Bloodlust Part 1: A Monster is Born

A suspicious blue eye looked up at the man sitting in the chair across the simple, clean desk. The man with his ugly metal-framed glasses and suspiciously undisturbed brown eyes. "You're lying. You're just trying to gauge my reaction." Alex accused, eye narrowing.

"I most certainly am not lying, Mr. Xander." Dr. Spruce replied, adjusting his glasses. "You're one of very few candidates to actually make it this far into our little study and we want to offer you the opportunity to do what you claim you've always wanted to do."

The doctor's tone made Alex bristle and he clenched his jaw in annoyance. He hated when people like Spruce used the "royal we" regardless of how many people were actually being spoken for by this one mouthpiece of a human. In his aggravation, Alex reached up to push his glasses further up his nose, a habit he hadn't been able to break even after ten years of no longer wearing glasses, and played it off brushing his brown bangs away from his black eye patch. After he'd gouged his lazy right eye out, he'd taken to wearing a contact in his left eye but he still had the urge to adjust his glasses constantly.

"So you'll let me kill someone without any consequences?" He questioned, tone still disbelieving. He'd heard of all the studies where subjects were told to do "terrible" things by authoritative figures only to see how far the subject would go to obey the figure or the studies where subjects were given the option to do something "terrible" without consequence just to see how many people would do something "evil" when given the knowledge they wouldn't be punished. Alex didn't care what Spruce or anyone else thought of him but the facility he was currently in wasn't like the psychiatrist offices he was used to; this building had lots of locks, lots of men in white lab coats, and more than enough big men with guns to make Alex nervous. He wasn't about to be thrown in the loony bin because his current psychiatrist had set a trap for him to say the wrong thing in front of someone official enough to turn him into a human lab rat. He knew he was being a bit paranoid, but he wouldn't put it past that judgmental bitch.

"Correct." Spruce replied, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands together on his desk. "One person, any way you want, no consequences. We only ask that you allow us to observe and record you."

Those certainly sounded like the condensed versions of the offer and conditions he'd been told earlier on in their little meeting, but Alex still wasn't convinced. "I want it in writing. I want a legal contract that says there won't be consequences for the murder." before Spruce could respond, Alex added "And I want a copy for myself."

"Not very trusting are you, Mr. Xander?" Spruce asked, the look on his face betraying amusement at the paranoid thirty-year-old in front of him.

"Not when it comes to white-coated dudes in armed buildings, no." Alex replied, hard expression never softening. He never smiled during things like this. He had no reason to act friendly with people like Spruce so he didn't.

"Fair enough." Spruce conceded, opening a drawer in his desk and pulling out two documents before filling in a few of the blank spaces. He then pushed both documents towards Alex and pointed out where he should sign.

Alex hadn't expected the doctor to be expecting him to ask for contracts but had time to compose his slightly widened eye as Spruce scribbled his name and the date into a few of the blank spaces. He read the papers over carefully despite what little writing they actually had on them, inspected the government seal carefully, and finally compared both papers to eachother to ensure they were exactly identical before signing where Spruce had indicated.

Once both contracts where signed, Spruce took one and tucked it away into a file with Alex's name on it and Alex took that as his cue to take the other. He folded it twice and slid it into his pocket under his cellphone with the Discord charm he still had despite the bittersweet memories it brought him. He pushed the flood of faded memories down as Spruce stood and he stood as well, following the doctor out of his office and into an annoyingly bright white hallway. Alex disliked white and without even a shred of personality to break up it's monotonous walls, he found himself getting a headache in the bright hallway.

The walk was thankfully short for the soon-to-be murderer and the doctor and before Alex had a chance to complain about the brightness of the hall, Dr. Spruce was unlocking a featureless metal door. As the door slowly opened, Alex saw that it was thick, as were the walls holding the door.

"Soundproofing." Spruce said, answering Alex's unasked question and stepping into another annoyingly bright room.

Within it there were several small tables on wheels like in a doctor's office, all of them holding tools and weapons. In the middle of the room was a woman with a bag over her head and a white paper gown covering her frame. She was tied to a chair by the wrists, ankles, and torso and didn't move as Alex looked around the room in awe.

"We'll be locking you in just in case your victim manages to get loose. Just let us know when you'd like to leave and we'll unlock the door for you."

"Right." Alex replied absentmindedly, walking further into the room as if in a trance.

"If you need anything or have any questions, you should let us know now. We won't be able to communicate with you once the study begins."

