Needles & Sins (10 page)

“Depends where you’re going,” I said. Rick didn’t say a thing, just looked her up and down with obvious intent.

“Anywhere that’s not here,” she said.

I nodded at the back seat.

“There’s room.”

Rick cocked his head to watch her as she opened the back door, and then turned to me, eyes glinting with fire and violence.

“She’ll do.”

Turned out, Jackie
had
been a farm girl, I’d pegged that right. She tossed her duffel in the seat ahead of her, slid herself across the worn vinyl and began to regale us with her life story before the door had fully slammed behind her. She’d milked and picked and tilled and loved a boy from down the acres before he’d taken up with a widow 10 years his senior on a bigger spread and damned if that didn’t set Jackie to the road once and for all to seek something just a little bigger than the hard grey earth of the back forty and eventual marriage to some other local mudfucker who could offer her a house of hens as well as cows.

We’d only been driving an hour when she asked to stop to take a whiz in the scrub at the side of the road. When she got back in the car, Rick was in the backseat waiting for her.

“I thought we should get to know each other a little better,” he explained.

She smiled, and put a long hand on the white stubble of his cheek.

“That’s sweet,” she said. “Did you know, you look just like one of those old movie guys? You know, the ones that were always in the action adventure flicks.”

“Did you know,” Rick asked, “that you talk a lot?”

She laughed, which really was a poor choice on her part, because that’s when Rick grabbed her by the hair, yanked her backwards and stuck his Bowie into her open mouth to slice off her tongue.

It didn’t really cut down on the noise level much for awhile. Though I couldn’t make out any words, I knew exactly what the high-pitched wails emanating from the back of the car meant.

Tongues bleed a lot, by the way. Every now and then, I felt a warm wet drop sponge down the back of my neck as I drove. She didn’t settle easily.

“You really fucked up the seats,” I said later, using an old shirt to try to sponge up the mess.

The girl was gagged and tied and lying on the side of the road by the car’s back tires. I’d had enough of her whimpering and had stopped the car to get out and take a breather. The sun was going down, and we were still in the middle of god-fuckin’-nowhere. The grey line of asphalt, broken by waist-high stands of grass and Queen Anne’s Lace, stretched out ahead as far as the eye could see. We’d only passed two towns in the past four hours, and both had been empty, doors flapping like lost laundry in the wind. I’d found a dusty bottle of whiskey in the broken down shop of one, and gotten Jackie to suck down half of it. I figured it would kill the pain and the germs at the same time.

“Had enough for one day?” I asked.

Rick nodded and moved to the trunk to get his gear. I followed, pulling out a beaten grey sleeping bag and a one-man pup tent.

We set up camp just off the road. I scouted around and found enough twigs and dead branches from a few small bushes to get a fire going for a couple hours, at least. There were still some cans of beans in the car, and I didn’t fancy eating them cold.

“I’ll take the girl for the night,” Rick announced, after polishing off a can on his own.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “But I’m guessing if she used to be a screamer, she ain’t anymore.”

He cuffed me in the shoulder and dragged the girl by one arm into his tent. She was beyond resistance by then. I stayed up a little longer, and looked out at the stars coming up over the prairie. Life’s in the journey, not the destination, they say. And this journey was one fuckin’ strange one.

Behind me, the whimpering started up afresh, and I smiled as I thought of the first time I’d met Rick.

I was walking down by the Old Plank River after dark. A stupid thing to do, really, but I had won my share of the county’s testosterone matches, and wasn’t worried about the neighborhood. There weren’t more than a few hundred left in Shawnee, and I’d bested my share of the musclebound. The moon was on the horizon, casting a low spotlight across the cattails on the shore, and the crickets creaked a racket like thunder on thorazine. High-pitched and loud.

But not as loud as the shriek I heard suddenly from a few yards away.

I didn’t run to the rescue. Nobody’s ever accused me of chivalry. But I was curious. I crouched lower to the ground and slipped through the brush towards the noise. The night had quieted with the force of the scream, and I stepped carefully, not wanting to crack a branch or lose my footing in a gopher hole.

When the waist-high grass disappeared, and I reached a stand of willow trees, I saw where the scream had come from.

White as a scraped oyster and laid out on the loam was a dying girl. She was pale but painted in fire, liquid pain drenching her in a shower of mortality. Her own. Her flesh wept with the tears of a thousand fickle knife-kisses, while between her naked legs a man thrust his own deceptive spear. He laughed with a welcoming grin as my face slipped free of the weeds.

“Welcome to paradise, my friend,” he said, never slowing his rhythm. Blood coursed down her ribs in spurts with his orgasm.

“She doesn’t have much gas left,” he announced. Then he groaned before pulling free and gestured with equanimity at her body.

“But she’s all yours if you want a piece.”

He stood, gore dripping down the hair of his chest like perspiration.

“I guarantee you, she’s worth the price of admission…which, in this case, was her life. And I already punched her ticket.”

He stepped back from the shuddering girl while his manhood mocked me with its nodding, knowing gaze there beneath the sardonic moon. I didn’t buy its tears as those of pity.

The girl locked eyes with me, a brief glint of hope in her tortured gaze. But I could see it was too late for her. In minutes she would be gone, regardless. I loosened my belt buckle, and nodded at the stranger grinning beside her.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, kneeling down to it.

That’s how I met Rick. If he thought he was going to shock me with his offer, he had another thing coming. I was a realist and an opportunist. I didn’t kill if I didn’t need to, but I didn’t shy from the act either. And I never looked away from a good thing. Life was short and brutal. You took what you could and then you were gone. And someone else got the goods. So I fucked Rick’s sacrifice moments after I met him, and then she was gone, eyes rolled back in her head as her breasts wilted with the stilled pound of her heart. As her body cooled beside us, Rick told me about his plan.

