Robert Crane - Alone

He took another step closer. “Wise, for one so young, to know the Wolfe so well. Wolfe is amazed that one so cut off all her life can feel connected to this world…but it matters not.” He swept closer in one swift movement and I didn’t resist as he closed his hand around my neck. “Wolfe is going to hurt you now…and this will go on for quite some time…until you can’t resist even if you want to…and then, when you can’t move, but you can still feel…then we’ll start the real fun…”

He slammed me against the wall and it felt like the world ended. My ears rang as though someone had set off the planet’s worst rock band in them, and it hurt like hell. My brain was swimming and for a moment the world spun upside down and then righted itself. Wolfe was still staring back at me with those black, lifeless eyes, like I was an insect he was studying. “I don’t want you to move for your own good, little doll…dolls shouldn’t move themselves when Wolfe plays with them…so this is for your own good…”

He reached back for a windup and threw me across the room and headfirst into the concrete. I don’t know for sure that it fractured my skull, but the gawdawful cracking noise told me that either my bones or the wall had given. Blood covered my face, trickling over my eyes. I could only feel it, not see it, because my eyelids had snapped shut. He grabbed hold of me again and hauled me into the air. My hands twitched at my side.

“Wolfe wouldn’t be doing this if you hadn’t hurt him. He would have handed you over to his masters, like they wanted, all safe and sound, but you had to hurt the Wolfe…not once, not twice, but thrice…and now you’re in his blood, and he needs you…and you need to learn not to trifle with big men…bad men…”

My eyes were lolling in my head as I tried to brace for the next impact, but I relaxed myself. Then he started to choke me, hard. I felt the stifling as I tried for a breath, then attempted to will myself not to breathe, hoping to get it over before he started having his fun with me, but I couldn’t. My lungs strained and I began to panic.

I tried to gasp, but couldn’t. No M-Squad was coming to save me. No cops. No…Mom. I was on my own.

Completely alone.

My eyes opened and my gaze lifted over his shoulder and I saw the box in the corner, door still open, almost leering, as though it were taunting me. Now the flashbacks came, at the end, as my pitiful life waited in the balance and I remembered moments I had tried to forget. All those years, Mom had held me in this house, like Wolfe was holding me now, keeping me captive, slowly squeezing the life out of me – and I let her, afraid of the box. Years of helpless imprisonment, putting aside everything I wanted out of my life.

It taunted me, in that corner. Years of being stuck in it, trapped, helpless.

Emotions poured over me like the icy water that had hit me earlier, a sudden, sharp shock. I remembered the last time I was stuck in that metal coffin, days without getting a breath of fresh air, and my fear built and built until I exploded, anger and hatred and sadness all rushing out. I pounded on the metal of the door, put everything into it and felt something I had never felt in all the times I had been in there.

It moved. The door moved, just a little. I hit it again and again and it budged a little more, and a crack of light from the outside peeked in. I hammered at the door, kicked, pushed at it, screaming, grunting, my weary and cramped muscles crying out to get free. The corner bent enough that I could stick my fingers through, and I pushed and the metal bent as I applied more and more pressure. With a final kick and punch I heard the top and bottom hinges strain and break and I ripped the door free, sucking in the breaths of life and falling to the basement floor, the cold concrete and breathable air letting me know that I was alive, and for once…I wasn’t helpless.

I wasn’t.

I stared back at Wolfe’s soulless eyes and the same fury washed over me, the same desperate hunger for air and life. He held me at arm’s length and my bare hands came up of their own accord and surged forward, wrapping themselves around his hairy neck. The black eyes looked at me in surprise and a smile found its way to his lips. His grip tightened on me as mine tightened on his neck. There was no way I would be able to kill him before he killed me, I knew that. And I didn’t care. I would not die without him knowing that I wasn’t a helpless, defenseless little doll just here for him to play with.

My fingers dug into his throat and he laughed. “You’re going to have to squeeze much harder than that to make Wolfe feel it, my little doll. All you’re doing is giving Wolfe a case of the tingles.”

I gripped him tighter and he squeezed me so hard my head pushed back. I worried for a moment it was going to pop off, but I maintained my furious hold on him. I could feel a tingle of my own in my hands, likely from the fact that he was depriving my brain of oxygen. I dug my fingernails into his skin and I saw faint trickles of blood well up beneath them, even as I started to feel a sensation of lightheadedness percolate through my being.

“What…what are you…doing…?” Wolfe’s words were choked, his eyes wide. I felt his grip slacken on my neck. I didn’t dare loosen mine, and the lightheadedness I had experienced was growing into something more. The light in the room seemed to be brightening, amplifying.

“It…it BURNS!” He let out a howl of pain and batted at my hands. His claws dug into my wrists, scratching at them, drawing more blood that trickled down his fingers. I looked down to see it pooling in little drips on the concrete and then looked back to his face, awash in agony, and felt his weight start to drag me down. My hands were clutching his throat; my skin was hot and my head was throbbing, rushing with blood. I felt a heightened sense of…everything.

I suddenly realized the room reeked of blood and fear, and I drew in another sharp breath. Faint thumping noises upstairs were audible to me for the first time, and I could hear noises in the pipes and sirens blocks away, and all this over the whimpering and screaming of Wolfe. My skin was on fire with the heat of his throat in my hands, and I could feel the veins in Wolfe’s neck pumping blood past my fingers.

“PLEASE!!” His voice shrieked, begging, pleading, filling the air in the basement. It was at that moment that I realized that if he could speak, I wasn’t choking him – at least not effectively. “It hurts…SO…MUCH!” His words came out in a whimpering shriek. “Wolfe is sorry, little doll, please let him go, pleasepleaseplease…”

A few more wails of agony, one last whimper, and a death rattle filled the air. I held Wolfe by the neck and there was a bitter taste in my mouth as he went slack; his black eyes rolled back in his head, now truly lifeless. The lightheaded sensation filled me and I felt like I was floating, then flying, but not like I had when I went unconscious…instead it was like I was flying at a hundred miles an hour, even though I was still there in the basement, looking at Wolfe’s dead eyes.

Though he weighed several hundred pounds, I held him up by the neck for several minutes, afraid to let go and empowered by the rush of whatever it was that was causing my head to spin. I finally let him slip from my grasp, and his body fell back, knocking over the box, which landed on the ground with a horrendous crash. Wolfe’s body rolled off the side of it and slid to the floor, unmoving.

I took two steps back and slumped against the wall. My head felt like it was about to explode. My mind was so jumbled I couldn’t control it; leaping in every direction, thoughts I could not have conceived of just a few minutes earlier were dashing through my head so quickly I couldn’t even track them all.