Endless Night (21 page)

A sigh began in my heavy lungs and made its way out through pursed lips. From the dark void of my porch, a screeching gust of foul air blasted my face with such force I felt my clothes press against my skin. The smell was similar to rotten meat. Terrified as all the fucks in hell, I screamed back into the blast of air. Using my foot, I kicked the door closed, slamming it against the darkness. In an instant, I was on my knees clinging to the doorknob. I flipped the deadbolt over and collapsed against the door. My heart pounding in my chest, all I could hear was the rushing of blood in my ears. I sat for a moment, anticipating further contact.

Silence. I scrambled toward my bedroom half on all fours, half on my own two feet. Moving so quickly through the room, I slammed into my bedside table, knocking the things on top to the floor. Even in the darkened room, I saw the glint of my shiny, freshly cleaned, Beretta. I checked the clip, to be on the safe side, and flipped the safety off.

Eerie silence filled the small apartment. Atrophy was setting in and my legs were beginning to protest any movement. Not believing for a minute this horror show was over, I found a spot to perch on the edge of the couch, facing the door, and waited. I sat in the dark, shining pistol in hand, and waited for evil to bust down my door.

A thud slammed against the door. And another and another. Until I thought, whatever beastly thing was on the other side, would bust right through.

“What in the fuck!” I screamed at the door just before it burst open.

Like a swift kick in the ass, all that I once knew as truth has crumbled, and new mysterious things begin taking shape. In the night that never seemed to end. The night that never gave way to the shiny light of day, fiction charged through and sunk its teeth into reality. I am the gory mess it left behind. Me and my big ass gun.

Reality bites.

From The Author:

When I first put pen to paper for this series the name Dylan Hart was not even a thought. Her story was one of humor and satire, not this drama you just read. It took only a day or two of jotting down notes and ideas for Dylan to pipe up and let herself be known. From there the others were born. Tatum came first, before the other crazy bitches that occupy this world. No girl is complete with a bitch friend to reminder her how awesome she is, of course. From there Mike was a must. Love interest? Not exactly. More like love lost and gone forever. Cyrus and the lot of them came in their time. One after the other, they each popped up and screamed their story. The turns this tale has taken over the last few years are remarkable knowing where the story started. Now, knowing what I do, knowing where this story will take me – where it will take you – makes me giddy with evil delight.

Thank you for hopping on this jacked up coaster of blood and voodoo. Are you ready for more?

There’s no turning back now.

Love y’all!

X’s

www.RMGilmoreAuthor.com

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Sacrifice
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Sacrifice – Dylan Hart #3

Becoming -
Lynnie Russell Trilogy part 1

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Sacrifice

Fear. Fear above all else is the driving force behind every negative emotion I own. Heart pounding, skin slick with sweat, mouth sticky, rage and fury building upon oneself until it's forced from every pore. Fear, my darling, is the end all be all of Dylan Hart.

Evil has descended upon me and it's ripe with death. Death from me. By me. For me. My penance. My ultimate retribution for the sins I've committed. My pound of flesh. My sacrifice.

Chapter One

"What in the fuck?" my voice screeched out as the wood of my front door splintered and shattered, leaving a gaping hole that lead to the blackness of my porch.

I held my pistol, and aimed steady at the black hole in front of me. The steel warming under the heat of my skin. Nothing came. The unseen force that busted my door made no attempt to make itself known. Reluctantly, I lowered my aim toward my lush carpet.

My gut churned with nervous vomit, but I released my breath and allowed my shoulders to relax, even if only just a bit.

From the darkness, a streak of white moved quickly, then nothing. My eyes trained on the hole in the door, I waited. Again, a movement of white through the black, but nothing more. My stomach roiled again. A stark white leg stepped through the human-sized gape in my door. My eyes went wide, but I didn't let the fear overtake me. My hands came up pointing the barrel of my gun at the hole. Fuck, through the hole, passed the hole at whatever was attached to that ghostly white limb. The leg pulled the lower half of a body through the hole, exposing the rotten flesh of an inner thigh and pubic area.

Fight or flight, bitch.

I gagged and forced myself to stay where I was. Gun trained. Fight engaged.

The torso followed, bare boobs
smooshed together between bound arms. I knew what was coming then.

"Oh, fuck this shit." Without a further thought, my finger squeezed. The recoil sent shock waves up my forearms. Fear had blocked my brain from hearing the shot, but the telltale ringing in my ears told me the gun had fired without a hitch.

