: Caleb’s and hers.
He stopped short of her bare feet. They were smeared with blood, black in the light, the flesh torn deeply in several places as if someone had tried to skin her. Now, there was an idea.
“I never would have guessed you had so much fight in you,” he said.
He stepped farther, his boots on either side of her legs. He adjusted his grip on the brass knuckles. The first hit should land between the shoulder blades, right on the spine. That would cripple her long enough for him to have her one more time. He could pull her jeans off and have her just like this. She would feel even better the second time. Hell, he’d take her in the ass. If she managed to resist at all, he’d crack her in the skull. It would be a shame for her to get knocked out, though--she’d miss all the fun.
&nb
sp; He bent over her, face approaching her ear, brass knuckles hovering over her spine. Drops of saliva, or maybe blood, dribbled onto her shirt. “You must hate your shitty luck,” he said. “Probably think you’re a real tough bitch, don’t you?”
“You have no idea,” she said.
She flipped over, stared at him for a beat with coins for eyes, and stabbed him in the gut with his own knife.
Victor was hardly aware of what was happening as he stumbled back, growling against the burgeoning pain in his midsection, and watched Mercy Higgins get to her feet and run away from him again.
SIXTY
Again, she ran. Her father’s car pulled her toward it with its promise of safety and escape but she couldn’t waste time with it--she had no keys and, unlike in the movies, there was no spare set tucked under the visor. Even if it was unlocked, the car would actually keep her confined so Victor could get at her.
But you stabbed him. He could be bleeding to death.
That was true, but she couldn’t count on it. She had released the knife almost immediately when she felt the firmness of his skin give way. The sensation of perforation traveled up the blade, through her hand, and into her arm like an electric shock that hurt and numbed simultaneously. It was an unnatural feeling, something innately wrong, and she wanted to get away quickly from that sense that she had crossed a boundary of acceptability.
Victor crossed that boundary first. A long time ago.
She did what she had to and maybe he would die and that would be the end of it, but that didn’t mean she could feel alright with it. Perhaps she never would.
She trailed her hand over the trunk of her father’s car as she passed. The metal was cold. It grounded her to a reality in which she was a quiet young woman who didn’t go out much, spent her hours reading, a girl who hadn’t been raped or even had sex, and who certainly had never stabbed anyone.
She wanted to cry. To stop running, drop to her knees, and cry it all out. Victor would catch up and kill her, but that didn’t matter as much as the need to purge her pain. To collapse and cry right now would feel as good as anything she had ever experienced before. The pure despair would feel so liberating in its relief.
There would be no stopping, however. No crying. Not yet. Later, if she survived, she would cry it all out, use an entire week to get it all out, but not now. Not when she had to keep running. When she had to find help or safety.
She ran over the gravel in the parking lot without feeling any of the sharp pebbles digging into her feet and crossed over onto Route 51, the main drag in and out of town. The asphalt was cold and flat and she imagined dipping her ruined feet into a soothing mineral bath.
The glowing spaceship of the Alexis Diner waited in the distance. It could have been hundreds of light years away, but Mercy knew it was only a mile or two, three at the outside. If she kept up her speed, she could get there in under a half hour.
When you run, you run.
Her renewed determination faded almost immediately, however, when she neared a long, dilapidated building on her right. It was the site of a former garbage company. The sign out front was crooked as if it might fall into the road from the slightest breeze and faded so badly she couldn’t read it until she was almost upon it.
She had passed this building hundreds of times, maybe more like thousands of times, but it had always been in a car and although she had seen the sign all those times, she had never let it register in her mind.
In large block letters, it read: Murray Waste Co. Next to it was another sign, CONDEMNED KEEP OUT. Her father had explained once that the place closed down because of financial fraud and illegal dumping. She hadn’t cared, but now it felt like urgent information and she tried to squeeze anything else from the confines of her mind where information is stored that is deemed unimportant. She came up with nothing.
It didn’t matter. She wasn’t stopping because this place held some secret meaning. She was stopping because there were people here.
Their voices drifted toward her from behind the building. Teenagers. At least two, maybe more.
She ran across the parking lot toward the rear of the building and tried to scream but nothing came out. Her throat was raw. It felt like she might never speak again.
Her feet slipped as she rounded the corner and ran directly into one of the teenagers. The kid was lanky, wearing baggy jeans and an extra-large sweatshirt. He tumbled backwards but moved aside to prevent a fall. Mercy clawed at his sweatshirt but couldn’t find a grip. She hit the ground.
“Holy shit,” someone said.
“What the fuck is this shit?” someone else added.
On her hands and knees, Mercy turned to look at her saviors.
