AFTERTASTE

by Scott, Kyle M.

  The shot never came.

  His head remained firmly on his shoulders.

  “Open your eyes, son,” Rod said.

  “No...I...I can’t.”

  “Do it!”

  John forced himself to look at the man. To his amazement, the gun had been lowered.

  “Beth, come up here,” Rod called over his shoulder.

  The woman, Beth, muttered something under her breath, but she did as asked. She, too, smiled on seeing John. “You have fine taste, Rod. Not bad, not bad at all. Now, can we kill the little peeping tom and get going?”

  “I have a better idea,” Rod answered.

  He looked at John. “You’re quite the horny little bastard, ain’t ya, boy?”

  John couldn’t find any words.

  Instead, he nodded, dumbly; confusion reigning.

  “Horny enough to risk your life just so you can jerk off to a couple of...dare I say it...clearly demented disco dancers.”

  Beth giggled, “Can you blame him? I mean, just look at these tits.”

  “You speak true, baby. You speak true...” The man hoisted himself up and over the fence, landing only a few feet from John. The pistol hung loose in his hand. He still wore an erection. It stood proud, pointing at John as though accusing him of his crime.

  John’s head darted left and right, looking for a way out.

  He’d be gunned down before he took two steps.

  Rod chuckled, “Don’t be scared, little fella. It’s nice to meet someone with a flair for perversion. How would you like to have all your fantasies come true....every sick, sordid, filthy one of ‘em?”

  John knew the man had registered the look on his face.

  What he must have saw there was a burgeoning interest.

  A tell-tale widening of the eyes.

  Hunger.

  Lust.

  “Looks like this is your lucky day, son. It’s time you tasted a little depravity.”

  Beth giggled as the man reached out with an open palm, “Wanna see what nirvana looks like?”

  John, fearful and excited, took the man’s hand.

  “Let’s get moving. The show’s about to begin...” Rod said.

  With that, the woman hopped the fence to join them. She took John’s other hand.

  She sighed, “When in Rome...”

  Together, Rod and Beth led a terrified and exhilarated John from the alley between the houses, out into the street and North towards the heart of the town.

  John figured he knew where they were going.

  And found he wanted to be there.

  Wanted it every bit as much as he’d wanted Slim.

  CHAPTER 23

  Tim came to, his world a dark blur...a myriad of shapes and soft sound echoing through the hallways of his consciousness. He could make out dark figures above him. As his senses regained a footing in his reality, the pain came. It was difficult to breath, and his spine felt like a lance had been thrust through it.

  Am I dead?

  Figures.

  Voices fluttered, reverberating in and out of his drifting mind. They sounded a thousand miles away, unmistakably feminine.

  Tim smiled in the darkness.

  Made sense that his hell would be populated by the opposite sex.

  Every relationship he’d ever been in had ended in shouting, tears and broken trust. He’d cheated on each and every partner, never being able to settle down into a steady relationship, never being willing to. His work, as it was, meant he was always on the move, always living on the edge, walking a high wire with death on one side, loneliness and depression on the other.

  He also thought it had something to do with his sister.

  His obsession...his life’s work...it all revolved around justice. Justice for his older sibling, who had saved his life and the lives and countless others. In the faces of the woman he had loved in his life, the ghost of his kin would always be there, hiding just behind the eyes, whispering in the cadences of their voices.

  He would hurt them, betray them, make them think him a bastard, all so they would push him away, lose their love. Leave him alone, with his past and its ghosts.

  Still, his sister would find him in his dreams, and in his nightmares. Sometimes, she’d be alone, chasing him though the ever-deepening darkness, down into forever, pleading with him to save her, to set her free.

  To take her place...

  His mother and father, perhaps loving him better, left his dreams alone, though their kind, smiling faces were never far from his waking thoughts.

  In the murk of his burgeoning consciousness, he could see their faces now, smiling, willing him to rise.

  To get up of the floor.

  To fight.

  Maybe I’m not dead then. Not yet, at least.

  Tim’s vision began to clear a little, the faces of his parents evaporating like morning dew under a black and lightless sun.

  Replaced by the faces of Slim and Meg.

  They were smiling, relieved.

  He reached up with weak hands, feeling before him to see if they were real.

  His palm fell on Slim’s cheek, he felt the warmth of her through the drying blood that had hardened on her features.

  “Well, shit...” he groaned.

  It was hard to talk, even harder to breath.

  Suddenly, he remembered.

  The psycho choking the life out of him. Slim looking, for all intents and purposes, out of her mind, on the floor. The kid, John, crying over...

  What?

  Tim looked at the girls, and the kindness and care he saw there could not fill the hollow void in his heart as he remembered.

  “The baby...” he whispered.

  Meg shock her head, fresh tears cutting white trails through black coagulating blood, as she also took his hand in hers.

  “No, Tim.”

  He’d known that already...hadn’t he.

  Slim took his other hand, and Tim allowed them to help him to his feet. He felt unsteady, exhausted inside and out. He rocked there, on his heels, as the two brave girls led him to the living room and the soft safety of the couch.

