The Empty House

Barbra looked around in the house. Dim light trickled from a bulb in the kitchen, and reflected unevenly off crinkly black plastic trash bags taped to the windows.

She tried to think of a word, some description of the room she was in. After a while one came, and that word was 'carnage'.

Blood splattered and smeared across the walls, soaked into the peeling wallpaper, ran down the particle-board paneling and dripped down to the threadbare carpet. Huge puddles ovaled on the bare areas, and dotted the yellowed, smoke-stained ceiling.

There were four bodies, sort of; the one guy had come for her from behind and she'd over-reacted. She'd ripped him apart. Arms and legs laid in the corners and the head was tumbled on the filthy couch cushions. Disemboweled internals strung around in the squalor.

Barbra sighed. "Whoops," she muttered. She hadn't intended to make this much mess.

The woman laid face down, bled out; a gray breast spilled from her top. The two men sprawled around, skin mottled gray. One of them, the one wearing expensive, urban style clothing, was still alive and twitching. She regarded him curiously, feeling his body quake in shock; he wouldn't last long.

The dog, the junkyard, pit-type guard dog, whimpered from a far room.

Barbra felt her body: she was soaked, again. This time down to the skin. Her clothes were completely saturated, all the way down to her feet. She was coated, painted, covered in blood. She stripped naked and padded to the shattered bathroom, passing the room with the dog. It looked at her with terrorized eyes. She smiled at it, showing her teeth. It cowered, then pissed underneath itself, laying in the urine, shaking so hard its head bobbed up and down.

In the bathroom she turned the sink tap and nothing came out. She got confused and turned to the bathtub: the tub had four big, plastic buckets of water in it.

"What the fuck?" Barbra exclaimed. The water was turned off. The group had been squatting in the house. "God damn it!"

She tried to think how she'd missed that; then remembered the dim lighting, candles, and a low thrumming from the trash-filled basement: a generator! Barbra huffed in exasperation.

"Fuck!"

She pulled the buckets out of the tub and stepped in. She located a thin, grubby towel, wet it in a bucket, and rubbed herself off as best she could, concentrating on her face.

"FUCK!"

She was angry. This was aggravating. She wiped herself; when she was more or less done she padded around the house, locating clothes. She found her favored outfit: drawstring pants, hoodie, cheap shoes. She shook the clothes, checking for cockroaches. She took a vinyl kids' backpack with a Warner Brothers character on it and put another shirt in it. It all smelled like menthol cigarettes and dollar-store detergent. Searching for clothes in a gym bag she found a big black pistol, a roll of cash in a rubber band, and a large baggie of pot.

She laughed; she hefted the gun. It was heavy. She gripped it, working with images she'd seen in movies. Curious, she fiddled with levers and pulled on the top of it, she thought it might be loaded. She experimentally pulled the trigger and the damn thing went off with an extremely loud blast, and a puff appeared on the grimy carpet. Barbra almost dropped it from surprise and shock.

"Shit!"

The gun had a shiny gold cylinder sticking out a squarish aperture in the top of it. She pulled the trigger again; nothing happened.

She laughed, tossed the gun in a corner, and picked up the baggie. In the old life she would have taken that shit and smoked it. Now, though, it was useless to her. She thought about it, then stuffed it in the backpack anyway, along with the money.

Barbra said to herself, amused, "Does this make me a gangsta?" Little White girl gangsta. She laughed: a staccato, loud, hilarious, and deeply threatening message. Then her body started to shake, again.

Barbra could feel herself start to throb.

She checked through the house one more time; one of the rooms held a large, shallow cardboard box set on the floor, flanked by bulging black garbage bags. Barbra looked in. There was a baby in it, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sleeping.

Barbra froze. She examined her feelings, and found a small spark. She really, honestly, had no feelings for adult human beings at all, although they were often fascinating. Children, though. She seemed to have some vestige of, maybe, a reproductive need, and children made her feel protective. She knew if she ever killed a child it would be by mistake, or out of overwhelming need, and it would torment her. The baby triggered that.

She thought. She knew the police were unlikely to show up anytime soon. Or at all, realistically. This area of the city was a wilderness, all but dead. There were barely any streetlights, and the majority of the houses were empty. It was a dying urban wasteland. There was no way to depend on anyone finding the child.

