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I've never been more frightened of my own intellect than when I finally finished this piece. It took me a few years of inner-reflection and soul-searching to get this story written, but I feel the end-results are both horrifying and brilliant. \nIf you read this piece and shit yourself from fright, then my purpose will have been well-met. >;3\nEnjoy! Comment if you wish, mainly upon your initial reaction.", "description_bbcode_parsed": "This was the result of a Salvia-laced marijuana hallucination. I've never been more frightened of my own intellect than when I finally finished this piece. It took me a few years of inner-reflection and soul-searching to get this story written, but I feel the end-results are both horrifying and brilliant.
If you read this piece and shit yourself from fright, then my purpose will have been well-met. >;3
Enjoy! Comment if you wish, mainly upon your initial reaction.", "writing": "This written work is the sole property of Maxwell Blackburnadeaux © 2007, 2012. Do not remove the original artist's proof or alter, revise, plagiarize, or otherwise abhorrently copy this story or any passages included therein for your own benefit. Do not redistribute this story for any monetary gain in any way, shape or form without first consulting the original author's explicit & exclusive written permission. All rights have been reserved under penalty of law.\n\nThis story is based entirely on adult-oriented fiction. Any similarities between real events, locations and/or persons are completely and wholeheartedly coincidental. All included described characters, locations and/or events are written to represent purely fictional entities and should not be taken under consideration as non-fictional. The author will not be held responsible for any negative substantial health conditions contrived from reading this passage of fictional material. Any and all readers must be readily aware that this story possesses a harrowing graphic nature and thus are primarily urged to continue reading only with a strong stomach and a keen will of tolerance towards explicit violent imagery and horrific mental stimuli.\nYOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.\n--------------------------------------------------------\n\n[t]Tantibus Ex Inferno[/t]\n\nI remember the first thing that came to mind when I awoke in a grimy ditch: [i]Oh great, now who did I piss off?[/i]\n\nAt the brink of twilight, I trudged through fog plumes sifting along a bleakly tanned skyline as I marched onward, limping through redwood barricades upon a near-deserted stretch of dilapidated asphalt, cracked and weathered from years of neglect. I’d been stumbling and tripping over my wounded shep-coon foot-paws for over a good hour now, completely lost in a relentless top-heavy daze. The fresh scent of pine sap, cedar bark and lush green firs left a musky earthen aroma sweltering in my canine nostrils as I droned onward along the tattered forest ranger’s shortcut (at least, that’s what I figured the path to be anyways) which stretched on endlessly without any delay, blind curve or break whatsoever. My Dickies hoodie-jacket vest was quite badly torn at the seams, collars ripped to shreds, pull-strings cut down to size and to top it all off, a zipper head went missing amongst the surrounding debris and muck. My pockets were quite barren, empty and devoid of the necessities I had initially been carrying with me before the shit hit the fan. They stole my wallet, driver’s license, Zippo lighter, even my lucky rabbit’s foot. Who in fuck’s name beats the tar out of some poor old shepherd-raccoon hybrid like me half-way to death just to apprehend one of those ornate little bogus good-luck charms? Evidently the crooked Russian gentlemen responsible for leaving me here to die alone in this dilapidated forest in the wake of their abhorrent subterfuge, that’s who.\n\nA stifling chill began to settle all around me, causing my shoulder blades to tremble a bit and the rest of my fur-adorned body to break out in a jittering cold shiver. My mandibles chattered with minute clinks that echoed directly into my ear canals, causing my entire skull to vibrate. I bundled up into what little was left of my thin cottony hoodie-vest, tucking my hands deep into large circular pockets and continued onward down the abandoned service road. I kept my pace admirably, limping along as gradually as a cow being lead through the large rusted iron gates of a grand slaughterhouse, unknowingly following a large herd as devoid to the realization of what’s to come to them in their immediate future as I had evidently been before. My poor violated masked face felt completely welted, bruised to a pulp, screaming with pain upon each and every application of pressure or touch to my raccoon-fuzzy cheek tufts. Even my slender shepherd muzzle felt tarnished with cuts, gashes and human fist-prints bruises, soil smudges and bloody smears. What a wreck they’d left me in!\n\nI had no other choice but to take it slowly, ambling along in a dream-like state of mind, a primordial zombie-trance, stumbling mindlessly amid Pacific Northwestern foliage, gawking around at the petrified dense forestry while keeping a third eye open upon my surroundings. My mouth held an uncomfortably bland, gagging and wrought-iron taste due to a nasty sweltering cut on my upper lip that I got from being thrown down a large embankment. Such a daunting fissure of geographic treachery is what initially brought me into this unique region of clustered, uncivilized forestry in the first place; a nice, secluded location to dump off a body or make a drug exchange without picking up any unwanted attention gaining on one’s back. That’s how the local authorities always conducted business, or tried to as best as business could be conducted. Catching perpetrators off their guard, exposing the dirty punks for all they were worth and then throwing them into the slammer with a twenty-five-to-life sentence slapped upon their wrists. Not me! No way was I about to let those upper-handed authorities gain dominion over my life! They’d have to fight me first before they ever hoped to take me alive, God willing.\n\nAs I was clearing out the foggy haze soliciting my mind and all the developing eccentricities that held sway over it, trying to make sense of what on earth had exactly happened to me, a massive throbbing headache sweltered and pulsated, maintaining its ugly presence throughout my poor shep-coon cranium, applying pressure to my quasi-feral sinuses, causing any singular flash of light to feel more like a thousand sharpened straight razors spun belligerently in figure-8s directly behind my eye sockets and in my groin. I hunched over while grabbing hold of my abdomen and started to dry-heave. To anyone else who may have arrived at my location by impromptu timing, they would have merely assumed that I was vomiting my guts out into a nearby curve. After my retching spell passed and I issues a slew of belches, I hurried along the road to make up for lost time. All around and above me the mighty Northern Redwood Big Trees, the grand-scale pillars of the Gods, tended to regularly in the nestled heart of Humboldt County, lumbered like humongous wandering giants. Sun rays shot through the branches, jettisoning the wide trunks and topsoil with brimming beams of stark solar beams. Seagulls hovered deftly nearby an opening in the forest’s copse heading towards the grand Pacific’s coastline. Wrens and chickadees also made their presence known throughout, chirping and screeching up a storm. From behind me somewhere up high, the low droning hoot of an owl carried throughout the wide-open slumber. For me, migraine headaches are and have always been a total bitch to put up with and regarding current matters at hand (like the fact that my face was nearly caved in), I believe this newly-developed headache certainly made things far less easy to deal with. I was having a swell – irony, be damned ¬– walk through the woods on this fine evening.\n\nSo there I was, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux, professional bassist/vocalist in the best damn tri-member grunge rock band to have come out of Oregon’s creative musical assembly since Floater, left to die violently in California’s National Redwood Forest State Park but rather left only to find myself even more confused, distressed and aching with uncertainty than I ever could have imagined before. Technically I should’ve been dead and perhaps should be now, but the opposition flubbed their proposed idea up something fierce to begin with. Thousands of people travel regularly through the Northern California Redwoods yet few had probably ever managed to tread upon this one single forlorn path of ranger-access road in where I’d been dumped beside quite sloppily. To make sense of what happened in a chaotic, stressed, all-out hurried explanation would be the rudimentary equivalent of a wild goose chase with no geese in sight, only an endless maze of mirrors and trapdoor hatches. That wouldn’t do… I needed to find a way out of this forest before the option of escape faded away more and more gradually.\n\nHopefully for my sake and for the sake of the general public, nothing will ever turn up about this. No leads, no witnesses, no mercy spared or sympathy shared for a long damn while at least until I find my way to a nearby police station or a hospital. How long that would take was far beyond my comprehension, though. Having been mugged and stranded without identification of any kind, I imagined the process itself would be far more difficult to conduct than I was allowing myself to consider it to be. How unfortunate for a poor soul like myself! And damn those abhorrent Russians for bringing me down to this level. How foolishly stupid my life choices tend to be…\n\nI kept on aimlessly navigating myself through unfamiliar territory, refusing to slow down or stop for any reason. As I looked around where I was, something dawned on me… I didn’t recognize this area of the forest. I could’ve sworn that during my hey-day of meth cooking and pot growing, I’d accidentally stumbled foot upon this particular patch of sheer Nor-Cal acreage. The strangest thing was that this organic patch of thickened redwood forest felt far more humid than most of the other locations I’d walked through… even muggy, in fact. This area was nothing short of a complete mystery to me, despite the fact that I’d practically been born and raised in it. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling a hankering sense of pure dread that swam rapidly within me and burrowed at my chest like a child paddling across the shallow-end boundary line of a public swimming pool, daring to inch further into the deep end, right into grown-up territory, despite all the whistle-toots and warnings from the volunteer lifeguards. \n\tQuite simply put, I’d been left for dead and this forest was now my newfound purgatory.\n\nMan, this evening wasn’t going at all how I imagined it would! My head felt like it was simply ready to burst as a result of the tumultuous migraine that hailed straight from the sixth ring of purgatory. My scrambled-egg brains wriggled around within my German shepherd-contoured skull, causing jerks of agonizing pain in response to each slight angular tilt and deep-gasping yawn that came rushing to me, exhausting me further with searing pain from each yowling wide-mouthed stretch of the jaw line. It felt as if I’d cut myself against a rusted sharp metallic edge and slowly developed lockjaw as a result. The sordid flashes of stress began to kick in with maniacal force now. The base of my neck suffered from a recoiling twinge that struck fast then spread down through my ribcage, finally settling upon the cusp of my spinal column. Hopefully a disc down near the base of my spine wouldn’t slip out and render me paralyzed on the spot. Holy shit, try to imagine that: a shepherd-raccoon hybrid anthropomorphic left stranded and paralyzed with a broken back upon the ground deep in the thickets of Northern-coast sequoias, eucalyptus and sagebrush assembling from the waist down… holy cow! I’d imagine that such a sight would definitely yield little to no help from any oncoming travelers cruising along a well-sought-out hefty backwoods detour. I could feel the sweltering throb of bruises beginning to bulge upon my fur-lined kneecaps and shins as well, aching hard with swift discomfort between each tattered uneasy step I took through this festering haven of oceanic fog and aromatic flora & fauna.\n\nHaving been born as a German shepherd/raccoon hybrid mix, my fur developed an intensely thick texture over time which made any grooming season a difficult and rather arduous one to invest in. Of course, I amended the situation by keeping warm in a cold atmosphere, such as the exact one I’d awoken to in total limbo. My ringed tail also felt extremely sore as if a semi-truck had rolled over it repeatedly with large thick-treaded Goodyear wheels, snapping every bone upon repeated contact. Come to think of it, I have no memory at all of how I even arrived in this dense and desolate hell-hole to begin with. I suppose it was natural intuition to walk north until I could seek out any kind of help or, quite possibly, an answer to my burning-hot questions. A small mountain town didn’t sound nearly as forlorn as I had imagined, not even in comparison with a major inner-city or a well-populated suburban neighborhood. I’d purposefully beg on my hand-paws and knees for any kind of civilization, even if I happened to walk into a two-building town excluded from any major road maps or commercial investing, a real “Children of the Corn”-style bible-thumping hick’s incest-savvy village would do me better than absolutely nothing at all.\n\nSuspicions began flooding my confusion-induced head since I awoke in that dirty damn ditch nestled among petrified stumps, clumpy moss patches and rusty piles of corroded soup cans, most likely bum litter from sometime last month or the scraps left behind by drug cartels keeping an ever-watchful eye over nearby grow operations. I had remembered imagining this forest eating up anything that dare stray off-course among its gnarled branches, coarse thickets of firewood for the weary lost camper or hiker. Anybody could enter for any set price but only a select few could leave in one piece, unharmed and free; unless this select few had been driven in by merciless Russians intent on collecting their gambling debt, however. Damn it all, if only I could be among the designated league of those few who escaped unharmed and wound-free! Beggars couldn’t be choosers though, I suppose.\n\nThoughts began to stir: [i]Oh, of all the places those friggin’ guys could’ve chose to dump me, they chose the middle of bum-pluck and nowhere. Simply friggin-A typical, I suppose. Way to go, Maxwell ol’ buddy, ol’ pal, ol’ shep-coon punk-ass, you’ve really done it in for yourself this time and quite well at that! I’ll have to remember when the next deal wraps up just to call a cab for a ride home instead of trusting the local clientele for a quick efficient trip back into town, dang it all. This is ludicrous. I’m not their punching bag. How dare they treat me like a tattered old rag doll, one they easily grew bored with and dumped alongside this shitty road like kitchen fodder! Man, they’ll get theirs.[/i]\n\nBarely noticing a tingling sensation easing up slowly from my bicep where I initially landed after being thrown from the moving vehicle, I still saw nothing in sight. Knowing my luck, I’ve only been walking for a few minutes, which feels like hours and hours ago. The twilit mist settled down immersed within sublime confides of the atmospherically peaceful remote Redwood forest. Looking at the solemn serenity of it all, how it embodied a prominently gorgeous nature preserve sanctuary, I felt just a little at ease. The coastal fog settled in briskly but the strangest thing of all besides limited visibility was that I heard absolutely nothing else around me. No varied thrush chirping, no woodpecker’s beaks thumping upon bark or black bears wading giant paws through salmon-dense streams, hunting diligently for dinner. I heard nothing at all, no streaming creek beds or pitter-pattering disturbances from local wildlife. I’d only been traveling straight along the same path for what may very well have been a mere fifteen minutes but initially this time around, it felt a lot more like fifty; a good, long, enduring fifty-plus. I shuddered quite suddenly, feeling almost as if a goose had trotted over my own grave. It was a terribly uncomfortable and unsettling feeling that caused my bowels to churn nervously and a surprise flush of gooseflesh to sprout up beneath my coarse matted raccoon’s fur.\n\nSuddenly to my guttural surprise and bare-boned nervous excitement, a bright brimming pair of glowing headlights flickered upon a pair of guardrails that wrapped expansively around the outskirts of the road’s edge like a large metal-encased serpent with yellow reflectors strewn along its prefabricated sides. Cone-shaped trail of lights flashed and jerked upon numerous congregations of thick towering trees and the crappy ranger patrol road itself with separated yellow lines drawn in a parallel path down its dead-center, faded and barely visible under the dimly-lit evening that had now begun to settle all around me, save for those cone-shaped expanses of yellow incandescent glow.\n\nI stopped walking all at once and instantaneously jolted down the road toward the oncoming source of civilization with a flash of unexpected speed and dexterity, expecting the worse to happen in the least-populated area imaginable. It hurt to run too fast, so I paced myself with power-walking steps, limping worse than a one-legged athlete jogging in a local triathlon with a sprained ankle. A terrible suspicion crept into my mind. What if this vehicle was in fact the same one which housed the men who had dumped me in this very forest? What if they had returned with more men or even more weapons to finish whatever sick intensions they had in mind initially with me? I quickly jutted my shepherd-coon hand-paws up into the air, exposing my fuzzy grey padded palms, waving them above my head in large sprawling arc-like motions as a signal to the driver to slow down, to stop, to careen off a cliff, to run me over, anything! I stared upon two vast fog lamps coming at me like effulgent gamboge eyes, practically blinding me in the settled dimness of the evening. Thank God for civilization!\n\nThe vehicle itself was neither a semi-rig nor a compact car. I would have been happy with a retired 60s hippie-wagon in the form of a large tie-dyed Volkswagen van. It pulled ([i]no, CREPT[/i]) forward, dashboard emanating an illuminated source of green-tinted light upon the driver’s face. The window was rolled down just enough for me to easily identify the mysterious figure as a human – a man who was chewing snuff tobacco and wearing a bulky fishing cap with a confederate flag decal embroidered upon the stained white surface of its upturned bent bill; redneck ahoy. The pickup truck cast a hazy red aura of incandescence from its rear taillights which shone brighter upon each slight squeal-pierced braking. As the engine revved down to a low industrial hum, choking and backfiring, burping gross pollutants into the misty dew, the driver quickly let his large traveling vessel decelerate to a slower crawl. I nodded with relief, hoping this onlooker was in fact just that – a mere pedestrian passing through just looking on. I’d rather not see anybody become far too involved in whatever absurd situation I had wound up in myself. I certainly didn’t wish for this madness upon anyone else.\n\nThe truck was an ‘89 (rough estimated guess) Isuzu Pup with a worn front-end and paint chips bent along the roof like cement-dusted Fritos, smothering both its outer edges and hood surface. The front bumper was rusted away to a jagged murky brown/beige scrap with dirt and engine grease-covered ridges. As the truck came to a full motionless stop upon the side of the dilapidated road, I could barely catch a glimpse of the man’s silhouetted eyes, twinkling from the dim fluorescent glow of the cockpit’s dashboard. I wondered ever-so-briefly if this random stranger could possibly be my salvation, my rescue effort to rediscover civilization and seek urgent medical care, my way out of this mess and into a peaceful well-being. Or had he come to finish the job at hand the Russians thought they had done already, disposing of me like a bulb-busted television set thrown effortlessly into a scrap-yard?\n\nThe figure reached a bulky hand out to me and curved it upward at the wrist, gesturing a greeting wave.\n\t“Hey there, bud!” He said, waving to me while I reacted with a perplexed glance of awe, “Say there, I can’t help but notice something peculiar about you… is it the tail?”\n\tI swished my furry ringed tail with a snapping jerk and shrugged at him.\n\tHe nodded and said, “Yeah, I’ve seen your kind around… I’m perfectly aware of you and all you stand for… if you ask me, I’d take it all back and start fresh, like from scratch. Damn furries.”\n\tI just stared at him, expressionless and silent. Was he some sort of bigot to my kind, a racist against the anthropomorphic population? Shit, I sure hoped to the Gods he wasn’t.\n\t“Say, I don’t imagine you must be lost? Pretty beat up too, by the looks of it. What, d’ya get in a scrap with your old lady or somethin’?” The man asked belligerently before continuing onward, “Say, you wouldn’t happen to be more of a raccoon or a dog?” He asked me.\n\tThe funny thing was that he never looked away from my face. Not once. I could only imagine the damage he’d been staring at profusely, all thanks to those Russian bastards and their obscure methods of debt compensation. However, deep down I felt that he wasn’t just looking at my fresh wounds… he was more fixated upon something else. Almost as if he’d seen me once before and was struggling to remember where or when, like I was his long-lost pupil.\n\tHe shook his head and cleared his throat, spitting out a thin petulant-brown rope of phlegm and tobacco spittle from his wide-opened driver-side window. “I uh… don’t suppose you’d prefer a ride into the next town down the way, eh boy?” The driver said, acting upon the urge to move on. He turned his head back toward the road, peering upon the tattered stretch of damp asphalt like a coroner at a funeral parlor purveying a mangled corpse that would take hours to prepare for a final viewing. “Boy, I’d sure hate to see you walk that far all by your lonesome, especially out here in these woods! I’d say the nearest town from here is about oh, say ten or fifteen miles due East… How about it, coon-boy? Care for a little lift?” \n\t[i]Its[/i] coon-dog [i]boy to you mister and don’t you forget it.[/i] I thought, standing defensively and peering upon him with a judgmental stare, debating to myself whether to take his offer up or not. I may have had a choice before, but honestly I could barely remember.\n\nI had trouble processing what he was saying due to a foreign and disconnected lurking fear, a scourging suspicion that I had just willfully given myself away to another enemy sworn and prepared to see me dead and buried somewhere deep in the heart of this enormous forest, maybe even drugged and anally raped with a Clorox-dipped rubber fist or a rusty tire-iron. No rest for the wicked. With mountain-men like this, one couldn’t possibly feel any less safe than, say, a cat walking on an electric transformer box or a deaf-mute man attempting to cross a railroad track, completely oblivious to the flashing red warning lamps surrounding him.\n\nI responded apprehensively, mustering strength enough to move my lips which felt irresistibly tender and swollen. \n\t“If… you’d b-be willing to… to allow me to… tag along…” I said, trembling with disoriented uncertainty, “…I’d be indebted… t-to you, sir.”\n\tI barely mustered the strength to finish just one sentence while my single bloodied eye peered upon the truck and its less-than-average condition, afraid to give him even a seconds’ glance. Those commie crooks must have hurt me pretty good. That or the nervous butterflies were fluttering out of control and impairing my better decision-making, causing me to perform an incredibly stupid act of overladen trust.\n\t“Well, I’d feel bad just leaving you out in the middle of these here woods all by your lonesome, little raccoon buddy! Why don’t you hop on into this here truck o’ mine so I can give ya’ll a lift into town? I’ll make sure ya’ll done get some medical help too.” He said, smiling with a gleefully humble expression that spoke of promises kept and lives saved. But deeper down beneath the thin veil of that man’s sullen face, there was another mask; an apparition, gleaming through the murk, staring, festering… plotting.\n\nThe man gestured to the bucketed passenger seat, stained with grease blotches and oily smears. His sprawled-open hand invited me into the dank cabin littered with cigarette butts and crumpled aluminum Budweiser cans. A very polite and inviting gentleman this one had been, but for how long I asked myself. How much trust could I lay down on the line for this stranger? Would I count on him to actually deliver me back to civilization in one piece, alive and well, undisturbed? If he did attempt to molest or attack me, I had to maintain a strong sense of defensiveness. I figured at the time that the only way to find out if he meant no harm was to try riding it out with him, God help me. \n\nThe moment of truth had arrived to me in the form of a sporadic decision made after a small mental debate. Would I stay on the road and tell this prick to shove off or would I decide to settle down and accept this man’s friendly offer to further gain help and assistance? I had no clue if I’d see another person (let alone a human) for a long while after witnessing this good ol’ boy’s redneck rig chugging along through such deep dark frigid woods. I frisked my hand-paws deep into my jean pockets quickly, wondering if I had anything at all stashed away neatly that I could offer for a fair trade… but naturally, there was nothing. My pockets were as empty as my stomach had felt right about then. This scraggly human seemed trustworthy enough if not a little slow around the edges of charm and appeal. Certainly he hadn’t been armed or dangerous or I would’ve known by now. I can always tell if a person is either a saint or a sinner just by spending a little excess time around them. I found a good way to tell is by looking them dead-on into their \n[i](sockets)[/i]\neyes – it’s always the eyes that give away a myriad onslaught of cleverly-concealed truths. Perhaps that was my Asperger’s syndrome working overtime on the hard-pressed clinical aspect of routine general social psychology? Or maybe I had been far too scared to assume anyone similar to this down-home country-bumpkin hee-haw could pose anything but a menial threat. I happen to make a steady living killing for money, so I wasn’t particularly worried about defending myself if things did get a bit heated. Just so long as I didn’t wind up tripping over my dumb delirious weakened shepherd-raccoon feet while attempting a daunting get-away, all the pieces would fall neatly into place upon the delirious jigsaw-puzzle of detrimental happenings soon enough.\nI accepted his offer with a weary response.\n\t“O-okay… thanks.” I said, whispering apprehensively. He exposed a mouthful of jagged, nicotine-stained teeth when he smiled briskly at me.\n\nI looked both ways across the stretch of shambled asphalt as alertly as ever and grew a slight hesitation to move from where I had paused steadily in disbelief and realization. This was the first time since waking up that I’ve been willingly offered any assistance, let alone a ride from another form of life, even still let alone a mere innocent civilian, a random passer-by traveling on an abandoned state-regulated patch of limited commerce. I figured if I had been driving through such dense woods, there would have been a slim but certain chance I would’ve just as easily offered any stranded hitchhiker a ride out of common courtesy. Then again, I suppose perhaps the bloody upper lip and torn hoodie-vest also flashed off unmistakably glaring announcements of swift cautious urgency. I could only suppose. Feeling generously uneasy and prepared for anything, I pulled the latch and opened the door, ducked down to avoid bumping my head upon the outer padded frame and took a seat in his cab, shutting the door without slamming it too hard and dimming out the small cabin light which resided upon the vehicle’s metal-buffeted ceiling. The truck came with its own stench of stale tobacco and diesel fuel, a mix that caused my dry-heaving to return full-swing. I cracked open the window by spinning a circular lever counter-clockwise embedded in the door’s leather-padded interior.\n\nWe rode onward into the evening like two cowboys set out to collect a bounty on a runaway fugitive. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros from a small niche under the radio and offered me a smoke. I declined politely since the last thing I truly needed was tobacco coursing through my coon-dog lungs. I had trouble breathing enough already; a few drags upon a cancer-fag would further fuel the fires of pain I now wallowed in wholeheartedly.\n\tAfter a brief moment of inner-personal reflection, he spoke to me.\n\t“The name’s Curtis Deton. And you are…?”\n\tSilent reprieve swept me as I glanced toward him. He kept his amicably curious gaze steadily fixated upon me, not on the road. He shifted focus between my orange nylon eye-patch and the puffy sweltering bruise upon my snout which had been unmistakably noticeable even under such dimly-lit conditions. I thought he would reach out and attempt to soothe it with a gentle massage or something, based on how he kept staring, hypnotized and entranced by his newly chartered and freshly battered anthropomorphic hitchhiker.\n\t“The name’s Maxwell... I came out here to—”\n\t“—go to a picnic, right?” Deton blurted out sarcastically, grinning like a hyena.\n\tI gave him an uneasy nod, gesturing none-such a thing as to my involvement in a picnic of any kind out in the middle of Gods’ country with fresh knuckle-marks strewn across my shep-coon face.\n\t“Not really, man. Actually it’s something like that, only this ‘picnic’ had no sandwiches, straw-woven baskets or checkered blankets of any kind. Not very many ants either. Those pesky little pricks, always going for the sweet stuff first! Am I right or am I right, amigo?”\n\tCurtis guffawed heavily at my reply back to him. Apparently he must have been easily entertained. That or he had picked up the perfect victim for one of his sick little routine exercises and could always use a good laugh before extracting his nefarious plans upon my delectable hide.\n\t“Boy, that’s all too true of a fact. Ants, beetles, cockroaches… hell, any insects are all just pests in the long run! I’ll tell you, whatever brought you out here is your own business and I wouldn’t dare try to butt into your own personal affairs, that I can respect, my fellow coon-boy!” Deton said. His tone was rather cheerful, considering the dark mood of the evening and his strange erratic behavior.\n\nI regarded Curtis with a disoriented mutual nod and shortly after noticed a small chain of trinkets dangling from his rear-view mirror, clinking with each bump and nudge from the service road. After a short time I realized most of them were golden-capped molars, aluminum beer-can tabs and a wide assortment of keys and memorabilia keychains. I also saw a small bronze-cast cross with an even tinier figure of Jesus Christ crucified upon its polished surface, a dirty silver-forged chain necklace with intricate loopholes forming a pattern similar to DNA strands, two small fuzzy Vegas-like die and lots of hemp-strewn strands, matted with crimson-bleached stains. However, nothing far too out of the ordinary, save perhaps for those shiny golden teeth adorning the small trinket bracelet, suspended upon the mirror’s adjustable rod.\n\tHe remained silent for a bit, then unexpectedly blotted out that silence, startling me awake from a sordid half-daze.\n\t“Strange though, seeing someone as…” I gave him an assertive stare while he attempted to comprehend the right term in his mind, “…[i]violated[/i] as you obviously are, or maybe have been - just walking along out here in the middle of Ozark country. Tell you what Maxwell, ain’t very many like you ‘round these here parts of the woods, that’s for DAMN sure, boy! I should know since I’m always comin’ through these here parts makin’ my rounds, deliverin’ the goods, fillin’ my quota.” Deton exclaimed. He pointed to me accusingly while emphasizing himself upon the word [i]damn.[/i]\n\nI sat back into the spongy truck seat, leather creaking behind my back, imprinting the shape of my spine into its surface and brought my hand-paws up to my face, rubbing my snout gently so as not to irritate the bruising far too thoroughly. It still stung like crazy to touch any part of my muzzle so I left it alone. Deton looked over my leg past where I sat and reached by the gearshift towards my lap. His hand approached outstretched, fingers spread wide, palm bent forward and grabbed for\n[right][i](my cock I knew it he wants to molest me make me his little bitch he’s nothing more than a sick fuck with no class just some old pervert who probably knocked up his teenage daughter before forcefully signing his wife onto welfare well not me buddy I don’t play that game with just anyone if you want to get to me in that fashion you’ll soon find that I too can become a crazy maniacal fucker at any given chance so you bring me)[/i][/right]\na small dilapidated matchbook from a pocketed cranny nestled in my armrest, pulling out a copper-colored match-head. He reached down to his feet and struck it against his boot-heel. As the tip ignited in a flash, he held the small flaming match-head to his face and lit the paper-end of his cigarette, breathing in short repetitive puffs before inhaling a long drawn-out drag. The glowing tip charred with small embers that lit up his eyes and the truck’s dashboard, splotched with mildew and aging corrosion. He shook and extinguished the match, twirled opened his driver-side window and blew out a hazy trail of smoke which spewed from his lips and dashed out the cracked-open tinted glass pane, flicking the burnt-out piece directly afterwards.\n\t“Exactly just how far do you intend to go, Maxwell?” Deton asked me with a pondering curiosity beneath his breath.\n\t“…I’d be fine just heading into the next town, whichever one that is, whenever we get there. That should be far enough, I imagine. Obviously, I need to get to a hospital or a clinic, since I think I may be more hurt than I imagine.” I replied to him. I rubbed my right ear, now tender as could be, achy to the touch. My God, even my ears hurt!\n\t“You might, Maxwell. You just might. Judging by that big-ass bruise on yer noggin’, I suspect whoever may have done that went and left you out here for some kinda good reason or another? You wouldn’t happen to be runnin’ away from somebody or somethin’ would ya, boy? Got in a little too deep for comfort with the wrong crowd and now you payin’ for it dearly, eh?” Deton asked suspiciously while keeping a steady gaze fixated upon my response.\n\tI began to feel a little uncomfortable at his tone of voice and his sneaking enigmatic undertones, so I let my mind speak for itself which may have been a dumb move in the long run. Damn my snappy comebacks! They always seemed to get the very best of me.\n\t“Dude, beats me. If I could find them, I’ll certainly remember to ask them. Thanks for the consoling advice, Curt. I’ll be sure to mail you a thank-you package when all this blows over, that is if I’m still alive to do so, pal. Jeez laweez…” I chuckled under my breath a little. He jerked his head toward me in response and sneered, obviously disturbed by my retorting statement.\n\t“Don’t be fuckin’ sassin’ me in my own ride, boy! Ya’ll bes’ be either grateful or lucky I even stopped for you, dammit all to hell – and the name’s CURTIS, not ‘curt’ or ‘dude’, ya’ll better just start mindin’ yer’ damn manners now, y’hear?!” Deton hollered.\n\nAfter I reeled back from his initial outburst, he scoffed, shook his head disappointingly and took another quick drag from his cigarette, trembling loosely between his pale-white lips, paying no attention to a fresh clump of ash that had crumbled and fallen upon his forearm, embers sizzling a few hairs growing upon its blotchy surface. He held a tight grip upon his steering wheel and focused on the road with stifling intense concentration, never looking back at me once after his initial verbal retaliation. Even though I felt intimidated by his sudden outburst, I still managed to hold my ground just the same. If I either snapped any further or showed him any sign of weakness or vulnerability, I feared he would take me unto his massive redneck hands after flaying me with more verbal attacks. I didn’t feel conditioned or prepared to withstand such forlorn treatment, especially not from a complete stranger and most especially from a complete stranger in the state of condition I had been previously thrust into. I’d already experienced my fair share of violence tonight and I didn’t need a double-dosage of that ridiculing arduous defeat. He had been right anyways; I was fortunate enough to have found a ride anywhere from anyone, especially in this heap of dense woodlands. I simply let my feelings harbor enough pent-up rage to blurt out something I hadn’t initially meant to say but wound up saying anyways, very much to my disadvantage. A few minutes of awkward silence followed closely behind us until I apathetically broke the ice.