“My baby,” he said as if in a dream.
“No,” Victor said. “Mine.”
With that, he punched the man again, knocking him into unconsciousness.
Caleb was still groaning like a pathetic puppy that had been kicked against a wall. “If you want her, you better get your ass out here and help,” Victor said.
The nighttime air was a cool blast that gave him renewed strength as if something potent had been injected into his blood.
Mercy had run to the far end of the camp where the trail continued up to the summit. She’d stopped to put on her jeans. She was fumbling with the second leg, trying not to fall. Victor did not run after her.
He had the upper hand. The key was to not lose it.
THIRTY-EIGHT
In fourth grade, firemen had visited Mercy’s school to give a presentation on fire safety. Most of the kids slept through the lecture on what to do in the case of a fire emergency and then came alive when it was time to investigate the truck like a piece of playground equipment and then stand back in awe at the awesome power of the fire hose. For Mercy, however, the notes on safety in an emergency held her rapt. She didn’t want Mommy and Daddy to burn to death in their own home. She created mapped-out escape routes in crayon on construction paper. Her parents humored her until she tried to have a fire drill at one in the morning. “But the fireman said we need to be prepared,” Mercy told her mother who looked like she had been beaten with a stick, one eye partially closed and twitching with sleep. “We have to practice what we’d do in an emergency. The fireman said--” but her mother hadn’t cared what the fireman said. If there was a fire, they’d get out. She didn’t need any early morning drills to know how to escape her own home.
This memory came back to her now and she almost laughed at the silly girl she had been and then started crying for her poor mother, who had only another ten years left to live, just ten and of those ten, how many restful nights would she have? And young Mercy had ruined one with her stupid drill. But it had been for a good reason. As the fireman said,
“In the event of an emergency, don’t think--respond.”
Mercy pulled on one leg of her jeans but her foot tangled in the opposite leg.
Drills conditioned the mind to respond to disaster. Schools had fire drills and tornado drills and lockout drills and lockdown drills, but they had never told her what to do if the event of a rape. Especially not when it happened on some damn mountain late at night.
Victor had come out of the tent but he’d gone to where they had been sitting before. At first she thought he was confused and that maybe he would wander right off into the woods searching for her, but then the flickering flames of the fire cast his hands in orange as they snatched up his hiking bag.
The two small fires in this large clearing conjured images of Satanic ceremonies. She could almost see the robe-clad worshippers circling the fires and chanting and a pair of pale arms raising a naked baby into the air as if the hand of God should come down and retrieve it.
You’re drifting, her mind scolded. You should be responding.
She should be fucking running.
She jammed her second leg through the pant leg and yanked up her jeans. The course fabric scratched her ass like sandpaper and ignited a fresh wave of pain in her crotch as if a lit firework had been crammed up there.
Might as well have been, she thought.
She turned to the trail before her and the distant peak of the mountain that was now a black splotch in a dark sea of sky but before she could take that first lunge of freedom, Caleb emerged from the tent and screamed something jumbled and distorted, something people wouldn’t quite catch unless they knew what was going on.
“Buuuuuiiiiiiiissssshhhhh!” Caleb screamed, by which he meant, bitch!
This monstrous cry held her in place as if hypnotizing her. Caleb lunged toward her in a haphazard stagger and at first it seemed like he might fall and maybe she’d get lucky and he’d knock himself out, but then his gait evened out and he evolved from ambling zombie to determined sprinter.
“YOU BITCH!” This time his words were much clearer.
She ran.
THIRTY-NINE
Victor might have laughed if there wasn’t a risk that Caleb might royally fuck this up. Caleb stumbled into a run, screaming like a wild man full of injured pride and bestial rage. Mercy watched him for a second and it almost seemed like she might wait for him, take him on face to face, but then she fled. It was the wiser move. But it made no difference to Victor. He had everything he needed.
He slipped two knives into his belt and kept another, the eight-inch work knife with the serrated inside edge and VD carved on the handle, in hand. The black, brass knuckles were cold against his skin. There were two flashlights in the bag: a Maglite and a flood. He chose the Maglite, the type Troopers carried for peering into cars in the dead of night. He had once purchased night vision goggles that, priced under a hundred dollars, had seemed too good to be true, and they had cracked in half the second time he used them. It would have been an unfair advantage, anyway. Primitive man did not have the luxury of technology. His eyes were getting better in the dark, anyway. Eventually, he wouldn’t need the flashlight. Although the flashlight offered other advantages.
Caleb vanished into the woods after Mercy. He was still screaming that she was a bitch and he was going to kill her. The sound echoed through the night like the distant call of some nocturnal beast.
Victor put on his boots. His feet were accustomed to this mountain and soon boots would be completely unnecessary. The soles of his feet were already thick pads of flesh that could withstand rocks and branches but boots gave him the extra protection he needed for what could become a prolonged hunt through the woods. And they were an excellent weapon, too.
He once found an injured crow on this mountain. One of its wings was cocked at a weird angle and wouldn’t fully extend. The bird tried desperately to get airborne with its sole-working wing but managed only to hop in circles. Victor stepped to it and the bird beat that single wing even more frantically. He watched it flap harder and harder until it ceased the struggle and appreciated Victor as if he might be its salvation.
The first stomp of his boot broke its neck. The second burst open the bird’s chest with a spew of guts.
He laughed at that.
Soon he’d be laughing in much the same way.
Victor Dolor headed across the open field to the path that wormed its way up the mountain and toward the black sky.
FORTY
The beam of her flashlight faded by degrees with every hard-footed lunge. The path ahead was clear but far from straight and the naked arms of branches protruded into the path, growing more imposing and sinister as the light dimmed. They were the skeletal arms of all the victims Victor had raped and murdered up here. They had come alive and instead of trying to save her, they wanted to seize her with their barbed arms and keep her in place so they could watch as Victor raped her again and then beat her to death. They’ll be laughing when he does it, she thought.
Mercy ran up the trail, grunting at the pain in her legs and crotch. The dying light wobbled before her like a psychotic vision before a patient collapsing into a seizure.
“You buuuuiiiiiissssshhhh!” Caleb screamed not far behind her, but far enough to offer hope.
The trail steepened. She bent forward as she ran and let her feet try to dig into the mountain for leverage. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realized she wasn’t wearing her boots. She had taken them off before entering the tent. Victor must have smiled at that. Even if she runs, dumb bitch will break all her toes, maybe even an ankle.