Shut The Fuck Up And Die! (23 page)

“
Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck,
fuck
.”

In a way, Matt would have almost
preferred Mona to be dead than arrested. The knowledge that she was
still out there somewhere, separated from him by bars and
razor-wire coiled walls, would have been too much. To know that he
could feel the warm touch of her hand, feel her lips brush his own:
it would be like torture. At least in death he would be able to
join her. At least there would be a
chance
they could be together again.

As he shambled closer to the parked cruiser,
he realized that tracks led away from the passenger-side door. They
couldn’t have been very old or else they would have already filled
in like his own had. And the tracks seemed to be making a beeline
directly into the forest. They disappeared into the woods almost at
a forty-five degree angle from where he’d emerged. If the snow
hadn’t been falling so heavily, there was a good chance that the
cop would have even been close enough to see him out there in the
pines.

Still . . . there was something about the
tracks which bothered Matt. Something that didn’t quite seem right.
His eyes followed the trail again and again, trying to discern
exactly what was wrong with them as he hobbled closer to the
car.

Now he could see that some of the snow had
fallen off the roof of the cruiser when the door had been opened.
It lay on the ground in a small mound with tracks cutting a solid
trench through its center. But even something about that felt
wrong.

He glanced into the forest again and tried to
imagine the cop bolting from the car and running across the lawn.
His feet would have kicked out clouds of snow in front of him as he
ran and . . . .

The snow.
It
should have been piled up in the opposite direction. The little
dunes scattered by running legs would have been heading
toward
the forest if the cop had
truly ran there. But they weren’t. Instead, they seemed to be
leading to
the car. And, now that he was closer, Matt
could also see that the snow was discolored with dark splotches. As
if something had dripped down and splattered against the
drifts.

Blood
.

At the same time this thought crossed his
mind, the door of the cruiser swung open. He hadn’t been able to
see the behemoth of a man through the frost-covered windows, but
Earl Gruber lurched out of the car almost as if he’d been thrown
off balance. His clothes were crusted with icy blood and the arrow
shafts still jutted from his body; only the feathered tips were
missing. He must have snapped them off to keep them from getting
caught in the undergrowth as he took a more direct route back to
the house. And then, realizing that Matt would return there, waited
in the car as his blood slowly clotted and froze.

The large man’s face was so pale that his
skin almost blended with the falling snow and he staggered forward
as if nothing more than sheer willpower was keeping him alive.
Bobbing and weaving, his feet crossed in front of one another and,
for all intents and purposes, it looked as if he were about to fall
flat on his face at any given moment.

Instead, the bearded man lifted his arm as
slowly as someone who’d been hypnotized into believing it was
weightless. His lips moved as he said something, but his voice was
too weak to compete with the wind’s hollow moan.

But words weren’t necessary. The unsteady
muzzle of the pistol pointed directly at Matt spoke volumes.

SCENE NINETEEN

Every time the ice pick plunged into Mona’s
flesh, the slobbering beast scrambling on top of her groaned as if
in the throes of a miniature orgasm; her screams seemed to fan the
fires of excitement in his eyes and his hand trembled visibly. This
caused the tip of the pick to wiggle inside each new wound and the
pain flared along her body as if trying to escape the point of
impact. It shot through her leg and raced up her side, causing her
to intuitively want to pull her body into a fetal position. But
he’d clawed his way on top of her to the point that his knees
pressed into the wounds on her hips now; no matter how hard she
struggled, she couldn’t even roll on to her side, much less curl
into a tight ball.

Panting almost as heavily as her attacker,
but for entirely different reasons, Mona fought to keep the waves
of darkness that threatened to overtake her at bay. It would’ve
been so easy just to let them wash over her, to allow the searing
agony to melt into the void of unconsciousness. Free from the pain
of Daryl’s furious assault, she would bleed out eventually and slip
into the cold embrace of death, leaving him to do whatever he
pleased with her lifeless body. But that was precisely what gave
her the strength to resist the undertow’s seductive pull.

