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The gun made a whispering scrape as it slid across the dirty, ragged linoleum floor. He began slowly rising to his feet.
“Stay down on your knees, asshole. Hands behind your head.”
“The police will be along real soon,” Sean said, sinking back down. “She’s transmitting a radio signal from her shoe. Want to see it?”
“Yeah, of course,” the guy said. “Of course she is. Of course they are.” He let out a high-pitched giggle. “Just look at this. Should I gut-shoot you, and let you bleed to death? Or sever your spinal column and leave you paralyzed? I oughta leave you alive, with the door open, for the animals. You can witness yourself becoming part of the food chain.” He slid the barrel of the gun down over Liv’s throat, between her breasts. “I don’t even know where to begin. I want to eat her up.”
Liv shriekedas he chomped into her neck and he sloppily licked the stinging wound. She clutched the nail she had wrenched out of the wall as the cold gun barrel made its way back up her half-bare body. He tucked it beneath her chin, jabbing it painfully deep.
“I’ve been looking forward to this for fifteen years,” T-Rex said. He shoved her chin up with the gun and kissed her, his muscular tongue poking into her mouth. She tasted her own blood, and almost retched.
“As soon as I get him squared away, I’ll put away the gun, baby-doll,” he went on. “I’ll just use the knife. Lasts longer that way.”
The world narrowed down to a pinpoint of brilliant clarity.
She did not want to die slowly and horribly at the hands of this monster. A bullet in the head would at least be quick—and it might give Sean a chance. He deserved a chance. He was magnificent. Charging in to save her, against all odds, all hope or logic.
She convulsed. The gun barrel slipped up her neck, slick with blood and sweat. She jerked her bound hands, the nail protruding between her fingers, in what she hoped was the direction of his face, and sank her teeth into his wrist. The nail hit oily, slippery flesh.
He shrieked. The gun went off, deafening her.
T-Rex tried to shake her off. His skin was slimy. His blood tasted metallic and hot. His muscles and tendons strained against her teeth.
The gun went off again. She could no longer hear it. The explosion reverberated through their struggling bodies. He tried to angle the barrel to aim it at her skull. Jammed his fingers into the corners of her mouth. He was going to rip her jaw right off, but she couldn’t have let go if she wanted to. She was locked on, like a maddened pit bull.
She opened her eyes. The heel of Sean’s boot brushed past her face, slammed into T-Rex’s hand. Her jaw loosened as the blow jarred them against the wall. The gun bounced against the wall, hit the floor.
So did she.
T-Rex swungup his massive knee. Sean barely blocked the blow to his groin, and the vicious jab to the temple. So the dude wasn’t all gym-rat muscle and ego. He was scarily quick. The glow in his wild eyes suggested drug enhancement. Whatever the shit was, it worked.
The guy came at him, howling, in a blur of kicks and punches.
Blood splattered onto Sean with each new offensive, but T-Rex was feeling no pain. He herded Sean into a corner. A kick to his face knocked him off course, but he swung back, lunging for Sean’s throat.
Sean blocked, grabbed, twisted. T-Rex didn’t even feel the torqued tendons. Bad breath, he noted with odd detachment, as they careened toward the back of the cabin. Foul. Guy should floss. They swayed, legs splayed, trying to trip each other. Barreling towards a warped door that led to the deck. They tore it off its rusty hinges and hit the deck with a rending crash. Panes of glass beneath them shattered, tinkled. Rotten planks shuddered and groaned, bowing at the impact.
Sean ended up on the bottom, as luck would have it.
T-Rex’s face was barely recognizable as human. Sean blocked a chopping blow to the collarbone. T-Rex got his enormous hands around Sean’s neck. It became a wrestling match. Sweat dripped from the guy’s brow, stinging Sean’s eyes. He kept his neck rigid, freeing his hand for a quick, desperate jab at T-Rex’s white-rimmed eyes.
T-Rex jerked back, and Sean jabbed in a sharp uppercut that rocked the bigger man’s head back on his thick neck. That broke his concentration, but Sean hadn’t even rolled up to his knees before T-Rex smashed him against the sagging deck railing. Planks cracked, bowed, and gave. Nails screeched as they were torn from their long home. The deck tipped. There was nothing solid to grab. He pitched over the edge.
It was a long fall, but the cliff was not sheer, and he bounced and slid over outcroppings of granite before landing on his feet, fortunately, bending at the knees. He rolled, came to rest facedown, his nose inches from crystalline water that lapped over the multicolored pebbles.
He scrambled up. T-Rex had not fallen with him. What was left of the deck dangled at a forty-five degree angle, planks scattered on the pebbled beach. T-Rex had glommed on to a tough shrub on the cliff face, and was pulling himself up onto the rocks where the cabin was perched.
Sean looked frantically around. He was trapped in a cove, rock on all sides, thorny foliage that would take ten desperate minutes to crawl through. T-Rex would be back up there in a couple of minutes. He pried his knife out. The angle sucked, but it was worth a try. He threw.
The knife embedded itself in the back of T-Rex’s ass.
The guy yelped, slid, caught himself. He reached back, and plucked the knife out of himself. “Thanks for the blade, you shit-eating prick. You’re going to love what I do to your girlfriend’s face with it.”
He stuck Sean’s blade between his teeth and kept climbing.
Sawingthrough plastic strapping that held one’s own wrists together required a cool head and steady hands, neither of which she had. T-Rex’s knife was wickedly sharp, and she kept nicking herself, or maybe worse than nicking. She could be slitting her own wrists. Not that she cared. Bleeding to death was the least of her worries right now.
She knelt on the doorstep, pressing her knee to the knife handle to hold the protruding blade steady enough to saw at the cuffs. Her thighs wobbled. Her fingers were slippery with blood. The knife kept slipping to one side or the other. She shook with desperate laughter. The first time in her life that she’d actually wished she were heavier.
