*trigger warning
Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Thirty Six
The third and final shot was somehow even louder, Felecia didn’t register the echo as the man laying on the ground screaming jerked and went limp. The man using Felecia as a shield pulled away from the shot and loosened his grasp on her considerably. Felecia saw the man on the ground, a channel had been blown through the top of his head. The person doing the shooting wasn’t a good shot, they were grand. They crippled the man first to make a point, a point the idiot still loosely holding onto Felecia wasn’t taking.
The man who still had Felecia by the waist was busy backing away and coming up with something vulgar to add to his list when Felecia used the moment to her advantage. She drove her good hand down past the arm holding her midsection and farther still until she was learning quit heavily to one side.
There would only be one chance, a miss or a close call would let the man know what Felecia was trying to do and he would either drop her on the ground and likely kick her to death or double his efforts in holding onto her while he strangled her to death on his way to cover. There was no panic, no terror or thought for her own life. Much like her last conscious moments in the hut with the lout beating her face in, Felecia was numb, calm, detached, slow and placid.
There was something inside of Felecia, it felt like a water snake, or a snail slowly working its way through the garden. Only the garden was her mind and the slow, slithering thing was what resided deep within her, the thing that made sure she survived in the hut. The darkness inside that made sure Felecia was busy using her good hand to go searching for the knife, to grasp it hard, to keep it there and use it when the time came.
Felecia let her hand brush the side of the man’s oily canvas trousers, she felt along the inner hem delicately as he hauled her backward with his careless steps into the frozen snow and loose mud. She waited, hoping for a fourth shot, the man holding onto her was showing plenty of himself and she was nothing but a limp, left leaning dead weight being held aloft by one tired arm. She could feel her heels digging in the mud and snow, the man’s head was above her and soon he might wind up dropping her anyway. The shot didn’t come though and Felecia let her slow, wandering hand reach the truss of the man’s oily canvas pants.
Grab, pull, and twist. The sensation was all awful, most of it was soft and squishy, like grabbing a handful of shucked shellfish, but there was something hard there as well, a single oval shape that Felecia felt push into her ring and pinky finger and that was where she applied the most pressure, the most of the pull and the twist.
The man holding onto Felecia moaned and started to squeal like a piglet with its foot caught in a fence. His terribly strong arm that held her in place yanked even harder and Felecia felt something push horribly inward before giving way. Suddenly breathing at all seemed an awful idea and the instinct to free herself from the awful grasp made Felecia yank and pull all the more until the man’s arm let loose while something being wrenched in her good hand also gave way and turned from rock hard to semi-solid.
Felecia wound up on the ground, dropped like so much trash into the frozen snow and wet mud. The slow, dull, slug inside her mind sent her good hand reaching into the pool of mud, blood, and brains that rested near the body of the man who took her knife from her. That hand came up holding onto the knife blade first and it took careful, focused, determination for Felecia to turn it around and wipe it off on the sleeve of her broken arm.
Crawling on her knees through slushy mud and chunks of frozen snow. Trying not to topple over into the pools of mud or blood or spattered gore. Seeing bloody red doubles of everything, Felecia waddled over to the man laying in the muck, curled up in a ball. He was no threat to anyone. The man was already conquered territory. That was no matter to the ugly slither inside of Felecia as she crawled over to him and knelt above him with the knife in her hand. No matter at all as she turned the knife around and brought her arm up and plunged it down into the man’s neck.
Felecia yanked at the knife and drove it down again into the man’s neck as he sputtered and gurgled his last, she repositioned herself and let the knife drag along the man’s jaw line up to his ear before she chose to raise the blade again and drive it down into the thicker material guarding his temple. The man who used Felecia as a shield on his way to slowly strangling the life out of here died there, drumming out his last moments as he kicked and jerked against her in the mud and snow.