Chapter One: Creatures of Scorn — Part 5

“The boy you stole eyes from was my twin brother. And you, as revolted as it makes both of us, are our father.”

Jake’s eyes widened, but Orchid didn’t give him a chance to say anything. She twisted the small dagger twice, separating his gut muscles before tossing the pencil thin weapon into a nearby trash bin. With a flip of a switch, her first knife was free, and she stabbed him three more times, each time working closer to the heart. Orchid didn’t stab him in the heart, but she did puncture his liver and his spleen, his stomach and one of his lungs. Orchid’s plan played out completely when an officer, sent in response to a routine call from Orchid’s bander, found her before she could sink the killing blow. Orchid swiped Jake’s eyes with her thin blade, the blood from the wounds blinding him temporarily. Even as the police officer was hurriedly reached for his plasma pistol, Orchid found herself burying the pronged dagger deep into the center of Jake’s chest, reinstating the weapon’s prongs.

“Hold it.” The young officer yelled, assuming authority where he really had none. Still, he approached her cautiously, his weapon finally drawn. “Drop your weapon and step away from the man.”

“This is no man.” Orchid said, her dark tone vicious. “He just tried to steal my eyes.”

Orchid stepped away from Jake, still holding him by the hair on the back of his head. Without immediate medical attention, Jake would bleed to death, but Orchid had no intention of keeping him from proper medical assistance. The officer not knowing anything about the situation had already signaled for an ambulance, having assumed that he had stepped into a domestic violence situation.

“This is your last warning.” The officer said, automatically transmitting for backup as he pulled the safety pin from his plasma pistol, letting it fall from his finger. The pin dropped, bounced, and rattled across the ground, coming to rest with a dull metallic click somewhere near Orchid’s foot. “Step away.”

Orchid’s suit would have easily protected her from the weapon, but Orchid put her hands up just the same. Before he could even consider the situation, and move in to detain her, Orchid Snapped, ripping a hole in space and disappearing from Sholm and the scene with only the traces she intended remaining behind. The police wouldn’t be able to track her — her custom suit was loaded with her personal jamming technology. Nor would they bother to look for her, once they realized the prize she gave to them. Leaving her father at the mercy of the most brutal legal system in the galaxy had been part of her plan. Justice at the hands of the police would neither be swift nor merciful. Even spitting on him so the police would know that one of his own children had tried to kill him was part of her plan. In knowing her identity, the mafia would treat the issue as a family affair, rather than target some innocent bystander or opposing mob boss.

Jake collapsed into the officer’s hands, where he begged mutely to be killed. The officer set the man down gently on the ground, feeling compassion only until Jake the Butcher’s wanted face came up on his visor plate with full information on his criminal history. Prison would not be pleasurable for a man with Jake’s history. Jake had harvested from many prisoners in his time. Prisoners were often youthful, immobile targets trapped in one place, easy to get to, with few who cared for them. Jake had taken full advantage of the prisons over the years, and had made hundreds of enemies among Sholm’s prison population.

“Jake Northrup, AKA Jake the Butcher, it is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest for crimes against humeity.” The officer said, locking Jake’s hands in cuffs.

The officer wondered if he would have let the girl kill the man, had he only known her intentions. Jake deserved to die at the hands of one of his potential victims — to suffer in a way only his victims could fully comprehend. Forensics came on the scene even as the emergency vehicle hovered down between the buildings and trees. A forensics-trained bander went over his body, gathering evidence on Jake’s attacker and on Jake, all to ensure no complications during the trial. If they found even a single cell containing DNA that wasn’t Jake’s, they’d try to cross-link it to a victim, and therefore link him as directly as possible to any crimes they couldn’t already directly prove his responsibility for. It proved pointless, Jake had enough evidence against him to be incarcerated for ten lifetimes, and the only cells on Jake at that time proved to come from his daughter — the victim who had so brutally brought him to justice. If the police knew what Jake was, they would have made certain he would serve a sentence for every one of those ten lifetimes. Instead, they made sure to try to cram that suffering into as many months as remained in Jake’s current life.

The officer pulled the husky, deeply pigmented ambulance driver aside while they loaded Jake into the back. “Jake the Butcher finally met his match.” He said as casual as he could. “Forensics said it was his own daughter.”

“Yeah. Heard it was a girl in a blank suit.” The ambulance driver answered back. “It’s already hit the news.”

“Real slick, huh? A knife wound like that must hurt. If your sensors were faulty, and you hit a few pockets of air on the way to the hospital, do you think it would kill him?”

“I’ve been having some trouble with the weather radar lately, now that you mention it, but nothing so critical that I’d lose a patient in his condition.” The driver replied, his voice matter of fact.

Jake’s bumpy drive to the hospital proved just the beginning of his suffering. After mouthing off to the judge, he was found in contempt of court and detained indefinitely to include the three lifetime sentences he’d been proven guilty of. The prisoners of Sholm Prison Complex One were of a type that weren’t treatable by neuron-therapy, medication, or in the case of incurable (often self-induced) brain lesions, progressive surgery. Hardcore and essentially self-chosen expounders of evil, even the worst of them loathed Jake for his choice of profession. Like a violent pedophile in a room full of serial rapists, Jake stood one step lower in the eyes of his fellows. Some of them had been victims of other butchers, though a few had suffered at his hand. All of them took their vengeance out on Jake in terrible, bloodletting ways. Within a year, Jake the Butcher had been a bitch and a punching bag, and had spent a great deal of time in the infirmary for injuries and illnesses ranging from ruptured hemorrhoids and anal herpes to broken shoulder joints and cracked facial bones. Given the advanced medical technology available in the prisons on Sholm, Orchid’s revenge, bittersweet and full of spite, would carry on for years — perhaps even decades — to come.