#;gore

"Drop it."

She'd only ever heard his voice booming from the Carmine pride skies on the eve of new years, the thunder which heralds the great annual slaughter of the wicked and damned. It didn't sound half as imposing inside this cramped stone chamber, but she would not make him tell her twice. Wouldn't dare—not inclined to make her suicide any more torturous than it needed to be. Spindly fingers uncurled from about the circumference of the spear-head she'd illicitly nabbed from the arms depot. Blessed. Deadly.

It clattered to the ground at her feet. The pool of ichor dampening the sound of metal meeting with stone but she flinched anyway. That made him laugh. It's was soft but pointedly derisive sound.

"Woof! Feisty little thing. A bit on the scrawny side. Are they skimping on your rations? For shame. C'mere. Let me look at you."

With that, his big hand slid Up along the meager curve of her neck, his fingers, thick and coarse, bunched her ratty bird's nest up into the hollow of his palm, which promptly balled into a tight fist, flush against her scalp. Adam turned her head on the axis of her spine so that she would face him, vis-á-vis, his gilded lightning against her ruby flames.

She remembers thinking that he had beautiful eyes. An odd thought to dedicate to somebody so vicious, maybe, but she always had a way with finding beauty in the macabre.

Those eyes roved her tremulous form, clad only in a threadbare pair of boxer type shorts.

She'd never felt so naked. Not because his gaze was overtly lascivious in nature but because it pierced and bored through her, like he was looking right into the core of her being. For a moment she wondered if he might be able to read her mind, but she banished the notion quickly. If he could see the playback of the events which had transpired inside this chamber, now tomb, he would not be so soft. This was his subordinate, after all, a trusted comerade in arms, and she had not been kind in her ministrations. She made him suffer, the same way he had made her suffer.

And she enjoyed every second of it.

If the commander had not barged in, she would've liked to spend more time with his body, looking at his insides, picking them apart, watching as every sign that this thing had ever been alive slowly evaporates, and chiseling it all into the deepest niches of her mind so that these precious moments might continue to bring her joy for the rest of her life—however short it might be.

But when does she ever get the things that she wants?

"You know, ordinarily, this type'a stunt might have left me a touch, hmmm, irked. But hell, i gotta tip my proverbial hat to you, pretty bird. Impressive work! Really! The cards weren't exactly stacked in your favor—I mean, obviously...look at you! Shrimpy little cherub looking ass! Hah! And yet here you are, alive and kicking. I dare say we might be looking at an act of divine intervention. What a world!Allelujah, amen and all that good shit!"

Swaying on her feet, Eluthéria looked up at this man, who was easily twice her size, with all the bewilderment of a toddler hearing a foreign language spoken at her for the first time in her life. She saw his lips move, heard the sounds but she couldn't by any means process what exactly he was trying to tell her. Adrenaline. Exhaustion. Fear. It all bore down on her like a big stack of cinderblocks, threatened to crush her frangible faculties under it's enormous heft.

Tears. First one. Then two. She blinked, and all at oncethe floodgates ruptured. This took him off guard.

"Oho, no,  no! None of this sniffling nonsense! You don't perform a top grade kill like that and then cry about it! Come on, girl, suck it up."

Adam swiped a calloused hand somewhat brutishly across her porcelain countenance, whisking away the brunt of the tears and the blood and the sweat. She didn't object. she wanted to, make no mistake. The touch of his skin against hers felt like needles in her brain, an absolutely vile sensation, she wanted nothing more than to be rid of it, but she hadn't the verve to make a fuss.

He shrugged his intricately embroidery cloak off his shoulders and draped it around hers.

Warm.

"Alright, come on, let's see if you've got any more fancy tricks up your sleeve, eh?"

His grip on her stark white locks slackened, and he ushered her towards the steel doors.

She remembers thinking that this was the day she was going to die.

“Say it back to me, mijo.”

Misael’s wrists flex weakly in their cold, chromium metal restraints—rubbed raw and bloody in the wake of his fruitless struggles.

A sharp gulp of a breath plunges into his aching lungs through trembling lips and chattering teeth. His vocabulary is unsophisticated, but ever expanding with new words and terminologies which he does not fully understand. Thusly, he is not confident in his ability to pronounce the words his grandfather is waiting on with any sort of faultlessness of grace, but the price of inaction, in this household, is infinitely steeper than the price of failure.

So he wets his bruised lips, and squeezes the first vowel out of his chest. The effort leaves him breathless before the sound leaves his tongue.

