by Nicole Fox
Slap!
His hand–his good hand–came so fast that I was barely aware of it before it struck. It connected with the side of my jaw and up to my ear, making it ring like bells on Christmas Eve. Distantly, I felt my lip split at the seam, and blood dribbled down my face.
“Ha!” I giggled. “Nice one! Good thing you can only slap with one hand–otherwise I’d be in real trouble!”
I rolled my eyes and glanced at his mangled hand, crumpled like old kindling, with a disdainful, mocking look. Internally, I felt bad for insulting this injury. After all, I had caused it, of my own irresponsibility.
But I had to focus on Erica and Thunder now. The more I could get under his skin, the more likely I would be able to manipulate him into revealing their whereabouts.
He saw my derisive look, and reared back his good hand again and punched me in the gut, so hard my whole body convulsed on the impact. As I fought for my breath, I also regained my chuckle, and laughed derisively as I raised my head once again.
“Oh, no more shenanigans for us?” I pouted. “Did Erica prove too much for you then?”
He glowered, and then a wicked smile caught on his lips. “Oh, don’t worry,” he sneered. “I’ll have my way with Erica soon enough–and with you looking on, powerless to stop me!”
Outwardly, I composed my face to a look of anger and disgust. Inwardly, I cheered. “Thank Christ! He hasn’t touched her yet!”
He reached his hand up–his broken, crooked hand–and caressed my face. It took all of my self-control not to bite him.
“You can have your little jokes,” he snarled. “Your confidence in your own superiority. I do not care. And you know why? Because I know the truth. You’re a braggart. And a coward. And a fool. Your idiocy and bravado cost me my hand all those years ago. And now, they’re going to cost you your life.”
He pulled a blade from his pocket, and ran it, almost sensually, down my abdomen. The sight of the knife did not scare me, in that it made me think of death, but it did make me worry that he might incapacitate me before I was able to help Erica and Thunder.
“Wait a minute!” I protested, allowing a false edge of fear to enter my voice. “What about Erica and Thunder? You said that if I came here, unarmed, you would let them go!”
Now it was his turn to cackle.
“I said no such thing!” He sneered. “I told you that if you ever wanted to see them again, you needed to come. And see them you shall. You will watch as we slit that old man’s throat–what stupid nickname do you have for him? Oh, yes: Thunder–and then, you gaze on while I fuck every bleeding orifice that little cunt of yours possesses–argh!”
I lunged out, snapping my teeth in the air like a wild dog. In his gloating, he had come close enough to my face for my jaws to close over the weak, pallid flesh of his cheek, which split beneath my incisors. He snarled and recoiled, clutching his face in rage.
“Aw, did that hurt, Marco?” I jeered, spitting out the residue of his flesh into a sticky wad on the floor. “Not so tough as you think you are, huh?”
Marco glared at me, his eyes burning with that same corrosive hate that had filled his gaze all those long years ago, when I’d destroyed his hand.
“Whatever happens to you now, Dominic,” I murmured internally, “You brought on yourself. Just make sure it isn’t brought on Thunder and Erica, too.”
“When I’m done with you,” he growled, seizing me by the scalp and wrenching my head back so hard that I could barely breathe, “You’ll look at what you did to my hand and wish I’d only injured you that badly.”
I stared back at him, meeting his gaze with my eyes and with silence. At last, he broke away. His words had quieted me, but I had, at least, shown him that I was not afraid.
Then, to my surprise, he left the room.
“That’s it?” I had the temerity to say, before, a second later, I heard the sound of something heavy being wheeled back through the door.
Marco appeared, pushing before him a long, metal table on wheels. Covering this table was what looked like, at first glance, a giant’s dentistry set: Fine metal hooks large enough to fish with, scalpels deep enough to rest a finger, and ball bearings, lined up in little metal tubes.
I consider myself a brave person, but I will admit: when I saw this terrible collection of monstrosities, I was afraid.
It seemed, however, that he did not want to go for his collection of sordid tools right away. He ignored them, and reached for a small drawer on the underside of the table. From it, he removed, a long, glistening leather whip.
I whistled. “See, I knew we’d get back to the sexy stuff.”
Marco glowered at me, raised his hand, and struck.
I could hear the whip slicing open the air like an overripe fruit before it connected with my flesh. I’d bowed my head just in time, so it bit across forehead and my collarbone, but missed my face. A neat red line, as tidy as if he had drawn with a marker, appeared where he had struck, and blood began dripping to the floor.
If this blow had hit my eyes, it would have blinded me.
“Still cocky now?” He demanded, raising the whip again. My body cried out to wince, to draw my legs up in a little ball to protect it, but I forced myself to stay relaxed, and take it like a man.
Crack! This time, the whip struck my chest. It cut a line from my right pec all the way down to my left hip bone.
