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Deathbed	By : MadameManga Category: WWF/WWE > General Views: 2322 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know the celebrities of WWE/WWF. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 8
- 9
- 10
This story is very loosely inspired by the plot of the opera “The Flying Dutchman”. I’ve cast a number of familiar people in the roles; they are not intended to be seen as their real selves, but as actors playing parts. All recognizable characters are the property of WWE, and no infringement is intended. This story is intended for entertainment purposes only.
Written in 2001.
Deathbed

by Madame Manga
“You OK, darlin’?” Deadman asked me as we went up the stairs, his arm around me. I leaned on him with a yawn. “I saw there’s blood on my thighs, and it ain’t mine. You didn’t hurt yourself bad, did you?”
“No…” It was a fierce, throbbing burn between my buttocks, though it hadn’t kept me from dozing for an hour on the sofa. “Well, a little.”
“A little? You don’t heal up the way I do,” he said, shaking his head. “You ought to be more careful.”
“Don’t lecture me—you’re not my father,” I said in irritation.
“Damn straight I’m not…” He squeezed my bare bottom with a chuckle and opened the bedroom door. “OK, you take care of yer pretty ass on your own. Hope it don’t bother you while you’re riding on my bike.”
“If I could get a warm bath, I’d be fine. Can I…?”
“Yeah, there’s actually hot runnin’ water in this dump, believe it or not.” Deadman shut the door behind us with one hand; the other arm remained around me. “Though since the propane’s screwy tonight, I dunno how much of a tubful you can get. Wonder what the hell’s wrong with that tank—I guess I’m gonna have to go take a look at it. Once I get my clothes on, that is.”
“I just need to soak a little, that’s all…” I yawned again and stretched, my back curving in his embrace as he bent over me from behind and nuzzled my ear. “And then we’d better go look for my Papa in town, even though it’s getting late. There’s a motel there?”
“Yep,” said the rider with a breath into my ear, running his tongue around the rim. “Only one for a long way, so there’s not any other place he could have got himself a room.” He turned my face and kissed me on the mouth; I responded lightly, a languid warmth moving through me. “Mmm…you sure you want to go out, darlin’?”
“I’m sure I want a bath,” I said with a smile, then sighed. “Papa is going to be frantic by now. I have to get hold of him somehow.”
“Heh. Guess I need a wash too.” He took the armful of our clothes that I held and threw it on the unmade bed. “Still got road dust and sweat, not to mention you, all over me. Mind if I join ya?”
“Not at all.” I smiled at him and went into the bathroom to fill the tub. There was no shower, only an old footed tub with a hand sprayer and a corroded, mineral-encrusted tap, rust stains running down under it and surrounding the drain. The white tile floor was cracked and discolored in spots but wasn’t dirty—the room, like the whole house, gave an impression of maintained decay.
The rider came in after I had located some shampoo and bath salts that obviously belonged to Stephanie. With the water running warm, I added a handful of the salts and wet my hair with the sprayer while kneeling on the worn mat. Deadman watched me wash my hair as the tub filled, his expression changing from a slight smile to a silent, concentrated regard. I quickly rinsed the suds out and pulled the long wet strands back from my forehead, occasionally glancing at him as he stood naked behind me, his arms folded.
“That looks real pretty,” he remarked in a quiet voice. “A woman washin’ her hair and getting ready to go out ridin’ with me.”
“You like it?” I asked, wringing some of the water out of my hair and wrapping a towel tightly around my head.
“Uh-huh. Been a long time since I saw something like that.” The rider’s eyes narrowed in thought. “There was someone I knew with hair ‘most as long as yours…I don’t recall who.” He frowned and let go of the recollection, then came forward, put an arm around me and lifted me into the tub with him. His long body lowered until he sat with his back against the end and his knees bent up out of the water, cradling me between his legs.