Standing in my living room, a naked girl oozed rusty dead blood from the hole I'd put in her belly. The nub of a neck that was left on her shoulders was dull with death and decay. I waited for the walking corpse to fall dead, or dead-like, leaking decayed ooze from her wounds. It never happened. Her feet shuffled forward toward me in an awkward cadence. Hands, wrapped in her black hair, reached in my direction. My ass left the edge of the couch as quickly as I could force it, and I stumbled away toward my room.

"What? What am I supposed to do?" I screamed at the corpse. Spit flew from my mouth with little control as the words came.

Movement at the door. A leg. A torso. Bound hands and boobs. Another headless body came through my door.

"Stop! Please!" I wanted to run. I wanted to hide, to leave and never come back.

You have nowhere to go, idiot. Out the hole the dead things were coming through? I don’t fucking think so.

Gun in hand, I pointed out at the thing in front of me. I heard the shot this time. It rang in my head like a marble bounced on glass. Another wound oozed, but nothing hindered the endless shuffle of dead feet toward me. At the door, a leg, torso, boobs, hands, matte blood atop of white shoulders. A third corpse breached the hole in the door.

"Why? Why are you here? I helped you! I killed the men who killed you!" I screeched at the dead girls in my living room. Didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

A leg, a torso, boobs and hands. Again. Again. Again. Seven decaying headless bodies shuffled through my living room. My feet moved back farther and farther until my back slammed into the jamb of my bedroom door.

"What do you want?" I screamed at the headless things. They couldn't answer me. Chopping a bitches head off, proved better than duct tape.

Fourteen hands reached out for me. Seven muted red stumps met my eyes where seven faces should be.

Eight. There should be eight.

At the door, a leg, a torso, boobs and hands bound with purple strands of hair appeared. Regina's living corpse came into my home uninvited. Eight dead things inched closer and closer. My heart felt like it'd flip out through my open mouth if I hadn't already been swallowing back bile compulsively.

"Stop!" Sliding backward, I maneuvered into the sanctity of my room. My trembling hands made music with cold steel and Azelie’s crucifix, which was still wrapped around my palm. My front door didn't stop them. Why I thought this cheap hollow core would save me, I didn’t know. I just wanted the fuck away from all those dead girls.

Locking myself in, I backed deeper into my darkened room. Never taking my eyes from my door, I backed and backed until the backs of my knees hit the edge of my bed. My butt automatically sat, giving my shaking legs a much needed break. Finally, sitting and breathing, sort of, I was able to hear small whimpering sounds. Disgusting images of gurgling blood stumps trying to form sounds ran through my head. This terrified me more than the bodies as a whole, merely because they had no natural source. Things with no heads should make no vocal sounds, theoretically. I swallowed hard and realized they were my whimpers. My short sobs. My fear seeping out.

The noises from my throat stopped, and with it my breath when my bedroom door began to rattle. The dead things on the other side were trying to get in. "No." My soft pitiful voice caused me to wince with anger, but it didn't change anything. My fear was too strong. I was just too terrified for the rage to build in me. "Stop," whining sobs filled the abyss that was my lonely, dark room.

My legs pulled me from the edge of my bed and backed me against the wall farther away from the rattling door. "No more," I sobbed. "Please. No more." My hands trembled, gun rattling in my clutch. My back flush with the cool wall, my legs shrunk. I slid to my ass on the floor. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry they did that to you."

The rattling persisted and I thought then of Azelie. She'd done this to these women. These dead girls at my door were here because of her. Dead because of her. She'd killed them with her greed and refused to let them rest in her quest to punish me for inadvertently foiling her plans. For spilling blood that didn’t belong to me.

Fuck that cunt.

Fear remained, but I fought it with all my might. "I'm sorry they killed you!" My voice still shook but the sobs were gone. "But I'm not sorry I killed those boys." The door shook fiercely with my revelation. "And I won't be sorry when I kill that voodoo bitch either!"

The door shook and the knob creaked under pressure from something on the other side. Azelie sent the dead things for me. She sent the bodies of eight dead girls to relentlessly crawl through my front door. They weren’t going to stop. It was never going to stop.

I took a deep, ragged breath and lifted my gun. 

It's never going to stop.

BANG!

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Becoming – Lynnie Russell Trilogy

Howdy ‘do? 

