He poked the nipple of the bottle between Sarah’s lips, but she pulled away, unleashing a fresh bout of screams. She whipped her head side to side, her chubby little arms smacking at his face in protest. He had already checked her diaper and found it clean. He tried the bottle again, knowing that forcing it on her was futile, but sometimes if he just got the nipple in her mouth she’d realize what was being offered and settle down. She jerked away, her open hand slapping his cheek while she redoubled her crying fit with new energy.
Aw, fuck it, he thought. He decided she must be as uncomfortable as he was, and his own agitation was probably helping to fuel hers. She was too hot, bothered by too much noise, and probably still hurting from Hector’s crazy assault.
He went back to shushing her, bouncing her lightly in his arms, blowing a loud feathery noise into her ears to mimic the noise of the womb she had spent so many months inside. All of his usual tricks failed miserably, to the point that she took yet another swat at him, as she buried her face in his neck. He spoke to her in a calm and reassuring voice, telling her, “It’s okay, sweetie, it’s okay.”
She probably knew he was lying.
“How much longer do we gotta fucking sit here?” somebody bellowed. Dec couldn’t see who, the complainant lost to the crowd. But he heard him well enough.
“Huh? Fucking somebody answer me! I’ve been fucking mauled! When do I get to see a fucking doctor?” he screamed.
The buzz, chattering, and clacking of hushed conversations and angry intonations ground to a halt. Heads turned toward the shouting voice, but Dec still couldn’t see the man.
An uncomfortable stillness settled over the ER waiting room, a brief moment of thick tension that threatened to turn into something worse. Even Sarah seemed to quiet, drawing a fresh breath in that moment of hushed silence. Somebody snorted, a tittering sort of laugh, and the tension popped.
Slowly, conversations resumed.
Sarah wailed again. The buzzing built up, gaining a good head of steam, and the painful thuds echoing inside Dec’s skull struck and struck and struck again, giving a bloody, knotty tempo to the kids’ song still clattering around in there.
The pale, greasy looking teen across from him moaned again, clutching his belly, kneading at the surface of his taught stomach with the fingers of both hands. Dec noticed that the boy’s hands were wrapped in stained strips of fabric, which looked to have been torn off his sleeves, the frayed strings of fabric jutting out across his bare shoulders. His knees were scraped raw, his shin covered in raw, oozing bite marks. Dec could see the yellow fat globules beneath the skin, torn wide open at the side of the boy’s calf and on his forearm.
The teen groaned again, sticking his head between his knees and heaved dryly. He worked up a thick loogie and hawked it between his Converse sneaks, the gob of mucus spattering into the puddle of vomit he had loosed upon the floor several minutes earlier.
Head still tucked low, the teenager looked up at Dec with bloodshot eyes, spit hanging in a thick, webby string from his lower lip. “Would you shut that fucking kid up?”
Dec’s face burned, his mind racing with a thousand awful thoughts, Sarah’s body the only thing keeping his hands from coiling into fists. “I’m sorry,” was all he said, but he was too tired and far too fucking annoyed to try faking remorse.
“You’re sorry, huh?” the kid said—and really, he was only a kid, Dec realized, checking his anger, probably not even old enough to drive.
He felt ashamed at having wanted to throttle this boy, and he leaned back in his chair to put more distance between them.
“You’re fucking sorry all right,” the kid said, mustering up a heaping measure of scorn that went well beyond his years.
“Look, kid, we’re all in a spot here. Just chill out.”
The kid laughed. Chill out. Yeah, that was a joke, all right. It was fucking sweltering in here.
Dec adjusted Sarah, transferring her head from one shoulder to the other, and shushing into her ear. That only riled her up even further, her chubby little arms and legs flailing at him, tiny little fingers pressing against his cheeks, trying to push his face away.
“It’s okay, sweetie, just a few more minutes,” he said. “It’s—”
Pain flared in his face as his nose shattered. He hadn’t even seen the kid move. The boy had darted out of his chair, shirt stained with a half-moon of vomit, spit, and sweat, and launched forward, slamming his knuckles right into Dec’s face. Dec’s head snapped back, his skull thudding into the wall.
