The Bride Stripped Bare

by Rob Bliss

  A bear skin moved. A body rose up from under it, crawled on all fours along the floor, paws slipping on blood and a piece of scalp, a woman in her forties scratching out the last of her existence, trying to find safety from the elephant in the room. Us.

  The truck idled as we watched her crawl. She stopped to cough up blood, vomit out a thin stream of yellow-brown bile, then she kept crawling. I aimed the rifle at her through my window.

  “Too many goddamn bears in this house!” Gord said. “Time for Goldilocks to get payback!”

  Elizabeth’s eyes were slits, looking into mine. “I want her. She’s mine.”

  Gord kept his foot on the brake as Elizabeth and I snapped off our seatbelts. I took the rifle with me as I joined Elizabeth in her hunt. Jars of jam and marmalade and pickled vegetables fell out of the truck with us.

  Following Elizabeth, I gazed at the damage done to the truck. Crunched metal, the stink of oil smoke rising through the exposed engine, green coolant pissing to the floor, blood smeared across the paint job, gristle and brain wedged in tire treads. A pig-in-a-blanket sat in one cracked open headlight.

  Elizabeth ignored the damage, stepped a slow march toward the crawling woman, gun barrel pointed down at the end of a rigid arm. Gunslinger eyes. Gord and I watched for anyone who may have come back to life to rush us, but we let Elizabeth enjoy her kill.

  She stood over the woman, watching her crawl, leaving behind a trail of bloody hand prints, until the woman finally noticed someone looming over her. Stopped her slow trek and craned her bruised face and bloody teeth up to see Elizabeth looking down.

  “Please,” the woman begged in a soft voice. “Please don’t…I don’t want to die.”

  A thousand-yard stare gazed down as the Magnum angled towards the woman’s forehead.

  “You or me, bitch…somebody’s always gotta die.”

  The woman closed her eyelids to wait for the bullet blast…but it never came.

  “Elizabeth!” a male voice called.

  “Gordy!” a female voice called.

  Both echoing from high up by the darkened ceiling, but we couldn’t see them until the voices screamed and the bodies dropped out of the darkness.

  Ropes unraveled in the air, ankles bound by shackles, wrists tied behind their backs, ball gags slipped down to collar their necks, each wearing a noose. The drop was too quick—impossible for the mind to register what the eyes saw clearly.

  Not until the ropes snapped taut, nooses jerked hard, heads popping off like dandelions, spinning end over end as the bodies crashed to the floor like stringless puppets, did we all know who the man and woman were. Gord rushed from the truck to inspect the dead with us. We all stepped to their upturned heads laying on the floor far from their bodies, eyes still open, horror frozen on their faces, blood forming pools around the ragged stumps of their necks still attached. Pieces of spinal column were still hanging by sinews from the heads.

  Ma and Pa.

  Why in the hell did we think we could’ve saved them from the family? I thought.

  None of us could scream or weep or yell—the sight was too foreign; no part of us held a language that could decipher what we stared at. I’m sure it was even more horrific for Elizabeth and Gord to see the torn heads of their parents staring up at them from the floor. The body and mind of both of them diving down deep into shock.

  I stepped away from the decapitations, tried to shake the images from my mind, trying to not let the shock settle too much over me. Gord and Elizabeth both stared down, the gun hanging loosely in Elizabeth’s hand, her arm swinging slightly.

  The woman who had begged for her life to be spared now had her mercy. And she took advantage of it.

  I stood behind Elizabeth and Gord, the rifle held loosely, trying not to look at the heads on the floor. But in my peripheral vision I saw the crawling woman muster her last bit of strength to lunge for the gun in Elizabeth’s hand. She easily grabbed it, rolled away, slipped and shuffled to her feet, body bent and pained from too many unseen injuries. But if she was going to die, she would take someone with her. The last person who had tried to kill her.

  Well, second-to-last.

  She raised the Magnum and Elizabeth just stood and looked at her, not comprehending what was real and what was fantasy. So she couldn’t react, caught facing the barrel of a loaded, powerful weapon. Blood dripped from the woman’s smile.

