by Edward Lee
Dean rushed to the window. At first, he could see nothing, but after the next crack of lightning—
My God!
He easily saw that the Lohan mansion was... under attack.
"Shirley!" he commanded. "Break open the gun cabinet!"
Shirley's big tits wobbled beneath the sheer night gown as she rushed to do so. Ajax inquired with a shout: "What the hell's going on?"
"They're trying to break into the house."
"Who?"
Dean's mouth froze before he could actually give voice to the reply. "Cattle!"
CRUNK-CRUNK-CRUNK! CRUNK-CRUNK!
Ajax went to the window, peered out. "You gotta be shitting me!"
But, lo, no one was shitting Ajax at all. When he glanced out the window, in the lightning-veined dark, he could see dozens of longhorned cattle rushing the mansion, ramming their brick heads against the outer walls. Dean knew that the oxen had brains that were little more than synaptic dish rags, but at this rate it was equally clear: it wouldn't take them long to break into the house.
"What happens if they break in?" Ajax moronically asked.
"Then we're all kabob!" Dean answered. "See those horns? Think they're sharp?"
Shirley re-entered the parlor with an armful of shotguns. "Here, boys!"
"Keep loading us up, Shirley!" Dean shouted. "This might take a while!" Dean and Ajax both racked rounds, then broke open the window panes. They aimed at the veritable morass of cattle charging the house and opened fire.
One blast after the next, they fired into the rainy night. Ox heads blew apart like piñatas, only it was not candy and toys which erupted from each gunshot, it was wet nuggets of brain. Ox faces exploded, blowing chunks of cud. Cattle bellies burst. Blood flew in sheets as innards uncoiled, and the sound was cacophonic: the desolate moos of psycho cattle dying in the night.
Dean and Ajax fired frenetically, popping a round, then jacking in the next, and Shirley, her big tits wobbling beneath the sheer nightgown, expertly cycled reloaded shotguns back to them. But even in this death-wave of double-00 buckshot, the oxen kept charging. Even when the killed beasts lay in piles before the house, more charged forward, ramming their great horned heads against outer walls. Each time the lightning flashed, Dean could see dozens more thundering up the hill to the mansion.
How many could they kill before one crashed through a window?
The killing went on for a solid hour, blast after blast after blast, gunsmoke stinging their nostrils, their eyes full of spots from muzzle-flash. But when it seemed to be over—
"Holy motherfucking shit," Ajax sighed.
Dean couldn't believe what he saw beyond his white-hot gun barrel. The vast hill which rose up to the Lohan Mansion lay heaped with dead and dying cattle corpses.
"Oh, man," Ajax exclaimed. "That's a lot of fucking Quarter Pounders."
"Did'ja get 'em all?" Shirley asked, her big tits wobbling beneath the sheer nightgown.
"I think so, Shirley. Christ. What's happening here?" But even as Dean asked the question, something abstract and camouflaged deep in his spirit thought he already knew.
And he knew it wasn't over yet.
Dean glanced over his shoulder, to make sure Arianne was safe; she still lay asleep on the couch. Ajax glanced over his shoulder, to make sure that Shirley's big tits were still wobbling beneath the sheer nightgown.
They were.
"I-I think we did it," Ajax sighed in relief, but just as he'd said it—
Thuh-RUNK-thuh-RUNK-thuh-RUNK...
The trampling sound could easily be heard by them both. Suddenly the house was vibrating again. Dean looked out the front bay window and at first saw nothing.
Then the lightning flashed.
"Oh, no... " he whispered.
"What?" Ajax yelled.
"Four Black Gertrudis are charging the house."
"Four what?"
"Four bulls," Dean further croaked. "The biggest species in the country. Four thousand pounds apiece... "
"Oh, that's just terrific!"
The windows exploded as if grenaded. Glass flew like shrapnel and, soon, so did bull snot, flying in long thin ropes as the four horned beasts crashed their way inside. Dean and Ajax stood back to back, facing the monstrous animals down. Their nostrils flared like turbine ducts opening and closing. But when Dean looked into their eyes, he saw the glow of something... evil.
