Lena pressed her lips to Lexi’s cunt and shivered with the first taste. It was like taking a bite of some exotic food for the very first time. The type of thing you eat and think, I could have this every day.
It felt like her orgasm had never even ended. She wasn’t going to delude herself into thinking she had a long life stretching out before her, but if the remaining minutes or hours or days could feel like this, she’d take it.
Grant moved behind her and stroked the back of her head.
Dear God, was she actually crying?
The tears mingled with the blood and she greedily continued to drink it. This was everything she didn’t want to be—the crazy, emotional woman crouched in front of her trough of food—but she didn’t care. Didn’t give a fuck. There were no judgments here. She and the guys, they were all one now, united against the outside world.
She continued sucking and lapping at Lexi’s vagina, afraid the blood would run out before she’d gotten her fill. She felt it make a warm trail down her throat and into her stomach, the endorphins inside her flooding her brain, keeping her insides buzzing.
When she reached her fill, she went nearly limp, placing her hands on Lexi’s bare knees to keep herself from sinking to the floor.
After giving her a few moments to collect herself, Grant helped her to her feet and she stumbled over to Edward, who held her while Grant crouched to feed.
Despite everything that had happened earlier, the eagerness with which Grant kneeled to partake of Lexi’s blood surprised him. But it shouldn’t have. This was what he was meant to do. This was all part of the ritual that had been laid out to him all those years ago. Just like violating Lucas’s corpse had been. It wasn’t sick or wrong if it had to happen. It wasn’t like he really had a choice. This was just what he and the others had to do if they wanted to make themselves whole again. Something had brought them together in the first place and something had brought them together now. They were stronger when they were together. They should have never gone their separate ways. They could have been so happy.
The blood coated his lips and his tongue and he felt more focused and present than he could remember. He searched his brain for Debbie but couldn’t find her. Of course not. She was afraid because they were coming for her. She knew she didn’t have that much longer.
As though to hasten the hunt, Grant drank faster and faster until he was nearly sick.
When he could not imagine taking another drop, he stood and looked at Shawn, who was holding the hand of his now dead wife.
Shawn held Lexi’s hand and stroked her cheek. Her eyes had closed some time ago and he’d felt her cheek gradually cool to the touch. She’d been so feverish before.
This wasn’t the way he’d imagined it ending between them, but it was probably for the best. Before she’d shut her eyes for good, he’d seen the recognition there. It was like she’d seen and realized all the times he’d lied to her, all the times he’d pretended to be happy, all the times he’d welcomed her back to his bed when he just wanted her to go away.
Was this why he’d held on to her? Was it because he was too lazy to move forward or because he knew he would need her for this exact moment? To be the sacrifice for him and his deranged friends?
He finally let go of her hand, the only warmth that which her dead body had stolen from him, and moved down her body.
Before kneeling, he took all of her in. This would be the last time he saw her like this. He fought the urge to strip off her shirt so she would be completely naked. So he could see her that way one last time.
Something twitched in her stomach and that only proved to Shawn that what they were doing was right.
He didn’t know why they had all doubted Grant. He was the one who knew. He was the observer.
Now, of course, it made perfect sense.
They’d had to fuck Lucas’s corpse so they could inseminate the vessel. If that thing they’d seen the one night were to be born again, then they had to create it. It wasn’t an immaculate conception.
He didn’t know how it had ended up in Lexi and didn’t really care. That wasn’t important.
The important thing was that it was here now.
He kneeled to drink from her. It would be his job to empty her out.
He licked and suckled her more lovingly than the others had. For him this was familiar territory and it was the last goodbye. Never again would he get the chance to do this.
There was something both familiar and exotic about the fluids he took into his mouth.
He sucked and sucked until she was dry, his big belly filling with her essence.
He continued sucking, as though he could pull the flesh from her bones and keep her locked inside himself.
“Shawn,” Lena said, “I don’t think there’s anything left.”
He didn’t want to stop. Didn’t think he should have to.
But Lena was right.
There wasn’t anything left.
Nothing left anywhere.
And there were other important things to do.
They’d come here for a reason.
He stood up and looked down between Lexi’s legs, her vagina now licked clean.
A face stared back at him.
The face continued pushing itself out of Lexi’s vagina.
It was the face he’d seen many years before.
He stood rooted in terror, even though this was something he should have expected.
The thing made a mess of Lexi’s crotch as it tore free.
Before he could move, the thing, not much larger than an infant, sprang from Lexi onto Shawn’s chest.
He staggered back, trying to get a grip on it so he could pull it from his body but it felt . . . hot. Like touching the eye of an active stove.
Before he could even scream, the thing’s mouth had latched onto his throat and, being so close to his ears, Shawn heard its teeth punch through the skin and the cords and tendons hiding within him.
Then he felt himself going down and the last thing he thought was, “It was all for nothing.”
Edward turned to bolt toward the sliding doors, but Grant grabbed his arm.
“No!” Grant said. “We have to stick together.”
