Mine (3 page)

***

Mason could see nothing but stars for thirty-seconds, fireworks of agony igniting in his balls and exploding up into his brain. Most women knew how sensitive a man’s testicles were in a funny, joking kind of way but hardly any of them truly knew the pain and damage they could cause with a lot less force than Sarah had just kicked him. He was hurt, and he was hurt bad. It took another full minute for the blinding, searing pain to taper away to a point where Mason felt able to open his eyes and have a look around. Finding it hard to breathe, the room still spinning, he was sure Sarah would be standing above him with the knife ready and willing to finish him off, but the bedroom was empty. Sarah was gone, obviously making a run for the truck.

Mason fought his way into a kneeling position and then eventually up onto the bed. After another few minutes he felt reasonably able to stand up. The first thing he noticed was that his knife was missing. He didn’t need to be a genius to figure out who had taken it. Sarah was armed now, and quite obviously dangerous, but that wasn’t going to stop Mason from having his fun. No way. It just made the game all the more interesting. Hobbling on slightly rubbery legs, he walked out into the living room, only to find the front door to the cabin wide open. Rage started to build within him.
Does she really think she’s going to get away that easy? After what she just did?

“I’m coming for you, Bitch!” Mason screamed as loud as he could, hoping Sarah was still close enough to hear him. “Better run little girl… ’cause ready or not, here I come. You should have taken me out while you had the chance.”

Jacked up and ready for the hunt, adrenaline pushing back the pain in his groin, Mason tore off his blood soaked t-shirt and went back into the bathroom to collect his discarded boot. The thought of running through the woods naked like some sort of wild savage appealed to him — turned him on, in fact — but it would be stupid to not at least wear his boots. Sarah would be moving as fast as she could with her bare feet, but she wouldn’t be able to move as fast over the pine needles and rocks as he could in his work boots. It was a key advantage that he was counting on to make up the distance between them. That and the fact he knew exactly where he’d parked the pickup and wouldn’t have to stumble around lost in the woods like she surely would.

Before he could take off after her, he needed to find a weapon of his own. Sarah had already proven she was more than capable of defending herself and Mason wasn’t about to underestimate her again. No, if she had the knife he needed to find something to even out the odds again; or better yet, put them firmly in his favor. Quickly looking around the living room and kitchen, his choices were limited. The hunting lodge had belonged to his father and no one had been here in years. It was basically abandoned and empty.

And then he spotted his father’s old
Jim Bear
signature series bow hanging on a hook over the ragged old couch. Beside the wooden end table, a quiver full of arrows.
Bingo!
Mason had come here half a dozen times every summer and fall with his dad and although he’d always loved the peace and solitude of the woods, he’d usually ended up hating most of those weekends. Hunting with his dad was the best part of the year but in some ways it was also the worse. Mason’s father was an avid hunter and was a marksman with a rifle, but his real passion has always been bow hunting. He wasn’t the kind of hunter who believed in just sitting still in an elevated blind all day either. No, not pops. He enjoyed the thrill of the chase, silently stalking through territory the deer or wild turkeys felt safe in, armed only with a half dozen razor sharp arrows. It felt more natural to him that way.
 

More
primal
.

It wasn’t that Mason didn’t enjoy hunting. He liked it a lot, actually, and had desperately wanted to please his father but even though he was a decent enough shot with his Remington .22, or with any of his old man’s rifles for that matter, his skills with a bow and arrow were basically shit. Every time he fired the bowstring would graze his arm causing him to yelp in pain. He wasn’t a wuss or a quitter, and he’d sort of liked the way it stung, but every time it happened it raised a welt on his arm and made his shot go astray. He had killed dozens of trees, hundreds of shrubs and bushes, but never once had one of his arrows struck a deer or turkey. Much to his father’s dismay.
 

Maybe the problem was he’d always been hunting the wrong kind of animal.
 

Mason grabbed the bow off the wall and slung the quiver of arrows over his shoulder. “This one’s for you, pops,” he said, heading out the cabin door. “Game’s on bitch!”

