Off Season - Jack Ketchum [74]
The knife withdrew. She started again and groaned as she felt it flick across the nipples of both her breasts. Then they too were wet with blood.
And then his mouth was on her, sucking at the wound in her stomach while his hands pulled off her jeans and pushed them to the ground. She was naked now, naked and beslimed with his lips. It felt evil to be naked in front of him, evil and sick and frightening. Then his mouth deserted her too and his hands were at her shoulders, forcing her to her knees. Weak as she was, she fell gladly.
She tasted blood on her lips and felt it flow from her nostrils as he began slapping her again around the face and ears. Suddenly she was impossibly tired. Her hatred of him remained, a thick knot inside her, but her strength and resistance were gone. In her imagination she tore him limb from limb, but had there been a gun in her hand she’d have had no strength to pull the trigger. The anger burned dull and sullen and useless. She was about to die. Yet all she wished for was a single moment of a power sufficient to kill him. Was this how Laura had felt? A single moment. She tried to summon it.
He lifted her chin and pushed back her head so that now she had to look at him. She saw the pleasure in his eyes and the wide, voluptuous smile. He pressed the point of his knife to her lips and she parted them so he would not cut her. Steel grated against her teeth. She parted them too. She had never felt so helpless in her life. It was too easy to imagine the knife emerging from the back of her throat, the swift wash of blood, her body going suddenly limp, her eyes glazed and dead. One move and . . .
The knife probed the inside of her mouth, passed over her tongue, described an icy circle around it.
At once she understood. She tasted the bitter steel and the salt taste of blood as the knife moved round and round her tongue. He laughed and nodded and there was no mistaking his meaning. He withdrew the knife and then released her.
So that’s the end of it, she thought. She watched him pull off the filthy jeans and saw his cock leap free. She thought, I’ll be good, then. It was not entirely resignation.
He moved in close and reached into her hair, pulling back her head with an exaggerated slowness, enjoying her helplessness. She opened her mouth and took him inside her.
He was eager and ready and she went to him as she was supposed to—as a lover, with all her skill, with fear and daring in place of passion, and she pleased him. It didn’t take her long. In a few moments she felt the sweat begin to break over his body and heard his idiot moan and felt the cock jump between her lips.
In her mind two thoughts blended and began to weld together into a single construct. Her hatred of him was one: that ran deep and thrilling. The other was a vast new sense of her own evil—of the awful place she had been brought to by these people, where there was no love or tenderness but only gruesome death and an appetite that never sated itself, which fed upon itself and drew all who came upon it into the same dark circle of self-destruction. She envisioned a night littered with corpses; the house a vague necropolis of strange dead children and friends and a sister she had loved; this filthy kennel the end of the journey of a lifetime. Whatever she did now, whatever happened to her, would not matter. Nick would not find her. No one would. What she had to do now was dictated from the start, when she had seen her sister die. It was very simple, actually.
He began to come. She waited until she felt the first warm jet of him at the back of her throat. Had she believed in god she might have felt grateful then—she had prayed for a moment of power over him and it had been granted