Depraved 2 (33 page)

Jodi grunted. “So say what you came to say and get out. I’ve tried so hard to make you love me. I can’t take this anymore.”

Sienna finished off the beer and dropped the can. She kicked it across the floor, sneering when Jodi had to dodge it. “You didn’t try for shit, bitch!” Jodi had never seen her sister show so much emotion. Her eyes were bulging and spittle was flying from her mouth. She had a feeling she was seeing the real Sienna for the very first time. “All you ever did was fucking criticize and try to control me! You never made any motherfucking real attempt to understand me or accept me for who I am. And you sure as fucking shit never had the first idea about what I’ve been going through all these years.”

The words stung, hitting harder than Jodi expected.

She shook her head. “You never gave me a real chance.”

“Fuck you. It should have been you who got shot that night, not daddy.”

The comment made Jodi gasp, shocking her almost as much as being hit by her sister. A sob welled up inside her. She shook her head again. “That’s not fair.”

“Fuck fair.” Sienna laughed. “You know what? I sucked your precious Delmont’s cock a bunch of times for extra cash. He always said I did it better than you.”

A flicker of anger cut through Jodi’s next sob. “I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you want. I don’t give a damn.”

Jodi’s anger continued to build. She was on the verge of lashing out at Sienna again when she noted some new damage to the girl’s trashy gothic gutter-tramp dress. There were some new rips in the fabric, for one thing, but that was the least surprising part of what she was seeing. The girl walked around in sleazy ripped-up shit all the time. But there were some substantial new stains the dark fabric had caused her to miss until now.

“What’s that on your dress?” she asked, pointing to one of the larger stains.

Sienna glanced downward. Then she shrugged. “Oh, that. That’s blood.”

Jodi frowned. “Whose blood?”

Sienna laughed. “Well, that’s kind of hard to say. I killed a lot of people today.”

“Bullshit.”

“Actually, it’s not bullshit.” Sienna’s leer as she said this made Jodi’s heart beat faster. There was a malevolent sincerity in her sister’s tone that scared her. “In fact, you knew at least one of them.”

Jodi’s breath hitched. “No. No. Not--”

Sienna rolled her eyes. “No, not that idiot, though I get why you’d jump to that conclusion. I killed Arlene.”

Jodi blinked in surprise. “What?”

“First I smothered her.” Sienna smiled. “That was a goddamn mercy killing, really. You should have seen the state she was in. Crippled bitch was drowning in her own shit and piss. That’s on Delmont. I’d say you should take it up with him, but he’s the one who crippled her in the first place, right? And you knew it all along, too.”

“That’s not--”

“Oh, shut up.” Sienna’s sneeringly dismissive tone left no room for argument. It said what they both knew—that this had been an open but not talked about secret between them for a long time. “Here’s the totally amazing thing. After I smothered her, I brought her back to life.” She giggled. “And then I put a fucking hammer in her head.”

Jodi’s instinct was to scoff at this, the same way she’d scoffed at all the lunatic things Sienna had said over the years. But her tongue was briefly stilled by the way this particular oddball boast meshed with what was happening in the basement.

She gave her sister a wide berth and approached the basement door. The thing down there seemed less agitated now, but the guttural growls it was making were still audible. A glance at Sienna told her she was hearing the noises, too. “You hear that?”

“How could I miss it?”

Jodi came away from the basement door. “That thing down there was dead earlier. I know because I killed it. Only now…well, you can hear for yourself. Something brought it back. Some demon.”

Sienna laughed. “Oh, you pitiful fucking simpleton. That’s no demon.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a zombie. Obviously.”

“A zombie?” Jodi asked, her voice deadpan.

“That’s right.” Sienna nodded as if nothing had ever been more obvious. “A zombie. You have a living dead thing in your basement.”

Rather than expressing more skepticism, Jodi took a few moments to further ponder what she knew of the situation. Her instinct was to dismiss any explanation that involved the word “zombie”, with all its horror movie connotations. However, the basic facts here did kind of point in that direction. Something living had expired and now that flesh was animate again. Zombie, demon, or something else, this mystery had no standard, rational world solution.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say I believe you.” Jodi slowly exhaled, thinking she might have bigger reasons to fear her sister than she had ever imagined. “You killed Arlene and you brought her back. How did you do that? And how is that connected to the noisy damn thing down there?”

“I’m a witch.”

“A witch.”

“Yep.”

What Jodi heard in Sienna’s voice now wasn’t the defensive tone she’d hoped to hear. Instead it was a confidence so total it rendered disbelief impossible. Jodi’s stomach clenched as she came to the inevitable conclusion that her sister was telling the truth. And that could only mean one thing.

“You’re in league with the devil.”

Sienna laughed. “Nonsense. I serve no one but myself.”

Jodi shook her head. “I’m sure that’s what you think, but the dark one holds you in his sway, I have no doubt of it.”

“And how can you be so sure?”

“Because witch or not, no one girl is powerful enough to do what you say you’ve done. Satan is using and guiding you, working through you to bring evil into this world.” Jodi nodded as a louder growl came from the basement. That sound coming at that precise moment was God’s way of underlining her statement. He worked in mysterious ways, but sometimes evidence of His hand was more overt than usual. “How else could the black magic you worked at Arlene’s house raise other things from the dead miles away?”

Sienna smirked. “The ritual I did at Arlene’s place didn’t reanimate your catch.” She moved a step closer to Jodi, smiling at the way she took a reflexive step backward. “The ritual I did out in Hopkins Bend a little while ago did that.”

