Depraved 2

by Bryan Smith

  Sienna thumped one of the batteries against the back of the kid’s head. “Settle down or I’ll beat you unconscious and drag you the rest of the way.”

  Allie made another, more subdued sound of protest, but she stopped squirming.

  Sienna tightened her grip on the batteries and again closed her eyes. She slowed her breathing and made herself let go of her anxiety about the larger task still ahead of her, focusing instead only on the input of the senses—the feel of the cool night air on her skin, the rustling of leaves overhead in the gentle breeze, the buzzing of crickets and other night things, and the sensation of the earth and the living thing beneath her. The talent that lived inside her reached out and tapped into these things, drawing energy from the elements and the living flesh. Her skin tingled as she felt the power crackle through her like electricity. It blazed to life somewhere in her center and surged outward in all directions, lighting up all her nerve-endings, including in her extremities. The batteries vibrated in her clenched fists, filling with juice and growing hot from the raw energy emanating from her every pore.

  She opened her eyes and thought STOP!

  The wild power vibrating inside her shut down in an instant, disappearing like light from a room with the flick of a switch. She let out a shuddery breath and unclenched her fists, gasping at how red her palms had become. The batteries were almost unbearably hot. Another few moments and they would have melted in her hands, scorching her flesh and making the rest of what she had to do problematic at best.

  Sienna put the batteries in the flashlight and thumbed the power switch. The light came on, brighter and steadier than ever. A triumphant grin came to her face. Her talent was getting stronger all the time. It felt like there was nothing at all she couldn’t do.

  There was another tangible benefit of having tapped into her talent now. She felt like herself again, all emotions unrelated to her own pleasure or gain flash-fried away in the surge of magical energy. She looked at the blonde locks at the back of Allie’s head and saw only a thing, a convenient means of getting what she really wanted. If she didn’t need her for the ritual, she would smash her head in and walk away without a second thought.

  She got to her feet and kicked the girl in her side. “Get up.”

  Allie sniffled and brushed dirt and brambles from her pink shirt as she got to her feet. Her bottom lip trembled as she lifted her eyes in a teary, wounded expression. “You hurt me.”

  “That’s right. And I’ll hurt you again if you don’t behave.”

  Allie’s brow furrowed. “You’re different now. What--”

  “Shut up.” Sienna aimed the flashlight at a spot just behind and slightly to the right of Allie. “That way. Start walking.”

  They wordlessly resumed the trek through the dark woods. Sienna followed Allie at a brisk pace, making sure the girl stayed only a few feet ahead of her. Despite the brighter light provided by the rejuvenated batteries, Allie stumbled a few times and each time Sienna yanked her back to her feet a little harder than the previous time. The girl was bawling nonstop by the time they emerged through a thinning line of trees into the clearing where Sienna’s father had been shot down four years earlier.

  Memories from that night popped into her head with shocking clarity. She saw the Braves baseball cap tumble off her father’s head as high-caliber bullets ripped through his body and made it do a macabre dance. The bullets passed through him as if he were no more substantial than a wisp of steam, leaving bloody contrails in their wake as they exited through his back. He hit the ground like a sack of bricks and moved no more, having breathed his last. The sound his body made when that happened still came back to her in the middle of the night sometimes. She shook her head to clear it of the hateful images. The time had come to let go of the past and set things right again once and for all. To do that, she needed a mind at peace and channeled in the proper direction.

  Sienna pushed Allie into the approximate center of the clearing and made her stop. After shrugging off the backpack and setting it down, she played the flashlight’s beam over the ground. At first glance, the clearing was as barren as the surface of the moon. Nothing was growing here, not even the least little bit of bramble or vegetation. This was a change from the grassy ground of years ago. It struck Sienna as fitting. This wasn’t just hallowed ground. It had been blighted by the senseless atrocity that had occurred here. But there were also no bones or other telltale traces of human remains. For a moment, she wondered whether this was the right place after all despite what her memory insisted, but then the beam lit up a wide patch of elevated ground.

