Depraved 2

by Bryan Smith

  Vivian gasped in shock. “What!?”

  Horst squinted at Daphne, his expression conveying something that wasn’t quite disbelief while simultaneously communicating a curious willingness to be convinced. “Why would she do that?”

  Vivian, her beautiful face twisted in an almost ugly scowl, jabbed a forefinger at Daphne and screeched at her. “You lying cunt!” She shot a furious look at Horst. “Please tell me you don’t believe this bullshit.”

  Horst’s answer to this was to swing the mini machine gun in Vivian’s direction. A flicker of fear crossed her face, but Daphne had the sense that deep down the woman still believed she could bring this situation under control through the sheer force of her personality.

  Horst squeezed the trigger and the gun spat bullets at her. At least three or four slugs drilled through the front of her black dress as Vivian toppled backward and landed in an awkward sprawl. Blood leaked from the multiple holes in her body to stain the floor beneath her. That she was dead was not in doubt.

  Daphne’s ears were still ringing from the close proximity to the gunfire. She stared at the fresh corpse and thought, So much for being your lesbian sex slave.

  The weird thing was the very mild pang of loss she felt.

  Gosh, was I actually starting to look forward to that?

  The mercenary part of her had desperately sought some way—any way—to shift the blame for Lexus’s death and deliver up an at least halfway believable alternative suspect. Vivian had been the only remotely viable option. Given the chance to do it again, Daphne would make the same choice every time. As fucked up and unexpected as it seemed, though, she really had felt like she and Vivian had forged the beginnings of a potentially interesting bond. Part of it, of course, had been the gloriously debauched introduction to the world of cannibalism.

  Oh, well, she thought. Easy come, easy go.

  There was, however, a potential upside to this development. If she somehow managed to survive this experience, she would retain her newfound taste for human flesh. The gastrointestinal disturbance aside, Kate had made for one of the most delicious meals she had ever experienced, maybe the most delicious. She envisioned a beautiful future of cannibalism with William. She would have to introduce him to it slowly, but she was sure she could eventually bring him around. She had been wrapping the man around her little finger since day one. She could make him agree to anything with enough determination. They could go out hunting for victims together. It could become one of their treasured traditions as a couple.

  Horst waved the gun at the hibachi table. “You. Over there.”

  Daphne glanced at Kate, who appeared to have finally succumbed from a combination of blood loss and the many wounds inflicted upon her flesh. Her features were slack and the eyelid that wasn’t pinned back with fishhooks wasn’t blinking.

  She looked at Horst. “Are you hungry? I admit I felt stuffed a little bit ago, but I’ve made some room.”

  Horst waved the gun again. “Just get over there.”

  Daphne shrugged and did as instructed, moving to an end of the table. “What are we doing? You won’t shoot me, will you? I thought you believed me…”

  She sniffled as tears rolled down her face.

  Horst’s expression had turned stoic. The red flush of rage had vanished. “I won’t shoot you, not if you do as I say.”

  Daphne wiped tears from her face. “I’ll do anything you want.”

  Horst nodded. “Good. Help me roll the dead sow off the table.”

  The butcher set the gun down and took hold of Kate by her wrists. Daphne followed his lead and grabbed the dead woman by the ankles. She wasn’t sure what the point of this exercise was. All she cared about was Horst’s promise not to shoot her. Staying alive at whatever cost was the only thing that mattered to her. She had learned that about herself today, if nothing else.

  Together they heaved Kate off the grill and rolled her to the side of the table. Daphne couldn’t help grimacing when she got a look at the woman’s charred backside, some of which had stuck to the grill. One more twist of her limbs and she dropped to the floor, landing with a heavy thump atop Francois.

  Horst picked up the gun and approached Daphne. She yelped as he grabbed the sheer front of her dress and ripped it from her body. His face turned hard again as he put the gun against her forehead, making her gasp. “Up on the table. Now.”

  Daphne’s eyes opened wide as fresh tears trickled down her cheeks. “What? No…no…this isn’t right. You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

  Horst tossed the gun across the room. “I never said that. I only said I wouldn’t shoot you.”

