Two | What Happened to Molly Walker
Karen awoke to a familiar image. The desert stretched out before her for miles and miles, only now it was moving without the accompaniment of a pane of glass and wind was blowing across her face. Hard metal pressed against her legs and back. There was an offensive smell, like grubby socks, lingering despite the wind. It came together instantly, like the answer to a riddle, only there was no gratification felt for figuring it out, only heart-pounding terror.
She was leaning against the side of a very muddy truck bed, next to a frail-looking girl wearing jeans that were stained around the crotch. The coyote girl; only now, stripped of her furs, she looked more like an actual girl who might have been an adolescent version of Karen’s daughter. Her face was paved from eyes to chin with shiny streaks. There was a large purple welt on her upper lip, where it looked like she’d been struck, and there was blood creeping its way out of her sandy hair. Her eyes were clamped shut, perhaps in denial of her present reality. Back in her world, the world in which she didn’t look like a trauma victim, she was probably beautiful. Karen’s motherly instinct took over and she reached out to place a gentle hand on the girl’s bare arm.
The girl’s eyes shot open like flashlights in a dark room. She saw Karen, gave a faint whimper and immediately covered her face like a boxer expecting a heavy blow. Then, seeing who’d startled her, she relaxed her guard a little, peering out between her fingers like a mouse peering out of its hole in anticipation of a lurking cat. The reality had returned, it seemed, because she was crying again. Her ashy green eyes were encased in red circles. Karen felt the urge to take the girl up in her arms.
“Hon, I’m so sorry,” Karen said. That was all it took and the girl instantly became a koala cub and latched onto her. She buried her head against Karen’s chest and began sobbing hysterically.
The girl couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and the more she cried, the younger she became. Her body shook with heavy sobs.
Good God, Karen thought. But God wasn’t good. Couldn’t have been, to have overlooked a person who was now so obviously and wrongfully scarred for life. When she finally stopped crying, she drew away slightly from Karen and looked long and pleadingly into her eyes. “Why?” She whimpered. It wasn’t so much a question as a statement. Why indeed. Karen squeezed her arm.
“I don’t know,” Karen said. But in her head she was thinking she
did know, and was already busy planning an escape. Up in the cab, their kidnapper was casually chewing away on a nasty gob of tobacco, confident that he had captured two blind mice he could manipulate with a chunk of cheese tied to the end of a string. The girl, judging by her present state, might have fit the description, but Karen wasn’t a blind mouse. The truck was moving at a decent clip, but perhaps they could jump. Still holding the trembling thing in her arms, she peered over the side of the truck.
The problem with jumping was they had no where to go. Karen scanned the horizon but could not see the road. Only miles and miles of…
God, I hate the desert. If they jumped, they’d become the shrieking cactuses. And by the time they reached anything resembling a roadside café or gas station, their throats would be too parched to permit their shrieking and their voices would be reduced to whispers. Whispers that would be drowned out by the rumble of an engine closing in behind them.
“He’s evil,” the girl said, taking Karen by surprise.
Karen thought this over for a few seconds and then spoke up.
“How long did he… I mean, when were you taken?”
The girl’s mouth began to move mechanically, recalling the memory. She was speaking fast, like it pained her to talk.
“Last night. I was just driving down the road and… and…I…I thought he was a drifter or something. I don’t pick them up, you know? But this one…well, I don’t know why I did this time. I’d give anything to go back in time and run my car right into him.” Her cheeks burned red, tears momentarily suppressed by anger. “I knew he wasn’t right from the moment he got in the car. He had the most awful voice, kind of squeaky. I got this uncomfortable feeling that he was eyeing me, like he wanted to.... I don’t reckon I want to know. I tried to stay calm though, tried to act brave. They say if you stay calm and look them in the eye, they can’t hurt you. I can’t remember what he said to me but it was something weird, like “what do you smell like inside” and I freaked out and then he pulled a gun on me. I was so scared. Then he grabbed my leg and tried to force his hand down my… I asked him to stop, but…I…I thought he was going to kill me.”
When she’d finished her story, her eyes were leaves on a wet morning. She tried in vain to brush them with her hand, sniffling as she did so.
“I’m so sorry,” Karen said again, stroking the girl’s head. She cringed at the thought of how close she had come to running her over. Then she glared at the man in the cab. He had
wanted her to get hit. What more, he had wanted Karen to hit her. It had been like a scene out of one of those old western movies where the evil guy in the top hat and cape ties the helpless damsel to the rail road tracks, all the while cackling like a maniac.
“You must be Molly then, right?” Karen said.
The girl frowned, confused. There was even a hint of suspicion in her bright ashy green orbs. “Molly?”
“Molly Walker. That’s your name, isn’t it? I heard about you on the radio.”
“No, my name’s Carolyn.”
Karen felt stupid after she’d said this. Of course this girl couldn’t be Molly Walker. The radio had said she’d been abducted two weeks ago. No, she was just Carolyn, just another person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like her.
