by Jim Goforth
Even if she did manage to free herself from her manacles she wasn't going to get very far in the way of escaping.
Right underneath her body laid a square section of floor from which a plethora of steel spikes jutted, straight up like giant rows of shark teeth.
Yanking free of the handcuffs would cause the tortured woman to drop right down onto the spike belt and impale herself in multiple places.
Either she wasn't aware of this nasty little trap beneath her feet or she was determined to drop herself upon the spikes and end the torture for good.
Corey had seen quite enough; sick to the stomach he wrenched his head away.
"Jesus Christ," he moaned. "What the fuck have we got ourselves into?"
"A fucking trap that's what." Tim hissed, his eyes angry slits of rage and loathing. "Those fucking bitches knew full well what they were sending us off to do. Well, fuck that, no pussy is good enough to die for. We're getting the fuck out of here, right now!"
"What is it?" Asked Lee, the only one of the trio yet to have observed the atrocity inside.
"Don't worry, you don't wanna see." Corey assured him.
"Let's go, fuck this." Tim was adamant.
"What about those girls? We can't just leave them."
"Fuck them." Tim was unrepentant. "Let those traitorous Goth bitches get their own friends out. Fucking using us like lambs to the slaughter."
Then Lee decided to take a peek inside and after that all hell broke loose.
Corey didn't exactly know what it was that Lee was expecting to witness, but he'd scarcely hunkered down by the gapped window and placed an eye to it before he jumped back away from it as though he'd scalded himself badly on a sizzling hotplate.
Caught in an awkward position, his sudden movement away from the window carried him over backwards and he landed with a solid thump atop a long rusting section of corrugated iron.
The ensuing noise was immediate and in the quiet still of the night sounded absolutely deafening.
Lee spouted a string of muffled panicked expletives as did Tim who grabbed Lee by the hands, bodily wrenching him up to his feet.
"Come on, get up, we gotta get out!" Tim spat.
A back door in the hovel slammed open, a commotion of noise issuing from inside; confused chattering in some unidentified alien language, hoarse shouting.
Corey stood frozen like a deer in the headlights as the Plebs, disturbed in the midst of their grotesque torture flooded out.
"Corey!" Tim was bellowing in a stentorian roar. "Move! Fucking run!"
Corey couldn't run, he couldn't move. He felt literally paralyzed as he gazed in abject horror at the monstrosities swarming out of the Pleb house.
He couldn't exactly tell just what the hell they were.
They were vaguely man-shaped with hulking shoulders and long muscular arms, but their horrendous faces appeared to be more simian with big flat squashed in noses, low heavy brows and thick black lips.
Some of them appeared to possess thick, wiry, black tufts of hair on top of their primate like craniums, but the majority were bald.
All of them looked as though they were armed with everything from knives, and hammers to rudimentary clubs, and they were all mostly clad in roughly hewn clothing.
Though blood spattered overalls looked incredibly absurd on their large cumbersome bodies it didn't decrease their frightening appearance any.
Corey continued to stand frozen as they swarmed towards him, his head swirling in a terrible nightmare, hoping he would wake up soon.
"Jesus fucking Christ Corey!" A voice thundered in his ear, the strident tones of Tim, and a pair of hands yanked at his shoulders, galvanizing him into action.
CHAPTER 10
Corey fled for the gate they'd entered the backyard through, jumping over cluttered piles of rubbish, stumbling through the debris.
He couldn't see Lee anywhere and assumed his mate had already safely exited and was somewhere out in the woods.
Guttural shouting and fearsome bellowing in some gibberish foreign tongue was chasing after Corey and Tim as they charged towards the gate, Corey's heart thundering painfully in his chest.
Tim reached the exit first, but he never made it through.
Something long and fast whistled past Corey's ear, slamming brutally into the back of Tim's bald head.
Blood instantaneously erupted like a fountain and to Corey's absolute horror he witnessed the blood slicked point of the hurled spear exit out through Tim's left eye socket, a punctured eyeball impaled upon it.