  I raised the rifle like a hunter sighting his prey, eye aiming down the barrel, marking my target. Squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered the woman’s left temple and brain and blood and bone sprayed out of her right temple. She craned over and fell like a Douglas Fir chainsawed at its base. The Magnum skittered across the floor, dragging blood behind it.

  “Well done,” a female voice announced.

  We looked up at the stage where I had become a married man to see Venus and two other women applauding. Venus wore a new white bear fur, and the burns scarring her face had almost entirely healed. Her hair had grown back, reaching the length of a brushcut, back to its original color, red. None of the drugs that Gord and I had attacked her with seemed to have an effect. An addict rarely felt their customary poison, needing more and more. Venus’ tolerance must have been beyond human, and her magic must’ve protected her from many methods of assault. Her missing eye was growing back in, smaller than the other, about the size of a dog’s eye. The two women, white and black, on either side of her both wore brown bear furs, bear’s heads dropped down their backs. They were the last remaining bridesmaids, neither with a scratch on them. They made me recall the maid I had killed.

  “The three of you have survived the House of the Dead—I’m impressed,” Venus said. She put hands on her hips, pushing her cloak open to expose her nude body, branded with the many family symbols. “Perhaps if mom and dad had been with you, they could’ve survived as well.”

  “You fucking cunt!” Elizabeth screamed with pure fury, snapping out of her shock, racing for the Magnum lying in blood.

  The two bridesmaids formed a line, one behind the other, and Venus closed her cloak to wrap her body, then stepped in front of her maids. Elizabeth spun and fired all six rounds at Venus until the gun clicked empty. Only two of the bullets had hit Venus, but they didn’t move her, merely appeared as small black starbursts staining the white fur. The gun wavered in Elizabeth’s hand for a few moments until her arm sagged and her rage began to wane. Venus put hands on her hips again to expose her body, and the bridesmaids stepped out from behind her. Looped their arms with Venus’, lightly kissed either of her cheeks, then both said, loud enough for all of us to hear, “Thank you, Mistress.”

  Venus smiled down at me. “Care to take a couple shots, husband?”

  I let the rifle barrel sag to point at the floor, kept my eyes away from my wife, wondering if she would just let us all walk out of the house and take our chances heading home.

  She paced the stage with the bridesmaids strolling arm-in-arm at her sides.

  “I don’t know how you managed to get through the dead and live to tell about it, but my father told me you were headed that way, so we let you go. I’ll assume my brother failed to stop you as well.”

  “Poppy’s fucking dead!” Gord said. “We barbecued him and his pet bear rug!”

  Venus bowed her head and nodded at nothing as her stroll slowed. She shrugged, “Oh well, men are the weaker of the species, can’t be helped.” She looked at Elizabeth and smiled. “I like your cloak, Elizabeth. Queenhood becomes you. Perhaps you’d like to join me in ruling this family. Do you like to eat pussy?” She stopped and raised an eyebrow. “Kevin does.”

  Elizabeth grit her teeth and stepped to the front of the stage. I rushed after her, holding her arm, hoping to prevent her from climbing up to confront Venus. There were too many members of Elizabeth and Gord’s family dead or lost to add herself to their numbers.

  “You fucking piece of shit! You killed my parents! We burned that last shithole—the Swamp Hotel—to the ground—and we�
�ll burn this one too! I’ll wipe you and your psycho-fuck family off the face of the Earth!”

  I held her from lunging onto the stage. Gord stood and looped his arm through hers. The three of us gazed up at Venus, who must’ve enjoyed looking down her nose at us.

  “You set yourself an impossible task, but I do like your spunk.” Venus winked. “I could use a girl like you. The family could use all of you—you’ve proven yourselves stronger, more powerful than ninety percent of the entire family. We need more like you in our gene pool.” She licked her lips and smiled down at Gord. “You even managed to slice off a piece of my tail. It’s been done so rarely; I’m always impressed by those who manage it.”

  Gord sneered at her. “You lost your power, didn’t you?”

  “How so?”

  “You can’t change into a bear.”

  Venus stifled a chuckle, then glanced at her bridesmaids, giving them a signal. Venus turned to show her back to us as the maids lifted the fur cloak over their mistress’s waist. The tail had grown back. Not as thick, about the diameter of a rat’s tail, pink and raw like new growth. It was long enough to reach the bottom of her ass cheeks but would probably keep growing to reach the backs of her knees again.

