Chapter 10
BRIGHT LIGHTS BLINDED her. She looked around in surprise, recognizing that she was inside of a small, private barroom of a type common to this part of town. There were several such clubs which catered to special clientele after the regulation bars closed up for the night. There were four men seated on leather stools before a small, but elaborate bar. They laughed drunkenly as the two men pushed her into the room. The red-coated bartender had a white, frightened face.
"Come on, gentlemen," he whined. "Fun is fun, but this is going too far."
"Relax, Mike," one of the men holding her said. "We just want to buy the little lady a drink."
She shook off their hands roughly. "i wouldn't drink with louts like you if i was dying of thirst. Now let me go, before i lose my temper and really make trouble for you."
The men let go of her, but they stood with their backs braced against the closed door. Jane took a quick inventory of them all, including the bartender. They were not the kind of bums she would have expected them to be. All were well-dressed, in their mid-thirties, and not unattractive. Their voices indicated a modicum of good breeding. She pegged them as overage college boys, the kind who set aside a night a week to get away from home and hearth to howl at the moon. Normally, she felt sure she could have handled them with firmness and reason, but tonight she was not so sure. In their eyes she detected a primitive wildness compounded of too much brandy and the uncertain madness that had effected everyone since the outbreak of bubonic plague.
A man with graying temples at the bar said thickly, "What a charming creature, and an angel of mercy, I see. My dear, take mercy on we lonely wayfarers." He pounded the bar. "Mike! A drink for this gorgeous damsel."
The bartender looked her way quizzically. "What will it be, Miss?"
Jane decided she would have to humor them. "Oh, if it will make these overgrown children behave, I'll have one Scotch and soda."
The men at the bar cheered. "Bravo! That's the spirit."
With the two men who had brought her in walking behind her alertly, she had no alternative but to sit down at the bar. Giggling and shoving each other, they pressed around her like juveniles around the belle of the ball. She was not frightened, just uneasy. Their glazed eyes inspected her brazenly from the top of her coppery head to the tips of her toes. She hunched her shoulders to minimize the thrust of her breasts against the summer uniform. Now she regretted not having worn a bra. She regretted the short skirts of the new uniforms, too. No matter how she tugged at the hem, it left inches of her rounded thighs displayed above her petite knees. The hunger in their eyes, as they licked over her legs and breasts, disgusted her. Men were like ravenous lions at feeding time when they saw a woman, she thought, especially when they had been drinking too heavily. She could literally see them salivating.
Coolly, she estimated her chances of getting away after one drink. A blond man with a flat, cruel face answered the question for her. "Our party is complete now, Mike," he ordered the bartender. "Lock the door." The man meekly obeyed.
Jane's green eyes met the blond man's pale, hard eyes unflinchingly. "That's unnecessary. I'll be leaving right after this drink." She sipped it slowly.
He laughed, showing white teeth. "What's the hurry? We haven't started the fun and games yet."
"I'll pass the games," she said archly. "You kiddies enjoy yourselves."
A dark, heavy man at the end of the bar slipped off his stool and weaved to the far end of the room. It was obviously a recreation area, she observed, featured by a shuffleboard, a pinball machine and a dart-board affixed to one wall. He removed the six feathered darts imbedded in the cork board and carried them back to a white line chalked on the floor.
"Show her your stuff, Harry!" the others encouraged him.
The girl was suddenly aware of the nature of the target painted on the cork surface. It was a picture of a naked woman with immense breasts and hips. Numerals were printed on various portions of her body. A 10 on each arm. A 20 on each breast. A 30 on each thigh. A 50 on her belly. And 100 on the plump apex of her thighs and belly. Jane flushed and looked away.
"Juveniles!" she muttered aloud.
The blond man frowned and pressed himself against her side. Even through the starched skirt, the flesh of her hip cringed at the pressure of his hard, masculine belly and thighs.
"Don't get snotty, sister," he said. "You better show respect for old Harry. He's the champion dart-player of this whole state, formerly of Princeton's elite Darts and Arrows Club."
Jane pushed him away firmly, and pretended to show some interest in Harry's performance. Drunk as he was, the heavy man was a proficient dart-player. In quick succession, he snapped off the little missiles with the feathered tails. They splattered into the cork, one after another, vibrating their feathers. Two of them were stuck into the target's breasts. Two hit the thighs. One was imbedded in the navel. The sixth scored a perfect bulls eye!
The other men cheered lustily and slopped more drinks into their mouths. The blond man placed a hand on the small of her back and let it side down over the globes of her buttocks, flaring over the back of the small stool.
Jane colored and said angrily, "Take your hand off me at once!"
His pale eyes bored into her hatefully, but he obeyed. "Okay, baby," he said, "but you're going to get yours before this night is over!"
Jane slipped off the stool and faced them fearlessly. "Thanks for the drink, gentlemen, but now I really must be going."
They locked at her silently, sly, furtive smiles playing around the edges of their mouths. The dart champion beckoned to her. "Come on over here, nursie. You can't leave before the main event. You're going to be the star."
"I'm afraid I'm no match for you at throwing darts, Harry," she said, oblivious to the undercurrent of excitement in his voice.
All the men laughed. "That isn't exactly what we had in mind," the blond man said. "You don't have to throw any darts."
An icy finger ran up her spine, slipped down the valley between her buttocks, chilled her thighs and ran up the front of her belly. Gooseflesh spread a rash across her hot flesh. The rayon of her panties felt cold and clammy.
"I don't understand," she said, not wanting to understand. Her knees began to tremble.
The men formed a circle around her, their faces leering and bestial. "It gets so monotonous aiming at a picture," Harry said excitedly. "No zest. like making love to a pin-up photo. You must understand."
