by Bryan Smith
She impaled another chunk of Kate with her fork. “You’re right. I would never do such a silly thing. The bloody sow tastes fabulous.”
This provoked another round of laughter from the guests and this time Daphne joined them. She was stunned to realize she was now actually enjoying herself. There was no longer any trace of pretense. She wasn’t going through the motions to avoid consequences. The wine was good, the food was wonderful, and she had warmed to the company. But the biggest revelation of all was the complete absence of guilt she felt at enjoying the taste of human flesh. Quite the opposite was true, in fact. Barbara Prescott had it right. She was part of a superior class of people and this pleasure was her right by birth, a right she simply hadn’t been aware of until now. Feeling guilty for indulging in it made as little sense as feeling guilty for eating a hamburger or stepping on a bug. Realizing this felt like maybe the biggest moment of self-discovery in her life. She felt freer than she ever had, like there was nothing in the world closed off to her, no experience so decadent or debauched she couldn’t enjoy it.
“I have something shocking to say.”
There was a pause in the scraping of forks and knives on plates as everyone paused in their eating to look Daphne’s way.
She smiled as she held each gaze a moment before saying, “I feel like I could fuck every one of you senseless right now. That’s how turned on I am by…” She picked up her wine glass and gestured at the meal strapped to the table and then at her dinner companions. “…all this.”
Some tittering followed this remark and there were some meaningful glances cast across the table. In a brief space of seconds, Vivian and the other guests communicated with each other in an entirely non-verbal way. Daphne had a vague sense of what was being communicated, but she held her tongue and sipped more of her wine. She was new to this world and it wasn’t her place to press for answers if the longer-tenured members of the group weren’t ready to provide them.
As it turned out, however, Vivian wasn’t in a mood to play coy. “An orgy will follow the meal, of course, as is tradition.”
Daphne arched an eyebrow. “Oh? Is this the surprise alluded to earlier?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The air of conviviality continued throughout the meal. There was much laughter, as well as many oohs and aahs of appreciation as Klaus continued his skillful decimation of Kate’s flesh while maintaining her life. This included opening her abdominal cavity and removing lengths of intestine. These were chopped into smaller pieces and shuffled off to members of the white-jacketed serving staff, who carried the morsels off to the kitchen to clean them and fry them in batter. The end result, in Daphne’s opinion, was an item far tastier than anything on any major restaurant’s appetizer menu, like a combination of bratwurst and fried chicken. Most of the left breast was carved away intact and served to a wide-eyed and grateful Francois, who tore into it with mad abandon with his knife and fork, shoveling so much of it into his mouth so fast he had to spit some of it into the bucket at his feet. His face was soon covered in blood and gristle. Daphne feasted on several more strips of thigh and calf meat. She belched several times. The first time she did this she was embarrassed, her face flushing bright red at how loud the sound was. To her ears, she sounded like an uncivilized pig, but the rest of them just laughed. Pretty soon, though, they were all belching up a storm and occasionally spitting up into the buckets at their feet, and the last of her self-consciousness deserted her.
She kept feeling like she was on the verge of becoming dangerously overstuffed, but every time she thought this she caught another delicious scent and decided she could have a little more. This was, however, easily the most she had ever eaten at one time, which was understandable. It was the most amazing meal of her life, making it hard not to gorge herself. But a point was coming soon when she would have to stop.
Before that could happen, however, Klaus cleared his throat and spoke in his sharply-accented tones, sounding like a German native who’d learned English as a second language, which was maybe the case. “Our subject has lost very much blood. The wonder drug, of course, has its limits. Before awareness recedes, we should do what we can to maximize the subject’s terror, which I believe enhances the flavor of the food. To that end, I believe the time has come to remove an eyeball.” He grinned. “Do I have a volunteer?”
Daphne’s right arm shot up. “Me! I volunteer.”
Klaus lifted an eyebrow and looked at Vivian, who nodded her approval.
