Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [47]
The car shuddered to a stop, the stench of scorched rubber in the air. Brett was in bad shape. With no seatbelt and one hand in his pocket, he’d banged his nose up pretty good. Donaldson grasped his hair, rammed his face into the dashboard two more times, then opened the glove compartment. He grabbed a plastic zip tie, checked again for oncoming traffic, and quickly secured the kid’s hands behind his back. In Brett’s coat pocket, he found a tiny Swiss Army knife. Donaldson barked out a laugh.
If memory served, and it usually did, there was an off ramp less than a mile ahead, and then a remote stretch of farmland. Donaldson pulled back onto the highway and headed for it, whistling as he drove.
The farm stood just where he remembered it. Donaldson pulled offroad into a cornfield and drove through the dead stalks until he could no longer see the street. He killed the engine, set the parking brake—the Accord had transmission issues—and tugged out the keys to ensure it wouldn’t roll away. Then he picked a few choice tools from his toolbox and stuck them in his pocket.
His passenger whimpered as Donaldson muscled him out of the car and dragged him into the stalks.
He whimpered even more when Donaldson jerked his pants down around his ankles, got him loosened up with an ear of corn, and then forced himself inside.
“Gonna stab me with your little knife?” he whispered in Brett’s ear between grunts. “Think that was going to save you?”
When he’d finished, Donaldson sat on the kid’s chest and tried out all the attachments on the Swiss Army knife. The tiny scissors worked well on eyelids. The nail file just reached the eardrums. The little two-inch blade was surprisingly sharp and adept at whittling the nose down to the cartilage.
Donaldson also used some tools of his own. Pliers, for cracking teeth and pulling off lips. When used in tandem with some garden shears, he was able to get Brett’s tongue out in one piece. And of course, there was the muddler.
Normally wielded by bartenders to mash fruit in the bottom of drink glasses, Donaldson had his own special use for the instrument. People usually reacted strongly to being fed parts of their own face, and even under the threat of more pain, they’d spit those parts out. Donaldson used the plastic muddler like a ram, forcing those juicy bits down their throats.
After all, it was sinful to waste all of those delectable little morsels like that.
When the fighting and screams began to wind down, the Swiss Army knife’s corkscrew attachment did a fine job on Brett’s Adam’s apple, popping it out in one piece and leaving a gaping hole that poured blood bright as a young cabernet.
Apple was a misnomer. It tasted more like a peach pit. Sweet and stringy.
He shoved another ear of corn into Brett’s neck hole, then stood up to watch.
Donaldson had killed a lot of people in a lot of different ways, but suffocation especially tickled his funny bone. When people bled to death they just got sleepy. It was tough to see their expression when they were on fire, with all the thrashing and flames. Damaging internal organs, depending on the organ, was either too fast, too slow, or too loud.
But a human being deprived of oxygen would panic for several minutes, providing quite a show. This kid lasted almost five, his eyes bulging out, wrenching his neck side to side in futile attempts to remove the cob, and turning all the colors of the rainbow before finally giving up the ghost. It got Donaldson so excited he almost raped him again. But the rest of the condoms were in the car, and befitting a man his age, once he got them and returned to the scene of death, his ardor probably would have waned.
He didn’t bother trying to take Brett’s kidney, or any of his other parts. What the heck could he do with his organs anyway? Sell them on eBay?
Cleanup was the part Donaldson hated most, but he always followed a strict procedure. First, he bagged everything associated with the crime. The rubber, the zip tie, the Swiss Army knife, and the two corn cobs,