The 13th (21 page)

“Drink her life and taste the sin!” Amelia’s voice called from somewhere behind him. But David didn’t stop to see from where. He had already wound his way through four rows of demonic nudists and was headed toward the back hallway. He hoped that he had the right keys.

He couldn’t afford to go back.

As he slipped into the dark hallway in the back of the room, David heard the doctor call out five words that would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life:

“And now for her child.”

The corridor felt cool and smelled wormy dank after the cloyingly heavy scent of bodies and heat and candles in the main room. David breathed it in like the purest drink of air ever.

He made a left when he reached the corridor branching, figuring that it would only help to have the assistance of the guys trapped down here when he went to rescue the women chained in the other room. Call it “David’s Gang.” He laughed. Better than chain gang, anyway.

He only hoped they really would help.

He found the key to the lock on the first try. The guys within hadn’t even time to heckle him before the door was creaking open.

“Told ya I’d be back with a key,” he announced.

“Took you long enough,” a dirty voice growled from inside.

“Ungrateful bastard, aren’t ya?”

“You want to keep using those lungs, or wear them?” This time, the owner of the voice strode into the dim shadow just bright enough to allow David to see him. He stood a full head taller, and probably a whole person wider than David did, but oddly enough, the smaller man was not intimidated.

“Gimme a fuckin’ break,” he said disgustedly. “I just let you out of the goddamn cell, which, I’ll point out, you and your behemoth muscles were unable
to accomplish. So quit giving me shit and give me a hand so we can all get out of this hellhole.”

Billy stood behind TG and at the start of those words he was convinced that the little guy was going to be the flattened guy in about thirty seconds. But instead, a slow grin crept across TG’s face. And his hand clapped David on the shoulder.

“Yeah, little man,” TG growled. “I gotcha. And I’m still gonna rip your lungs out. But not until we’re all topside, right?”

“Whatever,” David said. “Just help me get my girl out of here and you can do whatever you want to me.”

“Thanks for the offer,” TG answered. “But I don’t do guys.”

David just shook his head and started toward the prison of the thirteen mothers. “C’mon.”

He led them down the dark corridor and across the hall leading back to the main room. The echo of screams and ecstasy bled down the shadowed bricks to meet them.

“Someone’s having some fun,” TG said. His face lit up when a woman’s scream rose and fell.

“You wanna beat up on some chicks, or you wanna beat up on Rockford?” David asked, as he fumbled for the keys. They stood in front of the door to the prison room.

“Can’t we do both?”

Billy punched TG in the shoulder. “Conserve your energy,” he cautioned. “We can always beat on some chicks.”

Somehow, despite the vileness of the comment, David got the feeling that the other man was arguing on his behalf, and he silently thanked him as the door swung open.

“Holy shit,” TG announced as the three stepped inside the prison room. Naked women seemed to be
chained to the walls everywhere, most of them with ragged black stitching across their lower abdomens. Some of those stitches still leaked blood from the struggles of the women against their bonds.

“Are you here to help?” one of the women asked as they entered the room. “You’re not the doctor,” said another.

“Not the doctor,” agreed TG. “Here to help, is another story.”

Billy elbowed him.

“One more time with the elbow, buddy, and yer gonna be using that beer-tap contraption back at the shack as a die-ally-sis machine.”

“Impressed that you know the word ‘dialysis,’” Billy answered, and quickly dodged a fist.

“Help me get them off the walls,” David said, staying out of it. At the same time, he was again scanning woman to woman to woman, looking for a darkhaired sylph with a lock of pink hair. While none of them were looking themselves—most hadn’t probably bathed in days, most were discolored and bruised across their midsections from surgery and most hadn’t used makeup or a hairbrush in weeks—David was sure he’d recognize Brenda at her worst if she were here. And he was convinced that she wasn’t.

His heart sank.

“What do you want us to do with them?” Billy asked.

David was tempted to say, “Nothing.” What did he care about all of these anonymous women? He was here for a reason…

“David!” a voice called weakly from the farthest corner of the dark room.

“Help them down,” he answered Billy, and turned in the direction of the voice.

He almost didn’t recognize her naked. Her arms
were bound above her head in thick, rough knots of rope, and the darkly trimmed finger of her pubic mound was not the color he would have expected from the sun-blonde knotted hair that streamed from her head to lick at her shoulders, but there was no mistaking the upturned tease of her pert nose or the deadly bright blue of her eyes.

