Feral Hearts Read online

  Feral Hearts

  A NOVEL

  Edward P. Cardillo Michael Fisher

  Amanda M. Lyons Mark Woods

  Jim Goforth catt dahman

  Edited by

  Edward P. Cardillo

  Edited by: Edward P.Cardillo

  Cover Art by: Michael Fisher

  http://jellingtonashton.com/

  Copyright.

  Edward P. Cardillo, catt dahman, Michael Fisher, Amanda M. Lyons, Mark Woods, Jim Goforth

  ©2014, Authors

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book, including the cover and photos, may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher. All rights reserved.

  Any resemblance to persons, places living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  A cknowledgements

  We would like to thank Alan Basso and Charlene Nunez for their extra pairs of eyes, feedback, and support.

  There was a vamp who knew no fat,

  Her maker knew no lean,

  They bit your neck and picked your bones

  And sucked your arteries clean.

  ~Edward P. Cardillo

  Part I

  Lonely Hearts

  Chapter 1

  Wandering Eyes

  Edward P. Cardillo

  It took me off guard the first time I saw Her. Her stark white face and black encircled eyes were startling. What was even more ghastly was when I realized she was looking at me.

  I was at a cookout in the city in a small common lot between buildings, minding my own business, when I stepped out to the curb for a smoke. Even though I was outside, I had enough courtesy not to blow my smoke in my friends’ faces.

  It was a balmy night, a thin sliver of moon cutting the blackness. When I think about it, I guess that’s what was initially so odd about that night. Despite all of the city lights, the darkness was thick, as if it was strangling the street lamps and the lit windows in the buildings on the block.

  As a matter of fact, I was looking up at the windows in casual curiosity, to pass the time, as I enjoyed my smoke. I was watching this one couple through their window across the street. They were in their kitchen, and they appeared to be arguing about something.

  The young woman looked more frightened than upset, and her guy seemed exasperated by his body language. He kept running his hands through his hair and pacing the room, popping in and out of view.

  That was when I noticed something. The girl kept glancing out the window, not at me but across the street. Every time she did so, she appeared to grow more and more upset. At first it just seemed like she was looking away from her boyfriend or husband, or whatever he was to her, while he argued his point.

  However, as I watched more closely, I noticed she wasn’t looking away from him. She was looking at something. Having half a cigarette to go, I was in no rush, so I turned my head and looked up at the building to see what she kept glancing at.

  My eyes were drawn to it right away. There were a few lit windows with people milling about in the goings on of their summer’s night. In between was a dark window with something white pressed up against the glass.

  I squinted under the haze of the street lamp and was startled when I released that the most ghastly face I’d ever seen was gazing down at me with an expression that still curdles my blood at the mere thought of it. It was feral. Wild and evil.

  It wasn’t just the stark appearance that unnerved me. The face, a woman’s face, conveyed with it some inexplicable feeling of…revulsion. Terror and revulsion.

  I quickly looked away and back at the window across the street at the arguing couple. The girl glanced across the street, but this time her gaze held. She held out a hand to silence her man, who was in the middle of making an important point.

  He stopped in his tracks, his face stricken with fear at what her gesture might’ve implied. He, too, looked across the street—something he appeared to have been avoiding the whole conversation that I saw—and looked at the window. Then the strangest thing happened…

  They both looked down to the street. They looked at me.

  As if that wasn’t eerie enough, the expressions on their faces took the cake. The guy looked relieved, and his girlfriend looked…apologetic.

  I dropped my unfinished cigarette to the curb and stomped it out with my foot. As I turned to rejoin the party, I looked up at the dark window to find that horrid face staring intently down at me. It was a face that looked hungry and hateful.

  Somewhat shaken, I didn’t enjoy the rest of the cookout and decided to call it a night. I said my goodbyes, finished my beer, and left the little lot. I quickly looked up at the window across the street only to find it dark.

  I turned to walk to the train without looking back over my shoulder at the other window, but I felt it boring a hole into my back with its gaze. She was still there at the dark window watching me, but I didn’t dare look back.

  It’s like when a homeless man makes uncomfortable eye contact with you, and you know he’s going to start harassing you for money, so you look away even though you know he’s stilling giving you the stink eye.

  But this was…different. A homeless man never gave me the willies down to my bones.

  As I walked the streets, passing darkened alleys and shadowy nooks between apartment buildings and storefronts, I felt Her watching me from the black. The idea was ridiculous, and I tried to laugh it off, but I at times caught glimpses of Her horrible face glaring at me, seething with hatred.

  I crossed the street, searching out crowds of pedestrians to surround myself. I’d done this with shady characters before, would-be muggers, but I wasn’t as afraid in those instances as I was that night.

  When She realized I was deliberately ignoring Her, She began to call out to me, Her voice as horrible and unnerving as Her face.

