The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Meadows of Asphodel

Chapter 8 — Traumagriculture

The thoughts I hear inside the house are all shame, guilt, fear, and loneliness. Thankfully, the person thinking them has chosen to hide and wait instead of trying to pick us off through a window, which gives me a chance to survey the massacre out front before I try to figure out how to deal with them. (Him? It’s surprisingly hard to tell by abstract thoughts alone.)

“Stay very quiet,” I whisper. “We may not be alone.”

Jen, Bell, and Karen all nod, but Gwen’s eyes are fixed before her, looking down at a cherub laying dead at her feet, a gash in the left side of its skull slashing out one of its little yellow eyes. Its teeth are different than I’d imagined—they’re square, like human teeth, but they’re coming in at strange angles, giving their mouths a gnarled, monstrous appearance nonetheless. Their little arms appear plump with baby-fat, but their fingertips are missing, sharp little bones protruding from the mangled tattered flesh at the ends of their fingers, sharpening their bones into little makeshift claws.

“They’re dead,” I whisper to Gwen, gently nudging a little comfort into her soul.

She jumps a little when I touch her, but her heart quickly slows, and for the first time she feels genuinely relieved that I came with Jen as part of a package-deal. Not that she dislikes me or anything, but my status has generally been somewhere between probably out to get me and maybe okay I guess.

Sensing an opportunity, I lean into that sense of security I bring her, smiling gently down at her as I work to strengthen the bond between my presence and her personal security, and her fear begins to erode into unease and disgust.

Aside from the size of the yard and the fresh bodies, there’s another major difference between this house and the last: the yard is meticulously manicured here, the gravel driveway carefully maintained—hell, even the little rose garden out front looks painstakingly landscaped.

The cherubs sometimes used to let desperate vagrants wander into town—fuck knows why, since they’d usually kill the travellers as soon as they tried to leave—but the people who lived here definitely weren’t squatters. Hell, if I were a gambling man, I would bet dollars to donuts (Jesus it’s been so long since I’ve tasted one of those wonderful doughy diabetes-rings) that some of the dead people in the yard were the original before-times occupants.

Another thing that strikes me as strange is that, for as much of a last stand as this appears to have been, there aren’t any battlements. The windows in the large house aren’t boarded up, there aren’t any makeshift foxholes or sandbag walls to mount a defense... hell, aside from splashes of blood and a corner of a window that was smashed out, probably to stick a gun through, the house seems to be entirely pristine. Which means two things: they didn’t expect to be attacked, and this battle, for all its carnage and its mountainous body count, ended quickly.

“Step light and stay behind me,” I tell everyone as I begin to cautiously make my way up the driveway.

The tiny stones of gravel crunch to announce our arrival regardless of how stealthy we try to be, but my goal isn’t to sneak up—my goal is to assure the concerned mind inside that we’re tenuous and cautious, not threatening.

We need to step carefully, hopping over dead cherubs, the sounds of the gravel dampening when we reach the areas covered in dried blood. As we get closer to the house, I eyeball the weapons that the dead humans have clutched in their cold dead hands: a pump-action shotgun, a fully-automatic machine gun, a rifle with an expensive-looking sight. All top-of-the-line, and likely still loaded. Guns and ammunition are a rarity in the town—one of the first things the angels did when they took power was have all firearms collected and destroyed. And, while they didn’t do much good against the angels and would barely punch a dent in the cherubs, they would work a treat against a human aggressor.

Still, I doubt any of us would be handy with a gun, and escalation definitely isn’t going to be the move right now, so I ignore the weapons and approach the door.

I give the door a gentle knock and slowly twist the knob, paying careful attention to the state of the mind waiting for us just behind it.

“Hello?” I say, slowly pushing the door open. “Is anyone in there?”

The heart leaps when I call out, but slows slightly as they level their gun at me.

I cautiously cross the threshold, hands outstretched as I step inside.

Rather than an enclosed hall, the front door opens to a tiled section of a massive living room, spattered with dried blood on the couch by the window but otherwise actually quite nice. Directly ahead of me, across the full breadth of the room, is a large double-wide archway leading into what appears to be a dining room. Centered in the doorway, a bearded man of roughly my own age stands, automatic pistol shaking in his hands.

