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nihilistsundays-blog · 7 years

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the minds of martyrs.

Ethan Schroeder has a special gift. Ethan Schroeder is also a sociopath and a capitalist, the difference between the two remaining blurry at best.

CONTENT WARNING FOR: extreme gore, cult themes, religious imagery, character death, cannibalism and animal cruelty.

One of the first questions people would ask Ethan, upon meeting him in person for the first time, was, “when did you first realize what you can do?” He had never offered a straight answer in response, because the truth was that he didn’t have one. He had no way of knowing how long the martyr gene had lain dormant in him, he had no way of knowing if it even was a gene at all. Magic, perhaps, physics, mystics - sorcery was only science that had yet to be understood, after all. Maybe a genetic mutation, maybe a blessing from some bored god. The important thing was that he was rich as fuck now.

His ten AM had a brain tumor. It was smallish, about the size of an apricot according to the scan she brought to him on glossy x-ray paper. Normally he didn’t take tumors, but the only problem with this one was that she didn’t have the money to cover the co-pay for her necessary surgery, which, thanks to her history of defaulting on medical bills, her insurance was insisting be paid in full and in advance. Otherwise, it was in a fairly “good” spot for a tumor, easily removed, and by now Ethan had enough money to pay for the best goddamn neurosurgeons in the world. He’d begun to consider tumors on a case-by-case basis, as a result. Ten AM was crying, hard, before he even offered her tea. It was always hard for him to determine whether or not their tears were born of sincere fear and pain, or a ploy to try and convince him to take on their ailments and wounds. He watched her, waited.

“They want nearly fifty thousand dollars!” burst from her in a rising wail. She was clutching a kleenex to her chest with one hand, ignoring the steaming cup of delicate green tea his maid had set down for her on the elegant oak desk between them. “And that’s after my insurance covers the ten percent they were willing to take care of, do they think I just have fifty grand lying around? What I have is three kids and no husband! What I fucking have is an overdue light bill and a fucking brain tumor!”

“Yeah, so, I’m Ethan,” he said with the subtlest touch of dry derision in his tone, a subconscious response to what he perceived as her hysterics. “Why don’t you take a deep breath, okay?” This was routine for him now, dealing with these desperate, hurting people. Occasionally one would inspire a kind of distant sympathy that stirred in him like a summer storm’s rumbling threat in the air before it erupted into a downpour of dangerous empathy, drowning him. Too much compassion would invite a corrosive guilt, he knew. A guilt that would encourage him to stop taking their money for his services, to save them for free, and that was unacceptable as far as Ethan was concerned. He’d been a scientist, once, or a student at least, his mind moved in a linear and pragmatic way. He could be a good person, or he could be rich. Wealth won.

“I’m sorry. I’m Dana,” she said. She was quite beautiful, something he hadn’t really bothered to notice until now. She sat before him with the easy grace and long, elegant neck of a dancer, her skin a warm, buttery brown and her hair a careless array of short chocolate curls. Freckles were splashed across a button nose and round cheeks, left exposed by her lack of makeup. Vaguely, he considered offering her a cut if she slept with him, but that was just far left enough of sleazy that he rejected the idea upon impact. He glanced down at her paperwork on his desk, going silent for a moment as he reviewed it.

“And you’re...twenty-eight, it says here?”

“Yes.”

“Suncare Health for your insurance?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay Dana, I think I can help you.” This set off more tears, which Ethan ignored as he went on. “I don’t normally take tumors, but yours is a case I may be able to accommodate. I’m going to have my lawyer contact your insurance company to hammer out the details, but in the meantime I’m going to make an appointment for you to come see me two weeks from now, if that works for you. Provided everything goes smoothly with Suncare, I’ll be ready to take care of this for you before Christmas.” Like a scientist, he’d streamlined the process of martyring for people to a fine-tuned formula. He quickly added her information to his secure online database, slender fingers flying over his keyboard as she sat and cried at his desk. It took him all of five minutes, and then he was handing her a business card, as crisp and cream-colored as a doctor’s. “I’ll call you if there are any issues.”

She rose to her feet, tears dripping down freckled cheeks, and he handed her another tissue. “Thank you, thank you so much,” she babbled. “I honestly can’t believe this is really happening, when I heard about martyrs a while back I figured it was some nonsense, like tarot card readers or something. I wonder why more of you guys don’t do what you do, turn it into a business.”

“Well, there aren’t a lot of American martyrs, otherwise we probably would,” Ethan replied, only half-joking, as she left his office, guided by his firm but gentle hand at the small of her back. Dana had subsequently consumed his tumor schedule for at least another six months - there was being a martyr, and there was being reckless. Ethan, his scientific career long since aborted in favor of full-time martyrdom - was still very much a calculating thinker, a logical mind. Poor Sasha, that had been her end, he’d heard. His ex had died, presumably via suicide, because the weight of her well-disguised but deeply disordered thinking had eaten her alive in the end. Ethan had no such plans to fall prey to such a humiliatingly human crack in his own mental armor, and so he spent every day studying, thinking, sharpening, tightening, preparing.

