by Glen Frost
Like an eel slithering its way out of a dark underwater cave, a mottled purple tongue ventured out from inside the woman's toothless mouth. As the girl brought her face closer to his, the stench of rotting flesh and soil washed over him in a tsunami of death that made him want to puke. Anya's tongue snaked between her hands, probing the depths of his mouth and throat in an obscene parody of a lover's kiss. When the intruding organ quite literally tickled his tonsils, Frank's body finally caved to the inevitable and vomited, spewing the few remaining chunks of last night's burrito straight into her open mouth.
Rather than pull herself away in disgust, Anya pressed her bony jaws more firmly against Frank’s, pushing her gums against his own and thrusting her tongue even further into his throat. Vomit and stomach lining trickled down each of their chins and dripped onto their respective chests. Frank's esophagus rippled, dry-heaving as it tried to disgorge the contents of his now-empty stomach.
The nauseating kiss had occupied his full attention, but now it was replaced by a painful sensation in the angle of his jaw as the girl increased her exertions, and what had started out as mere discomfort now became agony as shooting pain lanced through his face and tortured mandible, which was being hyper-extended to an angle far beyond its normal range of motion.
Acting purely on terrified instinct, Frank finally released the handrail and brought both hands up in a vain attempt to stop the hurt. He gripped Anya's wrists, but try as he might, the meth-head couldn't move them even a single inch. The girl's legs were suddenly wrapped around his waist, ankles crossing behind him as she began to dry-hump him. Her leap caught him off-balance, and then he was falling backwards through the air.
Frank's head and shoulders struck the wooden steps hard. The rotten wood shattered and broke apart on impact, dumping Frank and Anya into some kind of closet beneath the stairs. Frank landed on his back, the impact driving the air explosively from his lungs. A crack and a sharp, stabbing pain accompanied the fracturing of three ribs. He groaned into Anya's mouth. The girl was straddling him now. She still held his jaws in a death grip. Flexing her muscles, Anya twisted and jerked, employing all of her preternatural strength.
The drug dealer's lower jaw came away with a harsh crack, accompanied by the snap of skin, muscle, and connective tissue. Everything below Frank's nose went along with it, tearing away as easily as the paper on an excitable child's Christmas gift. Blood spurted from the gaping cavity in a thick red stream that sprayed all over Anya's face and chest. She bathed in it, reveled in it, shaking her head from side to side, determined not to miss a drop.
Blood magic, the oldest kind. The source of all her strength.
Lolling from beneath his upper jaw like a bright red power tie, Frank's tongue dangled obscenely, twisting and spasming while he tried to scream out in agony. No sound came out, nothing but a stream of bubbles to interrupt the torrent of blood, no matter how violently he thrashed. Anya held Frank's mandible in her hand, enjoying the sensation of bloody pulp running down her wrist and along her forearm. She stood, carefully knocking away scraps of wood from the staircase, and climbed out into the downstairs hallway.
Looking back into the hole that their falling bodies had both made, Anya watched with fascination while Creep One drowned in a river of his own blood. She felt no horror, no remorse, no guilt; nothing but a sense of great satisfaction.
So entranced was she by the visceral sight that Anya failed to notice a nearby door opening quietly behind her.
Failed to notice as a shadowy figured emerged slowly into the hallway.
Failed to notice it raise a shaking hand to point a gun at the back of her head.
Failed to notice it pull the trigger.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Click.
Terry Kroger was good at very few things in life.
Cooking up meth or heroin? Expert level. Finding that one last viable puncture site in a venous system riddled with more holes than a Swiss cheese? He was pretty damned good at that too.
Firearm maintenance, on the other hand, was something that he sucked at. Sucked.
The boy labeled Creep Two by Anya didn't have a concealed carry permit. He would have scoffed at the very idea of taking a firearm safety class and learning to do things the legal way. He had scored the battered Smith & Wesson and its single magazine the old fashioned way: By slipping a couple of hundred bucks to one of Donnie's sketchier contacts and making the trade in Cheesman Park, all the while studiously ignoring the furtive-looking gay men who lurked close to the trees and clumps of bushes, looking for a random fuck buddy to hook up with for the night.
