Blood gushed from deep ruts in his skin. Then he passed out.
Ernest collapsed. “Oh my god,” he panted. “Level Four complete. Did you get all that, Ian?”
Ian’s heart pounded and his head thudded. “I feel sick.”
“We’re almost done. Hang in there.”
“Can’t,” Ian said. “Gonna be sick.”
“We can’t stop now and leave him hanging. We have to put him out of his misery. Take a deep breath. Get a fucking grip, man.”
The three stood around Nolan. His once not-quite-handsome face was now a gnarled and hideous ruin, a distorted parody of his former self. Metal patches stuck to his skin and hair. His cheeks were open sores, oozing pustules of flesh and exposed bone where metal had leaked through. The lining of his nostrils were two solid metal caves. Bloody tears trickled out of the corners of his eyes.
Ian gently squeezed the nose and felt the soft metal shift beneath his fingers, felt the spongy mass of tissue give beneath his touch. His stomach flipped, and he wished he’d ignored that strange compulsion to touch Nolan.
“Level Five,” Ernest said. “We end this. See what sort of resolve or strength this freak has left.”
Caleb listened to Nolan’s chest with the stethoscope. “His heart’s strong, I guess,” he said, licking his lips, stepping away from the body. “It’s still beating, anyway.”
“I thought he’d be dead by now,” Ernest said, staring off at nothing. “Let’s do this. Final level.”
He grabbed a length of tubing from the tray. “This is flexible, like a garden hose, but it’s metal. Coiling of some sort. I snagged it from the garage, when the mechanic wasn’t looking. Open his mouth.”
Caleb tipped Nolan’s head back and pried open his mouth. Ernest fed the tube down his throat.
“Write this down: 8:00 p.m. About to attempt Level Five. Tubing has been fed into subject. The tube acts as a sort of trachea. Get ready, guys. This is it.”
Ian nodded and licked his lips. His heart pounded so fiercely his temples ached.
“Hold him tight, Caleb!” Ernest placed a funnel at the end of the tubing in Nolan’s throat. He turned back to the pot and filled a quart-sized metal measuring cup, then dumped the molten metal down the tube and into Nolan’s throat. He pulled the tube out as the throat and mouth filled with the liquid, the neck and throat bulging.
“Level Five!” Ernest cried, a look of triumph filling his eyes and spreading into an enormous grin. “Subject appears to be suffocating. His eyes are—”
Nolan’s movements were lightning-fast and unexpected; in the throes of his mindless, adrenaline-powered paroxysm, he broke through the last of the thick cords and bolted upright, his head whipping. Blood poured from deep gashes across his body where moments before he’d been restrained. His arms and legs pinwheeled and struck out in every direction at once, searching for help, his brain now mush, his actions primal, mouth gasping for air.
Metal, blood, and vomit flew everywhere, coating the walls and the young men. Nolan’s pupils disappeared and he searched and pawed blindly, trying to scream through the terrible obstruction in this throat, trying to pull it out, gasping and retching, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and reaching down his throat, his body trying to vomit out the foreign objects.
Nolan was free from his restraints but his actions were primal and desperate. His bulging eyes had focused enough so that they trained on a terrified Ernest, who was now trying in a blind panic to remember where he had left the exit.
Nolan grabbed Ernest from behind, searching for help, a desperate young man tortured beyond recognition, searching for someone to save him from his living hell. So it was his fortunate luck, and Ernest’s piss-poor luck, that he was able to exact his revenge without even knowing it.
For in his final moments, Nolan—weighed down by the metal filling every major cavity in his body—gurgled and sputtered his final gasping breaths, falling forward, impaling Ernest’s tailbone, piercing major organs with what was possibly the world’s hardest and sharpest dildo.
This contorted mess of twisted body parts fell forward into the table, crashing to the floor. The metal-filled pot overturned, spilling its boiling contents on Ernest’s head.
He screamed, arms flailing, the liquid hardening into a layer on his head and shoulders, the skin beneath bubbling and dissolving off his bones.
