With breath came muscle control, coordination, and fierce determination. She raised her right foot to plant the sole and heel flat against the crumbling plaster, tensed calf and thigh. Although jammed between wall and beast, she managed to drive her knee between his legs. The shot was not the ball-crusher she hoped, but it made him grunt and relent just enough so that she could shove him back a half step and slip past him.
He swung one hand and swatted her alongside the head. The blow rang through her skull, and though she didn’t see stars, concentric rings of darkness welled through her eyes and made a vortex of the room. She staggered, stumbled, dropped to one knee. He booted her in the backside, and she sprawled facedown, terrified but also mortified by her near helplessness when contesting with brute strength and savage purpose. He dropped to his knees and roughly rolled her onto her back, knocking aside her flailing fists to seize her by the throat and apply just enough force to make her understand that he could choke her to death one-handed if he wished.
She could see his face again, shadowed but complete enough to reveal his demonic and implacable intention, a deeply perverse desire unmistakable in his green eyes. Hulking, bull-strong, as broad-faced as a steer, he seemed at the same time reptilian, as if he gave out from every pore the poisonous smell of the venom in which his brain was steeped. Clutching her throat, his face a pale moon of madness floating above her, he said, “I can screw you and then kill you or kill you first. But if you make me kill you first and I can’t have the fun of doing you alive, then I’ll kill you so slow and nasty, you’ll think it’s taking half a lifetime.” When she gagged out a curse, he pulled back his left fist, big as a sledgehammer, aimed it at her face, and said, “You want to say that again, bitch?” One punch would shatter her nose and the orbit of one eye, and a second would split her lips, break out teeth, fracture her jaw, after which no surgeon in the world would be able to put her back the way she had been, supposing that she survived. For this monster, sex and violence were one and the same desire, and either would be as satisfying as the other. When she hesitated, he pulled the fist back farther and worked her tender throat with the steel fingers of his right hand, and he repeated his question: “You want to say that again? You want to curse me, you stupid skank?” She wheezed out, “No.” He asked if she’d take the quick kill or the slow, and she said, “Quick,” meaning that she would endure rape in return for the minimal mercy of which he might be capable. “Terezin,” he said, “put a guard on places you might go, and I lucked out. He doesn’t want you. He just wants you dead. But I get my fun first, like he’ll get his birthday fun with that little bitch.”
He let go of her throat but backhanded her across the face, a hard slap meant to confirm his dominance, to knock out of her any last trace of rebellion, to leave her stunned long enough for him to straddle her. One knee to either side of Bibi, still not having fallen upon her, he unbuckled his belt as she looked up at him with a pretense of weakness and resignation. When she crossed her arms over her breasts, he laughed at that expression of maidenly modesty, and his laugh was a low wet sound that reminded her of his tongue in her mouth, nauseating her anew. Busy with the zipper of his pants, eager to expose himself, he didn’t notice that her right hand was under her blazer, didn’t realize that she was probing an interior pocket. The handle of Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade came smooth and cool into Bibi’s hand, the nub of the release under her thumb. She drew the knife from beneath her coat, and the blade sprang out for use, seven inches long and razor-sharp and as pointed as a rapier.
As his jeans slid down his hips, his left hand pulled at his underpants, and his right was already deep inside the pouch of the garment, fondling what he sought to free. His eyes, heavy-lidded with insane desire, widened only when her hand thrust forward. He saw the wicked knife an instant before he felt it. His shirt split as if it were paper, and his flesh proved no more resistant than butter. The blade went in to the hilt. His left hand closed over hers, as if to extract the switchblade in such a way as to minimize further damage, but Bibi twisted it before yanking it out of him, cross-cutting the original wound. And thrust it again, past his grasping, ineffectual hand. And tore it free. She heaved up, rocked him. He fell not upon her, but to her right, and she scrambled away from him.
In the heat of it, under the hammer and seemingly helpless, Bibi had remained cool, had done what needed to be done, as best she could do it. But now fright rode her back and whipped her, and her spinning mind spun out at once a dozen ways that she could still end up dead here in her old bedroom.
He would have a gun. He hadn’t thought he needed it. Pride in his brute strength and the pleasure of physically overwhelming her had ironically made him vulnerable. But the gun would be under his coat—was he wearing a coat?—or in an ankle holster. And right now he was surely fumbling for it.