The Woman on the Beast

by Macie Holloway

  The Woman

  on the

  Beast

  a season for Horror

  a novel by:

  Macie Holloway

  The End Time Series Part II / Soul Snake Sequel

  Copyright 2016

  REVELATIONS 17:6-16

  6 I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abdominal things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery: Babylon the Great, the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth.

  I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of God’s holy people, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus. 15 Then the angel said to me, The waters you saw where the prostitute sits are peoples, nations, multitudes and languages. The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. 16 And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.

  ATTICUS FLETCHER

  “Is your name Atticus, or Fatticus? Or, is it ASS KISS?”

  The twelve-year-old bully was relentless and for no good reason.

  Ham sandwich chunks were stuck in his braces.

  His slimy green gums made it clear he had gingivitis.

  The kids knew his real name was Elroy, but no one mentioned that.

  Atticus was more fun to pick on.

  His mother was a prostitute. Every mom in the neighborhood called her the Black Widow Spider, and she thought it was a compliment.

  The class erupted in laughter at the millionth Fatticus joke in only one month.

  Ms. Mallory raised her timid voice in yet another failed attempt to sound threatening.

  “Ass Kisses’ mom is a hooker!” a rowdy heckler spouted off from the back of the class.

  Ms. Mallory’s beady blue eyes scanned the room helplessly.

  It didn’t matter. She knew defending Atticus would only make things worse.

  Poor kid.

  The other mothers wouldn’t let her kids play with him.

  He had more freckles than a Dalmatian.

  His hair was so bright and red she wouldn’t look directly at it for fear it’d burn out her retinas.

  For reasons Ms. Mallory would NEVER understand, his mother named him Atticus.

  He was thirty pounds overweight even though he barely ate his lunch and never brought a snack.

  Poor kid never had a fighting chance.

  While Atticus was grateful Ms. Mallory never defended him, he enjoyed the fact that he could sense she wanted to.

  Ms. Mallory was a real lady with a real job.

  Atticus wished Ms. Mallory was his mother.

  The sound of the squealing school bell broke up the crowd of hecklers.

  Ms. Mallory let out a deep sigh of frustration.

  She was always grateful for the high-pitched squeal of the bell.

  No matter how much she attempted to be threatening, her meek high-pitched voice commanded no respect from the merciless sixth graders.

  She was so tired.

  She had really wanted to be an airline stewardess, but her mother steamrolled over her, just like her class.

  “Atticus, wait!”

  Oh great. They’re already calling me Ass Kiss. Now Ms. Mallory wants me to hang out with her after class.

  His lashless green eyes darted to the window and back nervously.

  Ms. Mallory didn’t appear to be in a hurry.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Just keeps getting better. He nodded in agreement, but held the tattered straps of his dog eaten book bag firmly on his shoulders.

  He tapped his sullied sneaker impatiently without even noticing his naked toe poked through the top.

  He was used to it, but Ms. Mallory couldn’t help but to notice that the poor kid didn’t even own a pair of socks.

  Atticus hoped she’d get his foot-tapping hint. She didn’t.

  “Atticus, I can’t change your situation, but I can help you look at it differently.”

  Oh geez, Yoda. Great. A presidential address.

  “We can’t expect others to create a happy reality for us. We have to do that on our own. You have to take control of your reality by taking control of your mind. If you let their bullying get to you, you are letting them control your mind. Your mind controls your actions. Your actions control your life. That means you are choosing to let others control your life.”

  Atticus stopped tapping and furrowed a bright red brow. He didn’t appreciate unsolicited advice from a woman.

  He looked out the window again.

  “Atticus!”

  He jumped, startled.

  She gave him the famous I-told-you-so look.

  He hung his head in shame as his cheeks turned as bright red as his hair.

  It was suddenly clear to both of them that she had given him sound advice.

  Coming from a woman, it was like a swift kick in the nuts to his over-inflated male ego.

  Atticus couldn’t even look her in the eye.

  “Are you done, Ms. Mallory?”

  She sighed again – defeated.

  “Yes, Atticus. You can go home.”

  BULLY BLOOD BATH

  Even school buses wouldn’t dare venture to the southern part of Applewood where Atticus lived.

  The dilapidated neighborhood no longer lived up to its original name and had long ago been nicknamed Wormwood.

  The parents of Applewood were required by the school to drop off and pick up their children at one central location on the outskirts of the white-trash ghetto sprinkled with stray dogs and meth dealers clad in wife- beater tank tops.

  Even the meth dealers drove their kids to the bus stop, but not Destiny Gail Fletcher, a.k.a., the Black Widow Spider of Wormwood.

  She was busy with her daily activities, which all began with the letter S: sleeping, selling sex, smoking crack or shooting up.

  “Lazy whore,” Atticus murmured as he trudged down the usual seven-mile path to his crack house.

  Seven miles was typically open season for bullies, but he hoped leaving late would give him a much needed day off from the usual harassment.

  As he rounded the corner of the brick school, he looked up to see the motley crew of twelve-year-olds had waited patiently on him instead.

  Great. Here we go.

