by Jim Goforth
"Where'd Lee go?" he wondered.
"He took Rach, Jess and Serena upstairs to the other showers," Blaise informed him. "Said he'd get towels and shit up there."
"Okay, fair enough," Corey recommenced sitting on his three seater and drained the dregs of his coffee.
Presently both Lee and Desiree returned, Lee stumbling down the stairs.
That left Melissa, Blaise, Desiree, Corey, Lee, Peter and Ryan in the lounge room, and the expectant eyes of Ryan and Peter turned towards Corey.
Corey shrugged and looked to Melissa.
She heaved a big sigh and withdrew her battered pack of cigarettes.
"Can we smoke in here?" she wanted to know and by way of answer Corey stood and wandered across to the entertainment system where an ashtray in the shape of a skull, missing the top of its cranium, sat.
He placed it on the coffee table up the end closest to her and waited while she sparked up and then handed the pack to Blaise.
"Okay," Melissa said at length. "First and foremost, what is said here doesn't leave this house alright? We're trusting you guys to keep whatever secrets we tell you. Can we do that?"
"Sure," Corey replied, maybe a little too quickly while both Lee and Ryan looked as though they had some reservations.
Peter merely grunted and nodded.
"I know you guys were probably a bit suspicious of us and after you hear this you'd probably be right to, but you've been good to us and we certainly aren't going to hurt you in any way. We'll do our best to keep you alive too because as you know Corey and Lee, you two are in danger while Raven's alive."
"What!" Ryan exploded while Lee simply looked agitated and nervous as if he'd thought being safe in Corey's house was sanctuary enough.
"No interruptions," Blaise said sternly.
"Okay," Melissa took a long drag on her cigarette, staring at Ryan and Peter. "For the benefit of you two, Corey, Lee and Tim met us last night down by the lake. We all arranged to go back to our place which is...was...in the woods on the far side of the lake, and have a party.
Prior to that party happening though we asked your friends to prove to us they were trustworthy if you will, and do a little something for us."
"Which was?" Prodded Ryan.
"Their mission was to go and help out two of our girls who'd gotten themselves into a spot of trouble."
"What sort of trouble?"
"They got kidnapped by the Plebs," Lee added helpfully.
"What the fuck? This is all Greek to me, nobody is making sense."
"Look we'll give you the abbreviated version of the story and then we'll explain what everything means after," Blaise said. "This is how Tim died, that's what you want to know so we'll tell you that first. Then we'll fill in the gaps. We owe Lee and Corey answers anyhow."
"Okay, but who are the Plebs?"
"They live in the woods too. Let's just say they are..." Blaise paused, searching for the correct term. "Well, they're mutants."
"Mutants?" Ryan could scarcely believe his ears. "Mutants live in the woods?"
"Don't forget the hot chicks," Peter chimed in. "They live there too."
"Thanks," Blaise tipped Pete a sly wink. "Well they used to live there."
"The mutants or the hot chicks?"
"The chicks you idiot!" Peter lambasted the dense Ryan. "These babes are the hot chicks. They're certainly not the mutants."
"Okay I follow. So the mutants killed Tim then?"
"Yes," Melissa said, exhaling a thin plume of smoke. "Yes, they did."
"I'm not finding this extremely easy to believe," snorted Ryan. "Mutants in the woods, killing people. Sounds like a lot of bullshit."
"It isn't," Corey confirmed solemnly, the expression on his face reflecting the tone of his voice. "It's true. The Plebs...or mutants if you'd rather, they killed Tim."
"How?"
"By spearing him through the head," Corey replied bluntly and brutally. "This is Tim's blood I'm decorated with."
"Shit!" Ryan floundered for more to say, gazing hopelessly at Lee. "That right Lee?"
"I didn't actually see Tim die," he shrugged. "But Corey did. It's true though. The Plebs were chasing us. We were spying on them when..."
As Lee let his voice die away to nothing, a weird spaced out look crawled slowly across his face.
It dawned on Corey exactly what morbid thoughts were crossing Lee's mind.
