Bestial (2 page)

A sound of movement startled him and he turned sharply to look over his right shoulder.

“Jeremiah,” he said. He stood and faced the older, taller man, took in a deep breath and released it in a long sigh. “Well?”

Jeremiah leaned forward and said something very quietly into his right ear.

The man smiled as Jeremiah pulled away. They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, then the man turned and left Jeremiah behind as he hurried out of the room.

In the foyer, the man swept a flashlight off a small desk with his left hand and opened the front door with his right. As he pushed the security door open and stepped out onto the covered wooden porch, he thumbed the flashlight’s button and a beam of light stabbed the darkness. He crossed the porch and stood at the top of the steps a moment, peering into the darkness of the yard with his good eye.

In the background, the ocean breathed its nighttime breaths and the crickets chirruped.

The eager susurrations that had been ongoing in the darkness around the house abruptly fell silent.

The man moved down a step. The flashlight beam rose and passed back and forth over the yard. It oozed over the dark, shadowy figures gathered there. They stood close together, covering the grass, spreading out to spill past the sprawling yard and over the driveway to the fence, and further out to the narrow road that passed between the house and the beach beyond. The light glowed eerily in the many pairs of reflective silver eyes that turned with anticipation to the man on the porch steps, waiting.

The moment hung heavily in the air like a thick, damp, tropical heat as the man’s single eye passed over the lake of eyes before him.

He tipped his head back slightly and shouted, “It’s a girl!”

The chirping of the crickets stopped. Even the sea seemed to pause.

The weighty heat of the moment remained in the silence that followed, until the man spoke again.

“And it’s
thriving
!”

In the near distance, another ocean wave rushed in against the beach.

A new sound rose from the dark, still crowd, but only for a moment—a brief sound of inhalation, the drawing in of a single breath by many.

In the dark, the heads of the crowd bent backward, faces turned to the glittering night sky, and together they filled the night with a loud, reverberating sound.

A rich, triumphant, lupine howl.

Big Rock, California—Lemon Tree Mobile Home Park—three months ago...

Penny Anderson and Byron Clifton walked together down the road that ran through the center of the Lemon Tree Mobile Home Park. It was a cool night in early summer, with the sound of televisions playing throughout the trailer park. Penny’s dark-blue flip-flops slapped against her heels with each step. She held a folded blanket tucked beneath her left arm. Byron was seventeen, a year older than Penny, but with his childlike mind, he giggled at nothing in particular and sometimes walked circles around Penny as they moved through the faint glow from the windows of mobile homes on either side of them. His black skin made him difficult to see in the night, while her thick pale arms and moon-like, double-chinned face practically glowed. They were on their way to their secret hiding place, known only to them, in the patch of woods beyond the back edge of the trailer park.

Penny’s mother Gretchen had gone out with one of her tricks—a new guy this time, bald and flabby, with a bushy mustache—giving Penny yet another summer night to kill by herself. She’d already gone through a package of Chips Ahoy Chocolate Chip Cookies and half of the upside-down pineapple cake Aunt Tess had brought them on Sunday, all while watching reruns of sitcoms on TV. She couldn’t eat that way while Gretchen was around, not without getting yelled at and sometimes slapped.

“How can you look at yourself in the mirror and keep eating like that?” Gretchen often shouted. “You’re
way
over two hundred pounds and you look like a fuckin’
whale
! I don’t even like you being here when guys come over because you disgust them and turn them
off
and then they don’t wanna
fuck
!”

Sometimes she watched Gretchen with her tricks. Penny was always to call her by name, never “Mom,” because the word “Mom” wasn’t exactly a turn-on to her clientele. Gretchen made no effort to keep her business private and even had sex with her men on the living room couch sometimes. Penny watched and masturbated. Sometimes she masturbated when there was nothing to watch. She thought of little besides food and sex, sex and food. The trailer smelled of sex all the time, and Gretchen always kept pornography around because some of her men liked to look at it. Penny often perused the magazines or watched the DVDs when Gretchen wasn’t around.

