Page 1 of Burn For Me

Four Years Ago

My whole life boiled down to a split second in time. What I was before that moment and who I became after hinged on one pivotal act that shaped me into the thing I am now. I’m a thing—I can admit that. I’m not sure if I’m quite a monster but simply calling me a man wasn’t accurate either. Normal men didn’t enjoy the screams of people in pain as they burned while watching them reduced to nothing more than ash, but I did.

I didn’t just enjoy it—I fucking loved it. I craved it, and I wanted to fuck to the sound of their dying wails. Well, at least I fantasized about what it would be like to kill more. In reality I’d only ever killed four people that all deserved it, and only got to see my mother burn alive.

I screamed, my voice a high-pitched screech that sounded more animal than human as the excruciating pain matched the stench of my flesh burning. Pushing on the front of the stove with my shaking arms, I struggled against the hold that held me by the neck. Another terror-filled cry left my mouth as the flame licked toward my eye, and I kicked out with my legs, not caring what I hit.

I heard a yell and then we were falling.

With a hard bang, I crumpled to the floor and went to touch my face, but Asher grabbed my hand and shook his head no. His eyes were wide as he stared at my face. Unable to stop myself, I glanced at the glass in the front of the oven and saw the bubbled and ruined skin.

“Come on,” he said and yanked on my arm.

My father was yelling and struggling, his hand reaching for me, but my brother pulled hard and got me to my feet. I slipped on the tiled floor of the kitchen, the cheap linoleum not giving any traction. Asher kept his arm around my waist as we stumbled into the front hallway and pushed out through the front door into the night. My father was bellowing for us to get back there, his words slurred. I looked over my shoulder once to make sure our father wasn’t following and never looked back again.

I barely remembered the sequence of events but remembered every tiny detail about how my parents paid for what they did. The screams, the blood, and the burning awakened a demon in me. It awakened my true self, and I liked the new me, or I did until my butt landed in this fucking place.

What was it about an asylum where builders and caretakers of said building thought everything inside the place needed to be white and smell like cheap bleach? The scent aside, I thought white was the most lifeless and depressing color they could’ve chosen. Then again, maybe that was the point. Maybe they were trying to kill us with boredom and exasperate our depression.

Shifting my shoulders from side to side working at the itch that was driving my shoulder blade crazy. All I could feel was a tingly sensation like something was crawling on my skin and grew in persistence the longer it was left there. Fucking straight jackets were such a pain.

“Ahhh, no, no, get it away from me!”

Sighing, I looked away from the view of the back garden to stare at the patient in the middle of a psychotic breakdown. I didn’t know the name of this guy, he’d only been here like three weeks, but he sure liked to scream. All fucking hours of the day or night, and now he was ruining the only time of day that I got to pretend that I was still part of society.

“Hey! Fucknut, shut up!”

The guy blinked and stared at me, his eyes wide like I was going to jump up out of this wheelchair and beat him as if I weren’t tied to it.

“Yeah, I’m fucking talking to you. I have fifteen minutes left. Shut the fuck up, and then you can scream the place down.”

The guy looked like he might start screaming again, and I glared at him and growled low in my chest. I pulled up my gums snarling at him as I pictured ripping his throat out, so he bled all over this bleached white hospital outfit. The guy spun around so his back was to me and hunched over as he mumbled softly to himself.

A rule I’d picked up while being here, look like the badest mother fucking crazy around, and the other nutjobs would leave you alone. Five years, three months, and twenty-one days…I glanced at the clock…and sixteen minutes. That’s how long it had been since I was first brought to this place. My life had become a rhythm of the same crap over and over. How they expected people to get better when they stuck them in this hole and then not give them anything to do was beyond me. Well, that wasn’t true. They gave you things like arts, crafts, or books. I’d never been a big sit back and relax with a novel kind of reader, but I figured out quickly that there was a lot of very useful information in books.

I’d learned that someone can survive a whole three minutes without breathable air. I glanced over again at the fidgeting man, who was being quiet but was giving off some serious nervous energy. That energy was filling the room and felt like nails on a chalkboard. Something else I learned was that it usually wasn’t the flame of a fire that killed most people. It was the hot gases that a person inhaled into their lungs as the body burned that killed them. This fact was particularly fascinating to me. It meant that, in theory, there was opportunity out in the world where I could slowly burn people for hours or days, and they wouldn’t die. The idea of prolonging the thrill was exciting. I might even be able to get them to live for months. I wiggled in my seat as the thought stirred a darker desire in my gut.

“Hi, you’re Derek, right?” a soft and pleasant voice said from behind me.

The reflection of whoever stood a few feet away was feminine and smelled like citrus. Bottom line, whoever she was, this person was new, which meant a new play-toy for me.

“What the fuck is it to you,” I snarled at the voice.

The woman stepped around into my line of sight, a stethoscope around her neck and a wide smile on her face. Her blue eyes weren’t like the rest of those that worked here. There was a sweetness that glowed inside of them. She also didn’t seem to care about my abruptness, which instantly made me skeptical of her.

What did she want from me?

“Well, I’m asking because if so, then I’m your new nurse, but if not, I’ll move on.” There was no way someone, especially me, wouldn’t notice how pretty she was.

She was going to be a walking target in this place, and my eyes glanced around to see what other guys had already caught sight of her. Her smile pulled at the rubble surrounding my heart as she turned to walk away, and I found myself calling out to her.

“Yeah, I’m Derek,” I mumbled and slumped into the wheelchair.

For the first time in a long time, I felt humiliated that I was strapped into a rolling chair. It had taken me a whole month to gain the privilege of being strapped into the wheelchair whenever they wanted to move my ass around. Initially, I fought it and spent the first couple of months confined to my room. I’d never been much for people as a whole, especially the crazy lot in this place. Yet, that much solitude even had me talking to myself for the sound of anything other than the screaming of my own mind.

The woman, who appeared not to be much older than myself smiled as she looked over her shoulder at me. “You sure about that?”

I could tell she was teasing. Her eyes sparkled with mischief that felt immediately addictive. The tiniest spark of ‘I wasn’t sure what this emotion was’ lit inside of me.