Adam had entertained himself with Angela’s corpse once she’d been dead, of course. Sniffed her piss-wet tights, groped her in ways she could no longer resist. Fucked her. But those weren’t the memories he treasured. They weren’t what he jerked off to every night. The memories he really loved, arranged in his fantasies like a cultivated garden, were when she’d still been alive. The softness of her throat fur against his thumbs as he sunk them into her trachea, the rapid flutter of her pulse against his fingers. The memories of that thrill were what he lived for these days, in this limbo between crime and punishment.
“What is the point of this, Adam?” The counselor’s voice interrupted his reflections, dragging him back to the cold, gray cell in which he’d spent the last six years of his life. “If you wanted to confess, you should have asked for a priest. My job is to answer any questions you have about how your execution will proceed.” The mouse in the black pantsuit tapped her fingerclaw on her clipboard nervously, despite the iron in her voice.
“Sorry,” Adam said with a half-grin, the wiry fox running his paw through his blue-dyed mohawk. “Guess I just wanted to see someone squirm a little one last time.”
She didn’t give him any kind of reaction, if he was hoping for one. “Great. If you don’t have any relevant questions for me, I’ll be going.” She turned and moved toward the cell door.
“Wait,” Adam said. “Sorry. Really. I do have a question.”
The counselor turned and looked at him with one eyebrow arched.
“Will it hurt?” The fox asked.
She sighed and glanced at her clipboard. “You’re scheduled for electrocution. Good news there. You’ve heard the term ‘electric bullet to the brain?’” Adam nodded. “It’s an understatement. Your brain won’t get shot, exactly. See, your brain is mostly water. And when electricity runs through that water, it heats up pretty quick. Your brain will literally boil inside your skull. You’ll be a southern fried fox, Mr. Dewcut.”
Adam winced. “That doesn’t sound like good news.”
“It is if you’re worried about pain. Maybe you’ll feel it for a moment, but there’s no way you’ll stay conscious long. The meat that makes you you, that thinks your thoughts and feels your feelings, will vaporize. My advice, once they have you all hooked up, just close your eyes and think of something that makes you happy.”
The fox swallowed hard, staring at his feet in front of the bunk.
“Is that all, Mr. Dewcut?”
“Yeah,” he choked out.
“I’ll be going, then.” The mouse didn’t turn, though. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “Just one more thing.”
“Huh?”
“I’m glad I got to see you squirm. One last time.”
---
Footsteps drubbed down death row at ten minutes to noon, announcing the arrival of Adam’s executioners. They came to a stop outside Adam’s cell, where he sat on the bed, staring at the gray stone wall. He recognized the warden – a short, wide badger in a brown uniform – and two bear guards. All of the death row guards were traditionally either bears or large wolves. These two looked at Adam, grinning as they slid open the cell door.
“Time to go,” The warden said, tossing something at Adam. It was about the size of a hardcover book, and made the fox flinch, but it bounced lightly off his shoulder. He picked it up from where it sat next to him on the bunk – a pull-up style adult diaper with a ruffly waistband. “Get dressed,” the badger said.
“Nope. No way,” Adam said, tossing the papery undergarment onto the floor. “I ain’t wearing diapers.”
“Mr. Dewcut,” the warden sighed, “when that electricity runs through you, every muscle in your God-forsaken body is going to clench up like a pastor’s asshole at Burning Man. You absolutely will piss and shit yourself. If you want to do that in front of everyone and die with a soaked crotch, be my guest. The undergarment is provided as a courtesy to the condemned, not a requirement.”
One of the bears stepped forward, holding up a pair of handcuffs. As Adam stood up from the bunk, he half-smirked. “I don’t think I’m going to give much of a fuck, frankly. I talked to the counselor, and she said it’s like an electrical bullet to the brain. I’ll be dead before any of that happens. The only ones who’ll have to deal with my shitty pants are you guys.”
The bear with the cuffs clipped them to Adam’s wrists, then pulled him forward. “I will consider it a price worth paying,” the warden said as the guards pushed him out through the cell door, “in order to remove you from existence, Adam Dewcut.”
Adam cut his eyes to the side at the warden, the half-smirk still on his face. “You know who did feel herself piss her panties before she died, though?”
The next thing he felt was the other bear’s fist slamming into his stomach. He let out an involuntary whoop and fell to his knees, gagging. He almost did soil himself right there in the hall. “Come on now,” the warden said, acknowledging neither Adam’s comment nor the guard’s punch. “Don’t make this difficult. Get up.” The two bears tugged Adam, tears running down his face now, back to his feet and pressed him onward.
