Family Tradition

Family Tradition

by Edward Lee & John Pelan

Kindle Edition

Necro Publications

2011

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Text © 2002 Edward Lee & John Pelan

Cover art © 2011 David G. Barnett

Chapter One

“Boy, are you fuckin’ them worms again?”

Startled by his brother’s voice, Esau Turvog guiltily dropped the bait can he held in one hand and the fistful of nightcrawlers he had in the other. Damn, he thought. He’d been just about to get a nut off when his brother interrupted him.

Esau’s brother Enoch stood in the shop’s doorway; his considerable bulk caused the woodplank flooring to bend. “Quit jerkin’ off with them worms, ’less of course you want to go dig some more up. The first weekend of May’s comin’ up, and we might have folks stopping by for some fishin’. We got a business to run here, ya know?”

Enoch wrinkled his nose in disgust as his younger brother stuffed his sullied cock, still slick with spit and worm slime, back into his filthy jeans. The boy was a damn fine cook, but that was about all. He just wasn’t right, Enoch knew. Never had been. Fucking sheep and cows was one thing—something all natural men partook of once in a while. But fucking worms? Somehow that just didn’t seem normal.

“Aw, Enoch,” Esau complained. “I was just about to have me a big cum.” What Esau did, by the way, was grab a big handful of worms from one of the bait cans in the fridge. Then he’d lay his dick right in that handful and start jerking. He’d squeeze the nightcrawlers so hard some of ’em would bust open as he shucked them back and forth over his tool. Them worms were full of blood, which shined up Esau’s dick nice’n pretty red. And them worms’d wriggle and squirm as he was jerkin’—felt real good. Next best thing to pussy, he thought. Er-shit. Maybe better. Sometimes, when Enoch was off to the shore for supplies, Esau would take a Q-Tip and, inch by inch, shove an entire worm down his peehole. Once he got it all the way in, he’d pinch off the end’a his dick and just let that worm wiggle around in there. It felt damn good, it did. Then he’d jerk off and release the pinch just as he was coming and pump his load out right along with the worm.

But not today. No nut today.

Esau reluctantly picked the nightcrawlers up off the floor, dropped them all back in the can, and replaced the can to the fridge.

“That’s better,” Enoch approved.

“What’cha want me to do now, Enoch?”

Enoch’s bulbous, bearded face scowled its disapproval. His great belly hung forth, stretching the front of his grimy overalls. “Boy, ain’t you got no wits at all? I do the gatherin’ and you do the cookin’. That’s the way it is’n you know that, right?”

Esau’s lower lip drooped. “Uh…yeah.”

“SO GO DO THE COOKIN’, YA IDJIT!” Enoch yelled. “Grandpa Ab ain’t got all year to wait fer your lazy ass!”

Enoch’s shout fairly kicked Esau out of the front of the bait shop. His big work-booted feet carried him off in haste, to the office and then to the stock room behind it.

Well, it wasn’t really a stock room, not by any typical definition.

Here, in other words, the stock was human.

Esau tromped fully into the room and—

««—»»

—the reeking filth-smudged man closed the door behind him. Flies circled around his bushy head; some walked on his grease-sheened face. Jewel, aka Julie C. Atkins, aka Convict Ident # W/F-4-97-98103, could only see him by looking back hard over her shoulder. Why? Because he and an equally filthy man had knocked her unconscious, and when she’d wakened, she’d found herself in this stinking room with her hands nailed to the floor.

“You’re sure a skinny one, ain’t ya?” the drawl commented behind her. Something clattered. Drawers opening, closing? “Shit, goddamn Enoch, always bossin’ me around. Well, fuck. I got time to have me some fun.” The voice got louder. “How’s that sound to you, stringbean?”

Jewel tried to speak but only the coarsest of unintelligible noises came out. Her hands burned as though pierced by white-hot pokers. If she leaned up, the pain redoubled, but it was the only way she could see. And when she could see, twisting her neck back…maybe she shouldn’t have bothered.

The man stood with his back to her, more things clattering as he stood before a filthy counter. From a drawer, he withdrew a short serrated grapefruit knife. “There it is.”

Terror sucked the breath from Jewel’s chest, then she gusted a shriek when he knelt down and hauled her up to hands and knees. Her hands felt as though a tractor had run over them, but as hard as she pulled, she could not unseat them. Rape seemed the next logical event, and she could even surmise the purpose of the short serrated knife chosen over other longer and sharper knives in the drawer. He began to cut off her sherbert-orange prison utilities. The uniform fell away in shreds, and then unbuckling sounds could be heard.

The pain and the horror nearly destroyed her capacity for coherent thought but at least this…rape…she could identify with. His cock felt oddly fat and enslimed when he kneed up closer and penetrated her. The stench of his crotch wafted beneath her, drifted into her straining face: old sweat and spoiled meat. His dick felt carbuncled as it slid to and fro, herpes blisters, with her luck, or knots of syphilis. But contracting social diseases was hardly a legitimate worry right now.

What would happen when he was finished?

Jewel was twenty-seven years old when the great state of Washington had elected to receive her as a penal resident for ninety-nine years with no possibility of parole. Christ, the baby hadn’t even died—it was only a fractured skull and accommodating temporal blot clot. Sure, he’d be totally retarded and epileptic for the rest of his life but she hadn’t killed him. And the whole kidnaping thing had been Dude’s idea anyway. Dude was Jewel’s pimp, and they were both junkies. The bag price of black tar just kept going up ($25 per quarter gram now!) and with both of them monkeying a two-gram-a-day habit, it was just too hard for poor Jewel to find twelve tricks a day every day. The city pigs were just too hot; johns were driving all the way to Tacoma now for their blow-jobs rather than risk having their names in the Seattle papers.

So. The short version? It had been Dude’s idea to snatch the baby from Redmond. That’s where all those rich