The Apocalypse and Satan's Glory Hole! (1) (10 page)

Edwina doesn’t even try hard. She drops to the ground and rolls with her assailant. Her knee comes up, and she uses the figure’s momentum to toss it over her head. She rolls with it and comes up with her shirt flapping to expose her lily-white ass, but at this moment she couldn’t give two shits about what she is displaying.

The attacker groans, and she lashes out a foot to land a perfect blow that flips the figure onto its back. Looking over her shoulder, she gets a glimpse of Darla, who is astride her own attacker’s chest, beating the hell out of whoever it is.

Darla looks up. Their eyes meet, and they both smile.

“You all right?” Edwina asks and feels stupid since the person under Darla is probably down and out for the count.

“Yep. Lets truss these mother fuckers up and see what we caught.”

Screams erupt from outside as the camp becomes a chaos of running figures and shouts in the night. There are groans and smacks and even a low howl that could only come from … a man! Edwina hops onto the figure she subdued and whips the black cloth off its face. A scruffy fellow with half a beard stares into her eyes with fear oozing from his blood-splattered face. He is clearly terrified. His nose is smashed and bloody, and two of his front teeth are broken. His lips are split, and all he can do is raise his hands to his face in supplication.

“Please,” he gags on his own blood, but Edwina has a different idea of what the man is asking for and delivers a crushing open-hand blow to his throat. He chokes and gags, tries to roll over and even sticks his fingers in his throat in an attempt to get air down. It’s useless, and after a minute his legs stop twitching and he stares wide-eyed at the ceiling.

Darla is also having pretty good luck. She wraps her legs around her attacker-turned-victim. Edwina gets a look as she first lifts her leg high then smashes her ankle into the guy’s face. Then she wraps her thick thighs around the man and smothers him right into her cooch. Just as he stops thrashing, she lets a long and loud fart rip across the tent.

Edwina collapses in tears.

Darla chuckles as she extracts her legs from the dead guy. She pulls the hood of his black sweatshirt aside, and they both stare at him. This one is younger than the first but still scruffy and covered in blood.

“What is that on his forehead?”

“Smudged blood, I think. Wait, it’s a symbol.”

Darla leans close. Edwina is ready to strike if the guy so much as twitches. It’s like that in the movies; when you get close to the dead bad guy, he always pops his head up with an evil grin. If he does that now, he is going to get a fresh fist in the s
c
hnoz. Just one of the many skills taught at this ‘girls camp.’

“It’s a fucking pentagram.”

Screams from outside the tent interrupt their scrutiny. Edwina is on her feet as fast as a whip with Darla right behind her.

“Poor men.”

“Yep.”

“So what the fuck do we have here?” Marcel wears a skintight black leather dress and a no-shit-taking frown. She carries a whip in one hand and a knife in the other. Edwina feels a tightening in her stomach every time the statuesque woman looks at her. She has heard the stories of the big tent where women go to serve.

Marcel is pacing up and down a row of chairs. Her high heels put her over six feet tall, and she is pretty much the spitting image of a dominatrix. Her prisoners are far from the spitting image of willing slaves. They are crying and moaning, and one of the little fucks has even pissed
himself
.

“You mean to tell me that you came here to kill us?”

“Yes,” one of the men sobs. He, like the dead men, has a pentagram on his forehead, but now it is smeared, and snot is running down his face and he almost looks pathetic. He cries when she stops in front of him and slowly brings the knife up to his face, to the place between his eyes and then drags it ever so slowly down his nose, lips, chin and chest until she stops at his groin. She uses the knife lightly, but it leaves a thin slit where it passes.

The man is tied to a high-back chair, and someone had the good sense to strap a two-by-four behind his head so that he can’t move his neck. When Marcel moves out of his line of vision, his eyes flick back and forth at the ocean of angry women before him, but his pleas fall on deaf ears.

“Why?”

“We came to unleash he who will obliterate the sun. The spawn, Satan himself.”

“Satan?” she asks lightly.

“Yes, the light destroyer.”

“Know something, champ? You are a fucking idiot.” And she jams the knife home in his groin. Blood sprays out, and he screams with such violence that his voice goes hoarse, and when he drags in a breath to do it again he can’t. He can only whimper with his mouth wide open while his
life drains onto the wood floor. After a while, he stops twitching.

There are only a few left, and their interrogations follow much the same pattern. Ask a question, get pissed and kill the bastard. When she is done, there are nine bodies in chairs and not a one has breath left. The man who held out the longest begged and begged. Even when Marcel slit his throat, he forced his head down against the strain of the ropes and managed to keep the blood from gushing out. But his breathing became troubled as the plan backfired and blood pooled in his lungs.

The women have no survivors, but they do have an awful lot of info. They know where the dumbasses came from. They know what they planned—as ridiculous as it sounded. And they know where to find the rest of the fuckers in the cult. The Sons of Satan’s Reedeming Cock are about to get a wakeup call.

Later, Marcel gets the ladies together and gets them all worked up. This is something she is good at and the reason she is the leader.

