I need a clever title.

I don’t have a title for this one that I am happy with. “Revenge” is what comes to mind but that just seems under-whelming.

Also, I am thinking of doing a story as a serial. What do most of you think. Are serials on a blog a good thing or a bad one?

L. E. White

Revenge

Two feet.

All Jack needed to do was to move two feet. If he could move, then he could reach the latch. If he could reach the latch, he could open it.

The bomb was attached to the latch. It would blow when Jack messed with the lever that held the boats together. Jack would die in that explosion. He knew it, but it didn’t matter.

Dead was better than this.

He pulled, trying to drag his slick, tortured hand through the cuff, but when that didn’t work, he shifted his hands back together and started clawing at it with his other hand. It hurt so bad, but trying to scratch enough of his own flesh away to get free so that he could kill himself was better than waiting for this other death.

The one he knew was coming. The one he felt.

The one her father had promised him on sunny, summer morning.

*****

When Jack came around the sun light glaring in his eyes was confusing. The last thing he remembered was walking out to his car last night. He had been walking out of whats-her-names house after she had given him a BJ and he was heading home. He remembered a burst of pain and then falling.

When he tried to move, he realized his hand and feet were connected. His ass was up in the hot, humid air and his cheek was resting on some smooth surface. There was something jammed into his mouth and it felt like a belt was wrapped around his head. He was trussed up like a pig.

“Morning.”

Jack knew that voice. He knew it and he feared it.

It was Beverly’s father.

“I don’t know if you realize exactly what is happening here, but since I gagged you I know you won’t be asking me. That’s fine, I planned to tell you anyway.”

A shadow blocked out the sun. Jack wasn’t in a position to look up much but it didn’t matter.  He couldn’t move enough to face him. He wouldn’t have faced him if he had any other choice in the world anyway.

A hand rested on Jacks head. It wasn’t stroking his hair or pulling it. Instead, it just rested there, unmoving and unnerving.

“I told you when they arrested you that the only safe place for you was in jail. When you got off on a technicality you must have known I would be coming for you. There was no way you were going to get away with what you did to my little girl. There was no way I would allow you to do that to someone else’s little girl.”

Jack tried to say something around the gag. Her father grabbed his ear and twisted it until all Jack was doing was crying.

“Don’t try to talk, I don’t want to hear you.”

The man rested his head back on Jack’s head as he waited for the young man to quiet down.

“Better. Now then, I have you here and I am putting an end to you. We both know that, but what you don’t know is how. I want to share that with you. So I will explain as I we go along.”

Jack felt the intrusion, the sudden, stabbing into his rectum, but it wasn’t all that painful and since her dad didn’t move it wasn’t him extracting some form of poetic justice.

“That was the tip of an enema bag. I am going to shoot your bottom full of water. “

There was a rushing sensation, a feeling of being full to the point of Jack’s stomach beginning to ache. Then, the thing was removed and jack was drug into a sitting position.

Now that his face was up, he could see his captor clearly. Bev’s dad looked like he always did. A t-shirt and jeans plus that stupid trucker hat he always wore on the weekends. He was standing beside an old wooden canoe that Jack was sitting in. Jack had his hands and feet cuffed together, he was naked, and now that her dad had given him the enema, he had to go very badly.

Bev’s dad picked up another canoe, and turned it upside down. He put it over the top of Jack, so that his head was poking out of a hole that had been cut in the middle. Then, he started moving around the boat.

“I have packed the edge of this top canoe with powder and ball bearings. If these latches are flipped, the whole thing turns into a pipe bomb. I don’t want you getting out of this.”

Jack bit down on the gag to keep quiet.

After that, the guy put on a pair of chest waders, the big rubber pants that some men wore to walk through a river when fishing, and then he smiled at Jack. Bev’s dad walked to the end of the boat.

“Have you figured out what is going to happen yet?”

Jack shook his head a tiny bit, afraid to move. He felt a bubble in his stomach and fought not to shit himself in the boat.

Her dad pushed the boat out a bit and began to wade into the tiny pond. “This is only a few feet deep, so I am going to push you out to the middle and anchor you there.”

Jack turned his head to look at the man when he moved up to the side of the boat. “This is one of the oldest forms of torture. I am going to leave you here, and you are going to shit yourself. The smell is going to draw in flies and they will lay eggs on you. Especially in those small cuts I made on your back. ”

Jack’s eyes widened. He began to thrash and pull against the cuffs but the strain caused him to let loose. His ass emptied into the boat in a rumbling fart that he and his friends would have laughed at any other time. He felt the gooey mass expand around him in the boat.

“That’s right. The fly larva will hatch and eat you. This will be slow and terrible. You will feel them wiggling and working around and you won’t be able to stop them. This is horrible and I hope you suffer. After what you did to my little angel, you deserve to suffer.”

Bev’s dad waded away, leaving Jack to stew in his juices and wait. Once he was out of the water and all of the stuff had been gathered up he turned back to the condemned. “By the way, this is private property. No one is around and no one is going to hear you try to scream around that gag. You are a pretty big boy, so I expect you to survive through at least two hatchings. You might die from starvation or de-hydration, but I don’t think you will. Remember, you deserve this.”

Jack had screamed at her father as he walked away. He screamed again when he heard the first of the buzzing.

*****

It hurt so bad, clawing at one hand to try and get enough skin and meat out of the way so that he could get loose. That pain was nothing though. It had been two days. He found out that the flies hatch from the eggs in about a day.  His back was on fire. Burning, tingling and stabbing all at once with a healthy dose of itch included.

