All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Crawling Claw

Trigger Warning: Gore. A lot of it.

Mickey Scarselli is dead. Blown into a thousand and one burning pieces. But in his very final moments, his thirst for vengeance was so great even death won’t stop it. Torn from its wrist by the blast, his decaying right hand is out to find out who killed him and why, and to slaughter every last one of those involved.

======

When Mickey Scarselli heard the click, he knew he was already dead. Instead of wiring the bomb to his ignition, they’d mounted it to a pressure plate under the driver’s seat of his Chevy Impala and waited for his 6’4” frame, two-fifty pounds of muscle, to sit down right on top of it. In the span between heartbeats, he reflected that he should have known better. He should have known they’d come at him like this. None of them had the balls to take him out face to face. He’d killed eight made guys in his time as a hitter for the Taranto Family, no other button man could claim half that number. Only four of those he’d killed using guns, the others he’d used knives, a garotte, his bare hands. Scars from a broken bottle marred his granite features. His eyes were hard and empty as those of a shark. No, they wouldn’t ever have come for him face to face.

In that fraction of a second, Mickey reflected on the decisions that had led him to this moment. His work for Gino Taranto, his refusal to kiss ass and cultivate allies that might have saved him. Getting sloppy and then finding out the Feds were connecting some of his hits. More than anything, he resented not being more careful and not checking beneath his seat after doing a quick scan of the car’s undercarriage before he climbed inside. Thought moved at the speed of firing neurons. His body hadn’t moved at all since he heard the click, one foot in the car and the other hanging out of the door. The wrist of his right hand resting on the steering wheel with a big ruby set in gold gleaming on his ring finger. His scarred face in neutral. He had just enough time for a brief surge of white hot, vengeful, purifying rage before the explosives detonated.

The seat disintegrated under Mickey. His pants were blown clear off his legs, followed by skin, tatters flayed from muscle, muscle turning to jelly, both limbs coming apart at the joints. The bomb’s design funnelled a column of force straight up into Mickey’s groin and torso. Organs were pulverised and rearranged, his pelvis, spinal column, ribs all splintering into shrapnel that ripped through the soft flesh surrounding them. Both arms tore free at the shoulders. The swell of expanding shock travelled through Mickey’s neck and into his head. His brain slammed against the roof of his skull with such force that it ceased function instantaneously. The blast yanked his lower jaw off by the hinges followed by the rest of his face, milliseconds before his skull fractured in a dozen places and mashed what was left of the malleable, pink tissue of his brain. Flame followed on the heels of the initial shockwave. A burning maelstrom snatched for anything it could get a hold of, crisping, charring, melting flesh and burning through bone, vaporising all of the oxygen inside the car to feed itself.

The rest of the explosion tore through the casing of the bomb itself, and through the floor of the Impala and its undercarriage. Cratering the asphalt beneath the car, the blast was significant enough to lift its wheels a good two feet off the ground. The interior of the car vanished inside a sphere of heat and pressure. Its frame buckled and deformed like a misshaped balloon. Windows dissolved and doors, along with other loose parts of the frame, were blown free in all different directions before the car returned to Earth with a terrible crash.

While most of Mickey Scarselli’s body was blown to unrecognisable fragments, his right hand stayed protected by the shadow of the Impala’s steering column. As the bomb transformed the rest of Mickey into dog food, and the steering wheel and dashed bowed away from the pressure wave, Mickey’s hand was messily hacked off above the wrist. Trailing flecks of bone, strings of flesh, drops of blood that were atomised by the expanding heat, Mickey’s hand was launched through the disintegrating windshield in some grotesque parody of birth.

Most residents of Mickey’s middle class neighbourhood had no idea they were harbouring a killer of his calibre in their midst until that morning so the car bomb came as something of an unwelcome surprise. The street hosted a mixture of old family homes and growing apartment buildings. Windows up and down the block shattered from the explosion’s shockwave. Most of the fireball it created was contained within the frame of the Chevy Impala itself but pieces of the burning vehicle shredded through gardens, smashed cars, and pitted buildings on both sides of the street. Miraculously, no one beside Mickey Scarselli himself was hurt. Burning pieces of Mickey sprayed the surrounding cars as well, splattering doorstops, and human grease painted itself across walls and sidewalks.

By a freak confluence of forces, Mickey’s right hand, intact, trailing a ragged stump of a wrist, catapulted six stories into the air while surfing the pressure wave of the blast. Fingers curled, it seemed to hang at the top of its apex for a few moments. Bits of safety glass peppered its surface. The ruby inset in the ring on his finger caught the sun like a spark. Then, the hand plummeted, falling in a slow curve.

Rather than drop all the way back to the burning car, or some other part of the street, the hand arced toward the rooftop of a three story apartment block near where Mickey had parked. There, among the satellite dishes and air conditioning units, it landed with a small splat lost in the rolling echoes of the blast from the street below. Tumbling end over end, it came to a rest under the lip of an air duct.

xXx

Police and fire department vehicles filled the street for hours, lights strobing. People were evacuated from their homes due to fears of more explosives on site, the possibility of other chemicals in the mix, and, of course, biological materials. After the fire was extinguished, investigators poured over the remains of the vehicle as well as surrounding properties. The search for evidence stretched well into the night. Forensic investigators and uniformed officers were still combing the area as the grey of dawn lightened the sky in the east.

Eventually, what remained of Mickey Scarselli’s Chevy Impala was loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck. Hundreds of miniscule pieces of evidence had been marked and photographed, involving literally thousands of photos, and then collected and taken away. People were allowed to return to their homes but the work continued. Professionals needed to be brought in for the biological components but there were also broken windows and other bits of damage from the blast to be swept away and fixed.

What was left of Mickey Scarselli inside the car had been unrecognisable as anything human. A twisted lump of charcoal blown into the backseat of the Impala. Some identifiable parts were discovered in the search made by the forensic investigators, hunks of meat, toes, teeth, but they failed to discover the largest of the recognisable pieces left behind and failed to realise it was even missing. Mickey Scarselli’s right hand lay forgotten on the roof of the three story apartment block a hundred feet from the site of the initial blast.

Left exposed to the sun and the elements, the severed hand began to putrefy. The exposed meat of its broken wrist and pitted scars from its trip through the Chevy Impala’s windshield started to fester. Its skin turned pallid and grey, and the flesh swelled. The band of Mickey’s ruby ring sunk into its expanding finger. Among other mafiosos, however, Mickey was known for his incredible strength. Often in meetings with other Families or crews, he would bring a pile of walnuts as a snack and spend the entire time crushing them in his grip, popping the kernels into his mouth, and leaving a pile of shattered shells in front of him. Even divorced from the end of his corded forearm and thickly muscled upper arm, the hand somehow retained its innate power. Hardened calluses marked the pads of its fingers and palm as the rest of the skin softened like an old piece of fruit.

