Crossing the Line (20 page)

“Why the hell would Aaron be following Forester and Clarence?” Carey asked.

“Because it ain’t them. There must’ve been some other people at that cabin, someone we missed.”

Otto slid the bolt action, chambering another round. He fired a second shot and this time heard the distinct sound of glass shattering. He had struck the windshield, but he was fairly sure he hadn’t hit the driver. There had been too much warning when the initial shot missed target.

Carey finally shouldered his gun and drew a bead on the vehicle. His round hit the car in the hood and a hiss louder than the wailing of the sirens filled the night. Both he and Otto chambered more rounds.

Neither man noticed the sound of the approaching footsteps until it was too late. Brute crashed into Carey’s side and lifted him from the ground. He forced the man into Otto, sending them both sprawling across the gravel driveway. Carey was knocked unconscious when most of Otto’s considerable weight came down on his head. Otto howled in pain as the cranium punched deep into the muscle of his lower back, driving at him like a well-placed kidney shot.

He fumbled for his prepared thirty-ought-six, but Brute ripped it from his grasp and tossed it aside. Otto’s heart raced with fear when he was lifted from the ground by the huge man in a brutal bear hug. Brute’s grasp on him increased until he couldn’t breathe. He kicked at the dog’s shins and thighs, but the beast didn’t seem to notice.

Otto literally
heard
his back break at the same instant that his nerve endings reported the intense pain. He was dropped to the ground then, his limbs completely useless. Brute kicked him across the face knocking him unconscious.

Carey woke to the sudden, intense pain of his jaw being stretched open. Brute had hold of his upper plate and lower jaw and was stretching them apart.
The thin layer of skin and muscle on either side of his mouth began ripping at the corners of his lips. He thrashed as much as he could, but the entirety of Brute’s weight was pinning him to the ground. Brute snarled savagely and quickened his pace.

Carey’s lower jaw was ripped out of its sockets an instant before most of the muscle keeping it attached snapped like overstretched rubber bands. Brute jerked it forward then, ripping it off of his face completely. Without missing a beat the dog tossed it aside and plunged his sharp nails into the soft spot behind the upper plate.

Carey felt the fingers digging through the top of his mouth and deeper into his head. His bladder released as the darkness of death began creeping over him. His final processed thought was that they had made a dire mistake making the dog so damn strong.

Brute plunged his hand into Carey’s skull all the way to the base of his palm. His fingers dug through the tissue of the man’s brain before he curled them and pulled out a handful of brain matter. He smeared the gray matter on Carey’s chest before turning his attention back to Otto.

The paralyzed man awoke as he was being lifted from the ground. Brute held him high over his head before bringing him down on his knee. The blow further shattered Otto’s spine and caused blood to rush up as his spleen exploded under the force. His lungs filled with blood, giving him the powerless sensation of drowning.

Brute shifted his hold on the man and picked him up by the ankles. He lifted him as high as his arms could reach before drivin
g his head down into the gravel. Otto’s skull cracked and his scalp was torn away in a few places. The first blow did not satisfy the dog, though. He was lifted and brought down three more times, until the top of his head was completely smashed and one of his eyes had been dislodged from the socket.

Brute dropped the corpse to the ground and stomped on Otto’s face, crushing it under his weight. He lifted his foot and repeated the action until the head had completely come apart.

Once satisfied he walked over to the gate and grabbed hold of it. Without so much as a groan of fatigue he pulled until the thick chain snapped. He threw the gate open as far as it would go and waved his new pack mates forward.

29

Anna crawled a little closer to the door of the ambulance. There was still no way for them to hear what was going on outside, but her heart rate had suddenly increased and she was taking it as a sign that the doors would soon be coming open.

Marcy and Lynne huddled closely together. Their “weapons” felt seriously inefficient after the night’s events. Lynne longed for a shotgun or a bazooka, something so big that everyone would shit their pants as soon as she whipped it out. Rushing at grown men with hollow pieces of aluminum seemed foolish. She ran her hand down the length of the gurney’s leg and wondered if it was really aluminum, but only for a moment before her panicked mind snapped at her for digressing from her current situation.

Both Lynne and Anna jumped when the
clank
of Marcy dropping her makeshift weapon echoed through the hollow innards of the ambulance. “I can’t do it,” Marcy sobbed. “I can’t kill anyone.”

“They’re going to kill us if we don’t kill them,” Anna said. She felt what little composure she had slipping away quickly. “They’re going to kill us! Every person on this planet with a dick is nothing more than a murderous rapist!”

“Calm down, Anna. I know where Marcy’s coming from,” Lynne said. “If you had asked any of us this morning if we would ever kill anyone we would have said no. It’s not easy to just forget about who we are.”

Anna crawled over to her friends and picked up Marcy’s discarded weapon. She handed it back to her forcefully. “It’s not who we are that you two are thinking about, it’s who we
were
. We would’ve said no this morning because before tonight none of us had been raped and beaten. We hadn’t been kidnapped by the fucking Donner Party in the back of a goddamn ambulance. Forget about what classes you’re taking next semester and start thinking about getting out of this fucked up situation without losing any more of your soul to these worthless animals!”

Marcy shook her head. “I’ve been thinking about it. We don’t even know how long we’ve been in here, do we? Well, I’ve been thinking about it since we decided we were going to fight back. And I think I figured out the secret to it all.”

“Enlighten me,” Anna said. There was a snide tone to her voice, one as sharp as a razor. It was obvious that she had succumbed to the idea of murdering their captors completely. Lynne wondered if there was any of the old Anna left. It was hard to believe she had been the peppiest of them all. Now her voice sounded like the snarl of a caged animal.

“If we kill them we’ll become them. I mean, if we seriously bash their heads in we’re going to be cruel animals like them.”

