Free Maleficarum: Hunger of the Witch by Jeremy Bennett Page A

instantly charred her skin, and the hair on her head melted to her scalp. Soon her cries of pain grew fainter as the fire found bone.
    With a powerful swing , Hegel tossed the charred witch to the pavement. “Here, a new dish—blackened slut,” Hegel said, yanking out her pitchfork. It didn't take long for the others to begin ripping into the cooked meat. As the cooked witch's brains spilled to the pavement like undercooked scrambled eggs, Hegel’s mind drifted back into her past. She was at that age where everything reminded her of something else, and this reminded her of southern Germany hundreds of years ago.
    At fourteen her family had been killed by the Black Death. She roamed many villages looking for any kind of sanctuary, but she found only looters and the dead. A young man of the church by the name of Gaston found her barely clinging to life. His eyes were soft and kind and so was his heart. During their travels she couldn’t help but fall in love with the one person who truly cared for her, the one person who looked to do Good in the face of so much evil, and the one person who had taken vows to never be with a woman.
    “I am married to God,” he would say when she would throw herself at him. Love became desperation and then hate. She met other travelers in those dark times. They said they could give her what she wanted: they could make him love her in all the ways that she deserved. The things she did next were so terrible that not even someone as Good as Gaston could ever forgive her. Those terrible things. She forced her mind back to the present in an effort to forget how she had become a worse plague on humanity than the sickness that took her family. It was time to focus on the task at hand, killing the food that had locked itself in the Black Crystal.

Chapter 7: Full Bladders
    The wound on Beverly’s shoulder was starting to bubble from the concoction, but no one had any idea if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Mike stormed from boarded-up window to boarded-up window, trying his best to see what was happening. Ever since he had seen the original Night of The Living Dead he had wanted to see a zombie apocalypse. It wasn’t the zombies he was interested in so much as the situations that they put people in.
    Trapped in a boarded -up farm house, the people in the movie had to use their strength and wits to survive, and he had always fancied himself as having an abundance of both. However, in his daydreams he had more guns and wasn’t scared shitless. The fact that these were witches and not zombies gave him no comfort, and he’d give anything to be sitting on the sofa in his trailer watching TV with a beer in his hands. But he was here, this was happening, and he would do his best to see that as many people could live through this as possible.
    Kim sat with her hands over her ears , trying to block out the incessant chanting of the chaotic forces outside. All she had wanted was some light happy reading to make her feel like a deep person; instead she got screaming hordes of devil worshipers. Life could be unfair that way sometimes.
    “Get me all the bottles you can find. I have something that might work ,” Nick shouted as he poked his head out from behind one of the bookshelves with a stern look on his face.
    “What?” Ann said as she ground her blade into one of the overturned bookshelves she was sitting on.
    “Witch bottles, ” he answered with a smile as he held up a book on the history of witchcraft. “It will work; so let’s snap to it.” Since no one had any better ideas, and they were all feeling powerless, it didn’t take much coaxing for Nick to get them to go along with his plan.
    As they frantically gathered up every bottle they could find, Nick explained what they were doing. “Witch bottles are a type of protection from witchcraft; not only do they stop the witches from casting spells, but also they can sicken or even kill the spell casters. Now I’m betting that every one