One night, morning, whatever it was, a poke in my arm woke me and I felt a cold rush of fluid hit my veins. I actually started feeling a little better. That bastard gave me fluid and antibiotics. I didn’t know why he wouldn’t just let me...die.
I felt raw and crusty. Sometimes he would use lube, but most of the time he didn’t. He got a little inventive once and tried another hole. But I still had some muscle left and he finally gave up. Or so I thought. At some point, I think he knocked me out and then did his business back there, because when I woke up, my crack felt like someone had pried it open with a butcher knife.
The Duct tape covering my mouth finally gave out and I spit the ball to the floor. My throat hurt when I tried to breath. There wasn’t any moisture in my mouth. I licked my lips and they were covered in cold sores. I’d wriggled and squirmed for as long as I could remember and finally the tape holding my wrists gave. I slipped my right wrist out and quickly had myself unstrapped. I tried to stand, but the muscles in my legs were wasted away and my feet were numb. I fell to the floor.
When I gained some feeling back in my extremities, I found a light switch on the wall. I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep myself from screaming when I saw the items on a small table directly behind the massage bench. A plastic bin had soaking surgical instruments in it. Next to that was a one gallon bucket. I forced myself to look and when I saw the pieces of bloody flesh inside, I dry heaved several times. I didn’t know until later that he’d performed a vaginal hysterectomy.
A door slammed from somewhere up above and I quickly made my plan. Inside the basin full of soaking instruments was a surgical knife. I grabbed it and turned the lights out. The familiar bounding of his feet pounded in my brain for the last time as he came down the stairs, no doubt, feeling frisky. I stood next to the light switch. His keys rattled as he opened the door. When he turned the light on, I swung the blade like a fighter delivering an uppercut. The blade penetrated just under his jaw line and when he screamed, I saw that it had gone all the way through his mouth, lodging in the roof, probably somewhere in the nasal cavity. He vomited and reached for the knife, but I pulled it out too quickly. He stumbled backward, holding his throat. That’s when I noticed the plate on the table, with more pieces of flesh on it and a fork and knife. That son of a bitch had been eating my insides.
The bleeding wouldn’t stop, but he didn’t seem to be dying. He bolted for the door and I slashed the knife across his face, severing one of his eyes. He fell to the floor, holding his eye as vitreous fluid and blood oozed through his fingers. He screamed like a ten-year-old school girl. I leapt on top of him and just started stabbing. No telling how many times, I just let loose and when he stopped moving, I stopped stabbing. But he was still alive. His good eye moved from side to side, as if he were still plotting his escape. I made him watch while I castrated him. He gurgled and puked blood. Then, before the lights went out completely, I popped a family jewel into my mouth. Strangely, I didn’t puke when I swallowed; something else he’d trained me to be good at. He died a couple minutes later.
The only people that knew about my traumatic hysterectomy were me and my OB/GYN. But I moved away from that hellhole and found myself living in Seattle. Flashbacks of my ordeal started haunting me, day and night. In an attempt to quail the painful memories, I went to a bar. My objective was to find out if I could receive pleasure from sex. I met a rather eager middle aged man. We went back to his house. He got a little rough with me when I said I didn’t want to have intercourse. That’s when I retrieved my keepsake from my purse and slit his throat. Surprisingly, it made me orgasm. Better yet, it stopped the nightmares and flashbacks.
***
My cell rang just as I took the first bite out of the man’s heart. I looked at the name. It said, MURRAY. Fuck, my boss. “Detective Kili, here,” I said with my mouth full.
“Teri, it’s Laurie.”
“Hey chief, what’s shakin?”
“Are you getting anywhere with the case?”
“I’m still walking the beat, talking to some of the girls, but nobody seems to know anything.” I smirked as I looked at the mutilated corpse on the floor in front of me.
“Shit. You want to team up again on this one?”
I was a little jaded. “For old times’ sake?” We’d been partners for six years before she got the promotion, before all of this started happening.
“Yeah, whadda ya say?”
“No. Thanks. I like working alone. Besides, who would call and bug me…” I paused, looking at the heart lying on the plate in front of me. “…when I’m busy.”
