Olivia (132 page)

Another gunshot ricocheted through the forest.  The voices, when they started whooping it up, sounded closer.

Olivia started away again, and then stopped, torn.  Was she walking towards them?  The way echoes rolled and bounced, it was difficult to tell.  Was that a smudgy funnel of smoke over the trees, or just a thicker place in the clouds?  Where were they?  Where was
she
?

She kept walking, clutching her hands before her as she went, and casting nervous glances in the direction of what might or might not be a human camp.  But wait.  There was something ahead, caught on a tree.  Something that fluttered in the light breeze.  It wasn’t a scrap of leather from her travel breeches, though; it was a ribbon, carefully tied around the tree’s narrow trunk.

A marker?  For the hunters?  Was she walking down a game trail?

Olivia looked down, shifting her weight from foot to foot uneasily, as though her suspicions alone would reveal a helpful plaque or a map of the area, perhaps with a You Are Here tag and maybe even a Here Is Kodjunn.

Of course, there was nothing.  The ground was dirt and pine needles, bark and rocks, and if there was a path, it was invisible to her ignorant senses.  More uncertain than ever, Olivia coaxed her feet to continue moving her forward.  Nightfall was hours away.  She couldn’t afford to second-guess herself until then.  Either she sat down under the heavy pattern of branches and hoped for a miracle, or she kept moving and hoped to stumble on Kodjunn, who was surely looking for her.

A rebel yell, from very nearby.  Two more flat cracks of gunfire.

“Will you stop with that fucking thing?” someone shouted, more exasperated than angry, and quite obviously drunk.  Dropping his voice, but still perfectly audible, he added, “Gimme that.”

Olivia was appalled.  She hunted through the thick growth of pines, but couldn’t see anyone.  She didn’t have to see them.  That she could hear them even when they weren’t shouting was enough to tell her she was way too close.

“Fuck off,” someone said sulkily.  “Gotta have a gun in the woods.  Protection.  Could be bears.”

Two or three others laughed contemptuously at this.  Olivia cringed back against a tree.  How many of them were there?  And where were they?  Was she walking right into their camp?  They didn’t sound as though they were ahead of her, but it was so hard to tell for sure.

“Hey, give it back!  Give it—Aw, fuck you all.  I don’t need the fucking gun.  I see a bear, I’ll just piss on it.”

“With that little pecker?  What’s it gonna do, die laughing?”

“Gotta use it if you want it to grow, Reb,” a gravelly voice said sagely.  “And I don’t mean pull on it your own self.  Gotta find some pussy, get a good tight fuck once in a while.”

They’re just men
, Olivia told herself, and made herself keep moving. 
Men on their own will talk big, say things they’d never say if they knew someone else was listening.  It’s locker room talk, nothing more
.

“You want to watch what you’re saying, Jimmy,” one of them said, cruelly interrupting another man’s stirring critique of the last ‘keg’ he’d ‘tapped’.  “I been out here ten days with nothing to look at but beards and ball-sacks, I’m about horny enough to fuck the crack of dawn.”

“Yeah, so why do I have to watch it?”

“You’re the littlest,” came the smirking reply and everybody laughed.  Manly kisses were blown, manly catcalls were made, and Jimmy, by the sound of it, retreated to where he could put his back against a solid tree and his ass firmly against the ground.  “Hell, boy, why you think we brought you?”

Just men
, Olivia thought again, but she was careful not to make a sound.

She had skulked another thirty feet when the hill abruptly ended and she found herself looking straight into the campsite, with only two trees between her and six men.  Two of them were facing her direction, although one of them was cleaning a gun and the other perusing a magazine.  Olivia found herself flat on her belly without any recollection of the dive that put her there.  She listened, but heard nothing but coarse laughter and coarser conversation.

“Loreen knows better than to say shit to me,” one man was saying.  “Hell, she came into the bedroom once when I was banging Rosie Harper, and she just turn around and left again.  You got to train your woman like you train a dog.  She bites, you give her a sock to the side of the head.”

“Rosie Harper’s a fucking whore.”

“Yeah, so what?  You tellin’ me you ain’t never paid for it?”