  She prodded Allie in the back and nodded. “Over there.”

  Allie whimpered and walked with halting steps to the spot indicated. She stood in the middle of the patch of elevated ground and turned her tear-streaked face toward Sienna. “Is your daddy under me?”

  Sienna picked up the backpack and approached the mound. “I’m pretty sure, yeah. The army must have buried him.”

  Allie wiped tears from her face. Despite her terror, she was still struggling to understand. “But…why would they do that?”

  “Who the fuck knows? They came out here and killed everybody in my hometown. They just fucking did it. That’s all.”

  “Why have I never heard about this?”

  Sienna rolled her eyes. “It was hushed up. Word got out, sure, but anyone who heard about what happened here blew it off as more conspiracy theory bullshit. All the online loons spreading their ‘false flag’ and Illuminati conspiracy stories meant the government barely had to make a real cover-up effort. Now everyone assumes crazy stories are all nonsense, even when they’re true.”

  Allie took a hesitant step toward Sienna. “But…you could make people believe it. You could go find a newsman from CNN or somewhere and convince him.”

  “Stop right there, little bitch.”

  Allie flinched at Sienna’s harsh tone. She didn’t take another step.

  Sienna scowled. “Look at me. No journalist in the world would take me seriously. I’ll leave the truth and justice business to someone else. All I know is those fuckers took my daddy from me and now I’m bringing him back.”

  “By killing me.”

  “That’s right.”

  Allie trembled. “That’s not…f-fair.”

  Sienna knelt and set the flashlight on the ground. “Nothing much is in this world. Life is pain. When you look at it that way, I’m doing you a favor. I’m sparing you a lifetime of misery.”

  She opened the backpack and rooted around in it until she found the knife. Allie let out a wail of distress when she saw it. “No, no, no, please.”

  Sienna stood up and approached her chosen sacrifice. “All things being equal, I do wish I had other options here. You’re not the worst little girl I’ve ever met. You have your charms, I admit. You know, in a movie or TV show things would be different. They’d never have me go through with this.” She chuckled. “You can picture it, right? The wind would be picking up and blowing shit around, making my pretty hair swirl about my face, and the music would be getting really dramatic. And then, in the last second, I’d have a change of heart and we’d fight the evil together. Here in real life, though, I’m the evil. And this isn’t that kind of story.”

  She rammed the knife into Allie’s stomach.

  And twisted it.

  When she pulled it out, the girl’s shaking hands went to the hole in her belly and blood gushed between her little fingers. Sienna kicked at Allie, knocking her onto her back. She then used the knife to carve a rough pentagram into the earth around her. As she did this, Allie stared up at the clear night sky and said “Ow” over and over in a small voice. Hearing this pitiable expression of pain made Sienna grimace. She told herself this was only because she found the sound annoying, but in truth she had experienced another little flicker of regret. But this time it was there and gone in an instant, no more troubling than a gnat buzzing in her ear.

  Once she had finished carving the pen
tagram, Sienna knelt at Allie’s side and peered into her eyes. They were starting to look a little dull and her breathing was becoming shallower with each passing moment. With no absinthe or other intoxicating liquid handy to help induce the state of ecstatic abandon the ritual required, Sienna believed the only viable alternative was to get drunk on her own madness and capacity for cruelty.

  She brushed Allie’s hands aside and pushed three fingers into the wound.

  Allie screamed.

  Sienna’s fingers delved deeper. The girl arched her back and her eyes opened wide as she screamed again. Sienna braced her other hand, the one still gripping the blood-soaked knife, against the girl’s chest to hold her down. Her fingers were stained crimson when she removed them from the wound. She painted her cheeks with dabs of blood and then did the same to Allie’s cheeks. The girl’s teeth chattered and her whole body shook. Sienna smiled and slurped the rest of the blood from her fingers. Next she leaned in close to Allie’s face, opening her mouth wide just above the girl’s mouth. Magical energy vibrated inside her as she inhaled deeply, drawing the child’s breath from her lungs, which emerged from between her lips like a fine mist. The power already buzzing inside her grew stronger with every precious bit of innocent breath that filled her own lungs.

