by Brian Hodge
She finally managed to give them the slip near the back door of the Silly Goose. She was safe for now, but what then. The fact that she’d been followed meant that they knew about her. She couldn’t return to the house. They’d probably be waiting.
The image of Henry Jenkins sitting on her father’s living room couch and aiming his police special at the front door sent her in the other direction. She needed time to plan. She needed to quell her rage and remember the lessons she’d learned in the Army.
Two hours later, she sat in a hotel room in Sweetwater sipping on a Coors Light, forming a plan.
She’d counted thirteen pregnant men. Henry, George from the shoe store, Alvin from the garage, Jimbo, Steve, Rick —- the rest she’d recognized but really didn’t know. On her third beer, she’d made the connection. All had been members of the Benevolent and Protective Brotherhood of Elks: a group of men who got drunk, played bingo and in some miracle of modern medicine had gotten themselves pregnant. And, if they hadn’t changed their schedule for some reason, they had a meeting tomorrow night.
It wasn’t until all twelve beers were scattered around the bed like discarded large-caliber bullets that she fell into a deep and drunken slumber.
She was in a forest, the tall long-leaf pines of Fort Bragg surrounding her, penning her in. She was in her battle rattle: a belt with two canteens and ammo pouches stuffed with magazines of 5.56 mm blanks, a rucksack filled with enough food and sundries to keep her alive for days, a Kevlar helmet, and an M16A2—deadly except for the clunky, red blank adapter that tipped the barrel.
And she was alone.
She’d been kneeling deep within an azalea bush for over an hour and many of the super stud soldiers trying to complete the last week of their special forces training had blundered by. She could have taken any of them, at any time, but she had a specific target in mind.
Fifteen minutes later, an A-Team slipped into view. Of all those who’d passed by her, these were the quietest. They made the forest a part of them — each tree and bush an extension of their limbs. Five men functioning as one. The very best of the United States Army.
When they finally crept within the kill zone, she smiled. “Don’t fucking move,” she’d whispered.
The A-Team halted. Greta felt them tense, especially the leader, Sgt. Henderson. He’d been caught by a woman and he’d never live it down. Sgt. Henderson was of the old school where women had no place in the Army and no place in combat.
And Greta had made it her personal goal to prove him wrong.
“I got two claymores in a V-shape ambush and you’re dead fucking center. Throw your weapons down. And do it now, Old School.”
It was just a game. War games to make the soldiers better. Hone and sharpern their skill. Too many people cheated, however. That’s why the special forces had invented their own unique claymore mines. Instead of firing enough ball bearings to kill everyone within a forty-five degree arc and out to thirty meters, these sprayed red paint pellets. She held the clackers in her left hand, ready to paint the men red if they decided to cheat.
She heard their cursing and counted as five rifles hit the ground. Greta stood and left the protection of the bush. She couldn’t help but laugh. As Sgt. Henderson turned around with the other men and she caught the agonized look in his eyes, she’d laughed harder.
Her only mistake.
He’d launched himself across the five feet that separated them and she’d squeezed the clackers. The rest of the A Team was suddenly covered in the violent propulsion of plastic and red dripping paint. But Sgt Henderson was outside the arc. She saw the fist as it hit the side of her face, and then she saw blackness.
When she’d awoken, she’d simultaneously felt the throbbing from her cheek and the minute breeze that teased her naked skin. She’d felt the roughness of pine bark against her back and buttocks and the rope, impossibly tight against her wrists and ankles. She’d opening her eyes, but realized that they already were open.
She’d been blindfolded.
And tied naked to a tree..
She began to pray.
“You can’t do this,” she’d cried. “This isn’t fair.”
“War isn’t fair, bitch. Did you think you could kill us?”
“But the rest of the team’s dead. You killed them,” she said, reasoning and happy that the instructors would discover the deaths and the man’s incompetence as a leader.
“Those uniforms are trash. We changed them. Now, it’s your word against ours,” he said, his voice changing from confidence to speculation. “I wonder what we should do to you?”
She felt hands move along her legs and wanted to scream. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. More hands grasped and pulled painfully at her breasts she bit back a scream. Fingers wound through her thick mound of pubic hair and she still refused to scream. It wasn’t until the end of the M16 entered her private place that she’d finally screamed and felt her soul withdraw to a safe dark place.
She’d swirled in the blackness of pain.
Misery was in her every breath.
She couldn’t feel her body.
She couldn’t feel the men.
She was in a different place.
A safe place.
“Why do you care,” came a voice, silky and warm.
“They raped me,” she heard herself mutter, rage and pain shuddering against her soul. “I want them to die.”
“Why do you care,” repeated the same voice. The words were a salve to her pain.
“It isn’t fair. I won,” she whimpered. “I’m a soldier.”
“You aren’t a soldier,” said the voice, the sound changing to nails. “You’re a woman. And women are meant for one thing.”
“No!” she heard herself scream.
“You’re nothing more than a baby-maker. You recycle sperm.”
“No!”
“You aren’t strong enough. You are weak. You are a woman,” the words scraped her like broken shards of glass.
“No!”
“Then what do you want?” it asked, soft and warm again.
