THE SMALL TOWN OF COALTOWN WAS REMARKABLY NORMAL... THAT IS, IT ALWAYS had been... until the hospitals began filling with bubonic plague patients. Swiftly the unbelievable happenings and excesses of Boccaccio's time began to happen in the twentieth century! In Sex in Society, Alex Comfort noted: "The frankly sexual manifestations of sadism and masochism are most commonly expressed as fantasies. But sexual fantasies of this kind, and the less obviously sexual manifestations of sadism, do tend to become important in all such societies as a means of government. . . An atrocity, in the sense in which the word has been lately employed, is not only a barbarous action but one having specifically sexual overtones... This excitement is of a kind which few individuals are able to admit to themselves... Some of the violence which there still is, moreover, and which erupts to shock the citizens, is not the product of sadism so much as of exasperation." The mob was exasperated, all right. They believed that they were doomed in a death-town, and that nobody was doing anything about it... so they decided to burn everything...
CHAPTER I
Donald Evans liked to stroll along the lake front in the early morning, watching the white-caps capture the glitter of the rising sun in the east. a half-century earlier, Coaltown had been one of the vital links in the Barge Canal,' once the principal transportation artery between the East coast and the Midwest. Railroads and airlines had changed all that. Now, the waterfront of Coaltown was practically deserted, rickety docks resting shakily on rotting pilings. But the old glamour was still there for Don Evans. He wrinkled up his nose distastefully as an offshore breeze wafted the stench of garbage and sewage to him. He felt the familiar fury rising in him as it always did when he reflected on the folly of irresponsible mankind. Men depleted their natural resources without consideration for future generations. They defiled the nation's natural beauties. They contaminated its waterways with all kinds of filth. Coal-town's own Lake Erie had been crystal-clear and pure enough to drink from not too many years before. Now it was a stinking, muddy sump, teeming with disease. Dr. Evans stooped and picked up a thick stick as two enormous rats slunk out from beneath a pier and squealed at him menacingly. The rats were getting thicker, bigger and bolder with every year that passed. Evans didn't like it. Lately, the hospital's emergency ward had been doing a heavy business in treating rat bites. The victims were mostly the poor kids who lived in the waterfront tenements.
The Coaltown General Hospital was located only a few blocks from Lake Erie. It was small, but one of the most modern hospitals in the area. Evans considered himself lucky to have been chosen as the hospital's first chief of staff. A local boy who had made good, Evans had made a name for himself in a big New York hospital. At 35, he was one of the really brilliant young internists in the country. He could have gone on to much bigger things, but he elected to come back and help the people who had been his friends and neighbors.
When he entered his office, his secretary Louise Pitts greeted him with her customary, languid smile. Louise was a ravishing brunette with a cameo face and the body of a Hollywood love goddess. One lock of gleaming black hair curled over her forehead and partially hid one of her eyes. It gave her a furtive, sensual expression. He often wondered why a girl with her attributes had gone in for low-paying hospital administration work. Once he had asked her, and Louise had answered in her throaty, mocking voice.
"I got this thing for doctors. They send me. Know what I mean?" She punctuated it with a sound like a tigress purring, and chills had climbed up Evans' spine. To his constant dismay, the good doctor found that he could become sexually aroused just by the sounds Louise made. She was a great, shining female animal, and a source of distraction to all of the male members of the hospital staff, single or married. A few times Evans had been tempted to fire the girl, but he could think of no justifiable reason for doing so. Louise was an ace at her job.
"Going to be another hot day," he greeted her this morning when he came into the office.
Louise laughed slyly. "The night was even hotter-at least, for me it was."
Evans ignored the innuendo in her voice and in her dark, merry eyes. Louise had a way of putting a sexual connotation on the most innocent topics. Or was it his own dirty mind that made it seem that way? Undeniably, any young, virile male would be hard put to keep his thoughts away from sex in the girl's vital, vibrant presence. Coaltown might be a one-horse hamlet, but its feminine population was as style-conscious as any group of sophisticated young women to be seen strolling along New York's Fifth Avenue.
Don Evans grew more uncomfortable each month as Louise's hemlines kept going up, up, up, in pace with the latest Italian and French fashions.
His eyes bulged as they took in her latest acquisition, a hip-hugging, white linen skirt that scarcely reached to the middle of her thighs. Louise was a tall, leggy creature, and when she bent over the filing cabinets with her back to him, Evans was helpless to control the rising arc of his desire. His hot gaze traveled up her trim calves, feasted on the dimpled backs of her petite knees, then raced hungrily up her round, tapering thighs. Her skirt was hitched up so high in back that he could see the bare, satiny flesh over the tops of her nylon stockings. He blushed, stifling a terrible urge to sneak up behind her and slip his hand up between those lovely thighs. He shut his eyes to blot out the maddening vision and leaned back in his chair, groaning softly to himself.
Don Evans, you're a no-good lecher, he admonished himself silently.
He thought about his wife, Carta, with confused feelings of guilt and puzzlement. She was cute and blonde and cuddly in bed, and she never denied him the joys of her shapely little body. Evans supposed their sex life was as good as the sex life of any couple who had been married for nine years, maybe even a little better. Naturally, the breathtaking adventure and experimentation of the honeymoon and their first months together was long gone, but they still enjoyed making love, on an average of three times a week. Evans knew he was being unreasonable, but he couldn't help feeling he was in a rut, romantically speaking. There were times when Carla wanted him that he was actually bored. Once he had almost fallen asleep during the foreplay caresses.
He opened his eyes again and feasted them on Louise's heart-shaped buttocks shaping the thin material of her skirt. He could make out the leg bands of her skimpy panties. He groaned again. He would never fall asleep in bed with Louise Pitts, that was for sure! It was equally sure that he would never be in the same bed with the girl either, he reflected sadly. No, Don Evans was a happy, respectable married man, and he would never cheat on his wife no matter how great the temptation.
Louise came over to the desk, replacing the temptation of her legs and buttocks with two equally exciting attractions. Her blouse was cut daringly low in front, and when she leaned over the desk, her large, fruity breasts were bared almost to the rims of their pink aureoles. Evans compelled his eyes to focus on the folder in front of him.
"What's up, Doc?" Louise asked blithely.
He felt his blush deepening. Was it possible, he wondered, that the double entendre was intentional? It was entirely possible, he decided. Louise was an intelligent, sophisticated girl who could be objective about her physical assets. She must be quite aware of the effect that her body exerted on the male animal. like any female, it must give her a sense of power and pride to know that the sight of her undulating hips and bouncing breasts could make strong men grovel in the dust with their tongues hanging out.
"What's up, Doc?" she repeated the question.
"What do you mean?" he asked tersely, expecting her to make some ribald return.
To his relief, she was quite serious. "They brought two cases into emergency this morning, didn't you hear? Doctor Bowles was out by the desk waiting for you to come in. I thought he must have told you about them."
"No, I didn't see him," Evans said. "I came up the back stairs. What did he want to see me for? About the new emergency cases?"
"Yes," she replied. "Doctor Bowles says he's stumped. He can't figure out what's wrong with the patients. High fever, delirium, the whole bit."
Evans frowned. "That covers a lot of territory. Didn't he run the standard tests on them?"
"He was waiting for the lab reports when I saw him last."
At that instant, Paul Bowles burst into the room. He was a thin, blond man with a handsome, ascetic face. The muscles in his gaunt cheeks were constantly twitching when he was wrapped up in a medical riddle. Evans noted that they were twitching vigorously this morning.
"Hi, Paul," Evans said. "Hear you have a problem."
"Yes," admitted the younger man. "I'm really bugged, Don. Male and female, both in their twenties. High fever, extreme swelling of the lymph nodes."
"What else?"
"Some enlargement of the liver and spleen."
Evans pinched his thin, aquiline nose between his fingers thoughtfully. "Got any good guesses?"
Bowles smiled sardonically. "Yeah, it could be bubonic plague."
"That's not funny, Paul," Evans said. He glanced at Louise sitting in profile to him at her desk. She swung around to face him, crossing her beautiful legs slowly. Beneath the short skirt he had a loin-tingling glimpse of the pale, inner rounds of her thighs above the nylon stockings, and a saucy bit of pink lace. Instantly, the aura of foreboding that Bowles' grim joke had cast over him was dispelled. There was more than mere sex involved in the fascination of a woman's body. Lust was a constant surging of the life force. While it was surging, it was impossible to think of death and disease.
Just then his telephone jangled, and he lifted the receiver. "Yes, this is Doctor Evans." As he listened to the voice on the line, an expression of stunned disbelief marked his ruggedly attractive face. He hung up the phone and looked up at Bowles.
"That was the lab," he said. "They've isolated the bug in those new patients. Pasteurella pestis!"
Bowles exhaled loudly. "Good heavens, no!"
"You weren't joking after all," Evans said. "It's bubonic plague."
The phone rang again. Evans lifted it, and the grim expression on his face deepened as he listened. "Emergency ward," he said to Bowles. "Three more of the same just came in. It looks as if we're really in for it, Paul."
Within six hours, the little, inconspicuous town of Coaltown was making headlines across the nation. The count of plague victims had climbed to twenty. Six people were dead. The governor declared martial law in the area. Troops erected roadblocks on every artery leading in and out of the city. Coaltown was, literally, in a state of siege, sealed off from the outside world like a leper colony. Death prowled through the streets and laid his icy fingers on man, woman and child, rich and poor alike. Oddly enough, the sense of doom that gripped the town precipitated a bizarre, hysterical carnival atmosphere. The streets teemed with people, swaggering with the bravado that comes with blind fear. They congregated in bars and on street corners, talking and laughing wildly. Merchants closed their shops. Workers didn't bother to go back to their jobs after the lunch hour.
At the high school, Andy Jensen, a senior English teacher, put his daily class plan aside and launched into a lively discussion about the great plague that decimated Europe in the year 1347.
"The Black Death killed off half the population of Florence," he told his students. "It also inspired a young writer to create one of the greatest classics of literature of all time. Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron."
The class tittered restlessly. Laura Watson, a slender, blonde senior with wide blue eyes, spoke up. "You mean that dirty book they keep under lock and key in the research room?"
Jensen, a tall, husky man of 27, felt his ears prickle warmly. He combed his brown crew cut with his fingers. "Dirty is not the right word, Laura," he said. "It's bawdy and explicit and admittedly preoccupied with sex, but it is true literature." He had observed that the teen-age boys and girls were infected with an excess of nervous energy since the news of the plague had broken. They twisted around incessantly in their seats, and he had a difficult time maintaining discipline. The girls kept crossing and uncrossing their legs, and it had a disconcerting effect on Jensen. Several of them were sitting in postures that were most unlady-like, affording Jensen vistas of bare, nubile flesh that he found impossible to ignore. His gaze traveled up Laura Watson's firm, bare legs, tanned and sleek from the sun. Her short skirt was rumpled high on her thighs. He noticed, too, the way her small, conical breasts strained against the fabric of her blouse. She seemed to be feverish, and the flush on her face spread down her slim throat and over the upper mounds of pink flesh peeping over the blouse's low neckline.
"He must have been a real horny guy," an anonymous male voice quipped. "People dying like flies all around him, but old Boccaccio can't think of anything but sex."
"That's the whole point of the work," Jensen explained. "The idea is that this group of people are on the verge of madness from living with the Black Death night and day. To take their minds off death, they decide to sit around and exchange stories about the subject most removed from death. Life, love, sex. The tales are outrageous and witty, calculated to titillate the humor and libido of any and all who retain any spark of life within them."
A spirited and stimulating discussion ensued, and Jensen was surprised at how many of the young people had read the Decameron, or at least selected, racy portions of it. He was a little nervous at the bold direction some of the remarks took. If the parents could hear their progenies spouting off on sex, some of them would be howling for his blood to the school board. Somehow the prospect didn't worry him very much. Ordinarily, Jensen was a timid, conservative fellow who would have done nothing to imperil his job, but today he felt abandoned and reckless. From his desk, he ogled the girls' legs and thighs with growing excitement.
Never before had he ever looked upon his feminine charges as females whom he could lust for, and who might lust for him. This new mood he was experiencing made him see the girls in an entirely different light. They were mature, female animals with full breasts and thoroughly developed sexual capabilities. He wondered how many of them had tested these capabilities. His attention focused on Laura Watson. He had always thought she was the cutest girl in the class with her upturned nose and short, unruly blonde hair that fit her delicate head like a golden cap. She had wide, sensual lips. Suddenly, he ached to taste them. He ached to slip his hands inside her blouse and coddle her little breasts. He ached to caress those tender, virginal thighs. Or were they virginal? Desire throbbed in his loins with embarrassing insistency. He almost gasped aloud as the girl uncrossed her legs, and, for a delicious instant while her thighs were parted, the delightful mysteries of her young womanhood were hidden from him only by the merest wisp of sheer rayon. He slumped in his chair as the bell rang.
"Class dismissed," he said.
Laura Watson took her time about leaving. She opened her pocketbook and took out her comb and lipstick. When those tasks had been completed, she stood up and stretched her arms over her head. Her breasts stood up high and pointed. Jensen's hand trembled as he picked up his pen. Then she tucked in her blouse and smoothed down her skirt. The teacher was fascinated by the way her slim fingers touched her thighs, hips and buttocks. It was as if she were caressing them. She turned toward him and smiled.
"That was one of the best sessions we've ever had, Mister Jensen," she said.
"I'm glad you found it stimulating," he said, "Stimulating, yes." Her color deepened, and her blue eyes were sparkling. "That Decameron must be hot stuff. Once when I was younger, my girl friend who works in the school library let me see a copy. It didn't make much sense at the time. I'd like to read it again."
Jensen laughed. "Why don't you do that and write a term report on the book?"
"I might do that." She licked her lips with a wet, pink tongue. "You don't have a class next period, do you, Mister Jensen?"
"No, I'm going back to my office to correct papers."
"Could I come with you for a few minutes? I'd like to discuss the Decameron a little more and get an idea of what you'd want me to write about."
"Certainly." Jensen's heart was beating wildly as he gathered up his papers and books.
On the way along the hall, her hip kept bumping against his hip. Perspiration beaded his forehead. What he was thinking was sheer madness! He had to muster all of his will power to keep from putting his hands on her right there in the corridor.
J must be losing my mind! he told himself, but his lecherous imagery could not be daunted. Although the class bell had rung, students were still milling about outside their classrooms, oblivious to their screaming teachers.
"This is wild!" Laura said, her voice breathless with excitement. "You'd think the world was coming to an end."
"That's something of what we all feel," he admitted, "here in Coaltown. Bubonic plague is no laughing matter."
"I suppose not." She looked up at him with a sly smile. "Boccaccio and his friends could laugh about it though, and tell witty stories. Maybe that's what will happen here in Coaltown. We'll have all kinds of orgies."
Jensen laughed nervously.
"You know, it's funny," she went on, "this plague business makes you feel queer inside. All those people dying. Maybe you and I will be next, who knows? It makes you want to kick over the traces, doesn't it? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die "
"Let's hope not," Jensen said. As they passed a section of lockers, his eyes flared at the sight of a boy and girl embracing in a dim corner at the back of one of the rows. While he kissed her, the boy had one hand on her buttocks, and his fingers were working her skirt up the backs of her thighs. They passed out of view just as the edge of her panties came into sight.
Beside him, the blonde girl giggled. "See what I mean?"
Jensen felt as though his head would burst from the pounding pressure inside his temples. He was intensely aware of every nerve-ending in his body, the scorching heat in his loins. He wanted to tear off his clothing, let the air at his tortured flesh. He tried to smother the erotic feelings with thoughts of his dear wife and of the baby girl that had been born to them less than a year ago. It was no use. Visions of heaped-up corpses set ablaze with oil kept intruding, as in the old painting he had seen depicting the horror of the Black Death. He saw his wife and child atop the pile of dead. And, in the background, he saw a male and female writhing in sensual embrace. They were Laura and himself.
When they were inside his office, he shut the door and leaned against it. The girl frowned. "Are you okay? You look so pale, suddenly."
"It's nothing," he said. "I was thinking about what you said before. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die."
Her pretty face had lost its childish, elfin look. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, her nostrils flared, her lips were full and pouting. "That story I read in the Decameron," she said. "I still don't understand it. Maybe you could explain it."
"Which one was it?" Jensen sat down in his desk chair.
Laura hoisted herself up onto the desk, facing him. He could have reached out and touched her bare legs, so long and lithe and tanned. Her skirt rode high on her thighs, and her knees were parted carelessly. His feverish eyes probed the soft, warm valley between her rounded thighs, straining to glimpse what lay beyond the shadows further underneath her skirt. He sprawled in his chair, no longer making any effort to hide his lust.
The young girl read it in his eyes and in his posture. She had indulged in adolescent petting and tumblings in the back seats of cars with boys her own age. The nature of the male animal's passion was no mystery to her. She liked to touch and to be touched. On a few wonderful occasions, she and a boy would bring each other to fulfillment. Laura had never gone all the way with a boy, but she would frequently lash her body into a state of burning excitement, conjuring up images of herself and some favorite boy friend doing the real thing.
Sitting in Jensen's private office with the door closed, sexual excitement teased her body to a high pitch she had never experienced before. A fiery pin-wheel spun madly inside her belly. She felt as if little, furry mice were scampering on soft feet up and down the hot insides of her thighs. Her breasts were swollen and smothered inside the tight bra.
"This story you don't understand?" he reminded her.
She cleared her throat. "Yes, it was about this monk and this innocent young girl. She had wicked thoughts and desires, so she came to the monk to confess and to ask his help in atoning for her sinful feelings. The monk told her that she would have to put the devil in hell. She asked him how to do it, and you know what the lecherous old guy did? He made her take off her clothes, and then he took off his clothes. 'This is the devil' he said, pointing to himself. And then he pointed to her and said, 'this is hell.' So he showed her how to put the devil in hell."
Ordinarily, Jensen would have been mortified hearing this ribald little tale from a young girl student. Today he was excited and titillated.
"What don't you understand about it?" he asked with a leer. He could see all the way up to her pink panties now.
Laura giggled. "I don't understand how that kid could have fallen for such a corny line."
Jensen took a deep breath. "Because she wanted to fall for it, that's how. Just as thousands of girls these days fall for equally corny lines. They fall because they want to!"
She squirmed on the desk, causing her short skirt to pull back higher on her bare thighs. "Want to what?"
"This!" He fumbled with his clothing.
His sudden wanton action hit the girl like the shock of cold water. She had been enjoying the game immensely up until now, the teasing game that all nubile females play with eager young males. She enjoyed exciting the male, enjoyed being desired. In her limited experience, however, male desire had been a vague phenomenon sensed but not seen in the dark. This was something else again. This was in broad daylight, and Jensen was an adult male, her own teacher! The spectacle of his stark, bold lust took her breath away. She shivered as he reached out and placed his hands on her knees. She was fascinated and repelled at the same time. His face was purple and contorted with desire. His voice was thick.
"Let's put the devil in hell, Laura," he said.
She pictured it in her mind, and her virgin flesh constricted defensively. It must hurt awful! she thought, intimidated by the force of his surging virility.
On the other hand, the feel of his hard, strong fingers stroking her thighs filled her body with weak, helpless pleasure. His hands slid up her tapered flanks, underneath the skirt. They caressed her quivering belly through her panties. Sly fingers slipped inside the leg bands of her panty legs. Her body stiffened, and her head jerked back. A strangled moan of rapture escaped her lips.
Her body and will were mesmerized by his stroking fingers. She didn't object when he began to work her panties down over her hips and thighs. He pulled them over her knees and down over her ankles and feet. He drank in her golden, untouched beauty like a thirsty man in the desert who has stumbled on a verdant oasis. He kneeled beside the desk and cradled her hips in his arms, drawing her body toward him. His lips teased the warm, pliant flesh of her belly. It quivered and twitched under his kisses like a nervous bird. She was uttering unintelligible noises and thrashing about on the edge of the desk. Her thighs gripped his head like a vise.
When he felt he had brought her to the proper degree of receptivity, he stood up and removed her skirt and her blouse. She opened her eyes and smiled at him as he unsnapped her brassiere and freed her firm, pointed breasts. Gently, he gathered her into his arms and sat down in his chair.
She recoiled at the insistent thrust of him between her thighs. "Don't!" she told him. "I'm a virgin."
He buried his face between her breasts, murmuring, "Eat, drink and be merry, remember?" He took one of the hard little nipples in his mouth and positioned her so that she was straddling his lap.
Pain knifed through her flesh. "No!" she gasped. "I don't want to. Only this way."
He felt her slim hands on him. It was delightful, but Jensen was no adolescent boy. His demands were not BO simply satisfied. He pushed her hands away and thrust against her impatiently.
"It only hurts for a second," he assured her.
"Cut it out!" she said angrily. She tried to break away, but he held her tightly against him.
Her pain and anger swelled as he stormed the citadel brutally. "You louse!" she screamed. Her clawed fingers slashed down on both sides of his face, raking his cheeks from temples to jawline.
"Hellcat!" he hissed and tried to grab her hands. One of her fists smashed into his nose, blinding him with pain. Blood jetted out of his nostrils, spraying her breasts and belly bright crimson. He lashed out at her wildly with his powerful arms. An open-handed blow caught her on the side of the head, knocking her off his lap. She sprawled on the floor like a rag doll, stunned, lying face down. The vision of her naked buttocks, plump, pink and inviting sent his lust spiraling upward again.
He was seized by an old impulse that he had refused to indulge in all the years of his married life. Sometimes when he and his wife were making love, he felt a strong compulsion to turn her over his knee and spank her. He would always stifle the urge guiltily. But now, the compulsion was indomitable.
He lifted the stunned girl off the floor and draped her face down across his knees. Her round buttocks reared high in the air, delightfully vulnerable. His face smarted where she had scratched him. Droplets of blood from his injured nose fell onto the smooth, pink flesh of her buttocks. Jensen was excited in a way that lifted his spirit to heights he had never enjoyed before. Trembling with pleasure, he hit her smartly with the palm of his right hand. Shocked out of her daze by the blow, Laura bucked and kicked her legs.
"Lemmegol" she howled.
Her resistance enhanced his enjoyment. The sight of his hand print on her round cheeks put him into a delicious frenzy. He hit her again, a slap that rang out like a pistol shot. Her pretty rump convulsed in agony.
"Oh! Oh!" she whimpered. "Please stop!"
He rained blows on her buttocks and thighs until her tender flesh glowed fiery red. The girl had no conscious recollection of when the change began. It was an abrupt, sudden thing. One minute her body was racked with torment. The next, the tendrils of fire that licked at all of her tender parts assumed an entirely different guise. The blood pounded fiercely in her breasts and belly and loins. Pain and pleasure fused in a delirious cataclysm of ecstasy.
With superhuman strength, she pulled away from him and rolled onto the floor. Lying back, braced on her elbows, her legs widespread in abandon, she glared up at him. Her eyes glowed with animal hunger. Her pointed breasts reached up at him, swelling with her frantic breathing. Her round belly heaved, and her thighs quivered.
"Hurry up!" she implored him. "I want it so bad, I can't stand it!"
Snorting like a conquering bull, he fell upon her fiercely. The pain of her first mating was nothing to compare with the exquisite pleasure that followed in its wake like the shock wave of a tremendous explosion. All of the demons that had crouched in the dark labyrinths of Jensen's mind for years broke free like a flock of squealing bats whipping out of a subterranean cave at sunset.
All over Coaltown that day, men and women were casting off the shackles of civilization that had constrained their emotions and desires all of their lives. In the wake of the first plague, a second plague was spreading over the city. The new plague was, perhaps, far more dangerous than pasteurella pestisl
CHAPTER 2
UP ON THE
"Hill," the fashionable section of Coaltown, the Lutz family sat around the supper table, picking at their meal without appetite. A transistor radio sat in the middle of the table, crackling out the latest bulletins relating to the plague. It was the opinion of the medical investigators that the dire affair had originated in Nova Scotia, where some weeks earlier, an isolated case had been reported on a Japanese freighter docked there. Inasmuch as the disease is communicated by a species of flea that infests rats, it was assumed that an infected rat from the freighter had left the freighter and climbed aboard one of the smaller boats that trafficked the St. Lawrence waterway and the Great Lakes. By grim chance this rat, or other rats which it infected aboard the smaller boat, elected to jump ship at Coaltown. Mingling with the numerous rats that lived in the swamps along the lake front, they had spread the virus. At the moment, a massive rodent extermination campaign was in progress.
Sam Lutz switched off the radio in annoyance.
"They lock the stable after the horse has been stolen," he said. "For years I've been trying to get the city council to clean up the waterfront. So now, they're doing it. Too late!"
Bess Lutz looked at her husband sympathetically. Every day his graying hair seemed to get thinner, the tire around his waist thicker, and his jowls looser. He was getting to be an old man before his time Sam was only 47. Bess noted that there were men at their country club who were older than her husband, but who were years younger in appearance and attitude. A lot younger! There were always one or two of them who made sly passes at Bess when spirits got too high at the Saturday night dances. They would press up against her opulent bottom at the bar, and sometimes they would even try to steal a kiss out on the darkened terrace. Just thinking about the lean, handsome man who had rubbed against her the week before made her buttocks tingle.
The trouble was that Bess's bottom had been tingling all too long without surcease. She was lucky if Sam made love to her once a month in this last year. His libido was fading, while her libido was blooming richer than it ever had at any other stage in her life. What was the term for her present condition? Hot pants, she thought, smiling wryly. She sighed.
At 45, Bess Lutz was a vibrant, attractive matron. Her auburn hair still glowed with a copper sheen, thanks to a good hairdresser. The flesh around her neck and jawline was still firm. Her breasts had never been too large, a fact which she was grateful for now. Even without a bra, they were not pendulous like the breasts of some of her contemporaries. Her legs were still slender, as was her waist. Perhaps her thighs and bottom were getting fleshly, but the men liked that in a woman, she believed.
Lately, she had been briefly tempted to encourage some of the men who made advances to her, but never too seriously. Affairs were such seamy, dirty business, particularly for the woman. The fear of exposure always outweighed the quick, greedy pleasure. Besides, she loved her husband.
The news of the plague and the ominous bottling up of Coaltown from the rest of the world had terrified Sam. Not that he feared for his own life. It was his wife and his two children he was worried about. He looked at the twins, sitting opposite each other at the table, and his heart was wrenched.
Dick and Sissy, a beautiful girl and a handsome boy, just turned 18. Except for the boy's stronger features, they might have been identical twins. They had deep blue eyes and flaxen hair. Dick had a slender, athlete's build and stood a head taller than his sister. Sam had been appalled when his precious daughter had blossomed into a mature female at the age of 15, with jutting breasts and the lush hips and buttocks of a woman. The legion of boys who flocked around her at the pool and at club dances were a source of constant concern to him. He knew what the little lechers had on their minds. They wanted to get their hands on her virginal breasts and her untouched flanks. It got so bad that Sam was coming to regard sex as an offensive mechanism. Every time he had relations with his wife, he would imagine some hot-blooded young stag doing the same thing to his darling Sissy. Now sex had no appeal to him whatsoever. He never considered Bess's feelings, or thought to ask.
He started as she got up from the table. "What's the rush?" he demanded.
"Got a date, Daddy," the girl said.
Sam pounded his fist on the table. "Oh no! Not tonight! You're not running around this city and catching the bubonic plague. You, all of you, are staying inside the house until this mess blows over."
Sissy, as she always did, bridled at his smothering, protective domination. Her blue eyes flashed. "Don't be ridiculous, Father!" she snapped. "Let's not get panicky. I don't intend to get near any rats tonight, and that's the only way the disease can spread. You have to get fleas from an infected rat."
Sam grunted. "That Peters boy is a rat if I ever saw one."
"You're impossible!" The girl spun angrily on her heel and stalked away.
Sam started to call her back, but Bess restrained him. "Darling, please," she said. "Sissy is almost a woman. She can take care of herself. You've got to stop treating her like a child."
Sam slumped in his chair, defeated.
Later when young Carl Peters picked up his daughter, he forced himself to be civil. "Where are you kids going?" he demanded.
Carl, a tall, rangy youth of 19, with wavy brown hair and an infectious smile, answered politely. "It's a warm night. I thought we'd walk over to the park and take a boat out on the bay." There was a small amusement park on Lake Erie. Its most attractive feature for the young people was the rowboat concession. For a dollar an hour, couples could go for a moonlight excursion on the bay.
Sam groaned. "You want to invite the plague?" he asked. "That's where the rats are, down by the lake."
The boy laughed. "We'll beat them off with an oar."
