Go Kill Crazy! (9 page)

This was destiny.

Dez sidled closer to Echo and slid a hand inside a rear pocket of her cutoffs. “So what do you say? Want to keep the party going, maybe help me fuck this guy up some more?”

Echo stared at the man’s wide, pleading eyes for a few moments and tried hard to feel any sympathy at all. Then she shuddered as Dez’s fingers clenched against her ass, sending an electrifying shiver of Dezsexuality rippling through her body.

She looked at Dez. “I’ll do anything you want.”

Dez smiled. “I know.”

She pulled Echo close and kissed her with hungry abandon.

Chapter Seven

De Rais Ranch

Two weeks before the shootout on 2
^nd
Avenue

Keely woke up in the big, empty field that occupied the southernmost portion of the ranch property owned by John Wayne de Rais. The compound functioned as the headquarters of the Order of Wandering Souls. The ground was hard and rocky and not at all an ideal place to spend a night under the stars. Not without a tent or sleeping bag, at least. Keely had neither of those things.

She groaned as she stretched her body and forced her bleary eyes open. It was a clear day and the sun’s position in the sky told her it was sometime in the early afternoon, which meant she had slept through another morning of chores. This was her week on laundry detail and Susan Wagner, overseer for female initiates, was notoriously strict when it came to doling out punishment. Order members were generally free to do whatever they wanted. Critical chores or tasks were assigned on a rotating weekly basis. If it wasn’t your week to do real work—and if you weren’t assigned to a recruiting party—you could spend all your time fucking and getting high if you wanted.

Keely had a long history of indulging her vices to an excessive degree. Out in the ordinary world, that had been a big problem. She hadn’t ever been able to hold down a decent job for very long. As a result, she was arrested multiple times on various charges, mostly shoplifting or petty drug offenses. It had been a real spiral of hopelessness kind of deal. Even her baby brother—hardly an angel himself—got tired of her shit.

Casey gave lip service to trying to help her, but he blew up at her after discovering she had pawned a bunch of his shit to pay for dope, calling her a junkie whore. He kicked her out after that. That was the lowest point in her life. She gave serious consideration to killing herself. Casey had several guns and she managed to swipe one of them before getting the boot. Her original plan for the gun had been to use it to liberate money from people who had too much of it. Her secondary plan—considered only briefly—had been to shoot Casey and then take her own life. A part of her that was still tenuously connected to reality realized this wasn’t exactly fair, but killing herself and checking out of this miserable world was acceptable.

Fate intervened, however, when she crossed paths with a recruiting party from the Order of Wandering Souls. She examined their flyer and listened with mounting skepticism to the crazy-sounding pitch from one of the Order members, a bearded, scraggly-haired young man who did most of the talking that day. He spoke with a dramatic earnestness that was like nothing she had ever heard outside of church, which she hadn’t attended since childhood. He talked of a coming time of “cleansing” and how she could be among the enlightened few who would one day inherit a changed world. This didn’t impress her much. It all sounded too apocalyptically biblical for her taste. But then one of the girls invited her into the group’s van to smoke some weed, a more effective come-on by far than all that end of days stuff.

Thus began one of the wildest days of her life. The weed was the most potent she had ever sampled and the next thing she knew she was getting finger-fucked by a hippie chick. She quickly realized there were no sexual boundaries with these people. No one belonged to anyone else. You could do whatever you wanted with whomever you wanted. Their liberal attitude regarding weed and other illicit substances was the biggest selling point of all. The rest of the day passed in a blur of tangled naked bodies and nonstop partying. It wasn’t long at all before all thoughts of suicide vanished.

The next day was very different, though no less exciting. Keely was granted a personal audience with John Wayne de Rais, the leader of the Order. He liked to meet one-on-one with all new recruits to ensure they were truly suited for membership.

John Wayne was older than the rest of them by decades, but he exuded a level of charisma Keely could only compare to A-list movie stars. He was a silver-tongued charmer with a quick wit. Keely was entranced the entire time she was in his company. She wound up desperately pleading her case with tears streaming down her face. The Order of Wandering Souls was where she belonged. It would be her salvation. John Wayne smiled in a benevolent way and assured her she would have a place among his people. However, when Keely offered to seal the deal with a blowjob, he did not refuse.

She had spent the months since fervently hoping for another intimate, private encounter with John Wayne, thinking she could maybe even please him enough to earn entry into his elite inner circle. But that was never going to happen if she didn’t stop fucking up like this.

She sat up and rubbed at her eyes, blinking against the bright sunlight. When her vision cleared, she saw a group of three people moving across the field in her direction. They were too far away to make out clearly, even with a hand held up to cut the glare of the sun, but she felt no sense of alarm. Members of the Order looked out for each other. This group had probably been dispatched to search for her when it was determined she had gone missing.

Keely resolved to seek out Susan Wagner as soon as she returned to the main part of the compound. She would apologize profusely for not doing her part when it was expected and volunteer for an extra week on laundry detail. It was only right.

The figures marching across the field became more distinct. All three were bare-chested men dressed only in dirty jeans and boots. But there was something off about their heads, which looked lumpy and misshapen from this distance. She squinted as they drew closer, trying to determine the cause of the irregularity. By the time they had closed to within twenty yards she realized they were wearing canvas hoods. This detail caused a first faint stirring of alarm. She had never seen anyone at the ranch wearing anything to obscure their identities, and there was no way to interpret the hoods as anything other than sinister.

The hooded men were coming rapidly toward her, their strides growing longer the closer they got. There was a sense of grim determination in their bearing. Keely’s heart started pounding as she got to her feet and took a few nervous backward steps. She took a quick glance around her and weighed the advisability of making a run into the nearby woods.

