“You want to say it?” he said. “You want to do it?”
She pulled out of the sulk, nodded briskly, set her knife in the middle of the accidental circle they were standing in. But no, not accidental, because then Trey put his pick-axe next to the Bowie, and motioned for Ben to do the same, gave him this impatient gesture like a parent whose kid has forgotten to say grace. So Ben did, piled the shotgun and the axe on top, that pile of glinting, sharp metal making Ben’s heart pound.
Suddenly Diondra and Trey were grabbing his hands, Trey’s grip tight and hot, Diondra’s limp, sticky, as they stood in a circle around their weapons. The moonlight was making everything glow. Diondra’s face looked like a mask, all hollows and hills, and when she thrust her chin up toward the moon, between her open mouth and the pile of metal Ben got a hard-on and didn’t care. His brain was sizzling somewhere in the back of his consciousness, his brain was literally frying, and then Diondra was chanting.
“To Satan we bring you sacrifice, we bring you pain, and blood, and fear, and rage, the basis of human life. We honor you, Dark One. In your power, we become more powerful, in your exaltation, we become exalted.”
Ben didn’t know what the words meant. Diondra prayed all the time. She prayed in church, like normal people, but she also prayed to goddesses, and geodes and crystals and shit. She was always looking for help.
“We’re going to make your baby a fucking warrior tonight, Dio,” Trey said.
They disbanded then, everyone picking up their weapons, silently marching into the field, the snow making a rubbery sound as they stomped through it, breaking its top crust. Ben’s feet felt literally frozen, separate things, unnaturally attached to him. But it didn’t really matter, not this, not much of anything mattered, they were in a bubble tonight, nothing had any consequence, and as long as he could stay in the bubble, everything would be OK.
“Which one, Diondra?” Trey said, as they came to a stop. Four Herefords stood nearby, unmoving in the snow, finding the humans unworrying. Limited imaginations.
Diondra paused, pointed a finger around—a silent eeny-meeny-miny-mo—and then rested on the largest one, a bull with a grotesque, furry dribble of cock slung down toward the snow. Diondra pulled her mouth back in a vampire smile, her canine teeth bared, and Ben waited for a fight-cry, a charge, but instead she just strode. Three long, snow-clumsy strides up to the bull, who took only one step away before she jammed the hunting knife through its throat.
It’s happening, Ben thought. Here it is, happening. A sacrifice to Satan.
The bull was leaking blood like oil, dark and thick—glug, glug, and then all of a sudden it twitched, the vein shifted or something, and blood sprayed out, an angry mist, coating them in specks of red, their faces, their clothes, their hair. Diondra was screaming now, finally, as if this first part had been underwater and she burst through suddenly, her cries echoing off the ice. She stabbed at the bull’s face, chopped its left eye into a mess, the eye rolling back into its head, slick and blood-black. The bull stumbled in the snow, clumsy and confused, sounding like a sleeper awakened to an emergency— frightened but dull. Blood spatters all over its white curly fur. Trey raised his blade toward the moon, made a whooping cry, slung his chopper hard underhand and buried it in the animal’s gut. The thing’s hindquarters gave out for a second, then it bucked up, started to trot drunkenly. The other cows had widened the circle around it, like kids at a fight, watching and lowing.
“Get him,” Diondra yelled. Trey took big loping hops through the snow, his legs kicked high as if he were dancing, his axe circling through the air. He was singing to Satan, and then mid-lyric, he brought the axe down on the animal’s back, breaking its spinal cord, dropping it to the snow. Ben didn’t move. To move meant he could partake and he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to feel that bull’s flesh breaking open under him, not because it was wrong but because it might feel too good to him, like the weed, where the first time he took a drag he knew he’d never quit it. Like the smoke found a place inside him that had been left hollow just for the smoke, and had curled up in there. There might be a space too, for this. The feel of killing, there might be an empty spot just waiting to be filled.
“Come on, Ben, don’t puss out on us now,” Trey called, heaving gulps of air after a third, a fourth, a fifth axe chop.
The bull was on its side, moaning now, a mournful, otherworldy mewing, the way a dinosaur in a tar pit might have sounded—dreadful, dying, stunned.
“Come on, Ben, get your kill. You can’t come and just stand,” Diondra yelled, making standing sound like the most worthless thing in the world. The bull looked up at her from the ground, and she started stabbing it in the jowls, a quick, efficient jab, her teeth gritted, screaming, “Fucker!” as she stabbed it again and again, one hand on the knife, the other covering her belly.