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Artistic Slashing Ch.14
🕑 Added 2023-07-19 06:28:11 +0000 UTCChapter 14
Bonkers II
Betty dashed from alley to alley, sprinting between backyards and fences as she moved back toward the richer area of town where the two women lived. It was exhilarating. She grinned to herself as she approached the first target. It seemed like that crafting session had taken longer than she planned.
The lights were out everywhere.
Betty stood at the back of the property belonging to the woman with the low, throaty voice. Pale moonlight played across the backyard as she looked over the fence. Toys were littered across the grass; a blowup ball and a small cart of some kind moved fitfully in the late-night breeze. The cart’s wheels squeaked forlornly as it moved.
Betty grinned.
A window was open on the second floor, just below the roof. It was small, probably a bathroom window, but it was big enough. She Slasher Stepped up onto the roof and lay down quietly, peering over the edge and into the window below her. The Throaty lady was asleep in the bath.
That could be dangerous.
Betty briefly entertained herself with the idea of Stepping in through the window and drowning the woman as she slept. It would be so easy… but where was the art?
Betty ripped up a roof tile and flung it at the cart in the garden. The roof tile was some kind of stone, and it made a loud clang as it hit the metal bed of the cart. Throaty jumped, splashing about.
Betty laughed and got ready to jump her when the woman exited the house. She tried not to giggle as the woman splashed about, trying to pull herself out of the water. Throaty was evidently a heavy sleeper and still seemed half asleep as she flailed her way out of the bathtub.
Betty thought this would be a good place for a nice hanging, with a side of disembowelment. Perhaps use the guts to decorate the trees?
A dull thump and splashing caught her attention.
“FUCK!” She yelled before slamming her hand over her mouth.
Betty watched Throaty’s head disappear below the water, a trail of red left behind on the tap where her head had slammed into it.
The bathwater rapidly turned pink, then a deep red, as someone started to bang on the door to the room.
Betty Slasher Stepped down, appearing on the other side of the fence and stalking off into the night.
What kind of a joke was that? She stomped her way down the back streets and pathways, frustrated beyond words. The first time she realized that hoofbeats were approaching was when they slid to a stop ahead of her.
Betty turned her burning eyes to the newcomer. It was a jogger.
A jogger! Who the fuck jogs in the middle of the damn night through the damn backstreets of a suburb?
She lashed out, Slashy claiming their first kill as blood fountained into the air from the decapitated jogger. She kicked the body aside and strode on.
It was almost five minutes later that she realized what she had done.
She froze, mid-stomp, as the image replayed in her mind. The scared jogger slid to the stop. Her arm shot out, blood flying as the head rolled from the neck. She had just kicked the corpse aside and walked on. She hadn’t even thought about it.
Was she becoming a monster?
Betty shrugged, finding she didn’t really care. Even if that jogger was a Bovinian saint of some form, they had seen her. So they had to die.
Simple.
Plus, she was pissed off. Throaty had been very rude and died of her own stupidity before Betty could kill her.
That could not happen again.
Betty turned, shifting away from her previous path and over toward the last member of the little trio that had met in the comic book store she was squatting in. The one with the light, airy voice.
Betty remembered the woman was quieter than the others as she had followed them through the streets. But she was not the shy kind of quiet. No. It was the other two competing for her attention the whole time. Light, airy, and the boss.
That was her target.
Surely nothing could go wrong this time?
The first light of day was just starting to mark the horizon when Betty got to the last of the trio. The houses were still dark and quiet as Betty walked up the center of the street. It had been a long night, and she was done with subtle.
A quick Slasher Step took her from the sidewalk to the covered recess that held the front door.
Deep in the shadow, Betty reached out and slowly twisted the lock. A slow, quiet splintering of the wood followed a soft creak. She tossed the lock aside and pushed the door open slowly.
She stepped into the hallway, deep carpeting muffling the sounds of her hooves as she gently closed the door behind her.
She was in.
This house, unlike An’dre’a’s, was opulent. Everywhere she looked, there was something marking the place as the home of a wealthy family. A careful and quiet search of the ground floor revealed nothing of note.
It was one of those houses that seemed like a show home. There were no personal touches, no clutter, no dust. Betty winced. It was like her parent’s place. She remembered all the lectures growing up due to a forgotten piece of paper, toy, or worse… the dreaded forgotten glass.
Her parents had been unforgiving about anything even remotely like a mess. Or, as Betty thought of it… proof actual people lived here. She grinned in the dark living room. That kind of thing could mess a kid up. They could grow up to be anything.
Feeling petty but doing it anyway, Betty went to the kitchen and got a couple of big bottles of dark, fizzy drink. She carefully poured the liquid over the blindingly white rug. Liking the effect, she cleaned the blood off Slashy on a sofa cushion.
This was better than therapy!
Or Betty assumed it was; she had never actually gone to therapy. Given that she was now a killing machine who had beheaded a jogger in a fit of pique, maybe she should have.
Betty tossed the empty bottles on the floor and made her way to the elegantly winding staircase that led to the second floor. Betty, stepping up to the first landing and peering over the top stair, found a long carpeted hallway.
Another Slasher Step brought her into the hall, where she found a set of doors leading off the hall.
A big set of double doors at the far end was evidently the main bedroom.
She opened each door in turn, peering carefully inside.
The first door led to a large bathroom with what looked like a hot tub. She crossed her fingers that there were no kids in this house. Then she could kill everyone here and have a nice long soak.
