by Bryan Smith
Abby bristled inwardly.
Her house?
As if Ma was dead already.
As if she had already assumed ownership of the Maynard legacy.
Abby lowered her head and charged her sister, her mouth open wide, as a roar of pure fury tore out of her lungs. Laura stood paralyzed in open-mouthed shock for a moment. But only for a moment. She turned and ran for the stairs, hit the bottom step in about a second and ascended the first few steps quickly. Abby let out another yell as she hit the staircase and pounded up the steps after her. Laura glanced over her shoulder as she reached the top of the staircase and screamed at the look of murderous rage on her sister’s face. She banged through the door and tried to slam it shut, but Abby rammed her shoulder against the old and brittle wood. The door creaked and splintered, flew to pieces as Abby barreled into the tight space of the pantry. Laura screamed again as she flew through the door to the kitchen and tried the door-shutting tactic again. She undoubtedly meant to lock Abby inside and keep her there until Ma or someone else returned.
But Abby would not be stopped.
She had a destiny to meet.
With Michelle.
Nothing could get in the way of that.
Abby smashed through the door an instant before it could close. Laura screamed again and staggered backward as Abby bulled her way into the kitchen. Her butt met the edge of the dinner table, and she let out a strangled yelp as Abby closed the rest of the distance between. Abby’s fist shot forward and slammed into Laura’s soft midsection, bending her over at the waist.
Laura wheezed and looked up at her through eyes misty with tears.
Eyes bright with shock and fear.
Abby’s fist came down again.
Laura’s nose yielded with an audible snap beneath the heavy blow. Blood gushed from her nostrils as she spun away from the table and hit the floor. All coherent thought left Abby’s mind then. Abby was gone during that time. In her place was a savage thing made of fury and violence. She straddled Laura and pinned her to the floor. Her fists rained down again and again. Endlessly. A blur of motion as Laura’s lips turned to pulp beneath the blows. A few teeth came loose from her gums and her mouth filled with blood. And still the blows kept coming. Abby didn’t feel the punishment her fists were absorbing. It was as if she had blocks of steel welded to her wrists.
She had no idea how much time had gone by when she finally stopped hitting her sister. Maybe a minute or two. Maybe ten or fifteen. It hardly mattered by then. Laura was still alive. A blood bubble at a corner of her mouth popped as a weak breath rolled out. But her eyes were glassy and unseeing.
The bitch wasn’t going anywhere.
Abby got slowly, shakily to her feet.
She took a look around the kitchen.
There.
The big meat tenderizer.
She grabbed it from a hook on the wall and settled herself atop Laura again. She didn’t do anything right away. She watched Laura’s eyes. Waited for them to focus and look at her. Waited for her to see what was happening to her.
Laura’s vision seemed to clear at last.
She looked at Abby.
“Please…”
Abby snarled and raised the heavy steel tenderizer over her head.
Laura shook her head weakly. “No…please…”
Abby’s hand came down.
Steel cracked against skull.
There were more blows.
A lot of them.
When it was over, Abby washed her hands with soap and a jug of water. She felt strangely calm and still didn’t feel quite like herself. Maybe that was because she wasn’t the same person she’d been just a few minutes ago. She’d undergone yet another change. She knew now what she was capable of doing to get what she wanted.
What she was capable of was anything at all.
I’m getting what I want, she thought.
I really fucking am, and nothing can stop me.
She returned to her sister’s limp body and knelt to seize it by the wrists.
