The entire store seemed to be staring at the little shrieking harpy and its mother with disapproving eyes, awaiting the moment when the obviously overwhelmed woman would actually begin to act like a parent and silence her son"s fit of egocentric rage with some corrective discipline in the form of a slap. It would never happen, not until the child was too old for it to do any good. The moment dragged on and on, the mother withering beneath the child"s aural a.s.sault, slowly being conquered, just on the verge of admitting defeat and giving in to her son"s whim.
In a last ditch effort to regain a control that had obviously been abdicated long ago, the mother gave voice to her parental inadequacies with a cry of defeat that masqueraded as a threat, but only symbolized failure and imminent resignation to all those who heard it, including the delinquent it was meant to correct. "Wait "til your father gets home! Do you want me to call Daddy?"
This was followed immediately by words that told all that witnessed the irksome spectacle that there was no respite in sight. "Do you want a time out?!"
Darrell"s stomach rolled. What the h.e.l.l had happened to parents? He had tried that tactic himself. The fool who invented it should be roasted alive on a spit, in Darrell"s opinion. It was just another admission of the parent"s loss of control.
The boy answered his mother predictably and appropriately. "f.u.c.k you!" The words flew out of his mouth along with a spray of spittle.
The child began to punch at its mother again. Darrell could take no more. The woman was staring up at the ceiling, as if praying to G.o.d to rescue her from her own child, when Darrell charged down the isle, looking like a troll from under a bridge in some long forgotten fairytale.
The ankle-biting little rug-rat was still yelling and screaming. Darrell pushed the mother aside and slapped the child to the floor with a backhanded swing that collided with his mouth with the sound of a gunshot. The kid"s head bounced off the tile with a loud smack that effectively cut off his shrill ranting. A trickle of blood ran down from the crack that bisected his lip. With eyes glazed in shock and dizzy from the blow, he looked up at Darrell. The child trembled as he met Darrell"s feral gaze, feeling like a rabbit cornered by a voracious wolf.
The little redheaded monster screamed for his mother. Darrell drew back and backhanded him again, this time with a closed fist. The force of the blow knocked the boy over backwards. He landed face down on the tile floor. When he looked up, his left eye was nearly swollen shut with a tremendous black and purple bruise that went from cheek to temple. It looked as if he"d just gone twelve rounds in a boxing match.
Darrell leaned over and pointed a long gnarled finger into the boy"s face. His eyes seethed with rage and madness burning like an electrical fire. "You yell one more time and I will beat the life out of you. Do you hear me?"
The child nodded, his jaw still hanging open in shock. He looked over Darrell"s shoulder, searching for his mother.
She finally overcame her own shock enough to protest. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing to my baby!"
She charged the gray-haired old man who"d just battered her son, swinging a fist and hooking her fingernails into claws, reaching out for Darrell"s face, determined to make him pay for hurting her child.
Darrell turned and casually caught the woman by her throat, pinching her windpipe closed just enough to guarantee her silence.
"Shhhhh!" he said, then turned back to the child, still holding his mother in an iron grip. He had to concentrate to keep his rage in check so that he didn"t crush her esophagus.
Why do they even bother having children if they don"t know how to control them? he wondered.
"I want you to apologize to your mother for disobeying her and embarra.s.sing her like that in public. SAY IT!!!"
"I-I"m sorry mommy!" the child cried and tears began to flow from his eyes steadily.
"And if you ever disobey your mother again, I"ll be back for you. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
Darrell released the kid"s mother and she rushed to scoop up her son.
They held each other and cried as Darrell turned and walked toward the exit. On his way, he pa.s.sed a cherubic, blonde-haired, three-year-old baby girl sitting in a stroller with a pacifier in her mouth. She was being pushed along by an overweight woman, roughly Darrell"s age, who was obviously her grandmother. The child"s real mother was probably little more than a teenager. As Darrell pa.s.sed, he reached down and overturned the stroller, dumping the child out onto the floor and leaving the toddler screaming as if it had been fatally a.s.saulted. Darrell bent over and retrieved the baby"s pacifier, adding it to his necklace. He carried the stroller away with him as both parent and child screamed at his back.
