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The gun was slippery between my sweaty fingers and palm. I kept it pointed down and away from me. The last thing I wanted was to accidentally blow a few toes off. After about thirty minutes, I’d almost forgotten my nudity. The indignity of it fading to a vague embarrassment. Sam was really being a dick at this point.
If I had to be out here hunting, I’d also make sure to try and see what I could of our surroundings. I wanted to see the fence Bri talked about. Maybe there was a way to get through it. Unless it was wrapped in razor wire or something, there should be some way to climb over or under it. Maybe a tree was close to it that we could climb and then jump over. Hobbling through the woods with a broken leg was better than staying in the house.
The sun was high and beating down on the forest when I heard it. A loud rustling sound to my right. The noise startled me. My foot slipped, sending me crashing down sprawling. An instant later a grunt sounded from my left followed by a heaving breath. Before I could get to my feet, the crashing sound of a person sprinting through the underbrush and foliage erupted, exploding the silence of the night. Instinct drove me to race after the sound.
Pine cones and small stones jabbed into my bare feet, but the pain faded as each step brought me closer to my prey. Lips drawn back, eyes narrowed, I must have looked like a madwoman full of bloodlust as I chased. Whoever it was, they were slow. Even with their head start, I managed to decrease the distance, catching up to them. Through the branches and vines that clogged the forest between the trees, I could see the outline of the person. A heavy, almost obese figure lumbering along. In their right hand, I thought I could see a club or baseball bat.
I raised my gun as I ran, aimed it at their leg, and fired. A fucking terrible shot. The bullet slammed into a tree at least ten feet to the person’s right, but the sound of the gun must have caught them off guard. They yelped and tripped over their feet, landing in a tumble of limbs, the bat spinning free of their hand.
Pushing through some low hanging branches, I came upon the figure in the small clearing where he fell. The full moon light shone down, illuminating everything. It was a man, very overweight, sweating and groaning in panic. When he rolled over and locked eyes with me I almost dropped my pistol. Mr. Cartwright? He stared back and recognition dawned on his face. He blinked rapidly like his brain tried to flip through the mental files.
"De…Delilah? Wait, no, Dahlia? Dahlia, Is that you?" he muttered, sweat glistening on his upper lip.
When I’d been taken from my parents, it had been nearly ten weeks before they placed me with my final foster family. That home had been a living hell. Before I’d been placed there, the DFCS put me in a short term foster home. David and Michelle Cartwright. It had been a short stay, and one of the few times in my life things had been safe and I’d been taken care of. The juxtaposition with my final home had made that departure much more bitter. Mr. and Mrs. Cartwright had been the closest thing to a real mom and dad I’d had until meeting Clint and Maria. The fact that he was here, in front of me, in this place, sent an icy stab of horror into my guts.
Raising the pistol, I aimed at his face. "Why are you here? Tell me the truth, Mr. Cartwright."
His eyes flitted down to my naked body, but there was not lust or excitement in his eyes, only a mild and confused curiosity before bringing his gaze back to mine.
"Um, I don’t know." He was lying. I could see it. The lie was written all over his face.
Tears threatened to spill from my eyes. One of the few people I’d liked was here. Sam only brought sadistic and sick people here. He wouldn’t be in this place otherwise. The thought was shoved away when I remembered what Sam had forced me to do to Clint. Maybe that wasn’t the case. What if he’d brought this poor man here because he was someone I’d had fond memories of? Was Sam going to make me torture and murder the only other father figure I’d ever had?
The gun remained trained on his head. Having that barrel pointed at his face must have made something in his mind snap. His face crumpled, and he started to sob. His voice through the tears turned my stomach.
"I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt them. They liked it. I never did anything they didn’t want me to. No one understands."
"What are you talking about?" My voice wavered as I spoke.
He was crying now, shaking his head. "Those boys needed a male figure in their life. Someone to, to, to, I don’t know, show them about life."
Suddenly it all made sense. Why he was here, what he was saying. I wanted to vomit. "Boys? Did you molest boys?" The words tasted bitter on my tongue.
A long forgotten memory floated to the surface. He’d bought me a new pair of shoes a few days after being placed with them. How happy I’d been and how amazing it was when he and his wife had taken me to get ice cream when we were done. In the days after my permanent family took me in, I’d sobbed myself to sleep for weeks wishing I could be with the Cartwrights instead. Now all those good memories were washed away like a chalk drawing in the rain.
Shaking his head fervently, he reached forward almost in supplication. "No. Not molest. That’s," he clasped his hands into fists, "ugh, that’s the word they keep using. No one understands. It was consensual. They were young but that didn’t mean they didn’t want it. I understood the truth, but even Michelle didn’t believe me. No one understands. It was done out of love. Reciprocal."
I fired the gun. Yanking on the trigger as hard as I could, unwilling to hear anymore. A few weeks before I would have hesitated, my mind would have been horrified by the idea of death. Now? I’d been innoculated to the horrors. At that moment, all I wanted was to end the life of a monster, regardless of whether they’d been kind to me.
