Brian Freeman - Stalked

The blizzard was a monster inches away, noisy and ferocious. Steel rattled and quivered as the gales assaulted metal walls. She heard hissing, like a thousand snakes, which was the whip of snow, as furious as a tornado. Wherever she was, she may as well have been outside, because there was no protection here from the wind and cold blasting through the walls. The frozen air across her skin told her she was naked. Her bare flesh puckered. Her toes curled, and she tightened her fingers into fists. A drop of water fell on her through the ceiling, tracing an icy trail down her thigh.

She cursed herself for being so stupid. Not telling Jonny. Not watching her back. She was a prisoner now, and she didn't fool herself with hopes of rescue, and she knew it was going to be bad. The kind of bad when you realized there was no God coming for you. The kind of bad she had been through before.

He was in the room with her. Every few seconds, she heard the screech of wood and nails separating as he shifted in a rickety chair. Without seeing him, she felt his eyes. She wanted him to say something. She wanted it to begin and be over with, but long minutes passed where he let her struggle in her blind, cold world, as if he knew that the waiting was worst of all. She felt like a child in line for a scary ride, her stomach balling up into fear.

She told herself it didn't matter. It was just pain. Long ago, she had taught herself how to tunnel inside her brain to hide from pain. To switch off her emotions until she felt nothing at all. No hurt. No fury. No love. She tried to remember how she had done it, how she could follow the trail there again, how she could find that place. Even now, she found herself resisting, not wanting to go back. Nothingness was a torture all its own, a soundless room that she had spent decades trying to escape.

She struggled at her bonds, feeling the bed jostle and shake as she tried to free herself, knowing she was wasting her strength. He laughed, the first real sound he had made, and then she heard him stand up. She smelled him getting closer. She tried to wriggle backward, but there was nowhere to go. He bent over her. His breath was in her face. She wrenched her face away, but his fingers grabbed her jaw like a pincer and twisted her back.

"I've waited a long time for this," he said.

She tried to drown out his voice and the odd echoes of terror it awakened in her. She focused on the storm, imagining the burying snow on the other side of the wall, wondering if the wind would pick her up and carry her away.

He dragged something cold and sharp against her skin, starting at her neck, making a line across her throat with what she realized was the point of a knife. He pushed deep enough to make her squirm but not enough to break the skin. The knife explored her like a curious animal. It made a circle around her breasts, and then her aureoles, and then punctured one nipple in the very center, a pinprick that made her shudder and drew a wet, warm drop of blood.

Unbidden, tears streamed down her face.

The knife moved lower, scraping through her navel, detouring to her thighs, pushing up under the bones of her knees, running up the balls of her feet, climbing back up and zeroing in between her legs. He turned the knife and laid the cold flat of the blade along her mound. She tensed and hunted for the faraway place, the nothingness room, but it was lost in her brain, and she didn't know where to find it.

"I should sign my work," he said. "That way, when Stride finds you, he'll know who it was."

She threw her head back and forth violently, ignoring the pain in her skull, and thrust her body up off the bed at him. Another scream died in the wet cotton in her mouth. He waited until her resistance ran out of force, and she collapsed backward, spent, dizzy.

His big hand found the flat square of her stomach and pushed down, expelling air through her nose. He stretched the skin between his fingers until it was taut, like a canvas.

" No! " she wailed, but there was no sound coming from her, just the storm outside. The protest, the begging, the pleading, were only in her mind.

The knifepoint penetrated her. Tissue separated cell by cell. Blood oozed. He began to carve.

Somewhere in the middle, she passed out. When she awoke again, her stomach was cold and hot, stinging and frozen, all at the same time. The blood had become ice, hard like sugar candy. The storm raged on behind the wall. The smells and sounds were the same, but something was different, and she realized that the rag stuffed into her mouth was gone. She could work the muscles of her jaw and breathe stale air.

Serena screamed, and she discovered she was in a small place, because the noise rattled back and forth between the walls, unbearably loud and tinny. Outside, though, it was a murmur held up against the roar of the wind. She kept screaming until her throat was hoarse and sore, and when she stopped, nothing at all happened. No one ran to find her. The blizzard paid no attention.

"Scream if you want, but no one will hear you," he said.

She didn't answer.

"Go two feet outside, and you can't hear anything. Believe me, you don't want to go outside now. You wouldn't last thirty seconds."

It sounded like thirty seconds of paradise to her. Thirty seconds of exposure, and then she could be warm and asleep and out of pain.

"Why me?" she asked.

"You were the one I wanted all along," he said.

"Why?" she repeated.

"Haven't you guessed?"

Something in the way he said it made her realize for the first time that this wasn't random. She hadn't crossed paths with a stalker and accidentally wound up in his sights. This was about her and him and always had been. Personal.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I think you know."

He was right. She did know him. When she thought about it like that, she realized that there was something familiar about him, something in his voice that stirred memories. She searched her past, but there were so many names. It was like that when you were a cop-the names blurred together. Most of the time it didn't matter, because how many perps cared about being collared by a fat cop in his fifties? But when you were a woman, when you were beautiful, when you were from Las Vegas, the past somehow hung on and never let go.

Her bad luck.

Right then and there, she knew. Bad luck. Tommy Luck .

Tommy Luck, who scarred his girlfriend with the point of his knife. Tommy Luck, who kept that ugly wall in his apartment with dozens of secret photographs of Serena-tortured photographs with missing eyes, slashes across her neck, red paint splashed on her body, holes where he had stabbed the images repeatedly with an ice pick. Oh, God, oh, God, why hadn't she kept track? He was in for twenty years, but the more they piled people into prisons, the more they let others out.

He was out. He was back. Tommy Luck. She should have done what she thought about doing years ago, when he first got out of prison. Followed him. Killed him. She could have erased him and erased all the pain for everyone else who wound up in his path. Maggie. Tanjy. Eric. All the others.

Her fault. She should have killed him back when she had the chance.

"You know, don't you?" he asked her.

She was silent.

"I want you to see me for what comes next. I want you to look into my eyes. I'll tape them open if I need to. You're going to watch what I do to you."

She felt the knife again, on her face this time, bruising her cheekbone as he cut away the blindfold. She couldn't help herself-she opened her eyes even when her mind told her to keep them shut. There was only a single bulb lighting up the space, but it was bright anyway after so much darkness, and she squinted and turned her head. He loomed over her, huge and strong, coming between her and the light, a silhouette of evil.