She took off in Red's direction, leaving Merlin standing behind her.
"Get him good," he called after her, turning and starting toward the highway to find Shari.
Heather lay atop a wooden picnic table, painted green and covered in words, shapes and symbols etched onto its top and benches. Beside her head, the word "I" and "BUTTHOLE" were carved into the wood, separated by a crude heart. She lay sulking with her arms folded beneath her head, scowling as she stared up toward the sky. Her mind was on Red's new obsession, the young redhead whom everyone had been calling Scarlet.
I wish they'd have killed her when they had the chance
, she thought in reference to Scarlet's escape from her two escorts. The uninjured of the two had informed Red via the radio of what had happened, and the fact that the enraged captive was now at large. She sighed, focusing her blue eyes absently on a brighter spot in the dark, overcast sky, where the moon struggled to shine through the clouds.
Now the bitch is on the loose.
About fifty feet from the picnic table, a gentle brook babbled. Its muted cascading was drowned out by the conversation going on upstream, where Heather's current superior argued over her walkie-talkie with Red.
"What do you mean?" Heather heard Cynthia demand. "Red, that crazy little cunt is coming for us. I don't care that your little fantasy love story isn't gonna happen."
Heather rolled her eyes, reaching for her earbuds and phone in her pocket. She inserted the earbuds, then scrolled through her phone, choosing a playlist from her rather limited pre-zombie music library. The argument going on down the way was hushed by the twang of pop country as Heather shifted onto her side. She peered out into the darkened wood with her hands folded, prayer-like, beneath the left side of her face.
She didn't want any more reminders of Red's affection for Scarlet.
I was close,
she lamented, recalling the night she had spent with Red after plying him with liquor, the night that had left her sore and bruised the next morning.
I almost had him, and then she showed up.
"Don't know what he sees in her," she said aloud in a soft, sing-song tone. "She's a ginger with, like, no boobs whatsoever."
The rest of the group was further upstream and past Cynthia, whom Heather could still hear on the walkie-talkie as she and Red continued to shout back and forth at one another.
"And we never even got to deal with Michelle and Evan before this shit broke out," Cynthia said. "Who knows where the hell they are? And Red, I have to ask--were you trying to abandon us back there?"
Heather's playlist resumed. As she stared into the dark woods, a projectile emerged, spinning through the air in her direction. A fraction of a second later, the wooden object was burrowed two inches into her left ocular cavity. She died immediately of shock, her back toward her group, as she lay on her side atop the table with her music still playing.
Daphne sat perched on a tree branch, squatting with her knees drawn together. She gazed at Heather lounging below, in the clearing lining the stream.
She knew there were others in Heather's group upstream, because she could hear scattered voices conversing from that direction. She also knew of their presence because she could smell them. The wind blew from north to south, carrying their scents toward her.
Their conversations, as well as that of their leader going back and forth with Red, were meaningless to Daphne. The words reached her mind not as complex linguistic packages communicating uniquely human ideas, but rather as animal sounds. They happened to be human, but to Daphne in her current state, they were no different than the night birds calling back and forth, or the chirping of the crickets. The only thing to differentiate the sounds of the people in question from the animals was their insidious intent.
Daphne cocked her head from the tree branch, regarding the young woman below. Her long, lean frame was spread across the length of the picnic table. Daphne remembered the punishment she had endured at the hands of the young blonde. On a very rudimentary level, she recalled how Heather had really earned herself the title and status of "sadist." She instilled mistrust and fear even among her own kind. Her ruthlessness was only matched by her stupidity, which was a potentially deadly combination for those around her.
Daphne's hand reached into her messenger bag, her fingertips closing around a sharpened stick. She held the stick in front of her for a moment, distracted by the form and feel of the wood in her hands. Her eyes traveled to the well-pointed tip, the pioneering extremity that would wedge its way into her victim's skull.
She launched the stick, watching intently while it spiraled toward Heather, appearing to move in slow motion from her unique, drug-induced perspective. She could almost see the sound of the slightly spiraling path cut through the air by the projectile, which found its mark in Heather's left eye. There was no further movement from the young sadist. Her right eye was open wide, and her mouth hung agape. Daphne lowered herself from the branch, hanging by her fingertips and dropping another six inches to the ground without making a sound.
