Fires remained silent.
He wasn’t really shocked by the revelation, but merely coming to terms with what his brother just told him...and then he mentally replayed the night that Mohinder had shown him how to shave, and that strange kiss.
‘Does that bother you, Fires...? Do you think less of me now that you finally know my guilty secret?’
‘No, Mohinder...why should I? Why would it make me change the way I feel about you? You’re my brother.’
‘Yes...but so many times I have wanted to be your lover too.’
‘My lover...?’ Fires asked with genuine puzzlement.
‘Yes...To be able to hold you in my arms and to kiss you, to caress you and...to be intimate with you in a way that men are not supposed to be intimate with each other...’
‘Who says...?’
‘They say, Fires, the men who make the laws and the rules...They say that it is a forbidden thing. Forbidden,’ Mohinder repeated the word with venom. A deep furrow of a frown creased his forehead as he continued hurriedly, ‘It is classed as illegal...Unlawful...It’s not allowed...Not in either the eyes of the law, nor in my religion. Do you understand...?’
‘Yes, I suppose I do, but I have my own secrets too, you know. Far darker than yours, and far, far more damning for me.’
Mohinder rose from the foot of Fires’ bed, made his way across to his own, picked up a pillow and then padded over, seated himself next to Fires and carefully adjusted the pillow behind his back to prop himself up.
‘So tell me your sins, my little brother...I’m listening.’
Fires gazed up at the cracked plaster of the ceiling for a long time before he began to recount the tale of his past, beginning with the flight from the farmstead and the death of his father, to the days spent on the run with his mother.
By the time he reached the point at which they were taken to the internment camps, he was crying, and almost choking on his sobs after detailing the rape and murder of his mother.
Mohinder slid down a little, putting his arm around Fires’ shoulder to try to placate him, to console him and reassure him, but urged him to continue as he cuddled the young man.
Fires took one final deep breath.
‘I have eaten dead people, Mohinder...I am a cannibal.’
There was silence and, as he waited for a response, Fires turned to look his elder brother in the eyes.
He expected to see condemnation, even horror and loathing, but all that greeted him was a smile.
‘That’s it?’ Mohinder said evenly, ‘Your terrible secret?’
‘But it’s horrible, Mo.’
‘No it isn’t, Fires...Vultures will eat the flesh of the dead, and so will the hyenas, crows and countless other animals...They all feed on carrion, and it’s the way that they survive. Even the larvae of flies do this to live...to survive.’
‘But...’
‘No, brother, you did what you needed to do, to survive, and I’m glad that you did it, because it brought you to me.’
‘So, you don’t hate me for what I did?’
Mohinder laughed softly and pulled Fires closer to him, squeezing him tightly and holding him against his warm body, his free hand gently cupping the young man’s head against his chest.
‘No, I don’t hate you...I love you.’
Fires looked up into Mohinder’s face and their eyes locked briefly, the smile frozen momentarily before Mohinder’s lips found his.
The kiss, when it came, was not quite as unexpected as before, but it was just as warm and pleasurable for the young man, if not more so, although it held far more urgency.
Fires almost pulled away, but found that he did not really want to resist as Mohinder’s strong arms encircled him, pulled him closer, stroked him and caressed him gently.
Mohinder’s tongue snaked into Fires’ mouth, probing and gently exploring it, rasping over his teeth and tongue, causing the young man to feel strange new stirrings within; sensations of genuine arousal and excitement.
Mohinder’s hands brushed over the young man’s thighs softly and crept around to his groin, finding and caressing the swelling there.
Fires moaned his pleasure as Mohinder stroked at the scrotum and began teasing the hardening cock with a warm hand, sliding it like silk, carefully and lovingly, over his aroused manhood.
The kiss eventually ended, and Fires pulled away as Mohinder’s hand pushed the young man’s shoulder gently back onto the bed, but Fires was willingly laying on the bed now to give Mohinder free access to his naked body, to let his hands roam and wander wherever they wanted to, exploring him and exciting and arousing him even more.
