The Primal Connection (2 page)

Finally, seeing a chance, he had occupied Terry. The trouble had been that, where in most cases, the process took only a second and left the host disoriented and confused for a few seconds; in this case, Terry had blacked out to wake up back at base.

Their reverie had stopped there, as the man, now dressed in coveralls that looked black in the darkness, suddenly opened the rear door of the van and stepped out. Behind him, he dragged a girl, eyes wide with terror and red from crying. From the look on her face, she was already sure she was going to die, and from the look on his, it was not going to be pretty.

Terry put the binoculars down. It was time to go to work.

The man was not huge, but then, his victim was tiny. Barely five feet tall and no more than a hundred pounds, he laughed at her as she tried to pull away. Had Terry been closer, he could have seen the predatory glaze in his eyes as he smiled, showing perfectly maintained teeth, while he ran his tongue over his lips, like a lion licking its chops at the sight of a fresh kill.

She would do nicely, the man thought. He hadn’t taken the time to really scout out the town like he normally would have, but then, he hadn’t had to. This one had made herself the target as she strolled down the darkened street in the middle of town late last evening.

The little slut was no doubt on her way to some late-night tryst with her pimply faced lover who would probably fumble around for hours before trying to ravage her only to finish quickly enough to leave her excited and frustrated. But then, who knew? Perhaps he was an older lover, perhaps one of the local pillars of the community or the local tough. For a moment, he luxuriated in the thought of catching the pair of them and making the lover watch as he beat and raped her, then making her watch as he cut his throat and bled him like a pig. His mind warped even further with the twisted combinations he could come up with.

Unlike the first one he had killed here several weeks ago, the two in Ryansville and Stokee that had all been older, this one was a young thing, barely out of her teens. It had been a while since he had found one so young plying the night, having had to satisfy his depravities with older barflies or hookers that half expected whatever it was he could do to them. They were sadly lacking in the area of providing the kind of pleasure he sought.

No, to really enjoy his sadism, he needed the young, fresh and easily frightened. The look of terror on their faces, the screams of pain and their pleading voices; to him, these were the best kind of porn.

He remembered he hadn’t always been this way. He had been satisfied with simply having sex with women once, not too long ago. He had even had a girlfriend. Thick, mousey, she had been, at the very least, adequate until a year or so ago. He could still remember the night he came home to find her in bed, toying herself to get ready for him. He had always loved that. Only now, it wasn’t exciting. Even when he mounted her and began thrusting, it did nothing for him. Then, he had smacked her naked ass harder than usual. Enough to make her squeal in real pain.

That had brought a response from him that he hadn’t had in years, enough that he did it again. When she rolled away from him demanding to know what was going on, he slashed at her face, his nails drawing blood. She had screamed then, and for the first time, he could see real terror etched in her face.

And her eyes.

Her eyes went wide with fear. Not a simulation she used to be coy or play helpless. This was real and genuine panic. She had tried to bluster her way out with threats, all the while trying to get out of the room, but he had grabbed her then burying his thumb in her throat to silence any more screams and to cause her more pain. The look in her eyes burned into his mind like hot coals in new-fallen snow, sealing the sight in as completely as a fly in amber. Even now, he could see it if he closed his eyes and willed himself to. In every glorious detail he could see it. The fear, the shock, the heartbreak of realizing that she had been so wrong about someone.

She had begun to cry then. To beg for her life. He wondered if she hadn’t brought up the idea of killing her, would he have thought of it. Probably, although at that moment, he had been so caught up in the moment, absorbing all the pleasure that had been there, tasting the fear he had inspired, it was really not on his list of things to do. In the end, he decided it really didn’t matter. Once he was finished with her, he had to kill her in any case. Mainly because he wanted to kill more and leaving her alive would have made him a target for the police.

And he wasn’t ready for that. Not yet anyway.

After he had done all he could with and to his former lover, he had chopped her body up and thrown it into a lake on the way out of town. He took the clothes on his back, emptied his bank account and hers and never looked back. To his knowledge, owed to the fact that his girlfriend was from a little town in the Midwest that she hated and never bothered to stay in contact with, and the fact that all her friends were as vacant and shallow as she was, no one had even reported her as missing. Her job was a temp-to-hire position, which she was lackadaisical about, and he was self-employed. The perfect situation. He wanted to leave, so he left. No one even noticed he was gone.

He had gone to several small towns, sometimes taking a playmate, sometimes not. Then, he began doubling back once they seemed to notice the pattern. He had no thought of what he would do if captured, just a burning desire to do as much of this as he could before he was.

Dragging the struggling girl through the doorway of the old abandoned house he had set up as his play station, he quickly secured her to the bed in the waiting chains. As she struggled, he noted her bladder had let go. He could feel the warm wetness between her legs. It excited him even further. So much so, he pulled out his cock and began to stroke it.

The girl watched, torn between terror and fascination. Despite the desperate air of the moment, she noted details about her captor. She had always held a rape fantasy deep in the recesses of her mind, and for a moment, she began to wonder if this was it come true. One look in the crazed eyes of her attacker though told her that if it were, she would not get a repeat performance once he was done.

Suddenly, his hand shot out and tore the tank top open, the material bunching behind her neck and biting into her skin.

She yelped in pain.

Hearing the tender cry in her young voice was too much for him. He reached his climax suddenly, shooting his hot sperm out and letting it land on her tiny breasts.

Her mind began to shut down then. It wasn’t fair. Another month and she would have been gone, having scrimped and saved for two years since she graduated, working at the local truck stop to finally pay the tuition for college. Instead, she was in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere about to be raped and murdered by a pervert. As if to protect her from what it knew was coming, her mind, at that point, simply stopped functioning.