"The sooner they learn the better," he muttered, twisting the stroller into a ma.s.s of warped metal and plastic. The little girl had been nearly four years old, at least three years too old to be riding in a stroller and sucking on a pacifier.
"The sooner they learn," he repeated.
He walked out of the mall and tossed that tortured relic of some years ago baby shower into the dumpster, wondering almost casually if he was perhaps taking his crusade too far. He rea.s.sured himself that all the kids he had disciplined were bad kids who would have only gotten worse if not for his intervention, that he was doing it for their own good. But, he wondered if he was also getting a little pleasure out of it, if perhaps he was not seeking to save the children but to punish them, to hurt them. He wondered if he was seeking revenge. Maybe, it was the parents he should have been punishing and not the children? Parents like him, who had failed their children, allowing them to become the brats that they were. Maybe, it wasn"t enough to teach the kids? Maybe, he needed to include the parents in his education?
"Let me get another hit off that, mom."
Darrell"s head whipped around so fast he nearly broke his own neck.
There stood the answer to his musings in the form of a mother and daughter dressed identically in skintight halter-tops, sans bra.s.sieres, and mini-skirts so short that you could tell they were not wearing panties beneath them and that they had recently shaved. They were both smoking cigarettes and pa.s.sing a bottle of Crown Royal back and forth. The girl couldn"t have been more than twelve years old. It was obvious that she and her mother were prost.i.tutes, just like Darrell"s baby girl Linda, who"d died in an alley with a needle in her arm and the s.e.m.e.n of the more than a dozen different men she"d f.u.c.ked that night still leaking out of her. Darrell wanted to scream. He wanted to yell at the top of his lungs. A parent was supposed to want better for their child than what they had. They were supposed to guide them, steer them away from making the same mistakes they made. What this mother was doing was abominable. She had to be punished.
How could she let her child do that?!!!
He wanted to rip her apart. He would show that little girl what became of women who sold themselves on street corners. He reached into his coat and closed his hands around the hunting knife in his left pocket and the Colt revolver in the other.
"The sooner they learn," he muttered as he stalked after them.
"Let"s go back to the motel, relax, and smoke these last couple of rocks before we hit the stroll again tonight. Okay baby?"
"Cool! I need a little pick me up. I feel like s.h.i.t tonight."
"Get it together honey! There"s a convention in town tonight. There"ll be twice as many tricks on the strip tonight and that means mo" money."
Acid roiled in Darrell"s stomach as he fought to hold in his rage and revulsion. As much as he wanted to attack them right then and there, he needed to be alone with them.
He followed closely, matching their footsteps as he slipped from shadow to shadow. He ducked behind some bushes just yards from where the mother stopped to squat by the curb and relieve herself. He could smell the acrid ammonia of her urine wafting from the gutter. His stomach lurched and this time he did regurgitate. Luckily, they had already moved off down the road and did not see him drop to his knees and throw up his lunch in the same gutter where the wh.o.r.e had just urinated. His body trembled with fury as he rose and continued his pursuit.
Darrell kept thinking of his little girl. Her a.n.u.s and v.a.g.i.n.a had been bruised and torn, her nipples bitten, there were welts and cuts on her back and b.u.t.tocks, livid blue and purple contusions around her throat from manual strangulation. He couldn"t believe that she hadn"t been murdered. Darrell had gotten sick then too, when the coroner told him that many of the bruises were old and healing at different rates. They"d been acquired at different times and most likely at the hands of different men. Trophies of her profession. This is what that little girl had in store, the path her mother was leading her toward. A life where a needle full of heroin and a cardiac arrest would be the greatest kindness she could hope for. Darrell gritted his teeth and flicked open the blade of his hunting knife.
