The fugitive’s head still hurt, broken skull fragments tangled his hair. When he probed the injury, he could trace the convoluted bendings of his brain. The blood trickled and cooled into the sea surrounding him on all sides. The sharks circled.
Being hit by a running shark propelled the fugitive forward, into waiting jaws of another one. That shark tore away most of his abdomen, and a good chunk of the rib cage. The fugitive didn’t have time to scream before frenzied sharks latched onto him. Their powerful jaws pulled him beneath the waves. More sharks converged on the scene. But they did not know the fugitive. He tore the sharp blade loose with his teeth and had it at the ready. He was a predator as well and they fell eventually to him.
The fugitive broke the surface of the water and looked toward the shore. There were fires blazing and the faint sounds of music. Broken, bleeding, and more than half-dead, the fugitive rolled over onto his back and began kicking with his feet.
Sounds of civilization grew stronger as he neared. He was going to make some changes. As soon as his preternatural ability to heal makes him whole again he was going to find a different manner in which to keep body and soul together. There had to be something else he was good at.
Something.
THE PIG BUTCHER.
In that foul Year of our Lord, 1348.
Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.
College of Medicine.
Montpellier, France.
HE FOUND A WAY IN.
He became a pig butcher and he was good at it. He didn’t mind it, not at first. It was easy because he was so good at it. He did it for a couple of years and it wasn’t too bad. Pig blood was almost as good as human blood. Almost. It was fine at first, more than fine. In fact it was dandy.
The best aspect is that you don’t have to hunt pigs to eat them. They are brought from the market to you. And like a spider, the pig butcher only had to wait. He would bury his sharp blade deep into their flesh and twist it on the way out. The blood would squirt hot and fast and he would sup on it until the only blood left was what he wiped from his satisfied face. But that just wasn’t good enough anymore. He missed the power of the human blood upon which he used to feast. He no longer wanted to be a butcher of pigs at the College of Medicine. He wanted to be a Man of Letters from the College of Medicine. The pig butcher wanted to be a physician. He wanted to lecture, especially on human anatomy. Fortunately for him, swine composition is remarkably similar to that of humans. And if your young man likes to be fucked by a pig butcher with blood and excretion slimed all over your tough, toned torso … well, then. He would be fine with tutoring you on what is needed to know, especially the English language.
Yes he wanted to be a physician because he wanted to be in. He wanted to go to Oxford and lecture on anatomy, but without all those years of required schooling. He didn’t want to change the world or discover new frontiers of science. He just wanted in.
Even if they would admit a lowly pig butcher to their hallowed halls, which they would not, he didn’t want to do the work, he just wanted the end result. The pig butcher believed he could get the means. He simply required a young man with a respectable inheritance, no family, and a trusting nature. It also greases the skids if said young man was a fevered sodomite who fought day and night to keep his secret hidden like it was his very last coin.
Whatever it took whatever degradation he was asked to employ and to endure he would do.
He just wanted in.
The pig butcher stood quietly by and watched him cry out in pain as he was stretched out on the rack. The pig butcher turned a big wheel. He heard the human’s body pop and crack. The physician passed out.
The pig butcher left the wheel and went quick-like, fetching a fetid bucket of human waste. He poured it over the physician’s face. The doctor came to, spitting out the bucket contents. He gagged and choked on the wastes and tried to spew out the big pieces.
The pig butcher went back to the wheel. He was alone with the doctor. The pig butcher cared only for the location of the physician’s loot: his Diploma, his Letters of Introduction, his purse. Along with the deed to his London home and the Lecturer position awaiting the good doctor at Oxford.
The pig butcher had his hands on the wheel, ready for another quarter-turn.
“Where’s the gold, Dr. Blyte?” the pig butcher asked. “Does Agnes know?”
The doctor squirmed about. Agnes was one of the sightless ones.
The pig butcher detached the rough leather straps from Dr. Byte’s limp, unmoving arms. He let the scared doctor thrash about and carry on. It was all a waste of time to shout so. All that it accomplished was to sweeten the blood with his insistence that there was no purse. But of course there was. If it didn’t exist, Dr. Blyte would have already been killed and his identity thieved.
The pig butcher secured straps tightly to the physician’s head and chin. He made sure it was tight. The slack was taken out with a couple quick partial turns of the wheel. The butcher made sure the tool he needed next was right behind him and ready to use. Then the doctor panicked. All of a sudden it seemed to finally dawn on him. He realized what would happen next. He was not talking his way out of this. His lover was going to kill him. That was all there was to it.
The pig butcher was a heart-thrilling dalliance for Dr. Willelm Blyte. They fornicated whenever the two of them could arrange it. The pig butcher was willing and able to do everything on the secrets list the doctor tried to keep from all. All that the butcher had wanted in return was help with human anatomy and his English.
The doctor was aware that he was now being tortured in the same hidden room at his home near the college. He was even strapped to the very shameful, same wicked contraption where the pig butcher tied him down and sodomized him. Covered with the blood of a freshly killed hog, the butcher fucked the doctor whilst the physician did the same to the pig. Sucking on his own bloody fingertips, Dr. Blyte would ejaculate streams into the pig carcass while the butcher ministered to the devil’s hole. It was delight in abundance. Often, the doctor would pass out, only awaking to the soft cleansing of the butcher.