  Why do you not look at me? You found me interesting before, She said in a thick Russian or Eastern European accent.

  As I walked the streets, continuing to ignore Her and failing miserably, Her beckoning turned to threats.

  Look at me, you piece of shit. I will not be ignored.

  When that didn’t work, I began to feel the pull on my genitals and on my soul. As I passed dark alleyways and black recesses, it was as if something intangible yanked at me, clawing my skin as she snarled.

  Come here, you little fuck. You’re mine.

  I drifted a little too close to a darkened doorway of an apartment building, and I could’ve sworn I felt fingers reaching out for me, Her terrible face with its black eyes leaning on the border of plain sight.

  When I made it back to my apartment, I locked the door and put on the chain. This was, of course, ridiculous because I somehow knew that locks and chains would not keep Her out.

  I went to sleep, if that was what you’d call it, with the lights and the television on, eager to put the night behind me like some bad dream. I convinced myself that She was the result of one too many Corona’s wrestling with greasy barbecue in my gut combined with a contact high from a partygoer’s roach, and that I’d wake up to a new day feeling better.

  But it was only the beginning.

  C hapter 2

  Angela

  Jim Goforth

  Issues. Angela Rollins had issues. A plethora of them.

  Sh
e knew that, and she accepted it. The problem was trying to find the appropriate way of dealing with them, and half the time she simply didn't even want to.

  This time, however, she managed to thrust herself into the position where she wouldn't be able to keep avoiding them, sweeping them under the carpet, or using artificial means to keep them at bay.

  Well, technically she could still do all of that but she was out of her comfort zone. She was out of her own country and careening along in a bus on foreign soil, destined for the biggest hotel in the town of Derosso, Italy.

  A hell of a long way from home.

  Furthermore, the whole reasoning behind this crazy jaunt was an off the wall attempt for Angela to start grappling with those issues, throttling them and beating them into submission until she felt she was functional again, unafraid.

  Among the host of issues that plagued Angela throughout her tumultuous twenty seven years of existence was the fact that she had a strong aversion to commitment; to be more precise, a blinding, heart thumping deathly fear of it.

  She killed relationships faster than a cyanide sandwich, clearing a circle of friends out quicker than a floater in the wading pool.

  So, being in a country far from the place she called home was the first step in taking control of the issue that crippled her human interactions and left her with a trail of broken romances, friendships, and acquaintances that sprawled from one side of the continent to the other.

  Angela wasn't just here on any random holiday. This was no simple sightseeing tour where she wouldn't have to interact with people because she wouldn't understand the language.

  This bus trip to Derosso, which followed a torturous plane trip of bad food and worse company, was the final leg of travel that would catapult her right into the midst of an organized tour for young single people, ready or not.

  One could dress that up or down in any way they saw fit, but at the end of the day, it was a tour organized as a matchmaking ploy, a lonely hearts club. It was designed to be a means for singles to find love, if not with those who had joined them on the tour then perhaps with somebody from Italy. Naturally, what better country to send the lonely hearts club off to than the romantic realms of Italy?

  'France,' Angela said to herself. 'They could have organized a trip to France.'

  That was neither here nor there. She had made it this far, past the point of no return. She resolutely sworn to herself she would see this through to the end.

  As she sat in her window seat, accompanied by a snoring overweight lady to her right with an upturned novel resting like a dead bat on her capacious stomach, Angela gazed out the window from behind her mirrored Ray Ban sunglasses and watched the scenery flash by.

  Angela drifted away into recollections of the past, how she reached this critical point where it was impossible for her to allow anybody close to her in any capacity, why she kept everyone at a healthy distance, why she was an abject failure at maintaining any guise of a meaningful relationship.

  * * *

  It started early, very early in her life. An only child, Angela enjoyed a fairly idyllic existence, doted on by her loving parents. Her father was a hard working accountant, and her mother was a stay at home, hands-on sort. Her earliest memories were happy ones, full of fun and frivolity.

  She could recall dress ups with dolls, sleepovers with her little friends in the neighbourhood, tea parties, riding bikes, all kinds of great things. Her house at the bottom of the cul-de-sac was often a prime meeting spot for the young girls of her age to assemble and play.

  When Angela was ten years of age, that all vanished, snatched away by a massive cruel hand of fate which balled itself up into a furious fist and pounded this wonderful childhood into nothing but dust. On the most terrible night of young Angela's ten year old life, while she blissfully carried on one of her many friendly sleepovers at her best friend Carolyn's house three blocks over, her parents were out for their weekly outing. They planned to have dinner at the often frequented Mexican restaurant El Torito, where her dad would indulge in in Tex Mex favorites and her mum would opt for one of the milder options on the menu, and then catch a movie downtown. The local theatre was showing a host of old movies from their heyday in some sort of nod to greats of the silver screen.

