Danika turned to the other barrels and began knocking them over. One after another curly-headed, tan-skinned heads tumbled out onto the garage floor. Danika looked from one face to the next as more police officers crowded into the garage.
“Are you okay, Ma’am? Jesus Christ! Are those real? We need a coroner over here. Somebody call CSU. It’s a fucking bloodbath in here! We’ve got bodies everywhere!”
Danika pried her eyes away from the lifeless faces lying on the garage floor and back up to the garage entrance where the two shadows were still standing there, smirking in superiority, unnoticed by everyone except her and Malik. She looked back down at Malik as what looked like half a dozen cops piled on top of him, twisting his arm behind his back and handcuffing him, their fear making them use more force than necessary as they tried to restrain him. Malik stopped struggling and looked up into her eyes even as her vision slowly faded and everything began to go black.
“Why? How could you do this?”
“I’m sorry, Danika. I didn’t want to hurt you. Some wounds don’t heal. Some wounds never heal.”
Danika fainted, thinking about scabs that continued to rip open and bleed decades after the wounds that caused them. The girls had called Malik a black scab. In a way, they had been right.
No Pain
The guy didn’t look like much. He was big, mostly fat, tall, about 6’4”, still two inches shorter than I, and his eyes had fear in them. I smiled, sensing an easy victory. Then I remembered where I was. There had to be more to him than what I saw. There was always a catch. Things were never what they seemed when Bill Vlad was involved.
Bill Vlad owned a traveling freak show infamous for acts that ran the gambit from the monstrous and grotesque to the supernatural. He also promoted underground no-holds-barred matches in which wealthy connoisseurs of the violent and the arcane bet exorbitant amounts of money on which combatant would leave the cage alive. It wasn’t just the fact that the matches ended in fatalities that drew the large wagers and opulent clientele. It was the nature of the combatants. Sometimes the freaks and monsters from Vlad’s traveling sideshow turned up in the octagon. I’d fought a man with eight arms, a seven hundred-pound cyclops, a human jellyfish with no skeleton or vertebrae whose body just absorbed my punches like wet dough. And just last month I’d fought a vampire. That was supposed to be my last fight. It was the closest I’d ever come to death.
The bloodsucking corpse had managed to open arteries in my neck, biceps, and thigh. My face, arms, and entire torso were rent with claw marks from the thing’s talon-like nails grown long from its months in the grave where Vlad had no doubt unearthed the preternatural abomination. We were both saturated in blood and gore from the bright red arterial spray spurting from my many wounds and mingling with the blood leaking sluggishly from the avulsions I had ripped and tore into its loose, dead flesh.
I didn’t know if the thing could still think beyond its appetite, whether its personality had survived its incarceration in hell and whatever dire magic Vlad had used to rescue it from the grave. All I knew was that it was trying to kill me. So it had to die. Of course, I had no idea how to kill it.
I was rapidly exsanguinating from half a dozen near fatal hemorrhages caused by the filthy talons and gore-streaked, tartar-stained fangs of the rapacious Nosferatu, and I knew that I had precious seconds before I bled to death. I had no fear of dying, but I was afraid of what Vlad would do with my corpse once I was dead. I didn’t want to come back like the soulless creature I was battling.
As the crowd cheered us on and the wagers increased, we struggled desperately in a growing pool of blood, me for my life and the prize money, and he for his life and the life pulsing through my veins. I snapped the leech’s limbs and broke its neck, struggling desperately to kill the undead parasite before my life bled out on the canvas mat. No medical attention until the fight is over. That’s one of the rules.
I was already getting woozy from the loss of blood when I ripped into its chest, cracked open its rib cage, and tore out the thing’s heart, finally killing it. The referee raised my arm just as I blacked out from severe hypotension. When I woke up in the hospital, I kept checking the mirrors to make sure I hadn’t become a bloodsucker, too. I panicked when the sun rose and the morning rays spilled into my room, afraid that I’d spontaneously combust. The whole thing was far more aggravation than it was worth.
When Bill Vlad dropped by to give me my money, it took five orderlies to wrestle my hands from around his throat. He smiled, his red handlebar moustache curling up on the ends like devil horns, as I tried to throttle the life from him. As he left, he winked at me, tossing my prize money onto the hospital bed. I’d made fifty thousand that night and vowed never to fight for money again. Then my “Babygirl” wanted a new platinum necklace and I’d found myself broke again. Vlad knew I’d be back. What else could a hideously scarred freak like me do for a living?