\n\t“Look, I’m sorry for snapping on you back there, man. You see, it’s just that I’m in pain, confused and really not entirely sure of what to do once I get into town. You understand my reasoning, right? It’s not like I meant to hurt or offend you any.” I said.\n\t“You mean IF you get into town… right, you bastard faggot?” He whispered. His face remained stony and unflinching. Deton’s gaze stayed glued upon the road ahead.\n\t“What?” I asked. My eyes grew wide with shock. He caught me entirely off my guard. In a heap of forlorn silence, he looked upon me with maniacal flaming eyes. The pupils had retracted to slivers and his irises were somehow illuminated with a glimmering blaze of red and orange.\n\t“Ya’ll heard me, little fuckin’ coon-faggot.” Deton said with great force, practically shoving out his words outward to me as if I’d received a last-minute cue in a Broadway musical. I stared, frozen in place. My heart shut down entirely. My testicles sunk up into my stomach. What I’d hoped would never happen, had just happened.\n\t“What? D’ya thinking that I’m just willing to give any of you hard-headed furry-murry-purry shitheads a ride for free? I doubt it, sonny. Ya’ll best just sit tight and relax, this ride will be wrappin’ up soon enough, you’ll see.” Deton said, smiling and butting his wrist up against my arm playfully.\n\nPanic crept into my thoughts and my veins felt warm with adrenaline as I peered out the window and noticed that we had begun to speed up. Deton was practically flooring the truck through the dense forest thicket and I was his unruly passenger, forced to bear witness to the madness of his enveloping fury. His knuckles turned white and clenched down firmly upon the wheel, audibly cracking and popping. His cigarette was still burning between his lips, nearly down to the filter now. Embers flew from the tip and brushed upon his face but he never even broke a stride, no reaction whatsoever, not even when a small still-burning clump landed upon the red-lined pulpy surface of his cornea and sizzled for a brief moment before extinguishing with a puff of smoke. He just kept staring forward at the road like a mechanical drone set to autopilot.\n\t“Sir, may you please let me out? I’ll happily walk from here. I didn’t mean to disturb you.” I said with a slight tremble under my voice.\n\tHe just laughed.\n\t“Yup… ain’t no such fuckin’ thing like that gonna be happenin’ tonight, kiddo.” Deton said to me, grinning wide and chuckling aloud beneath his breath.\n\t“I beg your pardon?” I said, staring at him through a cacophonic daze.\n\t“Shut your damn cock-sucking muzzle, faggot. Just sit still and enjoy the ride.” He replied with stern hostility while bearing a goofy insane grin between his stubble-strewn cheeks.\n\nMy heart kicked back to life again as it rose up to my throat, pumping and throbbing off the charts. My stomach tensed up tighter than a snare drum and felt weighted down as if it had been injected with sulfuric acid and radiator fluid then shaken [i]via[/i] martini strainer. My chest felt numb and small prickly twinges of gooseflesh began to flood across the surface of my body beneath my skin which caused my fur to rise up like static electricity running a steady current through my limbs, how a cat must have felt when disturbed from its nightly meal or poked with a silver fork. Curtis Deton had no intention of helping me at all. In fact, he had only one deep-rooted intension in mind from the get-go. What else could he have wanted to do with me if not lend a hand and grant me a ride into town? All at once I feared for my safety and well-being. He had no intent to help me at all. He hungered for my soul, truly desperate to see me fall prey to his will. I was on the verge of either being raped or murdered by this southern-accented maniac with his molar-capped trinkets and his neck protruded with veins visibly pulsating beneath his high-strung expression of drastic irrationality.\n\t“Look, just let me out right now and there won’t be any trouble. I won’t tell anyone about this and you won’t have to do anything out of line to keep this whole thing under wraps. I’ll never tell a soul about anything that happened so far.” I said, trying to plead a bargain over my life with Deton, who was now all but gone upstairs.\n\tHe giggled maniacally at my desperation and went right back to ignoring me while driving faster than any stuntman should ever be allowed to in a regulated fashion. I began to grow impatient and suddenly I let my mind speak for itself yet again; another bad move, quite possibly the worst one of all this time around; fighting words with a knife.\n\t“Listen motherfucker, I know people who could kill your goddamned bitch-ass in the blink of an eye and if you don’t let me go, I’ll be back with a couple of guys who will certainly rough your face up as good as mine was. Hell, we’ll just drag this whole damn thing to the proper authorities so they can issue a restraining order on you—”\n\t“[i]—SHUT UP QUEER-BAIT!!![/i]” Deton shrieked ecstatically.\n\tHe reached up and clenched my cheek-tuft in the firm grip of his rugged callused hand and shoved my head violently aside, slamming it into the window of the passenger-side door. The glass shattered from the force of impact and I felt like my skull had been crushed along with it. My good un-patched eye remained shut tight, thank goodness. Otherwise I would have been permanently blind from the spraying shards of glass that rained down upon my face and lap, bouncing off my muzzle and shoulder. The momentous collision with the window was so fierce that I immediately grew woozy once more. A dizzying rush of indubitable nausea sweltered within my stomach and my head felt dream-like, euphoric and tremendously distraught. The whooshing echoes of trees and roadside guardrails rushing by outside along with the blaring roar of the truck’s engine became distant, hollow and overall entirely unimportant to me. I inhaled deep and felt a torrential numbness steadily creep into my lungs. I passed out and fainted upon his grimy stain-dabbled truck seat. I felt no impact, no tingling, no open gashed wounds or throbbing bruises any longer. I was dead to the world. I felt nothing. Nothing at all.\n\nUntil I woke up stripped nude, tied down and gagged in the back of Curtis Deton’s pickup truck, I couldn’t feel a single thing beforehand. How long had I been passed out? I had no idea in mind what exactly happened between being physically assaulted and this very moment in which I was now living. Had I passed out that harshly? Utilizing extreme caution, my one eyelid fluttered gently open so as not to expose the sensitive gelatinous surface of my single non-patched eyeball to any excess dirt or grime that my face had been nearly buried in. My tail was strapped to my thigh with twined rope, tied down forcefully enough to rupture even the bare skin beneath my fur. The pain I had once felt before hitching a ride with the redneck maniac nearly tripled in potency and my entire body was now a howling, searing vessel of pure hurt, a bare hollowed chassis of mixed alcohol and ammonia swashed through muscle filaments and lit aflame. The freak had removed all my torn clothing including the hoodie-jacket and thrown the pile into a nearby bonfire pit, judging by the soft orange glow that reflected upon a nearby lumbering redwood tree adjacent to the damp earthen pickup bed which I was laying in and the smell of charred cloth. Moths fluttered all around me by the hundreds, suspended in the air like small intangible bi-planes with ribbed antennae for turret guns. Never before had I seen so many moths gathered in one distinct location.\n\nAs I lay steady, I began to feel a slight hankering sensation swarming my body, a ticklish irritation that caused my hairs to stand on end and my knees to tingle profusely. I quickly realized that ants were crawling all over me, utilizing my unconscious dead weight as their surrogate anthill. I shrieked and shook violently in a feeble attempt to bat them off and I kicked something sharp, thin and brittle. A crunching sound emanated from within the pickup bed and I froze steady, peering down toward my paw-padded shep-coon feet, dismal with fraught and worry. A pile of moist, rotting bones had been piled into the truck’s cargo. I had caved in a skull during my spastically strained yet brief kicking phase. Insane horror settled into my conscious awareness and I held back every ounce of breath so as not to scream out loud deliriously. Maggots roosted upon a tattered ribcage, covered with a thin filmy layer of outstretched decomposing skin and yellow curdled flesh. Femur bones lay propped up against my shins, black and covered with small bead-like indentations. The small punctured holes I saw were human teeth marks. The realization crept in like a pitiful strain of pneumonia or terminal stage-4 cancer and I could only lie perfectly still in captive disgust. Curtis Deton wasn’t just a rapist or murdering madman. The man (or the monster, more or less) was a damn cannibal, a bottom-feeding vulture, one who had thrived upon killing, cooking and eating his fellow hitchers. I refrained from passing out again and swallowed back a spewing shot of vomit inside my canine maw that was constantly threatening to evict whatever previous digested meal I’d consumed the night before outward rather violently. That would only attract more insects, one thing I’d rather not wish for right at this very moment.\n\nI rolled from my side and lay outstretched upon my back, arms tied up tightly beside me, legs bent upward at the knees. I felt another set of bones rub up against my shoulder and I looked down wearily to see the skeletal remains of a long-deceased rotting fetus. The scent of decay was pungent and acrid in my nose, sickly-sweet like pure vanilla extract mixed with seminal fluids and stale chocolate-coated cherries. Now there was no holding back. I crooked my head over to my side and gagged intensely. Projectile vomit spewed forth like a chunky water balloon filled with mushroom soup exploding against a thumbtack. Goopy trickles of warm acidic bile leaked down the side of my cheek. I could taste some of the turkey pot pie and porter ale I’d eaten and drank previously, before being picked up and brought into this protective barrier of natural eloquence. The taste in my mouth was awful, positively revolting. It also burned my throat to puke so harshly. I could barely breathe enough as it was with the feeling of maggots devouring and feasting all around me, squirming and gnawing and wriggling and mashing against pulpy rotted flesh, little parasites playing out their roles in the great never-ending performance of the cycle of life. Ants festered upon every square inch of my body still; some even crawled up into my nostrils. They were excavating my sinuses, tickling me into a turgid sneeze. I snorted and exhaled deep and hard, releasing a potent expulsion of air, blowing out a wad of ant-covered phlegm that splattered upon the petite infantile skull, lopsided and bent in an askew manner, seeming to stare lovingly back up at me.\n\t[i]If I survive this, I’ll certainly never toy with Russians ever again for the rest of my life,[/i] I thought. I began to weep uncontrollably with fright and impending defeat, shedding a steady stream of uneasy tears down my tarnished shep-coon face onto a patch of clotted dirty red hair follicles, perhaps from a high-school cheerleader or somebody’s old former lover or mistress. I saw a silhouetted black figure move from the left side of my singular peripheral vision and approach toward me from the side of the truck.\n\nI shut up immediately and glanced upward toward a large outstretched shadow adorning the slant-angled redwood that towered above the truck itself. The black shape couldn’t possibly have belonged to Curtis Deton, or any human for that matter. It stretched outward with thin, gangly arms that appeared to house spiked claws upon flayed fingertips, more like a pair of wings outstretched from each side, bending and contorting, visible from the glow of the bonfire’s hellish burning smoke pit. The lower-half of its body seemed to resemble a spider’s abdomen. A raspy crooning sound could be heard which reminded me of miles of shrubby fields teeming with cicadas, screeching and swarming during annual harvest season. The black figure’s wings folded inward, retracting back into the abdomen-shape with squelching noises barreling out into the night. The body itself assumed a newfound identity, transforming before my very eyes. After the shape became human-like again, it approached the truck slowly and elegantly. The shadow grew smaller and thinner as the figure trotted closer. I urinated into the truck bed at this point, scared out of my wits and uncertain as to how I’d escape from this damn predicament. Whoever ([i]whatever[/i]) Curtis Deton was, I would find out soon enough… much to my own absolute dismay.\n\nThe forest’s late-night breeze descended head-strong and deep into a thorough windswept frost that crept over my naked body. My tail felt numb, like a foreign limb that didn’t rightfully belong attached to my hindquarters. The ants had retreated almost entirely. Something that I couldn’t exactly comprehend or understand but I could certainly distinguish at a whim - they had disappeared from plain sight, as if they were under some sort of command from this horrifying creature, this demonic figure in disguise as a human, a redneck, a buck-toothed Liberal-fearing mountain man. The maggots still kept their stride gallantly, squirming and suckling upon rotted flesh and exposed bone marrow like excited children during Halloween, banqueting from overfilled bags of cavity-inducing sugary-sweet candy. To the maggots, these piles of human remains were the grand equivalent to the candy, and the cannibalistic little suckers themselves served as the hungry, over-hyper children. The remnants of entrails and pulpy sinew were a delicacy to the pristine rice-shaped larvae and they were the luckiest creatures of all to have hitched a ride with Curtis Deton, unlike myself, not feeling as fulfilled or content as they were. Flies buzzed mercilessly throughout the air, clustered in massive enveloping groups, settling upon the slew of human decay and filth that surrounded me. Before long, I’d forgotten that I wasn’t alone. As I glanced upward from the pickup bed, trying to catch a peek around, that was when I saw the shadowy figure, nearly towards the edge of the pickup truck, leaves crunching beneath each calculated reeling step. A fairly balding ridge of human head popped over the metallic ribbed edge of the flatbed like a polished cue ball, followed by a furrowed brow, a pair of hazy clouded eyes, a slightly crooked thickly-bridged nose that curved in a hook, rosy-red cheeks and a queerly daft Cheshire-cat grin that spiraled up toward soot-powdered ears. Curtis Deton stood over the truck bed and watched as I, staring attentively from inside, plotted his intentions. Judging by his expression, he seemed to be rather pleased with his most recent capture. Rather pleased, indeed.\n\nI pleaded with every ounce of strength left in me to Curtis Deton.\n\t“P-p….please… j-just let… m…me go…” I begged sympathetically.\n\t“Not a chance in hell. Sorry Maxwell, but this is for your own good. You see, nothing infuriates me more than a god-forsaken abysmal threat such as you and your filthy type and I mean [i]nothing.[/i]” Deton said in a bellowing snarl. “Degenerative fodder like you makes the rest of us appear very bad through the eyes of others. I honestly don’t know what you were thinking in the first place, coming out into these woods, looking to rustle up some form of trouble or another, hoping to make amends to people you can’t possibly make amends to any longer. What a lame-brain you are, coon-dog.”\n\tI noticed immediately that Curtis Deton’s good-natured Southern drawl had changed entirely. Instead, he sounded like an irritated grizzly seeking compensation for stolen salmon, or one truly pissed-off mob-boss toad with a severe head cold. Deton stared silently toward me, housing a reprimanding expression upon his face. Bloodshot eyes bulged in their pudgy hallowed sockets, looking at me unflinchingly with a hideous conniving intensity, never blinking once.\n\t“W-what the…?” I whispered to myself in an incomprehensive daze, wondering what happened to his normal speaking voice. In fact, I wondered what exactly had happened to Curtis Deton himself.\n\nAlarmed at how abysmally reformed Deton’s voice sounded, how foreign he had suddenly become in an audible sense and in such a short amount of time (immediately in fact), I grew even more frightened than ever before. I knew I was still talking with him, but I also knew the real Deton, whoever he may have been, was already long-since dead. This atrocity that stood before me was something else entirely, something that had decided to renovate the man’s body temporarily in the most uncomfortable method imaginable. I gagged in the back of my throat, attempting to hold sway over my severely nauseated stomach at the disturbing and all-out disgusting thought.\n\t“You and your ‘anthropomorphic’ kind are all the absolute bloody same. Do you realize how many others like you I’ve killed in the past? How many others like you who have all come at me with their own exact same problems that need assistance? Menial threats and retaliations made for and against me? I imagine you don’t have a clue in the world where exactly we are right now, huh? That’s just as fine as can be, young coon-dog. I made sure that both you and I couldn’t be discovered under any easy circumstances by just anyone. That would spoil my dinner, Maxwell, and I absolutely HATE having my evening supper spoiled by any outside influences… I’ve certainly seen many people these last couple months, as you can now plainly see before you too.” Deton said to me matter-of-factly as he waved a skinny malnourished hand toward the piles of mangled bones, fly-coated fleshy clumps and misshapen cadavers that surrounded me in the pickup’s trunk-bed. \n\nI sought out the strength and the will to speak up louder than usual this time, feeling the strain of nausea dwindling down a bit just long enough for me to be heard.\n\t“But you… you’ve killed humans! Your own kind! You… killed and ate your own people! You stashed their bones like rubbish, like table scraps! Christ, you even killed a woman and… and…” I choked back on a lump forming in my esophagus and a steady-flowing stream of tears that threatened to over-empower my emotions again while he smiled proudly, “…you sick bastard, you even killed an unborn child… you murdered a pregnant woman and ate her, maybe her baby as well. Ate them both just like fucking hors d'oeuvres after the main entree!” I said.\n\tUnbelievably, Deton laughed at me. He laughed deep and heartily with his hands propped evenly against his hips, nodding impressively.\n\nTired and weary, I glanced down beside me and regarded the fetal remains, coated with maggots which looked under dim lighting conditions like small moving white rice pellets and a goopy wad of snot-drowned ants. Beetles and cockroaches crept in and out of its hollowed eye sockets, infesting the infantile cranium with freshly-laid larvae.\n\t“The woman wasn’t just any old whore wandering the outskirts of Eureka, mind you, my dear sweet coon-doggie. She wasn’t just anybody whom you’d consider truly important in the long run either, not to me as well, or rather to the poor soul of this poverty-stricken fool’s body, this pitiful man whose hollow vessel I now reside in. His very spirit was once embedded within this construct of skin and bone, this sloppy confided pile of human detritus, but no more. He is dead and soon you, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux, will be too, fair and square. You’ll join him along with his beloved wife and beautiful unborn child. We would’ve been such a dear, sweet family, wouldn’t we? Yes, we would have been such a beautiful picture-perfect quaint little union for anyone to feast their eyes upon, to be related to, to be acquainted with, to be admired by others. Perfection has never been more… well, perfect. All things must end soon enough though.” Deton exclaimed with his head bowed down and his lips curled into a mocking pout, a false sympathetic expression pasted upon his icy-cold face.\n\t“What do you think of that, dear sweet little faggot?” He asked me.\n\nI lay frozen in place, on the verge of upchucking again at the gag-inducing scent of death that surrounded me. Flies buzzed all around me, scavenging with apathetic repetition, droning endlessly with a numbing hum, a high-pitched tone of flapping wings and putrid regurgitation. \n\t“Maxwell, what do you think of that, I said?” He asked me again.\n\tI gazed at his contorted face with thin prying confused absurdity.\n\t“Wait… how did you know my [i]full[/i] name? I only gave you my first name before, just how in the hell did you know what my full… name was? I don’t…” I replied to him, trailing off into incoherent mumbling. I haven’t been smashed through a window so hard to recall whether I’d ever disclosed such information to a complete and total stranger once before already.\n\tDeton said, “You are confused, dear coon-boy. I can see it in your one good hybrid eye; you know the one that was spared from the massive meth-lab incident all those years ago? You can’t fool me, little coon-dog bitch.”\nOnce again, my heart took a dive-bomb trip down south to Dixie.\n\t“All this will make much more sense in all due time, my splendid creature! You will soon find out more than you may ever wish to know.” Deton said. He smiled, licking his chapped cracking lips with his cold-sore coated tongue, popped his knuckled beneath his fists, and chuckled evilly like a man with nothing to lose.\n\nCurtis Deton walked around to the rear bumper and pulled up hard on a release latch which caused the tailgate door to come swinging down with a snapping bang that startled me half to death. His torso was coated in a dark crimson liquid that appeared to stain every follicle of chest and groin hair upon the surface of his infectious skin. He reached in and grabbed hold of my ankles, struggling hard to drag me out of the truck’s rear flatbed surface. It wasn’t as hard as he predicted though. I refused to fight his advances any further. Being thrown into the bed of a truck with the fetid remains of others can be an emotionally and mentally exhausting experience for anyone. My body slid along the slimy remains of corroded skin and gobbets of spoiled yellowish-beige fleshy matter. A large rope of pulpy flattened intestines that had been caked upon the corrugated surface of the flatbed served as a slimy makeshift lubricant that allowed me to glide along quite easily. The forlorn tickling sensation crept back into my feet, feeling like the ants had made a triumphant return, only when I looked down I could see nothing but the man’s clammy hands cupped in a vice-grip around my ankles, pulling me further out from the dilapidated vehicle. I slid out and flew downward, my head narrowly missing the edge of the tailgate door and I fell fast, hitting the ground with a dull impending thump that barreled out into the evening like a muffled gunshot, creating a mushrooming cloud of dust from where I’d initially made impact.\n\t“Hoo-wee! That was a lot more difficult than it looked. You are a trifle bit heavy, Maxwell! I’d advise you lose some weight, but I suppose it’s a bit too late for that now, isn’t it? Perhaps I can help you shed some of those excess pounds? What say you, my love? Have you ever seen first-hand what liposuction surgery can do for a man of fair fatty excess, son?” Deton said, giggling in response.\n\t“Go fuck yourself.” I replied without missing a beat or stuttering once.\n\t“Beg your pardon?” He asked with a queer curiosity. His eyes lit up with shock.\n\t“You heard me. The local police will file a missing person’s report. They’ll track your sick ass down and my connections won’t rest until they see your head impaled on a pike, you fucking sick animal. You deranged psychotic freak, do you really expect to get away with all this and not think any repercussions will come of it? I’ll see that you go down in flames, you maniacal piece of shi—”\n\t“—Now, now, now, that wasn’t a very nice thing to say to your ol’ buddy, was it?” Deton said, crouching down and clamping his vice-grip over my muzzle, jerking my head up to face him dead-on. I snarled and his grip tightened over my snout, firmly grasping hold of my jawbone. He looked into my eye and pushed my head aside, letting go of my muzzle with limited restraint.\n\nI lay back down perfectly still, crumpled into a fetal position, eyeing the naked man who stood before me with arms folded across his chest and head nodding horizontally, weary with regret. A bony limb dangled from the edge of the opened tailgate door. It waved back and forth like a ghastly pendulum, coated with maggots and moist putrid rot. It seemed to be exchanging a sordid wave towards me. I could see a wedding band on one bony finger that had remained intact.\n\t“I’m going to have to teach you some manners, dear boy.” Deton said with an abrasive calmness that frightened me extensively.\n\tHe reached down towards me as his knees bent and popped and cracked under pressure. His thumb-sized cock dangled reproachfully, shriveled up well enough to resemble a skewer of dried prunes, nestled upon a tuft of chestnut-brown curly pubic hairs. At once I caught sight of a faint glinting from his wrist. A jagged hunting blade lay fastened in the grip of his hand, palms bent with sausage fingers gripped over its silver hilt. He was on the verge of cutting me open and gutting me like a fish, eating away at my intestines while I could only lie awake and fully conscious, watching him feast upon me, screaming in agonizing shock and dismay. Instead of cutting into my breastplate however, he carved at the twine rope that held my arms, legs and tail fastened together.\n\nWith a brisk popping report, the rope immediately snapped loose and I shook free from its impending grip. I stood up faster than a cornered fox on the verge of attacking an oncoming jackal in self-defense, eyes opened wider than tea plates, staring at the nude figure clutching a serrated gorging blade in his grasp. Deton swung the melee weapon back and forth in his hand like a samurai practicing a knife-juggling routine. Without a single word of hesitation, he chucked it over his dirt-smudged shoulder, casting it directly into the pit of the large bonfire erected behind him. Upon landing with a faint snapping clink, the flames bellowed outward explosively with green and blue sparks that rose like pyrotechnic rocket fuel drums doused with gasoline and lit, belching and spewing fire in flashing vicarious discharges. A sulfuric scent of burning hair and scorched fingernails rose to my nostrils. I saw a translucent figure appear suddenly from behind Curtis Deton’s adhered body with each flash of stark vivid light. It peered down upon me with holistic dark-red pulsating eyes and appeared to be smiling with conniving hungered intent, teeth bared like round sharpened daggers carved from onyx stone.\n\n “I won’t lie to you, dear Maxwell. I’m not at all as I appear to be through your eyes. You only see what you choose to see, a pitiful human being with a crooked bridge of rotten teeth and other unsatisfying features, but I am more than you can ever comprehend or understand. Oh my sweet coon-hound boy, it’s a true pity we cannot possibly see to making amends anytime soon. I would have loved more than anything to have seen each other eye-to-eye. So tell me, why on Earth did you mindfully refuse to pay back the local Russian insurgency? They sent me to ask you this, you see. I’m a middle-man of theirs, a messenger of sorts, if you will. So tell me young man… when exactly did you intend on paying them back?”\n\tI glowered upon the disfigured mountain man, one hand-paw propped up against the petrified stump of an ancient long-dead redwood, the other hiding my genitals from his inferior gaze. His lifeless, glassy stare penetrated my one good eye and froze my soul, feeding upon my inner psyche. He was spearheading me with a thoroughly potent mental attack. I felt my will to resist slipping mercilessly under the folds for his had simply been too strong.\n\t“I opted for alternative means of paying them back but they wouldn’t listen though! If they sent you to kill me, they must have been awfully desperate because I swear, I was about to give them what they wanted! I swear to God, I swear on my life, on my mother’s life, my brother, even my father! Please believe me!” I croaked aloud, frightened and mortified beyond all comprehension.\n\tCurtis Deton rolled his head back and bellowed aloud with roaring outrageous laughter. His molars had been capped with dental fillings that flashed from inside his wide-open mouth and immediately he returned his prying eyes back toward me with a stern expression fastened upon his face. His eyes appeared to be glowing with that same esoteric light I saw from his apparitional shadow earlier.\n\t“You should never have stolen from those Russians, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux. No you never should have done such a thing, such a terrible, uncivil, unruly, irresponsible thing to have done. They sent me to find you, you know. After they beat you and threw you in this forest to die, they called upon me to track you down. To find you and finish the job.” Deton said with a shriveling maniacal tone.\n\tSuddenly, his voice began to chafe incomprehensibly. Deton began to sound like Nick Nolte with a bad case of bronchitis. He grit his teeth and with a virulent snapping noise, he spit out a molar, then a lateral incisor, another molar, a wisdom tooth, and soon enough the rest of his teeth followed suit, tumbling out of his mouth in a consecutive parade of mangled enamel and fading pulpy gum root.\n\t“Such a bad, [i]baaad[/i] thing for you to have done…” Deton said in a gummy murmur, devoid of what little teeth he had left now. His eyes grew even wider than ever and his tear glands began to visibly swell up, trickling with blood. Something crazy was happening to Curtis Deton.\n\t“[i]Soooooo veeeeeerrrryyyyy baaaaad![/i]” Deton hollered aloud into the sky, arms outstretched, legs jerking against each other.\n\nThe truck caught on fire. Large coarse flames engulfed the flatbed and caused a thick haze of smoke to swelter with a gagging scent which had reminded me of an unclean crematorium filled to the brink with spoiled moldy cadavers. The tires popped with piercing hollow exploding bangs, causing the vehicle itself to rock and sway. The gagging scent of burning flesh and hair filled the air and overpowered my sense of smell so wickedly, I felt nauseated all over again. I saw the corpses shriveling and contorting in the bellowing fury of flames, crumpling into charred ashen remains in their newfound crematorium, crumbling the way a piece of parchment paper held up to a stovetop would. The skulls all lay piled in a heap, burning and charring. Silently, one of the heads reared back from the burning pyre and appeared to stare directly at me, a skeletal grin bore freely upon its petite face. It was the remains of the dead infant. It was casting a ghastly smile at me, staring from hollowed sockets with a keen interest. If there were still eyes, it never would have looked away from me. It kept staring with a sense of sincere pondering suspicion. It took every ounce of strength and will inside me to keep from screaming my poor head off.\n\nAs if I couldn’t possibly see anything much worse than I had before, I saw the most awful thing I’ve ever seen in my life in the illuminated raging hellfire. If the truckload of dead rotting carcasses and excitably attentive fetal remains didn’t prod at my sanity, this would most certainly have been the [i]coup de grace[/i] that would’ve unabashedly sent me over the edge of reason and logic, had my tolerance been any weaker. Curtis Deton’s face began to tremble rapidly. His entire body in fact began to twitch insanely, jerking harder than an epileptic in a strobe-lit mirrored room within a carnival fun house. His arms sprawled out to the sides in an upside-down V-shape that almost appeared Jesus-like, similar to the small crucifixion cross ornament that hung from the truck’s rear-view window, now lit aflame in the scorching vehicle’s cabin. Deton’s legs which had been angled perfectly even alongside his hips began to buckle and bend into a horrific feral animalistic posture, bones cracking and snapping, popping with every slight movement into an upright digitigrade stance. His swollen shriveled cock began to grow erect, a purple phallic appendage bulging and bleeding like a ruptured vein from his penile aperture, or piss-hole in lament terms. Something hideous was happening to the body of Curtis Deton. Something was truly, unnaturally wrong. Someone\n[right][i](Don’t fool yourself Maxwell this is more like something now get it straight someTHING)[/i][/right]\nwas attempting to be let loose from the body of the doomed human vessel, which served as a holding cell for... something, as Deton himself had told me moments before, along the lines of which I could never comprehend or understand. Thinking back, I decided I never wanted to try figuring it out. Seeing it first-hand had been more than enough for me - way more than enough.\n\nAs I stared in complete and unnerving terror, the body of Curtis Deton began to… well, for the lack of a better term, change.\n\tHe began to bleed from his gaping mouth, gushing scarlet crimson upon a nearby pile of leaves and barren topsoil. One of his eyes had somehow popped free from its socket and dangled freely, shriveled like a prune, hanging attached to a stringy optic nerve. His arms began to contort and shift, sprouting small thorns along the outer ridges of his biceps that punctured through his matted loosely-hung skin. With a startling flash of haste, his fingers bent so far astray that they all snapped and twisted backwards, dislodging his knuckles with loud macabre popping that sounded like heated popcorn kernels exploding in a massive kettle. His fingers separated from one another, torn apart and ripped at the webbing in-between like bamboo shards splitting into fragments, severing veins and arteries until his arms resembled five spindly tentacle-laden fleshy bristles on both sides. Membranous fluids seeped in between the flayed fingers, forming large nearly-transparent wings, fuzzy and coursing with intricate varicose veins and sharpened claw-tips. His torso split down the crease of his abs with a shockingly loud snap, exposing a putrid layer of muscular tendons, drenched in a dark crimson-red liquid that looked like infected blood, spraying out in a torrential mist. His muscles contracted and squirmed aside with a life of their own, bearing forth a crooked inhuman breastplate. His ribs shattered one at a time as his torso assumed a disfigured shape reminiscent of a black widow spider, an enormous black fur-lined abdomen jutted out from where his tailbone had once been. His spine creaked, flexing into a curvaceous cleft shape. His legs separated into four mangled fragments each, smothered with petite wavy vacuuming bristles and fetid excrement. He opened his jaw so wide that it dislodged from his skull and hung wearily from his neck. His tongue stretched down to his esophagus in a Cartel Tie, swaying around loosely like a blind worm seeking shelter. The top half of his skull severed after being thrown back in a whiplashing jolt, bobbing the dried eyeball against his cheek like a rubber paddle ball, exposing a round filmy pinkish-grey ball of cranial matter that appeared to be a swollen cerebellum. From the gap of his throat sprouted an infant wolf cub’s disfigured head, protruded in a messy batch of filmy fluids. It began to yelp and bark loudly, yowling and crying uncontrollably, coughing up coagulated bile. Suddenly eight pitch-black eyes blinked open upon the surface of its muzzle and it laid its sight upon me, settling down at the drop of a hat, yipping and growling as innocently as any puppy would. The expression in its face spoke of love and compassion, as if it wanted to be played with… but I knew it was all a ploy. I wasn’t just born yesterday. There’s no doubt in mind that I would have easily fainted again if I hadn’t wound up discovering the strength and the will within me to start running right the fuck away into the forest to escape from the hideous monstrosity that had once been Curtis Deton, but no more.