Abysmally depressed, Sam watched his daughter come down the stairs. She was wearing a white linen frock that displayed her bare shoulders and the cleavage between her small, round breasts. He was horrified by the brevity of her skirt. It showed her bare, brown legs and thighs in a provocative fashion.
To his wife he muttered, "When she sits down in that boat, he'll be able to see her backside."
Bess nudged him with her elbow and sighed nostalgically. She remembered too well how it was to be young and desirable, and to see the glow that came into a boy's eyes when he looked you up and down. She agreed with her husband about the short skirt. It was too brief, but she trusted her daughter. A girl liked to show off her charms and excite the admiration of the male. Sissy might let the boy look at more of her body than was proper, but she wouldn't let him touch. At least, Bess prayed, she wouldn't let him touch too much.
Sam was furious at the possessive way the boy took Sissy's hand in his own. When his wife went in to do the dishes, he called his son aside.
"I'm worried about your sister," he said. "This town is going crazy since this plague hit it. Drunks roaming all over. I heard a bunch of men and women who work in the paper mill got arrested for going swimming in the nude at high noon."
Dick Lutz laughed. "I'd like to have seen that."
"Don't get fresh," his father said. "Look, I want you to do me a favor. Follow your sister and that chump she's with. See that nothing happens to her."
The boy's fair eyebrows lifted in shock. He knew that his father was foolishly overprotective about Sissy, but he had never gone this far.
"You want me to spy on them?" he said.
"Call it anything you want." Sam took a fat roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off twenty. "This is for your trouble."
Dick's eyes were bright. Twenty dollars, just for playing private eye! He wanted a new movie camera, and that twenty would be a big start in the right direction.
"What the heck!" he said. "You got a deal!" He grabbed the bill and ran out of the house. "I'll have to hurry if I want to catch them!"
From babyhood to adolescence, the relationship between Dick and Sissy had been unusually close, as it is with most twins. They played, bathed and slept together. They did not think of each other as being sexual opposites. Even Bess Lutz did not think about it until one memorable day when the twins were nine years old. They were cavorting about in the big bathtub when little Sissy let out a whoop of delighted surprise.
"Dickie, stop that! It tickles." She began to giggle hysterically.
Curious, Bess popped her head into the bathroom, and her eyes bulged. Dick and Sissy were kneeling in the tub, and the boy was holding her around the waist while he pressed himself against her plump bottom. His innocence was unquestionable, but the instincts of his male body were unmistakable.
She kept her voice calm. "That's all for today, kids. Come out and get dry."
"Aw gee!" the boy protested. "We're having fun."
"Yeah," his sister echoed. "We're having fun."
Bess didn't doubt it, and she was badly shaken. From that moment on, the twins bathed separately and slept in separate rooms. Dick and Sissy were mystified by the change in their routine, but after the initial sadness of it, they accepted it.
Dick didn't think about the episode in the bathtub which had precipitated the gulf in intimacy between his sister and himself until he was twelve, and some friends told him in shocking detail about the facts of life. It was quite clear to him then that that is what he had been trying to do to his sister the day in the tub, and his mother's attitude became comprehensible.
Puberty was a difficult time for Dick. As Sissy developed into a woman, he found himself regarding her less as his sister and more as a female. She, on the other hand, was as much at ease with him as she had been when they were kids bathing in the same tub. She thought nothing of parading through the hall, past his open door in her bra and panties or in a sheer, shortie nightgown. As he lay awake in his bed on warm nights, visions of her firm, pink-tipped breasts would float before his eyes. He would see her svelte, slender legs with the fine golden hairs bleached white by the sun. He would see her round buttocks peeking coyly out from under the hem of her shortie nightgown when she bent over the sink to brush her teeth. His body would grow turgid with lust. It was a shameful thing to him, but he could not help it. When he was possessed with such thoughts, the only way he could get to sleep was to rub himself until he achieved physical release from his sexual tensions. He would pretend the hands were Sissy's hands.
Things got better after his sixteenth year. He was a popular boy at high school, and enjoyed a surplus of female admiration. Other girls replaced his sister in his lewd fantasies. Then the fantasies ceased altogether. There were numerous girls who were only too willing to let Dick Lutz touch their bare breasts and their bare thighs and to adore his flesh with their hands and mouths. A few of them even let him go all the way.
Sissy was forgotten, an image cast off with his adolescent years and problems.
Dick set off down the dark street, whistling and crunching the crisp new twenty-dollar bill in his pocket. It might be a gas at that, he thought, spying on his sister He wondered whether she did the things with Carl Peters that he did with his girl friends at school. The thought of it excited him strangely, and he was glad it was night so that his condition would not be noted by passersby. Looking down from the Hill on the business section of Coaltown reminded him of the Fourth of July. Lights blazed everywhere. The streets were crawling with people. Down by the wharves, kerosene torches blazed like swarms of fireflies as the exterminators hunted down the deadly rats in their lairs.
The road to the park skirted the main part of town. After ten minutes of brisk walking, he saw Sissy and Carl walking up ahead with their arms about each other's waists. He slowed down, keeping a half-block behind them. The park was jammed with strollers, mostly boys and girls holding hands and mooning over each other. Their faces looked hot, and their eyes were bright with fever. They courted each other with brazen disregard for spectators. Dick passed a bench where one young couple were entwined like two snakes. One of the boy's hands was down inside the girl's blouse, while one of her hands "was deep in his pants pocket, obviously caressing him. The excitement that Dick had felt before was heightened by the lewd spectacle. Now he didn't care who noticed it.
He was sorry in a way that he had accepted this assignment. What he felt like doing was to pick up a girl and take her into the bushes, but he would do the job his father had paid him for. From a safe distance he watched Sissy and Carl approach the boat concessionaire. The man shrugged and pointed to the empty boat racks. Obviously, his boats were all rented out. The young couple turned away and walked off down a path that followed the shore of the lake. Dick followed them.
They walked with their hips and thighs pressed tightly together. Their eyes were locked. When they passed under a lamp, he could see the fire gleaming in their faces. From time to time they would stop and kiss. Hot, lusty kisses. Dick began to feel uneasy about what lay ahead. From his observations, based on past experience, he was sure that Sissy and Carl each had up a full head of steam and were headed for a secluded spot to get their ashes hauled. What would his father expect him to do if that happened?
They walked to the far end of the park which was dark and deserted except for the writhing silhouettes of lovers on the grass. At last they came to a hedge and ducked behind it. Dick took off his loafers and came up quietly on the other side of the hedge. Kneeling down, he peered through a gap in the branches and could see them only a few feet away. At that opportune moment, the moon broke through its cloud cover, illuminating the boy and girl vividly. They were stretched out on the grass, kissing ardently. Beads of sweat oozed out of Dick's forehead, and his heart pounded heavily against his breastbone.
Carl was stroking her bare shoulders, gleaming palely in the moon glow. She whimpered as he slid her shoulder straps down over her arms. Dick held his breath as Sissy's round, firm breasts popped into view. She wasn't wearing a bra. Obviously she had wanted to make things easy for him. Dick felt anger simmering inside of him, mixed with his rising sexual excitement. Her nipples swelled up rigidly as the boy caressed them with gentle fingers. Dick hated Carl Peters. He had no right to take such liberties with his twin sister! He could hear Carl bragging about his conquest in the locker room tomorrow.
Sissy was breathing very hard and twisting in Carl's embrace. Now the boy was stroking her legs, shoving her skirt up higher and higher on her lovely thighs. She parted her knees eagerly as his hand dipped between her thighs. Dick's anger and resentment climbed to dangerous heights. He hated Sissy now as much as he hated Carl. She was a little tramp, no better than the sluts who slobbered over him in the back seat of his car on Saturday nights. Her skirt was twisted up around her hips, and Carl was rolling her panties down. Her round tummy quivered whitely in the moonlight. She lifted her buttocks to assist Carl. At last he pulled the panties off her feet and tossed them aside.
Dick was shocked by the sight of his sister lying there on the grass in naked wantonness, all of her glories exposed to the lecherous gaze of Carl Peters. What was even worse, she was clawing at the boy's clothing like a hungry animal.
"Be patient, doll," Carl mumbled. He pulled off his trousers and shorts.
With a little moan of pleasure, she grasped him eagerly. A red mist descended over Dick's eyes. Rockets exploded in his brain. He fumbled around with his hands under the hedge and found a large stone. Holding it tightly in his right hand, he stood up and vaulted the hedge.
Carl was already on top of the girl, so he didn't see what hit him. With a savage cry of satisfaction, Dick swung the heavy stone against the side of the other boy's head. He collapsed without an outcry. As Carl fell to one side on the grass, Sissy gaped at the dark figure looming over her in mute terror. The terror turned to astonishment and shame when she finally recognized him.
"Dick!" she whispered. She was too stunned to move, or even to pull down her skirt.
Dick stared down at her bare belly and thighs, spread wide to receive her lover. Brotherly rage and indignation fused with inexorable male desire excited by the vision of the lovely, naked, ready female body. He wanted to kill her and to love her at the same time.
Her throat constricted as she sensed the way he was looking at her. Stricken with shame, she pulled down her skirt and started to get to her feet. She tried to muster up righteous indignation to meet his scorn.
"Dick Lutz, you ought to be ashamed, spying on me like this!" Tears welled up in her eyes as she stood up and faced him.
"Whore!" he snarled, and spit in her face. He grabbed her bare shoulders as she tried to cover her breasts and shook her violently. His fingernails bit deeply into the soft flesh.
"You're hurting me!" she whimpered.
Blood seeped up between his fingers, dark and slippery. The feel of it lashed his fury. Still holding her with one hand, he slapped her face, then backhanded the other cheek. Her head snapped back and forth as he hit her harder and harder. She began to scream, but he silenced her with a fist in the mouth. Her lips were a bloody smear. Grasping her by her blonde hair, he forced her down on her knees and bent her backward until she thought her spine was going to snap. She cried in pain.
"Oh, no! Please, I'm sorry!"
"You're sorry!" he said scornfully. With her back arched, her breasts were thrust up boldly into the air, their round slopes gleaming in the moonlight. The nipples were still tumescent from Carl's kisses.
"Is this what you want, whore?" he said wildly. He bent over and pressed his open mouth to one of the hot, satiny globes.
Sissy stiffened and gasped. "Dick! Stop that!"
His kisses were savage and agonizing. He bit her, softly at first, but as he approached the scarlet summit, his teeth dug deep and pierced the tender skin. Sissy writhed helplessly in his iron grasp and bleated like a wounded animal. Abruptly, he shoved her away from him, and she sprawled on her back on the grass. Her skirt was tangled high on her thighs. Her bare legs shone like ivory in the moonlight. He gazed at them, entranced. Hesitantly, he reached out a hand and laid it on the thigh nearest to him. The flesh was warm and sweet with youth. His fingers glided up the velvet inner side, pushing her skirt all the way back. His hand plunged greedily into the soft nest of her belly and thighs.
She jerked up her knees and tried to roll away from him. Her voice was weak with shock and disbelief. "Dick! What's wrong with you? I'm your sister!"
"Dear sister," he said dreamily. He unfastened his belt.
Her eyes widened in horror. There could no longer be any doubt of his intentions. His lust was a blazing, ugly reality that stupefied the girl. As he fell on top of her, she lashed out at him with her arms and legs. Her nails lacerated his ears and face, but he felt no pain. His body was dead, but for one throbbing, demanding sensation. He punched her in a breast. Her little fists battered at his face, bloodying his nose, but he came on relentlessly.
He pinned her shoulders to the earth, and pried her legs apart with a knee. He gazed into her wide, terrified eyes. They were his eyes, exactly the same shade and shape.
"No, Dickie!" she pleaded with him. "You mustn't do it!"
"I must," he said.
She moaned and reared up as his body found her body. The touch of his flesh against her flesh was like a jolt of electricity. A crazy, vague memory flitted through her mind, of a day long ago when they had frolicked as children in a bathtub. The impact stunned the girl. This thing that was happening to her now was the culmination of what had begun on that day, years before. She saw it now, the terrible inevitability of it.
"Forgive him!" she howled at the stars as he swelled within her.
It was not the first time for Sissy. There had been Carl, and before him another boy. This was not the same. She lay as one dead as he commenced the age-old rhythm. Her body was cold at first. The first sensation she noticed began in her fingers and toes, the warm tingle of quickening blood. Her breasts came to life, next. She gazed down at them and was shocked and shamed to see the nipples stiffening. She whimpered in resignation as the warm, swirling sweetness seeped down into her belly.
An elation that was more than sexuality filled Dick as her hips rose to meet his thrusts, picking up their tempo. Her contractions delighted him. Suddenly, she was as wild and wanton as she had been with Carl. He closed his eyes and listened to the thunder of his pulse. It was like the roar of breakers crashing on an ocean reef. A tidal wave swept down upon them and lifted them high on its crest. He heard his sister screaming as the wave broke and sent them tumbling high and free into empty space.
After a long time, they sat up and stared at each other. Dick winced at the spectacle of her swollen, bloody face and bruised breasts. His own blood was salty on his lips. He looked at the crumpled figure of Carl Peters lying on the grass. He had a bump on his head the size of a goose egg, but he was stirring restlessly. Soon he would be conscious.
Sissy buried her face in her hands and began to sob. "Why, oh why, Dick?"
"I don't know," he said in a dazed voice. "I think I went mad when I saw him touching you. I thought I was being protective, like Dad. Then, somehow, it all changed when I looked at you lying there so naked and lovely. I've always loved you, Sissy, but I never realized how much. You and I being twins, that must be it. I read once that man loves his own self more than he can ever love anyone else. We're all narcissists, basically, I suppose."
"I think I understand," she said miserably. "You love me with a special love because I'm your other self, your twin."
"Something like that. I guess I've always wanted to make love to you, because in doing so I'm making love to myself in some strange way."
"It's terrible, Dickie," she wailed. "The worst part is, it was wonderful for me. Even the pain."
"Even the pain," he repeated. "I wish I could say I was sorry, but I can't."
"What can we do? It will happen again, won't it?"
He waited for a long time before he answered her. "No," he said finally and with finality, "it won't happen again." He stood up and buttoned his clothing.
"Goodbye, Sis," he said.
"Where are you going?"
"For a long walk." He took the twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and dropped it beside Carl Peters "You can tell Carl and the folks that you were jumped by a couple of thugs."
He walked away without looking back, far past the boundaries of the park. He cut through the woods to the shore of Lake Erie. He walked down the beach to the water's edge, and kept on walking. The dark, oily water reached his waist, then his chin. Then he was gone.
CHAPTER 3
Dr. DON EVANS slumped behind his desk, wan and red-eyed from fatigue. It was nearly midnight. The only nourishment he had taken all day came from the score of paper Coke and coffee cups lined up on the window sill behind him. He was so weary that even the sight of Louise Pitts bending over a file cabinet, flouting her lovely derriere, no longer stirred him.
When she straightened up, he said to her, "Why don't you call it a day, Lou? They don't pay overtime here, you know."
She smiled at him. "Why don't you call it a day?"
"I will soon," he told her. "There haven't been any new plague cases for two hours now. Maybe we're over the hump." He winked at her lecherously. "Anyway, I'm not a panting newlywed like you."
The girl did not appreciate the joke. "Who's panting?" she snapped and turned away from him.
Evans frowned. Un-like most newly married girls, Louise never mentioned her marriage unless someone else brought up the subject first. Then she changed the subject as soon as possible. He knew that the reason had nothing to do with her shyness about the sexual implications of her new status as a wife. Louise had always adopted a free and breezy attitude about sex. She was a broad-minded girl who could enjoy a dirty joke or a suggestive remark as fully as any woman he had ever met. As a matter-of-fact, he had always thought of her as being a trifle salacious. When Dave Pitts was first courting her, she had talked about him a good deal. However, from the day she had arrived home from her honeymoon, she had never mentioned her groom in the office.
"Did you phone Dave to tell him you'd be late tonight?"
"No," she said. "He's probably asleep by now." Evans snorted. "A new groom? Who are you kidding?"
She ignored him. "Boy, could I use a drink. A real stiff one." She opened the top button of her blouse and blew down into the valley between her ample breasts. The act titillated his sluggish libido, and prompted him to do something he would not have done ordinarily.
"I could use a drink, too. Come on, we'll have it together."
Louise's dark eyes lit up. "Why, thank you, sir. I'd appreciate that. A girl can't go into a bar alone at this time of night."
"Tonight, she can. No holds barred in Coaltown tonight, so I understand. Paul Bowles said a teen-age girl tried to pick him up on the street while he was out for supper. He has a theory that this plague business could turn our fair city into a jungle. He could be right. Down through the ages, fear has always been a handy excuse to kick over the traces. The times of the great plagues in the Middle Ages were distinguished by inordinate immorality and licentiousness."
Louise came over to him and stood so close that the points of her breasts almost touched his chest. "Maybe this will end up in a wild bacchanal, do you think?"
Evans couldn't take his eyes off the white flesh bulging over the top of her bra, coyly visible where she had opened the button. He swallowed hard. "Ready for that drink?"
She stepped back and looked down at herself. "I'm a holy mess, aren't I?" She ran her hands over her hips and thighs, trying to smooth out the wrinkled skirt Behind, it was plastered to her legs and buttocks. Evans no longer felt tired. The thought of the firm, succulent body beneath the skirt and blouse made his loins vibrate. Dave Pitts was one lucky man, he thought. If the guy was asleep when Louise got home, as she had suggested, he was also a darned fool!
Dave Pitts was not asleep. like the other citizens of Coaltown, he, too, was affected by the macabre excitement generated by the plague and the quarantine. It was the kind of excitement that reached deep down into the core of a man, disturbing dormant yearnings which he had believed were permanently silenced when he married Louise. That had been a mistake. Marrying Louise had been a mistake. They both knew it. Only the girl was not sure what the reasons were. Dave knew, only too well.
Dave Pitts' destiny was determined the day he and his father overturned in their auto when Dave was five years old. The father was killed, and the boy was pulled screaming from the burning car. His mother went into a state of shock from which she never fully recovered. For a year after the mishap, she never let her son out of her sight for five seconds. Her cloying protectiveness never altered materially for the next ten years. When the boy was nine years old, she was still taking him into the ladies' rooms of theaters and restaurants. They slept together in the same bed until he was fourteen.
It was in his fourteenth summer that Dave and his mother rented a bungalow on a small lake in Vermont. In the bungalow next to theirs was a widower and his teen-age daughter, a dark-eyed, slim brunette of seventeen. The widower was immediately attracted to Mary Pitts.
Young Dave had no inkling of what sex was all about, and even had he known, he would not have regarded his mother as a sexy woman. She was his
"Mom." Truth was that the thirty-eight-year-old widow was quite fascinating to the opposite sex. She had a fragile, frightened kind of beauty, like a faun. Her eyes were enormous and luminous, her skin was pale and flawless, and her long, black hair hung down to her waist when it was undone. She had small breasts, like a girl of fifteen.
Dave was puzzled and resentful. He didn't like this tall, husky man with the big shoulders and hairy chest hanging around his mother. Sometimes, when they were on the beach, Bart Smith would come running up, looking like a naked ape in his tight bathing trunks. There seemed too much of the man for the trunks, and Dave always had the wild idea that the skimpy Lastex was going to explode, leaving Smith stark nude before his mother's shocked eyes.
Mary Pitts had exactly the same notion. She would blush in shame as her heart accelerated at the thought. She could not help wondering what he would look like. Her eyes kept focusing on the most embarrassing parts of him when he was in a bathing suit.
Before her husband's fatal accident, Mary Pitts had been a perfectly normal woman and wife. She had been an ardent woman who enjoyed conjugal relations as much as her husband did. Now nine years had gone by without any sex for her. She had never even thought about sleeping with a man, until she met Bart Smith. Her son saw the paleness gradually leaving her cheeks every day she was with Smith, and he sensed the reason why, but could not define it.
It was Betty Smith who put him straight. One sunny afternoon, he was alone in the bungalow while his mother was boating with Smith, when the girl walked into his room. Betty had a mature, woman's body sheathed with the firm, glowing flesh of youth. Her breasts, larger than his mother's, were aggressive and insolent in a thin cotton halter. Hip-hugging shorts were molded to her round buttocks and flat belly. Her legs were long and golden from the sun. The sight of the human body, male or female, made Dave uncomfortable. He didn't like to look at himself in the nude.
She looked over his shoulder at the book he was reading. "Dirty book?" she asked lightly.
The boy blushed. "It's about Lassie, a dog."
She burst out laughing. "Oh, brother! Don't you know kids your age should be thinking about other things?"
He blinked. "What kind of things?"
She studied him thoughtfully. "I believe you really are square. Or maybe you're one of the sneaky ones. Could be you have a picture of a naked girl hidden in your Lassie book."
"I do not!" he protested vehemently.
"Okay, okay!" She laughed. "I was only kidding. Don't be so touchy." She sat down on the opposite end of the couch from him and threw one leg over the backrest. The tight, binding shorts almost split.
"My dad and your mother are at it again," she said.
"What do you mean?" he said uneasily.
She winked and ran her fingers through her short brown hair. "They went out to that deserted island for a picnic."
Dave frowned. "They're always going out to that island. What's out there that's so interesting?"
Her dark eyes regarded him with incredulous amusement. "Don't you know anything about the birds and the bees at all?"
"Birds and bees?"
She sat up suddenly and moved closer to him. Her face was flushed with excitement. "You know the difference between boys and girls, don't you?"
His eyes avoided her penetrating gaze. "Sure I do," he said hesitantly. It was partially true. He knew, for instance, that women had breasts. He knew, too, that there were other vague differences between their bodies from whispered talk among his classmates. Still, he had never truly experienced the pleasurable curiosity about sex that was normal fcr a youth his age. His mother was a female. His mother was a shining saint, first, though. His mother was everything that was good and pure and clean.
"I don't believe you know anything," the girl said. She reached behind her and undid her halter, shrugging it off her shoulders. Dave's eyes widened on her bare breasts. They were as firm and round as oranges. Their pink tips fascinated him.
She giggled. "Don't you like them?"
He was speechless.
She took one of his hands and touched it to one breast It was warm, soft and springy, smooth as velvet under his fingertips. A sensation something akin to an electric current passed up his arm and constricted his throat Absently, he stroked the fleshy slope and touched the pink summit To his surprise, it expanded like a tiny balloon in his fingers.
Betty shivered. "Now you're learning. Doesn't that do anything to you?"
"It feels nice," he said.
"Where?"
"I mean you're nice to feel," he said, expressing himself with difficulty. The electrical current had passed down into his body as he touched one breast and then the other. There was an unfamiliar heaviness deep in his belly, as if warm water were collecting there in a pool.
"Take off your clothes," she instructed him.
The boy recoiled in mortification. "No, that's dirty."
"Don't be silly. Here, I'll go first." She fumbled at the buttons at the side of her shorts and stood up, facing him. Wriggling her slim hips sensuously, she pulled down the shorts and stepped out of them. She posed for him, naked except for her filmy, peach-colored panties. Dave's blush deepened as she began to roll the panties down over her hips and tummy.
"Peek-a-boo!" she said, bumping her hips at him.
The boy was becoming genuinely excited. The curiosity about sex, repressed so long, gushed forth. He could feel something happening to his body that bad never happened to him before. It was frightening, but at the same time, very pleasant He began to undress as Betty slipped the panties down over her thighs and knees.
The glow in her eyes brightened when she saw him. "Well, you're quite a little man, after all," she simpered.
Dave stared at himself in confusion. This debut of his incipient masculinity was a wondrous thing. The girl pressed herself against him, and the shock of her bare flesh against him took his breath away. Her nipples burned into his thin chest. Her belly pulsed hotly against his loins, welcoming the bold thrust of his flesh.
Her arms went around his neck, and she rolled up her eyes. "Oh, sweetie, you are a quick study, as they say in the movies," she said dreamily.
Suddenly, Dave felt as if a tornado were whirling inside of him, sucking up all of his vital organs into a turbulent vortex. He clutched the girl by the buttocks, holding her tight as he moved against her in uncontrollable convulsions. Excruciating pleasure exploded in his loins, and he cried out.
Betty laughed. "You are a quick study. Too quick. Now what am I going to do?"
The shattering experience had dazed him. He let her push him down on the couch and lay there as her slim hands worked on him with teasing caresses. "Got to prime the old pump, Davey boy. Now that you've got that one out of your system, everything will be fine."
In no time at all, the wondrous fire was roaring up again inside of him. The physical phenomenon of his desire was miraculous to the inexperienced boy. His eyes widened as the girl straddled his hips.
The sight of her woman's body somewhat intimidated him. There was a fierce, ominous mystery about it. He felt as he did standing at the edge of a thick, dark forest, peering into the unknown shadows in its depths.
"What are you going to do?" he asked timidly.
"Second lesson," she said. "This is where they separate the men from the boys. What happened to you before was strictly for the boys. Fasten your seat belt, kiddies. The fun is about to begin."
Dave felt himself sliding down a steep, slippery slope into a bottomless pit. The quick descent left him giddy and breathless. It was at that precise moment that his mother's scream exploded on his ears.
Betty tumbled off of him and rolled on the floor. Dave leaped up and covered himself with his hands as best as he could. The last time he had read such horror and shock in Mary Pitts' eyes had been right after his father's fatal accident. In her bathing suit, she looked far less frail than she did in clothing. Today she looked positively gargantuan to Dave. Her disbelieving gaze flitted from boy to girl, and, finally, settled on the girl. Her black eyes glittered with a snake's hatred. Her voice hissed.
"You harlot! You unspeakable little slut." She cursed the Smith girl with words he had never heard her use before.
Betty was white-faced and scared. She bent and gathered up her dotbing from the floor. "I'd better get out of here," she muttered.
Mary Pitts stared around the room wildly. Her hands were convulsing, the fingers itching to punish the strumpet in a fitting fashion. Then her eyes lit on the thin, hickory walking stick standing in a corner. With a cry of angry exultation, she picked it up and rushed at the girl. Betty was struggling into her panties, but in her haste they were tangled low on her thighs. Her buttocks were thrust out prominently, an inviting target for the enraged mother.
The hickory stick whistled down in a wide arc, cracking Betty squarely across the plumpest portion of her buttocks. She leaped a foot off the ground, arms and legs flailing in torment It felt as though a hot poker had been drawn across her tender, pink flesh. The pain rocketed around in her belly and shot up her spine and down into her toes. She tripped over the tangled panties and went down on hands and knees, with her bare bottom stall offering a vulnerable target for Mrs. Pitts. She swung the stick again, branding a second thick, red welt across the plump cheeks just below the first one. Betty screamed in agony and pitched forward on her face. She clutched at her buttocks, trying to calm the screaming flesh. This time when Mary Pitts swurig the stick, it smashed Betty's hands and fingers. The girl moaned and fainted. She was lying on the floor as if she were dead when
Bart Smith burst into the room. A towel was knotted around his waist. "What's going on here?" he demanded. "I was in the shower when I heard someone screaming." Abruptly he spotted his daughter's abused body on the rug. His heavy, square face was stricken. "My baby! What have you done to her?"
Mary Pitts lifted the stick to strike the prostrate girl again, but Smith was on top of her like an angry bull. "You sadistic witch! I ought to kill you!" He wrested the stick away from her.
Yowling like a cat, she clawed at his face. "She seduced my little boy," she cried. "She's evil and lecherous. He's just a child."
As her nails raked his one cheek, Smith hit her with the flat of his powerful hand on the side of the head. Mary went crashing into the wall with a jolt that shook the rafters. Stunned, and with blood seeping from one nostril, she collapsed on the floor.
The big, angry man turned to young Dave, who was rooted to the same spot he had been in when he first got off the couch. He blinked at the naked boy and then looked at his daughter who was coming out of her swoon. "Seduced?" he said vaguely, as the import of what Mary Pitts had charged sunk into his brain. His face was swollen and red with fury as he examined the boy.
By some perverse alcherny of emotion, his tumescence had not been the least bit affected by his mother's unceremonious arrival or by his growing terror for the raging father who confronted him now. It was not passion. It was more like paralysis. His body was in a state of suspended animation occasioned by shock and fright. Bart Smith misinterpreted what he saw.
"You brazen little bantam rooster. Seduced you, did she? More like it that you raped her! I'll put a dent in your hide that you won't soon forget." He slashed the stick across the boy's nude loins.
Dave howled in agony. It felt as if his body had been cut in half by a scimitar. As he staggered around the room doubled over and coddling his smarting flesh, Smith flailed him on the buttocks and the backs of his legs with the cruel hickory stick. He might have killed the boy if his daughter had not restrained him.
Grabbing his arms, she cried, "Don't hit him any more! Please, it wasn't his fault."
The words finally registered, and Smith slumped. The stick clattered to the floor. He covered his eyes with his hands. "She was right then?" he groaned. "You did seduce him."
