“Hold me tight, okay?”
“I am,” she cried.
As Amanda got close to one of the man’s legs stretched across the hall, he turned and croaked, head lolling on his neck. When his dead eyes met Amanda’s he went feral, a hissing rasp in his throat and he gnashed his teeth.
Amanda said, “You know—we … we saw a man throw up blood at a restaurant yesterday …”
Sheila and Alyssa exchanged looks. The farrier returned her attention to the attacker and said, “My brother called in sick to work this morning. He didn’t … he didn’t look too good. And his … his girlfriend, she was sick yesterday.”
Now the man reached so desperately for Amanda’s bare legs he fell over and looked to crawl, and she stepped back into the bathroom.
“No, no,” Alyssa demanded, swatting his thigh with her weapon.
He spun and lashed out at her, but his movements were clumsy and ineffective, his grasping hands coming nowhere near her, though she stepped back defensively, anyway.
“Come on, quick!” Sheila said, waving her on frantically and skipping back so there was room for Amanda to sprint past.
She went for it, dashing through his outstretched legs like hopscotch. And then he grabbed her, the nails of his hand scratching the side of her knee and conjuring up images of wriggling microbes in a petri dish, body bags in Sierra Leone and she shrieked, kicking and pumping her knees even higher to get clear.
The sound of Sheila’s crowbar whipping through the air and striking the man’s arm was sick and wet; the metal singing as it struck bone and there was a frightening crack. Turning, Bethany’s face buried in her neck protectively, she saw Sheila and the farrier stepping back, horrified. The man still held out a ghoulish broken-fingered hand, only now it hung down at an improper angle, the jagged point of a bone poking up a tent in the sleeve of his flannel shirt. Sheila’s strike had delivered a sickening compound fracture.
Sheila gasped, “He didn’t even …”
Amanda didn’t need her to finish. Scream. The man’s bone snapped, and he did nothing but growl and groan and continue to reach for them.
“Let’s just get out of here,” Amanda said, a creeping feeling up her back telling her not to breathe the diseased air in here.
14
Amanda
Outside in the sun, standing in the center of the hard pack paddock, the two women checked Amanda’s head for injury. Bethany cried and sobbed, Amanda holding her face to her bosom.
“There’s so much blood,” Sheila muttered. They worked her hair apart, trying to see if her scalp was cut. Her head pounded from where she’d cracked it against the corner of the door frame, and from smashing into her attacker’s face. Her vision glowed white around her eyes, making her feel a little fuzzy. Sheila called the police and ambulance but hadn’t been able to get through yet. She told her there was a medical center and that the farrier would take her and Bethany in the carriage to get checked out if they couldn’t rile an ambulance. “I don’t think it’s your blood, Amanda,” she said now. “I don’t see anything flowing; it’s his blood in your hair.”
“I have to sit down,” she said, feeling lightheaded.
Alyssa said, “Come to the carriage,” taking her elbow, but it frightened her that it was so close to the office, and that … man was still in there.
“I’m all right,” she told her, tugging her arm away, resisting being brought in the direction nearer to where she’d been assaulted. “I just … I need to call my husband.” Now with both hands smoothing her crying daughter’s back she went to the nearest wagon and rested her rump against the footboard.
For a while she listened to her heart pound, twisted her head on her neck to stretch the aching muscles and tendons, looking to relieve the headache, and watched the two women with their own phones pacing in circles. Alyssa said to Sheila, “You getting a signal?”
“No, nothing now,” Sheila answered, her voice echoing around the faces of the metal outbuildings around them.
She had to call Christian. The vacation was over. Poor Bethany might never be the same; such a traumatic event when one was so small and undeveloped could stunt her forever. Her sobs had quieted, but she still shivered and moaned against her chest.
She whispered in her ear, “Bethy, want to sit up in the wagon?—Mommy wants to see your face, okay, baby?”
Bethany shook her head no against her neck.
Her growing girl was a little heavy and her back was sore, so she sold her on it: “I’m right here, Bethy, sit and face me, baby, I’ll dry your tears.”
No affirmation, but no complaint this time, she turned and hoisted Bethany’s rump over the footboard so she could sit on the bench seat. “Oh, you’re getting so grown up I can barely lift you,” she cooed as she settled her.
They met eye-to-eye, and she smiled for her daughter, showed her that fear was temporary and that what happened was over. She ran Bethany’s tear-soaked hair off her cheeks and behind her ears. While her hand went in her pocket to retrieve her phone, she caressed her hot cheeks with the back of her fingers, wiping her tears away. “You want Daddy to come take us home?”