The room seemed to rock in front of her as the horrible realization took shape in her mind. "No!" she breathed. "You wouldn't! It isn't possible!"
"But we would." The blond man snickered. "We got talking about it tonight, and we decided that old cork target had to go. We wanted a real live girl who has all the right things in all the right places." He touched her breasts and her belly.
Jane leaped back only to be grabbed by two men behind her. She whirled her head frantically, gazing imploringly into their merciless faces. Their eyes were filmed over with the excitement and anticipation of perverted lust. Their fangs gleamed wetly in the fluorescent lights. The fear engulfed her now in great smothering waves. It was fear such as she had never experienced in her lifetime, crazed, animal terror, the child's terror of the dark unknown. In Jane Tyler's prosaic, ordered existence such horrors had no reality. It was like trying to comprehend the atrocities perpetrated in wartime Buchenwald two decades after the fact; trying to picture one's self as one of the Nazi victims. It was impossible! Just as it was impossible to comprehend what was happening to her now. She screamed and thrashed out violently with her arms and legs. The men restrained her easily and carried her over to a table, laying her down on her back.
"Okay, that's enough, you guys!" the bartender objected. "Let her go, or I'll call the police." He ran around the bar and headed for a wall phone.
The blond man pounced on him like a big cat, grabbing his shoulder and spinning him around. He drove a heavy fist into the bartender's face, splitting his nose like a ripe tomato. The smaller man fought back, but he was no match for his attacker. The blond man hit him with an uppercut and pinned him against the bar. Holding him there with a hand on his throat, he picked up a bottle of brandy and smashed the bottle down savagely on his head. The bottle shattered explosively, driving cruel splinters of glass into the man's head and face. Blood and brandy streamed down his shoulders and back. With a moan and a shudder, the bartender crumpled in a heap on the floor, his head hanging across the brass foot rail.
While four of the men held her arms and legs, the man called Harry grasped the neckline of her uniform and tore it down to the waist, slip and all. They murmured appreciatively as her high, hard breasts pointed up at them.
"like snow melons topped with maraschino cherries," Harry said. He touched one of the red nipples. Jane cringed away from him, moaning and shaking her head from side to side.
"No, no, no! Please, don't hurt me," she begged. She screamed as Harry suddenly pinched the sensitive nipple brutally between his fingers.
The blond man came over to the table, his eyes smoldering. "What a woman!" He tangled his fingers in her long, auburn hair. "You're perfect, baby. Perfect."
"Let's get on with it," one of the other men complained. "I'm in a bad way, as you can see."
His friends looked at him and laughed. He made no effort to conceal his lust from the girl. Jane shivered and looked the other way. They undid her belt next, and the blond man yanked the skirt of her torn uniform down over her thighs and legs. She was naked now except for her garter belt, panties and nylons. Lusty eyes devoured her long, lovely legs. They were masterpieces of art that no sculpture could ever duplicate, slim ankles tapering to arched calves, small-boned knees swelling to beautifully rounded, symmetrical thighs; and, above that, more lush, ripe womanhood than any of them had ever seen. Harry slipped one hand down inside of her panties and stroked her belly. His fingers felt like snakes crawling over her flesh. She whimpered as he squeezed the soft, pliable flesh roughly between his strong fingers.
"Tender as a young chicken," he said. He proceeded to slip the pink panties down over her hips. Because the other men were holding her legs splayed on the table, they could not go past her thighs. He ripped them apart and threw them aside. Jane shut her eyes to blot out their feasting eyes.
"Leave her stockings and garter belt on," a dark man said. "They make her sexier."
The blond man giggled. "What could be sexier than this?" He fondled her so harshly that she winced in pain. "Okay, boys take her over against the wall.
Harry, is your shooting eye ready?"
Jane struggled desperately and screamed as loudly as she could as they lifted her off the table and dragged her to the back of the room.
"Save your breath, honey," one of them muttered. "No one can hear you. There's a city ordinance that says these after-hours clubs must soundproof their ceilings to keep down the noise."
They pulled her over to the wall and slammed her back against the dart board, holding her arms out to the sides. The men who held her legs kneeled down.
"Watch your aim, Harry," one of them cautioned. "I wouldn't want to get hit with one of those little buggers."
Harry held one of the darts up to the light and ruffled its feathered tail. The steel tip glittered wickedly. It was about a half-inch long and sharp as a pin. A tense silence settled over the room. Jane hung in the inexorable grasp of her captors, her body quivering with fear.
Harry frowned. "This isn't going to be easy. Her boobs are shaking like dishes of jello."
"You'll manage, Harry," the blond man said. He sat down on a chair off to one side with a glass of brandy.
Harry flipped the first dart. Jane saw it coming at her in a blur of feathers. It struck her just above the nipple of her right breast, the tip penetrating to half its length. The girl howled, as much in terror as in pain. The breast quaked violently, and a thin trickle of blood painted a red, vivid line across the nipple and down the bottom slope to her belly.
"Lovely, Harry! Lovely!" The blond man leaned forward eagerly, his eyes hot and luminous on the feathered dart sticking out of that beautiful mound of creamy, white flesh. The men holding Jane stirred restlessly, taking advantage of their duties to fondle her round arms and thighs. Pain seared her breast with each throb of her heart.
Harry licked his lips and threw the second dart. It stuck high on her left breast. "Bad shot," he said disappointedly.
"You're a perfectionist," the blond man said. "You can't throw a strike with every pitch."
"Come on, Harry, don't waste time," the man who was holding her left leg urged. "I can't wait much longer." His fingers quivered hungrily on the inner side of her leg.