Another punch, then another, and again.
He was only dimly aware of the boy’s other hand grabbing for Sarah, fingers twisting around the back of her shirt and pulling, the strained noise of the fabric groaning under the threat of tearing.
“No, wait,” Dec said, the taste of iron and copper in his mouth. His front teeth were loose.
A fat arm swung at the kid, shoving the boy aside, and Dec wrapped Sarah up in both his arms, his own pain forgotten. He’d been saved, thank Christ or Allah or Vishnu or whoever the fuck, but he’d been saved.
The heifer was on her feet, too, going after the boy, and Dec was suddenly sorry that he had ever thought her a heifer. No, she was a fucking goddess! She’d saved Sarah! She swung a thick ham-sized fist at the boy, knocking him square on his ass.
Go, lady! He wanted to cheer to her on, scream her name in victory.
She fell upon the boy, pinning him to the ground, throttling his face. Those ham-hock hands turned into ground beef as the skin of her knuckles shredded against the boy’s teeth. There was a wet, grisly popping noise as her fist blew past the teeth and wedged into his mouth, his jaw forcibly pried open around her thick, wobbly, sweat-shined wrist.
She tore her hand away, the boy’s tongue flapping uselessly in her grip. Broken teeth studded the back of her hand. She flung the tongue aside and grabbed his lower jaw in one hand, the fingers of her other hand stabbing into the boy’s nostrils as if his head were a bowling bowl, and savagely pulled in opposite directions. A wet tearing sound, along with the boy’s squealing, rose over the noisy madness around them, and then the woman held up a deflated flap of skin in victory. As she moved, Dec saw blood pouring profusely from the boy’s face. The teen’s nose was missing, ripped away to reveal a hollow recess filling with red, an angry trench bisecting his face and ending in a grisly triangle of missing flesh between his eyes. His lower jaw bulged, off-center from the rest of his face.
Dec had been so caught up in the sudden rush of violence before him, that only at that moment did he realize others were fighting as well. Some were trying to pry the woman away from the brutalized boy, while the large man—her husband?—fought them off so she could really go to work.
Pained screams rang out, pleading cries, people begging.
Most of all, though, was the noise of wetness and a squishy tearing. He tried to ignore the savage pummeling of meat, of muscles being flattened beneath concussive blows, but failed miserably. Failed, too, at trying to ignore the sudden squelch of screams cut off too soon.
Dec took to his feet, grabbing the diaper bag and hooking it over his shoulder. The strap tugged painfully at his neck and collarbone, caught up on something that nearly pulled him off his feet.
He twisted around, in time for his face to greet the bloodied fist of the large man that had been on his right. He skittered back, but didn’t fall. Couldn’t fall. Instead, he lumbered into a cluster of bodies behind him, and they dragged him into their warring party.
He tripped, and tried to shield Sarah from the kicks and fists raining down upon them.
No, please, no. God no, he thought over and over, not caring a whit about his own survival. Sarah was his top priority, and he tried to shove himself away from the flurry of limbs slapping and punching at his body.
The fat man pushed his way through, his large, pockmarked face leering at Dec with red-rimmed eyes and glistening, hungry lips. The man was drooling as he reached toward Sarah, his fingers grab
bing roughly at the infant’s shirt, and Dec scrabbled back, or tried to, but there was nowhere to go. All he saw were shoes and legs, bodies towering over him and fighting one another.
Sarah was yanked violently from his arms, and he let loose a hoarse scream.
“No!”
A sticky, warm wetness splashed across his face as the man bit down. Dec squeezed his eyes shut tightly, but there was no way to blot out the pained screams of his baby girl, or the moist, smacking noises of lips around wet meat.
A loud cracking noise silenced his daughter, and a steady stream of blood washed over him and then slowed to a rhythmic drip, drip, drip.
He shuddered and kept his eyes closed, waiting for his own end.