Suddenly Carolyn began trembling, as though the temperature had plunged fifty degrees. If eyes could talk, hers would have been screaming. “What is he going to do to us?” The question half flew, have fell out of her mouth, landing with a messy splat on Karen’s sense of ease. Carolyn had vomited something foul, and Karen couldn’t look away. She had been kind of avoiding the thought, thinking that she was Karen Spears and that nothing bad was likely to happen to her, not when there were six billion others like her on the planet. But that was just it, wasn’t it? Something bad
had happened to her, something unbelievably bad. And now she had to, in the words of her senior counselor of her smoking habit, face the facts.
She was about to say something along the lines of “We’ll figure it out” when she spotted something in the distance. It was little more than a black spec on the horizon but it sent her stomach plummeting into a fathomless abyss. Her heart beat shot up in tempo, and the back of her throat dried like cotton balls had sprung up there. Her legs felt shaky again and they were having difficulty supporting her weight. To the casual observer, the black spec was little more than an ant crawling its way across the great orange-blue seam where the land met the sky. But to her and her unfortunate friend, it was another thing entirely. It was a building, perhaps, not to be mistaken for a house, which is not typically found in the middle of the desert. Situated miles away from any trace of civilization, it could only be called a dwelling, completely and utterly isolated from the sounds of traffic or the smell of freshly cut lawns or the laughter of little children. Aside from the driver, and the two of them in the back, only the buzzards knew of its existence. There were no directions for returning from this place, only hot sand and an oasis of unseen pain.
And it was also the place where they were going.
“Hold onto my hand,” Karen said after seeing what little color remained in Carolyn’s face disappear altogether. “You’re right, you know. He can’t hurt us if we’re brave.” She meant it to sound convincing, but her voice was now wavering. Her bladder felt full and she thought, if she didn’t get to relieve herself soon, she and Carolyn would be wearing matching pants.
When the truck finally stopped, and Karen had a close up view of the black spec which was now a small village of metal shacks surrounding a well and little else, her hand left Carolyn’s and immediately flew to her nose. The stench was caustic, like a compost pile left to putrefy in a hot yard. Only it wasn’t just rotten vegetables she smelled. No, rotten vegetables would have been a fragrance next to this. Karen was sure there were dead things hidden away in those shacks. Fortunately, the sudden opening and closing of the car door made her forget to breathe. The two of them were now faced with the crazy cowboy again, who was looking just over their heads, as though he’d just spotted a hawk in the distance and was fascinated by it. “Welcome home ladies,” he said, still watching the hawk. And, as if on cue, something snarled and barked from behind one of the shacks. Cowboy’s face twisted into a deep frown, as though an earwig had crawled its way into his brain and procured a terrible itch. He scowled in the direction of the barking and yelled “Quit your yammering boys” and then the scowl turned into a shark grin and he added, “We have company.”
Thirty-two years of people being polite and generally kind to her made Karen think she’d been thrown suddenly and without warning into a nut house. Cowboy had arrested her wrist, muttered something unintelligible and yanked her hard over the side of the truck where she fell awkwardly to the ground. Where she landed, fiery pain had bloomed and she could not contain herself. “Fuuuuuck!” She yelled at the top of her lungs. “You crazy
fucker!” The tears started to come now, hot and wet on her dry cheeks. Her knee was burning like it had been stuffed full of hot coals. Cowboy, whose eyes were averted and uncaring, had a grip like a vice on her left wrist, and was now using it to drag her across the dirt yard.
Things were quickly going from bad to worse. In a moment, she was drug inside one of the shacks, through a set of plastic strip curtains that demarcated an inner room, and was looking up at a butcher’s block. A large wooden table stood in the middle of the room, covered in what looked like animal guts. Her mind inserted the word animal because she didn’t know, nor did she hope to ever find out, what human guts looked like. A huge meat cleaver was stuck conspicuously in the table, and it went without saying that it had seen its fair share of use. Miraculously, though Karen was capable of seeing few miracles at this point, the smell in this place was actually less offensive than the one outside. The rotting, nastiness she smelled earlier had been replaced with a wet meaty smell. It reminded her of several years ago when she’d visited her uncle’s abattoir. The smell was death alright, but a cleaner, more recent death, and somehow that made it easier to bear.
Feeling it seems had lagged sight, and she became painfully aware of how cold this place was. It was like an ice box. She found herself rubbing her exposed arms and legs to keep warm. All she had on was a t-shirt and shorts; after all, it had never been in her itinerary to make a detour out into the desert to spend some time in a strange man’s meat locker. There was a noisy humming that led her to discover twin fans mounted to the ceiling, exhuming the air from the room and keeping it at a lower pressure. This wasn’t a shack at all, but a well disguised butcher house.