Bursting into tears, Betty ran from the house, naked.
Eyes glazed, her father followed her with leaden steps.
By this time, Mary Pitts had recovered from the stunning blow he had dealt her. With tears streaming from her eyes, she rushed over to her son and embraced him.
"My little boy," she sobbed. "Oh, I'm so ashamed! This is my fault for neglecting you while we've been up here. I was weak. I fell victim to the sins of the flesh, and this is my punishment. All of your life I've protected you from things like this. What could you know about such things? You're so innocent. That terrible girl took advantage of your goodness and innocence. Still, they say that everything has its purpose. Maybe what happened is for the best It's a good lesson, and you must never forget it. When you sin, you must suffer for it Oh, my poor lamb." She stroked his bruised buttocks and thighs gently. "As soon as Mama puts some soothing lotion on you, we'll get out of this vile place."
Just before they left in a taxi for the station, Dave spied a peach-colored pile of fluff underneath the couch. He retrieved Betty's panties and held them up. In the scuffling they had been kicked out of sight. They were soft and fragrant with the perfume of her body. A twinge of sweet remembrance stirred in the boy's loins, even though his flesh still ached from the beating her father had given him. Looking around furtively, to make sure his mother wasn't watching, he jammed the panties into his pocket
It was the first fetish in a collection that would grow to almost a hundred items of intimate feminine lingerie in the space of the next ten years.
Until he met his wife, Louise, Dave Pitts attempted no further sexual relations with women after that hideous afternoon at the lake. Only in his daydreams did he indulge his physical drives. In his fantasies he was safe from brutal consequences such as the kind Betty's father had inflicted upon him. Also, he was safe from his mother's prying eyes.
Through the years, Dave pursued his strange hobby diligently. He would mark the home of some desirable female and stake it out like a detective. Sooner or later, her lingerie would appear on the clothesline, and Dave would filch a brassiere or a pair of panties or a garter belt. It was his symbolic conquest of the woman herself. Another good source of his fetishes was the park and the lovers' lane on a hill overlooking Lake Erie. An evening prowling these sites was always good for a pair of panties or two. The starry-eyed girls seldom missed them.
Later, in the darkness of his room, Dave would recapitulate the passionate scenes he had seen on the park grass or on the seats of parked cars. Only, in his improvisations, the man making love to the girl would be Dave Pitts. Holding the panties, which had recently contained the vibrant buttocks and loins of a woman, against his body was almost as good as holding the live female herself. Or so he thought until he met Louise.
Dave Pitts could have had women galore before Louise. He was tall, slim and handsome with a mop of unruly, dark hair and a charming smile. At the shoe store where he worked, salesgirls and women shoppers were continually giving him the eye. Pleasant and friendly to all of them, he never snapped at the bait.
With Louise, he had no choice. She was an aggressive, uninhibited girl with a healthy animal desire for love. It was she who arranged their first date. It was she who engineered their first kiss. It was her forceful sensuality that convinced Dave that he might be able to lead a normal sex life. The deciding factor was the death of his mother. After that, Louise became a mother substitute to him. Before their marriage, she thoroughly enjoyed the role. The maternal instinct is equally as strong as the mating instinct in females.
Dave himself confused the two, lumped them together, really. He disposed of his collection, took a deep breath and proposed to Louise.
It was all perfect until their nightmarish wedding night. After hours of frantic foreplay on their wedding couch, they had given up in despair. Dave was totally impotent. The bride fell asleep, muffing her frustrated sobs in her pillow. Dave lay awake all night staring at the blank ceiling, as the horrible reality came clear to him. He loved Louise as he had loved his mother. He didn't need or want her lovely woman's body. Not in the disgusting way he had wanted the body of the girl when he was fourteen. That kind of relationship could mean nothing but pain for him. He still bore faint scars on his rump to prove it. He looked at the chair where, hours earlier, Louise had eagerly cast off her trousseau lingerie, a white lace brassiere and frilly, white lace panties. He could make them out clearly in the moonlight, as fragile and wispy as spider webs.
For the first time that night, he experienced the uncoiling of desire in his belly, the desire that all of his wife's ardent kisses and caresses had been unable to produce. He squeezed his eyes tight shut and sobbed silently to himself. Nothing had changed. His sexual responses could only be activated by the symbol, the fetish.
In daylight, he tried to deny the inevitable. He would not revert to that form of satisfaction. Time and time again, he tried to make love to his bride, but it always ended in failure. In the last few weeks, they had given up trying. He guessed it was only a matter of time before she would divorce him.
On the day the plague crippled Coaltown, his old desires nagged at him with special compulsion. The girls and young matrons who came into the store for shoes were all infected with the restless excitement that infected the city. Some of them made bold advances to the handsome young clerk in spoken innuendoes and in brazen actions. They would giggle and wiggle about when he handled their feet and legs, purposely allowing their short skirts to ride high on their silken thighs. Dave was treated to intimate glimpses of white flesh above the tops of their stockings-and much more. His head was swimming with images of lace and satin, frills and bows. By the time the day was over, his fingers were itching for the sensuous feel of a piece of lingerie.
He ate a quick supper alone in the apartment. The fact that Louise was not home from work and hadn't phoned did not concern him. She was no longer even real to him. As soon as it was dark, he left the house and headed for the park, heart beating in anticipation. He had all the excitement of a young man going to keep a date with a desirable and willing girl.
CHAPTER 4
THERE WAS A surfeit of lovers in the park that night It made things difficult for Dave. They were so closely situated on the grass and in the shadows of bushes and trees that you couldn't sneak up on one couple without stumbling over two more couples that you didn't realize were there. a few times he came close to getting a punch in the nose from irritated males. Mobs always unnerved him. Before midnight he gave up on the park and headed for the local lovers' lane.
Things weren't much better on the wooded hillside overlooking the lake. The cars were packed in the clearing, fender to fender. Dave was elated to spot one car parked far back from the ridge under a weeping willow tree. He circled around and came up on it from the rear. It was a sedan, and both front doors were open to provide maximum circulation of air on this hot summer night. The radio was playing softly. Crawling on hands and knees, Dave made his way to a point about two yards from the car where he could see the occupants through the open door. It was a man and a woman. Their faces were dark silhouettes. From the chest down, their bodies were dimly illuminated by the lights of the dashboard and radio dial. The girl's blouse was open, and her skirt was pulled high up on her thighs. She moaned and squirmed in the man's embrace as he kissed her passionately on the eyes and nose and mouth. His hands worked the blouse off of her round shoulders. His fingers dipped inside of her brassiere and slipped one gorgeous, rounded breast out of its cup. It trembled in his hand like a mound of Jell-O. Dave could see the dark summit telescope out as the man teased it between thumb and forefinger. The girl squirmed in delight and kissed him with fierce ardor.
. The man freed the other breast and balanced it on the palm of his hand as if it were a ripe pear. Hungrily, he bent his lips to the upturned nipple. The girl threw back her head and whimpered ecstatically. Her long legs thrashed the skirt almost back to her hips. Her perfect thighs gleamed palely above the tops of her stockings. They parted eagerly as the man's hand plunged between them. She lifted her buttocks off the seat as he pulled her panties down over her hips.
Dave's heart beat faster as he watched the slow descent of the silken garment. The girl kicked off her high heels so the man could pull them over her feet. He bunched them up in his hand and tossed them onto the floor. Dave took a deep breath and crawled closer to the car. He was confident that their mutual rapture and rasping breathing made them oblivious to the crunching of the dry weeds under his hands and knees.
They were frantic to consummate the affair. After the man removed his trousers, the woman got up on her knees and straddled his thighs, holding her skirt bunched up around her waist. She didn't bother to remove her stockings or garter belt. She hung above him momentarily, her firm, round buttocks taut with anticipation. Then with a small outcry of joy, she settled down to receive him.
Dave Pitts was no longer interested in the naked, gyrating bodies on the seat. His attention was fixed on the little bundle of nylon and lace on the floor of the car. Holding his breath, he stretched one arm into the car and clutched the panties. Still not daring to breathe, he withdrew the arm and held the panties possessively against his body. Slowly, he backed away from the car into the cover of some bushes. Limp from the nerve-racking ordeal, he stood up and hurried away from the scene. The last thing he heard was a feminine voice lifted in rapturous fulfillment.
It was after one a.m. when he got back to the apartment. To his satisfaction, Louise still had not returned. He supposed that the plague emergency meant extra duty for all hospital personnel. He hoped she would stay away until he had a chance to enjoy his latest acquisition. It had been a long time since Dave had indulged his strange passion for female undergarments. With trembling fingers, he extracted the frothy bunch of material from his pocket. Holding the panties by their waistband, he inspected them in the light of his bed lamp. They were very brief, made of diaphanous white nylon with a narrow band of lace trimming the leg bands. On the upper right side of the front panel, a word was embroidered in red: "Friday."
Dave" laughed. They were an inexpensive type of underwear sold in sets of seven pairs, with the days of the week inscribed on each pair. Lots of girls wore them, which was probably the reason they seemed so familiar to him. He settled back on the bed and crushed the fluffy things to his face, inhaling the heady perfume of the woman. A spark flashed in his mind, a nagging distraction that made him sit up and regard them thoughtfully. He knew that perfume well. It was the favorite scent of his wife. The spark fanned brighter.
Possessed by an ominous impulse, he sprang off the bed and strode across the room to Louise's bureau. He opened the drawer where she kept her lingerie and rummaged among her panties. He pulled out a pair of lime-colored panties trimmed in lace and spread them out on the bureau alongside the pair he had stolen that night. They were identical, except for the color and the day of the week embroidered in front. Nervously, he sorted through the lingrie until he had assembled the remaining pairs of the set. There were just six. One pair was missing from the drawer, the ones she must have worn on this day, Friday!
There was no longer any doubt in his mind. The faceless girl in the car who had impaled herself so lustily on the unknown stallion was his wife!
For a moment, he felt weak and nauseous. He staggered back to the bed and collapsed with the incriminating panties clutched in his hands. He stared at them numbly. A chaos of emotions whip-lashed back and forth in his mind like the churning of storm clouds in a black sky. He had expected Louise to divorce him, but he had never expected this. Divorce was one thing. Infidelity was very different. He had married Louise because he loved her and trusted her. It was true he had failed her sexually, but he had not betrayed her. Adultery was betrayal. The anger built up inside of him slowly but powerfully. He twisted his fingers in the flimsy nylon of the white panties and methodically ripped them into shreds.
Standing up, he looked at himself in the mirror. His face had a wild, contorted look that made him look like a stranger. It was a familiar stranger, though. He remembered then. It was the look on the face of his mother when she had surprised him and Betty Smith on the couch that day when he was fourteen. It was the look on the face of Betty's father. Shock, disbelief, wounded fury.
Dave's mind was very clear. He knew what he had to do. Marching into the bathroom, he opened the linen closet and searched for the old-fashioned razor strap that a previous tenant had left behind. He carried it back to the bedroom and placed it on his dresser. Then he lit a cigarette and waited.
Louise came in a few minutes after two o'clock. Her thick hair was disheveled, and her blouse and skirt were badly wrinkled. Her pretty face looked tired, but there was a quality of smooth serenity about it that sent his anger towering. She was limp, relaxed, fulfilled.
She smiled, but her luminous eyes avoided his eyes.
"Sorry I'm late," she apologized. "I should have phoned, but the hospital has been a madhouse all day."
"That's all right," he said, controlling himself with great effort. "Did you walk home?"
She turned away from him and placed her bag on the dresser. "No, Doctor Evans drove me home."
"Oh, Doctor Evans?" His voice was flat.
"It's amazing," she said. "The town is still jumping at this hour."
Dave laughed without humor. "It's jumping, all right."
She headed for the bathroom, unbuttoning her blouse. "I'm screaming for a shower. I'm going to throw these grimy clothes right in the hamper."
He blocked her way. "Wait! Take your clothes off out here."
Her dark eyes flared, not in alarm but in puzzlement. "Why should I?" she asked. Her laughter was shaky. "Have you been drinking, Dave?"
"No!" he snapped. "I just want to watch my wife undress. That's not an unreasonable request for a husband to make, is it?"
Louise flushed, and her voice faltered. "No, but I don't understand. Is this some kind of joke?"
"No joke. Take off your clothes."
She laughed uneasily. "This plague is doing queer things to everybody. Whatever you say, my dear. Okay, here it comes. Little Louise, queen of the strippers." She performed an exaggerated series of bumps and grinds. Beneath her flippant bravado, he could tell that she was scared.
She finished unbuttoning the blouse and whipped it off. Her bra looked as if it had been put on hastily, and her breasts appeared lopsided. Reaching behind her, she unfastened the brassiere and shrugged it off. She arched her back, so that her breasts surged forth boldly, the red tips turning up pertly. She danced around him, shaking them like a burlesque starlet. It was quite a show she was putting on, a desperate show to distract him.
Undulating her hips from side to side, she pulled down her half-slip and stepped out of it His eyes burned into her dimpled navel. She was naked, but for her stockings and garter belt! She was not wearing panties! What slim doubt he had reserved, the long chance that it had been a remarkable coincidence and that Louise would be wearing her white nylon panties with "Friday" embroidered on them, went up in smoke now.
"No panties?" he asked, with a smirk.
She looked down at her bare hips and belly and giggled. "Oh! It was such a hot day, I didn't wear any."
"You wore them," he said relentlessly.
Her cheeks were on fire. "No, no you're mistaken. I didn't wear them." Her laughter climbed to a hysterical pitch. "A girl just doesn't go and lose a pair of panties without knowing it," she said, trying to carry off the hoax.
Louise Pitts was on the verge of panic, and she didn't understand why. There was no possible way her husband could know what had happened tonight between her and Don Evans. So, why was she so frightened? She had never been frightened of Dave, even before she discovered he was impotent He was a weak, ineffectual excuse for a man. But the man, the Dave Pitts who was confronting her now, seemed anything but weak and ineffectual. He towered over her imposingly, his handsome face craggy and brutally masculine.
"No," he said acidly, "a girl doesn't lose her panties without knowing it" He reached into his back pocket and took out the ripped undergarment, thrusting it toward her. "Here are your panties, doll. The same ones that Don Evans pulled off your backside tonight."
Louise thought she was going to faint. The room spun giddily before her glazed eyes. All day long the feeling had been growing in her mind that the world was topsy-turvy. It was true.
"Oh, Dave," she whimpered, "how did you get them? How did you find out?" She had not missed the panties until she and Don were driving back to town, but had dismissed the loss lightly. She thought they must have fallen out of the car in lovers' lane.
"Never mind how I got them," Dave said. He turned to the dresser and picked up the leather razor strap.
Louise jammed the knuckles of one hand against her mouth to stifle a gasp. "Dave, what are you going to do?"
He slapped the heavy strap rhythmically against the palm of one hand. "I'm going to beat the daylights out of my cheating wife, that's what I'm going to do!"
Louise made a desperate dash for the bathroom, but he stuck out a foot and tripped her. She sprawled on the floor on her hands and knees, with her bare, buxom bottom sticking high in the air. Dave lashed the leather strap viciously across the rosy cheeks. An angry red welt seared the tender flesh from hipbone to hipbone. The girl shot to her feet and ran around the small bedroom, massaging her smarting buttocks frantically. Dave cornered her and swung the whip again. The leather strap snapped wickedly across her bobbing breasts.
Pain such as she had never experienced in her life exploded through her body. She clutched at the throbbing mounds and collapsed to her knees, weak with agony. She tried to scream, but her windpipe was clenched in a vise of steel.
A warped ecstasy compounded of rage and lust surged through Dave's body. He felt masculine, powerful, omnipotent. This cringing female creature groveling on the floor was completely in his power. He could use her as he willed. He whipped the razor strap across her shoulder blades, branding another cruel welt in the helpless, soft flesh.
Louise wailed like a baby and arched her back. Her breasts were swollen hummocks of burning flesh, the nipples inflamed and twice their normal size. Dave was seized by a mighty urge to clasp the tortured mounds in his hands, to fasten his lips on the scarlet summits. Her raw, pulsing buttocks enticed him. And then it happened!
A painful cramp knifed through his innards, convulsing his bowels and doubling him over. He dropped the strap and clasped his stricken belly. It was as if a dam had begun to crumble deep inside of him, and the torrent behind it tore at muscle, flesh and bone with vindictive fury. It filled the dry well in his loins with miraculous suddenness. Dave was astonished.
"Look at me!" he gasped in wonder. "Look at me, Louise!"
The girl was crouched on her haunches on the floor, holding her tormented breasts. Pain had numbed her senses. She shook her long hair out of her eyes and looked back across her shoulders with dull obedience. He had shed his clothing, and stood over her like a conquering warrior. The muscles of his thick thighs were knotted with tension. His belly was corded, and a pulse fluttered wildly near his right hipbone. Her eyes went round as saucers. This was not the half-man she had been married to for so many futile, frustrating days and nights. This man was all man, a vital, potent bull of a man!
With a cry of triumph, he kneeled down behind her and grasped her throbbing buttocks with masterful, confident hands. She shuddered as his hard belly and thighs convulsed against her hot, soft flesh. The powerful surge of his virility between her thighs wiped away the emotional pain she had endured for so long, and the physical pain she had endured this night from the strap, in a single sweeping stroke, like the swipe of an eraser across a chalked blackboard. His hands slipped underneath her armpits and closed on her sensitive breasts. She winced, but the agony of the flesh could not defeat the glory of the spirit that filled her flesh.
"My husband!" she sighed. "My lover!"
He filled her womanhood completely. What she had experienced and enjoyed with Don Evans earlier was pale satisfaction compared to the monumental bliss she knew at this moment. She reared back against him, wanting to make her whole body one with his body. They rocked together in a frenzied dance of love, plastered thigh to thigh, belly to buttocks, chest to back.
"I love you, darling," she cried out at the beautiful instant of fulfillment. "I love you, Lou!" he said rapturously.
They soared into bliss that seemed to last an eternity. The pleasure was too exquisite and heady for the frail human flesh and spirit to tolerate. Before it was finished, they both blacked out, the same way an astronaut lapses into brief unconsciousness when he descends from heavenly heights to the atmosphere of the mortal world.
When his senses and sanity returned, Dave picked up his wife and carried her to their bed. He placed her down gently. The cruel welts striping her breasts, back and buttocks made him cringe with shame. He lavished kisses on the dear flesh he had so abused with the heavy razor strap. He soothed her burning breasts and buttocks with his cooling, healing saliva in the way an animal will lick the wounds of its wounded mate.
Louise came out of her swoon to find her sore body already replenishing the desire she had believed was drained bone dry by the glorious climax she had just achieved.
"Don't you do a thing," he murmured to her softly. "Just lie there and let me love you."
She reached for him with her hands, and her breasts swelled with sweet gratitude as his flesh responded to her caresses instantly and ardently. Abruptly, her pleasure waned as she saw herself as she had been with Don Evans in the car, a wanton, panting female animal, eager not for love but for a quick, bestial coupling. Louise began to cry.
"What is it, darling?" he asked.
She told him about her shame, sparing herself nothing.
Dave was hurt, he could not deny it. "Still, if it hadn't been for what happened between you and Evans, this good thing the two of us discovered tonight might never have happened," he rationalized.
"I suppose so," she conceded. "But will you ever forgive me that? Can you?"
He smiled. "I don't know, really. Can you ever forget the torment I've inflicted on you? Who can tell? All we can do is to try."
CHAPTER 5
NOT LONG AFTER her children had gone out, Bess Lutz went upstairs and took a shower. Toweling herself before the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door, she took inventory of her body. Her breasts were about the size and shape of ripe pears. In her teens and twenties, they had been as round as apples. She remembered with bittersweet nostalgia how Sam could never get enough of her body in those days. He had worshipped her breasts. Now he reacted to them as if they were just another piece of furniture in the bedroom. Bess shivered as the rough nap of the towel tickled her red nipples, teasing them erect. She examined her belly and buttocks in the mirror. They were fuller than in her youth, riper, but there was no trace of sloppy flesh or wrinkles. They could still stir desire in the male. Bess sighed. Sadly, her body no longer held allure for her husband.
Moved by sudden determination, she let down her long, auburn hair and brushed it until it glowed with hidden fire. In her bedroom she opened her most expensive perfume and dabbed it behind her ears, on her throat, on her navel and behind her knees. She slipped into a sheer negligee and belted it loosely. Humming, she went downstairs, where Sam was watching television in the study. She perched on the arm of his leather armchair and put an arm around his shoulders.
"Anything new on the plague?" she asked.
He grunted. "The medical examiner says the crisis will come in another twenty-four hours. We'll know by then whether it's under control or going to become a full-scale epidemic."
"Turn the TV off, honey," she said. She stroked the back of his neck with teasing fingers.
"Why?" he demanded. He noticed her provocative negligee for the first time. "Hey, Bess, you can see right through that thing."
She giggled coquettishly. "That's the idea."
He frowned. "Suppose the kids come in and see you like that?"
"They'd think I'm trying to seduce their father," she told him. "And they'd be right. Come on upstairs, honey. We don't get to be alone like this very often." She shifted around to face him on the arm of the chair, deliberately letting the robe fall open in front.
The sight of her bare, powdered body seemed to shock Sam. "What's got into you tonight, Bess?" he asked.
Her smile was lewd. "Nothing, yet. How about changing that, lover?" She took one of his hands and placed it on one hot breast. Her flesh swelled with desire, the nipple surging against his palm. "Please, Sam," she whispered urgently. "I need you "
Sam snorted. "You gals pick the darnedest times to get romantic. Hey! Stop that!"
Her one hand slid down slyly inside of his trousers and found him. "You need to relax, darling," she urged him. "You've been wound up like a spring. Remember how you used to say your problems didn't seem as bad after we made love? Please, Sam, let me try to help you relax."
"Maybe later," he said wearily. "I got too many things on my mind now, Bess." His flesh was as cold and passive as marble. In revulsion, she pulled back her hand, hating him, but hating herself even more. It was pretty sad when a woman had to beg for a little love from her own husband, had to try to sell him a bill of goods like some cheap waterfront whore.
"I'm going up to bed," she said sharply, and stood up.
Sam merely grunted. He was absorbed by a special news bulletin from the mayor's office. Bess breezed out of the room and climbed the stairs briskly. Her anger and frustration were stifling her. The thought of lying down on the lonely bed in the hot, humid darkness was intolerable. She had spent too many nights on the torture couch. Something had to give. A few nights earlier she had been reading a sexy novel, and by the time she turned out the light, her body was in a state of intense sexual excitement. It had taken all of her will power to resist the urge to resort to the infantile practice of her girlhood for relief. She was not going through that self-debasing battle again this night. Impulsively, she threw off her negligee and began to dress. She slipped on a pair of black lace panties. She picked up the matching bra, but changed her mind. She did not care to be harnessed on this sweltering night. Anyway, she rationalized, it was dark and nobody would notice. The silk blouse she chose was slippery and sensual on her bare breasts. Rejecting a slip, she stepped into a short sheath skirt. Her daughter had given it to her for her last birthday, but Bess had never worn it before. It was too sexy for a middle-aged woman, she thought. She still thought so, but she didn't care any longer.
"Maybe I'll pick up a healthy young stud," she said to herself, not meaning it. Even the joke made her feel better somehow.
Bess didn't bother to put up her hair again. She tied it at the back of her neck the way the young girls did, in a long ponytail. Slipping her bare feet into ballet slippers, she went downstairs. Not bothering to say anything to Sam, she opened the front door and went out into the night.
She walked aimlessly, thinking about the rut she and Sam were in. There were times when she believed he tortured her deliberately. She had read about men and women like that. They were subtle sadists, inflicting mental agony on their mates by withholding their needed love. The pain Bess felt was very real, almost physical pain. It throbbed in her breasts and in her loins, as real as a chronic toothache.
Along a stretch of dark street, a car pulled up alongside of her. A series of wolf whistles emanated from its interior. She was startled and offended at first A young boy, no more than nineteen, poked his head out of a window.
"Hi, babe," he greeted her. "How about a ride?"
She ignored him and kept on walking. The car followed her slowly, its occupants directing a steady stream of whistles and remarks at her. Bess was unable to maintain her indignation for long. It was funny and quite flattering to be found appealing by a bunch of males who were young enough to be her sons. The confidence which Sam was always undermining was bolstered by this uninvited attention.
I've still got sex appeal, she thought with pride.
She turned her head finally and inspected the youths in the car. There were four of them, their faces indistinct in the darkness. They were big and husky, and two of them wore athletic sweaters with the large 'C of Coaltown High School emblazoned on their chests.
At last the car pulled away from her and turned the next corner. Bess thought she was rid of them. She was startled, when she reached the corner, to see the car parked by the curb and two of the youths standing outside of it, leaning up against the front fender.
They approached her, laughing. "We decided that a pretty chick like you shouldn't be walking around unescorted on a night like this," one of them said.
"Get out of my way this instant," Bess said, with the imperious air of an adult chasing two mischievous children out of her flower beds.
These two were not children. They were adult males, in body if not in years. Bess gasped as they each grabbed one of her arms and propelled her toward the open door of the car. She tried to scream, but a heavy hand clamped across her mouth. Then she was seated in the back seat of the car, wedged in between their hulking bodies. The driver gunned the car down the street, as the boy beside him in the front side turned around and leered at Bess. He was a young, brute animal, handsome in the way of all young animals. All of them had that same anonymous appearance. Butch haircuts, square jaws, broad shoulders and big hands.
She gasped as those same big hands fondled her thighs and her breasts.
"Wow!" one of the boys, who was feeling her breasts, exclaimed. "She ain't got anything on underneath this blouse."
"I guess she was looking for a pickup," another one suggested. "Well, you hit pay dirt, babe. You got four of us. Oh, are we going to howl tonight!"
Bess was terrified. "Please let me out," she whimpered. "I'm a respectable wife and mother. I was just out for a breath of fresh air."
They thought this was hilarious and laughed uproariously. "Oh, you're a joker, doll. You really are," the blonde boy next to her said. "Next right, turn out to the highway," he instructed the driver.
Bess gazed wildly out the window. The lights of the town were behind them. She recognized the dark road that led out to the farmland beyond Coaltown. About ten minutes later, the car veered off the road, following a dirt drive that led back to a complex of dark buildings. The driver braked before a barn. The youths piled out, dragging Bess with them. She struggled frantically, hut they held her as easily as if she were a child. They all went into the barn and shut the door behind them. A switch clicked, and glaring light from a bare, unfrosted bulb suspended from the ceiling lit up the interior.
Bess saw they were inside of an old, abandoned barn, flanked by empty stalls on either side. Rusty farm equipment lay scattered around the dirt floor or was hanging from pegs on the rickety walls. There were several piles of thick, dry hay in the center of the room. They shoved Bess down on one of the piles and looked at her.
"Say, this one ain't no chick!" a red-headed youth with pimples said, with faint disappointment. "She's forty if she's a day."
"But she ain't no bag," a dark boy said. "Get a load of those legs. Smooth, real smooth.'
"Bet she's a hot number," the blonde said. "Them older women always are the best, they say."
"Well, let's find out," the last one said. "What'll we do, draw straws?"
The redhead giggled. "I got a better idea. Let's let the lady take her pick who she wants first. May the best man win."
They thought that was hilariously funny. Laughing, they began to shed their clothes. Bess was paralyzed by panic. Her enormous, gray eyes regarded them in horror as shirts, pants and underwear were doffed. It couldn't be happening! Not to her! You read about women being raped in the papers, but it didn't really impress you. It was like the sex scenes in novels. Once you put down the book, it was nothing more than a lot of words on paper. This was real. These hard, bullish young bodies menacing her were real.
She cringed down in the straw, appalled by their naked lust. During the past months of her celibate existence, Bess had been preoccupied with guilty dreams of male virility. When the need was very strong, she had even decided that to be raped would be better than nothing. like a bad penny, that unwholesome desire had come home to haunt her, fourfold!
The redhead stood over her with his hands on his hips, flaunting his masculinity at her. "Okay, baby, who is it going to be? We're all yours."
"Come on, take it off," the blond boy said impatiently. "Let's get this show on the road."
The paralysis left Bess abruptly. Fear launched her into desperate, furious action. She aimed a swift kick at the redhead's belly, and felt her heel dig deep into vulnerable flesh. He screeched and doubled up, almost retching. Bess bounded to her feet and ran for the door. The blonde's leering face was in her path. She clawed at it with the speed of a tigress. His grin dissolved in surprise and pain as her nails ripped open his cheek. She shoved him aside and kept running.
