Off Season - Jack Ketchum [75]
Then suddenly she was on her feet, feeling his warm blood splash her legs and naked thighs while he screeched and released her hair and tried to halt the pumping gout of blood. She reared back and spit away the stinking stump. He howled like a mutilated animal. She loved the sound. She loved the cooling gore across her thighs. And then in an instant she was rushing toward the entrance to the cave, her mouth an angry, wild grin, unmindful of the women who seemed to rise up out of nowhere to clutch at her, unmindful even of the huge bald man who was weak from loss of blood and unable to stop her.
She thrust them all aside with a preternatural power, tossed a child against the cave wall with such violence that she heard its skull pop and split open like a melon. She heard herself wail with all the mad joy of a warrior delighting in his fallen enemies. And she was delighted, at last to have hurt him and to be free. Arms wide, she ran toward the entrance, past the fire that licked at her shins, past all the half-human vitriol and garbage sprawled stunned around her.
She saw the moonlight peeking through the entranceway and raced toward the clean scent of the sea that at once assailed her nostrils through the heavy reek of smoke and gore. I did it, she exulted, I got him! She tore away the skin at the mouth of the cave and hurtled forward into the night.
The man in red was walking slowly up the pathway to the cave when he heard the screams inside. They were not the screams of his captives, of the boy or of the women, but of his people. The loudest, the worst—the one that froze him there—was his brother. He had never heard anyone scream like that before but he knew his brother’s voice. There were ghosts angry in the night tonight. The hunt had gone bad, and they all would pay now.
He hesitated in fear of what he heard inside. But the screams continued. They pressed him on, despite his fear—their urgency a dim call to the depths of his compassionless soul, reaching to a common heritage of blood and violence; a summons to be answered. Grim, silent, joyless, he walked on.
In her rush to freedom she did not see him. For a moment the clean fresh air embraced her like a gentle lover. Then his hands were on her and she was struggling against hard male flesh, tearing with bleeding fingernails at the red shirt he wore, and all her newfound strength could not save her.
That Nick, following behind, had seen them from the rocks below she could not know, nor that he was racing toward them up the rockface. For Marjie everything crumbled in an instant. The momentary power in her fled, routed forever. Her body went limp against him as he carried her inside and tossed her down by the fire. She was lost, used up, vanished. The strength she had called upon could never be summoned again. The struggle was over. The struggle but not the nightmare . . .
In moments the children were upon her like flies at an open carcass. She began to scream, a high thin wail that could not even begin to express the pain and despair, the thousand tortured nerve ends that tore and broke under their weight and beneath their jaws. They went at her like wolves, gouging flesh from her cheeks and arms and shoulders, ripping wildly at her breasts and thighs. In mindless astonishment she saw them in the act of eating her alive. She saw them tear a nipple from her breast, and they were still on her when she heard the gunfire.
It was a tableau Nick had never dared imagine as he ran up the narrow path to the cave. But in an instant his eyes took it in. The man in the red shirt whirling on him in front of the fire. The two women flanking him—the pregnant one standing beside a blood-splattered child whose head lolled off to one shoulder at an unnatural angle. To the rear, the boy in the cage looking up at them in wideeyed surprise and the thin man on his knees, screaming and clutching his genitals. The