  Angela was sketchy on the details of exactly what transpired between the conclusion of the dinner and the brief couple of blocks walk to the cinema. Given her age, she was pretty sure the police had withheld a lot of information to shield her from the full horror; both of her parents were accosted by a raving junkie brandishing a bladed weapon.

  While robbery for the purpose of scoring a fix was surely the prime motive, the crime violently escalated to murder and in the bloody aftermath, young Angela Rollins was left an orphan. Her serene life was shattered into fragments that could never be repaired.

  From that point on, she discovered bitter lessons about family and friendship.

  With no surviving family members and none of those parents of the little girls she called friends having any desire to take her in, she became a forgotten child. An orphan. A ward of the state.

  Angela was a child shunted around facilities, foster homes, and temporary lodgings. She was a child who became unmanageable for some families and susceptible to the less than hospitable intentions of others.

  The reasons for a seemingly wonderful childless couple wanting to take in a withdrawn and randomly aggressive little dark haired girl as their own might have appeared genuine and caring to those in charge of finding Angela a suitable placement, but she soon discovered otherwise.

  Angela's experience with the Mulholland’s was the first of this kind, but it wasn't to be the last.

  “As a unit wanting to create a strong family environment,” said Mr. Mulholland, “we have an emphasis on games in this household. Family games. Games we can interact with each other, where we learn about one another. We don’t know anything about you and we want to know more, so we will start with a simple game. It is called the snake game.”

  “Think of it as a new start for you, a chance for you,” Mrs. Mulholland simpered, her voice saccharine. “A new family, and one that wants you, but you have to want to be here too. You have to show us how much you want your new family. Sweetie, have you ever seen a snake shedding its skin?”

  Shaking her head, Angela couldn’t follow the question. She knew what a snake was, but she hadn’t ever seen one, much less seen one shedding its skin.

  “A snake sheds its skin for new growth, it leaves the old behind and embraces the new. This is what we want you to do, Sweetie. Not just in the sense of leaving your terrible old past behind, but now in the game. Can you show me how a snake might shed its skin?”

  Once more, the little girl didn’t quite understand what her new mother was alluding to, not until her new father started to undress. Shedding his ‘skin’. Waiting for Angela to shed hers.

  As she was shuffled through the system in a seemingly never ending line of freaks, deviants, and all around fruitcakes masquerading as normal human beings, she learned, or least came to believe that humanity was inherently evil.

  She discovered and witnessed human nature at its very worse. It might have broken a weaker spirit, obliterated her will to live, driven her to end it all in one final act.

  It didn't break Angela.

  It did, however, send her into a downward spiral into seedy worlds populated by predators, illicit substances, shady characters of both sexes, violence, and deceit. By the age of sixteen, she had experimented wholeheartedly, though occasionally forcibly, with more drugs than most average individuals would have contemplated in an entire lifetime.

  By the age of eighteen, she was proficient in a slew of unsavoury career options; table top dancing, exotic and pole dancing, peep show dancing and the like added to her repertoire. She had no qualms with wielding her sexuality like a weapon, utilising it to full advantage to manipulate and obtain whatever she required that was going to benefit her, her ends always just
ifying her means. The host of depraved characters that she encountered along the way in her fucked up childhood had helped to shape her, mold her into a woman who would gain what she needed and have no regrets about doing so.

  They were, however, responsible for making her deathly afraid of letting anyone close. As a result, she had deeply engrained trust issues causing commitment and intimacy issues.

  Sex was no problem. She switched emotions off and on like an automaton. To her the act, whilst intimate, didn't have to be emotionally intimate, and she used it when it was to her benefit. It was long term intimacy that created the problem.

  Until she met Dallas.

  Dallas might have looked exactly like any one of the other twisted, perverse souls that swarmed the seething hotbed of twisted humanity where Angela worked her various establishments against a backdrop of neon blasted landscapes and police sirens. Despite his steely eyes, comprehensively tattooed frame, unshaven visage, and long shock of dark brown hair, he was nothing like any of them, nor was he anything like the string of ordinary looking Bill and Mary Everyday psychopaths she had crossed paths with along the way.

  He was a genuine soul—decent, kind, respectful. He was a man whose qualities were masked beneath his rough exterior, and a man who gradually begin to crack Angela's frosty exterior and creep in under her defenses. He was the one who, bit by bit, began to instill in her a shadow of a belief that humanity might have some saving graces after all, or at very least that some members of it did. Not each and every one of them was a rotten apple.

  Though he did share similar misanthropic views as Angela for the most part, having witnessed enough of human behaviour at its very worst, he acknowledged that there were rare diamonds among the rocks. Silver linings amidst swollen fat bruised clouds. Moments of good amongst a mountain of shit.