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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Hunters' Moon
A "Vorare" story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

The snap-sound of distant gunshots brought Gordon's head away from the wall. It was the sound of an answered prayer; the sound he had heard time and time again in his half-waking dreams and meditations, floating through the twilight world of his hunger.

"Time," he whispered. His head and shoulders snapped fully away from the concrete prison walls, eyes wide. "Time," he repeated, this time in a voice filled with excitement. "George. George! It's started."

George lifted his own head, breath coming short and shallow from where he lay. "You heard it too? I thought it could be another dream ..."

"No. They've turned on each other, George. Either they've turned on each other or someone outside has finally broken the silence. Either way it's time."

"Hope it's the turning," said George as he stood.

"We can hope."

Standing side by side, their gaunt frames resembled not the starveling prisoners the Farm had desired, but the hard, lean shadows of predators. For months now they had lived upon scraps and morsels of one another's flesh ? the lone pigeons caught weeks ago were long since devoured. They had known instinctively to consume everything they could find on the birds, the marrow of those tiny bones snapped between thumb and forefinger, sucked dry and then ground into bone-meal against the concrete walls to provide them with some trace minerals.

There was no longer any softness in their bodies. Both wasted with months of hunger to begin with, they had lost all excess water in their systems over the course of their imprisonment. Every waking minute had been spent caring for one another, stripping scraps of flesh to feed the other; or focused on the terrible moment in which they would escape. They had spoken of it time and again, willing the worms of betrayal to gnaw their way into the Farm and its inhabitants, each of them working on the meager energies afforded by the other's body to keep up their strength and sanity.

Gordon brought the remnants of his shirt to his mouth, as trusting and prepared as if this moment ? this gift ? had waited for him throughout eternity. "I'm ready. Let's find out."

"It's going to hurt."

"I know it is. But we need this. Now go."

He bit into the twisted fabric of the shirt, once white but now wine-colored with the tracks of old wounds, but did not look away. He shuddered involuntarily as George brought his face close to the temple, as he felt the hot breath along the side of his face.

An exhalation. An inhalation. Gordon's chest, shoulders, face tensed in agony. George took his head in his hands, right fingers splayed across the forehead, left fingers across the rounded back of the skull.

"I'm sorry," he said. "And I thank you for this gift."

And George's incisors bit straight through Gordon's right earlobe. The sound, so intimate and so closely tied to his aural canal, was wet and terrifying. Despite his knowledge of what would come he screamed into the fabric as George pulled his head back, eyes closed as his tongue probed the soft, rubbery cartilage now trapped between his molars.

"Oh, my God," said Gordon in agony. "Oh, God, that's horrible."

"It's exquisite," said George, lisping horribly around the lump of Gordon's severed earlobe.

"Don't. God, don't talk until you swallow it." Gordon sank to his knees, pressing the shirt against his ear to stop the blood, now crawling down his neck. "Please, George, swallow before you say it again."

George looked at Gordon's form on the floor, and deliberately swallowed before a convulsive shudder wracked through his body.

"Good. Good. Next," he said, grabbing for Gordon's head again. "Bite down again. Not much more. Not much more and it'll be over and we'll be free again."

"God," said Gordon, biting obediently into the fabric of the shirt. This time he unconsciously brought his left shoulder up to cover his tender neck as George leaned in, drawing an equally unconscious snarl that made him start, and pull away.

"Sorry," whispered George. "I'm sorry. I know it's hard. But you're right. We need this. You said as much yourself. You'll eat next, I swear."

The hot breath lingered, as did the pain.

***

"Stop," Gordon croaked. "George, stop. You've had enough." Blood trailed from both sides of Gordon's head, in the ragged void where his earlobes had been. Penny-sized wounds bled from the middle, ring and pinky fingers of his left hand, now curled to uselessly clutch at the bloody shirt.

George's own fingers were prying at the shirt, working to tear it out of Gordon's grip. "A little more, Gordon. Just one more bite and I'll be strong enough to take the door, I know it."

"You said that after the first finger," screamed Gordon. He had thought no water left in his body, but the tear-whips behind his eyes threatened to overwhelm his senses entirely. "You swore. We swore to each other, George, one then the other."

"And I meant every word of it."

"You were my brother!"

"And you are mine, Gordon." The voice seemed far away. "I'll carry you to safety. You won't have to know the horror again, won't live with the knowledge of what we've done here. I'll carry you to safety and get you to a hospital and you'll be free of it all. I need to be just a little bit stronger ..."

George's voice didn't ring with the horror he spoke of. It was strong and full, rich and red and thick not with fear but with longing. The hard grasp of his fingers had lost the tenderness with which they once cradled Gordon's face and arms, now digging into flesh and hair as Gordon twisted and turned, trying to tear his arm away.

"Let go of me!"

"A little more. Just a little." The breath, the plea, came hot and close against the now too-sensitive skin. "I'm so hungry, Gordon. So very hungry."

