Dirty Harry 03 - The Long Death (2 page)

As the thought ended, she was whirled over and sat up. She felt a centralized sensation between her legs and heard a moisture-ridden sucking sound. Then the rubber mask fell away. Air slapped her like the hand of an angry suitor. She closed her mouth to gasp, blinked, then opened her lips to get as much oxygen as she could. As she tried, another rubbery wad was rammed into her mouth. She felt something move down her tongue and spread out, pushing open her jaws until they would go no farther. Then she was spun over onto her front again. For the first time she heard one of her attackers speak.

“Get her fucking hair out of the way,” he hissed.

Barbara’s proud blond mane was bunched up in a man’s hand, like spaghetti being twisted up in a fork, then pulled over to the side of her head. She felt a buckle being tightly secured on the back of her head, sinking two straps into her cheeks. She tried biting down. The thing in her mouth wouldn’t give. She tried spitting it out, but the straps on her cheeks were attached to the buckle as well as to the gag. She screamed. It emerged from what space it could as a choked gurgle.

She was flipped over onto her back again. The night was finally given some delineation by her eyes. She could only just make out the silhouettes of her attackers toiling over her waist, but she could see herself. First she saw a hose attached to a squeeze-bulb coming out of her opened mouth. She saw her black, thin sweater stretched over the sturdy mounds of her breasts. She saw a thin, coiled leather rope stretched from between her legs to her belly button and tied around her waist.

She tried moving her arms. It pulled the rope along her pelvis even tighter. It started a heat inside her already tight jeans. As soon as she felt it she moaned, and the indignity, the humiliation, and the fear hit her like a battering ram. She had been attacked. She was in the darkened, deserted shed. She was helpless.

She fought back as best she could. Her legs were not yet tied so she kicked with all her might. Bound as she was she couldn’t get enough leverage to collect any power. The attackers had placed her in the middle of the floor, so she couldn’t make noise by hitting the walls. The men moved back so she couldn’t do any damage there.

Instead she writhed, kicked, and moaned. She made pitifully little sound in the small enclosed area. Anyone outside wouldn’t have heard a thing.

“I’ll get the van,” she heard one of the men mutter. “You like this sort of thing more than I do.”

“Yeah,” said the other.

The first man moved over to the door, opened it slightly, and slipped out. Barbara twisted around to see him leave. The moonlight that came in during those few seconds was enough to expose the shed’s interior. There was nothing inside she could use to get free. Just an empty cardboard box or two beneath the shack’s one small window.

Barbara squirmed toward them. If she could just lean up against them or the wall, maybe she could gather her wits. She struggled up to her knees. She had put one booted foot flat on the floor when the other attacker moved over, put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her onto the floor again

“Uh, uh,” he said with quiet relish, “none of that.”

She twisted onto her side, raised her head, and looked at him. The blue moonlight coming in the window revealed his face. If not for the high cheekbones, it would have been a totally gentle, boyish face. The eyes were brown, the hair was thick and brown, and he was clean shaven. His skin looked almost soft. But his thick neck and strong cheekbones gave him away. There was muscle under that smooth, placid surface.

There was also perversion. Looking away for a moment, Barbara glanced at the window. When she looked back, he was motioning at the glass with his head.

“Go ahead,” he said, “I won’t stop you.”

She stared at him, her eyes widening with frightened confusion. What could they want? The wad filling her mouth and the mucous filling her throat made it hard to breathe. And the minimized air made it hard to think. She wasn’t rich. She made just enough with her free-lance word-processing jobs to pay for tuition, rent, and food. Her parents weren’t wealthy. Besides, they had all but disowned her after she went away to college. She hadn’t written or talked to them in about a year and a half.

She couldn’t understand it, and her confusion wasn’t helped when the second man motioned at the window again.

“Go ahead,” he said more as an instruction than a suggestion.

Her head was beginning to hurt. Moaning, she rolled over onto her stomach, brought both knees up under her and sat up. She was about to stand when the man behind her moved up, pulled off his belt, wrapped it around her thighs, just above her knees, buckled it tight and pushed her on her face a second time.

