B01M0OJOU7 EBOK
Page 17
Though most of the blood was washed or wiped from his face, dark residue still lurked between his teeth when he cracked that familiar creepy, crooked grin.
“Y’all wakin’ up now? Finished snoozing? Great t’see. Woulda been a helluva shame ta have y’all attend a party and been too outta it ta appreciate.”
He cast his eyes around as those only just now acknowledging they were in tight restraints started to struggle and scream. He waved a hand expansively around at the assemblage of freakish souls gathered with him, drinking whatever concoction they had in their containers, leering, laughing, staring with unnerving gazes at the hapless prisoners.
“Well, assumin’ most y’all are back in the land of the party, I’ll do the duty of a good host and make some introductions. Name’s Skillet, that’s Ox, Braun, Charlie, Hoss, Molly…aww shit, none of y’all care about names do ya? Ain’t why you’re here. Y’all came out ta party and ain’t nuthin’ else important. Which suits me fine. Couldn’t be assed goin’ round namin’ names anyways. In any case, everybody’s here. Which brings me to another point. Y’all might notice that you’re tied, but ain’t gagged. Well, if you’re so inclined, feel free to scream fit ta bust a gut. Coz ain’t nobody hearing around here. Everybody from around here is…well, here.” Grinning that insane grin, he waved his hand with a flourish at his assembled companions, then gestured to somebody over in the shadow riddled corners where the lantern light didn’t quite extend.
“Now, none of you fancyass, high-falutin’ self-absorbed folk had the good manners ta invite us to your party, so now it’s our party. Still, we got the humility and good grace to ensure everybody here keeps up the party vibe, so rest assured, y’all get to drink along wit’ the rest of us.”
Now the persons gestured to earlier moved out of the shadows and they wheeled with them a strange trolley contraption which hosted a series of large wooden barrels on it. Other members of the bizarre congregation toted empty mason jars and canisters to serve as drinking implements. For a fleeting fearful moment, Renetta was expecting the shadowy lurkers to wheel out an archaic thing laden with torture devices and wicked cutting blades, but apparently these backwoods fruitcakes were indeed, bringing forth drinks.
“Now we ain’t get any of your fancy designer drugs or manufactured ha-loose-inogens out these parts; we got weed some folks grow and a coupla buddin’ chemists who try to cook up some shit, but what we do got is…this. We call it Strange Old Brew.”
Those with the empty containers were filling them from taps on the barrels and making their way around the collective of imprisoned High Society souls. Renetta noticed that those distributing the drinks were also freeing one hand each for people to hold what they were given. She suspected, the non-issue over people screaming themselves hoarse, also applied to people having a free hand. It wasn’t going to be enough for any of them to tip the scales in favour of any escape bid, not with so many of Skillet’s creepy cronies all around.
It was Skillet himself who brought a mason jar of liquid to her, his blood encrusted teeth visible in his wide grin. She stared at the morass swimming in that jar, not quite certain what components were in it. She expected typical moonshine-which she suspected was what was in those barrels-to either be clear or some amber colour, but this was a strange reddy hue, shot through with swirls of black, greens, browns, all kinds of murky tones she couldn’t precisely define. It looked deadly, revolting, and if she hadn’t seen Skillet's cohorts merrily slugging from it with gleeful abandon, she’d have assumed it was laced with poison or something at least intended to make the High Society violently ill.
She still wasn’t certain the freakish clan had ulterior motives, but right now it just appeared as if Skillet and co. wanted them to indulge in their vile home brewed alcohol. She could already smell the alcohol odour wafting off the lethal murk as Skillet neared; it must have been a potent brew indeed. It was enough to turn her stomach, on top of the drinks and drugs she’d already consumed this evening. Refusing it wasn’t an option though. If there was any way out of this fucking mess, they had to play as nice as they could. After all, Nestor and Wilson-who she couldn’t see anywhere in the room-had landed the lot of them in this situation, by being the polar opposite of nice to Skillet. He could hardly be blamed for bearing them animosity. Apparently, he and his weirdling associates just wanted to party and drink with them, though their methods of rounding up new party participants left a little to be desired.