  In a few more moments, Allie was no more.

  But Sienna had never felt more alive.

  She dropped the knife and got to her feet, turning her face toward a vibrant sky suddenly bursting with color, deep hues of violet and crimson in pulsating, shifting patterns. The trees that circled the clearing stood taller now, almost tall enough to touch the heavens, their tops draped in a shade of neon green. She understood she was seeing creation as it really was, in all its cascading brilliance, normally hidden by humanity’s limited powers of perception. The air around her felt suffused with unnatural energy. It seeped into her skin and ignited a new inner fire, a thrumming, burgeoning power, one capable of instigating apocalyptic conflagrations. The heat filling her was exquisitely, almost unspeakably delicious.

  Sienna danced over the body at her feet and called out to the gods to bring her daddy back from the beyond, beseeching them in a voice amplified by her talent. It was like the roar of a great beast, resounding majestically in the clearing. But then all that brilliance in the sky dissolved to blinding, all-encompassing white and the world seemed to go away for a time, Sienna lapsing into a state of gray and fuzzy semi-consciousness.

  Her eyes were open when full consciousness returned, her face still tipped upward. The sky above her, however, had reassumed its “normal” state. She felt a pang of loss and wished she could always view the universe in its unfiltered form. The light display had ended, but her skin was still tingling from the infusion of power. And though that initial intense surge of energy had faded, she still felt stronger than ever, invincible and gloriously free.

  Then she felt the little fingers clawing her ankle and looked down.

  She frowned. “Huh.”

  Well, this is unexpected.

  Allie had resurrected.

  She was still flat on her back, but her head was swiveling slowly side to side as a low, groan emerged from her mouth. Her eyes still looked glazed and her skin had that pale death pallor. She was dead but animated, the same as Arlene. The sight of a reanimated body did not, in and of itself, disturb her, but in this case it was more than a little puzzling. This was the first time any of her sacrificial offerings had rejuvenated and at first she could make no sense of it. She could only ascribe it to the unprecedented explosion of energy this ritual had unleashed.

  Allie’s clutching fingers slid away from Sienna’s ankle and found the knife. Though her recollection of it was vague, Sienna knew she had dropped it during the ritual. It hadn’t seemed important at the time, Allie being dead and all. The girl’s fingers closed around the base of the blade, gripping it tight, its sharp edge slicing bloodlessly into her undead flesh.

  Allie sat up.

  Sienna frowned.

  Uh-oh.

  She hopped backward as the little zombie girl took a swipe at her with the knife. The blade missed nicking her shin by about an inch. Despite the close call, Sienna wasn’t overly worried. Zombie or not, Allie was little and could be easily overpowered. She wasn’t about to turn tail and flee, not until the matter of her father’s resurrection was settled.

  The apparent answer to that came seconds later as a patch of ground at Allie’s feet shifted and swelled upward, as if something buried beneath it was attempting to rise to the surface. Sienna’s heart started pounding and a wide grin of unrestrained joy split her face.

  I did it!

  The ritual had been successful. Her daddy was coming back to her at long last. But dark thoughts tinged the joy as multiple other patches of ground were disturbed. The problem was pretty basic—they were too spread out to be caused by one returning dead man. She had heard stories from other survivors of the Hopkins Bend massacre about the army burying the dead in shallow mass graves. While she hadn’t doubted the tales, they had never struck her as a source of concern. Her daddy had been killed out in the woods, away from the other massacre victims. She had assumed he would be alone in his grave.

  She had been wrong, apparently.

