Dangerous Toys

The Final Girl-2

He’d been watching and waiting for most of the day, but not hopeful, and when he arrived home that night without his deer, his father was apt to whoop him again. His old man had been most of a year out of work now, and they were counting on the meat. His father had bagged three already, one legally, the other two not so much. Even his mother had done her part, shooting turkeys and quail from the back porch of their little house a few miles down the road.

He had in fact been dozing when he heard the sound of an approaching car turning off the Cavendish Road. It came into view, racing down the narrow gravel road, and slid to a stop on one of the few wide spots.

The driver jumped out, scanned the roadside, then darted into the trees.

Curious, roused out of his boredom, the boy who would soon become a monster watched, tracking her with the scope of his rifle.

She moved quickly at first, then more slowly and carefully through the thick underbrush. She walked toward the tree with the deer stand, not noticing the boy watching her from above. She lost her footing for a moment and slid down a short incline, dusted herself off, then looked around.

She was blonde, good looking, maybe only a few years older than the boy, and he didn’t recognize her. He knew everyone who lived on Old Peck Grade and most of the people who lived in and around the nearby town of Orofino.

He swiveled the rifle to her parked car, sighted in on the rear bumper and the Montana license plate, then sighted in on the girl again in time to see her shimmy out of her underpants. She slid them down her legs, stepped out of them, then pulled up her skirt and squatted down to pee.

Seated cross-legged in his deer stand, the boy’s heart began to hammer. He felt himself growing hard, his face flush with a surge of hot blood, and heard the rasp of his suddenly heavy breathing.

Later, afterward, he decided it was his excited respirations that gave him away, because that was when she looked up, saw him high up and sighted on her, and screamed.

His first crazed impulse, more a reaction to her shriek than anything, was to slip his finger over the trigger and squeeze.

Don’t be stupid, he though. She wouldn’t dress out at more than fifty pounds.

He gave a short, brief giggle as he put the rifle down. It was a little funny, but her continued screams weren’t.

I have to explain to her, he thought.

What? That you were peeping on her?

That I wasn’t going to shoot her.

He stood to do just that, crossing his hands over his crotch to hide the growing bulge he felt there, and she bolted. For a few frenzied moments she tried to climb up the short, steep bank she’d slid down, but when she saw him descending the rough rungs nailed to the trunk of his stand tree, she changed direction and fled away from the road.

Moments later he was chasing her.

She didn’t get far.

At first, he followed the sounds of her panting cries and the noise of her crashing through the underbrush, then he found her left shoe, an open heel flat with its toe lodged in some burrowing animal’s hole. He spotted her other shoe a moment before he saw her.

What had started as a panic to catch her before she got him into trouble, to make her understand he hadn’t meant any harm, had turned into something else. He had his deer-gutting blade in hand before he realized he meant to use it.

He was no longer just chasing her. He was hunting her.

The road was perhaps a quarter-mile behind them when she went down and he heard the sharp crack of a breaking bone. Her high squeal of shock and pain was cut short as her contact with the hard earth drove the breath from her lungs.

He came upon her, half-swooned in a hollow between two old and broad fir trees. The skirt she’d hiked up to piss was mostly gone now, torn to ribbons by her passage through the woods, and her panties had been left behind. Her shirt was torn and open at the front, and one plump and dirt-smeared breast was out for him to see.

The Monster slowed to a walk and unbuckled his belt as he stepped into the hollow, his knife leading the way.

She was fully awake again and trying to rise on her broken leg when he fell over her.

Afterward, he dragged her deeper into the woods, almost in view of the Clearwater River in the valley below, and covered her body with that autumn’s freshly fallen duff. On his way back to the road, he picked up and tossed her shoes as far into the woods as he could, and then stopped to pick up her dropped panties.

He thought about keeping them, then thought better of it.

