by Sam West
“I did too, but he’s a fucking snitch. We’ll see if there’s a market for that kind of movie, but I very much doubt it. At least, that ain’t where the money is.”
“What did he do?”
“Stealing from me, that’s what. The drug deals I got goin’ on the side, we was supposed to be working together, but he was fucking stealing from me, man. He was royally screwing me over.”
Steven didn’t give two shits about Ratski, his untimely demise didn’t bother him in the slightest. He was a shifty piece of crap, and he’d never liked him. The same went for Curly and Dairy.
But things are different now. They’re gonna have to start showing me some respect.
“What happens next?”
“We clean up, and then that’s it for you for tonight. Me and Curly are gonna get rid of the bodies in the canal and then the guys are gonna crash here tonight. We’ll talk more about our plans tomorrow.”
“You mean we’re gonna kill more women and Curly’s gonna sell the movies at work?”
What a fucking question, he thought, I can’t believe I just asked that. A shiver of excitement coursed through him. this was mad, this was insane, this was…
Fucking suicide. We’ll never get away with it.
“Yeah, that’s pretty much the size of it. Go take a shower, the clothes you’re wearing are gonna have to go in the canal with everything else.”
Steven was wearing his favourite jeans and hoody, and he blanched.
“Better to be safe than sorry, right? The police ain’t ever gonna know anything, but it’s probably best we get rid of the clothes we was wearing, just in case,” Mark said.
Steven conceded that it did, indeed, make sense and that sense of foreboding intensified.
“How can you be so sure that we’ll get away with this?”
Mark smirked. “Because we will. We’re fucking untouchable. Who’s gonna report them missing? No one, that’s who. No body, no murder, simples. Now go take that shower and go to bed. I’m really proud of you tonight, Steven. You’ve done enough. Me and the lads will take it from here.”
“I want to help.”
Mark patted him on the back, more gently this time. “I know you do, bro, and I gotta tell ya, I’m so fucking proud of you tonight I could fucking burst. You really came through with the goods, didn’t ya? But you need to rest now. Besides, you ain’t got your driving license and you ain’t as strong as me and the lads. I need a bit of muscle power with the bodies. So go on, fuck off into the shower and get to bed.”
Steven got to his feet. He detected no malice in his words and when he got to the bedroom door he stopped and turned round.
“I enjoyed it,” he said impulsively.
“Yeah,” Mark said with a friendly sort of leer. “I saw that. Now go on, fuck off.”
CHAPTER NINE
No, she screams, but it comes out muffled because her knickers have been rammed in her mouth.
You brought this on yourself. You shouldn’t have worn a skirt. You shouldn’t have flirted with him. You shouldn’t have invited him up for another drink…
Those exact same thoughts haunting her nightmares, just as they had done in real life.
Justin Robins thrusts inside her dry vagina. She is lying face-down on her living-room rug, her skirt rucked up around her waist, her large breasts mashed painfully against the ground. Worst of all, her hands are tied behind her back with the tights she had been wearing on their date.
“Fucking prick-tease, fucking whore,” he grunts with each hard thrust.
This is all my fault.
She never should’ve kissed him, she never should have led him on.
You’re a stupid cunt, the mocking voice whispers in her head. You can’t start necking with a guy, then slam on the brakes.
She prays for him to finish soon, and from the way he’s pumping her like a dog on heat she thinks her wish will be granted any second now.
Suddenly, he pulls out of her and his dead weight lifts from her back. At last, she can breathe again. She goes to haul herself up, momentarily forgetting that her wrists are lashed behind her back with her tights.
Where’s he going?
Feebly, she lifts up her head in time to see his back retreating into the kitchen. His blue jeans look a little baggy round his backside where he loosened them to free his cock, but otherwise he doesn’t look remotely like he’s just raped someone.
