Author's NOTE: PREPARE for the longest TORTURE SCENE in my entire writing career! Many of you will be disgusted, a few will actually hang yourselves by your mouse cord, but in the end, I will go to sleep knowing that someone out there is retching. I am making no sense. Just enjoy. Free the koalas!

Chapter 8, Part 1: You're Free, Squee!

Johnny couldn't believe his luck. The access card he'd filched off of Ian was some sort of membership card to a psychology book club. It wasn't even worth two cat's sneezes to Johnny, and he had given it to some bum on the street.

Now here he was, breaking in manually, just by bashing his fist in through the window. At least, he tried to do so, but he hadn't much more force to him than a bed sheet. He used a piece of the aluminum window ledge instead. The glass splintered instantly.

Johnny stopped, sniffing the air. Something reeked pretty awful, and he didn't even want to guess what it was. He had broken into the lab-test area of the mental hospital. It was pretty unusual to find himself breaking in to a place like this. He knew there were a few doctors on night shifts, and that scared him a bit, but overall, he had a pretty tranquil, murderously-calm feeling to himself. It was a feeling as inky as the black night.

He moved his way through the room, avoiding stepping on the glass that he had scattered. It was pitch-black inside (the author loves this time of day most… mwa ha ha!). He leaned out into the hallway and saw immediately what the smell was.

A man was crouching by the water fountain, a trail of vomit leading from his collapsed body to a room. He had obviously been drugged and probed in some unusual experiments. Johnny tried to walk away but the man looked up and said, rather loudly: " It's the Canadians! They're building a fleet of killer fuzzy gerbils, and we're all going to die! Nice shoes."

" Uh…" Johnny backed up against the wall, reached into the slot in it (where the mail was pushed through) and pulled out the knives he had pushed in there. It was the only way to get them into the building without setting off any of the metal detectors that were put into the windows. This was a place where very little crime was allowed.

" The Earth is slowly spinning off its axis! It's going to plunge into the sun and we'll all melt!" The man shrieked. He clawed at his face. " My eyes! MY EYES! They'll shrink up into raisins and fall out my nose!"

" Hush!" Johnny hissed, raising his knives threateningly. " Someone will hear you!"

" Hear me! Oh, please, hear me out!" The man grabbed Johnny's knees and shook them.

Johnny almost buckled from the force exerted onto his kneecaps. He felt they'd crush inwards. He had once watched a weight-lifting show where a man's kneecap exploded on the 200-pound lift. Seeing it was the highlight of his day. He didn't want to witness it firsthand though. With a soft chop, sounding oddly like a knife going into a watermelon, the crazy man was dead.

" Completely unnecessary." Johnny whispered to himself. " But oddly satisfying." He turned into the nearest room and saw a woman, completely naked, with feces spread across her body. " Oh… uh… sorry." Johnny slipped back out of the room.

He walked down the hall, wondering where the Crazy-Little-Boy-Ward was. His feet didn't have to travel far, for just as he passed a room, he saw Squee inside, strapped to his bed with leather belts. His hands were clawing at the air, and he was whimpering: " Shmee! Where's my Shmee?"

" Squee?" Johnny pressed his face close to the glass.

Squee looked up. All he could see was a big, sickly-beige mush smashed against the window, a cloud forming where the mouth was, and the deadly glimmering eyes. " AHHH!" Squee shrieked, trying to rip himself upwards. Try as he might, he couldn't.

Johnny pulled back from the window-glass and opened the door slowly. He walked inside. " Did you miss me?"

" Squee!" Squee squeaked out spontaneously. Say that ten times fast.

" Look what I brought. I came prepared this time." Johnny took out his knives and spun them around his fingers. The blades whooshed through the air, shimmering happily, and then stopped midair, pointed right at Squee's face.

" Eep!" Little Todd whimpered. " Please don't hurt me, Scary Neighbor Man!"

" I won't hurt you. I'll take you home with me, then hurt you." Johnny laughed maniacally. " Just kidding." He started to slice open the straps on Squee's stomach.

" Not my intestines!" Squee gasped. " The lady on the discovery channel said they're filled with bacteria buggy-buggies, and they're called E.Coli, and they'll come out and eat me!" He shivered.

" Don't squirm around." Johnny warned him. He had freed the straps on his stomach and was beginning on Squee's arms and legs. " How do you get yourself into these things? What have they been doing to you, anyway?"

" Mommy and Daddy just left." Squee said, finally.

" Those fuckers!" Johnny shrieked angrily, slamming the knife down just between Squee's knees. " Oh, sorry… heh! What if I hit just a centimeter to the right? You'd be filled with aganozing pain. Hee." Johnny undid the last strap. " What about the doctors?"

" They tried things." Squee said, finally. " Bad things."

" Bad things… along the line of…?" Johnny prompted.

