It was the winter vacation; his single father was on a business trip to Italy, his brother was bringing a different woman over each night in preparation for his own vacation, and his boredom was off the charts. Rumble groaned, reclining on his bed and lazily bouncing a worn tennis ball against the poster-coated door on the opposite side of the room. Vaguely, he considered doing something else – but what? Never was anything good on television anymore and every game he owned he’d beaten at least four times. All his friends were on the opposite side of the city or on vacation someplace that didn’t stink of tire fumes and frustration, his girlfriend was in Sri Lanka on her yearly visit to see her own absent parents, and there was actually a limited number of times a day an exasperated and lonely teenage boy could jack off – admittedly, it was mighty large number, but Rumble’ wrist was already killing him and messing around trying to bust the handle of his door with the ball probably wasn’t helping too much.
Again, he groaned. He threw his head back against an unwashed stack of clothes he replaced his pillow with and shut his eyes. For a second or so, Rumble dozed. Then the tennis ball’s rebound terminated and landed, whacking him on the forehead. Cursing and mumbling, the boy sat up, his eyes coming to a focus on one of the dozens of placards covering his wall like cheap and badly-coordinated wallpaper. The one he specifically saw advertised cider and, right then, a cold apple cider sounded really nice. It was either that or another day of lying in his own dried sweat, wondering whether the broken thermostat would roast him to death before his boredom led him to suicide.
Rumble shrugged, clambering out of bed and stumbling over to the nearest pile of discard that looked like it contained clothes, and clean ones at that. He tugged out a pair of jeans, ripped but only from years of neglect and not from design, as well as a vaguely-fitting hand-me-down hoodie and a pair of socks that, while not matching, didn’t knock him to unconsciousness at first smell. All that he yanked on over his briefs, before starting out his room and into the apartment at large.
There on a detour to the door out, in front of the fridge, he found a note. Rumble let out another groan upon reading it, before crumpling the hastily-scrawled paper up into a ball and trying to punt it out the window. He missed, his balance failed, and his head clonked itself against the fridge door a moment later and left a dick-shaped dent. Grumbling ferociously and clasping his bleeding nose shut, Rumble cursed his brother Thunderlane for leaving so soon – and unannounced – to go on a sudden air force training exercise, and indubitably taking his wallet with him.
That last bit really annoyed the boy, who now sat on the corner of the bath and impatiently waited until his nosebleed ceased. Without that, without his older brother’s ID, buying a case of cider would be a little trickier and, judging by his reflected and petulant scowl in the mirror, the clerk would immediately call him out for being a good four years underage. Still, to his extreme exasperation, he looked like a kid; specifically, the one he actually was and not a particularly masculine one at that, with long-lashed stormcloud-blue eyes that seemed indigo in the chill winter light, a lamblike shaggy mess of mousy dark hair that framed them to ironically cherubic effect, and an overall slender and anemic build that utterly failed to give the impression that it belonged to a capable and responsible adult.
His tolerance of his own reflection just about at its limit, the boy sighed, drawing a basin of water and plunging his face into it as to wash the chili flakes of dried blood of it. Somewhat he considered still attempting the beer run. Knowing the clerk at the liquor store, and knowing him fairly well considering how many times a month Thunderlane ordered him over to it, the worst that could happen would be him getting chased out. The best? Well, if the man was feeling extremely generous, he’d look past the conspicuous lack of both ID and respectable facial hair the young teen possessed. Actually… what was that his brother said, Rumble wondered as he towelled his head dry: He who dares wins? Fair enough, might as well at this rate then.
Sparing one last glance at the mirror on the way out, Rumble noticed his complexion – after three weeks of mouldering inside the apartment doing nothing but masturbating and ordering junk food – looked greyer than a zombie’s. Coughing into his fist, hopefully for effect and not from that nasty lethal bug going around, he grimly noticed his breath currently smelled worse than one of said zombie’s greasiest farts. Hopefully, Rumble mused as he slipped his threadbare trainers on at the door, the cider would improve that.
