Tolerable Cruelty - Chapter 16 (Patreon)

HarMo's Note: Big thanks to my editor, Au Goose, for his assistance on this chapter!

Chapter 16

With Peter more than out for the count, Piper rinsed off in the shower quickly and blurred herself dry with her superspeed. Slipping on her dark wetsuit for the second time in as many weeks, she laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. She stripped it back off. No more of this. She’d find a proper, midnight black camouflage catsuit for her little covert operations.

One broken-into costume store later, Piper emerged with a black, one piece bodysuit, complete with mask. Her flaming red hair flowed behind her as she flew, the zipper at her front unable to close all the way up due to her overly prodigious swells.

She’d look for an upgrade next time.

Taking to the sky, Piper flew the 200 miles to Sarasota County Jail at around 9:00 PM. Her luminescent eyes cut through the darkness, her body completely unaffected by the biting cold.

Five minutes later, she landed in the empty exercise yard like some dark fairy, completely silent on her pointed toes. Placing her ear against the locked door, she listened for signs of activity. Low level murmurs, soft conversations. She listened for Bledsoe’s distinctive, thin, reedy voice. But she got nothing.

Piper floated to the roof and lay on it, waiting for the conversations to die down. She amused herself by grabbing a stray piece of wood and carving the block into a sharp shiv with her fingernail. After all, it might come in handy for what she had planned. Stab Bledsoe a few times in all the non-fatal bits, maybe get this year’s parole meeting canceled...

Ten minutes later, the thin tip was honed deadly enough to slice individual cells apart. And Piper had been taking her time.

With the murmurs inside tapering off, Piper floated silently to the locked cell door once again. Inserting her finger into lock, she couldn’t find a way to slide the deadbolt open, so she simply pressed through the entire metal mechanism. Slicing it apart with a fingernail, she pushed the bolt aside relatively quietly.

Before Piper actually opened the door and pushed her way in, her supercharged hearing finally detected it. Bledsoe! And the nasally shit was talking to someone. Piper held her ground and eavesdropped intently from hundreds of meters away.

“Hey man, here you go.”

A package rustling and changing hands.

“Aww yea, this cost me a lot of green.” Bledsoe’s voice.

“You got another parole meeting tomorrow huh?”

Piper assumed it was his cellmate.

“Tomorrow huh? I don’t give a fuck. I just be where C/O tell me to be. Guess it’s that stupid Daughty fuck that ain’t know when to back off even when I tell em to.”

“Another family this time? Shiiiiit, I swear you come up with a new name erry time. You know you only got convicted for a double murder right? You’re just talking bullshit.”

“Why don’t you ask the Daughty or whatever the fuck their name is then? Been so many, who can keep track. Finally got caught on these Poolma fucks. They ain’t ever gonna give me parole, why should I give a fuck?”

“Oh, no, that’s it. It’s the Palomas that you’re meeting tomorrow.”

Piper rage was growing by the second. A large visible vein throbbed on her forehead while she clenched her fist with planet-crushing force. But this interrupted her flow of anger. Was this really a cellmate? How could he know details as fine as these?

“Oh is this the old man and his wrinkly bitch? He bein’ all heroic and shit got him and his bitch dead.”

The other person laughed. “You fuckin’ love tellin’ this story, huh? It’s fuckin’ funny though.”

That was it. Piper slid the solid metal door open as quickly and quietly as possible and peered inside. Every prison room was behind a locked, swinging door, not like the jail cells that she’d envisioned. Good.

She flew down the dimly lit corridors, silently following the unfolding conversation. Each prison cell had their own bright lights inside, further masking Piper’s rapid travel through the relative darkness. But they were all meant for single occupants. So who was her target talking to?

Piper gripped her shank tighter, nearly breaking it in half with a pinch of her fingers. Maybe not just injure. Maybe seriously maim was in the cards. That could happen in a place like this at any time, right?