" They took Shmee."

" Oh! Oh… no…" Johnny said, in a very insincere way. " Uh… anything else?"

" They put a thermometer where I go poopie."

" The toilet?" Johnny looked up from his knives, which he was putting away into their rightful place – the little holsters at his sides.

" M-my tushie." Squee turned red and began to cry a little.

Johnny began to laugh. " That's funny though! I'm sorry, but that's funny!"

Squee shook his head, sobbing.

" Shh!" Johnny said. " Big kids don't cry. If you're upset, stab something or yourself. Write an angst-ridden poem. Anything but cry."

" I'm not a big kid." Squee whimpered. " I want my Mommy and Daddy!"

" I'll take you to live with me. How's that?" Johnny offered.

" NO!" Squee gasped.

" It's not that bad. I cleaned out most of the bodies. It's pretty cozy, if you can find someplace to sit. Most of the furniture disintegrated from all the blood that sank in. I called the company to ask what to do if a severe amount of bloodshed damages my couch, but they won't return my calls." Johnny crossed his arms. " Hey, are you going to stop crying or do I have to put you in a potato bag and carry you out?"

" I'll go." Squee said. " My name's Todd."

" You're Squee." Johnny replied harshly. " Todd's… damn, that's the name of the football captain at my high school. The one that called me fag first." Suddenly, there was a flash of recognition cross Johnny's face. Another memory, and so quickly this time. " Yep…" Johnny whispered finally. " May he rot in pieces." He gave a murky laugh.

Squee looked sad. " I don't want to go live with you."

" I'm telling you, Squee. I'll treat you much better than you're being treated here. You'll get to eat… sometimes… well, occasionally. Aw, fuck, I'll have to go to the store more often, won't I?" Johnny looked at his hands with a bit of a worried expression. " I hate the sunlight." He muttered. " They really ought to put a visor around that thing."

" Doctor Ian was the worst." Squee said. " He was a meanie-mean guy. His breath smelled like dookie."

" Ian…?" Johnny's nostrils flared in recognition. " What did he do?"

" He would hit me. If I didn't wanna do stuff." Squee whimpered out. He lifted up his hand, which was covered in cuts, bruises, and boo-boos. " He said he'd explode my brain. And he gave me all these apples to eat, but they looked like huge, shriveled brown prunes, and he'd make me eat them, and…"

" Ugh." Johnny whispered in pure disgust. " Suddenly I feel like retching. Excuse me." He stood, taking in two deep breaths of air. He could feel a dizzy feeling circulate towards his mind. He breathed so quickly and erratically that it was pretty refreshing to take a good, deep breath.

" There's something bad about Ian. I heard him saying some stuff to the other doctors." Squee looked down at his feet shyly. " He said… he said he cleaned out his girlfriend's house, and instead of throw out her paintings, he sold them. And he got rich. And he keeps taking her money." Squee began to cry again. " I wanna go home… not your home!"

" Follow me." Johnny said.

Squee nodded but looked at Johnny expectantly.

" What? You want me to hold your hand?" Johnny muttered, exasperated. " Here, hold this." He gave Squee a little wooden plank. " Children. Honestly." Johnny moved down the hallway, Squee trotting behind him.

" I'll kill him." Johnny said loudly.

" Who?" Squee asked nervously. " ME?"

" No. Ian."

" NO! Not because I said!" Squee cried out. " You can't! That would mean I sort of killed him, and Shmee says that if I kill anyone I'll have to live with Pepito, and Pepito's dad keeps spitting nachos at me when he talks, because he talks with his mouth full, and…"

" Shh!" Johnny grumbled. " You never talked to me before. What's with the motor mouth now?"

" Nobody talks to me. They took Shmee away. I can hear him cry at night." Squee confided.

" God." Johnny said. " You want me to get him, right? Where is he?"

" In Ian's office." Squee told him. " But don't go there! He is in there! And sometimes he has scary ladies in there with him, and they get drunk and he pays them and they sit on him sometimes or he sits on them and they hurt each other. I can hear them moaning and stuff." Squee shivered. " It's really scary."

Johnny was getting increasingly furious. " That money-grabbing, whore-banging little FUCK!" He shouted at Squee.

Squee's eyes widened into what had to be the size of dinner plates.

" Listen, Squee. Remember that bad man in the alley?"

" Ian says I should forget my bad memories." Squee whispered.

" Ian can shove bean curd up his ass!" Johnny spat. " Just remember what I said? Some people are just machines. Poorly wired, irresponsible machines. They should just… I don't know… be tied up and thrown in cages. Ungrateful bastards." He straightened up and said: " I'm going into Ian's office."

" Don't hurt him!" Squee cried out. " He knows how to find my Mommy and Daddy!"