When he’d been nine, he’d picked up a dead bird on the ground. Some childhood cruelty had burst its tiny belly with the impact of a bloody BB pellet that he’d fished out with his index finger hooked knuckle-deep in warm, slick starling innards. It was a dear little thing, and to this day he remembered gazing down at it, gripped with the senselessness of its end, much as the way he’d felt seventeen years later upon attending Sasha’s funeral as his eyes had settled on her mercifully closed casket. It was a cornflower-blue that she would have hated, chosen by her father in one final act of control over her life – death – whatever, one last disregard for his daughter’s feelings that had inspired in Ethan a kind of dawning understanding when it came to her. The bird though, it hadn’t been too late for Ethan to save her.

He hadn’t known then, of course, as he held the tiny, dying thing in his chubby little hand what would happen. Martyrs had to activate their gift neurologically, he’d reasoned with others online, triggering some dormant chemical reaction that somehow absorbed the wounds and illnesses of others into their own bodies – more than one of them had died on the experimentation table of some scientist, squirming and struggling through a sticky mess of magic to find the mathematics of it all, the biology and sense. None had succeeded thus far, but Ethan had left dying stars and dying hearts behind in college. He was independently wealthy now, and capitalism made enough sense to him to erase the craving for any more answers. The bird had twitched in his hand, a tiny beak opening on a tiny chirp, and the stabbing pain had punctured his soft baby-belly almost immediately.

He'd watched the flesh and feathers close around the bloody wound in the bird, he'd watched it flutter away in less than a minute, and then he'd yanked up his t-shirt to examine the BB-sized hole just left of his navel. Martyrdom couldn't replicate the actual foreign material, but the wound was exactly the same, albeit embedded in his own soft internal tissues as opposed to a starling's. His own did not heal, but it was a simple thing to go home and patch himself up with hydrogen peroxide and several band-aids crisscrossed over the puncture. He was not squeamish, little boys weren't raised to be, and he didn't say anything about it to his parents, who weren't interested enough to notice their son wincing every time he rose from the dinner table that night.

At twelve, he'd tried again.

"I can't," his best friend Joaquin had explained wearily over the phone one October night. "I'm sick, Mom says I can't go over to anyone's house or I'll infect the whole block and everyone will be pissed at her."

"Come over anyway, I promise it will be okay," he'd said quietly, rounding the corner of the kitchen and living room adjoining wall so that his mother, washing dishes, didn't eavesdrop. "I have a secret, but I can only show you."

Joaquin was a stocky, golden-skinned boy, his ink-black curls and warm, laughing dark eyes a stark contrast to Ethan's lanky blondness, the hawkishly masculine features that were already starting to emerge inh is face. Joaquin still had baby-soft cheeks and a dimpled, boyish grin. He looked sallow when he arrived at the back porch entrance that night though, a little flushed and stuffy. He was coughing, hard and wet, into a tattered napkin when Ethan let him in. He'd been practicing on large bugs and small animals all afternoon, taking the cat into his father's tool shed to mask its yowls every time he'd stabbed it in the side with a sharpened pencil before resting his hand against the tiny wound to take onto himself. His torso was littered with tiny stab marks now, bright little beads of blood that had washed away in a stinging rush like hail in the shower.

"What's such a big deal that I had to come over now?" Joaquin wanted to know, but Ethan only smiled like a knife and took his hand into his own. It was cool, clammy and damp. Joaquin followed him out to the oak tree on the perimeter of their backyard, behind the house and facing away from the street. It was the beginning to a moderate sprawl of woods between their house and the Suarez family's, and they'd often go camping there where their parents knew they were safe.

"Sit down," he said. "I haven't done this with a sickness yet, only injuries. I think it'll work though."

"Dude, what the hell are you even talking about right now?"

They settled, cross-legged in the cool grass and facing each other, Joaquin sniffling and rubbing his nose. "I've been thinking about it," Ethan went on, giddy now with the rush of this potential new discovery about what he could do. "A cold is an infection, a viral infection like they taught us in school, right? And we learned that being coughed on or sneezed on by someone with a cold will spread it. I think all I need to do is to let you spread your cold to me, and do my thing when you do it, and then yours will go away."

"Are you like...did you sneak some of your dad's JD again?" Joaquin demanded, impatient now with the way Ethan was mostly talking to himself out loud and leaving him fumbling in the dark. "Are you saying you want me to sneeze on you? Why?"

"No dude, don't be gross. That's disgusting. I'm going to kiss you."

"What?"

"Kissing passes cold viruses too, remember?"

"And that wouldn't be disgusting? I'm not kissing you!"

"Dude! Don't be like...homerphonic or whatever they said in school. Besides, this isn't a gay thing. This is an experiment."

"Yeah, it sure sounds like an experiment to me. Sounds like you want to do a lot of experimenting here, Ethan. Save it for high school, would you? We'll be there next year."

"Bro? Seriously right now? Shut up. We're doing this." Ethan's resolve won out over Joaquin's reluctance - something about the intensity of his burning, hungry gaze overwhelmed the other boy. He felt caught up in it, washed away on the wave of Ethan's zealousness.