The S&W had been a decent handgun when it was new, but its three previous owners (including the one who had laboriously filed off the serial number) had ridden it hard and put it away wet. It had been cleaned less often than the average transient, and when it came to the prospect of stripping the weapon down, cleaning, oiling, and then reassembling it again, Terry wouldn't have known where to even start.
The pistol's magazine had never been taken out, nor had the shells been unloaded and reloaded, let alone wiped clean. The instant he had heard the loud crash coming from the stairway, Terry had pulled out his .45 caliber insurance policy and racked a round into the chamber. Unlike a lot of people, he never walked around with one in the pipe. The idea of blowing his own dick off thanks to a misfire was just too frightening to him.
Terry hadn't the slightest idea of what the hell was going on; all he knew was that both of his two companions had disappeared upstairs to go and get it on with the hot Russian chick. Frank had gone up after getting a text from Donnie. He had smirked at Terry and simply said, "Three-way."
Then had come the calamitous sound of something falling down the stairs, followed by the crunching of splintering wood. He wondered at first if they'd gotten rough with the woman, but just to be on the safe side, Terry had gone out to see just what was what.
The staircase was still in semi-darkness, but enough of the grey pre-dawn light was coming in for him to make out a figure rising up from inside what he soon realized was a hole in the stairs. At first, he could only make out the general outline, but the long hair told him that it wasn't Donnie or Frank. Raising the S&W, he took a tentative step closer, followed by a second.
A mirror hung at head height on one of the water-stained walls in the hallway, left over from whoever had lived in the house last. Never taking the gun away from the back of the Russian girl's head for an instant, Terry let his eyes dart over toward it. Ignoring the cracks that spider-webbed its surface, he was able to peer a little deeper and could just about make out the girl's face.
Except it wasn't a face at all. The thing that was reflected in the mirror was skeletal and ugly, like something out of a bad trip or a horror movie. Strips of flesh were stretched across gleaming bone. The mouth was set in a lipless rictus sneer, one that was wholly devoid of all teeth.
Something in Terry's brain said HOLY FUCK! Involuntarily, his finger snatched at the trigger, responding to the dump of adrenaline that was coursing through his body as a direct response to the terror he was now feeling. The S&W barked once, the sound deafeningly loud in such an enclosed space.
Anya's head was slammed forward, strands of dark hair flying in all directions. She reached out instinctively and grabbed the edges of the hole in order to break her fall. The .45 caliber round entered at the rear of her occiput and, as luck would have it, exited through her open mouth, taking small chunks of brain matter and soft tissue along with it.
A living, breathing human being would have been killed instantly, but for a revenant such as Anya, things were a little more complicated. The impact took her by surprise, but the loss of brain tissue didn't seem to be slowing her thought processes down in the slightest. She pivoted on the balls of her feet (as fast as the boots would allow) and found herself looking straight down the barrel of a handgun, one that was bobbing and weaving in tiny erratic movements, as the hand that wielded it was trembl
ing.
It was the kid, she saw: Creep Two, the little fuck. Annoyed at herself for having missed such an obvious threat, Anya hurled Frank's ripped-off lower jaw straight at him with all the strength she could muster.
Terry reflexively pulled the trigger a second time, but there was a click as the hammer dropped and no bullet emerged from the gun. Thanks to his generally shitty maintenance standards, the spent shell casing from the first round had stovepiped halfway inside the weapon's ejection port, preventing a second round from being fired until the packaging that the first had come in was cleared.
Anya's aim was close to perfect: the thrown mandible caught Terry squarely in the face. The coronoid processes on either side of the jaw naturally tapered down to points, which made it easier for them to penetrate flesh and bone. With a sharp crack, a small section of Terry's skull located right between his eyebrows fractured, cracking open like the shell of a hard-boiled egg that had been whacked with a spoon. The force of impact was so great that angular stress fractures coursed along each side of his skull.