The little girl kept looking back over her shoulder, peering into the darkness as if she could sense him there. Most likely, it was just her normal paranoia, heightened by cocaine use. Finally, they turned the corner and the mother began fishing into her purse for her keys. Darrell moved in closer as they approached the door to one of the rundown rooms.
The two wh.o.r.es staggered up to the motel, reeling from alcohol and a c.o.c.ktail of illegal drugs. They never saw the powerful looking old man in the multi-colored fur coat as he came rushing at them from behind a nearby parked car. He forced them into the room, slamming the door behind him.
Darrell had bound them both in duck tape. He"d left the mother"s ankles unbound to allow him access. He didn"t gag her either. He wanted her daughter to hear her scream.
"Stop hurting my mommy!" screamed the twelve-year-old girl. Mascara ran down her face like black tears and lipstick smeared across her lips and cheeks like bright red welts. Darrell punched his entire arm into her mother"s dilated v.a.g.i.n.a up to the elbow.
"Pleeeease! Stop hurting my mommy!"
A wet, sticky, ripping sound accompanied each thrust as he drove his arm in deeper, tearing her reproductive system apart. The bottle of Crown Royal he"d shoved into her r.e.c.t.u.m shattered. Her v.a.g.i.n.a continued to tear until c.u.n.t and a.s.shole became one gaping orifice, dripping blood in a tremendous pool that saturated the p.i.s.s-stained motel carpeting. The woman had stopped screaming and now only whimpered helplessly. Her eyes were vacant, fixed and dilated. Her mind had snapped. Tears still streamed down her cheeks, turning brown as they ran in rivulets through the feces that covered her face from when Darrell had defecated upon her.
"Is this what you want? Is this how you want to end up? You still want to be just like your mommy?" Darrell growled, staring directly into the young girl"s face as she continued to scream.
"You"d better get your a.s.s back in school and make something of yourself or I"ll personally make sure that you suffer worse than this."
Darrell withdrew his arm from the mother"s vandalized t.w.a.t with a hideous "Shlorp!" It was covered in blood, excrement, and tissue. Darrell scowled as he looked about for a place to clean it. He went into the bathroom to wash up, leaving the two wh.o.r.es bleeding and crying on the bedroom floor. When he returned, he had his knife open.
"Watch this, little girl. Watch what men like me do to wh.o.r.es."
He grabbed the girl"s mother by the hair and flipped her over onto her back. He knelt down on top of her and began to saw off her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
She began screaming again. Twisting her nipple and stretching her breast taut, he sawed down to the white of her ribcage and tore her entire mammary gland free of her chest. He worked her over with the knife for the better part of an hour. Her terrible anguished screams grew deafening in the tiny apartment. She began to convulse in agony as Darrell cut a long incision around her face and began peeling it off of her skull. When he finally left the room, he took the woman"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s, face and v.a.g.i.n.a with him, leaving her hollowed out remains writhing and shrieking in an ever-widening pool of blood. He never touched the little girl. There had been no need.
"If you don"t get your life in order, go back to school and stay off these streets, you will see me again."
She got the message.
By the time the old man left the apartment, it was well past midnight. The streets were bustling with activity and he was exhausted and feeling decidedly anti-social. He just wanted to go home. Today had been more exciting than most and he was drained. There were so many children to save and he was just one man. He had miles to walk to his home on the other end of town. He scrambled along quickly, imagining snuggling beneath his covers with a good book and a cup of warm tea. He tried to stick to the shadows as much as possible as he made his way toward home. He knew that the cops would be looking for him and he was not exactly inconspicuous.
He barely noticed when the car full of kids pulled up alongside him. Until they jumped out and attacked him.
"That"s him!" a tiny hoa.r.s.e voice cried out from the car. It was Joey, the smoker.
One of the larger boys lunged out of the car and swung a baseball bat at Darrell"s head. It connected with a loud crack that sent the old man sprawling onto the floor.
"That was my f.u.c.king brother you almost killed, you f.u.c.king freak!"
It happened so fast that he didn"t have time to go for his gun. The kids held him down and searched his pockets, removing both his knife and his revolver before they began kicking and punching him.
