The Lore of Prometheus

by Graham Austin-King

  He sighed, looking over the trail of wax that charted the progress of the candle across the room. “I have to say, I really didn’t think it would come to this.”

  “No, please. Give me more time. I can do this.”

  She pulled at her arm as he picked up the candle stand, wrenching backwards against the restraints as she tried to force her wrist through the cuff.

  “That isn’t going to work, Mackenzie,” he told her, holding the stand in front of her. “Put out the flame. That’s all I’m asking, something you’ve done twice already. I really don’t want to have to hurt you.” He set the candle into position beneath her wrist and stepped back to watch, a slight smile on his lips.

  The heat was a gentle warmth for half a breath and then it changed, almost instantly, becoming a blistering heat that had her screaming as she twisted and wrenched at the unyielding cuffs. The Man in the Suit watched her, unmoved by her screams, as the skin on her hand and wrist scorched and blistered.

  “Damn you!” he cursed and snatched the candle away. “You can do this, girl. I have watched you do this. I had thought this would be enough incentive, perhaps I was wrong.”

  He looked towards the smoked glass at the end of the room.

  “Bring him in.”

  The technicians brought in a metal chair first, setting it in a corner of the room over a small grate. She watched them leave again, confusion battling with the searing agony of her wrist and forearm.

  She waited, frowning at the open door until they emerged. The man was emaciated, so thin the hospital robe hung from him like a sheet on a washing line. He looked at her as they carried him through the door, his eyes calm despite the gag buckled around his face. She would have known him even without the amputated limbs.

  “Armond,” she said, it was barely more than a whisper.

  “Yes, I thought perhaps if you didn’t care about yourself, then maybe you’d care about your little friend here.” The Man in the Suit smiled fondly as he watched the technicians strap Armond to the chair, fastening broad leather belts around his torso and what remained of his arms and legs.

  The Man in the Suit grimaced and turned to her with a shrug. “It’s not quite as good as the frame we have you in, but we had to improvise.”

  Was he apologising? Mackenzie shook her head. “What are you doing to him? Why is he gagged?”

  “Well, you and he have been speaking for quite some time now. It was beginning to become a distraction for you. As for what we’re doing to him, well that rather depends on you.” He picked up the stand, the candle still burning on top, and crossed the room to Armond.

  “I would say this won’t hurt, old friend. But I think we both know better than that, don’t we?”

  Armond shook his head violently and looked up as the man lowered the stand and put the candle in place, burning beneath the stump of one leg. The gag muffled the screams, but the agony still managed to find a way past it as he thrashed against the restraints. The Man in the Suit turned to Mackenzie with a broad smile.

  “There you are,” he said, sweeping an arm towards the screaming Armond. “Incentive.”

  “Leave him alone, you sick bastard!”

  “Such language.” The Man in the Suit shook his head in disapproval. “If it bothers you so much, put out the candle.”

  Armond’s skin was blistering already, smoke or soot turning the skin around the burn into a dirty grey colour.

  “Let him go!” Mackenzie screamed.

  The man shook his head with a small smile. “It hurts, there’s no doubt of that, but it won’t cause him any lasting damage.”

  She glared at him, face twisted with disbelief.

  “Look.” The man pointed.

  He was right. Where the blisters should have been rupturing and the burn deepening, fresh skin was already fighting to close over the burn. The wound was in flux, fighting to heal even as the candle flame gnawed at the flesh.

  “His healing truly is quite remarkable,” the Man in the Suit told her, making his way past the technicians to the doorway. “Sadly, it’s not anything that could be replicated. The testing has been interesting but, honestly, I think I’ve run my course with it.”

  “So, what?” Mackenzie spat, not even bothering to hide the contempt in her voice. “You’re bored with him?”

  The man laughed, waving a finger at her. “Be careful with that tone.”

  He went out through the door. All the while Armond screamed into the heavy gag strapped to his head and beneath the muffled sound of his screams, the faint sizzling of the candle cooking his flesh.