Dropped from Terry's nerveless fingers, the S&W clattered on the scuffed wooden floorboards. A look of profound surprise was frozen across his face, his own jaw gaping stupidly. A long, thin line of drool hung from his lower lip, swaying gently from left to right and back again. Twin streams of blood began to run down from each of his nostrils. He stood frozen in place, utterly immobile. More blood pulsed out of his ears, dribbling across the lobes and splattering across his shoulders. Anya was sure that she could see tiny chunks of brain matter mixed in with it, little grey peas to flavor the bright red soup.
Terry's eyes rolled up into the back of his head until only the whites were showing. Droplets of blood were beading around the jawbone that was embedded in his face, growing larger and more numerous with every passing heartbeat.
Pursing her lips, Anya raised the flat of one hand up to her mouth and blew him a very theatrical kiss. Just like in those old Warner Bros. cartoons that she had grown up on, Terry keeled over backwards, hitting the bare wooden floorboards hard enough to kick up twenty years' worth of accumulated dust and dirt.
Terry’s mouth emitted a low-pitched groan. His muscles stiffened and contracted. He lay there until he died, twenty minutes later, voiding his bowels and bladder as the life left his body. Anya stood in silence and simply watched, her arms wrapped tightly about her naked, blood-stained upper body.
"Well," said a familiar voice from somewhere over her shoulder, "that's three down. How many more to go?"
Anya turned slowly, looking up toward the top of the staircase above her. The accent had been pure English upper-class poshness. She knew its owner all too well. "Come on out here, if you want to talk."
The two dead girls emerged slowly from the darkness, looking down on her with looks that were alternately smug and revolted. Anya put her hands on her hips and nodded to each of them in turn.
"Lydia. Emily. How did I know that sooner or later, you would be back...?"
CHAPTER NINE
Vasily Guskov couldn't sleep. Again.
These bouts of insomnia were getting more and more common of late, and it had nothing to do with the size and condition of his prostate, which had him getting up five or six times each night in order to go and take a piss.
He wondered briefly if it could possibly be his conscience, but quickly dismissed the idea, seeing it for the laughable fiction it truly was. The very concept of feeling guilt or remorse for something that he had done was utterly alien to the Russian. He had spent the past seventy-plus years of his life clawing his way to the top in life, and you didn't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, after all.
Vasily was tall and painfully thin, weighing in at a spare one-twenty. Until just a couple of years before, he had been wiry and lean, but healthily so; all of that had changed when he began to cough up bright red blood. Along with the terrifyingly productive cough had come the shakes and the night sweats, drenching the bedsheets and leaving them in a messy tangle at his feet. If Vasily had still been married, his wife would no doubt have been disturbed, but the last of his three spouses had died seven years ago, in no small part because one of his employees had filed her car's brake lines down to nothing.
Served the prune-faced old hag right. Even now, as an admittedly old man, Vasily had a roaming eye. Katya had nagged and nagged him over it, day in and day out, until finally he hadn't been willing to listen to another word of it. Having the old bitch die in a high-speed road traffic "accident" had been as simple as giving Vladimir the word. The dour Vlad, as he liked to be known, was less than half his employer's age, and Vasily's go-to man for wet work.
Wet work...such a pleasant euphemism for killing...for murder. As the head of an international human trafficking and prostitution syndicate that also dabbled in the occasional bout of drug smuggling on the side, Vasily found that he had need for Vlad's particular talents more often than one might have expected. If it wasn't an employee who needed to be kept in line, or a 'commodity' that needed to be disciplined, then Vlad was generally turned loose on anybody outside the organization that threatened its interests, or those of Vasily himself...after all, they were one and the same, when all was said and done.
