Cadet 3 (8 page)

Billy dragged her along the ground to the
base of a convenient tree. He tied a slipknot around a head-high
limb, and then looped the other end around one of Jodie’s ankles.
Then he hauled her up with the rope until she was dangling inverted
from the branch, her head three feet above the ground, breathing
raggedly.

The tree was a spruce, and the branch from
which Jodie was suspended was, consequently, quite springy. So
instead of merely hanging upside down with a fiery ball of pain
burning in her midsection from being kicked, she was also bobbing
up and down on the evergreen branch like some kind of bizarre toy
store Christmas display.

Billy placed his light on the ground, and
then opened his pants. He steadied Jodie’s body with his hand,
stopping the bouncing motion, for which small favor she was
grateful. He stood about an inch from her face and pressed the edge
of his blade against her throat.

“Now sweetheart, if you plan to go on livin’
much longer, you’ll open that pretty little mouth a yours and start
suckin’ on me,” he said.

Jodie opened wide. She did her best to give
him as much pleasure as possible, which, even in this inverted
position, was considerable. Bill was well endowed, but Jodie was
experienced in handling greater length and girth, and he presented
no problem for her. The only unusual thing about this one was the
terrible taste, the worst she had ever encountered, reminding her
of spoiled meat. Billy, it seemed, was not a fanatic about personal
hygiene. It was difficult for her to suppress a powerful urge to
vomit.

Bill held her by the ears, using these as
handles to ram himself as violently as possible down her throat.
When she did not react as he had expected by struggling or trying
to scream, he changed his tactics.

“Havin’ a good time, are you?” he asked.
“Mebbe y’all will like this too.” He closed his thumb and finger
around her nostrils, cutting off her air.

Evidently, he found the way she twisted her
body and kicked her free leg as she fought for her life to be
stimulating. As Jodie was about to lose her tenuous grip on
consciousness, he finished and pulled back with a sigh of
contentment. “Ah, that’s better!” he said.

He squatted on the ground to study the
semiconscious woman. “That was fair to middlin’,” he told her. When
she did not respond, he slapped her face and pinched her cheeks
until she revived.

“Now, s’spose you tell me what-all you city
folk was doin’ campin’ out here in the sticks?” he asked. “I kin
see from yer gear yer some kind a military, but this don’t look
like nuthin’ official. I would’n be su’prised if it turned out that
crowd a soldiers up at that fancy cabin had somethin’ to do with
you-all bein’ here. Mebbe they’re lookin’ for you, an mebbe you
don’t want ’em to find you.”

Billy’s shrewd guesses were coming
uncomfortably close to the truth. Jodie was reluctant to tell the
sadistic hillbilly the truth, but she suspected that if she did not
do something, they were all going to be dead meat anyway. She
decided to try to enlist him on their side. As far as she could
tell, she had nothing to lose.

She took a deep breath and started to talk.
“You’re right, Billy. My friends and I are in hiding. A group of
men, we don’t know exactly who they are, are attempting to
overthrow the government, and they’re after me because I am next in
line as the Chief of the General Staff. Maybe you heard of me. I am
Lieutenant General Jodie Lawrence. My friends and I are going to
beat these traitors, and when we do I am going to be running the
whole country. I won’t forget anybody who helped me when I was in
trouble. I can promise you that if you and your boys help us, I
won’t hold this little party against you. I’ll be grateful, and a
grateful CGS has the power to get you just about anything you could
ever want.” She paused expectantly.

As he squatted, apparently considering her
offer, Jodie heard the muffled screams of her companions, as the
brutish hicks abused them. She could see Merry, her hands tied to
an overhead branch, twisting and dancing frantically as she
attempted to evade the flaming branch Mort was jabbing at her naked
body.

Steph had a noose around her neck and her
hands tied behind her back. She had been lifted off the ground by
one of the Carson brothers who thrusting at her, and she was
obliged to cling to him with her long legs wrapped around his waist
to avoid being asphyxiated. Behind her, a second brother was
grunting like a wild boar as he energetically rammed himself into
Steph’s back door, while the third looked on, waiting for his
turn.

