Chapter 12
The van steamed of sex, satiated sex and an undercurrent of tension. A gushing warmth of affection flowed between the two women, so strong they could not look the other in the eye. Two women, arch enemies, thrown together in a fight for survival. Now what?
In unison their eyes turned to the men. They stiffened, dared not to move. Images of plunging knives and reverberations of their own cries screamed in their ears. Chuck pulled himself up from the mattress and was grabbing for his pants-when he swung around. The van door was opening.
"STOP WHERE YOU ARE OR I'LL SHOOT!" a voice in the darkness shouted as Shorty bolted upright, pulling free of Carla's collapsed body.
"What the hell?" Chuck's jaw fell slack. His dark eyes snapped murderously as the policeman, with drawn gun, grabbed him by the arm and yanking him through the open van door, pointed the barrel between his eyes.
"Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" Chuck guarded his face with his arm.
Every detail, every movement was lightning fast and blurred, and over with in less time than it took for Carla and Mae to realized they were safe. Outside the van there sounded a deafening report like a guerilla ambush, a noise you could feel as it echoed in the night. The women cowered together, locked in each other's arms as a scream rent the air. Sobbing, they stared into the darkened night to see Chuck lying a couple of yards away in the sand, staining it with blood spurting from his arm. He kicked and squirmed like a beached whale, and his voice was low as he groaned from the pain of the .38 slug in his bicep.
In the same frenzy, Shorty rolled over on the mattress and pounded his fists into the mattress and cried. The game of hunt and chase and kill had ended for both of them.
"You ..." The policeman's pistol was brandished before Shorty's watery eyes. "I don't want to shoot you too. Get your ass out of there!" They slapped hand cuffs on him, after forcing him to dress. There was no reason to handcuff Chuck; the bullet wound immobilized him.
The police officer and Paul exchanged looks of mingled grief and satisfaction.
"We've had reports from campers of harassment ... clothes missing, sleeping bags ... a couple of weapons found in caves." His eyes lifted to the light splashed interior of the van where the two women sobbed in each other's arms. "You two get dressed. We'll have to take you to the emergency room for a sperm count." His eyes rested on their naked bumps and curves for a lingering moment. He shook his head, muttering to himself: "Can't say as I blame those guys."
Paul hopped into the van, pulling off his jacket and draping it over Carla's shoulders, shivering and goosebumped. The full impact hit her now and she began to feel, really feel, the bottle up emotions she'd been holding back. Feebly, she opened her cum-encrusted lips to speak, to try to relate to this man, the man she loved, how much she needed him now, but words refused to form. He stroked her hair back from her head. His hands were soft and gentle.
"Oh, Paul ..." she choked out at last. "It was awful!" He pulled the jacket around her breasts and, with his arm around her shoulders, helped her limp out of the van towards the waiting police car with its flashing red light. He opened the door and helped her in. He looked at her for a studious minute, cupping her shoulders with his reassuring hands. With a jerk of the head toward the van where Mae lay in a sobbing hysteria, he asked:
"I have to know something. Did she provoke this? Did she do this to you?" When he and the patrolman had tip-toed over the sand toward the van, after finding Chet passed out in the sand, rope tied and gagged, they had heard the moans and grunts of intercourse, forced intercourse, and that roused his suspicions. The sex hungry Mae, when ignored, was capable of coercing anyone into her game, and he had assumed just that-until he'd seen the glimmer of the knife through the van window.
"No ..." she shook her head, auburn hair floating about her shoulders. Lusty scenes of she and Mae groveling in lesbian love flitted through her brain and she wondered, with a shiver, just how much Paul had seen.
But then every one of them had been acting under strange influences this weekend, relenting to temptations that ended so ungratifiyingly. So much for a quiet trip to the beach to get their heads together and mellow out, she thought squeezing back tears.
"I ... I don't want to talk about anything ... I can't." Her face was pale, her mind blank, her heart aching. Could she ever relate to this man the lusty details of forced sex with Mae, the ugly man who'd driven her to ecstasy ... the fact that three people, men and women, had been making love to her at once? Once he knew, would he want to marry her?
Love wasn't love without forgiveness, she realized, recalling the naked lesbian sex with Mae, a bizarre thing. Forgiveness had its own time table and who could predict what catalyst would spur the heart into opening onto another, of forgiving the other's weaknesses. For admitting to one's failures requires strength. That was one subject she knew little of.
Mae. Her face lifted to the van where Mae lay sobbing with no man to console her. Near the dying fire Chet lay in a drunken stupor, ropes freed from his ankles and wrists, impassive to the world. Mae had no one.
"I have to talk to Mae," she whispered softly, her voice drowned out by the scuffling between Shorty and the police man. "It wasn't her fault ... she tried to protect me, she really did ... but when they-"
"Shhh ..." He put a hushing finger to her lips. "Go to her then."
Slowly she pulled free of his arms and with the sand cold under her bare feet, padded back to the van. Mae lay naked on the mattress, crying into the blanket.
"Mae?" Sitting on the edge of the mattress, Carla pulled the tear wetted strands of silken honey hair back from her face and gently lifted her head with a hand cupped under her chin. The mascara smeared baby blue eyes had lost their sparkle, dulled to gray shades of despair.
"He doesn't even care! I've been raped ..." she gasped, "almost killed ... and he doesn't care!"
"Shhh ..." Carla wrapped her arms around the other and pulled her close, consoling her as one would a child. "It's not that he doesn't care, it's that he isn't very strong right now and he needs you ... Of course he's going to hate himself tomorrow, he's going to blame himself, and maybe that's what it will take for him to quit drinking. You have to give him some credit, Mae, you have to let him find out for himself what's right for his life. That's what this camping trip was about" she added with a snicker of irony. "None of us were ready for it, none of us counted on this happening, but it did and we have to work things out from there."
She wrapped the blanket around Mae's shivering shoulders. "Come on ... they're waiting to take us to the hospital."
Leaning against the patrol car, Paul's eyes fastened on the two women stumbling through the door emerging from the van, the hellish prison for the first time in an hour ... sixty long minutes of torture and degradation.
Mae fell to sobbing. "I'm worth nothing, oh Carla, I've been so jealous of you, so afraid of you ... I hated you for having someone who cared about you."
Carla wrapped her arm around the tall, leggy blonde and glanced toward Paul. She was lucky, very lucky. Sometimes it took pain to realize that.
Later they could discuss the horrible web of dark emotions that entangled them all in this trap.
On a weekend at the beach, away from Los Angeles. There was nothing wrong with giving it another shot.