65 Proof (54 page)

Dominick reached into the Torture Man’s cabinet and removed a can of lighter fluid. He popped the top and squirted it at the Torture Man’s face.

The Torture Man screamed when the alcohol hit his punctured eye. He stumbled backwards and tripped over the generator.

“You little bastard! When I get you…”

Dominick grabbed the nearest object — a digital camera sitting on the cart — and fell upon the Torture Man. He brought the weapon down on his tormentor’s face, again and again, the plastic case cracking and splintering as he used it to knock out teeth and break bone.

The Torture Man lashed out, connecting with the side of Dominick’s head. Dominick fell onto his back, landing hard. His vision blurred, and something was poking him behind his left shoulder.

Next to him, the Torture Man sat up. He grabbed the pencil and pulled. His eye slurped out of the socket, looking like a tiny red jellyfish trailing its tentacles. The Torture Man howled, dropping the pencil. The eye swung freely down at cheek level, hanging by a coil of optic nerves.

Dominick reached behind his back, seeking the source of his discomfort. He pulled it into view.

It was a steel clamp, almost the size of his hand. He squeezed the ends and it opened its jaws, baring tiny teeth. A cord was attached to the bottom, and Dominick followed it along the floor to where it plugged into the electric generator.

He glanced at the Torture Man, who had managed to find his rubber whip. He smacked it against Dominick’s face, the pain instant and staggering.

Dominick rolled onto his side, still gripping the clamp. The whip lashed across his naked back, and he cried out.

“You think you know pain?!” the Torture Man bellowed. “I’ll show you pain!”

Dominick spun around onto his bottom, taking another whip stroke in the face. He thrust the clamp at the Torture Man, securing it to his ankle.

Then he stretched out his hand and hit the switch on the generator.

The reaction was instant.

The Torture Man doubled in half like a book slamming shut, and pitched head-first to the floor. A strong whiff of ozone plumed around him as his grotesque body shook in racking spasms. Blood sprayed from his mouth and a piece of tongue escaped his clenched teeth and tumbled down his chin.

Dominick crab walked backwards, putting distance between them. He watched, wide-eyed, as the clamp on the Torture Man’s leg began to smoke, and then ignited the soaked-in lighter fluid.

The Torture Man burned like kindling.

Dominick pulled his gaze away and found the drawer next to the cabinet that held his clothes. He tried to ignore the popping sound of blistering flesh and the Torture Man’s gurgling moans. By the time he’d tied his shoes the moans had died along with the monster.

The can of lighter fluid was on the cart, next to a pair of tin snips. Dominick shoved the snips in his back pocket and squirted fluid onto the rack. Then he did the same to the Torture Man’s dreaded cabinet and the instruments it contained.

They burned well.

Finally, he went back into the Waiting Room and doused the walls, staring one last time at the picture of himself on the rack, watching it burn.

They would be coming. Soon. He had to get away.

The door to the courtyard was open, and amazingly, no one was around. It made sense — the Hall Monitors hadn’t expected to escort him out of there for another few hours.

Dominick stepped out into the fresh air. The sun winked through the trees like an old friend. A light breeze cleared the stench of urine from his nostrils.

The fence was just beyond the basketball courts, locked and topped with razor wire. Impossible to climb over.

But he wasn’t climbing.

Two minutes with the tin snips, and he was though the fence.

Freedom enveloped him like a mother’s love.

He ran off into the woods, giddy, yet knowing that someday he would return.

But not as a victim.

Dominick had read the forbidden history books. He knew that a hundred years ago there was no torture in America’s Public Schools. There was once a time when eleven-year-olds like himself went to school to learn. When education wasn’t Government indoctrination. When children were free.

The Torture Man, evil as he was, was just a symptom of the disease. Both a part of the system, and a product of it.

But Dominick knew there were others like himself. Fighters, who sought change.

He would meet up with these people. Grow strong. And in time, when he returned to this place, it wouldn’t be as a victim.

It would be as a liberator.

Dominic Patalglia ran through the woods, not looking back at the Elementary Camp. His footfalls were sure and strong, and as he ran he could swear that he heard the sound of a thousand boys and girls behind him, cheering.

I wrote this for the anthology Wolfsbane & Mistletoe, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner. It was one of those stories that practically wrote itself. Werewolves have always been one of my favorite monsters, and I was thrilled to have a chance to cut loose and let my imagination run wild. Some quick notes: The Salvation Army is a wonderful organization with over 3.5 million volunteers, and I’m pretty sure none of them are cough syrup swilling psychotics. The names used in this story are all names of characters from famous werewolf movies. Unless someone tries to sue me, in which case I made all of them up. (L.L. Cool J also did a rocking version of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.”) While the modern Bible is missing many of its original passages, the Book of Bob isn’t one of them. You’re probably getting it confused with the lost Book of Fred. Other than that, everything in this story is 100% true.

R
obert Weston Smith walked across the snow-covered parking lot carrying a small plastic container of his poop.

Weston considered himself a healthy guy. At thirty-three years old he still had a six-pack, the result of working out three times a week. He followed a strict macrobiotic diet. He practiced yoga and tai chi. The last time he ate processed sugar was during the Reagan administration.

That’s why, when odd things began appearing in his bowel movements, he became more than a little alarmed. So alarmed that he sought out his general practitioner, making an appointment after a particularly embarrassing phone call to his office secretary.

Weston entered the office building with his head down and a blush on his ears, feeling like a kid sneaking out after curfew. He used the welcome mat to stamp the snow off his feet and walked through the lobby to the doctor’s office, taking a deep breath before going in. There were five people in the waiting room, two adults and a young boy, plus a nurse in pink paisley hospital scrubs who sat behind the counter.