She laughed. Told me to be careful and hung up.
After finishing my meal I threw on a pair of coveralls and rolled the corpse up in the tarp and blankets. I’d chosen a far corner room of the hotel, bottom floor, nowhere near the parking lot and lots of woods out back. Not hard to find that kind of thing on the outskirts of Seattle. I’d stash the body in the woods and dump it in the Puget Sound later. Sounded like a plan to me. Lately, there’d been sightings of some Great White sharks. I may have had something to do with that, since I was basically chumming the Sound.
The clock read two A.M. when I drove out of the parking lot in his car, my hair still sticky wet from the shower. None of the tenants were awake and the nasty guy behind the counter slept soundly with a newspaper over his face. Good thing I prepaid for the room. I was really good at covering my tracks. And it didn’t hurt that I was the lead detective hunting down the most notorious serial killer in Seattle’s history, a cannibal hooker…me.
Crankin’
by John Arthur Miller
Crank tightened the razor wire encircling his forearms until slivers of metal cut into flesh. The metal bunched thicker nearer his hands and clumped around his knuckles turning them into hellish gauntlets.
“You ready, boy?”
Crank glanced at the old man. Mickey received his nickname before the Rocky movies had come out, a perfect ringer for the boxer’s manager. Crank nodded. The steel gate swung inward and Crank entered. Blood squished between his fingers, drooling to the floor.
“One more hit, old man?”
Mickey put the crack pipe to Crank’s lips.
“Only got one rock, boy.” Mickey leaned close, reaching through the fence. “Need two?”
“I wish,” Crank spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “There isn’t time for two, pops. Light it.”
Crank inhaled the harsh smoke made metallic by the barilla pad. He inhaled deep, letting it fill his body until it accelerated with nervous twitches. He exhaled gray smoke.
“Come on, light it again, pops.”
Mickey obeyed and Crank cashed the rock out with a deep draw. He wished he could warm the sides of the pipe, melt the residue off, because that was the best shit, but there wasn’t time.
Crank felt the nanonites in his body already repairing the effects of the crack, already flushing it from his system. Part of a prison experimental program, like his opponent, they were swifter and stronger than six men, and they healed at an accelerated rate.
“Get ready, boy.” Mickey took the pipe from Crank’s trembling lips. “Your opponent has entered the ring.”
Crank exhaled and turned around, smoke stinging his eyes. The steel door behind him clanged shut, and across the octagon stood a seven-foot monster of muscle. Couldn’t be human, but there he was, fists bound with razor wire just like Crank’s. The behemoth’s bald pate glimmered in fluorescent lights, one healthy eye glaring. The giant raised his fists and squeezed until they trembled, growling like a cougar, as great splats of blood lathered the floor.
“Remember what you’re fighting for, Crank,” Mickey yelled. “Not the drug.”
Crank frowned and thought of Natasha and William, his family, held somewhere on the complex, hidden away. He hoped they were safe, secure—not dead.
I don’t do drugs anymore, he’d said two days ago, at a time when everyone called him Mack. I quit doing crack years ago. Marrie
d a beautiful woman and adopted her kid. I take care of my family now.
***
He stood on Main and Fulton Avenue, waiting for the nine o’clock bus. It had been cold, a December wind cutting through his coat, the leather one Natasha had given him last Christmas. One-Eye stared from the back of the Cadillac, his driver idling the car.
“What’s the matter, Mack? Don’t like me anymore?”
“I told you—”
“We’ve seized Natasha, Mack.” One-Eye smiled. “You have a nice boy, too.”
Mach reached through the window for One-Eye, but the driver turned around with one fluid motion and pointed a revolver at Mack’s head. The hammer clicked back.
“You were the best drug enforcer I ever had, Mack. One-Eye sighed. Practically grew up in a dojo. Your folks didn’t want you anyway, did they? And those skills you learned? Well, I need you to come back and fight. I’m in debt—can you believe it? And now…now I need the best. It’ll be just like the old days. Especially with those new nanonites the prison system injected into your system.”