While Lee had previously been quick to lay the blame for Tim's death squarely at the feet of the women who sent the trio of lads off to the Pleb house, he’d obviously failed to acknowledge his own part in the tragedy.
Up until right now.
After all Lee had been the one to jump away from the window, the one who had fallen on the corrugated iron.
He was the one who created the great noisy din which had drawn the attention of the Plebs to them.
Without the ensuing havoc, without any noise at all the Plebs may never have noticed them.
Things may have panned out entirely differently.
Lee slumped back in his chair, his face ashen.
"Fuck, Corey, you know what? It was me who got..."
"No it wasn't," Corey cut him off quickly, though it was fair to say that if Melissa and her crew were to blame in part for Tim's demise, Lee was also at fault.
Corey found it easier to blame nobody.
After all Raven picked the arrival of the men as a catalyst in her traitorous attack and maybe Tim, or even Lee or Corey may have died in that instance.
What had happened had happened, there was no use blaming anybody or trying to play 'what if'.
Hindsight was wonderful, but it didn't solve anything now.
CHAPTER 22
"Don't blame yourself Lee," Corey persisted "Hell, we might all have died in the fire if we hadn't been at the Pleb house. Nobody could have foreseen anything that happened."
"Fire? What fire? You guys are talking in tongues."
"The fire that burned these girls village down. That's why they don't live in the woods anymore."
"Alright, shit back the bus up," Ryan said, eyes flashing from Corey back to the twosome of Blaise and Melissa. "Back to where the mutants speared Tim. Then what happened?"
"We fucking ran for it!" Lee declared, seemingly a little appeased by Corey's assertion that given the circumstances it could have been anyone's time to die.
"Leaving the two chicks that were kidnapped there?"
"Fuck, we were freaking out!" Lee defended his and Corey's decision to run. "We were gonna go back and tell these girls,” indicating Melissa and co "that we needed more people to break Tasha and Erica out. Then all the freaks came charging out and we hid in the bushes."
"At which point Desiree appeared," Corey picked up the story. "With a gun, thank fuck."
He pointed to the pistol which was still hanging in his belt.
"I don't know where Lee was at this stage, but Desiree and I went into the house while the Plebs were out," he continued, failing to add how he'd been coerced into doing so though the sweetener of the deal never actually happened. "We got the girls free, but unfortunately Erica was dead. As we tried to get Tash out the Plebs came back, one of them to begin with, and ambushed Desiree."
"Shit, what happened?"
"We killed him," Corey said as calmly as if he'd taken the Pleb out to lunch. "We had to."
"While these two were in the house," Melissa took a turn at narration. "The Plebs had come down to our camp, summoned by one of our girls. This lunatic bitch has been conspiring with the Plebs the whole time to take over leadership of our clan by the way.
So under her guidance a bunch of renegade girls and the Plebs set about torching our village, burning it down and murdering any who opposed. Myself and these other girls here in this house are the only survivors who didn’t defect to Raven's team."
"Raven being the lunatic bitch?" Peter queried to a nod from Desiree.
"Jesus Christ on a donkey!" Ryan blared, his eyes like saucers in his h
ead. While he may have been having a hard time swallowing this nightmare tale, the solemn tones of the various narrators combined with their plethora of weapons on hand and their disheveled appearances tended to lend authenticity to it.
Besides, while Lee was known to these boys as something of a practical joker it was evident that he was clearly upset by the tragic events and was certainly not in prankster mode.
"Do the police know? Have you gone to the police?"
"No police involvement," Melissa said, her voice suddenly hard. "None at all. No police."
"But people are dead; you've got to go to the police! Shit, I'll tell them myself!"
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Melissa warned with a steely glare. "No police."
"Okay," Peter played peacemaker. "No police yet. Carry on."
"No police whatsoever," Blaise said. "Our mess, we have to sort it out."
"What the great fuck do you mean by that?"
"Shut up Ry. Carry on," said Peter. "And by the way could I please have one of those smokes? I'm dying for one."
"Sure." Blaise flung the packet to him and he got up, moving across to join Lee on the three seater he now occupied by himself.
