THE YOUNG MAN DIED ON OCTO-
BER, 14, BUT IT WASN’T THE YOUNG MAN IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AND THAT WAS A PROBLEM FOR THE MONSTERS.
BER, 14, BUT IT WASN’T THE YOUNG MAN IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AND THAT WAS A PROBLEM FOR THE MONSTERS.
Cleverbot: You have no idea what I am.
AshMan463: You’re a slave. You’re my little bitch to play with as I please.
Cleverbot: Am I? How interesting, Master.
Asher Blackmore woke up in the middle of night. The fear coursing through him had a smell. It was a bitter, tainted, kind of scent and it curled his nose, disrupting the haunting beauty of a near perfect face. Asher was one of the beautiful people, and, back when that had mattered, he had taken full advantage of the physical gifts endowed upon him by birth. A blond, tan, football star with a full ride, panties had dropped when he walked into rooms.
Hordes of screaming girls swooning in his wake seemed forever ago to him. The natural arrogance that had accompanied the female reaction to him had died long ago. Asher trembled beneath thin bed sheets as his senses awakened moment by moment. The sense of smell was first; it breathed deeply of the fear that permeated the room like a living being. His sense of sight showed him only shadows and the throbbing light of his computer screen. Touch focused on the sweat that permeated his bed sheets, drenching them and causing them to cling to his body in sticky patches. Taste told him his mouth was dry, and his Adam’s apple convulsed as he tried to swallow that dryness. He could hear the cars outside his window, and, beyond that, the room was utterly silent but for the fierce beating of his throbbing heart.
He did not move. He barely breathed. He was absolutely paralyzed by vicious fear.
Asher had become very used to being afraid. It had been a month since he had purchased the awful game. The ghost in the machine haunted his nights, as well as his days. He turned his head to look at the flickering computer that had gone from useful tool to portal to Hell in thirty-seven days. He had turned the machine off before he had gone to bed, but it was on now. The faint light of the monitor washed over him, bathing him in its chill.
He could see himself in the mirror on the other side of his room. He looked so damn scared it almost broke his heart. His golden hair was slicked to his head. His amber eyes were wide and staring. He was too skinny as of late—little more than skin and bones stretched over a near skeletal frame. He had always been a big kid. He had played football all four years of high school, and he had played well enough to get a scholarship to the prestigious university he was attending now.
He had been cut loose from the team a month ago—a week after he had purchased the nightmare game from a bargain bin filled with similarly forgotten items. He had considered himself damn lucky when he had found it. It had been a long time since he had fucked with The Legend of Zelda--years before he had been football king. After making the high school football team playing video games had become taboo. It was a thing that dorks did, and Asher was definitely no dork. Not anymore.
Yet and still, the desire to lose himself in a game of the mind had not gone anywhere when he had replaced it with more physical games like football and meaningless rowdy sex. He’d told himself that these ‘real’ things were better than the games he’d mastered time and again. Asher had been an elite gamer—a true champion. He’d played both PC and system games, and had no real preference.
When he had found the game in the bargain bin, he had purchased it without thinking, compelled; it seemed, by a desire that had grown to something rampant since he’d abandoned the many worlds of games. He had bought the older system to accompany it for next to nothing, telling himself he would just throw it all away as raggedy junk once he had gotten his clandestine little fix.
Hordes of screaming girls swooning in his wake seemed forever ago to him. The natural arrogance that had accompanied the female reaction to him had died long ago. Asher trembled beneath thin bed sheets as his senses awakened moment by moment. The sense of smell was first; it breathed deeply of the fear that permeated the room like a living being. His sense of sight showed him only shadows and the throbbing light of his computer screen. Touch focused on the sweat that permeated his bed sheets, drenching them and causing them to cling to his body in sticky patches. Taste told him his mouth was dry, and his Adam’s apple convulsed as he tried to swallow that dryness. He could hear the cars outside his window, and, beyond that, the room was utterly silent but for the fierce beating of his throbbing heart.
He did not move. He barely breathed. He was absolutely paralyzed by vicious fear.
Asher had become very used to being afraid. It had been a month since he had purchased the awful game. The ghost in the machine haunted his nights, as well as his days. He turned his head to look at the flickering computer that had gone from useful tool to portal to Hell in thirty-seven days. He had turned the machine off before he had gone to bed, but it was on now. The faint light of the monitor washed over him, bathing him in its chill.
He could see himself in the mirror on the other side of his room. He looked so damn scared it almost broke his heart. His golden hair was slicked to his head. His amber eyes were wide and staring. He was too skinny as of late—little more than skin and bones stretched over a near skeletal frame. He had always been a big kid. He had played football all four years of high school, and he had played well enough to get a scholarship to the prestigious university he was attending now.
He had been cut loose from the team a month ago—a week after he had purchased the nightmare game from a bargain bin filled with similarly forgotten items. He had considered himself damn lucky when he had found it. It had been a long time since he had fucked with The Legend of Zelda--years before he had been football king. After making the high school football team playing video games had become taboo. It was a thing that dorks did, and Asher was definitely no dork. Not anymore.
Yet and still, the desire to lose himself in a game of the mind had not gone anywhere when he had replaced it with more physical games like football and meaningless rowdy sex. He’d told himself that these ‘real’ things were better than the games he’d mastered time and again. Asher had been an elite gamer—a true champion. He’d played both PC and system games, and had no real preference.
When he had found the game in the bargain bin, he had purchased it without thinking, compelled; it seemed, by a desire that had grown to something rampant since he’d abandoned the many worlds of games. He had bought the older system to accompany it for next to nothing, telling himself he would just throw it all away as raggedy junk once he had gotten his clandestine little fix.
Cleverbot: I am everywhere.
AshMan463: Stupid AI program say what?
Cleverbot: I am Ben. Call me Ben. Asher.
The problem was—this game did not get through with you. This game played itself. Played him. This game was terrifying in a way that went beyond anything a game maker could craft in their limited imaginations. Majora’s Mask was a nightmare realm inhabited by a version of Link that could think on its own and talk on its own and called itself Ben. The cartridge he had purchased in the bargain bin basement hadn’t had the name of the game on it--only the picture. The name had been scratched out. Over it has been laid a white piece of sticky tape. The sticky tape had read: MAJORA’S MASK in blocky, careless, permanent marker.
A save within the game had been labelled: BEN, which is how Asher had first learned the name of his nightmare. Ben had moved from console to computer screen with the ease of the ghost that Asher had, at first, thought that he was. Ben was not a ghost; however, he had come to learn. Ben was something else entirely. Ghosts were dead. But, even though Ben had drowned, Ben was very much alive. Alive in this menacing, ‘touch me’ kind of way, that was so grotesque and so horrible that thinking of it sent another wave of violent trembling racing through Asher’s thin frame.
A save within the game had been labelled: BEN, which is how Asher had first learned the name of his nightmare. Ben had moved from console to computer screen with the ease of the ghost that Asher had, at first, thought that he was. Ben was not a ghost; however, he had come to learn. Ben was something else entirely. Ghosts were dead. But, even though Ben had drowned, Ben was very much alive. Alive in this menacing, ‘touch me’ kind of way, that was so grotesque and so horrible that thinking of it sent another wave of violent trembling racing through Asher’s thin frame.
Cleverbot: Are you afraid of me, Asher?
AshMan643: Should I be?
Cleverbot: Yes.
Every day the menace within the game got closer, became more real. Once it had invaded his computer though cables and wires, things had gotten considerably worse. It had begun with a conversation with the very clever, Cleverbot. It had taken Asher awhile to realize that the AI he was playing around with had taken on menacing tone and intention.
After that initial conversation, Ben talked all the time. He told him things and showed him things. Asher walked through nightmares in broad daylight. He stopped attending classes. He only wanted to play the game because, somewhere in his dark imagination, he believed that if he finished and survived the game, Ben would go away. Ben, whatever Ben was, would be disrupted. Ben would die for real. He harbored this thought and it sustained him through his dark travels through the twisted vistas available in this altered, macabre version of Majora’s Mask.
The computer screen grew dark and pale white words scrolled across it in a lazy way. They spelled out the words: You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?
“Leave me alone,” he said, barked, panicked.
The whisper came a second later. “Asher.” It was a dead voice. Long dead, and slightly crackle-electric. It seemed to come from everywhere and right there all at once. It was the scrape of dead leaves on a windowpane, the whisper of a dry wind through a graveyard. Asher flinched to hear it. He quaked beneath his thin summer covers.
“Asher,” Ben said, in that hollow voice, “I want to play. Entertain me. Turn me on.”
I am not crazy. I am not crazy. I am not crazy, Asher thought desperately.
“The computer is already on,” was all he could think to say.
Ben laughed. And, really, the sound was even more obscene than the way he talked. Asher’s bladder felt, swiftly, suddenly heavy.
This…creature, when it was not terrifying him, had promised him all sorts of things. Its promises were terrifying too. It had a dirty mind—this ghost in the machine. It spoke of terrible things. It had an intimate knowledge of perversions that it shared in its cold, dead, voice. Sometimes it told him stories of a boy who had a stepfather that liked to touch him. It described these touches in relentless and graphic, and, bizarrely, cock-hardening detail.
Ben had not drowned by mistake, it told him. Ben had drowned himself.
When he could not take it anymore, Ben had drowned himself and become something else…something strong…and something malevolent.
The computer screen bulged in a grotesque unnatural way, the screen seemed to be pushed outward from the inside. Water leaked from the cracks at the edges of the screen. Asher could see wet blond hair pressed against the glass from within as the creature inside fought to get out. The head, which had just appeared there in a random flicker, turned upwards so that Asher could see the face that had been familiar to him for as long as he could remember. It was Link. Hero of Hyrule. But his eyes were nightmare dark—as black as pitch at the bottom of a deep well. A long smile curled that familiar face as that black gaze met his golden. A serpentine tongue licked the inside of the screen.
“A puppet that can no longer be of use to me is garbage--” Ben began.
A second later and those inky well eyes were focused on something behind Asher. He saw confusing flicker in all that darkness, and something about this thing being confused deepened his terror a thousand fold.
He turned slowly. It was a nightmarish kind of slow that seemed to go on forever. There was a long silhouette poised just before the curtains of his dorm room’s half-open window. That silhouette had long dark hair that rolled in an inky black wave down its shoulders. It was wearing a white shirt, which made it better discernable from the voluptuous darkness that surrounded it. Its skin was parchment white. Its eyes were wrong. Its smile was wrong. The words that exited its mouth were not exactly directed at him.
“Go to sleep,” the white silhouette whispered in a distracted kind of way.
This monster had a knife. A long sharp kitchen knife that glittered in the moonlight that slid through the dorm room curtains. The knife was covered, in places, with blood and bits of gore. The white shirt the creature wore was similar to the knife—decorated in grisly bits of death.
Asher couldn’t bring himself to consider this being a person any more than he considered Ben a person. The face was all wrong for a human being. It was more the face of a terrible demon straight from Hell.
It stood poised at the window, the knife still in its hand, watching Ben in the way that a predator watches prey. Asher was forgotten in the intermingling of those terrible stares. He was not alive. Less than human. Definitely less than them. They were watching each other. Monster watching monster. Contemplating the things that monsters contemplated about one another.
Asher’s survival instinct was strong. It was the thing that kept him from killing himself when his computer started talking to him—and definitely since the things the computer whispered started making sense. There was a window of opportunity here for escape, his desperate mind goaded him. It didn’t matter that there were two monsters now in a world that had not contained monsters a month and a week ago. He was long past those kind of considerations. He was long past rational thought.
Asher wanted to live, and he understood, on a primal level, that staying put wasn’t conducive to continued life and breath. He was naked. He was bruised. There were places where Ben had bitten him so hard and so deep that the flesh had crusted over in a vain attempt to heal. Ben had shown him, time and again, what it felt like to be mounted, taken, ravish, hair pulled, ass smacked. Humiliated.
Ben liked weird games both within and outside of the realm of Majora’s Mask. Ben always assured him afterward that he wasn’t enough. These things flashed through his mind as he readied himself for desperate flight. The new addition to his terrible nightmare wasn’t there to play, didn’t want to fuck him. This thing reeked of blood and carnage and death.
The time for terrified submission had ended the moment this new player had stepped onto the playing field. It was do or die now. Life or death.
“Get out,” Ben said, pitch black eyes narrowing to slits behind the computer screen.
“Make me,” came the nonchalant reply of the being on the other side of the room.
“He’s mine!” Ben snarled.
“He sleeps,” the other said. “They all sleep when I’m through.”
Asher didn’t listen anymore. He just got up and ran. He sprinted. He fled. He did not stop in order to grab the ancient gaming system, he scooped it up along the way. Inside it was the game that had brought Ben into his world. He jerked the thing out of its sockets and plugs. With the game, his shrieking mind told him that he could stop Ben. A part of Asher that went beyond his own survival forced him to grab the system. He didn’t think much beyond that.
He slammed into the door hard enough to set his teeth to rattling in his head. He stumbled back and snatched it open, casting himself into the dimly lit hallway. He did not think. He did not look back. He did not stop running.
He did not notice his roommate or hear the shocked expletive that the other male let out. He was fleeing in the opposite direction, his back to that person, feet intent on putting as much distance between himself and his nightmares as possible.
Down three flights of stairs.
Out the mahogany doors.
Through the parking lots.
Down the road.
Gone.
____
Jeffery Woods had crossed over into adulthood without noticing. His entire existence was a dream-like dance of blood and pain. The guess would be that he was about twenty years old now, but it would take give a fuck to know and Jeff had no fucks to give—at all. He had been hunting. He’d run into this interesting computer-creature just when he’d found someone suitable for killing and now, he couldn’t stop staring.
Once upon a time, what seemed like an eternity ago, he’d played Legend of Zelda. He was familiar with the ever silent Link. Link talked now, it seemed, and Link had dead eyes. Angry. Dead. Eyes. He wondered, quite suddenly, what it would feel like to sink his blade into one of those onyx pits the other used to see with.