"I mean like...you really think my cold will go away if I give it to you?"

"I know it will."

"No you don't, that's why this is an experiment, remember?" Ethan didn't give him a chance to argue any further, heaving forward to slam his mouth into Joaquin's in one breathless surge. It wasn't any kind of kiss to make the movies - in his eagerness, he nearly split Joaquin's lower lip, bruising their mouths with the impact, but he held it, tilting his head to one side and then the other to make sure it worked, moving their mouths together until he was satisfied that if it was going to succeed, what they'd done would be enough to get them there.

Things were quiet, then. Ethan pulled back, Joaquin touched his sore lower lip. Crickets chirped and a car whispered by on the street far north of the backyard. "That was my first kiss," Joaquin finally said, dazed. "If it like, counts with a guy."

"Don't be gay, man." Ethan rose to his feet, wiping his hands off on his jeans. "We should know by tomorrow if it worked."

Joaquin called Ethan early the next morning, and his mother woke him up to take the phone upon Joaquin's insistence. "Dude! It worked, it bitch ass damn hell worked!" Joaquin erupted once Ethan was on, using every curse word he knew to emphasize his point. "I woke up this morning, no fever, no stuffed up nose, no cough, no nothing! I feel great right now, I could run for miles!"

Ethan, by contrast, felt like bitch ass damn hell. His head was throbbing, he could only breathe from one nostril, and despite shivering in his bed, he was flushed and overheated all over. He laughed despite it all, sitting up in bed. "Oh, god," he mumbled, more to himself than his friend. "Oh, god. This is...oh, god."

"You were right, how the hell did you DO that? I can't even deal right now, I'm losing my shit! Shit, man!" It was like Joaquin had suddenly remembered another curse word that he'd forgotten to use at first. "You're sick now, right? That's what it is, like a trade-off? I owe you so big, man."

"Oh, god," Ethan said again, an awareness blooming, unfurling like a flower or a tentacle inside of him, some wet and gripping thing curling around his organs. "What the hell am I?"

"You're a damn miracle, is what you are. Father Quinta says people are like that sometimes, angels on earth or whatever. Can you do this all the time? Can you take on any sickness or injury?"

"I don't know."

"You've gotta find out."

He spent the next seven years finding out. He stabbed more cats, several dogs, excessive birds. He snuck into hospitals dressed as concerned relatives, he did his own research in the interest of avoiding the inevitable questions from doctors, but came no closer than any of the others within America’s handful of known martyrs to finding an answer to what they could do. There was a doctor in London who claimed to have an idea, but refused to share it with the public. His empirical evidence was, Ethan suspected, ostensible at best.

In 2015, on a blustery early December day, he found himself driving past a recent car wreck off the side of I-95, and slowed to assess the situation. A woman hung halfway out of her driver’s side door, crooked and precarious as a loose tooth and probably a lot more painful considering the blood dripping down her face to the point that even Ethan noticed it. The problem however, lay in the fact that said car was a 2001 Pontia Aztek at best, and Ethan hit the gas. The Kidneythieves on his shuffler drowned out her moans, which had permeated his closed car windows just a moment ago, though not loudly enough to bolster his sympathy beyond his pragmatism.

He was the first to water the notion of charging for his services as a martyr - or at least the first to actually act upon them, to be as “callous, capitalist, and cruel” as one needed to be to so much as consider such a thing, according to one magazine that printed an unflattering portrait of him shortly after he announced his intentions to the world via a press conference in Boston. They called him an opportunist, they called him sadistic, they called him cold. And then they started calling him for help. He didn’t bother wasting his time with the lingering flus or the sprained ankles that the wealthy didn’t want to have to wait out, he considered chronic migraines on a case by case basis. The broken bones before proms and the minor lung infections eventually netted enough to pay for a lavish loft in Cambridge, then a sleek black Volvo, truffled cheeses in his fridge and women who never managed to be that crazy bitch Sasha in his bed every night. She still crossed his mind, sometimes.

It was the first man he slept with, a stocky and swarthy man named Chris - short for Christiano, he’d explained, not Christopher - who suggested his divinity. He’d been a touch tipsy on Grey Goose and crans when he’d been approached at the bar that night, and Chris had been wearing a gray silk vest and tie over a crisp black Oxford that had struck him as very elegant drinking attire. His sardonic but largely inoffensive sense of humor had charmed Ethan, and a few more drinks had him mentally shrugging. Why not? See if we like it.

His body was thick and powerful, muscle coiled like steel spring under sleek brown skin, his curly, graying hair more salt than pepper, and while the sex hadn’t really done anything for Ethan, he laid awake smoking afterward with a sense of distinct satisfaction. Exploring their sexuality was something normal young people like him were supposed to do, after all. Discoveries were always worth it, a scientific sort of dogma, and tonight he’d learned that he wasn’t super into having sex with men. Chris did look beautiful though, dozing on his back and bathed in moonlight through his bedroom window, and Ethan considered that he was attracted to specific men occasionally in a solely aesthetic way. Paintings in museums were beautiful and enthralling, but he didn’t want to fuck them, and that was about where he stood when it came to the Kinsey scale.