  Some days there were only two bullies. Some days there were more than five. That particularly overcast muggy Wednesday he was lucky enough to only be surrounded by three snot-nosed Garbage Pail Kids.

  “Your mom sucked my dick for five dollars, Fatticus!”

  They started heckling from ten feet away.

  Atticus rolled his eyes at the scrawny boy with the rat tail who was so short he still couldn’t ride carnival rides. No one even knew his name. Everyone called him Rat Tail Boy.

  Normally Atticus stared straight down at the toe that had long ago escaped his shoe, but he looked straight ahead now that Ms. Mallory’s ball-busting advice had his temper burning redder than his hair.

  “That’s because she charges less for the tiny dicks,” he fired back. He was determined to grow back his neutered nut sack at any cost.

  Rat tail hocked a German loogie for ten seconds straight. With no mercy, he fired the slimy spit missile close range.

  The yellowish green saliva shrapnel splattered across his freckled nose and clung to his lips before slowly rolling off his chin in gooey green streams. Rat Tail’s loogie missile practically warranted homicide.

  Using his forearm Atticus attempted to
wipe away the slime, but a sticky residue clung to his face and hardened over his lips. Atticus felt as if his burning temper were now smoking out of his ears.

  Create your own reality.

  Create your own reality.

  Ms. Mallory’s advice was useless. His blood was quickly thickening into hot boiling lava.

  The third bully sported nerd glasses thicker than coke bottles and a flat face as round as a moon pie. His name was Bryce, but Atticus called him Cheeseburger Head, or sometimes Bryce Burger.

  “Sluts like Fatticus’s mom suck dick the best because they are professionals! DSL, baby! Those big wet juicy lips could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. She’s a real pro, and pros drink cum like it’s a banana milkshake.”

  Atticus glared at him, freckled face to moon-pie face and fired back, “Maybe so, but if it wasn’t for cheap whores, four-eyed cheeseburger heads like yourself would never get pussy.”

  Cheeseburger Head stuck out his crusty high-topped sneaker and retaliated with an ankle sweep that should have been ruled out as below-the-belt, but bullies didn’t play by the rules.

  Being as cumbersome as he was clumsy, Atticus’s gigantic body slammed into the concrete freckles first, busting his loogie stained lip.

  Raucous laughter sounded off victoriously.

  Adrenaline pumping, Atticus bounced back onto his feet like a cat and attempted the wipe the already hardened spit from his bloody lip.

  It seemed that Ms. Mallory was full of shit.

  Create your own reality MY ASS, Ms. Mallory. Next time, keep your Jedi mind tricks to yourself.

  Now Ham Sandwich Braces chimed in as sharp and squealing as the school bell.

  “Fatticus would fuck his mom, too, if he wasn’t a butt-fucking faggot.”

  Atticus’s blood seemed to be thickening like lava. Now his ears were burning as bright red as his hair and his heart was pumping piping hot magma through his veins.

  Delirious with fever, he imagined himself an active smoking volcano, and for the first time Atticus realized his own fury was a source of superhuman strength.

  Enough is enough, you dick suckers.

  Though his face was a red as the devil, his voice flowed out as smooth as silk.

  “Hey guys, since my mom is such a professional dick sucker, she keeps a ton of cash in her purse. Like $500. I’ll steal it and give it to you if you’ll leave me alone.”

  Atticus knew a good strategy always trumped a quick temper and the devil himself couldn’t have presented a more tempting bargain to a band of broke bullies.

  Silence ensued as their slow brains needed time to process a barter.

  Light bulbs finally flashed in all three heads as they imagined how many video games they could buy with $500.

  Ham Sandwich Braces was apparently the leader of the pack since he answered on behalf of his circus apes.

  Being the tallest was no doubt the deciding factor that won him the presidency.

  It certainly wasn’t his good looks.

  “It’s a deal, Fatticus. You give us your mom’s dick sucking money, and we’ll leave you alone – forever.”

  Yeah, sure.

  Atticus may have been white-trash, but he wasn’t stupid white-trash. He knew blood-thirsty demented circus monkeys didn’t keep bargains.

  That was O.K.

  He had a plan.

  “Why waste time? Let’s go get the money now. She’s always sleeping at four o’clock. Then you guys will still have time to make it to Game Stop before they close.”

  “Lead the way, Fatticus,” the leader commanded as he revealed slimy brownish green gums. Atticus didn’t know which was more disgusting, the gingivitis or the brown ham sandwich chunks stuck in the railroad tracks of his shiny silver braces.

  That kid really needs to lay off the white bread.

  Since money always had a way of shutting idiots up, the rest of the walk home went quietly and without torture for once.

  Finally Rat Tail moaned, “Are we almost there? You live a million miles away, Fatticus.”

  “Next house on the right, Rat Tail. Hang in there, midget man.”

  The boys turned pale with fear as they approached the ramshackle abode streaked with green mildew.

  It was the type of house that would spontaneously disintegrate if even lightly misted with a pressure washer, but Atticus never had to worry about that. Destiny more than likely thought a pressure washer was a sex joke.