Outside, it was a quick three flights of stairs down to the lobby. There, adjusting his hoodie and vaguely wondering if he should’ve slipped a shirt or five on under it since the actual building and the grim drizzle outside were both far more frigid than his Arabian-summer-hot apartment, Rumble caught sight of somebody. Specifically, a body that could keep any man happy – no matter the day’s temperature. Its owner was named Adagio Dazzle, and she owned the penthouse floor of the apartment. Thunderlane’s main aim in life, apart from getting to fly a supersonic stealth jet, was to bed her. Rumble was likewise – in his mind, who wouldn’t if given the billion-dollar lottery chance to do so? She was perfect, six feet and a searing hot hourglass figure of it, with a tan warmer than any busted thermostat and a cascade of golden curls that gleamed brightly under the dim fluorescents of the hotel lobby. Adagio stood, no – towered – over everyone else, decked out today casually but no less mesmerizingly in a dashing bomber jacket and painted-on tight daisy duke blue jeans, with just the lightest tempting hint of cosmetics and jewellery both gracing her already siren-like features. Dismissively, she sniffed, adjusting her scarf and checking her watch, an oddly blocky piece better on a company man but no slouch on her own wrist – Rumble naturally figured she was waiting for somebody, but his heart nearly exploded when he learned it was him.
“Yeah, you’ll do,” she curtly repeated to the incredulous boy. “Well, what are you waiting for? Large scale societal collapse? Hurry up and come on. Do you want me or not?” She gestured then, for him to follow her out of the otherwise-deserted lobby, all the way back up to her own luxurious apartment, preferably before the feared apocalypse came down on the unsuspecting city.
Rumble did, nearly tripping over his own feet as he scrambled into the elevator after her.
Then he did trip, and would’ve fallen face-first into her cleavage had Adagio not effortlessly sidestepped him. She sneered as he tugged himself back up from faceplanting into the railing, his countenance having gone from corpse pale to bonfire scarlet. “I like the enthusiasm, kid, but hold up until we’re inside, okay? I don’t want to get any more stains in this place,” she said, sweeping a slender arm around the dingy elevator.
By then, he could barely nod in agreement, let alone reply he was so nervous. Up close, Adagio was pretty much exactly like how he’d imagined her to be, only that she was mildly more nervous than he expected your average model to be and also that her perfume was undercut slightly by the scent of… raw bacon? Other than that though, she was very bit the goddess he fantasized about daily, and the minute-long ride up to her penthouse felt like an agonized eternity as he stared transfixed at her while she just curtly tapped a foot and glared at her thousand-dollar timepiece.
Eventually, however, the lift bell dinged, the tinny muzak ceased, and the doors opened to reveal a totally uninspiring hallway. Rumble’ pounding heart sank an inch – he’d expect something nicer, preferably with Greco-Roman statues and bits of gold filigree and potted plants. Then Adagio sashayed forward, produced a key from her designer handbag and unlocked the pair of heavy padlocks fortifying the entry.
She paused then, snapping her head down to the eager boy and giving him a look sultrier than a thousand strip clubs. Her eyelids sank to suggestions of smouldering nights and flaming passions, her lips tilted up to angelic busts and fiendish trysts, and her posture adjusted itself ever so slightly to better adjust for a burning eagerness. “Third door on the right,” she purred, “Just give me a second to… freshen up. But do be a good boy and shut the door, will you, Tumble?”
Barely had he let her finish before he had sped off to find the room, the mispronunciation of his name forgotten in seconds as his hormonal mind was once again overwhelmed with the wonders yet to come, maybe literally. And as the fairly dim and gullible Rumble walked hurriedly through the penthouse’s corridors and eagerly searched for the correct room, his supposed suitor paused for a second to tug at the brown leather hems of her jacket and check her reflection in the elevator’s mirrored walls before its doors slid shut and, with them, any escape the idiot boy might’ve chanced at. Of course, the woman’s reflection was immaculate – she thought so anyway, reflexively flicking a perpetually stray curl back into place before turning away from the blank glass. Ignoring the wolfish growls in her stomach, Adagio hissed in one deep breath before setting her expression back to a sultry smile and setting one hand’s grip to iron-tight about the handle of the taser hidden in her bag.
“He who dares, wins. That’s what that wanker with the mohawk kept saying, right?” she whispered, before giggling slightly in anticipation. With that, she strode forth into her home’s gloom.
Meanwhile, Rumble had just about made it to the second door on the right – just one away! – when suddenly something in his guts twitched. He farted. About three seconds later, it occurred to him that he probably ought to go take a shit before anything spectacularly embarrassing occurred. That he went to do, and, judging from the fact that the ajar door he’d passed on his way into the oddly dark apartment – blinds all drawn shut and blackout curtains behind them – that had a shower in it, it’d probably have a toilet in it too. Quickly, before the regrets of last night’s takeaway curry truly set in, the boy sprinted off to it.
