The Cutthroat Cannibals

by Craig Sargent

  The milky rays of the moon bathed her long golden-red tresses. Silky flesh raised on milk and butter and honey, upturned erect nipples, smooth turn of thigh and arm, slightly flushed rosy-cheeked face. Stone felt his groin swell and throb with a sudden urgent, insane desire.

  She began crying again and Stone turned to her, wishing more than anything that he could hold her, comfort her, kiss her.

  “Don’t cry, sweet Charise.” But he couldn’t really offer a reason not to cry. Even if one did believe that there was an afterlife, leaving this one in the teeth of those albino slugs was enough to make even the toughest of the tough sick to his stomach.

  “Stone—they plan to use me tomorrow.” She winced in pain at the very thought. “Earlier today, before you came, they were touching me all over and laughing about how they’d construct a pulley system to lower me on top of them since they were too fat and didn’t have the strength to do it their filthy selves.”

  “Jesus,” Stone muttered with a sharp intake of breath. Somehow his whole little rap seemed like so much bullshit in the face of her words. Being raped by those two might be worse than being eaten by them. She looked at him hard now with the burning fire of the half-possessed in her blue-green eyes. Her expression was strange, fearful, and curious.

  “There’s something else. I—I—am a virgin. They will—I don’t want it to be this way. I may be dead within twenty-four hours—but first they’ll rape me, both of them, perhaps even their filthy servants.” She looked down at the cold, hard earth, hardly able to continue. But her own rising desires were stronger than her natural female shyness. She raised her head again. This time her eyes were bold, flaming like novas. “I want you to take me first. A decent man to be the first one into me, to make love to me.”

  “I—I—” Stone stuttered over and over, tongue-tied like a buck-toothed thirteen-year-old on his first date. “It’s not that I wouldn’t be honored, don’t get me wrong,” Stone said, looking around to see what the cavemen were up to, but every one of them was out cold. Not a figure was stirring. “But we’re not exactly in the best situation to—” He looked over at her brother, who was hanging there still unconscious, and her father out in the land of Nod, perhaps never to come out of it. A fun bunch to hang out with.

  “I have my own ways,” she said. “Watch!” She squirmed suddenly at her bonds, pulling her whole body this way and that, wriggling her extremities like a belly dancer, so that she was able to stretch her lower torso all the way around—and their bodies were hip to hip, though their heads were still about two feet apart. He felt the ice-hard erection swelling under his zipper as she lifted her foot and undid the pants, then the zipper. He looked at her in amazement.

  “We used to have contests in high school to see who could perform various tasks with their feet so we could see what it was like to be handicapped to have no arms or hands. I was the best.” Stone could see that she was, and just what a useful talent it was. She opened his zipper with her right foot, pulling with her toes, and the engorged member burst forth.

  “They never thought of this,” Charise said with a sly smile, massaging the tool with her foot, running her sole up and down the shaft, curling her toes around the organ so that Stone instantly started going half mad.

  It was really quite amazing what a shot of male hormone in the bloodstream would do for one’s energy level. For though Stone had felt he was ready for the morgue just minutes before, now, with her half-naked lushness, the triangle of hair between her legs exposed like a golden fleece, he suddenly felt as if he was ready to go fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. Though a few minutes with the woman who was pressing hard against him would be far preferable.

  “Do it,” she said frantically. “Please, Stone, help me somehow, to get it in.” She sounded half mad, with the look of the fanatic in her eyes, to lose her virginity, and fast. She gripped one leg around his waist and pushed up hard with the other. She pressed the moist lips of the furry triangle forward until it met the swollen head of Stone’s manhood. She was wet, very wet, and giving off a scent that made him feel intoxicated, the scent of fruits and flower petals and musk and the inside of a woman’s creamy thighs. She pushed her hips forward, trying to find him, spasmodically reaching for him with her center, again and again. Tomorrow she would be dead. She would give her all, her love, her body to this man, at this moment. There would be nothing else.

