Sex and Murder

by Douglas Allen Rhodes

  “You gonna rape her?” Angel asked. She seemed happy at the prospect.

  “No, I don’t rape.”

  She looked at me like I was odd.

  “Why’s she naked then?”

  “I wanted to see her body.”

  Angel laughed, and I took the clothesline from her and tossed it to Ma the Ice Queen.

  “Tie him up,” I ordered.

  She did as she was told. When she’d finished, I had her sit back down on the couch. I cut off the excess rope—still a good five feet—and threw it to Angel.

  “Take care of your mom.”

  While Angel obeyed, I fashioned a gag for her father, using his wife’s sweaty wife-beater. He looked petrified the entire time I worked on him, and I was about to fuck with him a little (you know, slap him around, put the gun to his face, that kind of shit), when a loud smacking sound from just behind me drew my attention back to Angel. I expected to see her wreaking vengeance on Mommy Dearest.

  I was wrong.

  Mom had smacked Angel to the floor, where she lay, curled at her feet. She towered over Angel, staring me down.

  I couldn’t very well let her fuck up the murder, so I eased the .45’s hammer down, set the safety, and swiped the gun barrel across her face with just enough force to knock her down. She fell to the couch, yelping in pain and lifting her hand to the large gash the gun had left on her cheek.

  I nudged Angel with the toe of my boot. “Get up.”

  She didn’t move or respond at all—she just lay there like she had in the car. I kicked her harshly in the ribs.

  “I said ‘get up’. Stop acting so goddamn weak. You think I want to take some pitiful little girl with me when she can’t take a punch? Huh?” I screamed.

  Slowly, she raised her head, staring at me wide-eyed.

  “You’re taking me with you?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  “Get up.” She did. “Now, finish tying up that bitch so we can get under way.”

  This time around, Angel got her mom trussed up without a hitch. Once she had the rope securely tied, Angel started beating on her mom. I let her go for a few minutes before stopping her. Hell, even if the woman hadn’t done all that shit that Angel claimed (and I believe she did do it) she still needed a seriously good beating.

  “Angel.” I placed my hand firmly on her shoulder.

  She growled and wildly slashed at her mom’s face, clawing deep grooves into the woman’s skin. The Ice Queen was fast becoming unrecognizable.

  “Angel!” I pulled her back.

  She spun on me, still crazy eyed and growling, and I thought for a second that she might try hitting me. She didn’t, though. She broke into a fit of maniacal laughter.

  “Sorry,” she said a minute later, “I got carried away.”

  “It’s fine by me.”

  On the couch, her mother cried and groaned, small bubbles of blood inflating and popping around her mouth and nose as she breathed.

  “You can kill them however you want, but didn’t you say you wanted to bathe in their blood and piss on their corpses?”

  A mischievous gleam sparkled in her eye.

  “You like that, huh?”

  “Wha…I….” I stammered.

  “Oh, fuck, I forgot some shit.” Angel started for the stairs. “Be right back.”

  I took the opportunity to gag her mom with the boxer shorts. She barely even noticed I was there. Afterwards, I strolled to the bar and fixed myself a drink—a fire and ice.

  I’d managed to get in five quick shots when Angel walked in, dressed in the vinyl outfit I’d bought her and carrying a weird-looking clay bowl.

  The weird bowl aside, she looked great. I tossed back my final shot and threw the glass over my shoulder.

  Knowing smiles passed between us, and I stepped from around the bar and walked towards Angel. I reached her, and she giggled and stood on her tiptoes to kiss me. I lifted her off the ground, and her legs locked around me. We kissed, long and deep, the electric passion of the murder to come coursing between us in a shared longing. Angel broke the embrace and gracefully slid down my body to the floor.

  With lust-filled eyes, I watched my bloody Angel saunter over to her father, who still stood beside the couch, stopping to kick him in the groin, before heading to the couch where her mother lay. She moved her mother’s limp head, positioning it so that she looked up at her. Then, with purpose, she peeled the vinyl from her body, continuing on to remove her stockings and garter until she stood before her mother, naked and revealed.