I leaned forward to turn off the water, which was starting to run cool, then lay back against his chest. He wrapped his arms around me and put his chin on top of my towel-turbaned head. With both of us occupying the tub the water lapped as high as my armpits, the warmth beginning to soothe my aches and stings. “You think your Papa’s goin’ crazy lookin’ for you, huh?”
“I guarantee it. He’s very protective of me, you know. Even though I’m not a child any more, obviously.”
“Guess I’d take good care of you if you were mine, darlin’.” One big wet hand raised up to stroke my face. If I were his? He’d said last night that I belonged to him; he’d taken me with little thought to my wishes; but now he seemed doubtful of everything that had passed between us, while I had a deepening conviction that I didn’t want to go home with Papa after all.
I had to contact him to let him know that I was all right, but the thought of simply saying goodbye and leaving Deadman to his lonely, bitter existence was repulsive. A couple of nights of passion? Was that all I could ever give him—a thing so many men had taken before him?
His lips wandered over the back of my neck. “But you’ve been away from home for a while, right? Why’s he gonna be so bent outta shape?”
“Well…I’m an only child, since my mother died when I was born and Papa never remarried. He raised me by himself and I’m all he has. His only family, that is. He keeps busy, because he made plenty of money in business before I was born and he knows a lot of people in the legislature and the state house. He does consulting and lobbying work.”
“Whatever ya say, darlin’. I thought you said you grew up in the country.”
“Uh-huh. We lived on my grandfather’s farm most of the time because Papa thought it was better for a child than the city. Pure and innocent environment; you know the idea. He’s kind of an old-fashioned guy. Sees things the way he wants them to be.”
“Yeah,” said Deadman in an ironic tone. “Pure as the driven snow around these parts. So Pop takes care of his pretty little daughter ‘cause she gets in trouble without him?”
“Oh, he did everything he could to teach me to take care of myself. He arranged his whole life around me until I was twenty, and then he let me go my own way. He’s a wonderful father.”
“That so? Sounds like there’s a lot you ain’t never told him.”
“He wouldn’t believe it even if I did tell him, and I’m not going to. I don’t want to break his heart. I love him, and he loves me.”
“Irene…” the rider said after a few minutes of silence while I washed myself with a cloth. “I, uh…”
“What?”
He let out a breath and seemed to change his mind about what he was going to say. “You ever going to tell me your name?”
“My name?” I twisted my head up to look at him, but saw only his nose and forehead at the periphery of my vision. “No.”
I felt his abrupt laugh but he seemed somewhat taken aback. “Suit yourself.” His hands moved over my upper arms and breasts, ostensibly helping me wash, but with a gentle caress on my skin. I floated a foot out of the water, pointing my toes to curve my calf and ran my palms down the leg and back up again.
“Damn, you’re pretty,” said Deadman for the fifteenth or sixteenth time, sounding resigned. “I don’t generally go for someone as little as you, and I reckoned I liked blondes, but you are the prettiest damn thing I’ve seen in…”
“Fifty years?”
He let out a short chuckle. “Yeah, in fifty years.”
“Tell me something about the women you’ve had.”
“Oh, boy,” he snorted, letting his arms fall into the water and sending up a splash that hit the cracked tiles. “Here’s where you get jealous and scratch my eyes out, right?”
“No. You know all about my sex life, so turnabout is fair play. How many women have you slept with?”
“I don’t recall nothing about any women. I never messed with any woman on God’s green earth, including you.” Deadman slid forward in the tub, pushing me to the other end as he raised his legs to give himself room, and lay down to duck his head under. The tub nearly overflowed.
For a moment I saw the rider’s pale face and muscular torso through shifting water, his eyes closed and his long hair swimming, wet-darkened nearly to my color and spreading like a stain around his head. The tattoos on his arms were blurred and half-readable.
My insides went warm at his virile beauty; even though I sat in water, I could feel the moisture between my legs. Then he sat up with a gasp and tossed his hair back, splattering water over the whole bathroom. He blinked through the rivulets that ran from his scalp and grinned at me.
“Tell me,” I said stubbornly.
