Chapter Five: Guilty Pleasure
The men whooped with joy, and rushed to take possession of their selections. There were a few scuffles, as there were six men and only four women, and some of the men wanted the same girl, but these were quickly settled with a few blows. There seemed to be an established pecking order among the mountain men. At the bottom were the three Carson brothers who had arrived last, to Billy’s displeasure: Rand, Bran and Ed. They were eventually forced to settle for sharing Steph three ways, after each was knocked to the ground in turn by the short but powerfully built Charlie and the massive, towering Mort. The former plucked Robin from the ground as easily as if she was an inflatable doll and tossed her over his shoulder, carrying her away to tie her to a tree. The latter grabbed Merry by the ankle and dragged her caveman-style across the clearing, face down in the dirt.
The others waited until after Billy had announced that Jodie was his chosen playmate. None of them challenged him. Jodie decided that Billy was the leader of this pack of human sharks because he was the toughest, smartest and deadliest by far, and the rest of the gang was justifiably afraid of him.
Billy knelt down on one knee beside Jodie, a commando knife in his hand, his flashlight blindingly in her eyes. “Now, cutie-pie, what’s your name, an’ how old are you? You look mebbe fifteen, if that, but somethin’ tells me you’re older’n that.” He flipped her over onto her back and began to cut away her shirt with the blade whispering against her flesh as he cut through the cloth.
“My name is Jodie,” she answered, trying not to allow fear show in her voice. She suspected that a man like Billy would want to terrorize his victims before he killed them, and he would want to keep her alive until he had fully savored her fear. “I’m a lot older than I look, you’re right about that. I’m actually twenty-four, and very experienced at sex. I’ll be happy to give you a great fuck, the best you ever had, and you don’t need to hurt me.”
“Huh. Is that a fact?” Billy asked. He drew back his boot and kicked Jodie in the midsection, explosively driving all the air out of her lungs and making her double up in helpless agony. He pulled her halfway from the ground by her hair with effortless strength, as she retched and fought to make her battered diaphragm start to function again. “I hope that’s not yer best offer, ’cos I plan to hurt you plenty, an if you don’t gimme the best fuck I ever had, why, I’ll hurt you lots worse.” He resumed plying the knife, cutting away Jodie’s trousers and panties with a few apparently careless but actually precise strokes of the razor-sharp blade, scoring her thighs with long, shallow cuts. When he was done, Jodie’s clothing had been reduced to a ragged ring of cloth around one ankle, and the collar of her shirt, and there were thin trails of blood running down her legs where he had cut her. Other than the few scraps that were the remnants of her clothing, she was nude.
Billy dragged her along the ground to the base of a convenient tree. He tied a slipknot around a head-high limb, and then looped the other end around one of Jodie’s ankles. Then he hauled her up with the rope until she was dangling inverted from the branch, her head three feet above the ground, breathing raggedly.
The tree was a spruce, and the branch from which Jodie was suspended was, consequently, quite springy. So instead of merely hanging upside down with a fiery ball of pain burning in her midsection from being kicked, she was also bobbing up and down on the evergreen branch like some kind of bizarre toy store Christmas display.
Billy placed his light on the ground, and then opened his pants. He steadied Jodie’s body with his hand, stopping the bouncing motion, for which small favor she was grateful. He stood about an inch from her face and pressed the edge of his blade against her throat.
“Now sweetheart, if you plan to go on livin’ much longer, you’ll open that pretty little mouth a yours and start suckin’ on me,” he said.
Jodie opened wide. She did her best to give him as much pleasure as possible, which, even in this inverted position, was considerable. Bill was well endowed, but Jodie was experienced in handling greater length and girth, and he presented no problem for her. The only unusual thing about this one was the terrible taste, the worst she had ever encountered, reminding her of spoiled meat. Billy, it seemed, was not a fanatic about personal hygiene. It was difficult for her to suppress a powerful urge to vomit.