  The maids dropped the cloak and Venus turned to face us with a smug smile.

  “That means nothing,” Gord challenged. “Take away that cloak and you’ve got fuck all. Why’d your two slave bitches duck behind you when my sister shot you?”

  Anger boiled inside Venus, her fists clenching, muscles writhing along her jawline. She threw off the arms of the bridesmaids, ripped open their cloaks to expose their breasts.

  “Self-regeneration for this family is child’s play! You are swooned by parlor tricks, Gordon! Would you like to see real power? The power that I hold over all of my ‘slave bitches’?” she mocked. She raised two hands of ten long, sharp fingernails. “Here is true power!”

  Turning to face the maids, Venus stabbed her spiked hands simultaneously into the bridesmaids’ breastbones, cracked ribs and tore through ligaments, her hands twisting as they dug deep into the women’s chests. Fingers curled inward and squeezed before Venus wrenched back her arms.

  The faces of the maids swooned with ecstasy, wept tears of joy. Bloody beating hearts were cupped in each of Venus’ hands as she turned to face us again, the maids collapsing bodily on either side of her.

  Venus bit into the pomegranates of her bridesmaids’ hearts, red juice slipping into the deep valley of her cleavage. With a chin greased with shiny crimson, she swallowed the morsels, then said, “They were my sisters. Gordon, you should show your sister how much you love her by eating her heart. Why don’t you do it for me right now? Such an act gives you power over your, or any, psycho-fuck family by making you the worst of them all. It is evil that keeps me alive, forever growing stronger. Something you will never have!”

  She tossed the remaining chunks of heart off the stage at us, and again proudly displayed her nudity, letting her cloak slip entirely from her shoulders as she turned to show us her tail. It had grown thicker and longer in a matter of seconds, now waggling to tickle her upper thighs, no longer pink, but as red as a bleeding heart.

  I swallowed a hard lump, knew none of us should let Venus have her moment on the stage, had to focus back to our only real goal.

  “Just let us go,” I pleaded. “This is over. We don’t want any part of it. We’ll go home and never say a word to anyone about you or your family.”

  She squatted down at the edge of the stage in front of me, holding her knees spread wide, the tail curling up, writhing along her pudendum slit. It grew, flexing like a worm.

  “That sounds like a great offer, Chris, but I’ll have to ask my daddy first.” She called off. “Daddy, they don’t like our party and want to go home.”

  We turned to see Gorman and Kevin enter from where the truck had crashed through the doorway into the room, stepping over bodies. With one eye socket gouged into a black hollow, Gorman carried the old piece of Venus’ tail in one hand, slapping it against the other hand as he climbed the stairs at one end of the stage. Stopped to look down at his other daughters laying with dark and bloody holes in her chests.

  Venus stood and a change came over her face, staring at the piece of tail her father held. She met his eyes, took a step back from him.

  “Is it wrong for a father to eat his daughter?” he asked, taking a step toward Venus, who edged farther away from him.

  She watched his eye as he raised the tail to his open mouth, Gord’s bite marks still at its tapered end. “It won’t work,” she countered. “The matriarchal lineage of this family won’t change if you eat it.”

  Gorman stepped on the white bear cloak, made a point of wiping his feet on it. Put the narrow end of the dead tail between his teeth and snipped off a morsel. Chewed and smiled with his cheeks bulging.

  “Perhaps not, dear daughter.” He swallowed the piece, snipped off another chunk and spoke with his words muted. “But I have a plan. You’ll love it…wish you’d thought of it yourself.” He swallowed, patted his stomach, then snapped his fingers over his shoulder.

  Kevin stepped up behind him, took the shoulder of Gorman’s red-and-black striped cloak, helped the priest remove his clothing while the old father continued taking bites of the tail. He turned around to show his back to Venus, smoothing a hand across the small of his naked back, pressing fingertips into muscle.

