Family Tradition

by Edward Lee

  Rochelle didn’t have time to scream; she scarcely even had time to feel pain, before the thing lifted her up and then pulled her down into the water.

  The last sensation she detected before death’s inevitable embrace was her flesh being sucked off her bones like beef strips off a skewer.

  ««—»»

  When Bob regained consciousness, he quickly realized he was still alive, then just as quickly wished he were dead. He could see nothing but black, but he could smell.

  Oh, could he smell.

  He smelled the devil’s toilet.

  One whiff of the caustic, evil odor and he thought his head might explode like a firecracker in a hard-boiled egg. Any inhalation he took felt like death seeping through his lungs and into his blood.

  He seemed to roll over logs of slime. Anything he reached out and grabbed was pestiferous. But as he tried to crawl toward what he sensed was upward, his hand landed on something that felt familiar.

  His flashlight.

  He snapped it on, roved it around—

  And screamed.

  What he’d fallen in was a corpse-pit, an endless one. His sanity snapped. A mindless swipe of the light showed him a cavern of slick skeletons and moldering corpses, descending down into a chasm whose depth he could not calculate.

  And since humans needed oxygen to live, he was forced to continue breathing. The pit was hot and humid. Nameless bugs and worms crawled on his hands each time he tried to crawl away. The only problem was…there didn’t seem to be anything to crawl away from.

  Then the flashlight slipped from his hand, clunked away into foul darkness. Bob lay stranded in utter black again.

  Until…

  Was it a hallucination? As his hand sunk in warm corpse-meat and rot-slick bones, his eyes seemed to detect the most minute variation in the darkness.

  Starlight and…the moon.

  Yes! he thought, crawling upward more rapidly over the mountain of human kindling. Above him, he could see it.

  He could see the opening.

  It was like a flap of some sort, the same ingress, no doubt, through which he’d fallen. It was an opening back to life!

  Flesh squeezed between his fingers like warm shit; faces slid off of skulls. Yet onward Bob travailed, back up toward the exit from this warren of Lucifer’s bowels.

  A few more minutes of crawling upward, then a few more seconds. Bob thought that if he took one more breath he would simply die.

  His desperate hand jutted out through the opening; his hand, suddenly, felt cool.

  Then another hand grabbed it.

  Sheree! he thought. She found me, and she’s pulling me out!

  Bob, then, was pulled out. He was pulled all the way out of the hole in the tarp and timber-frame that his near-300-pound body had busted through when he’d inadvertently stepped on it.

  “Sheree!” he shrieked in glee when he’d been dragged all of the way from the corpse-dump.

  “Shee-it,” came a reply. “Lookit this, would’ja?”

  It was not Sheree who’d pulled Bob out. It was Enoch.

  ««—»»

  Hurry the fuck UP! Sheree thought, watching the pull-ferry crank on her side slowly revolve. Fuckin’’ Ashton. He’s so fat it’s like hauling a barge!

  But then the crank stopped.

  It stopped dead. Sheree just stared at it for an incalculable passage of time. Did she hear a distant splash? Then another?

  Sheree didn’t know how much time transpired before she took the crank herself and began to turn it. The resistance seemed slight. And when she’d cranked the boat all the way back to the pier, she quickly played the beam of her flashlight over the boat.

  Ashton was not in the boat.

  At first she didn’t know what she was looking at. At first…she thought the boat was empty.

  But it wasn’t quite empty, was it?

  No.

  The boat contained two piles of human innards.

  — | — | —

  Chapter Twelve

  Esau had found Darren wandering around the north shore, babbling inanely, of course, and still covered with shit. “Got’cha, fella!” Esau had exclaimed upon the capture. “Fun time’s over!”

  “Frab-blab-yoo-hlab!” Darren objected.

  Esau drew his buck knife cleanly through the tendons behind each of Darren’s knees, and that put an end to any further jaunts. The fact that the boy was still enslimed in his own fecal matter didn’t faze Esau in the least. His hands were used to fecal matter. He merely flipped the boy over his back and tromped back to the prep shack.

  “There ya go, Fattie,” Enoch was saying, having just dragged Bob into the shack too.