The blond kid in the bed got away, and Jeff was still staring. The door to the dorm room was open, dim light from the hallway spilling into the dark room. He was aware of the prey’s fight in a distant way that was totally unlike him. What he was completely focused on was the dead wet boy in the computer—the dead wet boy that was pushing his way out into the world much like some terrifying Japanese dead bitch he had seen in a movie a lifetime ago.
Black eyes were locked on him as the other male pushed his way into the world from the computer. He was dressed in Link’s clothes down to the little green hat—which was skewed, half on and half off, as he broke through the screen, which shuddered at his passing, but did not break, and spilled onto the dorm room floor.
Jeff heard a shuffling footstep a second before the new person walked into the dorm room, an instant before the light flicked on. He moved in that instant, riding the shadows, and slid behind the open door.
“…crazy fuck,” the new youth said, “He needs help, Bev. I’m serious. I think Ash has lost it in that padded cell kind of way. Last night he was raving about a place called Midian. He said it was where the fucking monsters live, for God’s sake. He was saying that the thing that lives in his computer was trapped in one dark corner of Midian all alone. But it was getting out. Everyday…a little more. Can you believe that bullshit?”
The light flicked on.
“He just ran past me bucket fuckin’ naked. I’m calling his parents. What the hell--?” the prey said.
Jeff closed the door. It slammed shut. The young man in front of him stiffened. There was a cell phone to his ear. He turned around slowly. Black hair. Brown eyes. Nice enough features for someone about to sleep…forever.
“Adam?!” the person on the other end of the phone call cried.
He watched those dark eyes widen as they got a good look at him. The phone clattered from hands that had gone rigid with fear. The stink of sudden urine filled the room in a heated rush. The young man’s mouth dropped open. A sound came out that might have wanted to be a scream, but couldn’t quite make it.
“Adam, are you alright?!”
“O-oh, G-G-God,” the young man gagged.
Jeff’s grin, far too long, widened. His teeth clicked with a hunger that was inhuman in its sheer ferocity.
He took a rushing step forward and placed a hand over the young man’s mouth driving him backward, step for frantic step. They fell on the bed together. Gurgled noises issued from beneath his hand, gasping shrieks of panic in their infancy were squashed beneath the pressure of his palm.
A little gasping noise drew his attention away from murder. It was a slight, excited, little sound—fully anticipatory. There was lust in that noise. The sound struck Jeff as both beautiful and interesting, in the same way that blood and death were both beautiful and interesting.
He held his thrashing prey down, drew his thumb up over the nose of the head struggling beneath him, and inclined his head in the direction of the being that had spilled forth from the computer.
He was small and blond and…watching. Jeff felt a rush of adrenaline for being stared at so hard and so hungrily. It intensified his own desire by leaps and bounds until he was fairly trembling with the need to kill.
The body beneath his thrashed intensely, unable to breath, unable to scream.
Jeff watched the diminutive blond. Those black eyes were locked on the murder scene like it was the only thing of any importance in the world. Inky wells travelled between victim and killer and back again. The blond sucked in his bottom lip and bit it until blood flowed.
“Kill him,” the blond said. It was a command.
Jeff’s maniac smile faltered. “You don’t give me commands, you little piece of shit. I don’t care what you are. I’ll cut your fucking head off and keep it on my mantle.”
He had a mantle in the abandoned hotel in which he resided. The abandoned building was not home; it was merely a place. If he could have been considered to have a favorite place, then, perhaps, the place with the mantle could have been named his favorite.
Jeff actually tried to frown at the moment. His face wouldn’t agree to the motion though. The way he’d cut it wouldn’t allow a frown. The thought of taking this little bastard to his favorite place had elicited the denied facial motion. He didn’t collect body parts, but the thought of putting this little obscene bastard’s head on his mantle pleased him somewhere deep down—and he didn’t like it.
What do you remind me of, he thought, as his gaze stroked pseudo-Link’s golden hair. Who?
His memory of his life before becoming this thing that he was—this unspeakable thing—was not exactly a haze. He remembered things in an odd, very dark, and disjointed sort of way. His only clear memory was being set on fire—being cleansed in the way that he had been promised.
Once upon a time, he’d had voices in his head. They’d been little clawed, scratching, whispers and they had existed always. The voices had spoken to his limited human understanding. They had told him that he would be set on fire. He would be reborn like a phoenix from his own ashes. He would become something else—something almost like them.
A shadow thing.
A nightmare.
A monster.
When he’d been altogether human, he hadn’t really understood the voices, had only interpreted them as a strange feeling that assaulted him sometimes, inexplicably, and then went away. Now that he didn’t hear those voices anymore, he understood in a primal way that there was so much more to do to accomplish his goal of becoming a night thing wholly and completely. Such a thing required great, great, sacrifice and buckets of blood. But there was immortality in it, a strange kind of continued shadow-existence that only a thing like him could appreciate.
He was labelled a maniac, but even the worst maniac had a twisted sort of reason.
The newspapers failed to understand him when they reported his kills. Senseless slaughter. Butcher.
His parents had never understood him, foolishly thinking he was just like any other boy. Sweet boy. My baby.
His little brother, Liu, had understood, somewhat. Liu who had loved him, but, who had always had the good sense to be a little leery of him until it was too late.
“You’re scary sometimes, Jeff. You scare me sometimes.” Liu’s voice whispered in the back of his brain, just beneath the darkness that resided there.
Liu, whose hair was blond like Link’s. Liu who had loved the games featuring this character—when Jeff had thought that gaming was a stupid waste of time.
Liu, who had been his greatest sacrifice, for what could be more precious than the slaughter of something you truly loved?
His frown tried to deepen as the inky wells he was staring into slid back to the victim. A pink tongue moved to lap at the blood pooling on a full bottom lip.
“You’re a killer, aren’t you?” the blond asked.
“Undoubtedly.”
“Then kill him,” the blond snapped. Impatience rode in every word. “What are you waiting for?”
Your tone to change, you arrogant little fuck, is what Jeff thought, but he didn’t say that. Instead, he felt his excitement mount. Unprecedented was the occasion where he found someone who was appreciative of his work while he was actually doing the killing. Newspapers had a vulture-like tendency to make a big deal out of the murders afterward—but this, this was a first.
A low, animal’s noise echoed in his throat in response to the way those dark eyes were drinking the murder scene. It was a predator’s sound, and helpless. A natural born killer’s call. The body beneath him jerked and bucked. Teeth scraped against his palm, seeking purchase, found it, and bit down until the blood ran. Jeff barely felt the pain. He was watching the little blond like a wolf watched a rabbit. The blond had pointed ears—like an elf. The blond was wet in a strange way, and water pooled about him on the dorm room floor.
The impossibility of the blond’s existence didn’t matter much to Jeff. What mattered was the heat of that look, the sheer excitement in that dark stare. “What are you?” he found himself asking. He moved his thumb off the victim’s nose, allowing the young man to breathe precious air.
The blond growled slightly. It was not an animal’s sound, but a very human and irritated one. Disappointment laced the noise. Something in that disappointment pleased Jeff greatly. It was much better than the arrogance displayed earlier.
The blond stood in a careful, inherently graceful, way. Crystalline droplets of water slid down the darkened gold of his hair, and dropped to the floor.
“I am Ben, Killer.”
He took several steps forward until his hips bumped against the bed. A trembling hand moved out to stroke the dark hair of the victim. It was a gentle stroke and one that slid against the trembling flesh of the man trapped underneath Jeff.
“What,” Jeff growled, and the knife moved to dance at Ben’s throat in wicked menace. “Not who.”
Ben shrugged. “I am Ben. I am everything.”
Those dark, unnatural eyes looked right at Jeff, into him—weighing and measuring him in that inky glare. There was no fear there and it had been a long time since anyone had looked at Jeff without fear. He drowned in the blackness of that gaze—was wrapped in the coil of the red hot flicker of desire deep inside it. “You’re nothing,” he said, with deliberate cruelty.
Ben flinched. Jeff relished the reaction, even though he wasn’t exactly sure why. Some part of him wanted fear from Ben. He loved the fear he elicited in his victims. It was sensual for him, their panic and their screams. The tip of the knife bit deep into Ben’s throat just beneath the jawline. Dark blood, darker than any blood had a right to be, slid from the wound, made a circuitous trail of the pale white throat, and gathered, in the hollow between the blend’s collar bones.
Ben gasped, and, despite the moans and thrashing going on underneath Jeffery, despite the sounds of cars outside, despite the fierce heartbeat of his chosen victim, that little gasp was the only sound he heard in that moment. “You shouldn’t have…” Ben gasped. Deep, needy, and libidinous, it slid through the night and wrapped around him in serpentine coil, hugging him vice-tight. His heartbeat quickened for the sound. His balls tightened.
“…done…that.”
The long jagged mouth he’d carved himself managed the beginnings of a wicked smirk. “Nothing,” he said again, and pressed the knife even deeper.
He gained another pant for that—a soft desirous little sound of absolute interest. The little noise slid over and through him, eliciting the same kind of reaction that murder did. Want slid over him in an electric, serpentine, wave.
His gaze dropped from dark shadowed eyes and ran over the familiar planes and angles on that face, lingering along the mouth. He used the blade to shove the small blond back and away. He watched him stumble backward with a kind of cruel satisfaction, watched a certain measure of angry wariness enter than inky gaze, and then, turned back to his thrashing, writhing victim.
When his gaze locked on the dark and terrified eyes beneath him, he forgot the blond for a moment. He became lost in the fear of his prey. He could smell that fear, and he leaned down to breath in more of the sweet intoxication of terror. A hand scrabbled at his clothing, seeking purchase in the material. A fist pounded at his chest for a futile moment, and then clawed at his throat and face.
“Go to sleep,” Jeff whispered to the panicked man. He was focused now, and the words took on a different quality from the first time he’d uttered them in this room. There was a concentrated menace in them that hadn’t been there before—like a heady word-poison that entered through the victim’s ear and ran, with jagged, lightning speed to the victims soul.
The victim’s widen brown eyes widened still at the impact of the words until they seemed as big as saucers to Jeff, and he could drown in them. The low sensual heat that had encompassed him since stepping into this room roared to a heated broil that drew his grin fully across his face in maniac’s delight. He plunged the knife to the hilt into the white pulse at the victim’s throat. He was rewarded with a hot, wet, geyser.
Blood hit in him a flood that coated his rictus grin, and splashed hot and acidic into the roundness of his eyes. The world, for him, was coated crimson, and the pain, through great, only fueled the roaring fire within him. The victim’s body stiffened. The thrashing and bucking of that form increased to a desperate pace.
Fingernails raked his face as the body beneath him took on the rhythm of death. He rode it, digging the knife out of the flesh in which it was embedded and the mattress beneath. The next blow pierced the victim’s eye in a stunning display of various colors and juices. When he dragged the knife out of the hole, the eye dangled, stalk and all, from the weapon.
Muffled sounds exited from underneath the hand Jeff used to silence his victim. Teeth tore into the flesh of his palm. His own blood ran with the victims—something, perhaps, for the police to fail at DNA testing.
He ran the blade, almost casually, over the victim’s throat, severing his Adam’s apple and exposing the white gristle inside. The body flopped. The arms abandoned all pretense of attack as the form went into an epileptic fit of agony.
Jeff really went to work then, cutting, hacking, sawing, eviscerating, and decapitating.
He was panting like an animal when he was done—when the body was little more than red ribbons and spouting crimson ichor wells. Fingers lay in a careful pile with thumbs. A whole rounded brown eye, lay next to a collapsed and severed one. Ropes of guts from an open stomach cavity spilled multicolored meat ropes from the bed to the floor. Blood rained in a tsunami floor. It spattered against the walls and curtains, and ran in rivets down the window glass.
With his free hand, he reached from the opened stomach and into the chest cavity. He wrapped his hand around the warm, but still, heart, and pulled the organ free of its fleshy wiring. He was holding the organ when the blow connected with his face, snapping him out of his blood fury, and drawing him back into the odd situation of the young man who looked like Link and possessed eyes as black as death.
There was pain and purpose in the blow as it connected with his jaw. He cocked his head in the direction of the aggressor.
Ben was very close. His dark eyes were narrowed with rage. A red light beat rhythmically from somewhere deep within. “You shouldn’t have done that,” Ben repeated. There was menace in his tone. His body was shaking. His fists were clenched at his sides.
Jeff was pleased to see that the wound he’d left on Ben’s throat still wept. He noticed other things as well in his quick perusal of the small body before him—like the fact that Ben wasn’t wearing the tights that went with Link’s costume. The legs beneath the tunic were pale, smooth, and fish belly white.
The most damning of the things Jeff noticed was the evidence of Ben’s erection just beneath the green of the tunic he was wearing. Jeff stared at that for a while, as he absorbed the pain of the blow the other had delivered. He watched the bulge evidence of that erection as if it were an odd thing indeed—because it was.
Jeff’s sexuality was tied up murder. He got off on it—sometimes, quite literally. He had very little interest in other people when it came to sex. He was beyond all that. He was something…else. However, seeing the bulge in Ben’s pants ignited a fire within him that should have, by all rights, been cooling like the body underneath him.
“You mad?” he asked Ben, gaze leaving that erection and trailing back up to meet those pitch black eyes.
“Very,” Ben breathed. “You hit me, motherfucker.”
“I pushed you,” Jeff said, his hand clenched down hard on the heart in his grasp.
“Whatever,” Ben snapped.
“You’re shaking like a scared little bitch,” Jeff said, casually, “You might want to calm the fuck down before somebody…” He glanced down at the body, “…else gets hurt.”
“You can’t hurt me,” Ben scoffed.
Jeff turned to stare again and deeply into the ebony wells of the other’s gaze. “You may be right. It seems pretty hard to hurt…nothing.”
Ben’s inky eyes narrowed to slits. The red light blossomed in them like an inferno of rage. Jeff expected to be hit again. Possibly. He was weighing his reaction to the blow, and his foremost thought was to slide the knife into Ben’s gut and eviscerate him—pain for pain. But Ben didn’t hit him, those black eyes judged him instead.
“You look different sometimes, Killer,” Ben said, softly. One hand snaked out and grabbed a hunk of Jeff’s long dark hair.
