Wired Jude

“Hellooooo!”
There was a stench in the air. Sickening, like nothing you’ve ever smelled before. There were flies buzzing all over the place. There were so many that it was only logical that a few of them would hopelessly wander into your mouth. It was one of these that finally made Joshua jerk awake.
“Huh?” he gasped as he choked on the fly. He tried to move, but he found that he couldn’t. His hands were tied to ropes that were bound to a metal pole running across the wall. After realizing that he was tightly bound with no escape, Joshua began to take notice of his surroundings. It was a big room, not very well lighted. There were different tools scattered on the floor: a hammer, saw, clamps, tongs, shovels, axes, and a pickaxe. These few objects could be seen shining under a little bit of sunlight that entered the room through a crack up in one corner to the back and to the right.
“You’re awake!” said a familiar, female voice in the shadows.
“Who’s that?” yelled Joshua, “Where are you?”
“That’s a dumb a question. I’m in this room, silly!” said the voice in the dark, “As for who I am, don’t tell me you don’t recognize my sweet voice. Here, let me shed some light for you.”
A short, young woman steps into the small stream of light. Light brown, wavy hair and light skin. She had eerie green eyes, fixed and without affect.
“J-Jude?’ stutters Joshua with confusion.
“Yes, baby!” squeals Jude, “How are you?”
Staring into her green eyes, Joshua realized something was different about her.
“Jude, wha-what’s going on?” asks Joshua.
“Now that’s a better question. Way better than ‘Where am I?’ and ‘Who are you?’” says Jude, mocking Josh’s deep voice, “Let’s see, you got home from work last night, you drank, I pretended to drink, we banged, and then I chloroformed your face.”
Jude smiles in such a manner that is just as discomforting as her gaze.
“Then I brought you here and tied you up on the wall because I have a bone to pick with you.”
“What are you talking about? Just let me down,” pleads Joshua.
“No, no,” answers Jude, pacing side to side, “that is not how this ends. This is a little, relationship problem that we have to fix and not just throw under the rug. Hear me out for a second.”
She stares at Joshua for a moment, as if expecting him to make a rebuttal. When he just stares at her, clueless, Jude picks up the hammer from the floor and continues as she plays with the tool:
“You see, baby, before I met you, I had something that you could call…bloodlust. I’ve always had it, even as a little girl. I have never liked the company of living things. My parents would by me puppies and kitties and birdies, but I became disgusted with their messes and constant neediness. So I disposed of them. At first, I just drowned them and I found an orgasmic satisfaction in their struggle and yammering. In the way they clung to a life they didn’t understand. But then, that wasn’t enough, so I began to escalate with knives at their throats and blunt force at their craniums. How did I account for their sudden disappearance? ‘They ran away!’ I would say.
“But my parents caught on to my fun, though. They deduced that there was a common factor in all my animal vanishing acts. They finally came to it when I was 14 and they caught me baking a live rabbit. They freaked out. They yelled at me and went on about how I needed help and how I was going to the therapist first thing in next morning. They were going to take my fun away. They were going to change me. I simply wouldn’t have that. So as soon as mom went for the phone to make an appointment, I took a pan and a steak knife, bashed my dad’s head in and slashed my mom’s Achilles. You gotta understand, those tendons are very thick. And for me to slash hers in one move, I was very pissed.
“And I got them together. They dared not move. They saw the knife in my hand, and they began to beg. They cried, whimpered, and yammered. And it occurred to me. They too clung to a life they didn’t understand. They were at their most basic instinct: survival. But they weren’t made to survive. If they were, they would have done something more than beg.
“So I took to people. I began to experiment with them in various ways. Inducing hemorrhages finally stuck, watching life slowly drip out through the slits on their neck and wrists. ‘Down the street, not across’ I always say. But it sucked to not be an active part of the process. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great performance on their part, but an audience can only watch for so long until they want to be part of the show too. That’s when I came across this!”
Jude pulled out of her back pocket a wire, coiled within itself. She stretched it out in front of her and held it up for Josh to see.
