THURSDAY, four-twenty-seven p.m.: WBBM television network interrupted its regular programming to flash a news bulletin: "TWO CONVICTS, IDENTIFIED AS CHARLES FOSTER AND MACK MILMAN ESCAPED THE STATE PRISON NEAR BRIDGEWELL AT ABOUT FOUR O'CLOCK THIS AFTERNOON. RESIDENTS OF THE AREA ARE CAUTIONED TO STAY INSIDE WITH THEIR DOORS LOCKED. THE MEN ARE DESCRIBED AS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. IT IS NOT KNOWN AT THIS TIME WHETHER OR NOT THEY ARE ARMED. WBBM WILL BRING YOU REPORTS THROUGHOUT THE EVENING IF THERE ARE ANY NEW DEVELOPMENTS."
When Nora came in from outside she dropped the clothes into the ironing basket, pulled a strand of her shoulder-length blonde hair away from her mouth, checked the clock to see what time it was, phoned the theater to find out when the show started and plopped herself back down in the Lazy Boy chair to watch a twelve-year-old I Love Lucy rerun. During the first commercial, she would run out to the kitchen and bring back potatoes and a peeler. At three minutes to five, when the program ended, she would put the potatoes on to boil and the pork chops on to fry. They would be ready, and piping hot, when her husband arrived home.
Four-forty-five p.m.: In a downtown theater the second afternoon showing of a spicy Swedish movie had just finished and the audience was filing out the front doors. Among them was Dave Bond. He had not told his wife he wasn't going to work that day, because she would have wanted to know why and that was a secret. He told his boss he had a doctor's appointment and that was the truth, but he didn't tell him what kind of doctor he was going to see.
The truth was that Dave had been to see a psychologist who specialized in marital problems. For a year he had been undernourished sexually, but only recently had the longing in his testicles been sufficient to induce him to get some professional help. He hoped the doctor would be able to give him some advice without having to meet Mrs. Bond. The last thing in the world Dave wanted was to let his wife know that she was driving him into an early grave with her prudish ways. He had compromised so long now that he didn't know how to assert himself where Nora was concerned. Even if he were to come right out and tell her he was unsatisfied, she probably wouldn't believe him. After all, he hadn't complained for a full year. She would be sure it was something else bothering him, and that he was just using sex as an excuse.
No, what Dave was looking for was some easy solution to a problem that he had allowed to fester the whole of his young married life, but he half expected the answer he got.
"Look, Mr. Bond," the doctor had told him. "I'm not a magician, I'm a marriage counselor and marriage is a contract between two people. I can't hear your side of this problem and give you a sure-fire answer. I should speak with both of you, you and your wife, together and separately, before I venture to advise you. However, since you don't want your wife to see me, all I can tell you to do is make your problem known to her and hope that she will understand."
Dave knew his wife well enough to know that she would never understand-not in a million years. She couldn't understand anyone enjoying sex, let alone wanting it more than once or twice a month To her way of thinking, sex was something hung over from the Pre-Cambrian era-a useless toe that hadn't fallen off yet. She wouldn't piss through her cunt if she had a choice. That was Nora, a stunning, sexless woman-a mistake that wouldn't let go.
The doctor had also advised Dave not to go back to work that day. "Do something you've been wanting to do for some time-relax and think."
And that's why Dave went to the dirty Swedish movie. He had secretly harbored the idea for months. He was so sick of family comedies he could puke, but Nora wouldn't think of going to see anything else. Feelings of guilt and fear of being caught had always prevented him from going on his own, but that Thursday was something different. He didn't care.
On his way from the theater to the parking lot where he had left his car, Dave recalled, as he often did, his wedding night-the night he had busted Nora's holy cherry. Nora would never know how he had suffered through the six months they went with each other. He had always believed that a relationship had to be founded on something other than sexual attraction, but during those months of courtship, he had found it increasingly difficult to think of anything else. Nora had a body that gave him the proverbial lover's nuts every time he looked at her. But whenever his hands started to get curious, he reminded himself that one wrong move could end the whole thing, and he was, after all, intending to marry her. And so for those long, agonizing months he buried his impulses no matter how strong they were; he waited and waited and waited for that night when he would at last lay his aching rod in her and bust her cherry.
Before the wedding they had never discussed sex. Nora had made it clear on numerous occasions that she disliked conversations along that line. Whenever their thoughts or their words strayed toward that topic, she promptly changed the subject. Anyway, Dave was no libertine. It didn't bother him tremendously that Nora was a staunch supporter of the "old ways." It was probably better that way. It insured her fidelity. He was looking forward to a long life with her.
Their wedding night gave him some nagging doubts. How foolish he had felt when he took her in his arms and kissed her passionately! He knew women were unpredictable, but her response was incredible.
"Please, Dave. Please!"
In no time she had reduced him from a virile man about to collect his nuptial rights to a shame-faced boy caught doing a "no-no". Although he did not know it then, he would spend the next year or more in that role.
Undaunted by his first scolding, Dave donned his rubber and waited for his bride to come to bed. When she did he was going to fuck her good, going to shove his brick-hard prick up to the knockers inside her precious pussy. That's what he had intended. What he got was two inches of dry cunt, an insult, and the excruciating agony of jerking into his prophylactic, alone, in a heap on the bed.
Even a year later the memory of that night sent shivers of embarrassment up his spine. Recalling the sex sessions that followed in the ensuing twelve months or so brought the taste of bile to his mouth.
But this evening, he decided, would be different. The movie had just brought a hard lump to his crotch, and along with it a feeling of aggression he had now known since before his marriage.
Maybe the doctor was right. Maybe I have to bring it right out in the open. Maybe it doesn't matter whether she understands or not. Maybe I should just say, "Give out or get out!" Maybe I should just grab her, strip her and fuck her against the wall.
Dave Bond became engrossed with the thought of ripping his wife's clothes off, spreading her legs and driving his cock into her cunt. He became so engrossed that he missed a news bulletin that came on the car radio.
"TWO CONVICTS, IDENTIFIED AS CHARLES FOSTER AND MACK MILMAN, ESCAPED...."
I'll take her tits, one in each hand and I'll squeeze them and massage them and roll their nipples between my fingers. And I'll suck them, too, until they're red and swollen and all the time I'll slide my cock in and out of her until her cunt drips on the floor ... big, open cunt ... juicy ... fat hard prick, slimy swollen. I'll fuck her so she knows she's been fucked. Maybe she'll even have a climax....
"... PRISON SPOKESMEN DESCRIBE THE MEN AS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS...."
I'll show her what being a woman is all about. I'll show her why I'm built with a cock and she with a cunt.
Five-ten p.m.: "You're early tonight." Nora met Dave at the door for her kiss on the cheek, but instead she got one on the mouth-hard.
"What's gotten into you all of a sudden?" she queried, trying to ease herself out of his arms.
"I'll tell you what's going to get into you!" He'd been wanting to say that for a year and it felt good.
"What do you mean?" She was still smiling, which meant that she hadn't understood the joke, but her smile deteriorated as Dave held her around the waist.
"Dave honey, if you want your supper, you'd better let me go. The pork chops are on-they'll burn."
"Let 'em burn." Dave was getting an erection.
"You must have been drinking. Come on, let me go." As Nora struggled, Dave applied more pressure and drew her against him and allowed his hardening prick to rub against her abdomen.
"Dave," there was no trace of levity left in her voice. "I think you'd better let me go!" Her mouth was drawn tight in anger.
Dave released his hold on her and she wheeled and ran to the kitchen. "Damn it, damn it, damn it!" he said to himself, clenching his fists at his sides.
In the kitchen, Nora flipped the pork chops over and over in the pan and sobbed under her breath. How could he? And I had such a nice evening planned. It's not like Dave to do that sort of thing ... come barging in here looking for ... for sex at this time of the day ... I gave it to him only a few days ago, too ... something's wrong.
Dave took off his sports jacket and shoes and sat down to glance through the evening paper, but no sooner had he read the top headline than Nora called him for supper.
"Your supper's ready."
Not our supper or the supper, Dave thought, but your supper. She's going to be like that for the rest of the night. Boy, I've really botched this one.
Ten-forty-five p.m.: Dave was right. Nora was "like that" for the rest of the night. She didn't bother to tell him that she had booked tickets for the show. She suffered it in silence until ten-thirty when she went to bed. Rebelliously, Dave had talked himself into staying up to watch the late show. He was bound and determined to show her he was not a lamb, but a certain corrosive thought chipped away at his will power.
Maybe there's still a chance, he pondered, that I might get a piece of tail yet, if I play my cards right.
But Dave knew that every minute he sat out in the living room in front of the television, his chances diminished. If he waited too long she would fall asleep, and to wake Nora up for sex would be disastrous.
"Stay tuned for the WBBM NEWS...."
Dave got up from his chair and turned the TV off. Through his mind were flashing images of his wife's naked body-her large firm breasts, her slightly convex underbelly, the V of her crotch hair. In his mind's eye, he saw himself, too-naked, sporting a pulsating hard-on, walking toward his wife-pelvis stilt.
I'll spread her cunt with my fingers-to hell with her phobias. And I'll jab my cock into it and bang it in and out until I blow. That's exactly what I'll do ... yes!
By the time Dave undressed and rolled into bed beside his wife, he was as hard as he had been on their wedding night, and for the first time since that night, he was not wearing pajamas.
Taking her hand in his, he squeezed it gently and whispered her name softly. "Nora ... Nora love ... Nora."
There was no response. Jim could tell by the way she was breathing that she wasn't asleep.
"Nora, honey ... love."
Nothing.
Oh, you dirty rotten bitch, he thought, you faking fucker. How he would have loved to say that out loud. How he would have loved to call her everything in the book-cunt, bitch, bastard, fucker, shit, piss-pot, clit, cock sucker! She was pretending to be asleep, so she knew what he was after. If he pushed it much further, she would pretend to wake up and catch on to his intentions in a split second, race from the room and spend the night on the couch in the living room.
Dave rolled over onto his back and stared into the silent darkness. His hands played idly with his cock. Suddenly he saw himself with a girl he used to know. Sheila was a beautiful girl-a nurse. But she was a whole woman. She liked sex and didn't bother to hide the fact. Dave saw Sheila cup his cock in her warm, womanly hands. He watched in his imagination as she slid it up between her breasts and rubbed it up and down ... oh, beautiful Sheila. She was the kind of woman who could do anything to a man, fuck him, suck him, lick his asshole-and she would never be a slut, because to her there was nothing dirty about sex. Not like Nora there, that useless chunk of flesh beside him, that cuntless wonder.
She was a slut of the worst caliber-a virginal slut. She was so virginal, she wouldn't even eat a banana unless it was cut in slices. She was virginal all right, but she was a slut too, because she had a dirty and suspicious mind. She saw filth in everything but herself. A dirty virginal slut-that was his wife, Nora.
Ah, but Sheila, she was so warm, so feminine, so alive with sensuous appeal. She enjoyed loving a man with her mouth or with her cunt or any other part of her that made him happy, because she enjoyed giving pleasure, for pleasure's sake.
Eleven-thirty p.m.: Dave Bond was about to do the bravest thing he had done in the whole year he had been married to Nora. He was going to show her he was not to be bossed around. He was going to demonstrate his virility. Rolling over onto his left side so that he faced her back, he took his cock firmly in his right hand and pumped it vigorously. Fondling himself and thinking of that warm and lovely Sheila had brought him to the brink of an orgasm, so it didn't take but a few strokes to bring his load gushing out. Jerk after jerk, shot after shot, he coated Nora's ass and back with come.
Nora had no idea what was going on behind her. She felt the wet heat of her husband's sperm but didn't know what it was. For some time, she debated with herself about whether she should investigate or let it be, but when the warm wet became cold wet and started to itch, she instinctively stretched her arm around behind her and scratched.
Oh my God! The sticky semen made webs between her fingers. He wouldn't! Surely to God he wouldn't.
Nora bounced from the bed and ran to the bathroom. She did not return to the bedroom that night.
CHAPTER TWO
FRIDAY, two o'clock a.m.: For Charlie Foster and Mack Milman, a dream had come true. They would not allow themselves to wonder how long it would last, for they had learned after a total of fourteen years in prison, eight for Charlie and six for Mack, that life had to be lived for the present. Bad fortune and good fortune were taken without question and this was the only bit of good fortune they had had for a long, long time.
They had been planning their escape from the state prison for over three months and Thursday afternoon it had come true. Like most convicts who try to escape, they had never really believed, deep down, that they would make it, but they had to try. Had they been stopped before they escaped, it wouldn't have been too great a disappointment. At least planning it had given them something to take their minds off the monotony of prison life for a few months and the attempt would have supplied an interlude of excitement in their otherwise boring lives.
But the fact is they did make it. They had successfully stowed away in the coffins of two of their dead inmates and had been transported comfortably out of the hell-hole of a prison in the back of a black hearse.
They had first conceived the escape when they heard, via the prison grapevine, that the state was no longer allowed to bury dead convicts in the prison cemetery. This had been an order from the state government, which was investigating reports that many convicts were being beaten to death by guards who then listed their deaths as "natural".
At two o'clock Friday morning they trudged silently up the foothills toward the forested mountains. They were already one step ahead of their pursuers because they had exchanged their conspicuous prison garb for the street clothes their dead comrades were destined to be buried in. They needed only food and, if they could get them, firearms, and they would be on their way the next morning in their little "borrowed" rowboat.
Of the two convicts, Charles Foster was the more intelligent and the more dangerous. There was little doubt in the minds of those who knew him that he was sick, but like so many criminals with desperate mental derangements, he was stuck away in a prison instead of a hospital and his condition had only been aggravated in the last eight years. At the trial, the court had confused his above average intelligence with sanity and had deemed him fit to stand trial after only a cursory psychiatric examination.
His conviction on a charge of rape brought a penalty of life in prison.
Mack Milman was a born loser. He was dumpy physically and slow mentally, perhaps even a trifle retarded, but he had one thing going for him-love of laughter. Perhaps out of self-defense, he had learned that a sense of humor was about all he could afford in life, that if he could find something funny, even in the most depressing circumstances, life would be tolerable for at least another day. He knew, more by instinct than by intelligence, that if he ever stopped laughing the game would be over for him. His existence, if taken seriously, would be insufferable.
It was Mack's love of laughter that attracted Charlie to him. In a world that took itself far too seriously and specifically in a prison so dismal that a piece of burned toast was an exciting sight, Charlie found Mack's ability to laugh a welcome relief. They were close friends from the first day Mack shuffled into the prison.
Charlie had often recalled the first words spoken between them:
CHARLIE: "What are you in for?"
MACK: "Manslaughter!"
CHARLIE:
"You mean to tell me you slaughtered a man?"
MACK: " 'Fraid so."
CHARLIE: "Well, consider yourself lucky you didn't kill him. When you kill a man they call it murder and you get life or death, but when you only slaughter him, you're only in for ten years or so."
Mack found that particularly funny. He had never thought about it until then, but slaughter did seem to be a silly word for a crime that was less offensive than murder. His laugh mechanism triggered and out of his throat gurgled a triphammer, whiskey laugh, the same unique laugh Charlie would be hearing frequently for the next six years and the same one he heard that dark Friday morning at the foot of Abbot Mountain when he cautioned Mack not to get his shoes wet in the puddles that had gathered from the recent rain.
"They belong to the state you know."
The two men didn't look much like desperate criminals as they trudged up a path toward the deserted cottage, Charlie in the lead, letting branches swing back into Mack's face and Mack bringing up the rear, doubled up in a wheezy laugh that Charlie described as an elephant farting through a screen door.
Before sneaking the last twenty feet, Charlie checked for telephone lines, a means of escape, places to hide and signs of life. He cautioned Mack to move quietly and then they scampered to the front door. It was locked.
One by one they tried every window until Mack found one that was unlocked. It was the bedroom window. Charlie checked to be sure there was no one inside and then the two convicts piled in.
Searching the place thoroughly, they came up with a .22 caliber rifle, hunting jackets, boots and a case of beer.
"This is the life, eh Charlie?" Mack sighed, beer in hand, feet resting on a footstool, head back against the soft padding of a large armchair.
"It'll do for now," Charlie replied, making himself comfortable.
"I'm going to get a woman before we get caught, Charlie."
"Maybe we won't get caught."
"Maybe not, but I'm going to get me a woman as soon as I can anyway, just in case we do."
Suddenly there was an impish gleam in Mack Milman's eyes. He leaned toward Charlie and shone his flashlight in his face.
"Charlie?"
"Yeah, Mack?"
"Tell me about ... the ... the rape again."
"I've told you that story hundreds of times."
"I know, but I want to get horny. Come on." Charlie took a long slug of his beer and smacked his lips loudly. "Okay, Mack, I'll tell you about the rape ... Let's see ... ah ... well I'd been watching this girl for weeks. She was fifteen years old...."
"Fourteen!" Mack corrected.
"Yeah, that's right. She was fourteen, but she was the most beautiful little cunt I've ever seen-sweet and wholesome. I can still see her now, the way she used to walk, so proud, with her young, up-swept titties puffed out-you could tell she hadn't had them very long, 'cause she was always conscious of them ... And that little butt of hers, high and round, how it bounced from side to side when she walked down the road ... Ah, she was a picture, that filly, from her wide, innocent, sparkling eyes, to her slender ankles. My lawyer thought I was sick, wanting to hurt something I thought was beautiful, but he should talk-he goes out hunting every fall. You ask any hunter if he thinks a deer is cute. Ask any hunter and he'll answer yes. But he'll go out and kill them for the love of it just the same. And hunters take the life of the creature.
I only took her virginity-her sweet little cherry ... And what's it there for in the first place, if it isn't for a man to rapture with his prick? ... Anyway, this gorgeous little girl lived in the country and she used to walk back and forth to the old country school every day, and I used to sit on the edge of bush and hold myself as she walked past. Oh, my balls hurt from looking at her. They ached so bad that I'd have to go into the woods and whack off in the leaves. But then one day, I decided I couldn't stand it any more. For two or three days, I let that semen build up in my system. I let my balls ache. When the day came, I could have screwed a donut and loved it ... "
Mack cackled into the night and pressed his hands down into his groin. The mental picture he had constructed of the girl whenever Charlie told him the story was redeveloping vividly, causing a squirming in his sex-starved groin.
"You see, one of the many mistakes mankind has made has been to listen to religious idiots who tell us that girls should not be having sex until they are married and that they shouldn't be married until they are out of their teens. That's ridiculous! Women out of their teens should only be fucked to procreate the human race-if it's worth procreating that is. Girls under twenty are made to be fucked for pleasure. As soon as they start their periods, they should start being fucked for pleasure, because that's when they're most enjoyable. We recognize that man is biologically equipped to enjoy sex, but we do everything in our power to minimize that enjoyment...."
"Get on with the story, eh Charlie?"
"Yeah, well, I decided I was going to enjoy that girl-to hell with what people thought. I asked her if she was any good at climbing trees. I told her my kitten was stranded up a tree and that my bad back would not permit me to climb up after it. Naturally, sweet little girl that she was, she consented to come into the woods with me to help me rescue my kitten ... '
"And you took her to a place you had prepared ahead of time, eh?"
"No, first I took her into town and bought her a nice dinner...."
"No you didn't."
"Who's telling this story, you or me?"
"Sorry, Charlie."
"Anybody'd think you raped her."
"I wish I had."
"So do I wish you had. I wouldn't be running away from the police now. Anyway, I took her to a part of the woods that I had prepared ahead of time. I had a stake driven into the ground and several pieces of nylon rope sitting under a tree. When we came to that place, I took my hankie out of my pocket and stuffed it in her mouth."
"Was it clean?"
"What?"
"Your hankie."
"What the hell difference does that make?"
"Well, if it had been a snotty old rag...."
"Oh, shut up about that. You'll take away my hard-on."
"You hard, Charlie?"
"Sure am."
"So am I. Go on."
"Okay, I don't know whether my hankie was clean or dirty, but I stuffed it in her mouth all the same and that prevented her from screaming out for help. Then I grabbed her hands, tied them together, then tied them to the stake in the ground. She was a tough little bitch, too. And she knew where to kick me so it would hurt, but I managed to avoid her feet-good thing, too, because by that time I was so hard she would have broken me in half. Anyway, with her hands tied like that to the stake, I had to get her clothes off. I mean, I wasn't going to .rape her and risk going to jail without getting a good long look at that lean little body of hers...."
"I guess not."
"Most of all I wanted to see her breasts-those solid young titties. They were pretty big, too. I felt them a couple of times when I was struggling with her. So, anyway, I started by ripping her white blouse open. Then I took my knife out of my pocket and cut her brassiere up the middle. I cut the shoulder straps too, so that it just fell away and there was nothing, nothing but the air between me and those tits. Oh, Mack, I don't know whether I can describe those beautiful boobies...."
"You always say that, but you always do."
"They were round, like apples-no, more like grapefruits-and even though she was on her back, they didn't flatten into nothing like some boobs do, you know what I mean? They sat there, proud and firm, rising up from her chest like twin mounds of pure virgin snow. And her nipples were pink and soft like candy floss-little round buttons that sat up on top of her breasts like jewels. I wanted to lean over and kiss them, to take them into my mouth, gently-oh so gently-and roll them around with my tongue. I wanted to, but I couldn't enjoy it until her legs were tied, so the next thing I did was unbutton her skirt and pull it down over her feet. Then came the supreme moment. I took hold of the top of her panties and ripped with all the muscle in my arms and there it was! A perfect V of soft, curly hair...."
"Cunt!"
"When I got her pants down I took one leg at a time and bent it back so that her feet touched her bun, then I tied her ankle to her thigh. I tied them both that way and then I was ready-ready for the greatest moment of my life. I stripped off my own clothes in no time and stood above her for a few minutes to build up the suspense. I could tell she didn't want to look at my naked body, but she couldn't help it. Her eyes opened several times and fixed themselves on my cock, my big heavy cock that dangled down in front of my balls, slowly filling with blood, slowly rising. I stood like that until my prick brought itself up to its full hardness, sticking straight out in front of me like a bull's horn...."
"But she was dry, wasn't she?"
"Just a minute! So, when my cock was full and hard as bone, its big purple head waving in the breeze, I crouched on my knees and spread her thighs with my hands. Fully exposed then, before my very eyes, was her young clean, untouched cunt, ready to be conquered by my eager prick. But she was dry and closed tight and I had to work up some wet before I would be able to get in, so I closed in on her and engulfed her with my mouth. Oh, you should have felt her squirm when I pushed my tongue into her slit. She wiggled and twisted and tried to cry out. But the more she struggled, the more intensely I kissed and licked and sucked her wonderful vagina until J was coated inside and out with my slippery saliva...."
"Fantastic!"
"I changed my position so that my cock was where my mouth had been. I used my left arm for support, while taking her breast in my right hand. I licked it all over before plunging the nipple into my mouth and sucking it ferociously. With my cock, I felt around to make sure the head was perched in the right place and then, with a few quick jerks, I eased into her cunt. Again, she fought the thongs and cried against the hankie, but she soon realized that fighting only made it worse. Every time she jumped or twisted violently, my cock sank deeper into her virgin flesh. Finally she lay back and went limp, large child's tears oozing from her eyes and I made three or four more inward thrusts that buried my cock up to the hilt in her hot, desperate pussy. My balls snuggled in against her open crack...."
"Then you were ready to fuck her good."
"Then I was ready to fuck her good. I began my in and out motion slowly at first, each stroke measured and controlled. Her whole body rocked with my steady rhythm, back and forth, in and out-my hips bobbing, my pelvis rolling, my cock zooming up and in, exploring parts of her cunt she didn't even know existed...."
"Fuck!"
"Exactly ... Already I could sense my balls hard at work, producing the oceans of cream that I would soon blast into her. My rhythm became more frantic. Friction mounted in the head of my prick. My balls shriveled in their sac, bunching in a ball at the base of my shaft out of harm's way. And then all hell broke loose! A faint, plaintive voice jiggled in the girl's throat as I plummeted her ex-virgin cunt with one hard, decisive thrust after another. I was committed now to a climax. There was no turning back, no stalling off. It was all ahead, full steam. Each stroke of my cock dug into her like I wanted to rip her up the middle; the fingers of my right hand tingled as they manipulated her budding tit. Then came that moment of moments-the fraction of a second when you feel you are going to die and you welcome it ... the divine interruption in life when everything ceases, everything disappears from sight and sound and your body cramps and bums, and your cock, like a cannon, blasts its charges into the black, hot depths of a woman. Discharge after discharge of white, sticky spunk, spread itself thickly over the inner walls of her cunt. My whole body screamed its ecstasy. And then it was over-vanished! Over so soon, so soon!"
"Aaaaahhh!"
"When I pulled out and sat back on my haunches, I felt like the world was mine. I looked long and hard at the quivering girl, her breasts-now a little less virginal, a little more womanly-pulsating with each panting breath she took. Her stomach shivered, her thighs twitched and her cunt looked like a giant irreparable wound, a wound that would stay with her the rest of her life, a wound that marked her graduation from girlhood to womanhood. Out of the meaty opening, my own semen oozed. It was white and foamy and it sparkled in the sunshine as it inched its way out of her cunt and down the crack of her ass to soak into the ground. Looking at the quaking girl, I felt a strong sense of ownership. Had anyone tried to rape or even touch her then, I would have croaked him. She belonged to me! I and I alone had brought her into a real existence by showing her the exquisite turbulence of natural sexual intercourse. I had made her a beast and a woman and therefore she belonged to me!"
"What do you mean, Charlie?"
"I mean that before I raped her, she was like everyone else, under the delusion that life should be smooth and without conflict, but I showed her that life-real life-is nothing but conflict. Birth is violent, death is violent and so should life be violent. Anyway, the law doesn't make allowances for intelligent peoples. Only the nitwits get off-I pulled twenty years. My lawyer put me on the stand because he wanted to prove I was insane. Instead, I proved that the court was insane. I told them why I had raped her and I know every man in that courtroom who still knew a cunt from a cracker had a pants-busting hard-on and every woman was swimming in her own juices."
"But they put you away anyway."
"'Course they did. Listening to me, they realized how much of themselves they had willfully smothered in the name of Christian morality, and they needed somebody to blame for it. I was their obvious choice. So, here I am! Let's have another beer."
Mack jumped to his feet. He had a large bump under his fly. "Sure thing, Charlie. I'll tell you what. I ain't gonna whack this one off. No, sir! I'm saving this one for a woman. I'm gonna have me a woman before we're caught. A nice woman, too. A nice smooth one with tits like you said that girl had, and a cunt like hers too."
By the time Mack returned with another couple of beers in his hand, Charlie was lost in some faraway thought.
"You gonna get back your old job in the library when we get caught, Charlie?"
