Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Read online

  Miyu loved the high she got from pain. The sweet intoxicating nectar of agony. She was enjoying all of this … until she wasn’t.

  It was some type of twisted mercy that made Lord bow down between Miyu’s muscular thighs and lick her engorged clitoris, sucking it, flicking it rapidly with his tongue until she began to tremble with the first tremors of a tremendous orgasm, adding an avalanche of her juices to the blood soaking the red satin bed sheet. Lord sucked her tender labia, eased his tongue deep inside her to lick the inner walls of her sex, fucking her with his tongue as she continued to convulse in ecstasy. He knew these few orgasms, no matter how delicious, would be small payment for the agony to come, but it was all he had to offer.

  “You will be my doorway,” Lord said, as he traded the scalpel for a large bowie knife, plunging it to the hilt in Miyu’s sopping wet vagina, seizing the hilt with both and hands and ripping the blade violently upwards, slicing her open from her sex to her stomach. She’d had no time to scream. Lord wasn’t sure she would have anyway. He wasn’t certain she could even distinguish her own murder from the salacious agonies he’d given her for the last couple hours.

  Blood sprayed everywhere, raining down upon them like rainwater, a meaty red deluge pouring from the yawning maw gaping in Miyu’s lower torso as Lord sawed his way up through her sternum and cracked open her ribcage. He reached into her chest with both of his gigantic hands to pry her apart and open the door.

  “I told you bitches I’d be back,” Lord said, smiling triumphantly as he stood, stepped both feet into Miyu’s vandalized corpse, and descended the stairs into Painfreak.

  3 hours earlier.

  “Because she is mine.”

  It was really that simple. Sophia was his slave, his submissive, his slut, and that made her his responsibility, and she was in danger, even if she was too deep into sub-frenzy, too busy chasing that next endorphin rush, to know it. She was in way over her head.

  Lord stalked through the streets of Las Vegas like a great, black, tidal wave. An irresistible force, kicking in doors, twisting arms, and breaking jaws, looking for his submissive. He was looking for the hell-spawned nightclub/dungeon that had swallowed up his property somewhere in San Francisco and spit her out here.

  He’d spent enough time at Painfreak in his twenty-plus years in the S&M and bondage scene to be familiar with its rhythms. It would be here. He knew it. And no matter what it took, he would find it.

  Las Vegas had fallen to ruin since the recession. The people here were broken. They had lost their homes, their jobs, and their marriages. Desperation and despair permeated the atmosphere all around like a sweaty film of existential malaise. Even the tourists that still trickled in came like vampires to suck what life remained from its desiccated carcass, or snuggle beside it in its grave and wait to be picked clean by the local scavengers.

  It cried out for extreme distraction, a screaming orgasmic escape from reality, and the normal disease-ridden street whores weren’t enough to satiate its thirst for debauchery. The swinger’s clubs could not appease its hunger for excess. The bars and casinos could not suck its soul out fast enough. Even the local dungeons and BDSM groups, now packed with sadists and masochists eager to exchange their pain for another’s, to torture themselves and others into forgetfulness and absolution, struggled to keep up with the growing influx of deviants, and faltered as their members demanded increasingly violent and prurient diversions, straining and bursting the limits of safe, sane, and legal. The City of Sin was starving for sex and violence on a plateau far beyond its typical mass-produced, vaudevillian iniquities. The starving hole in the pit of this city was a siren call for Painfreak.

  Lord searched in the old seedy part of Las Vegas Blvd, where the peep shows and strip clubs with ten-dollar lap dances and twenty-dollar blowjobs still proliferated. Empty crack vials, condoms, and heroin balloons competed for space on the sidewalk with cigarette butts and broken glass. You could get married, drunk, high, pick up a prostitute, or gamble away your life’s savings all on the same beer-stained street. Hallow-eyed addicts, and worn and wounded whores shuffled zombie-like, squinting and scowling in the early a.m. sunlight, like ghouls startled to find themselves caught outside their graves at sunrise. Their hunger urged them forward, not satisfied by whatever sins they’d indulged in the night.

