"Sofie sweetheart, I need you to stay awake." Jenny whispered into the girl's blond hair.
"But it's so cold. I'm so cold." Sofia was shivering, but that was better than fever sweats. "I know, I know it's cold." Jenny was shivering too, the leather of the vest didn't do much in the way of keeping in heat.
"I know you're scared Sofie, I am too, but they're all looking for us. Rick and Carol. They won't let anything happen to us, just you wait and see." Jenny tried to convince her self, they wouldn't leave them. What had the unkept man, Devon or maybe Dillon, said that he could track. She was sure she'd have left a path, crashing through the woods they way they had.
The noise benith them grew louder, growles and moans echoing in the rafters of the barn. Jenny locked her legs more firmly around the beam she was clinging too. For the second time in less than a week, she felt trapped. There was nothing she could do.
"Hey, Sofie, I think I know how we can get down, you know, like in the story. We'll just have to wait for your hair to grow out."
"What are you talking about Jenny?" Jenny smiled,
"Oh don't tell me you've never heard of sleeping beauty." She could feel Sofia shaking her head, her hair brushing back and forth across the leather vest.
"Well, we're going to fix that immediately, Once upon a time there was a Princess named Rapunzel..."
The last time Jenny had been this far up shit creek someone had come to her rescue, though she'd hardly call him a prince.
Five days ago:
She squeezed her eyes shut, praying that somehow she would tap her heels together and be anywhere but here. His fingers, blunt and greasy, skimmed her chest as he redoubled his efforts at unbuttoned her shirt. She shivered, a combination of bone numbing cold and mind numbing fear, the motion set her swinging slightly.
The quick-ties round her wrists, which had been chafing before, burned now. In the rapidly falling dark she could only see faint shapes and shadows of trees. She shook again, this time with fear. Dark was when the, the things, seemed most active. She strained her eyes, trying to see any flicker of movement beyond the trees. She could see little, the forest was so dense. Even so, she could hear the other man was talking, his nasal voice getting closer.
The shorter one was standing beneath her, still fumbling with the buttons on her shirt. The taller one, the mastermind [although she was using that term on a relative scale], was advancing towards her, through the trees. She could hear his heavy footfalls cracking twigs and crushing leaves. Her head still throbbed and her vision was blurred round the edges. Shock she thought absently, maybe a concussion. Even with her blurry vision, in the gathering dark she could make out his nicotine stained teeth, bared in a leer. He stopped in front of, but slightly to the left of her. He rocked back on his heels and then leaned forward. The action brought his sunburnt face only a few inches from her own. She lent backwards, trying to avoid having any contact with him. Before he'd moved too quickly for her to get a good look at him, now that she was able to, she rather regretted it. He was fat, or had been fat. Now his skin hung unpleasantly loose, swaying slightly as he stepped towards her. In the way of some men who rapidly loose weight, he still bore the paunch characteristic of a beer belly. It looked as if someone has deflated his face, and now his jowls wobbled precipitously as he moved.
Distracted by her perusal of the leader, she missed the shorter one moving in again. He resumed his campaign against her buttons, looking up now at her face. His face was as round and pallid as a full moon. His cheeks were pockmarked and pitted, and when he opened his mouth to cough, she could see he was missing his front two teeth. Still coughing sporadicly, he undid the last button and flicked the sides of her shift apart. He wheezed, the exertion of pulling her shirt off taxing him. The breeze brushed her shoulders, bared to the night air. She tried to focus on something other than his arms circling her, pulling on the clasp of her bra. Her brain stuttered and came to a halt.
This was about to happen, she was going to be one of those girls, who gets found in the forest in Bones by some unsuspecting picnickers. Well, she would have been one of those girls if the world hadn't gone batshit nuts. Now, it was commonplace to see grisly skeletons, the type that haunt crime scenes and nightmares, walking the streets. Oh god, what had happened. Maybe this was some sort of fever dream and she was going to wake up in her bed. She squeezed her eyes shut, wishing with all her might. But it was to no avail, she could still hear the sound of the short one's breathing, and now she could feel in against her skin. She tried to hang limp, give no indication of how truly terrified she was.
The short one had a hang nail, she could tell because he kept snagging the blue lace of her bra strap. She whimpered as he pressed closer to her, fiddling with the clasp. She tried to disconnect, this was her mortal shell, she was ether, she was ephemeral she was, oh god, she was about to die. The trees blurred further as her vision tunneled. Something incongruously bright centered her. A blue heeled oxford was laying on the pine needles a yard away. When had she lost her shoe? Thinking back to that afternoon made her head ache. She already knew the hair was sticking to her head, matted with congealed blood. Perhaps she had some sort of subdural hematoma, maybe there was internal bleeding and in a second she would keel over. That would show her two would-be rapists to slam peoples' heads against the foliage. Thinking about the attack made her seethe with anger, she had been so stupid!
The other one, the one with more teeth, had grabbed her from behind. God when was she going to stop being so trusting. She'd gone to college alone, she knew to always bring her own beer to parties, never to leave her keys under a rug on behind a potted plant. She should have kept on diving. She never should have stopped, and certainly not gotten out of the car.
When the first one, the short one, had asked if she'd seen his daughter she had been suspicious, but he'd looked so sad. So he'd also looked unkept and dirty, but she'd assumed she couldn't look too much better. Everyone looked unkept and dirty, personal hygiene did loose some of its importance when confronted with the end of the world as you know it. She had figured it would only take a second, and maybe she had seen the girl. The photo had been torn and filthy but the little girl couldn't have been more than seven, with a wide gap-toothed smile. She remembered Sara's picture from about then, maybe second or third grade. She'd helped her pin her curls up in two french braids, and let her wear some of her jewelry, an old, slightly tarnished silver Celtic knot. She had been so focused on the picture she hadn't heard the tall one come up behind her.
