He was fine about letting Veronica in to watch, but if he showed her any favoritism, it might cause hard feelings within the group and he didn’t need that. Things were going too well… or at least, as far as he knew.
“Why don’t you let Ronny in to act as our representative?” suggested Joann, the tall black woman. She had a strong personality and she knew the other women would probably not object to her suggestion. Besides, Veronica’s relationship with Forrest was easily now the worst kept secret in the silo.
Forrest agreed. “Mike, it may not be a bad idea for you to watch too.”
They went inside, and the first thing Veronica saw on the monitor was Black Beard using a steel baton to bash in the skull of his captive, who was now sprawled facedown on the kitchen floor with his hands still tied behind his back.
“Oh, my God!” she said, turning away.
Black Beard then picked the dead man up and laid him across the kitchen table on his belly, cutting his hands free and slitting his coat up the back with a large Bowie knife. He wasted no time slicing into the man’s lower back.
“Excuse me,” Veronica said, pulling open the door and leaving the room. The moment she came out, the other women could see that she had just witnessed something ghastly.
“What did you see?” Tonya wanted to know.
Veronica looked at the children now gathered about, leaning to whisper into Erin’s ear: “Cannibals.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Erin muttered. “Okay, kids, come on. Let’s get back to school before Andie comes looking for us.”
She took the kids back to class, and Veronica went on to tell the rest of the women in the hall what she had seen. Back in Launch Control the men were still watching as Black Beard stood carving out the dead man’s liver, dropping it black and greasy-looking onto the countertop, where he cut it into portions and set them aside. When he was finished, he retrieved the frying pan from the floor and put it on the stove, laying parts of the liver into it and turning on the gas.
“He’s about to get pissed,” Ulrich said.
The flame burned for almost a full minute before going out. Then Black Beard fiddled with the knobs, realizing there was no more gas in the line. He smashed the chairs into pieces and left the kitchen.
Kane looked across at Forrest. “Captain, I request permission to go up there and blow this asshole’s brains out.”
“I wish we could,” Forrest said, leaving it at that.
By now the man wearing the camouflage jacket had moved the women into the living room and made them sit on the couch, where they huddled together for warmth. They looked alike, sisters perhaps, appearing to be in their early thirties, but with the grime on their faces, it was hard to tell. Black Beard spoke with his comrade, then went back into the kitchen, where he began building a fire in the sink with wood from the broken chairs.
“Those two women aren’t for food, you know. What are we going to do if these assholes rape them on camera?”
“Feel bad for them,” Forrest said. “If we go up and kill those two assholes, we may as well kill the women too. We sure as hell can’t bring them down here. God knows how sick they might be.”
Black Beard got a fire going and stood holding the frying pan over the flames.
“That’s gotta smell like holy hell,” Danzig said, seeing the smoke rising up from the pan.
They all watched as Black Beard stood cooking up the liver, taking a piece for himself. When he was finished, he piled the pieces onto a plate and carried it into the living room, where he sat down on the couch beside the women. His comrade grabbed a handful of the meat and stood eating ravenously. Black Beard then offered a piece to one of the women and she took a bite.
“Oh, Christ, she’s eating it!”
“What do you expect her to do? If she doesn’t, that bastard will torture her. They want those women alive, dude.”
“Let’s go up there and waste these dudes, man!”
“Look, we all knew this kind of thing was going to happen,” Forrest said peremptorily. “So soldier up!”
“What do you think about this shit, Doc?”
“I don’t know,” Michael said in amazement. “Though I guess it is fascinating in a horrifying kind of way.”
“I wonder how long before those women end up as food.”
“Well, I can tell you this much,” Michael said. “One of those two men is likely to end up as food before either of the women.”
They watched as the meal was ghoulishly devoured.
Black Beard left the room and dragged the dead man out into the backyard, butchering him much the way one would butcher a game animal, dumping the intestines and other organs in a pile. He then spent the next couple of hours cooking up the rest of the dead man’s flesh on the grill, using the bag of charcoal from the back porch. As he cooked the meat, he dropped it into a black trash bag he had taken from beneath the sink. When he was finished he came back into the house and took a container of salt from the bottom cupboard and poured all of it into the meat bag, shaking it around.
“Who left that salt up there?”
“Must’ve been up there when we bought the place.”
“Oh, shit. Look!”
Black Beard was grabbing one of the women by her hair and dragging her from the room.
“That’s caveman foreplay.”
“You’re sick.”
“There’s no use letting it get to you, man.”
Black Beard took the woman upstairs into one of the bedrooms, pulled down her ski pants and pushed her forward onto the bed with her hands still tied, her pale bottom showing. She made no attempt to escape or to resist as he unbuckled his pants and knelt on the bed behind her. He pumped for two minutes and then it was over.
“ ’Least he didn’t beat her.”
“Check out your man, Doc. He’s making his move!”
The camouflage man was sneaking up the stairs with his shotgun lowered. Riveted, Michael stood watching as Vasquez switched the camera feed to keep up with the man now creeping into the bedroom. Black Beard saw him and grabbed for the shotgun lying beside him on the bed but he wasn’t fast enough. His comrade blasted him in the face at close range, and most of his head vanished from the beard up.
The gore-spattered woman rolled off the edge of the bed to avoid being hit by the body as it fell over onto the mattress.
“Hooah!” Danzig blurted, and everyone laughed, everyone except Michael, who was simply shocked.
The camouflaged man got the woman to her feet and pulled her pants up, taking her downstairs where he pulled her pants right back down, along with those of the other woman, and over the next half hour he smoked Forrest’s cigarettes and took turns at the women on the couch, seemingly in hillbilly heaven. When he was done, he divided the man meat up between four different trash bags, tying them together in pairs and draping them around the women’s necks. Once he had satisfied himself that his idea was superior to that of his dead associate, he put the meat bags on the floor and took a dog chain from his rucksack, chaining the women together at the neck and locking it with a combination padlock. The other end of the chain he used to bind their ankles together, locking it in the same fashion with a separate padlock.
“Ain’t takin’ any chances, is he?”
Next, the man unbound their wrists, presumably to restore the circulation to their hands. He then went up upstairs to take the shells from Black Beard’s shotgun, along with the Bowie knife, collapsible baton, and some other items from the dead man’s pockets too small to identify. Shoving Black Beard’s body onto the floor, he stripped the bloodstained blankets from the bed and went back downstairs, where he curled up on the couch and went to sleep, leaving the women to shiver on the floor. Within thirty minutes it was too dark to see what was happening in the house, and ten minutes after that it was too dark to see anything outside of the house. The time was six P.M.