Page 107 of Homebound
Did it matter? She huffed a small puff of air. Nothing mattered. She was just going through the motions.
The man stood up with her.
Gemma slowly went in the direction of her uninviting brick abode. The steps echoed loudly against the frozen ground, and she was almost at her grotto when she realized they weren’t her steps. She stopped and turned. The man with the watchful eyes stopped with her.
“Why are you following me?”
Upon closer inspection, he looked all wrong, sickly, as if rotting. His pallid face was peppered with open sores oozing pus.
His cracked lips split in a parody of a smile revealing blackened teeth. “What a tasty morsel you are.”
Morsel? He must be mad. “I have no money. I have nothing. If you plan to rob me, you’re wasting your time.”
His eyes bored into her, the maniacal gleam in them giving Gemma chills that had nothing to do with the cold.
“Morsel,” he repeated slowly.
She shrugged and started walking, the odd man’s steps following her. Morsel, what a croak. But some instinct, a part of human DNA integral to survival, forced her to veer off her beaten path and head away from the grotto. She didn’t know why and didn’t think about it.
Her steps quickened, a weak spurt of adrenaline pushing her forward. She threw a furtive glance over her shoulder and saw him walking after her at a close distance. With her body’s energy levels in the red zone, Gemma pushed on down a familiar street, turning at an abandoned plaza. The junkyard lay to her right, and the solid bulk of the prison loomed in the distance. Surprised to find herself in this part of town, she stopped and turned again to face the man.
“Stop following me! Go away!”
He withdrew a huge knife.
“Morsel.”
She understood then. Her eyes peeled wide as a flash of sheer terror heated her frozen bones. “You want toeatme?”
He displayed his decaying teeth, and his eyes squinted in anticipation. “Tasty girl. Tender meat.”
He fully intended to kill her and eat her flesh. Maybe not even in this order. Gemma had known for some time she was soon going to die, had resigned herself to her fate, but not in her worst nightmare had she imagined it to be like this. God, please, not like this.
She pivoted and broke into a run. Immediately, her lungs seized up, and she started panting from exhaustion. Her legs were laden, and running felt like wading in molasses. But she ran, and ran, and ran, and he ran after her. She had no chance, yet stopping was out of the question.
Her familiarity with the surroundings was her only advantage, and she feared not a significant one. There was the old church where she used to take Simon to feed him his yogurt. It seemed like eons ago. As if drawn to it by a magnet, Gemma awkwardly scaled the waist-high wall and fell inside. Scrambling off the floor, she stumbled deeper into the ruin, past the vast expanse of the nave. She scurried like a frightened rodent looking for a hiding place, adept at wedging into holes in walls.
Dropping on all fours, she crawled behind a heap of crumbled bricks.
The horrendous man had fallen behind, but not far. His footsteps crunched on frozen gravel as he rounded the building. He was no longer running when he walked in.
“Here, little kitty. I know you’re here. Come,” he sounded so terrifyingly cheery.
Gemma tried to make herself one with the bricks. Her heart fluttered inside her chest, the beats frequent and weak. Her vision was wonky. Her ears rang. From her vantage point at the floor level, all she could see was his feet shod in worn-out dirty boots. A good distance away at first, they came nearer as he crossed the nave.
“Come out, sweet thing. Come…”
She stared fixedly at his feet as they rounded the pile of bricks behind which she lay in a curled position and stopped. She knew he could see her plain as day.
“My sweet,” he laughed, a merry sound. She saw the tip of the large knife pointing down as he held it at his side.
Suddenly, there was a movement behind him, and another pair of boots came into view. Those steps were silent; the feet were larger. The boots’ surefooted wearer approached in a measured gait, the toes turned ever so slightly inward as he walked. Gemma stopped breathing.
The man with the knife continued laughing, anticipation making him giddy and lax. He never heard the other one come from behind. A whoosh, and the laughter turned into an aborted gurgle. The knife fell from his hand… and his head rolled off his shoulders, cracking as it hit the floor. The body followed the head and tumbled down. A clean slice of the cut neck came to rest inches from Gemma’s face, blood coming out in spurts as the dying heart continued its spasmodic pumps. She would have gagged, but weakened as her body had become, it wouldn’t rise to the occasion.
One booted foot impatiently pushed the body aside clearing the way for Gemma to get out. He lowered himself into a crouch in front of her. A bloodied hunting knife hung from his loose fingers.
“Hello, Gemma.” The obsidian eyes that took up almost half of his face betrayed no emotion.