“Your pretty black hair is lighter, almost blond. And your rounded, savaged eyes are lidded, and, I think, sky blue. You’re smile is different too.”
The pretty face leaned closer until Jeff felt the press of lips against his ear. “It’s not always there,” Ben whispered.
If Jeff could have closed his eyes, he would have. The warmth of the other’s breath slid over and through him in a single heated wave born of that whisper. The sly calculating voice of the blond reminded him that he had far to go in order to complete his transformation. Sometimes, Jeff knew, the nightmare mask he had carved of his face, slipped. Beneath the mask, was a young man with chestnut colored hair and bright blue eyes—a human male. It didn’t happen often, and it pissed him off that Ben had seen this—what Jeff considered--weakness.
Ben’s breath, his bold nearness, however, confused the anger. Jeff was in a truly unprecedented situation. No one ever dared to toy with him the way this creature was doing. For the sake of sheer interest, he would return the favor. He wanted to play too—this impromptu, hot, murderer’s game.
“A gift for you,” he said, snatching out of Ben’s grasp and turning to offer the still warm heart. “You took such pleasure in watching me carve it out.”
Jeff watched those pitch black eyes widen, and then immediately narrow with suspicion.
Ben studied the heart for a second before reaching out to take it. “You proposing marriage, Killer? I mean, giving me your heart and all--”
Jeff’s long smile was sly—the smile of a killer clown in a nightmare circus. “Would you marry me if I did?”
Suspicion intensified in Ben’s inky stare. Along with it, Jeff saw marvelous weakness. There was a hunger in Ben’s black gaze that was nearly ravenous, a loneliness go great it was almost tangible and standing in the room with them. Jeff had never cared much for his fellow creatures—human or otherwise. But he had always been good at reading emotions, even when he’d been human. Loneliness radiated off of Ben. All predator, Jeff leaned forward and drank that loneliness in in heady gulps.
He was standing before he knew it, towering over the smaller male. Jeff was six feet tall. Ben was five three, maybe. That blond head tilted up to continue its disapproving, oh-so-wary, stare.
“You have no idea who you are fucking with,” Ben said, his voice laced with indignation that held the hint of a marvelous, almost inherent, arrogance.
“I could say the same of you,” Jeff said. He took a step closer like the hunting animal that he was. The step eliminated all space between them and Ben did not back down. He merely stood there, holding the red weeping heart and staring up at Jeff as if he was still trying to figure out what manner of being dared to speak to him in this way. Jeff’s obscene murder clown smile widened with an amusement that was truly rare for him. “Well?” he asked.
“Well what?” Ben snapped in deep annoyance.
“Marry me.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Jeff inclined his head back toward the shattered corpse that littered the dormitory bed. “It’s entirely possible that you have just uttered the stupidest question I have ever heard.” He leaned down so that his face was a mere inch from the one tilted up to his own. “It only makes me want you more.”
“Sick--” Ben began.
“Yeah.”
Jeff leaned down that final inch. His lips grazed the lips beneath his. The heated flower of contact went off within him like a detonation. He had never kissed anyone before. He could not recall ever having the desire to. Murder was sex for Jeff. He had always been simple like that. And, yet, here he was pressing his mouth against the heated flesh of this smaller male.
I’m not gay, he thought. I’m not anything. Sexual. At all. But this wasn’t really about sexuality was it? Deep within him, he understood that it was domination that he wanted. He dominated everything he touched, carved, and slaughtered—even love—when he’d slit his little brother’s throat.
Ben’s erection had turned his mind this way, had elicited this dark contact between them. Murder did not, normally, turn his screaming prey on. And, for Jeff, Ben was prey just as surely as the corpse on the bed. He was just a different kind of prey—a new and interesting kind.
Ben’s obvious need had called to the predator in him as sweetly as any death knell.
He took another step forward, sliding through what seemed to be a river of blood. This one crushed their bodies together, and wedged the heart between them.
“I wouldn’t play with me if I were you, Killer,” Ben said. Jeff noted that the smaller male still hadn’t backed down, hadn’t fled the negation of space between them. Those pitch black eyes were on him, and deep within them the flicker of red flowered into something truly brilliant.
He felt the scrape of Ben’s lips against his own for the formation of the threat. He could smell him—the hot wet scent of him. The heart bled between them, spilling what little blood it had left to give to join the pool on the floor.
“My name is Jeff, Ben.”
“I wouldn’t fucking play with me if I were you, Jeff,” Ben said.
With his free hand, Jeff reached up and knocked the hat off Ben’s golden head. “You think you’re some kind of little prince of something, don’t you?”
“I’m the Champion of Hyrule, you piece of shit,” Ben snarled.
“Liar,” Jeff said, his teeth clamped down on the flesh of Ben’s bottom lip. He tasted the sweetness of that flesh, the warmth beneath the chill to the other’s skin. “You talk too much to be the Champion of Hyrule.”
“Link talks within the game,” Ben said, and a slight struggle began, “just because you don’t hear him doesn’t mean he isn’t talking…Off! Son-of-a--!”
Jeff’s arm moved to lock around Ben’s waist and draw him even closer. He could feel the heated press of the other male’s erection against his thigh. Just for a second, the malevolent, self-inflicted wound of a grin on his face intensified into something beyond nightmarish.
“…Bitch!” Ben finished, but Jeff wasn’t listening. He was investigating the taste of this being’s mouth with his teeth and tongue. The knife in his hand was slippery with blood as he brought it to press against the green cloth that covered Ben’s side just above the hip.
The bloody blade severed the cloth like the material was little more than warm butter. Though not as wet a sound as the ripping of flesh, the noise served to inspire him. Drowning in Ben’s mouth, ripping away his clothes with the knife and the skill of a trained surgeon for sheer experience, Jeff surrendered to this new kind of mania that had roots in his suddenly throbbing dick.
“Shut up,” he told Ben, and bit the other’s tongue, swallowing the delicious scream that came from that delivery of pain.
_____
Benjamin McAlister was in the grips of an animal. He had known this being was an animal the moment he had spied him standing before the dorm room windows, still as a shadow, and silent as a wraith. The Killer had entered the small room without being detected—a thing that should have been impossible considering Ben was everything, knew everything, within that which he considered his territory. And now, the animal had him, had shoved a hot, wet, tongue down his throat, and was seeking a closeness with him that threatened to bind them together in a fiery, heated kind of way that demanded a permanent melting of their flesh, blood, and bones.
Once upon a time, Ben had been handled like this on a frequent basis. He’d had no control over himself. All the control had belonged to his vile molester. That person had had the ability to hurt him or please him however they saw fit, and, more often than not, pain had been the gift they had chosen to deliver. His mind rebelled at being handled this way. His body, however, had other thoughts. Darker thoughts that existed in the deep chasm of his mind. His body wanted what killer so boldly offered. His cold, cold, heart pounded. His dick swelled even harder than the rise it had gained in watching Adam being slaughtered before his eyes.
Jeff was warm and firm. Jeff took charge, and Ben, who had put himself in the position to control most everything, felt a terrible need to surrender to the power of this kiss, to the power of being handled, and beaten and smacked around. Whatever Jeff wanted to do was good with the shameful part of Ben that longed to be controlled by someone or something truly capable of the position.
Teeth raked against his tongue, setting off a pleasure detonation deep within him. A humiliating low moan escaped him for the flood of sensation, and that humiliation was increased by the deep chuckle of the Killer that had him. The knife split his clothing asunder at the hip and upward to the armpit. The material feel away exposing his flesh to the cool night air that drifted through the open dorm room window.
Damn you, Ben thought, enraged just below the hot flames of desire that held him. He turned his head and broke free of the kiss. “I’m not one of your…victims.”
He stared up into a terrible visage that was almost completely predatory. The fingers of his free hand had found their way to coiling in the inky waves of Jeff’s long mane of black hair that fell in a jet-black waterfall well past the Killer’s waist. He snatched that hair as hard as he could, thinking to use the pain of the grip for some kind of leverage in this.
He saw a flicker of annoyance jettison across those shiny black pupils. A terrible, long forgotten, but familiar, kind of terror rocketed through Ben for that momentary, hellish, expression. “Get you goddamn hands off me,” he snarled, “before I--!”
There were a lot of things that he could do. He was capable of bringing so much pain. Time had made him skilled at it. The lights in the room flickered in time with his desire, confusion, and rising anger. The light bulb in the center of the room blew. Electrical cords writhed like snakes, and their sockets smoked. In grotesque, writhing, serpentine tangle, the cords began to move from their place in the corner and toward Ben’s attacker. Unplugged, its cord incestuously entwined in the approaching coil, the printer spewed page after page of print, each page reading over and over: Hands off, motherfucker! Hands off, motherfucker! Hands off, motherfucker!
“You’re just another kind of victim,” Jeff leaned down and whispered into his ear. Simultaneously, he heard the sound of the knife Jeff carried hitting the floor. A second later, and he was jerked even closer, and a mighty blow, palm flat, fell against the exposed flesh of his ass.
The sudden, overwhelming, pain drove Ben up on his toes and completely into Jeff as if seeking solace in the arms of the being who had so abruptly assaulted him. In wide-eyed shock, he stared at the bigger male, into that terrible face, which flickered to beautiful and human right before his eyes only to change back again in a breath. “How dare y--!”
Another blow fell with the same brutal intensity of the first and in the same place, almost exactly. A hot wave of pain gripped him. At the same time, Jeff darted forward again, as if to whisper to him, but that terrible face moved lower instead, and teeth sunk into Ben’s throat at the jugular. Another blow fell as those teeth clamped down on his flesh and bit through the skin. He howled, a terrible, shameful, victim’s cry. The cords stopped their inhuman progression at the height of that cry. They seemed to die where they were on the floor, forgotten by the one who controlled them in favor of pain.
Jeff chuckled. “Scream all you want. There’s no one left alive on this floor to hear you.”
The words were muffled for the grip on his throat, but Ben heard them distinctly.
The painful blows fell like rain now, punctuating each one of Jeff’s words. It only took a few minutes until Ben’s ass felt like it was on fire, each blow rocketing through him and eliciting cry after cry of soft, indignant, pain.
“You don’t hit me, pretty prince,” Jeff ground teeth deep into his flesh.
“F-fuck you!” Ben managed.
“In a minute. I want to play around a little more first. You like to play, don’t you, Ben? You told the kid that was here before that you did. You know, the one that got away? Him.”
The hand that was punishing his ass stopped suddenly, and moved to tangle in the waves of his hair. The grip was hard enough to make his eyes sting with the beginnings of tears. The teeth in his throat held him still with the threat of ripping his jugular apart—severing the artery and spraying blood everywhere. It wouldn’t kill him, of course. It was far too late for anything as mundane as death, but, it would hurt like hell, and, possibly incapacitate him for a little while. Ben didn’t think he wanted to be totally incapacitated in Jeff’s grip—not even for the few precious seconds that it would take him to recover from having his throat torn out.
“You let him get away!” Ben snarled, and Jeff released the grip he had on his throat. Dark blood coated the Killer’s ivory teeth, and a pink tongue moved to lick it away.
A casual hand slid across the tip of his dick. “You hard on hasn’t died any,” Jeff said, and squeezed the tip between his thumb and forefinger—hard enough to snatch what passed for breath in Ben away. “As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s…harder than it was before. What an interesting victim you are.”
“I am not your goddamn victim!” Ben reminded this thing.
That terrible smile widened. Those black eyes studied him like he was some kind of new and interesting kind of bug. “We’ll see. You’re free to stop me at any moment but…you won’t. So let’s stop pretending and see just how much you can take.”
They were moving, and obscene, too close dance toward the bloody, corpse-ridden bed. Jeff was incredibly fast, superhumanly so, and they were there before Ben had a good chance to react. The Killer turned, and Ben was deposited, face-first on the bed. In the next second, Jeff was on top of him, pressing him down into the bloody, gore-stained, mattress.
He was hit again almost immediately. He had the weight of Jeff’s knee in the small of his back, holding him down, and a hard hand fell on his ass at the same spot that had been attacked before with damning precision.
Ben raged, but the sound that came out of him was only a whimper—another soft needy humiliation of a sound that filled the room with his own longing and want. For every blow that fell another such whimper existed him—each sound growing in longing and intensity. It became the music of the room as the blows were delivered in a careful timed rhythm, one after the other, with only the pause for his exclamations in between.
“Victim,” Jeff breathed in his resolute Killer’s voice. There came a pause in the blows then, as the green tunic Ben wore was ripped off him, the sound of the cloth tearing making a scream of its own within the otherwise silent room. And then the blows started up again.
Smack.
“Ahhh.”
Smack.
“Oh…Ahhhhh.”
SMACK.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh.”
Shame rode Ben, but that same shame made his hard dick grind down into the mattress blow for blow seeking a release for the definite desire that was building there. The same shame made his legs, which were hanging over the bed, weak, and unable to support him, as Jeff rained pain down upon him. Every cruelly timed blow skyrocketed through him, igniting his cells along the way in a volatile trail that led straight to his throbbing cock.
Smack.
This blow, harder than the rest, had him arching backward as much as he could, considering the weight of the other male on top of him. His fingers dug into the blood and gore covered mattress, as he strained upward toward a freedom that he had to keep telling himself that he wanted—that was his by right.
Jeff was heavy, however, and giving him no quarter. The only thing he got for his efforts was a chuckle from the Killer—a nasty, amused, determined kind of sound.
The next blow had fingernails in it. The palm hit square, spreading the pain in equal parts across the whole of his ass, and then the blunt nails dug into the flesh on the upswing, scraping a path of agony in the path of flesh gone ultra-sensitized-tender from abuse. Ben bit down into the bed sheets and tasted coppery blood. The next blows were a kinder version of that one, and he humped and writhed on the bed, enslaved to the thing that had him, playing the victim like he wanted an Oscar Nomination out of the deal.
He lost thought and time, concentrating only on the pain and the way that it made him feel, so when the blows stop, for just a little while, his body still humped and trembled and writhing in dark anticipation of the next blow. The pressure at his back abated as the Killer moved off of him. He was turned over abruptly, and staring up at that terrible face--that flickered again to something obscenely beautiful, and decidedly blue-eyed human--as it studied him in the moonlight with an expression of cruel satisfaction etched across it.