He is so boyishly handsome with his floppy blonde hair, twinkling blue eyes, dimples and easy smile. She still cannot reconcile this sweet, funny, popular guy she has been crushing on for an entire term with the monster that has raped her.
Was still raping her.
Justin Robins. Her crush. The gorgeous guy in the year above her, studying for a degree in Sociology.
Justin Robins. Her rapist.
Come on, Julie, fucking move it.
Groaning, she tries to sit up, but all she manages to do is to flop onto her side. Her vagina is in screaming agony, like she has been torn open from the inside out.
Why, oh why, did her flatmate Ceinwen – a fellow student taking the same Nursing degree as her – decide to bugger off back to Wales this weekend? No, the gods had not been smiling on her this night.
Justin re-appears in the living-room almost immediately. At first, she is barely aware of the object he is holding in his hand as she is concentrating too hard on his face.
He is smiling down at her. How could I ever have thought he has a beautiful smile? she wonders in disbelief. She thinks how cruel his smile is, how his eyes twinkle with an unhealthy lust.
A lust to overpower her. To control her and to hurt her.
To kill her.
Oh God, he’s going to kill me.
The nasty thought slams into her brain, knocking her breath out. It is the first time she has thought it, and it leaves her paralysed.
Using her tongue to roll the knickers forward in her mouth, she coughs and jerks her head to try and dislodge them. She doesn’t give a shit how ridiculous or repulsive she must look, like a snake regurgitating an entire rodent.
“Don’t even think about it, you dumb bitch. If you scream, I’ll cut your throat. Then before you die, I’ll go after your entire family and slit their fucking throats, too. Then I’ll slit my own fucking throat.
“And you wanna know why? Because I’d sooner die than have people know what I really am. And if you shut the fuck up and be a good little girl, I won’t hurt you. If you blab after we’re done here, I will kill you. Are we clear?”
As he is speaking, for the first time she notices what he holds in his hand.
It is a tub of margarine from out of her fridge.
He scoops out a blob of margarine with his fingers, slowly rotating his hand in front of his face, examining the gloopy yellow substance like he has never seen it before.
She groans into her knickers when he rolls her onto her stomach, his words reverberating in her head. She has to be quiet. She has to do as he says. If he did anything to her parents, she would never forgive herself.
But when she feels his slimy fingers probing the crack of her arse, her resolve crumples. She bucks and writhes beneath him, but she is no match for his strength.
“Keep still, bitch. Take it like a good girl.”
She feels his weight on her the backs of her thighs, and a tearing sensation at the base of her spine as her arse-cheeks are unceremoniously spread.
A slippery finger jabs at her arsehole and she freezes in terror.
Oh, God, this can’t be happening…
But it is. The digit slides into her. In and out. In and out. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut. It feels abysmal. Disgusting. Horrendous. Never has she felt so dirty, so violated. Being raped pales in comparison to this.
She struggles beneath him, but she is powerless to stop him when she feels him shuffle up her body. His hard cock guided by his hand replaces his finger. That too, is greased-up and ready to go…
She knows the pai
n is coming. That unspeakable, gut-ripping pain.
Justin slides into her and….
Julie lurched bolt-upright in bed with a gasp, her heart slamming. She was drenched in sweat. Shakily, she pushed her damp hair off her forehead. Grant was on his back snoring, his open mouth doing a passable impression of an unhinged trapdoor caught in a breeze.
His presence comforted her, reminding her she was safe and sound at home. Passing cars illuminated the bedroom, lighting up the familiar surroundings.
Justin was a long time ago.
He’s in prison now, remember?
Yeah. No thanks to me…
After the rape, Julie had remained silent. Two years ago, she had read about him in the paper. Turns out she wasn’t the only one he had raped. Only, he had gotten clumsy back in 2013 and had ended up killing a girl.
He can’t hurt you now.
It had been months since the last nightmare. Bloody months. Those fuckers next door had stirred up all those old, rancid emotions; emotions that she had done so well to bury over the years.
