Crossing the Line (31 page)

Brute took the handle for the first time and gave it five mighty twists. There were a few
pops
as more rusted wire snapped under the pressure. The groaning of the tree bark matched that of the barbed wire, but both were overshadowed by the howls coming from the bound woman.

Anna cautiously got to her feet and stumbled over to Deloris. She raised a shaking hand and clasped Deloris’s bottom jaw. The woman’s eyes grew wide with horror as her mouth was forced closed around the razor wire bit. Flesh was shorn all the way to the back of her throat and the bottom of her ear lobes.

One of the snapped wires hung grimly from her forehead. Anna used it to affix the bit in place. She offered her best smile, which was not much of one due to her injuries, and walked back to her spot in the audience.

When Ivy found it impossible to turn the crank anymore she walked away and found one of the posts they had stripped. She carried it over to the bleeding woman and swung it with all of her might. Deloris had no place to recoil to, so her body took the blunt force without resistance. A two inch nail sticking from the post caught her across the pelvis. When Ivy yanked the post free the flesh there flapped down to cover the woman’s sex.

Tracy took Ivy’s lead and picked up another of the posts. The two women beat at Deloris as if she was a piñata while Brute continued to crank the lever.
Blood poured as the wire sank deeper and deeper into her body. The pieces
that were torn loose by the wire we batted at with vigor by the women, often hard enough to dislodge them from the infrastructure of Deloris’s crumbling body.

Even Brute’s impressive strength soon was put to the test as the fat gave way to the denser muscle and bone beneath. More
snaps
came as wires popped free of the nest. They whipped past the girls and on a few occasions they actually were cut by the sharp spines. As the injuries drew Deloris closer to death she began losing control of her logical mind. She shook against the wires, only helping in the destruction of her body. The bit dug ever deeper into her face, drawing a jagged line of torn flesh and blood up toward her ears.

With all of her might, Tracy swung the post at Deloris’s jaw. The lower jaw came unattached from the rest of her face and was flung away into the nearby brush. Two of the bitches went to retrieve it and began feeding on the meaty fat hanging from the multiple chins.

What was left of Deloris’s head looked like artwork devised by some sadist with a Marquis de Sade fetish. Barbed wire criss-crossed her face leaving deep bloody grooves. Her lower jaw missing left behind only a visual of the razor wire bit digging deep into the tissues at the back of her throat. Her eyes were squeezed shut tightly against the flood of blood that was running over their lids.

The assault on her body hadn’t killed her yet, though by now there was a thick puddle of blood at the base of the tree and one of her arms had been severed at the elbow. Her body looked like sausage being pushed through a meat grinder. The flesh that was hanging loosely from her thrashing body looked as if it wa
s being pushed off of her by unseen hands
.

Brute snarled as he worked the hand crank. His injuries spilled blood thickly as the action demanded more strength. His wounds opened wider and became more deadly. He felt the chilling hands of death reaching out for him and decided that ther
e was no better way to lose his
life than killing the woman that had tormented him as long as he could remember.

He twisted the crank as hard as he could and an enormous
crack
came as the ball of barbed wire snapped completely away from the pieces strung across Deloris’s body. She fell to the ground with a wet
smack
.

The women continued to beat at her even as she lay still. It wasn’t until the bitches rolled her over that they stopped their assault. The bit had been forced up into her brain cavity by the last act of strength. Deloris was no longer amongst the living.

The girls backed away and took a seat next to Anna on the ground and they watched as the bitches began feasting on her flesh.
Deep wounds were revealed as they peeled back the layers of fat to get to the sweeter meat beneath.

Brute walked around the tree and collapsed next to the corpse. The bitches lost interest in their feast and went to their wounded Alpha.

45

After Ivy and Tracy had worked on Anna using the medical supplies they found at Deloris’s house they filled her with antibiotics and left her to sleep on sofa cushions they had laid on the floor of the library, which had sustained the least amount of damage during the gunfight. Working on Brute’s wounds was much more complicated and neither of them knew exactly what to do. They patched him up as best as they could and hoped that Anna would awaken soon so that she could instruct them on how to heal their savior.

The
y
loaded Brute up with pain killers and antibiotics and he soon fell asleep in a curled ball next to Anna. Even the way in which he slept made him appear more canine than human. Neither of the women wanted to admit it out loud, but they were both quite sure that he was not going to survive.

For a time Ivy and Tracy, too, fell asleep. Without the drugs in their systems they awoke immediately to the sound of the bitches coming into the house. Unsure if they could trust the breeders both girls went for shotguns they had collected from the armory. When the women came around the corner into the room they did so in a pattern that reflected the movement of coyotes. They skittishly looked for a place to hide amongst the furniture.

Tracy lowered her gun. Had it not been for the women they would have never gotten Brute back to the house. It had taken all of their might to carry Anna with the night’s events finally setting in as fatigue in their muscles. The bitches had dragged Brute the distance and left him with the girls.

Tracy had no way of telling how long she had been asleep other than the direction of the sunlight. She guessed it to be about noon, which would have given them four solid hours or so. She felt refreshed, but far from okay.
She would never be the same person again and she knew it.

Behind the dogs came a litter of small children. They ranged in sizes from toddler to teenager. Some of them obviously had belonged to the pack and had missed the final battle, while others were wearing formal clothing and looked terrified of their captors.

These were obviously the children from the back house. There was no sign of the women said to have been left to protect them. Not until the last bitch stepped into the room and a woman followed her in. The woman looked scared, but she also didn’t seem to have been attacked.