  “Please, do it, get it in,” she pleaded, her eyes rolling back, her whole body starting to tremble. Stone guided the probing staff in by moving his hips. Suddenly the very tip of it reached her and slid in between the parting flesh lips.

  “It’s hard, it hurts,” she groaned, a single tear falling down each of her flushed cheeks. He pushed suddenly with all his strength to penetrate her, get it over with fast. She gasped and rolled her eyes heavenward as the organ moved suddenly, cleanly into her. She froze, motionless for a second, trying to get used to the newness of it. Then she began moving, slowly at first, up and down on the long shaft, then with increasing vigor and jerking motions, holding on to his hips with her right leg wrapped tight around his hips and back. He slid in and out of her in deeper and stronger strokes, filling her whole center, her stomach. She moved against him like deep velvet being cut by a knife, like a girl/woman who had realized her dreams at last, even in the very midst of death.

  “Stone, Stone,” she mewed, like a deer calling in the soft grass. “It’s so good… it’s…”

  “Don’t talk,” he said, “they’ll hear us. But I know, I feel it too. Your body is—is paradise.” Then they were both reaching that peak called orgasm, a series of quivers the first signs from her; the relentless buildup of a bull-like load, of a Hoover Dam about to burst, sent shudders through his tortured body. Then they came, simultaneously gasping out, heaving in jerks of complete ecstasy.

  At last their tremors both subsided and he slipped out from her as she choked down a scream of loss. “I love you. Can I say that, Martin Stone? I know it’s insane, completely mad. But can I say it just for this night?” He stared back at the beautiful creature beside him.

  “Always,” Stone said as softly as he had ever spoken in his life. “Say it always.”

  “Tomorrow when they come, they’ll find a woman. A woman who has already known a man. They can do what they want with me now—because I don’t care. They can take me but not dirty me.”

  He looked at her with tears in his own eyes now. Because he did care. Suddenly he cared terribly what was going to happen to her. He couldn’t let her die, which meant that he had to save himself, save them both, no matter the impossible odds. Stone had touched her perfect beauty and he wasn’t about to let it die.

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-two

  THE only thing worse perhaps than knowing he was going to be eaten in a few hours was the fact that Stone had to listen to the two albino brothers arguing with one another all fucking day long. From the moment they emerged from their human-walled tent on the hill that morning they were snapping at each other from their respective wheelbarrows. Arguing about which plates they were going to use tonight, about how to roast the meat, about whether to have some of them as appetizers or all as the main course. In a world of narrow parameters the brothers found plenty to fight tooth and nail over.

  They spent the afternoon preparing their sauces and spices that they were going to use on the four prisoners. But though the sauces got made the arguments and snipping at each other only grew fiercer as the day wore on. One of the subhumans made the unfortunate mistake of spilling a whole vat of some precious flavoring or other right into the coals. After they whipped him to shreds they had his head bashed in and then threw him to the other cavemen to eat. The subhumans tore into the bloody burger oblivious as to whether they were eating their own kind or not. All meats digest the same as they pass through the stomach.

  Stone went half crazy when the two wheel-barrowed loads of sludge had themselves pushed over to their four prisoners. They had their underling
s strip them all completely naked. Stone strained at the cords that held him securely to the pole, wishing he could cover Charise’s nakedness from the slime bastards. For the moment however all they wanted was to baste the four. Two vats were brought up and their neanderthal servants, the more intelligent of the lot, were set to work slopping the foul-smelling “sauces” all up and down them, covering every inch of their bodies. Stone felt humiliated, infuriated to the point of exploding. It was worse than being whipped, beaten even. Denying him even the dignity of being a man, turning him into nothing more than a meal, a Sunday pig, a goose, a hanging duck in a Chinese deli.

  “You bastards, you fucking slime bastards,” Stone screamed over and over uselessly as he lunged out, trying to kick at the two.

