by Jim Goforth
Desiree let the head drop to the wooden floor with a thump and wiped the wet blade on the creature’s dirty garments, looking for all the world like some achingly beautiful warrior princess.
"That is one Pleb who won't bother anybody any more," she declared and sheathing her knife, proceeded to yank Corey's hatchet from the corpse.
"Where's the gun?" Asked Corey.
"There," Desiree pointed. "Wanna grab it for me?"
Corey did so, impressed by the weighty feel of the weapon in his hand.
He clenched it in a two fisted grip, aimed it at the deceased Pleb and then swung it towards the open door, envisioning the remainder of the ogres returning.
He pictured himself squeezing the trigger as they swarmed in, busting shot after shot, dropping the Plebs one by one.
"Any more of you motherfuckers in here?" Desiree shouted though no response came.
Corey didn't really expect one; he guessed they wouldn’t answer if they were.
"I guess not, I'm sure they would have come out when you called me," Corey said.
"Alright, let's get the girls out before they come back."
"Are we still going to...? Corey found himself enquiring before realising entirely what he was asking. "You know...?"
Desiree stared straight at him and a giant mischievous smile blossomed on her face.
"Of course we are," She winked. 'But you'll need to get rid of that blood all over you."
"Yeah, right." Corey was stupefied with joy. This was turning into a very bizarre mixture of both the worst night and the best night of his life, and it was becoming exceedingly hard to keep up with it.
He felt surreal as if he wasn't actually in his own body, but rather watching proceedings from elsewhere.
"Let's go," Desiree prodded, carefully leading the way to the torture room Corey indicated, the hatchet in her fist.
He stalked along behind her with the pistol clasped in his hands, daring another Pleb to attack them, vowing he wouldn’t be taken by surprise as Desiree had been.
Entering the torture room Corey found it even more grotesque and unspeakable than he'd remembered, its corners packed with lit black candles and items of torment, dancing black shadows streaking the walls.
Corey expected both entrapped women to be alive with movement due to the series of events leading up to and including the mass departure of their fiendish captors, but he was wrong.
The pair of enslaved girls were both still and limp, heads hanging in unison, blood made black by the scant light streaking their naked abused bodies.
To be fair Corey had never seen any semblance of motion from the brunette girl on the far side of the rack, but the curly haired blonde at the fore had previously been so active with her attempts to escape that he was certain she would still be moving, especially after the Plebs had vanished from her vicinity so abruptly.
"Erica! Tash!" Desiree exclaimed, dashing towards the rack, halting suddenly when she observed the spike trap underneath the women. "Shit, how are we gonna get them down without impaling them?"
"And then freeing them from the cuffs," Corey added to the complications.
"Fuck!" Desiree yelled and the blonde girl raised her head, relief and hope sparking in her eyes.
"Desi..." She croaked. "Thank god."
"Tash, are you okay?"
"N...not really," Tash managed to whisper in a voice gone hoarse from terrified screaming. "Pain...but I'm...I'm alive."
"Do you know how we can get you down?"
"Leve..." Tasha was obviously having trouble speaking.
“Leave? We aren’t leaving you here,”
"Lever...on the wall. I...need…water."
"Corey, go find some water." Desiree ordered then to Tasha. "A lever drops the rack, what about the spikes?"
"Can't...talk…any...more."
Corey didn't need for Desiree to tell him twice, he was back out the door, trailing down the hallway they'd come along with his pistol in hand.
He was glad the illumination in the hallway was minimal for he was certain the walls of it were decorated in much the same way as the fence surrounding the property was.
Back in the room with the slaughtered Pleb he suddenly had a brainwave.
If this Pleb was the only one left in the house while the others departed to hunt for the intruders, then surely he, as guardian of the captives, had the keys to the handcuffs.
'Brilliant Corey', he praised himself. 'Simply brilliant. But get the poor lass water first.'
It didn't take him long to find water in this very room, located in an ancient looking water tank sitting in the far corner, a stack of rusting metal cups sitting on a disheveled table alongside it.
