Chapter 7

After the close call in the kitchen, they were all pretty careful. Even Jim, who had been Julie's biggest concern, seemed to accept the situation for the time being. He looked different, somehow, since she had deliberately put the make on Pete. Where Jim had looked at the men with an obvious hatred in his eyes, now he seemed to have given up a little, to have ceased caring quite as much. The possession of her body by force had given him something worth fighting for, and that had been lost when she took the lead with Pete.

Julie stood washing the dishes, vaguely conscious of the robe that hung open, revealing her body. She stood as close to the sink as she could to block off the sight, but it wasn't completely successful. She had to turn to pick up dishes, and each time she did, the big guy, Butch, would grin right on cue as he looked at her nakedness. The other two men had gone into the parlor with the baby, and with Jim still tied up, and were listening to the radio. They had left Butch in the kitchen to stand guard over Julie and Sally while they did the dishes. To keep him amused, they had left Connie with him. Connie still looked as though she were in a state of shock from the first time he had raped her. She sat perched on his knee, her face blank except for a slight smile which looked as though she were keeping it there by a half- conscious effort to keep Butch happy.

She was wearing a robe, of course. That had become the uniform of the day for the women in the house. A robe without a sash or buttons. The one she was wearing at the moment was yellow, bright and cheerful, in contrast to the look of vacuous desperation in her eyes. It was as though she had fled into her mind to escape reality, and was peering back out at the world to see when it would be safe to join it again.

Butch divided his attention between the women at the sink and the one on his massive lap. His hands were occupied, one with a breast that was revealed by the pulled back robe, and the other with one of Connie's thighs. At first Connie seemed unaware of the contact, but she wasn't really driven that far back into herself. Julie had realized that when she noticed the little tremors of fear and disgust that passed over her. Julie picked up a fresh stack of dishes, and Butch leered at her stupidly with an empty, childish sexuality.

Get your eyes full, you son of a bitch, she thought, and felt a stab of fear that he might do just that: get his eyes full and decide to do something more than look at her. He kept looking in her direction after she turned back to the sink, and Julie realized with a start that he wasn't looking at her any more, but at Sally, who was facing slightly toward him as she stretched to put a platter on a high shelf in the cupboard. Julie looked at the girl long and hard until she realized what the meaning of the look was. She glanced at Butch and pulled the robe about her, but of course she had to release it to pick up another dish, and it fell open again. There was no sense in blaming Sally for that, she decided. Her own robe was just as widely opened as Sally's, and that was the way Max had planned it, of course. It had been one of his smarter moves, she thought, because it kept at least one of their hands busy most of the time holding the robe closed. Besides that, she supposed, it kept the men happy and excited when the garments were allowed to go their own way.

Still, she didn't suppose it really made much difference to Sally. She was a little too casual about the whole thing to have anyone believe that she really cared about the revelation of her body's secrets.

It was amazing, Julie thought, how it was possible to know someone all her life and then realize that you didn't know her at all. She had always thought that Sally was a nice girl. Not a prissy little virgin, perhaps, but still a nice enough girl, better than average. And then, that little show she had provided from the bedroom, that solo aria she yelped out, had shown Julie just how much little sister liked going to bed with a man. It was disgusting. She had thought to protect Sally from the advances of men like Max and Pete, and it turned out that the joke was on her, Julie. Because Sally was having a ball. This was probably just the kind of situation she was used to in school, Julie thought, except for the guns. The Big Men On Campus probably didn't need guns to get her into their bed. That was the way it was done. Girls like Sally were the new generation, and the Now Generation as they called it, and she wasn't the type to need any protection from a man like Max. She was probably teaching him a thing or two. It was disgusting. Julie had never considered herself a prude, God knew, but the kind of thing Sally had shown herself capable of enjoying was disgusting.

She placed the last dish in the drainer and looked over at Butch. She supposed she should get a dish-towel and help Sally finish with the drying, but right now she didn't want to look at Sally, much less help her.

"Is it all right if I sit down now?" she asked Butch. "I'm very tired."

He grinned obscenely. "Heh, heh, I'll bet ya are," he said, and it took her a second to realize that he was referring to the time she had spent in the bedroom with Pete. "I'll bet ya both are," he said. "Yeah, you can sit down. Right here." He pointed to his other knee, the one Connie wasn't occupying.

"No, I really would like to sit down, if you don't mind, I've been on my feet for some time, you know." She thought he was kidding about her sitting on his lap at the same time as Connie, but he frowned at her answer.