  “Can you see anything yet?” he asked his daughter as she stared at her father’s back. “I think I can feel a small bump, like a spinal bone, trying to push through. I’m giving birth from the top of my ass!” he laughed as he turned to face Venus, snipped off another bite of tail, chewed rapidly as his eyes stared deeply into hers. “What do you need to make gunpowder?” He ticked off ingredients with his fingers. “Sulphur, saltpeter, and charcoal…mix any two of these ingredients and you have nothing. Mix all three in the correct measurements…and you can blow up the world!” A bite, jaw muscles writhing under parchment skin, his molars grinding the flesh of his daughter. A single line of blood wept from his missing eye socket. He raised a finger. “I am an exulted member of this family. Male, yes, but that shouldn’t hinder me anymore in my purpose.” A second finger joined the first as he smiled and held up the remaining length of tail. “Second ingredient…and it is delicious!”

  He took another bite and stepped off the cloak toward his daughter. Venus stepped back, body tense, waiting for him to strike. Glancing over his shoulder, she saw that Kevin hadn’t moved, still had the priest’s cloak in hand, so it wasn’t likely that he was part of whatever plan Gorman had for his daughter’s destruction.

  “So what’s the third ingredient, you’re wondering? And I wondered that too. For a long long time.” He smiled, eyebrows raising in delight as he nodded. “Yes, my dear, your father—the man you are so much like—has been thinking about doing away with your power—if not you as well—since you were born. Shortly after I killed your mother and fed her to you, I entertained the idea of killing all of my family members. Taking power for myself. The males of this family know they will always be subjected to the will of the females. Because that’s how it has always been. So they don’t resist their lot in life, become complacent. So, too, do the females never question their right to rule.” Another piece of tail went into his cheeks. “But I am old, have seen and done so much throughout many eras of Mankind, and I thought I could do one monumental act before I died. Create an earthquake that would shatter the foundation of tradition in this family and inspire every generation after me.” His incisors snipped off another piece of dead flesh, had about three inches of tail left to devour. “A sea change from matriarchy to patriarchy. It would, of course, entail getting rid of the queen first.” He motioned to Gord. “This wonderful potential husband of yours did me a favor by cutting off your tail. It had happened before, but you knew to protect the severed limb. I knew I would have to strike quickly because there would only be a small window of
opportunity before you grew it back.” Another inch went between his molars. I gazed at his tailbone. Difficult to see if anything had grown—it could’ve been a shadow, a play of the light, or it could’ve been a growing bump. “I just had to calculate my three ingredients before I took a chance at overthrowing you. And now I have them.” A bite, and one-inch left.

  “You have nothing, old man,” Venus hissed, holding her ground. “Your mind is going—senility setting in. A disease of the outsiders will be your death. There are no ingredients that can give you the power of a woman. If there were, you would’ve tried something before now.”

  He popped the last tail piece into his mouth, smiled as he wiped his hands. “That’s true, but we haven’t made sweet incestuous love for so long. You’ve been so busy hunting down your grooms, turning them into your pie-eyed, lust-driven, breeding slaves that I’ve rarely had a moment alone with you, my precious one. You have protected your tail very well…with your cloak, your grooms, and every female of our lineage. So how can a father possibly get a piece of his daughter’s sweet ass?”

  Venus smiled, shook her head, let loose a half-hearted laugh as she put hands on her hips, proudly displaying herself to her father. “You’re as stupid as a husband. You thought that if you had one more chance to enjoy this—” she fluttered hands down the length of her body “—that you’d have the opportunity to cut off my tail? To destroy me!” Her chest trembled as she laughed. “You’re thinking too much with your ego. Like all men.”

  Gorman sucked his finger and winked. “You may be right. You always are, my love. But any man will tell you that the way to a woman’s ass is through her heart.” His body became rigid and a pause held on the stage. Then Gorman suddenly yelled, “Now!”

  Gitch and Skood rushed out from behind the stage curtain. Gitch’s skin showed burns and still bore the scars I had given him—his face mangled, jaw twisted to one side, tears in the flesh having been sewn together with copper wire—and he wasn’t as stable on his feet as Skood was. It was as though Gitch’s legs were broken but he still ran on them, ignoring terrible pain, trying to overcome his many wounds. His face twitched; hands shaky as he held a knife.