Sylvia Kasikoff
Does it matter a whit how a person dies? Do you care whether you die in bed asleep, dreaming of verdant fields in Scotland, or plunged deep into the wetness of hot, full-tilt sex? If the coronary is relatively painless, what does it matter? Death takes you and you are a memory. Death has a way of sandpapering the circumstances of the death and the status of the decedent. If you die by being shot by an unknown perp who takes your heart there in a dark alley near West Erie and leaves your blood-drenched, mutilated corpse for the snapshot scrap-book of a crime photographer, is that somehow a worse death than a president succumbing to gunshot wounds while comatose on a blood-soaked emergency-ward gurney? The only difference is the latter pictures may get a wider circulation.
And what of the assassin or assassins unknown? You are scoped, with a Mannlicher-Carcano, a ridiculous mail-order carbine, a piece of dreck, and—just for argument's sake, let's say a second weapon. Cross fire. You're a dead man. Is this appropriately presidential, somehow, as opposed to the decedent with the missing organ? Probably not. We die a death. It doesn't seem to matter much how, or what, or why, or where—or even who. You can hope for a minimum of pain, a modicum of dignity, a maximum of privacy, and that's about the best you can do.
But then on the other hand, there are some deaths so ignominious and awful that we shudder at the nightmare suggestion of such an end. Some deaths seem designed to kill you again and again, taking you by inches, letting you contemplate the moment when life's flame winks out as you cringe in screaming, fearful terror. The woman in the field was about to die one of those deaths. Not the worst imaginable by any means, but a brutalizing shocker to someone pampered and protected and—like most of us—isolated from the cruelties and depredations of the street life.
At first it appeared that he had no dick, she thought to herself, irrationally, in the frightening perplexity of the moment. She thought "thing" not dick, but all the same. It wasn't enough that she was about to be raped and murdered and perhaps even tortured brutally by this hideous, waddling mastadon of a madman, this fat, stinking horror that had suddenly overturned her life, but to be assaulted by some prickless FREAK only added to her overwhelming nausea, terror, and discombobulation.
The good-looking, youngish, brunette, nude, flat on her back, terrorized to the point of paralysis, stared wide-eyed at the huge, gross figure that hovered above her as she lay there helpless on the rough blanket. He was enormously fat, a moving mound of flesh, and as he stood there slobbering over her, he did indeed appear to have no penis. He was the one they had built that Vietnam spike team around, the one called CHAINGANG.
Actually Daniel Bunkowski's genitalia was normal, perhaps even slightly larger than average, but his sex was covered by cascading rolls of fat that encircled his gut like ugly, rubbery truck tires.
"On your knees," he mumbled as he dug around in the lower of the fat rolls and produced the wet end of a pink cock which he held daintily between two fingers the size of big, steel cigars. "Suck that, bitch," he commanded.
She started to run from him, instinctively, just as she remembered that one of her hands was handcuffed to a device that was wired to a large tree nearby. They were near some farmer's fence row, on an army blanket that he'd thrown over some weeds at the edge of a wooded area near the road where she was now parked. If only she could somehow manage to get loose and make a run for it.
It had all happened in a heartbeat of nightmare reality. She came over the crest of hill on her way home from grocery shopping, doing maybe forty or forty-five in the Datsun, and the man was standing right there in the middle of the road all of a sudden, a great big man waving his arms, and she almost ran him down before she could get her vehicle to brake to a stop.
She smashed one of her expensively shod feet, almost standing on the brake pedal, the Datsun fishtailing along the gravel to a rubber-peeling stop.
She was so angry at first. He hadn't moved except to wave his arms, and she was running late anyway, and he had this look of great concern on his face as he kept yelling something she couldn't hear. Why doesn't he come around to the side? she thought.
"What?" She mouthed through the windshield. He appeared friendly somehow, and certainly not menacing despite his huge, bursiform appearance, and in fact stayed around in front of the vehicle as he continued to yell something to her, doing his usual complete and flawless little mini-job of method acting.
She had the window almost all the way down, still unable to hear what he was saying and she asked him loudly, "What? I still can't hear you."
"I'm sure sorry, ma'am," he was saying politely as he came waddling around by her side of the Datsun, "we've had a problem on down by the [something, it sounded like France Place] there." He spoke quickly, that deceptive took of great concern on his face, talking very fast as he came around the side and leaned down, and she was wondering if that road had washed out again when, as he was laying down his bland camouflage of conversation, speaking some gibberish to her, she felt herself immobilized as this hulking, giant presence froze her to the seat, reaching in and taking the ignition keys, switching off the engine as he did so, pressing her back, pulling on the hand brake, opening the door all in a smooth, practiced series of rapid hand movements.
"Listen," he rumbled as he reached for the seat adjustment below. "Listen to me very carefully and you won't be hurt or molested in any way. Listen—now," he admonished in a deep, rumbling, basso profundo, "don't scream or try to attract attention or I will hurt you. I do not wish to harm you or bother you in any way. Do you understand what I'm saying? Nod if you understand me." She nods like a trained Shetland.
"You must obey me or I will hurt you. Neither of us want this. First, I want you to push the seat back to the farthest position it will go. Now do it!" She is shaking so badly she can barely find the release and she jumps as she grabs his hand, which is covering it. He roughly shoves the seat back, slamming her with the impact like car-crash whiplash. Obviously he is just teaching her to obey his orders. "Very good. Now you will come with me and do exactly as I say. Follow me? Nod." She nods about twelve times.
In the few seconds it takes for him to look up and down the road and double-check the field beside the road he gives her a rumbling, terse set of instructions about following orders, not making a scene, all the usual things he says to a potential victim as they lock with fright. She is now nearing that fear-paralysis stage and he has other ideas for her so he snaps her out of it.
A paw closes about her thin wrist and encircles it like the jaws of a mighty, steel workbench vise. She is unceremoniously jerked out of the car and feels herself being transported through the air, dragged over into the road ditch where he retrieves a huge duffel bag.
The bag, one you or I couldn't even get off the ground, is lifted as you'd pick up a small stack of books. He grabs a blanket off the top of the duffel and hurls the big bag back into the ditch, and they are heading out across the nearby field, he is carrying her really, and her high heels touch ground only every fifth or sixth step.
"Smile," he commands her, and before it can register on her dazed brain she is snapped through the air like a helpless puppet. "Smile!" She plasters a ludicrous grimace across her face in compliance and they reach the near fence row.