“I told you—”
One-Eye pushed a button on his cell phone and held it up. “Let her speak.”
Crank heard Natasha’s whimpering voice. “D-don’t hurt my son.”
“Natasha!” Mack yelled. “Are you okay?”
“Mack,” came his wife’s electronic voice. “Mack, help! Call the police! Call—”
One-Eye shut his flip phone and said, “Don’t call the police, Mack—not if you know what’s agreeable for your family.”
Mack tensed his fist and swore if One-Eye ever hurt them… but One-Eye interrupted. “There’s only one thing that can hurt them now, Mack.”
“What’s that?”
“Being uncooperative.”
Mack hung his head. “What do I have to do?”
One-Eye grinned and handed Mack the vial of crack.
“What’s this for? I don’t do this shit anymore.”
“I need to know that I can trust you, Mack. I need Crank back.”
Two days later, Mack knew full well what was expected of him: kill or be killed. They called him Crank, like in the old days when he worked for One-Eye, when he busted legs and murdered. The drug thought for him back in those days, making him reach further and further into the darkness, until the only thing that mattered had been the high.
“Doesn’t “crank” have to do with meth?” Natasha had asked him from the drug rehabilitation clinic when they first met. “Why do they call you Crank?”
“I’m like a cranked up meth-head when I smoke, only worse, see? I become mean, and I’m capable of despicable acts. The martial arts skills I learned while growing up… well, I could still do them while high. Maybe not as clean, but I was hypersonic.”
She asked, “While on crack?”
“Yeah.”
“What about now? What about when you’re not on crack?”
He smiled and shrugged at his counselor. Natasha had told him her story: came from USSR, working for the Russian mob. A whore loaned out to the highest bidder—not for her money, but for drugs. “More of a white slave,” she’d said. “They kept us girls high twenty-four hours a day, seven days per week.”
Crank remembered her sitting behind the desk at White Oaks Inpatient, his file opened on her desk. Judge Simpson had signed the order of his admittance, the bills paid for by the State. She was his counselor.
“When you’re not on crack,” she pressed, “what are you like?”
“I don’t know. It’s been so many years since I’ve been high… I just don’t want to remember.”
***
That was five years ago. Five years of sobriety, of honest labor and a good family, separated him from the man he used to be. Except for the past two days. Crank bobbed on his feet, ready to kill his opponent.
As the steel door closed behind his opponent, he remembered his opponent yesterday, a quick little Oriental man Crank had destroyed. He refused to think of himself as Mack now, because for the sake of his family, he had become Crank, an expeditious killing machine high and capable of—
The bell rang multiple times. Tobacco and pot wafted through the underground auditorium. The crowd cheered as the announcer—outside the ring, of course—roared, “Ladies and gentlemen… welcome to Duel to the Death!”
Couldn’t they have been more original? Even in his crack-high, Crank figured he could come up with something better. Leave it to One-Eye to promote this crap.
“In this corner, we have the challenger, brought out of retirement by his promoter, One-Eye—” Crank shook his head, for he’d never fought in the Octagon. “—we have the challenger, Crank!”
The crowd booed. A beer bottle struck Crank’s shoulder, but he didn’t feel it—he was too high. Crank considered walking up to his opponent to attack. His opponent attacked instead.
“And his opponent, none other than the current reigning champion—”
Crank ducked a vicious right hook that swished air, and, from his vantage point, saw his opponent’s feet were bound in razor wire to his knees. Bloody footprints followed his opponent from where he’d entered the ring.
How’d I not notice that?
He knew why he hadn’t noticed: the crack haze.
“—undefeated for two years… one-hundred and ninety-eight fights—”
The behemoth brought his knee up, Thai style, but Crank blocked with his hands. The razor wire bit into his opponent’s knee, shredding it, but it also knocked Crank’s hands into his own face. One barbed edge stuck into Crank’s eye, but it didn’t matter because the white of the eye had been damaged, not the iris. Crank’s head flew back and be became disorientated.
