by Schow, Ryan
This was Crowbar Man up close, and he was no joke. Cocking his head, he studied her like she was a thing, an intrusion, an alien species. His eyes flicked to the blood leaking down the side of her head. The corner of his mouth twitched, ever so slightly. More teeth getting a hold of more chapped skin, slowly peeling it away. Was that convulsing thing a smile, his tell? Or was it something worse?
He spun his crowbar in his hand, blew what looked like a snort out of his nose, then lifted the crowbar over his head and made a grunting face as he prepared to brain her. She rolled to the side fast, the crowbar barely missing her. She wished to God she could hear the metal striking the ground to let her know if this was a real threat or if he pulled the shot and was just trying to scare her.
When she rolled back over, it was because she was trapped between his legs. He was lifting the crowbar again. Her eyes went to a smudge of dirt on the neck of the ominous tool. This was for real!
She kicked up as hard as she could, catching him right in the grapes. The pain gave him pause. She kicked him again, just as hard, and then she scrambled backward on all fours, scampering away from him.
Clearly in pain but not stopped, he started after her. She drove her heel into his shin, jarring him, slowing him down.
She finally rolled onto her belly and pushed herself up to run but was grabbed by the seat of her pants and jerked back harder than she’d ever been jerked in her life. She actually felt her vertebrae pop.
Before she could contemplate the horror upon her, the beast wrenched her once more, yanking her pants down to the edge of her hips. A third, vicious pull tore the waist of her pants, giving her room to maneuver. It was the half-second advantage she’d prayed for, but it was not enough.
A rough hand grabbed her by the hair and the torn seat of her pants. Lifting her up off the ground, into the air, and high over his head, the sheer terror finally broke loose. When she started screaming, she couldn’t stop.
He took three big steps then heaved her thrashing body into the air. She went flying, landing on her back in the wet, scratchy brush.
Leighton tried to get loose, but every move caused the sharp ends of the brush to tear into her skin. Crowbar Man wasted no time getting to her. Instead of grabbing her again, he punched her right in the vahjeen, and good God, the pain was legendary! She knew she deserved that for the ballsack-beatdown she put on him earlier—if turn about was fair play—but c’mon...
He stood back, looked at her, started to laugh. That’s when she remembered her belly-band holster. One of the mags had fallen out, but the Glock was still there. She pulled her shirt and jacket away from her waist and whipped the pistol out, but she wasn’t moving fast enough.
He lunged at her; all she had to do was clear the holster.
She did, just in time.
Three quick shots caught him low in the gut. This wasn’t a kick to the baby maker, or a heel driving into a shin—this was the real deal, the mother of all gut-busters.
“Gotchu,” she snarled.
He took another step toward her, slower but resolved. His face was a pained growl. She raised the gun, aimed it at his head, and—shaking her head like she didn’t want to do it—said, “No.”
Right then, a fist-sized rock smacked the side of his head. It had come in like a fast pitch, causing the brute’s eyes to roll back into his head and his body to fall over sideways.
She scrambled out of the brush, getting scratched up on her arms, legs, and neck. The stone thrower rushed in with a cantaloupe-sized rock and started slamming it into Crowbar Man’s head. The first few shots turned her stomach. She could only imagine what the pulping sounds of stone crushing bone were like. Wet and meaty, for sure. Shots four and five started to cave in the man’s head. The seventh shot broke his eyeball, a string of goop sticking to the rock. The tenth, eleventh, and twelfth shots exposed the skull and the contents within and that’s when she’d had enough.
“STOP!” she screamed.
Aaron turned around, murderous rage in his eyes. She backed up, horrified. Dropping the stone, he stood and turned around.
Oh my gosh, he said. She was reading his lips when all she wanted to do was run. I was so worried about you. Look at you.
He took a step toward her. Even though his hand was coated in gore, he had blood spatter all over his face and in his hair, which made him look like a total psycho.
“You need to go away,” she said. He opened his mouth to refuse, closing the distance between them. “Go, Aaron!”
But he wasn’t going. He just kept on coming.
Chapter Nineteen
Aaron Westbrook
Aaron drove his body through the brush trying to get to Leighton. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do until he saw the rock pile. Three deafening blasts split the air. Gunshots. Did she shoot him, or did he shoot her? Grabbing a baseball-sized rock, Aaron pushed through the last of the brush and flung the rock at the brute with all his might. Back home, he was used to killing timber rattlesnakes with rocks, so his aim was dead on.
The rock cut open the side of the man’s head, but more importantly, it knocked him out. Seeing Leighton trying to get out of the brush let him know she was still alive. But if that guy got back up…
He ran back to the rock pile, unearthed a larger rock, then wasted no time getting back to the fallen brute. The first blow to his head was the zinger, the one that made it safe to be around the guy. He saw Leighton struggling with the brush, her pants half tugged-down, her underwear and gun belt showing.
Was he trying to rape her?
Kill her?
Aaron turned back to the man, fell to his knees before him, and started walloping him on the head with the large rock, over and over and over again. He’d killed his father the same way. This was familiar. Satisfying.
