CHAPTER 41 BLOODY VENGEANCE
Cruz and Sanchez worked methodically, yanking blood-stiffened fabric from limp limbs, their fingers leaving white impressions on blue-tinged skin. The killers' exposed flesh pebbled in the biting cold—pathetic, shriveled, and vulnerable against the slate-gray morning.
“Put them in the pen.” Clint and Cochise grabbed the men's broken bodies by their armpits, skin slick with sweat despite the frost. The Spaniards took their ankles, and together they hoisted the naked men over the splintered fence, dropping them with unceremonious splashes into the steaming cesspool of mud, piss, and shit.
The stench hit like a physical force—ammonia sharp enough to water their eyes.
The gangsters climbed over the fence, boots squelching in the filth as they propped the killers against the rough-hewn posts.
When Cochise yanked the tourniquet free from the deputy's thigh with a savage twist, dark arterial blood surged forth in rhythmic pulses, spreading in crimson tendrils through the black muck.
Clint unsheathed his knife with a soft metallic whisper, the blade catching the gray dawn light.
The Egyptian mirrored his actions, his larger weapon emerging with predatory grace.
Squatting in the mud before the killers, Clint ran his calloused thumb along the razor edge, feeling the cold bite of steel against skin.
“How do you like playing the victim? Fun, isn't it?” he mused, his voice flat and merciless.
“Helpless. No one around with a fuck to give.” His gaze dropped to the man's shriveled genitals, blue-tinged and pathetic in the biting cold.
“Not hard? What's wrong? Not as exciting from this side?”
Clint's eyes scanned the large pen where dark, hulking shapes shifted in the swirling fog, their wet snouts and bristled backs appearing and disappearing like ghosts, accompanied by hungry grunts and the squelch of hooves in filth.
The cowboy turned to the Egyptian, whose face had settled into the impassive mask of an executioner. “How about we liven up the party for these boys?”
The Egyptian's blade flashed silver in the gray light, then crimson as it sliced through flesh, gristle, and nerve endings in one savage arc.
The Mangler's scream started human but rose to something animal as his cock separated from his body, pelvis thrusting upward as if still trying to escape the blade, his spine arching so violently that mud-slicked vertebrae threatened to rupture through skin.
Blood didn't just spurt—it geysered in rhythmic pulses that painted his pale thighs and splashed back against Cochise's boots, steaming briefly in the frigid air before freezing into ruby crystals.
“You see?” Clint growled, his voice dropping to a register barely human as he locked eyes with the deputy.
“You're not the only ones who like to play with knives.” The blade plunged into the man's inner thigh with a wet sucking sound, parting flesh like butter as Clint dragged it downward, opening a chasm that fountained dark arterial blood.
The deputy's scream shattered the morning stillness, a guttural sound that tore his vocal cords raw.
Before the echo died, Clint's hand moved again—a blur of calculated savagery—as he carved the man's dick from his body with three precise strokes. The severed organ pulsed once in the cowboy’s grip before he flung it contemptuously into the mist. The air erupted with feral squeals and the wet sounds of tearing flesh.
Cochise reached down, seized the Mangler by his sweat-drenched hair, and wrenched his head back until vertebrae cracked.
The Egyptian's blade—eighteen inches of Damascus steel—sliced through the flesh on both sides of the man's neck in one fluid motion, deliberately missing the carotids but severing every nerve ending.
Blood vessels burst beneath the skin, painting purple-black bruises in real time.
Dropping to a crouch, Cochise dug the tip of his knife into the screaming man's navel and dragged upward with surgical precision, parting skin and yellow fat.
The Mangler's abdominal wall quivered like gelatin as his intestines strained against the membrane, threatening to spill forth in glistening coils.
Cochise snatched up the severed genitals—still warm and pulsing—and hurled them into the mist where unseen jaws snapped and fought with feral savagery.
Rising to his full height, the Egyptian's face remained a stone mask as he methodically wiped the blade clean on his thigh, leaving a crimson smear like war paint across the denim.