  She closed her eyes against the horror of it all, trying to block out the screams, until her nose betrayed her. The smell of scorched flesh wasn’t all that close to cooking meat, but it was close enough. Dear Christ, was she salivating?

  The Man in the Suit returned within moments with a red jerry can. “You haven’t put that candle out yet, Mackenzie? Poor Armond really is counting on it.”

  She froze, staring at the plastic jerry can in his hand. She knew what those were for. “Please, don’t do this.”

  He smiled at her, spreading his arms and spinning in a slow circle as he walked over to where Armond screamed. “Let’s see just how quickly he can heal, shall we? Unless you want to put the candle out? I really don’t think you’ll be able to manage it in a moment.”

  “I can’t, you son of a bitch! You sick bastard, you know I can’t!”

  The smile fell from his face and he worked the top free of the jerry can. “That was the wrong answer, Mackenzie.” He kicked at the candle, sending the stand clattering across the floor as the candle went out.

  “You can’t say I didn’t give you your opportunity,” he shot back at her, and then sloshed the can over Armond, sending the fuel splashing over his body. Armond’s moans of pain turned to panicked shrieks as the Man in the Suit pulled out a zippo lighter and stepped back away from Armond.

  “I always liked fire,” he told her with a little smile. “There’s something so magical about it.”

  And then the lighter was burning and flying through the air towards Armond.

  The fuel caught with that odd whump you so often hear on television, and Armond’s shrieks were lost in the sound of the flames and the Man in the Suit’s laughter.

  She focused on the flames until her head pounded. Until Armond’s screams had turned to silence and the only sound was the extractor fans in the ceiling. Until her own screams had faded to whimpers and sobs, and the horror of it all claimed her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I woke in darkness. Not the murky gloom of early morning, but an inky blackness that made me wonder if my eyes were actually open. For a few moments I was still caught in the memory of Kabul. Call it a dream, call it a flashback, it fucks me up every time I suffer through it. It had been months since the last time I was dragged through it all, but every time it was just as sharp.

  I could almost smell the dust of that place. I woke with the feeling of it coating my tongue and lining the inside of my throat, and behind it all was the smell of the blood—that faintly metallic scent that forced me to remember the red mist that drifted down through the air after Sunglasses shot Turner.

  And then the taste filters through, past the dust and the dirt on my tongue. I try to avoid thinking about whether that taste was real. Whether we’d been forced to breathe in tiny droplets of his blood that were still hanging in the air. Sometimes it’s better not to know the truth of things.

  It wasn’t the bodies that bothered me; the dead are just that. We all knew what we’d signed up for. We knew the risks of the job. No, the looks from the men still living were far worse than the blank stares of the dead. The questions and accusations came later, but the looks from McCourt and Yates said everything they would put into words afterwards.

  How did you do that?

  Why did you wait?

  You could have saved them. How could you let everyone die?

  I’ve always hated being
drugged. I had four teeth taken out when I was eleven so the dentist could fit me with braces. I must have been one of the last kids they knocked out with gas instead of just using an injection for local anaesthetic.

  I can remember breathing in through the mask and the man counting backwards with me from ten. I remember the room spinning, and my vision sinking down into darkness as if I were being sucked down into a whirlpool.

  It’s the ‘coming to’ that I remember the most. The feeling of being roused, pulled from a deep sleep that shifted far too quickly to nausea, and then leaning over the edge of the chair, stomach heaving as I threw up onto the floor whilst the dentist swore at me. I remember the feeling of the wads of cotton wool, or gauze, or whatever it was that they’d put in my mouth to help stem the bleeding. More than anything I remember the drive home. I sat in the back of the car as I probed at the new holes inside my mouth with the tip of my tongue, and prayed for my head to stop spinning.