She wanted to ask or rather demand that she be made able to go to the bathroom but that would have to wait because currently she was about to be made into a sushi dish. Cowboy had picked up the cleaver, which looked almost comically big in his hand–at least it would have been comical if it hadn’t made her stomach sink into her guts–and was brandishing it in front of her face. “If I had my way,” he said, “I’d take off that nose, then I’d take off those lips.” As he said this, he swung the blade unnervingly close to her face, making a slicing motion in the air across from where her lips were. “Then I’d show you your new face in the mirror. And to make sure you didn’t look away, I’d take off those pretty eyelids as well. And when you couldn’t see the forest for the blood, I’d have my way with you. How’s that sound Stacey Baby?” At this point, he pressed his lips against her cheek. It couldn’t really be called a kiss; what he did was half suckle, half lick the side of her face, like an infant calf nursing off its mother’s teat. Hot saliva stuck to her cheek and solidified there. She felt like she was going to puke.
Then, she felt something hard hit the back of her head and she was out like a light. When she came to some indeterminate time later, she realized why she hated being knocked unconscious. Disorientation sent her head spinning, like she was on a merry-go-round in no sign of stopping. She felt light headed and woozy. She wondered if she’d had a concussion, or if her capturer had inadvertently caused internal bleeding somewhere in her brain and she would die in a few short hours. She could only hope.
At first, her vision was blurry, and then the image cleared, much to her displeasure, and she found herself sitting at a dinner table that might have been taken from the set of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There was a red-stained table cloth (guess where those red stains came from?) covering it, and on top of it there was an assortment of odd dinnerware and what could only be called dining paraphernalia. There were candelabras with half their wax candles melted down to nothing, food platters piled with food that had long since seen its expiration date, an old fashioned hand-crank napkin dryer, silverware sets still in their prepackaged containers that had the air of having been stolen and placed here by a person who thought this was what any average joe’s dining table needed. And everything was caked in a generous helping of cobwebs. The whole thing would have made Martha Stuart drop dead from shock.
Cowboy was sitting at one end of the table with his feet propped up and his hands behind his head, like an ornery school boy who is fiercely opposed to displaying any kind of dinner room formality. He said nothing, for the moment, and Karen counted that as a small blessing. Across from her, the girl she had been hoping had taken the opportunity to escape while she’d been drug painfully against her will was sitting upright, bound to a chair. This prompted her to look down and she saw that she too was bound in similar fashion. Only the portion of her arms from elbow down was free to move. Which was convenient, because there was a bowl of Extra Chunky Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup sitting in front of her. Oh yeah, and she’d pissed herself too.
“I thought you might be hungry,” an unwanted voice said from the head of the table. Though it might have just as well been speaking to the ceiling.
Karen could only imagine what was in the soup. Probably poison, kill them both outright so he could have his way with them then and there. But hadn’t he said he wanted to cut up her face while she was still alive? On second thought, it was probably a sedative, knock her out again like before so he could strap her down to a table and go to his work. But hadn’t he had the opportunity to do that earlier? Maybe, just maybe, he was true to his word, that he
did want them to eat. After all, where’s the fun in making mince meat of someone who’s too weak from hunger to lift a finger? Maybe he was plumping them up so he could peel away their layers of fat and make clothing out of it. She shuddered at this last thought. Still, the soup in question didn’t smell all that bad.
Reluctantly, she picked up her spoon and stirred around the contents of her bowl and as she did so she imagined Cowboy, in some back room, stirring the soup in a large cauldron, every now and then tossing some strange and unsavory ingredient into the mix which would hiss and bubble like a witches’ broth. But still, hunger is a persuasive talker, and already it had come striding into her mind, briefcase in one hand, ball point pen in the other and began to plead its case to her as to why, crazy as it might sound, she should try Cowboy man’s soup. Eventually, the smart-looking smooth-talker had won out and she was lifting a spoonful of Extra Chunky Campbell’s into her mouth, not wincing at the taste but instead smacking her lips in surprised satisfaction. She looked across the table and saw Carolyn doing the same. Down at the end of the table, the all-too-eager cook was eyeing them all-too-eagerly. His feet were now off the table and he was clasping his hands together, his face full of ghoulish delight.
“Hope you like it. It’s a
special recipe.” He was obviously about to make a point of something. Perhaps to say he added skunk piss to it in hopes that they would both start hacking and gagging in unison. At this point, Karen would have gladly drunk a tall glass of skunk piss if it would have gotten her out of this place. Then he said chillingly and at length, “I think we all owe our thanks to a special lady for this meal tonight” and Karen dropped her spoon. At the same time, another spoon dropped on the other side of the table. Karen met Carolyn’s eyes; her face was as pale as a ghost's.
“She might have been a dirty little cunt,” Cowboy went on casually, “but I’ll be an armadillo’s ass if I ever say Miss Molly Walker didn’t taste
right fine with a nice broth and a can of split peas.”
will eat you!
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