by Johnson, MP
For all its bluster about protecting hardworking Wisconsinites, for all the paranoia about the armory, the group hadn’t done much more than serve as a glorified club during Morgan’s thirty-five years in the lead. They had helped sandbag off a couple floods over in North Dakota, broken up an unsavory student protest at Stout and recovered no less than a dozen missing children. Most had simply gone off on their bikes, but there was the Hathaway girl, who Morgan himself had found in old Dervis Crutch’s basement. Crutch hadn’t made it out of that basement, and Morgan never did talk about what had happened there, not even to Retta. Every few years, when a national news program did a piece on militias, he would give an interview and say that the organization was just a bunch of old boy scouts. Well-armed boy scouts.
When they arrived in Catspaw, he felt the sudden need to shit. He refused to take a bathroom break when he was this close, though. As the van turned off Twenty-Nine and rumbled over a rutted gravel road, he grumbled, “Damn decrepit bowels.”
“Daddy, I have a worried feeling,” Cassandra said, clutching her gun tight.
“Me too, Cass.”
“I was excited, before,” she said. “I’m not now. Not at all.”
“This is nothing to be excited about,” Morgan replied, wringing his hands.
Derby maneuvered the van onto an even smaller dirt road. An old barn stood in the gray distance, most of its red worn off. A little closer, a farmhouse.
Sweat bled out of Morgan into the lining of his Carhart as Derby parked in the driveway of the farmhouse. Cassandra tapped her razor nails on her assault rifle.
“Wait here,” Morgan said.
“What?” Cassandra replied, startled.
“I want to try this the easy way first.”
Morgan picked up the license plate from Renny’s car and touched his waist for the reassurance of his pistol. Then he climbed out of the van and walked quickly toward the front door, not giving himself enough time for second guessing, but allowing a moment to whisper the Lord’s Prayer as he climbed up the three front stairs, intentionally stepping on the fresh red smears so he wouldn’t be tempted to look at them and confirm what he already knew they were.
Bits of shattered flowerpot crunched underfoot, and he cringed at how loud the sound was, loud enough to draw the attention of someone inside. He heard feet stomping toward the door and fought the urge to step way. Instead, he held up the license plate and prepared to state his demands: his daughter turned over immediately, or . . .
When the door swung open, he had no time to issue his ultimatum. He saw black fur and blacker eyes coming at him fast. A bull, complete with horns. Very sharp horns. Before he could step back, the horns slid into him just below his ribs, lifting him off the ground and carrying him off the stairs and back onto the driveway, the bull following.
As the horns sunk deeper, Morgan realized this was no bull, just a bull head on the body of a man. Black Bull shoved so hard, the horns stabbed Morgan completely through and emerged from the back of his thick torso. As easily as they had torn through Morgan’s insides, the horns had trouble piercing the backside of his jacket. The canvas simply tented over them for a moment and fell back when Black Bull withdrew them. From the puncture wounds, blood seeped into the brown material in fast growing circles.
Morgan stumbled back and dropped to his knees. He held up his hands, but the bull man rammed again, this time stabbing through both of Morgan’s raised palms. Then the bull man stood up straight, lifting Morgan to his feet in the process, letting the militia leader dangle like a puppet on a string from his horn-impaled hands.
With his own hands, Black Bull dug into the wounds in Morgan’s torso, pushing in wrist deep. Blood came up Morgan’s throat like a cough he couldn’t control. He breathed it out onto his attacker’s face, a light red mist that collected on dead black fur like dew on grass. The bull man thrust his hands deeper into Morgan’s insides. Morgan could feel them in there, thick-knuckling their way to his lungs, squeezing them, crushing everything. Morgan refused to plead for mercy. He would not show weakness. Not in front of his men. Not in front of his children. He knew he would die. He prayed to God that, by dying strong, his team would stay strong, take this man down and find Sera.
