Hand of Fate

a short story

Hand of Fate

The ancient cypress trees loomed like skeletal sentinels, their moss-draped limbs reaching out over the narrow road that snaked through the Louisiana bayou. Spanish moss hung like funeral shrouds, swaying slightly in the humid breeze that carried the rotten-sweet smell of decay from the swamp waters. Dedina Petty's rental car crawled along the crumbling asphalt, headlights carving a weak path through the oppressive darkness that seemed to press against the windows like a living thing.

Spring break was supposed to be about cheap tequila shots and sunburns in Panama City, not getting lost in backwater country where the silence felt predatory. But Dedina had insisted on taking "the scenic route" after their last gas station stop, ignoring the weathered local's warning about sticking to the main highway after dark. Her friends had rolled their eyes, then dozed off, lulled by the monotonous drone of tires on pavement and the whiskey they'd been passing around.

"I'll just be a minute," she'd called, stepping out into the thick night air to stretch her cramped legs while her friends slept in the car. The mosquitoes immediately found her, whining near her ears as she walked a few paces from the vehicle. She'd noticed the silhouette by the tree line too late—a tall, unnaturally still figure watching her. The last thing she remembered was the sickly-sweet chemical smell as a gloved hand clamped over her mouth from behind, the scratch of leather against her skin, and the peculiar realization that her attacker held her with his left hand while he pressed the soaked rag to her face with his right.

Dedina awoke to the copper-penny taste of blood in her mouth and a white-hot pain radiating from her shoulder. Her tongue felt swollen, her throat raw from screaming she couldn't remember. As consciousness returned in painful waves, she became aware of sounds filtering through her foggy mind—water dripping somewhere in the darkness, and something else. A laugh.

It started low, almost a hum, before rising into something that made her skin crawl—a high, fluttering sound that seemed to dance between amusement and madness. It was a sound that didn't belong in a human throat, more like the call of some nocturnal predator. The laughter faded into soft, pleased humming as she heard someone moving around nearby, metal implements clinking against each other methodically.

"Awake now, are we?" The voice was surprisingly gentle, almost soothing, which made it all the more terrifying. "Good. It's always better when they're aware."

Her vision swam into focus in sickening waves, revealing a windowless room with pitted concrete floors stained in rusty patterns she instinctively knew were years of accumulated blood. The damp air was thick with the smell of bleach that failed to mask the underlying odors of decay and suffering.

She hung suspended from a large, industrial meat hook, her wrists bound so tightly that her fingers had gone numb, the coarse rope digging into flesh already rubbed raw. Her toes barely brushed the cold floor, the position slowly dislocating her shoulders with each passing minute. Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped with metronomic precision, marking time in a place that seemed to exist outside of it.

Panic clawed at her chest like a trapped animal as memories of news reports flooded back. The "Southpaw Strangler" had been terrorizing this part of Louisiana for the past two years. Three college girls on spring break, all gone missing, all found weeks later in the bayou with precise, surgical cuts that suggested an almost medical knowledge of human anatomy.

She'd seen a news story about him just two nights ago in their motel room. Her friend Marissa had tossed a pillow at her when she'd lingered too long on the gruesome details. "Turn that off before you jinx us," Marissa had laughed, though her eyes held no humor. "With your luck, you'll be his next victim."

The FBI profilers had determined from the angle of the wounds that the killer was left-handed—each cut made with chilling precision by someone who wielded the blade in their dominant left hand. It was this detail that had captured the public's morbid imagination and earned him his macabre nickname in the press. Now she hung like a piece of meat in his lair, waiting to become case number four.

A small workbench stood against one wall, tools meticulously arranged by size and function—scalpels, bone saws, and devices whose purpose Dedina couldn't begin to imagine, all gleaming under the single hanging bulb that swung slightly, casting crawling shadows across the walls. A collection of polaroid photographs was pinned to a corkboard above the bench. Even from her position, she could make out the lifeless eyes of girls who had hung where she now did, their expressions frozen in a final moment of terror.

Blood pounded in Dedina's ears, her heartbeat drowning out everything except the sound of her own ragged breathing. She twisted against her bindings, ignoring the fresh pain that shot through her shoulders. The rope fibers began to fray against the hook's rough edge where decades of rust had created a serrated surface.