The two remaining youths hit her from behind with flying tackles. Pain exploded through her body as she fell to the ground, and their big, muscular hulks pounded down on top of her, crushing the wind out of her lungs. Stunned, she was dragged back to the straw bed roughly. The dark ones kneeled on either side of her and began to pull off her blouse. She read the lust in their eyes as her breasts were bared.
"Beautiful! Beautiful!" one murmured. "She's hot stuff for her age. Here, doll, this is for you." He took one of her hands and placed it on his body, but she recoiled in disgust.
Bess kicked out frantically as they pulled off her skirt. The sight of her lush hips and buttocks encased in the tight black panties increased their impatience. Their ruthless fingers tore at the scanty briefs with the ferocity of two wolves fighting over the carcass of a doe. She was naked, now, except for the elastic waistband and leg bands of the panties.
"This ain't going to be easy," one of the dark youths muttered breathlessly. "It's going to take three of us to hold her down."
The boy she had scratched came out of a dark corner of the barn, wiping the blood from his mauled cheek. In his other hand he carried an old buggy whip. "She needs some taming first," he said. "Stand aside boys, and I'll show you how they break nasty little fillies where I come from."
Laughing, the boys who were holding Bess stood up and backed off. Crouched on the hay, she tried to cover her nakedness with her arms and hands. "Ain't she cute," the redhead said. The blond one snapped the whip smartly in the air above the woman's head. "We're going to ride you, lady, come hell or high water. Now, why don't you behave?" He flicked the whip expertly at her so that the knotted leather tip stung her white belly, leaving a fierce red welt just below her navel.
Bess whimpered in agony and rolled over in the straw as he raised the whip again. The youths ogled her buxom buttocks hungrily. The whistling lash cracked loudly across the full, fleshy cheeks, bisecting their perfect rounds with fiery crescents. Bess screeched in agony. Never a woman who could tolerate much physical pain, she thought she would surely die. In convulsions of torment, she writhed around on the straw. The blond took dead aim at her bulging breasts as they bounced into view and flicked the cruel thong at her left nipple. She almost fainted, the sensation was so excruciating. The inflamed summit swelled to twice the size of its twin. Screaming madly, she floundered up on her hands and knees with only one purpose on her mind, to flee from the awful pain.
She stumbled, and her elbows gave way, pitching her face into the hay. Her attackers murmured in lewd appreciation as the awkward posture exposed her most vulnerable parts to their gaze. The whip snapped again with malicious accuracy. A volcano of molten fire spewed up between her thighs, inundating her whole body. She collapsed in a merciful swoon.
"Okay," said the redhead. "She's had enough. Let me at her. He bent over the helpless woman and rolled her over on her back. His hands clamped roughly on her upturned breasts as he fell between her unresisting thighs.
Bess felt no pain when he possessed her. To a woman of her age, married for years, lusting male flesh was not exactly a novelty. Somewhere, deep down inside, a mocking laugh echoed. Of late, it had been a decided novelty! She cursed her husband for his neglect, the cruel rejection that had brought her to this humiliating circumstance. Sprawled out on the floor of a barn like a brood mare, servicing four young stallions!
His cry of pleasure sounded in her ears. There had been a time when Sam cried out like that for the joy her body gave him. The youth rose from her and another took his place eagerly. His hands were gentler on her breasts. Her nipple still vibrated with the sharp sting of the whip, but it was a dull pain. She winced each time the male's surging pushed her smarting buttocks into the hay. Some of the soft stalks poked up between her thighs, tickling her. She was acutely aware of his fingers kneading her breasts. The feeling was not altogether unpleasant. His release was strangely warming.
When the third one came to her, she could not resist a compulsion to open her eyes. It was the blond youth she had scratched. With his gashed cheek, he had the brutal, powerful look of a Hun. She shivered at the gross masculinity of him. Her own husband had never exuded such virility and strength even in his best days. Experienced as she was, she gasped at his furious assault. This one really let a woman know that she was being possessed! Her first timid convulsion astonished Bess, mortified her. Frantically, she tried to suppress the glimmer in her loins. It happened again, stronger this time. A look of surprise flitted across the lust-filled face above her.
"Say, is this for real, doll?" he muttered.
The answer came in a tumultuous wave, that crashed over the reef of her reserve. Her hips lunged up to meet his thrust, her thighs gripped his sides. She swallowed him hungrily, catching his rhythm and then surpassing it. The wonder and glory that had been deprived to her starving body for so many months blossomed forth like golden sparks from an exploding rocket against the night sky.
She was ready again before the last of them took his turn. The others watched in wide-eyed awe, marveling at the unexpected developments of the evening.
"She must be a nympho!" one of them said.
"She's crazy for it!"
"I'm for seconds!"
"Holy cow!" the redhead muttered. "This is like one of those stories in the book Mister Jensen was talking about in class. She's a babe right out of the Decameron."
Bess had never known what raw lust could be like. Her experience with Sam had been limited to the gentle desire of love. This was wild, mad, impossibly ecstatic. It was the craving of the uninhibited body and spirit fulfilled beyond her most shameless dreams. The flaming welts that laced her belly, breasts and thighs had supplied a new dimension to the experience of sex. The pain had supercharged her senses and her nerve endings. It had expanded the horizon of her libido in the same way that certain narcotics could expand the senses of sight and sound and smell.
'Tm ready for seconds," the redhead declared.
She took him hungrily, smiling like a wanton hussy.
When the last boy had taken her for the second time, Bess was physically and mentally depleted. The raging pressures and tensions that had beset her for so long were drained dry. She felt as loose as a piece of wet macaroni. The four youths were exhausted, too. They lay around her on the hay, dozing or staring blankly into space. Bess stood up, finally, and gathered up her clothing. Her panties were ruined, but her blouse and skirt were intact. She put them on, wincing as the cloth irritated the savage welts on her breasts and buttocks.
The boys revived and commenced to dress, too. There was an air of guilt and shame about them. They did not look at Bess or each other. The hangover from excessive lust can be more painful than the morning after an alcoholic binge.
The redhead cleared his throat and said in a formal voice, "Sorry we tore your underwear, ma'am."
"Sorry we beat you up too," the blond added.
Bess winced at the term, "ma'am." It was the address he would use to his mother, or someone ancient enough to be his mother. She felt suddenly old and weary.
"Forget it," she snapped. "The party is over."
One of the dark lads laughed. "It was some party, all right. You liked it too, right, ma'am?"
"I had a ball," she said. "Now, it's getting late. Would it be too much to ask you fellows to drive me back where you found me?"
"We'll take you right to your door," the redhead offered.
Her laugh was brittle. "No thanks." The boy blushed. "I don't suppose we could all get together again some other night?" She patted his cheek. "I'm afraid not I told you the truth before. I'm a respectable married woman and mother."
It hit them like a slap in the face. In embarrassment, they turned away from her. "Come on," a dark youth said huskily. "Let's get out of here."
On the drive back to town, Bess studied them thoughtfully. "What you did tonight, do you often do things like it? Raping women, I mean?"
"Naw!" the redhead said bitterly. "It was a wild thing to do. This plague business has got everybody hopped up. We had a few beers, and it seemed like a good idea at the time."
"Now you're ashamed?"
"I guess so."
Her voice hardened. "And you're worried, aren't you?" p
They looked at her uncertainly. "Worried?" one asked.
"You're worried," she said, "because I'm a respectable married woman like your mothers. You don't like to think a thing like this could happen to your mothers. Rape-it isn't a very nice thought, is it? Suppose it did happen to one of your mothers? How do you think she'd take it?"
"Shut up!" the blond boy said nervously.
"It scares you, doesn't it?" Bess sneered. "She might like it as much as I did, that's what you think!"
The car screeched to a stop on a dark street. "Get her out of here," the driver ordered.
The door flew open and she was shoved out. Bess smoothed down her skirt and tucked in her blouse. "So long, friends," she called after them. "Thanks for a lovely evening."
She walked a few blocks aimlessly before she recognized where she was. It took her fifteen minutes more to get home. The door was unlatched, and she went in silently. The television was still blaring in the study. She walked down the hall and looked into the room. Sam was sprawled in his chair, snoring peacefully. A wave of scorn swept over her as she studied his pot belly rising and falling with his labored breathing. She thought of the hard, flat bellies of the youths who had raped her, their muscled chests and bulging thighs. Bess smiled to herself.
"Fat, lazy, impotent Sam," she said to herself. If only you could have seen me tonight. If only you knew! Oh, how I wish I could tell you about it! The anger left her then and she sighed sadly. Poor old Sam. If she told him, he'd probably grunt and go right on watching television!
The urgent clanging of the doorbell startled her. She hurried down the hall and opened the door. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw her daughter flanked by two patrolmen. Sissy's face was swollen and bloody. Her clothing was torn. She hurled herself into Bess's arms, sobbing.
"Mama! Mama! It was so awful!"
Bess tried to calm her hysterical girl while she listened mutely to the story the policemen related. "She and her date were walking in the park when a bunch of hoods jumped them," one cop explained. "They conked the boy over the head, and he's in the hospital in fair condition." His eyes dropped. "Your daughter isn't hurt, ma'am, but there's one thing you should know."
"She was raped," Bess said shakily.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You didn't catch the hoodlums who did it?"
"Not yet. This is the fourth girl who's been raped tonight. This town is going berserk. The chief is swearing in a dozen extra deputies to help matters."
She patted Sissy's disheveled head. "All right. Thank you, officers, for bringing her home. I won't keep you. I know you must be needed elsewhere."
They touched the bills of their caps. "Thanks, ma'am. Maybe you better have your family doctor look at the girl."
Sam came staggering out of the study as they left. . His voice was thick with sleep. "Whazza matter?" he demanded. "I thought I heard the bell. Voices."
His eyes snapped open wide, and he gasped as he saw his daughter. "Sissy, baby, what happened? Were you in an accident?" Crying himself, he ran to the girl and put his arms around her. "Baby, tell Daddy what happened!"
Bess gave it to him hard and fast, as the officers had told it to her. The blood drained out of Sam's face, and his eyes were aglow with fury and hatred so intense that Bess was frightened. Unexpectedly, he turned and went back into the library. When he came out, he had a revolver in his hand. He jammed it into his belt, inside of his shirt, and walked to the door.
"Where are you going?" Bess asked anxiously.
"Out to find the dogs who did this to Sissy."
"Sam!" she yelled after him. "Don't be crazy! You don't know who they are. Sam, you'll get in trouble! Please, come back!"
He was already out of earshot.
CHAPTER 6
IT HAD BEEN a long, difficult day for Carla Evans. Her four-year-old daughter had measles, and her six-year-old son had been a holy terror, teasing his sister unmercifully. The news of the plague unnerved her, in the bargain. Don had assured her over the phone that he was in no danger, despite his proximity to all the plague victims in the hospital.
"It's the rats who spread it," he told her.
Rats! The very thought of the horrible creatures made goose pimples rise all over her body. They made her breasts all prickly, and she had to stick her fingers down inside her bra and rub the itch away. Sheepishly, she felt her nipples stiffen. It was a heck of a time to get sexy, she thought
Just before supper, little Wendy had started screaming hysterically. Carla bolted up the stairs and into her room, her heart hammering in fright. The fright turned into anger when she saw her son hiding under the bed, pretending to be a rat. After soothing the sick child, she yanked Bobby across her knees and pulled down his pants. She planted six sound slaps across his bare bottom and left him screaming more loudly than his sister. By the time they were in bed, she was exhausted. She undressed and took a cold shower. Afterward, she sat naked on her vanity bench and combed out her fluffy blonde hair.
Carla Evans was not a beautiful girl, but she had a wholesome prettiness about her. Her blue eyes were clear and wide-set, and her small nose turned up at the tip. She had a generous mouth that ripened sensually when she smiled. Her body was svelte, but not voluptuous. Her medium-sized breasts were perfect cones, her waist very slim. She had good legs, and thighs that tapered into slender hips. Not boyish hips, because her buttocks were plump and rounded.
As she brushed her hair, Carla studied her naked body in the mirror. She liked her body. Her bones were small and not at all prominent under the flesh. From head to feet all of her contours flowed together smoothly, as if she had been molded from styrene plastic. She rubbed her thighs together, stimulating the pleasant sensation that had been glowing in her loins most of the day. She wondered whether Don would be too tired to make love to her when he got home.
When her hair was brushed, she tied it back with a ribbon and put on a satin nightgown that fit her trim body like a sheath from breasts to below her knees. It was one Don particularly liked. She was lying on her bed, reading a magazine when she heard the noise in the cellar. Frowning, she got out of bed and put a negligee over her nightgown. She went downstairs and opened the cellar door. Her hand turned the light switch.
Carla screamed and clutched the door jamb for support, There, on the landing below her, crouched a huge rat. It was bigger than a cat. The body was fat, the long tail lashing the landing like a whip. The face was hideous, malevolent, with pointed, furry ears and long whiskers that vibrated as it squealed angrily at the woman. The mean little eyes gleamed red in the light. She slammed the cellar door shut and locked it. Terror tore at her vitals.
She rushed to the phone and started to call the hospital, then stopped herself. She could not add to Don's already overwhelming problems. Instead, she dialed the Shaws, their neighbors. Bob Shaw answered, and she told him about the rat.
"Must be a stray that was driven up from the lake," he said. "They're burning them out down there. I'll be right over."
Minutes later, the door chimes rang. She fell into Bob's arms gratefully. "I'm so scared, Bob. It might get at the children."
"Take it easy, Carla," he said. He disengaged her arms gently. The feel of her warm body underneath the thin gown and negligee made him uncomfortable. Bob Shaw was a big, broad-shouldered man, well over six feet, and all muscle. He like to look at pretty women, but kept them at a distance. His wife, Dale, was all the woman he needed or wanted. A moral man, he never entertained lascivious thoughts about the wives of his friends and neighbors.
He held up a long, wicked-looking bayonet. "This is the best weapon I could find. It's a war souvenir. Now, where is that rat?"
She pointed to the cellar door. "Down there. Please be careful. He looks so dangerous."
"With this baby, I'll be more than a match for him," he assured her. He walked to the door and opened it cautiously. The rat literally exploded out of the darkness, squealing in fury. It struck his legs and sent him slamming back into the wall. He felt its teeth clamp on the fat part of his thigh, like a steel trap. Cursing, Bob carefully placed the tip of the bayonet against the rodent's side and jammed it in as hard as he could. The sharp blade sliced clean through the fat, furry body, its tip emerging on the other side. Screeching in agony, the rat let go of the man's leg and twisted its head to bite at the instrument of its pain.
At the unexpected, shocking onslaught of the creature, Carla had stumbled back frantically. The heel of her slipper caught on one of the children's toys, and she tumbled to the floor. The robe fell open, and her nightgown slipped up high on her thighs. Bare legs askew, she lay there petrified with terror, watching the quick, violent battle between man and rat.
Shaw stood braced against the wall, holding the impaled rat at arm's length. Mortally wounded, it nevertheless refused to die. The sight of it wriggling on the bayonet and snapping futilely at the hard steel was grotesquely horrifying. Its fur was red and glossy with blood around the wounds where the blade entered and exited its body. Its jaws were gory from biting at the steel. The little, maddened eyes regarded Shaw balefully.
The man looked imploringly at Carla, sprawled out on the floor. The sight of her jolted him. His eyes were magnetically drawn to her lovely, bare legs, to her bare, rounded thighs exposed so immodestly below the rumpled skirt of her nightgown. Powerless to avert his gaze, he peered beneath the gown, into the alluring shadows beyond. It had been a long time since Shaw had seen a woman that way other than his wife. The vision flustered him badly.
As her shock Wore off, Carla became abruptly aware of her abandoned posture. Flushing, she clamped her knees together and tugged down her nightgown. Trembling, she got to her feet. The incident was eclipsed for both of them by the increased exertions of the rat to free itself.
"Why won't it die?"
"I guess I didn't hit a vital spot." Shaw shuddered. "We've got to do something. This gives me the creeps. Does Don have an ax? Maybe I can finish him off with that."
"The garage," Carla stammered. He followed her out of the side door, across the breezeway to the garage. Shaw stood in the middle of the garage, holding the rat at arm's length while Carla searched frantically for an ax.
A tremor shook the man as he realized that the tip of the bayonet no longer protruded from the far side of the rat. In some way, it was managing to work itself gradually free. The bloody jaws reached out toward him viciously.
"We've got to do something fast!" Shaw yelled. "I think he might get loose!"
Carla gasped. "I can't find it! Maybe the cellar!"
"No time!" Shaw's frantic eyes lit on a can of gasoline standing beside the power mower. "Grab that fuel can!" he ordered.
The girl was horrified. "Oh, no! You couldn't!"
"Grab that can, woman, and douse this critter before it gets loose! Hurry!"
Revulsion made her nauseous, but she obeyed. The rodent screeched in anguish as the gasoline deluged it.
"It almost sounds human," Carla said.
Shaw ran out into the breezeway and fumbled for his lighter. Flicking it into flame, he held it cu-: toward the frantic rat. The high-test gasoline exploded all around the doomed creature. Carla wanted to turn away from the horrendous sight, but a strange force compelled her to watch the cremation. It continued to twist and dance on the end of the bayonet in the middle of the fiery ball for a long time. Carla touched her hand to her throat, where her pulse beat wildly. Absently, the hand slid down her neck and up the creamy slope of her chest. She clutched at her right breast. It lay in her hand, heavy and soft through the layers of satin around it. Her fingers touched the nipple, and it sprang to life between them.
The rat seemed to get smaller and smaller as the flames consumed it. It was still now, and the sickening odor of its burning flesh drifted to her nostrils. Vomit gushed up her food pipe in a bitter geyser, and Carla turned away to the bushes.
When she had recovered and washed her face, she went into the kitchen. Shaw was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and swigging whiskey from a bottle he had found in the den. High on his right thigh, his trousers were stained with blood.
"Oh, Bob!" Carla said in distress. "I forgot you were bitten!"
"It's nothing," he said.-
"Nothing! Nothing but the plague, you mean! You've got to have it attended to immediately!"
He shrugged. "Dale is out with the car, and I don't feel like hiking all the way to the hospital."
"Oh, dear!" she said. "Our jalopy is in the service station. Don dropped it off on his way to work this morning, and he was going to pick it up after work."
"I'll go home and put some iodine on it."
"No, wait a minute!" Carla had an inspiration. "Don has everything we need in his office. I'll cauterize the wound for you, and then he'll look at it later when he gets home!"
Shaw stirred nervously. "What do you know about cauterizing?"
She laughed. "Don't be silly! I was a nurse before I married Don."
She led him into her husband's examination room, and indicated the big leather-topped table. "Take off your pants, Bob, and climb up on the table."
Shaw swallowed hard. "My pants?"
"Of course."
Blushing, the big man turned away from her and unbuttoned his trousers. He stepped out of them, feeling awkward and silly, standing before her in his jockey shorts. He stretched out on his back on the table and looked up at her. When she had been a nurse, Carla had grown accustomed to seeing dozens of men nude and semi-nude. The male body was not novel to her. But, for some reason, seeing Bob Shaw in his underwear made her feel warm and embarrassed. She focused her attention on the rat bite on his right leg. It was an ugly, jagged wound, clotted with rusty blood.
She frowned. "It doesn't look good, Bob. I'm going to have to bleed it some more to clean it out."
"Okay," he said hoarsely. His heart was beating faster, not out of fear or nervousness about his wound, but at the close, perfumed presence of Carla Evans hovering over him. Sweat beaded his forehead as he remembered how she had looked sitting spraddle-legged on the floor with her nightgown pulled high over her knees. Desire stirred faintly in his loins, like a snake waking from a coiled sleep. He battled it desperately, closing his eyes against the tantalizing memory. If that happened in front of Carla, he'd never be able to face her again!
"Get on with it," he said, impatient to feel the cleansing pain.
Carla was the efficient nurse again. She gathered her tools around her, cauterizing iron, needles, antiseptic, gauze and a sharp scalpel. She sterilized the scalpel and bent over his wounded leg. His thighs were hairy and thick with muscle, she noted.
"Brace yourself," she warned him. "This will hurt." She spread the jagged bite with the tip of the knife. Expertly, she cut away the loose skin and mangled bits of tissue from around the rough edges. A pulse on the inside of his leg quivered beneath her gentle fingers. Shaw was fascinated by the white, slender fingers splayed on his brown, corded flesh. As she worked, the hand slid higher.
Oh no! he prayed silently. Not any higher, please! I couldn't stand it!
In his mind, he saw the white hand moving higher and then closing around him. The snake of lust stirred more restlessly this time. He got a reprieve as she cut deep into the maw of the bite to start the flow of blood again. Intense pain penetrated to his thigh bone and radiated along his nerve endings, down his legs and high into his belly. He gritted his teeth.
The bright spring that welled up inside the wound made Carla a little dizzy. Ordinarily, she had a strong stomach, and this was, after all, only a minor thing. She guessed it was the cumulative effect of all the pressures of her day. First plague, then the nagging kids, the rat and the horrifying spectacle of it writhing in fiery torture on the bayonet. She became aware of the feel of his leg under her fingers. His flesh was hard, masculine, hot. A chill rippled down her spine from the base of her neck to the globes of her buttocks. A warm flush spread across her belly and her bottom. She forced her mind back to her task.
"It's not bleeding enough," she told him. "I'm going to have to help it along. Lie still and relax."
Shaw stared incredulously as she slipped out of her robe to give herself more freedom of movement. Her naked body was maddeningly defined under the sheer, tight nightgown. He could see the red points of her breasts poking against the satin. It spanned her belly, showing the dimpled navel. His eyes dropped lower to the tantalizing shadows at the apex of her thighs and belly. With her arms braced on either side of his thighs, she bent her lips to his wound.
The room spun dizzily before his eyes. His breath choked in his throat. Her mouth was fixed like a suction cup on the bite, drawing out the rodent's venom. Her sweet lips made his flesh tingle blissfully. Her soft breasts were compressed against his thighs, only a flimsy layer of satin separating them. With a moan of resignation, Shaw surrendered to the overpowering desire that tore at his vitals.
The girl looked up, with blood on her lips, to the sight of his bursting virility. She swayed drunkenly and brushed a strand of limp, blonde hair out of her eyes. It was so hot, so very hot. Her flesh was burning. She was on fire inside and outside. Warm honey was trickling down her body underneath her nightdress, flowing between her breasts, coating her nipples, skimming over curved belly and funneling down into the pulsing well between her quivering thighs. There was a madness in the air.
A montage of vivid images swept before her eyes. The rat's red, hate-filled eyes. The plump body squirming on the cruel lance, its red blood dripping onto the kitchen linoleum. Its inhuman cries of agony as it burned alive. The raw, jagged edges of the bite in Shaw's virile thigh. The flow of his blood as the scalpel bit deep.
Her vision cleared, and she looked down upon the big male animal preened in all his male splendor, the way a peacock flaunts his magnificent tail to lure the females.
Her mouth was dry as she whispered, "Take off your clothes." With a supple motion, she slipped the nightgown over her head.
In a trance, Shaw took off his shirt and shorts. Naked, his body seemed gargantuan. Carla experienced a feeling of lusty abandonment so exquisite that it took her breath away. Laughing softly, she bent over him again. Her fingers and lips adored him. There was a mystic quality about her acts. She felt as though she had been transported back to some ancient time when naked maidens paid homage to the fertility gods by worshipping at pagan phallic altars. The pipes of Pan sounded hauntingly in her ears.
"Now!" she sobbed, lifting her head. "Quickly!" She scrambled up on the table and mounted him. She plunged down with a wild scream of erotic triumph.
The world spun faster and faster. Now she was the rat impaled on a cruel bayonet. She squealed and squirmed as the blade sent fire through her body. The spark was struck, and flame exploded all around her, sheathing her breasts, belly, buttocks, limbs in a fiery cocoon. The ultimate pain. The ultimate pleasure. Pleasure and pain, the acme of erotic splendor. She shriveled up into fine, dry ashes.
After it was over, the two of them were speechless with shame and regret. Carla sobbed hysterically into her hands. "What's wrong with us? You and I aren't really like this, Bob. We're respectable people. You love your wife. I love my husband. I never wanted any other man but Don in all our married life. Why?"
Shaw lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. "I remember in the war, the terrible things that decent men did. A whole squad of soldiers raping a German girl fifteen years old. They left her torn and bloody. Afterward they rationalized it, pointed out the millions the Nazis had murdered in their damnable ovens. Justifying one act of sadism and brutality with another act of the same thing. And there were other girls who gave their bodies freely for a cigarette, a bar of chocolate. Was it because they were starving for candy and cigarettes? I think not. It was an act of glorious self-debasement. People! I shudder to think of the capacity each of us carries buried within us for evil. War triggers our basest desires. Fear, savagery always unleash our worst emotions. This plague, it's like a war, in a way. Coaltown is a beleaguered city. It's got all of us in a state of hysteria."
"Words, words, what do they mean?" she asked dully. "It's no good knowing why we do these things. They're done. Nothing can ever change that."
"No," he admitted, "nothing can change it." He fingered the wound on his thigh. "Everything leaves a scar. Both of us, we're casualties of the plague just as rightly as the poor devils who are burning up with fever at the hospital."
She nodded sadly. "Here, let me finish binding up your wound."
This time her fingers were dead, lifeless digits on his flesh.
Along the lake shore the scene had the exciting madness of a Bosch mural. The rat-hunters had grown into a great restless, unmanageable army. Men, women, young children joined the fray. Their eyes and teeth gleamed insanely in the flickering light of the torches. Their cries of sadistic pleasure mingled with the agonized screeching of the rodents. Weapons ran the gamut from sticks to guns.
A dark-haired girl, with one breast hanging out of ' her halter, held aloft a sharpened broomstick with a rat impaled on the point.
A blonde woman waded knee-deep in the water, pursuing a swimming rat with raised ax. Her skirt was pulled up and tucked down inside the waistband of her panties. The men studied her bare thighs with lascivious eyes. She caught the rat and cleaved it in half with a blow of the ax. The men surrounded her, congratulating her, patting her with sly hands. She felt one hand squeeze her round bottom. Another slipped up inside her blouse and fondled a breast. She felt something poking urgently into the soft flesh of her belly. She reached down and felt it, teasing and caressing. Other hands were pulling down her panties. She giggled and protested, but did not object when the hands pulled her into the shadows of a dock. They put her down on the sand and gathered around her. She moaned in delight as a faceless man settled in the bower of her thighs. The others couldn't wait. They pushed themselves at her from all directions.
Her shrill laughter floated over the lake. "Please, boys, one at a time!" Then she was inundated, it seemed, in hot pulsating flesh.
Sam Lutz stumbled along the waterfront, a shocked spectator to the slaughter and debauchery. He passed a dark doorway in which a male and female were convoluting in an upright embrace. The woman's panties were tangled about her ankles. She lifted her head to gasp for air, and a beam of light struck her face. With a jolt Sam recognized her as one of the secretaries at his department store.
Further along, a crowd of screaming people were gathered around a small boathouse. A family of rats was held at bay underneath it by a ring of torches. Men and boys were sluicing gasoline into the crawl-space from tin drums. Then some woman threw a flaming torch under the building. Flames belched out on all four sides, driving the mob back. In seconds the building was enveloped in fire.
Burning alive, the pain-crazed rats blazed a trail through the people, leaving fiery, zigzag wakes. They looked like crazy comets as they streaked down the beach and through the streets. Sick to his stomach, Sam staggered into a crowded bar and order a double Scotch.
He downed it in one gulp and ordered again. While the bartender was pouring it, he became aware of a firm, warm pressure against his thigh. He turned his head and looked into a pair of green cat's eyes. She was a girl no older than his own Sissy. In fact, he thought, she looked like Sissy. Her blonde hair was hanging in two ponytails down her back. Her little breasts surged up in her sweater like turrets. His eyes were drawn to her thighs, glistening with sweat below the hem of her scandalously short dress. Sam looked away guiltily.
Her knees nudged his thigh again. "Got a match?" she asked, sticking a cigarette between her red lips.
Sam nodded and took out his lighter. He lit her cigarette, frowning at her. "You don't look old enough to be drinking in bars," he said, addressing her as if he was talking to his own daughter.
She laughed merrily and placed a small hand on his thigh. "I'm old enough to drink and to do lots of other things, Pops!" she said. "How about buying me a drink?"
CHAPTER 7
"YOU LOOK AWFUL grim," she told him after a while. "What gives?"
His head was spinning from the unaccustomed jolt of so much alcohol, and his tongue felt loose. "A girl was raped tonight," he said thickly.
She laughed. "A lot of girls have been raped tonight. Or so they say. That's a square word, I think. Lots of times it's a good excuse for a girl to have her fun and ease her conscience by pretending that she didn't really want it."
