(3) Painstaker

Ten: Monster

Warning: Some gruesome stuff

*

"Do you want to do it?"

There were tears staining my blotchy cheeks. My skin felt raw. Scratched. Torn to pieces. Nothing like what would happen to the rogue who lay sprawled in an empty grass field, with nobody around but me and my father. The man, the rogue, had his eyes on me. He couldn't speak from the material stuffed in his mouth, and his hands were tied behind his back. His eyes, an innocent shade of forest green, glinted at the sight of me.

I wanted to puke.

"Well?" My father inquired in a calm voice. He spoke flatly, emotionlessly, as though everything that happened didn't matter.

"I-I don't know. I don't think I can."

"Why not?" My father snapped. "He deserves it. Wouldn't you agree?"

The sky was cloudy, rolling in front of what was once a cerulean blue. Dark rain clouds, threatening to wash away all of the blood.

There was blood on my arms. I thought. Maybe. I wasn't sure anymore. It could have been raindrops. I didn't care. The rogue was staring at me with amusement in his soulless eyes, and I wanted to poke them out with my fingers. Wanted to, but couldn't. I was a coward; something my father knew.

My father was holding a long dagger, curling toward the end. With nothing but the sound of a swoosh in the air, his hand came down and he chopped into the skin of the rogue. The material in the rogue's mouth muffled his screams. He didn't look so smug anymore. Over and over, my father chopped away, making sure to draw out the kill as slowly as possible. This time, I knew it was blood on my skin. The impact of the dagger into skin caused splashes of blood to coat my front.

Tears rolled down my cheeks. I had never seen something so gruesome. I saw parts of the body, inside parts, that I should have never laid eyes on. I couldn't tell what everything was, only the bone that my father had dug into. Over time, the rogue's scream had become so hoarse, there was barely any sound escaping his throat.

All I did was stare as he disembodied a stranger. A rogue. A monster. Somewhere along the way, when the sound of the chops didn't make me wince anymore, I wondered what the true definition a the monster was. Was it the rogue, and all of the hell he caused? Or was it my father, who was bringing justice to evil? Was it me; the girl who watched as the rogue's eyes glistened with tears, as his skin rippled with agonized pain, and felt nothing?

Maybe we were all the monsters.

My father had barely broken a sweat. With the rogue torn to pieces, he tossed the dagger at my feet. Blood coated all the way up his arms, some on his torso, some on his face. "Rogues are the vilest of beings," he told me. "They deserve no mercy." He crouched at my level, placing his bloody hand on my shoulder. Even with his face close to mine, I kept my eyes on the rogue. "If you spare the life of a rogue, you are worse than vile. You deserve a fate worse than this." He motioned toward the corpse.

My eyes flickered to my father for only a moment. When they returned to the corps, it wasn't the same rogue laying dead and unattached. No; it was Flower's lifeless eyes that were staring back at me, with the head of her brother laying next to her.

A scream ripped from my throat, so loud it scratched raw at my vocal cords.

*

The scream was real, and I was awake. Springing forward too quickly, my forehead rammed against the dashboard. "Pull over," I gasped. My body felt sweaty and tired. My nerves were a jumbled mess.