Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

The little redheaded monster screamed for his mother. Darrell drew back and backhanded him again, this time with a closed fist. The force of the blow knocked the boy over backwards. He landed face down on the tile floor. When he looked up, his left eye was nearly swollen shut with a tremendous black and purple bruise that went from cheek to temple. It looked as if he’d just gone twelve rounds in a boxing match.

Darrell leaned over and pointed a long gnarled finger into the boy’s face. His eyes seethed with rage and madness burning like an electrical fire. “You yell one more time and I will beat the life out of you. Do you hear me?”

The child nodded, his jaw still hanging open in shock. He looked over Darrell’s shoulder, searching for his mother.

She finally overcame her own shock enough to protest. “What the hell are you doing to my baby!”

She charged the gray-haired old man who’d just battered her son, swinging a fist and hooking her fingernails into claws, reaching out for Darrell’s face, determined to make him pay for hurting her child.

Darrell turned and casually caught the woman by her throat, pinching her windpipe closed just enough to guarantee her silence.

“Shhhhh!” he said, then turned back to the child, still holding his mother in an iron grip. He had to concentrate to keep his rage in check so that he didn’t crush her esophagus.

Why do they even bother having children if they don’t know how to control them? he wondered.

“I want you to apologize to your mother for disobeying her and embarrassing her like that in public. SAY IT!!!”

“I—I’m sorry mommy!” the child cried and tears began to flow from his eyes steadily.

“And if you ever disobey your mother again, I’ll be back for you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Darrell released the kid’s mother and she rushed to scoop up her son.

They held each other and cried as Darrell turned and walked toward the exit. On his way, he passed a cherubic, blonde-haired, three-year-old baby girl sitting in a stroller with a pacifier in her mouth. She was being pushed along by an overweight woman, roughly Darrell’s age, who was obviously her grandmother. The child’s real mother was probably little more than a teenager. As Darrell passed, he reached down and overturned the stroller, dumping the child out onto the floor and leaving the toddler screaming as if it had been fatally assaulted. Darrell bent over and retrieved the baby’s pacifier, adding it to his necklace. He carried the stroller away with him as both parent and child screamed at his back.

“The sooner they learn the better,” he muttered, twisting the stroller into a mass of warped metal and plastic. The little girl had been nearly four years old, at least three years too old to be riding in a stroller and sucking on a pacifier.

“The sooner they learn,” he repeated.

He walked out of the mall and tossed that tortured relic of some years ago baby shower into the dumpster, wondering almost casually if he was perhaps taking his crusade too far. He reassured himself that all the kids he had disciplined were bad kids who would have only gotten worse if not for his intervention, that he was doing it for their own good. But, he wondered if he was also getting a little pleasure out of it, if perhaps he was not seeking to save the children but to punish them, to hurt them. He wondered if he was seeking revenge. Maybe, it was the parents he should have been punishing and not the children? Parents like him, who had failed their children, allowing them to become the brats that they were. Maybe, it wasn’t enough to teach the kids? Maybe, he needed to include the parents in his education?

“Let me get another hit off that, mom.”

Darrell’s head whipped around so fast he nearly broke his own neck.

There stood the answer to his musings in the form of a mother and daughter dressed identically in skintight halter-tops, sans brassieres, and mini-skirts so short that you could tell they were not wearing panties beneath them and that they had recently shaved. They were both smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle of Crown Royal back and forth. The girl couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. It was obvious that she and her mother were prostitutes, just like Darrell’s baby girl Linda, who’d died in an alley with a needle in her arm and the semen of the more than a dozen different men she’d fucked that night still leaking out of her. Darrell wanted to scream. He wanted to yell at the top of his lungs. A parent was supposed to want better for their child than what they had. They were supposed to guide them, steer them away from making the same mistakes they made. What this mother was doing was abominable. She had to be punished.

How could she let her child do that?!!!