Page 45 of Kill Sleep Repeat

That did it. One little comment can change your whole perspective. It made me realize what I had to do. Literally. I’d have to shit myself. If I made a real mess of it, he’d have to change me, and the linens too. He’d have to remove the restraints in order to clean me, and when it came right down to it, I realize that would not only be my best chance of escape, it will be my only chance.

When I was young, and the night terrors came, my mother used to say that what happened in my dreams was far worse than anything that could happen in reality. How wrong she turned out to be about that. Wallowing in your own feces for ages is not all it’s cracked up to be.

I was careful to wait until the room was dark. There are no windows in this room, but there is a skylight. Probably this is what saved me.

In and out. In and out. Breathe. My eyelids flutter open. I jolt upright, unsure if I’m dreaming or awake. I know something very bad has happened, but all the pieces are scattered in my mind, thousands of tiny fragments, my memory is hazy and incomplete, like a jigsaw puzzle, before you’ve worked out what it is supposed to be.

Thick liquid pools downward and wets my lashes, matting them together. Using the back of my hand, I brush the blood away. This is how I know I’m alive. There’s so much blood.

But I’m alive. Injured, but alive.

He might be too.

I have to know. I can’t stay here, in the perceived safety of this room. So long as he is breathing, safety doesn’t exist. If he’s not dead, this will never ever stop, and I really need it to end here. I make my way through the cabin, following the trail of blood—his or mine I’m not sure. The marble floor is heated under my feet, and the expanse of the cabin is surprising.

As I pass floor to ceiling windows, I stop at a grand fireplace, grabbing a fireplace poker. Gripping it tightly, I can’t help but stare out at the view. It’s mesmerizing. There’s seemingly nothing but white for miles. Snow upon snow upon snow. No houses, no cars, no roads, no people. I scan the property. I see a small shed, and a long drive. A row of birdhouses suspended in the air. That’s it. It’s terrifyingly isolated. As remote as anything I’ve ever seen.

I hear something on the second floor. A creaking sound. I don’t know the house well enough, or at all, to know if it’s possible he could have made it up there.

Clutching the fire iron, I follow the trail of blood into the kitchen, knowing it will be the best place to find a weapon other than a fire iron. Although it will do, a knife would be better.

The kitchen is open, large, and it reminds me of a show kitchen, not one that has been lived in or well used. The blood specs have tapered off, and just beyond the massive island, I see him, slumped forward.

“Warren?” I say but my voice comes out tiny and foreign. It doesn’t sound like me. It sounds like something is lodged in my throat. “JC, can you hear me?”

Silence. Other than a hiss or a creak from the deepest recesses of the house, here and there, it is eerily silent. Using the fire iron, I nudge him gently. His body falls to the right.

When he lands with an easy thud, I see the extent of the damage I have done. Slowly, it begins to come back to me. Him wiping my feces, a struggle ensuing. But then my mind goes blank. Shock, which acts as a protective mechanism, I know.

His face is torn off. Or rather eaten off. The bones that make up his nose, his eye sockets, and chin remain. But his flesh and some of the muscle is gone. His eyeballs bulge and flitter every once in a while, confirming that he is alive. His lips are missing, but his tongue is intact, or at least what is left of it. His teeth, once shiny and white, are now tinged with blood.

I’ve seen worse. Maybe. My stomach lurches forward, and I want to throw up, but relief takes over, pushing the bile down.

Now, I must focus.

I am in the middle of nowhere. I need to get out of here. I need to find a phone and a car, but first, clothes. My body is weak and bruised, and there is a severe gash at the base of my temple that I need to stop bleeding. My right hand is possibly broken. There is a dead man on the floor, his face half chewed off. The sun is sinking, the light will soon fade. But for now, I am safe.

Safe, as in to say, this bastard has me pretty good and well fucked. After striking him with the iron, just to ensure he’s really done for, I reach down in search of a pulse. He flops forward, his eyes fixed on some faraway place. It’s the first time, in all of my kills, that I’ve ever seen what it looks like under the skin on a person’s face. Bile creeps its way up my throat. My stomach rolls.

I leave him, and then fumble through the cabinets, hoping to locate a first aid kit, some aspirin, and the knife drawer.

Walking over to where he is slumped, I flash the knife in front of his dead eyes. “Fancy a spinal cord severing?”

His body twitches, which gives me a good scare. The body is not always still, once it dies, and no matter how many times you’ve seen it happen, it’s the sort of thing one never quite gets used to. If you’ve ever seen a skeleton without skin, you can imagine what he looks like. I have done an extensive amount of damage. There will be no open casket for him.

One minute I was laying in my own shit, my backside stinging, my own waste burning my skin. The next, he was changing me, unfastening my restraints, placing me in a tub of cold water.

I stared straight ahead, playing on the shock factor, while he sponged my body clean, while he lathered my hair with shampoo, while he shaved my legs, armpits, and pubic area. All the while, I stayed mute, silent, resigned.

Then when he was satisfied with his work, and he turned for the towel, I saw my opportunity and I took it. I lunged at him, knocking him off balance, my nails clawing at his skin, his eyeballs, my teeth tearing into his neck and face. I bit and chewed, and hit and clawed, until eventually his whole body went still. I tasted his blood and his flesh in my mouth, and my fingernails were full of bits and pieces of him.

I won, at least temporarily, but I did not come away unscathed. Sometime during our scuffle I had either been struck or had hit my head, and blood was raining down. It painted my naked body, and when I momentarily glanced in the mirror, I nearly smiled at the feral woman, staring back at me. I looked like a warrior painted in my own blood, mixed with the blood of my prey, unable to tell which was which.

And now in this kitchen, I look at him lying there. A pathetic excuse of a human. Now nothing more than a corpse.

I want nothing more than to get the fuck out of here, to find my way home. But I don’t want to mess that situation up, either. While I have time to plot my next move, I plan to take it. And more than anything, I want to remember how I made him suffer.

My entire body aches. It aches worse than any pain I’ve ever experienced, worse than the aftermath of childbirth, when your whole body feels like it has been hit by a Mack truck. Being tethered to a bed, being hung from the ceiling for hours, is, for me, new territory. I wonder what it will be like if I died here. Would anyone ever find me? Likely not. I only care because of the girls. It’s hard to accept death when there’s no body—believe me, I know.