by Bryan Smith
Bradley was becoming visibly anxious and agitated now. Every profane or blasphemous utterance made him cringe and look like he was moments away from crying. “Please don’t talk like that.”
“Why not? It’s a free fucking country, right?”
Bradley struggled to keep his composure. In a few more moments, he managed to relax. When he spoke again, it was with an obvious determination to move the conversation along. “Are you kin of Arlene’s?”
“We’re cousins.”
Bradley frowned. “I ain’t ever seen you around before.”
“I don’t get out this way often.”
“How’s Miss Arlene doing? My daddy will want to know. He’s awful fond of her. They’ve known each other forever.”
“Well, you can tell your daddy she’s doing awesome, Bradley. Never better, in fact.” Sienna began to edge the door shut. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m doing some work for Arlene around the house and need to get back to it.”
Bradley braced a hand against the door to halt its forward progress. “Why you got your other hand behind your back?”
Sienna smiled as she showed him the hammer. It was a good thing she hadn’t used it to bludgeon anything to death lately. Explaining caked-in blood and bits of bashed-in bunny brains might have been a problem. “It’s like I said, I’m doing some work around the house. Right now, I’m…hammering stuff.”
Bradley’s hand pressed a little more firmly against the door. Sienna was forced to relinquish her grip on the knob as it began to swing inward. “Maybe I should have a look around. Something doesn’t feel right here. My daddy would never forgive me for not laying eyes on Miss Arlene myself if later on it turns out something’s wrong with her.”
Sienna backed away from the door. “Suit yourself.”
Bradley came inside and approached the spiral staircase. He peered up at the shadowy second floor landing before glancing back at Sienna, who had moved quietly closer to him. “She up in her bedroom?”
Sienna’s cover story options were limited now that Bradley was in the house. She realized now she should have tried a little harder to bar entry, but it was too late for that now. She had perhaps been a touch too distracted by the boy’s looks to think straight.
“Sure. But I have to warn you—she’s not in the most talkative mood right now.”
Bradley gave her a strange look. He leaned closer to her, his nose twitching as he sniffed her breath. “You’ve been drinking. A lot.”
“So what?”
Bradley’s expression turned disdainful. “You shouldn’t drink. Mama says intoxicating spirits are one of the ways the devil lures people into his traps.”
“Your mama sounds like a big ball of no fun at all.” She smirked as she put herself closer still to him and tried for the sultry tone of a seductress. “I bet she takes a dim view of sex, too.”
Bradley’s gaze dropped to her chest and lingered there a moment for the first time. Color bloomed in his cheeks and he again made his eyes go elsewhere. Seeing him befuddled pleased Sienna. “You can stare at my boobs if you want. I don’t mind.”
Bradley’s cheeks flushed a darker shade of red. “I, uh…”
She touched his arm, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Don’t be embarrassed. You can fuck me if you want.”
The boldness of this proposition surprised Sienna. Her plans for the day hadn’t included sex with a stranger. Then again, murder hadn’t been part of her original agenda, either. But she had learned that in life it’s important to be flexible and open to new opportunities. It was basic stuff. Surely even Bradley could see what a good idea this was. He must be perpetually horny and frustrated, like most guys his age.
Or perhaps not.
He pried her hand loose and started up the staircase. “Sex is another of the devil’s traps.”
Sienna sneered. “Let me guess. More of your mama’s wisdom.”
“That’s right.”
Anger abruptly displaced Sienna’s lust, burning it away entirely. “And what do you think your mama would have to say about me?”
“She’d say you should stop dressing like a whore of Babylon and get right with Jesus.”
Sienna’s anger intensified as she watched him continue up the stairs. She was no angel and had done many morally questionable things, but that didn’t mean being called a whore to her face was acceptable.
She raced up the stairs after him, again experiencing that queasy feeling as the rotted steps bowed precariously beneath her tread. She caught up to the meddlesome, irksome farmhand just as he reached the second floor landing.