"The world is all wrong. All wrong!"
"What do you mean, Charlie?"
"The wrong men live and the wrong men die."
"Yeah ... that's for sure."
"You know, I heard about a soldier who was wounded real bad in Vietnam and when he was in the hospital dying, he wrote a letter home telling his wife that he would soon be home. 'We shall let no darkness come between us but our own,' he wrote her. How much did he know about the 'cause' he was fighting for? Oh well, that's life ... No it isn't, it's a game ... it isn't really life...." While Charlie rambled on in disconnected phrases, Mack nursed his erection and the two men slowly sank into sleep. In a few hours the sun poured through the cottage window and the two men arose and prepared for their departure. When everything was ready, they sat down again to finish off the last few beers. Mack's mind was on one thing-getting a woman before they were caught and sent back to the state prison. That was the reason he had escaped in the first place. He really didn't think he would get his freedom. In fact, he wasn't sure he wanted it.
But Charlie's mind was on something else entirely. He hadn't slept much through the night. Mostly he had been thinking about the world and his situation in it, and the thoughts had left him twisted and tormented. His sickness was taking hold of him again.
CHAPTER THREE
FRIDAY, six-fifty a.m.: Dave Bond turned the ignition key of his car and the V-8 engine cracked and rumbled into the crisp stillness of the misty morning. He left the car idling and returned to the house to pick up the box of groceries and some extra clothes his wife had packed. They were leaving for the cottage.
Dave had taken the day off work to go to the cottage a day earlier than usual as a kind of apology for his unforgivable action the night before. What had started out as an honest and sincere attempt to assert his masculinity had ended up a fiasco. The minute his semen burst from his cock and splattered on his wife's back, Dave's confidence and "devil may care" attitude had drained and he was left feeling stupid and incredibly weak. When his wife raced from the bedroom, he realized that he had made a fool of himself by insulting his wife and that some kind of apology was necessary.
But, as badly as he felt about the whole thing, Dave knew that to admit the truth would do nothing to sew up the split between his wife and himself. To explain to her that he had gone to see a dirty movie and that it made him horny, that he had come home to try out on her what he had seen, would have been disastrous. It would be adding insult to injury and it would have made the rift between them wider, if not irreparable.
And so, apologetically, he told her that the pressures of his job and of the city were at the bottom of his problem. He implied that she had been the innocent victim of his pent-up hostilities and asked for her forgiveness. Naturally, Nora accepted this explanation. She even liked the idea that her husband was having problems with the world, for that made her job all the more important. It was her duty to support him in moments like these. When Dave made the suggestion that they go to the cabin a day early, she accepted immediately saying, "If you think it will help you, I'm all for it."
And so they climbed into their car and backed out of the driveway, it seemed as though the tear in their marriage had been mended. In reality they were worlds apart.
Six-fifty-eight a.m.: "TWO MINUTES TO NEWS TIME," the radio disc-jockey announced in a voice that seemed too cheery for that hour of the morning. "IF YOU'RE ON THE WAY TO WORK RIGHT NOW, DRIVE CAREFULLY AND KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD. POLICE CHIEF REDFIELD SAID LAST NIGHT IN A SPEECH ON AUTO SAFETY THAT WOMEN'S FASHIONS ARE PUSHING THE ACCIDENT RATE HIGHER. HE CLAIMED THAT MEN ALLOW THEIR EYES TO WANDER ONTO FEMININE DISTRACTIONS, LONG BARE LEGS, DANCING DERRIERES AND BRA-LESS BOSOMS WHEN THEY SHOULD BE WATCHING THE ROAD. HE ALSO SAID-"
"Turn that off!" Nora's words were clipped and emphatic. Everywhere she went, she heard references being made to sex. It was as though the whole, perverted world was closing in on her, trying to smother her decency. It was no wonder-she thought to herself-that good men like her husband found it difficult to control their emotions when all around them overt and covert sexual displays aroused their animal lusts. "It makes me sick!"
Dave did as he was told. After the debacle of the night before, anything remotely sexual would be an irritation to Nora. He, too, wished the world would turn off its sexual impulses for a while, at least until the wound in his marriage healed over. He turned the radio off promptly and searched the top of his mind for something to talk about, something superficial, something irrelevant to what was on both their minds.
"I hope we have good weather this weekend."
"Mmm, so do I."
"Have you heard what the weather will be?"
"No, I haven't heard any weather forecasts, but judging from the sky, I think it should be all right."
"At least for today."
"Mmm."
"It's Sunday that John and Marion are coming up, isn't it?"
"Yes, Sunday. They said they should be up around noon, Sunday."
"That should be nice."
"Yes. I guess you'll be doing some fishing with John, will you?"
"Well, I thought I would, if you don't mind."
"No, I don't mind."
"Mmm."
Dave fell silent. In his mind he replayed the conversation they had just had, word for word. The sterility of it made him sad. Their life together was a desert. How long, he wondered, could they go on pretending that sex didn't exist?
She could go on forever, he thought maliciously. She can and will go on until her cunt is overgrown. She thinks sex is a passing phase and she's going to wait it out. When I'm finally over the hill and don't care any more, she'll be happy and content ... but my God, I'm only twenty-five! The feeling that came over Dave at that point was one of desperate futility. Twenty-five or thirty years of this! The idea was absurd. He knew he was not very aggressive where Nora was concerned, but only a fool would go on that long without fulfillment.
The next thing I know she'll be telling me she wants kids and that will be the end of all hope. She'll lose her figure before I've even had the opportunity to enjoy it.
Suddenly a scheme began to form in Dave's mind. Why not let her have a baby? he thought. Then I can have a mistress and we can both be happy. I wouldn't even have to tell her I was fucking someone else. She'd be so hung up with the kid she wouldn't care anyway. That's it! That's the solution. Get her pregnant and then start looking around for a mistress ... wouldn't have to look very far either. That new steno at the office would do just nicely ... yes ... yes ... yes!
In the long, cumbersome silence that befell the car, Nora did her share of thinking, too. She had accepted Dave's explanation of why he had done what he did the night before, but she didn't completely believe it. There was something deeper than just the pressures of his job that was bothering her husband, something more basic. Why else would he attack her in a sexual way?
I have done my duty for him where sex is concerned, she said to herself, but he is still missing something. There is something he is trying to prove.
In her own mind, Nora zeroes in on what she concluded to be the central issue. The moment had come, she believed, for them to start their family. He needs to prove his manhood. If I become pregnant, he'll realize himself as a full male. That's all that's bothering him. He needs to be a father.
The stony silence in the car metamorphosed into one of intangible, but perceivable, self-satisfaction. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bond had arrived at an interpretation of the problem that confronted their relationship. They had designed similar solutions but their motivations were worlds apart.
For a long time, the silence continued as they both tried to think of a way to bring up the subject of children.
They had been driving for nearly half an hour.
Seven-twenty a.m.: The telephone at the Bond residence was ringing. On the other end of the line was Marion Lovestone, who had something very important to discuss with Nora. She and her husband John had heard the seven o'clock news broadcast.
Seven-thirty a.m.: The Bonds were on the highway and barreling northward at seventy-five miles per hour. For them, the weekend had begun and they were looking forward to a relaxing escape from the rat-race of the city. Separately, they had both decided to make love this weekend without preventive measures. Dave figured Nora would consent to an unscheduled screw so long as it was in the cause of procreation, not pleasure. Nora knew Dave would jump at the opportunity, but it remained yet for either of them to introduce the subject, and the longer they sat silent, the further away their minds drifted.
Nora's reveries were of babies, while Dave's were of the new stenographer his company had hired only a week before. She was a tall, shapely blonde with legs, legs, legs-long, slender legs and mini-skirts that barely covered her rump. When she sat in her typing chair, her skirt worked its way up to afford every man in the office an unobstructed view of her ass-cheeks and Steno loved every hot, adulterous glance she received from the married underwriters and executives who found any excuse to pass her desk. Yes, Steno was a hot little number and many's the time Dave had felt like tearing out of his office and jumping her right there in the middle of the typing pool. Dave had always felt guilty about feelings of lust for women, his wife included, but Steno had changed that. His desire for her was so strong that it could not be bridled by morals and ethics. In fact, where Steno was concerned, Dave was proud of his adulterous thoughts. They made him feel like a man. Some days, he would sit for hours on end and mentally undress her over and over again in sensuous detail as he did in the car that fresh Friday morning on the way to the cottage....
First, he would stand back from her and study her poised figure...."Let me see " ... in a red mini-dress with long straps and gold buckles ... On the top she wore a white blouse with frills down the front ... "Okay now" ... He would stand ten feet away from her, looking her up and down; then he would slowly approach her and undo the top button of her blouse ... back one pace and again study her clothed body ... look long and hard at the twin bulges in her blouse ... try to imagine their shape and size. Would she have large puckered nipples or small soft ones? Brown or pink? Large, rambling areolas, or small, perfectly round ones? ... Now the second button. Push back the lapels and reveal a V of golden chest ... One more button and her bra comes into view ... crisp and blindingly white against her rich tan. Over her bra, her breasts bulge ... soft flesh, held hard by the tight halter ... Undo the rest of the buttons on her blouse now-fast-and drop the straps of her skirt one by one over her shoulders. Take her blouse off and let it slide down her back, over her rump to the floor. Look now at the gentle slope of her shoulders, her smooth flat shoulder blades, the sexy twist in her spine ... study her narrow waist and the subtle grades and hollows of her stomach and abdomen ... Suddenly the frilly white band of her panties comes into view, but that must watt ... Look instead at how fully she fills out her brassiere, how her breasts pack the deep cups, how the shoulder and back straps fit tight against her skin ... Take the bra strap now-squeeze it together, let it go ... feel how it gives to the weight of her surging breasts. See how easily it slips off her shoulders to the floor ... And how there they are-twin mounds of sweeping, streamlined flesh-milk white breasts, upturned and full, cupped with light brown areolas and nipples that pucker up to be sucked ... later. First, drop her skirt and slide your hands down inside her panties ... feel the heat of her rump against your palms ... feel how sex radiates from the pores of her skin ... Now ease her panties down over her hips, along her long mellow thighs to the floor....
The image of the naked stenographer that stood like a marvelous statue in front of his mind's eye was startlingly detailed. Dave found himself growing short of breath. Under his seatbelt, his cock had escaped through the slit in his underwear and was pressing uncomfortably against the cold, rough steel of his zipper. He dared not try to adjust it for fear his wife would see him and wonder what had been going on in his mind.
Nora was still entertaining thoughts of motherhood. It was the lack of children in their relationship that made Dave slightly unpredictable where sex was concerned, she concluded. Most of all, she was enjoying the thought of being able to deny him sex for several months while she carried the baby. That-she thought-might do him a lot of good.
The time passed quickly and, before either of them realized it, they had arrived at the foot of Abbot Mountain.
From there, it was a long, twisting climb to their private cabin. The cabin actually belonged to Dave's father, but when the elder Mr. Bond moved from the city to the country, he no longer felt the need for a cottage. He offered to sell it to his son and Dave accepted without hesitation. Not many young men his age owned their own cabin in the mountains, with twenty acres of private forest.
Only a few miles left to go and then they would be at the cottage.
We'll unpack and I'll make a pot of coffee, Nora plotted. Then I'll break the news to Dave. "Dave darling, I want to have a baby ... How would you like to be a father? ... Why don't we become parents?"
In the wind that caressed his face, Dave once again saw the image of the naked steno and he saw himself with her, running his fingers lightly over the entire silky surface of her body. He saw himself kissing her breasts, nudging them with his nose, nibbling them with his lips. He breathed deeply as he imagined himself going down to his knees in front of her, dragging his tongue across her stomach, in and out of the dimple of her navel, over her rounded abdomen and into the curly forest between her legs. He felt his tongue spread the lips of her cunt.
Someday, he thought, someday soon, I'll do that for real. I won't have to imagine it. I'll get the real thing.
Nine-oh-two a.m.: Dave Bond stepped out of his car.
Inside the cottage, Charles Foster sat in a chair in the comer of the room and twisted his hands into gnarled shapes. "We'll bum it to the ground. What do you say, Mack? Will we bum it to the ground? Hey, Mack, I'm asking you a question. Do you or do you not want to burn this domicile-this seasonal domicile-to the terra firma? Do you want to set a match to this fucking shack? Uh?"
Milman, usually attentive to what Foster had to say, was not listening at that moment. As he had passed the front window something caught his eye. There was something moving through the trees-coming up the path!
"Charlie! Charlie, come here!"
"Did you bring the playing cards?" Dave asked his wife as they trudged up the path toward the cottage. "We should have a game of bridge when the Lovestones come up Sunday."
"Yes, I put them in with the clothes, but we're not playing bridge. Anything but bridge. You know I can't stand playing bridge with Marion. She's a lousy bidder. Besides, I don't see why it always has to be men against women. Why can't you and I be partners once in a while?"
"Because John and Marion would have to be partners and John can't stand playing with his wife. She's a lousy bidder."
"We'll play euchre or something?"
"Should we go out through the back window?" Mack was growing increasingly agitated as the oncoming couple closed the distance between themselves and the cottage, but Charlie Foster showed no sign of concern. Thoughts were racing through his mind at a frenetic pace.
"Charlie?"
"No, Mack, no. Sit down. We're going to meet these people...."
"But...."
"Mack, you did say you wanted something before you got caught and sent back to the can, didn't you?"
"Yeah, but...."
"What was it you wanted?"
"You know, Charlie-a woman ... but ... "
"One of those homo sapiens is a female. Why don't we wait and see what she looks like?"
A faint grating noise sounded deep in Mack's throat and gradually it built up into a diabolical laugh. "Yeah?" he queried, mostly with his eyes. "Yeah," Charlie replied seriously.
The two men tiptoed across the room to the kitchenette and waited breathlessly, like young pranksters, for the couple to enter the cottage. Charlie cocked the .22....
"When we get inside, I'll make a pot of coffee and then I've got something I want to talk to you about," Nora told her husband when they were only a few feet from the front door. "It's a kind of surprise."
Dave Bond inserted the key into the padlock on the door, turned it and the lock snapped open. Opening the door, he stepped out of Nora's way and said graciously: "After you, dear lady."
CHAPTER FOUR
FRIDAY, nine-ten a.m.: "Welcome to our little mountain paradise!" Charlie emerged from the shadow of the little kitchenette holding the rifle hip high, his finger caressing the trigger. "Please close the door and come right in!"
The Bonds obeyed without question. Not until they were both seated in the living room did the impact of what was happening hit them. Their hearts jumped to their throats.
"My name is Charles Foster and this is Mack Milman. What do we call you?" There was an unrelenting smile on Charlie's face, a cruel smile that one would expect to see on someone who was not quite all there.
"My name is Dave Bond and this is my wife, Nora. Would you mind telling us what's going on here?"
Charlie approached the seated couple cautiously. Mack followed close behind. In both of them there was a feverish excitement. The Bonds were the first people they had known any contact with since escaping prison. Since neither of them had received many visitors on the inside, the Bonds were really the first non-screws and non-prisoners they had seen in six years. On top of that, this was the first opportunity for them to give, instead of take, orders; the change of roles was invigorating.
"Yes, we'll tell you what's going on. My friend and I-Charlie nodded toward Mack and Mack nodded back-"are from the university. We are doing research in animal behaviorism, and that includes homo sapiens-or orangutans, as I prefer to call us, since we are more wild than wise, more savage that sagacious-or, we are convicts escaped from the prison at Bridgewell and we have come here to steal some boots, some victuals and a gun...."
"What the...." Dave was baffled. He looked with puzzled eyes at his wife, who mirrored his confusion. The man with the gun talked like someone who might be connected with a university and they were certainly dressed like eccentric professors, but they acted like escaped convicts. Which explanation were they to believe?
"So you see," Charlie continued, very obviously toying with their emotions, "I've given you a choice, the most valuable gift I can give you. You may be confused. You may wish I hadn't given you a choice, but that's only because you have never had to live without choice. You don't know what it is to live without freedom...."
"Sounds like something a convict would say...."
"So which do you want me to be, an escaped con or a university graduate studying animal behaviorism? The choice is yours."
Dave looked at Nora once again. They searched each other's eyes for help. Finally Dave spoke up. "If you really are from the university, why are you holding us at gun point?"
"Why, to record your reaction to it, of course. How does an average married couple react when they are subjected to a set of circumstances totally foreign to their habitual way of life? That's what I'm studying, if ... if I'm from the university. If I'm from a prison ... well then, I'm holding the gun on you so that I can kill you if you try anything foolish."
The more Foster talked, the more confused the Bonds became, but individually they were arriving at the same conclusion-that no convict they had ever heard talked the way Charlie Foster talked and so, odd as it seemed, he must be from the university.
"So which is it going to be, are we from the university or the prison?"
Dave indicated that he was going to speak, but for a moment he paused to weigh the choice one last time. "What do you want us to do for this study?" he said at last.
Charlie leaned back in his chair and looked for some time at Nora. His face still held its incessant smile.
"Well, I'm rather partial to choices," he said at last. "For example, Mrs. Bond, which part of your husband do you like the best, his penis or his mouth?" '
"I don't know what you mean." Nora was doing her best to hide her repulsion. The very question gave her a queasy feeling.
"Well, let's put it this way-which would you rather touch with your mouth?"
"Oh my God, don't make me sick!"
Charlie looked at Mack. His smile broadened even more. Already, it seemed he had hit on a phobia, a weakness, a wound in the young Mrs. Bond's psyche that he could prod. She had made the mistake of showing too much emotion-a mistake she would make repeatedly over the next few days.
"I see," said Charlie musingly. "You find your hubby's penis disgusting, do you? You would prefer to touch his mouth. Okay! Mack, bring a glass from the kitchen."
Until Mack returned with the tumbler, Charlie did not take his eyes off Mrs. Bond. He had her where he wanted her and would not let go until she broke.
"There now." Charlie took the glass from Mack and extended it to Jim. "Take this now and spit in it. What did you say your name was again?"
"Dave."
"Take this glass, Dave, and spit in it."
Dave did as he was told and handed the glass back to Charlie.
"Thank you. Now, Nora, drink your husband's saliva."
Nora wrinkled her face in disgust. She closed her eyes and refused to look at the glass. When Charlie insisted that she drink its contents, she swung with her arm and sent the glass flying across the room.
The smile finally disappeared from Charlie's face. He stood up and aimed the rifle down at Nora's head. "You," he said gruffly at Dave, "take off all of your clothes."
Dave looked at Nora.
"Never mind her! Do as I say!" Charlie shouted.
"Now, Nora, I think you should be nude for this little experiment, too. Take off your clothes."
"I will not!" Nora challenged.
"Nora! Do as he says," Dave urged. He had never seen anything like this man's eyes before.
"You take off your clothes or I will get Mack here to rip them off."
Again Nora refused and again Dave advised her to do as she was told and again Charlie threatened. But Nora was steadfast in her refusal to be ordered about by the two convicts, not so much out of bravery as out of naivete. She assumed that any evil she could not imagine could not be real, and that, therefore, if she showed Foster that she was not a pushover, he would let her alone. In her mind she was cursing her husband for giving in so easily. It was almost as though he was going along with them, as though he wanted to be humiliated and to see her humiliated.
Charlie nodded silently at Mack. The little man marched up to Nora and seized the lapels of her blouse. One violent tug sent buttons flying in every direction. Before Nora could even think about defending herself, her blouse was off and Mack was tugging at her bra.
"Don't you touch me, you filthy little creep!" She screamed, trying to wriggle free. But Mack had a firm grip on her bra strap. One jerk, and the clasps tore from the material; two more, and the undergarment joined the blouse in the corner of the living room. Nora was left cradling her breasts in her arms and sobbing like a baby.
Dave made a quick lunge for Mack, but Charlie instantly whirled to point the rifle directly at Dave's heart.
"If you choose a course of action so foolish as that again, Mr. Bond," Charlie warned, "I shall be forced to blow you a new asshole."
Dave retreated to his former position, and watched helplessly as Mack continued to maul Nora.
"How quickly our courage vanishes," Charlie observed with a wry and sadistic smile. "Now, Nora, do you want to finish undressing or do you want Mack to help you?"
Nora stood silently.
Once again Charlie gave his sidekick the signal to go ahead. Mack stepped up to Nora. He ripped the button from her skirt and yanked it down to her ankles. The defeated woman gave only a token resistance. She fought a little more energetically when he jabbed his thumbs down the top of her panties and pulled them to her knees, but to no avail. Before she really knew what had hit her, she was crouched beside her husband, naked, covering her crotch with one hand and her breasts with the other.
The stage was set, but before going on with the show, Charlie paused to examine Mrs. Bond's gorgeous body.
"Stand up straight, Nora-and let your hands fall at your sides. Do as I say without any of your back talk or I'll let Mack have a go at you!"
Reluctantly, Nora straightened up and took her hands away from her breasts and groin. She brought one knee in front of the other to keep her thighs as tight as possible. She could feel three pairs of hot eyes burning into her intimate parts.
Her husband-her own husband-had turned his glance toward her and was drinking up the riches of her body as lustfully as the others. At that moment she hated him with every fiber of her body. He was more male than decent, and that was the first lesson Nora learned that day on Abbott Mountain.
The three men let their eyes roam indulgently along the slim lines of Nora's figure-her large jutting breasts, her smooth belly and well-rounded hips, her long streamlined thighs, the absence of any movement whatsoever except for a slight, almost imperceptible quivering, the blushing in her cheeks, seven parts embarrassment, three parts anger.
Dave was horrified at the men's humiliation of his wife, and at her obvious mental agony. But at the same time, he couldn't help seeing his wife as a desirable woman. It was a sensation he had long since forgotten.
"Now, Nora, you kneel in front of your husband and fondle his genitalia. That's his cock, in case you don't know."
Nora did not move.
"Mack, you better take off your clothes as well," Charlie directed over his shoulder. "I'm going to give you another choice, Mrs. Bond. You can fondle your husband's cock, or you can fondle Mack's. Which will it be?"
Again Nora made no attempt to move. She stood motionlessly, her head hanging in defeat as she cried into her bosom. "Please. Please ... Why are you doing this to me? I've never hurt anyone in my life ... It's sick, what you're doing. It's sick. Please...."
"Lady, I'm going to count to three. If you're not on your knees in front of your husband when I finish, I'll let Mack have a go at you. Understand?"
"No ... please ... please. I...."
"One!"
"Oh, God, they're sent from the devil ... Help me...." Nora sobbed to herself.
Come on, Nora-do it! Dave screamed in his own mind.
"Two!"
Oh, let me have a crack at her, thought Mack, I'll shove my old cock into her so fast she'll crap herself!
"Come on, Nora...." Dave's hands were clenched in anticipation, his cock was thickening into an erection despite himself. "Do it, Nora-do it!" he heard himself whisper.
"Oh God, help me!" Nora cried out, shaking her head hysterically.
"Three ... Mack?"
Dave watched the proceedings, his mind burning with rage. The rage was directed at the convicts, but some of it splashed onto Nora. She was so miserably hung-up that she couldn't make the decision to touch her husband's cock, even to avoid touching a criminal's.
Mack walked up to Nora and reached around to the back of her head. Taking a fistful of hair, he slowly bent her head back.
"On your knees!" Charles commanded.
Nora cried out in pain. Her mouth open, her eyes glistening with tears, she fell to her knees, then dropped in a crumpled ball when he let go of her hair.
"Get up!"
She lay on his feet-limp.
"Get up!"
Once again Mack took a handful of hair and yanked, bringing her sharply to her knees.
"Take it in your hands and stroke it," Charles directed. "Feel the soft skin and the hard meat; feel it!"
Mack twisted his clenched fist, pulling her hair hard. Nora brought her hands up from the floor and hesitantly extended them until they came into contact with Mack's cock and balls. There was no life in her touch.
"He said to play with them," Mack said.
Haltingly, Nora began to stroke his penis lightly, bringing it straight out from his body in a bold, frightening erection. She felt her stomach turn as her eyes fixed on the swollen head of it swaying ominously not a foot from her face. It looked almost like it had a life of its own-its vertical eye, its long arched back, its steady pulse.
Nora had never seen a full grown cock in such detail before. She had seen her husband's once, but only fleetingly, by mistake. This one was right in front of her face, larger than life, larger and uglier than she could ever have imagined cocks could be. And she was touching it, petting it with her own hands!
But, in spite of her feeling of repulsion, Nora could not take her eyes off Mack's hard-on. It was almost as if she thought it might bite her if she did. She continued to run her fingers along the length of it studying it in detail, like one studies a poisonous snake. Her eyes roamed from the rounded blunt head, over the bumpy ridge to the narrow neck and along the thicker shaft to the hairy base, from which point his testicles dangled in their fleshy sac. From there, her eyes traced out the bulging seminal duct along the underside of the organ.
Dave stood and watched jealously as his wife did for a convict what she would never do for him. It was horrible-but it was exciting, too. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to have her soft, delicate fingers dancing around his prick and balls. The thought brought a deep, hollow feeling to his groin and sent oceans of blood rushing to fill his prick so that it swooped out from his groin, straining at its roots and jumping with every beat of his heart.
"Kiss his cock, Nora," Charlie smiled, waving the barrel of the rifle in Nora's face. "Kiss it and love it with your mouth."
Nora's eyes opened wide with disbelief. Her head shook abandonedly from side to side. "Oh Lord, you can't do this to me. It's ... it's animalistic ... it's sick. Please. God ... please...."
Charlie undid the belt he was wearing and pulled it out of his pants. Without asking her again, he brought the belt through the air and laid it forcefully across her back.
Nora screeched in agony as the hard leather burned her sensitive skin. "Oh God, you animal, you maniac. You can't ... you can't ... You'll die for this ... you pig of a man...."
Dave's fists were tightly balled at his side. He took a step forward, but was again restrained by Charles' gun barrel. "Why are you doing this?" he demanded, helplessly.
Charles smiled. "Say that I am playing at God," he said. Again Charlie smashed the belt full strength into Nora's back.
Nora arched her back and put her hands behind her, causing her breasts to surge forward, fully exposed. Charlie brought the belt back and let it go again, this time across her boobs.
"Oh God! Lord Jesus! Please, stop ... please, stop." Nora's voice faded away into tearful convulsions. She leaned forward and took hold of Mack's cock once again. It was now harder, thicker and longer than ever. She tried to bring it to her mouth, but her hands would not cooperate.
"Suck it!" bellowed Charlie, growing increasingly more irritated the longer Nora balked. "Suck it!" The leather belt whistled through the air and cut into the soft flesh of Nora's back.
"Oooohh!" Nora smothered her scream by jabbing the head of Mack's cock into her mouth.