My Babygirl was a stripper at an all-nude gentleman’s club on Industrial Avenue called “The Rose Patch.” I met her one night as she danced onstage before the leering eyes of men hungry for a glimpse of a tight ass and a pair of perky breasts; men like me. They were lined up around the stage waving dollar bills at her. I sat down amongst them, my brothers in sin, entranced by the bounce of her near perfect ass as it gyrated to the wails of some Prince tune from the eighties. I didn’t think she’d even notice me, given her choice of men whose faces did not look like overcooked bacon, but she came right over to me and sat right on my face. Of course it could have been the fact that I had a fifty clutched between my teeth while everyone else was waving ones at her. It didn’t matter why. All that mattered was that she’d chosen me.
Her name was Evangeline and she was everything a man could want; big tits, firm ass, long blonde hair down to her waist, face like an angel. I started going to see her every night. Pretty soon she was giving me hand jobs for fifty bucks a pop in the VIP room on a regular basis. Though sometimes, we would just talk. It was the closest I’d ever come to dating someone.
One day she confided in me about her pimp. I had suspected she was doing more than dancing and giving hand jobs and with more guys than just me, but still I felt like we had something special. She assured me we did.
“With you it’s different. I want to do things with you, but with those other guys.” She shuddered for effect.
“Why don’t you just dump this clown?” I asked
“I’ll never get away from him. Every time I try to leave him he beats me up and threatens to kill me. The only way I’ll get away is if you kill him for me. Then I could be yours.” She already had my cock out stroking it with her left hand while using her long hair to shield her actions from the eyes of the club security. When she lowered her head down between my lap and slid it down her throat, she knew she owned me. At that moment, I would have done anything for her. She withdrew her head from my lap just as the hyper-muscular bouncer poked his head into the booth on a routine check. She looked into my eyes pleadingly. “Anyway you want me, Daddy.” My knees went weak and my heart melted. I could still feel the dampness where her mouth had encircled my cock. I wanted Babygirl more than I’d ever wanted any woman or anything.
“But Babygirl, I’m not a killer.”
“Well what good is it having a monster for a boyfriend if you can’t sick him on people?”
Yeah, I heard her call me a monster, but I also heard her call me her boyfriend and that decided the matter. I paid the bouncer for a little privacy and she sucked me off to seal the deal, letting me fuck her beautiful silicone stuffed breasts as she licked the head of my cock until I erupted all over her sweet little face. She smiled up at me with my seed drooling down her cheeks and off her chin looking like something from a Bukakke flick and my heart turned to Jello.
She looked just like an angel. An innocent whore. Still somehow pure and good, her innocence untouched even beneath a veil of semen. But if that pimp kept making her fuck strange men for money all that goodness and innocence would be destroyed. That twinkle in her eye would be snuffed out for good, replaced by that cold, vacant, thousand-yard stare on the faces of all the other whores in the club who’d all seen and done too much. The same soulless expression that haunted my own features. I had to help her.
Later that night I cornered the club manager, who was also Evangeline’s pimp, in his office, and strangled the life from him. The next day I got a call from Bill Vlad.
“You ready to come back to work now?”
“Fuck you, Vlad. You know I’ll never work for you again after that shit you pulled with the vampire. That damned thing nearly killed me!”
“Well, that is the name of the game, kill or be killed. And besides, you never felt a thing. I mean, you can’t. And how many people have you killed? Just the other night I happened to be walking past this strip club with my trusty camera. I’ve got some lovely photos of you throttling Mikey the pimp right in his own office.”
“You bastard.” It was all I could say. He had me.
“Now what would Evangeline say if you wound up going to prison for twenty years or so? Do you think she’d wait for you? Besides, don’t you think she deserves a boyfriend who can buy her nice things? I pay you well, don’t I?”
“Okay, but it’s double this time.”
I knew Evangeline had set me up. She’d probably been working for Vlad from the very start. But it was too late. I was in love with the deceitful bitch, and no way could a guy who looks like me keep a woman like that without money in his pockets. So I took the fight on a week’s notice without the slightest clue who or what my opponent was.