“Hi,” I say, trying to gently coax some calm into his mind.

His hands steady, and I suddenly hope that I’ve done more than just steady his aim. I see his eyes dart over my shoulder where Bell and Jen peek in the door frame and gasp when they see the armed man.

“Get inside,” the man says in a hushed voice. “All of you.”

I sense that he’s afraid and cautious—but, given the scene that played out on his front lawn, I can’t say I blame him.

I gesture to my companions, and we file in. I see his eyes linger on Karen for a while, who blushes self-consciously at the new pair of eyes assessing her body.

“What church you from?” he asks, quickly adding, “Close the door.”

Gwen shuts the door behind us as I answer, “The churches are gone.”

The man’s eyes briefly snap to the stain in the living room as he takes a split-second to compute. “How?”

I jerk my head over my shoulder and say, “I have a feeling you already know how.”

A sensation rolls through his mind, almost like a chill of terror and revulsion rippling throughout his body. He has to hold his breath and give his head a quick shake to restore his faculties. “Bullshit,” he says, staring me in the eyes. “Angels would stop ’em.”

I slowly look to the window, directing his gaze back towards the carnage in the yard. “Are you so sure about that?”

The man shakes his head. “Are they gone?”

I furrow my brow. “The angels?”

“No. Them.“

I shrug. “They seem to have ripped through town like a tornado. I haven’t seen trace of them for a few days.”

He nods slowly. “It’s fine,” he says. “Good will prevail, brother. Trust me.”

“Forgive me for saying so,” I say, gently nudging my next words into his mind to see if they stick, “but I think good already has prevailed.”

The man’s head twitches slightly as though is brain was grinding up my suggestion and shitting it out his brainstem.

“You believe what you want; it’s a free country,” he tells me, without a hint of irony in his voice. " But it’s not a free property, and you assholes are trespassing.”

His mind is much more clear now, finally convinced that we aren’t a threat. However, once his head is clear of terror, something buried in his mind clicks in—a bravery that’s conditional to when he’s the one in charge. His mind even has a pet name for it: Sheepdog.

It’s a term I was looking forward to never hearing again. It’s a philosophy that classifies everyone else as either a victim or a threat. And now that I, in my infinite wisdom, have supernaturally convinced this man that I’m not a threat, I can finally clearly read this man’s intentions.

“You can leave,” he tells me, “but the slave stays here.”

I stare in the man’s eyes, which are now cold and steely. “She’s not a slave,” I tell him, my words growling into his brain.

But it’s not enough. His mind twists the growl into an angry bleat. “Get over here, girlie,” he orders Karen, who shakes her head and then turns to Jen.

Suddenly I regret encouraging the ‘fill her mouth with semen’ play.

Jen pipes up, “She’s with us because she wants to be, and she’s staying with me.”

The man’s lips pull into a smile. “Alright. You can stay too.”

Jen silently stares daggers at the man.

I shake my head. “Listen, we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot—”

My tone of voice triggers something in him, and he cuts me off with a shout. “Fuck your wrong foot, you heathen shit. You know these girls would be better off here with a real man to protect them. Not out there with some helpless little pussy.”

I suddenly really, really want a reason to knock this man’s teeth out. I consider compelling him to throw his gun down and fight me, but it occurs to me that I haven’t been in a fistfight since before this whole thing began while, judging by the bodies out front, this guy has been living with at least a half-dozen brothers and cousins this whole time. “Helpless pussy? I’m not the one with a lawn full of my dead family.“

The words come from a dark place, and I can only watch as rage propels them from my mouth.

The rage is met with rage, and the man squeezes the grip a little harder, finger sliding over the trigger. “That’s gonna cost ’ya,” he says. “All your girls are staying with me.”

“We’re not his girls,” Bell says, stepping forward. “Besides, I don’t think you’d be able to handle one wife, let alone four.“

I want to raise an arm to push them back—Bell clearly has no idea how close this guy is to shooting me and taking them prisoner—but I know that any motion I make will be met with violence.

“I ain’t keeping you for wives,” the man growls. “Now if you don’t want me to put down your man here like a rabid dog, I suggest you ladies mosey on down to the basement while the men have a chat.”

