The box cutter sliced through the air barely scraping against Maddie’s soft cheek. She squeals and leaps back yelling, “What the hell?” In her fist gripped firmly, the bat quivered in brief vibes. Her anger began to crowd her rational thoughts.
Matthew starts stuttering and finally spits out, “I-I-I don’t know! I’m scared, you heard what he said! He’s gonna kill us!”
“So instead of thinking of a plan, you swing at me! F**k you Matthew!”
She swings her bat missing him by an inch, her bat collides into the glass wall causing it to bounce back. The glass wasn’t just any normal type, this was at least bullet-proof, to the best of her knowledge at least.
The clown narrows his eyes and continues to feed Karla by force, his fingers almost tasted worse than the meat. “The people want to see blood, cut her stomach open, get creative! Quit being a p***y!” the clown screams.
Maddie holds the bat in one hand and looks across the narrow path to Matthew, her heart was fluttering and her cheeks were on fire, she knew the man behind crusted makeup wasn’t telling jokes. She loved Matthew, but she valued her life even more. She runs forward and begins to swing the bat.
Matthew dodges left and screams, “Maddie stop! It’s me!”
The bat locates his left arm as a salty tear forms in her eye. She couldn’t stop, this wasn’t a game, this was real. The prize for such brutal atrocities? Life.
Matthew falls down and digs his box cutter into her right knee. He didn’t expect the fountain of blood that sputtered out onto his shocked face.
She let out a wail and dropped down, but not without her bat. It came crashing down on his back. He felt his spinal cord jerk, numbness expanding among his lower torso. He thrust his blade in a final attempt hitting Maddie in her stomach, centering into her belly button. He twisted it, and felt like he was the winner of this fight, until his skull draped over his brain like a snug helmet. The bone pierced his brain causing his vision to disappear, his hearing was still available but only until the second blow. The third blow sent him to the floor, in cluster seizures his body jerked and twitched.
“Now that is what I’m talking about!” the clown says. His red painted lips gleamed in a wide grin. “What you waiting for? Kill him!”
Maddie rests on her knees with meatloaf sticking out of her leg in a thick raw chunk, her belly springing back and forth with a shallow stream dripping down. She thinks of how her and Matthew met as he laid on the floor twitching.
He was her first friend in elementary. She was a tom boy and didn’t fit in with the girls, but Matthew accepted her. She didn’t always smell pleasant due to her dad not paying the water bill on time, he never made fun of her like the others. He always made her feel welcomed and like she had a friend, like she was wanted around. He was her first friend, her first best friend. And now, her first murder.
“Finish him or I’ll use that box cutter to slice the fat from your body!”
The voice was all too familiar and terrifying. She bit her lower lip and looked down at Matthew. In his despair and sadness, he looks up at her and seems to nod his head, almost as if he was accepting his fate, or at least she tried to imagine. Closing her eyes, the bat hammers down.
“More! That body is still moving! I wanna be able to mop his remains, put your back into it!”
Following the clowns demands she continued to hit over and over again. Eventually her bat tapped the glass underneath a wet floor. She opened her eyes and instantly regret it, a pond remained with pink oatmeal on top, where her friends head once sat.
She grabs onto him suddenly, her adrenaline dissipating and clear thoughts rushing back, her heart became attached to an anchor sinking into a bottomless pit. She picked his headless torso up and pulled him into her chest, between tears she continued to whisper, “Forgive me Matthew, please forgive me. I didn’t want to.”
“Very well my love,” a feminine voice interrupts. A woman wearing a black cloak walks up to the glass and smiles deviously. Her face was hidden behind a black cat mask, her green eyes glowing through the slits, she pressed a hand against the glass.
“We have a winner, and how do you feel Maddie?”
Maddie tightens her clench on Matthew. She sighs through shudders and whispers, “How do you know my name? What is all this for!” She lets one hand free to bang against the glass.
The woman smiles, placing both hands against the glass she says, “Let us finish this conversation, before ending our game shall we?”
Daunting past the enclosure ahe sees Karla, still eating a fatty piece of muscle. Rank juices dripped down her chin. “Oh what tangled webs we weave, you have no idea what all this is about do you?” the woman asks.