Fingers twitched.

As the digits relaxed, an impartial observer might have blamed the movement on the tightening of tendons as they dried in the early afternoon sunshine. But then the fingers twitched again, and again, like a man slowly waking from a long nap. One by one, each of the fingers tested themselves, swollen flesh creaking, and then all four fingers and thumb balled themselves into a fist.

Attracted and not at all disturbed by the movement, a mangy, grey pigeon fluttered its way across the roof. Landing amid the satellite dishes and other extrusions, it was drawn by the sweet spoiled smell of the decaying hand. The hand froze like a small animal sensing the presence of a predator. The pigeon kept coming, its head darting in quick jolts, letting out a cooing noise. After a few moments of study, its beak speared forward. With tiny snips, it drew a tatter of flesh from the stump of Mickey’s wrist.

The severed hand sprung like a rat trap. Thick and calloused fingers seized the bird by the head and back. Letting out a frantic cooing, the bird’s wings extended and beat a desperate tattoo but it couldn’t take off with the hand’s extra weight clinging to it. Instead, the two of them crashed sideways, spilling feathers the colour of slate across the rooftop. Two fingers locked around the pigeon’s throat and squeezed. With a twist, the hand snapped the bird’s neck like a paper straw. Instantly, the bird went limp. Disturbed by the short battle, half a dozen other pigeons roosting across the roof took flight. The small drama went completely unnoticed by anyone below on the street.

Climbing off the body of the pigeon, Mickey’s hand gathered itself onto its fingertips. Its fingernails, splayed, were rough and uneven, bitten rather than trimmed. The ruby gleamed on its ring finger like an open eye. Above the knotted arrangement of its wrist, a forearm, fringed with dark hair, extended for another good couple of inches before ending in a rind of red-brown, crooked flesh. From the flesh emerged two spars of yellowing bone, radius and ulna, that snapped off at jagged points another two inches above that. Scurrying, crablike, the hand felt out its immediate surroundings.

The hand was not Mickey Scarselli. It couldn’t have said what it was even if it had the words to form the thoughts and the mouth to speak them. It had no eyes, it had no circulatory system, it had no brain. It did, however, have Mickey’s memories and the knowledge of how it had come to be. It was as if in that final fraction of a second between the click and the explosion that shattered Mickey into a thousand and one burning pieces that the surge of indignity and rage the man had felt had been so pure it infused itself into every single part of him. And now, that imprint had come to inhabit, and to animate, this single remaining piece of him.

By now, detectives might be waiting on a DNA test or other forensic magic but they would be operating on the assumption that the hunk of burnt ham they found in Mickey’s vehicle was Mickey Scarselli. If Mickey’s hand wanted real vengeance, not potentially seeing his killers languish in the courts for months or even years only to be dismissed for lack of evidence, it might have to move fast. Thankfully, the cops would have their theories and their leads but they didn’t know the underworld and its killers like Mickey had. Mickey’s hand now shared that knowledge. It shared that terrible thirst for retribution that he’d felt in the final heartbeat of his life. It shared his rage. If Mickey Scarselli ever had the capacity for mercy though, if he’d ever had the capacity for forgiveness, the hand did not share those traits.

Fingers propelled the hand to the edge of the rooftop. There, eyelessly, it studied the scene below. Cars filled the road. People, local residents, cleaners, handymen, cops, journalists, and ghoulish tourists, milled up and down the sidewalks. Yellow police tape wrapped around the patch of burnt and shattered asphalt where Mickey’s Impala had been parked. The hand knew it would be best to avoid scrutiny, a lesson Mickey Scarselli had learned well in a previous lifetime in spite of his size, his reputation, and his propensity for inspiring terror in those around him.

After taking in its surroundings, Mickey’s hand leapt to the rail of a balcony six feet below. It landed clumsily, scrabbling for purchase, but then quickly turned around and launched at another balcony another story lower. No one either inside the attached apartments or on the street glimpsed the movement. If they had, they might have mistaken it for a bird or piece of falling trash.

With a series of leaps, Mickey’s hand made it to the ground and went scuttling into a hedge while it measured its next move. It didn’t know who would have planted the bomb. Who killed Mickey or, more importantly, on whose orders. Not yet. But it knew with great certainty who was likely to have supplied the weapon.

xXx

Bombmaker Gary Teller checked the blinds above his apartment’s fire escape and peered down on the street. His fingers twitched. Outside, the tail of a siren echoed into the night. A cigarette smouldered down to the filter between two fingers of his other hand. Seeing no movement below reassured him that the cops weren’t coming for him, yet. But they would, he knew they would. Ever since he’d heard about what happened to Mickey Scarselli he knew eventually the cops would make their way around to him. Combing through his dingy, one bedroom apartment, he’d made sure it was free of any evidence of his illegal trade. No detonators, no wiring, no tools, not even clothing that might contain traces of explosive material. He’d left an unregistered handgun he owned and a stack of cash he’d struggle to explain with a friend, hoping he’d be actually able to get the gun and most of the money back. And he’d had to make sure there was nothing else illegal in the apartment including drugs, hence his twitchiness.

Across the apartment, Teller’s intercom screamed. The shrill buzz nearly sent Teller out of his skin. It warbled for a few seconds, went silent, and then blared again in several shorter bursts. The sound cut right through him. This was it, he thought. Cops, or someone who’d want to ensure his silence about Mickey Scarselli.

Teller raised the cigarette to his lips as he crossed the room, smoking the last of it before dropping it to the floor and crushing it into the carpet. He was a narrow man, too thin, eyes hollow. Tattoos climbed up and down his sinewy arms. Nicotine stained his fingernails. He’d learned his skills as a bombmaker in the Marines as an explosive ordnance disposal technician. Dishonorably discharged, he’d taken what he’d learned to the open market. He thumbed the button for the intercom.

“Yeah, what?”

Nothing but silence greeted Teller from the other end. He waited. Suddenly, the buzzer howled again. He jumped backward as if shot. The buzzer screamed for several sustained seconds, ceased, and then once more blared in short spurts.

“What?” Teller stabbed at the microphone. “What, what, what?”

No answer. Teller moved on from thinking it was cops to thinking it must be kids, fooling around, unless the intercom speaker was maybe busted. A tightness wrapped around his chest though. His stomach churned. As soon as he released the mic button, the buzzer began screeching again.

“Fuck it!”

Taking his keys, Teller ripped open the door to his apartment. He scanned the hallway before stepping out. The elevator was busted, again, so he had to descend three flights of stairs. Part of him actually looked forward to taking out his woes on some gang of little punks if it was kids messing with the buzzers. Foul as he’d been feeling, amped up as he was, screaming at a teenager, maybe taking a few swings, might be a good release. As he reached the dingy lobby, however, he could see through the reinforced glass door of the entry that there was no one standing at the intercom.