  Daphne screamed.

  Given another second, she might have tried to run, but Horst clamped a strong hand around her throat before she could get her brain and feet in motion. She fought against him, slapping at him and clawing at his face, but he negated this by punching her in the side of the head with his free hand. The blow landed with incredible force. She stopped fighting as things went fuzzy for a moment.

  Horst scooped her into his arms and dumped her on the grill.

  As Daphne struggled to clear her head, the butcher began to shackle her to the table.

  28.

  The stress was getting to Jodi Lynn Baker. She didn’t know how much more she could take of the frustration and anxiety that had been relentlessly ratcheting up all day. Not only had there been no real relief from it at any point, but there had been nothing to hint relief of any sort was imminent any time soon. The main source of her concern was still Delmont. It just wasn’t like him to go so many hours without contacting her and it certainly wasn’t at all like him to ignore all her calls and voicemails. She had no concrete proof anything was amiss, but she just knew something had happened to him. She could feel it in her damn bones. It didn’t help that the men she’d sent to look for him also seemed to have fallen off the radar.

  It was after her tenth or so unanswered call to Floyd’s number that she finally lost control. She let out a shriek of frustrated rage and hurled the phone across the kitchen. It shattered as it struck the wall behind the dining table. A brief moment of near-catharsis followed this outburst, but the feeling was quickly obliterated by an even larger sense of despair. Now there was no way anyone could return her calls. The house hadn’t had a working landline phone for years. She was completely fucked.

  And now here came another round of agitated, guttural noises from the thing in the basement, rattling her nerves again and adding extra emphasis to how desperately she needed Delmont to come waltzing through the front door to put everything right.

  How it was making noises at all was a mystery. She had gotten carried away earlier, back when she’d ventured down into the basement to take out her frustrations on the catch. Torturing the woman didn’t make her worries go away, but it did make them easier to bear for a while. The screams and pleas for mercy were a balm to her troubled soul, which was why she kept at it long after she should have stopped. She worked on the outsider bitch with abandon, hardly caring where she cut or gouged flesh. But then she nicked an important artery in her thigh and was unable to stem the alarming flow of blood. She was dead soon thereafter.

  Only now she was alive again, jerking ceaselessly against the chains and making noises like a demon. The noises scared the shit out of Jodi. She became certain some agent of Satan had possessed the dead flesh. The notion that the devil had in some way invaded her home had her muttering desperate prayers and wringing her hands as she paced the kitchen. She needed Delmont to come home and kill the thing again, for good this time, because she sure didn’t have the guts to go down there and do it herself.

  The sliding glass door at the back of the kitchen began to open.

  Delmont!

  Jodi’s heart leapt into her throat as she whirled in that direction, but it was just Sienna, making an unexpected return after their acrimonious parting earlier in the day. The deflated feeling that swept through Jodi then was so crushing it made her weak in t
he knees. It took a physical effort to keep from dropping to the floor. But she brushed her disappointment aside and rushed across the kitchen to her baby sister, drawing her into her arms and holding on for dear life. She buried her face in Sienna’s dyed-black hair and began to weep and prattle on, spewing out a disjointed, unintelligible account of her worries for several moments. Sienna stood stiff as a board as she endured this outpouring and made no move to comfort her sister.

  At last, Jodi let go of her and wiped her eyes as she moved back a step. “You don’t care, do you?” she said, her bottom lip trembling. “Your own flesh and blood and you don’t give a shit that I’m scared out of my mind.”

  Sienna regarded her in her usual dead-eyed way. “I thought I made my feelings clear earlier. I’d like to see you dead.”

  Jodi took an angrier swipe at her eyes, vulnerability giving way to anger, the way it always happened when dealing with her hopelessly maladjusted sibling. “Then why are you even here? I thought you were going away forever.” She sneered. “Let me guess, it’s tougher out there than you thought. How pathetic. You couldn’t even get through one whole day of being homeless.”

