Last of the Ravagers, page 8
He straddled the demon and raised the box high over his head.
Then he slammed it down again.
And again.
Over and over until there was nothing left of Angelina’s head but a squishy, bloody, pulpy mess on the floor.
Panting heavily, Ned got shakily to his feet and tossed the metal box aside. It hit the floor with a clatter, its lid coming open as several syringes rolled out of it.
Billy shook his head and whistled. “Holy goddamn moly. I think the bitch is finally dead.”
Doc Richardson dropped to his knees and started sobbing.
THIRTEEN
Eleanor awoke alone by the crackling flames of the fire, which now felt too hot within the confines of the cave and in the aftermath of aggressive sexual coupling. Her body was covered in sweat and sticky, drying blood. As she dragged herself toward the sunlight beyond the cave entrance, she desired nothing more desperately than a good, cleansing bath. She felt drained and at the brink of total exhaustion. Tom’s horse was still waiting for her somewhere beyond the entrance to the cave. She could hear the animal softly whinnying, as if sensing her lethargic attempt to reach it.
This effort had nothing to do with regret over anything she’d done. There’d been no sudden swelling of remorse for knowingly standing by while her family was slaughtered, nor did she regret torturing and butchering Sally. All these things had occurred at the behest of her new master, for whom she still felt a deep and unswerving devotion. She would do anything he asked of her, no matter how perverse and disgusting.
Unlike her master, however, she was only human, and there was a limit to what her body could take. She was simply overwhelmed and depleted, in both body and mind. A period of rest and recuperation was needed. Though he was human only in appearance, surely the stranger must understand that.
She was reaching forward to claw at the cave floor again and drag herself a little closer to the entrance when she felt one of his big hands close around her right ankle. A soft, defeated whimper escaped her lips as he dragged her back deeper into the cave. He didn’t stop pulling her along the uneven, pitted ground until they were again within a few feet of the fire.
“You are not to leave without my permission.”
Eleanor sighed. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m just tired. I need to sleep. I need a bath.”
He grunted, letting go of her ankle. “You require replenishment.”
She grimaced as she turned her head to look at him. “Yes. Please. If I can’t leave, please let me sleep.”
“There is no time for that. Wait here.”
“Okay. Whatever you say.”
The stranger moved away from her, passing from her field of vision as he returned to the back of the cave. His blue-skinned minions were still back there and they started making excited chittering and grinding sounds at his approach. Though she knew the strange creatures wouldn’t hurt her without his permission, they nonetheless made her nervous. Their alienness triggered an involuntary sense of revulsion, something she would’ve felt even without knowledge of their murderous capabilities. They had no fear of normal men, of that much she was sure, but they both deeply feared and revered their master.
From the back of the cave came some loud cracking and popping sounds. At the same time, the chittering of the stranger’s minions grew louder and more high-pitched. They sounded like birds fighting over crumbs on the ground. In a few more seconds there came a final, louder pop. Then she heard the man’s footsteps again as returned to her.
He nudged her ass with his foot. “Sit up.”
Eleanor groaned tiredly, but did as she was told.
She frowned.
The popping and cracking sounds she’d heard were a product of the stranger removing Sally Frederickson’s head from her body with his bare hands. The stretched flesh of her throat had a gruesomely twisted look to it. The head dangled from the fingers of his right hand, which were entwined in the dead woman’s long dark hair.
The stranger sat across from Eleanor in a cross-legged position, their knees nearly touching. “You require a meal. One that will restore you to full vitality within moments of ingestion.”
Eleanor stared at the severed head clutched in his hands, frowning in confusion. “What, am I supposed to eat her face or something? How’s that supposed to revitalize me?”
The thought of it triggered a sick twinge in her guts. The reaction was an odd and unexpected one, considering she’d already taken multiple bites out of one of the dead woman’s kidneys after ripping it from her dying body moments earlier. That, however, had been in the heat of the moment, in the midst of a dark and thrilling dive into perverse revelry, with the stranger fucking her and telling her what to do. In those moments, she was completely in his thrall, incapable of feeling sickened by anything he required of her, but she was no longer in that state of depraved frenzy.
The stranger smirked. “Eating her face would not bring about the rejuvenation you require. Watch.”
He clutched Sally’s head tightly in his hands while pushing his thumbs into her eye sockets. Eleanor heard liquid popping noises as the eyeballs yielded to the intense pressure, bursting apart. Blood and other fluids oozed out around his thumbs. Once his thumbs were fully inside the sockets up to their top knuckles, he began pulling his hands in opposite directions. At first nothing happened as the stranger’s face became a mask of sneering concentration, but in a few more seconds Eleanor heard popping sounds again.
The man was cracking Sally’s head open like a gourd. Eleanor felt another of those little twinges in her gut, only this time the feeling was overridden by a deepening curiosity about what he had in mind. The cracking sounds got louder as he continued ripping Sally’s skull apart. As the process continued, the flesh covering the front of the skull began to stretch and tear apart like thin tissue paper.