She cried out, only to hear a sodden sob as she painfully hit the ground. Her arms were useless to her—it was her breasts that took the brunt of the fall. She rolled over to see that his belt was a perforated kind that was popular in the sixties, one that could be buckled anywhere along its length. She looked up to see his smiling face.

“Now,” he said soothingly, “go ahead.”

She tried to plead with her eyes. They filled with tears and her breath came in sobbing bursts. His expression didn’t change. Slowly, she rolled onto her stomach and crawled toward the window. He walked around her and watched her progress from the side. Twice she caught the squeeze-bulb hanging out of her mouth between the floor and her chest. And twice the pressure made the wad in her mouth spread even more. It was a hand pump, she realized. She had seen it in a doctor’s hands when she was taking the blood pressure part of her yearly physical.

Through the red-flecked haze in her head, she thought about all the captive heroines she had seen on television. For them, a scarf over the mouth or between the teeth were enough. At the very worst, their lips would be taped shut. But here the object was not to keep her mouth closed, but wide open. The pain and the effectiveness of the device was nearly overwhelming.

Finally her forehead touched the hewn wall of the shed. She was right below the window. She raised her aching head and looked up at it. It was a regular setup with four glass panes interrupted by two crossing pieces of wood. It could not be opened. She tried standing up. The belt binding her knees made it impossible. The bottom of her legs simply kicked out forward and back. Her ankle joint was no help since her fashionable, high-heeled boots didn’t have much give.

“Good. Very good,” whispered the man behind her. “You did that really, really well.”

He walked behind her, pulled a box close to the window and sat above her. He then cupped a hand under, her jaw and wrapped his other arm around her waist. He spread his fingers so his thumb went under her turtleneck and his pinky slipped under the waist of her jeans. He lifted her up onto his lap.

She sat on something hard and jutting. She tried to pull herself upward, but his hand tightened around her jaw, spreading to her neck. He slowly, strongly, eased her back down to his lap.

“There now,” he said. “There, there now.”

Barbara’s terror was mingled with anger. He was talking to her like a baby or a pet dog. Always the most soothing, yet authoritative of tones. And the most caressing of hands. She could feel the strength of his fingers on her, but she could also feel the smoothness of his flesh. It stroked her face and warmly rubbed her stomach. She sat on his lap, her heels a few inches off the floor and her hair a few inches from the top of his head. She felt small and powerless in his clutches.

He enhanced that feeling by directing her gaze out the dirty glass pane. His fingers gripped her chin and twisted her chin in that direction. She could see the exit of the Science Building from the window as well as the entrance to the Student Union where she had been heading when she was attacked. And from where she was sitting she could see one or two other students going about their late-night campus business.

She started as she saw them. And just as she jerked forward, the attacker calmly placed one of his legs in front of the two of hers. She couldn’t kick the wall, his leg was in the way. She couldn’t butt the glass with her head, his hand was holding her back. She couldn’t scream, the inflatable gag filled her mouth. She couldn’t fight, the leather wrapping her hands which was bound to her waist by a leather thong kept them nestled against her rear end.

In desperate frustration, she struggled anyway. She writhed and shook in his grip. She bucked on his lap, throwing her head forward and back, trying to scream all the while. She contorted her hands, trying to pull free of the bindings. Her shoulders and torso vibrated with the effort to escape. She felt sweat all over her face, saliva drooling out the corners of her mouth, and an aching heat between her legs.

“Oh, that’s nice,” she heard him whisper. “Oh, that’s nice.”

It was only then that she realized what she had been doing. She realized where her hands were and what effect they had on him when she wiggled them to get free. She realized that every time she moved her arms she tightened the rope between her legs.

Her mind started to give way to hysteria. She tried to stop, but she couldn’t. She kept writhing in his grip. He only held her tighter on top of him. He started cooing continually. All she heard was his mutter as she looked out the window and shook uncontrollably.

