Taken Page 3

  Jack tore the tape from her lips with one sudden yank. She let out a loud scream, and rolled over onto her stomach on the dining table, to find her face only inches from Dianne's breasts. Now unbound, she backed away from Dianne; she touched wounds Jack had carelessly inflicted with his knife, wincing from pain. She placed her face into her blood-covered hands and began to cry.

  “Take off those rags she's got on, Jack. I want to see what we’ve got to work with here.”

  Jack began awkwardly tugging her shirt up and over her head. The waitress sat up straight, holding up one arm in a gesture Jack assumed was intended to make his job easier. But then her other hand shot into her fanny pack and came out with her tube of lipstick. Jack was happy to see that she was getting into the spirit of things; he knew this would all be so much nicer if she was a willing participant.

  The waitress slipped the cap off the tube; before Jack could react, he found himself getting a face full of pepper spray. He screeched in agony as she sprayed the caustic stuff right into his eyes. Jack tripped over a chair and fell onto the floor, where his skull thudded loudly against the linoleum.

  His head exploded with sparkling light, and pain seared from his eyes into the back of his head; he couldn’t see.

  The waitress was on him so fast that he never had a fighting chance. He heard a scraping, like alligator teeth grinding together, and then came real pain – like his head was imploding.

  A second traumatic blow to his head was accompanied by the brittle crack of splintering wood; then another blow, and an absolute tsunami of pain cascaded over him, leaving mass destruction in its wake.

  And then nothingness, as Jack passed out and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  When he regained consciousness, panic and pain were having an orgy inside his skull. His pulse quickened as he heard the brash bang he had heard a thousand times before, the screen door of his house slamming shut somewhere behind him.

  He was still blind from the pepper spray, his eyes felt like fried eggs that had been stomped into a shag-carpet by a grizzly bear with shit on its paws. He tried to blink the remnants of the pepper spray out of his eyes, but it was no use.

  Jack could hear fervent activity going on in the room around him, but was too blind to see what was happening. He licked his lips, and gagged in revulsion as the pepper spray burned his gums and tongue.

  As he attempted to wipe his eyes with his sleeve, he realized the gravity of his situation. He realized he was bound tightly to a chair. How the hell had this happened? How had he lost control so utterly and completely? How had the waif-like waitress managed to turn the tables on him so successfully?

  Losing his ability to see was the most terrifying thing that had happened to him, but the sounds of movement erupting here and there around him held a close second. He struggled to free himself, but he couldn’t budge an inch. The waitress, it seemed, was a natural at this sort of thing.

  “Dianne,” he croaked. Her name ripped out of his throat and he began to cough convulsively, his throat on fire.

  Dianne did not reply, but he knew she was in the room with him. He sensed her presence. He caught a whiff of her perfume, and realized she had to be within feet of him.

  “Dianne?” he whispered. It took an alarming amount of effort.

  His sense of smell was suddenly awash with the strong vapors of gasoline.

  “Rayne,” he coughed. “What are you doing?”

  There was no response, not that he really expected one. Jack understood full well that the waitress held the reins now, and she was driving this horse straight into the ravine.

  He sensed someone approaching, and then his face was assaulted as the waitress scrubbed his eyes furiously with a bath towel she had gotten from the hall closet. His eyes were still sensitive and watery, but he could finally see blurry images and shadows.

  The waitress stood before him wild-eyed and disheveled. She reminded Jack of Sissy Spacek in the movie “Carrie”, after the scene where she is drenched with buckets of blood. Fresh blood was smeared across her face and was leaking out the wounds on her legs from where his knife had rent her flesh.

  She was holding his five gallon gas drum, the one he kept in the shed, the one he always kept full.

  He knew he was in bad trouble, but Jack was more worried about Dianne. He glanced around the room and saw her still sitting calmly in her chair, a ghostly shadow sitting directly across from him. Seeing her gave him a pang of relief as his stinging eyes tried to focus.

  He was about to whisper to Dianne that everything would be fine, everything would be okay; but then the waitress walked over to Dianne and doused her with gasoline, emptying half the drum on his Goddess.

  Jack called her name over and over in a high-pitched voice, like a helpless pig squealing in a cage. The waitress whirled around and told him to shut the fuck up.

  “You know what Jack?” she asked, in a tone more incredulous than afraid, “I guess I should have known, since you’re obviously a dummy that your wife would turn out to be a dummy, too.”

  “Leave her alone you bitch!” he wailed. Leave her alone! Don’t you dare hurt my Dianne!”