Jane moaned in anguish as she stared down at the brightly colored instruments of torture puncturing her creamy breasts. The sight of her blood made her dizzy. Her leg jerked in the man's strangle hold as the third dart pierced her flesh in the meatiest part of her left thigh. A ribbon of fire whirled around and around the circumference of her leg, climbing higher and higher until it sizzled in her belly. She felt faint, watching a droplet of blood swell like a tiny, red balloon around the point of the dart. The blonde man got up restlessly and walked over closer to her.
"Try a navel shot, Harry," he suggested.
Jane screamed hysterically, her belly quaking in anticipation of what was to come. Harry squinted down the body of the dart and let it fly. It flew in a fluttering parabola and hit with a soft thud just below her dimpled navel.
"Good try, Harry!" the men chorused.
Jane writhed in their hands, finding new strength in the agony that tore through her body. Her breasts lashed from side to side, dislodging one of the darts. The blonde man stepped up to her and pulled out the remaining darts.
Harry protested. "John, I'm not finished."
"Let's try a variation," the blond man said. He pulled over a small table and nodded to the men holding her. "Turn her around and lay her across the table."
Jane abruptly went limp, all resistance gone. She felt the dull resignation of a laboratory animal, accepting the indignities and pain to which she was being submitted with hopeless detachment. It was happening to a stranger, not to Jane Tyler. Her breasts throbbed, her belly and thighs tingled with pain. Her body was alive with feeling, unpleasant feeling, but more feeling than she had ever experienced before. From girlhood, Jane had pampered and petted her lovely body as if it was a priceless treasure. She had bathed it and oiled it and kept it smooth and antiseptic clean. She had regarded it more as a work of art than as an organism of flesh and blood. When she permitted men to make love to her, she had always felt the anxiety a collector feels when some clumsy clod picks up one of his priceless pieces. Her one satisfaction from the sex act came when it was safely completed and her dear body was restored to a state of perfumed cleanliness.
That was all gone, now. These brutes had defiled the temple of her womanhood. They had snatched the work of art from its pedestal, chipped it and scratched it, smashed it into little pieces. They could do no more to her than they had already done. The pain and blood filled her with deep, mystic satisfaction.
She offered no resistance when they threw her face down on the table with her legs dangling to the floor and her buttocks flaring in their faces. They gazed at her round bottom, with lust arching higher and higher in their hungry bodies. They ran their hands over the perfect fleshy spheres, teasing the white, satiny skin, peering and probing the intimate secrets of her. Never had she been so degraded. She reveled in the touch of their filthy paws. A ball of white fire was building deep in her belly. It made her buttocks swell and glow. Her throbbing breasts, mashed against the table-top, tingled strangely. Sensations she had never experienced before vibrated in her thighs and loins.
"Stand back, man," Harry said. "The time for play is later." The sight of her gorgeous buttocks made him tremble with such desire that he could scarcely draw a bead with the fifth dart. Breathing deeply, he steadied himself. The dart sped toward the target, embedding itself, the full length of its barb, in a plump cheek.
Jane shuddered and groaned as the ball of fire in her belly swelled. She felt the bite of the last dart in her other buttock, heard the men cheering for Harry. Her nipples were gorged with blood. Her thighs and belly were scorched by the flames of an inferno bubbling deep within her, a volcano that had been dormant for years, suddenly boiling to new life. She was aware of a void, a vacuum that yearned to be filled.
The blond man plucked the darts from her rosy bottom and wiped away two drops of blood that glistened on her cheeks like dew shining on a rose. They had flogged their lust to an erotic pitch that none of them had ever known before with their wives or other women they had shared sex with. Now they tore off their clothes wildly, babbling like idiots. They were blind to what was happening at the front of the bar.
Mike the bartender had regained consciousness. Covered with blood, he crawled slowly to the door. He unlocked it and slipped out into the night.
Jane felt the rough hands grasping her buttocks, and the fierce surge of hard, male flesh between her thighs. The vacuum was filled at last! The ball of fire in her loins burst with the blinding light of a hydrogen bomb. Rapture, glory, sweet enchantment bubbled over in every remote cell of her body.
The men gaped in wonder as, out of the ashes of pain, blood and defilement, the dry dust of frigidity, there emerged a nymph of insatiable passion.
When the first man had exhausted himself, she turned over on her back and lay spread out like a sacrificial maiden on the altar. She arched her back, reaching out to them with her breasts and belly. Her arms and legs were spread invitingly. The smile on her lips was wanton, pagan.
"She's the reincarnation of Eve," Harry murmured in awe, and he fell upon her furiously. Her breasts burned his chest, the nipples' hot ingots searing his flesh. The clenching of her thighs squeezed the breath out of his lungs. Her heels pounded demandingly on his buttocks.
She outraced him to fulfillment, then her desire surged back again, and she joined him at the pinnacle of ecstasy. One by one, she swallowed them up, a ravenous female whose appetite would never be satisfied. All of her life, Jane Tyler would seek to make up for years of sexual malnutrition. In love as in eating, gluttons are made by the haunting memories of deprivation.
When they were finished with her, she lay slack on the table with her eyes closed. The dart wounds in her breasts, belly, thighs and buttocks were marked by pinprick clots of blood. They would heal and be almost invisible, but Jane would always know they were there, symbols of the time she had been crucified and then resurrected.
She sat up with a start. Uniformed policemen were flocking through the door. Her six attackers, still naked, were at the bar, drinking. A husky cop rammed the end of his nightstick into Harry's fat, pink belly. Harry bleated like a calf and folded up on the floor. The blond man cursed and threw a bottle at the policeman's head. It shattered, slashing his cheek open to the bone from temple to jaw.
Another cop fired his pistol at the naked, blond man. It shattered his hip and sent him flying against the back bar. Glasses and bottles crashed on top of him as he slumped to the floor. The other men grappled with the police. They were chopped down with nightsticks and gun butts.
