Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu: A tale of Atomic Love (6 page)

“I was free,” he said again, and nodded his head, because that was exactly right. Then he grinned at her, a breathtakingly beautiful grin, although he didn’t know this, of course. But
Montessa’s throat closed and her heart shuddered in her chest at the easiness, at the joy, at the satisfaction of that grin. And that smile, those white teeth. That was the beginning of this for her. That was the second that she decided maybe she wanted to live, after all.

Renan had favors. Lots of them. Things owed to him since before the dawn of time, it seemed, and this was the perfect time to call them all in.

Monty had been gone for over a week now. A week. No calls, nothing. And that wasn’t right, wasn’t what a woman was supposed to do for her man. He found himself seeking comfort wherever he could find it, cursing her name with each bump, each hit, each woman. She was selfish, making him worry. Running off and passing her little whore self around to any panting dog that looked at her. Laughing at him, he knew it. He just knew.

So he called in his favors. Had sets of eyes looking for her everywhere. If she used her credit card, if she showed up on any newsfeed, if she stuck her head out anywhere in the country, he’d find her. He’d drag her back, screaming, if he had to.
Then he’d make her pay. Oh, he’d enjoy that part. Making her pay was like nothing else on earth. It was like hearing the angels sing.

Montessa was enthralled. She watched Lu’s mouth while he spoke, watched the way he used his hands,
the way his emotions and expressions changed his face according to where he was in the story.

He talked about his dad’s abuse, about the way he hid in his closet as a little boy. The way they took him to rituals and the shamans beat their drums and how he ate the special foods meant to cleanse the soul and body. Lu had set the shaman aflame the last time his parents took him. She had been put out quickly. Maimed but not murdered. Scarred but alive.

“So not my first kill, but almost,” he said, and the way his eyes twinkled, it was like something out of a fairytale.

“Tell me how it felt to kill your father,” Montessa urged, and even though he had already told her, he told her again. And again, when she asked for it a third time. She was a child with a favorite bedtime story. Tell me again, please. Again. More and more and more.

“The way his bones cracked, it was like nothing I’d ever imagined,” he said. His voice, the excitement, it made her blood run faster through her veins, screaming through arteries like a rollercoaster. “The smell of his clothes as they burned. The heat. I watched his sparse hair burn right off his head, and it was…oh, Montessa, it was something special.”

She liked the way he said her name. She liked it very much.

“Ever feel like you have a calling?” he asked. “Something you’re really good at? That it was made for you to do, and you’ll never be happy unless you’re doing it?”

“That’s how you feel? That you were meant to kill your father?”

“Absolutely. Nothing ever felt so right. It was almost like being a knight. A deity. Taking the evil out of the world. I was doing the universe this big favor, right? It was almost holy.”

She wanted to ask if it felt like that with the other girls. If it was holy, as well. Were they being sacrificed on the altar of some god? Was he communing with a type of spirit as he slit throats?

She was almost jealous.

“When you kill me,” she said, and noticed that Lu blinked furiously, as if startled, “will you remember me? Maybe not as fondly as you remember your father’s death, of course, but will I…”

She didn’t know how to finish. Would she mean something to him? Fulfill him in some way? Could he sup on her soul for a little while, until he felt the need to take another woman, another life, and she became just another body in a line of bodies?

“Never mind,” she said.
“I don’t really want to know.”

He was quiet. Thoughtful. When he spoke, his voice was low and melodious
, and she remembered how smooth and calm it had been when she first heard it through the hood.

“I told you I’d dispose of you in the sea.”

Her smile, it was sunny. Full of radiance and joy and peace.

“Thank you,” she said, because she knew what he was saying.

“You’re welcome,” he answered, and blushed a bit on his high cheekbones, because he knew what she had been asking.

The silence in the cab was companionable. Soft and sweet. He wanted to reach out and hold her hand, run his fingertips against her fragile knuckles, but her hands were still shackled to the door handle. Out of his reach.

Such delicate hands but surprisingly strong. She could alter the course of the world using those hands.

That was when Lu realized he was going to let her go.

CHAPTER NINE

His heart hurt in a strange new way. Felt too tight, like it was bound and everything in him screamed to take his knife to it, to the knotted tissue, and whatever iron band had wrapped around it. Release it.
Excise the hurt. Remove this pain. Lu didn’t like it, not at all.

It came from letting the girl go. He knew this. When she left, she’d go directly to the police and tell them all about the young Asian man, early 20’s, surprisingly muscled and wiry, maybe 130 pounds. 150? She
was really terrible with weight. But he usually wore a t-shirt. A dirty denim jacket when things got cold. Jeans and white sneakers, like a frat boy. Oh, yes, and he had a knife. A long, shiny, very clean and very sharp knife. He murdered his father with that knife. He drives a semi. His name is Lu. He’s killed several other girls. When you find him, it should be the death penalty all the way, please. He hit me in the head with a wrench. It hurt so terribly, so terribly that I threw up, over and over and over. It’s a miracle I got away.

He’d be dead before the police organized their search. Dead before they
chased him down, hounds to his fox, found him, threw him to the ground and cuffed him. He wasn’t going to live his life in a box. Wasn’t going to relive his precious kills for them, so some strange families could have
closure
. He didn’t care about their closure. He’d give himself to the sea, first.

“What are you thinking about, Lu?” she asked him.

“Shut up and go to sleep.”

He felt her hurt, a tangible thing. It rested on his tongue like snowflakes, like co
caine, bitter and worn and familiar. She was so used to hurting that she practically wrapped it around herself like a blanket. A soft, thin protection. The most ineffective of armors.

He sighed.

