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Thursday, July 30, 2015

60 Born to Make the Kill

Natalie was more comfortable in the sedan than on the mud-caked, steel floor of the van and for that she was grateful. She glanced at the dashboard clock. If it was accurate, the time was 10:32 p.m. It had been just over an hour since they had passed through Raymond, Washington and more than two and a half since they crossed the river on the long bridge.

After Tony stole the sedan, he had forced Rudy at gun point to transfer everything including Hank to the new car. He tied Rudy’s hands to the frame under the front of the passenger seat so tight, Rudy sat hunched over with his hands stretched to the floor between his feet. From where Natalie sat behind him, she could not see for sure, but from the complaints Rudy voiced at the time, it seemed like an unnecessarily uncomfortable position, but Tony seemed oblivious to everyone else’s pain. He continued to drive, and lit one cigarette off the end of the last.

Where there had been times of chatter between Rudy and Tony throughout the day, mostly Rudy trying to get Tony to let him drive or making casual, mostly one-sided, conversation, the silence that ruled the car since the sun set outside of Lincoln City had become more sinister and oppressive. It was as tangible as the glass in the door next to her. Even though she could see right through it, she didn’t have to put her fingers on it to prove it was there. She had asked Tony just after she helped the older couple escape in their Jeep, “What do you want from me?” He avoided the question with a brusque “… shut the hell up and get back in the van.” With plenty of time to think, she had begun to believe there was more to her abduction than just Tony’s psychosis. He was on a rampage for certain, two, if not three, people had died as a direct result of her captivity. But was it really her confinement that got the people killed, or was Tony acting without conscience so badly for another reason?

From her seat behind Rudy, she turned her eyes up from Hank and found the rear view mirror. Tony drew on his smoke. In the mirror his eyes were illumined. She felt them search for her in the darkness of the backseat. They looked just as cold and frozen as the eyes she met in the studio parking lot. But there was something else. In the motel room as they were about to run out the door, he had looked away from her as if something needed to be hidden. Now he didn’t flinch, and in the seconds their eyes engaged, he showed her a resolve she hadn’t seen before. It was like in the silent darkness of the sedan, he had come to a decision. What determination he had arrived at she could only guess, but with the way things had gone since the screen test, it couldn’t be good for her.

This time she broke the stare and looked back into the face of the still figure in her lap. In the lights of a passing vehicle, she saw the glimmer of Hank’s eyes again.



Like a dreamless sleep, over the last day Hank had no connection with the life ebbing from him one heart beat at a time. No day nor night, no sunrise nor sunset, no past nor present, and the future a concept yet unborn. Comatose, the lost day started like the last breath before anesthesia rips all thought away and ended at the same moment—no sense of time’s ceaseless movement. No reality—no dark nor light, no sound nor sight, no scent nor touch—just nothing. Until there was something most terrifying.

Hank felt his body pummel through a density like that of the earth’s crust. Whether pushed or pulled, a power greater than he drove him like a relentless missile deeper in his descent and bored a path through the solid mass. The solidity compressed behind him as he pierced through and left no evidence of his passing. As he descended further through the compaction, his flesh ripped away from his muscles and then the muscles split open with excruciating gashes. He couldn’t move a limb by his own will and he dared not open his eyes as he knew that against the onslaught of the mass they would be shred to ribbons.

Then, in the terror, there were hands, disembodied hands, millions of hands grabbed and pulled at him as he passed though. They slashed at his lacerated flesh and exposed muscles, and worked their razor-edged fingers into the wounds to tear them deeper and deeper until the bone was bare. How they came out from this density he couldn’t imagine. No one could. And then he heard them, the voices that once belonged to the hands. They screamed and shrieked, not from the horror of their eternal damnation but for the pain, the searing torment of the endless millennia of their punishment.

He broke through the dense crust and began to free-fall. At first relief to be released from the agony of his flesh being ripped away brought calm to his mind, but then he felt them. They floated all around him. Some were solid and slashed into him like a whip of vengeance. Some writhed over his body like a swarm of vipers. Others piercing through him and left a freezing chill and something like shattered icicles in their tunneled path. He opened his eyes only to be confronted with the shifting faces of the screaming horde. Their mouths were wide black holes that morphed in grotesque shapes, and their eye sockets were orange flashing balls of flame. They never took a breath so the shattering timbre of their anguish never ceased.

As he tried without success to avoid the inevitable and continuous collisions, he sensed a dread fill his soul with a darkness blacker than the densest ink in a writer’s well, and knowledge beyond imagination witnessed that these were the fortunate ones. Dread engulfed him as he realized his doom would yet be revealed.
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