“Very well,” the butcher said, gesturing to the head of the table. “Please…over here.”
Daphne stood and moved to the spot indicated.
The butcher handed her a fork. “When I give the word, you are to jab this straight down into the eyeball. Do not merely prod at it. Use your strength to pierce the orb. It will be tougher than you expect.”
“Got it.”
Klaus reached into a pocket of his apron and removed a small item. It was a plastic case the size of a ring box. The plastic was translucent and Daphne could almost make out the shape of something inside it. He opened the case and removed two six-inch lengths of cord, each with fishhooks attached to either end.
The butcher noted Daphne’s puzzled expression and smiled. “This will make it easier for you. Here. Watch.”
With one hand he pinched Kate’s left eyelid between thumb and forefinger and stretched it back. Kate sucked in a breath and made weak noises of denial. Daphne’s stomach fluttered ever so slightly as this happened. She had believed she was beyond being repulsed by now and that was largely true, but something about the way the woman’s eye moved as Klaus did his work elicited a twinge of queasiness. It got worse when he slipped one of the fishhooks under the eyelid and roughly jerked it forward to pierce the flesh. Kate moaned as this happened and dots of blood emerged from the wound to stain her eye red. Klaus pulled the eyelid back and used the fishhook at the opposite end of the cord to anchor it to her scalp. He repeated the procedure with the second cord, after which the round, dancing orb was fully exposed.
Klaus looked at Daphne. “Remember what I said. Jab hard. Pull the eyeball out as far as you can. I will cut the stalk.”
Daphne nodded and moved the fork into position above the jittery eyeball. A louder moan escaped Kate’s throat as she tried without success to shake her strapped-down head. She muttered barely coherent pleas for mercy. Klaus plucked a fat corncob off the grill and jammed it deep into her open mouth to muffle her protestations. Something about the way the corncob looked protruding from Kate’s mouth struck Daphne as funny and her queasiness subsided.
She raised the fork to slightly higher than shoulder level and did as Klaus had instructed, jabbing down as hard as she could. The tines first dimpled the eye and then pierced it. Vitreous humor welled out around the tines as Daphne pushed the fork deeper into the eyeball, smiling at the way Kate’s other eye bulged as this happened. The movement of the orbs no longer bothered her at all. If anything, it enhanced her pleasure. She again reflected on how quickly a person could come to enjoy supposedly horrible things. Kate’s muffled voice turned hoarse from shouting as Daphne shifted her grip on the fork’s handle and began the process of pulling the eyeball out of the socket. Once it came free, she stretched the stalk as far as she could and Klaus sawed through it with a knife.
Daphne then held the fork aloft with the eyeball impaled on its tines.
The dinner guests put their utensils down and applauded. Daphne bowed slightly at the waist like an actress taking a curtain call at the end of a play. She handed the fork to Klaus at his prompting and he cooked it for her on the grill, returning it to her minutes later on a small serving plate. The eye had been bisected and was in a bed of melted cheese with a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper. Daphne offered the plate to Vivian, thinking she could curry favor with her mistress by letting her have this special treat.
But Vivian waved the plate away. “That is yours. You earned it.”
; Daphne shrugged and wolfed the eye omelet down. It wasn’t her favorite part of the meal, to say the least. There was a slimy quality to it that grossed her out, but she smiled and tried not to show her discomfort. The good thing was the meal seemed to be winding down. Everyone was eating slower and edging toward overstuffed stupor. Francois was the first to push his plate away and sit back from the table. The Frenchman wiped at his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief and let out an explosive, odiferous belch. In the same moment, Daphne’s stomach lurched in a way that made her buttocks clench. Then came an even more severe lurch that left her quivering and queasy.
She looked at Vivian with desperate eyes. “Is there a bathroom I can use? Please?”
Vivian pointed to a door in a corner of the room. It was behind the baby grand piano, where the tuxedoed pianist still sat playing mellow jazz. “That way.”
