Chapter 5
Keith
I was fighting back nausea the entire drive until we made it to our safe house. It wasn’t really a house, but that’s the purpose it served. The closed-down, cheap-ass amusement park was once a successful business for my grandfather. The entire outer walls of the park were made to look like a children’s castle, painted a light gray with fading pictures of knights, princesses, wizards, and dragons. The inside was nothing spectacular. It had only a few rides; a Faris wheel, some bumper cars, a carousel, some old-fashioned cars that rode around on a track, and a tiny little funhouse. Other than that, the rest of the park used to be a petting zoo; each group of animals lived in their own enclosure based on nursery rhymes.
My dad tried to run it for a while after my grandpa retired. However, when smartphones and tablets became a means of entertainment, people stopped bringing their kids. I couldn’t blame them; this place was only cool to kids under five anyway. When the doors closed for good, my dad sold the animals and used the property for club events. Now that he was gone, I was using it for revenge.
Zane and Taven carried the man inside the funhouse. Most of its innards had been gutted, leaving only wonky mirrors, a creepy clown that buzzed when someone stepped on a hidden plate, and a drab forest backdrop.
The rest of the building looked more like a haunted house rather than the harmless children’s exhibit it had been. We added some unused animal cages, a dentist chair, a butcher’s table, and fun torture toys. Other cages held chains and shackles to hold our victims until we were ready to play.
Together, we lifted the heavy sack of shit onto the table and strapped him in. The man groaned, indicating that he would most likely be awake within the next few minutes.
“Did you kill her?” questioned Taven as he yanked off his pig mask.
Yanking my own off, I stared back at him in mild shock. “I had to.”
Clenching his micro dreads, he swore under his breath and kicked at the floor. “Why the fuck did you do that?”
“I said I had to.”
He shoved me. “We aren’t real serial killers, Keith! We had a plan. We were supposed to stick to that plan!”
“And she would have fucked that entire plan up!” I shouted back. “I made it look like a burglary gone wrong. If I had let her live, she would have called the cops, and this would be all over.”
“Did she see your face?”
“It doesn’t matter, we’re wearing fucking pig masks, Tav. The cops would have put two and two together. I’m with Keith on this. He did what he had to do,” inserted Zane.
“What makes us any better than them? You just did exactly what they did,” growled Taven. “You know my sister and my niece were killed to cover up their fuck up. Now you just killed an innocent woman to cover up ours.”
I wanted to argue, but he was right. A sting gone wrong killed our entire chapter, plus civilians. Taven’s sister and niece were two of them. The only reason the three of us were alive was because we were sent to a party for a new chapter opening up their clubhouse in another state. Those bastard pigs took everything from us. We weren’t even an official chapter anymore. We still had the clubhouse, but to be an official chapter, we needed five members. We were nomads. The national president of our club allowed it, considering what we had been through. He wasn’t willing to strip the patches of brothers who had just lost everything.
Our conversation was interrupted by another groan. “What the fuck is going on? Who the fuck are you?” the cop shouted. I grinned and walked into the cage. The moment his eyes landed on my face, he gasped. He knew exactly who we were and what was about to happen to him.
“Squeal, piggy,” I sang as I reached for a hatchet hanging from a hook.
“I want this one,” Zane demanded, pushing past me and grabbing a butcher knife from our tool kit.
I had taken care of the first one. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was a woman or the fact neither of the others had killed someone in such a personal way before, but they seemed queasy about it. But with the male, Zane seemed to be all in.
Holding the cop’s head still, my friend cut into the flesh of his cheek. The blade sliced down to the corner of his lip and then back upward to the cheekbone. The man thrashed, his eyes wide and full of terrified pain. His squeals were almost inhuman. Zane slashed the same path on the cop’s other side, leaving the man with a gaping smile. He could barely scream; his tongue lulled from what remained of his gaping maw as tears mixed with blood. The knife was plunged into the man’s stomach and wrenched up, gutting him. That was when the screams really started. If he were left in that state, the man’s death would take forever. Goodness knows the pig deserved it. Zane had barely begun to remove the intestines before the fucker shit himself and crossed the bridge to hell.
“Scoop the guts out, dump them, then we’ll dump him,” I ordered as I smiled at the gruesome sight. “And don’t forget the apple.”