Scabs Read online

  The night was half over when they lay spooned against each other breathing heavily with sweat and semen drying into the sheets.

  “You still think I only like white women?”

  Malik kissed the back of her neck gently.

  “Oh, you definitely know how to appreciate a sista.”

  He laughed.

  “I’ll be right back”

  Malik got up from the bed. His legs felt as if they were made of Jello. He staggered into the bathroom and closed the door behind him, grabbing onto the sink to steady himself. He was just about to turn on the lights when he heard them.

  “That bitch must be crazy fucking a big black scab like you. That nasty trifling ho! If you won’t kill that bitch than we will.”

  Malik knew why he hadn’t heard the voices in his head all day. Jennifer and Kelly weren’t in his head any more. They were right there in his bathroom.

  He turned his head and watched as the two small shadows crept from his shower stall forming the tiny teenaged bodies of the two girls who’d tormented him since grade school. They hadn’t changed in almost twenty years. Kelly still wore her ruffled shirts with the Izod sweater and tight Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. Her hair was permed and straightened and hung down to her hips. Jennifer was dressed almost identically except her hair was Jeri curled and she wore a denim jacket with Prince and Michael Jackson buttons pinned all over it and one lace glove. They both were carrying knives.

  “We’re going to cut that disgusting bitch’s heart out.”

  They kept fading in and out of the night. One second they were featureless silhouettes, shadows moving within the darkness, and the next their features were sharp and clear, knives glinting in the moonlight.

  “You can’t be here. This isn’t possible!”

  Malik groped for his medication, shattering the mirror on the medicine cabinet as he ripped the door open and fumbled inside for the little prescription bottle.

  “Are you okay in there?”

  “We’re going to kill that bitch. She shouldn’t have touched you. You’ve contaminated her now with your filthy Black African hands. You were probably just a mercy fuck anyway. She just felt sorry for you. You were her good deed for the day. A charity fuck.”

  “Ewwww! That’s so nasty! How could she do that with you?”

  “She said I was handsome.”

  “You’re not handsome!”

  “She said you were handsome? Ewwww!”

  Malik found the bottle of anti-psychotics and struggled with the child proof cap. He removed the cap just as Kelly stepped forward and slashed his wrist with the knife, fading back into the night after delivering the blow. Malik screamed as Jennifer lashed out and slashed the other wrist.

  “We should just kill you. You’re the one always bringing these whores here and forcing them to have sex with you, making them stoop to your level.”

  “Malik? Are you okay in there?”

  Danika knocked lightly on the bathroom door.

  “No, let’s kill her. She makes us look bad. She makes this filthy black nigger think he’s good enough to be with us. He’s so black he sweats oil.”

  “Yeah, let’s kill that high yellow bitch!”

  Jennifer reached for the doorknob and began to open it. Malik rammed into it slamming it shut and the two girls turned on him and began slashing at him, cutting up his forearms as he struggled to defend himself. He struck at them with his fists, but his arms passed harmlessly through the darkness as the two girls faded in and out of the shadows.

  On the other side of the door Danika had heard enough. Something was wrong. Fear gripped her as she heard Malik in the bathroom arguing and fighting with someone who shouldn’t be there, arguing about killing her. Just minutes ago she had been lying in his arms, thinking to herself how easy it would be to fall in love with this man. Now she was afraid that he was some type of psycho.

  Danika hit 911 on her cell phone and left the line open as she rushed to gather her clothes. Whatever was going on in the bathroom was growing more and more violent. It sounded as if Malik was in pain. She was just about to run out of the house when something in Malik’s voice made her stop. Maybe someone or something was really in there with him?

  “Run, Danika! Get out of here!”

  “Filthy black ape, black scab. You shit-colored African jungle bunny!”

  Malik was covered in cuts and slashes when he came staggering out of the bathroom carrying a knife in each hand.

  Danika watched him slash at the air and then slice his own forehead. Blood rained down his face and dripped from the wounds in his neck, chest and forearms. Danika screamed as she watched Malik’s face twist and contort, morphing between rage and terror as whatever demons he was struggling with made war within him…and he was heading right towards her…swinging the knives.

  Danika ran. She didn’t know where she was going. The house was big and she could not find her way to the front door in the dark so she opened the first door she came to and ducked inside. It was the garage.

  There were big metal canisters that looked like oil drums scattered here and there inside the garage and Danika tried to tell herself that she had just seen too many horror films when she began to speculate on what might be inside. She felt along the wall for the switch to open the garage door, afraid to turn on the light for fear that Malik might find her again. There was no switch. She’d have to open the door manually.

  “That half-white bitch shouldn’t have been slummin’ around with your big gorilla-looking ass. Ya black spook! You so black I can’t see you at night until you smile.”

  “He’s so black he could hide in a coal bin.”

  The voices coming from the house were sounding less and less like Malik and more and more like someone else. Like children’s voices in stereo. It sounded as if he was possessed. There were more sounds of struggle as glass shattered and something heavy fell over with a thud. She heard Malik scream again and wondered if whatever was inside his head had slashed one of those knives across his throat and ended his suffering. But then she heard the voices again.

  “We know that nasty redbone bitch is still here. We’re going to find her. We’ll kill her and then we’ll finish you off, too.”

  “Nooooo!”

  Malik screamed again and Danika stopped halfway to the garage door when she heard him sob and whimper. He was in pain. Those evil voices were torturing him.

  “Leave him alone!” Danika yelled.

  The garage door raised and Malik was standing there in the driveway a knife in one hand and the moonlight behind him silhouetting his form.

  “I said, leave him alone.”

  She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know what she was saying. All she knew was that she had to help. It might be the only way to save her own life as well as Malik’s.

  “You filthy slut! You’ll fuck anything if you’ll fuck this filthy black scab.”

  “He’s so black that when I close my eyes I can see him better!”

  The voices no longer sounded anything like Malik. His lips didn’t even move when they spoke. They were the voices of spiteful children. Conceited little girls who thought it was fun to ridicule anyone that they believed to be less than them.

  “You’re wrong. He’s beautiful.”

  “He’s a nasty black ape!”

  “He’s a beautiful black man. You girls are behind the times. Black is beautiful now. Those light-skinned pretty boys are so eighties. Women want real men these days and the bigger and blacker the better.”

  “She’s lying! Nobody wants you. You’re just a big ugly black African!”

  Malik was still standing there on the driveway holding the knife. His mouth still did not appear to be moving even as insults poured out of him. There were shadows hovering around him. As Danika looked she thought she could almost make out the silhouettes of two young girls. She even imagined she could see their faces twisted into smirks of superiority.

  “They’re wrong. I wouldn’t
have come home with you tonight if that was true. I- I thought I was falling in love with you. We might have fallen in love together if these little bitches hadn’t gotten in the way.”

  Malik turned and looked right at the two shadows standing by his side. He raised his knife to slash into them when the two police officers tackled him knocking him into the garage right into the barrels. Three of the metal canisters fell over and the lid came off of one of them. Danika screamed as a woman’s torso tumbled out of the barrel followed by her head. The disembodied head spun as it tumbled across the garage floor turning towards her. Even dead, Danika could tell that the woman had been very beautiful, with long curly brown hair, light cappuccino-colored skin and hazel eyes just like her own.

  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?”