The Death Panel: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness Page 2

  He heard suitcase latches snap open and looked up at her through a red haze of dull pain to see her tits and the Luger all pointing at him. Her lips cut a cruel smile. He smiled back, meaning it.

  It was nuts but he had a ferocious hard-on. For the first time since he’d seen that field full of dead soldiers with bloated boners, he felt real lust for a woman and had the hard evidence to prove it. He’d taken a few beatings since the war—most recently from Iron Skillet Scarlotti’s goon squad—but never with this crazy result. It had taken a sadistic bare-breasted Nazi broad to raise his cock from the realm of the dead.

  Trench figured he’d reached one of those turning points people talked about. A freak twist sure to take him to some very dark places if this buxom bitch didn’t kill him first. Maybe he felt he deserved punishment for all the Krauts he’d killed or maybe just for surviving the war when so many others hadn’t. He knew this wasn’t the time to figure it out.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Look what you’ve done to me.”

  He rolled onto his back so she could see the erection tenting his trousers. She cocked a brow.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “You take care of this and I’ll call off the Feds.”

  She laughed. It was a dirty laugh coming up from the diaphragm and shaking her breasts.

  “I’m not joking,” he said. “I told the desk clerk to talk to them while I came up here to stop you. Let me use your phone and I’ll call ’em off. Then you and me can settle up. Whaddaya say?”

  “What are you saying to me, take care of this?” She pointed the pistol at his crotch.

  “Make it go away and I’ll make sure you get away. Unpack your riding crop. And don’t shoot off that cannon or you’ll queer our deal and the Feds will nab you.”

  He stood, picked up the phone and called down to the desk. “Kid, did you talk to that F?d?rale?”

  “Yeah, but I think he thought I was some crackpot. He finally said he’d send somebody out.”

  “Call him back and tell him we were wrong about the lady and that she’s already checked out.”

  “But …”

  “Do it.” Trench cradled the phone, unfastened his trousers and dropped them. His cock popped out of the slit in his underwear and pointed at the woman still pointing her pistol at him. He said, “Not exactly a Mexican standoff, but you can see I’m serious about this. Call it a hard bargain.”

  * * * *

  She tore off his shirt and undershirt, then handcuffed him to the bedpost and worked him over good with the riding crop, each stinging lick pumping up his lust to the point where he could no longer distinguish pain from pleasure. Finally, she peeled her slinky gown off her hips, straddled him and took him inside with practiced ease. She rode him hard, whipping his hip with the crop to urge him on. Her gun was within easy reach on the edge of the bed, and it crossed Trench’s mind that she could finish him off with it when the fun was done, but that only added to his twisted excitement.

  When the big moment came, Trench felt as if the planet had flung him into the stratosphere, where he hung blissfully suspended, briefly free of worldly concerns and cleansed of wartime sins. Then gravity yanked him back down into the gooey thick of things and the Nazi vixen astride him whipped him mercilessly as she spouted spirited curses in her native tongue.

  He stayed hard and she rode him harder, her pelvis and tummy gyrating like a belly dancer’s. She whacked his face with the leather crop and all he could do was clench his eyes and grit his teeth. She shouted “Heil Hitler!” Then her eyes rolled up in her head and she brayed like a dying donkey. She went rigid all over as if an iron rod had been jammed up her ass, then she fell forward, breasts flattening on Trench’s chest, passion spent.

  He thought he should be feeling some kind of post-bang remorse now for having trafficked with the enemy to satisfy his twisted desire, but what he actually felt was grateful relief that his family jewels and scepter were no longer defunct. He wasn’t much worried that he was now at the dubious mercy of a sadistic woman notorious for her gleeful practice of genocide. Maybe he was a little worried that he wasn’t worried. But he was still hard inside her and he was already thinking of an encore performance.

  But then the woman sat up, picked up the Luger and a pillow to muffle the shot and put the gun against his head. She smiled, clamped her pussy on his prick and pulled the trigger.

  Laughing, she tossed the pillow away and looked at the smoking bullet hole in the mattress next to his head.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Trench shouted.