The policemen gathered around Jane, who sat huddled on the table with her legs drawn up and her arms wrapped around her knees. She sensed their furtive, guilty eyes on her breasts and thighs. One stout, older cop took off his jacket and draped it around her.
"I'm Captain Hart, Miss. We got here as soon as we could. Are you all right?"
"I'm all right," she said. She had an insane desire to laugh. She looked up at the mob of male faces surrounding her, and the warm fluttering between her thighs commenced again. They were big, virile men. She wished they would take off their blue uniforms. She tried to picture all those males naked, with their masculinity fired by the sight of her nude body. She was sure she could take on all of them.
"You were raped?" the captain asked.
She could no longer repress the giggle. "Raped?" she repeated. "I can't even count the times I was raped."
"There's an ambulance on the way, Miss," the chief said. "Try to relax. You'll be all right."
Jane could not control herself. Shrugging off the jacket, she squirmed off the table. She proudly displayed the wounds on her breasts and belly and thighs.
"We were playing a game," she said. She fondled her breasts, giggling. "These are worth twenty points each." She pointed to her navel. "Fifty points." Then she grabbed herself between the thighs. "This is the bulls-eye. One hundred points."
Captain Hart looked around uneasily at his men. "Tell me, one of you, whether that ambulance is coming."
Jane pressed herself against him. "Let's have some fun while we're waiting, Captain." Her hands grasped him through his trousers. "I feel so funny. Do it to me, please!"
Hart stared into her eyes with mounting horror. His flesh crawled. Of all the madness he had witnessed this day, none of it compared with the madness he saw in this woman's eyes.
Minutes later, they carted Jane Tyler away in a straight jacket, her body consumed by an unholy fire that only death could quench!
CHAPTER ll
IT WAS AFTER three in. the morning when Don Evans drove into his driveway. Guilt and remorse rode like a leaden ball high in his chest. When he had invited Louise Pitts out for a drink, it had been an innocent gesture of friendship. He was still not quite sure of how they had ended up in a lovers' hideaway in an adulterous embrace. Madness, sheer madness. Evans didn't know how he could face his wife. He hoped she would not be waiting up for him, but she was. Carla was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and chain-smoking cigarettes. She was pale and tired, and there was a tic at the corner of her right eye. She seemed strangely distant. The front of her robe was open, and her breasts strained against the filmy nightgown. He hated himself for comparing them with Louise's more voluptuous breasts.
"You should be in bed, honey," he told her.
"I couldn't sleep." She told him about the horrible experience with the rat, and about Bob Shaw's bite, carefully deleting the account of what had happened between her and Bob in the examination room. It seemed like a bad dream now, something that had no basis in reality. She kept telling herself that it had not happened, but her heart knew better.
Evans was shocked by the grisly story. "Thank heavens old Bob was around to take care of you," he said.
The double entendre was in her mind, not in his intent. Carla blushed furiously. Turning away from her husband quickly, she said, "Let's go to bed."
Evans scrubbed himself scrupulously in the shower, just in case any of Louise's perfume lingered on his body. When he came back into the bedroom, Carla was lying in their double bed, facing the wall. He had a last cigarette and brought her up to date about conditions at the hospital and in the city in general.
"I think we're going to lick this thing before it has a chance to get any real impetus," he said. "I doubt there'll be a rat left alive by morning." He reached over to switch out the light, when the front-door chimes clanged impatiently.
Carla sat up in bed, wide-eyed. "Who could it be at this hour?" she asked tensely.
"I don't know." Evans slipped his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his slippers. He started downstairs in pajamas, with Carla at his heels, clutching a wrapper around her body.
He opened the door and was surprised to see Bob Shaw and his wife, Dale. Dale Shaw was as tall as Evans was, a statuesque brunette with flashing, dark eyes. Her breasts were the biggest Evans had ever seen, yet they were not sloppy. Her husband's favorite joke was to wink and say: "Dale's a Texas girl, and you know that they grow everything bigger in Texas!"
Standing at the door, she wore a skirt-and-sweater ensemble that emphasized the lushness of her hips as well as her breasts. Her sultry face was ominously grim. Bob Shaw's expression was even grimmer. He was wearing trousers and an undershirt, and his feet were bare.
"Can we come in?" Dale asked sharply.
"Sure." Evans stepped aside to let them pass. Dale shoved Bob ahead roughly and brushed past Evans quickly. As she did, the doctor's eyes widened in shock. She was holding a heavy .45 caliber automatic pressed into her husband's back! With the expertise of an experienced gunslinger, she moved to a position where she could cover them all with the gun.
"What the devil is this?" Evans demanded. "This is a poor time for practical jokes, Dale."
"No joke!" the sultry amazon snapped. Her dark eyes glittered on Carla Evans. The slim blonde girl looked puny beside her. "Little, baby-faced Carla," she said in a simpering voice. "Shy, modest Carla. I guess maybe that's the joke." She looked at Evans. "Only the joke is on you and me, Don."
"What is this, Dale?" Evans said crossly. "Stop talking in riddles and tell us what this is all about."
Dale snorted and waved the gun at Carla. "Suppose we let your wife tell you, Don. Go on, you little cheat, give it to him straight, the way Bob gave it to me!"
Carla swayed and put a hand to her throat. She glanced frantically at Bob Shaw. The big, husky man looked as miserable as a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. "I'm sorry, Carla," he said. "I had to tell her. It was bugging me something awful. Dale and I have always played square with each other."
"Sure!" his wife hissed. "Fair and square, that's my boy! Turn my back for a couple of hours, and he tumbles in the hay with a cuddly little blonde pussycat!"