  This felt worse. The darkness wasn’t helping. My head was spinning and lurching in that awful way it does when you’re really drunk and haven’t quite managed to pass out yet. When you lay flat on the bed and cling to the edges with both hands and feet to keep from being thrown off. If I’d had something to look at, I might have been able to focus on it. As it was, I lay there and squeezed my eyes shut against the darkness, using the feeling of my eyelids pressing together to convince myself I wasn’t dead.

  I don’t know how long it was before I noticed the restraints. The passing moments could have been minutes or hours, and the after-effects of the drugs weren’t enhancing my ability to think straight. I reached to run my hand over my face, to pinch at the bridge of my nose and scrape the sleep from my eyes. The cuff stopped me before my hand moved more than an inch, the metallic clink of the chain reinforcing what my wrist was already telling me.

  I took stock of things slowly, facts fighting their way through the fog inside my head as I became aware of my situation. I was naked for one, the skin on my back was sticking to the cushioned padding of whatever it was I was bound to. It pulled free with a sucking, tearing, sound as I shifted. I was bound, wrist and ankle, with a wide band pressed against my chest and stomach.

  “Fuck.” My voice sounded strange in the darkness. The drugs had left my throat dry and my voice was a hoarse, rasping thing.

  “I’d say that’s about right, yes.” Johnson’s voice was loud enough to make me jump, coming from somewhere over to my right.

  “Oh Christ.” This was all I needed.

  “Not me, mate. Don’t think I’m really cut out to be anyone’s messiah.”

  I didn’t need this. I needed to focus, to work out where I was, and if I could get out. Being captured and confined is all about control. The only way to really survive it is to hold on to something—to find something that you yourself can control no matter what they do to you. At least, that’s what they told us in training. It’s a bit like the prisoners who go on hunger strikes. When everything else has been taken from you, one of the last things you can control is your willingness to eat. I needed to find something like that. Something I could cling to. Having a hallucination muttering in my ear wasn’t going to help.

  “Fuck off, Johnson,” I muttered.

  And that was Rule Three broken again. I looked over towards where I’d heard his voice. It was odd how I couldn’t see him in the darkness. How was it that I needed light to see something that was only in my head anyway? The mind is a strange thing.

  “Focus, Carver, for God’s sake.” I shook my head and forced myself to concentrate. The room was heated, which was something at least, and that simple fact had a host of implications. If Mujib, or whoever had me now, were going to bother to heat this place then they wanted me in reasonable condition. It also implied that whatever it was they wanted me for would require my cooperation. I took some comfort from that.

  I slept for a time. With nothing else to do, and my mind still fuddled, it was probably the best idea, and when I woke for the second time it was with a clearer head. Thirsty and aching, but clearer.

  I debated with myself for a while about whether I should call out or not. The only cards I had to play against my captors were psychological ones, and given that I spend quite a lot of my time seeing people who aren’t real, then that deck was suspect. In the end, I decided water was more important than games, and called out.

  They didn’t answer.

  The cuffs were leather, I decided. Worn enough to have some give to them, but new enough to still be smooth and free of any cracks that I could feel on my wrists. I spent a bit of time pulling on them, testing whether my hands would slide through if I lost enough weight. Possibly, I decided. But if I lost that much weight then I’d probably be too weak to get out of the torso restraint, and almost certainly too weak to get out of wherever it was they were holding me.

  I took naps, sleeping whenever I could in an effort to save energy. It didn’t work well. I’ve always had a tendency to sleep with my mouth open and it was dehydrating me faster than staying awake would have. The human body is about two thirds water. You can last weeks without food. Water is another story. The most an average person can last is about a hundred hours.

  By what I thought might be the third day, I’d broken.

  I called out. I screamed.

  Sometime after that, I begged.

  The lights woke me, blasting down at me like a desert sun. After so long in total darkness the lights were so bright that I couldn’t bear to open my eyes and had to let them adjust to the red glare that came through my eyelids.

