Trigger Warning
Author: William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone
Date: 2018-08-28 00:00:00+00:00
Description: From the USA Today –bestselling authors of Stand Your Ground comes the explosive story of a liberal college under siege—and freedom under fire. Former Army Ranger Jake Rivers is not your typical Kelton College student. He is not spoiled, coddled, or ultra-lib like his classmates who sneer at the “soldier boy.” But regardless of his differences with the rest of the student body, he needs an education. And when terror strikes, the school needs Jake. Without warning, the sounds of gunfire plunge the campus into a battle zone. A violent gang of marauders invade the main hall, taking students hosta
Publisher: Kensington

Trigger Warning:

strong sexual content involving rape and incest; graphic descriptions of aberrant violence and torture; blood, puke, shit, and other bodily fluids; insects and their consumption; vermin; animal costumes and/or furries; pervasive vulgar language; racial, homophobic, and transphobic slurs; police brutality; misogyny; reference to the Confederate flag; religious abuse and/or portrayal of religion as abuse; profanities against god and criticism of the sacred.

John Raptor

Copyright © 2016 John Raptor

Cover Art: Copyright © 2016 Heather Kannianen

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

…put sharp objects in their belly…make them suffer and scream and cry out with pain…fuck up their naughty parts…ruin them and make them plead until they lose all hope…and then laugh and giggle and make some tea…

…1 YEAR AGO

Robert

On the outskirts of Hell, North Dakota, there are lots of Jesus signs. And on that hot-as-the-Devil’s-asscrack day in July (Jew-ly as my grandmother pronounced it; “goddam kikes!” as she called actual Jews), it was 87 degrees, and my hands were planted firmly on the wheel of my patrol car, which kicked up a column of dust in my rearview as I sped along the gravel roads. The large billboards (meant for whom, I do not know) whizzed by on my right and left, hanging out in the wheat and sunflower fields like fat, unwanted prom dates: faded, sun bleached, discolored, dog-eared, drooping. One poster was torn so badly you could see an ad for Hell’s Diner beneath: half Hell’s Diner, half “YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!” and I don’t think they were talking about the town 40 miles back.

ABORTION STOPS A BEATING HEART: a blue poster with a red vulva-shaped heart that had blood dripping from it, as if it was on the rag (god’s natural abortion). Quite melodramatic.

HE COMETH TO JUDGE THE EARTH! PSALM 98:9

HELL IS REAL (indeed it is, I grew up there)

FEAR GOD

IT IS TIME FOR JESUS CHRIST! ACCEPT HIM!

JESUS CHRIST PAID FOR MY SINS! WHO WILL PAY FOR YOURS?

THE FOOL SAYS IN HIS HEART: THERE IS NO GOD!

WHOREMONGERS AND ALL LIARS SHALL HAVE THEIR PLACE IN THE LAKE OF FIRE!

WHERE ARE YOU GOING? HEAVEN OR HELL!

So many exclamations and nagging questions about so much bullshit.

The A/C hit me in the face at full force, turning the inside of the patrol car into an icebox. On the dash, the hula girl danced next to my pink Glock .40.

Sweat trickled down from my pits even in the cold—so cold I could see my breath. That sweat was not from fear, but adrenaline (excitement) and that adrenaline only increased when I pulled up to a town called Flasher: population 232.

The shades I wore tinted the gravel roads a sick orange, making it appear as if I was driving on some kinda alien planet, rather than toward Shitsplat, USA—just another small North Dakota town with nothing particularly interesting going on in it, except maybe that box in the gravel parking lot just off of ND-21.

That box was a video store, which I deduced because of the weak graphic design on the front of the building: a poorly drawn magic lamp with a wavy cloud of seminal fluid spewing out its magic spout, and written in thatseminal fluid in boring Courier New font was:VIDEO MAGIC.Get it? Because it’s a movie store.

I shouldn’t give the graphic designer too much shit, because in a bold move, he/she/it added these bells and whistles to the logo:VIDEO MAGIC.

Whoa, dude. Edgy.

But I digress.

Have you ever had that moment where you feel sick with adrenaline? Like the moment the rollercoaster reaches the top of the first swell, or the first time you’re about to fuck a girl? Sorry ladies, let me rephrase that: or the first time you’re about to get fucked? That’s how I felt when I pulled into the dusty parking lot.

Scrotum tight as a walnut, dick a tiny nub, hand reaching for the pink Glock.

I squeezed the grip and stared at the store: a great decoy. I was sure they even rented videos to nearby Flashites, even though Flasher probably had a gas station or drugstore in town that served the same function—most small ND towns did.

The windows were pasted over with faded, sun bleached posters—like the Jesus posters, but instead, adverts for the Satan Hollywood machine: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Monsters, Inc., Rush Hour 2, The Mummy Returns, Ocean’s Eleven, Jurassic Park III, Planet of the Apes, A Beautiful Mind

I hadn’t seen any of them—didn’t watch many movies. The last movie I saw in theaters was Pearl Harbor and I wasn’t really eager to relive that experience.

Why watch people be active when you can take action into your own hand?

My fingers clenched the grip of the pink .40 and I kissed the fingertips (of my other hand) and touched them to the Hula Girl’s tiny lips.

“You stay here, sweetheart. Daddy’s gonna catch some crooks. Don’t you worry your pretty little head. I’ll be back soon.”

I killed the engine, crawled out of the squad car (adrenaline pumping, coursing through my veins like cocaine) and slid the pink gun into the back of my pants.

Only two cars in the gravel lot: a green Oldsmobile and a red Datsun with a confederate flag in the back window.

I moved toward the glass door pasted over with the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone poster—sweat trickling down my sides, hot sun baking my icy skin. As I entered the box, the bell above the door jingled, and I slid my shades back onto the top of my head.

Rows and rows of shelves, stocked fully with VHS tapes: the first red flag. Probably no movies here filmed after the year 2001. Fuck, they probably had the Pearl Harbor VHS two-pack.

Aside from antiquated film formats, they also had a fridge full of liter sodas and racks of chips, popcorn, and candy. I picked up a box of Hot Tamales, looked at the expiration date: May 2001.

Probably everything in this store was as old as or older than Pearl fucking Harbor.

It smelled like mildew and cat litter in here…also, a hint of lime and bleach.

A humming noise, like heavy machinery, could be heard from somewhere in back.

“Can I help you, sir?” the fat albino at the register.

I almost didn’t notice him, even though he looked like a 400-pound Pillsbury Doughboy.

My stomach gurgled. The adrenaline had loosened my bowels and I had to shit. The feeling of shit in my rectum only increased my excitement and pleasure (like being finger fucked) and as I approached the counter, a smile tugged at the corner of my blistered lips (Gramma said I licked them too much; bad habit for a bad boy).

“Aladdin,” I said.

“‘Scuse me?” the albino said.

“Aladdin. That’s the password, isn’t it?”

“I don’t what you’re talking about. The new releases are over there.”

“Oh, you know what I’m talking about. I want some goddam snuff films. You know…cellophane dripping with the blood and gore and viscera of real people, tortured and mutilated and killed for my entertainment. Now quit being a fat albino bitch and show me where they’re at.”

A long pause as my heart hammered in my ears, and the pulse in my neck twitched.

This was better than a rollercoaster. Better than head.

You couldn’t replicate thrills like these on the silver screen.

“Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave,” Pillsbury Doughboy said.

I laughed…dry as a Scotch and ginger ale.

“I don’t have to do anything you tell me.”

The power. Better than the coke. This was all natural, baby.

I flashed my badge and realized my nub was now a hanging hard-on.

The fat albino glared at me. “You got a warrant?”

“You know, I’ve been thinking of making a snuff film of my own.”

“We have the right to deny service to anyone.”

“You know what I’m going to call it?”

“Leave. NOW!”

The punchline: “Dead Doughboy.”

The cart you’re strapped into has reached the first swell and you feel your belly climb into your throat as you drop drop drop, screaming your fucking head off, the adrenaline coursing through you at full blast, a white bright light of pure ecstasy and thrill.

I pulled the pink Glock and put four rounds into the albino. The shells discharged pop pop pop pop and hit the mildewy grey carpet with a soft pat pat pat pat.

The shots rang loud in the enclosed space, making my eardrums sing. The stench of gunpowder burned in my nasal passages: a mixture of sawdust, nitroglycerine, and graphite. (There was no smell of cordite, as many cop shows falsely assume—that’d only be possible if I was using a WWII-era gun).

Blood spattered a crooked Fargo poster that had been Scotch-taped to the wall behind Pillsbury Doughboy. This blood probably came from the exit wound in his head, because I doubt there were any exits in his midsection, as it was too thick for 40 cals to pass through.

TL;DR: the albino was dead.

…EARLIER

Alex

Parked the shitty Datsun I stole from mom next to the nigger’s green Oldsmobile. She never reported me. She didn’t care. She loves her lil’ Alex, no matter what he does, because she loves Jesus and she’s all forgiving and she turns the other cheek. Dumb bitch.

Hot day in July, back at Video Magic to film another scene. Bought this lil’ shack from some guy in town who owned it; some farmer from Flasher who used to run it as a General Store or some shit. Now, it was my devil’s playground: torture, drugs, and rape. Sold most the drugs (meth, heroin, coke—none of that pussy LSD or weed shit) to kids who went to Hell High. High school was about 40 some miles away, but they’d make the drive. Some of those same kids even rented out the snuff tapes—usually pasty white dudes with acne and a hard-on for sex and murder. But what male doesn’t have a hard-on for sex and murder? It’s primal; it’s animal. We’re all animals, and males are the dominant animal.

Of course, some males are more dominant than others. Some males are beta-males. Pussies and bitches. The kinda faggots that can’t bench 400lbs and drop to their knees to eat a bitch out.

But me, I’m an alpha male. I’m the ultra-male.

I am the devil, and I like to have fun.

I have the devil tattooed on my bicep, and the mark of the beast on my forehead and the back of my right hand. When I bought the shack from the Flasherite cowhand, I covered those tats up: baseball cap, long sleeves, and gloves. Didn’t want to scare away the local yokels—religious nuts, all of ‘em. Out in the boonies of ND, you get all kinds of weirdos. It’s one of the few places in the US deserted and empty enough to house such simple minded folk. Just miles and miles of cows and idiots.

Good country people.

Salt of the earth.

Before entering Video Magic, I rubbed the Thor’s hammer hanging around my neck between my fingers as I quickly scanned the dusty parking lot. Empty (except for the Niggermobile), as were the gravel roads and ND-21.

Good.

Inside, the bell above the door jingled, and Tubs (the fat nigger himself) greeted me. Although Odin created all of Midgar, niggers are part of the inferior races and I only associated with Tubs because if there’s one thing niggers are good at, it’s pimping girls, scoring coke, and killing (and he’s albino). They do it better than any Aryan I’ve ever met—which is a goddam shame. Wotanism (Will of the Aryan Nation) is my religion and I’m goddamned proud of it.

But I’m not religious like the other wackos out here. My religion is the true religion and it makes sense, unlike Xianity. The thing that pisses me off the most about Xians is that they pretend to love everybody and turn the other cheek, instead of realizing there are superior and inferior: the strong and the weak, the alpha and the beta. And only the strong will inherit the earth. The meek are too pussy to do shit. They will be trampled by those of us who don’t give a fuck about their morals or values or trigger warnings or safe places or social justice.

They will die by our blood soaked hands because we don’t have feelings. We don’t cry and bitch. We party and kill. We enjoy the spoils of the earth and don’t apologize to some fucking hippie savior who let kikes nail him to a cross (fucking pussy!) Odin created the white man as the dominant race to plunder and destroy; to enjoy the lust of his creation: rape, murder, drink and drug.

The white man’s point of view is the only one that matters. Niggers, faggots, sandworms, chinks, kikes, trannies, crackers (wait, scratch that; I just got on a roll), you can all shut your fucking mouths unless you want me to rip out your fucking teeth or rape it, you pieces of shit.

My favorite books are The Turner Diaries, Behold a Pale Horse, and the White Man’s Bible. Also, I like Atlas Shrugged.

“You got the girl?” I asked Tubs.

Tubs pointed to the back of the store…toward the Kill Room.

I moved through the video aisles (mostly porn, horror, and children’s flicks) into a skinny white hallway with a heavy steel door at the end. A light-up dancing Snowman (leftover from Christmas) stood next to the door, its eyes glowing red, its stick hands waving back and forth as it sang “Frosty the Snowman.”

I kicked Frosty aside and slid the bolt back. These words were scrawled on the door in red spray paint: NO EXIT.

Inside the Kill Room: eggshell cartons covered the walls, splattered with a coppery brown substance. Chunks of grey clay crunched beneath the heels of my shoes—cat litter, to absorb the blood. A trick I learned when I worked at a gun range and a man went in, not to fire at targets, but his own fucking head. My boss shrugged, went into a backroom, retrieved some cat litter, and dumped it on the body. “Shitty way to go out,” he said, and laughed. I laughed too.

In the center of the Kill Room: a girl tied to a chair, gag in her mouth. Her eyes wide, terrified. Mascara dripping down her cheeks. Nothing original. Typical shit you’d see in any horror flick you’d let the kiddies watch—but this is motherfuckin’ reality, ladies and germs.

Steve Cheese—long ratty hair pulled into a pony tail (called it his “p-tail,” fuckin’ queer), Hawaiian shirt, cross around his neck, joint between his thin pale lips—had a camera on a tripod pointed at the girl.

“Hiya, Alex. Whassup, my man?”

I grunted.

Greetings are for pussies.

Steve offered me the joint. “You wanna hit?”

“No,” I said.

“Alright, alright. Let’s kill this bitch.”

On the floor, lying in cat litter, were several torture instruments: chainsaw, ax, hammer, nail gun, wire snips.

I reached for the chainsaw, because I’m classic.

I like the simple things in life.

I put my foot in the rear handle and tugged the starter cord, squeezed the throttle, and the Texas Massacre Instrument revved to life.

The girl thrashed in the chair, red ball gag in her mouth—wet and dripping with her saliva and tears.

“Okay, we are ROLLIN’!” Steve announced, staring into the viewfinder, his yellow rotting teeth grinning from his droopy acne-pocked face.

He pointed the camera at the action—but I could care less about the snuff films we released on the deep web and rented out to horny teenage boys. I was just in it for the kill. The thrill.

I am the devil, and I like to have fun.

“You wanna fuck this? You wanna suck this?” I screamed at the girl.

I held the chainsaw centimeters from her face so she could feel it vibrating in her fillings, feel the wind coming off the spinning chain.

She screamed and cried behind the gag.

In some pansy-ass liberal college the professor would probably want to know the girl’s point of view. What’s she feeling right now? Who are her family and friends that will miss her? Does she have a boyfriend or husband, kids? Or is she bisexual, a dyke? What does this scene say about male privilege and its undeniable connection to violence against women?

Who gives a fuck?!

I touched her eye with the spinning chain and it spread open like a fresh cunt. Blood sprayed. I reached into my pants and started jerkin’ it.

“You’re makin’ me so hot, bitch! Suck it! Suck that metal cock, you filthy fucking whore. You cunt!”

Steve giggled. “Good shit, man. Good shit!”

…PRESENTLY

Alex

I wake up in a dark, cramped room. No, a confinement chamber. With the kinda wallpaper you’d expect to find in the house of some old bitch with lots of cats: yellow with flowers and fucking smiley faces ever-fucking-where. The windows have black garbage bags duct-taped over them. The only light comes from a dim bulb that swings on a chain above my head.

I am bound to a steel chair, which is bolted into the floor, rusty chains wrapped around my waist and ankles, my hands tied behind my back with twine, and seated in front of a small fold-out table.

A wave of nausea rolls through me. The inside of my head feels like a garden of barbed wire…probably effects from the sedative the bastard bunny used on me.

Fuck! FUCK!

A clown enters the room. I shit you not.

“LET ME OUT OF HER E OR I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

“You’ve been a bad, bad boy, Alex,” the clown whispers into my ear through its latex mask-hole, “…and the wages of sin is death. At sunrise, the Lord will reveal his face to you. He will cast you into the valley of darkness.”

The clown giggles and then leaves the room. The door clangs shut, the bolt sliding home (much like the steel door to the Kill Room) and I just sit here, bound to this chair, fear creeping into my guts.

No, not fear.

Fear is for pussies.

Anger.

Rage.

Creeping into my balls.

MUST. KILL.

On the table in front of me: a box of Captain Crunch, a bowl of soggy cereal, and a rusty spoon; a small sticky note next to the bowl tells me to EAT UP! :)

Not fucking likely.

A newspaper, also spread out before me, tells me the time for sunrise, highlighted in yellow:

6:09.

An alarm clock with red digital read-outs warns that it is currently midnight. In other words: You have six hours to get the fuck out of here, bitch.

Before this, before this shit, all I remember is the girl crying and the camera rolling and the stench of sweat and pussy and blood and I was laughing and the blade was at her neck and I was getting off on this and I had a raging hard-on and she wouldn’t quit screaming and this fact only made me harder and want to butcher her more…and then this guy in a rabbit suit popped up out of fucking nowhere and said, “You’ve been a naughty boy, Alex,” in this high-pitched faggot’s voice and started giggling madly and poked me with a syringe and I thought he was injecting me with AIDS and I was about to cut his throat with the machete but then I woke up here.

Across the table from me is another man chained to a chair: Steve Cheese, aka The Film Guy (but that’s not possible). His face looks like it’s been sewn on. His throat has been slashed; his Hawaiian shirt stained a dark red. On the wall behind him, scrawled in blood (his?), are a cross and the words: HE LOVED YOU THIS MUCH!

A scalpel is clenched in Steve’s cold dead grip.

“LET ME OUT OF HERE YOU FUCKING JESUS FREAKS! LET ME OUT!”

Robert

I wake up in darkness, a red pulsating pain throbbing between my eyes; the thick stench of sewage putrefying in my nostrils. I retch onto the concrete. I retch until there is nothing left but strings of acidic bile hanging from my chapped lips. And then I wobble onto rubbery legs, stumbling through the darkness, heart pounding in the base of my throat, until I collide with a stone pillar—which I lean against for support.

Swallowing deep breaths, I wait for my eyes to adjust to the room. There is a faint green glow, which tints the walls and floor—the latter spotted with black puddles of some noxious smelling substance. I squint, rub my eyes, and realize my hands are covered in it: Mud? Shit?

I scan the room. No, not a room. A chamber. The size of it startles me. Concrete walls and floor, no windows. Some parts of the floor are covered in gravel.

My heart skips and I nearly scream when I spot someone else in the chamber: a girl, blonde, sitting against the far wall, her knees drawn up to her chest, mascara smeared all over her cheeks. She’s wearing a mini-skirt and halter top and big pumps. Looks like a cheap whore.

She doesn’t acknowledge me. Stares at the floor.

“Where the fuck are we?” I try to yell, but it comes out a soft quiver. Almost sounds like a cry.

She doesn’t answer.

“Hey!” My anger comes out this time.

The girl looks up, glaring.

Startles me.

“Who are you? Where are we?”

“I…don’t know,” she whispers, and it echoes eerily off the concrete walls.

Her face scrunches up, and she starts sobbing.

“Hey. Don’t cry. It’s going to be okay. I’m a cop. They’ll come looking for me.”

“They say you’re the reason we’re here.”

Warm dread flowers in my chest.

“What? Who?”

“The bunny,” she says.

I lean against the pillar, hands shaking. I take a deep breath, choking on the humid stench of rot and shit.

“The bunny.”

“They’re wearing masks.” She breaks down sobbing again.

“Pull yourself together. Who are you?”

“J-J-Jennifer.”

“Okay…Jennifer. Just calm down. Everything is going to be alright…I promise.”

“They said you’d say that.”

A chill racks my body, despite the fact that it’s hotter than hell down here. “Wha—who?”

“The bunny,” she says.

I sigh and sit down on the floor, against the pillar.

“They said you’re an expert in evil.”

I run my hands through my hair—greasier than a lubricated rat.

“What do they mean by that?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

…YESTERDAY

This is the part where we do a flashback to how my life used to be, before all this shit happened. Okay, well here it is.

It was a Saturday and my wife Cindy was in the kitchen baking lasagna and pulling down bottles of wine, red and white, but hopefully not planning to serve both to each of her guests or else the house was going to be full of flatulence.

I had just got done with a 16-hour shift and was pulling into the driveway in my squad car, when I imagine Cindy spotted me through the kitchen window, wiped her hands on one of those gaudy wedding towels her parents bought for us, and rushed to the door to invite me in.

She was the perfect drone…I mean, housewife. She fit our cookie-cutter lifestyle and her gender role to a gingerbread woman T.

We were white, upper class, Christian (meaning we went to church occasionally—Christmas, Easter, whenever someone we kinda knew croaked or got married), straight, and cis. No confusion about our sexuality, gender identity, or otherkinness. Nope. We were normal normal normal normal.

Average.

Ordinary.

We were chameleons that could blend in and fit in anywhere, rendering us completely safe from predators…mainly, our own kind.

What more could you want out of life?

“Hi, Rob. How was your shift?” Cindy said, white teeth gleaming, blue eyes sparkling. I imagined if I shot her face open, there’d be nothing but wiring and circuit boards behind that mask.