He glanced back at her. “What is that awful stench? It smells like something died up here.”
Sienna said nothing, but her grip tightened on the hammer’s handle.
Bradley let out a gasp of shock as he entered the room at the end of the hallway. Sienna stood just inside the doorway as she watched him stagger in shock toward the bed. Whatever he had expected to discover upon entering the room, it wasn’t this.
He was shaking as he looked back at Sienna with a stricken expression. “What have you done to Miss Arlene? And why are you smiling?”
“You are a very boring boy. You know that?”
Bradley started digging in a hip pocket.
“What are you doing, Bradley?”
He had a cell phone in his hand now. “Calling the police.” His shakiness caused him to fumble his grip on the phone and it dropped to the floor. “You’re evil. Evil.”
He knelt to pick up the phone.
Sienna pursed her lips.
Hmm…
Bradley was on one knee in the exact center of the pentagram she had drawn with her lipstick. She raised the hammer and came at him too fast for him to react. He was staring at the bed and trying to make his thumbs work on the phone’s keypad when the head of the hammer crashed against the crown of his skull.
The phone flew from his hand and slid under the bed. Bradley pitched forward and was on his hands and knees when the hammer struck his skull again. Blood gushed from the gash in his scalp as he rolled onto his back, staining the edge of the pentagram a dark crimson where his head landed.
His eyes filled with tears as he held up shaking hands to ward off further blows. “Please…no…please…”
Sienna knelt next to him. “Yes.”
She raised the hammer and slammed it straight down at his face. The blow broke off several of his perfect teeth and filled his mouth with blood. The next blow pulped his nose and the one after that collapsed an eye socket. His body twitched as she continued to hit him. She liked the sound the flat edge of the hammer made each time it pulverized more bone. His bladder voided and stained the front of his jeans. After a few more blows, she stopped hitting him, sat back, and watched him convulse and gasp for breath.
Sienna had reasons for delaying the coup de grace. For one thing, she wanted to watch him suffer. The sound of his helpless, desperate gurgling fascinated her, as did the bloody bubbles emerging from his mouth. This interest was based in intellectual curiosity as much as anything else. Her mind was like a video camera in those moments, recording and filing away for possible later reference this document of how the human body behaves in the immediate aftermath of violent trauma. But the bigger reason was that prolonging his demise gave her the perfect opportunity to put her reanimation theory to the test. Forget procuring a goat. What could generate more psychic juice than a human sacrifice?
After a few more moments of watching Bradley struggle and weaken, Sienna grabbed the absinthe bottle and downed the remainder of its contents. She then put down the hammer and retrieved her knife, putting it to the boy’s throat as she closed her eyes, focused her energies, and repeated the reanimation incantations. The temperature in the room plunged as the blade pushed through tender flesh with delightful ease. Blood jumped from the severed carotid vein, coating her hands with gore that turned cold as it encountered the room’s unnaturally lowered temperature. Sienna dropped the knife and brought her han
ds to her face, painting it with the dead boy’s blood as the volume of her voice rose and the candle flames guttered. The trance she entered this time made her brain explode with undiluted pleasure.
When she opened her eyes again, she was writing on the floor in an orgasmic frenzy and something somewhere above her—something on the bed—was moaning. But the sound drifted away as the beautiful white light took her again.
11.
The silence was heavy in Jodi Baker’s rental house. The house had been a busy hub of Baker family activity Jodi’s first couple years in her new town, its several rooms occupied by a rotating cast of various members of the Baker clan, several of whom had also escaped from Hopkins Bend. Most of them moved on after a couple years, leaving Jodi and her sister as the only regular occupants, though Delmont was around most of the time..
Delmont was not a well-liked man in general, but this was especially so within the Baker family, which was mostly of the opinion that the story Arlene had told after her so-called accident was a load of horseshit. It didn’t matter that the law had elected to accept her preposterous version of events. The man had attempted to kill one of their own and everyone knew it. He was the main reason hardly any of her kin ever came around to visit anymore.