***
The guy circles me with a big dopey grin on his face. I suppose it could look menacing if you were prone to fear. I wasn’t. His teeth were unnaturally large and straight and white. Like he had a fetish about toothpaste and dental floss. He had huge puppy dog eyes and pudgy cheeks like an oversized adolescent. A cherubic face, like a choirboy. He didn’t look at all like a killer. Maybe that was the point. Maybe Vlad wanted to watch me tear this guy with the choirboy face into bloody strips of steaming viscera, not so much a traditional gladiatorial event as simply feeding Christians to lions. I knew Vlad wasn’t too fond of Christians anyway.
The guy hits me, and the blow nearly takes my head off. The fucker’s strong, stronger than most humans, but that didn’t mean much. Mike Tyson is stronger than most humans, too. Besides, I have an edge. I don’t feel pain.
The nerve centers in my brain don’t function as they’re supposed to. I can barely feel anything, pain or pleasure. I am a freak of nature, a natural oddity. I grew up in Bill Vlad’s Circus of Oddities. My destitute and drug-addicted parents sold me to him when I was eight years old once they discovered my talent/affliction. I was the boy who could walk on glass and hot coals, who could swim in boiling water, who could cut himself to the bone and stitch up the wound while playing a video game.
Pretty soon I was the circus’ star attraction. During three acts a night, over a period of more than ten years, I was cut, gouged, scalded, burned, beaten, bitten, electrocuted, and crushed. By the time I was seventeen I had broken every bone in my body at least twice and there was not a single patch of skin that wasn’t covered in scar tissue. When the Bill Vlad Circus of Oddities rolled into town, people would flock from all around to watch an adolescent boy get tortured on stage. Sick world we live in.
As Bill Vlad’s Circus grew increasingly more bizarre so did the acts I was forced to perform. I was put into a pit to wrestle bobcats and wild dogs. Once, when I was ten or eleven, I was pitted against a Komodo dragon that Vlad had starved and tortured to make crazy mean. Its razor sharp claws nearly ripped me apart before I snapped its neck. That act became a sensation, and soon I was being matched against increasingly bizarre creatures from alligators to anacondas. The crowds would watch aghast as I was mauled and my flesh was rent to glistening red ribbons, then be amazed when my bleeding body was taken out of the pit and I was given ice cream or a toy. Whenever anyone would protest and accuse Vlad of child abuse, he would cheerfully remind them that: “He can’t feel a thing.”
I would smile and go back to playing my video games as paramedics rushed to stitch my wounds. As soon as I became an adult, Vlad wanted me to add sex to my act, so I began torturing my genitals onstage. I would stab my testicles with spikes and then cauterize the wounds with a Bunsen burner as the crowd cringed and gasped in horror. I grew to hate Bill Vlad. Each time I injured myself I imagined that it was his penis being twisted with vice grips and pierced with spikes and needles, his testes being sliced open and zapped with a taser gun.
The one thing Vlad was good for was anticipating my needs and accommodating them and usually before I was even aware of them. Right after I hit puberty he began supplying me with whores after every show. I didn’t know where he was getting them from but he seemed to know my taste in women without even having to ask. He knew me. He knew all my secret desires.
Every prostitute he sent to my trailer in the middle of the night was of the same type, plain, average, no excessive amounts of make-up, no gaudy, overtly-sexual outfits, a shy demure personality. They looked like anything but prostitutes. They could have been the girl next door who babysat your kid brother on the weekends. They never screamed or winced when they saw my scars, always showing the appropriate amount of sympathy and concern but without the outrage or revulsion that normal women displayed when faced with the multifarious wounds and injuries that decorated my flesh. These girls were pros.
They would take my scarred penis down their throats sucking and licking it like it was the world’s richest source of nourishment and then ride it like they were on a merry-go-round pony. Always with a smile, as if taking my gnarled and tortured flesh between their legs was the most joy they could imagine. But then, once my hour was up, they would leave and I would be alone again. No matter how good they were at maintaining the illusion that they really wanted to be there with me, the illusion always had a time limit. Even if they stayed all night there was no fooling myself that they would stick around in the morning without being paid extra for it. My heart broke every time I watched one of them walk out my door. By the time I was twenty-one I had had enough. I left the circus to become a fighter.