" I know. But do they want to be found, Squee?" Johnny said, sagely. He looked down at the velcro fastenings on Squee's shoes and added: " Neat. I remember when I wore those as a kid. Mine had monkeys on them. I like monkeys."

Squee blinked.

Johnny almost reached out and patted his head, but in the last minute he shrank away and disappeared into Dr. Ian's office. Inside, he stood, like an awkward nightly intruder in a huge mansion, looking around and trying to figure out what to do. There he was – Ian, asleep at his desk.

Johnny lifted his knives, wondering just how to kill him. Perhaps he should only severely damage his internal organs, and then hang him up by his own intestines to let him drip dry of all the slimy foulness he held.

" Dr. Ian, special delivery in-patient for you!" Johnny shouted, and with a huge smack in the head, Ian was jolted out of his sleep.

" Whuu---huh?" Ian blinked wide-eyed. He glanced up at Johnny and exclaimed: " Who are you?"

" Surely you have heard of me." Johnny replied darkly. He lifted a single rose from his coat pocket, twirling it around in the air, and he recited: " I am all you don't know and all you fear, all you avoid, here to take all you hold dear." He turned to Ian, his grin growing huge, his eyes catching the light and glowing a sickly orange, like a cat's. " Devi must have told you about me."

" Johnny?" Ian exclaimed. " I… I was sure you were gone! DEAD!"

" Perhaps you can't see me by this light." Johnny kicked Ian off the chair and towards the huge rectangle of light that was spread out across the floor by the window. " Maybe you recall seeing me around." Johnny walked into the pale moonlight, his face illuminated.

" You - - the guy from the restaurant." Ian said. " What do you want from me?"

" You've hurt a friend of mine. Two friends of mine, really. And I have very few friends, so I hold what I have dearly." Johnny said. "DEARLY, you hear me?" Johnny slammed the knife down and right through Ian's hand. It was pinned to the floor.

" Oh! Christ!" Ian sobbed.

" You may bellow out to any deities at this point." Johnny informed him.

" You're crazy. What friends are you talking about?"

" Well, other than the fact that a majority of my comic-book readers have ended up in here…" Johnny said (right next to the Jhonen Vasquez fans – Author Sez), "… Devi. You've hurt her. And you've hurt Squee."

" I don't know any Squee's."

" You call him by the name Todd Casil." Johnny said.

" Todd belongs in here." Ian said. " He's a very unstable boy. Extremely traumatized."

" And I'm sure shoving a thermometer up his ass was story-book time for him?" Johnny pressed his knee into Ian's stomach. " As much as I hate to soil my pants with your flaky skin filth…" He paused. " I think I'd hate to soil my pants, period. Well, besides my own self-reflections on such things, I think that you must die. Please take this very personally." Johnny took out some nails and hammered one into Ian's foot.

" I didn't hurt Devi!" Ian shouted. " I did nothing to hurt her!"

Author Sez: I am filled with brutal rage at this moment. It involves somebody that said something to me someplace, and if you know anything of it, you must die. I must walk away now (or at least metaphorically in my head) and vent for a few seconds…. Ah. Better. I can now continue.

" Oh, but you did." Johnny said. " You fed her with poisonous lies. You convinced her I was gone. You gave her a euphoric feeling of safety and detachment, then you fed off of her instability by using her financially!"

" You sound like a psychologist." Ian whispered in a moment of self-mocking. You see, there is a time in every psychologist's life where they realize that they are complete and utter looneys. Horrible self-mutilation ensues.

" Really? I can multi-task too. Observe." Johnny took out another nail. " See? As I nail your kneecaps together, I can speak hateful words to you at the same time. It's really a time-saver for us tragic souls."

Pause for Manic Cackle.

Ian shook his head. " Devi was happy with me. Happier than you can ever make her. She won't even allow herself to be with you. You're a lunatic!"

" Devi was not happy with you." Johnny insisted. " She was fueled by fake promises and a charade of falseness, beneath which, when scraped away evenly, you'd find pure and utter desolation. There was no love."

" But we did it!" Ian persisted.

" That's not love!" Johnny exploded, and a few nails found their way into Ian's upper biceps.

Ian gasped in horror at the pain.

Pause for Applause.

" Love is a shattering feeling." Johnny said. " Have you never sampled any decent literature? Your psychology books deceive you. It is not a debacle that comes after five stages of so-called relationship building. It's a primitive instinct, a lust-driven fury, a maddening spirit… You'll feel a pinch now, this will skim right by your spine…"

" What do you know of love?" Ian hissed. " You know nothing."

" I know what hate is, and love is the same thing. Love is hate but manifested in a different way. I learned to despise and regret many things, and they have manifested themselves into a love like no other. Unrequited love." Johnny sighed. " And I deny it, I despise myself more for having such feelings. But feelings, then, are hate as well, so even if I stopped loving I'd still have my hate, and then what do I do? I have nothing to expand my feelings on. Love is hate to me."