"Fire!" Dean wailed.
Ajax pumped two rounds into the first bull's head. It exploded after the second impact. Dean killed the next two with four quick jerks of the shotgun's slide. The fourth two-fuckin'-ton bull leveled its possessed gaze and scuffed its front hoofs on the carpet.
"I got him," Ajax said. He raised the shotgun and squeezed the trigger—
click
"Fuck!" he yelled. His weapon empty, Ajax promptly saturated his pants with urine. The fourth bull began to charge—
"Oh SHIT!"
BAM!
Shirley's big tits wobbled beneath the sheer nightgown as she plugged the demon-possessed bull right between the eyes with a Remington 870P chock full of big-ball buck. The animal's head flew apart, splaying brains, blood, and mucus onto the fine avacado-and butternut wallpaper.
"Great shot, Shirley," Ajax wheezed. "What a fuckin' battle."
Dean felt a strange static crawl over his skin. "The battle might not be over yet," he said.
Thuh-RUNK, thuh-RUNK-thuh-RUNK...
"Oh no!"
They looked out the window and saw not four but six more two-ton Black Gertrudis monsters charging up the hill.
"Shit!" Ajax yelled. "Shirley! More guns!"
Shirley shrieked the final revelation. "Oh my God, boys! We're plumb out of ammo!"
Ajax liberally filled the back of his jeans with his last meal, but Dean—
"Dean, what are you—"
Dean dropped his empty gun and ran away, fleeing up the stairs.
"Thanks a lot, buddy!" Ajax shouted. He glanced quickly to Arianne, still asleep on the couch, then glanced to Shirley. Fuck that dirty skinny junkie, he thought. He grabbed Shirley, tried to haul her out of the room, but—
CRASH!
—it was too late.
Suddenly the room was full of crazy sharp-horned oxen. The beasts were as big as cars, and torns stretched nearly a yard wide, their points sharp as awls.
Shirley's big tits wobbled beneath the sheer nightgown. "Oh, Lord!" she cried. "We're gonna die, ain't we?"
Ajax kissed her on the lips. "Yes," he said. He hugged her tight. "But it won't hurt for long."
The lead bull stared at Ajax, its devil-red eyes like hot coals. Ropes of snot dangled from the silver-dollar-sized nostrils. Its front hoofs scuffed... then it began to charge—
"It won't hurt for long," Ajax whispered again and hugged Shirley tighter.
They squeezed their eyes shut, grit their teeth and waited for the end, but—
Ajax opened his eyes. The bull had stopped in its tracks, its deadly horn-tips a full foot away from Ajax' belly.
As a shadow grew before him, the bull reluctantly backed up. Ajax thought he heard footsteps coming down the stairs.
Dean stepped in front of them.
"Dean!" Shirley shouted in glee.
Dean walked confidently between the crazed bull and Ajax and Shirley. The bull kept backing up.
The bull was... scared.
Ajax wasn't sure but it seemed that the most vague lime-green light glowed off of Dean's head. There was one thing, though, that he was sure about: what Dean held in his hands, like a branch-cutter, was his rusty pair of horn-crankers.
He pointed them at the first bull. "I'm the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be," he told the bull. Then, for effect, he clacked the horn-crankers a few times. "I'll dehorn you like pulling toothpicks out of cocktail fruit, so go back to your evil mama." Dean's voice resonated, not a man's voice now but something almost godlike. He held the horn-cranker upward, a demented Moses raisin
g his holy staff.
"Fuck with me," he said to the bull. "I dare ya."
The giant bull whinnied, jerked its huge head to and fro—then it jumped back out the window from whence it came. The other bulls followed suit, thrashing their mammoth bodies out the windows, exploding the frames, and disappearing into the teeming, thundering storm.
"God be praised!" Shirley said. "It's over!"
Ajax whooped it up. "Man, you've got some kind of magic! Those big motherfuckin' things just took one look at you and they were heading for the hills!"