“I have to drop my load off tomorrow. Empty the truck. I’m trying to figure out what to do with you first, okay?”

“What do you usually do with your girls?”

A beat. A pregnant pause, as they say in books. A time where the air in the cab grew heavy and dark and expectant and full of responsibility. He didn’t want the responsibility. Didn’t need it. Wanted to kick the door open, roll out onto the moving ground beneath him, and pelt down the road away from her. She knew what he did. He knew she knew it. She wanted to hear him say it, to be beaten down by his words. So he said them.

“Kill them.”

“Oh.”

“You asked.”

“I did.”

She turned her face to the window, and Lu cursed. Cursed louder and hit the steering wheel.

“Montessa, enough of that!”

She turned back, her face white and her mouth dropped open. He saw it, saw the blood running from the corners of her mouth, saw her eyes swollen shut and the bruises that colored and puffed her face. Saw how many times hands had been put on her, and that she expected the same from him.

He’d already done so.

He blinked and the gore was gone. She was just terrified. Terrified and whole, her cuts and wounds having healed while they had been together, for the most part.

His heart twisted again.

“You accept too much, do you understand me? You’re always spouting how your mama said you were special. So be special. Enough of this beaten animal act all of the time.”

She pulled away from him, made herself into a small ball near the window, and that was it. All that he needed.
The perfect opportunity.

He pulled the truck over, too fast, and the brakes hissed and puffed and threw up gravel like sheets of water.

“Lu? No!”

He reached over her, so close that he could smell her sweat and fear and something that tasted like sorrow, and unlocked the padlock. He grabbed her bound hands and pulled her roughly between the seats.

“Lu! Lu, please! I don’t want to die!”

He pulled her close to him, her hands up in the air
, over her head. Shook them.

“Is that true?” he asked.

Her breath was coming heavy and fast. Her muscles were rigid and taut, her too-blue eyes wide and frightened and at the same time, smoldering with something darker.

Horror? No. Fury.

Lu nearly smiled, but caught himself in time.

“Huh, girl? Is it true? Do you want to live?”

She couldn’t speak, but nodded. Her face was so close to his that she could lift her chin and bite deeply into his bottom lip, if she wished. Tear it and spit the blood back at him. He almost hoped she would. Teach him a lesson. Make him sorry. Hurt him so good.

She blinked and he was satisfied to see there weren’t any tears there.

He threw her onto the bed built into the corner.

“If you want to live, then act like it.”

He felt the set of his face, the granite under his skin, as he climbed back into his seat and started the truck. A breeze flew around the cab, a storm, a tornado of ill feeling, and he heard the chair fall over and slide around in the back. Knew that Montessa was raging inside. If he was lucky enough, she’d go Apocalyptic and incinerate them all. But she wasn’t at that point, not yet. Perhaps she never would be. But, oh, how he hoped she’d fulfill her violent potential, and soon.

He’d sleep in the driver’s seat tonight. Let her have the back. Free to roam, free access to his tool box. She’d cut the ropes around her wrists, and then…what?
Stab him in the neck? Possibly. Try to creep out without his noticing? He wouldn’t sleep a wink, he knew it, but he wouldn’t try to stop her. Let her go. Let her be free. She’ll go back to whatever life she would go back to. Her boyfriend would probably kill her. It seemed a shame that he would get to do so and Lu wouldn’t. Lu would have made it kind. Appreciated it. Filed it away in his mind of Beautiful Kills. Remembered her fondly, both alive and as a corpse. He wanted her in a way that loser wasn’t even capable of.

He realized his jaw was aching. Clenched too hard. He tried to relax, tried to focus on the road, on the whistling of the Montessa-created storm around his ears. Think of the here and now. The imminent. Don’t spend any time wondering how soft her hair would be when it was freshly washed and free of sticky blood. Don’t realize, with surprise, that for the first time, he was going to miss somebody.

He nearly ran off the road, righted the truck quickly. Sucked in a breath and held it.

It was true. He was
actually going to miss her.
 

CHAPTER TEN

Her hair swirled around her, her breaths coming out in gasping almost-sob
s of rage that she tried to rein in. The pressure in her head and chest pushed out, nearly exploded from behind her eyes and teeth. If she didn’t hold back, she’d blow the truck apart, she could feel it. Kill herself and Lu and there wouldn’t be anything to find, just tiny bits of rubble and detritus carried on the wind.

She had to calm down. Breathe. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

She held her hands to her face, her wrists bloodied and sore and raw. With her eyes covered, things seemed less pressing. She was here. She was safe. He had put her here to let her escape. She knew this. And appreciated it on a level, too, of course. Of course she did. But at the same time…

I’m tired of being tossed away.

Abandoned. Left. Her mother. Used up until her body and soul ground into little bits by her father, or at least the man that she had been trained to think of as her father. Used and left by her cousins. The neighbors. Everybody.

Renan hadn’t trashed her. He was frightening and abusive and scared her so deep that her guts pooled in her bowels, that she tasted vomit whenever he leaned in to bite or kiss her, she never knew which one.
But he hadn’t left. He threatened to kill her if she walked out on him. That’s the opposite of leaving, isn’t it?

It isn’t love. Of course it isn’t love, and Montessa had never deluded herself into believing love entered into the equation with Renan. But still, he wanted her around. To control, certainly. To beat on and break. But to keep. Regardless of the consequences.

Being kept was the reverse of being abandoned, and Montessa had walked down enough dirt roads, wiping the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand, to know she wanted to stay. Be kept. With anyone, she didn’t even care who, anymore. It wasn’t so much to ask. Nothing to ask, really. It was just not being left again, and that was all. She didn’t expect any more than that.