The humans didn’t know what they were in for then.
In the meantime, he sat watching the news, brooding.
She was his bride. One of three. Kreshnik’s appetites were enormous. Her two counterparts were nearby in the dark, recuperating. The sodomy had been especially brutal this morning.
There had been a fourth. They had abandoned her corpse when they’d uprooted and come here. An anal fissure had become infected and given way to septic shock. Kreshnik had pleasured himself in her and on her and drank from her until her last day, and when that had arrived he had drained her. She met her end in delirium, semi-conscious, a wan smile on her face.
There would be another, this bride knew. She would be used up in his service. The thought, as she filed Kreshnik’s nails, caused her no concern. Her fate, one she accepted willingly, was to serve him as all others who had come before her had. When she was finished, ruined, she would be cast aside. As had been the fourth, as had been others she did not know.
She refused to cling to any false hopes that the Master would deign to convert her, to turn her to the ranks of the children of the night. His mother, for one, would be against it. His mother, the vampire that had converted Kreshnik long before the scientists and technicians had gotten a hold of him. Kreshnik’s mother, who looked with disdain on her misbegotten son.
Kreshnik’s mother was far off, and this pleased the bride.
As costly as the bride’s dedication was and would be, it was not without reward. For her commitment, Kreshnik gave her a pleasure she had never known or imagined possible. The elation of a thousand blows upon her body. The transient pleasure accompanying asphyxiation, Kreshnik’s gloved hands crushing her neck. The glory of blood shed, of writhing, covered in someone’s remains—as earlier today. Beyond these temporary pleasures, Kreshnik’s existence had given her a purpose unmatched.
In the short term there was this human, the one they called Boone. He would be found. He would be made to suffer. Scantily clad in her wimple and latex bondage gear, she wore her sai. She had been instructed in their use by the masters of the East, the Thuggee and Shinobi in the employ of her Master’s clan. She was more than adept in their implementation. She would partake in the elimination of this Boone.
Then to Kosovo, to chase down and destroy the accursed Serbs, to return her Master’s people to their rightful home. And, finally, back to America, to deal with Rainford and those few like him. She still felt young and strong. She hoped to participate in it all at Kreshnik’s side. She imagined the sex that would accompany these events.
Blood and slaughter sent Kreshnik into a conjugal fury. She suspected he had lost all physical pleasure in the sexual act. For him, sex was purely about power, about exerting his strength of body and will over others. He was easily lost in the frenzy of flesh upon flesh. He had strangled the life out of men and women in her presence during coitus. His needs were tremendous.
One of his other brides stepped into the glow of the television behind the Master, draping his cloak over his shoulders. He barely turned his head, disinterested, fixated on the screen. His cloak was a brilliant red with two black eagles, back to back. The flag of his homeland. The flag of his peoples.
Kreshnik, the bride knew, had not been a vampire long. Perhaps a century. He still clung to a rudimentary sense of nationalism. To a people, to a land. Time, she had been led to understand, would diminish this attachment.
The other woman stepped back into the dark. As she finished shaping and sharpening the nails of his one hand, the bride thought how service to her Master had allowed her to transcend mere human emotions. She felt no jealousy for the two other women who doted on Kreshnik. They were his brides. They were her sisters. She had felt nothing for the fourth they’d left behind, knowing that that one would be replaced, as would she when her service had drawn to a close.
It was a certainty that did not concern her. It was as it should be. It was at it had been. She would live in the moment and, when the time came, die in it. She could ask for nothing more. She longed for nothing more than dying by her Master’s hand or dying for him. She was an extension of her Master, and he would slough her off just as she clipped and shaped dead nail from his claws.
The bride polished his nails as the Master waited anxiously before his television.
18.
1:30 P.M.
“Okay…”
“Light weight, baby. All you.”
“Okay, let’s do this.”
“On your three, B.”
