Transcendence

by Benjamin Wilkins

  It’s just the bigness of the store that’s spooking me, she thought. The smell had to just be the remains of an animal of some kind, probably killed a long time ago. Ace would have known if somebody or something else was here with them. He’d have said something. Besides, she could hear him swearing at JP now, so obviously he wasn’t too concerned.

  Still, she had a nagging feeling that she was being stalked, but then she saw a doll named Carla and forgot all about everything else. It took Bobby-Leigh about thirty seconds to get the doll out of the box. Its eyes blinked. Its strawberry-blonde hair was so soft. She pulled out another doll named Molly and immediately facilitated a conversation between the two human-shaped pieces of plastic. When the man’s hand closed over her mouth and the arm yanked her up against his chest and held her so tightly against him that she couldn’t breathe, much less move, much less call out for help, she was taken completely by surprise.

  Her assailant’s hot breath washed over her neck as he carried her soundlessly away from the voices of her sister and the guys. It was rancid and wet. Bobby-Leigh tried to cry out, but his grip on her was too tight for her to draw breath. Against the back of her thigh she could feel his erection as she bounced against him while he ran. Though she’d never seen a penis, flaccid, hard, or otherwise, she knew what was poking her in the leg, and she knew what it meant.

  Another man holding a candle opened a door and smiled at her in the wash of the flicking light, like he’d just won the apocalypse lottery. She could feel his breath too as they passed him and it was just as bad as that of the one who held her. Hot. Wet. Rancid.

  Another door. Then another. Until they were somewhere in the back of the store where there were no more skylights, just the darkness beyond the reach of the single candle that was lighting the way.

  A final door opened and Bobby-Leigh was tossed like a bag of trash into a room that was probably a manager’s office back before the shit hit the fan. All the furniture seemed to have been moved out. The carpet was wet and it stank, but she could smell the thick body odor and rotten breath of the two men above the musty mold below her easily. Desperately trying to get her bearings and calm herself down, Bobby-Leigh rolled as she hit the ground and came up sitting on her knees.

  The man who had snatched her pulled out a nasty-looking hunting knife. The other man held up a hand ax menacingly. They seemed confident that the display would ensure that Bobby-Leigh would do what they wanted her to. They were both sickly thin. Their mouths and arms were covered with sores. Their hair was flat and greasy. The ax man was in slightly better shape, but both obviously had caught something, and it was something bad. The candlelight glinted off the blade in each man’s hand. She’d never get past them to the door, and that was the only way out of the room, so Bobby-Leigh waited for them to come to her, just like her uncle had taught her to.

  The man who had grabbed her dropped his pants and pulled out his erection. The flesh of his manhood, covered with the same sores that were on his face and arms, was her first real look at a penis, and she didn’t like it one bit. It looked like a terribly malformed finger to her, not just because this one in particular was so diseased, but because of the way it just pointed up there like that from the ugly tangle of hair between the man’s legs. She couldn’t imagine a woman wanting a baby bad enough to put one of those things inside her. Penises seemed like horrible wastes of flesh that didn’t belong on a body at all—like some kind of elongated growth or a weirdly shaped wart. Boys were truly disgusting creatures. She didn’t know the name of the venereal disease that had produced the sores, but she knew enough to know what the men wanted from her, and that if they got it, they’d make her just as sick as they were.

  Uncle Allen had told Bobby-Leigh this day would come, and he’d done what he could to teach her and Jennifer how to fight and get away when it did. “Girls, I don’t want to scare you,” he’d said completely out of the blue one day, not long after the nukes started popping off. “But I do want you to be prepared. One of these days, a man, or a group of men, is going to try to force you to have sex with him.”

  The bearded surrogate father had been dressed in a red Hawaiian shirt that completely contradicted the gravity of the lesson he wanted to teach, a fact he had seemed aware of when he looked at Bobby-Leigh and asked, “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  “Rape,” Jen had said.

  “Exactly. He’ll try to put his penis in your vagina, or your mouth, or somewhere else, or he’ll try to put something else in you, his fingers, his tongue, the details don’t matter. He’ll probably try to hurt you as well. Sex is what I’m talking about here, girls. But not normal sex. Rape is different. It’s about power as much as it is about getting off for these guys. So it’ll be very scary. And you’ll be tempted to just close your eyes and not fight back, to just pretend like it’s not happening. You may even be tempted to think it’s somehow happening because of something you did, or that you deserve it for some reason.”

  Bobby-Leigh had started to cry at that point, but Uncle Allen had not stopped, nor did he pull any punches. As far as he had been concerned, this was a perfectly appropriate time to cry.

  “But you listen to me now. I’m serious. I need you to really hear this: No matter what happened to get you in that situation, it will not have been your fault. You are not to blame that it’s happening.”

  “What if—”

  “No. Listen to me. If it happens to you it will never be your fault. Never. If it happens, it’s because the man, or men, are bad. Evil. That is it. No exceptions. No matter what you did or didn’t do. No matter what you said or didn’t say. No matter what you wore or didn’t wear. You get to decide what happens to your bodies, girls. Period. Full stop. Okay? Nobody else has the right to make you do something, or to make you feel like you have to do something sexually with them, or with anybody else. Ever. Ever, ever, ever.

