Crossing the Line (18 page)

Aaron reached over and slapped her across the face hard. Her head bounced off the side of the dash board. She could taste blood in her mouth from where her teeth had dug into her cheek. And despite the pain, despite the ringing in her ears, she suddenly felt much more empowered than she had a moment before. The rage and pain in her mind caused the reservoir of sanity to finally run dry. Her mind shifted from that of a logical, educated woman to that of a pinned animal.

She lashed out in a flurry of limbs. Her manicured nails clawed at Aaron’s face, knocking the cigarette from his mouth down into his lap. A foot caught him in the jaw, driving his head back against the shatterproof glass of his driver’s window. The other foot struck him in the nose, bending the cartilage to the side. She crawled up into his lap and grabbed hold of his ears, pulling at them wickedly.

Aaron punched her as hard as he could, aiming for her left side and instead striking her in her bony hip. She cried out in pain and shot her head forward. Blinding pain raced into Aaron’s mind as her teeth sank into either of his nostrils. The well maintained teeth sank deep into the twisted cartilage of his nose. Ivy shook her head from side to side savagely, howling around her mouthful of nose. Blood sprayed and painted his cheeks. He punched at her again, this time his knuckles struck her in the breast.

She jerked back, her teeth tore away most of the flesh of his nose and two of her nails broke off in between his right ear and his skull. Without missing a beat she elbowed him in the remains of his nose.
The first strike made his mind fog over, the next knocked him unconscious. Ivy spat the remains of his nose out of her blood-filled mouth. She reached down and unclasped his gun holster.

Aaron’s senses came back when he heard the
click
of the round being chambered. He opened his watering eyes and looked down the barrel of the gun. Ivy flipped the safety off and screamed wildly as she pulled the trigger. Aaron’s face came apart beneath his left eye. The flesh caught fire where the bullet exited from the back of his head. The smell of burning hair hung thick in the confines of the SUV.

Ivy pulled the trigger again. The semi-automatic pistol fired another round. The slug tore through the center of Aaron’s forehead. The frantic young woman was only slightly aware of the splatter of brains that landed in the backseat of the vehicle with each shot. She continued to pull the trigger until the gun went empty and even then relished the sound of the dry
clank
once the ringing in her ears subsided.

When she was finished with her close-range execution Aaron’s face looked like a model made of Play Dough by a toddler. Blue, white, peach and red all smooshed together
and dripping down on his unmoving chest.

Ivy climbed back over into the passenger seat and let the hot pistol fall to the floorboard. She sat and stared out the windshield, ignoring the absence of remorse in her mind. She told herself that she had no reason to feel guilty any time any nagging rose from her former, more civilized half.

After managing to gather her wits some she pulled the keys from the ignition and unlocked the glove box. Inside she found another loaded clip for the pistol and a box of shells for the shotgun. She pulled the ammunition out and slid the fresh clip into the gun. After unlocking the shotgun and moving it out of its harness she filled it with buck shot. She left the gun leaned against the dashboard, the hilt on the floorboard.

She unlocked her door and limped around the SUV. Her assault on Aaron had hurt the soles of her feet, which were already tender from her trek up the driveway. She leaned against the hood of the vehicle, using it as support as she made her way to the driver’s door. She pulled it open and lost her balance. She fell on her butt and the blanket fell away from her naked body. A gale of tears spilled from her eyes as she used the open door to pull herself back to her pained feet. She held her breath as she reached over the corpse and unhooked his seatbelt.

She picked back up the blanket and threw it over her shoulder as she limped back around to the open passenger door. She closed the door and leaned against it. She pressed her feet against Aaron’s side and pushed with all of her might. Using the door as leverage she managed to cause the body to topple over out of the vehicle. One of his ankles caught and the leg remained in the car even as his head bounced off of the asphalt.

She climbed over to the driver’s seat and pushed the leg out of the vehicle with a howl of fury. After the corpse had been fully ejected she picked up the keys from the floorboard of the truck and slid them into the ignition. The vehicle started without hesitation. Ivy slid the car into the gear and pulled out onto the road, heading in the direction that Aaron had been driving.

26

Otto and Collin shifted uncomfortably under Deloris’s gaze. They were sitting in the uncomfortable chairs that she reserved for situations such as this. Her employees thought of them as the interrogation chairs. They were made of wicker, but not professionally. In many places the woven pieces dug into their flesh uncomfortably.

Deloris sat in her wheelchair and wheezed around the breathing tube that hung over her ears and dove into her nose. Her enormous girth seemed to make the chair buckle at the bottom. Her floral nightgown came down to just beneath the bulges that were her knees. Her ankles had been completely swallowed by folds of fat. Her toe nails were perhaps the scariest part of her appearance, they had been allowed to continue to grow to the point that now they curled and were piss yellow.

“So Greg and Car
ey are working on sound proofing the van?” she said.

“They oughta be done by now,” Otto said.

“Good, they always w
ere good boys,” Deloris coughed and
pull
ed
a stained dish towel from her lap to catch the tar colored phlegm and burst out from between her lips. After the spiel she took a hit off of her meth pipe and leaned back heavily in the chair.

“Why w
ould Brute go feral?” she asked. The question hung in the air as a series of heavy grunted syllables. “What happened yesterday?”

“He was trying to get at the treats and Aaron put a hurting on him. It wasn’t anything unusual really. He used the Louisville Slugger and gave him a few whacks. When he was done Brute lashed out at him, though. If we weren’t there he probably would’ve killed him. So we put him in the pit for the day. He seemed fine this morning when we let him out.”

Deloris glared at Collin. Her eyes were so pale of blue that they almost didn’t look like they had irises at all. She closed her hands in tight fists on the arms of the chair and shook her head. “You’re not telling me something! If you want to keep your goddamn job you’re going to start talking!”