Evans was suddenly numb. His lips were bloodless, pressed in hard against his teeth. His voice was hollow. "What are you saying, Dale?" He glanced fearfully from Shaw to Carla. The man looked away guiltily. Carla covered her eyes with one hand and began sniveling.
"Go ahead!" Dale jeered. "Turn on the waterworks, doll. That always gets the brutes where they live."
"Dale," Evans persisted, "are you saying that your husband and my wife...? " He was unable to put the repugnant thought into words.
"Your wife and my hubby, yes, they were making the two-backed beast tonight in your' office. Little Carla made him take off his pants so she could fix up his bite, and sex reared its ugly head. I do mean ugly!" She spat in disgust at her husband.
"I don't believe it!" Evans said, stunned. He looked to Carla for a denial, but all she could do was weep.
"I'm sorry, Don," she cried. "I don't know what came over me. It was as if I had no control over my mind and my body, as if some invisible malevolent force was manipulating me like a puppet."
"She's telling the truth," Shaw mumbled. "It was the same way with me. You wouldn't understand. We were two different people."
The trouble was that Evans did understand. Only a few hours before, he had experienced the same phenomenon in the exciting presence of Louise Pitts. Even at the moment of their eager coupling, some part of him had stood to one side, contemplating their lechery with distaste. Understanding was not forgiving, however. He felt murderous rage blazing up inside him. It was unthinkable that his wife would open her arms and her thighs to another man, that she would let another male feast dn her abundance.
"You whore!" he shouted, and even as he said it, he knew it was the colossal conceit and vanity of the male animal speaking for him. It was one thing for him to sin with Louise. It was quite another thing for his wife to sin with Bob Shaw.
He looked at the gun Dale was holding. "Are you going to shoot them? I wouldn't blame you if you did."
"Naw!" She laughed bitterly. "The two of them ain't worth going to jail for." Excitement had brought out her native western drawl very strongly. "Down where I come from, when a gal's man cheats on her, her father or her brothers take a horse whip to him. Well, I don't figure on bothering my dad and brothers to come three-thousand miles to do a job I can do myself."
"Now see here, Dale!" Shaw took a step toward her. "Let's stop this nonsense." He stopped short, looking down the wicked muzzle of the .45, hearing the click o? the safety as she flipped it off.
"One more step," she said quietly, "and I'll be a widow." She turned to Evans. "Do you have any strong rope?"
"An old clothesline."
"Get it, pronto!"
Evans ducked down the cellar, wondering what she had in mind to do with Bob and Carla. He smiled wryly. He doubted if there was a horse whip available in the county. While he was downstairs, Dale ordered her husband to remove his clothes.
He turned fire red. "Come on, honey, I can't do that."
She sneered at him. "Why not? Only a little while ago the two of you were rubbing bare butts together. Why be modest now? Now get out of those clothes before I put a slug through your gut!"
"Okay, okay." Shaw began to unbutton his pants. He was afraid of Dale. She had always been a loud, flamboyant girl who could ride, shoot and drink with the best men, but there was an added quality of reckless belligerence in her attitude that was unfamiliar to him. There was madness in her eyes. She waved the gun at Carla. "You, too! Off with your robe and nightie!"
"No!" the blonde girl gasped. She clutched her robe around her more tightly and backed against the wall.
Dale advanced on her ominously. "You want me to tear them off you, all right!"
"Better do what she says, Carla," Shaw advised her. "She means business."
Whimpering and trembling, Carla stripped off her robe and nightgown. Naked and covering her pear-shaped breasts self-consciously with her hands, she cringed under Dale's scornful scrutiny.
"Never figured you'd go for a filly with little boobs like that. I had bigger ones than her when I was twelve years old. You'll be playing with dolls next," she taunted Bob Shaw.
Carla was bristling with feminine indignation and injured vanity. "You big cow!" she shouted. "You belong on a dairy farm!"
The tall brunette's eyes flashed fire. Stepping toward Carla, she cuffed her on the side of the face with a hand as powerful as a man's hand. The blonde girl was knocked to the floor. The imprint of Dale's fingers branded her soft, white cheek.
At that moment, Evans came up out of the cellar. He was shocked to see that Shaw and Carla were naked, and concerned to see his wife sprawled on the floor. "What's going on here?" he demanded.
"Your wife got snippy, and I had to show her who the boss is. Okay, Don, cut that line up into lengths and tie them up, hands and feet."
"What for?" Evans asked hesitantly. The initial flush of his hurt and anger was wearing off. He didn't really want to see his wife suffer further physical pain. The mental pain she was suffering was quite enough.
"Stop asking questions and do what I tell you," the Amazon told him. She punctuated the order with a jab of the big pistol. "You're either on my side or their side, Don. Either way, we play by my rules." Evans did not argue.
He bound their hands in front of them and bent down to tie their feet. "Wait," Dale said, "maybe we better all go down the cellar." She leered at Shaw and Carla. "Wouldn't want to disturb the kiddies or the neighbors with lots of screaming, would we?"
Carla shivered, feeling her breasts and buttocks prickle with gooseflesh. "Screaming?"
Dale came over and gave the blonde a clout on the backside with the flat of one hand. "Got a solid little rump on her, I'll say that," she observed. "Now git! Down the cellar!" She waved the .45 menacingly.
Shaw, Carla and Evans led the way, with Dale bringing up the rear. When they were downstairs, she pointed to an overhead pipe. "String them up on that, Don," she instructed him.
"Now, hold on, honey," Shaw pleaded. "This has gone far enough."
The big, dark girl laughed harshly. "It's only begun, lover boy. Lift your arms so Don can tie them to that pipe."