When the young man stepped out of the Science Building directly across the street, she suddenly became stockstill. She stared directly at him as he looked away from her down the street. She felt her attacker’s head nestled among her long hair at the back of her neck. He didn’t know about the student. He just kept muttering soothing words and pulled her tighter on his lap.

Barbara strained forward, trying to reach the window as she gathered her breath for one explosion of sound. She was sure she could do it. She was sure she could get the other student’s attention with one sudden noise loud enough to get through the glass partition. Then, if he looked close enough, he would see her in the darkness and go get help.

At that moment the student’s head turned to look down the street in the other direction. For a split second Barbara had seen his eyes look directly at her from across the street. But he hadn’t seen her. He had looked right through her. And after that, he began to cross the street in her direction.

Barbara leaned ever forward as her lips curled up and away from the saliva-slick padding. She pulled back her head to drive herself forward and call out.

She was just beginning to jerk herself forward when the arm tightened around her waist and the hand cupping her chin slapped across the bottom of her face. Her muffled shriek bubbled beneath his fingers, and her forehead trembled a hair’s breath in front of the glass.

“Don’t worry,” came the quiet voice of her captor deep in her ear. “He can’t see us. He won’t hear you. Now, now, don’t worry.”

And with that, he began rocking her on his lap and the hand around her waist slipped over her rope-belt and under her dark sweater to settle on one warm breast. He fondled her and rocked her and cooed to her while she watched the other student walk away oblivious. He coddled her until she could hardly breathe and her sight was colored by swashes of darkness. When she saw his partner’s van turn the campus corner, she lost consciousness.

Barbara really didn’t know what happened after that. She really didn’t know what was happening now. All she could remember was the pain, the darkness, and the choking. She also recalled fighting and the sensation of falling, but after that, nothing. Nothing but a seemingly endless road that ravaged her bare feet and wound farther and farther into the twilight zone.

There was darkness all around her. She weaved from side to side, trying to follow the double yellow line in the center of the cement. Every time she got close to the forest bracketing the road, she pulled herself back. She wouldn’t go into the woods. She was afraid of what might be waiting for her behind the trees.

So instead she ran along a dim yellow band in the rain. And while she ran, she tried to remember why she was doing it. But, strangely, all she could remember was smiling faces. She saw one especially gentle-looking man smiling warmly at her. She couldn’t understand why that caring smile filled her with such dread.

Slowly, subtly, the gentleman’s face was infused with light. Two white dots shone out of his eyes and grew until they looked like suns and blotted out the man’s entire visage. Then the entire road was filled with the same light. Just in time, Barbara recognized them as car headlights, threw her arms across her head, and fell to the side.

Two thick steel radials marked the road just inches from her. The car swerved, smashed a headlight on a roadside tree, spun around, slammed its rear into another tree, and screeched to a halt five hundred feet down the road, pointing in the opposite direction.

“Holy shit!” said Danny Barnes as he pulled himself from under the glove compartment. “Did you see that?”

“Christ Almighty,” Tom Stillman breathed, his white-knuckled hands still gripping the padded steering wheel of his Firebird.

“Come on,” said Danny as he kicked open his door, vaulted out, and ran down the road.

“Christ Almighty,” Tom said again, trying not to hyperventilate.

Danny ran to the huddled form of the blond in the hospital gown. The thin cloth was stuck to her skin by the rain, and the hem had hiked up over her hip. He grabbed her shoulders to roll her over. She responded by fighting and howling like a wildcat. They struggled in the rain, he leaning down, not loosening his grip on her shoulders, she on her bended knees, punching and scratching the best she could.

“Tom!” Danny yelled. “Tom! Come on and help me, will ya?”

The young man behind the wheel snapped out of his spell when he heard his friend’s voice. He scrambled out of the car, glanced at the damage, then ran over to the fight.

“What the hell is this?” he exploded. “Who is this broad?”

“How the hell should I know?” Barnes spat. “She’s drugged or something, I don’t know. Crazy, out of her head. Give me a hand, will you?”

“Come on,” said Stillman, waving an arm at the straining girl, “she’s wearing a hospital thing. She must be an escaped looney or something.”