HELLz BELLz (27 page)

Joe screamed: NO! And he knew he had to get out of the hellish tunnel. He shut his eyes and focused on the screaming, hoping it would lead him out.

The sustained metallic shriek sucked him from the darkness and into the dancing firelight.

John’s frayed voice echoed behind him:
The light at the end of the tunnel are the hungry fires of Hell!

Joe stopped, stooped, puked a gooey splatter of nightmare residue, then he turned back toward the sound of Sara’s trilling voice. She stood naked in the bowels of the tunnel. Vine-like strands of darkness writhed and twisted about her ankles. She raised her arms to him, pleading for him to come to her. Jagged veins of darkness shot from the walls and twined about her arms as she mouthed his name.

Something slithered up Joe’s thighs. He looked down at Suzie Shrimpton’s bee-stung lips smiling around his thick cock. He tried to swat her off him, but she remained firmly attached, sucking his engorged organ with inhuman vigor. Sara was shrieking now, her face sagging with the weight of despair. Serpentine Suzie shed her clothing like a snake shedding its skin as she twined up his body, climbed up his frame, locked her fingers behind his neck and wrapped her legs around his hips, shoving her fleshy breasts in his face. His outsized cock slid into her slick gaping slit. She sheathed him with her oozing cunt—so tight and tantalizing he
had
to fuck her. No matter that his wife was watching.

She cackled, she huffed, she made obscene noises as she rode his sturdy erection, fastened to him like a praying mantis clinging to a leafless sprig.

No, no, no, he said—or wanted to say—but he was no match for his mounting lust. He thrust his hips with a sinner’s glee. Their genitals played a squeaky squishy symphony. Unable to hold back any longer, he exploded into the diminutive snake-woman. She pumped him hard. Rode his pole. Siphoned his sizzling jism.

His eyes were fixed on his wife. A shape-shifting shadow insinuated itself between Sara’s legs. She screamed soundlessly as it plundered her and plug-fucked her till she bled.

Joe’s legs went weak, noodle-loose. He staggered as Suzie slid down him, her sex leaving a glistening mucus trail down his leg to the top of his foot. He fell against the pulsing wall of the tunnel and shrieked girlishly when he saw Suzie’s innards sliding and spilling out of her vagina. He’d fucking disemboweled her! But her guts kept coming, rolling out and roiling in a stew of gushing blood. Prostrate, knees bent, belly distended, Suzie’s scream hit an operatic high as the impossibly large thing came squirting out of her and flopped on the tunnel floor like a panicked fish out of water. The man-sized thing broke free of its transparent sac. It flopped. It convulsed. It pounded its fists. And with one last wheezing hiss, it died.

Joe crawled over to it for a closer look. The thing’s dead eyes looked back at him from his own face. The fucking little slut had given birth to Joe’s corpse.

The translucent shadow-thing between Sara’s thighs was splitting her apart, the prick-stung lips of her sex ripping open, bloody fissures spreading up her belly and down her legs, cracking flesh, opening her up and turning her inside-out like an obscene smile devouring itself.

Joe turned away and began crawling toward the Hellfire at the end of the tunnel…

* * *

James slowed to a fast walk as he approached the hooded guy in front of the karaoke lounge. With his weapon in one hand, he raised his other hand in greeting, hoping to show he meant no harm. “What’s up?” he said.

The guy’s face was shadowed by the sweatshirt’s hood, but James saw two pinpoints of light where the dude’s eyes should be and a long nose that looked chiseled out of rosy marble. The guy motioned for him to enter, then disappeared into the Okey-Dokey Karaoke. James followed.

He slogged through the murky light. Hanging from the low ceiling was one of those big spinning globes of sparkling light like the one in that old John Travolta disco flick. It shot thin shafts of colored light through the smoky air. James saw lifeless bodies sprawled on the floor and across tables and chairs, but he didn’t see the hooded dude. His foot slipped in a pool of blood, but he kept his balance and walked toward the low stage where the karaoke machine sat hunched behind the mike stand. “Where are ya, dude?” he called.

“Here,” the guy said from the back of the room. “It’s your turn in the spotlight.”

A blinding white light hit James in the face and he shaded his eyes with his free hand. Squinting, he said, “What’s that?”

“You know.” The man’s voice was melodious and deep, and James wondered why it had that echo-chamber effect when the guy wasn’t even talking through a microphone.