And the thin, whiny voice wouldn’t stop. Bledsoe was re-telling the gory details of his double murder, bragging and embellishing his deed as if it were some heroic effort! And whoever his mysterious cohort was, going along with it and laughing at the victims!

Her cold, calculated plan for temporary relief turned blood red.

With the echoing sound of their voices growing ever nearer, Piper turned a corner and came face to face with one of the speakers.

It was a guard! He’d delivered some sort of contraband and he was positively laughing it up now!

Piper was upon him in an instant. She curled her fingers around the tall, heavyset guard’s neck and lifted him into the air. His uniform wouldn’t protect him from her wrath.

“Grrk!” he squealed at the sudden appearance of this mystery woman clad in a black catsuit.

“Unlock the door,” Piper ordered coldly.

Legs off the floor, the guard kicked and flailed helplessly as he grasped her slim arm to try and break her grip. His keys jingled by his belt.

“Yo what the FUCK!” Bledsoe screamed.

The nearby inmates could hear the commotion and began to stir. Grunts, hoots and muffled jeering leaked out from behind the many locked doors.

Piper unhooked the keys and dangled them in the guard’s face.

“Which one?” she asked, squeezing his fat neck even harder.

The despicable man’s face turned purple as his eyes bulged. He desperately pointed out a few keys with his trembling hands.

Piper flung him against the wall. He would have screamed if he hadn’t had the wind knocked out of him.

Before he could slump, she had her hand over his mouth, muffling his imminent yelling.

Piper reached down with her free hand and gripped his thigh with her steely fingers, squeezing hard enough to bruise his flesh before snapping the thick bone at its core. His scream of agony was muffled by her sealing fingers. She lifted her knee into his other good leg, breaking the largest bone in there as well.

“Keep your fucking mouth shut, you corrupt piece of shit.”

The howling from neighboring cells was now accompanied by heavy pounding against their prison doors, the creatures within sensing violence.

She lowered him to the floor, taking care not to aggravate his already serious wounds further. He might never walk again without a cane, but he’d live.

“W-w-w-what the fuck! Get away from me!” Terrified eyes vanished from the slit window as Bledsoe backed against the inner wall of his far-too-comfortable prison as far as Piper was concerned.

She took her time trying one key after another, slowly, deliberately. The scraping and clinking of metal against metal only served to amplify Bledsoe’s fear as he awaited for his mysterious tormenter to dole out whatever she had planned.

Behind her, Piper heard the guard suck in a deep breath, perhaps about to scream. She whipped her head around and caught his gaze with a dark, foreboding look on her face as his mouth was mid-shout. Piper shook her head subtly and clucked her tongue.

The guard’s voice caught in his throat. He immediately ceased whatever it was he was about to yell.

Piper looked back to Bledsoe with a satisfied, evil grin. The door clicked open. He began to cower and back away from her, his craggly face quivering in fear.

“What a fuckin’ tough guy you are,” Piper growled. She’d never actually seen him in person before. Peter had always asked her to wait outside during the hearings, trying to protect her from this terrible part of his life. The worst part of his life.

Piper sneered sinisterly as she made eye contact with Bledsoe for the first time, with no barrier between them. The flickering fluorescent light annoyed her, so she flew upwards, fist raised, and smashed it into pieces. As the glass tubing rained down upon them to clink on the concrete floor, he felt the terror of looking into the beautiful, glowing eyes of the grim reaper in the sudden darkness.

“Gua--!” was all he managed before Piper blurred from behind the door and was directly in front of him.

He was face to face with Piper. Pure agony dotted his entire left arm. He had been stabbed across its entire length, multiple times. He could see the wooden shiv in Piper’s hand, dripping with blood. Was it his?

He screamed in blood-curdling pain.

The inmates howled even louder.

Piper looked at this demon disguised as a human who had tormented Peter’s life. Maiming an arm wasn’t nearly enough. Stabbing him over a dozen times in the blink of an eye wasn’t enough.

He needed to not exist.