All of it was done in hiding and silence. Dr. Willelm Blyte had everyone fooled. No one knew where the secret room was. No one but Agnes and she wasn’t saying anything. She was now deaf to his pleas and was helping the pig butcher.
The butcher smiled at the frightened heretic, thus allowing his true self to emerge. Dr. Blyte saw how the long, sharp teeth punctured the butcher’s lip. Blood drops bubbled out and, mixed with saliva, inched slowly down his chin like lava. The butcher’s talons dug into the wood of the wheel, splintering it as his claws split the surface. Those yellow eyes assessed closely the questioned.
“God in Heaven,” the doctor cried when the torturer changed. “By the Cross of Jesus,” the sinner shouted, “I confess! I confess!”
The heretic doctor’s eyes went impossibly wide, horror dominating. Fear was his mask. The pig butcher smelled the sinner’s blood. It was ripening beautifully. He was ready to be plucked and savored.
“I confess!” the heretic repeated.
But first: the information. The pig butcher was not going to be fucking walking to England. He was going to travel in the manner Dr. Blyte would find safe and comfortable.
“Tell me, then, doctor dear … where is thy purse?” And Dr. Blyte told him all.
In the end it was easy to find, hidden right there in the open. It was in a locked cabinet in the doctor’s secret room. The pig butcher did not even need the key to open the cabinet. His brute force tore it open as if it was only an animal’s hide to be removed.
The purse was thick with coins and small jewels. The purse was easily concealable and the pig butcher had no doubts as to his ability to keep it safe on his own person.
Once the purse was secure, the butcher went back to Dr. Blyte.
“Let me confess my sins to a priest,” the heretic begged, “Or if not, then you. Please!”
“You can tell God your sins in person
,” the butcher muttered, “fore I already know them all. And I care not.”
The pig butcher spun the wheel. The sinner’s scream was cut short when his neck split and his head tore free.
The spine stretched, fractured, but remained intact. The rack rotated the feet side down; thereby allowing gravity to pull most of the blood back into Dr. Blyte’s body.
The pig butcher reached behind him and grabbed the waiting tool. With a flash of glinting, a sharp blade sliced the doctor’s spine in two. The tool was dropped to the floor. The butcher had his talons sunk deep inside his tortured lover’s flesh before the blade had settled on the hard-packed earthen floor.
The pig butcher lifted the headless body skyward lightning fast. He quickly dislocated his jaw. Dr. Blyte’s ragged neck was deep in the butcher’s cavernous mouth. He snapped his lower jaw back up once. It locked onto warm flesh with no leaks.
The doctor was held aloft by the pig butcher, as if he was a giant bowl of mead. The butcher sucked hungrily on the severed neck like it was his momma’s swollen breast. When he was finished, the pig butcher released the drained body. He eased his jaw back into place.
The butcher sat himself down on the floor. He stared absently at the doctor’s remains. The pig butcher relaxed and floated within the surge of power the blood gave him.
It’s all about the blood. Now that he has re-tasted human blood, the pig butcher wanted rivers of it. He wanted as much as he could get. He made up his mind. The pig butcher was not going to do without it. Not ever again.
He was a pig butcher and he was good at it. Not anymore. That ship has sailed.
The pig butcher will be sailing, himself, within a fortnight. It has almost all been arranged. When the ship finally drops anchor at the port city of Dover, England, it will be the new and improved Dr. Willelm Blyte who shall emerge.
All signs of the former pig butcher have been erased and buried deep, along with the head and tail of the former doctor.
THE PHYSICIAN.
In that foul Year of our Lord, 1353.
Plague Rages Still.
Bedlam Hospital.
London, England.
DR. WILLELM BLYTE, a Doctor of Medicine and a Regent Master of Oxford College, finished her off with one last gulp. It was the end of his medical rounds of the Plague victims. He’d had seen to them all; given to them their depletura therapy. The blood-letting had drained them all as the therapy filled him.
The physician was very plump, flushed pink, and growing even more so by the day. The more blood he drank, the more he wanted. After a time, he could no longer fit into his special Plague clothes. He had to have another haz-mat suit made. He subsequently grew out of that motherfucker, too. Finally the physician dropped the entire pretense and just arrived in his civilian cotte.
Since he had been a good steward of the wealth and property of his adopted identity, the physician’s personal clothing was top of the line. First a linen undershirt was worn next to the skin. Then next both the cotte beneath and the houppelande covering it were made of primarily fine raw silk, with linen and extra stitching at the French seams. Today’s suit was very recently tailored. It had lovely bright shades of black and wine in coloring. The full-length sleeves tapered tastefully at the wrists. Pewter buttons ran down the full length, thereby covering the snug pantaloons, or worn open for the tasteful rakes. It fit a bit bigger than perfect when tailored. But now, now it stretched like the green skin of an overfed tick.
And still the patients came from all points.
The physician dropped her to the rags-covered pallet. Her cooling body settled with ankles crossed, arms slung out either side. He looked at her a moment. Her dead eyes indicted him.