"Not my daughter!" he snapped. "She's a good girl."
The blonde's eyebrows lifted. "So, it was your daughter got raped?"
"Yes." He drank lustily, spilling some of the Scotch down his chin.
"Do they know who did it?"
"No, but I intend to find out before the night is over."
The girl whistled. "That's a mighty tall order, Pops. How do you intend to fill it?"
His thoughts blurred. "I don't know. I thought I might hear something in a bar. You know how these young thugs like to brag about their sexual prowess."
She frowned. "If they were young, you'd stand a better chance going to a bar where mostly young guys hang out. I come to this place myself, only because I like older men," Her green eyes shone wickedly, and she rubbed her thigh against his. Sam was repelled by her brashness, but the intimate touch of her hard youthful body nattered him too. The alcohol had lowered the gates of his formidable inhibitions a little.
"What does a pretty kid like you see in old men?" he wanted to know.
She smiled. "They're much nicer to a girl. They appreciate it when a young girl pays attention to them, and they go out of their way to please her."
Sam nodded. "Old lechers. Look, how about showing me the places where the young crowd hangs out?"
"Be glad to." She slid off the bar sinuously, deliberately letting her skirt skid all the way back to her hips. Sam had a disturbing glimpse of a triangle of pink silk between her tapering thighs.
"No fair peeking," she said slyly.
Sam blushed. "I'm not like one of your lecherous old men," he said pompously.
She laughed and took his arm, pressing her hip into his thigh. "If we're going to date, you better know my name. It's Sylvia."
"Pleased to know you, Sylvia," Sam said, trying to maintain his dignity with all the Scotch sloshing around in his belly. "Just call me Sam."
She took him to a joint called the "Devil's Tooth." It was a smoky, bare place with a low ceiling and booths along the walls. In the center of the room, sweaty couples gyrated to the frenetic rhythms of a Negro combo. Sylvia saw a group of boys and girls she recognized sitting in one of the booths. She went over to them and pulled up chairs for Sam and herself at the end of the table. They greeted her loudly.
"Long time no see, Syl," a redheaded youth said. "What brings you slumming?"
"I'm restless, like the rest of the town. Meet my friend Sam."
They all regarded the stout, older man with amusement. Sam felt uncomfortable at their scrutiny, as if he were an abnormal specimen under a microscope. "Live it up, old-timer," a blonde boy said, placing a pitcher of beer and two glasses in front of the newcomers. Sam observed that the boy had a row of angry scratches across one cheek.
"What happened to you, Si?" Sylvia asked him.
The other boys at the table roared with drunken laughter. "Old Si got mixed up with a wildcat," one of them said.
The blonde youth grinned sheepishly. "But she tamed down after a while. Turned out to be quite a pussycat."
"Did she ever!" a dark boy hooted.
Sam felt a sudden, inexplicable antagonism toward these young men. It came to him in a sixth sense, the way an animal smells a threat to its security. Could these be the hoods he was looking for? he wondered. The animals who had raped Sissy? His hand tightened around his glass, and his muscles coiled for action.
"She was an old doll," the blonde volunteered. "Over forty."
Sam relaxed. They weren't talking about Sissy.
The boy went on. "One of those frustrated matrons who don't get enough from her old man, I'll bet."
"Knock if off!" a girl at the table said. "She was probably some old whore from a two-bit house."
"Not a chance!" he said huffily. "This babe was class. Expensive clothes, underwear." He laughed. "She had a cute mole on her bottom too."
Sam heard him through a curtain of music and bedlam. Mole. On her bottom. He dismissed it with a shrug.
The subject had turned from sex. "Did you hear about the guy they fished out of the lake a while ago? Drowned himself."
A cold weight compressed Sam's heart. "Do they know who it is?"
"No identification the last I heard," the boy said, "He was blonde, a good-looking kid."
Fear crushed Sam deeper into his chair. "Where did they take him?"
"To the morgue, I guess."
The stout man lurched out of the chair and headed for the door. Sylvia gaped at him in surprise. "Hey, where are you going, Pops?"
"Looks like he's going to puke," a boy suggested.
"Yeah." Sylvia ground out her cigarette and stood up. "I'll be seeing you, kids. I don't want to let this one get away."
They watched her go, laughing to themselves. "Syl is a good kid, but she plays too rough for me," the red-headed boy said.
The girl caught up to him in the middle of the block. "Hey! Where are you going, Sam?"
Sam didn't look at her. "To the morgue."
"To the morgue?" Sylvia was incredulous. "What for?"
"To look at that boy who was fished out of the lake. I have a strange feeling I may know him."
She took his arm and remained silent the rest of the way. Sam identified himself to the attendant at the morgue. There was a policeman stationed there, too.
"Haven't had such a full house since the flu epidemic back in World War One," the attendant said gleefully. He was a thin, cadaverous little man with long, bony hands that he kept rubbing together dryly. His bloodshot eyes licked hungrily up the girl's voluptuous body. "I'd like to get a customer like you, honey," he said, with a leer.
"Dirty old man," she sneered.
He took them into a cold, clammy room with tiers of drawers on each side wall from floor to ceiling. He opened one of the drawers, and a beautiful, blonde boy stared up at them. He was naked, and his sightless eyes were deep blue. Sam choked and looked away.
"It's my boy," he sobbed. "My Dick. Oh Lord, why?"
Sylvia was stunned. "Gee whiz! That's terrible, Sam." She ran after him as he rushed out of the morgue and into the street. At the curb, he collapsed on his knees and vomited into the gutter. The girl came up and held his head.
"Easy, Pops, easy," she said, stroking his forehead.
At last his retching stopped. "It's my fault," he said.
"I killed Dick."
"Don't be a nut! The kid drowned. He was probably out on the lake in a rowboat and fell overboard."
"My fault," Sam repeated with dull repetition. "I sent him out to follow Sissy. I'm responsible."
Sylvia helped him to his feet and put an arm around his shoulders. "Look, Pops, let's go back to my place and talk about it. You need a drink."
He let himself be led through the winding streets, along a dark alley and up a long flight of stairs to an apartment in a cheap rooming house. It was surprisingly well furnished, though.
"Did your parents do all this for you?" Sam asked. "A girl your age really shouldn't be living alone."
Sylvia laughed and lit a cigarette. "My parents are both dead. No, I did it all by my little self."
"You're so young," he said wonderingly. "What kind of money can a young girl like you make here in Coaltown?"
Her green eyes slitted. "You'd be surprised, Pops."
Sam didn't care about her. All he could think of was the cold, white body of his son lying in that drawer at the morgue. How could he tell Bess? He groaned and slumped back on the couch.
"Where's that drink you promised me?" he asked.
She went into the kitchen and mixed two strong drinks. She brought them back into the parlor and gave one to Sam. "This will straighten you out, Pops," she said. She put her glass down and took off her sweater. "You don't mind if I make myself comfortable?" she asked him. "This dump is sweltering from the sun beating on the flat roof all day."
Her breasts looked like two balls of foam rubber in a white mesh brassiere that showed her red nipples. Casually, she took off her skirt. Her white mesh panties matched the bra. The filmy undies hid very little of her femininity, just enough to taunt the eye of the beholder. She had the sleek, supple body of a cat.
Sam stared at her impassively. "If you're a hooker, Sylvia, forget it. You picked the wrong guy. I'm dead, inside and out, only I haven't got the sense to lie down."
She laughed and shook her pony tails girlishly. There was something incongruous about the sweet, childish face on the sexy body.
"I'm not a hooker, Sam," she said. "I knew you weren't that kind of a man the minute I laid eyes on you."
He blinked. "How could you know that?"
"By instinct, mostly, I guess. There's a look in the eyes, a kind of slump to the shoulders. You can't pin it down, really. But I always know. I don't think you're over the bill, Sam, but the old motor doesn't roar the way it used to, right?"
"What do you mean?" he demanded, blushing self-consciously.
"Don't kid me, Sam. If you and your wife make love once a month, it's a big deal."
He hung his head, saying nothing.
"Your desensitized, Sam, dead like you said. But it's only skin-deep. The spark is still burning, but you have to cut through a lot of blubber to reach it and fan it."
"Stop that kind of talk," he told her. "I'm not interested in your ideas about sex. My son is dead, and it's my fault. If only I could atone. If only I could be punished."
Her lips curled slyly. "You think that would help, if you could be punished?"
He buried his head in his hands and rocked back and forth in grief. "I wish I was dead. They should tie my arms and legs to wild horses and let them tear me apart."
Her green eyes glowed. "That would be exciting, but a little impractical. You're right, Sam, about one thing. You need to be punished for your sins. It would make you feel a lot better. A lot of men like you come to me for that reason."
He looked up curiously. "For what reason?"
"To be punished, of course," She went to him and began to unbutton his shirt "Let mama undress you, first."
. He watched her impassively. His brain was dazed by drink and shock and grief. He was too tired to protest, too tired to make his own decisions. He let her take off his shirt and undershirt.
Sylvia giggled and slapped his paunch with the back of her hand. "That would make a nice little cushion for a girl to bounce on, Pops." She told him to stand up, and she unbuckled his trousers. Soon he was standing naked before her, a fat old man with a bald head. His condition gave him satisfaction. It was good to feel this young girl's amused eyes on his gross, unclothed body. Humiliation filled him with perverse satisfaction.
"You wait," she said. She turned and went into a bedroom, her plump buttocks flexing inside the tight mesh panties. A faint notion of desire blew across his loins, but it was only a notion.
Sylvia returned, wearing patent-leather shoes with stiletto heels. In her right hand she carried an object that caused Sam's eyes to widen. It was an old-fashioned cat-o'-nine-tails, the kind his mother kept on a hook beside the kitchen stove when he was a child. It had a thick leather handle tapering down into nine separate leather straps with knots spaced along their length. She slapped it playfully against the palm of one hand.
Her voice was low and soothing, the rhythmic cadence singsong and hypnotic. "Your son is dead, Sam It's your fault, you said so. How you hate yourself! You don't deserve to live, but you are too cowardly to kill yourself."
"Yes, yes," he blubbered, the tears streaming down his cheeks. "Oh my poor Dickie, what have I done to you?"
The leather thongs slapped harder and harder into the girl's hand. "You must be punished," she said. "Down on your hands and knees," she commanded him.
Sam obeyed and crouched down in front of her as if in prayer. His eyes were on a level with her full, round thighs. Her lush womanhood asserted itself boldly through the mesh panties. He felt unfamiliar excitement in his loins. He shut his eyes and tensed himself for the blow.
"All right," he whispered.
White teeth gleaming against her gums, Sylvia slashed the cat-o'-nine-tails across his bare back. The nine cruel cats plowed deep, bloody furrows in his white flesh from shoulder to shoulder. Sam groaned and fell forward on his knees and elbows, gritting his teeth against the fiery agony. His white, flaccid buttocks were upturned to her now. Green eyes blazing, she swung the brutal cats again. The lashes painted vivid, red welts across the flaccid cheeks, spaced with bloody gouges from the knots. Sam reared up like a branded steer, clutching his buttocks. He couldn't hold back the wail of anguish.
"Beautiful! Beautiful!" the blonde girl hissed between her teeth. Her face was transformed. The innocent child had become submerged. This was the face of a witch, a beautiful witch. The eyes were fiendish, the mouth cruel as a scimitar. She got behind him and kicked him in the buttocks, so that he fell face down on the floor. Then, leaping high in the air, she came down on top of him with her stiletto heels stabbing into the vulnerable flesh just over his kidneys. The agony of it paralyzed Sam. He lay there helplessly, gasping for breath, as she stomped all over his back, buttocks and thighs, digging the pointed heels viciously into his flesh until he resembled a bloody waffle.
Sam's entire body was a symphony of pain. It vibrated in his fingertips and toes, played a cadenza along his spine, beat like a drum in his belly. It Was terrible, but it was wonderful, too. He was suffering the tortures of the damned. He was suffering for his son's cruel death. He could never fully atone, but at least he was beginning to pay off the debt. Through the red mist of agony, he saw Sylvia taking off her brassiere. Her pointed breasts shook in his face, the blood-red nipples two, taut accusing fingers.
He staggered up on his knees as she peeled off her panties. He grabbed her around the hips and cupped her smooth, round buttocks in his hands. He buried his face in her velvet belly. She shrieked in passion and beat him across the back and rump with the cats as his mouth drank deeply of her marvelously sweet flesh.
At last, she cast the cat-o'-nine-tails aside and let her body slide down, with her legs spread on either side of him. His lips traveled up the length of her torso and found one of her hard breasts. There was no desire in him at first, just gratitude for the measure of solace she had brought him. Gradually, he became aware of her nipple pulsing in his mouth, of her belly rubbing against his. She pushed him down on his back and lay on top of him, writhing her hips until she had achieved her purpose. With a jolt, Sam realized that he was virile as he had not been in more months than he could remember. His aging body was alive again! She took him greedily. His pleasure was real, vigorous. Her buttocks bounced up and down. Priming the pump. Her breasts bobbed up and down. He could see the blood on her thighs and belly. His blood.
It came from deep down inside of him, roaring up like a wildcat oil well. Pain and pleasure fused in the distorted alliance of sadomasochism. Male and female, they fed each other's need for destruction. They cried out like beasts in torment, not desire. Their fulfillment was the peace of death, not of love and creation.
Sam dragged himself over to the couch and rested his cheek on the cool cushion. He wept bitterly. When he had recovered, Sylvia was belting a dressing gown around her. The look of girlish innocence was restored to her face. She smiled at him sweetly.
"You okay, Pops?"
"I don't know," he moaned, lifting himself painfully. "I feel funny, as if something is gone inside of me. Maybe my soul."
She laughed. "You've crossed over a frontier into alien country. It will pass in time."
"In time?" he winced.
"Of course. You'll want to come here again, won't you?"
He looked into the evil green eyes. His voice was heavy with shame. "I don't want to. But I will."
"They always do."
"They?"
"Yes, I have lots of customers like you, Pops."
"Customers, yes." His voice was vague. "You expect payment?"
"Certainly. I like it as much as you, but a girl has to live. You'd expect to pay a whore, wouldn't you?"
Sam felt terrible, sick inside, sick in spirit. "I suppose so. How much?"
"A hundred dollars. My service is unique. It's more expensive than getting absolution in the confessional, but my methods are so much more effective and satisfying."
He found his clothes and took out his wallet. He counted out six tens and two twenties. "I've got to go home now," he said. "I've got to tell my wife about our son." He shook his head. "What kind of madness has possessed this town?"
The nucleus of the madness was the Coaltown General Hospital. The wards and rooms were overcrowded, beds resting mattress to mattress in some cases. The nurses and residents were run ragged. They functioned on instinct like automatons.
After Dr. Evans had left, the burden of responsibility fell on Dr. Paul Bowles. In the early hours of the morning, nurse Jane Tyler summoned him.
"I'm afraid Mrs. Taylor in terminal isolation is dying. We've tried to reach her husband, but he's not home. Her fever is up to one hundred seven!"
"I'll look in on her at once," Bowles said. He strode down the corridor to the isolation ward. Most of the patients were in drugged sleep or delirium. He walked to a bed in one corner with a screen around it. Mrs. Taylor was a beautiful, young woman. Her raven hair was fanned out across the pillow, her lovely face aflame with fever, her violet eyes glazed with a hallucinatory film.
She smiled as he took her pulse. It was weak and erratic. Her voice was dreamy. "John, darling, are the children in bed?" she asked.
Bowles shivered. John was her husband. She thought he was her husband. "It's all right," he said gently. "Go to sleep."
She laughed hysterically. "Stop teasing, John. You know I want to make love. I've wanted to so badly all day."
Bowles pulled back, but she grasped his hand in both of her hands. Her strength was fierce. Bowles was a dedicated young man who had given his all to medicine. He had never had time for marriage. He had sublimated his sexual instincts successfully, but not without pain. Once a month he frequented a house of prostitution in a nearby town, but he had never enjoyed true passion in a woman.
The delirious eyes implored him. "Love me, John! Love me!" she whispered. "I want you."
Suddenly, she whipped the sheet off, exposing her naked body to him. The short, hospital nightgown was rumpled up under her armpits. He stared at her in terrible fascination. The fever had suffused her flesh with a rosy glow. Her breasts were swollen, the summits rigid with tumescence.
"I'm on fire, John," she pleaded. "Help me! Please help me!" Smiling the bold, lascivious smile of a woman in the grip of desire, she parted her sleek, warm thighs and moved her hips in an unmistakable invitation.
Bowles was wet with perspiration. He trembled uncontrollably. He glanced around the dim ward wildly, looking for help. It was silent, except for the unconscious patients. She struggled up violently and pulled him down on the bed.
"Please, Mrs. Taylor!" he gasped, fighting to push her down. He couldn't hold her squirming shoulders, and his hands slipped down to her breasts. They swelled in his grasp like live things, the hot nipples nudging his palms. Bowles was shocked as the fire in her body was transmitted to his flesh. One of her arms locked around his neck. With her other hand, she tore at his clothing, mumbling to him in an inarticulate jargon of passion and delirium.
Many times in his career, Bowles had seen this embarrassing reaction of patients under the influence of drugs or fever, male and female. In all hospitals there is an atmosphere of sensuality stimulated, it would seem, by the close proximity of sickness and ever-present death. Bowles thought it must be a chemical defense mechanism, as if the glands of propagation were screaming their defiance at the dark threat to their life. He had never been confronted by it so dramatically before and without the reassurance of other doctors and nurses around him.
"I want you, John, and you want me," she ranted. He recoiled as her searching hand touched his bare body.
"Mrs. Taylor!" he begged her. "You must stop this at once!"
They wrestled around on the bed violently. Her smooth, slippery flesh burned Lis hands as he tried to hold her. He touched her breasts, her belly, her hot flanks. She was a madwoman. All the while, her hands were caressing him. The agony was more than any man could bear. Bowles was a man starved for love, the comfort that only a vibrant female body could give to a man. Here was a woman offering him the joys of her body, urging them on him with fierce passion. True, she was a sick woman, a woman who had no conscious reason of what she was doing. Bowles was a stranger to her, a man dedicated to healing the sick, to bringing her peace and comfort.
But this was not a time of reason. In one day, the earth had turned on its axis, and the world was topsy-turvy. He was sick himself, from overwork and strain. All will power drained out of him. His body was waxing and warming to her caresses. Her face swam before him as he slipped between her thighs. She surged up to devour him with a cry of grateful joy.
"John, my darling!" she murmured happily.
He kissed the dry, feverish lips, let her draw his cool tongue into her parched mouth. The power of her awed him. She seemed to be drawing on his strength and health, sapping his reserves with great, hungry convulsions. She was a wayfarer in the desert, drinking lustily from a life-giving oasis.
At the climax, his spine dissolved into jelly. In exquisite spasms, he poured his life to her dying shell. She gave a great, joyous sigh and collapsed on the bed.
He feared she was dead, but a quick examination proved she was in deep sleep. Her pulse was stronger and steadier, and her breathing was less labored and shallow. It was a miracle!
Bowles walked from the room in a stupor. His behavior was reprehensible. He could not excuse it. Still, he could not fault himself too severely for what had happened in the room. The mysteries of life and the universe were interminable. The human brain could not comprehend their complexity.
At the desk, he steadied himself and told the nurse: "Mrs. Taylor-I think she's passed the crisis. I think she's going to be all right."
CHAPTER 8
ON A MOUNTAINSIDE overlooking Coaltown were the expensive and exclusive Tudor Academies, the twin prep schools for boys and girls. Most of the students hailed from Philadelphia, New York and Boston, offspring of the finest families. They rarely fraternized with the natives, except for surreptitious occasions when the older boys from Tudor East went into town to visit the houses of prostitution on the waterfront. The girls from Tudor West led a completely cloistered life. Tudor West was off limits to the boys, and vice versa. The inmates, male and female, eyed each other with hot eyes at a distance through the steel picket fence that separated each institution from the other. Infrequently, a boy and girl would manage to slip away for an assignation in the woods, but security and supervision in the girls' school was generally too tight for it to be a common practice.
Only once in the twin schools' history had the barriers come down, so to speak, one spring when the lads of Tudor East had taken inspiration from the celebrated panty raids that were the rage at Ivy-League colleges for a few years. All four terms of boys stormed the girls' citadel, marching around the dorms and chanting in lusty voices.
"We want panties! We want panties!"
The genteel young ladies of Tudor had let down their hair that night, not to mention their drawers. A shower of intimate lingerie floated down to the eager boys. A few of the more zealous girls didn't even bother to remove the panties. They jumped out of the windows, themselves. The consequences of that raucous rebellion had been a score of dismissals and two pregnancies. It never happened again, but the boys of Tudor East still talked about the "big night" with wistful nostalgia after the lights were out in the dorms. The new boys who had not participated were most affected by the lurid accounts of the hanky-panky that supposedly had taken place during the famous raid.
They would lie on their hard cots, rigid with lust, envisioning the girls of Tudor West wagging their bare buttocks and bare breasts out the windows to inflame the boys. And they would pretend that the girls were stroking their hot bodies with cool, velvet fingers.
"I'm sick of doing it to myself," fifteen-year-old Steve Lewis complained to his roommate constantly. "One of these nights I'm going to sneak across the road and get me a real piece. Those babes are as hot for it as we are. Did you ever watch them panting through the fence over the guys in their gym shorts? Billy Watson said he showed it to them once, and they almost broke down the fence to get at him."
Karl Schultz snorted and put down his math book. "Watson is full of it! Anyway, you couldn't get near one of those broads even if she'd let you. They've got Dobermans patrolling the grounds at night."
Steve laughed slyly. "They don't scare me, pal. I know a way to get inside the girls' dorms without even leaving this building-by the door, that is."
Karl sat up in surprise. "You got a genie, I suppose?"
"Something just as good. The other day I was looking at the blueprints of this school in the library. Did you know that both schools, all the buildings, are heated by a central system?"
"Sure."
"Did you know that there are miles of underground tunnels through which the steam pipes run, and that the tunnels are big enough for a man to crawl through?"
Karl whistled in awe. "Now, I get it! Lewis, you are a genius, I have to concede it."
Steve smiled superciliously. "Thanks. So, suppose you and I conduct our own private panty raid some night. Even if we don't make out with the girls, we'll have a treasure of lacy fluff that the pussycats keep their goodies in to make our lonely nights more bearable."
"Fetishist!" Karl sneered.
"It's better than nothing," his friend said.
On the day that the plague hit Coaltown, Steve told Karl, "Tonight is the night. Excitement is in the air. I hear there's all kinds of wild parties going on in the girls' dorms."
He was right. The same afternoon, Barbara Jensen, who taught Greek drama at Tudor West, phoned her husband at Coaltown High School. "The dean wants me to sleep over tonight to help keep order in the dorms. The girls are very restless over this plague business."
Jensen, who had just finished his lewd interlude with Laura Watson, was glad to hear it. He needed time to compose himself after the mad thing he had done. "Perfectly all right, dear," he assured her. "Your mother is perfectly capable of taking care of the baby."
It was arranged for Barbara Jensen to sleep in the room occupied by Sonia Fisher, a Tudor senior.
Supper hour was six o'clock in both Tudor schools, and Steve and Karl chose this strategic hour to make their foray into the catacombs of the heating system.
"The girls' dorms will be empty now," Steve said as they crawled through the cold, clammy tunnel, illuminating their way with a flashlight. After some time, they emerged into the dark cellar of a building that Steve judged to be a dorm. In stockinged feet, they crept up a black service stairwell. On the first landing, Steve opened a door a few inches and peeked out into a deserted corridor.
"Coast is clear," he announced. "Let's go."
They padded down the hall, examining the name-plates on the doors. Steve read a familiar name and grabbed Karl's arm.
"Sonia Fisher," he said. "I remember her. She was captain of the girls' debating team that beat us last year. A real sleazy number. Come on, let's go." He opened the door and slipped into the room.
Karl Schultz was nervous. The invasion of the girls' dorm had sounded like fun when they planned it. Now he had second thoughts. "Maybe we ought to go back," he said. "If we get caught here, we'll be kicked out of school."
"Nobody is going to catch us. We'll hide under a bed and wait for Sonia to come back and undress for the night. You can bet that will be some show. After she's tucked in and asleep we slip out, take a couple of pairs of panties for souvenirs and retreat. When the other guys hear about it, we'll be heroes."
Reluctantly, Karl went along with him. The girls' rooms were fancier than the boys' quarters at Tudor East. Lace curtains, vanities, and flowered bedspreads that brushed the floor.
"Perfect," Steve said, lifting the spread on one of the twin beds in the room. "We'll never be spotted under here." Grunting and straining, the two boys just managed to squeeze under a bed. "Just don't sneeze," Steve warned his friend.
Barbara Jensen arrived at her temporary quarters before Sonia got back from supper. She decided to change and shower before the girl put in an appearance. I
Beneath the bed, the boys' eyes bulged. "Holy cow!" Steve whispered to Karl. "That isn't Sonia! She's too old to be one of the girls. It must be a teacher!"
Teacher or not, their hearts raced. Barbara Jensen was quite a dish. She had a luscious, hourglass figure that even the severe black dress, which was the uniform of all teachers at Tudor West, could not depreciate. Barbara was sorry she wouldn't be with her husband that night. For some reason that she could not explain, she was in the mood for love. Ordinarily, she seldom gave sex a thought during working hours, but this day she had been obsessed with daydreams of herself and Andy lying close on their bed after a stimulating shower.
I'll have to settle for a cold shower now, she told herself with wry humor. Real cold!
Humming, she took off her dress and slip and posed before the vanity mirror in her bra and panties. They were scandalous French creations, the bra a half cup that did little else but support her ripe, round breasts and left her nipples brazenly free. The panties consisted of two small triangles of black lace, front and back, that barely retained a semblance of modesty. She touched each nipple with a finger, pushing it in and letting it spring out again.
Above the neck, she was a plain, pretty girl of 25 with even features and large, brown eyes. Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun at the base of her neck.
Peering out from their hideaway, the boys were panting with lust. Neither of them had ever seen a woman this naked before. Their hungry, adolescent bodies ached in torment as she unfastened the bra and let her magnificent breasts tumble free. Barbara studied herself in the mirror, cupping her hands beneath the fleshy fruits and lifting them high. She liked her body, pampered it with the finest, most delicate lingerie under the horrible, shapeless garments she was compelled to wear on the job. With her back to the interlopers under the bed, she rolled her panties down over the swelling globes of her buttocks. The panties floated daintily around her ankles, and she bent over to pick them up.
Karl thought his eyeballs would burst. He felt Steve's fingers biting into his arm, heard his muted groan. He knew he couldn't take much more of this without losing his head. He had all he could do to keep himself from charging out of their hiding place and assaulting that bare, beautiful bottom. He was truly relieved when the woman went into the bathroom and out of sight.
"I've had enough," he said to Steve. "Let's grab her panties and bra and make a getaway."
"Don't be a nut!" the husky blonde boy said. "They'll be coming back from supper about now. We'd be caught for sure."
It proved to be true. Soon there was a loud commotion in the corridor outside the room, scuffling feet and girlish voices and laughter. A little later, Sonia Fisher came into the room. She was a willowy brunette with long, straight, black hair and exotic features. Her lithe body rippled with feline grace beneath her blouse and skirt. Her dark eyes widened as Barbara Jensen came out of the bathroom, naked.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Jensen," she said respectfully. "I didn't know you were showering."
Barbara grinned. "Perfectly all right. After all, this is your room. I'm the intruder." She felt the girl's gaze on her magnificent breasts, and was pleased by the admiration she read in the look. She was proud of her body and enjoyed showing it off. The hunger she read in her husband's eyes when he looked at her in the nude excited her as much as his caresses did.
"Could I borrow a nightgown, Sonia?" she asked the girl.
"Of course." Sonia opened her lingerie drawer and picked out the most expensive nightgown she owned. It was a pink, frothy thing that billowed out in rich folds below the hips. Barbara slipped it over her head and examined herself in the mirror.
"It's lovely, dear," she said. "A little tight in the bosom, but lovely."
The girl blushed and touched her own smaller breasts self-consciously. Barbara's breasts swelled in secret satisfaction, nearly spilling out of the low neckline.
"Sounds like a stampede of cattle out in the hall," she said, frowning.
"This plague has all the girls hopped up," Sonia said. "There isn't going to be much sleep in this dorm tonight. A bunch of pajama parties are underway already."
"Are you going to one of them?" Barbara asked. She sat down at the vanity and undid the bun, letting her luxuriant hair uncoil down her back.
"I can't. I'm up for sorority punishment tonight for speaking out of turn at the last board meeting."
The teacher laughed. "That's too bad. I hope they're not too hard on you."
