The Minotauress

"Yeah! And thens we can high-tail it out's this fuckin' place!" Balls rallied. "Why not! Crafter done it so's why cain't we?"

The Writer chuckled smoke. "Mr. Balls—the process would require one of us to be sacrificed."

Silence.

Very slowly, then, Balls and Dicky turned their gazes to Cora.

The Writer thought: Oh, dear...

Cora flailed against her bonds. "Why the fuck you rednecks lookin' at me?"

Balls shrugged. "Well, see, me'n Dicky still got a haul to make, and the Writer here, he's got the smarts, but you, Cora? You don't bring much to the table, in fact the way I see it, you're about as useful as a dick on a cow... "

"Let me go, you fucker!" she squealed.

POP!

Balls' fist made short work of Cora's protestations. She slumped over again, out cold.

"It's murder," the Writer reminded them. "It's a capital offense."

"Does it look like I care?" Balls retorted. "Shee-it. We'se'll just summon ourselfs our own demon, then we can get out'a here and still walk off with a shitload's Crafter's hair-looms."

"That's purdy dang good thankin', Balls," Dicky said.

The Writer struggled for any idea to thwart the plan. "Tephramancy requires human ashes; that's why Crafter has his own crematory. It probably won't even work with all the power shut off."

Dicky's minuscule intuition fired up. "But that thing runs on gas, don't it? We done seed all them propane tanks outside."

Balls stalked right up to the idle machine, pushed the ON button, and—

POOF!

—the pilot flared from the surge of propane.

"So much fer that, Writer!" Balls turned the knob to high. "Looks like we're ready to have ourselves our very own demoneric sacker-fice!"

And then the dirty-work began.

(IX)

The Writer felt ultimately responsible but then poor Cora didn't have much of a life to begin with. At least her travails and the pain of her addictions is at an end, he tried to rationalize.

Balls didn't need much instruction; he and Dicky, first, picked up Cora's unconscious form, and—

CRUNCH...

—impaled her throat on the iron spike of the last wooden door. Her junkie eyes sprang open; she flipped feebly on the spike, whose tip exited the hollow of her throat. Then she began to gargle foamy blood.

Balls looked to the first corpse, then to the Writer. "She gotta be nekit?"

Queasy, the Writer reeled at the gargling sound. "It doesn't say so specifically in these tomes but naked sacrifice victims do seem to support the time-held cliché. Nakedness begets lust, and lust offends God. By soliciting a demonic source, you pay tribute to it by offering a naked sacrifant."

Balls' Buck knife cut off Cora's tube-top. He frowned at the irregularly nippled breasts that were flat as proverbial beer coasters. "Shee-it. I seen bigger lumps in pancake batter. Hope her cooze looks a right better than them little skin-bags she's got fer tits."

"It don't," Dicky assured.

Balls hauled the cutoff shorts off her dirty legs and feet. "Oww! You gotta be shittin' me, man!" he howled in objection at the woman's groin. "Is that groaty or what? Her cunt looks like a fuckin' baby gorilla!"

Neither the Writer nor Dicky even looked this time. Balls' expression puckered as he grabbed the branch-cutters. "Any gal with a pussy that ugly deserves ta be sacker-ficed... ," and without delay he hooked the cutter's lower blade into her navel, pushed, and—

crack! crack! crack!

—began to clip a rive from her upper abdomen to her neck. Dark, disease-rife blood poured from the opening.

"Er, let's see now... Dicky, grab me that metal frame-lookin' thing off the other ‘ho—right, Writer?"

The Writer sighed in place. "Yes. It'll be necessary to widen the chest cavity enough to access her heart."

Balls figured it out by intuition. He sunk the retractor's prongs into the wound, then turned each of its two knobs. Each crank divided the severed ribcage in increments. Balls reached right in and manually spread the tainted, pink-black lungs, to reveal a quivering white sac.

"Wow, it's white. I'd always thunk hearts were red."

Dismally, the Writer informed, "The white mass is actually the pericardium which surrounds the heart. I'm afraid you'll have to cut both out."

The mass was still barely beating. Balls grabbed it and yanked, then with surprising finesse severed the aortic arch with the razor-sharp Buck knife.

After doing so, an inch-thick plume of blood vaulted out and hit Dicky right in the face.

"Dang, Balls! Aw, man!"

Balls chuckled. "Sorry, Dicky. Don't swaller none. Bet it's loaded with the AIDS and everthang."

Dicky spat, frantically flapping the blood off his face, while Balls twisted the sac and severed the pulmonary trunk, superior and inferior vena cava, and all the other meaty connections.