by Sam West
“Craig!” called out a familiar voice. “Oh God, I thought you were dead.”
“Jessie?”
It hurt to lift his head; the muscles in his neck and shoulders trembled with the effort. The sight of her was so improbable, he thought she was a hallucination. She was naked, her arms stretched high above her head, forcing her onto the tips of her toes.
She was hanging from the ceiling from a meat hook.
His head flopped back down again.
“Are you hurt?” he managed to croak out.
“No. Apart from being hit over the head with a frying pan, knocked me out cold. But I’m OK. What about you Craig? Jesus Christ, what have they done to you? Your arm…”
Her voice trailed off into sobs.
“What about Beth and Tim?”
She didn’t answer, she just continued to sob softly. He lifted his head once more to look at her.
Despite everything, his gaze lingered on her breasts. He had dreamed about her naked body for so long. And now here she was, starkers. He watched the way her little tits trembled slightly with her sobbing, the way her small pink nipples were fear hardened and poking out between the golden curtain of the hanging hair on her bowed head.
His gaze travelled lower, down the flat plane of her stomach to the downy blonde curls that exactly matched the hair on her head. His gaze fixed on the shadowy cleft between her legs, at the partly hidden, fleshy folds he had fantasised about filling up with his cock for so long.
Then he looked away in shame.
“The others,” he said, staring up at the ceiling, disgusted with himself. “Have you seen the others Jessie?”
“No!”
She was crying in earnest now. The sound of it damn near broke his heart.
“I need you to tell me what happened,” he said slowly, as if speaking to a retarded child.
“Things got ugly quickly when you and Tim left,” she said between choking sobs. “That bitch’s husband made an appearance, he attacked us. I fought him, and got knocked out. Last thing I saw of Beth she was out cold on the floor... And then I woke up here, hanging fucking naked from a fucking meat hook.”
Craig could hear her growing hysteria.
“You need to calm down Jessie.”
“Stop telling me what I need to do. This is all your fault, you never should have left me and Beth alone with those animals.”
Why the fuck am I still lying here? Craig thought. I still have one arm, don’t I?
With a sickness in his heart and soul that threatened to undo him, he forced himself to look at the place where he used to have an arm.
He noticed for the first time that he was topless. The old fucker must’ve removed his bloody mac and t-shirt when he was out cold. There was a leather belt much like the one at his waist pulled tight around his stump.
That’s when he realised that the smell of burnt flesh was coming from him.
Oh Jesus fuck, the old guy’s cauterised me.
The sight of his own, blackened flesh was almost enough to tip him over the edge.
His jeans were wet down the front, a mix of his own piss and blood.
Oh Jesus Christ, I’m near fucking death here…
He groaned through gritted teeth when he hauled himself into a sitting position. His right hand was still cuffed to the belt and with trembling fingers he began the laborious process of easing the thick leather strap through the buckle with the tips of his fingers.
“Hang on Jessie, I’m coming.”
The door burst open.
“No son, you’re not.”
“You fuck!” Craig screamed at the toothless, grinning old man. “Let us go.”
Although he wasn’t even sure he could hear him over Jessie’s high pitched screaming.
“Noisy bitch, ain’t she?”
He hobbled up to Jessie and slapped her hard across the face. Her face snapped sideways and the screaming stopped dead. Her mouth was smeared with blood where a tooth must’ve caught her lip.
“Just let us go,” Craig howled.
“Just let us goooo,” Bish mimicked, then laughed.
He pulled out a dirty looking handkerchief from the pocket of his old man style, grey trousers and stuffed it in her mouth. Jessie groaned, her eyes bulging over the makeshift gag.
Craig shuddered when he thought about what the old fuck might have wiped on it. Poor Jessie.
Craig’s neck started to tremble as he continued to lift his head to watch the horror show. The old fuck circled Jessie. He did it slowly, inspecting her as if he was a farmer inspecting his livestock.
“Nice specimen,” he approved, running a hand over her flanks as if testing for firmness. She visibly flinched under his touch. “It was a tough choice, I can tell ya. You shoulda seen Michael trying to choose, he was like a kid in a sweetie shop.”
“Who the fuck is Michael?” Craig gasped. “And choose what?”
“Michael, my brother, you dumb shit. The guy who made your dinner.”
Jessie groaned and her entire body shook with sobs.
“Anyways, it was a tough call. I’m guessing that maybe this one has the edge on good genetics, but Michael had his heart set on the other. And even though my tastes don’t run thataways, I appreciate that the other has a more comely body.” He squeezed one of Jessie’s breasts, eliciting an ungodly sounding groan from her. “this one ain’t got as much meat up top and she don’t go in and out as much as the other. The arse is a bit flat, even if the face is prettier.”
“Don’t talk about her like that. And choose what?”
“For breeding or for eating.”
“What?”
“You heard. Truth is, our gene pool has gotten a little shallow in recent years. The kids are suffering. We need a fresh injection of new blood otherwise we might just die out. But hell, we also gotta eat. We all get hungrys for a different kind of meat.”