  “I wanted to see if you would shit yourself like a scurvy Jew.”

  He drew blood from his tongue to keep from unleashing a long stream of hard-bitten G.I. profanity upon this nutso Axis Sally in the flesh. Instead, he said through clenched teeth, “Well I didn’t, did I.”

  She laughed, clucking like the Queen Kong of hens. Then she got up, walked across the room and dug a deck of cigarettes from her purse and lit one, tossing the mussed tresses of that Veronica Lake hairdo with a heavy air of melodrama as she blew smoke at the ceiling. She sat on the bed and crossed one knee over the other, pursing her lips and blowing on the cigarette’s ember. She spit a strand of tobacco off the tip of her tongue and took another drag.

  “What shall I do with you?” she asked, blowing smoke in his face.

  “Get these cuffs off me and I’ll get you out of here. That FBI guy might be curious enough to come nosing around anyway.”

  She looked at the faded ink of the American flag on his left shoulder. “What did you do in the war?”

  “Killed Nazis.”

  She made a clucking sound with her tongue. “Die jungen Blumen des Vaterlands.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The young Flowers of the Fatherland.” She reached over and stroked his half-mast penis with one hand and blew on her butt’s ember again, making it glow red-hot.

  Trench began to sweat. He squirmed. The cuffs rattled against the bedpost.

  “Let me see what you’re made of, Yank.” She touched the ember to the root of his cock, the tender spot just above the scrotum. He gritted his teeth and tried not to flinch as the cigarette sizzled his flesh. Amazing as it was, his dick remained rigid.

  “Not bad,” said the Beautiful Butcher of Auschwitz. She took another drag off the butt, then dropped it on the carpet. “Now I will make my mark on you so that you will not forget me.”

  She opened a suitcase and dug out the Luftwaffe dagger. Smiling as she unsheathed it, she sat on the edge of the bed, smoothed the hairs on his chest with her empty fingers and then set to work with the dagger, cutting a line in the flesh above his left nipple. Trench sucked wind through clenched teeth. He didn’t try to fight the knife. The pain was sweet and he figured he had it coming for fraternizing with this sadistic Nazi cunt.

  Couple of minutes later, Trench had a bloody swastika etched in his chest. And a cold-blooded hard-on that refused to flag.

  Gerda von Falk chuckled and pressed the dagger’s point against the underbelly of his penis. “Your little soldier remains at attention for me, his commander. But I must go now and leave him to his sad little outpost.”

  “Get these cuffs off and I’ll carry your bags.”

  She lit a cigarette, then said, “I do not think you are as dutiful to me as your little ramrod trooper with the purple helmet. I think perhaps I should leave you as you are as I go to make my getaway.”

  “I’m going with you,” he said, “wherever you’re going. I’m done being a house dick.”

  “You see?” She pointed with the two fingers clamped on her cigarette at the bloody swastika on his chest. “I have marked you and you are mine. Like a Jew, yes?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I see. Take me with you.” As soon as he said this, he realized it was something a woman might say. What the hell’s wrong with me? But he knew the answer. Something had been wrong with him but this witch had worked her evil magic and now he was cured. Did he actually want to go
with her or was he just playing out the string to make sure she didn’t leave him cuffed to the bed for the housekeeper to find? He wasn’t sure. Not yet.

  With an unreadable expression on her face, she keyed the cuffs open and he was free. Completely free. It was the freedom of not having a plan, of not knowing what you were going to do until it was done. Trench was amazed at how liberating this was. He could make things happen or he could let them happen. Either way, he was alive, and that was reassuring. He was more than a walking corpse with a hard-on. He was still in the game, and no matter how twisted it got, the game was only for the living.

  She tossed him a towel. He blotted blood from his stinging new swastika while she got dressed. Ten minutes later he was carrying her two suitcases as they stepped off the elevator and into the lobby. He ignored the puzzled looks his battered face drew from the desk clerk and patrons. He kept his eyes glued on his blond companion’s back as he followed her outside and into the hotel parking lot. He was subservient to her; it was right that he should walk behind her. And it offered a nice view of her undulating ass cheeks.

