The stick felt much lighter now without its other half, but it was still heavy enough to do some damage. She hit him once, twice—three times in the side of the head, and each time chunks of the branch broke free. She couldn’t have landed a fourth blow even if she had wanted to because by then the branch had literally fallen apart in her hand like a brittle piece of candy until she was just holding onto a piece of twig.
Blood was pouring down the side of his face, and she swore it only made him look more primal. Which she thought was ironic; she had never looked at him as a man but always as a beast that needed to be put down. That was how she had approached this mission, how she knew she could pull the trigger when the time came—
Trigger.
Gun.
Where’s the Glock?
Something wet landed on her cheek, and Allie almost threw up. It was Beckard’s blood, pouring down in thick rivulets from the gash along his temple and onto her. Some had streamed around his left eye socket and pooled there, making his eye look bloodshot. It was a sight to behold — one side perfectly normal while the other was fiery red, like something you’d see on the face of a demon from the pits of hell.
Allie was trying to fight through the revulsion of being bathed in Beckard’s blood when a streak of sunlight glinted off the sharp blade of a knife. He had pulled out the knife along his hip and was raising it over his head and was grinning down at her like a wild animal, blood running along the side of his face to his jawline, then drip-drip-dripping onto her.
“You wanna know what Carmen said before I killed her?” he asked, though every word came out sounding more like pained grunts. “She begged me not to do it. She cried and cried and cried. I got so tired of it I cut her throat just to shut her the hell up!”
She was waiting for it. Gathering her strength and loosening up her body. Her arms were flat on the ground, not fighting him. If he noticed that she wasn’t resisting his much heavier body as it pinned her, he didn’t show it.
Then again, she wasn’t sure if he was aware of anything at the moment but his own clearly maniacal emotions. He certainly hadn’t recognized that his entire right hand had begun bleeding again, that the white gauze was getting redder by the second. Was he even remotely aware that he was losing an obscene amount of blood, so much that he could actually bleed to death out here?
She stopped thinking about him and thought of Carmen instead.
Ten years of research, little sister. Six years of training and three years of getting ready for this one single moment.
This is for you, Carmen.
God help me if I time it wrong.
He plunged the knife down, aiming it straight for her neck. Just like she knew he would, because Beckard always went for the neck. All those grisly crime scene photos from his earlier years, and then later when he tried to hide his pattern, but they were there if you knew where to look, and she knew where to look.
The killing blow always goes to the neck!
She jerked her relaxed body to the right, twisting her torso at the same instant. The knife flashed by a split second later and sank into the ground, just barely half an inch from her neck. He had driven the blade down with such force that it kept going and didn’t stop until the guard thumped! against the floor of the woods.
Allie didn’t give him time to adjust, to pull the knife out. She balled her right hand into a fist and swung at his face, aiming for the spot along his temple where he was bleeding profusely. He had bent slightly over her body, his forward momentum carrying him so much closer to her that she didn’t even have to rise from the ground to make contact.
She felt the crunch of her knuckles slamming home against the side of his face. A thick wad of blood sprayed the area and splashed her at the same time. She flinched, blinked out the blood that had splattered her eyes, and refocused on her target through her suddenly red-tinted vision.
Again! Again!
She ignored the warm sensation of (his) blood on her face and hit him again, and again, and again, all while he was still trying to pull the knife out of the ground. He was grimacing with the pain — or was that confusion on his face? Did he suddenly understand what was happening now? That although he was on top of her and he was bigger and stronger, that he was no longer in charge? That she was? That soon—
The fifth time she smashed her fist into the side of his face, he finally relented and toppled off her like some kind of sleeping bear, unable to remain upright any longer.
Allie didn’t wait, didn’t hesitate, didn’t spend a precious second or two wondering if he was hurt enough that he would stay down. She broke into motion, rolling to her right, and didn’t stop until she was winded and pain throbbed from her side where her broken ribs reminded her they still needed medical attention.
She scrambled up to her knees and looked for the gun. Beckard’s gun.
Where the hell did it go? If it had fallen into one of the bushes, she was out of luck. There was no way she was going to find it in all of this green—
There!
It was fifteen feet away from her and five feet behind Beckard. Except Beckard was too busy pushing himself up from the earth, dripping blood from one entire half of his face, to know what was back there. He was a truly sorry sight, and she might have actually felt some sympathy for him if the last ten years of her life hadn’t been devoted to ending his miserable existence.
She ran for the gun.
He was still trying desperately to pull the knife out of the ground when he looked up and saw her running toward him. More than that, he saw where her eyes were looking, and he turned around, saw the gun, and gave up on the knife. He dived for the Glock, stretching out with his bloodied right hand with an almost guttural grunt.
She was still three feet away when he wrapped his fingers around the gun—
No, no, no!
She was moving on pure instinct when she veered off target at the last second and turned slightly to her left just before launching her body forward again, but this time feetfirst. She aimed for the biggest target — his chest — and slammed both shoes into it with everything she had.
He was swinging the Glock around when she caught him with both flying feet and sent him reeling back to the ground. She was hoping she could jar the gun loose, but Beckard somehow clung onto it even as he fell. She landed back down to earth on her ass and back, her body vibrating from head to toe from the impact. She wanted to scream out but couldn’t manage that much. The pain from her broken ribs was excruciating, and she wondered if that little stunt hurt her more than it did him.
Beckard was on his back and sitting up slowly. So she had managed to hurt him after all, though not enough to make him give up the gun. What was it going to take to put this monster down? The gun still clutched in his fist, she thought, might go a long way in achieving that end. Except the semiautomatic was in his hand and not hers, which was a big problem.
He turned his head and grinned at her through a mask of his own blood. She stared back at him because there was no point in moving anyway. He had her. The gun in his right hand was pointed across his chest and right at her from five feet away. Just getting up and running would have taken two, maybe three seconds. She had less than one at the moment.