Helplessly, Shaw and Carla raised their bound hands high above their heads, and Evans lashed them securely to the pipe with lengths of the old clothesline. Little Carla had to strain up on her toes to reach the pipe. Her breasts were lifted high, the nipples pointing toward the ceiling. As he tied Shaw, Evans' eyes were drawn hypnotically to the oblong of white gauze fixed with adhesive tape to the man's leg. He visualized Carla's slim, white fingers touching the wound, caressing Shaw's hairy, muscular flesh. With grudging envy, he noted the bullish masculinity of the big man. You could hardly blame a girl for being tempted, he reflected bitterly.
Dale Shaw rummaged in a corner of the cellar where Evans had stored some odds and ends of lumber. She picked up three dowels fashioned out of birch wood, each about a yard long. Holding them bunched together, she whipped them back and forth through the air with a whistling sound.
"My third-grade teacher down in Texas used to have a couple of cuties like this under his desk. When any of us would cut up, he'd make us lie down across a chair, and whammo!" She slapped the thin, wooden sticks down hard on top of a packing crate.
Carla could feel the impact vicariously in her belly and buttocks. She whimpered and gazed imploringly at her husband. "Don, you've got to stop her. She's a sadist!"
"I do think you're overdoing it, Dale," Evans said uneasily. "Corporal punishment is outdated."
"Not where I come from!" She stalked toward Shaw and Carla, her dark eyes glittering with lusty excitement. Jamming the pistol into the belt of her skirt, she lashed the dowels back and forth in the air. The green wood was strong and springy. Standing to one side, Evans winced as she whipped Shaw across his hard-muscled buttocks. The big man roared and tugged at his bonds like a maddened stallion. Three vivid welts were stenciled across his rump. He gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut as she hit him again and again. The hard birch sticks bit through the tough hide, into his raw flesh. His blood stained the bleached wood. At last he could endure it no longer. A stifled scream came from his pain-twisted lips.
"Dale, please! Enough!"
She stepped back, grinning in triumph. "I guess it is, at that."
Evans was sick to his stomach. Shaw's buttocks was a checkerboard of bloody lines. Carla was crying hysterically, spinning and writhing like a dervish. The harsh rope cut into her tender wrists. As Dale turned her attention to his wife, Evans leaped forward.
"Leave her alone! She's had enough!" he shouted.
The wicked sticks slashed across Carta's white belly as she thrashed around wildly like a frightened mare on a tether. Whimpering in agony, she drew up her legs, doubling her knees over her stomach. Back and forth she swung like a pendulum.
"Now that's a cute trick!" Dale sang out. She swung the sticks underneath Carl's up-drawn legs, spanking her across the tops of her thighs and the bottom crescents of her buttocks. The blonde girl's sensitive flesh flamed in torment.
Evans reached Dale and grabbed her wrist as she tried to hit his wife again. The pistol slipped out of her belt and skidded across the cellar floor. They wrestled for possession of the dowels, eye to eye, reeling back and forth. A sensual smile curved her lips.
"Don't be so noble, Don," she said. "She deserves to suffer, the cheat!"
A big woman, in the grip of strong passions, she was more than a match for his strength. Yet there was nothing masculine about her. Her big breasts, bursting out of the sweater, surged against his chest as they struggled. An exotic perfume wafted into his nostrils out of the deep valley between them. Her hips ground into his, her belly soft and female through her thin skirt.
"None of us are saints, Dale," he reasoned with her. "They've both been punished enough." He managed to twist the sticks out of her grip.
"You're stronger than you look, Don," she said with admiration. "You're in good shape, for a doctor." There was a sly, subtle change in her manner. Unexpectedly, she put her arms around his neck and molded her ripe body against him. Her eyelids were heavy, her breath hot on his cheek. She glanced over at Shaw and Carla, who were watching them curiously.
"Maybe you're right Don," she said softly. "Maybe there's a better way to get back at them." She pulled back from him and grasped the hem of her sweater. With a swift, supple motion, she pulled it over her head. With a glance of brazen defiance at her husband, she shrugged her brassiere off one round shoulder and then the other. The most magnificent pair of breasts Evans had ever seen swelled in his face. They were as round and firm as honeydew melons, their scarlet summits gleaming like ripe strawberries.
Bob Shaw's voice trembled. "Dale, honey," he said. "What are you doing?"
"You should know, dear," she sneered. "You and that blonde hussy invented the game." She turned toward Carla and lifted her breasts with her hands. "This is where we separate the girls from the women, dearie!"
The pain in Carla's buttocks and tummy was eclipsed by the innuendo in Dale's voice. Her feminine intuition told her exactly what the big brunette had in mind. She glanced anxiously at Evans.
His gaze was magnetized by those big breasts. In a trance, he saw Dale unzip her skirt and let it billow to the floor. Her legs were long and shapely, every bit as magnificent as her breasts. Her thighs flared to wide, fecund hips encased in tight, translucent panties. She seemed to Evans to be larger than life, a glamour artist's conception of the female form with all the sexy attributes blown up exaggeratedly in a vision designed to dazzle the male eyes.
She went to Evans, arms outstretched, breasts bobbing, buttocks undulating from side to side. Her smile was wanton, inviting. "Let's give them a show they'll never forget, Don," she whispered. She put her arms around his waist and pushed him back toward an old divan that sat against one wall. His knees struck the seat, and he fell back onto the cushions. Dale giggled and sat on him, straddling his thighs. Her enormous breasts loomed up in his face like two white balloons.
"You cut that out, Dale!" Shaw forgot his pain in his jealous fury. "You do this to me, Dale, and we're finished, I swear it!"
She looked across her shoulder and stuck out her tongue at him. She winked at Carla, and jeered. "After a ride in a Cadillac, it's tough to go back to a Ford, honey. Your hubby is going to find that out."
Tears streamed down Carla's cheeks. "Don't do it, Don," she begged. "She can't make you if you don't want to."