Karla shakes her head to the left and right, the clown’s hand firmly placed under her chin making sure she finishes her meal. She pulls her mask off and drops it to the floor. Karla immediately recognizes her as the h****r from Maddie’s house. The woman chuckles walking around the table, gliding her finger across the edge she says, “I was once a good person, a really good one. I went to church, I was in college, I had my whole life ahead of me. Yeah, I was gonna be somebody successful in this town. And that’s what I held onto,” she turns to Maddie, “that was until your dad came along. A*****e didn’t understand what ‘no’ meant. Him and his friend, both took turns r****g me in an alley after I left a bar one night. Told me if I screamed it meant I liked it, swear it must of made him c*m faster cause he went two rounds. Battered and bruised, I swore I would make him hurt, like he hurt me. The town drunk wasn’t hard to find, but his friend was a little more challenging to do. After some searching I found out he had died of a heart attack, but he had a son, Donald.”
Maddie stays on her knees, one trembled in large doses of torture while her skin seeped in the liquid between the glass and her body.
“Two were on my list, but then things changed. Found out I had a bun in the oven, yeah that made things complicated. Didn’t want to have an abortion, wasn’t the baby’s fault his dad was evil. So I saw a gynecologist, he was professional until I mentioned who the father could of been. Why did I not look further into it? I guess I have myself to blame. He couldn’t do the deed himself, guess he was too holy, so he asked a close friend to help him. Sara was his child, funny he had a kid yet made sure mine died. His friend played it too smooth, a ‘accident’ occurred with her. A perfectly misplaced toy on a stairwell in my apartment complex was meant to kill us both, only lost my unborn though. Wasn’t hard to look her up, Matthew was her surviving child. Now why would all these people help and go out of their way to help a piece of f*****g alcoholic s**t?”
The woman looks towards the clown and then to Maddie, “Start the press, I want to watch her suffer.”
“Wait, you said she would live!” Karla screams. Her heart was torn apart from Matthew’s death, and Maddie’s brutality. But, despite everything she didn’t want anyone else to suffer or die. The clown lets her go and walks over to a wall nearby the glass case. He pulls down on a corroded crank. Slowly turning it, he yells, “Keep going baby!”
“Why help him? Of all people, and the extremes they went through, why? Because they were all just as f****d in the head as he was, only he showed it openly. All your parents have a dark secret they never exposed, they obviously owed one to the drunk. For what? I’ve yet to find that part out, but I will, trust me. Years later he’s destroyed so many brain cells he didn’t even recognize me, easy to slip in and observe the home and your schedules, considering how often you all were there. This handsome clown helping me is Benson, my husband. He learned of my plans during drunken confessions and happily agreed to help his lovely wife, considering he had been to prison and learned many tricks and trades. He was all too willing to help express some hurt onto others.”
The glass walls begin to close in squeezing the space between Maddie in tight places, her breathing begins to grow more rapid as an anxiety attack comes on. She tries to turn around but gets stuck sideways, she pushes her arms out straining. The clown gets caught with the crank and rears back kicking it. The wall forces inwards, Maddie’s left arm snaps at the elbow causing her bone to shove out. Falling to the ground she holds her arm screaming for her dad. The glass continued to attempt to greet each other, while Karla begged for mercy.
“You don’t have to kill her! I’m sorry for what happened, I’m sorry for what they did, just please spare her!”
“Spare her?” the woman asks. Scowling, she crouches down to Karla’s level. “No one spared my virginity when it was taken violently, no one spared my unborn child, so spare your feelings child, because we’re just getting started. Crank faster!”
Benson’s knuckles turns white as he strains to turn the crank, Maddie’s lips split apart while the back of her skull forces her teeth to push through, scraping against the glass. Her ribcage begins to splinter in wheezy thrusts as each breath brings in more pressure. The top of her skull separates with brain pushing out like overcooked porridge spilling out onto her hair.
Karla turns away sobbing.
“Don’t cry dear, we’ve saved the best for last obviously. The people have asked for Saw Of S****y. You see those in the corners?” The woman points to cameras aligned among the ceiling, “You are the stars of all this. See killing you all wasn’t enough, I wanted to do more than just a personal revenge. And there it was, the dark web, the seedy underbelly of the deep web. A hidden world of sick people like us, but who are willing to pay big bucks to see it happen. None of this was coincidence. Benson gained Becky’s trust, being an older man who could provide alcohol for a young teen, she felt rebellious to talk to him and tried to date him. Who better than a popular girl who knew everyone? After she spilled her guts, figuratively and literally, we found more out about you all. He was who told her of the dark web, knowing she would spread the word at school. Then after she was done, we just needed to wait for the right opportunity and catch Donald online. Tracking his IP address was easy, thanks to our special guest.”
Karla focuses on a man emerging from the shadows, he wore a black hoodie and had the face of a porcelain mask. “Meet Phantom1976, he spoke to Donald and sent him the link, from there things began to fall into place. Little by little, our plan came together, and we gained profit from it. It all worked out too perfectly, and now here we are about to finish it all.”
