One thing she learned about herself was that she had a vast reservoir of endurance. Coach Phillips, who taught Social Studies to the low-functioning students, told her early on that running cross country was about unleashing the potential of the human body. Her first run, Mercy lasted a mere fifteen minutes before she had to stop. Phillips knelt next to her on the path in the middle of the woods behind the school and she thought he was going to tell her that maybe track wasn’t for her, but he’d said something else instead. Something that meant a whole hell of a lot to her now.
You’re only beaten, he said, if you surrender. This is a sport of the mind as much as the body. If you can focus on the finish line, you can push yourself to it.
His motivation was cliche and corny but it had worked. She had gotten up and run another twenty minutes before hitting the fabled wall. When she walked across the finish line, which was a stick the kids had jammed into the ground, she was exhausted and shaking all over but she was proud. And determined.
A month later, she was finishing the runs in above-average times. She never improved her speed much more than that, but her endurance kept getting better. She could run and run and run. When races ended where other kids collapsed or even vomited, she would still be jogging in place, asking Phillips if she could run it again, only half joking. She powered through violent cramps in her sides and overcame the pain in her ankle when she twisted it halfway through a competition.
You’re not a speed racer, Phillips told her after one race, but you are a marathon runner. Might not get you in the Olympics, but it may come in handy when you really need it.
Mercy stopped running that summer when her mother received the first diagnosis. God, that was so long ago. The cancer battle could be swift or it could be protracted. Her mother had waged a war. She knew she should run, knew it would help her deal with the stress, but she could never find the energy. Running felt too much like running away and she couldn’t do that. She’d tried a few brief runs during college but it never really came back to her.
If you don’t keep the endurance strong, Phillips warned her after she quit, you’ll lose it.
If only Phillips could see her now. Body aflame with pain, blood puddles dried on her shirt, bare feet mangled and torn as if they had been passed through a shredder, and still she ran. If ever there was a time for her inner marathon runner to strut her stuff it was right now. Endurance was the name of the game and anything but first place meant death.
Like when she was in the zone back in high school, Mercy ran with a very clear image of the finish line in her mind. She saw her father’s car perfectly. The slightly deflated front right tire that Dad pumped back up every week or so while commenting that he had to get new tires one of these days. The multiple gashes on the rear passenger door like grooves from a giant claw that Mercy had added to the car the first time she ever tried to back it into the garage. Finally, the vintage license plate with the tiny Statue of Liberty on it that he wasn’t legally supposed to have anymore but cops had never pulled him over for it.
She saw the car as well as if it were a high-resolution digital photo. She could even see the way the gravel crested in front of each of the tires like little mountains. And the way shadows contorted over the surface of the boulders set around the parking lot that, on a different day, children would use for an improvised playground.
She even remembered the other car in the lot: a beater relic from the eighties that--
That Caleb had been driving. She had even thought he was attractive with his broad shoulders, thought maybe they’d meet up somewhere on the mountain.
Good thinking, Mercy.
With any luck, he was getting his eyes pecked out right now.
Her feet slipped down the face of a rock that long ago split in half and she had to grope at the trees to stay on her feet. The small outcropping where she had stopped with her father earlier (what felt like much, much earlier) was around her somewhere. She thought. Or she might have passed it. Or it might still be ahead.
“Focus,” she told herself.
The major threat, Coach Phillips told the team before a particularly grueling practice, is not physical strain. It is mental torment. If you let your mind wander, if you lose focus, so too will your body. Then it’s all over. When you run, you run.
She blocked out any thoughts of that outcropping and kept her concentration on the path ahead of her. She was running and that was all that mattered. That and the car waiting in the parking lot.
FIFTY-FIVE
Even without a flashlight, Victor saw the trees and all the debris on the ground in brilliant lucidity. He was becoming the best of his primal self. He moved so fast that for several feet at a time he wasn’t even touching the ground. That might only be an illusory byproduct of his speed and adrenaline, but he embraced the sensation. The universe wanted him to track her down, get her under his knife.
He found one of his many side trails and paused only the briefest of seconds before continuing down the mountain. This way was much riskier than the well-beaten trail thousands of people had traversed before him, but it was Victor’s destiny to forge those new paths, to carve out of this world what would become the New Way.
The ground slanted to keep his feet moving and branches propelled him forward with skeletal fingers on his back. He filled his lungs to capacity in mid-stride inhalations that were like injections of superhuman power that coursed through him as hot, pulsating energy.
He had felt like this once before. A few days after what would be his mother’s last visit to his bedroom, Victor went to her room in the middle of the night, walked to the edge of her bed, and stood there for a while watching her sleep before raising the carving knife high over his head where some faint light reflected off it for a moment, and then stabbed his mother thirteen times. He stabbed her in both breasts, in the throat, which geysered out blood like a busted water pipe, and in her crotch. Her eyes opened after the first hit but she didn’t make a noise until he pierced between her legs and when he did, she moaned the way she always did when she was on his thing and telling him what a good little boy he was. He pushed the knife as far inside her as he could and when he removed it, his hand and most of his forearm were soaked in blood and strands of internal tissue. She died with her eyes on him. She was no longer breathing but life resided still in those eyes. They shone through the darkness like ghost lights. He stabbed each of them and then went about the messy business of cleanup.
There were a million things he could do wrong but he he was content. No, he was much more than content: he was liberated and empowered. He wrapped her body in her bloody bed sheets and dragged her down to the garage. Even after he cleaned up the blood trail he made down the stairs, he knew there would still be microscopic traces of blood, perhaps something more substantial than mere invisible specs; there would be plenty for cops to find and use against him. Hell, after he finished chopping her body into foot-long pieces, the concrete garage floor was so stained that he would have to paint the floor to cover it and that subterfuge would be easily surmounted during an investigation. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to get caught. This is what the universe wanted. This was his destiny.
He was so assured that he would never be caught that he simply toted a garbage bag worth of severed body parts into the woods behind the house and scattered them as he sauntered on a three-hour hike. He made sure to mark the tree where he placed her decapitated head. Three weeks later, he tracked back into the woods but the head was gone. Some animal had carried it off. That made Victor smile. In fact, he found only a small section of bone, either from her arm or leg, that had been stripped clean of flesh. He kept it. It currently sat on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink.