Fresh Flesh (21 page)

"Go ahead and sleep." Jessica pointed at the
dirt again. "I'll be okay. I've got my switchblade."

"Rich woman with switchblade. A killer
combination."

"Now if only I had my high heels?"

"You're sure about me sleeping? I could use
some."

"Yes, get to it. It will make me feel much
better knowing I'm not Rich Woman With Switchblade Traveling With
Zombie."

Richard laid down. "OK. I don't think they're
out there, Jessica. It's too dark here at night. You're standing
less than five feet from me and I can barely see you."

"Sleep, Richard. For your own good."

Richard didn't reply for almost a minute, and
she wondered if he had fallen asleep that quickly.

"Were you serious earlier, Jessica? Did you
really mean that you've forgiven me?"

She moved in and kissed his cheek."Yes."

He reached out and gently squeezed her
hand.

"I'll only sleep a few. . . hours," he said
and drifted away.

When he started snoring, she pulled his hand
to her lips and kissed it: "Goodnight, Richard."

"Sleeping?" Kyle stood up from the crackling
campfire. Sweeter words he hadn't heard in awhile. "I'm going this
time to make sure it doesn't get fucked up. I'll take the woman,
you and Seth make damn sure Templin doesn't follow."

"Kill him?" Walkins asked.

"Just make him. . .uncomfortable. I want him
to come to me for her."

Walkins enjoyed the plan.

"As soon as you're finished with Templin,
follow me back here."

Walkins nodded.

Kyle put a cold finger on Walkins' soiled,
bare chest.

"But if this thing falls through. . ."

"Nothing will go wrong. They don't suspect a
thing."

Kyle wasn't as confident. "We'll see."

In another time, there had been Sherry.

Sherry and he had been together first. They'd
met in eighth grade at a school dance and almost immediately fallen
for each other. At that age, their parents called the relationship
"puppy love" (Richard's father coined it, "just a cherry-bust"),
but to the young lovers, it was much more. Richard and Sherry had
caught the arrow, yet neither of them would know it until it was
over.

They were a typical teenage couple they went
everywhere together, scrawling their names on each other's
notebooks (Richard carved her name on the inside of his locker),
everything was smooth until the tenth grade.

Until Sherry showed her real self. It took
two years for it to happen, but when it did, it came in full force.
Over a few weekends, she two-timed Richard a half-dozen times.
Richard never understood why Sherry acted that way, and in the next
two years, it went unexplained. She gave him excuses but never
answers.

Through his dreams, Richard was assaulted by
pictures, fragments and memories of Sherry. She had been his
world.

And now there was Jessica. Jessica was not
Sherry but she represented what he had wanted Sherry to be. Jessica
seemed like the one woman in his life that he could at last depend
on.

Not his mother. Jessica had wanted to know
about his mother but the story there was too dark and disappointing
for Richard to delve into.

Richard knew it was Sherry he meant to hit,
not Jessica, and all the guilt that had ever existed stemmed from
his relationship with Sherry.

In another time, Richard Templin stirred in
his sleep.

Jessica couldn't hear anything but crashing
waves. No wind, no rattling tree branches, only crashing upon
crashing waves. The island was unusually quiet.

They haven't given up yet. They aren't done
searching for us.

A different sound startled her.

The crack of twigs. Footsteps
approaching.

Jessica bent down and started to shake
Richard. He stirred but didn't wake. She paused, straining to hear
it again, just once more, and there were no twigs breaking or
footsteps. Her ears were playing sound games with her head. Richard
turned over and snored.

The waves crashed again.

Imagination.

Five minutes passed of staring into the
darkness. She realized that all along this had been what she'd been
so afraid of: night alone in the twisting ravine. Even though she
wasn't alone, Richard wasn't able to tell her that she was only
hearing "night sounds." Her immediate protection, the switchblade,
was clutched with bone-white knuckles in her hand.

She tried to take her mind off the darkness
and think of something else. Perhaps a song.

Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,
ninety-nine. . .

Wrong song.

She tried to think of Skynyrd songs since
that was the last music Richard mentioned but the song titles held
disturbing ties to events on the island.
Tuesday's Gone
was
a reminder of every day being gone and time having no meaning on
the island.
That Smell
reminded her of Butch Smith
smothering her while Richard fought the wrestler.

So she left Skynyrd and went back to counting
bottles of beer.

She reached ninety bottles of beer and
stopped. She could have used those nine bottles of beer right then.
Oh how smoothly they would have gone down. Nine bottles of beer for
a lady her size would have numbed her senses. Now that's what she
needed because when you weren't sober you didn't worry.

You didn't get scared.

Different song. Sing a different song . .
.

She stopped, caught in her own confusion,
because she could not think of the opening words to even one other
song.

Except Jingle Bells, but Christmas Music was
less appropriate than the bottles of beer.

So she gave up the singing and started to
count something more ridiculous: sheep.

But that's supposed to make you sleepy, you
don't want to be sleepy, 'cause if you're sleepy you dream, if you
dream, you have nightmares, and if you have nightmares. . .

She passed on the sheep. It was never sheep,
anyway, that she counted to force herself to sleep. It was rocks,
wasn't it? Rocks, in her opinion, had to be the most boring things
on earth.

Another twig cracked. And another.

Another.

Branches gave way and opened toward her.
Startled, she dropped her weapon.

Hands. Terror. HANDS.

The hands found their mark.

A hand on her throat.

A hand on her mouth.

Hot breath on her neck.

She was being dragged away when she finally
started screaming, the sound muffled in her captor's hand covering
her mouth.

In his dream he was once again being seized
by huge birds. However, this time, the birds appeared much more
vividly. They were huge eagles with fiery red eyes and sharp hooked
beaks, their fur silky and stiff. The eagle's talons dug into his
flesh, gripped like barbed wire, promising pain if he attempted
struggle.

But he didn't struggle because he knew where
they were taking him.

Paradise
.

The eagles carried him up, up, and away
toward paradise in the blue skies. He could feel the wind blowing
colder as the eagles carried him higher. One eagle carried his arms
while the other concentrated on his legs. A movie he'd watched as a
kid,
The Wizard of Oz
, the scene where the monkeys with
creepy, flapping wings carried off Dorothy and her friends.

But they weren't carried off to paradise.

And he wasn't either.

Richard began to feel fear, coupled with pain
from the talons digging into the flesh beneath his wrists and below
his knees. Penetrating with the ease of a knife through raw meat,
four hooked ice-picks secured his frightened body.

"Where are you taking me?" he screamed but
the birds ignored. They kept flying him closer and closer to
something. He sensed it wasn't a where, it was a thing.

The skies surrounding him began to
darken.

He never thought to wake up. A stupid thing
too, because at that moment Jessica was being dragged away and he
was about to be attacked.

The skies blackened. Richard couldn't see the
eagles any longer. He didn't feel their talons in his skin.

Now Richard was in a crowded room with a
party going full bore.

Mary Ellen Brubet was bragging about having
the biggest tits on campus. Roy Shyler was telling his bored
girlfriend about his grand slam last year. Paul Franklin was trying
everything to get laid by the only girl in the room who hadn't
turned him down. Billy Zebosky was leaning under the half-barrel,
tapping it into his mouth like a drinking faucet.

Several others with faces he didn't recognize
were puking. His own Sherry was somewhere, probably two-timing him
again. The house was trashed with empty and partially-full beer and
whiskey bottles, magazines, books and people sprawled everywhere
like memories of a fierce battle. Drugs were going strong in one
corner: pot, coke, barbs, someone was even riding the rocket.

And he was in the other corner nearest the
door with three others admiring it: the homeowner's sleek .357.

It was a clean machine.

A sharp machine.

A death machine.

Before Richard could stop the nightmare from
reeling fast forward, from plunging him into the real horror, some
fool opened the front door.

And there stood a dozen uniformed men in
blue.

Willy Parker, the only kid more stoned than
him, freaked, snatched the gun and started shooting. Firing all
over the place.

"NO, YOU CRAZY FUCKER! NO! DON'T
SHOOOOOOOOOOTTTTT!" Screaming everywhere.

"STOP YOU FUCKING IDIOT! STOP
SHHHHHHOOOOOTTTTINNNGGG!"

Richard wrestled for the gun, but was too
late, because the death machine had already claimed two lives.
Followed by a third when he tried to grab the gun.

Gunfire from the police. More screams.

Richard was holding the .357 Magnum. And
something else.

A heathly chunk of Willy Parker's brain.

"DROP IT OR YOU'RE DEAD!" a voice screamed
over the flurry.

He dropped it. Searched for words. Faltered.
Suddenly something that hadn't happened then happened now.

A man with one eye came rocketing through the
doorway, brandishing a long buck knife.

Standing in front of him.

Glaring.

"You did
this
to me." the man pointed
to his poked-out eye, the flesh flapping and useless.

When Richard realized what was happening he
started screaming, his blood turned into icy mountain water.

The man with one eye was not a dream, nor was
the long buck knife that he jammed into Richard's leg.

Two nightmares merged.

Jessica was being dragged away by Kyle
Roberts while the man with one eye stood over him along with his
partner. Their faces were lit by torch. He knew both. Seth Everson
glared with one eye while Donald Walkins used both. Their eyes
moved to the knife wedged in Richard's leg like an axe in a
chopping block. Blood was starting to gush fountain-like from the
wound.

The pain hit him sudden and sharp. He fought
it, but the pain was incredible, imitating the feeling of someone
standing over his leg sawing into the bone, through the bone,
sawing, sawing and sawing.

"You did this to me, you cocksucker!" Seth
ground the knife further into Richard's leg. Walkins grabbed
Richard like a rag doll, bent his arms behind his back and held him
while the one-eyed man landed a fist to his solar-plexus.

"OOFF!" was the sound emitted from Richard's
lips. Too much pain. Sawing, oh, the sawing.

"Richard!" Jessica voice faded, legs kicking
bushes as the darkness swallowed her.

"Jessica!" he returned the call.

Seth took another fierce punch, this time a
left cross to the chest. The air escaped from Richard like a popped
balloon.

His whole leg was numb, only feeling the
warmth of his blood flowing rapidly down his ankle.

"You're a lucky sumbitch, Templin," Walkins
said, shooting foul breath in his ear. "Lucky that Roberts wants
you alive, or Seth and I would carve you right here."

"YOU DID THIS TO ME!" Seth screamed, punching
Richard in the face.

Richard hung barely to consciousness.

"Seth don't like you much, Templin." Walkins
chuckled. "Thinks you're a punching bag."

"Bastards," Richard gasped, feeling the light
and dark. Everything started spinning.

The sawing bone feeling in his leg continued
and then Seth yanked out the knife.

"Better stop the bleeding, Seth." Walkins
suggested. "Stick him with the torch."

The sawing turned to burning. His leg was a
raging fire. The smell of scorched flesh rose instantly to his
nostrils and gagged him.

The two men cheered over Richard's pain.

Pain. The pain.

"I'm supposed to give you this message,"
Walkins said, twisting his arm behind his back. "Roberts is waiting
for you."

Walkins threw Richard to the ground and he
reached for his throbbing leg.

"Let's get back," Walkins told Seth, "I can't
wait to fuck that bitch."

No . . . no—NO!
Richard tried to rise,
but the second he moved, Walkins spun around with a right hook and
sent him back to dreamland.

Kyle Roberts licked his lips as he dragged
Jessica.

"Let me go, please" Jessica cried, pounded
him with her fists. Kyle didn't say anything while dragging her. He
was too excited by how easy capturing her had been.

There were two ten-foot branch-poles sticking
out of the ground next to the campfire that she hadn't seen there
earlier today.

Roberts dragged her to the poles and started
tying her hands. She struggled, flailed and tried to kick for groin
like Richard had done to Bat Jackson but kept missing. Roberts kept
that vulnerable spot of his anatomy out of reach.