I allowed Allie to have the window seat, seeing as how she was already unstable. It was a small price to pay to be taken to where I assumed Blake and Rob would be. Even if that meant that I had to basically rub hips with a disgusting hillbilly.
The road ahead was so dark. The lights on the early 80’s model pickup truck put out enough illumination for us to see just far enough in front of us so that Don wouldn’t miss a tight curve or hit a deer.
Ahead of us, I saw the ebony filled silhouette of a structure. I smiled from ear to ear and hit Allie on her leg, pointing ahead. For the first time in hours, I saw relief in her eyes. She turned and tapped on the window to get Michael’s attention. He looked inside the cab, and then looked over the top of the truck, hitting the roof above us in excitement, as the old gas station on the side of the road began to come into focus.
I jumped as the truck sped up, and I heard Michael let out a yelp before his body slammed down onto the metal flat bed. I looked over to Don and saw that his face had changed. He gripped the steering wheel with tense determination as the truck continued to gain momentum.
As we came up on the gas station, I noticed that it was abandoned. There was nothing out here on this road, except for the speeding truck we were riding in.
“Stop the truck,” I said, but Don ignored me.
Allie started to melt down into the seat next to me, crying in panic. I turned and saw Michael trying to keep his body from sliding all around the truck bed.
“Please, stop the truck.”
I never saw the back of his hand; the burn shot across my face without hesitation and I felt the blood pool in my mouth.
Attacking him and trying to stop the truck with force wasn’t an option. If we swerved and hit something or rolled into a ditch, Michael was dead for sure, and there was no guarantee that we would make it either. Assuming there wasn’t a hospital nearby, I felt we stood a better chance of seeing where he was taking us.
Unfortunately, Allie didn’t think things through the way I did.
“Fucking, stop!” she screamed. She unbuckled her seatbelt and came over my lap. I was tending to my bleeding mouth and didn’t notice her coming. Allie began slapping him on his arms repeatedly, urging him to stop the truck.
Don let out a groan and simultaneously turned the wheel and slammed on the brakes.
I don’t know exactly how far Michael’s body traveled; I just remember hearing his yell come over the top of us and then fade before hearing the distant thud of his body landing somewhere far away from where we’d come to a stop.
The other crash I heard was the passenger side window breaking as Allie’s body was thrown back toward it and her head slammed against the glass, shattering it. I looked over and saw her body slumped over against the door, and blood trickling off her face.
Right as I let out a scream, the fist came into my nose and I blacked out.
7
I can still remember the dream I had after being knocked out cold by the old man.
I dreamed I was running through an open field, wearing a flowing pink and white sundress, laughing while my bare feet massaged the warm grass. Blake appeared, jogging behind me and then picking me up from behind. We tumbled into the grass, and he kissed me as two small children ran up to us, saying “mommy” and “daddy”. We were a happy family, everything that I’d dreamed of everyday of my life since I’d met Blake.
I awoke from the dream to the exact opposite: a nightmare.
A bucket of cold and dirty water was dumped over my head to carry out the task of waking me. My whole body trembled as the water soaked my hair and poured down both the front and back of my shirt. It smelled awful, like they’d gathered the water from a sewer. The dirt in the water stung my eyes, and it took me some time for them to open afterward.
When they finally opened, I found myself enthroned in darkness.
I was sitting in some sort of chair. My hands were bound to armrests with leather straps pulled so tight that they cut through the skin, and I could feel the cool blood trickling down the side of my hand. It was useless to try and free my hands, and only brought more burn to the wounds. My bare feet rested on some sort of small metal platform, and my ankles were also bound to something. My mouth was gagged with a sock that tasted like it had been marinated in the shit of eight different species. I wanted to try and spit the sock out, but my mouth had been taped over to prevent me from doing so.
Moments later, I heard a click, and street lights began to warm up. The bulbs hissed as they woke.
When the lights finally warmed enough to illuminate my surroundings, I looked around and saw that I was sitting in the middle of a small abandoned town in a wheelchair. The chair sat in the center of a dirt road. On each side of me were small shops like you’d see alongside Main Street in an old country town from the 1950’s. Some of them stood alone while others were multiple suites tied into single structures.
As the lights came to their full glory, I felt a hand comb my wet hair, and fingertips pass over my bare shoulder. It sent a chill up my spine. I looked up and saw his face, trying to scream at him through the disgusting sock.
Don.
He kneeled down in front of me and ran the back of his tarred hand across my face. I tried to turn away but it was useless. He moved closer to me, sticking out his tongue and making a wretched sucking sound with it between his lips. Wincing in the chair, I felt his chapped tongue move up my cheek, his chin hair mopping up the saliva as he stopped near my eye.
His thumb wiped the tears away under each of my eyes, and then he put his hand on my shoulder.
“I want you to meet some of my friends.”
Two other men appeared from behind me and stood on either side of Don. I’d noticed right away that they all had the same tattoo etched on their forearms. It was an upside down cross with the word “Family” in an old-English style lettering.
