The Trace Trilogy (Book 1): The Wretched

by R. James Faulkner

  “How did you figure this out?”

  Maggie looked up at Ben, perplexed. She said, “Mama and Papa own a gas station. Don’t you know that?”

  Ben tied the larger gas container to the handlebar of the bike and pedaled back the way he had come. He glanced over his shoulder at the two girls standing beside the open doors of the van.

  What the hell am I doing? I’m never going to make it to Jackson this way.

  He went as fast as he could back to the other road, slowing only when he was at the intersection. He stopped and surveyed the area for several minutes. After he thought it was safe enough, he rode closer to double check. Ben parked the bike across the road from the store and watched for movement. Satisfied that it was deserted he moved across to the parking lot and searched for a check plug.

  Ben found one, opened it, and fed the siphon tube down the small opening as quick as it would go. He worked the pump and found Amy was right, it took a long time to pull out any gas. He strained with the collapsing pump to speed it up, but it only released a trickle into the container. Long minutes passed as the gas flowed in a weak stream. He looked at the siphon and tried to find out why it pumped so poor. Ben heard air bubbling in the chamber. That meant the hose clamp was loose and let air seep past and the siphon lost vacuum. He got out the screwdriver he found in the vehicle with the dead woman and tightened it.

  The sound of something hitting the door of the gas station frightened him. He pulled out the revolver and aimed it. The door had large metal bars across it, not to keep people out, but to trap them inside. He saw the people with pale skin, covered in filth, as they pressed their angry faces into the glass. They moved their mouths but he could not hear what they were saying. The sight of them sickened him. He waited until he could tell the people would not be able to get and resumed pumping the gas.

  Ben worked the pump twice as fast. His arms burned from the rapid motion, but adrenaline kept him moving them. He had the container filled in a matter of minutes. The hard part was strapping it to the bike and pedaling with the extra weight. Ben considered filling the van with gas and taking it for himself, leaving the girl and her family to find another way south. He knew it was wrong to think about doing such things to people, but the weak died in the world the way it had become.

  I could die in this new world. I could lie down and just let it happen.

  The ride took longer going back. When he returned to the van, Amy and her little sister stood behind him, watching his every move with caution. He noticed the handgun Amy held.

  “Nice gun.”

  “It’s Daddy’s,” she said. “I had to go find it. I dropped it on the road when those women chased us. Think it’ll still work?”

  “It will,” Ben said. He nodded his head as he pulled the container from the bike.

  It took a few minutes to pour the gas into the van, it took longer to start it. The starter rolled the engine over but it did not crank.

  “Careful, you’ll run the battery down,” Amy said.

  “I know how to crank an engine. It just lost its prime is all.”

  After several dead attempts, it shuddered to life. Ben disliked the loud noise it made and felt vulnerable sitting inside it. He turned it off and got out.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Going to load my bike,” he said. “Don’t need to leave it running.”

  “Why?”

  “Wastes the gas.”

  “No. Why are you loading your bike?” Amy said.

  She stepped forward and put her hand on her hips. Ben understood why she asked. He did not blame her.

  “I’m driving you to your family, and then I’ll be on my way.”

  She nodded her head and stared at his face. Amy accepted it with reluctance but felt it was a bad idea. However, he did get the gasoline, and the least she could do was let him drive it down the road. It would get him closer to Jackson. Even if he took the van from them, it would not alter their previous situation. Ben tossed his bike on top the van and used electrical wire to strap down the handlebars to the luggage rack. When they all got inside, he started the engine and put the transmission into drive. Moving under the power of the van was an odd feeling to him. It had been a year since he had ridden in any motorized vehicle. Amy pointed to the left.

  “Up here,” she said. “At this campground.”