My name is
Sharlene Carolynn Diamond Russell. It's a mouthful, I know. My mama must've hated me dearly to stick me with a name like that. Most folks don't know me by anything but Carolynn, thank goodness. And my friends all call me Lynnie. So far, I've been pretty happy with that.

This is my account of the day my life changed forever. As best I can remember it anyhow. Now, normally someone would start their story from the middle, at the point the action begins. I think this story is better told from the beginning. Not back to the day of my birth, mind you. I will start my story just before I was born, for the second time. The day I became…

Hell Bent, but Homebound

It was my twentieth birthday. I always figured I'd be out on my own by twenty. Maybe I'd be living in a college dorm miles away from my parents and this hick town. Poor life choices and lack of funds kept me trapped in Havana, Arkansas. 

Stifled by my overbearing mama and ignored by my absentee daddy, I didn’t have too many opportunities to spread my wings, as they say. I made the choice to move in with my older brother, Garret, at the thought of some kind of freedom. Well, as much as somebody could get in a place like Havana.

Daddy drives long-haul so he’s never home and when he is it
ain’t long enough to get to know him much.  I’m sure he loved me, brought me gifts and things, just didn’t give up his time too often. My mama, God love her, she never could stay in one place too long without a man to keep her there. She loved us kids with all her soul, but if it weren’t for me and my brother she’d have left Havana a long time ago and never looked back.

Garret moved out the day he turned eighteen. He landed himself a roomy, three-bedroom, double-wide on a couple of acres just outside of town. Just far enough away from home. That was six years ago. I was pissed when he left. He’d left me alone in that smiling, happy, penitentiary we called home. I moved out to his place a few months before my twentieth birthday. I tried to stick it out long enough at home to save up enough to get a place of my own. That obviously never happened.

I knew eventually I'd break free of this backwoods, redneck prison. But, I kept reminding myself, living with my older brother had its perks. For one, having a housemate that's twenty-four provides a ton of opportunities to get drunk. It’s a luxury, I promise. My home town, Havana, is in Yell County. I am one of the lucky twenty-thousand people in this county who can't drink, legally, regardless of age. You see, we're a dry county. Alcohol isn't sold here.

Thanks to my brother and my only real friends, it was Maldoon's for my birthday celebration. I'm not really into honky-tonks but Carolynn Russell never turns down a good time. Maldoon's is just over the county line by Blue Mountain Lake; it's technically in Logan County. It's nothing big, basically a glorified barn with a full-bar and a bandstand. Maldoon's is chock full of cowboys in their tight jeans and shit-kickers, but it's the closest place to Havana that will serve alcohol. Hell, Leroy will get anyone drunk for a price or a smile and wink. Kids have been going to Maldoon's to drink since before I was born. The guy who owns it, Leroy Maldoon, is pushing eighty by now and used to be the sheriff of Yell County in the sixties. I guess when you're the law you can do what you want.

Normally I'd be working till five, but its tradition at Sam’s gas station to get your birthday off so I had the entire day to relax and figure out what I’d wear to Maldoon’s. On any other night I'd just pull on a pair of jeans and a tank top, but it was my birthday so I figured I'd dress up.

It was twelve on the dot when Garret walked through the front door. "You make lunch, sis?"

If I learned anything being stuck at home with my mama it was to always have something on the table. "I got beans in the pot and the bread's just ‘bout done." I said, as I smiled at my big brother. He smiled back.

Garret is the only man I ever trusted. I loved to spend time with him.  We look a lot alike, my brother and me. Our smiles are almost the same. Bright and shiny and showing a lot of teeth.

"Did you talk to mama today?" He asked while he picked at the beans in the pot on the stove.

"She called at eight. Woke me up on my day off to say happy birthday. You know her speech; it's the same every year. 'Twenty years ago today you were born. It was eleven fifty-four at night, your birthday could have been tomorrow, but out you popped, cryin' and hollerin' all the way'." I copied my mama's voice pretty good. Hell, I was damn near her spitting image. I was pretty annoyed by that. Garret laughed. He knows our mom just as well as I do. He knows how annoying she can be. "You coming to Maldoon’s with us tonight?" I asked him.

"Yeah. I’ll be bringin’ Rusty with me." He smiled and wriggled his eyebrows up and down.

Rusty Kemp was a scoundrel to say the least. He was ornery, no good, and had harassed me since I hit puberty. He's also been my big brothers best friend since the second grade.