“You’ve heard of The Char-Lee?” he asked after we’d tendered our introductions. I nodded. There was no one who hadn’t heard of The Oracle. In the west, beneath the bleeding heart of the blood-red sunset she lived. Since the start of the long fall she’d been there, waiting for the pilgrims, answering their questions with both riddles and direction, a Sphinx of obscuration. There were those rumored to have left her bloated in her gifts of magical power, but just as many whose fat bubbled yellow and frothy from their bellies as their shrieks of terror melted with their greed into the stone ground at her feet. The Oracle suffered fools none at all. Hence her second name, The Char-Lee. She was yin and yang, life and death. Her benevolence was matched only by her brutality.

It was a dangerous journey to find her, and still a more dangerous gamble to gain her audience. Still, Rick never wavered in his studies of those sacrifices, rituals and devotions that supposedly set one on the path that assured that they would be granted the powers of The Oracle.

“As many as find her, are lost,” I said, when he finished telling me his goal.

“And as many are lost, gain their answer,” he replied, thrusting a finger into the hard bone of my chest.

With that, he reached behind him, into a pile of discarded clothes and belongings, and pulled out a mouthharp. With a wink, he began to play a blues scale, and somehow, under the light of a rising moon, it felt right. Naked, I swayed along to the call of his instrument.

He didn’t best me with muscle, he beat me with devil music. And mind.

Sometime before morning, we set the body loose in the current, and walked unsteadily back to town. Rick had brought a bottle of whiskey with him to the sacrifice, and I had no qualms with helping him quaff it.

When we lifted the body from the earth to take her to the river, a stream of blood and kidney rained on the ground beneath her and at last I blanched, turning my face away.

“The Char-Lee will require a sacrifice for her knowledge, you know,” he said. “Are you man enough to make it?”

I shivered at the mounds of flesh still quivering on the earth and said yes.

“Blood doesn’t bother me,” I said. “People do.”

When the moaning ceased, I kicked dirt into the fire and crawled into my tent. This time, I wasn’t interested in Rick’s seconds. Sometimes a man just wants to forget the screaming regret of death’s valet for a night. And having sex with the mute baggage stowed in Rick’s tent would only remind me of how close crept the worms. I crawled back to my tent and tried not to think of her blood flowing down my wrists, as I knew it must when we brought her to The Char-Lee for sacrifice.

Or so I thought.

Until the next day when I looked up from my enjoyment of the clover to see Rick’s blade dripping with her life.

“
Se la vie
,” he pronounced, and I looked away, disgusted.

“They’re not just standing around on every corner, waiting to have their necks cut,” I said.

A part of me could still hear her chattering on about her ex, aghast at the perfidy of his infidelity. She never had even imagined the brutality of life as we knew it. Despite having been a child of the fall. She should have known better. Still, I had an unnatural sympathy for her ignorance.

Let it bleed
, a voice in my head whispered.
Let it all bleed away.

She was buried without ceremony. Rick threw her out of an open door as I maneuvered around pothole after cratered pothole. I didn’t realize she was gone until I heard the back car door slam, so intense was my concentration on what was left of the road.

“We’ll find another town,” he said, when I caught his eye in the rear view mirror.

The road turned to ash three days later.

The heady honey of clover dried to the brown leaves of thistle. And then, there was only the scraped orange of dead clay. The hills rose away from the road, and the weeds blocking our path frayed to naught but fissures in burnt asphalt.

“We must be getting close,” I said, when the sky slipped from blue to brown at high noon.

“Not yet,” Rick promised, pointing at the leached earth.

“The Char-Lee lives where no life dare press,” I quoted. Rick had shared any number of books and articles about the elusive Oracle with me over the past weeks.

He pointed at sparse bunches of green amid the clay and sand.

“Still, life strives here.”

“And our sacrifice?” I ventured.

“Will turn up,” he promised.

I didn’t feel so sure, but I kept quiet. I didn’t think there were going to be any other towns.

As night crept down over the barren earth, a single spot on the horizon kept its dull orange glow. I navigated the increasingly deep holes in the pavement with as much speed as I dared, praying to cover the ground in time. We could have walked as fast.

The glow meant fire.

Fire meant humans.

Humans meant fodder for sacrifice.

It didn’t cross my mind that they might not
want
to become sacrifices.

“Leave it here,” Rick said a short while later, and I turned the key in the ignition. It was a long walk to the dot of fire in the distance, but we couldn’t afford to alert them to our presence. We didn’t know if there were five or fifty ahead.

The walk was long, and mostly silent. Night gathered around us surreptitiously, an inky fog, and by the time we were near enough to see the creators of the campfire, it was almost too dark to see each other.

I reached out to touch Rick’s arm, to slow him, and he shoved my hand away.

“Don’t get fresh,” he whispered. “I hardly know you.”

I punched him, and pulled him down into the weeds. We were on a knoll just north of the campfire, and below us, I could see two figures leaning in to catch the heat of its blaze. One of them had long hair, the other, short. More than that, I couldn’t make out.

“Looks like a couple,” I hissed in Rick’s ear, and I could see his teeth gleam like moonshine in the shadows.

“You can have him, if you want, but she’s mine,” he announced.

“You’re the one with the oral fixation,” I retorted, patting the bulge in his shirt. He always carried a carton of cigarettes tucked into his shirt.

“Make you a deal,” he whispered. “I take him out while you hold her down. You can feel her up all you like, but I get to break her in, deal?”