Dave was consumed by conflicting emotions. He thought of all the times he had lain awake at night wondering what it felt like to be sucked by a woman-any woman, let alone his own beautiful wife. The very sight of her soft, full mouth engulfing the hard rod of a man was enough to bring him to the brink of ejaculation. Only four or five feet away, his own dear, puritanical wife was sucking a man-sucking! The very same woman who ran from the bedroom when she discovered her husband wasn't wearing pajamas, was sucking a man in front of her husband. It was unbelievable.
Nora considered biting Mack's cock in half, but she knew that would be signing her own death warrant. Instead, she allowed the smooth fat head of it to slide in and out of her mouth. But, getting very little pleasure from that, Mack instinctively rammed his cock in further, causing Nora to clamp her lips around it to stop it from choking her. Now she was sucking in earnest. Her taut lips hugged the rigid shaft, causing the foreskin to slide back and forth over the hard meat. The salty taste of the cock activated her salivary glands, greasing the organ in spit, making it slide in and out with greater ease, the corona slithering across the roof of her mouth to the soft palate and back again.
For several minutes there was no sound in the room besides Mack's heavy breathing and the slurp of his cock going in and out of Nora's mouth. Then like a violent explosion, Charlie strapped Nora's back once again with the belt.
"Handle his balls, woman!"
Nora brought her right hand up quickly and cupped Mack's testicles. At that precise moment his cock jerked back and upward and a large shot of hot, acidic spunk splashed against the back of her throat.
Nora's stomach heaved. She spat out Mack's cock, spluttered, spewed, and choked.
"Oh God, I'm going to be sick. I'm ... I'm going to be sick ... Oh, how could-"
The ammonia-like odor of the spunk drifted into Nora's nostrils and brought a lump to her throat.
"Mack," Charles insisted, "get a wet cloth and clean Mrs. Bond up. We don't want her to be uncomfortable. She's got a lot of work left to do."
CHAPTER FIVE
FRIDAY, ten o'clock a.m.: Charlie handed the rifle to Mack and took off his own clothes. It had been eight years since his cock had tasted the charms of a female, and now that it was close enough to smell her, it arched and stretched in the direction of Nora's cunt.
Mack, his sexual appetite temporarily sated, took the rifle, pointed it in Dave Bond's direction, and stood ready.
Nora cowered in one comer of the room, head down, hands over her crotch and breasts. Her mouth ached from sucking Mack. Although she had spat it out ten times over, she could still taste his semen. It seemed to her that she would never be able to cleanse her mouth of the acrid substance, that it would stay in the tiny cracks and crevices as an undying testimony of what had happened that morning at the hands of the male sex, into which category she threw her husband-for in her eyes, he was every bit as foul as the convicts. When she had finished servicing Mack, she had turned to get up and noticed her husband standing, watching the event in an obvious state of sexual stimulation. He was more man than husband, more savage rapist than protector of his wife's virtue.
I have no husband, Nora told herself over and over again. I am alone in a den of beasts-filthy, rabid beasts.
While Nora quaked in the comer and cursed her husband and the male sex in general, Charlie plotted her next task. She would, he told them casually, suck her husband, while he made love to her dog-style. Mack would stand over her with the rifle and the belt to make sure she did as she was directed.
As the husband of a woman who was being raped and perverted before his very eyes, Dave was incensed, outraged, moved to kill in her defense; as a man who had been tantalized by the nearness of a beautiful woman and starving by her thoughtless, puritanical ways, he couldn't control the desire in his glands. That it took two ruthless convicts with a loaded gun to make Nora open up to him was horrible, but even if this meant the end of their marriage, he couldn't help the desire that beat at him from inside.
As directed by Charlie, Dave sat down in the chair and opened his legs. Mack moved in behind Nora and pushed her into position.
"Down on your hands and knees, love," Charlie ordered.
Nora did not comply immediately. She stood staring venomously at her husband. "You filthy, rotten pig!" she spat. "You're as sick as they are.
You ... you pervert!"
The belt sang out across her ass, leaving a long red welt.
Nora jerked and cried out.
"Down on your knees!" Charlie bellowed.
Nora slowly descended to her hands and knees in front of her husband. Her eyes ran with tears of anger, frustration and hatred, but she had stopped feeling sorry for herself. She had stopped crying over her lost virtue and was now hatching a plan of revenge-not against the convicts, for they were dangerous men and they had a gun-but against her husband, who seemed to be using the situation to satisfy his own perverted desires.
This will be the last time he uses me, she said to herself as Mack prodded her ass with the barrel of the rifle to make her move closer to the chair. It may be the last time he uses any woman!
"Now, honey, you take your husband's cock in your mouth like you did Mack's-and you do it nicely. We don't want you to pull away just because you get a little bit of cream in your mouth. We want you to stay with him until he's finished, understand? If you don't, Mack is going to lay your back wide open with that belt." Charlie got up and walked around behind Nora.
Instinctively she tucked her ass down into her heels to hide her cunt.
Charlie nodded to Mack, and the belt descended with a stinging smack.
"Lift up your rump!"
Nora elevated her behind.
"Okay. Now stay in that position. You may begin."
Nora took a pensive look at her husband's prick-a long, hard, brutal weapon looming out from that dirty, black, sweat-infested forest-and at his testicles spread out on the chair in their limp, wrinkled sac. Without this handful of meat and those two squishy balls, she thought, the relationship between them would be perfect. Yes, it was that grotesque, germ-ridden organ that she was being forced to take in her mouth, that male monster that was his only fault. Without it, he would be the perfect husband....
Dave looked down at his wife's face as she hesitated between his legs. He correctly read her expression as one of unadulterated disgust.
You'd probably like me a lot better if I didn't have a cock, Dave thought to himself, feeling the insulted and very much humiliated. You probably think that everything would be beautiful if it weren't for this piece of meat between my legs. Well I can tell you, you little bitch, that without that piece of meat, there is nothing! You might just as well have married a woman. A woman who can't cope with her husband's sexual desires is a woman who doesn't deserve to have a husband. Stick that up your cunt and suck on it!
Waiting for his wife to suck him off had worked him up almost too much. Had she backed down at that point, he would have taken the belt to her himself. She didn't. She took his cock between her fingers reluctantly and inserted its painfully throbbing head into her mouth.
A sensation that Dave could only have imagined before now consumed him. Nora's soft, fleshy lips caressed his cock. The hot juices of her mouth tickled the touchy glans of the corona. The subtle movements of her tongue sent ecstatic charges up the shaft of his hard-on to his aching testicles. Almost immediately upon contact, he experienced the burning sensation in the tip of his cock that forewarned him of the imminent explosion of come. His balls shriveled in their bag, collecting into a hard lump at the base of his prick. His breath and heartbeat both quickened; die tips of his fingers tingled and went numb. It was coming. Already the semen was inching its way through the many tubes of his groin, getting ready to blast through the barrel of his cock into his wife's mouth.
Dave's body wrenched forward in agony. He grabbed for his wife's hair to pull her head away. When that didn't work, he tried to wiggle his fingers into her mouth to pry her jaws apart. Nora's entire body shook with the force of her bite. Her teeth dug into the bone hard meat of her husband's prick.
Charlie, who had been on the verge of entering her from the rear when Dave screamed out in pain, leaped to his feet and seized the belt from Mack. When three quick strokes across the woman's back seemed to have no effect, he switched the belt end to end, reared back and with a powerful swipe, brought the buckle down hard against the vulnerable and delicate tissues of Nora's vagina.
Instantaneously, Nora spun away from Dave and rolled on the floor clutching herself. A scream tore from her throat and echoed off the walls of the cottage, drowning out the deep guttural groans of her husband who doubled up in the chair holding his cock in his hands. Both their faces were hideously contorted.
Tiny droplets of blood trickled between Nora's fingers from a wound in her left cuntlip, while large black and purple pools of blood were forming just under the skin of Dave's prick. For several minutes the two of them nursed their respective injuries.
Charlie and Mack stood at a distance and shook their heads incredulously. "And the Lord created the beasts of the fields," Charles muttered. "The bulldog, the moray eel, the Gila monster...." The young, innocent housewife on whom he had intended to forcefully vent his desires, had turned out, in his mind at least, to be far more violent and perverted than anyone had ever accused him of being.
Similar thoughts were going through Dave's head at that moment. When he had partially recovered from the shock of the whole thing, he just stared at the floor in disbelief. He had known for a long time about Nora's dislike of sex and sexual organs, but he had never imagined her hatred might be so sadistic.
"Oh, God, woman, how could you?" he demanded breathlessly. "Your own husband!" His eyes reflected his near maniacal anger when he turned them toward his wife who still lay, crouched on the floor, her bloodstained hand covering her vagina. "You'll pay for this, Nora. You'll wish to Christ you hadn't done this. I swear, you'll pay!"
Dave got up slowly and walked, holding his cock in his left hand so it wouldn't bounce, over to where Mack and Charlie were standing silently.
"Let me have that, will you? I want to teach my ... my wife ... a lesson." Mack handed him the belt. Dave approached Nora slowly, his head down, his jaw set firmly, the knuckles of his right hand white with rage. When he was within striking distance, he stopped, stretched his arm out behind him and with a full overhand swipe, brought the belt down viciously across the left side of her face. Nora gasped and screamed, bringing her hand up to her head. Again the belt went behind Dave's back, over his head and down, this time gouging the tender flesh of Nora's breasts. As she writhed in torment, Charlie turned to Mack and motioned for him to grab her legs. "Hold them open!"
Mack squatted at Nora's feet, seized her ankles and pushed her legs open, while Dave took hold of her arms and stretched them above her head, pinning them to the floor with his feet, then took a deep breath and stood poised to strike.
"Here's to our marriage, Nora."
A hoarse, cackling laugh bubbled in Mack's throat. He looked up at Dave and flashed a toothy grin. His eyes flickered as he watched the leather belt snap through the air and crash land, full force on Nora's cunt.
"Ooooww ... oh God ... oh God ... God ... Dave ... Dave...." Nora flogged her head from side to side so violently that Dave could feel her tears splashing on his legs. Her voice, a full octave lower than normal, seemed to be coming from her bowels. "Oooh please ... please stop! No more, please! I'm sorry ... I'm sorry ... I'm sorry."
Dave stepped down off her wrists and moved away from her. Mack, still smiling, let go of her ankles and stood up. For a while the three men looked down pitilessly as she lay spread-eagled on the floor sobbing with her whole body.
"Here's to our marriage," Mack repeated, punctuating it with a hearty laugh. "That's funny."
"She should have been a nun," Dave remarked coldly, making Mack wheeze even louder.
Ten-thirty a.m.: Dave rounded up a few pieces of rope and helped Charlie and Mack tie Nora to the kitchen table. He had come out of the fog of rage into which she had sent him, but even now it wasn't as hard to obey the two convicts' orders as he'd have thought. When this was all over, if they lived through it, their marriage would be dead anyway. He would divorce her as soon as possible and that would be that. He hadn't asked for this situation, and he felt a normally kind man's sick feeling at what was happening. But at the same time this seemed like poetic justice and Dave was honest enough to acknowledge the thrill lurking beneath the horror as he pulled the ropes tight.
The three men tied Nora down on the table so that her feet just touched the floor and her cunt lay bare and wide open right at the edge so that she could be fucked from a standing position.
Moving in close to the end of the table so that his cock touched her exposed cunt, Charlie gyrated his hips. The brushing of his cock against her furry cunt brought him up into a full erection. Then, placing his thumbs in the groove, he spread the lips and poked his stiff rod against her. His first thrust was so forceful that it sent the table skidding four or five inches across the floor. Nora screamed. Only Dave seemed to notice. Mack placed his feet behind the legs of the table to prevent it from moving and Charlie pulled back for his second thrust. This time his cock sank in about two inches, stretching the dry skin around Nora's cunt and making her yell and squirm against the ropes on her wrists and ankles. But he was in now and no amount of twisting and turning could stop him from fucking her. Taking his time, Charlie pushed in deeper and deeper. Dave watched, transfixed, as the convict's cock disappeared inside his wife. He felt his own cock stiffen once again as Charlie's pubic bone met Nora's.
Charlie jerked his hips back and forth making his cock slide in and out between the taut walls of Nora's cunt, bringing lubricants to the surface and making the lips open out like a blooming flower. He placed his hands on her hips, his thumbs pressing down on her abdomen and drove his cock harshly into the warm pit.
At the other end of the table, Dave leaned over his Wife excitedly and took her right breast in his hand. It started as a gesture of comfort, an unconscious movement on his part. The fact that it landed on her tit was purely an accident. Or was it? The firm, warm mound felt good to him. He didn't pull his hand away. Nora didn't seem to notice.
Wrapping his hand around the breast, Dave squeezed and kneaded it, rolling it around and around, pinching and twisting the nipple, then bending over, he took the nipple between his sharp front teeth and bit it.
A raw, agonizing roar exploded from Nora's mouth. Every muscle in her body strained against the ropes that bound her, but they wouldn't give. The table rocked from side to side as she writhed in pain.
Mack roared delightedly.
Charlie continued to ram hard, and at the same time he was digging his thumbs into her abdomen. As he moved toward a climax, his thrusting became sharper. He stabbed faster and faster, until for a moment, his head stretched back and he held his cock deep inside without moving. Then it jerked, blasting into the dark hollows of her cunt. He held himself there as the last drops drained from his prick, and then he casually withdrew and walked to the living room.
Dave stood at her side and watched without feeling. He wished she would die.
CHAPTER SIX
Eleven o'clock a.m.: Having worked up a sizeable appetite, Charlie ordered Dave to make some lunch.
"Mashed potatoes and wieners will do just fine." Nora was left stretched over the edge of the table, tied there. Being tied in that uncomfortable and humiliating position and being brutally raped by Foster had more than made her regret what she had done to her husband. Now there was no fight left in her, no desire for revenge, only an immense feeling of defeat, but she couldn't convince Charlie of that fact. No matter how much she pleaded with him to untie her, promising to do whatever he asked without hesitation, he was impassive.
"I gave you several choices. You chose unwisely and now you must face the consequences."
But, uncomfortable as she was, at least while lunch was being prepared, Nora was left alone. Charlie's cock was slowly returning to an unstimulated state, while Mack's was not quite ready to take her again. And so for thirty minutes there was silence on Abbott Mountain as the cons waited for food and Nora Bond waited for the next attack.
Eleven-thirty a.m.: It came when Dave piled three plates high with mashed potatoes and wieners.
"Three plates?" Charlie questioned, looking at Mack, then at Dave, then back at Mack. "Three plates? Now, Mr. Bond, I know you feel than you are more on our side than on hers, but let's keep this relationship on a sensible basis."
"You mean you're not going to give me anything to eat?" Dave asked gloomily. If he was going to find a way out of this situation, he'd need his strength.
"I mean nothing of the sort. We're more than happy to let you eat, aren't we, Mack?"
"More than happy!"
"Certainly, we're more than happy to let you eat, but where we come from, knives and forks are reserved for the privileged few and here that means us."
Charlie picked up the plate Dave had dished out for himself and walked to the end of the table. With all the aplomb and ceremony of a magician, he took a wiener from the plate, showed it around the room, tossed it from hand to hand with exaggerated precision, and inserted it between the battered cuntlips of Nora's pussy. Following the same procedure, he packed mashed potatoes by the handful around the wiener, covering her entire cunt.
"There," he said grandly, "Mr. Bond, is your lunch, a la cunt!"
Mack convulsed in a grisly laugh, pointing feebly at the mound of mashed potatoes with one hand, while holding his gut with the other.
After Charlie motioned repeatedly for him to start eating, Dave finally shuffled around to the end of the table and went down on one knee. He looked at Charlie and received a nod of approval, then he took a bite of the wiener and scooped some potatoes with his tongue.
"Bon appetite," Charlie grinned, saluting with his fork.
"What about her?" Mack asked through a mouthful of potato, "you going to give her any?"
"Oh, how thoughtless of me. Of course we'll give her some." Charlie dug his fork into his pile of potatoes, lifted it high in the air and flung it. "Bull's-eye!" he shouted as the potatoes splattered against her nipple.
"Bull's-eye!" Mack repeated, having capped her other tit with a second white glob.
"Bull's-eye!" rejoined Charlie, packing her navel. Through it all, Nora sobbed in futility.
Eleven-forty a.m.: Charlie and Mack had cleaned their plates and Dave was in the final stage of cleaning his wife's cunt. So engrossed was he in cunnilingus, that he barely noticed the presence of Charlie and Mack in the room. His only interest was in those brownish cuntlips and that sensitive nodule, the clitoris. The clitoris? Surely his wife had one, but where? His tongue flicked back and forth, up and down, around and around, searching for the pleasure button. If he could find it, maybe he would be able to show his sexless wife that there could be some enjoyment in sex. If he could find it!
Suddenly ... yes ... there it was. His tongue hit the small, never-been-used clit. Nora's hips pitched subtly to one side. Aha, she's got one and it works, Dave thought, bringing his tongue to bear down directly on the clit. Who knows, maybe she'll be a different person once she knows what it is to have a climax.
Bringing his thumbs into the groove of her cunt, Dave spread the lips and fully exposed the target of his stimulation. He leaned heavily into her and started his tongue in motion, making lazy circles around the clitoris. Already he sensed a certain tightness in his wife's body and when he occasionally broke the circular motion to drag his tongue straight down over the clit, her whole lower body lurched in response.
A few minutes of this, he thought, and she will be a different person. For the first time in her life, her body will come alive. Just a few more minutes.
But Mack and Charlie were growing impatient. Watching a man eat his wife, under normal conditions would be good for a kick, but there on Abbot Mountain, miles from anybody, where they had a completely free hand to do whatever they wanted, it was dull stuff.
Charlie had an idea. "Okay, Mr. Bond, that's enough. I've got something else for your wife to do now."
A quick look at his wife's breasts had told Dave that she was on her way toward an orgasm in spite of herself. Her nipples were twisted and hard, standing up proud as they had never done before. Her face displayed only the remnants of the disgust she had shown earlier. She liked what was happening between her legs. She wasn't anywhere near admitting it to herself, but she liked it-Dave was convinced of that.
The action of his tongue went from fast to frantic. If he could only drive her over that peak before the cons lost patience....
"Okay, Mister ... let's go...."
"A few seconds more ... she's almost there!" Feeling a tense, relentless motion in his wife's body, a kind of slow churning under the skin, Dave plunged his longest finger deep into her cunt and with a piston-like motion tried to finger her to a climax, his tongue still manipulating her now swollen clitoris. "She's going ... she's going...."
"Hey, you!" Charlie placed his hand on Dave's forehead and pushed. The eager, desperate husband fell away from the table, his wet shiny finger popping out of his wife's cunt.
"You're getting cocky, aren't you, Mister, disobeying orders? Well, we can fix that." Charlie's eyes glowed with anger. The madman in him was coming alive. He ordered Mack to untie Nora and bring her into the living room area. Then, with the rifle pointing at the back of Dave's head, ordered him to sit in the middle of the floor. Dave, now aware of how foolish he had been, being more concerned with getting sexual kicks than with the fact that he was as much a prisoner as Nora, did what he was told without question.
When Mack brought Nora into the living room and sat her down beside her husband, Charlie handed her a glass, the same one Dave had spat into earlier that morning and gave her her instructions.
"Whack him off in this glass."
"Wha...."
"Masturbate your darling husband into the glass and don't ask questions."
"But ... I...."
Charlie dangled the buckle end of the belt in front of Nora and stared at her. "One more moment's hesitation and I'll rip you wide open."
Again Nora tried to protest, but before she could get three words out, Charlie reared back and released the insidious instrument of torture, wrapping it around her neck, gouging her shoulder with the hard metal of the buckle.
Nora tried to grab the belt, but Charlie was too fast for her. Before she knew what had hit her, another stroke, followed by another, tore at her bruised and battered flesh. She fell down on the floor and screamed in agony, but the belt kept coming, taking painful chunks of flesh with every hit. Finally, realizing it was the only way to stop Foster, she got to her knees and scampered back over to her husband and took his cock in her hands.
Charlie stopped swinging.
Playing clumsily with the semi-hard prick she blurted out without looking up, "I don't know how ... that's all I was trying to say ... I'm not sure I know how to ... to ... masturbate him...."
The two cons looked at each other incredulously then burst into uproarious laughter. "She doesn't know how!" Mack exclaimed through his hoarse laugh.
Suddenly, the corners of Charlie's mouth dropped. "Show her how, Mister," he commanded Dave. "Show her how you whack your tack every night in the bathroom. Show her how it's done."
"Now look...."
"Show her!" Charlie bellowed, holding the belt up threateningly.
Dave took his penis between his thumb and forefinger and slowly moved the foreskin up and down along the shaft.
"This is the way we whack our tack, whack our tack, whack our tack," Charlie sang, tapping his toe and snapping his fingers in rhythm with Dave's stroking. "Come on, Mister, faster. It'll take you all day at this rate."
Dave increased the speed of his hand action. Charlie increased the speed of his finger snapping and toe tapping. This time Mack joined in the song. "This is the way we whack our tack, so early in the morning."
Dave's face flushed with embarrassment. His wife sat back on her haunches and tried not to look at his groin.
"How the hell do you expect to learn if you don't watch what he's doing?" Charlie snarled, holding the strap away from his body, ready to strike. Nora turned her eyes toward her husband's cock and kept them on the blunt head as it disappeared under the foreskin and reappeared several times a second.
"Come on, Mister, take a good hold of it. You look like you've never done this before-That's a laugh, eh Mack?"
"Sure is! With a wife like he has, he probably does it three times a day."
"Come on, Mister, wrap your hand around that cock and whack it or I'll wrap this, buckle around it!"
Dave closed his whole hand around his prick and beat it with a steady rhythm. It responded by straightening out and swelling. The head turned a dark red and the foreskin no longer covered it.
"All right, hand it over to your wife."
Dave let go of his cock and Nora extended her hand to take it gingerly. It was hot and hard against her cool hand and it seemed to squirm with life. She worked the loose skin back and forth over the hard muscular ridges of the thick shaft, awkwardly at first, but then, after adjusting her position and getting used to the motion, her strokes became as light, fast and skillful as her husband's.
Notwithstanding the fact that the situation did not exactly promote a stimulating sexual activity, Dave found that the soft feminine stroking of his penis was bringing him very close to a climax. A burning itch started at his feet and traveled upward across the surface of his body. His muscles flexed spasmodically, his breath quickened and he had that impending feeling in the head of his cock.
Suddenly it happened. His cock kicked back like a cannon and the first shot of Semen sailed through the air. Desperately, Nora slammed the glass down over her husband's cock to trap the rest of his load.
A heavy chuckle rumbled from Mack's throat.
Realizing that the sperm would just run out of the inverted glass, Nora, with no respect for her husband's anatomy, wrenched his cock straight down between his legs, causing him to sit bolt upright in the middle of his climax.
When his cock had shot itself out, Charlie instructed Nora on how to clean the dregs from the seminal duct. When she had done that, he took the glass from her and handed it to Dave.
"Now you go over and sit in that chair and you drink this. You've got ten minutes to drain the glass."
The barrel of the rifle bobbing two or three inches from his nose dissuaded Dave from arguing the point.
Meanwhile, Mack had informed Charlie of his desire to see Nora masturbate herself with a wiener and had gone to the kitchen to get one.
"Bring some butter while you're at it," Charlie called after him. When Mack returned with the necessary props, Charlie told him to prepare Nora by spreading the butter on her cunt for lubrication. That done, the two men sat on the floor in front of her and ordered her to begin. Like her husband, Nora did as she was told without hesitation.
Bringing her knees up and opening her legs, she brought the wiener up to her greased vagina. With one hand under her left knee and the other between her thighs, she eased the meat into her cunt. It felt like a stick of ice against the soft, warm tissues of her inner cunt walls-cold and slimy.
Nora pushed the wiener in about two inches before drawing it back out again. She had a morbid fear of it breaking off inside her too deep to be fished out, but Mack was not satisfied. He insisted she shoved it in all the way.
"Out of sight," he cried excitedly, "push it in out of sight." When Nora silently refused, she received the buckle twice across the shoulders.
"Oh God ... God!" she cried spinning across the floor, clutching at the wound the buckle had made in her skin. Suddenly she was consumed by hysteria. "Damn you ... damn both of you! Bastards! Bastards!" She wheeled and picked up a beer bottle and hurled it without aiming at the two cons. It caught Mack on the forehead just above the right eye. He slumped forward, his head in his hands. Frantically, she looked around for something else to throw, but before she could find anything suitable, Charlie had sprung to his feet and raced across the room to where she was standing. He drew his fist back behind his head while holding her firmly with his other hand.
"You're as good as dead, lady!" he hissed, setting his jaw. With a grunt, he sent his fist hurtling toward her face, but a few inches from the target it was intercepted by Dave. He had run up behind Charlie, thrown his shirt over his head and drawn it tight around his neck. He was trying to choke him to death. And it might have worked, too, had Mack, only temporarily dazed by, the blow on the head, not come up behind him and driven his knee, full force, into Dave's kidney.
Dave slumped to the floor gasping for breath. While Charlie, too, tried to get his breath, Mack picked up the rifle and held it alternately on the Bonds.
"We'd better tie them up, eh Charlie?"
Charlie nodded his head.
Twelve-thirty p.m.: Nora and Dave sat in the middle of the floor, their arms and legs bound. Charlie and Mack sat facing them on the couch.
"You know," Charlie began, rubbing his neck, "I can't make up my mind about you, Nora darling. I mean, about how I'm going to kill you. I don't know whether to stuff the barrel of this rifle up your cunt and pull the trigger or fuck you with a beer bottle and smash it inside you-let you bleed to death. Which do you prefer?"
Silence.
"I said which do you prefer?"
Dave spoke up. "Look, let my wife go...."
"Shut up! Mrs. Bond, which way would you like to go?"
More silence.
Charlie leaned forward and jabbed the barrel of the rifle hard against the nipple of her left breast. Nora winced and gasped as the pain of the blow penetrated her body, but still she did not speak.
"I know how I'm going to kill you," Charlie said, turning to Dave. "I'm going to cut off your cock and balls and make your wife eat them right in front of you. A sharp knife would be too quick and painless-just like going to sleep-but a dull knife, tearing through your cock bit by bit, that'll make you scream like a baby. But first we're going to be kind. We're going to give both of you one last pleasurable moment. We're going to fuck you in the ass-both of you. Isn't that sporting of us?"
The two cons untied the hands of their victims, then walked around behind them and pushed them over on their hands and knees. They played with themselves until they were both erect. By a tacit agreement, Charlie got Nora and Mack got Dave. "After all," as Charlie had often said in prison where homosexual relations are the only ones available, "an asshole by any other name would smell as sweet."
