Shut The Fuck Up And Die! (22 page)

“
You were s’posed to love
me, you miserable fucking cunt!”

Daryl launched the wrench toward Mama’s
laughter with the flick of the wrist. It tumbled through the air
and then there was a sharp crack followed by the shattering of
glass. The windowpane tinkled to the ground and sunlight streamed
into the basement as if it had been pressed against the blackened
glass and waiting to save him all along.

Dust motes churned in the wide shafts that
fell across the boxes and junk, but the light also revealed
something else: Mona.

She was so close that Daryl could see his own
reflection in her dark eyes. He could see the contortions of rage
on his face, the way the veins in temples throbbed and pulsed, and
how his mustache almost looked as bristly as the scruff of a riled
curr.

She, however, looked as calm as if she’d
walked into a tea party. She smiled graciously and toyed with the
hem of her shirt as she shifted her weight from foot to foot.

The two simply stood there for a moment as if
time had come to a grinding halt. But then she parted her lips and
an old, leathery voice croaked out from a head two-thirds its
age.

“
Looks like the naughty boy finally
grew a pair.”

With a roar, Daryl launched himself at the
dark-haired woman, his hands forming into claws before him as his
focus narrowed upon her slender throat. Mona’s hand balled into a
fist and she jabbed quickly, rolling her shoulder forward as her
knuckles connected with Daryl’s nose with a wet smack. Blood
stained the pores of her fist as it gushed from Daryl’s nostrils,
but it wasn’t enough to stop the force of his attack.

His body slammed into hers and the two
toppled backward. She seemed to fall almost in slow motion and, if
it hadn’t been for the old woman’s corpse, her head would have
bounced off the edge of the old freezer.

Daryl scrambled over Mona as his hands
snatched an ice pick that had rolled across the floor almost as if
it had wanted him to find it. She thrashed and kicked, but he was
beyond pain now, beyond feeling the tread of her boots as they
planted rows of red ridges on the side of his face.

Instead, he clung to her pants with one hand
as if he were trying to claw his way along her body. With the
other, he slammed the pick into the meat of her thigh, burying the
slim shaft of metal into her flesh almost entirely up to the red
handle.

When he jerked it out, blood spurted through
the perfectly circular hole in her jeans like the waters of a
fountain. The sight of the crimson arc made his breath catch in his
throat and his pulse quicken and he stabbed again as she twisted in
pain.

Now, it was her turn to scream. Her turn to
feel the agony and fear.

He stabbed again and again, bringing down the
ice pick and creating constellations of wounds within a crimson
nebula that crept up her leg.

Stabbing at the hip now: his elbow jarred as
if he’d knocked his funny bone when the pick slammed into her
pelvis. She was screaming so loudly that it seemed to fill his head
with its rattling timbre and her hands punched and scratched and
pulled uselessly at his hair.

Daryl was focused and hard and wanted nothing
more than to sink the ice pick into the soft mounds of flesh on her
chest. To drive it into her wicked heart like the needle on Mama’s
sewing machine and shove his tongue down her throat as the last
breath of life wheezed from her butchered body. He would inhale her
soul and take her like she had never been taken before.

For he was in full control now. He was no
longer a bad boy. He was a man. And it was time for this bitch to
die.

SCENE EIGHTEEN

The snow fell so heavily that the world
almost looked as though it had been overtaken by static. The trees
were nothing more than indistinct, dark blurs behind an
ever-shifting veil of white and visibility was so getting so bad
that a cliff could have loomed just ahead and Matt never would have
known until he was practically upon it. To make matters worse, the
wind whipped through the pines like an escaped beast. Its prolonged
howl devoured the sound of Mona screaming in the distance and it
shoved at the man who, stooped before its might, tried to push his
way forward. His feet felt as if they’d been encased in fifty pound
blocks of ice and his face was as dry and chafed as a worn-out
saddle despite that fur-lined hood that encircled it.