Teller crossed the lobby anyway. Triggered by movement, the piss yellow light overhead took a few moments to stutter to life. Even though he couldn’t see anyone outside, he threw the door open. He crossed the stoop and scanned the street for any likely suspects. A couple of cars drove by, and people milled around street corners and shopfronts, but he didn’t see any kids or anyone who looked like they were making a getaway.

Paranoia took hold and Teller retreated back inside before the door swung closed. He kept looking over his shoulder even as he made his way back across the lobby, as if worried some threatening figure would materialise from the shadows.

That unsettled feeling pursued Teller up the stairwell. A couple of times he paused, hearing some small sound that seemed out of place. When he reached his apartment again, he found the door ajar. He entered and shut it behind him. Something didn’t feel right. His apartment, filthy as it was, felt disturbed, invaded. An out-of-place smell tickled his nostrils. A whiff of corruption.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” Teller asked the emptiness of his living room, feeling stupid even as the words left his mouth.

A baseball bat rested inside the cupboard beside Teller’s door. He hadn’t gotten rid of it along with his handgun, the cops couldn’t fault him for being a sports fan. Retrieving the bat, he raised it to his shoulder as he circled the room.

“Hello?”

Although the living area and what Teller could see of the kitchen looked empty, he felt like he was being watched. Holding the bat, he patrolled the apartment. It wasn’t like there were a lot of places an intruder could hide. Bits of clothing and fast food trash covered the living room. His tiny kitchen was a greasy mess, more pizza boxes, Chinese takeout containers, and empty beer cans cluttering every surface. The bathroom was similarly filthy but empty.

Teller used the bulbous end of the bat to probe open his bedroom door. His bed sat, unmade, in the middle of the room, a heap of clothing and shoes at the foot of it. The room smelled like stale cigarettes, and, something else, that whiff of rot again. He went deeper, checking both sides of the beds and the built-in wardrobe. He should have been reassured but that sensation like he was being watched only got stronger and stronger.

Something scuttled along the wall and back through the doorway. Teller let out a yell and threw himself backward, raising the bat. A rat, that’s what it must have been. He’d only gotten a glimpse of it but it was about the right size and his mind wasn’t ready to accept any other possibilities just yet. A rat, a pale one, with white fur and a ruby red eye. An albino, and deformed in some way.

“You little shit!” Teller shouted.

A storm of emotions took hold of Teller. An instinctive rage and disgust but also a kind of savage glee. He’d wanted something to take his frustrations and fears out on and now here was the perfect target. He was going to bash that white-ass, fucked up rat to pieces. The little mutant, he anticipated the wet splat of the bat hammering it into the floor. The spray of blood and pink guts arcing across the carpet like some modern art masterpiece.

Teller stormed back into the living room and scanned the floor. No sign of the rat but for a moment he could hear it moving. His pulse raced. Leading with the bat, he stalked around the room and kicked at pieces of garbage. Then something caught the corner of his eye.

A bookshelf to one side of the room held a service medal in a display box along with framed photographs from Teller’s time in the service. Apart from a thick layer of dust, the shelves were kept in a far neater condition than the rest of the room. Perched on the top shelf, a severed hand balanced on its fingertips. A ruby ring was wedged onto one of its fingers. Shards of bone jutted from the broken flesh above its wrist.

For a moment, Teller regarded the hand in shock. The hand seemed to regard him as well. In spite of the ‘rat’ he’d been chasing, Teller’s first thought was that whoever had slipped into his apartment when he went downstairs must have left the hand there as some kind of message. They might still be around, about to take advantage of his distraction. But before he could act on that assumption, the hand scurried forward and launched itself at Teller.

Mickey Scarselli’s severed hand smacked Teller across the side of the face. He staggered back but it was a glancing blow. The hand fell to Teller’s shoulder. Teller flailed and tried to use the bat to hit it without thinking. The hand scampered around the back of his neck, hanging from his shirt, and then climbed to the top of the ex-Marine’s head. Gripping, it steered him into the wall.

The hand was strong, stronger than any disembodied hand had the right to be, but it was no longer connected to the weight and power of Mickey Scarselli’s arm, his shoulders, his chest. Teller’s head left a shallow crater in the drywall but he wasn’t knocked out. He reeled backward, swinging the bat in both hands as he tried to find the hand or whatever was puppeteering it. Realising it couldn’t rely on Mickey Scarselli’s overwhelming size and strength, the hand had to fight smarter.

The hand bounced onto Teller’s shoulder and then from there to the floor. Landing lightly on its fingertips, it scurried behind the man. Searching for the hand, Teller hauled around with the bat. Its heavy end clattered and destroyed more drywall.

“What the fuck? What the fuck are you?” Teller shouted.

The hand circled. Teller spotted it and tried to bring the bat down on its metacarpals. The weapon made a dull whack as it connected with the carpet. The hand lunged and seized Teller by the ankle. It wrenched his foot sideways, causing him to stumble. The hand pawed its way higher and climbed Teller’s leg. Through the crotch of his loose track pants, Mickey’s hand grabbed Teller’s groin and Mickey’s walnut-breaking grip bore down on his testicles.

“Ah, ah!” Teller yelped.

Crippling pain lanced through Teller’s groin and knotted his stomach. It felt like a barbed harpoon tunnelling through his pelvis. He dropped the bat and clawed at Mickey’s hand with both of his own. Hot jets of agony rocked his entire body.

“Let go, stop! Please, stop!”

Strength drained out of Teller’s legs and he fell sideways, crashing to the carpet. A snake writhed in his guts. Finally, the hand released. It gave him a last little slap to the area and then scuttled away. Teller clutched himself, tears streaming from his eyes. Free or not, he couldn’t move for several long moments.

The hand scampered back to the bookshelf from where it had launched itself at Teller’s face. Unable to simply grab the shelf and pull it, the hand wedged itself into the gap between the shelf and the wall, climbed, and began to push. Tendons creaked in its swollen fingers. The shelving was flimsy plywood and, exerting Mickey’s prestigious grip strength, the hand shoved it away from the wall without too much effort.

Teller saw the shelf coming and cried out, trying to roll out of the way. Sickening pain still shot through his groin, however, and he didn’t get far. The shelving crashed down on top of Teller’s hips, waist, and thighs. Framed photographs and other bits and pieces smashed and scattered. Teller let out a loud moan, more of terror than pain. Given how light the shelf was, the impact wasn’t too severe and he could have easily pushed it off but then the hand circled in front of his face. Between its index and middle fingers, it picked up a shard of glass from a broken photo frame and waved it in front of his eyes. The implication was obvious.