Bethany nodded and her chin dimpled like she would cry again.
Then her eyes snapped wide, crystal blues with almost a full field of white encircling, her mouth fell open, and she croaked, “No, Mommy, no, Mommy …”
“You don’t want Daddy—”
She turned. Bethany had watched the attacker open the door from the office, sunlight reflecting now a square off its glass insert, him stumbling out, catching his big feet in the door as it tried to close on him. He ambled out to the square porch and Bethany clutched her from behind so hard her tiny nails dug into her arms.
She screamed “No! No, Mommy!” her little voice so high and sharp and piercing it almost short-circuited her brain.
“Fuck, Bethany!” Amanda yelled and pulled her arms out of her clutch, her daughter almost tumbling out onto her face over the footboard. Now she darted her hands out to support her, but Bethany was wild and mindless, eyes squinched shut, mouth wriggling in an elastic bow as she shrieked with abounding fright.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she soothed, looking over her shoulder to see the other two women putting their phones away, eyes locked on the man stepping down off the hard-pack and approaching where they stood on the center of the stable’s drive. He staggered stiffly, his hand dangling from his smashed arm, blood streaming from his fingertips.
Sheila went to the left, Alyssa to the right, the two of them looking like they would corral him. Sheila stooped and snatched up the hank of rope Amanda had seen her with earlier.
Turning and gripping the narrow points of Bethany’s shoulders and looking blazingly direct into her eyes she told her: “Bethany, you’re going to close your eyes, curl up in a tight ball under the bench and you won’t come out till you hear me, got it?”
“No, Mo—”
“Bethany!” she snapped and shook her hard.
“Yes,” she bawled, her face scrunching up and turning a dark shade of red as the tears returned.
“Go, go right now, Bethy,” she said, pushing on her back and guiding her to squat down, curl up and shimmy herself under the bench where she couldn’t be seen behind the footboard. “Stay there!” she told her, turned and dashed across the macadam.
The timing couldn’t be more perfect. The girls had corralled him, brought him near the center of the drive and confounded him like the chicken had confounded Bethany, darting this way and that … As Amanda launched to join them, his back was to her, arms held out like he would grab one of them, his legs apart. Ten sprinting strides brought her right behind the man and he didn’t even turn. Her foot snapped up like a hammer, bringing the whole of her body’s acceleration—a perfect hit between his ass cheeks, the laces of her Ked striking home against his scrotum. The force was devastating and her foot and ankle shrieked in pain like they’d been broken. His testicles would have been pasted, and she hoped s
he’d scrambled them like eggs over the insides of his underwear. She hopped away and cried out, falling to her knees and clutching at her ankle.
That was all the man did, too. Didn’t holler or yell, just fell to his knees, looked around for a beat, then got a foot out underneath him, trying to stand.
Amanda sobbed a simple sound of defeat as he rose.
But the girls were on him fast. Before he was up the two of them taking an end of the same rope and running around him. They kept out of his reach, working under and over another as they went clockwise and counter, circling him with the rope. One arm bound against his side, he stumbled backward and fell. They jumped him, and Amanda rode a rising swell of sudden unforeseen victory, leaping to her feet and skipping close to help.
Alyssa had a long length of the shaggy rope and she went around his ankles. Sheila got her knees on his chest and with both hands wrestled his good wrist, trying to push it to his side so she could tie it against him. He struggled with her, groaning the whole while, sneering dully. Her cowboy boots shot out, scuffing in the dirt and sending up sand as she pushed his wrist to his neck, looking instead to lash his arm around his own neck. That was when she got bit.
She screamed, oddly low and animal rather than high and panicking, let his arm go and rose up. Her left hand got too close, and he’d gnashed his teeth, catching her pinky finger and pulling. Her right hand hammered up and down on his already broken nose, sending up spurts of black blood while she fought to pull herself free. Bone snapped, and now she shrieked. When she fell back, she clutched her hand to her stomach and hugged it, curled up to a ball on her knees, her forehead dug into the dirt.
“Oh, fuck,” Amanda moaned as the man lay on his back, feet bound, one smashed arm tied against himself, and he chewed; bright new blood spattered his mouth now, sitting like oil on water, and he chomped a ragged piece of flesh. Sheila’s finger had been removed and now he ate it.
Afterword
I hope you enjoyed reading this episode as much as I enjoyed writing it!
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About the Author
Shane McRory lives on a haunted farm in the woods with a bunch of animals.
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The Walker Family Vacation (Episode 2) Page 5
