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unconscious so she did not have to hear it. The ragged scream collapsed into a howl.
    The howl ... the one she’d heard earlier ...
    Her right hand found something on the ground beside her. It was hard and cold, made of metal. She closed her hand on it and swung her arm back, then plunged it forward. She drove the metal object home hard, and something crunched beneath it.
    The long howl stopped.
    Her rapist stopped moving.
    He collapsed on her heavily, suddenly still and silent, not even breathing. He was so heavy on top of her, she found it difficult to breathe. But he had stopped. He was still inside her, but he had stopped slamming into her.
    Is he dead? she wondered. What did I do to him?
    She remained there for an endless time, unable to move at first. Then, when she did move, her movements hurt, as if her entire body were raw. Emily tried to crawl backward, out from under him. When that did not work, she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed. She threw her whole body into it, all her weight, and heaved him off of her to her left.
    When his body hit the ground beside her, it expelled a long, gurgling breath, its final sound.
    Then she crawled backward, away from him, until she reached the flashlight. She rolled over and closed her right hand on the flashlight as she struggled to her feet. Her torn clothes dangled from her in wet tatters, and dirt and gravel clung to her exposed skin. She turned around and shone the beam down on him.
    The long, dark hair looked unwashed and matted. Dark stubble grew all around his gaping mouth, covering the lower half of his face. He was a man of medium height, pale, arms spread at his sides. His filthy clothes were torn and tattered into strips. His right eye was no longer silver, and there was no longer anything wrong with it. It was open wide, like his mouth, a blue eye, perfectly normal. There was, however, something wrong with his left eye—something protruded from it. She stepped toward him, bent down, and turned the light on it.
    It had a fat black handle, caked with damp earth. Emily reached out, closed her hand on it—the black handle was plastic. She pulled on it, not very hard at first, and it did not come out. She put a little more strength into it, and it came out with a wet sound. It lifted his head off the ground for a moment, then his head flopped back down as it was released.
    It was a long rusty corkscrew—with the man’s left eyeball impaled on the end, something long and wet and jiggly dangling from the back of it.
    Emily gasped and dropped the corkscrew as she stumbled backward. Her right heel hit something—a rock embedded in the ground, maybe—and she fell backward, flailing her arms for balance, trying to come out of the fall.
    The back of her head struck the edge of the paved road hard, and blackness overcame her.
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    * * * *
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    Hugh Crane closed his hands on Vanessa Peterman’s round breasts and his thumbs flicked over her nipples, which stood rigid beneath them. Vanessa straddled his lap in the back seat of her white Chrysler 300 with darkly-tinted windows, which was parked in his driveway. She bounced up and down on him.
    The children were planted in front of the television in the living room, enraptured by the Cartoon Network, or the Disney Channel, or Nickelodeon, or whatever it was they’d been watching when he’d left them there. They were avid television watchers, and he knew they would stay right where they were, their attention focused on the screen, until he called them away.
    Vanessa made high-pitched sounds behind tightly closed lips, and her hands closed on his chest, her fingernails clawing him through the cotton of his unbuttoned shirt as she came. Hugh quickly followed her, crying out short, staccato sounds as he thrust his hips upward, driving himself into her.
    It was the second time for him—he’d lost count of Vanessa’s orgasms. She was wildly orgasmic. It was one of the things