Originally Published in the Bram Stoker Award Nominated Human Monsters (Dark Matter Ink, 2022)
Ambush Predator
by
C.S. Humble
At a distance, Marie Evans appears to be a woman sitting on a park bench. From no more than ten feet away, she seems blissful, serenity itself, admiring the sun which, tipping like a bowl, pours light through the downy green of an alder tree. Her eyes are blue and wide. A gaze of remembrance, suggesting there is a smile beneath the surgical mask looped around her ears. This mask for pandemic fears indicates that she is both careful with her health and considerate of the health of others. Photographers dream of catching this moment in the wild. Painters hope to capture, with strokes of oil or swirls of acrylic, the feeling they are sure Marie is feeling: that moment of simple satisfaction on her smooth brow that is so elusive to others in a world anxious with many, many wrinkled cares.
At a distance, neither the politics of our time nor the economic uncertainty present in every age can penetrate the peaceable shield haloing the long silver-white hair. Ribbons gently rustled by the wind yet undisturbed by distant wars or the always-in-our-heart fear of societal collapse. These things exist in the world around Marie Evans. But they cannot touch her. These very real, very tangible threats plaguing every other participant in our modern life are, like any observers of the calmly sitting Marie, distanced from her.
But this is at a distance.
Closer inspection of Marie’s life reveals that she was once as lucky and satisfied as she currently appears. She has a loving wife. Three marvelous children: two adopted, the youngest birthed from her own womb. Marie loves them all the same, and any intimate examination of her life proves an expert witness to the fact that she is filled with love and passion. She enjoys orchestra concerts and film—The Sound of Music is everything to her.
It was also the last thing to her.
Nine hours prior to this moment, Marie Evans spent her evening visiting the Dauphin Theater. Her favorite theater, featuring her favorite movie. Julie Andrews was a perfect ray of light. Christopher Plummer, an old indelible crush, remains her champion.
The film ends. Everyone applauds.
Marie Evans then leaves the theater at 10 p.m. She calls home, responsible and considerate, telling Jessica, her wife of two and a half decades, that she is on her way. This phone call takes exactly seven minutes and twenty-nine seconds. It is just enough time for Marie to reach her car, which is parked just out of reach of a singular lamp in the lonely parking lot, and long enough for the few other nostalgia-driven moviegoers to miss what happens to her.
She opens the driver-side door of her recently purchased sedan—a congratulatory purchase Jessica insisted upon—and just as she straightens one leg to slide onto the leather seats, still perfumed in brand-new-car smell, a big calf-skin–smooth hand slides over her mouth. The other hand, just as swift, moves with brutal effect.
Marie’s vision flashes black to white. Her vision then comes back to her, where she sees her shoes, ankles and calves sliding across the ground as she is pulled away from the safety of the vehicle. She mumbles, confused. Her world flashes white to black.
Two months after this night, the media will, for the first time and not the last, use the phrase, “The Black Wells Annihilator.”
Seventeen people after this night will see what Marie Evans wakes to see:
A large round man with no aspect of athleticism or strength. His lumpy bulk, stuffed into white scrubs, hides completely the metal folding chair supporting him. Eyes large and bulbous, the shade of moonstone. “I’ve injected you with a paralytic agent” he says, his voice soft, almost fragile. “It’ll keep you from doing what you’re about to do.”
Those cold stone eyes do not blink when Marie screams for help.
The fibrous cloth crammed into Marie’s mouth, jammed deep in her throat, muffles the sound of the most violent, harrowing noise she will ever make. Only the two people inside the cramped confines of the modified storage truck will ever hear the sound. The muscles of Marie’s abdominal wall squeeze into action, trying to curl her weight forward and rise. The leather straps across her breasts and thighs, along with the downy lambswool-lined cuffs around her wrists and ankles, squeak against her straining. So new, the straps do not yet bear the wrinkles they will earn over the coming years. This is their first test. It is also the first proving ground of fantasy-driven exploits for the man looking silently at Marie. Like the straps and cuffs, the man will, over time, develop creases as his methods become well practiced. The procedure more nuanced.
This is also Marie’s first time.
There will never be another time.
“Don’t strain,” the man says. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
Marie’s heart climbs into her throat, trying to get out. Her mind gropes deep down into the dark strength of the reptilian-simple instincts crouching behind her human reason. It begins to kick and thrash, to doubt and deny the reality of her situation.
The man shoots out of the chair to full attention. With two blue, sausage-like fingers forked with varicose veins, he pinches Marie’s nose shut.
“Stop,” he says. “You’re ruining it.”
Marie twists her head violently. The straps hold her tighter than a lover. The man’s clamped fingers simply ride out her wild struggle. She tries to breathe through the impacted gauze, which only serves to pull the fibrous loose ends against her gag reflex. Added to the fear of her abduction comes Marie’s greatest fear made manifest without her captor even knowing it.
She is choking to death.
Pulling the cloth out of her mouth and throat would be easy were she not manacled to the bed bolted to the truck’s floor. Her fingers, already growing numb at the tips, curl into claws, biceps knotting tight as she tries and tries to reach for the mass inside her mouth. Marie’s stomach convulses. Saliva and bile fill her mouth, soaking the gauze. Making it heavier. Heavy enough so that the slickness of her throat mixed with angle of her neck allows the gravity of the world beneath her to pull the gauze past the cliff of her tongue, tickles her tonsils, and dangles in the aperture of her convulsing windpipe. For the briefest heart-racing moment, she hopes the man notices, simultaneously disbelieving that she’s even thinking this. That her own captor will save her.
