A Confession of Pain

by D.X. Machina

September 16, 2006

"And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."

--William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

They awoke in darkness.

"What the fuck? Where are we?" asked Ted, shaking his head and trying to figure out why his head felt like it had been bashed in with a brick.

"Dark," murmured Caden, shaking his head blearily.

"What happened? What's going on?" Adam said, suddenly getting a very bad feeling about this.

"Dude, shut up, I'm trying to sleep," said Sean. Then, "Ouch! Knock it off!"

"Sean, seriously dude, something's up. We've been kidnapped or something."

"What the fuck? What the fuck! Oh, shit, man, you don't think—"

"Shut up, Ted. You're not helping."

Adam had always been the leader of the group, ever since their freshman year. He had natural charisma—it ran in the family.

It had been he who had kept them together through the worst of it, kept their heads straight, kept their stories straight, kept them from selling each other out. If he said shut up, people shut up.

He knew what Ted was saying, though, and he knew that Ted was right. "We have to get out of here," he said, finally, after staring into the inky blackness of the chamber they found themselves in for some time. "If we don't, we're in trouble."

"That bitch," said Caden. "You think she's behind this? Slipped us some roofies or something?"

"She wouldn't dare," said Sean. "After all the publicity, she couldn't come after us. No way."

"We can't have much time," said Adam. "We need to find the door to this place. Quick, start feeling around the walls, see if you can feel a break or something."

They investigated as best they could in the darkness, searching for some sort of exit—or at least, the way an attacker might come in. But there was nothing to be found.

"There has to be something, right? I mean, you think she sealed the room shut?"

"It felt like plywood," said Sean. "Maybe she lined the walls with it."

"I don't know," said Adam.

Further discussion was tabled by the earthquake.

They were thrown into each other as the room was pitched wildly like a bottle cast upon the ocean. The quake ended with a sudden slam.

Adam was laying on top of Caden when the lights went on. "Son of a bitch. What—wha—ahhh!"

Adam rolled to his right to see what it was Caden was screaming about. It took his eyes a second to adjust enough to make out the backlit figure that peered down at them from above, mouth in a wide, evil smile. The others were screaming and backpedaling, but Adam stood his ground.

It was Alyssa.

Of course it was.

◘ ◘ ◘

They hadn't set out to hurt her.

Indeed, they had just been drinking a bit too much. Alyssa had been hanging out with the boys, as was her wont—she was flirting with them all, a bit, and drinking heavily, and she passed out midway through the evening, and they were drinking heavily, and Caden had copped a feel, and that had led to trying to sneek a peak at the goods, and then Adam had copped a bit more intimate feel, and—

They weren't bad guys. Not really. She'd been flirting with them. All of them. And she hadn't said no. At least not at first. The fact that she was unconscious through Sean and Caden and had only started screaming when Adam took over, only started screaming, "No! No, no, God, please, no, stop! Please. Please—"

They didn't mean it. Oh, sure, they'd held her down so Adam could finish, but what were they supposed to do, leave him with blue balls?

Well, maybe they should've. Heck, they all felt bad—even Ted, who'd declined the opportunity, felt bad for not telling everyone to knock it off. They tried to apologize, but Alyssa wouldn't be reasonable. She kept throwing the word "rape" around, like she hadn't been flirting. She'd been flirting! With all of them! It wasn't like she didn't want it. At least, that's what it had seemed like at the time to them. She'd wanted it.

Adam's dad wasted no time. It would've hurt his ambition for higher office had he done so. He knew a Senator's son being charged with rape would be disastrous for his hopes to someday win the Presidency—unless his son beat the rap. And so his dad had called in favor after favor, fixer after fixer. He got a great defense attorney, a private investigator, a publicist. His attorneys told Rita Cosby how "the victim" had thrown herself at all of them, how she'd only regretted it afterward, how she'd said she'd blackmail them all. Alyssa's name just happened to be leaked to a tabloid, along with the fact that when she was sixteen, she'd had an abortion.

The day after Adam testified, the New York Post ran the headline "SEN'S SON: SHE'S SLUT." The day after the acquittal, he went on Larry King to tell how hard the ordeal had been on him, on his family, how grateful he was for all the support, how he really felt bad for Alyssa, because she wasn't a bad girl, really. Just misguided.

Adam's dad was happy—the publicity had hurt him with women initially, but the acquittal and his son's masterful performance had propelled him to a double-digit lead in his reelection bid. Adam's friends were happy—they weren't going to jail.