“Oh, God, no,” he cried. “No, no, no.”
He could hardly hear his plaintive begging beneath the noise of hungry feasts, of jaws snapping shut and gorging on flesh, the stink of blood and ruptured bowels flooding the ER.
A dull thud smacked into the soaked carpet beside him, and he made the mistake of opening his eyes, ever so briefly, wondering if perhaps he would be pardoned from the madness. Maybe they thought him dead already, though he ached with a longing to die. He was a useless failure, deserving of no less. So, when he opened his eyes and saw the fat man, jowls and quavering chins coated in a thick, musky layer of gore that could only have been Sarah, he stilled himself and tamped down on the reflexes to struggle, to defend himself. There would be none of that.
The fat man leaned in, as if to kiss Dec, and bit down on Dec’s lower lip and pulled. The frenulum that connected his lip to his gums pulled taut, and then snapped painfully, torn away with his mouth. Dec howled, his gums and teeth exposed, and then the man bent in for another bite.
Dec’s hands twisted into the man’s hair, pulling that bloody, ugly mug into him for a grisly kiss as he let the fat man dine. His cheek ripped away from the bone, and still he screamed, but he refused to fight, even as a thick, sour tongue pushed through a fresh hole in his face and brushed against his. He gagged against the metallic taste and the rough sensation of the fat man’s tongue slathering against his bared teeth, wet chomping sounds deafeningly loud in his ears. A primal instinct told him to fight, but the rational side of his mind resisted, even as a mouth pressed against his eyelid and sucked and chewed. He took it, took it like a man, the way his dad had always told him to when things got rough.
Perversely, Sarah’s play mat song still sang in his head, despite the pain, despite his longing to die. The fat man feasted, and the song played on and on.
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…
Eyes and ears, and a mouth and a nose…
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes…
12
CRAIG HARBIN HAD KILLED nearly a dozen endangered animals, and thousands more that were not, during his lifetime of hunting. Both his home and office were crowded with trophies, the heads of elephants, black rhinos, lions, tigers, bears, elk, moose, deer, and buffalo mounted for display.
He lived his life by two guides only—the King James Bible and the Michigan DNR Hunting Season Calendar.
For the last weekend in August, he hunted elk, and again in January if additional thinning was needed to ensure population management goals. During early to late September, he killed bear in the Upper Peninsula. Weekends in October up through mid-November, he killed deer with bow and arrow, and again with firearms in mid-November up till the end of the month, and spent the first half of December using a muzzleloader. In September and October, he liked to mix things up with the occasional goose and pheasant hunt, and mixed in quail hunts with the deer hunts in October and November. Throughout the rest of the year, he hunted bobcat, coyote, and fox.
Over the last decade, he had spent more than five million dollars on African safaris. Some of the animals, like the lions, were protected and lived on game reservations where hunting was illegal. In those instances, he paid extra so that his guides would lure the lions away from the preserve.
In July, he had spent a week in Zimbabwe where his guides managed to lure a lion away from the Hwange National Park. First, they had killed an antelope and tied it to their vehicle and scented an area more than half a kilometer away from the park, drawing the lion toward them.
Harbin had shot the creature with two arrows, but failed to kill him. The animal bolted, and Harbin and his men spent nearly two days tracking the wounded beast. Harbin’s heart had raced in excitement, and he’d had an erection almost the entire time.
When they did find the lion, the animal had collapsed and was wheezing, lying in a pool of its own blood. One of the arrow shafts had broken high up, but the three-bladed broadhead had run deep and been buried in the lion’s flank. The second arrow was higher up in the beast’s ribcage, and had probably pierced a lung.
Harbin had licked his lips, his mouth suddenly dry. His cock throbbed, painful with anticipation, as he raised his rifle and fired into the animal’s chest. In his mind’s eye, he imagined the lion’s massive heart exploding, and again he licked his lips.
“Can you guys give me a few minutes?” he asked his guides. They nodded and ambled back to the Jeep, laughing.