“About what?”
“You heard me, Deadman.”
“Oh, you want to know I got my nickname?” The rider slicked the water out of his eyes and reached for me, settling my back against his belly again and holding my left breast in his right hand. “Well, I was in the 28th Infantry in the Ardennes…” he began in a humorous tone, then paused. “No, that ain’t it. A neighbor of mine was in the 28th.”
For several moments he turned his head from side to side, searching the air. “Damn, I forgot my battalion number—must be gettin’ old, huh?”
“How could a G.I. forget his battalion number?” I said in utter surprise, leaving aside for the moment that he was still evading my question.
“Damned if I know. I was a squad sergeant in B Company, 4th Platoon, I know that. Definitely the fuckin’ infantry. I was drafted in January of ’43 and I shipped out three months later. Shit, I oughta go write it down before I forget that too.”
“Are you losing your memory in general?”
“Eh…maybe I am. I lose bits of it here and there.” He scratched his head. “Just little stuff like that. Little, but sort of important. I can’t recall my dad’s name any more.”
“That’s strange. How long has that been going on?”
“Ten or fifteen years, maybe. I didn’t really notice at first. Starting to get annoying, though.” He shrugged against my back. “What’s to do? I ain’t going to any doctor about it.”
“No, I guess not!” We both laughed.
“He’d be saying ‘Nurse, this man’s dead! No wonder he’s losin’ brain cells!’”
“But you remember being in the Battle of the Bulge? My grandfather used to tell stories about that. He was a sharpshooter in the 33rd.”
“Yep, I’m livin’ history—with a bad memory. I got almost killed twice in that battle…well, I wasn’t wounded. But I should have been dead. That’s how I got the name Deadman.”
A thrilling twinge went through me. “Should have been dead? That almost sounds like what happened to me when I blew my tire.”
“Maybe so.”
“Tell me how it felt—if you remember, that is.” I turned my ear against his chest and looked up at the underside of his jaw. For the first time, I realized that Deadman had no heartbeat, and a little chill went through me. He could bleed and his face could flush with emotion—his circulation must operate by necromancy alone. He seemed so alive, with his bodily appetites and his sense of humor, and to recall that this was a man who had lost his life fifty years ago was almost a jolt.
“Sure, I remember,” the rider said, looking a bit quizzically at me. “Let’s see—the first time was the worst. I was in this shell hole with half my squad and a brand-new second lieutenant who’d got separated from his command, and a Kraut grenade landed right at our feet.
“The lieutenant grabbed it and tossed it to get it out, but like a goddamn fool he threw it in my direction, and since I’m so damn tall it hit my helmet and bounced back in. Went off in the air about a yard from me and a few feet down from the rim of the hole, so the explosion was kinda concentrated in there. Those potato mashers didn’t throw a whole lot of shrapnel, but they sure did make a bang. I was knocked flat on my ass, and when I looked up all I saw was red.”
He made a wide gesture with one hand. “Every man in that shell hole was smashed to hell—all my best friends were splattered everywhere. Except me. I wasn’t touched. Covered with blood and bits of G.I. from eyebrows to bootlaces, but I hadn’t a scratch. Like I’d been marked out for special protection.”
“God.”
“Yeah, I felt damn weird about it, and when there was a break in the fighting and I had a chance to let it sink in, I was real torn up about all my buds biting it at once. I didn’t give a crap about the officer.” Deadman laughed. “But their guts all over me and everything—I had me a little attack of the screamin’ heebie-jeebies. Everybody in the whole company that had a flask with ‘em gave me a drink, ‘cause I was so spooked my eyes just about fell out’ve my head. But stuff like that happens in a battle. You’ve got no idea why things happen, but they do.”
“You don’t sound as if it preys on your mind, though.”
“Nah. It was a long time ago, I guess.” He made a sound deep in his throat, halfway between a growl and a chuckle. “I recall the taste of it in my mouth. All that blood, and my uniform stunk of it for days until I could get a spare. Made me sick…at the time. Guess that wouldn’t bother me much now.”
