Shut The Fuck Up And Die! (2 page)

Darlene's heart pounded as if it were
hammering out mayday messages in Morse code and she tried to regain
control, to keep from recoiling from the fury of the assualt. But
with each new slit that appeared, the holes in her palms pulled
against unforgiving metal with agony so intense that splotches
exploded like dark fireworks in her field of vision.

Darlene's once pale arms were now sticky and
warm, coated in blood that glistened like liquefied rubies in the
dim light of the room. Numbness blossomed in her shoulder and she
felt it creep down her arm, devouring sensation like an insatiable
swarm of insects. Her breath escaped in ragged pants and snot
bubbled from her nose as tears washed over Darlene's face and
cheeks. Everything wavered in and out of focus as she slipped back
and forth between the high definition reality of her torture and
blessed, split-second blackouts.

The zeal of Mary's assault began to lose
steam. The cuts became less random, less frequent, and the old
woman watched the blood pulse and percolate with the corners of her
mouth turned up in the hint of a smile.

Placing the gore streaked paring knife on the
table, she backed away, her eyes never straying from the carnage
she'd wrought upon Darlene's arm. The old woman's chest heaved with
each breath and her nostrils flared wide like an excited
animal.

“
Good . . . so good . . . .”

Mary slipped the straps of the sun dress over
her bony shoulders and the entire garment slid off her body like a
curtain at the conclusion of a magician's trick. It bunched around
her feet in yellow folds of fabric and she stood for a moment,
frozen in time.

Her naked body was just as pale and wrinkled
as her face and her breasts sagged as if the nipples were actually
lead weights that pulled them toward her round stomach. Sparse
croppings of silver hair jutted out from the mound between her
legs, giving the impression of an old dog beset by mange.

“
Bleed for Mary, girly. That's it . . .
bleed.”

She stepped out of the tangles of her dress
and walked toward the table with her palms out as if she were
finding her way through the dark. Her arms trembled and a soft sigh
escaped through her chapped lips as her fingertips brushed
Darlene's wounds. The thick liquid stained the creases and folds in
Mary's palms and left long smears along her victim's bicep. Not
satisfied with that, however, the old woman pinched the gashes
between her fingertips and milked more and more blood from the
hatch marks of slits and cuts. She rubbed her hands up and down
Darlene's arm: stroking, petting, swirling patterns like a child
with red finger paint.

Then she leaned her head back, as if looking
toward the heavens, and raised her blood covered hands like a
prophet. Something abut her gave the impression of a woman who'd
just had the best sex of her life, who was tired and spent and
still tingled with remnants of pleasure.

She took a slow breath which quivered in the
back of her throat and, with eyes half-closed, her hands traced
lazy circular patterns over her naked body. Darlene's blood left
long streaks against the old woman's alabaster flesh as if Mary
were the canvass in an abstract painting of depravity. The valleys
formed in her spindly neck, her cumbersome breasts, the tops of her
thighs: all were swirled with red, smudged with crimson, and the
old woman's hands dipped again and again into Darlene's
never-ending well.

“
I'm so pretty, now . . . so very
pretty . . . . Just wait ‘til the boys get home. They'll be so
pleased and tell me how beautiful and young I look. They love their
Mama. Such good boys. Such fine boys. And I'm sure they'll want to
play with you again as well, girly . . . .”

SCENE TWO

The trees on either side of the road were
white, leafless, and reached up from the snow-covered forest like
skeletal hands intent on raking the clouds from the darkened sky. A
few pines were scattered throughout the collective, but on this
moonless, winter night they were nothing more than cookie-cutter
silhouettes with highlights of snow like frosting upon their
boughs.

The worst of the storm had passed earlier in
the day but random flakes still swirled like dust motes in the high
beams that cut through the night. The car that was responsible for
the light that splashed over the encroaching darkness of the woods
was a blue hatchback. It wove along the snaking road, occasionally
fishtailing in some of the sharper bends, as windshield wipers
slapped away the slush that spattered against the glass.