Hours passed in a fog of pain and desperation as she worked the rope back and forth, her hands slick with her own blood. The darkness outside the room's single, dirt-encrusted window deepened then gradually lightened to a sickly gray dawn. When the binding finally snapped, she collapsed to the floor like a marionette with cut strings, biting back a scream as her injured shoulder hit concrete. She lay there for several minutes, lungs heaving, as feeling painfully returned to her hands in a rush of needles.

She staggered to her feet, legs trembling beneath her like a newborn fawn's, and lurched toward the workbench. Her fingers, clumsy and slick with blood, knocked over a tray of gleaming instruments that clattered to the floor with a sound like church bells. She froze, listening for any response, before frantically searching for something—anything—that might serve as a weapon.

Her fingers closed around a rusted meat hook, smaller than the one that had held her but still wickedly sharp, its point honed to a glistening, malevolent curve. The metal felt cold and impossibly heavy in her palm, its weight somehow carrying the burden of its previous victims. Dedina positioned herself beside the door where shadows gathered thickest, the hook gripped so tightly in her trembling hand that her knuckles bleached white beneath the blood smears. She pressed her back against the damp concrete wall and waited, counting heartbeats, each one possibly among her last.

The hinges protested with an almost human whine when the door finally swung open. Light spilled across the threshold, briefly blinding her. A tall, slender man stepped inside, his movements deliberate and unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world—which, Dedina realized with a chill that reached her marrow, he believed he did. His left hand was gloved in supple black leather that gleamed in the dim light, while his right carried a carefully folded clear plastic tarp, the kind used to ensure blood spatters didn't stain floors. His face was surprisingly ordinary—the face of someone who might bag your groceries or sit across from you in a doctor's waiting room—except for his eyes. They were pale, almost colorless, like dirty ice, and utterly devoid of anything Dedina recognized as human.

Those empty eyes widened slightly at the empty hook, the only indication of surprise in his otherwise expressionless face. In that moment of hesitation, Dedina lunged forward with a primal scream torn from the depths of her being, driving her makeshift weapon deep into the side of his neck where it met the shoulder. The hook sank through flesh with a sound like a knife plunging into overripe fruit. She noticed with bizarre clarity that his black leather glove was on his left hand—the dominant hand that had methodically slaughtered her predecessors, the hand that had earned him his infamous moniker of the Southpaw Strangler.

As he fell, that same terrible laugh bubbled up through the blood filling his throat—a wet, gurgling version of the sound that had haunted her semiconscious state. Even dying, he was laughing at her, as if privy to some cosmic joke at her expense.

Arterial blood sprayed across her face in a warm, pulsing fan, metallic and salty on her lips. It painted the concrete floor in abstract patterns as he thrashed and gurgled, his hands clawing frantically at the curved metal embedded in his throat. The sound that escaped him was inhuman—a wet, bubbling rasp that would echo in Dedina's nightmares if she lived long enough to have them. Fueled by terror and adrenaline, she wrenched the hook free and struck again, and again, and again, her movements mechanical and desperate. Each impact sent shockwaves of pain through her damaged shoulder, but she couldn't stop, wouldn't stop, until he lay motionless on the floor, his vacant ice-pale eyes reflecting the swinging bulb above like twin moons on the surface of bloody water.

Dedina stood over him, her chest heaving, his blood cooling on her skin as it dried in the stagnant air. Her entire body trembled violently, shock setting in as the adrenaline began to ebb. She forced herself to kneel beside his corpse, her hands shaking as she searched his pockets for keys, for a phone—anything that might lead to escape. Nothing but a small pocketknife and a handkerchief that smelled of chloroform.

The room she'd been held in had no windows other than the small, filthy one too high to reach, and no doors except the one he'd entered through. Stumbling on unsteady legs, she pushed through it and found herself in a narrow hallway that led to what appeared to be the main part of a cabin. The floorboards creaked beneath her weight, the sound unnaturally loud in the pressing silence.

She staggered outside into the humid night, the air thick enough to chew, finding herself in the middle of nowhere. The sky was a void, no stars penetrating the dense cloud cover, no distant lights suggesting civilization. Cypress knees poked through black water that surrounded the property on all sides, and the sounds of the bayou—frogs, insects, the occasional splash of something breaking the surface—created a discordant symphony of wilderness. His ramshackle cabin sat isolated on a small island of dry land, a rotting wooden structure slowly being reclaimed by the swamp itself.

