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?”
“Fuck you, Vlad. You know I’ll never work for you again after that shit you pulled with the vampire. That damned thing nearly killed me!”
“Well, that is the name of the game, kill or be killed. And besides, you never felt a thing. I mean, you can’t. And how many people have you killed? Just the other night I happened to be walking past this strip club with my trusty camera. I’ve got some lovely photos of you throttling Mikey the pimp right in his own office.”
“You bastard.” It was all I could say. He had me.
“Now what would Evangeline say if you wound up going to prison for twenty years or so? Do you think she’d wait for you? Besides, don’t you think she deserves a boyfriend who can buy her nice things? I pay you well, don’t I?”
“Okay, but it’s double this time.”
I knew Evangeline had set me up. She’d probably been working for Vlad from the very start. But it was too late. I was in love with the deceitful bitch, and no way could a guy who looks like me keep a woman like that without money in his pockets. So I took the fight on a week’s notice without the slightest clue who or what my opponent was.
The guy circles me with a big dopey grin on his face. I suppose it could look menacing if you were prone to fear. I wasn’t. His teeth were unnaturally large and straight and white. Like he had a fetish about toothpaste and dental floss. He had huge puppy dog eyes and pudgy cheeks like an oversized adolescent. A cherubic face, like a choirboy. He didn’t look at all like a killer. Maybe that was the point. Maybe Vlad wanted to watch me tear this guy with the choirboy face into bloody strips of steaming viscera, not so much a traditional gladiatorial event as simply feeding Christians to lions. I knew Vlad wasn’t too fond of Christians anyway.
The guy hits me, and the blow nearly takes my head off. The fucker’s strong, stronger than most humans, but that didn’t mean much. Mike Tyson is stronger than most humans, too. Besides, I have an edge. I don’t feel pain.
The nerve centers in my brain don’t function as they’re supposed to. I can barely feel anything, pain or pleasure. I am a freak of nature, a natural oddity. I grew up in Bill Vlad’s Circus of Oddities. My destitute and drug-addicted parents sold me to him when I was eight years old once they discovered my talent/affliction. I was the boy who could walk on glass and hot coals, who could swim in boiling water, who could cut himself to the bone and stitch up the wound while playing a video game.
Pretty soon I was the circus’ star attraction. During three acts a night, over a period of more than ten years, I was cut, gouged, scalded, burned, beaten, bitten, electrocuted, and crushed. By the time I was seventeen I had broken every bone in my body at least twice and there was not a single patch of skin that wasn’t covered in scar tissue. When the Bill Vlad Circus of Oddities rolled into town, people would flock from all around to watch an adolescent boy get tortured on stage. Sick world we live in.
As Bill Vlad’s Circus grew increasingly more bizarre so did the acts I was forced to perform. I was put into a pit to wrestle bobcats and wild dogs. Once, when I was ten or eleven, I was pitted against a Komodo dragon that Vlad had starved and tortured to make crazy mean. Its razor sharp claws nearly ripped me apart before I snapped its neck. That act became a sensation, and soon I was being matched against increasingly bizarre creatures from alligators to anacondas. The crowds would watch aghast as I was mauled and my flesh was rent to glistening red ribbons, then be amazed when my bleeding body was taken out of the pit and I was given ice cream or a toy. Whenever anyone would protest and accuse Vlad of child abuse, he would cheerfully remind them that: “He can’t feel a thing.”
I would smile and go back to playing my video games as paramedics rushed to stitch my wounds. As soon as I became an adult, Vlad wanted me to add sex to my act, so I began torturing my genitals onstage. I would stab my testicles with spikes and then cauterize the wounds with a Bunsen burner as the crowd cringed and gasped in horror. I grew to hate Bill Vlad. Each time I injured myself I imagined that it was his penis being twisted with vice grips and pierced with spikes and needles, his testes being sliced open and zapped with a taser gun.
The one thing Vlad was good for was anticipating my needs and accommodating them and usually before I was even aware of them. Right after I hit puberty he began supplying me with whores after every show. I didn’t know where he was getting them from but he seemed to know my taste in women without even having to ask. He knew me. He knew all my secret desires.
Every prostitute he sent to my trailer in the middle of the night was of the same type, plain, average, no excessive amounts of make-up, no gaudy, overtly-sexual outfits, a shy demure personality. They looked like anything but prostitutes. They could have been the girl next door who babysat your kid brother on the weekends. They never screamed or winced when they saw my scars, always showing the appropriate amount of sympathy and concern but without the outrage or revulsion that normal women displayed when faced with the multifarious wounds and injuries that decorated my flesh. These girls were pros.
They would take my scarred penis down their throats sucking and licking it like it was the world’s richest source of nourishment and then ride it like they were on a merry-go-round pony. Always with a smile, as if taking my gnarled and tortured flesh between their legs was the most joy they could imagine. But then, once my hour was up, they would leave and I would be alone again. No matter how good they were at maintaining the illusion that they really wanted to be there with me, the illusion always had a time limit. Even if they stayed all night there was no fooling myself that they would stick around in the morning without being paid extra for it. My heart broke every time I watched one of them walk out my door. By the time I was twenty-one I had had enough. I left the circus to become a fighter.