  As he dropped onto the cushions like a dead thing, he took in these two strong, wilful women.

  For that was what they were...women...not girls.

  He’d seen great strength in Slim even before the battle, and knew she was a survivor, but he’d lost all hope in her, believing her vestiges of strength muted and suffocated in those last second before the attacker chocked him out.

  He thought the death of the infant had broken her.

  He was sure of it.

  Yet here she was...a fierceness in her poise, a new-born determination in her eyes.

  And Meg...

  She hadn’t said more than five words since they rescued her from her kill-crazy parents. Tim could sympathise, having lost his family too. Meg’s parting with her family seemed even more atrocious than his own, and he marvelled that she’d found her way back from the darkness. Until now, Tim hadn’t really taken her in. She’d seemed like excess baggage, someone who needed to be saved and cared for, only a means to get the wily and dangerous Slim fighting on his team. Now, he could see in her what Slim so obviously saw.

  She was beautiful.

  No, more than that, she was magnificent.

  These girls would be any red-blooded man’s dream, were they not so damned intimidating. Meg bristled with the same furious energy that filled Slim.

  Yet he wondered at how they’d survived.

  What brought Meg from her seemingly permanent state of shock, and Slim from the onset of hers?

  As he lay there, fighting for each breath and feeling like each time he gulped he swallowed scorching sand, Tim took them in.

  He saw they were holding hands.

  Suddenly it was clear.

  Love.

  It conquers all, after all. Who the fuck would have thought it?

  He tried to laugh, managed only a rasping sputter, and rolled his head to the side. It l
anded on the arm of the couch, and Tim let his eyes close.

  “No, Tim. You gotta stay with us.” Slim’s voice.

  Tim drifted, glad to be free of the pain for even the briefest of moments.

  A sharp pain in his cheek brought him scuttling back to the unwelcome world.

  Meg pulled her open hand back, “I’ll slap you again if you don’t pull your shit together. We have work to do, big guy. All of us.”

  “Incredible women,” Tim groaned. “Though I have a nasty feeling you two are gonna be the death of me.”

  “You’re absolutely sure about this?” Tim reloaded his shotgun as he spoke, taking his time to secure the bullets properly. His vision remained a little distorted, and his breathing was still an exercise in pain, but he felt his cognitive abilities returning. He’d be ready to fight soon. To take on the enemy and try to put a stop to the hell that had swallowed Plainfield, once and for all.

  But he needed help.

  And now, against all hope, it seemed like he may just have it.

  The two girls, both of whom he’d saved, and spent the last few hours fighting for survival with, seemed to have reached a crossroads.

  Or a dead-end.

  It all depended on perspective.

  Tim liked to think of himself as a positive guy.

  Even demon hunters could be glass half full kinda folks.

  That said; he didn’t want to see these girls harmed. Both of them had been through a living hell, and if they were set on helping him, there may yet be worse ahead.

  Much worse.

  Where’s that shining positivity now, Hoss? Tim thought to himself, as he locked and loaded the final cartridge.

  Meg was the first to answer.

  “We’re sure.”

  Tim sighed. “You do realise what we’re up against here, right? Both of you?”

  Together, the two Amazonian warrior princess’, as he had come to see them in light of the night’s chaos, nodded their heads in affirmation.

  Slim knelt by his side, resting her elbow on the arm of the chair, and looked him straight in the eyes. “We have to do this, Tim. We don’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  She reached for his hand. “There wasn’t one for you.”

  Tim found he couldn’t look her in the eyes.

  He focused on his weapon as he spoke, “I know that what’s happened to you,” he looked to Meg, “To both of you, is unspeakable. I'm sorry you got involved in all this. I really am. If I could have prevented all of this with my own life, I would have, but I'm just one guy, and a pretty fucked up one at that. I was too late to stop it. Too late to end this fucking thing before it started, and I’ll probably die tonight trying to fix that mistake. I plan to do it anyway.

  “You two, though...you two have your whole lives ahead of you. You can take off out of here, never look back. Cut your losses and get the fuck out of dodge.”

  “Cut our losses!?” Meg barked. “I watched my sister being cut into pieces! I watched all the light and all the love that I’d ever known, disappear from my mom and dad’s eyes like it was never even fucking there! I was tied to a bed, naked, and tortured by the people I trusted the most, and the only fucking reason I’m still alive is because you two saved me, by murdering my own family!”

  Meg stormed over to where Tim sat. He flinched as she joined Slim, meeting him at eye level.

  “And Slim...Slim’s father is out there somewhere. He’s apparently killed her brother, and is itching to kill her too, his own goddam daughter! Whatever the fuck this thing is that’s invaded our home is, I don’t care if it’s a demon or an alien or a fucking terrorist...I want to kill it!”

  “Me too,” Slim added. “. There’s no going back, Tim. Not ever.”

  “We might not be walking away from this. In fact, it’s highly fucking unlikely, you both know that, right?”

  Both girls looked to each other, finding the strength in their bond, courage in their love.

