Flesh and Blood

by Sian Rosé

  Yet she waited, unwilling to knock again. As though the door was made of lava, she hurriedly retracted her hand and froze, her eyes wide and unblinking as they remained fixed on the front door.

  Wind panted in her ears, and suddenly the summer night air was cold and unforgiving against the sides of her neck. She gulped. Blood roared and drummed in her ears, so loud and so vicious that she did not hear movement behind the front door before it was roughly being pulled open, revealing a tall, slender figure in the dark doorway.

  Sharp but beautiful features stared expectantly outwards, cold eyes piercing into her skin, searching her up and down, sizing her up like a bloody joint of meat in the supermarket.

  “Yes?” a heavily accented voice half-demanded, its glassiness jolting Minnie out of her bewildered daze.

  The tall blonde who stood before her looked like some sort of supermodel, with perfectly sculpted facial features, a stick-thin body, and a bountiful sliver of cleavage peeking tauntingly out of the top of her dark, skin-tight jumper.

  Minnie’s throat prickled, as dry as sandpaper.

  “I’m looking for my boyfriend,” she blurted out dumbly. Her rushed words seemed to sit, uncomfortably transfixed into the cold air for a few moments, their utter ridiculousness reflected back to her. A sharp stab of fear probed her in the bottom of her spine, a flashing red siren of a warning.

  Run.

  “What makes you think he would be here?” the blonde asked. Her face softened into an amused smile. She folded her arms, evidently relaxing.

  “I…”

  “Oh,” the woman interrupted before Minnie could reply, “is it… is your boyfriend the intruder? The thief?”

  The accusatory expression felt like a glass platter smashing over Minnie’s head, but she attempted to swallow back her fear. “I’m sure there’s just been a misunderstanding.”

  “Oh?”

  “My boyfriend and I… we were just….”

  Eyes sparkling in the night, the blonde glanced around the still emptiness of the night before stepping backwards and gesturing down the narrow, dark hallway behind her. An unpleasant smirk was playing across her glossy, plump lips, as though she were the mean girl bullying the ugly, fat kid.

  “Misunderstanding? Then you come in and explain?”

  Minnie’s mouth fell open. She could feel her heart beating uncomfortably fast inside her rib cage, rattling the bones.

  With a short breath inwards, she placed her hand protectively over the barely-there bulge of her abdomen. Swallowing back her fear, she nodded and took a brave step forwards.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  2019

  Flo knelt on the ground. She nibbled nervously at the skin around her thumb and kept glancing between her two older brothers, whose faces were both twisted and red with indecision.

  Also on the ground, a few feet away from Flo, lay Sambuca and Destiny. Both girls had the sides of their faces pressed into the dirt, their exposed faces wobbling and blotchy with tears. Their skinny, pale arms joined in the middle, stubby fingers clasped around each other.

  Every so often, Lloyd or Zach would tell them to shut the fuck up. Flo felt herself overwhelmed with an irreconcilable difference. Half of her was filled with delight and excitement, her entire body on fire with the thrill of this impromptu capture. But then, the other half-remembered the darkness in her father’s face as he warned the children to ‘lay low.’ In her short eight years of life, Flo had learned that whilst there was so much joy to be had in controlling and prolonging the suffering of others, it was not an activity that constituted ‘laying low.’

  Daddy was going to be furious.

  “Why’d you have to text Mum and Dad?” snapped Zach, for the fourth or fifth time in the last half an hour. He glared angrily at his little sister. “We could’ve dealt with this on our own.”

  Flo rolled her eyes, “you two really are as dumb as each other, aren’t you?” she glanced at Lloyd, who was uncharacteristically quiet.

  Destiny whimpered and lifted her head slightly off the ground. With wide, watery eyes, she stared pleadingly up at Flo, no doubt expecting a child to have some form of mercy.

  Flo stood up and coldly held the teenager’s gaze.

  “P-p-p-please…”

  Her body tingling with the thrill, Flo roughly kicked the girl as hard as she could across her face, causing her to let out a loud, blood-curdling shriek of pain and terror which cut through the satisfying crunch of the cheekbone.

