Where am I? How did I get here?
Then, despite the pounding in her skull, Acadia remembered her mother’s terror and Sunday telling her about the gun with the hair trigger.
Where is he? Where am I?
Thunder cracked. Lightning scarred the sky. The wind reversed direction and gusted up a sickening stench, and Acadia knew exactly where she was.
Closing her eyes, she screamed, and screamed again.
But the sounds that made it through the gag, though tortured and shrill, were muffled by the wind, no more than the noise of a teapot boiling in another part of the house or a train horn blowing in the distance, something easily dismissed on a dark and stormy night.
Acadia didn’t care that no one could hear her. She screamed and yanked at her restraints until the skin at her wrist and ankles was raw, and her stomach seized up in knots. Flopping back in the mud on the bank above the backwater slough where her father’s alligators fed, she started to sob.
There was a snapping noise, and a soft glowing light came over her from above and behind her head. It came closer, grew stronger. Acadia strained against her bindings, arched her head to look backward, and saw Marcus Sunday holding two of the Coleman lanterns her mother kept around for hurricanes.
Sunday hung them on barbed wire strung between fence posts driven into the ground. Her wrists were bound to the bottom of those same posts. She looked down at her feet, saw her ankles tied to two other posts closer to the water.
“Your mother told me the light brings them,” Sunday said, appearing at Acadia’s right side. “Light and blood.”
He got out a pocketknife, locked the blade open, and crouched beside her. As he ran the dull blade up one side of her rib cage and across her breast, Acadia shook like someone lost in a snowstorm.
“Your mother likes to talk,” Sunday went on. “Funny how some people are like that when they meet a published writer, just willing to open up and tell you all sorts of crazy things about themselves.”
“Please, don’t hurt her,” Acadia tried to say through the gag.
“What’s that?” Sunday said. “I can’t get what you’re trying to say there.”
She screamed at him so hard, her face flamed red and veins bulged at her pounding temples.
“I didn’t understand that one either,” Sunday said, amused. “But I got the subtext, and honestly, lover, I don’t give a shit about you begging for yourself or your mother. I don’t even care to hear your flimsy excuses or pleas for mercy. I just need you both out of the way so I can move on.”
He gestured at the slough and then up the bank to her. “And this little tableau? A gift of serendipity, an irony for me to treasure to the end of my days.”
Acadia panted in the mud, and then screamed and writhed in agony when Sunday pressed the blade to her navel and sliced shallowly, down a good six inches. Blood poured from the wound.
“You can imagine now, can’t you?” Sunday asked. “How they’ll come for the place that’s bleeding first?”
Acadia lost all control then, screaming and weeping in convulsions of fear th
at went on for a full minute and left her spent and almost catatonic.
“We could have gone farther, you and I,” Sunday said, pocketing the knife. “A lot farther. But you pressed the issue, lover, so here you are, and here come your dead daddy’s pets. I’m betting they’ll make you sing before they’re done.”
“No, Marcus,” Acadia tried to say through the gag. “Please?”
But Sunday snorted, walked away, and didn’t look back.
For several long minutes there was only the howling of the wind and the rain. Then, as if the eye of the storm was passing overhead, the rain slowed to a drizzle, the wind died, and the moon peeked out through a vent in the clouds.
“Help!” Acadia screamed through her gag, managing to make a long, insistent whine of it. “Mom!”
She stopped, breathed in through her nose in short bursts, trying to listen.
Swish.
Plop.
Blip.