There is silence in her ears and blindness in her eyes. Everything is numb; she cannot feel her feet as they move towards the house, and her voice is unrecognizable as it leaves her throat.
"Mom?" she says.
Her fingers search frantically for the phone as she keeps her gaze on the doorway to the kitchen. The stairs are just beyond, and Mary would be walking down them soon if she had heard her.
"Mama? Are you awake yet?"
Her hand knocks the receiver of the rotary phone, and she lifts it to her ear, breath shaking as she listens.
Dial tone.
An immediate sense of relief washes over her at the low electrical hum. With feverish motions, she dials the sheriff's department. Help first and then her father. If anyone knew where Samuel was, it would be them.
"Hello? Warren County sheriff's—"
"Oh God, please, I think Mi—" she starts.
But a wave of peroxide hits her in full, and she chokes before she can get another syllable out. Saliva wells beneath her tongue. The line cuts to static, to which no amount of shaking fixes.
Her blood runs cold, colder than winter, colder than anything she's ever known.
"No, no, no…" she says desperately, and then at the doorway: "Mama? Are you there?"
Everything is pinched, warping in and out of her limited focus. She wants to vomit, to run away, to see if there's anyone who can help her. The smell is everywhere—it's sterile and as inexorable as death.
She slides a knife from the block on the counter. It's large in her small fist, and she thinks that she's more likely to hurt herself with it than anyone else. Myers liked knives too, or so she'd heard. One of the boys killed on Halloween had been tacked onto the wall like a drawing, held into place with a piece of metal suitable for carrying his weight. A thumbtack was for papers. Knives must be for people. On the stairwell, her stitches tug with pain and the reminder that this is not a dream even if it feels like one.
Julia hopes Myers is not in an artistic mood.
She is steady at the top, pushing on to the master bedroom where her mother lies in one sleep or another. Her ears re-tune themselves to the upper floor then, and there is nothing for a long, long moment until her focus shifts to soft breathing, nearly undetectable if not for the fact that it is right above her head.
The hair on her arms raise. Her back is lathed in heat from a body that is not her own, a sweltering hold that ties her there without him physically needing to.
She doesn't move and neither does he.
Sweat slicks her palm for a millisecond before her heels dig into the shaggy carpet, propelling her forward. Myers' fingers brush the back of her shirt, and when that fails, twist to catch the long strands of her sandy blond hair. Her body is crushed to his in an instant. She's like a fish out of water, a wild thing reeled in from a lake. The pain makes her so desperate that she flails by instinct rather than conscious thought. The knife turns to his belly in a last-ditch attempt, but it is cut woefully short—Myers catches her wrist in a bone-crushing grip and yanks her hair so hard she is forced to go on her toes.
"Let me go!" she screams.
Her weapon is wrested from her hand, and she thinks it's the end when the cold tip of the blade touches her throat. His hand is bare, arm covered in blue up to the elbow as far as she can see. He must have been wearing that since his escape because it is stained beyond imagination. Mary would have been appalled if she'd seen Julia's clothes in such a state.
And with some horror, she realizes this vague thought humanizes him, a man who is literally about to run her through with a kitchen knife, a man who has likely killed her mother and will perhaps hunt down her father.
But Myers isn't a thing. She couldn't—wouldn't feel that way even if Samuel did. Myers is a living, breathing being and would remain so until the end. Whatever end that would dare come for him, that is.
The tension drops from her then. It drains down, down until there is nothing.
"If you're going to kill me, just get it over with already," she murmurs, tipping her chin back. The steel tip follows her movement, pressing once again to delicate skin. The position he'd made her take on the balls of her feet has her leaning heavily against him, one hand on the fingers in her hair and the other on his coverall sleeve.
"Come on, I don't have all day. You—don't you have other people to murder?"
It is perhaps the most foolish thing she will ever say because he stiffens and jerks her head back. The rubber of his mask scrapes her cheek as he slams the hilt of the blade against her temple, and all that remains is blinding white.
…
Wretch!
…
It is hours before Julia wakes, hours still before the pounding in her skull dulls to an intermittent throb. To add to the injury, she's trussed up like a pig in the backseat of an old vehicle, blindfolded. She bites her tongue to keep from swearing whenever Myers hits a pothole. The motion jars her bruised face, and she swears he's doing it just to spite her. He must have decided to take an especially bad road, maybe for its remoteness since he hadn't bothered to tape her mouth.