  The car was an old Packard and she said he could drive. He put the suitcases in the backseat.

  “Where to?”

  “West. To California.” The way she pronounced the state’s name, it conjured mental images of forbidden forms of fornication.

  They smoked in silence and soon they were outside the city, the Floridian flatlands drawing them toward the promise of landscapes less monotonous.

  “I think you are a secret Jew,” she said as she tossed her cig’s butt out the window.

  “How’s that?”

  “Maybe you don’t have the Jewish blood but you are weak, submissive. Like the Jewish vermin we exterminated. No fight in you. You cower and piss yourselves like docile dogs.”

  He balled his fist and threw a crazy roundhouse left against the side of her head. Her head bounced off the passenger door, and the car swerved and just missed dropping a wheel into the roadside ditch. He hit her again to make sure she was out like a refrigerator light with the door shut.

  That was when he knew he’d reached the end of his tether. He felt it and understood. It felt like a rubber band was attached to his belly, an invisible umbilical band that had let him get just this far and was now ready to snap him back to reality, back to his Twilight life.

  Her eyes were half open, glazed and unseeing. Trench got the cuffs out of a suitcase and hooked her to the metal frame under the seat. Then he drove ten miles to a hick town with one traffic light and bought a garden hose and a roll of duct tape from a hardware store. Whenever the Kraut opened her eyes, he socked her jaw and put out her lights again. After the third punch, she didn’t open them anymore.

  Ten minutes later he was driving along a dirt road into a shadowy backwoods jungle. He pulled over at a small clearing. Black dirt salted with white sand. Lush vegetation surrounding. The woman’s head bobbed. She moaned. Fluttered an eyelid.

  Trench shut off the motor, got out and set to work with his hardware-store purchases. He stuck one end of the garden hose into the exhaust pipe and secured it with duct tape, making sure the seal was good. Then he ran the other end of the hose through the narrowly opened rear-door window of the Land Cruiser. He used duct tape to make the window as airtight as possible, then he slid behind the wheel and cranked the engine.

  The woman looked at him with heavy-lidded eyes. She mumbled something in German.

  Trench grabbed her purse and rummaged through it until he found her tube of bright red lipstick. He scooted next to her and drew a swastika on her forehead and then, as an afterthought, he drew another one on her mouth so that the four angled arms of the hated symbol surrounded her pouty lips.

  Already the exhaust fumes were filling the car, burning his eyes and making him cough. He slid out and shut the door. He looked up at the thunderheads piling up in the east and said, “Jesus? Tell me not to do this.”

  Thunder rumbled, sounding too much like distant artillery.

  Gerda von Falk was coming to now, coming to the realization that the end of her life was at hand. She rattled the cuffs and began shouting, first German, then in English. Thunder hammered the earth and sky, coming on like well-placed artillery rounds.

  “Speak now, Lord, or to hell with her,” Trench said to the sky. “And you know I don’t speak thunder.”

  He watched the light leave the sky. He listened hard. Looked for signs and wonders.

  Nothing.

  He looked at Gerda von Falk sitting in a glassy cube of smoky exhaust. “God forgive us both,” he said. Then he started for the highway.

  Half a mile down the dirt road, he stopped, turned around and went back to the car. He knew he had to see it through as witness, knew he was bound by the executioner’s unwritten code. He owed it to all those dead Jews and gypsies and to all the innocents mutilated and mangled by the mad Nazi doctor and his murderous bitches.

  She was coming undone fast, suffocating in the devil’s cloud of unmaking. She’d yanked against the cuffs so hard that her wrist was ripped raw and bleeding, her shoulder dislocated. Her blouse had popped buttons and her bra was full of vomit. A thick string of puke hung from her lips, which were going blue. She gasped for air like a decked grouper. She went fish-eyed as her brain no doubt began to die in a haywire shower of panicked thoughts and maybe even fear of divine retribution. She would be pissing and shitting herself by now.

