THE PROTECTOR M/M rape, cruelty, violence and death
By Ruthless
DISCLAIMER: This story is a work of gay erotic fiction. If you are underage or if you are offended by stories of this nature, please do not read it. As always, the author welcomes your comments, questions, flames, criticism, complaints, requests for stories or requests for missing instalments are welcomed by the author at Ruthless@nbnet.nb.ca
**** WARNING ***
This story is not for the squeamish. If you can't stomach blood, don't read it. It depicts violence, death, sexual violence and gore.
Blood. A red tide. I wake panting. I fling my eyes open to escape the scarlet streams that fill my sleep. My heart is rattling in my chest. I remember. Even with eyes open I cannot escape what I dreamed. I squeeze my eyes shut again. I can't shut it out. Blood. Dreams. Memories.
He was a slim hipped teenaged boy. I saw him in the basketball court below my apartment. He lived somewhere in the same building. For long hours during the day, I heard the dull rhythm of the basketball. A sleek brown ponytail snaked down his back as far as his waist. He was about fifteen, I thought, but he didn't go to school. He worked nights instead.
At eleven in the evening I saw him in the lobby of the building, a leather punk jacket on his square young shoulders, a defiant sneer twisting his lips. He met my eyes in challenge. I stared back, mild eyed. I would not be stared down by a punk in my own territory. The adolescent uncertainty won out. He dropped his eyes.
A minute later his lift came, a white panel van screeching to a halt in front of the glass doors. The boy dashed out. The heels of his sneakers flashed red lights.
I thought about the sandals that Roman prostitutes used to wear in the old days of the empire, the words: Follow me, imprinted in the soles, so that men could follow her tracks. Were his shoes the same, a signal so his customers could follow him down the sidewalk?
The panel van was his place of work. Five or six hours every night, it parked at the corner of Clayborn and Wyndott. The boy lounged on the sidewalk. I drove past in a nondescript rental car and made note of him. He smiled cockily at the passers by. If a man was interested enough to stop, they were only steps away from the dark privacy of the van.
Where was his pimp, I wondered? Not in the front seat of the panel van. Surely not in the back: that would scare away the customers. Somewhere near on the street? I drove past again, scanning doorways, alleyways, windows. There was no man lingering. When the boy worked, he had no protector near him.
At night, between cruising the bad neighbourhood and talking to the over-dressed girls who lingered on the corners, I read the reports. A twenty-one year old Caucasian male, found dead on the sidewalk in Millbank, blood pooled in a red lake around him. He was found in an area frequented by prostitutes. Millbank was only thirty-five miles away from here. The man had a criminal record for solicitation and gross indecency.
The boy and I knew each other by sight now. From behind I watched his brown ponytail swinging insolently, an arrow that directed the eye downward to his rump, encased in tight jeans. But from in front he dropped his eyes, no longer able to keep up the pretence of truculence.
Once, meeting in our building's elevator, I spoke to him. My voice was hard. "So how much do you get paid when you suck dick, son?"
A pink flower opened, I saw his cheeks become the colour of impatiens. His answer was a mutter, almost too mute to comprehend. "Thirty-five." A hustler, blushing? But we live compartmentalized lives. The same question that would make him smirk and strut on a dark sidewalk filled him with shame in the hallway of his own home.
In the early morning, in bed, I envisaged his brown head in my lap, the sensations of a dispassionate professional tongue, strumming me swiftly higher. In my imagination I felt him pant, the hot air puffing out on my thighs and testicles.
A new report was filed and I read it. A seventeen-year-old Caucasian male, wrists tied behind his back, found in a ditch beside the highway. There was so much blood, and the blood had gone stiff and black, that it looked like he had been doused in paint. That was on Highway 11, between Millbank and Rochester, sixty-two miles north of here. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Another faggot hustler killed in the line of work, and nobody mourned him.
Valentines day, and the same kid in my building, giggling drunk lurched into me. Red and white paper hearts cascaded to the floor. He almost sobered. "Shit, mister... I'm sorry!"
"Don't worry about it, Kid." I said. I walked on. The paper hearts were like roses, red and white. They scattered away from my feet. They were white like the sheets in the mortuary and red, like fresh new blood.
On the street corner, the hookers were wary. They were nervous. They got into cars with strangers and went to private places with contemptuous men who wanted to stick things into their bodies. But that was what hookers did.
The basketball kept up its afternoon tattoo below my window. The sneakers with the red flashing lights disappeared one day, to be replaced by seven dollar Bargain Mart specials: Either the boy had been mugged or sold them. I pictured him being mugged, falling to the sidewalk. A crowd of legs around him. His arms shielding his face. Hands ripping at him, tugging at the high status sneakers on his feet, his legs pulled wide as they dragged him scraping over the concrete. There was no mark on him, so I had no evidence which it had been.