  Sienna opened the refrigerator and peered inside. She pulled out a can of Pabst and popped the tab. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve been away from this dump longer than that before.”

  She put the can to her mouth and drank deeply from it.

  Jodi stomped across the kitchen and snatched the can from her hand. Foam flew from the opening as she tossed it in the sink. She glared at Sienna. “You need to leave.”

  Sienna smiled and took another can of Pabst from the refrigerator. “I’ll leave when I’m ready.”

  Jodi knocked the can from her hand. It hit the floor with a thump and rolled across the linoleum until it came to a stop against the dishwasher. “You don’t live here anymore, you psychotic cunt. That means you don’t get to help yourself to anything you want.”

  Sienna delivered a stinging backhand blow across her face. Jodi cried out and reeled backward. The shock of the unexpected attack was worse than the pain. This was a new wrinkle in their increasingly bitter relationship. Sienna had said plenty of outrageously cruel things to her over the years, but this was the first time their quarreling had taken a physical turn. And the look on Sienna’s face indicated she was willing—and perhaps eager—to lash out again. Her usual carefully controlled mask of indifference was gone. Her eyes were bright and avid, the sharp twist of her mouth infused with a hatred so deep it was painful to look at.

  Tears came to Jodi’s eyes again. “Why did you do that?”

  Sienna took a third can of Pabst from the fridge, her expression all sneering defiance as she popped the tab and chugged half of it down in one go. She wiped moisture from her mouth with the back of a hand. “I wanted to hurt you. Why else would I do it?”

  “Is that why you came back, then? To hurt me?”

  Sienna gulped more beer and belched. “I’m here to say my final goodbyes. This is the last time I’ll ever see you.”

  Jodi grunted. “So say what you came to say and get out. I’ve tried so hard to make you love me. I can’t take this anymore.”

  Sienna finished off the beer and dropped the can. She kicked it across the floor, sneering when Jodi had to dodge it. “You didn’t try for shit, bitch!” Jodi had never seen her sister show so much emotion. Her eyes were bulging and spittle was flying from her mouth. She had a feeling she was seeing the real Sienna for the very first time. “All you ever did was fucking criticize and try to control me! You never made any motherfucking real attempt to understand me or accept me for who I am. And you sure as fucking shit never had the first idea about what I’ve been going through all these years.”

  The words stung, hitting harder than Jodi expected.

  She shook her head. “You never gave me a real chance.”

  “Fuck you. It should have been you who got shot that night, not daddy.”

  The comment made Jodi gasp, shocking her almost as much as being hit by her sister. A sob welled up inside her. She shook her head again. “That’s not fair.”

  “Fuck fair.” Sienna laughed. “You know what? I sucked your precious Delmont’s cock a bunch of times for extra cash. He always said I did it better than you.”

  A flicker of anger cut through Jodi’s next sob. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe what you want. I don’t give a damn.”

  Jodi’s anger continued to build. She was on the verge of lashing out at Sienna again when she noted some new damage to the girl’s trashy gothic gutter-tramp dress. There were some new rips in the fabric, for one thing, but that was the least surprising part of what she was seeing. The girl walked around in sleazy ripped-up shit all the time. But there were some substantial new stains the dark fabric had caused her to miss until now.

  “What’s that on your dress?” she asked, pointing to one of the larger stains.

  Sienna glanced downward. Then she shrugged. “Oh, that. That’s blood.”

  Jodi frowned. “Whose blood?”

  Sienna laughed. “Well, that’s kind of hard to say. I killed a lot of people today.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Actually, it’s not bullshit.” Sienna’s leer as she said this made Jodi’s heart beat faster. There was a malevolent sincerity in her sister’s tone that scared her. “In fact, you knew at least one of them.”

  Jodi’s breath hitched. “No. No. Not--”

  Sienna rolled her eyes. “No, not that idiot, though I get why you’d jump to that conclusion. I killed Arlene.”

  Jodi blinked in surprise. “What?”

