Pressure - By Jeff Strand Page 0,76
left arm was twisted at an unnatural angle.
Melanie ran at him with the claw hammer. He tried to deflect her attack with the mallet, but she got him in the shoulder and tackled him to the floor. Their landing was blocked from my view by the metal table.
“Mommy!” Tracy screamed, distracted before she could get the key into the handcuff lock.
I heard a loud thwack and a grunt from Melanie.
Darren got up. He let out a furious, animalistic roar, raised the mallet, and ran toward Tracy and me. She shrieked, dropped the keys, and ran to the other side of the room.
I tugged on the handcuffs and cried out in frustration.
Darren strode over to the shelf. I could only see part of Melanie behind the table, but I saw her take another swing at him with the hammer, one that didn’t even come close.
Darren selected a hypodermic needle from the shelf and turned back to face Melanie. He kicked her, knelt down upon her, and slammed the needle into her.
As she took another swing at him, the hammer dropped out of her hand.
Tracy ran for the doorway, and Darren easily caught her by the arm. She bit down on his hand, hard enough to draw blood but not hard enough to keep him from slamming the needle into her shoulder.
He shoved her to the ground. She didn’t get up.
“Shit!” Darren screamed, kicking the side of the metal table. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
He picked up Melanie’s claw hammer, turned it claw-side down, and began slamming it into Mr. Grove’s body, screaming obscenities with each blow. He slammed it over and over and over, splattering my boss’s face and chest. After nearly a minute he began to strike with a sideways motion, tearing off chunks of flesh with each swing.
Finally he flung the hammer as hard as he could against the shelf of tools, knocking several of them to the floor.
None within my reach.
“Why would she do that?” Darren wailed, digging a finger into the bullet wound in his side. “Why would she do that? Why couldn’t she see?”
He grabbed Melanie and roughly dragged her out of the torture room and into the bedroom. He stormed back into the torture room, picked up Tracy, and carried her into the bedroom as well.
“Don’t hurt them!” I begged. “Please! I’ll do anything you want!”
I heard the bedroom door slam. Darren returned to the torture room and sat down on the corner of the metal table, facing me. “I thought we were friends.”
“Darren…”
He jammed his finger into the wound again and bellowed with pain. “I should take everything away from you! I should!”
“Darren, please! Just give Melanie and Tracy back to me!”
“Why?”
“Because they’re all I have!”
“That’s a trite fucking answer! I should kill them!”
“No!”
“Give me a reason not to fuck them up.”
“Because this is all my fault! Not theirs! I shouldn’t have lied!”
“When?”
“When I said that cutting off the woman’s head didn’t feel good.”
I had him. I knew I had him.
“It felt incredible, Darren, the way drugs probably feel. And it scared me. I should have listened to you, but I was scared. I’m sorry for being scared.”
Darren stared at me, his expression now blank.
“But, please, don’t hurt my family. We can hide all of this. That thing you saw in Tracy, that cloud…I saw it, too, and I was scared by it, but you were right!”
Darren lowered his head. “I think I was wrong.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
He stood up and slowly wandered over to the shelf, moving like a zombie.
“Darren, please, you can’t hurt them! You can’t hurt my family!”
Darren selected a small knife. “I don’t know…shit, I just wanna go to sleep…”
He walked toward the doorway.
“No, don’t leave!” I screamed, tugging on the handcuffs. “Talk to me! Let me make you understand!”
Darren walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind him.
I screamed after him, begged him, threatened him. Then I screamed at myself. At my parents. At my teachers. At God.
When I could scream no more, I just wept.
The bedroom door opened. Darren didn’t even look at me. He just kept his head lowered and went down the stairs.
I heard a car drive away.
The keys that Tracy had dropped rested next to my leg. Picking them up with my toe was easy; stretching out on the floor and moving them up my leg with quick jerks of my body was not. It took all night to get them into my mouth.
I just kept telling myself