Mountain Madness by Daniel Pyle Read Free Book Online

that made it seem as if he’d been doing it all along. Dave let go of the woman long enough to punch her in the face again. This time, his fist connected with her perfect elf’s nose and drove it into her skull. Dave couldn’t hear the crunching cartilage over the boy’s continued shrieking, but he felt it. Her blood gushed across her cheek and mixed with the sprayed droplets of his own. He grabbed hold of her broken wrist again and used his other hand to reach into his cargo pocket.
    He wouldn’t tolerate disrespect like that. No, sir. Not for one second. He wrapped his fingers around the rubbery grip and brought out the first of his weapons.
    The woman opened her mouth. Beg , Dave thought, now she’ll beg . He would have. But when she spoke, she did so in a heavy gurgle that reminded Dave of a character he’d seen in a movie years before, a movie he could no longer quite remember, and she uttered just a single word.
    “Rnnnnnn,” she said, both her good eye and her bad rolling into the back of her head. “Rrrnnnnn.” The word was no more articulate the second time. She coughed out a blood-tinted wad of phlegm and then screamed, “RUN!”
    Behind him, Dave heard the back door slam. He ignored it. He knew where Georgie would run, and he could deal with him later.
    He held the knife between her face and his own, twisted it through the air like a hypnotist trying to put her under. “I don’t know what kind of a relationship you think we’re gonna have,” he said to her, still spinning the knife, “but if you think I’ll let you act that way in front of our son, you’re dead wrong.”
    She groaned and looked squarely into his eyes. “Fug you,” she said and spit into his throbbing eye.
    Dave grabbed hold of her by the blouse with his free hand and lifted her to her feet. The movement momentarily sandwiched her broken wrist between the two of them, and she howled even after Dave had pushed her far enough away to relieve the pressure. Blood, spittle, and sweat dripped into a puddle on the floor between their feet.
    “I was wrong about you,” Dave said. He wrapped his fist up so tightly in her shirt that two of its buttons popped off and fell into the mess on the floor. “I thought if the boy was right, you’d have to be right, too.”
    He held the knife up again and contemplated the perfectly honed edge. “You’re not,” he said, looking back at her dripping face. He saw the fear in her eyes, but also the respect hiding somewhere deep behind. She was right to respect him. He’d earned it.
    He pushed her to arm’s length with his clutching fist and jammed the hunting knife high into her midsection, just below her sternum. He twisted the blade once, forcefully, and then drew the knife down her abdomen to her pelvis. The mess of innards that came spilling across his hand felt warm and sticky and smelled like shit.
    She hadn’t screamed again, this woman whose name Dave didn’t know, but when he pulled the knife free and stepped back from her, she did make a long guttural sound in the back of her throat. Dave thought she would vomit, but instead she let loose a strange kind of snort that clouded the air around her face with a faint pink mist.
    The woman dropped to her knees and slid a little on the newly expanded mess. She clutched feebly at her eviscerated organs but succeeded less in reclaiming them than in tearing them to shreds with those razor-blade fingernails. Dave watched her struggle. This wasn’t quite the same as gutting a deer or a rabbit, where the thing was dead before you did your slicing and dicing. He stepped to the woman, grabbed hold of her hair, and wrenched her head back until she was staring up past his face and at the ceiling. She grabbed the cuff of his shirt with one of her wet hands, but then lost hold and slid again in the mound of her intestines.
    Dave swung the knife, cut halfway through her neck, pulled the weapon free and swung again. This time it came out dripping on the