There were no other inmates on this death row, so the walk was quiet aside from the footsteps of Adam and his guards. Until the end of the hall, that is; there, at the doorway from the row into the execution chambers, two reedy-looking meerkats fussed with a contraption of some kind. It was like a spotlight on a tripod, an hourglass-shaped piece of glassware on top, filled with a pale blue liquid. An old-fashioned looking camera was bolted onto the side of the tripod next to the spotlight. The meerkats, dressed in white lab coats, looked up as Adam was led by them, then quickly looked away.
“The fuck is that?” Adam asked.
“Scientists!” The warden smiled and nodded to the meerkats. “They’re going to take some kind of measurements. Studying death, what happens to your body when you die. Can’t say I understand it myself, but I promised them a dead man, and you’re the lucky fox!” He noticed Adam looking nervously at the camera and grinned. “Re-thinking that diaper? Too late, pal.” He pushed the fox through the door into the execution chamber.
Adam had expected a dimly lit room with stone walls, maybe ominous dripping. This was more like a doctor’s office, though. Bright fluorescent light illuminated a ten-by-ten room with a tile floor, powder-blue walls, and a drop ceiling. A glass wall looked out over several rows of pew-like benches for observers. There was no mistaking the object in the center of the room, though – a tall-backed chair built of dark, thick, slightly-stained wood, with a metal crown high up on the backboard. As he walked into his death room, Adam saw the chunky breaker switch, tucked behind a curtain so it wouldn’t be visible from the chair.
The bears guided him toward the chair, but they didn’t have to shove him. He walked forward in a daze, relishing the adrenaline pumping through his veins. After years of boring gray walls, he could hardly believe he was finally seeing the chair, walking toward it, sitting down in it. Before he knew it, he realized that he’d taken his last step. The wood was cold against his bottom, but the metal contacts were colder as they clapped down over his wrists and ankles.
Adam panted, squirming in the execution chair, and realized he had another reason to wish he’d accepted the diaper – he was rock-hard now, tenting his orange prison outfit. That wasn’t really a surprise – most of his arousal at taking Angelica’s life had been curiosity about what she felt and jealousy that all her thoughts, all her experiences, would mean nothing in a few moments. And here he was, in the same position. Instinctively, he looked out at the observation benches to see who was there to witness his humiliating state, before realizing it didn’t matter at all. There was no point to being embarrassed, or scared, or even aroused. The realization only made him harder.
Still, he was glad to see only two faces in the observation room, and nobody he recognized. Not that he’d expected any of his family to show up after what he’d done. Still panting, he tried to rub his erection against his inner thighs, hoping his squirming would just look like fear. The guards didn’t give his obvious arousal any attention or comment – seemed they’d seen that kind of thing before. Adam kept trying to stimulate himself with little success until his reverie was broken by a sudden, sharp buzzing sound.
Adam jumped and yelped, thinking the execution had begun. He didn’t feel any electricity, though, and as far as he could tell, he was still conscious. One of the bears chuckled, stepping out from behind the chair holding a whirring wireless hair clipper. “Not just yet, sweet cheeks,” he rumbled.
“Oh come on,” Adam whined, shirking away from the clippers as much as he could as the bear pressed them into his scalp. Orange and blue fur, the remains of his proud mohawk, fell into Adam’s lap.
“Believe me,” the warden said from over by the curtain hiding the breaker, “you don’t want any fur coming between your brain and those volts. It wouldn’t be much fun.” Adam looked at the falling hair and took in a deep breath. He was just losing one more thing that didn’t matter anymore. In moments he was going to lose a lot more, so there was no point getting worked up about a little hair.
Adam yelped and jumped again as cold water splashed over the bald skin of his head. A soaked sponge dripped water down his neck, squeezed out by the metal dome lowering over his head, pressing his ears down. The bear pulled a strap under his chin, buckling it so tight that Adam didn’t think he could open his mouth. Probably to stop his jaw from hanging open gruesomely once he was dead, he realized.
“We ready to roll on this?” the warden called.
“Waiting on the nerds,” a guard replied as the two meerkats carried their equipment into the room. They were in the chamber itself, not the viewing area. One of them plugged cables into the camera attachment while the other peered at the blue liquid in the hourglass-spotlight contraption.