As such, Adagio reached the third door on the right a good minute before her guest did. Spotting, despite the midwinter blackness, that the tough sheet of steel was still open, her normally seraphic face twisted into a fanged snarl. Her free hand contorted into a fist, and that tightened until crimson streamed down her palm and drizzled down onto the already splattered floor. He… he hadn’t escaped, had he?
No, that’d be ridiculous, she reassured herself – her senses were good enough to hear the elevator’s doors ding back open and, besides, he was a lovestruck fool. No way was he running away from this, from her; what kind of living, breathing male human would? She shut her eyes, pausing for a second or two before slipping back into a less predatory frame of mind.
“Oh Tumble!” Adagio sang, letting a hint of real disappointment slip into a voice otherwise smoother than good cider and sweeter than white chocolate, “You naughty boy, now where ever did you run off to? Don’t you know it’s rude to keep a woman waiting?”
He heard her, and gulped. Rumble, of course, had not escaped. Now he was busy with washing his hands and slightly considering inhaling a breath of air freshener in order to make his halitosis problem go away. Instead, fearing for his life for all the wrong reasons, he simply stuck the can into the pocket of his hoodie before brushing his hands dry and rushing off to meet his date. He also pocketed a watch on his trip over, but that was his kleptomania speaking, not his nervousness.
Three things happened then.
Firstly, Adagio heard his footsteps clacking against the penthouse tiles. In response, she merely drew her taser and took a step back against the wall – within seconds, she was flush against it and nigh invisible in the darkness to boot.
Second, Rumble arrived at the third door on the left, stopped, brushed back his mop of hair and put on his most attractive grin and then strode into the room with all the confidence of a lamb on its conveyer-belt way to a brief but unforgettably colourful meeting with a bolt to the temple.
Third was a bang bearing very much in common with one of those execution guns’ lethal cracks – it was the sound of the reinforced door slamming shut. Following it, Adagio’s composure finally snapped and the cannibal exploded, hands on her knees, into a spool of gut-busting laughter.
“Oh… my… gosh, you fucking retard!” she screamed, confident in the walls’ custom soundproofing to blot out any and all auditory evidence of her murderous habit, “How could you… possibly be that stupid? Why would a chick like me… ever want to bang a snot-nosed troll like you?”
Initially, Rumble presumed it naturally to be some kind of roleplay; the kind he sort of guessed women of Adagio’s calibre were into – a minute or so later and the door would just clunk open, and there would the object of his desires be standing, no longer laughing like a lunatic and hopefully dressed in nothing but a smile and some strategically applied whipped cream. Obviously, that did not happen. But eventually, he figured that out and, a few moments later once his own screaming was well along the way to doing bugger all for him except giving him a sore throat, Adagio stopped chuckling and wandered off to lunch on the leftovers of the last idiot she’d seduced.
Some minutes later, halfway through sucking the raw marrow out of the cracked-open femur of a once lecherously irresponsible fighter pilot and watching some anime shlock about a thirteen-year-old girl and the assassin who somewhat disturbingly loved her, Rumble’ screaming began to grate on the vampire’s supernaturally attuned hearing. Groaning, she licked the viscera off her fingers before grabbing the remote and pausing the show, then and yelling down the hallway, “Whole place is soundproofed, moron! Shut the dick up already, would you? Trying to watch an isekai over here, for fuck’s sake.”
Rumble, ninety percent of him by now thoroughly convinced that he was well and truly screwed but ten percent still holding onto the hope of at least being murdered while she was wearing a string bikini or something, he shut up. For the first time since being kidnapped, he stopped pounding on the door and took the time to examine his surroundings. A moment later, he was done. The third door from the right led to a windowless broom closet with filth-coated concrete walls, a bare bulb hanging dead from the low ceiling like a hanged convict, and just enough floorspace for a boy as shrimpy as he was to lie down and have a good cry. He proceeded to do just that as the realization that he was just about well and truly doomed sank upon him like a wet towel over the struggling skull of a waterboarded prisoner. Tears rolled down his cheeks, but his voice was by then too horse to annunciate them past anything more than a strained sob. It wasn’t like anyone who could hear him would care either way.
