restricted passage. His face, however, was now nearly as pale as the corpse whose bowels he was being strangled with and his eyes looked as if they were about to pop from him head. Though Mona couldn’t see them, his lips flapped wordlessly: not so much as even the softest wheeze passed through them as his thrashing grew progressively weaker. Within minutes, his arms flopped to the floor and his entire body was limp and still.
Mona, however, had learned her lesson about taking chances. Despite the cramps which wracked her arms and the throbbing pain in her legs, she didn’t ease her grip on either his torso or the old woman’s intestines. She mentally counted to one hundred three times before allowing her body to relax.
She pushed Daryl’s body off her own as easily as if it were nothing more than a bag of laundry and he stared at the ceiling with unblinking eyes while Mona wriggled out from underneath him. She sat on the floor for a moment, catching her breath and wincing as her fingers probed the wounds on her leg.
For some reason, Daryl had focused entirely on the right side of her body; so, as Mona attempted to stand, she placed all of her weight on her left leg. The basement seemed to swim around her and she reached for the freezer in an attempt to steady herself. After taking several deep breaths, her eyes swept the room and finally alighted on a pair of rusted crutches that peeked out from a mound of moisture-bloated boxes. She hopped over to it slowly, afraid that if the dizziness returned she would fall and be forced to crawl.
The short trip, however, proved easier than she thought it would be. She pulled one of the crutches free and wedged it beneath her arm. The top was made of some sort of foam that had become hard and brittle with age and it almost felt like an oblong rock pressed into her armpit; but at least she was able to walk with minimal pain again.
Going up the rickety stairs would be tricky, she knew, but she hobbled to them, intent on getting the hell out of the basement and perhaps finding some bandages. Pausing at the bottom, she took one last look over her shoulder.
Daryl’s body was sprawled across the floor with Mary’s guts connecting the two like some bizarre umbilical cord. When his body went limp, his arm had had fallen in such a way that his left hand lay gently atop his dead mother’s fingertips.
“How fucking sweet…”
Mona spat on the floor and looked up at the stairs, mentally working out the best way to traverse them with her crutch. She was cold, bloody, and her body felt as if she’s just ran a marathon… but, at the same time, there was still that overwhelming rush that always accompanied a kill. It was more than just the adrenaline and endorphins pumping through her body.
It was power.
It was control.
It was everything that made life worth living….
SCENE TWENTY
Matt watched the gun bob and weave in front of him and wondered if Earl would actually be able to hit him. The large man looked as if it were taking every ounce of his willpower just to remain on his feet: his knees were buckled slightly and, even through the snow, Matt could see that there was a glassy haze to his eyes. There couldn’t be much life left in him: with the freezing temperatures, the arrow wounds scattered across his torso, and accompanying loss of blood, it could only be a matter of time before Earl collapsed. It seemed as if he barely had the strength to even hold the gun, much less pull the trigger.
Still… he’d somehow managed to dig the weapon out of the snow, haul his sorry ass through the woods, and make his way back here. Which meant that he had the heart of a survivor. A lesser man simply would have laid out there in the wilderness, closed his eyes, and allowed death to claim him. But this brute… he was something else.
In a way, Matt almost respected the man. He saw in him a lot of the same qualities that he’d recognized in Mona. You could teach a person to be a marksman; they could also learn how to stalk prey and not strike until just the right moment. If exposed to enough violence and bloodshed, the same person could even be trained not to so much as even blink as they watched the life drain out of another human’s body. But the innate hunger to persevere, to push your mind and body well beyond its limits for the achievement of a singular goal: that was something you had to be born with.
It was also what made Earl as dangerous as a hand grenade that may, or may not, have had its pin removed. Fate often had a way of watching over those with the drive for dominance. Maybe it was evolutionary or perhaps the person’s personality was simply so strong that events unfolded according to its influence. Whatever the reason, Matt had seen a time and time again. A bitch in the woods who took three shots to the head before she finally stopped stabbing Matt’s father with a broken limb. The husband in Roanoke who’d had a pistol fall right into his lap when the night stand toppled over onto his dying wife.
And these rare moments were what made it all worth it: everything else was nothing more than a passing amusement, the souls of the dead like tokens spent in the arcade of life. But times like this one, when Matt felt as if he were facing down a true contender, those were the instants when he truly felt most alive. Here in the snow, surrounded by the desolate wilderness and dilapidated farmhouse, he and Earl were like gladiators facing off in an empty coliseum. Only one would taste the blood of his enemy. Only one would emerge victorious.
“Let’s do this thing.”
With a battle cry that burst from his mouth in plumes of breath, Matt charged at his worthy opponent. He weaved through the snow, darting back and forth erratically as Earl tried to follow him with the muzzle of the gun. Closing the distance rapidly, he was ready to rip out the bearded man’s tongue out with his bare fingers if he had to. And that was when Earl squeezed the trigger.
Rather than a roar that boomed out like thunder in a snowstorm, however, there was only a soft click. Earl’s finger pulled the trigger again and again, but each time the result was the same. With a laugh, Matt stopped; still ten feet away from the other man, he shook his head as if he couldn’t believe what he were seeing.
“What’s the matter, big guy? Out of ammo there?”
For a moment, Matt’s eyes flittered over Earl’s shoulder and his smile broadened until it looked as if he were shooting a dental commercial in the midst of a blizzard. When he next spoke, his voice was much louder as he squatted down and picked up a handful of snow.
“Killing your mother… that was something else. A real hoot, as you’d say. You should have heard her. The screams, the crying… the way she clung to me like a frightened kid just before I tossed her ass down those stairs.”
By this time Matt had stood again and he drew back his arm like a baseball player winding up for a pitch. Hurling the snowball at Earl, he continued talking, his voice loud and rapid.
“You should’ve stayed down out there in the forest.”
Earl tried to dodge the projectile but it splatted against his face squarely and exploded in a shower of snow.
“You should have just laid out there and let the storm bury you and then things might not have turned out this way. If nothing else, you could’ve hid out there in the woods. Let us think you were dead and then come crawling back home once we were on our merry way. But, no. You had to think you were Mr, Tough Guy, didn’t you? You had to have your revenge. How’s that working out for ya, sport?”
Earl staggered forward as if barely clinging to consciousness. He’d turned the useless gun over in his hand so that he now held it by the barrel and brandished it like a club. Matt, however, seemed nonplused by the man’s stop and go aggression. He continued scooping handfuls of snow from the ground, rolling them into loose balls, and lobbing them at his attacker. And the entire time his monologue continued in its rapid fire delivery.
“Your little plaything’s dead. Your mother’s dead. Your brother’s dead. And soon, you’ll be dead, too. See, me and Mona we’ve been at this a long, long time. That I-77 killer they’ve been prattling on and on about on the radio? Yeah, that’s us. You won’t be the first family we’ve killed, not by a long shot. But I can say this: you were certainly the most interesting.”
A snowball thudded against Earl’s chest as Matt hopped from foot to foot.
“You know what your downfall was, Goliath? Your anger. I had to teach my wife how to channel hers, just