  Lord was not a fan of sunlight either. The dark suited him better. His midnight complexion blended in with the evening shadows and he felt himself one of them. The night was an extension of his being. But the club would be more dangerous after dark. Painfreak was a nocturnal predator that slept during the day. At night, it harvested pain and innocence, devoured souls, much as Lord did. But Lord considered himself the hero in this story.

  He’d taken many lives, broken many more hearts. But it had all been consensual. He gave the lost and lonely what they desired, and sometimes agony and death was what they wanted most. Who was he to deny anyone the lusts of their darkest hearts? The more he tried to convince himself he was different than the club’s owners and infernal occupants, the less dissimilar they both seemed. But the fact that Sophia’s fate would be no less agonizing with him than inside Painfreak was a secondary consideration. The point was that she wore his color, his wolf’s head brand on her inner thigh.

  She’s mine, and she has the book!

  The Stratosphere Hotel loomed overhead, casting its long shadow over the twilight streets while the morning sun slowly chased back all other shadows. Lord walked among the damned. Their ravenous eyes crawled over his ebon flesh, searching for some morsel of generosity. Money. Sex. Conversation. A simple smile. He had none to spare.

  Even well into his forties, Lord was still an impressive figure. His six-foot-six, 230+lb body was still lean and hard with muscles bulging beneath his leather trench coat. The only signs of his age were the two inch-wide streaks of white in his goatee, and an overall hardening of his face and eyes. His gaze held a cold wisdom that old warriors acquired after years of sustained battle. As if his very soul had grown callouses to protect itself.

  Lord was shirtless beneath the black leather trench coat. Even in January it was sixty degrees in Vegas, though the strong wind dropped the relative temperature another twenty degrees. His coat flapped in back of him like raven’s wings. Between the two slabs of black granite that formed his pectoral muscles hung a simple silver chain adorned with a dried rattlesnake head. He had accumulated a few scars over the years, some from battle, some from violent, primal sex. A lightening bolt of keloidal tissue ran from beneath his right eye down his cheek, neck, chest, to just above his right nipple. That had been a fun night. Lord absentmindedly traced the scar with his fingertip, remembering the dominatrix who’d given it to him. She had cut him, then he had cut her, and then he had cut her some more, and some more, until they’d ended the evening fucking in a pool of blood while her husband watched, masturbating while suspended from the ceiling from metal hooks. She had been a succulent morsel who’d soon bowed before him and become his slave—as had her cuckolded spouse.

  Sophia, on the other hand, had been an innocent—comparatively. She was no virgin, but she was a virgin to the pleasure of pain. She was new to the world of deviant sex. Her experiences had been limited to the positions commonly found in internet porn. But she had wanted more.

  She’d been haunting San Francisco’s bondage and kink clubs. The ones South of Market and in the Tenderloin district, trying everything with everyone, from rope play and predicament bondage to whips, floggers, paddles, and knife, electrical, and fire play. Every night she was with a different Dom or Master, until Lord took notice of her, and brought her into his fold. Lord introduced her to salacious agonies she’d never imagined herself capable of, and she’d gobbled up every torment he’d subjected her lovely flesh to, then begged him for more. She was a pain-slut, an endorphin junkie, and she was going to get herself killed, and worse. Much, much worse. It wasn’t just that she’d gone to Painfreak without him. She’d taken the book with he
r, The Book of A Thousand Sins, and Lord knew exactly what she intended to do with it.

  Lord found what he was looking for on Industrial Avenue, a block down from the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Strip Club,” adjacent to an old furniture warehouse. It was a large nondescript structure of gray stucco and stone with blacked out windows. The place looked no different than the other buildings in the area, deliberately innocuous. The exterior changed from city to city, but the interior was always the same, updated every so often to keep up with style trends, but essentially unchanging. Lord could smell the blood, the semen, the hellfire. It singed his nose hairs and fired something deep within him that only came out during intense scenes, when he let the animal inside take prey. It awakened the dark, violent, predator inside. This was the place. Painfreak.

  A ten-foot high chain-link fence surrounded the building. There was barbed wire on top that looked brand new, giving the place a secretive, forbidding appearance, yet the front gate stood open for anyone to walk in.