‘You are so very beautiful, Fires,’ Mohinder softly whispered in the darkness, and then began to kiss the young man’s torso, gradually working his way down to Fires’ groin, causing the young man to squirm in both pleasure and anticipation as Mohinder’s warm wet lips finally found, and closed around, the erection there, fingertips caressing the scrotum, and eliciting sighs and moans of delight from his adopted brother.
Fires had never felt anything like this in his entire life.
He felt that his body was so deliciously aroused and unbelievably hard, and Mohinder’s mouth felt so lovely lapping at it, teasing it and sliding up and down the shaft of it that he thought he might burst soon, that the pressure building within him might actually cause him to explode.
It was at this crucial moment that the door of their room burst open and Mohanlal’s voice broke the spell.
‘Mohinder!’ he exhaled in shock, silhouetted by the dim light that filtered in through the open door frame...
On the cool and overcast afternoon of April 7th, the three men noticed the sudden increased activity around the foreigners’ house and thought that it was more than likely due to the preparation for a party of some kind, and hoped that if alcohol was flowing, it would make the burglary go much smoother. They only had to let the foreigners fall into the deep sleep of drunkenness and it would be a breeze.
At 10:00pm, the kaffirs were watching in silence from the safety of their hiding place as lights gradually faded and dimmed around the foreigners’ house, until only a sporadic flickering candlelight was visible in one room, and eventually this moved upstairs and into the rear bedroom.
At 3:00am on the morning of April 8th, the three blacks climbed through the lower rear window, having slowly and carefully prized open the casement, and crept carefully around the back room and kitchen area, filling canvas bags with anything of value that was left lying around.
There was some gold, but not much and most of it low quality, although if these burglars had bothered to do some research, they would have discovered that most goldsmiths favoured nine carat gold to work with, and certainly no jewellery, so they felt thwarted and frustrated when they found none.
They were convinced that there had to be more hidden somewhere in the house, which was when Pietrus Mubizela spotted the small kerosene lamp and box of matches stored on the shelf to one side of a door in the corner of the kitchen area.
He struck a match and lit the wick, watching anxiously as the flame flickered into life with a sputtering sound, and then flared with plumes of acrid smoke to illuminate the whole room.
‘Cover that flame, you dumb kaffir!’ Amos Wutanashe hissed at him, and he quickly cupped his hands around the flame, opened the door and gazed at the rough stone steps that appeared to lead into some kind of cellar.
Amos followed him down into the dank and mouldy musk of the basement where they were joined by Billy Mafokeng, who finally managed to uncover the safe that had recently been buried and set into the dusty basement floor, but realised that they would need the key to open this antiquated monstrosity.
Billy thought for a moment and then made his decision.
Pietrus was sent to wait outside the house by the casement window through which they entered. He would stay there with what they had managed to find and stuff into their bags thus far and to keep watch, but also to be there fo
r them to pass any more gold and jewellery out to, once they carried them from the safe.
Billy would search downstairs for the key, whilst he sent the burly Amos to go prowling around upstairs and see if he could locate it there. However, during this part of the search, a lumbering Amos inadvertently disturbed Mohanlal Valjee, whilst rummaging in a bedside cabinet in the old man’s room, rousing him from a fitful sleep. Amos immediately clamped a large, strong hand over the man’s mouth, and put the butcher knife to the old fool’s throat, whispering in his ear and instructing him to tell them where the key for the safe was hidden.
The wizened foreigner was stubborn though.
Mohanlal was not about to surrender his profits and the future of the business to a bunch of thieving blacks, but he misunderstood their determination and desperation.
The big black man pulled Mohanlal roughly from his bed, forced him to the door of the bedroom, where the old fool braced his arms against the frame refusing point blank to budge any further.
Mohanlal now had only a few seconds of his life remaining.