As the head gave way, the squelching sounds of the skull coming apart were like an orchestra of savagery and he was the conductor. In spite of the intensifying rain, he kept going, the effort in itself exhilarating, the brutality somehow reaching deeper parts of him.
When the beast’s head caved open, when he saw the first flash of an ivory-colored skull itself and then the brain matter inside, he felt a strange new arousal. It was beyond sexual, more than spiritual, it was—
And then she screamed for him to stop.
He stopped.
Aaron turned around, looked up at her, saw that he’d scared her again. He was always scaring people. Wiping his hair out of his eyes, he barely recognized the words leaving his mouth. He only knew he’d saved her, that she was alive, for him.
He stood, walked through the rain to her, reached out for her, but then the gun came up, her panic taking hold. Aaron had seen her like this before. He wore a bit of the earlier abuse on his skin.
Holding up his hands, he said, “I know I shouldn’t be following you, but I honestly want nothing from you. I was just…scared for you. Don’t you see that? I was scared for you, because of this.” Looking down at the dead man, he said, “Because of people like him.”
This seemed to calm her, some of that craziness leaving her eyes. She lowered the gun, slid it in her belly-band holster. Walking a few feet, she picked up a loaded mag and slid it into the mag holster on her belly-band belt. Instead of walking away from him, she slowly approached him. He stepped back, feigned concern. In reality, he would take her beating again. He didn’t like the pain, but he wasn’t opposed to it either. He’d developed a taste for it over the years.
“It’s okay,” she said.
He stopped moving as she took another step toward him. He could be anyone, anything, the perfect chameleon. “Please don’t hurt me, Leighton.”
Instead, she gave him a hug, his body suddenly pushed against hers. He felt her breasts pressed into his ribs, her arms curled around him, her head turned sideways against his upper left pectoral muscle. Right then, he felt all of those extra workouts paying off. Girls like Leighton needed strong men around.
Then she let go and it was l
ike having a blanket pulled off you, or like being pushed out of a car and left to fend for yourself. He didn’t want her to leave, to let go, to…look at him. He was ashamed by what he’d done—killing that man so violently. He could have just hit him a few times and that would be it. But he hadn’t.
He hadn’t.
“I’m going to get an energy bar and a Band-Aid for my head,” she said. “Do you want an energy bar, too?”
“That would be great, thank you.”
He was starving.
When she went to her lean-to, she came out with the paintball rifle. She fired at him three times, hitting him in the chest, the grouping tight. Staggering backwards, stunned, he couldn’t breathe. Looking down, clutching his chest, he saw green paint splattered on his shirt, in his hands.
“I told you not to follow me!” she screamed.
“But I…saved…you.”
“I saved myself, Aaron,” she hissed, her face completely changed, her look…rabid. “He would have bled out. You slowed him down, but I had my finger on the trigger and my sights on his forehead.”
“But I…”
She raised the rifle and shot him in the forehead, rocking his head back. Bright, ferocious pain split his skull in half. He staggered backwards, fell into the brush. She stalked forward, a killer, a monster, and she stood over him.
“I think I’ve been clear, Aaron. But you’re not a good listener, and you’re not respectful.”
She took out the can of pepper spray; he couldn’t even muster the strength to protest. She shot him in his face full stream, causing him so much pain he began to curse and cry.
That was the most embarrassing moment in his life. He had never been so mad, so defenseless, or so ashamed.
When he didn’t immediately move, she kicked him in the balls again and said, “Get going!” He felt his eyes flash wide, and his mouth hang open in a silent, voiceless scream.
She slung the paintball rifle over her shoulder, cinched the strap against her chest, and withdrew her Glock. She aimed it at his head.
“You need to tell me you understand what I’m saying or I’m going to kill you right here and now.”
“You won’t,” he managed to say on his last exhale of breath. He could barely see her now, the pepper spray setting his eyeballs and face on fire.
She pulled the slide and said, “You tested me, and now you want to challenge me?”
He held up his hands, closing his eyes against the burn. “No, no. I’m good. I’ll go. Just please don’t shoot me.”
He struggled to his feet. Everything hurt so badly he couldn’t move right. It was the bee-sting burn in his eyes, the angry welting he felt on his chest from being shot with paintballs, the goose-egg knot swelling on his forehead, and the gripping fist of pain where this fiery-blond donkey kicked him in the balls.
He pushed his way through the overgrown brush, the branches tearing at his already burning skin, his knees weak, tears streaming from his eyes.
When he was far enough away, the silent tears turned to a sob, which eventually rose to the sounds of a tortured wail. Leighton couldn’t hear him, and there was no one out there, so he just let his emotions go. Bawling like a big, blubbery baby, he got more mad at himself, and madder at her, and this caused him to scream even more.
When he could see the world clearly again, he started to walk faster, and when the rain began to pelt him, to drench him, he broke into a jog. His dorm room wasn’t that far away. An hour’s run at best.
He jogged down the highway and howled, spit and slobber coming out of his mouth as he threw back his head and cursed into the dark heavens.
Some time later, as he got close to the campus, as he walked down the center of the road past all of the banks, he realized he could not let Leighton get away with everything she’d done. What she did was torture. It was inhumane. Instead of going back to his own place, he would go to her dorm room and he would wait for her there. She had to come back sooner or later. And when she returned, he’d choke her out with a healthy dose of her own dreadful behavior.