Edward wrested his arm from Grant.
“Well let’s stick together outside,” he said.
Lena stalked around the island and grabbed a butcher knife from the block near the refrigerator.
Didn’t seem like a bad idea. Edward grabbed one too. It was a lot narrower and a lot less menacing. Following suit, Grant grabbed one, as well. It looked like a bread knife. Edward didn’t know how much good it would do.
They turned their attention back to the thing feeding on Shawn. Edward swore it looked like it was getting bigger as it did so. Now maybe the size of a sturdy toddler.
He made the mistake of glancing back at Lexi. He still didn’t know how that thing had come from her. Was it possible it had been in Shawn and he’d somehow passed it onto Lexi? Had it somehow been in all of them?
He watched as the thing munched away on Shawn, as greedily as they’d each drunk from Lexi. He felt paralyzed, tethered, like he couldn’t get away even if he wanted to.
Lena was the first to lead the charge. She took a step in the direction of the thing, the knife quavering in front of her.
Edward still wanted to run. There was no way they were going to beat this thing. Especially now that they were diminished by one. That was what it was supposed to be about, right? Them together? They were only complete when it was the four of them.
No, he told himself. That’s how the thing had gotten this far. It was in his head. It had been in his head all these years, as something more tangible than a bad memory. It had been in all their heads. He had no doubt about that now. Of course it had. Suppressing the bad memories. Because if any of them had remembered what had happened that night in its entirety, not one of them would have come back. They would have just formed an online support group or something. Or continu
ed living their lives as they had been, keeping the memories tamped down, pressing forward with whatever sad shape their lives would have ended up taking.
Edward moved to Lena’s right. Grant moved forward next to Edward. There were three of them and one of it. Safety in numbers. He nearly laughed at the thought.
“What do you want from us?” Lena said.
Edward knew there wouldn’t be any response because there weren’t any rational answers. Or the answer would be the most textbook, rational explanation upheld by the history of everything: People are born and sometimes they have shitty wiring and some good things happen to them and some bad things happen to them and then they die, often in ridiculous ways.
The thing stopped feeding long enough to turn and look at them.
Why hadn’t they immediately fallen on it, plunged their knives in, cutting and rending it to pieces?
Edward was pretty sure the thing was staring at him.
Looking back at the thing, he saw both the creature he’d freed all those years ago and the semblance of something else.
Someone else.
Shawn.
The fucking thing had eaten of his flesh, drank his blood, and stolen whatever life he’d had left.
This made Edward so inexplicably crazy he was ready to charge forward, knife at the ready.
Then the thing began talking to him as it had the one night.
The night the thing had promised it wouldn’t hurt him.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt Shawn either,” Edward said.
“Huh?” Grant said.
Edward ignored Grant, doing everything he could to focus in on the swelling creature. His head felt hot, like his brain was filling up with something. The thing continued speaking in a tone Edward found almost soothing.
A warning bell went off in his thoughts.
He shouldn’t be listening to this thing.
“Everything you say is a lie.” Even as he said it, he didn’t know if he believed it.
The thing finally released itself from Shawn and Edward looked down at his expired friend only . . . he wasn’t dead.
Edward watched him writhe around on the floor and slowly sit up.
He couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The thing continued whispering to him.
Edward began walking toward Shawn.
“Edward!” Lena called. “What the fuck—”
Edward turned and charged at her, plunging the knife deep into her throat, doing exactly what Shawn begged of him. He pulled it free, a spray of blood jetting out and coating his naked torso in sticky warmth.
Grant made a panicked, whimpering sound and Edward turned toward the thing, toward Shawn . . . who lay dead and mangled on the floor.
The creature was not in sight.
Edward heard Lena’s body hit the floor and, somewhere very far away, laughter.
“What did you do?” Grant said. He still held the knife and now looked at Lena’s body, writhing as it bled out.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
Edward slumped to the floor, horrified at what he’d done.
The tears came in great racking sobs.
The sounds in his head were jumbled nonsense. There was no way to shape them. No way to form them.
He held the knife to his right ear and plunged it in deep.
THIRTY-THREE
Grant didn’t know what to do. He placed his knife down on the island with a dull click. It wouldn’t do any good.
He turned to look at his dead friends surrounding him. In one respect, he saw it as something of a delayed reaction. Wasn’t this what he imagined happening when he aimed his car at that tree? Couldn’t he see it? Couldn’t he see their mangled teenage bodies being pulled from the wreck of his car and zipped into body bags?
No.
Because he hadn’t been thinking anything at the time. His mind had been a blank.
Was that the first time he remembered that blankness? The first time he’d felt the sliding and the shift?
Yes.
But it wasn’t the last.
He remembered being in the kitchen with his mother while she sliced an apple. Then he’d gone blank and when he tuned back in, she was holding her bloody finger in a paper towel and staring at him like it was his fault.
Whatever was inside him, it liked pain. Grant didn’t like to see people hurt. So he’d started hurting himself.