Seeming to come out of his trance, Alex turned to the doctor. "Can you dim the lights or something? It's fuckin' bright in here." Alex had always been a firm believer that the word "fuck" wasn't a bad word at all, just a fun word.

"Absolutely, so long as we can still see you. Once we've locked you in, the lights will start dimming, you just tell us when." Upon Alex's nod of understanding, Spruce took the door handle in his hand. "Was there anything else, Mr. Xander?"

"Yeah. Would it be cool if I put on some music?"

"Certainly."

For the first time since meeting Dr. Spruce, Alex smiled. "Sick. That's all."

Giving a nod of his own, Spruce stepped out of the room and closed the door, jiggling the handle a bit after he heard the automatic lock engage just to be safe. Satisfied, he left to go to the observation room where a few of his colleagues sat, ready to take notes on Alex's actions.

Turning, Alex looked up and gave a thumb's up to one of the cameras in the room when the light's no longer aggravated his eye. They stopped dimming and he fished his phone out of his pocket, setting it and his copy of the contract on a table. He browsed through his music and choose a powerful, mostly instrumental playlist he often masturbated, worked, and did housework to. After starting the playlist up and closing his eye for a brief moment to let the music soak into his mind, Alex turned on his heel and let out a deep sigh. He began walking around the small room to get a feel for his arsenal. There was everything from spoons to guns and it was all organized fairly well, though Alex did spot a few things he'd have done differently.

Pushing the cart holding the small assortment of handguns into a corner and bringing closer the tables he thought he'd actually use, Alex noticed a table with a rack containing different vials of liquids and several syringes. He examined the vials and set aside the ones he thought had potential, reading over their brief, simple descriptions. After choosing his weapons, Alex took the bag off the woman's head and saw that she was unconscious.

Pursing his lips, Alex picked up one of the large knives from a table and flipped it over in his hand so the blade was pointing down. He aimed carefully as his lack of depth perception often made it hard to hit things he aimed for and slammed the knife down with all the force he could muster into the unconscious woman's hand. It went into her hand between her middle and ring finger and actually split her hand open as his aim had been a little off and the knife hadn't hit dead-center like he'd wanted. It had, however, embedded itself into the chair slightly from the force.

Awoken by the sudden pain, the woman shrieked and began to look around frantically before her eyes rested on a smirking Alex. Before she could say anything, Alex took a scalpel from the cart and caught her chin in his hands, holding her head still in a grip so tight, it made her jaw ache.

"First thing's first" Alex mused over the music, bringing the scalpel closer to her face "I'd like you to smile while we're together." With that, he stuck the small blade into her mouth just enough to almost get to her teeth and began to cut, giving the now sobbing woman before him a Glasgow smile. He pulled back once the deed was done and smiled darkly as she began to ask who he was and why he was doing this.

Not caring to answer any of the woman's questions, Alex stood back and looked at the canvas before him. After a bit of pondering, he decided on an idea. Using the same scalpel, Alex began cutting circles in a pattern only he could see into the woman's wounded arm and then did the same, but with squares, on her untouched arm. Setting the scalpel down, Alex took a device that reminded him of an eyelash curler, but sharper, from a table and opened it to the width of the circles. He dug the tool's sharpened blades into the circles and began using it to takes pieces of flesh out of her arm. She screamed and pleaded for him to stop but Alex might as well have been deaf. After digging the skin out of all the circles, Alex selected a tool similar to the first but square and with teeth instead of blades and dug out the flesh from the squares he'd made.

By the time he was done, the woman was hoarse from screaming and sobbing but she continued to try and plead with Alex to stop. He merely grinned a wicked grin at her before taking a vial from the few he'd selected and filling a syringe with it. He was careful to make sure the syringe didn't have any air bubbles before injecting the woman in the chest with it. It was adrenaline and it kicked in quickly, perking the woman up almost instantly and causing her to renew her struggling.

Taking a moment to consider the maelstrom of ideas whirring around in his brain, Alex eyed the paper dress. Pursing his lips again, he leaned forward and pulled the blood-soaked front of the dress away from the woman's body to see that she was wearing undergarments underneath. Nodding once, Alex used his foot to brace the chair and ripped the dress off the woman, tossing it aside and picking his scalpel back up.

He started towards the woman's collar area but stopped frozen in his tracks when he saw something on her hip. It was a tattoo of a cross wrapped in a banner that read "the lord will provide". The smile that cracked across Alex's face when he saw the tattoo was enough to make the white coats watching from the computer room shudder and it even caused the woman to shut up briefly before she started back up her begging. Placing the scalpel just above the top of the cross, Alex made sure to dig the blade in as far as he could as he cut around the tattoo. After he'd completed his carving, he grabbed a curved knife from a table and slowly peeled the tattoo and the fairly thick piece of flesh it was attached to away. It was quite the effort, but Alex managed to separate the tattoo from the broken woman's body.

