Chapter Four~
"Shit, I'm hungry," the male Hellborn growled while he watched the television with fading interest. His captive was lying on her side in her bed, nodding off from the boredom and quiet.
The sound of soft knocks brought his starving mind back into the here-and-now as he slipped from the bed and marched towards the front door.
"About fuckin' time," he said by way of greeting when he opened the door and saw a strangely-dressed female holding a medium-sized paper bag. "What are you supposed to be?"
"Food delivery," a smiling Mayberry declared, trying to smooth the anxiety from her voice. "You ordered food, and I delivered it. So...food delivery."
Seeing the bag in her hand, the kidnapper reached for it, but Mayberry raised a hand to stop his progress, opening the bag herself and reaching into it.
"Have to make sure everything's here," she explained as she rummaged around the bag, which had the logo of Wally Wackford's Joke and Sex Toy Shop printed on the side facing her.
Sneaking quick glances past him and into the room, she sighed gratefully when she saw the little girl sitting up after noticing the male getting the door.
"Let me get you your money," The kidnapper grumbled, looking down to reach into his pants pocket for his wallet.
When he retrieved it and looked up again, he saw Mayberry holding an open palm of white powder up at his face's level.
A sharp exhale blasted the substance, a combination of the joke shop's sneezing and itching powder that she had mixed before arriving, into his face, immediately burning his eyes and nostrils.
Ignoring the kidnapper's curses, coughs, and blind, furious scratching, Mayberry shoved the criminal into the room, where he blindly back-pedaled until he fell onto the carpeted floor.
Mayberry ran to the startled girl, who jumped further along her bed to escape this new stranger in her life.
"It's me, the mirror lady!" Mayberry said, giving her a smile to put the youth at ease. "I'm here to help you!"
At the mention of the mirror, the girl remembered her conversation with the voice earlier and brightened at the thought of her freedom, scooting back to meet her savior.
"You're the voice I heard in the room?"
"Yep! Let's go!" Mayberry said as she scooped her up.
At the sound of a door slamming shut, she turned to see the blinded kidnapper clumsily standing guard and still favoring his face and eyes.
"Who the fuck are you?" he hissed, scratching his face with one hand and groping at his pants' back pocket with the other, finally pulling out a large switchblade.
When the blade extended and caught the light, grim reality set in. Mayberry ignored the child whimpering in her arms while her mind raced for a tactic to get them out without injury. As long as he guarded the door, the only option that kept yelling in her mind was that he had to be removed, by force, if necessary.
A necessity that grew more as her inaction gave him more time to recover from the prank.
Putting the girl down, Mayberry whispered to her, "Do you know where the office is?"
"Where the stinky guy is?"
"Yeah."
She nodded fearfully.
"When I get him away from the door, you run to his office, and you stay there until I come to get you, okay?"
"I'm scared."
"Don't worry, just hold your breath."
"No, I mean of him!" The girl indicated her captor.
"Don't worry. I'll be right behind you."
Mayberry quietly went over to the kidnapper's bed, picked up the tv remote, and turned the volume to its maximum. Confused, the criminal tilted his head to the tv's direction, trying to pinpoint the intruder from the cacophony and failing.
"What's goin' on? Where the fuck are you?"
Mayberry frowned in frustration. He was sufficiently distracted but didn't budge from his spot. Then, an idea hit her.
Motioning the girl to stay where she was, Mayberry lifted the ashtray from the bedside bureau and crept towards the bathroom doorway directly across from the front door.
Despite the noise distracting her, as well, she pitched the receptacle hard at the kidnapper's face. It ricocheted off of his forehead and produced the desired reaction immediately.
He turned to the angle the ashtray struck him and charged, blade out, towards her.
Quickly, she sidestepped the approach, stuck out a hoof, and watched as he kicked into it, tripped, and tumbled into the bathroom with a thud she could feel through the floor.
After closing the door on his violent attempts to right himself, Mayberry called to the girl, "C'mon!" and rushed to the front door.
The unlocked door swung, and the girl slipped through first. Mayberry took a step past the threshold and felt something grip and yank her tail hard, pulling her back awkwardly.
"Go to the office!" she screamed to the girl.
The girl ran breathlessly across the parking lot, and in her young life, she couldn't tell what lent her fearful wings more that night. The kidnapper, the mysterious mirror lady, or the now distant contest of life and death being waged behind her.
Back in the room, she turned to face her attacker on auto-pilot, just in time to catch his wet knife hand by the wrist with her two trembling hands.
With adrenaline or some demonic analog of it, surging through the male, Mayberry felt like she was arm-wrestling a construction vehicle.
Fighting against its slip, she wondered why it was wet and found her answer when she chanced to see the fury in his equally damp face. He obviously took a moment to wash the powder from it and his eyes, although he still squinted tearily.
Mayberry knew she had a tiger by the tail; she didn't dare let go but wished she knew how to disengage and run. They wrestled wildly, fighting for leverage and looking like dancers in a violent, sped-up waltz.
Coming to one of the beds, the kidnapper planted his hooves, pitched forward, and pushed her onto it, diving on her to drive his weight and the knife into her.
"I'm gonna stick you, bitch!" he grunted, shaking the hand to make her tire all the faster.
Fear gripped the teacher's heart in an iron vice. The rescue was falling apart! Even with Mayberry's painful, albeit temporary death, the girl could still be recaptured because the teacher proved too foolish and weak.
"Not...on a first date!" she grunted back.
The quip kept her fear at bay long enough to rally a few more seconds of strength to her burning arms, but her reserves were running low.
A residual of the sneezing powder made him rear up and sneeze into Mayberry's face, spraying her with foul-smelling spittle and almost making her lose her keep-away with the knife.
"Ugh! Dammit!" she gagged. "Y'know, dogs can clean themselves! You don't have to help!"
The blade's keen point shook over her until finally, when her vigor waned for an ill second, it slashed through her coat, cut cleanly across her sternum, and deflected off her broach.
Although he was rewarded with a scream that could be heard over the tv's racket, the fear, anger, and pain roiling inside her was now a red brew, spewing rage from its overflow.
As her demonic aura rose like a furious sunrise, sounds faded to an indistinct muffle, the flowing, red-hot furrow on her chest dulled to an itching memory, and the tips of her elfin ears burned with blood. The world grew redder than average, and an iron strength seized control of her like a ragdoll caught in a mindless storm.
The male's face twisted in sudden pain as his wrist began to succumb to Mayberry's two-handed grip. The knife dropped from him, and now he was trapped, held from leaving the bed by her grasp, which crushed his wrist into shards.
Mayberry's tail rose from behind the kidnapper before a length of it looped around his throat like a slipknot.
She let go of his wrecked wrist, but pulled back on her tail, wrenching him high from the bed like a noose.
At its highest trajectory, she loosened her tail so that he was thrown end-over-end into the air. He crashed headfirst into the television screen, blackening it before the set tipped forward from its stand and fell on him.
He rested under the ruined set, a moaning heap, as Mayberry favored her aching, black blood-stained chest while sitting up shakily.
The girl, she remembered, thinking of where she was waiting now. Nothing was more important than her.
Passing by the criminal on her way out and thankful for the quiet, Mayberry muttered loud enough for him to hear, "Way too much shit on tv these days."