Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(89)
Her flashlight was a beacon that made of her an easy target, and it revealed her attacker only in the penultimate moment, when abruptly he abandoned stealth and rushed her from the doorway.
In the instant before impact, the ice-white flashlight beam stuttered across his looming face. Broad and blunt, cleft-chinned and beetle-browed, it was a countenance familiar to victims through thousands of years, seen on marauders and plunderers, on those who tortured with hot irons and exquisitely sharp skewers, on those who lynched and beheaded and those who wielded the clubs in the gulags.
He crashed into her with devastating force, he the bull and she the china shop, so that she thought something essential inside her broke on that first contact. As he collided with her, he seized her and lifted her, his momentum barely diminished, and carried her with furious intent, slamming her into a wall. Pain flashed down her spine and through her hips, around her ribs, up her spine and across her shoulders and down her arms, her breath bursting from her with such violence that with it went the ability to inhale.
The flashlight had flown from her hand and now lay in a far corner of the room, washing the juncture of two walls. The backflow of light was too dim for Bibi to make out the details of the face immediately before her, only the shape of the skull, like the head of some demented and hornless minotaur in a nightmare. That terrible moment was only prelude to worse.
As she gaped in shock and in a failed attempt to draw breath, his mouth found hers, and he thrust his tongue between her lips in a loathsome imitation of a kiss, his breath hot and spittle foaming. She wanted to bite his tongue all the way through, bite it off, but she couldn’t get her breath or work her jaws, the impact having paralyzed her. Pinned, arms useless, she wasn’t able to reach for the pistol in her shoulder rig. Pressing obscenely against her, the attacker realized that she was armed, eased up on her just enough to thrust a hand under her blazer, tore the Sig Sauer from the holster, and threw it across the room. He yanked the T-shirt out of her jeans and got his hands under it and groped her breasts, as she at last inhaled, drawing into her mouth his exhalation scented with onions and bacon grease.
With breath came muscle control, coordination, and fierce determination. She raised her right foot to plant the sole and heel flat against the crumbling plaster, tensed calf and thigh. Although jammed between wall and beast, she managed to drive her knee between his legs. The shot was not the ball-crusher she hoped, but it made him grunt and relent just enough so that she could shove him back a half step and slip past him.
He swung one hand and swatted her alongside the head. The blow rang through her skull, and though she didn’t see stars, concentric rings of darkness welled through her eyes and made a vortex of the room. She staggered, stumbled, dropped to one knee. He booted her in the backside, and she sprawled facedown, terrified but also mortified by her near helplessness when contesting with brute strength and savage purpose. He dropped to his knees and roughly rolled her onto her back, knocking aside her flailing fists to seize her by the throat and apply just enough force to make her understand that he could choke her to death one-handed if he wished.
She could see his face again, shadowed but complete enough to reveal his demonic and implacable intention, a deeply perverse desire unmistakable in his green eyes. Hulking, bull-strong, as broad-faced as a steer, he seemed at the same time reptilian, as if he gave out from every pore the poisonous smell of the venom in which his brain was steeped. Clutching her throat, his face a pale moon of madness floating above her, he said, “I can screw you and then kill you or kill you first. But if you make me kill you first and I can’t have the fun of doing you alive, then I’ll kill you so slow and nasty, you’ll think it’s taking half a lifetime.” When she gagged out a curse, he pulled back his left fist, big as a sledgehammer, aimed it at her face, and said, “You want to say that again, bitch?” One punch would shatter her nose and the orbit of one eye, and a second would split her lips, break out teeth, fracture her jaw, after which no surgeon in the world would be able to put her back the way she had been, supposing that she survived. For this monster, sex and violence were one and the same desire, and either would be as satisfying as the other. When she hesitated, he pulled the fist back farther and worked her tender throat with the steel fingers of his right hand, and he repeated his question: “You want to say that again? You want to curse me, you stupid skank?” She wheezed out, “No.” He asked if she’d take the quick kill or the slow, and she said, “Quick,” meaning that she would endure rape in return for the minimal mercy of which he might be capable. “Terezin,” he said, “put a guard on places you might go, and I lucked out. He doesn’t want you. He just wants you dead. But I get my fun first, like he’ll get his birthday fun with that little bitch.”
He let go of her throat but backhanded her across the face, a hard slap meant to confirm his dominance, to knock out of her any last trace of rebellion, to leave her stunned long enough for him to straddle her. One knee to either side of Bibi, still not having fallen upon her, he unbuckled his belt as she looked up at him with a pretense of weakness and resignation. When she crossed her arms over her breasts, he laughed at that expression of maidenly modesty, and his laugh was a low wet sound that reminded her of his tongue in her mouth, nauseating her anew. Busy with the zipper of his pants, eager to expose himself, he didn’t notice that her right hand was under her blazer, didn’t realize that she was probing an interior pocket. The handle of Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade came smooth and cool into Bibi’s hand, the nub of the release under her thumb. She drew the knife from beneath her coat, and the blade sprang out for use, seven inches long and razor-sharp and as pointed as a rapier.