'Til Death Do Us Part

Chapter One: The Will To Survive

Glory

Glory

The window of the grungy old clothes dryer she’s contorted herself into is caked in grime and near impossible to see through, but at least if she can’t see him, he probably can’t see her—not that she can see much of anything with her glasses lying in broken shards somewhere in this god forsaken junk yard.

Her entire body aches, and there’s a screaming pain in her ribs that triggers the urge to vomit, but she has to resist if she wants to survive. Even the slightest sound could give her hiding spot away.

Glory has always been a fighter, but even she has enough sense to know that with the drug still in her system she’d fare no better than the rest of her band . . . and judging by the cacophony of screams and the awful crescendo of bones breaking and flesh rending, they’re not faring well. 

Oh God.

She hated them; they’d been at each other's throats for weeks now, but at one point she loved these people. She would never have wished this on any of them.

She can hear the killer stomping around in a rage, grunting obscenities as he passes by her hiding spot, too close for comfort, too many times. As terrified as she is, there’s also hope in it.

He doesn’t know she’s in here.

She could survive this.

“Oh,” he drawls, his rage seemingly forgotten in favor of sick amusement. “We got a live one.”

Fuck.

She hears the crunch of the gravel beneath his boots, and her heart threatens to explode clean out of her chest. There’s nothing she can do but hold still—so horribly, painfully still as she waits for death to find her.

“You wouldn’t happen to have seen where your friend ran off to, would you?”

Someone else is alive.

A wet cough precedes the words, but even that short sound is enough to tell her who the killer is talking to. It feels as though all of her insides are turning to jelly. There’s no way. If he saw her . . . 

“Get. Fucked,” he groans, punctuated by yet more viscera coughed up. “She’s gonna live, and if I know her at all, she’s gonna rip your head off and serve it to your ass on a fucking plate—” Suddenly he lets out a strangled cry, and a piece of Glory’s heart wrenches.

Kev was a prick—always has been, and always was as long as he lived—but he didn’t give her away.

There’s a horrible crunching sound that she can only recognize as Kev’s face breaking—she should know, she’s broken it before, that time he slept with her cheating-ass girlfriend. She almost ended up in jail for that one, but he didn’t turn her in then either—she’d never had a man fuck her so good with a broken jaw.

Another crunching sound comes, this one wetter than the last, and her body trembles with abject horror as she struggles to keep herself from heaving. The sounds only get worse when the screaming stops—like a meat hammer in a butcher shop, made all the worse by the sound of the killer’s laugh.

At least Kev can’t feel it anymore.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are . . . ” the killer beckons, almost seductively, until he’s suddenly stomping again, pacing aggressive circles in the gravel. “COME THE FUCK OUT!”

He’s furious that he can’t find her; for all he knows, she could be halfway to the state line by now. It’s been so long since he’d seen her. She sees him though, and she’s frozen by sheer terror when she catches a glimpse of his blood-soaked hands from beyond the grimed-over glass.

He practically howls with rage one last time before stomping out of Glory’s sight.

At first, she thinks nothing of it—he’s just looking for her somewhere else, or maybe waiting around to lure her into a false sense of security—but eventually she realizes that dawn is threatening to break.

Has she really been in that old dryer for hours?

It doesn’t feel real. None of this nightmare feels real. She’s not even sure if she can even move; if she’ll ever be able to move or make any noise ever again—the inside of this once candy-colored rusty old thing has become her whole world, her tomb, in the span of the longest several hours of her life.

The world outside would go on without her, surely, but it won’t forget about her, and the barest hints of sunlight reminds her that outside of her metal safe haven her entire band lies dead in various states of brutalization.

She knows it was brutal—she’d heard all of it—and she’s not looking forward to seeing it.

Maybe it would have been better if she had just died in that old dryer—certainly a part of her did, but she didn’t. Her heart is still beating, and if the killer doesn’t find her, the police will.

Glory is in shock, but she isn’t stupid. Even if she didn’t have a violent criminal record, the mainstream American courts won’t hesitate to pin the blame on an openly queer musician to keep the public from panicking over the real killer.

No, she has to get out of here, or she’ll have survived this nightmare only to end up being shoved into the electric chair while polite society cheers the men who put her there.

Unwilling to die that way, Glory drags herself out of the dryer, wincing from the pain as the rusted metal digs into her skin. She can hardly feel her legs, the limbs having gone numb from spending so much time pretzeled up in hiding. It takes every last shred of willpower not to scream out into the dawning day, bloody and wailing like a newborn babe, but the fact that no one knows where she is is the closest mockery of safety she has.