School was Penny’s idea of hell. She was tortured endlessly by her classmates, and even the teachers sometimes chimed in with cruel remarks or derisive laughter. She lived for weekends, and especially for the summer break, which was about to start. Then she didn’t have to be anywhere or do anything. When she wasn’t eating or masturbating, she spent time with Byron, her only friend, who lived just a few trailers down with his parents. Byron’s parents were always screaming at each other, and sometimes his dad beat up on his mom, so Byron always welcomed a chance to get away from them with Penny.

Recently, Penny had started experimenting with Byron. He was retarded, like a little boy, so it didn’t matter to him that she was so fat and had pimples all over her face. And yet, as childlike as he was, he was seventeen, after all, and as horny as she. He often sported an erection, so he welcomed Penny’s advances. A couple of weeks ago, she’d taken him to their hiding place and they’d spent some time kissing. Byron had gotten so excited that he’d begun humping Penny’s leg as they kissed. When she stopped and refused to kiss any more, Byron had frantically opened his pants and jerked off, grinning and grunting the word “Good” over and over. Penny had found it exciting to watch—he was hung better than most of Gretchen’s tricks, but then Gretchen always said black guys had bigger dicks than anybody else. The next time, Penny had jerked him off, and the time after that, she’d given oral sex a try on Byron while masturbating herself. Then she’d let him fondle her fleshy breasts, which were only slightly larger than the rolls of fat beneath them. She’d let him touch her later and had taught him to call the hairy mound between her massive thighs her “coochy”, which had made him laugh. This time, she had other plans.

They passed the last two trailers and moved into the wooded area behind the park.

“You gawn lemme play wit’ yer coochie?” Byron said with a guffaw as they passed through the wall of bushes and into the small clearing that was their hideout. It was surrounded by trees and bushes and a couple of large rocks.

“Something better than that this time, Byron,” Penny said with a smile. She spread out the blanket on the ground. As Byron sat down cross-legged on the blanket, Penny took off her black tank top and hiked up her purple skirt. She wore no underwear. “You wanna stick your wiener in my coochy, Byron?” she said.

Byron guffawed. “‘Zit gawn feel good?”

“Oh, yeah. It’ll feel real good. For both of us.”

More laughing as he slapped his big hands against his thighs. “Yeah, sure, yeah.”

A faint breeze whispered through the tops of the trees around them, and they could still hear the faint sound of television sets playing in trailers in the park.

“Take your pants off,” Penny said. Byron stood and dropped his pants as she stretched out and spread her legs. “Now you lay down between my legs, Byron.”

“‘Tween yer legs?” He thought about that a moment, giggled, then got down on top of her.

Penny reached over her fat middle and grabbed his cock, which was already erect—it seemed to be most of the time—and put it in her. An explosion of breath came from her lungs. She whispered, “Okay, Byron, in and out. In and out. Fuck me.”

“Fuck you?” He laughed. “Momma says that’s a dirty word an’ I shouldn’t never say—”

”Just
do it
.”

As Byron moved, Penny struggled to reach down between his belly and her rolls of fat to rub her clitoris. Byron moaned as Penny bit her lower lip and clenched her eyes shut, losing herself in the sensation of his thrusts. She lifted her big legs into the air, spread them as far as she could. Byron began chanting, “Good... good,” with each thrust, but Penny barely heard him. She was lost in the new feelings she was experiencing. She climbed toward her orgasm, felt it build, ready to explode into a bright flash of inner white light.

Byron grunted, then cried out.

A moment later, Penny realized he’d pulled out and was no longer on top of her. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but darkness at first. Then there was movement above her, and weight pressed down on her again. Byron—at least, she
thought
it was Byron at first—slid back into her, and she clenched her eyes shut again. But now he began to pound her much harder. Hands roughly clutched the backs of her knees and pushed her legs back hard, so far that it made her hips hurt. A sharp, foul smell filled Penny’s nostrils as an unfamiliar voice growled above her. She opened her eyes again.