“Alright,” I said.

I moved past her, slumped down on the couch, and did what any average Joe would do after a long day’s work: turned on the tube.

“Ryan and Brandi are coming over tonight,” Cindy said.

The thought of socializing after a 16-hour shift instantly filled me with anxiety and rage, but these feelings were too dulled by exhaustion and apathy for any of it to register on my face, or in my eyes, which were blankly fixed on the evening news: a new virus may wipe out humanity. Oh god, if only.

“Who?” I asked.

“My friend Brandi and her husband.”

“Oh God, not that cunt.”

“Be nice, Robert. Brandi is not a…c-word.”

“I wasn’t talking about Brandi.”

“I thought you liked Ryan.”

“No,” I said. “I never said that. You’re living in your own fantasy world. You don’t listen to anything I say.”

“But Ryan’s a nice guy.”

“There are no nice guys.”

“What about Brandi? Do you like her?”

“I don’t talk to her. She’s your friend and you don’t even like her. Last time she was here all she did was complain about the wallpaper.”

“It’s not that I don’t like her, it’s just that…”

“She’s a vacuous bitch?”

“What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem. I spent my night chasing meth heads down Sunset and the last thing I want to do is hang out with Brandi and her numb nuts husband.”

“You just need to get to know Ryan better. I’m sure eventually you two will get along fine.”

“Just like every other husband you try to hook me up with? Why do we have to socialize all the time? Can’t we just…be left alone?”

“Socializing is normal, Robert. It’s what normal people do.”

Cindy returned to the kitchen, and I continued to stare into the TV: all the bees are dying and it may be the end of humankind. Next: the weather. Looks like a sunny day all week.

***

The horizon of the suburbs was tinted a yellowish-orange as the sun set where it usually sets (the west) and we were out on the back patio, staring at our acres of green lawn and my wife’s yam garden, which garnered her the award for best yams in the neighborhood three years in a row.

Can you feel the excitement?

I sat in a lawn chair with my shades on, taking long swallows from a beer. Unfortunately, Ryan was seated next to me, in his own lawn chair, as my wife and Brandi were setting out silverware on the patio table and talking about sales at the mall and some girl named Ashley who is pregnant AGAIN, even though she can barely afford rent on her condo.

It was so stereotypical it felt almost…scripted.

Cindy announced that she was going to get the wine and Brandi offered to help her carry glasses.

Then Cindy did something that I hate. She turned to me and Ryan and said: “You boys doin’ alright?”

I’m not a fuckin’ boy, you cunt.

“Super!” Ryan said.

“Okay. We’ll be back in a sec. You two just keep talking about sports and cars and tools and other man stuff. Haha.”

If Cindy loved me at all, cared about me one iota, she’d know that I could count the number of shits I give about sports, cars, and tools and “other man stuff” on one hand…if I were missing fingers.

“Will do!” Ryan said.

Twat.

We sat in complete silence, until Ryan interrupted the calm with:

“So, did you catch the Raiders game last night?”

I took a swig of beer, emptied the bottle, and tossed it into the yard.

Ryan laughed. “Nice throw.”

“Quit the small talk crap,” I said. “I don’t care about you and you don’t care about me. So, just…stop…it.”

“Hey, man. Just tryin’ to be friendly.”

“Last year, I found a dead girl in a dumpster. She was eight. Her mom sold her into prostitution so she could pump more junk into her veins. A group of niggers bought this girl for the night. Eight years old. They violated her in every orifice…then they beat her skull in with a crowbar because she tried to fight back. When I found her…around 4am, I think it was…her hair was matted with blood and cum and shit. I don't know where the shit came from. I'm a grown ass man…and I cried. I fucking cried like a baby when I saw that baby doll…her innocence raped and violated…her whimsy crushed. Girls that age are supposed to like dolls and ponies and pink things. That girl…all she ever knew was dirt, puke, shit, grit, cum, blood, junk. She took it in the ass, the vag, the face, so her goddam mother could get her fix. Pathetic. Makes me sick.”

Ryan said, “Jesus.”

I reached into the cooler, cracked open another beer.

“It’s a fucked up, monotonous world out there. Full of filth and shit. Monsters wearing human masks. It never ends. It’s like the goddam Energizer Bunny.”

Cindy and Brandi brought out the wine, giggling about some vapid shit that didn’t matter, at the moment, or in the end.

My wife asked: “Who wants Red Ass Rhubarb?”

***

Angela’s body was hot and I was hard between her legs, caressing her erect pink nipples with the pads of my thumbs and grasping both breasts, as I eased myself deep inside her, thrusting, punching her cervix. She clawed at my back, breathing hard, coming to…

We both orgasmed at the same time, and I buried my face between her breasts (slick with sweat) licking them like a puppy dog and crying with pleasure. Angela’s warm heavy breaths ruffled my hair and I could smell her. God, she smelled good: the musky scent of sex and the salty smell of sweat. I licked the cum off her cream pie and gave her another orgasm—massaging her clit in a slow, circular motion with my tongue as I fingered her.

She started screaming a combination of God and I’s names, and then took the sweet Baby Jesus’ in vain.

I met Angela at my gym. She was a yoga instructor who gave me a private lesson: aka she forced my chin down on the mat between her legs while she did the splits, her hot open cunt right in my face, lips spread. I breathed on her pink insides and she threw her head back and moaned as I stared up at her large heaving breasts and she forced my lips and tongue onto her gaping wetness and I devoured her.

In her private shower room, she told me that she had been a dirty girl and ordered me to scrub her nubile body with soap and then to grope her breasts, ass, and pussy with my fingers under the hot running water. After I cleaned her up, she bent over, backed into my erect cock, and pushed me against the wall with her ass, which bounced against my groin as she forced me in and out, in and out…the hot water dancing on her back and the crack of her a—

But back to the scene:

I sat with my back against the headboard and lit a cigarette as Angela snuggled up against me.

“Did you hear about those cannibal kids in Minnesota? They killed and ate like thirty people,” she said.

I didn’t feel like talking about this crap. Not with her. She was my escape—not only from work, but my wife, my boring ass life. She was my fantasy girl, in the flesh—a gorgeous sex toy.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “I heard about it. They were both fast food mascots. They killed people while wearing their ridiculous costumes.”

“I think it’s so sad—kids these days. I don’t know why they’re so mean. I blame the parents.”

“The boy cannibalized both his father and mother.”

“Probably served them right for raising such a fucked up kid.”

“Yeah. It’s a fucked up world,” I said, bored, taking a drag off the cig.

“People do stupid things.”

“Yeah. People are stupid,” I said.

This conversation was going nowhere and I had the sudden urge to just leave.

“Did you ever hear about that serial killer in Chicago who cut out prostitute’s eyes and replaced them with big black buttons?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Richard Harris. He was a pecan.”

“I think he hated women.”

“Yeah, probably. I mean, he killed them.”

“Why do so many men hate women?”

“I…don’t know. They feel…like they’re better than them, I guess. And somehow that excuses their violent and sexually deviant behavior toward them. For Richard, I think it was partly his religious upbringing. His parents were pecans too.”

“Did you ever hear about that brain surgeon who got shot in the head, ended up in a coma, and woke up a serial killer?”

I got drowsy and started to doze off…said something like, “Um…ye-ah.”

“ROBERT!”

I jumped. “What?”

Angela crawled on top of me, her breasts pushed against my chest, and I stared down into her cleavage, my dick getting hard against her ass and cunt. She started rubbing her wetness against me, and then she asked again, licking my lips, talking into my mouth.

“Did you hear about that guy?” She sneaked her tongue between my lips, and I bit her softly.

“What guy?” I asked, drawing away.

“The guy who got shot in the head and turned into a serial killer?”

“No. I haven’t heard of him. Sounds like Phineas Gage.”

“Who’s Phineas Gage?”

“Guy in the 1800s. Had a railroad spike go through his head. Used to be a charming guy like me, but then he turned into a complete asshole.”

“Did Phineas kill anybody?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Talking about this turns me on,” she said, gripping my cock, and positioning it into her cunthole.

“Not again, baby doll. I’m exhausted.”

“Oh come on. I know you got more spunk in ya than that.”

“Fine,” I said.

I squeezed her firm ass as she humped my dick, over and over and over, until I felt sore down there, my head burning. I told her I needed a break and she pulled me out with a wet pop and turned around, presenting her wet, sopping lips to me from behind, and smashing her ass against my face, forcing me to rim her asshole and cunt. When she finally gave me some breathing room, I bit her on the ass, and she pulled her cheeks apart, inviting me inside. I pushed my throbbing dick inside her asshole and instantly shot a load. The orgasm burned my urethra this round, as if I was coming molten lead, and I winced, crawling out of the bed, my dick limp and throbbing, thinking that I needed to get out of here before this nympho made it fall off. I reached down and picked my boxers off the floor. “I better get going. Cindy will start worrying about me.”

Angela lay sexily on the bed, stroking her breasts, sucking on her fingers, wetting her nipples.

“Cindy, Cindy, Cindy. When are you going to leave that bitch?”

“Never. She’s my wife. Besides, if I left her, what would I do? Marry you?”

“Maybe.”

“No, sweetheart. What we got…the reason it's so good is because it's wrong. It's sinful. If we got married, we'd be bored of each other in a week.”

Sex with my wife Cindy was…banal (missionary, or a lackluster hand job beneath the sheets as I boredly fingered her). Sex with Angela was dangerous and erotic. It was wrong and it gave me a rush—like that rollercoaster, like shooting that fuckin’ nigger in the head.

My excuse to leave that godawful dinner with Ryan and Brandi was that I had lots of paperwork at the office. I needed Angela’s pussy more than anything that night. Her pussy was like heroin. Soothing. Made me forget what a shit life I had.

Angela pounced on me as I made my way toward the door, wrapping her strong legs around my waist, and poking her tongue in my mouth. I told her I had to go and put her back down on the ground.

She bent over and told me I wasn’t allowed to leave unless I spanked her.

“I’ve been a very naughty girl tonight.”

So I spanked her, and left.

In the hallway of Angela’s rundown apartment (which reeked of mildew, cigarettes, and booze), I clicked the button for the elevator. The doors dinged opened and a six-foot bunny rabbit stood before me, looking eerie in the sporadic glow of one of the elevator’s flickering lights. It was waving a padded hand, and holding a basket of brightly colored eggs in the other. Part of me wanted to scream, but I molded it into a shrieking laugh, got on the elevator, and pushed the L button.

“A little early for Easter, isn’t it, Bunny?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.

The Bunny, in a cutesy high-pitched voice, said: “I have a special Easter present for you, my friend.” Covered its buck teeth with a padded paw, giggling.

I shook my head.

The Bunny handed me an egg.

“That’s alright,” I said.

“Take it,” The Bunny insisted.

I sighed, taking the egg. It was the kind of shitty plastic pastel-colored shell you would put candy in and hide from the kids.

“Go ahead…open it. You’ll be wonderfully surprised.” Giggle, mouth cover.

I opened the egg…

…a sticky, used condom.

“You sick fuck!” I screamed, quickly tossing the plastic shells.

The Bunny giggled (a series of manic shrieks and hoots), dropping the basket of eggs as it covered its mouth with both padded paws. I kicked the eggs away and stood against the elevator door, trying to stay as far away from the sick fuck bunny as possible.

The Bunny wouldn’t (couldn’t) stop giggling. It was keeling over with high-pitched fits of laughter.

“What is wrong with you?” I screamed, my voice cracking: fear.

“Was her cunt tasty?” the Bunny squeed.

I puked on the Bunny’s big padded feet. Red and yellow chunky bile. Cindy’s lasagna.

The last thing I remember: the Bunny picked an egg off the floor (unlike the others, it was big and black, like the egg of an ostrich), popped it open, and inside was a syringe. The Bunny lunged at me and stuck me in the neck and I hissed as the fluid bit into my veins. The Bunny grabbed my face in one padded paw and stared at me with its large mesh eyes (and behind that mesh was a person, wasn’t there? A man, a woman?  Someone who knew me and hated me and knew what I was up to…Cindy?), the bunny’s face, its mask, permanently frozen in that chipper buck-tooth smile.

“You’re sinner number one,” a deep gravelly voice emitted from the cute cheeks and whiskers. I felt the world sliding out from beneath my feet into an endless black void and I could hear all the blood rushing into my face.

The Bunny threw its head back and giggled like a mad school girl and then black.

…NOW

I grope around the chamber, looking for an escape. Jennifer tells me it’s hopeless, there’s no way out. I ignore her, tug on the steel door. It’s sealed tight, won’t budge. I search for another door, splashing through the muddy black water, and tripping, falling. Scraping my palm open on some gravel. Bleeding.

“FUCK!” I scream. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

I crawl back to the pillar, trembling, and I can feel Jennifer staring at me in the dim green light, from her little corner in the chamber.

The steel door squeals open and I suck in a deep breath, looking through hot tears, through black muddy fingers and blood. The Bunny enters…giggling.

“You’ve been a naughty boy,” it says, and points at me.

“What the fuck do you want?” I choke on my words. I have no spit.

“I want to make you suffer.” The Bunny giggles again, covering its mouth.

Jennifer cries.

“Welcome to hell,” the rabbit’s voice goes deep and gravelly, and then back to high-pitched giggling, as it frolics around the chamber, jumping up and down on all fours. It shakes its fuzzy tail at us and then slams the steel door shut.

The echo of that slamming bounces around the chamber for what feels like forever.

Erica

Oh fuck it’s dark in here. I can’t see. My hands tied behind my back. I’m lying on cold concrete. It presses into my face. I feel a cobweb on my lips but I can’t get it off. A door opens at the top of the stairs. I’m in a cellar, I think. I let out a raspy cry. My mouth is bloodied (I can taste copper) and my eyes are dry (balls of dust). Fear and revulsion and sickness are the only things keeping me warm down in this dank hell hole. The silhouette of the rabbit (the long ears) comes down the stairs, each wooden step creaking beneath its padded feet. That thing…it’s giggling. I try to get up, but my ankles are bound too…I can only roll around on the concrete, flopping like a dying fish out of water. The restraints bite into my skin.

“Yes, Jesus loves me, yes Jesus loves me,” the rabbit sings.

I start crying.

“The Bible tells me so.”

“Leave me alone!” I scream, my heart shredding into a million little pieces.

I can’t fucking stop shaking.

“Are you afraid of me?” the rabbit says. “If I were you, I’d be afraid of me.” The voice goes deep. “Because I’m one sick fuck!” Followed by the high-pitched giggling. Hehehehehe.

“Oh God…please…leave me alone!”

“God doesn’t live down here, silly,” the rabbit says in its high-pitched voice.

The padded feet come off the last riser, and the rabbit stands above me, looming; its fluffy white chest, puckered cheeks, and buck teeth stained satin; its large dead eyes reflecting green pools of light.

“Yes Jesus loves me yes Jesus loves me.”

I’m crying, the back of my mouth aching. Everything aching. I want to puke but I can’t. I shit myself and it runs down my thighs (the thong I was wearing beneath my miniskirt—before that thing brought me here—has been removed; I was bare and sore when I woke up in the darkness). I gag on my stench, my filth. My rectum throbs, wet and itchy from runny shit…blood?

“They are weak,” the rabbit sings, kneeling down in front of me. “But He is strong.”

I’m crying so hard my whole body aches.

“SING IT YOU SICK FUCK!” the deep voice bellows and echoes.

“Ye-ye-yesss…Je-Jesus l-l-loves me…” I break down, my eyes pulsing in their sockets. “The Bu-bu-Bible tells me so.”

The rabbit snickers, grabs me by my bound wrists, and drags me across the floor. Hits a switch. A dim bulb flickers on, casting a sickly glow. I shriek when I see the dentist chair in the center of the room, spotlighted by the hanging bulb. The rabbit pushes me into the cold leather, undoes my wrists—I lash out and claw the rabbit’s face the moment my hands are free. But the rabbit is strong, and holds me down, giggling, as he/she/it binds my wrists again, but this time, in the chair’s leather restraints. I kick my bound ankles forward, punching the rabbit hard in the gut. It keels over, laughing, gasping for breath, and then clutches one of my fingers in its big paw.

Icy terror fills my veins at the thought of the rabbit bending my finger backward until the bone snaps, but instead: it buries a rusty tooth scraper into the nailbed. I scream.

“No one can hear you, bitch,” it says. “I hope you got your tetanus shot.”

The rabbit forces a steel contraption into my mouth that holds it open…

And then he/she/it starts up the tooth drill.

I thrash in the restraints…screaming so loud my head is vibrating and my ears are ringing and it sounds like a mad house down here as my brain cracks and my heart explodes and I think about my bloody bloated body in a dumpster somewhere and the rabbit giggles, I swear, even though I cannot hear it over the piercing noise of the drill.

The rabbit stares into my gaping maw with its dead mesh eyes and then shoves the drill bit into my back molar. The drill’s high-pitched scream rings in my tooth, my ears, my brain, and a sharp, hot pain instantly flowers in my lower jaw and I become light headed and start seeing things (demons in the shadows) and I’m screaming and crying and puking and pissing and shit is dripping down my thighs (itchy, developing a rash). The rabbit continues to drill, putting holes in my teeth and vacuuming blood and puke from my gaping maw with a suction tube.

At some point, the pain and fear blurs together and I don’t feel much of anything anymore…just acceptance. That this is it.

Then it stops.

My face sheathed in sweat; my eyes wide, darting around the room; mad, crazy…everything blurry; tears and sweat burn hot in my tear ducts.

“You’re sinner number three,” the rabbit says. Deep voice: “Welcome to hell.”

The rabbit giggles as it switches off the light, hops up the stairs, and slams the door shut—leaving me in darkness, bound to the dentist chair.

Saliva and blood fill the back of my throat and I feel like I’m drowning; having trouble swallowing due to the fact my mouth is being held open by the metal contraption. For a moment, I forget how to swallow and hot panic fills me…but then my throat goes into tight wild spams, and the blood and spittle go down. I cry: my tongue dry, my sinuses and throat burning with bile. The rabbit left me, left me down here, quivering, crying in pain, covered in shit and piss and puke and blood. Who the fuck is he/she/it? What the fuck do they want? Why me? God, why me? Why is this happening? What did I ever do to deserve this? Is it because I’m a whore? God, why?

The itchy rash on my shit and piss covered legs drives me even madder than the singing pain in my teeth and jaws.

In the darkness of the cellar, I feel something crawling across my face…tiny sticky feet tickling my cheek. A spider? I scream, fighting the restraints. I fight so hard I snap my wrists.

Jennifer

I hate men. All of them.

I hate this prick sitting across from me, crying his eyes out, drenched in mud water. I don’t know what he did, but I already hate him for it. I’m guessing rape, because he’s a man, and men can’t help but rape; they’re filthy animals (unevolved ape-men) that only think with their little heads. “Progressives” love to hate on the white male, but it’s all of them: red, yellow, black, and white—they’re all fucking rape-machines. And they call us whores? Ha.

But I guess I deserve to be down here with him. After all, according to the Bunny, we (the ape-man and I) are both sinners.

Then again, that Bunny (behind his mask) is probably a man. Only a man could be this cruel. Only men love kidnap and torture and violence. It’s the only thing they read about and watch on TV. And it’s always from their perspective. We watch through their eyes as they commit these violent, disturbing acts—and if we are men, we stroke our dicks. But the women are left out, only to ponder how anyone could be so turned on by such atrocities, and confused about what to do with our hands…maybe catch the rising bile from the backs of our throats?

I haven’t moved an inch from my spot: back against the wall, legs drawn to my chest.

I hear a muffled voice, giggling, screaming, a high-pitched whining (some kinda torture device?), followed by more screaming.

I quiver against the cold stone wall of this prison.

The ape-man starts pounding on the wall near the source of the noise (the next room, maybe?), crying, “STOP IT!” Probably the same thing your victim cried out, but you refused to listen, didn’t you, ape-man? You know what you want and no one is going to tell you to stop. You don’t care that she was a child once, just like you, you don’t care about her feelings, her hopes and dreams, her parents and brothers and sisters who love her…just that wet, squishy spot between her thighs. You don’t understand the importance of consent because you always want it. You don’t understand not wanting it. You want what you want and you’ll take it no matter what. You don’t think about how it’ll hurt her, damage her; destroy her confidence and self-esteem, her fucking life. You don’t think about the years of therapy she’ll go through after; the times she’ll break down crying when she tries to be intimate with another man (they all remind her of you), the apologizing and the excuses she’ll make up trying to make the men stay, not think she’s crazy, not leave her for not putting out at the appropriate time (man-time, which is always now; of course, some of the ape-men will promise to wait for her, but that waiting period will usually be two to three days; by then, they will take what they want or leave), but they only want what you want, don’t they?…her fucking cunt. They don’t care about the pain and hurt and PTSD and triggers, the constant struggle she goes through every day to exist in a callous world ruled by raping and killing machines. And it was foolish of her to think there would ever be a man who cared, who understood, who would be patient and wait as she nurtured her damaged sexuality back to health…the sexuality you took and destroyed with your angry phallus. It never crossed your filthy mind again, but she lives with it every day you fucking pig. You swine. Hope you die.

