Authors: Bryan Smith
Shit!
She tried to slam the door shut, but the blonde girl cackled as she burst through the opening before that could happen. There was a big carving knife in her hand now, produced from seemingly nowhere. Melanie belatedly realized she had been holding it behind her back the whole time. She reflexively held up her hands as the big blade arced toward her. It cut deep into the meat of a forearm. The pain was instant and terrible as bright red blood leaped from the big gash in her arm. Someone was screaming. She didn’t know whether it was her or John. Not that it mattered. Not that anything mattered other than the price they were both paying for her act of unthinking stupidity. A late night knock on your door never heralded anything good.
The hatchet-wielding boys dashed into the house and headed straight for John, who shrieked as he backed away from them and tripped over his feet in his panic. The boys grinned like madmen as they fell upon him and went to work with their hatchets. Great gouts of blood leaped into the air as the heavy blades punched through flesh. John struggled at first, bucking beneath them and fighting desperately to dislodge them. But they were too much for him and too much damage happened too fast.
The blonde girl threw the door shut.
Melanie staggered backward through the foyer until her back met a wall. Tears streamed from her eyes as her assailant advanced on her. “Please…I’ve got money. A lot of money.”
The blonde smiled. “Money is meaningless.”
She abruptly swung the knife at Melanie again. This time the blade raked across an upheld palm, loosing another river of blood. Melanie wailed in pain and began to blubber, insensibly pleading with this incongruously beautiful agent of evil. She couldn’t fathom how this was happening to her or why. This wasn’t how her life was supposed to end. She had so much still to do. So much still to accomplish. More music to make. Awards to win. And, someday, a family of her own to begin. This wasn’t right. It was a brutal, horrific insult against the proper course of things. How could God let something so terrible happen?
Please save me…somebody…anybody…please…
But no one was coming to Melanie Montgomery’s rescue tonight.
The blonde seized a handful of Melanie’s long hair and dragged her screaming into the middle of the living room. The screams gave way to sobs when she got a look at John’s ruined body. He looked more like an oversized bloody ragdoll than a man. His head had been nearly severed and one of his arms had been chopped off. There were several more equally sickening wounds. Melanie felt a crushing wave of guilt as she recalled her callous thoughts about John from just a few minutes ago. He was a good guy. He hadn’t deserved this. No one deserved this.
The blonde stabbed her in the stomach and she pitched to the floor, landing on her hands and knees. The blade entered her flesh yet again, this time penetrating her back. Her arms gave out and she started crawling across the floor, trailing blood on the varnished hardwood.
There was laughter from the boys.
The blonde said, “Flip her over.”
Strong hands seized Melanie’s arms and did just that. She cried out as she was dropped onto her back. The boys held her down, preventing any further efforts to escape.
The blonde knelt next to Melanie and smiled. “Are you ready to accept John Wayne’s gift of love?”
Melanie sniffled. “What?”
The blonde slapped her. “Stop crying and pay attention. This is important. The time of cleansing has arrived. We’re going to make the world pure again, starting with getting rid of all the dirty little moneygrubbers like you. It’s time for you to transcend your life of greed and selfishness. Are you ready to accept John Wayne’s gift of love?”
Melanie whimpered uncontrollably for several moments before the blonde slapped her again. Then she said, “I don’t want to die.”
The blonde smiled. “That’s a shame. His love was yours to take. If only you had accepted it willingly.”
Then she snarled with savage glee as she plunged the carving knife deep into Melanie’s abdomen. One of the boys got up to turn up the volume on the music to cover the sounds of the loudest screams yet. The blade went up and down many more times. It made a sickening wet punching sound each time it entered her flesh. After a while consciousness began to ebb and Melanie stopped being aware of how much it hurt. Which was nice. Letting go was nice. Or at least better than incomprehensible suffering. And it was nice to have such hauntingly ethereal music accompanying her into the abyss.
Sally kept careful count.
She stabbed Melanie exactly sixty-nine times. She wasn’t sure why, but the number felt right. It was the perfect amount to establish the beautiful cosmic synchronicity instinct told her was necessary. Before the act of flesh transformation via blade was complete, Thomas flipped the record over to the other side.
Sally had never heard it before, but it seemed like a nice record.
Later, they wrote on the walls with the blood of their victims.
Chapter Eighteen
Meeting the Gang/Trial by Fire
It was late afternoon by the time Casey followed the old Impala down the little dirt road that led to the rental house Echo owned. She had never spent much time at this place during their time together and this was only the second time he had ever been here. The one other time he had helped her haul away some worthless old furniture abandoned by some renters who’d abruptly packed up and left without proper notice.
Two other cars were parked on the gravel driveway in front of the house, a sun-bleached 80’s Camaro with Florida plates and Echo’s Lexus. The Camaro had a large outline of a Playboy bunny on the rear window. A sticker on the bumper advertised something called “The Booty Boutique”, which showed a silhouette of a shapely, long-legged woman next to the name. No way that was anything but a strip joint, albeit one with a more colorful name than the norm.
After parking behind the Impala, he got out of his car, removed his sunglasses and hooked them over the collar of his shirt. He squinted at the house as the Impala’s driver’s side door creaked open and Echo emerged into the slowly fading sunlight. “Wow. I’d almost forgotten what a nice place this is.”
Echo snorted as she hip-checked the door shut. “It’s a dump, but it’s been our base of operations for a while.”
There was a wry twist to Casey’s mouth. “Base of operations? What are you, some kind of elite squad of stripper commandos?”
A fleeting smile touched the corners of Echo’s mouth. “I told you to watch the wiseass bullshit. You need to take that seriously. My friends may not look it, but they are hardcore killers. If they get the feeling you’re disrespecting them at all, you are fucked.”