From where she hung, Jodie could not see what
Charlie was doing to Robin, for which she was moderately grateful.
The faint cries coming from the far side of the clearing told her
that her lover was at least still alive.

“So you’re the one the whole country’s
looking for?” Billy said at last. He no longer spoke in a thick
countrified dialect as he had up to now, but sounded very much like
an educated, urban Easterner. “The radio says you’ve been kidnapped
as part of a plot to overthrow the government. There’s a million
dollar reward for information on your whereabouts.”

He looked at the expression on her face, and
grinned. “You don’t think I talk with that cornpone accent all the
time, do you, General Lawrence? I’m not a real mountain man, like
the boys, although they think I’m from some ‘holler’ in West
Virginia. I came out here from Baltimore. I grew up in Wilmington,
Delaware, so you can see I’m really a city boy. You’ll keep my
secret, won’t you?” he asked, winking conspiratorially.

“Now, as it happens, I’m in no position to
turn you in for the reward,” he went on. “You see, the boys and I
have a little meth lab out here in the woods, about a mile over
that way,” he pointed, “and we have no desire to attract the
attention of the authorities.”

Jodie said, “You won’t have to worry about
being arrested if you help me. I don’t give a crap about your drug
business, Billy, and once this thing is over, I’ll be in a position
to make sure you won’t be bothered by anybody; state, federal or
local, if that’s what you want.”

Billy shook his head. “But you don’t have the
full picture yet, General. You see, I left Baltimore because things
were getting a little hot for me there. I have a hobby that is
frowned upon by… well, by almost everybody.”

As he talked, he was lowering the rope
holding Jodie, until her waist was level with his crotch. “You see,
the reason I had to leave Baltimore in such a hurry is my unusual
interest in pretty young girls.” His voice dropped. “Did you ever
hear of the ‘Jigsaw Man’, General Lawrence? Well, that’s me.”

She had. The story had been carried all over
the country. Eighteen months earlier, Baltimore police had raided a
row house in a derelict section of the city, where they found
various body parts belonging to eight different victims, all
females between the ages of 18 and 30, wrapped in cellophane and
stored in a large freezer. The unknown perpetrator, subsequently
given the nickname “the Jigsaw Man” by the press, had never been
apprehended, in spite of a massive investigation led by the
FBI.

When Jodie’s eyes widened in reaction, Billy
said, “So you have heard of me. Luckily for me, I was out of the
house the day the police broke in and found all those girls… well,
all those parts of girls, anyway… in my the basement. After I came
out here, I put together our little group, and introduced the boys
to my hobby. This area is practically the perfect place for it.
There’s nobody around for miles, so the little bitches can scream
all they want and the only ones hearing them are raccoons and black
bears. We even have a smokehouse next to the lab, where we can
preserve the meat after we’re all through playing with them. I got
lucky on Thursday. I picked up a couple of brainless freshmen girls
from Virginia Tech hitchhiking on Two-Twenty, and brought them back
to the shack. I kept a souvenir. Let me show you.” He opened his
waist pouch, fumbled around in it for a moment, and said, “Here it
is.”

He held the object in the light. It was a
human ear. The earlobe was pierced with a lapis stud earring. “I
think her name was Tara. She was a cute little thing, and after I
cut this off, she couldn’t do enough to please me.” He tucked the
ear back into the pouch and smiled in reminiscence. “She was so
sweet and pathetic when she got down on her knees and begged for
her life that I almost didn’t have the heart to finish her
off.”

Jodie stared at Billy with burning eyes. “You
are one sick fuck,” she said hoarsely.

Billy nodded. “I sure am,” he agreed. The
knowledge did not seem to trouble him.

He spun Jodie’s body halfway around, and then
began to rub up and down in the valley between her buttocks.

“So you can see that even if I could trust
you to keep your word about the meth lab, there is no way you would
be able to overlook my other little guilty pleasure. I couldn’t
take even the smallest chance of anybody finding out what the boys
and I are up to out here,” he said. He jabbed unsuccessfully at her
back door a few times, then said, “Tight little thing, aren’t
you?”

