Crossing the Line (17 page)

“I
am
still terrified,” Marcy said. “I don’t know if I could bash someone’s head in. I mean, I want to hurt these bastards, but I don’t know if I am capable. It’s against my nature, you know?”

“Fuck who we are and who we were before all of this started. When we get out of this cluster fuck we’ll go right back to being who we used to be. For right now, though, we’ve got to get out of this situation,” Anna said.

Marcy was silent for a moment and then she giggled. “There’s a song that says something like
I want to go to Heaven, but I don’t want to go right now
. I’m pretty sure I won’t have a problem fighting back tonight.”

“Okay, then it’s settled. We wait for them to open the doors, or slip up somehow, and then we catch them off guard.”

“And we bash their heads in,” Lynne said. She nodded her head. “We owe them a lot worse than a caved-in forehead.”

“Once we start fighting back we don’t stop until we’re sure the piece of shit isn’t getting back up,” Anna said. She clenched her broken piece of the gurney’s legs so tightl
y that her knuckles turned white
.

Marcy unfolde
d one hand and spit directly int
o her palm. “Shake on it.”

Lynne nodded and spit in her own palm. They shook ha
n
d
s
vigorously. Anna watched the exchange with disgust
. When they turned their open palms toward her she swallowed back the urge to puke and spit in her own palm. The sensation was enough to make her queasy. By the end of the night she was sure that something so small as a little spit wasn’t going to bother her anymore, though.

The women looked wild-eyed at the doors. Lynne stripped off her shirt and tore the sleeves off of the shoulders. She wrapped the fabric around her hands and pulled the shirt back over her head. After a moment’s consideration the others followed suit. Once their hands were protected they picked back up their weapons.

They sat crouched, staring at the doors. They had no idea how long it would take, but their minds were too absorbed in the ideas of revenge for any of them to care.

24

Clarence and Forester were growing impatient when the front door to the lake house opened and Brute emerged. He was carrying the lifeless corpses of two of the women. One of their heads had b
een blown half off at the neck
. The other looked as if she had been raped to death. Each corpse was thrown over one of his enormous shoulders. He set them down when he was a few feet away from the police officers.

“What the hell took you so long, Brute? That’s a bad dog!” Clarence asked.

“No kill…” Brute said. He brushed the hair from the tiny woman’s face and looked up at Clarence. “Brute no kill…”

“No shit, you didn’t kill any of the girls. And who the hell gave you permission to speak?” Forester said. He pulled his stun gun from his pocket and aimed it at Brute. “Who do you think you are?”

“Brute no kill…”

“Brute, you are being a very bad dog,” Clarence snapped.

Brute rose to his feet and looked at the police men. He snarled, all of his muscles flexing. He pulled the skull from his face and let it drop to the ground. “Brute no kill the girls…” he snarled. “You bad boy.”

Forester shot Brute directly in the throat with the stun gun. The big man did not seem to notice even as the one-million volts of electricity pumped into him. His muscles tightened and loosened, but nothing else came of the shot. His lips curled in a snarl as he pulled the darts out of his flesh and tossed them to the ground.

“Fucking dog has gone feral,” Forester said. He pulled his sidearm and fired a round without hesitation. The round tore through Brute’s shoulder. Blood sprayed from the wound, but he barely lost a step. The big man snarled as a second round hit him in the thigh.

Clarence reached for his gun, but was taken off guard by a blow to the side of his head. He stumbled back a step and turned to his attacker. Tracy lifted the enormous log over her head and brought it down between his eyes. His head bounced back off of the roof of the patrol car and the world went dark around him. The flesh on his forehead split open wide and blood ran down into his rolled back eyes.

Tracy did not stop the attack just because he fell to the ground unconscious. She brought the log down on the top of his head, cracking open his scalp. Blood sprayed
up the side of the cruiser. She swung as if going for a homerun and the side of his face caved in as his skull was smashed in.

Brute snarled as the third round hit him a few inch
es from where the first had torn
through his shoulder. He launched himself forward and grabbed the police officer around the throat. Forester’s breath caught in his throat as the huge hand wrapped around his esophagus. His eyes opened wide as he was lifted through the air.

Brute smashed him down onto the hood of the cruiser and the steel crumpled
around his broken frame.

Brute dragged the man from the crushed cruiser. Clarence wheezed and blood slipped from the corners of his mouth. He had no way of telling how many of his bones had shattered, but he knew the injuries were severe.

Brute pulled him through the gravel by the ankle and lifted him from the ground. He felt blood running quickly up into his mouth from whatever had been torn during the brutal body slam. There was a moment of confusion in which he thought he might survive, but then pain sounded in his gut. Brute shook his head from side to side, tearing the flesh over his stomach
. He howled with agony and tried to wiggle his way free.

The pain receded as Brute pulled his face away from the man’s belly. The next instant even more pain sounded in his midsection. He felt the flesh rip away as Brute’s sharp claws dug deep into the muscle.

“Brute no kill girls…” Brute snarled. His claws punched through the last layer of muscle and stabbed into Clarence’s innards. Brute ripped the intestines out of the hole and
twisted them around his hand. Brute released his hold on the man and pulled until the tissue snapped apart.

Tracy turned back to the gory mess that had become of Forester’s head. With a scream of satisfaction she bashed the man in the forehead six times.
His head bounced off of the cruiser again and again. After the skull collapsed completely the skin
tore away. By the time she relented there was nothing left of his face except for blood and gore.

A huge hand fell on her shoulder. She turned around quickly and the second hand grabbed the log. Terror filled her when she looked up at the enormous beast. His lips closed, covering his sharpened teeth. The fury seemed to completely vanish from his face.

