Deviants

by Natalie Bennett

  The million dollar question was what happened to the people?

  “Shut the front door and lock it,” I called to Tito just as he stepped inside. He did what I asked for once without any rebuttal.

  I walked into the main part of the kitchen and searched the drawers, finding a large cutting knife.

  “Coming?” I asked him, making my way back to the foyer and slowly starting up the staircase, taking in the golden framed pictures of a family that lined the walls. The steps creaked behind me from the pressure of Tito’s weight.

  At the top landing, I took a moment to survey the hallway. There were two doors on one side and two on the other. All four were closed.

  “I don’t think we should be up here. We have no idea what or who could be in one of those rooms,” Tito whispered.

  “Then go back downstairs.”

  This man needed a testosterone shot in his balls. His fear was driving me bat-shit.

  I had no idea he was this emasculating.

  Moving forward, I opened the first door on my left, finding an empty room that clearly belonged to a little girl. There were unicorn stickers all over one purple wall.

  Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, I moved on. The next room was plain with no real character to it. There was an old basketball in the middle of the floor and a weathered desk beside a window. The first door across the hall revealed a small bathroom. The final room was where the bodies were.

  A man, a woman, and an adolescent boy lay on the floor. All three had bullet holes in the center of their foreheads.

  The little girl from the pictures was missing. I knew she wasn’t inside the house, which meant she was more than likely taken or dead somewhere in the woods.

  “Who do you think did this?” Tito asked from behind me.

  Crouching down, I reached my hand out and swirled two dirt clad fingers in the blood to get an idea of the texture, ignoring the sound Tito made in his throat. Next, I stroked the man’s face. His skin was taut but rigor mortis hadn’t fully set in yet, and the room was lacking the smell that came with decaying bodies.

  “It wasn’t Romero or his people, if that’s what you’re thinking, and they haven’t been dead for very long,” I responded, standing up.

  “How do you know any of that?”

  “Because I’m an expert when it comes to death, and no one was tortured. There’s also no inverted cross or sigil anywhere, and you know the Savages always leave behind a charming token of their presence.”

  Stepping back, I turned around and walked out of the room to head back downstairs.

  “And the little girl?” Tito asked, following me.

  “She’s obviously not here.”

  “Okay, so what do we do about that?”

  “You can do whatever you want. I’m going to raid the cabinets for food and sleep in one of those beds.”

  Turning the kitchen sink on, I grabbed some soap and began washing my hands, scrubbing beneath my nails.

  “Are you serious?”

  “What do you suppose I do? Go hunt down whoever took her so I can be the next to get a piece of metal in my brain?”

  He didn’t respond, so I dried my hands on a cloth towel and then busied myself finding something to eat. I ended up with two pathetic pieces of wheat bread, a dish of strawberries from the fridge, and water from the tap.

  “Look, I’m hungry, I’m tired, and so are you. There’s food, and there’s a place to sleep here. Sounds like two plus two to me.”

  “Yeah, and the people who lived here are all upstairs.”

  “Well, until they ask us to leave, I’m sure they won’t mind,” I quipped over my shoulder, heading back to the upper level.

  The heavy contempt in his voice every time he spoke to me grounded what was left of my nerves down to my brittle bones, and I had no energy left for a battle of words.

  I made my way into the room with the desk and sat the pitiful lackluster meal on the bed. It took me fewer than five minutes to consume my food and chug the water.

  I could hear Tito grumbling to himself when I got back up to shut the door. I’d left him some bread and strawberries so he’d have something to eat; he should be grateful and kissing my ass for not gutting him with the kitchen knives.

  Grabbing the desk chair, I positioned it beneath the bedroom doorknob when I saw there wasn’t a lock.

  Plopping down on the bed with a heavy sigh, I shut my eyes to revel in the feel of a mattress beneath my back instead of dirt or concrete.

  The shower across the hall beckoned and my feet screamed to be free of my worn down boots, but with the bodies across the hall, I felt better being completely clothed. Letting my guard down wouldn’t be the wisest thing to do. If shit were to hit the fan, being ass naked or barefoot wouldn’t do me any favors.

  I stared up at the white textured ceiling, my muddled mind sloshing in every direction. Even beyond the brink of exhaustion, sleep still chose to evade me and insomnia taunted. I didn’t have this issue when I slept with Romero.

  Frustrated, I threw an arm over my face and tried to force myself to a dreamland.

  I could still feel Tito’s disappointed eyes on me. He assumed I was a heartless bitch for not showing anguish over the missing girl.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t care; on the contrary, the situation had memories trying to resurface from when I was younger that I was doing my best to suppress.

  The girl could be no older than ten at most. I hated all the possibilities of what could be happening to her. It killed something inside of me even thinking about it, because I knew there was nothing I could do.

  I couldn’t help anyone else without helping myself first. I had to ensure the potential life growing inside me would never have to go through what I did.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I was going to ignore him, but the urgent tone beneath his whispered words had me rolling out of bed.

  Pulling the chair away from the door, I cracked it open and felt my glare morph into a frown, seeing Tito as distraught as he was.

