they looked like Trey did, and these past few days, I hadn’t seen him work out, so those muscles must be due to the tiger inside.
It was amazing, when you thought about it. Trey could shift into a tiger. Who the hell could say that about themselves? Besides the other people here who could turn, I mean. We had an elephant and an ostrich, I think.
I got off the stage, though I was much less graceful in hopping down than he was, not at all smooth on my feet. The way Trey walked, it was like his tiger form was peeking through, quiet and silent, graceful and all that. I wondered if he could always land on his feet; that’s what they said about cats, right?
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your tent.”
I held back any remarks about how gentlemanly he was being, though I did get all warm and fuzzy inside. Well, maybe not warm as in heated up, but you know what I meant. It was a figure of speech.
Moving to his side, I gave him a smile. He was the first to walk out of the tent, and I was set to follow him, but immediately after walking out, he walked back in, giving me a sheepish look. “Uh,” he paused, holding the tent flap closed behind him. “I don’t know if you want to leave right now. There’s… well, let’s just say Gina’s getting busy outside.”
Gina was the tightrope walker, I think. It hadn’t been long enough for me to learn everyone’s names yet. I was bad with them as it was, but since I literally had an eternity to learn them, I wasn’t going to put pressure on myself.
The way Trey spoke, it sounded like Gina was getting her pipes cleaned out, so to speak. A part of me wanted to blush and pretend I didn’t hear him say that, but another part of me wanted to say, okay, so what? She saw me going at it with Nigel, so why should I feel awkward seeing her do it? Not with Nigel, but with whoever it was around here that had caught her eye.
Holding my head high, I puffed myself out and pushed past him, ignoring his stuttering as I exited the main tent and saw just what Trey meant by getting busy.
He didn’t mean getting busy in the form of getting naked and doing the dirty deed with someone else. No, while the middle-aged tightrope walker was naked, she was not, however, getting a dick stuck inside of her. What she was doing was something much, much worse, something that was immediately seared into my brain, for it reminded me of the nightmare I’d so recently woken up from.
Gina was covered in blood, straddling the man who walked the tightropes with her, not fifty feet away from the main tent, out in the grass, beneath the light of the moon. Her pale body was literally splattered with red, though the blood looked more black under the pale moonlight. Her hair dripped in red, her bare chest heaving as she dug her fingers into the stomach of her partner and pulled out some of his intestines, wrapping them around her neck and giggling like a madwoman.
Like a totally insane, absolutely crazy madwoman.
And I was now a part of the same crew.
I froze, and Gina’s gaze, full of bloodlust, rose to meet me, a grin spreading on her face as her laughter intensified. A hand, strong and unyielding, pulled me back into the main tent, and for a moment, I couldn’t say anything, could hardly breathe as I met Trey’s stare.
“What,” I said, startled, “was that?”
“That, uh, that’s Gina. Believe it or not, she and Greg take turns each night,” Trey said, shrugging. “They’re actually tame compared to a lot of the others.”
I blinked. “I don’t even know how to process what you’re telling me. She just killed Greg—” And then I remembered the words Nigel had spoken to me before; we were all dead here, nothing but bodies that shouldn’t even be up and walking around. You couldn’t kill what was already dead.
Trey said nothing, watching as the gears clicked in my brain.
“So, in the morning, he’ll be fine?” I asked, trying to make sense of it all. Every night prior to this, I’d always been in my tent before sundown, so I never saw the craziness, never been a part of it myself. I didn’t want to, now especially.
I wasn’t like