Renetta sure as hell didn’t think she liked what their ideas of a party might entail, particularly after the High Society were completely hammered on this ugly rot-gut booze here, but she didn’t really want to see what horrors could unfold if Skillet ever got so pissed he lost that crooked grin all together.
“Yeah, ain’t no clever kinda name like you folk give to your drugs, just simple out here. Strange Old Brew. SOB for short. ‘Cause it hits you like a goddamn sonofabitch, see?” Skillet seemed amused by his own wit. “This’ll knock ya damn socks right off; guaranteed y’all ain’t never had liquor like this before.”
Renetta didn’t quite catch the reactions of all the others around the room being either forced to imbibe in the feral mixture, or willingly accepting new overproof alcohol to contend with this fucked up situation; she was concentrating hard on trying to get some down and keep it down long enough to satisfy the convoy of freaks, but she heard a parade of choking, gagging and violent splatters on the stone floor indicating some unfortunates projectile vomited the vile substance.
Desperately, she tried to ignore all of that and sucked down a healthy measure of the stuff, feeling it burn almost immediately. It was the harshest alcohol she’d ever tasted, and hit her like a ton of bricks, but it wasn’t just the booze that made her feel terrible. There were a melange of other tastes swimming in there, coppery, unpleasant and sludgy, and if she wasn’t mistaken there were bits and pieces of solid matter in there. Undistinguishable floaters, as if the barrels were infiltrated with insects or other impurities.
“Shit, c’mon now,” Skillet chortled. “Woulda thought you hardcore party animal, drug-takin’ daredevils woulda breezed through the SOB. Shit’s potent and will fuck y’all up in no time flat, but that’s right up y’alls alley, ain’t it?”
With that he wandered back to the barrels, as Renetta dry retched and heaved, trying to keep the bilious liquid from resurfacing, and others lost the battle completely.
“And y’know what’s gonna be the best thing about this particular batch?” Skillet asked.
His hand flashed out towards the nearest barrel, and then tipped it up, facing towards the captive High Society. There were no lids atop the items and each person could clearly see right inside.
The dead face of Nestor, surrounded by a swirl of hair, swam in the gruesome mixture, which Renetta could now see was comprised not just of alcohol, but blood, floating sections of flesh and other indeterminable items. Ox and Hoss tipped up other barrels to reveal the likes of Heath and Wilson crammed inside, in segmented chunks.
“All the drugs and booze and shit flowing through the systems of all y’all is gonna make this batch of Strange Old Brew just about the most intoxicatin’, wicked shit folks round these parts have ever clapped their lips around. Folks are gonna lose they minds. And all y’all there…well, we got a whole lot more barrels that need them special ingredients. Reckon we got just enough barrels for each one of you.”
Abruptly he had a knife in his hand and was slashing it across Nestor’s throat. The man may have been dead, but blood still came from the slice. Skillet dashed Renetta’s mason jar into the grotesque quagmire, ensuring he caught some of the fresh blood and then upturned it to his mouth, downing it all.
“Ain’t no party like an SOB party, ‘cause an SOB party don’t stop!”
RIDING THE CATERPILLAR
Amanda M. Lyons
“Danny! What did you do?” I knew she would be upset. Shit, if she knew half of what I did, she’d be even more upset, but it was for the
best, every little bit of it. Cass was dead as shit and it was because she was gonna do us all some serious damage if I didn’t act. Worst thing is, it was all my idea in the beginning, so really I should be in her place. But she was the one that got it into her head to talk about it and that just wasn’t gonna work for me.
