Blood Mountain

update of Deliverance with the three of them burying Victor’s body and then trying to control their paranoia that the cops were going to find out, find out and lock them all away for the rest of their lives. All for killing some shit head rapist.

“Mercy!” Daddy yelled.

Caleb’s arm tightened over his throat. “Whoa there, Hoss,” Caleb said like he was some fucking cowboy.

“Please!” Mercy said in a voice on the verge of hysteria.

Her father realized what Caleb was doing and grabbed his arm. “Get off of me,” he yelled.

“Afraid I can’t do that,” Caleb said. His body jerked forward and Daddy screamed, his own body slumping forward at the hips as if his back had given out.

“Daddy!”

He dropped to his knees, Caleb maintaining his wrap around the throat. Daddy ground his teeth against some intense, unseen pain. His eyes rolled frantically in all directions as if looking for some escape hatch from this sudden trap of pain.

“Mercy,” he said, only now it was less her name than the desperate plea of an injured, vulnerable man.

He reached for her but she couldn’t move. This was too much to process. It wasn’t happening, that was all. Victor was still on top of her, having his way with her, and she was off in some other now where the horror continued to unfold in the sinister corners of her mind where nightmares reigned.

When her father fell forward onto the ground, Caleb held the knife so the body slid free. Light glinted off the blade in the small gaps that blood hadn’t obscured.

“What an annoying fuck,” Caleb said and stared at Mercy. “Is it my turn yet?” His smile was the most horrifying thing she had ever seen.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Victor wished Mercy could appreciate the moment from his point of view. If fear and panic hadn’t destroyed her mind, she might be able to admire how well this plan had progressed. Instead, she was in the clutches of white hot fear, nothing more than a cornered animal desperate to escape.

He could push aside the pain emanating through him; he had learned to do that many years ago. Later he would suffer the crippling spasms and full-body seizures, but not now, not with the adrenaline flushing his veins. Even so, he knew how to keep control, to harness that primal strength, to not be rash and do something stupid.

Caleb stepped into the tent and got to his knees. He was completely focused on Mercy but his brain was flooded with the fantasy of rape, so he didn’t register the flashlight clutched in the girl’s hand as a weapon. Its light flickered on his face, distorting his features like a facade in a dream, but it was Caleb who was in the dream. He was overcommitting out of desperate longing.

Victor was not surprised when Mercy brought the flashlight straight up into Caleb’s chin in a quick, powerful arc. Caleb’s jaw snapped shut on a sliver of tongue and his head rocked back as if he had slammed it against a wall. It had been too easy for her to catch him off guard, too easy for her to disable him and scramble on her knees for the exit.

“You fucking idiot,” Victor said without surprise.

Caleb responded in single-syllable moans while he clutched his face and rocked back and forth on the ground like a traumatized child.

Mercy’s white ass glowed in the tent doorway for a moment, a small moon just for his pleasure, and then she was gone.

Victor pulled up his pants, secured the belt and went after her.

He made it halfway out before the girl’s father screamed to life and grabbed him around the waist. His fingers latched onto Victor’s belt and pulled him back inside the tent. Victor tried to yank free of his grip but the old man’s last gasp was a mighty one.

“My daughter,” he said through clenched teeth. “My baby.”

Victor rolled onto his back and kicked the man across the face with his bare foot. The grip came loose and Victor could reposition above him. He punched him across the face twice and waited for another retaliation.

“My baby,” he said as if in a dream.

“No,” Victor said. “Mine.”

With that, he punched the man again, knocking him into unconsciousness.

Caleb was still groaning like a pathetic puppy that had been kicked against a wall. “If you want her, you better get your ass out here and help,” Victor said.

The nighttime air was a cool blast that gave him renewed strength as if something potent had been injected into his blood.

Mercy had run to the far end of the camp where the trail continued up to the summit. She’d stopped to put on her jeans. She was fumbling with the second leg, trying not to fall. Victor did not run after her.

He had the upper hand. The key was to not lose it.

THIRTY-EIGHT

In fourth grade, firemen had visited Mercy’s school to give a presentation on fire safety. Most of the kids slept through the lecture on what to do in the case of a fire emergency and then came alive when it was time to investigate the truck like a piece of playground equipment and then stand back in awe at the awesome power of the fire hose. For Mercy, however, the notes on safety in an emergency held her rapt. She didn’t want Mommy and Daddy to burn to death in their own home. She created mapped-out escape routes in crayon on construction paper. Her parents humored her until she tried to have a fire drill at one in the morning. “But the fireman said we need to be prepared,” Mercy told her mother who looked like she had been beaten with a stick, one eye partially closed and twitching with sleep. “We have to practice what we’d do in an emergency. The fireman said--” but her mother hadn’t cared what the fireman said. If there was a fire, they’d get out. She didn’t need any early morning drills to know how to escape her own home.

This memory came back to her now and she almost laughed at the silly girl she had been and then started crying for her poor mother, who had only another ten years left to live, just ten and of those ten, how many restful nights would she have? And young Mercy had ruined one with her stupid drill. But it had been for a good reason. As the fireman said,

“In the event of an emergency, don’t think--respond.”

Mercy pulled on one leg of her jeans but her foot tangled in the opposite leg.

Drills conditioned the mind to respond to disaster. Schools had fire drills and tornado drills and lockout drills and lockdown drills, but they had never told her what to do if the event of a rape. Especially not when it happened on some damn mountain late at night.

Victor had come out of the tent but he’d gone to where they had been sitting before. At first she thought he was confused and that maybe he would wander right off into the woods searching for her, but then the flickering flames of the fire cast his hands in orange as they snatched up his hiking bag.

The two small fires in this large clearing conjured images of Satanic ceremonies. She could almost see the robe-clad worshippers circling the fires and chanting and a pair of pale arms raising a naked baby into the air as if the hand of God should come down and retrieve it.

You’re drifting, her mind scolded. You should be responding.

She should be fucking running.

She jammed her second leg through the pant leg and yanked up her jeans. The course fabric scratched her ass like sandpaper and ignited a fresh wave of pain in her crotch as if a lit firework had been crammed up there.

Might as well have been, she thought.

She turned to the trail before her and the distant peak of the mountain that was now a black splotch in a dark sea of sky but before she could take that first lunge of freedom, Caleb emerged from the tent and screamed something jumbled and distorted, something people wouldn’t quite catch unless they knew what was going