Prey For Us Sinners/Part 3
Part 3
Madison Malholtra  |
Lunchmeat  |
Julie Skels  |
Duncan Slade  | |
Anais Duprey opened the wine bottle with a pop that made all four of her trauma-sharpened guests flinch. Her daughter stood beside her, watching silently. The girl, small and freckled, reminded Julie of an overpriced doll in a storefront window. Then Anais sent her a look and the little girl retreated to the safety of the nearby farmhouse without saying a word. Only then did Anais begin to pour.
The wine was heavy and deep red.
There was something to this woman. A focus. Had Julie not known what she knew – that this waif with streaks of grey in her hair had fought and killed in a deadly game – she would have assumed the woman a retired dancer. Ballet perhaps. There was a way to her; so in control of her body. The way her back stayed straight. How one arm hung perfectly still as the other poured the wine for her guests.
Did she look like a killer? What does a killer look like?
She’d asked this question before. A faint memory lingered. Of standing naked in front of a bathroom mirror. Asking, is this the smile of a killer? Are these the eyes of a woman who has just set a man on fire? And then the realization that she looked the same and even though everything had changed, maybe nothing was different.
Anais finished pouring. No one drank, not at first.
"There are fewer than sixty bottles of this particular wine left. In the entire world. If I was going to poison you all, I promise, I’d pick a different vintage," Anais said. She helped herself to a glass and took a drink.
"The man you seek, the one who started this, who runs the games… he gave this bottle to me. It is my prize. A new bottle on the first day of Spring. Every year as long as I live."
Lunchmeat laughed under his breath. "Lady," he said. "You fought in their game and your prize was membership in a wine club?"
Anais smiled back at him. "No, my prize was something else. And with it, they give me wine and they give me solitude. This entire vineyard is mine. It is my monastery."
"And the girl? Did he give you her too?" Mal said with just a touch of venom.
"No," Anais said. "She is my doing. My daughter."
"Does she know?"
Anais shook her head with that careful control. Maybe she was a dancer. Before.
"She does not. And I wish to keep it that way. I earned my peace. And I wish it for her too. If when I am done talking, you decide to murder me, I ask that you hide my body well. So that Annalise does not find my body amongst the vines."
Anais’ words conjured up an image in Julie’s mind. The overpriced doll girl, her face painted with curiosity and now just a little bit of concern. Where was her mother? She had been with those strange people. The big man with the markings on his face and the one with the eye patch and the girl with the metal teeth and the grey-pink hair. They were gone and yet, where was mother? Now the little girl is walking through the vineyard, calling out her mother’s name. Or would she just call out "mama" endlessly?
Mama...
Mama...
Calling it even as she finds Anais lying in the dirt, little black hole below her right eye from where the bullet entered. The exit wound has taken off most of her skull.
Mama...
Mama...
The sound of heavy breathing snapped Julie back to attention. A laugh. Who was laughing?
"I told you, we won’t kill you if you help us," Mal said. "We need to find him. Sergei Kalimnick. The survivor of Erangel."
"And are you going to kill him?" Anais asked flatly.
They all shared a look at that question. Duncan and Mal were already nodding, determined. Lunchmeat seemed more unsure. They had talked about this; it seemed this was all they talked about at times. And yet Julie now couldn’t remember the answer. Were they going to kill Sergei Kalimnick?
"The man is a monster. Plain as freakin’ day," Duncan said, reaching for the bottle to refill his glass. "He deserves to die for everything he’s done."
"Nothing about this is plain, Mister Slade," Anais said. Julie noted a slight look of surprise on Duncan’s face – she knew his name.
"You were broken. Not just you in particular. All of you," Anais said looking over the group. Her words came out slow and rehearsed. "And he found you and he scooped you up like a child who finds a bird with a bent wing. That Battleground was a little box he placed you in. So you could be reborn and fly again."
Duncan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "How do you say Stockholm Syndrome in French?"
Julie didn’t know what that meant, but Anais clearly did. She locked eyes with Duncan and sipped her wine. "I understand you have every right to be skeptical. But you didn’t finish. You stepped into the river and ran from your baptism. Why? Because the water was too cold?"
Lunchmeat sighed. "Everywhere we go, we just keep finding crazier and crazier people."
"I wasn’t incarcerated when I volunteered for the game," Anais said. "But I was in a prison of a kind. Of my own making. I owed money – a great deal – to terrible people. People who would hurt the ones I loved. I was going to take my own life to protect them. But I couldn’t. Because in addition to being an addict and a weak person, I was also a coward."
Anais looked from Duncan to Julie. She clearly knew about them. But did she know everything? Did this woman know her crimes? Did she know about the Monster?
Somewhere in the dark something laughed at that.
"They found me," Anais said. "And they asked me the question. The same question I imagine they asked you. ‘Do you consider yourself a survivor?’. And I lied and I told them I did.
"Why?" Julie said.
"For the same reason I… the same reason the old me did everything. Because I was afraid. I spent my whole life being afraid. It was no different, being on that cargo plane, clutching my parachute, afraid to look in the eyes of the men and women..."
She trailed off for a moment. Julie could tell – Anais was back there. On the plane. Reliving it.
"I thought I should wait to jump. Let the eager, the blood thirsty, jump first. But then I started to panic. The thought came to me: I’d be waiting to jump with the tacticians. The strategists. The longer I waited on the plane, the more I thought I’d be tempting one of the others to follow me down. Me specifically. There were not many women on the plane, maybe I was a target.
So I jumped. I landed in the center of the island. I still don’t know where it was held, my Battleground. Somewhere cold and desolate. The sun never came out – not once in the three days I spent there.
