The smell of fear is a lot like white vinegar mixed with piss and garlic. It lingers in the air and on your clothes for hours, especially when you’ve been standing near it in an enclosed space for a prolonged period. Something about the pheromones we secrete when tens of thousands of years of evolutionary predatory response systems hardwired into our DNA goes into overdrive.
Deer, Moose, Gazelle, and other fauna are more prepared for these kinds of situations, with endorphin glands adapted to overload the sensory system when an apex hunter like a mountain lion or grizzly bear has clamped its jaws down around their necks. The prey go limp. Passive. Their bodies numb and the blank stares with doe eyes glaze over.
Fate accepted. You had a good run.
Humans do not have the capacity for this. We are predators. Even when faced with a grueling and unavoidable death, those prey instincts are overridden with an irrational sense of hope. Clinging to the possibility that they might be freed, might escape, that some guardian angel will deliver them from this pain. That the jaws of the monster that has them just might show them mercy.
Our imaginations turned against us.
This is why we beg. Why we plead. The stench of garlicky piss and vinegar is most pungent in these moments. When pain is the only language being spoken. When terror is the only alphabet we comprehend.
I have him strapped to a metal table and hung upside down. The steel cuffs around his wrists and ankles have long since broken the skin and left behind rigid and crusty rings of dried blood. All that squirming, and nothing to show for it.
We’re in a small shack, about 10x10, located deep in the 400 acre North Texas hunting lease my friends and I use for drinking shitty beer and shooting the occasional trophy buck between November and January.
Unfortunately for this man, it is mid-February, and there is no one around for miles and miles to hear his screams.
I’ve already taken one of his eyes, and poured sulfuric acid in the opposite ear. Half-blind and half-deaf, his equilibrium is off center, caught in a perpetual vertigo. His body is slanted on the table as he futilely tries to keep himself straight.
You might think me a monster, and you’d be right. Something happens to a man when the only thing in the world he truly loved is taken from him. This young man on my table, this wannabe online anarchist, this involuntarily celibate hobgoblin thought he’d go out in a blaze of glory like so many of his predecessors when he walked into that elementary school with an AR-15. He thought his face would be plastered across digital history by every show-boating, bottom-feeding, and fear-dispensing media agency in the US.
I took his cock three days ago, cauterizing the veins and arteries with a blow torch so that he wouldn’t bleed out. He cried. A lot. Any man would. Not that he used it very much throughout the pitiful display of the life he’s lived. Still, I can tell he misses it. Its funny how quickly a nihilist suddenly begins to care about things when they experience true suffering.
I visit him several times a week, checking his feeding tube and replacing his IV to ensure he doesn’t starve out or die from dehydration. The guys I hunt with won’t be back to the lease to prep for the next deer season until mid-July.
Plenty of time to play.
Before we play, I set up the camera that feeds into a live-stream on a cloud in the dark web, where each session is then uploaded by a legion of bots across every social media and video streaming platform. The websites try to take the videos down, but by then, just like revenge porn, its been copied, reposted, and copied again in mass distribution. Like a ceaseless game of whack-a-mole.
While I push the plunger on the syringe filled with 1000 micrograms of LSD into the injection port of his IV, I think about all the women and mothers across our country. How they’ve looked to us men to fix this unrelenting problem. When they seethe with tears streaming down their cheeks, the look of absolute betrayal in their eyes. How we men have failed to fulfill our most fundamental duty.
Protect the offspring.
They’re not wrong. We have failed. Allowing ourselves to get caught up in the pointless debates about banning firearms or developing a better infrastructure for mental illness, as if either of these things will make the monsters go away. We pay bullshit lip-service to the overhaul of a judicial system that’s too weak at the knees and ankles to have any real impact. We pretend that civilized means can fix barbaric ends. We pray to silent gods who refuse to assist the cowardice of our apathy, while children continue to be gunned down by maniacs looking for 15 minutes of infamy.
It was 9:23am on January 28th when he shot his way into my son’s school. Moving from classroom to classroom. The survivors told accounts of high pitched squeals and wails before being drowned out by the rapid blasts of a 5.56, high-power carbine rifle. Followed by a haunting silence.
They found my son’s body under his desk. He and another little boy were embracing each other when their lives were taken.
Once the carnage was over, the shooter must have suddenly developed a sense of self-preservation and fled the scene before emergency responders could arrive.
I found him before the police did.
His pupil dilates as the effects of the LSD begin to set in. I play a musical number of death metal and baroque on the surround-sound speakers in the shack as I click on the strobe lights. I keep a space heater near him to keep his blood warm so that he won’t freeze to death, and so that his nerve endings can’t escape to the numbness of winter’s cold.
He has plenty of teeth left for me to take, and I haven’t gotten around to using the bottle-cap opener on his fingernails yet. Today I’ve brought a jagged block of dry ice that will eventually make its way into the cretin’s rectum.
In his one eye I can still see my son crouching under his desk, holding that other boy and telling him that everything will be alright. That his dad is gonna come save them.
And for the next 18 hours, I become the Devil.
Chapel Perilous is now available in paperback and ebook!
Beautifully written
"Its funny how quickly a nihilist suddenly begins to care about things when they experience true suffering."
So true.