Screaming like a nightmare plagued child, Corey didn't even realise that the geyser of blood was splashed all over him as Tim's body dropped like a stone, laying facedown over the rusted bear trap, the spear lodged in his shattered skull sticking straight up like some triumphant explorers flag post.
Now just acting on the instinct to take flight, Corey had to hurdle Tim's prone corpse to escape the backyard, praying desperately that a spear wasn't about to stab him through the back of the head.
His screams died away to choking sobs of terror as he fell on his knees outside, stumbled up again and continued to move blindly, not knowing where he was headed, just acknowledging how badly he needed to put distance between himself and those loathsome abominations who'd just murdered his friend.
Even in his terribly shocked state he knew there was no point going back for Tim because there was no way Tim wasn't dead with a barbed spear driven right through his skull from one side to the other.
Suddenly hands seemed to reach out of nowhere, snatching him, one wrapping around his mouth clamping it shut, the other grabbing him about the waist.
He was yanked over backwards in a dense thicket of scrub where he immediately began to struggle for his life.
"Sssh! Corey! Be quiet, calm down, it's me," whispered a familiar voice he wasn't certain he'd ever hear again. "I'm taking my hand away from your mouth so just don't scream."
"Desiree?" Corey choked out weakly in a hoarse whisper.
"Yeah, it's me."
"They fucking killed Tim! Speared him through the head! He's fucking dead and Lee...I've lost Lee, I don't know where he is!" Corey babbled.
"Quiet," Desiree whispered. "Be quiet. Don't say anything 'til it's safe."
"Shit," Corey murmured, sinking down low in the overgrown grass.
He was still in an intense state of shock, but the abrupt and unexpected appearance of Desiree somehow tempered that state, minimising it so he wasn't a screaming incoherent mess who'd lead the Plebs straight to where he hid.
He attempted to crane his neck to gaze upon Desiree, but her firm hand on his shoulder stilled him.
"Don't even move," she commanded softly. "Let them think you've run back down the mountain."
So they remained silent and still in the scrub, hearts pounding, waiting for the sounds of the blundering Plebs to abate, praying they wouldn't be discovered.
Presently the noise of the Plebs did fade away, guttural shouting and crashing about in the woods vanishing in the distance and Corey could only hope that hearing no triumphant bellows indicated that wherever Lee was cowering he hadn't yet been discovered there.
"We safe to move yet?" Corey dared to whisper.
"Yeah I think they're gone. Have you seen our girls?"
"Yes. In the house. I think they're both still alive, but they're in a bad way."
"Okay, let's go."
"Where?" Corey asked with an edge of fear in his voice, hoping desperately that he didn't already know the answer.
"Into the house, to get the girls."
"Shit! Won't the...won't whatever the fuck those things were be there?"
"I'm pretty sure they all came out after you lot made all the noise."
"Pretty sure?" Corey wasn't entirely pleased with that response. "That's no guarantee now is it?"
"That's why I have this," Desiree raised a hand, neatly filled with pistol. "These fuckers don't have guns that I'm aware of."
"That you'
re aware of?" Corey appeared to be developing an inane predilection for repeating what Desiree had just said to him. "I'm not going back there. For anything. Tim is dead; Lee might be too, nothing could persuade me to go back."
"Nothing?" Desiree queried, hitching up a questioning eyebrow.
"Nothing." Corey was adamant. He'd seen one of his two best friends brutally killed, he'd lost the other one somewhere and the shock of it all was just beginning to sink in, dropping down like an icy shroud over his blood splattered form.
"You certain?"
"I'm certain. I have Tim's blood all over me; I've seen things tonight I never wanted to see."
"But you haven't seen all the things you wanted to see have you?" Desiree pressed.
Corey gazed blankly at her. He wasn't being deliberately obtuse in his stupefied state, he merely didn't quite follow where she was heading with her line of enquiry.
"Come on baby, we're almost there," Desiree continued. "We just have to get Tash and Erica out, find Lee, get back to the camp and then we'll come get revenge for Tim, I swear it."
