Chapter 2 - The Horror Inside
The fiberglass crunched loudly beneath the titanium blades. Ruth winced at the noise, praying the thunder would drown it out. She squeezed the handles with all the strength her sixty-three-year-old hands could muster.
Crack. Snap.
She cut a straight line down the side of the cast, from the elbow to the wrist. Then, using her fingers, she dug into the thick, rigid casing and pried it apart like the jaws of a trap.
A terrible, rancid smell instantly filled the room. It smelled of rotting meat and ammonia.
"Oh, my God," Ruth gasped, clapping a hand over her mouth.
The cotton padding beneath the fiberglass was not white. It was stained a dark, rusty brown. And it was moving.
Trapped between the synthetic cotton and Caleb’s inflamed, blistered skin were dozens of large, black insects. They were Dermestid beetles—flesh-eating bugs used by taxidermists to strip bones clean. But they weren't just eating dead skin; Marissa had coated the inside of the cast padding in a sweet, slow-dissolving acidic gel that was slowly burning Caleb’s flesh, giving the starving beetles soft, raw tissue to feed on.
Caleb looked down, let out a silent, breathless scream, and squeezed his eyes shut, shaking violently.
"Don't look, Caleb. Do not look," Ruth commanded, her voice vibrating with a terrifying rage. She grabbed a towel from the bathroom, soaked it in warm water, and began frantically wiping the bugs and the acidic gel away from the boy’s ruined skin.
His arm was covered in shallow, weeping bite marks and chemical burns, but the bone itself seemed stable. The pain he had been enduring for four days was unimaginable.
"We are leaving," Ruth said, wrapping his arm in a clean, dry towel. "I'm taking you to the hospital, and then I am calling the police on that monster."
But as Ruth turned toward the bedroom door, the brass handle slowly turned.
The lock clicked.
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Marissa stood in the doorway, fully dressed in black slacks and a turtleneck, holding a silver master key in one hand and Ruth’s discarded gardening shears in the other.
"I told Grant we shouldn't have hired an overly emotional nanny," Marissa whispered, her beautiful face twisting into a mask of pure malice. "You just couldn't mind your own business, could you, Ruth?"