The face that hovered above her was not Byron’s. It was white and darkly bearded and the eyes—

A ragged gasp tore from Penny’s throat.

The eyes above her were a sparkling silver.

“Byron?” she croaked. “
Byron
?”

The man on top of her pounded harder. Spittle dribbled from his open mouth as he growled again and again. His hands gripped the backs of her knees so hard that she thought he was going to break the skin.

The darkness was distorting the face of the man who was fucking her—that had to be it, she decided, because she could not be seeing what she
thought
she was seeing.

Closer, closer,
she thought,
almost, so close...

His face was changing shape. Strange sounds came from him—popping and crunching—as his nose seemed to grow longer. The entire bottom half of his face jutted out from his skull in a sudden, trembling thrust, and he opened his mouth—now a snout—as his teeth became long and sharp.

...
no, no, this isn’t happening, but... closer, closer... oh god it’s a nightmare I’m having a nightmare... closer, closer...

As she came in a bright flash of pure white inside her head, the large, heavy figure on top of her slammed into her with increased force, swelled inside her, and released a sound that was a mixture of impassioned cry and roaring howl.

Gasping for breath, her fatty flesh quivered as she attempted to crawl backward on the blanket, away from the hulking man above her. He pulled away from her, got up on his knees, and pulled his right arm back. He swung his fist down hard and it connected with Penny’s left temple.

There was another bright flash of white, but this one was not at all orgasmic.

When she opened her eyes, the dark shape above her was gone and her ears rang with a deafening silence. Even the murmur of televisions playing in the trailer park had stopped. Moonlight shone through the tops of the trees above her and gave everything a faint bluish tinge.

“Byron?” she said, her throat dry, voice hoarse. She propped herself up on her elbows, then slowly climbed to her feet and straightened her bunched-up skirt. She found her tank top on the blanket and pulled it on, then looked around for Byron. She called his name again, but got no response. She quickly folded up the blanket and tucked it under her arm. “Byron, are you still here?”

She wondered who the man had been, the one who had replaced Byron between her legs. For the first time since it happened, she felt a wave of fear, of...
creepiness
. Some stranger, a man who was not her friend Byron, had fucked her. She’d always been queasy about her mother’s lifestyle—having sex with virtual strangers, trading sex for money and/or drugs, bringing them home and fucking them and sending them on their way without ever knowing anything about them, even their real names. And now,
she
had done something like that—but it had not by choice. Had it?

Have I been raped?
Penny wondered.

She walked toward the edge of the little clearing that had become her and Byron’s secret place—

—and her foot caught on something, throwing her forward. The ground swung up and slammed into her with a thud, knocking an explosive grunt from her lungs. Penny clumsily and heavily climbed to her feet, picked up the blanket, and turned around. She looked down to find that she’d tripped over Byron’s legs, his pants down around his ankles. Her eyes followed his legs up to his bare ass, and then...

From the waist up, Byron disappeared in a black mass of glistening lumps and jagged bones.

Penny gasped. It wasn’t until then that she caught a whiff of the thick, coppery scent in the air. She stumbled backward away from the torn body, hugging the blanket to her chest. A storm of emotions raced through her—fear, sadness, guilt. She looked down at her feet in their flip-flops. Had she stepped in blood?

A possible scenario played out in her mind—she tracked blood back to the trailer, the cops followed her steps, and Gretchen found out about what she’d been doing with Byron, that she was guilty of luring Byron out to the hiding place to be killed by this stranger from nowhere. Penny could not let that happen. Moving numbly and without much thought, she took off her flip-flops and wrapped them in her blanket. She walked a good distance around Byron’s body, left the hiding place, and hurried back to the trailer.