"I don't want to. I'm not reassured that there aren't any more of those awful freaks in that place."
Desiree stared at him long and hard and then she took one of his hands and placed it upon her thigh, very close to the heat of her groin.
"Okay," she said. "What if we fuck in the Pleb house after we let the girls free?"
Of all the coercive statements which could have jolted the numb Corey out of his fugue that was the one that did it.
"O...Okay, I'll do it. I'm coming."
"Don't come just yet," Desiree said, a little light hearted joke to help him calm his nerves. "We hafta get the girls free first."
"Right."
"We ready?"
"Yep. Let's go." Corey said though he was far from ready to enter the slaughter ground of the backyard let alone take a solitary step into the bowels of the torture house.
It was only Desiree's blunt persuasive statement which helped him rise to shaky feet and traipse carefully after her.
The surrealism of the night was absolutely doing his head in.
Ashamedly as they crept to the still open gate he found that he wasn't thinking about the body of his deceased friend or the whereabouts of Lee, he was entertaining impure thoughts of the delectable Desiree.
The pair of them were in the back yard, creeping through the junkyard debris before he acknowledged what a psychological miracle Desiree had performed on him.
Her simple question, straightforward as it was had his formerly tormented mind running in lustful circles, conjuring up delightful sexual images rather than abhorrent violent ones. He'd come in through the gate, his eyes on the wonderfully oscillating curves of her buttocks instead of on the corpse of his dearly departed friend.
He simply couldn't believe he'd entered the arena of death without even casting one single horrified glimpse at Tim's prone figure.
He hoped that didn't make him a bad person, but conceded that Tim wouldn’t have wanted his friends to fall to pieces and make themselves easy targets to get slaughtered as well.
He could even imagine Tim's grinning face saying 'Well at least one of us got laid that night, too bad I died before it was me.'
Then he and Desiree were at the house.
Even with Tim gone and Lee lost, Corey couldn’t muster up any rage or anger to direct at Desiree.
He knew full well that Tim had been correct in saying the women basically set them up, sent them off into the midst of hell but he chose to believe that Desiree wasn’t an instigator in this, rather Melissa or Raven.
After all Desiree had secretly told him she'd be there to have his back.
Unfortunately she hadn’t arrived in time to prevent the unnecessary murder of Tim, but as promised she was there now, managing to be Corey's rock, able to prevent him from losing his mind.
Without her presence he knew he would have tipped himself over the brink of instability, unable to cope with witnessing Tim's savage death.
He wondered how she'd managed to elude Melissa and the rest of the camp in order to follow him and his fellows here, and guessed they were probably missing her now.
The Pleb torture house was just as Corey had last seen it, albeit without the marauding hordes of bestial freaks swarming out of it; they'd even left the back door they'd exited out gaping wide open.
Desiree took a cautious step up onto the ramshackle construction which constituted the back verandah, clenching her pistol like Dirty Harriet.
Gazing upon her Corey was reminded acutely of Angelina Jolie in the film adaptation of the Playstation game Tomb Raider, starring as Lara Croft.
Except that character carried two pistols and Desiree was hands down far sexier than Miss Jolie or Miss Croft.
"Where are the girls?" Asked Desiree.
Corey pointed to the window with the fallen board where he and the others first clapped eyes upon the scene of horror.
"They're in a little room there. They are in a bad way, they're strung up on a rack thing with handcuffs I think, and there's a spike trap right underneath them if they happen to get free."
"But, they're alive?"
"One of them is, she keeps trying to get free. I don't think she's aware of the spikes underneath her feet though. As for the other girl, she doesn't look very lively to me. Either she's worn herself out trying to get away or she's...you know."
Corey's voice trailed off. He knew Desiree was aware of what he was attempting to convey to her.
"Okay," Desiree didn't look extremely pleased but then again Corey didn't expect her to. For what was supposed to have been a bit of a party night, it was turning into one hell of a grim evening slash early morning.