One of the men carried a baseball bat over his shoulder. He was slender, wore a dirty wife beater with a pair of equally dirty jeans, and had long blonde hair with streaks of gray in it. His beard was long enough to braid and I could see the dirt under his fingernails.
On the other side of Don stood the other man—the largest of the three. He was grotesquely fat, pushing at least three hundred and twenty-five pounds, had shaggy brown hair, a clean face, and wore a red with blue plaid shirt under overalls. The only weapon he carried was the perverted glare he looked upon me with. He stared through me, looking me up and down with every intention of making my worst nightmares come true.
Don pointed to his right, at the man with the bat. “This here is James.”
James slapped the bat into his palm a few times, keeping a stern look on his face.
“And this one over here is Beau.”
The fat one kept looking me up and down. I couldn’t adjust my tank top with my hands bound, and my black bra was exposed at the sinking neckline of my tank top. His tongue moved across his top lip, wrapping around to his bottom, and he pressed them together, mimicking a kiss toward me.
At that moment, I knew I was at the start of a night I was never going to forget, sitting in the middle of Hell.
***
Don knelt down in front of me, his green eyes reflecting the light from the street lamps. I kept my face to the right, staring at one of the abandoned buildings across the street. His dank breath stung my nostrils.
“Look at me,” he said.
I didn’t. My eyes remained focused on the building as I imagined what and who had once occupied it. How could a town, even as far out as we were, simply be abandoned and sit untouched? Someone had to know this place was out here, and stumble upon us eventually.
A large hand gripped my cheeks and turned my face to Don. It was the hand of Beau, continuing to eye fuck me, hinting that he would have the better of me, yet.
Beau let go of me and stepped away, as Don’s hand now came across my face at the temple, knocking my head to the left. He took my chin into his hand, the same way Bea
u had, and brought his face within inches of mine.
“You listen, bitch, and you listen good. You’re gonna fuckin’ do everything I say. If I say look at me, you look. If I say bow down and kiss my feet, you bend down and lick that shit. If I say fuckin’ run, then you better believe you’ll be movin’ them little chicken legs as fast as you can. You understand that?”
I nodded, panting around the sides of the dirty sock in my mouth. By this time, my legs had fallen asleep and gone numb, and the ropes around my wrists had settled, still burning through the flesh.
“Good.” As he said this, he stroked my face with the back of his hand and smiled at me.
“If I take that sock out of your mouth, are you gonna be good?”
I nodded and bit down on the sock as Don ripped the tape off, removed the sock out of my mouth, tossed it in my lap, then turned around and, like the minute hand on a clock, moved his slender arm clockwise and pointed to the different buildings around us.
“See all these places?” he asked me. “We got some great surprises for you in four of ‘em, baby girl.”
Again, Don knelt down in front of me.
“I’m assuming by now you’ve done the math. There were five of you when I led your dumb asses here from the gas station.”
Of course I had done the math. My entire body shook and tears flowed from my eyes like it was the norm. Don lit a cigarette, blowing the initial cloud into my face, then continued.
“That one fuck head that pissed me off and the pretty one who was drivin’ got a nice head start on y’all. Beau and James here didn’t have too much of a problem roundin’ ‘em up. Didn’t think they would after that dumb fuck let me under the hood of his truck. Didn’t take quite as long as I thought for that radiator to overheat.”
He blew another cloud of smoke into my face, and I winced, wishing I could put my hands up to block it.
“You’re the reason the truck broke down?”
Don nodded. “And honestly, I expected to have to work harder for the rest of you. But that was like taking Pop Tarts from a bucket.”
Finally, I began to plea for mercy with him.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “I’ll give you anything. My dad is a lawyer. He has money...”
Don smirked and stood up. “I’m getting the payment I need out of you, darlin’. Every killin’ needs a witness. Your daddy’s a lawyer, you should know that.”
My entire body went numb as Beau moved behind me and began to roll the chair forward.
“Please. Oh, God. Please,” I said.
Don put his hands on my knees, forcing Beau to stop moving forward with the chair.
“God? You came looking for the Crossroads to find the Devil and now you call out to God? Let me tell you something about the Devil, sweetie. The Devil…“ He let the smile build to a crescendo on his face. “…he found you.”
8
As the chair moved, I became dizzy. The world around me began to spin, and I closed my eyes to try and block out the painful reality.
Beau pushed the wheelchair while James walked to my left and Don to my right, until he started to veer off away from us.
“I’m gonna go check on the others,” Don said.
James nodded at Don, and we watched him walk toward a building across the street.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
I received no response. All I heard was the smack of the baseball bat in James’ palm every three to five seconds, filled in with the heavy breathing behind me of Beau. Every now and then, he would lean down to my hair and sniff, and I could hear his lips smack as his tongue wet them.
Looking up at James with glassy eyes, I pleaded with him now, hoping he may be more merciful than Don.
“Please let me go. I’ll do anything. I’ll give you anything.”
A violent slap to the back of my head rocked my neck side to side.
“Shut the fuck up,” Beau said with a terrible lisp.
Tears covered my face as I bowed my head, looking into my lap and wondering if I would ever see daylight again.