Daphne pushed her chair back and bolted from the table, nearly knocking over a female member of the waitstaff in the process. She muttered an apology and made an anxiety-filled dash to the bathroom, moving with stiff-legged, ungraceful strides in an effort to keep anything from coming out of her ass before she was ready. As she reached the bathroom and hauled the door open, Francois called out a plea for her to not take too long as he was feeling in need of a purge as well. Daphne’s only reply was a strained smile as she stepped into the small space and pulled the door shut harder than strictly necessary, making it slam into the frame. She then lifted the toilet lid, hiked up her dress, and sat down.
Nothing happened right away. Her stomach was too knotted up. She let out a breath and waited, knowing what was coming. Within seconds her bowels would relax and the explosion would happen. In the meantime, she took a look around the little room. It was hardly larger than a toilet stall in a public restroom. There were no windows, which was why Vivian hadn’t hesitated to let her enter the room unescorted. Not that she still had much desire to escape. Oh, she supposed she would slip away if the opportunity arose. She had ingratiated herself with these weirdoes to the point where she was sure she was no longer in danger of being harmed, but that would still be the sensible thing to do. On the other hand, there was the touchy issue of what, if anything, she would tell people about what had happened today in the event she did manage to escape.
That was the question she was mulling over when the moment she had been waiting for finally arrived. Her asshole opened wide and an absolutely massive amount of shit began to spray out of it. There were some solid chunks at first, partially digested bits of Kate splashing into the toilet bowl. The follow-up eruptions came out wet and runny. Daphne moaned and rocked forward on the seat, praying for an end to the scalding diarrhea blasts soon. Her sphincter was straining to the breaking point. Her anus felt like a raw wound. After a very long while, a few more solid chunks of Kate finally emerged and her stomach and straining rectum at last began to relax. She sobbed in gratitude and couldn’t help wondering what she would see if she looked in the toilet bowl. An eyeball floating in a sea of shit, maybe?
She made a mental note—Don’t look in toilet, close eyes before flushing.
At long last, the epic episode of gastrointestinal distress began to near an end. She heaved a sigh of relief and reached behind her for the flush handle.
And that was when the gunfire erupted in the dining room.
25.
As she followed Allie down Rural Route 42, Sienna found herself humming a snippet of some half-forgotten song from her childhood. At first all she had was the melody. But something about it compelled her to keep humming it. After a while, the fog shrouding the memory began to lift and she realized it was a song her daddy used to sing. It was by Buck Owens and it was called “Love’s Gonna Live Here Again”. That her brain had dredged up something with a title like that at this crucial juncture in her life was almost too poignant to bear. Her eyes misted as her mental defenses crumbled and she understood with fresh clarity how much she missed not just her daddy but everything about her old life in Hopkins Bend. No matter what happened now or where she went after this, if anywhere, this place would always be her real home. This was something she’d always felt, but now it came on stronger than ever. The town’s emptiness matched perfectly the desolation she felt in her soul.
Love ain’t ever gonna live here again.
They had been walking for more than twenty minutes and no traffic had passed their way the entire time. Of course, this was as expected for a barricaded ghost town, but it was nonetheless disconcerting. She supposed there was a remote possibility of a military vehicle coming along, but she doubted that would happen. If any of the army people were still around, they were staying well-hidden.
Sienna focused most of her attention on the right-hand side of the road, keeping her eyes peeled for a sign advertising Hopkins Bend General Store, which she was sure was somewhere along this stretch of Rural Route 42. She had a clear image in her head from that fateful night of her daddy stopping their truck just shy of the faded old billboard. She remembered seeing it through the truck’s windshield and recalled it having an old-fashioned font and design style, like something from the 1940’s or 50’s. The sign marked the spot where they had bailed out of the truck and ran into the woods.