By the time sunrise eventually rolled around Corey decided he would not have been overly surprised if the sun just simply neglected to show its face at all.
"What else can you tell me? How are they hurt?"
"Well the one I could see pretty good, the lively one-they're both naked by the way-she'd got cuts and scratches and blood all over her front, looks like they've been slicing at her with razor blades and shit like that. It isn't pretty."
"No, I daresay it's not pretty," said Desiree and as angry as she looked, she looked might pretty to Corey.
He wondered, even though she was aware of the girls being in trouble, if Desiree had any real idea of the extent of the trouble they were in and surmised from the suitably enraged expression on her countenance that perhaps she didn't.
He didn't really know what else he could tell her about the situation, guessing he'd told her all he could.
"Okay, I'm going in," Desiree said. "Whistle or yell or do something if these fuckers come back. I'll call you if I need you in here."
"I will." Corey promised, inwardly pleased that he wasn't yet required to enter the torture chamber that was the Plebs house, though also perversely disappointed by the fact that they weren't entering the place as a team.
Still, he told himself, we are a team. I'm the lookout, I guess because I don't have a pistol.
Desiree was gone before he realised, swallowed up in the darkness inside the hellish abode leaving him standing dumb and feeling vulnerable even with a keen bladed hatchet in his hands.
Then a scream rent the night, issuing from the darkened interior making him jump with startled fright.
"Corey!" It was Desiree screaming and Corey bolted into the house.
Once inside it was dark, but not so dark he couldn't see due to an abundance of lit candles around the place.
What he saw was Desiree sprawled on her back, grappling and struggling with a grotesque ogre of a Pleb, the horrid fiend sitting atop her, reaching for her face with its blackened claws.
Since both of Desiree's hands were empty Corey supposed that she must have been jumped by the Pleb, consequently losing her weapon.
He didn't even think, he merely acted, lunging at the twosome and swinging his hatchet down with enough force to cleave a rhino
’s skull.
The wicked blade slammed into the beast’s broad back and buried itself, lodging hard in some bone, eliciting an unearthly howl of angered pain.
Still clinging to the handle of the weapon, Corey was bodily flung across the room as the Pleb hauled itself off Desiree, straining to yank the axe from its back.
Free of the Pleb, Desiree scrambled backwards and then let fly with a savage two footed kick up into the beast’s ribcage.
As the Pleb tried to swing at her with its free hand, the other still clasped to its back, Corey sprang to his feet and swung a boot at its head.
He connected with a solid meaty crunch, knocking the Plebs cranium sideways and the brute dropped flat on the floor, facedown.
"Yeah!" Shouted Corey, stunned and pleased by his own violent ferocity. "That one is for Tim you ugly ass motherfucker!"
Then as a painfully vivid mental picture of Tim being brutally speared made its unwelcome presence apparent in his mind, he felt more savage rage well up inside him.
He was fairly certain that the fiend who'd actually flung the spear to bring about Tim's demise was with the main party hunting Lee rather than sprawled out on the floor, but to him all the Plebs were torturers of women and murderers of his friend so it didn't really matter.
Angry, he kicked the beast in the head one more time for good measure, satisfied with the resulting sound of his boot connecting with bone.
"Good show Corey, mighty good job," praised Desiree, getting to her feet. "That's the spirit, you pretty much saved my life there. Guess I owe you a lot more."
"No," Corey said blushing though her statement excited him. "You saved my life out there so really I owed you. I still owe Tim though."
"Well this one is for Tim," Desiree said and before Corey's eyes she straddled the fallen Pleb, whipped out her knife and yanking the comatose brutes bald head up slashed her blade rapidly across its throat.
Corey had to jump backwards to avoid the instant spray of blood from the Plebs severed jugular, he was already liberally doused in Tim's blood.
Surprisingly he felt nothing at the killing of the Pleb, but a savage burst of satisfaction and a slight wistful feeling that it wasn’t him drawing the killing blade across the throat.