A chainsaw whirs to life as the porcelain revs it up, he inches to Karla smiling widely. Karla jerks her head to the woman and yells, “What do I have to do with any of this? You had something against everyone, but not me!”
The woman laughs loudly and responds, “Wow, your father never told you did he? Course’ he wouldn’t, such a shame. I’d like to linger on but I feel the show must go on. As I mentioned, Saw Of S****y is exactly what it sounds like. Except your hands will be cut off, before you’re sodomized with the saw until your split in two. Sorry kid, it’s what the people wanted.”
“Wait no, please don’t!”
The swirling chains rip through one wrist before she could say anything else. Each layer of muscle cut was a lifetime of anguish. The saw tears through hitting the table digging in, getting caught for a moment, blood sprayed out of her fresh socket as a pointed tip stuck out in between the geyser. In a panic she shoves her bone upwards stabbing the porcelain man in his eye. He jerks backwards screaming while falling to the ground. Karla lifts her feet placing them on the legs of the table. She applies as much force that her legs were able to, causing the dead wood to snap. The table falls down allowing her to pull on her one good arm releasing the rope strained around her wrist. Crying from fear and going into shock, she tries to do anything she can to survive.
The clown is running towards her at this point, yelling obscenities. She instinctively drops down causing him to trip over her small body. His mouth bites down on the chainsaw, teeth grinding down to his gums and the blades still cutting through until his skull causes it to get caught and stop. The woman backs up and turns to run away. Karla sees the porcelain man lying still on the floor, his eye socket a red murky puddle. The clown with his jaw separated, her wrist still bleeding heavily, she decides to use this opportunity to try to escape.
Running past the traps she wraps her stump in her shirt, her adrenaline pumping in furious gushes, she barely felt any pain. She managed to get around all the death attractions and found a door slightly cracked open. Pushing it open she leans her head back as an axe is swung towards her. It wedges into the door, the woman screams at her and tries to pull it out. Karla pushes her back onto the ground pouncing on her, she the begins to paw at her face with her one hand. Her nails claw at her face rapidly, she pushes her fingers into her eyes and borrows them in while screaming, syringe squirts of blood fly upwards as the woman tries to grab at her. Karla lets go and walks over to the door, she places her side against it for leverage, and tugs on the axe. It comes out with ease as she steps towards the screaming woman, crawling around the floor searching.
Karla swings the axe down into her waist, it stops shorter than she expected so she steps down on it until a crack is heard. The woman jaunts her body around for a few more minutes before dying, slowly.
She wasn’t getting away with all she done, not after what she had put her and her friends through. Karla was able to flag down a passerby after walking away from an abandoned slaughterhouse and finding civilization. She was a town away from where she lived, the hospital contacted her father and the police. As the news aired that night, the bodies of all her friends were found among other ones. Her dad was still alive, he had been absent during the home invasion, for what she didn’t question. She was only happy to hear he was alive and worried for her. They moved shortly afterwards to a new state far away, they lost contact with every parent from their hometown. After years of therapy, she was able to finally move on and begin life again. She began to date and eventually got married, even had a daughter of her own. Her dad moved into a nursing home as he became too elderly to take care of himself and was too much for her to schedule into her married life.
Seventeen years after her nightmare, things were going well for her. Karla had a nice office job, learned to function with a prosthetic hand, a beautiful eleven year old daughter named Mya, and even a loving husband. Life was perfect, and it seemed nothing could change it.
Karla was going through the house picking up laundry to wash and stopped by her daughter’s room to pick hers up. A noise emanated from her computer screen as she stepped in uninvited, one that sounded oddly familiar. A woman begging for her life appeared on screen, n**e and covered in a brown substance. Her shocked daughter turned away from the screen and yelled, “I didn’t know what it was mom I swear! It was a video sent to me in a email!”
Karla drops the basket and runs over.
“Who sent this to you?”
“I don’t know, I thought it was a spam email! It just said ‘PLAY’ on it! I didn’t know it was this, who is that?” Karla exits the video as a new email arrives, from a user named Phantom1976. Reluctantly and regretfully she opens it.
“My dearest Karla, it’s so nice to reconnect with you. My how you’ve grown, you even have a daughter of your own! Mya is beautiful, as are you. It took me some time to find you, you moved so far away, but don’t fear, it’s given me plenty of time to make many new friends and create new games. What we had, what we endured, was only the beginning. Questions were left unanswered last time, now it’s time to find out the whole truth. Welcome to a new world of pain you’d never imagine, so many new friends and now a family of your own. I’ll be seeing you soon for another round.”
Thank you to everyone who read this, appreciate all the ratings and comments!