Looking up into her puffy, tear-filled eyes with his one blue eye, Alex grinned once more. Without looking he used his free hand to grab a tube of super glue and used his teeth to take the cap off. Dropping the cap, Alex set the tube aside. He then grabbed her jaw in his vice-like grip again and forced her mouth open. "Where's your god now, bitch?" He hissed darkly, shoving the tattoo into her mouth and quickly sealing her lips shut with the glue before she could spit it out.

Watching the woman's struggles grow weak, Alex realized that perhaps he'd been too rough. She was losing quite a bit of blood from her injuries, especially the hunk of flesh taken out of her hip as the wound went so far down that blood was practically pouring out of it. Frowning at the realization that he'd need to wrap things up soon if he wanted to kill her the way he'd always dreamed of killing someone, Alex took another vial from the table and the syringe he'd used to give her the adrenaline. He took the liquid into the syringe and tapped it for bubbles once more before holding the syringe in front of the barely struggling woman's face.

"Acid." He informed her, smirking as her eyes widened in horror. He squatted down and stabbed the needle hard into her leg, ignoring her hard flinch, and injected the acid into her. The pain was immediate and clear on the woman's face but Alex wasn't quite done yet. "Hopefully that doesn't kill you before I can." He mused, taking a small length of rope from a table and wrapping it a few times around each hand. Alex moved behind the woman and again placed his foot on the chair to steady it before wrapping the rope around the woman's neck and pulling hard.

He could smell the acid as it ate away at her leg and she shook and twitched with renewed vigor at the pain and lack of oxygen. Alex's knuckles were turning white from the rope and the smell of the acid mixed with the smell he hadn't previously noticed, urine, wasn't agreeing with his stomach. Closing his eye, Alex focused on the feeling of the rope getting tighter and tighter from the woman's desperate attempts to suck in a breath and the sound of his music. After over a minute of admirable struggling, the blood loss and lack of oxygen took their toll and Alex dropped the rope once the woman struggled no more.

Slowly walking around to the front side of the cadaver, Alex took in his handiwork, admiring what he knew he'd always had in him to achieve. The current song hit it's crescendo and a wave of euphoria took over his senses. Cracking another chilling grin, Alex began to laugh. It was soft at first but it grew, psychotic and gleeful, and when it was over, Alex turned off his music, not caring about the blood he got on his phone, and tucked it and the contract back in his pocket.

"I'm ready to go, doc." He said to the air, turning his eyes, and his grin, to one of the cameras. It didn't take long for the door to click unlocked and Dr. Spruce opened it. His expression was carefully neutral as he spoke.

"Have fun?" He asked, stepping aside to allow Alex to exit the room and then escorting him down the hall.

"Weren't you watching, doc?"

"I certainly was." Spruce replied, mildly amused at the change in Alex's personality. "You put on quite the show for my colleagues and I. I do believe we were all quite surprised that this was your first time." He opened a door and motioned for Alex to enter.

Stepping into the room and realizing it was a small bathroom, Alex turned to Spruce. "Thanks." His grin had died down into one that was far less menacing and he felt more relaxed than he had in years.

Nodding once, Spruce motioned to the shower. "We thought you might want to clean up before we send you on your way. I think you'll find the scrubs we've provided draw much less attention from people than blood-soaked clothing."

Even Spruce's use of the "royal we" wasn't enough to get Alex down and he nodded. "Right. I just leave when I'm done cleaning up then?"

"Correct." Spruce replied, motioning to the scrubs on a counter as well as bag with an inconspicuous bio-hazard symbol in the corner before leaving Alex to his cleanup.

Stripping off his bloody clothes and stuffing them in the bag, Alex replayed his first murder in his head. He wiped the blood off his shoes with a few paper napkins and sealed up the bag, setting his phone on the counter and starting his playlist back up where he'd left off. He removed his eye patch and set it next to his shoes before getting into the shower and cleaning the blood from his body. The memory of choking the life from his very first victim made him hard and in the warm stream of the shower, he took care of that as well. Once he was finished, Alex shut off the water and wrung out his fairly long hair before tying it into a ponytail.

Dressing himself and replacing his eye patch over his socket, Alex took his phone and the bag containing his clothes and left. Unbeknownst to him as he left the building, that wouldn't be the last he'd hear of Dr. Spruce or his mysterious organization.