She went into the body-strewn front room. The last, well-dressed man wasn't dead yet. She made the decision and placed a shoe on his skull; his hair had an elaborate design clipped into the sides. She pressed down. She heard a loud, crunching 'pop', his blood stopped moving, and his body was done.

She visually hunted around, finally locating a little prepay phone. She slipped it in her pocket and walked out. She'd get a distance away and call the police, tell them about the baby. She walked outside, trying to note the location of the house. Her body vibrated and she was getting very, very sexually aroused.

On what was left of the street moonlight gleamed on shattered blacktop. Huge tangles of weeds and trees signified the remains of housing. The place was perhaps like Rome after the fall. They should turn it over to pasture, let animals graze in it. Farmland.

Barbra walked for a ways, then a bus passed by. It startled her. It was the only vehicle she'd seen since leaving the house. The bus pulled up at a signless post and a young man got off. He paused at the corner, fiddling with ear buds and some device. He wore a dark coat and had a green, military backpack. His dark skin shined in the orange-ish, sodium vapor light reflected from the sky. He looked trim and fit. Barbra hurried closer, catching his eye.

The man started at seeing her. Whether that was from her sudden appearance from apparently nowhere or the fact that she was White was open to debate, she thought. She checked in his mind, and found an amusing thing: his first thought was that she was a cop. She laughed silently and waited.

He said, "Do I know you?"

Barbra smiled grimly.

"You're about to."

She followed him to an isolated, low, vintage, well-kept craftsman-style house with a manicured lawn inside a bright silver chain-link fence. The fence had flour-de-lis on top of each post. They went in through a latched gate, and she walked up the stairs onto the porch. Plastic lawn chairs were placed evenly, carefully. The floor surface was swept clean.

The entry door had a plaque on it, a ceramic picture with a racist, cartoonish image of a Black Mammy in a polka-dotted head scarf. Words below the face stated, 'Wipe Yo Feet Honey Chile'. Barbra looked down and found a bristled welcome mat. It said 'Welcome' on it in black script. She wiped her shoes.

The man twisted a series of keys in the door and turned to her.

She smirked. She had to ask him the question. "Are you going to invite me inside?"

He said, "Yes, come inside."

Barbra sighed, relieved. She remembered an important point: "Is there anyone else in the house?"

"No. They nobody."

She walked in, passing him. A low light gleamed in the large front room; hallways led off. The house had pretty wood floors with a parquet border, and dark woodwork around leaded-glass windows and doors. A built-in, stained-glass cabinet full of china dishes shined in one wall; on another was a large photographic portrait of a wedding couple. The woman in the picture was extraordinarily beautiful. The place was a delight, a craftsman-style, well-preserved home, and sparkling clean. She nodded, impressed. The house was far nicer than anything she'd ever managed. It was a very lovely home.

She said it. "You have a very lovely home." She paused; she felt a need to call this young man something. "What's your name?"

"Davon."

Barbra twirled in front of him, stripping off her clothes. "Well, Davon, fuck me. As hard as you can. Come on. Fuck me." She leaned in towards him and snarled, "Fuck me." She placed the will in his mind to do it.

He paused. "You want to go to the bedroom?"

Barbra said, "Doesn't matter to me." Her body pulsated. She needed it, right now.

Right now.

"Come here." Davon took her hand and led her off the main room down a hallway. He took her through a paneled door with a brightly-polished brass doorknob, and into a dimly-lit bedroom.

Barbra was amused by the decor: a totally sexist poster of a buxom and ass-endowed girl in a thong and stripper pose; various rap record covers, and a diagram of cutlery from a culinary school. A short desk with a laptop on it was positioned neatly in a corner, and the bed was a single with a very primitive, hand-sewn, country-looking quilt on it. She smiled; Davon was kind of a kid. She noticed, though, a set of dog tags and some kind of military patch hung on a cloth-covered, crafty-type bulletin board, along with evenly spaced copies of job applications.

Clothes were neatly stacked on stamped-metal bracketed shelves, folded just so, and she could smell the telltale scent of fastidious ironing and an organic fabric softener. She looked a little more carefully: his pairs of jeans, really everything, were carefully ironed and folded.

Davon firmly positioned her at the foot of the bed and stood behind her.

Barbra waited, then sneered and rudely said, "Well?" She could feel some kind of sudden flare inside him; his blood sped up. Anger: that's what it was.