  He saw a white camper trailer in the trees where Amy directed him. Ben pulled beside the picnic table and turned off the ignition. Amy grabbed the keys and jerked them out. She hopped from the seat and jogged to the door with her sister. He watched as she spoke to someone inside the doorway. Several tense minutes passed before Amy stepped back from the door and an older woman came out. Jessica held John’s shotgun up to her shoulder. Ben sighed to himself and stepped from the van with his arms held up. Amy tried to stop her, but Jessica kept the barrel pointed at the young man. Jessica spoke with a shaky voice.

  “Thank you kindly, sir,” she said. “But you best be on your way now.”

  Ben turned, grabbed his bike from the top of the van, and put it on the ground without saying a word. He sat on it and intended to leave. Instead, he got off the bike, holding his hands up as he faced her. He motioned that he had something in the backpack he wore. Jessica watched him and held the shotgun leveled at his head.

  “Go ahead.”

  Ben unzipped the pack and dug into it. He pulled out an orange colored bottle. With his hands held up, he eased forward, and set it on the picnic table. Jessica nodded her head to Amy and kept her eyes on Ben. Amy grabbed the small bottle from the weathered wood and handed it to her.

  Jessica read the bottle and looked at Ben in disbelief. He nodded his head to her and motioned for her to go inside. Jessica turned and ran back to the camper door. Amy stepped closer to Ben. She watched Maggie as she followed her mother.

  “What was in the bottle?”

  Ben put his head down and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Some antibiotics,” he said. “Not a lot, but maybe enough to get him to Jackson.”

  “Stay here with us,” Amy said. “We could travel together.”

  “You don’t know if I’m sick.”

  “And you don’t know if we are. Just think it over.”

  Ben nodded his head and searched for the setting sun behind the trees. He told Amy he would camp close by and watch out for strangers. She thanked him and went inside with her family. Ben hid in the trees up the hill from the camper.

  It was not the cold that kept him from sleeping, it was the girl he had met. He thought about her, how she could have died if he had not come along at the right time. Ben did not want to help her or her family, but the van was the fastest way to get to Jackson. He wished he never looked into her sad eyes. They reminded him of that little orphan girl.

  18

  Her head hung forward. She kept her eyes closed and pretended to sleep while listening to the men chant together. The skin of her wrists seemed to be stretching. She dared not let them know she was conscious to give more time to assess her options. Her numb fingers did not respond to the commands to move. Strangers on her body, they seemed foreign and unable to communicate. Disoriented and weak, she tried to shift weight on her deadened legs. The captors had not drugged her. Dehydration did the work for them.

  How much longer must I live? How long will God let me suffer this way? Please, just let me go…just let me die.

  The room filled with the sound of hammering. She cracked her eyelids enough to see a pair of feet on the floor in front of her. Angela did not doubt they belonged to the flat-faced bastard coming to torture her in silence again. A stinging pain caused her to look at her breasts, and the sight of them confused her. She was unsure of what she was looking at in the dim light from the candles. They hurt with each breath, but she could not tell what the people had done to them. The black filth covered feet shuffled closer to hers. They touched the tips of her bloody toes.

  A finger entered her right nostril and forced
her head to tilt upward. She tried to bite the hand, her teeth nowhere close to the bony knuckles. The face of another came into view, it was the pale skeletal woman’s. She blinked her eyes and tilted her head sideways as if to question Angela. The air smelled foul with her womanscent mixing with the odor of the men. It was a thick, noxious mingling, repugnant in its overpowering effect, and invaded Angela’s nose with each breath. The pale woman’s mouth opened, revealing her shattered teeth, as she raised her thin arms high above her.

  “Behold.”

  The word was a whisper that her lungs exhaled, breathing out each syllable. There was a sudden brightening of the room as each of the men used burning sticks to light more candles. The woman moved sideways as her arms spread out, directing Angela to look where she pointed. The walls repelled her cackling laugh, refusing to absorb it into the plaster and wood beneath.

  “Oh, god, no… you sick… sick…”

  Angela’s voice faded from her, replaced by shuddering breath. She sobbed, and it turned to a long wail, high-pitched and violent. As she banged the back of her head into the plaster-covered wall, tears rushed from her reddened eyes.

