by Ian Woodhead
Believe me when I say that you put your life on a limb by coming here. You only have to walk down the high street to sense the general dark vibes of the place. It isn’t just the people either. The very soil in Brutality extruded wrongness.
Look, I’m not making up this shit. If you were here, you’d see it too. Then again, if you were in Brutality, the chances were pretty fucking high that you’d be dead within a week.
We found Alan around the back of the Shop and Save, curled up under a pile of damp cardboard. It was Stuart Trimble and Jackie Palmer who worked up the guts to pull him out. It’s not that either of them was scared of anything. Hell, Jackie might be a girl but she has bigger balls than me, and that’s saying something.
They only hesitated because he stunk of shit and piss. I mean really fucking reeked. We’re talking holding your breath bad.
Stuart said that putting him out of his misery would be the best thing we could do for the smelly old cunt. His instinct for self preservation lying dormant in Alan’s sizzled head must have woken up at this point because, he kicked out with his left leg, the soul of his boot scraping across Jackie’s bare shin.
She toppled backwards, crashing into a couple of black metal dustbins, while her gob uttered a stream of obscenities.
True to form, Arnold Lister ran over to the girl, totally ignoring the old man sprinting down the alley. We all knew the baby of our gang would walk over broken glass just to smell the girl’s shit but even he knew the rules. It was business first, pleasure later. It was that simple.
Stuart and I raced after Alan, wanting to catch him before he escaped out onto the high street. It’s not like anyone would bother running to assist the tramp, it’s more likely that they’d kill him to save us the bother.
Sneaky knife thrusts were not uncommon in Brutality.
I put on an extra burst of speed, smiling to myself when I overtook Stuart. The old bastard was almost within reach. Disregarding my personal safety and knowing that I’d need a thousand showers after this, I rugby tackled the cunt, my smile growing even wider when Alan’s face smashed into the concrete floor. A sharp crack suggested that he’d either broken a couple of teeth or he no longer had a straight nose.
It was almost worth the fact that Alan’s filth now stained my brand new Reebok top.
Between the two of us, we dragged the baby back into the courtyard. Just for trying to flee, we didn’t even turn him on his back. We just grabbed a leg each and ran, listening to his screeching as we scraped his face across the floor.
It was kinda spooky how both Stuart and I shared that thought, even fucking spookier due to one major factor in my relationship with my gang but I’ll get to that in a bit.
We both must have been thinking about Jackie’s leg, which is why it was only right that Alan got a load of gravel rash as well.
See, Jackie might be dead hard, but she’s still as fit as fuck. Unlike Arnold though, we don’t go all sissy and queer about it.
I know for a fact that Stuart’s fucked her. Only once mind, it is part of the initiation, part of the deal. When Arnold reached the age, he’d understand this. Something told me though that the chances of Arnold reaching seventeen were about as likely as Alan walking out of the alley with a smile of his face.
Right about this point, when Jackie had swatted away Arnold’s paws and Stuart had turned Alan onto his back, my stomach did this really weird slow turn and I found it proper hard to swallow.
I knew that my time had come. This was it I had to kill this snivelling excuse for a person. Stuart grabbed both his legs, while Arnold and Jackie sat on his arms. The fact that Alan smelled like the contents of a three week old pisspot were totally forgotten.
The hammer used in our ceremonies made its appearance, the head black with the blood from countless other initiations.
Our gang had been going for a very long time. Stuart once told me that his own grandfather was once head of this gang.
I kneeled down next to his head and looked into the man’s upside down face. His eyes bulged in terror. I guess that even this fuckwit could understand that his pathetic existence was about to come to an end.
My stomach would not stop swaying about. It honestly felt like I was seasick. Even the thought that once I did this, the tip of Jackie’s tongue would be flicking over the tip of my solid cock by the end of tonight, wouldn’t get rid of the feeling.
Stuart had already filled me in on how much of a slag she was in bed.
I don’t know why I hesitated for so long. I want to think that it’s because I had gotten way too over excited about the task and not because the conscience that I tried to bury for so long was making one last attempt to break through.
In the end, it was the sight of Jackie bending over, giving me a view of her large tits that finally settled it.
I raised the hammer and smashed it against Alan’s forehead. His eyes literally shook in their sockets. The blow had made a depression in the man’s skull but he wasn’t yet dead.
I hit him again, and with Jackie’s urgent prompting, I smashed the hammer down, over and over again, my blows keeping time with Jackie’s gasps.
I only stopped when the blood slicked handle slipped from my grip and flew over my head, landing onto a pile of black bin bags.
Jackie looked up and into my eyes. Her fingers slipped out of her twat and brushed over my crotch. She leaned over and slowly licked my face clean while her fingers massaged my crotch.
This went on for a good few minutes, only stopping when Arnold’s grubby little hand snaked in from nowhere and squeezed her left tit.
Stuart gave him a proper slap for that. I was close to giving him a good fucking kick too, considering how close I’d been to spurting. Jackie was the one who pulled me back.
Once Stuart had punished the little turd, he pushed his hand into Alan’s smashed up head and pulled out what looked like dirty porridge streaked with raspberry jam. Frankly, it was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen.