“I want... I want them to feel what I feel. Let them be what I am,” she heard herself say.
“All of them?” asked the voice.
“Every fucking one of them,” she heard herself say. “Every fucking one of them.”
Her last words trailed off and the darkness left her. The ropes disappeared. The men disappeared. When she opened her eyes, she saw the cheap wallpaper of the hotel room and the beer cans scattered across the floor.
A memory of the warm metal of the barrel of the M16 still teased her insides, and as always after the dream, she wept.
Greta huddled in the bush. She was going to finish what she had started. Inside, the meeting had already begun. She heard them, laughing and drinking. Their very frivolity made her throb with anger.
She wore her battle rattle again, one of the only things she’d kept from her four-year stay in the Army. This time, there were no blanks. She carried enough ammo to kill a hundred pregnant men.
Greta slid from the bush and followed the shadows along the side of the clubhouse. She reached the corner and peaked around. When she saw that it was all clear, she sprinted around the back. With bolt cutters, she removed the lock from the basement door. She slipped the bolt cutters back into her rucksack and opened the door upward. She stared onto the depths of the basement and trained the Mossberg into the darkness.
After a few seconds of listening, she descended the stairs and tugged the door shut behind her. From atop her head, she pulled down the AN-PVS 7 night vision goggles. Flicking the switch, she was greeted with a small whine. She blinked twice to get used to the eerie sensation and the darkness of the basement came to life in green and white. She stepped quickly to the fuse box.
It was less than a minute from when she shut off the power until she burst into the upstairs room.
While she’d been waiting, she’d counted twenty-seven pregnant men and three who appeared
normal. She scanned the room quickly. White shaped figures milled in confusion. When her vision reached the small stage at the other end of the room she stopped. Atop the stage were three white shapes. Two stood, and one knelt, his head bobbing in a familiar rhythm.
Concentrating, She finally made out, not a white figure, but a figure made of complete darkness standing in front of the kneeling figure. Even the technology of the goggles could not illuminate the form, and that fact told her much.
A man bumped into her and she spun, catching him on the side of the head with the butt of the shotgun. He screamed as he went down and the sound stilled the milling men. A moment later, they were running blindly, adding their screams to the increasing din.
Greta fired mechanically. Although each flash of the barrel temporarily blinded her enhanced sight, with so many targets, she hardly needed to aim. When the shotgun was empty, she let it clatter to the floor rather than reloading. She snatched up her Colt AR-15 that a Good Old Boy over in Sweetwater had modified to automatic for her. The staccato sounds of supersonic death thundered over the screams as she raked the barrel from side to side. She reloaded five times, sending one hundred and eighty rounds of 5.56 millimeter murder into the crazy harem that had been an Elks Lodge.
She dropped the smoking rifle and drew two nine-millimeter pistols. Greta stalked among the bodies. Where she saw movement, she placed a round into a head. She was like a rancher culling a herd.
Chest heaving and sweat dripping from her body, she found herself at the foot of the small raised stage. She saw three illuminated forms sprawled along the wooden floor, unmoving. The darker figure was nowhere to be seen.
Greta cursed and ripped off the goggles, becoming as blind as her prey. She reached into her cargo pocket and removed a flare. Closing her eyes, she removed an end and lit the phosphorous. The initial spark blinded her even through closed lids, but it was nothing like it would have done had her eyes been open. Greta tossed the flare onto the stage and grabbed her last shotgun—this one had a pistol grip and hung from a strap from over her shoulder and held special ammo.
She heard laughter. “Why did you come?”
Greta spun toward the source of the question and blinked her eyes trying furiously to clear her ruined vision. She recognized the voice and felt the ghosts of hands along her camouflage-covered skin as it returned the memories of the rape.
“You know why!” she screamed.
Her vision began to clear. The immense figure, that had been mere darkness with the goggles, appeared in all its frightening reality. The figure in front of her stood nearly eight feet tall. Spines protruded along its naked body at odd, uneven angles. Broad feet displayed seven wicked claws. A mane of hair flowed down its back in a parody of a punkish mohawk. Two red eyes sat above a mouthful of dagger-like teeth. From between muscular legs hung a great dangling penis, easily two feet long, covered with purple slickness.
Greta gagged as the reality of the form struck her.
“Not what you expected?” came the warm voice.
“I... I didn’t know what to expect.”
“What form did you expect your rage to take, Greta?”
“My rage... ?”
“It was you who made me. Who called me forth.” The demon laughed harshly. “I am what you wanted.”
“No,” Greta screamed. “It was you!”
“Ah, my dear Greta. My poor misunderstood sperm-recycler. You begged me to do this. You are the one who proposed this,” he said indicating the carnage with a taloned hand.
“Did you know that your father was the first?”
She screamed and fired the shotgun at the laughing demon. Five rounds exploded in the flesh, creating huge divots of purple wounds. When the priest had seen her soaking the buckshot in the church’s baptismal, she’d told him to fuck off. He wouldn’t have understood, anyway.
