Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories Page 25

  Time to get down to business, he thought.

  An inspection of his bedroom revealed no one lurking under his bed or elsewhere. Not that he’d expected anything else, but the search had to be done for the sake of thoroughness. Next he went down the hall to the second bedroom. After listening at the closed door a moment and detecting no sounds of movement within, he opened the door and went inside.

  The room was crowded with junk, but no one was inside it.

  Sam then went to the window overlooking the parking lot outside the apartment building. Hardly anyone was moving about out there at this time of night. The one face he did see was familiar. It belonged to Lucy Austin, the good-looking woman who lived in the apartment directly beneath him. As he watched, Lucy got in her silver Sonata, backed out of her space, and drove away, probably heading out for a night of bar-hopping. She did that a lot. Sam knew, because he’d been keeping a close eye on her for a while.

  Once Lucy was gone, he more closely scrutinized the other cars in the lot. He saw none that looked unfamiliar or suspicious. There were no dark-clad figures sitting slumped down in the seats, at least none he could discern. It was nighttime, though, and the illumination provided by the pole-mounted sodium lights wasn’t as strong as he might have hoped.

  Regardless, he knew time was short. Whoever had been here would be back. He had to act now. To that end, he hurried back to his bedroom, dragged a large travel bag out of the closet, unzipped it, and set it down in the center of his bed, laying the Glock down next to it. He then began rapidly filling the bag with as many clothes and necessities as he could manage. Doing this included multiple trips back and forth across the hall to the bathroom and several more to the second bedroom where his most treasured things were stored. There was so much more he wished to take with him, but he just wouldn’t be able to do it. It filled him with rage and a burning sense of loss. He wished he could get his hands around the neck of the person who’d put that doll on the table.

  At last, he could fit no more items in the bag. It was stuffed to overflowing and he just managed to pull the zipper shut. By then he’d changed into more suitable clothes and was ready to go. He picked up the gun and shoved it into the waistband of his pants. He then grabbed the thick strap of the travel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and walked out to his living room.

  Where he froze in his tracks.

  They were waiting for him there, the men in the black ski masks. Upon closer inspection, one of the intruders was a slim woman with small breasts. The four intruders were dressed all in black. All appeared unarmed. The door behind them was standing wide open. It stayed that way only another moment, until another ski-mask-wearing intruder came in and shut the door. This fifth person was larger than the rest, bigger even than Sam. Like the others, he appeared unarmed.

  Stupid assholes.

  Sam dropped the travel bag and aimed the gun at them. “Congratulations. You tracked me down. I hope you got some satisfaction from that, because you’re all about to fucking die.”

  Sam squeezed the trigger multiple times.

  Nothing happened.

  None of the intruders made a sound. They just stared at him. Sam checked the Glock. The magazine was empty. The fuckers had unloaded his gun. He had some extra ammo in his travel bag, but he knew he’d never have time to get to it. Something shiny glinted in his peripheral vision.

  His head turned toward the dining room table.

  There were multiple sharp instruments there.

  And more dolls.

  All at once, he knew what they had in mind. And he couldn’t allow it to happen. It was a horrifying, ghastly notion. The thought of enduring it was more than he could bear. There was only one course of action left open to him. He lowered his head, gritted his teeth, and ran right at the main group of intruders, hoping to bull his way through them.

  For a fleeting moment, he thought he might actually make it out the door. He’d taken them by surprise. Two intruders got knocked to the floor as he ran into them. Another was staggered by a powerful roundhouse punch he delivered to the man’s chin. But there were just too many of them. Soon they recovered and overwhelmed him.

  He was dragged kicking and screaming into the kitchen, where he was forced to lie flat on the floor. A rag was stuffed in his mouth to muffle his screaming. The woman knelt next to him and cut open his shirt with a scalpel. Sam struggled harder than ever, putting every bit of his not inconsiderable physical strength into the effort, but he was unable to budge them.