"I think you better do like I say, lady," he said slowly. He seemed to have trouble with words, and she wondered whether his intelligence was just marginal or perhaps sub-marginal. "Come 'ere," he said, pointing to the knee. Julie wished she had decided to help Sally with the dishes. She walked over to the big lunk and perched on his knee. She was conscious of the gun behind her, leaning against the wall. Even if she got it in her hands, which she doubted after seeing how surprisingly quick Butch could be, and even if she could manage to kill him without hurting poor Connie, Jim and the baby were in the parlor with Max and Pete, and she couldn't very well leave them here. Not just to save herself, Sally and Connie. And she couldn't be sure that Connie would be quick-witted enough to make a break with them. That meant that even if she could manage to kill Butch with the shotgun, the best she could be sure of would be to save herself and Sally. And Sally, she thought, probably wasn't worth it anyway. So she sat very still on Butch's lap, holding her robe closed with both hands and waiting to see what he would do.

He brushed her hands away, and the robe fell open. Julie sat with her hands raised for a moment, poised to pull the robe closed again, but she didn't dare to do something like that, something that Butch would object to. Slowly, she dragged her hands down to her lap. Her thighs were bare now, as the robe dropped away from them. She was naked down the front, her breasts, from the nipples inward, and her snatch revealed. She folded her hands, hiding herself below, but Butch slapped them away, and looked straight at her there until she thought she would go crazy with embarrassment.

He pulled his hand out from the inside of Connie's robe, releasing her breast, and slid it over Julie's thigh, his fingers curled around the inside of it, petting her roughly. Julie felt her bowels curl up inside her like a burned insect. This was worse than Pete even, and a thousand times worse than Max. It was like having a smelly animal try to cover her. She felt more humiliated than she had with either of the two men, even when they had possessed her.

Butch laughed. It was a strange sound, deep and guttural, and yet at the same time childish and idiotic, as though a gorilla had suddenly giggled.

"This is great," he said. "I never had two at the same time before."

You probably never had one before, unless she was a prostitute, Julie thought, but she said nothing, and managed to keep her face impassive. Butch's hand moved up to her pussy, and he poked it lightly, as though afraid it might break. Then he laid his fingers on it and worked them down between her thighs. She could feel his fingertips against her slit, and there was a sexual thrill to the feeling even though she felt disgust at the same time. He laughed again, and suddenly he brushed Connie off of his lap. He did it quickly and roughly, as though she were some inanimate object that had served its purpose. He put his arm around Julie and hugged her close, his other hand working deeper into her crotch, and then penetrating her slit, working up inside of her.

"Open up," he ordered, and she forced her legs to part, to Make room for him. The fingers worked deeper into her, delving up inside of her in a quick, rough move that made her jerk suddenly. "You like that?" he asked with another laugh. He let the arm that was around her slip past her shoulder to her neck, pulling her into him even more closely, and he draped his hand down to her naked left breast, cupping it with a massive palm. Julie had never felt so tiny and helpless in her life. She felt very fragile in his grasp, as though he could break her with a single movement of one of his arms. She sat very, very still, afraid that any movement on her part might be construed by his pea-brain as resistance, and he might move to stop her. And with his strength and his stupidity, he could go too far, and break her bones without meaning to.

The fingers moved around inside of her, slithering over her vaginal walls, until they found her clitoris. She let out a little yelp at that, and her body twisted violently at the sensation that ran through her. She threw back her head and her mouth hung open under the intensity of her physical reaction. Another grunting laugh came out of Butch, and he gave her clitoris a little squeeze with his fingers, sending an even stronger feeling through her.

"Oh, God," she breathed, and the words came out thickly, almost incoherently. She could feel his hot breath on her, and it disgusted her. But his fingers inside of her had a magical power. They were distressing, but not disgusting, and she couldn't help the overwhelming pleasure that ran through her body with each movement of those fingers.

Connie was still on the floor where Butch had shoved her. She sat there, her robe open, is though waiting to see what was expected of her. She seemed like a child except for the decidedly un-childish body that was revealed by the open robe.

Suddenly, Butch pushed Julie down off of his lap onto the floor beside Connie. She hit with it thump, and Connie looked up, startled, and looking alert for the first time since the initiation she had received into sex at Butch's hands. She moved away from Julie, one hand pushing her hair back from her face. She looked like someone coming out of a long sleep.

Butch came down on top of Julie, came down hard and drove the breath from her. She tightened under his sudden weight, but she didn't try to get away. She had learned in the last day and a half, she thought, that it made no sense to try to get away.