  Sambuca burst into fresh floods of ugly tears, her face twisted and red as she gripped tighter onto her friend’s clammy palm. She wriggled nearer towards her, her eyes widening in horror as she caught the size of the bloody gash that now glistened beneath her eye socket. The girl’s pitiful cries were interrupted by the sudden crunch of dry grass and the rustle of branches behind them. Flo felt her chest sink with relief at the sight of her mother, closely followed by her father appearing in the clearing.

  “What the hell happened?” Minnie sighed, coming towards them. “Jesus, I let you out of my sight for what? An hour?”

  Zach scowled at Lloyd, “someone couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.”

  Lloyd looked as though he might cry, his heart pounding hard inside his chest in grim anticipation of what was to come. He was right to be afraid. In what felt like less than a second, his mother was on him, dragging him up by a clump of his greasy hair with surprising strength in her slender arm. With her other arm, she swung her fist hard into the side of his face, instantly splitting open her son’s nose, causing a gush of blood to trickle from his nostrils.

  “Mum! No!” he howled in pain, but Minnie was not listening. Again and again, she pounded her fist into the teenager’s skull until the flesh on one of his cheeks started to resemble a bloody pool of ground mincemeat. At last, she let go of him, and his body crumpled pathetically onto the ground like a broken rag doll.

  The colour drained from Zach’s cheeks, his entire body rigid with guilt as he watched his brother’s beating. He wished he hadn’t grassed him up, almost as soon as he’d seen the light in his mother’s eyes switch. He shouldn’t have been so shocked. All four of the Garnet children knew full well that, whilst there wasn’t a lot their parents were morally adverse to, any kind of sexual violence always seemed to cut deep. And whenever their boys had ever even shown the faintest glimmer of interest in perverse behaviour, it had been rewarded with severe punishment.

  Minnie breathed out and wiped her bloody knuckle on her trousers. Usually beautiful, her face was contorted so that she looked ugly and terrifying so that not even Flo could find comfort in her presence anymore.

  “If I ever catch you or hear of you pulling shit like this again…” she spat at Lloyd, “I swear to fucking god, I will chop your bollocks off myself.”

  Apparently indifferent, Ronnie stepped forwards then and squatted down beside Destiny’s body. The girl had been knocked out by Flo’s kick, so her head was limp and useless as he roughly pulled it up and tightened his grip around her neck.

  “What are you doing to do?” Minnie asked him gruffly, putting her hands on her hips.

  Ronnie didn’t reply, his face tensing as he squeezed harder and harder until Destiny’s spindly body began to convulse and shake against the ground. Sambuca cried harder, her body quivering helplessly as she watched the monster strangle her best friend to death, just mere centimetres away from her.

  Destiny died quickly, disappointingly so. Ronnie preferred it when his victims put up more of a fight. However, he knew this was no time to be prolonging the inevitable.

  “We need to get out of here as soon as possible,” he said, feeling for Destiny’s pulse. “The pond runs into a stream,” he nodded towards the direction behind Zach, “we’re better dumping them in there. Once the corpses start to bloat, they’ll be exposed quickly enough, but by then, we’ll be a good few hours away.”

  Sambuca let out a loud, high-pitched cry of terror as her body instinctively curled up tightly
into a protective ball.

  “Where’s Stella?” Minnie asked then, glancing around, suddenly aware that they were one family member down.

  Zach groaned and rubbed his temple, “she went to rob some drug dealer we found.”

  “What? Where?”

  “I know where the caravan is,” Sambuca blurted out suddenly, her pupils wide and manic as she suddenly scrambled upright. “I know where the other girl was going. She was going to Neil’s place.”

  Ronnie raised an eyebrow at her, then glanced over at Zach.

  “You mean to tell me you’ve sent your sister off to rob a drug dealer, with no backup, and not even any fucking idea whereabouts?” he growled at his eldest son, his eyes crinkling at the sides.