He knew he had to keep going, that this
battle against nature was one he couldn’t afford to lose; somewhere
on the other side of the forest, his new wife screamed as if her
flesh were being rendered from bone. Even if he couldn’t hear it
over the fury of the wind, he knew it was there. And it haunted him
with every step, every panicked twinge of his heart . . . .

“
I’m coming, baby, hang on, I’m
coming.”

The elements, however, had other plans. When
the snow had first begun falling again, his tracks were as distinct
as the green boughs overhead. As the blizzard gathered its muster,
the prints filled in so rapidly that it almost seemed like the
packed snow within them were being forced up and Matt tumbled
through the drifts as he tried to run. Now, they were nothing more
than vague indentations that barely resembled the shape of a human
foot. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the wind drove stinging flakes
of snow into his eyes, forcing him to bow his head and concentrate
only upon the tracks just in front of him. If he didn’t make it out
of this forest soon, he could be left wandering aimlessly for
hours. If not days. By the time he found his way back to the
farmhouse, it could very well be too late.

Matt tried to push the thought out of his
mind, but this proved as difficult as walking against the wind.
Again and again, an image of Mona formed in his mind. Never of what
was actually happening to her. That was simply too much to even
begin to imagine. But he did see her eyes, wide and glazed with
pain, as that precious mouth of hers yawned in a scream loud enough
to shatter windows. She was pale, bloody, and . . . .

No. Anything was better than thinking
about that. He tried counting his steps, whispering her name
through blue tinged lips, and even singing.
Sleepwalking
by The Ravonettes. He and Mona had
always considered it to be their song and she would squeeze his
hand affectionately every time it got to the part about something
evil in the heart.

But the lyrics offered no comfort this time.
In fact, it almost felt more like a dirge. Like a final goodbye to
the only thing this maggot infested carcass of a world had produced
that was every really worth a damn.

“
Hang in there, sweetie.”

Raising his head, Matt hoped to see the
farmhouse like a mirage in the distance. But the storm was so
fierce that it was if he’d walked into a swirling wall of white.
Even the trees five feet away were hidden in the maelstrom now and
the trail he followed had disappeared as thoroughly as if it never
existed.

“
Mona!”

Though Matt shouted so loudly that his voice
choked on her name, his desperate tone sounded flat and muffled,
even to his own ears.

“
I shouldn’t have left her alone. What
the fuck was I thinking?”

It’d seemed like a simple enough plan at
first: him leading one of the brothers into the forest while Mona
finished off the other one. But he’d forgotten how quickly squalls
could form in these parts. Sometimes, the change was so abrupt that
it was like someone had thrown a switch on the control panels of
reality. He and his father had once spent an afternoon of
extracurricular activities with one of their living toys only to
find, mere hours later, that snow had fallen so quickly that the
cabin door wouldn’t so much as budge.

He could still remember the girl, curled up
on blood spattered sheets, naked and trembling, as she pleaded
between sobs for them to just let her go. To let her live. When
they had done nothing more than ignore her, her pleas turned into a
single repeated word: why?

She’d reminded Matt at the time of a
wounded pixie: short hair, pointy ears, smears of blood on her back
that very well could have come from having the wings plucked out of
her spine. But now, in his memory, the face began to morph. The
cheekbones seemed to raise as the face became less angular and the
ears rounded as her hair lengthened like time-lapse footage. The
thin lips become fuller, the eyes a little less round, and the skin
tone lightened subtly. No longer was she the hitchhiker with
disproportionately long legs and willowy arms. Now it was Mona that
he saw, cowering against the log walls as his father approached
with Bowie knife in hand. But her eyes looked past his old man,
past the flannel shirt and gleaming blade; she stared directly into
Matt’s soul as she parted her lips and formed that single
question:
why?

“
No!”

