Sacrificing Virgins (6 page)

The crowd drew back from me, setting me free from where they'd pinned me to the pavement and I stood up outside the car, cradling my arm and staring at the crowd of blank eyes that glittered like obsidian in the descending night. Silence fell like midnight fog around us, as the mob grew still, and the moment pregnant.

“What
are
you?” I whispered. “What do you
want
?”

One of the men stepped forward, and tentatively opened its mouth. A growling sound came out, and then a word. “Jeessst.” It said in a voice like shifting gravel. Its unblinking eyes fluttered at the sound and it seemed to smile. Understanding dawning.

“Jeessst yur legs,” the man said, the words coming out slowly before it stepped forward. Its face looked pleased. “Jeesst your arms.”

“And what do I get in return?” I asked.

“Us,” someone else growled.

From above I heard the fluttering drone of thousands of translucent wings.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“The places you have never gone,” came my only answer, a whisper from the crowd. And then the cool teeth of a Luna Roach settled onto my spine. For a moment I struggled, hoping to throw it off. But then the ice slid through my brain, and I felt the world go quiet.

As I slid back to the ground, I wondered what would become of my body. And of all the bodies that surrounded me. Normally in a symbiosis, the predator used the host to serve as a nest for its offspring.

Oh God, I cried, as my body went numb. What would gestate and grow inside of Kara. What would hatch from my poor, sweet baby?

What would climb out of my own swollen belly after I had been used and used up? Or would they use me like Jenna?

I prayed that the chittering sounds I heard in my brain would take any knowledge of that away. Already, I could almost understand what the keening, droning noises I'd been hearing now during the nights meant.

Eat. Eat.

Kill. Eat.

Spawn.

Paul Hughes was lucky. His bad day had ended a long time ago now, before things really did get bad.

Mine was only just beginning.

Nailed

Some people found their sex toys in adult catalogues and others in seedy bookstores. But Natalie found hers…in her garden.

No, she didn't harvest a cucumber for her nightly pleasure. Or a warty squash (
studded—for her pleasure!
) But she did find something deep beneath the roots of her tomato and pepper plants that extended deeper into the heart of her house than her kitchen.

Something that got its roots in her…

The sun felt good on her back as she pulled weeds in the “back forty”, as Crisofer liked to call it. She always left the T out of his name because she thought it sounded more “come hither-ly”. Right now, she wasn't feeling very “come hither-ly” though. She wore a loose old T-shirt and ratty jeans so that she could kneel in the mud, and as she did so, pulling weeds and digging holes with a hand shovel beneath the exceptionally hot August sun, she felt the sweat beading and dripping from the nape of her neck and down her spine to slip and drip into the crack of her ass.

Sweat on a body could be sexy in some situations, but this definitely wasn't.

Natalie tried to pry the roots of a thistle out with her gloved hands. But it wasn't budging. The sweat kept streaming down her back as she dug and pulled and dug some more. Her hands followed the thick white root farther and deeper into the gray-caked concrete that was the earth of her garden. She needed to have a truck of loam or manure dumped back here this fall for next year. This earth was too hard from topsoil to clay.

When the ground suddenly gave way and the shovel sank down until the spade head completely disappeared, Natalie straightened up, and yanked her hand and shovel from where they had suddenly been swallowed. The thistle “tree” of a weed fell over to the ground.

Natalie looked down into the pit she'd dug. And saw a small tunnel at the bottom of the hole. It opened farther into the earth beneath.

“What the hell…” she murmured. It was a phrase that Crisofer always said.

She reached a gloved hand into the hole, and felt the hair on her arm tremor when it sank deeper into the dirt. She stretched until her shoulder touched the top of the ground.

“Whoa,” she whispered, as the cold of the air beneath the ground made the hair on her arm stand up. When the shiver reached up her arm and into her spine, she pulled her hand out of the hole and shook her head. “What the hell,” she said again.

Then she stood up and really got busy with the spade.

In a few minutes, the place where the stubborn thistle had been was no longer visible. Instead, an opening the size of a manhole cover had quickly revealed itself. And a few minutes later, when the pile of dirt thrown to the side of her healthy-looking Big Boy tomatoes had grown to knee deep, Natalie stopped her work, wiped the streaming sweat from blinding her eyes and looked down.

She whistled.

But there was nobody around to hear.

