Crossing the Line (29 page)

It was almost comforting to know that even if the monster survived the night he would not kill Gene’s son or daughter. The little comfort afforded by the thought was quickly forgotten when Gene’s pelvis was crushed in Brute’s supernaturally strong grip. He cried out in agony, wishing that the spinal injury had left him incapable of feeling the pain rushing through his body. He had always thought that quadriplegics weren’t capable of feeling anything below their neck. Now he knew he had been wrong. Of course he had been wrong about many things.

He felt genuine remorse for what he had done while working for Deloris. The sins would not be forgiven by any just God, though. Not in the quantities that he had performed them. The rapes, the murders, the disposing of evidence, all of those things would be brought down upon him at his final judgment and he would spend eternity in Hell. God forbid the same Hell that Brute wound up in.

Brute’s rage exploded out of him as another preternatural snarl of rage and anguish. He raised Gene high above his head and brought him down on along the massive, rock solid ridge of his shoulders. Gene’s broken spine snapped in a dozen places. Little fragments punched into his organs, but not deeply enough to kill him. He felt every nerve ending’s report of suffering and it overloaded his brain.

Brute slung the man off of him as if he weighed nothing at all. Gene crash landed on a coffee table and it exploded under the force and weight. A long shard of varnished oak pierced his side, barely missing his intestines. Brute grabbed the shard of wood and ripped it free, tearing a long gash as he pulled it through the flesh and out of Gene’s abdomen.

“You want Brute to be monster,” Brute said. “Brute can be monster. Brute knows how Deloris like Brute to kill. So mean, so messy.”

Brute raised the shard of wood over his head and brought it down in Gene’s open mouth. Teeth exploded and snapped away at the gums. The thick piece of oak tore his tongue into pieces as it was forced back against the uvula a moment before the thin piece of flesh tore from the back of his mouth. The wood tore through the back of his throat and erupted out of the back of his head.

Brute pulled the spike free and stabbed the dead man again, this time in the chest. Though his strength forced it straight through the muscle, broken bones and internal organs, he still twisted it as it came out between Gene’s shoulder blades.

Brute stood then and let out another loud snarl. He fished out his penis and emptied his bladder into t
he bloody hole that had been Gene’s
mouth.

Still ignoring his numerous injuries the beast marched out of the den. He did not care if he survived the night. He intended to kill every last one of the people that had destroyed his pack. He would let the girls help him kill Deloris. They deserved to know the weightlessness that revenge left inside you.

42

Ivy heard Brute’s cries and longed to go to him, but she also heard movement coming from upstairs. The survivors weren’t walking like dogs they were walking like wounded humans. She knew that leaving their hiding place would put them at risk of being shot by Deloris and her employees.

Hopelessness filled her heart when she realized that the pack must have ultimately lost their battle upstairs. It was a brutal, gory crusade but one that they had deserved to
be victorious in. The agonies
she had suffered had only come from this one night, the dogs had been put through torture for their entire lives. And now the sick fucks that had taught them to live like attack animals had killed them. Which— by all logical means— meant that they would soon find and kill her, Anna and Tracy. 

They had put up a good fight, but the college girls were not ruthless killers. No matter how much they had evolved toward becoming killers throughout the night they had not gained enough knowledge in the art of homicide to succeed in a battle with a small army of killers.

Her downtrodden mood mirrored that of her friends. They were beaten, broken and their souls had been ripped apart. Not a single one of them were
fully alive, not anymore. Bits and pieces of them had died and been cremated thro
ughout the events of their girl
s only spring break vacation.

Though a part of her really wanted to be furious at Chandra she knew, from Anna’s account, that the girl had died a humiliating death. Yes, her actions had led to the rapes and executions by the frat boys, but that didn’t mean she deserved to die. Ivy longed for some of the weed that had started this whole nightmare. A good joint would have made facing their ultimate doom a lot easier to cope with.

Anna’s mind was in a completely different place. Her feeling of guilt continued to compile until it was driving her insane. There were so many variables that had gone into the events leading up to their stay at the lake house. Such as:

If she had never left Ben he would have been with her on the trip. Ben would have taken a more logical approach to planning out the vacation and suggested that they go somewhere more populated so that they could drink at bars, mingle with crowds and do all the other customary shit that Spring Breakers do. If she had somehow convinced him that Porter Harvest was a good place to vacation he would have been a male presence, which would have meant that the other girls could bring men. That in itself may not have saved them from the sick fucks that rented the house out, but it may have kept the frat boys from being so deviant with their punishments on the girls.

Another if:

If she had paid attention to her instincts she would have known something was seriously wrong while she sunbathed on the raft. Every fiber of her being had told her that someone was watching her. The glimmers of light coming from the forest had obviously been flashes on a digital camera. If she had only been less concerned with the fucking clothes in her closet that she couldn’t fit anymore because she had finally managed to grow some tits and an ass she would have been able to warn her friends that there was something afoot.

So many of the little “ifs” were running through her mind that she thought she might explode from the guilt. She had no way of knowing that a good deal of this was being caused by blood loss and a high fever. Her mind was attacking her because she was dying.

She had a sudden urge to run outside and just start screaming for a fairy godparent. With the wave of a magic wand all of this could be wiped away cleanly and she could go back to her materialistic existence where it actually mattered that she had spent half a grand of student loan money on a wardrobe that no longer fit her.

Tracy was holding up better than either of her friends. While they collectively melted down and submitted to the idea of death she was formulating a plan. She was also truly listening to the sounds the old house was making.