“STOP IT STOP IT STOP IT!” the ape-man cries.

I want to kill him. Make him shut up.

I’m wondering how I’m going to die and my stomach turns. I need to puke. I want to, but I can’t. The back of my throat keeps going into spasms...but nothing.

I stare down at my hands. At the chipped purple fingernail polish. I don’t know why, but I think about the time I gave a guy a hand job down at PUSSY CATS. The club I was a stripper at before I met the Bunny.

…YESTERDAY

The hot pink neon sign above the strip club floor winked: PUSSY CATS—except the C, A, and T bulbs had burnt out, so the neon simply flashed PUSSY   S. And that’s what they (the ape-men) were here for. The girls danced and the “gentlemen” watched, hooting and hollering. Stupid, simple-minded beasts. One of the girls at the club, think her name was Erica (stripper name: Candy Cane), argued that it was empowering to be a stripper: the women are in control because their sexuality renders the ape-men into slobbering, idiotic fools. It’s a lie some of us girls tell ourselves to feel better about our pasts: rape, assault, torture—all from the hairy hands of ape-men. We want to believe we have power over our abusers, that our broken sexuality can be healed by using it to abuse the ape-men back. But the ape-men will always have the power. It doesn’t matter how stupid or idiotic or unevolved they are, they will always have the fucking power because of that pathetic piece of flesh that hangs between their legs. Society acts like it’s a goddam scepter, instead of a stick and balls. Very fragile—only an unevolved fuckhead would have their reproductive organs hanging outside their body. But it doesn’t matter. These callous violent idiots rule the world and have their hairy ape-fingers on the Mass Assured Destruction button. That’s really our only hope: that someday, these fools will put us all out of our misery.

That night, I was swinging on the pole, wearing a G-string and nothing else (if this was from a ape-man’s POV, I’d be describing my routine in gratuitous detail: how my breasts jiggled, how the fabric of  the G-string nestled into my nooks and crannies; sexualizing the ugliness and grittiness of the shit I had to deal with day in and day out just to make a living, to feed my girls, to support the drug habit I had acquired to manage my PTSD: the result of multiple abusive relationships; how hot!), and there was this ape-man in a suit, slick hair, watching me. He held out a Benjamin. Code for: private show, also known as blow or hand job; if it was five Benjamins, he’d be getting his condom wet.

I strutted toward the edge of the stage and stuck my ass out at him so he could slide the money into my G-string, as if I were some kinda fucking cash register (so empowering!)

I did a dance on the edge of the stage for him.

In the mirrored-walls, I caught a glimpse of myself: on my haunches, touching my skin (tinted by green neon lights), looking sick and dead inside. How could anyone be turned on by this green, sickly woman with no life behind her eyes? Oh, right. The ape-men didn’t care.

The ape-man in the suit smiled; a predatory smile (didn’t matter if you dressed an ape-man up, he was still an ape-man).

Later, behind a red curtain, the ape-man and I sat in a private booth.

I couldn’t even look at him. He scared me. So I just stared at the floor: black with glittering specks. So many specks. What were they?

The ape-man touched my thigh and my body stiffened (but not in the way his body did).

“I once gave a girl such powerful orgasms that she killed herself just to make it stop. She thought her head was going to explode.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“She stabbed herself through the heart with a knife as she came.”

Cocky, lying piece of shit. “Oh,” I said, pretending to be impressed, putting a hand through my blonde hair—ape-men love that shit. “I don’t want an orgasm…that powerful.”

I was shaking, hoping he didn’t notice. It would only heighten his arousal, his predatory instinct.

The ape-man moved his hand farther up my thigh, leering at me.

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I quickly got up and left—hoping he wouldn’t be angry enough to rape or murder me, as the ape-men often do when you deny them.

“Hey, where are you going, bitch? I paid good money for your pooty!”

Outside, the big neon lights hummed: PUSSY CATS.

I hurried across the parking lot in my pumps, some ape-men that were just entering the club hurling cat calls at me: “Hey, bitch, wanna suck my dick?” Clever as ever. But I won’t lie: the cat calls shook me up. My heart was already pounding from the encounter with the ape-man in the suit, but the cat calls triggered further distress and anxiety: flashbacks.

My first boyfriend pinning me down on his bed as some obscene cartoon blared from the TV, his dirty ape-boy fingers squeezing my breasts (no intimacy or gentleness, just rough and angry, full of hate), and me, just lying there, taking it, afraid to speak up, as his pet rats (Tyler Durden and Patrick Bateman; always outside their cages for some damned reason) nibbled at my toes, making me feel even more violated. Later, he blamed me. Told me I should have stopped him. Broke up with me because I made him sin and now he had to ask Jesus for forgiveness. I told him if he loved Jesus so much he could get on his knees and suck his dick.

Scared out of my mind, my kneecaps knocking together, somehow I kept myself moving across the blacktop in those pumps—which were killing my ankles, btw.

The air was humid, wet, felt like rain coming. That’s probably why I had mascara running down my cheeks…then realized I was crying.

Like a fucking baby.

Oh God, suck it up. Suck it up, girl, I told myself.

But no. That’s what the ape-men wanted. They wanted us bitches to just suck it up, get over it. Shut up.

But I wouldn’t.

Fuck them.

Fuck them in their hairy ape-men assholes.

An ape-man started hollering obscenities, then threw his head back with loud obnoxious laughter. I glanced over my shoulder, hoping to God it wasn’t the ape-man in the suit with the slick hair. It wasn’t. Just some asshole with his ape-men buddies.

On the street corner was a phone booth (one of the few left) and I quickly shut myself inside.

I refused to buy a cell phone—too much money, and I needed that money for my girls (and my junk fix—the only thing that could calm my anxiety in this cesspit ape-man world). Of course, now I was probably out of a job. My boss wouldn’t be too happy that I walked out on a client. Maybe I could be a waitress.

I put two quarters in, dialed a number with shaky fingers. The other line rang, but there was no answer.

“Come on, come on, come on, Sis. Pick up. I need a ride.”

I hated the anxiousness in my voice—it made me even more anxious.

KNOCK KNOCK—on the glass of the phone booth.

I nearly screamed into the receiver and jumped out of my pale skin.

I feared it was the ape-man in the suit…but worse: a bunny-man, waving at me behind the glass.

“Fuck off, weirdo!”

The phone booth slid open and I screamed, dropping the receiver. The Bunny stabbed me in the neck with a syringe and pushed down on the plunger: a stinging filled my veins. Goddammit, it hurt.

I had heard about sick fucks injecting people with HIV and felt my heart stopping and then the sound of a river rushing in my head and I—

…NOW

…woke up in a cold torture chamber with an ape-man who is going crazy.

“Let us out of here, you sick fuck,” he’s screaming.

“Shut the fuck up!” I yell back.

He looks at me, starts toward me. I quiver; afraid he’s going to hit me, rape me, kill me.

“This isn’t my fault,” he says (of course, it’s not; that’s what all the ape-men say: “I can’t help it; you’re giving me blue balls; you tempted me; waaa, waaa, waaa!”)

“This is obviously the work of a psychopath,” the ape-man continues. “Trying to get a point of morality across through sick immoral acts. Richard Harris was the same goddam thing.”

“Who the fuck is that?”

“A serial killer—cut prostitute’s eyes out, replaced them with big black buttons. Said he did it because they were sinners.”

I like how the ape-man mansplains it to me like it’s something new or intriguing, but it’s just the same old ape-man bullshit. Shut the fuck up.

“Let me guess,” I say. “He sexually violated the women before he killed them.”

“Yeah,” the ape-man says. “Have you heard of the case?”

No, it’s called not being a fucking idiot. Dickhead.

I say, “No.”

“He blamed the hookers; said they led him into temptation. So he killed them.”

No shit, ape-man. Sing me a tune I haven’t heard.

“There’s no escape,” I whisper. “We’re going to die.”

“No!” The ape-man screams, startled by reality. “We’re getting the fuck out of here! One way or another!”

“What’s your sin?” I ask him.

The ape-man glares at me. “None of your goddam business.”

“Yeah, actually, it is. It’s the reason we’re down here.”

“No, it’s not! We’re both down here because we both did something stupid! We’re stupid! You’re stupid, and I’m stupid!”

“Why are you stupid then?”

“Why are you stupid?” the ape-man shoots back.

I wipe mascara off my face and look down at the floor.

“You’re a whore, that’s obvious,” the ape-man says.

I don’t want to (I want to fire back, tell him he’s a dirty filthy good-for-nothing ape-man), but I start crying.

He doesn’t care and ignores me, like ape-men are wont to do.

Robert

A fucking whore just like fucking Angela.

I should’ve never got involved with that fucking slut. It had to have been her. She’s the only one I’ve ever told. I don’t know why I told her more than I told my own fucking wife. Because she asked, I guess. She wanted to hear the fucked up shit.

Angela’s fucking crazy, obsessed with sex and murder. This is probably her idea of foreplay. She probably wants me all for herself. Probably had my wife murdered. Now I’m stuck in a death chamber with this slut.

This isn’t my fault, goddammit!

I try to pray but I can’t. I don’t even remember the last time I prayed. I stopped caring about god a long time ago.

A steel door on the opposite end of the room slides back—I never even noticed it. Am I blind? Or did it just materialize out of nowhere? Am I losing my fucking mind?

Jennifer starts weeping again and I want to bash her fucking face in.

The Bunny enters the room, giggling. (What else is fucking new?)

“Tick-tock, tick-tock. At dawn, the sinners die,” the Bunny says.

“I need to take a piss,” is what I say.

“Okey dokey, artichokey.” The Bunny steps aside, gesturing outside the chamber. Must be a trick. That thing can’t actually be letting me out. “There’s a bathroom down the hall to your left.”

I move toward the Bunny, shaking, sweating, sick with anxiety…and slowly inch past…it. The Bunny stares at me (wide dead eyes). I squint, trying to peer into the mesh…but see only darkness: no face, no human of either sex. It giggles and I nearly scream my fucking head off…but somehow, hold it in.

Outside the chamber, I move into a long corridor: dark, except for a sick green light that tints the walls from an unknown source. Though judging from the way the green light shimmers (like the reflection of a swimming pool on a low ceiling), it’s from a body of water.

“Don’t run away,” the Bunny calls after me, “or your torture will be ten times worse.” This, of course, sends the Bunny into a fit of mad giggles, which echo off the dripping stone walls.

I shudder; continue down the corridor, splashing through puddles, cursing as the wetness soaks through my socks and shit-water squishes between my toes. My footsteps echo all around me as I step back onto solid concrete. I can’t quite judge how long the corridor is by the echoes, but I assume there are connecting corridors, maybe even mazes of them—like some sort of horrible labyrinth holding Minotaurs…except, we are the Minotaurs.

I spot a rusty steel door (embedded into the stone wall) with the words BAFROOM scrawled on it (in blood?) and slowly reach for the copper handle, which has turned a pale green—probably from exposure to moisture.

Not surprisingly, the door squeals open.

It’s dark in here. Again, the only light is the ghostly green glow that haunts the rest of this labyrinth. I search the ceiling for green bulbs, a window, anything to let in that ethereal light…but find nothing but more and more concrete.

The bafroom itself is a shithole (pun not intended): the tile floor cracked into chunks. Two out of the three porcelain sinks smashed and dripping shit-water and all three with rusted spouts and handles. The soap dispensers full of black grime and…maggots? Jesus Christ. Blood-spotted paper towels and blood-filled syringes litter the floor. I feel like I’ve contracted a disease just by walking in here.

No urinals, only a stall with BATTERY ACID scratched into the peeling grey paint. (When I was young, I always pissed in the stall anyway. I valued my privacy).

The stall door is broken off (so much for privacy), hanging out in a dark corner against one of the smashed sinks. And I’m thinking there must be a way out there must be a way out for god’s sake I’m out of the fucking chamber!

Your torture will be ten times worse. Hehehehehe.

I pull my limp dick from my pants—so hard and throbbing hours, days, months? ago, when I was with Angela. (That fucking whore!)

I look down into the steel mouth of the toilet…

…a severed penis.

Floating there in the brown water.

I suck in a cry of terror and I can’t piss. No matter how hard I try I can’t get my bladder to loosen. It’s full, so full it hurts, but I can’t. I bite my lip, crying, trying not to look at the dick floating in the dirty toilet water like a long white turd.

I claw at the stall, which has drawings of cut-off penises carved into the paint (blood gushing out the aft ends), and slowly start to urinate, but it goes all over the floor, the seat, anywhere but the bowl…

…I bite down harder and my lip bleeds and I piss straight into the steel mouth and I can hear it hitting the murky water, and then the sound muffles, like rain on the roof, and when I open my eyes, I’m pissing on the cut-off dick and it’s bobbing up and down in the shit-water.

Erica

Lying on a bed, my shattered wrists and ankles bound to the bedposts, a dirty handkerchief tied tightly around my head, the filthy cotton violating my mouth…I try uselessly to bite through it. It tastes like gasoline and oil.

I’m crying, twisting in the restraints (which only reignites the screaming pain in my broken bones), my brain spinning, my soul plummeting…into the darkest of voids. I’ve never known such fear. Even when my ex used to tie me up and I didn’t know what he’d do to me, I never felt such fear. Sometimes he’d be gentle…other times he’d burn me with cigarettes, call me a cunt, slap and hit me. He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He made Christian Grey look like a Mormon missionary. You never knew who you were going to be sleeping with that night. Part of it was thrilling, but mostly, it was scary and I was afraid to leave him. Afraid he’d rape and kill me. But for fuck’s sake, he’d already been doing the former for years, hadn’t he? But maybe I deserved it because I didn’t say no. My daddy always said that a boyfriend couldn’t rape you, because a boyfriend had the right to fuck you whenever he wanted. Told me that if you got a man started, you had to finish him. Told me that you couldn’t kiss a boy without him fucking you. That’s why I never kissed a boy until I was 19. But I guess daddy was right. When I kissed Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde fucked me…and I let him, because it was my fault for starting it.

My daddy told me that if I didn’t want it, I was a prude.

Told me to widen my horizons and spread my legs.

I never fought back; there was no point.

People were going to use you, no matter what.

Your body was not yours, only others to hit, slap, and rape.

Might as well accept it.

A montage of abuse spins before my eyes, as if viewed through a zoetrope. So many faces…all with that awful, lustful glean in their vacant eyes. Eyes like windows—which did not offer a glimpse into the soul, but only unfathomable depths of darkness.

And despite all I’ve been through, all the shit I’ve waded through, all the hurt I’ve been subjected to, all the bruises, the limping, the make-up covering cuts and scratches and burns, the hospital visits, the lying to doctors, the cowering in corners as he/she/it screamed and yelled and threw things and treated me like I was inferior, stupid, dumb, unworthy, and all the praying to god to protect me and save me, only to realize that god is also an abuser and does not give a shit…none of that compares to the fear I feel now as I hear footsteps clunking down the hall, and see shadows pooling beneath the door.

I scream into the handkerchief, heart pounding in my eyes, as the rusty doorknob squeals, followed by clicking sounds…and the rabbit enters the room.

The handkerchief muffles my cries: I’m unheard, as always.

“Sex is evil,” the rabbit says. “Probably the foulest act I’ve ever witnessed. Sweaty bodies creating sickly fluids, spewing and spreading their disease. It makes me want to puke. Puke until there’s nothing left.”

Flashbacks: …all the guys I’ve ever fucked, some for less than ten dollars, and how empty I felt some nights, and how I’d cuddle up under the covers and cry into a pillow for hours and sometimes cut my wrists and snort cocaine off the bathroom sink. Once, I jumped off the balcony of my apartment but I only broke my ankle…

…My father fucking me in the ass and how I puked as he violated me and it was tuna and it reeked and I could feel his slimy semen dripping out of my bleeding asshole (blood and semen dripping down the back of my child thighs) and smell his horrible whiskey breath hours after it was over and I did what I do now (minus the cocaine): go in my room and cry and pray for a way out. But god never listened…

…Kids at school could tell I was not like them. I didn’t talk. I never laughed. I had no light in my eyes. I was a whore. My father raped me and I was dirty. I would never be clean for my future husband like the other girls in my class. I was always told how important it was to stay pure, but I had already been damaged…

…So I stopped caring and I’d let guys use me. If I chose to let them use me, at least I still had some control in my life. In middle school, guys would touch me for a dollar. High school, I’d blow a guy for five bucks…

…all the girls gossiped, called me a ho, a skank, a bitch. And I guess I was. But I was goddam proud of it. Part of me thought they were jealous: I was fucking all the cute boys (and ugly ones) and they couldn’t get none. Also, I had more money than them and the work was easy: touch and suck and done (most guys only took about a minute or two). Those stuck-up bitches could have had it all too if their stupid “self-worth” didn’t get in the way…

…Now, men (and some women) pay up to $700 to fuck me. Candy Cane—that’s my name at PUSSY CATS. I am one of their hottest and most requested (the club labeled me “exotic”). I reduce those fucking horndogs to slobbering Neanderthals.

But no matter how much the price tag goes up on my pussy, I feel empty.

In reality, I have no power.

Those school bitches were right: I’m a skanky, dirty ho.

Those men and women (those customers), those boyfriends and girlfriends…they were my father, raping me, over and over, again and again and again. Nothing had changed: I was still that powerless little girl—doomed to relive my father’s abuse, his betrayal of my innocence, the rest of my fucking life.

“You’re a fucking whore,” the rabbit says (as if reading my thoughts) and rips the handkerchief from my mouth.

Crying, sobbing: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s not my fault. Please…don’t fucking do this. Just let me go.” My teeth and jaws, my shattered wrists singing with pain; I let out a raspy cry: “Oh god…please…don’t kill me.”

“You don’t know god,” the rabbit says. It does not giggle.

The rabbit isn’t fucking around anymore. It’s not having fun or finding amusement in the torture. It’s dead serious. Which somehow disturbs me even more.

“Oh please…please…” The swelling in my face is so great I can barely breathe. “Please don’t kill me. Oh god…I’m sorry. My dad raped me. He fucking raped me you fucking bastard!”

“That’s no excuse,” the rabbit says. “Honor thy father.”

The rabbit goes to a counter with a microwave oven sitting on it. He opens a drawer beneath the counter and I can see that it’s full of surgical tools (the reflection in the microwave’s blank mesh face) and I start screaming, my limbs turning to jelly, my heart swelling in the back of my throat. I scream at the top of my lungs: “NOOOO!” Shredding my vocal chords. I start choking, eyes bloodshot and red, dripping tears. “No you sick fuck! Let me go let me go!” The restraints bruise my ankles, and the broken bones in my wrists grind against each other, flowering fresh pain. I holler, snot and tears mingling on my lips, and I know the pain will only get worse but I can’t stop crying. “Please god! Please god help me! I’m so sorry! So sorry!”

“God doesn’t give a shit about niggers, especially nigger whores,” the rabbit says. “You people don’t feel pain anyway. You’re fucking animals.”

The rabbit crawls between my legs with a scalpel and I start twisting and shrieking in the restraints as it rips off my panties (just like my father…and Luke and Neil and Brady and Alex and Robert and John and Samantha and Alice) and presses its cold instrument to my inner lips…I feel a thunderbolt of pain as it slices into my clit…blood gushes onto the mattress, onto the rabbit’s furry white chest and paws and vacant eyes (like so many of my abusers)…and I know I’m going to die and the fear swallows me up and…

…AT ANY MOMENT

There was a girl just like me…

…who removed bloody bandages from her head as he/she/it watched.

Neither said anything.

Her mascara trickled down her cheeks in tendrils, as he sat down on the bed, the springs inside squeaking like feral mice.

A block of lead resided quietly in his throat.

She washed the wound, the sink filling with crimson like chum on a salty sea.

He exhaled a slow breath and she jumped. His eyes looked sad and innocent in the glow of the sliver moon.

But her scalp throbbed…and tiny crumbs of green glass fell from her long hair, tinkling in the porcelain basin. Somewhere downstairs, a shattered beer bottle lay in the trash. She glanced at him. He stared through her, at the picture on the wall. In the picture, he held her from behind: he in a pressed charcoal tux, she in a flowing pink Cinderella gown. Prom 2007.

He exhaled again. She did not jump this time, only quivered. She could smell rotten barley permeated on his tongue. Heat rose in her chest. Her gut twitched. The tap on the sink was silenced. Crickets whispered to each other in the night. Tires squealed in the street, destroying the cricket’s serenity. Loud laughter and screaming soon followed. She jumped again.

He did not move. He did not say anything. She crawled into bed, turned on her side, and watched the moon wane through the window. She expected him to say something, perhaps kiss her on the cheek.

He said nothing.

He sat for a long moment on the edge of the bed and then moved, the springs beneath crying as he turned away from her. He stared at the opposite wall and fell asleep.

…LAST YEAR

The man didn’t move. He stood in the rain like a statue, droplets of rain glittering on his trench coat like diamond beads in the yellow glow of the street lamps. I was afraid of him, but I didn’t know why. It wasn’t the pale moon which cast his shadow long on the sidewalk. It wasn’t the Pall Mall which dangled between thin white lips. It wasn’t the fact that I couldn’t see his eyes beneath the brim of his hat. No, I was afraid of everyone, not just this man. The kind and gentle faces struck fear in me, as well as the ones hidden in shadows. As I passed him on the street corner, I felt my chest tighten. He did not move toward me. He did not look at me. When I locked myself in the safety of my apartment and felt hot tears pour down my cheeks, I realized why I was afraid. Everyone wore the face of my father.