***

Sarah watched as her boyfriend walked out onto the front porch of the dilapidated cabin. Other than his work boots he was as naked as she was, his eyes wild with rage and pumped full of adrenaline. In his hands, Mason was carrying some kind of old fashioned hunting bow and her heart skipped a beat as she watched him pull a long fiberglass arrow from a leather quiver draped across his back. The arrows looked newer than the bow, and the gleaming metal tips on the end of the shafts looked exactly like what they were: razor sharp and deadly. Sarah tried to imagine what it might be like to feel one of those arrowheads rip into and through her body, tearing its way through skin and tissue and deflecting off bone, but she shut those thoughts off immediately. That wasn’t the way this game was going to go down. She was stronger than that. Stronger than Mason realized. At the end of the day if only one of them was going to make it through this madness, Sarah had every intention of it being her.

She watched Mason dash off and disappear down one of the trails, and only then did she come out of her hiding place in the thick strand of trees beside the cabin. She knew her Neanderthal boyfriend enough to know he’d charge off blindly into the woods thinking she would be in panic mode, stumbling around lost trying to put as much distance as she could between her and the cabin. Fortunately she was smarter than that. She had no idea how to find her way back to Mason’s F-150 on her own, but if she played her cards right he’d lead her right to it. Even better, she’d constantly have him in sight and it would be her who would have the element of surprise if it came down to a confrontation.
 
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, of course. He was far bigger and stronger than her and it would be foolish to take him on if she could avoid it. Sarah would kill Mason if need be, no worries there, but if all went as planned she’d follow him to the truck, wait him out until he wandered off to look somewhere else for her, then slip quietly into the pickup and be gone before he knew what was happening.
 

Then again, maybe slitting his throat and carving the words FUCK YOU in capital letters into his belly might not be the worst thing that could happen. The crazy bastard deserves worse than that after all the times he’s cut me. Maybe I should hack his bruised balls off and stuff them in his mouth as he dies? See how he likes the taste of them for a change?

Now there was a good idea!
 

Payback’s a bitch, right? And so am I…

With thoughts of blood and sweet revenge swirling around in her amped up mind, Sarah carefully headed off down the trail she’d seen Mason take thirty-seconds earlier. She held the bloodstained knife out in front of her, its cold steel blade confidently leading the way.

***

Three quarters of the way back to the pick-up and Mason still hadn’t seen hide or hair of Sarah. He’d been sure she’d get herself lost in these woods and would be making such a racket trying to fight her way through the bush that he’d have no trouble tracking her down. His plan was to end this quickly. His feverish mind was also occupied with images of the impending carnage but the thrill of the hunt aside, deep down Mason knew that he still loved Sarah. He wanted her to die —
needed
her to die — but he didn’t want her to suffer. Well…not
too
much, anyway. In a perfect world, he’d hoped to catch up and then get out in front of her without being spotted. Set up in a spot where she’d be unknowingly walking right into his trap. Then it would be target practice time.
 

Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…
he’d thought, chuckling to himself.

It hadn’t been that easy though — nothing ever was — and he forced himself to slow down and rethink things through. The woods were thick in this part of the state, and there were far too many hiding places for his liking. His bow was a deadlier weapon than her knife but if he was honest with himself he knew it wasn’t the ideal choice for any kind of in-close combat. Mason started to get nervous; a little bit anyway. He started seeing Sarah’s face or the flash of what might be a blade behind every second tree and hiding in every bush. He had to remind himself to settle down; that there was no way his dainty little girlfriend would have the guts to take him on one on one. For sure she’d be running away as fast as she could; only if that were the case where the hell was she? The woods around him were as quiet as a funeral home at midnight. If Sarah were flailing through the woods in a panic, he’d have heard her from miles away.
 

So where was she then?

Fuck!