\n\nSprinting through the dense brush of the vast Redwoods, I hoped to be free of the demonic presence once and for all. It chased after me though, thrashing wildly, pummeling down anything in its path to make a clearing. I heard trees snapping in half, roots unearthed from their deep-nested habitat, water from a nearby stream splashing noisily. Over all this devastation, I could also hear the demon itself screeching with a high-pitched wailing that echoed through the woods and bounced off the redwood trees surrounding me. The sound was ear-piercing, enough to throw my equilibrium off and cause me to run into a lumbering gait, as I ignorantly tripped over a small bundle of rooted stumps beside me. The creature also sounded famished and disgraced, let down and disgusted miserably by seeing its fine main course of the evening (yours truly) run off without having a chance to indulge upon at least a small trickle of my bodily fluids.\n\nI stood up and jolted through the thick brush and foliage, the dull ache in my leg all but forgotten now. I kept my arms held out far and wide to push aside any obstructions, never looking back to catch even a single moment’s glance. Before long, I arrived at a large hollowed-out petrified redwood trunk and leapt into it, hiding away from sight. I heard the creature outside shambling along, taking long drawn-out steps; spindly legs squishing down upon weathered dry leaves and twigs, each advance pitching forth a terrifying rumble into the ground. It must have been rather angry with me not staying long enough to hear what it had to say, so instead it bellowed its words out into the night with a series of blood-curdling wails which sounded like ambiance from a schizophrenic’s worst nightmare. When it screamed, the sound fastened into my mind… it was a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard before, stemming from its deepest vocal regions. Something like an emphysema patient mixed with a dying ewe.\n\t“FAGS like you never amount to ANYTHIIIING! You will all die by my hand and my will alone and not even God or its minions will stop me in doing so! Piss on your fucking God, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux! [i]I am your God now, little coon-boy faggot![/i] Come on out here and bow down to your God! Kneel before me and let me suck your brains out through your nostrils with pride, my sweet little sperm-gargling faggot!” It screamed.\n\tThe demon pressed on, hollering aloud in a series of shrieking wails, possessing an impatient tone of voice beneath its raspy, croupy snarling. It sounded completely starved.\n\nI remained in place silently. I sat perched up against a strip of worn bark, frozen solid without even ushering in a single breath. Near my finger-paw, a banana slug oozed along sluggishly atop a clump of moss. I could only sit and stare at it, proboscis eyes swaying steadily, a trail of slime in its wake. I sat as still as a sculptor’s nude visual study and conjured nightmarish possibilities of what would happen if the affront to God caught me right here and now, what kind of indescribable misery I would face. I remained perfectly still, listening to faint crinkling and thrashing from within the forest. It sounded distant, perhaps at least four to eight hundred feet away. If the screaming died down solemnly enough, I’d make a break for it. I’d run as fast as I could possibly go, away from the presence of the horrific entity that now hunted for me assertively.\n\tIt spoke.\n\t“What was that, Maxwell? Did you hear something? I sure did…” It said, sounding more like ten feet away. The will to sprint far, far away had never been stronger than in that one infallible moment. I thought for sure I was a goner. Luckily though, after a brief moment of silence, the demon continued to speak aimlessly to absolutely no one, and I breathed deep, letting loose an exasperated sigh of relief.\n\n“If you are praying for help, I’ll deliver it to you in the form of a tire-iron rammed down your bastard throat! You can run from me, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux, but you’ll never be able to hide from me forever, you drug-addicted little boy-slut! I’m well-nigh aware of your life, dear sweet Maxwell. I know the grand, obscure truth behind it all… you, my boy, are a genuine fuck-up! A living, breathing failure! If you’ll just give me your whereabouts, I’ll make it all better for you, my dear sweet young luscious boy. You won’t regret my promise, you fucking faggot whore, I promise!” The beast hollered aloud with a raspy shrill tone.\n\tAnother rumbled slamming sound followed by a groaning and the dull whump of a falling tree, more leaves shuffled, a boulder rolling aside, a hellish hyena scream.\n\t“I bet you’d love to… pay a visit to your delicious bitch of a mother? Maybe your retarded younger brother can come along as well, eh Maxie-poo? You can have so much fun! How does a three-way gangbang with the charred carcasses of my old family and yours all at once sound? Quite remarkable, I’d imagine… wouldn’t that just be nice? You can try banging your poor young ignorant-minded little virgin brother while licking at your sweet mother’s whore cu–”\n\tFor my own sake and for the sake of my dearly beloved family, no longer alive on this plane of existence upon this day and age, I covered my canine ears with my palms quickly. No way was I about to let on to what this monster was talking about regarding my own family. I knew the freak was only trying to get into my head, to upset and disturb me, to cause me to come out screaming bloody murder in a fit of exasperated grief, only to ignorantly expose myself, like a free sample of biscotti soup in a supermarket. I wouldn’t give into what that… thing… was saying though. I knew my family, it didn’t, and that was that – the final step, the short straw, the deal-breaker, the incredulous truth of the matter. After a few minutes of null and void silence, I pulled my palms away from my ears to hear if the demon was still yammering on about them. I was pleasantly surprised to hear its statements just beginning to wrap up though.\n\t“…you pathetic little shit! My family and yours would get along rather well, methinks! What say you, little slut?! Do you want to know how my kind endures an orgasm, Maxwell? Let me just say that it makes [i]your[/i] standard everyday ‘climax’ look like a slight heart murmur by comparison. There are meat hooks and mile-long strands of barbed wire involved, Maxwell. Maybe I’ll try a little foreplay with you a bit before I devour you whole… what do you say to that, young lassie? Feel like taking one for the team? I’ll be gentle with you I promise… perhaps maybe someday we can even invite your sweet old man? I’m sure your dearly devoted father has a lot to catch up with you, gorgeous young coon-dog. Lots to catch up on, indeed…”\n\tI waited for the words to come with flying colors and sure enough I wasn’t let down any. This demon knew me all too well; better than most anyone else could ever say or claim they did.\n\t“Perhaps we can invite your loving father to tag along and attend the grand engagement with us? That way he can happily penetrate your young tender coon-dog virgin ass again, how about that? It’ll be so much fun, just like old times once more! Eh, Maxie-poo? What say you, kiddo? How about another butt-full of daddy’s sweet sticky warm sperm to keep you on edge? Wouldn’t that be absolutely [i]delightful,[/i] my dear sweet young coon-boy hooker-bitch?” It hollered. The croupy demonic voice echoed with a deafening wail and I struggled to remain perfectly still in spite of the terrifying presence felt all around me.\n\tSilence… but not for long.\n\t[i]“MAXWELL WHERE ARE YOU GODDAMMIT??! ANSWER ME YOU PATHETIC LITTLE WHORE!!! TELL ME NOW BEFORE I GET REAL ANGRY WITH YOOOU!!! I’M ALREADY FED UP ENOUGH AS IT IIIS!!! DON’T MAKE THIS ANY WORSE, FOR YOUR OWN SAAAKE!!!”[/i] The creature shrieked into the ensnaring redwoods, causing my skin to crawl beneath my fur. It sounded pitiful just listening to this thing’s casually-speaking voice but now it sounded God-fearing hideous screaming aloud enraged, motivated by a potent hunger and the thrill of the hunt to kill.\n\nEven though I was terrified out of my wits, I had also felt a surging rage coursing through me. Not only was I scared to death, but I was also [i]angry[/i] at the demon. This anger must have been apprehensive at first to bear its true face, but now I had felt very nearly overwhelmed with its rabid intensity. My heart beat through my chest and emotions poured through me like a stream of sulfuric acid drenching a mechanic’s exposed unshielded hand. I wondered who or what in the hell this entity could possibly have thought it was, preaching to me about my family the way it did. How cruel and misinformed the creature’s knowledge of my own personal background and history had been! My mother was a saint who struggled all her life to get herself better and my little brother was taken far too early from us no thanks to a hit-and-run incident. He was, however, fairly right about my father. My old man did abuse me when I was younger, but he meant no harm by it and I know this to be true – he had an awful lot on his plate back in the day. I’ve forgiven him of all his wrongdoings since that terrible time. To hell with Curtis Deton and whatever became of his body for defiling my own family in such a harsh manner!\n\nAs much as I had wanted to, I couldn’t afford to run just yet. Thinking back about what the hellish monstrosity mentioned to me about my family and his spending time together had drawn forth far too many sinister memories, harkening pastimes that penetrated me emotionally and left me in a silent corrosive state of sheer entropy. I suddenly felt entirely and overwhelmingly exhausted. As softly and as silently as I could muster, I began to weep, cautiously fearing the entire time that the nightmarish presence would creep up behind me and skin me alive, littering my insides along the base of the overwhelming forest of the big trees, laughing aloud the entire time.\n\tAfter I let my feelings out and cried vehemently enough, I sniffed deep and wiped my eyes dry of streaking tears. Slowly, I peeked out from behind the tree trunk. No sign of life. I barely even heard a swishing of a brush or the snapping of a branch. I could just make out the popping, crackling sound of the truck burning and saw ever-so-slightly a faint orange incandescent glow emanating from where I came running from previously. The insanity had blown over for now and I had felt slightly at ease, but not entirely. I could tell that whatever was now chasing after me was still out there, still close, maybe even right beside me. It could kill me now and I’d probably never even see the deathblow coming. \n\nI crept out from the base of the trunk, peering around in all directions attentively and keeping watch over my surroundings as alertly as a native Viking hunter sent out into the dark underground woods to embark upon an initiative first-time breaking-in hunt. No thumping sounds echoed from the ground. No horrifying screaming came trailing out from the cluttered botches of nearby redwoods. I began to strafe cautiously now through the forest with my one eye peeled wide open, avidly watchful, carefully aware of my surroundings. No sign of the ugly bastard anywhere, thank goodness. Soon enough, I’d run into a nearby road and pray-tell some reliable trustworthy civilization, maybe a traveling family or a couple stoners out on a drug-run whom I’d be able to hitch a ride from. Maybe score some new clothing as well, a suitable bit of shelter, some medical attention, an operating telephone to call up some reliable people to—\n\tI heard his youthful voice call out to me.\n\t“Brother!”\n\tI looked back and saw nobody.\n\t“Hey, big Bro!”\n\tThat voice sounded all too familiar to me. It hit me almost immediately with a feverish slap to the face. A memory stirred, jilting my senses.\n\t“Bro! Help me! I’m over here! That bad man hit me with his car, can you fix my arm, please? Make it better, big bro! I hurt, Maxwell! Help me, please?!”\n\tHe walked out from behind a tree and my mind took a turn for the worse. My dead brother stood naked and tattered in shambled right before my very eyes. His arm was crooked and there was a protruding knob of bone jutting out from his bicep where he’d been hit years ago. He regarded me with anxious eyes, frightened and uncertain. I felt tears welt and leak down from the corner of my good eye.\n\t“You were never there for us, you little brat.” Another voice proclaimed, suddenly from behind me. I turned around and saw my mother, shriveled and devoid of fur. Her beautiful ringed tail had all but disappeared, now replaced with a jutting branch of filth and matted chafing hair. Her stomach was carved open, exposing a baby shepherd-raccoon fetus from her womb, a botched Cesarean-section. “You let us die without even a wink of thought, Maxwell. You didn’t do good enough by any of us and now look where we are. All dead to the world. You could’ve done more to ensure we stayed living, but you didn’t. You never did, you little shit. Now look at us! We’re dead and rotting. God, I need a fucking hit so bad right now, Max. Have any scag I could inject into my arm, baby?”\n\tthey both shambled towards my direction. They walked slowly, droning onward with a penetrating aura of unease emanating from all around their ravaged bodies. They approached me with pointing fingers and frowning faces, stern and forlorn. My brother dangled his broken arm in front of his chest and my mother aimlessly fondled at a large flap of skin that hung from her pelvis like a burlap sack. I turned to run away. I hit him and I was thrust back even further from reality faster than the speed of sound. My dead father stood in front of me, buck-naked and possessing a humongous erection. It dripped with pre-cum and produced a sour musky scent that caused me to gag profusely. It also held a knot formed at its base, for my father was the other half to the equation of my being – a full-fledged German shepherd dog-man. He licked his chapped, crusty lips and gazed upon me with lurid intent. A sultry perverted chuckle emanated from the bowels of his throat.\n\t“Ey’there, kiddo. Fancy meeting ya’ll here, eh? Come on over ‘ere so Daddy can feed ya some medicine. It tastes fine, sweet as sugar; one gulp is all it’ll take, boy. One quick swallow and all them fantasies of yers gonna come true before ya very eyes, honey. If you don’t suck, I’ll fuck. Ya’ll never gonna jizz as hard from a girl as you will from yer Daddy’s knotted cock, little bitch. I guarantee it on my life. All our lives, little slut.”\n\tI stepped back, polarized beyond all comprehension. I barely even recognized where I was anymore. I wasn’t lost in the depths of the Redwoods. Instead, I was back in my childhood bedroom, back in the old trailer-home I lived in for years. I’d come back to Brookings and I couldn’t be more frightened at the prospect of a full-fledged family reunion.\n\t“You are dead. All of you are fucking dead. Quit screwing with my head, Curtis! It won’t work on me forever!”\n\tMy father’s forehead sprouted six new pitch-blackened eyes.\n\t“Oh, golly-gee Maxwell! I thought this was appealing to your senses?” It asked.\n\t“It most certainly isn’t. You’re a sick bastard and I’ve just about had enough of this.”\n\tMy mother’s deceased fetus cringed its shriveled head towards me and spoke.\n\t“Are you sure you don’t want to be back together with your beloved family once more? I can arrange for a proper reunion, perhaps… something better than this, of course.”\n\t“Go to hell.” I said without even thinking twice about it.\n\tMy brother pulled his arm off from his shoulder, producing a jettisoning stream of fresh blood. He swung the arm to and fro like a dilapidated rag-doll, panicked beyond mere comfort. His face spelled out complete agony.\n\t“OWIE!!! It hurts so bad, big bro! Please help me! Please, help! I can’t stand the pain! I want to be dead! I’d rather be dead than feel this pain! Oh God Maxwell, please!”\n\tI just shook my head and turned my eyes away from all three of them. Phantom spirits plagued my sensibilities, tapping into my deepest subconscious memories and thoughts, ascertaining hidden memories that have resonated with me for years. I saw things I’ve never told anybody before during my entire life in the deepest confides of the forest sanctuary upon this doom-laden evening.\n\tI heard a vehicle’s engine drawing closer behind me. It shut off and I heard doors open. My family turned away and shrieked with abysmal fear, distraught to shame. His penis went immediately flaccid and he curled up into a fetal position upon a mound of fresh ferns. My mother shoved her dangling skin-flap back into her midsection and fainted to the soil beneath her. My brother simply evaporated into thin air, tear-strewn eyes glowing with a deep crimson glow right before he disappeared.\n\t\nAs I began to think toward the future and a life without Curtis Deton in it, I bumped into a short, portly, no-necked man. He wore a black-suit jacket with black leather slacks and a white freshly-ironed undershirt. He also had a small brown bowtie fastened tightly around his collar, gold buttons fastened upon his cuffs and the most obscene bowl-cut imaginable. He cried out in a startled shout and began to speak aloud in a strange foreign language to me, angrily holding up a Ruger pistol to my face, taking aim at my forehead. Soon enough, a few others like him appeared from a black Mercedes parked upon a small dirt-strewn path which curved and twisted into an unforeseen trail. They too had horrendous bowl-cuts and fancy attire, brandishing AK-47s and Ruger pistols, brandished and exposed, armed to the teeth. Their irises blemished with a turquoise baby-blue tint and wide cubical-shaped heads lacking any signs of necks. \n\tThe Russians. Ironically, I ran straight into a half-dozen of them.\n\tThis night just kept getting better and better.\n\nThey came back into the forest to collect their pay from me but unfortunately for them, what they got would prove to be way more than a mere financial compensation could ever have bargained for. I began to notice a dense population of moths fluttering through the air. At first there were just a few, then a few more, and those few more became a dozen each and suddenly before long a vast bunch began fluttering all around in the night sky, swooping deftly in whimsical flight patterns. They were multiplying by the baker’s dozen. Soon the entire area began to fester with these light hovering insects. All at once, I was reminded of the moths I’d seen awhile back, when Curtis Deton originally kept me tied, bound and captive in the trunk-bed of his pickup truck. These moths, perhaps they served as sentries for the demon? Perhaps they served as a foreshadowing burden of proof – warning indicators that announced silently whenever the demon itself came immaculately close within range. God, I sure hoped not.\n\nThe man who yelled apprehensively at me suddenly flung straight up into the air, noosed in a hairy cord. His Ruger fired off once with a supercharged report aimed to his side. The gun slipped immediately out of his grasp, falling to the ground, landing with a dead-weight thump. The body of the Russian man dangled and gagged quite loudly before his neck was severed with a loud muffled twisting snap, causing his limbs to spasm uncontrollably. The black dangling rope pulsated with ridges and fine-toothed filaments similar to a tentacle, a bristled tentacle, a long protruding coiled arm, black and hairy.\n\tA spider’s leg… [i]shit.[/i]\n\tThe damned demon had returned just in time for the main course and it couldn’t be more pleased with itself, judging by how much fun it seemed to be having with the Russian hit men. I swore that I’ve never seen anything more distraught or psychotic in my entire life up until this point, and probably will have never seen anything like it for as long as I live... but time and time again, I’ve been proven indubitably dead wrong.\n\nOut of the stark terrifying shadows of branches from a nearby tree above, it approached. The demon came crashing down upon the forest floor between me and the Russians, screeching aloud with a sinister gargling undertone that sent ripples of gooseflesh up my arms and a numbing twinge of fear up my spine. Nude and fully exposed, I stepped backwards and tripped over a lumbering branch which caused me to fall down flat upon my hindquarters. My ringed tail flung up from between my legs and remained prone while I sat perfectly still, staring awe-struck with insane concentration at the ensuing hysteria. The chaos felt as if it lasted for a good twenty minutes, when technically it was more along the lines of two to three. Things always tended to slow to a speeding crawl when dealing with traumatic adrenaline-fueled scenarios and this one certainly wasn’t any different.\n\nI watched with absolute horror as the Russian’s corpse split right down the center, gushing out bruised organs and sloshing seminal bodily fluids upon his comrades, his partners. They were horrified and groaning aloud while some screamed apprehensively and others spewed cursing in their native tongue. An exposed spine dangled from one side of the man’s half-torn ravaged carcass. The chain of bones and sinew broke free and came plopping down upon the ground at the feet of the other Russians, seeping with viscous fluid. The creature began to eat from the other half, starting from the split cranium which exposed pinkish-grey brains and working its way down past the exposed esophagus, soon reaching the fatty gristle of the dead Russian’s beer-belly, sopping up the raw fat, sounding like a toothless old man sucking down a Jell-O shooter. The God-forsaken presence slurped and smacked hungrily from the dead Russian’s severed carcass, softly purring with a low satisfied hum. At least the bastard could finally eat something! I only thanked the Gods it wasn’t me.\n\tAll at once, the Russian men began to fire their weapons at the creature, enraged with mortified shock, screaming bloody murder in lieu of their sloppily-devoured partner. A few bullets whizzed past my head, snapping down briskly upon the ground and penetrating a few redwood trees beside me, crunching into their barked surface, leaving fist-sized impacted bullet holes. The nightmarish overgrown insect from hell threw the two split slabs of human cadaver to its sides, dragging them across the rugged forest surface. It charged upon the five others in a surprising jerk of swift speed, casting out a single braying wail that could have awoken the dead.\n\tThe hit men kept firing away into the thing’s pulsating body, screaming defiantly and cursing obscenities in Russian repeatedly. One lost his entire head into what must have been the wide-open jaws of the beast itself. I saw in a glimpse of a moment that the wolf cub’s skull had split apart and exposed a wretched set of fanged mandibles that opened and closed in a disoriented gaping slack-jawed yowl. It chewed upon the Russian’s skull and the man himself sent a pitiful muffled scream coursing through the demon’s maw. Before long, the scream died down to a gargle and the creature spat the dead Russian from its fulfilled jaws. The corpse was beheaded completely, neck scored with bite marks and gushing blood from its nape like a fountain. A stubbed chunk of crimson-stained spine stuck out from the base of its neck like a whitened tree-stump growing loosely from a bundle of flesh and muscular sinew. The sight was disarming at best. I thought I’d lose my mind immediately thereafter, seeing such a massively graphic display of macabre disgust and sheer violence.\n\tThe last of the Russians – four of them now – wasted their rounds upon the hideous monstrosity while firing away, instead only being met with dull clicks from their weapons after they had spent the last of their ammunition to no avail. They threw their unarmed guns at the lumbering spider-like demon and tried to run toward their prized Mercedes, prying hastily at the vehicle’s door handles, hoping to lay low and stay protectively sealed, maybe even to make a swift getaway. Not the wisest idea though, as they found out the inadvertently hard way.\n\nSporadically and without any hint or warning, the Russian’s prized Mercedes burst into flames. The scorching blast launched a plume of scalding air outward in a majestic cloud of stifling heat that hit me like a slap to the face or maybe a burning pallet of weighted masonry bricks. The blast wave was positively enormous in capacity and blunt explosive force, damn near singeing each whisker off my muzzled face. I could see a few bristles from my whiskers burnt down to twiggy nubs just before my peripheral vision, coiling into tiny grey ashen snakes. The blast wave left an agonizingly deafening ring in my ear canals, rendering me temporarily incapable of hearing a damn thing amongst my surroundings. I watched the car explode with a grand sense of horrified awe and amazement as clear as daybreak but couldn’t at all hear it commencing, could only see it first-hand. I watched the chromed waxen-polished hood of the vehicle fly open and swing upward then shoot swiftly through the night air and arch its path right down backwards, as it crashed violently through the double-paned windshield, almost how a boomerang operates. The force of the impact shattered the glass surface abysmally with a jarring twang of teeth-grating tinkling and crunching. The initial point of impact upon the windshield crinkled under the pressure and caused a spider-webbed series of cracks to ripple outward and burst into a million crystallized shards that sprayed within roughly a ten-foot radius all around the doomed Mercedes. The leather interior bellowed and burnt profusely, engulfing anything that dare come within the path of the flames. Soon, a massive explosion rattled out from under the engine block of the vehicle and a stark, gruesomely-sized fireball engulfed the last few remaining Russian men in a cacophonic blaze. They all caught fire and were running around aimlessly in circular motions, naturally forgetting the fundamental basics of how to stop, drop, and roll. They were too ensnared in a heightened panicky, crazed state of mind to remember anything, even their own names probably if asked. \n\nOne of the men had been horribly scorched to a crisp and was lying dead beside the driver’s front-side wheel well from the initial explosion, with third-degree burns over roughly eighty-five percent of his body. He’d lost his eyelids, nose, ears and facial hair as well. I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that he was by now officially rendered unidentifiable, since the upper-half of his torso was charred and burnt stone-solid and his teeth (strangely enough, every last one, even the molars) had all but been entirely removed from his mouth, leaving a blackened husk of flesh and bone with a pink jaw-line ridged with chapped periodontal gums. Had they been blown out of his mouth from the explosion alone? It didn’t seem possible, not likely, not even credibly accurate in the least… but still there was a hankering suspicion that drove me mad, like a splinter that lodges itself in a small crevasse upon my brain, daring me to dig around and fondle. I couldn’t even identify his damn face anymore and neither would the coroner as well for that matter, if this man’s body ever made it to a coroner in the first place without being eaten whole by my corrupted fallen guardian angel.\n\nThe hideous beast wrapped four of its eight hairy, spindly legs around the remaining two out of three Russian men. Their badly burnt bodies crinkled and crisped with each intricate movement as they were pulled up by their charred waists, hoisted up to eye-level with the demon, as it stared fondly into both their panicked crying faces. The two Russians, with burnt hair, crisp char-broiled ashen skin, eyelids curled upward like paper-thin wheat flakes, begged for mercy. Fresh tears streamed down their faces and quickly disintegrated into small puffs of steam due to second and third-degree burns adorning the fleshy ridges of their taut cheeks. Slowly, the demon strutted around in a semi-circle and faced me directly. Its eight glaring pitch-black eyes stared down upon me. The wolf cub’s skull hung limply, split in two, jagged stubble teeth tarnished with fresh blood. The creature itself appeared to smile at me, staring, fascinated with a certain level of satisfactory fulfillment. The demon grinned toward me while savoring the moment. Perhaps I didn’t really need to die as immediately as he’d wanted me to. Perhaps I’d get a chance to ultimately ensure my debt be resolved with the Russians.\n\t“See, Maxwell? I didn’t even need their help. They asked me first but I didn’t need their help after all. I can easily handle things all on my own. See? Do you see now, Maxwell?” It said in a rumbling, wheezy voice, distraught and phlegm-adorned. This time around when It spoke to me, It seemed entirely content and at peace with itself, sort of how one feels after having finished a generous serving of dinner and laying back to embrace and digest the rewarding meal over a pint of fine ale.\n\tI stared in a cold frozen gaze, silent and perplexed, dazed incomprehensibly.\n\nThe demon suddenly swung the two charred men around in the air in figure-eight shapes and violently smashed their heads together. Both their craniums cracked harshly like two thick ostrich eggs colliding forcefully into one another at breakneck speeds. Brain matter spewed from their ruptured skulls and rained goopy cranial debris down upon the ground in matted clumps, adorned with specks of skull fragments and sinewy pulps of bone marrow and perspiration from overstressed tear glands. The creature threw both their carcasses towards me, causing them to land in the bushes where I lay prone and steadily behind, frozen in place, not moving but a single inch.\n\tThe last Russian man, perhaps the leader of the group, attempted to swing at the demon with an exposed machete that he must have had concealed deep in his pocket; he charged toward the horrific entity in a futile last-ditch effort to gain new ground towards a supreme victory.\n\tInstead, he wound up being split into travel-size pieces.\n\tThe demon’s spindly spider legs wrapped around each one of the determined man’s limbs like ravenous tentacles and lifted the poor remaining fool into the air, suspended against the midnight sky like a large human kite hovering in a solemn lazy summer gust. The machete slipped from the man’s grasp and fell spinning back down towards the planet, impaling itself blade-first into the topsoil below. I stared at it fiercely, contemplating whether or not to grab for the handle, settle the hilt against my palm and thrust the melee weapon deep into the creature’s neck or face, maybe the boisterous fuzzy dome-shaped abdomen. \n\tWhat had once appeared as a human figure hovering through the air deftly like a kite was violently pried apart into six separate various-sized chunks. Two severed arms and legs, a dismembered head and a ruptured torso, now spewing blood from five mangled stumps like a free-flowing sieve. The God-forsaken monster consumed the man’s crimson-stained torso with a sloppy gluttonous frenzy and threw the other parts into the forest, dumping them like used chicken bones from a KFC original recipe bucket, chucking them aimlessly into the surrounding darkness around its eight throbbing limbs. The demon’s jaws crunched down upon a ribcage and chewed repetitively. A bruised rope of intestines dangled from its chin, swaying limply and motioning in conjunction with each bite taken before being sucked back up like a noodle from a bowl of chow-mien. I wanted to vomit once more – very badly – but I dared not to. I couldn’t bring myself to upchuck again. I could barely even manage to flinch remotely.\n\nAfter the demonic entity had finally finished its meal and belched slightly, the spider-beast crept over and plopped down upon the soiled mossy surface directly in front of me, moaning groggily, sounding rather pathetic, maybe even overfed now. Thank goodness! Aside from the crackling of the flames from the exploded Mercedes, the forest grew silent once more. No gunfire, no hollering in Russian; no more humans.\n\t“I have met my quota, Maxwell. This is good. I’m ready to give them what they want now… a little dessert, yes… you see, now its… time for the final serving… of the night. Watch this… Maxwell… just watch… what I can… do…” The demon whispered into the air towards me, croaking with a raspy bellowing undertone. Even while facing certain doom, this monstrous entity never lost its intimidation-factor. However, I could tell right away that whatever the hell this thing was, it was most certainly weakened now.\n\nDeton flayed wildly upon the ground, legs thrashing voraciously, bouncing and swinging madly in psychotic circular motions. The horrific entity shrieked and wailed violently, gargling from deep within its ill-fated vocal chords.\n\tAll at once, I understood too clearly. The large spider-demon’s abdomen tore apart and thousands upon thousands of petite beige-tinted baby spiders came pouring out from the ruptured seams. They crawled and dodged and lunged and approached toward me with tiny shrilled ear-piercing whistles and chirps. They surrounded me upon the ground, miniature toothpick-thin legs trotting upon the upturned soil and moss and dilapidated branches all around me, scrawny putrid insect bodies, infantile fanged mouths bared and exposed, ready to lunge right at me and suck me dryer than a California raisin.\n\nWhat remained of Curtis Deton quit thrashing almost immediately and lay perfectly still. It started melting, caving in and disintegrating before me. A supple gust of smoke and thick steam rose up from the massive spider-demon’s carcass. Soon it had disappeared entirely and what was left was a black tarnished patch of burnt mossy topsoil. No bones, no remains, nothing. I looked around at the multiple Russian carcasses, mutilated beyond comprehension, and felt that cold-chill sensation creep into my spine again. That damn goose had been walking over my grave once more, this time it seemed stuck in place. The vehicle burned with sheer effulgence, crackling briskly, shattering windows and melting the interior dash board. If it weren’t for the thousands of “children” spawned from the demon’s womb, I would’ve been long-gone from this location by now.\n\nThe diminutive baby spiders held their ground still though, surrounding me with prime carnal intent. The newborns appeared to be very hungry from the looks and sounds of it, and their now-deceased single parent had left them a satisfying treat to feast upon for days after it was long dead. They cluttered up and enclosed me into a shifting ring of impending death. All at once, I knew immediately that I was a goner. My doom reigned nigh and I only had a brief amount of time to chance it by making a quick escape. Before I could decide to run though, the bastards charged upon me, infesting my fur while puncturing my body with their tiny pronged teeth. I could feel hundreds of them puncturing into my skin, inserting their tiny insect bodies into my veins to drink my blood, piling deep into my sinus passages, treading the insides of my throat and nostrils. I felt them crawl up into my ears and rip into my tear glands and flood their delirious presence upon my one good eye while occupying my empty left socket, festering and feasting as the remainder of my body’s surface was covered from head to paw with the little cannibals, sucking me dry, devouring me completely, hungry enough to stay feasting upon my corpse throughout the next month, spinning webs in my chest cavity, utilizing my carcass as their new habitat to spawn and multiply and—\n\nMaxwell awoke in a daze beneath his ruptured bed-sheets, screaming aloud into the cool autumn evening. Even though the nightmare had subsided almost at once, he still felt a hankering itchy sensation beneath his fur. He finally calmed down, ceased the itch and became silent again, breathing hard and heavy in the wake of reality. He reminded himself to pay back the Russians what he owed them first thing in the morning. He lay steadily upon his back in silence, staring up at the ceiling, repeating a name over to himself in his head, hopefully never subsiding to another night terror of such distraught and terrifying magnitude for the rest of his days.\n\t[i]Curtis Deton… Curtis Deton… Curse… Debt… Destruction…[/i]\n\n[right][b]END[/b][/right]", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "This written work is the sole property of Maxwell Blackburnadeaux © 2007, 2012. Do not remove the original artist's proof or alter, revise, plagiarize, or otherwise abhorrently copy this story or any passages included therein for your own benefit. Do not redistribute this story for any monetary gain in any way, shape or form without first consulting the original author's explicit & exclusive written permission. All rights have been reserved under penalty of law.