  The woman pushed the exquisitely sharp blade of the scalpel into his quivering abdomen and parted his flesh in a straight line down to his waist. The pain was immense as blood gushed out of the deep incision. He bucked harder than ever as the woman—who he now saw was wearing surgical gloves—pushed her hands through the gash in his belly and began sawing away at something else inside him. A disconnected part of him had a feeling she knew what she was doing, that she had the detailed anatomical knowledge of a professional, but it was hard to care much about that as the blood continued to gush and the pain spiraled out of control.

  After what seemed like a thousand agonized eternities, one of the intruders moved out of sight for a moment and returned with a handful of the dolls. These were handed one by one to the woman, who pushed them through the gash in his belly and into his open stomach.

  There were five in all.

  Five Barbie dolls.

  One, no doubt, for a dead daughter belonging to each of the five intruders. It was symbolic retribution. Sam knew this because at varying times over the years he’d perpetrated a similar act on the corpses of their children. He didn’t need to see their faces or hear verbal verification to know this. He’d thought he’d been so careful with the frequent moving around and changing of his name, but somehow they’d caught up to him.

  He ached to say something defiant and hurtful as the life drained out of him, but the pain was just too much.

  The Barbie Butcher choked on his own blood on his way down to Hell.

  BLOODSUCKING NUNS FOR SATAN

  MOSES DICKERSON HAPPENED UPON THE provocative scene purely by chance that warm July evening, those alluring nuns doing things he never would have imagined nuns doing. He’d been on his way back home after a night of sucking down Millers at Reggie’s Pub. After arriving at the corner of Dreadmire Street and Impaler Avenue, he made the call to turn left instead of continuing straight ahead to the other side of Dreadmire.

  Straight ahead was his usual route home. It was the quickest way back. Tonight, though, he felt like taking his time and walking the streets a bit. There were two main reasons for this, one being that he’d had significantly more than the usual amount to drink and wanted to allow his level of inebriation time to fade a little before he returned home. This wasn’t done out of fear of Valerie—his wife of sixteen years—giving him shit for drinking too much. She didn’t care. Hell, she drank more than he did. They were happy together and tolerant of each other’s vices and bad habits. Moses looked forward to seeing her again in an hour or so. He just didn’t like to come home too hammered because of unhappy memories of his bad-tempered father doing the same. He preferred to return home with nothing more than a nice, pleasant buzz.

  The bigger reason for taking the long way home was harder to explain. Sometimes, for reasons he would struggle to articulate if asked, he just got a little restless. When these moods struck him, he liked to get away by himself for a bit and just wander. These infrequent urges nearly always came over him without warning and tonight was no exception.

  So he continued down Impaler Avenue for a time, moving at an unhurried pace along several blocks, pausing occasionally to peer in at the wares on display behind the windows of closed stores. At one store, Marie’s Curios, he spied a necklace that struck his fancy. He thought it would look pretty draped around Valerie’s slender neck. The price handwritten on the little tag next to it was more than reasonable, too.

  Making a mental note to return to the store the ne
xt day, he moved away from the window and continued down Impaler Avenue until it intersected with Delphine Street. On impulse, he checked traffic before crossing Impaler to the other side of Delphine.

  It was a nice night. The sky was clear, the stars above little pinpoints blinking on a black velvet canvas. There weren’t a lot of pedestrians out and about at this hour. Moses heard a distant sound of cars, but none were in sight and for a moment it was possible to pretend he was alone in the city. It imbued him with a peaceful feeling.

  He was a few blocks along down the opposite side of Delphine when St. Seyrig, a very old and very gothic-looking Catholic church replete with spires and carved stone gargoyles on the roof, came into view on his right. The wrought-iron gate to the church’s courtyard stood slightly open, which was the norm. It was closed and locked only on rare occasions. The church was just another of the city’s many familiar landmarks. Moses had passed by it countless times over the course of his life, and he would have paid it no mind whatsoever tonight if not for the moaning.

