Everyone lay strewn around the floor like children’s toys. They were all still blindfolded. The men had been shot in their heads, and her nephew and the baby too. The invaders hadn’t needed to look in anyone’s eyes. The women lay half-naked and bleeding. Sara gagged. The babysitter moaned and rolled onto her side, closing her splayed legs and tightening into a fetal ball.
Sara crossed to the window bay and looked out over the front porch at the four men. They passed a bottle and slapped each other on their backs. One of them pointed to the neighbor’s house on the corner with its lights burning in the windows.
Sara turned back to the women on the floor. She went to both of them in turn. They looked to her with pain, humiliation, and horror stark and bare in their eyes. She released them from their torture. Her first deliberate kills. Acts of mercy. Just like her gift to Phoebe months later. Sara’s compassionate motives helped ease her guilt, weakening her compunction for when she needed to kill for other reasons.
The four men became three after only a week. Sara couldn’t follow too close. She dare not expose herself or give them any hint, not even the faintest scent of their stalker. But when the one drifted back and walked into the alley, she had no choice. When his piss pattered against the side of the very dumpster in which she cowered, she stood.
Drew, the shortest of the four, the drunkard, jumped back, pee spraying up into his startled face as he stared goggle-eyed at her sudden appearance. Then he collapsed dead. His urine continuing to fountain, raining down on him, as Sara slipped out into the street.
The second of man died at his own hand. In some ways, nothing had changed. Just as statistics indicated before the Curse had fallen upon the world, suicide remained the primary function of guns. Sara learned of his death while eavesdropping on the last two. They stood shaken and stunned. They resolved to leave the town and walk to the city some ninety miles south. To start fresh. Sara snuck off as their talk drifted to fantasies of what they might find. She wanted to see the dead man herself.
His name had been Randy and he looked almost as pathetic with the gun between his legs and his brains splattered on the bricks behind him as he had that first night, sitting in an armchair in the corner house. He’d nagged the others to go back so that he could take another turn on the Redfeld’s babysitter, whom he called ‘the young one.’ To Sara’s relief, the other three hadn’t acquiesced. Only their promise of ‘plenty of fresh, young pussy ahead’ actually got him out of his chair and marching out of the neighborhood.
She understood, too intimately, the kind of despair that might have led Randy to take his own life, but she had zero sympathy. Sara despised the man and her only regret at his death was that she hadn’t caused it.
Number three, Phil, was the first person Sara killed by hand rather than with a thought. He and Peter made the moronic choice to follow the train tracks down the coast to the city, easily doubling their walking distance, and hers, as they snaked along every zig and zag of the shoreline. The rails—perched on an endless, winding mound of crushed rock and gravel—provided little cover, so she kept to the beach, taking advantage of the twisting path and the noise of the surf to keep her hidden.
After two weeks of stumbling on the uneven ties, scraping hands and knees on rough stones, and nibbling through all of their poorly rationed beef jerky, the men came upon an impromptu community coalesced around an abandoned strip mall in the northern suburbs. Loose and unorganized, like a cross between a farmer’s market and a homeless encampment, the little community had no security or watchmen. Phil and Peter wandered in and joined a group sharing a pot of soup, no questions asked.
Sara waited a few minutes, half expecting her quarry to start murdering everyone, raping and pillaging as they had before, but they didn’t. They kept their eyes down and made friendly conversation. Sara scuffled in from the other side of the parking lot. She wandered between a couple of campfires before discovering that the group used the restrooms at the back of an old Vietnamese restaurant. She drifted in to wait in the hall outside the toilets.
Sara pushed up to Phil when he left the men’s room. Asking if he was new and if he wanted a proper welcome. He wouldn’t look at her, refused to meet her eyes, despite her aggressive come-on, but he didn’t hesitate to use his hands. Even after grabbing at her breasts and ass, Phil wouldn’t raise his face to hers, so she gutted him with a rusty oyster shucker she’d found next to a burnt out beach fire three days earlier.
Sara enjoyed the warmth of his blood flowing over her taught knuckles as he slid to the floor in the hallway. Her other hand clamped over his mouth while the distorted sounds of Def Leppard blasted too loud for the speakers in the dining room behind her.
Sara felt certain that Peter had caught on. He must have realized that he and his friends had been hunted. He seemed to deliberately avoid being alone after he discovered Phil in the back of the restaurant. But that only made Sara more careful, more determined, and patient. She watched from afar as he began to collect his new crew over the following weeks and struggled with her own ambivalence as he failed to rouse them into another vicious gang. Instead she listened to him preach his dream of a new society based on respect and restraint.
At night she would dream of that night, of staring at the mirror and discovering her husband and friends sprawled across her living room. She woke up each morning with a refreshed anger that only swelled at his hypocrisy.
One night, she lost track of them. Peter had gathered four cohorts by that time, three men and a woman, and Sara left them camped out in a downtown park. She slept on the second floor of an empty building, but they’d disappeared by the time she woke and checked on them. It was four weeks later and a few miles south when she caught sight of two of the men heading into an old Asian supermarket.
Sara had nothing to do with Scott’s death—two men had gone into the store, but only Derek came out. She followed as he scurried back to the basement hideout.
She was sneaking around on the ground floor, trying to figure out where Derek had gone when Peter found her.
“Hey!” His shout made her jump and, turning, she toppled a bundle of scrap metal, long slender pieces of a bed frame or shelving. The sound of them hitting the concrete floor reverberated around them as Sara stood frozen in front of her nemesis, certain that she would be recognized.
Of course, Peter had no idea who she was. He’d never laid eyes on Sara before. He hadn’t yet heard about Scott’s death and saw only a lost and lonely wanderer. He welcomed her, gave her a candy bar, and told her to wait while he talked with the others.
“It’s a democracy,” Peter said as he left.
Apparently they voted her in.
The others seemed well intentioned, warm and welcoming, but the cruel irony of the bandanas hanging around their necks only steeled her resolve. Peter had stolen the idea from her family even as he’d raped, murdered, and mutilated them. It didn’t matter if he’d found some kind of enlightenment, had repented his past, or strove for penance for his crimes. She would end Peter and destroy his dream.
Peter’s grip on Sara’s wrists relaxed and he dropped his arms. Sara reached up to his bandana.
“Trust me,” she said, knowing he would.
Sara left the building behind, walking across the litter strewn parking lot with a bounce in her step. She’d completed her mission. Her revenge exacted, she could forge ahead with a clean slate and live a new life.
Maybe she would gather a tribe. She could collect strays, like Peter had done, and build a community from the diverse skills and backgrounds of the people she selected. It was a good idea, she had to give him credit for that, and it might have worked but for his past coming to haunt him. Stalking him. Staring him down. But Sara didn’t have that problem, her past was dead. The memories faded like dreams.