Page 44 of Run

“Come on you fucker, where is your goddamned fucking skull.” I curse, tossing limbs and heads out of the way, my hands getting coated in the slime and waste, with chunks splattering on my clothes.

Never before have I gotten as messy as I am now, frantically searching through the pit of corpses. I need to find him. I can still hear him in my head, telling me how useless I am, saying the same things to mother as he raped her and took her from me forever. The amount of decomp on me, making mestink, covering me in death is a small price to pay to find him and shut him up for good.

It's his fault I struck my Lily, my princess, my precious flower. It’s his fault I murder and destroy, all of it beginning with the name he bestowed upon me. I dig more, becoming enraged by the panic from the memories of him.

“Hedeon.” I can hear him laugh in my head as I dig. “Destroyer.” He cackles. “Like father like son, my boy.”

“No! No! No!” I scream into the pit, grabbing my head, covering my ears like I did as a child to block out his maniacal laughter as he ruined my life.

“What? You sad that the little useless boy turned into a God?” He continues, his evil hiss sliding through my head like the snakes that guard this garden. “I made you what you are.”

“You fucking did.” I cry out, pulling my hair, shaking my head violently, trying to knock him out of me, but he continues to laugh in that demonic sound that makes my blood cold.

“You’ve finally made me proud, son.”

“Fuck you! Fuck you right to hell!” I scream, dropping to my knees, feeling the fluids ooze through my sweatpants. “Where the fuck are you?”

Maggots and worms crawl up my hands and arms as I dig faster and faster, looking at the faces of the ones who still have skin, tossing them aside. He’s down here deep, but I’ll find him if it’s the last thing I do. He needs to stop, to get out of my head, to leave me alone. Three decades of him making me as evil as he was, ten of those years being after his death at my own hands. I thought doing to him what he did to mother would rid me ofhim, but all it did was turn the physical monster into a haunting ghost.

Goo drips off my hair, splashing in my face, and without a care in my haste, I wipe it away, smearing more of the nastiness on my skin. The odor is intense as I disturb the pile, gagging me, making me want to vomit for the second time today. Hedeon, the destroyer, who kills with no remorse is sick at his collection and that can’t be.

“No. I will not puke over my own work.” I grunt, throwing a half-eaten torso out of the way, finally exposing the bare bones underneath.

The ones down here the longest have nothing left but the grey and green bones that have long been picked clean. They clatter against each other, rolling around as I swish through them, going deeper.

I’ll know the one I’m looking for, it’s the only one where the facial structure is half missing. The most violent of my kills was him, my first, the one that made me who I am when I enjoyed the sounds of his bones breaking and him finally giving in and crying in pain at the hands of the “useless” boy whose soul he murdered.

When my hands find the sharp edges of him, my fingers slipping through the missing sinuses of his fucking face, I lift him up from the ooze. I hold his skull in my cupped hands like an offering to the gods and scream.

All the hate and the pain comes back as I look at him. He’s nothing more than bone that has had a decade to rot but he still has a face to me. I can still see his evil eyes that match mine. I can still smell his cologne even through the stench ofdecomposition. I can still see his lips curled up in a snarl as he abused us both.

“Fuck you!” I scream, squeezing the skull in my hands with all my might.

I can hear the bones weakened by time crack and pop as I put my rage into them. I want them shattered, pulverized into dust that will blow away with the wind.

“Out of the pit for you. You don’t deserve to be in here. You deserve worse. You don’t get the honor of existing at all, even with the dead. You are nothing more than waste to be disposed of.”

Still on my knees, covered in the utter filth, I stare into the empty holes where those eyes used to be. It’s like a flash back scene on a movie screen as I fall into them, the image of the skull disappearing, being replaced with him alive and cackling until I pummeled him. I’m dreaming it in my consciousness, lost to the night that made me what I am.

~~~

“Father stop!” I scream at him.

I’m no longer that little boy, afraid of the monster. I’m a man of twenty now. Twenty long fucking years. Eleven of them alone with him, in this house, hiding from his abuse. But no longer will I suffer at his hands. His fists and feet will never again do to me what they have done for so long. His filthy cock will never defile another human.

Those hands that took my mother from me, the ones that have made me bleed more times than I can count don’t deserve to touch anything ever again. He’s losing them tonight.

He’s picked on the wrong boy in the wrong place, backing me into the corner of the kitchen where mother used to sing to me. I can hear her spirit, so soft and sweet, with the love for me pouring out of her.

“Aww little boy wanna play big?” He sneers, spitting in my face, holding the front of my shirt in his fist, shaking me, or at least trying to.

I’ve glowed up. I’m no longer the scrawny thing he tossed around. I’m bigger now. I have muscles that I’ve been training for years, just waiting for the day I can use them for what I developed them for. My eyes are no longer soft, and the hate in them mirrors his. I can do this; I can finally put him in his place.

“I am big. Or haven’t you noticed I’m bigger than you now.”

“You’re still a pathetic piece of shit, just like your mother was.”

The roar that escapes my mouth could shake down the house. It bellows out of me with so much force his eyes draw in and for a single moment I see something other than disgust in them. I see pride, and it makes me sick. I would rather he hate me, than be proud of me for becoming him.

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