Depraved

by Bryan Smith

  Pete grimaced. “Jesus…”

  Justine’s expression didn’t change as she related the tale, radiating carnality and desire even as she continued with the grisly revelations. Any grief she might feel was locked away somewhere deep inside. “You wouldn’t believe the blood. So much of it. Like an ocean of red pumping out of him. Some of their dogs were wandering around in there. They licked my lover’s blood off the floor. Jim took so long to die. I wanted him to die by then, of course. Any life he might have after that wouldn’t be worth living.”

  Pete wanted her to stop talking about it, but couldn’t bring himself to say so. “That’s horrible, Justine. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why? You didn’t do it.”

  “I know. But—”

  “Then they stripped the meat from his bones. Muscles, ligaments, sinew. They cooked the tender parts on the stove. They made me watch that, too.”

  Pete was starting to feel sick. And frightened. He’d known he’d been taken by crazy people, but even so had not suspected so startling a level of depravity. He imagined heavy blades chopping into his own flesh and felt bile rise in his throat. “Justine…please, I’m sorry this happened to you, but could you please—”

  “I was forced to eat some of the meat they cooked. I can still taste my lover’s seared flesh on my tongue.”

  Pete swallowed bile again. “Oh, God…”

  Justine smiled.

  Then she began to slide down the length of his body, her tongue tracing a wet trail from the tip of his chin and down his torso to his crotch. His once again erect cock leaped toward her mouth and she swallowed the whole throbbing length of it in one breathtaking gulp. Pete gasped and clutched at the ground. She plied him with mouth and tongue for several moments before disengaging to smile at his pale, shaking face.

  “You like that, Petey Pete?”

  Pete couldn’t say anything. He just groaned again.

  Justine laughed.

  “I think you understand now why I need you, Pete. I’m going to make you forget all about Megan. You won’t be able to help it. Soon you’ll be obsessed with me. You’ll worship the ground I walk on.”

  Pete whimpered as she massaged his balls. “I…please…”

  “I’m good at that, you know.” She stroked his shaft and licked her lips. “I wrap men around my little finger and make them do whatever I want. You’ll be no different.” She stopped stroking him. “Now say please again.”

  Pete let his head settle back against the warm ground. He stared up at the clear night sky and he thought about Megan, nights they’d lain on a blanket on a beach or in a park and stared up at the same sky, whispering sweet promises to each other in the dark.

  He closed his eyes.

  And he said,“Please.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Something poked him.

  Hoke groaned in protest and rolled onto his side, still asleep. He was immersed in a lovely dream and wanted no part of anything happening in the waking world. In the dream he’d hooked up with the bitch again, that Jessica, and this time he’d turned things around on her. They were back at his house in Nashville, having escaped somehow from the psychos in Hopkins Bend. And she was so grateful. He was her hero. He’d done some kind of amazing goddamn thing to get them out of the clutches of those fucking backwoods retards and mongoloids. Which made total sense to Hoke, who knew full well how much of a badass he was capable of being. Sure, he’d been knocked around by the Kinchers and generally humiliated by Garner, but it’d always been only a matter of time until he went all Chuck Norris on their sorry mutant asses.

  Anyway.

  Jessica…

  Yeah, she was all over him, begging him for forgiveness, offering to do whatever he wanted to make up for being such a bitch. But there are some things a man just can’t let slide. Like being forced into the trunk of his own car at gunpoint. Or being made to apologize and beg for his life out in the middle of nowhere. Things like that gnawed at a man, made him feel kind of like a bitch. A punk. A fucking pussy. So what he did was, he punched her square in the fucking face. Knocked her right on her pretty round ass. Then picked her up and knocked her down again. At some point fisticuffs gave way to rape, as he tore her clothes off and had her every which way a man could have a woman. All of which was a damn good time, but the best bit was happening as he felt something poke his sleeping body a second time…

  He groaned and weakly waved at the thing poking him. “Stop…”

  The dream grew fuzzy around the edges and threatened to disintegrate, but his subconscious clung to it with desperate tenacity.