…NOW

Robert

I have a sledgehammer in my hands.

This will probably come as a shock to you, but after pissing on that severed dick floating in shit, I ran in the opposite direction of the Bunny, and made a detour into the twisting corridors (god knows how many there are), deeper and deeper into the labyrinth…where I stumbled upon a square concrete room drenched in blood and gore. It was the most horrific thing I’d ever seen. Like every sick psychopath’s wet fantasy come to life: chainsaws, drills, scalpels, sledgehammers, stun guns, butcher knives, axes, acetylene torches (all hanging along the wall like the tools in my garage that I never use), and in the center of the death room, a wooden chair with leather restraints. I grabbed a sledgehammer and journeyed back into the dank corridors with the alien green glow. At one point, I got lost, and started to hyperventilate. Gagging on the stench of spoiled meat and shit, the back of my throat went into wild spasms. My stomach tried to pump up its contents, but there were none, and I made several dry heaves, and then got back onto my wobbly legs…

…god, I felt weak.

To steady myself, I placed my hand against the wall, where missing patches of wallpaper (smiley faces and flowers) and plaster revealed wooden boards and pink insulation. Here, the corridor resembled more the hallway of a house than the winding stone corridors of a dungeon. But the wall was full of holes, chunks of plaster and wallpaper scattered on the gravelly ground. I loosened one of the holes, ripping it wider, and maggots spilled out. I screamed. Stomped the maggots into paste. Caught my breath. Kept moving.

The wallpaper, plaster, wooden boards, and pink insulation disappeared, giving way to more stone walls, as I stumbled around a corner…

…and saw the Bunny (back turned to me) standing in the doorway of the chamber. Inside, I heard Jennifer’s sobs echoing off the stone walls.

The Bunny screamed: “SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING WHORE!” and moved toward her.

And now, here I stand, sledgehammer in my hands…

…and rush up behind the Bunny on my tip-toes…

…Jennifer’s eyes turn to silver dollars when she spots me, behind her rabbit tormentor…

…the Bunny freezes; must realize she is looking past its long rabbit ears, at something behind—

TOO LATE.

I bring the head of the heavy sledge down on the back of the Bunny’s neck.

CRACK! The sound of snapping vertebrae.

The Bunny drops like a sack of bricks.

The sledgehammer hits the concrete with an empty clang…and shortly after, I follow, collapsing to my knees, crying. Fucking crying.

Jennifer kneels next to me, hugs me, and whispers, “Thank you.”

“Oh my god…oh my god…oh my god,” is all I can say, as blood pools around the Bunny’s head.

“It’s okay. He was a prick,” Jennifer says.

“No,” I say. “I can’t believe…I can’t believe I hurt Cindy. My wife. I can’t believe I betrayed her. Oh god. They’re right. I’m a sinner. I’m a monster. I’m evil.”

“What’s your name?”

“Robert.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here, Robert.”

Jennifer takes my hand and we exit the chamber, entering the maze of corridors—the labyrinth. She has to hold me up, keep me steady, as I lean against her freckled shoulder.

Seconds later, I collapse to the concrete floor and begin to dry heave again.

Alex

Okay, I’m getting really fucking pissed. No way in hell some fucking goddam clown is going to kill me. Also, I’m really hungry…even that soggy Captain Crunch is starting to look good.

Oh, yeah, update: I’ve been in this room for six fucking hours. Haven’t pissed or shit or had a drink or any food in all of that time, or the time before, when that fucking thing drugged me and locked me up here.

Fuck. I really need to shit. So backed up I could drop enough logs to rebuild Lincoln’s cabin. Nigger sympathizing son of a bitch! Wish I could go back in time and be the one to blow his fucking head off. Oh well, thanks John Wilkes Booth—even though you were a faggy actor, least you did something right.

I always hated hearing about that liberal twat Lincoln—yeah, yeah, shut the fuck up, I know he was actually a Republican (before they had balls)—in Introduction to American History. Fucking nigger apologists, I’ll tell you what, that’s all the college education system is: a bunch of goddam beta-male hippies preachin’ love and peace…and feminazis.

Kill ‘em all, that’s what I say. Let Odin sort out the rest.

I got kicked out of college for writing a paper that was too “pro-Aryan,” as my History professor put it. All I said was that the white race was superior and we should sterilize the lesser races, abort their children, and force them into servitude or kill them if they refuse. Apparently, these ideas were not allowed in the prestigious halls of academia, where people are supposedly “open-minded.” Once I shared my truths, their minds were suddenly tighter than a 12-year-old girl’s asshole (well, unless that 12-year-old girl was my sister; I loosened that bitch up when she was nine). Whatever happened to freedom of fucking speech?!

Most people hate the idea that there are lessers. They fear it, because they are the lesser, the weak, the ones not fit for life. Natural selection, bitch. It’s fucking science. There are alphas, and there are betas, and there are omegas (the most worthless, deserving rape and death).

For example, women are the lesser sex—which is why they should have no rights and submit to sex whenever the fuck an alpha male wants it. Rape is a bullshit political term. There is no such thing. A buzzword created by feminazis and beta-males to strike fear into the idiot masses. Bitches were created by Odin for alpha men to fuck, not to be standing around in the campus streets like cattle, chanting “NO MEANS NO,” “YES MEANS YES,” or whatever cutesy phrase they’ve come up with that week while painting their nails, crying into pillows, shopping for shoes, hashtagging “trigger warning” on their Tumblr posts, and pinning knitting patterns on Pinterest. We’ve already given them too much power, because society has become weak and kowtows to the weak, afraid of hurting feelings, of triggering negative “emotions.” Emotions are for pussies and faggots. If you can’t fight back, then fuck you. You toughen up or get fucked, bitch.

It’s a dog eat dog world, and if you’re not the one eating, you’re the one being eaten.

Which reminds me…that Captain Crunch is looking tastier than a dyke’s cunt right now, goddam. I think I’m not supposed to eat it, but I can’t remember the reason why. It’s poisoned, maybe? Oh well.

The red digital read-outs on the clock say 6:00.

Guess they’re going to kill me soon.

Let those faggots try. Bet they’re faggots. That’s why they chained a stud like me up. They get off on it. They’re probably watching me through a peephole, jerkin’ it. Fucking queers.

“Somebody let me out of here! I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass! I’m gonna rape your fuckin’ face!”

Probably shouldn’t have added that last part; might be makin’ them hornier.

Wait, why would the clown have threatened to kill me at dawn if it poisoned my cereal? Doesn’t make sense, does it? Clown would probably want to do it himself with a scalpel, like the one it used on that beta-male Steve Cheese over there. I can tell Steve’s a beta because he allowed his throat to get slit (and he said “hi” to me once, instead of grunting).

Pussy.

I’m not going out that way.

I’m an alpha, goddammit.

I do the fucking around here.

No one fucks Alex Rodriguez.

I wrestle the restraints, pulling my wrists in opposite directions, the thick muscles in my arms rippling, veins bulging (get off on this queers, while you still can—before I fucking rip you apart!)

The twine that binds my wrists snaps. Unfortunately, the chains around my waist and ankles are still tightly in place (the chains around my ankles looped through a tiny steel hoop on the floor).

Chained like a goddam nigger in a slave ship. No Aryan Alpha Male should be treated like a fucking slave. I’m a son of Odin, goddammit!

I stare at the bowl of soggy Captain Crunch.

“Poisoned, I bet ya. Motherfuckers.”

I pick up the rusty spoon, my stomach gurgling from sickness and hunger, the combination making me nauseated. I dip the spoon into the curdling milk, the stench sour in my nostrils, but I don’t give a shit. I raise the spoon to my lips. Take a bite.

I feel my face twist in disgust. But I force it down.

Another bite, another swallow.

Soggy, chunky, sour. I force it down.

Another bite, another swallow. A sharp pain rips into my throat and I choke, gag as something lodges there.

The blood drains from my face.

Black dots dance on my eyeballs.

Goddammit, something sharp and jagged.

I grapple at my throat. Scan the room frantically.

Everything becomes blurry, unfocused. Black spots shower over my retinas.

FOCUS.

The scalpel in the corpse’s hand!

I twist the scalpel from Steve’s dead clutches, cutting my palm in the process. And then I proceed to perform self-surgery: slicing open the bottom of my throat, right below the Adam’s apple. I gnash my teeth so hard I shatter my incisors, tiny bloody pieces of enamel tinkling onto the table and floor.

I pull the scalpel across, deep and fast—but the pain isn’t any worse than the sharp, jagged object clogging my air passage.

I finger my bloody throat-hole—I can feel membranes, like dripping wet meat. And then my finger pads are poked by something sharp, jagged; the offending object: a tiny, rusty circular saw blade.

I toss it onto the table, where it clatters with a metallic clang next to Steve’s frozen, rigor mortis fist. The fist that once gripped the bloody scalpel I now drop to the floor.

I struggle for breath and it rasps in and out of my newly acquired throat-hole, blowing blood bubbles as I exhale. Dinner and a show.

I hold my hands over the wound, futilely trying to stop the bleeding—but my throat has become a pouring crimson fountain. The gushing blood is warm, almost comforting, as my head goes light. My life, dripping down the front of my white (now mostly red) wife-beater—something I’ve worn while beating a few wives (not my own; marriage is for beta-males and cunts).

I feel the world fading…my eyes roll upward…and then I’m falling, face first toward the soggy cereal—

SPLASH!

Black.

In the darkness, I hear the door to the room squeak open.

Latex gloves? grab me, pull me upright in the chair.

I gasp for oxygen, face dripping with spoilt milk and blood.

I don’t try to fight them, it, whatever—the fingers of my numb mind just barely grasping the fine threads of reality. All I see is a shape and a pair of hands.

I let the hands do their work.

They sew my throat-hole up…the needle pinching, stinging, but I’m already in so much pain that I’m barely lucid and don’t give a shit. Pain and terror has become my Novocaine—not as good as the shit in the dentist’s office, but it suffices.

The filament pulls tight, the thread is snipped, and then the sentient hands wrap gauze around the stitched wound.

The Shadow connected to the Hands comes into focus…

…the Clown Mask. Smiling down at me. A red smile which is frozen on the white soulless face.

“Fucker,” I tell it in a raspy, 50-year-smoker’s voice.

The Clown giggles, honks its nose, then very seriously says: “I just saved your life you ungrateful cunt.”

“What do you want?”

“You’re a killer, aren’t you?”

“I only kill niggers, queers, sluts, and trannies…you look like you might be all four. So yes.”

Clown Mask sets a pink Glock .40 on the table, next to the cereal bowl.

“Do you remember this gun?”

I don’t say a fucking thing.

“Well, you should. It almost ended your life.”

I don’t say a fucking thing.

“There are others in this place of death. In this Hell House. I’m not supposed to be doing this. Gramma Wilkins says it’s against the rules. But you see, I hate the others. I like you. Kill them, and you shall be free.”

Clown Mask sets a key next to the gun.

“This key will undo the chains that bind you. This is the key to your salvation. Kill them, Alex. Kill them all: the cop, the whore, and the nigger bitch.”

I snatch the pink Glock.

Raspy, coughing up blood: “Fuck you.”

BAM!
Right in the motherfucker’s clown face.

…BEFORE

I suppose you’re waiting for my backstory.

Well, fuck you.

I don’t waste time dwelling and bitching about the past. I don’t whine about how people hurt my feelings to try and justify why I’m such a big mean monster.

Alex Rodriguez is a fucking mean bad ass and always has been, straight out his mother’s loose flappy cunt, baby.

Alex Rodriguez doesn’t look back, only forward: to the next pussy to fuck, the next drug to swallow, smoke, shoot up, the next victim to beat and kill and rape (sometimes in that order).

Fuck you.

You ain’t gettin’ no backstory about my father slapping and molesting me.

In the end, it doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t justify me or the things I do. I’m a monster and I’m proud of it.

These whiny cunts that tell you their backstories are just masturbating.

Ooo look how damaged I am. Look what I’ve become. See what abuse does to people. Isn’t it sad?

Look at me look at me look at me.

Shut the fuck up.

No one gives a fuck!

Jennifer

We continue, deeper and deeper into the labyrinth (as Robert calls it). He keeps muttering to himself that he’s been here before. I try to ask him questions: What? When? Why? How? But he is non-responsive and just says the same things over and over: “I shouldn’t have cheated on Cindy. I shouldn’t have had sex with Angela. I’m a monster. I’m evil. It’s my fault, all my fault. I’m the reason we’re here. I couldn’t be man enough. It’s my fault she died. Oh Jesus Christ, I’ve been here before. The labyrinth, the labyrinth. We are the Minotaurs. I shouldn’t have cheated on Cindy…” and on and on and on.

I don’t know what to tell this babbling ape-man, so I just say: “It’s going to be okay,” and, “Do you think you can walk by yourself?”

Robert nods, steadying himself against the wall, releasing his death grip on my shoulder.

I departed with the pumps about five minutes ago. Those fuckers were killing me. Better to walk on cold concrete than destroy my ankles.

“I’m sorry,” Robert says.

I shrug, say, “It’s okay,” even though I don’t know what he’s apologizing for. Being an ape-man? Highly doubt it.

“I shouldn’t have called you a whore,” he says.

I don’t trust that an ape-man can ever truly apologize for anything without an agenda (usually sex aka rape; the only “sex” ape-men are capable of), but I smirk and say, “It’s okay. I am a whore.”

Robert just looks at me.

“Let’s keep moving,” I say.

Deeper and deeper into the labyrinth: the maze of winding stone corridors and the eerie green light.

Then:

“Look! Stairs!” I cry out (almost too hopeful; I should know better), pointing.

“Thank fucking god,” Robert says.

He rushes up the steep wooden staircase, and I follow close behind—thankful I took off my pumps. If I tripped on these risers, I’d break my fucking skull open.

At the top of the stairs is a door with a rusty knob (of course)—this place is a lockjaw factory.

Robert struggles to twist the knob, clockwise, counterclockwise, but it won’t budge either direction.

“Figures,” I mutter. “Couldn’t be that easy.”

“Stand back,” Robert says, raises his foot, and gives the door a solid kick. It flies open, smacking the wall on the other side. Guess sick fucks can’t afford door bumpers.

“Impressive, Copper.”

Robert smirks, as if to say: I’m hot shit, I know. (Don’t get too cocky, ape-man. You were sobbing and muttering like a bitch just a second ago.)

If the labyrinth was the basement of this hell hole, I’m assuming this is the ground level: more of the same bullshit. Narrow hallways, maze-like…except the floors are hardwood instead of concrete, and the walls are covered in peeling yellow paper.

The Yellow Wallpaper.

I shudder.

I’m going to end up like that woman in the story, thinking she’s trapped behind it—except I’ll have the sadistic smiley faces and flowers joining me as company.

Fly paper, I think. Trapped in it like a fly on fly paper.

My heart throbs in my throat when I hear…muffled screams? Moaning? Is someone being tortured or fucked? Maybe an ape-man raping a woman?

Coming from somewhere down the hall.

Robert bolts toward the noise.

I follow, somewhat reluctantly. Curious what it is, afraid to find out, but not wanting to be left alone in this maze. I’d rather be with an ape-man than face another one of those Bunnies.

I wonder if there are more of them.

Have to be.

The Bunny couldn’t have been the only torturer in this hell hole.

Could he?

I wish he was, but know it’s a lie.

Where there’s an ape-man (or bunny-man), there’s a colony…eager to murder and rape and stick their dirty fingers in the pie and contaminate and destroy everything.

Robert halts at a fork in the hall…listens for the noise.

Silence.

Then we hear it again.

To the right.

Muffled screams.

To the left.

Muffled screams.

Right.

Right.

Left.

Right.

Left.

Left…

…a long hallway with a door at the end.

That’s where it’s coming from.

The muffled cries.

Robert rushes down the hall, tries the door…it’s locked, of course.

Kicks it in.

I stare into the room over the ape-man’s shoulder.

Erica (Candy Cane).

Oh god.

I grab my belly and keel over onto the floor…afraid to move from the spot.

Erica is naked, chained to the headboard by her neck, her limbs cut to stubs, her mouth sewn shut. Between her legs is a gaping bleeding hole (God, I feel pain down there just looking at it).

A crater of burnt flesh oozes blood and yellow pus next to her right breast; a vacant spot where her other—

Written on the wall:

THEY CUT OUT MY NAUGHTY PARTS!

Her vagina and left breast hang from nails, both dripping crimson patterns down the yellow paper.

Robert expels bile onto the hardwood.

I stay kneeled in the hallway, crying. Muttering: "Oh god oh god oh god oh god oh god…”

Robert gets a hold of himself and moves toward Erica, pauses—unsure what to do. Just stares, then glances around the room—

There’s an acetylene torch in the corner…must be what they used to cauterize her stumps after they cut her arms and legs off—with what, god only know—

Then I see the chainsaw, flesh and gore stuck in the teeth.

I wonder if they used the acetylene torch to cauterize her breast wound and her vag—

“DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY!”

Robert jumps and I scream.

On the night stand is one of those singing fish (splattered with blood) that used to be popular…except its head is missing. As the headless bass wreaths on the plaque, it belts out more of the song, reassuring us to not worry, but be happy. Halfway through: the voice becomes slurred, drawn out, deep (“dooooonnn’t worrrrrry”), until it dies.

Robert catches his breath, moves forward.

A gun lies on the pillow next to Erica’s head, as does a scalpel.

The ape-man uses the scalpel to cut the stitches binding Candy Cane’s mouth…at which point (when her tongue is finally freed), she screams at the top of her lungs: “KILL ME! JUST FUCKING KILL ME!”

Those hopeless cries chill my marrow…but not as much as what happens next.

Robert picks up the gun, shoots her in the head—no hesitation. A trigger-happy ape-man, always eager to kill and destroy. Hairy finger wrapped around the hair trigger.

Chunks of Candy Cane’s brain and skull splatter the pillow beneath her, the headboard.

He puts her down like a rabid animal.

Robert

I can’t believe I just killed her but oh God her screams were so horrible probably the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard. God, she was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot.

I slide the gun (a .38 Smith and Wesson) into the back of my pants, and move into the hall. Jennifer is on her knees, against the yellow wallpaper, shivering, crying—smiley faces and flowers all around her head. I try to hold her but she pulls away, dry heaving.

I want to pick her up off the floor and tell her we have to keep moving, but I myself am afraid to take another step into this mad house.

“Oh God…why did you do that? Oh God,” she tries to say through heavy tears.

Because it was logical, but instead, I say: “She was suffering.”

“You fucker!” More sobbing.

“I know,” I say, and that’s all I say. Nothing else to be said.

Jennifer kneels there for a long moment, shaking. I try to steady myself against the smiley face wall, but my heart won’t stop pounding. I can feel it in my fingertips, my eyes.

“Oh god oh god oh god,” Jennifer is praying?

Hot tears pour down my cheeks and I want to get down on my knees and beg god for mercy too, but it’s too late for me. There’s no going back. I’m in hell. Where I belong.

“Come on, Jenny…” I don’t know why I call her that. “Let’s go.”

I help her up and we move through the twisting halls, turning right, left, left, right, left, right, right…always on edge, afraid that the Bunny will appear again, pop out from behind any corner. There have to be more of them.

We heard screaming in the cell next to us…of course, that could have just been the same Bunny torturing another prisoner, but what about the mutilated bitch we found up here?

There have to be multiple sick fucks in masks.

There was last ti—

We stumble upon the living room (a wide-open space!):

Dusty floorboards, torn up couch (yellow foam spewing out the arms and seats), old TV with UHF dial (playing a popular conservative news channel, where the current topic is “HOW TO TELL IF YOUR MUSLIM NEIGHBOR IS A TERRORIST;” up next, “ARE TRANSSEXUALS TRYING TO RAPE YOUR KIDS IN PUBLIC RESTROOMS?” Muted), a deer head over the fireplace, and an aquarium full of dead fish (bobbing on their backs). The windows have black trash bags taped over them.

I punch the picture window and quickly draw back bloodied knuckles, gnashing my teeth. Behind the trash bags and glass: concrete and steel bars.

“Where the fuck are we?” Jennifer says.

“In hell.” A raspy voice from behind us.

Jennifer and I swivel around, toward the voice—as I do so, my hand is on the grip of the .38 S&W and I draw it, aiming it forward, at—

Alex Rodriguez. Half his wife-beater stained red. Bloodied bandage around his neck. Good for nothing white supremacist (the irony being that he’s a spic; a white spic, but a spic nonetheless), whose specialties include drug running, sex slavery, grand theft auto, murder, torture, and snuff films (the kinda shit you find on the deep web).

He doesn’t have any tear drop tattoos, because if he did, it’d look like he was wearing black face. Instead, he has a demon tat on his bicep (sharp pointy horns, big beady eyes, talons wrapped around the breast of a nubile, scantily clad woman who is clearly not consenting), and beneath the demon, in green letters: HELLBOUND.

