“The girl I stabbed upstairs...” Slim interjected. “She was possessed.”
“Yeah...”
“Okay, so...why did you have me use this blade on her, if she could have been killed any other way?” The conversation was making Slim dizzy.
Tim smiled; a more open and warm expression of emotion than she had seen of him on this dark and depraved night.
“You saw what it did to her. That’s why I had you use it...because I wanted to make you believe. I wanted to show you that what you think of as the ‘supernatural’ really exists.”
He stood to his full height, and handed the blade to Slim.
Its weight was incredible. How could she not have noticed it, before?
As she gripped the dagger, she felt an intangible energy course through her veins, up her arm and into her cerebral cortex like a drug. Light seemed to fill her mind, and she recognised the feeling as having occurred before.
She’d sensed it flowing through the weapon as she’d held it before, though not as keenly. Now it felt...personal...a surge of power that was both within and without.
Of her and for her.
The blade itself felt like an extension of her arm; a part of her that had long been missing. It frightened Slim, and exhilarated her, all at once.
“Much more importantly, though, I had to know...” Tim continued.
Slim frowned. “Know what?”
“If you had the inherent goodness inside you that’s required to wield the fucker.”
Slim’s grip on the dagger tightened. She relished the power she felt. “And why is that?”
“Because tonight, Slim, you’re the one who’s gonna cut that evil fucking shit-stain down to size...”
CHAPTER 27
“But why me...why can’t you do it?”
Fear trickled down Slim’s senses like acid rain, clinging to her like an eroding deluge.
“I’ve done terrible things, Slim. Terrible things that I can’t take back. I’ve killed people.”
“So have I!” She almost yelled, before remembering just where they were and what was out there on the streets.
“No, you haven’t. You’ve killed people, yeah, but not people as we think of them. Everyone you’ve put down tonight, was already dead; the part of them that we love and cherish, anyway. You did what you had to do. And you did it with no hesitation. Me, I’ve killed men and women...tortured them.
“I’ve extracted information in the most vile of ways, from people who perhaps deserved better. They were murderers, cogs in the machine, but they were human, for all their flaws.
“ What’s worse, I delighted in it. Every time I put one of those fuckers down slowly, I saw my sister’s face. My parent’s faces. My long-dead friends. I did my duty, but I revelled in it. I’m not fit to wield this dagger. I don’t think I’m clean enough.”
“Wonderful,” was all she could muster.
So it was to be down to her. All this long night, he had known that she had to be the one to make the killing blow, to bring the dark creature down to its knees.
She felt used.
Betrayed, somehow.
Cheated out of ever having the chance to decide.
And then Slim thought of her brother.
She thought of all her friends and family, torn apart by this evil thing that had chosen her town as its playground. She wondered how many had died, and felt her stomach turn at the thought of so many slaughtered by their own kin.
She knew that, when the time came, and if the fates were willing and in her favour, she would do this thing. She would kill this dark being.
Still, numbing terror gripped her.
“How do we get close to it?” She felt betrayed by the tremor in her voice, knowing that he expected her to be strong. For whatever reason, this strange man who had, in the space on only a few short, hellish hours, become one of her only companions in the world, trusted her to be able to do this thing.
Slim felt driven to prove him correct.
“It’s ancient, Slim...as old as time. It’s out there right now, drawing the remaining people to it, bringing them in for its final blow. Its mind is elsewhere. It believes it’s won,” he said, quietly.
“And hasn’t it?”
“Not yet, but thinking it has will make it weak. Its ego...its unshakable belief that nothing and no one can stop it, will be its undoing. We can get close. The dark one’s conviction of its invincibility will be our weapon. We can get close to it. I’m sure we can.”
Slim didn’t share Tim’s enthusiasm, and by the look of drawn-out horror etched in Meg’s face, she didn’t share in his confidence either.
But what else was there?
To run?
Run where?
Slim thought of her mother, bleeding out in the driver’s seat while all she could do was sit helplessly and watch. The nightmares of that night had bled into her every waking moment, dissolving her joy in life, tainting her spirit.
Haunting her.
Slim knew that some things could never be outrun.
Regret stood tall as the great bane of her heart.
No more running.
“It won’t expect us to show. It won’t imagine for a second that anyone would be crazy enough to walk willingly into its web. If we enter there, and show no fear, we can get close. Make it believe we’re part of this horror. Make it believe we’re already lost. Then, when the time is right, we strike.” He let the words hang in the air like dying embers choking, free of oxygen.
“You strike,” he said to Slim.
Meg’s eyes were like saucers. “So we just waltz right in there, acting like fucking lunatics, and this thing will be blind to us?”
“It’ll be busy, enjoying the final fruits of its labour...” Tim’s countenance was grim. “We’ll have to act as the others act to get close.”
“What the fuck are you asking of us?” Meg’s terror was contagious.
Slim reeled.
He can’t expect us to.
He can’t.
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do...”
Slim understood what he asked.
Her stomach churned at the thought of it.
“When do we do this?”