  “But they’ll try. Maybe not anytime soon, but eventually, a man is going to try. And when it happens, no matter how scared you are, you have to fight. You can’t just close your eyes and pretend like it’s not happening, or like it’s okay for some reason. You have to fight. Because if you don’t fight, a part of you, a very important part of you, is going to break, and I don’t know if, in the future, broken parts like that will be able to be fixed. And I can’t have that. I can’t live with that.”

  “We’ll fight,” Jen said.

  Bobby-Leigh nodded, but didn’t look like she’d put much fight up if it came to it. But what eight-year-old does look like they’d be ready to take on the pedophiles and rapists of the world? Allen had thought, still not believing his birds-and-bees talk had come to this. When his father had had the talk with him, it had been centered around making the girl happy before you make yourself happy, treating women like people, not objects, always wearing a condom and not getting anybody pregnant before you were married. But times had changed. None of that mattered anymore. The talk was now entirely focused on how to kill, or at least incapacitate, your inevitable rapist before you got violated. Good times. But he had known that Emmett would want his girls to be able to take care of themselves in this world, and of course he had been right—though Emmett would never find out about it.

  “I’m going to give you both a special knife,” he had said next, taking out two small, lightweight, and extremely sharp curved karambit blades, each with a rugged rubber hilt and a finger hole at the bottom to prevent slippage and aid in welding the tiny weapon.

  “This knife was inspired by a bear claw. It’s very effective for women when it comes to self-defense,” he told them. “And that’s what it’s for. Nothing else. Do you guys understand? You are not to use this for anything else. Nobody should even know you have it, because you are never going to take it out, unless it’s to use it as I’m going to show you. Maybe if you’re lucky you won’t ever have to take it out, have to use it at all. But these are not the kind of days to count on being lucky. You are to have this knife with you at all ti
mes. Do you understand me? At all times.”

  Emmett’s younger brother stared the girls down until they both looked away.

  “You hold it upside down. Your index finger goes through the hole in the bottom here. Held like this, the most effective way to use it is with a punch then slash kind of movement. Like this.” He showed the girls how and then made them do it themselves.

  “Good. See how the blade will cut both as it goes up as well as while it comes down? And how hard it is to see in your hand. You can use all that to your advantage, okay?”

  He showed a little more and corrected them as they practiced themselves for a few minutes, before he continued. “There are four major arteries that you need to know about. One of these will almost always be accessible in the kind of situation we are talking about, and if you can cut one, the man attacking you will be dead in less than a minute. Now, you’ll be tempted to whip this out and try to use it to scare the man into leaving you alone. But never do that. Because, what did I just tell you?”

  “Never take it out unless we are going to use it,” Bobby-Leigh said.

  “But aren’t we using it to scare the dude?” Jen asked.

  “No. Look, as far as you are concerned, this knife only has one use, okay? Slicing arteries. So you don’t take it out until you are sure you can use it like I am about to show you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll need the element of surprise, girls. And you never know who is watching. Most girls get raped by people they know. Did you know that? I don’t know if that is still true anymore, but you’re not going to take any chances. This knife is a secret weapon, secret being the key word. So no showing it off, no using it for other things, and if the moment comes that you think you are going to have to use it, no matter how scared you get, you wait for the opening you need.”

  “What if we never get an opening?”

  “Then you haven’t waited long enough. One will always come. And until it does, you fight them with whatever else you can find. You use your hands and feet and teeth if it comes to that. But you do not take this blade out until you know you can sever a vein. Promise me.”

  “Okay,” Jen said.

  “I promise,” Bobby-Leigh said. She had stopped crying, which made Allen smile. There was a seed of toughness inside her, and he could see it just starting to sprout. He wished Emmett could see it. The girls were going to be okay. His brother could stop blaming himself for destroying their fragile young minds when whatever happened with Susan had happened.

  Allen had thought then, just before he’d started to teach the girls about blood flow and the anatomy of the circulatory system, that maybe it was time to head east to see his brother, even if he’d expressly forbidden him from doing so. The world in which Emmett had sent the girls off to live with him was gone now. Surely agreements made in that world held less sway in this new one.

  But Allen hadn’t gotten the chance to take the girls east in the end.

  Bobby-Leigh now looked at the disease-ravaged pedophiles in the candlelight and hoped her uncle had been right about everything he’d shown them. Weeks and weeks of practice and training had left her confident in her abilities to defend herself. But this was the first time she’d ever had to use the deadly art she’d been taught, and she was at least as nervous as she was scared. In her right hand she stealthily palmed the secret blade, like Allen had shown her, while with her left she punched the man who had grabbed her, the man with his cock out, as hard as she could in his hairy ball sack. She hated the feeling of his warm erection as it brushed across her hand, but she loved the sound of her tiny fist smacking into his flesh and the shock on his face that a little girl like her was so hell-bent on fighting back.

  “Hold her!” the man with his dick out croaked to his partner as he dropped to one knee in pain. Before he could stand back up, the quick little bitch hit him again, this time in the neck.

