Depraved (13 page)

Then she sighed.

“Okay.”

Larry reached for the dashboard lighter and lit his cigarette. “Cool.”

They stayed silent for a while after that.

Jessica stared out the open window on her side, watching the dark blur of trees as the sedan sped down the winding road. She could be making a big mistake by going along with this. Her original thought had been to stuff the guy in the trunk, same as she’d done with Hoke. But this felt right for reasons she couldn’t quite put into words. Reasons based on gut instinct and primal lust, which she supposed were as good as any tonight.

She kept one hand on the gun in her lap.

With the other, she reached for Larry’s knee…

It was full night now.

So she wouldn’t stop saying it.

“Now it’s night. Now you fuck me. Now it’s night. Now you fuck me.”

On her hands and knees, her round ass wiggling in the air as she moved toward him, looking like a predatory alley cat ready to pounce on prey.

“Now it’s night. Now you fuck me. Now it’s night. Now you fuck me.”

Pete backed up, felt the fence against his back.

Looked down, saw her smiling face staring up at him.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Stay away from me.”

Her hand on his crotch, squeezing his hardness through the khaki fabric.

Pete moaned.

Reflected moonlight gleamed in her dark eyes, accentuating madness.

She smiled, licked her chapped lips.

Squeezed him again and reached for his zipper tab.

“Stop!”

Pete shoved her hand away—a hand much softer than he’d expected—and moved sideways away from her, into a corner of the cage.

She laughed and came at him again on all fours.

His fingers curled through the chain-link fencing.

“Please stop…”

More mad laughter. “I can’t wait to feel you inside me. I’m so wet. How do you want to take me first? From behind? On top? You want me to ride you?”

Kneeling at his feet now, soft hand sliding over his crotch again.

Pete whimpered, curled his fingers tighter around the chain-link fencing.

His erection strained the front of his khaki shorts and she gripped it, stroking him through the fabric, the motion soft at first, then harder, twisting his cock and making him cry out.

He cursed his weakness, tried to dampen the arousal by thinking about Megan again, but she seemed far away now, and he stayed hard as the woman manipulated his organ in almost sadistic ways without actually freeing it from its khaki confines. He couldn’t understand why this was happening, or why he was so unable to control his physical response to Justine’s crude seduction techniques.

She had begun to seem more attractive as the light leeched from the sky, the night obscuring the filth, and the glow of the moon highlighting the lush,sensual curves of her body. And something in her naughty mantra,

…now it’s night, now you’ll fuck me…

had worked on him in more subtle ways, slithering into the back of his brain and whispering erotic promises of ecstasy to the most primitive parts of his subconscious. And somehow it began to work, revulsion giving way to desire. So now he was on the verge of giving in completely. He could take some solace in knowing he’d fought this. A tiny, almost infinitesimal amount, but solace nonetheless.

Enough to get through this exercise in degradation anyway.

The zipper was down now, the button of his shorts open. She yanked his shorts down and drew him fast into her warm mouth. Pete gasped, arched his back, and screwed his eyes shut. Her head bobbed up and down, her tongue doing things to him Megan didn’t know how to do; then her mouth came away from him and he cried out again.

He opened his eyes and looked down at her.

She was on her back now, on the ground, legs spread wide, one hand flexing between her legs, another tweaking the erect nipple of a breast.

She lifted her head to look at him. “Now it’s night…”

His nostrils flared. “…and now I’ll fuck you.”

He stepped out of his shorts and fell upon her.

The first thrust was among the most glorious things he’d ever felt. Later he might feel only disgust at his weakness. But right now, in this moment, fucking this insane stranger was all he cared about. She growled and wrapped her legs around him. Her nails raked bloody grooves across his muscled back. He took her breasts into his mouth, licked and nipped at the hard nipples. They changed positions twice, and he wound up spurting deep inside her as he banged away at her from behind. But that wasn’t the end of it. She shoved him to the ground and sat on his face.

