A Sliver of Light Read online

  #6 knew that other weapons were drawn upon him – he had seen what happened to the rebels so he knew the consequences of non-compliance. “I can’t do it,” he wailed again.

  “You son of a bitch!” #7 spat the words out with venom, spittle hanging from his lips towards the ground. He must have thought he was okay after all the clicks in the room – only to have his relief cruelly taken away.

  “Two seconds #6 or it’s over for you.” Zoran took a few steps toward #6.

  Menacing.

  “Kill him now Zoran,” yelled #7. “Get it over with!”

  Just as #6 was about to say he couldn’t do it, his eyes shut tight, crow’s feet lines splayed out across his temple. His hands went dead still for a second and he squeezed the trigger.

  The boom filled the room instantly. It sent a high pitched squeal through Stephen’s ears. It also sent a lead projectile through #7’s head, an explosion of brain, skull and blood spraying outward as the body fell limply to the floor.

  The orgy yelled/screamed/hollered as one organism. The hellhole erupted in euphoria – people fucked harder, money changed hands and the festivities picked up the pace.

  As Stephen sat down, Zoran announced: “End of round One.”

  Nothingness

  Derek Giles sat in the room over-looking the motley bunch of deviates enter his little den of iniquity – his own personal Sodom and Gomorrah. He recognized most of the faces straight away but some took a little bit longer than expected – some of them he didn’t really know at all which concerned him somewhat. Gate crashers were certainly not welcome at this sort of gathering.

  When Brian Something entered, Derek barely recognized him – and then he realized that it had been several months since Brian was last here. Derek checked his files and, sure enough, they showed that Brian had been travelling for the last 4 months throughout North and South America. He’d lost weight, his hair was longer and he was deeply tanned.

  Derek wondered if he had been to similar functions overseas – doubtful.

  It’s not like this is anything unique though – it’s just that these types of gatherings are certainly much more underground than your average orgy. Anyone can find a good swinger’s party through adverts in the paper, swinger’s magazines or websites and so on. But to find one so extreme, so depraved…well, that was a little more difficult.

  This was an exclusive club, membership not easily given.

  You had to know where to look, the right people to ask.

  Derek was one of those “right people”.

  Oliver Miles was an associate of Derek’s who worked in a porn store not too far from here. He had been approached by customers asking him about snuff orgies – where people are killed for fun. As expected, that kind of enquiry was going to raise a few eyebrows. Ollie informed Derek straight away and arranged for him to meet with these chaps. Derek gathered their details from Ollie and performed his usual checks through the labyrinth of contacts he had in various agencies. He needed to make sure that these guys weren’t cops. How they knew to contact Ollie was beyond him – maybe it was sheer luck? Maybe they asked at every shop hoping to finally get the right person?

  Either way, they did manage to get the right contact in Ollie and once Derek learned that these two were simply your average “run-of-the-mill” perverts, he arranged to meet them to discuss the matter.

  The meet was at an industrial estate at 1AM – the warehouse Derek chose had been vacant for some time as the owner of the furniture company that was based there suddenly developed an urgent need to disappear from the face of the earth. At 1AM, on ground foreign to them, these two guys were sitting ducks – it was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel for someone like Derek Giles.

  Someone with his training, his background...his proclivities.

  As they stood there waiting for Derek to show up, he was already in the shadows watching them. He’d been there for an hour anyway, making sure he wasn’t followed and that no-one else was staking it out as well. These guys were amateurs, but even amateurs can read books and arrange some form of ambush. Derek needed to be sure that he wasn’t going to be outnumbered or caught unawares by these guys – that would be so embarrassing.

  They stood there, cold, waiting for their clandestine initiation into the underworld of sex and violence. The tall skinny one turned his back to Derek’s position and wandered away a little.

  Derek’s cue.

  The next thing the tall skinny one knew, warm liquid squirted onto the back of his neck and he heard a soft gargling sound followed by a dull thud. He turned to see his companion face down on the gravel, the head barely connected to his neck. The knife Derek had slashed through his throat with had all but severed the head, the vertebrae was the only way his head stayed on.

  Even in the dark the skinny guy could see the blood pouring out and he felt it’s warm caress down his spine as it flowed below his collar. He touched the back of his head and his hand came away red – his companion’s blood.

  Panic!

  It always sets in on occasions like this – Derek had seen it so many times. It was still amusing to him and he still got a real buzz out of being invisible whilst his prey wildly thrashed and panicked, not actually knowing where the attack would come from.

  The skinny guy turned around, frightened, terrified; eyes wide and staring into the night. His feet scuffed the gravelly ground, small pockets of dust rose as he stumbled off. It was like his body had started running before telling his feet and he tripped over, sliding on the gravel.

  He was face down and easy prey. Derek pounced quietly, cat-like, professional, and thrust the foot long blade into the base of his quarry’s skull. The long slender steel shaft arced upwards into his brain and Derek twisted it left and right quickly, mashing the cerebellum and the brain stem. This stopped him breathing instantly and he was dead.