“And I shall be your very last patient.” Silently she scolded: “The last one you are to ever see. “
“I should have brought my cane,” he thought.
The physician settled back onto the creaking, protesting stool. He wasn’t overtly troubled. Who gives a hairy horse shit what the dead think. The way Dr. Blyte figured it, if they really did have any insight, the wretches wouldn’t have gotten sick in the first place.
“I really should have,” he added. But he didn’t, so he took his eyes away from the accuser and studied instead his hands.
The both of them hurt like the devil. His fingers did as well. They’re burning now. Hot stabbing pin-pricks of neuralgic spears trying to push themselves out. The fingers were bright pink, almost red. All ten digits were as plump as over-stuffed sausages, he noticed. They were both hard and rigid. The hands felt like they were on fire. His fingers were too coarse to move independently of each other. Each subsequent attempt to do so became more difficult.
The physician was sweating buckets all the time now. The flood of sweat was at first a light pink and then even pinker and still it was only getting darker by the moment.
Although only two weeks old, the bloody sweat has stained his latest tailor-made suit of silken clothes. It was ruined. He should have worn the linen suits, he was thinking. But then he realized that he no longer fit in even those. What was once a looser fitting, height of cotehardie fashion was already ripping at the seams. The physician loosened the restricting belt and tugged the outer houppeland off him. He dropped the fur lined silk garment to the dirt at his feet like it was nothing but a labor soaked field tunic.
Even without the long coat on, still his clothes were tight and binding. They were digging into his red flushed flesh. He could barely take a lungful of air in and he couldn’t breathe out at all. Dr. Blyte was swelling, puffing up, and filling to capacity with blood and more blood until he feared he would truly burst from it all. He had so much blood on board that the physician should have not had to breathe at all. But with a barely constrained panic, he had to breathe.
Almost as if to prove some deranged stance, the pewter buttons that ran down the middle front of the cotte began to poke out. The eyelet material stretched audibly. The binding proved too weak. The buttons then popped themselves free. They shot out in a firecracker line, sending the pewter skittering everywhere. That’s when people began to turn and look.
Horror alarms began clanging in his too tight skull. The pressure felt like he had wriggling, growing larvae pushing their single-minded way out of his ears. The doctor was feeling his heart chug away. It was being asked to circulate an impossible volume of blood. His heart was failing and he was still having much difficulty breathing. The linen shirt he tore free with one frustrating, panicked hand.
The doctor’s torso was speckled with pin-points of red blisters and whole webs of blown capillaries. The physician had to get out of Bedlam hospital. He had to get into the night, leave this foul banquet and get some fresh air.
Dr. Blyte stood slowly up. Or, at the least, he tried to. But the spindly, underused muscles of the physician’s legs were cramping up in knotted bunches. His knees were sketchy from the improbable weight. Crimson sweat popped out all over his forehead. It made Dr. Blyte look like he just swatted away a swarm of biting insects.
The physician wobbled where he stood, not able to step forward or to regain his seat on the stool. His eyes began to tear. The tears were slow going at first, then fast, ending in a cascade of salt-bloody tears that poured from his bulging eyes of his engorged face. The doctor’s gums were also bleeding. His teeth were all moving about of their own accord like unhinged marionettes.
“Primum non nocere!” he shouted in a surprisingly booming voice. He gurgled-choked and then spat out several of his teeth in the process. Some of those teeth made it as far as the pewter buttons had. Some went even further. Deep within the physician’s breast his shame at his sham and the gluttony that followed was suffocating his lungs and choking off his heart. “Now it is belated!” He groaned out with what was left of him to muster, “I shall never make amends!”
But what really could he have done? There was always more. What was he expected to do? He had the keys to the sugar-sweets cupboard. No one was wagging fingers of disma
y and the candy would never run out. Dr. Blyte, after years of the vermin, livestock, and prey that ran from him and fought back, finally he could cut and bleed as many as he wanted, as many as he could. And now he has. And now he also has full awareness of his imminent demise. The Fates have thrown his last cards on the table.
He watched with dismay as his sausage-stuffed fingers split at the tips. The physician used the talons that grew from the center of the wounds to attempt to claw out his throat. To get some air out so some could get in. Then he coughed up oysters of blood and filth from deep within his lungs, spitting and spilling it all, riding on a snail-slime sheet down his mammoth gut. The physician slapped at his tears as both his ears unexpectedly spurt. Ejaculates of blood shot out of the ruptured eardrums like cannon fire.
Dr. Blyte cried out through a mouth that was overfilled with muddle: “Medica, cura te ipsum!” The unrelenting pain forced the physician finally to his knees. The force of his mass smashing and crashing onto the inert floor left splatters of red and greenish-yellow fluid in the dirt. He clawed the ears and shrieked: “Unpaid! Unsettled! UNABLE!!”
Clots of blood then exploded with vicious force out of his mouth from his stomach. It sprayed out in pond ripples, splattering the floor ten feet in front of him. Because of his ruptured eardrums, Dr. Willelm Blyte couldn’t hear as the drops as they fell.
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