Her captor put out a hand to steady himself against the wall. His orgasm took a lot out of him. He recognized the blank stare on the girl. She was going into shock as the deadly earnestness of her situation sank in. Good. It gave him time to prepare. He knew how to bring her out of it when he wanted to. And fear was more intense when it was the first thing you see when you wake up.

Funny thing was he couldn’t remember where he’d learned that.

* * * *

From the rim of the canyon, Terry had watched them enter the house. It was clear this was his target and what was about to happen. He hadn’t been sure of it until then, but at least that part was over now. Trouble was that convincing Benin would take all night unless he had something definite to tell him. Now, he did, but the time it would take for Benin to get out here would give this freak time enough to scar the girl for life.

He was too far away for Charlie to tell if it was the guy that was one of the occupied, which presented another problem. Faced with imminent capture, the Chrliti inhabiting this guy or, at this point, the girl, he’d just transfer to one of the cops who came to arrest him. What they didn’t know was if this clown was the one doing this or was being manipulated by the entity. Charlie’s people couldn’t ordinarily control a person, but if the host produced enough bioelectricity, they could, in some cases, influence that person’s subconscious, inhibiting control and releasing whatever demons that person had. If it was this guy in this case, it seemed it hadn’t been too much of a fight.

If he slipped away, he might get into a person that had real power. This guy was just the tool, but what he did would get him dealt with by the law. Charlie and he would deal with the Chrliti though.

It would have been easy, but for the fact that Charlie couldn’t tell over the distance who was the occupied one here. When they got into town, Charlie had done his thing and checked the town for his people, finding only a handful, all of whom were simply content with their lives in their small town. It was only after the sun had gone down and most of the town’s occupants, human or Chrliti, had gone to bed, that he had detected the one they had followed.

They had both assumed he was one of the occupied passing through, but when Terry got close enough for a more in-depth scan at a light, Charlie was able to note the vileness of their target. Unfortunately, he was also able to detect the fact that there were two bioelectric fields in the van.

Unable to define which one the Chrliti occupied, they could only follow along to find out which one was which. Which had led them here.

Terry got close to this thing outside Billings at an arson scene. Again, Charlie had been able to detect his brethren but not to identify him. And given Billings’ far larger population of Chrliti, he had been unable to track him either. The death of several girls in the ensuing months had given Terry an idea, and he had gambled on checking this place out even after the first attack was long over.

He had told Charlie, “This friend of your runs a pattern that he follows. Only instead of going directly, he doubles back randomly.”

Charlie had agreed but added,
“Not as random as you think. He waits until the town he struck tries to force itself out of the fear and return to normal. Then, he strikes a second time. It strikes me as reminiscent of the way my people travel through space.”

Sensing Terry’s confusion, he went on.
“In space, we simply hitched rides on whatever happened by. Usually that entailed riding it for a long time going in circles. The result is that we generally think in circles. And doubling back on territory we already went over.”

Again, Terry found himself learning something new about his companion. They had been together for the years ever since they had met in Iraq. The problem was that Charlie, unused to talking in human formats, seldom told anything new without an almost direct question. Terry spent most of his time dragging answers out of him.

To Charlie, it was just the fact that he had never had to explain to others of his race. Among them, questions such as
how are you doing
or
feeling okay
weren’t done, because there was no need. They could already tell. Having to explain thoughts or, worse, emotions to a human was as alien to him as…they were to humans.

It served to remind Terry that regardless of how attached he had become to Charlie, he was still an outsider. While Charlie had been on Earth for years, inside thousands of hosts, Terry was barely thirty. He felt like he was a first grader trying to have a conversation with a college professor. A very smart first grader, because even though Charlie was definitely the smarter of the two, he was not a strategic thinker. And as far as deduction for the human contingent, all of that was on Terry.

Charlie knew all this. And added to the fact that Charlie had no physical form, he knew that it would be Terry who had to do all the work. Fortunately, Terry enjoyed the job.

Especially this part, as he opened the trunk of his car. From the hidden compartments, he started pulling out his favorite toys. Two nine millimeters in a double holster went over his shoulders under his jacket. After a second, he reached back into the cubbyhole and pulled out a small revolver, slipping the holster into the small of his back.

“Why do you have three guns?”
Charlie asked in his mind.

Terry smiled to himself, knowing Charlie would sense it. “Force of habit. And besides, I like guns.”

He could feel Charlie’s disapproval.
“Your people have some very strange habits. And you develop so many strange attachments. It’s almost as if you—”

Charlie never finished as Terry suddenly began whistling. Charlie groaned loudly in his mind. Whistling to him was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Hearing it in the melody of music made him cringe. Show tunes were Terry’s personal addition to the torture simply because he knew Charlie hated them.

After giving him a minute to get past the sound, Terry smiled, saying, “Some of the worse things happen because of people’s habits, like this clown. You need to be on top of the game if you plan to win.”

Charlie accepted that without question. Probably because he didn’t want another dose of Terry’s shrilling.

Terry finished dressing for the occasion. A pair of cuffs and a bowie knife in a leg scabbard completed the ensemble. Lastly, a small canvas pouch clipped onto his belt. If he were right, he’d need it later.

As a final preparation, he pulled out his cell phone, dialing the number to the Lester P.D. After the third ring, a deputy answered, sounding angry at being disturbed.

“Lester Police Department, Deputy Abbot speaking.”

“Hello, Deputy. This is Terry Bridger. Is there a number where I can get a hold of Agent Benin? I think I have some information that he can use.”

Over the line, Terry could hear the sigh as the man thought about what he had just heard, adding to what he had heard from Benin about the man on the other end of the line. Benin hated Bridger openly. No one there was sure why, but the fact was that Agent Benin was the representative of the federal government, while Bridger was a maverick that just showed up, according to Benin, within five minutes of a news crew.