  “Hey, brother!” Esau greeted. “Lookit what I found!” He flopped Darren down onto a wood table; speckles of shit flew off of him at the impact.

  “Ya found him,” Enoch grunted approval. “But what about that skinny girl?”

  “Ain’t found her yet, Enoch. But I’se kin tell ya, she cain’t get far.”

  “You better hope so, boy.”

  Esau grinned. “Did’ja find my surprise?”

  “Say what?”

  “The surprise I left for ya! A right purdy blondie, she is.” Then Esau turned up one of the oil lamps, illuminating the corner of the shack.

  There hung Carol, blanked-faced in her compounded horror, her big tits pushing out her top.

  Enoch scowled. “Aw, boy, ya dang know I don’t wanna fuck gals.”

  Esau proudly walked over to the wall, flipped up Carol’s denim skirt.

  “Look like a gal to you?” he asked.

  Enoch’s gaze peeled. “Ya don’t say? Dang!”

  “All fer you, my good brother! Take a look at that dick on this bitch!”

  Enoch was taking a look, all right, and giving his crotch a rub ta boot. “And not a hair on it,” he remarked.

  “No, sir. She—er he, er whatever—ain’t even got a hair in her ass-crack. Not a single one! I’se looked!”

  “Shee-it, I gots ta have me some of this,” Enoch informed, unbuckling the shoulder straps of his overalls.

  “And I see you done fetched Bob,” Esau said, noticing the obese, unconscious man on the table.

  “The fat dumbass stepped on the blammed tarp we got coverin’ the pit. I hauled him out, brung his fat ass here.” Enoch hocked on the dirt floor. “Take care’a that skinny kid while I put the blocks to this big-tit bitch with a cock.”

  It didn’t take him long. From the place which she’d been efficiently nailed to the wall, Enoch pushed Carol’s knees back to her shoulders.

  Meanwhile, Esau walked not to Darren but to Bob, inquisitive at the newest capture. He slammed the man’s head repeatedly against the tabletop. The warning was redundant, however; their captive was obviously not in any condition to go anywhere. Blood streamed down the side of his face from a cut on his head, the cut centered in the midst of a rapidly swelling lump the size of a halved pear. Close to the same time, Carol revived, twisting and struggling to pull free of the nails which affixed her hands to the wall, squirming in a desperate effort to see if Bob was, in fact, still alive.

  “Bob!” she screamed. “Bob!”

  Enoch licked the side of her face as she struggled. His breath stank as though he’d been eating roadkill.

  Carol began to sob again as she felt her knees being pushed farther back, blood welling slowly from her ruined hands. It was useless to try to pull free; the slightest motion filled her with nauseating waves of pain.

  Enoch spit in his palm and lubricated his organ. Carol felt pressure, then a blinding, rending pain as he forced himself into her, so startled by the pain was she that both bowel and bladder voided simultaneously.

  “Damn!” roared Enoch as he pulled out with a wet squishing sound. “Lookit that, that nasty he-bitch just shit and pissed all over me!”

  “Dang, she shore shits a lot,” Esau said, plying Bob’s face like fresh sourdough. “That’s what she was doin’ when I’se caught her—
takin’ a big shit in the woods. She left a dang pile, she did.”

  To emphasize his complaints, Enoch ran his hand up the crack of Carol’s ass, brushing her flaccid cock and balls aside.

  Carol tried to wrench her head back, but he’d grabbed a handful of hair and twisted it around his hand so that she was unable to move. The stench of her own shit made her retch as he wiped his hand off in her long blond hair. “I don’t like this he-bitch,” Enoch complained next. “I’ll fuck that fat ’un there on the table. Meantime—” his eyes flicked toward Carol. “Cut this one’s peter off.”

  Esau amusedly shook his head. “Ya know, Enoch, I was thinkin’ ’bout that earlier. Thought maybe it’d be better to cut it out instead’a cuttin’ it off. I’se got cookin’ ta do, and there ain’t nothin’ better than a whole set of a guy’s works on the grill. Ya cut the whole thing out from the root. Watch me.”

  Enoch had little interest in watching his brother’s skills. Instead he yanked Bob’s slacks off, spread his fat, log-like legs, and sunk his genitals right deep up Bob’s back-end.