He studied the still beast, a swelling ache of victory riding high in his chest. He felt dizzy, giddy.
He moved to the rear of the corpse and knelt in the bloody mud, setting the rifle beside him. Unable to contain himself any further, he unbuckled his belt and shoved his shorts and underwear down his thighs, the cloth bunching around his knees.
The lion was male, but he didn’t care in the least. He withdrew a condom from his shirt pocket and slid it over his engorged member, and slowly pushed into the dead lion’s anus, his hips rocking gently at first, gaining steam. He reached and grabbed a fistful of bloody pelt, pulling it hard, damn near yanking the beast’s fur out as he drove deeper and faster into the corpse, his balls aching toward release.
Caring not at all about the stench of shit and death, or the buzzing of flies circling him, drawn by his sweat and the fresh body he bucked against, he moaned loudly. His free hand groped for the beast’s testicles, and he found himself surprised by the weight of the large scrotum as he cupped the balls in his hand and massaged them. Inching closer to release, the cords on either side of his neck stood out as his desire grew unbearable and uncontainable, the noise of his bare waist slapping against the lion’s pelvis filling the jungle.
He let out a vicious shout as he came, slamming his hips against the lion’s haunches, suddenly exhausted and spent. He withdrew, gagging on the musky odor of his fecal-stained cock. He’d lost the condom inside the animal’s rectum, but he felt too good to care. He could always shower back at his lodge.
Satisfied, his pulse rate slowly returning to normal, he hitched his shorts back up and collected his rifle. Then, he went back to the Jeep and retrieved a machete, which he used to hack off the lion’s head, already planning on where to mount his newest trophy.
Harbin loved to hunt. One of his greatest joys in life had been killing anything with four legs, although, eventually, he began to discover the joy in two-legged prey. And whatever he killed, he fucked.
When he was seven, his father had handed him a rifle and helped him kill his first buck. The sensation of taking another life was disquieting, but oddly satisfying. He’d felt a moment’s guilt, a slight hesitation, even as his finger wrapped around the trigger and gently pulled. Then he saw the puff of blood and the deer collapsed, and he smiled. He’d felt powerful.
He’d hunted ever since.
When he was younger, a strapping man of twenty-seven, manning the check-in desk of his father’s hotel—his father had owned a string of multi-million dollar beachside resorts up and down US 31 and when he finally passed, Craig had inherited them and continued to run them profitably—he spied the long, thin legs of a young girl as she moved with her family toward the bank of elevators. He knew from their guest reg
istry that she was eleven and that her name was Ruby, on the cusp of womanhood, her small breasts barely making a ripple in the fabric of her shirt, her hips narrow but, he found, decidedly inviting. He had licked his dry lips then, too.
He was careful to observe and learn their routine. She and her family would only be in town for a week, but he watched from a distance and they paid him no attention unless it was to ask for dinner recommendations. He always recommended Mabel’s, down a ways in Traverse City but before you got into downtown, or Pearl’s if they wanted something spicy and didn’t mind the drive over to Elk Rapids. Those were his favorites, and he recommended them to anyone that asked. But for them, in particular, there was a certain thrill to the advice, a certain connection between them. He could eat there, knowing that Ruby had been there as well, at his own insistence. And if the end of his shift happened to coincide with their dinnertime, then he could easily and discreetly follow, wait, and watch.
One morning, he watched as the parents left the hotel together, without their daughter. They stopped at the front desk, smiling in recognition.
“Pearl’s was great,” the father said. “How’s Mabel’s for breakfast?”
“Mabel’s is fantastic any time of the day,” Harbin said. “They have great omelets.”
The father nodded sagely. “Omelets it is.” He rapped his knuckles on the counter, decision made.
“I’ll call ahead, make sure they set aside a good table for you. Just the two of you?”
“Yeah. Ruby’s not feeling so hot, so we’re letting her sleep.”
Harbin frowned in commiseration, but inside he was absolutely rapturous. “I’m sorry to hear. You’ll have to take her there for supper then.”
Mass Hysteria Page 9