“Christy!” David grinned. He left TG and Billy and ran to her, throwing his arms around her as if they’d been intimate for years. She was the only hint of the world as he’d always known it that he’d seen in hours.

“I’d blush, but I’m too fuckin’ worn out to care,” Christy whispered in his ear.

“I’d get excited, but I’m too freaked out right now,” he answered, eliciting a slight laugh from the young cop.

“They’re killing all of the women, aren’t they?” she asked.

He nodded. “I saw them kill two so far,” he said. “And I think they’re going to work their way through this whole room. They say they are performing some kind of ceremony of the Thirteenth.”

Across the room, TG and Billy were working on the ropes that bound some of the women to hooks dangling from the raftered ceiling.

“This ain’t easy,” TG declared.

“It was pretty easy when you decided to hit me up in a bar and drive me home,” a voice came from the opposite wall. “Oh,
that
was easy as pie.”

“Hair pie is always easy,” growled TG. “Shut up, bitch.”

David stayed out of it, and worked on Christy’s knots. “Brenda’s not here,” he said, as he leaned closer, straining to unthread the heavy rope. The touch of her cool, but velvet soft breast slid across his arm like an evil tease.

Christy fought to ignore the touch, as much as desire for more vibrated through the wracked wreck of her physique at that moment.

“No, she’s not,” she agreed. “I haven’t seen her since we left her room.”

“Where else could they be holding her?” he asked.

“There’s another room I saw, when they brought me in here,” she said. “You’d think it’s a closet, but it’s just another entry behind the door over there.”

She tried to point with her free arm, but it didn’t budge. Pins and needles swallowed her up in an ocean of sensation, none of it pleasant.

“Why isn’t she here with the rest of you?” David asked, undoing the other rope.

Christy shrugged. “I’d guess they have something special in mind for her.”

“Like what?” he asked, pulling the last loop from around her wrist.

Again she shrugged.

“Something worse than death?”

Brenda had never really been afraid of the dark. If anything, she embraced it. The dark was a walk down First Street at midnight, savoring the taste of heavy rain in the thick night air, sensing more than seeing the wave of the trees along the railroad line. Dark was the place she lived in after her parents were asleep, and she felt an itch, no, a drive that couldn’t be denied and so her hands dragged wet, sticky ecstasy across her thighs as she writhed alone on her bed. Dark was the moments she lived
in alone, and alone was a feeling she knew and felt safe in.

“Safe” wasn’t a word you could have used to describe Brenda’s emotional landscape right now. Rope chafed painfully against the soft skin of her wrists and ankles. The bindings held her back to the cold, rough stone wall. The doctor had brought her here and disrobed her with a cold efficiency that was frightening in its speed and complete lack of emotion.

Now the dark was a palpable force of evil around her, not a friend at all. Brenda tried to break the pall by forcing her mind to relive the time down at the Clam Shack a couple weeks ago when a woman billing herself as “Johnny Cash with titties” sang a set and alternated between a raspy feminine contralto and a damned-impressive deep-voiced rendering of the Man in Black’s “Jackson.” There was something just so wrong in seeing a broad-shouldered, redhaired Irish girl singing in a range below where most men could reach, that the show had left an indelible mark in Brenda’s brain.

But the novelty of the singer’s meandering through an eclectic catalog of Allanah Myles, Billy Idol, Janis Joplin, The Style Council, and the aforementioned Cash didn’t ease the atmosphere in the dark for long. Pretty soon Brenda was back to feeling the air swirl around her without a body to move it. And from there came the touches, feather soft on her neck and breasts. And after that, the more demanding pinches on the inside of her thighs. Brenda would have chalked it up to…mosquito or spider bites…if it hadn’t been for the laughter.

And the voices.

They whispered in the air like the scratching of leaves on a shutter. Or the gentle tapping of branches on glass.

Only…she wasn’t near a window. She was locked in a tiny, dark, damp room in a basement, and the air shouldn’t have been moving at all. And it certainly shouldn’t have been colored by the sighs and moans of spirits in flight.

And the whispers of leaves on windows didn’t usually translate in your ear to the faintest encouragements of “Soon, you’ll be with us” or “Soon, I will be in you.”

