Held & Pushed (2 book bundle) (8 page)

Soon, her
screams became so shrill they were like shards of glass scratching at my
eardrums. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand to hear her scream any more, he
suddenly dropped to his knees and unfastened his slacks. He raped her while she
screamed. Her screams seemed to excite him. The more she wailed, the harder at
her he went. At the pinnacle of her screaming, the moments just before her
voice cracked and went hoarse, he was thrusting at her so hard, it seemed as
though he were trying to go through her and penetrate the floor. My girlie
parts ached just watching. I couldn’t even imagine the pain she was
experiencing. I hoped like hell I’d never find out.

When he
was finished, he was panting uncontrollably as sweat rolled down his face and
fell from his chin. He slowly got back to his knees. As he put himself away and
fastened his slacks, I saw the blood on his manhood. He stood and spit on her before
walking back to the stairs. I thought he was leaving, but instead, he turned
and sat on the bottom step, facing me from only a few feet away.

I trembled
as I watched him run his hands through his hair and take deep breaths to calm
his breathing. I shuddered when I noticed the torn pants and his bleeding knees
inside. In his frenzy, he hadn’t even felt his own wounds. Or maybe he had.
Maybe he was one of those people that got off on pain.

He smiled
at me. After what he’d just done to her, he was able to smile at me.
Unbelievable.

“It
wouldn’t be that way with you, you know.”

My mouth
had gone dry. After swallowing a couple of times and working up some saliva, I
was able to say, “Then why is it that way with her?”

“I’ve told
you,” he said, clearly irritated at having to repeat
himself
to me. “I never liked her. She isn’t good company. All she cares about is
herself
. She’s not like you.”

I wanted to
ask him what was so damn special about me, but I knew enough not to. All he
ever said was I was good company, and I made good conversation. He liked me. He
liked my personality, my attitude. I decided to leave it alone and just be
happy that there was something about me he liked. Maybe his liking me would be
my salvation. Surely, it would at the very least save me from the fate that had
befallen Stephanie.

Chapter
11

Ron left
me naked in the basement. Normally, he allowed me to wear my panties. Not this
time. He had taken everything. I still tried to look on the bright side. At
least I wasn’t tethered to the floor and spread apart the way Stephanie was. I
could pull my knees up to my chest and cover myself somewhat. So at least there
was that.

I tried to
talk to Stephanie. After many times of saying her name, she finally turned her
head slowly toward me. In her eyes, I saw nothing. Whether they were empty
because she’d given up or because he’d stripped her of everything that made her
a person, they were empty.

I asked
her if she was okay, but she said nothing. A few minutes later, she closed her
eyes.

The
temperature in the basement was cool. With no clothes and no blanket, I did the
best I could to stay warm. I curled up in the fetal position and eventually
fell into a restless sleep.

Throughout
my life, I’d occasionally had nightmares. Usually, I was being chased by a man
trying to kill me. Sometimes, he stabbed or shot me, and I always woke right
before I died. This time, when I woke, the nightmare that haunted my sleep was
nothing compared to the nightmare taking place only a few feet from me.

I slowly
rolled over, every muscle in my body aching. Blinking rapidly to clear my
vision, I focused on Stephanie and what was happening to her. I wished I’d
stayed asleep.

Ron was beating
her with a fireplace poker. Over and over, he raised the poker and brought it
down with a thud against Stephanie’s frail body. But that wasn’t the scary
part. The scary part of the scene was the lack of movement coming from
Stephanie.

I watched
carefully but saw no signs of life. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t yell or
scream. She did nothing. She was dead. She had to be.

After many
more blows to her lifeless body, Ron stopped. He threw his head up toward the
ceiling. I could see his back and shoulders heaving as he gasped for air. With
his back to me, I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t think I wanted to.

Moments
later, I didn’t have a choice. He whirled around and glared at me. He raced
across the room toward me and in a flash he was standing beside my mattress
looking down at me, still holding the poker.

“This is
your fault,” he screamed, pointing the poker at my face.

Still
pushing away sleep, I asked, “How the hell is
this my
fault?”

“I went to
your room this morning to get you up and dressed. But you weren’t there,” he
said, his voice rising and falling as he spoke.

“No. I’m
not there. Because you brought me down to this dungeon,” I screamed up at him.
“I didn’t ask you to bring me down here. I didn’t want this. So it’s your
fault,” I yelled, clearly having learned nothing yet.

His
nostrils flared with anger. My attention focused on the poker and I thought
maybe I should stop yelling at him. I knew I should, but I also knew that my
back-talking sassiness was what he liked most about me. It was a fine line that
was sure to be the downfall of me once I stepped across it at the wrong time.

For a
while longer, he stood over me, though he had at least lowered the poker and
now held it at his side. I watched as he slowly calmed down. His nostrils
stopped flaring, his chest quit heaving with his heavy breathing, and he finally
relaxed his grip on the poker.

As he
calmed down, so did
I
, though I was still terrified.
I’d watched him kill Stephanie. And if she was already dead before I woke up,
then I’d watched him beat the hell out of a corpse. Either way, I knew I wasn’t
dealing with the average feller. This man was truly a psychopath, flying from
one extreme to the next in the blink of an eye. Professionals who had spent
years studying and researching people like him didn’t know how to deal with
them, so how was I supposed to know how to handle him? And unlike the pros, my
life depended on it.

He tossed
the poker aside, but too far for me to reach. Even if I turned myself around
and stretched my body as far as it would stretch, I wouldn’t have been able to
reach it with my foot. Even in his madness, he was smart enough to know not to
leave it where I could get to it. That made him even more dangerous in my opinion
because even when it seemed that he’d lost all touch with reality and his
thoughts and emotions, he still knew what not to do.
Scary.