At 6’4” and three hundred and thirty five pounds, Father Mark was one of the largest men of the cloth the archdiocese of Rome had ever slapped a collar on. A former college football player turned divinity student, he loomed over the rear of the flat bench on which Boone lay.
“One,” Boone grunted, his hands affixed to the Olympic bar above him.
“It’s you, B, it’s you—”
As a boy, one of Mark’s favorite stories had been biblical, that of Samson and his immense strength. The priest had just finished his fourth set on the bench, knocking off six smooth reps with 455 on the Olympic bar. He and Boone had been trading places and pyramiding up in weight, from their earliest warm-ups with one forty five pound plate on each side of the bar to two and three and then four with a quarter thrown on each end to bring it up to more than four hundred and fifty pounds.
“Two—”
“You baby! You!”
Boone had stripped the twenty-five pounder off his side of the bar and slapped another forty five on, bringing the total to five forty-five pound plates on that end. Father Mark had raised an eyebrow but didn’t bother to ask.
Mark had the strength of a beast in the field, but Boone, though shorter and leaner than the priest, was stronger. Boone had retard strength. Mark had seen Boone lift some insane iron in the years they’d trained together, and if the guy had it in his head that he could bench five hundred today, well then, Mark would be there for a lift off. And he’d be there to pull the weight off Boone’s chest if he had to.
So Mark had slapped another wheel on his side of the bar and Boone had sat down on the end of the bench.
“This ain’t shit—” Boone had sputtered, psyching himself up.
“This weight ain’t shit, B!” Father Mark had yelled back at him. “This weight is your bitch! Do this shit B! Do this!”
“Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck—” Boone had banged his fist against the side of his head a few times, arched his back, got under the bar and secured his grip.
“Three!” Boone grunted and Father Mark heaved the cambered bar from the supports, using his elbows to brace it. He drew back and Boone steadied the weight above his chest for a moment before lowering the iron to his chest, touching the light flannel shirt he wore, then exhaling and pressing.
“Light weight!” Father Mark spat as Boone locked out the first rep. When they benched they saved the locking out for their heavier sets. Their reps with 135, 225, and 315 had been short and choppy, seemingly effortless. Mark had felt 405 and the six with 455 had taken everything from him that he was going to be able to give it today.
Boone lowered the bar for a second time to his flannel, open over a sleeveless t-shirt. Mark watched him carefully. A few times in the past he’d had to pull the bar off the guy’s chest. Boone was never scared of the weight. When Boone got it in his mind that he was going to war with the iron he went to war and he took no prisoners, even if his body failed him.
The bar went up again, slower this time.
“Mine!” Boone sputtered, his face beat red, his back arching, his work boots driving into the rubber mats on the floor.
“Yours!” At the bench next to theirs, the group of Italian kids in their wife beater t-shirts had stopped lifting and were watching, wide-eyed.
“One more—” Boone gasped and lowered the bar a third time to his chest and Mark wondered if he was going to clear the nipple line or if the weight would stall on his friends’ torso.
Sure enough,
the bar started to rise. Boone grunted and heaved, his booted feet pushing through the floor, his lower back arching more, his upper arms inching up to parallel with the floor.
“Come on!” Father Mark roared down at him. “Do this! Do this!”
The bar wavered on its ascent and a couple of the Italian kids yelled some kind of encouragement but Boone and Father Mark were in their own little world, a man against five hundred pounds and the forces of gravity and another man watching over him.
The bar inched up but Mark knew and he reached down and gripped it and just like that Boone thrust it the remaining few inches to a complete lockout. Mark guided it back to the supports and the bar slammed home, the plates clanging against one another.
Boone sat up on the bench, breathing hard. The flannel shirt had dark circles under his armpits from the sweat, and this had been their first exercise of the workout routine. The Italian kids were talking to one another and one of them was flexing his pecs and looking down the cleavage.
“Good set,” apprised Father Mark. He wore a boat top over a string tank top and the blood had suffused his pectorals, his upper chest flooded bright red.