Besides the woman shouting into the walkie-talkie, Daphne had seen and heard roughly a dozen more, fifty feet upstream. She reached again into her bag, her fingertips brushing over the sticks piled at the bottom. They were generally uniform in length and width, filling the bag slightly less than halfway. They numbered in the dozens, between two and three, though Daphne's mind didn't directly formulate numbers. She knew by the sensation and the fullness of the bag that there were more than enough for the sadists at hand.
She stalked toward Cynthia, waiting until the woman's back was facing her, and aimed the stick at her lower skull, where the spinal cord joined the brain. As the weapon spun through the air, its movement produced a light whistle which only Daphne could hear. The sound spoke to her, and she replied with a faint smile as Cynthia was struck at the base of the skull. The lifeless sadist tumbled forward into the stream, her face and torso preceding the long ponytail trailing behind her. The light splash produced didn't seem to get the attention of anyone else upstream, so Daphne continued to the north.
As she passed Cynthia's corpse, she saw that the walkie-talkie was submerged, cutting off Red's contact with the group. She also saw the glint of Cynthia's blade, slid through a makeshift sheath at her hip. She crept over to the side of the stream, plucking the woman's knife from her holster and using it to slice her right ear away from her skull. She slid the ear onto the length of cord with the others. Regarding the knife, she saw that it was apparently well-used, a stainless steel implement of mediocre quality. Given the circumstances, however, it would have to do.
With the newly acquired weapon, she stalked back to Heather's corpse, adding the young woman's right ear to the rest as she looked down at the corpse, her face twisted with vengeance. Up and across the stream, someone from Cynthia's group approached the waterway, looking southward in Daphne's direction. Wanting to avoid being seen, Daphne retreated into the treeline, watching as the person whom she now saw to be a male sadist found Cynthia's body, followed by the radio just barely submerged by the shallow, flowing water.
He started toward Daphne's side of the treeline, and she reacted by plunging her hand again into her bag. As the shadowy figure approached, she dispatched a stick, its point driving into the unknown sadist's chest cavity. Daphne started toward the moaning, twitching mass lying about twenty-five feet away, flattening a patch of tall grass matching his shape.
As Daphne reached the man, she drew Cynthia's knife. He lay face-down with his knees drawn up beneath him. Daphne pounced, mounting his back, and drew the blade across the back of his neck at a hard angle, severing his spinal cord. The sadist's body went limp, and Daphne confiscated his steel gut hook blade and his ear before continuing to the north. She kept within the treeline until she reached the rest of the group, none of whom seemed to be aware that two of their comrades were missing.
She leaped onto a tree branch roughly four feet off the ground, then climbed onto the next limb above. There were four females and seven males below, some seated at the two picnic tables and some on the ground. She stepped toward the end of the branch, then dove ten feet to the ground. Her landing was soft, the impact absorbed by the earth as she sunk onto one knee upon making contact with the ground. Within a fraction of a second, she was up and running toward the confused group of sadists.
Before any of them could so much as draw their weapons, Daphne dashed between the two tables and across the stream. As had she passed through the gathering of enemies, her right hand darted out to her right as it clutched Cynthia's field knife. Her left hand, wielding the nameless man's gut hook, did the same on the opposite side. The result was two dying sadists left in her wake, lying on the ground and bleeding out from severe throat lacerations as she scaled a pine on the other side of the stream.
She jumped into the neighboring tree, circling to the front. Reaching into her messenger bag, she eyed a rotund male approaching the border of the woods. She flicked her wrist, launching the stick into his left temple.
Her hand dove into her bag again, taking out two sticks, one for each of the two sadists who had been close behind the last victim. She flicked her wrist twice in quick succession, her movements practiced and reflexive. The sharpened pieces of wood each found their marks, leaving one male and one female sadist dead or dying. The male was clutching the side of his throat, gurgling through blood, and the female lay face-down with the stick protruding from her neck, just behind and below her left ear.
Six remained, four males and two females. Daphne heard movement to her right. She looked up the stream, noting three dark figures on the opposite side. They were fleeing to the northwest as they entered the woods.
Daphne looked down, noting the three sadists left. They were ducked within the treeline opposite from her, but she was nonetheless fully aware of their odious presence. From across the stream, she heard the cocking of a hammer as a brave and foolish hand ventured from the treeline into Daphne's field of view. It took less than a second for her to reach into her bag, produce a stick and send it sailing through the air. It skewered the unseen sadist's hand, causing the woman to howl in agony, no doubt having suffered multiple badly broken bones. She dropped her gun, then ran in the general direction of those whom Daphne had seen fleeing moments before. The two remaining males followed suit behind her, although one of them paused to pick up the gun she had dropped.
