Transformation (6 page)

5.

“It’s simple,” Ben said calmly. “You two must fight to the death or I kill all three of you.”

Orange light danced along the blade of a large knife as it reflected flames from the roaring fire. Flesh puckered like fresh dough as the razor-sharp edge pressed against the nude girl’s throat. She sobbed uncontrollably and winced as Ben pulled on her long blond hair he had twisted in his grip. He had her long blond hair twisted in his grip and rested his chin on her shoulder.

The girl was a bit heavy, which was why Ben selected her to be the sacrifice. He liked them skinny. She wept, her hands cupped over her vagina, her eyes filled with tears that rolled down her cheeks. Her breath was a rasping staccato as it escaped between chattering teeth. Her body trembled violently from fear and the cold.

Two young men, boys really, were standing naked in the glade in front of a huge fire. One was taller and more muscular. The other was skinny and small and shook like a leaf as he wept, blowing large snot bubbles.

“It’s OK Brett.” His voice cracked. “We both know what has to happen. Just make it quick.”

“I’m not killing you for that sick fuck.” Brett jabbed his finger at Ben, but refused to look at him. He grit his teeth and balled his fists as he looked at the other boy. Brett was this kid’s nemesis until very recently and bullied him relentlessly, but he wasn’t evil. Now they were bonded together as brothers as god awful circumstances tend to do.

Ben pressed the blade of his knife against the girl’s throat and she yelped as blood slowly trickled down her neck.

“C’mon on, you know how this is going to go.” Ben sneered.

“You hurt her and I will kill you. You think a knife scares me?”

A loud boom made everyone jump. Brett hit the ground, his head half gone. The oozing blood looked black and shiny in the firelight. Several girls screamed. Willow, barely able to stand, was leaning against the van in the deep shadows of night. She let the gun drop to her side.

Ben was livid. “What the fuck? You stupid bitch!”

Willow shambled slowly forward from the shadows. As she spoke her voice was weak and strained. She sounded congested.

“Shut up Ben.” She paused for several moments and just stood in the shadows. No one moved or said a thing. The fire crackled, some of the kids sobbed lightly. Ben waited for her to speak. She shuffled forward a few more steps until she was visible in the firelight. Ben almost laughed she was so hideous.

Willow’s eyes were swollen almost to the point of being shut. They were dark blue and black and oozed fluids from the corners. She held her head stiffly and at a slight angle and her nose was flattened sideways against her face. With each step she took she fought pain. She stopped again.

“I want all you assholes to shut the fuck up. I’m trying to sleep.” She waved the gun weakly and then aimed it at Ben’s head with a steady hand.

“Don’t make me come out here again or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

Holding the gun steady for any length of time was too much for her. She dropped it to her side.

“Shut up. No more noise.”

She let the gun drop to the ground and staggered back to the van, melting back into the shadows. Ben watched her go. This was the first time he’d seen her stand since the attack. He’d been waiting for her to die or overdose on all the pills and booze she’d been downing.

All eyes looked longingly into the darkness where the gun had fallen. Ben saw it too. He pushed the girl down and walked over to retrieve it. When he did, three of the kids took off into the woods as fast their feet could carry them. Naked and barefooted they ran headlong into a black void filled with sharp rocks and large twisting tree roots. But that didn’t slow them down one bit. Ben fired at the escapees but none dropped. He fired until the firing pin was clicking loudly on empty chambers.

The sound of an empty gun firing filled the others with the energy and the hope they needed to make a break for it. They all dashed into the woods at the speed of desperation and survival. But Ben wasn’t going to let them all get away if he could help it. He dropped the gun and ran after the closest person. It was the snot bubbling skinny kid. He grabbed him by the hair and jerked him backwards and off his feet. The kid fought ineffectively as Ben pulled his head back and slit his throat.

The boy’s high-pitched scream was cut off by a horrible flapping sound. Air from the kids’ lungs, meant to power a desperate scream, was forced through the gash in his throat and it caused the flesh to slap back and forth. The severed jugular vein pumped in a few large spurts. It was over in seconds and Ben was already on the move. He chased down a girl that had tripped and was just a little behind all the others. He jumped on her and wrestled her down.

The girl fought hard, kicking up dirt and leaves in her frenzy and screaming. Her loud shrieks were cut off as Ben kneeled on her back. He pulled her head back and stabbed her in the neck several times.

Ben sat back on his knees, straddling the girl’s corpse. He was catching his breath, feeling his heart beating a mile a minute. He wasn’t winded or frightened. He was excited by the battle with the naked girl. He loved to hear them scream but when they died, when the screaming stopped, he really got worked up. He tried to savor the moment, felt the cool night air on his face. Smelled the coppery blood and what he called a death shit. He insisted the death shit had a different smell. He didn’t like it any better, it was just a different sort of shit smell. His happy time was interrupted by shuffling leaves in the background.

He rose to his feet and spun quickly, moment ruined, and saw Willow coming at him slow and steady.

“Ben you fucked everything up—again.” She hissed.

“Fuck you.” He was pissed. He could hear several of the kids still thrashing through the woods in the distance. He searched and thought he saw a ghostly form or two fading away into the darkness.

“Stop all this shit. I need you.”

He looked her over. She wasn’t desirable anymore at all. Her eyes were still darkly bruised and swollen, and one seemed to be looking in a different direction. Her nose was bent sideways and lay flat against her face. It made the upper lip on one side of her face lift in a slight sneer. She’d tried to straighten her nose by herself, but even under the deadening effect of several drugs she could tell something was seriously wrong. She couldn’t stand the grinding in her head when she tried to move her nose back in place.