Beau hit me in the back of my head once he noticed that my head was down, and I looked up from my lap again to see the place they were taking me.
A line of suites went down the side of town, and we were headed toward one in particular. The building was about ten yards away, and I could see that the windows out front were still in place, but had spider cracks in them that appeared to have come from bullet holes. Above the door in cursive letters, a sign read “Mike’s Ice Cream and Treats”. Next to the last word in the title, there was a smiley face with half of the mouth missing. The sign was rusted and beaten, and would have been a gold mine for any pickers who might scavenge the town looking for old junk to re-sell.
The chair stopped just in front of the entrance and James stepped ahead of us, reaching his free hand to the door handle and pulling it open. As he swung the door toward us, a bell rung, startling me with an echo through the openness of the vast warm air surrounding us. Beau pushed the chair over the door frame with little care and I jostled, which brought a pain into my neck, already sore from the whiplash I’d sustained in Don’s truck. The turbulence also caused my wrists to pull against the tightened straps, agitating my already open wounds.
Beyond the door, I saw nothing. The inside of the abandoned shop was pitch black, framed only in shadows. James held the door open and Beau leaned down into my hair again, and I heard a slight groan as the chair began to move forward. Though I clenched when I felt Beau’s dank breath on my neck, I had become completely still and quit wiggling in the straps. I think that, somewhere in an involuntary part of my brain, I’d hastily become numb to all reality. I knew I was going to die that night and had begun to accept it.
We entered the shop and my lap disappeared. The angle that the street lights shined at didn’t allow for any light to come into the building through the windows, and I found myself in an unfamiliar, pitch-black place with two sociopaths.
The wheelchair came to a stop, and I heard a click beneath me. Beau shook the chair to make sure the wheels had locked in place, and then I heard him begin to move away from me. Over his fading footsteps, I heard mellow groans as well as giggling. The giddiness progressively became louder, and I soon could barely hear the groaning.
The men’s heavy footsteps behind me moved from tile to gravel and I heard the door begin to shut.
“Enjoy the show,” James said.
Then, all I heard was a small grunt, the sound of something whistling past my head, and then a bouncing thud on the tile floor in front of me which made me jump. Once the object landed, it sounded as if it was rolling on the ground.
Behind me, the door closed all the way, and I could only hear the groans. The laughter had ceased.
“Hello?”
Then, I heard a loud click followed by a constant, muted buzz, as the lights in the store warmed up.
The initial shine caught me off guard and temporarily blinded me. Unable to shield my eyes, I tilted my head to my shoulder and shut them.
When they finally fought their way open, I understood for the first of many times that night exactly what Don had meant.
The Devil was real.
And I was in Hell.
9
Michael dangled in front of me like a puppet.
He was stripped down to his dark gray briefs and was left barely conscious. A pair of piñatas hung on either side of him. They were in the shapes of horses and were only a couple of feet off the ground, spinning around in circles, slowly.
His strong body did nothing to help him in his current state. His hands were bound above his head with the rope that held him up, his washboard abs covered in blood, parts of his hair torn out, and his left eye swollen shut. Michael was broken, and it apparently wasn’t just from being thrown from the truck bed. Only the tips of his bare toes, possibly only the nails themselves, touched the ground, and I could tell by the strain in his calves that he could hardly hold himself
up, the veins popping and the definition showing in fine lines.
“Michael?”
His right eye twitched in its socket and looked toward me. It was completely bloodshot.
I was so focused on Michael that the child sitting on the ground in front of him hadn’t even fazed me.
He sat just a few feet away from Michael, facing the wall to my right. The boy was dark complected with jet black hair styled into a crew type cut, and he couldn’t have been more than eight years old. He wore a dirty ribbed white tank top that was two sizes too big, and a pair of shorts that had more string hanging off of them than material to actually cover the tops of his legs. No shoes or socks were on his feet, which were black with dirt. He must have heard me crying because he finally turned his head toward me. And when I looked into his eyes, I saw only the whites in them mixed with shades of a pale silver. They looked empty and soulless.
The boy was blind.
He had a smile across his face, and I could tell he was raging with excitement. He began to crawl toward me, slapping the tile as he moved, panting with his wet tongue hanging over his chapped bottom lip. I tried helplessly to free my legs, but it was useless.
Only a few feet in front of me, he stopped and turned. As my eyes followed him, I realized what he was doing.
A baseball bat was lying on the ground just a few feet to my left. It appeared to be the same one that James had had earlier, and I could only assume that the noise I’d heard before he and Beau left the room was the sound of James throwing the bat onto the ground.
The blind child was reaching around on the ground for the bat.
“Michael. Oh, God. You have to try and get free.”
The only response I got was a groan.
The boy turned and looked my way, now only a couple of feet away from the bat.
“Michael, please.”
Nothing. All he could do was shift his weight back and forth from his toes, which I imagined sent a splitting pain into the balls of his feet, all the way up his legs. The pain would extend all the way up to his bleeding wrists, burning from the twine tightening and cutting into them.
The Witness: A Slasher Horror Novel Page 4
