And here it was, that thing she’d been missing for so long.
The hunger.
The need.
It was glorious.
And, for a time, it allowed her to forget the things that troubled her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Are we gonna kill this fucker or not?”
Dream didn’t reply to Marcy’s question right away.
She had two fingers wedged between slats of a window blind and was peering through the small opening at the motel parking lot. The place was a moldy dump on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio. They’d been holed up here for two days, lying low after a robbery gone bad in Cleveland. A cop was dead and surveillance video of the crime had made the national news. Some genius with the FBI had connected the dots, linking the bloody convenience store holdup with a string of other brazen crimes, including the murder of a young girl at Niagara Falls and a mass murder at a New England farmhouse. The common denominator being a group of young women traveling together, three whites and one black.
The female gang angle made the story a sexy one and thus a natural for the chattering talking heads on the twenty-four-hour news networks. But the whole thing really blew up when Dream was identified from her appearance in the surveillance tape. Now the reportage was virtually non-stop, and Dream found herself wishing for a major ter rorist strike or something, anything to divert the media’s attention in another direction.
The parking lot was somewhere just shy of half-full. Most of the cars she could see were old and in shabby condition. A nearby Caddy sported a leopard-print steering-wheel cover. A pair of fuzzy dice dangled from the tilted rearview mirror of a Plymouth Duster. The Starlite Inn did not attract an upwardly mobile class of clientele. But that didn’t bother Dream. Among other things, it meant their old Dodge van didn’t look out of place.
She turned away from the window and looked at the balding, middle-aged man cuffed to the headboard of the queen-sized bed. Blood leaked from his nose and trickled over the strip of duct tape covering his mouth. He wore rumpled black slacks and a blue polo shirt that was at least a size too small. His bloated belly stretched the fabric of the shirt and made him look pregnant. Marcy was pointing her Glock at his head. Two nights ago a bullet fired from the same gun had ended the life of a Cleveland officer on routine patrol. It was an ugly weapon. A brutal, merciless thing. And the sight of it pointed at another likely victim made Dream’s stomach churn.
Despite everything, it was still hard to deal with all this killing.
But it was getting easier. Some. And that was maybe the worst thing of all.
She sighed. “You can’t shoot him. Too much noise.”
Alicia cackled. “Ooh, this should be good.” She sat at a little table at the far side of the room. She aimed a remote control at the television and hit the mute button. She turned in her seat to get a better view of the bed. “So what’s it gonna be, Dream? Gonna reach inside his brain, make the motherfucker hemorrhage?”
A toilet flushed and Ellen returned from the bathroom. “No, that’s boring. Make his head explode, like that dude in Scanners.”
Marcy laughed. “That would rock.”
Ellen’s eyes were wide and she was blinking rapidly. She kept licking her lips and wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. Snot dripped from her nose and Dream could see little white specks above her upper lip. Marcy was just as twitchy. The two had spent much of the evening snorting the cuffed man’s cocaine off the back of a Gideon Bible. The stuff had turned up during a search of his belongings, several white Baggies hidden in the lining of a scuffed and dented old suitcase. Turned out the guy was some low-level middleman in the drug trade, information he’d coughed up after a pistol-whipping from Marcy.
Dream sat at the edge of the bed and looked the man in the eye. A muffled whimper issued from beneath the frayed edges of the duct tape. She’d given him a thrashing earlier in the evening, back in those first moments following their invasion of his room. He’d opened his door to step out for some reason. And the moment the door was open Dream and her companions swarmed out of the van and bludgeoned their way into the room. He’d been full of bluster at first, hurling threats and a barrage of sexist epithets. So Dream had been rough with him, surprising him with her strength. She remembered the feel of his nose breaking beneath the force of her fist. She’d pulled the punch. Otherwise the man’s head would’ve come right off his shoulders. She was that strong now. And getting stronger all the time, the power inside her growing by leaps and bounds every day. And full of a fury that had nothing to do with the man’s apparent misogyny. It was only an extension of the darkness that had taken root in her soul, a sickness of the spirit she could only assuage with violence.
Dream pinched the man’s nostrils shut and watched his eyes go wide. He thrashed and managed to dislodge her fingers, sucking in air through the narrow passages. Dream climbed up on the bed and straddled him. Marcy let out a whoop that made her sound like a drunken sorority girl at a kegger.
Ellen dropped to her knees at the side of the bed.“Do it.” Her hands were clasped in a way that was almost prayerful. “Suffocate the pig.”
Dream ignored it all as the man continued to buck beneath her. Her body rolled with the motion of his struggles. She thought of the time she’d ridden a mechanical bull in a bar in Florida. That had been fun. So was this, in a deeply twisted way. There was something distinctly sexual about it, in fact. She hadn’t been with a man in months. A mad impulse to rip the fat man’s pants off and suck his cock to hardness flashed through her. She pictured herself riding the man’s dick and felt a dampness between her legs. She could kill him while he was still inside her, rip his throat out with her bare hands.
Then Ellen’s breathy whisper: “Hey…this is kind of…hot.”
The words broke the spell. Dream would not sate her needs with this man. He wasn’t worthy. And she wasn’t quite debased enough to relish the notion of playing the starring role in a live sex act for her friends. Not yet. So she exerted her strength and pinned the man firmly to the bed. He still thrashed with all his might. Useless. Dream felt that darkness rise inside her again, that sickness aching to feed. She raised her fists and brought them crashing down on his face. She felt bones and cartilage splinter and yield beneath her hands. His head whipped side to side, the motion a blur, like a punching bag in a gym. His face was a bloody, pulpy mess by the time she broke off the beating.
But he was still alive.
Still breathing.
A blood-red snot bubble welled from the end of a crushed nostril and popped. Dream stared at the man’s ruined face and felt the same numb disconnect she always experienced in the immediate aftermath of her violent outbursts. The pillow cushioning the man’s head was flecked with blood. More dark red droplets dotted the backs of his flabby arms. His hands had gone limp, the metal handcuff bracelets having slid down to a spot directly behind the crown of his skull. Looking at him triggered the same muted repulsion she sometimes felt when watching an especially gruesome horror flick. Then the numbness was gone, completely, and she owned this again, this twisted reality that was sicker by far than any cheap bit of celluloid exploitation.
Now you finish it, she thought. This guy’s an asshole, but he’s a human being. End his suffering.
The strip of duct tape had loosened during the beating. She pressed it down and pinched the man’s nostrils shut again. It didn’t take long. He regained consciousness for a brief moment. His hands jerked once against the brass headboard slats. Then he went still. His eyes glazed over and he was gone.