The man driving the car clutched the steering
wheel so tightly that his fingernails dug crescent moons into the
leather cover. He leaned forward in his seat, as if trying to peer
through the cone of snow that seemed to rush at them, with his lips
pulled into a tight frown.

The light of the dashboard cast a warm glow
across his face and the woman in the passenger seat took a moment
to admire him. His hair was dark and wavy and flowed down to the
tops of broad shoulders. Even though they'd been in the car for the
last nine hours, it had somehow managed to look as perfect and
styled as if they'd only checked out of the motel moments earlier.
It framed his narrow face perfectly, falling in just the right
places to bring out the green of his eyes and accentuate those high
cheekbones. She knew that if he smiled, a single dimple would
appear just above his mouth and, not for the first time, the woman
wondered how she had gotten so damn lucky.

It wasn't that she was ugly. With only the
smallest amount of foundation, she could cloak the scattered scars
of teenage acne; and since she'd replaced her chunky, old glasses
with contacts, her eyes had taken on an almost chestnut color. Or
maybe that was simply her imagination . . . could eyes really
change hue simply because they were no longer trapped behind thick
pieces of glass? If anything, shouldn't her eyes have seemed
clearer before, when the thick slabs of glass had magnified them
and made them seem oddly disproportionate to the rest of her round
face?

She worked a tangle out of her long, black
hair and then swept the wispy bangs away from her forehead as she
glanced at herself in the mirror. She knew she was pretty now; she
wasn't the same frumpy nerd who'd chewed on pencils in high school,
who tended to sit in her secondhand clothes at an otherwise empty
table in the lunchroom. In the half decade following her
graduation, she'd blossomed and was acutely aware of the catcalls
that were sometimes hurled in her direction as she walked down the
street. But Matt? He was the type of man sculptors aspired to
capture in stone and granite. Rugged, so good looking that she
sometimes got moist just looking at him, always so smartly dressed
in his turtlenecks and blazers and crisp jeans. For all intents and
purposes, he looked as if he were ready to grace the cover of some
men's magazine at any second.

“
You want me to take over for a bit,
darlin'? You look tired.”

His eyes shifted lightly, just enough so she
knew he could see her from his peripheral vision. Something about
that brief second of contact made her feel warmer inside than all
of the air whooshing out of the heater vents and coaxed a smile.
She looked at her left hand and wiggled it from side to side gently
as she watched the light bounce off the golden band encircling her
ring finger.

“
I'm okay . . . just want to hurry up
and get there, ya know? All this driving . . . .”

His voice trailed off as his gaze shifted to
the dashboard. He frowned again and pecked at the plexiglass with
one finger, as if trying to encourage a stuck gauge into
movement.

“
Why don't you see if you can find
anything on the radio, Mona?”

She used to hate her name. It caused images
of old, chain-smoking women to sprout like weeds in her mind. She
always envisioned them so very clearly: fingernails stained yellow,
hair all up in curlers, and loose dressing gowns dotted with
pinhole burns from falling ashes. But when Matt said it, it made
her feel as if she were framed in a gallery somewhere, put on
display for long lines of people to admire as they discussed her
more subtle features in low whispers. Funny how something as small
as the way someone says your name could make you feel so special,
so cherished and secure.

Her fingers flipped on the stereo and the car
was flooded with static. She scrambled for the volume knob and
lowered it until the sound coming out of the speakers seemed more
like the hiss of a distant waterfall and began guiding the little
needle across the dial with slight twists of her wrist. For the
most part, there was only white noise and an occasional high
pitched whine that seemed to surf the peaks and troughs of the
atmosphere. But then there was a burst of noise and she turned the
dial back more slowly, trying to narrow down the transmission into
something that could actually be heard.

