Bryan Smith - Soultaker

He thought about taking her to a hospital, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Doing that would doom everything and Cindy would probably die anyway.

Frustration made Raymond pound the steering wheel again. “Fuck!”

His breath hitched and a sob worked its way out of his throat. A series of progressively more wrenching sobs followed. This lasted until it hit him that he was living down to Lamia’s worst assumptions about him. He wiped the tears from his eyes and looked at the rearview mirror. There was no one behind him. A glance through the windshield confirmed that the opposite end of the alley was also deserted. But it wouldn’t be for long.

He got out of the car. The sight of Cindy’s badly mangled legs made him gag. They were twisted and broken, though he saw no compound fractures, no shards of bone sticking through punctured flesh. In that regard only she’d been lucky. Not that it mattered. Cindy’s limited future remained very bleak. Raymond choked down bile and forced himself to act quickly. He extracted the girl from the shattered window and dragged her to the rear of the Lexus. She whimpered softly, but did not regain consciousness. Raymond opened the trunk, hoisted her up, and dropped her inside. He hesitated a moment, his hand poised on the trunk lid, ready to slam it down. By all rights, the broken girl should no longer pose much of a threat, but he knew he shouldn’t take that for granted. With this much weirdness in the air, that would be the height of arrogance.

He removed his GUN CITY USA purchases from the trunk and stowed them in the backseat.

Then he slammed the trunk and got the hell out of there.

Trey McAllister sat at the chintzy little kitchen table in his mother’s house and stared at his fists, feeling sick as he remembered how his brother had fallen beneath the force of his punches. A sickness surpassed only by the guilt he felt at the memory of the shock and betrayal he’d seen in Jake’s eyes.

He told himself it had been necessary. That he’d done it only to protect his brother. Once again he reviewed the morning and laughed bitterly. He recalled the lies he’d spewed to drive Jake away and laughed again, and this time he felt a sting of tears. It had been the performance of a lifetime. Real Oscar-caliber work. If by some miracle he managed to make it to tomorrow alive, he would have to give some serious thought to pursuing an acting career.

The thought of surviving triggered yet another round of that numb laughter.

That wasn’t going to happen.

He was a walking dead man and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. Which was kind of okay. He’d been through a lot. Had seen a lot of awful things. Had been made to do things so gruesome and deranged that the thought of living with the memories horrified him nearly as much as the acts themselves.

So, yeah, dying-preferably sooner rather than later-would probably be for the best.

He thought of the hopelessness of his predicament some more and laughed one last time.

“What’s so funny, child?”

Trey’s breath caught in his throat at the sound of her voice. He clenched his fists tighter as he struggled not to scream.

The voice turned colder. “I asked you a question. I expect an answer.”

Trey consciously reminded himself to breathe. He exhaled slowly and unclenched his fists with great deliberation. Then he turned to look at Myra. And he did the only thing possible. He told the truth. He couldn’t lie to her. There would be no point even if he could. “I was just thinking about everything. About my brother. About how much I hate you. And about how fucked up this all is.” The depth of his despair came through in his voice. He made no attempt to hide it. “And I was thinking about how there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it.”

Myra was nude save for a tiny black thong. He looked at her slim, pale body and tried to feel even a ghost of the overpowering lust he’d felt for her just days ago. But there was nothing. It made sense. The compact little body he’d once found so enticing was only a facade.

She smirked. “You’re right about that. But you’re wrong about the other thing. I could make you feel lust for me again if I really wanted.”

Trey felt a chill. She was still inside his head. Still knew his every thought. It was a violation. A mental rape of sorts. And just one more thing he could do nothing about. “I know. But it wouldn’t be any more real than the girl I’m looking at.”

Myra ran a hand slowly down one side of her sleek body. “Oh? I could alter my appearance, you know. Change my shape, make it more pleasing.”

Trey shook his head. “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

“I suppose I do, at that.”

She stared at him for several long, exceedingly uncomfortable moments, her dark, glittering eyes boring into his skull like lasers, making him squirm. Then she turned away from him and opened a cutlery drawer. Trey heard a clank of steel as she sorted through the contents. He sucked in a breath when she turned toward him again. The gleaming carving knife looked impossibly big in her little hand. She approached the table with a slow roll of her hips and set the knife down before him.

“What-”

“I’m giving you a chance to take yourself out of the equation, but I’m leaving it all up to you, darling.” She grinned at his thunderstruck expression. “You can live for a while or die right now. If you choose the latter, you can do the job with that easily enough. It’ll hurt, of course, horribly, but that won’t last long. Well, not too long.”

Trey looked at the knife and thought about it.

And thought about another possibility or two.

Myra snorted. “Yeah, right. Try and I’ll pop a vessel in your brain before you even get the fucking thing off the table. Now put that idiot thought away before I take this choice away from you. You’ll want to think about this very carefully, Trey. It’s the last time you’ll ever have any say in what happens to you.”

Trey stared at the knife another long moment, then pushed it away with a sigh. “I…can’t.”

“Because you’re a coward.”

Another sigh, then, very quietly: “Yes.”

Her laughter was smug and very satisfied.

Trey hated himself more than ever in that moment.

“What’s going on in here?”

Trey turned his head away from Myra’s hateful face and cringed at the sight of his mother sauntering into the kitchen. She wore only a grimy white T-shirt and a pair of lacy pink panties. She winked at Trey and patted Myra on the ass on her way to the refrigerator. She took a can of Old Milwaukee from the fridge and popped the tab.

She took a long swallow from the can, made a sound of almost sexual satisfaction. “Got-damn. Tell you what, ain’t nothin’ hits the spot like a beer after getting laid.”

Trey struggled not to throw up.

Myra had elected to stay inside and out of sight during the confrontation with Jake. She was not yet ready to reveal herself to the older McAllister boy for some reason. After Jake and his girl left, Trey and Jolene came back inside. Myra had been very pleased with the way the whole thing had played out. And she had chosen to show her pleasure by dragging Jolene into one of the tiny home’s two bedrooms. Trey had retreated to the kitchen at the sound of the first orgasmic squeals.

And now here they were again. Utterly shameless. Making no attempt to disguise what they had been doing. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Jolene finished off the beer and tossed the crumpled can into the overflowing sink. Then she sidled up next to Myra and slipped an arm around the girl’s waist. Keeping her eyes on Trey, Myra smiled and leaned into the embrace. Jolene slipped a thumb beneath the band of Myra’s thong and gave it a snap. “Mmm…your girl’s primo stuff, boy. Knows her way around a woman’s body better than any man I ever knew, that’s for goddamn sure. If I’d known that, I never would’ve given you so much fuckin’ grief about her.”