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Vasily got to his feet and padded over to the bedroom window. Sweeping aside the curtain, he looked out into the darkness. Snow, snow, and more fucking snow, as far as the eye could see. This was starting to feel like the Rodina — the Motherland, he thought grimly, despite the fact that he had left Russia in his early teens and rarely went back. The actual transfer of slaves — no, commodities, he corrected himself quickly — was handled by younger and far more disposable men than he.
Vasily much preferred the rugged wilderness of Evergreen, Colorado, to the country of his birth. This small town was located just far enough west of Denver to offer up a little peace and privacy, yet not so far that he felt too isolated. Not too hot and not too cold, as the child's fairy tale — what was it called? Goldilocks? — went. Yes, for Vasily Guskov, Evergreen was just right.
He was a wealthy man, having racked up far more money than he could ever spend in what remained of his lifetime. As such, he had purchased a 14,000 square foot home that was built onto and around the hillside in a secluded valley. It had cost a pretty penny, but then Vasily could well afford it, and the privacy it offered him allowed him to indulge in some of his more outlandish peccadilloes.
Checking his watch, he saw that it was fast approaching six o'clock in the morning. There had been no phone calls in the night, no emergencies requiring his attention. He had lieutenants to take care of all but the most pressing emergencies. At least one of them was always on-duty in this house, overseeing Vasily's personal security on a twenty-four/seven basis. It wasn't that he was a paranoid man, Vasily reflected; it was just that when you moved in the shark-infested circles that he did, you often ended up stepping on somebody else's toes...and that somebody was usually armed and all too willing to exact a little payback when they judged that the time was right.
That was why there were never less than six armed guards on duty at any given moment, not including the lieutenant who oversaw them. One could never be too careful, after all.
Vasily looked down, distracted by a familiar sensation. The fly of his pajama pants was unbuttoned. Poking through it was the purple head of his penis, along with an inch of veiny white shaft. He smiled. Even at my age, I am still rampant like a bull. Perhaps now is a good time to indulge myself once more...
He reached into the drawer of his bedside table and removed a small bottle. Unscrewing the cap, he looked inside. Seven left. They weren't prescription, but that was no obstacle to a man of his means and connections. Extracting one of the little blue pills, he popped it into his mouth. That would sustain the hard-on for hours.
Throwing a dressing gown over his shoulders, he opened the bedroom door and took the long wooden staircase downstairs. Two of his boys
were snoring, one on the living room couch and the other reclining in an easy chair. He didn't blame them for that. The house was wired with a top-notch security system. It was only if the damned thing went off that he would actually need them awake. Generally when that happened, it was down to elk, or other local wildlife. If it ever turned out to be something a little more dangerous, then he would want the boys to be as well-rested as possible.
Tired men didn't shoot as effectively as rested ones did.
In the kitchen, Vladimir was sitting on a stool at the breakfast bar and crunching down a bowl of carrots and other mixed vegetables while he thumbed through something on his tablet. At the sound of Vasily's slippered footsteps on the tile floor, he looked up.
"Good morning, Mr. Guskov. Would you like some coffee, sir? It is fresh. I brewed it myself, not half an hour ago."
Even at this ungodly hour, his tone is still respectful, Vasily noted with approval. Vlad was six feet three if he was an inch, and a solid two-forty...practically all of it muscle. He was a health nut, as the Americans liked to say, addicted to his cross-country hikes and his stupid fucking paleo diet. Ridiculous. I would sooner die screaming than give up my steak.
"No thank you, Vlad. I have pressing business...downstairs."
The two men exchanged a knowing smirk. Vasily had made sure to pull his robe about his waist before heading downstairs, but there was no denying the eager bulge that was plainly visible just below the belt line.
"Very good, sir. Which bitch is next in line? Marina? Lyuba?"
"I think that Tatiana is in need of correction this morning."
"Ah, yes. Tatiana. Incredible tits, that one."
They both laughed. Vasily's quickly became a cough, which in turn brought up spots of frank red blood. He wiped them away with the knuckles of his right hand. A worried look upon his face, Vlad made to fetch him a tea towel, but Vasily waved it away.