Depraved 2 (23 page)

Harley clumsily tried to get to his feet so he could walk to the stain, but a firm hand on his shoulder pushed him back down.

Floyd’s expression was stony. “No, son. Walk on your knees.”

Harley gaped at him. “Please don’t make me do that.”

Cletus put his gun against the back of Harley’s head again. “Do it, boy”

All his remaining dignity gone forever, Harley began to waddle forward on his knees. The men chuckled and walked with him, Cletus maintaining his position to the rear.

After he had managed several awkward yards of progress, Harley heard Cletus say, “Sure you don’t want to hang on to this one?”

“Nah. Not enough meat on his bones.”

“Yeah, guess you’re right. Can I do the honors this time?”

Harley thought, Holy Jesus…

Floyd grunted. “Sure, but make it fast. Sooner we catch up to Delmont’s killers, the better.”

Harley heard the cocking of a gun right behind his ear. He screwed his eyes shut as he quit waddling. As he knelt there sobbing in the street, he put an image in his head of James and Big Train, the three of them hanging out in heaven and doing bong rips forever.

The gunshot that killed Harley echoed through the empty street.

He didn’t hear it.

20.

The light was getting dimmer outside. Pretty soon it would be hard to see in the house even with the window blinds open. Jessica stood at one of the living room windows and looked out at a scene rendered surreal by the fading daylight. Some of the neighboring houses had been boarded-up, while others had not. There was no rhyme or reason to it she could tell. Maybe the boarded ones were filled with rotting bodies. The yards had turned into overgrown fields and in some cases had overtaken the driveways. A few years ago the view from the window would have been of an ordinary neighborhood. But this was a dead place now, laden with a sense of stillness and slow decay. She felt a weird kind of awe at realizing this was how the whole world would look not long after an extinction-level event wiped out the last of the human race.

Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. The human race had a lot of amazing technological and artistic accomplishments to its credit, but Jessica had seen enough of the human animal at its worst to know the bad far outweighed the good. Humans were beasts capable of a level of savagery far exceeding any of the so-called “lower species” in the animal kingdom. Human beings took advantage of each other and exploited each other whenever they could. They also often reveled in the pain and suffering of others. It had been that way from the beginning and it would be that way until the last woman on earth had drawn her last breath.

In Afghanistan and in secret prisons around the world, she had participated in countless prisoner interrogations, often utilizing techniques that went well beyond what was legally acceptable for agencies like Homeland Security. Waterboarding was the worst thing in their arsenal. And while waterboarding was no fun at all, it was child’s play compared to the range of far more severe options available to Jessica’s secret unit, which were often more medieval in nature. None of it was officially sanctioned by anyone in the higher levels of government, of course, but in the years since 9/11 units like hers had been granted a freedom to operate any way they saw fit and no one ever examined their activities too closely. Some people suspected some not very nice things were happening, but results were what mattered. The world was being kept safe and that was all anyone really cared about.

For a long time, Jessica had believed in what she was doing. The end justified the means. And because she had done the awful things she had done in service to her country, she had believed none of it meant there was something wrong or broken inside her. But she had been wrong about at least the latter part of that. Little by little, her soul had been chipped away, her sense of what was okay and what wasn’t okay forever tarnished.

She looked at Billy. Here was the ultimate proof of the irreversible damage done to her spirit, her humanity. He was again flat on his back on the sofa, staring up at the increasingly dark ceiling with eyes that looked as unfocused as those of a catatonic. She stared at him and waited to feel the regret she knew a normal person would feel in the aftermath of doing bad things.

But, except in one small way, regret remained elusive.

The assault on Billy hadn’t ended with the forced oral sex. After riding his face for an intensely pleasurable several minutes, she had pulled his pants down and sucked him hard. He was crying the whole time, but his body helplessly responded to her oral ministrations. So she got on top of him and pulled him into her, riding his cock with ferocious abandon until he popped inside her. Yet another of the many ways in which she was being reckless. There was no condom, no protection of any kind, and she was ovulating. They might very well have conceived a life just now.

Jessica shook her head at the thought.

As if I needed any other proof that I’m not in my right mind.

The sexual part of it had been just the first phase in her assault on Billy. After that, the torture commenced. Now that it was over, she was having a harder time understanding why any of it had happened, but the torture bothered her more than anything else. It made her think that this was just who she was now, that her time in black ops had turned her into the kind of person who simply enjoyed hurting other people, because there was no getting away from the fact that a part of her had enjoyed hurting Billy. Watching his face twist in agony when she inserted a screwdriver in his wound had thrilled her almost as much as the sex.

Jesus…what has become of me?

The screwdriver was on the coffee table next to an open toolbox. She had found the toolbox while rooting through the cabinets in the kitchen. In addition, she had found some very sharp knives in a wooden block. These were also on the coffee table. She had used them to cut on Billy. His face and torso were nicked in dozens of places.

The whole thing went on way longer than she had originally intended. During that time, she was a slave to compulsion, to an inner urge to hurt and punish Billy as much as possible, way, way out of proportion to anything his earlier resistance might have merited. After a while, she understood the compulsion was a kind of defense mechanism. She was trying to dehumanize Billy, to render what she had done acceptable because his pain didn’t really matter.

