Bears of Burden: THORN

by Candace Ayers

  Stranded in the semi darkness under a dim orange streetlight was more than a little creepy. My heart rate was elevated. It was past ten at night and I was breathing hot, fetid air in one of the worst parts of San Antonio’s South Side. Not to mention I was dressed in my favorite short, black mini-dress that hugged my butt and was oh-so-good at lifting my bust line up just where I liked it to be. Oh, yeah, and my coveted four hundred dollar heels.

  Alright, well, I guess I’d have to describe my surroundings to AAA since there weren’t any road signs anywhere. I grabbed my cell out of my small clutch purse, and Fuuuck! Dead. At that moment, I saw a light that looked like it might be heading this way.

  Please be a cop. Please be a cop.

  I repeated like a mantra. But, my hope disappeared as the roar of a motorcycle engine grew louder and nearer. I thought about getting back in the Jeep, but before I could reach it, the motorcycle engine crescendoed to a deafening level and then abruptly ceased.

  “Having some trouble, little lady?” The man’s voice was high-pitched and mocking. It was accompanied by a squawking, earsplitting woman’s cackle. My mom always taught me never to judge a movie by the DVD cover, I think, but the sound made my nerves jangle and I was trembling slightly as I turned around.

  The man striding towards me was of average height and build, but his expression gave him the honor of having the evilest face I’d ever seen in my life. It contorted his forked beard, and scars rippled up extending over his battered and bald head.

  Behind him, sitting on a big black chopper, was a scrawny girl of maybe twenty-five with straggly, greasy blonde hair falling limply around a face that might have been pretty once. Drugs? Whatever it was, something had ravaged her looks, and she held the same sinister visage as her partner. Her self-confidence appeared to be unfazed though. Her stocking tops showed clearly from under her short leather miniskirt, and her breasts were crammed into a tiny bikini top and barely hidden by her patched leather vest.

  “It… it just banged and shut down,” I managed to say sounding, at least I thought, mostly calm. As he continued towards me, his eyes ran slowly up and down my body. I saw his vest was similar to the girl’s. The left breast bore the name ‘Rectum’. Before I had time to process his lovely moniker, he walked right past me.

  “Sounds just like Darla over there,” he grinned, earning a middle finger from his girlfriend. “Well, let’s just see what we can do, shall we?”

  He opened the Jeep door, popped the hood, and then walked around front to shove his head under it. A small sense of relief flooded me. Maybe mom was right about those DVD covers. I read the name ‘Angel Dogs’ from the gang patch on the back of Rectum’s vest, and I thought maybe he was my unlikely savior.

  “You see here?” he called, beckoning me over, his head still in the bowels of my motor. I stepped cautiously towards him, still trying to save my heels. Suddenly, a vice-like grip clasped my left arm at the same time as thin, sharp fingers coiled around my throat. Before I could release a sound, Darla’s piercing screech split the night and Rectum’s eerie, sneering grimace emerged from under my hood.

  “Now here,” Rectum brought his face so close to mine I could almost taste his fetid breath, “is where you’re completely fucked.”

  Chapter 2

  My legs turned to Jell-O. If Darla didn’t have such a firm grip on me, I’d have been on the ground. I tried to scream, but her iron-grip tightened, choking off any sound from escaping.

  “Don’t worry, baby,” Darla hissed in my ear, “you’ll get your chance to scream. We’ll make you scream.” She let out another high-pitched cackle and then ran her wet tongue run down my cheek.

  “I love a lady with some curves,” offered Rectum as his gaze scanned my body. He reached his dirt smudged hand forward and, with seemingly no effort, ripped the front of my dress clean open, right down the middle, exposing my bra-covered breasts.

  “Yeah, she’s hot,” gloated Darla. “Fuck her blue, Recky-baby, then it’s my turn.”

  I tried to fight. I struggled, trying to cover myself up, but Darla was unbelievably strong. There was nothing I could do but pray that I would come out of this relatively unscathed. Not much hope of that though.