In unison, they dropped to their knees behind their respective assholes and ran their thumbs down into the grooves.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FRIDAY, twelve-forty-five p.m.: Like twin cannons on the side of a warship, the two cocks loomed heavily toward their victims. Although both were roughly the same length, Mack's seemed much bigger, much more ominous, because it was thicker and darker in color. It hung lower and meatier than Charlie's. At the base it could have been two inches thick and almost black in color. The shaft, although not as dark or thick, sported a very prominent seminal duct that stood out from the underside of it a good half an inch. The head was perhaps the most impressive part of Mack's prick. It was a dark velvety brown, slightly lighter around the edge where it joined with the neck, its surface was as smooth as highly polished wood.
Charlie's cock, although more streamlined and less hulky, was nonetheless a formidable one as Nora Bond would soon discover.
Charlie and Mack sat on their haunches and greased their cocks with butter while the Bonds, in their awkward dog-like positions, quaked with apprehension and embarrassment. Nora's mind was a myriad of thoughts, impressions and feelings. In that posture, she was reminded of the time she had witnessed a male and female dog screwing. The recollection sickened her, but not quite in the same way as it had in the past. She was not so much concerned with the animalism of sex or the indignity of the position as with the lack of choice on her part. In fact, although she didn't know it yet, her whole concept of sex and perversion was in the process of changing. She was no longer absolutely positive that being fucked in the ass or sucking cock was necessarily perverse. What she did know was that to be forced to suck cock and to be force-fucked in the ass was perverse and inhuman.
But whatever else was happening inside Nora's mind, one thing was certain. After doing and seeing what she had done and seen on Abbot Mountain in those few hours, she would never again recoil in disgust at catching sight of her husband in the nude the way she had done the night before they left.
What did not enter Nora's head was that she might soon die a hideous death. To that possibility she had anesthetized herself completely.
Not so with Dave. The prospect of having his cock torn off and being left to bleed to death was very much on his mind. If there was anything worse than being buggered in front of your wife, it was being buggered just before you die. Foster was insanely clever, Dave knew that. Had he described their deaths in dignified terms, they would have been inclined to fight heroically to stay alive, but the ignominious demise he had designed for both of them was intended to crush their spirits. Would it work? Even Dave didn't know how much fight he had left. He would have to play it by ear.
With their long, horny rods glistening with a thin coat of butter, the two convicts prepared in unison to perform sodomy on the Bonds.
Their techniques-learned in prison-were almost identical: playing their hands lightly over the hindquarters of their victims in broad, loose patterns, up the back, down the sides, around the hips and the thighs, edging closer and closer to the center of their attention, the round, brown muscular ring buried between the fleshy cheeks of the asses in front of them. Finally, Charlie slid his thumbs down the crack in Nora's ass and Mack followed suit on Dave.
"You two had better relax. The tenser you are, the more painful this is," Charlie advised-to no avail. Both Nora and her husband pinched their bungholes even harder.
Charlie was the first to make contact. Elevating himself from his haunches, he brought his greasy organ in line with Nora's anus. Touching the tip of the head of it, he released her ass-cheeks to let them clamp shut and hold his cock in position. With his left hand he took a firm grip on her hip; with his right he gave additional support to his cock. He thrusted. Nora grunted and her body lurched forward.
Nothing!
Dipping his finger in the butter, he gave her bunghole a liberal lube job and recommended to Mack that he do the same.
Again, positions ... get set ... thrust!
Nora gasped and fell forward.
Charlie drew her back, took aim a third time and jerked his hips. This time he felt the sphincter muscles give slightly and his cock-just the tip of it-broke through and he was in. When Nora fell forward, he went with her to keep his cock where it was, and then, with a violent tug of his left arm, he yanked her rump back toward him and at the same time drove hard the other way with his pelvis. Nora's anus dilated painfully. Nora groaned like a mare and stretched her head back in an expression of torment. A look of intense concentration crossed Charlie's face, followed immediately by one of ecstasy. His hard, grisly cock sank in two inches!
To Charlie's left, Mack was still trying to make his entrance. Dave it seemed, had a tighter asshole than his wife and, so far, everything Mack had tried had failed. At last he decided to get in simply by overpowering his victim. Taking the same posture as Charlie with his left hand wrapped tightly around Dave's waist and the other gripping his own cock, he placed the corona against the sphincter and leaned heavily.
Dave's eyes were clamped shut and his mouth was twisted grotesquely as he concentrated on keeping a tight asshole, but Mack steadily increased the pressure until Dave was sure he could not hold out. In desperation, he attempted to hurl himself forward, but Mack, in anticipation of just that, had slid his hand down from Dave's hip to his cock and balls and grasped them tightly. As Dave lunged forward, he felt the insufferable strain on his prick and ball sac. In a panic, he jumped back again and as he did so, Mack tilted his pelvis and thrust.
"Aaaaahh ... God!" Dave's face contorted in pain as his asshole opened wider than it had ever opened before. Tears dripped from the corners of his eyes. "Oh Jesus!" He sputtered as Mack jabbed again, sending his prick in farther.
Nora instinctively reached for her husband's hand and squeezed it tightly. For one soft moment, the couple looked into each other's eyes. Then the bumping started. Feeling for all the world like someone had jammed telephone poles up their asses, they dared not change their positions. They merely closed their eyes, lowered their heads to the floor and winced, hoping they could hold on until it was over.
Sensing that their victims had capitulated, the two cons released their vise-like grips and concentrated on driving their cocks in farther.
Mack's cock bit inch by inch into Dave's bowels, until their balls tapped together lightly.
Charlie's stiff prick dug into the back door of Nora's anatomy until his testicles kissed the pouting lips of her inverted cunt.
With every bump from the rear, the Bonds squeezed each other's hands tighter and tighter. With every bone hard inch of cock that passed through their dilated sphincters, their eyes and jaws clamped shut with greater pressure. The pain was excruciating-like shitting a giant cement turd!
When the cons were up to the hilt in the warmth of their victims they began a quick, jerky, back and forth motion with their hips, bringing their cocks out one or two inches and driving them back in with mounting ferocity.
Charlie leaned forward over Nora's back and reached around to seize both her breasts, which hung pendulously under her. For several seconds he flopped them back and forth and from side to side with ecstatic abandon. Charlie had always liked big-breasted women in this position, and Nora's tits were huge and heavy. Then he let his hands roam down to the nipples which he pinched between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. In long, exaggerated strokes, he milked them like they were cow's teats. All the while, he rocked his pelvis, driving his piston back and forth through the snug ring of her asshole.
Mack reached around in front of Dave's right leg and took his dangling balls in his hand, gently lifting them up to the base of his prick and letting them fall again to the bottom of the loose velvet scrotum. He let them roll over his fingers, occasionally jostling them in their sac. Then he let his finger meander up the ball sac to the thick arched base of Dave's prick. Taking the organ delicately in his fingers, he moved the foreskin down along the flaccid shaft and over the head, then brought it all the way back again to the root. He repeated this action numerous times, punctuating each long, slow stroke with a thrust of his own cock up Dave's ass.
Dave, in spite of his efforts to stop the process, found himself getting hard, for Mack's was an expert stroke. He knew how to make a man's penis react even if the man didn't want it to. That was something the prison rehabilitation center had taught him.
As he felt Dave's cock growing thicker, longer and hard, Mack stopped the monotonous long stroking and concentrated on the head, specifically the extremely sensitive ridge of the glans. Flicking his finger back and forth across the ridge caused the head to swell up to twice the size it had been when he started.
Nora, too, found involuntary pleasurable things happening to the inner mechanics of her cunt as Charlie continued the inexorable milking action on her nipples. Her uterus began to contract spasmodically with every stroke of his hands. The interminable thrusting into her anus had numbed that part of her to the pain of penetration; what was left over was an overall stimulation to that entire area between her legs including, if not specifically, her vagina. The pleasurably painful cramping in her cunt increased in frequency as Charlie became more agitated; as much as she tried to fight it, her whole body seemed to glow with sensitivity. Her breathing became short and shallow, her heart thumped against her breast and she began to rock on her knees to the intoxicating rhythm of the convict's cock. It was as though her mind no longer had control over her body. It was an unfamiliar and frightening feeling.
Dave had been forced to abandon any desire to remain aloof from what was happening to him, for his cock was now as hard as a brick and tingling uncontrollably with every stroke of Mack's hand, which was now wrapped entirely around the swollen, throbbing organ. As the con increased the speed of his thrusting and stroking, Dave was soon driven to the point of no return, the moment when nothing in the world could stop the flow of semen.
When it happened, Dave groaned from deep in his chest. There was unmistakable pleasure in that groan. His cock jerked spastically, the slit in the end of it expanded and spat out large gobs of steaming semen. At the same time, Mack thrust three or four times in quick succession, then arched his back and growled like a lion as his own prick blasted, recoiled and blasted again until white, foamy come trickled down the crack of Dave's ass into the coarse hair around his testicles.
The contractions in Nora's cunt were coming now with such frequency and intensity that her breathing had turned into noisy panting with intermittent groans of ecstasy escaping her dry, open mouth. Charlie had left her nipples hard and swollen and was now concentrating entirely on her hindquarters. With his left hand on her hip, he pulled her ass toward him as he plunged his cock deep into her bowels. At the same time, he dragged two fingers of his other hand in and out of her cunt and back and forth across her clitoris until, finally something inside her exploded and propelled her into a hysterical orgasm.
"Aaaahh!" Her voice ran the gamut of notes from high and piercing to low and earthy. For a moment it seemed as if her heart might stop altogether.
Charlie followed Nora almost immediately. When he felt her going, he straightened up and stretched his back as far as it could go and then, with the most penetrating of all thrusts, he blasted his load into her ass.
When her climax had ended, Nora collapsed with Charlie falling on top of her, his cock still immersed in her ass, pinning her to the floor. Beside them, Dave and Mack lay in the same position. For a long time there was nothing but heavy breathing and assorted odors in the cottage. Then, ponderously, the convicts made their withdrawals.
First they would wash their penises, then they would sit down and have a cigarette and then....
One-fifteen p.m.: Marion Lovestone, worried that she could not contact Nora Bond, was calling her husband at work.
"Maybe they don't know about the escaped convicts. Maybe for some reason they went to the cottage early this week and they don't know about those men...."
John Lovestone told his wife not to worry. "It's possible that Nora has gone out somewhere and that she'll be back later. But if you want, I'll call Dave at work...."
Combing the area of Bridgewell and Pitcher's counties was a search force of nearly one hundred policemen from various squads.
At that moment, one of the policemen, Sergeant William Jansen, was talking to the general store manager at Pitcher's Point.
"That over there is Abbot Mountain. Some cabins up there. Dave and Nora Bond got one, and a big piece of land around it. Ain't seen 'em today, but I know they're over there ... usually come up Saturdays, but I guess he had a day off work or something 'cause I saw their car go by yesterday."
"Has anybody around here reported seeing any suspicious looking strangers?" asked the sergeant.
"Not as I know of," was the store manager's reply, "but that don't mean much. Folks hereabouts ain't very nosey, and a lot of strangers go through here. Folks loan out or rent their cabins."
Sergeant Jansen decided to sit it out for a while. He wasn't certain just what he should do. If the convicts were over on Abbot Mountain holding the Bonds as prisoners, the police would be putting the lives of innocent people in peril by trying to investigate the place. Besides, if they go and the convicts were there, what would they do?
"Would you happen to know whether or not Dave Bond has any firearms at the cottage?" asked Sergeant Jansen.
"He sure has," the store owner replied without hesitation. "I've seen them. He has a twenty-two caliber rifle and a pistol which he keeps under a loose floorboard in the bedroom right by the bed. He got the pistol last summer when he had that rash of burglaries in the area."
"Two, eh?"
"That's right, two, a rifle and a pistol."
One-thirty p.m.: Marion Lovestone's telephone rang. It was her husband. He had called the insurance office where Dave worked and was informed that he hadn't gone into work that day.
"Maybe you're right, dear. Maybe you ought to call the police to see if they've checked the cabin. It can't hurt to check."
Marion hung up and called the police, but she got no satisfaction from the desk sergeant. All he would say was that there were many people searching the area of Abbot Mountain and that he was sure they would check it in due course if they had not done so already.
"But can't you call them on the radio and inform them there may be people on the mountain?"
"Madam, I expect that if there are people on that mountain, they know about it already."
Marion hung up the receiver, all the more anxious for having called the police. She phoned her husband back and told him what the policeman had said.
"Don't you think we should drive up there ourselves and talk to the police? We might be able to help them. I mean, we know the mountain very well and we might be able to give them a few tips...."
At first John Lovestone was reluctant to get involved. He thought they would be more of a nuisance than a help to the police, but after several minutes of talking to his wife, he too became quite concerned for the welfare of the Bonds.
"Okay," he conceded, "I'll pick you up in fifteen or twenty minutes."
Mack Milman looked up at his-partner and smiled. He was squatting beside Nora with his index finger in the cleavage of her cunt. "Should we kill them now and get out of here?" he asked Charlie.
Foster didn't reply immediately. He reflected for several seconds before shaking his head. "I don't know, Mack. I've been thinking maybe we shouldn't go out in the daytime. I expect this area is crawling with screws by now. It might be too risky. I've been thinking maybe we should wait until dark tonight."
Nora and Dave breathed silent breaths of relief.
"You're right, Charlie." Mack, too, was pensive. "And I've been thinking about something else. Maybe we shouldn't kill them, I mean, why do that? If we get caught now, we'll just go back to prison, but if we kill them they're going to roast us for sure."
"Now you hold on a minute, Mack, my friend. Who said anything about you killing them? Don't worry, you aren't going to be roasted. Killing these two is my privilege. I'm going to do it my way and by myself. Besides, we're not going to get caught-that I can promise you!"
Mack was not satisfied. He didn't want his friend risking the chair either, but the emphasis with which Charlie spoke the last few words indicated that he intended them to be the last on the subject. Mack said no more. He went back to playing with Nora's clitoris.
CHAPTER EIGHT
One-forty-five p.m.: Since they had decided to stay on Abbot Mountain until dark, Charlie concerned himself with the problem of entertainment. After all, if they had to sit and do nothing for a whole afternoon, they would be bound to get irritable and they might be moved to kill off their hostages prematurely, just for the excitement of it.
Finally, Charlie elected to have Nora do a striptease. That would give Mack and him something to look at for a few minutes anyway. He described to Nora how he wanted her to do the dance.
"We're trying to fill up time here, so there's no sense in rushing this. I want you to put all your clothes on and then take them off slowly, piece by piece, while you're dancing. If you want music, just hum. And do some bumps and grinds-you know, like the strippers do-like you're trying to push your cunt in our faces from three feet away."
When Mack had untied her, Nora rubbed her wrists and ankles where the ropes had burned her, but she made no move toward her clothes. She just sat where she was with a cynical expression on her face.
"Hurry it up, woman-get your clothes on." Charlie's patience grew thinner as the day went on.
Nora seemed to be giving it one last thought before opening her mouth. "Why should I? I mean, why should we do what you say any more? We know we're going to die sooner or later, so why not make it sooner?"
Charlie shook his head unbelievingly. He was a man whose whole life was doomed ahead of him, but never once had he contemplated giving it up. Were he in Nora's position, he would value every short, fleeting second of life and here she was willing to give up hours of it.
"Mrs. Bond," he replied seriously, "you ... you amaze me. You don't seem to be alive. I mean, if there's any reason, any reason at all for human beings to be on this planet, it is to stay here as long as possible. That goes for all of us. Do you realize that anything could happen between now and tonight when I intend to kill you? Anything! You could be rescued within the next hour. Only a person who does not enjoy life could be willing to throw away several hours of it as though it were worthless. I mean, how many hours do you have to have before you would consider it worthwhile going on? If I said I was going to kill you tomorrow morning, would you do the strip to stay alive? Or if I gave you a couple of days or a couple of weeks, would you consider it worthwhile staying alive?"
Nora was visibly impressed with the convict's pep talk. As she had in moments before, she found it difficult to believe that a man so intelligent could be so ruthless. To him, she offered only a token argument.
"It's not a matter of time. It's the fact that I know I am going to die. Even if you put it off until tomorrow it wouldn't make any difference...."
"Chrissake, lady, that's ridiculous! We're all doomed to die anyway. It's just that we don't think about it. All that's bothering you is that I've made you think about death for the first time in your sheltered life. Now you just think about that, lady. If you want to live another six or seven hours, you get up and get your clothes on and do a dance for us. If you don't ... well, I'll think of a way to use those hours so that you'll wish to Christ you'd danced your ass off."
Charlie sat back in silence and waited for Nora to make her decision. Before long, she rose to her feet and walked to the other side of the room and began to dress.
Mack sniggered when she leaned forward to drop her breasts into the cups of her bra. When she was fully dressed, she went back to the center of the room and stood awkwardly with her hands loose at her sides. She looked down at her husband, who was still bound hand and foot and smiled faintly. Then, turning back to Charlie, she said sincerely, "I really don't know what to do."
"Have you never seen a stripper at work?" Charlie queried, underestimating her naivety. "Never."
"Well, striptease is just what it sounds like. You take off your clothes to the rhythm of some music.
You know which parts of your body men want to see so you tease them a little bit before you let them see those parts." Charlie reflected for a brief moment. "You do know which parts of your body men want to see, don't you?"
After a pause: "Yes."
"Which parts are they? Name them."
Again, something inside Nora balked at answering the con's question, but having her hands and feet free to move around after having been bound tightly felt so exquisite that she didn't want to do anything that might trigger his temper. He had been right-deep down she did want to live those last few hours as freely as possible. She forced herself to answer his leading question.
"My ... b-breasts and my crotch."
Charlie wasn't satisfied. "That's an ugly word. What's another way of putting it? Not crotch, but...."
"Vagina."
"Better, but there's another word-shorter and more to the point. Come on, you know it. Begins with 'c'."
"C-cunt."
"Good girl, Nora. We're going to educate you yet. So men are interested in your cunt and your tits-say that word. Not breasts, but...."
"T-tits."
"Right! Men are interested in seeing your cunt and your tits as well as your belly and your ass and so on. So you strip in such a way as to tease old Mack here and myself until we're hard. If you can do that, you're pretty good because we've both had it twice this morning and it's going to take a bit of work to get us up again. So come on, strip!"
Nora stood for a few moments with her head down trying to think of a way to start her dance, but before she could get her feet moving, inhibitions set in like rigor mortis. "I can't get started," she said in a child-like voice.
Suddenly, Charlie's foot came down heavily on the floor. His hands slapped together loudly in a steady beat. "Brrrroooom-boom-boom ... brrrooom-boom-boom...." In his rough-edged voice, he belted out the tune to "The Stripper," a song that was popular the year he went to prison. Mack joined him with an uncoordinated clapping of his hands. He was reminded of the Christmas Eve chapel services the year before, when the prisoners started out singing "Silent Night, Holy Night" and ended up screaming at the top of their lungs, "Silent Nit, Holy Shit." Those who took the services seriously were upset and started pushing and punching and the whole thing turned into a free-for-all. It was the best Christmas Eve Mack could remember since he was a kid.
Every fiber in Nora's body tingled with the boom of Charlie's voice and the stomping of his foot. Her feet started moving easily. Her inhibitions quickly disintegrated and her body loosened up. Because her clothes had been tom off her back earlier in the day, she had had to tie her blouse in a knot just below her bustline. Clumsily, as her body swayed and bent to the rhythm in the room, she now reached for that knot.
"Not yet," Charlie interrupted his humming to call out, "not yet, dance some more. "Brrroom-boom-boom...."
Nora dropped her hands, but this time she did not let them land lifelessly at her sides. Instead she placed them on her hips and let them slide up and down her thighs. Charlie let out an ear-piercing whistle and Mack followed suit. After a few seconds, Nora tried again. She brought her fingers up to the knot in her blouse.
"Yeah, yeah, take it off!" Mack bellowed.
When the knot was untied, Nora held her blouse in place and continued to dance. Then, turning her back to her audience, she let it fall slowly to reveal her bare shoulders. From there she let it inch down her back to show a little more skin ... a little more ... a little more, until finally, by straightening her arms at her sides, she allowed it to cascade to the floor.
Turning around again to face the men, she began to gyrate her hips and flex her stomach unabashedly. Whether she realized it or not, she was beginning to enjoy stripping. Somehow she felt ... powerful.
To a volley of hoots and whistles, she loosened her skirt and turned it around and around, threatening at any moment to drop it, but always catching it at the last second. Except that her movements were somewhat clumsy, and the musical accompaniment crude, she looked almost professional.
Finally, she let the skirt fall the way of the blouse and was left moving sexily in her bra and panties. Her guess was that the bra should be the next garment to go, even though, in her estimation, breasts were abundantly more attractive-if one had to differentiate-than crotches.
Besides, her bra was killing her! When Mack had ripped it off earlier in the morning, he had torn the first set of clasps out of the material and she had to do it up in the second set, making it much too tight.
Moving with complete abandon now, Nora flattened both hands on her abdomen and dragged them up over her stomach up to her breasts momentarily before sending them back down the same route to the lowest part of her underbelly. She made a few crude bumps with her hips and a deep, concentrated grind with her pelvis and then, back up her body came her hands, their fingers moving like feelers, scanning the area for something to grab hold of. Her breasts!
Cupping her mammary glands firmly, she eased them up so that they puffed out gloriously over the top of her brassiere, all the while maintaining the ritualistic rotation of her hips and pelvis. Then, casting a quick glance at the cons, she let her fingers dance around behind her to unhook the restrictive harness. As she did so her breasts surged forward like water suddenly undammed. Mountains of soft flesh billowed forth, but still they were not visible. Still her bra clung to them as though it jealously wanted to protect them from the lustful eyes of the fast-breathing men.
Once again Nora pirouetted to give the men a back view while she let the bra slip from her bosom. When it fell she kicked it across the room.
"Brrroom-boom-boom ... brrroom-boom-boom...."
Nora made a slow turn back to her audience, holding her large naked breasts in her hands and rolling them sensuously in brazen circles as her pelvis twitched. Finger by finger she lifted her hands from her breasts until only two fingers on each hand covered her nipples. With those two fingers she pulled her breasts from side to side making them jiggle and bounce. Then, with a flourish, she threw her hands high in the air and thrust out her chest. A quick look at her audience told her that both Mack and Charlie were sporting erections. Dave was not looking.
Nora made a turn of forty-five degrees to give Mack and Charlie a profile view. She arched her back, placing her hands on her rump and puffed up her chest to show the full, dynamic curvature of her breasts.
"Yoooowweee!" Mack was holding onto his cock like his life depended on it.
"Brrrooom-boom-boom ... brrroom-boom-boom...."
Nora, her movements much more suspenseful and professional now, let her hands meander over her breasts and belly to the rim of her panties. One at a time, her thumbs disappeared under the silky material. She eased it down just a fraction, then let it snap up again. This teasing action she repeated four or five times, pushing her panties down farther each time until, finally, she revealed one or two hairs of her pubic garden, then she wheeled on her toes and bent over, thrusting her rump out toward the men. Bumping heavily from side to side, she wiggled her panties down with tantalizing prolixity.
"Brrroom-boom-boom...." Both Charlie and Mack were hoarse from screaming. Their beet-red faces were dotted with perspiration. They watched intently as Nora peeled down her panties to expose the round well-packed cheeks of her exquisite ass, which still carried traces of Charlie's sperm.
Holding her hands between her legs, Nora once again presented the cons with a generous front view of her naked, pulsating body-all, that is, but that wonderful patch of hair they were both interested in. With the speed of a magician, Nora replaced her right hand with her left and back again, offering the very briefest glimpses of her precious cunt until, at long last....
"Brrroom...."
Her hand flew into the air and she flexed her buttocks, driving her pelvis up and out so that the top part of her cunt was plainly visible.
Without breaking the incessant rhythm, Charlie jumped to his feet and sidled up to Nora, pushing his hard-on against her pubic bone and rotating it in a lustful fashion. Mack followed suit immediately, leaping up behind Nora and wedging his stiff prick up between the cheeks of her ass. In unison the three dancers moved like a well-oiled machine, their every nerve alive with sexual awareness. Mack wrapped his arms around Nora and seized her breasts to knead and massage them rhythmically. Charlie rubbed his hand hypnotically up and down her sides and for a long, heavy moment the trio fused into one body of primitive, passionate motion. Nora's head went light and airy. She let it fall back limply against Mack's. Her mouth was open, her nostrils flared. A reddish glow formed just beneath the surface of her milky skin. She felt her nipples grow rigid in Mack's hands and when he rolled them in his fingers, it caused a cramping sensation deep in her cunt.
Slowly Charlie bent his knees, bringing his prick down over Nora's pubic bone to the cleavage of her cunt. On the hair around her labia cool moisture had formed like a fresh spring dew. Charlie continued his downward sweep until his cock popped into position and was snagged between Nora's burning cuntlips, then, slowly, he straightened his knees. For a moment, Nora stopped breathing, and when she resumed it was short and agitated as Charlie's cock moved slowly upward through the dark wet tunnel of her cunt.
Although the cons had stopped humming by now, the steady intoxicating rhythm could still be heard by all, almost as if it were still in the room somewhere-oozing out of the woodwork. Nora continued to pump her hips and rock her pelvis automatically as Charlie penetrated her deeper and deeper, bringing more and more of his male hardness into her to fill the vacancy between her legs.
Suddenly there was movement behind her. Mack's swollen prick descended the groove of her rump until it reached the brown ring of her asshole. It still stung from the ruthless battering it had received from Charlie earlier and when Nora felt the insistent head of Mack's cock knock at it, she flexed her buttocks. For a moment she fidgeted like a young filly before a stallion for the first time, but then she recalled what Charlie had advised her. "Relax!"
Haltingly, she released the powerful muscles of her gluteus maximus. There was a quick jab, a sharp sting and then a cool, permeating tingle that radiated from her asshole throughout her whole body. She sighed as Mack eased the rest of his hard meat into her.
With a total of about twelve inches of cock inside her body, Nora rode deliriously with their bumping and thrusting as the two men tried to coordinate their rhythms. She could feel the flesh between her legs opening up as if to beg for more phallic meat. Hungrily, she sat into Mack's cock and spread her legs wider for Charlie; insistently, she flexed the muscles in her abdomen and vaginal walls; desperately, she grabbed Mack's hands and brought them back to her surging breasts.
After the temporary disruption caused by the entrance of the two cons, the three once again coasted into a drowsy, somnambulant rocking motion, the two cocks driving like slow pistons in and out of Nora's body.