That went on for a while.

When it was over, she dismounted and lay beside him, curling a soft leg around his midsection. Her breath was warm against his ear as she whispered,“Good?”

He shivered and sighed. He swallowed thickly. “Yes. Good.”

She walked slender fingers across the sweat-matted hair on his chest. “The Preston boys fuck me sometimes. They’re not good. I don’t get off at all.”

“Uh-huh.”

Pete just didn’t know what to say to that. It grossed him out to know his captors had also invaded the same warm space he’d just enjoyed. All this aside from the disturbing revelation that her primary complaint regarding their abuse of her was their inability to make her come. Which was a sobering reminder of how very cracked Justine’s mind had become during her time in captivity. She’d probably been mentally ill before she was abducted, though he couldn’t know that for certain. He didn’t know anything about her, really, beyond how very good she’d felt squirming beneath him. Yes, it had been good. He hadn’t lied about that at all. Hell, it had been maybe the most intense sexual experience of his young life. He could be honest about that, at least. But he felt like shit for allowing it to happen. He loved Megan, and he had betrayed her.

Justine moved her leg, and her silken thigh slid over his crotch. He felt a fresh stirring of arousal. Pete knew they would be at it again very soon. His guilty conscience would not prevent that. Again, he felt shame for his moral failings. But in these circumstances, locked in a cage and likely facing a very grim future, shame would not override lust. He might never be free again, might not even be alive much longer, but in this moment, right now, a warm human body was pressed against his in the dark.

She placed a finger on his chin, gently turned his face toward hers. “What are you thinking about, Petey Pete?”

“Things.”

She giggled. “What things?”

He hesitated at first, not knowing how much of his inner turmoil he should share with her. Some of it involved feelings that should remain private no matter what, but he was also unsure of whether he wanted to talk about anything of substance with Justine. Any amount of real emotional intimacy could lead to some pretty heavy
complications down the road. In the end, though, he just couldn’t help himself. There were all these thoughts rattling around in his head, a clamor of conflicting voices, and they screamed for release.

“I was thinking about my girlfriend. Her name is Megan.” His voice cracked slightly on her name, but he cleared his throat and went on. “I shouldn’t have let this happen. I betrayed her.”

Justine wasn’t smiling now. Her eyes no longer sparkled with off-kilter amusement. “I’m your girlfriend now.”

Pete sighed. “No, Justine. You’re not. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.” He saw her expression harden and scrambled for words that would assuage her feelings. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad this happened. You made me feel good for a while, and that’s no small thing considering what’s happened to us. And, hell, I’ll probably never see Megan again.”

Justine’s stony expression didn’t change. “I am very stable and normal when I have my medication. I’ve been without it for a month.”

Pete was surprised at how lucid she’d become. “Well…I’m sure that’s true, but—”

“In the real world, in my real life, men chase after me.”

“I believe you, but—”

“I have a good job. And a degree from Wellesley. I’m smart and successful.”

Pete squinted,studied her expression closely. He detected no hints of subterfuge or delusion. “Okay. I do believe you. But I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

Her expression softened a little and she moved her face closer to his. “I’m saying you are not bound to your girlfriend. She is not your wife. And if you get me out of here, there is no good reason why you would not choose me over her.”

Her lips were so close now they were almost touching his.

Pete desperately wanted to kiss her.

But he made himself say, “We live together. We love each other. Maybe we don’t have a legal document proclaiming us man and wife, but we are bound together nonetheless.”

“Such a pretty speech.”

Pete shook his head. “It’s not just a speech. It’s—”

“The Prestons ate my fiancé.”

Pete blinked slowly. “What?”

Justine shifted her body. Her breasts pressed against his chest, her thigh angled against his crotch. “They stretched him out on a big table and made me watch while they chopped off his arms and legs. He was still alive when they did this.”

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.”

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 range 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
bull
shit, 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 carried 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.