“—the rending machine, the one and only, Shredder!” The announcer’s voice hung onto the last word, and Crank instinctively brought his right hand up to wipe blood from his eye, until he remembered the razor wire.
Shredder threw a roundhouse kick before Crank could recover, and it thundered into Crank’s ribs. A sudden onslaught of insanity pumped through Crank’s system; every pore opened on his dry skin, emitting a bead of sweat that hurt like needles thrusting through flesh; his mind became alert with sudden clarity until laughter bubbled up from his cracked ribs. The pain forced him into a strange, slow motion lucidity. Before Shredder could pull his foot covered in razor wire from Crank’s mangled side, Crank caught it with his left gauntlet. A razor along Shredder’s foot caught a wire winding about Crank’s fist, and suddenly Shredder was suspended, off-balance.
The crowd Ohed and Awed.
“They’re so fast I can’t hardly see ‘em move,” the announcer yelled. “Isn’t this exciting? Those nanonites in their bodies are really something!”
Shredder’s remaining foot shot up toward Crank’s chest to perform a stomp-kick. Crank ducked and threw a scraping punch along Shredder’s right leg, still caught on his left gauntlet, following through and letting his razor wire rake flesh down to the bigger man’s groin, where Crank’s right gauntlet connected with a soft thud against flesh. Shredder collapsed onto his back. A whoosh of wind escaped his lungs and dust plumed around his gargantuan body, arms sprawled out.
“He’s down,” the announcer roared. “The first time in two years, and the champion is down. But the question is: can he get back up?”
If it hurt, Shredder certainly didn’t show it. Shredder drove the knee of his free leg into Crank’s shoulder, then drug his razor-wire binding his foot across Crank’s face.
Crank didn’t even feel it, but he realized enough cuts meant blood loss and weakness. He couldn’t afford any more injuries, even with the nanonites in his bloodstream healing constantly. He pulled on his right fist, but it stuck within Shredder’s crotch. The crowd went crazy, standing to its feet.
“Looks like it’s come down to a stalemate,” the announcer said. “The challenger’s tied the champion up, but Shredder’s grinding the challenger’s flesh. There’s only so much of that any man can take.”
&
nbsp; Shredder pulled his foot across Crank’s shoulder toward his face again. Razor-wire edged closer to Crank’s throat. Crank knew he didn’t have a chance with his carotid artery slit open, so he shrugged to protect his throat with his shoulder while screaming as he pulled. After a grunt, hefting the giant off the ground, Crank pulled free the fist that had been buried in the big man’s groin. Shredder’s trunks were flayed like his crotch, and a testicle lolled out of his boxing trunks, the cord elongated and hanging out of what was left of his scrotum. The big man howled like a wolf, but Crank didn’t let up. He struck Shredder’s inside thigh again, afraid to let his fist stick to the big man’s boys again, or catch his gauntlet’s razor wire against Shredder’s.
Over and over, he struck Shredder’s right leg, the foot still caught on Crank’s left gauntlet. Crank held Shredder’s free leg down with his knees. Crazed with crack and bloodlust, Crank pummeled until flesh dangled from Shredder’s leg in chunks. Blood didn’t splatter, it sprayed. Crank burrowed through the main artery in Shredder’s leg, striking the same spot repeatedly.
“Die, you prick, die!”
Crank thought of Natasha, of William. Somewhere in the distance of his distorted thoughts, through the crack haze, their images wafted before his bloodshot eyes; images like hallucinations, but not so strong that he couldn’t see the gristle hanging in stringy clumps from Shredder’s leg. So he continued striking, grunting with each thrust of his fist bound tight in death, to fulfill the fantasies for blood belonging to those sickos in attendance.
When a stretch of white leg bone gleamed in the fluorescent lights, and when blood stopped flowing from Shredder’s exposed wound, Crank knew the behemoth had bled out. Crank looked down and saw blood everywhere, an inch thick. Crimson covered the octagon, Crank’s shorts and legs, his arms and stomach. His sweat pushed against the coat of Shredder’s blood that had cast a wet veneer over his entire body.
Ruthless: An Extreme Shock Horror Collection Page 14