See, Cass was the one that told us about the stuff, it was some really weird shit, total mindfuck once you got it in your system, but first you had to get past the weirdness that was deliberately getting yourself stung by a pretty colorful little caterpillar. Except these guys weren’t little and they packed one hell of a wallop. I can’t even remember what they called the little bastards, some sort of foreign butterfly, a bigger version of those that sting your ass when you touch them in your backyard. I used to get stung by them all the time when I was a kid because they’d fall out of trees and onto me as I walked, so you can imagine that it took me a little bit of focus to get myself to give it a go even after I heard about all of the neat side effects.
They’re green, like vivid lime green, with these really bright blue spikes on their back and red lines along the back, kind of like God made them out of day glo paint and set ‘em free in the world. They’re really big too, every caterpillar I ever saw was no bigger than a little kid’s fingers, these suckers were more like the size of sausages and pumped full of some seriously messed us hallucinogens. Cass said they found out about them because of this South American tribe, one of those that hardly anyone sees, and they stay off the grid until something really big comes along, like those assholes that cut down the rainforest, and we hear all about them. Scientists said this tribe had been using these little guys as a ritual drug, to have spirit quests or something like that.
Big thing was that they didn’t believe in using them for just anything- or very often at all. I mean, it was for ritual, and not just getting high, so of course not. I can’t remember what Cass said about the religious stuff, why they used them for whatever belief system they had, I was too hooked on the info about what the stuff did. Boy, did that come to bite us all on the ass.
Anyway, meantime I hear all of this from Cass and I get this crazy idea going, let’s get us some of this stuff and see what we think. It was actually pretty damn easy to get a hold of, I guess it must’ve had something to do with the fact the tribe was news to us, and so the DEA wasn’t exactly regulating these bugs or anything. I don’t even think the animal rights and ecology people had gotten to it yet, believe it or not. Had to be some scientists involved though, because that’s how we ordered them, through some assistant to those kind of big shots who didn’t care about the little bugs as much as they did the money that could be made sneaking them out of the area to interested parties.
We ordered a box, so we got a couple of them. Cass kept them in a big old fashioned bird cage she had from when she used to help her mom raise parakeets for pet shops, must’ve been a pretty good group of them since it was big enough to have been a leftover from a closed pet shop. Certainly gave the things some room to move around in there, so that was good. She’d been smart and ordered a couple tropical plants that they ate down there, kept them in a mini greenhouse designed for orchids and other delicate plants near the cage for the caterpillars to keep the humidity just right for them too.
Like I said, I was pretty reluctant to try them for a while there even after I asked her to get them for us. Cass, figuring she had some real idea of how to be with them after all of her research, was pretty nervous but hoped right in after she knew they were settled in real nice in her basement. It was a damn good thing that Cass was alone in that place, and it was out a bit from town. The way she carried on, things would probably have caught someone’s attention, probably the cops.
She stuck an arm into the cage that afternoon, kind of waiting for them to brush up on her with her lip caught in her teeth. Eventually some of the spikes got her arm, the other caterpillar even snuck up from behind and nudged her neck with some more. Her eyes went real big when it happened, I mean, this was the good shit, it was damn near instantaneous her response!
Things got pretty heated and personal after that. She was sighing, almost cooing like a bird, while her hands roved all over her body. I was pretty weirded out at first, but then she was right up on me and she’d put my hands on her breasts so that I could feel the nipples thick and engorged under her t-shirt. I could practically smell her even through her jeans. I wasn’t going to argue with all of that, but I also wasn’t going to be that creep that took advantage of things. I looked down into those deep brown eyes and that moist pink mouth agape and almost whimpering, and I took a breath before I spoke.
“Hey, Cass, not that I mind; you’re one very fuckable young woman and I really dig the idea of taking part here, but are you sure you’re cool with all this? That it’s not just the drugs talking?”
She growled then, frustrated and writhing, so that I got a whole lot more invested in a hurry. She whipped off her t-shirt and thrust one breast into the cup of my palm while she shoved my other hand down her pants to the warm, wet tangle below.