He had some interesting ideas. “I know you think all this shit that you do is medical,” he began after he woke up, the two of them sitting up in bed together and sharing a cigarette. “But you ever think it’s God? You read about the demigods and shit, children of the divine. Maybe you’re some kind of angel.”

Ethan snorted derisively before he could stop himself. “Friend, I am no angel,” he assured him. The idea was germinating though, and Chris was gazing at him with a new reverence.

“I bet you are. Who you are Ethan, what you can do...it’s a miracle, you’re a miracle. There’s no way around it, no matter what religion you subscribe to. It’s something you should think about, people like you aren’t given these gifts for no reason. You have a purpose in life.”

“I do. It’s to make tons of money and die laughing when I’m a hundred years old,” Ethan agreed placidly, stubbing out their cigarette. Chris only sighed, shaking his head but allowing the kiss to his temple that Ethan offered before sliding out of bed. “I’m gonna take a shower, order us some food.” Their relationship never progressed beyond very occasional and even more casual sex whenever he felt the itch for something different, but about six months after their first encounter Chris called him and asked him to come to his apartment.

It was early evening by the time he made it there, later than he’d anticipated, but a woman who needed the bruises that her abusive husband had left splashed across her face absorbed before she left for work that night had demanded his attention. The group waiting in Chris’ apartment was smallish, about ten people including the two of them, but there was an intensity radiating from their surface that gave Ethan pause in the archway leading into Chris’ living room. Some were holding cups of coffee, others bibles. They could have been alcoholics, or Republicans. “Ethan,” Chris said, rolling his name with the bone-quivering resonation of a church bell. “Thank you for coming.” He rose to his feet for some reason, and then, as if on some silent cue, so did the rest of the group.

Ethan arched a blond eyebrow. There were six women and four men including Chris - one of whom he recognized immediately. Joaquin, his old childhood best friend. He was taller now, thicker and more muscular, but his laughing dark eyes remained. There was a blonde woman who wore a soft, fuzzy white sweater over skinny jeans and had braided her thick hair over one shoulder, who introduced herself as Julie. She seemed highly alert, a touch less convinced than the rest of the crowd, but she flashed him a pair of dimples that had Ethan filing her name away for future reference. Dana was there as well - ten o’clock, he remembered. There was an older woman with a sensible and steely-gray pixie cut, fine lines etched into her face as deliberately as veined marble. Her name was Ella. One by one they introduced themselves, and explained why they were there.

“When I first heard about the martyrs on TV, I didn’t know what to think,” Ella said. “I’ve never been a religious sort, but it’s more for lack of convincing source material than any lack of faith. I’ve been a part-time Buddhist, a lip service Catholic, but nothing felt proper divine to me until you folks started popping up everywhere. Even that though, couldn’t be trusted - remember that one on TV, who was all proud about the way she gets her little thrills by letting people tie her up and force her to absorb their wounds?” Ella shivered slightly. “It occurred to me that there could be some very dark implications of what you people do, but then you came along. Offering to use your gift to help others, like a saint.”

“Let’s not shit ourselves here, babe,” Ethan cautioned. “I’m no saint, no matter what Chris has told you. I get paid for what I do.”

“Well of course you do,” she argued, gazing adoringly at him. “This isn’t ancient Israel, and shit’s expensive. No one can possibly blame you for that, What you do is offer a foolproof alternative to western medicine - we all know that half of the time, surgeries and medications don’t work, or only work halfway, but you offer a proven solution that works one hundred percent of the time, and you do it for less than what the insurance companies ask for! That’s worth a lot, Ethan. You’re worth a lot, more than you know it seems.” The group murmured its approval of her declaration, and she smiled with a tender triumph. “You are a miracle, Ethan Schroeder. You’re a hero and you’re an angel. You’re the only martyr in existence who bothered trying to apply your gift to help the suffering, and there’s a reason for that.”

“Yes, the reason is that all of the other martyrs who figured out what they could do were too scared to come forward. Do you have any idea how much personal security I have to hire so that someone with stage four brain cancer or whatever doesn’t lunge out at me with a gun on the way home, demanding that I take on his deadly illness for free in some back alley somewhere? It took a lot of planning and precaution on my part to set all of this up, to get to a place where it would be safe for me to tell the world what I can do.”

“I’m sure all of that is true,” Ella said with a glassy-eyed serenity. “But the real reason you came forward to help others is because it was inevitable, because you are a vessel for a higher presence. I don’t know if that’s God, or Shiva, or Apollo or whoever. But there is literally no question that you have been sent here for a grand and holy purpose, and we’re here to tell you that we want to help you in any and every way that we can. We’ve been talking about this for nearly a year now you know, trying to figure out how to approach you - do you think it was a coincidence that Chris found you in that bar six months ago?”

Ethan blinked, an awareness dawning in him that settled heavy in his stomach somewhere between impressed and vaguely horrified. “Wait,” he said slowly. “Why would you send Chris? Before that night, I’d never had sex with a guy before. I’d never even considered it.”