But there was no longer time for that. They were too close now. There was no chance of outrunning them. She cried out as two of the men roughly seized her and shoved her to her knees in front of the third man, who backhanded her across the face. The ferocity of the blow sent a shockwave of pain through Keely, but she was more disturbed by the mere fact of the blow than the force behind it. In the entire time she had lived at the compound, she had never seen an act of violence perpetrated by Order members against another member.

A possible explanation flitted through her mind and she latched on to it with desperate hope. The men of the Order respected and cherished their women and would never harm them. These men were outsiders. That would explain the hoods. It would make them harder to identify later, if she survived this encounter. She was probably about to be raped, a prospect that horrified her to the core, but that same desperate part of her thought she could endure it and survive so long as these hooded beasts truly were interlopers unconnected to the Order. The alternative was too sickening to contemplate.

This final hope was crushed as she stared up at the man looming over her and realized she knew him. He was a tall man with a big frame, muscular but with a bit of pudge around the middle. Keely would have recognized him soon enough even without the skull tattoo on his chest. The skull covered an old swastika tattoo he’d gotten in prison. A casual observer would never be able to make out the swastika. It had been obscured pretty effectively. But Keely could discern the shape of it. The big man had told her all about it one deliriously passionate night a month earlier.

Her features contorted and tears leaked from her eyes. “Garrett? I…don’t understand. Why—”

Garrett Palmer delivered another hard backhand blow, this one so savage it knocked her to the ground. “Keep your mouth shut. You’re coming with us.”

They began dragging her across the field, moving at a pace significantly faster than she could match. She slumped between the two men holding her and her bare feet slid over the rocky ground. Garrett’s last blow had sapped most of her remaining strength and it was all she could do to remain conscious as they headed for the group of cabins that acted as living quarters for most Order initiates.

Keely was mortified at the sight of all the people standing around outside when she and the hooded men arrived there several minutes later. She searched a lot of grim-looking faces and saw a mix of anger, fear and what might have been actual concern for her. No one was occupied with chores. No one was fucking, getting high or otherwise having fun. This was a serious communal moment. They were here to bear witness to her shame, possibly on instructions from John Wayne himself.

She was taken to one of the largest cabins. Keely had been inside this one on only a few occasions. It had several rooms and functioned as office space for Susan Wagner and other Order higher ups.

They’re not gonna kill me
, Keely told herself.
There’s no way that’s gonna happen.

But was that really true?

She started crying again as she realized she couldn’t be certain. That weird gathering outside was something new. It reminded her a little too strongly of scenes from old western movies, the ones where the condemned outlaw was marched through the center of town on the way to the gallows. Maybe something a lot like that was about to happen here. Now that she had allowed herself to entertain the appalling idea, it was easy to see how they could get away with it. This was a huge property. There was a lot of space to bury a body and be reasonably certain no one would ever find it.

The hooded men pushed her down a hallway until they reached a closed door at the end. Garrett knocked on it and said, “Ma’am? We’ve got the Miller girl.”

A voice Keely recognized responded. “Bring her in.”

Garrett opened the door and stepped into the room. The other men hauled Keely inside and one of them kicked the door shut. As with most of the cabins, there was no electricity here, hence the presence of oil lamps (currently unlit) and other low-tech throwbacks to other eras, including a metal filing cabinet and a manual typewriter. The typewriter sat atop a big desk that filled more than a quarter of the available space. Seated behind the desk was Susan Wagner, whose stern and unforgiving expression triggered Keely’s tears again.

“Susan, please, I know I’ve been fucking up a lot, and I’m really sorry, but I swear—”

“Silence her.”

A big fist slammed into the small of Keely’s back, driving her to her knees in front of the desk. The pain this time was worse than that inflicted by any of Garrett’s backhanded blows. It felt like she had been hit with a bowling ball. Another blow like that might cripple her, an insight that effectively overwhelmed the need to apologize or explain herself. She wasn’t saying anything else until she had Susan Wagner’s express permission.

Susan glanced at the men standing behind Keely. “Leave us.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When the men were gone, Susan smiled. “Stand up.”

Keely grimaced as she got slowly to her feet, and as she did so, she forced herself to face a fact her mind had thus far refused to look at head-on. She was being tortured. What was happening here went far beyond the bounds of normal Order discipline. It was also worlds removed from John Wayne’s glorious message of enlightenment.

Susan smiled. “Remove your clothes.”

Keely frowned. “What?”

Susan slapped a hand against the desk’s surface, making her jump. “Remove your clothes. Don’t make me tell you again.”

It was the last thing Keely wanted to do. Hadn’t she been humiliated enough already? But there was no one around to intervene. No one to whom she could plead for mercy. There was no choice at all here, save for perfect obedience.

She removed her dress, then her undergarments.

Susan smiled. “Now bend over and grip the edge of the desk.”

Keely winced at the thought of what this would do to her aching back, but again she obeyed. The only thing to do at this point was to endure whatever extra level of humiliation Susan had in mind with as much stoicism as possible, then once it was over, maybe start reassessing her commitment to the Order.

Susan stared at her for a long moment without speaking. There was a curiously avid cast to her features and Keely belatedly realized the woman’s gaze was trained on her hanging breasts. Then she looked Keely in the eye and smiled. “Tell me, child…have you ever been caned?”

Keely sighed. “Please don’t do that. It’s not right.”

Susan shook her head in a reproachful way. “Nonsense. You’re only getting what your behavior warrants.”