Adam wasn't happy, but he told himself he had to do it, that it was her or him, and that he had no choice.

He wasn't, after all, a bad guy.

◘ ◘ ◘

As Adam stared up into her beautiful brown eyes, he knew they'd be the last thing he ever saw.

"So, fellas," her voice boomed, as she looked down at the shoebox that contained the pitiful remnants of her attackers, "how's it going?"

"Alyssa, please! If you hurt us, you'll pay for it!"

"Really, Caden? You see, that's what I used to think. I used to think that when I was younger. But you see, you guys proved to me that you could get away with hurting someone."

"Alyssa," Adam said quietly, "if we all disappear, you'll be the only suspect."

"You think, dear Adam, that I haven't considered that? No, I know damn well that they're going to find me out. That's why the tape's rolling."

At this, she pointed to a camcorder, that was aimed down at the men.

"What do you want?"

"To hurt you like you hurt me," said Alyssa. "But first, I want you to tell the truth about what happened."

"Look," said Ted, "you were flirting with…."

Alyssa moved with lightning speed. She picked him up, and casually flipped him into the air, her hand open, following him all the way to the table where her palm slammed into him, quickly extinguishing the life from him. She brought her blood-spattered hand up for the other three to see.

"Anyone else want to cling to the party line?"

"Goddamn it, Alyssa! You—you killed him!"

"You are sharp, Caden. Can't get anything past you. You want to be next?"

"Look, we raped you. What are you going to do about it now? Just kill us, then show people the tape and make everyone feel sorry for you?"

Alyssa glowered at Caden, and he shut up.

"You know, there are worse things than death. I was nice to your boy Ted there—his life was over in an instant. He didn't have every mistake he ever made broadcast on national television. He didn't have minicams set up outside his mother's school, he didn't have his little sister ask him if he really might have been asking for it.

"You sons of bitches have no idea how nice I was to Ted. It's because he didn't rape me. He just let you guys do it. I owed him niceness."

Alyssa smiled—a smile that had once been beautiful. "I don't owe you anything but pain."

◘ ◘ ◘

Caden had been the next to die.

She'd closed up the lid to the box, and all Adam and Sean knew was what they could hear. He'd begged for mercy, pleaded in fact. But all Alyssa had said was, "You're the one who pegged me in the ass, right?"

She'd sat on him, smothered him to death with that ass. She had pitched his lifeless corpse back into the box, before retrieving Sean, and closing the lid once more, leaving Adam with the body of his friend.

"You bitch," Sean had screamed. "You fucking bitch. You fucking deserved it, you little cunt! I'm glad I did it! Fuck you!"

Adam listened as she dismembered Sean, pulling each limb away—and something more—before she counted six by plucking his head from his body.

He listened and he cried.

By the time she picked him up, he offered no resistance. Instead, he looked into her beautiful brown eyes, eyes he'd once fixed on with an admixture of love and lust, eyes that looked at him with nothing but hatred, and he said, "Before you kill me, let me confess."

◘ ◘ ◘

The tape got out, somehow.

There was endless recrimination, of course. The Society had blamed the police who'd initially responded to the 911 call from the hotel; the officers had been so shocked that they'd failed to adequately secure things for some time. Then again, the Society had to admit that perhaps someone in their group—maybe someone with a soft spot for the old League—had copied and leaked it.

Whatever the conduit, the tape had been an immediate sensation. Nancy Grace had gone wall to wall with the "Shrinking Vigilante" story, tut-tutting over the killings while running pixilated footage ad nauseum and muttering darkly about what she'd have done if someone accused her of faking a story.

But it was really Adam Stevens' confession that held people. It was so simple. "I deserve to die," he'd said. "I lied about Alyssa. She was a good person, before we hurt her. My friends are dead because of me, and Alyssa's a killer because of me, and I'm sorry."

Alyssa had paused—it was clear on the tape that there was a moment of debate in her mind—before discarding whatever fate she'd planned for Adam, she simply tossed him on the floor and crushed him underfoot.

A quick death. There were worse things.

As for Alyssa, the hotel had not noticed the absence of its guest for some time. There were rumors of course—she'd been seen at a truck stop in Abilene, or with an older redheaded woman in Miami, or wandering through the streets of Edinburgh—but nothing concrete.

The story would move on; it always does. But no matter her ultimate fate, Alyssa had won. Because in the end, they'd paid for it. That's what's supposed to happen when you hurt someone.