Brink of Extinction

by Nicholas Ryan

  They were wretched skeletal figures, their dark eyes haunted, the rags on their backs filthy. He stopped before one of the men and edged the muzzle of the pistol under his chin, using the cold steel of the barrel as a lever to raise the man’s face. He was probably in his forties, his cheeks sunken and raspy with stubble. He looked like a gaunt wasted wraith, the flesh of his face turned muddy yellow, the eyes like hollows set deep into the sockets of his skull. The man’s nose had been broken and there was blood on his upper lip and smeared across his chin. Beside the man knelt another, this one a little younger, a little better fed. Gideon grunted, and then a shout drew his attention back to the house.

  One of the attackers – a broad-shouldered hard-faced brute with a scar that ran from the corner of his eye around to his ear – slung his weapon and strode to where Gideon stood silently glowering. The man’s face was grimy with dust and dirt. He scraped the back of his hand across his sweat-stained brow and stood to attention. Gideon balanced on the balls of his feet.

  “The count is twelve,” the attack leader reported. “Three women, seven men and a couple of kids.”

  Gideon’s eyes flashed. “You let two escape,” he said, his voice crackled like breaking ice. “A male and a female, because you were impatient. You did not wait for my signal. You disobeyed my instructions. As a result we have lost valuable merchandise, and one of my vehicles has been destroyed. How do you plead?”

  The man frowned. “Sir?”

  “I asked you how you pleaded,” Gideon’s voice was level, almost emotionless. “Guilty or not guilty?”

  “Sir, under the circumstances I feel – ”

  Without flinching, and without the expression in his eyes altering, Gideon thrust the pistol under the other man’s chin and pulled the trigger. The man’s skull blew out, dashing the contents of his brains against a wall in a pink and custard colored mush.

  At that moment another figure suddenly broke from the darkened doorway of the house and ran for the grove of trees on the far side of the road. It was a young boy, maybe twelve years old; a grubby little urchin with hunted eyes beneath a mop of lank sandy hair. Shouting in surprise, four of Gideon’s men took up the chase. They cornered the boy like a pack of hunting dogs in the fringe of the trees, laughing excitedly and gasping for breath from the exertion. Bewildered, hemmed in on all sides by the dark brutal faces of his captives, the boy looked about him wildly, his face wide-eyed and white with terror. One of the men behind him danced in lightly and slapped the boy on the back of the head. The boy whirled, and reached into his pocket for a knife. Suddenly the hunters backed away, the circle became a little wider and the taunting humor went from their faces, replaced by something darker and more dangerous.

  Another attacker stepped in quietly behind the boy and used the butt of his shotgun to crack the child viciously across the back of his legs. The boy went down on his knees in a cry of pain. The knife skittered from his nerveless fingers and then the pack swarmed over him, raining vengeful punches and kicks until the child ceased to move again and lay very still in a growing stain of his own blood.

  Gideon watched dispassionately. The morning was proving an expensive exercise. Bodies that could have been auctioned were being executed instead. He pondered the cost of discipline and terror and begrudgingly accepted that in order for terror to reign, blood had to be spilled, and fear needed to be fed. He turned on his heel and raised his voice to an imperious shout.

  “Is there anyone amongst you that is capable of finding and catching the two escapees who fled?”

  A man came forward from out of the knot. He was Chinese, with a straggly black moustache and goatee beard. His eyes were glittering gun-metal grey, his movements lithe and prowling. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  Gideon grunted. “Take three others with you, Mr. Chong – and bring them back – alive. I don’t want these ones cut. I don’t want them maimed like the last ones. Understand?”

  The one named Chong nodded his head with just the tiniest glimmer of disappointment.

  “In the meantime, I want a rope thrown over that branch,” Gideon pointed to a gnarled tree in the front yard of the adjoining old house. “Bring the old woman forward… and a chair.”