  In the dream, Jessica was now chained to the Falcon’s rear bumper, and he was dragging her down a wideopen two-lane highway at full speed. She’d screamed and cried out for the first hundred yards, but had since fallen silent. He knew he was now dragging a corpse, but that didn’t lessen his enjoyment. He glanced frequently at the rearview mirror to watch her broken and battered body bounce and roll, leaving a wide red smear all over a ribbon of clean, freshly laid blacktop. And he rode down that shimmering dream highway with a fat cigar wedged into a corner of his mouth, smirking and cackling like a demented movie villain. Yeah, life was good here in dreamland.

  The next poke dug hard into his ribs and jolted him awake. He seized a long pole protruding through slats in the horse-stall gate. The person on the other end of it yelped and let go of it. Hoke pulled the implement close and saw that he was now in possession of an old shovel caked with rust and grime. The handle felt about as sturdy as a blade of grass. He tossed the thing aside with a grunt of disgust and stared into the shifting, formless gloom on the opposite side of the gate. It was too dark to make out details, but he sensed there was more than one person standing outside the stall. He heard it in the subtle variations in breathing patterns, and in the way some patches of darkness seemed deeper and broader than others.

  He sneered and spat a wad of phlegm at the gate. “Y’all enjoyin’ the fuckin’ show?”

  Someone giggled.

  There was a soft exhalation of deeper laughter.

  And a bit of hands-over-mouth unintelligible snickering.

  Hoke grabbed the shovel again and got to his feet with a creak of weary bones. Yeah, the thing was flimsier than a whore’s lingerie, but he could maybe swat somebody’s head with it once, give them a little scare. He hefted the shovel and took a step toward the gate, but stopped cold at the sound of a loud snap in the darkness. A bright light came, bathing the stall’s interior in a glare intense enough to make him squint. He shaded his eyes with a hand over his brow and leaned forward to peer through the slats. There were four of them out there. A girl and three boys, one of them holding a Coleman lantern over his head. He knew the one was a gal only because of her enormous knockers. These were porn-star tits. You could float to Africa on them. But her face looked like something he might have puked onto a sidewalk some night after last call in east Nashville. Everything was misshapen. Gigantic, protruding forehead. Mostly bald scalp with a few tufts of limp, dirty hair clinging to it like scrubgrass on a desert plain. Prominent cheekbones that looked as if they had formed wrong in the womb, twisted in ways cheekbones shouldn’t twist and grown almost too big for the taut yellow skin stretched over them. The vaguely piggish nose was her most attractive feature. Or least vomit inducing. The boys with her looked as if they’d been puked out of the same diseased womb. They were monsters, all of them. And they were all staring at him, leering at him, studying him as if he were a specimen in a zoo cage. One of the boys, the tallest and leanest one, was staring at him with sausagelike lips curled and one hand down his pants, the hand going up and down as he groaned.

  “You sick little bastards.”

  The girl covered her mouth and giggled again.

  Hoke knew he’d only get one shot with the shovel. Miss Nightmare America and the masturbating beanpole were equally tempting targets. The beanpole’s eyes rolled back in his face and a sound like the dying bleat of some big, dumb ra
nge animal issued from his wide-open mouth. He arched his back and his engorged rod shot streams of jizz high into the air, the white liquid flashing almost prettily in the lantern’s brilliant glare.

  Hoke made his decision.

  One way or another, he was taking out the scrawny pervert.

  He hefted the shovel again and moved toward the gate. The little monsters cringed and moved backward. Hoke derived some small satisfaction from seeing the fear evident in their butt-ugly faces. It lasted until he realized their attention was not on him. They huddled against each other, quaking in terror as something from the far end of the barn approached them. A long shadow rose out of the darkness and fell over them, creating the illusion of a capering figure moving between the horse stalls. This was a shadow composed of sticky darkness, a thing blacker than the heart of the darkest primeval night, and it seemed to swallow the light projected by the lantern as it loomed closer.

