Wrath White: Scabs

Danika watched him slash at the air and then slice his own forehead. Blood rained down his face and dripped from the wounds in his neck, chest and forearms. Danika screamed as she watched Malik’s face twist and contort, morphing between rage and terror as whatever demons he was struggling with made war within him…and he was heading right towards her…swinging the knives.

Danika ran. She didn’t know where she was going. The house was big and she could not find her way to the front door in the dark so she opened the first door she came to and ducked inside. It was the garage.

There were big metal canisters that looked like oil drums scattered here and there inside the garage and Danika tried to tell herself that she had just seen too many horror films when she began to speculate on what might be inside. She felt along the wall for the switch to open the garage door, afraid to turn on the light for fear that Malik might find her again. There was no switch. She’d have to open the door manually.

“That half-white bitch shouldn’t have been slummin’ around with your big gorilla-looking ass. Ya black spook! You so black I can’t see you at night until you smile.”

“He’s so black he could hide in a coal bin.”

The voices coming from the house were sounding less and less like Malik and more and more like someone else. Like children’s voices in stereo. It sounded as if he was possessed. There were more sounds of struggle as glass shattered and something heavy fell over with a thud. She heard Malik scream again and wondered if whatever was inside his head had slashed one of those knives across his throat and ended his suffering. But then she heard the voices again.

“We know that nasty redbone bitch is still here. We’re going to find her. We’ll kill her and then we’ll finish you off, too.”

“Nooooo!”

Malik screamed again and Danika stopped halfway to the garage door when she heard him sob and whimper. He was in pain. Those evil voices were torturing him.

“Leave him alone!” Danika yelled.

The garage door raised and Malik was standing there in the driveway a knife in one hand and the moonlight behind him silhouetting his form.

“I said, leave him alone.”

She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know what she was saying. All she knew was that she had to help. It might be the only way to save her own life as well as Malik’s.

“You filthy slut! You’ll fuck anything if you’ll fuck this filthy black scab.”

“He’s so black that when I close my eyes I can see him better!”

The voices no longer sounded anything like Malik. His lips didn’t even move when they spoke. They were the voices of spiteful children. Conceited little girls who thought it was fun to ridicule anyone that they believed to be less than them.

“You’re wrong. He’s beautiful.”

“He’s a nasty black ape!”

“He’s a beautiful black man. You girls are behind the times. Black is beautiful now. Those light-skinned pretty boys are so eighties. Women want real men these days and the bigger and blacker the better.”

“She’s lying! Nobody wants you. You’re just a big ugly black African!”

Malik was still standing there on the driveway holding the knife. His mouth still did not appear to be moving even as insults poured out of him. There were shadows hovering around him. As Danika looked she thought she could almost make out the silhouettes of two young girls. She even imagined she could see their faces twisted into smirks of superiority.

“They’re wrong. I wouldn’t have come home with you tonight if that was true. I- I thought I was falling in love with you. We might have fallen in love together if these little bitches hadn’t gotten in the way.”

Malik turned and looked right at the two shadows standing by his side. He raised his knife to slash into them when the two police officers tackled him knocking him into the garage right into the barrels. Three of the metal canisters fell over and the lid came off of one of them. Danika screamed as a woman’s torso tumbled out of the barrel followed by her head. The disembodied head spun as it tumbled across the garage floor turning towards her. Even dead, Danika could tell that the woman had been very beautiful, with long curly brown hair, light cappuccino-colored skin and hazel eyes just like her own.

Danika turned to the other barrels and began knocking them over. One after another curly-headed, tan-skinned heads tumbled out onto the garage floor. Danika looked from one face to the next as more police officers crowded into the garage.

“Are you okay, Ma’am? Jesus Christ! Are those real? We need a coroner over here. Somebody call CSU. It’s a fucking bloodbath in here! We’ve got bodies everywhere!”

Danika pried her eyes away from the lifeless faces lying on the garage floor and back up to the garage entrance where the two shadows were still standing there, smirking in superiority, unnoticed by everyone except her and Malik. She looked back down at Malik as what looked like half a dozen cops piled on top of him, twisting his arm behind his back and handcuffing him, their fear making them use more force than necessary as they tried to restrain him. Malik stopped struggling and looked up into her eyes even as her vision slowly faded and everything began to go black.

“Why? How could you do this?”

“I’m sorry, Danika. I didn’t want to hurt you. Some wounds don’t heal. Some wounds never heal.”

Danika fainted, thinking about scabs that continued to rip open and bleed decades after the wounds that caused them. The girls had called Malik a black scab. In a way, they had been right.

No Pain

The guy didn’t look like much. He was big, mostly fat, tall, about 6’4”, still two inches shorter than I, and his eyes had fear in them. I smiled, sensing an easy victory. Then I remembered where I was. There had to be more to him than what I saw. There was always a catch. Things were never what they seemed when Bill Vlad was involved.

Bill Vlad owned a traveling freak show infamous for acts that ran the gambit from the monstrous and grotesque to the supernatural. He also promoted underground no-holds-barred matches in which wealthy connoisseurs of the violent and the arcane bet exorbitant amounts of money on which combatant would leave the cage alive. It wasn’t just the fact that the matches ended in fatalities that drew the large wagers and opulent clientele. It was the nature of the combatants. Sometimes the freaks and monsters from Vlad’s traveling sideshow turned up in the octagon. I’d fought a man with eight arms, a seven hundred-pound cyclops, a human jellyfish with no skeleton or vertebrae whose body just absorbed my punches like wet dough. And just last month I’d fought a vampire. That was supposed to be my last fight. It was the closest I’d ever come to death.

The bloodsucking corpse had managed to open arteries in my neck, biceps, and thigh. My face, arms, and entire torso were rent with claw marks from the thing’s talon-like nails grown long from its months in the grave where Vlad had no doubt unearthed the preternatural abomination. We were both saturated in blood and gore from the bright red arterial spray spurting from my many wounds and mingling with the blood leaking sluggishly from the avulsions I had ripped and tore into its loose, dead flesh.

I didn’t know if the thing could still think beyond its appetite, whether its personality had survived its incarceration in hell and whatever dire magic Vlad had used to rescue it from the grave. All I knew was that it was trying to kill me. So it had to die. Of course, I had no idea how to kill it.

I was rapidly exsanguinating from half a dozen near fatal hemorrhages caused by the filthy talons and gore-streaked, tartar-stained fangs of the rapacious Nosferatu, and I knew that I had precious seconds before I bled to death. I had no fear of dying, but I was afraid of what Vlad would do with my corpse once I was dead. I didn’t want to come back like the soulless creature I was battling.