Mimicking the Egyptian’s precision cut, Clint carved a jagged line up the deputy's abdomen, the knife catching and tearing rather than slicing clean.
When the blade punched too deep, gray-pink intestines bulged through the wound like writhing snakes, steam rising from the glistening coils as they met the frigid air.
The deputy's screams turned to wet, choking sounds.
Clint leaned in close enough to smell the metallic tang of blood mixing with the acrid stench of voided bowels.
“Guess he's better with a knife,” Clint whispered, his breath ghosting against the dying man's ear.
“No matter.” He straightened, wiping the bloody blade on his jeans.
“The hogs don't care how pretty the cut is.”
The gangsters hauled themselves over the fence, boots squishing as they extracted themselves from the mire, leaving dark crimson footprints on the frost-whitened ground.
They formed a silent semicircle at the pen's edge, faces impassive as stone beneath the gray morning light, breath forming ephemeral ghosts that dissipated into the mist as they waited for nature's executioners to complete what they had begun.
Dark shapes materialized through the fog, huffing and grunting, their wet snouts twitching frantically as they caught the iron-rich scent of fresh blood.
A massive boar—six hundred pounds of muscle beneath mottled white and black hide—charged forward first, yellow tusks gleaming.
It slammed into the Mangler's splayed legs and buried its snout in the raw, weeping cavity where his cock had been.
The beast's jaws clamped down with bone-crushing force, tearing away chunks of inner thigh and perineum in savage jerks of its massive head.
The Mangler's scream shredded the air as the hog's head thrashed side to side, its mouth frothing pink with blood and saliva.
His spine arched in agony as his shattered limbs flopped uselessly in the mud like a broken marionette.
The second hog—a monstrous sow with yellowed tusks and teats dragging in the mud—charged with such frenzy it collided with the deputy's torso, slamming him flat.
Its jaws locked onto his throat wound with a wet crunch of cartilage, head whipping side to side until arteries tore free like rubber bands stretched past breaking.
Blood sprayed across its bristled snout in a fine crimson mist as its front hooves trampled his abdomen, puncturing the membrane with sickening pops.
Intestines spilled forth in steaming ropes, instantly tangled in the sow's cloven feet.
The man's eyes bulged, mouth stretching in a silent scream as his vocal cords dangled, severed and twitching, from the ragged hole that had been his neck.
Then the entire herd descended—a writhing mass of tusks and teeth that tore into the men with demonic frenzy.
Bone splintered with wet cracks as jaws powerful enough to crush concrete pulverized femurs and spines.
The men's screams gurgled into silence beneath the cacophony of feeding—the obscene wet sounds of tongues lapping blood, of intestines being yanked through abdominal cavities like ropes in a savage tug-of-war.
Blood-drunk hogs trampled each other in their frenzy, their squeals reaching an almost sexual pitch as they fought over choice organs that steamed in the cold air.
The metallic reek of opened bodies saturated the air, mingling with the acrid stench of voided bowels and ammonia-sharp urine until the stink became a physical presence, thick enough to choke on.
Clint hawked a glob of saliva over the fence, where it landed with a wet splat on the Mangler's exposed ribcage. “Fucked with the wrong family, motherfuckers,” he growled, voice rough as gravel.
The gangsters backed away from the pen in unison, boots crunching frost-rimed earth, shoulders hunched against the dawn chill that cut through blood-spattered clothing.
Behind them, wet, tearing sounds punctuated the fog as pink mist rose from the feeding frenzy.
They slid into the Sedan without a word, doors slamming with dull thuds that echoed across the empty farmland.
The engine growled to life, headlights cutting through the dense morning fog as they rolled away from the slaughter, taillights bleeding red into the grayness until they vanished like vengeful spirits returning to some darker realm of hell.
The driver of the Jeep killed the Rubicon's engine and sat motionless in the oppressive silence of a dirt turnout, fifty yards from where the two-lane country road curved toward the pig farm.
His knuckles whitened against the steering wheel as the Sedan finally appeared through the gauzy dawn light, its taillights bleeding red through the mist as it passed his hiding spot.