Black Bull reared back and head-butted Morgan so hard that Morgan’s hands tore in half and came loose from the horns. Morgan stumbled backward. He tried desperately to remain on his feet, but failed. As he kneeled on the iced-over drive, panting his last breaths, he saw that the bull man had not let go of his insides. Loose cords hung, sickly purple and dripping, stretching from the holes in Morgan’s stomach to the bull man’s clenched fists like a skipping rope.
With his last bit of life, Morgan grabbed what was his and pulled. His intestines tore. Brown muck oozed from the fissures and Morgan crashed face-first into death.
Chapter 10
“Holy fuck,” Cassandra muttered. Derby sat next to her, still clenching the steering wheel, moving his mouth but not saying anything. The black bull stood over their crumpled father. Not a bull at all, but a man wearing the head of a bull like a mask.
“Sick fuck!” she shouted.
She clicked the safety off on her AK and took aim, not thinking about the windshield between her and her target. When she pulled the trigger, the glass whipped around her, a little hurricane of sharp ice.
Her brother covered himself and screamed, “Jesus, Cass! Stop!”
The tiniest fragment of glass landed in her left eye. On instinct, she reached up to hold her eyelid open so her tears could flush the scratching invader out. Instead, her touch severed her eyelid almost completely. The thin, eyeshadow-smeared slice of flesh hung there like a shower curtain torn halfway off the rod. Blood obscured her vision.
Her razor nails. She had forgotten about her razor nails.
“I screwed up!” she cried, holding the palm of her hand against her mangled eye.
The rest of the militia men emerged from the other vehicles, opening fire on the farmhouse. Black Bull retreated inside as scraps of white siding flew. The men continued to shoot. The windows of the house blew out. One of the house numbers flew off and skipped across the driveway. The door exploded off its hinges.
Cassandra noticed Derby looking at her, as if for instructions. She obliged. “Kill the fuck out of that cow-headed freak. Find Sera,” she snarled, overcoming all pain, all sadness, all other emotions.
“What about you?” her brother asked.
“I need a minute.”
Derby nodded and hopped out. Cassandra remained in the van as her brother led half of the militia over her father’s body and into the farmhouse. She had freaked out and made a mistake. As much as she had practiced, she had never been in a combat situation before. She had reacted poorly and was lucky she had only lost an eyelid and not an eye. Another fuck-up like that and she’d be doing the enemy’s work for them. She needed to mentally regroup and make sure that didn’t happen.
But she also needed to get into the house with Derby and the others. That joker couldn’t shoot worth shit, and the others were a bunch of weekend warriors. They were obviously up against an enemy far more brutal than they had expected. What had they expected? They hadn’t talked about it. They had no plan. Nothing. Maybe they had all assumed it would be easy. She had figured that, at the very worst, it would be a creepy rapist or something. Not this creepy though. Not wearing-dead-livestock-heads creepy.
She cleared some glass off the dashboard, making a clean area. With the forefinger and thumb of her razor-free hand, she pinched her dangling eyelid and tore it off, screaming. Blood haloed an eye that, now lidless, bulged crazily from its socket. She gently placed the lid on the clear spot of dashboard, hoping that this would end quickly so she could rush to a hospital and have it sewn back on.
Assault rifle in hand, she climbed out of the van. As much as she wanted to bolt into the farmhouse after the rest of the group, she refrained. She would not make any more mistakes. She would survey the area, which the
y should have done before they even pulled in. What had her father been thinking, just walking up to the front door?
Her father. There he was, twisted and bleeding. She had never considered the possibility of him dying like this, or dying at all, really. He had always been so strong. Subconsciously, she had come to believe that nothing would ever take down Morgan Durn, and she had worked hard to instill in others the same belief about her. Both facades had crumbled. Both she and her father had been stupid and weak. He had let his guard down. She had acted without thinking. But no more. Now the only hurting to be done was by a man in a bull mask, and she was eager to make it happen.
She checked her nails. Blood dripped from the long, black acrylic tips. Beautiful and clearly deadly. She was tough, but she was no tomboy. She knew she was attractive, and liked to experiment with makeup and get her nails done, but it was less about frivolity than about feeling confident and looking awesome when she was shooting guns.
