Amber twitched and sighed heavily. Something felt very wrong to her but she could not place why. She slowly opened her eyes and noted that she was lying on one side, facing the en suite bathroom with the window at her back. She squinted wearily and knew something looked wrong.
It came to her in a mere instant of clarity: there was not enough light in the room. Only sunlight streamed through the window and the overhead light she had left on had been turned off. Mixed feelings shot through her then and she struggled with them.
Her first feeling was happiness. With the overhead light off, Greg must have returned home and turned off the light before waking her. The second feeling was of deep foreboding. She had no reason to suspect the one who turned the light off was anyone but Greg and yet her intestines were tying themselves in knots.
She noticed the shadow spilling over her covers and it dawned on her that it was the shadow of a man. This should have made her joyful because it should have kicked the feeling of foreboding to the preverbal curb. Unfortunately the shape of the shadow was all wrong. The man was too tall and too slim to be Greg.
Greg was only five feet and ten inches tall, average sized. They were actually the same height and she remarked to him all the time that the numbers for her meant she was above average while for him he would forever be average. He took this with a smile or a laugh.
Despite his average height, Greg had broad shoulders and a thick back. His waist tapered to his hips and he did have a bit of a pouch beginning now but the rest of his body was built more muscular than what the shadow spilling across her form was revealing to her.
Amber heard the breathing then. It was light and fast, Amber could tell that the stranger standing next to her bed behind her was excited. Amber knew she could not reach the baseball bat if it was still against the dresser. The stranger had probably moved it and even if he had not, there would be no time for her to turn, throw off the covers and grab the handle before he grabbed her.
Or worse: before he grabbed the baseball bat and beat her with it. Amber swallowed thickly and wished she had hidden the baseball bat underneath the covers. At least then she would have a bit better chance of fending off the unknown man behind her.
A smell permeated her nostrils finally and she blinked at it. It smelled like old copper pennies and if she had not been a nurse, she was certain she would have smelled it quicker. Being a nurse made her used to this particular smell and she almost cursed her own lack of attention. The figure behind her was either bleeding or covered in blood. If Amber strained to listen, she could hear the blood pattering on the area rug that the man was standing on behind her.
She wondered briefly what would cause that amount of blood to be on a person and knew that the man either had to be bleeding from the throat or would have had to cut someone across the throat. Bleeding from the throat would mean she could just wait him out as he would die in less than five minutes. If he had cut someone across the throat then he could stand there forever. Eventually he would get bored of watching her and attack.
A thought dawned on Amber and she suddenly realized that the stranger behind her was not bleeding from the throat. His breath was not coming out raspy or wet enough. So he had cut through the flesh of someone else’s throat and been covered in the spray in the process. He had probably watched the spray until it died down and he knew for sure the victim was dead from loss of blood.
Amber almost jolted upright in bed at that thought. The only person who could be dying in her house would be Greg. Tears came unbidden to her eyes and she squeezed them shut. Greg was not dying downstairs as he would all ready be dead by now. The amount of blood on the man behind her and the amount of time that had passed between Greg being cut open and her lying there thinking would mean Greg could no longer draw breath and never would again.
She pushed her eyes shut to stop the tears and wondered if the man was leaning over her enough that he could see her profile. If he was, he must be able to see her crying and see that she had been awake this whole time. Amber realized with a spark of knowing that he could not see her face. He was not at the right angle and her head was buried in the pillows.
Anger rose up in her then. Who was he to kill her husband on her most favored holiday during her favorite time of year? What did he gain from it? Amber’s tears died and she scowled deeply. Before she could second guess her own actions she let out a roar of fury, threw the covers from her form and over the man. She then tackled the man, collapsing atop the struggling form and releasing a flurry of punches to area where she thought his face would be.
She screamed wordlessly with every punch she laid on the man underneath her. Strong arms clamped around her waist so suddenly that she did not register them until she was being thrown off. Her head slammed into the thick metal foot board of the bed and she lay there dazed for a long moment.
In that moment, the stranger tugged the covers from his bloody person. Amber noted in a daze that she recognized the man as the one she saw when she had been shovelling snow. His hair was brown and messily tied in a pony tail and his eyes were the same shade as his hair. Amber noted gleefully that his nose and lip were now bleeding freely.
She tried to puller herself to her feet but found that her body declined to give her the proper response. The man stood and shook himself like a dog coming out of water and Amber tried to shift away. Her neck and back shouted in protest. Amber let out a little gasp of pain but refused to close her eyes in protest of the agony.
By now the man had turned and was looking down at her with a grin that set his lip to bleeding more quickly. Amber blinked away the haze threatening to settle on her and wondered at how bad her concussion actually was. She hoped it would not hinder her too badly so she could get out of this situation but knew hoping was not enough.