Like any city girl she had tried to knee him in the groin. She'd seen Miss Congeniality, she knew to S.I.N.G. Unfortunately, she hadn't figured on two men, or that what one lacked in height he made up for in wiry muscle, or that her fingers gouging wherever she could reach, would hardly phase him, slapping her fingers away like so many buzzing mosquitos. She must have lost her shoe in the struggle as they dragged her off the road. Her ribs felt tender, maybe bruised, that too was from when he had winded her.
Lost in her reverie she followed the line of a tree trunk behind her abandoned shoe. She noticed a dark stain on the bark of the white birch where her head had hit the knot in the tree. Blood. The stain was her blood. She mused that it looked like quite a bit of blood. Rivulets had run down the furrows in the bark, making it look for all the world like someone had shot the trunk. It seemed fitting, nature bleeding, after all the natural order of the world seemed to have been thrown out the window. If she were nature she'd be bleeding too.
The sudden loss of pressure alerted her to the inevitable, somehow the man, probably only one evolutionary step above an Australopithecus, had managed the clasp on her bra. She gasped and let out a choked, halting breath.
"Don't cry girly." He ran his fingers over cheek, catching on the swell of her mouth. Running the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip, pulling it down she could taste dirt and sweat and the unmistakable coppery taste of blood. She began to tremble in ernest. He leant forward, smelling of roast meat and halitosis, his oily lips were suddenly against hers. He sucked on her bottom lip, and she bit him, the force required to surge forward made her wrists scream and the world spin, but his profane exclamation was reward enough.
"Fuckin' Bitch bit me! Marvin, did you see that? The little bitch bit me!" The man, holding his hand to his lip, backed away. Marvin, the tall one, cackled. She could see him moving forward again from his place by the small fire, his face red, sweaty and twisted into a cruel smile. The deep shadows around his eyes were in sharp relief by the rising moon, making his face look more like a skull.
"Feisty aint ya?" he smirked, then turned to address the short one, nursing his swelling lip. "I told you Frank, all these little trumped up 'career women', just a bunch of city whores. Love nothing better than to get a man by the balls. They get off on it, ya know. But once we show 'er how to treat a man proper, this 'un could be fun." he spit a stream of brown tobacco from the corner of his mouth. Swiping the back of his hand against his chin leaving a streak on the puffy flesh, Marvin grabbed her chin,
"She's been awfully quiet. What do you think girly?" She had been silent. Noise, light and motion attracted the more undesirable and undead occupants of the forest.
The end of this confrontation seemed inevitable, so she threw caution to the wind and snapped,
"I'd rather get bit!" She snarled, and working up her final reserves of courage, spit in his face.
Marvin raised his eyebrows, and used the corner of her shirt to wipe his face. Then he winked at her,
"Oh, I can do rough if that's what you're into."
She jerked back, pulling her chin out of his reach. She moved to bring her legs up, but after hanging like a draining deer for several hours her muscles wouldn't cooperate and she slumped back on with a yelp of pain as she felt her shoulders grinding together, straining against the stress of holding her up.
"I'll scream." she was shivering now, cold and fear and a creeping sense of inevitability were setting in.
"Why'd ya wanna do that for, huh?" Marvin grabbed her hair, wrapping it round his hand to stop her swinging away.
"Told you," She panted, "I would literally rather be eaten alive by the walking dead, than get fucked by an impotent redneck." The look in his eyes told her she had gone too far, but what did it matter, her big mouth had always gotten her in trouble, why should this time be any different. Frank's red face only got redder. She had made him angry and now she was going to reap the rewards.
He grabbed the back of her neck, holding her to him and grinding against her hip obscenely. She screamed. She really didn't want to be a victim of the dead, she'd seen people, people being eaten, but in that instant she would rather have the flesh stripped from her bones than have this man's hands on her for another second. So she screamed, pouring into it all her fear, her anger at being in this place, her hatred of these men and others like him and the steely certainty that this might be the last thing she ever would do. She regretted an instant later.
As if conjured by her scream, someone had just emerged from out of the woods. Someone alive by the looks of it.
"Frank!" Marvin yelled, all thoughts of caution and machismo thrown aside as he warbled out a tremulous cry.
"Deal with it Marvin, gonna show this bitch what it's like to ghet brok'n in" Oblivious to the newcomer Frank palmed her breast, moving the bra that hung from her shoulders out of the way. He leaned forward to whisper in her ear,
"Bit small, but I'll make due"
"Make due with this!" She kneed Frank in the groin and watched him double up and fall backwards. Not her best one liner, given the circumstances, it would have to do. Looking down at Frank she almost didn't notice Marvin was gagging. He stumbled as if he was drunk then fell to the ground. There was a sharpened stick running through his neck, which, she assumed, accounted for the gargling noise.
Before Frank had time to stand up again, the man was on him. There was a sickening crack, just the the one her wrist had made when she was eleven and riding her bike in the rain. Frank dropped, now just dead weight. The man straightened up, flicking his eyes up and down her still suspended body.
"Howdy Darlin' how's it hangin'"
She blinked, this was a hallucination, she was dead or dying and her brain had fabricated this fiction to make its self feel better. She chuckled, then blanched,
"Pleasure to meet you, I'm going to be sick"
"I get that reaction a lot" he muttered, cutting her down just in time. Unfortunately, her wrists, chafed and tingling with restored blood flow, didn't hold, and a day that had begun with such promise ended with her face down in her own sick.