  * * *

  It required a man’s hand hooked under each armpit to drag the frail old lady to the front lawn of the nearby house. She was a withered husk of a woman, her face crumpled into a wrinkled sobbing mask beneath a shock of white hair, her arms and legs like brittle sun-bleached skeletal sticks. She was dressed in a sweater and a pair of baggy over-sized grey trousers, the legs of the pants rolled up so that the white bony feet showed. She was shapeless beneath the clothing, her body soft and fragile and stooped with age. The guards balanced her on the chair under the bare spreading branches of the tree, and another fashioned a crude noose from the tail of the rope and hung it around the loose-fleshed folds of her scrawny neck.

  Gideon strode along the line of cowered captives, hands clasped behind his back, each pace measured and precise. He glowered down at their bowed heads. “I want to know,” he said slowly, “whether there are any more of you hiding in the nearby houses.”

  He left the words hanging in the frigid air for a long moment. “It is your duty to tell me, because volunteering information will ensure the life of the old woman.”

  None of the captives spoke. They remained hunched on their knees, their hands bound, their heads bowed so that their foreheads were almost touching the cold sidewalk. At the end of the line Gideon could hear someone sobbing softly. He went towards the sound and stopped in front of a woman with a tangled mess of dark hair. “You,” he snapped and prodded the woman with the toe of his boot. She flinched as if a snake had bitten her. Gideon kicked her thigh and the woman looked up at last, her lips trembling, her eyes welled and brimming tears.

  “Do you know anything? Are there others hiding in any of the houses nearby?”

  The woman shook her head mutely, but the small movement was enough to loosen the tears in her eyes. They spilled down her cheeks, cutting little pale runnels into the dirt on her face.

  Gideon frowned. He looked back over his shoulder to where the old woman stood under the tree.

  “Do you know the old lady?” he gentled his voice suddenly.

  The woman kneeling before him looked startled by the sudden warmth and compassion in the cruel face. “Yes,” she said softly. “My mother.”

  Gideon nodded. He had suspected as much. He reached out kindly for the woman’s shoulder and his face came closer. “I’ll kill her quick,” he promised.

  Gideon went back across the lawn and paused beside the old woman, who stood perched precariously on the chair. He nodded a signal to the two guards and they stepped away, snatched up the dangling length of rope, and slowly began to heave. The noose tightened around the old lady’s neck and the terrible insistent strain lifted her up onto her tiptoes. Her face turned white and swollen with horror, and her breathing became strangled. Her eyes grew huge, bulging from the wrinkled folds of her flesh.

  Gideon took his time. The woman started swaying, the struggle to stay on her toes making her bony legs tremble uncontrollably.

  “I will ask one last time,” he raised his voice, letting the menace carry to the kneeling captives. “Does anyone have information?”

  The old lady began to sob softly, her chin lifted to keep herself breathing, but giving her the appearance of stoic defiance. Gideon sighed.

  One of the men who was straining to hold the rope taut had a wickedly-bladed machete dangling from the belt of his trousers. Gideon took up the small axe and went back to the chair. He looked up into the old woman’s face that was slowly turning purple as the struggle to breath became more difficult, and then he swung the axe down in a blur, severing the toes of the old woman’s left foot. She screamed horrendously, crying and wailing so that the noise merged into a blend of haunting nightmare terrors. Blood gushed from the stump of her foot and the severed toes fell into the grass. The
woman swayed, trying to hold herself upright on just one foot while the waves of unholy pain crashed over her.

  Gideon waited until the harrowing sounds of the old lady’s agony became just a thin reedy wheeze in the back of her throat – and then he wielded the axe once more, cleanly amputating the toes from the old woman’s right foot. She slumped and dangled in the air, her old body twisting a slow macabre turn, and the men on the rope bent their backs to hold her aloft.

  It took a long time for her to strangle to death, and for the shriveled old body to finally void itself, the stench of her bowels drifting on the air like a pungent stinking cloud.