" You sicken me." Ian told him.

Pause for the pause.

" Oh, no… I am already sickened by much of this world. I am sickened by myself and by you, by Devi and by Squee. And yet it makes it somewhat endearing, to let such pure and utter maliciousness fester into a protectiveness." Johnny sighed. " Well, you are now paralyzed waist down. I didn't mean to drive it in that far. I suppose all the better for you…" He took out his knives. " I wonder if you'd enjoy being beaten to death with your own arm?"

" Please… please, let me go!" Ian begged.

" And yet minutes ago you cursed me into the blue moon." Johnny cackled. " Oh, the emotions I draw from you. Emotions are such guilt-heavy things. I bet that you regret your anger now. No mere repentance will help you in this situation. Oh, no…" Johnny nailed a row of nails in the shape of a skull into Ian's upper thighs.

" Why can't you just kill me?" Ian sobbed. " It hurts!"

" That is all the pleasure of torture, then, isn't it?" Johnny smiled grimly. " I enjoy this just a tad more than you do, though. I know that later Devi will try to move away even farther from me. No matter, I will find other ways to prove that I can change."

" You can't change. It's part of you, like a DNA code." Ian said. " You'll end up killing her. You'll probably be doing her one minute and choking her the next."

" How dare you suggest such - - such things?" Johnny threw his knife into the palm of Ian's other hand. " As if physicality is something I desire! Hah!"

" I'm sorry - - I'm…" Ian was near passing out from the rushes of pain.

" Would it be more European if I leave you like this, hopefully draining of blood by morning? I have no use for the blood, so no use to keep guard." Johnny looked around. " You might try to get away though, and hobble, filled with holes, towards the phone. That's always a worry. I might have to cut the phone lines…"

" Just kill me then!" Ian begged. " PLEASE!"

" Oh, alright." Johnny grinned. " I won't argue against killing you." And with one final swipe of a knife, Ian was dead.

Author Sez: Possibly the longest, most excruciating torture scene I've ever written. Joy is pulsating through me. Really, it is.

o-o-o

Chapter 8, Part 2: Devi's Reaction

" DEVI! Turn on the T.V.!" Tenna shouted in a frantic voice. Tenna rarely spazzed out this badly.

Devi was actually asleep, something she did very, very rarely. " What happened?" Devi mumbled. " A meteor crashed on Earth and killed everyone but us? That would be pretty weird…"

" No, worse." Tenna dragged her out of bed and plopped her in front of the TV. " Five o'clock morning news, girl. Watch."

Reporter Dippy Schitz was saying: " In another horrific murder scene, Dr. Ian Stabin was found nailed to the floor of his office. It was, as Police Man Doe NutLuffer explained, 'a very wacky tragedy'."

" Oh, God!" Devi screamed. " IAN!" She kept screaming nonsensical words for a few minutes, then burst into tears. She hadn't cried for a while, but now she just felt absolutely wasted of emotions. "I know who did it. It had to be – oh Sweet Jeezus!" They were showing clips of the murder scene on TV, bloody entrails hanging out and all.

" Jesus? What?" Tenna squinted at her.

" No! Don't get all it-was-religious-fate at me now, Tenna! It was Nny!"

" Nny… he wouldn't do something like this. I mean, he likes you, but Jeez, girl…"

" He would." Devi whimpered. " I am never going outside again. Why did he do that?"

" Maybe he had some weird reason." Tenna said. " Or maybe he was just mad that you chose Ian over him."

Reporter Dippy Schitz continued: " There is also a little boy missing from the mental hospital. Some connections are being made whether this psychotic little boy had turned into a mini-homicidal-maniac. It's too soon to tell. Join us next time at – Dippy "Bull" Schitz, Where You Get Your Daily Bull!"

Tenna turned off the TV. " Well…."

" You get the mail from now on. You… you check it. Make sure there's no bombs or some freaky stuff. I will not let Johnny contact me again." Devi sighed. " I tried living a normal life, but noooo…."

Tenna shook her head. " I guess you're becoming a hermit again, then?"

" Maybe I'll just kill myself." Devi mumbled.

" Don't do anything stupid." Tenna warned.

" Sometimes existence is so meaningless." Devi said, finally.

o-o-o

Author's Note: I've gotten a LOT of emails from people asking what I look like. Er….. it was pretty weird to just explain myself verbally so now I have a photo. Warning! In this, my skin glows sickly yellow. Most of the light I get is from the computer screen, after all… http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/1467104.jpg So yeah, you can see a photo of me, if you are ready to be horrified at my sickly-appearance. If you flame me for my photo, please eat shit and die, you meathead. You're being a complete and stereotypical bully.