  She looked in sudden and absolute distress across the small room to the other wall. They had removed Mike’s flesh from his body in one large mass. The men had stretched and nailed it to the plaster, mounting it for proud display like an animal pelt. The unblinking and widened face of her husband’s best friend stared back at her. Every inch of his skin was still intact, from his toes to his ears, even his genitalia remained attached to the flayed flesh. They had cut him open and spread him out like a map. His intestines and various muscles hung arranged around the borders of his flesh creating a bloody aura. His bones, in dotted lines, framed the whole vile display. At the floor beneath the skin of his feet sat his eyes staring at her with his brain on top of them and the once beating heart lying in front. It formed a gruesome version of a face.

  Angela screamed, the sound built past her sobs and reached its maximum with astounding clarity. She could not stop herself, it was too disgusting, too devastating. He sacrificed himself to save her, only to wind up dissected, rearranged, and nailed to a wall in an abandoned house.

  She continued to cry, unable to turn away as the men gathered around the cut-faced woman. They removed her clothes, lowered her pale body to the blood-soaked floor, and removed the rags that covered their own bodies. All of them became a tangle of moaning, thrusting, blood covered body parts, writhing like worms around the nucleus that was the woman. The men were worshiping the solitary female form, each trying to provide her with the most satisfaction. Angela looked down at the mass of arms and legs, from within the center she saw the pale woman’s jagged toothed smile and her unblinking and dark eyes.

  “Behold,” the woman said. “Witness creation.”

  There came sounds of ecstasy and the sounds of despair. There arose from the tangled mass on the floor cries of passion and from the wall the cries of pain. Angela was in agony, and they were in bliss. A nightmare standing before a dreamscape.

  Angela leaned her head back, looked at the ceiling, and screamed. She screamed until her voice failed and she was mute. She could feel the slick bodies moving against her legs. The room filled with noises of men grunting and the woman moaning. There was the occasional press of a hand into her groin, a puff of hot breath on her neck. She kept her eyes squeezed shut, refusing to look into the gaze of the other woman. Angela could feel the woman’s fingertips running the curve of her breasts.

  Hours went by with no discernible speed, she opened her eyes to see sunshine beams from gaps in the boarded over window. The room was empty, she was alone with the remains of Mike. Her body was stiff with arms and legs numbed. She tried to stand upright and relieve the pressure on her arms. There was silence within the house, no sound of people or pests. Now was her time to find escape and she looked around the room, hoping to spy something of use. She found there was nothing other than the nails that held her and Mike to the blood-smeared wall and the dried blood that covered the floor.

  She leaned forward to look past the open door into the kitchen. The floor was bare and the cabinet doors stood open. However, there was something new to the room. A metal can set on the counter, battered and beaten in, with most of the red paint knocked from it. Burned sticks lay beside it, the ones they had used to draw on the walls.

  If only I could get to it, set it alight, burn all of them inside this damned house. I’ll burn them all…burn…

  Angela strained forward trying to see around the threshold of the door. She felt the pull of her arms on the nails as she craned her head to see farther into the kitchen. A small pop in her arm was all she noticed at first and then her body swung toward the left. She sensed a more forceful tug from her left arm before she landed on the floor with her back. Unable to move her arms and legs at first, she waited for the feeling to come back and looked up at the nails. Small pieces of flesh hung from the head of them, dark stains of her dried blood tracked down the wall. The sudden liberation from her bondage, it was not at all what she expected, and by no means so immediate and unhindered.

  The thought that she heard someone coming caused her to panic. If they found her free, they would mount her back to the wall more secure, making a second attempt to escape impossible. She could not take that, she would not survive in that way much longer. Angela fought against her unresponsive limbs and tried to roll over and crawl forward. She felt needles of pain in her legs as muscles cramped under her skin. Her arms felt like electricity was buzzing up from her elbows. She got to her unsteady knees and tried to shake her arms awake. Her eyes met with the eyeless face on the wall, the white paint peeked through the opened slits of eyelids. She repeated the words to herself, the same ones she told Mike when she abandoned him and tried to save herself the first time.