  * * *

  Chong brought the two fugitives back to Gideon with their hands lashed behind their backs and rope nooses around their necks. The man was pale and drawn, his jaw clenched against the nausea of the gunshot wound that had struck him high in the shoulder. He had lost a lot of blood. His face was drained of color, his pallor sickly with exhaustion. The woman’s face was swollen and she was limping. They were paraded solemnly before the rest of the prisoners, and then brought to where Gideon waited, seated on the shaded porch of the house.

  “Bring him to me first,” Gideon said.

  The captive staggered against the hands that held him, his feet numb and tripping. Gideon frowned.

  “Are you badly wounded?” he asked.

  The prisoner said nothing and Gideon’s frown became a scowl. He sighed impatiently. “Very well. I shall find out for myself.” He pushed himself out of the chair and went to where the man was being restrained. Blood had soaked the sleeve of the filthy jacket dark red. Gideon explored the muscle of the forearm with his fingers, his eyes fixed on the fugitive’s expression with sinister fascination.

  “Does that hurt?” he buried his thumb deep into the open wound and the prisoner screamed in white-hot agony. His knees turned to rubber and he became dead weight in the grip of his guards. Gideon made a grievous face then wiped his bloodied fingers across the man’s cheek. He crouched close to the man so he could hear the painful rasp of every breath, and lowered his voice to a confidential whisper.

  “The woman. Is she your wife?”

  The man said nothing, his eyes blazing with hatred yet his body trembling as if in the grips of fever.

  Gideon looked saddened. “Don’t make me repeat myself again.”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” Gideon became thoughtful for a moment. He glanced to where the woman was being held, and ran his gaze lingeringly over her body. “She’s very pretty. Have you been married long?”

  “Four… four years,” the prisoner strained.

  Gideon nodded. “And…” he cleared his throat as if the next question was a matter of some delicacy, “does she know how to pleasure a man?”

  The prisoner clamped his mouth into a line of vile disgust.

  Gideon persisted. He was enjoying himself. “Does she like sex?” his tone became conversational. It was almost as if he were talking to himself. “I’ve never been married, you see. But it’s something I’ve always wondered about,” he tapped the scarred wreckage of his chin in a parody of contemplation. “I’ve always wondered whether a husband could ever look at his wife the same way after she’s been taken by a stranger… or maybe many, many strangers…”

  The prisoner flung himself forward, snarling, his face purple and swollen with toxic rage, the veins and cords of his neck standing out like thick ropes, his gnarled fingers hooked as they stretched for Gideon’s throat. One of the guards locked a thick muscled forearm around the man in a tight choker hold until the anger was squeezed out of him in a long rattling gasp.

  Gideon sighed wearily and strode to where the woman was being restrained. He looked her over with casual interest. She was blonde, and beneath the greasy smears of dirt her skin appeared ashen grey with fear. The flesh beneath her eyes was heavily smudged with the blue bruising of sleeplessness and tragedy. The clothes she wore hung loose off her. Gideon walked around her in a slow circle, inspecting her like a piece of machinery.

  “Well she certainly looks like she has been built for pleasure,” he said out loud. He stood before the woman and ran the tip of his tongue around the mangled slash of his mouth in a gesture that was as lewd as it was evil. He leaned close so he could whisper in her ear.

  “Have you ever fucked another man since you have been married?” he asked quietly. “Ever woken up in the middle of the night, dreaming of a dark muscled stranger rutting into you, making you moan like a whore and begging for something your husband could never provide?”

  The woman’s features screwed up into an expression of disgust. She recoiled, and then spat venomously into Gideon’s face. A white froth of spittle bubbles trickled down his cheek.

  Gideon lashed out, the strike of his bunched fist impossibly fast, a blur of movement and motion that socked meatily into the woman’s midriff, lifting her off her feet, driving the wind from her lungs with a great whoosh of breath, and hurling her backwards into the muddy earth.

  Gideon went back up onto the porch steps and snatched a cruel handful of the restrained husband’s hair and lifted his face. The man groaned. “Let’s find out, shall we? Let’s both learn whether your wife is a good fuck,” he snarled vengefully. “I think the decision should be left to a jury – it’s certainly too momentous for just one man’s opinion.”