“Oh, that was a happy accident, honestly,” Chris interjected, his eyes glazed over with the same devout zeal that was mirrored in Ella’s gaze. “I only ever intended to talk to you, to get a feel for where you were spiritually and how receptive you’d be to our ideas. But then you blessed me, Ethan. You gave me something so precious, you let me touch something divine for the first time in my entire life.”

“Dude? We got drunk and fucked in a mediocre room at the Ritz,” Ethan pointed out, his mind spinning as he finally sat down. “No need to write a fucking Harlequin romance about it.”

“You’ll understand soon,” Dana tried. “Give us time, let us convince you. We’ve all been waiting for you Ethan, for so long. Our whole lives, some of us. Now we’ve found you, and we’re here to help you in any way that you need. We’ll do anything Ethan, we’re in your hands. Our lives are yours.” She was crying now, as she seemed prone to, and a tall, olive-skinned man with neat dark hair and thick brows and stubble draped an arm around her comfortingly. “We love you Ethan, we all love you so much. You’ve given our lives meaning again, we’ll do anything for you. Just tell us what you need.”

“What I need is for all of you to calm your asses down and leave me alone,” Ethan began, but then Joaquin was approaching him where he sat, dropping to his knees in front of him and reaching up to take Ethan’s hand in his own.

“I was so foolish, on that day back when we were kids,” he all but whispered. “I didn’t see what you were, I didn’t understand it. But my life has felt so empty since we drifted apart Ethan, and now I know why. It’s because God dropped you into my life as a gift early on, and I walked away from it out of sheer ignorance. Never again, I’m with you now until the end of all things.”

“Until the end of all things,” the entire room murmured softly, and Ethan shot to his feet, his eyes a little wide.

“Right, so. I’m going to go, you people have fun being fucking insane or whatever,” he said, backing slowly out of the living room just in case. Chris though, smiled patiently and handed him a business card.

“We had a feeling this would be a lot to take in all at once,” he said gently. “Call me when you’re ready.”

He wasn’t ready for a solid two weeks. He didn’t expect that he’d ever be ready, in fact. But the memory of their dazed murmuring and their damp, glassy eyes lingered. Their total vulnerability, the sight of Joaquin on his knees, the soft amber light of Chris’s living room that permeated his mind’s eye for weeks. Then, one chilly October morning, Ethan awoke to a slanting, icy needle-rain pummeling his bedroom window, and he sat up in bed and smiled a faint smile.

He called Chris on the same day, and the entire group, twelve strong now - Chris had started an invitation-only website - arrived at his apartment despite the roiling gray sky that had seeped into a dreary day. “We knew it wouldn’t take long,” Chris said as they all filed in. “Tell us what to do for you, Ethan.”

The time had come to put this to the test, to determine just how far these freaks were willing to go, and Ethan silently thanked that crazy bitch Sasha for the inspiration as he handed Chris a pair of brand-new gardening shears, freshly sharpened by some asshole at Lowe’s who had insisted on calling him “bud” until he’d nearly punched him in the face. “Take off your shoe, and cut off your little toe,” he instructed him, fully expecting to be asked for an explanation as to why this was necessary. But instead, Chris didn’t hesitate, dropping to one knee like an NFL protester and yanking off his Nike.

“Do you mind if I get some paper towels from the kitchen?” Dana asked. “I’d hate to see him bleed all over your floor. Beautiful hardwood.”

Ethan stared at her for a brief, flabbergasted second, and then shook his head. “Knock yourself out?”

“Thank you.” She rose to her feet and kissed his cheek in passing as she went, gathering a thick pad of Bountys that she brought back into his living room, carefully laying them down for Chris to brace his foot against. Ethan watched, completely transfixed and increasingly amused, as Chris met his eyes with the most loving smile anyone had ever directed his way just before snapping the shears shut around his little toe. It popped free, tumbling forward an inch or so and rolling to a stop at the edge of the paper towels, toenail still attached. A minor welling of blood bubbled up from the exposed, tiny mess of bloody muscle tissue and the remaining tiny bone stump jutting out from the whole affair, and Chris struggled to swallow his moan of pain.

Slowly, Ethan’s smile widened. “Nice,” he said, softly.

Julie was standing, watching, leaning against the far right wall with her arms crossed over her chest. It was hard to tell under the mood lighting of Ethan’s living room, but she looked slightly ill. Which, he supposed, was understandable. Chris curled up on his side, clutching his stomach for some reason, and Ethan looked him over with a scientific sort of curiosity. Dana went about cleaning and bandaging his new stump, a serene calm having settled over her like a fresh snow. She was entirely different from the woman he’d met in his office several weeks ago, a new purpose having lit her from the inside out now. It flickered behind her dark eyes, a seeping madness, a delusion of focused tranquility. It was a malleable thing in his hands, Ethan knew, and he could use it.