When the sound of its engine faded, he twisted the key, feeling the Jeep shudder to life beneath him.
He eased onto the empty road and drove the half-mile to the turnoff.
The rear access road welcomed him with a spray of loose gravel that pinged against the undercarriage.
Tendrils of fog curled around the vehicle as he navigated the narrow path, the Jeep's black silhouette dissolving and reforming in the mist like a wraith, each revolution of the thick-treaded tires grinding against the stones beneath.
When he stopped near the furthest back pen, he exited the Jeep, the door's creak cutting through the wet morning air.
Gravel crunched beneath his boots as he approached the fence, fingers curling around the rusted wire.
Beyond it, two dozen Hampshire hogs—each easily four hundred pounds or more of muscle and hunger—swarmed in a feeding frenzy.
Their guttural squeals pierced the fog as they tore into what remained of the two serial killers, pink snouts stained crimson, yellow tusks ripping through sinew.
They fought over strips of flesh that disappeared down gullets with wet, smacking sounds.
A pig's jaw clamped down on something that cracked like kindling, while another shook its massive head side to side, a length of intestine swinging from its mouth like obscene party streamers.
The Mangler's son slumped against the fence wire like a broken doll; his head wrenched at an angle that exposed the glistening white vertebrae of his neck.
The left side of his face had been torn away completely, revealing a grisly mosaic of exposed jawbone, splintered cheekbone, and pulpy crimson tissue.
His remaining eye—clouded like spoiled milk—stared vacantly at the sky as a massive boar, bristles matted with gore, rooted through his scalp.
The beast's yellowed tusks peeled back strips of flesh with wet, sucking sounds, exposing the gleaming dome of skull beneath.
Blood-flecked foam dripped from the hog's jowls as it tore away a fistful of hair still attached to a flap of scalp, tendons snapping like rubber bands as the creature jerked its head backward.
The driver moved closer, the stench of opened bowels and copper-tang blood making his nostrils flare.
Through the fence, the Mangler's exposed ribcage heaved with wet, gurgling breaths, pink froth bubbling from the corners of his lips with each exhale—somehow, still alive.
One arm ended in a glistening stump where a pig had gnawed through wrist tendons, leaving splintered radius and ulna bones jutting like broken pencils.
His eyes—bloodshot and bulging from their sockets—darted wildly until they locked on the driver's face, madness clearing as reality anchored him in his final moments.
“You don't know me, motherfucker,” the driver growled, teeth bared like the feeding swine.
“But I sure as fuck know you.” He squatted, the wire fence pressing patterns into his knuckles as he leaned in close enough to smell the metallic stench of blood and bile.
His whisper slithered into the Mangler's ear, hot breath disturbing the matted hair crusted with blood and mud.
Rising to his feet, he watched a rivulet of blood trickle from the corner of the Mangler's mouth, pooling in the hollow of his throat.
“What you took from me, from my brother .
.. I'm taking back.” He spat a thick glob of phlegm that landed with a wet splat across the monster's pulverized face, mixing with the mud and gore. “You lose.”
Moments after the realization lightened the Mangler's bloodshot eyes, a massive sow lunged forward, yellowed tusks puncturing his temple with a wet crunch.
His skull collapsed inward like a rotten melon, pink-gray brain matter erupting through the fissures in a viscous spray.
The pig's jaws worked with mechanical efficiency, grinding bone to powder as cerebral fluid oozed between its bristled jowls and dripped in glutinous strings onto the mud below.
His remaining eye bulged from its socket before bursting under pressure, viscous jelly streaming down his ruined cheek.
The driver returned to the Jeep. Inside the vehicle, he gripped the leather-wrapped steering wheel, his knuckles whitening as he cranked it hard to the left.
Gravel spat from beneath the tires as the Rubicon pivoted, suspension groaning under the weight of vengeance satisfied.
As he accelerated away, the rearview mirror framed the feeding ground growing smaller—a gory scene of justice served raw.
His decades-long mission hung by a single, fraying thread. He had just one last thing to do.