  Rectum’s filthy fingers trailed down my stomach. He was going to tear the rest of my dress away, and my underwear too, no doubt. He was practically drooling from his disgusting pie hole when he abruptly froze. His head turned sharply to gaze down the road, back the way they had come. That’s when I heard it too. The low rumble of another motorcycle.

  Tears welled at the back of my eyes. More Angel Dogs coming to join the party? So, now I was to be passed around like a rag doll? I wouldn’t be able to withstand this.

  “Hear that?” asked Darla, sounding worried.

  “Ah, fuck!” snapped Rectum. He grabbed me by the shoulders and casually tossed me towards my Jeep.

  I landed hard and painfully. My head smacked the metal of the wheel well and bounced off. Face down on the sidewalk, all I could hear for a few minutes was white noise. I was too stunned to move, so I lay still, somewhere between sleep and consciousness. Sounds of the world around me started to penetrate, but it all seemed surreal, like the sounds were background noise from a TV.

  I heard another motorcycle pull up but it sounded different from a normal cycle engine. It was bassier, brassier, ballsier. There were angry voices after the engine died, then grunts, screams, maybe cloth tearing, and something like moist ripping and cracking that reminded me of pulling a drumstick off a roasted chicken. My head throbbed and my eyes were so heavy. Someone must have kicked a bucket over. There was a quick splash, and thick warm liquid pooled around my bare legs before I finally succumbed to sleep.

  I was standing in a field, my breath misting on the air. Even though my dress was ripped open to the navel, I didn’t feel cold. My feet, now one bare and one clad in a dirty, scuffed, four-hundred-dollar heel, made a soft crunching sound through white snow that blanketed the ground. Oddly, my skin still felt the radiating warmth of an August night in South Texas.

  There was fencing around the field, and beyond that, a long way off, a city skyline. Not a tall, angular, modern skyline, this was lower, with church towers, dome-shaped building tops, and smoke stacks. It reminded me of an old European city from two or three centuries ago. London? More like Vienna, Budapest, or St Petersburg.

  As I turned, the view was similar in every direction until I spotted a figure in the distance. Just a small dark shape, but definitely a man with a hat and cane. I glanced to my left for a brief moment, and when I looked back, he was standing at arms distance before me. I could see little of him except a long black cloak and a plain black tricorn hat. His cane, penetrating the snow and held at a relaxed angle in his gloved right hand, was also black, except for the head of a hunting dog intricately carved out of silver on the handle.

  He lifted his head revealing a pale face with penetrating but sad gray eyes, a smooth, firm chiseled jaw, straight nose, and full lips. He looked about my age, but his eyes held the look of lifetimes of wisdom. He was incredibly handsome by any standards and I felt my body reacting accordingly.

  As his gaze met mine, I’m certain I noticed a glimmer of happiness cross his face, but only for a moment. His eyes travelled the length of me. Up and back down. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t open my mouth. My mouth was disconnected from my brain and just wouldn’t do what I commanded. The man trod a slow circle around me. I wanted to turn with him but, again, my body was unwilling to follow the commands of my brain. I sensed him close behind me, felt the soft leather of his gloves on my shoulders.

  “Beautiful,” he whispered, his mouth very close to my ear, the words dripping sweetly like honey. My stomach twisted as he gently slid the fabric off my shoulders, allowing it to drop to the snowy ground. I did manage to eject a small gasp this time. I tried to cover myself, except again, my body would not comply. It almost felt as though my body longed for this man. It made no sense. He continued circling
me slowly, stepping around to face me again, his eyes absorbing all of me.

  My heart was racing and my throat was dry. My tongue felt like it was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I should have been cold standing in a snow covered field in my underwear. I should probably have felt embarrassed standing in my underwear being ogled by a perfect stranger. I didn’t though. What I felt was a craving, a fierce hunger for this man. My body was crying out for his touch.

  What in the world had me yearning for a stranger in period clothing? The whole thing was insane. I don’t care how sexy he was; still crazy.