On his forehead and right hand: 666, the mark of the beast.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: Alex Rodriguez also has a pink Glock pointed at my face.

“Lower your gun,” I say.

“You first, motherfucker. How do I know you’re not one of them?”

I slowly lower the .38, and say, “I’m a cop.”

Thankfully, Alex lowers the pink Glock. “I’m a crook.” Then: “You come to save the day hot shot?”

“No. I just want to get the fuck out of here.”

“Any ideas, copper?”

“No.”

“I’ve been around this whole goddam place. There’s no fucking way out.”

He chokes, hand going to his bandaged neck. Spits a wad of blood and spit onto the dusty floorboards.

“There has to be a way out.”

“No. Nada. The windows are blocked with fucking cinderblocks and steel bars, the fucking doors are sealed tighter than a 12-year-old girl’s asshole. This place is a fucking prison.” He snorts. “What the fuck did you do to end up here, copper?”

A rat scurries past Alex’s feet and into the maze of hallways. Jennifer screams.

“And what the fuck is that cunt doing here?” Alex glares at Jennifer.

“Don’t call her that.”

“Don’t worry, copper. She ain’t nothin’ to be sweet on. She’s a whore. Aren’t you, Cinnamon?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jennifer screams.

“She’ll let you touch her patooty for a Benjamin.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

I tell him to, “Stop it.”

“What? You one of them fuckin’ feminazis? Fuckin’ beta-male comin’ to rescue the damsel in distress in hopes of gettin’ your balls licked? You want that pussy, just take it, man. No need to ask.”

“Shut the fuck up you fucking ape-man piece of shit!” Jennifer screams.

“Shut your fucking mouth, cunt!” Alex points the pink Glock, and Jennifer gets down on her knees, covering her head with her arms, sobbing. “That’s what I thought, bitch!”

I raise the .38. “Put it the fuck down.”

Alex shrugs, sticks the barrel of the Glock down the front of his pants. “Fine, man. I’m chill. As long as that cunt knows her place and keeps her fucking vag shut, I’m cool.”

I lower the .38, but don’t holster it.

“So, you know who locked us up in this fucking shithole?” Alex asks.

“No. I don’t know who they are. Some guy in a bunny costume. I knocked him out with a sledgehammer. Didn’t bother to remove his mask.”

“Some dude in a clown mask had me. I shot him in the fucking face.”

“A clown?”

“Yeah, man. A fuckin’ clown. Gave that fuckin’ queer a new asshole, right in his fuckin’ face.”

“So, there’s more of them?”

“No fuckin’ shit. I’ve already shot five of the fuckers.”

Jennifer sits on the couch, face buried in her palms, sobbing.

“Would you tell that cunt to shut up?”

I ignore that last part: “Wait, five?” I’m not feeling good.

“Yeah, they’re all fucking faggots playing dress up, man. Wearing clown masks, bunny costumes, bear costumes…one guy was wearing a moose head. It’s like a goddam furries party up in this bitch.”

I stare into the aquarium. One fish is alive, nibbling on a finger lying at the bottom of the tank. Gnawing the pink, stringy flesh from the white bone.

For a brief moment, I see a pale penis instead of a finger.

Alex

These pussies are going to hold me back: a beta-male, feminazi, SJW cop and a slut whore cunt. When they least suspect it, I’m going to pull the Glock and put them both out of their pansy-ass misery.

They haven’t given me any new info. They don’t know how the fuck to get out of here. They serve no use to me.

Fuck ‘em.

The strong always prevail.

It’s already past sunrise, isn’t it? Those faggots told me I’d be dead by sunrise, but here I am.

No one fucks with Alex Rodriguez.

Those faggots thought they could tie me up, choke me, cut my throat…but they were fuckin’ wrong. I prevailed because I am an alpha male, an Aryan son of Odin.

Adrenaline courses through my veins in an awesome wave as I watch the copper shiver as he stares into the aquarium.

The cunt is still crying her eyes out on the couch like a goddam bitch. Weak. Pathetic.

I hate victims.

I could have been a victim, but instead, I fought back.

Why would you want to be a victim when you could be an abuser? Power is better than submission.

Fuckin’ faggots always trying to get sympathy. Cryin’ whiny ass bitches: “I was abused, waaa. People are hurting me, waaa. Violating my boundaries, waaa.” Grow a sack and fight back, you cunts! You will always be abused as long as you let people abuse you. If you don’t become the abuser, you will always be the victim.

Fuckin’ losers.

I’m about to reach for the pink Glock (what kinda faggot has a pink Glock?) when the copper says

Robert

“What’s your sin?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, copper?”

“We’re all here because we’re sinners. So, what’s your sin?” I already know (he has a laundry list), but I want to see if the cocksucker will fess up.

“None of your goddam business.”

Guess not.

“You already pointed mine out,” Jennifer says. “Don’t be a pussy. Tell us.”

“Shut your fuckin’ face, cunt!”

“Make me!” Jennifer screams, and my finger gets itchy on the trigger of the .38.

I watch Alex’s eyes…watch his fingers twitch…they’re ready to reach for the pink Glock…but instead, he turns to me and says: “I used to make snuff films and sell them on the deep web.”

“You sick fucker!” Jennifer screams.

The fingers go for the pink Glock, which is drawn (barrel scraping against denim) and pointed at Jennifer.

“Shut the fuck up, bitch!”

The .38 that I never holstered is already raised, pointed at Alex’s sweaty bald head.

“Drop it,” I say.

“I’m not actually going to shoot her, fuckface. Just tryin’ to scare the piss out of the cunt.”

“I don’t care. You’re a murderer. Give me my gun.”

Alex scoffs. “Not until you confess your sin, copper.”

“None of your goddam business, scumbag.”

“What the fuck did you just call me, you pussy-faggot cocksucker?”

“Give me the goddam gun!”

“No. I fuckin’ confessed. Now it’s your fuckin’ turn, bitch.” Pink Glock still trained on Jennifer. “Confess or I’ll blow that whore apart.”

Alex chokes, gun-free hand going to the bandage on his throat. He spits up another bloody loogie.

“I cheated on my wife,” I say. Long pause, as I consider whether I should go on. “And I…I let my sister die.”

“That’s it? You cheated on your whore wife and let a bitch die? Who fucking cares? You’re a sad, pathetic beta-male bitch.”

My finger nearly flexes on the trigger…but somehow, I control myself.

“DROP THE GODDAM GUN!”

“Fine, whatever, faggot.” Alex releases the grip and lets it clatter to the floor.

“Kick it over to me.”

Alex kicks it over, and I bend down to get it, keeping the .38 trained on him. I pick up the pink Glock and slide the .38 into the back of my pants, Glock now trained forward.

“Okay, now, let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say.

“Who made you fuckin’ leader?”

“I’m the one with the fucking guns,” I remind him.

“I told you, there’s no fucking way out of here.”

“Then what the fuck do you suggest we do?”

“Don’t let that fucking ape-man tell us what to do. He’s a fucking monster!”

“Shut up, cunt!”

“I said: don’t talk to her like that.”

“Why? Do you want to fuck her in the ass or something?”

“I’m not a fucking piece of meat!” Jennifer.

“Could have fooled me. You sure looked like one on that pole, Cinny. You sure looked like one when you were going down on my cock.”

“ENOUGH!” I yell. “Quit it.”

“Why do you give a fuck, copper? You don’t respect these cunts. You had no problem using Angela as a hole to collect your fuckin’ cum in.”

My blood freezes. “What the fuck did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“How the fuck do you know about Angela?”

Jennifer says, “Who’s Angela?”

“Shut up.” Me this time.

“She’s a whore, like you cuntface,” Alex says. Then turns to me: “I’m her fuckin’ pimp. I know all her johns.”

Shit. He knows who I am. Does he remember my face?

“The clown said you’re the reason we’re here.”

“He’s a fucking clown. You can’t believe anything he says.”

Alex’s cold predatory eyes study me. “I know you from somewhere.”

I’m sweating, my finger tightening around the trigger. “Do you?”

“Yeah. Your face is very…familiar.”

…1 YEAR AGO

Alex

Smell of blood and cat litter and I had already spent my load (wet and dripping down my leg) by the time the bitch’s arm was off (beat her stupid bleeding cunt face with it) and her teeth were shattered (thanks to the hammer).

As I grabbed the wire snips (to remove her fingers, toes, and labia), I heard a muffled BANG BANG BANG BANG, and it wasn’t coming from my gun: a Desert Eagle .50AE, which lay on the litter next to the ax. Once I was done mutilating and torturing the bitch, I planned on blowing her apart with the semi-automatic handgun (the most powerful, aside from the S&W Model 500).

The gun from outside the Kill Room sounded more like a Glock—the kind coppers use. 40 cal.

The Film Guy (Steve Cheese) looked up from the viewfinder and said, “What the fuck was that?” His pants unzipped, limp cock hanging out. Already spent his load too.

I didn’t say a goddam thing…just listened, wire snips in my hands. I slowly set them down and reached for the Desert Eagle.

The BANG BANG BANG BANG filled the Kill Room—gunshots fired through the door.

Steve went down like a sack of shit, red bloody holes opening in his torso like hungry mouths.

My fingers wrapped around the grip of the Eagle, just when the copper kicked in the door. I raised the gun…

…and felt a .40 inch fist punch me in the kneecap. The force knocked me down into the cat litter. Blood squirting. Me screaming like a bitch.

The bitch behind me screaming.

The Eagle fired and shot a hole in the wall next to the copper. The copper glanced at the hole, then walked across the clay (crunching beneath his boots) until he stood above me…pointing a pink Glock .40 S&W (of all fucking things) at my fucking head.

“Nice gun, faggot,” I said through gritted teeth. Laughed.

The copper only smirked. “You remember my face, scumbag,” he said. “You ever think about torturing some pretty doll again, I want you to know, I’m coming for you. And next time, I’ll finish the fucking job. I’ll rip off your fucking head and cum down your fucking throat. When you close your eyes at night, I want you to dream about this face. I want you to fear this face.”

“I have rights, you piece of shit.”

My finger tightened around the trigger and I aimed the Eagle—

BANG

Another .40 inch fist punched me, this time in the shoulder, knocking me back with god-like force.

I lay in the litter, staring at the bitch behind me tied to the chair, missing an arm, an eye. Her face looked like a botched abortion and she sobbed, red spittle dripping from her red lips.

“She had rights too,” the copper said. “But not anymore. Thanks to your kill-happy prick.”

“Fuck you, copper.”

He stepped over to where I was lying on my back…and I waited…waited for him to press the barrel of that faggot pink Glock against my forehead and fill the clay with my blood and grey matter.

He reached into his ass pocket, put on a leather glove (while aiming the faggot pink Glock), kneeled next to me, tugged the Eagle from my fingers with the gloved hand…and I waited…waited for him to press the barrel of that manly alpha male Desert Eagle .50AE against my forehead and fill the ground beneath this Kill Room with my blood and grey matter.

Instead, he stood up, pointed the Eagle at the girl (sobbing screaming crying) and blew the bitch’s fucking head off.

The manly-sized shell casing hit the litter floor, smoking, and the copper crunched across the clay in his boots, walking over me, toward the bullet-hole-ridden door…paused…and turned.

“See you in hell,” he said, then left.

…NOW

Robert

“You’re the fucking copper that shot me!”

“Should have remembered my face, asshole.”

My finger twitches across the trigger of the pink Glock and I fire through Alex.

BANG BANG BANG BANG

Alex Rodriguez (alpha male) is nothing but a corpse—with four gaping pussies bleeding from his chest, stomach, and forehead. Should have used a tampon you fucking bitch.

Jennifer cries. “Oh thank god.”

I shoot her in the breast. She flops back on the couch, a dead whore.

The animals enter the living room—filing in from the maze of hallways. Mascots from hell. Rat Head, Moose Head, Bunny Head, Bear Head, a fucking Fish (Bass?) I pull the .38 from the back of my pants (barrel scraping against denim) and aim both pistols forward, emptying the cylinder from the .38 and part of the cartridge from the .40 into the animal-heads of these sick fucks, and into their chests, just for good measure.

They collapse on top of each other in a pile; discarded Chucky Cheese employees.

Then…more of them. Rat Head, Clown, a Bunny, a Dog, a Cat. I empty the cartridge of the .40 and they hit the floorboards.

Then…another fucking Bunny (Jesus fucking Christ!), holding an idling chainsaw.

I point the empty .40 at him. “Stay away from me!”

The Bunny comes closer, chainsaw purring in its paws.

Then more of them, from the halls.

How many of these sick fucks are there?

A Rat Head, a Clown, a Dog, a Moose.

I move the barrel of the pink Glock back and forth, sweeping them.

The Bunny keeps moving closer, closer. Face unchanging; a frozen buck-tooth smile.

“Stay away from me!”

The Bunny halts.

“Shoot me.” That high-pitched voice again.

Sweat drips into my eyes, my heart punching my chest. Weak in the knees.

I don’t dare pull the trigger, for fear the empty clicking sound will set them off on a murdering frenzy…so I just stand there, gun pointed forward…and, oh god. I’m shaking.

The Bunny tilts its head to the side, like a confused cat. Then puts its paw over its mouth and giggles.

I hate that fucking giggle.

“You’re out of ammo, Robert,” it says. “Time to make your contribution to society…” Giggles. “As fertilizer!”

The Bunny squeezes the throttle: the motor farts (brraaap!) and the chain spins.

I drop the guns, put my hands up.

“Please, don’t! I surrender!”

Before I know it, that fucking creepy Clown is grabbing me from behind and holding me in place.

The Bunny thrusts the chainsaw at me and I flinch, squeeze my eyes shut. The spinning chain is so close I can feel it vibrating in my skull, my teeth.

I slowly open my eyes…the nose of the saw inches from the bridge of my nose, my vision split down the middle: on either side, the dead-eyed Bunny, holding the chainsaw, its buck-tooth grin yawning open.

I’m hyperventilating, going light headed, inhaling gas fumes, which burn the lining of my throat, the cilia in my lungs.

“It’s time for you to talk to Gramma Wilkins,” the Bunny says in its cutesy high-pitched voice, and kills the saw.

“Oh fuck.” I puke.

The animals gather around me, grab me by the arms, and pull me toward the kitchen; yellow bile dribbling from my lips, down the front of my shirt.

The Clown grabs Jennifer by the ankles and pulls her bleeding body into the maze of hallways, to god knows where.

Jennifer

When I come to, there’s a pounding red pain in my breast where I had the implant because us girls will do anything for more cash at PUSSY CATS. Sell our bodies, sell our souls—just for a bite to eat, a drop to drink. And because the ape-men like it; like fake body parts and empty pleasures. Simple creatures appeased by simple things. Rape-machines that get revved up at the sight of a fucking nipple resting atop silicone or a hint of shaven lip beneath a G-string.

A Clown…a sideshow circus freak…splattered in blood…dragging me by the ankles like some kinda goddam caveman…through the maze of halls…toward its rape room. Oh God, I’m still on the first floor, my long blonde hair spread out behind me as I’m pulled toward a wooden door…I think it’s the door that leads down into the…

Labyrinth.

I start screaming, my throat sore with it. I remember the time I swallowed so much cum I got strep throat. Worked so hard to feed my girls and my junk habit, then had to pay for a doctor’s visit and antibiotics. Despite my cravings for the junk, I bought the girls boxes of Mac n’ Cheese.

My muscles ached; nose running and skin sweating. Couldn’t stop shitting and vomiting. Couldn’t sleep. My veins begged for the junk, but I chose the girls’ lives over the desires of the flesh…something an ape-man would never do.

The Clown drags me down the stairs.

The muscles in my legs scream (like they did during the withdrawals) from being yanked, and my ankles burn in the grip of the Clown’s latex gloves.

The wooden risers bite and scrape my back as I’m pulled downward, into the bowels of this dark, damp hell hole, and I keep thinking so close so close so close but so close to what?

I was never going to escape.

It was all a lie.

A lie I told myself to make myself feel better, like the lie that Erica (Candy Cane) told us: that we were actually using the ape-men, the ape-men weren’t using us.

Now she was dead; her vagina cut out, her breast lobbed off, her brains fired out of her skull by those damn dirty ape-men.

She had to learn the hard way: you can’t use an Abuser; “use” is their middle name.

Robert. Fucking Robert: just another damn dirty ape-man. Fucker shot me in the breast. As I slide down each riser, the pain radiates deeper into my chest; feels like I’m having a heart attack.

Robert. He did look familiar, but sometimes, you see people, and they look like people you’ve seen before, but you’re just not sure.

I should have recognized him, considering I’ve had his dick in my mouth. But I’ve had so many dicks in my mouth (Empowering!)

The back of my head hits the last riser, causing my incisors to crash together, and I cry, but the Clown (one of the abUSErs) does not care, and that’s the trademark of any abuser: they do not give a shit, about anything.

The Clown drags me through the dank labyrinth, down dark corridors, through black sewage and gravel (which rips my skin apart). I wonder if there’s hepatitis in the water; doesn’t matter. I already have C (from sharing needles; found out after trying to donate plasma to make extra money), and in 20 or 30 years my liver will be as hard as these concrete walls.

I puke, keep puking, then dry heaving. Green bile. I swallow and choke on it. Gagging, coughing; my lungs on fire. My stomach empty and going into spasms, trying to bring up anything, causing my abdomen to cramp (just like the withdrawals).

The Clown drags me into a concrete box…in the center, a wooden chair with leather restraints for the wrists and ankles.

Jesus.

Along the wall (like tools hanging in some ape-man’s garage): chainsaw, axe, sledgehammer, weed wacker, nail gun, drill, Taser.

Oh Jesus Christ.

I shit and piss myself and lose all hope and cry.

The Clown drops my sore, throbbing ankles onto the cold concrete then grabs a handful of my long blonde hair in its rubber glove and yanks me onto my feet.

I scream. It fills the square room. So loud I swear it can be heard on the moon.

If there are any ape-men out there that can hear it (a woman’s scream), you can be sure they quickly ignore it.

The Clown (wearing that awful latex mask: white face, blue eye shadow, red lips, empty black eyes) pushes me into the chair and restrains my ankles and wrists. He/she/it (most likely an ape-man, due to its taste for extreme violence) pulls the restraints tight as he can, so that they bite into my skin.

I bite my tongue, drawing blood, and spit into his eyes.

The Clown flinches (a little).

“Better get tested in three months,” I tell him. “I got Hep C, you fucking ape-man piece of shit!”

The Clown seems unfazed and starts to whistle “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” as he ganders at the torture instruments lined up along the cinderblock wall.

I just want it to be quick…but I know it won’t be.

I wish I’d die of a heart attack. Right now.

Die of fear.

Is that possible?

I see the Clown select a…what the fuck is that?

And as my mind puts the pieces together, I think, yes, it most definitely is possible to die of fear.

The Clown is holding a steel strap-on with a pointy knife head. (Think I saw this in a Brad Pitt movie once.)

My skin tries to crawl off my bones as I shriek.

The Clown sets the steel dildo on the floor with a hollow clang, then reaches above my head and tugs a string, which switches on a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. After this, the Clown saunters over to the rusty door and slams it closed (because it wants privacy?) The sound is like trains clashing together; it reverberates off the walls and in my skull—a hive of vibrating, buzzing bees.

Then, the rusted bolt slides home.

Thwock!

Trapped. In this room…with that thing.

This fucking ape-man piece of sh—

The Clown’s big latex fingers begin to undo the pom-pom buttons on his baggy, multi-colored (red, yellow, blue, and green) one-piece suit. He rips away the ruffled collar, revealing the neck of the latex mask. Tears the suit open…

What the fuck?

The Clown’s one-piece slides down his slender shoulders, revealing breasts and a patchy vulva.

Fuck me.

It’s a she-ape.

Fucking cunt.

At first, I think it’s in my head…then I realize the words are bouncing off the cinderblock walls: “FUCKING CUNT!”

The She-Ape removes her big clown shoes, then attaches the strap-on to her waist and strokes the steel shaft, purposefully slicing her hand on the blade-head and laughing behind her latex mask.

I scream, my throat scratchy and raw, and try to say, “Leave me the fuck alone, you she-ape cunt!” but the words won’t come out.

The She-Ape plants her bare feet on the wooden chair, on either side of my outer thighs, her ass sticking out into the room as she lowers the steel cock toward my mouth. I clamp my lips shut (the way I did when my brothers tried to push it in; but they pinched my nose, and when I gasped for breath—). The She-Ape cuts my lips with the blade and when I cry out, slides the cold steel into my mouth and throat.

The She-Ape humps. Hard.

I see a piercing white ligh—

Robert

The linoleum in the kitchen is yellow and peeling. Smiley faces stare at me from pink wallpaper, which is also peeling.

The Bunny forces me into a chair at the kitchen table. Sitting across from me is Gramma Wilkins, who looks older than time itself. Her face is a sea of wrinkles that bunch together whenever a facial expression presents itself; looks like a fucking bulldog. Her eyes were blue once, but now they’re milky white (cataracts?) Liver spots dance across her boney arms like freckles on a ginger kid.

