A Little Chat

When I entered the room, everything was already in place. I appreciate good prep and well understand the revealed costs of sloppy planning, having too many times spent precious hours compensating for amateurism and the preciousness of dilettantism. These jobs can be so messy when not properly attended, and posers and show-offs merely increase the difficulty of a hard circumstance.
I am an executioner. I receive pay and even the occasional plaudit for making people offensive to my employer non-existent. To that end, often at my discretion, usually at direct request, I see to it that those dispatched enjoy a journey of agony so remarkably intense that demise is a welcomed mercy at my hand. Often the pain inflicted is sufficient to send my subjects into the great beyond without further inducement on my part.

Which is fine. I find no particular joy in my work, it is but a job and one few are properly suited to. Through training and practice one develops skills, but the drive to such avocation must exist innate: executioners are born then made good through work. Those who take up the work owing to some psychopathology or sociopathology invariably leave the field, often the way many of their subjects do – by death’s official hand. I’ve dispatched more than a few.

Today was different – a little moonlighting. A favor to a friend if you will. Death was not the object, no. Something much deeper and more grievous – I would find this wretch’s spirit and rip it from him. I would eviscerate without ever touching a blade. I’m just that good.

I didn’t know him, didn’t know why, don’t care. Ever. Not my place. I am a technician, an engineer of pain, of death, but not a moral authority or judge. I seek no confession or repentance, I offer no atonement. Those fall out of the purview of my department. I’m the nuts and bolts guy, dealing in hard realities, not squishy abstracts. Salvation? Repentance? Take it to the man in the dress if you want someone to feel your pain. You come to me, you feel your own as well as any I can muster for you.

Usually I work in a fairly sterile official environment – blank walls, tile floor with a drain, good light but not too bright (I have my vision to consider), a rolling worktable for my tools, and a single metal chair or gurney for the subject. Intensity Rooms, as we call them, are ideally isolated with good sound-proofing and access to running water. Water is vital for cleaning up as well as making a mess out of someone, so a good room always has a nozzle.

As I wasn’t working in my usual institutional environment I was pleased at the steps taken to assure my maximum effectiveness. The room appeared as an add-on to a residential house: tile floor, glass walls, decent ceiling clearance.

It had been cleared of everything but a single chair, upon which the subject had the occasion to be lashed. The walls were enshrouded in black to control the light, visibility, and to deaden sound. As this was to transpire in a fairly populated suburban setting, I took the unusual step of turning on some music, giving it some volume. It was just me and him. As it should be.

The music was my own, something driving yet grating, like running the finest edge of a cheese grater across the inside of your skull, back and forth with increasing urgency. I wisely wore earplugs: often even with gags and other sonic muffling accoutrements the subject can manifest cries so shrill as to leave one with hearing loss if not adequately prepared. My ears still ring from an evisceration in Wrilling where the subject shook so violently as to dislodge my ear protection and render me permanently impaired.
Such are the hazards of such work. Beats plumbing…
He was naked but for a sack over his head. His hands were cuffed behind him and he was additionally secured to the chair (which was bolted to the floor) by his ankles. He wasn’t going anywhere. I had all day.
I stepped over to him after setting my toolkit on the table which had been set for me. As the music wailed I leaned in close to his head. “Can you hear me now?” I ground my boot heel on his left foot’s little toes, crushing them. He shuddered then slammed his bagged head right into my nose, breaking it, blood gushing. He had spirit. Even pained, I found that to be good. I was there to remove it, crush it, demolish it, shred it beyond any recognition – I needed to know where it was.

I stood, grabbing my bleeding nose with my left hand, elbowing his face with my right, knocking a few teeth out. They oozed out in a bloody drool under the sack which obscured him from me. He heard me.

I was furious, more at myself than him. I hadn’t even changed out of my street clothes, my shirt was saturated with blood – my blood. I got cocky, and the pro knows that getting cocky is a sure way to get yourself fucked up. And with no one more so than a person you are about to kill, a person who knows you are going to kill them. They don’t tend toward tolerance or ready compliance – most when pressed will fight to stay alive.

In those moments, I am the one they fight. Hence the precautions. I am the vanguard against run-amok disregard for rule of authority: after me comes chaos. With me comes chaos controlled. That is the role of the executioner: chaos controlled.
He got me right on the nose. Assuredly broken. It hurt an awful lot, my eyes welled with tears. I instinctively looked around: any cameras? The threat of embarrassment overcame the pain of injury, an amazing condition. Upon establishing our privacy, the throbbing became one with the pulsing musical beat swirling around us in our special time together, and I grabbed some cotton and stuffed it in my nose. My shirt was a mess. I was annoyed.

I took it off and considered it – if I didn’t give it a good cleaning right now, it was lost. I was at work: lost. I set it aside; I would make use of it soon enough. Long ago I determined to accept loss or personal failure with dispassion – my line of work is about loss and personal failure, to get trapped by sentiment is to perish. I stepped up and kneed him in the nuts. Even though the chair was bolted to the floor, the impact moved him back at least a foot – he literally compressed under my assault.

Then he expanded! I pulled back just as he erupted in puke and blood, cascading from under the sack, rolling down his chest and belly, pooling around his horribly mashed balls. I stepped back and brushed a little puke and what looked to be part of a tooth from my pant cuff. He trembled violently, sweat pouring from him along with more puke and blood. He definitely heard me.

“You know why you’re here.” A statement, not a question. They always know why they are there and to a person deny it till they can endure it no longer. Many cave rather quickly these days as the pussification of our culture has lowered our threshold of pain. Now it hurts too much to even go to work and everybody sits around whining about their pain online. It sickens me.

He was silent. I wasn’t sure if he was being cagey, thought he was being tough, or had swallowed his tongue, so I posited my suggestion more forcefully by bringing a two-foot length of 1.5-inch steel pipe down on his knee, busting the cap right out of his leg, sending it bouncing across the floor. Must have caught him with the edge. Oh well…

The third option averted, he bellowed, “Cocksucker!” I brought the pipe down hard on his shoulder, shattering his right collarbone. He heaved, flopping that direction, and I hit him upside the head with the pipe, just a tap, to keep him focused. He reeled. His chest and crotch were fairly covered with bloody puke and what looked to be chunks of flesh – he probably bit through his cheek. But still he didn’t cry or beg. Defiance. I like it.

I dropped the pipe end down on his right foot – it caught him on the middle toes, breaking three of them nicely, nearly severing the middle one. He jerked. “Still feel tough huh? I’ve got all day. This is just the intro, you can trust me on that. They’ll be finding pieces of you in coyote shit from here to Pomona.” I grabbed my desecrated shirt and stepped over to him. My kid gave me that shirt. Still, as I had executed him several years back the sentiment just wasn’t there.

I took the shirt and wound it into a fairly tight rope. Wrapping it around his neck, I twisted it tight and pulled him up hard. Holding the shirt in my left hand I began to pummel his face through the bag with my right, pounding, pounding.

Then, one good smack and the bag came off. I beheld the wretch. He had allowed his transitory other pursuits to distract him, he had neglected the one person who stood by him and made her sad. The wretch was I.

I woke with a start. I trembled and noticed I was soaked with sweat. Robin slept peacefully next to me. She had been reading more of her grim tales of monsters of days gone by. Once more, her sickness caught up with my madness and it infected my dreams. Sure, I had missed her birthday gift, I deserved the beating. But I was so sick of her psycho nightmares.

I smacked her on the back of the head and pretended to be asleep. She woke up all kerflubbled.

It’s good being a jerk….