Then she began to drag it toward the splintered pantry door and the cellar beyond.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Somewhere around the end of the third or fourth time Justine coerced him to hardness yet again and had her way with him, Pete happened to look at just the right section of darkness beyond the pen and saw that they had an audience. A lean figure stood several feet away, watching them from the shadows. The rear of the house was some thirty yards from the cages, too far away for the back porch light to illuminate the person’s face. Pete’s first thought was the voyeur was Carl, but no, the dark-outlined figure was too short to be that son of a bitch. This guy had to be the third Preston brother, the one whose name he didn’t know. He stretched his neck and squinted his eyes in an effort to make out more detail, and instantly regretted it. He couldn’t see the man’s hands, but judging by the frantic motion of his right arm, one of them was at his crotch, going up and down like a piston. Pete felt sick. The redneck bastard was jerking off. He wanted to yell at the guy, tell him to stop being such a goddamn pervert, but what was the use? The asshole would just do what he wanted anyway. And he might get mad.
Pete didn’t want him mad.
God, no.
Justine’s vivid account of her boyfriend’s mutilation and murder was always right at the edges of his thoughts, even as she was in the midst of fucking him half-blind, like now. He didn’t want to wind up like that. But it seemed inevitable. And every time he thought that, a black hole seemed to open in his heart. Christ, but he didn’t want to die, and especially not like that. He was too young. There was still so much to do. So many adventures still to be had. It wasn’t fair. And worse, he knew too well how it would go down. He would beg. Plead. He would cry. Promise anything. And they would laugh at him. Taunt him. And then introduce him to a level of pain he’d never imagined could exist.
Justine clamped a hand around his chin and forced him to look at her.
She was on top of him, her body undulating as she rode him. He watched her breasts bounce as his hard-on throbbed inside her. She smiled and her hand went to his throat, closed tight around it, cutting off his air. Pete wheezed. The instinctive panic he’d felt the first several times she’d done this hit him again. But after a few moments, she relaxed her grip and he sucked in hard, filling his lungs with sweet, glorious air. She laughed. She laughed every time she did that. It was scary. But he couldn’t bring himself to make her stop. And why should that be a surprise? She’d already proven many times how thoroughly powerless he was against her.
She slapped him and laughed again.
Pete’s whole body ached. She’d used and abused him beyond the normal limits of what he thought he could endure. Had he thought this was their third or fourth go-round? It was hard to be sure. The evening had been little more than a blur of sweaty, seemingly endless sex. So he had kind of lost count. This could be the fifth time they’d been at it. Hell, the sixth. Who the fuck knew? It was crazy. He was as horny as the average guy his age. He had a healthy libido. But prior to tonight, he would not have thought it possible to get back in the saddle so many damn times in one night. But the girl had magic fucking fingers. Every time he came, she’d let him rest for a very short while, then go to work on him again. God…the things she could do with her fingers, mouth, and tongue. He thought of what Megan was like in bed. Good. Very good.
But nothing like this.
Not even close.
The sting of betrayal he felt every time his thoughts went in this direction was less severe every time. This time it hardly hurt at all. Justine had said she could make men do what she wanted. She could wrap any man around her little finger. Perhaps she hadn’t been exaggerating. So what did that mean? That he belonged to her now? He had to be as crazy as she was to even toy with the idea.
Justine slapped him again. “Do you like it when I hit you?”
Pete gulped, looked up into her glittering eyes. “Y-yes.”
&nbs
p; “You see? You’re already mine.”
Pete didn’t argue. Why bother?
The rhythm of her writhing body slowed to an exquisite grind. Pete moaned and screwed his eyes shut, arched his back toward her.
Then he heard something.
A scrape of metal against metal.
He frowned and thought, What was—
Justine yelped as she was ripped away from Pete and thrown to the ground several feet away. Pete lay there panting, his mind a whirl of confusion as he struggled to figure out what was going on. Then he sat up and saw the Preston brother standing in the center of the cage with his back to him. He was fumbling with the fly of his jeans and advancing on Justine, who screeched and scooted backward into a corner. The dogs in the other cages howled and leaped against the chain-link fencing, making it rattle loudly. Pete glanced toward the house and the closed back door, expecting to see it swing open any second as one of the other Prestons came out to investigate the racket. But that didn’t happen. The door stayed shut and no other lights came on inside the house.
Pete’s attention shifted abruptly to something else.
