There was no sound. Fat Joey could see the grit on Charlie’s filthy floors puffing out with each ragged breath he took, but he couldn’t hear even that. It was as though what he was seeing was so awful, his eyes needed to borrow fuel from his ears to process it all.
The Dark Man bent Juicer double, caught him by the high collar of his jacket, and ripped the back of his head off with a brittle seashell-snap. Juicer’s body convulsed, and Juicer’s eyes went wide. Juicer wriggled, fast at first, and then slower as the Dark Man dropped him and held up the chunk of Juicer’s skull and brain and hair.
Sound exploded back into the room. Tape-muffled screams and the sobbing of the bar whores assaulted Joey’s senses, but he couldn’t focus in on them. Dimly, the thought came to him that even if he weren’t taped up, he wouldn’t be able to run. He couldn’t even close his eyes. He could do nothing but watch.
The Dark Man returned to his table and sat, pulling out another pen-like device, a little thicker than the first. He used it to extract something that looked a little like the pink eraser off a new pencil. The Dark Man capped the device and waited, looking over his females again, until something beeped. Then he uncapped the pen-thing, ejected a gummy-looking, pink raison onto the floor and turned his eyes on Ross.
Ross was shrieking behind his duct-tape gag, and when the Dark Man stood up again, Ross tried to caterpillar himself across the floor to the door. The Dark Man slowed his step, keeping pace beside him until he had reached the exit. There he leaned against the wall and watched Ross struggle to raise up enough to rub his jaw on the doorknob in futile effort to open it.
He chuckled, sighed, and then took Ross by the shirt and dragged him easily back to the center table. The Dark Man faced a couple of chairs together and dropped Ross into one of them. He sat down in the other, leaned back, propped one arm causally on Dawg’s dead back and smiled.
“Yes,” he murmured. Fat Joey could see the Dark Man’s eyes like empty sockets, and teeth, teeth like a wolf. “I saw you. I saw you put your hands on my Raven. I saw you fuck her mouth. I saw you fuck her tits. I saw you piss in her hair just to hear your dead commander laugh.”
The Dark Man raised Dawg’s diminished head and waggled it at Ross. Thick blood poured down onto the table and splashed out over the road brother’s legs. The Dark Man smiled again. “I think he’s through laughing.”
Ross was gibbering behind his gag and after a moment’s savored contemplation, the Dark Man reached out one claw and punched a hole in it so he could speak.
“Please, mister…mister, I’m real sorry.”
The Dark Man was nodding, almost with sympathy. “You know, I think you are, at that.” Then he reached across, seized Ross by his hair, bent him forward and cracked his skull open.
A part of Ross’s brain came away with the knobby hunk of skull and that was bad. The scream shrieking high only to lower into drooling bubbles was worse. Much worse.
The Dark Man sat back, hooking his device into the yellowish ropes of matter clinging to bone, and extracted whatever he was after. The Dark Man waited as it hummed, eyeing his female captives, until it beeped at him. He depressed a button so the device spat out the used bit of pink tissue, then flicked his wrist to bring out a glass ampule filled with pale liquid. He set this in his pack and reloaded his device with an empty vial. When he stood up again, the Dark Man’s eyes came to rest on Fat Joey.
He shook his head hard, trying to project his sincerity, his fucking reason, to this Devil in a black coat, but even if he hadn’t been bound, he couldn’t have run. His whole body felt like the bones had dropped out of it. He felt like he was dead already.
The Dark Man came for him, smiling that half-sided, easy-going smile. He hunkered down and extended that awful clawed hand, punching through Fat Joey’s gag with a tolerant air.
“I never touched her,” Fat Joey said, the words tumbling out as though sprayed from a hose. “I never touched her, not once, I never did.”
The Dark Man was nodding, and Fat Joey felt hope, thin and fragile, trying to find a gripping place in his heart. “I know you didn’t,” the Dark Man said, and suddenly showed his sharp teeth in a demon’s smile. “That just means I kill you fast.”
Chapter Seventeen
Raven sat on the edge of a booth table, her legs dangling off the floor and hands clasped between her tightly-together knees. She kept catching her reflection in the window and it bothered her. She looked like a delinquent child outside the principal’s office, one that had finally had all the rebellion scared out of her.
She was watching Kane work his little lab. He’d filled his fourth ampule and stopped there, with four bikers and the women still to go. Of the women, he’d killed only one outright, the one Raven’d had to go down on, tasting sour sex and curdled cum and the reeking meat of her until she thought she’d pass out and die. Now the woman was dead, piled with the others behind the bar.
Twice, someone new had come to the bar. Both times, Kane had watched them through the window, and then showed them his gun when they opened the door and ordered them to lie down. Both times, the bikers had tried to reach for weapons and had their head air-conditioned for their trouble. They were also behind the bar.
The sun was going down. Raven watched the sky change color through the grimy window over Kane’s broad shoulders. She tried not to see her reflection in the glass. It was getting harder and harder to recognize herself. Better to look at Kane.
He had glanced back at her now three times and finally he said, “This is going to take a while. Come and blow me and then get some sleep.”
Raven slid off the table, looking over the captive women as she passed them. Kane noticed the path of her eyes and chuckled, putting his tools aside and turning in his chair to open his thighs to her.
“I’m going to scan them,” he said dryly. “But I won’t hold my breath while I do. If one of them is clean—” He snorted to show the likelihood of this. “—or can be cleaned, I can let you rest for what remains of your…” He sought the word, scowling.
“Period,” she supplied, still unsure.
“But if they all have to die…” He shrugged. “Your mouth is almost as good as a fuck. Better in some ways.”
“You’re not—” She tried to clamp down on the rest of that, but he looked at her sharply and she reluctantly finished. “Not going to replace me?”
“Replace you,” he stated, and cracked a thin smile while she hunted for a way to translate that. “Why would I do that? I just got you the way I want you.” He trailed his eyes with relish down her naked breasts to her skirt, glanced dismissively at the other women, and then back at her, sliding one hand up her thigh to hook a claw through her clit ring and tug lightly. “If I could wait…what? Five days?”
“Four or five.”
“Then I would.” He tugged again, then released her and rubbed one palm restlessly over the taut bulge his clothes restrained. “But I’m not going to wait if I don’t have to. Not if I can throw a fuck into one of these ichuta’an until I can have you again. And have you the way you are.” He cupped her sex again, hungrily staring as though he could see right through her skirt to her pussy and admire it, ringed all around with steel. “The way you are,” he murmured. “The way I made you.”