  “Dad, I…”

  “Spare us the bullshit,” snapped Minnie. She glared furiously, “I’m so disappointed in both of you,” she told both of her sons, her voice a disgusted snarl. “Lloyd, you help your father get rid of that body. Zach, you come with us to find Stella.” She lunged forwards and dragged Sambuca up by the crook of her skinny arm. “And as for you, well, I’m only going to warn you once not to fuck with us, girly.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Summer, 1999

  Inside the house, the warmth was like a tight-fitting cloak resting on the tiny bumps of goose flesh that ran up and down Minnie’s arms. As soon as the front door was firmly closed behind her, and she was enveloped in the thick, smoky atmosphere of the dark hallway, a finger of unease probed the base of her spine. It was hot but uncomfortably so. Like the stagnant air inside a closed coffin, as opposed to the pleasant glow of a homely fire.

  “This way,” the blonde drawled, the hot steam from her mouth penetrating the skin on Minnie’s neck.

  Wordlessly, Minnie forced one foot in front of the other, her pulse quickening with every step further and further into the suspiciously dark and gloomy house.

  “Where’s Ronnie?” she asked, her voice coming out in a high-pitched squeak. The corridor seemed to go on and on, never coming to an end, yet growing increasingly darker as they progressed.

  “Steve!” the blonde barked, the sudden rise in her voice making Minnie freeze. “Steve, we have a visitor. The girlfriend!”

  From further down the passage, there was a small click, and suddenly the space was flooded with a murky orange glow of light. Minnie clasped her hand over her mouth and felt bile churn in her stomach as she caught sight of a man standing in the doorway at the end of the hall. He was tall and very slim, with thick black stubble covering the lower half of his face and glassy eyes that seemed to slice through the musky atmosphere. He wore a pair of dirty jeans and an off-white apron that seemed to be stained with splodges of dark tomato sauce, but his bony arms and chest were visible underneath it. On his hands, he wore gloves, not cooking gloves but rather the surgical kind that doctors wore in hospitals.

  “Well, well…” the man, Steve, smirked. “Well… looks like our little friend was telling us porkies, eh Zita?”

  Zita’s voice tickled the back of Minnie’s ear as she leant forward, the strong stench of her strange perfume attacking the teenager’s nostrils. “He says he don’t have any friends,” she whispered, sending a shock of lightning down Minnie’s spine.

  “Where’s Ronnie?” Minnie croaked, clutching her elbows, her lower lip wobbling uncontrollably. “Please, I have money; just let us go,” she hated herself for the fact that tears were already dribbling down her face. “We have lots of money; I’ll give you all of it. Just let me and Ronnie go.”

  Steve folded his arms and paused, seeming to contemplate Minnie for a moment. He looked her up and down, licking his lips thoughtfully.

  “How old are you kids?” he demanded, eyes gleaming. “Can’t be older than eighteen, no?”

  Minnie’s cheeks burned red. She felt foolish. How stupid of her to bowl in there, just a silly little girl who knew fuck all about this dark, sinister world they’d so foolishly got themselves sucked into.

  “Please, please just let us go,” she begged, her vision blurring.

  Steve sighed and leaned against one side of the doorway, gesturing for Minnie to come through. However, Minnie’s feet remained fixed tightly to the ground where she stood. She wanted him to give her Ronnie, and she had no desire whatsoever to go any further into this unpleasantly smoky abyss.

  “If you want him, you go get him,” Zita drawled, her words like blades of glass in Minnie’s ears.

  “R-R-R-Ronnie?” Minnie heard herself calling out as she swallowed back a huge, tight lump of acid in the back of her throat. Her skin prickled as she dragged her feet along the manky carpet and furiously blinked back tears that continued to obscure her vision. “Ronnie?” she shouted again. The girl slowly ascended down the last part of the passage and then past Steve. As she went, she could feel those two sets of cold, unfeeling eyes boring into her and two delighted, an evil smirk dancing on two sets of lips as she fell further and further into the trap. Briefly, she considered running, but she knew she wouldn’t stand a chance. With every fibre of her being, she hated herself for being so fucking stupid and wished more than anything she could just go back in time.

  But alas, she couldn’t.