Craig shivered on the table. He understood what the old man was saying, yet he didn’t, all at the same time.
“Just let us go,” he said, knowing it was pointless but unable to stop.
He was feeling weaker by the second. Having an arm lopped off wasn’t doing much for his energy levels.
“I don’t think so, son.”
“What are you doing, old man,” he asked, slipping in and out of the blissful darkness.
It would feel so good, right about now, to sleep. But he couldn’t. Jessie needed him. He closed his eyes and rested his head on the table.
“Jessie, I’ve never told you this before but I love you.”
His speech was slurred, he could hear how his words were running together. It was like he was drunk; drunk on pain and despair. He could hear things. Clattering noises that could only be bad. But he kept his eyes closed and focused on the love he felt for Jessie.
“I’ve always loved you, since the first second I saw you. But I guess Tim did too. It should’ve been me, Jessie. I love you so much…”
His words were cut short by the kind of noises that no person had any business hearing in their lifetime.
There was an ungodly sawing sound, followed by the type of high pitched wail that could curdle milk. Bish was grunting with the effort of whatever it was that he was doing and Craig felt his mind closing in on itself, as if to protect the last vestiges of his sanity.
Jessie, his mind groaned, close to irreversibly ripping apart. Her scream splintered his brain.
And then the silence.
He didn’t dare lift his head. It could only be bad. Bad beyond the realms of his comprehension.
He flinched when he heard an object clatter to the concrete floor. A discarded tool of some kind, something quite heavy. He wasn’t going to look. Uh uh. No way.
A giggle escaped his lips. It started off small then seemed to grow. It reverberated in his chest, gaining momentum until his entire body shook with a laughter that was wrenched up from the depths of his guts.
“You think this is funny boy? You laughing at old Bish?�
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The old cunt sounded pissed, and it made him laugh all the harder. He laughed so hard the pain had dimmed to a dull, distant ache and his mind was filled with laughing.
“Open yer eyes boyo, Bish has got a surprise for yer.”
Craig didn’t want to. He kept his eyes tightly shut and felt something hot and wet splash on his Adam’s apple.
Oh boy, oh boy, that can’t be good…
A fresh burst of hysteria gripped him and he sprayed more laughter.
“I said open yer God damn, mother fucking eyes or I’ll slit yer throat like a fucking pig.”
Craig figured he had to open them eventually.
He found himself staring up into Jessie’s gentle grey eyes. They were wide with terror. Her face lowered and her cold lips touched his.
His laughter turned into a scream.
Because before her lips pressed down on his, he saw the jagged, bloody stump of her neck. He glimpsed the severed spinal column and the red pulp of the sawn open neck.
He twisted his head from side to side, desperate to escape the macabre kiss. But the more he thrashed, the harder the mouth of the once love-of-his-life bore down on his.
“What’s the matter boy, I thought you loved her. Has she got bad breath or somethin’?”
The weight lifted from his face and he gulped down air. His heart was beating so hard he thought it might explode right there on the table.
He kind of hoped it would.
The old fucker held up Jessie’s head by the tangled matt of her blood soaked, blonde hair. It swayed above his face, and he could see right up the bloody stump.
He closed his eyes, but it was too late, the image of it would be burned there for the rest of his life.
“Ay, she’s a pretty ‘un alright. I normally bat for the other team, but hell, an ‘ole is an ‘ole. And this ‘ere throat ‘ole is one of the mightiest fine ‘oles I ever did see.”
Jessie’s head dangled from his fist by the hair, bumping against the side of his spindly leg.
Bish proceeded to unzip his blood splattered, grey trousers and raised the neck stump to his stiff little cock.
Craig wanted to look away. Truly, he did, but somehow he couldn’t. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the bastard’s shrivelled penis. The thing looked like it had been embalmed, it was a horrible shade of grey and no more than a few inches long.
When he held the base of the vile thing with one hand and rammed Jessie’s neck down onto it, Craig threw up.
He couldn’t roll away from the horrific sight and in his effort to escape the vision he twisted his head and threw up over his arm stump.
Dimly, he wondered if his puke would cause a fatal infection.
The wet smacking sounds and the old man’s grunts pierced his brain.
He lay there panting, whimpering to himself to drown out those sounds. Even with his eyes closed, he could still see it. Jessie’s lifeless eyes staring up into the face of her murderer as her head was rammed up and down the stiff shaft.
“Oh yeah,” the old man groaned.
Judging from the increased speed of the slapping, squelching noises, he was nearing completion.
With a final, inhuman growl that made Craig’s flesh crawl, everything went silent for a moment.
“Oh yeah boyo, that was one hell of a nut. If you play yer cards right, I might just let you have a go. You ain’t ever experienced real pleasure until you fucked a neck stump, I can tell ya.”
Craig kept his head turned away from his captor. He was beyond voicing his disgust. He was in a whole new, dark place where any attempt at speech would fail to express his feelings.
Instead he let the tears roll freely down his cheeks, not giving a shit what the old man might think of him for crying. He held the image of Jessie in his heart and mind, at a time when her head was still attached to her neck.