“How much did you help me?”
“I just touched the bar. Honest.”
“Priest wouldn’t lie, right?”
“Priests lie,” said Father Mark. “But I wouldn’t lie to you, Boone.”
“Priests lie? No shit.” Boone shook his head and beads of sweat flew off to the black rubber mats on the floor.
“Yeah, lying’s only a venial sin.” Mark started to pull the forty fives off one end of the bar and sliding them onto a weight tree next to the bench.
“Remind me, why’d you get into the priesthood again?” Boone stood and stretched his arms out, his chest tight already, pumped with blood.
“The boys,” quipped Mark, nodding over to the Italian kids. “The boys.”
“Sick bastard.” Boone laughed and yanked a plate off the other end of the bar. “What d’ya want to do next?”
“Inclines. Dumbbells.”
“This gym only goes up to one-eighties.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we benched first then, right?”
19.
2:45 P.M.
“When’s that GH from China coming in, B?” Father Mark asked in the locker room.
“The Jintropin? Next week. Why, you interested?”
“Fuck no. Just want to know when I can start looking for side effects in your ass is all. Acromegaly, that kind of shit.”
“How’s my hand look to you?” Boone took his hand off the syringe long enough to flip the priest the bird.
Both men were exhausted, spent from an intense workout. Father Mark spooned some rice and chicken from a Tupperware container into his mouth. He was ravenous after every workout. Boone rarely ate right after a workout and Mark wondered how the guy did it.
Nothing was normal about Boone though, thought the priest. They’d known each other since they were both kids, lost in the city’s group- and foster-home systems. At least Boone had had a foster family, tried to take him in, make him feel like one of them. Mark hadn’t had that.
“You still doing a thousand milligrams a week?” the priest asked, referring to the vial of testosterone Boone was filling his syringe from.
“Nah,” Boone answered matter-of-factly. “I’m up to two fifty a day.”
“Two fifty? That means you’re running, what, seventeen hundred a week?”
“Seventeen fifty,” corrected Boone.
“Well,” Mark chewed his chicken and rice. “That’s some bullshit there.”
“I heard Yates does five thousand a week,” said Boone, and it sounded like he admired the idea. Dorian Yates was the six-time Mr. Olympia.
“Yates never did that kind of shit. Plus he’s retired. Where’d you hear that?”
“I didn’t. I just made it up.” Boone removed the needle from the rubber stopper and put down the vial. He held the syringe up and tapped the side of it. Both men watched the bubbles in the oil-based liquid float to the top.
One thousand seven hundred and fifty milligrams a week, on top of who knew what else Boone was popping into his system. Father Mark worried about his friend, but it wasn’t the steroids or growth hormone or any other muscle-building substance he used or might use that worried him. Those took their time to kill, if they could really kill you at all. Mark worried more about the recreational drugs he knew Boone indulged in.
If Boone thought nothing of ingesting thousands of milligrams of androgens and anabolics a week, god knew how much booze and blow he could consume. Father Mark didn’t know much about his birth mother but he knew she was Irish and he liked to think this and his sheer size explained how he could hold his liquor, but there was no way he could fathom how Boone held his.
Boone stood up and pulled down his sweat pants and drawers. He pushed up on the plunger a bit and watched the testosterone cypionate jet into the air.
“You want to stick it in my ass?” he asked the priest.
“Give me that.” Father Mark took the needle from his friend. “You got a wipe or anything?”
Boone spit in his palm and rubbed his ass cheek with his flannel.
“That’s sterile to you, huh?” Father Mark shook his head.
“Skip the foreplay and just give it to me, okay?”
“Fucker.” Mark plunged the syringe into his friend’s buttock. “I hope this hurts.” He pulled back on the plunger slightly. When the case didn’t fill with blood he knew he hadn’t hit a vein so he slowly depressed the plunger, injecting the testosterone into his friend’s body. Oil-based, it would sit in his buttock and dissipate over the next couple of weeks.