I closed my eyes and thought about my accident. “What happened at the moment of the explosion? Did you feel as if…you’d been up into the air and back? So fast it took the wind out of you? Did you see a flash of light?”
“Sure. The damn grenade went off.”
“Well… not like that. Sort of inside your head. But all around you too, as if it came from every direction…I’m not describing it right, I know.” I had an impression of power, something essential that defied all words. “A brightness you couldn’t look at, but that went all through you. Does that sound at all familiar?”
“No, I don’t recall that. More like, red and black on the insides of my eyelids, an’ a really terrible smell. Now that I think about it, it felt like the meat was rottin’ right off my bones. Guess that’s what freaked me, even more than the blood. Why? This flash of light happen to you?”
“Uh-huh. Just for an instant, and when I opened my eyes I was still sitting in the car.” I looked at my hands and flexed the fingers, wondering. “What about the second time you almost died?”
“Well, I wrote the grenade off to dumb luck, and then it went and happened again. About a week later. I was takin’ a shit in the bushes during a lull, freezin’ my bare ass off, and then the goddamn Nebelwerfers started up and rockets were falling all around. I grabbed for my rifle with one hand and my pants with the other, and whheeooo, I heard a 105 millimeter comin’ straight down on me, screamin’ through the air above the trees.” He whistled a loud fluttering crescendo and arced a pointed finger down into the bathwater. “You could tell just from the sound if it was headed for your vicinity.
“I still had my pants around my ankles and I didn’t have nowhere to run anyhow with those rockets hittin’ on every side, so I just squatted there and waited for that shell to burst on my head and prayed that it was a dud. It wasn’t no dud—it landed a couple yards in front of me and the ground just seemed to lift up and set down again like hell was havin’ itself a good sneeze. I smelled that bad smell again—it wasn’t H.E. or cordite. Worse than rotten corpses.
“When I could tell what the hell was happening, I was lyin’ on my back at the bottom of the crater, starin’ up at the sky, and there was dirt still droppin’ down on my face. The trees were all knocked flat for twenty yards in every direction, pointing out from the spot I was at, and the snow was all gone or covered with that black dirt. That shell killed a dozen grunts and a chaplain, but even though I was at ground zero it only knocked my helmet off and scorched my hair. Lost my rifle, too.
“I crawled out’ve the hole and stood up in the middle of the slaughterhouse when the medics came running with stretchers. There was a boot with somebody’s leg still in it and a pile of guts nearby, and my head was smokin’ and my pants were gone and the rest of my uniform half blasted off, and the medics looked at me like I’d grown horns and a tail. Crossin’ themselves and saying Hail Mary.
“When I got to camp the captain told me by rights I oughta be a dead man. Couldn’t argue with him. They’d been calling me Tiny before that, just to be funny. Or ‘Hey, you Texas asshole’. I was Deadman for the rest of the damn war.”
“You sound just like my grandfather. Though according to his war stories he could pick off gun crews better than Sergeant York.”
“Yeah, I must be near as old as your grandpappy,” snorted Deadman. “Thanks for the reminder, girl!”
“He died when I was ten, so he lived to sixty-three. He was born in 1918.”
“Aw, shit. I’m older than him. This is fuckin’ embarrassing.”
I giggled and put a hand over my lips while he groaned; I could barely help it. “So when were you born?’
“Eighty-eight years ago. 1913. March the...um.” The rider paused again, searching for an elusive fact in the same way. “Twentieth? No, the fourteenth—shit.”
He balled his fist and thumped the side of the tub. “I don’t fuckin’ believe this—I don’t remember my own damn birthday! What kind of idiot forgets his birthday?”
He seemed exceptionally upset, so I tried to lighten the mood. “I know some women who’d like to pretend they never have any.”