“Fuck me, now.” It was all growl and need, primal and all that dominant shit that got me going in the thick of things. It did not take long to escalate from there, me deep inside of her as she bucked back to meet each thrust I gave, and she cutting lose with all the groaning and obvious enjoyment she could get out of our little impromptu. I had no idea it would mean that I would get sucked so deep into it all until I caught the same high a moment later, we later figured it had traveled into my bloodstream through her bodily fluids like one hell of a wicked STD/aphrodisiac punch. The two of us kept going at it like mad until we were too tired to move and the high deepened into something more cerebral.
Cass said she remembered the sex because it was very intense and more involved than it was without the drug, but after that our experiences were very different. While I saw some of the more standard blurs and multicolored distortions you usually get with psychedelics, Cass got this wild sort of vision quest thing in some jungle. Lots of images about some sort of priestess, a jaguar, and fertility rites, I guess that makes a lot of sense considering the effects it had just had on us. It was still pretty weird for her though, made her want to be safer with how we handled any of the rest of us trying it out.
Only trouble was I was a big mouth and I’d liked what I got out of it, all about perspective, you know? I got everybody together about a week later and told them all about it. Cass came in on it all as I was explaining it; she was pretty pissed, had been on the verge of us maybe killing the things and disposing of them to be safe about it all. I didn’t tell them all who it was I’d been with that day, just about the sex, that my high had been residual and that both parties had found it pretty damned intense. I had hoped that would be enough to make her feel better about it, but it wasn’t, not really.
The group included about five other guys and a couple of girls outside of me and Cass, it made the odds of things getting pretty kinky go up. Everyone was in a mad dash after hearing the story, bolting down Cass’ stairs to reach the caterpillars as fast as they could. Cass had made a point of getting ahead of them to stem the flow of the tide, so she was over by the cage when the crowd rushed forward, smacking her into it.
It didn’t take long for it all to take off after that.
Cass has this startled look on her face that told me she’d been stung again, one that was washing away as she slid free of the crush and leaned against the greenhouse, trying to gather her focus. I made a point of going over to check on her, feeling bad that she got sucked in when she hadn’t meant for anyone to be taking part at all. While I was, the others were reaching their arms through the bars, offering them to the caterpillars. Lips went slack as the drug hit them, arousal thickening flesh and jutting organs as the pervasive scent of sex began to drift through the room. A collective sighing began, the women darting forward to choose their partners and the groups, none of them singular, came together to do as each woman bid.
Sure, it was hot, what about two women writhing around with a couple of guys isn’t? How often do you get to see that sort of thing in person, take in all the angles as they’d naturally adapt to the needs of their partners instead of taking on all of those faux angles suited to cameras? One girl lying on a guy so that another could take her from the front as he got her backside, the other between two standing men, one in her mouth and the other inside of her as she ground back and forth between them. The last guy was drifting between the groupings in turns, almost ministering to their needs as they randomly did to his in turns. There was something more to this whole thing. Yes, it was fucking, the pure primal shit most of us everyday folks never really give in to, or not often anyway, but it was also…well, religious. The women, that was part of it, only the women were in control here, and as I watched them writhe and moan, I saw it was also only the women who were stung.
Why?
I didn’t have long to consider it. The scent of sex thick like a cloud in the air and the smell of something else, something like flowers, like the girls were opening up in bloom. It was closer now, Cass’ arms whipping me around to face her, the sound of popping buttons as she ripped away her blouse, the sigh of pleasure as she set her heavy breasts free of her bra, and the heat of her grinding into my crotch as she wrapped her legs around me. I smelled it on her, thick from her sex as I took in her breasts and in minutes I was flush inside her, the drug creeping into me from her so that it all became a blur of images. I remember others, men and women joining us over time, various angles, open welcoming mouths, thick wet sexual organs and that deep, sweet, meaty flowering scent that came from them edging me on.