My aim was still shit, even from a couple feet away. The bullet, rather than blowing his brains out the back of his skull, instead tore through the cartilage of his left ear, blowing the appendage apart. He belted out a guttural scream and clamped a hand to the ruined side of his head.
Things happened fast. The gunshot surprised me again, even though I’d been more prepared. I almost dropped the weapon a second time. While I fumbled to secure it Mr. Cartwright rolled to the side, snapping his hand out to grab the baseball bat he’d dropped. He caught it, swung backhand without looking, and managed to make contact with the elbow of my hand holding the gun. It didn’t hit hard enough to break any bones, but it caught the nerve cluster inside my elbow. The funny bone. My hand immediately went numb, my fingers turned to water, and the gun did fall from my hand.
Rather than pressing his advantage and trying to beat me senseless with the bat, he scrambled to his feet and took off again. I leaped forward, grabbing him around the ankles with my good hand, the other was tingling and beginning to wake up. Cartwright fell and bashed his nose on the ground.
"Oh god," he screamed, clutching his face.
He rolled over as I climbed up his massive frame, dragging the knife out of its sheath. My teeth were bared in a grimace of determination. Part of me wanted him dead even more than when I’d been punishing my father or Branson. Those men had been obvious scumbags. The type of people you’d more than likely avoid if they were walking toward you in the grocery store. This guy? He’d put on a show of being a generous and kind soul, a man who would help a young girl for a few weeks, the kind of person you’d think it was okay to leave a child alone with. He’d used that and had done unspeakable things to little boys. Somehow that cloak of benevolence was more unspeakable than outright and overt douchebaggery of someone like Branson.
The knife rose up, ready to arch down, and fear flashed in his eyes. He shot his hand out, fingers slick with the blood of his broken nose, but he managed to catch my wrist the moment it descended. Instead of slamming the blade home in his chest, my tiny arm stopped mid air, caught by his meaty paw. He was too damned big. Too strong. He jerked and twisted my hand around until the blade sliced across the forearm of my other arm. Not deep but enough for the pain to shock me. Breaking my concentration. Gasping and tumbling off of him, I still managed to keep hold of the weapon. Cartwright jumped to his feet and ran.
Instead of chasing immediately, I spent a few precious seconds searching for the gun in the moonlight, running my hands through the leaves and dirt until I found the rigid metal. With the pistol back in my possession, my pursuit began. It didn’t take long for me to realize I’d fucked up by looking for the gun. The adrenaline of almost being killed twice must have spurred him on faster than his obese frame would have usually allowed. Already, the sounds of his escape were fading, getting more distant.
The gym in the mansion had made me stronger and given me more endurance than I’d had in my entire life, but running through a forest naked with no shoes was not a great way to chase someone. Sharp rocks jabbed at my heels, making me wince and stop to rub the pain away, the weird tactical vest was rubbing my armpits raw, and the forest was getting more dense as I went, the moonlight held back by the canopy. It was almost like walking blindly. It went on like that for over an hour. Searching, listening, I even tried to sniff the air like a damned dog at—one point hoping I might catch the smell of Cartwright’s sweaty ass—but it was pointless. I’d lost him. The bitterness in my heart burned like acid at the back of my throat. I didn’t just want to punish him, I needed to punish him. My time in the mansion had changed me at a fundamental level, and this was the first time I’d truly understood that. My desire to make him pay pushed me on, hunting for that natural high that came from hurting someone who deserved it. The warm and pleasant sensation that trickled down my spine as the guilty screamed and begged, the wetness that crept between my legs as the blood began to flow out of their bodies. The weird part was, that while I ran through the forest, I wasn’t terrified by that fact. Instead, I took solace in the fact that after all the things Sam had taken from me, there’d been one thing he’d done that I could be grateful for. He’d made me strong.
The search continued, but it was probably pointless. Stumbling on Cartwright earlier had been a fluke. The area around the mansion and warehouse was huge. Rather than fully attempting to find the man, I used the hunt as a way to search for the fence Bri had mentioned. I didn’t know if Sam was somehow watching me through hidden cameras, or maybe tracking the cuff device itself. Hell, it could have been as simple as a built in timer. Either way, I had to be careful. It had to at least appear like I was still hunting for my prey, even if my actual search had turned toward a route of escape.
The problem was I had no clue about my orientation. For all I knew, I could have been walking back toward the warehouse instead of away from it. That couldn’t be helped though. Instead, I did my best to move in a straight line. Eventually I’d either come to the house or this mythical fence. Nearly two hours into my search, something appeared in the distance. A bright gray against the blackness of the forest. Moving closer, my vision adjusted, finding it was metal reflecting the light of the moon. The fence. It was still too far away and too dark for me to get a good look at it, but the top of the fence was clearly visible, as well as the spiral rings of barbed wire that rested upon it.