This story is based entirely on adult-oriented fiction. Any similarities between real events, locations and/or persons are completely and wholeheartedly coincidental. All included described characters, locations and/or events are written to represent purely fictional entities and should not be taken under consideration as non-fictional. The author will not be held responsible for any negative substantial health conditions contrived from reading this passage of fictional material. Any and all readers must be readily aware that this story possesses a harrowing graphic nature and thus are primarily urged to continue reading only with a strong stomach and a keen will of tolerance towards explicit violent imagery and horrific mental stimuli.
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
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Tantibus Ex Inferno

I remember the first thing that came to mind when I awoke in a grimy ditch: Oh great, now who did I piss off?

At the brink of twilight, I trudged through fog plumes sifting along a bleakly tanned skyline as I marched onward, limping through redwood barricades upon a near-deserted stretch of dilapidated asphalt, cracked and weathered from years of neglect. I’d been stumbling and tripping over my wounded shep-coon foot-paws for over a good hour now, completely lost in a relentless top-heavy daze. The fresh scent of pine sap, cedar bark and lush green firs left a musky earthen aroma sweltering in my canine nostrils as I droned onward along the tattered forest ranger’s shortcut (at least, that’s what I figured the path to be anyways) which stretched on endlessly without any delay, blind curve or break whatsoever. My Dickies hoodie-jacket vest was quite badly torn at the seams, collars ripped to shreds, pull-strings cut down to size and to top it all off, a zipper head went missing amongst the surrounding debris and muck. My pockets were quite barren, empty and devoid of the necessities I had initially been carrying with me before the shit hit the fan. They stole my wallet, driver’s license, Zippo lighter, even my lucky rabbit’s foot. Who in fuck’s name beats the tar out of some poor old shepherd-raccoon hybrid like me half-way to death just to apprehend one of those ornate little bogus good-luck charms? Evidently the crooked Russian gentlemen responsible for leaving me here to die alone in this dilapidated forest in the wake of their abhorrent subterfuge, that’s who.

