even mount a counterattack.
One of the females, blonde and fierce, well-muscled, gutted two of Angie’s best hunters with agile slashing motions that disemboweled them. Then she herself went down with three spears in her.
Angie was in the battle by then, shrieking her war cry as one of the females jumped out to meet her with a carving knife in each hand. There was no fear on her. Nothing but bloodlust. She slashed admirably, almost taking Angie’s head off, but then a hatchet caught her in the neck and Angie seized the moment. She leaped, bringing her foot down on the girl’s kneecap. There was a pleasing snap and a pleasing cry from the female who was instantly hobbled. Angie sliced her across the breasts with her butcher knife, then sank it between her legs, pulling upwards at the same time, opening the female wide. Her blood splashed against Angie and it was invigorating.
Another female with dark lustrous hair had gored two of Angie’s hunters.
As Angie approached her, she had just eviscerated one of them -a man-and he crouched there on his knees, his hands filled with the white coils of his own intestines. The female slashed him across the eyes, turned, and began stabbing the other hunter-a woman-in the face, throat, and chest.
Then Angie jumped her, knocking her down and stabbing her through the throat. The female fought and screamed, but Angie yanked her head back, felt the female’s teeth bite into her hand with an explosion of pain. Angie shrieked and slit her throat, sawing through the windpipe and carotid artery, hacking through meat and muscle until the blade bit into the cervical vertebrae. And even then, filled with pain and anger and a wild animal dementia for the kill, she cracked the vertebrae and sliced the head free. She held it up to the sky and the mother moon above in glory, blood splashing from the stump of neck down her face and making her feel more alive than she ever had before.
It went on for maybe ten minutes, probably not even that long. Knives cutting and axes chopping. Blades grinding against bone and clubs shattering ribs and spears punching through soft white underbellies.
And then…silence.
Nothing but corpses and parts there of.
Hacked victims still squirming on the ground.
And the victors, blood-drenched and meat-smelling, rising up from their kills and howling to the sacrificial moon high above. Angie, spitting out blood, surveyed the scene of carnage instantly. Three of the boy’s pack had run off to regroup, but the others had been slaughtered. Angie noted that six of her own were dead, five others mortally wounded.
Kathleen Soames had already eaten the boy’s genitals as was her way. Then she had disemboweled him and was now rolling in his blood and entrails, scenting herself with the kill. Others of the tribe were imitating her.
They did not touch the heart.
Angie carved open the chest with her knife, shearing through muscle, snapping ribs in her bare hands. She slit the arteries away, sliced the heart free of its protective membrane. As the others watched with almost religious awe, she bit down deep into it, feeling the strength of its owner becoming her strength.
The boy’s cunning was her own now.
As a hunter devours the flesh of a wolf to absorb its ferocity, so she ate the boy’s bloody heart, tearing strips of it away with her sharpened teeth, enjoying every taste and texture. She fed upon it with a mystical rapture, feeling his spirit entering her with each bite.
When she was done, she went around to the mortally wounded and slit their throats one after the other. It was the way a warrior must die. Not slowly like a pig in the straw, but with blood in their mouths and a glaring steel memory of killing.
As she stood over her tribe, watching for other packs that might try and poach their kills, her hunters took trophies of bones and ears and body parts. One woman was fashioning a necklace of vaginas that she had slit free then threaded onto a necklace of beads around her throat. More heads were taken and speared on broomsticks.
Kathleen Soames, her red and green banded body now entirely red, stood by Angie’s side, appraising the night. Killing to her was not only ritual and necessary, but almost sexual in nature. She drew her strength from the taking of lives, from her victim’s blood washing her down, from the select remains she then fed upon. She was a fearsome sight standing there, blood still dripping from her. The moonlight gleamed off the sticks and rodent bones braided into her hair, the bone inserted through her nose.
Her lips long since sliced free, she grinned with gums and teeth.
“Enough,” Angie told the tribe and they rose up from the field of blood, bones, limbs, and torsos.
The men urinated on the remains so all would know the penalty of poaching the tribe’s territory. The women squatted near where the men pissed and wetted the ground themselves.
Then, Kathleen Soames leading the way with a decaying head on a broomstick, they faded into the night, glutted and pleased at the offerings of the mother high above…
67
Don’t you touch me. Don’t you dare touch me.
One of them had taken notice of Macy now. He was a hulking creature, stinking of excrement, his oblong face and body thick with a crust of something that must have been mud, dried blood, and congealed fat. In the flickering firelight she could only really see the gleam of his bared teeth, his eyes like two bloody holes.
He was standing there, watching her, his feet placed right in the pool of blood that was pretty much all that was left of the screaming woman after they’d dragged her remains away. Macy knew it couldn’t go on. They simply wouldn’t ignore her forever. She tried to be quiet, not to draw attention to herself, but now that just wasn’t enough. At best, she would be raped. At worst, they would make her suffer unimaginable agonies before putting her on the spit.
He went down on one knee, arms outstretched, fingers splayed in the pool of blood. He looked like a runner waiting for the start of a race. He was grinning. He knew she was frightened, probably could smell the fear on her as she could smell the filth on him. And the really awful part was that he was enjoying it. She could see that. He was actually enjoying her discomfort, getting off on it, copping a sadistic thrill.
He laughed beneath his breath with a hoarse, grating sound.
Macy was getting angry.
That this inbred, barbaric piece of shit would enjoy her suffering was just too much. Yes, she wanted to run as fast and far away from him as she could. But part of her wanted to stand and fight. To smash his head open with something, wipe that mocking, vicious grin off his face.
He inched forward; she recoiled.
He pulled back, laughing.
A game. That’s all this was. She did not doubt that it would end in something terrible for her, but for now it was just a game. Macy’s wrists were still tied behind her back, but the knots were sloppy and loose. If she only had a few seconds unobserved, she knew she could squirm free.
He was creeping closer, smelling like he’d been eating dead things and garbage.
Macy waited. She would not flinch.
He reached out to grab her ankle and she moved quickly, instinctively. She lashed out with her right foot and cracked him in the face with her heel. He let out a barking sound and fell away.
Macy moved.
She’d spent the past three years in gymnastics and it paid off now. She rolled onto her back and brought her roped wrists down to her ass, wriggling, squirming until she got them around the mounds of her buttocks. Straining every muscle and ligament, she got her wrists to the back of her knees and slipped her legs out.
The man was staring at her. Not quite recovered from the kick in the face, but very much ready to pay Macy back in kind.
Do it now or just forget it.
Macy leaped to her feet and as that caveman sonofabitch tried to grab her ankle, she jumped away and kicked him in the ribs. He grunted and fell. Then she ran, knowing the chances of escape were futile. A boy stood in her way and she knocked him aside, knocked aside another woman and darted around a man with an axe in his
