For a few moments I was hesitant about posting this. It's on the macabre side, so if you're not into this thing-I doubt I am myself, but I guess I'll write anything-don't bother reading it. It's certainly not for everyone. The justice I speak of is perhaps small, but it seems to reek of something many people call Karma. I just call it being badass.
A Justice
In an instant, the woman forgot who she was. Before she had built up the courage to open her eyes, she felt cold metal pressing against her, keeping her upright while she was presumably unconscious, and still held up now. She couldn’t help thinking about her hunger and her thirst, though she knew that more important things were right in front of her. She wished she had not bothered opening her eyes.
Harsh, artificial light shone down on the laboratory, all stone and steel and stained with blood. For being such a condemned place, it was massive. Did the owner of this place believe he would never be found? Stone tables, slightly tilted, everywhere, as though this was something from the Dark Ages. Without warning, a man who she guessed owned the laboratory stepped into her view.
The man seemed decaying, more stitched-together masses of flesh than real human. His hair was a long, stringy black that looked as though he had torn it off a witch and made a wig. His entire face was wrong, with too-high cheekbones, the nose tilted to the side, smallish eyes slanting towards the center of his face. The pupils were vertical slits, like that of a snake’s. Fear coiled up inside the woman. Somehow she knew all was lost before she looked at his hands.
“You see before you a genius, a madman, an atrocity,” he said, voice too deep and pure to come from a man as small as he was.
The woman’s eyes widened.
“Too afraid to speak, I see. But will you be too afraid to scream?”
Her eyes slammed shut as she forced the sudden bile back down her throat. When she opened her eyes a few moments later, a hand had appeared before her.
Tentacles the size of normal fingers waved incessantly, as if they had minds of their own. Occasionally, one would twitch as though struck by electrical shock, stopped for a few seconds before starting the motion again. The rest of the hand was normal, but without muscle—she could see the man’s bones through his thin layer of flesh.
“Will you amuse me?” he asked.
He raised his hand up over her head before resting it on top. Some of the tendrils dug into her skull, feeling their way into her brain. Two slid easily into her ears. She could still hear everything: her pulse, her heavy breathing, the grinding of joints as the man stepped forward.
“Play time, my little pets,” he said, voice suddenly hoarse and dry.
She could feel the tendrils inside her head, charging up with…something. A jolt. Light. Bliss. Agony. She thought she might have screamed, but the sound of electricity covered everything. Then another pulse, and all the ecstasy that tried to hide the pain was gone. Shock after shock, minutes passing before another one. Her heart thundered. What breath did she have? Then a stop, suddenly, but the tentacles were still in her head.
“Did that feel like hours had passed?” the man asked, voice deep again. “It was probably about thirty seconds.”
Pulling his fingers from her skull, he turned on his heel and began pacing and muttering to himself before moving over to a table far away from where the woman was and coming back with a small knife. He quickly took one of her arms, which she couldn’t feel, and made a cut at the end of her finger. On the other arm, she saw, was an IV tube, but she didn’t know what filled the bag.
“I have three good options,” the man mused, probably to himself. “Since you are going to bleed slowly, with nutrients coming back to you, it will take maybe three hours for you to pass out from the blood loss. Firstly, I could try to time it so that you pass out from the shock of the lightning just before the blood loss. Secondly, I could attempt to focus enough power to make lightning come out of your finger, harming as little as possible. Lastly, I could see how quickly I can overload your system.”
Gasping, the woman managed to speak. “Third one…please.”
“I will take ‘mercy’ on you and choose the third option.”
The man took his time walking back to the table to put the knife down, before coming back with a hideous grin marring his face even more. He raised both his hands and let the tendrils do the rest, easing their way back into the woman’s head. She could feel them again, locking into place in a half-dome above her brain, tips sticking into the mass itself. Small, preliminary shocks began, linking together into one massive charge. Lightning seemed to strike through her, ripping her apart, shattering her soul. Fire inside her, excruciating pain, serenaded by a darkness that devoured her whole.
Laughing, the madman turned and dug his tendrils into the side of a man’s face. No more than the scum deserved for trying to sneak up on him. With a powerful jolt, the attacker flew a few feet before his face took a journey across more of the stone floor.
“Resilient fellow. Yes, I see you getting up. I’ll fix that.” He chuckled.
Kneeling down, he put both hands into the man’s throat. The unified charge came more easily; he thought he saw lightning come out of his victim’s throat.
“Servants, take the bodies away,” he called.
“Yes, master,” the two servants said, slightly bowing and always keeping their gaze from him. Even the artificial intelligence he had created pretended to fear him. He could never have dreamed of such a good existence.
“Come out of hiding, assassin,” he said to the thin air.
From the shadows stepped a man, a dagger in each hand. Another one, looking exactly like the first, came from the opposite direction. Gradually, a small army of these men, each one looking slightly transparent, as though made from smoky glass, surrounded him.
“Would you perhaps mind showing me your real self?” he asked. “From above, I assume.”
Smiling, a more solid-looking man appeared from the darkness above a chandelier. “You found me,” he said with a shrug.
A knife carved through the madman’s heart as he was looking intently at the man on the chandelier.
“Actually,” the man with the fatal blow said, “I found you first. You assumed that none of these copies were the real one…though I doubt that you would bother to look at each one.” He pulled the heart from the chest without much trouble. “Not beating. I assumed as much, but I know it has given you power in your undeath. Power I might be able to take for myself.”
He began to walk away, turning around once more. “It will feel like hours have passed when I leave. It will have been about thirty seconds.”
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