  Trench lit a smoke and watched her die. He ached in a hundred places and that was good. It was right that he should. It was the way of the world. You bought your ticket with suffering, and dead or alive you took the ride. He didn’t know where he would end up but he knew it didn’t much matter.

  He was doing the Lord’s work or the devil’s. As things now stood, it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference which. Either way he was damned.

  In halos of lightning, storm-cloud angels played hell on heavenly kettledrums. Then came the roaring downpour and the Nazi bitch was gone for good.

  Trench walked away in the rain.

  Blood Sacrifices & the Catatonic Kid

  Tom Piccirilli

  * * *

  Two moves from mate Barry the chronic masturbator started pawing at the white bishop like he was choking his chicken and said, “Heya, hey, look there—” I turned in time to see the Catatonic Kid get up off his coma couch and cut Harding’s throat with a shiv made from a shard of ceramic ashtray.

  Harding the orderly stood 6’3 and went two-thirty of mostly muscle. He didn’t go down easy. Arterial spray shot around the intensely white walls of the ward as Mary the Nictophobe started losing her shit. She screamed and sort of danced in place and couldn’t even get herself out of the path of Harding’s spurting carotid.

  I didn’t mind watching him go down. He was a rude, rotten son of a bitch who liked to intimidate and humiliate the patients. He had a habit of opening mail and stealing cash or candy bars or whatever appealed to him at the moment. Now he was scrambling on the floor trying to clamp one hand across his slashed throat. But he was so taken by the wondrous and terrifying sight of his own pouring blood that he kept pulling his hand away and staring at the frothing red puddling in his palm.

  Harding checked around the room looking for mercy. Our eyes met and he saw I wasn’t going to help. I mouthed, Fuck you, prick. He glanced up at Barry and, even as he bled out, an expression of disgust crimped Harding’s features as he got a look at the unholy sight of what Barry was currently doing with a black rook.

  The rest of the nuts, freaks, depressives, hysterics, deficients, and paranoids didn’t seem to notice and just kept up with their muttering, hand-wringing, floor-licking, and carrot-waxing. Mary had crumpled trying to rub the blood out of her eyes.

  The Catatonic Kid riffled Harding’s pockets and snatched his wallet. He unclipped the huge key ring from Harding’s belt, drew out Harding’s smaller set of car keys from the orderly’s back pocket, and even pulled the dripping watch from Harding’s
wrist. I thought that was going a little far.

  Harding croaked, “Please—” and the Kid kicked him in the face.

  Harding tried to lever himself to his feet one last time and toppled across the ping pong table. It collapsed under his weight and he lay unmoving atop the crushed net.

  The Kid had been in a non-responsive fugue state for the three months we’d been here. He came in the same day I did and both of us were placed into the same group therapy. They tried to snap him out of his unresponsive state by pretending that he wasn’t in one. They talked to him, asked questions, waited for answers. I thought the doctors were some ripe stupid assholes.

  They finally wised up and dumped the Kid in the community lounge where he’d lay on his coma couch and stare at the ceiling. The other nuts kept clear of him. The doctors and nurses came in and flashed a light in his eyes every so often, tossed pills down his throat, and fed him. He’d eat slowly, hardly ever blinking. They’d wipe his chin and let him lie back down, and the rest of us would pass him by like he was a piece of furniture.

  He’d been faking the entire time and I admired the amount of willpower it had taken. Not just to pretend, but to pretend for so long and then still manage to make it all the way back. I knew guys in prison who’d tried to fake insanity so they could get out of solitary or into the hospital wing. Some of them faked it so well for so long they just went crazy.

  The Kid knew which key got him out of the ward. He’d been watching, aware, careful. He moved with a certain predator canniness, swift but cautious, with a restrained sense of power. During the nights he must’ve been exercising, keeping himself fit and sharp.

  I followed along behind him, silent in my little baby booty slippers. When he got to the next security station, where Jenkins sat filling out his logbook and helping one of the nurses get medication ready for the patients, the Kid slid along the wall holding his shiv up like he was going to kill them both. I grabbed his wrist and pulled him into an alcove.