Chapter One

Haiti

The Mumbo looked resplendent in her top hat; thick black tresses that hung to her waist, were loosely woven with colorful silk ribbon. A dark cape, lined in scarlet satin, was fastened about her neck. She had thrown it back across her naked shoulders from where it hung sharply down, all the way to her ankles. Her skin shone like black, wet stone in the moonlight; sweat glistening from her sinewy flanks, and a belly like river-rock.

Her pale heels flashed to the rhythm of her hips as she strode up the hillside to where the man was trussed to the trunk of the tree.

She leaned into him, cocked her face, and through extended jaws, exhaled heat and moisture into the man’s face. The Mumbo smiled, then took up his penis. Squeezed. Hard. The heady beat from the drums intensified. He cried out when she gripped his testicles, tried to turn away, anticipating the nauseating pain.

She thrust a hand around, pinioning his anus, restraining him. The Mumbo lifted his shriveled member and cradled it between the fatty rolls of her sex and, raising her hips, she dry-humped him. She threw back her head in ecstasy as she mocked intercourse, plowing him through the folds of her vagina. And then she acted out a wild orgasmic release.

The Mumbo gripped his penis more firmly; searched the white, wild eyes as she inserted the blade into his bowels, just above the pubis bone. The drums beat harder; maddeningly faster. He howled in disbelief and horror; screeching at the Caribbean night-sky as she tore the knife up. All the way. Until it nudged his breast bone. The entwined ropes of his entrails bulged out through the gash.

“You be me brother now,” the Mumbo whispered into his tormented face. And she thrust her hands into the gaping wound; gripped his guts and spilled them out onto her naked belly like a basket of twisting eels. She felt the heat, the blood, and the juice, trailing down across her sex, dripping from her flanks. The man’s lifeblood, pulsating over her. It was her life, now.

She turned to her congregation and raised her arms to the unified cry. The drumbeat was heavy and she stomped her feet; dancing naked in the dirt that was quickly turning to mud... bloody mud! Her hands circled about her head with strands of the man’s small intestine, hanging from her fingertips, like purplish-gray Mardi Gras beads. “Re-tri-bu-tion,” she screamed.

“Retribution,” the gathered assembly chanted and the smoke from the fires bellowed.

Miami

“She’s a bug? Is this broad nuts?”

Lindsey’s editor peered over her shoulder, was eavesdropping on her computer screen.

“She’s not a broad; first thing... and second... she’s aButterfly,” Lindsey Rey stated emphatically. “And why don’t you go read your own damned e-mails?”

“Yours are more interesting.” He made a disgusting noise, sucking on a pencil. “Isn’t a butterfly a bug? Or is it like a spider? Spi