Of course there had to have been some water somewhere in this torture hovel, no living thing could sustain life without it and as much as the Plebs probably didn't deserve to live they were alive and therefore required water.
Corey filled a cup, daring not to think of what bacteria lurked in the murky mire, but he guessed Tash couldn’t afford to be choosy.
Done with that, he hastened back to the body of the Pleb, hunkering down beside it, casting a glance out the open door, hoping not to see the Pleb horde returning with a captured Lee.
His brainwave paid off immediately for hanging from a rustic belt around the brute’s waist was an immense keychain laden with an assortment of keys.
With no means of cutting the belt Corey was forced to take the item off the Plebs corpse and fish the key ring off the strap.
He dropped the keys in a pocket with a satisfied grunt, took possession of his gun and the water cup and headed back to the torture room.
The elation he'd felt upon discovering the keys was short-lived once he stepped back into the candle littered recess carrying his various items.
To his consternation Desiree was hunched on the far side of the rack, her face buried in her hands, sounds of quiet sobbing issuing from her.
Tasha still prone on the rack also had a face streaked not only with blood but tears, her eyes puffy and red, her lips quivering constantly.
Corey halted just inside the door, feeling the joy he'd felt inside puncture like an overinflated balloon and shrivel up into a dried little husk.
"What's up?" He questioned in a small querying voice. "What...what's happened?"
Desiree stood and walked around the front of the rack, wiping her eyes.
"Erica's dead," she said bluntly, then flung herself into his arms, squeezing him tightly.
He would have embraced her in return and he wanted to, but with a full cup of water in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other it wasn't entirely possible for him to do so.
At length Desiree released him and took the water from him, holding it up to Tasha trying to get as much liquid as possible into the abused girls mouth, as difficult as it was.
"She's dead," Desiree murmured in a soft litany of disbelief. "They've killed her, she's dead. She's gone. She died."
The 'on a brighter note' line Corey had been prepared to enter the room and say now didn't seem quite so appropriate.
"I found the keys to the handcuffs," was the safer option he now took, saying it quietly as he watched Desiree attempt to get more water down Tasha's throat.
"That's wonderful!" Desiree exclaimed, seemingly buoyed a little by that tiny spark of bright news in all the dark mire.
With her parched throat now somewhat moistened, Tash could speak a fraction better though she still did so in a hoarse stage whisper voice.
Corey wondered irrationally if that was what her natural voice sounded like and then supposed if he'd been giving vent to some of the terrified screams Tash had been, his throat would probably be a tad raw and scratchy too.
"You pull...the lever on the wall," Tasha was saying. "And it will...it will let the rack down and drop the spikes...under the floor."
"Beautiful. I was wondering how to get around the spikes." Desiree wasted no time in making her way to the lever and yanking it dow
n.
With an ungodly screech the rack bearing the bodies of the two women descended to the floor, the deadly spikes rolling under the floor as if on a conveyor belt of sorts, replaced by innocuous wooden panels.
As Tasha's feet touched the floor Corey handed the gun reluctantly to Desiree and hurried to the tortured woman’s side, fumbling in his pocket for the keys.
It took him five goes to find the correct key on the mammoth key chain, murmuring comforting words to the fretting Tasha all the while until he had a key which turned in the cuffs.
As they clicked open and released Tasha's wrists, she stumbled forward and fell down onto the floor.
Dropping beside her Desiree began to rub and massage her wrists as gently as possible, for they were marked with bloody gouges from the cuffs.
"Where'd you get that water hun?" Asked Desi of Corey.
"There's a tank in the room with the Pleb."
"Okay, I'm just going to take Tash and clean her up."
"What..." Corey paused, gazing at Erica's lifeless form on the rack. "What are we going to do about Erica?"
Desiree looked as though she'd forgotten all about the other girl and a suitably aghast expression was reflected upon her beautiful countenance.
"We...we can't really take her with us can we?"
