Frostitute 2: Dead Reckoning: A Twisted Tale of Extreme Horror Page 2

  But first things first: Anya wanted to get the hell out of this storm and go to ground for a while. Not because of the elements, which no longer bothered her in the slightest, but because she needed to give the heat a little time to die down before making her next move. Depending on what Piotr told the police (and whether they believed a word of it) then they could be looking for her already, which was probably why her subconscious had made a point of taking the most inaccessible, out-of-the-way back streets that she knew of.

  While she had been lost in deep thought, Anya's feet had brought her into one of Denver's roughest neighborhoods. It was the sort of place that even the cops refused to enter unless they were in pairs. Although the city might be experiencing winter storm conditions, the denizens of this little slice of paradise were not all asleep and indoors, even at this time of the morning. A pair of eyes had noticed her from the downstairs window of a run-down old building. Shortly after that, a pair of feet had begun to surreptitiously follow her along the sidewalk.

  The first indication that she had of being stalked was when an arm snaked around her neck and tightened, constricting her windpipe...or tried to. Her assailant had no idea that his victim didn't actually need to breathe.

  She stopped dead in her tracks, allowing the man to take control of her...for the time being.

  "Don't move, bitch. Don't say a god-damn word. Hell, don't even breathe." The voice was jittery, shaking, just like the tremulous arm that was now wrapped firmly around her neck. Somehow, she didn't think that the shaking had much to do with the cold. The guy was most likely a tweaker, either strung out on meth or, even worse, going through withdrawal…and therefore desperate enough to do pretty much anything in order to score some more.

  Anya obeyed, remaining perfectly still. The tip of a knife blade was poked into the soft flesh of her throat and then jabbed a couple of times for added emphasis.

  "Good. That's good." The tweaker laughed, a shrill, nervous little giggle that betrayed his underlying insecurity. "Now, you're gonna come with me, see? Step backwards, like this. With me. Come on. Come on."

  He applied a little extra pressure with the blade in order to motivate her. In a living, breathing woman, he would have already drawn blood, Anya realized. That told her that this miserable little piece of shit was probably all too willing to hurt her, or any other target of opportunity that happened to have come along this way tonight, in order to get what he wanted.

  She smiled. Anya would have been the first to admit to being a cold-hearted bitch even at the very best of times, but she did possess some sense of morality. She had already decided that she was never going to hurt an innocent on her quest for vengeance. But walking piles of garbage like this were totally fair game...

  But not here. Not on a city street, even at this hour of the morning in the middle of a winter storm. It was too public. Besides, the meth-head might have friends, and her supernatural strength needed to be recharged. It was based upon blood magic, the oldest magic of all: the more blood that she spilled, the faster her inhuman strength and agility was replenished. As Anya walked backward, allowing herself to be pulled along by the impatient tweaker, she looked down. His arm is so thin, she thought to herself, staring distastefully at a leather-jacketed sleeve that she could probably have encircled with her thumb and forefinger. This one is scrawny. Probably contains hardly any blood at all. Let us hope that he has some friends...

  She felt herself being half-pulled, half-dragged across the threshold of a doorway into a gloomy entrance hall. The building must have been a house once, but now it looked fit to be condemned. In the dim light of a bare bulb dangling from a flex above her, Anya could see that the wallpaper was peeling away in tattered, curling strips, helped along by streaks of water damage that ran from floor to ceiling.

  "In here." Elbowing a door open, Anya’s abductor forced her into what must at one time have been the living room. A broken-down old couch lined the far wall, the stuffing leaking out of its arms and cushions. On it sat two men, both of them almost cadaverously scrawny in appearance. They were leaning forward, bent over a scratched-up old wooden coffee table. One of the men passed a light-bulb to the other. It was glowing faintly, due to the lighter that had obviously just been used to heat it up, and a thin plume of smoke was streaming out of one end.