Inexorably, the tension mounted until Nora's cunt was a knot of pleasurable contractions. With a long, deep sigh, she rolled her head from side to side and dug her fingernails into Charlie's buttocks. Mack followed with a deep, suspended thrust as his cock pumped semen into her bowels. Last to come was Charlie, but when he did, it was with a violent impaling jab of his prick, a jab that lifted Nora to her toes.
When they had finished and pulled out, they stepped back and left Nora standing in the middle of the room, legs spread, gently swaying from her toes to her heels, white, sticky semen making shiny trails down the insides of her thighs. Her face and breasts were flushed, her hands tingled with pins and needles. There was a loud hum in her ears through which she could still hear the drug-like droning rhythm of "The Stripper" as bellowed by Charlie Foster, madman, pervert, savior, and killer.
Through the orgiastic display, Dave had kept his eyes on the floor. Now that it was over he ventured to lift them. The first thing he saw was his wife's buttocks, flexing and relaxing spasmodically. From the crack, long stalactites of sperm hung lazily like gentle drops of water after a hurricane. For the first time in a long while, he felt real jealousy. A burning desire was smoldering in his heart, a desire for two things-to kill Charles Foster and to fuck his wife, to fuck her hard and mercilessly like Foster had done.
Two-forty-five p.m.:
John and Marion Lovestone had arrived at Pitcher's Point and were talking to Sergeant Jansen. Among them, a plan was being hatched.
"How soon can you have a policewoman out here?" Jansen asked over the car radio.
"In about an hour I should think, sir."
"No good. Can't you cut that in half?"
"Not unless we drive a hundred all the way and we can't do that without using the siren. If the men are out there they'll hear us coming for miles. I could...."
"Okay, never mind, never mind. We'll have to think of something else."
"I was going to say, sir, that we could try to get a chopper, but I can't guarantee it would get there any faster, what with having to find one that's available and all...."
"No, never mind. I'll try to work something else out."
"Right you are."
Sergeant Jansen left the patrol car and walked back to the general store where John and Marion were standing talking to the store manager. The big burly cop had an idea he thought might work. There was only one thing wrong with it. It depended on the courage and fortitude of someone who was not trained for capers like this-a complete amateur and a woman at that.
"Mrs. Lovestone...."
CHAPTER NINE
FRIDAY, three o'clock p.m.: Marion Lovestone, after an involved discussion with her husband and Sgt. Jansen, agreed to help the police get to Abbot Mountain. The plan was this: Marion would drive up into the mountain forest with the sergeant, who would be dressed in her husband's clothes. Other police would hide in the back of the passenger compartment, and in the trunk.
It was hoped that Nora and Dave would catch on to what was happening and go along with the scheme without giving it away. Marion speculated that they might already have warned the criminals that the Lovestones were coming to the cottage this weekend.
Sgt. Jansen hoped that, dressed as John Lovestone, he, along with Marion, would be able to gain access to the cottage. What he did after that would remain to be seen. He would just have to play it by ear.
Of course, all of this was contingent on the fact that the escapees were, in fact, holed up with the Bonds on Abbot Mountain. It might very well be that Sgt. Jansen and Marion Lovestone would find Nora and Dave quietly relaxing in the sun, but they could take no chances.
The car was loaded as heavily as was safe. Six cops managed to pack themselves in. In the second seat, Marion sat tensely, her feet resting on a cop's back. Her stomach was a bundle of nerves, but she was hiding her apprehension well. Only her husband could sense how frightened she was.
"Are you sure you want to go through with this, Marion?" he asked, holding onto her elbow gently.
"Sure, John!" There was a note of uncertainty in her curt reply. "They probably aren't even there-the cons, I mean."
Scared as she was, however, Marion could not help but indulge in a titillating feeling of adventure. In the well-regulated life she and her husband had, it was a moment too rich to pass up. Taking a deep breath, drawing her petite, but well-built torso up bravely, she smiled anxiously. John kissed her securely on the mouth.
"I was going to say, 'I wish I were going with you,' but I don't. I wish you were staying here," he said with a hint of strained humor.
When Sgt. Jansen returned, dressed in John's sports jacket, shirt and pants, he extended his hand hurriedly to John and smiled. "Thanks for the use of your wife, Mr. Lovestone. We won't be long."
He climbed into the car, being careful not to step on any of the prostrate policemen and turned the ignition key.
"Just remember there are restrictions on the 'use' of my wife," John called out over the rumble of the motor. "Just because you're now John Lovestone, don't get any ideas about connubial rights!" A chorus of laughter sounded from the bevy of cops hidden in the car. Both Marion and Sgt. Jansen smiled broadly as the car pulled heavily away from the curb. Would he ever see his wife again? For the life of him he wished they had never gotten involved, especially at this time, when he and his wife were enjoying the best part of their relationship. A year ago, he wouldn't have minded so much, because a year ago he couldn't stand his young wife. She was dull, dry, sterile and sexless, but in a very few months, she had undergone an amazing metamorphosis. John never did find out the cause of this inestimable change in her attitude and behavior and he didn't really care. He was so elated to finally have a woman and a lover to live with, rather than a preacher and a prude, that causes and motives seemed academic and unimportant. All he knew was that Marion had suddenly come alive in sexual as well as other matters, and that was something he had all but given up hope for.
In the last few months, they had watched pornographic movies together, made love against the wall, performed oral intercourse on each other and done sultry nude dances in their own living room.
A far cry, he thought, from the Marion who remained a virgin for the first week and a half of our marriage!
Yes, they were alive, the Lovestones. They found each other exciting sexually and invigorating. As John often said, "My wife is the nicest piece of tail around!" And he meant it! The young couple no longer talked about love and a meaningful relationship. To John, Marion was a goddamned good lay and a great companion. What else could he ever hope for? To Marion, John was a friend, an advisor, a confidant and perhaps, most importantly, an indefatigable stud. They were as happy as a married couple could be, and they neither loved nor obeyed each other. Honor, respect and an inclination for raw sex had become the basis for their relationship.
So John Lovestone was disturbed at this time at the thought of his wife involving herself in an adventure that was potentially dangerous. Sitting in the general store, he sipped beer and listened to the store manager's interminable chatter, hearing little and responding less.
"'Course, you know what the trouble with this country is ... It's too big ... too many people looking after too many things for too many other people. Now you take, for instance, the automobile plant over to Bridgewell ... Now that's all that town's got, ain't it? You take them guys over there ... them workers in the factory. Now they work and live in Bridgewell, their kids go to school there, they go to church there, some of them was born and raised in Bridgewell and yet when there's a strike called up in Detroit, them guys in Bridgewell gotta strike too. Now, don't you see? They's got more in common with workers in Detroit than they has with their own community. Now, don't you see, they don't live in Detroit, they don't send their kids to school there, most of 'em probably don't even know nobody in Detroit, but...."
Three-fifteen p.m.: Still a mile from the cabin on Abbot Mountain Sgt. Jansen gave Marion some last minute instructions and advised her to relax as much as possible.
"If the cons are here and we get inside, then you can look as nervous as you want, but until then try to look like you haven't got a care in the world," he suggested.
When they reached the cabin, Sgt. Jansen climbed out of the car. Marion, still seated, yelled out as she had been told to do.
"Nora! Nora! You hoo!"
"Hey, you old sow's ear," Sgt. Jansen added to the commotion, "get out here."
Marion handed a suitcase and a box of food up to Sgt. Jansen, then climbed out of the car. The sergeant purposefully neglected to help her, believing that looked more like a married couple, and together they started up the path toward the cottage.
Inside there was a frantic shuffle of feet.
"Who the hell's that?" Charlie shouted in a whisper, grabbing Nora and pushing her to the window. At first she wondered what she should say, then suddenly it struck her. She had not seen them yet but the female voice sounded like Marion's. Her guess was that they had come up early for some reason or another. Her immediate impulse was to fling open the window and yell at them to turn back, but on second thought, she realized that with Marion and John they would be four against two and the odds on their being able to escape would be doubled.
"It sounds like Maron and John Lovestone, friends of ours from the city. They said they were coming up on Sunday, but I guess they decided to come for the whole weekend," Nora told Charlie, who seemed disturbed by the addition of two more people. It meant he would have to kill four. But, on the other hand, he knew he couldn't send them away. That would be the end of his and Mack's freedom.
"So invite them in," he told Nora, nodding toward the door.
"Like this?" she exclaimed, looking down at her nakedness.
"Just open door a few inches and yell to them before they come through the trees, then close it again. By the way, this female, what does she look like?"
"You'll see, soon enough."
Nora went to the door and opened it. As she did so, Charlie raised the rifle to her temple to remind her not to try to escape.
"Marion?"
"Yes."
"Come on in, I'm just changing from my bathing suit."
Charlie shut the door with his foot and directed Nora over to one corner of the room. He stood with Mack in the bedroom doorway, training the rifle on the door. Soon there was a sharp knocking and the door opened.
"Come on in," Charlie smiled delightedly, seeing that Marion was, indeed, an attractive woman. "Come in slowly or I'll put a hole through you."
Three-twenty-five p.m.: Sgt. Jansen was bound hand and foot and made to sit down beside Dave. Marion was left standing. Charlie, holding the rifle on the two women, looked long and hard at the shackled sergeant.
"What's your name?" he demanded.
Jansen hesitated a few seconds before answering. He did not want it to look like he had memorized the information.
"John Lovestone," he answered at length. "Where do you live?"
"Six seventy-three Wilsted Drive."
"What do you do for a living?"
"Same as him. I'm in insurance."
"Is this your wife?"
"Well, of course it is. Who the hell...."
"How old is she?"
"Twenty-four."
Charlie stopped questioning for a moment but still stared hard at the sergeant. Then he turned toward Marion and held out his hand. "Give me your purse."
Marion Lovestone's stomach jumped. Instinctively she turned to the policeman for advice, but she was on her own now. Already, only moments after their arrival, she was in danger of blowing the whole thing, but what could she do?
Haltingly, she handed her purse to Charlie and waited with her heart in her mouth. Had she done the right thing or had she given the sergeant away? She would soon know.
Fishing through the contents of the purse, Charlie came up with her driver's license. For a moment there was a ghostly silence. Then: "It says here that she was born on April the fourteenth, nineteen forty-six. Now I'm only a lowly criminal, but I'm pretty good at tallying up years, having had considerable time and inclination to do so, and according to my calculations, that makes your wife twenty-three, not twenty-four." Charlie scanned the people in the room for their reactions. Nora and Marion began to fidget, but Sgt. Jansen played it expertly. "Oh come on, what are you trying to make of it? I lose track for Chrissake. How old are you?"
Charlie did not reply, but he was thinking hard. "If this is some kind of set-up, if he isn't really her husband, they would have memorized their facts a lot better than this. Anyway, people do forget ages. I'm not sure of my own." Taking a seat on the couch, Charlie addressed himself to Marion. "Okay, lady, take off your clothes and join our nude therapy group."
"Now wait just a minute...." Jansen interjected.
"Shut up, you. Go on, lady. Let's get a look at the real you."
Marion looked at Nora and the latter nodded her head advisedly. Secretly she would be glad to have another naked woman in the cottage, especially her long time friend Marion. There was an odd kind of security in it.
Marion was wearing slacks and a sweater. Crossing her hands in front of her and gripping the bottom of the sweater, she pulled it over her head to reveal her ample, youthful bosom harnessed tightly in a crisp, baby blue bra. Unbuttoning her slacks, she slid them down and stepped out of them, stalling for time by folding them neatly and throwing them over the back of a chair. But she only delayed the inevitable, for there was no way she could escape stripping completely in front of these people. She did not mind baring herself among strangers, but she would rather not have done it without her husband present. Finally, she reached around behind her and unhooked her bra strap, causing the garment to fall away exposing her divinely sculptured breasts. They were not quite as full and round as Nora's, but they were mature and firm, swooping out like ski jumps, their dark nipples coming to a sharp point. When she bent over to roll down her panties, her breasts swayed lazily like ripe pears on a tree in a gentle breeze. When she was stark naked she stood at attention and waited for her next command.
"I think Mack and I would like to see you two do the thing-you know, make out-right there on the floor," Charlie leered.
Marion looked like she was going to say something, but a quick glance at the bruises on Nora's face, neck and shoulders and breasts made her think better of it. She was, after all, no longer a prude, not since that afternoon in Bob Raftner's apartment. She had never told her husband about that episode and, although she was sure he suspected, he never asked her to and as long as there no feelings of guilt or jealousy between them, she saw no reason for telling him. He, after all, had benefited as much from that event as she had.
Marion had been attending university classes at the time Bob Raftner was an associate professor there. When her grades in English began to slip, she asked Bob to give her some private tutoring. That's how she ended up in his apartment. What happened after that had no explanation and, as they both agreed when it was over, needed none. While trying to explain to her the value and power of words, Raftner had rolled a marijuana cigarette, which he cajoled her into smoking with him. Then, as she began to float euphorically through time and space he read in his most seductive baritone a long poem by Dylan Thomas, entitled "The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait," which alluded constantly to male-female relationships and to sex. When he had finished, he asked Marion how she felt. Her reply was short and to the point: "Dirty!"
"Of course," Raftner shouted, "of course you feel dirty. That's because you had your cunt tickled by a dead poet. Instead of using his fingers, he used words-soft ones, hard ones, ones that are long and smooth like a man's cock, others that are wet like your pussy. Don't you see how words live?" he demanded emphatically, falling to his knees and pressing the palm of his hand against the moist material of her panties.
Marion changed completely at that moment. The sum of her life up to that point was cast away and a new life began.
The dirty words he droned into her ear opened her cunt and brought her nipples up like raspberries on her breasts. She flung her arms around him and dragged him to the floor on top of her. Taking off only her panties, she opened her legs to him and accepted his hard manhood.
"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!" she sobbed hysterically. Associate professor Bob Raftner did just that. He drove his rigid cock up to the balls in her molten flesh and moved it back and forth. And her love-starved pussy sucked desperately on his meat, sucking, sucking until it sucked out the white lava, and then it went limp and lay open like a gaping wound, its desire for cock sated for a few hours.
But the odd thing about her affair with Raftner was that Marion never had any desire to perpetuate it. She was extremely grateful for what he had done for her, but only because it opened up a new part to her and to her husband. It was John, after all, whom she had chosen to spend her life with and the affair would not change that. As for the tutoring, it didn't do much good in the long run. Marion flunked English and several other subjects and dropped out of college that year, but she never lost her appreciation of Dylan Thomas.
During the months that followed she and her husband developed an exciting sexual relationship that brought them closer than they had ever been to each other. They no longer let their marriage interfere with their sex lives.
So Marion was certainly no prude and, although she didn't relish the thought of making lesbian love, her objection was not of a moral nature. It was merely a matter of personal taste and as such was not worth the risk of getting her head bashed in.
The two girls went down on the floor and awkwardly put their arms around each other. They weren't exactly sure what it was that Lesbians did when they made love, but some coaching from Charlie solved that problem.
"Kiss each other," he urged, leaning forward on the couch. "Kiss each other hard on the mouth."
Nora and Marion looked at each other, seeming to communicate without words. Each gave the other a reassuring pat on the shoulder and slowly ... slowly ... closed the distance between their mouths.
Charlie and Mack watched in transfixed silence.
Only their loins stirred. Nor could Sgt. Jansen hide his fascination. He was impressed with how bravely the girls did what he was sure must have been repulsive to them. He hoped to Christ that he and Dave Bond were not commanded to do the same thing.
Dave was the only one in the room who didn't witness the Lesbian affair. How quickly-in the course of only one day-the tables had turned. It was now he who was the prude, disgusted by the enthusiasm his wife displayed in doing what the cons told her to do. He could not get the image of her being fucked up the cunt and ass at the same time-and enjoying it-out of his mind.
CHAPTER TEN
FRIDAY, three-forty-five p.m.: Nora's lips met Marion's. For a moment, both girls were hesitant and shy, but the constant bellicose directing from Charlie forced them over that barrier. Their lips pressed together, tighter, tighter. Their mouths opened slightly and suddenly they were locked together passionately. Their passion was not altogether fake. Both Nora and Marion found in the other's warm, searching lips a security, a communication which they sadly needed. It seemed to them that at least as long as they were kissing nothing bad could happen. And so, gripping each other lovingly, they kept their lips pinned together.
"I said make love!" Charlie bellowed from his ringside seat. "Use your hands."
Nora led the way. She knew, better than Marion, what would happen if they did not comply with Charlie's wishes. Letting her hand slip from its innocuous position on Marion's back, she brought it down over her rump, over her thigh, up between her legs, over her stomach to her breast. There, she worked it feverishly. Marion, still somewhat inhibited, responded simply by drawing out abstract patterns on Nora's back and rump with her index finger.
Suddenly Nora's tongue left the security of its own mouth to enter Marion's, making a deep, busy excursion over gums and teeth. The effect was electrifying. Marion broke away from Nora's kiss, her breath shallow and uncertain, her body alive and stirring. Nora took the opportunity to slide across the floor until her head was level with her best friend's breast. Taking the gland in her hand, she squeezed it up and inserted its nipple into her mouth.
"Nora ... Nora, please...." Marion whispered, uneasy about what was happening inside her at the hands of another woman. Does this mean I'm a Lesbian? she wondered.
Determined, it seemed, to suck all of Marion's resistance out through her right nipple, Nora drew hard on the rigid brown nodule with taut lips, bringing her breast to a sharp point, letting it snap back, gripping and sucking it out again, until finally she pulled Marion across the brink of sexual desire. No longer holding back, Marion let her body relax and fall toward Nora, pushing her breast deeper into the latter's mouth.
Her cunt now reacting to the persuasive stimulation, Marion opened her legs immodestly and let Nora's hand find its way to the center of her womanhood-her clit!
Dipping her fingers into the pool of lubricant that was Marion's cunt, Nora dragged them up over the clitoris and began slowly but intensely to manipulate the button of pleasure.
Inexorably, the sensation mounted. Nora's hand moved faster and she complemented that stimulation with another French kiss. Marion lost control of herself. Her body became a mass of seething sexuality, arms and legs pumping, abdominal muscles expanding and contracting spastically, breasts heaving against Nora's. There was only one way to go now-over the top!
Difficult as it was for Sgt. Jansen to keep from being transfixed by the Lesbian activity in front of him, he knew he must concentrate on other things. He knew Charlie Foster's record only too well and he made no mistake about the fact that the criminal genius would kill all four of the hostages before he left. That's why he had to think fast of a way to save all, or at least some of their lives.
Most, if not all of the policemen, he reckoned, would have managed to get out of the car by that time, but they would be of no use unless he could bring about a situation where they could invade the cabin without endangering the people inside. But how? How? A check of the cottage told him that there was no other entrance or exit besides the front door and that, although there were several good places to hide in case there was a quick outburst of gunfire, they were no good if Charlie was left standing, because he would soon be able to seek them out and kill them one by one like ducks in a barrel.
No, some means had to be devised to get the rifle away from the cons. Then and only then would the four hostages be safe. Sgt. Jansen set his mind to work. He was wondering about the hand gun the store manager had talked about " ... under a loose board in the bedroom"
Four o'clock p.m.:
As an expression of pleasure-pain contorted Marion's face, Nora held her tight, massaging her cunt tenderly. There was a gentle love between them that probably could not exist between man and woman. It was not a lasting thing, only a brief moment of feminine conquest in a world dominated by the cruelties of the male sex. Nora was pleased to have done her friend this favor.
But no sooner had Marion climaxed than Charlie was thinking of what he could have them do next to keep the sexual circus going. He had elected to let them live another three hours, during which time he expected to be entertained at their expense. He rejected Mack's suggestion to have the men "go at it," because as he said, "We've seen nothing but that for the last eight years." Instead he prodded the girls over to where the men were sitting and ordered them to stand astride the men's heads-Nora over Sgt. Jansen and Marion over Dave.
"Eat!" was his one word command and both men obeyed with only a modicum of resistance. "Eat!"
Sgt. Jansen and Dave leaned the top parts of their bodies forward and tilted their heads back. Both mouths met both cunts at precisely the same time.
I won't tell my wife about this part of the case, Jansen thought, his tongue reaching out to trace the periphery of Nora's slit. In his ten years on the force he had seen and done many odd things in the course of duty, like the time he had busted in on a prostitute and had her indignant client masturbate on his trousers from behind, or when he had gone up to knock on a car window in the local Lovers' Lane and found a thirteen-year-old minister's daughter sucking a boy off, or when he had to give mouth to mouth resuscitation and cardiac massage to a nude actress who was dying from an overdose of sleeping pills and got a painful erection doing it; but never had he been called upon to eat a woman's cunt-not until now, that is. But like a real professional, he did his duty well. (As he had often said, "Why do a job halfway when, with but a little more effort, you can do it well?")
Sharing his sentiments, Nora leaned her groin into his face and delighted as his tongue found the center of her cunt groove and penetrated her. In response, her pussy opened wider to him, as though to engulf his whole face. The wet, soft lips of it almost seemed to turn inside out to expose more surface to the stimulation. As he extended his tongue as far as it would go, she squatted on it and felt it tickle the inner cunt walls of her fuzzy passion pit.
Now, as periodically she had done throughout the day, Nora was stunned by the change in her attitude about sex. What had happened to bring about this unbelievable transformation she did not know, but there it was. The girl spreading her cunt over the tongue of a man she didn't even know, was the same girl, physically at least, who had often expressed shock and disgust at her husband's sexual overtures, mild as they always were. What causes a woman to wake up suddenly in the middle of her life and realize her buried sexual appetite?
Was it simply that the forcible entry of the cons had primed her, broken her second hymen, the most important one, the psychological one? Nora didn't know. What she did know; however-and this was the only important thing to her now-was that she had been misinterpreting the meaning of sex and certainly underestimating the pleasure of it. She could have no way of knowing what Dave's reaction to her change of heart would be if both of them were to live through this ordeal but, even though she still loved him, she could not concern herself very much with whether or not he could still go on being her husband, for now that her sexual desires had been awakened, she would need a man who knew how to satisfy them; if Dave for some reason or another, found it impossible to do so, she would simply have to find someone else. One thing this nightmare had taught her was that in life it is primarily your own needs that you should look after. Others must be equipped to look after their own. Any other arrangement is false and necessarily doomed to collapse.
Dave's mouth action on Marion was not yet nearly as energetic as Jansen's was on Nora, but he was getting there and it was jealousy that was motivating him. He was even more incensed at his wife's activity than before. Earlier in the day, it had pleased him to see his wife being raped, humiliated and beaten. He had even participated. But to see her actually enjoying the perverted acts that were being performed on her and that she was being forced to perform, irritated him immensely-and with her now only a few feet away, cooperating so vigorously with the stranger who was mixing his saliva with her cunt juices ... well, that was the last straw. What he had started half-heartedly, by pushing his mouth against Marion's already puffy cunt, while watching, out of the comer of his eye, his wife and Jansen indulging lavishly in the art of cunt lapping, he now pursued with a vengeance. All his anger and frustration and jealousy, he channeled into his lips and tongue, nibbling, poking, sucking furiously, hoping to bring Marion to an orgasm before Nora arrived and thereby proving how enthusiastically he had sucked her.
Keeping his wife and the cop in his peripheral vision, he copied the latter's technique, for when it came to eating a woman, Dave was a rank amateur. When Jansen pressed his whole mouth against Nora's cunt and appeared to be gobbling her up, Dave did the same with Marion. When Jansen drew his mouth away and played only the tip of his tongue around Nora's clit, Dave aped him, trying to put just a bit more passion in his actions then Jansen did.
Both girls swirled drunkenly, their knees growing weak, their breath short, their cunts swollen, wet and hanging open like hunks of disconnected flesh, contacting rhythmically with every flick of the lappers' tongues, but before either of them climaxed, Charlie ordered them to reverse the roles.
The men, their feet tied, sat down and spread their knees open. Nora unzipped the sergeant's fly and fished out his cock. It was as hard as marble. For a few seconds, she played with it, slipping the foreskin back and forth over the arched shaft, then kissing it softly at first. She placed herself in a comfortable position and drew her lips back and forth several times over the head. Finally, she plunged it into the hot cave of her mouth and Jansen's head reeled in ecstasy.
Marion, too, accepted her role without complaint. She cupped Dave's balls delicately and kissed them then, nostrils flared, breasts flattened against his thighs, she engulfed him completely, driving her tongue hard into the sperm slit. It was evident from the second she took his cock in her mouth that Marion knew a lot more about fellatio than Nora did.
The two girls performed well and in no time both men, but especially Dave, were on the way to orgasms. But then, suddenly, something happened that put Dave momentarily out of the race. It was the realization that in the position he was sitting in, his hands, which were stretched out behind him, were only a few feet from the loose board in the bedroom floor, the loose board under which lay a .38 caliber revolver. The gun had been on his mind since early in the morning, but this was the first time he had managed to get close enough to really have a chance of getting it. But how could he close the distance without giving himself away? How?
Meanwhile, Nora had managed to bring Jansen to a climax. Gripping his cock firmly in both hands as it jerked repeatedly, she smothered the explosion of his semen with her mouth. When it was over, she kissed his wet cock and shriveled balls several times, then set up and wiped the come from her chin.
Seeing that Dave and Marion had not yet finished, Charlie was assailed by the idea of a further variation of the oral sex act. Excitedly he ordered them to perform it on each other at the same time and without knowing it, he had just supplied Dave with the solution to his problem. In the process of assuming the sixty-nine position, Dave managed to get his hands over to the loose board and since they were out of the convicts' line of vision, he could work freely to lift the board and pick up the gun. Driving his face against Marion's cunt, he tried to look engrossed in what he was doing so that the cons would not check the activities of his hands. Feverishly, he worked his tongue up and down the groove of her pussy and she continued to mouth his cock. He only hoped neither of them climaxed before he could reach the pistol.
Working cautiously, so as not to make a sound that would tip them off, Dave lifted the loose board and placed it silently on the floor. Now to get the gun, which lay several inches below floor level. Arching his back as though to get better leverage against Marion's vagina, he managed to get one finger hooked in the trigger guard and lifted the revolver precariously out of the hole in the floor.
He had it! But now came the hardest part, the part he hadn't considered, namely, how to get his hands in front of him to aim the weapon effectively. He knew as long as his hands were tied behind his back, he represented no threat to anyone, for he knew that even if he were able to stretch his hands around to one side and aim the gun from there, the aim would not be accurate. He might easily shoot and miss and that would be the end of the four of them. No, somehow he had to get his hands in front of him. It was that or nothing.
Explaining to John Lovestone how semen stains got on his pants was going to be embarrassing, to say the least. Sgt. Jansen wondered who would be the one to tell him. But that was hardly the kind of thing he wanted to concern himself with right then. A more important problem was whether or not any of them would live to see John Lovestone or anyone else again. At four-thirty, time was running out.
