by Edward Lee
Harley Mack didn’t fool around this time. One quick impact of his big fist into Cinny’s head silenced her shriek instantly and knocked her right out. He peered fretfully over the hillock and saw to his relief that the two security guards still had not heard her outburst thanks to the engine noise from the delivery truck. Damn lucky. He decided to throw in the towel for tonight; how could he possibly get a good stakeout of the place with this noisy drunk bitch screamin’ every five minutes? Fuck it, I’ll just come back out here Saturday night and do the job, and I’ll leave this pain in the ass home…if I don’t kill her first… He’d have to carry her back to the boat but that was no big deal; the meth kept her good and skinny. Before he reached to pick her up, he thought: What the hell was she squawkin’ about this time? A snake?
Then he looked closer.
The little pin-head wasn’t lyin’.
A snake indeed had bitten her—or, in fact, was still biting her, vigorously on the leg just above her ankle. It was just a green snake not even two feet long, and not poisonous.
Harley Mack grabbed the snake, yanked it off her, and flung it away, but as he did so a sudden nauseousness dropped down into the pit of his belly. He flung Cinny over his shoulder and tromped back toward his boat as quickly as possible.
Yes, there was something fucked up about this park, and Harley Mack wanted to get out of there fast.
Why?
Because when he’d pulled that snake off of Cinny’s leg, he couldn’t help but notice something.
The snake had two heads.
(II)
The wooden packing crate was eight feet long and a foot high and wide. Within the two-by-four beams that formed its structure, plywood sheets extended. Clare could easily read the black stenciled letters:
FRAGILE
ONE (1) MAGNA-FERRIC CARBON ELEMENT ASSEMBLY INCLUDING
ONE (1) CONDUCTION HARNESS
AND
FOUR (4) MAGNA-FERRIC CARBON ELEMENTS.
DO NOT DROP!
After the driver and Rick had hand-trucked the crate into the loading dock hold, Clare signed for the delivery from Hodder-Tech Industries Inc.
“What exactly is it?” she asked the driver.
His eyes looked bloodshot from too much caffeine. “Got no idea,” he replied, adjusting his backward Devil Rays ball cap. “I just make the drive and the drop. But we do make a lot of regular runs for Hodder-Tech.”
“Where to? Hospitals? Clinics like this?”
“Yeah, but also lots of factories.”
Factories? “Then I guess it must be some kind of an illumination element.”
“Got no idea.” He grinned at her with bad teeth. “Have a good ’un!”
He got back in his truck and left. Clare just shook her head.
“I think it’s some kind of heating element,” Rick offered after locking up the hold.
“Heaters? In Florida?” It sounded absurd to Clare. “If that’s true, it’s a damn long heater. That crate was eight feet. You mean like baseboard heating?”
“No, like a water heater or something, I think. I asked Dellin about it once. For some medical equipment. Oh, now I remember. He said they needed them for sterilization.”
Clare’s brow ridged. She didn’t see how something that heavy and long could be needed for sterilization but then again, it wasn’t her field. Oh, well. Sterilization. At least she had her answer, odd and rather boring as it was.
“Any word on how the girl’s doing?” Rick asked.
“I called the hospital a little while ago. She’s dehydrated and in shock but in stable condition. They’re also treating her with a lot of antibiotics to ward off infections; she had a lot of insect bites.”
“It’s really too bad how these people get mixed up with drugs and then things like this happen. She could’ve died out here.” He glanced at the red taillights of the delivery truck. “I’m going to go lock the main gate up after the truck leaves, then I’ll come back and show you around. I’ve still got a half hour to go on my shift.”
“Forget it,” Clare dismissed him. “I’ll sign you out on your log. Just go home after you lock the gate.”
This news gladdened Rick. “You sure?”
“Yeah, Joyce did a good job of showing me around earlier. Actually I’m kind of anxious to make my first solo rounds. Just take off. There’s no point in both of us sweating our butts off out here.”
“Thanks, Clare! Have a good shift.”