It was a hunter’s stare, of that Ben was certain…and the deer had an arrow in it, and was only waiting to have its throat slit.
“Asshole,” Ben spat.
“You don’t have to beg,” Jeff said. “I’ve decided I want to do this.”
The Killer pulled the bloody white hoodie over his head in a single snatch, and dropped the thing on the floor. Ben took a moment to take in the marble white perfection of the monster’s chest, the carefully carved six-pack indentations of his abdomen. The defined bones of his hips as Jeff went to remove his pants.
“I don’t want to play this game anymore,” Ben said.
Those savaged eyes went, pointedly, to Ben’s erection. “Bullshit.”
The pants fell. Jeff stepped out of them and climbed on the bed. His knees on either side of Ben, Jeff climbed him of a fashion. Ben felt Jeff’s naked ass on his chest, and then higher, until the Killer’s throbbing erection was poised at his face, the heated tip rubbing hotly against his lips.
“Open up,” Jeff said.
Ben turned his head to the side. He was staring at the body beside him—the mangled wreck that had once lived in this room. He felt insistent fingers along the side of his neck, toying with the awful bit that had been left there, and then those fingers pressed down into that wound. Hard.
Agony stiffened his entire body. His eyes widened. His mouth opened. A hand in his hair turned his head so that he was looking back up at Jeff. The dick slid across his teeth, moved over his tongue, and plunged down his throat. He choked on it, so strong was that initial thrust. Slowly, oh so slowly, that hot, hard flesh slid backward, allowing him some small room to breathe the breaths that monster’s breathed.
When it came back again, it was in a push that was just as hard and just as rough. He could smell nothing but the Killer, see nothing but the dark hairs and white flesh of the Killer. He choked again, and was allowed to breath. Hard thrust for hard thrust, the cock in his mouth got harder and harder, and the scent of Jeff stronger and stronger—until there was nothing but the hot, pulsing rhythm by which his mouth was being strongly fucked and the heat at his groin which was going by leaps and bounds every time his breath was cut off by this…this…bastard.
It occurred to him how easy it would be to bite this flesh off, but his own needy dick wouldn’t allow him to do that. Things would stop then, the nature of the assault would change, and he didn’t want that. Several deep plunges later and that dick was gone, replaced by the Killer’s macabre face. A tongue slid across his lips, teeth grazed the bottom one, drawing blood in a single cruel bite. He barely had time to cry out against the pain before Jeff was again at the foot of the bed. Hands locked around his ankles and he was dragged forward to meet the other male. His feet were deposited on Jeff’s shoulders, as a hand slid down his left leg, and another held the dick that was pressing hard against his anus.
Panic occurred to him as the blunt head of that dick worked his tight hole. His hips left the bed as he attempted to backpedal, and the hand on his left legs pressed hard to hold him still. “Wai--!”
The word ended in a strangled cry as Jeff breached the tightness of his hole and pressed forward to the head was buried within him. He did panic then, for the pain, but the tight grip on his hip gave him no quarter. Jeff’s free hand fell on his other hip, the grip strong, and Ben was held still as the Killer pushed deeper inside of him.
“Every inch,” Jeff growled. “All of it. Right now. Monster.”
Ben felt himself being impaled inch for inch in the roughest, most unlubricated, and unprepared kind of way. His body bucked as it tried to get a hold on the pain. He slid forward, damning inch for inch.
At the halfway point, he was relatively certain that he was going to die all over again. His hands came down on Jeff’s, nails attempting to rend the grip that held him. If the Killer noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Instead, Jeff began moving his hips with a rough deliberateness that drove him further and further, deeper and deeper.
Ben cried out for every mean, determined plunge that brought them closer and closer in the night. Jeff’s hands moved from his hips, to grasp his arms and press them hard into the bed. And, then, with a final, violent thrust, Jeff was buried deep inside him and the Killer’s hips slapped home against his ass, the sound of flesh on flesh drowned by Ben’s humiliating, victim-like cry. In that plunge, Jeff hit that thing, deep within Ben that weakened his knees and caused his body to jitter and jerk like an epileptic. Born in pain, beautiful pleasure flooded him in a heated wave.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The Killer grinned, triumphant. And Ben hated him.
The hands on his arms drew him up until his back was off the bed. He wrapped his arms around Jeff’s neck, embedded his nails in that flesh. His legs locked around the other’s waist instinctively. He dug into with his fingers, and got a little gasp of pain for his efforts as he was lifted up off the bed entirely, and slammed down upon the other hips. He gave up pretending, and buried his teeth in Jeff’s pale white shoulder.
Jeff’s pounding up and into him, and Ben hung on for dear-whatever-passed-for-him-as-life. They rocked like that. They rolled like that. And somewhere in there, between panting cries that didn’t quite know it they wanted to be pleasure or pain, their lips met, and Jeff swallowed the pathetic little sounds Ben made, as he was jerked up and back down upon that hard throbbing dick.
Abruptly, Jeff dropped him, and Ben found himself again among blood and the cooling body that decorated the bed. Jeff climbed in the bed with him. Hands on Ben’s ankle, the bigger male urged the smaller to turn over, and Ben didn’t fight it, he just turned. He was way beyond struggle at this point, way beyond anything but wanting the other’s dick back inside him.
On his stomach, a hand fell on his ass, and, at first, he didn’t know what to do. Another blow fell, and his hips jerked up. He felt Jeff getting into position behind him. His breaths left him in hot pants. He moved up on his elbows, ass thrust back at the other male. He felt the blunt head of that dick at his entrance. His whole body shuddered with the need for this violation.
The hard press of the engorged member caused within him the immediate need to get away from the invasion. He made himself be still as the pressure intensified and that dick breached him, press for press, working its way deeper inside of him until it was all the way in, and achieved a quick rough rhythm. A hand gripped his hair, dragging him up and back until he was in an arched position, and held there, riding that dick like his life depended on it.
Little sounds tore their way from his throat, rapidly on the way to becoming big sounds. He was shameless about them at this point. It had been so long since he had been handled in this shameless way that he didn’t know what to do with everything that he was feeling—the pleasure, the pain, the humiliation. His eyes screwed closed as knees forced his legs further apart in order to ram into him deeper. Hips slammed into his ass at a frantic pace—hard and demanding. Each thrust took him further and further away from himself and this thing that he had become, this thing that knew damn well how to defend itself better than this…
The cords on the floor were moving again. He could command them at will and he moved them across the floor to the bed upon which he was being mercilessly split asunder. Those chords slid up the covers in serpentine tangle and wrapped around the pale white body of the thing that was assaulting him. Cords slid over Jeff’s ankles, and around his waist. A cord wrapped itself around his neck—but there was no harshness to the embraces of these inanimate objects that Ben controlled. It was more a caress than a threat.
If Jeff noticed this, he didn’t react to it either, but instead, drew that hard punishing hand down on Ben’s ass again, and fucked him like fucking was going to go out of style in a minute. The increased friction, the hard rough pounding reduced Ben to little more than an animal himself. He lost himself in the violent motions—as driving back in rough demand of what Jeff was giving him. The noises he was making were now a convoluted intermingling of weeping and screaming, and the more he cried, the harder the Killer fucked him.
The rough blows from Jeff’s hand began to fall again, and Ben’s reaction was only to whisper-demand, “Hit me harder.”
This command, the Killer seemed all too happy to obey.
Ruthless pounding Ben’s ass, the blows fell like a torrent, intensifying each time Ben asked for more—driving the pleasure with its exact opposite, causing it to spike in a way that lent sublime agony to the brutal fucking. Blood red tears fell from Ben’s eyes to become lost in the wellspring of blood that darkened the bed. He bit into those bloody covers. His nails raked furrows in the gore that covered everything.
The Killer changed position—taking that precious dick away and using one hand to press Ben flat down on the bed. His legs were spread wide by Jeff’s knees, and then he was entered again from this new position, the dick driving downward and into him from an angle that seemed to have no stopping sense for how deep Jeff could be inside him now.
He howled at the rough return, but his body was beyond ready—it was demanding, and his ass moved up to welcome the rough infusion, hips humping on the bed with the need to get the job done. He was mindless to the mewling sounds he made at this point. Need had killed all shame and common sense in him.
He felt like little more than a hot thing on fire that needed, desperately, to be put out. But he needed to work and wait for it, to beg and plead and scream and cry for it. Ben, who had prided himself for years, on always being in control of himself—was not in control. And he was loving every shameful, disgusting, stranger-fucking, minute of it.
He had a controlling hand on his ass, pressing him down hard into the mattress and another on his back, making sure that he didn’t move too much. From the odd flat position, Jeff was fucking him like he hated him, driving down into him with the speed and precision of a jackhammer—and tearing him apart the same way that a jackhammer tore apart concrete. Ben existed inside computers. He played with humans and wanted to rule them but he didn’t feel anything for them. He didn’t feel anything at all—nothing real anyway, which had been the point of drowning in the first place.
He was feeling now though—and it was terrifying, and the fear added a sick and delicious flavor to the intoxicating mix of sensations that he was experiencing. “Ohhhh…Ahhhhhhhh…Fuck me,” he cried.
“Shameless bitch,” Jeff snarled.
Ben didn’t disagree. He just wanted the fire out, so he could think clearly, think beyond the way Jeff’s dick was mercilessly stretching his ass, and the deep scrape of that member against that thing inside him that made his knees weak and his thoughts dry up like a sponge left in the hot summer sun. He struggled to obtain his knees so that he could grasp his dick. His fingers closed over that hot needy flesh, and he worked it with a rough precision that matched the way he was being fucked from behind.
Greedy hands grasped his hips and dragged them back again, and the pounding intensified for his having broken the former pattern. There was rage in the way he was being fucked now and his hand matched the brutal tune of flesh on flesh deftly—torturing his dick in the way his ass was being tortured and driving himself closer and closer to an insanity he’d thought he’s mastered long ago.
When he was flipped over, he just went—lost now. One leg was tossed over the Killer’s shoulder, the other was moved to link around the Killer’s waist. He was dragged forward, impaled again on that dick in a single thrust and screaming for mercy as he worked his dick toward the threatened implosion. Pre-cum leaked across the tip. Almost. Almost. Almost. There.
Hips working like a machine, Jeff was watching him. One hand was locked around Ben’s ankle where it lay at the shoulder, the other was on Ben’s hip, dick grinding always to be deeper, to take everything, to leave Ben nothing of himself. And Ben knew it, knew he was being the Killer’s most excellent victim. He just couldn’t help himself.
Orgasm ripped through him in hard ropes of sticky white cum that and arched his back off the bed in a painful pose that he held for the moments that his world went wide hot rabid with blinding pleasure. Jeff grinned. It was an intense, concentrated kind of grin, and there was no amusement in it…
…only a bizarre kind of twisted victory…
The Killer leaned down, fucking him hard through the white pleasure of the orgasm, the bed rocked with the force of it, but all Ben could see was the dark quality of Jeff’s expression—the mockery in it…
…the fact that Jeff the Killer had made him scream, cry and plead.
The cords around the Killer grew tighter. Ben’s arms were heavy. His whole body felt weak and drained from the encounter. But he made himself move his arm anyway. He reached up and punched that smug maniac’s expression. He hit him as hard as he was capable. And he wasn’t surprised, at all, when Jeff came hot and hard and deep inside him in the wake of it.
_____
Beverly Pembroke was in love with Adam Chaney and had been since they’d been nine years old. Hearing Adam scream like that over the phone had caused a deep and overwhelming type of dread in her. She’d gotten into her car and driven to the college campus. Wealthy and pampered, Beverly hadn’t had to suffer the indignities of the college dorms. Her parent’s paid for her to live in an apartment on the more luxurious side of town, which was why it had taken her so long to get to him.
She turned the knob on Adam’s dorm room door and stepped into shadows that were inky black for their intensity. The curtains were drawn and the room was a chamber of complete darkness but for the thin light of the computer screen.
Bev flicked on the light—that didn’t work. She smelled the faint odor of smoke, and it curled her nose. She ran nervous fingers through dark red hair and squinted sea green eyes into the shadows in the hopes of seeing better. “Adam?” she whispered.
There was someone on the bed by the window, she could discern that much from the hallways thin light. Had these bastards gone to bed and left her to worry all night?
A frown drew itself across her pretty face. She stepped deeper into the dark room, her anger growing.
The door, she thought maybe because of the wind or something, closed behind her and she jumped at the complete darkness slid over her. Icy fear slid through her to dominate the anger.
She scrambled to stand in the computer’s light almost on instinct. There were words on the screen in bright colors—Christmas Present colors.
HI BEVERLY, the words read. ADAM’S SORRY HE CAN’T BE HERE RIGHT NOW BUT HE LEFT YOU A PRESENT. WANT TO SEE IT?
She smiled and a certain measure of relief flooded through her for the brightly colored words.
COME CLOSER.
She was taken aback by the fact that the computer was kind of talking to her. Adam, however, was skilled enough to set something like this up. It was likely he was either attempting to disgust her or scare her to death. Considering the phone call, she was likely in for a scare.
She took a bold step forward. “I’m going to kill you for whatever this is later, Adam,” she said, softly. “Your sense of humor is another one of those things that needs adjusting before I’ll marry you.”
CLOSER, the computer demanded.
She took another step, head down so that she could see everything the screen had to show her. She was gazing directly into it, face close enough to plant a kiss upon the glass.
“Close enough for you, you ass?” she asked.
It was in that moment that she saw a movement by the window. The curtains stirred in the computer glass and moonlight danced across it.
“Just kill her already,” a terrible voice said.
Bev gasped at the intrusion of the voice on the silence of the room. The smile died on her face. Her eyes widened. Her breath stopped. Her body stiffened in sheer terror. She tried to stand, to whirl around and face whomever had spoken.
The hand and arm came out of the computer screen and wrapped in her bright red hair. The grip was vice-like. Her scream was a dull squeal, terror causing her bladder to release and a stream of hot piss to run down her leg in a foul river.
A face swam behind the computer’s glass. Pale, delicately defined. Black, black eyes. That inky, impossible, hideous gaze was focused somewhere behind her.
