Ice Cold Alice by C.P. Wilson

Author:C.P. Wilson [Wilson, C.P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Published: 2017-04-20T07:00:00+00:00

Then…

19

I came around to the soundtrack of wet thumps and begging cries. My eyes wouldn’t open. Tilting my head to better hear, I searched the room with my ears.

“I’m sorry, Darren.” Thump.

“Darren, the baby.” Thump.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

As the room eventually grew silent, my eyes finally did as I bid them and showed me the broken world around us. Darren stood over the prone body of my little sister, his back and chest heaving with effort. Nicole’s eyes were open, but they were blank. She’d taken herself elsewhere, somewhere the horror this moment had become couldn’t reach her. To escape our father’s violence, she’d done this exact same thing as a child. It was how she’d survived him.

Laid there, eyes glazed, folded protectively around her barely-showing bump, Nicole bled from a cut to her eye, her forearm and from between her legs. Darren muttered something inaudible to me between rasping breaths.

An image of Nicole as a baby danced before my mind’s-eye. She was a beautiful child, a good baby, quiet and content. She became a precocious teen and a formidable young woman. Always, I felt a parent to her rather than her sister. At times a parent was what I was to her. So alike, that’s what they always said of us but I never felt that way, I always felt responsible for her. I still did.

In a sickening explosion of violence, he stomped on her lower back. In response, I hauled myself dizzily to my feet and ran at him. Even with all the speed I could muster and my entire body weight; even with him stood, lost in his own red fury, unaware of my approach; even with the rage of a lifetime to power my charge I barely managed to knock him to the ground.

Despite being unable to control my momentum, I recovered more quickly than he did, bringing my foot down with force onto his nose. He screamed like the weakling he was as the bone split under my heel. I felt some satisfaction at his pain.

I grabbed a heavy lamp from the table on my right and brought it crashing down onto his face. Rather than cow him, the double blow, the viciousness of my assault, enraged and empowered Darren, gifting him an adrenaline flood that brought him surging to his feet. Before I’d had the opportunity to take even a half-step away from his clutching hands, he had me by the throat in a steel cable grip.

Using all of his considerable strength and weight, he forced me onto my back and placed a thick knee across my neck and jaw. When he pressed down the world disappeared into two pinpoint holes at the centre of darkness.

As my mind slipped away again, he lifted the pressure. I gasped in a hoarse broken breath and my eyes let the light back in again. The very last thing I saw was his fists pummelling my face as I lay helpless. My last thoughts were with my sister.

∞∞∞

With great effort, Nicole shoved at the carpet with both hands, bringing herself to her knees.

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