"But he does want to," Dale purred. She buried his face in the creamy valley between her breasts. Her flesh felt like hot velvet against cheeks. Her perfume left him dizzy. She squirmed around until she was sitting on his lap with her long legs stretched out on the cushions. She kissed him on the mouth, shoving her wet, squirmy tongue between his lips. It was as sweet as cotton candy. The pulse in Evans' loins began to pound insistently.
"Don!" Carla's agonized voice made him look up. "If you love me, you couldn't!"
He fought a valiant fight, but the contest was unequal. There was too much vibrant woman in his arms, , and he was only human. Dale mashed one of her breasts against his mouth. The hard nipple surged between his lips. Involuntarily, his tongue caressed it. The girl threw back her dark, shining head and groaned in pleasure. "That feels so good, Don," she sighed. On the sidelines, Shaw and Carla watched in helpless pain and humiliation. "Don, Don, Don," Carla chanted. "Be strong. I love you."
Dale lifted her hips and pulled down her panties. She shoved them down around her ankles and kicked them high into the air. "The sky's the limit," she said gaily. She took one of Don's hands and pushed it dawn between her thighs. He felt as if he were immersed in a pool of smooth honey. She moved against his fingers rhythmically, priming the fire in her loins and in his. When she felt his response, she slid off his lap and undressed him. Evans was too inflamed to care any longer about Shaw or Carla or about anything else. At the moment, his only world was Dale Shaw, big-breasted, fleshy, wonderful Dale. She was the mother of all females. She was mother earth herself. He cast off the last of his clothing and kneeled on the couch facing her. Her hands and eyes admired his virility.
She laughed at her husband. "Think you're the only man in the universe, don't you? Take a good look, Bobby-boy!"
She did things to Evans that made his wife turn pale. Carla felt the bitter taste of vomit in her throat and averted her head. She shivered as Dale emitted crude, passionate endearments to Evans.
Dale's voluptuous body was an irresistible lodestone that sucked in his flesh the way the magnetic pole draws the needle of a compass. He went to her with fierce lust, losing himself in her arms, legs, belly and breasts. Passion wracked her body like an earthquake. Her fists and heels beat a violent tattooo on his back and buttocks. Her teeth bit into his shoulder. Her breasts crushed his chest. It wasn't an act of love. It was a cataclysm! When it was over, Evans felt like a pithy orange husk out of which the last drop of juice had been wrung.
He heard Carla weeping, heard Shaw's bitter curses. Dale sat up, pushing him away from her. She was finished with him. "I guess that evens things up," she said casually. She got off the couch and picked up her discarded clothing. She dressed quickly. "Get your clothes on and cut them down," she ordered Evans.
He obeyed quietly. After he released Shaw, he stood in front of him, waiting. The big man flexed his muscles, looking from Evans to his wife. He seemed uncertain what to do. Hatred and violence waxed and waned in his eyes.
"Go ahead," Evans taunted him. "Hit me. Kill me. It doesn't make any difference."
Shaw started to say something, then clamped his mouth shut. His huge body slumped, and the fire went out of his eyes. He turned away from Evans, rubbing his chafed wrists.
"I'd be killing a dead man," he said and walked slowly to the stairs.
"Don't forget your pants and shirt, dear," Dale Shaw said in a casual, wifely voice.
The Shaws left, and Evans took Carla into the examination room to attend to her hurt buttocks and belly. Her blue eyes were bright and vacant, a lifeless doll's eyes.
Evans spoke finally. "Maybe Dale is right. Remember what she said? She said, T guess that evens things up.' I'm willing to accept that. How about you?"
She sighed. "I don't know. I keep remembering what Bob said to you. 'I'd be killing a dead man.' I think, maybe all of us are dead. We died tonight."
"No," he said firmly, "we mustn't think that. Sick, yes, but not dead. The whole town is sick. You can smell it in the streets. You can feel the fever. The fever of the plague has lowered our resistance, made us susceptible to all sorts of complications. Do you understand?"
"I think so," she said dreamily. "Bob said something like that earlier tonight." Her breath caught, and she turned her eyes away from him. "After we did what we did."
"Stop it!" Evans said sharply. "I don't want to think about it." He walked to his desk and picked up his calendar. Angrily, he tore off the top page. "This day is gone. It never happened."
"I wish it were only true," Carla said miserably.
He studied her naked body lying on the table with dispassion. Her breasts looked deflated somehow, the nipples pale and shrunken. The cruel welt across her round, white belly was a scarlet letter. Every time he looked at the scar, he would read the story of her infidelity. And it would remind him of his own treachery. Twice in one night! Louise and Dale.
"Go to bed," he told Carla. "There are some things I have to attend to down here."
She left the office silently, her blonde head bent in dejection. Evans went into the kitchen, got out the bottle of Scotch and carried it back to his office. He lit a cigarette and slumped in his chair, swigging raw whisky from the bottle. It was as tasteless as water. Shock, fatigue and despair had numbed his senses to all stimuli. Maybe Shaw was right, he thought. Maybe he was dead.
His gaze was drawn to a medicine cabinet against one wall. He singled out the brown bottle with the red letters on the label: LSD. Early in the week, he had secured a precious allotment of the controversial hallucinatory drug for supervised experimentation in the hospital's psychiatric division.
After he had taken the dose, he sat down again and placed the bottle on his desk blotter. The bottle seemed very green, the blotter seemed very brown. He laughed. That was crazy! It was the blotter that was green. The bottle was brown. Or was it? In any case, the colors were so vivid that they hurt his eyes.