“Just a moment!” the scientist on the spotlight called. “Sorry!” He gave the metal box around the spotlight a frustrated bang with his fist, and Adam winced as it turned on, blasting him with a strange white-blue light. Adam got the impression that there was more light there than he was seeing, like when he looked at a UV blacklight, except much brighter. “Okay, all good!” the meerkat said.
The warden nodded. “All right. Any last words, Dewcut?”
Adam started to talk, but his voice was a rasp. He coughed, then spoke up again. “I deserve this,” he said, his voice wavering. “I can’t say that I’m sorry for what I did. But I wish I was.” It was the truth, and it was the best he could do.
“Insipiring,” the warden deadpanned. “All right, we’re rolling on three.”
“Rolling on three!” the guard next to the chair called back. Adam took in a deep breath through his nose and closed his eyes. The light from the scientists’ contraption shone through them, but he ignored it.
Something that makes me happy.
Angelica’s body against his. Wrapped around his cock, his thumbs. Her final spasm, like an orgasm, and splash of urine against his crotch.
“Roll on two!”
“Roll on two.”
Adam’s entire existence became pain.
He felt a terrible impact on his chest and belly, and heard a bang in his left ear as his eardrum ruptured. Every muscle in his body seized and clenched harder than he’d have thought possible, his left bicep and an abdominal turning into fire as they tore themselves. He felt like he was spinning, and had a hard time remembering where he was. Then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be anywhere – the mouse lady had told him that he wouldn’t feel any of this. She lied!
Adam thrashed in the restraints, soaking his orange pants despite his erection and filling the space under his tail with his final bowel movement. He didn’t know that he was soiling himself, but he felt roaming spots of burning pain in his crotch and rump as electricity arced between his skin and the wet fabric. His eyelids flew open, and he saw only a white, milky blur – the fluid inside his eyes had cooked like the white of an egg. Black spots began to swarm the white, floating in his field of vision, and he felt something other than pain for the first time since this eternal moment had begun: panic.
Adam’s panic came from his slow realization that he couldn’t breathe. Hadn’t breathed, in fact, since this began. His diaphragm was seized up, pulling against the bottom of his ribcage and unable to relax. His heart was probably doing the same, hence the blackening vision. His oxygen-starved brain was drawing this moment out, but the realization that his lungs and heart had stopped came to Adam as a relief. This moment would end soon, even though the mouse had bullshitted him about boiling brains and electric bullets.
A sudden jerking sensation went down Adam’s neck that confused him for a moment. Then the pain in his muscles gave way to tingling and a hot numbness, and he realized the shock must have ended, and his head flopped forward. His heart jackknifed back into action, beating irregularly, feeling like a dying rabbit in his chest. The black spots cleared from his vision, and Adam would have groaned if he still had control over his body. With relief, he realized he still couldn’t breathe, and the panic of asphyxiation was becoming easier to ignore, like a distant siren. His heart may have started again, but there was no way he could last too much longer without breathing.
Vaguely, Adam felt a cool disc press against his hot, mostly-numb flesh. The guard was listening to his irregular heartbeat with a stethoscope. It didn’t matter – even with the electricity off, he couldn’t breathe. Something inside him had been damaged too badly to keep going. They could just let him die.
“Still alive, second shock,” the guard announced.
No! Just let me die! Bitch mouse counselor lied, I’m feeling everything!
It was his last coherent thought before pain took over his universe for a second time. Despite the numbness of his dying body, the deep agony was as bad as the first time.
That Adam’s last sane idea in this world was slander against a woman just trying to do her job was shameful, but not out of character. The counselor hadn’t lied. She was, in this instance, incorrect due to unlucky circumstances, though the victim of that bad luck was Adam. She was correct that, in most cases, prisoners seated in the electric chair lost consciousness almost immediately. She was also correct that this was a result of the brain frying and boiling inside the prisoner’s skull. She was only wrong about which part of this particular prisoner’s brain happened to boil.
Like a microwaved turkey, an electrocuted brain will have hot spots. Little pockets of higher resistance that build up more heat than the areas around them. Almost anywhere on the brain, that will cause unconsciousness. Unfortunately for Adam, the only real hot spot in his brain, the only patch that steamed and bubbled and finally set up like an overcooked egg, was a spot way down on his brainstem that told his diaphragm to rise and fall, his lungs to fill and empty. The electricity made his heart seize, but not long enough to kill him. By the end of the execution, he took four shocks to die, and he felt every second of them before he asphyxiated. The panic of strangulation didn’t stay numbed by the pain as carbon dioxide built up in his cooking blood. Instead, it rose and rose and joined the pain in an infernal duet, singing a scream that drove Adam’s mind far past sanity before his brain finally shut down.
