Apocalypse

Excerpt from the novel Meltdown©1998

‘Sweet’ Melyssa was highly pissed off. Angered in the extreme. That was the only reason she needed, at first. The bizarre scene that followed, full of strange intimations and future connotations, would be better understood later. But for the time being she was just overwhelmed with anger. Pure, unadulterated anger.

Of course, there was a volatile stew of other emotions also churning inside her: a veritable witch’s brew of dark, primitive impulses surging forth from her ancient reptile brain. These were scary, exciting, and enraging all by turns, and she couldn’t have sorted them out right now, separated them one from another if she’d wanted to. And she definitely didn’t want to. None of them really mattered except the anger. Anger was her defense in this adversity, her protection and motivation all in one. It buried her despair, swamped her fear and anguish, masked her lesser-understood emotions and fuelled the desperation of her sudden violent struggles. Their nameless European captor had just left, taking their irreplaceable daughter with her, and now she and Kurt lay here alone, awaiting whatever summary cruelty their executioners had planned.

Melyssa had no doubt that death awaited them all, and her white-hot rage at Kurt for stupidly giving in and forcing their submission when they’d still had a fighting chance for life helped her now in this darkest hour. She had an almost pathological hatred of being bound – a residue of the horrible teen-age experience that had cost her her little sister. Now, empowered by more than just her anger at Kurt and that renewed if decades-old specter of torture and death, she began wrestling furiously with her bonds.

Unlike her husband, who’d apparently lost his ability to think, she’d cleverly crossed her wrists in an x, rather than placing her hands palm to palm. That stratagem had given her both a sloppier tape job and a precious extra inch with which to work. As soon as the door to the utility room swung shut, and the sound of the chair being wedged under it confirmed their utter captivity – and privacy – Melyssa began stretching and scrunching and struggling to bring her taped hands under her butt, over her legs and around to the front of her body.

Thanks to her lucky lack of underwear, step one didn’t take long at all. Her soft cotton, elastic waist-banded sweat-shorts aided the process considerably, reducing skin friction by catching on her bound wrists and then slipping easily down her naked hips as she wriggled her also luckily slender butt throug