  His ears detected the sound—faint at first—just as he was walking past the gate. At first he assumed he was hearing sounds made by a drunken homeless person passed out somewhere nearby, perhaps even inside the courtyard. Some of them experienced moments of religious delirium when they were really far gone and found their way in there at night, but he soon realized this was something else altogether. He’d continued on for a few more strides when the sound abruptly rose in volume. It was then that he perceived its lustful quality.

  Moses stopped walking and listened a moment longer, frowning as he strove to determine whether he was actually hearing what he thought he was hearing. In any other circumstance, the question would not have been in doubt. Moses knew the sound of a woman in the throes of sexual ecstasy when he heard it. What was baffling was that it did seem as if it was originating from somewhere inside the dark courtyard. Not being a religious man, Moses was not offended by the basic notion of sexual activity occurring on church grounds, so long as it was engaged in by consenting adults rather than pedophile priests taking advantage of altar boys. If two grownups were in there screwing around, more power to them. He didn’t consider it sacrilege, a concept that meant little to him anyway.

  In all his years of walking past this place, however, he’d never heard anything remotely like this issuing from the premises. This was what puzzled him. Bums doing things to each other in the dark wouldn’t have been too surprising, he supposed, but this didn’t sound like that either. Though he hadn’t yet glimpsed the person doing the moaning, the sound struck him as entirely too healthy-sounding to have emanated from the rotgut-roughened throat of a homeless person.

  Not only that, but it was . . . exciting.

  After several moments of standing there and listening to the woman’s moaning—which was not getting any quieter—Moses realized his dick was getting hard. He glanced down and saw an erection straining the front of his jeans. Another moan issued from inside the courtyard, this one significantly higher in pitch than any of the previous ones. Judging from the sound of it, the mystery woman wasn’t far from transitioning from moans to screams. Moses’s cock twitched, further straining the crotch of his jeans.

  The intense state of arousal surprised him. He’d always found female aural expressions of pleasure stimulating, but hearing such sounds, especially when he hadn’t had sex on the brain at all until just a moment ago, didn’t tend to produce instantaneous, rigid results. Usually a visual element was required, too. And there was the issue of how much he’d had to drink to consider. This made the painfully swollen state of the organ doubly surprising, as a very high blood alcohol level normally suppressed arousal, at least in his experience. He knew guys who claimed otherwise—that, to the contrary, being hammered made them extra randy—but he was not one of those lucky assholes.

  Bottom line, his dick should be pretty limp right now, but it wasn’t.

  Weird.

  Moses was turning around and moving toward the open courtyard gate before he was even consciously aware of having decided to do so. When he did realize what he was doing, he admonished himself against it. He should turn around and hurry on home. Maybe when he got there he could surprise Valerie with one of the hardest fucks she’d enjoyed in some time.

  This is what he told himself as he stood there with his right hand curled around one of the wrought-iron bars of the gate. It was what he should do, no doubt about it.

  Moses’s hand tightened around the wrought-iron bar.

  He let out a breath.

  Then he pushed the gate open wide enough to slip through the opening and enter the courtyard. The gate’s hinges creaked slightly as he did this, making him wince. He feared the fornicators would hear this and lapse into silence. After all, it was possible they were so into what they were doing they simply hadn’t considered the possibility of being caught in the act. His intrusion on the scene might change that.

  The moaning did not cease, however, nor falter for even a moment.

  Moses continued deeper into the courtyard, winding his way along the concrete path and passing by benches, trees, statues of various religious figures, and a water fountain. A very large tree with thick branches and abundant leaves dominated the center of the courtyard. The big tree stood in a circle of grass, around which was a low brick wall. Years had passed since Moses had last ventured inside the courtyard, but memory told him another long bench sat inside near the tree. The moaning seemed to be coming from that general area.