Sighing heavily, she swung her trembling legs over the side of the bed. As if she could sleep now. She was going to go downstairs and switch on all of the lights and make herself a nice cup of tea…
What the hell was that noise?
She froze on the side of the bed, not even realising she was holding her breath until she was forced to shakily exhale.
Yes, it was definitely the sound of a door slamming. For a gut-wrenching second, she thought someone had let themselves into their house. But no, that was impossible as the front door was bolted from the inside.
Muffled, male voices preceded the bang, followed by the unmistakable creak of a sliding van-door in need of an oiling.
The bastards next door, she thought, glancing at the bedside alarm. The green digits blinked 3.18 in the gloom, and she frowned.
What the hell are they doing this time of the night?
A voice in her head warned her not to look. Twitching curtains in the early hours did not go down well in this neighbourhood. Yet she was unable to stop herself from crossing the short distance over to the window and gingerly peeling back the edge of the curtain.
She was there just in time to witness Mark walk round to the driver’s side of the beat-up old van. At least, she thought it was Mark, it was hard to tell in the dark, even if the street lamp was right outside her house. There was no mistaking his fat friend, however, who climbed into the passenger side.
No sign of his little brother, though. Of course there wouldn’t be, she told herself. Steven was a sweet kid, and whatever his shit of a big brother was up to, she felt sure that Steven wouldn’t be involved.
Who says that they’re up to anything?
She didn’t believe it though, not for a second. Who went for a drive at three in the morning?
Mark opened the door, and just as he seemed about to climb in, he looked up at her window.
She gasped and staggered backwards, but not as quick as she would’ve liked. Her reflexes were dulled by fatigue and the vestiges of the nightmare that clung to her like a damp shroud.
Shit! What if he saw me?
So? What if he did?
She found she was trembling; it occurred to her that she’d been doing a ridiculous amount of that today.
Relax, for pity’s sake. He couldn’t have seen me, the lights are off in the bedroom.
Except he had seen her and she knew it.
Grant continued to snore softly, oblivious to her drama. She thought about waking him, but she didn’t want him seeing how shaken she was. She didn’t want him asking too many questions.
She didn’t want to tell him about Justin.
Some things are best buried.
Changing her mind about going downstairs – she didn’t want ‘them’ to see she was up and therefore there had been someone snooping at them through the bedroom window – she climbed back into bed and pulled the duvet up to her chin.
Go to sleep, she told herself. Everything will be better in the morning.
She hated it so much when that particular box opened in her mind. It didn’t happen often, but when it did it was bloody hard to shut it again.
It will be better tomorrow, she repeated to herself, forcing her eyes closed.
But try as she might, sleep never came.
*****
Next door, with just a brick wall separating him from Julie, Steven lay on his bed, listening to his brother and Curly drag the bin-bagged bodies into the back of the van. In the room adjacent to his, Dairy was snoring like a fucking pig.
He stared up at the ceiling, the events of the night churning over and over in his mind.
We’ll never get away with this. This is madness.
We will never. Get away. With this.
But maybe they would. How many people, exactly, did he know that had murdered anyone? None. Because ninety-nine percent of the population didn’t have the balls to do it. Who was going to miss Ratski or Crystal? No one, that’s who.
They might wind up on the missing persons list. Well, Crystal would anyway. No one would miss Ratski seeing as he had nothing and no-one.
Okay, maybe Crystal’s mum might eventually come knocking, but it wasn’t like she actually gave a shit. She was on baby number six, the father of which had left her, just like all the others had. She had a six-month-old and a four-year-old to feed, not to mention her own crack habit. Crystal – the oldest of the six siblings – hadn’t spoken to any of her brothers and sisters for four years. She hadn’t even met the most recent two.
And Ratski had been sofa-diving for the past few months, his most recent sofa being Curly and Dairy’s.
Seems like they got fucking sick of him too.
