Off Season - Jack Ketchum [40]
That would do, he thought. Now for the other windows. And the gun.
Outside, Carla swung slowly from the heavy rope, lost in nightmare.
She shivered uncontrollably, her body laved in sweat, Jim’s blood still slimy across her stomach and thighs. The cool night air was a vicious wind, biting deep into her fevered flesh. The wound along her backbone where they’d dragged her over the windowpane was closed now and she felt no pain. The pain was in her feet, starved for blood, and in her choked and swollen ankles. Her tongue felt thick, her lips cracked and dry. She forced her eyes to focus.
A group of ragged children were building something out of leaves and sticks and old rotted wood a few yards away. A thin gaunt man with a leering smile poked her in the ribs with his forefinger and placed a large metal bucket—the kind you could bathe in—beneath her. Next to him, a man in a bright red shirt drove two pegs into the ground with a wooden hammer, one on either side of her about four feet apart. There was something familiar about the shirt. She noticed that the man’s right hand was missing its middle and third fingers. Then she remembered a man in a red shirt waving to her from down by the brook. Was it yesterday?
She watched, uncomprehending, while the man tied long leather thongs to each peg and then drove the pegs deeper into the hard earth. He stood up and ran a line to her left wrist and tied it tight. She tried to swing away from him but it was no good. Her strength was gone. He laughed at her. Now she felt a pressure in her fingertips and knew that in a few minutes they would give her pain. He ran the second thong to her right wrist and tied it. So that now she would not even be able to move back and forth on the rope anymore. She looked down into the bucket. A darkness filled with tiny motes of light began to close in on her.
Dimly she heard the hammer pounding inside the house but she could not understand what that sound meant, could not connect it to anything. She heard herself sobbing and felt tears roll across her forehead. Yet even that felt very far away. She knew she was failing and tried desperately to cling to consciousness, to ward off shock. Something would save her if she kept awake and sane. There would be some opportunity. She shook her head. She saw the thin man reach into his pants, withdraw the knife, and open it. She tried to move against the ropes, and for a moment the pain broke through and rocketed her to clarity.
She remembered Jim’s body sprawled against her, the heat of his bright blood, the precise angle of his head as he tumbled away. It horrified her to know that she did not care about him, that she only cared about what was happening to her now, about Carla living, about not dying the way she had seen him die. She did not want that, she would not accept it. She would struggle against this black thing settling like a pair of wings over her that kept urging her toward sleep and carelessness. She moved her head forward and looked up, disbelievingly, at her own helpless flesh.
In the glare of the headlights she saw herself pale and trembling, her feet together and arms spread wide in some inverted parody of crucifixion. She looked up at the flesh that men had touched and she had touched, now thrust upward to the peaceful, starry sky, and knew in that moment that conscious or unconscious they were going to kill her, that there was nothing she could do or