“Brute no hurt…” he said.

“Do you know where they took my friends?” Tracy asked.

Brute nodded.

“Show me.”

Tracy pushed aside the corpse and opened the passenger door. Brute cocked his head to the side and frowned. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re friends.”

Brute shook his head. He patted his hand on his chest. “You dog…”

“Yes, we’re dogs. Will you show me where
my friends are?”

Brute nodded his head. He climbed into the car. He didn’t seem to notice that the car sank down so far that it nearly scraped the curb.

25

Ivy’s unease reached an all new level when Aaron pulled off the road and turned off the SUV’s engine. He tapped at the steering wheel a dozen times, his jaw clenching visibly. When he turned to speak to her she let out a small yelp of fear involuntarily.

“Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I was wondering if I confide in you. It won’t take but a couple of minutes, if that’s okay.”

“Sure, I don’t see why not,” Ivy said. She hoped her unease wasn’t apparent in her voice.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-three, almost twenty-four.”

“Goddamn. I knew it! I’ve been doing this same shit for longer than you’ve been alive. How terrible is that? This same routine over and over again since before you were born. If that doesn’t make me a loser, what does?”

“I don’t think it makes you a loser. I think it proves you like your job. You seem pretty good at it, too.”

Aaron smirked at her. “You’re a terrible fucking liar, Ivy. You are just another one of the rich people that come up here and rent the lake house. You think all of us locals are retarded inbreds, don’t you? Well, let me tell you something, little girl, I wasn’t born in this town, I moved here when Deloris offered me the job. And at first I thought I was going to be working as a legitimate police officer, I really did. It wasn’t until she spelled it all out for me that I realized why she sought me.”

Aaron ran a hand through his hair and shook his head. “I should have known that there wasn’t any respectable police force that would hire me after what the LAPD put on my record. That little shit deserved what was coming to him, and I wasn’t the only one that did something to him, but I was the one that took the fall.
But if you can’t trust your own aunt, who can you trust?
”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Aaron.”

“I know that, Ivy. I’m not a fucking retard, remember? I know you’re sitting there thinking that you’re in a cluster fuck of a situation with a whacked out cop talking like a lunatic. And in reality, that’s pretty much exactly what’s going on.”

Aaron slammed his hand on the steering wheel hard enough to make the SUV rock. He glared over at Ivy, pure hatred in his eyes.

“To be honest with you as soon as Deloris told me that we’d be knocking off rich little cunts like you I was okay with the idea. If it wasn’t for the privileged that kid we beat to death would have never gotten any of us in trouble. He was a no good drug dealer, even if his parents were real estate wizards. And he fucking shot a cop. You don’t shoot a cop and get away with it.”

Ivy couldn’t even speak. His eyes were wild. His hands were clenched tightly. He was ready to attack her and she knew it. She glanced over at the shotgun. Aaron followed her eyes and smiled.

“I would want to kill me, too. But you don’t even know the half of what I’ve done here. It was my idea to start using the dogs. It was an easy decision, really. We don’t have to get our hands dirty, but we reap all the rewards. And, to be completely honest, I’d always wanted to see what would happen if you raised a person as a dog. And do you know what? It works perfectly. Treat them like dogs, beat them like dogs, teach them like dogs, and people will become dogs.
”

Aaron unclenched his fists and wiped his eyes with his palms.

“Deloris acts as if this whole fucking thing was her plan. She thinks she can sit on her throne and command us as if we were dogs, too. But do I look like a fucking dog to you, Ivy?”

“No,” she said. She found herself shrinking against the passenger door. She wished she could vanish. She wanted nothing more than to disappear before anything else could happen to her. Her mind was already wild with the memories of what had happened on the raft and the sight of her friends being loaded into the vans. She couldn’t take much more suffering before she simply broke. She could feel it, a great weakening in the fibers of her sanity. Just looking at the madman posing as a police officer made her want to tear the eyes from her head. She wanted to scream, to kick at the lunatic, and to laugh. Laughing seemed like the most logical of all of her impulses. Surely a situation like this was impossible. There was no way that an educated, strong willed young woman could end up in this big of a mess.

“I should
have put a bullet in that bitch’
s head a long time ago,” Aaron said. “I don’t know why I continue to let her treat me like a fool. It doesn’t make any sense. She won’t even let me fuck the girls that we kill. How is that fair? If we’re going to kill them anyway why can’t I get a piece of ass?”

Aaron lit a cigarette and set the Zippo down on the dash board. “She only lets me fuck the bitches. They stink, goddamn it. I mean, a couple of them were cute when we first picked them up, but they’ve been living in the kennels so long they smell like dogs.”

“What—what are you going to do to me?”

“Well, that depends, really. If I take you back up to the house Deloris is going to have me feed you to the dogs with your friends. It’s just the natural order of things around here, you know? But I was kind of thinking that I would take you off into the forest and get me a little piece of that tight pussy of yours and then shoot you in the face.”

“Jesus Christ, is every man on this planet a fucking pervert?” Ivy snapped. She hadn’t expected the words to come out as easily as they had, but now that she said them there was no going back and she knew it. She decided she would finish her thought and deal with the consequences. He had already said that one way or the other she was as good as dead. It wasn’t like her to go down without some kind of fight.

“First it was all those drugged up frat boys, now it’s some old fuck in a police uniform. When people call you a pig they are hitting the nail right on the head, aren’t they? You want me to feel sorry for you or something, Aaron? You’re nothing but a sniveling little shitbag killer that can’t even fuck without getting permission from
Deloris
, whoever the fuck that is. You want my sympathy? Pull out your dick, I bet it’s so small I won’t be able to help feeling just a little sorry for you.”