He started small. First, he sent Joaquin and Julie out to do his grocery shopping and laundry. A limping Chris cleaned his entire penthouse loft one frigid December day while he took some minor model to the movies. She wasn’t cute or interesting enough for him to save her number, but fucking her on the tacky cherry-red sofa in her apartment killed enough time for him to come home to a gleaming and polished space. Chris’ nostrils flared when he arrived back home though, picking up the heady scent of overpoweringly floral perfume. “Someone had a fun day out,” was all he said, the struggle to keep his tone light and careless pathetically evident in his voice.

“Getting jealous over me is even more ill-advised than deciding that I’m your neo-messiah, frankly,” Ethan said mildly, flipping through some junk mail. Mostly handwritten letters, which people seemed to consider more personal than simple emails that were way easier to delete, begging him to help their children at a discount because they couldn’t even afford his fees. His own recycling bin was stuffed to bursting with them. “I never promised any of you weirdos a goddamn thing, but shit. If you want to clean my apartment and do my chores for free, then have at it.”

Chris sidled up behind him, running a hand up the small of his back. “You’re so eager to make all of us believe that you’re devoid of empathy, that you don’t see what we see,” he said with a tender patience. “We understand, Ethan, we’ve talked about this amongst ourselves. You’re testing us, testing our faith in you. You want to see which of us is weak, which of us gives up on you when you pretend you don’t care or understand your own mission.”

“Sure, why not? You’ve gotta go now though, I’m beat.” He kicked off his shoes and fell belly-up onto his sofa, using his phone to turn on the 80-inch flatscreen mounted to the far wall of his living room. A light, glittering snow had begun to fall outside, and he briefly considered letting Chris stay until he was done with him, but decided in the end that he really was too exhausted. He fell asleep there, with some Joaquin Phoenix movie lulling him off.

In the morning, he sent Ella and Dana to do his bank run, to pick up his dry cleaning, and when they returned with his receipts and cheerful smiles, he let them wash his car. His agent had left him two voicemails about an invite to do the Dr.Phil show, the topic of which was “Ethan Schroeder and the Martyrs: Opportunistic Sociopaths or Savior Angels?” Of the seven known martyrs in the U.S, Ethan was by far the youngest, and most attractive and charismatic of the group, so the bulk of the media attention had been focused on him, which suited him perfectly. One of his followers - “the healed” they’d begun calling themselves - called his agent for him to solidify the plans, while Ethan took a spa day and let two scrawny and dubiously legal girls knead the knots from his back while slathering his face with a mint-green clay that tingled pleasantly.

“I mean, it’s my body,” he told Dr. Phil two weeks later. “I really don’t have to use my gift at all if I don’t want to, right? Isn’t that my right? Can anyone really blame me for asking for a small reimbursement in return for taking on their sicknesses? I’m offering them a one hundred percent accurate and empirically proven cure for whatever is wrong, at maybe a quarter of what the health insurance companies offer patients for treatments that may not even work in the end. Honestly, I think what I do is very reasonable, I’ve got to eat too you know? I’m the one who’s sick so much of the time, it’s not like we martyrs can heal ourselves. I need the best doctors in the world to ensure that I can continue providing the service that I do for people. In the end, all I care about is helping the helpless.”

He had a soft, steady voice and very light blue eyes like a husky dog’s, and his loose waves of still-long lemon-blond hair fell around his shoulders like a girl’s, and the crowd sighed with a kind of reverent approval all at once. Ethan smiled warmly at them, mimicking his memory of Chris’ gentle smile and soft-eyed gaze. He had a habit of doing that, of very subtly adjusting his mannerisms and tone to match those of the people around him, of mimicking emotions he’d witnessed from others in the past when they seemed appropriate for any given situation. It was a skill that had served him well and taught him much over the years, as his own capacity for empathy had withered to a dry ash long ago.

These people - all people - were fucking disgusting, he’d decided at some point shortly after a wailing father had thrown himself at his feet when Ethan had rejected his plea to take on his son’s epilepsy. Some more than others, like the difference between cats and dogs. Dog-humans were drooling, slobbering, shitting freely all over everything with no sense of dignity, wildly humping anything they came across, only ever concerned with their own base needs. Cat-humans were a little better, cooler and more poised, walking softly on padded feet and turning up their noses at anything lesser than they, but they were just as deluded as the dogs in the end. In the end, they were all just mindless animals.

Snot had oozed from the man’s nostrils, a wet splat of it hitting his beautiful office floor as he’d wept, one hand clutching the top of Ethan’s leather Oxford. “Please,” he’d whispered, his voice cracking. “The doctors say that with every seizure he has, his brain is a little more damaged. He’ll die soon and there’s nothing we can do. I know we don’t have the money up front, but I swear to the lord Christ that I will pay you. I’m begging you, please don’t let my baby die.”