She stares at me with those glassy eyes—which appear to be hanging for dear life to her skull’s hollow sockets. Next to her is a small globe; not colorful like the ones you see in a kid’s classroom, but tan and brown. Tan waters and brown lands. Ugly fucking thing.

She spins it with her boney fingers and the seven shit-colored continents blur against the tan seas.

“The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken…there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened. People will die of fright in anticipation of what is coming upon the world. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory…when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.”

“I thought you’d be dead by now,” is my reply.

“Do you believe in the Lord Jesus?” Gramma Wilkins says, ignoring me.

“I don’t believe in anything.”

Gramma Wilkins takes a sip of tea with a shaky hand.

“I highly doubt that,” she says, setting the china back down; it rattles against the saucer. “Everyone believes in something. For instance, don’t you agree that there are those who need to be punished in order to be put upon a straight and narrow path? Children, for example, are spanked, put in pain…why can’t the same be done to adult sinners?”

“Sinners contribute to society.”

“And what is it that you contribute to this…society?”

“I'm a cop. I keep this cesspit society clean.”

Gramma Wilkins laughs (weakly). Coughs up phlegm into a wrinkled palm. Then sips more tea.

“Oh, Robert, but you yourself contribute to this…cesspit. You’re weak and stupid.”

Silence.

“Have you learned any lessons, Robert?”

“I guess. If I had known you were going to torture me, I would have never cheated on my wife.”

“Well, good,” Gramma Wilkins says, then bites into a piece of toast with her big blocky dentures. “You learned something.”

“Can I go now?”

“That’s what the Hell House is for. Learning lessons. Discipline. You’re tortured for your sin, and you become good.”

“Or you die,” I say.

The Bunny, behind the kitchen counter, digging through a drawer (I don’t like the sound of that clanging): “Many die, many die.”

Gramma Wilkins takes another bite of toast…her dentures fall out. A pair of teeth, slathered in saliva, sitting on the table with a piece of burnt bread squeezed between the incisors. Wilkin’s empty maw simply laughs, tongue flapping between bleeding gums.

“Some die,” she says. “Some have to die.”

“So have I learned my lesson?”

“Do you know the difference between right and wrong?”

“I don’t know. Those are very abstract ideas.”

“Do you even believe in right and wrong?”

“Killing is wrong, sex is wrong, drugging is wrong. Do I win?”

Gramma Wilkins giggles, shaking her head, and then picks up her dentures and drops them in her cup of tea.

Splash.

“It’s a shame so many had to die for you, Robert. So many had to be put on display. Yet, you still fail to learn your lesson.”

“What was it I was supposed to learn exactly?”

“You’re in hell with these sinners because you’re no better than them. Whores, killers, blasphemers, thieves, liars, and spics.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a controlling bitch.”

“I’m not controlling anything, Robert,” she says, a tinge of anger in her voice (good!) “I’m trying to send a message.”

“You should be happy with what I’ve done with my life. I’m taking control and being a man. I’m the violent, ignorant sociopath you always wanted me to be.”

“I’m not angry about the killing, Robert. God tells us to kill. But you’re being a whore. Letting those harlots tempt you and take you away from your wife.”

“Have you been spying on me? Did you seriously have me kidnapped and locked up in your fucking torture chamber to teach me a lesson? This is insane! I’m not a child anymore, Gramma. I’m a grown ass man!”

“You can’t kill sinners if you are a sinner, Robert. It’s…hypocritical. I had to cleanse you.”

“Fuck you. I don’t need your fucking help.”

Gramma sighs. “I thought I equipped you with a harder form of communication, Robert…but you still act like a goddam cunt.” She touches the globe with her long jagged nails. “The world is shit and if you can’t take shit, you will die out there. If you can’t even resist the urge of the flesh, I don’t know how you’ll fight the Devil when the end times come. You need to grow a pair…or do you still think you’re a girl, Robert?”

“Shut the fuck up. I’m not a girl. I’m a man. A tough, grizzled fucking man, you dumb bitch. That’s what you wanted and that’s who I am so just shut the fuck up.”

“Are you sure you’re not playing dress-up in your wife’s panties? Her bra? Why do you have a pink gun?”

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

“Are you having sex with all these women to prove something, Robert? That’s no way to prove your manhood. That’s the way of the weak man. Weak men like my husband, who allowed harlots to rule his Phallus. One of those harlots was your sister.”

“Shut the fuck up you fucking old crazy bitch!”

The Dog and Rat put their hands on my shoulders, assuring that I stay seated and don’t try anything funny. The Bunny still stands behind the counter, staring at me from across the room, from behind Gramma.

“Now, now,” she says. “Language, Robert.”

“Delilah never did anything wrong. Your fucking piece of shit husband raped her.” I’m on the verge of tears. I can barely talk. My throat swells.

“No one is innocent,” Gramma says. “What is it I used to say to you?”

Tears burn in my eyes and I whimper: “Even the righteous deserve to die. We are all sinners, and the wages of sin is death.”

“Yes, and that’s why Grampa and Delilah had to die.”

Gramma finishes her tea, tipping the china until her dentures slide back into her gummy maw. Then she sets the cup on the saucer with a trembling hand (rattle rattle rattle) and smiles.

“…put sharp objects in their belly…make them suffer and scream and cry out with pain…fuck up their naughty parts…ruin them and make them plead until they lose all hope…and then laugh and giggle and make some tea…”

I stare at her.

“Do you love anyone?”

“No,” I say. “You took away the only person I ever loved.”

“What about your wife? Do you love her?”

“…I don’t know.”

Gramma Wilkins opens her leather-bound Bible on the table, flips the pages until she reaches a part marked with a strand of blonde hair, and begins to read a highlighted passage:

“And if thy penis offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter life maimed, than having a penis to go into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched.”

“You sick fuck!”

I try to stand up, but the Dog and Rat hold me down as the Bunny hops over with a butcher knife, giggling its whiskers off. Moose Head kneels next to me, undoes my belt, and pulls down my pants and boxers. The Bunny lowers itself to my dick, tickling my shriveled up manhood with its fuzzy face. It drives me absolutely bonkers and I shit myself. Liquid shit (fear, anxiety) filling the seat, dripping onto the floorboards.

The Bunny waves a paw in front of its face, as if to say, “Pee yew!”

I thrash in the chair, screaming, but the Dog and Rat are strong, holding my arms tightly behind my back.

“Didn’t expect such a tough, grizzled man to be so tiny,” the Bunny says.

“Get off me you fucks! Get off me!”

“Maybe he’s not a man at all,” the Rat says in a deep voice. No cutesy-ness.

“I am a man,” I scream. “Please, I am. I don’t want to be a bitch. I swear I want to be a man.”

“Your penis looks like a giant clit,” the Bunny giggles. “Sure you haven’t been taking hormones, Nancy boy.”

“Please, please, gramma, stop it, make them stop. I’m a man, and I want to be a man, I swear. I won’t let the whores tempt me anymore, I promise, gramma. Please, please, please, just let me go. I’ve learned my lesson. Please, please, please, gramma. Please.” Hot tears pouring down my face.

“For a man, you sure cry like a bitch,” she says. Then, to the Bunny: “Chop it off.”

“NO!”

The Bunny strokes the head with its big paw, tickling my balls with its whiskers, and I feel myself stiffen, get hard, dripping from the Cyclops’ eye.

“Oh my, Gramma Wilkins, look at this. We have a grower. Looks like a man after all.”

“I don’t care. Chop it off.”

“Damn shame,” the Bunny says, and raises the knife.

I wince, wait for the—

I feel a blow; hear the butcher knife slam into the wooden seat beneath me. Hot pain blossoms in my lower abdomen, in my balls, as the shaft snaps, breaks. Then, a warm gush of blood and my head goes light and I start heaving, but there’s nothing left in my guts.

I hear blood splatter onto the floor, dripping from the wooden seat. Pitter pattering like rain. I can’t feel my fucking face, my fingers, my toes: numb. The only thing I feel is molten lead burning between my legs.

The Bunny holds the penis up like a trophy. The Dog claps its big goofy hands. The Moose dances. And Gramma Wilkins cackles like the ol’ crone she is.

“Maybe you’ll learn your lesson now you naughty lil’ boy,” she screams.

And then these fucking freaks in animal masks (fucking furries) drag my bloody, shitty ass across the hardwood, through the maze of hallways, down the stairs, and into the dank labyrinth, where they continue to drag my bloody, shitty ass across wet concrete and gravel…until we reach one of the torture rooms.

The Bunny hoists me up onto my feet; my legs wobbly, groin bleeding. Shaking like a goddam leaf. Crying.

Gramma Wilkins points into the room and I see Jennifer, tethered to a chair, a steel cylinder shoved into her mouth, a blade sticking out the back of her head. (Is that a fucking dildo?) Next to her, a naked woman wearing a latex clown mask.

“It’s pathetic how many people had to die to get a point across to you, including your own sister,” Gramma Wilkins says.

“Did you like the stripper?” The Bunny giggles. “Did you want to fuck her?”

Crying. “No, no, no, no.”

“Liar. We know she had you in her mouth,” the Dog.

“A righteous man hates lying; but a wicked man is loathsome, and comes to shame,” Gramma Wilkins mutters. Then: “It’s always been about you, Robert. You should be happy. You’re in the spotlight now. It’s all about you, bitch.”

I don’t say anything.

“Everyone’s cocky until they’re being mutilated,” Gramma Wilkins says.

The naked woman wearing the clown mask yanks the dildo knife out of Jennifer’s mouth, producing a spray of blood that sprinkles the concrete and cinderblocks. Then she drags Jennifer’s body from the room, past our feet, and down the hall.

The furries push me farther into the bowels of the labyrinth, to another torture room. Gramma Wilkins knocks on the rusty door, and seconds later, I hear the bolt slide back, and the heavy door creaking open on squealing hinges.

Another concrete box, like the last room. Blood on the floor. A wall lined with torture tools. In the center, a wooden chair with leather tethers, a single lightbulb hanging overhead, and…

Angela.

Next to Angela stands another naked woman, but this one is wearing a Devil’s mask: cartoony red face, goatee, horns (real, moving eyes).

I cry. “No, no.”

Angela stares at me: eyes wide, full of tears (confusion, fear).

“You need to make a choice, Robert,” Gramma Wilkins says. “Either you go free, and Angela dies. Or you set Angela free, and you stay here with me, in Hell House, forever.”

I swallow rising bile. Choke.

My tongue is a dried sponge; tastes like the back of a toilet seat.

“…kill her.” My voice a crackle, but an echo in the chamber.

Angela tries to scream, but she’s gagged: red ball in her mouth (like a clown nose), dripping with saliva.

The Bunny giggles. “Now watch this. This is going to be fun.”

“I don’t want to watch.”

“Why? Because you can’t jerk-off?” Giggles.

“You must witness the consequences of your choices, Robert,” Gramma Wilkins says.

The She-Devil inspects the torture instruments: ax, nail gun, hammer, chainsaw, knives…

Reaches for a weed wacker. Primes the pump, then tugs the starter cord until the trimmer head spins.

Angela thrashes in the restraints and I try to look away, but the Bunny holds my head as the She-Devil thrusts the wacker into Angela’s face. The trimmer slashes her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, and slices an eyeball, which instantly fills with blood and drips viscous fluid down her face.

I could close my eyes, but I can’t. I have to see what they do to her. I have to watch and pay for my sins.

My knees give out (jelly)…and I collapse to the concrete, the freaky furries no longer able to hold me.

“Oh god no no no no.”

“Oh God yes yes yes yes!” Gramma Wilkins cheers.

The She-Devil kills the wacker, goes back to the wall of torture instruments, sets the wacker down on the worktable, and opens a drawer, digging for something.

I’m terrified to know what.

Finally, the She-Devil produces two double A batteries and a deflated balloon.

I am so confused and scared.

The She-Devil rips the gag out of Angela’s maw and Angela screams; saliva and vomit dripping from her chin, onto her chest.

The She-Devil pushes the batteries and the balloon down Angela’s throat until they become lodged there and she starts choking.

And we watch.

We fucking watch her choke to death.

“Stop it stop it stop it!”

Gramma Wilkins smiles. “Too late now.”

Angela’s face turns blue…her body goes limp.

“Oh god no,” I cry.

The Bunny grabs me under the arms, forces me to my wobbly legs.

“Quit being such a pussy.”

“Now, now, Bunny. No reason to be vulgar,” Gramma Wilkins scolds. To me: “Come along, sweetheart. It’s over now. We’ll show you the exit.” Then pauses. “Before you go, we better patch you up.”

They lead me to a dirty white medical room (like a doctor’s office) with black and white tiles on the floor and a crooked kitty poster on the wall (hang in there). Next to the examination table is the naked She-Clown and she’s wearing latex gloves and holding…an acetylene torch.

I try to run, but realize it’s useless. My legs are too weak…I’m too weak…too much blood loss.

The Bunny, Dog, and Rat force me down onto the table as the She-Clown positions the torch between my legs, holding the stub of what used to be my dick between her latex fingers.

The single fluorescent bulb in this room is dim and flickers, making me nauseated and dizzy…or maybe that’s the blood loss.

“We must cauterize the wound or you’ll bleed out,” Gramma Wilkins says.

I hear the torch burst to life (fwooosh!) The stench of the acetylene burns the lining of my nasal passages.

I wince, waiting, waiting…

Molten lava pours into my balls and belly.

I clench my teeth until the enamel cracks and blood fills my mouth.

I hear screams echoing through the corridors. Someone in great pain.

I realize that someone is me.

“You’ll need a blood transfusion,” Gramma Wilkins says, burying a needle gauge into my arm. “We drained Jennifer, Cinnamon, whatever that harlot’s name was. Thought you’d need her blood to survive.”

The blood circles through the plastic tubes, entering my veins from an IV bag.

“Hope you enjoy Hep C,” the She-Clown says in a deep gravelly voice…and laughs, honking its nose.

I don’t know if this last part actually happens…the world is a blur and I’m fading in and out, my brain unable to comprehend the terror and pain constantly inflicted upon me by this shithole world.

Hours, days, months, years later…Gramma Wilkins and the Bunny lead me through the maze of underground corridors…until we reach a garage. The only vehicle inside is an old beat-up pick-up.

The Bunny pushes a button on the wall and the garage door reels back, opening, letting in sunshine.

I swear I haven’t seen the sun…forever.

A wheat field stretches out before me. A gravel road leads away from the house.

“Get out of here, you filthy sinner,” Gramma Wilkins says from behind me.

I stumble into the sunlight, along the gravel path, staring across the golden fields…then slowly turn back to Gramma Wilkins.

She and the Bunny stand in the darkness of the garage, next to each other, like circus freaks. The Oldest Woman in the World and her Man-Sized Pet Rabbit.

“I love you, Robert. I want what’s best for you. I know what’s best for you. That’s why you had to be punished. For folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him. Do you remember that? That’s Proverbs. You should read the Scriptures more often, Robert; it’ll protect you against the harlots. For all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, Second Timothy 3:16. Jesus loves you, Robert. And so do I.”

I turn away from her, stare out at the golden fields…feel the wind through my hair, against my sweat and blood and shit. I realize my boxers are back on, covering my shame…I don’t remember when that happened.

My legs are caked in blood.

I swallow.

Pain still throbs in my groin, piercing and hot.

And I say, “Thanks, Gramma,” and start limping down the gravel road.

Behind me, I can hear the garage door slowly closing on its track.

I don’t look back.

…30 YEARS AGO (1979)

When I was twelve, I didn’t have too many friends because my Gramma rarely allowed us to leave the house, unless it was to go to church school, prayer meeting, or it was Sabbath. “We” were strict Last Day Adventists and considered Saturday to be the day god rested from creating the world and thus god’s holy day, much like the Jews, except “we” loved Jesus and were saved by his blood (unlike the kikes). Gramma hated lots of people: Catholics (“Babylon! Apostate! Antichrist!” she would declare), blacks, Muslims, Sunday Worhsippers (a.k.a. pretty much all Protestants), women, children, liberals, gays and dykes and trannies, but especially me and my sister.

I remember when some of the guys at church school (a brick box in the middle of nowhere; attendance: 20 students, grades 1 - 8) found a porno mag lying in the grass during recess. They were taking it all in: tits, pussy, ass. Young-boy eyes feasting upon lady-parts they had never seen before.

None of those guys liked me either. They all thought I was a faggot because I didn’t like playing sports and couldn’t catch a ball to save my balls.

I usually hung out with the girls and got a lot of shit for it.

“You hang out with those girls and you’ll grow a big fat vag,” one of them told me (I think his name was Brady).

I couldn’t identify with them (the guys). They were mean and angry and aggressive. They’d beat me up for not being as angry and mean and aggressive as they were: throw sand in my face, spit on me, kick me, hit me, squeeze my testicles…one time, one of them (don’t remember which one) tea-bagged me. When we played floor hockey during PE, it was always boys vs. girls, but the guys told me I had to play on the girl’s team because I didn’t have a wiener. The teacher agreed and made me goalie, so the guys could use my face as target practice. I often had welts on my lips, cheeks, and forehead; my shins, thighs, and arms. The teacher wouldn’t allow me to wear padding. He hated me just as much as the guys; he was one of the guys. Told me I was too quiet and if I didn’t want to get beat up, I should be more assertive.

When I told Gramma about being bullied at school, she said, “Boys and girls are neurologically different, Robbie. Girls are empathetic cunts and boys are aggressive and ambitious. You’re a boy, so toughen up. Quit being a cunt and fight back.”

“But I don’t want to be mean, Gramma.”

“Too bad. The world is mean.”

“If boys are mean, how come I’m not mean?”

“Boys aren’t mean, numb nuts. They just have a hard communication style. They believe in discipline instead of coddling. Girls are too nice. They encourage weakness.”

“But I want to be nice, Gramma. Does that mean I’m a girl?”

She slapped me hard in the face. “You have a widdler, don’t you? You’re a man. Now quit bitching and start acting like one!”

The day Brady found the porno mag, I did what Gramma told me: I became one of the guys.

***

The guys were sitting near a tree, gathered around a moist mag that had been lying in the dewy grass (at least, I hope that’s why it was moist), out of sight from the teachers (there were three teachers: two grumpy bitches and a fat, mustached dickhead—my teacher). When I walked by (to go talk to Ashley and Madison about whatever), Brady called to me: “Hey faggot, get over here.”

Even though they treated me like shit, I was too nice to not hang out with them sometimes and be their punching bag. The abuse was ignored by the mustached fuckhead by relabeling “verbal abuse” as “they’re just busting your chops” and “physical abuse” as “rough housing.”

Boys will be boys.

But I obviously wasn’t one of the boys; I was their bitch. (Neil was the second bitch on the totem pole. The guys would rag on him—hit him in the balls, call him queer and faggot—and since I was bottom bitch, Neil would take his anger and humiliation and rage out on me.)

“You ever see one of these, faggot?” Brady held up the mag, and I felt myself stiffening when the image hit my eyes. A woman with her legs spread, touching her gaping labia.

“Wow, I think the faggot actually likes it?” one of the other numbskulls said.

On the next page, a woman bent over, revealing her ass and labia from behind.

I felt flush. I had never seen anything like it.

Naked women…right there. In front of me.

“That’s one hot bitch,” I said, trying to sound tough, cool, whatever the fuck.

The guys all laughed.

“Right on, Robbie. You do have a willie after all.”

I had never bonded with these boys before, but all the sudden, as we looked through the porno mag and scoped tits and ass and pussy, I was one of them.

It felt…good, in a way. To be accepted by these Neanderthals. But also, empty. I didn’t actually believe anything I was saying, and regretted saying it. Things like:

“I’d love to shove it up her ass.”

“Wish I could make that whore take it in the mouth.”

“I want to violate that cunt’s cunt.”

I was always shy (another weakness, according to Gramma), so the boys couldn’t stop laughing when they heard me (quiet Robbie) saying such vulgar things.

“You know what, Robbie? You’re alright,” Brady said.

They asked me why I hung out with girls so much if I was such a cool guy.

“I want to get some, duh. Why else would I hang out with bitches?”

“But the bitches here are fucking ugly,” Brady said. “All ones and twos.”

I stammered, froze. Didn’t know what to say. My face burned. Oh God. I was turning red like the bashful weak fuck I really was.

I couldn’t admit that I actually liked hanging out with the girls because they talked about stuff instead of kicking around balls and beating the shit out of each other like goddam animals.

That was weakness. That meant I was a cunt…I mean, a girl.

And girls were empathetic and nice, which was bad. I couldn’t be any of those things if I wanted to survive in this shithole world as a boy.

So I said: “Pussy is pussy. It’s all the same in the dark.”

Brady laughed.

I continued to hang out with the girls, under the guise that all I cared about was their pussy. And some of the other guys started hanging out with the girls too. And we acted different around the girls. We put on our nicest smiles and cleaned up our language and were real sweet on them.

But when it was just the boys, we’d trash talk them. Talk about how they were nothin’ but pussy, how they were fuckin’ bitches (nothing too original; that would require more than two brain cells to rub together). Brady bitched that he tried to kiss Abigail, but she refused to put out.

Brady called her a “retarded bitch” (I assume because she had dyslexia) and a “fuckin’ whore!”