Daphne lingered within the limbs of the trees lining the stream's eastern side while the sadists fled to the north. Once the woods around her felt clean again, the air having been more or less cleared of the repugnant residue they left behind, she lowered herself to the ground.
Crossing over the stream, she entered the woods to the west and broke into a sprint, her feet barely touching the ground as she moved. She swung out further to the west, hoping to get ahead and cut them off. Grabbing hold of a branch that was roughly head-height, she swung hard until her toes brushed another branch ahead. She pulled up with her torso, vaulting onto the limb. Without ceasing her movement, she bounded off, arcing at a zenith of around fifteen feet above the ground before descending from her long jump.
As her feet rejoined the terrain, she continued her northbound sprint. From between the trees, she saw flickers of hurried movement from the sadists to the east. She ducked into a headlong run, leaning her shoulders and torso forward, to keep below a stretch of young mulberries branches about four and a half feet high.
Her arms trailing behind her and her soles making quick, quiet contact with the forest floor, she followed alongside the sadists who, she knew, would lead her to Red.
Lucas peered through the darkened wood, searching for some sign of Red's group. In the pitch-black, moonless night, he figured, even a small amount of light should be noticeable from a close enough distance--a smartphone screen, a flashlight, even the lit ends of cigarettes or joints.
Before Cynthia had gone quiet, and minutes before Lucas and his group were ambushed by the odd, deadly woman, he had heard her accuse Red of intentionally leaving all but his own small, core group behind. He suspected that it was true. Although he had heard Red insist that he was nearby, telling Cynthia to just head west, Lucas knew right away that he was just sending the group on a wild goose chase. Red was cutting them loose, at least all but his original group, who had been friends of his since before the dead had arisen. He had never really been a leader, so much as an opportunist with enough pseudo-charisma to ensnare the lowest class of small-town America. Now that times were hard, the fake charisma became transparent for what it really was.
In the case of Lucas himself, he had been more or less sucked into the situation like a deep cesspool which was easy to enter, but nearly impossible to escape. He had been useful to Red for his mechanical talents, which mainly came in handy for motorcycle and A.T.V. repairs.
Once a part of the group, Lucas quickly realized that he had made a mistake. On the one hand, he knew that being part of a large group should help his chances of survival. On the other hand, he detested much of what the group did to sustain their likelihood of said survival. They seemed, by default, to raid and steal rather than scavenge. For a short time, Lucas found himself puzzled by the phenomenon. There were so few people left alive for the abundant resources remaining. Why, he had wondered, did they insist on taking the route of violence?
It was only a matter of days, however, before the hard, cold facts sank in. For people like Red and his group, the sadism was part of the experience, a resource just like food, water, drugs and sex. It was not only deliberate, it was a way of life that they relished now that they were free to do it with no one, generally, to stop them. It became abundantly clear to Lucas that in the old world, it was laws and nothing more that kept some people from committing various acts of savagery.
It's like Pandora's box opened up,
he thought,
and the lid's been busted to pieces and flung to the four corners of Hell.
Lucas had been acquainted with a few of the sadists in his group before the end of the world, and he had never suspected any of them to have such tendencies. He wondered if any of them had honestly had none back then. He wondered how many had simply had their sociopath switches flipped as a result of the horrific events that had unfolded during society's dramatic end. He supposed that if their switches were that easy to flip, they must have been dangerously close to the cusp all along.
As he ran northward, too busy to pay attention to his protesting muscles, he knew only that he wanted out. The mind set of these people was not his own, and Red's fight was not his fight. Although Michelle and Evan had defected, asking him if he was interested in joining them, he had distanced himself from their plan. He felt that his odds of a successful escape would be low with the two of them in his company.
Since the events that had unfolded during their escape, however, he supposed that their timing had been good, if only by pure blind luck. Red was far too busy to care that two of his lower-ranking members were leaving the group, given that he was contending with a surprise night attack from a group larger, more skilled and better armed than his own. This was in addition to the red-haired young lady with a vendetta, the woman whose prize was Red himself.
As he and the others around him continued their frantic northward flight, he slowed his pace slightly, feigning exhaustion, until he was lagging at the end of the group. After a quick check to ensure that the others were all still facing ahead, he ducked behind a thick, gnarled tree. After a few moments, he risked another brief glance at the group, who showed no sign of noticing his absence. He started back south toward Jonesboro, which he knew to be the destination of Evan and Michelle.
Not too late to get out.