  “Ah good,” one of them laughed out so that every part of him shook and shimmied like some diseased jelly. “That’s excellent, yell, kick, do it all, it increases oxygen in the blood, makes the meat tastier, much tastier.” This of course only made Stone even more furious so that he turned red and leaped straight up in the air, throwing out a side kick at a ninety-degree angle.

  But of course they had positioned themselves out of range of their prisoners. In the past their captured “dinners” had often lashed out when tied up—the albino brothers had the scars and missing teeth to show for it. Not that much of anything was distinguishable within the folding drips of fat that were their formless faces. Just fat white lips that moved and argued and directed their slaves to “be more fucking careful with the bat guano, you fools.” All in all it was just about the worst afternoon Stone had ever spent.

  They were to be eaten when the sun went down. Or at least the meal would begin. For the four of them were to be spread out between sundown and midnight. The brothers debated every detail of the banquet, either not caring that their “meals” heard every word of their fates, or more likely enjoying the sadistic mental torture as well to the hilt. Stone was a mental wreck trying to figure some way out of all this. He couldn’t allow it to happen, not just his own death alone, but all of them eaten by these slime. It just couldn’t be. And yet try as he might, searching every brain cell that still functioned, he couldn’t find a single fucking route of escape.

  If his wrists had been tied a little bit looser it was possible. But the bastards knew their fucking knots. For as much as he squirmed, pulled from side to side, ripped his wrists at the leather thongs, he couldn’t get them loosened even a fraction of an inch. Cannibals apparently had their accessory skills. What would the fucking major have done? Stone tried to imagine his old man caught in this situation. But he never would have allowed it to happen. Probably wouldn’t even have allowed himself to get caught in the fucking landslide in the first place. But try as he might to conjure up the major’s image in the fading light of the day he couldn’t, no face appeared in the clouds or rose from the flames. Stone was alone, unutterably alone, and he had no way out.

  Then it was dark. Just like that and the two white slugs came over in their wheelbarrows. Again they argued, snapping and snarling at one another like an old couple married forty years, about who should have the honor of being the first meal of the evening. Stone kept his cool this time. He knew he’d need every ounce of strength. He’d make his move when they came to take him. There’d be dozens of the subhumans around but he’d have to try.

  But it wasn’t Stone or the girl whom they chose first. Rather her still unconscious brother, who the brothers agreed, after twenty minutes of vicious screaming catfight, had to be the first since he was closest to death and they didn’t want to lose any of their precious fresh meat. The young man was cut down and loaded into a third wheelbarrow. Then the entire procession was wheeled over to a blood-splattered wooden table as Charise screamed and screamed again.

  “Roger, Roger, please God no—don’t take him. Oh no, no, no.” But there wasn’t a thing she or Stone could do about it. Her father stared out blankly as if looking at infinity. The cro-mags took the naked body, now coated with orange and green creams and sauces a half-inch thick, and threw it right up in the center of the table, which Stone could see even from a distance, by the flames of the cooking fires off to one side, was covered with blood and a thick, oily dried slime of the past bodies that had been consumed on it. The bastards had their own picnic table, half-broken umbrella above it and all. A regular family fucking outing.

  As Stone and the girl looked on in horror they saw that the slime weren’t even going to cook Roger. They were going to eat him alive. The albinos had their underlings push the wheelbarrows they were riding in forward and up to the table, one on each side so they were facing each other. Then the cro-mags tilted the wheelbarrows forward, holding the things up at an angle using their shoulders to keep them upright against the great weight pushing down on them. The albinos reached greedily forward from across the table, and each holding a huge kitchen knife sharp as a razor, dug right into the still living, breathing, though mercifully unconscious man.

  Charise gasped as a long red gash appeared across his chest and stomach. Then they reached in and ripped out still-beating organs, squirming pancreas, rippling kidney, and popped them right into their mouths, chewing and laughing lustily over the fine taste. Then she couldn’t look and only Stone remained staring at the dreadful sight. They cut into the living youth again and again, as they plucked his eyeballs from his head, digging them out with olive tongs and popping them down whole, like fresh clams.

