"Yeah, well…" Clete was indecisive and said, "Let's compromise. Half-way between yours and mine."
Rodney nodded eagerly, and turned back toward his wife. "Come on…" He looked all around. "Where's Tanya?"
Clete said, "Fuck Tanya, let's go," and he set off in the direction he thought they should go.
The wrong direction.
When she had heard the gunshot, Tanya had darted into the bushes and set off in her own direction. She thought she knew where they were, and she certainly wasn't going to lead them to her dogs. She also feared that her dear friend DesirЋe was in danger. The shot had sounded a long way off. She only hoped she would be in time.
The possibilities raised the hair on the back of her neck. Priscilla takes DesirЋe into the hills. Next they hear a single gunshot. Were they shooting at the dogs? If so, why only one shot? If not, at whom was the bullet fired?
Billy came around a curve in the dirt road and swerved to avoid a BMW that had gone into the ditch.
"Who was that?" Billy asked, pressing the accelerator down harder.
"I think it was Denning," Sam said, "but I'm not sure. Looks like he spun out in the dust."
"Did he see us?"
"I don't know. Looked to me like he was looking under the tires, but I don't know." Sam looked at his friend, wondering what he was planning. "Are you going to stop and help him?"
"Are you kidding?"
"But you can't do anything now. We've got to assume Denning knows we're here, and then there's the two people with Clete. What about them?"
"We'll take 'em out," Billy said, his eyes darting from the rearview mirror, to the road, to Sam's face. "Tired of waitin' man. They're all the enemy. We'll take 'em out. Clete, Denning, the bitches."
"Billy!" Sam shouted, aghast. "We can't take anyone out today, don't you understand? They'll hang us high, man. We can't kill all these people around here. We'll never cover our tracks."
"Fuck 'em, Sam, we're gonna do it. Just give me a clear shot at the black bastard. I'll wilt that big pecker for good."
Sam was terrified. Being with Billy in his state of mental instability was like being in a whirlpool, getting sucked toward the center and down to the bottom. The young man's mind was gone, and Sam wanted out. But something in him told him to stay with Billy and stop him from killing everyone. Clete, well, he deserved it, but the reporter and his wife had nothing to do with it. And why was Mark Denning up here as well? They couldn't shoot him. They would be running all the rest of their lives.
Running until they were caught and executed.
"Billy, Billy, Billy," Sam said. "Let's go back. Right now it's all wrong."
"No fuckin' way, Sammy boy. No fuckin' way. We're goin' all the way today."
Sam closed his eyes. Billy was taking him right into the jaws of fate, and nothing would stop him.
By the time Sam and Billy had gone by, it was too late to stop them. Mark got up from his inspection of the position of his right front wheel and cursed heartily. If he had only driven a bit slower and more carefully, he wouldn't be immobilized right now. Now he was afoot, unless someone came along by chance with the gear to pull him out.
Mark was more than a little worried now. The haste with which the three other vehicles were traveling gave him a definite feeling of impending disaster. Why had Priscilla and DesirЋe been together? Why was Clete following them, and the third car, why was it going so fast bringing up the rear?
Mark took off walking up the road in wake of the other three cars. Whatever was going on, he might get there in time to see the aftermath, which, he feared more and more, would be horrible. And what of his dear, sweet, misunderstood DesirЋe now?
At that moment, DesirЋe let her T-shirt fall to the ground. She looked up at Priscilla, and then diffidently followed with her bra, liberating her big, round breasts.
"Go on, slut," said the girl in the tree. "Get those pants off. Everything, I said. Jeans, socks, panties, tampons, whatever."
The blonde peeled off her jeans, and then tearfully removed her thin panties. "No tampons."
"Good," Priscilla said. She looked at the advancing dogs, who all kept their heads erect, not dropped low like skulking beasts, but lifted high in fearless defiance. She saw DesirЋe's apprehension and said, "Don't worry, slut. I'm sure you'll find a way to handle them. Now, I want you to rub your pussy, real good, get it nice and juicy." She brandished the gun. "Dez. I'm getting impatient."
The angel-faced blonde thought she would die of shame. Her cheeks were red as tomatoes, and then she looked behind herself at the dogs. They were approaching slowly. They were huge animals, far outsized for their breed, with a wolf-like quality she couldn't isolate, but they were distinctly feral. They didn't seem to be anyone's pets, though she knew that one of them had probably been Liz's pet Lobo. She remembered a few months ago, after Nancy Pace had been raped in that same vacant house that she herself had been… What was the word? Raped, seduced, coerced?
She remembered what Liz had said about Lobo when he got to a woman, remembered running from the house in horror. Things were beginning to come back to her now, and she was recalling other things now, and her straining intellect would have been able to isolate them if it had not been filled with terror and imagined scenes of herself being torn apart by four sets of savage jaws.
"Go on, Dez," Priscilla insisted. "Stroke that pussy."
DesirЋe's hands trembled as they moved down her creamy, unblemished belly to the thick, silken patch of butterscotch hair covering the tender pillows of her labia. She moved her finger into the slit, and found her clitoris, but she was so terrified that she failed to feel any of the arousal that Priscilla thought she would. She closed her eyes and tried harder, but the harder she tried to feel, the less she felt.
However, Lobo remembered her scent and approached her from the front as the others crowded around. His nose nuzzled at her honey-colored pelt and into the split between them, but her legs were so tightly closed, his tongue could not reach the sensitive well of her sex. With a bit of impatience, he nudged her harder, unbalancing her, and she had to quickly widen her stance to maintain herself upright, her thighs parting enough for access while her hands automatically reached out beside her and found support on the necks of two of the others. Lobo's soft, wet tongue whipped out and underneath her and swiped her center from anus to clitoris.
DesirЋe cried out, half in terror and half in surprise. This was awful, so awful, to be licked between the legs by a dog, fully in front of her gloating enemy Priscilla, and now, one of the animals behind her had begun licking as well, into the cleft of her buttocks and the moistening slit of her vagina. Two tongues, lashing ceaselessly between her legs. The feelings were strange, but not so much different than what the two strangers had done to her in the Buchanan mansion.
Oh! Ooooooooh! Felt strange, very strange! Felt good! Felt good? How could it feel good? It was wrong. Perverted and evil. But it did, it felt good.
She felt herself losing her balance again with the feelings that were making her weak in the knees and she set her feet wider apart again, giving the dogs yet better access to her feminine core. Looking down through eyes growing ever yet blurry, she saw the stainless-steel chain around the dog's neck. It was Lobo, and looking down at him as his tongue laved her vulva brought a forgotten image back to her consciousness. She knew this animal, this dog. This Lobo. He had done this before – to her. She remembered his licking her, stirring up feelings once, no twice before. Purely animal feelings, divorced from her mind and morality, merely brought up by the flesh of the animal's tongue stroking across the passive, excitable flesh of her clitoris and vaginal lips.