But Dean stood agitated in the candle light. His horn-crankers—the nexus of his power—hung limp from one hand.
"Something—something's wrong," he sensed. Then he looked at the couch.
Arianne was gone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
"You two! Halt!"
Dean and Ajax stopped cold at the muddy trail which wound down from behind Stoddard's Mill to the opening of the mine. They'd driven here posthaste in the rented Blazer, and were fortunate that the storm had blown over shortly after their wholesale slaughter of the demon-possessed cattle back at the mansion. Before they'd left, Shirley had managed to scrounge up a few more rounds for the shotguns. Then she'd waved teary-eyed as they'd driven off, her big tits wobbling beneath the sheer nightgown.
Dean had only one thing on his mind: saving Arianne. And he was well aware now of the supernatural intricacies draped around all that was happening.
He knew things now.
He knew who the smoke-woman was. He knew that she'd used her evil will to possess the cattle back at the mansion. And he knew that she'd been the one who'd abducted Arianne. She'd been the one responsible for all of the recent abductions about town. Dean could taste the answers in his brain. He could smell them.
But when he and Ajax had arrived at the trail to the mine, a uniformed state police officer in foul-weather gear had stopped them at once, gun drawn.
"I said halt!" he ordered through the pouring rain. "And drop those shotguns!"
Dean and Ajax obeyed, and held their hands up. "Great idea, hoss," Ajax muttered. "He probably thinks we're involved in the abductions and killings."
"I didn't know cops were out here. They weren't here before."
"This is a crime scene," the cop reminded them. "What are you doing here?"
Ajax stepped right up. "We're just concerned citizens, officer. We'd heard about the horrible things that've happened out here, so we wanted to come out and try to get the culprit ourselves." He could see five other cops surveying the perimeter around the mine entrance. "But since you fine officers are out, there's no reason for us to be here. So we'll just be on our way, sir."
"You'll be on your way to the back seat of my patrol car," the cop informed him. "You're both under arrest. I'm taking you in for questioning. Start moving—" but no sooner had the cop given the order, his colleagues at the mine began to shout. Several shots rang out. "Stay here!" he commanded to Dean and Ajax. "Don't move!"
Dean and Ajax froze with their hands up, watched the cop run off into the dripping woods. "We're leaving now, right?" Ajax asked. "We can get back to the Blazer and be the fuck out of here before he can catch us—"
More gunshots rang out, then—screams.
"Grab the guns!" Dean yelled. "They need help!"
Ajax stalled as more screams resounded. "Fuck those guys. Let's go back to your mansion and have a beer."
"Come on!'
They retrieved their shotguns—Ajax however reluctantly—and ran toward the skirmish. More screams sprang through the dark, after the gunfire died. By the time Dean and Ajax arrived at the wood-propped portal to the mine...
The six poncho'd police officers lay dead in the mud, gored to death, the high horn-holes still seeping blood.
"Fuck," Dean uttered.
"Yeah, fuck—as in let's get the fuck out of here, like now!" Ajax hotly suggested.
As he stared at the mine entry, Dean's voice sounded like bricks scraping together. "Arianne's down there somewhere."
"You don't know that!" Ajax contested. "She could be dead in the woods somewhere! She could be lying dead behind the mansion for all you know!"
"She's down there," Dean corrected, staring at the entry with his new-found psychic vision. "I'm not leaving here till I get her back."
"Well that's your gig, man! You want to stick your neck out so your head'll be lopped off, that's your business! Me—no way!"
"Fine... " Dean walked into the mine's wide egress; Ajax, without much faith, followed. Their flashlights beamed dead ahead: dirt walls propped up by heavy wooden stulls like railroad ties. Railroad tracks led them down further, until...
"Damn," Dean muttered.
The entry ramp stopped at a four-tined fork which led further down into multitudinous branches and off-shoots: tunnels within tunnels.
"It's a fuckin' maze!" Ajax complained. "We'll never find our way through this shit!"