Ben smirked. She wasn’t in any shape for fucking. He briefly thought he’d just save them both the trouble and slit her throat too. Willow knew Ben all too well and saw the look in his eyes. She lashed out with both hands and tore at his face with sharp nails. She gouged him hard, tearing open freshly scabbed wounds. She turned to run but the world swam and she fell forward. Ben was on her back as she hit the ground.

“Bitch!” He grabbed a handful of dreads. He yanked back hard, attempting to get to her throat. But in the darkness he was faced with a tangled mess, an ocean of seething dreadlocks, as Willow fought to free herself. He couldn’t figure out where anything was so he began to stab wildly where he thought her head might be.

“Whore! Cunt!”

Ben held the knife in both hands and lifted and dropped his arms repeatedly but Willow just bucked harder and wilder. She started to scream. Willow was fighting so hard she threw up a cloud of debris. The ground beneath her was getting swept bare. She fought hard, driven by fear and adrenalin, but the grinding in her injured neck made her nauseated and caused her to stop. She felt the twinge and tingle of nerves up and down her body. It was a terribly wrong sensation to feel emanating from one’s neck. She had to stop for a moment and lay face down and be quiet for just a few seconds.

Ben suddenly froze and started screaming. His knife made a light
thunk
as it hit the dirt. He was holding his hands up in a position of surrender, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Willow had her right hand behind her back and held both his balls in a grip powered by fear, desperation, and hate. She smiled when she felt Ben pissing himself.

“You motherfucker.” She rasped. She started to feel weak from the fight, felt like passing out but wouldn’t allow herself to. She dry heaved, would have vomited had she anything in her stomach. She started to roll over.

“You asshole.” She said, her voice catching with emotion. She was sure that she had done some serious damage to herself and was scared.

Willow slowly rolled, not letting go of her death grip on Ben’s balls, twisting them in the process. She managed a smile when she saw his face. He was frozen in pain and indecision trying to catch his breath. She felt numbness dancing up and down her spine and through her legs to her feet. Once on her back she introduced her other hand into the mix.

Ben let out a painful moan. His breath came in jagged gasps. He face was white as a sheet. He tried to hit her, but that just increased his own pain. She smiled when she heard the word
please
whisper past Ben’s clenched teeth. But the world was swimming wildly for Willow and she couldn’t do anything more than stay focused on her primary task, keeping the balls in her vice-like grip. She lay on her back on the damp ground wishing she could let go and end this, go back to the van and pop a huge handful of pills. But they’d both crossed a line there was no coming back from. One of them was going to die. She was wondering what might happen next. She had no ideas.

Ben was starting whimper. He started to gag and she knew the intense pain was going to make him vomit. She squeezed a little harder and pulled. Vomit roared from Ben’s mouth and splatted across her hair, face, and chest. He fell backwards and Willow let go. He was flat on his back and unconscious.

Willow rolled on her stomach and clawed at the dirt to get away. She panicked when her legs refused to move. She pulled herself through the dirt slowly feeling the numbness in her back, not feeling anything below the waist. She was sobbing loudly. Her life was an irreparable mess. Her arms were starting to shoot with a pain that caused her to spasm. And Ben had managed to stab her a few times in the back of the head, glancing blows that sliced her scalp deeply in several places. Blood poured from the wounds and down the sides of her face. She felt her heartbeat in her nasal cavity like a hammer.

She was dragging herself facedown, almost blind in the dark with all the blood and her long full dreads. She couldn’t bend her neck to look forward so she strained her eyes looking ahead of her in an attempt to see where she was going. She saw a pair of bare feet in front of her.

“Please help me. You saw what Ben did to me.” Willow reached her hand up and grabbed the leg, it was cold and damp and the skin slid a few inches down the shin. She looked, ignoring the painful grinding in her neck to see a deadhead bending down towards her with arms outstretched. She let out a shriek that woke Ben from his pain-induced blackout.

Ben watched as Willow was set upon by three zombies. He experienced a rare burst of emotion. He was scared to lose Willow. Although he’d just tried to kill her, the reality of losing her shook Ben to his core. He would’ve rushed headlong into the biting dead to save her if he hadn’t seen her blood spraying in the air after which her ear-shattering screams were suddenly cut off.

Ben was up and running towards the van, despite the pain. He heard several screams in the woods from all around and knew that more of the dead were on their way. Even though he was face to face with death, the burning pain in his groin that radiated through his abdomen threatened to drop him. Ben gasped, forced his feet to move one after the other, trying not to vomit again. He resisted dropping into the fetal position but the second he pulled the van door shut behind him he fell to the floor and shook and moaned in agony.

Ben lay perfectly still, not for fear of the zombies, but because moving caused him incredible pain. Even laying still the pain was intolerable. If he were able to move freely he would have simply driven the van away from the glade. As he lay, listening as the last of the distant screams end abruptly, he wept in pain and loneliness. Not for Willow’s pain but his own.

Ben listened as the dead thumped around the van until they eventually wandered off. The pain was still bad, even laying perfectly still, and he had to do something about it. He finally sucked it up and straightened out slightly from the fetal position daring to only moving his arm and head. He found Willow’s pill bag, a gallon sized Ziploc bag filled to the point where it could barely close. He pulled it towards him with one hand and when it fell on its side it burst open and spilled out on the carpeted floor. He fished out several pills from the pile that would knock him on his ass and dry swallowed them. It was cold and getting colder. He pulled a sleeping bag and several of the old blankets and pillows over himself as he prepared for a long hibernation. His immediate plan was to float in a pain free void for a long time. If he never came back from that void so be it.

§

Later Ben awoke, but only for a brief moment. He wasn’t quite sure if he was dreaming or not. Was everything a dream? Was Willow really gone? Was there really ever a Willow? Was the van really moving, sunlight pouring through the front windows, and jostling his body all around? He was still very high, he realized as he let himself fall instantly back into a deep slumber.