Chapter 3 #2
This night had started out no differently, until a set of dual mufflers rumbled outside my bedroom window, alerting me to his arrival.
A cold chill snaked up my spine, and nausea coiled my insides as I fearfully wondered what he had in store for me. Would he be assaulting me here…taking me to another location… filming it again ?
My tormentor hadn’t been by in weeks. I’d hoped he died in a wreck, a mugging gone violently wrong, an overdose. Or perhaps God had finally answered my prayers and he’d stepped into a pit of rattlesnakes in the desert. Anything that would prevent his return.
They spent the first thirty minutes with my mother while I stared at my crusty bedroom window, thinking about how easy it would be to escape through it. Yet each time I worked myself up to running away, even for just a few hours, the monster’s words crept back into my mind…
“Don’t you ever try to run from me, and if you ever tell, you’re dead.
Your mother is dead. I’ll drag you and your brother into the desert with a bunch of my friends…
and you won’t survive what we do to you.
You think this is bad? Take ten of us. We’ll fuck you both to death and leave your carcasses for the buzzards! ”
“I said no!” My mother’s shout drew my attention to the bedroom door.
I dropped from my bunk and pressed my ear against the thin wood.
“I agreed to pictures of them! Still photos, without their faces! Never movies! And you were never supposed to touch them or take either of them from this home! Get out!” I heard shuffling, what sounded like a struggle, then my mother’s angered shout of “Get out!” once more.
“Shut the fuck up, junkie whore!” a man’s voice I did not recognize shouted back at her. There was a loud slap, and my mother shrieked.
I grabbed Dom’s bat and opened the door to intervene.
A man was on top of her, his knees crushing her into the couch beneath his weight. The other wrestled her arm with one hand, a syringe in the other.
“No! Get off me!” She tried to fight, but it was no use. Within moments of sticking her with the needle, she began to drift. Her pale eyes landed on me before either of them noticed me standing there.
“ Damien…” she whispered, before succumbing to the drugs. “ Damien…run…”
There was no making it to the front door without either of them grabbing me.
I turned and bolted to my room, locking the door behind me, and scrambled to the window.
Two loud bangs, then the flimsy door splintered, and they were inside.
Hands grabbed at me, pulling as my fingernails scraped the sill.
They easily wrestled me to the floor. My tormentor’s full weight straddled my waist, his knees pinning my arms at my sides. He yanked up my shirt to expose my torso and ran his hand down my body in the sick, caressing way he always touched me…before he’d hurt me.
“Told you he was even prettier in the flesh, despite these thin scars… Lithe body, unique eyes like his whore mother.” He almost purred the words.
His other hand gripped my jaw painfully.
“Look at his bone structure. That devilish little glare… Tell me he ain’t gonna grow up looking like one of them heroin chic runway models! Aren’t you, pretty one ?”
“Oh yeah…I see it… He’s got that young River Phoenix look .”
They both laughed.
“The mother barely gives a shit about them. Been paying her off for a go at them both, for a while now. And there’s no father in the picture.”
“Perfect. This one in particular isn’t gonna age out for a long time.
Even if he survives into his twenties, they’ll still want to fuck him.
” The other guy stared down at me with an insidious hunger in his eyes.
“We’re gonna make a killing. How about it, kid?
You wanna be an international movie star ?
” They both laughed again. “I should kick your ass for holding out on me with this one.”
“Guess I was a little possessive.” My tormentor sighed. “Can you blame me? He’s so pretty… Trading pics and videos is one thing… I just wanted him to myself for a while.” He stared with longing, as if he felt something for me. “We all cave under the weight of greed, though. Don’t we, pretty one?”
“Well, now that I’ve seen him in the flesh, I think I’m ready to go again.
Besides, I want a taste before we take him.
Not a big fan of the used-up ones,” the other growled, his hand moving to grip the bulge in the front of his jeans.
“Gave his junkie momma enough to keep her ass dead to the world into tomorrow.”
“Yeah…alright… Get ready to grab him, he’s a fighter.”
The other one rubbed his hands together and moved closer. “ Oh, I like that…”
My cries fell on deaf ears.
My prayers went unanswered.
After a while, he got off me…letting my used and broken body slide down the side of Dom’s bunk, until I was lying on the worn carpet again.
“ My turn .” My tormentor snickered, kneeling. He grabbed my ankles, and the carpet felt like hellfire licking at my back when he dragged me toward him, splaying my legs on either side of his thighs.
I stared at him while he shoved his jeans down further… There was a Bowie knife on his belt… An odd feeling washed over me when my eyes settled on it.
If God has forsaken me…might there truly be another force willing to hear my silent pleas for mercy and protection?
“Damien?” my brother’s voice called from the front room. “ Damien!” He sounded frantic, moving toward our bedroom. My rapists turned in his direction.
“ Now!” snarled an unfamiliar voice from the deepest recess of my mind.
I grabbed the knife, yanking it free of its sheath, and plunged it into the base of my tormentor’s throat, burying it to the hilt. Mildly shocked at how easily the blade penetrated the skin, I pulled it out to stab him in the abdomen.
Blood poured and spurted. His eyes bulged as his hands wrapped around his neck in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding.
I kicked him off me and pushed myself away from him, knocking the man backward in his shocked state.
He fell at the other’s feet, gurgling on his own blood, just as Dominick entered the room.
My brother grabbed the baseball bat I’d dropped at the door and swung at my second, stunned assailant.
“ The other… Keep going… Kill them!” the demonic voice inside my mind urged. “Kill them!”
As Dominick wailed on the other rapist, I lunged forward with the knife, plunging it into the man.
The blade sank into his side, scraping between his ribs, though it did not penetrate as easily or as deeply this time.
When I ripped it out, he screamed in shocked agony.
I stabbed him again and again while he twisted and flailed in a desperate attempt to avoid the blade.
He stumbled against the bunk beds and fell back onto the bottom bunk, where he had just used me…
“ Damien!” My brother was shouting my name, but I could barely hear him over the blood thundering in my ears…over the voice inside my mind demanding me to kill! Kill! Kill!
“ Damien! Stop!”
There was no stopping. The force inside drove me on. I stabbed and stabbed, until the muscles in my arms screamed in painful protest, burning as if the fires of hell were coursing through my veins… I stabbed until I was too weak to carry on.
Breathing heavily, my naked body coated in their blood and trembling, I finally turned to face my brother.
Dominick wore a look of wide-eyed horror… “Damien, give me the knife…”
We aren’t through!
“No… Mom knew …” I turned from the massacre in our bedroom to stare through the doorway.
“Mom knew about them… about what they were doing to us… what they planned to do to me…” My crimson-streaked arm shook as I raised the bloody knife to point down the short hall in her direction.
“I heard her… I heard her … She did this to us! ”
Before I could take a murderous step in her direction, the room began to spin. Whatever omnipotent force had taken over my body was gone.
The knife slipped through my wet fingers and thudded against the blood-soaked carpet. Then my world went black.