James said, “You mean…?”

“That’s right. This is your one shot.”

James chuckled and gave him the next line from Eminem: “
Do not miss your chance to blow
. Right?”

“Y
ou got to…”

“
Lose yourself in the music.
Right, right, but who
are
you, man? How do you know me?”

“The question is, are you ready to blow?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess. But—”

“Pick up the microphone. Time is…shall we say, short?”

He removed the mike from the tall stand and held it close to his lips. His shaky breath exploded through unseen speakers. “Uh, I don’t know, man. I mean, I don’t have lyrics written down.”

“The words are in you. All you have to do is give them voice.”

James squinted at the bright light. He could see only the dark outline of the hooded man’s head behind the blazing white disc. “Yeah, but—”

The man’s arm shot forward out of the spotlight, traversed the width of the room, stretching like malleable plastic; his hand slapped against James’s forehead. Jolted, James watched in awe as the arm withdrew, shrinking to its original size.

“Whoa! How the fuck…?”

Then the words to his unwritten rap overflowed the banks of his lips and he machine-gunned them into the microphone and out into the outlandish world.

* * *

With the muzzle of her .38 just inches from the bitch’s face, Sara thought to cap her “Fuck you!” with a killing shot to the little slut’s head, right between her beady eyes, but when she squeezed the trigger, the hammer fell with a metallic click—and without the report of exploding gunpowder. Misfire, Sara thought.

Suzie the slut grinned and said, “Fuck
you!
” Then she stuck the barrel of her pistol against Sara’s forehead and pulled the trigger, but at the same time Sara threw up her left arm to knock the pistol aside, and the gun went off inches from her temple, deafening her and blowing off the top of her ear.

They grappled and kicked at each other, each holding the wrist of the other’s gun-hand. Though Sara was bigger than her opponent, the short slut fought like the hellcat she was. Sara angled a shot at the side of Suzie’s head. Missed.

The petite woman writhed and twisted wildly; Sara lost her grip on the cunt’s wrist.

Suzie pointed her pistol at Sara’s chest and fired just as Sara twisted away in panic.

The slug hit the side of her left breast; it exited through the hole it made in the opposite side and blew a bigger hole in her right tit, where it lodged just behind the nipple. She grabbed her wounded breasts as she fell to the ground. Blood poured through her fingers. She didn’t scream or cry. The bell within the flames did her screaming for her.

The evil little bitch stood over her and took aim at Sara’s face.

* * *

Joe stumbled from the bowels of Hell and into the fire. The flames bit his hands and he screamed with the bell, snapping his arms out of the dying fire. Whimpering with pain, he spun toward the sound of startling gunshots.

He saw Suzie Shrimpton standing over his wounded wife, pointing a pistol at her.

He tried to move quickly, but his movements were sluggish, his feet scarcely making contact with the earth. Then the world slipped its cogs and for one bizarre time-warping instant, he was back in the upstairs hallway of his house, walking toward the bedroom to find Sara, feeling as though he were in a hallway in the twisted reality of a parallel world.

His movements caught up in a rush to the physical realties of this world—his sojourn outside of time finally at end—and he was diving at the undersized woman, taking her down. They scrapped like kids on a schoolyard, thrashing and rolling on the wet grass, fighting for control of the pistol. Suzie sank her teeth into his forearm and held on like a pit-bullish hellhound.

Then the iron bell stopped screaming.

A white disc blazed brighter than the sun in the night sky. Joe stared into it. Suzie straddled his hips and forced the barrel of her pistol past his teeth and into his mouth. The blazing disc disappeared with a blinding flash, branding Joe’s retina with its image.

The silence in the wake of the bell’s screaming was somehow more terrifying than the fact that Joe had a gun stuck in his mouth. He was partially blinded, totally fucked. He was about to die, straddled by the woman who’d given birth to his corpse in that grotesque underworld grotto.

Yet he was frightened half to death of this ominous silence.

“I’m gonna fuck you good, Joe,” Suzie said with a diabolical sneer. “I’m gonna fuck your brains out.”

Then she cocked the hammer with her thumb, smacked a goodbye kiss at the air…

The gunshot filled the silence.