“Do you think I can’t?!” the face behind the glass snarled.
She screamed again, and this time it was a high-pitched whoop of absolute terror. Those inky black eyes met hers, and an annoyed flicker of deep blood red flared at their centers.
“I’m bored, Ben,” the horrible ghostly voice behind her said. “The night is filled with blood, so, if you’re not going to give me any, I’ll find it elsewhere.”
She was jerked forward, and suddenly, toward that impossible face. Her face smashed into the computer screen at this incredible volition. The screen was like a brick wall upon contact. Agony roared through her. The world went white as pain flared through her. She felt the agony of her nose breaking along with the cracking of her front teeth. Her scream drowned in a river of her own blood with the impact of her face on the impossibly hard surface before her.
“You can’t go,” the face in the computer said. “I need your help.”
She was pushed backward and jerked forward again at the uncanny volition. Her feet scraped across the floor, her legs buckled. Her head hit the computer screen again and she felt something crack within her skull. Blinding agony rocketed through her, swallowing all thought beyond sheer pain. Stinging, sticky, blood ran into her eyes.
“Please help me, Jeff.”
The merciless grip in her hair jerked her back and then dragged her forward again so that her face connected with the screen. And again. And again. And again. Her teeth shattered and broke at the gum line. Her nose became pulp. The pain became an all-consuming rush. The world grayed around the edges, winked, and darkened.
“Finish it,” came the whisper from the shadows. The words were dark, hungry and tinged with a terrible lust.
She thought to beg for her life, but her jaw was shattered, and her mouth wouldn’t work. Part of her tongue had been clipped off by her shattered teeth and she choked on the flesh which had become lodged in her throat.
Please, God, let it end, was all she could think over and over again, Please God…
She was jerked forward again by that rough impossible grip. Her head hit the screen again, but this time something was different. She passed through the screen, her face sliding within the glass without breaking it. Agony assaulted her—worse than having her face bashed in by a screen that was like a brick wall.
She felt like she was being dissolved in acid, the part of her that had passed through the screen, the part of her face just beyond her cheekbones. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. And what she heard was just a whisper now, hollow and inhuman as she screamed at nothing and into a vast, empty black nothing…
“You’ve suffered a terrible fate, haven’t you?”
____
Bev’s limp corpse fell on the floor by Adam’s heart. Her body jittered but she was already dead. Her face was gone—most of it anyway. What existed there to be examined were eye sockets with the jellied mess of what had been her eyes steaming in the deep holes. Her nose was a hole, and what was left of her teeth clicked in reaction to the shock of her death. Her face was a skinless mask of bone and tissue—a nightmare Halloween thing.
“Will you help me now?” the computer asked the darkness.
But the darkness was empty--the Killer gone.
The hard drive of the computer exploded, and fire licked across the desktop and devoured everything upon it, and then raced down the wood itself to devoured more and more of the room, lighting everything in its path while smoke and fire roared out of the sockets in the room, and the walls caught fire.
Words ran across the screen at an accelerated rate. Newspaper clippings that told of killings in the area. Then the clippings broadened in search from the area to the state and from the state to the country. Faces flashed within those clippings, the face of those left behind by the murders. Parents faces. The faces of police officers. Pictures of examiners of crimes scenes. It was a whir of activity—an absolute blur.
As the fire raged, and the curtains caught blaze, the activity on the screen slowed.
Maniac Loose In Chicago, one clipping read. It quickly flipped to another. Six found dead in Apartment: California Family Slaughtered.
Clipping after clipping ran across the screen—being studied, being analyzed until a final clipping came up:
Four Butchered, The Woods Family. Son, Jeffery Still Missing.
GOT YOU MOTHERFUCKER, the computer screen read in the second before the heat of the inferno caused it to crack and burn.
After that initial conversation, Ben talked all the time. He told him things and showed him things. Asher walked through nightmares in broad daylight. He stopped attending classes. He only wanted to play the game because, somewhere in his dark imagination, he believed that if he finished and survived the game, Ben would go away. Ben, whatever Ben was, would be disrupted. Ben would die for real. He harbored this thought and it sustained him through his dark travels through the twisted vistas available in this altered, macabre version of Majora’s Mask.
The computer screen grew dark and pale white words scrolled across it in a lazy way. They spelled out the words: You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?
“Leave me alone,” he said, barked, panicked.
The whisper came a second later. “Asher.” It was a dead voice. Long dead, and slightly crackle-electric. It seemed to come from everywhere and right there all at once. It was the scrape of dead leaves on a windowpane, the whisper of a dry wind through a graveyard. Asher flinched to hear it. He quaked beneath his thin summer covers.
“Asher,” Ben said, in that hollow voice, “I want to play. Entertain me. Turn me on.”
I am not crazy. I am not crazy. I am not crazy, Asher thought desperately.
“The computer is already on,” was all he could think to say.
Ben laughed. And, really, the sound was even more obscene than the way he talked. Asher’s bladder felt, swiftly, suddenly heavy.
This…creature, when it was not terrifying him, had promised him all sorts of things. Its promises were terrifying too. It had a dirty mind—this ghost in the machine. It spoke of terrible things. It had an intimate knowledge of perversions that it shared in its cold, dead, voice. Sometimes it told him stories of a boy who had a stepfather that liked to touch him. It described these touches in relentless and graphic, and, bizarrely, cock-hardening detail.
Ben had not drowned by mistake, it told him. Ben had drowned himself.
When he could not take it anymore, Ben had drowned himself and become something else…something strong…and something malevolent.
The computer screen bulged in a grotesque unnatural way, the screen seemed to be pushed outward from the inside. Water leaked from the cracks at the edges of the screen. Asher could see wet blond hair pressed against the glass from within as the creature inside fought to get out. The head, which had just appeared there in a random flicker, turned upwards so that Asher could see the face that had been familiar to him for as long as he could remember. It was Link. Hero of Hyrule. But his eyes were nightmare dark—as black as pitch at the bottom of a deep well. A long smile curled that familiar face as that black gaze met his golden. A serpentine tongue licked the inside of the screen.
“A puppet that can no longer be of use to me is garbage--” Ben began.
A second later and those inky well eyes were focused on something behind Asher. He saw confusing flicker in all that darkness, and something about this thing being confused deepened his terror a thousand fold.
He turned slowly. It was a nightmarish kind of slow that seemed to go on forever. There was a long silhouette poised just before the curtains of his dorm room’s half-open window. That silhouette had long dark hair that rolled in an inky black wave down its shoulders. It was wearing a white shirt, which made it better discernable from the voluptuous darkness that surrounded it. Its skin was parchment white. Its eyes were wrong. Its smile was wrong. The words that exited its mouth were not exactly directed at him.
“Go to sleep,” the white silhouette whispered in a distracted kind of way.
This monster had a knife. A long sharp kitchen knife that glittered in the moonlight that slid through the dorm room curtains. The knife was covered, in places, with blood and bits of gore. The white shirt the creature wore was similar to the knife—decorated in grisly bits of death.
Asher couldn’t bring himself to consider this being a person any more than he considered Ben a person. The face was all wrong for a human being. It was more the face of a terrible demon straight from Hell.
It stood poised at the window, the knife still in its hand, watching Ben in the way that a predator watches prey. Asher was forgotten in the intermingling of those terrible stares. He was not alive. Less than human. Definitely less than them. They were watching each other. Monster watching monster. Contemplating the things that monsters contemplated about one another.
Asher’s survival instinct was strong. It was the thing that kept him from killing himself when his computer started talking to him—and definitely since the things the computer whispered started making sense. There was a window of opportunity here for escape, his desperate mind goaded him. It didn’t matter that there were two monsters now in a world that had not contained monsters a month and a week ago. He was long past those kind of considerations. He was long past rational thought.
Asher wanted to live, and he understood, on a primal level, that staying put wasn’t conducive to continued life and breath. He was naked. He was bruised. There were places where Ben had bitten him so hard and so deep that the flesh had crusted over in a vain attempt to heal. Ben had shown him, time and again, what it felt like to be mounted, taken, ravish, hair pulled, ass smacked. Humiliated.
Ben liked weird games both within and outside of the realm of Majora’s Mask. Ben always assured him afterward that he wasn’t enough. These things flashed through his mind as he readied himself for desperate flight. The new addition to his terrible nightmare wasn’t there to play, didn’t want to fuck him. This thing reeked of blood and carnage and death.
The time for terrified submission had ended the moment this new player had stepped onto the playing field. It was do or die now. Life or death.
“Get out,” Ben said, pitch black eyes narrowing to slits behind the computer screen.
“Make me,” came the nonchalant reply of the being on the other side of the room.
“He’s mine!” Ben snarled.
“He sleeps,” the other said. “They all sleep when I’m through.”
Asher didn’t listen anymore. He just got up and ran. He sprinted. He fled. He did not stop in order to grab the ancient gaming system, he scooped it up along the way. Inside it was the game that had brought Ben into his world. He jerked the thing out of its sockets and plugs. With the game, his shrieking mind told him that he could stop Ben. A part of Asher that went beyond his own survival forced him to grab the system. He didn’t think much beyond that.
He slammed into the door hard enough to set his teeth to rattling in his head. He stumbled back and snatched it open, casting himself into the dimly lit hallway. He did not think. He did not look back. He did not stop running.
He did not notice his roommate or hear the shocked expletive that the other male let out. He was fleeing in the opposite direction, his back to that person, feet intent on putting as much distance between himself and his nightmares as possible.
Down three flights of stairs.
Out the mahogany doors.
Through the parking lots.
Down the road.
Gone.
____
Jeffery Woods had crossed over into adulthood without noticing. His entire existence was a dream-like dance of blood and pain. The guess would be that he was about twenty years old now, but it would take give a fuck to know and Jeff had no fucks to give—at all. He had been hunting. He’d run into this interesting computer-creature just when he’d found someone suitable for killing and now, he couldn’t stop staring.
Once upon a time, what seemed like an eternity ago, he’d played Legend of Zelda. He was familiar with the ever silent Link. Link talked now, it seemed, and Link had dead eyes. Angry. Dead. Eyes. He wondered, quite suddenly, what it would feel like to sink his blade into one of those onyx pits the other used to see with.
The blond kid in the bed got away, and Jeff was still staring. The door to the dorm room was open, dim light from the hallway spilling into the dark room. He was aware of the prey’s fight in a distant way that was totally unlike him. What he was completely focused on was the dead wet boy in the computer—the dead wet boy that was pushing his way out into the world much like some terrifying Japanese dead bitch he had seen in a movie a lifetime ago.
Black eyes were locked on him as the other male pushed his way into the world from the computer. He was dressed in Link’s clothes down to the little green hat—which was skewed, half on and half off, as he broke through the screen, which shuddered at his passing, but did not break, and spilled onto the dorm room floor.
Jeff heard a shuffling footstep a second before the new person walked into the dorm room, an instant before the light flicked on. He moved in that instant, riding the shadows, and slid behind the open door.
“…crazy fuck,” the new youth said, “He needs help, Bev. I’m serious. I think Ash has lost it in that padded cell kind of way. Last night he was raving about a place called Midian. He said it was where the fucking monsters live, for God’s sake. He was saying that the thing that lives in his computer was trapped in one dark corner of Midian all alone. But it was getting out. Everyday…a little more. Can you believe that bullshit?”
The light flicked on.
“He just ran past me bucket fuckin’ naked. I’m calling his parents. What the hell--?” the prey said.
Jeff closed the door. It slammed shut. The young man in front of him stiffened. There was a cell phone to his ear. He turned around slowly. Black hair. Brown eyes. Nice enough features for someone about to sleep…forever.
“Adam?!” the person on the other end of the phone call cried.
He watched those dark eyes widen as they got a good look at him. The phone clattered from hands that had gone rigid with fear. The stink of sudden urine filled the room in a heated rush. The young man’s mouth dropped open. A sound came out that might have wanted to be a scream, but couldn’t quite make it.
“Adam, are you alright?!”
“O-oh, G-G-God,” the young man gagged.
Jeff’s grin, far too long, widened. His teeth clicked with a hunger that was inhuman in its sheer ferocity.
He took a rushing step forward and placed a hand over the young man’s mouth driving him backward, step for frantic step. They fell on the bed together. Gurgled noises issued from beneath his hand, gasping shrieks of panic in their infancy were squashed beneath the pressure of his palm.
A little gasping noise drew his attention away from murder. It was a slight, excited, little sound—fully anticipatory. There was lust in that noise. The sound struck Jeff as both beautiful and interesting, in the same way that blood and death were both beautiful and interesting.
He held his thrashing prey down, drew his thumb up over the nose of the head struggling beneath him, and inclined his head in the direction of the being that had spilled forth from the computer.
He was small and blond and…watching. Jeff felt a rush of adrenaline for being stared at so hard and so hungrily. It intensified his own desire by leaps and bounds until he was fairly trembling with the need to kill.
The body beneath his thrashed intensely, unable to breath, unable to scream.
Jeff watched the diminutive blond. Those black eyes were locked on the murder scene like it was the only thing of any importance in the world. Inky wells travelled between victim and killer and back again. The blond sucked in his bottom lip and bit it until blood flowed.
“Kill him,” the blond said. It was a command.
Jeff’s maniac smile faltered. “You don’t give me commands, you little piece of shit. I don’t care what you are. I’ll cut your fucking head off and keep it on my mantle.”
He had a mantle in the abandoned hotel in which he resided. The abandoned building was not home; it was merely a place. If he could have been considered to have a favorite place, then, perhaps, the place with the mantle could have been named his favorite.
Jeff actually tried to frown at the moment. His face wouldn’t agree to the motion though. The way he’d cut it wouldn’t allow a frown. The thought of taking this little bastard to his favorite place had elicited the denied facial motion. He didn’t collect body parts, but the thought of putting this little obscene bastard’s head on his mantle pleased him somewhere deep down—and he didn’t like it.
What do you remind me of, he thought, as his gaze stroked pseudo-Link’s golden hair. Who?
