Chapter One
“Boy, are you fuckin’ them worms again?”
Startled by his brother’s voice, Esau Turvog guiltily dropped the bait can he held in one hand and the fistful of nightcrawlers he had in the other. Damn, he thought. He’d been just about to get a nut off when his brother interrupted him.
Esau’s brother Enoch stood in the shop’s doorway; his considerable bulk caused the woodplank flooring to bend. “Quit jerkin’ off with them worms, ’less of course you want to go dig some more up. The first weekend of May’s comin’ up, and we might have folks stopping by for some fishin’. We got a business to run here, ya know?”
Enoch wrinkled his nose in disgust as his younger brother stuffed his sullied cock, still slick with spit and worm slime, back into his filthy jeans. The boy was a damn fine cook, but that was about all. He just wasn’t right, Enoch knew. Never had been. Fucking sheep and cows was one thing—something all natural men partook of once in a while. But fucking worms? Somehow that just didn’t seem normal.
“Aw, Enoch,” Esau complained. “I was just about to have me a big cum.” What Esau did, by the way, was grab a big handful of worms from one of the bait cans in the fridge. Then he’d lay his dick right in that handful and start jerking. He’d squeeze the nightcrawlers so hard some of ’em would bust open as he shucked them back and forth over his tool. Them worms were full of blood, which shined up Esau’s dick nice’n pretty red. And them worms’d wriggle and squirm as he was jerkin’—felt real good. Next best thing to pussy, he thought. Er-shit. Maybe better. Sometimes, when Enoch was off to the shore for supplies, Esau would take a Q-Tip and, inch by inch, shove an entire worm down his peehole. Once he got it all the way in, he’d pinch off the end’a his dick and just let that worm wiggle around in there. It felt damn good, it did. Then he’d jerk off and release the pinch just as he was coming and pump his load out right along with the worm.
But not today. No nut today.
Esau reluctantly picked the nightcrawlers up off the floor, dropped them all back in the can, and replaced the can to the fridge.
“That’s better,” Enoch approved.
“What’cha want me to do now, Enoch?”
Enoch’s bulbous, bearded face scowled its disapproval. His great belly hung forth, stretching the front of his grimy overalls. “Boy, ain’t you got no wits at all? I do the gatherin’ and you do the cookin’. That’s the way it is’n you know that, right?”
Esau’s lower lip drooped. “Uh…yeah.”
“SO GO DO THE COOKIN’, YA IDJIT!” Enoch yelled. “Grandpa Ab ain’t got all year to wait fer your lazy ass!”
Enoch’s shout fairly kicked Esau out of the front of the bait shop. His big work-booted feet carried him off in haste, to the office and then to the stock room behind it.
Well, it wasn’t really a stock room, not by any typical definition.
Here, in other words, the stock was human.
Esau tromped fully into the room and—
««—»»
—the reeking filth-smudged man closed the door behind him. Flies circled around his bushy head; some walked on his grease-sheened face. Jewel, aka Julie C. Atkins, aka Convict Ident # W/F-4-97-98103, could only see him by looking back hard over her shoulder. Why? Because he and an equally filthy man had knocked her unconscious, and when she’d wakened, she’d found herself in this stinking room with her hands nailed to the floor.
“You’re sure a skinny one, ain’t ya?” the drawl commented behind her. Something clattered. Drawers opening, closing? “Shit, goddamn Enoch, always bossin’ me around. Well, fuck. I got time to have me some fun.” The voice got louder. “How’s that sound to you, stringbean?”
Jewel tried to speak but only the coarsest of unintelligible noises came out. Her hands burned as though pierced by white-hot pokers. If she leaned up, the pain redoubled, but it was the only way she could see. And when she could see, twisting her neck back…maybe she shouldn’t have bothered.
The man stood with his back to her, more things clattering as he stood before a filthy counter. From a drawer, he withdrew a short serrated grapefruit knife. “There it is.”
Terror sucked the breath from Jewel’s chest, then she gusted a shriek when he knelt down and hauled her up to hands and knees. Her hands felt as though a tractor had run over them, but as hard as she pulled, she could not unseat them. Rape seemed the next logical event, and she could even surmise the purpose of the short serrated knife chosen over other longer and sharper knives in the drawer. He began to cut off her sherbert-orange prison utilities. The uniform fell away in shreds, and then unbuckling sounds could be heard.
The pain and the horror nearly destroyed her capacity for coherent thought but at least this…rape…she could identify with. His cock felt oddly fat and enslimed when he kneed up closer and penetrated her. The stench of his crotch wafted beneath her, drifted into her straining face: old sweat and spoiled meat. His dick felt carbuncled as it slid to and fro, herpes blisters, with her luck, or knots of syphilis. But contracting social diseases was hardly a legitimate worry right now.
What would happen when he was finished?
Jewel was twenty-seven years old when the great state of Washington had elected to receive her as a penal resident for ninety-nine years with no possibility of parole. Christ, the baby hadn’t even died—it was only a fractured skull and accommodating temporal blot clot. Sure, he’d be totally retarded and epileptic for the rest of his life but she hadn’t killed him. And the whole kidnaping thing had been Dude’s idea anyway. Dude was Jewel’s pimp, and they were both junkies. The bag price of black tar just kept going up ($25 per quarter gram now!) and with both of them monkeying a two-gram-a-day habit, it was just too hard for poor Jewel to find twelve tricks a day every day. The city pigs were just too hot; johns were driving all the way to Tacoma now for their blow-jobs rather than risk having their names in the Seattle papers.
So. The short version? It had been Dude’s idea to snatch the baby from Redmond. That’s where all those rich Bill Gates geeks live. Ponying up a couple hundred grand to get Junior back? That was pocket change to all those rich fucks.