He turned her around, shoved her face first onto the bed, and grabbed her ankles with very strong hands. It made her almost laugh: this one might actually be good. He ripped down his pants, yanked off his shirt, and knelt between her calves. Barbra stuffed her face in the bedcovers and issued her demand again:

"Fuck me."

Davon hesitated, positioned his cock at her pussy, then slipped inside her. He gasped, then groaned, then did what she told him to. Davon fucked her. He fucked her hard.

He kept ahold of her ankles for a while, thrusting roughly and grunting with each motion, then moved his hands to her waist, pinning her down to the bed. Barbra let him do it: it was way okay, good.

Barbra felt around in his psyche, and located an amusing center: Davon was filled with suppressed resentment of what he thought she was. He was expressing frustration and buried angers. It was amusing because she wasn't at all what he thought, but his hate-fucking a White girl was making the sex very, very good. Barbra almost laughed from the realization, but then Davon slammed his cock into her and she gasped in delight.

Davon bent over her and she reached back to grip his side, feeling rippling muscle. He was in excellent shape, cut, sculpted. She could feel his blood banging through his veins and arteries, and the pulsing of his body made her shout, once, briefly. He grabbed her wrist and smacked his hand on her shoulder, pushing her down onto the bed as he twisted her arm behind her back.

He fucked her, brutally, out of control, slamming and fucking, making low huffing sounds with each impact. She could hear slapping sounds of his body on hers, fucking her pussy, her body, pounding.

Barbra felt her face break into a huge, open-mouthed smile. This was very, very good. Way good. She gasped and groaned, fucking back on Davon as best she could within her self-imposed physical limits. She was wet, so wet, dripping, and the man-boy fucked the shit out of her. She felt him slam against her ass, smearing wet over his belly, and she moaned and cried into the handmade quilt, fucking.

She didn't even have to touch herself: Barbra came, hard, a quick, splitting orgasm that made her arch her back involuntarily. She felt herself move her secured arm in Davon's firm hand, and without meaning to she damn near lifted him off the bed. She lost control for just one second, and she could feel his surprise and almost a sense of alarm; but then he was coming inside her, and his mind and thoughts cleared out.

Barbra stuck her other hand into the mattress, and she could feel the change coming on, and had to try to control it. She didn't need to kill the guy. The effort had an unexpected side effect, though: she came again. That was not quite as good, but good enough, and to her alarm she could feel her claws get longer and her teeth come out. Luckily, though, Davon was still in his coming zone and didn't notice.

Barbra felt the familiar, the come inside her pussy, her body absorbing the energetic fluid, the semen and protein strands and all the mixture of the human. The sensation made her groan, loudly.

"Oh, oh, oh, GOD." She groaned again. "Fuuuuck."

Davon pulled out and Barbra gasped, almost a shriek, from the withdrawal.

Davon fell on his knees and smacked her ass. This pissed her off, or stimulated her, somehow. Hitting actions of any kind tended to trigger an unfortunate response. She controlled herself, just barely, and for safety stayed on her knees, face in the bed and ass in the air, hand behind her back. She gasped and moaned, coming down.

Davon stammered, "Jesus Christ, lady..."

Barbra turned her head to look at him. When she met his eyes she could see in his head a bit better, and was highly entertained at what she found: he was absolutely, hilariously dumbfounded at how his night had turned out, being picked up by a little White chick in a hoodie at an inner-city bus stop. Funny. It was funny, funny, funny shit. She had to laugh, so she did, shaking with mirth.

Barbra finally calmed down and breathed some more, straightened herself, then got up. She stood in front of the kneeling man, and stepped up on tiptoe. She knew what she was doing: her condition or whatever made her sexually special, seductive and irresistible when she wanted to be. She smiled down at him.

Davon looked over her body, at the designs and gleaming geometric scars, and was fascinated. He didn't hate her anymore, not even a little. His heart was cleared out.

"Interesting," Barbra thought. Human beings were interesting creatures. Odd that when she was human she'd been so oblivious to that.

She said, very honestly, "Thanks." She caressed his face and touched his closely cropped hair, feeling the texture. Davon was a handsome young man. Barbra walked out of the bedroom to the main entry to retrieve her clothes. In the main room she slipped on the drawstring pants and the t-shirt, noting the cheap backpack; she wondered if she should just leave it, as a kind of present. It was a lot of pot, and a decent amount of money. Davon could probably use the money, and smoke or sell the pot, and she could always get more.

Thinking, she perused the room, the photograph, and the hallways that led off.

She saw a movement.