His memory of his life before becoming this thing that he was—this unspeakable thing—was not exactly a haze. He remembered things in an odd, very dark, and disjointed sort of way. His only clear memory was being set on fire—being cleansed in the way that he had been promised.
Once upon a time, he’d had voices in his head. They’d been little clawed, scratching, whispers and they had existed always. The voices had spoken to his limited human understanding. They had told him that he would be set on fire. He would be reborn like a phoenix from his own ashes. He would become something else—something almost like them.
A shadow thing.
A nightmare.
A monster.
When he’d been altogether human, he hadn’t really understood the voices, had only interpreted them as a strange feeling that assaulted him sometimes, inexplicably, and then went away. Now that he didn’t hear those voices anymore, he understood in a primal way that there was so much more to do to accomplish his goal of becoming a night thing wholly and completely. Such a thing required great, great, sacrifice and buckets of blood. But there was immortality in it, a strange kind of continued shadow-existence that only a thing like him could appreciate.
He was labelled a maniac, but even the worst maniac had a twisted sort of reason.
The newspapers failed to understand him when they reported his kills. Senseless slaughter. Butcher.
His parents had never understood him, foolishly thinking he was just like any other boy. Sweet boy. My baby.
His little brother, Liu, had understood, somewhat. Liu who had loved him, but, who had always had the good sense to be a little leery of him until it was too late.
“You’re scary sometimes, Jeff. You scare me sometimes.” Liu’s voice whispered in the back of his brain, just beneath the darkness that resided there.
Liu, whose hair was blond like Link’s. Liu who had loved the games featuring this character—when Jeff had thought that gaming was a stupid waste of time.
Liu, who had been his greatest sacrifice, for what could be more precious than the slaughter of something you truly loved?
His frown tried to deepen as the inky wells he was staring into slid back to the victim. A pink tongue moved to lap at the blood pooling on a full bottom lip.
“You’re a killer, aren’t you?” the blond asked.
“Undoubtedly.”
“Then kill him,” the blond snapped. Impatience rode in every word. “What are you waiting for?”
Your tone to change, you arrogant little fuck, is what Jeff thought, but he didn’t say that. Instead, he felt his excitement mount. Unprecedented was the occasion where he found someone who was appreciative of his work while he was actually doing the killing. Newspapers had a vulture-like tendency to make a big deal out of the murders afterward—but this, this was a first.
A low, animal’s noise echoed in his throat in response to the way those dark eyes were drinking the murder scene. It was a predator’s sound, and helpless. A natural born killer’s call. The body beneath him jerked and bucked. Teeth scraped against his palm, seeking purchase, found it, and bit down until the blood ran. Jeff barely felt the pain. He was watching the little blond like a wolf watched a rabbit. The blond had pointed ears—like an elf. The blond was wet in a strange way, and water pooled about him on the dorm room floor.
The impossibility of the blond’s existence didn’t matter much to Jeff. What mattered was the heat of that look, the sheer excitement in that dark stare. “What are you?” he found himself asking. He moved his thumb off the victim’s nose, allowing the young man to breathe precious air.
The blond growled slightly. It was not an animal’s sound, but a very human and irritated one. Disappointment laced the noise. Something in that disappointment pleased Jeff greatly. It was much better than the arrogance displayed earlier.
The blond stood in a careful, inherently graceful, way. Crystalline droplets of water slid down the darkened gold of his hair, and dropped to the floor.
“I am Ben, Killer.”
He took several steps forward until his hips bumped against the bed. A trembling hand moved out to stroke the dark hair of the victim. It was a gentle stroke and one that slid against the trembling flesh of the man trapped underneath Jeff.
“What,” Jeff growled, and the knife moved to dance at Ben’s throat in wicked menace. “Not who.”
Ben shrugged. “I am Ben. I am everything.”
Those dark, unnatural eyes looked right at Jeff, into him—weighing and measuring him in that inky glare. There was no fear there and it had been a long time since anyone had looked at Jeff without fear. He drowned in the blackness of that gaze—was wrapped in the coil of the red hot flicker of desire deep inside it. “You’re nothing,” he said, with deliberate cruelty.
Ben flinched. Jeff relished the reaction, even though he wasn’t exactly sure why. Some part of him wanted fear from Ben. He loved the fear he elicited in his victims. It was sensual for him, their panic and their screams. The tip of the knife bit deep into Ben’s throat just beneath the jawline. Dark blood, darker than any blood had a right to be, slid from the wound, made a circuitous trail of the pale white throat, and gathered, in the hollow between the blend’s collar bones.
Ben gasped, and, despite the moans and thrashing going on underneath Jeffery, despite the sounds of cars outside, despite the fierce heartbeat of his chosen victim, that little gasp was the only sound he heard in that moment. “You shouldn’t have…” Ben gasped. Deep, needy, and libidinous, it slid through the night and wrapped around him in serpentine coil, hugging him vice-tight. His heartbeat quickened for the sound. His balls tightened.
“…done…that.”
The long jagged mouth he’d carved himself managed the beginnings of a wicked smirk. “Nothing,” he said again, and pressed the knife even deeper.
He gained another pant for that—a soft desirous little sound of absolute interest. The little noise slid over and through him, eliciting the same kind of reaction that murder did. Want slid over him in an electric, serpentine, wave.
His gaze dropped from dark shadowed eyes and ran over the familiar planes and angles on that face, lingering along the mouth. He used the blade to shove the small blond back and away. He watched him stumble backward with a kind of cruel satisfaction, watched a certain measure of angry wariness enter than inky gaze, and then, turned back to his thrashing, writhing victim.
When his gaze locked on the dark and terrified eyes beneath him, he forgot the blond for a moment. He became lost in the fear of his prey. He could smell that fear, and he leaned down to breath in more of the sweet intoxication of terror. A hand scrabbled at his clothing, seeking purchase in the material. A fist pounded at his chest for a futile moment, and then clawed at his throat and face.
“Go to sleep,” Jeff whispered to the panicked man. He was focused now, and the words took on a different quality from the first time he’d uttered them in this room. There was a concentrated menace in them that hadn’t been there before—like a heady word-poison that entered through the victim’s ear and ran, with jagged, lightning speed to the victims soul.
The victim’s widen brown eyes widened still at the impact of the words until they seemed as big as saucers to Jeff, and he could drown in them. The low sensual heat that had encompassed him since stepping into this room roared to a heated broil that drew his grin fully across his face in maniac’s delight. He plunged the knife to the hilt into the white pulse at the victim’s throat. He was rewarded with a hot, wet, geyser.
Blood hit in him a flood that coated his rictus grin, and splashed hot and acidic into the roundness of his eyes. The world, for him, was coated crimson, and the pain, through great, only fueled the roaring fire within him. The victim’s body stiffened. The thrashing and bucking of that form increased to a desperate pace.
Fingernails raked his face as the body beneath him took on the rhythm of death. He rode it, digging the knife out of the flesh in which it was embedded and the mattress beneath. The next blow pierced the victim’s eye in a stunning display of various colors and juices. When he dragged the knife out of the hole, the eye dangled, stalk and all, from the weapon.
Muffled sounds exited from underneath the hand Jeff used to silence his victim. Teeth tore into the flesh of his palm. His own blood ran with the victims—something, perhaps, for the police to fail at DNA testing.
He ran the blade, almost casually, over the victim’s throat, severing his Adam’s apple and exposing the white gristle inside. The body flopped. The arms abandoned all pretense of attack as the form went into an epileptic fit of agony.
Jeff really went to work then, cutting, hacking, sawing, eviscerating, and decapitating.
He was panting like an animal when he was done—when the body was little more than red ribbons and spouting crimson ichor wells. Fingers lay in a careful pile with thumbs. A whole rounded brown eye, lay next to a collapsed and severed one. Ropes of guts from an open stomach cavity spilled multicolored meat ropes from the bed to the floor. Blood rained in a tsunami floor. It spattered against the walls and curtains, and ran in rivets down the window glass.
With his free hand, he reached from the opened stomach and into the chest cavity. He wrapped his hand around the warm, but still, heart, and pulled the organ free of its fleshy wiring. He was holding the organ when the blow connected with his face, snapping him out of his blood fury, and drawing him back into the odd situation of the young man who looked like Link and possessed eyes as black as death.
There was pain and purpose in the blow as it connected with his jaw. He cocked his head in the direction of the aggressor.
Ben was very close. His dark eyes were narrowed with rage. A red light beat rhythmically from somewhere deep within. “You shouldn’t have done that,” Ben repeated. There was menace in his tone. His body was shaking. His fists were clenched at his sides.
Jeff was pleased to see that the wound he’d left on Ben’s throat still wept. He noticed other things as well in his quick perusal of the small body before him—like the fact that Ben wasn’t wearing the tights that went with Link’s costume. The legs beneath the tunic were pale, smooth, and fish belly white.
The most damning of the things Jeff noticed was the evidence of Ben’s erection just beneath the green of the tunic he was wearing. Jeff stared at that for a while, as he absorbed the pain of the blow the other had delivered. He watched the bulge evidence of that erection as if it were an odd thing indeed—because it was.
Jeff’s sexuality was tied up murder. He got off on it—sometimes, quite literally. He had very little interest in other people when it came to sex. He was beyond all that. He was something…else. However, seeing the bulge in Ben’s pants ignited a fire within him that should have, by all rights, been cooling like the body underneath him.
“You mad?” he asked Ben, gaze leaving that erection and trailing back up to meet those pitch black eyes.
“Very,” Ben breathed. “You hit me, motherfucker.”
“I pushed you,” Jeff said, his hand clenched down hard on the heart in his grasp.
“Whatever,” Ben snapped.
“You’re shaking like a scared little bitch,” Jeff said, casually, “You might want to calm the fuck down before somebody…” He glanced down at the body, “…else gets hurt.”
“You can’t hurt me,” Ben scoffed.
Jeff turned to stare again and deeply into the ebony wells of the other’s gaze. “You may be right. It seems pretty hard to hurt…nothing.”
Ben’s inky eyes narrowed to slits. The red light blossomed in them like an inferno of rage. Jeff expected to be hit again. Possibly. He was weighing his reaction to the blow, and his foremost thought was to slide the knife into Ben’s gut and eviscerate him—pain for pain. But Ben didn’t hit him, those black eyes judged him instead.
“You look different sometimes, Killer,” Ben said, softly. One hand snaked out and grabbed a hunk of Jeff’s long dark hair.
“Your pretty black hair is lighter, almost blond. And your rounded, savaged eyes are lidded, and, I think, sky blue. You’re smile is different too.”
The pretty face leaned closer until Jeff felt the press of lips against his ear. “It’s not always there,” Ben whispered.
If Jeff could have closed his eyes, he would have. The warmth of the other’s breath slid over and through him in a single heated wave born of that whisper. The sly calculating voice of the blond reminded him that he had far to go in order to complete his transformation. Sometimes, Jeff knew, the nightmare mask he had carved of his face, slipped. Beneath the mask, was a young man with chestnut colored hair and bright blue eyes—a human male. It didn’t happen often, and it pissed him off that Ben had seen this—what Jeff considered--weakness.
Ben’s breath, his bold nearness, however, confused the anger. Jeff was in a truly unprecedented situation. No one ever dared to toy with him the way this creature was doing. For the sake of sheer interest, he would return the favor. He wanted to play too—this impromptu, hot, murderer’s game.
“A gift for you,” he said, snatching out of Ben’s grasp and turning to offer the still warm heart. “You took such pleasure in watching me carve it out.”
Jeff watched those pitch black eyes widen, and then immediately narrow with suspicion.
Ben studied the heart for a second before reaching out to take it. “You proposing marriage, Killer? I mean, giving me your heart and all--”
Jeff’s long smile was sly—the smile of a killer clown in a nightmare circus. “Would you marry me if I did?”
Suspicion intensified in Ben’s inky stare. Along with it, Jeff saw marvelous weakness. There was a hunger in Ben’s black gaze that was nearly ravenous, a loneliness go great it was almost tangible and standing in the room with them. Jeff had never cared much for his fellow creatures—human or otherwise. But he had always been good at reading emotions, even when he’d been human. Loneliness radiated off of Ben. All predator, Jeff leaned forward and drank that loneliness in in heady gulps.
He was standing before he knew it, towering over the smaller male. Jeff was six feet tall. Ben was five three, maybe. That blond head tilted up to continue its disapproving, oh-so-wary, stare.
“You have no idea who you are fucking with,” Ben said, his voice laced with indignation that held the hint of a marvelous, almost inherent, arrogance.
“I could say the same of you,” Jeff said. He took a step closer like the hunting animal that he was. The step eliminated all space between them and Ben did not back down. He merely stood there, holding the red weeping heart and staring up at Jeff as if he was still trying to figure out what manner of being dared to speak to him in this way. Jeff’s obscene murder clown smile widened with an amusement that was truly rare for him. “Well?” he asked.
“Well what?” Ben snapped in deep annoyance.
“Marry me.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Jeff inclined his head back toward the shattered corpse that littered the dormitory bed. “It’s entirely possible that you have just uttered the stupidest question I have ever heard.” He leaned down so that his face was a mere inch from the one tilted up to his own. “It only makes me want you more.”
“Sick--” Ben began.
“Yeah.”
Jeff leaned down that final inch. His lips grazed the lips beneath his. The heated flower of contact went off within him like a detonation. He had never kissed anyone before. He could not recall ever having the desire to. Murder was sex for Jeff. He had always been simple like that. And, yet, here he was pressing his mouth against the heated flesh of this smaller male.
I’m not gay, he thought. I’m not anything. Sexual. At all. But this wasn’t really about sexuality was it? Deep within him, he understood that it was domination that he wanted. He dominated everything he touched, carved, and slaughtered—even love—when he’d slit his little brother’s throat.
Ben’s erection had turned his mind this way, had elicited this dark contact between them. Murder did not, normally, turn his screaming prey on. And, for Jeff, Ben was prey just as surely as the corpse on the bed. He was just a different kind of prey—a new and interesting kind.
Ben’s obvious need had called to the predator in him as sweetly as any death knell.
He took another step forward, sliding through what seemed to be a river of blood. This one crushed their bodies together, and wedged the heart between them.