  “Come with me,” was all he said before spinning around and zooming back down the stairs.

  Grumbling in the back of my throat, feeling far less than energized, I followed.

  “What is it?” I asked, stepping off the last stair.

  He wordlessly waved me forward without turning away from whatever he was looking at. I crept up beside him and used my hip to bump him out of the way so I could peer out the storm door.

  I was immediately taken back to an old movie called Children of the Corn when I saw the little girl from the pictures on the wall staring back at me. I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

  “How did you know she was out there?” I asked him, never taking my eyes off her.

  “She knocked and then ran back down the stairs.”

  I hummed in response. She didn’t look to be under duress. Her clothes were clean, and her dark hair was neatly parted down the middle. Everything about this was off to me.

  It was the middle of the night, her family was behind me with bullet holes in their foreheads, and she was wandering around the woods playing ding-dong-ditch?

  Not fucking likely.

  “We can’t leave her out there,” Tito said before he bumped me back out of the way and tried to open the door. I threw my weight on the wooden surface, slamming it shut with a loud bang.

  I turned my head and glared at him. “That’s exactly what we need to do.”

  My warning either went right over his head or his flawed compassion meter was at maximum capacity. With a look of abhorrence aimed at me like a weapon, I was shoved sideways, almost falling on my ass. Tito threw open the door, charging out before I could stop him.

  The gunshot sounded like it came from the right, but I knew it was the left. Tito’s leg buckled just as he hit the first step, his bellow echoing louder than the gunfire as he fell in an awkward heap on the walkway.

  Arterial spray peppered the gray paint on the stairs and the cracked concr
ete.

  The little girl looked at him and smiled as four people stepped from the surrounding darkness.

  A man stroked her head and told her, “Good job” before settling his gaze on me. I quickly assessed the scene. Tito held his hand over a leg that was gushing like a geyser, doing his best not to show he was in pain.

  There were three men and a chick with dirty blonde hair standing around him in a semi-circle, all looking up at me, and all carrying long black guns hooked over their heads.

  This obviously wasn’t good.

  Taking a silent breath, I stared into the cerulean blue eyes of the man straight ahead. I locked down my poker face, forcing myself not to look at Tito.

  It was always friends and family that wound up used as leverage against you in dire situations—precisely why it was best not to have any.

  “Why don’t you come on out.” Blue Eyes spoke, breaking the tense silence. It wasn’t a question as much as it was a politely spoken demand.

  Damn Tito and his stupidity! How did he miss the fact that the little girl was bait? Her demented ass was still smiling down at him. He walked himself into this. I didn’t feel an ounce of sorrow for his suffering, because now I was in shit with him.

  “What if I don’t want to?” I asked innocently.

  Blue Eyes barked out a laugh, flashing his teeth. Surprisingly, they weren’t the color of urine. His clothes were clean and he was unmistakably healthy, letting me know these weren’t your average band of outliers.

  “I could come in and get you,” he said calmly.

  Yeah, no, that wasn’t happening.

  Knowing I couldn’t run without likely being shot in the back had me begrudgingly stepping out onto the porch.

  None of the others with him spoke, so I assumed he called the shots.

  I moved down the stairs, keeping my hands by my side, flicking a careless glance at Tito. He had torn a piece of fabric off his shirt and was securing it around his wound. “Skinners,” he groaned through his teeth, not bothering to look up.

  I briefly wondered if the pain was making him delusional, but I didn’t have time to discern that. Ignoring the other three people with him, I kept my eyes locked with the man in front of me, slightly tilting my chin up to accommodate our height difference.

  He looked pretty damn good if I was honest, with his odd blue eyes and dark curly hair.

  He didn’t hold a flame to Romero because, also being honest, he was the perfect specimen.

  On the bright side, if Blue Eyes decided to use his gun and paint the house behind me red with my blood, I’d get to look at something pretty as I died.

  “Get down on your knees,” he commanded in the same tone, snapping me out of my intrusive stare down.

  “Wow, straight to foreplay?” I replied, not making any effort to do what he said. If he wanted me on my knees, he would damn well have to put me there. Call it stupidity on my end, but I wasn’t going to bow to any man.

  He smiled as if reading my mind and gave the slightest lift of his chin. It was almost unnoticeable, but I caught it. Not a second later, the butt of a gun was slamming into my jaw and I was on the ground just like he wanted.

  Pain exploded up the right side of my face; a metallic tang flooded my mouth.

  Holy fuck, it hurt. I swallowed a mouthful of air to drown out my whimper and blinked three times to clear the tears away.

  I glanced up at the blonde who was now smirking down at me. Keeping my head was an incredible test of my willpower. I tampered down the urge to lunge up and wring the bitch’s neck. Attacking her would only cause me more harm.

  “Now, that wasn’t very nice.” I gave her a big smile, feeling blood dribble down my chin. I spit the back tooth she knocked out, right onto her black boots.

  I heard a laugh, and then someone told her “no,” not a fraction of a second before her gun came down again on the back of my head.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The heat was unbearable.

  Perspiration gathered on my brow and slowly rolled down and pooled between my breasts. It was only a matter of time before I’d be sitting in a deep puddle of my sweat.