“The streets are empty. Whoever is left alive out there, is with him now, at the restaurant.”
“Oh, shit.” Meg moaned.
Tim looked to his shotgun, but never picked it up.
He won’t need it, Slim understood.
“We do it now,” Tim said.
CHAPTER 28
The tall man could feel their spirits die...
Every single one of them.
Their souls...withering and rotting; maggot-ridden and fetid.
Devoid of light.
The front area of the restaurant had become a mass of seething, sweating bodies. The masses who had made the dark pilgrimage to his den, having been granted entrance to his brightly lit, oh-so-welcoming domain only days before, had eaten their fill.
Gorged on the spiritual death he served them.
They had eaten well, grown fat like pigs while their souls had fed the parasites; the Lyxar.
He stood amidst the throng, touched by none but beheld by all, as women screamed and men roared. Orgasmic bliss and searing agony poisoned the air within the restaurant’s walls.
The floor of his lair was now a swamp of blood, faeces, body parts and semen. A hundred loads spent on faces, oozing from torn assholes, drooling from feverish, wanton lips above and below. They had fucked their fill like wild, unbidden beasts, with no concern as to where or how they filled the orifices of others or had their own filled.
And they had slaughtered with just as much wanton ferocity as they had fucked.
It seemed there was no satiating these disgusting creatures, once they were set free.
At his feet, a woman wept with black joy as a man forcefully jammed the sleek barrel of a rifle into her bloodied hole. Tears welled up in her eyes as she came again and again, trembling with each thrust.
The tall man laughed aloud, a terrible bellow, like the crackling of newly scorched flesh, as the man pulled the trigger.
The woman’s groin exploded in a cloud of meat and pelvic bone, her insides rupturing as the bullet made mincemeat of her organs. Her legs blew apart at impossible angles, one severing from her body completely. The man, unfazed, retrieved the limb and began sucking on the dead toes, masturbating himself to yet another orgasm as he drew the already cooling foot into his yawning mouth.
Foot fetishist, the tall man mused.
How quaint.
The tall man surveyed the room, breathing in the beautiful scent of sex and death.
One of the untainted girls for whom the old man had died outside, had survived.
He watched intently as she was pinned to the floor, face first. A small group of men and women circled her, as two burly men held her down. The girl’s screams were gargled, and the tall man saw she was drowning in the human muck that coated the floor. She barely made a sound when a woman pounced on her naked back, wielding a straight razor, and unzipped the girl’s flesh. The tall man savoured the horror in the girl’s huge brown eyes as the group reached inside the wound and began clumsily removing her spine. She was a drooling vegetable in her last moments.
It was beautiful.
Even one such as he, who had traversed the darkest fires of the pit, and tasted of the void, could marvel at the hunger and depravity that lay festering in the mortal heart of humans.
The tall man squatted to the floor.
With one long, hooked fingernail, he swiped up a glob of the slime from the face of a woman being penetrated in all her holes, raking huge furrows in her flesh that flowered crimson as he receded his prize. Raising his finger over his open mouth, he allowed the mixture of blood, skin and semen to drip from his talon and slide down his infernal gullet.
It was an act of power only; the vile concoction was scorched into nothing before it reached the burning, roiling flames of his black belly.
Smiling a killer shark’s grin, he surveyed the red world he had created.
As he watched the frenzied orgy, the doors, now awash in crimson, swung open, giving entrance to the vile freshness of the evening air.
It cut through his senses like a scythe, sickening him with its purity, though soon it, too, was poisoned and corrupt.
Nothing within these brightly coloured walls would remain pure.
Nothing.
His dark, piecing gaze fell on the newcomers.
I can’t do this, Slim reeled.
The sight before her, as she entered the restaurant, was unspeakable.
To her side, Meg and Tim, too, stopped momentarily, taking in the full horror of the vision.
This was a slaughterhouse.
Worse, it was a Hieronymus Bosche vista. A contained world of utter depravity the likes of which she could never have imagined.
All three had made their way to their dark destination in silence, believing in their hearts that they knew what to expect.
Tim had prepared them for it as best he could.
But this...
This was so much worse than anything they could have foreseen.
On the floor, right by her feet, a man was knelt over a naked girl, no more than twenty. He bit his lip in silent concentration as he squeezed what Slim realised was a fork into the girl’s eye socket. With a grunt, he plucked the jellied orb free. It hung, impaled on the tines of the utensil, a dripping delicacy fit only for the unholy. The man held it aloft, pride singing in his smile, before opening his mouth and biting deep into the eyeball.
Slim turned away quickly, as it burst; spilling fluid down his cheeks and neck.
She noted that the girl was not screaming...far from it. The man’s young victim was rubbing herself furiously, seemingly climaxing as he fed on her eye.
Slim wondered briefly if perhaps blindness could be a blessing, and decided it could.
She longed to reach for the hand of Meg, find some comfort there amidst the madness, but Tim had warned them.
Show no disgust, show no humanity.
“If the dark one senses anything...we’re finished,” he had said.