  “Yeah, there ya go,” Enoch grunted, humping on the table. The table bowed.

  Bob regained consciousness a rather hasty fashion, screaming like a truck horn.

  “Sorry, fella,” Esau sniggered at Carol, “but my Grandpa likes a wiener roast just like anyone,” and he drew a sharp boning knife very quickly up Carol’s perineum, two fast swipes upward at an angle, one side, then the next. A few more slices along the top and around the scrotum, and he was removing the entirety of Carol’s very male genitalia from the base of the root. Carol gargled her horror, flipped and flopped against the bare wood wall, feet kicking madly. The blood flooded from her newly carved groin.

  “That’s it,” Esau said with pride, holding up the cleanly severed works. “Think I’ll marinate it in some yakisoba sauce fer an hour or so.” He tossed the cock and balls into a plastic bucket..

  “And those big ol’ titties?” he celebrated. “They’ll come in handy later!”

  Enoch’s big body remained atop of Bob’s back, pumping and pumping, while Bob was puking and puking. “Yeah, boy, I’se kin tell ya had it up the ass before. Guess yer one’a them queer-boy city faggots, huh? Yeah…” Enoch pumped harder and harder, then buckled and came. And he came, it should be added, in considerable volume. “Cain’t help the last part, Tubby,” he said through a chuckle. “See, I’se a little different.”

  By now, of course, it didn’t matter much to Bob; he was already unconscious again and suffering from horrendous internal bleeding. So the revelation was moot.

  When Enoch withdrew his “cock” from Bob’s rectal vault, this same withdrawal pulled something out along with it: most of Bob’s large intestine.

  It lay there between his spread legs like a fat coil of dark dough. The reason that Enoch had been able to yank out Bob’s lower g.i. tract with his penis was fairly simple when one calculated the most obvious point: Enoch’s “cock” was a bit more than that.

  It was a tentacle, red-tipped and complete with suckers. Several feet long in its excited state. In this case, it was a diminutive egress in the tip from which Enoch pissed and ejaculated. And just as Esau had only one testicle, Enoch had none. His spermatic ducts were internal, just like that of an octopus.

  Both brothers, in other words, were genetic freaks, in varying stages of evolution. Esau had something more semblant of a dick—however lumpen—Enoch had something a bit more close to his chromosomal home.

  A tentacle.

  “I say, dang! That there was a good cum!” Enoch exclaimed. He stuffed his penile appendage back into his stained overalls. “That pretty much takes care of these two.”

  Carol now hung dead by her impaled hands. And Bob lay belly-down, just as dead.

  “Yes sir!” Enoch continued. “This was more fun than that them three little bitches came through here on spring break last year. Hell, that little redhead lasted almost a week. I still think she would’ve hung on a while longer if you didn’t keep sticking your whole hand up her.

  “I know, I know, A retorted his brother. “It just feels really cool when you got your whole arm up their pussies and you can feel around all that squishy stuff inside. Shit, you flex your fingers around up in there an you can even pull some stuff out.”

  Enoch recalled the three girls somewhat wistfully. They’d gotten off the old highway by mistake and were driving around half-stoned looking for somewhere to buy beer when they’d come over to the bait shop. Two of them had died almost immediately under the brothers’ ministrations. But that redhead?

  They’d stuck ten-penny nails through her tits’n twisted ’em like handles, they did. Blood squirted out like water from a fuckin’ faucet.

  “But the fun’s over fer now,” Enoch reminded. “You find that stringbean gal with the trout cookin’ in her cunt, and ya also fetch that other chick. They’se both still on the island. Me? I’ll go ashore and take care’a the cook.”

  Esau winced. “He ain’t a cook, Enoch. He’s a Master Chef.”

  “Whatever.” Enoch was about to leave. He pointed down to Darren who scrabbled on the ground with his cut knees. “Ya better take care’a that ’un there. Don’t want him gittin’ out again.”

  “In a jiffy,” Esau said. His boning knife flashed, and in all of two seconds, he had slit open the shit-covered boy’s belly open—

  “Jab-nab-hoo-glap…”

  —and expertly removed the twenty-pound distended liver, snipping off the hepatic veins like strands of wet vermicelli yarn.