He gripped the arms of the chair in astonishment as the cap suddenly popped off the bottle. Smoke, the color of human flesh, poured out of the mouth of the bottle. He knew now what the bottle contained. Aladdin's lamp! Genie! And what a genie! Her breasts and belly materialized out of the smoke. Her nipples sparked with red fire. She was a composite of Carla, his wife, Louise Pitts and Dale Shaw. Her proportions kept changing like the images on the screen of a kaleidoscope.
She beckoned to him with a finger, smiling in wanton promise. "Come with me," she said. Her thighs parted, and, to his amazement, she began to grow larger and larger until her voluptuous body filled the whole room. He cried out as her thighs and belly enveloped him. He was an explorer in the midst of a lush, tropical forest uncharted by man. He plunged laboriously through the thick, tangled foliage, smothered by the heat and humidity. Ahead of him he saw a dark, unfathomable cavern. He plunged headlong into the unknown. Screaming in terror, he fell end over end into a bottomless pit, like Alice invading her Wonderland.
Dim memories echoed in his brain. A time in New York at an American Medical Association conference, when a learned man had lectured on the subject of LSD.
"It can take you to heaven or hell," the man had said, "depending on which direction you are headed to begin with. "Wherever you are going, it takes you there much faster. Faster than the speed of light."
As he fell, Evans wondered where his destiny lay, in heaven or hell?
He blacked out. It might have been seconds or days before he opened his eyes again, he did not know. There was no doubt in his mind where he was, though It had to be heaven.
He was lying on a huge, satin cushion, soft as a cloud. The air around him was fragrant with perfumed steam rising from a heart-shaped pool. A dozen or more young girls, all naked and breathtakingly beautiful, were bathing in the pool. The surface of the pool was covered with rose petals. The petals clung to their bare, sleek breasts, bellies and buttocks. Their flesh ranged from milky-white to dusky-brown, with golden tones in between. Their teeth were white, and their hair was long and shimmering. Their plump loins pulsed with life and fire.
Desire, unbearable in its intensity, overwhelmed Evans. The walls were made of mirrors, reflecting a hundred images of himself back to him. He was amused to see he was clad in satin shirt and pantaloons like some mystic prince out of the Arabian Nights.
The girls saw he was awake, and they began to laugh happily, leaping up and down in the water, clapping their hands. He was entranced by the vision of their bouncing breasts, all festooned with the rose petals. He got on his knees and called out to them. Eyes glowing with eagerness, they scrambled out of the pool, their sleek, young bodies shedding water in sparkling droplets. They surrounded him on the immense cushion, shaking their breasts in his face, rubbing their thighs and buttocks against him. He had never seen, or even conceived of, such a surfeit of vibrant feminine flesh. He was a greedy child turned loose in a candy store, free to gorge himself on parfaits, bonbons and other goodies.
It was a gourmet's feast. Their nipples were sweet, candied cherries. Their buttocks were billowy marsh-mallows. His fingers dipped in pots of honey. Their lust-crazed faces swam around him. Demanding hands tore at his satin shirt and pantaloons, stripping him naked.
Abruptly, their levity ceased. Their pretty faces were shocked, disbelieving. Then one of them shoved her knuckles against her mouth like a snickering little girl and pointed at him. Now the others began to titter and point at him. The tittering built to wild, hysterical laughter. Mystified, Evans looked down at his body. Sheer terror overwhelmed him.
He was as sexless as a mannequin in a department-store window!
He touched his smooth, neuter flesh, and his fingers recoiled. In panic and fury, he struck out at their faces with his fists and feet. He felt bones crunch. Noses split open, spewing forth bright-red blood. He smashed one girl's mouth, and her teeth sprayed out on the floor like broken pearls. He gouged out another's eye and squashed it in his hand the way he would squash a grape. He beat and kicked them until their faces and bodies were broken, bloody pulps. Through it all, their laughter swelled in his ears fiendishly.
He looked across their swaying heads at a figure who had suddenly appeared at the other end of the room. It was a blonde girl, slim and beautiful. She was grinning at him and dangling a curiously familiar object in her right hand. Evans untangled himself from the mob of bloody, screaming women and crawled off the slippery satin cushion. He staggered up and went toward the blonde girl. When he drew closer, he recognized her. It was his wife Carla.
But what was she holding? A stricken cry of torment strangled in his throat. "Oh, no!" he said hoarsely. "No!"
He saw what it was she was taunting him with. It was the corpse of his dead manhood! As he came closer, she danced away, flaunting it at him the way a matador teases a bull with his red cape. Evans cursed and lunged at her, but she eluded him nimbly. Around and around they went, but he could never catch her.
The other girls were jumping around them now, their bloody, mutilated faces grinning at him. They shouted encouragement to Carla and heaped vile abuse on Evans. He lumbered after Carla, an emasculated bull blind with fury and hatred.
Tiring of the game, Carla shed her gown and leaped naked into the steaming pool. The rose petals splashed up and clung to her heaving belly and glistening breasts. She laughed and held out her arms to him. With a hoarse cry of triumph, he flung himself into the water. The heavily scented water was sickening in his nostrils. He reached out for her and grasped her warm, slippery shoulders. She laughed and flung the thing she was holding high in the air. Evans' fingers crawled up the smooth slopes of her throat and clamped it in a murderous vise.
She only laughed harder. Her cheeks grew swollen and purple, her eyes bulged, her tongue ballooned out of her mouth, yet the grotesque, mocking grin remained pasted on her face. In desperation, he plunged her head under the rose-tinted water. Blackness closed in on him, merciful blackness.
The sunlight streaming through the Venetian blinds shocked him into wakefulness. He was slumped over the bathtub in the small bathroom in the master bedroom. The tub was full, the water spilling steadily over the rim. He heard the roaring of the faucets in his ears. His hands were locked on Carla's white throat, and her dead, throttled face stared up at him from the bottom of the tub, shimmering like a phantom wraith.