“In one instance in particular, two young ‘virgin slaves’—girls who looked a lot like Audrey and myself, in fact—were sacrificed exactly as I described on the altar of the Aztec gods. These ‘virgin slaves’ had been defiled, abused as sexual slaves in perverted rituals by another of the holy men. It seemed there was never a shortage of Aztec holy men.” She chuckled, the sound lifeless and horrifying.
“After the conclusion of the ritual sacrifice, while the corpses of the two ‘virgin slaves’ lay draining blood onto the sacrificial altar, their holy-man master reanimated their lifeless bodies, that they might live forever and continue serving him. But of course there was one small problem. Their hearts were missing. So they were doomed to a continuous cycle, to be repeated throughout eternity. Once each month, the girls would be forced to repeat the sacrificial ritual they had been subjected to, locating a live donor and removing his beating heart, eating it, thereby replenishing their heartless bodies.”
She blinked her awful eyelids and looked down at Gary in surprise, as if only now remembering he was even in the room. “Would you like to hear the ironic part of the whole situation?”
Gary stared up at her, enthralled by the terrible story. “What?” he whispered.
“That ‘holy man’ of which I spoke? The demon who first abused the two virgin girls and then misused his awful, cursed powers to reanimate their corpses?”
Gary nodded.
“Well, this ‘holy man’ became the first to provide replenishment. One month after that horrible dual virgin sacrifice, he became the first victim of the now-undead slave girls, his body sliced open and his beating heart wrenched out of his chest, sustaining them for another twenty-eight day cycle. The very last thing he viewed with his dying eyes was his own heart being ingested. I believe in your language that is called ‘justice.’
“Now, are you following me? Do you see where I’m going with this?”
He stared back. This was fucking impossible. The whole goddamned thing was impossible. These two beautiful young girls, originally intended as the latest victims in his years-long rape/murder spree, were not centuries-old undead Aztec slave girls, doomed to wander the earth for eternity, carving up humans and eating their hearts and then moving on. It was not possible. It was a trick, it was some kind of spell, it was—
—That was when he saw the knife.
It wasn’t his utility knife. It wasn’t any of the identical hunting knives the girls had hidden throughout the inside of their Saturn. It didn’t look like any knife he had ever seen.
The knife Janelle held in front of her body with two hands featured a colorful handle, inlaid with what looked like precious stones, blue and black and purple, glittering in an intricate patterned design. A thumb guard in the shape of a bird’s beak separated the handle from the obsidian blade, which was no more than a few inches long, but which appeared honed to a razor-sharp edge.
The two girl-things gazed at the knife intently, examining it with near-religious fervor, the intensity in their cold dead eyes unmistakable. And he knew.
4 - Janelle
They had rarely let things go this long without finding a suitable donor before. Through centuries of trial and error, the girls had learned that their bodies would retain their natural, human-like forms for very nearly the full twenty-eight days before eventually beginning the inevitable descent into decomposition. Only in the final twelve hours was the process noticeable to the human eye, although for a day or so before that, the girls would find themselves becoming tense and irritable for no reason, suffering from creaky joints, sore bones and unexplained pains.
Prior to allowing themselves to be hijacked by Gary Newton, the girls had very nearly selected a different donor, a long-haul trucker they picked out the day before at one of the many truck stops dotting the interstate. The man was much older than Gary, probably in his sixties, but they had learned long ago that the age of the donor was irrelevant. As long as the heart was beating, it was sufficient for rejuvenation.
But the man seemed old and weak, no challenge at all, really, and they had decided to pass him by in hopes of finding a more interesting donor. The moment Janelle spotted Gary at the ice cream stand she knew they had found their man. Over the centuries she had developed a very keen sense of awareness regarding the people around her, and she had known immediately he was damaged goods; that he wasn’t quite right; that he was ripe for the taking.
Luring him in had been simple. American males in the twenty-first century, especially young ones, were so easy to arouse it was almost pitiful, easier even than the Aztec “holy men” from so long ago. Now their donor lay before them, naked and spread-eagled, the recognition dawning in his eyes that everything she had just told him was, in fact, true, impossible as that may be for him to believe.
