That wet strangled cough was the worst sound Freddy could imagine. It made his stomach roll with nausea and grated on his nerves making him want to scream. Freddy began nervously chewing at his own bleeding nubs ignoring the sharp prickles of pain that each bite sent through his nervous system.
Freddy blamed all his obsessive compulsive behaviors on that mutant poodle. He had been torturing it for years and still it would not die. It still whispered in his ears every night; planting post-hypnotic suggestions like...shove splinters in your anus or chew off your fingertips. He hated the thing.
Once, Freddy had been looking through an old photo album and had been surprised to see that damned dog in almost every picture going back to his great-great grand mother. He could not help but to think about David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, who had claimed that his neighbor’s dog was a thousand-year-old demon who ordered him to kill. His grandparents had once lived next door to the Berkowitz family. They’d lived there right around the time the Son of Sam was rampaging across New York. Freddy was afraid that soon the dog would have enough control over him to make him a murderer too. He had to kill the thing. He’d taken a knife to it again yesterday yet the thing was still breathing and barking and coughing and eating and shitting all over the house!
Determined to end the poodle’s dominion over his life, Freddy leapt from his bed, wincing as the needles in his asshole dug in deeper. He carefully bandaged his fingers; wrapping each torn appendage with pieces of toilet paper, not noticing that they were just as quickly bleeding through the makeshift Band-Aids. No more poison, no more guns, no more knives. Freddy would make sure the thing did not survive. He would burn it to death!
Freddy opened the door to his bedroom and walked out into the hallway, cursing aloud as he stepped directly into the wet, green and brown feces that covered every floor surface in the house.
“Fucking dog.” He growled to himself.
He had to cover his face with a bath towel as the horrible, rancid pork smell of the half-dead, diseased dog, mixed with the smell of feces and roared up his nostrils, down his throat and into his stomach where it caused a tidal wave of bile and stomach acid. Freddy paused for a second as he fought to keep the wave from rising up his throat. Once his stomach was settled, he cautiously negotiated the obstacle course of dog shit and made his way to the kitchen where he knew the terrible creature would be.
“Hi Mom.” Freddy said and dutifully bent over to plant a kiss on her withered cheek. The movement disturbed the legion of flies that had been planting eggs in her eye-sockets and feeding on the cocktail of bodily fluids evacuating her body. Her hair was moving, alive with maggots and still more flies. Her entire body was vibrating, seething with activity as dozens of carrion eating parasites were busily eating away at her flesh, taking her down to the bone.
Freddy yelled and kicked at the dog when he noticed that it had chewed off another of his mother’s feet, taking most of the flesh from her one remaining shin as well. The dog yelped and retreated, dragging yards of bluish purple intestines with it from where Freddy had tried to disembowel it last year. As it barked, its brain flopped back and forth, threatening to spill from its exposed brainpan. Freddy had taken a few swings at it with a baseball bat sometime around Christmas. Its matted and filthy white fur was dotted with red from all the bullet holes Freddy had put into it over the years, and the hilt of a carving knife still protruded from its throat from Freddy’s recent attempt to saw the thing’s head off.
The hideously grotesque canine growled at him and backed away as he approached, limping and tripping over its intestines and leaking blood and bile all over the linoleum floor, adding to the mess already left by the piles of excrement from both the dog and Freddy’s dead mother. Freddy could still remember the flood of urine and...and shit that had released from his Mom’s bowels when he shot her as she tried to protect that damned poodle.
“He’s been in the family forever! You can’t kill it!”
“I know it’s been here forever and don’t you think there’s something wrong about that? The damned thing won’t die! Just look.” He pointed the .357 Smith and Wesson revolver at the over-sized mutant poodle and his mother bent down to shield the thing. The bullet entered somewhere around mid-back and exited her solar plexus in an explosion of gore. She sat at the table, smoking one of those cheap generic cigarettes that smelled like charcoal and berating him for being a failure as a son as she bled to death. He listened to her vituperative tirade, each venomous word barely squeezing out between wheezing, whistling breaths from her ruptured lungs as they filled with blood and she slowly drowned. Her last words were something like:
“You pathetic waste of life! You should’ve been a stain on your daddy’s sheets! And don’t you dare hurt my dog!”
Immediately, Freddy had increased his efforts to kill the thing. The canine abomination was now feeding off the only thing in the house that had ever loved it.
“Ungrateful son-of-a-bitch! And she tried to protect you!” Freddy yelled.
The dog sat and began licking its ass in response.
There was a can of lighter fluid in the pantry and Freddy bent to retrieve it. The dog began to howl and bark before succumbing to a horrific fit of coughing. It scrambled to the back door and scratched at the cheap aluminum, trying to claw right through it to freedom. It could sense that Freddy was up to something.
Freddy had the lighter fluid, the automatic log lighter and a devilish gleam in his eyes. He backed the dog into the corner and began dousing it with the accelerant.
“Don’t do it, Freddy. You’ll be sorry. I’ll make you skin your own penis with a cheese grater tomorrow if you fuck with me!”
Freddy was used to the threats. He didn’t care what the dog said. This would be its last day on earth. Freddy threw the match. He turned to get the fire extinguisher from under the sink as the dog began to howl and scream in indescribable agony. There was definitely something odd about the dog. Normal canines didn’t scream or talk for that matter or live after they’d been stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, and disemboweled.
The dog was trying to bite at the flames. It’s teeth were bared in a threatening snarl as it attacked the immediate source of its pain. The fire rapidly crawled up its back, shearing through the mangy tufts of hair as it began to consume the dog’s living tissue. The little fat still clinging to the dog’s emaciated body added fuel to the fire and furthered the progress of the flames. The poodle’s flesh was starting to bubble and run like frying lard. Both of its eyes were sizzling in their sockets like sunny-side-up eggs. They exploded with an audible pop.
Freddy sprayed the dog with the fire extinguisher as soon as it stopped moving. He had to spray the walls as well as the fire had begun to spread up the drywall. Freddy cried out in joy as the blackened canine skeleton slumped to the floor. He negotiated his way through the festering piles of feces, back out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into his bedroom, pausing only to silence the wailing smoke alarms with a few whacks from his baseball bat. The house was now eerily quiet without the horrible coughing and hoarse barks. The only sound was the hum of flies on his mother’s body, audible even through his closed bedroom door. Strangely enough, he found the sound soothing. It was like mom was humming him to sleep with some out of tune lullaby. Freddy laid down on his bed and felt years of pressure suddenly drop from his mind. The demon was dead. He fell into a deep contented sleep and dreamt of being a baby in his mother’s arms, trying to remember what the milk from her mammoth breasts had tasted like.
When Freddy finally awakened hours later, it was to the same hoarse barking and wet, tubercular, phlegm-congested coughing that had greeted him every morning of his life. His left ear dripped with snot and saliva from where the wet nose of a thousand year old demon, the same one who had told David Berkowitz to take a .44 caliber pistol to couples on the streets of New York, had whispered in his ear as he slept. The ratty carpet had a trail of paw prints in black ash that led from his locked bedroom door to the edge of his bed. The damned thing had picked his lock again! Freddy cursed loudly as he reached for the cheese grater and began shredding the foreskin from his penis. He wasn’t sure why he was doing it, but he had nothing better to do.