At one in the morning, I passed him on the usual corner. His face froze with recognition. I got no easy smirk, just a startled white face. I gave him a nod and kept walking. There was no protector watching him over him that night.
Barr Village: thirteen miles west, in the dumpster behind the Three Mile Tavern, the young man was eighteen and his jeans were around his ankles. Blood dripping out from under the puffy plastic sacks in the morning, had alerted a janitor coming out with more trash to where he was hidden. I pictured it, crazy streaks and splashes that had crawled up the walls of the dumpster. A Rorschach test in horror. Trees, explosions and butterflies randomly depicted in blood. The dead young man had a reputation for not being overly fastidious. He would do anything for a few bucks, including give head. Another hooker.
Well, everyone knew it had to be sex. No good denying that it was sex, even though there was no sperm found in their throats or back passages. Police are not too surprised when they don't find sperm in a snuff rape. Rapists are commonly impotent at the time of the crime. The adrenalin is too high. The need to hurt is fiercer than the need to cum. It often comes later.
No one debated if this killer was on the hunt because of sex. They were hookers all. They were young hookers. They were male. Someone had spilled sperm somewhere. I pictured white thick globs of cum, trickling down the knuckles of a hand in a quiet bedroom.
I spoke to the boy four nights later. He went nervous first and stuttered, but what I told him to do, he did. He had to. He tried to appear like he wasn't scared of me, but his eyes tracked me too closely. He came with me, into the back of the van and I talked to him.
"What's your name?"
"Adam."
And how old are you Adam?"
"Eighteen."
"Uh-huh." I said. I didn't ask him for an id. I let the lie go. I told him what he was going to have to do instead.
"I'm going to protect you, Adam." I told him. I lied.
I guess he knew how badly he needed protection because he never said he didn't want me around.
I said another thing to him that night. "Don't touch me." I said. "Understand? Don't touch me. Save that for your pimp and your customers."
"Okay." His voice was low. "I guess what you want to do is harmless, right?"
From then on I was near. I didn't drive the streets slowly and aimlessly. I stayed near the kid. Sometimes I sat in the front seat of the panel van and sometimes I sat in a car parked a few spaces away. I watched the bulky men pause and speak to the slim boy. I watched them go into the back of the panel truck. My balls ached when I watched.
Because we were thrown together we talked a little. Mostly it was about basketball. "Come on..!" Adam insisted. "This year the Celtics are playing badly. That's all you have to say. It isn't injuries holding them back!"
One night in the front of the van he talked aimlessly. "Fuck, I wish I could go back to school. But how can I? I can't work 'till three in the morning and then get to school for eight. And those teachers, always getting on my case..."
"Don't even try to go back to your old school." I said.
"But I don't even have my grade nine!" His voice suddenly jumped full of intensity.
"Go to Adult Ed." I said. "They have afternoon courses. And the teachers there don't give you a hard time. They give you the work, that's all. You're better off going to Adult Ed instead of regular high school."
He looked at me forgetting to be afraid, to cover his ass with lies. "They wouldn't take me. Not unless I was eighteen."
They took him. I went in and spoke to them. That kind of string pulling is easy. People, even bureaucrats are cooperative if you phrase it right.
The next time a boy got slashed it was in Pogan Creek. The dead boy was only sixteen. He had no record, but it was established that he did hang around the public washrooms. After the ambulance was gone, they sent a street cleaner truck trundling in. The big tires tore up the grass. Scouring jets of water washed everything away. Clods of sod and dirt went hissing down to the gutters. The flowerbeds were left as muddy trenches with the blossoms gone, but the wide pools of blood were obliterated.
Once the kid came out of the back of the van with his hair loose and hanging. At the flicker from my eyes, he spoke lamely, defensively. "That guy wanted it down. He said he wanted to feel my hair."
Instantly, at his words, I almost felt it myself, the subtle softness of the sliding strands on my legs, surrounding the intense wet pull of his mouth.
Adam twisted his hair back into an elastic. "Sorry." he said to me.
Two in the morning: "Is that cops?" A man demanded belligerently. "You never used to have someone around. Is that cops? Why is he watching?"
"He's not cops." Adam said. "He's my protector. You understand why I've got one now? You know what's been happening."
I no longer heard the basketball's steady broken rhythm in the court below my window. Adam was at school in the afternoon and the court was empty.
Once on a slow night, he crawled into the van when the rain came spattering down. He sat on the seat beside me, nothing to say in the face of my silences. After half an hour his hand wandered over. It slid onto my thigh. He had a limited repertoire, only a few ways of relating to people.