Their rate of decomposition was accelerating, as it always did when they allowed themselves to delay rejuvenation until so late in the process. Ancient cells cried out for replenishment that could be offered only by the sustenance provided by a still-beating human heart. Nothing would ever equal the satisfaction of that first feeding, nearly five hundred years ago now, when the two girls had surprised their captor, the “holy man,” in his bed in the middle of the night, skin sloughing off their bodies much as it was doing now, marching him out of his home under cover of darkness and straight to the sacrificial altar, but still the process was not without its rewards.
Janelle would never wish what they went through every month on another human being. Nevertheless, the process remained awe-inspiring, no matter how many times it was repeated. By her calculations they had undertaken this life-giving ritual now nearly six thousand times, and every single time she had to stop and marvel at the mystical process being called forth.
Audrey, on the other hand, cared nothing for mysticism, inspiration, satisfaction, or anything else. She had lost something that could never be replaced at the hands of their “holy man” so many centuries ago, back when they were still just two frightened teenaged human girls suffering at the hands of a cold-hearted sociopath. Audrey was truly an empty vessel, even more so than Janelle, doomed to wander the earth soullessly forever.
Janelle had no idea whether she still had a soul, if such things even existed for normal humans, but she held out hope, however unrealistically. After all, the things that had been done to them so long ago—beginning with rape and humiliation and ending with the reanimation of their desecrated bodies—none of it had been their fault; they had been unwilling and unwitting participants from beginning to end. Victims in the truest sense of the word.
So there was hope. There had to be hope. It was the only way she could ever find the strength to continue their endless journey.
But now it was time to proceed. It was well past time to proceed. Skin sloughed off their emaciated forms in ever-increasing flurries, and the non-specific pains that never failed to wrack their bodies in the hours before feeding were becoming more and more difficult to ignore. Soon, if they did nothing, they would simply collapse and fall to the floor in a state of suspended animation, unable to move but unable either to die. They would be at the mercy of the humans, fodder for the scientific experiments that would inevitably follow; victims again, just as they had been so many hundreds of years ago.
Janelle would never allow that to happen, either to Audrey or to herself. She moved to the bed. Below her, Gary Newton stared into her eyes in mute terror. She smiled down at him and watched as the fear mushroomed in his eyes. He gibbered senselessly and tugged in mindless panic against his bonds, desperate to escape, the steel handcuffs slicing into the soft skin on the inside of each wrist. He didn’t seem to notice.
Janelle knew she had to be careful or their donor would simply die of fright before his heart could be harvested. It had happened before, usually when they selected an older donor, which was one reason they tried to stick with young males. If he died too soon today, though, their own decomposition process had advanced to the point where it would be im
possible for them to find and harvest a new heart in the limited time they had left.
They had to hurry. Holding the ancient sacrificial blade in her right hand, Janelle leaned down and gently covered their donor’s mouth with her left, pushing relentlessly, using her incredible strength, still far greater than any normal human’s even this late in the decomposition process. He immediately began thrashing—as much as possible, which was not much—and trying desperately to scream, but of course with his mouth covered no sound could escape beyond a soft keening wail.
The tip of the blade sliced easily through his skin. She began at the base of his throat and made a clean incision straight down his chest, slicing to just above his pubic bone. She knew he was suffering very little pain, thanks to the knife’s almost supernatural razor-sharp edge. Blood pulsed out of the long wound, splashing over the sides of Gary Newton’s carved skin like the ocean lapping at the seashore.
Audrey moved to the other side of the bed and while Janelle kept her hand clamped tightly over their donor’s mouth, her friend and fellow sufferer reached into the pulsing cavity, putting one delicate hand on each side of the rib cage. Then she pulled with a strength belied by her tiny body. A rending, cracking sound filled the inside of the cheap motel room as his ribs snapped in rapid succession.
Then she plunged her practiced hands inside his chest, wrapping her slim fingers firmly around his heart and neatly removing the life-giving organ. It beat and throbbed in her hands as blood spurted from torn arteries, dripping over her knuckles and wrists, falling onto Gary Newton’s chest and back inside his ruined body. He stared unbelievingly at the sight of his own heart. Then the light of consciousness began to fade from his eyes and he was gone at the same time Janelle took the first bite.