  I could feel a solid lump on the back of my head, and the side of my face was painfully swollen. There was a throbbing ache every time I swallowed or moved my tongue.

  A man had been screaming and begging for his life for what seemed like hours on end, abruptly cutting off just minutes ago.

  Now I could hear someone pitifully sobbing.

  A solid brick building was at my back offering no shade, and I had loose rusted chains around each of my wrists, but I wasn’t going to complain about that. Not when the two women beside me were completely nude and hanging upside down from some manmade contraption.

  They weren’t moving, and both of their eyes were shut. I stared at their naked bodies until I saw the slight rise and fall of their chests. Their skin was covered in raised heat blisters and had an ugly red tint. They were slow roasting in the sun.

  I shifted on the concrete when my ass started to fall asleep. If the abundance of old bloodstains splattered across it was anything to deduce, this wasn’t going to go well for me.

  “Hellooo?” I called out for the hundredth time. My voice sounded like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. Unsurprisingly, no one answered me.

  Pulling my legs up to my chest, I rested my cheek on my knees and tried not to breathe too deeply.

  The smell of body odor and death was potent, and I only cared for one of them.

  I had no idea where Tito was. The man screaming had too deep a voice to have been him. I couldn’t see anything but a manicured grassy field and a house in the far distance.

  Studying the two women beside me again, I noted how drastically different they looked. The one on the very end had purple hair and was heavyset. The one next to me had brown hair and was almost as thin as I normally was, aside from the protrusion in her midsection.

  I wondered how long it would take me to look like they did, and why I hadn’t been hung the same way.

  My throat was parched, my body ached, and my stomach churned with another bout of sickening nausea, but I held it together.

  I was so damn tired of ending up in situations I had no control over.

  Lifting the rusted-orange chains up so I could examine them, I couldn’t see a way to get them off. I was stuck. Fighting was always my number one option, but I had no idea what I’d be up against—or who—and I wasn’t exactly in the best physical condition.

  I knew I had to consider a few added limitations. I wasn’t an idiot. But the position I’d found myself in didn’t make me a delicate wallflower, either. I wasn’t the first woman in the Badlands to end up this way. Hell, some women popped kids out like they were pinball machines. I couldn’t even be that far yet.

  Regardless, if it really was set in motion and meant to be, I could handle it.

  What I couldn’t do was magically escape a set of chains. There was only one person I could think of who could get me out of this, and he was nowhere near the facility.

  Groaning, I leaned my head back and shut my eyes. I just needed him to save me one last time.

  I was almost entirely out of it when I felt the rim of a plastic water bottle at my lips. Slowly peeling my eyes open, I saw a woman in front of me, encouraging me to drink.

  “Come on,” she whispered encouragingly when I coughed the first bit of water right back out. Her next attempt paid off. I guzzled down the soothing liquid like a newborn calf whose life depended on it.

  All too soon, she was pulling away with whispered words that sounded an awful lot like “He’s coming for you,” Then, she was gone, disappearing around the corner so fast I wasn’t able to get a clear look at her face.

  If it wasn’t for the slight relief, I felt I would have chalked it up to me hallucinating.

  Elation was the first emotion that rushed through my veins when her words repeated in my head. I naively thought she meant Romero.

  That id
ea was wiped out when a guy came strolling around the corner of the building with a thick garden hose clenched in one of his hands, and pushing a bright red wheelbarrow.

  Suddenly alert, I scanned the contents of it and a small trickle of worry ciphered into my conscious—not for me, but for the woman right beside me.

  Shifting slightly, I found my eyes traveling up the body of a man who was the same size as me, all the way up to his mohawk and then back down to his honey brown eyes.

  “Sorry blondie, I’m not allowed to play with you. Boss’ orders.” He winked, completely misinterpreting why I was looking him over. The little smile accompanying his statement had a brittle laugh slipping out of my mouth.

  “You should probably move as far right as you can.” He flashed another smile, gently setting the wheelbarrow down.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m prepping them.”. He turned the hose nozzle and then proceeded to spray down the two women. Neither of them reacted beyond quiet whimpers.

  They must have really been out of it because the water was scalding, hot enough that steam visibly lifted from their flesh and burst some of their heat blisters, leaving milky pus to run free.

  I scooted as far away as I could, just like he’d advised, sucking in a sharp breath when a few drops of water landed on my knee.

  I wasn’t expecting what came next but I wasn’t all that surprised, either. It made Tito’s grumbled phrase make a helluva lot more sense. The stick figure of a man put earphones in, pulled a pair of leather gloves on, grabbed a thin knife, and walked towards us.

  He continued to pay me no mind, getting straight to work. He started with the woman farthest away, the one with purple hair.

  With an incredibly steady hand, he began carefully cutting and peeling the skin away on her face, starting at the center of her chin.

  His blade cut clean through, as if it were garnering softened butter. I watched him, torn between feeling sickening awe and repulsion.

  With the bloody knife handle clenched between his teeth, he used two hands to lift off almost the entire surface of the woman’s face.