Bill held her by the ears, using these as handles to ram himself as violently as possible down her throat. When she did not react as he had expected by struggling or trying to scream, he changed his tactics.
“Havin’ a good time, are you?” he asked. “Mebbe y’all will like this too.” He closed his thumb and finger around her nostrils, cutting off her air.
Evidently, he found the way she twisted her body and kicked her free leg as she fought for her life to be stimulating. As Jodie was about to lose her tenuous grip on consciousness, he finished and pulled back with a sigh of contentment. “Ah, that’s better!” he said.
He squatted on the ground to study the semiconscious woman. “That was fair to middlin’,” he told her. When she did not respond, he slapped her face and pinched her cheeks until she revived.
“Now, s’spose you tell me what-all you city folk was doin’ campin’ out here in the sticks?” he asked. “I kin see from yer gear yer some kind a military, but this don’t look like nuthin’ official. I would’n be su’prised if it turned out that crowd a soldiers up at that fancy cabin had somethin’ to do with you-all bein’ here. Mebbe they’re lookin’ for you, an mebbe you don’t want ’em to find you.”
Billy’s shrewd guesses were coming uncomfortably close to the truth. Jodie was reluctant to tell the sadistic hillbilly the truth, but she suspected that if she did not do something, they were all going to be dead meat anyway. She decided to try to enlist him on their side. As far as she could tell, she had nothing to lose.
She took a deep breath and started to talk. “You’re right, Billy. My friends and I are in hiding. A group of men, we don’t know exactly who they are, are attempting to overthrow the government, and they’re after me because I am next in line as the Chief of the General Staff. Maybe you heard of me. I am Lieutenant General Jodie Lawrence. My friends and I are going to beat these traitors, and when we do I am going to be running the whole country. I won’t forget anybody who helped me when I was in trouble. I can promise you that if you and your boys help us, I won’t hold this little party against you. I’ll be grateful, and a grateful CGS has the power to get you just about anything you could ever want.” She paused expectantly.
As he squatted, apparently considering her offer, Jodie heard the muffled screams of her companions, as the brutish hicks abused them. She could see Merry, her hands tied to an overhead branch, twisting and dancing frantically as she attempted to evade the flaming branch Mort was jabbing at her naked body.
Steph had a noose around her neck and her hands tied behind her back. She had been lifted off the ground by one of the Carson brothers who thrusting at her, and she was obliged to cling to him with her long legs wrapped around his waist to avoid being asphyxiated. Behind her, a second brother was grunting like a wild boar as he energetically rammed himself into Steph’s back door, while the third looked on, waiting for his turn.
From where she hung, Jodie could not see what Charlie was doing to Robin, for which she was moderately grateful. The faint cries coming from the far side of the clearing told her that her lover was at least still alive.
“So you’re the one the whole country’s looking for?” Billy said at last. He no longer spoke in a thick countrified dialect as he had up to now, but sounded very much like an educated, urban Easterner. “The radio says you’ve been kidnapped as part of a plot to overthrow the government. There’s a million dollar reward for information on your whereabouts.”
He looked at the expression on her face, and grinned. “You don’t think I talk with that cornpone accent all the time, do you, General Lawrence? I’m not a real mountain man, like the boys, although they think I’m from some ‘
holler’ in West Virginia. I came out here from Baltimore. I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, so you can see I’m really a city boy. You’ll keep my secret, won’t you?” he asked, winking conspiratorially.
“Now, as it happens, I’m in no position to turn you in for the reward,” he went on. “You see, the boys and I have a little meth lab out here in the woods, about a mile over that way,” he pointed, “and we have no desire to attract the attention of the authorities.”
Jodie said, “You won’t have to worry about being arrested if you help me. I don’t give a crap about your drug business, Billy, and once this thing is over, I’ll be in a position to make sure you won’t be bothered by anybody; state, federal or local, if that’s what you want.”