She understood now.
Humanity in a place such as this would be a beacon.
A target etched directly onto one’s soul.
And so Slim resisted that most basic, human urge...to be protected and to protect.
As she looked around the restaurant, she strove to maintain a blank, dead stare.
Even as the eyes of many of the patrons fell on her body, with unrestrained lust.
And no wonder.
She was naked from the waste up, as was Meg.
Both had slathered themselves in blood from the battle back at the house, doing all they could to make themselves look like a part of the insanity.
Tim carried in his hands, a human arm, which he swung like a baton around his head as they had opened the doors.
She hated herself, and hated Tim for making them do this, yet knew that it was the only way.
As though reading her thoughts, Tim tapped her shoulder discreetly.
“Move,” he whispered.
Slim stepped forward, into the carnage. Both her companions followed suite, as one...moving into the writhing, moaning, copulating, killing flesh, hoping to become invisible to their quarry.
Slim thought of rock concerts in hell, and figured this was exactly what it would look like.
The stink of shit and sex was everywhere. She struggled to keep her balance as she slid on unidentifiable body parts, and was pushed aside by the distracted and demented revellers.
She was halfway towards the counter, when Slim felt hands reach for her exposed breasts, squeezing roughly at her nipples, pinching hard enough that she had to bite back a scream. The filthy, naked, would-be molester seemed to melt from the naked throng, and he grinned like a demented clown as he fondled her.
She allowed it, even as her insides churned in horror.
The lust-crazed man leaned forward, his mouth wide, looking to suckle on her now red and angry nipples, and still she held her ground.
Have to make it through the crowd.
Have to make it to him.
To the master.
He was nowhere to be seen, though the air felt heavy with his presence. She had sensed it upon entering this charnel house...a lingering, choking pestilence that overwhelmed even the pervasive stink of shit, semen, blood and death.
He was here.
But where?
Trying her best to ignore the pervert who attempted to claim her as his own, she surveyed the sea of flesh before her.
Then the man’s drooling lips were on her nipple, suckling like a bedevilled child.
“She’s mine, cunt,” Tim snarled. He grabbed the man by the hair and pulled him from her. The pervert’s mouth receded with a sliver of spit, as he yelped in surprise.
She watched the man’s eyes bulge, bugging out of their sockets and, looking down, saw that Tim had opened his stomach with his knife.
The man fell to the side, stinking air expelling from his lungs in his death throes, as his insides spilled onto a copulating couple by their feet.
The couple kept on fucking, even as they bathed in his guts.
“Keep looking, keep moving. Don’t stop,” Tim whispered.
To her side, Meg stepped forward, sensing her terror and opting to lead the way.
They made for the counter, deep into the throng, surrounded on all sides by sex and death.
Scared to take her eyes of Meg for fear of losing her, Slim tripped over something. She went down hard, her face meeting and almost connecting with the cause of her fall. Almost within kissing distance, a human head stared back at her with lidless eyes. Slim fought her scream as she took in the horror. Whoever this poor soul was, they had been skinned. She was staring at a severed head with no face. Only the eyes, still vivid blue, remained. All else was blood and bone.
Tim pulled her up
right, and urged her onwards.
Fighting her intense horror, she made her way behind Meg, as they had done so often at a hundred rock and roll concerts. One in front of the other, determined to stick together, never to lose sight of each other.
Finally, after what seemed an eternal vacation in hell, they made their way to the restaurant’s service counter.
There was no pretence anymore that this was a restaurant. The counter was now no more than a smorgasbord displaying unspeakable morsels, meat cast aside by the killers...human hearts, sliced off nipples, a severed penis and more, periodically plucked at by manic hands and hungry mouths.
Slim even saw a human brain. It sat atop a pool of dark red blood, looking like a grisly leftover from a b-movie.
Vomit rose in her throat and she choked in down.
The staff were stood behind the tills, as though waiting to take orders. Their faces calm and smiling, as though nothing more untoward than a busy day at work was transpiring.
Only their eyes betrayed their intent.
Cold, lifeless stares fell upon her, lacking anything remotely human.
She turned away from their stares.
Still no sign of him.
As she searched the terrible scene for the being that wrought all this madness, Slim felt the dagger humming with an unquantifiable energy. Its power seemed to course up her calf from its concealed place in her boot.
The knowledge that such a powerful weapon was on her person, ready to reach for at any moment, gave her a small modicum of courage, a tiny glimmer of hope that threatened to bend and break under the weight of the darkness that enveloped her.
She prayed her courage held out, prayed it was enough, when the time came.
Around her, the moans of the dead, the fucking, the feeding and the dying rose in an ever sickening crescendo as the mob’s carnal ferocity heightened.
She felt all the eyes at the counter turn to her, every member of staff penetrating her soul with their gazes.
The townsfolk engaging in cannibalism continued stuffing their bellies in ignorance, but the staff were eying Meg, Tim and herself intently
They’re wondering why we haven’t joined in.
This isn’t going to work.
AFTERTASTE Page 19