They trudged along for many more minutes without the sign coming into view. Despair skirted the edges of Sienna’s thoughts as the sun continued its slow creep toward the horizon. In a few more minutes full dark would be upon them, leaving them wandering aimlessly through a nightscape rendered unfamiliar by the darkness and lack of distinctive landmarks. But then, with the last bit of daylight leaching out of the sky, she began to perceive the shape of the billboard. Barely discernible in the encroaching gloom, it was a faint rectangle some thirty yards straight ahead.
Sienna quickened her pace and nudged Allie in the back, urging her to do the same. The girl let out a little cry of fright when she felt the gun barrel press against her back, but she did as instructed and in a few moments they arrived at the sign.
“Stop right here.”
Allie stopped and turned around to glance at Sienna, a quizzical expression on her face as she gave the surroundings a skeptical once-over. “Is your father buried somewhere around here?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see a cemetery.”
Sienna shrugged off the backpack and unzipped it. She put the gun inside it and took out a flashlight, another of the items she’d liberated from the farmhouse. “My daddy isn’t buried in a cemetery.”
“Then where is he?”
Sienna indicated the tree line to their right with a tilt of her chin. “Some soldiers shot him dead out there in the woods.”
“Hmm.”
Sienna zipped up the backpack and shrugged it on again. She snapped on the flashlight and aimed the beam at the woods. The light didn’t penetrate very far beyond the tree line, and the way the beam flickered a couple times made her think the batteries might be weak. She screwed the cap on tighter and hoped they had enough juice left to last until she had accomplished what she had come here to do.
“I know how it sounds, but it’s the truth.”
“Why would army men kill your father? Was he a terrorist?”
Sienna sighed. “No, he wasn’t a terrorist. And I don’t know why the army guys killed the people here. Not the whole reason, anyway. Nobody does, as far as I know. Okay, so listen up. I put the gun away, but you still better behave and not try to run away. I’m bigger and faster than you. If you try anything, I’ll catch up to you and beat the snot out of you.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“I definitely would. You just try me. Now get moving. I’ll be right behind you.”
She gestured to the tree line with a wave of the flashlight. After a brief hesitation, Allie started moving in the indicated direction, but she stumbled as she set foot in a shallow ditch. Sienna grabbed the girl by an arm and jerked her to her feet more roughly than she intended, eliciting a high-pitched squeal of pain. An apology sprang to
her lips, but she let it go unvoiced, recognizing that it would be counterproductive. She needed to be firmer with Allie now that they were approaching the moment of truth. The girl was about to die. It was time to start treating her like an object instead of a little human being.
That would make doing what she had to do easier.
Hopefully.
A hard prod in the back with the flashlight made the girl cry out again. This time it was accompanied by tears. The sound tugged at Sienna’s heart. She grimaced and tried to deaden her emotions, something she was usually able to accomplish with ease. It bothered her that she had to make a conscious effort, feeling dead inside having become her normal state of existence some time ago. However, though it took a bit of work, she was soon able to draw the veil back across her emotions.
They continued their slog through the woods at a pace so sluggish it was maddening, a problem exacerbated by the way the flashlight’s beam kept cutting in and out. Several times they had to stop so Sienna could shake the flashlight or take the batteries out and give them a brisk rub together. These dubious methods met with meager success, providing only a few more moments of precious illumination. At last, however, none of the usual old tricks would work. It was time to try something less conventional.
She ordered Allie to stop.
The girl frowned as Sienna again opened the flashlight. “What are you doing?”
Sienna took out the batteries, tucked the flashlight beneath an arm, and closed her eyes as she curled her hands around them. “Magic.”
“Why are your eyes shut?”
“So I can concentrate. Now kindly shut the fuck up.”
“I could run away and you wouldn’t even know it.”
Sienna opened her eyes and glared at the increasingly annoying child. “That’s a good point.”
Allie shrieked as Sienna grabbed her and spun her about. She cried out again when Sienna kicked at the backs of her knees and forced her to the ground. Allie squirmed and made noises of protest when the older girl settled herself astride her to hold her in place.