And now Sienna was gone, too.
Except for the woman in the basement—and she didn’t really count, being a future meal—Jodi was the only person in the house. The emptiness depressed the hell out of her. Jodi sat at the kitchen table, nursing a gin and tonic. She stared into her drink and wondered how she could have let things go so wrong.
The talk about Arlene’s accident being a failed murder attempt was true. Jodi knew this because it was something she and Delmont had discussed before it happened. In fact, killing Arlene had been her idea. She had been in helpless, total blind lust with Delmont since her arrival in Bedford and had been desperate to have him all to herself. But she wasn’t stupid. She knew people would talk. It was why she’d been in favor of taking their time and devising the perfect way to get rid of the bitch. What she hadn’t counted on was Delmont getting drunk and impatient one night and impulsively taking matters into his own hands. The idiot had botched the job, of course, and had failed to finish off his useless wife.
In retrospect, Jodi had to wonder if putting the idea in his head in the first place might have been the kind of colossal mistake from which a person could never come back. The ongoing fallout had simply never stopped. And now everything and everyone she had ever really cared about was gone—with just the one exception.
Jodi sipped her drink and stared at her silent cell phone.
Delmont had left a while ago to clean up some unspecified mess phoned in by one of his hunter buddies. He had a regular crew of men whose job it was to clean up after the hunters and dispose of any cars or other belongings their catches had left behind. It was rare that Delmont was out on a call more than a couple hours.
He had now been gone more than three hours.
It was possible he was on a complicated job, requiring more time to resolve than usual. She knew it was too soon to start worrying, but her anxiety was soaring with each passing minute regardless, propelled by an intuition so strong it felt more like genuine precognition. The problem was she’d already called three times in the last hour and had left three increasingly distraught voicemails. There was nothing to be gained from leaving yet another one. She tried telling herself the man had either lost his phone or had forgotten to charge it. These were perfectly reasonable explanations for the lack of response.
But they failed to reassure her at all.
Fuck.
She picked up her drink again and knocked back the rest of it. After giving some consideration to mixing another one, a better way to kill the time until Delmont got back to her came to mind.
Jodi grabbed her phone and went down to the basement.
The bound catch screamed behind the dirty rag in its mouth when it saw Jodi. Its eyes got so big they looked like they were about to pop out of its head. Jodi smiled. The poor thing was probably remembering the last time she had paid it a visit. Seeing the creature’s terror took the edge off her anxiety. It also motivated her to make this visit at least as memorable as the previous one.
Arrayed across the surface of a table in the center of the room was a wide assortment of tools, many of which had been put to good use over the last several days. This was the other thing she had missed about the old ways. Eating human flesh was a delight without equal, but abusing that flesh while it was still alive was almost as good. This was tradition. Everyone in a household was expected to participate, even children. Nothing was more important than bringing young ones up right and teaching them the old ways. Many of the menfolk took it even further, of course, using the catches for sexual release. That wasn’t a part of it for Jodi. She just enjoyed causing the things pain.
After mulling over the possibilities a bit, she put her phone on the table and picked up a wood carving tool with a short, curved blade.
She approached the catch and held the blade in front of its face so it could have a good look. Then she laughed. “I don’t think anyone’s used this one on you yet. See the way the blade is curved?” She turned the tool so the catch could see what she meant. “This will be good for scooping out bits of meat from some of your fleshier parts, like your thighs and tits. What do you think? Sound like fun?”
The restraints encircling the catch’s wrists and ankles were bolted to the brick wall behind her. There was a bit of room to maneuver, but it couldn’t go very far without the noose looped around its neck tightening and cutting off its air. The thick length of rope the noose was fashioned from was tied to a beam above it and there wasn’t much give. It knew this by now, of course, but the knowledge didn’t stop it from cringing backward when Jodi came at it with the gouging tool. Jodi giggled when the noose tightened and the creature’s face started turning red. She slipped fingers beneath the coil of rope and loosened it for the poor thing.