There was a blur. Piper stood across the cell from the orange jumpsuited monster, her hands empty now.

Suddenly, Bledsoe’s hair-raising screams of pain ceased. His eyes bulged in shock.

His chest was warm and wet. His voice was somehow gone. He looked down, tracing her beautiful features before seeing the blood soaking and spreading through his prison fatigues.

She had placed a wooden shank straight into his heart.

“Say their names,” Piper hissed.

“Who…” Bledsoe wheezed.

“Paloma!”

“Pa...lo…”

Piper lunged forward at normal speed, the heel of her palm driving the shank all the way into his failing organ. The life in his eyes faded away to nothingness.

“Motherfucking piece of shit,” Piper spat.

As the corpse fell to the floor, she couldn’t resist slamming her knee into his face, leaving it an unrecognizable, bloody pulp. Then a fist flashed downwards, snapping vertebrae and rupturing organs with explosive force.

“Rrrrraaawwwgg!!” She screamed, shaking the reinforced walls. A howl drowning out all the other prisoner’s, inspiring them to an even greater outpouring of wordless shrieking, dragging them along in the wake of her frustration and hate. She kicked the corpse, taking his stupid leering head clean off.

“John! You killed John!” Somehow the nearly forgotten guard had dragged himself to the open cell door in time to the murder’s head become a splash on the walls.

Completely unsatisfied, her boiling rage found a new outlet.

“John?! You’re on a first name basis with this piece of shit? Giving him contraband, chatting him up… what, do you suck his fucking dick too?!”

Piper’s fury froze. Killing Bledsoe hadn’t been nearly enough for her. She regretted finishing him off that quickly. She wanted Bledsoe to feel all the pain he’d caused them, his spectre tormenting Peter and his family for over a decade. Her eyes began to spark with electricity, blue arcs of lightning clearly visible in the shrouded darkness.

She walked toward her new target, letting her heeled boots clack slowly, ominously along the prison floor.

He whimpered as he stared at this harbinger of death in her crackling blue eyes. Eyes even colder than Bledsoe’s.

Piper squatted to her knees, emphasizing her devastatingly long legs. Slowly, ominously, she brought her hand to his and lifted it into his view.

Without warning, she grabbed his pinky and snapped it.

“So how many victims did he actually kill, you fuck?”

The guard bit his tongue as tears streamed down his face.

Piper snapped his ring finger as well.

“That’s two for the Palomas.”

“Mmmmm!” he cried.

“And I overheard you talking about a few more…”

She crushed his entire hand in her grip, a literal handful of bones grinding and popping and crumbling to splinters as she squeezed with cold precise anger.

“Gnnnnnn!”

He would have yelled louder if not for Piper’s hand suddenly crushing his jaw into chunky paste. It hadn’t taken any effort at all. Her palm rested against his ruined cheek, almost a caress.

“I wish I could kill Bledsoe, or John, as you call him, over and over. But you’ll have to fucking do, won’t you, you fucking fuck!”

Piper flicked her hand, smashing his head into the wall faster than human eyes could follow, leaving a wet, bloody, headless stump.

The cells around her sounded like feeding time at the zoo, hands beating against them in a primal rhythm, shouts and growls and shrieks blending together with the blood pounding in Piper’s ears.

She looked around, her breath suddenly coming in ragged gasps. She seriously considered leveling this whole fucking place. She could. It would be easy. But even that wouldn’t kill Bledsoe any deader.

“Dammit!” she hissed, glancing around, trying to remember everything she might have touched.

Or I could just level the place, she thought again.

Tempting.

No. The sounds around her grew even more frenzied as the mingled smells of blood and brains and shit began to waft through the block, but she wasn’t part of that tide anymore. She’d done what she’d come for. A little more, really, but the nightmare for Peter and his siblings was over.

She wiped the ring of keys off on the headless shitbag’s uniform with her super speed, leaving no trace of her fingerprints on the metal.

Then she was gone.