From the north, the deluge of gunfire continued while the sky continued to rain, cleansing the mine and mill of some of the spilled blood. Daphne's pale, naked flesh was now rinsed clean, though pink, bloodied water still dripped from her long, russet hair. The wreath of ears around her neck rustled as a stronger breeze blew past and caused her to break out in goose flesh.
"You know what I did with this knife?" Red asked, pointing to his own back. Daphne didn't have to understand the language. It was clear to her that her own knife had been used against her, that it had been used to cause her permanent maiming. Red nodded just before coming in for an attempted strike, as if the confirmation would suffice to distract her.
Daphne blocked his blow with her borrowed blade in the irritated manner of a person swatting at a fly, while simultaneously raising her bent knee up and into Red's groin. His left hand was flung out in a loose backhand. She was surprised by how quickly Red's body responded, even while he recoiled and palmed the traumatized organs with his right hand. The other gigantic extremity swung freely, making contact with the side of Daphne's face. She allowed her body to move in the direction of the impact to minimize the pain and damage dealt by the blow, rising off of her feet as she was knocked backward, coming to lie on her back.
She sprang upright in one motion as Red steadied his revolver in his left hand.
"It's a damn shame," he said, shaking his head. "We really coulda been something, the two of us together." He peered down his barrel at her, a light smile spreading across his face. "It could've been you riding and fighting at my side." He looked her up and down as his muzzle remained fixed on her. "Yeah. I can picture it."
His words failed to get through to Daphne in her primal state. Without breaking her gaze from his, she pounced before he could react. Her legs gripped his torso, the fingers of her left hand clawing and kneading his face and right eye. At the same time, she chopped hard across the back of his left hand with the edge of her palm and pinkie, causing him to drop his gun.
Having disarmed Red, Daphne entered a state akin to berserker rage. She lowered her feet to the ground and released blow after blow to his face, both fists going non-stop at a steady rhythm. Although Red's head lolled back with each connection and he steadily paced backward with the force, he managed yet to stay on his feet. As his face ebbed again and again to face Daphne , she saw that his skin had torn in many places. Swelling and bruising were already beginning to cause distortion of his features, which were alarmingly severe even under normal circumstances.
As Daphne continued her assault of Red, striking him with her hardened, rugged knuckles, his back hit the unyielding form of a dense, elderly oak. Left with no functional hands, he tried to encircle Daphne with his huge, muscle-bound arms, intending to wrestle her to the ground. She began by ducking around to his right side, grabbing his lower arm with one hand and just below the bicep with the other. She raised her foot to force the elbow in, bending it at the wrong angle and causing a messy dislocation, complete with tearing of the tendons and muscle. She lifted his useless arm and pinned it to the tree behind him, using the dagger to stake through the muscle between his ulna and radius above the wrist. She then probed his inner right jacket pocket, producing the knife that was rightfully hers.
She focused next on his broken left hand as he babbled unintelligibly. She attempted to raise his hand so that it could be stapled to the tree. At that moment, Red became slightly more cognizant through the hazy blur in his mind induced by severe brain damage. He saw the miniature, naked aggressor raise her newly recovered titanium knife, and he had a hazy sense that she was preparing to tack his left hand to the tree, bringing it to meet the right. He summoned all the focus and intention left in him and swung the broken hand at the feral young woman, contacting the right side of her face with his left wrist and lower forearm.
She was knocked momentarily to the ground, surprised that Red was capable of any sort of final hurrah. He took the opportunity to yank the dagger free from his right hand, a howl of pain rising up from within him and fading into a fit of delirious laughter. He loomed over Daphne, attempting to utter something vaguely demeaning. To his dismay, though, the words came out garbled and meaningless. As he stood swaying over Daphne, he was acutely aware that he was quite broken. The uncommonly petite woman before him, now leaping to her feet, had done what he was certain to be irreversible damage to his brain.
He saw her lunge for her knife, which had fallen from her grip upon receiving his backhanded strike. Having significantly longer arms and legs than the young woman, he reached the implement first so that he was holding both the dagger and the titanium knife. His grip was tentative and awkward, with a broken hand on one side and a ruined elbow on the other. He just barely grasped the weapons as he lunged forward, attempting to gnash at Daphne with her own knife. His balance, however, was virtually non-existent, and he tumbled, landing prone on his front and stretching more than six and a half feet across the ground.
On his way down, he had slashed Daphne's shin with the titanium knife, producing a gash so deep that on the average woman, it would have hit bone. Daphne, being well-muscled as she was, had a bit more of a buffer, though it as still a significant wound. She narrowed her eyes, peering down at her babbling adversary.
She pounced and mounted him, plucking her knife from his weak grip. She stabbed once again through his left hand, though this time, it was affixed to the ground instead of the tree. She pushed down until the grip of the knife was barely protruding from the layer of sweetly scented, decomposing leaves.
She scrambled for the dagger behind Red's feet. Having retrieved it, she pulled his rather limp right arm from beneath him, outstretching the limb and pinning the hand to the soil with the dagger.
He was still chattering incoherently as she straddled his back and reached around the front with both hands, gripping his throat. He tried to kick his legs as she dug her fingers in between his trachea and the dense muscle surrounding it. She clamped down more tightly around Red's wind pipe, her fingers squeezing closer to one another.
