“Well, we can’t leave her if she’s still alive.”
“Yes, we can. Tooth, I don’t feel good about this. Nobody even knows we’re out here.”
“Chill out, Wolverine. When we get there the first thing we’ll do is call the cops from her phone.”
“But what if she’s dead by then?”
“Then call Japan and ask for sucky fucky. They like that.”
I looked at the house and listened to the barking coming at me from the other direction. There was a pang of shame in my gut because I knew I was being a wimp about the whole situation. I was like a squirrel who couldn’t decide whether or not to cross the road when traffic was coming, while Tooth was already on the other side safe and sound. I must have looked worried because he pulled up his shirt and showed me the gun.
“Besides, we’ve got a little backup of our own,” he said. As I spun around to go back down the mountain trail, he grabbed my shirt and added, “Let’s go down over here. It’ll be faster than having to walk back around.”
“We should get the car.”
“It’ll be there when we get back.”
“But what if we need it to get help, to rush her to the hospital or something.”
“We’ll take her truck. C’mon.”
“But what if it broke when the jack broke?”
“What if I punch you in the boys for being a pussy? Look, it’s gonna take us twice as long to go down and get the car and then drive around than if we just run down right here.”
Shit. He was right.
We started climbing down the mountain again, breaking limbs and sending rocks rolling down the slope. Going down a mountain is always harder than going up because your body naturally leans forward. That coupled with gravity makes downhill hiking a bitch. The damn dog wasn’t helping my nerves either, and when a moment later I heard the first rumble of thunder in the distance, I knew this was going to be a stressful night.
If I’d only known what was going to happen next I would have taken the gun from Tooth and put bullets in both our brains.
CHAPTER 10
Pushing through the woods was harder than I’d expected. The branches interwove like latticework and we couldn’t break them all with our hands, so we circled wide and came back around. As we neared the house, the overgrowth gave way to rotting logs stacked here and there. Some of them were split into cubes and small triangles, possibly leftover firewood. Then again, maybe not, because after the logs we had to scale a makeshift fence created from old tree limbs. Log cabin, split rail fence-maybe she was a lumberjack? I’d seen female lumberjacks before; they gave logging demonstrations at summer camps. They also scared the shit out of your average womanizer.
The damn dog was still barking and I started to think we’d get bit before we could even find our damsel in distress.
On the other side of the fence, we could see the back of the house clearly through the remaining trees. It was a small two-story deal, with cream curtains in the windows, and dead flowers in the window boxes. Between us and the house was a small back yard with a broken swing set, some car parts, and a big gas tank of some sort. The ground was all dug up like some big dog had been burying things, which reminded me. .
I grabbed Tooth before he left the cover of the trees. “Watch out for Cujo.”
He put a finger to his lips to shush me and followed the woods around to the left, where the driveway came up beside the house. We were keeping just within the tree line.
Treading softly, I followed under the noise of the barking dogs, which were still out of sight. Seconds later, the barking stopped and I heard panting heading our way. I froze, praying Tooth had heard it as well. He did. We both stood like statues as two big rottweilers the size of bulls came trotting around from the front yard. They stopped next to a door set in a little windowless alcove that jutted out from the side of the house. From the look of it, it probably went down to a storage cellar underground.
Man, those two dogs were beasts; they wouldn’t break a sweat taking down a wolf. Together they could probably make a rug out of a bear. They pawed at the door, whimpering, while we maintained our best tree impersonations.
“Ten bucks says those are cellar stairs and she fell down them,” Tooth whispered.
“How the fuck do we get past those dogs? If we move at all now, we’re dead.”
“I don’t know. They look pretty concerned. Maybe they’re nice. Rottweilers are pretty nice animals, you know.”
“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. They’re not nice. They’re protection.”
Slowly, he began to slide the gun out of his waistband. Was he going to shoot them? I may not have been a member of PETA but I didn’t see the sense in killing animals that were only doing their job. He said, “Just in case,” and moved toward the yard.
As we tiptoed through the trees, we heard a voice coming from behind the door. It was muffled but it was still as hysterical as when we’d first heard it. Sure enough, it was our woman and she was still alive. I was studying the dogs, trying to figure a way to distract them, when I got this sudden rush that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t place it at first; it just made me nervous, like my spider sense was tingling. Then it hit me: the paw prints. The dogs had left bright red paw prints all over the door. Was it. . was it blood? Tooth had seen it, too, and glanced back at me over his shoulder like he was going to say something, but before he could utter a word, everything went to hell.
Two bodies exploded out of the door, running full speed directly toward us.
One was a woman, bound, gagged, covered in blood. The other was a thin shirtless man waving a hand ax in one fist and a saw in the other. My stomach lurched and I went rigid. I couldn’t move. My brain sort of refused to accept what it was seeing. Up was down, black was white.
Instantly, both the woman and the man saw Tooth and me, and both went wide-eyed. The woman kept screaming, kept racing our way. The man went ape shit, his face twisting into furious determination.
The gag on the woman’s mouth slid to the side and she wailed with all the energy of someone whose last attempt to live depended on it. It was deafening.
She was almost to the edge of the yard, maybe ten feet from where we stood, when the man swung the ax down on her, wedged it into her skull with a loud crunch. Blood spit out like a fountain. Her body went into spasms but she kept running, bolting into the trees beside us.
There was a loud bang.
The gunshot shook me out of my trance and I pissed myself, screamed, and ran into the woods. I didn’t know where Tooth was, or who or what he’d shot at, and I didn’t care. I was pure adrenaline. I ducked low limbs and hopped boulders and ran right into the makeshift fence, which I’d forgotten about. I jumped up and grabbed the top of it when something plowed into me like a battering ram.
It was the woman.
Together, we fell to the ground, and I landed on top of her. She was out of her mind, mouth wide open, blood spurting from the ax in her head. Her eyes spun about like a robot’s with broken servos. She wailed, I screamed, she grabbed for me-I lost it. This wasn’t happening. I jumped off her. Screaming like a lunatic, I went for the fence again.
Out of nowhere, one of the rottweilers clamped down on my leg and sank his fangs into my flesh, piercing my shinbone. I screamed for God to save me, to pull me from this blizzard of mayhem. I saw the trees go whizzing by my face, felt flesh tearing off my leg, saw the woman flip-flopping on the ground like a fish out of water, felt my head smack against the fence, saw the dog’s fangs snap near my throat, saw more trees whiz by, the dog again, the woman.
A searing fire raced up my leg.
The dog was thrashing me like a rag doll.
I punched it as hard as I could in the face. I punched it again and again until I heard something crack. With a yelp it let go and dashed back toward the house. I reached down to my leg and ran my hand through the wetness