“Duly noted.”
Echo frowned. “I mean it, Casey. Please mind your mouth in there.”
Casey forced the last remaining traces of levity from his expression, which was harder to manage than it should have been. It wasn’t that he didn’t take her warnings seriously. He knew well enough by now to heed Echo’s words when she was in no-bullshit mode. But something about being on her good side again—even if only tentatively—brought out the smiles and wisecracks. And somehow it didn’t matter that she had been beating him and threatening his life only a few hours ago. Every time he looked into her eyes all he could think about was how badly he had fucked up with her and how lucky he was to have even the remotest chance of winning her back again.
“I hear you, Echo, I promise. I’ll be on my best behavior.”
“Do better than that. Your life depends on it.” She jerked her head toward the house. “Come on, let’s get on with it.”
Casey followed her up the steps to the porch, where she unlocked the front door after a quick flip through her keys. Inside there were cobwebs in the corners and the hardwood floor was dusty. Some wooden crates were lined up against a wall adjacent to a hallway. But what really grabbed his attention was the heavy machine gun fastened to a tripod mount. The big gun sat atop a metal cart with rollers in the middle of the living room. Ammunition belts were piled next to it. Its presence in this setting was incongruous and disconcerting. A weapon like that belonged on a desert battlefield somewhere on the other side of the world, not in some unassuming little house in the southern United States. It was another indication Echo and her friends were into some dangerous and shady things.
Echo noted his dumbfounded expression and shrugged.
A rickety wooden table was the sole piece of furniture in the kitchen. The beat-up old thing looked like something Echo and her pals had scrounged up from a dump somewhere and maybe they had. Some metal folding chairs were arrayed around the table. There was an enormous pile of cocaine in the middle of the table. As they entered the kitchen, a blonde woman scraped some of the coke away from the pile with the edge of a credit card and started cutting lines. Casey couldn’t help doing a double-take when he saw the blonde. She was so stupidly hot it nearly melted his brain.
The blonde glanced up at him and smirked. “So this is the infamous Casey? He looks like he wants to fuck me.”
Echo grunted. “Why should you be different from anyone else?” She snagged a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam from the table and pressed it into Casey’s hands. “Here. Drink up. And stop gawping.”
Casey didn’t hesitate to take her advice. The way the blonde was watching him made him feel light-headed. He would have to watch himself where she was concerned. He was a strong-willed guy in a lot of ways, but history had proven again and again how that didn’t necessarily apply where gorgeous women were concerned. Falling victim to that weakness again under these circumstances just couldn’t happen.
A long-legged woman with an abundance of lush, dark hair sat in a chair opposite the blonde. She was gorgeous too, though perhaps just a shade shy of being the kind of earth-shattering bombshell the blonde was. And that was no knock against her. In any other room full of beautiful women, your eyes would go immediately to her and stay there. Like Echo, the blonde and the raven-haired beauty had a distracting number of tattoos. Also like Echo, they evidently both preferred to wear as little as possible.
Casey’s brain started to melt again.
He took a few medicinal slugs of whiskey to counteract the effect.
Echo waved a hand at the blonde. “This is Dez.” She then gestured at the leggy brunette. “And this is Lana.”
Casey tipped the whiskey bottle at them. “Girls. Good to meet you. So…what’s with the giant gun of doom out there?” He jerked his chin toward the living room. “Expecting a Taliban invasion?”
Dez shook her head. “That’s privileged information, Casey. Our business ain’t your business, at least not yet. Now sit down and do some fucking cocaine with me.”
Casey shot a troubled look at Echo. “Look, I appreciate the hospitality, but cocaine just isn’t my thing. Hell, that goes for drugs in general. My sister—”
Echo nudged him hard with an elbow. “Just shut up and do it.”
“But—”
Another, harder nudge. And a look to match. “You’re doing it.”
Casey pulled out a chair and sat next to Dez. He set the whiskey bottle on the table.
“I guess if Echo says I have to do this, I don’t have a choice.”
Dez reached out and touched one of the tender spots on his face. “Yeah. I can see she put you in your place.” The pad of her thumb lightly rubbed the still-raw gash. “From what I hear, it’s the least you fucking deserved.”
Casey held his breath.
He couldn’t help it—her touch made his dick twitch.
But then her hand came away from his face and she bent her head toward the table to snort up a thick line of powder. Her head popped right back up and she stared into a middle distance with a slack expression for a moment. Then she cackled like a madwoman and leered at Casey. “Your turn.”
She passed him the clipped straw she’d used to snort the coke.
And then she put a hand on his knee. Echo made a sound of annoyance, but she said nothing. Casey’s dick twitched again. In a deliberate effort to negate the physical reaction, he focused his attention on the obscene amount of cocaine in the center of the table. It looked like a small snow drift. He knew an eight-ball of coke went for between two and three hundred dollars locally, depending on source and quality. An eight-ball was just 3.5 grams. So right now he was looking at many thousands of dollars of coke, perhaps
tens
of thousands. The realization raised a number of troubling questions. Then again, he already knew Echo and her friends were murderers. Drug-trafficking, guns or whatever else they were into sort of paled compared to that.
Dez squeezed his knee. “Hit that shit.”
Casey shook his head. “What?”
Dez shifted in her chair and put her feet in his lap. Echo made a louder sound of irritation, but again said nothing. “What’s with the drooling idiot look? Didn’t know Echo had a thing for retards.”
Casey glanced down at her feet, which were crossed at the ankles. They were perfectly shaped feminine feet. The nails were painted red. He had a momentary impulse to take a big toe into his mouth and suck on it.
He looked at her face and swallowed hard. “I, uh…”
Echo groaned. “For fuck’s sake, Casey, she’s just messing with you. Dez is a lesbian.”