The Diabolical Conspiracy (11 page)

Mike was again reminded strongly of that first night of this madness. He felt caught. Trapped. Helpless. He could act to help this girl now or he could do as he had been told. Either way, it would probably result in something unacceptably tragic.

He shook his head. “Why me? Why does it have to be me? Any of you could have delivered this…
package
. Goddammit, why are you making me do this sick fucking thing?”

Olson remained unperturbed by this display of emotion. “I understand you’re upset. But you need to set that aside for now. Nadia will explain everything once you get to her house.”

Mike didn’t say anything to that. He just shook his head again and continued the struggle not to fall completely apart.

Olson grunted. “I’ll take your silence as compliance. You know damn well you’re not going to risk the lives of all your family and friends for one little girl. Now help me get the barrel up on this dolly.”

12
.

The drive back across town to Nadia’s house was even more nerve-wracking than the tension-fraught drive from the call center to Fat Sam’s had been. It didn’t help that he seemed to be hitting every red light en route to her subdivision, thus lengthening the ordeal by untold minutes. He had never been particularly superstitious until recently, but now it was easy to see this as additional evidence of some force in the universe working against him. The way the day was playing out definitely felt like the handiwork of an unseen malevolent cosmic joker, with an array of perfectly timed roadblocks popping up at intervals designed to drive him crazy from frustration and anxiety. He didn’t know what the overarching joke actually was yet, but he was pretty sure he was an integral part of the eventual punch line.

And at no point did he cease being aware of the living human cargo stashed in the trunk of his car. It was bad enough he had her at all, but the drive might at least have been marginally less tense if the barrel had not been too big to fit in the trunk. Initially this had been a source of relief, as he assumed Olson or Nadia would simply summon someone else to transport the “package”, someone with a vehicle that had ample trunk space. He should have known he wouldn’t get off the hook so easily. Olson consulted with some employees and procured some bungee cords. Several of these were used to secure the trunk lid after they had wedged the barrel in as far as it would go. Mike’s protests that this was too risky fell on unsympathetic ears.

“
What if I get pulled over?” he’d asked the portly restaurant manager, struggling to keep the pitch of his voice from rising to a whine. “The cops might want to know what’s in the barrel.”

“
Well, you better hope you don’t get stopped,” was Olson’s less than helpful reply.

His personal safety was just part of it. Yes, he had killed a man after being threatened and backed into a corner by these people. That was a bad thing and a stain on his soul he could never erase. But there was a huge difference between doing monstrous things because you enjoyed doing them and doing them because you were being coerced. He wasn’t a bad man, not at heart. True, he didn’t wish to encounter representatives of the law just now, but he also didn’t want any harm to come to this girl. Yet if he didn’t take action of some sort, harm certainly
would
come to her.

As always, however, his options seemed limited, if not nonexistent. There was the time limit for reaching Nadia’s house to contend with, for one thing, but the bigger complicating factor was Olson’s confiscation of his cell phone prior to his departure from Fat Sam’s. Nadia’s orders, according to Olson. She didn’t want him phoning his relatives with warnings and then making a last ditch dash to the police station. And the time limit meant he couldn’t risk stopping somewhere to find another phone to use. Other than doing precisely as he had been told, there was nothing he could do that wouldn’t endanger the people he cared about.

Marnie was waiting for him out front when he arrived at Nadia’s house. It was dark by then and external house lights came on as he pulled into the driveway and switched off the engine. Instead of getting out of the car right away, he watched Marnie come toward him down the sidewalk. She was smiling as she made eye contact with him. He hadn’t known she would be here, but her presence didn’t surprise him. She was essentially Nadia’s second-in-command. Whatever sick thing they had planned for the unfortunate girl in the barrel, it was clear it was something of great importance to the group. So of course Marnie would be here for the arrival of the precious “package”.

She circled the car and opened his door for him. “Hey, sexy. What are you waiting for? Get your ass out here.”

Mike forced a smile of his own. Then he drew in a calming breath, undid his seatbelt, and got out of the car. His smile became a frown as he glanced out at the curb. On meeting nights, cars usually lined the curb bumper-to-bumper outside Nadia’s house. But the only other cars around belonged to Nadia and Marnie. “There not a meeting tonight?”

Marnie slipped her arms around his waist and pulled him close, mashing her breasts against his chest. “No, baby. It’s just you, me…and Nadia.”

“
Huh. I just figured, you know, what with the, uh…package you had me bring here that…well…there’d be some kind of freaky satanic sacrifice scenario happening.”

Marnie laughed and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Freaky satanic sacrifice. You’re silly.” More lilting laughter from his ‘girlfriend.’ “And you’re right, actually, but that’s all happening tomorrow.”

Mike’s heart sank at those words. He’d hadn’t fully realized it, but on a subconscious level some part of him had harbored a naïve hope that the Diabolical Conspiracy had some non-fatal intent in mind for the little girl. What that might have been he couldn’t imagine, but it didn’t matter now, because Marnie had emphatically put the matter to rest. They meant to kill the girl and as of this moment she had maybe a day left to live.

Unless he did something.

But what?

What, goddammit!?

Marnie kissed him again, a touch more hungrily this time, then stepped back again. “Nadia will give you the lowdown soon, but first let’s get that thing in the garage.”

That thing.

He stared at Marnie for a moment and tried hard not to show the disappointment he was feeling. She was a bad person. Very bad. He had known that for some time now. But somehow it still stung when something happened to remind him how utterly soulless and unforgiving she really was. This being one of the more blatant instances of that. The girl in the barrel was nothing to her. She wasn’t a human child. She wasn’t something precious. She was just…a
thing
.

That was the real turning point.