After carefully picking out all the skull fragments, he then brought this horrible goop up to his mouth and took a small bite.
I thought I was going to be sick.
He then offered this mess to Arnold who didn’t hesitate in eating his share, before Stuart did the same to Jackie. She winked at me before that beautiful long tongue manoeuvred a portion of this brain matter onto the surface before it flicked back inside her mouth.
Stuart then stopped before me, grinning like some fucking retarded clown and told me that I had to finish it off. Even down to licking the palm of his hand clean.
Even though what Stuart wanted me to do was proper gross, I was still going to do it. I mean, how could I refuse? Jackie was practically raping me!
I slurped up every wet lump and slowly licked all that sloppy, warm juice from his skin. I even winked at the lad, I think that freaked out the cunt just a bit. I didn’t stop until he snatched his hand away and called me proper weird.
Both Jackie and Arnold giggled at that.
Stuart saying that to me wasn’t the proper weird bit. What totally threw me was the brain’s taste. It didn’t really taste of anything.
Look, it’s not like I expected tramp’s brain to taste like a fucking cheeseburger but I did kinda expect you know, something.
We left that alley with Jackie’s arm across my shoulder while my hand caressed her arse cheeks.
It was my turn to wear the retarded clown look because I finally believed that for the first time in my eighteen years some people in this fucked up town had accepted me.
---
My parents ripped my sister and I out of our haven in the middle of the country and dumped the family into Satan’s pits, back when we were only kiddies.
After what I’ve already described about Brutality, you can kinda guess exactly how bad the local kids treated a pair of new kids, aged just ten years old.
Tammy and I are twins, you see.
My sister used to be a right little gobshite in our old
school and she, the naïve dork that she was, thought she could carry on just like that in Lower Brutality Secondary School.
I tell you, if I hadn’t been there to look after Tammy, she wouldn’t have lasted a week in our new home. The local kids were vicious to both of us but the bastards really did take great pleasure in trying to torture my little sister.
As far as I know, none of them inflicted too much physical damage to Tammy but it was a close run thing. I tell you, the kids never gave up trying to seriously fuck her over.
We were lucky, if you could call it that. Mum and dad said that Tammy and I didn’t have to start our new school for a full week. It would give us plenty of time to acclimatise, to get to know our new town and to make new friends.
Yeah right.
It didn’t take a week for me to realise our parents had made the biggest mistake of their lives moving to Brutality.
Tammy and I spent a full day wandering around the town with our jaws resting on the ground. We were only out of the house for five minutes when we first sampled the first of Brutality’s dubious delights.
Our house wasn’t far from the town centre, so we made that our first destination. We’d passed through the high street a couple of times already, in dad’s car and although it didn’t look like Blackpool Promenade, it’s all we had now. Maybe we’d get lucky and find an arcade machine in a café?
Mum had given us some money so, if we found nothing of interest, at least we’d be able to get something to eat.
I remember us stopping in front of this chip shop, my stomach growling due to the lovely smell of hot grease floating out of the open door when this old woman and a young girl, about our age walked past us.
The girl smiled at me and I smiled back, while wondering if she went to our new school. She was very pretty, long blonde straight hair which reached all the way down her back.
Tammy nudged me. She obviously thought I was staring. Then the old woman looked straight at me, opened her mouth and grinned, exposing this cave of blackened stumps.
I don’t think I actually yelled out but I must have jerked in fright and bumped into this pretty girl because the next thing I saw was the girl looking down at the pavement, at the ice cream she’d just dropped.
The old woman went into this stern but sympathetic mode, ushering the girl past us and politely refusing our offers to buy the girl another ice cream.
Okay, big fucking deal, it’s not like she chainsawed off her head in front of us and I think that’s the point. See, stuff happens in the town, really bad stuff, yet it’s all kept behind closed doors, hidden away, like some giant dirty secret. See, the ice cream event didn’t just end with this old woman with rotten teeth disappearing around the corner.
I took Tammy’s hand, told her not to say a word then sneaked up to the edge of the chip shop and peered around the corner.
She was beating the little girl. I mean really fucking laying into her. Blow after blow, it was horrible to watch and yet, I couldn’t pull my eyes away. It was the most brutal spectacle had ever witnessed. What made it even more bizarre was neither of them was making a single noise. Her bony fist smashed into the girl’s shoulder, her back, her face, every area where flesh was exposed.
This went on for at least a minute until Tammy pushed me to the side so she could look. My sister gasped out loud.
That is when the weirdest event happened.
Both the girl and the old woman froze in mid punch. They looked back at us before she grabbed the little girl’s hand again and casually walked off like nothing had happened. Tammy looked at me, her mouth forming a little ‘o’. My sister wanted me to tell her that she’d really seen that. If it wasn’t for that girl now walking with a slight limp, I would have asked the same question.
I guess you could call that experience, a life changing event. Witnessing the woman beating ten shades of shit out of that girl took the blinkers off our eyes. So during the rest of the day, Tammy and I noticed stuff that most normal folk would have just walked past without a moment’s thought.