  He leaned in close again, and since my body wouldn’t move, I could do nothing but breath him in. He smelled like fresh apples and blackberries, with a warm undertone of cinnamon. Delicious.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” his gently voice held a faint eastern European accent. Delicately, he ran a gloved finger along my jaw, down my neck, and tenderly along the inner curve of my breast. I felt my breath catch, my nipples harden, and a tingling begin even lower. I was desperate to speak now. If I had the capacity, I knew I would beg him to take me. That’s when the snow began to thaw.

  No, not the snow, the whole field was melting away. I couldn’t see him anymore. The cityscape of St Petersburg, or Vienna, or wherever, was also gone. I looked down and saw blood. It was splashed over my legs.

  “Miss? Miss?”

  I was sitting slumped against my jeep with a pretty young girl, a paramedic, shining a light in my eyes. I tried to ask her what she wanted but my question emerged as a coughing fit instead.

  “Got her!” she called out to someone else, then slipped an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth.

  “Do you know your name?” the girl asked me.

  “April,” I told her, my voice was dry and crackly and muffled by the mask. Blinking the spots out of my eyes, I could see I only had one shoe on and it, as well as most of my feet and legs, were covered in sticky dark red blood.

  Chapter 3

  The thought that I was doused in my own blood was quickly dispelled when my vision returned and I was staring at Rectum. His face was frozen in a wicked grimace, leering, wide-eyed at me, only now upside down, his head attached to his shoulder by only a thin flap of skin. His chest had been ripped in half in a rough line, running from just under his neck to his groin. Ripped. Not cut with a sword, not bitten by some wild animal, but ripped. As in torn. Like a paper doll. A wave of nausea shot through me as my eyes followed the pool of blood around his body to where it extended in rivulets towards my legs bathing me in the sticky, metallic smelling liquid.

  Darla was next to him. She may have fared slightly better, but it’s all relative. Her chest was gone. A gaping hole going right through it. Whatever had been inside, lungs, heart, ribs, was just… gone. I had to look away before I vomited.

  The girl, who was not actually a girl, but a small-statured female EMT with short red hair, intense light blue eyes, and a name badge that read ‘Emma’, draped a blanket over me. There were questions. I don’t remember the questions, but they must have been all the usual questions asked to someone with a head injury. I don’t remember my answers either, but after the Q and A, I was helped into the back of an ambulance.

  As I sat on a cot in the back of the ambulance, a tall, African American man wearing a cheap but well cared for grey suit climbed in next to me and introduced himself as Sargent Gouldon. More questions.

  After listening to my story, the Sargent let out a breath, looked around the crime scene, and shook his head.

  “And you’ve no idea how your would-be assailants ended up mutilated?” he asked.

  I drew my oxygen mask away from my face for a moment. I was exhausted, nerves shattered, dress torn, and I just wanted to go to sleep and pretend tonight never happened.

  “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Death Squad?” I offered.

  He didn’t smile.

  “Look here, Miss Hamilton,” he growled angrily, “I’m just trying to make sense of this mess and figure out why it’s not you lying there raped and murdered, instead of these two bloody messes!”

  “I should be more grateful?… Is that what you’re saying?” I asked. “Or is it that you resent me for making your job tonight so much more difficult?” Hell, I guess I couldn’t blame him for being tense, I was completely baffled as to what might have happened and I’d been here the whole time.

  “Shit, I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, calming down. “Of course, I’m very glad you’re okay, and I’m not suggesting you are anything other than a victim. Please, while the incident’s fresh in your mind, I’m just asking you to try and remember if anything else sticks out. Anything else that might have happened before you lost consciousness.”

  “I’m sorry, Sargent,” I told him.

  “I’m sorry too,” said Emma, my EMT savior, “but you gotta hop out now. She needs a head CT and lots of rest. If you want any more answers you’ll have to find her back at the hospital.”