“Oh, my God,” Teller said. “What? What do you want?”

The hand considered Teller for a moment, as if working out how best to communicate. Teller really took it in for the first time. The torn wrist and broken bits of bone, clearly blown off rather than cleanly severed. The bits of safety glass embedded in the back of the hand. The big ruby ring on its ring finger. He recognised it only vaguely but given the news of the bombing he quickly put it together.

“Mickey? Mickey Scarselli?”

After a few moments, the hand dipped a couple of times in a sort of nodding gesture. In spite of the pain tangled in his gut, Teller let out a strangled laugh. He had to be going insane. The guilt, his depression, the drugs and withdrawal, right now he was rolling around on the floor talking to thin air and thinking it was the severed hand of one of the many people he’d helped to kill. More laughter bubbled out of his throat and he started shaking.

Mickey’s hand darted forward with the shard of glass between its fingers and drew a thin line through Teller’s face under his left eye. The pain quickly focused him and the laughter stopped. Gasping, he recovered his equilibrium. Real or not, the hand could hurt him.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, what do you want?”

The hand considered him for a few more moments before dropping the piece of glass. It pointed at Teller and then rolled over, onto its back, like a puppy. Bunching into a fist, it violently released its fingers a couple of times.

“Me, bomb? Me bomb, is that what you’re asking?”

The hand rolled back onto its fingertips and nodded. Blood trickled down the side of Teller’s face.

“Yes, yes! I made the bomb!” Teller was so excited to be able to communicate for a moment, to be able to understand this game of charades and forestall the possibility of more pain, that he forgot what he was confessing. “I mean, yes, sorry. I made the bomb that-, killed you?”

The hand rolled onto its back again. Thumb folded into its palm, it splayed its four fingers.

“Four? For? Who for? Who’d I make the bomb for?”

Leaping back to its fingertips, the hand nodded. Teller’s mind spun. Normally, he would put up at least some token resistance to interrogation. The simple fact that his interrogator was the severed hand of a man he knew to be dead, however, was enough to shatter his resolve.

“Tony, Tony Bonacci! You know him, don’t you? He’s a-, he’s a hitter for the Silvi Family. I didn’t know it was for you, I didn’t know anything! But, I gave the bomb to Tony Bonacci.”

The hand considered the information. Mickey Scarselli had known Tony Bonacci, so the hand knew of him. It made sense that he would be the one sent after Mickey, but why? He would have only done it with the sanction of the head of the Silvi Family, Anthony Silvi. Mickey had killed a couple of their guys in the past, could it be revenge?

“I don’t know anything else,” Teller said, as if sensing the hand still had questions. “I don’t know anything.”

The shelves covering Teller’s legs shifted as he tried to pull free. With a guilty expression, he froze and looked at the hand. Eyeless, the hand focused its attention again. Thumbing the piece of glass back into its grip, it launched itself at the man. Teller let out a short scream.

xXx

Tony Bonacci wanted to look good for the cameras if the cops came to arrest him and did the whole perp walk thing. A dark suit, tailored around his shoulder holster and a Glock handgun he had a perfectly legal permit to carry at all times, hung off his powerful frame. His goatee beard had been trimmed and manicured, his dark hair kept slicked back from the temples. So far, however, two days since the Mickey Scarselli job, life went on as normal. Carrying an armful of groceries, he unlocked the front door after checking for anything amiss and looked for wires without even thinking about it as he swung the door open and entered.

Tony’s place of sanctuary was a pastel, two story house in the middle of unremarkable suburbia, a white wagon wheel in the middle of the perfectly kept yard. But being the kind of hitter sent after other hitters, Tony had an animal’s sixth sense for danger. As soon as he stepped inside, some smell, some errant breeze, something, put him on alert. Without hesitating, he dropped the groceries onto a side table and reached inside his jacket for the Glock.

“Mama? Ma?” Tony shouted.

Tony didn’t expect an answer but he made the effort as he moved first toward her room. These days, his mother was virtually catatonic. Her brief moments of lucidity, or borderline lucidity, were tiny islands being swallowed by a rapidly rising stream. Normally he wouldn’t have left her alone but it was the nurse’s day off and the grocery store was less than ten minutes away.

Prodding open the door, Tony found his mother undisturbed. Her wasted body reclined in a hospital-style bed, grey hair splayed on the pillows. An oxygen mask covered the lower half of her face and her eyes were closed, she looked peaceful. Tony scanned the room for a few long moments before moving on, convinced his instincts hadn’t sparked for nothing.

In the laundry room at the back of the house, Tony found the shattered window. Someone had punched a brick-sized hole in the lower portion of the glass. A rock and shards lay on the floor. It was probably the errant breeze through the window that alerted him but he also picked up a faint smell in the air. Corruption, like a dead thing. The hole was certainly too small for someone to climb through and too far away from the handle of the nearby door to reach it. He wondered if the damage was only meant to send a message, or if the intruder had gotten scared off, but he kept searching anyway.

Tony went to clear the lower level of the house before moving upstairs. Entering the kitchen, he kept his gun raised, checking both sides of the doorway before committing. Unfortunately for him, he kept his gaze at head-height and failed to really study anything lower.

The hand, with Mickey’s knowledge, knew how professional Tony Bonacci was as a hitman. Probably why he’d come at Mickey with a bomb and no kind of warning, to make absolutely sure he died. It needed a plan to take him down. It lurked just inside the doorway with a knife from the butcher block, small and sharp, in its fingers. As Tony stepped past it, the hand lunged and drove the knife into Tony’s ankle just above the heel of his dress shoe. Driven in by the hand’s thumb, the blade sliced through sock, skin, and through his vulnerable Achilles tendon. The tendon frayed beneath the pressure of the blade and then gave way with a loud snap. Stretched, it retreated under the left leg’s calf muscle in one explosive movement. Tony let out a loud yell of surprise and pitched forward as the leg went limp under him.

“What the fuck?” Tony folded to the floor.

Mickey’s hand scuttled toward Tony’s other leg, about to repeat the operation on his second tendon. Tony surprised the hand with his rapid reaction. Almost as soon as he hit the ground, Tony rolled across the kitchen and away from his unseen attacker. His left leg dragged but he managed to propel himself onto his right knee, aiming back at the door frame.

For a stunned moment, Tony took in the severed hand with the knife between its fingers. He saw it moving. Instinct took over, pushing all confusion and disbelief aside, and he opened fire. Flat claps of gunfire filled the kitchen. The hand dropped the knife and sprinted sideways as bullets drilled the floor and cabinetry behind it.

Tony took in the broken bits of bone sticking from the hand’s wrist. He noticed the ruby ring winking on its finger. It sparked a brief flash of recollection but he pushed it aside to concentrate on what he was doing. The hand slid into a space between Tony’s refrigerator and the wall. A final bullet hit the lower corner of the fridge, spraying insulation.