The feet moving around on the upper floor were doing so in a pattern. They were arranging some kind of trap at the top of the stairs. They moved from the stairs back to the room and back again several times. It was not in the fashion of sentinels, but in the rushed fashion of people who were arranging something.

Brute’s pattern was easy to follow, but he was injured. He kept stumbling and falling into things. He had been trained to be a silent stalker so the smashing of objects as he passed was a tell-tale sign that he was hurt and hurt bad. Still, he had no intention of giving up on his objective. He was moving through the house directly back toward the stairs.

She knew she had to intervene before he fell prey to whatever plan the masters had come up with, which gave her very little time to do as she planned.

She got to her feet, shocking both of her friends, and dashed into the kitchen. Anna and Ivy followed after her and softly protested when they realized her intention. She hushed them and pulled at the bottom of the oven until it fell away. She reached her hand into the dirty, dusty cavern beneath the oven until her fingers fell on what she was looking for.

She pulled the gas line out and left it lying in plain sight. She couldn’t cut it just yet because she knew that a firefight would soon ensue. Next she went to the fridge and threw out all of the contents. If there was no way of escaping at least one of them would fit inside and it would protect them against the explosion.

Finally she went to the bank of drawers and yanked them all completely out u
ntil she found the knife drawer. She dumped the contents on the floor and sorted through them until her fingers fell on a meat cleaver. Satisfied she set the cleaver next to the propane line and motioned for her friends to follow her out of the kitchen.

Ivy was right that if it came down to a gun fight they didn’t stand much of a chance against the people upstairs. Not unless they had some kind of edge, and strategic places to return fire from. She arranged her friends on either side of the stairs, using walls to block them from view. Her place would eventually be beside the stairs in the shadows cast by the lights running up beside them on the wall.

It was not much of a hiding spot, but she was going to take what she could get. With all of the elements of her plan in place she whispered to each of her friends that she would be right back and followed the sounds of his clumsy movements to Brute.

Seeing how many times he had been shot made her heart ache. The behemoth was incapable of standing completely upright. His body throbbed with pain and his injuries were leaving a trail of blood that anyone could have followed.

When he saw Tracy his eyes lit up a bit. He stumbled over to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. The warm sensation of blood running from his
destroyed arm down her back almost tickled, but she suppressed the urge to pull away from the hug. He deserved comfort.

“Brute kill them all,” he said.

“No, you’ve saved us enough for one day, Brute. It’s our turn to save you,” Tracy said.

Brute was too weak to protest. She set him in the kitchen and told him to stay and made her way to her hiding place. From above she continued to hear movement, but she still wasn’t sure what kind of ambush was being planned.

Time seemed to go in slow motion. Everything from her breathing to the distant ticking of an old grandfather clock seemed to slow down. She held her breath and ventured to see what was being done at the top of the stairs. The sight made her gag and almost lost her balance. The sickos had piled corpses at the top of the stairs. She stilled herself and looked closer at the stack. There was something metal shoved between two of the bodies.

Tracy returned to the bottom of the stairs as quietly as she could and drew a bolt on the metal object in the bodies. She pulled the trigger and, not surprising, missed her target. He second shot struck the metallic glimmer. The ensuing explosion shook the entire house, making photos and trinkets fall from the walls and shattering a couple of windows.

The shockwave made Tracy fall on her ass. It spared her from the worse of the flying flesh shrapnel. A burning pile of intestinal track splattered precisely where she had been standing. Appendages and indiscernible chunks of flesh painted the ceiling and walls. More offal splattered across the floor.

In the aftermath of the explosion the walls around the top of stairs were badly damaged and painted a chunky red with gore. The top stair was completely gone while six more had suffered damage. The stairs would now be very dangerous to navigate, which Tracy thought could possibly give them a possible advantage. It could also hurt their chances, though. An ambush at the bottom of the stairs had been what she hoped for.

Leila came to the edge of the stairs and looked directly down at Tracy. A shard of bone had stabbed through the side of her neck and blood was pumping from the wound. She tried to lift her gun, but it was a futile effort. Before she could even get it to her shoulder she fell face-first down the stairs, destroying two
near the top of the case.

She crashed into the floor inches from Tracy and gargled on her own blood as she attempted to say something. Tracy was unconcerned with whatever it was she was trying to say. She grabbed the end of the bone sticking out of the woman’s neck and hammered it in deeper with the butt of Leila’s dropped gun.

Taking the gun, Tracy scrambled away from the dead woman and returned to her hiding place. A moment later she heard an anguished scream come from the head of the stairs. It was another woman, which perturbed Tracy a bit. She had spent a lot of time hating men today, but now it seemed she needed to just be disgusted with the entire human race.

No gunfire was returned. After the single scream and the shuffling of some feet everything went silent up above them.

42

Deloris looked at the
ruins out in the hallway and slammed her hand into the arm of her chair with rage. The little bitches should have been dead a long time ago and now they were fucking up her house! Between the dogs and those college brats she would be spending thousands on remodeling.

“All the dogs are dead except Brute,” Ethan said. “How the hell are we going to keep the business running?”

“You and Norton will have to do some of the dirty work. We have more dogs to train, anyway,” Deloris said.

“More dogs? The bitches got away, too!” Jessica said.

“Yes, but I’m sure the Gloria and Kendra have done a marvelous job protecting the children.”

“Those aren’t dogs, those are our kids!” Norton said.