Besides, Mark’s right. Can’t have a murder without a body, can you?
He laced his hands behind his head and stared thoughtfully up at the crack in the ceiling. He remembered the way Crystal had looked, the way she had felt.
Except it wasn’t Crystal in his mind’s eye anymore, it was Julie.
CHAPTER TEN
Steven was fucking Julie. She was bent over the back of the sofa, her luscious arse offered up to him. Fuck, she felt good. So fucking tight. So wet. She was enjoying herself, too. Not like Crystal. Julie wanted him as much as he wanted her; this was her fantasy as much as his. She wanted to be gang-raped.
Just as he was about to come, his brother strode up to them and began sawing at the back of her neck with the bread-knife, his lips pulled back in a sneer behind the stocking-mask. Julie bucked and writhed as Steven continued to fuck her. Mark continued to saw. A spray of blood hit Steven in the face, but he didn’t stop fucking her. Nothing on the planet would be able to get him to stop.
Don’t kill her, he wanted to say, she’s not like the others. She’s special.
But the words wouldn’t come. And even though he didn’t want her to die, even though he didn’t want this heaven to end, her terror and her agony just felt so fucking good.
Despite everything, she was still turned on. Deep down, she wanted to die, he could sense it. She wanted to die in a blaze of sexual agony…
And Steven was about to make all her dreams come true…
“Steven? Get up.”
Mark’s voice penetrated his dream, dragging him out of the moment that he didn’t want to ever end. Groggily, he opened his eyes.
“What time is it?” he slurred.
Light filtered through the flimsy curtains of the box-room, the familiar hum of traffic bringing him too.
“Seven. Time to get up.”
“It’s early,” Steven grumbled, flipping over onto his side so that he was facing the wall, conscious that he had been lying on his back with his hard-on sticking up like a fucking tent-pole.
He gritted his teeth. God, he was so fucking horny, he wished that his brother would just leave him alone so that he could toss out a quick one.
“Yeah, it’s early, and we got a shit-load to do today. She saw. H
er next door. I dunno what she saw, exactly, but that’s what you gotta find out.”
“What?” he asked, Mark’s words making no sense to him.
“Her. Your girlfriend next door. Something’s gonna have to be done.”
That brought him to, and he struggled into a sitting position. “Julie? What do ya mean? What did she see?”
“The nosey bitch was peeping out the bedroom window last night. I don’t think she saw us loading up the back of the van, but she saw me and Curly getting in to the van. She’s gotta be wondering what the fuck we were doing going out driving that time of night.”
“How’d that go, anyway?” Steven asked, a pang of guilt stabbing at him for not asking straight away. He’d been so knackered after last night’s activities that he’d gone out a like a light and hadn’t even heard them come back home after they had disposed of the bodies in the canal.
“Fine. We dumped the bodies, no problem. No one saw, and every fucker fly-tips where we went.”
“What am I supposed to tell her?”
“I don’t know, you’re the one doing fucking A levels, not me. You’re supposed to be the creative, brainy one. Tell her whatever the fuck you want, just make it believable. Me and the lads are going out, now.”
“What? All of you?”
“Yeah. We’re going to B and Q and a few other places for some supplies. The nosey cunt next door likes you the best so you’re on damage control.”
Steven swung his legs over the side of the bed and rubbed his bleary eyes, doing his best to organise his thoughts.
“Do you expect me to knock on her door? Won’t she think that’s really weird?”
Mark shrugged. “Your call, bro. Do watcha gotta do, makes no odds to me. Just make sure the bitch don’t call the police. Because if you think she might, then it’s bye bye blondie.”
He made a throat-slitting motion, running his forefinger across his neck.
Steven frowned. He had enjoyed raping Crystal, and he was looking forward to getting his hands on another girl later. But killing Julie? Despite his fantasies and horny dreams, he wasn’t sure that he actually wanted her to die. She was a nice person and she had only ever been sweet to him.