“What the fuck?” Tony repeated.

Pain radiated from Tony’s severed Achilles. Blood soaked through his sock and began to pool inside his shoe, running onto the floor. Try as he might, he couldn’t get his left leg to cooperate. He struggled and half-hopped across the floor. The image of the hand’s ring rose back to the front of his mind.

“Mickey? Mickey Scarselli, is that you?”

Unlike Teller, Tony didn’t stop to question the reality of the situation. There was a severed hand in his kitchen, living, animated by some unknown force, and it meant to do him harm. These were facts. Like a lot of men in his line of work, he had a certain regard for the unexplained. He knew a hitter from another Family who’d had a psychic tell him he was being followed at all times by a ghostly procession of his former victims. Even knew about the poison ivy the hitter had fallen into while in the middle of a job. Tony never let it occupy too much of his mental space but when confronted with the supernatural he accepted it easily and started looking for his next course of action.

“Mickey? I assume you found out it was me who planted that bomb and you got some feelings on that. Nothing personal, pal, it was just business.”

Balanced on one leg, Tony slammed into the refrigerator. He led with the pistol and peered around the side of the fridge. When he didn’t see Mickey’s hand he began to wrestle the fridge out of its alcove. He left foot dragged and left bloody streaks on the floor.

“Mickey? It’s just business, but I am going to have to finish what I started, aren’t I?”

Struggling with his balance, Tony yanked and walked the fridge out of place. He probed at the widening gap with his pistol. Suddenly, the hand appeared on top of the appliance. Clawing at the edge of the door, it flicked it open and into Tony’s shoulder. The blow didn’t have much force behind it but with his injured leg Tony staggered backward. He whipped the gun around as he fell and squeezed off another round. It shattered the cupboard door above the refrigerator. The hand bounced off the fridge all the way to the floor. Tony recovered his footing. The hand scampered across the kitchen toward the sink. Tony aimed and fired again, and struck it. He wasn’t sure what a bullet could do to an already dead hand. The hand didn’t know either. But the bullet hit the back of the hand and drilled a hole straight through it before embedding itself in the floor. The hand flipped and spilled sideways.

Hopping, Tony propelled himself across the kitchen with his pistol in one hand. The hand spasmed, its fingers curling like the legs of a dying insect. Tony considered putting another few bullets through it but instead he bent over and grabbed it with his free hand.

Mickey’s hand came alive again and Tony was surprised at its strength. Its flesh felt cold and oily. Dropping his pistol on the counter, he grabbed it with both hands. In spite of the bullet hole through its palm, the hand thrashed and flexed and almost broke free.

“Alright, you little shit,” Tony said.

Tony’s kitchen had two sinks side by side. One with a regular drain and one with the gaping mouth of a garbage disposal fringed by rubber flaps. Wrestling with the hand, Tony used his elbow to hit the switch for the disposal. The howl of its blades filled the kitchen, serrated, stainless steel knives spinning at 2700 RPM. The hand fought even harder, the bones sticking from its wrist moving like a barbed tail that was too short to strike.

Anything forced into the disposal, the blades would chew into chunks small enough to flush into the sewage system. Tony reached the sink. Suddenly, the hand focused and seized Tony’s left index finger between its own index and thumb. With an ugly snap, it wrenched the finger sideways and broke it just below the knuckle. Tony stiffened and let out a growling cry. The hand grabbed another finger and broke it like a baby carrot. As if he’d touched a hot stove, Tony yanked his left hand away. With his right, he shoved the hand toward the garbage disposal. It glanced off the edge and struggled. Blades spun and shredded below. The hand twisted and broke another two fingers on Tony’s right hand, one at a time. Before he could recover his grip with both hands, Mickey’s hand slipped out of his grasp.

The hand scrambled across the burnished aluminium of the sink and rebounded off the side, and then swung from the tap like a gymnast. With his severed Achilles leaving him with only one good leg, Tony swiped at it but nearly toppled over. The hand jumped to the windowsill above the sinks. Radius and ulna pointed forward, it propelled itself at Tony like a guided missile.

The twin shards of bone jutting from the hand’s severed wrist slammed into Tony’s left eye socket. Tearing the eyelids and skin around the eye, one bone punctured the eyeball while the other carved down the inside of the socket, dislodging and further mashing the eye. Tony bellowed wordlessly and fell backward, his good leg going out from under him. His backside crashed to the tiled floor but the pain from his tailbone was nothing amidst the thundering agony of his eye socket. Pain split his head open. The right half of his vision remained normal but the left exploded, blurred, smeared, and turned hellish colours as his optic nerves tried to make sense of the waves of feedback they were receiving. Blood and fluids spewed down the side of Tony’s face.

In spite of his broken fingers, Tony snatched the hand out of his face and threw it across the room. Mickey’s hand flew and bounced off one of the cupboards. Fresh blood and clear goo covered the spikes emanating from its wrist. More of the same rolled down Tony’s cheek.

“Oh, you fuck, you shit!” Tony moaned.

The hand shot across the room like a rat, heading straight for Tony on the ground. At the last second it veered away from him, leapt, and grabbed for the handle of another cupboard door. Fingers clawing, from there it vaulted up to the sink. The garbage disposal kept howling. Tony realised Mickey’s hand was going for the gun.

“No!”

Tony scrambled to get his working leg underneath him. His hands barked in pain as he grasped for the nearest bench but he ignored them. Pushing through the pain from his ruptured eye socket, what remained of his vision went grey and he nearly passed out. Before he could reach it, however, Mickey’s hand made it to the gun.

The hand pulled the gun upright. Its thumb found the safety. Tony hesitated for just a brief moment. The hand aimed with fantastic precision for something with no eyes. Bracing its wrist against the countertop, it wrapped its finger around the trigger and fired. The bullet punched through Tony’s right kneecap, pulverising the patella and folding the leg under him. Tony dropped with a yell, crumbling into a pile of broken and bleeding limbs on the kitchen floor.

“Fuck, fuck!” Tony managed to choke.

The hand kept the gun levelled at Tony from the benchtop beside the sink. Instinctually, without a plan, Tony dragged himself backward across the kitchen. Blood and bits of bone were left slimed on the tiles behind him. He came to a rest against the doorway opposite the sink. He felt terribly tired all of a sudden, and began to get cold as blood pumped out of him.

“Okay, Mickey, okay, you got me.” Tony tasted salty blood and ocular jelly on his upper lip. “Now what are you going to do?”

Mickey’s hand regarded Tony for several long moments. The garbage disposal warbled on and on, coughing and catching a couple of times. Tony wondered who among his neighbours might have heard the gunshots and whether the cops would be on their way. The hand, he thought, could be thinking the same. If it could think the way a person could think. A nice neighbourhood like his, however, people might not even recognise the sound of gunshots muffled by his house’s walls.