Thinking
of a way to get back on his good side and back to the main floor of the house,
I asked, “What are you going to do now?” I hoped he didn’t detect the tremor in
my voice.

“I’m going
to have to get rid of it. It’s going to start smelling soon, and I don’t want
you to have to smell that.”

Good. He
was looking out for me, in a sick sort of way. All hope wasn’t lost. I felt
certain that soon, maybe later today or tomorrow, he’d take me back upstairs.
He still liked me enough to not want me trapped down here with the smell of a
rotting corpse. Of course, my hope was destroyed when I asked for food.

“Ron, what
time is it?”

“Why? Do
you have somewhere you need to be?”

“Yeah.
I need to
be at home with my family, but since that isn’t possible, I was just
wondering.”

Glancing
at his watch, he answered, “Seven thirty.”

“I’m
hungry, and I need to pee.”

After
staring at me for a few seconds, he put his foot against a plastic bowl that set
on the floor between Stephanie’s body and me and pushed it my way. I watched
the bowl slide toward me and stop a foot or so away from the mattress. I
reached out and pulled it the rest of the way to me. Looking inside, I thought
he was joking. He must be.

“What’s
this?” I asked, looking up at him.

“If you’re
hungry, eat that. It’s what I fed Stephanie until she quit eating. Poor thing
starved
herself
to death,” he said looking over his
shoulder at her body.

“No, I’m
pretty sure you beat her to death with that there poker.” When I saw him snap
his head back to face me, I quickly moved on. “If this is what she had to eat,
no wonder she wouldn’t eat it. What is it anyway?”

“It’s dog
food.”

“Are you
serious?” I looked into the bowl again. It didn’t look like dog food. Of
course, with the maggots and flies covering it, who could tell what it was?

“It’s the
good kind.
None of that cheap stuff.
Besides, dog food
is required by the FDA to be fit for human consumption. People eat it during
recessions like this. It’s fine.”

“It’s got
bugs all over it.”

“Yes. It’s
been down here a while. Let’s see, she quit eating over a week ago, maybe close
to two weeks. Pick them off. Or eat them. They’re full of protein.”

“You know
what else is full of protein?
Steak and eggs.
Why
don’t you run upstairs and make that happen for me?”

He
laughed. “There’s the girl I love.”

Love?
What
happened to like? I didn’t dwell on the use of terms. What captured my
attention was that I was back in his good graces.
One step
closer to getting back upstairs.

He headed
up the stairs.

“Are you
going to make me something to eat?”

“Eat what’s
in the bowl, Nicole. When you’re down here, you don’t get the luxury of my
cooking. And if you need to pee, do it on the floor.” With that, he went
through the doorway and closed the door behind him, leaving me alone in the
basement with a full bladder, a battered corpse, and a bowl of rotten dog food.

Chapter
12

I waited
and waited for Ron to return, but he didn’t. My belly growled, but I ignored
it. If Stephanie could go nearly two weeks without food, surely I could go a
couple of days. That should be long enough for him to allow me back upstairs.

Funny how
I had begged him to let me go home, and now I was begging him to let me go upstairs.
The worse my situation got, the better off I realized I’d had it before.

Eventually,
I could hold my pee no longer. I looked for a bucket or a hole or anything, but
other than the bowl containing the dog food, there was nothing. So I squatted
on the mattress with my butt hung over the edge and let it go. I cried as I
peed, having been reduced to such animalistic ways, but there was no other way.
Beside the mattress was better than on it.

After I’d
drained my bladder, I sat on the mattress and looked at the mess I’d made as it
slowly crept across the concrete floor. As it made its way to the drain in the
center of the room, it pooled around Stephanie’s heel. I felt horrible that she
had to lie in my piss. Damn Ron.

At some
point, I fell asleep. I had no way of keeping track of time in the basement. If
there were any windows, they were tightly covered and let in no light. I never
knew what day it was or what time it was.

I woke to
the feel of someone’s hand on my butt. Once again, I was curled in the fetal
position to stay as warm as I could. I opened my eyes but didn’t move. Focusing
on the feel of the touch, I ruled out the possibility of a bug or a rodent. It
was definitely a human. A disturbing image flashed through my mind of
Stephanie’s cold corpse crawling across the floor and touching me. I quickly
rolled onto my back to find that Ron was on his knees beside me.

“Will you
have me now?” he asked.

Immediately,
I answered no.

In a huff,
he got up. In the dim light of the bare bulbs, I saw that he was naked.
And excited.
And now, angry.

He paced
back and forth for a little bit, mumbling under his breath something I couldn’t
make out. I watched him closely, afraid this would be the time he raped me. And
if it was, I’d still consider myself lucky that I wasn’t Stephanie.

I watched
in amazement that even in his anger and frustration, he kept his erection. It
bobbed around in front of him as he angrily stomped back and forth across the
room. Had this been a movie I was watching from the comfort of my own home, I
would’ve surely laughed. But here, in this moment, it was the farthest thing
from funny.

Then, he
saw Stephanie. With no more than a second’s worth of consideration, he walked
over to her and got on his knees. With her arms and legs still shackled to the
floor, spread wide, he had his way with her.

As if it wasn’t
disturbing enough to watch him rape a dead woman, I listened as he said my name
over and over while doing it. With each thrust of his hips, he said, “Nicole.
Nicole. Nicole.” As he climaxed, he said my name again. This time, it was loud.
A long, terrifying howl of my name, sure to haunt me in my
sleep.