“You were amped up today, B.”
“Work,” said Boone, his neck craned, watching the liquid disappear in the meat of his ass cheek.
“Still having those dreams?” In college Mark had majored in psychology. These days when he wasn’t serving mass and pumping the iron he was finishing up his coursework in the City University’s doctoral program in Psychology.
“Had one today,” admitted Boone. Mark had been listening to Boone’s dreams ever since they’d roomed together when they were both fifteen and Mark had had to wake a whimpering Boone up from some night terror.
“How was that for you?” Boone asked as Mark pulled the syringe free and handed it back.
“Your ass is too hairy, but that’s just a personal preference on my part.”
“You ever get tired of the pedophile jokes?”
“If I told you I did, would you stop?”
“No.”
“Your idea of cleanliness invites abscesses,” the priest noted as Boone pulled up his pants.
“Next to godliness, right?” asked Boone. “And you’d know, right?”
“Wait and see, B. Don’t come crying to me when you get a big hole in the side of your ass. What’d you dream about?”
Boone capped the syringe and walked over to the garbage can under the paper towel dispenser, tossing the needle away.
“Fuckin’ crazy shit. Bleak landscape, all burnt and ash. Shit’s covered in bones. I mean, human bones, like thigh deep. Corpses on top of the bones, all—how do you say it, dried out and mummified and shit?”
“Desiccated.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Desiccated,” Boone popped the top off a bottle he’d pulled out of his gym bag. He dumped a handful of pink tablets into his palm. “Desiccated corpses all dried up and shit. The sky’s all dark and cloudy except for the sun. The sun burns red, Mark, red…and then this thing rears up, spreads its wings, blocks out the sun—”
“You’s strong, dawg.” Two of the Italian kids had come into the locker room and one of them was talking to Boone.
Boone scoffed, not deigning to answer. He popped the handful of pills into his mouth and dry swallowed. “Breakfast of champions” he muttered more to himself than anyone else.
Mark sighed. Orals had a way of wreaking havoc on a man’s liver,
having to pass through it twice. Better to inject. And that Russian D-Bol Boone was gulping down…God only knew the quality of it.
“Yo, where can we get some of that?” The second kid nodded towards the bottle in Boone’s hand.
Mark saw the look crossing his friend’s face so he spoke up before Boone could. “I’ll handle this one, B. Do me a favor and go get yourself a protein shake at least.”
Boone grunted something, grabbed his gym bag and walked out of the locker room.
“Yo, what’s up with your friend, bro? Roid rage?” The kid was trying to joke around but Mark cut him off short.
“Let him hear you say that, he’ll rip your nuts off and use them as a hood ornament.”
“I was just kidding, yo.” The kid looked down at his pecs, sufficiently cowed.
“Yo, that guy is strong yo.” The other kid tried to take up the slack. “I mean, we got a friend out in Philly who’s strong, but that guy—”
Mark munched his chicken and rice and let the kid go on about how strong the guy out in Philly supposedly was. Everyone seemed to know someone who was bigger and stronger than Boone and Mark, but Mark knew he and his friend were too of the biggest and strongest mugs walking God’s green earth. Usually the other someone lived out on a farm somewhere and lifted engine blocks and trained like Rocky getting ready to face Drago in Rocky IV, or so the stories always seemed to go.
“Yo, seriously, you know where we can get some of that, cuz?” The other kid looked up from his pecs and interrupted his friend’s story.
“You knuckleheads got names?” Mark asked them.
“Joey.”
“Mossimo.”
“Mossimo? Shit. What’d you just get off the boat?”
The kid looked like he didn’t know how to take the comment. What was he going to do? Get mad at the three hundred fifty-plus pounder hulking on the bench? Mark spoke up and let the kid save face. “I’m just fuckin’ with you. Plus I’m a priest, so whattya gonna’ do? Kick my ass? You’ll definitely go to hell for that.”
I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) Page 8
