The Minotauress

"That's low-down, Sarge. That's a scumbag thing ta do."

"Uh-huh," Lass agreed. "And look at it this way, Liberace. The sooner we get this check-out finished, the sooner my dick's gonna be back in your yap."

Lass' big size-12 shoes crunched forward, gravel popping. Dodell followed. Ahead of them, the long-closed Stoddard's Mill seemed to grow as they approached, its silo tower spearing the night. They walked around behind the drooping edifice, and Lass scanned his Mag-Lite to and fro over the range where they'd previously found seven dead, gutted children.

Nothing tonight.

"Thank, God," Lass mumbled.

"What's that, Sarge?" Dodell asked.

"Shut up, queercakes. And keep your hand out of your pants. That old shriveled bitch Mrs. Codder said something about way behind the mill, near the old mine."

"She said she saw a monster," Dodell reminded.

"That's right, Elton. So let's check it out. Probably just a rummie cooping in the trees. We'll find him and beat his ass black and blue and be on our way. Go check around the right. I'll check the left."

They both parted. Their bright flashlight beams roved through the darkness. The woods rose before Lass. Lass stopped, cock throbbing.

Fuck. That was one doozy of a head job, he thought. He rubbed his crotch in recollection. I might have ta, I might—

Lass was too aroused. He needed another nut—bigtime. The follow-through and all that. Second nut's always better than the first. Dodell's footsteps could be heard crunching away.

No one would know.

Lass whipped it out in the dark, not thinking of Rachel Welch or Pamela Anderson but of Private Dodell's hot, balls-of-fire mouth. He shucked his stiff meat back and forth like skin on a fresh pork sausage, then raised up on his police tip-toes and—

"Oooooooo!"

He squirted his restless seed deep out into the night.

Man! he thought.

But no sooner had he replaced his penis into his trousers... he heard the smacking sound.

"The fuck?"

He switched his Mag back on, roved it to the left.

And stared.

What he was staring at was not another dead child but a veritable pile of dead children.

And, if the flashlight beam could be trusted, the child on the top—a boy—was still alive.

Quivering. Shuddering. Convulsing.

But still alive.

"Hold on, son!" Lass proclaimed. "I'll help ya!"

It was then, though, that Lass noticed just exactly where his plume of sperm had landed: in the boy's mouth.

"Aw, Jesus, kid. I'm sorry... "

The apology was hardly needed; the boy died a moment later, smacking Lass' sperm. He'd been gutted and gored, and so had the six other children who lay there between twin oak trees, stacked neatly as bags of heifer feed. This is DAMN fucked up! he thought. What the hell am I gonna do! I can't keep all these dead kids out of the papers!"

Dead kids were bad enough. But what about a dead cop?

That's what Lass found when he tromped off to the other side of the mill's rear. An old track-trail led down the cleared path, toward the head shaft of the gypsum mine that had been closed decades ago. Lass' bright flashlight scoured the space between the rusted rails, and he saw—

Footprints? he wondered.

They were footprints, all right. But not human. They were—

Hoofprints, he discerned. Like a bull's.

Ten feet further down the tracks, Lass found Dodell's body sprawled in the dirt. The best cock-suck in town was dead. The younger officer's chest had been ripped open, gored.

Lass was too scared to scream. Mindless, now, he turned and ran back to the cruiser, certain he would hear the manic hoofbeats following him. By the time he'd returned to the front of the mill, he was shaking feces out of his pant legs. He drove off, spinning wheels in gravel, and sitting in his own hot shit.

««—»»

Pasiphae exhaled the rich darkness, watching the idiot constable flee. Such fools, she thought. What has happened over the ages, to turn the world into this... folly? She was back now, that's all that mattered, and for however long, she would turn her hatred into blood, into screams, into the same wreckage that had summoned her return.

She drifted through the woods, a voluptuous oil slick, not moving around the trees but through them. Her footfalls made no sound, and not even the most minute branch snapped beneath her feet, not even a crisped leaf. But she was flesh too, she was real. She could smell and taste and feel, and in this she rejoiced.