Allyson hurried to catch up to Wanda, whose long strides had nearly carried her to the edge of the woods in the time Allyson had paused to study the soldier’s expression. She stepped through the line of trees and put an extra spring in her step as she glimpsed Wanda’s back in intermittent flashes through the maze of trees. They were moving along a winding, ill-defined path. She moved quickly along lengths of bare ground, then had to take her time negotiating areas covered with thick bramble and blocked by low-hanging branches.
She was nearly out of breath by the time she emerged into a small clearing. Wanda was standing in the center of the clearing with her back turned. She moved closer to the other woman and said, “It’s…kind of…nice out here.” She laughed once, a sound rendered brittle by her live-wire nerves. “If you’re into the whole back-to-nature thing, I mean. I’m not, really, but I’m trying to get used to it.”
Wanda laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about that, Allyson.”
She turned around and Allyson gasped at the sight of the gun pointed at her chest. Her knees went weak and her stomach did a slow roll. “Wh-what…is this?”
Wanda moved closer. “Get on your knees, Allyson.”
Allyson knew she should turn and run. A mad dash back into the woods was her only chance of escape. But the sight of that looming gun barrel was so intimidating. The strength drained from her legs and she dropped to her knees. Wanda’s smile broadened as she approached Allyson and placed the warm gun barrel against the center of her forehead.
She laughed at the sight of tears spilling down Allyson’s cheeks. “Poor little thing. Did you really think I brought you here for some heart-to-heart, girl-to-girl talk?”
Allyson was shaking uncontrollably by now. The steel biting into her flesh felt like the cold finger of God, the Almighty laying His judgment down on her. She’d done a lot of bad things in the past and now the time of reckoning had come.
Wanda pressed the gun harder against Allyson’s forehead, making her look up into her leering face. “I’ve been assigned by my Mistress to act as your executioner. You shouldn’t never have fucked us over, bitch.”
Allyson’s eyes blinked in confusion. “Wh…?”
Wanda’s forefinger began to exert pressure on the 9mm’s trigger. Allyson knew she was an instant away from dying. She should be praying to God for forgiveness in hopes that He might show her some mercy once she crossed to the other side. But instinct sent her mind scrambling to make sense of w hat Wanda had said.
It almost seemed as if…
BLAM!
Allyson screamed as the shot rang out, the blast echoing in the clearing as Wanda toppled backward and fell hard to the ground. Allyson remained frozen for a moment, unable at first to comprehend that she was still alive and that the person who’d meant to kill her had been struck down. Then she gasped as she heard heavy footsteps moving past her toward the fallen woman.
The soldier she’d glimpsed outside the mess hall knelt next to the woman he’d shot and felt for a pulse. Then he showed Allyson a grim expression and said, “She’s dead.”
Allyson nodded.
Then the world went fuzzy and she fell into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The view from the balcony pleased her more with each passing day. A small, ramshackle community was rapidly taking shape out there in that alien desert, with numerous primitive huts and a handful of prefab buildings and trailers dotting the landscape. The huts functioned as the new living quarters for the slaves. The prefab buildings and trailers—which were surrounded by a chain-link fence tipped with barbed wire—housed the Black Brigade compound. Plans for the near future included the establishment of a large, open-air marketplace, drinking halls, and places of entertainment, where the live sex and torture shows once enjoyed by the Overlords of Below would be resurrected.
Giselle’s intent was to fashion the incipient city into a bustling center of filth and decadence, of tawdry spectacle and ultimate corruption. She imagined the new community several months hence. A fully realized city of the damned. Used-up prostitutes bleeding to death in alleys, razor-wielding psychopaths prowling dark streets, murderers and petty criminals alike strung up from public gallows, children ripped from the arms of their parents and made to watch as mommy and daddy were raped and slaughtered in the streets by Black Brigade soldiers, and all-night fetish/torture sessions in a lounge reserved exclusively for an elite few in the Brigade’s power structure.
The vividly imagined atrocities brought a smile to her face.
Beyond the embryonic city, hundreds of slaves clad only in loincloths and sandals continued to work at hauling huge slabs of stone toward the steadily rising structure just visible at the edge of the horizon. The technology and machinery necessary to greatly speed up the construction process was available, but, as with so many other things, Giselle preferred to do the job the old-fashioned way. She liked watching the slaves toil. But there was a purpose to the method beyond the simple joys of casual cruelty. The human misery honored the death gods, who drew sustenance from pain and gave power to those who appeased them. The city taking shape beneath her would also honor the death gods. Giselle would provide the old ones with a veritable feast of suffering and death, a nonstop carnivale of depravity unlike anything they’d seen before, eclipsing anything from Medieval times or modern war. Her forces were working continually to cull thousands of sacrifices from normal human communities, mostly the marginalized people no one in authority cared much about. Poor people. Prostitutes, runaways and drug addicts. This in addition to the handful of societal castaways who managed to find their way here by accident every year. Ms. Wickman had largely contented herself with the random strays who happened into her territory, but Giselle had no interest in conservatism. She was determined to be bold. To do big things, bigger even than the Master had ever envisioned.
She heard a click of heels behind her. A moment later Ursula was standing to her right, leaning over the balcony railing to stare intently at the bustling, busy forms a half mile below. “Wow, Razor City is really coming along.”
Giselle glanced at her lover and smiled. “Yes. I enjoy watching it grow.”
Ursula was wearing a long, cream-colored backless dress woven from a thin, clingy fabric. It adhered to the pronounced curves of her long, slender body in a way that made Giselle’s breath quicken. Her hair was an almost white shade of blonde. It was long and straight and fell in a brilliant spray across the pale expanse of her back. Her flesh was the incandescent white of one who has spent nearly all her life indoors. That and her fine, regal features made her look like an ice queen from a fairy tale. Ursula turned her head to look at Giselle and the spray of hair across her back rippled and shifted, revealing a small birthmark on her left shoulder.
Ursula lifted an eyebrow. “Are you having naughty thoughts, Mistress?”
Giselle moved closer and laid a hand on her lover’s back, enjoying the way Ursula shuddered slightly at her touch. “Perhaps.” She moved her hand slowly over Ursula’s back. “Are you in a mood to tempt me?”
Ursula licked her lips and said, “Always.”
Giselle pulled the woman into a sudden embrace and kissed her with vigor. Ursula matched her hunger and grabbed at her hair, pulled her head back to kiss her throat and the hollow between her breasts. Then Giselle grabbed her by the hand and led her back into her quarters and the huge, plush bed they’d shared so many times over the last month. They disrobed quickly and fell upon each other in the bed, rolling over the soft sheets, limbs shifting and intertwining, mouths warm and seeking, hands rubbing and probing. A little later, when they lay sated and still in each other’s arms, Giselle said, “I feel like giving you a present.”