Clare waved as he drove away. When she walked down the loading dock ramp, back to her truck, the high-watt floodlights clicked off via motion sensor. For some reason, she felt listless now, bored—even after all the commotion of the day. She was eager to begin her first official round of the site’s punch stations, to get a feel of the property on her own. The main gate, the lake, the beaches, several points on the clinic grounds, and a number of other areas of the site were fitted with punch stations that verified exactly what time the guard had been at the station. Long gone were the days of punch clocks that guards had to lug around with them; now all they needed was their master key, which logged the punch time in on the security computer. Clare had made many a round in her career but never on a site so beautiful. Even in the stifling midnight heat, the look of the place in its edges of moonlight seemed paradisial. The evening throbbed from the dense waves of cricket trills. Night birds frolicked. This sure beats looking at Air Force security warrens and hearing F-16s taking off every two minutes.
The exotic animal sounds faded when she approached the shore, and she smiled to herself when she recalled exactly where she was now, what Joyce had called “Trojan Point.” The small lagoon lay still as black glass. No lovers tonight, she thought when she roved the Blazer’s spotlight across the area. She drove around the lagoon’s rim, then found herself on the beach. She turned off the engine, turned off the headlights. This late and this dark, the beach suddenly became a tiny domain of the surreal, a secret place only for her. The gentle surf lapped ashore. The moonlight lay long rippling lines, like foxfire, across the water, and all at once, Clare felt as though she were the only person in the world.
Eyes wide open on the water, she thanked God, or the universe, or the fates for what had happened to her…
Thank you so much for letting this happen to me. Finally—something good. Thank you.
It wasn’t quite a prayer but it may as well have been. She was happy now, for the first time in over a year. But she was grateful too.
She wanted to just sit here for a few more moments, relishing the peace and quiet. It was so tranquil, so serene. But soon distractions began to intrude. Not thoughts as much as images—images of men.
Dellin and that attractive, preoccupied manner of his, doctorish but sexy. Then Rick, rugged, tough but smart, and the hard muscles she remembered when she’d secretly watched he and Joyce in their erotic clinch. God, she thought, a little short of breath. She was getting hot, and it wasn’t from the evening heat. It bewildered her, this sudden rush of hormones; it had haunted her all day. She’d worked with attractive men for years but it never had such an affect. Hard as she tried to push out the images, they continued to sneak into her mind: now she was remembering more of what she’d seen of Rick and Joyce on the video screen, Joyce’s bare breasts thrust out, Rick hands all over her as if molding a voluptuous statue, his mouth sucking wet trails along her skin…
Stop it.
Something else, then—not an image from memory but a fantasy. She gave into it, she couldn’t help it. It was not Joyce on the screen now, it was her. Suddenly Rick’s hands were on her, Rick’s mouth was laving her nipples. Clare was the sultry statue now. Her breath gusted as the image changed and got darker, hotter. It was no longer Rick who tended to her, it was Dellin, stolid, intent, his dark eyes hard on her. She cringed and rose to her tiptoes against the tree as Dellin’s hands gripped her waist and began to slowly slide upward over her sweat-damp skin. The hands cupped her breasts and squeezed, tweezering her nipples in the V’s of their fingers.<
br />
Ssssstop…
Even more inexplicably, the muse amplified. Yes, she was being touched now, as she would love to be touched, the slow deliberate hand sliding back around her buttocks. When her thoughts pleaded for the fingers to slid up further, they obliged, less than gingerly running up the furrow of her sex. But the hand wasn’t Dellin’s any more, it was Adam’s.
Here was the inexplicable part: as much as she deplored the impertinent park ranger, the affects of the fantasy sharpened. She knew where it came from. From earlier, when he’d lifted her out of the waist-deep sinkhole; he’d put his hand between her legs in the pretense of helping her out. It probably hadn’t even been necessary, just a rude man copping a cheap feel—
But she didn’t care now, and she didn’t bother telling herself to stop any more. She just sat there in the Blazer, in the moon-lit dark, and gave in to it. The hand pressed harder, the fingers probing. His tongue slid up the side of her neck, and then he began to whisper to her:
Duh-duh-don’t worry, Clare. I wuh-wuh-won’t hurt you till I’m done.