A stifling chill began to settle all around me, causing my shoulder blades to tremble a bit and the rest of my fur-adorned body to break out in a jittering cold shiver. My mandibles chattered with minute clinks that echoed directly into my ear canals, causing my entire skull to vibrate. I bundled up into what little was left of my thin cottony hoodie-vest, tucking my hands deep into large circular pockets and continued onward down the abandoned service road. I kept my pace admirably, limping along as gradually as a cow being lead through the large rusted iron gates of a grand slaughterhouse, unknowingly following a large herd as devoid to the realization of what’s to come to them in their immediate future as I had evidently been before. My poor violated masked face felt completely welted, bruised to a pulp, screaming with pain upon each and every application of pressure or touch to my raccoon-fuzzy cheek tufts. Even my slender shepherd muzzle felt tarnished with cuts, gashes and human fist-prints bruises, soil smudges and bloody smears. What a wreck they’d left me in!

I had no other choice but to take it slowly, ambling along in a dream-like state of mind, a primordial zombie-trance, stumbling mindlessly amid Pacific Northwestern foliage, gawking around at the petrified dense forestry while keeping a third eye open upon my surroundings. My mouth held an uncomfortably bland, gagging and wrought-iron taste due to a nasty sweltering cut on my upper lip that I got from being thrown down a large embankment. Such a daunting fissure of geographic treachery is what initially brought me into this unique region of clustered, uncivilized forestry in the first place; a nice, secluded location to dump off a body or make a drug exchange without picking up any unwanted attention gaining on one’s back. That’s how the local authorities always conducted business, or tried to as best as business could be conducted. Catching perpetrators off their guard, exposing the dirty punks for all they were worth and then throwing them into the slammer with a twenty-five-to-life sentence slapped upon their wrists. Not me! No way was I about to let those upper-handed authorities gain dominion over my life! They’d have to fight me first before they ever hoped to take me alive, God willing.

As I was clearing out the foggy haze soliciting my mind and all the developing eccentricities that held sway over it, trying to make sense of what on earth had exactly happened to me, a massive throbbing headache sweltered and pulsated, maintaining its ugly presence throughout my poor shep-coon cranium, applying pressure to my quasi-feral sinuses, causing any singular flash of light to feel more like a thousand sharpened straight razors spun belligerently in figure-8s directly behind my eye sockets and in my groin. I hunched over while grabbing hold of my abdomen and started to dry-heave. To anyone else who may have arrived at my location by impromptu timing, they would have merely assumed that I was vomiting my guts out into a nearby curve. After my retching spell passed and I issues a slew of belches, I hurried along the road to make up for lost time. All around and above me the mighty Northern Redwood Big Trees, the grand-scale pillars of the Gods, tended to regularly in the nestled heart of Humboldt County, lumbered like humongous wandering giants. Sun rays shot through the branches, jettisoning the wide trunks and topsoil with brimming beams of stark solar beams. Seagulls hovered deftly nearby an opening in the forest’s copse heading towards the grand Pacific’s coastline. Wrens and chickadees also made their presence known throughout, chirping and screeching up a storm. From behind me somewhere up high, the low droning hoot of an owl carried throughout the wide-open slumber. For me, migraine headaches are and have always been a total bitch to put up with and regarding current matters at hand (like the fact that my face was nearly caved in), I believe this newly-developed headache certainly made things far less easy to deal with. I was having a swell – irony, be damned ¬– walk through the woods on this fine evening.

So there I was, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux, professional bassist/vocalist in the best damn tri-member grunge rock band to have come out of Oregon’s creative musical assembly since Floater, left to die violently in California’s National Redwood Forest State Park but rather left only to find myself even more confused, distressed and aching with uncertainty than I ever could have imagined before. Technically I should’ve been dead and perhaps should be now, but the opposition flubbed their proposed idea up something fierce to begin with. Thousands of people travel regularly through the Northern California Redwoods yet few had probably ever managed to tread upon this one single forlorn path of ranger-access road in where I’d been dumped beside quite sloppily. To make sense of what happened in a chaotic, stressed, all-out hurried explanation would be the rudimentary equivalent of a wild goose chase with no geese in sight, only an endless maze of mirrors and trapdoor hatches. That wouldn’t do… I needed to find a way out of this forest before the option of escape faded away more and more gradually.

Hopefully for my sake and for the sake of the general public, nothing will ever turn up about this. No leads, no witnesses, no mercy spared or sympathy shared for a long damn while at least until I find my way to a nearby police station or a hospital. How long that would take was far beyond my comprehension, though. Having been mugged and stranded without identification of any kind, I imagined the process itself would be far more difficult to conduct than I was allowing myself to consider it to be. How unfortunate for a poor soul like myself! And damn those abhorrent Russians for bringing me down to this level. How foolishly stupid my life choices tend to be…

I kept on aimlessly navigating myself through unfamiliar territory, refusing to slow down or stop for any reason. As I looked around where I was, something dawned on me… I didn’t recognize this area of the forest. I could’ve sworn that during my hey-day of meth cooking and pot growing, I’d accidentally stumbled foot upon this particular patch of sheer Nor-Cal acreage. The strangest thing was that this organic patch of thickened redwood forest felt far more humid than most of the other locations I’d walked through… even muggy, in fact. This area was nothing short of a complete mystery to me, despite the fact that I’d practically been born and raised in it. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling a hankering sense of pure dread that swam rapidly within me and burrowed at my chest like a child paddling across the shallow-end boundary line of a public swimming pool, daring to inch further into the deep end, right into grown-up territory, despite all the whistle-toots and warnings from the volunteer lifeguards.
\tQuite simply put, I’d been left for dead and this forest was now my newfound purgatory.

Man, this evening wasn’t going at all how I imagined it would! My head felt like it was simply ready to burst as a result of the tumultuous migraine that hailed straight from the sixth ring of purgatory. My scrambled-egg brains wriggled around within my German shepherd-contoured skull, causing jerks of agonizing pain in response to each slight angular tilt and deep-gasping yawn that came rushing to me, exhausting me further with searing pain from each yowling wide-mouthed stretch of the jaw line. It felt as if I’d cut myself against a rusted sharp metallic edge and slowly developed lockjaw as a result. The sordid flashes of stress began to kick in with maniacal force now. The base of my neck suffered from a recoiling twinge that struck fast then spread down through my ribcage, finally settling upon the cusp of my spinal column. Hopefully a disc down near the base of my spine wouldn’t slip out and render me paralyzed on the spot. Holy shit, try to imagine that: a shepherd-raccoon hybrid anthropomorphic left stranded and paralyzed with a broken back upon the ground deep in the thickets of Northern-coast sequoias, eucalyptus and sagebrush assembling from the waist down… holy cow! I’d imagine that such a sight would definitely yield little to no help from any oncoming travelers cruising along a well-sought-out hefty backwoods detour. I could feel the sweltering throb of bruises beginning to bulge upon my fur-lined kneecaps and shins as well, aching hard with swift discomfort between each tattered uneasy step I took through this festering haven of oceanic fog and aromatic flora & fauna.

Having been born as a German shepherd/raccoon hybrid mix, my fur developed an intensely thick texture over time which made any grooming season a difficult and rather arduous one to invest in. Of course, I amended the situation by keeping warm in a cold atmosphere, such as the exact one I’d awoken to in total limbo. My ringed tail also felt extremely sore as if a semi-truck had rolled over it repeatedly with large thick-treaded Goodyear wheels, snapping every bone upon repeated contact. Come to think of it, I have no memory at all of how I even arrived in this dense and desolate hell-hole to begin with. I suppose it was natural intuition to walk north until I could seek out any kind of help or, quite possibly, an answer to my burning-hot questions. A small mountain town didn’t sound nearly as forlorn as I had imagined, not even in comparison with a major inner-city or a well-populated suburban neighborhood. I’d purposefully beg on my hand-paws and knees for any kind of civilization, even if I happened to walk into a two-building town excluded from any major road maps or commercial investing, a real “Children of the Corn”-style bible-thumping hick’s incest-savvy village would do me better than absolutely nothing at all.

Suspicions began flooding my confusion-induced head since I awoke in that dirty damn ditch nestled among petrified stumps, clumpy moss patches and rusty piles of corroded soup cans, most likely bum litter from sometime last month or the scraps left behind by drug cartels keeping an ever-watchful eye over nearby grow operations. I had remembered imagining this forest eating up anything that dare stray off-course among its gnarled branches, coarse thickets of firewood for the weary lost camper or hiker. Anybody could enter for any set price but only a select few could leave in one piece, unharmed and free; unless this select few had been driven in by merciless Russians intent on collecting their gambling debt, however. Damn it all, if only I could be among the designated league of those few who escaped unharmed and wound-free! Beggars couldn’t be choosers though, I suppose.

Thoughts began to stir: Oh, of all the places those friggin’ guys could’ve chose to dump me, they chose the middle of bum-pluck and nowhere. Simply friggin-A typical, I suppose. Way to go, Maxwell ol’ buddy, ol’ pal, ol’ shep-coon punk-ass, you’ve really done it in for yourself this time and quite well at that! I’ll have to remember when the next deal wraps up just to call a cab for a ride home instead of trusting the local clientele for a quick efficient trip back into town, dang it all. This is ludicrous. I’m not their punching bag. How dare they treat me like a tattered old rag doll, one they easily grew bored with and dumped alongside this shitty road like kitchen fodder! Man, they’ll get theirs.

Barely noticing a tingling sensation easing up slowly from my bicep where I initially landed after being thrown from the moving vehicle, I still saw nothing in sight. Knowing my luck, I’ve only been walking for a few minutes, which feels like hours and hours ago. The twilit mist settled down immersed within sublime confides of the atmospherically peaceful remote Redwood forest. Looking at the solemn serenity of it all, how it embodied a prominently gorgeous nature preserve sanctuary, I felt just a little at ease. The coastal fog settled in briskly but the strangest thing of all besides limited visibility was that I heard absolutely nothing else around me. No varied thrush chirping, no woodpecker’s beaks thumping upon bark or black bears wading giant paws through salmon-dense streams, hunting diligently for dinner. I heard nothing at all, no streaming creek beds or pitter-pattering disturbances from local wildlife. I’d only been traveling straight along the same path for what may very well have been a mere fifteen minutes but initially this time around, it felt a lot more like fifty; a good, long, enduring fifty-plus. I shuddered quite suddenly, feeling almost as if a goose had trotted over my own grave. It was a terribly uncomfortable and unsettling feeling that caused my bowels to churn nervously and a surprise flush of gooseflesh to sprout up beneath my coarse matted raccoon’s fur.

Suddenly to my guttural surprise and bare-boned nervous excitement, a bright brimming pair of glowing headlights flickered upon a pair of guardrails that wrapped expansively around the outskirts of the road’s edge like a large metal-encased serpent with yellow reflectors strewn along its prefabricated sides. Cone-shaped trail of lights flashed and jerked upon numerous congregations of thick towering trees and the crappy ranger patrol road itself with separated yellow lines drawn in a parallel path down its dead-center, faded and barely visible under the dimly-lit evening that had now begun to settle all around me, save for those cone-shaped expanses of yellow incandescent glow.

I stopped walking all at once and instantaneously jolted down the road toward the oncoming source of civilization with a flash of unexpected speed and dexterity, expecting the worse to happen in the least-populated area imaginable. It hurt to run too fast, so I paced myself with power-walking steps, limping worse than a one-legged athlete jogging in a local triathlon with a sprained ankle. A terrible suspicion crept into my mind. What if this vehicle was in fact the same one which housed the men who had dumped me in this very forest? What if they had returned with more men or even more weapons to finish whatever sick intensions they had in mind initially with me? I quickly jutted my shepherd-coon hand-paws up into the air, exposing my fuzzy grey padded palms, waving them above my head in large sprawling arc-like motions as a signal to the driver to slow down, to stop, to careen off a cliff, to run me over, anything! I stared upon two vast fog lamps coming at me like effulgent gamboge eyes, practically blinding me in the settled dimness of the evening. Thank God for civilization!

The vehicle itself was neither a semi-rig nor a compact car. I would have been happy with a retired 60s hippie-wagon in the form of a large tie-dyed Volkswagen van. It pulled (no, CREPT) forward, dashboard emanating an illuminated source of green-tinted light upon the driver’s face. The window was rolled down just enough for me to easily identify the mysterious figure as a human – a man who was chewing snuff tobacco and wearing a bulky fishing cap with a confederate flag decal embroidered upon the stained white surface of its upturned bent bill; redneck ahoy. The pickup truck cast a hazy red aura of incandescence from its rear taillights which shone brighter upon each slight squeal-pierced braking. As the engine revved down to a low industrial hum, choking and backfiring, burping gross pollutants into the misty dew, the driver quickly let his large traveling vessel decelerate to a slower crawl. I nodded with relief, hoping this onlooker was in fact just that – a mere pedestrian passing through just looking on. I’d rather not see anybody become far too involved in whatever absurd situation I had wound up in myself. I certainly didn’t wish for this madness upon anyone else.

The truck was an ‘89 (rough estimated guess) Isuzu Pup with a worn front-end and paint chips bent along the roof like cement-dusted Fritos, smothering both its outer edges and hood surface. The front bumper was rusted away to a jagged murky brown/beige scrap with dirt and engine grease-covered ridges. As the truck came to a full motionless stop upon the side of the dilapidated road, I could barely catch a glimpse of the man’s silhouetted eyes, twinkling from the dim fluorescent glow of the cockpit’s dashboard. I wondered ever-so-briefly if this random stranger could possibly be my salvation, my rescue effort to rediscover civilization and seek urgent medical care, my way out of this mess and into a peaceful well-being. Or had he come to finish the job at hand the Russians thought they had done already, disposing of me like a bulb-busted television set thrown effortlessly into a scrap-yard?

The figure reached a bulky hand out to me and curved it upward at the wrist, gesturing a greeting wave.
\t“Hey there, bud!” He said, waving to me while I reacted with a perplexed glance of awe, “Say there, I can’t help but notice something peculiar about you… is it the tail?”
\tI swished my furry ringed tail with a snapping jerk and shrugged at him.
\tHe nodded and said, “Yeah, I’ve seen your kind around… I’m perfectly aware of you and all you stand for… if you ask me, I’d take it all back and start fresh, like from scratch. Damn furries.”
\tI just stared at him, expressionless and silent. Was he some sort of bigot to my kind, a racist against the anthropomorphic population? Shit, I sure hoped to the Gods he wasn’t.
\t“Say, I don’t imagine you must be lost? Pretty beat up too, by the looks of it. What, d’ya get in a scrap with your old lady or somethin’?” The man asked belligerently before continuing onward, “Say, you wouldn’t happen to be more of a raccoon or a dog?” He asked me.
\tThe funny thing was that he never looked away from my face. Not once. I could only imagine the damage he’d been staring at profusely, all thanks to those Russian bastards and their obscure methods of debt compensation. However, deep down I felt that he wasn’t just looking at my fresh wounds… he was more fixated upon something else. Almost as if he’d seen me once before and was struggling to remember where or when, like I was his long-lost pupil.
\tHe shook his head and cleared his throat, spitting out a thin petulant-brown rope of phlegm and tobacco spittle from his wide-opened driver-side window. “I uh… don’t suppose you’d prefer a ride into the next town down the way, eh boy?” The driver said, acting upon the urge to move on. He turned his head back toward the road, peering upon the tattered stretch of damp asphalt like a coroner at a funeral parlor purveying a mangled corpse that would take hours to prepare for a final viewing. “Boy, I’d sure hate to see you walk that far all by your lonesome, especially out here in these woods! I’d say the nearest town from here is about oh, say ten or fifteen miles due East… How about it, coon-boy? Care for a little lift?”
\tIts coon-dog boy to you mister and don’t you forget it. I thought, standing defensively and peering upon him with a judgmental stare, debating to myself whether to take his offer up or not. I may have had a choice before, but honestly I could barely remember.

I had trouble processing what he was saying due to a foreign and disconnected lurking fear, a scourging suspicion that I had just willfully given myself away to another enemy sworn and prepared to see me dead and buried somewhere deep in the heart of this enormous forest, maybe even drugged and anally raped with a Clorox-dipped rubber fist or a rusty tire-iron. No rest for the wicked. With mountain-men like this, one couldn’t possibly feel any less safe than, say, a cat walking on an electric transformer box or a deaf-mute man attempting to cross a railroad track, completely oblivious to the flashing red warning lamps surrounding him.

I responded apprehensively, mustering strength enough to move my lips which felt irresistibly tender and swollen.
\t“If… you’d b-be willing to… to allow me to… tag along…” I said, trembling with disoriented uncertainty, “…I’d be indebted… t-to you, sir.”
\tI barely mustered the strength to finish just one sentence while my single bloodied eye peered upon the truck and its less-than-average condition, afraid to give him even a seconds’ glance. Those commie crooks must have hurt me pretty good. That or the nervous butterflies were fluttering out of control and impairing my better decision-making, causing me to perform an incredibly stupid act of overladen trust.
\t“Well, I’d feel bad just leaving you out in the middle of these here woods all by your lonesome, little raccoon buddy! Why don’t you hop on into this here truck o’ mine so I can give ya’ll a lift into town? I’ll make sure ya’ll done get some medical help too.” He said, smiling with a gleefully humble expression that spoke of promises kept and lives saved. But deeper down beneath the thin veil of that man’s sullen face, there was another mask; an apparition, gleaming through the murk, staring, festering… plotting.

The man gestured to the bucketed passenger seat, stained with grease blotches and oily smears. His sprawled-open hand invited me into the dank cabin littered with cigarette butts and crumpled aluminum Budweiser cans. A very polite and inviting gentleman this one had been, but for how long I asked myself. How much trust could I lay down on the line for this stranger? Would I count on him to actually deliver me back to civilization in one piece, alive and well, undisturbed? If he did attempt to molest or attack me, I had to maintain a strong sense of defensiveness. I figured at the time that the only way to find out if he meant no harm was to try riding it out with him, God help me.

The moment of truth had arrived to me in the form of a sporadic decision made after a small mental debate. Would I stay on the road and tell this prick to shove off or would I decide to settle down and accept this man’s friendly offer to further gain help and assistance? I had no clue if I’d see another person (let alone a human) for a long while after witnessing this good ol’ boy’s redneck rig chugging along through such deep dark frigid woods. I frisked my hand-paws deep into my jean pockets quickly, wondering if I had anything at all stashed away neatly that I could offer for a fair trade… but naturally, there was nothing. My pockets were as empty as my stomach had felt right about then. This scraggly human seemed trustworthy enough if not a little slow around the edges of charm and appeal. Certainly he hadn’t been armed or dangerous or I would’ve known by now. I can always tell if a person is either a saint or a sinner just by spending a little excess time around them. I found a good way to tell is by looking them dead-on into their
(sockets)
eyes – it’s always the eyes that give away a myriad onslaught of cleverly-concealed truths. Perhaps that was my Asperger’s syndrome working overtime on the hard-pressed clinical aspect of routine general social psychology? Or maybe I had been far too scared to assume anyone similar to this down-home country-bumpkin hee-haw could pose anything but a menial threat. I happen to make a steady living killing for money, so I wasn’t particularly worried about defending myself if things did get a bit heated. Just so long as I didn’t wind up tripping over my dumb delirious weakened shepherd-raccoon feet while attempting a daunting get-away, all the pieces would fall neatly into place upon the delirious jigsaw-puzzle of detrimental happenings soon enough.
I accepted his offer with a weary response.
\t“O-okay… thanks.” I said, whispering apprehensively. He exposed a mouthful of jagged, nicotine-stained teeth when he smiled briskly at me.