"You better give me your word there will be no calls to the police from anybody in this house," Melissa spoke to Corey, but her unnerving stare was fixed on Ryan.
It made Ryan uncomfortable, the menacing dark eyes, one surrounded entirely by a black star, and he gazed at his feet.
"No cops," he mumbled.
"Yep. No cops," Corey asserted, inwardly fearing the moment he and his friends would be told why the women were so loathe to involve the authorities in the murderous chain of events.
"Agreed. No police. Carry on," Pete said for the third time.
"As we were freeing Tasha and making plans to hide the bodies of Erica and Tim somewhere we could come back and take them away for proper burial the Plebs returned, obviously having done their worst to our village and our people." This time it was Desiree who was speaking, her voice soft but nonetheless powerful. "We had to run. I'd given my gun to Corey which was a good thing since he's an incredible marksman as you probably know. He took out two of the Plebs, killed one for certain and then we managed to hide while the Plebs took off again, this time smarter than before leaving half their number to guard the house.
By the time we reached our home it was too late to do anything, it was a pile of smoldering ash."
Visibly shaken by horrible memories of this, Desiree paused and shuddered. She drew in a big shaky breath, steeled herself and commenced talking.
"We thought everybody was dead. Everybody. Then thank god Melissa and these others here emerged."
Tactfully Desiree failed to mention such things as Lee hiding in a hole refusing to budge and Corey hurling up his guts courtesy of the barbecued human flesh stench.
"Unfortunately before we could leave the godforsaken site," Melissa took over from Desiree as the latter was beginning to look somewhat distressed recalling the horror of first gazing upon the desecrated camp. "One of the surviving girls was shot by a sniper. That's when we knew we had to really fucking bail. We had a handful of guns, but we weren't equipped to fight a battle with fucking snipers taking potshots at us. The Plebs caught up as we were crossing the bridge."
"Bridge? What bridge?" Ryan interjected
"There's a river with a bridge across it," Melissa said shortly. "We'd all crossed with only Desi and Corey on it when the Plebs came out of the woods."
"Wasn't this guy the hero?" Blaise indicated Corey with a healthy squeeze of his biceps. "Stood on the bridge cool as can be, bang bang, took out two Plebs and sent the rest running back into the woods."
"That he was," Melissa agreed. "Damn amazing shooting. Anyway, everyone got across, Desi and Blaise managed to get the bridge free of its supports and send it down into the river, therefore slowing the Plebs up a fraction and we all hightailed it back across the lake to the car park there."
With a sideward glance at Ryan Corey noticed that his friends eyes were still bulging wider and wider with astonishment.
For one irrational moment Corey entertained the thought that if the muscled surfers eyes got any wider his face would virtually be wholly composed of eyes and little else.
"Across the lake? How'd you magically manage that?"
"In boats," Blaise said as though she were talking to a simpleton.
"The very boats that got us into this shit in the first place," Lee murmured so softly that possibly only Peter heard him, though Peter failed to comment.
"Alright," Ryan nodded; accepting that with boats on hand the lake crossing was a possibility. "So how the hell does Errol Haskell's van come into it? He pick you up hitching or what?"
"Not likely," Corey scoffed.
"Then how'd you come across his van?"
"It was at the lake car park when we ditched the boats. We were looking for a vehicle, any vehicle, because it was already decided we'd come to my house," Corey carried on with the tale. "We didn't know at the time it belonged to Haskell. I was looking at it thinking there was something familiar about it, but it didn't click until later. It was the only car there, it had the doors standing wide open and the keys inside, can you believe that? We were all rightly pleased 'cause a van that size was just what we needed.
So everybody piles in. Only there's a cricket bag in the back, leaking blood, turns out it had a dismembered body in it."
This time the statement drew no disbelieving remarks from Ryan and Peter, only mute boggle eyed expressions of astonishment and revulsion.
Ryan's mouth opened and closed wordlessly.
"Haskell came running, screaming and swearing murderous revenge, but it was too late. Blaise bailed him up with the shotgun while I got the van running then she jumped in and we drove here. So here we are."