And he was back in their kitchen, telling Sara he was out of smokes and was going out to buy a pack and that he was thinking this really might be his last pack. I think I’m about ready to quit, he told her. Maybe I should go to that hypnotist you went to. You mean it, Joseph? she said. Those things really will kill you, ya know. Yes, he said. I’m tired of being a slave to tobacco. And he kissed her lips and said I’ll be right back and went out into the hot night.

The woman’s body twitched and then went limp. Blood leaked from her head and dripped into his eyes and he pushed the pistol out of his mouth. The gun oil on his tongue tasted fruity and bitter. He rolled her off him and wiped his eyes as he sat up. Her left breast had fallen out of her halter-top. There was a glistening smear of gore above the puckered nipple.

“They get in through the eyes,” said Sara. The front of her shirt was bloody, clinging to her ruined breasts. “Those shadows.”

“You shot her,” Joe said.

Sara stood over him, pointing the gun at his chest. “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” she said with chilling finality. Then: “You fucked her in the bathroom, didn’t you?”

“No. Hell no. I—”

“Don’t say you’re sorry,” she said. “Not if you love me.”

He glanced over at Suzie and knew she was dead. He couldn’t let his eyes linger any longer there. He looked back at his wife. “You’re hurt,” he said. He wanted to get up but she was standing too close. “You’re bleeding, Sara. You have to let me help you.”

She pointed the pistol at his face, aiming at a spot between his eyes.

She said, “Not a chance in hell.”

A tongue of fire flicked out of the muzzle and the .38 slug slammed into his skull.

* * *

James was in the zone.

In the deepest groove. It was dope. The hippest whiteboy rap in the world. Had to be. The words gushed out. The mike sucked them up and sent them booming from the big speakers to the hip-hop beat thunder-thumping from the karaoke machine.

The gangsta monk in the hooded gray sweatshirt bobbed in time to the beat.

James belted out the words without even knowing where they were coming from.

“Not a chance in hell you can ring my bell/’Cause I fucked your mother an’ the bitch can’t tell if she’s comin’ or goin’/Suckin’ or blowin’/You can bet yo ass that she be showin’ when the shit starts growin’ and her tits start flowin’/But hey, what the fuck? It don’t mean nothin’/You gotta keep suckin’ on my poison bone/’Cause the lights are on but ain’t nobody home/Ain’t nothin’ to git/Don’t give a shit/ If it don’t fit you can eat my shit/Hey! C’mon, my nigguz, that shit ain’t hip/Gimme yo lips and I’ll let her rip/Ready on the left/Ready on the
right/All us nigguz be born to fight/All fuckin’ night/The pussy be tight/Bust this shit with all our might/C’mon you skells, Sing it out right/Hellz Bellz…Hellz Bellz…Hellz Bellz/ All fuckin night…”

* * *

Sara stared into the dark blue hole in her husband’s head. Viscous shadows dribbled out of it.

“They got in through your eyes,” she told her Joseph, “but I made ’em come out. See?”

Her weeping breasts throbbed with a deep pain she did her best to ignore.

Be a big girl, she told herself. Pull up your big-girl panties and stop whining.

She looked at the blackened hunk of iron in the bed of embers on the church lawn.

At last all was quiet.

Now maybe she could think straight and figure out what to do next. Reflect on what she had done. Everything had gone to hell. Turned to shit. But now she could feel the world righting itself and that sinister creepy world hidden behind this one was settling back into its secret place, no longer threatening to break through the paper-thin skin of commonplace reality.

She knew Joseph was dead—in this world, at least. She didn’t know about the other one. He might be alive and well there or in some other
there.
She wanted to believe he was. She wanted to believe she could still love him from here and that wherever he might be now, he would know she forgave him his thoughtless betrayal.

She no longer believed in the myth of Heaven. The cruel Maker of this world would have no use for Heaven. But she had glimpsed another world behind this one, and she decided to believe Joseph could find his place in it.

She walked over to the black iron bell and touched her fingertips to it. It was cool, untouched by the heat of the fire.

The bell belonged to that other world and had never been fully here in this one. She divined that its ringing had bridged the two worlds, brought their opposing atmospheres together like cold and hot air meeting to create a storm. And the storm had punished Druid Hills until it blew itself out. A storm had raged within her and she had turned that rage upon the world without. But now it was over, and she sat down in the grass, cradled the pistol to her bloody breasts and waited for what was to come.