“Jack Kaplan never pays for it.”  A considering pause.  “I been known to
take
it, but I ain’t never paid for it.  Tell you what, if a woman walks out of her house with her tittybuds showing and her ass crammed into jeans too tight for her, there ain’t no such thing as ‘please no please stop.’”

Grunts of agreement.  A bottle broke.

Olivia buried her head briefly in her arm and then started crawling faster.  It seemed to her as though the woods opened up about two hundred feet ahead of her.  It looked like the ground might drop off a little, too.  It might even be the clearing she’d run from the night before.

She risked a glance over her shoulder.  The trees still striped her view of the campsite, but she could still count all six humans.  As she watched, one of them announced a call of nature, and her heart actually stopped as she thought he might come her way.  If he had, he would have found her without any trouble at all.  As it was, he went in exactly the opposite direction and vanished from sight.

Olivia jerked her head back around and started crawling again.  She forced herself not to hurry.  She was too close to them.  The reptilian shush of pine needles sliding beneath her as she slithered on her belly seemed overloud.  She couldn’t risk any sound greater than that.

Another ten feet, and she looked around again.  More trees, more distance.  Still no real cover.

Twenty feet.  She started to get on her hands and knees, but lost her nerve and kept crawling.

Forty feet.  There was a subtle rise to the ground, and the trees were more densely scattered.  The campsite was well behind her now; she could see the backs of two of the humans, but no more than that.  It had to be enough.  She pulled herself into a crouching position, her ears aching to hear them, then made herself run a little ways.  She stopped, listened, and then ran again.  She could still hear them, but she couldn’t see any part of them or their camp.

Breathing a tiny sigh, she opened up her feet and ate the distance between her and the clearing.

It was the same!  Here was the dented ant’s nest!  Here was the sloping hill where she’d sat and talked with the Great Spirit.  Here was the muddy ground of the slow-flowing river she’d nearly fallen in!  She slid down the slope and stood in the damp grass, searching the sky anxiously.  If they were looking for her, they would have to see her here.

She hunkered down on a knobby thrust of grass to wait.

5

She was dozing when she first heard the noise.  It sounded stealthy, but not too stealthy, and her first thought had been of snakes.

At once alert, Olivia hunted through the grass without moving, but saw nothing.  She glanced up at the darkening sky, then over in the direction of the campsite.  She had removed herself to the driest section of grass, dimly mindful of leeches, but had seen no sign of wildlife.  Doubtless, the raucous noise of the humans was keeping the forest animals at a generous distance; all too often throughout the day, they’d fallen back on firearms for entertainment.

The sound came again, from behind.

Olivia spun around, backing up on her hands and knees, but still saw nothing. 
Sound carries, right
? she thought, on the verge of panic. 
If I were to scream, maybe Kodjunn could get here before the humans.

Irrational, improbable.  Nevertheless, extremely tempting.

From the corner of her eye, she saw movement in the grass as something streaked towards her, but when she whipped her head around, it stopped.  She backed further away, keeping her eyes pinned to that spot.  Another rustle from the right.  Then from straight ahead.  Olivia bounded backward.  Her feet splashed into the running water.

“Jesus, that’s cold,” Olivia hissed, as icy water enclosed her ankles.

But the words were stunned from her mind when the water became hands and she was yanked back and into the river.

Her scream became a cascade of bubbles.  Her body went instantly numb.  Hands seized her arms, legs, hips, throat, breasts, thighs, hair.  The rushing water became distorted laughter.  The cold became biting teeth and scratching claws.  And then there was a face.

Drained of power, Olivia was helpless to do anything but drown.  She could not hear the things Bahgree said, but the hatred and insanity in that evil face did not need translating.  The face swam closer, gibbering, gleeful.

Olivia’s feet glanced off the bottom of the river.  She immediately got her legs beneath her body and kicked up as hard as she could.  She broke the surface, seized two handfuls of grass and tried to scramble out of the water. 

She became the rope in a vicious tug-of-war between the Water-Woman, and her own grip on the grass.  She could hear a thick tearing sound as dozens of tiny roots tore free, but she was still holding on.  She kicked furiously, screaming out curses even as she fought to pull herself free.