Jansen guessed that some of the cops might be right up to the cabin by now but, knowing that the slightest mistake might cost the lives of some or all of the people inside, they would not make a move until they got the word from him. The word they had been told to listen for was simply, "NOW!" Until they heard that word, they would be able to do very little to help the people inside.
Dave Bond had decided that so long as Charlie was watching, he would not be able to get his hands in front of him and that until either he or Marion or both of them had climaxed, he could continue to watch. And so, with the pistol held firmly in his shackled hands, Dave settled down to concentrate on eating and being eaten.
For a long time it was difficult for him to relax, but once he did, he could feel that old familiar burning in the head of his cock that told him he was soon to blow. Overcoming the stiff pain in his neck, he continued to lay his tongue across the length of Marion's tingling twat, hoping to give her the same pleasure she was giving him, but that was not the way things would be. Before he could bring her to that peak, his own body jerked involuntarily, driving his cock deep into her throat, spewing semen like a volcano. It was all over and as much as Dave would have liked to lie there and just enjoy the utter euphoria of the moment, he knew that the time had come to make his move. When he had rocked himself to a sitting position, Marion flashed him a sticky white smile. He returned a nervous grin. He realized at that point that his jealousy of Nora had vanished completely. It seemed that all barriers between them had been knocked down. There was nothing they had to hide from each other now. Indeed, after this, what was there that they could possibly hide?
Dave turned his grin toward Nora and she returned one of her own. It seemed strange that this warm moment should come at a time when they had both just committed perverse adultery in front of each other and at a time that could end in death any minute.
"Hey, you!" Charlie growled. Marion turned to face him. "Yeah, you-come here! I've got something else for you to do!"
Marion spun around on her heels and stood up to approach Charlie, who was sitting on the sofa. Now was Dave's chance. By standing up, Marion had blocked the line of vision of both Charlie and Mack momentarily. It was now or never.
Quickly, he lifted his naked butt and slid his hands under him. As he did so the barrel of the revolver banged on the floor, causing him to sit down too soon, pinning one of his hands. Mack hearing the dull thud, leaned to one side to look around Marion.
"HEY!"
Dave struggled frantically, ripping his hands out from under his ass....
"Hey, Charlie...."
Desperately, Dave slid his hands down under his legs to his ankles and then tried to hoist up his feet to get the gun free. At that moment, alerted by Mack's exclamation, Charlie leaped to his feet and hurled Marion to one side. Seeing the pistol in Dave's hand, he seized the rifle which he had temporarily leaned against the sofa. Now it was just a contest of reflexes. Dave still had one foot caught in the rope that bound his hands. Violently, he jerked his right leg and freed his hands. As Charlie leaned over to grab the rifle Dave took quick aim at his head. One shot had to do it! If he missed with this bullet, Charlie would surely blow a hole through him. It would be all over then.
Looking down the short barrel of the pistol, the last thing Dave saw was Charlie's temple. He squeezed the trigger.
CLICK!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FRIDAY, four-forty-five p.m.: John Lovestone thumbed nervously through the glossy pages of a Playboy magazine, comparing each naked smiling female with his wife. This one has bigger boobs but she also has bigger thighs as well. None of them has her nice round butt ... He was hardly aware of the steady, monotonous chatter of the storekeeper who, on account of business being slack, had seized upon the opportunity to bend a new ear.
"You talk about Playboy bunnies ... They're obsolete now you know ... oh yes. This fellow Hefner, he wanted to change America's puritanical ways ... he was the great liberator ... now he's the puritanical one. His centerfold girls aren't really nude, you know. They're covered in an inch of make-up and he has a look-but-don't-touch rule in all his Playboy Clubs. That's puritanical. Nowadays you can go to New York and get pictures of girls with their pussies smiling at the camera-crotch hair and all-no make-up ... just the real bare, naked girl ... cover to cover clit ... And I hear tell of bars now on the West Coast that have topless waitresses who'll let you squeeze their titties if you want to. So you see, Hefner is out of date and now you hear him talking about the disgraceful display of nudity in the theaters. Some turnabout, eh?"
John nodded his head absent-mindedly. In a way, he resented the storekeeper's intrusion on his privacy, but in a way it was a comfort as well-that's why he didn't get up and leave the store. As long as the old man didn't ask more than the occasional nod or smile from him, John could tolerate his incessant drivel and it was, after all, better than being all alone at a time like this.
In the cottage there was a chilling silence. For several seconds after Dave had pulled the trigger of the pistol, everyone remained motionless, waiting for Charlie's reaction. Charlie himself was stunned for a moment. For that split second he thought his time had come. In a flash, he looked down the barrel of the .38 caliber pistol, his emotions roared to a crescendo and back down to a calm resolve. He had prepared himself for his demise. In a crouched position, his hand on the rifle, he had frozen. He knew he would never be able to get the rifle up in time. There was nothing left to do but stare death in the face. For a moment that was both too short in actual time and too long in psychological time to measure, he waited for the blast and instantaneous sting of the bullet.
For Dave, too, time had elongated drastically. It seemed to take forever to get his hands free of his feet, to aim and to pull the trigger. During that time, he watched Charlie's facial expressions run the gamut from shock through fear and hysteria, to capitulation. In a second, he expected to see that face disintegrate.
As his index finger curled around the trigger, Dave felt a strange sense of communication with the man he was about to destroy, the communication that always exists between the condemned man and the executioner, between the hunted and the hunter. It was the same tacit communication that was driven many a professional hangman mad, for there is nothing so all penetrating as the silence of a dying man.
For the briefest of moments after the misfire, neither man knew whether the gun had gone off or not. After all the dull CLICK at that moment was as loud as an atomic blast and the shock it alone caused was enough to give cardiac arrest to anyone whose nerves were the slightest bit unsteady.
Realizing that the gun had misfired, Charlie continued to raise the rifle. Dave, no longer able to control his nerves, panicked and squeezed the trigger five times in rapid succession. Each time the result was the same, nothing but the sound of metal smashing against metal. As a last resort, he tried to throw the weapon, but with his hands tied this attempt, too, ended in dismal failure. The gun crashed against the floor and slid past Charlie benignly.
Charlie brought the rifle up to his hip in line with Dave's head. For a long while there was silence. Dave's face now showed the horror of the condemned man, while Charlie's reflected the cold, implacable hardness of a killer-ash-grey, drawn with eyes that exuded all the warmth and compassion of a cobra.
Dave felt a mild tremor in his hands and feet and as Charlie stretched out the moment of death, it built to a quaking of his entire body. This was the moment when the condemned man screams at his executioner: "For the love of God, get it over with!" Dave was about to do just that when all at once a wrinkle appeared in Charlie's chiseled face, a wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. It broadened and the con's lips reshaped themselves into a grin, then a smile, then-like a volcanic mountain bringing up its guts-an uproarious laugh, a laugh that snowballed to such a hysterical pitch that it betrayed to Mack, to Nora, to Marion and to Sgt. Jansen the fact that Charlie Foster had been scared shitless.
His knees beginning to quiver, Charlie slumped to the sofa and belly-laughed until his eyes ran with brine. Mack joined him with an uncertain "I don't know what we're laughing at, but I'll laugh anyway" type of laugh.
Together, the two cons rolled about on the sofa, holding their aching guts, wheezing, choking, sputtering-Mack confused, Charlie desperate-but through it all, Charlie never took the rifle or his eyes off Dave. When he had cleared his system, he wiped his eyes and pulled himself forward on the couch. He cleared his throat and let his smile take its time departing his face, then with a sincerity that seemed out of place, he addressed himself to Dave.
"Nice try! Nice try! I must confess I didn't think you were capable of such a thing, but by God you showed me, didn't you? It was a gamble, as are all brave acts. Had the gun gone off, you'd have been free right now and I'd have been dead. You'd have been the winner and I the loser, but that's not the way things turned out. Instead, you're the loser and I'm the winner. I suppose we can conclude from that, that God is on my side-either that, or he's indifferent. I expect it's the latter. I expect God doesn't care any more what goes on down here, no more than a scientist gives a damn about an experiment that went wrong. Anyway, here we are-right back where we started, except that I now have more respect for you. Of course that doesn't matter, because I'm still going to kill you, but at least I'll have a better idea of what kind of man I'm killing."
Noting the apparent logic of Charlie's words, Sgt. Jansen decided to try "talking him down." Perhaps, just perhaps, he had not thought about the consequences of his act.
"Look, a man like you, intelligent, well-read, not too old, you have a lot to live for-even if you do have to spend some time in prison. You can get books (here. You might even be able to write. I don't see why you'd want to throw all that away. If you gave yourself up now and if none of us pressed charges-and I don't think any of us would-you'd only have a few years tacked onto your sentence, which you might get knocked off for good behavior. But if you kill us, well ... you don't have a hope. You'll be caught and...."
Sgt. Jansen had no way of knowing just how far away from the intended target his words would be, but he soon found out.
"Hey, hey," Charlie interrupted, "you sure you're in the insurance business? You sound more like a cop to me. That's the way screws talk, because of their lack of brains. But I'll tell you why I'm going to kill you and why it's no use trying to talk me out of it. You see, I haven't been in prison for the last eight years, I've been in limbo. What you people on the outside don't understand is that a man doesn't become a criminal just by breaking the law. Breaking the law only makes him a potential criminal. It isn't until he's been to jail that he becomes a full-fledged crook. It's like a man singing in the shower-that doesn't make him a singer. It isn't until he goes to school and studies his craft that he becomes a singer. That's what prison is all about. It's a place where a man can go to learn the crafts of a criminal. While you're in prison you're neither alive nor dead. You're in between-like God-belonging half to the living and half to the dead. And the only reason you want to get out is to prove to yourself and to the world just how godly you are. Now that I'm out, I'm going to employ my powers as a god. I'm going to do what only gods can do. I'm going to give and take life. I've already done the giving-I've shot billions of sperm cells into the lady's cunt. If they fall on barren ground, that's her fault. If not, then I've started another human life. And now the time has come for me to exercise my other godly power-to take life. And if you're trying to tell me that society will bum me for this-well, I can tell you that society put me in the chair eight years ago and they've been burning me ever since. Besides, you can't kill me. I'm dead already. Dead, yet alive-godly. You can put me through those last few terrifying moments before you pull the switch, but that's only because, like God, I still have a few more human emotions left.
But as far as my mind is concerned, you, all of you and the rest of the mortals out there, you killed that long ago...."
Charlie interrupted himself to tell Mack to tie up Nora then, without pausing, went back to his lecture. "Now, Mr. Bond, here, he tried to perform a godly act without the godly power to do so and now he must face the consequences ... That's something you didn't count on, isn't it, Dave? Did you give it any thought at all? Was your act brave or foolhardy? Or was it just plainly the only thing you could do under the circumstances? At least you didn't just lie there passively, which is what a goodly number of people would have done under the same circumstances. I'm alive and you're doomed-such is life, but I have no one to thank and you have no one to blame."
Sgt. Jansen now knew that he was confronted with a well-spoken madman. What he had mistaken for logic had turned out to be insanity dressed in logic. Watching anxiously as Mack tied Nora's hands tightly behind her back and secured her right ankle to the leg of the sofa and Charlie greased a beer bottle with butter, he wondered if perhaps he ought to yell out the command to his men and hope that they could hit Charlie before Charlie could kill any of his hostages. But what if Charlie was able to get a shot or two off before the men got him? What if he killed Nora or Marion or Dave? Would he, William Jansen, ever be able to live with the guilty feeling that maybe-just maybe-had he waited, some opportunity might have arisen whereby Charlie could have been disarmed before he had a chance to shoot? But, on the other hand, how long could he wait? He had only a vague idea of where his men were situated. Would they be able to shoot in time to stop the madman?
Sgt. Jansen had only a few minutes to make up his mind, for at that moment Charlie had begun his scheme. With Mack holding Nora's left leg open, Charlie inserted the neck of the slippery beer bottle into her cunt and bumped it twice with the heel of his hand. Nora let out a blood curdling scream that was all but completely muffled by Mack's strong right hand over her mouth.
Sgt. Jansen tried to leap to his feet. His mouth came open and he took a deep breath to scream the command to his men, but before a sound came out, Charlie whirled around and clipped the cop in the mouth with the butt of the rifle. Both Nora and Jansen were unconscious and all was silent again. Dave and Marion were transfixed with horror.
All but an inch of the beer bottle had disappeared up Nora's vagina and there was already some blood dripping out from between her legs. Charlie expressed his disappointment at the fact that she had passed out. "I would have liked her to be conscious for this," he explained callously.
Getting to his feet he paraded back and forth beside her, bouncing the rifle in his hands. "The bottle is packed in there so tightly that just the weight of this rifle alone falling on it will shatter it into tiny pieces, each one gouging into the tender flesh of her cunt. By the time we leave tonight, she will have bled to death. So will the rest of you in your own way. It's too bad Nora had to be the first-she's given me much pleasure today. But we have to start with someone."
Charlie took his finger from the trigger of the rifle and let the weapon slip through his hand so that it was perpendicular to the floor, then, grasping it by the barrel, he lifted it above his head.
Sgt. Jansen, barely recovering consciousness, could make out only a blurred image of what was happening. Desperately, he strained to call out the signal to his men, but to his horror, he had no voice.
Summoning every ounce of energy that was left in his body, Dave overcame his paralysis and leaped toward Charlie, forgetting about the rope that bound his feet. He crashed heavily to the floor several feet short.
Suddenly the front window shattered, and at the same instant there was the sound of a shot, distant and thin in the clear mountain air. Charlie staggered, and his hand flew to the back of his head. At the same time he dropped the rifle. He swore and staggered and almost fell. Dave made a go for the rifle, but his bound feet held him back. Mack scooped the rifle up and held it to the two men, at the ready. "Charlie!" he shouted, sounding panicky and frantic. "Charlie, you all right."
"I-I think so," Charlie said. Then the two men looked at each other with a startled look, as though they had just realized what had happened. Both of them hit the floor at once, like trained infantrymen under fire, just as another shot rang out and splinters were hammered from the back wall of the cottage. "They're shootin'!" Mack said stupidly. "Somebody's shootin' at us!"
Charlie crawled to where Marion sat on the floor, her hands and feet bound. He grabbed the girl and pulled her upright, standing behind her. "Get the other dame," he ordered Mack. "Quick!
Give me the rifle!" Without question, Mack handed the rifle to him, and he held it out in front of him, resting the barrel on the woman's shoulder. "Now let's see you sons-of-bitches shoot!" he yelled, wondering whether they could hear him. One thing was certain, he thought. They could see him. And they could see this cunt, too-and that was the important thing. They weren't going to shoot again while he was holding her.
Mack managed to get the ropes off of Nora. He pulled her off of the table and stood her in front of him as Charlie had done to Marion. She whimpered in pain as the bottle rubbed the inside of her belly. Then Mack saw the gun, the revolver, still lying on the floor, and picked it up, an idea forming in his mind with uncharacteristic speed. He held the gun against Nora's head. It wouldn't fire, but the bastards outside didn't know that, probably. "You make a peep about this gun, and I'll strangle you, bitch," he whispered to Nora. She stood still, apparently still in considerable pain from the movement of the bottle inside of her. "What are we gonna do now, Charlie?" he asked.
Charlie couldn't help admiring the way Mack had thought quickly for once, and grabbed that pistol. It might not be any good, but those cops didn't know that. And he had no doubt that cops was what they were. These two bastards had brought the cops up with them. That was the only way it could have happened. Now Charlie and Mack would use the same car to get away. "We're gonna make a run for it, that's what," he said to Mack. "We're gonna have a little date with these two lovelies, and take them out of all this." He laughed tightly, nervous but excited. Maybe he'd shoot a cop or two while he was at it. "Come on!" He dragged the bound Marion to the door, opened it and shoved her through in front of him. He stopped in the doorway so that no one could get a shot at his back. He pulled back, exposed the hammer of the rifle and pressed the barrel against the girl's head. The cops were all around them, one of them right close to the window, to Charlie's side. He squeezed the trigger of the rifle and held the hammer back with his thumb. "Anyone want a free shot at me?" he asked. "Go ahead. You, over there. Go ahead and shoot. You'll kill me all right. And you'll kill this bitch at the same time. A high-speed hollow point in the brain will usher her out of this vale of tears just as fast as that goddamn thirty-eight of yours will do to me." He grinned. "Come on out, Mack."
Mack squeezed through the doorway beside him, escorting the Bond woman with him. She was still moaning in pain.
"Get that cop's gun," Charlie said, motioning his head toward the one at the window. "And if he gives you any trouble, kill that bitch."
Mack moved toward the cop, who stood transfixed, not knowing which way to turn. He started to step back, but then apparently thought better of it and handed over the gun without any trouble. Mack dropped the gun he had been holding on Nora Bond and laughed. Now he had the real thing, Charlie thought. They were both armed now, for real. Mack swung the gun up over his head and brought it down on the side of the cop's head, right above the ear. The cop fell with a little murmur of sound.
"All right, Mack," Charlie said. "Now, let's get to that car." The keys were in it, just as he had expected. He pushed the woman into the front seat and then slid in next to her, behind the wheel. "We're gonna ride out of here now, cops," he shouted. "Any of you want to take a shot at us, you go right ahead. But you better kill both of us at once, or at least one of these dames is gonna die." Mack slid into the back seat, with the other dame, still moaning aloud. Charlie started the engine and backed the car around, aimed it down the mountain road and slipped it into drive. When he stepped on the gas, the car shot out with exhilarating power. He drove fast, to keep from giving the cops a good shot, and also to make it clear to them that even if they did kill him, they might end up with some dead dames on their hands when the car crashed, at high speed, into a tree.
In a moment they were out of sight of the house, still moving fast. Charlie heard Mack sigh deeply, but he withheld his own sigh. They weren't safe yet. They'd never be safe until they were out of the country-and maybe not even then. But at least they could get away from this place, and these cops, and to some place where their whereabouts wouldn't be known.
And then the idea hit him. The one place where the cops would never think to look for them now....
CHAPTER TWELVE
When the officers entered the cabin the first thing they saw was Sgt. Jansen, tied up and semi-conscious. Then they noticed Dave Bond, also tied, and babbling hysterically about his wife. They untied the men and used the walkie-talkie to radio down for transportation and a doctor. They also informed the men at the bottom of the mountain that the car was headed down that way.
"Who the hell are you, some kind of a cop?" Dave asked when he managed to get hold of himself enough to speak normally.
"Yeah, I'm a cop," Jansen said.
"Well, you've certainly done a good job op this one, haven't you? Now they have my wife and another woman, and Christ knows where they're going to take them."
"Okay, so we didn't pull it off the way we expected," Jansen said. "It was a try. A calculated risk."
"Well, maybe I don't like the way you calculated." As soon as he had spoken the words Dave regretted them. The man had been on the spot, had had to make a decision. And he had put his own life on the line in doing it.
"Now, look," Jansen said. "I don't-"
"Forget it," Dave interrupted. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. But I can't help it if I'm a bit upset, now can I?"
"No, of course not," Jansen said, mollified. He held out his hand. "My name's Jansen. Sergeant Jansen. And you don't know how sorry I am about your wife. And the other woman, too. We'll get them back if it's humanly possible." Jansen turned to the other officers. "Where did he take them?"
"Down the mountain, Sarge," One of the uniformed policemen said. "They took the car and spun out."
"And you couldn't stop them? Did it occur to any of you geniuses to shoot the tires?"
"Sure, but he threatened to kill the women if any of us fired a shot. We didn't know what to do." j;
"All right, all right. Let's get out of here. I want this place cordoned off tighter than Fort Knox."
"That's already been done," the other cop reminded him. "They can't get out of here."
"I wouldn't have thought they could get away from this cabin, but they did," Jansen said testily. "What about the lake area? You got that patrolled?"
"Sure, I don't know they'd get out that way, though. That lake is down a thousand foot cliff, and it's deeper than some parts of the ocean."
"Well, don't wonder about it. You just get on the radio and make sure that everyone, no matter where, is sharp. Those bastards are slippery. And that goddamn Foster is a genius. I don't want to take any chances of losing them."
"Okay, Sarge," the cop said, heading out the door. The transportation and the doctor arrived then.
"We're all right," Jansen said to the doctor. "Let's get the hell out of here."
It wasn't hard talking Mack into the idea. Mack was obsessed by the idea that he was going to be caught in the long run anyway, and he was willing to go along with just about anything Charlie came up with. He had given it a little bit of thought, but then he had agreed, and Charlie had known he would.
They drove the car toward the side of the mountain where the lake was. It was Charlie's hope that the cops would think they had been trying to head for the other side of the mountain, and then to drive down through some of the less sparsely wooded parts and sneak out without using the road. When they were in the area of the cliff, they slowed down and drove slowly and carefully. It was getting dark, and they didn't want to use the headlights for obvious reasons. They stopped just a hundred feet from the cliff.
"Now we wait," Charlie said. And they waited. They waited for an hour, to give them plenty of time, those cops, and then they started the engine and drove the car close to the cliff. They had taken the bottle out of Nora's slit, because if the car should be spotted, they didn't want her dead or dying-She was too valuable as a hostage. They sat there, listening to the woman cry, and enjoying the sound, because it was something they hadn't heard in years and because it showed their power over these two broads. They waited until it was really dark, and then they got out of the car, dragging the women with them. Charlie had untied Marion's feet, and used the rope to tie Nora's hands behind her. Both of the women could walk now, but they'd find it hard running through thick woods, naked, without shoes, and without the use of their hands.
Charlie let the emergency brake off, and they shoved the car toward the cliff. At the last moment he had an idea. He stuck in his foot and stamped on the brake pedal, set the brake again, and then got in and started the engine. He found a makeup case in the back seat and set it on the gas pedal. Then he turned on the headlights. "Now they got to hear or see this thing," he said. He pushed in the clutch and shoved the car into low gear, then let out the clutch and watched the car jerk and limp its way to the cliff. For a moment it looked as though the thing wasn't going to go over, and they both held their breaths. But then the car gave one last spin of its wheels, and went over the cliff. It dropped like a meteor into the lake, hitting with a sound that was half splash, half crash. Charlie and Mack both laughed with glee. "Okay," he said. "Now we head back. And let's be careful."
They made it back to the cabin about midnight, going by a circular route, watching out all the time, and working to keep the women in line. The place was dark, just as Charlie had known it would be. There was no reason for the cops to stay there any longer, especially after that car crash. They must think that all four of them had gone down with that car. And that means that they wouldn't be looking for them any longer-at least not very hard.
"You see," Charlie said, "there isn't any reason for us to leave this place at all. There's enough food to last for a while, and maybe we can pick off some squirrels or something with the twenty-two. Things can cool down quite a bit before we have to leave here. We've even got entertainment with us," he finished, gesturing toward the two women. "And right now, I'm tired and hungry. And I feel like a hot meal and some of that entertainment."
Mack grinned at him. He might be slow witted, Charlie thought, but when the conversation was on sex, the man was quick enough to understand. "Nora," Charlie said, "I think we'll let you fix dinner for us. Give your pussy a chance to get over its soreness. Marion here will serve in the entertainment department for the time being." He gestured toward the stove. "Now, if you get any ideas about putting something in the food that isn't good for us, forget it. Because you and Marion here are going to taste everything before we do. You understand?" He waited for her to answer, and then she didn't speak, he rammed the barrel of the rifle into her belly, low enough so that her soreness would be affected. She screamed shortly, and then bit her lip.
"I understand," she said.
"Sir."
"What?"
"I think it's time you girls learned to have some respect for your betters." He pulled the rifle back again, ready to punish her once more.
"I understand, sir," she amended sullenly but quickly. Her hand rubbed at her sore abdomen.
"Good. Now you get your pretty little ass over there and fix us some dinner. Just enough for two, now. We have to conserve our food, and the easiest way to do that is not to feed you girls. Feeding you two would be a waste of good food anyway, since we're going to kill you in a few days. And without food in your bellies, you won't be as likely to run away. Running takes strength. Besides, since you girls are going to be whores now, earning your living, so to speak, by fucking and sucking, there's no reason we should take any chances on either of you getting fat."
Nora looked at him for a moment, then moved into the kitchen. There was a defeated slump to her shoulders, and he guessed that she was beginning, finally, to accept the idea that she was doomed. Not that she wouldn't bear watching. But she walked like a slave now, and he liked that. She had been such a proud, imperious bitch at first. It was fun knocking the stuffing out of a dame like that. He'd have to think of some more nice things for her to do before he did her the favor of killing her.
But now he turned his gaze to Marion. "Okay, honey," he said. "Now, how badly do you want to live?" She didn't answer. Charlie laughed. "Badly enough, I think, so that you're going to do as you're told for the next few days. Who knows? You may be rescued yet. Wouldn't it be a shame to let prudishness kill you just before you would have been saved? Look how close it came last time. If that bullet had hit me directly, instead of just skimming the back of my head, you'd probably be home with your hubby right now, enjoying a good fuck. Come to think of it, I hate to cheat you of that. So we'll furnish you with plenty of fucking for the next few days. Isn't that right, Mack?"
Mack grinned. "That's right, Charlie. That's one thing I can guarantee. We'll give them a good fucking all right." He grinned for a moment, then laughed aloud. "A damned good fucking."
"Right. But in return, you got to do some nice things for us," Charlie said. "In appreciation for all that fucking we're going to give you, you have to give us a good time, too. And if there's one thing I like a woman to do for me, it's suck me off. And right now I think it's a good time for you to do that. And I don't want any bullshit about it, any arguments or any hesitation, or anything but just a nice, quiet, respectful, 'yes, sir'-and then you do it." Charlie was sitting on a straight chair. He spread his knees farther apart as he spoke to show her her destination. She looked at him nervously, and he saw the forming of a tear in one eye. It excited him. Then she nodded slightly, a lowering of her head as she accepted her fate.
"Yes, sir," she said softly. She moved forward impulsively, like someone jumping into a pool of icy water all at once to get it over with. She moved right in front of him, paused and hesitated for just an instant, and then fell to her knees. That brought her up between his own knees. She reached forward and pulled down his zipper. Her hands were shaking so badly he could feel it as she pulled the zipper down. Then she reached inside. When her hand touched his prick she jerked back for an instant, then made herself grab the organ firmly. It had begun to stiffen at the first touch. Now it came up like a switchblade knife.