  He went into a crouch as he approached the wall. When he reached the wall, he dropped to his knees and peered over the top of it. What he saw then made his cock strain harder than ever and set his heart to pounding. He reached down and fondled himself through the fabric of his jeans.

  Two Roman Catholic nuns were inside the wall beneath the low-hanging branches of the tree. A direct stream of moonlight shined through a serendipitously open section of branches, providing ample illumination. One of the nuns was on her back on the bench near the base of the tree. Most of her garments—including the holy habit and its underskirts—were strewn about her on the ground. Of her holy garments, she wore only the wimple that covered her head and framed her lovely face, which was currently sheened in sweat, the mouth open wide in ecstasy. Her legs were spread wide, one propped on the bench, the foot of the other on the ground.

  The second nun—also wearing only her wimple—was on her knees between the supine nun’s spread legs. Both women had large breasts and lean, toned bodies. This came as a surprise to Moses, who was not accustomed to nuns looking like Playboy models. The kneeling nun had a nice round ass. He gave his crotch a harder squeeze as he stared at it a moment

  The nun on the bench moaned again, writhing on the bench and squeezing her breasts as the other nun flicked rapidly at her clitoris with the tip of her tongue. She screamed when the nun pleasuring her pushed three hooked fingers into her vagina and flexed them. The explosion of sound was like a gunshot ringing out in the night. A few moments ago, so dramatic a noise might have scared Moses off, but he was too enthralled by what he was seeing for that to happen now. He opened his pants and reached inside them to grab his dick, gasping as he did it.

  A part of him felt bad for what he was doing, like a peeping Tom. This wasn’t the kind of thing he did ordinarily. In fact, he’d never done anything like this until now. He wasn’t a voyeur. He wasn’t a lowdown, creeping predator. In the normal course of things, Valerie was all he ever needed to satiate his needs.

  But there was nothing normal about what was happening here. The need driving him consumed him. He felt powerless. It took him a few moments longer to begin to realize just how true that was.

  Another sound from inside the brick wall snagged his attention, pulling his gaze toward a man who was lying on his side several feet away from the bench. The man was nude and facing away from Moses, who initially assumed the sound he’d made was just another result of sexual ecstasy. He figured this was some kind of f
reaky Catholic free-for-all threesome. The guy was masturbating while watching the nuns go at it. But then the man made the sound again and Moses realized what he was hearing was more like an expression of pain.

  More of an agonized squeal than a moan.

  And he was making the sound repeatedly.

  Moses’s hand froze around his dick.

  He frowned.

  Maybe there was something much darker going on here than he’d first suspected. In fact, maybe it would be a good idea to start backing away and get the hell out of here.

  While he still could.

  But before he could do that, the head of the squatting nun snapped toward him. Yellow eyes flashed in the moonlight. Her mouth opened wide, exposing long fangs at the corners. Her mouth was smeared with blood.

  Moses swallowed hard.

  “Oh, fuck,” he whispered.

  Fucking lesbian nun vampires. Didn’t see that one coming.

  He began to raise up out of his crouch, setting his feet beneath him as he got ready to turn and run.

  The nun on the bench sat up straight. Her eyes also flashed yellow in the moonlight. As the moonlight fell across her flat belly, Moses saw that three large, looping numbers had been freshly carved across it, blood dripping from the gashes.

  Three sixes.

  Moses gulped again.

  Fucking Satanic lesbian nun vampires. Fuck me sideways with a rusty pitchfork.

  The nun with the numbers on her belly beckoned to him with a crooked finger. “You.” Her voice sounded barely human, tinged with the sibilant hissing of a serpent. “Come to us.”

  Moses shook his head. “Nope. I’m out. Sorry.”

  He had every intention of bolting from the place as he uttered these defiant words. However, he found he was unable to resist the nun’s command. Against his will, he walked into the brick circle, whimpering as he approached the nuns.

  More commands were issued.

  Moses stripped off his clothes and tossed them aside, again against his will.