  Derek stood over the two bodies and realized that he still had one more to go – Ollie. Oliver was a liability and Derek couldn’t risk leaving him out there to be approached by people at random – he could be exposed at any moment if this continued. These two guys had quick and relatively painless deaths – but Ollie would be a different matter.

  When Derek called Ollie to help him dispose of the bodies, Ollie obeyed – he knew not to say “No” to Derek. They took them out to Derek’s boat and, just before dawn, launched off to the other side of the islands. At this time of year, there was little chance of anyone even being on the water at all, let along close enough to see what they were doing. They handcuffed the two victims together and then to an engine block Derek had stowed away earlier in the evening – and over the side of the boat it went.

  Once that was sinking into the depths of the ocean, Derek coldly stuck the knife into Ollie’s back, severing his spinal cord between L3 and L4.

  Ollie’s legs gave way and he fell to the deck of the boat. It didn’t even hurt him all that much and whilst he tried to scream, Derek kicked Ollie hard in the stomach, taking the wind out of his lungs and rendering him silent. Then Derek threw him overboard.

  Ollie splashed around with his arms for a little while and Derek noticed, with cold indifference, the look of horror on Ollie’s face when he realized that not only would his legs no longer work, but he was going to drown out here as the sun rose.

  Derek had seen this look before, although it had been a while and he wasn’t sure what saddened him more – the fact that he could so routinely dispatch three people so easily, or the fact that he didn’t care one way or the other about it.

  “She” knew the answer to that. That was another thing Derek would have to confront when he returned to her. But, for now, he couldn’t concern himself with the thoughts of Sonja – he had to make sure that he was safe.

  That was the way it needed to be for him – he could not afford to have this get out. Each person who comes in had to be vetted and checked to make sure that the group wasn’t being infiltrated or compromised. Each participant knew the inheren
t dangers in participating – they had made their deal with the devil.

  If they had known the price they would pay for getting involved in this group, then maybe some of them would have thought twice and not joined in. Derek could not advertise the consequences for a breach of trust – that’s a sure-fire way to get caught. But they had seen, first hand, what happened to those who betrayed the group, those who didn’t have the stomach for it.

  Fear can be a very good motivator indeed.

  He knew it was really just a matter of time before they actually did get found out – eventually someone would talk and expose the whole group. Maybe, in some perverted way, Derek wanted to be caught? It was starting to get a bit passé for him anyway. The first time it was like:

  “Can we actually DO this?”

  Then it was like:

  “I can’t believe we’re actually DOING this!”

  And now it’s a bit like:

  “Oh, you wanna do THIS again?”

  The sex and the sado-masochistic stuff was one thing and, Derek felt that frankly, amongst consenting adults, there’s certainly no crime in it. The drugs did add an illegal element but it was never enough to instil any real feeling that what they were doing was any more extreme that anything you’d find in most other cities of the world. But the Russian Roulette…well, that was what tipped this over the edge. It’s what made them elite, extreme and evil.

  The Extreme Team. The method of disposal was quick, easy and more than most of these wastes of skin deserved anyway, Derek rationalised. Not that he considered anything that they did to be a form of vigilante-ism…but they all felt it was a form of trash disposal in some way.

  But Derek knew that this had a limited life span, an expiry date close to completion. He thought of Sonja, he thought of the time away from her that they both needed. And he thought how appalled she would be at this. That, in itself, was enough for him to think that this was the last night.

  Game on

  Stephen was # 2 and he handed back his gun to the guards. Stephen could see #3 was now crying again, wallowing in self-pity and faecal matter. The track pants #3 wore showed a distinct wet skid-mark down the crack of his overweight butt – the top one-inch of butt crack seemed to allow the stench to escape.

  Slimy flabby arse cheeks rubbing together, lubricated by faeces...just what Stephen wanted a vision of as he sat with his fellow competitors.

  “You fucking stink,” he said to #3 as the large man finally reached the floor. Stephen now had a vision of the shit spreading across the expanse of arse as he sat and squirmed on the concrete.

  In an instant Stephen’s humanity kicked in and he felt sorry for the guy...actually, not sorry. Pity. There is a difference and it was certainly pity. Pity has a sense of inevitability about it – like the bad stuff that had happened and would continue to happen had been pre-ordained and there was nothing #3, nor Stephen, could do about it.

  Between sobs, Stephen made out: “Sorry”, “I’m going to die”, and “I don’t deserve this”.

  “None of us deserve this, but it’s where we have ended up,” replied Stephen, as he took in the rest of the competitors in this sick game.

  There were 11 of them left; #7’s lifeless corpse had been dragged away by one of the gun-toting nutcases who brought them there. 11 people, 7 men and 4 women left. And there were various different reactions to the game so far. #3 next to Stephen was the only one who had soiled himself and seemed beyond repair – for him the only solution now was death. One of the women and two of the men were clearly drug addicts, they shifted around and were even more jumpy than you’d expect after round one of Russian Roulette. One guy, #11, had the tell-tale track marks on both arms and legs of a long time IV drug user.