Boots, sneakers, a baseball bat and what may have been a pipe crashed down on his head and face, cracked his ribs, crushed his hands and shattered his kneecaps. They were beating him to death. Darrell was barely conscious when he felt the splash of liquid being poured all over him, followed by the pungent odor of gasoline. Then, he was burning. He could even hear the children"s laughter over his own screams.
They never learned.
Joey and his big brother Mike snuck back into the house through the bas.e.m.e.nt window and tip-toed all the way upstairs to their bedrooms on the second floor, careful not to wake their parents. They still smelled like smoke and gasoline. They both lay in their beds and tried to shut out the image of that old b.u.m"s face sizzling and running off his skull like frying lard as the flames consumed him. Joey had just managed to quiet the screams in his head when he heard the window slide open and that same burnt pork smell that had lingered in the air after their impromptu cremation came wafting into the room, roaring up his nostrils.
He opened his eyes just as Darrell"s charred skeletal face moved towards him, blocking the moonlight. Joey was sure that the old man had been dead when they left him smoldering on the sidewalk. When he examined the man"s face-eyes missing, teeth gleaming through where his lips had burned away, bits of burnt tissue clinging to an otherwise bare skull, other bits flaking away and fluttering to the floor as ash-he saw nothing to contradict his original a.s.sessment. Darrell was indeed a corpse. He tried to scream, but the old man pinched his windpipe closed before he could utter a peep.
Darrell sparked the flame on the Bic lighter clutched in his blackened fingers and held it up to Joey"s face.
"You have to learn not to play with fire, Joey."
Joey tried to scream again as the crazy old dead guy aimed the flame up his right nostril. Joey"s flesh began to sizzle. He writhed on the bed in nerve-searing anguish, but Darrell held him firm.
The boy had learned at least one of the lessons. He knew now that there were things in the world that could hurt him, that he was not invincible and that he could not get away with anything he wanted. The other lessons would take longer and be much more painful. But, Darrell had time. The boy had to learn.
Darrell would not let him grow up to be a criminal like his son Jake, on death row for murdering a drug dealer. He would teach the boy better. The old man moved the lighter to Joey"s eyelid and smiled as his eyeball sizzled and popped.
Addict.
J. F. Gonzalez.
"Addict" originally appeared in Insidious Reflections #5, January 2006.
J. F. Gonzalez is the author of over a dozen novels of horror and dark suspense including Back From the Dead, Survivor, Primitive, The Beloved, and the upcoming novel They. He is also the co-author of the popular Clickers series of novels (co-written with Mark Williams and Brian Keene respectively). He writes in a variety of media including print, screen, and the corporate world. A native of Los Angeles, California, he relocated temporarily to Pennsylvania, where he now resides and is trying to escape from. Learn more about him at www. jfgonzalez.com.
It was a place he stopped by occasionally on his way home from work and, like most underground p.o.r.n flea markets, it moved around periodically. This time it was in a modern three-bedroom tract home in Alhambra. Dennis Hillman stopped by shortly before 2 p.m. after having left work early for the day.
He tried to stifle a yawn as he flipped through home-made magazines containing photos of various s.e.xual acts. Normal garden variety in-andout didn"t do much for him anymore. It hadn"t in a few years. The deeper he got into it, the more hardcore his p.o.r.nography had to be. It was his unique tastes in p.o.r.nography that led him to seek out places such as Carl Grossman"s group a year or two back. You couldn"t find b.e.s.t.i.a.lity or scat stuff in neighborhood p.o.r.n shops. Or women being f.u.c.ked by guys with d.i.c.ks the size of those little souvenir baseball bats you could pick up at Dodger Stadium.
There were half a dozen other p.o.r.n junkies browsing through Carl"s wares this afternoon. Dennis ignored them as he silently sifted through the materials. None of it excited him anymore. He felt a slight sense of disgust with himself as he leafed through a rape magazine. Violence didn"t even turn him on anymore.