Red gazed out toward the mine, his vision beginning to fade. His legs gave up their struggle to assault the attacker, and his arms went limp. In a primitive, distant manner, he was aware that he was already done for. He had hoped that she would be his queen, and she had done him in. As the final waves of his consciousness ebbed away, he wished her all the worst in the world.
Daphne felt her foe go limp, the last vestiges of life and breath leaving his body. She pulled her titanium talon free, but left Lacey's dagger embedded in Red's right hand. Standing and panting, she became acutely aware that she was cold, injured and severely exhausted. She bent down to slice away Red's right ear. Rising and starting again toward the highway, she paused and turned to do something which was unprecedented for her. She crouched and sliced off the left ear, as well. She strung them through the holes in their middles onto her necklace with the rest, making her way west as the world spun around her.
As she walked, the glow of daylight brightened to the east. She planted one foot in front of the other, but she was unsure how she would make it several miles back to her group. Red's elimination had been her objective, and having accomplished it, her body and mind had no remaining fuel with which to deny the maddening fatigue.
She stared up at the brightening clouds above her, determined to focus and continue ahead, when she heard movement to the north, three sets of human footsteps. She froze, listening intently. She didn't recognize the voices or the words, but she recognized the tone of self-righteous vengeance. She scaled the nearest tree, intentionally making a sufficient ruckus to draw their attention. She waited, crouching on a low branch as they approached with their guns drawn and their gazes searching the woods as they moved.
When they were roughly beneath her, she dropped down in front of them. She lunged low, rising and burying her gut hook into the lower abdomen of her first victim. She twisted the blade as she pulled it free, releasing entrails and fluids. As the sadist went down, sobbing and blubbering as they held their spilled guts, Daphne focused on the next one, swinging her limp right hand into the sadist's temple and producing a cracking sound.
The victim was sufficiently stunned to allow Daphne to focus on the third enemy. She reached down and around his body before he could respond, grabbing his ankles and yanking his feet out from beneath him. The sadist was briefly airborn, falling feet over head. The back of the skull smacked hard onto a tree root upon contact with the ground. The sadist seemed to be thoroughly lifeless, staring up at the brightening sky, so Daphne went back to the one still standing, the one with the broken skull. He stumbled toward Daphne, swinging a baseball bat studded with nails. She rushed him, easily evading his clumsy attempted strike, and knocked him to the ground, rolling him onto his front. Before he could buck her off, she plunged her knife into the base of his skull.
Behind her, Daphne heard the first of her three victims, the one who had been disemboweled, whimper and moan. She crossed over to him, rolling him over onto his belly as he protested faintly.
"No," he said. "Please, don't--please...."
Disregarding his objection, Daphne drew her knife across his spinal cord at the base of his skull. She sliced off his ear, then collected those of the other two sadists, adding them to her necklace. She stumbled once again toward the highway. She moaned in protest as she heard movement to her north, two hurried, human treads. Her shoulders heaved, her body convulsed in defeat, and all at once she was certain that she had no fight left in her. She had completed her goal, but she was beginning to doubt that she would make it out alive.
"Daphne!" called a familiar female voice. It belonged to Sonia, a young woman in Daphne's group. She was with Victor, the newcomer who had joined them in Bixby. The two jogged over to Daphne.
"Oh, Jesus, is that you?" Sonia uttered as she reached Daphne, alarmed by the young woman's feral expression and her nudity, save for the wreath of ears around her neck. She removed her leather trench coat, wrapping it around Daphne's chilled, naked body. She took out her radio, pressing the talk button.
"Shari," she blurted, "we found her south of the building, between the highway and the mine."
"I'll be right there,"responded Shari over the radio.
Daphne pointed urgently toward the driveway to the north as her eyes threatened to close.
"What?" Sonia asked, motioning toward the three dead sadists she had seen Daphne eliminate, then toward the building. "Those sadists by the building?"
Daphne nodded.
"They're gone," Victor assured her, looking her dead in the eye. "We took care of them. Just like we saw you do to those three guys just now. You took them all out in less than a minute--that's very impressive."
Daphne wasn't listening. She was taking in the glittering rays of morning sunlight from between her fluttering eyelids. She smiled lightly as her legs went out. Victor caught her before she could crumple to the forest floor, cradling her leather-clad body in his arms.
"We'll talk later," he said as he and Sonia started north toward Shari and at least a dozen others who were hurrying south to meet them, visible through the trees at only about twenty yards away.
"Holy shit, Daphne," Shari said breathlessly as she ran over, hugging her friend tightly while Victor continued to hold her weight in his arms.
"She seems very tired," Victor said.
"And maybe hopped up on something," Sonia added.
Shari frowned. "
What?
Daphne doesn't do that."
Dr. Liu appeared beside her. He peered down at Daphne's eyes, opening and closing as she ebbed out. He saw the enlarged pupils, suggesting hallucinogens, but as he felt her pulse and observed the state of her skin, he also suspected dehydration and severe exhaustion. He produced a bottle of water and a straw from his pack, inserting one end of the straw into the bottle and the other into Daphne's mouth.
"She's going to need sleep," he told Shari, "probably a whole lot of it."
As the group headed west through the woods, Daphne relaxed in Victor's arms, finally allowing her eyes to remain closed. Smiling broadly, she tilted her face back to bask in the golden glow of the morning sun, radiating from behind Victor. Inhaling fully, comforted by the clean, still air of dawn, she breathed out and conceded to sleep, letting oblivion overtake her troubled mind.