Some things, it turned out, did still matter.
---
“Dear God.”
“Hush!” Dr. Wheeler hissed.
The smoky air in the execution chamber reeked of shit and burning fur. The body in the chair twitched a few times as the guard held his stethoscope to its chest, but the meerkat scientists didn’t need him to tell them that Adam Dewcut had died. The evidence was in front of them, in a series of silver-plated glass plates.
“No heartbeat,” the bear announced, wrinkling up his nose. “Jesus, we really gotta clean this?” He bent down, using thick gloves like oven mitts to undo the metal clasps on the chair.
“Naw, toss ‘im in the casket like that,” the warden said, stepping out from behind the curtain. “It isn’t like there’s going to be a funeral. You two get what you need?” He glanced over at the scientists.
“Yes, sir!” Dr. Winton chittered, positioning himself between the warden and the results of their experiment. “Plenty of data! Thank you for allowing us to conduct our experiments here.”
The warden nodded and grabbed the corpse’s feet. “Ooh! Heck!” He winced and sucked a singed finger.
“Here, sir.” One of the guards handed him a pair of insulated mitts. The warden slipped them on and picked up the feet again, lifting them as the guard pulled up on the shoulders. Another guard pushed a plain pine box into the chamber. Urine dripped from the corpse’s stained rump as they carried it over to the box and dumped it in with a heavy thud.
Back in the hallway, breathing the clear air deep to rid their lungs of the filthy smoke, the two meerkats hunched over the silver plates. An image was stamped onto each, monochrome in silver, like a photograph from more than a century ago. This was the only way Wheeler and Winton had found to resolve their spectral light – trapping it in silver. They’d had promising results with dumb animals, but never yet encountered a chance to test it on a sentient being.
In the first image, Adam writhed in the chair, smoke rising from the metal crown and blood running from his nose. His eyes were wide open, pale milky orbs. Behind him, over the shoulder of the chair, the air glowed in a strange mist, as if the light from the scientists’ device had coagulated into a wispy orb. In the second image, there seemed to be a figure emerging from the mist – the bright silhouette of a female head, shoulders and chest, with just the slightest hint of wings behind her. In the third, the figure, pure white in the monochrome plates, stretched her hand out to Adam’s body, and a similar white figure, male with a tall mohawk, seemed to be dividing away from the corpse. In the fourth and final plate, the male figure followed the female figure into the shining light, half-disappeared into the mist when the picture was snapped.
“We’ve done it, Wheeler.”
Dr. Wheeler clicked his pen in and out nervously, staring at the plates. “Yeah...”
“Proof of an afterlife! I don’t even know where we should publish! The Lancet? Nature? Theology Today?”
“We don’t,” Wheeler said gravely, gathering the plates and tucking them into a carry case.
“What?” Winton blinked. “How can we sit on this? It’s the biggest news since a round Earth! Bigger!”
“We can’t. Winton, I never thought we’d actually find… I mean, can you imagine? What will happen to society? What will happen to murder rates? Suicide rates? What will stop the rich from starving the poor? Mass executions of the slightly-abnormal! Winton, we can never show these to another soul.”
“Soul,” Winton repeated, staring down the long, dark death row. “Wheeler, we proved that we have souls. It would be evil to hold this back.”
“Evil?!” Wheeler snarled, snagging his partner by the lapel and pulling him up until their whiskers brushed. “You want to talk about evil? That motherfucker--” Wheeler stuttered, pointing back toward the execution chamber with the paw that wasn’t tangled in Winton’s lab coat. “You know why we can’t show this to anyone? You know why it would really destroy everything? Because even though I never thought the afterlife was anything more than a simple comfort for simple minds, at least a belief in it meant that people got what they deserved. The good would get Heaven, and the bad would go to Hell. That was the only thing about it that appealed to me. And did you see what happened back there, Winton?” He shook his partner, as if trying to physically drive the question into him.
“Y- yes! He died!”
“Yeah. He died. And it looked like that evil son of a bitch went to Heaven.”
I actually saw this next one on the popular page a few days ago. I've been on the fence about posting it because, while there has (arguably) been worse stuff posted to this thread, there's just something so depressing about the title and accompanying comments.
I need a shower; my skin's crawling.
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