He grabbed at her hair and yanked her back towards him. “What’s your fucking problem? I’m trying to save your life.”
He backed into the overturned coffee table and they both tumbled onto the chesterfield. Angela felt one of his arms wrap around her neck. The other hand left her hair and started groping between her legs. He was trying to pull her dress up. Something hard and warm was pressing up against her panties. My God, he’s going to rape me.
She gasped through the choking pressure. “Please… don’t do this…you don’t have to do this.”
“Just you and me,” he whispered back. “There ain’t no one else. I’ll take care of you.”
A part of Angela wanted to stop struggling. Let him do what he came here to do. He’s young. It will only take a few seconds. She could see the charred corpse through her flailing legs, four inches of white knitting needle sticking out from under its chin. This wouldn’t end with just the violation of Angela’s body. He would do more to her. She could feel something warm and wet in her hand—the plastic cup fragments. She worked the pieces in her fingers, settling her bloody palm around the longest shard. The boy’s forearm was crushing Angela’s windpipe, dull yellow stars were swimming before her. She tried pleading with him one last time. “Let me go… I won’t tell… anyone.”
His hand was digging between her legs, his nails cutting the insides of her thighs. “I know.”
Angela swung her arm back and drove the plastic shard somewhere into the side of his head. The bone of his skull was harder than the plastic. She scraped down and it caught in the soft flesh of his ear. The teenager howled and the pressure around Angela’s neck lessened. She planted an elbow into his nose and pushed herself free. She tried for the window one more time, but her foot caught on one of the coffee table legs. Angela fell sideways, and the woman’s corpse broke her fall.
“Fucking… bitch.” He was coming at her again, one hand cupped over the ravaged side of his head.
She wouldn’t make it outside in time, and even if she did, there was nowhere to run, no one to call for help. Angela was on her own, and she would need something a lot more effective than a broken cup. If she could make it to the kitchen—find a knife or something else sharp. His hands were in her hair again, dragging her back to the chesterfield. Angela reached out for the last weapon in arm’s length. She pulled the knitting needle out of the woman’s throat and drove it towards the chest of her attacker. There was a moment of resistance, and then a soft popping sensation as the needle’s end punctured skin and sunk between two ribs.
The teenager released her and stood straight up. He stared dumbly at Angela without making a sound. Two seconds later he fell back onto the chesterfield, like a tree falling in the forest. The needle had been far more effective than the plastic shard, and Angela’s best guess at where his heart was had been spot on.
I killed him… Oh dear Lord, I just murdered another human being. She tried reassuring herself that he would’ve done the same to her. He had already proved himself to be a killer. The needle sticking up from his chest had ended two lives; it would’ve been Angela’s body lying there—after being horribly violated—had she not beat him to it. Still, the guilt pushed its way back in, overriding the logic of what she’d done. She had told him her name, but never asked for his. I stabbed a man to death without even allowing him to tell me who he was. Angela looked away from the unmoving form and saw the church bell through the window opening. It sat there on its pile of holy rubble, leaning precariously to the north, like a big, black head tilted to one side, staring back at her. Judging.
You messed up bad, girl. It was her step-father again. She had wondered where he had gone in the last twenty-four hours or so. Not only did you take a life, but you killed a man. Jesus on a stick, girl… what the heck were you thinking?
“He wasn’t a man, and he tried to… he was going to hurt me.” She couldn’t say words like rape or molest to her step-father. Those were ugly, ungodly terms, and they were even worse coming from the mouth of a girl. “He murdered the owner of this house—stuck a knitting needle through her throat.”
It didn’t give you the right to do likewise. You did some awful sinning back when I was around, but this takes the cake, girl. How are you going to explain yourself at the pearly gates? How are you expected to meet your mother and me in the kingdom of God with that sin resting on your shoulders?
She tried to block out the weighty questions and concentrated on the boy’s dead body. She hadn’t asked him his name, but perhaps there was another of finding out. Angela tapped at his dirty sneaker and drew her hand away quickly. When the foot didn’t move, she tried it again, like poking a seemingly dead animal and waiting for it to lunge back to life. She knelt beside the body, finally convinced its lunging days were over, and slowly began searching through the front pockets of his black track pants. He was still warm but would cool soon. His limbs would stiffen. She was responsible for that. Angela Bennet. For all she knew, he may very well have been the last