I thought it would be one hell of an asset to be a no-holds-barred fighter who felt no pain, and often it was. I would fight until the last drop of my blood splashed onto the awe-struck faces of the ringside observers. I would fight with broken bones and lacerations, with a concussion, or even when my lungs could not take in enough oxygen to maintain my aggression. I was relentless. Other times it just led to really gruesome defeats. My survival instincts were extremely dull due to the lack of pain response. I discovered that you need pain to be a successful fighter. It tells you when to increase your defense, or fight harder, or when to give up. I was carried out on a stretcher as often as my arm was raised in victory and sometimes was both victor and victim simultaneously. On more than one occasion, fights that I was winning were stopped because I had so grievously injured myself in order to defeat my opponent that the judges and audience alike were repulsed. Many an audience was treated to the sight of me trying to choke out an opponent using my own shattered arm as a garrote. Eventually I was banned from legal competition. That’s when I went underground. It wasn’t long before I ran into Vlad again.
Vlad was heavily tapped into the black market. Most of his bizarre attractions were looted from crypts and shrines, kidnapped from jungles, and smuggled from medical research facilities. Nothing happened underground that Bill Vlad didn’t catch wind of. So when news of a guy who felt no pain and defeated opponents while taking injuries that would have crippled most men began to spread among the criminal underground, Bill Vlad immediately rushed in to capitalize. He offered me twice as much money as I had been making, if only he could pick all of my opponents. I knew there would be a catch but, after years of exploitation and abuse, my sense of self-worth was small enough to be purchased…even by the devil himself…even by Bill Vlad.
So that’s how I wound up back in the employment of the evil showman with the handlebar moustache, flaming red hair, bloodless white skin, and shark-toothed grin like a demented Dumbo the clown, fighting creatures literally plucked from the darkest bowels of the earth. That’s how I wound up facing this guy with the choirboy face and a punch like George Foreman.
He swung at me again and this time I rolled with the punch. Even so, the force behind it was tremendous. I wouldn’t be able to take many more of those. I kicked him in the leg, landing my shin on his thigh with the force of an axe chopping wood. His leg buckled and he had to struggle to stay on his feet. His face contorted in agony but he continued to fight.
I kicked him in the same spot again and again until a ghastly black and purple bruise swelled on his thigh and he began to limp. Then I brought my shin up into his side and was satisfied to feel it meet the resistance of his rib cage and then break on through, causing all the air to expel from the choirboy’s lungs in an anguished bark. He wilted and doubled over and I slipped around him to get him in a chokehold, wanting to end it quickly. He fought hard to keep me from securing my forearm under his chin and around his throat, so I wrapped up his arm instead. I grabbed his wrist and tossed both my legs over his shoulder with his arm locked between them. It took only a thrust of my pelvis to snap his elbow.
Choirboy howled in pain and continued to howl as his flesh began to melt and reform. I could hear his bones snapping and popping as they reorganized themselves under his skin. I didn’t know what the hell was going on until the fur began to sprout all over him. He stopped howling and began to growl. I watched his ears grow and the tail sprout from his ass as his wrestling trunks tore.
“Fucking Vlad! He put me in here with a goddamned werewolf!”
I felt the pressure as his slavering fangs clamped down on my forearm and crushed my ulna and radius bones. Blood spurted from my fractured and lacerated arm, and I knew that I’d been badly wounded. I felt the tug as my forearm separated from my humerus and disappeared down Choirboy’s throat. I didn’t cry out. What would have been the point? I didn’t feel a thing. But now the clock was ticking again. If I didn’t kill this thing soon I would bleed to death.
The silver and gray werewolf stood to his full seven-foot height, with bits of flesh from my amputated arm clinging to the fur around its snout, which was dark and shiny with my blood. He still had those big puppy-dog eyes, but his snarling predatorial grimace didn’t look quite so dopey with the two-inch canines and rows of jagged teeth lining his mouth. I had no idea how to kill a werewolf; I’d never really believed they existed. If I had, I would have been expecting Bill Vlad to eventually put me in with one. I was happy to see that the thing’s arm was still broken. At least it could be hurt.
He came at me fast and low. Before I could defend myself, Choirboy had already ripped open my belly exposing my bloated intestines. Bleeding badly and mortally wounded. I launched myself at it and trapped and snapped its limbs while it tore at me rending my flesh from my bones. All I had to do was kill the thing, and Vlad would get me to a doctor and stitch me up. Then I would take the money, and Babygirl and I would move away from this place, go somewhere, and get married. This was definitely going to be my last fight.
Choirboy broke free and we backed away from each other. He dragged his shattered hind leg and cradled his broken arm with his eyes still blazing with fury. I held my intestines in with one hand and planned my next attack. Even injured, the choirboy was still dangerous- perhaps even more so. His fighting spirit mirrored my own. He would not quit. But he could definitely feel pain.
I began to circle him for the kill. I had broken his leg now along with his other arm. I was just about to charge in and go for the thing’s throat when that sound of bones breaking and popping started again and I could see the bones slipping back into place under the creature’s skin. Choirboy was regenerating. The blood spurting from my severed limb seemed to be slowing down, as was the flow coming from my eviscerated torso and lacerated throat. I was getting dizzy. I had to kill this thing before I bled to death. Choirboy was now fully healed. I watched him flex his now fully rejuvenated arm and rise on his newly healed leg. Steeling myself for another brutal attack, I swore again that this would be my last fight.