I don’t need to be psychic to know that he means to kill me as soon as they’re out of sight, but being able to hear him think it does help me confirm my fears.

Don’t show your powers. It seems like such an easy ask. And yet, all I can think about right now is trying to use my gift to physically rip his brain out of his skull, like Red said her friend could do.

“Listen,” I say, trying to nudge a little peace into this maniac’s mind. “I’m sorry about what I said. You’ve clearly been through a lot. But it’s over now—we can sit down and talk about it.”

His head shakes slightly. “It’s not over,” he says through grit teeth, somehow physically resisting my influence.

“Look,” I say, my hand slowly reaching to the little knife dangling by my side, slipping it out of its holster. “I’m putting down my—”

The world slows to a crawl. The man’s eyes follow my hands to the little knife and go wide. His weapon falters. His stomach feels like it hits the floor as the tiny glowing blade leaves its sheath. Time slows more. He’s overwhelmed by an urge to run. To hide. To piss himself and curl into a ball. But he can’t. In an instant, he’s painfully aware of where he is, centered in the double-wide archway. His hands shake more. His eyes fill with spots.

Time stops.

For both of us.

I’m sitting in a recliner with a controller in my hand. Bruce, my older cousin, is on a killing spree, but I’m sneaking up behind him about to put an end to his fun. Nate and James, my brothers, have been shitting the bed all round, but that’s nothing new—we’ve been playing this game for twelve years straight, and I’m still the only other person who knows what the fuck they’re doing.

“We expecting a delivery?” I hear Uncle Sam shout to us as he looks out the window.

A sudden thunderclap shatters the otherwise calming buzz and cooing of the livestock. It takes a second to realize that it’s strange—the sun is blazing hot through the window, which means there’s not a cloud in the sky. But I shrug it off and get the kill, whooping at Bruce as Killjoy flashes on the screen.

“Hey, Uncle Sam, what’s it like to be the father to... a...”

I don’t feel fear. I catch it like the flu. Uncle Sam crosses himself and stumbles backwards, muttering “g-g-get the-the guns...”

I drop the controller, letting James walk up and kill me as I slowly stand and look out the window, where clouds of cherubs start to swarm over the house.

I barely have enough time to clock two people before the cherubs respond. One of them is a tall woman with long blonde hair holding two stone knives with glowing blades—like the one that put me here, only longer. The other is holding what looks like a short steel sledgehammer.

In half a second, I can’t see anything but the churn of our little winged protectors, swooping in to save us once again.

Another thunderclap, and the swarm parts.

No, that’s not right. It doesn’t part. Not entirely, anyways. A line of little bodies stretch out in front of the guy with the hammer, who stands still and patient, following the swarm with his eyes.

As they swoop in from his left, he takes a swing, and I finally get to see what caused the thunder: the man connects to a cherub with an upward swing, and blinding light bursts from its poor tiny body, arcing to the nearest sweet little cherub, and the next, and the next, and the next. It only takes the blink of an eye, but at least twenty of our baby angels are blasted out of the sky.

The rest of the swarm parts and flees, circling for another angle.

I don’t even notice that my brothers and cousin left the room until my dad shouts to me, “Jesus, Lou, get your fucking gun!”

My cousins, uncles, brothers, and mom all stare at me expectantly as another flash of light cracks out of the corner of my eye.

“Right,” I mutter, scrambling past them and sprint to my room.

My hands shake so much that I can barely maneuver the mag into the weapon, but I remind myself that my family is counting on me—and that the world is counting on them. We knew we’d eventually have to fight for what’s right.

As soon as I join my family, they begin to file into the yard.

“Only take clean shots!” Uncle Sam barks to us. “Save your bullets, and don’t hit the cherubs!”

The blonde stranger glances up to Uncle Sam and... I don’t know, I can’t tell for sure, but I think I see her smile and wink.

The cherubs—or the ones that are left—break into two small flocks and try to simultaneously go for the man and the woman.

The man bats them away with another clap of thunder, scattering them, but the woman quickly disappears into the second flock.

I breathe a sigh of relief and take aim at the dude. One down. Of course this is no problem. It can’t be. We’re doing God’s work.

I aim carefully, like Uncle Sam says, but Nate jumps the gun and shoots first (because of course he does). Worse, he strangles the trigger like it owes him money, spraying every bullet he has to his name in about 3 seconds.