“Honest, Deloris. That’s what Aaron told me. He said he found Brute trying to get into the treats and gave him a whooping.”

“You mean to tell me our oldest dog just got angry over a little beating? I don’t buy that for a minute. Brute’s always been a good dog.”

“He’s been acting weird for the last couple of seasons, Deloris. I mean, what’s up with the skulls? We didn’t train him to do that shit. He’s been acting on his own accord.”

Deloris looked at Otto and then back at Collin. “Otto, I think it’s about time we find out what really happened, don’t you?”

Otto nodded his head. He got to his feet and walked across the big room, dodging around the antique furniture and the occasional wadded up dish towel full of phlegm. Collin shifted in the chair and stared at Deloris with terror in his eyes.

“I swear to you, Deloris, I don’t know anything more. If you want to know what happened you should be asking Aaron. I was only there at the tail end of the ordeal.”

“I don’t believe a word you say, Collin. I know you and Aaron have been going out and finding whores on your days off. How do you think that makes me feel, huh? I’ve given you a good job, I feed you, I put a roof over your damn head, and you’re going to repay me by fucking townie whores?”

“I’m sorry about that, Deloris. It’s just the bitches are starting to stink. I think the dogs have been getting at them. I don’t want to put my dick somewhere that one of those mongrels have been. It’s disgusting.”

“You knew the rules before you took on your position,” Deloris said. She coughed again, this time so violently that the nose piece fell out of her nostrils. After wiping the snot from her triple chin and taking another long hit off her pipe she set the dope on the coffee table next to her chair.

“Do you have any idea why this operation has been a success for so long? It’s sure as hell not because of you or that moron Aaron. It’s because when we follow the rules of my house things go as planned. Now we’ve got survivors sitting out there in the garage because you thought you were smart. I want to know what you did to my dog!”

Collin was so intimidated by Deloris that he didn’t notice Otto coming up behind him. Otto grabbed a handful of his hair and held him against the chair as he kicked and flailed his arms. Otto wrapped the leather straps around his torso, pinning him to the chair. He pulled Collin’s head back and put the helmet on next. The leather skull cap had chains that were used to tie the cap to the leather straps on the chair. Next came the horse blinder, making it so Collin was forced to stare directly at Deloris.

Deloris sprinkled more meth onto the burnt tin foil and hummed absently as Collin’s legs were chained together. She heated the dope up and inhaled its intoxicating smoke while Otto used a skinning knife to cut away Collin’s pants.

Once Collin was ready to be properly questioned Deloris snorted a healthy pinch of meth and wiped her nose with the filthy dish towel. She looked at the man and for a moment there actually seemed to be compassion in her eerie eyes.

“Tell me what happened yesterday.”

“I already told you.”

Deloris nodded at Otto and he drove the skinning knife’s tip between the muscle of Collin’s lower leg and the bone. Collin howled in agony and thrashed at his bindings. Otto’s expertise made the removal of the flesh seem easy. Within a minute Collin’s lower leg was devoid of meat or muscle from the back of his knee to his ankle.

“Tell me the truth or you’re going to be dog food, Collin,” Deloris said.

“It was Aaron’s idea! Hell, I didn’t even know what was going to happen until it was too late.”

“No excuses, just tell me what happened.”

“We found this girl at the truck stop right off the interstate. She was doped up on something, I don’t know what. We brought her back here because she said she was down to give us a little pussy for some meth and pills. Aaron was fucking her good, right out by the dog pins. He stuck it in her ass and she started freaking out bad. She was screaming really loud and all of the dogs just got real riled up by the whole thing.”

Otto idly played with the knife while he listened to the story. He knew at some point Collin would make the mistake of lying again and he could continue his fun. Otto had only been working with the company for a little over two years, but he had quickly become Deloris’s favorite. He had a dark side to him that reminded her of her late husband.

“I told Aaron to shut the bitch up. I didn’t want her waking everybody up before I got a turn at her, you know? And besides, if you’re going to be a whore and fuck a stranger you ain’t really got the right to say no to a little butt fucking. So Aaron did something really stupid then. He dragged her ass right over to the kennel and fucked her against the fence. She was crying really loud and freaking out about the dogs, you know? Then Brute came out and was looking at her all weird, not like he normally looks at people. She asked him for help, told him she was pregnant or some shit like that.

“And so he started growling at Aaron and told him to stop.
He said something about not killing anymore girls.
Well that just pissed Aaron off so he cut her throat. He was still, you know, doing his thing. I don’t know what bothered him so much about it, but Brute came unglued. He jumped the fence and went right for Aaron.”

“So you didn’t fuck the girl at all?”

“No, I didn’t get a chance to fuck her.”

“But you sure did something to fuck with Brute, didn’t you?”

“No, that was all Aaron! I didn’t do nothing to Brute!”

Deloris cleared her throat and picked back up the tin foil. Otto took his cue and got to his feet. He grabbed Collin’s left hand and drove the skinning knife between the knuckles of his index and middle finger. Collin screamed in pain as Otto wiggled the blade from side to side, breaking the joints connecting the fingers to the hand. The pain of the fingers being sliced off caused Collin to piss all over himself.

Otto snorted with disgust and grabbed Collin’s cock. He sliced it in half from the tip to the base and left the pieces lying butterflied on Collin’s blood soaked scrotum.

“Okay, okay,
fucking Christ
!” Collin sobbed. “I shot the dumb fucking dog, okay? I shot him in the ass. But it was only rock salt, it broke the skin but didn’t do any real damage. After that Aaron beat on him for about twenty minutes with his baseball bat. When he was knocked out we threw him in the pit.”

“And what about this morning?” Deloris asked.

“When we let him out of the pit we told him he’d better kill all of those bitches or we were going to kill the pups.”