The Minotauress

impending thunderstorm will likely wash away any tangible evidence—'

Dean turned off the set, horrified himself by what was taking place in his hometown. His mind whirled with names, places, sights, and sounds which all melded together to form the picture of the DeSmet he'd always known. But now the picture was different, soiled and flecked with dirt.

Shirley, in her grief, didn't seem to notice the distance that Ajax' hand had traveled down her back. 'It's like some evil spirit has infected our goodly town,' she half-sobbed. 'A devil. God in Heaven, who could do such a thing? Who could ever want to bring harm to those lovely babies?'

Evil, Dean recanted in his mind. A devil. But she was right, something had come to DeSmet and was taking bites out of it. A maniac seething in insanity? A pagan cult sacrificing children to some imagined horned deity? A real devil, if such things could be real? It didn't matter which. They were all the same.

'Shirley, don't bother fixing dinner for us,' Dean announced. 'We're going out there, right now.'

'We are?' Ajax asked, with more complaint in his voice than query.

'But, Dean!' Shirley gibbered away. 'You can't! It's too dangerous!'

'We'll be fine, Shirley,' Dean assured, drawing out the car keys. 'I just want to check the place out before the storm rolls in. Come on, Ajax.'

Ajax reluctantly withdrew his consoling arm from around Shirley.

'Be careful, boys!' Shirley's big tits wobbled as she waved after them.

Dean and Ajax went out the front door and down the slate-topped steps to the cul-de-sac. 'Aw, man,' Ajax griped. 'I was getting wood. She thinks I'm hot. I was moving my hand down her ass and all she did was squeeze me tighter.'

'Ajax, we're here on business,' Dean reminded. 'You're not supposed to be feeling up the housekeeper.'

'I wasn't feeling her up. I was consoling her. I was imparting solace to her obvious state of unease.'

'The only thing you were imparting was your hand up her ass.' Dean unlocked the 4x4. 'You were pawing on her like she was a prom date. For God's sake, Ajax. She's an old lady.'

'An old lady's head on Shannon Tweed's body. Fuck. My dick's leaking.'

They got in and drove back out the service road, Ajax shaking his head all the way. 'And what's this shit about a storm? The sky was crystal clear when we drove up.'

Over the next hill, thunder rumbled. 'Welcome to South Dakota,' Dean said. 'Storms sneak up fast. You can be out working the fields with the sun beating on your back, and five minutes later it's pouring rain and you're dodging lightning.' Even as he spoke, churning black thunderheads, like an abyssal surf, began to consume the twilight.

'So where are we going?' Ajax asked. 'Your dad's ranch?'

'No. The woods along Stoddard's Mill, where the cop was killed last night. 38th and Auburn—that's what they said on the news.'

'Fine, but what are we gonna do?'

'I just... want to... see something,' Dean cryptically replied.

Twenty minutes later, they were there, idling slowly down the unlit street. Trailers and salt-box houses lined the left side of Auburn, while all that flanked the right side was the forest. Dean kept his eyes peeled as Ajax smoked. At the corner of 38th, Dean pulled to a stop.

'Just as I thought,' he murmured.

'What? The woods?'

Nudged into the woods, a small clearing could be seen, and woven within it, yellow police cordons flapped in the rising wind. 'That's where they found the cop's body,' Dean projected.

'Uh-huh. But that still doesn't explain why we're sitting here instead of having a nice home-cooked meal at your mansion.'

'All of the dead kids were found near Stoddard's Mill,' Dean explained. He pointed. 'That's just east of here.'

'Fine. East of here ain't here,' Ajax reasoned.

'At the hospital my father said something. He said that he was attacked near the old gypsum mine, which is right behind Stoddard's Mill.'

That seemed to ring a bell even in Ajax' nicotine-sodden, sex-crazed brain. 'What a minute. The night we got kicked out of the bar—'

'We didn't get kicked out of the bar,' Dean refreshed his friend's memory. 'You got kicked out of the bar.'

'Right, but that night, didn't you tell me that you used to dump the rendering bilge from dead cattle into —'

'The gypsum mine, yes. Hell, if a cow or steer died at night, we'd throw the whole carcass down there. Must be thousands of gallons of rancid bilge down that shaft, and hundreds of rotten cattle. We'd even dump the extracted horns down the mine. Thousands of them, tens of thousands.'

'Sweet. But I still don't see what that has to do with anything.'

'Don't you think it's a little odd?' Dean asked.

'I think it's a little odd that we're sitting here on the brink of a thunderstorm when we should be chowing down at your pad and I could be goosing your housemaid.'

Dean smirked at his friend's incognizance. 'You're telling me it's coincidence? Eight men and over a dozen kids, all gored to death by an animal with horns. All near the old gypsum mine, and the old gypsum mine just happens to be the illegal depository for... what?'

'Dead cattle, dead cattle bilge, and dead cattle horns,' Ajax calculated.

'Right. And that bothers me.'

Ajax looked at him askance. 'What do you mean?'

Dean felt his teeth grinding together. What did he mean? It was just something