They’d smuggled the kid into their $32-a-night place at the Bush. Dude had gone out to look for some tricks (in truth, he sucked dick better than Jewel) and his only instruction had been that she keep the kid quiet. Fine. Jewel had been spiking for a vein in her foot when the baby started bawling like a full maternity ward; the distraction caused her to infiltrate. The vein collapsed, and the next thing she knew she had a syringe full of heroin and blood about to coagulate. Her only resort was to muscle it quickly into her arm, which cut the high in half and would cause a giant abscess. The little crumb-snatcher had fucked up her fix! So wasn’t it understandable that her momentary rage would urge her to pick the kid off the bed and toss him to the floor? It shut him up, all right. It also cracked his coconut.
The cops and FBI came along shortly thereafter. See, Dude hadn’t really gone out looking for tricks. He’d gone to the police to collect the fifty-grand reward the parents posted for the kid. He’d skated, and Jewel was in the slam for life: The Smith-Clark Correctional Center For Women. According to the rule, male detention officers were never allowed in the main block, so they’d simply transport them out for various work details when they wanted some action. All of the girls—Jewel included—were very cooperative. At least it got them off the block, and most of the DO’s would always slip them some tranks or speed in gratitude.
It wasn’t bad.
But most of the girls were short-timers compared to Jewel. Ninety-nine years? With no parole? Fuck that noise, Jewel concluded. Two DO’s had taken her and four other inmates out to 101 on a brilliant sunny Saturday. Pick Up Squad, they called it. They’d pick up trash along the road while the DO’s smoked and watched over them with shotguns. They were leg-ironed, of course, but when the DO’s got them back into the truck for some partying, they’d generally take the irons off. Jewel had been amazed at the expertise with which she’d sunk the sharpened popsicle stick into both of the DO’s necks during the second round of blow-jobs. They both fell back, blood bubbling from their holes. Five seconds later, all five girls piled out of the back of the truck, and that’s the last Jewel had seen any of them.
For a dumb junkie, at least, she was pretty smart. It wouldn’t be long before there was a state-wide dragnet out on them. And those other stupid slits? Fuck them. They’d be back in stir in less than twenty-four, singing like canaries about how Jewel did all the killing. Shit on ’em. With ninety-nine years, Jewel was not going back.
And she’d been right.
She’d run and run. Through woodlands so dense it was almost impossible to pass without a machete. And as the sun set, she found the shore.
She was standing on the shore of a sizeable lake, and in the middle of the lake—
An island, she noticed.
She grabbed a log and paddled her way across. It took over an hour, and when she got to the other side, she was nearly freezing. But this island looked like an overgrown piece of shit if there ever was one. No roads, no dwellings. It looked uninhabited, which couldn’t have thrilled Jewel more.
She slept for a while in brambles, then later, as the moon drifted high, she stomped her way for the middle of the jungle-like island. Not too long after that, however, she’d been discovered by the two huge reeking men, who seemed to be searching for worms in the moist ground.
Then…
Here Jewel was now, hands nailed to the floor and being clumsily raped from behind by the smaller and stinkier of her captors.
“Here she comes, Skinny,” the veritable ogre huffed. His dirty fingers reached under, pinching her clitoris, his fat hips pounding. “And there she goes—ooo, mama!” The cock continued to feel odd as it released its seed; the dirty hands squeezed her hips as the climax throbbed to its finish.
He popped out; Jewel felt warm sperm run down her leg, as if he’d just uncorked a bottle of it. Then the malodorous bulk behind her asked the strangest question:
“What they feed you skinny bitches up there at girlie prison?”
Jewel collapsed back to her stomach, the pain roaring at her hands. The man pinched the back of her thigh till she squealed. “Huh? What they feed ya?”
Jewel, at this lowest moment of her life, could scarcely comprehend the question.
He punched her right at the small of the back. More air sailed from her lungs. “Be that way, Skinny,” he said. Then he did something stranger than his question. He widely parted her buttocks, then sniffed. Then licked.
She could hear his lips smacking. “Hmm. Peas’n carrots? Meatloaf…with a little more meal than meat?”
Somehow, even through the shivering veil of her horror, her brain registered. He’s…right. Peas and carrots and meatloaf. That had been her last meal, the lunch she’d had in the dining hall just before she’d been taken out on Pick Up Squad.
“Fuck, skinny as you are?” the voice rumbled at her back. He got up again, went back to the counter. “What the fuck good are ya, huh? Like suckin’ a tiny piece’a meat off a toothpick. And I’ll tell ya somethin’ else. For a little bony gal, you sure got yourself one big pussy. Shit, Enoch could park his whole fuckin’ truck in that giant cooze on you.”
Jewel didn’t know what he was talking about and, by now, it clearly didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was back at the knife drawer. He’d already cut off her clothes.
What would he cut next?
The answer was not long in wait. Another sharp crane of her neck and she saw him take a foot-and-a-half-long ham knife from the drawer.
His reeking girth sat down right on her clenched ass, and with the knife he began sloughing wide sheets of skin off her back. The agony paralyzed her; she shuddered in place, a moth pinned to a cork board at the mercy of the entomologist.
Little mercy here, though.
It was the most deft skill with which he pared all of the skin off her back—a great single sheet. Then he did the same to her buttocks, then her legs.
Jewel quivered as if in low electrocution.
“Now let’s git your tummy,” her foul butcher remarked. All the fight out of her, the man yanked the nails out of her hands and flipped her over, then expertly flensed all the skin from her lower abdomen to her collarbones off in a single sheet.
Just as she was dying on the floor, her mind detected these few final words:
“Looks like it’s shad-row and scallions in crispy sesame rolls tonight…”
— | — | —