“A-a-a-ax-axill-a ... ary ..”

Like a caterpillar attempting a valiant escape from the hawks’ pitiless talons, his spine curves off the metal gurney’s hard surface, into a meager arch.

The clamp’s vicious jaws part the yielding flesh of his dainty shoulder, burrowing in deep, past muscle and sinew, to find the rubbery tube of his axillary artery. It closes it’s frigid mandibles, pinching the delicate vessel in it’s unrelenting grasp, effectively stopping the frantically rushing blood dead in it’s tracks.

He’d scream, if such a thing were feasible, but his vocal cords are raw and abraded.

The boy’s breath leaves his lungs in a harsh, gurgling wheeze.

“The axillary artery. Yes, that’s  good. And what’s it’s neighbor  called? You remember this Misael—use  your words.”

Those distinctive, pallid blue eyes roll around in their sopping sockets, two brilliant marbles sinking into the unplumbed depths of the Atlantic ocean. A quick smack to one tender, honey brown cheek brings him back from the brink of unconsciousness.

“Pay attention. this information is going  to  save  your  life  one  of these days.“

Tears roll down Misael’s temples, and disappear into the white streaks of hair sprouting just above the conchs of his ears. A genetic condition he’d inherited from his mother. Something that made him unique—terribly, horribly desirable.

“Ssss-uhh-hh-b-b—”

Another cold clamp is shoved into another pre-cut incision and another wave of dizziness and nausea racks his undernourished body. He can feel the bile crawling up his throat, leaving a sour and all too familiar taste in his mouth, but the contents of his stomach are too minuscule to force anything else up through his esophagus. Not feeding him that morning may have been a merciful act on Roderigo’s part.

A more likely rationalization, would be that he simply did not want to deal with a bigger mess than he would inevitably make out of his only grandson.

“Subclavian  artery, Misael. Infection spreads  quickly through the vascular   system,  so   you   can   see why this is an important  precautionary measure that we need to  take  before we proceed any further with your—”

The old man touches his scraggly beard, uncharacteristically unkempt, but it hardly takes away from the regal aura he exudes with every word he says and every action he takes.

“—reform, if you will.”

Misael can feel the onset of hypoxia tickling the tips of his fingers.It’s an odd sensation, that is not unlike burying your hand in the grains of warm sand at the Miami beach—tight and tingly, not entirely unpleasant. It’s a train of thought that he clings to with all his force of will, and rides, out of this place, away from the coldness of the gurney and the pain of the clamps and the visceral fear twisting his insides into knots and bows.

If he closes his eyes, and squeezes them hard enough, he can almost see the tender rays of the late afternoon sun dancing on the ocean waves. Tinting the sea and sky a brilliant array of warm, twisting, undulating and flickering colors.

“This is a little bit unconventional, as far as medical practices go—”

Roderigo’s gruff voice barrels through Misael’s fantasy land like a sledgehammer, and it all comes crumbling down within seconds.

His eyes shoot open, and immediately fixate on the calloused hand poised on the edge of the gurney, palm facing skyward and holding a formidable looking syringe. It’s filled to the brim with a substance of a bright, unnatural orange hue—something that boy could not hope to put a name to even if he tried. Conveniently enough a big bottle of the same exact red-yellow tincture stands on a rolling table adjacent to the bench he’s strapped to. 

The label reads ‘Drano liquid’

A string of words that means nothing to him—but he feels like he might be able to recall seeing something similar sitting in a cabinet under the kitchen sink that one time he had hazarded a peek somewhere that was forbidden.

“—but it will get the job done.” 

Before the last word leaves Roderigo’s chapped lips, the needle is burrowed deep in the bulging vein of the boy’s skinny forearm. The old man’s thumb circles the plunger, almost teasingly, gradually applying just enough pressure to send the chamber’s corrosive contents trickling into his body. 

He can feel it—even with the numbness creeping up the extremity he can feel his blood boiling in it’s fragile tube—the pain is like nothing he has ever experienced.

Like a fish out of water, his body jerks to and fro, writhing, thrashing, tossing, turning, all in a feeble attempt to escape his confines, one which only lasts for the most fleeting of moments. Once that moment has passed an odd calm washes over him—even as the liquefied contents of his limb gush out of the  perforation where the needle had invaded his body—oozing like a fleshy volcanic eruption.

He can’t stave off the ocean waves. 

They’re pulling him under. 

Dragging him down into the silent, murky depths.