When she wrapped her hands around Black Bull’s neck, she wanted his heart to beat faster not only from fear, but from lust. She would make him hurt and she would make him horny. Not that she had anything more than the vaguest idea about that. In her twenty-one years, she hadn’t spent a lot of time with men. The last time she had sex was partially an attempt to bring a new member into the militia, a buff jiu jitsu instructor fifteen years her senior. That hadn’t worked out so well. She didn’t like sex that much anyway. It was boring compared to fighting and shooting guns.
Now, the remaining seven militia men circled around her. While she had an AK, the rest weren’t quite as heavily armed. Hutch and Mike had shotguns. Mark, Gears and Peter had pistols. Old man McCoy, who had actually been in the group since her grandfather’s days in charge, loaded an arrow into his bow.
“We know there is at least one psycho inside,” Cassandra said, taking charge, proud at how authoritative she sounded even as blood continued to bubble around her eye. “There may be more in there, but we’ll let the others take them out. We’ve got a barn behind the house and plenty of woods where more men could be hiding or fucking cows or whatever. More importantly, Sera may be in there somewhere.”
Cassandra wondered about the likelihood of finding Sera alive. Sera was tough, but she was more personality tough, not fight tough. Cassandra’s relationship with Sera had always been weird. Sera was so much older, sometimes she was more like a third parent than a sister. So responsible. When Cassandra was around three or four, she had invented a game called tackle. It involved charging across the living room and plowing into Sera. Since Sera was in her twenties and so much bigger, the rule was that she had to be on her knees. Sera would pretend to get bowled over, and it would end in tickling. As Cassandra got older, she kept trying to egg Sera into fighting. Once when she was fifteen, Cassandra took it too far. She punched Sera in the stomach, and Sera had doubled over. Cassandra put her guard up to block, but Sera had just walked away.
“I don’t think I can deal with this,” Gears interrupted.
“What?” Cassandra asked in disbelief.
“Yeah man, this is fucked,” Peter added.
“This is fucked,” Mike replied, “and it’s exactly why the militia exists.” He glanced at Cassandra and attempted a surreptitious wink, but everyone saw.
Peter and Gears groaned in unison.
“Mike is right,” McCoy said. “Stop being pussies. A man is dead for crying out Christ, a good fucking man, and his goddamn daughter is asking you for help, so you’re going to fucking help. This is what we do.”
Peter stomped. “This isn’t sandbagging the—”
“Wait,” Cassandra hissed. “Shhh!”
A rumbling broke through the argument.
“There!” She pointed across the snow-strangled cornfield.
Engines. Tractor engines. Combine engines. Three massive farm machines rolled forward, cow men at their controls. So there wasn’t just one cow man. There were at least three more. Maybe there were dozens elsewhere, maybe an army of these freaks.
“Bring them on!” she yelled. Adrenaline rushed through her veins, glowing.
The militia men lined up beside her and aimed their weapons at the encroaching machines as they closed in. Guns cocked. McCoy pointed his bow. Fat lot of good that would do against cow-headed freaks in tractors. That was fine, Cassandra thought. She and her men had God on their side. God, guns and family. Who needed an army?
She raised her AK-47 and took aim.
Chapter 11
The farmhouse hadn’t seemed so big on the outside, Derby thought, making his way from one room to the next with the militia men following close behind. He wanted to make a joke about the use of space, but nothing jumped off his tongue. The timing was wrong anyway.
The feel of spaciousness could be attributed to the lack of furniture, which also made the search easier. Nothing for Black Bull to hide behind. Nothing at all except dingy mattresses scattered here and there, many of them stained with blood. There were a lot of mattresses, more than one man would need. That thought sent a chill up Derby’s spine and caused him to squint harder into the shadows, of which there were many. The weak daylight was no help inside these walls. The windows seemed to have been permanently stained by night. Closer inspection revealed they had actually been stained by black spray paint. Everything smelled like burnt eggs and mold.
“The interior design is . . . ,” Derby started to quip, but the immediate sneers sent his way by the militia men shut him up before he could finish.