I searched for a weapon. I found ammunition – I couldn’t tell what went with what but it didn’t matter because I couldn’t find a gun. I found a backpack loaded with medical gear. Morphine. Bandages.
And then I found the blade. Three feet long and sharp. A machete."
Julie watched as the woman silently mouthed the words – machete – a few more times. Like a resonating prayer.
Duncan, Mal, Lunchmeat – they were ready to flip the table and maybe hurt her just moments ago. Now they were quiet. The story wasn’t just taking Anais back – it was taking them all back.
"Maybe if I had kept looking I would have found a gun," Anais continued. "But I was terrified. Just like I had been all my life. And when I saw the car, a rusted old sedan they had placed on the island, keys in the ignition, I hid inside it. In the backseat. Like a child. I curled up in the floor well and I cried. I realized that I was too afraid to kill myself and so this was my sentence. Suicide by Battleground."
"I sat there, shivering. I could have turned the car on for heat but I was too afraid to even do that. That someone would hear it. I don’t know how much time passed. It was almost night when I heard someone. The footsteps sounded so loud. Like it was a ploy, like they wanted me to know they were coming. They came into the car and sat behind the wheel and I’ve never felt more afraid in my life and I knew I couldn’t move. And then I heard it."
"A voice."
Julie felt the hairs on her neck prickle. A wave of electric warmth tingled across her scalp.
"Get up you stupid girl, it said to me." And as afraid as I was of the man in the car, I was more afraid of the voice in my head. I got up and I didn’t have room in the car to swing so I just stabbed. With both hands.
"The blade went into his neck here," she said, placing a finger just above her collarbone. "The moment it went in I yanked it out and I struck again and again. And he just... opened up. All of him spilling onto the steering wheel and the windshield. And I just put it in him and took it out and put it in again and all I could think about was that we’re all just...
Anais looked over at Julie as she finished, "we’re all just bags of blood. And I had ripped his bag wide open."
Julie looked into her wine glass. The remains of the wine. Deep red.
"He died quickly. I took his body and I dragged it out from the driver’s seat. I didn’t know what to do – all I was thinking was that I couldn’t sit in the car with his body. And I couldn’t leave the car because I was so afraid. And so I dragged him around to the back and I unlocked the trunk."
"It was empty – the trunk – except for a wool blanket. I took it and I tried to lift up the dead man. I was now watching myself from outside my body. Watching from afar as this other woman, covered in blood, stuffed a corpse into the trunk of a rusted sedan."
"I went back into the car and I covered myself in the blanket with the machete between my legs. This is what I would do. I would not stalk the highlands with a high-powered rifle. I would not throw hand grenades at armed men. I would sit here with a wool blanket covering my body and when they came I would cut them open."
"How many?" Julie asked.
Anais stayed quiet. Did she not want to say? Did she not remember?
Finally she looked at Julie, emotionless. "Four more."
"Again and again. One in the dark, stinking of gunpowder and alcohol. He didn’t even notice the blood until he sat in it and I had the machete in his neck. In and out and in and out. This one fought me. But he was open and he bled and he went in the trunk next."
"At dawn, a woman. She had a butterfly tattooed on her face. Just under her eye. I saw it when I was stuffing her body beside the other two."
"I remember thinking it was pretty. Her face tattoo."
"The fourth one was easy. And then the last… He searched the car. He was smart. He saw me and ran. I don’t know why he ran. Maybe he was afraid like I was. Like I had been. But he ran and so I clawed my way out of the blanket and up into the driver’s seat. It was sticky with blood now. No, more than sticky. It was like a sponge. I sat down and I could feel it leaking out of the cloth seats. I keyed the ignition and I put the car into drive and I..."
"I crushed him. Beneath the wheels of the car. Another bag of blood that opened."
"I sat there, my head against the wheel, and I waited. Someone would have seen me. Or heard the man scream. I would hear a shot or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would just go black. But instead I heard the helicopters. I didn’t know what it meant."
"See, I had forgotten this was a game I could win."
"I had forgotten this was a game at all. All I knew is that I wanted to survive. That I would fight for it. And then the helicopter landed and the Lone Survivor of Erangel emerged and he came to me and helped me out of the car. It was over. I had killed the last of them."
"I fell to the ground and I cried. He took me in his arms and he… he cried with me. Both of us. Two survivors. And he whispered into my ear that I could have anything. Anything I wanted. Name it. Name it and it would be mine. And I was blind from the blood in my eyes and I said to him that he had already given me what I needed.
He had shown me that I wanted to live."
The wine was finished. And apparently, so was her story. The mental image – that of Anais’ body discovered by her little daughter – had been replaced by something else. A vision of a rusted car, the interior soaked red. The trunk, a sepulcher.
"That was the only time I saw Sergei Kalimnick," Anais said. "He has given me what I asked for and more. And every March, the wine. Always the deepest red. That is all I know about this man. I don’t know why he does it. And I don’t know why they call him the Pawn."
"But I do know where you will find him..."
That last bit snapped them all to attention.
"You do?" Mal asked.
Anais nodded.
"In a week there will be another Battleground. And when it is over, there will be the sound of helicopters. And he will emerge to hold another soul in his arms. If you wish to find him, go to Miramar..."
Duncan, Mal, and Lunchmeat all shared a look. They had their lead. They had their next target. Julie couldn’t tell what exactly was going on in their heads – she was too focused on what was happening in her own.
Old bones cracked as limbs shook off sleep. An eye fluttered open. A whisper of a simmering discontent.
The monster had awakened.