Moments later, the two halves of Sally’s skull came fully apart and the stranger roared in hungry triumph, sounding more like a beast than a man. He scooped out a big handful of gooey brain matter from Sally’s cracked-open skull and shoveled some of it into his mouth, making snorting, hungry sounds as he chewed and swallowed.
Next he reached out to Eleanor, a big, heaping glop of brains held in his outstretched hand. “Eat.”
It was a simple command. Just one word. Easy to understand. And this was a man one should never even think of disobeying, not if one wished to go on living much longer.
Eleanor, feeling genuinely queasy now, hesitated anyway. “Um . . . ”
The stranger laughed, licking tiny bits of brain matter from his lips. “I understand. Even after all you have done today, after all the taboos you have transcended, this feels like one step too far, but trust me when I tell you you’ll never feel even a shadow of that loathing again after your first taste of this most uncommon of delicacies.”
Eleanor frowned, still not fully convinced. “Is that right?”
The stranger chuckled. “Oh, yes. Devouring the brain of someone you have killed conveys power and insight. You will feel stronger than you ever have before. And you will know your victim’s thoughts, everything they ever knew. When amplified by my power, there is no greater pathway to knowledge, no greater conduit of energy.” He stretched his hand a little closer and a few tiny morsels of brain slopped over his fingers and dripped to the cave floor. “Go on now. Eat.”
Despite her queasiness, Eleanor was officially intrigued. “I’ll know everything she thought? Really?”
The stranger nodded, his dark eyes twinkling with mischief in the dying light of the fire. “Yes. Really. As I already do.”
Eleanor let out a shuddery breath and tentatively reached out, dipping her slender fingers in the pile of gelatinous glop held in the stranger’s much larger hand. She experienced another moment of reflexive disgust, but she shoved aside the feeling and pushed a handful of brain matter into her mouth. The moment the large helping of it touched her tongue, she knew the stranger was once again right about everything. Never in her life had she tasted anything finer. She groaned in almost sexual ecstasy as her taste buds lit up. As the first bits of it slid down her gullet, she felt electrified, bursting with eager energy and a renewed and strengthened desire to give herself fully to her new master, with no hesitation or shame.
She flopped over and rolled about on the ground. Images, thoughts, and feelings that did not belong to her invaded her consciousness with the force of a tornado, a torrent of raw and unfiltered information that for a period of several moments overwhelmed and frightened her. This was the totality of everything Sally had ever been filling her up to the point where she feared it might overtake and obliterate her own identity. In addition, she felt the dead woman’s psychic essence flitting about in the midst of it all, filled with confusion and teetering on the edge of living again. This essence, Eleanor instinctively realized, was what people meant when they talked about the soul. Unanchored from its own body, however, the soul was an ephemeral thing. It required that strong connection with its birth body to remain in the earthly realm. Before long, Eleanor sensed the woman’s essence start to dissipate and drift away.
Then it was gone.
Eleanor’s eyes snapped open and she sighed heavily in relief. She sat up, feeling more alert than she could remember feeling in a long time, possibly ever, and suffused with so much strength and energy she felt capable of fighting mountain lions with her bare hands . . . and winning. Power coursed in her veins, crackled in her nerve-endings. She looked at her hands and flexed her fingers, feeling and reveling in a new and massively elevated capacity for brutal violence. Curling one hand into a fist, she felt that new strength gather and focus itself, eager for a target. In that moment, she felt fully capable of ramming that fist right through a man and ripping out his heart.
In the absence of a fresh victim to kill, she relaxed her fist and looked inwardly, delving into that section of her mind that now contained Sally’s thoughts and memories. This time she was able to examine it all in a more leisurely fashion. The information was already there. She accessed it simply by focusing.
As it turned out, the school teacher’s carnal interest in Eleanor was not a fleeting or impulsive thing fueled by the consumption of alcohol. Sally was a woman who liked women exclusively. She became smitten with Eleanor the first time they met and immediately began scheming potential methods of seduction. This despite being fully aware of Eleanor’s status as a devoted family woman and respected member of the community. Sally simply did not care about any of that, believing she sensed something in Eleanor that was just waiting to be awakened.
She succeeded in seducing Eleanor, which filled her with elation. This wondrous feeling was, unfortunately, followed by the shattering disappointment of rejection as the object of her intense desire took extreme measures to avoid ever being in her presence again. The repudiation destroyed Sally. The worst part of it was how she had to work so hard at hiding her pain from the citizens of Snakebite, an almost impossible thing that led to excessive drinking and suicidal thoughts. The teacher went to her death truly believing she was in love with Eleanor.
It was a strange thing, being in the grip of memories that were not her own. One could lose oneself in them if one wasn’t careful. Eleanor focused on the face of the stranger, who was watching her with a look of intense concentration and curiosity. In a few seconds, the illusion of being someone else faded and she was herself again, albeit not exactly the same as she’d been before.
A shiver went through her and she laughed softly. “That was . . . incredible. I felt . . . lost for a few minutes. Not myself.” She laughed again. “I can’t believe some of the things in Sally’s head. She really loved me. Also, she killed an ex-husband back east before fleeing to this desolate place. Never would’ve imagined anything so lurid in her background.”
