Krimson Mind: The Krimson Cycle Vol. 1

Chapter Twenty-Two

Max knew that something had gone horribly wrong. It had been just after sunset when the three of them had pulled up in front of the house. Max opened his eyes and saw that it was completely dark now. The entire city seemed deathly quiet. It was as if the city was holding its breath in anticipation of something.

Max slowly dragged himself to his feet, every muscle screaming in pain as he moved. There was dried blood on his face and chest. On the porch, was a huge, dark-colored stain that had a very distinctive Max-shaped patch cut out of its center. Max looked around and saw no trace of Krimson. To make matters that much worse, there wasn't even any sign of a fight. It was as if Krimson had simply disappeared.

He turned around and opened the screen door, and then the front door. Instantly, he silently wished that he hadn't. The coppery scent of blood, mixed with ruptured bowel and urine assaulted him. He gagged on the stench, but managed to keep his dinner in his gut.

The overhead lights were still on, and everything was lit by florescent brightness. The carpet was originally the color of desert sand. Now it was the dark brown of quickly drying blood. As he stepped into the room, the carpet made squishing sounds as he took each step. That's when Max saw it.

At first, his mind wouldn't identify what he was seeing. Max knew that it was a method of self-preservation. If he couldn't identify it, it couldn't become part of some perverse, new nightmare. Max knew that people shouldn't have to see things like this. But here it was. And the longer that he stared at it, the easier it became to identify. He'd seen men, soldiers, getting hacked apart on battlefields long ago, but this was something else. Something far more primal, something less than sane perhaps.

"Fuck, me! It's a fucking torso!" He gasped quietly when the image fell into place. "It's a fucking woman's torso!"

Where the arms should have been, white bones stuck out, gleaming in their exposure. Max could see that the bones were ragged and unevenly broken. A chunk of vertebrae stuck out of where the torn flesh of the neck was. The skin of the torso was dreadfully white, as if every ounce of blood had drained out of it. Max heard the squishing of his footfalls and realized that it probably had. The torso was dressed in a red t-shirt and what had been jeans at one point. But had been reduced to a ragged pair of blood-soaked Daisy Dukes.

Max looked away from the torso. He had seen the dead before. He had killed many of those corpses that occasionally haunted his dreams. But this wasn't the same thing. A corpse on a battlefield was one thing. But this was animalistic brutality. As he looked about the room, Max realized that he could see a disembodied arm lying next to the table. He turned again and found himself staring at a naked, blood soaked leg. His stomach churned, then heaved. He vomited on the leg until his stomach was completely empty. This average living room had been turned into a slaughterhouse that Freddie Krueger himself would be proud of.

As Max wiped his mouth dry, he saw James. His newest friend was kneeling in front of the couch. He was bent over the center cushion. Max knew two things for certain. He knew that James was very dead. He also knew that James was already in the transition phase from human to vampire. Krimson had let Max know that she had given James a heavy dose of her blood. Max walked over to James's lifeless body. The entire cushion that he was laying on was soaked with blood. Max closed all of the curtains that would allow anybody to see into the living room of horrors. Then he grabbed James beneath his arms. Max whispered the spell that would teleport them both back to Krimson's house. And with a flash of light, they were gone.

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I awoke slowly. I knew that I'd been moved. I was no longer sitting on the floor with a broken skull. My problem was that I didn't know who had moved me or when I had been moved. I tried to move my arms and legs, only to find that I had been bound to the stone slab in the center of my cell.