“Stop yer whimpering boy, lucky for you I just got me rocks off so I is in a happy mood.”
Craig’s crying grew louder in his own ears.
The old man began clattering around, doing things that Craig didn’t want to know about.
The sound of an engine revving and spluttering into life after two or three attempts made him involuntarily swivel his head round.
Bish had a chainsaw. The circular blade of the thing whizzed round at speed. The old man threw him a toothless grin and turned his attention to the decapitated, hanging corpse of Craig’s dead love.
He started on her leg first. As the metal teeth of the noisy machine sliced through the flesh, Craig noticed that Jessie’s head had been placed by his feet.
She lay on the side of her face and stared accusingly up at him.
You bastard, you should’ve saved me.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Bish hadn’t heard him. He must have reached the femur, for his frail shoulders looked locked tight and his entire body shook with the effort of sawing through her young, healthy bones.
Oh God, those noises…
He cried louder so he didn’t have to listen. The cries turned into screams, blending with the revs of the chainsaw in a grotesque duet. A distant, still sane part of his mind warned him that he was hysterical.
The engine of the chainsaw cut out just as the leg thumped to the floor. There was so much blood. It didn’t spurt in hard jets from her stump like he expected it to, but then, she was a corpse. It just kind of dropped out of her, a red puddle growing around her solitary ankle.
Bish leaned over to pick up the leg. His old, thin arms trembled with the effort and he groaned when he straightened his back.
He staggered over to Craig and dumped her leg sideways across his lap. Their stumps touched in a grotesque greeting and Craig felt those pesky giggles making a reappearance.
“Shit, I’m too old for this,” Bish moaned, revving up the chainsaw once more.
Craig laughed and stared up at the ceiling as Bish set about dismembering Jessie.
Craig didn’t think things could get any worse.
But they would, before the night was over.
CHAPTER FOUR.
During the hour that Jessie met her demise, Beth was living a nightmare all of her very own.
Her nightmare, however, was of an entirely different kind.
Unlike her boyfriend, who came to on a table in a shed, Beth came round on a bed.
She must’ve drunk a shit load last night because her head was pounding with a hangover from hell and she couldn’t remember anything.
It was pitch black and Beth was deeply disorientated.
A bad, bad feeling gnawed in her guts but she couldn’t place it.
What happened last night, she thought uneasily. And what is that smell?
The bad odour hung all around her, rancid like rotten eggs. Her arms were thrown above her head and she went to bring them into her body but they wouldn’t move.
A horrible vision flashed behind her eyes. The fat, bald man in the blood splattered apron throwing her over his shoulder and pulling down her knickers…
She tried to sit up and realised fully for the first time that her wrists were bound above her head.
This isn’t my bedroom. And this isn’t that dive of a B and B in Cornwall either…
“Hello dear, how did you sleep?”
A voice, in the darkness. Her heart tripped in terror.
As her eyes acclimatised to the dark she could make out a short, wide figure looming over the end of the double bed.
Beth screamed.
“Oh, don’t start screaming, I’d hate to cut out your tongue, you’ll be needing that to service the men folk.”
The figure moved away from the bed and suddenly the room was bathed in brilliant light which stabbed her retinas.
In a split second she took in the room, and her predicament.
It was Margaret, the crazy bitch from the pub in the room with her. The room had been so dark because the window was boarded up with planks of wood.
There was nothing in the sm
all room apart from the bare, double mattress on the wrought iron bedframe on which she was lying on the right hand side. The room was a shithole. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls and the floorboards looked as though they hadn’t seen water and soap for years.
Most alarmingly of all, she was naked, her hands tied with rough rope to the iron headboard. She peered over her breasts at Margaret, who stood at her feet. Beth kept her legs tightly pressed together, at that moment more mortified than she was scared.
The smell seemed to be getting worse, making her want to puke.
“What do you want with me?”
“Your young, fertile body, dear. You’re going to make babies for us. You could say we need a dose of fresh blood brought into the family.”
Tears streamed down Beth’s face, blurring her vision.
This couldn’t be happening.
But it is. You have to calm down.
“Where are the others?”
“You’ll be seeing them all again soon, don’t you worry about that.”
“Let me go, Margaret.”
“No dear. You live with us now.”
Beth’s head flopped back on the mattress. She stared up at the mould ridden ceiling, trying desperately to calm her wildly beating heart.
Margaret doubled over suddenly and let out a low groan through gritted teeth, clutching her swollen stomach.
Beth raised her head to watch her, taking that moment to tug violently at the rope binding her wrists.
All she got for her efforts was rope burn.
Margaret straightened up and Beth stopped struggling.
“Michael!” she shouted. “The baby’s coming!”
Beth stiffened in fear when she heard footsteps creaking on what sounded like a flight of stairs.
The door burst open and she cringed when Michael’s huge bulk entered the room. He was still wearing that blood splattered apron and the mere sight of him made her want to scream.
She was sure his apron was painted with more blood than before.
She remembered how easily he had swept her off her feet, the sheer brute strength of him.