“Not you, baby. You’re a good age. Just about the same as me when I went into the Army.” He sighed. “That damn Army changed me a lot. I was a nice, quiet guy before the war, ‘cause I was half a head taller and six inches broader in the shoulders than any other man in eight counties once I hit seventeen or so. I didn’t have to be a loudmouth to get my way. I went a little…crazy afterwards.”
“Riding motorcycles?”
“I had me a bike before the war. But I didn’t go ridin’ it at a hundred miles an hour—the roads weren’t that good, and I wasn’t acting like I didn’t care if I crashed myself to hell. I was a wild one when I got back from fuckin’ France. A real desperado, frankly, even for a native-born Texan. All those guys were dead, and I wasn’t. Didn’t seem fair.”
“So you rode hard and lived hard. Did you drown your sorrows in drink, or women?”
“Both, I guess—aw, you got me.” Deadman slapped himself on the forehead. “Walked right into that one!”
“Yes, that was a trap. Now you have to tell me all about it.”
“Heh heh heh…ain’t nothing wrong with your memory, baby.”
“No.” I reached up and patted the side of his face and he kissed my fingers.
“OK, you got me dead to rights. Gotta make my confessions. I had me a lot of women in my time,” said Deadman expansively. “They liked my bike and they liked my attitude. I was a new face anyhow, ‘cause I didn’t take a job out here ‘til after I was mustered out. I wore a leather jacket and I wore my hair long—that’s down to the collar, mind you, since most fellows ‘round here had crewcuts. I screwed girls every chance I got, before the war and after, and even back then when their daddies toted shotguns, you’d be surprised how horny the women were where I was concerned. I got me the bad girls and I got me the good girls who liked bad boys. I got me a blonde with big tits every Saturday night, right?”
He was laughing. “I’d take ‘em out for a ride and drape ‘em over the handlebars doing top speed—”
“Oh, you’re making it up!” I elbowed him in the ribs.
He kept laughing. “You asked for a little teasin’, darlin’. Gonna get out that gun again?”
“I’m seriously considering it—oh!”
“What?” He tensed at my sudden exclamation. “Somethin’ wrong?”
“I left my purse in the barn—with the gun in it. I wonder if…” I recalled the blessed silver bullets that Aitch had given me. Perhaps the family had left my possessions alone for fear of the cartridges, or perhaps they had stolen everything I had.
“Last night? You took it out there?” The rider sat up straight and turned me around between his knees so he could look into my face. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“Why wouldn’t I hold on to my purse?” I said.
“No, the gun. You picked up your gun and headed out there while I was gone?” He didn’t seem precisely angry, but alert and even apprehensive. “I wondered what the hell you were doing out in the barn. What were you aimin’ to do?” Taking my face in both hands, he looked severely at me. “You wouldn’t go tryin’ to finish up what that flat tire didn’t do?”
Suicide, he meant. I stared at him, seeing the green fire in his strange eyes. He was dead, in a sense, and he feared what would happen to me if I joined him in that state. “What would it matter if I did? You don’t want to have to take me where I’m going? It’s going to happen sooner or later. What would it matter if it was a little sooner?”
“Holy shit, girl!” Deadman hissed through his teeth. He let go of me and moved back as far as he could in the tub. A small tidal wave sloshed over the end. “Don’t even fuckin’ think it, you hear me?” He jabbed a finger at my face. “I don’t have any chances left. You do. Don’t go wasting ‘em!”
“A chance for me?” I shivered; the water was cooling. “I’m as doomed as you are. Didn’t you know that?”
“You’re still alive! There’s always a chance while you’re still alive!” He was breathing hard, his forehead creased and his eyes burning into mine. Somehow the indifference that I had noted on our first meeting had given way to something else. Somehow life and death mattered to him in my case—it mattered a great deal.
“I’ve told you what I’ve done.”
“Yeah, and you ain’t sorry for it that I can tell…except for that baby of yours.” Hs face darkened. “And you told me to call you by her name, and you must be feeling your guts twist every time I do. What the hell did you tell me that name for, Irene?”
