crossed fingers over the wounds until they were completely gone. His ribs repositioned themselves one by one like pressed piano keys resetting.

The two went back and forth like this for ten minutes, the upper hand shifting from one to the other with each retaliation. They were an equal match – Slaughter with his brute strength and cunning and Bernie with seemingly limitless resilience. He was tired though. Perhaps it was from this fight or perhaps it was from the many decades of incessant fighting. The depression he had felt during his last torture was seeping back into his spirit and he had the thought that perhaps it was time to let Slaughter retire him.

The animal instinct in Slaughter could somehow sense this moment of weakness and the combination of that instinct and his adrenaline physically forced his body to attack. He jammed one claw into Bernie’s belly and used the other to lift him by the neck, pinning him to a wall, four feet off of the ground. Bernie was in excruciating pain and starting to bleed out and suffocate but he didn’t writhe nor otherwise protest. He closed his eyes.

There remained one patron still sitting at a table in the shop, seemingly undeterred from his novel and coffee by the intense fighting. He glanced over his book at the current development and calmly set it down, as he rose from his chair. He was a medium height and slightly lanky in build. He appeared to be about 65 years of age but had a brightness and vitality about him more resembling a 40-something. His receding salt and pepper hair was slicked back into a pony tail. He wore black oxfords, navy slacks and a white, short-sleeved henley t-shirt. Fiendish approached Slaughter from directly behind, removing two sheathed scalpels from his pocket and the scalpels from their sheaths. He held one in either hand like crochet needles, dropped to a knee and rapidly jabbed them into the crimson-furred ankles where he assumed there to be Achilles or similar tendons – he couldn’t be 100% sure of Slaughter’s anatomy.