“Ooh,” I grunted. “Nice shot, Matty. You’ve been practicing.”
He snarled at my nonchalance, and struck me again and again, covering my body with agonizing stripes of blood and torn skin until, try as I might, I could not help but moan aloud.
Marco paused, panting with exertion. He held the tip of his weapon up to his face and scrutinized its bloody, fraying edge with a smile.
“In most civilized societies,” I murmured. “This would be the point where you ask me for information. You know, torture me a bit, then demand the truth. So, what is it you want to know? Tips on pleasing a girl in bed? Tips on pleasing a man? Oh, I know! It’s how to get your henchmen to respect you, instead of insulting you in the dark–”
“Argh!” He lashed out again, striking, this time, my open mouth. I felt my lips splitting like the skin of a tomato that’s been trodden on, and blood poured down my chin and onto my chest like spilled cherries.
“Wha? Di’ I touth a nerve?” I asked, struggling to speak with my injured mouth.
Marco did not answer. Instead, he turned away from me, and began tinkering–out of sight–with his torture tools, splayed across the table.
“Think, Dominic! Think!” I told myself, but it was getting harder and harder as the pain from my chest and mouth threatened to overwhelm me. “You need a plan to help Erica and Thunder! And something better than simply mocking the guy!”
I had hoped, that by angering him, I could manipulate him into losing control, and revealing something about either of my friends. But, I saw now: him losing control meant my death.
If I was going to survive long enough to help the two of them, I would have to be strong, and go with the sitution. Draw it out, until he tired or changed his tactic. It would be unspeakable agony for me, I knew, but I had to at least try.
For Erica.
When Marco turned around again, his whip was still in his hand. This time, however, it did not just end with a piece of tapering leather: now, those little metal ball bearings–in a group a three–were fashioned on the end. It would no longer be long, clean cuts. No, he wanted to bruise as well as lash. Fracture bone as well as bleed.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and waited.
It was not a whip, but a hand, I felt upon me next.
He was swiveling me around, so that my back was to him now.
“Don’t worry, Dominic,” he said, drawing the cold steel of the ball bearings across my back. “I will not kill you yet. That would be too simple. Too…merciful. No, we’re gonna be together a good, long while.”
“Good, you bastard,” I thoug
ht. “Let’s make a day of it, shall we?”
But I remained silent. I wanted him angry, yes, but not so furious he’d lose control.
Crack! He struck! The whip flew through the air, connecting with its leather strap in the small of my back. Lighting fast, the rest of the whip followed across my back until the ball bearings, accelerating faster than the speed of sound, finally exploded against my shoulder blade.
I cried out. I could not help it. It felt as if I had been struck by electricity, arcing down the burning pathway of the whip to a deadly explosion on my shoulder. Just from that single impact, I could feel my flesh swelling, hardening as it puffed up with internal blood.
From behind me, Marco chuckled. “That hurt, didn’t it?” He asked. “Good.”
Crack! Smack! The whip cut the air again, this time from above, drawing a red line down the length of my spine and shattering upon my tailbone. The pain was enormous, and though I felt the scream clawing its way out of my throat, I fought it back.
I could not allow Marco to get bored with me before I figured out what to do. My silence did it: I could hear his disappointed grunt as he struck me again and again, waiting for me to cry out.
Strangely, as the pain built, I felt myself growing numb to it. Every strike knocked the pain further away, until it and I were floating in different universes. In fact, so distant did it become that, for a moment, I felt myself outside of myself, and looking down at my body, dangling through the air.
The wrists were purple and swollen. Blood trickled down from where the cuffs had cut into the skin. My chest was savaged red with lines, as if a wild, clawed animal had ravaged me. And yet, my back was even worse: there were the red lines, yes, but also deep, mottled bruises, red and purple and green, where the ball bearings had struck me. I had only seen bruises like that a few times in my life:
On the body of a fellow Broken Spire, murdered by a rival gang. They had kicked him to death with steel-toed boots.
Another was my own father. Nearly killed in a motorcycling accident. He’d hit that road at forty miles an hour. Thank God for leather–those bruises would have been skin torn from the bone if he hadn’t been wearing it. When he’d showed me what happened, he’d lit a terror in my young self that made it impossible for me to be near a motorcycle for years.
And then, five years later, he died in a car crash. Go figure.
The point is, I had seen injuries like that before. They were injuries that, without care, could spell death.
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter,” I thought, feeling even the strange image of myself, from outside myself, growing hazy. “Maybe Marco will kill me and then he’ll let Erica go.”
“No!” Another, stronger voice growled. As it did so, the world came back into focus, and so, too, did the pain. “You must persist! For Erica! For Thunder!”
I thought of her, sprawled across the white sand of a beach in a beautiful black bathing suit, gesturing to me. “Yes, that would be so nice,” The first voice muttered. “Just think of it.”
