Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

The others on the national parks tour bus with him had all been taken on a side tour, bused out to a copper mine somewhere nearby. In the relative peace here at the hotel, he found silence and solace, and he could here give full vent to his sexual excitement over the memories he had collected.

He clutched one of the photos and brought it to his chest, rubbing it into his nipples and down to his flat stomach. Each photo was taken at the moment the crackling fire opened up the bodies like melons.

God would forgive him his small and petty pleasures; Satan had directed him, and God had allowed it all. He was, after all, only human…

So he would continue to indulge and enjoy himself now as he had then, on seeing them die amid licking, stroking flames. He hadn't known it would be so potent a sexual high that he achieved when the flames' tongues licked a victim's fat away. It recalled his excitement as a child when he had burned small things and rubbed their ashes against his body. It recalled a certain moment in the dim past when he'd killed that little girl, had watched her being swallowed up in the jaws of a searing fire, in the very mouth of Satan.

He had forgotten the thrill of it all, had denied his true nature. Now he knew that in order to feel-to feel anything-for him, there was no other way. At least not until his pact with the Devil was a fait accompli.

He stared into the next photo he grabbed up, imaginatively climbing into it to become the burning victim, his body catching the wavelike fire. The photos helped him to return to the moment and excite himself anew.

He brought the picture down to his crotch, rubbed it along his inner thigh with the other one in his other hand pressed against his penis. Semen stained the photos with his release, and seeing it come forth, he saw, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted it as an epiphany of memory, and a monumental memory came like a horseman from his unconscious mind.

He had once seen with his amazed little boy's eyes the evidence of Satan's own semen where it bubbled up from Hell, had seen it and had wanted to leap into it, but he had forced the event into a corner of the deepest cave within him. And so it felt natural, this sexual explosion he felt with each burning body. It was as natural as nature itself, he believed.

And so it was natural for Satan to have selected him for the work at hand.

Feydor groaned at the overwhelming sexual release he now felt, and he rolled over onto the other photos, his brain replaying the actual events in his mind so vividly that he was once again there in the room with the flaming corpse, first this one and then that and then the other, again and again, over and over, hearing the tormented cries, which only further excited his genitals.

Still, Dr. Stuart Wetherbine had somehow managed to keep a foothold somewhere in the back of Feydor's brain, and he now loudly condemned Feydor's puerile connection with Satan's semen, with fire and flaming corpses. Wetherbine's was the one small voice remaining in his brain that told Feydor he was simply rationalizing away his conduct, but a larger part of his brain said otherwise, a larger part brought to the argument the actual fact that he-Feydor Dorphmann-had, of all the billions on the planet, been selected, that he had been contacted by demonic powers due to his twisted birth needs, perhaps due to his DNA, his genetic makeup.

He'd spent years in self-analysis and had created a complete picture of his own needs, but for years after coming to the conclusion that only through burning himself with matches, cigarettes, and candles could he ever achieve any sexual satisfaction, only then could he control the urges. And he had successfully done so for most of his adult life, putting away "childish" things. However, the dike broke when Satan came into the picture, telling him to open himself up to Satan, to answer his own birth needs, to accept the seed placed in him at birth.

And so he had, and so others must burn so that he might rejoice. "Rejoice, ye sinners!" he said and laughed. "Rejoice, and behold the righteousness of evil."

Sated for the moment, he rolled over on his back, Polaroids sticking with semen to his body. He now stared up at the ceiling when Satan whispered anew in his ear, asking, "Who's next? Number four is waiting. "

Feydor contemplated number four. He didn't think of them as kills, as people being burned alive; he thought of them as gifts given over to him by Satan. Satan arranged for the firewood, Feydor the fire. And God… God allowed it all. God allowed Satan-and Feydor by extension-his way.

Again he told himself, speaking to the room and to Satan, "I have done your bidding in good faith. I have accomplished far more than I ever realized possible in so short a time and in good fashion; I am fully one third of the way to your goal of nine victims."

"It's… not… enough," Satan disagreed, his voice spilling over with threat.

It's never fucking enough with you, Feydor thought but said, "Each victim has been sacrificed to you, each has become a prize for you, my demon god, and soon you will have your final prize: Jessica Coran. What more can I do? It can't be rushed."

We're traveling by bus, for God's sake, Feydor recklessly thought.

"I heard that," Satan replied with a hint of mirth, leaving Feydor to wonder if he had heard all of his recent thoughts.

"Buses are slow. The killing will take time."

''Don't question providence.''

"I wouldn't think of it." Satan liked calling his wisdom and his kingdom providence so as to mock God.

"You already have questioned my wisdom."

And Feydor had. His demon director had chosen an unusual mode of transportation, and it was on Chris Lorentian's ticket. The demon god, quite taken with serendipitous fate, had said, "What better way than this to lure Coran across state lines and the country, away from the safety of large cities and toward the gateway into Hell itself?"

"Where is this place?" he'd asked.

"You have stood at this destination before, and you once almost succumbed to the alluring beauty of a death in the place where you are now leading Coran in pursuit of you.

Feydor vaguely recalled Satan's semen, a bubbling white mud pissing upward from out of the earth in some place he'd been as a child, some sort of tar pit of superheated, bubbling mud spurting up from the ground. This strange place must be one of the many destinations on the national parks tour. Feydor grabbed for the itinerary given him on the bus the day he and Satan had together left Vegas. He scanned each destination until his eyes fell on Yellowstone National Park. He had been there once, years and years before, a lifetime before, as a child. He'd stood before the steaming geysers, hundreds of them it seemed, with their steam and sulfur clouds creating huge, ghostly veils, like the astral wanderings of the dead, over the land. He'd become mesmerized, paralyzed even by the sight of the cauldrons of boiling, superheated water belching up from the center of the earth. He'd seen the bubbling, scalding mud pots that created lavalike sculptures. He had taken steps toward the 280-degree water, preparing to leap into Satan's saucepan when his father had suddenly grabbed him and pulled him away, scolding him and saving him from the scalding waters while loudly detesting his stupidity and idiotic expression.

A day later, while again in the park where death met life, he'd found a substitute for himself, and he had watched while his victim, the one he'd pushed into the scalding water of a geyser, literally boiled to death. It had been exquisite to watch, but he'd put the image from his mind now for years. Guilt and remorse had been so constant afterward that he finally erased all memory of the moment until now. Little wonder Satan had found him again.

"I promise you your freedom from me and all the demons that have ever controlled you in this life, if you comply now with my wishes," Satan sharply again reminded Feydor.