User blog:MrTyeDye/The Nightmare House (Part 5: Lynn)

Previous Chapters:

(Lori)

(Leni)

(Luna)

(Luan)

It was a task that took an entire summer's worth of planning, several trips to the hardware store, hours in the garage, and countless spent allowances, but by the end of August, Lynn had finally done it. She had constructed a decent-sized boxing ring in the backyard. Roughly 12 feet by 15, with a two-foot wooden platform covered with a couple inches of padding, and four wooden posts in the corners bound together by three tightly bound strands of nylon rope. By Lisa's estimation, she had saved at least a thousand dollars by building it herself instead of buying a pre-made one online.

And now, it was time to test it out.

Lynn hopped up onto the ring and climbed over the ropes, clad in a black sports bra and mesh shorts that left little to the imagination. The humidity was already making her sweat a bit, which imbued her body with a luminous sheen that accentuated the contours of her taut, muscular body. In the corner opposite her sat her apprehensive opponent: her comparatively puny little brother, Lincoln.

There was no singular reason why she so often gravitated towards Lincoln when it came to picking a sparring partner. It was partly because he was the only one too cowed by her to say "no", partly because of the thrill she got from beating boys, and parly because he had a surprisingly high tolerance for pain. With most of her other sisters, she felt like she constantly had to hold back, but Lincoln could take almost anything she could ditch out. She couldn't even remember the last time she made him cry.

But that didn't make him any less nervous about the upcoming round. As he rose to his feet, his knees started knocking together, which only called attention to his scrawny chicken legs. Lynn smirked, assumed a boxing stance and flexed her meaty thighs, which looked to be at least twice as thick as his.

"Ready to go, little bro?" asked Lynn.

"Um...I-I guess?" stammered Lincoln, forcing himself into a boxing stance that mirrored hers and shuffling into the center of the ring.

"You better be," said Lynn. "Ding, ding."

Lynn lunged at Lincoln, who responded by throwing up his fists in self-defense. Lynn, undeterred, came out swinging with a vicious series of hooks, putting pressure on the boy and causing his block to crumble. Lincoln managed to duck under one of them, and tried to return fire with a hasty jab to the midsection. Much to his chagrin, Lynn's washboard stomach easily absorbed the blow. Before he could go back on the defensive, Lynn nailed him with a flurry of stinging blows, capped off with a thunderous cross to the face that knocked Lincoln off-kilter.

Lynn, ever the tactician, gave Lincoln a moment to recover before making her next move. He stumbled about for a few seconds, clutching his head before pushing himself back up into a standing position. Just as he was starting to turn back towards Lynn, she socked him in the chest with a haymaker that sent him flying into the corner with a blunt thump. Lincoln groaned in pain upon hitting the post.

This time, Lynn was determined to keep the pressure on, and she charged towards Lincoln, locking him in the corner. Lincoln yelped and threw up his fists in front of his face, and Lynn responded with a few underhand shots to his unguarded gut. Just as Lynn intended, the pain caused his guard to falter and shrink, giving her an opening for a knockout blow. With a glint in her eye, she stepped back, cocked her right fist, and sent it rocketing towards Lincoln's face. The next thing she heard was the dull thud of her gloved fist colliding with wood.

I missed?!

Lynn looked forward to see that her brother had somehow managed to duck out of the corner in the split second she took to wind up. When she spun around to face him, she was immediately clocked by a sharp uppercut that sent her reeling backwards into the corner. Lynn let out a painful hiss as her back collided with the un-padded wooden surface; she was sorely regretting her decision to leave the posts uncushioned to save money on padding.

But that was the least of her concerns now. Before she could even process what had just happened to her, Lincoln glided over to her and buffeted her with rapid jabs and crosses. Lynn could feel her muscles start to get worn down by the assault, and she threw out a hard uppercut in an attempt to break the combo and stop Lincoln's momentum. Lincoln swung back, just barely dodging it.

This, at least, freed Lynn from the corner, and she tried to capitalize by putting Lincoln back on the defensive. She hurled another punch his way, but this, too, was dodged, and the force behind her whiff threw her a bit off-balance. Before she could get her bearings straight, he leaped up into the air and hammered her in the cheek with the strongest cross he was capable of throwing. Lynn, unprepared for such a blow, spun around and fell face-first onto the mat.

Lynn could scarcely believe that, just a minute into the match, she was the one tasting the mat. All she wanted to do was knock around her wimpy little brother for a little while. Where was he even getting this from?