The next door dashed that hope. A pair of beds, tiny little beds. And inside, two tiny Bovinians looked like chibi characters as they lay on their pillows, blissfully unaware of the monster staring down at them. It took all of her willpower not to lean down and pinch their adorable puffy cheeks.
A door on the other side of the hall led into another child’s room. This one was not so little. The room was almost four times the size of the twins’ room across the hall. In many places, that would have been the room's main feature. But not in this sick little town.
No, this place had its creepy dial turned all the way up to eleven.
A teenage girl, about the same age as the counselors from the camp, was sprawled across a large bed in the center of the room. At each corner of the bed, posts carved in the shape of bovinian males, well-endowed Bovinian males, all bound and gagged and apparently in agony. The walls of the room were decorated with scenes of a similar nature in styles that ranged from cartoonish all the way to extremely graphic realism.
Betty wandered around the room, silently examining the rest of the furniture. Despite the bed and artwork, the rest seemed pretty standard teenager stuff. There were even a set of school books. Maybe all that torture stuff was the Bovinian equivalent of the porny posters boys had on their walls back on Earth?
More likely rich people were just fucking weird, whatever species they were.
Closing the door, Betty moved on to the big double doors. She cracked them open and looked through to the room beyond. It was another massive room. This one had almost the exact same layout as the teenage girls, only on steroids. The bed itself was the same, but the posts went all the way up to a canopy over the whole thing.
Two things set this room apart from the teens. The first was that the artwork covering the walls was of much higher quality. Betty admired the brushwork while trying to ignore the content. The teen’s stuff was all bondage with a side of torture. The mother seemed to have discarded the torture for outright murder. The bovinians on the walls were in poses of extreme pain as they screamed silently. Blood was the primary color of most of the works.
Not just blood-colored, she sniffed at the paint. The paintings actually held blood.
It was sick.
Betty turned to the other major difference in the room.
The bovinian male rotated gently as he hung from the ceiling. He wasn’t dead. Just bound, gagged, and hung above the bed. Her target lay asleep in the bed underneath him.
His eyes were open, and his breath came in short pants as he tried to make a sound or a movement to awaken the woman underneath him.
Betty tilted her head to the side and looked at him. He panicked, screaming into his extremely thick gag.
Betty grinned.
She walked a slow circle of the bed, tracking with him as he slowly rotated from the hook he was tied to. The bondage job was quite thorough, honestly. His hands were bound behind his back, and his arms were tied to his side. His legs were bent back in a way that could not be comfortable, and giant hooks over his shoulders held them in place. He was naked, but only technically. Ropes covered pretty much every inch of his skin.
Betty reached out with Hacky and poked him. He passed out.
Betty stifled a giggle and leaned over the bed, looking down at the sleeping woman. It was time to get to work; the sky outside was lightening by the minute now.
Betty took a two-handed grip on Slashy and raised both arms as high as the roof allowed before stabbing it down and through the woman’s throat. Slashy cut through the throat and into the bed below before lodging in place. The Bovinian’s eyes flew open, and she gurgled as she scrambled at the sword jammed into her throat. Pink foam and deep red blood bubbled from her mouth.
Betty moved fast, swinging Hacky repeatedly, severing the woman’s arms before her eyes rolled back and her struggles stilled.
She decapitated the man hanging from the ceiling and lay him in the bed. The woman was suspended in his place; the large and rather ornate hook held her quite comfortably once jammed into the back of her skull. The decapitated head she wasn’t sure what to do with… she paused and looked around the room before clicking her fingers and heading back down the hall and into the teen girl’s room. She popped the head on the pillow next to the sleeping girl.
A little surprise for her when she woke up.
Before she left, Betty spent a minute locking the door to the young kids' room. From the outside.
They didn’t need to be the ones to discover this.
Pity she wouldn’t get a chance to use that hot tub.
Oh well!
============
Betty took one last look around the comic shop after she had a nice long shower. It had been a fun place to stay, and she was definitely going to miss it. She stopped to stuff a few more graphic novels into her new bag. She had found it shoved under the bed upstairs. It was a lovely black duffel that held more than it looked like it would. With a last look around the shop, she headed out the back door and into the alleyway.
There had been a pleasant surprise waiting for her when she had stepped out of the shower. Her clothes had been not just clean but almost looked pressed.
The joy of having clothes that fit again could not be underestimated. She had activated Shift Form, once more becoming a Bovinian for her walk out of town, and been delighted the clothes changed size right along with her.
As Betty rounded the corner of the alley, she smelled the faint scent of smoke as the fire she set in the store started to grow.
What?
She had no choice. What if people figured out someone had been living there?
Besides, the owner was dead, so who cared?
Betty walked her way out of town, stopping at a cafe and buying herself a few treats on the way.
She had been walking for a few hours, and the little town was far behind her when she saw the first vehicle. Unlike the ones going by far overhead, this one was hovering low to the ground as it made its way down the road. It reminded her of a pickup truck. Only it was a hovering sled in a pale and dusty looking red.
A pickup sled? Betty shrugged.
At least that answered the question of why they had roads when the vehicles flew. It seemed there were a few land vehicles, after all.
She stuck out a thumb on a whim and jumped into the vehicle's cab as it stopped.
“Hi,” She said, smiling brightly. “I’m Bet’ti!”
The woman inside gave her a tired smile, and the vehicle moved off. “I’m Sa’ra’ha” She nodded at Betty. “What’s a girl like you doing alone on these roads? Didn’t your mother tell you it’s dangerous out here?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Betty said, “My mother’s dead.”
In the back of her mind, she felt the timer counting down on her Shift Form…