  “Let’s start with her,” she called to me.

  Picking up the butcher knife she’d brought down originally, Angel sliced through the Ice Queen’s left breast with a quick motion, severing it. Mom’s body leapt with pain and fell to the floor, flopping around like a dying trout. Angel stomped down hard in the center of the woman’s stomach, pinning her, and, with a flash of steel, she removed her mother’s remaining mammary.

  Even through the boxer-shorts gag, Mommy Dearest’s screams sounded horrible. She howled and bellowed with rage and pain and the certainty of death.

  Angel cackled like a madwoman and cut off both the woman’s ears with two quick slashes of her blade. Blood sprayed everywhere—it soaked the floor, stained the couch, and splattered delightfully across Angel’s sylvan frame.

  Dropping her knife, Angel attempted to lift the thrashing remains of Mrs. Jordan, but the weight of the struggling woman was beyond her strength. She tried and failed several times before she spun to face me, her face a feral mask of unleashed retribution. She loosed a guttural growl.

  “Don’t just stand there, help me.”

  When I didn’t move, she fell to her knees and started pounding on the dying woman’s frame.

  “Help me! Help me! Help me!” she screamed.

  I walked over to stand above her. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Hold her. Get her up so that her head and shoulders are above the hot tub.”

  Her eyes blazed with inspiration, and she leapt from the woman’s body to stand before me. Blood ran along the length of her body, collecting on her right breast and dripping thickly from her nipple ring. The muscles of her thighs quivered with anticipation, and her tiny frame shivered.

  I stripped down to my socks and gloves and set my clothes on top of the bar. Impatience tortured Angel, but she waited obediently, her hands clenching and unclenching in angry little fists.

  I returned to find her mother too weak to offer any struggle, and I hoisted her without effort onto my shoulder. Angel reached a bloody palm out to brush against me. Her eyes flashed murder.

  I carried the limp and dying body of her mother to the hot tub and held her there like Angel had asked. Angel turned the hot tub on and grabbed the axe. Realizing what she had in mind, I adjusted my hold on Mom’s body and held her by her calves, far out of the way.

  Angel raised the axe and, with a fierce arc, brought its blade down hard on her mother’s neck, severing the head and sending it roughly into the tub with a splash. Blood sprayed and gushed from the corpse, and the water in the tub turned a dark and wicked red. I pushed the body forward so that it hung over the side of the tub, the leaking neck submerged in the crimson pool.

  Angel pranced about the room, doing little dance steps and giddy jigs.

  “Yes!” she cried out several times. “Oh, yes, the bitch is dead. The fuckin’ bitch is really dead. Hey ho,” she sang in her best munchkin voice, “the bitch is dead, the fuckin’ bitch, the fuckin’ bitch, hey ho, the fuckin’ bitch is dead.”

  I smiled at her, and she danced over to me, taking me by the hands and lifting my arms as she cavorted around before me. She turned with a giggle and shimmied her body against me, splotching me with her mother’s blood.

  “Now, for—” Her words stopped short with an alarmed abruptness, and I instantly guessed the reason: we’d completely ignored her dad.

  Now he was gone, nowhere to be seen.

  “Oh, fuck!” she howled.
“No. You can’t get away. No!”

  Frantic, she ran over to where we had left him, her head shooting from left to right in a desperate search for her dad. Along the way, she’d scooped up the axe again and brandished it menacingly before her.

  I had checked Pop’s ropes myself and knew that they were tight. No matter how ignored he had been, there was only so far he could have gotten. My hunch proved right, and Angel found him behind the couch, trying for all he was worth to crawl under it. She yelped with triumph.

  “Thought you could get away?” she taunted him, bringing the back of the axe head down hard against his spine.

  His muffled screaming grew louder as I walked around the couch to get a better view. Angel rolled her father onto his back and jumped down next to him, putting the axe head and her face in close enough to almost touch his.