He also thought about driving her car further down the dead-end road and pushing it off the cul-de-sac at the bottom, and again decided not to. Instead, he tossed the panties onto the back seat floor, took the small purse on the front passenger seat, and tore the license plates from the front and rear bumpers.

The car was gone by the next day, and a month passed before he heard anything about a missing Missoula woman named Patricia Carroll.

A fisherman, ironically stepping deeper into the trees to urinate out of sight of his children, found the body, and Clearwater County Sheriff Ed Knox paid the young monster a visit later that day. The sheriff was a hard-eyed old man who held the young monster’s family in low regard and knew about the deer stand overlooking the grade. It was a soft interrogation done on the young monster’s own front porch, but it was only the first, and they both knew it.

An older and wiser monster understood that luck alone had saved him.

Before there was time for a second and harder interrogation, a deputy found the shell of the missing woman’s car on blocks in the back yard of another Clearwater County scumbag, Jeffrey Fish. Fish’s list of prior offenses, ranging from indecent exposure, drunk and disorderly, and several which the local press referred to vaguely as assaults against women, assured him a visit from the local law, the discovery of the missing woman’s car on his property set the hook, but it was Patricia’s panties, grimy from much handling and stuffed into his front pocket, that put him on Sheriff Knox’s plate.

The Monster learned two things from his first kill.

The first was that he would do it again.

The second was that he must do it better, smarter.

And so, he had. He killed for the next fifty years, and was never interviewed by another sheriff, deputy, or detective.

He kept no trophies, except for the sketchbook he started in college, where his talent and love of art finally decided his direction in life, and in which he recorded every woman who had ever met The Monster.

Professor Charlie Smith, The Monster, drove Jenna to the pocket park at the corner of Grimes Way and Terre View Drive, where the Agricultural Sciences portion of the WSU campus ended and actual farmland began. The parking area was small, enough for two cars if they crowded close, but he guided his old Tempo carefully off of the gravel and onto the dirt, stopping under the cover of a grove of black hawthorn wearing their fall colors. The park consisted of a picnic table, benches, and a small square of grass. He planned on leaving her posed on the table within sight of the road. He wanted her found quickly. His doctor had ordered him to reduce his stress, and an interminable wait for the discovery of a concealed body would simply be too stressful.

“Jenna.”

No response. She continued to sag against her seatbelt.

He slapped her lightly on the cheek.

Her head flopped sideways onto her right shoulder, then rolled forward again.

He’d expected her to be coming around by now, he didn’t want to have to carry her, but she was a small thing. He could drag her, and he did.

Into the trees, he laid her out on a soft spot of ground covered in wild grass and the first fallen leaves of autumn. He cut the zip tie binding her ankles and stripped her, cutting her shirt away so he could leave her hands bound.

Naked, she looked younger than her true age. Short and slim, without much in the way of hips or breasts. He felt his body responding to the sight of her, bound and naked before him. His heart began to beat harder, quicker, his p***s stiffened.

He kicked her legs apart, then knelt between her knees and unbuckled his belt.

That was when her eyes opened.

There was no slow and groggy return to consciousness. Her eyes were closed one second, then opened and focused on him at the next. There was none of her usual good-humored playfulness in them, but he had not expected there would be. There was also no fear, none at all, and that gave him a moment of pause.

Her eyes flicked down to his unbuckled belt, and though he couldn’t see her lips, her cheeks strained against the tape covering them in what looked like a smile. Her eyes returned to his face, and her eyebrows arched.

He could almost hear her thoughts.

Well, what are you waiting for?

She stretched beneath him, raised her bound hands over her head, arched her back invitingly.

This isn’t right, he thought, and his body responded to his sudden sense of unease. He broke out in a sudden, clammy sweat, and his prick began to shrivel.

“b***h,” he whispered, and produced the gut hook blade. He brought it down close to her face and waited for a more appropriate look of fear to widen her eyes. He needed her fear to continue, could not be a man without it.