“How can she be a whore if she doesn’t put out?” I asked.

“Oh, she puts out. Just not for me. She puts out for her daddy. And for her daddy’s friends. I bet she takes two dicks in her pussy at the same time.” He put two fingers through a cupped hand and laughed.

I laughed too (but inside, I felt sick).

Boys will be boys.

***

Brady hid the porno mag in his locker, and we agreed that’d we’d all share it. Each day, one of us would take it home. Brady got it for three days in a row because he was the one who found it. Second-bitch-on-the-totem-pole Neil didn’t think that was fair, but Brady threatened to make him first bitch if he didn’t shut his fucking mouth (not precisely in those words).

I took the porno mag home on a Tuesday, hidden between the pages of my Bible textbook (the guys thought it was a hoot). And that night, after supper and devotions, I holed up in my claustrophobic box-of-a-bedroom and cracked the text open. I could already feel myself getting hard. My nerves tingling with ecstasy.

The porno mag.

Such a thing of beauty for a 12-year-old boy. Not only the stepping stone to his manhood and the acceptance of his male peers, but…naked ladies!

I flipped through the pages, salivating over the still-images of big breasted blondes in their birthday suits bent in various poses.

My face flushed as my eyes caressed the heaving breasts, shaven vulvas, and big shapely asses.

I found my favorite spread: a tight shot of a girl’s vulva (from below), her fingers between the lips. B.g.: her long blonde hair thrown back in ecstatic pleasure, her other hand squeezing a breast. The nipple hard and erect.

I humped the bed as I stared at the image and burnt it into my retinas for later consumption.

The bed springs squeaked and I tried to slow my pace, fearing my Gramma would hea—

Footsteps. In the hall.

I quickly hid the porno mag under the sheets and sat up with my Bible text.

Gramma Wilkins entered the bedroom, glowering at me.

You been lookin’ at the girls, Robbie?

Panic.

No.

Those girls are demons. Harlots and whores. Jesus said to even think about one of them whores in a lustful manner is as bad as adultery. You don’t want to be a sinner, do you, Robbie? I know you’re at that age now, that age when them girls are going to start lookin’ pretty, but you better keep out of their snatch ’less you want your widdler to rot off. Those whores and harlots have sex diseases, Robbie. They may be pretty on the outside, but inside, they're pure nastiness. The book of Revelation says the whore rode the Beast. You don't want to be the Beast, do you, Robbie? There’s a special place in hell for the Beast and the False Prophet. Ordinary sinners will just burn up and die, but the anguish and suffering of the Beast and False Prophet shall go up forever and ever. You do not want to be a Beast, Robbie. One of them ornery Beasts that fucks harlots in the backseat of their sports car and ends up with a soulless fornication child. Right now, you have a soul, Robbie, but you can lose it. Those harlots are incubi and they’ll suck your soul right out through your widdler. They’ll infect you with their diseases. They might even try to convince you to take them to one of them baby-killing factories if your silly willy breaks the condom.

I won't do any of that dirty-nasty stuff, Gramma. I promise, I promise. I want to be pure for the Lord.

Now Robbie, don’t lie to me. Lying is a sin, and liars burn slower and hotter, along with adulterers and gossipers. Thou shall not bear false witness, number nine.

Gramma tossed a pair of stiff boxers on the bed.

I found a pair of your shorts in the laundry bin, Robbie, and there’s a peculiar stain on them. You mind explainin’ that stain to your dear ol’ Gramma? What would your mama think? Your sweet ol’ mama who ripped her insides apart to bring you into this cesspit world, who withstood the degradation of sexual intercourse to bring forth your existence? Thank Christ she's dead.

I don't know where that stain came from, Gramma. I don't know.

You goddam well know where that stain came from, you little shit! You’ve been touching your widdler! You’ve been defiling the Holy Temple of God with impure thoughts and actions! Is this the way you repay the woman who raised you and fed you and clothed you…by degrading yourself? Your poor dead mother must be rolling in her grave. Is this why she died, Robbie? Is this why your father killed her by not being man enough? So you could act like a goddam animal? We might as well have evolved from monkeys like those nasty-evil scientists say if impure imps like you wallow in sick fantasies and spray your seed all over the place! That seed is meant only for the womb of a woman to whom you are married.

Gramma shoved the boxers in my face, grinding my lips against the stiffened, crusty fabric.

See this stain? SEE IT!?

Crying.

Yes, Gramma. Yes, Gramma. Please, Gramma. Stop, Gramma.

This stain is a waste of potential life! Life wasted on the inside of your shorts, just because you were too horny to keep your filthy hands off your widdler! What were you thinking about when you were touching yourself? Were you thinking about your sweet dead mama? Surely not, or else you would have kept your hands to yourself. So what were you thinking about? One of them harlots! One of them Whores of Babylon! You know that all who enter Babylon are lost, don’t you, Robbie? Don’t you?

Yes, Gramma. Yes, Gramma.

Do you want to be lost, Robbie?

No, Gramma. No, Gramma.

If I see any more stains on your shorts, if I see any stains on your bed, on the carpet, if I hear you’ve been seeing one of them harlots, touching their skin or their insides, I will cut that widdler of yours right off! You understand, Robbie? You understand?

Yes, Gramma. Yes, Gramma.

Then she left, slamming the door.

…34 YEARS AGO (1975)

It was the summer Jaws came out and everyone who left the cinema was afraid to go into the water. I remember this because I kept seeing ads for the film next to the article about my dead parents, and thinking to myself: I wish I could be afraid of something so silly.

Instead, I had to fear what would happen to me and my sister.

I feared that we’d have to live on the streets, that we’d starve to death begging for food, that we’d become frozen to the pavement in some alley during the harsh Chicago winter.

That would have been a better fate.

Instead, the courts gave our grandparents (whom our father referred to as “religious pecans”) custody and we were moved to a state and town we knew nothing about:

Hell, North Dakota.

You couldn’t find a town or city on any atlas that would have described the next year of our lives more accurately…except, maybe, Hell, Michigan. (We would have been better off living there, because our crazy grandparents didn’t.)

Grampa and Gramma Wilkins lived on the outskirts of that appropriately named town, out in the middle of fucking nowhere (there was a lot of nowhere in North Dakota). If you followed Hell’s Main Street until it turned into Scenic Highway 200, and you kept going, past the trees and hills (yes, in western North Dakota, there are trees and hills), over the bridge that crosses the Hart River, and hooked a left over some railroad tracks, you eventually ended up on a gravel road that led to scattered houses separated by acres and acres of golden wheat fields. Our grandparents lived in a big ranch house in one of those fields; so secluded that their driveway was nearly a mile long.

Grampa drove us out there in his big pick-up, the big tires kicking up dust. And I remember the dread I felt.

My sister and I were used to the city: tall buildings, hot dog vendors, busy sidewalks and streets full of honking cars. Out here, it was dead. Quiet. Too quiet.

Grampa stared straight ahead at the ranch house as it loomed toward us like a gothic nightmare. He was a quiet man. Didn’t say much: less than two words since picking us up at the Bismarck airport. There was a tiny calendar pinned to his dashboard: Jesus knocking on a door, waiting for an answer. On top of the dash was a book titled The Great Controversy between Christ and His Angels and Satan and his Angels.

Religious pecans. That’s what our father had called them. It wasn’t offensive because they were his parents. He grew up with them. He knew all too well. Said he barely escaped alive. But never went into too much detail.

“Some people just want to believe in something very badly,” he had told me once. “There’s nothing wrong with that. But some people’s beliefs are more important to them than people. They will hurt and neglect others because of their beliefs. It’s called fanaticism. And it’s very dangerous.”

As if losing our parents wasn’t bad enough, now we lived with these pecans! And since we were minors, let’s not bullshit: according to the United State government, these pecans owned us. Custody is just a nice way of saying that.

Our dad had broken off contact with the pecans before Delilah and I were ever born. We had literally never met them until our parents died.

I held my sister’s hand as Grampa pulled into the driveway. I could see tears in her eyes. She was just as scared (maybe more) as I.

“Here we are,” Grampa said, glancing at us dismissively. “Home sweet home.”

Gramma greeted us in the foyer with a big smile and a hug, kissing our heads, saying how great it was to finally meet us after all these years.

Delilah and I didn’t say anything. We were wide-eyed, trembling.

“Don’t be afraid, my dearies,” Gramma said. “We won’t bite, will we, Arthur?”

Our Grampa, Arthur, only hrmphed.

She cooked us dinner (if you could call it that): some kinda weird loaf made of Special K cereal and cottage cheese.

“I’m guessing your mommy and daddy fed you meat,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “Well, we don’t eat the flesh of animals in this household. The Prophetess White said that if we were to eat flesh diets, God would have provided animals to feast upon in the Garden. You must flee from the evils of devouring flesh and instead feast only upon fruits, nuts, and vegetables. This is God’s original plan. Amen.”

Grampa said, “Hrmph.”

“What about cheese?” I asked. “Isn’t there cheese in this? That’s not a nut, fruit, or vegetable.” (But you’re a nut, I wanted to add.)

“There’s no cheese,” she said.

“But you said it’s cottage cheese loaf.”

“It’s just a name,” she said. “Now eat.”

At an early age, I would learn that our grandparents weren’t only self-righteous, but that they were also huge hypocrites (the folly of those who put themselves up on pedestals).

Our grandparents had set up separate bedrooms for me and my sister, because “boys and girls should never sleep in the same room, or else they might be tempted to lie with one another.”

Delilah didn’t want to sleep alone and wouldn’t let go of my hand.

Gramma scolded her.

“Get to your room now, young missy!”

“But I want to sleep with Robbie.”

“Girls don’t sleep with boys,” she said. “Don’t be a hussy! Get in your room now!”

“She’s afraid of the dark,” I interjected.

“Too bad,” Gramma said. “The world is a dark place, so she better get used to it.”

Delilah cried as Gramma dragged her into the bedroom (at the end of a long hallway) and locked the door.

That was a bad sign: the locks were on the outside.

I closed the door to my room, willingly…and cried as I listened to my sister’s shrieks from down the hall. God, it sounded like she was dying.

At some point in the night, one of the grandparents got up and marched to the end of the hall (the floorboards squeaking and creaking), undid the latch, and opened the door, slammed it shut…the screaming stopped.

They fucking killed her, I thought, minus the expletive.

I shivered under the sheets in my barren room (only a bed, four white walls, a hardwood floor, and a painting of Prophetess White), fearing that my sister was dead.

After an hour or so, I heard her bedroom door open again, close, lock, and then the footsteps moving up the hall.

Part of me wanted to get up and knock on her door…but I was frozen.

The blank face of the moon stared at me through the window. A bird screamed in the night. The noise was awful: sounded like someone killing a baby.

We were in the middle of nowhere, our parents were dead, and we were living with religious pecans.

It was the first time I had considered killing myself.

I was eight.

***

We weren’t allowed to watch movies or read fiction. We weren’t allowed to eat meat. We weren’t allowed to drink soda because it had caffeine (even though Gramma drank tea). We weren’t allowed to attend public school, because it was run by the government and they would try to indoctrinate us with satanic ideas about evolution and sex. We weren’t allowed contact with anyone outside the church (which met every Saturday, because Sunday was the Mark of the Beast, and all those who worshipped on Sunday would be cast into hell during the Third Coming of Christ, also known as the Second Death, when Jesus would resurrect the evil dead and slay them with fire, and God’s remnant—the Last Day Adventists—would watch with glee as God cleansed the earth and set His New Kingdom upon the ashes of the wicked, where God’s chosen would live forever and ever). And we weren’t allowed to talk to niggers.

My sister wasn’t dead, but she looked dead inside.

She stopped talking.

Stopped crying.

Stopped feeling.

She tried to stop eating…but Gramma would shove whatever concoction she mixed together in that kitchen of hers down Delilah’s throat: soybean casserole, leek pie, soy dogs, gluten patties, lentil stew, tofu nut loaf, raw potato, facon (fake bacon). Gramma also made us swallow these terrible drinks that tasted like dirty dishwater (maybe they were).

She always talked about having good blood; not blood tainted by the flesh of animals or addictive chemicals.

Said we needed to be pure for Jesus’ Second Coming.

We needed strength for when the soldiers would come for us. Soldiers of the Vatican’s New World Order seeking out Sabbath Keepers.

In the end times, all Sabbath Keepers would be rounded up and tortured in unimaginable ways. But it was an honor to die like this: to die for Christ and Sister White. Yet we needed to prepare. Prepare to flee into the mountains, the woods. To fight the Catholic-run government when it rose up and declared a bounty on all Sabbath Keepers.

These were the kinds of paranoid rants we’d hear from Gramma, from the church she forced us to attend every Sabbath. And every Sabbath, there’d be a children’s story. The piano music would change to “Jesus Loves Me” and all the obedient children would flock to the front pew and sit down, waiting to hear some shit-story about subservience to god.

My sister and I always went to the front pew. We had no choice. It was either that or a whipping from Grampa’s belt.

One time, Gramma had the duty of performing the children’s story…with a little help from her friends of the Last Day Adventists, Pecans for Sister White. These members of this infected church-body were dressed like animals: a Bunny, a Dog, a Rat, a Moose, a Cat, and randomly, a Clown.

The mascots scared the children. We didn’t like them waving at us.

I held my sister’s hand as the Bunny looked through us with its big vacant eyes, gesturing for us to stand up and sing.

We obeyed (out of fear) as the furries marched their padded feet and squeaked a tune about fighting in the Lord’s army. When they piped out the last note, the furries saluted (uncomfortably close to a Nazi salute, now that I think about it).

We saluted back.

Then (left of stage) entered the Devil (or, a church member wearing a Devil’s mask, rather).

“Why do you worship on Sabbath when all other Christians worship on Sunday?” the Devil asked the furries (and clown).

“Because God made the Sabbath day holy and told us to rest on that day and worship Him,” the Bunny said in its pre-pubescent, high-pitched voice. “It’s the fourth commandment!”

“But don’t you know that the Catholic Church changed the Sabbath-day to Sunday?” the Devil asked.

“And this is how you will know the antichrist,” the Dog turned to us, felt tongue hanging out of its maw. “He will speak against the Most High and try to change the set times and the laws.”

“No one has the right to change God’s laws,” the Cat cried. “Now, shoo you mean ol’ devil. Get out of here.”

The furries (and clown) then chased the Devil from the sanctuary, as the kids giggled. My sister and I did not. Our faces were solemn…cold.

Gramma, who had sat down next to a little black boy to watch her drama unfold, stood back up, microphone in her frail, wrinkled hand, and turned to us.

“When they capture and torture you, they will want you to defend your beliefs. That’s why you must read and study the Scriptures, the writings of Prophetess White. God’s Word will be your ammo in the end times. If you are weak in faith, if you have unclean blood, if you are not strong enough to withstand the torture of the Papacy and their foot soldiers…your soul will be destroyed.”

The laughter and giggles were over. Shit just got real.

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10:28. That’s our Bible verse for today, children. Have a happy Sabbath.”

Kids in that church cried a lot, for some reason.

***

The only friend I had made at church was a little black kid named Dexter. He was funny and cool. We didn’t talk about religion, just hung out after the sermon was over and skipped rocks across the parking lot or tried to catch grasshoppers or climbed trees (while our parents and grandparents discussed paranoid delusions with the other pecans over rancid, soy-laced potluck food).

My sister hung out with us too, but she was withdrawn…followed us like a ghost.

Dexter didn’t mind, and was never mean about it.

I told him that my grandparents locked Delilah in her bedroom at night…that she was scared. That’s why she was so quiet.

People demand an explanation when you’re quiet. Dexter didn’t, but nodded.

“Yeah, my parents can be mean sometimes too.”

He hugged Delilah, trying to comfort her, I guess…but she quickly withdrew.

“Sorry,” Dexter said.

“It’s okay,” Delilah said…first time I had heard her talk in forever.

“Are you scared of the end of the world?”

I didn’t know who Dexter was talking to exactly (me, Delilah, both?), but I said, “I don’t believe in that crap.”

Dexter laughed.

We were only eight, and he said, “Yeah. Me neither. It’s stupid.”

Dexter and I weren’t friends for very long because Gramma told me I wasn’t allowed to hang out with him anymore.

When I asked her why, she went off on a feverish rant, her words slurring together with drunken hate:

they smell and their women try to stay pregnant and collect welfare checks pigs feeding at the trough their nigger babies hanging off their soiled titties like hungry nigglets hungry nigger mouths constantly craving and sucking wanting more more more—when Cain killed his brother Abel God banished him to the land of Nod and turned his skin black and killer niggers have been a plague on humanity since—killing and raping that’s all they know to do they cause all the crime in America that’s why police officers shoot ‘em and ask questions later it’s what has to be done to keep white people safe—Prophetess White warned us about these sinful races god destroyed the earth with a Flood because of them but after the Flood there again has been an amalgamation of man and beast: the dark-skinned monkeys who have sex out of wedlock and mix their genes with ours (unequally yoked!) and overpopulate the planet with mulattos (almost makes me believe in abortion!) whom we support with our hard-earned dollar—it’s not politically correct to say these things but they’re true and that’s what the pinkos are afraid of: reality—the niggers are growing like a melanoma on the white populace and it won’t be long before it develops into stage 4 and we are all dead because of this fuckin’ heathen race

“Gramma, you swore.”

“No, I didn’t. Shush up.”

The next time I saw Dexter at church, I ignored him. I knew if I talked to him, Gramma would beat me with a wooden spoon, or have Grampa hit me with his belt, or they’d lock me in my room and not feed me for days—forcing me to shit and piss into a bucket (all these things had happened before; punishment for my sins).

Every Sabbath, Dexter would try to talk to me, and eventually, I told him: “I can’t hang out with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a nigger.”

His eyes widened. He had a look on his face as if I had just smacked it.

“Oh,” he said.

He never bothered me again.

I felt awful for the thing I had said. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I sucked it up. My Grampa told me crying was for faggots (as he beat me with his belt).

So I sucked it up like a man and moved on.

***

One night, our grandparents decided to leave Delilah’s bedroom door unlocked, because she had been behaving modestly for almost a week (a.k.a. being quiet and submissive). That was the night my sister snuck into my room; she was scared. Scared of the shadows on her wall. Scared of being alone in that bedroom at the end of the hall. Scared because she missed mom and dad and hated this prison we were trapped in. She slinked under the covers and we cuddled, me holding her sobbing face against my chest. Her hot tears wetting my shirt.

“I miss mom and dad,” she cried.

I hushed her. “Don’t wake them up.”

She whispered: “I miss mom and dad.”

“So do I, Dee.” My nickname for her.

Silence. The room dark except for the moon waning through the window.

“Robbie…Grampa licked me.”

“…What do you mean?”

“He licked my…pee-pee.”

My stomach turned. “When?”

“When we first got here.”

The night they locked Delilah in the bedroom (the lock on the outside). Her screams echoing down the hall, keeping me up. Then the footsteps pounding across the floorboards…entering her room. And the long silence afterward.

“He told me to shut up…and then he pulled down my pants and licked me.”

At eight, I didn’t even know how to react to this. I didn’t feel anger or fear…just confusion. Why would Grampa do that? He was old, and Dee was a kid. Why would you lick someone there in the first place? I was aware it was inappropriate to touch a girl down there, much less lick them, and could not understand why Grampa would do that (even though he had no problem hitting us with his belt).

“That’s weird,” I said.

“I don’t like Grampa and Gramma,” she said.

“Me neither. They’re pecans.” I giggled.

She giggled a little too.

Then we heard feet pounding down the hall and our tiny hearts climbed into our throats, choking us with fear. The door to Dee’s room swung open…and there was a pause. Then the feet turned around, pounding toward my room.

Dee hid under the covers, crying, shaking like a leaf.

The door burst open and Grampa stood there, glaring at me, at the form beneath the sheet next to me.

He marched over to the bed and ripped the sheet away.

“Get out of Robbie’s room, you little slut!”

Dee cried and cried and cried, screaming: “No, no, no, no!”

Grampa grabbed Dee by the wrist and ripped her from the bed, sending her toppling onto the hardwood floor.

“You don’t sleep in the same bed as a boy, especially your brother, you filthy harlot. It’s sinful.”

“Dee’s not a harlot,” I cried. “You’re a harlot! You raped her!” I don’t know where it came from…the words shot out of my mouth before I could even think to hold them back. I didn’t even know what a harlot was at the time. But I knew what rape was. My dad was a police officer, and he told me rapists were the lowest, dirtiest scum of the earth and that he wished he could put a bullet into their backs…but a jury of your peers and all that shit. He told me rapists always got off with a slap on the wrist, if that even. Some were praised for being so brave after being “falsely accused,” their victims blamed for the crime of lying and seeking attention. Some of the victims committed suicide; they couldn’t handle being violated by the perp, and then again by the jury of their peers, and yet again by family and friends and strangers who made a mockery of their trauma. It wasn’t necessarily the rape that caused the suicide, but the lack of support. My mother told me that she had been raped in college, and that her father was the only one who had stood by her, who supported her. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would side with a rapist, but I was a kid, naïve, stupid. I didn’t know about religion and politics yet. I didn’t completely understand my father’s words about how ideologies become more important than people and how dangerous that is.