He was going to do something to stop this and damn the cost. He didn’t know what he would do yet, just that he would do something. The decision lifted a mental weight and allowed him to relax some. His smile in that moment was even genuine. He would do something. And he even had a little bit of time to figure out what that might be.

Marnie tilted her head to one side, her eyes narrowing some as she studied him. “You look almost…happy.”

“
Something wrong with that?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Not at all.” She leaned into him again and gave him another kiss. “It’s just nice to see. It’s been a long time. You’re finally feeling like a real part of this, aren’t you?”

Mike laughed and made himself nod. “Yeah. That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

She gave him a fierce hug. “I’m so glad. You had me worried for a while.”

Mike put his chin on her shoulder and breathed a weary sigh. “Me, too.” He closed his eyes and tightened his arms around her. “But everything’s gonna be all right now.”

They held each other a few moments longer. For Mike, they were moments tinged with bittersweet nostalgia as he recalled his former intense affection for Marnie. At last, though, they broke the clinch and got to work on getting the barrel out of his trunk and into the garage. Once they had accomplished that, Marnie used the crowbar to pry the lid off and peek in at the girl. The child still looked dazed, which wasn’t surprising given the bumpy ride she’d endured and the drug still circulating through her system.

Marnie smiled. “She’s perfect. Nadia will be pleased.”

She replaced the lid, took Mike by a hand, and led him into Nadia’s house. There were no pulsing strobe lights in evidence this time, but the house was dimly lit in every room but the kitchen, with floor lamps on instead of overhead lights. This was par for the course. Every time he came here he felt like he was walking into a haunted house. Nadia liked to keep things dark and spooky.

Speaking of…

“
Where’s Nadia?”

Marnie tugged at his hand and kept moving. “This way.”

A woman of mystery, as always. But Mike was resigned to that now. So he let Marnie drag him through the kitchen into the living room and then up a set of dark, crimson-carpeted stairs to the second floor. There was a short hallway at the top of the staircase. At the end of it a door to a bedroom stood partially open. Red-tinted light spilled through the opening.

Marnie paused outside the door and waved him in ahead of her. “You first.”

Mike frowned, feeling a touch of apprehension, but he didn’t know what to do other than what he’d been told. As usual. So he pushed the door open and stepped into the room, his eyes widening at the sight of Nadia lying languidly upon a large, plush-looking wood-framed bed. She was stretched out at an angle across the bed and lying on her side, with a side of her head propped in an upraised palm.

She was wearing a tiny black negligee.

She smiled when she saw him. “Hi, Mike.”

Mike gave his head a dazed shake. “What…uh…”

“
Get undressed, baby.”

That was Marnie, speaking from somewhere behind him. He turned to look at her and saw she had already begun shedding her clothes. Her pants were bunched around her ankles and she was undoing the buttons of her form-fitting blouse. She laughed at his astonished expression.

Nadia slid off the bed and embraced him from behind, her hot breath against his ear making him shudder as one of her hands went to the zipper of his trousers and tugged at it. “Relax, Mike. This is your reward for a job well done. And for earning our trust. Let yourself enjoy it.”

Mike’s state of arousal was off the charts. It temporarily blinded him to everything else. He’d fucked multiple women the night of the orgy, but Nadia had not been one of them. She hadn’t seemed interested in the male members of the cult and he had assumed the reason was strictly a matter of sexual preference. But maybe he had been wrong about that.

Nadia writhed against him from behind as she pushed his pants down past his hips. Marnie, fully undressed now, approached him from the front and tugged his pants the rest of the way down. Then she stood again and ripped his shirt open, sending buttons flying. After that, they were both wriggling their lithesome bodies against him, peppering his flesh with wet, hot kisses as they moaned and caressed him with their soft hands.

Mike started getting lost in the sensual overload of it all even as an increasingly remote part of his brain kept thinking about what an amazing and singularly unlikely thing this was that was happening to him. The orgy had been another kind of thing. A heady, delirious combo of drugs, sex, murder, and madness. It had felt like something barely connected to reality, almost like fractured memories from a fever dream. But now he was completely sober and experiencing something out of his wildest fantasies. He was in the middle of a hot girl sandwich, that ever elusive three-way combo that was the ultimate holy grail of sex for most guys. It was the kind of thing that never happened to ordinary dudes like himself. But it
was
happening. It was real. And it was impossible not to get lost in it, even so soon after being made to facilitate the first phase of something vile and horrendous.

But he could think about all that later.

Acting on some apparently sub-aural signal only women could hear, they each simultaneously seized him by a wrist and dragged him toward the bed--and then threw him down upon it and pounced on him.

Yes
, he thought.
Whatever it is I need to think about, I’ll think about it later.

Later, later, late--

Nadia did something to him that made him gasp and thrash on the bed.

And soon after that he was screaming.

13
.

The evening unfolded as a relentless and fearless exploration of flesh and the numerous wondrous ways three willing and eager bodies could intertwine in the pursuit of unending carnal bliss. After abandoning himself to this extended interlude of decadent indulgence, thoughts of the girl in the barrel rarely strayed into his consciousness. And every time that did happen, either Marnie or Nadia would send the troubling images fluttering away with yet another expert manipulation of his body. They were the most skilled bedroom partners of his life, each possessing apparently endless knowledge of ways to bring him soaring to the heights of senses-melting ecstasy, as well as equal skill in how to ease him back from the precipice and further delay the inevitable release his body cried out to achieve. After a while, it became nearly a form of torture, the way they repeatedly made him scream and beg for the mercy of orgasm. And they delighted in his “suffering”, frequently laughing at him and taunting him. He didn’t come for the first time until nearly an hour after they had stripped him of his clothes. When it finally did happen, he lay gasping on the bed for many dizzy moments as he struggled to put the scattered fragments of his consciousness back together.