The man took a step towards her and Amber let out a growl as her only warning. The man tilted his head to a side and almost started laughing until Amber’s foot slammed into the juncture between his legs. He doubled over and Amber noted the bloody knife that dropped out of his hand.
When he fell to his knees, she kicked him with both feet in the face. When he fell backwards, she slammed both her heels into his stomach four times. Finally she regained most of her senses and was able to pull herself to her feet.
The world tilted dangerously and Amber felt bile rising to her throat. She looked dizzily at the dresser for the other portable phone but saw it was not there. She also noticed that her baseball bat was missing and scowled at the writhing figure on the floor. For good measure, she put her full body weight into his groin until he screamed and passed out from pain.
She nodded then regretted the motion of her head. Amber leaned against the bed for support taking a few deep breaths before stumbling out of the room. She pulled the door closed behind her and pushed a potted plant in front of it. When he came through the door, she would hear him if she was still in earshot. She was not planning to be in earshot.
She fumbled down the stairs with her head spinning and her stomach lurching at every step. The scent of blood came to her nose again and she turned wildly to look behind her, unbelieving that she had missed the sound of the pot breaking. She lost her grip on the railing and tumbled the rest of the way down.
She landed back first in a cooling pond of blood. She noted with some difficulty that the man had not been behind her and the smell had been coming from in front of her. She slid in the blood as she tried to get back up. She managed only to fall twice more and stained her cloths red.
Finally she was able to get to her knees and stare into the messy lake of red blood before her. Her eyes adjusted to the dim light coming through the window of the front door and she saw Greg’s still body crumbled beneath her. He had broken her fall.
Amber’s breath hitched in her throat at that and her slick hands came up to cover her mouth to prevent the shout of agony that was threatening to rip from her throat. Greg’s eyes were unblin
king, unseeing and starting to glaze over. The wound on his throat was at an angle, starting high on the right side, almost behind his ear and finishing so low she was sure it would scrape against his left clavicle.
Amber noticed with stark precision that the wound was almost three inches deep in the middle of his throat and the edges were ragged. The skin around it was blotted with red as was the front of his tan suit and white dress shirt. There was a forming bruise under his left eye and his knuckles were split. Amber took comfort in knowing that he had fought back.
Something crashed upstairs but Amber paid it no attention. She thought it was important but could not remember why when she looked into her husband’s dead eyes. She began crying then, thick tears sliding down her face and making rivers through the blood there. She curled in on herself and sobbed out her agony.
Then a thick hand slammed down on her shoulder and something with too much weight to it knocked her over the head. Amber felt her eyes roll back into her head and knew that she would not wake up from this. She fell into Greg’s still chest and closed her eyes knowing that she would at least be with her husband soon.
Amber opened her eyes to see her bathroom ceiling staring back at her. She blinked in abject wonder at the simple fact that she had been able to open her eyes. Heavy breathing came from beside her but for the moment she did not want to turn her head.
Pain trailed along her right side, sharp and immediate and she tried to push through the haze of her mind to figure out what was causing this pain. Her side throbbed and she let out a little moan but did not close her eyes. Finally she turned her head to the right and saw the stranger lying right beside her with a grin on his face. She screamed and tried to roll away but an ache erupting along her side stopped her still.
“You’ll pull out the stitches if you do that again,” the man whispered to her and Amber noted that he had cleaned himself up.
“Stitches?” She stuttered in confusion.
It was her head that had been hit and there was no reason for her to have stitches on her side. There was no reason for her not to be able to feel her right arm. It should be squished under him but she did not feel the pins and needles associated with it. The only thing she could feel was pain that sung along every nerve on her right.
“I sewed us together so we can never be apart,” the man explained with a grin.
Amber stared at him for a long moment the implications of that statement settling into her person. Her throat closed and her vision narrowed to two little pinpricks of detail as her gaze shifted to stare at her own body.
Bile rose strong in her throat as she looked at the stump that used to be where her right arm was. It was joined with thick black thread to the stump were his left arm had been. The precise stitches continued all the way down her side, joining him to her, her to him until they stopped two inches above her obscenely pink panties. She noted a small dot of blood where a needle had entered her flesh at her stomach and realized that he had put her under.
“Who, why, oh God,” Amber tried to mutter out around the thick lump that had settled in her throat.
“My name is Russell and I did this because I love you,” the man said with a light chuckle and shifted to kiss her cheek.
Memories flooded back over her. He was the stalker from high school. His glaring looks as Greg protected her year after year. The shouts of her ex boyfriends when they found Russell trailing behind them on their dates. She coughed and tried to turn away again but only managed to turn her head.
