Wrath White - Scabs

It was my mother who first began to notice my weight-loss. She would beg me to eat and then look frightened and concerned when I would refuse or regurgitate the few morsels I managed to ingest. She would constantly ask me what was wrong because I had completely withdrawn from all my friends and would stare off into space for long minutes, occasionally bursting into tears. Nothing could comfort me. Sarah’s melancholy presence haunted me every hour of the day.

Pretty soon the kids at school started to remark on my increasing strangeness. Not just my daydreaming and emotional outbursts but my deteriorating appearance. My cheeks began to get that drawn and sunken look. The bones in my face grew more and more pronounced as if my skull was rising to the surface. I spent hours in the restroom vomiting up what little I was able to force myself to consume. My friends at school were the first to make the connection to Sarah, even before I did. They recognized the same stench of death.

“What, did you catch AIDS from that crack whore who died last year? I knew you were fucking her! Man, that’s nasty!”

In the end I lost all my friends anyway. None of them stuck by my side. Teenagers were supposed to be immortal and my obvious illness threatened that notion. I was a reminder that all things die. So they shunned me like the plague. My mother said that they had never been real friends anyway. I hated to hear that. I’d killed a girl out of fear of losing their friendship. Now she was the only one who still came around.

Sarah’s been with me now every night since I started chemotherapy. The feel of her cold dead flesh against me as I lay nauseous with radiation poisoning is the worst of it all. I know she thinks she’s doing me some kindness; being at my side in my hour of need. Trying to give me the comfort I’d never extended to her. But seeing her just reminds me of what I will soon become and how I hadn’t been there for her. Maybe that’s part of her plan as well; to save my soul by giving me a taste of true remorse. She no longer looks anything like the Sarah I knew. Her body is bloated with gasses and her skin looks loose and oily as if it’s ready to slip right off of her. Her eyes are gone and her hair and nails have grown long. I know that this is how she now looks lying in her coffin.

I turn to look into the empty pits where her eyes should be and feel her sorrow wafting toward me in waves. I’d had it wrong this whole time.

It wasn’t her own death or even my cruel betrayal that caused the terrible sadness within her. She wasn’t feeling sorry for herself, but for me. She knew all along that I was dying too. The tremors start and I wrap my arms around her frigid flesh as Sarah curls against me. And I’m grateful for the comfort she offers. The coolness of her bloodless flesh brings some relief from the fever raging through my dying body. I feel her cold tears drip from her cheeks onto my arms like drops of ice water and I warm them with my own. Sarah had not been so crazy after all. In the end, she was my best friend.

Pressure

Vincento turned to look at her with those beautiful silvery gray eyes that had melted so many hearts, eyes like a timber wolf, predator’s eyes. His long raven-black hair spilled damp and limp with perspiration onto the hard metal table. His brow was knotted in concentration and every lean hard muscle in his body was tense and straining. Maria knew he wanted to scream. She watched as those gorgeous eyes trailed over to look at the solemn six-year-old who sat in the corner playing with the instruments she would soon be using to torture him. He closed his eyes and shook his head vehemently.

“No! No!”

She clamped the jumper cables back onto his nipples and fired up the generator. Vincento’s body convulsed and contorted in nerve-searing agony as flaming talons of electricity shredded through his nervous system. She watched impassively as he thrashed about on the table with saliva frothing and drooling from his mouth in long ropes. He tried his best not to scream, knowing it would do no good and that it would give Maria satisfaction to hear it. She removed the cables and looked at him expectantly. Vincento’s chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath. His body still vibrated with electricity, and his nerves still screamed in agony. He shook his head again.

Maria removed one of her six-inch stiletto pumps and punched the heel of it into his eye. She did it so fast he’d barely had time to react. There was a wet, sticky, pop as it gouged through the eyeball. Blood drooled down his cheek onto the table and Vincento cried out in horror and anguish.

“You sick cunt! You sick fucking cunt! You ruined my face!”

Maria was a very patient woman. She had all the time in the world. She would get the answer she wanted.

Vincento stopped yelling and his one remaining eye refocused on Maria with an undisguised and utterly indescribable hatred. Maria smiled.

“Are you ready to tell me what I want to hear yet?”

“Fuck you! Fuck you, you crazy bitch!”

Maria shook her head. He would need further persuading, but he would talk. They always did. Her father had taught her well.

Michael Damiano, Maria’s father, had been an enforcer for the mafia in Vegas since the days of Bugsy Seigel. He’d become quite an accomplished hit-man and was greatly sought after for his skills at extracting information. He could make anyone talk. Even after his health had begun to fail, and he could no longer withstand the rigors of the job, he had continued to take on contracts, subbing out the work to his daughter whom he’d educated in the art of pain. She’d learned very well. Soon his buddies in the syndicate found out about his daughter and tried to put a stop to it. They could not stomach the thought of a woman in harm’s way. Some of them threatened her father. Maria threatened back. She left the bodies of her competition littering the front lawns of a few of her detractors. They left her alone after that. Some of them, even while denouncing her father and her in public, had continued to send contracts their way in private. Maria was good, and even those macho assholes had known it. One thing she had excelled at, even becoming more accomplished at its delicate intricacies and nuances than her father, was interrogation. For her father, it had been a science and he had it down cold, but for her, it was an art, and each canvas had different secrets to yield.

Maria heated the scalpel on the Bunsen burner and then approached poor Vincento. She had kept him awake for two days and he was dizzy with exhaustion, hungry, thirsty, cold, damp, and scared. This wouldn’t take long she hoped. She really took no pleasure in it. It was just something she had to do. No matter what, he had to talk, and if he didn’t…well, there really was no choice. He would suffer until he broke; until he spoke.

As Maria swabbed his chest with iodine she was once again awed by how handsome he was. His tanned muscular body was like a living Adonis. Even with one eye he still looked a lot like Antonio Banderas. It was almost a shame to ruin him. She began to cut.

Vincento winced and writhed on the metal table, biting his lip and refusing to cry out, as she sliced the heated blade through the skin just over his nipples. The macho ones always had the hardest time. They tried so hard not to cry out, not to beg, not to give in to her, but in the end, they all talked. Some just suffered longer before they broke. Vincento was definitely a tough guy; as macho as they came. He would suffer a long time. But he would talk. He would talk.

She cut two parallel incisions an inch apart down the length of his chest then drew the blade of her scalpel across the top connecting each incision in sort of a long rectangle. She gripped the top of the flap of skin with a hemostat and rolled it down the way a metal key rolls down a sardine can. Now Vincento did scream. The most anguished, agonized cry the human larynx was capable of producing erupted from him as she yanked down on the hemostat and jerked the skin free with a wet, sticky, riiiiiiping sound. Maria had heard this sound before; many times. It wouldn’t be long now. He would talk.