And here he thought he’d been giving his mind over to someone named Debbie. Turned out, maybe, that he was Debbie, or something like her, going into people’s minds, whispering to them.
He tried to shake this thought away.
It was ridiculous.
Irrational.
Absurd.
A delusion of grandeur.
He’d seen the thing that caused the carnage around him. He’d seen the thing that had hovered around Lena and Lucas as they’d fucked. He’d felt it inside Lucas’s corpse, tasted it in Lexi’s fluids. Of course he had. That’s why he’d come to this house. Lucas had never left Twin Springs either. He had been right under his nose the entire time. It wasn’t until Lena had strangled the life out of Lucas that the others chose to believe. Of course they had. So none of them would have felt guilty for what Lena had done. Oh, sure, good old Grant could drive them all into a tree of his own volition but pretty little Lena couldn’t kill someone unless it was vital to some grand ritual. So he wasn’t the most stable person on the planet. Grant wasn’t a killer. The killers, the monsters existed in the blank spots. That was the real fuck of it, wasn’t it? They didn’t want you to know what they were doing so it was just like, boom, and out go the lights, like freezing the consciousness of the world so they can just hop around and do whatever it is they want to do.
And now Grant had seen one.
They all had.
It wasn’t his fault he was the only one left to do anything about it.
He was going to find that thing—that Debbie or that creature or demon or whatever the hell it was—and show the world. They needed to know things like this existed. Then maybe he’d admit himself back into the hospital and see if they could make the blank spaces go away, stop the shift from happening. The blank spaces left him feeling incomplete and he was tired of feeling that way. Not to mention this sense of incompleteness was going to be intensified now that all of his childhood friends were dead. That . . . that was really something that was going to take a lot of talking through.
But this search for meaning or sense of purpose or whatever would have to be his, like, immediate driving factor, because even as he stood here, the thing was getting farther and farther away and he needed to find it, needed to catch it, maybe even needed to kill it just so he could prove to the world or whatever that these things exist.
Maybe he should put on clothes.
No.
This was more important than clothes.
There was no time to put on clothes.
He wondered if he should search the house first.
No.
That would be ridiculous.
Its work in the house was already done unless it came back for Grant but, he didn’t know, he wasn’t terribly afraid of that. He felt immune or something. That was probably it. That was probably why he was the only one to have the foresight to get all of them back together although, okay, looking at the pools of blood surrounding him, that maybe hadn’t worked out so well for them. But he felt pretty sure it was the blank spots that had given him this clarity, which really let him focus in on the things the others had been afraid to talk about.
Still, clarity or not, he was done with the blanking out.
He wanted his whole brain back.
But first, everyone needed to know the truth.
There was a demon stalking the world and its name was Natalie.
Grant walked toward the sliding doors, opened them, and went searching for the thing.
Other Grindhouse Press Titles
#666__Satanic Summer by Andersen Prun
ty
#039__Cockblock by C.V. Hunt
#037__Irrationalia by Andersen Prunty
#036__Full Brutal by Kristopher Triana
#035__Office Mutant by Pete Risley
#034__Death Pacts and Left-Hand Paths by John Wayne Comunale
#033__Home Is Where the Horror Is by C.V. Hunt
#032__This Town Needs A Monster by Andersen Prunty
#031__The Fetishists by A.S. Coomer
#030__Ritualistic Human Sacrifice by C.V. Hunt
#029__The Atrocity Vendor by Nick Cato
#028__Burn Down the House and Everyone In It by Zachary T. Owen
#027__Misery and Death and Everything Depressing by C.V. Hunt
#026__Naked Friends by Justin Grimbol
#025__Ghost Chant by Gina Ranalli
#024__Hearers of the Constant Hum by William Pauley III
#023__Hell’s Waiting Room by C.V. Hunt
#022__Creep House: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#021__Other People’s Shit by C.V. Hunt
#020__The Party Lords by Justin Grimbol
#019__Sociopaths In Love by Andersen Prunty
#018__The Last Porno Theater by Nick Cato
#017__Zombieville by C.V. Hunt
#016__Samurai Vs. Robo-Dick by Steve Lowe
#015__The Warm Glow of Happy Homes by Andersen Prunty
#014__How To Kill Yourself by C.V. Hunt
#013__Bury the Children in the Yard: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#012 __Return to Devil Town (Vampires in Devil Town Book Three) by Wayne Hixon
#011__Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#010__King of the Perverts by Steve Lowe
#009__Sunruined: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#008__Bright Black Moon (Vampires in Devil Town Book Two) by Wayne Hixon
#007__Hi I’m a Social Disease: Horror Stories by Andersen Prunty
#006__A Life On Fire by Chris Bowsman
#005__The Sorrow King by Andersen Prunty
#004__The Brothers Crunk by William Pauley III
#003__The Horribles by Nathaniel Lambert
#002__Vampires in Devil Town by Wayne Hixon
Irrationalia Page 16