I looked both ways across the stretch of shambled asphalt as alertly as ever and grew a slight hesitation to move from where I had paused steadily in disbelief and realization. This was the first time since waking up that I’ve been willingly offered any assistance, let alone a ride from another form of life, even still let alone a mere innocent civilian, a random passer-by traveling on an abandoned state-regulated patch of limited commerce. I figured if I had been driving through such dense woods, there would have been a slim but certain chance I would’ve just as easily offered any stranded hitchhiker a ride out of common courtesy. Then again, I suppose perhaps the bloody upper lip and torn hoodie-vest also flashed off unmistakably glaring announcements of swift cautious urgency. I could only suppose. Feeling generously uneasy and prepared for anything, I pulled the latch and opened the door, ducked down to avoid bumping my head upon the outer padded frame and took a seat in his cab, shutting the door without slamming it too hard and dimming out the small cabin light which resided upon the vehicle’s metal-buffeted ceiling. The truck came with its own stench of stale tobacco and diesel fuel, a mix that caused my dry-heaving to return full-swing. I cracked open the window by spinning a circular lever counter-clockwise embedded in the door’s leather-padded interior.

We rode onward into the evening like two cowboys set out to collect a bounty on a runaway fugitive. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros from a small niche under the radio and offered me a smoke. I declined politely since the last thing I truly needed was tobacco coursing through my coon-dog lungs. I had trouble breathing enough already; a few drags upon a cancer-fag would further fuel the fires of pain I now wallowed in wholeheartedly.
\tAfter a brief moment of inner-personal reflection, he spoke to me.
\t“The name’s Curtis Deton. And you are…?”
\tSilent reprieve swept me as I glanced toward him. He kept his amicably curious gaze steadily fixated upon me, not on the road. He shifted focus between my orange nylon eye-patch and the puffy sweltering bruise upon my snout which had been unmistakably noticeable even under such dimly-lit conditions. I thought he would reach out and attempt to soothe it with a gentle massage or something, based on how he kept staring, hypnotized and entranced by his newly chartered and freshly battered anthropomorphic hitchhiker.
\t“The name’s Maxwell... I came out here to—”
\t“—go to a picnic, right?” Deton blurted out sarcastically, grinning like a hyena.
\tI gave him an uneasy nod, gesturing none-such a thing as to my involvement in a picnic of any kind out in the middle of Gods’ country with fresh knuckle-marks strewn across my shep-coon face.
\t“Not really, man. Actually it’s something like that, only this ‘picnic’ had no sandwiches, straw-woven baskets or checkered blankets of any kind. Not very many ants either. Those pesky little pricks, always going for the sweet stuff first! Am I right or am I right, amigo?”
\tCurtis guffawed heavily at my reply back to him. Apparently he must have been easily entertained. That or he had picked up the perfect victim for one of his sick little routine exercises and could always use a good laugh before extracting his nefarious plans upon my delectable hide.
\t“Boy, that’s all too true of a fact. Ants, beetles, cockroaches… hell, any insects are all just pests in the long run! I’ll tell you, whatever brought you out here is your own business and I wouldn’t dare try to butt into your own personal affairs, that I can respect, my fellow coon-boy!” Deton said. His tone was rather cheerful, considering the dark mood of the evening and his strange erratic behavior.

I regarded Curtis with a disoriented mutual nod and shortly after noticed a small chain of trinkets dangling from his rear-view mirror, clinking with each bump and nudge from the service road. After a short time I realized most of them were golden-capped molars, aluminum beer-can tabs and a wide assortment of keys and memorabilia keychains. I also saw a small bronze-cast cross with an even tinier figure of Jesus Christ crucified upon its polished surface, a dirty silver-forged chain necklace with intricate loopholes forming a pattern similar to DNA strands, two small fuzzy Vegas-like die and lots of hemp-strewn strands, matted with crimson-bleached stains. However, nothing far too out of the ordinary, save perhaps for those shiny golden teeth adorning the small trinket bracelet, suspended upon the mirror’s adjustable rod.
\tHe remained silent for a bit, then unexpectedly blotted out that silence, startling me awake from a sordid half-daze.
\t“Strange though, seeing someone as…” I gave him an assertive stare while he attempted to comprehend the right term in his mind, “…violated as you obviously are, or maybe have been - just walking along out here in the middle of Ozark country. Tell you what Maxwell, ain’t very many like you ‘round these here parts of the woods, that’s for DAMN sure, boy! I should know since I’m always comin’ through these here parts makin’ my rounds, deliverin’ the goods, fillin’ my quota.” Deton exclaimed. He pointed to me accusingly while emphasizing himself upon the word damn.

I sat back into the spongy truck seat, leather creaking behind my back, imprinting the shape of my spine into its surface and brought my hand-paws up to my face, rubbing my snout gently so as not to irritate the bruising far too thoroughly. It still stung like crazy to touch any part of my muzzle so I left it alone. Deton looked over my leg past where I sat and reached by the gearshift towards my lap. His hand approached outstretched, fingers spread wide, palm bent forward and grabbed for
(my cock I knew it he wants to molest me make me his little bitch he’s nothing more than a sick fuck with no class just some old pervert who probably knocked up his teenage daughter before forcefully signing his wife onto welfare well not me buddy I don’t play that game with just anyone if you want to get to me in that fashion you’ll soon find that I too can become a crazy maniacal fucker at any given chance so you bring me)

a small dilapidated matchbook from a pocketed cranny nestled in my armrest, pulling out a copper-colored match-head. He reached down to his feet and struck it against his boot-heel. As the tip ignited in a flash, he held the small flaming match-head to his face and lit the paper-end of his cigarette, breathing in short repetitive puffs before inhaling a long drawn-out drag. The glowing tip charred with small embers that lit up his eyes and the truck’s dashboard, splotched with mildew and aging corrosion. He shook and extinguished the match, twirled opened his driver-side window and blew out a hazy trail of smoke which spewed from his lips and dashed out the cracked-open tinted glass pane, flicking the burnt-out piece directly afterwards.
\t“Exactly just how far do you intend to go, Maxwell?” Deton asked me with a pondering curiosity beneath his breath.
\t“…I’d be fine just heading into the next town, whichever one that is, whenever we get there. That should be far enough, I imagine. Obviously, I need to get to a hospital or a clinic, since I think I may be more hurt than I imagine.” I replied to him. I rubbed my right ear, now tender as could be, achy to the touch. My God, even my ears hurt!
\t“You might, Maxwell. You just might. Judging by that big-ass bruise on yer noggin’, I suspect whoever may have done that went and left you out here for some kinda good reason or another? You wouldn’t happen to be runnin’ away from somebody or somethin’ would ya, boy? Got in a little too deep for comfort with the wrong crowd and now you payin’ for it dearly, eh?” Deton asked suspiciously while keeping a steady gaze fixated upon my response.
\tI began to feel a little uncomfortable at his tone of voice and his sneaking enigmatic undertones, so I let my mind speak for itself which may have been a dumb move in the long run. Damn my snappy comebacks! They always seemed to get the very best of me.
\t“Dude, beats me. If I could find them, I’ll certainly remember to ask them. Thanks for the consoling advice, Curt. I’ll be sure to mail you a thank-you package when all this blows over, that is if I’m still alive to do so, pal. Jeez laweez…” I chuckled under my breath a little. He jerked his head toward me in response and sneered, obviously disturbed by my retorting statement.
\t“Don’t be fuckin’ sassin’ me in my own ride, boy! Ya’ll bes’ be either grateful or lucky I even stopped for you, dammit all to hell – and the name’s CURTIS, not ‘curt’ or ‘dude’, ya’ll better just start mindin’ yer’ damn manners now, y’hear?!” Deton hollered.

After I reeled back from his initial outburst, he scoffed, shook his head disappointingly and took another quick drag from his cigarette, trembling loosely between his pale-white lips, paying no attention to a fresh clump of ash that had crumbled and fallen upon his forearm, embers sizzling a few hairs growing upon its blotchy surface. He held a tight grip upon his steering wheel and focused on the road with stifling intense concentration, never looking back at me once after his initial verbal retaliation. Even though I felt intimidated by his sudden outburst, I still managed to hold my ground just the same. If I either snapped any further or showed him any sign of weakness or vulnerability, I feared he would take me unto his massive redneck hands after flaying me with more verbal attacks. I didn’t feel conditioned or prepared to withstand such forlorn treatment, especially not from a complete stranger and most especially from a complete stranger in the state of condition I had been previously thrust into. I’d already experienced my fair share of violence tonight and I didn’t need a double-dosage of that ridiculing arduous defeat. He had been right anyways; I was fortunate enough to have found a ride anywhere from anyone, especially in this heap of dense woodlands. I simply let my feelings harbor enough pent-up rage to blurt out something I hadn’t initially meant to say but wound up saying anyways, very much to my disadvantage. A few minutes of awkward silence followed closely behind us until I apathetically broke the ice.
\t“Look, I’m sorry for snapping on you back there, man. You see, it’s just that I’m in pain, confused and really not entirely sure of what to do once I get into town. You understand my reasoning, right? It’s not like I meant to hurt or offend you any.” I said.
\t“You mean IF you get into town… right, you bastard faggot?” He whispered. His face remained stony and unflinching. Deton’s gaze stayed glued upon the road ahead.
\t“What?” I asked. My eyes grew wide with shock. He caught me entirely off my guard. In a heap of forlorn silence, he looked upon me with maniacal flaming eyes. The pupils had retracted to slivers and his irises were somehow illuminated with a glimmering blaze of red and orange.
\t“Ya’ll heard me, little fuckin’ coon-faggot.” Deton said with great force, practically shoving out his words outward to me as if I’d received a last-minute cue in a Broadway musical. I stared, frozen in place. My heart shut down entirely. My testicles sunk up into my stomach. What I’d hoped would never happen, had just happened.
\t“What? D’ya thinking that I’m just willing to give any of you hard-headed furry-murry-purry shitheads a ride for free? I doubt it, sonny. Ya’ll best just sit tight and relax, this ride will be wrappin’ up soon enough, you’ll see.” Deton said, smiling and butting his wrist up against my arm playfully.

Panic crept into my thoughts and my veins felt warm with adrenaline as I peered out the window and noticed that we had begun to speed up. Deton was practically flooring the truck through the dense forest thicket and I was his unruly passenger, forced to bear witness to the madness of his enveloping fury. His knuckles turned white and clenched down firmly upon the wheel, audibly cracking and popping. His cigarette was still burning between his lips, nearly down to the filter now. Embers flew from the tip and brushed upon his face but he never even broke a stride, no reaction whatsoever, not even when a small still-burning clump landed upon the red-lined pulpy surface of his cornea and sizzled for a brief moment before extinguishing with a puff of smoke. He just kept staring forward at the road like a mechanical drone set to autopilot.
\t“Sir, may you please let me out? I’ll happily walk from here. I didn’t mean to disturb you.” I said with a slight tremble under my voice.
\tHe just laughed.
\t“Yup… ain’t no such fuckin’ thing like that gonna be happenin’ tonight, kiddo.” Deton said to me, grinning wide and chuckling aloud beneath his breath.
\t“I beg your pardon?” I said, staring at him through a cacophonic daze.
\t“Shut your damn cock-sucking muzzle, faggot. Just sit still and enjoy the ride.” He replied with stern hostility while bearing a goofy insane grin between his stubble-strewn cheeks.

My heart kicked back to life again as it rose up to my throat, pumping and throbbing off the charts. My stomach tensed up tighter than a snare drum and felt weighted down as if it had been injected with sulfuric acid and radiator fluid then shaken via martini strainer. My chest felt numb and small prickly twinges of gooseflesh began to flood across the surface of my body beneath my skin which caused my fur to rise up like static electricity running a steady current through my limbs, how a cat must have felt when disturbed from its nightly meal or poked with a silver fork. Curtis Deton had no intention of helping me at all. In fact, he had only one deep-rooted intension in mind from the get-go. What else could he have wanted to do with me if not lend a hand and grant me a ride into town? All at once I feared for my safety and well-being. He had no intent to help me at all. He hungered for my soul, truly desperate to see me fall prey to his will. I was on the verge of either being raped or murdered by this southern-accented maniac with his molar-capped trinkets and his neck protruded with veins visibly pulsating beneath his high-strung expression of drastic irrationality.
\t“Look, just let me out right now and there won’t be any trouble. I won’t tell anyone about this and you won’t have to do anything out of line to keep this whole thing under wraps. I’ll never tell a soul about anything that happened so far.” I said, trying to plead a bargain over my life with Deton, who was now all but gone upstairs.
\tHe giggled maniacally at my desperation and went right back to ignoring me while driving faster than any stuntman should ever be allowed to in a regulated fashion. I began to grow impatient and suddenly I let my mind speak for itself yet again; another bad move, quite possibly the worst one of all this time around; fighting words with a knife.
\t“Listen motherfucker, I know people who could kill your goddamned bitch-ass in the blink of an eye and if you don’t let me go, I’ll be back with a couple of guys who will certainly rough your face up as good as mine was. Hell, we’ll just drag this whole damn thing to the proper authorities so they can issue a restraining order on you—”
\t“—SHUT UP QUEER-BAIT!!!” Deton shrieked ecstatically.
\tHe reached up and clenched my cheek-tuft in the firm grip of his rugged callused hand and shoved my head violently aside, slamming it into the window of the passenger-side door. The glass shattered from the force of impact and I felt like my skull had been crushed along with it. My good un-patched eye remained shut tight, thank goodness. Otherwise I would have been permanently blind from the spraying shards of glass that rained down upon my face and lap, bouncing off my muzzle and shoulder. The momentous collision with the window was so fierce that I immediately grew woozy once more. A dizzying rush of indubitable nausea sweltered within my stomach and my head felt dream-like, euphoric and tremendously distraught. The whooshing echoes of trees and roadside guardrails rushing by outside along with the blaring roar of the truck’s engine became distant, hollow and overall entirely unimportant to me. I inhaled deep and felt a torrential numbness steadily creep into my lungs. I passed out and fainted upon his grimy stain-dabbled truck seat. I felt no impact, no tingling, no open gashed wounds or throbbing bruises any longer. I was dead to the world. I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

Until I woke up stripped nude, tied down and gagged in the back of Curtis Deton’s pickup truck, I couldn’t feel a single thing beforehand. How long had I been passed out? I had no idea in mind what exactly happened between being physically assaulted and this very moment in which I was now living. Had I passed out that harshly? Utilizing extreme caution, my one eyelid fluttered gently open so as not to expose the sensitive gelatinous surface of my single non-patched eyeball to any excess dirt or grime that my face had been nearly buried in. My tail was strapped to my thigh with twined rope, tied down forcefully enough to rupture even the bare skin beneath my fur. The pain I had once felt before hitching a ride with the redneck maniac nearly tripled in potency and my entire body was now a howling, searing vessel of pure hurt, a bare hollowed chassis of mixed alcohol and ammonia swashed through muscle filaments and lit aflame. The freak had removed all my torn clothing including the hoodie-jacket and thrown the pile into a nearby bonfire pit, judging by the soft orange glow that reflected upon a nearby lumbering redwood tree adjacent to the damp earthen pickup bed which I was laying in and the smell of charred cloth. Moths fluttered all around me by the hundreds, suspended in the air like small intangible bi-planes with ribbed antennae for turret guns. Never before had I seen so many moths gathered in one distinct location.

As I lay steady, I began to feel a slight hankering sensation swarming my body, a ticklish irritation that caused my hairs to stand on end and my knees to tingle profusely. I quickly realized that ants were crawling all over me, utilizing my unconscious dead weight as their surrogate anthill. I shrieked and shook violently in a feeble attempt to bat them off and I kicked something sharp, thin and brittle. A crunching sound emanated from within the pickup bed and I froze steady, peering down toward my paw-padded shep-coon feet, dismal with fraught and worry. A pile of moist, rotting bones had been piled into the truck’s cargo. I had caved in a skull during my spastically strained yet brief kicking phase. Insane horror settled into my conscious awareness and I held back every ounce of breath so as not to scream out loud deliriously. Maggots roosted upon a tattered ribcage, covered with a thin filmy layer of outstretched decomposing skin and yellow curdled flesh. Femur bones lay propped up against my shins, black and covered with small bead-like indentations. The small punctured holes I saw were human teeth marks. The realization crept in like a pitiful strain of pneumonia or terminal stage-4 cancer and I could only lie perfectly still in captive disgust. Curtis Deton wasn’t just a rapist or murdering madman. The man (or the monster, more or less) was a damn cannibal, a bottom-feeding vulture, one who had thrived upon killing, cooking and eating his fellow hitchers. I refrained from passing out again and swallowed back a spewing shot of vomit inside my canine maw that was constantly threatening to evict whatever previous digested meal I’d consumed the night before outward rather violently. That would only attract more insects, one thing I’d rather not wish for right at this very moment.

I rolled from my side and lay outstretched upon my back, arms tied up tightly beside me, legs bent upward at the knees. I felt another set of bones rub up against my shoulder and I looked down wearily to see the skeletal remains of a long-deceased rotting fetus. The scent of decay was pungent and acrid in my nose, sickly-sweet like pure vanilla extract mixed with seminal fluids and stale chocolate-coated cherries. Now there was no holding back. I crooked my head over to my side and gagged intensely. Projectile vomit spewed forth like a chunky water balloon filled with mushroom soup exploding against a thumbtack. Goopy trickles of warm acidic bile leaked down the side of my cheek. I could taste some of the turkey pot pie and porter ale I’d eaten and drank previously, before being picked up and brought into this protective barrier of natural eloquence. The taste in my mouth was awful, positively revolting. It also burned my throat to puke so harshly. I could barely breathe enough as it was with the feeling of maggots devouring and feasting all around me, squirming and gnawing and wriggling and mashing against pulpy rotted flesh, little parasites playing out their roles in the great never-ending performance of the cycle of life. Ants festered upon every square inch of my body still; some even crawled up into my nostrils. They were excavating my sinuses, tickling me into a turgid sneeze. I snorted and exhaled deep and hard, releasing a potent expulsion of air, blowing out a wad of ant-covered phlegm that splattered upon the petite infantile skull, lopsided and bent in an askew manner, seeming to stare lovingly back up at me.
\tIf I survive this, I’ll certainly never toy with Russians ever again for the rest of my life, I thought. I began to weep uncontrollably with fright and impending defeat, shedding a steady stream of uneasy tears down my tarnished shep-coon face onto a patch of clotted dirty red hair follicles, perhaps from a high-school cheerleader or somebody’s old former lover or mistress. I saw a silhouetted black figure move from the left side of my singular peripheral vision and approach toward me from the side of the truck.

I shut up immediately and glanced upward toward a large outstretched shadow adorning the slant-angled redwood that towered above the truck itself. The black shape couldn’t possibly have belonged to Curtis Deton, or any human for that matter. It stretched outward with thin, gangly arms that appeared to house spiked claws upon flayed fingertips, more like a pair of wings outstretched from each side, bending and contorting, visible from the glow of the bonfire’s hellish burning smoke pit. The lower-half of its body seemed to resemble a spider’s abdomen. A raspy crooning sound could be heard which reminded me of miles of shrubby fields teeming with cicadas, screeching and swarming during annual harvest season. The black figure’s wings folded inward, retracting back into the abdomen-shape with squelching noises barreling out into the night. The body itself assumed a newfound identity, transforming before my very eyes. After the shape became human-like again, it approached the truck slowly and elegantly. The shadow grew smaller and thinner as the figure trotted closer. I urinated into the truck bed at this point, scared out of my wits and uncertain as to how I’d escape from this damn predicament. Whoever (whatever) Curtis Deton was, I would find out soon enough… much to my own absolute dismay.

The forest’s late-night breeze descended head-strong and deep into a thorough windswept frost that crept over my naked body. My tail felt numb, like a foreign limb that didn’t rightfully belong attached to my hindquarters. The ants had retreated almost entirely. Something that I couldn’t exactly comprehend or understand but I could certainly distinguish at a whim - they had disappeared from plain sight, as if they were under some sort of command from this horrifying creature, this demonic figure in disguise as a human, a redneck, a buck-toothed Liberal-fearing mountain man. The maggots still kept their stride gallantly, squirming and suckling upon rotted flesh and exposed bone marrow like excited children during Halloween, banqueting from overfilled bags of cavity-inducing sugary-sweet candy. To the maggots, these piles of human remains were the grand equivalent to the candy, and the cannibalistic little suckers themselves served as the hungry, over-hyper children. The remnants of entrails and pulpy sinew were a delicacy to the pristine rice-shaped larvae and they were the luckiest creatures of all to have hitched a ride with Curtis Deton, unlike myself, not feeling as fulfilled or content as they were. Flies buzzed mercilessly throughout the air, clustered in massive enveloping groups, settling upon the slew of human decay and filth that surrounded me. Before long, I’d forgotten that I wasn’t alone. As I glanced upward from the pickup bed, trying to catch a peek around, that was when I saw the shadowy figure, nearly towards the edge of the pickup truck, leaves crunching beneath each calculated reeling step. A fairly balding ridge of human head popped over the metallic ribbed edge of the flatbed like a polished cue ball, followed by a furrowed brow, a pair of hazy clouded eyes, a slightly crooked thickly-bridged nose that curved in a hook, rosy-red cheeks and a queerly daft Cheshire-cat grin that spiraled up toward soot-powdered ears. Curtis Deton stood over the truck bed and watched as I, staring attentively from inside, plotted his intentions. Judging by his expression, he seemed to be rather pleased with his most recent capture. Rather pleased, indeed.

I pleaded with every ounce of strength left in me to Curtis Deton.
\t“P-p….please… j-just let… m…me go…” I begged sympathetically.
\t“Not a chance in hell. Sorry Maxwell, but this is for your own good. You see, nothing infuriates me more than a god-forsaken abysmal threat such as you and your filthy type and I mean nothing.” Deton said in a bellowing snarl. “Degenerative fodder like you makes the rest of us appear very bad through the eyes of others. I honestly don’t know what you were thinking in the first place, coming out into these woods, looking to rustle up some form of trouble or another, hoping to make amends to people you can’t possibly make amends to any longer. What a lame-brain you are, coon-dog.”
\tI noticed immediately that Curtis Deton’s good-natured Southern drawl had changed entirely. Instead, he sounded like an irritated grizzly seeking compensation for stolen salmon, or one truly pissed-off mob-boss toad with a severe head cold. Deton stared silently toward me, housing a reprimanding expression upon his face. Bloodshot eyes bulged in their pudgy hallowed sockets, looking at me unflinchingly with a hideous conniving intensity, never blinking once.
\t“W-what the…?” I whispered to myself in an incomprehensive daze, wondering what happened to his normal speaking voice. In fact, I wondered what exactly had happened to Curtis Deton himself.

Alarmed at how abysmally reformed Deton’s voice sounded, how foreign he had suddenly become in an audible sense and in such a short amount of time (immediately in fact), I grew even more frightened than ever before. I knew I was still talking with him, but I also knew the real Deton, whoever he may have been, was already long-since dead. This atrocity that stood before me was something else entirely, something that had decided to renovate the man’s body temporarily in the most uncomfortable method imaginable. I gagged in the back of my throat, attempting to hold sway over my severely nauseated stomach at the disturbing and all-out disgusting thought.
\t“You and your ‘anthropomorphic’ kind are all the absolute bloody same. Do you realize how many others like you I’ve killed in the past? How many others like you who have all come at me with their own exact same problems that need assistance? Menial threats and retaliations made for and against me? I imagine you don’t have a clue in the world where exactly we are right now, huh? That’s just as fine as can be, young coon-dog. I made sure that both you and I couldn’t be discovered under any easy circumstances by just anyone. That would spoil my dinner, Maxwell, and I absolutely HATE having my evening supper spoiled by any outside influences… I’ve certainly seen many people these last couple months, as you can now plainly see before you too.” Deton said to me matter-of-factly as he waved a skinny malnourished hand toward the piles of mangled bones, fly-coated fleshy clumps and misshapen cadavers that surrounded me in the pickup’s trunk-bed.