  She’d sealed her fate from the moment she’d lifted her hand to knock on the front door.

  And the horrifying, blood-curdling sight that awaited her beyond Steve and his narrow doorway was visual confirmation. Visual confirmation that Minnie had most definitely made the most epic, most deadly fuck-up of her entire life.

  “Ronnie!” she gasped, her knees knocking, immediately giving out beneath her body so that she collapsed onto her side, her palms slapping the cold tiles of the floor beneath her. She widened her shredded lips to scream, but the breath had been sucked out of her by sheer terror so that all she could do was stare. Inside her skull, every cell and inch of her shrieked, raced, pounded, and spiralled into sensory overload until she felt that her eyeballs would pop out of her head, and her heart would squeal into overdrive and eventually die out.

  The room she had stepped into was a kitchen. Poorly lit by a solitary desk lamp which was sat atop of a wooden dining table. At the dining table, taped by his wrists and ankles to a chair, sat Ronnie. Where his thick, dark tufts of hair had been, there was now nothing but a soggy red mess that dripped and drizzled all down his gaunt, clammy face.

  His eyes were rolling into the back of his head, but something ignited in them when he caught sight of her there on the floor, watching his suffering and agony.

  An involuntary groan of grief rolled out of her mouth as her horrified gaze travelled downwards towards his exposed chest, where three thick, bloodied gashes were emblazoned deeply across his torso.

  “Goodnight, princess,” a foul-smelling voice breathed in her ear, jolting her out of the horrific daze before something soft was clamped tightly over her face, making the edges of her vision dissolve and turn to black.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  2019

  Sunlight blazed behind Stella’s thin eyelids, the rays of light penetrating the skin and stinging her unmoving pupils. The skin around her wrists burned and ached, and her fingers seemed to groan in protest as she attempted to move her hands.

  Fuck.

  Slowly, she breathed out, as quietly as she could, then untightened her eyelids, allowing in just a thin sliver of her surroundings.

  She was outside, and the sun was out.

  Swallowing, Stella continued to open her eyes until she could see that she was slumped up against the trunk of a tree, somewhere in the middle of a woodland that she did not recognise. Hurriedly, she glanced around, looking for any sign of movement. When she realised she was apparently alone, she began to jerk and twist her body, a hiss of pain leaking from the corner of her mouth as restraints pulled tightly at her bones. Looking down, she instantly realised why.

  Thick black rope made of something hard, like a metal cord or wire, was wrapped tightly around her hips, keeping her attached to the
tree trunk. Judging by the stinging sensation in her wrists, the same material was also tying her arms.

  FUCK!

  Clamping down hard on her lower lip, the young woman wriggled and leaned as far forward as she could, making as wide a sweep as possible of the surrounding area.

  The area of forest was denser than the park she’d visited with her brothers and sister earlier, and there were no caravans in sight, which meant that fucking creep had taken her out here on purpose.

  “Bastard!” Stella snapped through gritted teeth, her pretty face furrowing into a deep, irritated frown. The dark shadow of her father’s face projected into the back of her mind then. His words of warning echoed against the inside walls of her skull.

  Lay low.

  Her parents would kill her if they found out about this. She was certain of it. “Shit!” she hissed.

  The snap of a twig somewhere behind her caused her to jump and then freeze still and rigid with shock.

  “Who’s there?” she demanded.

  A few seconds later, Neil came into view. He was wearing the same grubby tracksuit as earlier but was now wielding a baseball bat in his hands. He stood directly in front of her and then dropped down so that he was squatting, their eyes level.

  “Only me,” he smirked, eyes gleaming unsettlingly.

  “This isn’t funny,” growled Stella, “let me go. Seriously, or my dad will fuck you up.”

  Neil sat back on his heels and threw back his ugly head as he laughed. “You hear that, boys?” he called to somebody behind the tree trunk, to a dark corner of the world where Stella could not see. More footsteps crunched on the woodland floor behind her, and soon Neil was joined by his little posse of grubby-looking chavs. One of them was predictably smoking a joint, whilst a few others also carried long, thick tree branches, shovels, and bats.