Sonia threw herself down on one of the twin beds. The springs snapped against the heads of the boys hiding underneath it, making them wince.
"I'll get a paddling. That means sore bottom for a day or so."
Barbara frowned. Physical punishment was theoretically forbidden by the academy rules, but the sororities ignored the restriction, and the faculty members tacitly looked the other way. Hazing and paddling were old, American institutions.
"I think I'll put on my heavy Levi's," Sonia said. "They absorb some of the impact." She got up and unzipped her skirt, took it off and walked to the closet in her blouse and pink panties. Barbara admired her. She had long, lovely legs, slender but shapely. Her bottom was pleasingly plump in the clinging panties.
The bedlam in the hall was worse now, and Barbara debated whether or not she should go out and pull her teacher's rank to quiet it down. Before she could make up her mind, the door of the room burst open and a swarm of girls pushed inside. Most of them were wielding short-handled paddles with broad, oblong wooden faces.
"Sonia!" they screamed in unison. "To the gantlet, girl!"
Barbara Jensen was unnerved by the wild expressions on their young faces. They looked more like a lynch mob than a group of sorority sisters. Paying no attention to her at all, they flocked around Sonia.
"Wait for me to get my Levi's on," the girl protested.
"No!" they thundered. "You come just as you are!"
They grabbed her arms and carried her out into the hall, ignoring her pleas. Butterflies fluttered in Barbara's stomach. Her breasts were uncomfortably hot and constrained in the nightgown's tight bodice. She got up and walked on shaky legs to the door. The violence in the air frightened her.
While the lower-grade girls formed a ring of spectators, the senior sorority members lined up in two rows, facing each. Their faces were inflamed with excitement as they waved their paddles in the air. At one end of the row, Sonia Fisher was pushed down on her hands and knees, with her pert buttocks upturned to receive the prescribed punishment. The thin panties molded her rotund cheeks like a second skin.
"Move, girl!" the sorority, president roared, and started the proceedings with a lusty whack of her paddle on Sonia's buttocks. The poor girl yelped in pain and plunged into the gantlet like a shot rabbit. Two paddles whistled down and smacked her, one on each cheek. The crack of wood against flesh echoed along the corridor. Agony exploded through Sonia's buttocks and radiated down her thighs and up into her tummy. Tears gushed uncontrollably from her eyes. She floundered along desperately with the panic of a fox fleeing from the hounds. The hysterical shrieks and laughter of the other girls rang in her ears. She had never heard them like this before. They reminded her of a mob in an ancient Roman arena, howling for the blood of the Christians.
Halfway down the line, she was grabbed and held. Greedy hands pulled at her panties, working them down over her buttocks. Sonia screamed in terror.
"No! Please don't!"
In the doorway of the room, Barbara Jensen watched in horror and indignation. She struggled through the tightly packed girls around the gantlet, shouting at the top of her lungs.
"Girls! Girls! That will be enough. Remember, you're young ladies!" She might as well have been screaming at a blank wall. The mob stood firm and wouldn't let her through.
Sonia's panties were all tangled around her thighs now, further impeding her. She struggled along with her naked buttocks vulnerable to the flailing paddles. Her smooth flesh turned from satiny-white to pink, then to pale crimson and finally to fiery red. Her tortured cheeks bobbed and throbbed as the merciless paddles battered them from side to side. Screaming in agony, she finally reached the end of the row and collapsed in tears.
As rapidly as the mob in the hall had assembled, it dissolved. Girls ducked back into bedrooms, the sorority sisters made off, waving their paddles victoriously and laughing like she-devils. Barbara rushed to the prostrate girl and helped her to her feet. The teacher was pale and trembling with outrage.
"Those little monsters!" she said. "They haven't heard the last of this. I'm reporting this disgraceful exhibition to the dean first thing in the morning!"
"Oh no!" Sonia blubbered through her tears. "If you report it, I'll be drummed out of the club. You know how sorority laws work? They'll say I finked out on them."
Barbara knew, from her own days at college. She helped the girl hobble into the room, supporting her with an arm around her slim shoulders. Her inflamed buttocks were puffy and sore, the skin stretched shiny and red over the angry flesh. Each step was pure agony.
"They even hit the backs of your thighs," Barbara said sympathetically. "I hope your back isn't injured. Better take off your blouse and let me see."
She helped Sonia remove her blouse and brassiere and examined her bare back. There were a few welts, but nothing serious. "Better lie down on your stomach," she advised. "I'll get something to soothe you, dear."
Naked now, the girl kneeled gingerly on her bed and eased herself down in the prone position. Barbara observed that she had nice, little breasts, round and firm and fleshy. Sonia was really a lovely girl, so feminine, and as graceful as a cat Her black hair hung about her face in a gleaming frame that set off her pale, exotic face. She reminded Barbara of an Indian princess. In the bathroom, the teacher found a bottle of fragrant, emollient oil. She hurried with it back into the bedroom.
The two boys under the bed were getting jittery.
The episode of the paddling had been a frightening thing to listen to, even though they couldn't see it. The sorry sight of Sonia Fisher when she came back in the room told a grim story. The boys felt the madness singing in the air, and it frightened them. Even so, Steve was perversely excited by the girl's swollen, bruised buttocks. Peeking through the fringe of the bedspread, he watched her lie down on the bed across the room. Her panties, bra and blouse lay in a small heap on the floor not far from the bed they were hiding under. When Sonia buried her face in a pillow and the teacher was in the bathroom, he could not resist an impulse. Holding his breath, he stretched one arm out from under the bed, reaching for the discarded clothing.
"You're nuts!" Karl hissed in his ear.
Steve's fingers snagged the pink panties and pulled them into his hiding place. He folded them up and made a little pillow on which to rest his cheek.
Barbara sat down on the bed and poured some of the oil into the palm of one hand. "Now just relax, honey," she said. "This will make you feel better." Gently, she applied the oil to the girl's smarting buttocks, massaging the sensitive skin in small circles with her fingertips. It was a crime, she thought, to abuse such a perfect body so brutally. The tender cheeks were so round, so smooth, the texture of the flesh like velvet under her fingers.
Sonia winced at the first painful touch of the older woman's hands. Her thighs and buttocks were on fire. The rich oil was cool and soothing, and quickly, the worst pain began to subside. Barbara Jensen had a gentle, healing magic in her hands that penetrated layer upon layer of skin and flesh to the very marrow of the girl's bones. A delicious lassitude pervaded Sonia's body. Her eyes drooped, and, if she had been a cat, she would have purred with pleasure. There was a sudden difference in the warmth she felt in her buttocks. It went clear through her, gathering in a sweet pool in her tummy, like honey. The perfumed oil oozed down the round slopes of her bottom and between her thighs, causing a slight, pleasant itching sensation in her flesh.
The night was warm and humid. Barbara stroked the girl lethargically, feeling the heat more than she had felt it all day. Her face was flushed, and her body was uncomfortably hot under the thin nightgown. Her breasts felt positively trapped in the bodice.
Her laughter was high-pitched and giddy as she stood up. "I'm going to take this nightgown off, Sonia," she said. "This room is sweltering." She slipped it over her head and draped it over a chair. Then she sat down on the bed again and resumed her ministrations to the girl's pretty bottom. The flush on her face spread across her bare breasts and down her midriff, fanning out across her belly and thighs. Barbara was alarmed to see that her nipples were blossoming like roses. Familiar sensations flickered around her erogenous zones. Familiar, yet totally alien to the present situation. All day long she had been preoccupied by the mild tumescent state of her body. She had wanted her husband. Now she wanted him desperately. It was ludicrous to think of making love while she was massaging the svelte body of a young girl, Barbara told herself, but she was powerless to stop the rising tide of her desire.
Sonia was stirring strangely under her caresses, moving her hips from side to side and moaning softly. Barbara was fascinated by her hands and fingers, almost as if they belonged to someone else. The fingers of one hand trailed down the soft insides of the girl's thighs.
"Oh, Mrs. Jensen!" Sonia cried out suddenly. She rolled over quickly and sat up. Her exotic face was ablaze with lust, eyes heavy-lidded, nostrils flaring, lips parted sensually. Barbara was a helpless victim of emotions she could not understand. She wanted to get off the bed, get away from this new personality confronting her, but her arms and legs were too heavy with the pulsing of hot blood.
"Don't stop, please," Sonia said softly. She smiled and grasped one of Barbara's hands, placing it on her warm, soft belly. Sighing, she arched against the hand, trapping it in the hot pocket of her thighs. Fire flashed up Barbara's arm and spread like lightning through her body.
The girl smiled. "You have such beautiful breasts, Mrs. Jensen," she murmured. She cupped one of the luscious fruits in her hands and brought it to her lips. Barbara moaned in anguish as the gentle mouth devoured her turgid nipple.
"No, Sonia, no!" she protested, but it was a feeble protest, drowned out by the fierce pounding of desire in her loins. The girl pushed her back on the bed and pressed her lithe young form against her, breast to breast, belly to belly, thigh to thigh. Barbara Jensen, stunned by what was happening but powerless to stop it, closed her eyes and let herself be carried away. The girl's hands and mouth teased her artfully, teasing her body until she was mad with lust. She cried out in ecstasy as Sonia tongued her navel. Soft hands slipped around her hot thighs and kneaded her quivering buttocks. Barbara's hips surged up eagerly to receive the final, wondrous, intimate kiss. Her greedy, frantic hands found the girl's buttocks, still flaming from the paddling. The two girls lost themselves in blind passion. Their lovely bodies writhed and twisted against each other in the glorious sunburst of completion.
Underneath the other bed, the two boys watched in fascination. "It's wild!" Karl whispered. "Two girls! Can you imagine?" He turned to look at his friend, but turned away quickly in embarrassment. Steve was rubbing himself against Sonia's panties, eyes closed, an ecstatic smile on his lips.
When it was over, Barbara Jensen was filled with remorse and self-revulsion. "This is terrible!" she said, sobbing into her hands. "I never knew I could do a thing like this."
Sonia laughed sympathetically. "Don't make a federal case out if it, Mrs. Jensen. It's the specialty of the house, here at Tudor West."
Barbara stared at the girl incredulously. "You mean you've done this before? With other girls?"
The dark girl's eyes gleamed wickedly. "Dozens of times. Most of the senior girls do. How do you think we get our kicks?"
"Stop it! I don't want to hear any more!"
"Well, you're going to hear it!" Sonia said bitterly. "You can't shut a bunch of healthy, red-blooded, mature girls up in a prison like this as if they were nuns. We're not nuns! We don't want to be celibates. The only chance we get to even look at the opposite sex is through an iron fence. After four years at Tudor, a girl is ready to climb walls, go out of her mind. The only sexual outlet available to us is what you and I had tonight." She grinned tauntingly at the older woman. "It isn't too bad, is it Mrs. Jensen? You were crazy for it, I could tell."
Barbara blushed and averted her shamed eyes. "I'll never understand it as long as I live. Nothing will ever be the same again."
"That's silly," the girl said gently. "You'll go right on making love to your husband, and you'll forget all about this. You're an educator, Mrs. Jensen. Educators are supposed to be always seeking new experience. Well, chalk tonight up to experience."
When they were in bed, Barbara stared numbly at the dark ceiling. Sonia was right, she knew. She couldn't allow five minutes of misguided passion to ruin her life. She was not a Lesbian, she knew that too. What she had done with Sonia tonight, she would never do again. It was one of those moments of madness that comes over every man and woman at some point in their lives. She thought of the plague raging the town below. That was madness too, and madness is infectious.
She smiled guiltily in the dark. Sonia had been right about another thing. She had enjoyed it! Her body was drained, and her mind was at rest. Smiling, she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 9
WHEN THE ROOM had been dark and silent for almost a half hour, Steve Lewis nudged Karl Schultz. "Time to make a break for home," he said.
The two boys eased themselves out from under the bed noiselessly, hardly daring to breathe. There was no chance of their waking the girls. Both were sleeping the dead sleep that follows sexual fulfillment. Barbara Jensen was lying spread-eagled on the bed, bathed in moonlight from the window on one side of the room. Her nightgown was rumpled up around her hips. One buxom breast had slipped out of the bodice. The boys stared at her in lecherous hunger.
"I can reach out and touch it," Steve said shakily.
"Don't look," Karl said. "It's enough to drive a guy crazy. Let's get out of here."
Steve sighed forlornly. "Yeah." He tiptoed over to a chair. "First I got to get these." He picked up he imagine panties Barbara had been wearing and jammed them into his pants pocket. "Now we got two souvenirs to show the guys."
The corridor was dimly lit and silent. The floor creaked as they hurried to the staircase, but not enough to wake the sleeping girls. When they reached the basement, Karl breathed a sigh of relief. "Home free," he said.
"Not quite!" a harsh voice rang out of the cavernous gloom of the dark cellar.
Lights erupted in the boys' faces, blinding them. When their eyes had accommodated to the glaring brightness, they found themselves surrounded by a score of girls. They were the same girls who had thronged into Sonia Fisher's room, and they still carried their paddles.
A tall, strapping girl with masculine features was in charge. "We've been waiting for this for a long time, fellows," she said. "Thought you were pretty smart, didn't you, coming over here through the conduits? Well, we were way ahead of you. We've had the exit at this end booby trapped since the beginning of the term, strung up with threads."
Steve remembered breaking through a maze that he had believed was a tangled spider web.
"We check it out every night so we can tell if we have any uninvited visitors in the dorm," the girl went on. "Tonight we hit pay dirt. So, all we had to do was wait for you to come back this way."
Steve looked around nervously at the ring of female faces. Girls had never inspired any other emotion than lust in his mind in the past. These girls were different. Their faces were set in identical, toothy smiles. Not warm, feminine smiles, but cunning, wolfish smiles.
The boy tried to conceal his mounting fear. "The fact is, girls, my pal and I were exploring the heating tunnels, and we got lost. We wandered into your dorm by mistake."
The girls laughed shrewishly. "Oh sure!" the stocky one said. "So while you were here, you decided to play Peeping Tom, and maybe take back a few souvenirs to show the boys, right?"
"Souvenirs?" Steve said innocently.
The husky girl pointed to his stuffed pockets. "What do you have there, friends?"
"Hankderchiefs, that's all." He backed away as she moved deliberately toward him. Two girls moved in behind him on each side and grabbed his arms.
"Hey!" he protested, struggling to break free, but they held him securely. Steve had always regarded females, even grown ones, as his physical inferiors. He was stunned by the strength of these little girls holding him.
The masculine one, who was obviously their leader, pulled the two pairs of panties out of his pockets and held them aloft. "Look at these, girls!" she shouted. "We caught them with their pants down, so to speak!"
The mob hooted and jeered. Their comments were very unsettling to the boys.
"Let's give it to them good!"
"The blonde one is mine. He's cute."
"He's too chubby. I like the tall, husky one."
In theory this should be the answer to a hard-up guy's prayer, Steve thought. Here they were, surrounded by a bevy of sexy females. The ones who were holding him were pressed in all around him. Their breasts were pressing against his arms. Their legs were soft and warm against his thighs and buttocks. Only it didn't make him feel hot at all. All he felt was an ominous, icy chill.
"What are you going to do to us?" Karl asked. Four girls were holding him, too. "Turn us in to your dean?"
The question triggered still louder peals of girlish laughter. "Oh no, you don't get off that easily, chum." The leader stroked her granite jaw thoughtfully. "Turnabout is fair play, they say, so for starters we'll give you a taste of your own game."
"I don't get it," Steve said tensely.
"You came over here to steal our pants, lads, so now it's our turn to steal your pants. What do you say, girls?"
The applause was unanimous.
"No!" the boys howled as tittering, hysterical females closed in around them. Eager fingers pulled at their belts and trousers. They tried to kick out with their feet, but they were hemmed in too tightly. Steve felt his feet being lifted off the floor, and, in mortification, he saw his trousers and undershorts being whisked over his feet. The girls squealed and clapped, shouting vulgarities that made his ears burn.
"I told you the blonde one was cute. Look at him."
"Poo! Who wants cute? The dark one's got what it takes."
Steve tensed as teasing hands explored his nakedness brazenly. In lewd fantasies, he had dreamed of femine hands touching him, but not as a part of a puglic exhibition. It was humiliating. Still, his body chemistry was more powerful than his humiliation, and the weak flesh responded promptly to the caresses. Poor Karl was in the same plight.
The girls were delighted.
"Oh, they're both adorable!" a hot-eyed redhead said. Her breasts were sharp points in her cotton sweater. She ran her hands sensuously down over her flanks, shaping her skirt to her round thighs.
"Down, girls!" the masculine girl said roughly. "They're beginning to enjoy this." She slapped her paddle smartly against her thigh. "Let's line up!"
Steve's heart flipped in his chest. They were going to make them run the gantlet, as they had done to Sonia Fisher! He still had a vivid image of Sonia's bruised, inflamed backside. Just the thought of it sent knives of vicarious pain through his gut. The girls lined up in two rows, pushing and jostling each other excitedly. Their eyes were unnaturally bright. Their bodies moved restlessly, breasts straining against their blouses and sweaters, the muscles of their thighs tense beneath their skirts and tight stretch pants. One pretty, blonde girl wore a form-fitting black leotard. He could see her tumescent nipples thrusting out of the tight cotton and the tremor of a pulse low in her belly. It dawned on him, with horror, that she was in a state of high sexual excitement.
Ahead of him, he saw Karl shoved down on his hands and knees. The boy's bare backside, plump and pale, trembled in the glare of the overhead light. He winced as two wooden paddles flashed down, smashing the flesh with a sound that made his knees dissolve into jelly. Karl screamed and bucked like a bronco with a burr under its saddle. With his buttocks glowing like neon lights, he scrambled through the gantlet and was obscured by a welter of swinging paddles.
Steve bleated in terror as he was hurled down on his hands and knees. He looked up wildly into the leering faces hovering over him. They weren't girls' faces. They were the faces of fiends. Their banshee wailing deafened him. Then the deluge of paddles eclipsed sight and sound, and there was nothing else in the world except pain.
It tore though his body like a cruel corkscrew, mangling his organs. His buttocks felt as if they were being roasted in a nuclear oven. His agonized flesh seemed to be splitting in a dozen places. The paddles splattered against thighs, hips, back. Twice he collapsed under the weight of his pain, but each time his surrender only spurred his tormentors to greater ferocity. His tortured body floundered up and plunged down the line.
A tiny brunette hit him with such force that her paddle shattered. In a fury, she drove her pointed shoe up between his thighs. The torture was too great to endure. Steve collapsed and fainted. They milled around him like snarling hyenas, beating him about the head and shoulders, until their leader interceded.
"That's it kids!" she shouted, pushing them back. "We don't want to kill him."
Meanwhile, Karl had navigated the torturous gantlet and was getting to his feet. Momentarily, he was ignored, as the girls were distracted by Steve's collapse. Dazed and crazed by pain and terror, he looked around in panic. Beyond the penumbra of the light he could see the stairs vaguely. Skirting the mob, he broke for them.
"Look out, one of them's getting away!" a plump blonde screamed.
"Get him!" the leader roared. "If he gets upstairs and makes a ruckus, we'll have the faculty on our necks." She raced to intercept him.
Karl saw she was going to reach the stairs before he did. There was only one thing to do. He lowered his head like a bull and rammed head-on into her belly. Her eyes bulged, and her lungs deflated like twin balloons. He slammed her hard into the wall, where she cracked her head and slid to the floor, unconscious. The boy took the steps two at a time, well ahead of the yelling females behind him.
He reached the first floor and escaped into the hall. At the far end was a set of heavy doors leading to the outside. The girls' excited voices assailed his ears, but the words did not make any lucid impression in his panic.
"Stop, you fool!"
"Don't go outside!"
"They turn the dogs loose after midnight!"
Karl reached the heavy doors, slammed down the release bar and flung them wide open. The sweet, summer night air was exhilarating in his nostrils. Moonlight flooded the spacious lawns and gardens. He ran along a cinder path as fast as his legs would carry him. Once he glanced back across his shoulder and saw that his pursuers had given up the chase. Still he did not slow down. In the distance he could see the high iron fence, with the sharp pickets silhouetted against the starry sky. He knew there were trees growing along the fence. He would climb one of them and drop over the fence onto the campus of Tudor East.
He was still a long way from the fence when he heard the dogs commence to bark. It was an angry, ominous sound that made the short hairs on the base of his neck bristle. The barking was closer now, converging on him from all sides. Lungs bursting, he ran faster. Only one hundred yards to go to the fence. His goal was a big, shaggy maple tree, straight ahead.
Out of the corners of his eyes, he saw the beast break out of some foliage to his right. It had a dark, sleek body, and its eyes and fangs gleamed savagely in the moonlight. Stark terror made his legs give way, and he fell to his knees screaming, throwing his arms up defensively. The huge Doberman hit him explosively. Its powerful jaws crushed his left elbow as if it had been caught in a steel mangle. The boy was flung onto his back, his screams of agony echoing across the quiet campus. The dog straddled him, tearing at his other arm to get at his throat. In horror, Karl saw his bicep slashed open from shoulder to elbow, muscles and tendons bared all the way down to the white bone.
Other dogs came bounding out of the shadows, jaws slavering, to join the carnage. He felt their steel-muscled bodies press in all around him. A jagged vice clamped on his throat, and his vision was obliterated by a hot, thick gusher of blood. Pain, fear, consciousness faded into peaceful blackness, the way a scene is wiped off a movie screen.
The watchmen came up and called off the dogs. They covered the bloody remains with a canvas sheet and phoned for the police and the coroner.
Down in the cellar of the dorm, the girls helped Steve Lewis to his feet and shoved him frantically toward the tunnel leading back to Tudor East.
"Get back and keep your mouth shut," they warned him. "If they find out what really happened, it means dismissal for all of us. You understand?"
He nodded dumbly and staggered into the conduit. By the time news of Karl's death reached the boys' school, Steve was safely in bed.
The girls changed quickly into their pajamas and nightgowns and were in their beds when the dean and local police roused the whole dorm for questioning. The interrogation ended without the authorities' learning a single fact to explain what a naked boy was doing on the grounds of Tudor West.
"Only way I can figure it," the police chief said to the dean, "is that this crazy kid got over the fence somehow and was on his way to the girls' dorm when the dogs got him. You know how it is with these young fellows with hot blood. He got it into his head that he had to have a girl and nothing was going to stop him."
The girls' dean shuddered. "We've had incidents like this in the past. Panty raids and that kind of thing, but nothing like this. How horrible! The poor boy knew we have guard dogs prowling the grounds after midnight. He must have been out of his mind, indeed."
The chief grunted. "It's this plague madness that's getting to everybody, ma'am. I'm afraid to think what will happen next."
At the hospital, nurse Jane Tyler was exhausted when her relief arrived at two a.m. She was relieved by Ann Baxter, a stout, motherly woman in her late fifties.
Mrs. Baxter was concerned about the younger woman's going home alone at this hour. "It's a jungle out there, Jane," she warned her. "Law and order have broken down. Drunks and perverts are waiting in every alley and doorway. As old and fat as I am, I had some pretty close calls."
Jane knew how prone older females were to exaggerate their dangers of such encounters. like old maids looking under their beds at night, they visualized lecherous males lurking behind every bush and hedge.
She smiled pleasantly. "I'll be all right, Ann. Don't worry. I don't have far to go."
Mrs. Baxter shook her head disapprovingly. "It's not safe, a pretty young girl like you on these streets."
Jane laughed. "Right now I look like something the cat dragged in. No man would want any part of me."
That was the misstatement of the year, and Jane knew it. At twenty-five, Jane Tyler still possessed the looks and figure that had won her second place in the Miss America Pageant in her college days. If anything, her figure had ripened with maturity. Her breasts were bold and firm, and in her starched uniforms, she could get away without wearing a brassiere. She never wore a girdle, either. Although her hips and buttocks were plushly feminine, her flesh was firm, and even in the tightest skirts, her bottom did not jiggle embarrassingly as most female bottoms were prone to do.
She had rich, auburn hair and slanted green eyes, specked with gold. There was not a delectable part of Jane Tyler that any man was-likely to overlook.
In spite of her sex appeal, Jane was never afraid of walking the streets of Coaltown after dark. She was a courageous girl, and she had discovered that the type of males who annoy women furtively on the streets was singularly lacking in courage. A sharp reprimand or a loud threat to scream usually sent them running off with their tails between their legs. The metaphor made her smile, it was so apt!
One of the reasons the girl was so scornful of unwelcome sexual advances was her lack of interest in the subject of sex itself. Appearances to the contrary, she was not a woman with a high sex quotient. She preferred to believe that she could take it or leave it alone, but the truth was that Jane Tyler was frigid. No virgin, she had entered into several unsatisfactory affairs while she was away at nursing school in New York. During the last three years, she had abstained from sex, entirely. She was a neat, meticulous person whose apartment and person were always immaculate to the point of obsession. She regarded sex as a messy, untidy business.
On the night of the plague, she left the hospital by the main entrance and strode briskly down the dark street in the direction of her home. With distaste, she soon saw that Ann Baxter had not been exaggerating about the atmosphere of drunkenness and licentiousness that prevailed in Coaltown. An intoxicated man about forty-five staggered out' of a doorway and tried to put his arms around her.
"Get out of my way, you pig!" she shouted. "Or I'll have you thrown in jail and press charges. Think how your family will feel about that!" She punctuated it by jabbing a high heel into his instep. He jumped away, whimpering and holding, his injured foot. Jane walked on, smiling in satisfaction.
Two youths with peach-fuzz on their cheeks blocked her way, further along. She faced them with her hands clenched on her hips, face scowling.
"I'm a policewoman," she lied boldly. "My job is to run punks like you into the station house, but I'm feeling generous tonight. Now scat!" They did.
When she passed the small park in the town square, a skinny young man stepped out from behind a bush and exposed himself to her. Giggling, he made an indecent proposition.
Jane swung her heavy handbag in a wide arc and clobbered him in the most strategic spot. With a screech of pain, he collapsed on the grass. The girl walked on briskly. Rather than unsettling her, the harrowing incidents actually exhilarated her. She felt strong and confident, unassailable.
She was nearing her apartment house when it happened, just as she passed a dark stairwell leading down to a basement dwelling. Two men bounded out of the shadows behind her and grabbed her. One clamped a hand over her mouth. The other held her around the waist. Jane did not panic. She kicked back viciously and felt her heel dig into a shin. Opening her mouth, she sank her teeth into the stifling hand in the meaty flesh between the thumb and first finger. Its owner howled like a hurt cat The man behind her cursed in pain, but maintained his hold on her. Jane filled her lungs for a lusty scream circulated to scare off her attackers, but, before she could sing out, a heavy fist smashed into her solar plexus, paralyzing her lungs and vocal cords. Gasping for air, she was dragged down the stairs and pushed into an apartment
CHAPTER 10
BRIGHT LIGHTS BLINDED her. She looked around in surprise, recognizing that she was inside of a small, private barroom of a type common to this part of town. There were several such clubs which catered to special clientele after the regulation bars closed up for the night. There were four men seated on leather stools before a small, but elaborate bar. They laughed drunkenly as the two men pushed her into the room. The red-coated bartender had a white, frightened face.
"Come on, gentlemen," he whined. "Fun is fun, but this is going too far."
"Relax, Mike," one of the men holding her said. "We just want to buy the little lady a drink."
She shook off their hands roughly. "i wouldn't drink with louts like you if i was dying of thirst. Now let me go, before i lose my temper and really make trouble for you."
The men let go of her, but they stood with their backs braced against the closed door. Jane took a quick inventory of them all, including the bartender. They were not the kind of bums she would have expected them to be. All were well-dressed, in their mid-thirties, and not unattractive. Their voices indicated a modicum of good breeding. She pegged them as overage college boys, the kind who set aside a night a week to get away from home and hearth to howl at the moon. Normally, she felt sure she could have handled them with firmness and reason, but tonight she was not so sure. In their eyes she detected a primitive wildness compounded of too much brandy and the uncertain madness that had effected everyone since the outbreak of bubonic plague.
A man with graying temples at the bar said thickly, "What a charming creature, and an angel of mercy, I see. My dear, take mercy on we lonely wayfarers." He pounded the bar. "Mike! A drink for this gorgeous damsel."
The bartender looked her way quizzically. "What will it be, Miss?"
Jane decided she would have to humor them. "Oh, if it will make these overgrown children behave, I'll have one Scotch and soda."
The men at the bar cheered. "Bravo! That's the spirit."
