Yaccub's Curse Read online

  Yaccub’s Curse

  by Wrath James White

  Kindle Edition

  Necro Publications

  2010

  — | — | —

  YACCUB’S CURSE

  YACCUB’S CURSE © 2009 by Wrath James White

  Cover art © 2009 by Erik Wilson

  This digital edition October 2010 © Necro Publications

  Assistant editors:

  C. Dennis Moore

  Also available in a trade paperback

  ISBN-13: 978-1-889186-84-9

  Also available in a signed & numbered limited edition hardcover.

  Cover, Book Design & Typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  a Necro Publication

  5139 Maxon Terrace • Sanford, FL 32771

  http://www.necropublications.com

  — | — | —

  Special Thanks to Brian Keene for his unending support and guidance, to Rosie Marte for the encouragement, patience, and belief in me during the writing of this, to Christie Marie White for the encouragement and support during the rewriting, to Tod Clark, my dedicated reader for his enthusiasm and encouragement, and to Maurice Broaddus for getting it.

  To Sultan, my son. In hopes that you will inherit a better world than the one I did and a life free of racism, poverty, and violence. This is for you.

  — | — | —

  Prologue

  6,000 years ago on the island of Paean in the Aegean Sea a child was created from the genetic material harvested from the followers of an ancient geneticist from Mecca named Dr. Yaccub. The child was of a pigment many shades lighter than the Africans from whose DNA he had been cloned and his eyes were like the sky and his hair like fields of wheat. But he had been created for destruction and his birth would signify the enslavement of the tribes of Shabass.

  “…This once said by a girl who couldn’t quit/ dope man please can I have another hit/ then the dope man said I don’t give a shit/ if your girl kneels down and sucks my dick.”

  —NWA, “Dope Man”

  ««—»»

  A parade of lost souls shambled up and down Germantown Avenue as the day came to an end. The destitute and drug addled, in various stages of intoxication and withdrawal crowded the street in every direction. They staggered out of bars, nodded in alleys and doorways, and paced the sidewalk, desperate for the next score, eyes filled with hunger and madness. It looked like a blaxploitation version of Night of The Living Dead.

  Dealers as old as fifty and as young as ten slang little white rocks of hardened cocaine mixed with baking soda to legions of the damned. Hopelessly addicted whores gyrated their emaciated half-naked bodies trying to attract a customer with whom to share their disease. Germantown Ave was one big outdoor fleamarket for drugs and sex.

  The gaudy red BMW sat idling at the curb. Its driver, a light-skinned black man with a lopsided yellow-toothed grin, leered out at the whores wandering the avenue. The passenger in the back seat was obscured by night, watching as a teenage whore with a large round ass that had somehow survived the ravages of chronic cocaine use stepped out of the shadows. Those remarkable buttocks bounced and jiggled seductively as she strolled the avenue.

  She had full succulent lips that were chapped and cracked where they had burned on the end of a glass pipe and breasts that had likewise remained full and ripe. She hadn’t yet lost as much weight as the other whores on the avenue but her hygiene had fallen to utter slovenliness. Her hair was a ragged tangle of split ends and singed knaps where a hot comb had burned it down to the roots. Her breath was an exhalation from the grave as if she’d brushed her teeth with road-kill and the stench wafting from between her thighs was like she’d recently been inseminated by a corpse.

  The minute she spotted the hideous gold-clustered front grille of the BMW sedan, she made a beeline for it. Even through the dense miasma of narcotics clouding her mind she could recognize a drug dealer when she saw one. Her foul breath steamed through the open window into the face of the pale grinning demon that sat behind the windshield.

  “Hey, sexy, I’ll suck your dick if you got some rock.”

  A ghostly hand wearing a diamond pinky ring and platinum Rolex rose up from the man’s lap holding a crack pipe loaded with little white stones of hardened cocaine.

  “Get in.”

  Quickly she wiggled around to the passenger side door and into the car.

  “Hi, my name is Sissy,” she said, smiling wide, her eyes aflame with desire for the rock rattling around in the fire chamber of the little pipe.

  “I don’t give a fuck what your name is,” the man replied. When he turned to look the prostitute in the eyes she was shocked to see his white skin and blue eyes.

  “You’re a white boy?”

  “What tha fuck do you care? A cock is a cock right? And a rock is a rock.” He unzipped his pants and withdrew his modest erection. Then he grabbed a handful of Sissy’s hair and shoved her head down into his lap ramming his penis past her tonsils. Sissy sucked obediently to keep from gagging as he stomped on the gas and sped off down the street.

  The fire red BMW screeched into the parking lot of Lingelbach elementary school just as Sissy began to scream. Skeletal white hands held her head down as his organ exploded in her mouth, filling her throat with his warm seed. He held her head down as he continued to cum then he pinched her nose shut and shoved his cock even deeper into her throat until she choked. She gagged reflexively, her throat spasming and her stomach heaving, regurgitating into his lap as his cock swelled in her esophagus and semen spurted down her throat . He still did not release her. She began to thrash and fight against him as semen and vomit clogged her airway and the man continued to pinch her nose shut, He shoved a gun under her chin.

