His tears now bordered on laughter and he ripped clumps of hair from his scalp to keep his hands from scratching open his own throat. Every muscle in his body was pulled taut and the shivering that had overtook him now seemed as if it had sank into his very core.
“It’s not my fault, Mama….”
“All your fault, you naughty boy. You should’ve protected me.”
“It’s not my fault.”
This time the statement was louder and sounded more like a statement than a question. As if the pressure and trembling within were forcing the words out like bursts of escaping gas.
“You let them torture me. You allowed me to die.”
Daryl felt as if a fissure cracked through his skull and everything that had been building up gushed out into the open. The force made him spring to his feet and his voice bellowed through the darkened basement as spittle flew from the snarl that distorted his face.
“No! I was a little boy, you fuckin’ bitch! A little fuckin’ boy that you were s’posed to love and cherish and protect! I was your son but it was never fuckin’ good enough, was it? Never good enough for anything!”
Mama’s voice laughed and Daryl’s hand shot into the darkness, scrambling over the mounds of junk until it felt cold metal beneath its fingers. He snatched the object with a rattling clink that caused the image of a pipe wrench to flare in his mind.
“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!”