All of her life, men had simply taken
what they’d wanted from her. First Uncle Louis with his promise of
kittens in his basement. Then Mr. Chambers, asking her to stay
after class so he could give her
individualized attention
. Her brother. After her
father had joined in, that bastard didn’t even bother to drug her
anymore. And she’d simply swallowed it all. She’d let the shame and
guilt and anger fester into a burning ember in the pit of her
stomach. She’d choked back the protests and sobs, had eventually
learned to just lay there and accept whatever disgusting thing they
wanted to do to her. On some level, they’d managed to somehow
convince her that she really
was
asking for it. That it was her fault and they were just
giving her what she actually wanted. That she would never amount to
anything more than a slutty whore . . . .

Until Matt had come into her life..
He’d shown her the beauty that was in her soul. It was like a
radiant jewel so deeply hidden within her that their thrusting
dicks could never hope to shatter it. They could leave her bruised
and aching and make it hurt to walk for days afterward . . . but
they would never
own
her.
They’d never control her. And, once Matt had taught her what it
meant to take the power back, they would also never violate her
again.

And she’d be damned if she was simply going
to lay there and let this degenerate, redneck animal do whatever
the fuck he wanted. It didn’t matter if it was a prick or a pick .
. . nothing entered her body without her permission.

The little weasel had stopped stabbing and
had her shirt clenched in both hands now. He yanked it so hard that
her torso rose slightly off the ground and Mona could tell by his
expression of stupid bewilderment that he’d simply expected it to
rip right off her chest. He pulled again, but still the fabric held
and he clenched his teeth as frustration flared in his eyes.

“
Stupid fuckin’ whore!”

He spat the words from his mouth as he glared
at her breasts, totally oblivious to Mona’s balled fist until it
smacked into the center of his throat. Something between a cough
and a gag erupted out of him and Daryl’s hands flew up as if to
protect his neck from another assault. Mona, however, had
anticipated this reaction and, as she struggled to sit from the
waist up, drove the heel of her palm into Daryl’s solar plexus.

She’d hoped the blow would send him reeling
away from her, but instead his body fell forward. His weight
crashed into her and the little progress she’d made at sitting up
was instantly neutralized. She fell back against the old woman’s
corpse again and her right hand reached out in attempt to break her
fall. Instead of hitting the floor, however, it sank into something
cold and squishy, something that felt like she’d just plunged her
hand into a vat of chilled jelly.

Before it even had a chance to register in
her brain that her hand had fallen into the old hag’s sliced
abdomen, though, her left hand formed into claws and raked at
Daryl’s watering eyes. The pain broke through the temporary
paralysis that had overtaken him and he yowled as he tried to roll
to the side.

Not getting away that easy, you piece of
shit!

With her hips free, Mona managed to coil her
legs around Daryl’s waist. She crossed her ankles and squeezed as
he squirmed like a worm on the end of a hook

“
How do you like that, mother fucker?
What, you don’t want my legs wrapped around you anymore? You don’t
want any of this?”

She ground her crotch forcefully against him
as she yelled, causing him to whimper. At the same time, he seemed
to remember the ice pick in his hand and he thrust it downward in
an attempt to break free of her grasp. However, blood streamed from
the deep furrows that Mona’s nails had carved into his face and the
salty liquid trickled into his eyes. Momentarily blinded, the pick
missed its mark and pinged against the concrete floor so hard that
the shock waves traveled up Daryl’s arm. His hand reflexively
opened and his only weapon rolled across the uneven floor as Mona
squeezed her legs more tightly.

At the same time, she pulled her hand out of
the old woman’s body. However, something sharp sliced through her
palm before she’d even managed to free it. She’d spent so many
hours cutting her arms with razor blades as a teen that Mona
instantly recognized the stinging sensation for what it was: a
sharpened blade.

