The New Craze
Redgrave saw the blood first. The floor was a smooth white tile, those little hexagon pieces like you saw in public restrooms. Spatters beaded on their surface or spread into thick Rorschach blotches that reflected the bald overhead lights.
He noticed the naked woman second because she sat on a little plastic chair further up the hall, moving a bit with music that throbbed in another room. She was pretty with angular features though she wore her brown hair limp and untended now.
Her breasts jiggled a bit as she shifted slightly, taking his attention from her face. She was probably mid-twenties, and her right shoulder was decorated with a pattern of colorful tattoos. He thought it odd she’d spent so much time sitting for that, but people’s priorities shifted too.
She looked his way, and he almost jerked his gaze away, but the focus in her dark brown eyes was elsewhere, not really on him, not suggesting she’d taken offense at his ogling. Dreamy, he decided, just before he felt the sting in his upper arm.
The big man, bald, shirtless but wearing a black plastic apron had jabbed him with a needle. The man had led him in here with a grip on his upper arm. He looked at his bicep as the plunger drove fluid into the muscle.
“On up here,” the man said when he withdrew it and took Redgrave up the passage to a seat across from the woman.
“Get undressed then just sit down here,” the man ordered. “Don’t drag ass. The drug’s gonna make your limbs feel heavy for a while.”
Redgrave looked back at the young woman, but she didn’t seem to notice him. He hesitated anyway. The bald man was pulling on latex gloves, but he noticed the vacillation.
“Go on,” he said. “Don’t slow us down.”
Redgrave peeled his polo shirt off as the man gripped the woman’s arm and urged her to her feet. She looked at his gripping hand, confused a bit, but she complied as the man guided her forward.
Redgrave watched as they moved on into an area at the end of the hall, an open workspace. He felt a little shock as he looked at the blood smears on the walls. The patterns on the floor tiles were even more plentiful and scattered in there. Several white buckets were positioned near large hooks at the space’s back wall.
A young woman wearing a surgical mask and a white apron of her own stepped to the bald man’s aid, slipping leather cuffs around the woman’s wrists.
“It’s just easier,” the aproned woman said. “You won’t have to support yourself.”
The bald man took the girl’s arms and looped the connecting chain between the cuffs over one of the hooks that extended down from the ceiling.
Redgrave’s brain fogged a bit, and the voices became distant as he watched the aproned woman select a sharp instrument, a scalpel, its tiny blade sending a flare of white-light reflection as she moved it.
He realized his leg muscles felt soft. If he tried to turn away, move back up the hall, they would give way.
He just watched. The first incision produced a thread-thin red line in the young woman’s flesh, the line thickening in an instant before droplets of blood moved down across her flesh.
Redgrave felt stirrings inside himself then and despite the drug’s effect, he drew in a quick breath as memory projected those old images.
Danielle, Danielle from fourth period English. Wavy-haired, usually wearing glasses, sweaters that weren’t too tight but didn’t hide her form. Her glasses had been off that night. Sweater too, and she had moved on top of him that warm evening, striving to make the most of the tight space in the car’s back seat.
She’d looked pretty fabulous there as he gripped her hips.
The window smashed in as she arched her back, those firm breasts thrust forward as the moans escaped her throat.
The jagged chunk of concrete missed, but the shards of glass cut into her, drawing rivulets of blood from her face and neck, running down her breasts. Her blood rained down upon him as he scrambled to grab his shorts and get out to defend her from her jealous ex.
He fought to control his breath now as the scalpel continued to work and the bald man helped the aproned woman with the flaying, patches of skin dropping one after the other into a bucket. The brightly tattooed skin giving way from the shoulder to reveal black-red muscle beneath, dark, gleaming red as the music pounded, a soundtrack for the scene unfolding.
The woman made no sound. She must have been given the same injection he’d received, must be numbed, but the drug was supposed to provide an energy burst. He wanted to ask, but the people were too busy.
And he couldn’t form words anyway. He just sat, continuing to watch, thinking of what was in store.
He lost track of how long it took, but when all of the outer layer was gone, when her head had become a ribbed-crimson dome and her form, still so feminine was free, the aproned woman stepped back.
“We’re going to unhook the cuffs,” the bald man said. “You should be able to stand now. The sprint should kick in soon.”
Sprint…that was what they called the drug. The drug that made this all possible, extended strength and energy…through…the process.
Redgrave breathed in again, anticipating.
“Come on,” the bald man said. And cuffs were placed around Redgrave’s wrists then arched over the hook just as before. He let his weight sag, relaxing. They said it helped if you relaxed and the drug’s initial numbing effects really meant you didn’t feel much. Then the euphoria was a cannon blast of energy through your system.
He saw that demonstrated by the girl. She had grown steady. It was true. She walked toward the doorway that opened off this work room. In the dark larger room beyond, where the music originated, lights, laser slashes of purples, reds, greens, blues streaked everywhere.
The girl waited only a moment in the door way and then stepped forward into the mass of writhing, fleshless revelers. They twisted with the music, bobbed, twirled in the mad ecstasy that had been promised in the forms everyone signed.
As the scalpel bit into the back of his neck, Redgrave willed the blade to work quickly. He wanted to catch up to the girl and dance with her, watching her form and looking into those brown eyes until they both dropped.
Horror Sleaze Trash 