Wrath White - Scabs

As the crowd cheered us on and the wagers increased, we struggled desperately in a growing pool of blood, me for my life and the prize money, and he for his life and the life pulsing through my veins. I snapped the leech’s limbs and broke its neck, struggling desperately to kill the undead parasite before my life bled out on the canvas mat. No medical attention until the fight is over. That’s one of the rules.

I was already getting woozy from the loss of blood when I ripped into its chest, cracked open its rib cage, and tore out the thing’s heart, finally killing it. The referee raised my arm just as I blacked out from severe hypotension. When I woke up in the hospital, I kept checking the mirrors to make sure I hadn’t become a bloodsucker, too. I panicked when the sun rose and the morning rays spilled into my room, afraid that I’d spontaneously combust. The whole thing was far more aggravation than it was worth.

When Bill Vlad dropped by to give me my money, it took five orderlies to wrestle my hands from around his throat. He smiled, his red handlebar moustache curling up on the ends like devil horns, as I tried to throttle the life from him. As he left, he winked at me, tossing my prize money onto the hospital bed. I’d made fifty thousand that night and vowed never to fight for money again. Then my “Babygirl” wanted a new platinum necklace and I’d found myself broke again. Vlad knew I’d be back. What else could a hideously scarred freak like me do for a living?

My Babygirl was a stripper at an all-nude gentleman’s club on Industrial Avenue called “The Rose Patch.” I met her one night as she danced onstage before the leering eyes of men hungry for a glimpse of a tight ass and a pair of perky breasts; men like me. They were lined up around the stage waving dollar bills at her. I sat down amongst them, my brothers in sin, entranced by the bounce of her near perfect ass as it gyrated to the wails of some Prince tune from the eighties. I didn’t think she’d even notice me, given her choice of men whose faces did not look like overcooked bacon, but she came right over to me and sat right on my face. Of course it could have been the fact that I had a fifty clutched between my teeth while everyone else was waving ones at her. It didn’t matter why. All that mattered was that she’d chosen me.

Her name was Evangeline and she was everything a man could want; big tits, firm ass, long blonde hair down to her waist, face like an angel. I started going to see her every night. Pretty soon she was giving me hand jobs for fifty bucks a pop in the VIP room on a regular basis. Though sometimes, we would just talk. It was the closest I’d ever come to dating someone.

One day she confided in me about her pimp. I had suspected she was doing more than dancing and giving hand jobs and with more guys than just me, but still I felt like we had something special. She assured me we did.

“With you it’s different. I want to do things with you, but with those other guys.” She shuddered for effect.

“Why don’t you just dump this clown?” I asked

“I’ll never get away from him. Every time I try to leave him he beats me up and threatens to kill me. The only way I’ll get away is if you kill him for me. Then I could be yours.” She already had my cock out stroking it with her left hand while using her long hair to shield her actions from the eyes of the club security. When she lowered her head down between my lap and slid it down her throat, she knew she owned me. At that moment, I would have done anything for her. She withdrew her head from my lap just as the hyper-muscular bouncer poked his head into the booth on a routine check. She looked into my eyes pleadingly. “Anyway you want me, Daddy.” My knees went weak and my heart melted. I could still feel the dampness where her mouth had encircled my cock. I wanted Babygirl more than I’d ever wanted any woman or anything.

“But Babygirl, I’m not a killer.”

“Well what good is it having a monster for a boyfriend if you can’t sick him on people?”

Yeah, I heard her call me a monster, but I also heard her call me her boyfriend and that decided the matter. I paid the bouncer for a little privacy and she sucked me off to seal the deal, letting me fuck her beautiful silicone stuffed breasts as she licked the head of my cock until I erupted all over her sweet little face. She smiled up at me with my seed drooling down her cheeks and off her chin looking like something from a Bukakke flick and my heart turned to Jello.

She looked just like an angel. An innocent whore. Still somehow pure and good, her innocence untouched even beneath a veil of semen. But if that pimp kept making her fuck strange men for money all that goodness and innocence would be destroyed. That twinkle in her eye would be snuffed out for good, replaced by that cold, vacant, thousand-yard stare on the faces of all the other whores in the club who’d all seen and done too much. The same soulless expression that haunted my own features. I had to help her.

Later that night I cornered the club manager, who was also Evangeline’s pimp, in his office, and strangled the life from him. The next day I got a call from Bill Vlad.

“You ready to come back to work now?”

“Fuck you, Vlad. You know I’ll never work for you again after that shit you pulled with the vampire. That damned thing nearly killed me!”

“Well, that is the name of the game, kill or be killed. And besides, you never felt a thing. I mean, you can’t. And how many people have you killed? Just the other night I happened to be walking past this strip club with my trusty camera. I’ve got some lovely photos of you throttling Mikey the pimp right in his own office.”

“You bastard.” It was all I could say. He had me.

“Now what would Evangeline say if you wound up going to prison for twenty years or so? Do you think she’d wait for you? Besides, don’t you think she deserves a boyfriend who can buy her nice things? I pay you well, don’t I?”

“Okay, but it’s double this time.”

I knew Evangeline had set me up. She’d probably been working for Vlad from the very start. But it was too late. I was in love with the deceitful bitch, and no way could a guy who looks like me keep a woman like that without money in his pockets. So I took the fight on a week’s notice without the slightest clue who or what my opponent was.

The guy circles me with a big dopey grin on his face. I suppose it could look menacing if you were prone to fear. I wasn’t. His teeth were unnaturally large and straight and white. Like he had a fetish about toothpaste and dental floss. He had huge puppy dog eyes and pudgy cheeks like an oversized adolescent. A cherubic face, like a choirboy. He didn’t look at all like a killer. Maybe that was the point. Maybe Vlad wanted to watch me tear this guy with the choirboy face into bloody strips of steaming viscera, not so much a traditional gladiatorial event as simply feeding Christians to lions. I knew Vlad wasn’t too fond of Christians anyway.

The guy hits me, and the blow nearly takes my head off. The fucker’s strong, stronger than most humans, but that didn’t mean much. Mike Tyson is stronger than most humans, too. Besides, I have an edge. I don’t feel pain.

The nerve centers in my brain don’t function as they’re supposed to. I can barely feel anything, pain or pleasure. I am a freak of nature, a natural oddity. I grew up in Bill Vlad’s Circus of Oddities. My destitute and drug-addicted parents sold me to him when I was eight years old once they discovered my talent/affliction. I was the boy who could walk on glass and hot coals, who could swim in boiling water, who could cut himself to the bone and stitch up the wound while playing a video game.