That reminded him of her roommate, Chandra. She had an interesting look about her. And that hourglass figure! He felt the stirring in him again, willed it away, but it wasn’t going away.
He slowed to a walk, and then he used a fist to start pounding at his privates, beating away the need, causing his knees to buckle in pain.
His mother said he needed to keep his seed, to save it for the perfect woman, to never let it go if he could help it because his seed was a bad seed, and bad seeds grow into bad boys, and then those same bad boys grow into worse men. These were the men she hated—men filled with vile seed who hurt women and made more bad seeds, further perpetuating the cycles of abuse.
“Your penis is God’s curse on mankind,” she’d said. “Use it for pissing only. Promise me that, Aaron. Promise me.”
“I will, mother.”
He hated disappointing her. So he’d kept the seed until now, even though keeping the seed was torture. In honoring his word to his mother, he punched himself again, over and over until he fell over in the middle of the street and started howling at the moon like a lunatic.
And then he punched himself some more.
Chapter Twenty
Leighton McDaniel
In the lean-to, with the last of daylight burning off, she used her knife to strip bark from the sticks. While shaking, bleeding, and trying not to cry, she prayed the wood underneath the thin skin of bark was dry.
Just outside the lean-to, under the canopy of the same tree, she’d made a small circle of rocks, then used a rock to scrape away the layer of mud inside it.
She hated that her hands were now dirty, but they were cold and nearly numb, and she hated that, too. If she couldn’t make a reliable fire, all her efforts would be wasted and there was a chance she could freeze to death out there.
She had kindling inside her backpack, along with a six-inch ferrocerium rod and steel striker attached by an army-green length of paracord. She’d seen her father and her uncle use these fire starters before, so she hoped it would work in the wet weather.
Outside, the day was closing all around her, the gloomy clouds hiding the sun, but not all the light it produced. Her head hurt like a mother, as did her pubic bone where Crowbar Man cheap-shotted her, but she was in better spirits now that he was dead and Aaron the freaking creep was gone.
When the wood was sufficiently stripped, she felt it and it felt cool to the touch, a bit damp. Her emotions flatlined. This wasn’t going to work! Fortunately, the rain died down enough for whatever wood she used to have half a chance at catching fire before getting doused by the dripping branches overhead.
Leighton crawled outside the lean-to, but the dry ground inside the circle of rocks was wet again—too wet to set the little amounts of dry kindling in. She needed a bed of rocks, or one large, flat rock. Unfortunately, Aaron had taken the biggest rock from the pile and beat Crowbar Man to death with it.
Still, she needed it…
Leighton didn’t want to go near the dead man, but she needed that rock. Swallowing hard, she made her way toward the body, the smell of damp carnage entering her nose and lungs.
She picked the rock up fast, getting blood on her fingertips, enough that the rock started to slip. She tucked her hand under the rounded side, and let out a deep groan. Her muddy hands were now muddy, bloody hands.
She waddle-walked the rock over to the campfire ring, dropped it down in the center, and wiped her hands on the ground first, and then on the thighs of her pants. The cantaloupe-shaped side of the stone was punched into the mud while the flat(ish) side was now sitting up, almost like a plate she could use to set her kindling upon.
From inside of her backpack, she grabbed the Bayite ferro stick and the striker, along with the kindling, then returned to the rock and placed the bundle there. Sticking the ferrocerium rod in the middle of the kindling, she started striking it, hearty showers of sparks jumping off the rod but not igni
ting the kindling. Was it too wet? Should she use the newspaper her uncle left in the backpack and burn that first? She kept striking, the leaves smoking, but not catching fire. Finally, she stuffed a handful of the newspaper underneath and lit it. The flames caught, and before she had a chance to fully stack the sticks around the fire to dry them out, the flames died down. She lost her chance. There would be no fire. That’s when she thought of her cell phone.
Her uncle once said, “If you’re out in the wild with no signal, your phone isn’t completely useless.”
Beyond the wash of self-pity, she tried to remember what it was he said to her, something about the lithium interacting with oxygen. From the backpack, she took her cell phone, grabbed the rest of the newspaper kindling her uncle Walker had left her—along with some semi-dry twigs she could possibly ignite if things worked—then went back to the campfire stone.
She used the blade-edge of the knife to pry off the cell phone casing. Tossing it aside, she pulled out the battery and looked at it. It read Lithium-Ion. She used the tip of her blade to pry off the terminals, then she slid the knife into the opening, really shoving it down inside. The result produced a few sparks, but nothing like Walker promised. She pulled the knife out, thought about it for a minute, then reasoned that if she couldn’t expose the lithium to oxygen through the terminal housing, she’d cut open the belly of the battery and see if that worked.
She put the tip of the blade to the belly of the battery, then heel-punched it, breaking the casing. A shot of what looked like steam hissed out. She felt that surge of excitement inside, but steam wasn’t fire and the rain was starting back up again.
Working the blade, careful not to cut herself, she sliced farther along the belly. Another puff of smoke shot out, but then it stopped.
