Butcher Part IV

The boy sat tied to a chair, wrists red and raw around the rope. A chill swirled around him, hungry, malicious. It rushed at him, raced through him, could do nothing but make him shiver terribly. The gleaming, usually spotless silver walls were speckled with drops of blood. The shades were drawn, no light streamed in, only the bright, harsh lights above shone on the shadows in the room. The screech of a knife being whet upon stone. The premonition of what was to come. His eyes would not close, fixated on his father’s throat, red, bright, a fountain gushing out liquid, so much liquid, still.

It was all his fault. His heart was still. Tears would not come. His eyes were dry, his body in shock. Numb.

His phone lay on the floor by his feet, a pokeball swirling, ready to catch a pokemon in front of it.

The shink of the knife being sharpened, the gushing of blood, slowing. His father’s lifeless eyes, there was a speck of blood in one of them. The boy was hyperaware, his senses heightened, everything he was feeling magnified.

The cold swirled around, waiting for its master.

He should not have opened the door. He was so excited to see panther meat though.

When he turned the handle on the heavy steel door, and the cold started to swirl out, waves upon waves, a lot of things happened very fast. His scream. He turned around, as his father was his with the chopping board, and the butcher moving towards his father, eyes narrowed in focus. That scene kept on playing in his mind. His father falling to the ground, everything slowed down, just two things in his world. His father’s unconscious body slowly tilting to become parallel with the ground. A thud, echoing, ringing loudly in his ears. Over and over. Over and over. The butcher striding across the shop, the boy’s neck surrounded by those thick arms, smelling of meat and blood. His own body was lifeless, weightless.

When he came to, he struggled, and his phone fell out of his pocket. The butcher turned the lights on, he was standing by the door, arms folded. He noticed everything about the room. And then he saw the body spurting blood. Ever since, his eyes had been there, seeing, unseeing. Focused, unmoving. His eyes were straining from the pressure, thin red veins starting to appear among the white.

The knife screeched through stone, loud, insistent, ever hungry.

He had opened the door, the cold wind hit him in the face as it rushed out. Hanging from the walls, everywhere in the freezer were dead human bodies. In varying stages of decay, some were unmistakably human. Just died. Faces contorted in terror beyond anything he had ever seen. Others were skinned, just bones, and there was everything in between. He had screamed. He had turned around and screamed. He had woken up tied to this chair.

His father was motionless, on the ground, blood everywhere.

The shinking stopped. The butcher came out from behind a hanging human body, huge knife in his hand, gleaming, cold wind swirling around it. “Im sorry,” he said as he brandished it. “God is great.” 

A slice through air and skin and bone and muscle.