But that’s what she heard.

The voices made Brenda shiver, and for the first time in her life she was petrified of the dark. At the faintest stir of air in the tiny room, her skin goose-bumped and crawled. When the soft, fluttery touches reached her lips she hissed, “No,” in answer, but the pressure only grew more intense until she felt as if her lips had met the pull of a vacuum.

Once she would have welcomed the kiss of the dark; it had been her lover through so many months and years of emptiness. She had never been the popular kid in Castle Point, and life after graduation hadn’t improved her social standing.

But now…those midnight touches filled her with fear. There was something out there. And that something now was…here.

“You will be ours,” the voice whispered in wasp-wing scratches in her ear. “You will be the Thirteenth.”

Brenda pulled against the knots on her wrists until she felt warmth dropping down the inside of her forearms. She pulled in vain.

Around her, she could hear the echoes of laughter, though there appeared to be nobody else in the room.

TG could only take so much shit. He was in the business of doling it out, not taking it. And for the past few days, he’d been on the receiving end entirely too much. First, Billy started cutting him crap, and then the damn doctor had shot him up with something raw and tossed him in the fuckin’ basement. But the capper was when this little twerp turned up to act like his rescuer and mouthed off at him over and over again and expected to get away with it.

Now the goddamned sluts on the walls were pissing in his face when he was trying to cut them free.

“You’re the asshole who…” one of them had the unfortunate audacity to say at this particularly inopportune point in TG’s train of thought. TG didn’t even think twice. The back of his hand shot out and cuffed her across already bruised lips. His hand came away wet, and he didn’t bother to see if it was from saliva or blood. He thought the perfect follow-up would be a left hook to the jaw, and after the satisfying crack of that action against her jaw, her tits seemed to hang even more slack as she relaxed against the wall, supported solely from the ropes around her wrists.

“Nobody calls me an asshole,” he pronounced. “In fact…” He turned to pick out David across the room. “Nobody gives me shit. Not now, not ever.”

Tapping one thick fist in an open palm, he sauntered across the room to where a naked blonde was wrapping two pale arms around the bare and equally pale skin of David’s back. TG considered doling out his lesson on the little prick with just his bare hands…but then saw a better option. Stepping over to a segment of the wall that had obviously seen some recent repair, he picked up a brick from a pile of masonry and debris on the floor. Then he turned toward David.

Billy staggered over then with a trembling woman wrapped around him like a leech…or an octopus. Her legs scissored around his waist as if she was trying to fuck him while he walked. She slowed him down, but Billy didn’t seem to mind. After all, the woman was naked, and pressing everything she had against him.

“What are you
doing,
man?” Billy asked his partner in crime when he finally shuffled close enough. The woman kept her face buried in Billy’s shoulder and refused to look up.

TG shrugged. “Takin’ care of business,” was all he’d say.

When the brick connected with the back of David’s skull, Billy raised his hand from the woman’s back to interfere. “What the fuck?” he complained. In a flash the smaller man was lying on the floor with the leechlike mother finally scrambling to get off of him. The mark of TG’s fist glowed on Billy’s cheek like sunburn.

“No more shit,” TG declared, as he grabbed the blonde who seconds before had been hugging David. Still stunned by the sudden collapse of the man she’d just been embracing, Christy was easy prey for TG, who reached out to yank her by the hair before she quite grasped what was happening.

The final look of comprehension in her eyes was filled with hatred. “You!” she spit before his meaty fist clogged her mouth.

TG yanked her hair toward the ceiling to keep her in place, and the punch she’d been aiming at his face instead raised skyward. She went up on tiptoe to ease the pain of her hair pulling out of her scalp by the roots, and as she did, her body stretched provocatively in front of TG. An unintended, but still sensual result. Her breasts pulled tight to her rib cage as she scrabbled to grab at TG’s fist to ease its hold on her hair.

“Nice rack,” TG commented.

“
Ass
hole!” Christy screamed.

TG shook his head in disgust, and raised the brick over her head. “When will people learn?” he asked nobody in particular. He didn’t wait for Christy’s response, and a moment later she lay prone on the floor, the gash on her forehead looking more black than red as the heavy blood swelled to the surface.