Anna grew silent. After a moment soft noises started coming from her throat. At first Lynne thought she was laughing. Laughing her way to the loony bin, as the saying went. It wasn’t until she let out a loud sob that Lynne realized she was crying.

Lynne threw her arms around Anna’s narrow shoulders and gave her a tight hug. Marcy followed suit. The three of them sobbed openly together. After a moment of this, though, they all broke apart and sat in silence. An onlooker would have thought that they were posed like defeated warriors. In reality, though, they were each searching themselves.

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to hurt anyone,” Anna said. “I have been trying to convince myself I would be able to, but I honestly don’t know. I mean, I can probably hit them a couple of times, but I don’t think I could finish the job.”

“We’re not killers,” Marcy said. She sniffled
for a moment before wiping snot away from her lips with the back of her hand. “We’re not even cat fighters. I don’t think I’ve ever even come close to going beyond a verbal argument.”

“I did once,” Lynne said. She smiled in the darkness, the memory floating up from her subconscious to warm her like a thick blanket. “It was the third grade. This little boner Lyle Billings kept pulling my hair. It had been going on for like two weeks. I asked the teacher to move me to a different desk because the jerk sat right behind me, but she just acted like I was retarded or something. Then one day we were all playing kickball and he came up and grabbed a handful and pulled as hard as he could. He ripped my new barrette out and a bunch of my hair went with it. I turned around and socked him right in the mouth. Only hit him one time, but it busted his lip. I got detention for three weeks and when he asked to be moved away from me in class the teacher assigned him a new desk.”

“I punched my brother in the balls once,” Anna said. “I can’t remember why, but I uppercut him right in the junk.”

“So that’s the extent of our fighting experience?” Marcy laughed. Her laughter was hollow and full of sorrow. Her voice sounded twice as weak as she felt. “One busted lip and a swollen set of testies— I have a feeling that these sick asses have a lot more experience than that.”

“But we have an advantage,” Anna said.

After a moment of waiting for Anna to elaborate Lynne asked, “What’s that?”

“These sickos all think we’re defeated little girls that are crying for our mamas right now.”

“We
are
defeated little girls crying for our mamas,” Marcy said.

“Maybe, but we can change that. We all agree that we’re sophisticated, educated women, right?” Her friends muttered agreements. “Well the key word there was
women
. We’re not little girls, we’re grown women and despite the fact that we don’t have biceps the size of an action star we aren’t weak, either.
In a fair fight we would get our asses handed to us, but it doesn’t have to be a fair fight. We can stick to the plan and attack after reaffirming to them that we are weak little girls.”

“The element of surprise,” Lynne said. “That did seem like a good plan when we came up with it.”

“What if we hit them and it just pisses them off?” Marcy asked.

“Then we die knowing that we gave it our best. It’s better than going out like the girls you see in the movies. I don’t want to be a damsel in distress offering sexual favors only to be served up as a loose meat sandwich to a family of Hannibal cannibals.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like Ivy,” Lynne said. She grinned thinking about the conversation she had with her friend on the way to the lake house. If only she had known had close to right Ivy had been she would have been all for turning around and hauling ass back to campus.

Marcy sniffled a little more, b
ut she seemed to have regained some of her composure when she next spoke. “I don’t want to be remembered as the girl that couldn’t fight for her life.”

“Then keep hold of your weapon and bash the fuck out of whoever opens those doors,” Anna said. She gave Marcy another hug and then pulled Lynne in for one, too. “We’re not just friends, guys. We’re sisters. And after tonight we’ll be sisters who survived the village of the retarded inbreds.”

“Or the sisters that beat the troglodytes senseless before they became someone’s stew,” Marcy said. She gripped her piece of the gurney tighter than ever before.

“Man, I hope they just cut off my feet. I paid fifty bucks for my last pedicure,” Lynne said. After a moment of silence all three of them laughed.

Marcy groaned. “I shouldn’t have laughed,” she said. “I’ve really got to pee.”

“Me too,” Lynne admitted.

“Yeah, liquor does that to everyone,” Anna said. An idea came to her then. “
Now you guys are really going to think I’ve lost my mind, but I think I have an idea.”

30

Mort dashed into the house in a huff. His sudden entry scared Deloris so badly that she nearly stabbed herself with one of her knitting needles.
She calmly folded the arm of the sweater she had been working on in her lap and stared at the young man.

“What is the problem, Mort?” she asked.

“Ma’am, Brute has arrived. He didn’t come alone, neither. There are women with him, I think from the house,” Mort said.

“How is he behaving himself?”

“He killed Carey and Otto.”

Deloris sighed and grief filled her features. She moved her chair away from her resting spot near the
fireplace and moved over to a bookshelf full of photographs. To anyone else the framed stills would have seemed grotesque, but to her they were beautiful family portraits. All of her dogs at various ages, in various states of their decline into their animal nature. They were beautiful, magnificent creatures, each and every one of them. Brute had always been one of her favorites, though. The HGH treatments had given him such strong muscles and unique features. And unlike the dog before him he had seemed to be more capable of human thought. Of course that had been the problem and she should have known it. If they were to be dogs they shouldn’t have been capable of retaining human thought.

She picked up a photo of him standing over his first kill. He had only been six when he had managed to strike down the pit bull. With his bare hands he had ripped the canine to shreds, tearing out its innards and twisting them until the dog’s whining ceased. The photograph was of the child, who looked closer to fifteen because of his size,
holding the corpse of the dog above his head in victory.

She forced back tears and set the photograph back on the shelf and lowered her head. “I think it’s time that we release Juggernaut. None of the other dogs or men stand a chance against Brute,” Deloris said. “It’s the only way we can put him down.”