Dedina's shoulder throbbed mercilessly, each heartbeat sending fresh waves of agony through her body. Blood seeped through her torn shirt, warm against her clammy skin. She assessed her injuries with detached precision: dislocated shoulder, significant blood loss, possible internal damage. She wouldn't last long without medical attention, hours at most. Frantically searching the cabin, her growing dizziness making the room tilt and sway around her, she found only a threadbare couch, a refrigerator containing nothing but beer and packaged meat she didn't want to examine closely, a small motorboat tied at a crude dock visible through the kitchenette window—and a sleek smartphone charging on a kitchen counter, its screen periodically illuminating with notifications.

Hope surged through her veins like a drug as she lunged for the device, nearly knocking it from its charger in her haste. The screen lit up beneath her bloody fingertips, illuminating her ravaged face in its glow. Her hope curdled instantly into despair as six simple words appeared on the screen: Fingerprint Required to Access Emergency Calls.

"No, no, no," Dedina whispered, her voice a broken thing in the silence. She tried again and again to unlock it, smearing bloody fingerprints across the pristine glass, each failed attempt punctuated by a mocking vibration. Her vision began to blur at the edges, black tendrils creeping inward as the blood loss took its toll. Her legs threatened to buckle beneath her as a terrible realization dawned with cruel clarity. There was only one way to use that phone.

The partial moon cast ghostly, fractured light through the cypress trees as Dedina dragged the killer's body across the yard to the dock. Each step sent volcanic eruptions of pain through her shoulder, each breath a labor that yielded diminishing returns. Blood loss had made her light-headed, the world tilting and spinning around her like a carnival ride. Twice she fell to her knees, vomiting bile onto the damp earth, before forcing herself upright again.

Summoning what little strength remained in her failing body, she pulled the corpse partly from the water where it had slipped during her struggle. The killer's blood had cooled and congealed, making his skin tacky to the touch. Methodically, as if performing a task she'd rehearsed countless times, she withdrew the pocketknife she'd taken from his pants and flicked it open.

The first cut was the hardest—not physically, as the sharp blade slid through flesh with surprising ease—but psychologically. The sound of the blade scraping against bone sent shivers down her spine that had nothing to do with the night air. She worked with grim determination, sawing through tendons and ligaments, her criminology classes providing unwanted knowledge about the anatomy of a human wrist.

Minutes later, she stumbled back toward the cabin, clutching her grisly prize wrapped in the chloroform-scented handkerchief. The severed hand felt impossibly heavy, as if weighted with the evil of its owner. Water and blood dripped from the makeshift package, leaving a macabre trail behind her that glistened in the moonlight.

Inside the cabin, Dedina unwrapped the hand beside the phone, her movements slow and deliberate despite the urgency screaming through her mind. With trembling fingers, she carefully sliced away excess flesh from the palm, fashioning a grotesque fingerless glove that she could slip her own hand into. The skin was cold and waxy against hers, the stiffening fingers extending beyond her own like a puppeteer's nightmare. Fighting waves of nausea, she positioned the dead man's fingertips over the phone's sensor, holding her breath.

Access Denied

She tried again, adjusting the angle, pressing harder, her own hands shaking uncontrollably now, the edges of her vision darkening with each passing second.

Access Denied

A cold dread washed over her like the bayou waters themselves as she turned the pale, waxy hand over, examining it in the phone's blue light. The killer's wedding ring glinted mockingly on the fourth finger, catching the light in tiny prisms.

It was his right hand.

A sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob escaped Dedina's throat as comprehension dawned with horrifying finality. In her blood-starved delirium, she'd forgotten the most important detail—he was the Southpaw Strangler. The hand she needed was still attached to the cooling corpse by the dock.

She tried to stand, to return to the body, but her legs finally betrayed her. Dedina slid down against the cabin wall, leaving a smear of darkening red in her wake, the useless phone falling from her grasp to clatter on the warped floorboards. A bitter laugh escaped her bloodied lips as darkness crept in from the corners of her vision, consuming the world piece by piece. In her final moments of clarity, the irony wasn't lost on her that her last sound on earth would mirror his—a laugh devoid of mirth, the universe's cruel punchline to a joke only the bayou would remember. Her last coherent thought was of the terrible irony—that the detail which had fascinated her most about the case would be the detail that sealed her fate.

The bayou remained silent save for the distant chorus of frogs and the occasional splash of an alligator slipping beneath the black surface of the water. The swamp was patient and hungry, as indifferent to Dedina's final rattling breaths.