Carl Grossman lumbered over. "Got something I think you might enjoy." Carl was a huge fat man; he looked like a crowd of fat people squeezed into a tight suit. His trousers were wearing thin, the tails of his white shirt was coming out from his pants. Even though Carl didn"t work a normal job, he still tried to dress as if he had a regular nine-to "Come this way," Carl beckoned. He turned and Dennis followed him down a dim hallway to the rear of the house.
"Just got this in the day before yesterday," Carl said, weaving his way through boxes piled on the floor. He opened a box and rummaged around inside it before he found what he was looking for. Dennis let his eyes stray around the room as Carl looked for the thing he wanted to show him; this was where Carl kept stuff for the hardcore freaks. His eyes rested briefly on a still from a b.e.s.t.i.a.lity film depicting a young woman with thin limbs and heroin sculpted cheekbones on her hands and knees being f.u.c.ked by a large monkey. "Here it is," Carl said, handing Dennis the item.
Dennis picked it up. It was a magazine, the cover showing a woman with blonde hair lying on a bed. Her throat was slit, a great cascade of blood spilling down her chest and on the mattress. Her eyes were open and glazed over.
Dennis handed the magazine back. "It"s snuff, and every snuff film I"ve ever seen is fake. Don"t try to p.a.w.n this s.h.i.t on me."
"It ain"t snuff," Carl said, handing the magazine back to Dennis. "Take a better look at it."
Dennis sighed and began flipping through the magazine, growing more disgusted with himself. What he should be doing was working at the office; he had to finish that CPM spreadsheet for a meeting next week. But the pull of desire was strong and he needed an outlet. Admit it, Dennis thought, his hands trembling slightly as he flipped through the pages of the magazine. You"re a hardcore p.o.r.n junkie. You"re addicted to this s.h.i.t and you know it.
The photos in the next few pages showed the same woman from different angles. The next few pages showed a young man, about twenty years old, climbing onto the bed with the woman and embracing her. The next few pages had photographs of the young man sticking his c.o.c.k between the woman"s lips and shoving it into her mouth. That particular set of photos ended with the man v.a.g.i.n.ally penetrating her.
"What is this, some kind of special effects thing?" Dennis asked, his curiosity only slightly aroused.
Carl shook his head, a sick grin on his face. "Keep looking."
The next few pages showed different subjects. One was of what appeared to be an old man, his belly puffy and distended, the flesh of his torso the color of dark storm clouds. A woman who looked like a junkie was sucking his flaccid p.e.n.i.s. It wasn"t until he got to the old woman-what Dennis thought was an old woman-that he stopped and stared at the picture, his stomach curling in his belly.
He flipped back through the magazine, looking at the photos again. His eyes were wide. "You mean ... this s.h.i.t is real?"
Carl grinned. "As real as they get, Dennis."
The photo that had stopped Dennis in his tracks was that of an old woman. She must have been Caucasian because her hair was straight and long. Her skin was black and blue and green in places, some of it wet-looking. There were spots of white in various parts of the body. As Dennis flipped through it the photos got perversely worse. There were close-ups of her decayed face, the eyelids sunken in. There were close-ups of her rotting b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the flesh falling off her arm bones. It wasn"t until the man entered the picture that Dennis held his breath. Even though he found it hard to go through the rest of the magazine, he did so anyway. His eyes were riveted on the scenes of the faceless man"s c.o.c.k buried in the rotting woman"s p.u.s.s.y, the close ups of the man"s p.e.n.i.s with brown, maggot-ridden, rotted flesh caked to it amidst creamy s.e.m.e.n.
Dennis closed the magazine. He couldn"t breathe, he was that excited. "Where did you get this?"
Carl shrugged. "Just got it in a few days ago. A local outfit. You want it?"
"How much?"
"Fifteen hundred."
Normally Dennis would have paid for it, but he hadn"t come prepared to pay that much money for something. "I"ll have to get back to you on that," he said, handing the magazine back to Carl. "I"ll call you."