As they moved through the house, the group fanned out. This was completely unplanned. However, it seemed natural and appropriate, at least at first. Now though, Derby stood halfway down the basement steps, barely able to see into the darkness in front of him, wondering why he had only one man with him and wishing it was one of the men whose names he knew. But it wasn’t. It was the big guy, Tyrell or Clarence. He would know if he’d been more involved in the group, like Cassandra. Lot of good that had done her. He wished he would have stayed home with the rest of his brothers. He didn’t even believe in this militia bullshit, and he had no delusion that he was going to rescue Sera, not now with his father dead on the doorstep. This was so fucked.
“You got a flashlight, Eric?” the big man asked.
“I’m Derby. And no, I don’t have a flashlight, but I see some light down there.”
“We should be quiet.”
“Yeah, we fucking should,” Derby replied.
“Don’t worry about it,” a voice said from somewhere near the flickering light, a woman’s voice, unnecessarily sultry. “They can’t hear you upstairs when you’re down here with us. You can hide from all the craziness.”
“Craziness?” Derby asked.
“Yeah, hon. It will all be over soon. The ceremony starts at dusk. Come down here with us and everything will be much easier.”
Derby didn’t like the sound of that. What ceremony? What was happening? Why was this woman down here in the dark. His curiosity got the best of him and he moved slowly down the stairs. With a snap, one of the steps gave way ever so slightly and he reached for his companion’s big hand. He held onto it well after he had regained his balance, finding comfort in that solid grip. He realized he had failed to take a gun from the ample supply in the back of the van.
“Do you have a gun, Ty . . . Charles?” Derby whispered.
“It’s Aram, and yes, I had the foresight to bring a weapon.”
The unseen woman giggled. “Not that you’ll need one down here.”
Derby continued toward the woman’s voice. A fantasy flitted through his head that he would find a young girl, perhaps Black Bull’s daughter, who would explain that her daddy had gone off the deep end and she was ever so thankful to Derby and the group for putting an end to the madness. Then she would reward him. She would take her top off and let him suck her breasts. She would drop her skirt and force his face into her crotch, and it would be the best moment of his life.
When he felt solid concrete un
der his feet instead of shaky wood, he zeroed in on the circle of flickering light at the far side of the basement. The light shined from a beaten lamp like a spotlight, revealing a set of naked breasts, but nothing above her neck or below her thick belly. Just those breasts, big and floppy, with veins winding toward raw nipples, like a map of well-trod territory. Those nipples had been sucked on hard, maybe even chewed on. Derby’s wouldn’t be the first pair of lips to wrap around them. He could hardly believe this was happening.
Derby inched closer, still holding Aram’s hand.
Aram pulled him back abruptly.
“You said ‘us,’” Aram said to the woman. “Who is ‘us?’”
In the moment of silence that followed, Derby heard more than the woman’s breath. He heard mewling and snorting. Heavy, wet breathing all around him, but low to the ground and hidden in the black. Something brushed past his legs.
“Oh fuck,” he said.
The woman leaned forward, moving her head into the light. It wasn’t her head though. It was the head of a cow she wore over her own, its white fur nappy with rot, its lower jaw torn off. Disintegrating flesh hung like emaciated earthworms from behind gnarled upper teeth. She dove into the shadows for a moment. When she sat up again, she cradled a calf in her arms. The animal darted for her nipple, licking it with a long pink tongue before locking its mouth around it and sucking out the milk. But milk did not satisfy the animal. The calf’s teeth broke skin. It mewled lustily as blood drained into its mouth, the excess pouring out and dribbling down the woman’s bulging stomach.
“Us,” the woman said. “Me and the children, of course.”
Chapter 12
With one eye draped in blood, Cassandra couldn’t trust her depth perception. She didn’t want to trust her vision at all. She wanted to not be seeing a tractor barreling toward her, its six-foot rear tires picking up snow in the treads and flinging it back into the air. What was that hanging from the grill, between the too-bright headlights? Skin. Bones. A human that had been disassembled, the parts laid out carefully and cleaned, before being put back together wrong. So very wrong.