The fantasy collapsed; her mind betraying her in the most treacherous fashion. Though it only lasted for a second longer, it seemed like hours, as every detail of her rape replayed in her mind. The dark, warm woods were gone. Now she lay flat on her back on a cold stainless steel autopsy platform. The examination lights nearly blinded her in their perfect white glare. It was Stuart Winster’s hands that were running over the contours of her nude body. She’d always regarded him as harmless; he was a civilian who worked on the base, a janitor, and the only significant thing about him was his being the son of one Colonel Winster—the commander of the Air Force Clinical Research Corp, who obviously used his pull to get him the job. Clare found out quickly that harmless was not the word to describe the retarded twenty-two year old.
His left hand was normal, and this was the hand that held the sharpened awl. He traced the needlelike point slowly up and down the skin of her belly, not enough to break the skin, just enough to leave a caustic tingle. It was his right hand that roved lower—the deformed hand. A birth defect made the hand look clawlike, with only two fingers—thumb and forefinger.
It was the hand that maximized her terror. Not her abduction and rape, not the fear of death. Not the image of his face, nor the slightly warped forehead. It was that plier-like hand…
She’d been on a midnight shift, making foot rounds along the admin perimeter. He’d knocked her out from behind with a club and then injected her with some kind of paralytic agent. She’d come to in the autopsy suite. Ankle and wrist ties weren’t necessary; what he’d injected her with affected total paralysis of the major voluntary muscle groups. She could open and close her eyes, move her lips a bit, but that was all, and the agent had no anesthetic properties.
She could feel everything. She just couldn’t move.
Clare, Clare… You’re real pretty.
Drooling, he licked all around her face while the two hideous fingers fished in her sex. A surge of agony like a cigarette to her skin ripped through her when he abruptly bit one of her nipples. Her reflexes told her to scream, to cringe and bolt at the pain but again there was the drug he’d injected her with. Not a single fiber of muscle moved in reaction, and not a peep escaped her lips. The teeth bit down so hard, she heard them click together.
It steepled her horror. What would he bite next? Her heart raced with that dreaded question when his mouth moved lower, below her waist where it was soon down there along with the hand, working in tandem. Clare just wished she could die. It was clear what he wanted to do, and without the extra breadth of three more fingers, it was rather easy.
I wanna play with you…inside.
Clare felt as though she were being operated on, if only non-surgically. Something alive and awful was inside of her but thankfully it didn’t last long. The pervert’s more dire needs took command, and that’s when he climbed on top of her and just did it. Clare felt no longer human, no longer really alive herself; she was just a pile of hamburger meat, being plied and prodded on a cold counter top.
Whether he actually would’ve killed her was something she’d never know. He’d climaxed fast, leaving the physical fact like hot glue between her legs. Now we play some more, Clare, he slurred, but he wasn’t off of her a minute before the SOD guard walked in. It was over just as quickly, Clare recovering in the hospital, expecting to see justice done.
Which never happened.
It had all been an exquisite set-up. In only weeks, they had it looking like Clare was a pathological liar trying to manufacture a fake rape case to make herself famous.
Jesus God, was all she thought now.
At last, she was able to shut it all out of her head. The nightmarish memory drifted away, as did the previous fantasies. Sitting in the truck now, she felt exhausted, icky with sweat, and partly nauseated. So much for the idyllic vision of the beach… She rolled up the Blazer’s windows, cranked on the a/c, and drove off.
At least she got her mind off it quickly. The cooler air made her feel better. She drove around to the punch stations on the island’s first spur and soon found herself on a road running along another beach. When she looked to her left—
Are those the beach cottages?
A narrow channel of water separated the spurs, and when she looked harder she could see the cluster of beach cottages on the other side. It was only a few hundred yards away. She could see lights on in some of them.