I sought out the strength and the will to speak up louder than usual this time, feeling the strain of nausea dwindling down a bit just long enough for me to be heard.
\t“But you… you’ve killed humans! Your own kind! You… killed and ate your own people! You stashed their bones like rubbish, like table scraps! Christ, you even killed a woman and… and…” I choked back on a lump forming in my esophagus and a steady-flowing stream of tears that threatened to over-empower my emotions again while he smiled proudly, “…you sick bastard, you even killed an unborn child… you murdered a pregnant woman and ate her, maybe her baby as well. Ate them both just like fucking hors d'oeuvres after the main entree!” I said.
\tUnbelievably, Deton laughed at me. He laughed deep and heartily with his hands propped evenly against his hips, nodding impressively.

Tired and weary, I glanced down beside me and regarded the fetal remains, coated with maggots which looked under dim lighting conditions like small moving white rice pellets and a goopy wad of snot-drowned ants. Beetles and cockroaches crept in and out of its hollowed eye sockets, infesting the infantile cranium with freshly-laid larvae.
\t“The woman wasn’t just any old whore wandering the outskirts of Eureka, mind you, my dear sweet coon-doggie. She wasn’t just anybody whom you’d consider truly important in the long run either, not to me as well, or rather to the poor soul of this poverty-stricken fool’s body, this pitiful man whose hollow vessel I now reside in. His very spirit was once embedded within this construct of skin and bone, this sloppy confided pile of human detritus, but no more. He is dead and soon you, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux, will be too, fair and square. You’ll join him along with his beloved wife and beautiful unborn child. We would’ve been such a dear, sweet family, wouldn’t we? Yes, we would have been such a beautiful picture-perfect quaint little union for anyone to feast their eyes upon, to be related to, to be acquainted with, to be admired by others. Perfection has never been more… well, perfect. All things must end soon enough though.” Deton exclaimed with his head bowed down and his lips curled into a mocking pout, a false sympathetic expression pasted upon his icy-cold face.
\t“What do you think of that, dear sweet little faggot?” He asked me.

I lay frozen in place, on the verge of upchucking again at the gag-inducing scent of death that surrounded me. Flies buzzed all around me, scavenging with apathetic repetition, droning endlessly with a numbing hum, a high-pitched tone of flapping wings and putrid regurgitation.
\t“Maxwell, what do you think of that, I said?” He asked me again.
\tI gazed at his contorted face with thin prying confused absurdity.
\t“Wait… how did you know my full name? I only gave you my first name before, just how in the hell did you know what my full… name was? I don’t…” I replied to him, trailing off into incoherent mumbling. I haven’t been smashed through a window so hard to recall whether I’d ever disclosed such information to a complete and total stranger once before already.
\tDeton said, “You are confused, dear coon-boy. I can see it in your one good hybrid eye; you know the one that was spared from the massive meth-lab incident all those years ago? You can’t fool me, little coon-dog bitch.”
Once again, my heart took a dive-bomb trip down south to Dixie.
\t“All this will make much more sense in all due time, my splendid creature! You will soon find out more than you may ever wish to know.” Deton said. He smiled, licking his chapped cracking lips with his cold-sore coated tongue, popped his knuckled beneath his fists, and chuckled evilly like a man with nothing to lose.

Curtis Deton walked around to the rear bumper and pulled up hard on a release latch which caused the tailgate door to come swinging down with a snapping bang that startled me half to death. His torso was coated in a dark crimson liquid that appeared to stain every follicle of chest and groin hair upon the surface of his infectious skin. He reached in and grabbed hold of my ankles, struggling hard to drag me out of the truck’s rear flatbed surface. It wasn’t as hard as he predicted though. I refused to fight his advances any further. Being thrown into the bed of a truck with the fetid remains of others can be an emotionally and mentally exhausting experience for anyone. My body slid along the slimy remains of corroded skin and gobbets of spoiled yellowish-beige fleshy matter. A large rope of pulpy flattened intestines that had been caked upon the corrugated surface of the flatbed served as a slimy makeshift lubricant that allowed me to glide along quite easily. The forlorn tickling sensation crept back into my feet, feeling like the ants had made a triumphant return, only when I looked down I could see nothing but the man’s clammy hands cupped in a vice-grip around my ankles, pulling me further out from the dilapidated vehicle. I slid out and flew downward, my head narrowly missing the edge of the tailgate door and I fell fast, hitting the ground with a dull impending thump that barreled out into the evening like a muffled gunshot, creating a mushrooming cloud of dust from where I’d initially made impact.
\t“Hoo-wee! That was a lot more difficult than it looked. You are a trifle bit heavy, Maxwell! I’d advise you lose some weight, but I suppose it’s a bit too late for that now, isn’t it? Perhaps I can help you shed some of those excess pounds? What say you, my love? Have you ever seen first-hand what liposuction surgery can do for a man of fair fatty excess, son?” Deton said, giggling in response.
\t“Go fuck yourself.” I replied without missing a beat or stuttering once.
\t“Beg your pardon?” He asked with a queer curiosity. His eyes lit up with shock.
\t“You heard me. The local police will file a missing person’s report. They’ll track your sick ass down and my connections won’t rest until they see your head impaled on a pike, you fucking sick animal. You deranged psychotic freak, do you really expect to get away with all this and not think any repercussions will come of it? I’ll see that you go down in flames, you maniacal piece of shi—”
\t“—Now, now, now, that wasn’t a very nice thing to say to your ol’ buddy, was it?” Deton said, crouching down and clamping his vice-grip over my muzzle, jerking my head up to face him dead-on. I snarled and his grip tightened over my snout, firmly grasping hold of my jawbone. He looked into my eye and pushed my head aside, letting go of my muzzle with limited restraint.

I lay back down perfectly still, crumpled into a fetal position, eyeing the naked man who stood before me with arms folded across his chest and head nodding horizontally, weary with regret. A bony limb dangled from the edge of the opened tailgate door. It waved back and forth like a ghastly pendulum, coated with maggots and moist putrid rot. It seemed to be exchanging a sordid wave towards me. I could see a wedding band on one bony finger that had remained intact.
\t“I’m going to have to teach you some manners, dear boy.” Deton said with an abrasive calmness that frightened me extensively.
\tHe reached down towards me as his knees bent and popped and cracked under pressure. His thumb-sized cock dangled reproachfully, shriveled up well enough to resemble a skewer of dried prunes, nestled upon a tuft of chestnut-brown curly pubic hairs. At once I caught sight of a faint glinting from his wrist. A jagged hunting blade lay fastened in the grip of his hand, palms bent with sausage fingers gripped over its silver hilt. He was on the verge of cutting me open and gutting me like a fish, eating away at my intestines while I could only lie awake and fully conscious, watching him feast upon me, screaming in agonizing shock and dismay. Instead of cutting into my breastplate however, he carved at the twine rope that held my arms, legs and tail fastened together.

With a brisk popping report, the rope immediately snapped loose and I shook free from its impending grip. I stood up faster than a cornered fox on the verge of attacking an oncoming jackal in self-defense, eyes opened wider than tea plates, staring at the nude figure clutching a serrated gorging blade in his grasp. Deton swung the melee weapon back and forth in his hand like a samurai practicing a knife-juggling routine. Without a single word of hesitation, he chucked it over his dirt-smudged shoulder, casting it directly into the pit of the large bonfire erected behind him. Upon landing with a faint snapping clink, the flames bellowed outward explosively with green and blue sparks that rose like pyrotechnic rocket fuel drums doused with gasoline and lit, belching and spewing fire in flashing vicarious discharges. A sulfuric scent of burning hair and scorched fingernails rose to my nostrils. I saw a translucent figure appear suddenly from behind Curtis Deton’s adhered body with each flash of stark vivid light. It peered down upon me with holistic dark-red pulsating eyes and appeared to be smiling with conniving hungered intent, teeth bared like round sharpened daggers carved from onyx stone.

 “I won’t lie to you, dear Maxwell. I’m not at all as I appear to be through your eyes. You only see what you choose to see, a pitiful human being with a crooked bridge of rotten teeth and other unsatisfying features, but I am more than you can ever comprehend or understand. Oh my sweet coon-hound boy, it’s a true pity we cannot possibly see to making amends anytime soon. I would have loved more than anything to have seen each other eye-to-eye. So tell me, why on Earth did you mindfully refuse to pay back the local Russian insurgency? They sent me to ask you this, you see. I’m a middle-man of theirs, a messenger of sorts, if you will. So tell me young man… when exactly did you intend on paying them back?”
\tI glowered upon the disfigured mountain man, one hand-paw propped up against the petrified stump of an ancient long-dead redwood, the other hiding my genitals from his inferior gaze. His lifeless, glassy stare penetrated my one good eye and froze my soul, feeding upon my inner psyche. He was spearheading me with a thoroughly potent mental attack. I felt my will to resist slipping mercilessly under the folds for his had simply been too strong.
\t“I opted for alternative means of paying them back but they wouldn’t listen though! If they sent you to kill me, they must have been awfully desperate because I swear, I was about to give them what they wanted! I swear to God, I swear on my life, on my mother’s life, my brother, even my father! Please believe me!” I croaked aloud, frightened and mortified beyond all comprehension.
\tCurtis Deton rolled his head back and bellowed aloud with roaring outrageous laughter. His molars had been capped with dental fillings that flashed from inside his wide-open mouth and immediately he returned his prying eyes back toward me with a stern expression fastened upon his face. His eyes appeared to be glowing with that same esoteric light I saw from his apparitional shadow earlier.
\t“You should never have stolen from those Russians, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux. No you never should have done such a thing, such a terrible, uncivil, unruly, irresponsible thing to have done. They sent me to find you, you know. After they beat you and threw you in this forest to die, they called upon me to track you down. To find you and finish the job.” Deton said with a shriveling maniacal tone.
\tSuddenly, his voice began to chafe incomprehensibly. Deton began to sound like Nick Nolte with a bad case of bronchitis. He grit his teeth and with a virulent snapping noise, he spit out a molar, then a lateral incisor, another molar, a wisdom tooth, and soon enough the rest of his teeth followed suit, tumbling out of his mouth in a consecutive parade of mangled enamel and fading pulpy gum root.
\t“Such a bad, baaad thing for you to have done…” Deton said in a gummy murmur, devoid of what little teeth he had left now. His eyes grew even wider than ever and his tear glands began to visibly swell up, trickling with blood. Something crazy was happening to Curtis Deton.
\t“Soooooo veeeeeerrrryyyyy baaaaad!” Deton hollered aloud into the sky, arms outstretched, legs jerking against each other.

The truck caught on fire. Large coarse flames engulfed the flatbed and caused a thick haze of smoke to swelter with a gagging scent which had reminded me of an unclean crematorium filled to the brink with spoiled moldy cadavers. The tires popped with piercing hollow exploding bangs, causing the vehicle itself to rock and sway. The gagging scent of burning flesh and hair filled the air and overpowered my sense of smell so wickedly, I felt nauseated all over again. I saw the corpses shriveling and contorting in the bellowing fury of flames, crumpling into charred ashen remains in their newfound crematorium, crumbling the way a piece of parchment paper held up to a stovetop would. The skulls all lay piled in a heap, burning and charring. Silently, one of the heads reared back from the burning pyre and appeared to stare directly at me, a skeletal grin bore freely upon its petite face. It was the remains of the dead infant. It was casting a ghastly smile at me, staring from hollowed sockets with a keen interest. If there were still eyes, it never would have looked away from me. It kept staring with a sense of sincere pondering suspicion. It took every ounce of strength and will inside me to keep from screaming my poor head off.

As if I couldn’t possibly see anything much worse than I had before, I saw the most awful thing I’ve ever seen in my life in the illuminated raging hellfire. If the truckload of dead rotting carcasses and excitably attentive fetal remains didn’t prod at my sanity, this would most certainly have been the coup de grace that would’ve unabashedly sent me over the edge of reason and logic, had my tolerance been any weaker. Curtis Deton’s face began to tremble rapidly. His entire body in fact began to twitch insanely, jerking harder than an epileptic in a strobe-lit mirrored room within a carnival fun house. His arms sprawled out to the sides in an upside-down V-shape that almost appeared Jesus-like, similar to the small crucifixion cross ornament that hung from the truck’s rear-view window, now lit aflame in the scorching vehicle’s cabin. Deton’s legs which had been angled perfectly even alongside his hips began to buckle and bend into a horrific feral animalistic posture, bones cracking and snapping, popping with every slight movement into an upright digitigrade stance. His swollen shriveled cock began to grow erect, a purple phallic appendage bulging and bleeding like a ruptured vein from his penile aperture, or piss-hole in lament terms. Something hideous was happening to the body of Curtis Deton. Something was truly, unnaturally wrong. Someone
(Don’t fool yourself Maxwell this is more like something now get it straight someTHING)

was attempting to be let loose from the body of the doomed human vessel, which served as a holding cell for... something, as Deton himself had told me moments before, along the lines of which I could never comprehend or understand. Thinking back, I decided I never wanted to try figuring it out. Seeing it first-hand had been more than enough for me - way more than enough.

As I stared in complete and unnerving terror, the body of Curtis Deton began to… well, for the lack of a better term, change.
\tHe began to bleed from his gaping mouth, gushing scarlet crimson upon a nearby pile of leaves and barren topsoil. One of his eyes had somehow popped free from its socket and dangled freely, shriveled like a prune, hanging attached to a stringy optic nerve. His arms began to contort and shift, sprouting small thorns along the outer ridges of his biceps that punctured through his matted loosely-hung skin. With a startling flash of haste, his fingers bent so far astray that they all snapped and twisted backwards, dislodging his knuckles with loud macabre popping that sounded like heated popcorn kernels exploding in a massive kettle. His fingers separated from one another, torn apart and ripped at the webbing in-between like bamboo shards splitting into fragments, severing veins and arteries until his arms resembled five spindly tentacle-laden fleshy bristles on both sides. Membranous fluids seeped in between the flayed fingers, forming large nearly-transparent wings, fuzzy and coursing with intricate varicose veins and sharpened claw-tips. His torso split down the crease of his abs with a shockingly loud snap, exposing a putrid layer of muscular tendons, drenched in a dark crimson-red liquid that looked like infected blood, spraying out in a torrential mist. His muscles contracted and squirmed aside with a life of their own, bearing forth a crooked inhuman breastplate. His ribs shattered one at a time as his torso assumed a disfigured shape reminiscent of a black widow spider, an enormous black fur-lined abdomen jutted out from where his tailbone had once been. His spine creaked, flexing into a curvaceous cleft shape. His legs separated into four mangled fragments each, smothered with petite wavy vacuuming bristles and fetid excrement. He opened his jaw so wide that it dislodged from his skull and hung wearily from his neck. His tongue stretched down to his esophagus in a Cartel Tie, swaying around loosely like a blind worm seeking shelter. The top half of his skull severed after being thrown back in a whiplashing jolt, bobbing the dried eyeball against his cheek like a rubber paddle ball, exposing a round filmy pinkish-grey ball of cranial matter that appeared to be a swollen cerebellum. From the gap of his throat sprouted an infant wolf cub’s disfigured head, protruded in a messy batch of filmy fluids. It began to yelp and bark loudly, yowling and crying uncontrollably, coughing up coagulated bile. Suddenly eight pitch-black eyes blinked open upon the surface of its muzzle and it laid its sight upon me, settling down at the drop of a hat, yipping and growling as innocently as any puppy would. The expression in its face spoke of love and compassion, as if it wanted to be played with… but I knew it was all a ploy. I wasn’t just born yesterday. There’s no doubt in mind that I would have easily fainted again if I hadn’t wound up discovering the strength and the will within me to start running right the fuck away into the forest to escape from the hideous monstrosity that had once been Curtis Deton, but no more.

Sprinting through the dense brush of the vast Redwoods, I hoped to be free of the demonic presence once and for all. It chased after me though, thrashing wildly, pummeling down anything in its path to make a clearing. I heard trees snapping in half, roots unearthed from their deep-nested habitat, water from a nearby stream splashing noisily. Over all this devastation, I could also hear the demon itself screeching with a high-pitched wailing that echoed through the woods and bounced off the redwood trees surrounding me. The sound was ear-piercing, enough to throw my equilibrium off and cause me to run into a lumbering gait, as I ignorantly tripped over a small bundle of rooted stumps beside me. The creature also sounded famished and disgraced, let down and disgusted miserably by seeing its fine main course of the evening (yours truly) run off without having a chance to indulge upon at least a small trickle of my bodily fluids.

I stood up and jolted through the thick brush and foliage, the dull ache in my leg all but forgotten now. I kept my arms held out far and wide to push aside any obstructions, never looking back to catch even a single moment’s glance. Before long, I arrived at a large hollowed-out petrified redwood trunk and leapt into it, hiding away from sight. I heard the creature outside shambling along, taking long drawn-out steps; spindly legs squishing down upon weathered dry leaves and twigs, each advance pitching forth a terrifying rumble into the ground. It must have been rather angry with me not staying long enough to hear what it had to say, so instead it bellowed its words out into the night with a series of blood-curdling wails which sounded like ambiance from a schizophrenic’s worst nightmare. When it screamed, the sound fastened into my mind… it was a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard before, stemming from its deepest vocal regions. Something like an emphysema patient mixed with a dying ewe.
\t“FAGS like you never amount to ANYTHIIIING! You will all die by my hand and my will alone and not even God or its minions will stop me in doing so! Piss on your fucking God, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux! I am your God now, little coon-boy faggot! Come on out here and bow down to your God! Kneel before me and let me suck your brains out through your nostrils with pride, my sweet little sperm-gargling faggot!” It screamed.
\tThe demon pressed on, hollering aloud in a series of shrieking wails, possessing an impatient tone of voice beneath its raspy, croupy snarling. It sounded completely starved.

I remained in place silently. I sat perched up against a strip of worn bark, frozen solid without even ushering in a single breath. Near my finger-paw, a banana slug oozed along sluggishly atop a clump of moss. I could only sit and stare at it, proboscis eyes swaying steadily, a trail of slime in its wake. I sat as still as a sculptor’s nude visual study and conjured nightmarish possibilities of what would happen if the affront to God caught me right here and now, what kind of indescribable misery I would face. I remained perfectly still, listening to faint crinkling and thrashing from within the forest. It sounded distant, perhaps at least four to eight hundred feet away. If the screaming died down solemnly enough, I’d make a break for it. I’d run as fast as I could possibly go, away from the presence of the horrific entity that now hunted for me assertively.
\tIt spoke.
\t“What was that, Maxwell? Did you hear something? I sure did…” It said, sounding more like ten feet away. The will to sprint far, far away had never been stronger than in that one infallible moment. I thought for sure I was a goner. Luckily though, after a brief moment of silence, the demon continued to speak aimlessly to absolutely no one, and I breathed deep, letting loose an exasperated sigh of relief.

“If you are praying for help, I’ll deliver it to you in the form of a tire-iron rammed down your bastard throat! You can run from me, Maxwell Horacio Blackburnadeaux, but you’ll never be able to hide from me forever, you drug-addicted little boy-slut! I’m well-nigh aware of your life, dear sweet Maxwell. I know the grand, obscure truth behind it all… you, my boy, are a genuine fuck-up! A living, breathing failure! If you’ll just give me your whereabouts, I’ll make it all better for you, my dear sweet young luscious boy. You won’t regret my promise, you fucking faggot whore, I promise!” The beast hollered aloud with a raspy shrill tone.
\tAnother rumbled slamming sound followed by a groaning and the dull whump of a falling tree, more leaves shuffled, a boulder rolling aside, a hellish hyena scream.
\t“I bet you’d love to… pay a visit to your delicious bitch of a mother? Maybe your retarded younger brother can come along as well, eh Maxie-poo? You can have so much fun! How does a three-way gangbang with the charred carcasses of my old family and yours all at once sound? Quite remarkable, I’d imagine… wouldn’t that just be nice? You can try banging your poor young ignorant-minded little virgin brother while licking at your sweet mother’s whore cu–”
\tFor my own sake and for the sake of my dearly beloved family, no longer alive on this plane of existence upon this day and age, I covered my canine ears with my palms quickly. No way was I about to let on to what this monster was talking about regarding my own family. I knew the freak was only trying to get into my head, to upset and disturb me, to cause me to come out screaming bloody murder in a fit of exasperated grief, only to ignorantly expose myself, like a free sample of biscotti soup in a supermarket. I wouldn’t give into what that… thing… was saying though. I knew my family, it didn’t, and that was that – the final step, the short straw, the deal-breaker, the incredulous truth of the matter. After a few minutes of null and void silence, I pulled my palms away from my ears to hear if the demon was still yammering on about them. I was pleasantly surprised to hear its statements just beginning to wrap up though.
\t“…you pathetic little shit! My family and yours would get along rather well, methinks! What say you, little slut?! Do you want to know how my kind endures an orgasm, Maxwell? Let me just say that it makes your standard everyday ‘climax’ look like a slight heart murmur by comparison. There are meat hooks and mile-long strands of barbed wire involved, Maxwell. Maybe I’ll try a little foreplay with you a bit before I devour you whole… what do you say to that, young lassie? Feel like taking one for the team? I’ll be gentle with you I promise… perhaps maybe someday we can even invite your sweet old man? I’m sure your dearly devoted father has a lot to catch up with you, gorgeous young coon-dog. Lots to catch up on, indeed…”
\tI waited for the words to come with flying colors and sure enough I wasn’t let down any. This demon knew me all too well; better than most anyone else could ever say or claim they did.
\t“Perhaps we can invite your loving father to tag along and attend the grand engagement with us? That way he can happily penetrate your young tender coon-dog virgin ass again, how about that? It’ll be so much fun, just like old times once more! Eh, Maxie-poo? What say you, kiddo? How about another butt-full of daddy’s sweet sticky warm sperm to keep you on edge? Wouldn’t that be absolutely delightful, my dear sweet young coon-boy hooker-bitch?” It hollered. The croupy demonic voice echoed with a deafening wail and I struggled to remain perfectly still in spite of the terrifying presence felt all around me.
\tSilence… but not for long.
\t“MAXWELL WHERE ARE YOU GODDAMMIT??! ANSWER ME YOU PATHETIC LITTLE WHORE!!! TELL ME NOW BEFORE I GET REAL ANGRY WITH YOOOU!!! I’M ALREADY FED UP ENOUGH AS IT IIIS!!! DON’T MAKE THIS ANY WORSE, FOR YOUR OWN SAAAKE!!!” The creature shrieked into the ensnaring redwoods, causing my skin to crawl beneath my fur. It sounded pitiful just listening to this thing’s casually-speaking voice but now it sounded God-fearing hideous screaming aloud enraged, motivated by a potent hunger and the thrill of the hunt to kill.

Even though I was terrified out of my wits, I had also felt a surging rage coursing through me. Not only was I scared to death, but I was also angry at the demon. This anger must have been apprehensive at first to bear its true face, but now I had felt very nearly overwhelmed with its rabid intensity. My heart beat through my chest and emotions poured through me like a stream of sulfuric acid drenching a mechanic’s exposed unshielded hand. I wondered who or what in the hell this entity could possibly have thought it was, preaching to me about my family the way it did. How cruel and misinformed the creature’s knowledge of my own personal background and history had been! My mother was a saint who struggled all her life to get herself better and my little brother was taken far too early from us no thanks to a hit-and-run incident. He was, however, fairly right about my father. My old man did abuse me when I was younger, but he meant no harm by it and I know this to be true – he had an awful lot on his plate back in the day. I’ve forgiven him of all his wrongdoings since that terrible time. To hell with Curtis Deton and whatever became of his body for defiling my own family in such a harsh manner!