But at that moment, I knew my Grampa was a rapist, and that he deserved a bullet in the back. And I wished my father was there to put it there.

“You’re a rapist and you deserve to be shot!”

Grampa just stared at me blankly. Then said: “Shut your goddam mouth, boy, or I’ll wash it out with soap. Don’t you dare say such a word again.”

He dragged Dee from the room by her wrist and I chased after, grappling onto Grampa’s gnarly hand, digging in with my nails, trying to loosen his grip on my sister.

He slapped me hard across the face.

“Get your fuckin’ filthy paws off me, you fucking queer! You think you can be the man of the house? Well, you can’t. You’re eight. I’m the man of the house and what I say goes. Didn’t your parents ever teach you to respect your elders?”

“Watch your goddam language,” Gramma yelled at him.

“Go back to bed, Eunice.”

“Gramma, Grampa raped Dee! He licked her pee-pee!” I cried.

Gramma glared at me. “Quit your filthy talk, boy.”

“Fuckin’ kid doesn’t know what the hell he’s talkin’ ‘bout,” Grampa said, as Dee struggled in his grasp, flopping on the floor like a fish caught on a line, and crying, crying so loud.

“Hush up, Delilah, you temptress, you harlot!” Gramma screamed.

“I didn’t rape nobody,” Grampa said. “I caught these two canoodling in Robbie’s room. If anything, Robbie molested her.”

“Your own sister,” Gramma shrieked. “Sickening! The Lord does not permit incest!”

“We were just talking,” I cried.

“You can’t sleep next to a woman without touching her,” Grampa said.

“You’ve already committed lust in your heart,” Gramma chimed in.

“We didn’t do anything,” I cried.

“Liar! No one is blameless! All have sinned and fallen short before the Glory!” Gramma, raising her hands to the heavens, to her false god.

“But Grampa licked her!”

“Is that true, Art?”

“She made me do it. She tempted me. She’s a harlot. It got her to shut up, didn’t it?”
“It’s not her fault,” I cried.

“If she didn’t want it, she would have cried out. The Law of Leviticus says that if a woman is raped and does not cry out, she shall be stoned! I’ve read Freud. I know that all little girls think about is fucking their daddies and killing their mommies!” Gramma lowered herself on her haunches to scream in Dee’s face: “Well, your daddy’s dead now, so I guess you had to turn to my Arty. You had to lead him astray! How many times did you take advantage of your father, you little slut? How many times did you call him into your room, because you were afraid of the dark, and then make him do awful things to you?”

“Stop it stop it!” I cried.

Dee thrashed in Grampa’s grip, sobbing, trying to escape…but little by little, she gave up, just like the fish on the line, who realizes it’s hopeless…it’s not returning to the water…it’s in Land World now, where the air is thick and suffocating…and slowly, it just lies there and waits to die.

“Lock them outside!” Gramma shrieked. “I want these whores out of my house!”

Grampa grabbed me by the ear and dragged us both toward the back door. We hollered and screamed the whole way (futile).

Outside, a few snowflakes began to drift lazily toward the earth, toward the barren, dirt ground, now vacant of golden wheat. Grampa shoved us to the dirt and kicked us in the ribs a couple of times, then walked back to the house.

“You can sleep out here tonight, until you learn to behave yourselves,” he said. “Hard to get a hard-on out in this cold, isn’t it, Robbie?”

Gramma came out with a bucket of water and dumped it on Dee’s head. “A cold shower for this little harlot,” she screamed. “Wash your sins away!”

Then they went back into the house and locked the door.

We banged on it for hours, begging for them to let us back in (futile).

Like the flopping fish on the line, we eventually grew weary and gave up, our voices hoarse and cracking from the screaming. We huddled together against the house, trying to absorb any warmth (futile).

Dee shivered as the water crystalized against her china doll face, and her breath came out as steam in the chilly air.

I stared up at the stars…you could see all of them out here, in the middle of nowhere, without any city lights or tall buildings or smog to obscure your vision. I wondered if there was anybody up there, looking down on us. Anyone who would feel compassion for us and save us.

As the wind picked up and chilled our bones, I realized what a crock of shit that was.

There was no god.

This was just life (shivering in the cold) and there was no one to pity us or protect us. No one watching over us. We were going to die.

It’s not fair, I thought.

But that didn’t matter. That thought was pointless. There was no fair. There was no justice.

Just like the rapists my dad hated, my Grampa and Gramma would get away with it. Because the world was amoral and only those who took from it got what they wanted.

There was no right or wrong, good or bad.

Everything was nothing.

Terrible thoughts for an eight-year-old. But what other conclusion was I supposed to come to as I sat beneath that big sky, staring at those apathetic balls of dead light, holding my shivering, crying sister in my arms as she froze to death?

“I can’t feel anything,” she cried. “I can’t feel anything.”

Neither could I.

Her tears froze to her pallid cheeks.

She shook, coughing and gagging on phlegm, and I held her tighter.

Her teeth chattered, bones clicking together eerily, and as I stared out across those dirt fields frozen over with frost, I swear I could see it: a figure in a black robe, floating toward us.

Then I heard that bird again. The one with the shriek that sounded like a baby being murdered.

“I can’t feel,” Dee cried. “I’m scared, Robbie. I don’t want to die. I’m cold.”

I tried to distract her. Myself.

“What’s your favorite color?”

“P-p-pink,” she said.

“That’s a good color,” I said.

“My lungs hurt,” she said. “I can’t breathe.”

I tried to hold her as close to my body as possible, as she continued to shiver and cry. Cry so hard. It reminded me of the night they locked her in her room and I could hear her sobs echoing down the hall. Part of me had hated her for crying so loud, for making me feel so much pain and fear. But at that moment, I hoped that she never stopped crying. It let me know that she was still here, alive, in my arms.

Hours later (seemed like years, decades, huddled in the cold, staring into the frosted dirt), the crying stopped and Dee’s body went limp:

Pale doll face.

Blue lips.

Vacant eyes.

Hair stiff with icicles.

No steam came from her nostrils or mouth.

I sobbed, nuzzling my face against…this dead thing in my arms (not a person anymore, just a corpse that used to be my sister). Trying to feel warmth. But all the warmth had left her.

My world split in half.

There was no one left.

My father, my mother, my sister…

I was alone…in the middle of nowhere…in these dirt fields…beneath this big sky full of dead stars.

Nothing would ever be the same.

…LATER (1979)

After Gramma had discovered the porn mag, she brought me and the boys to what she called the Hell House. Which was odd, because Last Day Adventists didn’t believe in hell. They believed that during the Third Coming, Jesus resurrected the evil dead, and then burned them with fire. Sinners (atheists, Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, abortionists, Sunday Keepers, and especially Catholics) were lit up and turned to ash. No long, drawn-out suffering. No eternal damnation. Just instantly killed by the loving hands of Jesus (can I get an Amen?) But that’s not what happened to me, Brady, Neil, and whatever the fuck those other two numbskulls’ names were. If Gramma would have killed us all outright, we would have been better off.

But no, Gramma found the porno mag underneath my sheets (I should have hidden it better, so stupid, so stupid) and hit me with her wooden spoon, leaving welts on my back. I only wished it would have stopped there. After she was done hitting my backside, she walloped me in the gut, the face, and the crotch. When that spoon hit the tip of my penis, it felt like someone had pinched it between their fingernails. The balls were the worse though. They were like two flashing stoplights.

Of course, the punishment didn’t end there, as I have already alluded to. My Gramma beat me until I confessed to where I had gotten the “filthy, harlot magazine.” And then she talked to the school board. The other boys’ parents.

Brady was pissed that I didn’t hide the magazine better, and that I ratted them out.

“Everyone knows your grandma is a crazy bitch. Now we’re all fucked. Thanks a lot, faggot.”

I wasn’t one of “the guys” anymore. Just a faggot narc that got us all in trouble.

The other boys’ parents agreed to let my Gramma dole out the punishment…because it wasn’t just my Gramma who was crazy (no matter what the guys said). All the people in that church were pecans…my Gramma was just a tad more sadistic.

On Punishment Night, she rounded all the boys up in Grampa’s big pick-up (Grampa died shortly after Dee; Gramma claimed that he tossed his shotgun into the bed of the truck and it went off and blew holes through his chest—I never believed her), and drove us out to the ranch house where she and Grampa used to live—but now it was just me and her.

The guys were quiet the whole drive.

Brady, Neil, and I sat in the front of the cab with Gramma, the other two numbskulls in the back.

“Your parents didn’t know what to do with you heathens,” Gramma said. “They were very disappointed in you, spraying your seed everywhere like animals. You’re supposed to be sons of Adam, children of God. Your parents thought they raised you better. Thought they taught you to not let a woman deceive you with her flesh. Weaken you with her harlotry. If you are to be men of God, you must resist temptation. It is only a heathen who allows women to rule his phallus.”

When we arrived at the house, we were all shaking. Unsure what exactly our punishment would be. She told us to get out of the pick-up, and I remember Brady pissed himself when he saw my Gramma go into the garage and come back out with a 12-gauge.

Oh my god, I thought. She’s going to shoot us all in the driveway. Our blood is going to paint the gravel.

Brady started crying, pleading for his life.

“Please, please, please, don’t kill me, don’t kill me. I swear I’ll never look at a naked girl again. Please please please.”

I swallowed an iron ball in my throat and told him to, “Shut up! Only faggots cry. Take your medicine like a man.” Shaking the whole time I said it.

Gramma smiled at me. The first time I’d ever seen affection in her eyes.

“Good boy, Robbie. Maybe you’re not a cunt after all.”

I felt an almost sickening gratification from the exchange. It was the first time my Gramma had ever accepted me in any capacity.

Then she pointed the double barrel at us and told us to move into the garage.

We did as told.

Once we were inside, Gramma hit a button with the barrel of the shotgun, and the garage door slid downward on its track. Then she ordered Brady to open a steel door against the far wall. His tiny hands struggled to pull the bolt, crying as he tugged on it, probably thinking he’d die if he didn’t get it (maybe he would have). Then he stumbled backward as the bolt slid out of its socket, and the heavy door squealed open on rusty hinges.

Behind the door: darkness.

Gramma pushed us into the soupy black air with the double barrel, and we shivered and whimpered as we were forced to file down a narrow staircase, into the depths of the labyrinth. When we reached the bottom, our feet crunched on gravel and…broken glass? I stepped in a puddle of some foul smelling liquid.

I could see more and more as my eyes adjusted: narrow corridors, a mysterious green glow shimmering along the ceiling.

I touched the wall: concrete.

It was humid and smelly down here. Damp and dark.

For a moment, I thought we were in a sewer. But why would there be a sewer underneath Gramma’s house? A rat skittered by my feet and I screamed.

The following events are a blur, but terror is etched into every choppy, vague memory. We were probably in the Hell House for an hour, but what I can remember only feels like two minutes of pain and screams. The other 58 are repressed; nightmares I don’t wish to resurface.

After I screamed (it echoed all around us in the narrow corridors), men (women?) in animal costumes lunged out and flogged us with whips. The usual suspects: Bunny, Moose, Dog, Rat, Cat, and Clown. Their cat o’ nine tails had nails and shards of glass embedded into the multi-tailed whips. They tore our flesh apart.

I’m not sure how long this went on, but then the shotgun was put to our heads and we were forced to shit and piss in buckets. This excrement was then dumped on our heads and we cried as we were forced to crawl through it—shit and piss and blood.

Two Bunny Mascots with flame throwers lit up the corridors with bright orange heat, sometimes directing it at us; not close enough so the fire would touch us, but close enough that we could feel the burn. (Trying to recreate hell, I suppose.)

A Devil Mask entered the corridor, flames lapping behind it, and started screaming, chanting, speaking in some demonic tongue, as it hit us with a pitchfork. Not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to leave bruises.

Then the furries dumped buckets of roaches onto our heads and shoved the screaming insects into our mouths. Gramma pointed the double barrel at us: “Chew and swallow!” The bugs’ spiny stick legs wiggled on our tongues, against the roofs of our mouths, in our throats (pieces of roach trying to crawl back out), as we chewed and swallowed. We bit them in halves, quarters, eighths—but the legs never stopped wiggling, I swear.

Neil nearly choked to death on roaches (so many of them shoved into his mouth at once), and as he choked, yellow roach innards and wiggling leg-parts spewed out his nose.

Then we were stripped naked and the Devil (and its furry friends) forced us to our knees, bent us over so our lips touched the cold cement, and shoved thick steel rods into our assholes, as far as they could go. At first, it felt like I had to poop, but as it went in deeper, I felt like something was penetrating my guts. It hurt and felt so weird. We cried and the Devil called us faggots.

When the rod was removed, warm blood gushed between my legs.

At some point, these shattered pieces of recollection are a haze of animal masks and clown faces peering out from flames—which licked at the (brim)stone walls as a cacophony of screaming and chanting echoed madly around us: the demons dancing, hitting us with hammers and shovels, kicking us, forcing us to crawl through broken glass, gravel, and tacks.

There were other tortures, but I don’t remember.

When it was over, we were bleeding. Our skin throbbing like a living animal full of lacerations and bruises. Gramma took us into the backyard, into the chilly night (wasn’t it day-time when we entered the Hell House?), and sprayed us down with the hose.

“Don’t want your shit and blood all over the pick-up,” she said.

Gramma drove us to the church, where the other parents were waiting to pick up their boys.

The church wasn’t in town. It was out in the middle of fucking nowhere, just like Gramma. There was a Seventh-Day Adventist church in town, out on Old Red Trail, but my Gramma said they were all “liberals.” They didn’t believe strongly enough in the Prophetess White and they poisoned their blood with meat and drug (coffee and pop).

Our Church, however, was where “true Adventists” attended.

We were all quiet. No one talked.

I heard Brady sniffle, but that was it.

“I hope you all learned your lesson,” Gramma said.

I finally broke the silence: “Yes, Gramma. Thank you, Gramma.”

She smiled. “You’re all men now. You’ve all faced the darkness. I know you’re probably upset that I hurt you, but the world is not going to coddle you. The world is shit. You gotta be tough to survive. If you’re a cunt, the world will eat you alive.”

When Gramma dropped the boys (battered, bruised, cut up) off with their parents…something happened that really disturbed me.

The parents were smiling, their yellow teeth gleaming beneath the parking lot lamps.

“Thank you, Gramma Wilkins,” they said—not in unison, obviously, but one of them said it, and the others agreed. They were not perturbed at all by the sight of their abused boys.

They simply said, “Thank you.” And to their boys, “I hope you learned your lesson.”

Back in the truck, on the way home, Gramma and I sat in silence.

I had nothing to say to that fucking bitch.

…NOW (2009)

I choke on tears and phlegm as I run away from the boarded up ranch house, limping. Cows milling in dirt fields stare at me as I hobble by, blood and shit caked on my legs. At some point, I’m too exhausted, too tired to care anymore, to feel fear or sadness or dread or anything, and I collapse in the middle of the gravel road, the sun baking my face.

Minutes, hours later…a Sunny Delivery truck pulls up to me, stops.

“Hey, you ok?” the young driver asks, as I lie in gravel, my boxers stiff and brown.

I sit on the small fold-out seat next to the driver, and stare out the windshield blankly as the countryside whips by.

“You need to get to a hospital,” Sunny says.

“No…just…get me home…to my wife.”

I can feel the lack of…anything between my legs. Or rather, can’t feel.

Can’t feel nothing.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You look like shit. Smell like it too.”

I lick my chapped lips.

“I got some water.” He hands me a bottle and I drink it, spilling onto the front of my shirt. Get some down the wrong pipe and choke for a bit. (Think of Neil choking on half-chewed roaches. I wonder whatever happened to that poor son of a bitch.)

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah…I just…got really fucked up last night.”

Sunny laughs. “Remind me to party with you next time.”

When we pull into town, onto Main, the sun is already setting. A drunkard stumbles out of The Hades Bar and in front of the Sunny truck. The driver slams on the brakes and mutters: “Piece of shit.”

I watch the drunkard stagger back onto the sidewalk and feel my eyes and nostrils burning.

When Sunny pulls up to my house, he asks me if I need any help, and as I stagger out of the truck, I tell him to, “Fuck off.”

“Fuck you too, buddy!” Drives off.

I hobble toward the front door. Push the doorbell.

No answer.

I shiver.

Try the knob.

It’s unlocked.

The house is quiet, dark, empty.

I force myself up the stairs, toward the bedroom.

Cindy is already in bed, her back toward me, and I lie down next to her…break down crying.

“I fucked up, honey. I’m so sorry. I love you. I really do. There’s, uh, no excuse for my behavior, I guess. I’m just…really fucked up, you know. I have…a lot of problems. When all you see is shit, and all you hear is shit, and all you know is shit, you tend to live like shit. You become shit. This world beats you, rapes you, and then expects you to be nice. And I try…but I can’t. I’ve done terrible things and I don’t know if I can live…with that knowledge anymore. I…I…I’m so sorry, Cindy.”

Giggling.

Cindy turns to me…and I see her…but it’s not her. Someone (some THING) has snipped her face from her skull and is wearing it as a mask.

“You’ve been a bad boy,” the thing says in a high-pitched voice, and giggles.

Fuck fuck oh fuck oh fuck.

And then the (thing), whatever, whoever the fuck is lying next to me in these sheets, yanks the Cindy-mask off his/her/its face and I can’t tell who or what the fuck is under the mask because the face is dripping with blood and all I can do is scream until my throat is raw.

…10 YEARS AGO (1999)

The warehouse was big and empty and I pushed the nigger inside, pointing the pink Glock .40 at him.

“Please, stop! I didn’t do anything!” the nigger cried.

“Did I tell you you could talk, nigger?”

I hit the nigger hard in the face.

Crying. “Please!”

“Shut your fucking watermelon-hole!”

“Please, I have a wife and kids.”

“Yeah. I have a wife too. Plan on having kids someday. Need to protect them from niggers like you.”

“I didn’t do anything, man.”

“You were selling drugs.”

“Please, man. I’m just tryin’ to support my family. Please. I won’t do it again.”

“What are you going to do? Get a real job? Get saved or some shit?”

“I already am saved, man. I swear. I’m a Christian. I just…got mixed up in some bad shit. I love Jesus, I swear. It’s just…it’s tough out here.”

“My dad was a cop. He busted a nigger, just like you, selling crystal. Got shot. My mom…she couldn't handle life without him. So she cut her wrists and arms in the bathtub. I was the one who found her body. Had to move in with my Grampa and Gramma when I was eight. They were fuckin’ pecans. Constantly talking about the end times, about sinners and hell. But my Gramma taught me one important thing: everyone, everything is shit. The world is shit. And if you can’t handle shit, the world will eat you alive.”

“I’m sorry, man, but…I didn’t kill your family.”

“You’re right, but I don’t care. You have the mark of Cain. It’s in your nature to rape and kill. It’s encoded in your genes. You’re a stupid fucking nigger and that’s all you’re ever going to be.” I put the pink Glock to his head. “Say it! I’m a stupid fucking nigger!”

“No, please, man, please.”

“SAY IT!”

Crying. “I’m a stupid fucking nigger.”

“Thanks…Dexter.”

I pulled the trigger.

POW!

Blood exploded from his black head and he hit the floor at my feet and I spat on his corpse.

…LATER

I was at PUSSY CATS and the strippers were stripping (jiggling their titties and shaking their G-strings) and I was in a private booth, drinking whiskey, when two girls walked by (girls I now know as Jennifer and Erica), and I called out to them: “Hey whores!”

They turned to look at me.

“Yeah, you. Who the fuck else would I be talking to?”

I slapped money down on the table. Benjamins.

“Both of you. Give me head. Double team my cock with your tongues.”

Jennifer and Erica looked at each other…took the money, got on their knees, and performed their womanly duties.

“You know what I did today?” I asked them, knowing they wouldn’t respond, because they were too busy licking the crown of my dick. “I killed a nigger. I took E. I had four shots of tequila and now this here bottle of Jack. And now…I’m mouth-fucking you two lovely ladies.”

I smiled, held up the bottle of Jack Daniels.

“If only you could see me now, Gramma. If only you could see me now, you ol’ bitch.”

…NOW

I’m on the floor and the Thing has a wire around my neck, choking me. I scratch at the wire, but cannot pull it away; I only succeed in gathering scraps of neck-flesh beneath my fingernails.

My eyes pound in their sockets and I feel blood gathering heavy in my face and I swear I can hear her, Gramma, whispering in my ear: “Oh, but I can, Robbie. I caaan.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Raptor lives in Fargo, North Dakota, with his wife and two cats. He was born in Kagoshima, Japan, where his parents served as missionaries. Raptor self-published and promoted his first book, Mystery Man, while still in high school. He is also the author of Hell High, Revenge of the Cannibals!, Pete: A Novel of Extreme Insanity, Bloodlust, and Sinner.

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Research & Special Thanks to:

John Ramsey Miller’s article “The Smell of Cordite in the Air of Inaccuracy” at Kill Zone Blog.

Kill Zone Blog and its contributors do not endorse this novel (Trigger Warning) or its author (John Raptor) in any way.