"Yes we will," Dean croaked back in assurance. "Follow me... back to the entry."
They both stomped back to the entrance of the mine. "You got a knife?" Dean asked.
"Well, yeah," Ajax replied. "You wanna butter some bread?"
"Start cutting," Dean ordered. He whipped out his own knife and began... cutting open the abdominal vaults of the dead police officers. From the rents, he yanked out long tubes of the small intestine. Like yanking yarn from the belly of a stuffed doll.
"Yank! Yank!" he shouted.
Confused, Ajax thought what the hell, and he cut open another dead cop's belly and began yanking out intestines. Got nothin' much else to do right now, he considered.
Soon six piles of pink-gray intestinal whirls lay at their feet. "Cut each loop off at the end," Dean instructed. "Then tie each end together."
"Say what?" Ajax inquired.
"Just do it!" Dean yelled. "You saw the mine! It's a labyrinth! If I'm going down there, I need to be able to find my way out."
Ajax seethed in his distaste, but he did it just the same. The human small intestine was twenty-four to thirty-two feet long. Ajax snipped of each end with his knife, then tied the ends together by way of a sheet-bend knot, connecting each end as effectively as possible. Shit squeezed out of each end, which set Ajax' face long. I'm handling police officer excrement, he thought. He flapped each wad off his hand like slabs of warm brown clay. But by then, at least, he was beginning to get it... when Dean tied the last end to his back belt loop.
A guideline, Ajax thought.
"Come on," Dean said, shotgun in one hand, flashlight in the other. "I'm going down there... to get Arianne out."
Ajax didn't argue. He followed Dean deep into the front mine stope, to the area which branched out into four different corridors. Ajax dropped the 150-foot reel of intestines to the dirt floor and kept his end tied about his wrist.
"I'll try one at a time," Dean said. "If I shout... pull me back."
"Got'cha," Ajax understood.
Dean took a deep breath. Then he began to lower himself into the first egress.
««—»»
This eats dick, Dean thought, plodding forward. The earth-formed corridor wound ever downward. The deeper Dean descended, the harder the stench wafted up.
The foulest stench to ever assail his nose, which stood to reason: it was into the main shaft of this very mine that they'd dumped hundreds of dead cattle and probably enough rendering bilge to fill a community swimming pool.
Some of the corridors were manways—barely wide enough to squeeze through—while others were haulage passages. Some, he knew, would lead to the main shaft, others to dead ends. Eventually, the corridor he now occupied ended at a great pile of rubble. Damn... Frustrated, Dean followed the life-line of intestines back to entry.
"No luck," he told Ajax. "A dead end."
"Maybe they're all dead ends," Ajax pointed out. "Maybe she's not even here."
"I know she's here," Dean felt assured. He couldn't explain how he knew, he just knew. This place was
full of archaic evil, and it was some equally archaic benevolence that whispered its secrets to him, emboldened him with its supereal wisdom. "Arianne's in there somewhere, and so is the hellish mother and son who've been tearing this town a new asshole."
"How do you know?" Ajax countered.
"I just do. And I know why they're here, I know what summoned them— vengeance."
"Vengeance? For what?"
"It's me they want. They've brought their horror here as vengeance against what I've done."
Ajax smirked as though the words were ridiculous. "And what's that?"
Dean's voice grated out as if confessing to murder. "I've cranked more horns out of more cattle heads than anyone in history."
Dean checked the second set of passages, then the third. Both were clueless dead ends. "This one," he said of the fourth, "has got to be it."
He stepped in as if entering the esophagus of an immense dead beast, then began moving toward its belly.
««—»»
When Arianne awoke she thought she must be drowning in filth; she didn't breathe as much as gulp great mouthfuls of air. She hung naked, suspended by her wrists, in some low cavern of beslimed wet rock. The old mine, she realized. I'm at the bottom of the mine. No source of light could be detected yet she could see the entails of her surroundings as if through some sort of filter, as if evil had a light of its own. Arianne knew at least that much: it was evil that had brought her to this foul place.