The vision was tempting. It called to me, like a siren on deadly seas. The closer I drew to it, the clearer it became, and the weaker my hold on reality.
“No!” I thought. “Hang on! Ignore it! Ignore it!”
“Erica…”
The voice that uttered that word was real. My jaw was moving, spitting out the word, slick with pain from rusty hinges. Marco paused in his assault.
“Oh, are you looking for your girlfriend?” He sneered.
No! I wanted to cry. No! Leave her out of this! But it seemed that my body had the strength only to mutter that one word: “Erica.”
Marco chuckled. It was a sound like poison gas gurgling up from deep underwater. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “You’ll see her soon. But first, I am going to break you.”
He went to his torture table and unscrewed the ball bearings from the tip of his whip. From my place above my body, I could see–I could see–him attaching his next terrible device:
The fishing hooks.
He grinned like a demon, drew back the whip, and struck.
My consciousness faded.
“This is death,” I thought. Then: “These are to be my final thoughts.”
I saw a bright light coming towards me. I tried to fight it, to close my eyes, to resist, but it was like fighting sleep after days–weeks, an eternity–without rest. It swept over me, cool and soothing, and then…
My vision cleared. I found myself blinking and dazzled in a sunlit garden, morning dew fresh on the petals of roses and ryegrass. In the distance, beside a white little cottage with chipping paint and hanging plants, was a paved driveway.
Three people stood circled upon it. A man and a woman, gray at the temples but full of life and vitality as their over-bloomed yard. And, between, mounted atop a shining new dirt bike, a boy.
I recognized him. It had been years since I’d seen him, but I recognized him:
It was me.
I wanted to approach, but something held me back. A preciousness, a purity in the moment, where someone like me–a cruel man, a criminal, a murderer–should not be welcome.
The boy tried going forward. He made it halfway down the driveway before teetering and falling to his side. He was unhurt–his thick knee pads and helmet had protected him–but he was still shaken. His mother scooped him up into a kiss, and then his father, after an equally affectionate one-armed-hug, plopped his son right back down on the back and told him to try again. The child did, and this time he made it all the way to the road before toppling over. The happy couple laughed and cheered him as he pushed himself up this time, and hopped right back on.
Mom, Dad, I tried to say, but the glint of the sun on the nearby frog-pound might as well have been talking. You were both so beautiful before you died. And I…I was beautiful, too.
At this thought, the vision suddenly changed. In all outward ways, it was identical–the same college, the same dirt-bike, the same gentle breeze through muffled wind chimes–but I still sensed an enormous difference.
I found it in the laughter of the woman. I studied her closely, and found, to my surprise, that it was not my mother, but Erica, standing there and cheering on the child. And it was not my father standing next to her, but me–as an adult. Gray at the temples, but still me!
And the little boy…As I gazed at him–saw the cocky, lopsided grin of mine, and Erica’s lovely hair, poking out from beneath the helmet–well, he could only be our son.
The vision blurred. I thought at first that it was fading, but no–it was because there were tears in my eyes.
“This is it,” I thought. “This is what I want. Me and Erica. This is the way for me to be beautiful again.”
Like my parents were. Like Erica is now. Through her…I can be too. And that means living.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dominic
“Argh…” I snapped awake.
Immediately, agony coursed through my awareness. I blinked, and felt the drab, lightless room–its walls now splattered with blood–slowly clearing in my vision. I could not see my back, but by the arcing fire and the aching chill, I could tell that much of the skin on my shoulders and spine was filleted. I could feel it hanging like shredded meat from long divots in my flesh.
I listened. There was a steady drip of blood from its trail along my body to the tip of my toes, down through the drain in the floor. Good architecture, I thought dazedly. I did not see or hear La Gancho.
Then, I heard footsteps. The coward in me wanted to close my eyes, to pretend I was still unconscious, but I would not allow myself that luxury. Though it cost every bit of energy I had, I raised my eyes to look La Gancho in the eye.
It was not him. It was a man I didn’t recognize. Old and bent, with yellowish-gray hair and a skeletal frame that did not preclude the pot belly sitting at his waist like some perverse pregnancy. Unlike the other Jaws, who wore only varying combinations of denim and leather, this man was dressed, of all things, in a busine
ss suit. He was muttering to himself as he entered, and did not seem to notice that I was awake.
“Nearly killed him, the bastard,” he was muttering. He had a large assortment of bandages tucked under one arm, which were apparently–though I could not believe it–for me. He set them down on La Gancho’s torture table and began roughly winding them around my torso.
“I can’t believe I’m wasting time on a thing like this…bandaging up this walking corpse just to prolong the torture. And that he’s wasting time on a thing like this…not when there’s money to be made!”
If I could have moved, I would have raised my eyebrows. “It’s him! The inside guy! The one they call the Egghead! He must be their connection–how they’ve been laundering money so securely!”