For a while, his mind was simply blank. Out of tears to weep, his brain went mute – never had anything like this, remotely like this, as horrid as this, ever happening before will do that. Nor had he wanted it to. Lacking a frame of reference for it all, Rumble was stunned, and even the darkness felt alien. It was too black, like there was an unshakable blindfold stapled to his aching head and, and if only, he could tear it off there'd be his familiar poster-covered bedroom waiting for him on the other side. A pang of doubt flashed in his heart like a sparking cinder – maybe he was dreaming, after all this was so surreal. A bone-breaking crunch echoing from one room over quickly extinguished that hope. He was here, kidnapped, and here to stay... until somebody rescued him.
Thunderlane would, right? He could always fix situations – as the hours passed on to the vile tune of tearing flesh, mediocre anime openings, and his own shivered breath in the stinking prison, Rumble stayed curled with his knees pressed to his ribs to conserve heat and he thought about all the times his heroic brother had come to the rescue. There were those bullies, those other ones, and that one time he’d needed a lift back from soccer practice… but, as noticed with a pang of despair and hunger both, there were also countless more failures. He didn’t call Thunderlane for a reason. That reason was, as he painfully recalled, the time he’d sold their PS4 to buy a new watch to impress his girlfriend, who was incidentally his Captain, named Cloudkill or Lightning Dust or Zap or something else equally as ludicrous. It went badly, but Thunderlane still wore the counterfeit Rolex, except when with another lady – their father used to joke he did likewise.
Still, his phone was exactly where he’d left it, and calling the police might actually be helpful here. No reason, after all, to drag it through the city’s crime-slick streets if he was just going to be out for a few drinks. It was charging, he remembered, by his bedside table – exactly ten yards below him if his math was right. Figuring that out, he moaned, buried his head in his freezing hands, and sniffed back tears again. Ten damn fucking yards! He could sprint that easy, if there was not the floor and a psychopath murderer in the way.
Rumble stayed where he was the rest of the night – barely was there enough room to stand, after all, let alone run. Eventually, curled sideways as already was, a rough sleep took him – tossed in the outer space void of the icy storeroom, any conception of what time it really was quickly dripped through his fingers, joining as his own dried tears on the grimy floor and he passed only to awake, perhaps awake, to the hammering pound upon his cell door. And, to his later, he took the voice’s salted sweetness to be motherly.
“Wakey-wakey!” chirped the vampire as she tampered with the catflap-sized hatch DIYed into the lower portion of the door, “It’s time for eggs and bakey.”
Rumble mumbled something and he rubbed the sleep from eyes – Mom? Wait, this wasn’t his room! Ah, yeah. Kidnapped. His already malfunctioning train of thought derailed for despair then, only to be jostled again by the now-blinding light spewing in from the opened hatch. Breakfast, illuminated like a divine descension, followed it. Eggs and bacon, continental style.
Again, he mumbled something – he was being fed? With food that smelled like heaven itself was fried up and plated? His stomach growling drowned out his apprehension. Barehanded, he swiped a still-sizzling hashbrown from the plate and stuffed it down his gullet. A piece of bacon, and then a poached egg and fried tomato, a piece of everything all followed. Everything was glorious, a much-awaited culinary daybreak to his nightmarish night.
“You smuggle a pig in there or something, kid?” Adagio mused, “Gah. Sounds like a trash compactor. Anyway, like, don’t expect leftovers again, okay? Just keeping you nice and pudgy until Spitfire arrives… running late, like always. Some shitty airshow up north again,” then she giggled, sliding the now licked-clean plate back with a stiletto heel right into a cracking break against the opposite wall, “Also, figure out what you’re eating yet.”
Rumble swallowed. Breakfast?
“No shit, dumbass. Lemme rephrase: who?”
Rumble swallowed; he regretted it immediately.
“… always a riot,” Adagio grinned as the boy began to retch, “but yeah I ain’t wasting long pig on my next… meal.”
Rumble swallowed, the vomit burning an acid trail back down his parched throat. He vomited properly when the hatch clanked inescapably shut, its execution of a slam being preceded by a single white ball rolling squishily into the prison. Only after inspecting it in the dying shadows did he vomit, when he saw how its iris so perfectly matched his own.
“Well, not much of it anyway. Only the nasty reject bits,” she cackled then, before kicking the little door shut and cursing the teenager back to darkness and despair both.