  Stone watched as they cracked open the skull with large calipers and argued over the brain, fighting for it with their hands, grabbing at it so the mass of pink stuff just dissolved between their fingers and squeezed out onto the table and down to the ground. He watched as they sliced open the chest and again fought over the treasure inside. But one stabbed the other in the arm and reached in quickly, grabbing the still beating organ.

  “It’s mine, you turd, we agreed last week: you get the brains, I get the heart.”

  “But you TOOOOOK the brains,” the other screamed back hysterically, licking at what little of said substance it could from its fat white fingers.

  “Well, too late now,” the high-pitched voice squealed as its hands pulled hard and ripped the heart right out of the youth’s open chest cavity, trailing tendrils and veins and all kinds of spurting shit. The albino held it and looked at it as one might look at an exotic species of jungle bird. Then he bit into the thing even as it kept beating, jerking spasmodically away from the broken teeth. But the heart, to say the least, didn’t have too many defenses, and the cannibal tore into it with gusto, taking huge, still beating bites of it, which flopped around like fish as they swam down his gullet and into the festering lake of his huge stomach filled with rotting foods from days past.

  Stone watched while every square inch of the youth was carved into an unrecognizable bloody carcass like a turkey left over from Thanksgiving dinner. There wasn’t going to be a hell of a lot to munch on come midnight. But then Stone realized they had more to eat. Much more: him.

  It had been dark about an hour, and the brothers albino were just finishing up the last of what had been a man, when Stone suddenly sensed, felt something behind him in the shadows. He turned, moving very slowly, though the brothers, nearly a hundred feet off, their faces covered with blood as they chewed out the marrow from the bones, were hardly in a position to notice him.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Stone hissed under his breath. It was the dog! The fucking dog was alive and it had come to save his ass. The animal looked curiously out of the bushes, somehow sensing that it shouldn’t come rushing ahead barking and tail wagging and everything. Stone made a shushing sound with his mouth, a signal he had tried in the past to make the pit bull understand meant play it cool, boy, real cool. The dog slithered around the dirt like a snake and came right up behind the stake Stone was tied to. It let out a low guttural growl as if asking, what next?

  Stone wriggled his hands tied behind his back around the pole and whispered, “Bite rope, dog! Bite t
he fucking ropes, you hear me?” The animal put its wet nose close to where Stone was wiggling and seemed to poke around there like a hog rooting for vegetables, trying to figure out just what the hell he had in mind.

  “The rope—bite—the—fucking—rope,” Stone said very slowly and deliberately, as if talking slow would make it all a little clearer. Somehow, it did. For the animal, suddenly realizing that the ropes had something to do with the Chow Boy’s predicament, nuzzled up close, standing up on his hind legs and opened his jaws about an inch. Moving in close and making sure that he was only getting leather, not flesh, Excaliber closed the teeth slowly until he made contact with the material. Then he grunted and snapped hard with all the strength of his breed’s jaw, over two thousand pounds per square inch. Even leather cord as tough as this wasn’t meant for that kind of stress. The cord snapped apart in the pit bull’s mouth and it pushed back down, landing on the ground with a soft thud.

  “Stay,” Stone ordered out of the corner of his mouth as he pulled his hands partially but not all the way around just to make sure they were completely free. They were. He looked over at Charise, whose eyes were closed, her head turned sideways, not able to bear to look at the remains of her brother.

  “Charise, baby,” Stone whispered sharply out of the corner of his mouth. “Listen to me, you’ve got to snap out of it. I’ve gotten free. I’m going to try to make a break for the car. Now I’ve got to know. The machine gun you told me about, remember?”

  Her head suddenly snapped up out of its daze and she focused on him. “Yes, the machine gun—”

  “Is it loaded? Did they take the feed away or leave it all there? Is the thing operable?” Stone prayed what the answers would be. For with them lay their only chance at getting out of this foul-smelling nightmare alive.