  “Braaaaaa-lab,” Darren uttered and died. Blood filled up the hole in his gut like a punch bowl full of Cherry Smash.

  Esau flopped the liver down on the table. “Sliced Foi Gras stuffed with scallions and buttered shad roe! I think I’ll hang him in the smoker, after marinating in his shit the skin ought to have a real nice tang to it!”

  Enoch shook his head. “I dunno, I was sorta hoping you might be able to barbeque some ribsY”

  “Enoch, that’s so common! We didn’t feed this boy special for a month just to barbeque ribs! Hell, all that corn-fed shit tenderizes meat better than Adolph’s. Just wait’ll he’s been in the smoker for a spell, I’ll make some Angels on Horseback with some breast slices wrapped around some oysters and salmonberry chutney on the side—it’ll be mighty fine. I just wish that we could keep Mr. Morrone alive to appreciate all I’ve learned watching his showY”

  “I’ll bring him back in one piece, but you know we can’t let him go. Hell, we don’t wanna have to move again. Remember Grandpa telling us ’bout all the trials and tribulations he had before he settled in here?”

  Esau looked at Darren’s shit-smeared corpse with visions of setting out a feast that even the master chef would be astounded by. Feeling a burst of inspiration, he took a large cleaver off the shelf and with two deft strokes severed Darren’s head.

  “What’d you that fer?” Enoch seemed genuinely puzzled by the decapitation.

  “It’s like you said, you do the procurin’ and I do the cookin’.” With that Esau seized a five-pound sledge hammer off the shelf and with a single downward blow cracked the cranium open as easy as splitting a breadfruit. “You hurry and find Mr. Morrone, I’ll fix us up some brain souffle for a snack!”

  — | — | —

  Chapter Thirteen

  His chest was wet and sticky; had he puked on himself? Gingerly he touched his chest and almost screamed at the sudden pain. It felt like his whole body was one massive hematoma. Ashton Morrone sat still, trying to remember what had happened to him. All he knew for sure was that he hurt like hell and that he had to piss. Standing up seemed like an enormously painful undertaking; Ashton just wasn’t ready for such an endeavor, so he simply relaxed and let his bladder empty, feeling the warm flow pool underneath him, soaking his slacks.

  As the tart smell of his piss reached his nostrils, memory flooded back. He’d been shot, and he should be dead… Galvanized to action by the realization that he
was perhaps critically injured Ashton stood up and clutched at his breast. The book tumbled out from his inner pocket, embedded in the thick leather were two tiny bullets. The third had gone completely and penetrated his skin. Touching it ever so gently he could see it just under his skin, an angry black spot in the midst of a circle of burned and bruised tissue. Ashton laughed in spite of the ripples of pain that his chortling sent roiling through him.

  The book on crackjaw eels had saved him! That and his own ample girth, a thinner man’s breastbone would’ve cracked like an eggshell.

  That effete, mincing bastard had actually tried to kill him for the fucking eels! Why, when he got back to Seattle, he’d own the son-of-a-bitch!

  Fuckin’ James, and that turncoat bitch!

  Stopping only to take a cleaver from the cutlery drawer, Ashton stumbled into the night, wincing with every step. He’d find that redneck kid and tell him what happened. After all, he was the guy’s hero, Isiah or whatever his name was wouldn’t take kindly to a murder attempt on his culinary idol. Ashton grinned just thinking about what those two rednecks might do to James when they caught up with him!

  He chuckled as he envisioned his rival bent over a tree stump and being made to not only squeal like a pig as the two brothers cornholed him into oblivion, but to go through a repertoire of barnyard noises that would astound Old Macdonald.

  ««—»»

  She touched herself between the legs and felt a fishtail, a fishtail slick with blood. Mavis tried to remember how this had happened. Was it the cigarette smoking man who did this to her? Was it Krychek? Those two men, they had to be aliens, no human beings could do the horrible things that they did. She’d always known that the X-Files were real. What better way to lull the public’s suspicions than to present the truth wrapped up as fiction on a TV show? Now she and Bess had stumbled on to part of the ghastly truth and there was no Fox Mulder to help her out. Hell, even Skinner would do at this point.