  Multiple sets of rotting hands poked through fresh holes in the earth, which continued to shift and bulge outward in many places. A head emerged through one hole, a skull only partly covered with rotten brown flesh. The eye sockets were stuffed with mud and a thick earthworm wriggled in one of them. Allie got to her feet and took lurching steps in Sienna’s direction as the dead things beneath her continued to rise from the ground.

  Sienna was starting to get just a little worried.

  The power she had channeled must have been even greater than she imagined. Or she hadn’t focused it with sufficient precision, because it was beginning to seem as if she had resurrected all the dead things of Hopkins Bend rather than just her father.

  Oops, she thought.

  Allie took another swipe at her with the knife. Again, Sienna narrowly dodged the attack, but this time she wasn’t able to be so cavalier about the potential danger. There was a good chance she might get hurt if she didn’t take evasive action. She grabbed her backpack and backed off several more paces. Several full torsos had emerged from the shallow grave. One of the dead things was all the way out of the ground and was crawling in her direction. With increasing desperation, Sienna scanned the resurrected corpses for identifying characteristics, any little thing at all that might tell her one of them was her father, but she was soon forced to yield to a crushing reality. Her power was immense, yes, but it wasn’t strong enough to restore dead flesh to a healthy, pristine state. That illusion had been shattered quite thoroughly. They were all too rotted to ever identify without the aid of a forensics lab. Even the remaining tatters of clothing were too caked with dark earth to help.

  Just rags hanging off bones.

  Tears spilled from Sienna’s eyes in a warm rush.

  Shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit!

  All for nothing. All for goddamn nothing!

  Allie was almost in range again. She kept swiping at the air with the bloody knife.

  Sienna wiped away tears.

  Goodbye, daddy, she thought. I’m so sorry.

  She turned away from the dead and ran out of the clearing.

  26.

  The guy with the beard hit Jessica upside the head with the stock of his rifle. She cried out and staggered backward, pain exploding in her head as she fell onto the sofa. Her assailant set his rifle on the coffee table and fell atop her before she could attempt to fend him off. She writhed beneath him and tried to push him away, but the zip-tie cuffs binding her wrists hindered the effort. His sheer mass was another major complicating factor. It was like being trapped beneath a giant boulder. The analytical part of her mind realized the impossibility of escape or successful resistance almost immediately. There was nothing she could do to stop him from doing whatever h
e wanted to her. And his swollen crotch left little doubt of his intentions.

  Years ago Jessica had vowed to never again let a man take her against her will. She would sooner die than let that happen. The purity of that vow was maybe a little tainted by what she had done to Billy earlier, but it was still very much in effect. She screeched through gritted teeth as she struggled to raise her cuffed hands toward the man’s face, intending to gouge his eyes out, which was just barely possible thanks to Zelda having cuffed her hands in front. But the big beast just laughed and pushed her hands back down, pinning them between their bodies. He rocked against her in a humping motion and she felt a shudder of revulsion upon realizing how large his cock must be. It felt big enough to rip her in two. The knowledge only intensified her resolve not to be violated. She would tear the goddamn thing off and feed it to him before she’d let that happen.

  “Looks like you’re fixin’ to get up in that shit.”

  This was the other man speaking, the one with the racist political T-shirt. He was about as big as his friend and twice as ugly, with a protruding brow that made him look like a white trash caveman. A scar down the side of his head was only partly hidden by his bushy hair. His filthy blue jeans looked like they hadn’t been washed in months. He grinned and reached for his crotch when he noticed her looking at him. Jessica again shuddered in revulsion as she watched him squeeze the massive erection tenting the front of his jeans.

  The one atop her glanced at his friend. “Damn straight. This one makes that bitch we nabbed earlier today look like garbage. I don’t even care if she killed Delmont.”

  “What’ll we tell Jodi?”

  The man on top of Jessica stared right into her eyes as he said, “We tell her the one I shot killed her man. Shit, she ain’t gonna know better. I’m keeping this one, that’s all there is to it.”

  He groped at her breasts and tore at her top. There was a sound of ripping fabric.