As he drew her effortlessly out from under, by both ankles now, Jordan tried to kick free, though her attacker proved too strong. She was halfway out when she stretched her right hand and managed to grasp the handle of the scissors and take them along with her.
“Let me go!” she yelled. It came up from her chest but sounded small and childlike.
The attacker pulled harder and she found herself out in the middle of the floor, the protection provided by the bed a distant memory. He jerked her leg to one side and Jordan was forced from her stomach onto her back, the room suddenly seeming very bright around her.
She could see him finally.
Tall, white, more muscular than Jimmy, but probably only a few years older than her brother. His blond hair stood out at odd angles, tousled from all the fighting. Sky-blue-eyed, pug-nosed, Beach Boy — looking with an awful wholesomeness. He wore a police uniform, but the badge and shoulder patch were different than those of their local Westlake, Ohio, PD. In his right hand he clenched a hunting knife, streaked with glistening red.
Releasing her foot, he leaned closer to her and she saw her chance. She thrust the scissors forward, but he responded with psychic ease, dodging her attack, slapping her arm away, scissors clattering across the floor somewhere.
As she watched her weapon twirl away, pain exploded inside her head, and as she fell back, she realized the attacker had punched her in the side of the head, which knocked her jarringly onto the floor.
The pain seemed to be everywhere and even smacking her head on the hard flooring didn’t register much. Jordan blinked and fought to clear her mind. Even as she did, her attacker grabbed a hank of hair and yanked, forcing Jordan to her feet with a fresh yowl of pain.
She tottered in his grasp, trying to get her feet under her, eyes darting around the room searching for another weapon and, at all costs, trying to avoid her dead mother.
Her attacker pulled her around until they were face-to-face, only inches apart, as if they were dancing — his icy blue eyes boring into her. She tried to turn away, but he jerked her hair and made her look at him again. This time anger mixed with her terror and she took a good look at her mother’s murderer. And probably her father’s, and her brother’s... who would be here helping if they could...
...if they were alive.
She doubted she’d survive this, but in case she did, she would memorize every detail about him. That he wore no mask meant he would likely kill her. She had a sudden fatalistic, even Zen-like realization of that. But if she could survive, she would know this bastard...
Start with this: he’s wearing contact lenses. Are his eyes really blue, or not?
He smells of cologne mixed with sweat from his struggle, making a pungent, sickly sweet odor.
The knife danced into her line of sight, her mother’s blood glistening on the blade.
Jordan tried not to stare at the steel shaft bobbing slowly like a serpent poised to strike. What gripped her now was not fear of death — she was past that — but the anticipation of pain. The pain she did fear, and that sent hot tears flowing.
“This is what I do,” he said, almost calm about it.
She said nothing, but her face must have registered her confusion at his too-simple explanation for slaughtering her family.
“It’s what I do,” he said, as if volume and repetition would make her suddenly understand his gibberish.
She managed, “You kill... families?”
He shook his head, obviously angry that she was too slow to grasp his meaning. “I reestablish the natural order... God’s natural order.”
“God told you to kill my family?”
His eyes flared and he smiled. “Yes. You perceive. How nice that you perceive.”
“I perceive that you’re insane!”
The eyes went cold again, as lifeless as her mother’s, and Jordan realized too late that she had made a mistake. Using her hair as a handle, he whipped her around, smashing her face into the mirror, glass shattering.
She crumpled, landing atop the dressing table, fingers scrabbling for a weapon — he’d found something to break that mirror for her, hadn’t he? — shards, or even a brush, makeup, anything, but he still held on to her long black hair and jerked her back to a standing position. Her hands empty, something warm and wet on her cheeks. That coppery taste on her lips was blood.
Better to keep her mouth shut.
Still using her hair like reins, he forced her to the floor next to her mother.
“Pick her up,” the intruder said.
Jordan looked at the dead body of her mother and began to sob. “I... I can’t... she’s too... too heavy.”
Her mother was barely bigger than her, but that was what she said to try to get out of the terrible task demanded of her.
“Then drag her,” the intruder said.
“What?... Where?”
He squatted down and showed her the knife again. “Wherever I tell you to.”
To punctuate his statement, he jabbed the knife deep into her mother’s back, just above the kidney.
Jordan cried out, as if the knife had gone into her.
There was blood, but not very much. Maybe dead people didn’t bleed.
“Now,” the intruder said.
Forcing herself to her feet, Jordan bent at the knees and picked her mother up under the arms. Though it made no difference now, Jordan tried to be gentle.
“Downstairs.”
The wood floor was slick with her mother’s blood and even as she struggled with her burden, Jordan fought to keep her balance, tears running freely down her cheeks again, mixing with the blood from the cuts inflicted by the mirror. To her surprise, Jordan felt no pain — no fear, really. Was this what it was like to accept death? It was that moment when the dentist’s drill sends you to that place where you lull yourself, This will be over soon, this will be over...
She dragged her poor mother into the hallway, heaving for breath.
The stairs now.
The intruder preceded her, going down backward, one knife-gripped hand also holding on to Jordan’s hair, the other on the railing. Her back to him, holding her mother from behind, she would take a step down, drag her mother a step, take another step, drag her mother a step...
Halfway down, she let go of Mom, and hurled her weight into the man, knocking him backward, her hair released reflexively as he fell. She spun to push him again, but he had regained his balance, and slapped her.
Slapped her hard, her head twisting impossibly on her neck.
Then, with the knife at her throat, his other hand gripping her by a bicep, he trotted her down the stairs and flung her to the floor. She was pushing up groggily to see the horrific sight of the intruder dragging her mother down the stairs by one arm, bump bump bumping, like a terrible Slinky.
She began to cry and then he was shaking her, as if she had fallen asleep in the midst of an important task. He had dumped her mother on the entryway floor nearby.
He pointed toward the living room. “In there. Take her!”
Holding her mother from behind, the back of the dead woman’s head near her face, Jordan hauled her burden, the small woman seeming heavy as a sack of grain. The smell of her mother’s hair lingering in Jordan’s nostrils reminded the girl of how comforting that scent had been on every other day of her life.