  The two men looked like utter creeps to her, their sallow faces pitted and pock-marked with the scars that signified their long-term abuse of crystal meth. Anya mentally dubbed them Creep Two and Creep Three. The appellation of Creep One she reserved for the piece of shit standing behind her. He was already marked down for special treatment.

  "Jesus Christ, Francis, what the fuck is this?" Creep Three looked up as they entered the room, freezing with the light bulb dangling from the tips of his fingers.

  "Goddammit, Donnie! It's Frank! You know how much I hate fucking Francis!" Creep One's forearm began to tremble. Creep Three's comment had made him angry.

  "Alright, alright. Jesus Christ, Frankie, what the fuck is this?" Creep Three rolled his eyes. Creep Two, who looked to be nineteen going on seventy, snatched the meth bulb away from him and took a quick toke, hacking up a lung when he sucked the crystal down deep.

  "You guys're on the last of it." Creep One sounded accusatory. "We ain't got no money, do we...'less you're holding out on us?"

  "Holding out, shit!" Three waved dismissively. "So what? You gonna rob her, is that your bright idea?"

  "She probably be good for that," One replied, nodding vigorously with sudden excitement, "but I figure she could be good for somethin' more too. I mean, just you look at her. Betcha we can have us a little entertainment before the mornin'. Ain't that right, hotness?"

  He patted Anya's rump with the knuckles of his knife hand. Playing the wide-eyed helpless victim, she simply said, "Anything. Just please...don't hurt me..."

  Creep One cackled, then spoke past her to Creep Three. "Well, Donnie...what do y'all say?"

  Three considered his options for a while, looking Anya up and down from the soles of her knee-length boots to her pert breasts and firm nipples that poked out from beneath the white cotton shirt. It was getting easier and easier as time passed for her to maintain the mask of normalcy, the illusion of her old physical appearance; in fact, it was now required practically no conscious effort on her part, her facade being something that she could drop to reveal her true countenance if she so chose. Otherwise, it seemed to stay in place just as easily as a jacket did once you slipped it on and forget that you were wearing it.

  "Alright," Three said at last. He nudged the teenage train-wreck that was still coughing up a storm next to him. "Terry, go make sure all the doors is locked."

  Sulkily, Creep Two put down the makeshift bulb-bong and went to do as Three instructed.

  Anya carefully kept any trace of a smile from her face as she thought, Yes, Terry...please DO go and make sure that all of the doors are locked...I would simply HATE for us to be disturbed...

  CHAPTER THREE

  The two paramedics remained frozen in place for a moment, neither of them quite believing what their eyes had just witnessed.

  It was John that broke the spell first, grabbing the med kit and rushing forward toward the battered and bleeding sack of meat that had just been hurled in their general direction. His boots lost traction on a slushy patch of sidewalk, causing him to overbalance and slide like a baseball player heading into home plate.

  "I'll take the other guy," Jerry said, cutting past his partner on the left and making a bee-line for the slumped figure and the guy who was cradling it, rocking it gently back and forth.

  Jesus, John thought to himself as he gave his patient a quick once over, this guy is a fucking mess and a half…

  Like most paramedics, particularly those in big cities, John kept a pair of trauma shears in the thigh pocket of his navy blue EMS pants. They were basically just blunted scissors that were meant for cutting off a patient's clothes as quickly as po
ssible. He pulled them out now and in less than twenty seconds had rendered Piotr what the street medics liked to refer to as ‘trauma naked.’

  If anything, exposing his naked body to plain sight made the patient look even more fucked-up in John's eyes, not less.

  Somebody really went to town on this poor bastard, no doubt about it, the paramedic thought to himself as he moved up to his patient's head to begin his assessment. Somebody went full bore medieval on his ass.

  During his seventeen years as a paramedic (and four years as an EMT before that) John Minear had assessed so many trauma patients that he no longer consciously thought about the process; it was totally automatic. His hands moved on their own, flying across the surface of the patient's body at lightning speed, working their way down from the head to the feet.