The hand moved the gun to one side, hooking its thumb through the trigger guard. Lightly, it jumped from the counter to the floor. Tony couldn’t move fast enough to grab the gun away from it, not with his legs the way they were. His blood pooled on the tiles. The hand stopped by one puddle beside the sink. Carefully, it set the gun down and then dipped a finger in the blood. It turned to the cupboard behind it. Tony considered whether to make a move but he wasn’t actually sure if the hand was looking away from him when it didn’t have eyes to begin with, and he felt so horribly weak.

‘WHO?’ the hand scrawled on the cupboard door, using Tony’s blood for ink.

“Who?” Tony repeated, and laughed. “You want to know who gave the order, is that it? What, so you can take them out too?”

The hand rolled to Tony’s pistol. Its bloodstained index finger wrapped around the trigger again and it fired, the recoil driving the hand backward several inches. The toe of Tony’s right shoe exploded. Several of Tony’s little piggies were ripped free, torn off at the knuckles, and blood spewed through the leather. Suddenly awake again, Tony screamed and thrashed. Some part of him tried to count the shots he’d made on top of the two that the hand had fired. How many bullets were left in the Glock? Too many.

Emphatically, Mickey’s hand gestured at the question on the door, ‘WHO?’. Tony let out another bitter, strained yelp of laughter. He had no reason to protect the man who’d given the order after all.

“You want to know, huh? You want to know? It was your own fucking boss, Gino Taranto! Yeah, that’s right! Silvi may have signed off on it too, but it was Taranto who gave the fucking order, asshole!”

The hand had no face to read. Tony let out another bark of laughter at its imagined shock but for a few moments it just sat there. Eventually, it put down the gun and returned to the pool of blood. On another cupboard, it slashed a single letter.

‘Y?’

“Why? Why? Fuck, man, because you’re a dinosaur! Or you were. The Families are merging, Silvi and Taranto, and they want to go legit. They didn’t think you’d go for it. You’d killed a couple of our guys in the past, hell, you’d killed enough of your own! It was what you lived for, wasn’t it? They knew you’d never go legit, and you knew too much to leave alive so Gino decided to clean fucking house and Silvi told me to take care of it.”

The hand absorbed what Tony had to say but showed no reaction. Satisfied he was telling the truth, it picked up the gun again and trained it on him.

“Wait, wait! My mother,” Tony said. “You got to let me call someone or something, so she doesn’t just lie there.”

When the hand did nothing to stop him, Tony fished his phone out of his pocket. Despite his broken fingers, he managed to punch in the numbers ‘nine-one-one’.

“Hey, yeah, this is Tony Bonacci, my address is one-twelve Maryland street, you’ll find my mother in the second bedroom. Better send an ambulance, and a fucking hearse,” Tony said, and he lowered the phone. “Okay.”

Wringing the trigger, Mickey’s hand emptied the Glock into Tony’s chest from across the kitchen. Recoil drove the hand backward, its wrist bones scraping the floor. Each shot echoed into the phone line still open on the floor. Chest shredded, already bleeding, Tony slumped backward and died.

xXx

Wriggling ivy climbed the dark brick of Gino Taranto’s home, built in the 1920s and styled to look like an English manor. Inside, the walls were wood panelled and covered in paintings and ancient wallpaper. Drapes framed the windows and even some doorways. The furniture was largely wooden, heavy, and antique. When he was alive, Mickey Scarselli thought the place looked like a haunted mansion.

After leaving Tony Bonacci’s place, Mickey’s hand took the better part of a day to make its way to Taranto’s mansion. If it had a sense of humour it would have been amused at the thought of the investigators showing up and finding fingerprints and DNA evidence from a dead man all over that kitchen. Knowing what Taranto had done, however, it fixated on its revenge. Once at the house, it had no trouble making its way inside. It could have strangled Taranto in his sleep but instead it waited and it watched. It wasn’t long before it heard talk confirming the merger between the two Families. Anthony Silvi, Tony Bonacci’s don and Taranto’s former rival, would be sitting down for dinner with Taranto in just a couple of days. Creeping around the house, the hand began to put a plan together.

“How’s that soup coming?”

The night of the dinner between the two Families, Taranto’s kitchen rattled with activity. A chef Taranto hired for special occasions moved from bench to stovetop where one of his assistants stirred a massive pot of thick, steaming soup. Blue gas flames burned brightly under the pot. Another assistant prepped plates for the mains. The chef reached for a magnetic strip mounted to the wall beside the stove before stopping.

“Where the hell have all the knives gone? I already checked the dishwasher, it’s like they’ve all vanished!”

After mains were served, Taranto’s caterers were ushered out of the house. The dirty dishes would wait until tomorrow and the two Families wanted to be able to speak freely without worrying about something being overhead. The only people in the house were the two dons, Taranto and Silvi, their capos, and half a dozen soldiers.

“I swear something must have died in the walls in there,” one of the cooks said as they left via the service door. “You could smell that, right? Like a dead racoon or something.”

Once the kitchen was clear, Mickey’s hand emerged from its hiding place beneath the sink. Taranto and Silvi’s men were all in the dining room with the dons. The hand hurried to the hulking gas stove, heat still radiating from its unlit burners, and wriggled around behind it. Finding the gas line attached to the back of the stove, it used Mickey’s considerable strength to tear it free. Sulphurous, shimmering natural gas began to gust from the rent pipe.

The hand crawled out from behind the stove and scuttled across the room. It had no lungs so the gas didn’t bother it. While the rotten egg smell filled the kitchen, it went about its work. Snatching several tea towels from one counter, it shoved them along the bottom lip of the swinging doors leading out of the kitchen so the gas smell wouldn’t leak into the corridor.

Meanwhile, in the dining room, ignorant of the goings on in the kitchen, the atmosphere was tense. The house’s owner, Gino Taranto, held court from the head of the long dining table with Anthony Silvi seated at the far end. Capos of both their crews lined the table between them. Some lower ranking members of the two Families ate off to the side in a sitting room visible through an open doorway.

Taranto was a stocky man in his late sixties, a thick, grey moustache carpeting his upper lip. Sawing through a steak slathered in mushrooms, he fed the dripping chunk into his mouth. At the other end of the table, Anthony Silvi was tall but with a wasted look. His health had been poor in recent years and he’d lost a great deal of weight. He didn’t seem to share Taranto’s appetite.

“When we spoke, we both agreed that Mickey Scarselli needed to end his employment before things went forward,” Silvi said. “It was you, in fact, who suggested we take the steps we did before he heard about us bringing the Families together. Tony Bonacci, we never discussed moving on him as well.”