"We can't leave her here!" Tasha wailed, struggling up to a seated position lancing Corey and Desiree with accusing eyes. "We just can't!"
Corey and Desiree exchanged glances. Desiree seemed almost ready to burst into tears again making Corey think about Tim laying dead out in the yard, his big body growing cold and it was almost enough to instigate a weeping outburst from him.
"Tash, we just can't carry Erica and Tim down the hill with us," Desi tried to explain to the wildly upset woman. "You are in no shape to help us, we can't do it."
The mention of Tim's name, the mere fact that Desiree had not forgotten that Corey's friend too was dead and needed his corpse saved from the marauding Plebs forced tears into his eyes involuntarily with a prickling sensation.
"Who's Tim?" Asked Tasha, perplexity taking over from her distress.
"Tim's Corey's friend," said Desiree. "The motherfucking Plebs got him too."
Realising that Tasha hadn’t actually been introduced to Corey as yet, her confusion only intensifying, Desiree had to explain further.
"Tash, this is Corey, my man; Corey this of course is Tash."
"And that..." Tasha pointed a shaking finger at the slumped figure of Erica. “That was Erica. My best friend. We're not leaving her behind. If she stays, then I stay."
"Tash!" Desiree fairly yelled at the adamant girl. "Don't be stupid! Erica is..."
Her voice trailed off as fresh tears blossomed in Tasha's eyes and spilled over.
"I know!" Corey suddenly exclaimed. "We can take them...Tim and Erica...and hide them in the bush somewhere, then come back later to get them, you know? They deserve proper burials."
"Yeah! That's right!" Tasha was quick to agree. "They do. Erica didn't deserve to die in the first place."
"No, neither did Tim. Nobody deserves to die." Corey murmured, still waiting to hear assent from Desiree on his suggestion. "Nobody that is except for these Pleb monsters."
"Okay,” Desiree finally said. "That's a good idea babe. I'll go get Tash cleaned up. Do you think you can get Erica down and outside, where we were hiding before?"
Corey nodded.
"Find some blankets or something and wrap her and Tim up, you know, so nothing fucks with them until we get back to them. I know it isn't a pleasant job or anything but we've got to look after them."
"It's cool," Corey replied, but inside he felt bitter and burning up with a furious building anger, not at Desiree, but at the entire fucked up situation. It wasn't a pleasant job at all, having to drag a dead woman, not to mention one of his best friends off to hide in the bush in order to prevent their corpses becoming even more defiled by the bestial Plebs, but bar Desiree there was nothing pleasant about the whole thing.
CHAPTER 11
Corey felt like a dumbfounded puppet stumbling terrified through a waking nightmare, the likes of which he'd never envisioned being a part of at any time in his life.
Finding the correct key he released Erica's body from the steel manacles of death and the corpse immediately tumbled away from the rack.
Corey tried valiantly to catch her and prop her up, but the dead weight landed atop him and bore him to the floor where he had to struggle out, attempting to shake disturbing visions of her as the living dead, snatching at him with cold fingers.
As he scrambled out, Erica was flopped gracelessly on her back, lifeless eyes gazing eternally at the ceiling of the hovel, naked flesh scoured with drying blood.
Corey couldn't prevent an involuntary shudder from racing throughout his entire body as he stared with a strange mixture of saddened pity and some disgust at the deceased girl.
In life she must have been quite a pretty woman, but the cold cruel embrace of death had robbed her of beauty, leaving her features gaunt and white, a swollen bruised knot on the left side of her head indicating she'd taken a blow or two before dying.
He shivered again at the prospect of having to lay his hands on her cold dead skin again and then steeling himself for the arduous task he stooped down alongside her.
Then Desiree called in a voice of urgency.
"Corey! Forget it, they're coming back!"
"Shit!" Corey cursed to nobody in particular and then bolted from the room, drawing the pistol as he did.
"Hurry, hurry!" Desiree rushed him, attempting to get the badly limping Tasha out the door.
As Corey joined them on the verandah he could hear loud bestial bellows echoing from out the front of the house.
