Brutal Precious
Page 35

Two of the men start towards Jack, but he ducks under their grasp and bolts for Sophia. One man throws himself on Jack, slamming them both to the ground in a spray of pine needles and dirt.
“Jack!” Sophia screams. Jack swears, kick and punching and thrashing like a wild animal, but the other two men catch up and put his arms behind him in a lock, forcing him to his knees.
A soft fog starts to roll in through the trees. The other men turn to Sophia, who screams and curls against a tree trunk like it’ll offer her some protection.
“Leave her alone!” Jack screams, a piercing scream that rips my heart into jagged pieces. “You f**king bastards, pick on someone who can fight back! No! No, Sophia! Sophia, run!”
“N-No,” Avery’s voice is clear, though Wren seems to be paralyzed, focused entirely on Sophia and Jack. “No, this isn’t how it’s supposed to – back off. Just back off.”
Her whispered commands don’t work. The men close in, and Sophia puts her head in her hands.
“Help me, Jack,” She cries. Some of the men sway, obviously drunk, as they close the gap and start pulling at Sophia’s dress. I choke back bile but Jack reacts quicker – the man holding him cries out and collapses, and Jack jumps up, scooping the aluminum baseball bat the man dropped and swinging it into the man, over and over and over. Avery swears, and even shell-shocked Wren flinches. Two men dive for Jack, but Jack slips through their meaty arms and swings for their skulls, a hollow, sickening thwack resounding through the trees when metal meets bone. The fourth man fumbles with something in his jacket, a gun maybe, but Jack ducks behind the first man who’s hauled himself off the ground, and the bullet cuts into the man’s shoulder, the force of it pinning him to the ground again. Jack takes the moment to lunge in, slamming the bat over the gunman’s neck. He crumples like a rag doll, the gun dropping into the leaves.
The whole time, Jack is grinning madly, his mouth and face blood-spattered.
The fifth man, the one who’d pinned Sophia to the tree, is frantically trying to pull his pants on. Jack slams the bat into his side, and the man staggers into the leaves, reaching for the gun. But Jack swings again, and Sophia screams. Something cracks, and it isn’t the bat, and the man holds his hand up, and against the night vision it’s a cluster of broken bones and mangled meat and dangling skin. The man looks at it, stunned, and then the pain catches up to him, and he starts crying and crawling away and begging.
“Please, man, we didn’t mean – we weren’t gonna –”
The man gets up, and starts running, and Jack throws back his head and laughs, and then chases after him. They disappear into the gloom, the night vision losing sight of them, but not of the sobbing Sophia, who staggers to her feet and tries to pull her dress back on. She’s shaking too badly. She tries to walk away, but trips on something, and her fall isn’t far but she rolls down the hill, hitting trees with vicious momentum until she rolls to a stop. There’s a stunned silence, minutes ticking by as Sophia squirms and there’s a squelching noise and then she goes still, her white-blonde hair splaying in the pine needles.
“Holy f**k,” Avery whispers. “Holy –”
From the darkness, Jack returns and a shiver runs through me, his grin gone and an even more terrifying expression in its place – one I’ve come to know very well.
The mask.
The ice mask is wearing him.
But it lasts for only a second, because when he sees Sophia he makes a choked noise and runs to her, dropping the bloodstained bat and cradling her in his arms.
“Soph,” He whispers. “Sophie, Sophie please –”
He holds his hand out, sticky and wet with blood. Sophia doesn’t move. He pats the pine needles around Sophia’s body and chokes again, the sound of a wild animal shot through. Blood. A pool of blood around her pelvis, her floral dress stained with it.
There’s a noise, like Avery shifting and her shoe breaking a twig. Jack’s head snaps up, eyes glowing an unholy white with the night vision, and he grabs the bat, face twisting with rage. Avery swears and takes off running, and as Jack advances, Wren’s paralysis breaks and he drops the camera, the lens barely catching his shoes as they flash by. Jack’s bigger shoes pass just a split-second after.
“I’ll kill you!” His screams echo. “I’ll f**king kill you!”
He keeps screaming, the sound fading and coming back, like he’s walking in circles. The metallic noise of a bat hitting splintering wood resounds, and his screams are deep and strong and furious and riddled with pain, and over them, Nameless finally speaks.
“He keeps screaming for a while. And then the tape cuts out.”
The tablet screen goes blue, then goes dark. My hands want to shake, but I compose them. Nameless is watching me for a reaction.
“So?” I say. “What was I supposed to learn from this?”
Nameless quirks a brow. “You weren’t terrified? He beat four men into pulp and killed the last one – ”
“The last one ran off the cliff because it was dark,” I say smoothly. “Jack didn’t push him. He killed himself.”
“He wouldn’t have been running if Jack wasn’t chasing him,” Nameless counters. “Don’t defend him. He killed a man and he’s going to jail for it once we turn this tape in to the feds.”
“He didn’t, and there’s no body anyway,” I retort. “You can’t prove anything.”
“Belina Hernandez. You know her, don’t you? You went to visit her.”
“How do you know –”
“Her pathetic computer was very easy to access. She keeps a journal on it. Belina Hernandez is the wife of the man who ran off the cliff; James Hernandez. Your bloodthirsty nemesis has been paying her child support under the guise of federal funds because he’s so guilt-ridden. How do you think it’ll look when the jury sees that? He’s practically convinced he killed James, and that’ll convince the jury.”
“He was protecting Sophia!” I snarl.
“Protecting is one thing. Mindless violence is another. This tape shows the difference very clearly.”
I clutch the tablet and weigh the pros and cons of throwing it into an incinerator, but Nameless laughs.
“I know what you’re thinking. Don’t try it. I have many copies on different harddrives. You’d just be ruining a perfectly good tablet.”
Nameless stands, and I shrink into myself, fully aware again of how locked in this room we are. I grip the nail file, but he just laughs louder.
“I wanted to show you just who you think you’re in love with. He’s not me, that’s for sure. But he’s worse than me. He’s a killer. He’ll hurt you more than I ever did.”
He ducks just in time as I throw the tablet at his head, my chest heaving. It clunks against the wall, leaving an indent in the pink paint.
“Fuck you,” I spit. “No one will ever hurt me more than you did.”
The door behind me suddenly unlocks, and a wild-eyed, afro guy walks in.
“Oh, u-uh, shit. Sorry, wrong room.”
I lunge for the door, but Nameless calls me back.
“It’s been nice talking with you, piggy. I know you don’t like it, but you’ll have to do a lot more of it.”