Jessica felt something wet on her cheek.

She frowned.

What’s this?

She touched her cheek and saw moisture on her fingertips when she pulled her hand away.

Oh, fuck. I’m crying.

She was startled because it’d been so long since she’d shed tears for anyone other than herself. But maybe the sense that the tears were for Billy was delusion, a belated, desperate attempt to believe that she could still feel empathy for others. It was just as possible that the tears were a delayed result of stress, of too much bearing down on her all at once.

Or maybe you’re overthinking this. Maybe the real you really is starting to wake up again.

At this point, she felt more moisture on her cheeks.

Fuck.

She wiped the tears away and tried hard to make them stop. During her time in the unit, she had been taught various ways of controlling her emotions. These included meditation and in-depth psychological analysis, as well as some experimental techniques involving hypnosis and drug therapy. Much of this occurred during an extended stay at the unit’s facility in Maine. By the time she was sent into the field for the first time, she was able to disconnect from emotion entirely, a good and useful thing in her line of work.

Now, however, she seemed to be losing a grip on all the things she had learned.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Billy.”

He had no visible reaction to her voice. It was the first either of them had said anything in more than half an hour and he didn’t even blink. Maybe he was so lost inside himself—so deeply traumatized—that he didn’t know she was here, or where he was for that matter. It was possible. She had seen things like it before. And if this was like those times, it might be a while before he was cognizant of his surroundings again.

She wasn’t sure why she was apologizing anyway. There was little point to words of regret in these situations. Regardless of which side of the equation you were on, they always rang hollow. All her moral handwringing aside, she wasn’t sure how sorry she really was. And even if he had heard and understood her, the words would have been meaningless to Billy. She had done what she had done and it could never be taken back, the damage both physically and mentally never entirely repaired.

Unable to bear looking at him even a second longer, Jessica walked out of the living room and through the kitchen to the back door. Though she was upset, her training had not completely deserted her. Rather than hauling the door open and rushing heedlessly outside, she paused at the door to peer through the window.

The sky was continuing to darken, but there was still some daylight, enough to sit outside for a few minutes before nightfall blanketed the neighborhood. She saw Billy’s truck and the back of another house on the other side of the overgrown field. She turned her face and pressed a cheek to the window to expand her field of vision. There still wasn’t the slightest trace of activity in the area, no cars and no people. Still, she hesitated a little longer, remembering her earlier paranoid suspicions about a lingering military presence in the area. As she stood there and thought about it, the dark tinge to the sky deepened even more.

Fuck it.

She stepped outside, leaving the door partly open behind her in the unlikely event she needed to beat a hasty retreat. Her paranoia fell away as she stepped out to the center of the little wooden deck and craned her head around. She saw only more overgrown yards and houses as dark and silent as tombs as far as she could see.

Jessica walked to the edge of the deck and settled herself on the top step, stretching her legs out in front of her. She set the gun down and peered up at the ash-colored sky. The summer heat was fading with the daylight and the cooler breeze that swept in felt nice as it caressed her cheeks, reminding her of summer nights when she was younger.

The whole family would gather for backyard cookouts at her parents’ place back then. A smile stole over her face as it all came back to her, the scents and the sounds, beers being cracked open, meat sizzling on the grill, the voices and laughter. Those were the days before her mother committed suicide, before so many things had changed. The last family cookout she remembered had to have been almost five years ago at this point. She wished she could go back to those days, wished everything was different.

She was so lost in her melancholy mood that the creak behind her didn’t register until a split-second too late. When it did, her eyes came open and she made a fumbling grab for the gun, knocking it to the next step down rather than curling her hand around the grip. She leaned forward and tried again, her heart pounding, her brain screaming at her, berating her for ever having let her guard down and for not taking him seriously as a threat.

Her fingers found the gun’s grip on the second try. She tried to stand up, but Billy slammed into her, unleashing an ear-splitting cry that was equal parts outrage and terror. He had found the guts to act, but he was still afraid of her, not that it mattered. He had surprised her utterly and she was in very real danger of being killed if she couldn’t overcome his tactical advantage.

The gun flew from her hand and landed in the tall grass as he hit her. The two of them hit the ground at the bottom of the deck steps an instant later. The impact jarred Billy loose though not entirely off of her. Jessica used the momentary advantage to ram an elbow into his stomach, causing him to cry out and spring backward. She scrambled out from under him, scooting forward on her hands and knees as she frantically searched the grass for the gun. Frustration seized her as it stayed hidden. She was forced to abandon the search and roll over when she heard Billy let out another bellow of rage and come charging at her again.

She got turned over in the same instant he landed atop her. He got his hands around her throat before she could get her arms up to fend him off, his face twisting and becoming ugly as it turned red. His eyes bugged out and his lips peeled back, revealing teeth stained brown from years of chewing tobacco. He shifted his weight and bore down on her throat as hard as he could, compressing her airway and reducing it to nothing so fast it was terrifying. She punched him in the ribs and flailed at his face, her fingernails digging into his cheeks hard enough to draw blood. None of this accomplished anything and he only bore down harder. She tried pushing her fingernails into his eyes, but he only twisted his head away and kept squeezing the life out of her.