Weston kept his head down and beelined for the nurse. The poop container was blue plastic, semi-opaque, but it might as well have been a police siren, blinking and howling. Everyone in the room must have known what it was. And if they didn’t at first, they sure knew after the nurse said in a loud voice, “Is that your stool sample?”

He nodded, trying to hand it to the woman. She made no effort to take it, and he couldn’t really blame her. He carried it, and a clipboard, over to a seat in the waiting room. Setting his poop on a table atop an ancient copy of
Good Housekeeping
, he got to work filling out his insurance information. When it came time to describe the nature of his ailment, he wrote down “intestinal problems.” Which was untrue---his intestines felt fine. It’s what came out of his intestines that caused alarm.

“What’s in the box?”

Weston looked up, staring into the big eyes of a child, perhaps five or six years old.

“It’s, um, something for the doctor.”

He glanced around the room, looking for someone to claim the boy. Three people had their noses stuck in magazines, one was watching a car commercial on the TV hanging from the ceiling, and the last appeared asleep. Any of them could have been his parent.

“Is it a cupcake?” the boy asked.

“Uh… yeah, a cupcake.”

“I like cupcakes.”

“You wouldn’t like this one.”

The boy reached for the container.

“Is it chocolate?”

Weston snatched it up and set it in his lap.

“No. It isn’t chocolate.”

“Show it to me.”

“No.”

The boy squinted at the sample. Weston considered putting it behind his back, out of the child’s sight, but there was no place to set it other than the chair. It didn’t seem wise to put it where he might lean back on it.

“It looks like chocolate. I think I can see peanuts.”

“Those aren’t peanuts.”

In fact, gross and disturbing as it sounded, Weston didn’t know what those lumps were. Which is why he was at the doctor’s office.

He glanced again at the three people in the waiting room, wondering why no one bothered to corral their son. Weston was single, no children. None of his friends had children. Being a mechanical engineer, he didn’t encounter children at his job. Perhaps today’s parents had no problems letting their kids walk up to strangers and beg for cupcakes.

“Mr. Smith?” the pink paisley nurse said. “Please come with me.”

Weston stood, taking his poop through the door, following the nurse down a short hallway and into an examining room.

“Please put on the gown. I’ll be back in a moment.”

She closed the door behind him. Weston stared at the folded paper garment, setting on the edge of a beige examination table also lined with paper. He set the container down on next to a jar of cotton swabs. Then he removed his coat, shoes, jeans, boxer shorts, and polo shirt, placed them in a neat pile on the floor, and slipped his arms through the gown’s sleeve holes. It felt like wearing a large, stiff napkin.

Weston shivered. It was cold in the room; examination rooms always seemed to be several degrees too cool for comfort. He stood there in his socks, rubbing his bare arms, waiting for the nurse to come back.

She eventually did, taking his temperature and blood pressure, then left him again with the promise that Dr. Waggoner would be there shortly.

A minute passed. Two. Three. Weston stared at the ceiling tiles, thinking about the hours he’d spent on the Internet looking for some sort of clue to what strange disease he had. There was plenty of disturbing content about bowel movements, including a website where people actually sent in pictures of theirs so others could rate them, but he’d found nothing even remotely close to the problem he was having.

The door opened, derailing his train of thought.

“Mr. Smith? I’m Dr. Waggoner. Please, sit down.”

Weston sat on the table, the paper chilly under his buttocks. Dr. Waggoner was an older man, portly. Bald, but with enough gray hair growing out of his ears to manage a comb over. He had on trendy round eyeglasses with a faux tortoise shell frame, and a voice that was both deep and nasally.

“Your blood pressure is normal, but your temperature is 100.5 degrees.” He snapped on some latex gloves. “How are you feeling right now?”

“Fine.”

“Any aches, pains, problems, discomforts?”

“No. I’m a little chilly, but that’s all.”

Dr. Waggoner removed some sort of scope and checked Weston’s eyes and ears as they talked.

“How long have you been having these intestinal problems?”

“Um, on and off for about three months. But they aren’t really intestinal problems. I’m finding, uh, strange things in my bowel movements.”

“Can you describe them for me?”

“Like little stones. Or things that look like strips of fabric.”

Dr. Waggoner raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I have to ask the obvious question first.”

Weston waited.

“Have you been eating little stones or strips of fabric?”

The doctor grinned like a Halloween pumpkin. Weston managed a weak smile.

“Not that I’m aware of, Doctor.”

“Good to know. Tell me about your diet. Has it changed recently? Eating anything new or exotic?”

“Not really. I eat mostly health foods, have been for the last ten years.”

“Been out of the country in the last six months?”

“No.”

“Do you eat a lot of rare meat, or raw vegetables?”

“Sometimes. But I don’t think I have a tapeworm.”

Dr. Waggoner chuckled.

“Ah, the Internet. It gives everyone a doctorate in medicine.”

Weston did the open his mouth and say “aaaaah” thing, then said, “I know I’m not a doctor, but I checked a lot of sites, and the things in my stool, they don’t look like tapeworm segments.”

“Stones and fabric, you said. Can you be more specific?”

“The stones are sort of white. Some very small, like flecks. Other times bigger.”

“How big?”

“About the size of my thumb.”

“And the fabric?”

“There have been different colors. Sometimes red. Sometimes black. Sometimes blue.”

“How closely have you examined these items?”

Weston frowned. “Not too closely. I mean, I never took them out of the toilet and picked them up or anything. Except for that.” Weston pointed to the stool on the table.

“We’ll have the lab take a look at that. In the meantime, I’m going to have to take a look myself. Can you bend over the table and lift up your gown, please?”