He died melting like a crayon in the sun, his colon impaled by his very own test subject, who was dead as well.
Some time later, Ian pulled himself up off the floor. In a daze he extinguished the light and pulled the door closed, shutting the carnage in behind him. His mind was numb, his body trembling.
He remembered earlier walking through a series of doors and now just walked down the passageways shell-shocked, trying to recall the way they had come just a couple of hours before. It felt like he had been down there for days. He realized it would be years before the bodies would be found, if ever.
When he reached the third door, Caleb was sitting there on the floor. Ian shined the flashlight beam in his glazed eyes.
“I forgot about you, man,” Ian said, sitting on the floor beside him. “When did you sneak out here?”
“Right after Nolan fell on Ernest. I got the fuck out of there. I thought you fainted or something.”
“They’re both dead. What are we going to do?”
Caleb exhaled, and ran his hands through his hair. “Do? We’re royally fucked, Ian. Look.” He shined the flashlight in the air and the beam fell on a combination lock, a keypad with the series of number 0-9.
Ian stared at it, remembering only that the combination was seven digits long.
“Oh, shit,” he squeaked, quickly getting up and entering random patterns of numbers into the keypad. “We can figure this out. I mean, how many combinations can there be?”
Caleb raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”
Within an hour Ian was pounding away at the keypad. He wailed on the solid oak door as well but only succeeded in smashing his knuckles and cutting the fleshy pads on his hands.
“What are we gonna do?” he cried, kicking Caleb, who stared into the darkness.
Ian searched the basement for an exit, a window, a crawlspace. All he found was hallway after hallway of solid rock.
Two weeks later the food supply was rotten beyond their desperation. Every last drop of dead blood—their only source of liquid besides the small reserve of bottled water and their own urine—had been consumed.
Starving now, Ian, whose fingernails were bloody pulps from his efforts to tunnel through solid rock, his throat raw from screaming for help hour after hour, wondered how long he would be able to survive on Caleb’s dead body.
Caleb was wondering the same thing … only he wondered if Ian would last longer if consumed while still alive. Wondered if the body parts would heal, providing Caleb with an endless food supply. Wondered what warm blood tasted like.
Staring at one another from opposite ends of the former torture chamber, Ian and Caleb began another experiment.
Asha
Eyes open, Asha thinks they are, anyway … feels her lids fluttering, the tips of her lashes brushing the tops of her cheeks. Utter darkness and unable to move; arms pinned to her sides. Like a coffin without the comfort of satin, without the room to move, to turn on her side, like sleeping in a dresser drawer. Tries to lift her head but even that is restricted, forbidden, forehead bumps into wood, that tiny gesture stirring the pins and needles in her dead legs and screams them awake. Panic now, deep breaths, clogged nose, mucus trickling and she can’t even wipe it away.
By her feet a panel opens, or is removed, light falling into her black space, consuming it like a cancer. Grief replaced by hope and she gasps, tries to call for help but has no voice, just a harsh whisper in place of words.
The room begins to slide away, or rather her bed does, her platform, sliding toward the exit, toward that beam of harsh light, moving now like a package of meat on a conveyor bel
t. She wonders if she’s been locked inside a morgue, a cadaver drawer, somehow mistaken for dead. This is what it feels like, the confined space a drawer in a series of drawers.
The drawer stops sliding, halts abruptly but she’s only halfway out, her legs protruding into the light, her body from the stomach up still cloaked in darkness and stuffed in confinement.
Naked, she realizes, now that she has that bit of light. Cold and naked.
Hands on her thighs, spreading her pinging legs, fingers and things unseen probing and touching and then something inside, some one, fucking her, tearing at the dryness of her vagina, pounding, shredding her until she’s wet with blood and his cum. She feels him ejaculate inside her and she wants to scream and thrash and kick, wants to kill him but has no voice and no energy and no room for movement.