After all, she and Chris had moved here to get
away
from the monotonous drone of civilization. They were really only about forty-five minutes out of the “loop”, but that drive down the expressway for a bit and then off onto country roads made all the difference. Many people had a longer commute from the city into the congested suburbs, but they'd opted for a route that led instantly to nowhere… And they liked it that way. It didn't take as long as you'd think to work your way down the backroads to get into “the country”. At least not when you headed steadily straight northwest of the city. Of course, when Chris was gone for days on business trips, their little love nest in nowheresville seemed very remote indeed to the person left turning on the porch lights at night. And that person would be Natalie.

But right now, Natalie was staring into a hole in her garden. A hole that seemed to open on a good-sized cavern. She carefully prodded with the spade and expanded the hole, wondering how far it extended. The garden butted up against a slope of silt that formed the hill leading up to their house; at the bottom, a long creek wound through the edge of their property, its water protected from view by a heavy growth of scrub bushes and trees. The hole she'd found seemed to extend up under the silt hill. Maybe the creek bed had buried it long ago, whatever it was…

Natalie worked at the edges of the hole and little by little it gave way until she had a three-foot-wide entrance to a darkened cave in the earth uncovered. She poked her head into the dark tunnel a couple of times, but couldn't see anything past the periphery… That was when she dropped the spade and ran back up the hill to the house to find a flashlight.

She wasn't going to get lost in the dark…but she
was
going to explore the hole that spied on the roots of her garden.

The narrow tunnel turned out to extend beneath the hill that led to her house. The floods and debris of decades had apparently built up a covering of mud that had obliterated the entrance, but Natalie had revealed the edges…and found her way inside.

And inside…was old.

She moved a flashlight back and forth like a pendulum as she made her way, first in a crawl and then a crouch down the path that led away from the hole in her garden. She hadn't gone too many steps into the earth when she saw the colored stones. They were placed on the ground, as if meant as a sort of gated periphery. Turquoise and ruby and slate-colored, they were fist sized and placed in a semi-circle of three rows. Beyond that, though, was what interested Natalie.

Bones.

Laid out on the dusty gray ground was a skeleton of old bones. Old human bones, she had to assume, from the look of the arms and legs and skull. Around the whitened bones were other things.

Strangely carved bits of wood and colored stones and twisted ropes of twined twigs and other unidentifiable things that looked both organic and very old—desiccated.

Natalie stepped into the weird buried cavern and bent down to touch the forehead of the skull that lay in the midst of the open space. It didn't move. But she whispered anyway…

“I'm not here to disturb you,” she said in the narrow space.

That was when she saw the rusted spikes between the bones of the skeleton's hands. And the decayed bits of rope that still circled the wrists and ankles of the long-dead figure.

Why had someone staked and roped this person to the ground?
Natalie wondered. She said “this person” in her head because she couldn't even tell if it was a he or a she.

The hair stood up on the back of her neck, and she stepped back from the skull. “Who were you?” she whispered. Natalie crouched on her haunches and looked at the skeleton lying on the earth, deep beneath her house. On a whim, she reached out and pulled the frayed twine away from the bones of the skeleton's wrists, and then did the same to the rope that remained around its ankles. That was when she saw the stone.

It lay between the thigh bones of the skeleton. Unlike some of the other stones and bits of debris, this was a carefully formed, sculpted piece of rock—rock so smooth and polished it looked like marble. It was mostly cylindrical, almost a foot long, Natalie thought, as she stared at its shape there in the dirt. The white stone stood out sharply from the dirt of the floor it rested on, and the shape stood out more. On one end, two round circular shapes had been carved. If they'd been rectangular, she would have compared them to a gun handle. Only…they were round. Like balls in a skein, stretched away from the thing that held them fast.

On the opposite end of the cylinder, the shaft was capped in a faintly mushroom-like shape, a softly carved rounded triangle of stone.

Natalie reached down and pried it from the soil. As her fingers curled around the long center of its shaft, she felt her heart trip. She held her breath and turned the thing first one way and then the other in her hands. Her fingers clung hard to the smooth surface of its center and she could feel her face blushing in the dark as her blood pounded faster. There was no question about what this thing was that she'd found.

It was a dildo. A carefully carved, ancient sex aid.

She looked at the bony remains of the long-dead body on the ground beside her and whistled. “Did they crucify you for
using
this, or
making
this?” she whispered in the shadowed chamber. She turned it over in her hand and ran the tip of her index finger over the “head” of the stone implement. “Well, you got nailed, that's one thing for sure…”

Again the hair on the back of her neck stood up, as if a snake had slithered across her skin. Natalie gripped the ancient sex relic hard and trained the flashlight in her other hand back and forth across the ground. Slowly, she began to back out of the room and into the narrow tunnel that she'd entered the buried room through.

