The Book of a Thousand Sins

by Wrath James White

  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 hell 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 and the boy answered his mother predictably and appropriately.

  “Fuck you!” the words flew out of his mouth along with a spray of spittle and 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 god to rescue her from her own child, when Darrell charged down the aisle looking like a troll from under a bridge in some fairy-tale. 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 floor with a loud smack that effectively cut off his shrill ranting. A trickle of blood ran down from the crack that now bisected his lip as he looked up at Darrell with his eyes glazed in shock and dizzy from the blow. 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 and 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 with his jaw still hanging open in shock. He looked over Darrell’s shoulder searching for his mother who finally overcame her own shock enough to protest.

  “What the hell are you doing to my baby!” She yelled as she charged the gray-haired old man who’d just battered her son, swinging a fist and hooking her fingernails into claws as she reached 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 embarrassing 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 passed 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 passed 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 assaulted. 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 mass 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 reassured 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 brassieres and miniskirts 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 passing a bottle of Crown Royal back and forth between them. The girl couldn’t have been more than twelve years old and it was obvious that both she and her mother were prostitutes. Just like Darrell’s baby girl Linda who’d died in an alley with a needle in her arm and the semen of the more than a dozen different men she’d fucked 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 hand around the hunting knife in his left pocket and the Colt revolver in the other.

  “The sooner they learned,” 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 shit 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 whore had just urinated. His body trembled with fury as he rose and continued his pursuit.

  Darrell kept thinking of his little girl. Her anus and vagina had been bruised and torn, her nipples bitten, welts and cuts on her back and buttocks, 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 whores staggered up to the motel reeling from alcohol and a cocktail 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 and 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!”

  The twelve year-old girl with the mascara running down her face as black tears and lipstick smeared across her lips and cheeks like bright red welts, screamed as Darrell punched his entire arm into her mother’s dilated vagina up to the elbow.

  “Please 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 rectum shattered as her vagina continued to tear until cunt and asshole became one gaping orifice dripping blood in a tremendous pool that saturated the piss-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 where 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 ass 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 twat with a hideous “Shlorp!” It was covered in blood, excrement, and tissue and Darrell scowled as he looked about for a place to clean it. He went into the bathroom to wash up leaving the two whores 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 whores.”

  He grabbed the girl’s mother by the hair and flipped her over onto her back, then he knelt down on top of her and began to saw off her breasts. Now she did begin to scream again. Twisting her nipple and stretching her breast taunt he sawed down to the white of her rib cage 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 breasts, face, and vagina 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 then 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 and 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 hoarse 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 fucking brother you almost killed you fucking 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 hear the children’s laughter even over his own screams.

  They never learned.

  ***

  Joey and his big brother Mike snuck back into the house through the basement 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 when they both lay in their beds and tried to shut out the image of that old bum’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 assessment. 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 he held 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 and 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 him better. The old man moved the lighter to Joey’s eyelid and smiled as his eyeball sizzled and popped.

  Münchausen by Proxy

  Ellie greeted the day with a smile that chased back the night. She cocked her ear toward the heavens and heard the chorus of screams and moans serenade her, seeming to come from every direction at once. Her children were calling. Her poor ailing offspring needed her. They were suffering and only she could help them.

  She brushed the morning dew from her hair and the droplets sprinkled down in a fine mist that settled to the ground beneath her. Her long platinum locks drifted on a gentle current of breezes like strands of cirrus clouds trailing behind her.

  Ellie considered herself an astounding beauty. She hated the fact that people often mistook her for a man. She was proud of her womanhood and prouder still of being the mother of so many beautiful children. No one had created more life than her.

  Even after all the kids she’d had her breasts were still full and ripe. They were too large to fit into a br
a yet they did not droop in the slightest. Gravity held no power at all over them. No plastic surgery could yet mimic their perfection. No man had hips as wide as hers or thighs as full and curvaceous or an ass as round and plump. In fact, no woman did either. She was, in her mind, the ultimate woman. It bothered her at times that others didn’t see her that way.

  “How many children do I have to have to prove that I’m a real woman!?” She shrieked to no one in particular. No one ever listened to her anyway. Until she did something dramatic. Then they all paid attention.

  Ellie was radiant today. A warm glow of joy shimmered about her as she made her way across town. Her children were calling her to their side and nothing made her feel more alive then being needed. They were sick, miserable, depressed, and only her love could make them better. She began to sing with a voice like wind and rain as she felt her children’s love envelope her.

  Ellie took her time going to the hospital that day. The sun was newly risen and its yellow and orange rays rippled across the sky like an ocean of spawning Koi. The shadows receded and Ellie’s smile widened in admiration of the day. This was going to be quite a beautiful one. She wished she had more time to sit and enjoy it. But the insistent cries of her progeny urged her forward.

  Little Joey lay in the hospital burning with fever as the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome ravaged his flesh. Joey was a hemophyliac who’d been unlucky enough to have received a transfusion with an untested batch of plasma. His parents won the malpractice suit, 16.5 million, but the money hadn’t been able to purchase a cure.

  Ellie hugged her son, warming his cold damp skin as he shivered and sweat and prayed for a miracle. The nurses watched him and were touched by his piety. Joey was one of the most faithful of all Ellie’s children. No one could believe as single-mindedly as a child. Even with the rashes and melanoma spreading across his flesh, even with the chills and racking cough, even though he could no longer control his bowels and was losing weight at the rate of nearly a pound a day, he continued to pray for a cure.