  “You’re gonna die, you asshole—you fucking asshole! How could you? How could you?” She screamed at the top of her lungs, her eyes wide open and fiercely angry, blood and spit shooting from her lips.

  She jumped onto him and shoved her crotch into his face, grinding it roughly against him.

  “You want this?” she screamed. “You wanna fuck me, you fuck, you goddamn fuck? Huh? You. Wanna. Fuck. Me?”

  She punctuated each of the last four words by slamming her hips into her father’s face, smashing against him with such intense ferocity that his head bounced off the floor under each impact.

  Angel jumped up and hammered at her father’s groin with the flat side of the axe head, looking for all the world like she was hammering a stake into his crotch. Dad no longer moved, except reflexively, staying still and sobbing into his dead wife’s shirt.

  Angel stopped her onslaught and turned to face me. “Hold him over the hot tub,” she barked, then, thinking better of it, she softly added, “Please.”

  I shook my head and chuckled, but did what she asked, placing Poppa Molester in the proper position, his body next to Mom’s. Angel snatched up the weird bowl and scampered over to the hot tub.

  Setting the bowl down, she repeated the axe stroke that had ended her mother’s reign just minutes before. Angel dropped the axe, grabbed up the bowl, and placed it under her father’s opened neck and collected his blood, filling the bowl to the rim. She stepped back from the tub and raised it above her head.

  “With this blood,” she intoned, her face taking on that much too serious look that teenagers alone possess, “I break my bondage. With this blood, I gain my soul. And, with this blood, I consecrate my body, giving it forever to you, my lord.”

  At first, I thought she was launching back into that Satan bullshit, but one look at her eyes, focused dead on me, corrected my mistake. She tipped the bowl a little, and a line of her father’s blood poured down onto her body. Slowly, she moved the flow across her breasts, covering them in the dark red lacquer.

  Thick streams of life and death ran down her body and legs, reaching her feet. Turning her face to the heavens, she ran the blood stream over herself, letting it mask her and mingle into her raven hair. She painted herself that way from head to toe, becoming a perfected canvass of murder art.

  She threw the bowl aside to shatter on the floor and walked with confidence to the hot tub stairs, ascending them and entering the bloody water. Her scarlet gaze rested upon me then.

  “Take me,” was all she said.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Halfway back to Illinois, flying somewhere over Minnesota, it struck me that I’d just made my biggest mistake so far. The cops would definitely be looking for Angel, and not just because she was missing and both her parents had been brutally murdered. No, they’d be hunting her because she was their number one suspect.

  First off, her fingerprints were all over the murder weapon—not to mention the butcher knife from the mastectomy—but she’d also left her bloody little footprints all over the basement. As if that didn’t point to her enough, and to make the situation really cut and dry, Angel had lain down on the carpet and fanned her legs and arms up and down like a kid trying to make an angel in the snow. I told her it was a bad idea, but she just giggled and did it anyway.

  She slept nestled against my shoulder dreaming dreams I knew quite well, and I realized that her face would soon be plastered all over the television. At a time when the media was salivating Pavlovianly over any opportunity to splash a high school shooting across the evening news, the story of a teenage Goth-chick who Lizzie Bordened her parents after mutilating their bodies would be a windfall too delectable for them to ignore. Shit, even MTV would mention her.

  Still, I couldn’t shake my want of her. She was a bad drug. I knew she was no good for me, knew that she’d most likely be the death of me, but I couldn’t wait to get her in my veins again.

  I was hooked.

  We arrived at my house at around seven in the evening, and I showed her around the place. I made sure to save the sex room for last, and we ended up staying there, snorting coke and fucking for the rest of the night.

  The girl’s sexual appetite was inexhaustible. More than once I fell asleep with her on top of me as we reached the morning hours. Finally, around six or so, she gave in and lay down next to me, allowing me to drift off into slumber. By ten the next day, though, she woke me up and demanded more.

  I told her to fuck off and went back to sleep.

