He had determined that her name was Meredith Hope Emerson, but he never used it. He called her “hon,” “honey,” “bitch,” or “cunt.” It was unprofessional to form an attachment to her; he had to think of her as just a faceless person whom he was going to kill. That was easy because he hated people. At the very gut level, he was filled with rage against society, especially women, because they tried to turn a man into a domestic faggot. A man was meant to be wild and free, not sit at home in a house with frilly curtains and cute little whatnots. A man might protest against this by having a few manly tools in the garage to fool him into thinking he was still a man, but he was really a neutered faggot.
Women controlled men because they had the pussy and knew how much men valued it. Women could threaten to withhold it, which increased the pussy’s value. They could threaten to give it to someone else, and that increased its value, too. The only time the pussy lost value was when women threatened to give it away and actually did. Males were safe when they were kids; but when puberty kicked in, they were trapped and led around the rest of their lives by the pussy.
Hilton pulled the van to a stop opposite a convenience store and warned Emerson to be quiet. He pumped thirty dollars of gasoline into his van. He was down to ten bucks now. Then he drove to the Appalachian Community Bank in Blairsville and checked the surroundings. Inside Emerson’s purse he had found not just one ATM card, but three: Frontier Visa, Capital One Visa, and MasterCard. He had struck the mother lode. There were just enough people on the street, for him not to arouse suspicion at the ATM. This was the tricky part. You couldn’t try to get money when there were too few people or too many people because, either way, you stood out. You couldn’t go when it was too dark or some dickhead cop would drive by the ATM and become suspicious. The fuckers were born suspicious.
Holding a towel in front of his face, he walked over, inserted a card in the ATM, and punched the PIN code that Emerson had given to him. The ATM rejected the PIN and spit out the card, but no money. Growing increasingly frustrated, Hilton tried two more cards; they were rejected, too.
He walked angrily to the van. “Them’s the wrong numbers. You better give me the right ones.”
Emerson insisted that the PINs were correct. He tried again but received no money. Emerson suggested that he try another bank, so he drove to Gainesville, twenty-three miles away, and then another forty-two miles to Canton. He tried the cards at different banks. Still, no money. Emerson gave him different numbers and convinced him each time that she was telling the truth. The killer was nervous because of the television security cameras that recorded activities at ATMs. He concealed his face with a towel and a mask made of duct tape and goggles, but that was even more suspicious.
It became too late to try the ATMs without attracting a cop, if one should drive by on patrol. It had also turned bitterly cold. He returned to the van. Hilton was also feeling weak, like he was going to crash, physically, as if he couldn’t keep going. His damn multiple sclerosis. He would crash and then the demons would come; and hours later he would find himself with shredded tires, wondering what the hell he had been doing all that time. The demons. Death chasing him since he was four.
“You’re running me around like a fucking idiot,” he said. “Keep this up and I’ll shoot your ass. Make one sound and it’s curtains.”
Hilton laughed bitterly at himself. The woman had him running back and forth like a trained monkey. He knew she was lying about the PINs, but the eternal optimist, he just kept going. Finally he was exhausted, and it had become too risky that he would be spotted with a towel in front of his face. He needed to find a campsite somewhere in a remote area. He thought of some higher elevations in Dawson Forest. The problem with that was the ground had frozen and snow was coming in; it would be heavier at higher altitudes and accumulating rapidly on the ground. He didn’t want to have a wreck or get stuck in a snowbank.
Two inches of ice and snow were already on the road, and Hilton’s tires had little, if any, treads. He almost lost control several times. The snow slashed parallel through the twin beams of the headlights, and the wipers labored to keep two half-moons of the windshield clear of slush. It was nerve-wracking in the dark, and then there was a heart-stopping incident.
Hilton’s van was sliding out of control as he drove around a curve. In the stabbing beams of the headlights, he saw that another car was stalled on the shoulder. Worse, there was a sheriff’s patrol car beside it, with the blue lights flashing. Hilton’s van continued to struggle up the hill as he fought panic and weighed the situation. The cop was only a few feet away and his attention was riveted on the car that had slid off the road. Emerson was quiet and didn’t seem to know what was happening. If she started to make a ruckus, though, the cop might hear her and make Hilton stop the van. The van’s windows were black and opaque from the outside, but you could still see in from the outside of the windshield.
Hilton struggled to maintain control of his emotions—and the vehicle—and he knew conditions would only be worse at higher elevations. The deputy would more than likely stop him, put up a roadblock, and tell him not to go up any higher. If he didn’t turn around and start back down, Hilton believed, the cop would stop him and tell him he was nuts. And he might see or hear Emerson in the van. He had no choice except to turn around and go down the hill and hope the cop didn’t interfere with him.
I don’t know what I’m doing, Hilton thought. What the hell do I have in mind? How do I find a campsite? How do I keep the cop from coming over?
In a panicked daze Hilton managed to turn the van around and start back down. He discovered that he had slid off the road into someone’s yard, but his tires found traction and he was soon back on the road. Hilton passed within a few feet of the deputy sheriff on the way up and then again on the way back down. Hilton did not understand why Emerson had made no noise, unless she was afraid of the threat he had made to shoot her ass.
Hilton drove through the vast darkness toward a remote area of Dawson Forest, where he didn’t think anyone would ever think to look. He had to move a ROAD CLOSED barrier before he could drive to where he would make camp, and then put it back in place after brushing away tire marks and footprints. Hilton was exhausted from his long day and all the hell that the woman had put him through. He felt himself coming down, ready to crash, and he needed to take an upper, downer, or anything he could find. Hilton made Emerson help him unload the camping gear, even though she complained of a severe headache and her eyes didn’t seem to focus. Although he was angry, Hilton gave Emerson what he considered to be his best cold-weather sleeping bag. It was a high-quality bag, but it was filthy.
Hilton was infuriated by all of the hard work and nothing to show for it.
“Honey, I told you I was gonna let you go,” he told her. “You’ve run me around. You’ve run me all over northern Georgia, made me put one hundred fifty miles on my van. You lied to me. You’ve run me around. Now you owe me some pussy.”
He unzipped his pants and raped her while she was chained and on the lumpy cargo bags, surrounded by two dogs, empty food cans, banana peelings, and other trash. Emerson was unresponsive, but Hilton believed that she was enjoying herself and saw the kidnapping, beating, and rape as part of an unexpected and exciting adventure on what would otherwise have been a dull, routine day for her.
After all of this had transpired, Emerson lay on those same cargo bags inside the van with Ella. Her abductor and his dog, Dandy, slept in the front seats. It was bitterly cold and Hilton sometimes ran the engine for short periods to get heat inside the vehicle. Emerson had a heavy five-foot-long steel chain padlocked around her neck, which was also padlocked to a metal seat brace inside the vehicle. Her right ankle was tied with a short rope, which was also secured to a fixture inside the van.
“This is just in case you decide to wander away, cunt,” the abductor had said before getting into his sleeping bag.
Emerson lay in the cold van, chained up, in the vast and lonely expanse of Dawson Forest.
Held captive by a homicidal maniac, she waited for whatever would happen.
Chapter 2
Julia Karrenbauer saw Meredith