I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) (24 page)

“Yeah, I was right,” said Bowie. “Look at
this bunch of cunts.”

“Make room for the master,” a voice in the
dark hissed. Lein’s voice.

Madison gasped as a tall, cloaked form
stepped into the torchlight.

“And look at the size of this one,
Maddy…”

Gossitch knew what it was as soon as it
appeared. The vampire from the trailer. The one that somehow
managed to walk around in the daytime.

“Well, ain’t he an especially ugly looking
motherfucker.” Bowie laughed. “But not as ugly as his little
suntanned bitch over there. You should have heard him, Maddy, when
he got stuck out the window. Real
Wizard
of
Oz
shit,
Oh
nooooo
,
I’m
melting
,
I’m
—”

A chain dropped around Bowie’s throat and
pulled his head back. Gossitch craned his neck and could see a
woman in a leather trench coat and a nun’s wimple pulling back on
the chain. The chain was attached to a sickle of some kind.

Bowie sputtered and choked, his body
straining against its bonds. The chairs were secured to the
ground.

Gossitch listened to Bowie being strangled
and wondered why they had left his gag in place. What could he have
said anyway?

Images flashed through Bowie’s brain as it
was starved of oxygen. His mother in her kitchen. Leroi on the
window sill, swinging his tail. His brother, Billy, smiling, young
and strong.

“Enough.” The voice was authoritative and the
bride immediately removed the chain from Bowie’s throat. Bowie
leaned forward and gasped for breath, his face purple. The woman
stepped around to where Bowie could see her.

“Oh fuck honey.” His voice was hoarse. “Why’d
you stop? I didn’t cum yet.”

The dark Lord Rainford stepped into the
circle of light. The other vampires and humans took a step back in
fear and deference. Only the Albanian stood his ground.

“I will remind you all,” Rainford spoke to
those gathered. “There is but one master present in this
company.”

As he said this he looked into the shadows
cloaking Kreshnik’s face under the boonie hat. If the thing
understood a word he said it did not acknowledge him. Lein, who had
announced Kreshnik, looked sufficiently cowed.

Rainford turned his attention to the
humans.

“Your ends,” he declared, “can be fast, or
they can be drawn out. But your ends are merely incidental. They
mean little to me, as did your lives. Answer me what I ask, and I
will make sure your final moments are allotted expeditiously.”

Gossitch forced himself to remain cool. If
the tall one was some kind of mutant vampire he’d never heard of
before, this thing before them was a creature of legend.

“Oh, this one talks with big words,
Maddy…”

“What do you want?” Madison asked, the terror
evident in his voice.

“What do you think they want, Maddy?” shot
Bowie, his rancor aimed at the assembly. “They want to suck my
cock.” He blew a kiss at Kreshnik. “Don’t you, honey?”

“That one dies slowly, master,” Shane
begged.

“I want…” Rainford paused between words, “the
one…you call…Boone.”

Gossitch breathed a sigh of relief. They
didn’t have the kid.

“And I want to fuck Pam Anderson!” shouted
Bowie. “But that don’t mean its gonna happen, does it?”

Rainford gestured with a hand and sat down in
his chair, the Albanian on his left. Dozens of eyes pierced the
dark behind them.

The three warrior nuns stepped into the space
between Rainford and the humans. As one they shrugged out of their
trench coats.

“Shit yeah, Maddy.” Bowie didn’t sound
scared. “Now
that’s
what I’m talking about.”

The women wore wimples on their heads and
latex S&M dominatrix gear cut out around the breasts. Their
nipples were pierced and they wore thigh-high, stiletto heeled
leather boots. One wore a scabbered katana on her back. Another
tapped the flat blade of a
sai
on her open palm. The third
wore a clawed fighting glove.

Rainford settled one leg over the other and
when he was comfortable spoke to the gagged man in the middle.
“Understand I, for one, have no stomach for this. But the children
must play…”

The wimple-clad women moved as one to
Bowie—

“Me first then, dear? How swee—”

–one drawing his head back with the katana’s
scabbard, another gripping him on either side of his head, the
third hovering over his face with a
sai
.

“Ahh, fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Bowie cried
out as the sai-wielding woman’s arms made sawing movements.