“This is an Italian wire, a favorite of the mafia bosses of old and a few Mexican hitmen. You wrap this around the dope’s neck and tie it up in a slip knot. The thing about the slip is that it won’t loosen. The wire is so thin that as you tighten it, it will cleanly start cutting through the guy’s neck until it comes off. But you gotta do it slowly so that you get all the basic instincts out. So that they feel it going through the trachea, and they no longer breathe. Through the aorta, so that no more blood flows through. Through the spinal cord, and they twitch one last time. They will beg and cry and finally realize that they never understood their own existence.”
All this time, Joshua found himself in shock. Out of words, except for a few.
“What are you talking about?” he finally asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Jude, I, uh” he paused for a moment to look for words, “this is not you! I know you well enough to not know that that is not in you.”
Jude then threw her arms to her sides and stomped her foot much like a little girl would.
“Are you not listening, Joshua!” she yelled, “You think you know me, but you don’t! What I just told you is not even an eighth of what I have done! Men, women, children, I have proven they are all the same just by goring out their guts and throats! This is what I am and what I do!”
Joshua still stared at Jude in disbelief. Jude picked up on it, so she sighed.
“I guess you only believe what you see,” she said as she stepped out of the stream of light, “Have you ever heard of black light? It’s a pretty cool thing for someone to have in their room. However, it also has its practical uses. Forensic scientists use it to detect body fluids, you know, like saliva, semen…and blood!”
There was a flick of switch, and two fluorescent light bulbs shined up in ceiling, revealing several patterns across the room. The outline of several pools shone on the floor, as did splatters on the walls and a few more on the ceiling. The tools that were scattered on the floor all shone in their entirety, maybe with small spots of darkness here and there. Most disturbing was Jude’s appearance under the light. Her clothes all glowed with splatter patterns, most dense towards her abdomen and forearms. And her face. Her face glowed under the revealing lights, where even her eyelids gave the impression of her eyes lighting up every time she blinked.
​ “Now do you believe me,” she said as she stretched out her arms, “this is what I am! And I like it! But you…”
​ She began to walk over to Joshua, pointing at him as she spoke.
​ “…you came along. And for a moment there, I thought that you had the potential to join me. So I let you into my life, and let you believe that we had hatched an intimate relationship. I slowly tried to accustom you to small, unusual quirks of my life, just counting the days until I would finally introduce you to the reality of my life. The beauty of it all.”
​She reached him in her slow stride, and caressed his terrified face with both her hands.
​ “But something unexpected happened. While I thought that I was in the process of changing you into something like me, well,” she paused for a moment and looked at him up and down, “you proved to be truly incorruptible. You held true to yourself after I tried to slowly get you used to my little quirks, but it backfired on me.”
​ She held up her wire at Joshua’s face.
​ “I tried to use this a few weeks ago! I found myself a pretty, perky blonde to tear apart, but her screams seemed...dull. I mean, she was shrieking like the little b***h she was, but I didn’t see them as exciting as I usually do. And the black f*g that I tried to gut open a few days later whimpered and cried, but he I thought he was so boring at it. Still, I managed to pull out his stomach, but it was bland.
​ “So for the next few days, I tried to figure out just what was going on. And it hit me! What was it was about these two recent projects that was different from all others: you. You had come into my life, and instead of I changing you, you began to flatten me out! You had come in, with your good heart and nature, and began ruining my fun! And I simply cannot have that.”
​ Sudden realization came into Joshua’s face. Realization intertwined with terror: Wide eyes, rapid breathing, sudden anxious movements. But disbelief still managed to grab hold of him.
​ “Jude,” he says amid forced breaths, “what are you going to do?
​ “I’m going to fix everything,” she says, twirling her wire in between her hands, “for me at least. And, well, for you too! I’m actually doing you a favor, helping you escape this world so cold!”
​ She began to wrap the cold wire around his neck. Before she had finished making the knot, Joshua spoke again:
​ “So, this is how it’s gonna end? You’re gonna kill me as slow as humanly possible?”
​ Jude looked straight into his eyes with slight bewilderment.
​ “This thing is not that slow.”
​ A pull of the wire ended the nightmare.

Author's Note

So I would like to know if I succeeded at creating an individual voice for each of them. I worry that the language may not be distinctive. Other than that, routine stuff: what works, more or less detail, how's the flow, that kind of stuff.