  The grass was tall enough to hide an NBA player. The mildew-spotted blue paint had chipped off in large random fragments, making the house appear to have what Atticus referred to as Crack House Vitiligo. There was no real door, only a screen door with no screen. There must have been at least nine stray dogs in the yard, six pregnant and four appeared to have caught the mange from his mother’s crack house.

  A litter of newborn puppies were moaning from a hidden location.

  Probably under the house again, Atticus thought.

  White-trash people either didn’t believe in fixing animals or had never heard of it, and his meth hood was no different. The more responsible pet owners used rusty chains for birth control. Since this method only worked if both dogs were chained, it was about as effective as passing out condoms to Spring Breakers.

  No one in Wormwood ever noticed though. Their nostrils were completely immune to the heavy wet cloud of steaming shit stench permanently suspended in the humid ninety-eight degree Mississippi air. The people of Wormwood couldn’t even smell it on their shoe anymore.

  They trudged through the gigantic steaming piles of shit swarmed in flies and streaked it all the way through house while chugging Budweisers and telling hooker jokes.

  Destiny had always been proud of the fact that her car wasn’t on blocks like the neighbors’ cars, yet plowed through the shit piles with the slack tires of her gray Chevy Malibu and parked halfway up onto the curb with one floppy tire dangling in the air like a flaccid penis. Not seeing the same curb that had been in the same place for twelve years usually meant she was smacked out enough to sleep through a category five hurricane.

  I’ll be damned. Destiny’s drug habit finally came in handy.

  Rat Tail shrunk away from the mange-spotted door frame in sheer terror.

  “I don’t wanna go in there. You guys go get the money. I’ll keep an eye on the dogs.”

  Since the dogs were now having sex in the middle of the yard, his excuse didn’t fly with the bully president.

  “Quit being a pussy,” the leader spit through his breaded braces.

  He wouldn’t admit it, but even Ham Sandwich Teeth got a chill down his lanky spine as he passed through the screenless frame and beheld the kitchen.

  For every pile of steaming dog shit outside, there was a slimy looking used condom randomly littered about a jet black floor and somehow still fresh with oozing body liquids.

  The boys never even noticed.

  Their eyes were too focused on the show-stopping main attraction … The centerpiece of white-trash whore Hell was an oversized black trash can overflowing with bloody tampons, bloody needles, and mangled up cum tissues surrounded on all sides by swarms of angry flies.

  Atticus never understood why the condoms couldn’t make it to the trash can like the other trash. They certainly looked alive enough to get up and walk by themselves or possibly swim. Thousands of German cockroaches bolted in black streaks flashing in and out of the hazardous waste, transforming the kitchen into a Six Flags Over Slut Land.

  The roaches brazenly darted out from the can in every direction as they were camouflaged by the jet black kitchen floor.

  In the true spirit of optimism, Atticus tried to think of the cockroaches more as a fascinating optical illusion of black water waves rolling across a kitchen floor like the Mississippi River.

  Jedi mind tricks did come in handy sometimes, but not for the virgin nostrils of his guests.

  As the potent odor of rotten fish sticks and sperm masked the smell of dog shit in the air, Ham Sandwich
Braces was trying to fight back the dry heaves while Rat Tail’s knobby knees were beginning to wobble uncontrollably.

  Don’t pass out. Don’t you dare.

  Rat Tail’s worst nightmare was to make contact with the living, moving floor that was shiny and slick from layers of oily black residue. Cheeseburger Head tried to run, but Atticus quickly snatched him up by his shirt collar.

  “Don’t look at all that. Stay focused. Money. Lots and lots of money!”

  Now Atticus was practically shoving the boys down the two-foot hallway and into his room. It was no pent-house suite, but anything would have been an upgrade from the kitchen.

  With queasy stomachs, wobbly knees, and singed nostril hairs, the boys were in no condition to protest.

  They staggered into Atticus’s empty room and clutched onto his window seal for dear life.

  “I’ll be right back with the money. Five seconds!”

  Atticus quickly shut his door to create a barrier to the symphony of smells, yet still he heard the boys scrapping over the window for valuable air space as he sprinted faster than roaches, dodged in and out of the condom obstacle course like an NFL running back and then leapt over the scattered jizz tissues like an Olympic hurdler.

  He knew he had better hurry because if the boys got a peek at Destiny’s room, their legs would crumble quicker than stale crackers.

  Atticus called Destiny’s room fishy-skank-whore Hell.

  A firefighter suit fully equipped with an oxygen tank couldn’t have saved those boys from collapse in such hazardous breathing conditions.

  He sprinted straight into the fish-fallout zone only to find Destiny’s naked body draped perpendicularly across a fat nude trucker with more back hair than a Grizzly bear.

  Atticus wondered if all truckers had hairy backs or if Destiny just got lucky every time.

  Bloody raised needle tracks were still fresh on their forearms. A meth pipes was still smoking all by itself on the black floor. What once resembled a mattress was now a mere sheet of paper on the ground. Normally it lifted her at least four inches off the floor, but the gigantic dead weight of the Grizzly Bear trucker leveled it to Ground Zero. The dark paneled walls were shiny with greasy brown slime instead of black for some reason, but Atticus didn’t have time to ponder the different shades of sludge throughout the crack house.