Page 58 of Afflicted

I let out a low whistle. “Is she even that good?”

Matt laughs out loud. “Look, she tries. She’s basically a virgin, has no idea how to get a guy off. But hey, she’s easy on the eyes, and, well.” He leans over and lowers his voice. “Between you and me, she’s tight as fuck. Like, I’m talking you have to work to get into her. So that’s fun.”

“Wow, really selling her there.” I clap him on the shoulder. “So you told Braun all this?”

Matt throws his hands up, gazing into the darkening sky. “I agreed to help him get laid. I was meant to get her all warmed up for him, and then he’d have some fun with her. He told me he’d never hurt her, he just wanted his piece of ass, and everyone walks away happy.”

I suck on my teeth. “You didn’t think that maybe she’d be, I dunno, opposed to this plan?”

“Man, I panicked. And look, I’m a feminist and all that, I know consent is the thing.” He rolls his eyes a little as he says it. “But, you know, she said she loved me, she’d rather that than have me dying, right?”

I rub my chin thoughtfully. “I mean, when you put it like that… But then why didn’t you just talk to her about it? She strikes me as an easy lay, surely she’d have just done what you said?”

“You know, I think I was so freaked out by that feeder catching me, I just went with whatever.” We reach the shed, and Matt turns to lean his back against the wall. “I never wanted her to get hurt. If I could just explain to her that we need to do things, you know, if we want shit to change, we need to make sacrifices.”

“Of course, mate. I get that.” I lean against the wall beside him. “Shame she’s being so difficult, ey?”

He glances over at me. “So you think you can talk some sense into her?”

“You know, I think I can.” I nod, taking a long drag on the cigarette, listening to it crackle. “Or I can deal with you myself, right now.” I round on Matt, whose eyes widen.

He opens his mouth to scream, but my hand is already around his throat, crushing his windpipe. I heave him through the door of the garden shed, slamming him into the wall and baring my fangs at him.

“You fucking limp-dick fuck.” I press the still-burning cigarette into his eye, and his screams are smothered by my hand crushing his neck. He convulses and flails, but it’s useless. “You know, ever since I saw that footage, I’ve been fantasizing about ways to make you suffer. To make you bleed and feel pain unlike any you’ve ever felt before.”

His mouth snaps open and shut, whispered shrieks bursting from his lips. His tongue lolls around uselessly, his one good eye clenched shut as the other one smokes and steams.

“Unfortunately,mate, I don’t have the time to make you suffer. But one thing I did want you to know, is that my girl was always thinking about me when you fucked her. The whole five seconds you managed.” I laugh cruelly, enjoying this moment way more than I should. “And very soon, it’ll be my cock in that tight little cunt, and I will make her scream in ways you could only ever dream of.” I overcome my revulsion at touching his pathetic dick, clawing my hands around him and tearing that useless fucking appendage straight from his body.

The scream reverberates through his body, no sound coming from his mouth, his one eye flying open as blood flows down his legs. I shove his dick into his mouth, forcing it down his throat as far as I can manage. He collapses to the ground, legs kicking, hands flailing at his mouth as he tries to breathe. Red foam spills from between his lips, cascading down the sides of his face as the flapping of his hands becomes more frantic and uncoordinated.

I retrieve the molotov cocktail I’d hidden in here earlier, lighting the rag at the end of the bottle.

“Godspeed, mate. Have a great time roasting in hell.”

I slam the bottle down next to him, the flames engulfing him quickly. There’s hay all over the shed, it’s going to burn nicely. I take a cigarette from the case, leaning down to light it in the fire burning Matt’s flesh from his bones, then leave him there, shutting the door behind me.

No feeders see me as I walk back to my cabin, and thank fuck because my hands are dripping blood, it’s sprayed all over my clothes. I pause on my front porch, taking the last few drags of my cigarette. The fire alarm goes off just as I stamp the butt out under my boot.

I head straight to the bathroom, stripping off my clothes and dumping them on the floor. I’m not going out there. I just listen to the alarm drone as I wash the blood from my skin. By the time they find out someone was in that fire, it’ll be impossible to tell how he died. And then I’ll reveal what I know about the footage, how it all makes sense now. How he must have been planning another attack, a diversion, to distract us from another wave of Afflicted. Just one of the revolutionaries Sam was talking about. That Boston warned us about.

I wash the blood off my hands, running them over my face. There’s a niggling feeling of shame in my chest, about how I talked about my girl. The things I said about her. Even just saying those words to gain that fucker’s trust, and then to torture him - yeah, that felt like shit.

No one’s ever going to talk about her like that again.

I’ll make sure of it.

* * *

As predicted,charred human remains are found inside the shed. Burned beyond recognition. They can only identify him because there’s only one human missing.

There’s shock when I reveal to my colleagues that Braun was in on it, that he blackmailed this man into letting his girlfriend be raped. Outrage when I tell them I discovered who disarmed the perimeter alarms. And here he was, doing it again. Trying to create a distraction. Fucking bastard.

Matt’s remains are thrown into a grave in the cemetery, covered with dirt and forgotten about. I go out one night under the light of the full moon to piss on it.

Petty? Sure.

But it made me feel a whole lot better.

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