"Good, they're coming in the front," he acknowledged.
"Move Tasha!" Desiree prodded desperately and then with Corey's aid, bodily lifted her off the porch onto the litter-strewn back yard.
The trio made for the gate, navigating through the rubble to where the inanimate form of Tim still lay prone, his legs in the yard, the remainder of his body stretching outside.
As they all vaulted the body, Corey doing so with a silent prayer to whatever deity might now happen to have possession of Tim's soul, a furious guttural roar erupted from very nearby.
"Fuck!" Corey exclaimed with good reason.
A brutish pair of Plebs were lumbering up alongside the outer perimeter of the fence, breaking into an ungainly run as they witnessed the threesome escaping from the backyard.
With both shaking hands clutching the pistol Corey took aim and squeezed the trigger, expecting to see one of the oddities take a tumble.
Nothing of the sort happened, the gun didn't even fire.
"The safety's on!" Desiree screamed at him.
"What?"
"The safety switch is on, switch it off!"
"Shit." Feeling like a regular dumbass letting a rudimentary error like that occur through panic, Corey lowered the weapon and clicked the red safety button off.
His hands still shaking like a leaf in a hurricane he was lucky he didn't drop the gun as he brought it up again.
The two beasts bore down on them as Tasha screaming took off in the bushes.
The Plebs seemed to be unarmed yet seemed oddly unperturbed by the pistol pointing at them and simply kept coming, uttering horrifying noises of rage.
"Shoot Corey, shoot!" Desiree commanded him and he squeezed the trigger again, this time achieving the original aim he'd sought.
The gun bucked in his hand, almost throwing him over backwards with a deafening report and the lumbering Pleb on the right staggered, surprise and pain blossoming in its sunken eyes, but did not fall.
The left side beast continued to charge and panicking now, Corey took shaky aim and fired the pistol again.
Barely four metres of space were between the trio and the approaching creature and this time Corey's blast did some damage.
The nearest Pleb
was hit in the face and Corey saw blood and shards of bone fly as the fired bullet smacked the Pleb square in the head.
This beast went down, sprawling in the long grass as the other brute, hit in the upper torso continued to move towards them, albeit much slower.
"Run!" Desiree yelled and Corey saw why.
Alerted by the gunfire the rest of the Plebs were coming, some of them thundering around the side of the fence, some of them spilling out the back door having come through the house.
He didn't need any further coercion from Desiree to flee; he turned tail and bolted, vaguely wondering if he should have fired the pistol one more time at the horde to warn them his crew would shoot to kill.
He supposed it didn't matter; dropping the first brute to its knees hadn't seemed to dampen the rage of its partner, even being shot had only slowed the former down a fraction.
"Tash you stupid girl!" Desiree railed at the unseen woman. "Where are you?"
"Hey!" A voice hissed at them from the undergrowth. "Get down here!"
Two pairs of hands snaked out of the bush, snatching at both Corey and Desiree.
Had the voice not sounded a warning Corey may have blindly blasted with the gun and blown his own foot off, but as it did and he recognised said voice he simply immediately grabbed Desiree and tumbled the pair of them to the ground.
The pairs of hands clutched them both and dragged them under fallen branches into some bizarre little cave-like structure, the mouth of which was well hidden by brush and fallen tree sections.
Inside the earthy hole hunched two familiar figures, the runaway Tash and with leaves and dirt in his dreadlocked hair, the long absent Lee.
There was hardly enough room for the four of them but they made do, crushed together like sardines in a tin, barely daring to breathe.
"Lee!" Corey was absolutely stunned and overjoyed to see his erstwhile mate still in the land of the living but Desiree quickly hushed him from further speech as the crunching stomping noises of the angered Plebs neared.
The guttural sounds which passed for communication between the brutes was very nearby but it merely seemed to drift past them, as though the freaks did not have the cranial capacity to actually scour the bush high and low for what they sought and simply trailed along hoping to catch a glimpse of their intruders fleeing.