  “If you bite me, bitch, you die that same second. You heard? Now, keep suckin’. You swallow my cum now bitch or I’ll fly your fuckin’ wig. Nasty bitch threw-up all over me. Yellow Dog, can you believe this shit?”

  The driver, who was called Yellow Dog by everyone except his mother, laughed and shook his head. The white man continued applying pressure to the whore’s neck, forcing his undiminished erection deeper and deeper until he could feel her mouth pressing into his pubic hair. Her eyes were wild, gasping for air, as he tucked the gun back into its holster and pinched her nose shut again. She punched at his thighs as tears wept from her eyes and she swallowed her own thick vomit and bile, almost throwing up again as it slid down her throat in warm nauseating chunks.

  He let go of her nose and raised the crack pipe to his lips.

  “Fire this shit up for me, Yellow Dog. I want to get high while this bitch sucks me off.”

  “Damn, Scratch, you got this bitch’s vomit all over you. I ain’t touchin’ that shit. It’s all over your hands too!”

  “Fuck it. I’ll do it myself then.”

  Even through her agony her eyes tracked the pipe as it fluttered above her, wanting to lose herself in its vapors. Scratch laughed, a shrill maniacal cackle, as he released her head in order to bring the disposable lighter to the bottom of the pipe and inhale deeply of the narcotic fumes.

  Sissy’s eyes rolled in her skull, wide with shock, as she raised her head from the white man’s lap and gasped for breath. She fought back the spasm in her stomach that threatened to let loose with another bout of vomiting.

  “You mutherfucker! You almost killed me!”

  “I guess I didn’t try hard enough then.”

  He inhaled deeply and the crack pipe flared. He removed a .45 automatic from a shoulder holster as the cocaine roared through his veins. Scratch’s eyes glowed like halogen lamps.

  Scratch pointed the gun at the whore�
�s stomach and pulled the trigger twice, blowing its contents onto the opposite door. The whore’s aborted fetus flopped out onto the floor of the BMW along with much of her intestines.

  He took another hit from the pipe then put the gun to the woman’s temple and voided her brains onto the car window. He reached across the woman’s corpse to open the car door. An avalanche of blood poured from her stomach wound, her mouth, nose, ears, and the hole in her temple. Her body flopped around in the seat, convulsing in its death throes. The driver shook his head in disgust looking back over the front seat at the dead prostitute bleeding all over the leather upholstery.

  “I hope to hell you don’t think I’m cleaning that shit up! Why’d you have to do that shit in the car?”

  “Fuck it. I’ll buy a new one.”

  The drug dealer opened the car door and kicked the prostitute’s brutalized corpse out onto the sidewalk where it continued to kick and spasm. He reached down and picked the fetus up from where it lay half under the front seat. It had been nearly decapitated by the gunshot to its mother’s belly. He held it up to his face and examined it closely.

  “That’s fuckin’ nasty, yo! What the hell are you lookin’ at that thing for?”

  Scratch tossed the dead baby out of the car onto the sidewalk beside its mother.

  “Just fuckin’ drive.”

  — | — | —

  Chapter 1

  “If you don’t know me then you’ve no right to judge me! I’ve got a good heart but this heart can get ugly.”

  —DMX

  ««—»»

  I bite down on the barrel. I never liked the way metal tasted, especially not gun metal and not a gun that’s been used as much as mine. I can still taste sulfur and gunpowder on the steel. I can taste the oil from its last cleaning. My teeth grate against the metal and a sound like metal in a blender rakes through my skull. I try to imagine what the bullet will feel like. If there will be pain before oblivion.

  Che` Guevera said “Freedom comes from the barrel of a gun.” He meant freedom from your oppressors, but the axiom applies equally to freedom from one’s self. From what we are. What we have become.

  “I’m going to blow my fucking head off!”

  I said it aloud for my own benefit. I needed to hear it. I wasn’t trying to shock anyone. There’s no one else in the house but me. I just wanted to see if I could actually say it. If I could mouth the words around the gun barrel. To test the depths of my conviction. I felt as if I needed to get the words out before the gun would fit properly.

  I slip my finger onto the trigger. I’m still not ready. There’s still more words inside of me. Words that have to be spoken before I pump this last shell into my skull and rid the world of another young monster. You’ve got to know why this is necessary.

  I reach over and turn on the old tape recorder. It whirs to life and I let out a deep sigh. I open my mouth to speak but the only things that come out of me are tears. They shame me. Not because I think they make me weaker or less of a man, but because I have no right to them. Not after all the pain I’ve caused.

  It takes me a few more minutes to get myself back under control before I can continue. I press rewind on the tape recorder and erase the sound of my self-pity. That’s at least one secret I will keep to myself. I press play again.

  I’m going to tell you about evil. It’s a long involved story and it damn sure ain’t pretty, but it’s something I’ve got to tell, something you’ve got to hear. Because I want you to hate it like I do. I want you to fight it, in the world and in yourself. Because there’s evil everywhere. Every-fucking-where.

  The story has to begin with me because I’m part of it. I’m a great big fucking part of it.

