Mr. Beast #5

The sky darkened. All of autumn’s colors were ducking under a veil of dusk. In that place, they lost their souls until dawn. Vibrant colors dimmed and disappeared from the day like the orange glow of once unthinkably hot lava crawling across an ocean floor. The Professional’s feet shivered, blue; His shoes had been lost, but that wasn't the reason for his shuddering. His shirt had been torn to rags; His hand was crushed beneath his skin but he hadn’t yet realized what was done to him. With one trembling hand, he clawed the top of his thigh, hissing through his teeth. The Professional's head lie rested on the steering wheel. His mouth, slack open, dropped spit between his legs and onto the floor mat below, where it landed warmly in a small pile between his fetal feet. Watching it fall, he could only have been thinking of what had happened. Realizing for a second time that he was alone, inside a locked car, his body started to feel more pain. His broken hand, laid over the curve of his knee, began to sting from within. He moaned and gurgled in pain, holding it upright, looking for a way to stop it. He noticed the bone of his smallest finger: Halfway up, at his knuckle, the skin covering was stretched with swelling, rosy pink and shiny. A frenzy of pain arose suddenly: in the very center of his palm, displaced bones, like fish-bones, caved in from every direction to stab opposing flesh whenever there was a muscle spasm. He whimpered and hissed, throwing his head around and then downward again, his unbroken hand cradling a now torturous, animal trap of a hand. Fuck. He could do nothing for himself but stay still, resting his head on the steering wheel. He remembered, ten years ago, his Driver’s Education teacher’s words on the day of their last class, “With a license, you are responsible for driving a machine that kills people.” Spit continued to fall from his open mouth, seeping deeper still into the floor-mat. Tortured physically, he dared not leave the car yet. He didn’t know what all had been done to him as it was too terrifying a thing, escaping the nightmare women. Frozen in his car, the professional coughed up everything.