The cooling relief of fresh breath in her lungs doesn’t last long before her eyes fall on the crushing reality of the horrors around her. Among the viscera, the severed limbs, and the broken bodies of people who she once called family, lies the woman that not long ago she claimed to love.

True or not, Glory can’t keep her body from trembling as she reluctantly approaches Sue’s body, with all the horror and awe one approaches a train wreck. She feels obligated to one last look, one final goodbye, until the horror of the situation truly sets in.

Sue looks at her.

“Oh god.” It’s the first sound that’s left her lips since she crawled into that damned clothes dryer, and it comes out like sandpaper against her esophagus.

Blood oozes grotesquely from and around a bit of pipe that’s been jammed into her throat, but still her frantic eyes follow Glory, as if begging her to do something, anything.

But what can be done?

Tears streak her face as she falls to her knees next to Sue, who’s fingers twitch uselessly when she gets near. Glory knows the other woman is trying desperately to reach out for her, but her ruined body can’t even do that.

An ugly silent sob wracks Glory’s body as she realizes what she has to do, the only thing she can do. She pulls the pocket knife from her beat up old vest, and drops to her knees.

Sue’s entire body trembles—with fear or anticipation, Glory will never know. Hot blood gushes over her hands when she pulls out the pipe, and her stomach churns. The worst of the work isn’t over, not by a long shot. She could almost swear it’s someone else’s knife, someone else’s hands when the blade rips through what’s left of Sue’s ruined throat, but once the grizzly work is done, and Sue’s mangled body falls slack for the last time, there’s no shaking off the weight of what she’s done, and she wretches.

Glory’s throat aches when the vomit comes up, followed by thick, harsh sobs. The best she can do for Sue now is to close her eyes, so at least her cooling corpse doesn’t have to look at the hellish surroundings.

Fuck.

Fuck.

She can’t sit around here feeling sorry now. If anyone finds her here, be it the killer or the police, she’s as good as dead, and she’s not ready to die just yet.

She has to be quick when she makes a break for her van, but she can’t afford to be careless either. The sick fuck who brought them here dragged them out of the van—she vaguely remembers that from when she was regaining consciousness—for all she knows he could be waiting for her there.

God. This is all my fault, isn’t it? She thinks.

It was her idea to stop for the strange hitchhiker in the gas mask, after all. Kev didn’t like it from the start—thought it looked sketchy, but she had insisted that the guy was no sketchier than them in their burnout van.

How wrong she was.

When she goes for broke and climbs into the van, she’s relieved to find herself alone, until that relief is replaced with gut wrenching fury at the sight of the empty aerosol canister that the bastard had tossed into the van when she pulled over to let him in.

She kicks the damn thing, sending it clattering onto the dusty pavement below. If it weren’t for the can and the drug that fogged up the van, they could have fought the hitchhiker off, it would have been six against one. But no, the fucking bastard drugged them and mutilated the rest of them, for the crime of her kindness.

Fuck.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, her fingers tremble as she reaches for the glovebox. Relief floods over her when she lays eyes on her spare pair of old glasses—they’re cracked in places, and the prescription is out of date, but at least she’ll be able to see well enough to drive.

It’s almost surprising when the van starts without issue—she had half expected the lines to be cut, or at the very least the key to be gone, but she supposes that the killer probably intended to use it as his own getaway car . . . and that with her alive it would be more of a liability than anything. After all, he’s got no way of knowing she’ll be more of a suspect than he is.

Driving out of there kicks her brain into autopilot, and it’s not until she’s back on the highway that the oppressive weight of acceptance rears its ugly head. Alone and miles from anyone who could hear her, she lets out a ragged scream that shakes her entire body.

They’re dead.

They’re all dead.

And she’s going to be suspect number one.

Even if she did have much of a life to go back to, she can’t even return to pick up the pieces. She may as well have died in that fucking hell hole, for how wholly the bastard has taken her life from her.

As it stands, there’s only one place she can think to go, and she can’t stick around long.

Glory

She pulls the rust bucket into the parking lot of a shitty little gas station not far from the city. The guy who runs it is an old friend, and in his line of work he knows better than to ask too many questions.

She can’t afford anyone digging to deeply right now, and she’s not even sure she could answer anyway.

If she opens her mouth, she’s liable to either scream, curse, or find herself unable to make any sound at all.

Since coming to the city, she vowed that she was never going to feel so weak and vulnerable again . . . now look at her.

It’s almost dark again by the time she manages to unglue her bloody and aching fingers from the steering wheel. Luckily, she’s still got a brick of weed under the passenger seat—she’ll need something to pay the ferryman. It feels almost wrong to see someone alive after the events of the past twenty four hours. She feels like a ghost in the land