Off Season - Jack Ketchum [1]
She had to go more slowly now. It was terribly hard to see. Long branches tugged at her hair and poked cruelly at her eyes. She crossed her bare arms in front of her to protect her face; the woods scraped them and they bled. Behind her the children paused and listened. She began to cry.
Stupid, she thought, stupid to start crying now. She heard them move again nearby. Could they see her? She plunged ahead through the thick scrub. Old brittle branches stabbed through her thin cotton dress as if she were naked, raking new troughs of blood along her arms and legs and stomach. The pain did not stop her; it drove her on. She gave up trying to protect her face and beat back the branches with her arms, thrashing her way through the scrub to the clearing.
She took a deep breath and immediately she smelled the sea. It could not be far. She broke into a run. There might be houses there, fishermen’s cottages. Someone. The meadow was long and wide. Soon she heard the sound of surf ahead and she kicked off her shoes and raced barefoot toward the sound; while eleven small pale bodies broke through the last stands of brush and watched her in the moonlight.
She could see nothing ahead of her, no houses, no lights. Only the wide plain of tall grass. What if there was only the sea ahead of her? She would be cornered, trapped. But she would not think of that. Hurry, she told herself, faster. Her lungs felt cold and ached inside her. The sound was louder now. The sea was very near, somewhere just beyond the meadow.
She heard them running behind her and knew that they were close, too. She ran with a power that surprised her. She heard them laughing. Their laughter was horrible; cold, evil. She saw some of them moving up alongside her, running without effort, watching her and grinning, their bared teeth and eyes gleaming in the moonlight.
They knew she was defenseless. They were playing with her. All she could do was run and hope against hope that they tired of the game. She could see no house nearby. She was going to die alone. She heard one of them yipping like a dog behind her and suddenly she felt something slash across the backs of her legs. The pain was sharp and intense and it nearly made her fall. She was not going to make it. They were all around her; it was impossible. She felt her bowels give way, and knew she was giving in to panic.
For the thousandth time she cursed herself for stopping the car, for playing the Good Samaritan. But it had shocked her to see the little girl stumbling alone along the dark, lonely road. She had swung around a corner and suddenly there she was, her dress torn almost to the waist, and in the headlights she could see that the girl had her hands to her face and seemed to be crying. She could not have been more than six years old.
So she’d stopped the car and approached her, thinking, Accident, rape; and the girl had looked up at her with those intense black eyes that had not the slightest trace of tears in them, and grinned at her. Something made her turn around, then, to glance back at the car and she saw them standing in front of it, blocking her return. Suddenly she was afraid. She screamed at them to get away from the car, knowing they would not. “Get the hell out of here,” she’d yelled, feeling helpless and foolish, and that was when they first began to laugh at her and first began advancing. That was when she felt their hands on her and knew they meant to kill her.
Now the runners beside her started to close in. She permitted herself a look at them. Filthy. Awful. There were four of them, three to the left of her and one to the right. The group of three were all boys and the single runner was a young girl. She veered toward the girl and rammed her. Her momentum flung the girl away and she heard a cry of pain. There were whoops of laughter from the others. She felt a quick burning pain cross her back and shoulders, then two lashes in quick succession across her buttocks. Her legs felt