Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

off the engine and the headlights. Everything went dark for a moment, but then individual fluorescent lights came on above the crosses, bulbs attached to lengths of metal that rose from behind the wooden structures and curved downward to hang above them, illuminating the people on the crosses in pools of blue white. The people were naked and represented a mix of ages, races, and body types. Men and women were equally present. The people were bound to the crosses by tight coils of barbed wire around their wrists and ankles, but as painful as that looked, it was nothing compared to the other condition they all shared. Their abdomens had been slit open from sternum to crotch, and their internal organs were now external ones. Viscera spilled forth from body cavities and hung down past the victims’ feet, entrails making soft, glistening piles on the ground beneath them. The lower halves of their bodies were streaked with blood, and the ground around the base of the crosses was soaked with the red stuff. But as horrifying a sight as the mass crucifixion was, far worse was the fact that each one of these men, women, and children were still alive. Pain-filled eyes blinked as tears flowed freely, mouths opened and closed silently as if their owners were trying to speak but could not. Bodies writhed in agony, some of their exertions so violent it was clear they were trying to shake themselves free. But all they did was cause the barbed wire to dig deeper into their flesh, fresh blood flowing from those new wounds. Lori didn’t understand how anyone could survive like this for any length of time. They should all be dead. But they weren’t, and she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised. This was the Nightway, after all.

She experienced an urge to tell Edgar to start the van, pull back onto the road, and drive away from this awful place as fast as he could. She almost did it, too. But she thought of her family and friends, of what the Cabal might be doing to them at this very moment, and she said nothing. They both sat there for a moment, gazing at the nightmarish tableau. Then Edgar got out of the van, and a couple seconds later, Lori did the same, keeping the blanket wrapped around her more for the security of it than any sense of modesty. Self-consciousness about her own nakedness seemed almost obscene among so many unclothed and violated bodies.

Edgar came around to the passenger side of the van, opened the door, and leaned inside. He opened the glove box, retrieved an object, then stepped back and closed the door. Lori saw that he held what looked like a gun in his right hand. At least it was shaped like a gun, but it was white and made of a number of smaller pieces that had been put together.

Those are bones, she thought. Small ones, like you’d find in a foot or hand.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“That’s just in case,” Edgar said.

“Good idea.”

The two of them walked around to the other side of the van and surveyed the scene before them.

“Goddamn,” he said. “And I thought void crawlers stank.”

Lori was too busy gagging to respond. The air was filled with the coppery tang of blood, so strong she could taste it. When she’d been a child, she’d bit the tip of her tongue while talking to a friend in her parents’ kitchen. She tried to recall which friend it had been. Aashrita? Maybe. It hadn’t hurt all that much, but it bled like mad, and her mouth quickly filled with blood. Terrified, she’d tried to cry out for help, but all she succeeded in doing was spraying blood all over (Aashrita) her friend, who immediately started screaming.

The smell here was bad, but equally horrifying to Lori was the low buzzing thrum that hung heavy in the air. Flies covered the victims’ exposed organs, crawling across them, traveling back and forth between the crosses, searching for just the right place to lay their eggs. She glanced at Edgar. He gazed upon the bodies nearest the edge of the road, swaying slightly, as if in time to music only he could hear. The man had said he hated bugs, but that was before he became a host to a legion of them. Perhaps because of his little hard-shelled friends, the flies’ droning sounded quite different to him than it did to her.

She caught movement out of the corner of her eyes, and her first thought was a cloud of flies had abandoned one of the corpses and was coming toward them. She raised her hands, intending to fend off the insects, but when she turned in that direction, she saw no mass of flies streaking toward them. Instead, she saw a figure – a person, or something shaped very much like a person – walking with sandaled feet across the blood-soaked ground. There was something about the way the figure moved, a subtle grace that Lori thought of as feminine, although it was difficult to gauge gender given the way he or she was dressed – a loose-fitting brown robe cinched at the right shoulder like a toga, leaving the left arm free, and beneath this a plain white shirt with long wide-cuffed sleeves. The figure wore a head covering that looked something like an unadorned bishop’s miter, made of simple white cloth, with thin strips hanging down on either side. The outfit looked like something that might’ve been worn around the time of the Roman Empire, but the cloth looked relatively new, and it was clean. Not a spot of blood on it. The person’s face was covered by a white cloth mask, which had no openings for eyes, nose, or mouth. Lori found the effect eerie, especially once she noticed the figure’s hands were covered by white gloves, its feet by white socks. What if there was no person beneath the cloth?