Done

DONE


George Costa's body was done.

He looked as bloodied and bruised as a man who has fallen from a four-story building, or perhaps tied to the front of a truck and run into a brick wall. The extraction of his tongue, the severing of his thumbs, and castration with pliers, had all been done within hours of his capture, and still George had no idea what his tormentor wanted.

When the man entered George's house, he pulled him out of bed, screaming and kicking, and roughly dragged him to the garage.

"Please, tell me," George begged. "Who are you? What have I ever done to hurt you?"

"Done?" the big-eyed man asked, as though the meaning of the word eluded him. "Not yet."

There was something strange about the man's eyes . . . something there wasn’t a word for. He was tall, his fingers and hands twice the size and length of a normal man, and he had a cadaverous paleness and gaunt face, like the body of an anorexic.

With superhuman strength, he held George down, stripped him of his pajamas, and grabbed a pair of pliers.

Stark fear widened George's eyes; sheer terror clenched and locked his jaws shut.

Later, the intruder cut into his guts. George watched him bend to the savage work, his long fingers digging into his fleshy ruins, searching for grisly morsels like a pig for truffles.

The excision of his eyes came next with an old rusty spoon he found in George's tool box.

When he shattered his legs into bone splinters and dust with a hammer, the man stepped back and said, "There, now you are done."

He grabbed George by the armpits and tried to stand him up, his ravaged body issued no surprise, no groan, and no resistance. Unable to stand, George tumbled to the cold, bloody cement, and then died in a crimson heap.

The man then left the house and headed next door.