TG dragged both Christy’s and David’s bodies to a small closet door in the back of the room, and thrust them inside. Then he pulled the door shut, refastened the hook latch on the outside, and returned to where Billy still sat on the floor rubbing his face. The girl who’d formerly been attached to him like a growth was cowering in a corner.

TG nodded his head toward the exit. “Now get up and let’s take care of some more business. I think we owe the doctor a house call.”

The thing about TG was that he was direct. He didn’t screw around. While David had spent a half an hour easing his way up and around the room in an attempt to remain “invisible” to the ritual killers, TG didn’t waste any time with subterfuge. He strode right out of the locked room and down the hallway,
exiting into the room full of naked, bloody cavorters. TG walked straight through that throng as if they were a room full of flies.

The doctor and his whore were standing on the stage, overseeing the flaying of some other helpless chick.

“Y’all like to tie people up, don’tcha?” TG asked. His voice, though quiet, seemed to boom through the room.

The doctor looked up from drawing a razor across the woman’s tits. The line of blood ended just before her right nipple as he acknowledged TG’s unexpected presence.

“I have some things I’d like to talk with you about,” TG continued.

Rockford’s face didn’t hide his surprise. “I locked you up,” he began, but his lips never finished the sentence. Instead, TG’s four knuckles broke against the doctor’s cheek with a crack that echoed through the room.

“Yes,” he agreed. “You did. That was your first mistake.”

TG slugged the doctor again in the stomach, and then brought up a knuckle sandwich for good measure to Dr. Rockford’s lips. They swelled faster than collagen injections, and the man crumpled instantly. But that didn’t leave TG alone in his victory.

No. The wrath of a woman is always worse than the fury of a man. And Rockford’s bitch was suddenly all over TG. A flurry of pounding arms and kicking feet assaulted him. Nails gouged painfully at his face.

TG laughed at the attack. He reached out one calm hand in the middle of the storm of the century and popped the bitch one right between the eyes. Just like that, she went down like a sack of quarry rocks.

TG rubbed sore knuckles in his free hand and stifled a small moan of pain. Bitch was made of
coral. The flesh across the back of his fingers had marks. Still, the warmth that always swelled his groin after giving a good thrashing filled him, and a grin began to split TG’s face. He began to turn to see what other victims he could put the hurt on; the room was full of ’em. For the first time in his life, TG figured he had a license to pretty much fuck up anyone and everyone within arm’s reach. Hell, he’d be doing a service, probably get decorated for it—his name’d be in the papers and all that shit for single-handedly bringing down a dangerous mob of devil worshippers. And it would be fun…

“Look out,” Billy warned from behind.

TG turned just in time to see the glint of steel in the air. He was not in time to dodge it though, and the sharp bite of death whispered its victory in his head even before the pain arrived.

A strangely tiny voice bleated from the body of a mean-looking heavyset man wearing a bloodstained apron and black latex gloves. In the cusp of those gloves, the man clenched the haft of the foot-long blade that was buried in TG’s throat.

“Asshole,” the ironically feminine voice pronounced.

TG’s unibrow twisted in anger, but all that came from his lips was a gurgle of red, red blood. His hands fumbled at the blade where it entered his throat, and then something like confusion swam across the anger in his eyes, and TG began to collapse, as if in slow motion. The Butcher held on to his blade, which slid back out of TG’s neck with a gentle glide in exact opposition to the force by which it had entered.

Billy had backed away at the attack, not having a weapon handy. Now the Butcher advanced on him, and the smaller man’s feet tangled and tripped over the rutting bodies on the floor, most of them still
oblivious to the turnabout battle going on near the altar of their worship. Once in the trance of ecstasy, the townspeople appeared completely absorbed in their degradations, and barely looked up as Billy fell backward over their twining hips.

When he at last was cornered against the back wall, the Butcher smiled grimly at him. “You could have joined us,” he suggested, as he drew a thin line of beading blood from the tip of Billy’s chin all the way down to the base of his cock. Then he drew a transverse cut across the shaking man’s belly button, effecting an upside-down cross on Billy’s torso.

“I will,” Billy promised. His voice trembled.

“No you won’t,” the Butcher guaranteed, and aimed the tip of his blade at the center of the cross.

At the front of the room, Dr. Rockford and Amelia had recovered, albeit with already purpling faces. Still rubbing his cheek, the doctor called out to his followers, “Let us continue. It’s time for mother number five.”