Billy shook his head. “But you don’t have the full picture yet, General. You see, I left Baltimore because things were getting a little hot for me there. I have a hobby that is frowned upon by… well, by almost everybody.”
As he talked, he was lowering the rope holding Jodie, until her waist was level with his crotch. “You see, the reason I had to leave Baltimore in such a hurry is my unusual interest in pretty young girls.” His voice dropped. “Did you ever hear of the ‘Jigsaw Man’, General Lawrence? Well, that’s me.”
She had. The story had been carried all over the country. Eighteen months earlier, Baltimore police had raided a row house in a derelict section of the city, where they found various body parts belonging to eight different victims, all females between the ages of 18 and 30, wrapped in cellophane and stored in a large freezer. The unknown perpetrator, subsequently given the nickname “the Jigsaw Man” by the press, had never been apprehended, in spite of a massive investigation led by the FBI.
When Jodie’s eyes widened in reaction, Billy said, “So you have heard of me. Luckily for me, I was out of the house the day the police broke in and found all those girls… well, all those parts of girls, anyway… in my the basement. After I came out here, I put together our little group, and introduced the boys to my hobby. This area is practically the perfect place for it. There’s nobody around for miles, so the little bitches can scream all they want and the only ones hearing them are raccoons and black bears. We even have a smokehouse next to the lab, where we can preserve the meat after we’re all through playing with them. I got lucky on Thursday. I picked up a couple of brainless freshmen girls from Virginia Tech hitchhiking on Two-Twenty, and brought them back to the shack. I kept a souvenir. Let me show you.” He opened his waist pouch, fumbled around in it for a moment, and said, “Here it is.”
He held the object in the light. It was a human ear. The earlobe was pierced with a lapis stud earring. “I think her name was Tara. She was a cute little thing, and after I cut this off, she couldn’t do enough to please me.” He tucked the ear back into the pouch and smiled in reminiscence. “She was so sweet and pathetic when she got down on her knees and begged for her life that I almost didn’t have the heart to finish her off.”
Jodie stared at Billy with burning eyes. “You are one sick fuck,” she said hoarsely.
Billy nodded. “I sure am,” he agreed. The knowledge did not seem to trouble him.
He spun Jodie’s body halfway around, and then began to rub up and down in the valley between her buttocks.
“So you can see that even if I could trust you to keep your word about the meth lab, there is no way you would be able to overlook my other little guilty pleasure. I couldn’t take even the smallest chance of anybody finding out what the boys and I are up to out here,” he said. He jabbed unsuccessfully at her back door a few times, then said, “Tight little thing, aren’t you?”
He went into his pouch again, this time removing a small glass bottle with a wide bottom and long, narrow neck. He reached around to show it to Jodie. “This is Louisiana hot sauce. I never go anywhere without it.” He brought the bottle of hot sauce back, twisted off the cap, and shook some of the contents onto himself. “Not only does it make good meat taste better, but it’s a pretty fair lubricant, in a pinch.”
He again pressed into Jodie’s rear entrance again. This time, the hot sauce was lubrication enough to allow Billy to overcome any resistance. Jodie screamed. The hot sauce felt like burning gasoline, and the pain increased as he penetrated deeper.
Billy paused. He whipped off the handkerchief he had knotted around his neck and stuffed it into the shrieking Jodie’s open mouth. “Normally, I would let you scream all you want,” he said, almost apologetically, “but with all those Army boys only a few miles away, there’s a chance somebody might be wandering around the neighborhood looking for you, and I wouldn’t want anybody to find you, at least not until we’re finished here.”
He grasped her hips and pulled sharply, thrusting into her, and then he reached down, encircled her slender throat with his hands and pressed down on her windpipe with his thumbs.
“That Tech co-ed had a great ass, but you’re the best fuck I can remember, General,” he told the hopelessly struggling Jodie. “It almost seems a shame not to keep you around, at least for a few days, but it’s just too risky.”