He doesn't stop at all when she's awake, and even when she's asleep, she doubts he notices. All the while, in the terrible minutes that slip through her grasp, she asks why—why her? Did she do something to deserve this? Myers isn't known for sparing his victims, for playing with his food before he ate it. Why is he taking her?
Again, she wonders if he is an artist. One of those types who want to prolong the experience at their victims' expense. Samuel was wrong on certain things about Myers already. What was to say he wasn't wrong in this as well?
Several instances where they'd disagreed about Myers' behavior stick out in her mind. The one that captures her most is the dog, the poor dog in her captor's old, dilapidated house in Haddonfield. He had killed and eaten it raw. Its corpse had been brutalized, a mix of teeth marks and matted fur scattered among the filth on the hallway floor. The photo she'd spied at the sheriff's department probably hadn't done the scene justice. She couldn't imagine how it must have looked in real life.
She said it was an action based out of necessity (though she couldn't help but wonder why he hadn't simply stolen food). If one is hungry, they eat, and Myers simply took what was available. Samuel judged it as an act of depravity; Myers had done it because he could. There is no personal distinction of right from wrong, but he performs accordingly because he knows it is wrong.
Is her kidnapping out of 'necessity' as she'd postulated before? Only time would tell.
They spend perhaps a day on the road before she's fed up with being ignored. He's kept her alive for this long, and she thinks she'll be safe for as long as it takes for them to get to their destination.
"Myers—You're Michael Myers, aren't you?" she says loudly, drowning out the deep rumble of the engine. The car doesn't sound healthy, and she feels hopeful that it might break down. "You must be. You're wearing a white mask and blue coveralls."
There is no answer, as she'd expected.
"I need to go. It's been some time, and I'm fit to burst."
He catches her meaning, she thinks, because the car comes to a stop a few minutes later. Next thing she knows, the ropes slide away, and the blindfold is torn off. He's staring down at her, heady evening sunlight raining down on his tall frame. She recognizes his body shape; it's the same she'd seen at the sanitarium countless times before.
They'd never had the pleasure of meeting though. Face to face.
He hauls her roughly out of the car. It's actually a pick-up truck with faded red paint and a rusty exterior. They're out in some kind of empty plain, maybe the Midwest at this point, and she looks her fill before he shoves her into the open. There is a cleaver in his hand, the idle threat of pain present in the graying dust around their feet.
There aren't any bushes nearby. She searches the horizon for one in vain before realizing he'd chosen this spot on purpose—his blank rubber features say it all. She damns him for his forward thinking.
"I'm not going unless you turn around," she tells him. "I can't go with someone watching."
He doesn't move. The staring contest that ensues is mostly one-sided as she can't really tell where his eyes are in the mask. She silently damns him again for good measure.
"Fine. Tie me back up. Maybe I'll go on the rug or something."
The moment she moves back to the truck, he jerks toward her. It's a quick motion, a blur before her eyes she's senseless to until it reaches her skin.
A stitch pops open when he drags her through the dirt screaming, blood running down her heel. His grip liquifies her upper arm, and he wrenches the bone from the socket just enough to give a clear warning.
"Okay! Okay, I'll go! For the love of God, I'll go!" she cries.
She shoves her panties down from beneath her skirt, squatting to get him to release her even a little. The adrenaline that runs through her makes it easy to ignore any possible embarrassment she might have felt. When it is done, Myers wastes no time packing her back up to continue their journey.
She doesn't let out a peep for the rest of the night. Not when he gives her bottled water and a stale convenience store sandwich or when he allows her another bathroom break. This time, she scuttles several yards out before he can grab her. Her skirt covers the essentials, thankfully, and she averts her gaze from his stony figure while doing her business.
Her arm pulses in time with her temple. He isn't considerate enough not to touch it when the ropes go back on, or perhaps he just doesn't notice. Either way, the fear retreats when he hits jagged paving, and everything hurts all over again. It's in step to the beat, to the thrum of the coolant and gasoline that runs below her.
She sees the night skies of a dozen worlds within the cloth wrapped around her eyes.
Michael Myers doesn't exist beneath any of them.
A/N: Betcha didn't see that coming! Things will be getting interesting for Julia pretty soon.
I hope you all enjoyed! :)