The first cold fingers of fear began to grab Mason around the neck. Not that he was willing to admit that — even to himself — but he realized right then and there that this fantasy hunt might not be quite as easy as he’d thought. Back in the day the deer and the wild turkeys hadn’t had the intelligence or the ability to fight back. If he fucked this up, he was in for a world of hurt. The claustrophobic dirt trail he was on started giving Mason the creeps. It wasn’t just that he didn’t
feel
safe in this confined area, he actually
wasn’t
safe. There were too many places Sarah could be waiting for him and too many angles of attack he couldn’t defend for his liking. He decided his best course of action was to head all the way out to where they’d parked the truck and wait for her there. Unless she got herself really lost, she’d have to eventually show up there, right? When she did, at least he’d be in an open clearing and his longer-range weapon would have the advantage again. All he had to do was wait her out.
 

Confident he was making the right call, he moved off along another trail, this one even narrower than the last. He knew these woods like the back of his hand and he moved off into the trees with a smile on his face.
That bitch is gonna get what’s coming to her. Might take me all day, but I’ll find her.
 
One way or another…she’s mine!

***

Like a panther stealthily stalking its prey, Sarah followed in Mason’s wake as close as she could without fear of being discovered. Luckily, her adversary was barging through the woods with all the grace of an elephant and making so much noise she really didn’t have to keep him in sight to know exactly which route he was taking. She hung back a decent distance and only moved once she was sure he was still heading away from the cabin, and not trying to double back behind her and pull something sneaky. As it was, Sarah was fairly positive that Mason had no clue she was actually behind him so for the time being was relatively safe.

At some point along their journey, Mason began to pick up his pace, his tentative movements becoming more confident and urgent. Sarah was forced to speed up to avoid being left behind and once or twice she was sure he must have heard the sound of her barefooted approach. If he did, he showed no sign of stopping or turning around, continuing to barrel along the narrow trails until eventually he led her back to the clearing where his F-150 was parked. Sarah was surprised at how quickly they’d made it all the way out to the dark blue colored truck, and equally surprised that the first step of her plan had worked. One thing had been true; there was no way she would have found her way back to this clearing all by herself.
 

Okay,
she thought, catching her breath.
Now I’ve just got to wait him out. He’ll get tired of standing out there eventually, and when he leaves I’ll make my move.

As quietly as she could, Sarah moved off the narrow dirt trail and into the thick forest surrounding the open clearing. She didn’t want to go far but she knew the last place she wanted to be standing when Mason decided to start looking for her, was right in the middle of the same trail that lead back to his father’s cabin. Moving over a carpet of dry pine needles that snapped and crackled beneath her and dug painfully into the tender flesh of her feet, she crept to a place about forty feet away from the trail where she could crouch down and keep an eye on Mason. In any other situation she would have burst out laughing, watching the big man marching around and around his pickup truck like some kind of toy soldier, stark naked except for his boots. There was nothing funny about this game they were playing though; and one wrong move or unnecessary sound could mean the difference between life and death.
 

Sarah carefully lowered herself to the ground and sat cross-legged beneath the bows of a large pine tree. Several long, sharp pine needles jabbed her painfully in the ass and upper legs but she managed to wiggle into a fairly comfortable position and settled in to wait. If she moved her head just a few inches to the left, she could see Mason making his rounds, his bow drawn and ready to fire at the first sign of an intruder.
Good…he’ll tire himself out all the faster that way. At some point he’ll give up and go back to the cabin.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.

It might have, but in the end it was Sarah who ran out of patience first. After a full hour of sitting immobile her legs were starting to cramp, and she was so itchy she felt ready to scream. Another ten minutes of silent suffering and she knew she had to do something soon or she’d make a noise that would give her hiding place away. If she did that, she was in big trouble, so before it was too late Sarah carefully stood up and spent a minute stretching her legs. From here she knew that she had two choices. She could slowly back away deeper into the forest and take her chances alone in the woods, or she could make her stand right here and now. It wouldn’t be dark out for several more hours yet but just the thought of having to spend the night naked in the woods was more than she could bear. No, she was tired of taking the safe, cowardly approach so retreating wasn’t an option she wanted to consider. Not when there was a perfectly good vehicle parked less than thirty feet away — one that she just happened to have the keys for.