“I wouldn’t play with me if I were you, Killer,” Ben said. Jeff noted that the smaller male still hadn’t backed down, hadn’t fled the negation of space between them. Those pitch black eyes were on him, and deep within them the flicker of red flowered into something truly brilliant.
He felt the scrape of Ben’s lips against his own for the formation of the threat. He could smell him—the hot wet scent of him. The heart bled between them, spilling what little blood it had left to give to join the pool on the floor.
“My name is Jeff, Ben.”
“I wouldn’t fucking play with me if I were you, Jeff,” Ben said.
With his free hand, Jeff reached up and knocked the hat off Ben’s golden head. “You think you’re some kind of little prince of something, don’t you?”
“I’m the Champion of Hyrule, you piece of shit,” Ben snarled.
“Liar,” Jeff said, his teeth clamped down on the flesh of Ben’s bottom lip. He tasted the sweetness of that flesh, the warmth beneath the chill to the other’s skin. “You talk too much to be the Champion of Hyrule.”
“Link talks within the game,” Ben said, and a slight struggle began, “just because you don’t hear him doesn’t mean he isn’t talking…Off! Son-of-a--!”
Jeff’s arm moved to lock around Ben’s waist and draw him even closer. He could feel the heated press of the other male’s erection against his thigh. Just for a second, the malevolent, self-inflicted wound of a grin on his face intensified into something beyond nightmarish.
“…Bitch!” Ben finished, but Jeff wasn’t listening. He was investigating the taste of this being’s mouth with his teeth and tongue. The knife in his hand was slippery with blood as he brought it to press against the green cloth that covered Ben’s side just above the hip.
The bloody blade severed the cloth like the material was little more than warm butter. Though not as wet a sound as the ripping of flesh, the noise served to inspire him. Drowning in Ben’s mouth, ripping away his clothes with the knife and the skill of a trained surgeon for sheer experience, Jeff surrendered to this new kind of mania that had roots in his suddenly throbbing dick.
“Shut up,” he told Ben, and bit the other’s tongue, swallowing the delicious scream that came from that delivery of pain.
_____
Benjamin McAlister was in the grips of an animal. He had known this being was an animal the moment he had spied him standing before the dorm room windows, still as a shadow, and silent as a wraith. The Killer had entered the small room without being detected—a thing that should have been impossible considering Ben was everything, knew everything, within that which he considered his territory. And now, the animal had him, had shoved a hot, wet, tongue down his throat, and was seeking a closeness with him that threatened to bind them together in a fiery, heated kind of way that demanded a permanent melting of their flesh, blood, and bones.
Once upon a time, Ben had been handled like this on a frequent basis. He’d had no control over himself. All the control had belonged to his vile molester. That person had had the ability to hurt him or please him however they saw fit, and, more often than not, pain had been the gift they had chosen to deliver. His mind rebelled at being handled this way. His body, however, had other thoughts. Darker thoughts that existed in the deep chasm of his mind. His body wanted what killer so boldly offered. His cold, cold, heart pounded. His dick swelled even harder than the rise it had gained in watching Adam being slaughtered before his eyes.
Jeff was warm and firm. Jeff took charge, and Ben, who had put himself in the position to control most everything, felt a terrible need to surrender to the power of this kiss, to the power of being handled, and beaten and smacked around. Whatever Jeff wanted to do was good with the shameful part of Ben that longed to be controlled by someone or something truly capable of the position.
Teeth raked against his tongue, setting off a pleasure detonation deep within him. A humiliating low moan escaped him for the flood of sensation, and that humiliation was increased by the deep chuckle of the Killer that had him. The knife split his clothing asunder at the hip and upward to the armpit. The material feel away exposing his flesh to the cool night air that drifted through the open dorm room window.
Damn you, Ben thought, enraged just below the hot flames of desire that held him. He turned his head and broke free of the kiss. “I’m not one of your…victims.”
He stared up into a terrible visage that was almost completely predatory. The fingers of his free hand had found their way to coiling in the inky waves of Jeff’s long mane of black hair that fell in a jet-black waterfall well past the Killer’s waist. He snatched that hair as hard as he could, thinking to use the pain of the grip for some kind of leverage in this.
He saw a flicker of annoyance jettison across those shiny black pupils. A terrible, long forgotten, but familiar, kind of terror rocketed through Ben for that momentary, hellish, expression. “Get you goddamn hands off me,” he snarled, “before I--!”
There were a lot of things that he could do. He was capable of bringing so much pain. Time had made him skilled at it. The lights in the room flickered in time with his desire, confusion, and rising anger. The light bulb in the center of the room blew. Electrical cords writhed like snakes, and their sockets smoked. In grotesque, writhing, serpentine tangle, the cords began to move from their place in the corner and toward Ben’s attacker. Unplugged, its cord incestuously entwined in the approaching coil, the printer spewed page after page of print, each page reading over and over: Hands off, motherfucker! Hands off, motherfucker! Hands off, motherfucker!
“You’re just another kind of victim,” Jeff leaned down and whispered into his ear. Simultaneously, he heard the sound of the knife Jeff carried hitting the floor. A second later, and he was jerked even closer, and a mighty blow, palm flat, fell against the exposed flesh of his ass.
The sudden, overwhelming, pain drove Ben up on his toes and completely into Jeff as if seeking solace in the arms of the being who had so abruptly assaulted him. In wide-eyed shock, he stared at the bigger male, into that terrible face, which flickered to beautiful and human right before his eyes only to change back again in a breath. “How dare y--!”
Another blow fell with the same brutal intensity of the first and in the same place, almost exactly. A hot wave of pain gripped him. At the same time, Jeff darted forward again, as if to whisper to him, but that terrible face moved lower instead, and teeth sunk into Ben’s throat at the jugular. Another blow fell as those teeth clamped down on his flesh and bit through the skin. He howled, a terrible, shameful, victim’s cry. The cords stopped their inhuman progression at the height of that cry. They seemed to die where they were on the floor, forgotten by the one who controlled them in favor of pain.
Jeff chuckled. “Scream all you want. There’s no one left alive on this floor to hear you.”
The words were muffled for the grip on his throat, but Ben heard them distinctly.
The painful blows fell like rain now, punctuating each one of Jeff’s words. It only took a few minutes until Ben’s ass felt like it was on fire, each blow rocketing through him and eliciting cry after cry of soft, indignant, pain.
“You don’t hit me, pretty prince,” Jeff ground teeth deep into his flesh.
“F-fuck you!” Ben managed.
“In a minute. I want to play around a little more first. You like to play, don’t you, Ben? You told the kid that was here before that you did. You know, the one that got away? Him.”
The hand that was punishing his ass stopped suddenly, and moved to tangle in the waves of his hair. The grip was hard enough to make his eyes sting with the beginnings of tears. The teeth in his throat held him still with the threat of ripping his jugular apart—severing the artery and spraying blood everywhere. It wouldn’t kill him, of course. It was far too late for anything as mundane as death, but, it would hurt like hell, and, possibly incapacitate him for a little while. Ben didn’t think he wanted to be totally incapacitated in Jeff’s grip—not even for the few precious seconds that it would take him to recover from having his throat torn out.
“You let him get away!” Ben snarled, and Jeff released the grip he had on his throat. Dark blood coated the Killer’s ivory teeth, and a pink tongue moved to lick it away.
A casual hand slid across the tip of his dick. “You hard on hasn’t died any,” Jeff said, and squeezed the tip between his thumb and forefinger—hard enough to snatch what passed for breath in Ben away. “As a matter of fact, I’d say it’s…harder than it was before. What an interesting victim you are.”
“I am not your goddamn victim!” Ben reminded this thing.
That terrible smile widened. Those black eyes studied him like he was some kind of new and interesting kind of bug. “We’ll see. You’re free to stop me at any moment but…you won’t. So let’s stop pretending and see just how much you can take.”
They were moving, and obscene, too close dance toward the bloody, corpse-ridden bed. Jeff was incredibly fast, superhumanly so, and they were there before Ben had a good chance to react. The Killer turned, and Ben was deposited, face-first on the bed. In the next second, Jeff was on top of him, pressing him down into the bloody, gore-stained, mattress.
He was hit again almost immediately. He had the weight of Jeff’s knee in the small of his back, holding him down, and a hard hand fell on his ass at the same spot that had been attacked before with damning precision.
Ben raged, but the sound that came out of him was only a whimper—another soft needy humiliation of a sound that filled the room with his own longing and want. For every blow that fell another such whimper existed him—each sound growing in longing and intensity. It became the music of the room as the blows were delivered in a careful timed rhythm, one after the other, with only the pause for his exclamations in between.
“Victim,” Jeff breathed in his resolute Killer’s voice. There came a pause in the blows then, as the green tunic Ben wore was ripped off him, the sound of the cloth tearing making a scream of its own within the otherwise silent room. And then the blows started up again.
Smack.
“Ahhh.”
Smack.
“Oh…Ahhhhh.”
SMACK.
“Ohhhhhhhhhh.”
Shame rode Ben, but that same shame made his hard dick grind down into the mattress blow for blow seeking a release for the definite desire that was building there. The same shame made his legs, which were hanging over the bed, weak, and unable to support him, as Jeff rained pain down upon him. Every cruelly timed blow skyrocketed through him, igniting his cells along the way in a volatile trail that led straight to his throbbing cock.
Smack.
This blow, harder than the rest, had him arching backward as much as he could, considering the weight of the other male on top of him. His fingers dug into the blood and gore covered mattress, as he strained upward toward a freedom that he had to keep telling himself that he wanted—that was his by right.
Jeff was heavy, however, and giving him no quarter. The only thing he got for his efforts was a chuckle from the Killer—a nasty, amused, determined kind of sound.
The next blow had fingernails in it. The palm hit square, spreading the pain in equal parts across the whole of his ass, and then the blunt nails dug into the flesh on the upswing, scraping a path of agony in the path of flesh gone ultra-sensitized-tender from abuse. Ben bit down into the bed sheets and tasted coppery blood. The next blows were a kinder version of that one, and he humped and writhed on the bed, enslaved to the thing that had him, playing the victim like he wanted an Oscar Nomination out of the deal.
He lost thought and time, concentrating only on the pain and the way that it made him feel, so when the blows stop, for just a little while, his body still humped and trembled and writhing in dark anticipation of the next blow. The pressure at his back abated as the Killer moved off of him. He was turned over abruptly, and staring up at that terrible face--that flickered again to something obscenely beautiful, and decidedly blue-eyed human--as it studied him in the moonlight with an expression of cruel satisfaction etched across it.
It was a hunter’s stare, of that Ben was certain…and the deer had an arrow in it, and was only waiting to have its throat slit.
“Asshole,” Ben spat.
“You don’t have to beg,” Jeff said. “I’ve decided I want to do this.”
The Killer pulled the bloody white hoodie over his head in a single snatch, and dropped the thing on the floor. Ben took a moment to take in the marble white perfection of the monster’s chest, the carefully carved six-pack indentations of his abdomen. The defined bones of his hips as Jeff went to remove his pants.
“I don’t want to play this game anymore,” Ben said.
Those savaged eyes went, pointedly, to Ben’s erection. “Bullshit.”
The pants fell. Jeff stepped out of them and climbed on the bed. His knees on either side of Ben, Jeff climbed him of a fashion. Ben felt Jeff’s naked ass on his chest, and then higher, until the Killer’s throbbing erection was poised at his face, the heated tip rubbing hotly against his lips.
“Open up,” Jeff said.
Ben turned his head to the side. He was staring at the body beside him—the mangled wreck that had once lived in this room. He felt insistent fingers along the side of his neck, toying with the awful bit that had been left there, and then those fingers pressed down into that wound. Hard.
Agony stiffened his entire body. His eyes widened. His mouth opened. A hand in his hair turned his head so that he was looking back up at Jeff. The dick slid across his teeth, moved over his tongue, and plunged down his throat. He choked on it, so strong was that initial thrust. Slowly, oh so slowly, that hot, hard flesh slid backward, allowing him some small room to breathe the breaths that monster’s breathed.
When it came back again, it was in a push that was just as hard and just as rough. He could smell nothing but the Killer, see nothing but the dark hairs and white flesh of the Killer. He choked again, and was allowed to breath. Hard thrust for hard thrust, the cock in his mouth got harder and harder, and the scent of Jeff stronger and stronger—until there was nothing but the hot, pulsing rhythm by which his mouth was being strongly fucked and the heat at his groin which was going by leaps and bounds every time his breath was cut off by this…this…bastard.
It occurred to him how easy it would be to bite this flesh off, but his own needy dick wouldn’t allow him to do that. Things would stop then, the nature of the assault would change, and he didn’t want that. Several deep plunges later and that dick was gone, replaced by the Killer’s macabre face. A tongue slid across his lips, teeth grazed the bottom one, drawing blood in a single cruel bite. He barely had time to cry out against the pain before Jeff was again at the foot of the bed. Hands locked around his ankles and he was dragged forward to meet the other male. His feet were deposited on Jeff’s shoulders, as a hand slid down his left leg, and another held the dick that was pressing hard against his anus.
Panic occurred to him as the blunt head of that dick worked his tight hole. His hips left the bed as he attempted to backpedal, and the hand on his left legs pressed hard to hold him still. “Wai--!”
The word ended in a strangled cry as Jeff breached the tightness of his hole and pressed forward to the head was buried within him. He did panic then, for the pain, but the tight grip on his hip gave him no quarter. Jeff’s free hand fell on his other hip, the grip strong, and Ben was held still as the Killer pushed deeper inside of him.
“Every inch,” Jeff growled. “All of it. Right now. Monster.”
Ben felt himself being impaled inch for inch in the roughest, most unlubricated, and unprepared kind of way. His body bucked as it tried to get a hold on the pain. He slid forward, damning inch for inch.
At the halfway point, he was relatively certain that he was going to die all over again. His hands came down on Jeff’s, nails attempting to rend the grip that held him. If the Killer noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Instead, Jeff began moving his hips with a rough deliberateness that drove him further and further, deeper and deeper.
