There was pain there, in her feet, but not so great as to block out the burning fire pokers in her groin. She could weep over her mangled feet later. If she survived.
That if, the great and only if that ever mattered, injected her with the extra adrenaline to keep scaling the mountain, keep moving up and up toward some distant plateau where the only escape was off a steep edge or down into the soil.
With the flashlight nearly useless and branches scratching at her face and arms, Mercy began to form a plan. It wouldn’t be anything miraculous or impressive, but if it worked maybe it could be considered both. Victor was coming after her, she knew that, but Caleb was the immediate threat. He was enraged and hollering out all his pain at her in a pledge of vengeance, but he was also injured and that made him vulnerable.
She clutched the trees lining the path and launched herself up the mountain, propelling herself ever forward. How long would it take to get to the top? Might it take hours? If so, how the hell could she maintain this pace? She would collapse well short of the top and then Caleb would be on her and even if she managed to stop him, Victor would be close behind.
She couldn’t think about that. Those were the worries of her cynical voice, which had gone quiet for once in her life. That’s because it doesn’t need to say anything, she thought. You know you’re fucked.
She wouldn’t accept that. No. She would not surrender. Not fall at the hands of two deranged men. Cancer had taken her mother but she had fought to the terrible end. She had, several weeks before that day of final gasps that dragged out interminably told Mercy that she would keep fighting. This cancer isn’t going to get the best of me, she said. I’m going to show it how tough a bitch I can be.
Mercy had fought tears when her mother said that to her but the memory now was like a glorious pre-game speech from a coach who truly believed that if the team took the field with all the confidence of winners there was no way they could leave it as anything but.
How tough a bitch can I be? Mercy wondered.
Grinding her teeth against the pain radiating from below her waist and still throwing herself up this damn mountain, Mercy felt the hard strength of complete confidence empower her.
“Tough as you want,” she said.
FORTY-ONE
Victor’s fingers hurt like hell. His balls had calmed from raging pain to a dull, almost detached sensation of numbed hurt, but the two fingers Mercy had bit throbbed like they were engorged to the size of plump diner sausages. Luckily they were the first two fingers on his left hand. He could make do without them. He could make do without the whole hand if necessary, but the pain was impressive. He had suffered many indignities of pain throughout his life but in only a few seconds, that bitch had trumped them all with a simple bite. The pain had been too great to carry both the flashlight and the knife. The blade with the carefully polished wooden handle joined the other blades along his belt.
Walking up the path at a quick, though not frantic, pace, Victor dared to shine the light on his injured hand. The fingers were swollen like they had been injected with some kind of filling that stretched the skin to the breaking point. His knuckles were faded creases in tubes of flesh and would not bend no matter how hard he strained. As if the joints had fused together.
Her teeth had broken through the skin just beneath the middle knuckles and ripped the flesh into a jagged, bleeding mess. The bones shone impossibly white against the fresh blood. If he wanted, Victor might be able to slide the flesh right off the bones as easily as removing a glove.
Fucking bitch. Before he sliced her throat, he would cut off all her fingers. Stuff them in her mouth and up her broken nose. Then he’d piss on her. Maybe even rape her again before finally destroying her.
He stopped. Caleb was screaming up ahead. His yells rolled through the quiet night with greater and greater insanity as if the trees were coming alive and hollering for blood. Victor could not let himself become another shouting madman. He had to remain calm, keep his crazed fantasies in check. Mercy had been clever and determined enough to escape into the woods and if let rage boil his mind, she might gain the upper hand once more. That once more might be all it would take.
The name of the game was calm, not crazy. She was probably launching herself up the mountain as fast as she could. She’d run out of steam pretty quickly. The mountain’s summit was a fair distance off with many steep sections that required patience to scale. She was not going to make it very far.
Even if she stopped at the cutout overlooking the town below, there was still nowhere to hide. The scenic lookout was a three-sided cliff with jagged rocks marking the drop all the way to the bottom.
He knew this place and she was just a stupid woman.
Victor took several deep breaths and continued up the mountain.
FORTY-TWO
Even tough bitches felt pain and that pain knew no bounds. The agony in her crotch had been the lead horse in the race of pain but her thighs were gaining on that horse and now her nose, a long-trailing contender, was galloping harder and harder, vying for the coveted lead position and right along with it was the race-fatigued head pain, always a participant, seldom a winner’s circle celebrant.
Every breath she dared take through her nose lit her nostrils on fire and that burning flared through her head as if electric shocks were zipping across the surface of her brain. She grunted against these shocks and screamed strength into her arm muscles to keep grabbing the trees but those muscles were burning and shaking and deteriorating to Jell-O. On top of it all, finally here came the misery of her poor feet. A big toe broken against a rock. A deep gash through the sole of her foot that could have been a giant carving knife laid as a trap.
Maybe Victor had set up traps. What if she was headed right where he wanted her to go? What if she made it all the way to the top of this mountain only to fall into some pit he had dug or step right into a bear trap? She would have to gnaw off her own foot.
That image released a flutter of cackles.
Now, you sound mad, she thought. Mad woman Mercy.
She could be a superhero like Wonder Woman only slightly crazed and out to castrate every male in the world. She’d wear a red cape and her weapon of choice would be a giant pair of gardening shears.
More laughter and her muscles nearly gave out in collective capitulation. No, no, no. She had to keep her wits and find that strength buried deep within her. She had to make it to the top of this fucking mountain and once there she could . . . could what?
“Chop some fucking balls,” she said and that did it.
As a child she had loved laughing so hard at jokes that the laughter constricted her breathing and pain radiated through her lungs with intense pleasure. She’d fall into those fits at some joke and then forget why she was laughing but her emphatic tear-inducing peals of joy were self-propagating and she could laugh at nothing but her own laughter for several minutes before her lungs insisted that they needed air. In such throes, she was helpless, vulnerable.
When new cackles morphed into all-out laughter, she did not reminisce on her hilarious laughing fits of childhood with fondness but focused on the vulnerability it presented and that brought fear. Tough bitches didn’t laugh. Tough bitches didn’t let themselves be vulnerable. Yet, somehow, the intense certainty that Caleb was going to jump out of the darkness and stomp her head into the ground like it was a watermelon only made her laugh harder.