  Together, they turned to the hallway. The door was shut now, locking out the evening breeze, but the hallway remained littered with the dead. Evil had seeped into the very fabric of their reality...a taint that could never be removed.

  He followed their eyes as they fell on the murdered infant. The small body rested beneath a pink, woollen throw-over. They’d planned to bury him before they moved on. It seemed the only thing to do, a small act of decency in a world spinning into sadism.

  Slim was the one who broke the quiet sadness that fell over the three.

  “This creature...this demon, it’ll move on from here, won’t it?” She never took her eyes off the tiny corpse as she worded her question to Tim.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’ll do this again?”

  “Yes,” he said, quietly. “It’ll find a new town, leave this one to its fate, and let the people tear each other apart in their madness. It’ll disappear like the wind, and this whole town will be nothing more than a memory, a month or two worth of outrage on the evening news, at best.

  “They’ll talk of how a small town went unexplainably crazy. They’ll surmise it was some form of terrorist attack – a biological contaminant, or mass hysteria brought on by some freak ecological occurrence, but they’ll never know the truth. The world will move on, and the survivors, if there are any, will rot in mental institutions or jail cells. The world will turn its eager gaze to the next atrocity that waits however far down the road and this will all be no more than a ghost story. That’s how it always works.”

  Tim laid his gun across his lap, and closed his eyes. “That’s how it worked after Blackhaven.”

  He could sense the girls were looking at him now, could feel their eyes on him, and their empathy. Whatever else they might yet become - victors or food for maggots – he and these two girls were bonded in blood.

  And in sorrow.

  “We have to stop this from happening again,” Meg said.

  “Or die trying,” Slim added.

  Tim couldn’t repress the grim smile that spread across his face.

  “Then let’s end it...” He opened his eyes once more, and took both girls hands in his own, “Or die trying.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see soon enough, Johnny boy. You’ll see soon enough,” Rod said, patting John on the back as they cut a swath down the centre of the road.

  John’s gripped Beth’s hand tighter in his own, still amazed and horrified that he was following these two down the centre of main street, both of them naked as they day they were born, and swathed in sweat and dirt from their lawn-side rucking. Beth gently caressed the growing bulge in his pants as they made their way down the moonlight street, towards the heart of town.

  “It’ll be fun in a bun,” she purred.

  He thought back to the mob, seemingly hypnotised and running on some vague and terrible autopilot, as they had passed by the fragile and temporary sanctuary he’d holed up in earlier with Slim and the others, and dread swilled in his mind.

  He knew what waited at Rod and Beth’s destination.

  Yet he was following, nonetheless.

  He told himself he had no choice, and it was true to an extent. He had no doubt Rod would have put that gun to his head and blown his cowardly ass from here to whatever hell was fated to him, had he chose to run.

  No choice, he repeated silently, over and over in his head, like a mantra.

  Still...the guilt drip-fed into his soul as, step by step, they drew closer to the end of the road.

  It was true that his choices were severely fucking limited, but that wasn’t the only thing propelling him forward.

  He wanted to go.

  He needed to.

  He groaned as Beth’s hand gripped his shaft, “Will I be...killed? After?”

  She laughed. “No idea, sweetheart, but what’s the difference?”

  The directness of her question shook him. After all he had seen, and had done, h
e had no ready answer.

  She was right.

  What the fuck did it matter anyway?

  In less than twenty four hours, he had gone from normal, happy high-school student, with little on his mind but the anxiety of upcoming exams and the need to get laid, to a devastated young man whose whole world had been pulled out from beneath his feet.

  He’d lost his best friend, his town, his closest companions, the girl he loved, and his dignity.

  He was a coward.

  A traitor to those who had depended on him for their support.

  All was death and ash.

  There was no going back.

  John tied to tell himself that this was his penance, to be led like a lamb to the slaughter.

  He tried to tell himself that this was all he deserved, that he was no ‘man’ and had no real claim of the right to grow into one.

  It felt lame...intellectually dishonest.

  This was no self-sacrifice.

  No cleansing of the inner fire.

  The dirt wouldn’t ever wash away.

  And the truth was he wanted this.

  Beth’s tender grip on him cemented what he already knew about himself.

  Yes, he would probably die.

  But before he did...

  Before he did, he may yet wallow in the eroticism that enveloped his pubescent being.

  He wasn’t going to face justice.

  He was going to dive into his carnality, and sink deep into its flesh, be consumed by its heat, taste of the bitter apple.

  If everything that the hunter, Tim, had said was true, then these people had lost a vital part of themselves...the human part, the moral core that held themselves and society as a whole together. They had been eaten from the inside out, consumed by their consumption, and they were, when all the stars looked down and the moon cast its ancient, hollow glow on them, victims.

  What was his excuse?

  He hadn’t been tainted by anything...supernatural. Nothing had entered his body and soul, and changed him from the inside out.

  No, John was a natural.

  Society at large may have been shorn of its inherent goodness, but as the night drew in around him and his two new companions laughed and joked together as though merely lovers on a first date, he saw the taint in his own heart for what it was.