Part of her mind couldn’t help but
wonder what the hell a blade was doing
inside
the old bitch’s body; but this was the
same part that always watched passively while the more primal
portions maintained full control. Those parts of her consciousness
didn’t question the improbability of the situation at all. They
simply saw an opportunity presenting itself and made her grasp at
the blade again.

Mona yanked at the broken knife, hoping that
it would pull free of the dead flesh and provide her with a weapon.
However, the cold metal was so slick with blood and gore that her
hand simply slipped over it again, opening a new wound in the
process.

Daryl doubled his efforts and thrashed about
on the floor as he tried to pull Mona’s ankles apart from each
other. Though unable to free himself entirely, he’d twisted around
so that his back was now facing her and, in the hopes that he might
connect with her face, threw his head backward again and again.

The wounds in Mona’s thighs and hips
protested with searing waves of pain but she squeezed even more
tightly and ground her teeth against one another to keep from
screaming. She knew she had to do something soon: she couldn’t
simply keep the man in a leg lock indefinitely. Sooner or later,
pain and exertion would get the best of her and the bastard would
manage to pry his way free. The blade of the knife, however, was
stubborn. Time and time again, it stayed lodged within Mary’s
carcass as it slashed fresh incisions into Mona’s palm.

The most recent injury had cut so deeply that
her hand had balled into a fist afterward and, when it did, it had
closed around something that felt almost like a coil of wrinkled,
fleshy rope. Slippery, cold, and spongy to the touch, Mona’s mind
instantly seized on what it was.

Still clutching the organ, Mona yanked hard.
There was a moment of resistance but then, with a sound that was
partly a squish and partly a slither, her hand pulled free from the
old woman’s body. At the same moment, Daryl had thrown his head
backward again and Mona took the opportunity to rise up just enough
so that she could throw a loop of the intestine over his head. Then
she pulled back with every ounce of energy she could muster.

Daryl fell on top of her and she tugged on
the guts as tightly as if they were the reins of a horse she were
trying to control. Passing one hand over the other, she curled the
intestine around his neck again, forming a garrote of sorts.

His fingers clawed at the entrails like a man
frantically trying to loosen a tie that had become so tight that it
was cutting off his air. Mona, however, pulled on them so
forecfully that her arms shook with exertion and his grasping
fingers couldn’t even wedge themselves between his throat and his
mother’s viscera.

Daryl’s heels kicked at the concrete
floor and his neck truly
was
red now: the flesh looked as if it were swelling up around
the length of intestine and his carotid artery bulged as his heart
tried to force blood through the restricted passage. His face,
however, was now nearly as pale as the corpse whose bowels he was
being strangled with and his eyes looked as if they were about to
pop from him head. Though Mona couldn’t see them, his lips flapped
wordlessly: not so much as even the softest wheeze passed through
them as his thrashing grew progressively weaker. Within minutes,
his arms flopped to the floor and his entire body was limp and
still.

Mona, however, had learned her lesson about
taking chances. Despite the cramps which wracked her arms and the
throbbing pain in her legs, she didn’t ease her grip on either his
torso or the old woman’s intestines. She mentally counted to one
hundred three times before allowing her body to relax.

She pushed Daryl’s body off her own as easily
as if it were nothing more than a bag of laundry and he stared at
the ceiling with unblinking eyes while Mona wriggled out from
underneath him. She sat on the floor for a moment, catching her
breath and wincing as her fingers probed the wounds on her leg.

For some reason, Daryl had focused entirely
on the right side of her body; so, as Mona attempted to stand, she
placed all of her weight on her left leg. The basement seemed to
swim around her and she reached for the freezer in an attempt to
steady herself. After taking several deep breaths, her eyes swept
the room and finally alighted on a pair of rusted crutches that
peeked out from a mound of moisture-bloated boxes. She hopped over
to it slowly, afraid that if the dizziness returned she would fall
and be forced to crawl.