She was older than most of the bitches. Gray touched the top of her soft red crown. She had bruises all over her arms and face from past beatings.

“I would have been a bitch if it wasn’t for Gene,” she said. “He took a liking to me five years ago and has kept me as his wife ever since. My name isn’t really Kendra, its Ellen, but he didn’t like that name so I got a new one.”

“What are you doing here?” Ivy asked, raising the gun at Ellen’s head.

“I’ve been trying to figure out a way to escape for five years, but I couldn’t just leave behind my babies,” Ellen sobbed. “So I stayed and I helped as much as I could. I tended to the wounds of the dogs and the bitches. I made sure that the babies did not smother to death when that cruel bitch had them buried. It wasn’t much, but it was how I kept grasp of who I was before I rented that godforsaken lake house.”

Ivy moved her finger away from the gun’s trigger but left it leveled so that she could blow the woman’s head off if she decided that she needed to.

“My husband and I were doctors, we owned a private firm in Oregon. We brought our children here so we could spend time with them. It seemed like we never had time at home. Our first night in the house
we heard something outside. When I looked there was a huge man looking up at me. That man,” she pointed to Brute. “He was wearing the skull of a deer.”

“He broke into the house and killed my husband, but when he saw me protecting my boys he let me and the children live.” At this one of the teenage dogs wandered over to her. She stroked his matted hair and pulled his head down on one of her shoulders.

“I can help patch you guys up enough that you should survive,” Ellen said. “Deloris kept a full doctor’s office worth of supplies here. We were all prisoners to her psychosis.”

“We’ll be fine,” Ivy said. “Help Brute first. We don’t know anything about stitches or any of that shit. We just tried to stop the bleeding.”

Ellen nodded. “We will need him to survive if we’re going to,” she said. “Every pack needs an alpha.”

46

It took mere hours for Anna to recover enough to travel to a hospital.
She and Ivy headed to the remaining ambulance
to make their
way out of the nightmare, with
Tracy straggling behind. When they finally reached the garage Tracy knew she had made her final decision.

“We will need a couple of days of recuperation before we move on. Please keep what happened to yourselves until we have time to get out of here,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” Anna asked.

“I can’t leave. I can’t go back to society and act like none of this ever happened. I became one of them last night.
No amount of therapy or inpatient hospital stays is going to take that away from me. If I were ever mugged or even bumped into at a bar by a man I would beat him to death. I’m no longer fit for society.”

“You can’t really expect us to just leave you up here to live with them like a dog, Tracy. You’re one of my best friends. You’re one of the few friends that I have left alive,” Ivy said.

Tracy shook her head. “I’m not alive. Not the Tracy that you knew at least. She died last night. And when you do tell the police about what happened here you tell them that all of the dogs died as well as me. They saved our lives. They will need help finding someplace safe to stay.”

Ivy realized she understood exactly how Tracy felt. She too wanted to stay with the pack. They had grown together like family overnight. Brute had become as significant a part of her life as her true family. If not for the dogs they would have died a hundred times. Still, she couldn’t imagine Tracy succumbing to the animal inside her.

“We will come back for you,” Ivy said as she started the ambulance.

“Don’t, I won’t be here anymore. We’ve got to get someplace safe.”

“I love you, Tracy,” Anna sobbed.

“I love you guys, too. We’re family and never forget that. Even though you’re not staying you’re both part of the pack, too.”

Tracy turned away before anything else could be said. She pressed the button to open the garage’s bay door
s and Ivy pulled out, purposely avoiding looking at Marcy’s corpse
. It seemed like an instant later they were passing the lake house and all of their vehicles. She thought of suggesting that they stop and get some fresh clothes and their purses, but knew she could not go back into that house if her life depended on it.

After navigating the narrow road for a while longer she stomped on the brakes. Anna was flung forward so fast that two of the stitches in her belly popped open. She groaned with agony. “Sorry,” Ivy said over to her.

She looked past her friend at the gas station. The guy behind the counter must not have been able to see them through the tinted windows because he was waving and grinning. Ivy turned into the station and reached beneath the seat for her shotgun.

“What are you doing?” Anna asked.

“Keeping a promise I made yesterday,” Ivy replied.

“Oh okay,” Anna said wistfully. She looked at the convenience storefront and smiled.
“
If they have those Reese’s minis will you pick me
up some and a Diet Mountain Dew?
”

“Sure thing. You stay right here and I’ll be back.”

As Ivy stepped out of the van she fully understood what Tracy had meant. She truly had become a dog overnight. Not only was she capable of killing, but she enjoyed it. She was going to enjoy every second of killing the man in the gas station.

She pushed open the doors and the man reached under the counter. A single squeeze of the trigger sent the man back against the cigarette display behind him. Blood poured from the wound in his side. He fell to the ground with a groan of pain.

Ivy walked over to the counter and aimed the gun down at his head. “Who were you waving at?”

“Deloris made me do it. I never wanted to see you or your friends get hurt,” he sputtered between tears. “Look what you’ve done to my new shirt.”

“Add it to my tab.”

Ivy pulled the trigger again and watched as the man’s head exploded in a geyser of blood, hair and brain particles. She turned away, allowing the smoking barrel to aim toward the floor. She went to the candy display and soda cooler and got Anna’s requests.

It was going to be a whole new world when she got back to school and she knew it.

EPILOGUE

Dominic sat slumped over in the arm chair. The newspaper was held loosely in his grip and his mind was racing. He knew his nephew’s blood was on his hands and they would never come clean. He set the paper on the coffee table with the pile of others and sighed deeply.