His stubbornness, struggles and uncooperativeness pushed Amos’s patience beyond the limits of endurance, and the adrenaline rush coursing around in the burglar’s body was the final trigger to make him pull the knife lightly across Mohanlal’s wrinkled throat, almost severing his windpipe and narrowly missing the carotid artery, but drawing enough blood to scare the old coot into talking.
Mohanlal let his grasp of the doorframe relax and allowed himself to be propelled out onto the small landing by this brute as he felt the warm sticky wetness of his own blood soaking his night shirt.
Downstairs, Billy Mafokeng heard these muffled commotions and quickly abandoned the search for a key to investigate the situation.
Amos had mistakenly viewed Mohanlal’s lurch forward as a feeble attempt to escape and decided to act.
Mohanlal pushed open the door to Mohinder’s room to warn him of the danger.
He briefly glimpsed Mohinder and Fires naked on the bed and, as he uttered his last word, he saw the final subliminal image of the young man’s erection slipping from Mohinder’s mouth.
‘Mohinder!’ he gasped in warning, before the viciously sharp blade silenced him forever by slicing several inches deeper into the flesh, severing both arteries and his windpipe...
Billy was ascending the stairs in a blind panic now, just as Amos slit the Asian’s throat, and immediately knew that he had made a big mistake in letting him come in on this job.
It had all gone dramatically wrong and they were suddenly looking at a murder charge instead of a mere burglary, unless they took more drastic action to cover their tracks.
He saw the old Asian man slump forward into the room to the left of the small landing at the head of the stairs, watched Amos follow the body, and then heard voices of alarm and a struggle.
‘Shit!’ he hissed to himself, and ran up the remaining few stairs to the landing...
Mohinder could sense the growing excitement in the younger man, could taste the delicious saltiness of his manhood in the back of his throat and knew that Fires would soon orgasm and ejaculate, and this thought aroused and excited Mohinder immensely.
The noise of the door bursting open startled him, and he thought for one moment that his dark secret and this seduction of Fires would ultimately become his shame, as his father disowned him, but the shadow of his father suddenly developed a large black stain spreading down the front of his night shirt, and gouts of blood spattered and sprayed onto the bare wooden boards.
A hulking shadow appeared behind his father, who crumpled and collapsed in a heap, clutching at his severed throat.
Fires’ erection was completely forgotten now as the fear, panic and vengeful anger surged through Mohinder’s body, causing him to leap from the bed to attack his father’s assailant.
Amos saw the naked Indian youth leaping towards him over the white boy, who lay prone and naked on the bed, his erect cock bobbing uncontrollably between his thighs as he did so. He heard the roar of primitive rage in the back of the young man’s throat, but simply batted him aside like a flea, to send him crashing head first against the wall.
Dazed, but not unconscious, Mohinder pulled himself to his feet as Amos approached, but was unprepared for the second blow to the head that left him so weak that Amos had no trouble in slashing at him with the knife, opening a rich red ribbon of pain across Mohinder’s chest.
Billy Mafokeng also entered the room at this moment and saw that Amos was slicing pieces off a young Indian man, whilst a young white boy had risen from a bed nearby and appeared to be going to give assistance to the other youth. Billy intercepted the white boy, kicking him in the groin and reducing him to a whimpering ball on the floor, as Amos held the Indian from behind, with a huge forearm clamped around his throat, and plunged the butchery blade so deeply into the young man’s back that it made an exit in the middle of his sternum, lifting the soft smooth brown skin before pushing out through it.
Mohinder’s eyes glazed and his body slumped on the wicked spike that impaled him like a rag doll, as limp and lifeless as his now flaccid member...
At 3:30 on the morning of 8th April, Fires writhed with pleasure as Mohinder’s moist warm lips and tongue delicately and sensually teased his hardness, whilst those gentle fingers caressed his inner thighs and scrotum.
As a virgin, he had never experienced any form of sexual pleasure other than the occasional, and totally unexpected, erections that seemed to come unbidden to a man of his tender years, either early in the morning or late at night.