The buzzing was so loud. They were all around the canoe as another one landed on his head beside his ear. The little bastard was crawling into his ear. Jack slammed his head sideways and tried to smash it, but it didn’t work. He could feel it in his ear.

He pulled at the handcuff and when his hand didn’t slip through, he screamed around the gag.

Again.

And again.

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“I don’t know about this.”

“I think you’re going to love it.”

“But what if we get caught?”

“Who is going to catch us here?”

“But …”

“No. No ‘But’. We have lain in bed talking about this before. I know you want to try it. I want to try it too.”

“I’m sorry; I’m just worried about what can happen.”

“I love you and I will make sure nothing ever happens to you.”

She looked down at her shoes, blushing a deep red, and then peeked up at him through her eyelashes. “Ok. I love you too.”

The big man lifted her chin and leaned down to place a soft, sweet kiss on her lips before saying, “Do you want to start?”

The petite young woman shook her head no, but there was a mischievous grin on her face. One that reached her eyes and made them sparkle.

“Pick how I should start.”

She pointed. He reached over to the table, and picked up a pair of pliers. She nodded and giggled.

Then he turned towards me. He lifted the pliers in front of the eye that wasn’t swollen shut and flexed them so that I could see.

“Now pick where I should start baby.”

The pixie woman that I had been flirting with at the bar walked up beside him, her fingertip tracing a line around full, luscious lips before pointing at me with one bright red finger nail.

After that, I screamed.

Back in the Saddle

I am swamped at work with the installation of my new project. I warned you that I might miss a post or two and last week that is exactly what happened.

But I’m back.

The following story was accepted and published by Hazardous Press in “A Quick Bite of Flesh” an anthology of zombie flash fiction. I really like this story and am proud to be able to offer it to all of you.  If you enjoy it, be sure to check out the anthology.

L. E. White

Like Father Like Son

“Pa, what are they?”

“Don’t ask questions boy. Run!”

Joe turned on his heel and ran for the trail that he and his father had followed to get on top of this hill. It was lucky that the moon was full; the light let him see where they had staked the horses for the night. The problem was that it also let him see the staggering bodies that were attacking his favorite horse.

Joe pulled his pistol while watching Blackie kick one of the attackers in the chest. Savages that looked like men but smelled like a dead dog that had been lying out in the sun. The only thing that got them up and moving was Billy’s screams. Poor old man had walked away from the fire to take a leak when those Injuns had jumped him.

“Don’t shoot and don’t stop,” Joe’s pa said. He grabbed Joe by the collar to drag him towards the path. “We can’t save the horses. Now move!”

The two men, one past his prime and the other almost there, darted through the brambles. Joe felt things grabbing at him but he couldn’t tell if it was the Indians or the brambles. The fear that he was going to get scalped pushed him on. The old men in town told stories about how those red devils would cut the top off your head as a trophy and Joe had often pulled on his own hair while thinking about it. He couldn’t think of anything worse than a scalping and it made him run that much harder.

He heard his pa fall down, and would have sworn he felt the big man’s breath against his back. Joe turned and saw that a crazy Indian had a hold of his Pa’s legs.

The crazy some-bitch shook his head on Pa’s ass before pulling away and tearing a big chunk of meat off. Joe drew and fired, putting hot lead into the man’s chest but it didn’t stop him. The Indian turned to look at Joe, who screamed like his little sister had when he put a dead snake in her doll house. Now that he was close, he could see that the Indian didn’t have eyes, he just had two dark holes in his head where they should have been. Whatever this had been, it wasn’t alive now.

Joe put the next bullet into the damned thing’s head and it fell over on top of his pa. He holstered the Colt and reached down to help his pa up as another one of hell’s heathen rejects came out of the brush towards them.

The big man was afraid. Joe had never seen his father look scared of anything, but tonight his eyes were wide and the moon light reflected off trails of tears that had ran down into his beard. Pa shook his arm free of Joe’s hand and shoved him away.

A couple more monsters, one wearing a Union soldiers uniform and the other a bowler hat, were stumbling down the trail towards them as the closest one dropped down on top of Pa and bit his shoulder. He screamed and tried to fight for a second before Joe shot this one in the head like he had the other. His Pa looked up at him and screamed, “I said run, boy!”

Joe jumped back, surprised by the anger in his Pa’s voice. He had just saved the older man’s life and now Pa was yelling at him to go away, Joe just stood there, looking at his father in shock.

The walking corpses were only a couple of steps away. After darting a look over his shoulder the injured man looked back to his son and said, “Please, Joe. Just run.”

Pa had never said please. He had spent years telling Joe what to do and whipping him if he didn’t do it. He had taught him that you had to be strong and stand up for yourself, but he had also beaten him down any time he talked back. Now, he begged Joe to leave him to die.

Joe squared his shoulders and raised his pistol. The first bullet flipped what had once been a fighting man ass-over-heels to drop the body in a pile on the ground. Joe figured the other would stop or dodge, but it just dove on top of his pa to try and take another bite. Joe kicked it hard enough to roll it off his father before putting his last ready round into the thing’s head.

“You wouldn’t leave me and I ain’t leavin’ you.” Joe stepped closer to the man who had taught him how to shoot as he reloaded his gun. “Now you lie still.”

With his gun in the air and his feet set wide, Joe wiped his face and watched more of the stinking corpses make their way towards them. He pretended not to notice that the biggest, meanest and best man he had ever known was lying on the ground.

Crying.