“I don’t know.” I started to get up to exit the tub, and Deadman grabbed my arm and forced me back down into the water with him.
“The hell you don’t. That name’s hers. That poor little deformed baby of yours, that you knew wouldn’t live the moment she came out of you!. I began to weep, but his harsh voice kept hammering at me. “It was a mercy killing, you say, and still you know it was wrong, and it’s about the only thing that makes you cry, you cold-hearted bitch!”
“Shut up!” The tears were streaming down my cheeks as I struggled with him, but still he held me. The towel fell from my head; my damp hair snaked over my breasts. I had cried for him; had he forgotten so soon?
“It’s the goddamn truth. It’s the only damn thing you’re sorry for, and you want to keep gettin’ reminded of it. You’re wanting me to stab you in the guts at the same time I’m fucking you.” I couldn’t speak for crying and he went on. “You love gettin’ fucked, but it’s gotta hurt or something? If you ain’t gettin’ forced, you’re hurtin’ yourself.”
Deadman poked his finger at my scratched breast. “That’s twice you made yourself bleed just to get me hot.”
“And you loved it, didn’t you?! You can’t tell me—!”
“’Course I did. That’s who I am.” The acid fire burned green in his eyes. “Why the fuck would a woman want to get the Hellrider hot? There ain’t hardly been one in fifty years who’d even get in arm’s reach of me. I already knew you were crazy, but I guess I was flatterin’ myself it had somethin’ to do with ME, not with what I do. What’s the final act of that kinda play? You’re fucking me like crazy, you’re hurtin’ yourself worse and worse—you working yourself up to something?”
“What if I am?” I cried, trying to avert my face.
“You just keep askin’ for it, don’t ya?” The rider seized my chin in one hand and turned my face towards him. “What are you tryin’ to make me do to you, woman?”
“I said—”
“I don’t mean that you like getting fucked against your will. I mean you keep askin’ for the worst kind of trouble, and yer hopin’ it’s gonna be as bad as possible so you won’t have to do it yourself. You confessed to yer husband’s best friend and you waited at home for the penalty. You were real scared to get on my bike, but you did it anyway. You saw me beat the hell out of Rattlesnake an’ Aitch, I took you away when you were screamin’ to escape, and still you let yer pretty hair down right where I’d get an eyeful. You used a gun on a guy like me, and then you came right out and said it—’Just kill me!’ You keep beggin’ for death, you little fool! Sweet Jesus—!”
The look in his eyes frightened me; he was angry with me for thinking of him as a means to an end, but not because he thought he had been played for a fool. I knew at that moment that I hadn’t been wrong in my half-dreaming ideas of how Deadman felt about me. What burned behind his anger was the emotion I had first seen as he carried me from the barn, and again it made me tremble.
The caresses of his huge hands: the looks he lavished on me while he took me and gave himself. It was the opposite of the evil, caustic glow that Satan had put in his eyes; a force far brighter, far more human, and far more transcendent of mere humanity. But could the one wash away the other? I thought it was impossible. How could love face down the power of Hell? Love was impermanent, elusive, indefinable and deceptive. It was there one moment and then gone, like the flash of light I had seen when my tire blew.
“Don’t be crazy,” the rider said, nearly choking. “You ain’t got the right. You could commit any crime that’s possible to commit, and you still wouldn’t have the right to hand yourself the kinda punishment you want. That judgment ain’t up to you.”
My chest and stomach shook with choking sobs, but I fought to get myself under control, pressing my hand to my mouth. “How do you know? How do you know what God thinks I deserve?” I slipped my wet arm from the rider’s grip. “Look who found me on the road. The Dead Man. Satan’s dark angel.”
I leaped out of the tub before he could stop me and grabbed a towel to wrap around my naked body. “I’ve been making love to Death. Death is what you are. Death and fiery damnation. Why didn’t you kill me and carry me off where I was meant to go? I belong in Hell!” I screamed.

Continued...
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- 10
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Deathbed