Kyler body physicals

The obvious threat acted like a pail of icy water. Kyler snapped open her eyes and found she was tied to a dentist's chair. Plasticuffs held her wrists and ankles, while a single lamp shone over her head, making her the star attraction in this grim theater of abduction. The walls of the room were lost in darkness, but echoes suggested a massive chamber.

   Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs, chapter 18

Red fire scraping in blackness, eternal, grating on bone and wrenching each spurting vein in mortal suffering. Could there be hope? So much was screaming from the wall of death. Her mind huddled in the corner of a car crash, a frightened child, every twitch of the flesh an act of sadism. Finding the next exposed nerve. Snip.

The cruel laughter of the traitor. Michelle Kyler was lost: real and unreal, the extremities of torture. Surely there had to be an end to it?

"You're not looking too good, dear."

Did Kyler imagine it, or was Pamela speaking to her again?

Black mounds of swelling obscured Kyler's left eye. Teeth had been broken and extracted. Two steel pins jutted from holes hammered into her knees. Her neck was a tracery of hyenic scalpel slicing. Her smart brown suit and white blouse were now no more than tattered cerements.

She grunted.

As Tolleson continued to work her over—twisting a corkscrew into bleeding, raw flesh—the voice spoke a second time.

"My, what have they been doing to you?"

Kyler tried to answer, but her jaw had been dislocated and was now spilling black berries of damage down the length of her neck; the severe beating reduced her language to a Morse code of desolation.

"Don't try to talk, dear," said Pamela. "Just think the words in your mind. I'll hear them."

Tolleson stood back to take a look at his handiwork.

"You know something, Michelle?" he said, pleased with the results. "I got real sick of listening to your self-aggrandizing bullshit. Michelle Kyler: the woman who put the big frigging I in FBI. You were SO easy.”

He picked up a tiny steel mallet and set about fracturing every bone in her left hand; methodically, one by one, starting with the pinky.

   Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs, chapter 18

Kyler craned forward, sank her teeth in the soft folds of Morgas's neck, and tore open a crater that sprayed jets of blood all over the collector's face. He screamed and stumbled, only to witness Kyler break free from her restraints as if they were made of tissue. The garrote slipped from her throat, giving Morgas just enough time to crap into his thousand-dollar pants before Kyler stood up and snatched the pistol from his hand.

Tolleson turned to see what was happening, inadvertently stepping into the moonlight; the shaft of silver was now pointing like a laser at his heart.

One—two—three—four—five—six. Each of Kyler's bullets found its ventricular target, knocking Tolleson off his feet, dealing with him dispassionately and decisively. His body slammed against the marble with a squelch, the four-chambered meat pump doing its best to supply the dead man with redundant corpuscles. The severed head fell with him and rolled beyond the moonbeams.

"Pleeaase," whined Morgas. He was crawling on all fours in a pig sty of his own shit and blood. "Help me," he cried, as he reached forward to kiss Kyler's feet.

Michelle rose to her full height above him.

"It's judgment day, Mr Morgas," she smiled.

Then she reached for the trolley full of torture tools and began to exact her revenge. It would take all her skill and know-how to cause maximum pain before the bleating hog bled to death. She had a minute at the most. But a lot could happen in sixty seconds.

   Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs, chapter 18

Kyler turned the radio off and checked herself in the mirror. Her face was bruised and she needed some dental work, but she'd healed remarkably well over the last seven days; in fact, her recovery seemed positively unnatural. She was delighted with her new look. Gone were the boring brown business suit and the white blouse, replaced by jeans, a checked shirt and a powder blue sweater. She'd also found time to have her hair done and now had a blonde permanent wave in place of her former shoulder-length brunette. And she wore a hunting knife in a leather sheath hanging off her belt.

"Don't worry, Jason," she whispered. "Mommy's coming. Mommy will make it better."

Staring through the windshield at the endless miles of farmland, she pushed harder on the gas and went speeding along the road. She didn't know where Jason was or what he was doing, but she knew that each mile she traveled was another mile closer to him.

A mother just knows these things.

   Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs, epilogue