The man with the hammer flexes and shudders—not like a man getting shot, but like a kid playing make-believe, taking each 5.56 round like a sharp jab of a finger.

James shouts something—I can’t quite hear it from the ringing in my ears, but we all think it: He’s wearing armor. Go for the head.

Nate, when we get out of this, I’m going to kick your ass for not letting mom take the first shot.

Mom takes the next shot with her rifle from inside the house, but it’s too late—the man has raised an arm to shield his exposed head, and her bullet bounces off his armored triceps.

I hear Sam shout another order, and everyone else begins to shoot. They focus fire around his head, but nobody seems to be able to hit it.

While everyone is focusing down the bulletproof man, I lower my weapon, my attention drifting to where the swarm should be tearing up the woman.

Usually they swirl and dance when they catch a sinner, laughing and playing as they scrub ’em from the world, but instead they seem to just bump into each other a few times and then part.

Nothing’s left. No blood, no parts, no weird glowing Bowie knives. “Something’s wrong,” I say, but I can’t even hear myself over sound of my entire family focusing down the impossibly-armored man.

They’re all so tunnelled-in on the guy that they don’t notice cherubs dropping. Not en masse, like when the man was swinging at them, but one at a time, like raindrops before a downpour.

I look up and see the woman.

Falling.

Everywhere.

Not at the same time; she’s falling all over the place, as if the whole sky was all connected into one giant tunnel for her, and she just keeps slipping from one piece of sky to another, appearing just long enough to slice through one cherub before she drops somewhere else.

I can’t help but lower my gun and look up as the sky clears, angel-by-angel, until there’s nothing left.

Then she lands, and the shooting stops.

I don’t know how, but she’s suddenly in front of Uncle Sam, at the head of our firing line, and my uncle—the man who bought me my first gun, who first taught me to shoot, who loved me like a son—falls into two pieces, split perfectly down the middle.

Most of us are stunned into silence, Nate whimpering as he desperately tries to reload. Bruce is the only one who can build the courage to act, screaming at the top of his lungs and squeezing his shotgun.

Uncle Sam’s body is showered with pellets as the woman sinks through the ground and comes out behind Bruce. The woman makes a motion so quick and effortless that I don’t even see her move, Bruce’s head rolls off his shoulders with a puff of arterial spray.

Gunfire rings in my ears, but my brain can’t accept it. My gun slips from my hands and I slowly back up towards the house as the blonde woman floats through my entire family with ease. After Bruce, she starts coming in at strange angles, popping up through the ground upside-down next to Nate, cutting his leg and hip bone clean off, then disappearing mid-cartwheel to drop knife-first into James’ face.

“Lou!” I hear my mother hiss at me as I back through the living room, the girl disappearing from sight. “Get back out there and—”

The tall blond seems to drop from the ceiling, driving those glowing knives into my mother’s shoulder blades.

Then she looks at me and smiles.

Fucking smiles.

“Where’s the nest?” she asks, her faint East-European accent somehow making her even more sinister.

Fuck you. I’m not going to help you. Sinner. Witch. Demon. Devil. Monster. Whore. I have another gun. A pistol tucked in the back of my pants. I’m a pretty quick draw. I can find a way to distract her. Draw on two in a three-count. Avenge my family. Deliver the Lord’s Vengeance.

“The barn,” I say, raising my trigger finger to point out back.

The woman watches me silently. Narrows her bright blue eyes.

“Please... don’t kill me...” I mumble.

“If you try anything with that pistol you’re hiding, I’m going to make you eat it,” she says. “Do you understand?”

I nod frantically, pissing myself to let her know I mean business.

The woman scoffs and disappears, leaving me to run to my room and cry.

Time begins to speed up again.

Every single emotion from that memory hits me—hits us—at the same time.

Anger. Despair. Grief. Shame. But most of all, terror.

His mind is gone now. We’re no longer dealing with a rational human. He’s little more than a wild animal, backed into a corner by a predator that, in his mind, is dripping with the blood of his family.

Time speeds up a little more. His hands are shaking. His eyes are drifting, focused on his past. He begins to squeeze.