Marion pulled the organ out of his pants and looked at it, and he could tell she was about to gag at what she was being forced to do. He smiled down at her benignly, and she blanched when she looked into his eyes. That smile had been more effective than any scowl could have been in showing her that he meant business. She readjusted her fingers on the cock, holding it gingerly but with determination. This one, he thought, was more sensible than that Nora bitch had been. He had to hand her that. She was going to do whatever had to be done to stay alive. She was probably thinking of all the things she would like to do to him to get even, and praying for the chance. She hated him, and hate, he knew, was one thing that could keep a person alive. It had kept him alive for long years in a maximum security prison. It had kept him alive until he could escape and work some of the hatred off against these women and their husbands. Now it was keeping her alive by making her strong enough to do what had to be done. He knew that no matter what he made her do, she would do it rather than die, in the hope that she could outlive him. It was a forlorn hope, and no doubt she knew that, but she was clinging to it because it was the only hope she had to live for. It would be a useful hope to Charlie, because that was his handle, his wedge. It was what would allow him to have his fun with this pretty little chick. Without that hope, she would probably tell him to go shit in his hat. She had the spunk, he guessed. She was a brave enough girl. In a way, she was braver than the other one, because sometimes it took more guts to stay alive than to die. She was willing to do things the hard way. No whining about there being no use in staying alive for a few more hours if she was going to die anyway. She would fight for the last breath in her body, and that was great. A brave one like this, he thought, could be a lot of fun. It would be fun seeing if he could break her down.
She leaned forward and hovered for a moment, her lips near to the tip of his cock. She couldn't seem to bring herself to cover that last fraction of an inch that would complete the kiss. She knelt there for a long moment, her body tense, looking almost like a pornographic statue.
"You going to do it, honey?" he asked with a gentle edge to his voice. "Or should I get a butcher knife and cut your tits off?"
"I'm going to do it," she said sullenly. "Just give me a moment to get used to the idea, will you?"
"No," he said in the same gently edged voice. "I won't give you a moment." She looked up at him, and her eyes widened just a bit. Then she leaned forward until her lips touched the tip of his cock. She didn't open her mouth. It was as though she had to do this thing in stages, bring herself up one step in horror at a time. Her eyes had closed too.
Charlie laughed, and so did Mack. She looked up into Charlie's eyes, and he saw such complete hatred in her gaze that he was tempted to kill her right then. But that was foolish. It didn't make any difference how much she hated him, he thought. She was helpless. He and Mack were men, stronger than the women, and they had guns. The women were unarmed. What was there to fear, as long as they kept their eyes open? Nothing. Not a fucking thing. He said. "You have one more chance, baby. Then I'm going to teach you a lesson."
She parted her lips, just a little, as though they were held shut by a strong rubber band, and that was as much as she could do. He laughed again. She opened her mouth more widely and, leaning forward, took the cock in between her lips. She had done better before, he thought, but that had been with a man she didn't hate. Now she was having trouble just keeping from getting the dry heaves. It tickled him to make her do something she hated that much, something that degraded her to such an extent. It made him laugh again, and he had to concentrate on something else to keep from blowing his load right then. She took more of the cock into her mouth. Now that she had actually allowed the intruding presence into her mouth, she was having less trouble with the whole thing. The worst was past, or so she doubtless thought. He felt her mouth, warm and moist, enveloping his prick, felt the touch of her tongue for just a moment before she pulled it back. Then he felt her tongue again as she pushed it against the head of his prick determinedly to get it there before he could order her to do it. He laughed again, and she blushed furiously, realizing that he knew what she had thought about then, and knowing that he had won a little victory over her despite herself.
She moved her tongue over his cock lightly, working herself up to the real licking she would have to do. She was working him too, of course, which was what it was all about. He felt the pleasure shooting from his cock into his loins like little darts, and he began to breathe more quickly with excitement. She rolled her eyes upward at the sound, and then closed them, as though the increased reaction from him made things all the worse for her. Her tongue paused for just a moment, and then continued. He looked at her down there, between his legs, and felt the excitement shoot through him. He almost came right then, but that would be too easy, he thought-too easy for her, and too quick for him. He wanted to make this last for a long time if he could. He wanted to hold her down there, a prisoner, for just as long as he could.
She had other ideas, of course. Now that she was at it, she had gained control of herself, and she was increasing the pressure rapidly, rubbing her tongue against the most sensitive parts of his prick to bring him to his orgasm as quickly as possible.
"Hold off," he commanded in a tight voice. "Make it last, goddamn it."
Her shoulders slumped at the order, as she realized that she wasn't going to get away with her little ploy. She lightened the touch of her tongue, and moved it back to the less sensitive area, letting him have his fun for longer than she had intended.
He laughed. "Now," he said, "Take a little time to kiss my balls."
She pulled away from his cock and then, leaning forward in a quick, darting motion, kissed his scrotum.
He felt a thrill shoot through him. "That's nice," he said. "Now, lick 'em."
She looked up at him, shocked, but when she saw the set of his face, she leaned forward, her tongue protruding from her mouth, and began to lick his balls. It felt good. He felt her hands cradling them, pulling her forward out of the front of his pants so that she could get at them. "Open my pants all the way," he said. "You need room to work, honey." She opened the top of his pants and they fell open. He lifted his ass from the chair and let her pull his pants and shorts down. "There," he said. "That's a lot nicer, isn't it?" She didn't say anything. "Isn't it?" he demanded, thumping her atop the head with his fist.
"Yes, sir," she said, without looking at him.
He laughed again. "Okay, now, get with it. Start licking and from now on I don't want to have to give you any more orders. You know how to suck a man off. You proved that earlier. You give me a good time, baby. You stretch it out. Because if I think you cheated me of one second's enjoyment, I'm going to use this rifle on you. And the first shot won't kill you, either. The fifth shot, maybe, or the sixth, or maybe the tenth. I won't be in any hurry to see you dead. You will be, though. Now go to it."
She looked defeated, but he knew that she was still fighting-fighting by surrendering. She was fighting for life, and that was basic to her. He had to hand it to her. She leaned forward again, kissed his cock, touching it with her tongue, and then kissed his balls again. She burrowed her tongue up between his scrotum and his thigh, licking his crotch, and he felt another thrill shoot through him. She knew how to do it, all right, he thought. She and that hubby of hers must have had a really good time. Only now he was having the good time. He wished her husband were still there at the cabin, so that he could thank the son-of-a-bitch for letting him have the use of his wife. If the dumb bastard had kept him where she was, down at the foot of the mountain, she'd be safe with him right now. It was really thoughtful, he thought, to bring her up there just so she could suck Charlie Foster's cock for him....
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FRIDAY, six-thirty p.m.: Jansen would rather take a beating than do what had to be done, but it was his place to do it-and his place to take the verbal beating that would probably come his way when he did. He was tempted to get into the police car outside and head back to town and leave the job to one of his subordinates, but the thought left him ashamed of himself. When they had made him a sergeant, he had known that there would be times he would regret the necessity of doing things that were the natural lot of the man in charge. He had pictured things like going up on that mountain today, instead of sending someone else up there. But he hadn't thought about this kind of thing. It had just never occurred to him. He would almost rather go back up on that mountain again than do this.
But it had to be done. And there was no sense in putting it off any longer.
He walked into the room where the two husbands had been stashed. They were sitting there smoking cigarettes and looking glum. As Jansen came in the door they both jumped to their feet nervously. They looked at his face, and he knew that, despite his efforts to keep his expression neutral, they could tell that something was wrong. How wrong, they probably couldn't even guess.
"You've got some news?" Dave Bond asked. The other guy just stood there, staring at Jansen.
"Yeah," Jansen said tiredly. "Yeah, we got some news. One of the men from the lakeside reported just a few minutes ago."
"Well, Jesus Christ, come out with it!" Bond roared. "If it's bad, tell us."
"All right. It's bad."
"How bad?"
"About as bad as it can be."
The two men stared at him for a long time. Bond finally asked, "You mean, they're dead? Both of them?"
"It looks like that. We've got some men looking through the woods, but from the looks of things, they were all in the car. It went off the cliff. Our guess is they were trying to get around the mountain, hoping that they could slip through the net over there."
"Could they have?"
Jansen shook his head. "We have the whole mountain covered. Surrounded. They couldn't have slipped through."
"You said it looked like they were all in the car? Haven't you checked?"
"It was on the lakeside," Jansen reminded Bond. "The car went down in water that's probably a hundred feet deep. There's no way we can ever find out for sure. But if any of them had gotten out of the car, they'd be around in that area," he said firmly. "It's almost positive that they all went down with the car." He didn't want to leave these men with any false hopes. Fate had been unkind enough to them. There was no sense in his being any more cruel. The sooner they accepted the truth, the sooner they could start to get over it. He stiffened himself, waiting for the accusations he was sure would come at him now, but there wasn't a word. Not one of the men even bothered to swear at him. They looked at each other, and their expression was so bleak that he felt the coldness of their loneliness in his own marrow. They turned and walked out of the place, and he wished that there was something he could say to them, something that might comfort them just a little. But he wasn't good with words, and he didn't suppose that anyone in the world was that good with them.
He went out to the police car, radioed in that the convicts were presumed dead, along with two female hostages, and then told the driver to take him back to the city. He wanted out of this place. He wanted to go home to his wife. And that made him feel guilty all over again, because he had just seen two men who had no wives to go to. And at least one of them had lost his wife because of Jansen's own half-cocked idea. He wondered what the department would say about his actions when it came out. He wondered, but at the moment he really didn't care. He knew he would care later, of course. But right now he couldn't seem to manage it. There was nothing important about his career when he stacked it up against two half empty beds, and two half empty lives....
Nora Bond stood at the stove, looking at the canned stew as it bubbled in the pan. She was standing near the drawer that held the cutlery, and she knew that all she had to do was to open that drawer and she would have a deadly weapon in her grasp. She didn't believe that she could get across the room and use it on Charlie or Mack before one of them shot her down, of course. But at least she could use it on herself. She could get out of this thing. It would be better to be dead.
Or would it? She couldn't help doubting that now. There had been a time when she would have thought any woman who doubted such a thing a tramp. She would have despised any woman who could have admitted that she would hesitate to end her life rather than allow herself to be used the way these men had been using her, and were apparently intent on using her again.
But now she wasn't sure. It wasn't just the fact that she was now brought up against it, and that the real choice was more complicated and difficult and more complex than the theoretical one. That was part of it, of course, and that was probably all of it at first, when she was first put through those awful moments by Charlie and Mack. She had wanted to live, and she had kept hoping, semi-consciously, that before she was made to do the next terrible thing, she would be saved, and so she kept on convincing herself that the thing she had to do at the moment wasn't bad enough for death to be preferable.
But now there was something else. Life had become sweeter in the past few hours. She hated to admit that to herself and she was amazed that she could do so, even in her own mind. After what she had been forced to do, by the standards in which she had always believed, life should be robbed of at least a big part of its sweetness and charm. She should feel depraved, prostituted beyond redemption-and if not wishing to die, at least, she thought, she should have the desire to run to the nearest convent and join it.
Instead, the only thing she could think of was that she wanted to live, she wanted to get through this whole horrible thing and still be alive, and go back to....
To what? Or rather, to whom? Would her husband take her back now? After that horrible thing she had done to him? She wished he were here now. She would show him how much she had changed, how much she had grown up in the past few hours. She would take that wonderful cock in her mouth now and caress it with her tongue, and she wouldn't stop until....
But he wasn't here, and he wouldn't be likely to come back, and she wouldn't be likely to go to him. When Charlie and Mack were finished with her, they would kill her, and that would be the end of it. But it was a tragedy, more than it would have been if they had killed her right away, because now she had learned so much. She had learned things she couldn't even put into words-things she just felt, and that she couldn't explain yet. And that was the part of the tragedy-that she would never learn to express the new wisdom she had learned in this short time. She wanted time, time to think it out and decide what she had been, and what she was, and what she could become in the future.
But of course Dave would never have her. Not now. She couldn't believe that he could forgive her. She didn't know how he had been able to put up with her childishness for so long. Certainly he could never forgive her for the thing she had done to him today, a thing that might, if she had been successful, have ruined his manhood for the rest of his life.
My God, what was I thinking of? She was only certain of one thing. If she did live through this horrible time, and if she saw her husband again, she was going down on her knees to him. That, she thought, would be a proper position-the one position in which she could beg him to take her back and at the same time prove to him, if he was willing to risk it, that she had learned something about being a woman.
She could hear what was going on behind her-the quick breathing of Charlie, and Marion's gasps for breath between contacts. She didn't look at it. She was amazed that she didn't feel more pity for Marion. She did feel sorry for her, of course, but not to the degree she would have several hours ago. It didn't seem as terrible now, somehow. It was the way you kept alive, and she knew her turn would come again. And when it did, she would do as she was told, without any whining, because it was the way things were at this moment, and that was what a person had to live with. There were worse things, she supposed. No, she didn't just suppose it. She knew there were worse things. One of them was death.
She watched the canned stew bubble and turned down the fire under the coffee. She was nervous, even a bit giddy, with waiting for her turn to come.
In a way she almost envied Marion. Doing it was, at least, better than waiting to do it.
Marion was too busy to consider the question of preference. It didn't occur to her to envy or pity Nora. She had a cock in her mouth, and that was the fact that she had to contend with. The central fact of her life was, she supposed, at least at the moment, that she was a slave-a slave to a couple of men who wouldn't hesitate to murder her if she did something to displease them. She had no choice but to keep on sucking on this cock, to keep licking it until Charlie was satisfied. And then, of course, it wouldn't be over. It would probably be necessary for her to do the same thing for Mack. And there would be more of the same later on. And in a way, she supposed, she should be grateful for the chance to do this kind of thing. It was all that was keeping her alive.
She was glad that her husband was safe, anyway. That was something. He hadn't come up here with her, and he was still safe and alive, and that was something to be grateful for anyway-along with the fact that he couldn't see her now. The cock bulged and throbbed in her mouth, and she knew Charlie was about to come. She steeled herself for the ordeal and tried to keep her mind on other things-on her husband and the fact that he was safe. She wished that they had had longer to live together, and love each other, and enjoy their love....
My God, she thought, what am I thinking?
She mustn't get into the habit of thinking of herself as dead. That was the way to be certain it came out like that. She had to consider the possibility that she wouldn't leave here alive, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion yet. It wasn't!
The cock jumped and bobbed in her mouth, and Charlie grunted with a pleasure that was almost pain. She could feel the tightening of his body in his legs, and she knew that it was going to happen now, right now. His come flooded her mouth, almost overflowing. She swallowed the come, gagging it down and continuing the massaging of his cock with her tongue, working to keep him happy, and to exhaust him now, if necessary, to keep him from wanting such a service again right away.
He cried out as the pleasure hit its peak, and his body tightened in waves of joy, and she felt his legs clamp around her body, holding her in a vise-like grip. Then his hands grasped her hair, pulling her face deep into his crotch, tugging it there until she almost suffocated. Marion felt the urge to fight him, to pull back for air, but she fought the impulse, let him bury her face against his abdomen and his crotch, and stayed there, fighting for breath and managing to get some air into her lungs.
Finally, he let her go. She pulled back and sat on her heels with her hands lying on her thighs. Charlie sat there, his cock still exposed, but soft now, soft and helpless and worthless to him. She thought that it looked harmless now, and it was hard to believe that this limp piece of flesh was the same thing that had been in her mouth a moment ago, twisting and bobbing and spurting its juices into her throat. She didn't even hate Charlie for the moment, though she had, and knew she would again soon. Right now, all she felt was an overwhelming tiredness. She just wanted to be left alone for a little while, so she could gather her strength and her will for the coming ordeals.
"You want some of her now?" Charlie asked Mack carelessly. Marion felt her body tighten, and she had to fight the urge to tell them to go to hell. She had to do it, she thought. If they told her to do it, then she had to. But despite herself, she felt the rebelliousness rise up in her like bile. And she knew that she was going to say something that might kill her, something that she would regret at least.
And then she was rescued from herself. She supposed, thinking about it later, that everyone in the room was surprised at what happened then, including Nora Bond. But right then Marion could only think of her own surprise. It just didn't seem possible that Nora could do such a thing. But she did.
"I'll do it for Mack," Nora said. "Let Marion have a rest."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FRIDAY, six-forty-five p.m.: Dave Bond sat in the back of the police car and listened to the report with a numbness where his heart should have been. "The car came over the edge," the officer was saying to Jansen, standing right outside the car. "I saw the headlights, and the car came out over the cliff, stopped on the edge for a moment, the sound of the engine reached me, and I nudged my partner, and he looked and saw it too."
"Could you see the occupants inside?" Jansen asked.
"No, sir. It was too far, and the windshield was reflecting light. The car dropped the full length of the cliff and struck the water hard enough so that it broke up. Then it went down. I saw some bubbles." The officer fell silent. Dave could feel the presence of his friend sitting beside him, and wondered if he was listening to the officer's report. He might be too numb to hear it at all. It was reaching Dave like something from a great distance.
"All right," Jansen said. "Write it down and turn it in." He got into the car and told the driver to head for the city.
"What about my car?" Dave asked.
"You're not in any condition to drive," Jansen said. "Your car will be delivered to your home tonight." The police car headed down the road. Dave sat listening to the hum of the tires on the asphalt. The trees rushed by on either side of them. Dave thought of the pleasure he had always taken from the trees before. Now he couldn't even enjoy the sight of them. He wondered if he would ever be able to think of such things with joy again. He thought of the way he had planned to divorce Nora-it seemed like a grotesque thought now. Life with Nora had presented its difficulties, and perhaps he would have left her if this hadn't happened. But he would probably have come back to her again. She was part of him. He had heard about one-woman men, and now he knew he was one of them. No matter that it was out of the question. Two maniacs and a sheer thousand foot drop had taken that choice away from him. Nora was gone.
It didn't seem possible. She was too real, for all her prudish hang-ups. He could have gotten around that. He was sure of it.
No, he thought. That wasn't being honest. He wasn't sure of any such thing. He was only sure that he would have continued to try. There was no way out of that. He loved her so much. And now he would have to find a way to live without her.
The car pulled up in front of his home. It looked foreign to him now, as though he had never seen it before, and it was a forbidding place. "You going to be all right alone here?" Jansen asked.
"I-I guess so," Dave said.
John looked at him. "You want me to stay here tonight, Dave?" His eyes were offering comfort, but they were asking it, too, and suddenly Dave realized that it would be good to have someone in the house with him. Anyone. And it seemed appropriate for John and he to comfort each other this night.
"All right," he said. "I guess that would help."
"You men want someone else to stay here too?" Jansen asked.
"No," Dave said. "No, that's all right. Thanks."
The inside of the house seemed all the more foreign for its familiarity. Without Nora's presence it was a mockery. He had the feeling, as he looked around, that this wasn't the same place at all, that someone had made a very clever copy of his home-clever but not perfect-and was playing a cruel joke on him. The little things that spoke of his wife's work, the things she had made or bought for the place, all looked different now, counterfeit and strange.
He went straight to the bar. That was the one thing that wasn't counterfeit, he thought. He planned to use liquor for a while and keep things from getting too sharp-edged. He knew it wasn't a good plan, that he shouldn't let himself get started on something like that because the habit would be too hard to break once he had started it. But he knew he was going to do it anyway. He poured himself a glass of bourbon that would have done him for a week usually. He gulped half of it down at once. He felt it burn his throat and chest and liked the feeling.
"Could I have one like that?" John asked. Dave took another glass and poured another snort, then slid it across the bar to his friend. They drained the glasses, and he refilled them. Dave couldn't feel any change from the drinking. He felt as sober as if the whiskey had been Coca-Cola.
"You have enough of this to last out the night?" John asked.
"I think so. Enough to anaesthetize us." He took a swig of his drink and then asked, "You want something to eat?"
"No. I don't think I could hold food down right now."
"Well, you know where the kitchen is if you change your mind. I'm going to take a shower and lie down with this bottle. Take anything you want," Dave said, gesturing to the stock behind the bar.
"Okay." John Sounded relieved at the fact that he was going to be left alone for a while. Dave guessed that his friend felt the same as he did. He didn't want to be left to rattle around an empty house all night. Neither did he want to be badgered by company sixty minutes out of every hour. They'd be good company to each other this night, Dave thought.
They both wanted the same things.
They both wanted the same things, Nora thought. And hours ago she would have thought that they were animals for it. Now she knew they were animals, but not because of the physical pleasures they wanted. She had learned to want those things herself. And for that she felt a kind of perverted gratitude to them. No, they were animals all right, but it wasn't because they wanted the pleasures of a woman's body. That was normal. It was because of the way they got them, and the things they liked to do that had nothing to do with the pleasures of normal sex.
She went to Mack and knelt before him as he sat down. They were all surprised at her offer. She knew that. And she was surprised at it herself. The words had come out before she had been aware that they were even forming in her. She had looked at Marion kneeling there in front of Charlie right after blowing him, and she had known, somehow, that the girl was going to say something, or do something, that she would regret-and she had suddenly been filled with pity for her, with empathy, and she had thought of it almost as a duty to relieve Marion of what she was expected to do. At least, she thought, the woman could be freed from it for a little while.
She took the stiff cock that jutted out from Mack's body and fondled it as she knew he would like. He grinned down at her with that moronic smile of his, and she felt something twist sickeningly inside of her. Well, she thought, you got yourself into this thing, girl. Now live with it.
She kissed the head of his cock. She had to do it quickly, or she would have lost her nerve at the last instant. She felt the soft skin brush her lips, tasted it fleetingly on the tip of her tongue, and then she made herself take the thing into her mouth. She held it there for a moment, wishing to get this first part over with so that she could get on with things. Then she pulled back a moment, stuck out her tongue and began to lick the cock lightly, painting it with her saliva. Mack grunted with pleasure. She had the feeling that he had doubted that she was going to go through this, but now he was beginning to get over that. She continued to lick the cock, working all over it, sliding the foreskin back and licking the shaft of it. She almost gagged as she did it, but it wasn't as bad as she would have thought it to be just hours earlier. She was able to get through it. She could do this for a long time and get through without any trouble to speak of. It was the way things were, and she supposed that part of being an adult was accepting things the way they were.
She kissed Mack's balls and licked them, and gave him no reason to complain of her services. She hated him-hated both of these animals-but this was the way to live through things, at least the way to live as long as possible. She didn't suppose there was much hope of rescue now. They had been too smart-too smart for the police, and too smart for Dave and John, too. But while there was any hope at all, she intended to stay alive. She wanted to stay alive through this, and she was going to do her best to make it.
She pursed her lips, pulling them in over the edges of her teeth, and began to rock back and forth on her knees, rubbing her lips over the Crown of Mack's cock. He began to grunt more loudly, and she felt his fingers dig into her shoulders until she thought she would pass out from the pain. He was as strong as a gorilla, and he didn't even know it. But she kept on, working him up quickly. This one, she thought, didn't have the sense of the other one, or the intelligence, and he wouldn't complain about being brought along too quickly. She would get it over with, and they would forget about sex for a little while, when they ate the meal she was preparing.
Nine-forty-five p.m.: Dave got out of bed and looked at the nearly full bottle sitting on the bedside table. In three hours he had had three drinks. Stiff drinks, but only three of them nonetheless, and he was sober as a judge. He held his hand out in front of him to check its steadiness, then walked along the edge of the rug next to the bed to be sure. Yes, he was sober. There was nothing wrong with his judgment. The things he had been thinking of might not be true, but they were logical. He was certain of that. He walked to the chair over which he had tossed his pants, and put them on. Then he walked to the closet and took out his hunting rifle and the M-l carbine he had bought from a fellow at the office in a weak moment. He had some ammunition for each of the two rifles, and he took it out of the closet too. Then he stepped into his shoes and walked to the door, opened it awkwardly with the rifles and ammunition in his hands, and went out to the living room. John was sitting there. He looked up and didn't seem surprised at the sight of the two guns. A bottle was next to him, and it looked almost untouched, as though he too had been spending his time thinking instead of drinking.
"I guess you've been thinking the same things I've been thinking," John said. Dave put the rifles down, leaning them against the front of the couch, and then sat next to John.
"Let's check it out and see. First of all, the cop who gave the report said that he saw the headlights of the car. If you were trying to sneak down off that mountain in the middle of the night-"
"I wouldn't use the headlights," John finished. "Also, with all the cops surrounding that place, how come they didn't see the headlights until that moment?"
"Right. Besides that, the cop said that there was some light reflecting from the windshield. That means that there must have been enough light so that the driver of that car would be able to make things out without using the headlights, another reason why he wouldn't be forced to use them."
"Good. He also said that he heard the sound of the engine after he saw the lights."
"Yeah, I thought of that, too. If the car was running all over the place in the dark, and those men were really trying to get away, and were going so fast that they weren't able to keep from going over that cliff, then why didn't he hear the engine before that? Why only after he saw the lights?"
"I'll tell you why," John said. "Because it's a long distance from up there to where the cop was standing, and it would take some time for the sound to reach him. And if the engine was idling, and he couldn't hear it, and then the lights were turned on and the engine revved up about the same time, it would take a while for the sound of the engine to reach him. But it wouldn't take any time to speak of for the light to reach him."
"Okay," Dave said, getting excited at the way their thoughts were going in the same channels. "And next thing, isn't it very goddamn convenient that of all the places that car could have gone off that cliff, it went over in the one place where the lake was under it, and nice and deep, and there was no way the car could be found and examined afterward?"
"Of course."
"Also, if that Charlie guy was as smart as he was supposed to be, wouldn't you think he'd do better than to run off the road that badly?"
"As a matter-of-fact, I would think so."
"And wouldn't he be smart enough to have thought about the lights, if we're that smart? About not using them, I mean?"
"Definitely."
"And wouldn't he be smart enough to know the one place where people would be least likely to look for him again?"
"The cabin?"
"The cabin."
"We're on the same beam, buddy."
"And something else." Dave paused a moment. "The cop said the car stopped just before it went over that cliff. Then it came ahead."
"Yeah?"
"It doesn't sound to me like it went over that cliff because it was going too fast. If that had been the case, wouldn't it have hurtled over without any pause? Or at least without much of a pause?"
"I haven't thought about that," John said. "But you're right."
"It seems to me that if the car was going slowly enough at that point so that it stopped when it hung on the edge, then the rear wheel brakes would have been able to hold it. And I can't imagine Charlie not having the sense to be standing on those brakes."
"Yeah. You're right."
"Now, what it sounds like to me is that someone started the engine of that car, put it in gear after placing something on the accelerator, and let it go. It ran up to the edge, and then stopped, and the wheels took a moment to dig in and drive it the rest of the way over the edge."
"It sounds the same to me."
"So there's a chance. Of course they may, if we're right in all this, have left the women in the car. But I doubt that. I was up there, and believe me, these guys aren't the type to get rid of two beautiful young women when they're about to hole up for a while." He was almost sorry he had said that, because he knew that it must hurt John, as it hurt him, to think of someone using their wives like that. But John's jaw set.
