Edward Lee - The Minotauress

They squeezed their eyes shut, grit their teeth and waited for the end, but—

Ajax opened his eyes. The bull had stopped in its tracks, its deadly horn-tips a full foot away from Ajax' belly.

As a shadow grew before him, the bull reluctantly backed up. Ajax thought he heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

Dean stepped in front of them.

"Dean!" Shirley shouted in glee.

Dean walked confidently between the crazed bull and Ajax and Shirley. The bull kept backing up.

The bull was... scared.

Ajax wasn't sure but it seemed that the most vague lime-green light glowed off of Dean's head. There was one thing, though, that he was sure about: what Dean held in his hands, like a branch-cutter, was his rusty pair of horn-crankers.

He pointed them at the first bull. "I'm the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be," he told the bull. Then, for effect, he clacked the horn-crankers a few times. "I'll dehorn you like pulling toothpicks out of cocktail fruit, so go back to your evil mama." Dean's voice resonated, not a man's voice now but something almost godlike. He held the horn-cranker upward, a demented Moses raising his holy staff.

"Fuck with me," he said to the bull. "I dare ya."

The giant bull whinnied, jerked its huge head to and fro—then it jumped back out the window from whence it came. The other bulls followed suit, thrashing their mammoth bodies out the windows, exploding the frames, and disappearing into the teeming, thundering storm.

"God be praised!" Shirley said. "It's over!"

Ajax whooped it up. "Man, you've got some kind of magic! Those big motherfuckin' things just took one look at you and they were heading for the hills!"

But Dean stood agitated in the candle light. His horn-crankers—the nexus of his power—hung limp from one hand.

"Something—something's wrong," he sensed. Then he looked at the couch.

Arianne was gone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"You two! Halt!"

Dean and Ajax stopped cold at the muddy trail which wound down from behind Stoddard's Mill to the opening of the mine. They'd driven here posthaste in the rented Blazer, and were fortunate that the storm had blown over shortly after their wholesale slaughter of the demon-possessed cattle back at the mansion. Before they'd left, Shirley had managed to scrounge up a few more rounds for the shotguns. Then she'd waved teary-eyed as they'd driven off, her big tits wobbling beneath the sheer nightgown.

Dean had only one thing on his mind: saving Arianne. And he was well aware now of the supernatural intricacies draped around all that was happening.

He knew things now.

He knew who the smoke-woman was. He knew that she'd used her evil will to possess the cattle back at the mansion. And he knew that she'd been the one who'd abducted Arianne. She'd been the one responsible for all of the recent abductions about town. Dean could taste the answers in his brain. He could smell them.

But when he and Ajax had arrived at the trail to the mine, a uniformed state police officer in foul-weather gear had stopped them at once, gun drawn.

"I said halt!" he ordered through the pouring rain. "And drop those shotguns!"

Dean and Ajax obeyed, and held their hands up. "Great idea, hoss," Ajax muttered. "He probably thinks we're involved in the abductions and killings."

"I didn't know cops were out here. They weren't here before."

"This is a crime scene," the cop reminded them. "What are you doing here?"

Ajax stepped right up. "We're just concerned citizens, officer. We'd heard about the horrible things that've happened out here, so we wanted to come out and try to get the culprit ourselves." He could see five other cops surveying the perimeter around the mine entrance. "But since you fine officers are out, there's no reason for us to be here. So we'll just be on our way, sir."

"You'll be on your way to the back seat of my patrol car," the cop informed him. "You're both under arrest. I'm taking you in for questioning. Start moving—" but no sooner had the cop given the order, his colleagues at the mine began to shout. Several shots rang out. "Stay here!" he commanded to Dean and Ajax. "Don't move!"

Dean and Ajax froze with their hands up, watched the cop run off into the dripping woods. "We're leaving now, right?" Ajax asked. "We can get back to the Blazer and be the fuck out of here before he can catch us—"

More gunshots rang out, then—screams.

"Grab the guns!" Dean yelled. "They need help!"

Ajax stalled as more screams resounded. "Fuck those guys. Let's go back to your mansion and have a beer."

"Come on!'

They retrieved their shotguns—Ajax however reluctantly—and ran toward the skirmish. More screams sprang through the dark, after the gunfire died. By the time Dean and Ajax arrived at the wood-propped portal to the mine...

The six poncho'd police officers lay dead in the mud, gored to death, the high horn-holes still seeping blood.

"Fuck," Dean uttered.

"Yeah, fuck—as in let's get the fuck out of here, like now! " Ajax hotly suggested.

As he stared at the mine entry, Dean's voice sounded like bricks scraping together. "Arianne's down there somewhere."

"You don't know that!" Ajax contested. "She could be dead in the woods somewhere! She could be lying dead behind the mansion for all you know!"

"She's down there," Dean corrected, staring at the entry with his new-found psychic vision. "I'm not leaving here till I get her back."

"Well that's your gig, man! You want to stick your neck out so your head'll be lopped off, that's your business! Me—no way!"

"Fine... " Dean walked into the mine's wide egress; Ajax, without much faith, followed. Their flashlights beamed dead ahead: dirt walls propped up by heavy wooden stulls like railroad ties. Railroad tracks led them down further, until...

"Damn," Dean muttered.

The entry ramp stopped at a four-tined fork which led further down into multitudinous branches and off-shoots: tunnels within tunnels.

"It's a fuckin' maze!" Ajax complained. "We'll never find our way through this shit!"

"Yes we will," Dean croaked back in assurance. "Follow me... back to the entry."

They both stomped back to the entrance of the mine. "You got a knife?" Dean asked.

"Well, yeah," Ajax replied. "You wanna butter some bread?"

"Start cutting," Dean ordered. He whipped out his own knife and began... cutting open the abdominal vaults of the dead police officers. From the rents, he yanked out long tubes of the small intestine. Like yanking yarn from the belly of a stuffed doll.

"Yank! Yank!" he shouted.

Confused, Ajax thought what the hell, and he cut open another dead cop's belly and began yanking out intestines. Got nothin' much else to do right now, he considered.

Soon six piles of pink-gray intestinal whirls lay at their feet. "Cut each loop off at the end," Dean instructed. "Then tie each end together."

"Say what? " Ajax inquired.

"Just do it!" Dean yelled. "You saw the mine! It's a labyrinth! If I'm going down there, I need to be able to find my way out."

Ajax seethed in his distaste, but he did it just the same. The human small intestine was twenty-four to thirty-two feet long. Ajax snipped of each end with his knife, then tied the ends together by way of a sheet-bend knot, connecting each end as effectively as possible. Shit squeezed out of each end, which set Ajax' face long. I'm handling police officer excrement, he thought. He flapped each wad off his hand like slabs of warm brown clay. But by then, at least, he was beginning to get it... when Dean tied the last end to his back belt loop.

A guideline, Ajax thought.