"Shoot. Why you bringin’ that idiot?" Rusty always made my blood burn under my skin he bugged me so. It’d been like that since I was a kid. He always wanted to play with me; I usually just kicked dirt at him. My mama used to say it was ‘cause I liked him. I never could figure out why my mama would ever think I liked a boy I kicked dirt at.

"You know he can’t be left alone too long. He might chew things up," Garret said with a stupid grin. 

I rolled my eyes and sighed. It was useless to argue, those two never left the house without each other. I served up lunch and we ate quietly. Before long Garret had finished shoveling food into his face and was packing up to head back to work. We said our quick goodbyes and he was off.

I was alone in the house again. I used the time to clean up lunch and straighten up the house. I swear, I think my brother only let me move in so he'd have a live-in maid. He's too scared of marriage to get a wife, so his sister was the next best thing.

I realize that comment could be taken wrong by certain folks seeing as though we're from Arkansas. But it’s not that way. I love him and he loves me. In a take a bullet for each other kinda way, not the marrying kind. He was all I had to lean on coming up in that backwards home of ours. We got close.

I cleaned for well into two hours but it still looked unkempt. You can't polish a turd, they say. And a crusty old double-wide full of yard sale furniture is pretty turd-like. I finally gave up and decided to leave it be.

I headed off to my bedroom to figure out what I'd wear for my twentieth birthday party. It wasn't like I was overly excited about the plans my friends had made for me. I don't like Maldoon's all that much and I can't stand Rusty Kemp, but I was determined to have fun if it killed me.

I put a dress on for the first time in six years. Unless you include prom, but I don't think that counts. The heat in Arkansas is sticky and tropical like, so most folks wear light fabrics. My choice for the night was a short cotton summer dress with little flowers printed on it. It showed my chest off nicely. My mama would've never let me leave the house in something that skimpy.

I gussied myself up as best I could with what I had. I was taking one last look in the mirror when I heard the front door open and slam shut.

"Whoo-wee! Look at you!" My brother’s voice hollered from the doorway of the bathroom.

"Oh, shut your mouth," I said with a smile.

"Well, I'll be damned. Lynnie, you sure are lookin' good!" This time it was Rusty in the doorway.

"You shut your mouth too, Rusty," I said, without a smile.

I saw Rusty smile behind me in the mirror. I ignored him and he walked away. If there’d been a pile of dirt nearby, I’d’ve kicked it at him. I gave my big blonde hair one last coat of hairspray and called it good. I had set my hair in hot-curlers and the result was big curly hair. The last of the hairspray promised it would stay that way. The higher the hair the closer to God, my nana used to say. I was pretty damned close.

I plopped my butt down on our hand-me-down couch and started pulling on my boots. Rusty was sitting in the Barcalounger by the front door. His face was dirty from laying asphalt. Him and Garret work in construction over in Russellville. I knew under all that dirt was a pretty handsome face. But under that handsome face was an idiot redneck I didn't want nothing to do with.

Garret came through the room and brought us both a beer. Him and Rusty sneak beers over the county line in their lunch pails almost every day. Sometimes he'll bring home something harder, but usually it's just beer.

"You ready get goin', birthday girl?" Rusty said with a wink.

"Go wash your face, Rusty. You got shit all over it." I said to him as I guzzled down my beer.

The doorbell rang a second later. It was Hattie. Henrietta Ruby Savanna Willits her mamma and daddy named her. Her daddy’s name is Henry; we can’t right call her that. So, she’s just Hattie. Where you end up with Hattie from Henrietta I don’t know, but it’s better than Henry I’ll tell you what.

Been friends since kindergarten, Hattie and me. She's spent every birthday with me since I turned five.  And even though she was the trollop draggin' my butt out to Maldoon's, there was no reason to change that tradition because of the location she picked.

"Your hair is so big, Lynnie. Mine don't get that big." Hattie said in a pout.

I just smiled at her. There was a part of Hattie that could be a bit uppity. She was Arkie as all get up but she sure as hell didn't think so.

"Alright, y'all meet us there?" I asked Garret.

"Yeah, we'll be along. Go on now, scoot." He said pushing me out the door.

Me and Hattie piled in her daddy's pick-up truck. The big tires kicked up rooster tails when Hattie stomped on the gas. I laughed and hollered, so did Hattie.

The sun was almost down and the road we were on was getting pretty damn dark. But I wasn't scared; I knew the road to Blue Mountain Lake like the back of my hand. Hell, everyone old enough to reach the pedals can get to that lake blind folded.

And drunk. Maybe not at the same time, but, you get the idea.

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