There was no fear, only a single, sly wink.

Her knees suddenly tightened at his waist, almost painfully, and her bound hands shot up and closed over his wrist as he brought the blade down.

The struggle that followed was short.

Jenna was stronger than he had imagined, and as she turned his blade to the side, she rolled him off of her. A knee found his groin, smashed into it again and again. He felt a pop in his wrist and the blade flew from his hand. He swung at her blindly with the other hand, felt his old bunched knuckles smash into her cheek, but she held on. He swung again, and she ducked under his fist, falling flat over him.

Her bound hands found his throat this time and squeezed.

He scrabbled at her clenched hands, reached for her throat, clutched at it, but couldn’t hold on.

This isn’t happening, he thought. This cannot be …

The Monster slipped into darkness.

“I’m disappointed in you, Professor Smith.”

The Monster awoke in pain, his throat swollen, his broken wrist a nest of needles, his back aching, his skin naked and cold with a cooling sheen of sweat. He tried to rise but couldn’t. The only part of himself he could move was his head, and he lifted it to find Jenna, dressed again, bent down in his car and wiping down the glove box and dash with the rags of her ruined shirt.

“You seemed like such a nice old guy, you even opened the door for me.” She stood, pushed the door closed with her elbow, and wiped down the handle. “I guess you didn’t want me leaving my fingerprints everywhere in your car.”

She approached him, and he saw she was wearing his shirt now, an old paisley thing far too large for her. Her backpack swung from her right hand and his blade was clutched in her left.

He tried to rise again, but couldn’t. Tried to move his legs, lift his arms.

He was caught. Stripped naked and taped around his chest, thighs, and ankles to the picnic table. She must have used the entire roll on him, saving back just enough for a double wrap around his head, sealing off his mouth.

“I thought you were one of the nice guys, but you weren’t.” She shrugged, set down her backpack, unzipped it and reached inside. “Look what I found in your trunk while you were sleeping.”

She held up his sketchbook, opened it and flipped through the pages until she reached his last entry. Her entry.

“I guess you were a maniac and pervert after all.” She set his sketchbook on the table at his feet and reached into her backpack again. She pulled out a red and white football jersey, a WSU Cougar jersey, and held it up for him to see. “He wasn’t very nice either. He was a rapist, but not anymore.”

She reached in again, pulled out a pair of bent and cracked glasses.

“He was a stalker.” She set the glasses down and pulled out an absurdly large gold and silver belt buckle. “This guy hit me in a bar last year when I wouldn’t go home with him. He called me a w***e, then he hit me. I had to wait a while to get him, wanted everyone to forget about it before I took care of him.”

She dropped the buckle onto the growing pile by his feet.

Next, she pulled out a small tin and shook it at him playfully.

“This is for you,” she said, and smiled. She set it down, then placed a lighter next to it and began repacking her bag of trophies. “I’ve met a lot of shitty guys, professor, but I think you might be the worst of them.”

She held up his sketchbook again, seeming almost to admire it, then packed it away.

“I thought about leaving this behind for someone to find, so everyone can know what a shitty person you are, but I think I’m going to keep it.”

When her bag was repacked she set it aside, then picked up his blade again. She grabbed his flaccid p***s with a grimace of distaste and stretched it out until he started to howl with pain behind his gag of tape.

The gut hook blade removed it quite efficiently, with a single swipe.

He’d always kept it sharp.

“Someone should have taken this away from you a long time ago,” Jenna said, shaking it in his face. She slapped him across the cheek with it, then dropped it on his chest.

The Monster screeched silently behind his gag, strained against his bindings. His heart hammered, seemed about to explode in his chest.

“Well s**t, I guess we’re about finished here,” Jenna said, then popped the cap off her tin of lighter fluid and sprayed him down with it. “I don’t believe in hell, I think it’s all bullshit, so you’ll just have to burn here.”

Jenna picked up her lighter and let The Monster burn.