“You know, I’m so sick of you people saying shit like that to me,” Ethan had replied, complete with an eye-roll. “Don’t let this happen, don’t let that happen. It’s not up to me, Papa. You think I wanted your kid to be a fucking epileptic? What makes you think I care? So don’t try to put that shit on me, I’m not the one who gave your kid a brain disorder. Maybe that lord Christ of yours wants him back, ever think of that? Isn’t that what you people believe in, divine will and shit? Now get the hell off my floor, fuck.” He nudged the man’s cheek with the tip of his shoe, watching him sprawl backward onto his back with his arms and legs flailing like an upended turtle. “I have made it very clear that I don’t do chronic illnesses unless it’s a matter of not having the cash for an available cure,” he pointed out. “You’re the one who thought you could manipulate me into putting myself into a potentially lethal situation by appealing to my sense of empathy. Luckily for me, my sense of self-preservation reigns supreme. Is any of this my fault? Why are you crying to me?”

The man snorted and sniffled, scrabbling to his feet with red-rimmed eyes. “You’re a monster,” he said softly.

“No, I’m a realist and you’re just flinging blame out of desperation now because you couldn’t goad or guilt me into giving you what you wanted,” Ethan shot back. “Nice try, asshole. Now get out of my office.”

The boy had died several months later, a clipping of his obituary appearing in Ethan’s mail shortly after. He’d held it in his hands for some time, standing in the kitchen and bathed in the amber light of a dying afternoon flooding in through the long, narrow windows by his sink. He’d read it five times, six, struggling for something, rooting around in his own mind for a spark, a softness, an ache, a pang, contact. Instead, the words registered only as ink on newsprint, a dying medium proclaiming a fitting end for a dying boy whose prolonged suffering was now over, and with that thought Ethan reached a little further into himself. A relief, a bittersweet taste in his mouth, a give. Nothing. Nothing at all, and he smiled faintly to himself because like the boy, he too was finally free.

This realization had bloomed in him about a month before he’d met Chris, and it felt like his life was coming together all at once once he became aware of the benefits of having a cult at his beck and call. He watched videos of the greats - Jim Jones, Billy Graham, Fred Phelps, David Miscavige, and good old Charlie Manson. He pieced apart the reason and brilliance tucked in between their rambling gibberish, becoming increasingly receptive to the potential a cult leader who was actually sane could hold in their hands. He became a surgeon of human emotions, peeling away and cutting into the excess and manipulating what was useful. He told Ella and Dana and Chris and Joaquin and Julie and Tyler and Hanna and Kellan and Liam and Audrey and Sara and Caleb that he loved them, deeply. They had twice-weekly group meetings where they sat and prayed to the “healers,” the “beings of light and love and redemption and remedy” that Chris had told them existed. Ethan listened to their stories, he held them in their arms when they cried. He took on their migraines and stomach aches, their minor injuries and bad days, he fucked at least half of them. They called these private times “renewals.”

“Maybe God and angels, maybe all of the healers, maybe it’s space,” he’d suggested idly to Ella one day as she’d stirred dough to make fresh bread for him while he’d lounged on the floor, reading. “Maybe it’s all just outer space, maybe all of these divine beings actually exist on some planet somewhere are just waiting for humanity to understand the truth of things so they can come and take us home. Maybe they gave we martyrs our abilities to test us, to see what we did with them.”

Ella dropped her spoon. The thirteen of them had bought an enormous house outside the city now, tucked right in the center of a sprawling expanse of unchecked forest. Ethan had thought he’d hate it at first, but he’d come to appreciate the quiet out there, not to mention how much harder it made it for people to waste his damn time when they came begging for healing. The truly poor usually couldn’t afford to come that far out, as having a car or truck that could handle the terrain could have been sold off to pay for whatever they didn’t want to suffer with anymore. “That’s beautiful, Ethan,” she whispered, coming to kneel before him and taking both of his hands into her own. “Thank you so much for sharing this insight with me, unworthy as I am. I love you so much.”

“I love you too, Ella,” Ethan said, glancing over her shoulder. “You’re not going to put that spoon back in the dough, are you?”

The group met without him, whenever he went into the city for an unfamiliar fuck or to blow some cash at the Burberry store. Sara and Dana had been asking him about impregnating them lately, offering up their wombs in the hopes of birthing a blessed martyr like him. He’d said yes of course, considering that he’d had a vasectomy in secret years ago. Thinking they were his favorites, the chosen holy mothers of his blessed babies, it made them happy. Happy cultists were obedient cultists, he’d learned, which had been the great mistake so many before him had made. They’d grown greedy, impatient, demanding, hateful and controlling. Ethan though, he was kind and gentle and caring and it was common knowledge in the manor that no one was ever obligated to stay if they no longer felt it to be the right path for them. He’d never once asked any of them to cut off their friends or families, to stop pursuing their personal interests. He fully intended on winning this game.

They’d been living in the house for over a year when he was woken up in the middle of the night. The sky was endless, starless, through his bedroom window, an icy moon hanging heavy and unobscured by clouds. His twelve were standing in a circle around his bed, holding candles in their hands, their flickering illumination creating a dream scene. He sat bolt upright in bed despite his sleep haze, blinking at them. “Hey, guys,” he said, his voice hoarse with sleep. “What’s going on?”

“I have wonderful news,” Dana said adoringly. “I’m pregnant, Ethan.”

“Bullshit?” spilled out of him before he caught himself, and he winced.

