There was something she wanted him to understand. She kept pounding the bone, offering him the toothy grin of baboon.
Maddie Sinclair had been an attractive woman before this happened to her. Yes, elitist and pompous, but also the sort of women men watched, the penis having no true shame. She was not thin and willowy like some TV spokesmodel, but shorter, hips and ass well-rounded, breasts quite large, long hair just this side of bronze and large liquid black eyes. Sexy. That was the word for it. She had it and she carried it well and that’s all there was to it.
But now… good God.
Naked and painted white, that brilliant red war paint at her face and breasts and loins, the streaks of dried blood and filth mottling her. Her hair hung in her face like strands of wet straw, her mouth hooked into a contorted, evil funhouse sort of leer. And those eyes—could you really call them eyes?—wicked crevices peering into a pestilent sewer blackness.
She edged in closer, slapped the ball joint of the bone in her palm.
The way she smiled was not the way human beings smiled. It was the lurid, carven grin of a crocodile. A smile of teeth and bone-crushing appetite. She glided forward on hands and knees, the stench of her enough to put Louis’ stomach in his throat. Her breath was sharp smelling like rat poison.
She had him and there was no way out.
Despite the crawling beast she was, the craven leer in her eyes was unmistakable. She did not want to make love, hell no, she wanted to screw, to fuck. And even that was far too dignified for a rodent like her. She wanted to rut like hogs in the mud and breed like wolves in the brush and apes in the trees. Rutting season. She was in heat and she wanted what he had.
And if he didn’t give it?
He knew the answer to that. The ones that had refused were hanging from the rafters, salted, boiled, tanned, or bubbling away in pots.
Maddie’s mouth was open and he could see her tongue worming in there like a maggot considering blackened meat. She crept closer, her breasts swinging from side to side like the teats of a cow. Louis could feel the heat coming off her. It was feverish, diseased, sickening. Not the sort of heat you associated with a human body, but maybe a cooling engine block.
He tried to squirm away from her and she did not like that.
She dove on top of him, grabbed him by the ears like a school bully and smacked his head off the hardpack of the floor five or six times. She was an absolute horror close like that… the greasy feel of her, the loose boneless gyrations of her body, the molten heat rising from her pores, and worse, oh God yes, the smell of her which was like dirty straw in a monkey cage. A unique and revolting effluvium of urine, scabby hides, and simian drainage.
Don’t throw up, Louis. Jesus Christ, don’t you dare do that.
She grinned down at him with that obscene drooling blow-hole of a mouth and he almost lost it right there. Some things were not meant to smile and she was one of them.
She ran her hands all over him, letting her fingers do the walking while he trembled at her touch and his stomach contents bubbled up the back of his throat. There was no escape, that was the most horrifying and demeaning part of it all. She groped his balls and squeezed his legs. She slapped his chest and gripped his shoulders while she slapped her thighs against him until he felt that his full bladder would burst. She pressed her fetid smelling corpse-face into his own, nibbled his throat and covered him with sloppy kisses, licked him and tasted him with a tongue that was coarse and gritty like that of cat. And when she pulled away, she left a rope of spit that broke wetly against his cheek.
The entire thing was not so much violation or suggested rape, but more like being a piece of meat: seasoned and tenderized, made ready for the stewpot.
Or maybe the marriage bed in this case.
She crawled away and he saw just how filthy her ass was. She turned, saw him looking at her, grinned almost childishly and spread her legs apart. She jabbed a thumb up inside herself and pushed it in and out and there was no mistaking what she had in mind.
Louis pissed right down his leg.
He had never felt so unclean in his life, contaminated by her touch, her smell, his own helplessness.
She went over to the fire.
She had a bowl in her hand.
She slit a few stitches of the gut bag and pried it open. The hot stink that came out was meaty and blood-smelling. She scooped something out of there with her fingers and brought the bowl to him. She wanted to feed him. Steam rose off the bowl, the juice inside congealed and fatty, the meat itself flabby and pale. He could not say what it was… a bit of lung? A strip of heart meat? A slice of kidney?
He drew away from it.
She opened her mouth with a sawtoothed grin and snapped her jaws shut. It was all so simple in her mind: meat was meat. No inhibitions against cannibalism, against feeding on your own kind, absolutely no cultural taboos because they had not yet been invented at her level of psychological evolution.
She shoved the bowl in his face and some of the juice spattered him, running down his cheek. It smelled like hot vomit.
He recoiled.
She stuck the bowl in his face again and he butted it out of her hands with his head. It flopped to the floor, right into the dirt. She made an enraged growling sound, snapping up a piece of meat and shoving it in his face.
I won’t.
I will not eat that, you foul fucking cunt, and I don’t care what you do to me but I will not eat human meat. So just… piss… right… off.
She saw the defiance in his eyes and jumped on him, scratched ruts in his face with her nails. If he didn’t want the offered meat, then he must want something else. She grabbed his pants and fought with the zipper while he fought against her. It was no use. Hands tied, legs tied, he was about as offensive as a wriggling worm. She yanked his pants down and he could feel himself shrivel to nothing. She brought her face down there, sniffing his balls. She jabbed her fingers into them, making him jerk with pain, but she kept right on doing it like some confused bratty child who did not comprehend why her Jack-in-the-Box just wasn’t working.
Then she straddled him again.
Rubbing herself against him while her daughters watched in breathless fascination. She stuck her breasts in his face, leaving white streaks on his cheeks. She kissed him, licked him, melted her rancid body into him. And when she slid her cankerous tongue into his mouth, he did the only thing he could.
He bit down on it until he drew blood…
79
When Macy pulled herself off the floor, she was aware of the pain thrumming through her body, but it was ancillary, removed, like the beat of her heart and the pulsing of her muscles it was part of her identity now. She was grimy from dirty hands, lustrous with grease-fat. A trickle of blood ran down the inside of one leg, it was crusted over breasts and belly, reddening her lips and smeared over her chin. Her hair hung in filthy strands over her face.
They had ringed her in, the clan.
Facing her was another girl, older than she. Like Macy she was naked though carefully painted with black and white stripes. Her hair was dirty, though a lustrous gold.
The girl hissed through clenched teeth.
Macy steeled herself.
Her eyes, go for eyes, then her throat.
The girl backed away, seemed almost submissive and when Macy let her guard down for that one instant, she charged. She leaped three feet and hit Macy square in the face, then hit her in the head and gave her another jab to the chin. Macy was overwhelmed, seeing stars and funny lights in her head. She folded up and the girl pounded on the back of her skull.