  The head...hot damn, was a fucking mess that was! The guy's eyes were gone, the sunken lids screwed tightly shut on empty sockets that wept tears of blood down both cheeks. The orbits around them were swollen and bruised. He was mewling and trying to cry, but the man kept coughing up bursts of bright red blood. Each cough was interspersed with tortured gargling sounds, and when John prised his lips apart, it became obvious just why that was the case: his assailant had gone to the trouble of tearing the man's tongue out.

  His mouth was bleeding copiously, and even though he kept spitting the blood and secretions up in an attempt to try and secure his own airway, John wanted a second pair of hands to suction it. With his partner busily assessing another patient, he wondered just what the fuck had happened to the fire department. Three or four extra sets of medically-trained hands would come in real handy right about now.

  "Keep coughing that shit up, man," he instructed, hoping that the patient could hear and understand him from inside the world of pain in which he must now be immersed. Whoever had tortured him (it was becoming increasingly obvious that it had to have been torture) had left him with his ears, which was something, at least.

  John moved on to the patient's neck, reaching around to the back in order to check the seven cervical vertebrae for injury. They felt grossly intact beneath his fingertips. Glancing quickly at the front of the man's neck, the paramedic noted with concern that the jugular veins were both standing out tall and proud, like those big ropey veins you saw on bodybuilders. That was usually a bad sign in a patient as gravely wounded as this. He made a mental note to come back and check on them again in a few minutes, once the man was loaded up in the back of the ambulance and out of the snow.

  "What do you got?" he demanded of Jerry.

  "GSW to the chest," Jerry hollered back. "No pulse. Gonna decompress."

  "Copy that."

  ‘Gonna decompress’ meant that Jerry was going to stick a couple of huge needles into the dead man's chest, one on each side, to try and relieve any air pressure that may have built up. Open thorax wounds could be deadly like that. Street medics liked to call them sucking chest wounds, which was truth in advertising at its finest: They sure as shit did suck if you got one.

  Every time you took a breath, air was drawn into the hole in your chest from the outside world — air that didn't belong in there. It built up pressure inside the chest cavity,collapsed the lung, then started building up around your heart and your biggest blood vessels, the aorta and the vena cava. The aorta wasn't usually a problem (as the biggest artery in the body, it was practically impossible to kink it off) but the vena cava was a vein, which meant the blood ran through it at lower pressures...The excess air could squeeze off that big old vein, tank your blood pressure, and kill you.

  The only way that paramedics could relieve that kind of pressure was to stab you with the business end of the biggest needle in their kit, which was also the one with the longest reach. It had to push through skin, muscle, and connective tissue, after all. If it worked, then it was a life-saving procedure; if it didn't work, on the other hand, then it wasn’t as though having an extra couple of holes in your chest was going to make you any deader.

  "Where the fuck is fire?" Jerry demanded, reaching into their shared kit for a ten-gauge needle.

  As if in direct answer to his question, a bank of flashing red and blue lights came into view. The Denver Fire Department was one of the few departments that operated white fire engines, instead of the more traditional red. Thanks to the snowy conditions, it was tough to see the vehicle itself until it was less than ten feet away. Mercifully, the apparatus engineer had shut down the sirens before she pulled the engine to a halt, saving both his and Jerry's eardrums from their deafening whine.

  John's hands were still working without conscious thought. Now he had moved on to his own patient's chest, which was crunchy on the right hand side when he pushed underneath the armpit.

  Broken ribs, he thought. At least two. Maybe three. Bad juju.

  Ribs had nerves and blood vessels running underneath them, which meant that the more of them you fractured, the higher the potential for internal bleeding. Making a mental note to give that right side a more thorough look-see when they were under the bright lights of the ambulance, John palpated all four quadrants of the man's abdomen, using the navel as a starting point. There was no rigidity or other signs of a belly bleed, which might have been the first piece of good news the patient had going for him.

