For those times, in particular, he hated her and had to kill her.
“That bitch,” Victor said as he finally got to his feet again.
His legs wobbled but he didn’t not fall. He would not let himself fall again. She had gotten the advantage over him somehow, pure timing and luck no doubt, but it was still his fault. The same way he tolerated years of his mother’s naked flesh against his own. If he didn’t assert his power, he would forever be a victim. Even worse, he would never be able to embrace his position in the coming New Times. He would be another weakling, wandering from place to place like a lost mouse, waiting for the moment he was cleansed off the planet.
That would not happen. He had not spent hours training his mind and readying his body to give up now, to allow someone else his rightful place. The universe wanted him to conquer this mountain. This was to be his refuge. But the wishes of the universe were not the same as fate. If Victor failed to rise to the demands of the occasion, the path of some other person would be crossed with his own. That person would be given the opportunity to embrace the coming darkness.
It started with Mercy. He could not let her get away. He had to kill her before she got off the mountain.
As long as his body didn’t give up on him, he would get her. She was obviously heading down the trail toward the parking lot below. It was a fast, direct route. But Victor knew this mountain. Knew the paths that only he had trod. He could get her. It would be a race and it would be close, but Victor was going to kill Mercy Higgins before she escaped Blood Mountain.
FIFTY-FOUR
Mercy glanced back into the woods several times and was lucky each time that she didn’t fall. It was stupid to keep looking, but she had to know because every few seconds she was sure he was right behind her, sure his hand was about to clamp on her shoulder or seize her hair and yank her to the ground.
She kept running, however, recalling the one season of cross country she had tried her junior year in high school because girls said that running was great for toning the butt. Mercy was the girl who, during gym class, walked the track by herself, book in hand. Girls like that didn’t get in very good shape, nor did they garner anything but bizarre glances from boys. So, she had joined the track team and endured one of the most torturous experiences of her life (got that one topped now) but she’d come away with a few important realizations about herself as well as a much firmer butt and thighs that looked damn good in really short shorts.
One thing she learned about herself was that she had a vast reservoir of endurance. Coach Phillips, who taught Social Studies to the low-functioning students, told her early on that running cross country was about unleashing the potential of the human body. Her first run, Mercy lasted a mere fifteen minutes before she had to stop. Phillips knelt next to her on the path in the middle of the woods behind the school and she thought he was going to tell her that maybe track wasn’t for her, but he’d said something else instead. Something that meant a whole hell of a lot to her now.
His motivation was cliche and corny but it had worked. She had gotten up and run another twenty minutes before hitting the fabled wall. When she walked across the finish line, which was a stick the kids had jammed into the ground, she was exhausted and shaking all over but she was proud. And determined.
A month later, she was finishing the runs in above-average times. She never improved her speed much more than that, but her endurance kept getting better. She could run and run and run. When races ended where other kids collapsed or even vomited, she would still be jogging in place, asking Phillips if she could run it again, only half joking. She powered through violent cramps in her sides and overcame the pain in her ankle when she twisted it halfway through a competition.
Mercy stopped running that summer when her mother received the first diagnosis. God, that was so long ago. The cancer battle could be swift or it could be protracted. Her mother had waged a war. She knew she should run, knew it would help her deal with the stress, but she could never find the energy. Running felt too much like running away and she couldn’t do that. She’d tried a few brief runs during college but it never really came back to her.
If only Phillips could see her now. Body aflame with pain, blood puddles dried on her shirt, bare feet mangled and torn as if they had been passed through a shredder, and still she ran. If ever there was a time for her inner marathon runner to strut her stuff it was right now. Endurance was the name of the game and anything but first place meant death.
Like when she was in the zone back in high school, Mercy ran with a very clear image of the finish line in her mind. She saw her father’s car perfectly. The slightly deflated front right tire that Dad pumped back up every week or so while commenting that he had to get new tires one of these days. The multiple gashes on the rear passenger door like grooves from a giant claw that Mercy had added to the car the first time she ever tried to back it into the garage. Finally, the vintage license plate with the tiny Statue of Liberty on it that he wasn’t legally supposed to have anymore but cops had never pulled him over for it.
She saw the car as well as if it were a high-resolution digital photo. She could even see the way the gravel crested in front of each of the tires like little mountains. And the way shadows contorted over the surface of the boulders set around the parking lot that, on a different day, children would use for an improvised playground.
She even remembered the other car in the lot: a beater relic from the eighties that--
That Caleb had been driving. She had even thought he was attractive with his broad shoulders, thought maybe they’d meet up somewhere on the mountain.
With any luck, he was getting his eyes pecked out right now.
Her feet slipped down the face of a rock that long ago split in half and she had to grope at the trees to stay on her feet. The small outcropping where she had stopped with her father earlier (what felt like much, much earlier) was around her somewhere. She thought. Or she might have passed it. Or it might still be ahead.
“Focus,” she told herself.
She blocked out any thoughts of that outcropping and kept her concentration on the path ahead of her. She was running and that was all that mattered. That and the car waiting in the parking lot.
FIFTY-FIVE
Even without a flashlight, Victor saw the trees and all the debris on the ground in brilliant lucidity. He was becoming the best of his primal self. He moved so fast that for several feet at a time he wasn’t even touching the ground. That might only be an illusory byproduct of his speed and adrenaline, but he embraced the sensation. The universe wanted him to track her down, get her under his knife.
He found one of his many side trails and paused only the briefest of seconds before continuing down the mountain. This way was much riskier than the well-beaten trail thousands of people had traversed before him, but it was Victor’s destiny to forge those new paths, to carve out of this world what would become the New Way.
The ground slanted to keep his feet moving and branches propelled him forward with skeletal fingers on his back. He filled his lungs to capacity in mid-stride inhalations that were like injections of superhuman power that coursed through him as hot, pulsating energy.
He had felt like this once before. A few days after what would be his mother’s last visit to his bedroom, Victor went to her room in the middle of the night, walked to the edge of her bed, and stood there for a while watching her sleep before raising the carving knife high over his head where some faint light reflected off it for a moment, and then stabbed his mother thirteen times. He stabbed her in both breasts, in the throat, which geysered out blood