"For their sakes, the sakes of those two animals, I hope they didn't kill our wives," he said. "Because if they didn't all I'm going to do is kill them. But if those women are dead, then I plan to take a knife and slice off their peckers a sixteenth of an inch at a time."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The meal seemed to meet with their approval. The two men made Nora and Marion taste from their plates before they would eat anything themselves. Then, before they sat down at the table, Charlie said, "I think we ought to see to it that these two dames are secured before we take our eyes off of them to eat, don't you?"
Mack didn't seem to know what he meant, but he grinned and nodded, obedient as a dog. Charlie smiled.
"There's some rope over there yet. Get it, will you, Mack?" Mack got the rope and brought it back. Then, at Charlie's request, he got a knife. "Turn around, honey," Charlie said to Marion. She turned obediently. He stood behind her for a moment, saying nothing, and then ordered, "Put your hands behind you now, sweetie." She hesitated, then obeyed. He wrapped the cord around her wrists tightly, then knotted it. He pulled it good and tight, so tight in fact that Nora could see Marion wince from the pain. He looked up at the ceiling and the exposed beams. There was a gap between beams and ceiling. Charlie tossed the rope up and over one of the beams, then took the end when it fell over on the other side, and pulled on it. Marion's arms were yanked up behind her. She cried out and almost lost her balance. If she had fallen, she might well have dislocated her shoulders, but she managed to stay on her feet. Charlie laughed with obvious enjoyment.
"Now you come over here," he said to Nora. Nora hesitated. This was getting sicker by the moment. She had become accustomed to the idea that if she didn't give these men anything they wanted they would torture her until she decided to do as they said. She had learned not to disobey them because she knew that they would not only be willing to hurt her, but would probably enjoy it. She hadn't thought that they would turn to this kind of thing, hurting her and Marion without reason except the sheer enjoyment of doing it. That was something beyond comprehension to Nora. But here it was. She didn't want to go near this man, and she was more afraid of the helplessness of being tied like that than she was of the pain. If they were going to give full vent to their sadistic natures now they wouldn't hesitate to take advantage of that kind of helplessness. In fact, she thought, to such a man, that kind of position, obviously helpless, would probably be like an engraved invitation to torture the two of them.
"You coming over here?" Charlie demanded. "Or shall I come and get you?" The tone of his voice, and the expression on his face, didn't leave her any doubt as to the degree of gentleness she could expect from him if he had to come and get her. She forced herself to move, lifting up each foot and putting it down in front of her with effort. She approached him slowly.
"All right, now," he said with elaborate patience, as though he were addressing a child who wasn't very bright, "turn around, honey." She turned her back on him. She felt more vulnerable than she could have imagined with her back turned to Charlie. He said, "Put your hands behind you, baby." She hesitated, then thrust her arms back. He wrapped the cord around her wrists as he had done to Marion. Nora had to use all the will power she had to keep from dragging her hands away. She felt a strong panic well up in her as he knotted the rope, making her helpless. Then the ropes were firm enough so that she couldn't pull away even if she tried to, and she felt like crying at the thought. He continued to wrap the cord around her and tie fresh knots, taking no chances. It seemed ridiculous to her that he was tying so many knots in the rope. He had enough knots there to hold a wild animal, much less a hundred and ten pound woman.
Then she realized what it was he was doing. Each time he tied a fresh knot, the rope became shorter. Her arms were pulled higher, and higher, until she felt the cramping sensation in her shoulders and back. He continued to tie the knots. Nora gasped with pain, then came up on her toes to relieve the pain. It helped a little, but he just used the slack to tie fresh knots. She could hear Marion behind her, gasping too as the rope was pulled shorter. She managed to glance over her shoulder and saw Marion on her tiptoe, the same as she was. It was obvious that Charlie and Mack were enjoying the sight. Two more knots, and then Charlie stood back.
"Well, now," he said. "That ought to do for the time being. I don't guess they're going to be running out on us, do you, Mack?"
"No, I don't think so," Mack said, with a grin. He seemed to think it was a very funny sight, these two women with their backs to each other, their hands behind them and pulled up high, their backs bent to take up some of the slack, their calves bunched with the effort to hold them on tiptoe. Nora's calves were already beginning to burn with the effort.
Charlie walked around in front of her and smiled. He reached up and gave one nipple a little pinch. It didn't hurt much. It was just a playful little gesture to make plain the fact that she was helpless and he was in complete control of the situation. "Now, I want you to stand there and be quiet like a good little girl," he said. "If I get one peep out of you, I'm going to have to get mean. So far, I've been real nice, haven't I?" When she didn't answer, he reached up again and pinched her nipple, harder this time, hard enough to wring a gasp from her. "Haven't I?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," she said. She couldn't see him, except from the chest down, because she was bowed in an attempt to ease the strain on her shoulders. He ran his hand lightly over her body, showing his proprietorship, then walked away, chuckling to himself.
"Come on, Mack," he said. "We don't want our dinner to get cold, after our nice hostess went to so much trouble to prepare it for us, do we?"
"Ha, no," Mack laughed, and they went to the table. From the corner of her eye, Nora could see them sit down. The food smelled good to her. She hadn't realized how hungry she was, and now she tried to remember the last time she had eaten. She couldn't recall. Of course, they were enjoying starving Marion and her, just as they were enjoying the rest of it. She felt tears start from her eyes, and there wasn't any reason to try to stop them. She let herself cry, giving some vent to the hatred, and the pain, and the beginnings of despair.
The Corvette's engine roared away under the hood, pulling the car along the highway at a steady sixty-five. Dave would have liked to drive faster, but he didn't want to take any chances on being stopped by the cops. It would be difficult to explain, if it should come up, why there were two loaded rifles in the trunk of the sports car.
Sgt. Jansen would have liked to drive faster, too, but he was doing this on his own, without any official sanction. He supposed that he should have called in the troops, but after closing things down at the mountain, he had thought better of that course of action. He didn't want to get a score of cops up there again, and find out it had all been a wild goose chase. He really didn't expect this thing to pay off. But while there was a chance of it, he couldn't just stay home and sleep. Those women could be up there, in trouble. And the details of that car's going over the cliff just didn't sound right. There were too many little details that didn't make sense. So Jansen had sneaked out of bed, without waking his wife, had left a note in the kitchen in case she woke up while he was gone, and then had dressed quietly, taken his service revolver and headed back up to the mountains. It wasn't much, but it was worth a try.
Nora was certain that if she was made to stand in this awful position for another minute she was going to lose her mind. But Charlie and Mack sat licking up the last of their meal, paying the two women no attention, and she didn't lose her mind. The sweat stood out on her forehead, and she felt her legs tremble with the effort of keeping her on tiptoe; the pain was all the way up into her breasts now, having spread from her shoulders. She closed her eyes and almost lost her balance.
Behind her she could hear Marion gasp from time to time. Neither of them had made any sound at all during the long minutes they had been tied in that position. They remembered the warning that had been given them by Charlie about making a sound, of course. They were both trying to stand up on tiptoe as high as possible, because each wanted to relieve the other of the pressure as much as possible. Coming down a little, or dragging her arms down a little, on the part of either of them could only be done at the expense of the other. And Charlie had seen to it that they didn't have any slack to play with. The rope was a strong one, and there wasn't much stretch in it. Nora wasn't sure she could stand this much longer. Waves of dizziness had begun to sweep over her, and she was afraid she might pass out any moment. She fought to maintain her consciousness, and her balance, because she knew that, tied in this position, if she should lose her balance and fall, she could dislocate her shoulders. She clenched her teeth to keep from making any sound. She wanted to cry, and she knew that she wasn't going to be able to hold back much longer. The pain in her calves and arms and shoulders and chest was reaching unbearable proportions. Behind her she heard Marion gasping, and she knew that Marion was having as much trouble keeping from crying out aloud as she was.
Then, just for a moment she lost her balance. She caught herself again before she could fall and dislocate her shoulders, but the sudden shaft of pain that shot through her brought an instant cry of agony. The moment she had made the sound she was filled with panic, and she cut it off, struggling to stand upright again. But the wrench in her arms left the pain there, and she couldn't seem to get back to the former level of agony, which had seemed so bad when she was feeling it, but now seemed completely bearable by comparison. She moaned softly, and then not softly, as the pain seemed to gain on her, as though, having been given this little bit of a start, it was chewing its way through her, and wouldn't stop until she was dead. She couldn't stop the pain from growing, and she couldn't seem to stop the moaning that came out of her throat now with no volition of her own. She saw Charlie look around, an expression of faint surprise on his face, as though he hadn't expected her to break so soon, and then the expression of satisfaction replacing it. He rose and walked to where she was standing. He faced her from inches away. The smile on his face was almost affectionate, as though he couldn't help liking her now that she had given him the excuse he had named for himself, and the sport could continue.
"Well, now," he said, "you went and made a noise, didn't you, cunt?" She said nothing, didn't even look at him. Her gaze dropped back to the floor, and she stood silently, waiting to see what he was going to do to her. He reached up and let his fingers move over her breast, stroking it lightly, cupping it. "I told you to keep your mouth shut, and be a good girl, but you just couldn't see any reason why you should do what you were told. Isn't that right?" He stood quietly for a long moment. Nora said nothing. "Isn't that right?" he asked again, a bit more insistently. Nora still said nothing. He caught the skin of her nipple between the nails of his thumb and forefinger and pinched hard.
The pain that shot through her at that was excruciating. It was something entirely different from anything she had ever felt before. Nora had never known that there could be pain like that, tiny, localized, and exquisite in its intensity. She threw back her head and screamed at the top of her lungs. The act of throwing her head back made her lose her balance again, and she almost fell. She had to fight to keep her balance, and it was hard to think of that, even with the pain shooting through her arms and shoulders, with this terrible agony in her nipple. He maintained the pressure for what seemed a long time. Finally, he released the nipple. But his hand remained close to it.
"Isn't that right?" he asked again, moving his thumb and forefinger meaningfully. Nora nodded swiftly. "I don't like nods and head shakes," he said. "I want a nice, polite answer to my question. Or do you need some more coaxing?"
"No! Please! You're right."
"Sir."
"You're right, sir," she said. "Yes, it's right, sir. Please don't do that again."
"What, you mean this?" He gave the nipple another pinch. Nora's toes clenched, digging against the wooden floor, as the pain shot through her afresh. Mack laughed, almost giggling like a child.
"Well, now," Charlie said. "Now that we've established the fact that you were deliberately disobedient, we have to decide what needs to be done about it." He looked at her for a moment without saying anything, and she could see that he was enjoying the situation. She looked into his eyes for a moment, feeling fear and hatred mixed, and then she dropped her eyes again. She had a feeling that he'd find something to do to her, all right, and that what was coming was going to make what had already happened seem mild by comparison. She waited, silently, for him to make up his mind to tell her what he was going to do to her.
"Come on, let's get you untied," he said suddenly. She felt a quick wave of relief. He was going to untie her! This pain was going to stop for a moment. She knew he'd find something worse to do to her, but at least for a moment it wouldn't be there, this awful pain. For just a moment she could be without it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FRIDAY, twelve o'clock midnight: When Dave and John arrived at the foot of the mountain, Dave was surprised to see the light in the little store still on. He braked the Corvette to a stop in front. "What's the idea?" John asked.
"Maybe we can talk this guy into opening up. We could use some extra ammunition. We only have a few rounds for each gun."
"I don't like to waste the time."
"Neither do I, but if we get into a real shoot-out with those two bastards, we're not going to be able to call time out while we run back to the store."
"All right," John said. "But let's make it as quick as possible."
They went to the front door and Dave knocked. The old man who ran the store came to the door, but didn't open it. Dave could hear his footsteps. "Who's there?" he demanded.
"It's me," Dave said. "Dave Bond. I want to buy something."
"I don't open till eight in the morning, Mr. Bond," the old man said, his voice sounding strange, as though he wondered why Dave was there at all.
"I know. But we're going hunting. My friend and I. We'd like to buy some ammunition before we go. Couldn't you make an exception just this once?"
"Well, I don't know...." But it was obvious from his tone that he was going to come through.
"Please," Dave said, putting all his pathos in it. He was banking on the man not being able to refuse a man whose wife had just been murdered that day.
"Well, all right. But I don't open up. I'll give you the ammunition through the door, and put it on your bill, Mr. Bond. What kind do you want?"
"A couple of twenty-round boxes of ought-six and fifty rounds of thirty carbine," Dave said. The man walked away and then came back a moment later. He opened the door a crack. It was on a chair to keep it from opening any farther. He looked out through the crack to be certain it was Dave, and then handed the ammunition out through the crack in the door. Dave took it. "Thanks," Dave said. He and John turned and went back down the stairs and headed for the Corvette. Dave felt a tightening in his belly at the thought that the heavy little boxes in his hand meant he was going after two men, and that he was going to kill them if they were there to be killed. He glanced at John and saw that he was thinking something very similar. They got into the car and Dave started the engine.
Last lap, he thought.
The belt was a thin one, an old thing Nora had bought three years before and left up here one weekend. It was so tight now, that it was raising angry red marks on her skin. Charlie tightened it more, pulling it to the last notch, and then secured it. The buckle was in the small of her back. Charlie took the rope. He'd had Mack take all of the knots out of it. Now he gave it 'a couple of quick, snapping pulls, and then began threading it under the belt. It hurt as he pulled it through the tight belt. The rope rubbed against her skin, making a burning sensation. Nora gasped at the pain, but it was slight compared to what she had been put through this day and night. She took it stoically.
Charlie pulled the rope through, then cut off a length and walked around to the other side of her. He threaded that length through on the other side. She wondered what he was doing. But of one thing she was certain. He would think of something impressive. He had proved that he was bright, and with his talent for sadism, she thought, he wasn't going to let her off lightly.
He cut off the rope again. Nora stood there, feeling absurd with the belt biting into her naked body, and the two lengths of rope hanging down, one on either side.
"All right," Charlie said. "Now, I want you to lie down right there on the nice, hard floor. On your belly for the time being."
She lay down without protest. There wasn't any sense in fighting him. He squatted next to her and, taking her left foot in his hand, pulled it up behind her. It was painful, after the way she had already been mauled. She was stiff and sore. But she bit off the gasp that tried to fight its way out of her throat.
Charlie pulled her foot up as far as it would go, she thought, but then she realized that she had been wrong, because he pulled it higher yet, cramping her calf against her thigh. Her knee protested with a little popping sound, and Charlie and Mack both laughed. Then Charlie gave the foot one more yank, dragging it right up beside the cheek of her ass. It hurt, but she buried her face in the floor and kept herself from crying out with the pain.
Charlie took the loose length of rope and wrapped it around her ankle tightly. Then he looped it over again, to take up the slack and stretch of the rope, and made another hitch in it. It held her leg in that bent position, her foot against the side of her ass. Her knee hurt like crazy, and she could feel the muscles in the front of her thigh burning with the stretching they were getting. He took the other foot and brought it up, too. He tied the rope around the same as he had done with the first one. The way he had tied her, her feet were now clear up beside her hips, and because they were pulled outward like that, her legs were spread. She began to have an idea of what he had in mind. But she hoped she was wrong.
He took some more rope and slipped it under her head. She felt it rub against her face as he pulled it through. Then he pulled her hair free from the rope and tossed it to the side, so that it hung down beside her face. He took her right hand and pulled it up high behind her, yanking it clear up to her shoulder blades. He tied one end of the rope to it, tightly, and then yanked on the rope. It burned her neck and throat. She whimpered a little, and then cursed herself for her weakness and bit off the sounds. Charlie yanked the rope again, pulling her right arm up a little higher. She thought something was going to break if he pulled again, but he gave the rope a last tug, and nothing broke. The pain was unbelievable.
He took her left hand and pulled it up beside the right, then tied it too, the same way. She cried, unable to keep from it now, knowing that she was giving him what he wanted by this sign of weakness, but she couldn't help it. She didn't even try any more.
He paused a moment, looking at her. She couldn't see him, but she knew he was looking at her. She could feel his gaze on her body. "Now, that's nice," he said. "You look very nice in that position, Nora baby." He grabbed her arm and leg and lifted her left side until she rolled onto her back. There was a burst of pain through her body as her weight came down on her arms and legs, and she let out a cry of agony, not even attempting to hold back any more. She saw Marion sitting in a straight chair watching, her face a chalky portrait of fear and pity, but mostly fear.
She knows her turn is coming, Nora thought.
Charlie stood up and took off his clothes. He took his time about it. "Now, we're going to give you something nice, honey. I told you, you were going to get in some fucking while you were up here with us. This is it."
She took a moment to realize what he intended doing. He was going to fuck her now! Right now, here on the floor, in this position!
"Oh, Jesus!" she said aloud.
He laughed. "It won't be all that bad, sweetie," he said, grinning impishly. "You know, if I tell another lie like that, I'm going to go to hell when I die."
He finished stripping off his clothes and then squatted down again. He threw his weight onto her all at once. She felt something pop in her knees, and her back was gouged by the belt buckle. She screamed, and heard his laugh from above her. He centered himself between her spread thighs. She was totally helpless. She couldn't have resisted him even if she had tried. And the pain was so great she didn't even think of trying.
They stopped the Corvette a good three miles from the cabin. Dave took the keys and opened the trunk. He handed the hunting rifle and the two boxes of .30-06 ammo to John. He had already loaded the rifles at home. John stuck the two boxes of cartridges into the pocket of his jacket. Then he checked the safety on the rifle and slung the weapon across his shoulders. Dave took the carbine out of the trunk, checked the fifteen round magazine just to be certain, then took out the two spares he had brought along. He slung the carbine, then dumped the box of ammo into his pocket. He closed the trunk and they started hoofing it up the trail, Dave loading one of the magazines as they walked.
They had gone a mile when Dave stopped. He stood perfectly still, listening. John had gone on another two steps before noticing that Dave had stopped. He turned and looked back at Dave. Dave held up a hand to signal silence. "A car," he said.
"I didn't hear anything."
"Well, I did. I'm sure of it."
"Maybe it's just someone who owns a cabin up here."
"Maybe. But I'm not so sure. It stopped. About where we parked the Corvette, I'd say."
"Now, how could you hear a car that far away?"
"Sound goes a long way up here. I tell you, I heard it."
They took places behind two trees. After a while someone came walking up the trail behind them. He was a tall burly man in dark clothes, zipper jacket pulled up tight under his chin. Dave recognized him as Sgt. Jansen.
Dave stood silently, hoping that John would do the same. Jansen walked past them, moving quickly. Probably saw the Corvette, Dave thought, and wonders who's up there. When Jansen had gone around the next bend, Dave came out from behind his tree. He saw John emerge from across the road. They came together and spoke, in murmurs.
"Jansen," John said.
"I know. Probably figured things out the same way we did." They started up the road again.
"Shouldn't we have let him know we're here?"
"I don't think so. He's a cop. He wouldn't want us to mix in this. And he'd have a hell of a time getting me to leave."
"Yeah. Same here."
"If shooting starts, we're going to be in on it. It'll be too late then for Jansen to object. And he'll probably be glad to have us around...."
Charlie's cock was sliding through her with wet sounds. She could feel no physical pleasure in her loins; it was almost totally drowned out by the pain in her legs and arms. She couldn't believe the pain. It was beyond anything Nora had ever thought possible. His weight was on her, and he seemed to be deliberately making it as bad as he could. Her knees felt as though they were going to come apart at any moment. She screamed again and again, and the weeping wouldn't stop, but it only seemed to excite Charlie all the more.
She was aware, dimly, of Mack, doing the same thing to Marion. He had taken what was left of the rope, and he was trying to tie her into the same position as Charlie had imposed on Nora. Nora felt a fleeting pity for Marion, but she couldn't think of it long. Her own pain was too great to allow her to think of anyone else's plight.
Charlie grunted and came in her. When he was through, he lay there, atop her, his cock going slack in her cunt. She wanted to beg him to get off of her, to take his weight off of her, but she knew it wouldn't do any good. It would probably do just the opposite, she thought, and make him want to stay there on her for as long as possible.
Suddenly he pulled back, yanking his cock out of her. He jumped to his feet, grabbed the rifle from where he had leaned it against the table, and ran to the door. He stood behind the door, the rifle held at the ready. When the door flew open, Nora tried to warn whoever it was, but her voice was gone, and the noise was too great anyway. It was that man who had come earlier and pretended to be Marion's husband. He came inside, a gun in his hand, and stopped dead in his tracks as Charlie rammed the barrel of the rifle against his back.
"That's a nice boy," Charlie said. "Now drop the big bad gun and kick it away." The man hesitated for a moment, and Charlie did something to the rifle that made a clicking sound. The man dropped the revolver and shoved it away with his foot.
Mack was just managing to notice that something was going on besides his raping of Marion Lovestone. He pulled out of the woman and stood up, looking surprised.
"We got us another hostage," Charlie said with a grin. "And another gun, too. I think we ought to thank the nice man for bringing us another gun." He laughed, and Mack laughed, too, uncertainly at first, and then with more force.
They walked up close to the cabin and Dave sneaked a look inside. What he saw turned his blood cold. He froze for a moment, and pulled back just in time to avoid being seen by Mack.
The women were alive, but it took him a moment to feel any joy about it. The sight of them in there, tied that way, obviously in agony, and obviously tied in that position so that it would be convenient to fuck them, made him sick. He felt the hate inside of him harden into a stone. He was going to kill those bastards. He was certain of that now. If John didn't get them first, he would.
"Well?" John asked in a whisper.
"They're in there," Dave answered just as softly. "And they're all right, near as I can tell."
"What about Jansen?"
"For a smart cop he didn't do very well this time. He managed to become another hostage."
"What are we going to do?"
"Go around the back. There's no door there, but there is a big window. We'll break that in and start shooting. Be damned careful you only hit what you're supposed to, though."
Charlie picked up the revolver the man had dropped and prodded him in the small of the back with it. Might as well get the dumb bastard tied up and then let him watch his wife get fucked some more. "Over there," he said, nudging the man toward another straight chair where he'd have a good view of the proceedings. The man walked where he had been told. Charlie walked there right behind him. When the hit happened, it took him so much by surprise he panicked, which was something he almost never did.
The window at the back of the cottage smashed inward, the glass showering the room in shards. He jumped in fright at the sound, and that saved his life. A heavy bullet whizzed past his ear, burrowing through air where his skull had been just an instant before. Another gun cracked three times, and Charlie heard Mack let out a scream of pain and hit the floor with a crash.
Charlie snapped a shot in the direction of the window and then, without thinking, ran for the door. He should have used the prisoner as a shield, but by the time he thought of it, he was already half way to the door. He ran out into the night, and felt the cold chew its way through his naked body immediately. This was lousy, he thought. He couldn't make it long out here without any clothes. And those guys, whoever they were, had rifles. All he had was a two-inch-barreled revolver with five shots left in it. He ran as hard as he could, feeling pebbles gouge the soles of his feet.
Someone was running behind him, maybe seventy or eighty feet back. A shot cracked out over his head, and he ran a little faster than he had thought he could. There were trees right ahead of him, and he ducked into the thickest part of them.
Another bullet, one of the heavy ones this time, whizzed through the woods, peeling a shower of bark away from one of the trees. The boom of the rifle was loud. Something heavy, he thought. The bastard was using some goddamn deer rifle or something!
Time to give up. That was all there was to it. He'd has his taste of freedom. He hadn't killed anyone, and he'd had some fun, and now he had to go back. Mack had had the right idea all along. Poor, dumb Mack. He'd had it all figured out. You couldn't get away for good. But you could have your fun while you were on the outside. Their own goddamn laws were protection, Charlie thought. They couldn't kill him if he wanted to give up. Or could they? Were these guys cops? Judging from the kind of weapons they were using, he guessed that they weren't. They weren't cops!
Who, then? Husbands? But one of the husbands was inside. The other husband, then? And maybe a brother or something?
Shit!
But they could be cops. They could be, and he had to find out.
"Hey!" he yelled. "I want to give up. I'll toss you my gun and come out if you'll promise not to cut me down!"
A familiar voice came out of the darkness.
"Fuck you!"
It was that other husband, what was his name?
Dave. It's Dave, goddamn it, and he intends to kill.
"Christ's sake," Charlie cried whiningly, "you can't kill a guy who wants to give up?"
No sound. The place was silent.
"Can you?" he asked, and then realized that he was making a mistake shouting and staying put. They were going to zero in on his voice and trap him. But just as he began to move, he got an answer to his question.
"The hell we can't!"
He moved. He went deeper into the woods. Then a thought struck him. There were other cabins up here. Maybe he could break into one of them. Maybe he could get some clothes, and maybe even a rifle. Then, by God, things will be a little different!
He headed into the woods at a good clip, moving as quietly as he could, holding the little revolver at the ready. If he had to, he could still shoot. He wasn't as well armed as they were, especially for this kind of place, but he wasn't exactly unarmed, either.
He heard footsteps behind him, and he spun and snapped off a shot. He didn't hit the son-of-a-bitch, but at least he did some good. The guy winced at the near miss, and it pulled his shot off. Charlie didn't know who the cocksucker was-someone he'd never seen before-but he was holding onto a hunting rifle, and as he snapped off the shot, the bullet whizzed past Charlie's head and sheared a limb from a nearby tree. The impact was so powerful he. could feel it in the air. Charlie felt that same panic again. He turned and dived into the woods as the guy was working the bolt on the rifle again.
Son-of-a-bitch! He moved as fast as before, and cursed the loose brush under his feet that made noise. They could probably hear him. And he couldn't hear a thing from them, either. What a goddamn lousy situation!
Then he saw it. A cabin off in the distance. At first he was afraid he had circled back to the same place, but then he got a good look at the place. It wasn't the same one at all. It was different, smaller for one thing. Lights were on all over the place. He approached at a run, eager to get inside. Then, as he came close, he looked through one of the windows and saw a woman there-a young woman, and she was undressing.
This was more like it. He'd get in there, force the woman to put him up. And while these bastards were out here looking for him, he'd be planning a way to knock them off first. And he'd have himself a nice, fresh woman. He remembered what he'd done to that Nora bitch. Now he'd do it to this woman, too. He walked toward the house, his eyes glued to the window.
And that was why he didn't see it. He stepped onto the concrete patio in front of the place, and he heard something hiss and slither at his feet. Then there was a quick prickle at his ankle, followed by stabbing pain. He almost had to laugh as he looked down. A red, yellow, and black banded snake wriggled away from his feet. If he had been Mack, he thought, he probably would have laughed. It was really ironic. If he had just watched where he was going, instead of getting interested in that goddamn woman, he wouldn't have been so careless. He'd have seen it. And he should have been looking down. He should have known enough to do that.
Hell, everyone knew snakes, even pretty coral snakes, crawled onto patios at night to keep warm....