The gate. It was open.
This was his chance to make a run for it. He had no choice but to give it a shot. He got to his hands and knees, felt his toes curl into the dry ground, his leg muscles tensing like those of a sprinter in the last seconds before the report of the starting gun. Freedom was just six feet away. He could get out of here and find Megan. They could get away from this place and back to the lives these fuckers had tried to steal from them. A voice from the back of his mind screamed at him to go, but he couldn’t make himself do it.
Not yet.
He found himself staring at Justine. She was still in the corner, unable to retreat any farther. The Preston brother had his pants down around his ankles and was kicking them off. In another moment or so, he’d drop to his knees and ram himself into her. The man was clearly a prisoner of lust, perhaps had been driven mad with it as he watched Justine do those amazing things with her body. Pete could hardly blame the guy. Watching that would drive any man mad. Mad enough to be careless.
Pete got to his feet and approached the man as stealthily as he could from behind. He was only a few feet away when the man dropped to his knees and leaned toward Justine. Pete let out a roar and launched himself at him, wrapping a muscular forearm around his throat and wrenching him away from her. He rode the man to the ground and shifted his arm so that the crook of his elbow was against the front of the man’s throat. The man screamed and thrashed, but Pete locked his arm in place by gripping his upraised wrist with his other hand. From there it was only a matter of keeping his grip in place and steadily increasing the pressure. The man’s struggles soon began to abate and finally ceased altogether. Pete kept the pressure on for an additional minute to be sure the guy was really gone. Then he let out a big breath and let go of him. He rolled the man over and stared for a moment at his still features, then sighed.
Then the enormity of what he’d done hit him.
It rocked him, made him feel faint for a moment.
Holy fuck, he thought.
I just killed a man.
He felt a strange twist of grief deep in his guts, but that didn’t last long. He remembered where he was and what these redneck fucks had done to him. And then he felt nothing but anger and a rising sense of righteousness.
Fuck this guy, he thought.
Burn in hell, asshole.
Justine was on her feet now.
She came over and spat in the dead man’s face. “Pig. You deserved to die.”
Pete looked at her. “Truer words have never been spoken.We’re getting out of here.”
Justine smiled.
Then she threw her arms around him and hugged him so hard he couldn’t breathe for a moment, which of course reminded him of what he’d done to the Preston brother. He disengaged himself from her and said, “Yeah, I’m happy, too. But we don’t have time to fuck around.”
Justine nodded. “Yes. There’ll be lots of time for fucking later.”
This girl, she had a one-track mind.
Not that he minded.
He found his clothes and hurriedly put them on. Then he clasped hands with Justine and they walked out of the cage, leaving the dead man alone with the howling dogs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The place was like goddamn Green Acres gone straight to fucking hell. Check that. Gone to hell and turned inside out. And in this Bizarro World version, Eddie Albert was getting ass-raped day and night and smoking crack round the clock just to fucking cope and deal. There were loose chickens clucking and pecking at things on the ground. An old hound dog loped alongside Garner, big pink tongue lolling out of its slobbery mouth. Various young members of the Kincher clan were just hanging out. He saw teenagers lounging sullenly on a rusted-out tractor. They were all ugly as original sin, but this one boy sitting in the tractor’s seat made the rest of them look like pinup models. His head was the size of a pumpkin. A big pumpkin. But his face had this sort of mashed-in look, as if a couple of guys had worked him over with Louisville Sluggers. One eye was at least an inch higher than the other, and a thick white pus wept from the other. The boy didn’t have a nose, at least not in the usual sense. There were some holes the size of peas in the center of his swollen, diseased-looking features. Hoke guessed the poor bastard breathed through them. The boy’s bloated lips twisted and formed the most grotesque smile Hoke had ever seen.
Hoke shivered. “Goddamn. That boy got thumped with the ugly stick so hard the ugly stick done broke. Am I right?”
Garner chuckled. “You admire my work, then?”