“Ladies, they thought they could come up here and kill us in our sleep. They planned to rape and strangle us. How does that make you feel?”

Edwina gets a chill when the cries of outrage come back. Fists pump in the air and hurled shoes and flung rocks batter the corpses.

“I say we pay a visit to these wackos and teach them a lesson they won’t forget because we are going to shorten their lives!” She cracks the whip, and the girls come to their feet, ready to rain unholy terror on the cretins who brought this on themselves.

The quake is so small it could almost be mistaken for the thudding of the women’s enthusiastic feet, but Edwina knows better, having lived in earthquake country her entire life. It is the barest of shimmers at first, but it builds and rumbles. It feels like it is right beneath them. She stares at the floor and watches the blood draining between the slats of wood, dripping onto the solid ground underneath.

The shimmer goes on for a long time.

Antichrist Comes
a-
Callin’

Lorna Jean Swallows is having a shitty day. Rose from 212 stopped by earlier and asked if she could borrow some sugar, just a half cup. Lorna is used to the frequent requests and gave her some. The old bat stops by at least three times a week, and she is sick and goddamn tired of it.

So today she went off on a rant about how her friend should quit mooching off her all of the time. How she should plan ahead and keep stuff in her cupboard. Then she remembered that Rose is senile and can barely recall what she baked yesterday. She has been losing it for about a year now. Should get tested for Alzheimer’s, that bastard disease, but Rose can’t remember long enough to make the appointment.

Lorna has been knitting a little sweater for her dog, Buttchunk, for a few days while the programs play on television. His lazy English bulldog eyes roll around when she holds it against his side like he is saying, “If you dress me in that thing, I will crap in your shoes.” But she knows the old boy will put up with it; he has for many years.

It’s later in the day when, still knitting and with yarn in hand, she wanders down to Rose’s apartment. She wishes she could step outside for some fresh air, but the blazing sun over Las Vegas is an inferno that would send her panting to her air-conditioned room in about fifteen seconds.

She strolls past Reverend Danske with his pipe hanging out of his mouth. Damn thing hasn’t had tobacco in it in an age, but he sucks on it just the same. He offers her a fine day and she offers him a blowjob. He declines, as always. Too bad; she hears from her male friends that her dentureless mouth is like a fine slice of heaven.

The carpet has been freshly cleaned since Leonard Shelton went and had his little accident. Not much of an accident; he got himself one of those crazy spells and ran up the hallway with shit pouring out of his backside. Made the whole wing smell to high heaven.

The shit stink still permeates the hallway, she swears it does. They need to pull out the drapes and hang them outside for a day. Let the scent
of old Leonard’s crap filter out. But does anyone listen to her? No they do not, and if anyone in God’s waiting room knows how to get smells out of stuff, it i
s Lorna. She and Dan ran their bed and b
reakfast for almost thirty years before he keeled over from a massive coronary after taking up with cocaine at the ripe old age of eighty-one.

White walls, bright curtains and gray carpet.
The whole place looks like a hotel, but that is just fine with Lorna. If it looked old and run down, then she would have no part of it. She was always fond of nice things, and her place to die should be no different.

Shuffle step because her hips grind bone against bone, and sometimes it feels like chunks of glass have worked their way in there. But she makes do, just as she always has. She strolls past Ernie’s room. Six birds and counting, but no one can count all the bird shit in the little apartment. She knows that the administrator asked him to get rid of the birds because only one is allowed, but the great thing about being old as dirt, or so Lorna has reckoned, is that you can put on a dumb expression, nod sadly and forget that the conversation ever took place. And that is precisely what she is hoping Rose will do. Forget her harsh words from earlier.

She knocks on her friend’s door and calls out, “Rose? Love? Are you in there?” Her voice still has a good southern twang to it thanks to almost fifty years in Dallas. All those years in the same city and most of them with the same fine man. They had a good life that only got better when they became swingers. Her mother found out and told her she was the most sinful person she had ever known.

Lorna took that as a compliment.

“Rose!” She knocks again and the door swings open. But Rose doesn’t answer.

She walks in and tugs her glasses up from the string that hangs around her neck. The room is a mess, the floor a gritty expanse of spilled sugar. The dark space feels empty, but she knows Rose doesn’t leave at this time of day. She watches sitcom reruns and laughs even though she has seen them over and over.

Beside an overturned chair, Lorna spots a foot peeking around the corner from the kitchen. She doesn’t have to be a genius to guess that Rose fell out of the chair. And she needs no CSI team to tell her the foot isn’t moving.

She rounds the corner and peeks at the figure, knowing what she will see, knowing it is her friend, knowing she is barely strong enough to roll Rose over and see about CPR if she has to.
If it isn’t too late.
If the old bat isn’t stiff.
Stiffs are the worst.

Lorna touches her friend’s foot, but it is ice cold. She gets to her knees and follows the curve of Rose’s body. Knees hook around the hallway, and her torso is on the kitchen floor.