Page 91 of Cognac Secrets

We’d done this once or twice before, and there wasn’t anything like the bikes starting to pull only to have to start all over again because the fella’s boots came off with the chains wrapped around it.

They hooked him up, legs splayed, arms splayed and I pushed off my bike where I’d been leaning on it to mount up.

This was a delicate operation, drawing and quartering a fella with a motorcycle. Had to start real slow, draw him up off the ground, let the pain set in and make it last to the point he gave up what you wanted.

I had to give Roadkill here some credit where credit was due. He held out a lot longer than I thought he would. Didn’t buckle within seconds like I expected. Lasted well over ten minutes before he started singing like a canary, telling Hex just about everything he could wanna know about the Bayou Buttfuckers and what was going on.

Seemed a fella had come to ‘em, some joker they called Lassie. Said Lassie had filled their heads with dreams of power beyond their station as a rag tag crew of swamp rats. Had set their eyes on recruiting and expansion. Had ‘em convinced that the Voodoo Bastards were some kind of low hanging fruit, that our numbers were small and that we could be nibbled at. Chipped away. Our territory and our operations ripe for the picking.

“Boy, you picked the wrong ones,” Axeman declared, kneeling down next to the sweating, panting, quivering mess of a man suspended between the four chains.

“If it is any consolation to you, friend. You have put a smile on my face, though.”

“Please,” Roadkill begged. “Please just make it stop.”

“Funny,” LaCroix told him. “If Louie had any workin’ throat left after you fuckers rolled through, I’m pretty sure he would have said the same thing.”

I looked to our president for the final say. Stone faced and without any feeling or remorse, he gave the signal to wind our captive up. We did, and he gave the hand signal to back it off and let the fucker feel it.

He screamed, he cried, he begged for mercy and finally hedidbeg for his mamma. That went on for a minute or three and then LaCroix gave a nod.

He’d suffered adequately. Me, I must have been a softer touch than I’d realized. I probably would have ended this shit a lot sooner.

We gunned our bikes, lurched forward, and I have to say, the sound the human body makes disarticulating and ripping the fuck apart like that isn’t something they ever got right in the movies.

For one, there was no swelling grandiose musical track denoting this supposed hero’s sacrifice or whatever such dumb fucking Hollywood spin the writers would put on it. There was no tragic lament on the wind, no slow motion, shots of the starry night sky or art-house bullshit.

No, there was just this heavy, tearing, a whining sound, a deep guttural squelching, and then the thud of his various parts hitting the ground as we all got our motorcycles under control and kept them from tipping and taking one of us over, with it.

I sighed, turned back, and got a good look at dude’s stretched and severed arm resting in the grass behind me. Hand purple, swollen, and wrist bloody where the skin started to tear and the hand had started to de-glove of its flesh.

It didn’t phase me over much. I’d seen a lot worse. After seeing your buddies blown the fuck up and their faces shot off and shit, this was awful, sure – but I’d seen awful-er.

“Well, shit,” I heard Chainsaw say back a ways in the opposite direction of my bike as I dismounted. I looked back as he toed a dark lump in the grass with his boot.

“This one didn’t come apart clean as some of the other ones.”

“He’s still shuddering, think we should shoot him?” I heard Collier call from where the torso still shimmied in the grass.

“Naw, he’s gone, that’s just his death throes,” Cypress called.

“Involuntary bodily responses and muscle impulses as a result of death.” Axeman said looking down at the shuddering body with a detached indifference that was subtly creepy. Like watching fog creep low on the ground through a damn graveyard at night. Cold, chilling, the sight clinging to the inside of your brain like the clammy vapor would to your skin.

I suppressed a shudder of my own that had nothing to do with the murder we’d just committed.

“I’ll get the chainsaw,” Chainsaw said.

“I’m grabbing the trash bags,” Saint declared.

We disarticulated him the rest of the way with the small chainsaw, put the pieces in the bags, and loaded the bags of parts inside the van.

“Swamp?” Cypress asked.

“No,” Hex said. “Make him his club buddies problem.”

“Fuckin’ copy that,” Cy said.

“The rest of y’all go where you gotta to get cleaned up and get back to your lives,” LaCroix ordered, and there was something just vaguely wrong with the thought of going back to Sandy with potential blood on me.

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