What Doesn’t Kill Her (2 page)

As he drew her effortlessly out from under, by both ankles now, Jordan tried to kick free, though her attacker proved too strong. She was halfway out when she stretched her right hand and managed to grasp the handle of the scissors and take them along with her.

“Let me
go
!” she yelled. It came up from her chest but sounded small and childlike.

The attacker pulled harder and she found herself out in the middle of the floor, the protection provided by the bed a distant memory. He jerked her leg to one side and Jordan was forced from her stomach onto her back, the room suddenly seeming very bright around her.

She could see him finally.

Tall, white, more muscular than Jimmy, but probably only a few years older than her brother. His blond hair stood out at odd angles, tousled from all the fighting. Sky-blue-eyed, pug-nosed, Beach Boy–looking with an awful wholesomeness. He wore a police uniform, but the badge and shoulder patch were different than those of their local Westlake, Ohio, PD. In his right hand he clenched a hunting knife, streaked with glistening red.

Releasing her foot, he leaned closer to her and she saw her chance. She thrust the scissors forward, but he responded with psychic ease, dodging her attack, slapping her arm away, scissors clattering across the floor somewhere.

As she watched her weapon twirl away, pain exploded inside her head, and as she fell back, she realized the attacker had punched her in the side of the head, which knocked her jarringly onto the floor.

The pain seemed to be everywhere and even smacking her head on the hard flooring didn’t register much. Jordan blinked and fought to clear her mind. Even as she did, her attacker grabbed a hank of hair and yanked, forcing Jordan to her feet with a fresh yowl of pain.

She tottered in his grasp, trying to get her feet under her, eyes darting around the room searching for another weapon and, at all costs, trying to avoid her dead mother.

Her attacker pulled her around until they were face-to-face, only inches apart, as if they were dancing—his icy blue eyes boring into her. She tried to turn away, but he jerked her hair and made her look at him again. This time anger mixed with her terror and she took a good look at her mother’s murderer. And probably her father’s, and her brother’s… who would be here helping if they could…

… if they were alive.

She doubted she’d survive this, but in case she did, she would memorize every detail about him. That he wore no mask meant he would likely kill her. She had a sudden fatalistic, even Zen-like realization of that. But if she could survive, she would
know
this bastard.…

Start with this: he’s wearing contact lenses. Are his eyes really blue, or not?

He smells of cologne mixed with sweat from his struggle, making a pungent, sickly sweet odor.

The knife danced into her line of sight, her mother’s blood glistening on the blade.

Jordan tried not to stare at the steel shaft bobbing slowly like a serpent poised to strike. What gripped her now was not fear of death—she was past that—but the anticipation of pain. The pain she
did
fear, and that sent hot tears flowing.

“This is what I do,” he said, almost calm about it.

She said nothing, but her face must have registered her confusion at his too-simple explanation for slaughtering her family.

“It’s what I do,”
he said, as if volume and repetition would make her suddenly understand his gibberish.

She managed, “You kill… families?”

He shook his head, obviously angry that she was too slow to grasp his meaning. “I reestablish the natural order… God’s natural order.”

“God told you to kill my family?”

His eyes flared and he smiled. “Yes. You perceive. How nice that you perceive.”

“I perceive that you’re
insane
!”

The eyes went cold again, as lifeless as her mother’s, and Jordan realized too late that she had made a mistake. Using her hair as a handle, he whipped her around, smashing her face into the mirror, glass shattering.

She crumpled, landing atop the dressing table, fingers scrabbling for a weapon—
he’d found something to break that mirror for her, hadn’t he?
—shards, or even a brush, makeup,
anything
, but he still held on to her long black hair and jerked her back to a standing position. Her hands empty,
something warm and wet on her cheeks. That coppery taste on her lips was blood.

Better to keep her mouth shut.

Still using her hair like reins, he forced her to the floor next to her mother.

“Pick her up,” the intruder said.

Jordan looked at the dead body of her mother and began to sob. “I… I can’t… she’s too… too heavy.”