  Fucking motherfuck! The young ones were supposed to be easy, what the fuck is wrong with this stupid little cunt? he thought, completely unaware for a solid second or two that Bobby-Leigh had just slit his carotid artery.

  The man’s partner, however, saw the blood spraying out his cohort’s neck into the darkness, and, totally confused as to how the girl had managed to cause so much damage so fast, just let his instincts take over. His ax swung down as the first snatcher finally realized his blood was shooting all over the room and he was going to die. Spraying blood extinguished the light and his screams filled the darkness.

  * * *

  “Bobby-Leigh!” Jen screamed as she searched franticly down the near-empty sporting goods aisle, with Jimmy, JP, Ace, and Cooperman hot on her heels, their guns drawn, trying to cover her. The screaming had stopped before they’d been able to determine where exactly it was coming from, and now they were just haphazardly going through the store. It hadn’t sounded like the screams of a little girl, but a person’s screams—real screams—never sounded like folks thought they would. Grown men sounded like little girls. Little girls sounded like grown men. Bobby-Leigh was gone. Somebody was screaming. Jen found it hard to wrap her head around the possibility that it wasn’t her sister’s cries they’d heard.

  “Maybe we should split up?” one of the guys behind her said. She was working so hard to keep herself under control that she couldn’t tell who it had been, but she thought it must have been JP, because he was the only one stupid enough to suggest something like that. Cooperman must have agreed with her.

  “Not unless you want us all to die,” the old man said.

  “This is a big store, Cooperman.”

  “Exactly.”

  Jen turned down the next aisle and froze.

  “This way!” she said.

  Bloody footprints were all over the floor. They were fresh, small. They had to be Bobby-Leigh’s. She followed them to the back of the store, to a door that said “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” When she finally made out a complete footprint, she realized she’d misread the tracks.

  Fuck! She should have let Ace lead, he was the fucking tracker! What the hell was she doing?

  Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

  This was the way Bobby-Leigh had come from, not the way she was going. But that was probably a good thing, Jen realized. She remembered Uncle Allen’s lessons on how to defend themselves with the karambit knives he’d given them. A knife she herself had strapped to her back at that very moment and had spent every day since her uncle had been murdered dreading having to use. She’d never asked Bobby-Leigh if she was carrying hers, but of course she would be. Bobby-Leigh had taken those lessons to heart. Uncle Allen had scared the shit out of her, but she’d listened, through tears at times but never without her complete attention. Jennifer suddenly wished she’d listened better herself, because whatever had just happened, her little sister had fought back and was now alive because of it.

  Probably.

  Maybe.

  Unless it was Bobby-Leigh’s own blood that she was tracking all over the store.

  The pride she’d felt a second ago flickered like a florescent light bulb that needed to be changed. Her mind jigged and jogged through scenarios of what could have happened. She let the images come, but didn’t hold on to them. As long as they flowed through her and then out, she’d be fine. If she grabbed one and let her mind nurture it and grow it to an obsession, she’d lose it. She’d berserk out. She still had hope now. So she let that hope calm her mind and let the rest of her thoughts and emotions just run though her like water in a river.

  Her sudden turn as she reversed directions caused her to collide with Ace, who had been right on her heels, trying to tell her she was probably going the wrong way the whole time. The collision knocked the sawed-off shotgun he carried out of his hands and onto the floor.

  “We’re going the wrong way,” she said.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

  Jimmy tried to give her a reassuring smile as she passed him, retracing her steps. But she ignored it. Maybe
he wasn’t such an asshole, she thought. But until they found her sister, she didn’t give a shit about whether she’d misjudged him or not. No matter how good looking he was or that her heart tingled a little bit when her eyes met his.

  But even though she didn’t smile back at him, their eyes locked, and in that connection what had been nothing but a mixed bag of teenage hormones suddenly became something else. Seven minutes before they found Bobby-Leigh, Jennifer and Jimmy fell in love, though it would still take a long time for them to realize it, and even longer to actually accept it.

  They finally came upon the little girl in the hair-care aisle and froze, the way someone would if they’d spotted Bigfoot in the woods. The little girl’s clothes were soaked with blood. Her hair was matted to her face. She had a cart with her and in it were the jumper-skirts they’d seen earlier, as well as several pairs of Mary Janes, a couple of pairs of knee-high stockings, and some makeup. The two spiked black dog collars were the only particularly odd items in the pile of goods. It would have been a cute scene, if not for the blood and the ax she was holding so tightly in her hands that her knuckles were white. Bobby-Leigh turned and looked at them. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. She didn’t smile. She didn’t cry. It was hard to tell if she even really saw them or not.

  “Bobby-Leigh?” Jen asked, not sure what she should say or how she should proceed. She could tell the little girl had been traumatized, but she didn’t look physically hurt. In fact, it looked like the blood she was covered in all belonged to somebody else. Her clothing wasn’t ripped or cut, just very bloody. Bobby-Leigh looked at her for another couple of seconds, but it felt like she was looking through her, or past her, or . . . Jen didn’t know exactly how to interpret that look. It was cold. That was all she could nail down in her mind.