  Forgive me. I used you Mike…I’m sorry…

  Angela felt the warm drops on her cheeks. All those years. All that time. Even before the sickness spread the country and he helped them, she was manipulating him with her charm. It made her feel special, wanted, desired. It mattered little to her how he might have felt. What he did for her, the help he provided in her time of crisis, it did not matter to her beyond her own self-fulfillment. It was not about him, that it might hurt him, she knew it and it never stopped her. She was selfish and self-obsessed. He was a mere subject to provide her with what she needed. The nonphysical admiration of her body, a spiritual devotion to her curves, she enjoyed his attention. He enhanced the confirmation of what she had always known of her own beauty. A thought struck her and pulled her back to the present.

  What makes me different from her?

  Anger at herself, anger at the woman and her mindless men, made her get to her shaky feet and walk stumbling from the room. She saw the blood that dripped from the large wounds on her wrists. The injuries were too severe, they would not clot by themselves. If she did not find something to wrap them with, she might bleed out. Her fingers fumbled at the drawers, pulling them out slow, trying to remain quiet. She heard the snores of men upstairs in an unknown room. Angela found a drawer with dishtowels, she struggled to wrap and tie them to her wrists. It felt like an eternity for her to pull the cloth tight enough with her teeth to stay on.

  She stood and looked at the screw on cap of the gasoline can. Her hands were limp as she tried to make the grip required to twist off the metal lid. Desperation driven and petrified of failing, she bit the metal cap and used her head to turn it free. Several attempts later and she smelled the petroleum stench coming from the container. She pushed the can over and let the liquid pour onto the bloodstained flooring. Angela walked backward toward the screen door that opened to the porch. One step further and she would make it to freedom.

  The scream came from behind, startling her, followed by the shove, forcing her back into the middle of the room. She tried to regain her balance but landed headfirst in the small hallway leading from the kitchen. Her initial reaction was to shi
eld her face, the pain flowed from her arms as her wrists bent backward. Angela rolled over to see the woman standing on kitchen floor smelling the empty gas can.

  “And what did you plan to do? Is this how you thought to end my life? I am now and forever. You cannot stop me.”

  She belted out the words to wake the men as she threw the can into the corner. Angela heard the scrambling upstairs as feet landed on the boards. They were coming to her now. Angela tried to push herself up. Her wrists were useless, and pressure on them caused her to wince in pain. The woman smiled as the men, naked and covered with dried blood, gathered around her. She pointed to Angela, laughing in her cackling way, and held up a small box of matches. The pale woman shook them so Angela could hear the matches inside rattle.

  “What did you intend to set my empire ablaze with? Your hope?” she said. The woman roared with laughter and lifted her arms out wide as she spun in a slow twirling of her body. “Behold…behold…I am the salvation…”

  Angela withdrew her hand from the lower pocket of her pants, holding the metal flip top lighter close to her face. She used her chin to open it. As she stared at the widening eyes of the ghoulish woman and the vile men, she ran the striker wheel down the front of her pants leg to the knee. The orange flame danced on the metal louvered end of the lighter when she raised it back up to hold it in front of her. It wavered as it flew from her hand and merged into the engulfing inferno it birthed.

  Angela felt the flames lick at her feet. She heard the fire rush upward, spread across the walls and along the ceiling. A scene unfolded before her eyes. One of figures dancing in flames, caught in some hellish version of a grand ball, the princess and the gentlemen spun around in the bright tendrils of yellow and orange. The men reached out to embrace their queen as the flames swelled around them. She pushed herself along the floor with her feet until she reached the front door. Angela used her legs to slide with her back up the door until she stood. She struggled to turn the doorknob, unable to grasp it with her hands. The black smoke surrounded her, making it hard to breathe, she heard loud pops and the sound of bodies falling to the floor.