  The waitress swung the gas can with all her might at the side of his head. There was nothing he could do to protect himself from her. He heard and felt the impact at the same time, like a gong being struck. It felt as exquisite as one can ever hope pain to feel.

  “Watch this, Jack,” she said, and walked into the living room. His vision was still blurry; Jack was unable to comprehend what she carried back into the dining room until she was right in front of him. He saw to his dismay that she was brandishing his hatchet, the one he kept with the wood next to the fireplace, with maniacal glee.

  Jack’s heart thumped and kicked with fear at the sight of the razor-sharp blade.

  “Stop,” he cried. “You can go. Just leave, please leave us alone. I’m sorry.”

  He writhed and wriggled, attempting vainly to get free before Dianne was harmed. The waitress, sensing his distress, turned and walked to his Goddess’s side, gently stroking her hair.

  “Take off those rags she's got on, Jack. I want to see what we’ve got to work with here,” the waitress sneered sarcastically, mocking him. She took one of Dianne’s hands and laid her arm palm-down on the table.

  Without hesitation, the waitress raised the hatchet and brought it down in a tight arc; the blow severed Dianne’s arm cleanly at the elbow with a single savage stroke of which the waitress’s petite frame did not appear capable, but apparently was.

  Jack cringed in horror as he waited for Dianne’s scream and the gush of blood from her newly dismembered arm; but neither came.

  It was all too much. He pissed himself, and as the warmth spread across his inner thigh the hatchet blade came crashing down into Dianne’s shoulder with a cold flash.

  Again, Dianne sat stoic and silent; Jack, however, screamed enough for both of them.

  The waitress dropped the hatchet to the floor, and began to dig around in her pocket. When the waitress pulled her hand back out of her pocket, Jack saw that she held something shiny in her fist. Even though he could barely see, he knew instantly what it was and his heart sank.

  It was his Zippo lighter.

  The waitress flipped it open, striking it alight in one fluid motion. For a moment the waitress held the flame close to her chest, as she canted her head upwards toward the ceiling. Jack thought she looked as though she was praying.

  Then she looked into Jack's eyes deeply, as though she was searching for something there. Once it was clear that she had found what she was looking for in them, she held the tip of the guttering flame against Dianne's hair.

  An immense whooshing sound filled the dining room, accompanied by the heat and intense light of an instantaneous blaze. Dianne was wholly devoured in the sudden eruption of flame; she burned fiercely.

  The waitress walked away from the burning pyre and stood before Jack.

  “How could you love that thing, you
idiot?”

  Jack watched with growing confusion as Dianne’s body melted in front of him, black smoke pouring from it upward toward the ceiling. She never moved once, not even a twitch, as she sat there burning.

  Jack’s vision was now almost back to normal. He was helpless to do anything but sit and watch as his beloved burned. What he saw was more than enough to make him wish he was still blind. She had been so beautiful, and now she had become a charred and melting blob, sagging and guttering in front of him.

  Jack was lost; he still could not understand this. It was incomprehensible to him that his Goddess was dying right here, right now, melting in front of his burning eyes.

  What kind of cruel trick is this? He thought. That isn’t Dianne, it couldn’t be.

  The waitress tapped him on the shoulder. As he turned to look at her, she doused him with the remaining gasoline. As the gas sluiced down his body, he watched as she poured a swath along the counter tops and along the floor all the way to the front door.

  She was going to light it like a fuse, he realized. The pepper spray had burned, but he knew nothing could ever prepare him for the pure agony he was about to experience.

  “I need help, Rayne.” he said desperately. “You know I do. I'm not right, and I need help. You can’t burn me up like this. You can’t just kill me.”

  She stared at him coldly, unmoved by his pleas for mercy.

  “I told you not to ever say my name again, freak.”

  Across from Jack, the remnants of the department store mannequin were settling, bits of melted plastic dropped to the dining room floor as the flames began to weaken.

  “There was something I wanted to tell you last night, after you gave me this,” she said, and held the Zippo lighter out in front of her.

  “But you never gave me a chance, did you, Jack? You think I’m just some piece of trash no one would ever miss – a random victim, right, Jack? Well, you fucked with the wrong bitch.”

  The waitress was shaking now, her voice cracking with panic. It was at that moment Jack knew he was going to die.

  “Anyway, Jack,” she spat at him, “I have my chance to say now what I wanted to say then: Thanks for the light, mother fucker.”

  Then Rayne struck the flint, dropped the lighter into his lap, and walked out of the house into the cool night air, leaving his screams behind her.

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  It was a