Self control kept the violence from breaking out beyond my voice. "Take your fucking hand off me, Kid, before I break your arm."
"I'm sorry," he said weakly. He tucked his hand onto his own lap. "I remember the ground rules. Don't touch you."
Long hours. Boring hours. Watching. Waiting. Biding my time. Pretending I didn't have a hard on, stiff and unsatisfied in my pants.
"I can take you home at the end of the night." I said.
"No." said the kid. "There'd be trouble. I'll wait until he comes to pick up the van and ride with him."
Did I tell you about the pimp? A tall man with a greasy cloud of bushy hair. He had long fingers, stained yellow. He had girls in his stable too. He spent the night watching his girls. Why the girls? Hookers were getting over being so afraid, now that they knew it was only boys being targeted. I never said a word to the pimp about Adam. I still don't know what Adam said to him.
Early in the morning, in my own bed. I would think about the boy, with his ponytail shaped like a question mark. The boy wiping the back of his mouth with his hand, looking at me. The boy in the back of the van, in the dark behind me, breathing in the cadence of slow gasps. And I would think of the dead eighteen-year-old with his pants around his ankles, or the dead sixteen-year-old who had had wings of blood fanning out on the ground below him. So I didn't masturbate.
And the night when it happened came in the end. I didn't know it was going to be that night. He had had a few customers. He had told me that the Celtics ought to be paid according to the games that they won. The bars had closed; the last stragglers had left the sidewalks empty. I climbed down from the van. "What time is it?"
"It's three twenty."
"I'm going home." I said.
I got my car. I drove back, past the van on my way home, only three minutes later. His pimp was there, just climbing into the vehicle. But Adam was not there.
I pulled up alongside. "Where's Adam?" I demanded. "Where is he?"
His fingers waved jerkily. His eyes were wide and wary, "He met a friend, his friend wanted him to go in there..."
Maybe nothing is going to happen. I jumped from the car. I left it to run down the sidewalk. Maybe nothing is happening, only the soft suction sounds of a mouth job, a few bills tucked into a back pocket. Nothing.
I saw two of them in a doorway ahead. The man had blond hair that looked white under the streetlight. Adam was half turned for a second and then they were inside.
There were no lights inside. Stairs, a hallway, the smell of grime and of cigarettes. A customer. Adam has gone with a customer. My Adam has gone with a customer. I blundered up, battering, following by instinct. I must have been following a draft, made by the doors they left open behind them. I tried doors as I went up. They were locked. And I could see nothing, only feel it. But it took time, blundering up and down the halls. The kid. The kid was up here with a customer. But it's just another customer, like so many other nights.
"He's my protector." Adam had told his customers. Yes, Adam, I am. But you're going to die tonight.
Then there was a noise ahead, and running feet. When I made the landing, the door was ajar with light behind it. I pushed open the door.
Adam lay, in the position of a child asleep, face down on the floor. His clothing littered the boards. The warm smooth planes of his body were half curled, one hand under his head, his ass humped up. For long seconds my gaze froze on him and the gentle cadence of his breathing, his up turned ass. I locked on the pale brown skin and pale brown floorboards. Nothing scarlet. Nothing red. His naked ass was unblemished and it was what I most wanted to stare at forever in the world. Three seconds I stared, perhaps, no more.
I started to turn and I saw and heard and felt the body heat of the pale haired man all at once beside me. He was behind me, darting in as I turned. I managed to get my fist cocked as he thrust. The heat of hell touched my belly and left me cold.
I sank slowly from my feet, liquefying. Each punch robbed me of my breath and sight. Three punches. His knuckles impacted deeply. It was not the punches that made my legs go under me. The blade that thrust beyond his knuckles paunched me. I buckled from the lethal violation of steel entering my intestines. He had an expression of shock on his face, perhaps mirroring my own.
From then on there was nothing I could do. Reach for a weapon? I could not control my own eyelids or fingers, much less my arms. I felt the floorboards hard against my shoulder blades. I heard the clunk of the weight in my jacket hit the floor beside my head as he flung my jacket aside. He was stripping me; I knew that from the sensation of his fingertips raking me as he dragged my clothing away. But all there really was, was the hot epicentre of weakness, the pain that resounded through me, more vast than all the oceans of the world. Heat. The hot blood streaming on my skin. Wet slippery hot blood. My life's blood.
He's going to castrate me, I thought. It was the first thought I formulated, to explain why he had torn my clothing away. Now that I was swiftly dying, that thought was not urgent enough to wake more horror in me. How many seconds difference would it make if his knife ripped in and out of my flesh again? But instead of the silver gleam of the knife, I saw the bare abdomen of his body as he stripped himself.