“I don’t know if admire is the right word, but brother, when you set out to put your blight on a bunch of folks, you sure don’t fuck around. Got to give you that.”
Another chuckle. “You haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until you meet Gladys.”
“Who the fuck is Gladys?”
“Ah, how soon we forget. Gladys is the Kincher matriarch. She is one hundred and seventy-nine years old.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Have I lied to you yet?”
“Uh…no. Guess you haven’t, at that.” Hoke frowned. “So…Whoa, hold on. How does anyone—and I mean anyone other than demon folk like you—get to be one hundred and seventy-nine motherfucking years old?”
By now they had reached the front porch of a house markedly different from the other ramshackle dwellings he’d seen as the Kinchers steered him through the woods to this place. For one thing, it wasn’t a cabin. It was an actual house. Not a new one, granted, but a house nonetheless. Looked like it dated from maybe the middle of the twentieth century, which made it brand spanking new compared to the fucking hovels the other inbred fucks in these parts called home. There was an old-fashioned television antenna on the roof. It was listing to one side and looked ready to fall over. With the advent of digital-only broadcasting, the thing was way obsolete, but it was at least indication of the presence of semimodern technology. Seeing it made him feel a little less like he’d been transported back in time to some hellish version of pioneer days. He was also able to detect the soft glow of electric lights through the gauze of chintzy curtains hanging over the grimy windows.
Garner climbed the two steps to the porch and turned to gaze down at him. “I am not a demon.”
“Uh-huh. Then what’s with the fucking horns?”
“I am a human-demon hybrid.”
“Right. Okay. Wow. Everything makes sense now.”
Garner’s head tilted to one side in a quizzical expression. “Oh? Good. I’m glad you’re catching on.”
Hoke rolled his eyes. “That was sarcasm, man. None of this makes sense to me. Not one little bit of it. You say you’re gonna use me as your vessel. Take over my body and use it to get around out in the real world where they ain’t used to seeing human-demon hybrids every damn day. I get that. Don’t like it, but I understand. The concept, I mean. The actual process of
making that happen…shit, I don’t even wanna think about it. But what I totally don’t get at all is how a demon could mate with a human and produce a viable offspring. You’d think them damn horns would rip a broad’s womb right the fuck up.”
A corner of Garner’s mouth tilted upward. “It’s true. A demon may rut with a human woman, but viable offspring is not possible.”
“So what the fuck, man?”
“I was human once upon a time. I told you before, my people had trouble with the Kinchers long ago.”
Hoke smirked. “Yeah, way back in the old-timey days. Hey, man. Did you have your very own horse-drawn carriage?”
“I did.”
Hoke laughed. “Far the fuck out, man.”
“Indeed.”
Garner’s smile was broader now. He looked genuinely amused. And in an almost benign way, too. Talking to him like this, it was almost like shooting the shit with a buddy over drinks at a bar. You could almost forget the real truth about the dude for a few moments.
Hoke’s mind flashed back to the rain of blood and body parts in the horse stall.
Almost forget.
Garner’s expression abruptly sobered. “My clan was new to the area. This was a short while after the states war. There was a land dispute. We staked a legitimate, legal claim. Money was paid, and all the right documents filed with the local government. But the Kinchers claimed the land was theirs and vowed to keep it regardless of what some piece of paper said. We tried moving in anyway. One night the Kinchers raided our camp. They took my wife and daughter. They raped and tortured them. My wife died, but my daughter escaped. She came home minus an eye and several fingers. She woke up screaming every night until I put her out of her misery with a dose of arsenic in her tea.”
Hoke’s face had turned pale. “Damn, bro. No wonder you went medieval on their asses.”
One of Garner’s blood-red cheeks twitched. More than a century and a half had passed since the atrocity he described had been committed, but the anger was still there, simmering just beneath the surface. “I knew no ordinary form of justice would suffice. I went down to New Orleans and consulted with a witch doctor.”