The unexpected reference to her hometown rocked Jodi. The awful things that had happened there haunted her still, and she and her sister rarely ever talked about them. “What in God’s name were you doing in Hopkins Bend?”

Sienna told her, beginning with her intent to bring back their daddy and ending with a graphic description of the ritual in the clearing. “Basically, I unleashed a lot more power than I expected. It felt like all the power in all of creation was flowing through me. And I think it sort of got away from me. I didn’t focus it right. And somehow it reached inside my head and looked at my idea of how things that come back from the dead look and behave, which is basically a bunch of shit from movies and The Walking Dead, and, well, it sort of made that shit come true. I don’t know how widespread it is, but I’m thinking maybe I fucked up kind of a lot.”

A growing sense of horror overtook Jodi. “You killed a child? Oh, Sienna…how could you?”

Sienna shrugged. “I had good intentions. And anyway, you’re a murderer, too, so you know what you can do with your bullshit righteous indignation.”

Jodi dropped to her knees in front of Sienna. The lord was testing her something fierce today and she had tried her damnedest to cope and prove she was strong, but there was only so much she could take. She reached for her sister with a shaking hand. “Please pray with me, baby. I know somewhere inside you is a sweet, lost little girl, the girl I knew before everything went so terribly wrong. With God’s guidance, we can get the real you back again. We just have to pray hard enough.”

For a long moment, that familiar dead-eyed look was in place again as Sienna stared down at Jodi. But then she smiled and said, “Okay. I’ll pray with you.”

Jodi sobbed, her relief was so huge. She closed her eyes, clasped her hands together in supplication, and began to recite The Lord’s Prayer. Sienna’s voice joined with hers two lines into the prayer. The poor girl still knew it by heart, despite the darkness that had overtaken her. Of course she did. Jodi had made her say it hundreds of times that first dark year after their escape from Hopkins Bend.

Jodi sensed movement and assumed Sienna had taken up a kneeling position at her side. Then she felt the cold touch of steel at her throat and instantly understood that her life was at an end. She opened her eyes and saw that the girl had taken a big carving knife from the knife block on the counter.

Sienna wound a hand in Jodi’s hair and jerked her head up. “Here’s my prayer, sister dear. I pray this fucking hurts.”

She dragged the knife across Jodi’s throat.

Blood leaped from the gash in her flesh as Jodi fell over onto her back. She looked up to see her sister standing over her, a look of satisfaction on her face. The girl let the knife slip from her fingers and clatter on the linoleum.

“You’re gonna wake up again, but you won’t really be you anymore.”

The girl turned away from her and began to walk away. Her footsteps were the last thing Jodi ever heard.

29.

The mutilation of the redneck son of a bitch named Floyd brought Jessica some measure of visceral satisfaction. So did the coup de grace she delivered to the asshole’s head with Zelda’s gun a few minutes later. But the feeling didn’t last long. She was still in a desperate situation and now had no choice but to abandon her compromised place of refuge. Standing in her way was a host of possible foes. Somewhere in this town lurked a hidden military presence. They would be coming for her when Zelda failed to check in. And then there were the rednecks. She didn’t know where they’d come from or why they’d targeted her, but it was reasonable to assume there might be more of them. Also in play was this inexplicable zombie element. For all she knew, that could portend some serious wider world implications.

Jessica laughed.

At this point, I’d welcome a goddamn zombie apocalypse.

There was nothing she could do about any of these complications except to go forth and deal with each of them to the best of her abilities as she encountered them. She for damn sure couldn’t waste any more time hanging out in this house.

After grabbing her purse and slipping the strap over her shoulder, she gathered up as much of the weaponry scattered around the room as she could. She dropped the handguns in the purse and took the rifle, too. The more firepower she had at her disposal, the better. She took one last look around and decided there was nothing else worth taking. This place was lousy with her DNA, but somehow she doubted that would ever matter. Legit law enforcement would never get a look at the scene anyway.

Satisfied she’d done all she could, Jessica left the living room and exited the house through the back. Though lights were on in the house, the backyard was still swamped in darkness. However, she was moving so fast and was so intent on getting out, she didn’t think to pause a moment and hunt for an exterior light switch.

And so it was that she ran right into a resurrected Billy a split second after hauling the door open and rushing out onto the deck. She shrieked as she collided with him, the impact of it jarring the rifle from her hands. His hands clutched at her and his mouth was inches from his face. His fetid death breath made her gag as she recoiled and fell back against the door behind her. The zombie growled and came at her. She shrieked again and got her hands up in time to brace them against his chest and keep him from tearing out her throat.

Maybe it was just her imagination, but she thought she detected a trace of actual anger in the sounds it was making. She doubted the creature was capable of anything but the most rudimentary thought processes so long after expiration, but perhaps there was some small trace of the person Billy had been somewhere inside its curdled brain. A fleeting wish she could tell him she was sorry for dragging him into this mess flitted through her head.

But then the zombie took another lunge at her throat, this one so ferocious it pushed her hands back and allowed its teeth to come within grazing distance of her skin. Jessica kept her hands braced against its chest as hard as she could, but the creature had caught her off-balance. One more lunge at her throat and she would be dead. A change of tactics was necessary. So she shifted her weight as best she could and kicked out against the deck rail to her right to propel herself sideways. This jostled the creature enough to give her a couple precious extra inches of separation, which she immediately exploited by letting go of the shirt and ramming a forearm up under its jaw.