He lay down on me. His face was in mine, breath gasping against my mouth. I felt his limbs scissor like a swimmer. Slick heat separated his belly from mine, and then nothing separated us. The prong of his cock found an opening in the slippery well of blood. It butted into me, into the volcanic heat where the crippling pain was radiating through me. His face was set in awe and exaltation as he drove his prick into the wound in my belly.
I tried to scream. I breathed instead. I had no vocal chords. I understood now why there had been no sperm in the throats or stomachs or asses of the dead hookers. I stared up at the killer's face as he stared down. I could identify that face now anywhere, anytime. I saw it so clearly that I memorized it.
He was smiling, astonished, as his body thrust urgently against me, almost bouncing on me. He was staring into my eyes. Words were coming out of him: boys, cunts, vaginas. Very little of his rational got through to me. The swell of pain where he had fused his body into mine was everything. His cock sliced again and again into the opening that his knife had made. My body was spasming, trembling so convulsively that my heels were rattling against the floor and my hands were slapping helplessly.
It took him only moments before he stiffened with a grunt. He crawled away. I saw his bright red thighs and stomach. My blood covered him from the nipples down. He was grinning now. It was only then that I realised that I had seen him before, I knew him from somewhere. His grin was too wide. It made him look like he was afraid. I was much more intent on dragging my useless, stick like fingers up to cover the mushy moistness of my ravaged abdomen than on looking at the man.
But I watched him as I lay there. First he crawled, then he stood up, then he tried to smile, then he staggered. And then he went to Adam, who was groaning on his knees.
No, I thought because Adam was groaning. Adam was alive. Naked, but alive. I rolled over onto my side. Like a jug tipped over, I felt the liquid pour out of me, and I gagged at the sensation, my tongue thrusting into the floorboards.
My knees came up, tight and protective against my chest. My arm scraped slowly upward. I saw the man reach Adam and lift him gently to his knees. Adam was drooping. His young cock followed the angle of his thigh as the customer held him in a grip that appeared to be an embrace. Everywhere the customer rubbed his gaudy red skin against Adam, he soiled my boy with smears of my bright dirty blood.
My hand reached my jacket and the weight that I had heard clunk on the floor. My gun. My fingers were twitching and trembling as I brought it out. They were so clumsy that I was almost batting at the weapon as I made it ready and cocked.
The customer was holding Adam in front of himself. Both knelt. Adam came only to his shoulder. Adam's eyes were on me, gone wide, come awake and gleaming with terror. But it wasn't just terror, there was a plea in his eyes. He was looking at me, pleading at me to help him.
From a fetal curl on my side, I raised the gun using both of my trembling hands. I saw the dismay on the killer's face. My gun. His knife. He had his knife in his right hand. He had his left arm locked around Adam, under his arm, clutching his shoulder. The blade was very thin and quite long. We faced off.
He would not leave either one of us alive. He wanted Adam to be dead. He would make sure that I was dead because I had seen his face. No matter what it meant to Adam, I was going to have to shoot. I was going to have to shoot him now, before my palsied fingers lost their grip on the gun. I realised this, and the killer saw this realisation in my face. Again, his understanding mirrored my own.
He moved first. It took me time to steady my aim. By then the steel had scythed forward maliciously, and driven hard across the boy's slender neck and vulnerable Adam's apple. It was like two ugly lips opening below Adam's chin. A wide mouth spat out a wave of blood. Crimson flooded the room as my gun cracked. They both folded. The walls were left dappled.
Blood kept pattering like a distant basketball. The wet wave was hot and slimy, where it had sluiced over me. There were great big drops on the floor in front of my eyes, the size of small red plums.
Roses, I thought. Those are roses, red plums or paper hearts, or red carnations. No. Only red things and nothing that sickened my stomach and broke my heart. The sweet sickish smell of it was palpable. I squeezed my eyes shut so I wouldn't see the big round red dots, and more moisture leaked through between my lashes.
They told me that the killer with the knife died. My bullet went through his cheekbone. I missed Adam and hit the killer with the headshot I had tried for. Both of them were DOA. The killer turned out to be a teacher at the Community College and a lay preacher at the Baptist Church. No more boys died.
They tell me too that it only took two or three minutes for my back up to follow the sound of the shot into the room, but that was long enough that I was in full cardiac before I got to the ER. I don't remember anything after I closed my eyes. I lost twenty-seven feet of intestine and I shit through a bag that's hooked up to my belly. I lived. I got a pension. I have years ahead of me.
But I still dream. I wake up thinking of Adam. I try to squeeze the trigger in my sleep, trying again and again to squeeze it faster, to squeeze it first. And then the blood rises up, a red sea of gore, in all its red horror and I taste its brine again, and I wake up. Adam...
End of story by Ruthless