As much as I had wanted to, I couldn’t afford to run just yet. Thinking back about what the hellish monstrosity mentioned to me about my family and his spending time together had drawn forth far too many sinister memories, harkening pastimes that penetrated me emotionally and left me in a silent corrosive state of sheer entropy. I suddenly felt entirely and overwhelmingly exhausted. As softly and as silently as I could muster, I began to weep, cautiously fearing the entire time that the nightmarish presence would creep up behind me and skin me alive, littering my insides along the base of the overwhelming forest of the big trees, laughing aloud the entire time.
\tAfter I let my feelings out and cried vehemently enough, I sniffed deep and wiped my eyes dry of streaking tears. Slowly, I peeked out from behind the tree trunk. No sign of life. I barely even heard a swishing of a brush or the snapping of a branch. I could just make out the popping, crackling sound of the truck burning and saw ever-so-slightly a faint orange incandescent glow emanating from where I came running from previously. The insanity had blown over for now and I had felt slightly at ease, but not entirely. I could tell that whatever was now chasing after me was still out there, still close, maybe even right beside me. It could kill me now and I’d probably never even see the deathblow coming.

I crept out from the base of the trunk, peering around in all directions attentively and keeping watch over my surroundings as alertly as a native Viking hunter sent out into the dark underground woods to embark upon an initiative first-time breaking-in hunt. No thumping sounds echoed from the ground. No horrifying screaming came trailing out from the cluttered botches of nearby redwoods. I began to strafe cautiously now through the forest with my one eye peeled wide open, avidly watchful, carefully aware of my surroundings. No sign of the ugly bastard anywhere, thank goodness. Soon enough, I’d run into a nearby road and pray-tell some reliable trustworthy civilization, maybe a traveling family or a couple stoners out on a drug-run whom I’d be able to hitch a ride from. Maybe score some new clothing as well, a suitable bit of shelter, some medical attention, an operating telephone to call up some reliable people to—
\tI heard his youthful voice call out to me.
\t“Brother!”
\tI looked back and saw nobody.
\t“Hey, big Bro!”
\tThat voice sounded all too familiar to me. It hit me almost immediately with a feverish slap to the face. A memory stirred, jilting my senses.
\t“Bro! Help me! I’m over here! That bad man hit me with his car, can you fix my arm, please? Make it better, big bro! I hurt, Maxwell! Help me, please?!”
\tHe walked out from behind a tree and my mind took a turn for the worse. My dead brother stood naked and tattered in shambled right before my very eyes. His arm was crooked and there was a protruding knob of bone jutting out from his bicep where he’d been hit years ago. He regarded me with anxious eyes, frightened and uncertain. I felt tears welt and leak down from the corner of my good eye.
\t“You were never there for us, you little brat.” Another voice proclaimed, suddenly from behind me. I turned around and saw my mother, shriveled and devoid of fur. Her beautiful ringed tail had all but disappeared, now replaced with a jutting branch of filth and matted chafing hair. Her stomach was carved open, exposing a baby shepherd-raccoon fetus from her womb, a botched Cesarean-section. “You let us die without even a wink of thought, Maxwell. You didn’t do good enough by any of us and now look where we are. All dead to the world. You could’ve done more to ensure we stayed living, but you didn’t. You never did, you little shit. Now look at us! We’re dead and rotting. God, I need a fucking hit so bad right now, Max. Have any scag I could inject into my arm, baby?”
\tthey both shambled towards my direction. They walked slowly, droning onward with a penetrating aura of unease emanating from all around their ravaged bodies. They approached me with pointing fingers and frowning faces, stern and forlorn. My brother dangled his broken arm in front of his chest and my mother aimlessly fondled at a large flap of skin that hung from her pelvis like a burlap sack. I turned to run away. I hit him and I was thrust back even further from reality faster than the speed of sound. My dead father stood in front of me, buck-naked and possessing a humongous erection. It dripped with pre-cum and produced a sour musky scent that caused me to gag profusely. It also held a knot formed at its base, for my father was the other half to the equation of my being – a full-fledged German shepherd dog-man. He licked his chapped, crusty lips and gazed upon me with lurid intent. A sultry perverted chuckle emanated from the bowels of his throat.
\t“Ey’there, kiddo. Fancy meeting ya’ll here, eh? Come on over ‘ere so Daddy can feed ya some medicine. It tastes fine, sweet as sugar; one gulp is all it’ll take, boy. One quick swallow and all them fantasies of yers gonna come true before ya very eyes, honey. If you don’t suck, I’ll fuck. Ya’ll never gonna jizz as hard from a girl as you will from yer Daddy’s knotted cock, little bitch. I guarantee it on my life. All our lives, little slut.”
\tI stepped back, polarized beyond all comprehension. I barely even recognized where I was anymore. I wasn’t lost in the depths of the Redwoods. Instead, I was back in my childhood bedroom, back in the old trailer-home I lived in for years. I’d come back to Brookings and I couldn’t be more frightened at the prospect of a full-fledged family reunion.
\t“You are dead. All of you are fucking dead. Quit screwing with my head, Curtis! It won’t work on me forever!”
\tMy father’s forehead sprouted six new pitch-blackened eyes.
\t“Oh, golly-gee Maxwell! I thought this was appealing to your senses?” It asked.
\t“It most certainly isn’t. You’re a sick bastard and I’ve just about had enough of this.”
\tMy mother’s deceased fetus cringed its shriveled head towards me and spoke.
\t“Are you sure you don’t want to be back together with your beloved family once more? I can arrange for a proper reunion, perhaps… something better than this, of course.”
\t“Go to hell.” I said without even thinking twice about it.
\tMy brother pulled his arm off from his shoulder, producing a jettisoning stream of fresh blood. He swung the arm to and fro like a dilapidated rag-doll, panicked beyond mere comfort. His face spelled out complete agony.
\t“OWIE!!! It hurts so bad, big bro! Please help me! Please, help! I can’t stand the pain! I want to be dead! I’d rather be dead than feel this pain! Oh God Maxwell, please!”
\tI just shook my head and turned my eyes away from all three of them. Phantom spirits plagued my sensibilities, tapping into my deepest subconscious memories and thoughts, ascertaining hidden memories that have resonated with me for years. I saw things I’ve never told anybody before during my entire life in the deepest confides of the forest sanctuary upon this doom-laden evening.
\tI heard a vehicle’s engine drawing closer behind me. It shut off and I heard doors open. My family turned away and shrieked with abysmal fear, distraught to shame. His penis went immediately flaccid and he curled up into a fetal position upon a mound of fresh ferns. My mother shoved her dangling skin-flap back into her midsection and fainted to the soil beneath her. My brother simply evaporated into thin air, tear-strewn eyes glowing with a deep crimson glow right before he disappeared.
\t
As I began to think toward the future and a life without Curtis Deton in it, I bumped into a short, portly, no-necked man. He wore a black-suit jacket with black leather slacks and a white freshly-ironed undershirt. He also had a small brown bowtie fastened tightly around his collar, gold buttons fastened upon his cuffs and the most obscene bowl-cut imaginable. He cried out in a startled shout and began to speak aloud in a strange foreign language to me, angrily holding up a Ruger pistol to my face, taking aim at my forehead. Soon enough, a few others like him appeared from a black Mercedes parked upon a small dirt-strewn path which curved and twisted into an unforeseen trail. They too had horrendous bowl-cuts and fancy attire, brandishing AK-47s and Ruger pistols, brandished and exposed, armed to the teeth. Their irises blemished with a turquoise baby-blue tint and wide cubical-shaped heads lacking any signs of necks.
\tThe Russians. Ironically, I ran straight into a half-dozen of them.
\tThis night just kept getting better and better.

They came back into the forest to collect their pay from me but unfortunately for them, what they got would prove to be way more than a mere financial compensation could ever have bargained for. I began to notice a dense population of moths fluttering through the air. At first there were just a few, then a few more, and those few more became a dozen each and suddenly before long a vast bunch began fluttering all around in the night sky, swooping deftly in whimsical flight patterns. They were multiplying by the baker’s dozen. Soon the entire area began to fester with these light hovering insects. All at once, I was reminded of the moths I’d seen awhile back, when Curtis Deton originally kept me tied, bound and captive in the trunk-bed of his pickup truck. These moths, perhaps they served as sentries for the demon? Perhaps they served as a foreshadowing burden of proof – warning indicators that announced silently whenever the demon itself came immaculately close within range. God, I sure hoped not.

The man who yelled apprehensively at me suddenly flung straight up into the air, noosed in a hairy cord. His Ruger fired off once with a supercharged report aimed to his side. The gun slipped immediately out of his grasp, falling to the ground, landing with a dead-weight thump. The body of the Russian man dangled and gagged quite loudly before his neck was severed with a loud muffled twisting snap, causing his limbs to spasm uncontrollably. The black dangling rope pulsated with ridges and fine-toothed filaments similar to a tentacle, a bristled tentacle, a long protruding coiled arm, black and hairy.
\tA spider’s leg… shit.
\tThe damned demon had returned just in time for the main course and it couldn’t be more pleased with itself, judging by how much fun it seemed to be having with the Russian hit men. I swore that I’ve never seen anything more distraught or psychotic in my entire life up until this point, and probably will have never seen anything like it for as long as I live... but time and time again, I’ve been proven indubitably dead wrong.

Out of the stark terrifying shadows of branches from a nearby tree above, it approached. The demon came crashing down upon the forest floor between me and the Russians, screeching aloud with a sinister gargling undertone that sent ripples of gooseflesh up my arms and a numbing twinge of fear up my spine. Nude and fully exposed, I stepped backwards and tripped over a lumbering branch which caused me to fall down flat upon my hindquarters. My ringed tail flung up from between my legs and remained prone while I sat perfectly still, staring awe-struck with insane concentration at the ensuing hysteria. The chaos felt as if it lasted for a good twenty minutes, when technically it was more along the lines of two to three. Things always tended to slow to a speeding crawl when dealing with traumatic adrenaline-fueled scenarios and this one certainly wasn’t any different.

I watched with absolute horror as the Russian’s corpse split right down the center, gushing out bruised organs and sloshing seminal bodily fluids upon his comrades, his partners. They were horrified and groaning aloud while some screamed apprehensively and others spewed cursing in their native tongue. An exposed spine dangled from one side of the man’s half-torn ravaged carcass. The chain of bones and sinew broke free and came plopping down upon the ground at the feet of the other Russians, seeping with viscous fluid. The creature began to eat from the other half, starting from the split cranium which exposed pinkish-grey brains and working its way down past the exposed esophagus, soon reaching the fatty gristle of the dead Russian’s beer-belly, sopping up the raw fat, sounding like a toothless old man sucking down a Jell-O shooter. The God-forsaken presence slurped and smacked hungrily from the dead Russian’s severed carcass, softly purring with a low satisfied hum. At least the bastard could finally eat something! I only thanked the Gods it wasn’t me.
\tAll at once, the Russian men began to fire their weapons at the creature, enraged with mortified shock, screaming bloody murder in lieu of their sloppily-devoured partner. A few bullets whizzed past my head, snapping down briskly upon the ground and penetrating a few redwood trees beside me, crunching into their barked surface, leaving fist-sized impacted bullet holes. The nightmarish overgrown insect from hell threw the two split slabs of human cadaver to its sides, dragging them across the rugged forest surface. It charged upon the five others in a surprising jerk of swift speed, casting out a single braying wail that could have awoken the dead.
\tThe hit men kept firing away into the thing’s pulsating body, screaming defiantly and cursing obscenities in Russian repeatedly. One lost his entire head into what must have been the wide-open jaws of the beast itself. I saw in a glimpse of a moment that the wolf cub’s skull had split apart and exposed a wretched set of fanged mandibles that opened and closed in a disoriented gaping slack-jawed yowl. It chewed upon the Russian’s skull and the man himself sent a pitiful muffled scream coursing through the demon’s maw. Before long, the scream died down to a gargle and the creature spat the dead Russian from its fulfilled jaws. The corpse was beheaded completely, neck scored with bite marks and gushing blood from its nape like a fountain. A stubbed chunk of crimson-stained spine stuck out from the base of its neck like a whitened tree-stump growing loosely from a bundle of flesh and muscular sinew. The sight was disarming at best. I thought I’d lose my mind immediately thereafter, seeing such a massively graphic display of macabre disgust and sheer violence.
\tThe last of the Russians – four of them now – wasted their rounds upon the hideous monstrosity while firing away, instead only being met with dull clicks from their weapons after they had spent the last of their ammunition to no avail. They threw their unarmed guns at the lumbering spider-like demon and tried to run toward their prized Mercedes, prying hastily at the vehicle’s door handles, hoping to lay low and stay protectively sealed, maybe even to make a swift getaway. Not the wisest idea though, as they found out the inadvertently hard way.

Sporadically and without any hint or warning, the Russian’s prized Mercedes burst into flames. The scorching blast launched a plume of scalding air outward in a majestic cloud of stifling heat that hit me like a slap to the face or maybe a burning pallet of weighted masonry bricks. The blast wave was positively enormous in capacity and blunt explosive force, damn near singeing each whisker off my muzzled face. I could see a few bristles from my whiskers burnt down to twiggy nubs just before my peripheral vision, coiling into tiny grey ashen snakes. The blast wave left an agonizingly deafening ring in my ear canals, rendering me temporarily incapable of hearing a damn thing amongst my surroundings. I watched the car explode with a grand sense of horrified awe and amazement as clear as daybreak but couldn’t at all hear it commencing, could only see it first-hand. I watched the chromed waxen-polished hood of the vehicle fly open and swing upward then shoot swiftly through the night air and arch its path right down backwards, as it crashed violently through the double-paned windshield, almost how a boomerang operates. The force of the impact shattered the glass surface abysmally with a jarring twang of teeth-grating tinkling and crunching. The initial point of impact upon the windshield crinkled under the pressure and caused a spider-webbed series of cracks to ripple outward and burst into a million crystallized shards that sprayed within roughly a ten-foot radius all around the doomed Mercedes. The leather interior bellowed and burnt profusely, engulfing anything that dare come within the path of the flames. Soon, a massive explosion rattled out from under the engine block of the vehicle and a stark, gruesomely-sized fireball engulfed the last few remaining Russian men in a cacophonic blaze. They all caught fire and were running around aimlessly in circular motions, naturally forgetting the fundamental basics of how to stop, drop, and roll. They were too ensnared in a heightened panicky, crazed state of mind to remember anything, even their own names probably if asked.

One of the men had been horribly scorched to a crisp and was lying dead beside the driver’s front-side wheel well from the initial explosion, with third-degree burns over roughly eighty-five percent of his body. He’d lost his eyelids, nose, ears and facial hair as well. I wouldn’t doubt for a moment that he was by now officially rendered unidentifiable, since the upper-half of his torso was charred and burnt stone-solid and his teeth (strangely enough, every last one, even the molars) had all but been entirely removed from his mouth, leaving a blackened husk of flesh and bone with a pink jaw-line ridged with chapped periodontal gums. Had they been blown out of his mouth from the explosion alone? It didn’t seem possible, not likely, not even credibly accurate in the least… but still there was a hankering suspicion that drove me mad, like a splinter that lodges itself in a small crevasse upon my brain, daring me to dig around and fondle. I couldn’t even identify his damn face anymore and neither would the coroner as well for that matter, if this man’s body ever made it to a coroner in the first place without being eaten whole by my corrupted fallen guardian angel.

The hideous beast wrapped four of its eight hairy, spindly legs around the remaining two out of three Russian men. Their badly burnt bodies crinkled and crisped with each intricate movement as they were pulled up by their charred waists, hoisted up to eye-level with the demon, as it stared fondly into both their panicked crying faces. The two Russians, with burnt hair, crisp char-broiled ashen skin, eyelids curled upward like paper-thin wheat flakes, begged for mercy. Fresh tears streamed down their faces and quickly disintegrated into small puffs of steam due to second and third-degree burns adorning the fleshy ridges of their taut cheeks. Slowly, the demon strutted around in a semi-circle and faced me directly. Its eight glaring pitch-black eyes stared down upon me. The wolf cub’s skull hung limply, split in two, jagged stubble teeth tarnished with fresh blood. The creature itself appeared to smile at me, staring, fascinated with a certain level of satisfactory fulfillment. The demon grinned toward me while savoring the moment. Perhaps I didn’t really need to die as immediately as he’d wanted me to. Perhaps I’d get a chance to ultimately ensure my debt be resolved with the Russians.
\t“See, Maxwell? I didn’t even need their help. They asked me first but I didn’t need their help after all. I can easily handle things all on my own. See? Do you see now, Maxwell?” It said in a rumbling, wheezy voice, distraught and phlegm-adorned. This time around when It spoke to me, It seemed entirely content and at peace with itself, sort of how one feels after having finished a generous serving of dinner and laying back to embrace and digest the rewarding meal over a pint of fine ale.
\tI stared in a cold frozen gaze, silent and perplexed, dazed incomprehensibly.

The demon suddenly swung the two charred men around in the air in figure-eight shapes and violently smashed their heads together. Both their craniums cracked harshly like two thick ostrich eggs colliding forcefully into one another at breakneck speeds. Brain matter spewed from their ruptured skulls and rained goopy cranial debris down upon the ground in matted clumps, adorned with specks of skull fragments and sinewy pulps of bone marrow and perspiration from overstressed tear glands. The creature threw both their carcasses towards me, causing them to land in the bushes where I lay prone and steadily behind, frozen in place, not moving but a single inch.
\tThe last Russian man, perhaps the leader of the group, attempted to swing at the demon with an exposed machete that he must have had concealed deep in his pocket; he charged toward the horrific entity in a futile last-ditch effort to gain new ground towards a supreme victory.
\tInstead, he wound up being split into travel-size pieces.
\tThe demon’s spindly spider legs wrapped around each one of the determined man’s limbs like ravenous tentacles and lifted the poor remaining fool into the air, suspended against the midnight sky like a large human kite hovering in a solemn lazy summer gust. The machete slipped from the man’s grasp and fell spinning back down towards the planet, impaling itself blade-first into the topsoil below. I stared at it fiercely, contemplating whether or not to grab for the handle, settle the hilt against my palm and thrust the melee weapon deep into the creature’s neck or face, maybe the boisterous fuzzy dome-shaped abdomen.
\tWhat had once appeared as a human figure hovering through the air deftly like a kite was violently pried apart into six separate various-sized chunks. Two severed arms and legs, a dismembered head and a ruptured torso, now spewing blood from five mangled stumps like a free-flowing sieve. The God-forsaken monster consumed the man’s crimson-stained torso with a sloppy gluttonous frenzy and threw the other parts into the forest, dumping them like used chicken bones from a KFC original recipe bucket, chucking them aimlessly into the surrounding darkness around its eight throbbing limbs. The demon’s jaws crunched down upon a ribcage and chewed repetitively. A bruised rope of intestines dangled from its chin, swaying limply and motioning in conjunction with each bite taken before being sucked back up like a noodle from a bowl of chow-mien. I wanted to vomit once more – very badly – but I dared not to. I couldn’t bring myself to upchuck again. I could barely even manage to flinch remotely.

After the demonic entity had finally finished its meal and belched slightly, the spider-beast crept over and plopped down upon the soiled mossy surface directly in front of me, moaning groggily, sounding rather pathetic, maybe even overfed now. Thank goodness! Aside from the crackling of the flames from the exploded Mercedes, the forest grew silent once more. No gunfire, no hollering in Russian; no more humans.
\t“I have met my quota, Maxwell. This is good. I’m ready to give them what they want now… a little dessert, yes… you see, now its… time for the final serving… of the night. Watch this… Maxwell… just watch… what I can… do…” The demon whispered into the air towards me, croaking with a raspy bellowing undertone. Even while facing certain doom, this monstrous entity never lost its intimidation-factor. However, I could tell right away that whatever the hell this thing was, it was most certainly weakened now.

Deton flayed wildly upon the ground, legs thrashing voraciously, bouncing and swinging madly in psychotic circular motions. The horrific entity shrieked and wailed violently, gargling from deep within its ill-fated vocal chords.
\tAll at once, I understood too clearly. The large spider-demon’s abdomen tore apart and thousands upon thousands of petite beige-tinted baby spiders came pouring out from the ruptured seams. They crawled and dodged and lunged and approached toward me with tiny shrilled ear-piercing whistles and chirps. They surrounded me upon the ground, miniature toothpick-thin legs trotting upon the upturned soil and moss and dilapidated branches all around me, scrawny putrid insect bodies, infantile fanged mouths bared and exposed, ready to lunge right at me and suck me dryer than a California raisin.

What remained of Curtis Deton quit thrashing almost immediately and lay perfectly still. It started melting, caving in and disintegrating before me. A supple gust of smoke and thick steam rose up from the massive spider-demon’s carcass. Soon it had disappeared entirely and what was left was a black tarnished patch of burnt mossy topsoil. No bones, no remains, nothing. I looked around at the multiple Russian carcasses, mutilated beyond comprehension, and felt that cold-chill sensation creep into my spine again. That damn goose had been walking over my grave once more, this time it seemed stuck in place. The vehicle burned with sheer effulgence, crackling briskly, shattering windows and melting the interior dash board. If it weren’t for the thousands of “children” spawned from the demon’s womb, I would’ve been long-gone from this location by now.

The diminutive baby spiders held their ground still though, surrounding me with prime carnal intent. The newborns appeared to be very hungry from the looks and sounds of it, and their now-deceased single parent had left them a satisfying treat to feast upon for days after it was long dead. They cluttered up and enclosed me into a shifting ring of impending death. All at once, I knew immediately that I was a goner. My doom reigned nigh and I only had a brief amount of time to chance it by making a quick escape. Before I could decide to run though, the bastards charged upon me, infesting my fur while puncturing my body with their tiny pronged teeth. I could feel hundreds of them puncturing into my skin, inserting their tiny insect bodies into my veins to drink my blood, piling deep into my sinus passages, treading the insides of my throat and nostrils. I felt them crawl up into my ears and rip into my tear glands and flood their delirious presence upon my one good eye while occupying my empty left socket, festering and feasting as the remainder of my body’s surface was covered from head to paw with the little cannibals, sucking me dry, devouring me completely, hungry enough to stay feasting upon my corpse throughout the next month, spinning webs in my chest cavity, utilizing my carcass as their new habitat to spawn and multiply and—

Maxwell awoke in a daze beneath his ruptured bed-sheets, screaming aloud into the cool autumn evening. Even though the nightmare had subsided almost at once, he still felt a hankering itchy sensation beneath his fur. He finally calmed down, ceased the itch and became silent again, breathing hard and heavy in the wake of reality. He reminded himself to pay back the Russians what he owed them first thing in the morning. He lay steadily upon his back in silence, staring up at the ceiling, repeating a name over to himself in his head, hopefully never subsiding to another night terror of such distraught and terrifying magnitude for the rest of his days.
\tCurtis Deton… Curtis Deton… Curse… Debt… Destruction…

END
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