Matt pounded on the side of his head as if
his palm could somehow dislodge this faulty memory from his
imagination. But the image clung tenaciously to tangled synapses,
growing more and more vivid with every step he took. Now he could
see the puffiness beneath the left eye that, if she’d been allowed
to live, eventually would have turned to swelling. The chip in the
front incisor from where she’d bit the iron railings of the bed to
keep from screaming. The glossiness of fear in eyes that seemed to
both beg and condemn in a single glance.

“
She’s okay.” He tried to tell himself.
“She’s tough. Whatever’s going on, she’ll get out of it. She always
gets out of it. She
has
to.”

What the hell had happened anyway? When Matt
saw that it was the larger of the two men who’d ran into the woods
after him, he’d expected it to all be over quickly. The little one
would be no match for his Mona. He had the timid mannerisms of
fodder, of someone who’d stumbled into an abattoir and only became
a butcher because the others who worked there assumed he was one of
their own. He’d fooled them into thinking he was worthy of a the
white apron and cleaver when, in fact, he was actually destined for
the hook.

But Mona’s screams . . . the pain that
trembled her voice even from such a great distance: what the fuck
had went wrong?

Even though the question plagued his
mind, Matt instinctively knew the answer. In a lot of ways, Mona
was like a cat. The thrill of the hunt wasn’t enough for her. She
needed to draw the game out, to psychologically bat her prey back
and forth before plunging her teeth into its jugular. She needed
to
play
. Only this time,
she’d apparently taken it too far . . . and was now paying the
price.

Lifting his head, Matt fully expected to see
nothing more than the same vortex of snow that had swirled around
him for the last ten minutes. But there, in the distance, he could
just make it out: a large, dark blob that was shaped vaguely like a
house. Like a phantom in the storm, it faded in and out of
existence. One moment he could see it so clearly that he could
almost make out the shape of the chimney on the slanted roof; the
next, there was nothing but flakes of snow whirling on eddies of
wind.

But those brief glimpses were enough. Matt
felt warmth flood through his chest as his pulse quickened. He
bounded through the snow like a lumbering bear, adjusting his
trajectory every time the farmhouse manifested through the blizzard
so that he was heading straight for it. Leafless brambles snagged
his clothes as if they were the fingers of the forest trying to
pull him back into its depths and hidden rocks sent him flailing
into deep drifts; snow had become packed into his boots so tightly
that it felt as if his ankles had been wrapped in cold packs and
the tears in his eyes seemed to be on the verge of freezing his
lashes together: but none of that mattered. He was close now, so
very close that the house’s periods of invisibility were becoming
less and less frequent. As if it were pulling itself into existence
from the tightly clustered flakes of now.

He couldn’t hear Mona screaming anymore. But
maybe he was still too far away. Maybe the wind was still masking
her cries with its incessant wail . . . maybe she was still
alive.

“
She could’ve killed him.” He tried to
tell himself as he scrambled closer to the house in the distance.
“She could be sitting on the couch right now, looking at that
catalog, and waiting for me to come back.”

Of course, there also could have been another
reason that she wasn’t yelling anymore. But that was an alternative
that Matt refused to entertain. His wife was alive and he’d be with
her shortly: that was the only possible outcome he could
accept.

For a while, it seemed as if the farmhouse
always stayed the same distance away. As if it were running away
from him as quickly as he stumbled toward it, mocking him with a
distance he could never hope to close.

“
I’m coming, baby. I’m coming . . .
.”

But then details began to present themselves.
The corrugated, tin roof. The brick chimney wrapped in chicken
wire, weathered clapboard walls, and windows that looked slightly
askew. And then, just like that, the trees that surrounded him were
gone.

Matt stepped out of the woods and, without
the protective barrier of the pines to buffer it, the wind slammed
into him so hard that he staggered backwards. As he struggled to
retain his balance, his eyes peered through the snow, searching for
even the smallest sign of the woman he loved. And that was when he
noticed the car.

Even though it was practically buried in
accumulation, the outline was distinctive. It was a cop car.