For a start, we noticed people cleaning the pavements in town with soapy water and stiff brushes. These folk were pleasant enough to us two. Nothing wrong there. it wasn’t until we reached the front of this grocery store and saw this middle-aged woman who hadn’t quite finished her little patch. She smiled at us, no bad teeth in this one, and told Tammy that some little girl had dropped her ice-cream, her chocolate ice-cream right in front of her window.
We smiled back and left her to it, feeling that woman’s eyes on the back of my neck. I knew blood when I saw it. My ten year old mind pictured loads of people crammed into the high street at the dead of night, hitting each other with clubs, bats and broken bottles, with not one person making a sound.
About one hour later, while I was browsing through a collection of comics I found in a newsagent on the other side of the town, Tammy grabbed my coat sleeve. Pulled me over to the shop window and pointed over to the low brick wall which separated the shop and a garden full of flowers.
I watched a large black bird gazing back at the window, that wasn’t what she wanted to show me. Tammy told me to look down at its feet. Dutifully, I followed her instruction and discovered Mrs Black Bird with its piercing eyes had found a little treat for her baby birds, a severed finger.
I didn’t say anything to mum when we got back. Tammy wanted to blurt out everything we’d seen. It took me a good couple of hours to stop the silly cow from doing that. I knew that our parents wouldn’t believe a word of it. They’d just see it as their kids being extra nasty to them and trying to spoil their new home.
As far as they were concerned, everything was working out just great for them. Both mum and dad had landed jobs here that paid well above the standard pay grade as well as buying a house that should be worth five times more than what they paid for it.
So we kept the secret of Brutality, somehow believing that it was the right thing to do. Looking back, I guess it wasn’t my brightest idea.
Tammy cried herself to sleep on that first night. She told me the next morning that it wasn’t fair the nasty woman beat that girl just because she dropped her ice-cream. My sister so needed to buy her another one and to give the girl a big hug.
She got her stupid wish a week later but not the way my poor sister could have imagined.
Tammy ended up in ice-cream girl’s class. Whether this was coincidence or design, I could only guess. Like Tammy hoped, she tried to apologise and ask ice-cream girl to be her friend.
This little bitch responded to Tammy’s offer of friendship by dragging Tammy into the toilets at first break and flushing her head down the pan. It didn’t finish there, oh no. She savagely twisted Tammy’s nipples and stole all her money, saying that whatever Tammy owned now belonged to her. She also threatened to break into her bedroom and superglue her nose and mouth shut if she ever told.
Through the sobbing that next night, my sister also said that every other kid in her class had a go, only none of them touched her, apparently only ice-cream girl could do that because she was the one who saw Tammy first so she had first dibs.
Tammy wasn’t the only new kid who was targeted that day. Only they didn’t get very far. You see, unlike my gentle sister, I don’t bow down to any bitch as Paul Eccles, my new class crowned king soon found out.
Like I said, Brutality had already prepared me. I knew what to expect when I first arrived at my new school. Mum and dad used to move from town to town a lot so we were used to being the new kids. Now Tammy and I had different methods. She used to try to be as nice as she could, lots of the smiles and cakes, shit like that. Me? Oh, I used to beat the shit out of anyone who tried it on with me.
With Brutality and its freaky set of complete fucking psychotics who lived here. I knew that if I wanted my technique to work, I would have to become worse than them. My ten year old mind pictured the big boys stamping on my fingers, sticking needles in my tongue or holding me down and doing the sex act on me. This was not
going to happen.
It came as a bit of a shock when my new teacher introduced me to my new classmates and everybody were as nice as pie to me. I mean really nice. I wasn’t fooled for a second though. Those smiles belonged to tigers and lions and to them I was yet another fluffy bunny to tear apart.
Paul Eccles and two of his biggest mates didn’t make their move until school had finished. I had expected this. Making the new kid think they’d gotten away with a first day beating is the oldest trick in the book. You’re supposed to expect them to jump you on first break or lunchtime. By the time last break has ended you start to think that maybe they’re not going to beat the shit out of you after all.
It wouldn’t have mattered what time they tried it on, I would have been ready for them.
The three cornered me right at the top of the playground, in full view of all the other kids and two patrolling monitors. The fact that I didn’t cry out for help when Paul’s big fist whacked me in the forehead wasn’t his only surprise.
Before the goon could hit me again, I whipped out dad’s wine corkscrew and slammed the business end into Paul’s bladder. His whole body shuddered yet he didn’t fall over. He just stood there, his face a complete picture of disbelief as I twisted the handle round and round.
Paul only reacted when I tried to jerk it out of his flesh.
This really weird high-pitched girly scream erupted from his gob. I jumped back and launched my left foot straight into his balls.
The boy dropped to his knees before falling on to his side, still whining and crying. Oh, he’d also gotten a serious case of the shake about this time too.
So what about his two mates, why didn’t they intervene? I had expected them to try and kick me to death at about this point. I already had my fingers wrapped around dad’s craft knife in preparation for this eventuality. Nothing happened though. The next thing I saw were two teachers running over to us. Mr Gregson, the geography teacher carried a stretcher on his back.