He went into his pouch again, this time
removing a small glass bottle with a wide bottom and long, narrow
neck. He reached around to show it to Jodie. “This is Louisiana hot
sauce. I never go anywhere without it.” He brought the bottle of
hot sauce back, twisted off the cap, and shook some of the contents
onto himself. “Not only does it make good meat taste better, but
it’s a pretty fair lubricant, in a pinch.”

He again pressed into Jodie’s rear entrance
again. This time, the hot sauce was lubrication enough to allow
Billy to overcome any resistance. Jodie screamed. The hot sauce
felt like burning gasoline, and the pain increased as he penetrated
deeper.

Billy paused. He whipped off the handkerchief
he had knotted around his neck and stuffed it into the shrieking
Jodie’s open mouth. “Normally, I would let you scream all you
want,” he said, almost apologetically, “but with all those Army
boys only a few miles away, there’s a chance somebody might be
wandering around the neighborhood looking for you, and I wouldn’t
want anybody to find you, at least not until we’re finished
here.”

He grasped her hips and pulled sharply,
thrusting into her, and then he reached down, encircled her slender
throat with his hands and pressed down on her windpipe with his
thumbs.

“That Tech co-ed had a great ass, but you’re
the best fuck I can remember, General,” he told the hopelessly
struggling Jodie. “It almost seems a shame not to keep you around,
at least for a few days, but it’s just too risky.”

At that moment, Jodie was in no condition to
appreciate the compliment. There was a growing buzzing in her ears
and a red mist obscured her vision, turning gradually gray and
growing darker with each passing second.
So this is what it
feels like to die
, she thought.

Then there was a sharp
crack
, followed
immediately by a dull
thump
in the near distance, and
suddenly the hands gripping her windpipe had been released. A heavy
impact on her left leg, side and shoulder sent her spinning on the
end of the rope, when Billy’s body bounced off hers as he tumbled
to the ground. As he fell past her, Jodie saw that where the back
of his head had been was now a gaping ruin.

Revolving around on the rope as she was,
Jodie had only an intermittent view of what followed. A figure
dressed in combat fatigues with an M-63 assault rifle in her hands
rushed silently by her. Jodie heard three more explosions in rapid
succession, the
crack
of the high velocity bullet cutting
through the air and the
thump
of the detonating round in the
assault rifle merging into a single sound with each shot, and by
the time her rotation had brought her around to face the far side
of the clearing again, she saw that two of the Carson brothers were
already sprawled bonelessly on the ground and the third was in the
act of joining them.

The rifleman did not even wait long enough to
see which way he fell. She turned her weapon towards the giant
Mort, who only now was beginning to realize that something had gone
wrong. He had just begun to turn towards the attacker and raise his
hand when flame spurted from the end of the rifle’s barrel, and a
small, neat hole appeared in the middle of his forehead. He
continued to turn as he pitched forward to crash face-first in the
dirt. Jodie had no doubt he was dead before he hit the ground.

Jodie lost sight of the action as she turned
momentarily away again. When she was once more facing the right
direction, she saw the final member of the gang, Charlie, shuffling
slowly towards the rifleman, with his pants down around his ankles,
his erection poking in front and his hands raised over his
head.

He said, “I give…”

Before he could say more, there was another
crack
and a hole the exact diameter of a 5.56mm bullet
formed just above and directly between Charlie’s bushy eyebrows. He
was thrown backwards, landing heavily and sending a cloud of dust
particles into the beam of the flashlight he had dropped on the
ground behind him.

Kate Swenson walked over to the corpse,
leaned over, pursed her lips and sent a wad of saliva to splash on
the forehead of the blankly staring face. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you
want to say something to me, dog meat?” she asked.

Chapter Six: Murphy

Kate took a few seconds to make a cursory
check of the six members of Billy’s gang, and when she was
satisfied they were no longer a threat, she immediately went across
the clearing to release Jodie.

“Are you all right, Jodie?” Kate asked, as
she gently lowered her to the ground and untied her wrists. “I’m
sorry I couldn’t come sooner, but I had to make sure they were all
too busy to notice me. I had to get them all, because if even
one…”