  My name is Malik Black. I was born in Philadelphia’s Germantown section. G-town. The ghetto. A slightly nicer ghetto than some of the others in Philadelphia, but a ghetto nonetheless. My shocked and appalled little body was evicted screaming and protesting from my mother’s womb as the summer died and gave birth to fall in September of 1985. I grew up during the height of the drug epidemic or war or whatever the fuck you want to call it. By the time I was old enough to walk the streets unchaperoned they were already tacky with blood, crunchy with broken crack viles, beer bottles, and hypodermic needles, filthy with spent shell casings and wasted dreams. I was carrying a gun myself by the age of ten.

  Around the way they called me “Snap” because my temper was as quick as my trigger finger. I’d have fit right in in the Wild West. I killed my first human being at the age of twelve. I’d like to tell you it was something I had to do, that my back was against the wall and I had no other choice. But we’ve all got choices. I killed because I wanted to.

  Everybody thinks I’m crazy. I probably am. I didn’t start out as a killer though. None of us did. The psychotropic depressant of ghetto life, of waking up everyday to watch the roaches scurry from the morning light and the crack whores scamper to catch the last trick of the day, of going to sleep to the sound of gunfire and the cries and curses of domestic violence, altered critical nuero-pathways in my brain warping an otherwise civilized human being into the hardened gangsta I am now.

  Perhaps I am a bad seed genetically predisposed to murder, some mad scientist’s joke on the world like Scratch said. Some may argue that I inherited my rage from my father and all the generations of angry black men that preceded him. I don’t know what the truth is anymore. Nothing makes sense.

  I didn’t vivisect animals in my basement, set fire to old folk’s homes, or read crime novels and dream of infamy. I wasn’t the only thing that went wrong with my generation. It was the entire decade in which I was born that was hostile and deranged and I simply conformed to this fucked up climate, instinctively acting for the preservation of self. But even that might be a lie. It’s possible, that I started it all, if not now then generations ago, eons ago.

  It should have been no surprise that the rage, violence, hatred, and hopelessness of G-town, the same place that gave birth to me, would have drawn an even greater evil to it. That worse things than our little gang would be attracted to the heat of gunfire, the screams of the dying, and the rivers of blood that ran down the street gutters like worthless sewage. G-town was the nexus of all realities. It’s where all the shit landed in Philadelphia when it fell.

  But how would we have spotted a monster amongst the madness we lived in everyday? Most of my friends were murderers, thieves, drug dealers. Some were rapists. Some were worse. You pick out the monster. I had bodies on me too. None of us were angels.

  Now, it’s easy to see Scratch for what he really is. Hindsight is pretty damn near omniscient. But back then dude just looked like one of us. Like just another pissed off thug. We were so busy doing our own evil we wouldn’t have recognized Satan if he’d been sitting right beside us waiting for us to pass him a blunt or a forty, which he often was. Yeah, I brought the devil to his throne in G-town. But I was the one who sent his ass back to hell too.

  Of course Scratch was well on his way to becoming a serious ghetto star when I met him in that old lot on Cherokee Street five years ago. With my help though, he became a superstar.

  ««—»»

  Germantown, sitting like a jungle cat waiting to spring on the Northwest side of Philadelphia, wasn’t what you would call hell. That was further east in North Philadelphia. But it was a hellacious place for us impressionable youths to learn the ways of the world. I often wonder how my perspective might have been different if I had grown up in Cherry Hill New Jersey or some lily-white suburb on the Main Line. How long would it have taken me to learn to hate? In Germantown we were weaned on violence and hatred. My boy Huey liked to say that when kids are born in the ghetto the doctors smacked them until they stopped crying.

  G-town was where all the Black folks from North Philly moved when they started making a little bank and got bold enough to attempt to improve their living conditions. It was pure futility really because as soon as Black families moved in the white families move
d out, the city began to neglect the neighborhood, allowing it to fall into disrepair becoming no better than the slums they left behind. They paid exorbitant prices to escape the ghetto and buy into this more integrated neighborhood only to see their property values plummet as white folks packed up as fast as black folks moved in and with them left all the public utilities and maintenance. Street lamps stayed broken for months casting entire blocks into a deadly sinister darkness that incubated crime. The streets fell into disrepair as the road crews neglected them allowing them to crack and split becoming an obstacle course of potholes and fissures. The sidewalks crumbled providing ammo for rock fights. Sometimes the trash wouldn’t be picked up for weeks and garbage would blow up and down the street smothering the neighborhood in stench and debris.

  Mom and I took to driving our garbage up to Chestnut Hill and dropping it off in front of the homes of rich white folks. Buildings would sometimes burn to the ground before fire trucks arrived and then their charred skeletons would remain for years, swaying in the breeze and providing refuge for crackheads, junkies, and winos. When they finally got around to demolishing the rat infested deathtraps, they rarely rebuilt. The neighborhood was filled with these empty lots scarring the landscape; irregularly spaced between the endless rows of identical homes like gaps in a smile. Police brutality and harassment increased exponentially with the Caucasian exodus and getting an officer’s help was like trying to squeeze your ass through a donut hole. By the time my generation came along, this nice integrated neighborhood had become like an extension of North Philly; just another fuckin’ ghetto filled with the angry and the hopeless.