When he’s finished raping her, the pseudo-bed is pushed back into blackness, the door panel shut solidly below, and she passes out from the strain of her pretend screams, voice gone from days of unanswered crying.
*
Time has passed, surely, but no way of knowing. A sudden light above her head disturbs her, and water is pressed to her lips, and she greedily and eagerly swallows every drop. What feels and tastes like bread is fed to her and she devours it.
Then the light disappears.
Shortly after, unable to prevent it, she urinates, the warmth running behind her buttocks, down her thighs, stinging the tender flesh. She dreads having a bowel movement but that happens a short time later. The stench steals her air, makes her retch, and in her own filth she waits, until the panel by her feet finally opens again and she is wiped clean.
Clean for a moment. Soiled again by rape.
This ritual goes on for … days? hours? weeks? No way to know. Time is endless, as are her thoughts, her only companion her memories, and even those are disjointed and fleeting, flashes of faces and events that she can’t remember having been part of. Can’t remember a time outside this box. Memories, trying to trick her, lull her into a sense of safety that she never quite trusts. So she fights them and soon can’t ascertain which are memories and which are hallucinations.
The next time the panel by her feet opens she hears a voice, a man’s voice, and her heart pounds jackrabbit fast, painful thuds. The drawer slides out, and this time fully enters the light.
“This one,” he says, barely able to see him, see what he looks like, barely able to see because her eyes burn and ache and try to fight the light that’s trying to claw its way into her head.
Finally able to crack them open, just enough to see the man with the square-rimmed glasses and gray curly hair. He leans into her and she can smell corn chips, a smell like a dog’s feet after a bath. Hands on her stomach, her ribcage, breasts, cold and strong hands poking rubbing squeezing.
The sound of doors, file cabinet doors sliding open and slamming shut, and she catches a glimpse to her side and realizes it’s not a file cabinet but a row of doors, the same row she’d just come from, someone there opening and closing the drawers, reaching inside, pulling people out and pushing them back inside.
The man with the square rims stops poking her body and pushes her table against the wall.
“This one too,” the other man says, scratching his scruffy beard with what seems to be a pencil but she’s not sure, too hard to see from where she is and her eyes still burn and refuse to focus.
Another woman is pulled from the row of drawers and Asha can see now how they have this set up, how the removable beds are platforms on gurneys and move so easily because they’re on castors.
Down a narrow hallway, unfinished rockface comprising the walls, dim lighting and smoky corridor like something out of a Hammer flick. Feeling has begun returning to Asha’s limbs and she tries to flex her fingers, undetectable movements, to see if she can. Wriggles her toes and hopes the madmen haven’t noticed.
Moments later they stop, inside another room, hot and humid like the tropics, unwashed sweat smell hanging in the air, a rancid perfume. She hears moaning, and the stench of something burning. Eyes dart to one section of the room, sees the source of the smell and again wishes she could scream.
“Put this one here,” Square Rims says and his voice rushes into her and she suddenly remembers him. Remembers meeting him for coffee because her friend Melissa said he was a terrific guy, “Works down on Wall Street, he’s got money, don’t you just love it?” and remembers wondering why Melissa would even say that, didn’t she know Asha has her own money and doesn’t need this guy, and then remembers thinking that he seemed like such a sweet guy, maybe just a bit older than she was used to dating but hell, what’s a few extra years?
The coffee, rich and strong because this coffeehouse burns their beans, but also tasted odd, slightly bitter but unfamiliar, not the bitterness of overly-potent coffee but an acidy tang of something like aspirin. Remembers leaving with him, wanting a cab but climbing into his car instead, thinking at first that it was a cab but her head was spinning or maybe the world was spinning and she stopped thinking clearly and went to sleep instead. When she woke she was surrounded by blackness, trapped in the coffin-like box, and even that now felt preferable to being in this room.
Now she wonders how she could have been so careless, so stupid, blaming herself even though she knows she was probably drugged.
