Untitled.FR11 by Unknown Author Read Free Book Online Page B

and he showed signs, she could go back in and reverse it or at least halt it, surely. Her sobbing would not stop, became less easy to conceal there in that confining room.
    “Katt?” A soft sleepy voice.
    It starded her. She eased back upright, drew an arm across her eyes. With her fingers she squeezed the bridge of her nose.
    “Are you all right?” He was scarcely awake.
    Calm. “Yes.” Came out a whisper. “Yes,” louder and the panic rose again. “It’s just that. . . we’ve been so far apart and . . . and I’ve missed you.”
    Marcus drew her down. She let herself stretch out at his side, feeling his embracing arms encircle her. Bursts of sob escaped, but not as violent now. “There there,” he said sleepily. He gave a yawn. “We’re here now.” Rustle of sheet as he raised it up over their shoulders. “Cry it out, rest now, we’re back together again.” He drifted off almost as he spoke, and she lay there, wide awake, for the longest time, feeling alien and elated and displaced, time ticking softly on the nightstand and pond sounds rising as geese touched down to ease her gradually into sleep.
    April had been easy. Kinda sloshed. Or maybe just a litde lax in the head. He’d picked her up leaving a frat house alone, walked her across Laurel and between the tall trees and toward Lory Student Cen
    ter and the dorms beyond. Trusting bitch. A little charm, a little sweet talk, easy flirting—like he’d practiced a thousand times in front of the mirror.
    She’d been swayable.
    He’d clomped her once at the beginning, soon as she’d climbed into his truck. Going dancing? Sure we are. She turned to lock her door at his request and Clomp! Then he didn’t want to, but he clomped her again when she resisted at the tree. He carried her from his truck. She tried to knee him on the way, then again when he pounded the stakes into the tree, unbound her hands, and attempted to tie the ropes to the stakes. She’d been fury and hellfire to deal with. Quiet sex-eyed April Downing had a fearsome will to live. So he’d clomped her a good one, propping her up and securing her hands. Her thin pale arms he stretched tight as a crossbar against the killing tree, which was thick as a century’s growth and took its time curving about.
    Wasn’t much moon but there was plenty of solitude, so if April decided to take to screaming, there’d be no cause for worrying about it but simply for celebrating the power of the human voice to thrill. Just like when the kids had held him down, kicking and screaming, and poured red Kool-Aid down his throat and into his nose and over his eyes, a choking then but they didn’t care—that sweet shit griming his face and the flies buzzing after him and that fake red odor in the air, pretend strawberry. April was wearing an orange frilly halter top and jeans and flats. Grazing his knuckles with tree bark, he reached around her to undo the three large buttons at her back. Then he needed the hedge clippers to scissor up her front and snip the two dangling halves from her shoulders. They fell apart. She was fuck awesome. April had the softest yum-miest whitest creamiest eye-achers he’d ever seen on an angel baby’s torso.
    He hoped society was proud. What was about to happen to this pretty bitch was all its fault. For years on end, he’d been good, though he’d had the urges and come close a few times. Then the fucking fed-erales had danced the Waco rat-a-tat-tat, all that cult shit urping up again, the Jim Jones tie-ins, week after week in the papers and on TV and it tore him up fierce. He’d manage somehow to get himself together enough to go in and simper at the eaters and take their orders and even clap his way through the jivey empty Happy Happy Birthday song for the yup folk and their kids. Same damn wipes that had forced Kool-Aid down his gizzard, only older. He’d never been Jimmy Jones; no, his mom much preferred just plain Jim, Jim the infant, Jim the toddler, Jim the gangly