“Oh, shit.”
Laneesha dropped the light, and Sara wasn’t sure what she’d seen. She picked it up off the dead leaves and knelt next to Martin, focusing the weak beam on his face.
Jammed into her husband’s mouth and protruding from his lips was a ball of nails. They jutted out of his cheeks like cat whiskers, dark with dirt and blood.
“Oh, jesus, oh baby…”
Sara’s first instinct was to help, to nurture, which she would have done with anyone in this situation. She worked soup kitchens every Thanksgiving. She spent a summer in Peru with the World Health Organization, helping to care for a TB epidemic. Sara had endless resources of empathy, and equal measures of strength to keep from breaking down. But seeing Martin—her Martin—like this, hit her right in the heart, and the tears came so quick and fast she wondered how she could have been so resolved to divorce this man if she still cared this deeply.
Sara put a hand on his forehead, her touch gentle so as not to hurt him any further. Her husband’s eyes found hers, locked on.
“ara…”
“Shhhh. It’s all going to be okay. Are you hurt anywhere else?”
He made the slightest of nods, then brought up his bound hands, tied together at the wrists. They were swollen, and the color of ripe plums.
Sara wasn’t able to hide her wince. She examined the rope, saw it was a simple slip knot.
“Okay, I’m going to count to three, then free your hands. When your circulation returns, it’s going to hurt really bad. You ready?”
Another nod. And something in his eyes, something beyond the fear and pain. Trust. Trust, and maybe even love. Sara clamped the light under her armpit and held his wrists.
“One…two…”
Sara went on two, pulling at the rope with one hand and pulling his right arm with the other. The rope resisted at first, then slipped off.
Martin’s eyes went glassy, then rolled up into his head as he let out the most chilling, agonized howl Sara had ever heard in her life. Sara bit her lower lip and kept her own cry inside, patting Martin’s chest, wishing she could bear some of the pain for him.
His back arched, bending at an almost impossible angle, and then, mercifully, he passed out.
Sara seized the opportunity. She worked fast, digging a finger into the corner of his mouth and touching the horrible gag stuck inside. It was a wood, roughly golf-ball sized, and Sara counted eight nails protruding out of it, each two inches long. Two skewered his right cheek, one his lower lip, and three his left cheek. The other two jutted from his mouth like tusks.
She stretched his left cheek back, forcing the gag further to the right, making the wounds on that side bleed fresh.
Martin’s eyes popped open and he lashed out, smacking Sara on the side of the head, sending her sprawling.
Sara opened her eyes and stared up at the forest canopy, a small opening allowing a few stars to shine through. She’d once again lost the flashlight, but little bright motes swam through her vision like sparks. Her head was ringing.
It was the first time Martin had ever hit her. Not his fault, of course. He’d been unconscious. But it was as good a blow as she’d ever sustained, especially since she hadn’t been on guard to block it.
She sat up, squinting as the light hit her eyes.
“Shine it on Martin, Laneesha, and kneel next to him.”
When the beam rested on Martin’s face he was looking Sara’s way.
“orry,” he said around the gag.
Sara blinked a few times. “We need to get that out of your mouth. I know your hands hurt, but I need you to keep them behind your back for me. I have to put the rope on again.”
Martin’s red eyes went wide with panic.
“Not tight,” Sara assured him. “But I don’t want you lashing out and hurting me or Laneesha. Okay?”
He hesitated, then nodded. Sara located the rope and again tied the slip knot, this time higher up on his arms, near the elbows. Then she ran her palm across Martin’s sweat-soaked hair.
“This is really going to hurt. But I need you to keep still. If you thrash, it could tear your cheeks off. Understand?”
Martin squeezed his eyes shut. “urry…oo it.”
“I…I really don’t want to be here,” Laneesha said.
“I need to you hold the light for me.”
“This is awful. Just awful. What if the people that did this to him come back?”
“You’re jiggling the light. Hold it still.”
“If someone put one of those things in my mouth…shit…I can’t…”
“Goddamnit, Laneesha! Act like an adult and hold the goddamn light steady!”
Sara never yelled, never swore, at the kids. And perhaps this shocked Laneesha so much that she shut up, keeping the light perfectly centered on Martin’s ruined mouth.
Sara again stuck a finger into the hinge of his lips, peeling back the cheek, trying to free the left side while forcing the nails on the right in deeper.
Martin’s head twitched and he screamed again. Sara felt the wood and nails vibrate from the sound, making her even more determined to free her husband from this horrible thing, pulling back as hard as she could, stretching the skin to an almost ridiculous length, then, with one quick motion, she tugged fast and firm.
The nail gag came out so fast it jabbed Sara’s palm, and Martin twisted violently to the side, pressing his bleeding face into the leaves, his whole body wracking with sobs.
“Honey.” Sara crawled over to him and put a hand on his back. “We’ve got to get going. Laneesha’s right. Whoever did this to you was planning on coming back for you. You need to get up.”
Martin continued to cry.
“Sara…” Laneesha was whispering.
“Laneesha, help me with Martin.”
“Sara…”
“I know. The sooner we get him up, the sooner we can get out of here. We’ll find the orange ribbon on the trees, follow it back to camp, then use the radio to—”
“SARA!”
Laneesha’s scream trumped Martin’s in volume, and Sara turned and watched as something filthy and foul-smelling grabbed Laneesha around the waist and dragged her off into the darkness, taking the flashlight with her.
When Georgia was a little girl, she wanted to have a friend. It didn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl. Just someone to play with. To talk to. To understand.
Her parents divorced when she was a baby, and Georgia only saw her father on weekends, and during those weekends he ignored her. During the weekdays, Georgia’s mom worked most of the time, leaving Georgia in the care of an assortment of babysitters who ranged from indifferent to downright cruel. One of them was a genius when it came to punishing a ten-year-old Georgia. Making sure she never left marks. Filling her head with terrifying lies if she ever told.
Georgia never did tell. She had no one to tell. Mom and Dad obviously didn’t care, and Georgia had no friends.
Part of it was her looks, she knew. Georgia used to have a lazy eye before she learned a vision exercise on her own in order to correct it. She’d also been overweight since birth. The combination of the two made her a joke among her peers, and a constant target for ridicule and torment.
So, instead of a friend, Georgia had pets at both households. Puppies and kittens and fish and birds and hamsters and gerbils and even an iguana.
Had her parents been paying more attention, they might have realized that the continuous deaths and disappearances of the animals they bought her were a warning sign that their daughter was severely disturbed. But they were busy with their own lives, and when one of Georgia’s pets met with a dubious accident, it was easier to buy a new one than question why.