  “No!” the man was overcome with a loathing sense of dread. He looked into Gideon’s ravaged face with an expression of abject horror and his mouth dribbled silver strands of saliva as he pleaded for mercy. “Please.”

  Gideon ignored him. He waved a signal to several of his men and they surrounded the woman. One of them struck her beneath the temple with the butt of his weapon and she crumpled unconscious to the ground.

  “Take her to the curb,” Gideon said.

  They carried the woman by an arm or a leg each, her head lolling backwards as if she were wild game felled by a hunter, and laid her out precisely, flat on her back, with her knee supported by the concrete curbside and then her legs stretched out into the road, her heel down on the blacktop so that the area of her leg between her kneecap and her shin was unsupported.

  “Hold her down,” Gideon said quietly.

  The men threw their weight down upon the woman, and the fierce clamping pressure seemed to rouse her. She moaned groggily and her eyes fluttered open, milky and unfocused for a second and then filling with sudden horror when she saw the maimed and disfigured man standing over her. She let out a gasp of panic and terror, and then her mouth opened wide and the sound became a horrified scream. She thrashed against the men who were pinning her down. They laughed at her with cruel smiles. One of them clamped his hand over the woman’s throat, digging his fingers into the soft flesh until he felt cartilage squeeze together. The scream choked in her throat for an instant… and in the split second of fraught silence, Gideon stomped viciously on the woman’s shin with all his weight. The sound of the bone breaking rang out as loud as the crack of gunfire. The woman screamed herself hoarse, writhing and groaning as the pain tore through her body and exploded in fireworks of blinding light against the top of her skull. Gideon looked mildly surprised. He glanced across at the husband. The man hunched, blubbering incoherently, between bawling out his wife’s name.

  Gideon stared down at the woman, her face twisted in a rictus of agony. Her teeth were bared, the flesh of her lips pared back. He squatted down on his haunches beside her.

  “You think that’s pain?” he sneered contemptuously. He prodded the broken bones of her leg with his finger and the woman screamed. “This is not pain,” he went on in a voice that became flat and lifeless. “Pain is when your drunken mother pours gasoline over the head of her ten year old child and sets him aflame. That’s what pain is. Agony is not a broken leg. Real agony is living through one-hundred-and-forty-three operations, until you retch at the thought of going under the knife again, and amidst the smells of antiseptic you get the whiff of your own body dying – the
rank stench of your dead flesh rotting off your bones. That’s what pain is. And torture –” he broke off suddenly into a strangled wheeze. “– is running through a building with your face and neck on fire, the hair singed off your head, your ears burned away and the flesh of your nose melting. It’s your eyelids being eaten away by fire and the living flesh of your cheeks dripping like wax onto your chest as you run until the white hot horror of what is happening drops you to your knees and you pray to die. You beg God for death because the excruciating agony drives you to the edge of madness.”

  Gideon stood slowly and took several deep breaths until the hectic flush across his features receded, and then he went into the crowd of his men. “She is yours,” he said so that his voice carried clearly. “Every one of you may use the woman for your pleasure, as many times as you wish. But do not kill her,” he warned. “Now that I have crippled her, she cannot run away from you again.”

  The men who had been holding the woman down as she rode through the agony of her broken leg now hoisted her eagerly upright. One of them hooked his fingers into the collar of her blouse and ripped downwards. The buttons flew from the fabric and the tails of the shirt gaped wide open. Beneath the filthy clothing the woman’s body appeared very pale, and very smooth. The cage of her ribs showed clearly through the emaciated flesh. The men dragged her behind one of the trucks like a heavy carcass, with her heels scraping cruelly in the dirt. The woman was sobbing pitifully, moaning incoherent with pain and terror. One of the brutes dropped to his knees and began to expertly hack her jeans away with the blade of a hunting knife as if he were skinning an animal.

  “Tie him to a tree,” Gideon indicated the woman’s husband with a dismissive gesture of contempt. “And be sure to find somewhere he can watch the fun. I don’t want him to miss a single minute.”