“And I already told you,” Taranto said around a mouthful of steak. “My guys had nothing to do with what happened to Tony, or to this other one that might have sold Tony the party favour that got the job done on Mickey. I know nothing about this, we were in agreement. I see no need for this talk about vendetta, an eye for an eye.”

“If not you, then who? One of your men, acting out of misplaced loyalty?”

“No, not to Scarselli. He was not the type to inspire loyalty. None of my guys would go against my word on his behalf.”

A few of Taranto’s capos nodded in agreement. The mention of Mickey Scarselli brought a sneer to their lips.

“Then, what? The death of one of my most loyal men is just a coincidence?”

“It could be revenge for some other service he performed, perhaps. But I’m pretty sure the only person that cared about Mickey Scarselli was Mickey Scarselli.”

Silvi looked unsatisfied with that answer but he picked up his knife and fork. “Well, something has to be done to find the parties responsible.”

“And it will be, we’ll do it together. If we’re going to do this thing, merging the two crews, if we’re going to put our funds toward something more legitimate then we’re going to need to trust each other enough to work hand in hand.”

In the kitchen, Mickey’s hand pressed the button to open the microwave. Behind the oven, the gas pipe hissed. The hand went to a nearby cutlery drawer and shoved a handful of knives, forks and spoons into the microwave.

One of the kitchen doors clattered open. A younger member of Taranto’s crew named Christopher Forelli entered with a couple of dirty plates. He stumbled and looked down in confusion at the tea towels stuffed against the bottom edge of the door. Smelling the gas that had been steadily filling the room, his nose wrinkled and his expression turned sour.

“Fuck is that?”

The hand launched itself off the bench and sprinted on its fingertips across the kitchen. Forelli was so distracted hunting for the source of the smell that he didn’t even notice the movement. Mickey’s hand had to take the man out before he alerted Taranto and the others. It had earlier hidden a kitchen knife, small and thin but sharp, behind a set of shelves near the doors. Grabbing the handle, it slipped the knife free and rounded on Forelli.

Eyes watering, Forelli heard the hissing from the stove and realised the danger. Covering his mouth and nose, he turned to shout a warning back down the hallway. The hand lunged, pulling the same trick it had with Tony Bonacci, slashing the knife through Forelli’s Achilles tendon. Blood splattered the tiles and Forelli’s leg went out from under him before he knew he’d been hit. The hand had no interest in keeping him alive for interrogation. As soon as the young man hit the floor, the hand scurried forward and rammed the knife into Forelli’s ear, pushing until it reached brain. Forelli spasmed, hands weakly batting at the air for a few moments, before going still.

The air shimmered with natural gas. Some of it had to be leaking toward the dining room by now. The hand scrambled back to the microwave and slapped the door closed. Quickly, it stabbed some random buttons on the microwave’s control pad and hit ‘Start’. Humming, the plate began to rotate and the interior glowed. Leaping from the bench, the hand raced from the room before the cutlery inside the microwave started to spark.

Down the hall, no one noticed Forelli’s extended absence. Taranto tipped the last of a bottle of wine into his glass. Suddenly, his nostrils flared.

“Anyone else smell that?”

The explosion ripped through one wall, shockwave knocking the dons and their capos flat against the table. Fire roared the length of the hallway connecting the dining room to the kitchen. Gusting across the ceiling, it clawed and clamoured like a feral cat. Heat stole oxygen from the room and thickened the air.

As the fireball retreated, it left flames burning along the eaves of the hallway. It leapt across furnishings, drapes, and paintings, hungry. A grey haze of smoke billowed through the room and an alarm blared. The men around the table gathered themselves, stunned and confused, angry, but mostly unhurt.

Mickey’s hand galloped through the house. Circling through several rooms, it entered the dining room from another doorway. None of the men noticed, too busy watching the flames and smoke spread. Covering their mouths, they waved to clear the air and began to shove back from the table.

“What the hell was that?” Taranto yelled. “Goddamnit, my house!”

The hand slipped, unseen, beneath the dining table. Earlier it had stashed a butcher knife from the kitchen directly beneath the centre of the table along with other knives all around the house. Picking up the knife, it set to work on the ankles of the men around the table. It hit Taranto, at the head of the table, first. With the edge of the knife, it slit both of the man’s Achilles. With a cry, the man stiffened and his useless legs thrashed. The hand moved on to one of the capos, slicing through the back of his ankle as well. The man threw himself backward with a scream, falling off his chair. The hand slashed another, and another.

Anthony Silvi shot up from the table. “What is happening?”

Picking one of the capos, the hand jammed the butcher knife through the man’s calf muscle. He went rigid, screaming, and snatched at the sharp pain. The hand scrambled up the man’s other leg, over his crotch and stomach, and slipped into his jacket. A handgun hung in a shoulder holster beneath the capo’s left arm. The hand didn’t bother removing the gun from its holster. Seizing on the gun, thumbing off its safety and wrapping itself around the grip, it buried the weapon’s barrel into the man’s left armpit and squeezed the trigger twice. From the perspective of those around the table, the man’s handgun seemed to simply explode, twice, of its own accord. The muffled blasts jerked the man around and he fell limply against the back of his chair.

“What the fuck?” Taranto tried to stand up but his legs wouldn’t cooperate, and he toppled to the floor.

Five lesser members of the two Families, soldiers, poured from the sitting room into the archway leading to the dining room. Mickey’s hand manoeuvred the dead man’s gun, still in its holster, so it was pointing through the back of the man’s jacket. Bullets ripped through the material as it opened fire. Burning strings drifted through the air. Three men were cut down as Mickey’s hand emptied the magazine and another was winged. Tumbling and tripping over one another, their bodies clogged the doorway.

Leaving the empty handgun hanging in the dead man’s holster, Mickey’s hand slipped back out of the jacket and leapt onto the table. Fire spread across the walls and smoke choked the air. The room was in chaos as they tried to figure out where the shots had come from. Several capos from different Families drew weapons on one another. Silvi, however, spotted the severed hand crossing the tabletop, walking on its fingertips and holding its shattered wrist in the air.

“What is that? What the hell is that?” Silvi shouted.

Plates and utensils and half-eaten food had been scattered all over the tabletop. The hand grabbed a steak knife and lunged at one of the men still getting to his feet. The hand rammed the knife through the back of his hand as he braced it against the table, pinning it to the wood. Mickey’s hand leapt onto his jacket and climbed the man’s chest. Another capo, spotting the disembodied hand, took aim and fired without thinking. The hand moved too fast to hit and instead the man fired twice into the other capo’s chest. Seeing this, a third man, his pistol also out, unaware of the living hand, put three rounds into the man who’d just fired. More shots erupted across the table, distracting from the spreading fire and downing most of the capos. Others tried to run but couldn’t thanks to their severed tendons.