  About two hours later, I awoke to the noise of sex. I got up and walked out into the hall. There, on the floor, a young guy fucked Angel, going at her with that eighteen-year-old fervor that’s more stamina and hormones than anything else. She saw me and smiled, blowing me a kiss. Her paramour had his head down and his eyes closed and never even noticed me. I walked past them towards the stairs.

  Later, after I’d showered and had a bit to eat, I decided to read for a while. Angel caught up to me in the library and plopped down, still naked, in my lap.

  “Hey lover,” she beamed, kissing my nose. “Whatcha readin’?”

  I set my book down and looked at her. “The Deepest Sea.”

  “Cool—is it good?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s about Vikings.”

  “Oh.” She paused in thought. “Are you mad at me?”

  “No, should I be?”

  “Well…I was hoping you would be.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Stupid, I was trying to make you jealous. Weren’t you? Even a little?”

  “Nope,” I told her. “Sorry, Angel, if you wanted to get a rise out of me—”

  She cut me off with a giggle.

  “If you wanted to upset me,” I rephrased, “you picked the wrong way. Far as I’m concerned, you can fuck anyone you want; I will be.”

  That shocked her, but she recovered fast. “I didn’t really want to fuck him. I just wanted you to get mad and kill him.” She pouted. “I guess I fucking looked pretty stupid, huh?”

  I shrugged noncommittally.

  “I feel stupid.”

  I kissed her forehead. “Angel, look. I like having you around, and you can come along when I kill, but that’s it. I’m not in love with you and I’m not ever gonna be in love with you. I don’t—”

  She burst out laughing, cutting me off and throwing back her head with the intensity of it. I began to feel uneasy, awkward.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked, a bit too harsh.

  “Man, who gives a fuck about love? Fuck, man,” she laughed again, “you’re a fuckin’ trip, you know that? Love!”

  She scoffed out the final ‘love’ and laughed again, making me feel just plain dumb.

  “All right, all right.” I tried to calm her down, but when she just kept laughing I added, “Fuck you.”

  “Awww,” she teased, “did I make you feel bad?”

  She laughed again, lighter this time. She smelled clean, freshly showered and perfumed with that odd-smelling scent that she wore, a fragrance like autumn leaves dipped in vanilla. My body came awake, and I parted my lips. She ran her fingers thr
ough my hair. Deep in my mind, the rational part of my brain sounded an alarm.

  “Where’s your boytoy?”

  “Oh, he’s still here.”

  I sat upright and pushed her out to arm’s length. “What?”

  “I said ‘he’s still here’. And his name is Tristen, not ‘boytoy’.” She smirked, infuriating me.

  “You didn’t just leave him unsupervised? Damn it, Angel, if he’s seen anything....”

  “Oh, he’s already seen some things.” She chuckled.

  “What do you mean?”

  She smiled mischievously.

  “Angel, where is the boy?”

  “Tristen,” she corrected.

  “Damn it,” I cursed, then composed myself. “Angel, where is Tristen?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “Where downstairs?”

  “The torture chamber.”

  A quick minute later I reached the chamber, Angel a few steps behind, throwing the door wide and heading inside. A cursory glance around the room gave no sign of Tristen.

  I turned to confront Angel. “I thought you said he was here?”

  Angel placed both of her hands behind her back and gave me the wide-eyed innocent look. “He was when I left him. Maybe he went home.”

  I was sick of the games. It was time I let that be known. I grabbed Angel by her shoulders and shook her—hard. Her head snapped back and forth, but she kept her smile.

  “Oooh, rough time, huh?”

  I let go of her shoulders in a way that pushed her backwards and into the wall. She giggled and gave me a defenseless little girl pose. I started to say something, but a creaking sound behind me drew my attention.

  Spinning around to face the noise, I cocked my head and listened, straining to figure out exactly where the sound was and what it was. I figured out the second part first—a metallic creak. The noise came from the iron maiden.

  In two strides, I stood before the sarcophagus-like death machine. I undid its clasps and swung it open. Tristen, impaled on sixty or so long metal stakes, greeted me with silent, bloody eyes.