  “First I smothered her.” Sienna smiled. “That was a goddamn mercy killing, really. You should have seen the state she was in. Crippled bitch was drowning in her own shit and piss. That’s on Delmont. I’d say you should take it up with him, but he’s the one who crippled her in the first place, right? And you knew it all along, too.”

  “That’s not--”

  “Oh, shut up.” Sienna’s sneeringly dismissive tone left no room for argument. It said what they both knew—that this had been an open but not talked about secret between them for a long time. “Here’s the totally amazing thing. After I smothered her, I brought her back to life.” She giggled. “And then I put a fucking hammer in her head.”

  Jodi’s instinct was to scoff at this, the same way she’d scoffed at all the lunatic things Sienna had said over the years. But her tongue was briefly stilled by the way this particular oddball boast meshed with what was happening in the basement.

  She gave her sister a wide berth and approached the basement door. The thing down there seemed less agitated now, but the guttural growls it was making were still audible. A glance at Sienna told her she was hearing the noises, too. “You hear that?”

  “How could I miss it?”

  Jodi came away from the basement door. “That thing down there was dead earlier. I know because I killed it. Only now…well, you can hear for yourself. Something brought it back. Some demon.”

  Sienna laughed. “Oh, you pitiful fucking simpleton. That’s no demon.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s a zombie. Obviously.”

  “A zombie?” Jodi asked, her voice deadpan.

  “That’s right.” Sienna nodded as if nothing had ever been more obvious. “A zombie. You have a living dead thing in your basement.”

  Rather than expressing more skepticism, Jodi took a few moments to further ponder what she knew of the situation. Her instinct was to dismiss any explanation that involved the word “zombie”, with all its horror movie connotations. However, the basic facts here did kind of point in that direction. Something living had expired and now that flesh was animate again. Zombie, demon, or something else, this mystery had no standard, rational world solution.

  “For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe you.” Jodi slowly exhaled, thinking she might have bigger reasons to fear her sister than she had ever imagined. “You killed A
rlene and you brought her back. How did you do that? And how is that connected to the noisy damn thing down there?”

  “I’m a witch.”

  “A witch.”

  “Yep.”

  What Jodi heard in Sienna’s voice now wasn’t the defensive tone she’d hoped to hear. Instead it was a confidence so total it rendered disbelief impossible. Jodi’s stomach clenched as she came to the inevitable conclusion that her sister was telling the truth. And that could only mean one thing.

  “You’re in league with the devil.”

  Sienna laughed. “Nonsense. I serve no one but myself.”

  Jodi shook her head. “I’m sure that’s what you think, but the dark one holds you in his sway, I have no doubt of it.”

  “And how can you be so sure?”

  “Because witch or not, no one girl is powerful enough to do what you say you’ve done. Satan is using and guiding you, working through you to bring evil into this world.” Jodi nodded as a louder growl came from the basement. That sound coming at that precise moment was God’s way of underlining her statement. He worked in mysterious ways, but sometimes evidence of His hand was more overt than usual. “How else could the black magic you worked at Arlene’s house raise other things from the dead miles away?”

  Sienna smirked. “The ritual I did at Arlene’s place didn’t reanimate your catch.” She moved a step closer to Jodi, smiling at the way she took a reflexive step backward. “The ritual I did out in Hopkins Bend a little while ago did that.”

  The unexpected reference to her hometown rocked Jodi. The awful things that had happened there haunted her still, and she and her sister rarely ever talked about them. “What in God’s name were you doing in Hopkins Bend?”

  Sienna told her, beginning with her intent to bring back their daddy and ending with a graphic description of the ritual in the clearing. “Basically, I unleashed a lot more power than I expected. It felt like all the power in all of creation was flowing through me. And I think it sort of got away from me. I didn’t focus it right. And somehow it reached inside my head and looked at my idea of how things that come back from the dead look and behave, which is basically a bunch of shit from movies and The Walking Dead, and, well, it sort of made that shit come true. I don’t know how widespread it is, but I’m thinking maybe I fucked up kind of a lot.”