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I look out...
"I look out across this room," her eyes are now little more than narrow slits, reflecting what little light infiltrates the darkness "and I see hunger. I see it in your eyes, in the way you laugh too hard, in the way you take too long to break your lingering glances."
"You are hungry."
Her voice booms across the basement, strong enough to shatter glass, pounding their ear drums to so much mush. They stare up at her; silent, rapturous and still.
She bends, places her finger to a barb on the wire that surrounds the dais. Pauses a moment. And then pushes, hard and fast; her eyebrows crease momentarily in response to the sharp rush of the pin-prick pain.
Standing back straight, she looks at them with her level, slitted gaze.
"Would you eat?" she asks.
There are several roars of assent, clamouring into the space left by her silence.
After a lengthy pause in which her eyes scan the gathered hoard, she tuts; the sound immense in the dark, concealing basement.
She bends again and this time grasps the barbed wire in her palm, pulling it upward and clenching her hand into a fist. She doesn't watch her hand, but instead maintains eye contact with the congregation. She pulls her hand, pulls it again, and again. All the time staring at them. Blood begins to seep through her fingers, dribbling off the back of her hand and spattering the tense wire where it disappears into her palm.
Now she nods. And speaks.
"WOULD YOU EAT?" she asks again, the voice thundering from a hundred hidden speakers, drenching them in volume and sonic waves.
This time, the shouts are unanimous, raising into a single, explosive, extended syllable.
"YES!"
And she stands, holding her hand up above her face until it begins to drip on her face. It dribbles down her cheeks, into the hollows beneath her ears.
Her hand floats forward, palm up, until it is in front of her face. Staring down the length of her arm like she were using it to sight for a shot, she scans back and forth across the heads of the crowd.
Finally she smiles.
"Then go," she speaks, her voice little more than a whisper, yet loud enough to shatter concrete, "eat."
The stillness ends, bodies move this way and that, all locomotive energy and desperate desire to be out in the streets of Los Angeles. They claw past each other, pull on each others shoulders to gain some advantage, push each other aside in their hunger, desire and will to be out under the stars.
"Eat!" she yells, her hand still outstretched.
They yell assent as they run for the exits.
"EAT!"
That massive, disembodied, earth-shattering voice pushes them out of the room and, as the crowd thins, the speakers erupt with her cacophonic laughter - the sound is unhinged, terrible, like a hyena that finally gets the joke.
The room clears, the congregation floor empty save for the cooling body of the woman who had been sacrificed earlier. The throwing knife stands upright from the throat, a pool of blood now congealing around the corpse. As light finds its way across the floor, more detail becomes apparent; slashes to the clothing, torn at random angles as if a wild animal has thrashed at it with tooth and claw. And in the patches of skin revealed by the slashing? Bite marks; red-rimmed and raw.
"Sebastian?" the massive voice speaks to the now empty room.
"Yes, ma'am?" a quiet, subservient voice speaks from behind the dais.
She turns, reaching to the podium and flicking a switch amidst a panel of buttons. When she speaks again, the sound is no longer amplified, now just a woman's voice, slightly hoarse, husky with over-use.
"Clean that up," she nods back over her shoulder, dismissively, "and get me the first aid kit."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And Sebastian?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Be quick about it, there's a good boy..."
She left the dais.
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This Pod rates: 2.33 |
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