He had never been aroused by or attracted to men either, but he knew that this situation was different; Mohinder was different, and this made it seem all right to accept it, to surrender to it and to enjoy it.
He could feel his pleasure mounting as his manhood slithered into and out of his adopted brother’s mouth, slick with his saliva, his balls aching to the point when he knew he was going to ejaculate.
He wondered briefly if he ought to tell Mohinder, to warn him of his impending orgasm.
The decision was taken out of his hands as the door was flung wide and Mohanlal’s shocked silhouette gasped his son’s name.
They had been discovered.
Mohinder’s mouth let Fires’ hardness slip back into the cool night air, lolling and bouncing firmly on his abdomen, and despite the chill, and the discovery by their father; Fires’ orgasm would not be denied. His body arched from the light cotton sheet as the spasm caused his throbbing erection to twitch and shoot warm sticky semen out into the air in a graceful arc that spattered his body and hit the wall above the bed head.
It hurt him so much and yet, at the same time, it felt like the most unbelievably pleasurable sensation he had ever known in his entire life...but something was amiss.
Instead of the warmth of Mohinder’s body next to his, he felt the bed shifting and changing as his brother leapt over him to run to the collapsed figure of their father.
A huge and hulking dark shadow appeared in the doorway and knocked Mohinder across the full width of the bedroom and into the wall, dazing him and making him unsteady on his feet.
Mohinder staggered as the big man moved towards him, and Fires’ anger boiled instantly within him. He immediately decided that he was going to help his brother in the fight, but was only halfway from the bed to the battle when another black man ran into the room and kicked him in the balls, doubling him over with instant pain and causing him to roll onto the floor in a foetal position.
He was completely helpless, and watched in sheer horror as the knife was being driven deep into his brother’s back and pushed out through his chest.
There was no doubt in his mind that Mohinder and Mohanlal were both dead, and a fierce rage took hold of the young man.
He rose to his feet and thumped at the large man, ignoring the rain of blows from the other black man in the room, though he quickly succumbed to them and was suddenly being forced backwards and falling o
ver and onto the bed.
There the two men had set upon him in unison, raining down their blows on him and beating him mercilessly, smashing his nose and fracturing his collar bone, before he rolled backwards off the bed, narrowly avoiding the vicious point of the slashing blade.
The two men chased him over the bed, scrambling after him, and as he backed away, struggling to draw in breath through the blood that ran down from his battered nose and into his mouth, he knew with certainty that he was going to die.
The blade swung at him again, screaming in white heat over his left arm as he raised it in defence to block the blow.
His right arm hung limply by his side and useless as a result of the broken collar bone. Agony screamed through it.
A tightly balled fist caught him in the midriff and knocked all the wind out of him, as a second slash of the blade cut into his right thigh and raked up to his groin, skirting his genitalia and parting the skin over his abdominal muscles.
He instinctively threw himself backwards once more, away from the vicious blade, panting and watching as the two men stopped, transfixed, as his back pushed into the woodwork of the window frame, buckling it, shattering it with a musical tinkling of shards of glass exploding outwards into the night.
They cascaded down onto the makeshift wooden stall at the front of the house that would normally be laden with piles of fruit and vegetables to sell. The glass fragments and the splinters of wood were joined by the limp body of Fires as he smashed down onto this stall, bounced from the shattered woodwork, consciousness leaving his body, as he slithered from the ruins and his head hit the street.
The two men watched as the naked white boy tumbled through the window, bleeding and battered, crashing down into the street below. They presumed from the sickening thud that he made when he landed, that he was dead. Panic gripped the burglars, worried that the noise might have awoken a neighbour who would raise the alarm.
Billy rushed down into the basement, retrieved the kerosene lamp as Amos squeezed out through the casement window to tell the wide-eyed Pietrus to get out of here...fast.
Orphan (Hunger Book 1) Page 6