Gordon looked frantically around the room, twisting and turning under the violent embrace. With a desperate lunge he threw his weight from one hip to another and rolled, carrying George underneath him, then atop him, using their momentum to roll underneath and over again and again until the back of George's skull slammed against the solid door of the stalls with a crack that echoed like the gunshot from without.

The squeals and cries of the swine from without told Gordon what he needed to know. "Meat! George! Just outside the door!"

"There's meat here," said George, teeth bared as he slammed a fist toward Gordon's jaw. Gordon wrapped his blood-smeared hands around the throat underneath him ? pressed all of his bodily weight against the windpipe below. Strong as the flesh had made him, George was dazed by the blow and still filled with a hunger only half-sated, and only half aware of its surroundings. He struggled and squirmed, and Gordon nearly smiled with the knowledge that he, too, could pass over ? could reach down and pluck the ripe red berries of the ears below, or rip away the bristled cheeks, fill his mouth and belly with all the bloody joy that lay below him.

"That meat won't do this to you, or worse." Gordon brought his face low, deliberately pressing with greater weight to hear George gasping for air. "Or then again, maybe it will. I guess Paul's right when he says that swine are mean-tempered, but count on this: you can kill a pig easier than you'll ever kill me, George, and you'll have not one more taste of me before I die. You open that door and you stay wallowing in that pigpen as long as you please, with the beasts where you belong, but I'm flying out of here free as I planned. You're going to break that goddamn door down with the strength my body's given you, or I'm going to strip your jackal's bones and tear your faithless liver free before I let you die."

The two strained at one another a moment longer before George let his hands fall away in mute surrender. Tested beyond the limits of his decency by the pain, the betrayal, and the rage he felt at their perfect plan gone astray, Gordon gave one final shove with the edge of his hand into George's windpipe.

"Remember," he said, and stood. George raised himself into a crouch, shoulder to the door, breathing hard through the bruises that were already raised against his skin. Then he dug his feet into the ground, planted himself, brought his body back, and threw himself against the door. It rattled, and the sound of running swine was too loud for Gordon's comfort, but the door held.

"Again," ordered Gordon, and George growled before complying. The third time Gordon threw himself alongside the cannibal, both bodies filled with tense rage and months of desire, sleepless nights of determination bent toward only one goal: Escape, escape, escape. It took five attempts before the crossbar buckled and snapped under their constant assault.

Both slipped into the pigpen, shoulders driving up mud and filth as their feet scrabbled for purchase beneath them. Gordon kept his eyes on George until he reached his feet, heard the angry screaming of the hogs now racing about the pen, some forward, some back, their actions and intentions as incomprehensible to his city-bred mind as everything else about this hateful life, this hated Farm.

He raced for the fence and launched himself into the air, his right hand's fingers scrabbling through the cold wire mesh, the wires singing against the open wounds of his left hand, now coated in the filth from the farm. The thought of infection ran sharply through his mind, and made the breath come in a short, barking laugh as he pulled himself up the five feet of thick wire paneling. Time enough to worry about such things when he was free, he thought, tearing new wounds in hands and face as he mounted the barbed-wire crown of the fence. He threw the bloody shirt over the barbs ? and he was free.

The open range surrounded him, the crystalline moonlight casting saw grass shadows in every direction save that of the pens. He heard chaotic shouts and calls from the area of the Farmhouse, the screams of children disturbed in their studies or their slumber, and over it all the heavy breathing from behind him as George, too, scaled the fences; perhaps come to his senses, perhaps lying as he had lied in the past ...

"Gordon! Gordon! God, I don't know what came over me!"

The words trailed off as Gordon bolted, keeping the moon to his right-hand side. The Master Farmer had been clear, those many months ago, that Canada lay not too far from the Farm's boundaries and that the Gentleman Ghouls were Americans. They might follow him beyond the border but he might find a better ear to hear his tale in the North Country; might find a town beyond their reach.

Keeping the moon to his right would point his shadow away from the Farm as well, would keep him from being spotted as easily, if the sound of their escape had been overheard. If Paul came for him, Gordon would fight to the death. If George caught him, the same. The last time he had been truly free he had spoken with the moon, had lived for months through a harsh northern winter with neither company nor friends, lived as an animal of the woods.

He would be pursued. He knew it. But there was no sound of footsteps behind him, and when he dared glance back, never pausing in his flight, he could see no sign of George. Either the guilt of what he had done in the grip of the hunger or the knowledge that Gordon would neither forgive nor forget the transgression had sent him flying in another direction.

Or perhaps he was off to the fray at the Farm, freshly fed and spoiling to visit the destruction he had promised on the Farm and all of its inhabitants, greatest to least. Gordon was glad to have missed that, at least, despite his hunger for revenge upon the Farm and its Master. He had not looked forward to the day when he would stand between the children of a cult and a madman bent on destroying them, but neither would he turn to their protection when freedom was at hand.

Freedom, and the north. The harvest and the hunt.

Story and image by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2006