Bile poured out of her mouth as she winced in pain from the stitches. The only good thing about this was that she was in fact left handed. If she remembered correctly, so was he. Amber saw with some absurd lucidity that her right arm was lying along beside her. She almost laughed but the smile turned into a sneer as she picked up the arm and slammed it into Russell’s face.
He yelped at her and tried to grab her own severed arm away from her but she was driven by an animal passion that caused her to keep bringing the limb down on him over and over again. Russell took the blows but did not pass out. Amber realized the arm was not sturdy enough to do the job and gave him a final whack across the eyes before turning away from him the best she could.
“Better now? I hope so, you are wearing my necklace after all,” Russell muttered after a moment.
“What do you mean?” Amber questioned without turning.
“The roses, the chocolates, the bear, the necklace, they were all from me. You’re my sweet Valentine,” Russell’s words poured over her like molasses.
A glint of silver caught her attention and Amber noticed the knife he had likely used to kill Greg sitting in her immediate vicinity. It was still clutched in his left hand, attached to the arm he had severed to join them. She noted another large knife a few feet away but dismissed it. Amber’s left hand skittered along the floor as he was still talking and she grabbed the deadened left hand of Russell.
Peeling back the fingers one handed was frustrating but Amber knew just where to apply pressure to get the knife to release. It did not clatter to the floor and it merely slid out of the now loosened grip of the dead hand. Amber’s lips pulled back into a snarl. She howled in fury as she turned with the knife in her hand.
Russell yelled at her to stop but she brought it down hard into his eye. She was not sure which eye it was but she did not care because she yanked the knife out and slammed it into his other eye. His right hand came up to grab her wrist and she slashed at it, the flesh oddly malleable under the blade.
Blood poured from the gash on his wrist and she pushed the knife through the center of his right palm before jerking it free again and slamming it into his forehead. He shuddered a few times and his right arm fell weakly to one side. She did not noticed as she was too busy pulling the knife from his forehead and pushing it into his throat with a cry of rage.
The knife separated flesh again and she tugged it free as blood sprayed her in the face weakly. She made no notice to this and pounded the knife through his sternum before pulling it free again and cutting into his stomach four times.
With heaving breaths, she stilled with the knife still embedded in his stomach. Amber gulped a few times to curb the light-headedness threatening to knock her unconscious. She did not want to die of blood loss attached to the man who killed the love of her life. With that in mind, Amber pulled free the knife for the last time and used it to tug out the stitches.
Her body failed her a few times and forced her to pass into unconsciousness but each time she woke with a greater determination and larger anger to hack away at the thick black stitches at her side. When the final one snapped free she lay there for a moment, covered in blood and sweat with her breath coming out in short gasps.
She flung the knife away and heard it clatter against the wall somewhere to her right. She could feel the blood leaking from her wounds but paid them no attention. Instead, she turned onto her left side and managed to sit up. Her hand skittered against the vanity until it found a roll of gauze. This she wrapped awkwardly around her abdomen, over her breasts and around the stump of her right arm.
Partially satisfied, she made it to her feet. The door kept tilting from side to side but Amber paid it no mind. She all but fell out of the bathroom and shuffled to stand before the staircase. Lying at the bottom of the stairs in a messy pool of half-congealed blood was Greg. She let out a grunt of determination and made her way down the stairs.
They rose up to meet her a heart beat later and she felt her tibula snap under the pressure. She felt the bone push through her skin and almost laughed. When she finally slammed against the floor for the second time that day she let out a little breath of relief.
One armed, she pulled herself closer towards Greg’s limp body. Amber ignored the pain from the leaking wounds on her right side. She disregarded the agony from her broken leg. She overlooked the ghost pain telling her that her right arm was still attached to her body and could help. She snubbed the throbbing in the back of her head t
hat threatened to take her under again. All she cared about was reaching the body of the love of her life.
Finally she was able to pull herself over him, draping herself over his motionless broad chest. She imagined his arms coming around her and smiled. She scowled a moment later as she remembered the necklace at her throat. This she pulled off with a growl and tossed it somewhere in the home. She did not care where it went because it was not a gift she wanted to own or see again.
She settled into Greg’s broad form with a sunny grin coming to her face. Amber snuggled against him and closed her eyes. No movement came from the house but in the distance she could hear police sirens. She vaguely remembered her friend mentioning that people could cut security wires and was in disbelief that it had only been a half hour. Perhaps the neighbours had called when she was screaming. Perhaps the wires being cut had not alerted the authorities until it was too late.
Amber pushed all these thoughts out of her head and snuggled deeper into Greg’s dead body. She pictured the smile on his face when he saw her. She could almost feel the gentle pressure of his arms around her waist. She swore she heard his deep voice saying her name and beyond the blood she could smell his cologne. As an ambulance and a police cruiser pulled into her drive-way Amber let out a small breath and knew no more.