The demon fell backwards, the sounds of its multi-octave pain like an airplane engine in the confined space of the lodge. Greta staggered forward, the discordancy threatening her consciousness. She fired the remaining two rounds into the ugly penis and reveled as it disappeared in an explosion of purple flesh and blood.
She stood over the thing that had been part of her for the last two years. Powerful eyes stared back into her soul and visions of her father on his knees shot through her like a bullet.
“You have gotten the best of me, child,” came the wheezing voice. “I feel the tug. I am not long here.”
Whatever Greta expected to feel at this point, sadness wasn’t it. Empathy poured from the demon in waves and as it washed over her, her rage was sublimated with melancholy grief and the senseless deaths of the men.
The thing smiled as its skin began to slough off and its eyes collapsed inwards.
“I will return, Greta,” it said as several teeth fell blackened to the ground. “Until then, my progeny shall rule.”
All firmness left the demon and she watched as it slid into a pool of flesh and bone. The liquid reflected the white light of the flare and as she stared into it, she could see a swirling of faces: her father, Henry, Fred, Alvin and dozens more she didn’t recognize, each agonized and screaming somewhere far away. Laughter echoed in her head as the pool shrank upon itself and disappeared in a pop that sent her to her knees with the pressure.
“Progeny,” she said, the word echoing in the dead room. And they were her children.
It’s a Sick World
by David Whitman
“This grave better not be the same as the last one,” Brooks said, gazing down at the coffin and brushing the dirt away from the lid. He pulled at his goatee as he stared at the casket.
The full moon shone down on us, granting more light than we wanted while doing such an illegal task. The night air was unnaturally cool, giving me the unsettling impression that I could feel the physical presence of the dead. Every time the wind would blow through the trees, sending shadows moving about in dream-like dances, I would jump.
City boys like me don’t function well in the south. Being a black man didn’t help matters any, either. I was more paranoid this far down south than I was in any big city area, but so far, everywhere I went stereotypes were being broken. I hadn’t heard the word “nigger” uttered one time, nor had I felt any racism. Being in a graveyard at night, though, dug up all my fears of cartoony redneck motherfuckers with red plaid shirts and memberships in the local Ku Klux Klan. It wasn’t too hard to imagine a brother hanging from one of the thick-limbed trees dotting the graveyard, a circle of white sheeted Klansman standing around with flickering torches.
I had a bad feeling about tonight. The whole atmosphere reminded me of a horror movie. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a brother survive a horror movie. That shit always pissed me off. Even when they were heroes, like in Night of the Living Dead, the brother got his ass killed.
We had spent the last few months trying to make a living at our various cons and scams and not doing a very good job of it. It was Brooks’ idea to get out of New Orleans and go out here in the Deep South to make some money. He figured the city folk were just too smart anymore, and that we would have a much easier time pulling a con on the country bumpkins. Shit didn’t work out that way, though. If anything, they were even wiser-more suspicious to anything we tried to pull. The pickings were damn scarce. It was Brooks’ idea to rob the dead, not mine. I figured that most people who had expensive jewelry willed it to their relatives.
“No, Rudy,” Brooks had said as I tried to shoot down his dumbass idea. “The dead are fucking rich. I had a buddy that used to do it and he made a shitload of money. Not only that, but this kind of jewelry could never be traced back to us. Who would think of tracing it back to the dead?”
The only problem was that things got a little strange when we dug up our first grave. We shrugged that off and moved on to the second, only to have the same damn problem. This was our fourth night in Greyson’s Cemetery and our fourth freshly dug grave. Shit just wasn’t working out.
See, I’ve always believed in karma. This is why my life is so fucked up. My granddaddy always used to say, “It always comes back to bite you in the ass.” I can’t tell you how many times that came true. I spent my whole damn life getting bit in the ass. I just can’t help myself. I keep damning myself no matter how much I try to see straight. I used to be in college. Look at me now. Shit, to think I was going to be a writer at one time in my sorry life.
I hate cemeteries to begin with. They scare the living shit outta me. Robbing graves was probably fucking up my karma in a real big way. Sometimes, I tried to rationalize our scams. I felt that if they were stupid enough to fall for our little tricks, then they deserved the loss of their money. To Brooks and I, it was like a game—a game which we lost more than we won. Robbing the dead was different—it was invading a place that should not be entered. Taking what was not meant to be ours. I just knew it was going to blow the hell up in our faces.
“Shit,” Brooks muttered, as he began to pry at the coffin lid, his round belly shaking up and down. “If it happens again, I think I’m gonna cry.”
I nodded and held my breath. This grave was a relatively old one belonging to a corpse by the name of Bannen Wilde. “I think it is,” I said. “It looks tampered with.”
The coffin opened, sending up a vague scent of dirt and mildew. We leaned over and peered in.
It was empty.
“Shit!” I shouted, falling back into the soft dirt. “Another five hours lost. Screw this shit, Brooks.”
“How the hell could the whole cemetery be empty?” Brooks asked.
He knew I sure as hell didn’t know the answer. Just thinking about it gave me the chills, big time.
Brooks slammed the coffin lid down, sending the stale and musty air into my face. “Fuck this,” he said. “Let’s not even bother putting the dirt back. Some sick bastard is beating us to it.”