Something impossible—an arm, meant to be a woman’s, but awkward and ugly—formed itself of brackish water and grabbed her by the hair.  One swift hard yank brought tears of pain to her eyes, but then the arm splashed apart.  The resistance in the water vanished.  Olivia kicked free of the river and clambered onto the bank.

She took rapid stock of herself.  She was freezing and shivering.  Her travel-breeches had been torn away, as had most of her shirt.  She was still wearing her left travel-shoe.  Her skin was bluish and pimpled with gooseflesh.  Otherwise, she was all right.

“Hey,” someone called.  “You ain’t never gonna believe what was making the ruckus!”

The river babbled out an ugly snigger.

Olivia started to scream out Kodjunn’s name.

6

They let her scream, and why not?  They were out in the middle of nowhere.  Six men fanned out in case she decided to run, but she was backed up against the water, and there was nowhere else to run.  They closed in on her, and then one of them had her by the arm and she was yanked roughly to her feet.

“What are you standing her up for, you idjit?”

“It’s too wet out here,” her captor said simply.

“Which one of us do you think she’s calling ‘cousin’?” another remarked, stumbling drunkenly alongside her as she was pulled back towards the campsite.

That halted the man who held on to her.  “Got a boyfriend?” he asked her.  “Where’s your cousin?”

She screamed for Kodjunn.

“She ain’t saying cousin, you stupid fucker, she’s saying cajun.”

“Missy, you want to shut up a second so we can talk to you?”

She screamed again.

The one that had hold of her punched her in the side of the head.

Her teeth snapped together, narrowly missing her tongue.  She stared at him, silent.

“Who’s it you’re shouting for, cajun or cousin?” her captor asked.

“Maybe it’s an Injun word for help.”

“She don’t look Injun.”

“Well, she ain’t getting any help either, so who the fuck cares?”

Olivia screamed for Kodjunn again.

Her captor, apparently deciding that her Indian heritage was a moot point, continued pulling her back to the campsite.  He was not long in reaching it.  There were two pickup trucks and a rusted camper parked there.  He hauled her over to the camper and opened the door.  Shoving her inside, he turned pompously to the others and said, “Wait your fucking turn, you goddamn savages.  Ain’t you got any manners?”

Olivia managed a last scream before he slammed the door.  Then she ran, but there was nowhere to go except to the back of the cramped vehicle, which was where he wanted her anyway.  He pushed her down on the filthy bed when she tried to scramble past him, already fumbling with the fly of his jeans.  He didn’t have to undress her; Bahgree had done most of that for him and all that was left was one shoe and the hanging shreds of her shirt.

Here I thought nothing new could possibly happen to me
, Olivia thought, and shocked herself with a laugh. 
I’ve never been gang-raped, so I guess I was wrong.  In a few hours, I am going to be one well-raped woman
.

Her captor gave a cry of triumph as he finally managed to get his jeans down around his ankles.  He seized her knees and she put both feet on his fat stomach and pushed.  He went over with a crash and she tried to run over him, but there was just too much junk in her way.  He caught her by the leg, pulled her down, and even got her on the ground.  However, the same lack of space that kept her a prisoner also kept him from having room enough to spread her legs wide enough to allow his massive bulk between them.

“Aw fuck,” he snarled.  “Gimme a hand, here.”

She slapped him.

He looked comically shocked for an instant before punching her in the stomach.  When she doubled up with a croak, he clambered to his knees and pulled her backwards to the bed.

Someone shouted outside.

“Fucking…get over…stupid bitch,” her captor finished, finally heaving her struggling body back onto the bed.

Two gunshots.

He hadn’t responded to the cries of his confederates—they’d been doing drunken whooping all afternoon—but he responded to the gunfire.  “Shut up,” he said to her irritably, and listened.

Something heavy slammed against the side of the camper.  Someone yanked at the door, pleading to be let in, and then Olivia felt the whole vehicle rock as whoever was out there was wrenched away, along with the doorknob.  A high scream ended abruptly in a thick, ripping sound.  A heavy body hit the ground outside.  The head hit the camper.

Olivia’s captor stood up slowly.  His jeans were still around his ankles.  The half-erection he’d worked himself up towards was now trying to hide beneath his bulging stomach.  “Jesus,” he breathed, turning waxy pale right before her eyes.  “Is that your cousin?”