  Hoke dropped the shovel and backpedaled until his back touched the wall. His heart thumped faster and his knees began to shake. A sick terror began to twist through his innards as he again felt Garner’s malevolent presence. He watched aghast as the oozing blackness engulfed the Kincher children, appearing for a moment to blot them out of existence. The shrill screams that came then belied that impression, and the shadow grew larger, tendrils of blackness writhing in the air surrounding it. The Coleman lantern hit the ground and rolled until it struck the door of another stall. The lantern’s powerful beam reached toward the barn’s roof, illuminating enough of the narrow space between the rows of stalls to afford Hoke a clear picture of what was happening.

  Not that he wanted to see any of it.

  God, no.

  But his eyes stayed open anyway, impelled by some masochistic impulse of the subconscious to watch. Some sick part of his psyche hungry for fresh nightmare material. And even for a man like Hoke, a rapist, a man with barely any kind of functioning conscience at all, the things he saw then struck him as beyond awful. Things no man should ever see. A thick tendril of darkness wound itself around one of the tall boy’s arms, flexed, and ripped the arm from the shoulder. The boy screamed as the limb came loose and blood fountained from the big, ragged wound. The tendril flexed again, and the severed arm went flying through the darkness, landing with a meaty thump inside Hoke’s stall.

  Hoke screamed.

  He covered his eyes, but the same sick, helpless curiosity made him peer between his fingers as the slaughter continued. There were more screams, but these soon petered out, giving way to agonized whimpers and inarticulate pleas for mercy. Hoke heard ripping sounds. More limbs torn from limp, dying bodies, the monster unzipping the flesh of the children. More body parts landed in the stall. The girl’s head hit the wall above him and dropped. Hoke shrieked as the ragged stump bounced off the top of his head and tumbled to the ground. He kicked it away and scuttled sideways into a corner. He winced at the wet splat of organs striking the ground around him. A liver or pancreas hit his knee and slid down his thigh, eliciting another high, girlish shriek from his aching lungs. He moved sideways toward the opposite corner, but there was no escape from the rain of gore. A long loop of intestine sailed into the stall, looking for a moment like a lasso slung by a demented demon cowboy, which was actually not far from the twisted fucking truth. The viscus smacked his face and he brushed it away, crying out again but staying where he was, knowing any further attempt to elude being hit was futile. More than that, it was the whole point of the insane exercise—to bathe him in blood and guts, force him down into the putrid depths of utter depravity. Hoke remembered some of the things Garner had told him earlier. Insane things. Vivid glimpses of hell. Nightmare promises from a monster.

  And on it went.

  Here came a heart.

  A lung.

  More coiled loops of intestine.

  A kidney, a tongue, a hand, an arm, another arm, an eye, a cock, a foot, a shredded stomach, various piles of undefinable glop…

  Hoke buried his face in his hands and waited for the carnage to end.

  It went on.

  More vile things hit him, landed near him.

  Then it ended with an abrupt atmospheric change. The air in the barn felt lighter, no longer charged with the electric sizzle of demonic energy. Hoke opened his mouth and inhaled deeply, sucking in the clean air, grateful for it even as his mind teetered on the brink of an irreversible descent into catatonia. Somehow he managed to stay away from the edge.

  But it was a close thing.

  “Open your eyes.”

  Hoke didn’t want to, but there was no denying that stentorian tone.

  He moved his hands from his face and lifted his head, saw the slender, dark-outlined form of a man on the other side of the gate.

  Garner.

  Hoke swallowed hard and piss dribbled from his flaccid cock.

  He sniffled. “Why me?”

  A grunt. “Right body, right time.”

  Tears streamed from Hoke’s eyes. “What if I help you find someone better? I can get you someone connected in the music industry. Someone with money.” Hoke’s mind scrambled for ideas. He did know some people. Important people. The important ones were more on the level of acquaintances than actual friends, but he felt certain he could get close enough to them to arrange a private audience with Garner. He’d sell out anyone given the chance. His own mother, even. Anyone to take his place in Garner’s scheme. “Come on, brother. Think of what you can do out there with money.”