  Because it knows very few would. And those few were more than enough to keep the club alive.

  Lord pondered the fact that he repeatedly anthropomorphized the club, ascribed a will and a motive to it, along with appetites and desires. It was how he’d always thought of it … a living thing within whose entrails they indulged and celebrated their lusts. The people who worked there were merely parasites riding it like ticks. The regular members, like Lord himself, enjoyed a more symbiotic relationship. It fed their passions and perversions, and it, in turn, fatted itself off their dark sexual energies. The tourists, however, they were merely snacks, hors d’oeuvers for the beast that was Painfreak.

  The club was the true monster. It was Lord’s rival for Sophia. Not any one of its patrons or employees, but all of them, the collective whole. And if any of them got in his way, he would not hesitate to make them casualties … even if he was not entirely sure how to accomplish such a feat when it came to the club’s more Luciferian denizens. The ones who lorded over the lower chambers of Painfreak. If she was down there, getting her out would be—challenging.

  Several cars were still in the parking lot, though there were no other signs of activity within or without the building. Lord walked around to the back and found a red door beside the loading bay with a small black placard, no bigger than a business card, just above the doorbell on the left that read “Painfreak.” He rang the doorbell.

  A skinny Asian man with Fu Manchu facial hair and a notoriously sour disposition, cracked open the door. He squinted against the morning sun and snarled in disdain, as if he took sunlight as a personal insult.

  “We’re not open yet. You know better than to come here during the day.”

  “Make an exception. I need to see someone,” Lord said, pushing the door open. He could have been more diplomatic, but he’d been here often enough to know sweet-talk would get him nowhere.

  A big bald guy with tribal tattoos mixed with traditional American tattoos covering much of his muscular bulk, stepped forward with his arms folded across his chest, barring Lord’s way. The man filled the entire doorway from frame to frame, even when he turned sideways. It was a mystery how he managed to get in and out of the tiny door. He must come in through the loading dock, Lord thought. The man resembled an old wrestler from the mid-eighties who’d called himself “The One-Man Gang.” He’d been one of Hulk Hogan’s many nemeses.

  “Okay, what can I give you to let me pass? You know, besides an ass-kicking.”

  The man smirked, amused by Lord’s threat, but not the least bit concerned.

  “Just turn back around and come back tonight, Sir,” the hulking bald man said.

  “Do you know who I am? What I am?”

  The Asian man stepped up and poked Lord in the chest.

  “Yes. We know exactly what you are. The rules still apply to you. Come back tonight or get banned for life.”

  Lord looked past the skinny Asian guy, and appraised the big bald guy behind him. The guy was as much fat as muscle. Built like a power lifter, big arms, big chest, and shoulders, equally big belly. Lord believed he could take him, but was far from positive. None of the employees at Painfreak were exactly what they appeared to be. And if he failed, he would be banned from the club, and there would go any possibility of rescuing Sophia. Even if he fought his way past the two doormen, there were others inside he would have to best, and they would get more difficult the deeper he ventured. Eventually, he would be stopped—permanently. Caution was definitely the better part of valor.

  Lord stepped closer to the big, bald guy, locking eyes with him, trying to see into the man’s spirit and take his measure. The big man’s eyes were black pools of obsidian that reflected nothing back. Were it not for the circle of white around the man’s irises, he would have thought he was staring into hollow pits. Whatever the man was, he wasn’t human, not anymore, if he ever was. Lord was the same height as him, and just as broad, though easily a hundred pounds lighter. Every fiber in his being wanted to test himself against the big guy, alpha male to alpha male. He wanted to see if the man had any guts, and what they looked and felt like.

  “Fine. I’ll be back. Believe me. I’ll be back.”

  “Wise choice,” the Asian man said.

  The big guy only snickered again.