At that moment, Jodie was in no condition to appreciate the compliment. There was a growing buzzing in her ears and a red mist obscured her vision, turning gradually gray and growing darker with each passing second. So this is what it feels like to die, she thought.
Then there was a sharp crack, followed immediately by a dull thump in the near distance, and suddenly the hands gripping her windpipe had been released. A heavy impact on her left leg, side and shoulder sent her spinning on the end of the rope, when Billy’s body bounced off hers as he tumbled to the ground. As he fell past her, Jodie saw that where the back of his head had been was now a gaping ruin.
Revolving around on the rope as she was, Jodie had only an intermittent view of what followed. A figure dressed in combat fatigues with an M-63 assault rifle in her hands rushed silently by her. Jodie heard three more explosions in rapid succession, the crack of the high velocity bullet cutting through the air and the thump of the detonating round in the assault rifle merging into a single sound with each shot, and by the time her rotation had brought her around to face the far side of the clearing again, she saw that two of the Carson brothers were already sprawled bonelessly on the ground and the third was in the act of joining them.
The rifleman did not even wait long enough to see which way he fell. She turned her weapon towards the giant Mort, who only now was beginning to realize that something had gone wrong. He had just begun to turn towards the attacker and raise his hand when flame spurted from the end of the rifle’s barrel, and a small, neat hole appeared in the middle of his forehead. He continued to turn as he pitched forward to crash face-first in the dirt. Jodie had no doubt he was dead before he hit the ground.
Jodie lost sight of the action as she turned momentarily away again. When she was once more facing the right direction, she saw the final member of the gang, Charlie, shuffling slowly towards the rifleman, with his pants down around his ankles, his erection poking in front and his hands raised over his head.
He said, “I give…”
Before he could say more, there was another crack and a hole the exact diameter of a 5.56mm bullet formed just above and directly between Charlie’s bushy eyebrows. He was thrown backwards, landing heavily and sending a cloud of dust particles into the beam of the flashlight he had dropped on the ground behind him.
Kate Swenson walked over to the corpse, leaned over, pursed her lips and sent a wad of saliva to splash on the forehead of the blankly staring face. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you want to say something to me, dog meat?” she asked.
Chapter Six: Murphy
Kate took a few seconds to make a cursory check of the six members of Billy’s gang, and when she was satisfied they were no longer a threat, she immediately went across the clearing to release Jodie.
“Are you all right, Jodie?” Kate asked, as she gently lowered her to the ground and untied her wrists. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner
, but I had to make sure they were all too busy to notice me. I had to get them all, because if even one…”
“Don’t explain and don’t apologize, Kate. You showed up in time, and that’s all that counts,” Jodie interrupted. She started to dig her fingernails into the knotted rope around her ankle, then glanced up to see Kate still kneeling at her side, staring at her anxiously. She waved her hand in a shooing motion and said, “I’m fine, Kate. Thank you for saving my life. Now I need you to go help the others. That’s an order.”
“Yes sir,” Kate said, reluctantly rising to her feet, “I’ll go right now.”
“And the second you make sure the girls are all right, go look in the tent. Murphy’s in there, and I think he’s in pretty bad shape. Do whatever you can for him, then report back to me,” Jodie added.
After a brief struggle, Jodie was able to work the knot loose and remove the rope around her leg. She spent a few seconds massaging life back into her foot before she stood up. She intended to go check on her people, but she had forgotten how badly Billy had beaten her up.
As soon Jodie got to her feet, she was hit by a wave of nausea and dizziness. Her head throbbed where Billy had kicked her, and there was a stabbing pain in her side. She came close to blacking out before she hastily sat back down. She stayed on the ground for a while before attempting to rise again, and the second time she rose much more slowly and cautiously, while holding one hand pressed to her side.
By then, the other girls had been set free by Kate. Steph and Robin had their arms under Merry’s shoulders, and were half-carrying, half-walking her to where Jodie waited.
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