He pulled savagely at his own clothes, and then his pants were down past his hips, and she caught a glimpse of his cock. It was huge, distended, bard and blue-veined. It was hideous, and she looked away, as though by not seeing it she could make what was about to happen somehow more bearable.

Butch took his cock in his hand and centered it on her slit, then drove it into her with one shove. She cried out in agony and pleasure combined, hating to admit to herself that the pleasure was real, was there, and it couldn't be denied.

The cock pushed into her, stuffing her with its bulk, and she felt as though it would rip her wide open. She hadn't known that anything could be so big, or so hard. It had a wonderful, pleasure-giving effect even as she felt sick at being possessed by such a beast. This was a cock that belonged on a horse, she thought, not a human being.

Then he rammed her, pulling and pushing, fucking with a rapid, tireless action, an energy that was as animalistic as the rest of his personality. His cock worked in her quickly, shoving and pulling and shoving, and she thought he would never stop. The pleasure mounted in her body, filling her with a tingling sensation, but still she wished that he would stop, would pull that thing out of her and leave her alone. He seemed to have the stamina of a herd of stallions. She could hear his breath and his grunts of pleasure, and disgust welled tip in her until she thought she would puke all over him and herself.

"Goddamn, you're good," he breathed in her ear, and it was startling, as though an ape bad suddenly spoken in clear English. She tried to shut the words out of her mind and to shut the experience out with it, to keep the reality that had become insupportable out of her consciousness. This had to end, she thought, this couldn't go on much longer. Surely there was a limit to even this beast's ability.

But if there was, he seemed not to have come very close to it yet. He was still ramming away, fucking her with all the force of a steam hammer. Stop, she thought, stop it, stop it, stop it, I can't stand it any longer, you animal, I can't, I can't...

But she would continue for as long as necessary, because there just wasn't anything else to do. There was nothing else--

A blast filled the room, filled Julie's head, and for a moment she thought that the room had exploded, that a bomb had been thrown inside or something. It was a huge, rocking kind of blast that seemed to split her head, and fill her ears. She screamed into it, and heard her own voice blanked out by the blast, but she knew that the blast was really over, and she had been temporarily deafened by it. Then her hearing cleared, except for the ringing in her cars, and she was suddenly aware of something warm and wet running over her face and body. She looked up at Butch, but he wasn't there any more. In his place there was a vast hulk of flesh with a maw of bone and red blood where his head should have been. Blood spurted out of the hole in the end of his neck, and ran over Julie, and over the floor. Julie screamed again, screamed in shock and disgust, and then the body was pulled off of her. She looked up through a blur of blood in her eyes, and saw Connie there, with the shotgun in her hands. A tiny wisp of smoke was curling upward from the muzzle.

"Come on," she was saying, "come on, Mrs. Bradford, we've got to run, now." Suddenly she dropped the shotgun and headed for the service porch and the hack door. Julie sat up and watched her go, and Sally after a moment's hesitation, followed. They disappeared, and Julie sat up and looked at the door through which they had gone, and thought, Oh, no, oh, God no, you've really done it now.

There was a rumble of heavy running in the hallway, and Max and Pete came in. They looked at the body of their friend, and then at Julie, and she saw that they thought that she had done it,

"No," she said weakly, "Connie. Connie and Sally. They went out that door. They went--"

Max headed out the door at a run, and Pete came over and grabbed up the shotgun. He looked at it for a moment, then dropped it to the floor and grasped Julie's arm. His grip was incredibly hard, cutting off the circulation as he yanked her to her feet. "Come on," he snarled. "I'm not leavin' you in here where you can untie hubby."

She went with him, not offering the slightest resistance. She followed out the door to the outside, and felt the bite of tiny stones on her bare feet. She winced at the pain, but he pulled her along with him, dragging her across the ground at a clip too fast for her to run. She did her best to keep up, and her toes stubbed painfully into rocks and bits of wood.

Max was ahead, running after one of the girls. From the yellow robe Julie could tell that it was Connie. She was running as hard as she could, but Max was overtaking her steadily. There were no cars in sight, and Julie knew that the girl had lost her gamble. There was no hope for her now. Julie felt a vague pity for her, but she had brought it on herself, and maybe on everyone else, too. There was no telling how the men would react to the killing of one of them. It couldn't make things any more pleasant, she thought, and so far the three females had owed their existence to the fact that there was one of them to each male. Now there would be an extra female, and no reason why they couldn't kill one of them. Whichever one they chose, she thought, and her blood chilled at the thought, because it was entirely possible that they would choose the one who was the oldest. After all, Max had thrown her over for a younger woman. Why shouldn't he and Pete decide to keep the younger girls and get rid of her?