“What are you doing to him?” demanded
Madison, terrified. “Stop it! Stop—”

Bowie alternated between yelling and
laughing.

Gossitch looked across at the vampire in the
chair. The thing was watching
him
.

Bowie was making a noise that sounded like a
growl and then became a curse.

“Fuck these skanky whores, Maddy. Fuck ‘em,
cunts! Shit…”

The women stepped away from Bowie. His face
was covered in blood and an eye was missing.

One of the women held Bowie’s eyeball up for
the crowd to see and there was a feint murmur of approval and
excitement.

“Sons of bitches.” Bowie’s voice, hoarse and
weaker, was no less belligerent. “Cunts.”

“Show him his face,” said Lein.

Shane thrust a large, framed mirror at
Bowie’s face with both hands. Bowie looked at himself in the
mirror. If what he saw or felt gave him pause he made no indication
of it. “I’m still a gorgeous bastard.” He looked past the mirror
and Shane to the woman who had taken his eye. “You know you want to
fuck me.”

Though his arms were bound to the arm rests
like Madison’s and Gossitch’s, Bowie had managed to turn his hand
sideways and pointed a middle finger at the woman.

“You too, you aristocratic fuck…” he spat at
Rainford.

The women moved back in, kneeling in front of
Bowie.

“Oh fuck now,” he muttered as they pried his
hand open. “Watch what they’re going to do to me now, Maddy, these
fucking—” His words were cut off with the intake of his breath as
the razor-sharp claws of the one woman’s fighting glove clipped
Bowie’s middle finger off at the second knuckle.

“Shit, that hurts! Freddy Kruger bitch
cunt.”

One of the women put the stump of Bowie’s
digit in her mouth and sucked greedily until a line of his blood
ran down her pale face.

“Gossitch!” Madison cried. “For Christ’s
sake, Gossitch, we gotta…”

The woman turned and kissed another on her
mouth, sharing Bowie’s blood. The third woman gently caressed the
first’s face, turning it up to her, lapping up the blood from her
face.

“If my ma could see me now…”

There was a rumbling in the room as the men
and women who watched grew excited. A few of the men were touching
themselves through the outside of their pants. The Albanian stood
silently while Rainford eyed Gossitch.

“Hey cuz, check it out.” Joey nodded his head
towards the two giants at the squat rack.

The crash as Father Mark racked the Olympic
bar in the squat rack competed with the Godsmack blasting out of
the gym’s speakers.

“How many wheels he got on there?” Mossimo
tried to count the number of forty five plates on each side of the
bar without looking like he was counting the forty five pound
plates on each side of the bar.

“Five.”

“He just got fifteen reps with that.”

“That’s crazy, cuz. Motherfucker’s
strong.”

“Shouldn’t talk about a priest like
that.”

“Oh yeah…look at this shit.”

Boone slapped another forty five on one side
of the bar. Father Mark, bent over with his palms flat on his
thighs and breathing heavily, nodded. He stood and slipped another
plate off the closest weight tree, slid it home on the other end of
the bar.

Boone said something to Father Mark that the
boys couldn’t hear. The priest reached back and slapped Boone
across the face.

“Oh shit…” breathed Mossimo.

Boone shook his head and got under the bar.
He looked insane.

Madison wailed in agony as the sai pierced
his neck.

“Fuck ‘em, Maddy,” screamed Bowie, three
fingers missing from his hand. “You hear me, Maddy? Fuck ‘em,
man!”

A warrior nun, her pale face already stained
with Bowie’s blood, leaned in and affixed her lips to Madison’s
neck, greedily gulping down the blood that streamed from him.

“Oh fuck, Bowie.” Madison blubbered. “Oh
fuck, Gossitch…”

“Shut up, Maddy,” roared Bowie. “You hear me?
Shut up! Don’t give them the fucking satisfaction, the fucking
cunts. Man the fuck up!”

“Bowie…Bowie…”

The woman pressed her finger over the wound
in Madison’s neck, staunching the blood. A second woman leaned in,
and as the first removed her finger from the hole, she fastened her
greedy mouth to his neck. Madison cried out again and sobbed.