When she wiggled her way back out into the sunlight and the garden, she stood on the edge of the plot and looked around at the weeding she'd been doing. She knew that she should get back on her knees and pull more of the weeds that were choking out her fledgling squash vines. But that pragmatic idea didn't hold water for a second. Instead, Natalie trembled as the words “get back on her knees” ran through her head. She absently ran a finger up and down the stone shaft in her hand and thought about going back to the house and getting out of her sweaty clothes. She thought about what the thing in her hand might have been used for once. And as she did so…she felt the sweat gather faster, trickling down her back and siphoning down into the channel of her ass.

Natalie blinked twice, fast. It was almost as if something snapped inside her. And then without another thought, she was walking up the hill and back to the house. Once she got inside, after she stripped off her clothes in the bedroom, turned on the water and stepped into the shower in the master bath, she reached for the shampoo…and realized she still had the stone in her hand.

Thinking fleetingly of hygiene, but even more of how amazing the sensation might be, she squeezed her shampoo over the smooth white stone and with her fingers spread it all around the cool carved surface. When it was fully slicked in soap, she held the ancient dildo by its carved balls and began to stroke her hand up and down the shaft, urging the soap along it to kill a millennium of bacteria. At least, that was the conscious thought she told herself. She was cleaning the relic, she thought, as the stem where its balls were, moved ever closer to her body until the stone cock pressed against her groin and seemed to emanate
from
her. In moments, she stood beneath the spray of the shower with the stone cock protruding from her body as if she were an excited male. Her hand worked the thing as if she could coax cum from a stone.

She felt overcome with lust in those moments, her eyes closed, her body…somewhere else. And then hesitantly, shakily, she turned off the water, halfheartedly toweled herself off, and then went and lay down on the bed without dressing. Instead, she reached into the nightstand for a bottle. She repeated the actions she'd done with the soap, and the room filled with the scent of baby oil as she lathered the polished stone head of the thing in her hand before she slipped it between her thighs. Slowly.

Slowly.

But then faster. For a moment, she felt almost as if the room had slipped away, and she was being taken hard and rough by a thin man in a room with colored stones…

Natalie didn't weed the garden anymore that day.

“What's for dinner?” Crisofer called a couple hours later, and Natalie woke with a start on the bed.

She felt fuzzy and groggy, but when consciousness really kicked in and she heard her husband's voice and suddenly realized that there was a hard piece of cool stone in her hand, her eyes went wide as the events of the afternoon came back to her. Quickly she rolled out of the bed and dropped the stone phallus into the nightstand. She fled to the bathroom, and pulled a robe from the door. She met Crisofer in the kitchen a minute later, apologizing profusely about falling asleep on the bed after being out in the heat.

“Can we maybe just go out for pizza?” she asked.

He smiled that lopsided grin he had, and said, “Sure. Since I'm headed to Cincinnati tomorrow, that will give you some easy leftovers for tomorrow.”

When Natalie woke the next morning, she felt guilty. As if she'd cheated on her husband, who stood just a few feet across the room, straightening his tie in the mirror. He'd tried to put the moves on her after they got home from dinner, but she'd begged off, claiming a stomachache. In reality, she had a crotch-ache, after pounding a foot-long piece of rock inside her for a good chunk of the afternoon. Even now she could feel the stinging ache of “overuse” and didn't look forward to her next trip to the toilet.

All that said…

Something inside her ached for Crisofer to leave the house so that she could open the nightstand drawer again.

Natalie closed her eyes and wished the thought away. She was a whore!

No. She hadn't slept with anyone.

But…

“Goodbye, sweetheart,” Crisofer said, bending down to kiss her. He looked so good in his sharp white shirt and black-and-silver tie. “I'll be back on Wednesday.”

“Good luck,” she smiled, and then snuggled into the pillow. “I'll be here when you get back!” she promised.

“Better be,” he said, and in a flash he and his suitcase had fled from the room.

Natalie waited until she heard the back door close before she reached into the nightstand. Just barely waited.

Her hand trembled as it darted from beneath the sheets to grab the handle of the drawer. She wrenched it out and seconds later, the cool head of the stone artifact was slipping along the silken skin of her inner thigh.

Moments later, eyes closed and hands busy, Natalie felt her skin suddenly chill. It was a weird feeling, with the blood surging through her groin and her hips arching up to meet the bank of her hands. Her body was more than warm; she was on fire as she shoved the ancient sex toy inside her and yet…her skin suddenly goose bumped as the air shifted around her. The breeze felt wonderful against her fevered skin, and yet…strange. Her bedroom was a closed space. The window wasn't open, the door to the rest of the house…mostly shut. There could be no breeze here…