Girl beside her, young girl maybe seventeen, eighteen, curly brown hair spread about her shoulders, hanging from the table she’s tied to. Lying naked, hands restrained to her sides, arms and legs restrained as well. Legs spread wide, feet almost dangling off the outer edges.
Can see this clearly because Asha is able to move her head, able to see the room, the women occupying it. On her other side is another woman, short jet-black hair looking blue-tinted in the oppressive overhead fluorescence. Small John Lennon glasses half on half off her face, cracked lens, and both women are crying. The black-haired woman with the ruined glasses is quivering, her limbs twitching beneath her multiple restraints.
The two men come together near the curly-haired girl, carrying objects that look out of place here, common household items and Asha shakes her head as if trying to force the meaning into her mind.
The one with the scruffy beard takes the curling iron and pushes it inside the girl’s vagina, the curling iron’s cord dangling between her legs like an errant tail. The girl sobs harder, louder, chokes on mucous and tears, a soulful wail spilling out of her lungs and mouth. Begging no, shaking her head, and Asha is afraid of what the girl is so terrified of.
The men ignore the girl for a moment and approach the black-haired woman instead, and she starts to scream, throws herself into the restraints as if she really has a chance of escaping. Her movements are limited, miniscule, almost nonexistent. A steam iron is laid flat on her stomach, the cord dangling to the floor.
Across the room, Asha notices several other women but can’t see them clearly, hard to make out their condition through the blood and the smoke.
“This one?” the bearded man says, hand stretched toward Asha, and the one with the square rims shrugs.
“Didn’t you have something in mind? Why’d you bring her in here?”
He shrugs again. “I did have a plan, but you brought curly instead and stuck her in the corner. Why don’t you share your thoughts with me next time?” and the two men argue over who was right and what to do with the extra woman in the room.
“Put her back in the cabinet then,” bearded guy says.
“Leave her here, Patrick.”
“What for?”
“Cause I’m not going all the way back inside,” Square Rims says, cocking his head, fingertips massaging the gray swirling through the hair above his temples, and he adds, “We can do her when we finish with these two.”
The one called Patrick shakes his head and coughs into his palm, and Asha thinks that he doesn’t look anything like a Patrick, looks more like a Butch or a Joe with his wiry scruffy beard, and she can’t understand why she’s thinking this, as
if it matters at all.
And she knows this is wrong, knows she’s not stupid and wonders how she could have ended up in this situation. And she wonders if she’ll get out of here alive.
“Let’s get this done,” Patrick says, leaning over the black-haired woman, grabbing the steam iron’s cord and letting it slide through his hand until it reaches the end, the small black plug in his fingers.
The woman’s eyes are huge now, and glassy, like the dead eyes of a mounted deer head, almost too big for the rest of her face, and Patrick stoops to plug the steam iron into the outlet.
At first there’s little movement from the woman, no place to go anyway, no reason to panic because the iron isn’t too hot yet, probably still lukewarm to the touch, but Asha trembles at the sight of it lying flat on the woman’s stomach.
Square Rims stands with a video camera pointed toward her, its low hum indicating that it’s on, that it’s recording.
Screaming now, steam rising from the iron, only it’s not steam Asha realizes, not steam at all but smoke, the woman’s flesh sizzling and smoking, the tiny crackles as fine hairs are singed into nothingness, cooked flesh smells coalescing with the smoke in the air and the woman thrashes, tries to throw the iron off her body. The iron jiggles and bounces and Asha sees the angry red blistered and bubbled skin. The shrieks replace the cooking flesh sounds, sounds like ground beef sputtering in a skillet. Patrick holds the iron in place as the woman flails, muscles and tendons straining and overworked against the straps, bulging in desperate attempts to break free. Blood trickles down her stomach, over her hips, soaks the sheets beneath her. Intense scarlet emphasized against the ivory soap whiteness of the rest of her cadaverous body.
It seems like forever before the screams dissipate, before the only sounds left are the slow endless sizzle of the iron and the metronome clicks of the video camera.
In The End, Only Darkness Page 12