Next to the baggy kid was another teenage boy but this one was wearing tight jeans and an equally snug sweatshirt. It was the same one he had been wearing at the diner so many hours ago. He had not been wearing the heavy bandage across the side of his face then, however.
SIXTY-ONE
Victor had only a handful of memories of his father. Most of these were purely mental pictures, moments his brain had preserved for whatever reason, yet Victor treasured them as if they could convey secret meaning. He recalled fights and the sounds of his parents having sex, loud and furious, but when he dared to recall any of the actual memories stored within him, the same one would always play.
Victor had been seven years old, perhaps not even, when his father came to him and said he had to go somewhere special. He picked Victor up from where he had been playing with his Matchbox cars and set him on the bed, legs dangling off, a million miles from the floor.
His father knelt before him. He was wearing his heavy winter coat with the thick, fury insides that reminded Victor of a dog. It was almost June. He hadn’t shaved in several days and he smelled stale like the fridge did when something went bad.
“Daddy’s got to do something,” he said. “He’s got to go somewhere special.”
“Why?” Victor asked.
His father’s eyes darted to the bedroom door and back to Victor. “Everyone has a calling. A purpose. Something they need to do.”
“Okay.”
“I didn’t know what mine was for a long time, but I do now. I need you to know that I’m doing it for you. Protect you.”
“What about Mommy?”
His eyes went back to the door, lingered there this time. “A man has got to do what is right for his son. That is all that matters.”
“Okay.”
His father grabbed Victor around his skinny arms, squeezed. “You need to listen to me very carefully. Can you do that?”
Victor squirmed against the hold but his father’s hands tightened even more.
“Can you do that?” he asked again.
“Yes.”
“Good.” The grip loosened. “I have to leave. There is something I have to do and then I’m going somewhere special. I’m doing it for you. I will save you a place, Victor. It is your destiny as it is mine.”
Tears welled in Victor’s eyes and he wanted to scream them out. “Don’t go, Daddy. Please!”
The hands came away and Victor thought his father might slap him even though he had never done anything like that before. Victor tried to wipe the tears from his eyes and something sharp poked him in the stomach. He opened his eyes.
Daddy was holding a knife against Victor’s bloated belly.
“I could stab you right now. Spill your guts all over the floor. That would save you the burden. I could do that for you. I love you enough to do that. Do you understand?”
“Daddy, please. It hurts.”
“Shut up. Be a man. It might hurt, but you’d be getting off easy. What waits for you is so much worse. But it is your purpose. I won’t kill you, but I would. You need to remember that. Daddy loves you so much, he would spill your guts.”
The tip of the knife pushed through Victor’s T-shirt and then Daddy flicked his wrist and tore a gash from Victor’s bellybutton to his right nipple. A stre
ak of blood that sort of resembled a crooked “J” saturated his shirt and then pain rolled in like a massive asphalt compactor.
“Scream all you want,” Daddy said. “But for Christ’s sake, be tough about it.”
Victor aged twenty-five years in a flash and gagged himself out of the shock-coma. He didn’t remember falling. He recalled only Mercy Higgins stabbing him and then running away. Escaping.
This was not the end of Victor Dolor. Daddy had given him all the advice Victor would ever need during that final interaction.
Victor screamed himself to his feet. The handle of the knife jutted from his midsection like a malformed appendage. He took it in his good hand. Scream all you want, Daddy had said. But for Christ’s sake, be tough about it.
He yanked the knife from his gut and relished the toughness in his scream. His legs wobbled and dizziness threatened but he would not fall down again. He willed himself forward, one small step after another, and managed an awkward stumble into the parking lot.
The wound was hot and bleeding but not so quickly that he would bleed out before he could track that bitch down and slice off her fucking head.
His car was parked behind the condemned garbage company. That was okay. He made it to the car Caleb had brought. Something he’d stolen in Pennsylvania a week ago. The door was unlocked. Victor dropped into the passenger seat and screamed again at the eruption of pain in his gut.
“Be tough,” he told himself. “Be tough.”
Just like Victor’s were in his own car, Caleb had stored his car keys in the glove compartment.
SIXTY-TWO
Mercy threw herself at the one in the baggy clothes. “Help! Help!” Her words sounded hollow like her voice might give out any second.
The kid threw his hands up and backed up quickly until he was up against the wall and she was on all-fours again, facing them this time. “Cellphone,” she said.
The boys exchanged a glance. The one in the skinny jeans with the bandage on his face from where Victor had hit him that morning was holding a partially smoked joint. He glanced at it as if he feared this whole thing were a hallucination.