With the two men who had brought her in walking behind her alertly, she had no alternative but to sit down at the bar. Giggling and shoving each other, they pressed around her like juveniles around the belle of the ball. She was not frightened, just uneasy. Their glazed eyes inspected her brazenly from the top of her coppery head to the tips of her toes. She hunched her shoulders to minimize the thrust of her breasts against the summer uniform. Now she regretted not having worn a bra. She regretted the short skirts of the new uniforms, too. No matter how she tugged at the hem, it left inches of her rounded thighs displayed above her petite knees. The hunger in their eyes, as they licked over her legs and breasts, disgusted her. Men were like ravenous lions at feeding time when they saw a woman, she thought, especially when they had been drinking too heavily. She could literally see them salivating.
Coolly, she estimated her chances of getting away after one drink. A blond man with a flat, cruel face answered the question for her. "Our party is complete now, Mike," he ordered the bartender. "Lock the door." The man meekly obeyed.
Jane's green eyes met the blond man's pale, hard eyes unflinchingly. "That's unnecessary. I'll be leaving right after this drink." She sipped it slowly.
He laughed, showing white teeth. "What's the hurry? We haven't started the fun and games yet."
"I'll pass the games," she said archly. "You kiddies enjoy yourselves."
A dark, heavy man at the end of the bar slipped off his stool and weaved to the far end of the room. It was obviously a recreation area, she observed, featured by a shuffleboard, a pinball machine and a dart-board affixed to one wall. He removed the six feathered darts imbedded in the cork board and carried them back to a white line chalked on the floor.
"Show her your stuff, Harry!" the others encouraged him.
The girl was suddenly aware of the nature of the target painted on the cork surface. It was a picture of a naked woman with immense breasts and hips. Numerals were printed on various portions of her body. A 10 on each arm. A 20 on each breast. A 30 on each thigh. A 50 on her belly. And 100 on the plump apex of her thighs and belly. Jane flushed and looked away.
"Juveniles!" she muttered aloud.
The blond man frowned and pressed himself against her side. Even through the starched skirt, the flesh of her hip cringed at the pressure of his hard, masculine belly and thighs.
"Don't get snotty, sister," he said. "You better show respect for old Harry. He's the champion dart-player of this whole state, formerly of Princeton's elite Darts and Arrows Club."
Jane pushed him away firmly, and pretended to show some interest in Harry's performance. Drunk as he was, the heavy man was a proficient dart-player. In quick succession, he snapped off the little missiles with the feathered tails. They splattered into the cork, one after another, vibrating their feathers. Two of them were stuck into the target's breasts. Two hit the thighs. One was imbedded in the navel. The sixth scored a perfect bulls eye!
The other men cheered lustily and slopped more drinks into their mouths. The blond man placed a hand on the small of her back and let it side down over the globes of her buttocks, flaring over the back of the small stool.
Jane colored and said angrily, "Take your hand off me at once!"
His pale eyes bored into her hatefully, but he obeyed. "Okay, baby," he said, "but you're going to get yours before this night is over!"
Jane slipped off the stool and faced them fearlessly. "Thanks for the drink, gentlemen, but now I really must be going."
They locked at her silently, sly, furtive smiles playing around the edges of their mouths. The dart champion beckoned to her. "Come on over here, nursie. You can't leave before the main event. You're going to be the star."
"I'm afraid I'm no match for you at throwing darts, Harry," she said, oblivious to the undercurrent of excitement in his voice.
All the men laughed. "That isn't exactly what we had in mind," the blond man said. "You don't have to throw any darts."
An icy finger ran up her spine, slipped down the valley between her buttocks, chilled her thighs and ran up the front of her belly. Gooseflesh spread a rash across her hot flesh. The rayon of her panties felt cold and clammy.
"I don't understand," she said, not wanting to understand. Her knees began to tremble.
The men formed a circle around her, their faces leering and bestial. "It gets so monotonous aiming at a picture," Harry said excitedly. "No zest. like making love to a pin-up photo. You must understand."
The room seemed to rock in front of her as the horrible realization took shape in her mind. "No!" she breathed. "You wouldn't! It isn't possible!"
"But we would." The blond man snickered. "We got talking about it tonight, and we decided that old cork target had to go. We wanted a real live girl who has all the right things in all the right places." He touched her breasts and her belly.
Jane leaped back only to be grabbed by two men behind her. She whirled her head frantically, gazing imploringly into their merciless faces. Their eyes were filmed over with the excitement and anticipation of perverted lust. Their fangs gleamed wetly in the fluorescent lights. The fear engulfed her now in great smothering waves. It was fear such as she had never experienced in her lifetime, crazed, animal terror, the child's terror of the dark unknown. In Jane Tyler's prosaic, ordered existence such horrors had no reality. It was like trying to comprehend the atrocities perpetrated in wartime Buchenwald two decades after the fact; trying to picture one's self as one of the Nazi victims. It was impossible! Just as it was impossible to comprehend what was happening to her now. She screamed and thrashed out violently with her arms and legs. The men restrained her easily and carried her over to a table, laying her down on her back.
"Okay, that's enough, you guys!" the bartender objected. "Let her go, or I'll call the police." He ran around the bar and headed for a wall phone.
The blond man pounced on him like a big cat, grabbing his shoulder and spinning him around. He drove a heavy fist into the bartender's face, splitting his nose like a ripe tomato. The smaller man fought back, but he was no match for his attacker. The blond man hit him with an uppercut and pinned him against the bar. Holding him there with a hand on his throat, he picked up a bottle of brandy and smashed the bottle down savagely on his head. The bottle shattered explosively, driving cruel splinters of glass into the man's head and face. Blood and brandy streamed down his shoulders and back. With a moan and a shudder, the bartender crumpled in a heap on the floor, his head hanging across the brass foot rail.
While four of the men held her arms and legs, the man called Harry grasped the neckline of her uniform and tore it down to the waist, slip and all. They murmured appreciatively as her high, hard breasts pointed up at them.
"like snow melons topped with maraschino cherries," Harry said. He touched one of the red nipples. Jane cringed away from him, moaning and shaking her head from side to side.
"No, no, no! Please, don't hurt me," she begged. She screamed as Harry suddenly pinched the sensitive nipple brutally between his fingers.
The blond man came over to the table, his eyes smoldering. "What a woman!" He tangled his fingers in her long, auburn hair. "You're perfect, baby. Perfect."
"Let's get on with it," one of the other men complained. "I'm in a bad way, as you can see."
His friends looked at him and laughed. He made no effort to conceal his lust from the girl. Jane shivered and looked the other way. They undid her belt next, and the blond man yanked the skirt of her torn uniform down over her thighs and legs. She was naked now except for her garter belt, panties and nylons. Lusty eyes devoured her long, lovely legs. They were masterpieces of art that no sculpture could ever duplicate, slim ankles tapering to arched calves, small-boned knees swelling to beautifully rounded, symmetrical thighs; and, above that, more lush, ripe womanhood than any of them had ever seen. Harry slipped one hand down inside of her panties and stroked her belly. His fingers felt like snakes crawling over her flesh. She whimpered as he squeezed the soft, pliable flesh roughly between his strong fingers.
"Tender as a young chicken," he said. He proceeded to slip the pink panties down over her hips. Because the other men were holding her legs splayed on the table, they could not go past her thighs. He ripped them apart and threw them aside. Jane shut her eyes to blot out their feasting eyes.
"Leave her stockings and garter belt on," a dark man said. "They make her sexier."
The blond man giggled. "What could be sexier than this?" He fondled her so harshly that she winced in pain. "Okay, boys take her over against the wall.
Harry, is your shooting eye ready?"
Jane struggled desperately and screamed as loudly as she could as they lifted her off the table and dragged her to the back of the room.
"Save your breath, honey," one of them muttered. "No one can hear you. There's a city ordinance that says these after-hours clubs must soundproof their ceilings to keep down the noise."
They pulled her over to the wall and slammed her back against the dart board, holding her arms out to the sides. The men who held her legs kneeled down.
"Watch your aim, Harry," one of them cautioned. "I wouldn't want to get hit with one of those little buggers."
Harry held one of the darts up to the light and ruffled its feathered tail. The steel tip glittered wickedly. It was about a half-inch long and sharp as a pin. A tense silence settled over the room. Jane hung in the inexorable grasp of her captors, her body quivering with fear.
Harry frowned. "This isn't going to be easy. Her boobs are shaking like dishes of jello."
"You'll manage, Harry," the blond man said. He sat down on a chair off to one side with a glass of brandy.
Harry flipped the first dart. Jane saw it coming at her in a blur of feathers. It struck her just above the nipple of her right breast, the tip penetrating to half its length. The girl howled, as much in terror as in pain. The breast quaked violently, and a thin trickle of blood painted a red, vivid line across the nipple and down the bottom slope to her belly.
"Lovely, Harry! Lovely!" The blond man leaned forward eagerly, his eyes hot and luminous on the feathered dart sticking out of that beautiful mound of creamy, white flesh. The men holding Jane stirred restlessly, taking advantage of their duties to fondle her round arms and thighs. Pain seared her breast with each throb of her heart.
Harry licked his lips and threw the second dart. It stuck high on her left breast. "Bad shot," he said disappointedly.
"You're a perfectionist," the blond man said. "You can't throw a strike with every pitch."
"Come on, Harry, don't waste time," the man who was holding her left leg urged. "I can't wait much longer." His fingers quivered hungrily on the inner side of her leg.
Jane moaned in anguish as she stared down at the brightly colored instruments of torture puncturing her creamy breasts. The sight of her blood made her dizzy. Her leg jerked in the man's strangle hold as the third dart pierced her flesh in the meatiest part of her left thigh. A ribbon of fire whirled around and around the circumference of her leg, climbing higher and higher until it sizzled in her belly. She felt faint, watching a droplet of blood swell like a tiny, red balloon around the point of the dart. The blonde man got up restlessly and walked over closer to her.
"Try a navel shot, Harry," he suggested.
Jane screamed hysterically, her belly quaking in anticipation of what was to come. Harry squinted down the body of the dart and let it fly. It flew in a fluttering parabola and hit with a soft thud just below her dimpled navel.
"Good try, Harry!" the men chorused.
Jane writhed in their hands, finding new strength in the agony that tore through her body. Her breasts lashed from side to side, dislodging one of the darts. The blonde man stepped up to her and pulled out the remaining darts.
Harry protested. "John, I'm not finished."
"Let's try a variation," the blond man said. He pulled over a small table and nodded to the men holding her. "Turn her around and lay her across the table."
Jane abruptly went limp, all resistance gone. She felt the dull resignation of a laboratory animal, accepting the indignities and pain to which she was being submitted with hopeless detachment. It was happening to a stranger, not to Jane Tyler. Her breasts throbbed, her belly and thighs tingled with pain. Her body was alive with feeling, unpleasant feeling, but more feeling than she had ever experienced before. From girlhood, Jane had pampered and petted her lovely body as if it was a priceless treasure. She had bathed it and oiled it and kept it smooth and antiseptic clean. She had regarded it more as a work of art than as an organism of flesh and blood. When she permitted men to make love to her, she had always felt the anxiety a collector feels when some clumsy clod picks up one of his priceless pieces. Her one satisfaction from the sex act came when it was safely completed and her dear body was restored to a state of perfumed cleanliness.
That was all gone, now. These brutes had defiled the temple of her womanhood. They had snatched the work of art from its pedestal, chipped it and scratched it, smashed it into little pieces. They could do no more to her than they had already done. The pain and blood filled her with deep, mystic satisfaction.
She offered no resistance when they threw her face down on the table with her legs dangling to the floor and her buttocks flaring in their faces. They gazed at her round bottom, with lust arching higher and higher in their hungry bodies. They ran their hands over the perfect fleshy spheres, teasing the white, satiny skin, peering and probing the intimate secrets of her. Never had she been so degraded. She reveled in the touch of their filthy paws. A ball of white fire was building deep in her belly. It made her buttocks swell and glow. Her throbbing breasts, mashed against the table-top, tingled strangely. Sensations she had never experienced before vibrated in her thighs and loins.
"Stand back, man," Harry said. "The time for play is later." The sight of her gorgeous buttocks made him tremble with such desire that he could scarcely draw a bead with the fifth dart. Breathing deeply, he steadied himself. The dart sped toward the target, embedding itself, the full length of its barb, in a plump cheek.
Jane shuddered and groaned as the ball of fire in her belly swelled. She felt the bite of the last dart in her other buttock, heard the men cheering for Harry. Her nipples were gorged with blood. Her thighs and belly were scorched by the flames of an inferno bubbling deep within her, a volcano that had been dormant for years, suddenly boiling to new life. She was aware of a void, a vacuum that yearned to be filled.
The blond man plucked the darts from her rosy bottom and wiped away two drops of blood that glistened on her cheeks like dew shining on a rose. They had flogged their lust to an erotic pitch that none of them had ever known before with their wives or other women they had shared sex with. Now they tore off their clothes wildly, babbling like idiots. They were blind to what was happening at the front of the bar.
Mike the bartender had regained consciousness. Covered with blood, he crawled slowly to the door. He unlocked it and slipped out into the night.
Jane felt the rough hands grasping her buttocks, and the fierce surge of hard, male flesh between her thighs. The vacuum was filled at last! The ball of fire in her loins burst with the blinding light of a hydrogen bomb. Rapture, glory, sweet enchantment bubbled over in every remote cell of her body.
The men gaped in wonder as, out of the ashes of pain, blood and defilement, the dry dust of frigidity, there emerged a nymph of insatiable passion.
When the first man had exhausted himself, she turned over on her back and lay spread out like a sacrificial maiden on the altar. She arched her back, reaching out to them with her breasts and belly. Her arms and legs were spread invitingly. The smile on her lips was wanton, pagan.
"She's the reincarnation of Eve," Harry murmured in awe, and he fell upon her furiously. Her breasts burned his chest, the nipples' hot ingots searing his flesh. The clenching of her thighs squeezed the breath out of his lungs. Her heels pounded demandingly on his buttocks.
She outraced him to fulfillment, then her desire surged back again, and she joined him at the pinnacle of ecstasy. One by one, she swallowed them up, a ravenous female whose appetite would never be satisfied. All of her life, Jane Tyler would seek to make up for years of sexual malnutrition. In love as in eating, gluttons are made by the haunting memories of deprivation.
When they were finished with her, she lay slack on the table with her eyes closed. The dart wounds in her breasts, belly, thighs and buttocks were marked by pinprick clots of blood. They would heal and be almost invisible, but Jane would always know they were there, symbols of the time she had been crucified and then resurrected.
She sat up with a start. Uniformed policemen were flocking through the door. Her six attackers, still naked, were at the bar, drinking. A husky cop rammed the end of his nightstick into Harry's fat, pink belly. Harry bleated like a calf and folded up on the floor. The blond man cursed and threw a bottle at the policeman's head. It shattered, slashing his cheek open to the bone from temple to jaw.
Another cop fired his pistol at the naked, blond man. It shattered his hip and sent him flying against the back bar. Glasses and bottles crashed on top of him as he slumped to the floor. The other men grappled with the police. They were chopped down with nightsticks and gun butts.
The policemen gathered around Jane, who sat huddled on the table with her legs drawn up and her arms wrapped around her knees. She sensed their furtive, guilty eyes on her breasts and thighs. One stout, older cop took off his jacket and draped it around her.
"I'm Captain Hart, Miss. We got here as soon as we could. Are you all right?"
"I'm all right," she said. She had an insane desire to laugh. She looked up at the mob of male faces surrounding her, and the warm fluttering between her thighs commenced again. They were big, virile men. She wished they would take off their blue uniforms. She tried to picture all those males naked, with their masculinity fired by the sight of her nude body. She was sure she could take on all of them.
"You were raped?" the captain asked.
She could no longer repress the giggle. "Raped?" she repeated. "I can't even count the times I was raped."
"There's an ambulance on the way, Miss," the chief said. "Try to relax. You'll be all right."
Jane could not control herself. Shrugging off the jacket, she squirmed off the table. She proudly displayed the wounds on her breasts and belly and thighs.
"We were playing a game," she said. She fondled her breasts, giggling. "These are worth twenty points each." She pointed to her navel. "Fifty points." Then she grabbed herself between the thighs. "This is the bulls-eye. One hundred points."
Captain Hart looked around uneasily at his men. "Tell me, one of you, whether that ambulance is coming."
Jane pressed herself against him. "Let's have some fun while we're waiting, Captain." Her hands grasped him through his trousers. "I feel so funny. Do it to me, please!"
Hart stared into her eyes with mounting horror. His flesh crawled. Of all the madness he had witnessed this day, none of it compared with the madness he saw in this woman's eyes.
Minutes later, they carted Jane Tyler away in a straight jacket, her body consumed by an unholy fire that only death could quench!
CHAPTER ll
IT WAS AFTER three in. the morning when Don Evans drove into his driveway. Guilt and remorse rode like a leaden ball high in his chest. When he had invited Louise Pitts out for a drink, it had been an innocent gesture of friendship. He was still not quite sure of how they had ended up in a lovers' hideaway in an adulterous embrace. Madness, sheer madness. Evans didn't know how he could face his wife. He hoped she would not be waiting up for him, but she was. Carla was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. She was pale and tired, and there was a tic at the corner of her right eye. She seemed strangely distant. The front of her robe was open, and her breasts strained against the filmy nightgown. He hated himself for comparing them with Louise's more voluptuous breasts.
"You should be in bed, honey," he told her.
"I couldn't sleep." She told him about the horrible experience with the rat, and about Bob Shaw's bite, carefully deleting the account of what had happened between her and Bob in the examination room. It seemed like a bad dream now, something that had no basis in reality. She kept telling herself that it had not happened, but her heart knew better.
Evans was shocked by the grisly story. "Thank heavens old Bob was around to take care of you," he said.
The double entendre was in her mind, not in his intent. Carla blushed furiously. Turning away from her husband quickly, she said, "Let's go to bed."
Evans scrubbed himself scrupulously in the shower, just in case any of Louise's perfume lingered on his body. When he came back into the bedroom, Carla was lying in their double bed, facing the wall. He had a last cigarette and brought her up to date about conditions at the hospital and in the city in general.
"I think we're going to lick this thing before it has a chance to get any real impetus," he said. "I doubt there'll be a rat left alive by morning." He reached over to switch out the light, when the front-door chimes clanged impatiently.
Carla sat up in bed, wide-eyed. "Who could it be at this hour?" she asked tensely.
"I don't know." Evans slipped his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his slippers. He started downstairs in pajamas, with Carla at his heels, clutching a wrapper around her body.
He opened the door and was surprised to see Bob Shaw and his wife, Dale. Dale Shaw was as tall as Evans was, a statuesque brunette with flashing, dark eyes. Her breasts were the biggest Evans had ever seen, yet they were not sloppy. Her husband's favorite joke was to wink and say: "Dale's a Texas girl, and you know that they grow everything bigger in Texas!"
Standing at the door, she wore a skirt-and-sweater ensemble that emphasized the lushness of her hips as well as her breasts. Her sultry face was ominously grim. Bob Shaw's expression was even grimmer. He was wearing trousers and an undershirt, and his feet were bare.
"Can we come in?" Dale asked sharply.
"Sure." Evans stepped aside to let them pass. Dale shoved Bob ahead roughly and brushed past Evans quickly. As she did, the doctor's eyes widened in shock. She was holding a heavy .45 caliber automatic pressed into her husband's back! With the expertise of an experienced gunslinger, she moved to a position where she could cover them all with the gun.
"What the devil is this?" Evans demanded. "This is a poor time for practical jokes, Dale."
"No joke!" the sultry amazon snapped. Her dark eyes glittered on Carla Evans. The slim blonde girl looked puny beside her. "Little, baby-faced Carla," she said in a simpering voice. "Shy, modest Carla. I guess maybe that's the joke." She looked at Evans. "Only the joke is on you and me, Don."
"What is this, Dale?" Evans said crossly. "Stop talking in riddles and tell us what this is all about."
Dale snorted and waved the gun at Carla. "Suppose we let your wife tell you, Don. Go on, you little cheat, give it to him straight, the way Bob gave it to me!"
Carla swayed and put a hand to her throat. She glanced frantically at Bob Shaw. The big, husky man looked as miserable as a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. "I'm sorry, Carla," he said. "I had to tell her. It was bugging me something awful. Dale and I have always played square with each other."
"Sure!" his wife hissed. "Fair and square, that's my boy! Turn my back for a couple of hours, and he tumbles in the hay with a cuddly little blonde pussycat!"
Evans was suddenly numb. His lips were bloodless, pressed in hard against his teeth. His voice was hollow. "What are you saying, Dale?" He glanced fearfully from Shaw to Carla. The man looked away guiltily. Carla covered her eyes with one hand and began sniveling.
"Go ahead!" Dale jeered. "Turn on the waterworks, doll. That always gets the brutes where they live."
"Dale," Evans persisted, "are you saying that your husband and my wife...? " He was unable to put the repugnant thought into words.
"Your wife and my hubby, yes, they were making the two-backed beast tonight in your' office. Little Carla made him take off his pants so she could fix up his bite, and sex reared its ugly head. I do mean ugly!" She spat in disgust at her husband.
"I don't believe it!" Evans said, stunned. He looked to Carla for a denial, but all she could do was weep.
"I'm sorry, Don," she cried. "I don't know what came over me. It was as if I had no control over my mind and my body, as if some invisible malevolent force was manipulating me like a puppet."
"She's telling the truth," Shaw mumbled. "It was the same way with me. You wouldn't understand. We were two different people."
The trouble was that Evans did understand. Only a few hours before, he had experienced the same phenomenon in the exciting presence of Louise Pitts. Even at the moment of their eager coupling, some part of him had stood to one side, contemplating their lechery with distaste. Understanding was not forgiving, however. He felt murderous rage blazing up inside him. It was unthinkable that his wife would open her arms and her thighs to another man, that she would let another male feast dn her abundance.
"You whore!" he shouted, and even as he said it, he knew it was the colossal conceit and vanity of the male animal speaking for him. It was one thing for him to sin with Louise. It was quite another thing for his wife to sin with Bob Shaw.
He looked at the gun Dale was holding. "Are you going to shoot them? I wouldn't blame you if you did."
"Naw!" She laughed bitterly. "The two of them ain't worth going to jail for." Excitement had brought out her native western drawl very strongly. "Down where I come from, when a gal's man cheats on her, her father or her brothers take a horse whip to him. Well, I don't figure on bothering my dad and brothers to come three-thousand miles to do a job I can do myself."
"Now see here, Dale!" Shaw took a step toward her. "Let's stop this nonsense." He stopped short, looking down the wicked muzzle of the .45, hearing the click o? the safety as she flipped it off.
"One more step," she said quietly, "and I'll be a widow." She turned to Evans. "Do you have any strong rope?"
"An old clothesline."
"Get it, pronto!"
Evans ducked down the cellar, wondering what she had in mind to do with Bob and Carla. He smiled wryly. He doubted if there was a horse whip available in the county. While he was downstairs, Dale ordered her husband to remove his clothes.
He turned fire red. "Come on, honey, I can't do that."
She sneered at him. "Why not? Only a little while ago the two of you were rubbing bare butts together. Why be modest now? Now get out of those clothes before I put a slug through your gut!"
"Okay, okay." Shaw began to unbutton his pants. He was afraid of Dale. She had always been a loud, flamboyant girl who could ride, shoot and drink with the best men, but there was an added quality of reckless belligerence in her attitude that was unfamiliar to him. There was madness in her eyes. She waved the gun at Carla. "You, too! Off with your robe and nightie!"
"No!" the blonde girl gasped. She clutched her robe around her more tightly and backed against the wall.
Dale advanced on her ominously. "You want me to tear them off you, all right!"
"Better do what she says, Carla," Shaw advised her. "She means business."
Whimpering and trembling, Carla stripped off her robe and nightgown. Naked and covering her pear-shaped breasts self-consciously with her hands, she cringed under Dale's scornful scrutiny.
"Never figured you'd go for a filly with little boobs like that. I had bigger ones than her when I was twelve years old. You'll be playing with dolls next," she taunted Bob Shaw.
Carla was bristling with feminine indignation and injured vanity. "You big cow!" she shouted. "You belong on a dairy farm!"
The tall brunette's eyes flashed fire. Stepping toward Carla, she cuffed her on the side of the face with a hand as powerful as a man's hand. The blonde girl was knocked to the floor. The imprint of Dale's fingers branded her soft, white cheek.
At that moment, Evans came up out of the cellar. He was shocked to see that Shaw and Carla were naked, and concerned to see his wife sprawled on the floor. "What's going on here?" he demanded.
"Your wife got snippy, and I had to show her who the boss is. Okay, Don, cut that line up into lengths and tie them up, hands and feet."
"What for?" Evans asked hesitantly. The initial flush of his hurt and anger was wearing off. He didn't really want to see his wife suffer further physical pain. The mental pain she was suffering was quite enough.
"Stop asking questions and do what I tell you," the Amazon told him. She punctuated the order with a jab of the big pistol. "You're either on my side or their side, Don. Either way, we play by my rules." Evans did not argue.
He bound their hands in front of them and bent down to tie their feet. "Wait," Dale said, "maybe we better all go down the cellar." She leered at Shaw and Carla. "Wouldn't want to disturb the kiddies or the neighbors with lots of screaming, would we?"
Carla shivered, feeling her breasts and buttocks prickle with gooseflesh. "Screaming?"
Dale came over and gave the blonde a clout on the backside with the flat of one hand. "Got a solid little rump on her, I'll say that," she observed. "Now git! Down the cellar!" She waved the .45 menacingly.
Shaw, Carla and Evans led the way, with Dale bringing up the rear. When they were downstairs, she pointed to an overhead pipe. "String them up on that, Don," she instructed him.
"Now, hold on, honey," Shaw pleaded. "This has gone far enough."
The big, dark girl laughed harshly. "It's only begun, lover boy. Lift your arms so Don can tie them to that pipe."
Helplessly, Shaw and Carla raised their bound hands high above their heads, and Evans lashed them securely to the pipe with lengths of the old clothesline. Little Carla had to strain up on her toes to reach the pipe. Her breasts were lifted high, the nipples pointing toward the ceiling. As he tied Shaw, Evans' eyes were drawn hypnotically to the oblong of white gauze fixed with adhesive tape to the man's leg. He visualized Carla's slim, white fingers touching the wound, caressing Shaw's hairy, muscular flesh. With grudging envy, he noted the bullish masculinity of the big man. You could hardly blame a girl for being tempted, he reflected bitterly.
Dale Shaw rummaged in a corner of the cellar where Evans had stored some odds and ends of lumber. She picked up three dowels fashioned out of birch wood, each about a yard long. Holding them bunched together, she whipped them back and forth through the air with a whistling sound.
"My third-grade teacher down in Texas used to have a couple of cuties like this under his desk. When any of us would cut up, he'd make us lie down across a chair, and whammo!" She slapped the thin, wooden sticks down hard on top of a packing crate.
Carla could feel the impact vicariously in her belly and buttocks. She whimpered and gazed imploringly at her husband. "Don, you've got to stop her. She's a sadist!"
"I do think you're overdoing it, Dale," Evans said uneasily. "Corporal punishment is outdated."
"Not where I come from!" She stalked toward Shaw and Carla, her dark eyes glittering with lusty excitement. Jamming the pistol into the belt of her skirt, she lashed the dowels back and forth in the air. The green wood was strong and springy. Standing to one side, Evans winced as she whipped Shaw across his hard-muscled buttocks. The big man roared and tugged at his bonds like a maddened stallion. Three vivid welts were stenciled across his rump. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut as she hit him again and again. The hard birch sticks bit through the tough hide, into his raw flesh. His blood stained the bleached wood. At last he could endure it no longer. A stifled scream came from his pain-twisted lips.
"Dale, please! Enough!"
She stepped back, grinning in triumph. "I guess it is, at that."
Evans was sick to his stomach. Shaw's buttocks was a checkerboard of bloody lines. Carla was crying hysterically, spinning and writhing like a dervish. The harsh rope cut into her tender wrists. As Dale turned her attention to his wife, Evans leaped forward.
"Leave her alone! She's had enough!" he shouted.
The wicked sticks slashed across Carta's white belly as she thrashed around wildly like a frightened mare on a tether. Whimpering in agony, she drew up her legs, doubling her knees over her stomach. Back and forth she swung like a pendulum.
"Now that's a cute trick!" Dale sang out. She swung the sticks underneath Carl's up-drawn legs, spanking her across the tops of her thighs and the bottom crescents of her buttocks. The blonde girl's sensitive flesh flamed in torment.
Evans reached Dale and grabbed her wrist as she tried to hit his wife again. The pistol slipped out of her belt and skidded across the cellar floor. They wrestled for possession of the dowels, eye to eye, reeling back and forth. A sensual smile curved her lips.
"Don't be so noble, Don," she said. "She deserves to suffer, the cheat!"
