Salt Pillars

Chapter 17

The destruction was visible from the street. Judd pointed to the house, but he resisted going near it. He knew all too well what the inside contained.

"Are you sure this is the place?" Travis asked, even though the answer was clear. Travis had insisted on coming along this time. He was tired of playing the bureaucrat on the sidelines; he needed to be in the game.

"Alright boys, Let's suit up." He gestured to Tony, who was standing at his side wearing his football helmet and shoulder-padding, as all the guys were except for Ryan — who felt small next to this gang of over-grown jocks. They had come ready to do battle equipped with various blunt weapons from baseball-bats to tire-irons and crowbars.

As they approached the house, they could see shattered glass and a smashed bush, still glistening with blood. The front door was open with a mangled corpse of a boy strewn out in the entrance. The wounds were fresh and the congealed blood had darkened to a black tar. He had slashes in the face and neck that were pooled with the stuff, and its skin had lost all color aside from a bluish hue. If all of that was not unsettling enough, his eyes were still fixed wide open in an expression of agony. The guys had gotten used to the sight of death, but this was fresh death — violent death.

Moving like soldiers, silently using hand signals, they entered through the front door where they found even more carnage. Jeanie's corpse was the centerpiece of the blood-spattered horror show, with streaks of bright red racing along the walls in a Jackson-Pollock-esque pattern and dark puddles ground into the carpet.

They searched every room, but the conclusion was obvious from the beginning: Cole was gone and Travis began to get angry. Cole had left behind a trail of carnage that told the tale of the most horrific atrocities, and yet he still managed to elude them. They directed their frustration at Judd, interrogating him as though he were an assailant instead of the victim.

Judd was so shaken with terror from his recent encounter, less then an hour earlier and from which he barely escaped alive, that he was unable to speak about what had happened here. The sense of dread still resonated throughout his core. Now this group of guys that were supposed to be protecting him, were cornering him with the same hostility. He broke-down, searching his memory for some clue that would help locate Cole for them, but the fear was a blinding light in his mind's eye that blotted out all other thoughts from visibility.

"Judd think!" Travis shook him, unable to muster any further patience with the situation. "What the hell happened here?" It was his father's temper shining through him. And although he realized that, the realization itself was not enough to contain the anger. Travis grabbed Judd, a battered mess, and shoved him against the wall. "There's no more time... you need to tell us now."

Judd began to describe the events of that night, incoherently at first, but as he continued to speak, the memory began to pour through him with almost perfect clarity. "It was Lily that they had turned their attention to first." He said in a flat tone as though he were under hypnosis, "My poor sweet Lily."

2.

The terrible realization first dawned on Lily as Torian stood above her, pointing the edge of a large knife in her direction. She could read the look on his face, lit up with a combination of viciousness and sexuality. His eyes danced rabidly in his skull, lusting to commit the acts that had transpired in his fantasies, and she was to be the object of this lust, the vessel of his fantasy made real.

Lily trembled uncontrollably beneath her blanket as Torian bent down to lightly tug at the edge, just to give her a little fright, which succeeded and she let out a scream as she pulled against her end. Not wanting to imagine the horrors that would transpire should the blanket that separated her body from this hideous boy be removed, she dug her fingers in tightly, and the tug-of-war went on. But he was toying with her, so when he felt that the game had become redundant, he yanked the blanket away effortlessly and tossed it aside.