“
. . . until tomorrow morning.” The
disc jockey's voice was soft and rhythmic, almost as if it were
pulling itself into creation from buzz of background interference.
“In other news, the badly mutilated body of a Fosterville woman was
discovered early Thursday morning. Found in a dumpster at an I-77
rest stop by maintenance crews, police chief Robert Hallohan said
it was too early to tell if this most recent murder is related to
the string . . . .”

“
Turn that shit off, sweetie. I was
thinking more along the lines of music.”

The announcer's voice was swallowed in fresh
burst of static that continued until Mona had reached the other end
of the spectrum where it finally resolved into the twang of banjo
and a nasal tenor that droned on and on about lost love and
regret.

“
Still can't find anything but
shit-kicker tunes, baby.”

Since they'd left the interstate, the
selection and quality of radio stations had decreased
exponentially. At first, they'd driven through quaint country towns
that looked as if they'd sprung full-blown from a Norman Rockwell
Christmas card: snowmen kept silent vigil in yards bordered by
picket fences, people hunkered in the cold and shuffled along
sidewalks while their scarves flapped like banners in the wind.
Though it had still been daylight, it was obvious that the
insurance agents and grocers had strung colored lights around plate
glass windows and giant green wreaths hung from every other
lamppost. Matt and Mona had found a classic rock station and they
blew through these towns while the Beach Boys harmonized
about
The Little Saint Nick
and The Boss informed everyone that Santa Claus was coming to
town.

As the quiet little hamlets gave way to
scattered farms and livestock, however, finding something worth
listening to had become more difficult For about ten minutes,
they'd tuned in to some station that had the cajones to assault its
listeners with the breakneck rhythms of Slayer and old school
Metallica; but they lost the station when they entered a stretch of
road where the hills pressed against the blacktop so closely that
it was like driving through the bosom of Mother Earth. By the time
they'd emerged on the other side, heavy metal was nothing more than
a memory and hard-drinking country ruled the roost. Now that
darkness had fallen and the landscape was nothing more than snow
covered mountains and trees as far as the eye could see, the
Bluegrass that she'd found was almost like a Godsend.

“
How much further did you say it was to
this cabin, anyway?”

Matt sniffled and cocked his head to the side
as if he'd developed a crick in his neck. He always did that when
he was thinking and it was one of the thousand little things that
Mona loved about this man.

“
About an hour, hour and a half taking
weather into account. Daddy liked his seclusion. I ever tell you
about the time he brought me up here for my first hunting
experience, darlin'?”

Mona giggled and rolled her eyes as she
popped open the glove box. She was sure there was a half-eaten
Snickers buried somewhere in all the paperwork and receipts and her
stomach gurgled as she searched.

“
Only about a million times,
baby.”

“
He was a good father. Maybe not a good
man . . . but a good father, nonetheless.

Mona stopped rooting through the glove box
and placed her hand gently on Matt's thigh. She hated hearing that
distant sound in his voice, that tone that made it sound as if
everything within her new husband was as hollow and empty as the
promises her own father had used to make.

“
You miss him, Mattie?”

He looked over at his wife with a smile that
somehow didn't match that pain in his eyes. Steering with one hand,
he placed the other on top of hers and squeezed so gently it almost
seemed as if he were afraid of crushing her bones.

“
I don't know if I
miss
him, per se. But he understood, ya know? I
could tell him about . . . .”

“
Mattie! Look
out!
”

Mona's voice was a shrill squeal and her
hands flew to the dashboard as if she'd suddenly realized it was
rushing toward them and needed to be held back. Matt snapped his
head back to the road just in time to see something large and brown
in the road ahead. It's eyes were silvery in the oncoming
headlights and it's white tail twitched as its haunches tensed.

Matt slammed his foot onto the brake as if he
intended to ram it through the floor and jerked the wheel to the
left. At the same time, the car seemed to be embodied with a life
of its own: the tail end swung around in what seemed to be a slow
motion spiral while the world outside the windows blurred.