Read Online The Forsaken by Ace Atkins - Free Book Online Page B

stepped off horses from another century.
    Stagg wandered out on the walkway, trying to get a glimpse of the pack rounding the Square, see if he recognized any of the bastards who’d come to town to make a stand and go ahead and squat and shit on his big day.
    “Mr. Stagg?” Ringold said. “You OK?”
    •   •   •
    “Y’all didn’t make it to the house?” Quinn said.
    “No, sir,” Diane said. Diane and Quinn stood in the pasture a few hundred meters from where the old house had been. “This is where he grabbed Lori and started to mess with her, putting his hands all on her, reaching under her shirt and into her jeans. He kept the gun on me and told me to sit, wait till he was done. I told him we needed to get to the old house, you know, just to keep him moving, trying to figure out a way we could get loose before we got inside.”
    Quinn nodded. Hondo broke into a wide circle and started to bark a bit at the cows, getting one big fat heifer to trot forward, the dog nipping at her heels. The dog barked some more and nipped at some other cows. Quinn looked up to the big bull on the hill and then back to Diane. The morning so gray and cold, he could see her breath as she spoke.
    That black pitchfork tree loomed in the distance.
    “He pushed her down to the ground,” Diane said. “Right here. He told us if we didn’t stop crying, he’d kill us both. He said if I tried to help her, he’d shoot me where I stood. I sat down and waited. He got to one knee, then pressed himself on Lori, and I just blurted out all of a sudden, I’m not even sure I’d said it, but I must have. I told him to come on with me first. I told him I’d let him have me first, not cry about it. I told Lori to goon, leave us alone. He didn’t say anything, but she wouldn’t leave us. She didn’t go ten feet, just standing there with arms across her chest, crying, watching as that son of a bitch ripped off my jeans and underwear with a pocketknife and did what he wanted to me. He smelled like pure garbage, grunting and calling me filthy names the whole time, gun in his right hand until he finished up. Yes, it hurt like hell. I bled down there for weeks.”
    “You gave a pretty good description to my uncle,” Quinn said. “You said he had burn marks on his face. A lot of scarring.”
    “On the right side,” she said. “And some white scarring across his head where the hair didn’t grow back normal. He wasn’t a big man, but he had a lot of weight and muscle about him. Real compact. I’d never seen him before. When he got going, he spoke in biblical passages about whores and harlots. He told me he hated me.”
    Quinn nodded. Hondo looped back to him, tongue lolling, waiting for orders on more roundups.
    “When he finished, he buckled up his pants and told me to get my ass up and to stand next to my friend,” Diane said, hands in the pockets of a Sherpa jean coat, gray strand of hair falling across her eyes. “I pulled up my things, which were ripped and trashed, and walked over to Lori, putting my arm around her. I remember doing that much, telling her that as soon as we could we just needed to start running. She nodded, shivering like she was cold, even though it was hot as hell that night. I held her hand as we walked, like when we were kids, and I would look back at the man, him trudging along with a grin on his face till we got near that old tree over there.”
    She stood and pointed to the charred relic of what had maybe been a big oak.
    “All of a sudden, he told us to run,” she said. “He said run, get gone, he was through with the whores, and we ran to that old house, even thoughthe house might’ve been worse. I always wondered why we didn’t run to the road, away from this place, but the house was shelter and closer and I guess we were thinking he’d leave us and go back to his car.”
    “How far did y’all get?”
    “From here?”
    Quinn nodded. Hondo had wandered over to Diane Tull and moved his head