The man says nothing. He only waits, knowing that Marie will come to understand the simple unspoken pact between them.
Stop struggling and I will let you breathe.
Marie lays herself flat against the bed, believing that if she lies still, the man will release her. The numbness from her fingers crawls into her arms. Her complaining gag reflex makes the unmistakable, involuntary human gurgle of panicked asphyxiation.
The man tilts his head to one side, chiding her as he releases her nose. “You did that to yourself.”
Though her nasal passage is clear, Marie can still feel the mucus-soaked gauze threatening to block her airway again. She breathes slow, shallow. Her heart beats so hard that every palpitation ticks a filament of cloth fiber against the roof of her throat, like a clock’s steadily ticking hand. A warm sensation steals the strength of her arms and thighs, tingles beneath the flesh of her knees, makes her shoulders go slack.
Tears roll from Marie’s wet eyes, so dense that she feels them pool in the folds of her ear.
“It’s okay,” the man says with the kindness of a mother soothing her child. Marie has spoken in this voice before, many, many times over. Has said a hundred times over the very words the lumbering giant says to her then. “You don’t have to be afraid.”
What he adds to those words sends a serpent of ice slithering through her brain.
“You don’t have to be afraid of anything ever again.”
The man turns. The scrubs pinched between the folds of his abdomen rustle, the sound muted against the white padded walls of the converted truck. “Science has given us the cure for fear and sorrow, pain and remorse.”
She hears the hard, smooth sound of metal instruments sliding together. Eyes scanning her surroundings to find some possibility of escape, her ears prick up at the distinct sucking murmur of a small, empty vessel drawing liquid into itself.
The man spins around with a gleeful flourish, happiness on his face. A syringe, beaded wet at the needle’s invisible terminus, looks small, almost inconsequential, in his pudgy hand. “And the best part,” he says, delicately turning the dripping needle tip toward Marie’s eye. “Is that you don’t have to feel a thing.”
Before she can twist her gaze away, the man makes a band of his strong hand, clamping it across her forehead. Thumb and middle finger mash into Marie’s temples, the strength greater than a vise.
The needle pierces above her eyebrow, puncturing her sinus. The plunger sinks at the pressure of his thumb, and the liquid rush of its contents chills Marie to the skull. The relief of the needle sliding out is the second-to-last ecstasy she will ever feel. The last ecstasy comes just after the last tear her left eye will ever produce. This happens when the needle slides into her tear duct, spraying a numbing agent into the reservoir. Marie’s eye rolls slack inside its socket.
Her tongue slides against her cheek, dormant in her mouth.
Now it is Marie, experiencing both complete relaxation and child-like terror, who sees things at a distance.
Feels, as if from a distance inside herself, the pressure of the slender icepick-like tool sliding coldly into the imperceptible gap between the ball of her eye and the bone of her nasal cavity. Feels, from so far away, the claw-hammer strike the end of the pick. She hears, wanting to scream louder and louder, the autumn-leaves crunch of the pick perforating a place inside her that has never once been touched.
Inside the imaginary mental place where Marie hides her secrets, her loves, and her deep passion for her wife, children, and musical films, she is screaming a prayer to any and every listening deity with the power to intervene.
A loud, booming sound breaks the silence. A hand, heavy on the bay door of the truck.
The man lording over Marie snaps his moonstone gaze to the sound’s origin. Though his placid demeanor remains, from somewhere deep inside this creature comes the beastial growl of the predator inside him.
In silence, he waits.
Marie screams her prayer louder, saying the names of her children over and over in supplicant plea.
Again, the door booms with the hand of someone who has taken interest in this storage truck that must be, Marie thinks, sitting in the parking lot next to the Dauphin Theater. A police officer or a concerned passerby. Someone, Marie hopes—anyone—willing to be everything she needs them to be right now.
Right here.
The man releases his grip on the pick, leaving it jutting upthrust from Marie’s eye socket as he walks toward the back of the storage truck. Marie, motionless, listens.
An old lever lifts.
The door groans.
“What is it,” her captor says.
The words that follow are colder than the steel against her skull.
“Is it over yet?” A woman’s voice. There is concern there, none of it for Marie.
“Not much longer. She’s ready now.”
“I don’t want to rush you, but—”
“Five more minutes.”
The door groans.
An old lever falls.
The man returns to supine Marie. With a deep sigh, he takes hold of the pick handle and draws it the metal—warm, red, and wet.
“Now,” the man says, turning one last time back to the little bench behind him.
Marie does not see the little barbed hook in his hand. Feels, from an impossibly wide mental distance, the long invasive hook slide into the gap beneath flesh and bone.
Marie’s head bumps up and down, up and down as the man’s arm pumps in quick, short strokes. Then, turning the hook, he leans himself forward, pushing his tremendous weight into the final strokes that shear away Marie Evans.
Strokes that steal who she was, who she is, and who she might have become in the sweet, golden years she had been so ready to explore.
The husk of Marie Evans is settled on a park bench, surgical mask looped back around her ears. She hears, unable to listen, the storage truck rumbling into the night.
Time passes. The sun rises, shining gold and bright on Marie’s vacant face, unable to comprehend its color or beauty. Unable to connect with the heart-lifting majesty as it rises like a celestial king between the blue, white-capped mountain spires so gloriously crowning the horizon.
At a distance, Marie Evans is sitting on a park bench.
But that is at a distance.
There was a time before when she enjoyed the park. The bench. The sunlight.
But she is not that woman anymore.
She will never be that woman again.