“Down!” I shout, though it feels like it takes ten minutes to make it through the word. I dive at the nearest body, driving my shoulder into Bell’s sternum and sliding my hand under the crook of their knee.

We’re still sailing through the air when I hear the first clap. It’s much louder than I thought it would be—even louder than the gunfire in the memory I just witnessed.

Another thunderclap rings out before I we even reach the floor. Bell opens their mouth and lets out a high-pitched yelp as the wind is forced out of their lungs, their eyes wide and panicked as I drive them into the hardwood.

I know that the shots are one immediately after the other, but each seems to come a little more quickly as I catch up with reality, and after the sixth they briefly cease.

“STOP!” I shout, commanding the man’s—Lou’s—mind.

My ears are ringing. Behind me, I can hear a wet coughing, and liquid splattering onto the ground.

I’m terrified to look. But, more than that, I’m furious. I rock to my knees and look up to Lou, ready to rip him apart from the inside out.

The rage immediately subsides when I see where I froze him, with the barrel of his pistol pressed against the roof of his mouth. True to the threat that Red’s blonde friend had made, Lou is ready to eat his own gun rather than face my weird little knife.

When the rage flees, concern takes its place, and I turn to my companions.

I suppose I should be thankful that Lou was literally firing in a fit of blind panic, because I don’t see any blood on the wall, and when I look down to the wet sputtering cough, I see Karen staring up at me, a little puddle of watered-down man-chowder on the floor in front of her and a guilty look in her eye.

“I accidentally spilled,” she says.

I smile a little to her and see everyone else stirring.

Fuck. Time’s a-wasting.

I turn my attention to Lou. I have maybe 20 seconds and probably zero words before his frozen state starts to look suspicious.

Think. You called Red without speaking. Just do the same. But be quick about it.

What did you mean, “I ain’t keeping you for wives”? And “It ain’t over”?

Lou’s eyes widen as my question thunders through his skull, his jaw clenching around the barrel of his gun.

He desperately tries not to answer. He tries very, very hard, to hide very specific details from me, like the fact that he has a third testicle, and that he needs the girls to bring back the cherubs.

When he thinks about needing the girls, I sense a little worm of guilt eating its way through his conviction, giving me an in.

I focus hard and force his train of thought down that wormhole, and my stomach immediately turns.

Time tries to slow down as he replay more memories, but as soon as his uncle takes a scalpel to Lou’s ball sack I force it to speed up, hoping to a God that doesn’t exist that doing so will spare me some details.

Unfortunately, the details are still there, but they mercifully whip by quickly, like I’m ripping off a band-aid.

According to whatever beliefs spawned this fucked up apocalypse, cherubs are little angels that are made when baptised babies pass away. The angels of the local Baptist church, Ezekiel and Jerod, tasked his family with making an army of cherubs by bestowing them with a holy testicle capable of simultaneously impregnating, baptising, and destroying every single egg in a woman’s body.

The churches—not just the Baptists, but the Catholics and Methodists as well—had been delivering women to birth more of those twisted monsters.

Two of Lou’s aunts, all his girl cousins, and one of his two sisters left in disgust as soon as they found out. Lou’s third aunt stayed, but killed herself after watching a batch of cherubs emerge from a woman her husband had just fucked. Lou’s little sister somehow got infected—best they can figure it, someone jerked off in her underwear drawer, and that was enough to make her into a host. All Lou could do was watch as—

I feel tomatoes and peppers try to force their way out of my throat, and I rip myself out of Lou’s memory.

Forced to watch what he’d done, the worm of guilt grows larger, burrows deeper, and weakens his conviction even more. I can see a path for him that leads to a light at the end of the tunnel, where he realizes the error of his ways and, tearful and dripping with regret, joins us as a ward.

As you were.

My companions all jump as one final gunshot rings out and Lou ruins the dining room’s tacky wallpaper.

I know my decision is very easily justified. Even if he were completely reformed, he’s got a mini-apocalypse sitting in his scrotum, waiting to escape in a fit of desperate loneliness. But what troubles me is that I don’t need to tell myself that it was justified. I don’t need to rationalize shoving him over the edge just as he was about to step away from the brink.

All I can think is, “Sorry, Louie. We have already have enough supernatural monsters.”