“No, it’s true. I’m a week late on my period, and I can feel it. I can feel what we created together, stirring inside of me. I feel holy Ethan, I feel new. All because of you.” She used her free hand to reach down and stroked his hair.

“Maybe we should take you to a doctor and see if they can feel what we created together too,” he said cautiously. “Just to be sure.” Because there was literally no fucking way this stupid bitch was pregnant.

“I’ve already made an appointment,” she assured him, threading her fingers through his hair. “But I don’t want you to worry about any of that now, tonight we’re focusing on you.” Normally Ethan was a major fan of people focusing on him, but her words sent a shiver down his spine. He blinked up at her, but she only smiled down at him, her face a shadowed echo of everyone else’s. “You made my life worth living,” she said to him, trailing her fingertips down his cheek. “All of our lives. We owe you everything, and despite it all you continue to give and give and give.”

“I mean, sure, I guess. Is there...something you guys need, then?” he tried, yawning.

“Yes. And since you won’t be able to communicate with us anymore soon, we want you to know how grateful we are. We love you, Ethan.”

“We love you, Ethan,” the group echoed in a dazed unison, their eyes glassy by candlelight.

“I won’t be able to what now?”

“Get his legs,” Joaquin instructed, and Tyler and Chris each grabbed an ankle.

“What the fuck--?”

Sara and Julie got his wrists, Julie’s eyes glittering in the dim as if she was finding a personal satisfaction in this that eluded the others. Her fingers felt sharp and bony, curled around his wrist like steel clamps. She leaned down low, under the guise of kissing his lips, but instead she whispered something to him.

“Sasha Fallon says hello,” she whispered, pain and anger slicing through her quiet hiss. “You think you’re the only one who can manipulate people, you piece of shit? It was so easy to make them see what they had to do to truly become holy.”

Ethan’s eyes went huge, and he flailed in their grip. “Stop it!” he tried, adding a weight to his tone that he hoped was authoritative as they hauled him off of the bed. “Fucking stop it!” But they didn’t stop, and instead they carried him down into the house’s basement, where rows and rows of wooden shelves had once housed root vegetables and mason jars of preserves and bottles of wine. They’d been repurposed into a crude cross, mounted to the filthy, gritty wall, and Julie helped the others yank and tear at his clothes until he stood naked and shivering and surrounded by all of them, twelve to one. “Okay, what the hell is going on?” he demanded, trying to remain incredulous, but the cold dread was seeping in. He knew exactly what Julie had planted in their minds, what she’d suggested was their only honest path to divinity. It rang as clear as a bell in her cold stare.

Joaquin knelt, wrapping both arms around his knees, hefting him up and carrying him over to the dirt-caked cross. He struggled, but Joaquin was thick and muscular and he only smiled up at him. Ethan almost considered himself lucky that he was so strong, because it only took one slam of the hammer a moment later, to drive the thick industrial nail through the center of his palm. One bleeding hand was now pinned to the left arm of the cross, and Ethan stared through wet, disbelieving eyes. The pain felt far away, somehow. It was possible that he was going into shock, he considered, but the relief of it was obliterated a second later, when Ella needed three bangs of the hammer for his other hand. His fingers twitched, and Sara wrapped a rough rope around his waist and the middle beam of the cross to support his weight.

Blood dripped into two old glass jars that Ella positioned precisely under his hands on the floor, collecting in dark puddles at their bottoms as the men went to work on his feet. The thinnest place to nail into was the webbing between his biggest and middle toes, and his head thunked back against the cross with a deep moan of agony as they finished their work. “He’s so beautiful,” Hanna said, sniffling a little as she gazed up at him. “Cut out his tongue.”

They only had serrated kitchen knives from upstairs, and so it took Joaquin several minutes of sawing through wet, fleshy muscle to sever Ethan’s tongue as his entire body shuddered on the cross. It came free with a faint tearing sound, the last centimeter of sinew unraveling as Joaquin used a pair of gardening pliers to pull it free. He was rewarded for his hard work with the first taste of Ethan, though he was kind enough to saw the quivering hunk of muscle tissue into several pieces for everyone to share. He chewed with a relish, smacking his lips to show his appreciation. Blood poured from Ethan’s mouth and down over his chin, neck and chest, painting a thick red streak across his body. His eyes rolled wildly in their sockets as he tried to silently plead with one of them to please stop this madness, but a wretched magic had taken hold of everyone in that basement.

They took his toes, then his feet, working their way up. Ethan was still alive when Chris finished slicing through the thick, tough meat of his hip until his steak knife tapped bloody bone and he was able to reach in with his fingers and used them to pop it out of his hip socket. From there, it was only skin and sinew holding his leg in place, and they were easy to cut through. They feasted on him while he watched, dying somewhere between their finishing his leg and beaming up at him through blood-smeared faces and bloody teeth, their throats working down the raw, rubbery chunks of him. His head fell forward, flopping loosely against his chest, and Julie, who had only nibbled on one of his fingers before letting the rest of the group gorge themselves, smiled up at the ceiling and said, “Amen.”

End.

#original fiction #horror #writing #horror fiction #body horror

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