Her mother was barely bigger than her, but that was what she said to try to get out of the terrible task demanded of her.

“Then drag her,” the intruder said.

“What?… Where?”

He squatted down and showed her the knife again. “Wherever I
tell
you to.”

To punctuate his statement, he jabbed the knife deep into her mother’s back, just above the kidney.

Jordan cried out, as if the knife had gone into her.

There was blood, but not very much. Maybe dead people didn’t bleed.

“Now,”
the intruder said.

Forcing herself to her feet, Jordan bent at the knees and picked her mother up under the arms. Though it made no difference now, Jordan tried to be gentle.

“Downstairs.”

The wood floor was slick with her mother’s blood and even as she struggled with her burden, Jordan fought to keep her balance, tears running freely down her cheeks again, mixing with the blood from the cuts inflicted by the mirror. To her surprise, Jordan felt no pain—no fear, really. Was this what it was like to accept death? It was that moment when the dentist’s drill sends you to that place where you lull yourself,
This will be over soon, this will be over.…

She dragged her poor mother into the hallway, heaving for breath.

The stairs now.

The intruder preceded her, going down backward, one knife-gripped hand also holding on to Jordan’s hair, the other on the railing. Her back to
him, holding her mother from behind, she would take a step down, drag her mother a step, take another step, drag her mother a step.…

Halfway down, she let go of Mom, and hurled her weight into the man, knocking him backward, her hair released reflexively as he fell. She spun to push him again, but he had regained his balance, and slapped her.

Slapped her hard, her head twisting impossibly on her neck.

Then, with the knife at her throat, his other hand gripping her by a bicep, he trotted her down the stairs and flung her to the floor. She was pushing up groggily to see the horrific sight of the intruder dragging her mother down the stairs by one arm, bump bump bumping, like a terrible Slinky.

She began to cry and then he was shaking her, as if she had fallen asleep in the midst of an important task. He had dumped her mother on the entryway floor nearby.

He pointed toward the living room. “In there.
Take
her!”

Holding her mother from behind, the back of the dead woman’s head near her face, Jordan hauled her burden, the small woman seeming heavy as a sack of grain. The smell of her mother’s hair lingering in Jordan’s nostrils reminded the girl of how comforting that scent had been on every other day of her life.

When she got to the living room, despite her efforts not to look, Jordan saw the bodies of her father and brother tossed like broken toys discarded by an evil child. She managed to swallow the wail of despair that wanted as desperately to escape as she did.

“Over there,” the intruder said, pointing with the knife. “In front of the couch.”

Jordan dragged her mother over to the sofa and rested her on the floor there.

“No. Sit her up.”

Jordan glanced back at the intruder, who lifted an eyebrow and the knife.

She did as she’d been told, and when her mother was seated on the floor with her back to the sofa, Jordan instinctively reached up to brush her mother’s hair into place.

“Now him,” the intruder said, pointing the knife toward her father, over by the fireplace.

Darker-skinned than her mother, Jordan’s father had been a successful insurance executive until this terrible night. Now, white shirt stained scarlet, vicious cut running from his left ear down across his cheek, Peter Rivera was the broken husk of a man.

Dad proved more difficult to move—half again as heavy as Mom. The living room’s white carpeting had patchy blotches of crimson and pink, and the tooth of the carpet made it even harder to move her father’s deadweight than on the wooden floor upstairs. At least her father’s eyes were closed, peacefully unaware of these posthumous indignities.

As Jordan struggled with her task, she heard the intruder stride over and she expected him to grab her by the hair again; but instead he grabbed a lifeless arm and helped her drag her father over next to Mom. She successfully arranged Dad into a sitting position against the sofa, as well. Her parents’ heads tilted toward each other, touching, a parody of a loving posture.

She knew what was coming next. Without a word from her taskmaster, she turned and faced her fallen brother, Jimmy, over by Dad’s recliner. Taller than her, Jimmy shared Jordan’s same delicate bone structure. He’d always been a skinny kid who got picked on for his gangly clumsiness, let alone his sexual orientation.

