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

it hurt to walk on with bare feet. But that wasn’t the main reason she wanted shoes. It was so the flesh of her feet wouldn’t come into contact with any of the blood that had been spilled here, of which there was a copious amount. It made the sand clump together in a manner that reminded Lori of what litter did when cats peed in their box. The thought was so ridiculous she almost laughed, but she stopped herself. She feared if she started laughing now, she would never be able to quit.

The blood-stink was worse this close to the bodies. No, not bodies. People. They weren’t dead yet, although they probably wished they were. She knew she would if she were in their place. There were other odors here, too. A smell like raw chicken, which she assumed came from the victims’ exposed organs. The musky scent of shit and the ammonia smell of piss, both the result of crucified bodies expelling whatever waste remained within them. Another reason to wish she had shoes. The Garden wasn’t silent. People moaned and whispered, drew in slow, painful breaths, mumbled prayers to whatever gods might exist to put them out of their misery. But if there were any such gods, it seemed they weren’t listening.

The crosses were arranged in neat rows regularly spaced from one another. It felt like she was walking through some nightmarish version of a cornfield, except the stalks held more than just ears – they had entire bodies on them. She felt laughter threatening again, and this time she bit her lip hard, hoping the pain would help her hold it back. She tasted blood, and she thought once more about that time she was a child and had bit her tongue.

“That was really gross.”

The voice was so soft, Lori almost didn’t hear it. She stopped and turned in the direction she thought the voice had originated from. A girl’s voice, she thought.

There, two crosses to her right, hung a brown-skinned girl, nine, maybe ten years old. Like all the others in the Garden, she was bound to her cross with barbed wire, and her flat tummy had been sliced open, her innards splayed onto the ground at her feet. Flies crawled over her organs, infested her open body cavity, buzzed around her head, landed on her face, scuttled across the soft flesh there…. Despite her condition, the girl’s eyes were wide open and alert, and she watched Lori with intense interest.

Lori experienced no shock of recognition upon seeing the girl, but she did feel a sort of tickle at the back of her mind, along with a tightening in her gut.

You don’t want to do this, she thought. It was true. She didn’t. But she walked over to the girl and stood before her anyway.

“Do you know me?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” the girl said. Her voice was weak, but this close Lori could hear her well enough. The girl leaned her head to the right, then the left. Lori had the sense she was trying to draw her attention to something, but she didn’t—

Her gaze focused on the girl’s inner forearms, first right, then left. They were sliced open from wrist to elbow, the cuts deep. Unlike her abdominal wound, which bled freely, the blood around these cuts was old and crusted.

Lori’s head swam and her vision blurred. She took several steps back from the girl, her movements awkward, clumsy. She felt numb, disconnected from her body, and she thought she was going to faint. She fought to hold on to consciousness, and while for several seconds the outcome was in doubt, she managed to remain aware and on her feet. When her vision cleared, she saw the girl was now a young woman, probably in her late teens. Lori recognized this version of her, just as she’d recognized the previous one, but this time she was able to give her a name.

“Aashrita,” she said.

The young woman gave her a weak smile. “Yes,” she breathed.

Was this the real Aashrita, somehow brought back from the dead, or was it something that only looked like her? Lori hoped the latter but feared the former was the truth. She felt memories beginning to crowd at the threshold of her mind, screaming to be allowed in. This was why she had come here, why she’d gone to Aashrita’s grave in the first place – to get answers. All she had to do was allow the memories to come. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t a matter of choice, a mere exercise of willpower. She simply could not allow the memories in, knew if she did, they would destroy her. The mental struggle was too much, and pain erupted in her skull as a migraine flared to sudden life. It hurt so much that tears streamed from her eyes, and her vision narrowed to pinpoints. She had to get out of here – now.

She turned to flee, the blanket falling away from her naked body as she did. But she only managed a few hobbling steps on her bad knee before something flew over her head, came down around her bare waist, and started pulling her backward. She fought it, gritted her teeth, put all of her strength into moving forward. She reached down to take hold of whatever it was that had wrapped around her and felt something soft, spongy, and wet. She looked down in revulsion and saw that her hands were slick with blood. A cord of some kind pressed tight against her flesh, bumpy and pinkish-pale. It was a length of intestine, she realized. Aashrita’s.

Lori continued to move forward. Another loop of intestine wrapped around her left wrist, and yet another encircled her right. Still she fought, although her movements were almost completely restricted now. The intestines were slick, though, so if she could manage to wriggle free….

A last loop came down over her head and pulled tight around her throat, immediately cutting off her air. She