Ben cried out for every mean, determined plunge that brought them closer and closer in the night. Jeff’s hands moved from his hips, to grasp his arms and press them hard into the bed. And, then, with a final, violent thrust, Jeff was buried deep inside him and the Killer’s hips slapped home against his ass, the sound of flesh on flesh drowned by Ben’s humiliating, victim-like cry. In that plunge, Jeff hit that thing, deep within Ben that weakened his knees and caused his body to jitter and jerk like an epileptic. Born in pain, beautiful pleasure flooded him in a heated wave.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
The Killer grinned, triumphant. And Ben hated him.
The hands on his arms drew him up until his back was off the bed. He wrapped his arms around Jeff’s neck, embedded his nails in that flesh. His legs locked around the other’s waist instinctively. He dug into with his fingers, and got a little gasp of pain for his efforts as he was lifted up off the bed entirely, and slammed down upon the other hips. He gave up pretending, and buried his teeth in Jeff’s pale white shoulder.
Jeff’s pounding up and into him, and Ben hung on for dear-whatever-passed-for-him-as-life. They rocked like that. They rolled like that. And somewhere in there, between panting cries that didn’t quite know it they wanted to be pleasure or pain, their lips met, and Jeff swallowed the pathetic little sounds Ben made, as he was jerked up and back down upon that hard throbbing dick.
Abruptly, Jeff dropped him, and Ben found himself again among blood and the cooling body that decorated the bed. Jeff climbed in the bed with him. Hands on Ben’s ankle, the bigger male urged the smaller to turn over, and Ben didn’t fight it, he just turned. He was way beyond struggle at this point, way beyond anything but wanting the other’s dick back inside him.
On his stomach, a hand fell on his ass, and, at first, he didn’t know what to do. Another blow fell, and his hips jerked up. He felt Jeff getting into position behind him. His breaths left him in hot pants. He moved up on his elbows, ass thrust back at the other male. He felt the blunt head of that dick at his entrance. His whole body shuddered with the need for this violation.
The hard press of the engorged member caused within him the immediate need to get away from the invasion. He made himself be still as the pressure intensified and that dick breached him, press for press, working its way deeper inside of him until it was all the way in, and achieved a quick rough rhythm. A hand gripped his hair, dragging him up and back until he was in an arched position, and held there, riding that dick like his life depended on it.
Little sounds tore their way from his throat, rapidly on the way to becoming big sounds. He was shameless about them at this point. It had been so long since he had been handled in this shameless way that he didn’t know what to do with everything that he was feeling—the pleasure, the pain, the humiliation. His eyes screwed closed as knees forced his legs further apart in order to ram into him deeper. Hips slammed into his ass at a frantic pace—hard and demanding. Each thrust took him further and further away from himself and this thing that he had become, this thing that knew damn well how to defend itself better than this…
The cords on the floor were moving again. He could command them at will and he moved them across the floor to the bed upon which he was being mercilessly split asunder. Those chords slid up the covers in serpentine tangle and wrapped around the pale white body of the thing that was assaulting him. Cords slid over Jeff’s ankles, and around his waist. A cord wrapped itself around his neck—but there was no harshness to the embraces of these inanimate objects that Ben controlled. It was more a caress than a threat.
If Jeff noticed this, he didn’t react to it either, but instead, drew that hard punishing hand down on Ben’s ass again, and fucked him like fucking was going to go out of style in a minute. The increased friction, the hard rough pounding reduced Ben to little more than an animal himself. He lost himself in the violent motions—as driving back in rough demand of what Jeff was giving him. The noises he was making were now a convoluted intermingling of weeping and screaming, and the more he cried, the harder the Killer fucked him.
The rough blows from Jeff’s hand began to fall again, and Ben’s reaction was only to whisper-demand, “Hit me harder.”
This command, the Killer seemed all too happy to obey.
Ruthless pounding Ben’s ass, the blows fell like a torrent, intensifying each time Ben asked for more—driving the pleasure with its exact opposite, causing it to spike in a way that lent sublime agony to the brutal fucking. Blood red tears fell from Ben’s eyes to become lost in the wellspring of blood that darkened the bed. He bit into those bloody covers. His nails raked furrows in the gore that covered everything.
The Killer changed position—taking that precious dick away and using one hand to press Ben flat down on the bed. His legs were spread wide by Jeff’s knees, and then he was entered again from this new position, the dick driving downward and into him from an angle that seemed to have no stopping sense for how deep Jeff could be inside him now.
He howled at the rough return, but his body was beyond ready—it was demanding, and his ass moved up to welcome the rough infusion, hips humping on the bed with the need to get the job done. He was mindless to the mewling sounds he made at this point. Need had killed all shame and common sense in him.
He felt like little more than a hot thing on fire that needed, desperately, to be put out. But he needed to work and wait for it, to beg and plead and scream and cry for it. Ben, who had prided himself for years, on always being in control of himself—was not in control. And he was loving every shameful, disgusting, stranger-fucking, minute of it.
He had a controlling hand on his ass, pressing him down hard into the mattress and another on his back, making sure that he didn’t move too much. From the odd flat position, Jeff was fucking him like he hated him, driving down into him with the speed and precision of a jackhammer—and tearing him apart the same way that a jackhammer tore apart concrete. Ben existed inside computers. He played with humans and wanted to rule them but he didn’t feel anything for them. He didn’t feel anything at all—nothing real anyway, which had been the point of drowning in the first place.
He was feeling now though—and it was terrifying, and the fear added a sick and delicious flavor to the intoxicating mix of sensations that he was experiencing. “Ohhhh…Ahhhhhhhh…Fuck me,” he cried.
“Shameless bitch,” Jeff snarled.
Ben didn’t disagree. He just wanted the fire out, so he could think clearly, think beyond the way Jeff’s dick was mercilessly stretching his ass, and the deep scrape of that member against that thing inside him that made his knees weak and his thoughts dry up like a sponge left in the hot summer sun. He struggled to obtain his knees so that he could grasp his dick. His fingers closed over that hot needy flesh, and he worked it with a rough precision that matched the way he was being fucked from behind.
Greedy hands grasped his hips and dragged them back again, and the pounding intensified for his having broken the former pattern. There was rage in the way he was being fucked now and his hand matched the brutal tune of flesh on flesh deftly—torturing his dick in the way his ass was being tortured and driving himself closer and closer to an insanity he’d thought he’s mastered long ago.
When he was flipped over, he just went—lost now. One leg was tossed over the Killer’s shoulder, the other was moved to link around the Killer’s waist. He was dragged forward, impaled again on that dick in a single thrust and screaming for mercy as he worked his dick toward the threatened implosion. Pre-cum leaked across the tip. Almost. Almost. Almost. There.
Hips working like a machine, Jeff was watching him. One hand was locked around Ben’s ankle where it lay at the shoulder, the other was on Ben’s hip, dick grinding always to be deeper, to take everything, to leave Ben nothing of himself. And Ben knew it, knew he was being the Killer’s most excellent victim. He just couldn’t help himself.
Orgasm ripped through him in hard ropes of sticky white cum that and arched his back off the bed in a painful pose that he held for the moments that his world went wide hot rabid with blinding pleasure. Jeff grinned. It was an intense, concentrated kind of grin, and there was no amusement in it…
…only a bizarre kind of twisted victory…
The Killer leaned down, fucking him hard through the white pleasure of the orgasm, the bed rocked with the force of it, but all Ben could see was the dark quality of Jeff’s expression—the mockery in it…
…the fact that Jeff the Killer had made him scream, cry and plead.
The cords around the Killer grew tighter. Ben’s arms were heavy. His whole body felt weak and drained from the encounter. But he made himself move his arm anyway. He reached up and punched that smug maniac’s expression. He hit him as hard as he was capable. And he wasn’t surprised, at all, when Jeff came hot and hard and deep inside him in the wake of it.
_____
Beverly Pembroke was in love with Adam Chaney and had been since they’d been nine years old. Hearing Adam scream like that over the phone had caused a deep and overwhelming type of dread in her. She’d gotten into her car and driven to the college campus. Wealthy and pampered, Beverly hadn’t had to suffer the indignities of the college dorms. Her parent’s paid for her to live in an apartment on the more luxurious side of town, which was why it had taken her so long to get to him.
She turned the knob on Adam’s dorm room door and stepped into shadows that were inky black for their intensity. The curtains were drawn and the room was a chamber of complete darkness but for the thin light of the computer screen.
Bev flicked on the light—that didn’t work. She smelled the faint odor of smoke, and it curled her nose. She ran nervous fingers through dark red hair and squinted sea green eyes into the shadows in the hopes of seeing better. “Adam?” she whispered.
There was someone on the bed by the window, she could discern that much from the hallways thin light. Had these bastards gone to bed and left her to worry all night?
A frown drew itself across her pretty face. She stepped deeper into the dark room, her anger growing.
The door, she thought maybe because of the wind or something, closed behind her and she jumped at the complete darkness slid over her. Icy fear slid through her to dominate the anger.
She scrambled to stand in the computer’s light almost on instinct. There were words on the screen in bright colors—Christmas Present colors.
HI BEVERLY, the words read. ADAM’S SORRY HE CAN’T BE HERE RIGHT NOW BUT HE LEFT YOU A PRESENT. WANT TO SEE IT?
She smiled and a certain measure of relief flooded through her for the brightly colored words.
COME CLOSER.
She was taken aback by the fact that the computer was kind of talking to her. Adam, however, was skilled enough to set something like this up. It was likely he was either attempting to disgust her or scare her to death. Considering the phone call, she was likely in for a scare.
She took a bold step forward. “I’m going to kill you for whatever this is later, Adam,” she said, softly. “Your sense of humor is another one of those things that needs adjusting before I’ll marry you.”
CLOSER, the computer demanded.
She took another step, head down so that she could see everything the screen had to show her. She was gazing directly into it, face close enough to plant a kiss upon the glass.
“Close enough for you, you ass?” she asked.
It was in that moment that she saw a movement by the window. The curtains stirred in the computer glass and moonlight danced across it.
“Just kill her already,” a terrible voice said.
Bev gasped at the intrusion of the voice on the silence of the room. The smile died on her face. Her eyes widened. Her breath stopped. Her body stiffened in sheer terror. She tried to stand, to whirl around and face whomever had spoken.
The hand and arm came out of the computer screen and wrapped in her bright red hair. The grip was vice-like. Her scream was a dull squeal, terror causing her bladder to release and a stream of hot piss to run down her leg in a foul river.
A face swam behind the computer’s glass. Pale, delicately defined. Black, black eyes. That inky, impossible, hideous gaze was focused somewhere behind her.
“Do you think I can’t?!” the face behind the glass snarled.
She screamed again, and this time it was a high-pitched whoop of absolute terror. Those inky black eyes met hers, and an annoyed flicker of deep blood red flared at their centers.
“I’m bored, Ben,” the horrible ghostly voice behind her said. “The night is filled with blood, so, if you’re not going to give me any, I’ll find it elsewhere.”
She was jerked forward, and suddenly, toward that impossible face. Her face smashed into the computer screen at this incredible volition. The screen was like a brick wall upon contact. Agony roared through her. The world went white as pain flared through her. She felt the agony of her nose breaking along with the cracking of her front teeth. Her scream drowned in a river of her own blood with the impact of her face on the impossibly hard surface before her.
“You can’t go,” the face in the computer said. “I need your help.”
She was pushed backward and jerked forward again at the uncanny volition. Her feet scraped across the floor, her legs buckled. Her head hit the computer screen again and she felt something crack within her skull. Blinding agony rocketed through her, swallowing all thought beyond sheer pain. Stinging, sticky, blood ran into her eyes.
“Please help me, Jeff.”
The merciless grip in her hair jerked her back and then dragged her forward again so that her face connected with the screen. And again. And again. And again. Her teeth shattered and broke at the gum line. Her nose became pulp. The pain became an all-consuming rush. The world grayed around the edges, winked, and darkened.
“Finish it,” came the whisper from the shadows. The words were dark, hungry and tinged with a terrible lust.
She thought to beg for her life, but her jaw was shattered, and her mouth wouldn’t work. Part of her tongue had been clipped off by her shattered teeth and she choked on the flesh which had become lodged in her throat.
Please, God, let it end, was all she could think over and over again, Please God…
She was jerked forward again by that rough impossible grip. Her head hit the screen again, but this time something was different. She passed through the screen, her face sliding within the glass without breaking it. Agony assaulted her—worse than having her face bashed in by a screen that was like a brick wall.
She felt like she was being dissolved in acid, the part of her that had passed through the screen, the part of her face just beyond her cheekbones. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. And what she heard was just a whisper now, hollow and inhuman as she screamed at nothing and into a vast, empty black nothing…
“You’ve suffered a terrible fate, haven’t you?”
____
Bev’s limp corpse fell on the floor by Adam’s heart. Her body jittered but she was already dead. Her face was gone—most of it anyway. What existed there to be examined were eye sockets with the jellied mess of what had been her eyes steaming in the deep holes. Her nose was a hole, and what was left of her teeth clicked in reaction to the shock of her death. Her face was a skinless mask of bone and tissue—a nightmare Halloween thing.
“Will you help me now?” the computer asked the darkness.
But the darkness was empty--the Killer gone.
The hard drive of the computer exploded, and fire licked across the desktop and devoured everything upon it, and then raced down the wood itself to devoured more and more of the room, lighting everything in its path while smoke and fire roared out of the sockets in the room, and the walls caught fire.
Words ran across the screen at an accelerated rate. Newspaper clippings that told of killings in the area. Then the clippings broadened in search from the area to the state and from the state to the country. Faces flashed within those clippings, the face of those left behind by the murders. Parents faces. The faces of police officers. Pictures of examiners of crimes scenes. It was a whir of activity—an absolute blur.
As the fire raged, and the curtains caught blaze, the activity on the screen slowed.
Maniac Loose In Chicago, one clipping read. It quickly flipped to another. Six found dead in Apartment: California Family Slaughtered.
Clipping after clipping ran across the screen—being studied, being analyzed until a final clipping came up:
Four Butchered, The Woods Family. Son, Jeffery Still Missing.
GOT YOU MOTHERFUCKER, the computer screen read in the second before the heat of the inferno caused it to crack and burn.