“Man up, Maddy…Listen to me, Maddy…”

If Gossitch could have, he would have ripped
himself out of the chair and killed each and every one of these
beasts with his bare hands. But he couldn’t move. Instead, as
Madison’s cries rose and fell, he locked his gaze on the thing
seated across from him. It looked back at him with a mix of boredom
and disinterest.

“Maddy! Listen to me! Fuck these fucks. Man
the fuck up, Maddy!”

The third woman now drank hungrily from
Madison’s neck.

“Die like a man, Maddy. Be quiet, kid. It’ll
all be over soon…”

Madison had stopped weeping.

“You can do it, Maddy, come on. Look at me,
kid.” The light from the flame reflected off Bowie’s blood slicked
face and his one good eye. “They took my eye out of my face,
Maddy.”

Madison was alive but quiet.

“Good, kid. The hell with these cunts,
right?”

Madison didn’t make a sound as the
sai
cut him again, opening a fresh wound on the other side of his
throat. Shane attached its marred face there while the women traded
places.

“Fuck them, Maddy. Fuck ‘em all…”

“Get up, B!” Father Mark was screaming
somewhere in the universe. “Get the fuck up!”

The bar was bent over Boone’s back, seven
plates on each side. Six hundred and thirty pounds plus the Olympic
bar. Six seventy five.

He was in the hole, his thighs below parallel
with all that weight crushing down on him. His breath was coming in
short, ragged gasps.

He pushed through the soles of his feet with
everything he had and as his quads straightened they quavered,
cramping, suffused with blood and lactic acid, screaming at him. He
churned the rep out like a machine and stood momentarily at the
top, his legs not quite locked out, saving his knees.

He could hear music from the stereo
again.

“Three!” Father Mark screamed behind him.
“One more, B. You got one more!”

Boone wasn’t thinking coherently. It was war.
Gravity wanted to drive him into the floor.

He grunted, exhaling, and as he lowered
himself and the load bearing down into his shoulders, he sucked in
a breath, ready for battle.

Madison had bled out and slumped lifeless,
still fastened to the chair.

“You like what we did to your friend?” Shane
wiped Madison’s blood from its mouth with the back of its hand.
“Cause you’re next…”

“Good,” said Bowie. “Fuck you. Come on
then!”

One of the warrior nuns took Shane’s hand in
her own and lapped at the blood there.

Another approached Bowie, brandishing the two
sai
.

“Yeah, come on, you cunt…”

The look in Bowie’s remaining eye was one of
anger.

“Shit yeah, you disgusting skank…”

She sat down, straddling his thighs, leaning
in to his face, grasping the sides of his head with her hands,
holding it steady.

“…shit, you fucking skank bitches. Fuck you
all then!”

As her tongue flickered greedily at the
ravaged hole where Bowie’s eye had been, Gossitch looked down.

“Okay. This is going to be a strip set.”
Father Mark had called the boys over and placed one on either side
of the squat rack.

Boone sat a few feet away on a flat bench.
He’d been there for several minutes, getting his breath back.

“Boone’s going to get as many as he can with
this,” Mark slapped the forty-fives on their sides. There were five
of them on either end of the Olympic bar. “He knocked himself out
on that last set, so he might only get five or six with this.

“Then he’s going to rack it. You guys wait
until he racks it, and then you each pull off a plate, okay? He’ll
do as many as he can with that and then he’ll rack it again.”

“Then we take off another forty five?” asked
Joey.

“You got it.”

“What if he gets stuck with the weight?”
Mossimo wanted to know.

“I’ll be behind him the whole time. I got
him. He gets stuck in the hole, I’ll bring him out. You guys don’t
touch the bar. You touch the bar, you’ll throw off his balance,
he’ll dump the weight. He dumps the weight, he’ll be pissed off.
You guys don’t want to see him pissed off.”

The boys looked at Boone. The man was staring
intently at the bar in the squat rack. He looked pissed off
already.

“Show him himself.” Rainford sounded
bored.

Shane was cackling psychotically as it held
up the mirror to Bowie. The man looked up and stared with one eye
at a face he no longer recognized. They had cut his lips and most
of the skin around his mouth and cheeks off and now the lower half
of a skull, all gum and teeth, grinned back at him. The shoulders
and chest of his shirt were soaked through with blood.