The stranger nodded knowingly, smiling again as he licked slimy brain goo from his fingers. “Humans are full of surprises. The interesting ones, anyway. Devouring the brains of the dull-witted ones is less fulfilling.”
Eleanor’s brow furrowed as she thought about it. “That makes sense, I suppose, but I can’t help wondering . . . what are you? If not human, I mean. What makes you so powerful?”
The stranger shrugged. “The answer to your question is simple and complicated at the same time. Here in your world, I am called Doyle. In other places, I am called other things. Sometimes similar things. Sometimes not.”
Eleanor leaned to one side slightly and spent a few seconds staring at Doyle’s minions, who were quiet now and regarding her with an equal amount of curiosity.
She met Doyle’s gaze again. “Okay, so I know your name now. You still haven’t told me what you are. While I’m at it, what are they?”
She indicated the minions with a lift of her chin.
He clasped hands with her. “I am like you. A living creature. Flesh. Blood. Imbued with what your kind thinks of as a soul. But I am more than that. Something better. Something stronger. I’m from a different world, one that scarcely resembles this one, but to which it is nonetheless intimately connected. There I am like a god. In your world, I am a god. I am a harvester of souls, an annihilator of the flesh. I am the Lord of the Dead. Last of the Ravagers. I can raise dead things, reanimate them, and use them in any way I see fit. My minions, for instance.”
Eleanor’s confusion continued to deepen. “What about them?”
Doyle chuckled. “I am able to reconstitute the bodies of those I kill in any form that pleases or amuses me. The minions, the way they look . . . it is a creation of mine. They are former humans and other mortal beings from other worlds. All of them. Remade and bestowed with a new purpose.”
Upon hearing this revelation, Eleanor felt distaste and fascination in equal measures. She had no reason to doubt anything Doyle was telling her, not after all the verifiably real dark wonders he’d exposed her to so far.
“And what is that purpose?”
Doyle kissed the back of one of her hands. “Isn’t it obvious by now, my queen? They serve as an advance guard in my army of the dead.”
Eleanor was on the verge of continuing to pursue the same line of questioning when what he’d said fully registered.
“Hold on . . . did you just call me your queen?”
He pulled her into his arms and she felt his once again rigid cock prod at her belly. “I did. Every king needs a loyal queen to serve at his side. Soon we will ride into glory together. But first . . . ”
Eleanor smiled. “Yes. First.”
She climbed atop him and soon screams reverberated in the cave again.
FOURTEEN
Less than an hour after her encounter with the bounty hunter, Charlotte Blanchard decided she wanted to go outside and get some fresh air, so she went out to the saloon’s porch. It was around half past noon and there weren’t many people out and about. A few buildings down on the other side of the street, two men came out of the hardware store carrying either end of a heavy wooden crate. They loaded the crate into the back of a wagon and shook hands.
She recognized the leaner of the two men. He was Jacob Montgomery, owner of the hardware store and a married man. She didn’t know much about Montgomery’s wife, Kathy, but she felt sorry for the woman, doubting she derived much satisfaction from her husband’s unusually tiny cock. Jacob had paid for Charlotte’s company on a few occasions and always had difficulty getting the thing inside her. The difficulty wasn’t a matter of arousal. He got hard with no problem. His little stub of a penis, however, was rarely able to penetrate her deeply enough to matter. It had to be embarrassing for the man, but that didn’t stop him from trying.
Sensing scrutiny from somewhere, he craned his head around until he saw her standing outside the saloon. She smiled and raised a hand in a silent greeting, but he quickly glanced away, murmured some parting words to his customer, and hurried back into the hardware store. The customer unhitched his mules from the post outside the store, climbed up onto the riding bench, and rode away.
Once the wagon was out of sight, Charlotte descended the porch steps to the dusty street. She was acting out of a combination of boredom and an intuitive sense that with her time in this nowhere town growing short there might be something to be gained by pressuring Jacob. Ordinarily she’d never think of putting the screws to any of Snakebite’s relatively upstanding citizens. There’d be hell to pay if word of it ever got back to Miss Agatha, madam of the girls who worked at the saloon. She’d be cut loose from the Last Chance and possibly even thrown in jail on trumped-up charges, ones that wouldn’t quite reveal the true nature of her offense.
As she headed in the direction of that hardware store, she became aware of some hollering emerging from the building across the street from the saloon. She paid this little mind. That doctor and barber were always going at each other and their squabbling often got loud and heated. This was just more of the usual, as far as she was concerned. Certainly nothing to be alarmed about.
She continued on down the street and, in another few moments, entered the hardware store. Inside were neat rows of shelving with various types of tools and items for the home arranged in an orderly fashion. In the back was a large pile of lumber and a table for custom cutting of the lumber, which was often purchased in large quantities by homesteaders who built their own barns and houses outside of town.
Jacob was behind the counter at the front of the store. He was examining entries in a ledger, a frown of concentration on his face when she came through the door. He grimaced when he saw her. “What are you doing here?”
Charlotte pooched out her bottom lip in a look of mock offense. “Jakey, darling, I’m hurt. Is that any way to talk to a woman you’ve been intimate with so many times? I had you figured for more of a gentleman than that.”