  I was utterly unprepared for the water. The cradle I was strapped to had a system of sprinklers surrounding it that blasted my naked body with cold water as it rotated around and below me. The cradle was shaped like a rough X with my arms and legs stretched out but held at an angle so I was slightly reclined. A hole was cut between the base of my back and upper thighs, I’m sure you can figure out why. Even so the stench of my own waste and filth was enough to make me gag as the water sluiced it away.

  I licked water from my lips as the sprinklers shut off and I looked up. A plastic tube hung down on either side of my face and a droplet clinging to the end of the one to my left was all the invitation I needed.

  Water.

  Bloody hell, I swear I’ve never had anything as sweet as that first drink. Drinking pints of water after being dehydrated is a great way to make yourself throw up, and I forced myself to stop after a couple of mouthfuls. God, I didn’t want to though. I wanted to draw on that tube until it ran dry.

  The other tube held some kind of gruel. It was almost tasteless, with a grainy texture, but it was food. I’ve survived on a lot worse in the past, and this was calories. Not eating or drinking for so long had taken a toll on my body, and I suspected I would need all the strength I could get.

  The door opened before I’d finished eating. A glass panel pivoted to one side on metal struts letting in a man in a pale suit.

  “You’re awake, Mr Carver. That’s good.”

  I didn’t really have a response to that, so I used the opportunity to study him as he drew closer. He was Middle Eastern, with a close-cropped dark beard. The suit looked tailored, though I’ve never been an expert on these things. He stopped well out of my reach, pacing back and forth as he ran his gaze over me; admiring his catch, I supposed.

  He smiled suddenly, an exuberant grin that somehow managed to make him look like a child, despite the beard.

  “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to meet you. John Carver, The Miracle of Kabul. That’s what they call you, you know?”

  He ignored my scowl, his grin growing even wider. “Finding you was no easy task. The people I’ve had looking for you…” He fell silent, the smile fading as he looked me over again, concern touching his face as his brow furrowed. “But you must be tired. You’ll need your strength for what’s coming.”

  I shook my head. He wasn’t making much sense and I’d already heard enough. “Who the hell
are you? What do you want from me?”

  He tutted, wagging a chiding finger at me.

  “That’s two questions, John, and you haven’t let me ask you anything yet. Hardly fair is it?” He laughed at the incredulous expression that crossed my face. “My name wouldn’t mean anything to you. I’ve worked hard to keep my identity secret. I have a number of names; so many that I’ve forgotten most of them. You can call me Afridi if you wish, though my connection to that tribe is a bit tenuous these days.”

  “Afridi? As in Ehsan Afridi? You’re a drug dealer?”

  “Oh Carver,” Afridi shook his head. “I thought you knew more about this part of the world than that. There are millions of Afridis. The tribe stretches throughout Pakistan and across half of Afghanistan. As for the ‘drug dealer’ title,” he pulled a face. “That’s a little insulting. It’s correct, or at least it was for a time, but I always thought of myself as more of a businessman than simply a peddler of narcotics.”

  The man was nuts, and clearly in love with the sound of his own voice.

  “What the fuck am I doing here?” I snapped.

  Afridi pursed his lips and ran his tongue over his teeth, looking every inch the disappointed parent as he sighed. “You’re here to teach me, Carver.”

  I closed my eyes tight for a moment, blocking out the insanity of the situation. “Teach you? Teach you what?”

  Afridi laughed, a surprised and delighted sound. “You stopped a bullet, Carver. You stopped a bullet with your power. Your name is still whispered across Kabul and half of Afghanistan. You’re here to teach me how to do it.”

  Oh God, not this. Anything but this.

  “I didn’t…’ I began, scrambling for the words. “I mean, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but it wasn’t like that.”

  Afridi laughed, shaking his head at my protests. “No, none of that here. I know you did it. I’ve met people who saw you do it. Shall we see if you can do it now?” He reached into his suit jacket and pulled a gun from a shoulder holster.