  The tiny woman almost shoved the large cop out the doors and we got underway. Over the gentle rocking of the ambulance and the hum of the engine, I wondered why I hadn’t told him about the other motorcycle? I may be a smart-ass, and even a pain-in-the-ass, but I wouldn’t normally break the law or intentionally hamper an investigation. It seemed obvious now, if unbelievable, that the noises I heard where Darla and Rectum being ripped apart. But what type of creature could do that and ride a motorcycle? Hell, maybe Gouldon was better off not knowing, for his sake. In case he found it and it didn’t want to come quietly.

  At the hospital, I was poked and prodded and tested up the wazoo. In the end, the diagnosis was that I had a bump on the head, a little gravel rash on my knees and arms, but no internal injuries or bleeding in my brain. It was still thought that I had a concussion, though, so I was going to have to spend the night in the hospital.

  Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone to inform of my ‘accident’ and subsequent hospital stay. The gallery would be closed so I wouldn’t be expected at work tomorrow, and with the exception of a cousin living somewhere in Arizona, I had no family. My career had been my life for as long as I could remember, leaving no time for friends or relationships. As pitiful as it sounded, my job was all-consuming. I tackled each piece as a personal quest, and I was driven to find and obtain certain works of art. The Dobronravov had been a pinnacle to me. I had been obsessed with it for four years, and was prouder of my successful efforts to procure it than I had been about any other piece.

  I was checked into a room, given a ridiculous gown and a toothbrush, and finally, at about three am, a young nurse told me to rest. Finally. The thing is, even though the adrenaline rush had worn off hours ago and I was beyond exhausted; I couldn’t seem to sleep.

  My mind wouldn’t quiet down. At first, the focus was what could have happened to me, had my attackers not been killed. I think I slept a little, having nightmares about that, but, soon enough my brain slipped into thinking about the dream; who was that guy? It had all been so incredibly vivid. How was he able to exert such power over me? How come I felt so attracted to him?

  I opened my eyes in the snow-covered field again. I was aware that I must have dreamed myself back into it, but it wasn’t the same. This time, I was wearing an outfit from centuries ago. A long, sunflower yellow dress that fanned out at the hem, covered my shoulders and slashed straight across my breasts which, thanks to the corset I’d been shoved into, were pushed up and very full.

  “And there’s my beauty,” I heard his voice again but, this time, I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. My pulse started racing. I now understood why those Regency ladies were always fanning themselves.

  “Who are you?” I managed to say this time.

  “You know who I am,” he whispered back. I felt his soft lips graze the skin between my neck and shoulder. I felt the fine hairs on my arms stand straight up, and a tingling in my nether region. “You love me,” he continued. I could feel his fingers loosening my gown
, until he deftly slipped it off my shoulders and it fell to the floor. My corset stopped just below my generous bosom, which was now only concealed by a thin, silk chemise, while my legs were hidden beneath a petticoat. I had a dim recollection that drawers were out in this period, so I took a nervous swallow and assumed that, aside from some thigh-high hose, I was naked under there.

  “I do?” I sighed, my mouth going dry as his fingers moved lightly across my back. I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against his shoulder, my breathing quickening further as his fingers traced under my arms and moved easily under the loose fabric, to stroke delicately across the sensitive skin of my breasts.

  “You do,” he confirmed, a low moan escaping from my lips as his soft fingertips brushed my achingly hard nipples. “Just as I love you and have been waiting for you for centuries.”

  His hands eased my chemise down, exposing me, but I didn’t care. My loins were burning, a throbbing desire emanating from my core. I knew I wanted to feel him inside of me. I turned around to face him as fast as I could. I threw my arms around his neck and pulled his face to mine. His hands wrapped around my waist, pushing my petticoat to the floor. The cool breeze tickled my bare backside, but I was too overwhelmed with yearning to be ashamed of my exposure.

  His lips descended over mine. I could feel his hands sliding over my stomach. His tongue parted my lips and I met its velvet touch with my own. The sensation brought another low moan from me and my feminine juices were dripping, preparing me for his joining. I was aware this was a dream, and I wanted him. It was the hottest dream, and sadly, the most action I’d had in… forever.

  Just as suddenly, though, he pulled away, stepping back. I stood before him, naked but for the corset still laced around my body, breathless and trying to figure out what I’d done wrong.