She knew that the rock configuration of broken granite close to the left side of the trail meant she was rapidly approaching a fork. The fork to the left continued to the top. The one to the right was a gentler trail that circled both mountains down lower, going past small ponds.
She took the one to the left. It was a hard climb. She hoped that her experience could outpace his easier time with boots. Since he was somewhat older, possibly in his late forties, she was also hoping to get him winded with the climb. If she could lose him, she could go down the back side of the mountain and then take a smaller side trail that led back to the house, where she could get a gun.
In the dark, he might not be able to follow that trail. Although, there was a full moon high overhead. Even with the full moon, though, the woods occasionally fell darker in denser areas.
Angela scrambled along a narrow ledge, staying close to the wall that rose vertically on her left. To her right the tops of trees rose from far below. It was a dangerous place to be careless. When she reached the far side of the wall of rock, the trail made a sharp left, following the granite formations.
When she rounded the corner, she spotted a length of dead limb. It was a little bigger around than her wrist and maybe five feet long. Cassiel was only seconds behind her. Angela knew it might be her only chance. She snatched up the deadwood, turned, and cocked her arm back.
As Cassiel rushed around the corner into view, Angela took a mighty swing. He hadn’t expected her to be standing right there in front of him. Angela grunted as she put all her power behind the swing. The dead limb caught him square across the face. The wood was partially rotten, so it splintered and broke in half across his face.
Even so, it was still strong enough to break his nose and crush the bone around his left eye socket. A four-inch splinter speared into his right eye. He put his hands up to his face as he screamed in pain and rage.
Even as she was still in the follow-through of her swing, he had come to a dead stop as his hands went to his injured face. Angela didn’t waste the opportunity. As she came around she side-kicked him in the knee of one leg. The kick wasn’t powerful enough or at the right angle to break his knee, but it was enough to knock that leg out from under him.
Cassiel slipped, did an ungainly pirouette on his other leg, and toppled over the side of the rock face.
Angela stepped carefully forward to peer over the edge to see him drop maybe thirty feet and then tumble down a broken boulder field from granite that had sheared off the cliff over the millennia. The rocks of that boulder field were sharp.
It was hard to tell for sure because all the trees were shading the moonlight, but she thought she saw him sprawled near the lower trail that went around the mountain. He was moving, but he didn’t seem able to get up.
Angela knew she could probably make it back to the cabin well ahead of him if he did manage to get up. But it was possible that he could still see and that he might get up and cut her off. This might be her one and only chance.
In that moment of hesitation, she again saw in her mind’s eye her grandparents kneeling in the dusty weeds at the side of the road as he shot them both in the back of the head.
Her rage overtook everything else and made up her mind for her. She raced back down the trail to the fork and then took the lower trail. All she could think about was that she finally had the man who had killed them.
When she made it down the trail and found Cassiel, he had obviously broken both legs, and by the way he twisted his upper body, possibly his spine. One leg was broken below the knee. A splintered tibia jutted through his bloody pant leg. His other foot was bent back at an impossible angle. He was on his back, writhing in pain, his face covered in blood. Once she saw him she realized he couldn’t see anything.
Angela picked up a jagged, heavy chunk of granite and leaped onto him, straddling his chest. He let out a grunt as she landed. He waved his arms, blindly trying to protect himself from what he couldn’t see.
When his waving arms swung wide open, Angela saw her opening and struck. She slammed the heavy rock down into his face. The chunk of granite was big enough that the weight and her strength behind the blow caved in the center of his face. Blood shot out to either side. A groan of pain gurgled out as his arms dropped wide apart and he went still.
Angela had always wanted to have the man who had killed her grandparents down in the basement for days and days while she extracted vengeance.
But now that she had downed him, her blind rage took over. She couldn’t think of anything else but how much she hated this man, how he had come into her life to destroy the only two people she had ever truly loved.
She used both hands to lift the rock and smash it down on his head. The rock was heavy, but she was glad to have the weight to help her smash his big, solid head.
After the third hit, his jawbone skewed off to one side. She could see his teeth sticking up amid a mass of bloody pulp. She brought the rock down again, breaking those teeth from his jaw, breaking the jaw.
She cried in fury as she lifted the rock over and over, crashing it down on him. Tears streamed down her face as she used that rock to crush the head of the monster who had killed her grandparents and so many other innocent people.
She didn’t know how long she straddled the man who had haunted her for years, the man she had fantasized about killing for years. She wept as vengeance carried her away and she pounded away at his skull.
Eventually, sobbing with emotion, she stopped.
This man, of all men, belonged down the hell hole her grandfather had found and built his cabin over, the cabin that he and Angela’s grandmother had left to her. The place they wanted her to have.
She stared down at what was left of Cassiel’s misshapen head. His face was unrecognizable. The rock had split his skull open. Jagged white bone stuck out through the scalp in places. Through those gaps, she could see his brain.
Angela pushed her fingers down into the hot mess to grip the bone. She cried out with the effort of pulling his skull the rest of the way open. The bone made cracking noises as it came apart. She reached in and pushed the brain to one side, and then with her other hand she gripped the spinal cord to help rip the brain from it so she could lift it out.
Angela sat there, straddling his still, barrel chest, holding up the brain, the nerve center, of the monster she had bested. Cranial fluid and coagulating blood dripped in warm globs off her hands. Some of it ran down her arms to hang off her elbows in long strings.
As she sat there, holding his brain in her hands, staring at it, an unexpected flow of visions, his visions, raced through that connection with her hands and into her own mind.
Angela sat, unblinking, as images flooded through her consciousness. They were unlike the visions she got from looking into a killer’s eyes, those visions of savage acts of murder.
A person’s eyes, she had heard it said, were a window into their soul. That was what it felt like when she looked into their eyes—like looking into their dark souls and seeing the black marks that killing had left on those souls.
This was completely different. These were not conscious thoughts of conscious acts. She sat transfixed at these images. It was unlike anything she had experienced before.
In her own mind she was witnessing a stream of subconscious impressions. She knew she was not seeing visions, but memories.
The strongest of those images were the most recent memories. They flooded through her mind, unending, disjointed, unbidden, desperate. They were jammed together, memory on top of memory, image on top of image, sensation on top of sensation. She was seeing the final dying thoughts of a human brain as it grasped the inevitable and tried to claw back memories, as if gathering them up to try to save itself from the approaching black abyss.
She was experiencing a mind dying. She could sense the profound desperation. The wish to live. The anger. The fear.