Only a year ago, right before his high school graduation, Jimmy’s biggest concern had been coming out to their parents. Jordan had known her brother was gay for years, but their folks seemed clueless.

But when Jimmy had finally screwed up the courage to tell them, Mom’s only response had been “Of course you are, sweetheart. We’ve known that for years.” Not a trace of judgment, much less sarcasm in her voice.

Then Jimmy had said, “Please pass the potatoes,” and the moment brother and sister had been dreading came and went without incident.

“Come
on
!” the intruder said. “Get
moving.
”

Now
he was in a hurry?

As she dragged her dear dead brother across the room, the enormity of what she was facing—the last few minutes of her life—finally settled in on her, and like even the bravest prisoner ever ushered to execution, she found herself shaking again.

The intruder helped her prop her brother up next to her mother and she thought about trying to fight back again, but her face stung with the mirror-shard wounds, her neck ached from his jarring slap, and she decided he had heaped enough pain on her already. All she wanted now was for this to be over. Someone someday would catch this monster, and stop him. But not her. Not tonight.

“All right,” he said, almost smiling, nodding, obviously pleased. He gestured with the knife again. “Now sit down next to your brother.”

“What?”

“
Sit
with him.”

She did it.

She joined her family, knowing she would soon be joining them in a more profound way and they would all be in Heaven together. Oddly, her sudden sense of calm was accompanied by an accelerated shivering.

She never would kiss Mark Pryor, though, would she?

The intruder leaned down over her, and Jordan’s eyes fixed upon the knife. Then she decided she didn’t want to see it coming, and closed her eyes.

But instead of the blade slashing across her throat or driving deep into her chest, she felt the intruder’s touch, almost gentle as he lightly brushed her hair away from her bloody forehead. His fingertips were warm, soft, not rough as she’d anticipated. She kept her eyes closed tight even as she braced against the blow that would be coming any second now.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to kill you.”

Her eyes sprang open, and a sudden fury rose up through her fear and resignation. “I should believe
you
? You murdered my
family
!”

He shrugged. “That doesn’t make me a liar.”

As if to demonstrate his goodwill, he moved away from her, settling on his haunches. But the knife was still firmly grasped in a gloved hand.

“Why would you kill them,” she asked, tears struggling to get out, “and not me?”

“I need you alive,” he said. “Now, quiet.”

From a pocket, he produced a small digital camera, much like the one Jordan had pestered her parents for last Christmas. Which she hadn’t gotten.

Holding the tiny camera up, he grinned, full of himself, and said, “Say
cheese
.”

She lurched as the flash went off.
This couldn’t be real, the killer of her family taking snapshots!

“Sit still,” he commanded.

This time she faced the flash blankly frozen.

He stuffed the camera into a pants pocket.

Then, from another pocket, he withdrew a small square foil packet. From sex ed class she knew instantly what it was… and what awaited her.…

Death was the better option. She had barely kissed any boys. She hadn’t come anywhere near what this creature obviously had planned for her.

She tried to get up, but he slapped her back to the floor and crawled on top of her. He pushed up her nightshirt even as she fought to keep it down. Her sightless parents, propped against the couch, looked on.

“You’re going to help me,” he said, his voice as cool as a cemetery breeze.

“Why don’t you just kill
me
, too?” she asked, wanting that, wanting that so bad.

“I told you. I need you. You’re going to help me.”

“Help you?”

He smiled at her, even as he fumbled with his pants. “You’re going to tell my story.”

“What… what.…”

He ripped open the foil pack, his grin goofy. “You will bear witness to what happens to families who don’t follow God’s natural order.”

Then he was heavy on top of her and Jordan couldn’t struggle anymore. He was too strong.

“Please just kill me,” she begged.

“No, no, no… just lay back and enjoy. You’ll live to tell my story. You’ll live to… to… tell… the
world
.…”

And even as the terrible thing happened, as Jordan Rivera retreated to a private corner of herself and distanced herself from this violation, she made herself a solemn promise.