  A soft exhalation of almost laughter. “I will not want for money. No, you are to be my vessel. Time is short. Too short to procure an acceptable substitute.”

  Hoke wiped snot from his nose and flicked it off his hand. “Shit.”

  He heard the metallic snick of the gate’s latch being pulled back. Then the gate moved inward and Garner stepped into the stall. The Coleman lantern dangled from the fingers of Garner’s left hand, casting garish illumination over the mess on the ground.

  Hoke had to know. “Why’d you kill them that way?”

  “Because I could.”

  Hoke frowned. “Well, shit. That’s some cold motherfucking shit, man. You are not right in the head. But hey, what do I care if you slaughter a gaggle of goddamn retards? Aren’t their folks gonna be out for blood when they get wind of what you’ve done?”

  Garner’s free hand reached into a pocket of his black suit coat and came out with a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He shook the pack and sucked one of the protruding white sticks into a corner of his mouth. He cupped a hand over the cigarette as he lit it. He inhaled deeply and blew out a cloud of pungent smoke. “Ah.” A chuckle. “I do enjoy a good afterglow smoke. Lord Satan granted me dominion over the blighted Kincher clan. They will not retaliate. They will bow and scrape at my feet, as they have done this last century and more.”

  Hoke eyed Garner’s cigarette enviously. “Uh-huh. They’re your bitches.”

  This elicited a deeper rumble of laughter from Garner. “Yes. As are you.”

  He lifted the lantern over his head and light played over the dramatic angles of his face and elongated chin, glinted off the horns protruding from his hairline.

  Hoke shivered.

  He made the sign of the cross and said, “Begone, demon.”

  Garner peered at him curiously. “What was that?”

  “Some shit I saw in a movie once. Some bullshit, apparently.”

  “Get up.”

  There was that undeniable tone of command again. Hoke didn’t bother pleading for mercy or disobeying. The bastard was right. He was Garner’s bitch, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Nothing obvious, anyway.

  His knees popped as he stood and wiped some of the grue from his face and chest. “Sure you want a vessel with early-onset arthritis?”

  Garner turned away from him and walked out of the stall. “Follow me.”

  Hoke followed the demon into the darkness. “Where are we going?”

  Garner’s laughter ca
rried a mocking tone this time. “To meet your new mate. Your blushing bride. The woman of your dreams.”

  “Huh. Is she hot?”

  Garner glanced over his shoulder at Hoke. “By hot I suppose you mean attractive. And that depends on your own peccadilloes. Tell me, have you ever fucked an octopus?”

  A boom of satanic laughter.

  Hoke gulped.

  He prayed for a bolt of lightning to leap from the sky and charbroil him where he stood. He looked up and saw the blinking lights of a jet flying overhead, carrying some lucky assholes far from here, but there were no clouds.

  So it was true what his drunk daddy used to tell him.

  God just didn’t like his sorry ass.

  Garner kept on laughing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Megan sat in a metal folding chair in the center of an empty room. The room was small, about the size of the average walk-in closet. There were no windows, and the white walls were unadorned, with the exception of a few pieces of graffiti scratched into the drywall. LINDA LOVES PUSSY. GOD HELP ME. NO WAY OUT. NO SHIT. And so on. The most interesting was a phone number with an area code Megan knew to be in Manhattan. Below the number was a scrawled, messy plea from someone named Sonia begging anyone with mercy in their souls to call her parents.

  Megan memorized the number.

  She was still handcuffed, but otherwise was unbound. She’d been alone in the room for some five minutes, deposited here while DeMars and one of the Prestons went off somewhere for some last-minute haggling. She got up and walked to the door, tried the knob, and found it locked. No surprise there, but she gave the door a closer inspection. Maybe she could kick it open. But it looked so sturdy. She recalled a video clip she’d seen on YouTube. This guy had been trying to break into some little store well after closing time to steal beer. He kicked the store’s door over and over, each kick more frantic than the last, until the final kick. The security footage of his leg snapping was a hard thing to forget.