SIXTY-TWO
Mercy threw herself at the one in the baggy clothes. “Help! Help!” Her words sounded hollow like her voice might give out any second.
The kid threw his hands up and backed up quickly until he was up against the wall and she was on all-fours again, facing them this time. “Cellphone,” she said.
The boys exchanged a glance. The one in the skinny jeans with the bandage on his face from where Victor had hit him that morning was holding a partially smoked joint. He glanced at it as if he feared this whole thing were a hallucination.
“Please!”
Why the hell were they just standing there, gaping at her like she was some bizarre display in a freak show?
She didn’t need to really ask that though, now did she?
“
The baggy-clothed kid squinted at her for a moment. “Wait. Didn’t we see this bitch somewhere? Oh, shit. She was at the diner.”
“Oh, yeah,” skinny jeans said. “She looked a hell of a lot better then. Fucking looks like she got raped by a gang of gorillas.”
The other kid chuckled. “Maybe she did.”
“That what happen to you?” Skinny jeans asked.
“Fuck!” Mercy yelled. “Help me!”
She expected some kind of humiliating comment about how they wouldn’t fuck her if she begged, maybe she should go fuck a dog or something, but the boys were silent.
“Please!”
The boys exchanged another glance and then they were running past her deeper into the big lot. She watched them disappear through a collapsed chain fence at the far end. She almost surrendered then. Maybe she could find a way inside this building and hide into some long-forgotten corner until the sun came up and she dared to go outside again. Giving up would feel so wonderful.
But there was a car parked off to the side. A newer car, not one abandoned years ago along with the rusted heaps that were once garbage trucks. Someone was still here.
She ran to it as fast as she could without falling and crashed against the driver’s window. She screamed and pounded her fists on the glass. Maybe there were kids in there, other teenagers who had come here to drink and fuck.
No response. She cupped her hands and peered in. Empty other than scattered sheets of paper on the passenger seat.
She tried the handle and almost fell over when the door opened. The courtesy light was a tiny sun that blinded her. She could hide in here, maybe. Victor wouldn’t find her. Hell, he was probably dead.
“Holy shit,” she said.
It
But he wouldn’t suspect she’d hide in it, either. She could crawl into the back and wait for him. Once he got into the driver’s seat, she could kill him.
That thought filled her with complete confidence and joy for a fraction of a second before completely dissolving. She couldn’t kill him. Stabbing him had been bad enough and she didn’t even have a weapon anymore. She’d have to strangle him with her bare hands. She could feel his skin against her own, his pointed Adam's apple bobbing against her palm as he choked and struggled.
She couldn’t do it.
Mercy got into the car. The light hurt her eyes. She opened the compartment between the seats. It was stuffed with tissues crusted with mucus. No, not mucus. It was semen.
She almost vomited. Instead, she turned to the glove compartment.
She could hardly believe what she found.
SIXTY-THREE
The keys were stashed in the glove compartments of each car for
Victor pulled the car out of the lot and stopped in the middle of the road as if he were staging a blockade. He glanced down the road in both directions. He would run her over first. Then slice her throat. Maybe he’d even rape her once more. He could baptize her in the blood from his injury. Smear it all over her face. Make her drink it.
She was either running down the side of the road where brush provided some coverage and obscured the the light of the moon or she was hiding.
There was only one place to hide that she could have reached so quickly.
He turned left and stomped on the gas.
She had probably found the way in through the back of the building. Thought she was safe in there. Stupid bitch. Other than Blood Mountain, Victor knew the insides of the former headquarters of Murray Waste Co. as if he had designed them in his dreams.
The car didn’t even reach forty miles-per-hour before the building was upon him. He slowed and started to turn off the road when another car rumbled out of the darkness and clipped his front bumper.
The car spun and came to a stop half on the road.
The other car stopped too.
“You fucking bitch!” Victor yelled.
He crushed the accelerator. The wheels spun on the dirt and the back end fishtailed for a moment before the tires caught and the car lunged forward.
He crashed into the back of his own car. It jumped forward and then spun its wheels for moment before screeching down the road.
He followed. The main center of Stone Creek was several minutes away. She wasn’t going to chance going all the way to the police station. There was only one place she was headed.
Victor should have known from the very beginning.
SIXTY-FOUR
The engine screamed and Mercy screamed right along with it. She had wasted time and now he was right behind her. It was Caleb’s car but Caleb was dead or paralyzed somewhere while crows pecked at his eyes. It was Victor in the car. She couldn’t escape. He had devised his psychotic scheme and no matter what she tried, he had thought of it before.
She could drive all the way into town, go to the police station and the lone officer on duty would be off on some call Victor had paid someone to make. He’d kill her right in the lobby of the police station. He’d know which way to turn his back so the cameras couldn’t catch a clear shot of his face. He was going to kill her and get away with it.
The red and yellow neon sign for Alexis Diner hovered in the dark sky. They were open 24-hours, but who would actually be there? How much staff was really needed at three in the morning on a Sunday? There would be at least one waitress and a cook. The cook would have knives. That would have to be good enough.
She came upon the diner in only seconds and had to slam the breaks and turn the wheel hard to make the