She thought about it a moment, then concluded, What’s the harm? She was done with that hour’s rounds, and it wasn’t like she’d be deliberately invading someone’s privacy. She just wanted to see what her cottage looked like from this distance.
She removed the pair of field glasses from the glove box and raised them to her eyes…
That’s some view. She was surprised by the strength and clarity of the binoculars, and even more surprised when she rolled up the zoom. The ripples on the water looked just feet away, and when she nudged the binoculars up just a little, she was looking at her own cottage in superb detail. She’d left the long motorized drapes open behind the sliding-glass doors, and a kitchen light had inadvertently been left on but it was enough illumination to see just about everything inside. Keep those drapes closed at night, she reminded herself. If she could see into the place this well, so could anyone else, especially Adam Corey whom Joyce already suspected of being a peeper.
A brief movement caught her eye in the next cottage—Mrs. Grable’s cottage. It was the only cottage that hadn’t been built on stilts. More movement shifted in a window.
All right, I know I shouldn’t be doing this but I’ve GOT to get a look at this husband of hers.
In one window she saw Mrs. Grable, quite naked. It spite of the woman’s age, it was easy to tell that she’d worked hard over the years to keep fit; she looked even better naked than in the simple dress Clare had seen her in earlier when they’d met. Good lord, she’s got a body like a South Beach sun bunny. Heavy breasts with dark, prominent areolae didn’t sag in the least, and there was no trace of cellulite on the buttocks or thighs. Regrettably, though, even at this considerable distance, Clare could make out the awful bite mark she’d glimpsed when being shown around, an oval ring around the nipple like a branding mark, and now she noticed several similar marks on her back. Without the brutal marks, though, Mrs. Grable’s hourglass figure and womanly lines would make most twenty year olds envious. And some twenty-eight year olds too, Clare admitted. The woman looked just as sexy after she’d slipped the tight maroon nightgown over her head, robust breasts jutting when she walked out of the room.
But where’s the damn husband?
The crisp field of Clare’s binoculars roved to the next block of light, the living room window, she supposed. The lights were dim here, though, and she could see the television on. There’s a man in there, all right, Clare determined, and he’s just like all men—a slavering sexist pig. It was obviously some travel channel on the tv screen, boun
cy blondes in string bikinis frolicking on some exotic, faraway beach.
Then she saw the husband.
From the position, she could only see his head. A good-looking man, longish dark hair with only a few touches of gray, nice facial angles. Just when I was starting to believe she didn’t really have a husband, here he is, Clare thought. And Joyce was right, he’s normal looking, handsome even.
She could see him smiling warmly as his wife entered the room. Clare’s eyes widened a bit behind the binoculars.
Mrs. Grable was now grinning, and there was something clearly wanton in the grin, a hot dirty passion. She stood in front of the television, blocking the screen—
And begin to dance.
Not the jig, either. A slow, fluid erotic dance, like a dancer in a strip joint.
Her hands opened against her trim waist, then began to slither upward until they were caressing her breasts. One hand lingered there, fingers tweaking a nipple, and then the other hand lowered again, smoothing over the sheer fabric that stretched across her pubis.
All right, she’s doing a striptease for her husband. Nothing wrong with that—until he starts beating her…
But now something clashed with her motives. This didn’t look like a dysfunctional marriage at all; it looked like a happy, lively one. The expressions on their faces were those of two people vivaciously in love.
But this man was really a wife-beater?
I don’t know, Clare thought. He just doesn’t look the part. Christ, maybe Mrs. Grable is just a klutz; maybe she really IS falling down the stairs and slipping on the soap. Maybe those bite marks were really rashes from some skin disorder.
Clare knew she had trespassed on their privacy enough. Just as Mrs. Grable was slowly inching the hem of her nightgown up over her bare hips and crotch, Clare turned the binoculars away from the window, leaving them to their play.
But as she did so, the viewing field fell immediately on another window, just as dimly lit, only this time it wasn’t light from a television, it was light from a few candles.