Regardless, she wasn't going to let her first match in the ring be a loss. The very idea of her getting outboxed by that comic-obsessed nerd was making her blood boil. She rolled herself under the bottom rope out of the ring, lumbered over to a couple of dumbbells she had set up on the grass, and started pumping them furiously, over and over again.

"C'mon, Lynn! You wanna lose?!" she snared to herself. "You wanna be the mayor of Losertown?!"

As she lifted, her already toned biceps started to throb and swell. The young tomboy, drenched with an ever- increasing torrent of sweat, seemed determined to cram as much mass into her arms as they were capable of containing. And it was working. Her enraged iron-pumping was making her biceps expand like two fleshy balloons, until they were nearly the size of softballs.

"Much better," she said with a dark chuckle, letting the dumbbells drop from her hands.

The newly pumped Lynn stormed the ring, hopped onto the platform, and used her beefed up arms to pull herself up over the post and into the ring. For the briefest of moments, Lynn saw a twinge of smugness in Lincoln's expression, which vanished as soon as he caught sight of her.

"L-L-Lynn, w-wait," he stuttered, looking ready to empty his bladder as Lynn marched up to him. "I-I... maybe we shouldn't- LYNN, NO!"

Lynn, refusing to entertain his pleas for mercy, delivered an earth-shaking uppercut, which let out a deafening, sickening crack as it collided with his chin. Lynn felt a glimmer of satisfaction upon hearing the impact; in all of her bouts in the ring, she had never heard a punch create such a piercing sound.

But there was a reason for that, as she was just about to find out. She looked back at Lincoln, and promptly dropped her stance, letting her fists fall slack at her sides. Lincoln's head had completely left his body, leaving only a jagged, fleshy stump behind.

"I...wha...a...buh...Lin...Lin..."

The now pale-faced jock could do little but sputter out chunks of half-formed syllables, and watch in horror as Lincoln's headless body dropped to its knees and fell forward onto the mat. And if that wasn't enough, a moment later she heard a thump behind her that could only signify the arrival of Lincoln's wayward cranium. She twisted herself around to see, lo and behold, her little brother's head lying at her feet, its face forever frozen in an expression of pure terror.

"Lin-Lin-Lincoln..." babbled Lynn, who was starting to feel lightheaded as a wave of nausea overtook her. The layer of sweat that enveloped her body now felt icy cold, and the warm, fresh air of the suburbs now felt suffocatingly thin. Any moment now, someone would come running into the backyard and see the evidence of her grisly deed lying before her. She could practically hear the inevitable shrieks of horror and outrage from her family echoing in her head.

It wasn't long before she did hear someone else's voice, but it was one that possessed a calm, measured tone, and belonged to a woman Lynn had never heard before.

"...and we go live to 1216 Franklin Avenue, where 13-year-old Lynn Loud Jr. has just murdered her younger brother via decapitation during what was supposed to be a friendly boxing match."

Lynn whipped around to find the source of the voice, and saw a thirty-something woman clad in a yellow jumpsuit, gripping a microphone and facing a mounted camera. Around her stood a bevy of cameramen, miscellaneous personnel, and nosy bystanders trying to muscle their way into the backyard, producing a collective din of cries, whispers and murmurs. Just beyond the driveway, Lynn spotted a white van that read "Channel 5 News" on the side. Lynn just gawked at the scene before her, occasionally flinching from the flash of a camera.

The reporter climbed up into the ring, motioning for her cameraman to follow her. Before Lynn could react, she found herself face-to-face with the newswoman, staring her down and shoving her microphone in her face.

"Now, Lynn, what made you decide to kill your brother?" she asked, her voice laced with thinly veiled contempt.

"I-I didn't mean to!" cried Lynn. "It was- it was an accident!"

None of Lynn's pleading did anything to temper the sternness in the reporter's expression or tone. "Interesting," she said. "Lincoln, why do you think your sister murdered you?"

The reporter crouched down beside Lynn and held her microphone close to Lincoln's disembodied head. At first, Lynn thought that she was making the darkest joke ever captured on television, but then she looked down and noticed that, when she wasn't looking, Lincoln's face had changed. That expression of horror was now replaced by a scolding scowl.

"You know, I wish I could say that I'm surprised, but I'm not," said Lincoln. "It's like winning is all that matters to her."

Winning is all that matters to her.

Winning is all that matters to her.

And that sentence was the last thing Lynn heard before she woke up.