A big woman, in the grip of strong passions, she was more than a match for his strength. Yet there was nothing masculine about her. Her big breasts, bursting out of the sweater, surged against his chest as they struggled. An exotic perfume wafted into his nostrils out of the deep valley between them. Her hips ground into his, her belly soft and female through her thin skirt.
"None of us are saints, Dale," he reasoned with her. "They've both been punished enough." He managed to twist the sticks out of her grip.
"You're stronger than you look, Don," she said with admiration. "You're in good shape, for a doctor." There was a sly, subtle change in her manner. Unexpectedly, she put her arms around his neck and molded her ripe body against him. Her eyelids were heavy, her breath hot on his cheek. She glanced over at Shaw and Carla, who were watching them curiously.
"Maybe you're right Don," she said softly. "Maybe there's a better way to get back at them." She pulled back from him and grasped the hem of her sweater. With a swift, supple motion, she pulled it over her head. With a glance of brazen defiance at her husband, she shrugged her brassiere off one round shoulder and then the other. The most magnificent pair of breasts Evans had ever seen swelled in his face. They were as round and firm as honeydew melons, their scarlet summits gleaming like ripe strawberries.
Bob Shaw's voice trembled. "Dale, honey," he said. "What are you doing?"
"You should know, dear," she sneered. "You and that blonde hussy invented the game." She turned toward Carla and lifted her breasts with her hands. "This is where we separate the girls from the women, dearie!"
The pain in Carla's buttocks and tummy was eclipsed by the innuendo in Dale's voice. Her feminine intuition told her exactly what the big brunette had in mind. She glanced anxiously at Evans.
His gaze was magnetized by those big breasts. In a trance, he saw Dale unzip her skirt and let it billow to the floor. Her legs were long and shapely, every bit as magnificent as her breasts. Her thighs flared to wide, fecund hips encased in tight, translucent panties. She seemed to Evans to be larger than life, a glamour artist's conception of the female form with all the sexy attributes blown up exaggeratedly in a vision designed to dazzle the male eyes.
She went to Evans, arms outstretched, breasts bobbing, buttocks undulating from side to side. Her smile was wanton, inviting. "Let's give them a show they'll never forget, Don," she whispered. She put her arms around his waist and pushed him back toward an old divan that sat against one wall. His knees struck the seat, and he fell back onto the cushions. Dale giggled and sat on him, straddling his thighs. Her enormous breasts loomed up in his face like two white balloons.
"You cut that out, Dale!" Shaw forgot his pain in his jealous fury. "You do this to me, Dale, and we're finished, I swear it!"
She looked across her shoulder and stuck out her tongue at him. She winked at Carla, and jeered. "After a ride in a Cadillac, it's tough to go back to a Ford, honey. Your hubby is going to find that out."
Tears streamed down Carla's cheeks. "Don't do it, Don," she begged. "She can't make you if you don't want to."
"But he does want to," Dale purred. She buried his face in the creamy valley between her breasts. Her flesh felt like hot velvet against cheeks. Her perfume left him dizzy. She squirmed around until she was sitting on his lap with her long legs stretched out on the cushions. She kissed him on the mouth, shoving her wet, squirmy tongue between his lips. It was as sweet as cotton candy. The pulse in Evans' loins began to pound insistently.
"Don!" Carla's agonized voice made him look up. "If you love me, you couldn't!"
He fought a valiant fight, but the contest was unequal. There was too much vibrant woman in his arms, , and he was only human. Dale mashed one of her breasts against his mouth. The hard nipple surged between his lips. Involuntarily, his tongue caressed it. The girl threw back her dark, shining head and groaned in pleasure. "That feels so good, Don," she sighed. On the sidelines, Shaw and Carla watched in helpless pain and humiliation. "Don, Don, Don," Carla chanted. "Be strong. I love you."
Dale lifted her hips and pulled down her panties. She shoved them down around her ankles and kicked them high into the air. "The sky's the limit," she said gaily. She took one of Don's hands and pushed it dawn between her thighs. He felt as if he were immersed in a pool of smooth honey. She moved against his fingers rhythmically, priming the fire in her loins and in his. When she felt his response, she slid off his lap and undressed him. Evans was too inflamed to care any longer about Shaw or Carla or about anything else. At the moment, his only world was Dale Shaw, big-breasted, fleshy, wonderful Dale. She was the mother of all females. She was mother earth herself. He cast off the last of his clothing and kneeled on the couch facing her. Her hands and eyes admired his virility.
She laughed at her husband. "Think you're the only man in the universe, don't you? Take a good look, Bobby-boy!"
She did things to Evans that made his wife turn pale. Carla felt the bitter taste of vomit in her throat and averted her head. She shivered as Dale emitted crude, passionate endearments to Evans.
Dale's voluptuous body was an irresistible lodestone that sucked in his flesh the way the magnetic pole draws the needle of a compass. He went to her with fierce lust, losing himself in her arms, legs, belly and breasts. Passion wracked her body like an earthquake. Her fists and heels beat a violent tattooo on his back and buttocks. Her teeth bit into his shoulder. Her breasts crushed his chest. It wasn't an act of love. It was a cataclysm! When it was over, Evans felt like a pithy orange husk out of which the last drop of juice had been wrung.
He heard Carla weeping, heard Shaw's bitter curses. Dale sat up, pushing him away from her. She was finished with him. "I guess that evens things up," she said casually. She got off the couch and picked up her discarded clothing. She dressed quickly. "Get your clothes on and cut them down," she ordered Evans.
He obeyed quietly. After he released Shaw, he stood in front of him, waiting. The big man flexed his muscles, looking from Evans to his wife. He seemed uncertain what to do. Hatred and violence waxed and waned in his eyes.
"Go ahead," Evans taunted him. "Hit me. Kill me. It doesn't make any difference."
Shaw started to say something, then clamped his mouth shut. His huge body slumped, and the fire went out of his eyes. He turned away from Evans, rubbing his chafed wrists.
"I'd be killing a dead man," he said and walked slowly to the stairs.
"Don't forget your pants and shirt, dear," Dale Shaw said in a casual, wifely voice.
The Shaws left, and Evans took Carla into the examination room to attend to her hurt buttocks and belly. Her blue eyes were bright and vacant, a lifeless doll's eyes.
Evans spoke finally. "Maybe Dale is right. Remember what she said? She said, T guess that evens things up.' I'm willing to accept that. How about you?"
She sighed. "I don't know. I keep remembering what Bob said to you. 'I'd be killing a dead man.' I think, maybe all of us are dead. We died tonight."
"No," he said firmly, "we mustn't think that. Sick, yes, but not dead. The whole town is sick. You can smell it in the streets. You can feel the fever. The fever of the plague has lowered our resistance, made us susceptible to all sorts of complications. Do you understand?"
"I think so," she said dreamily. "Bob said something like that earlier tonight." Her breath caught, and she turned her eyes away from him. "After we did what we did."
"Stop it!" Evans said sharply. "I don't want to think about it." He walked to his desk and picked up his calendar. Angrily, he tore off the top page. "This day is gone. It never happened."
"I wish it were only true," Carla said miserably.
He studied her naked body lying on the table with dispassion. Her breasts looked deflated somehow, the nipples pale and shrunken. The cruel welt across her round, white belly was a scarlet letter. Every time he looked at the scar, he would read the story of her infidelity. And it would remind him of his own treachery. Twice in one night! Louise and Dale.
"Go to bed," he told Carla. "There are some things I have to attend to down here."
She left the office silently, her blonde head bent in dejection. Evans went into the kitchen, got out the bottle of Scotch and carried it back to his office. He lit a cigarette and slumped in his chair, swigging raw whisky from the bottle. It was as tasteless as water. Shock, fatigue and despair had numbed his senses to all stimuli. Maybe Shaw was right, he thought. Maybe he was dead.
His gaze was drawn to a medicine cabinet against one wall. He singled out the brown bottle with the red letters on the label: LSD. Early in the week, he had secured a precious allotment of the controversial hallucinatory drug for supervised experimentation in the hospital's psychiatric division.
After he had taken the dose, he sat down again and placed the bottle on his desk blotter. The bottle seemed very green, the blotter seemed very brown. He laughed. That was crazy! It was the blotter that was green. The bottle was brown. Or was it? In any case, the colors were so vivid that they hurt his eyes.
He gripped the arms of the chair in astonishment as the cap suddenly popped off the bottle. Smoke, the color of human flesh, poured out of the mouth of the bottle. He knew now what the bottle contained. Aladdin's lamp! Genie! And what a genie! Her breasts and belly materialized out of the smoke. Her nipples sparked with red fire. She was a composite of Carla, his wife, Louise Pitts and Dale Shaw. Her proportions kept changing like the images on the screen of a kaleidoscope.
She beckoned to him with a finger, smiling in wanton promise. "Come with me," she said. Her thighs parted, and, to his amazement, she began to grow larger and larger until her voluptuous body filled the whole room. He cried out as her thighs and belly enveloped him. He was an explorer in the midst of a lush, tropical forest uncharted by man. He plunged laboriously through the thick, tangled foliage, smothered by the heat and humidity. Ahead of him he saw a dark, unfathomable cavern. He plunged headlong into the unknown. Screaming in terror, he fell end over end into a bottomless pit, like Alice invading her Wonderland.
Dim memories echoed in his brain. A time in New York at an American Medical Association conference, when a learned man had lectured on the subject of LSD.
"It can take you to heaven or hell," the man had said, "depending on which direction you are headed to begin with. "Wherever you are going, it takes you there much faster. Faster than the speed of light."
As he fell, Evans wondered where his destiny lay, in heaven or hell?
He blacked out. It might have been seconds or days before he opened his eyes again, he did not know. There was no doubt in his mind where he was, though It had to be heaven.
He was lying on a huge, satin cushion, soft as a cloud. The air around him was fragrant with perfumed steam rising from a heart-shaped pool. A dozen or more young girls, all naked and breathtakingly beautiful, were bathing in the pool. The surface of the pool was covered with rose petals. The petals clung to their bare, sleek breasts, bellies and buttocks. Their flesh ranged from milky-white to dusky-brown, with golden tones in between. Their teeth were white, and their hair was long and shimmering. Their plump loins pulsed with life and fire.
Desire, unbearable in its intensity, overwhelmed Evans. The walls were made of mirrors, reflecting a hundred images of himself back to him. He was amused to see he was clad in satin shirt and pantaloons like some mystic prince out of the Arabian Nights.
The girls saw he was awake, and they began to laugh happily, leaping up and down in the water, clapping their hands. He was entranced by the vision of their bouncing breasts, all festooned with the rose petals. He got on his knees and called out to them. Eyes glowing with eagerness, they scrambled out of the pool, their sleek, young bodies shedding water in sparkling droplets. They surrounded him on the immense cushion, shaking their breasts in his face, rubbing their thighs and buttocks against him. He had never seen, or even conceived of, such a surfeit of vibrant feminine flesh. He was a greedy child turned loose in a candy store, free to gorge himself on parfaits, bonbons and other goodies.
It was a gourmet's feast. Their nipples were sweet, candied cherries. Their buttocks were billowy marsh-mallows. His fingers dipped in pots of honey. Their lust-crazed faces swam around him. Demanding hands tore at his satin shirt and pantaloons, stripping him naked.
Abruptly, their levity ceased. Their pretty faces were shocked, disbelieving. Then one of them shoved her knuckles against her mouth like a snickering little girl and pointed at him. Now the others began to titter and point at him. The tittering built to wild, hysterical laughter. Mystified, Evans looked down at his body. Sheer terror overwhelmed him.
He was as sexless as a mannequin in a department-store window!
He touched his smooth, neuter flesh, and his fingers recoiled. In panic and fury, he struck out at their faces with his fists and feet. He felt bones crunch. Noses split open, spewing forth bright-red blood. He smashed one girl's mouth, and her teeth sprayed out on the floor like broken pearls. He gouged out another's eye and squashed it in his hand the way he would squash a grape. He beat and kicked them until their faces and bodies were broken, bloody pulps. Through it all, their laughter swelled in his ears fiendishly.
He looked across their swaying heads at a figure who had suddenly appeared at the other end of the room. It was a blonde girl, slim and beautiful. She was grinning at him and dangling a curiously familiar object in her right hand. Evans untangled himself from the mob of bloody, screaming women and crawled off the slippery satin cushion. He staggered up and went toward the blonde girl. When he drew closer, he recognized her. It was his wife Carla.
But what was she holding? A stricken cry of torment strangled in his throat. "Oh, no!" he said hoarsely. "No!"
He saw what it was she was taunting him with. It was the corpse of his dead manhood! As he came closer, she danced away, flaunting it at him the way a matador teases a bull with his red cape. Evans cursed and lunged at her, but she eluded him nimbly. Around and around they went, but he could never catch her.
The other girls were jumping around them now, their bloody, mutilated faces grinning at him. They shouted encouragement to Carla and heaped vile abuse on Evans. He lumbered after Carla, an emasculated bull blind with fury and hatred.
Tiring of the game, Carla shed her gown and leaped naked into the steaming pool. The rose petals splashed up and clung to her heaving belly and glistening breasts. She laughed and held out her arms to him. With a hoarse cry of triumph, he flung himself into the water. The heavily scented water was sickening in his nostrils. He reached out for her and grasped her warm, slippery shoulders. She laughed and flung the thing she was holding high in the air. Evans' fingers crawled up the smooth slopes of her throat and clamped it in a murderous vise.
She only laughed harder. Her cheeks grew swollen and purple, her eyes bulged, her tongue ballooned out of her mouth, yet the grotesque, mocking grin remained pasted on her face. In desperation, he plunged her head under the rose-tinted water. Blackness closed in on him, merciful blackness.
The sunlight streaming through the Venetian blinds shocked him into wakefulness. He was slumped over the bathtub in the small bathroom in the master bedroom. The tub was full, the water spilling steadily over the rim. He heard the roaring of the faucets in his ears. His hands were locked on Carla's white throat, and her dead, throttled face stared up at him from the bottom of the tub, shimmering like a phantom wraith.
CHAPTER 12
FROM THE TIME he was old enough to walk, Teddie Ross had been the town bully. A head taller and twenty pounds heavier than his male contemporaries, year after year, he did as he pleased with everybody, and what pleased him most was of a perverse, sadistic nature. In the fifth grade, his favorite hobby was hanging stray cats to death on tree limbs. At a young age, he accosted a slight 'girl in the park and made her take off her clothing. Then he dropped his own trousers and made her perform a number of unnatural sexual acts with him. In the end, he raped her. A mature male physically, he sent the child home hurt and bloody, crying hysterically. For that little caper, Teddie spent a year in reform school.
Incarceration only whetted his appetite for the cruel and unusual. Mainly, his target was the weaker sex. He loved to make women suffer. Unfortunately, Teddie was blessed with a handsome face and a rugged physique that made females especially vulnerable to him. His treatment of them ranged from blatant physical torture to subtle mental torment.
One of the most insufferable things he ever did was on the night before his wedding to Sara Blake, daughter of the richest family in Coaltown. He married Sara for her father's money, but, while he was courting her, he was also seeing the daughter of a local farmer. Rachel Fields was the prettiest girl in Coaltown High School, a raven-haired, fawn-like creature with a sweet face and liquid, brown eyes. She was a tiny girl, just five feet tall, but her petite figure was perfect in all respects. It was her frailty that excited Teddie.
Rachel knew nothing of his plans to elope with Sara Blake. She was madly in love with him, and thought he loved her too. She was a girl with high moral principles, and refused to let Teddie make love to her no matter how insistent he was. She did let him slip his hand inside her blouse and fondle her cute, plum-sized breasts, and she would shyly bring him comfort with her small, gentle hands. Teddie pretended to go along with her, but all the while he was planning diabolical revenge on Rachel.
The night before he married Sara, he drove Rachel out into the country and parked beside a moon-drenched lake. The air was sweet, the setting romantic. Teddie had never been so glib and persuasive in his life. Kissing her little plums, he slipped his hand underneath her skirt and caressed her trembling belly through her panties.
"I love you, Rachel," he said. "Please let me do it to you."
"No," she said stubbornly. "I'll never do it with anyone except the man I marry."
He wriggled his tongue around a small, pink nipple. "I want to marry you, dear. Let's run away together tomorrow morning."
Rachel's infatuation blinded her to his deceit. "Are you serious?" she asked breathlessly.
"Completely. Tomorrow morning." His hand slipped inside the waistband of her panties and stroked her bare flesh.
The girl was drunk with happiness and the glow of desire his skilled fingers kindled in her body. "Oh, Teddie," she sighed. "I love you so much."
His ringers worked the panties down over her rounded hips and plump thighs. "What's one night?" he said slyly. "Tomorrow we'll be man and wife. Let me do it to you, baby."
She couldn't rebuff him any longer. "All right, darling. I suppose it's all right."
She let him undress her completely. She blushed as his lecherous gaze traveled over her lovely, delicate body and he covered her breasts with her hands. The blood drained out of her face quickly though when Teddie undressed. She had never seen a naked man before, particularly a man who was bursting with lust. The sight of him petrified her.
"Oh, darling" she said nervously. "I'm afraid."
Teddie laughed. "Oh come on now! We've fooled around plenty in the past. It shouldn't be this much of a shock to you."
She hung her head shyly. "I never looked," she said softly. "I always kept my eyes shut."
He thought that was hilarious. "You're a cute little doll, did I ever tell you that?" He grasped her around the waist and lifted her onto his lap. She put her arms around his neck trustingly and sighed in wondrous expectation as he clasped her buttocks in his big hands. Rachel had read too many romantic novels. She believed that all lovers were gentle and patient with their women. That illusion was exploded in one sharp, brutal thrust. Her tender flesh convulsed in agony as the man she loved vented his lust and savagery on her helpless body. When he was finished with her, she doubled up on the seat, moaning and writhing in pain and humiliation.
The hurt he inflicted on her that night was pale compared to the cruel blow he dealt her the next day. When he took her home that night, he gave her specific instructions to meet him at the railroad depot at noon the following day. When she arrived in her best Sunday dress and her little valise in hand, she saw Teddie boarding a train with Sara Blake.
Tipping his hat politely to the stunned girl, he said without a qualm of conscience, "Hello, Rachel. This is my wife, Sara. We're off on our honeymoon. Wish us luck."
Stricken with grief, she watched the train pull out of the station. Then she went home and hanged herself in her father's barn. Nobody except Teddie Ross knew the reason why Rachel did it.
As it turned out, Rachel may have been the luckier of the two girls. Before the honeymoon was over, his new bride was in a state of shock from his cruel sexual excesses. Less than a year later, she was committed to a state mental institution.
By the time he was thirty-five, Teddie had left his evil mark on the flesh and spirits of a dozen more girls.
The day the bubonic plague struck Coaltown, Teddie was ecstatic with excitement. Violent, painful death had always thrilled him, and plague meant violent, painful death on a mass scale. There were the side benefits too, the hysterical depravity on the streets, muggings, rape, fights, drunkenness, the bloody war on the rats. This was his element.
Most of the day he spent in one of his favorite haunts, a bar where whores and junkies consorted. Tension built up in his body like high-voltage current. Twice that day he had gone to one of the private bedrooms in the cheap hotel over the bar with girls, but conventional sex brought him only temporary relief. In the gray hours of the next morning, he went upstairs a third time with another girl, a slender, nervous redhead who was rumored to be a nymphomaniac. She was on the bed naked, wriggling her hips in desire before he got his shirt off.
"Come on, honey," she wined. "I'm hotter than a two-dollar pistol."
With a cigarette hanging from his lips, he lay down beside her and ran his hands over her eager body. Her nipples were pulsing like twin beacons. Her loins quivered in readiness.
"Now!" she gasped. "Now!"
Smiling at the sudden inspiration that came to him, he kneeled over her. "You may be hot now," he said, "but you're going to be a lot hotter."
As her hips surged up to receive him, he removed the cigarette from his mouth, palmed it in one hand and slipped the hand between her thighs. The girl's eyes flew open, her face was contorted by shock and agony. She gaped at him in dumb disbelief. Earlier, she had stood on the beach, watching them burn out the rats. She had a vivid recollection of one rodent running with its hind quarters ablaze. She screamed like that rat now, clutching at herself to tear out the terrible, burning pain.
Teddie got off the bed and dressed, laughing at her tortured convulsions. He left the room and shut the door. Her wailing followed him down the hall, fading out as he descended the stairs into the bedlam of the bar below. He felt wildly exhilarated, restless, eager for excitement. The episode with the redhead had whetted his appetite for more of the same.
"Something ought to be done," a drunk was saying to a group of other drunks around him. "This quarantine, you know what it is? The government is making all of us sacrificial lambs. Coaltown is a sinking ship, and they're bottling us up inside of it. They're going to keep us here until every man, woman and child of us dies off with the plague. Then they're going to come in with flame throwers and burn up the whole town. That's the only way you can lick the plague, don't let anybody kid you. Fire!"
Teddie moved up the bar, licking his lips. "You're right about one thing, friend. Fire is the only way to wipe out the plague. Only why wait until we all die off? Why not stamp it out while some of us are still alive? That's how they beat the big plagues that ravaged Europe during the Middle Ages. They heaped up the corpses, yes, and the dying, and they burned them to ashes on huge pyres."
The men and women looked at him uncomprehendingly, their eyes glazed from dope, drink and fatigue. "You figure we should burn the dead?" a spokesman asked.
Teddie's eyes glittered excitedly. "Yes! And the dying!"
"How could we do that?" a woman asked. "The law wouldn't allow it."
"The law!" Teddie hissed scornfully. "A bunch of blue-jacketed puppets taking orders from the governor, who is safe and sound with his family in his mansion. There are certain times when it's a man's duty to take the law in his own hands. If we don't do something to save ourselves, who else is going to help us?"
They were mesmerized by his intensity. "Yeah," several of them chorused, "we got to save ourselves."
Teddie vaulted up on the bar, his voice rising to a mad pitch. "Let's see your hands! Which of you are with me?"
'I don't know," a man said uncertainly. "It's one thing to burn the dead, but those poor devils in the hospital, I don't know."
"Those poor devils in the hospital are goners anyway," Teddie argued. "Put them out of their misery, I say."
"Yea!" a mighty roar went up from the crowd, as all sentiment swung in his direction like iron particles collecting on a magnet.
Teddie threw his arms into the air. "All right! We'll need torches, like the ones they burned out the rats with. We'll need gasoline and pitch and rags. We'll need weapons too. We may have to fight our way through this crisis."
"And we'll need plenty of whiskey!" a man yelled, displaying his false teeth in a crazy smile.
It was daylight when the vigilantes set forth on their mission of terror. They swept through the empty streets, to the morgue, first. The attendant in charge and the policeman with him were stunned by the sight of the torchbearers. Their faces were bestial, inhuman.
"What is this?" the cop demanded, nervously unsnapping his pistol holster.
"We're going to burn this place down," Teddie told him. "Those corpses in there are infested with plague germs. If they aren't burned now, the whole town is doomed. Step aside!"
The cop cursed and went for his gun. He was overwhelmed by a squad of men wielding hatchets and clubs. A flashing blade split his head open from crown to jaw, like two halves of a melon. The scared attendant tried to get inside of the storage room and slam the heavy door closed, but Teddie was too quick for him. He rammed a blazing torch in the poor devil's face, smearing it with fiery, jellied gasoline. The odor of burning flesh and hair were heady stimulants in Teddie's nostrils. Blazing like a human torch, the attendant staggered wildly out of the morgue and collapsed on the steps.
Teddie led his mob into the cold storage room and pulled open a drawer. He sluiced gasoline onto the cold, white corpse it contained and applied the torch. As the flames consumed it, the lifeless body bolted upright in the drawer, impelled by the sudden constriction of its shriveling tendons.
Teddie danced around, laughing in fiendish glee. "Look, everyone, I can raise the dead."
At the very moment the mob was razing the morgue, Dr. Donald Evans was climbing the steps of the police station. He went grimly to the desk sergeant. The sergeant looked up and smiled. "Hi, Doc, what brings you here so early?"
"I want to report a murder," Evans said.
The cop's eyes widened in surprise. "You joking, Doc?"
Evans started to reply, but he was interrupted as Chief Hart burst out of his office, his face pale. "Murphy!" he shouted. "Send out a call to all patrol cars! Contact the militia outside of town! We need reinforcements, but quick! I just got a tip over the phone that a mob is going berserk. They're burning down the morgue, and they're going to burn down the hospital next! Some nutty idea about wiping out the plague!"
Evans blanched, his confession forgotten. "The hospital? We've got to stop them."
"Come on, Doc!" the chief said. "You can ride over with me." The two men rushed out of the station.
When the mob reached the hospital, Evans, the chief and six cops with drawn guns were posted on the front steps. "There must be over a hundred of them," Evans muttered. "We'll never be able to stop them."
"We'll try," the chief said. "Reinforcements are on the way. Maybe we can stall them until the militia gets here."
The seething mob flowed to the steps, and Teddie Ross vaulted up to the third step. He brandished his torch like a sword.
"Get out of our way. We're going to do what has to be done. Kill the plague with fire!"
Behind him, his army murmured in agreement. Their faces were sweaty and black with soot. One girl's blouse hung in tatters, and her large, white breasts were bare. The man alongside her had an arm around her back, the hand crooked under her armpit, his grimy fingers stroking one of her breasts.
"You're insane!" Evans said. "All of you. Bubonic plague isn't spread by the dead or the sick. It's the rats, and the last of them were finished off by the extermination crews during the night."
"He's lying!" Teddie yelled across his shoulder to the mob. "Don't listen to him. If the plague can't be spread by humans, why did they quarantine the whole town? Why are the soldiers keeping us prisoners in this death-hole?"
"It's an extreme precaution to prevent infected rats or fleas from spreading elsewhere in trains, produce trucks, that kind of thing."
"Get out of our way!" Teddie growled. "We're coming through!" He started up the steps, waving the torch.
Evan's gaze lit on the five-gallon drum of gasoline that swung from Teddie's other hand. He turned to the chief and whispered. "Get your men inside and let me have your gun. I have an idea."
"Let me handle this, Doc," the chief objected.
"No time for arguing! Do as I say."
The chief shrugged and handed him the revolver. He motioned his men to retreat inside the plate-glass doors. Evans and Teddie confronted each other on the sweeping stone steps.
"Go ahead, shoot me, Doc!" Teddie taunted him, advancing another step. He nodded back at the mob. "They'll tear you to pieces if you do."
Ignoring him, Evans lifted the pistol and aimed it at the gasoline can in Teddie's hand. He squeezed the trigger slowly. The sharp report echoed over the heads of the men and women milling around in the street. The can twisted in Teddie's grasp as the bullet tore through it. High-test fuel sprayed up all around him. The flaming torch in his other hand ignited the spray. In a spontaneous chain reaction the can exploded like a giant Molotov Cocktail. There was a mighty roar, and a sheet of flame flashed the breadth of the steps. Teddie and Evans were enveloped in fire.
Fear and horror broke the hypnotic spell that Teddie had cast over his followers. They broke away from the flaming stairs where the two men were doing a weird, sickening dance of immolation. Their bodies seemed to grow smaller and smaller as the hungry fire consumed them. It was five minutes before the inferno subsided. Small fires still flickered in pools of gasoline on the worn spots of the stone steps. By that time, Teddie and Evans were twisted, charred, unrecognizable hulks.
Jeeps nudged through the stunned crowd, carrying armed militiamen. The people offered no resistance. The danger had passed.
Inside the hospital, Chief Hart wiped his forehead in relief. "That crazy Doc," he said in a pained voice. "He knew he didn't stand a chance when he did what he did. But he gave us the fraction of time we needed. The militia were too late to have stopped that bunch. Another five minutes and they would have been running amok through every corridor of this hospital." He stared at the charred bodies on the steps and shuddered. "What a way to go!"
At noon, the crisis was over. Coaltown had been free of new plague cases for more than 12 hours. The quarantine was lifted. The citizens of Coaltown straggled back to their normal routines and duties with the dull, somnambulistic attitude of celebrants with king-sized hangovers. Everyone was a little guilty, a little ashamed of what he could remember about the night before. More ashamed of what he could not remember, did not want to remember!
The mayor and the police chief conferred with Dr. Paul Bowles, who had been appointed temporary chief of staff of the hospital after Dr. Evans' tragic demise. The three men went over the town's casualty lists.
"It's ironic," Bowles said bitterly. "What the plague did to the people of this town is mild compared what they did to themselves and to each other."
All over Coaltown, grieving men and women were saying or thinking the same thing to themselves. There was hardly a household that had not been scarred in some way by the never-to-be forgotten night when plague and lust had brought damnation to a peaceful lakeside community.