Anthony Silvi broke and ran. He was forced to circle the table to make it out of the room. Keeping his head low, he ducked and dived as bullets ripped through the air above him. Inhaling a lungful of smoke, he hacked and coughed and almost fell.

“Help! Help me!”

Both Achilles severed, Gino Taranto reached for Silvi from the floor. Amidst the madness and bloodshed, he’d resorted to dragging himself away from the table hand over hand. Sweat poured down his face from the rising heat. Silvi deftly sidestepped the other don and continued toward the front door.

The hand launched itself off another dead man’s shoulder and dropped to the floor. Lost in the chaos, it followed Silvi out of the room unmolested. Taranto recoiled as he saw the severed appendage sprint past on its fingertips, eyes wide.

Silvi made it to the front door but his tremulous hands struggled with the row of locks Taranto employed on the main entrance. Smoke crawled along the ceiling. Mickey’s hand moved into the hall behind Silvi. Reaching beneath the cushion of a nearby chair, it retrieved another knife it had hidden there earlier. With the knife between its fingers, it advanced behind the don. It didn’t bother going for his ankle, instead simply slashing into the man’s right calf muscle. Tripping and falling, Silvi turned to see the disembodied hand behind him.

“Who are you?” Silvi choked. “What-, what are you?”

The hand climbed Silvi’s leg. The man looked so shocked he failed to react until the hand slammed its knife into his inner thigh. Ripping the blade loose again, it split Silvi’s femoral artery. Blood gushed out of the wound, soaking immediately through his pants and covering the carpet. He snatched at the hand but it scrambled backward, out of reach. Moaning, Silvi clutched the wound but blood ran out of him like water down a drain. In only seconds, his face turned white as a sheet of fresh paper.

Dropping the bloody knife, the hand went to work again. In addition to hiding knives around the house, it had also hidden a couple of lighters and a box of matches in different rooms. To make sure the chaos continued and the fire consumed everything, it ran to those rooms and set fire to more drapes and furnishings. In the old house, the hungry new flames spread quickly.

Returning in the direction of the dining room, the hand came across a pathetic figure dragging himself across the floor. Gino Taranto, desperate to escape the flames, pulled himself forward hand over hand. Twin trails of blood followed his ruined ankles. A ceiling of thick smoke closed in overhead, getting lower and lower with every passing second. Seeing the hand stop in front of him, he recoiled.

“What? How?”

The hand looked battered after the events of the last few days. Its skin had taken on the greenish-grey pallor of spoiled meat. Its nails were ragged and peeling free. The bloodless cuts and scrapes covering its surface, the bullet hole straight through its palm, and the rind of flesh at its wrist all festered. Around its ring finger, however, Mickey’s ruby ring winked in the low light like a demonic eye.

“Holy God, Mickey? Is that you?” Taranto said.

Mickey Scarselli’s hand scuttled forward. With still-powerful fingers, it took hold of Taranto’s chin and jaw. Taranto clamped his mouth shut and snatched at the hand but it resisted him and drove its blunt fingertips between the man’s lips and teeth. Taranto’s throat reverberated with a desperate cry. His eyes bulged as the hand forced his mouth open and began to crawl inside. He fought to get a grip on the hand’s wrist and failed. As flames tore down the walls around him, Taranto fell onto his back, gagging and choking as the dead man’s hand shoved between his crackling jaws and down his throat.

xXx

The fire burned ferociously through the old home. Firefighters managed to keep it from spreading to any of the surrounding properties but by the time it was extinguished the two story mansion was a shell of its former self. News of who the house belonged to made its way through the ranks of firefighters and other first responders, and wild theories and rumours began to spread. Those theories, however, failed to prepare investigators for the carnage they found when they were cleared to move inside.

Throughout the night and well into the next day, the process very much mirrored the one that had occurred at the site of Mickey Scarselli’s burned out Chevy Impala only days before. Many of the same individuals were involved. Contrary to their original theories, detectives began to believe that Mickey’s death was not an isolated incident, an inside job, but that it must have been the first shot fired in a larger campaign by an unknown party. What other explanation could there be?

Photographed, marked, and combed for evidence, the bodies were sealed into body bags and wheeled out of the house. One corpse was found just inside the front door but most of them had been concentrated in the house’s dining room. Fire had destroyed the vast majority of initial evidence but autopsies would reveal their secrets. Two EMTs sat in the back of a transport vehicle as it pulled away with a pair of black body bags stacked on gurneys between them.

“Jesus Christ, what a mess,” the first paramedic said. “I don’t know if the overtime is worth this. I’m never going to get the barbeque smell out of my uniform.”

The second EMT stiffened. “Hey, hey! What the hell is that?”

“What is what?”

“That bag, it’s moving! We’ve got a live one!”

The top of the bag rose and fell as if breathing. Stunned, both paramedics watched for a moment before the first snatched at the zipper. A powerful waft of smoke and burnt bacon filled the back of the vehicle, making them both gag.

“No way,” the first paramedic said. “No way is this guy alive, look at him!”

The body was shrunken by heat and unrecognisable. Flames had scorched the flesh black, burning away clothes and hair and extremities. Its limbs, withered, were tucked around themselves as if for protection.

“You saw it too,” her partner said. “Look, look!”

The corpse’s chest rose a couple of inches again as if inhaling, and then fell. Ashen skin started to crack, revealing boiled pink flesh underneath. What remained of the face, however, didn’t move. Both EMTs leaned closer. Moments later, they recoiled, screaming, as the chest ruptured open. Somehow, impossibly, a bloodied but unburned hand exploded from the meat, breaking through the sternum, grasping, snatching at the air, a gleaming ruby ring slotted around one of its fingers.

======

Sean: Man, I’ve been wanting to write a story with the Crawling Claw for ages! I just couldn’t figure out the angle until I thought of making it the hand of a hitman seeking revenge from beyond the grave and then it all just snapped right into place. Not dissimilar to my story from early 2022, Swarm, but this time seeing the revenge from the other side. It’s bloody, it’s pulpy, it’s just the kind of thing I imagined I’d be writing more of when I first started writing Monster Manual stories but then I got super into much generally weirder shit.

Pretty happy with my output lately. Rolling off some momentum after taking a week off from work, working on a couple of different novels and punched out a few more short stories, shorter than this one that’s for sure, so keep your eyes open for them in the coming weeks!

You know what I should mention more? What I’m reading at the moment. Well, a few days ago I read the third and presumably final book in The Seven Kennings series by Kevin Hearne. I don’t keep up with new releases so I was really pleasantly surprised to find this one on the shelf. Awesome series, if you like a modern twist on classic, epic fantasy with just… shitloads of characters, I can’t recommend it highly enough.