  Sliding his hands down to just above the waistband of the patient's underwear, John pushed on the hips, happy to see that there were also no signs of fracturing there. The same was true of the femurs, the strongest bones in the body. His right ankle had gotten a little swollen, probably thanks to the landing, but that wasn't exactly going to kill him.

  His crotch, on the other hand...

  The man's underwear was completely sodden with blood. Ever the professional, John pulled the elastic waistband out just far enough to let him look inside. What he found there made even the seasoned paramedic shudder. The poor bastard's nut sack was swollen to the size of a small grapefruit, bright purple in color, and looked ready to burst...which closer inspection revealed that it already had, because a viscous, gelatinous fluid was pulsing steadily out of a jagged scrotal tear. The underwear was also streaked with urine, probably coming from the ruined chunk of gristle that had once been the poor fucker’s dick.

  John winced. Whatever makeshift weapon had been used to do this, there was no denying its effectiveness. The penis had been crushed, smashed into a barely recognizable pulp. If his patient lived (which was by no means certain) the paramedic would have bet a year's pay that he was never going to be able to have children; hell, he would probably be pissing through a catheter for the rest of his life...

  "Whaddya need?" the fire officer asked, taking a knee beside them. Three other firefighters clustered around him in a semi-circle.

  "A couple of you need to go and help Jerry." He jerked his head in the direction of his partner. A pair of firefighters trooped over there obediently. "Now help me roll this guy, would you?"

  Piotr groaned when the three first responders rolled him onto his left side.

  "Fuck," one of the firefighters said, grimacing. He was looking at the back of Piotr's underwear, which was every bit as bloody as the front. At first, John thought that the blood had simply soaked up from between the patient's legs, but it was his job to make sure he inspected every inch of skin before delivering Piotr to the trauma team at the hospital. After checking the man's back, paying particular attention to the places where his ribs connected to the spine, he pulled back the underwear in as professional a manner as he could manage.

  What he found there made him want to gag.

  One of the firefighters had to go one better. His retches turned to genuine vomiting almost as soon as he realized that whatever had been stuffed into the man's anus was organic in nature. Fortunately, the firefighter was able to turn aside and spew the contents of his stomach into the nearby storm drain.

  "What the fuck is that?" the fire officer wanted to know, his face a mask of horrified curiosity.

 
"It's...oh God..." John fought the urge to puke. A bundle of thin strands of tissue no thicker than a drinking straw poked from between the patient's buttocks. The ends were frayed, as though it had been torn free, and the whole thing was coated in blood. "It's one of his eyes..."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  "Well, Terry, is it taken care of?" Creep Three demanded when Creep Two came back into the room.

  "Sure is," the diminutive tweaker said, closing the hallway door behind him. "Front and back doors is locked. Ain't nobody getting out of here without our say-so."

  Although she wasn't the best with American accents, even Anya could tell that Creep Three wasn't a local. Not by a long shot.

  Creep Three (what was his name again? Donnie?) was picking at a series of scabs that lined his inner forearm. After a closer look, she realized that they were track marks. She wasn't exactly shocked that these guys had turned out to be IV drug-users as well as wannabe rapists.

  "Good. Nobody's gonna disturb us." He leered at her, showing a mouthful of rotted meth teeth. "Now look, honey, this is how it's gonna be. Unfortunately for you, you picked the wrong night to come walking down the wrong street. You see the three of us here — me, Francis —"

  "FRANK!" Creep One bellowed.

  "—me, Frank, and Terry?"

  Anya nodded vigorously with what she hoped was a suitably convincing display of nervousness.

  "We don't get our pipes cleaned that often anymore. Don't ask me why, but the ladies just don't seem to be falling all over themselves to get cosy with us these days."

  "Not unless we’re tradin' some crank with the whores in exchange for a little road head," Creep One snorted in her ear. Anya had heard the word crank before, from Piotr. It meant crystal meth, and he had told her that it went back to the days when Hell's Angels smuggled it in the crank shafts of their motorcycles.