“There. Is that better?”
The catch hung its head and sobbed through the gag as air whistled through its nose.
“I know you’re scared, but you’ll be better off if you just hold still while this happens. You can take comfort in knowing it’s not time for you to die.” Jodi smiled. “Not yet.”
Tears spilled in endless streams down the thing’s flushed cheeks.
Then it screamed and thrashed against its restraints as the gouging tool shredded flesh for the first time. The noose tightened and its face turned red again, necessitating another assist from Jodi. It only took another couple times of having its air cut off before the thing learned its lesson and held still so Jodi could work on its flesh without interruption.
This went on for some time and Jodi found it relaxing. All the tension went out of her and for a while she forgot all about Delmont and his troubling silence. When she felt like she’d worked on the catch enough for a while, she swept up the scooped-out bits of flesh and carried them up to the kitchen along with her phone. The shredded meat went into a pan on the stovetop along with some cooking oil and spices. But she wasn’t hungry. Her intent was to take the meal back down to the basement when it was ready and force the catch to eat its own yummy flesh.
The meat was sizzling up nicely when she thought to check the time again. She frowned when she looked at her phone’s display. Another half hour had passed with no word from Delmont. Her anxiety returned in full force.
“Fuck this.”
She punched in a number she knew and put the phone to her ear.
Floyd Poteete answered on the second ring. There was a slight slur in his voice when he said, “What’s up, Jodi Lynn?”
Jodi frowned. “Have you been drinking?”
Floyd burped. “A wee bit. There some kind of problem, girl? You sound worked up.”
Jodi filled Floyd in regarding her concerns about Delmont. “So I need you to head out to Hopkins Bend and check up on him, okay?”
Floy
d groaned. “Lord, woman. You got worried shitless about nothin’.”
“Do you want me to tell Delmont later you wouldn’t help me?”
Floyd grumbled something indecipherable.
“What was that?” Jodi’s tone was sharp. “I didn’t hear you.”
Floyd sighed. “We’ll do it. Jesus.”
“Good. Call me as soon as you know anything.”
She hung up.
The delicious scent of cooked meat had filled the kitchen by then, making Jodi’s nostrils twitch and her mouth water. She decided she was hungry, after all. Satisfied that she’d addressed the Delmont problem as best she could for the time being, she scooped the meat into a bowl and carried it down to the basement, where she and the catch shared a tasty meal.
12.
The single bullet Jessica fired tore through Billy’s left bicep and sent him howling in pain to the street. That the bullet had found a non-lethal target was pure chance. Jessica had drawn a bead on him too fast for true precision. Her only goal had been to prevent him from getting the shotgun. If the bullet had instead pierced his skull and blown out a sizeable chunk of his brains, she would have considered it an equally successful result. The sparing of life was incidental.
Giving the writhing, screaming man a wide berth, she walked over to the shotgun and picked it up. She then took a look up and down the street to see if anyone else was around and watching. It didn’t seem likely, but she hadn’t expected to encounter the cop impersonator, either. This area had been a commercial district. On the opposite side of the street was the former location of a used cars dealership. The standard colorful pennants flapped in the light breeze, but the big lot was empty and the showroom windows were boarded up. The same went for all the other shuttered businesses in the vicinity, including a pawnshop, a CVS drugstore, and a tanning salon. There was no more evidence of a recent human presence anywhere. Even the graffiti tags she saw here and there looked old and faded.
Her gut told her they were alone for now, but this guy she had killed looked like a local. He probably lived in one of the neighboring towns. He might well have friends who would know to come looking for him in Hopkins Bend if he went missing. So finding a place to hole up and stay out of sight as soon as possible was still her top priority. There were just a few minor issues to take care of first.