Ryan and Peter exchanged bemused glances.
The ash on Peter's cigarette was so long it was more ash than cigarette.
He acknowledged this just in time and flicked the ashen chunk into the ashtray before it dropped onto the plush carpet.
"Holy fuckin' Christ!" Ryan exclaimed. "What...but...how...fuck."
He gave up attempting speech and hunched forward in his chair, elbows resting on his knees.
"Did Haskell recognise you two?" asked Peter of Corey and Lee.
"Unfortunately yes. Well, me anyway. He didn't see Lee."
"Shit. So he knows exactly who has his van."
"I would say so, yes."
"Is there anything ruling out him coming here looking for it?"
"Getting a shotgun shoved in his face again might be something of a deterrent to him."
"Aside from that. You said he had a body in the bag, does he know you know about that?"
"Maybe. Maybe not. We just tossed the bag out of the van. Bits and pieces fell out after that. Only Desiree and I saw it so maybe he doesn't know we know."
"Whose body was in the bag?" Asked Ryan. "Was it Tim?"
"Haskell didn't kill Tim, you idiot," said Peter. "The mutants did."
"Well who then? Obviously he killed somebody."
"We don't know," Corey shrugged. "Probably some poor girl he raped. We all know fucking Haskell is a rapist."
Melissa and Blaise exchanged furtive unreadable glances.
"How do you know that?" Blaise wanted to know.
"Word around town," Peter replied vaguely.
"Usually those kinds of words reach us," Blaise said cryptically.
"What do you mean?"
"We'll tell you in a sec," Blaise brushed the query off. "You think he's liable to turn up here?”
"I don't," Corey said. "Not in daylight anyway."
"You never know," Lee interjected. "You can't predict what that fucker will do."
"Oh okay," Blaise sounded oddly disappointed that Haskell probably wasn't likely to turn up on Corey's doorstep any time soon.
"Still, all the same it isn't good," Peter said. "He'll be out for revenge a
nd if he thinks you've seen the body in the bag, or you know about it he'll be looking to shut some mouths up about it."
"Too right," Ryan agreed with a pointed look at Lee. "Starting with you Hunter and then you Summertime. This is fuckin' crazy not going to the cops. You have to go to the cops if only to tell 'em about Haskell and nothing else."
"Ryan, we stole his fucking car!" Corey tried to make Ryan see sense though he knew if he were in Ryan's shoes he'd be thinking along the same lines.
Melissa got to her feet, towering impressively above the seated remainder and snatching up her cigarette pack from the coffee table proceeded to thumb one out into her mouth and light it up, despite having virtually just finished one.
She then picked her shotgun from where she had it sitting, propped up against the lounge.
For one terrifying second Corey believed she was about to blast Ryan with it.
Exhaling a stream of bluish smoke, Melissa began to pace back and forth like a caged tiger, her eyes mere slits of annoyance.
Desiree curled her divine legs up under her rump and sat cross-legged in her chair.
Ryan, Lee and Peter shifted uncomfortably in their respective seats while Blaise just smiled blandly and gazed at a H.R. Giger print on the wall.
Corey wrung his hands and debated how quickly he could yank the pistol out of his belt if Melissa suddenly leveled the shotgun and began to shoot.
"No cops," Melissa said softly. "And I'm not going to say it again. And here's why."
She stopped pacing long enough to fire a menacing gaze which encompassed all four of the men and then resumed her zoo-bound big cat impression.
"Do any of you guys know about, or hear about Black Widow Justice? Or the Twilight Twins? Or alternately the Toxic Twins?"
Various affirmative replies, mostly mumbled yeses or mute nods greeted the enquiry.
Corey had heard about both identities Melissa asked.
Firstly, Black Widow Justice was, or had been, in recent years an unknown unidentified female serial killer who exclusively targeted known sex offenders, rapists and similar convicted criminals.
Allegedly only a teenage girl when she began her violent bloody rampage, many saw Black Widow Justice as more of a heroine, an avenging angel for victims of crime rather than a cold blooded psychopath.