for the next month. Anything was better than this.
But when Claire opened her eyes again she saw that she wasn’t back home in her bed. Far from it. She was still standing in a walk-in freezer with an insane boy she’d just met half an hour ago behind a dumpster at McDonald’s. An insane boy who was dressed up in women’s clothing, smelled of an expensive perfume made famous by Marilyn Monroe and who was now slicing through the other strap on her halter top.
The boy smiled and pulled down Claire’s destroyed shirt around her waist. Her nipples immediately hardened into painful diamond points as they made contact with the frigid air. No doubt a well-placed flick of a finger would have shattered them clean off into a million tiny pieces.
‘Nice tits, Claire,’ the boy said after a moment, running ran his gaze admiringly over her naked chest while wave after wave of painful goose flesh danced across her bare skin and stitched it up tight. ‘Real nice tits, as a matter of fact. Some of the best I’ve ever seen.’
The boy reached out his free hand and tested the firmness of her breasts, squeezing gently and lifting first the flesh of her right breast, and then her left. ‘Much better than I thought they’d be. But to tell you the truth, I didn’t think boys were supposed to have tits. What are you? Some kind of freak? Some kind of transsexual or something?’
Claire fought back the overpowering urge to vomit. Stomach acid crept up her throat and burned the thin lining of her esophagus. ‘I’m not a boy,’ she whimpered, swallowing back the acrid fluid she tasted in her mouth and finally reduced to acting her age now. ‘I’m a girl. You’re a boy.’
The boy sneered and lifted the hand that he was using to hold the meat cleaver, rubbing tear-streaked mascara gently from beneath her left eye with the pad of his thumb. As he did so, the cold metal of the flat side of the blade pressed softly against Claire’s cheek and left an impression that she knew she’d be able to feel for the rest of her life – however long or short that might turn out to be right now. ‘Well, now,’ the boy said. ‘I’m a boy, huh? I guess we’ll just see about that, now won’t we?’
Whirling around abruptly, the boy reared back his right arm and with all his might flung the cleaver into a side of beef ten feet away, a baseball pitcher dialing up the speed on his very best fastball. The fabric of his dress wrapped around his legs from the sudden motion. An audible whoosh concluded with the grotesque hacking sound of metal biting deep into flesh and bone. Then he lifted his dress over his head.
Claire widened her eyes in shock and horror.
The boy wasn’t wearing underwear, and there wasn’t anything between his legs, save for a mass of ugly scar tissue where his boy-parts should have been.
‘Do you see a penis here?’ the boy asked incredulously, lifting his hands high into the air and staring down hard between his thighs. ‘Do I look like a boy to you, Claire?’
Claire Bishop stopped crying then, much too stunned by the gruesome sight in front of her to feel anything but revulsion and pity. Despite her bizarre circumstances – despite the fact that this boy had kidnapped her and had her tied up half-naked in the middle of a downtown freezer – she actually felt sympathy for the pathetic figure standing before her. How could she not? Never before in her life had she witnessed anything even half as gruesome.
Claire lifted her burning stare to meet his. ‘What happened to you?’ she breathed. ‘Who did this to you?’
The boy dropped eye contact with Claire first. A look of sorrow crossed his down-turned face. ‘I did this to me, Claire,’ he said mournfully. ‘I did this to me because I was a disobedient little boy who didn’t listen to my mother. And I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to do it to you now, too. That’s just the way it has to be. Since I’ll never be a real man, I can’t let you be one either. Fair is fair, after all.’
Stepping forward again, the boy slid Claire’s shorts down her hips, all the way to her ankles. His sparkling green eyes narrowed into accusing slits when his gaze landed on the feminine triangle nestled between