  Lord turned and walked away, feeling wretched for not accepting the challenge, even though he knew he had made the wisest choice. It wasn’t what his heart wanted. His soul called out for combat and death. But he knew there was another way. Painfreak had its followers, fans, and acolytes, but so did Lord. He took out his cellphone and sent out a group text. Hundred’s of submissives of every race and gender, most unknown to each other, in dungeons and bedrooms all over the country, and all over the world, shuddered in fear or squealed with excitement as Lord’s text was received. He had been planning this moment for more than a decade. Now, the time had come to transcend. There were other ways to enter Painfreak besides the front door, ways he didn’t even know if those two assholes were aware of. All Lord needed was a sacrifice … a big one.

  “Talk of the Desert” was about the seediest stripclub/peepshow on the Las Vegas strip or in all of Las Vegas for that matter. Most of the women who worked there were prostitutes, drunks, crackheads, and meth addicts. Both of the bouncers were high on painkillers and juiced up on testosterone and human growth hormone. One was a large Samoan with dreadlocks a thick beard and a neck the size of most people’s waists. He looked like he could bench-press a dump truck. His friend was a big white guy with the face of Jim Carey and the body of Lou Ferrigno. Lord kept an eye on both of them as he scoured the club for just the right kind of whore. He was looking for bruises, welts, burns, cuts, rope burns, anything that might suggest the predilection for pain.

  The place was so dimly lit, it was difficult to discern the features of the naked women slithering between the tables, eyes unfocused and sparkling with amphetamines. They were pale silhouettes, illuminated briefly by roving spotlights and flickering disco balls. That was undoubtedly by design. In the red and blue strobe lights, they did not look nearly as unappetizing as they no doubt did in full light. In the darkness, they were reduced to tits, thighs, hips, and asses. Those were the only parts that mattered to the average customers anyway. From the features Lord could make out, it would be a blessing not to see more of their faces.

  Lord found the darkest corner, just beyond the flicker of the strobe-lights and the glow from the dim bulbs behind the bar. Immediately, like hungry piranha, strippers from several different parts of the room began to slink toward him.

  “Wanna dance?” Asked a slender bleached blonde woman with perfectly round fake breasts that sat up on her chest like scoops of ice cream. Her face was a maze of wrinkles, and her lips were swollen with collagen. But other than the damage her plastic surgeon had done to her, there were no other visible bruises or marks.

  “No,” Lord replied, turning to look at the next woman, a Hispanic woman with big, floppy, ti
ts, wide hips, and a thick waist, hair dyed with streaks of burgundy. She smiled revealing a mouth full of crooked and rotting teeth.

  “You wanna dance?”

  Again, Lord inspected her for signs of masochistic tendencies, and again, other than a swollen jaw, probably the result of a poor choice in domestic partners, he found nothing. Lord waved her away.

  A muscular Asian woman came next. She was just over five and a half feet tall and had the arms and shoulders of a boxer or mixed-martial artist, the thick muscular legs of a gymnast, and the beginnings of a six-pack. She was built like a warrior, like she was hardening her body for battle. Her face was lean and angular, manly, with an oversized jaw and forehead, obviously the result of too many testosterone injections. Even naked, breasts and vagina fully exposed, she could easily have been mistaken for a male to female transsexual, just not a very convincing one. A man transitioning to a woman would have undoubtedly taken greater care to appear more feminine. Even when she began to sway her chiseled torso to the music, grinding her muscular ass in the air, she still gave off a distinctly masculine air.

  What caught Lord’s eye, however, was the micro-branding of an Aztec sun on her upper thigh, the intricate Kanji symbols carved on her chest, arms, and stomach in delicate thin lines, obviously the work of a steady hand and a scalpel, the seven silver rings pierced through her labia, and the whip marks on her back. On her neck she wore a rolled steel choker, a collar. Someone owned this powerful beast of a woman, or at least thought they did.

  “Sit with me,” Lord said before she could entreat him to pay for a lap dance.

  “Do you want a—”

  “I said, sit!” Lord growled, pointing to the empty seat beside him. The Asian woman dutifully complied, slipping soundlessly into the chair. The other strippers who’d been headed toward his table turned away to find other prey.

  “What is your name?”

  “My name is Jade.”

  “No. Not the name you use to get twenty dollar tips from desperate Asiaphiles. What is your real name?”