She smiled at Audrey, closing her teeth on the human heart, careful not to catch her friend’s fingers between her powerful jaws as she bit into the life-giving force. Almost immediately, sweet regeneration flooded her body. Rotting skin tissue began healing, the unbearable stench of decomposition lessened and then disappeared, and the ancient, endless cycle began again.
Epilogue
Ocean swells pounded the pristine Wells Beach sand, the temperature unseasonably hot for late-September in Maine. Most vacationing families and tourists had long since abandoned the rocky coast, not to return until next Memorial Day, so the grateful locals once again had the beach all to themselves. A few daring high school boys splashed in the cold North Atlantic surf, but the majority of beachgoers stuck to the shore, content to soak up the warm rays on what was sure to be one of the last truly nice, summerlike days until next June.
Troy Gildon tossed a Frisbee along an empty stretch of sand, smiling as his Golden Retriever, Jack, sprinted joyously after it, snatching the disk out of the air and returning with it clenched triumphantly between his jaws. A tall, muscular high school quarterback, Troy had already committed to a full scholarship at the University of Maine next year, where he was expected to compete for the starting job on the Black Bears football team.
He wrestled the Frisbee from Jack’s mouth and flung it again across the beach where it caught a gust of wind and turned in a graceful arc toward the road, landing at the feet of two pretty, bronze-skinned girls roughly his own age. The girls were dressed in identical jeans shorts and T-shirts, with the same straight jet-black hair tumbling over their shoulders and halfway down their backs.
One of the girls looked at Jack sprinting across the sand and smiled, revealing a mouthful of arrow-straight, dazzling white teeth. The other appeared bored, uninterested in what was happening around her, or maybe she just had a lot on her mind; Troy couldn’t tell which. One thing Troy did know, however, was that these two exotic-looking beauties weren’t local girls. Over the last four years he had dated most of the girls in town—most of the pretty ones, anyway—and knew he would never have been able to forget these two if he had seen them before.
The smiling girl snatched the Frisbee off the sand just ahead of Jack’s snapping jaws. She held it high over her head, laughing now as Jack wheeled around her, tail wagging madly, begging her to toss his toy again. Even her preoccupied friend offered the barest hint of a smile before her face slackened again into a kind of noncommittal beauty.
“Save us!” the smiling girl shouted across the sand to Troy, her voice lilting and melodic over the roar of the breakers crashing behind him.
He trotted over to the two girls, flashing a dazzling smile of his own. “How lucky am I?” he said. “My dog picks out the two prettiest girls on the entire beach to play with!” The smiling girl handed him the Frisbee and he tossed it toward the water. It came to rest thirty feet into the surf and Jack crashed through the waves in hot pursuit.
Troy turned toward Smiling Girl. “I’m Troy,” he said. “You two girls are obviously from out of town; I would remember if I had seen you around here before.”
Smiling Girl glanced at her friend, who returned her gaze blankly. “Yeah, we’re from a little place way down southwest of here.”
Troy laughed. “Everything is southwest of here!”
“Good point,” Smiling Girl answered. “We’re just passing through, doing a little traveling, and we were hoping to find someone who might be willing to show us around.”
Troy’s grin widened like he had just hit the lottery. “Look no further,” he said. “I’m all yours.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allan Leverone is a three-time Derringer Award Finalist and Pushcart Prize nominee whose short fiction has appeared in dozens of print and online magazines and anthologies. A previous novella, Darkness Falls, was published by Delirium Books in September, 2011.
His latest thriller, The Lonely Mile, was released by StoneHouse Ink in July, 2011. Allan lives in Londonderry, NH, with his wife, Sue, three children, one beautiful granddaughter and a cat who has used up eight lives.
Learn more at www.allanleverone.com.
Visit his DarkFuse page at: www.darkfuse.com/allan-leverone/
Join The Book Club
Join the Delirium Book Club @ DarkFuse.
Get 24 original dark fiction novellas for $70
www.darkfuse.com/delirium-book-club.html
Table of Contents
Prologue
1 - Gary
2 - Janelle
3 - Gary
4 - Janelle
Epilogue
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Join The Book Club
Heartless (Delirium Novella Series) Page 6