Scrambling back from the puddle of noxious sick and half-digested flesh festering by the door, the watch he’d pilfered slipped from his pocket and scraped against the tiles. Once he’s heartbeat had slowed from the buzzing tempo of a hummingbird’s wings, the boy collected it – the glow-in-the-dark glint of its face informed his growing disgust that it was a Rolex, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Rumble proceeded to scream until he was ill again.
For aeons, or weeks, or days, or hours, or maybe even real months that wretched cycle proceeded. Rumble lacked an opinion on which the worst days were – those in which Adagio tormented him; quickly he’d learned to avoid the meat, and shortly afterwards the soup; those were agonizing, personally painful like skateboarding scars as each time a piece of his dignity was so carefully scraped away, but the endless mindless vacuum of boredom and depression was no better. After what he gauged to be the third breakfast, it grew to painful to reminisce about home – his father, his girlfriend, his old life being mediocre at school and bad everything else – all of it felt worse in the dark than any torture, and more crushing than any claustrophobia. As such, the longing just faded to sleep, and his dreams soon faded to prayers of death.
And then something changed: Spitfire arrived. To Rumble’ woozy and barely coherent surprise, Adagio was none too impressed to see her again either. Apparently, there had been a change of plans.
“Dazzle,” said the gravelly voice belonging to Spitfire.
“Spitfire,” went the cheerfully unhinged reply, “You’re a fortnight late, you butch slut! Two damn sonofabitch weeks I’ve spent waiting for your airplane ass to pitch up here. Did you know how hungry I got, how bored I was, how angry I am?”
“Yeah, I can figure. But I actually have a job, Dazzle, one past living off mummy and daddy’s trust fund. At least,” she hissed, and Rumble imagined the redhead fury to pinch the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes and grimace then, “at least tell me you didn’t do nothing stupid.”
Adagio, for once, was sheepish. It suited the brazen temptress about as well as a nun’s habit would’ve. “Ah. Define do?”
“Anything stupid.”
“Only your boyfriend. He was really stupid. Like, unimaginably. Also, he was cheating on you. It was kinda like School Days, if you ever saw it.”
Rumble didn’t need to imagine anything then from his stinking oubliette – Spitfire’s roar made it all clear.
“Hey, hey! We need to eat.”
“There’s fucking millions of people in Canterlot City, asshole. And you choose the one I actually liked?”
“Thunderlane was asking for it, literally. Well, sorta. I mean, he was flirting with me! I wasn’t going to say no if he wanted to be inside me that bad..”
Spitfire’s sigh, despite emanating from a genuine vampire, it had real pain in it. “… Adagio?”
“Yeah?”
A gunshot echoed. Footsteps followed. A door slammed shut.
Oddly, her shot was perfect – the bullet even ricocheted off the handle of the door third on the right. Busted, the remains of the lock clattered to the floor. And, once he was confident the woman was departed, Rumble edged the door ajar and peaked out. How bright the apartment now was compared to the hell he’d been locked in – it burned his eyes, and the warmth felt glorious as it burned away a fortnight’s worth of biting cold. Seeing as nobody remained in the penthouse, Rumble emerged, clutching the now almost-emptied can of air freshener in his shaking hands like it was a weapon of real note.
He stumbled on uneasy legs closer and closer to the doorway out. On the way, he passed by Adagio’s slumped corpse. The woman had once been beautiful. No more. Now she was a demon, fallen from grace and brains splattered out in a crimson halo around her crumbled form. The blood steamed a little in the dim light, but Rumble was confident the scarlet smoke contained no soul at all. What did catch his eye though, apart from the way her behind stuck up so nicely in the air while her ruined face lay pressed bloody to the tiles, was the watch on her wrist.
It had been, in weeks past, his father’s. But the old man wouldn’t be needing it anymore, or ever again. Rumble, after all he had been through, had no emotion left to expel. His grip simply broke, and the can clanked to the viscera-splattered floor, rolling until the combat boot of one air force captain caught it, and then crushed it to a crunching burst of cherry fragrance and ruined metal. Spitfire sneered, and aimed her service pistol at Rumble’ skull.
“Figured there’d be dessert around here somewhere,” the woman said, licking vermilion lips that held no lipstick upon them, “Shame too, looking so much old Thunder. I’m almost offended, totally mad. Lost two partners, and now I see you.”
Rumble barely had time to raise his hands in defence and raise his voice in protest before a 9mm tore through them all.
Dead, free at last, brainless, the grey boy collapsed atop the object of his desires, and Spitfire devoured them both that evening with on ciabatta with a bit of mustard.
