by mike Evans
He was as naked as the day that he’d been born. The burning in his head was almost matched by that of the ones in his arms and legs from being stretched apart. Matt bent down, pulling on his legs, seeing there was a little give. He took the rope which was bound to his left ankle and cranked it one notch tighter until the gear he had attached to spin the rope and make it tighter clicked. He repeated the act on his other legs and his arms.
Moon yelled, “You’re going to rip my fucking arms off, cocksucker!”
Matt tilted his head a little and shook his head no. “What you’re going to do, is tell me who did that to my father. I mean there is a good chance you were guilty for it, since you were the stupid fuck that they left behind. I can only assume your boss doesn’t like you… like, at all. Because this has to be about the worse thing in the world.”
“But you aren’t gonna make it no tighter, are you?”
“No, pretty soon these ropes will be pretty limp. Now, where are the others who did this to my dad? He didn’t deserve it. I can only assume that you didn’t ask him enough questions to figure out who he was. You saw the mask I left out this morning,” Matt pointed to his mask which he was still wearing and continued, “this mask to be exact. I hope that you are smart enough to tell me what I want, because I can keep you alive, but I don’t think you are going to want that very soon.”
Moon wiggled and pulled on the ropes, but they didn’t so much as budge more than an inch. Matt dipped his finger in the head wound. On Moon’s stomach, he drew a smiley face.
“You need to tell me: who was with you?”
Moon—who understood what Matt could do, but didn’t comprehend the amount of respect warranted by a man when he had a table’s worth of kill toys sitting next to him and you were his toy—screamed. “I'm not telling you anything! They’d fucking kill me if I did.”
Matt took Moon’s throat and started to squeeze until he began to see stars and colors. “So now, what exactly were you thinking was my end game here, dipshit?”
“You’re gonna kill me anyways. You fucking kill everyone you, sadistic fuck. Probably runs in your damn family! Hell, if that other pussy was your dad, then it has to.”
“I'm not going to lie, this is going to hurt. I’d be dishonest if I said that I’d not be enjoying this, but I think that we both know I am telling the truth if I say that I will enjoy it.”
“I can take whatever you got, fucker. Go burn in hell.”
Matt looked at Moon for a moment longer. “You’re sure about that? Final answer?”
Moon tried to spit on him and show him just how tough he was, but the blood was too thick and sticky and simply dribbled down his chin getting lost in his chest hairs. Matt patted his stomach, showing the carving knife that he’d selected. “This was dad’s favorite; cuts right through a lot of important shit. You don’t know how tricky deer can be, especially when it's cold.”
Moon began to buck but was strung up so tight that his feet and hands had turned purple. He screamed as Matt ran an initial cut, separating his skin, starting at the inside of his right leg and running it up to the outside of his right buttock. Blood began to pour down his leg, joined by urine. Matt said, “Oh, that didn’t take much, now, did it? You are going to be in for a long night. I’ve given you some medicine to help with the bleeding. I don’t want to lose you before I’ve got what I want. I’m going to leave quite the display when I'm done. It’ll be a shame that not very many people will get the opportunity to see you. I wish that I could stay longer to see it as well. But there’s a lot of blood which needs to be spilt. You fucked with the wrong family and, well, I'm not going to be as nice as you were to my dad.”
“But we tortured him…”
Matt patted Moon’s love handles and said, “Well, let's just say I'm going to take you piece by piece. You don’t seem to appreciate what it means to be one of my victims. Now, let me ask again: who did this? Who was it?”
“Go fuck yourself!”
“Go fuck myself—sure. This is gonna hurt a little, bear with me though.”
Matt slid the knife in past the initial cut, up until he was at the hilt of the blade. He brought the knife up the backside of his leg, carving up and down, using all the pressure he had available. Moon screamed, trying to keep his breath but couldn’t. His stomach rolled as the finality of the situation dawned upon him. “I’ll talk, I’ll talk!”
Matt looked at him and said, “You know, I don’t think that you are respecting me just yet. I need to do this to really bring the point home.”
“I’ll tell you anything, just stop, please, before it’s too late.”
Matt pulled the knife out showing Moon the blade, letting his blood drip into the leaves below. Matt smiled, putting a finger under it, looking at Moon. “You been with many dirty ladies?”
Moon had tears now that he couldn’t stop. “You gotta let me reason with you. You know how much money we have?”
“Blood is cheap, and I'm not concerned with a retirement fund.”
“We’re going to cook up here… move our operations from the factory at the end of town and out here; Ramsey is going to be the richest man in the northwest.”
“Ramsey? End of town… Is this the same town that Sheriff Zeke was in charge of but won’t be any longer?”
Moon nodded. He was glad to be giving answers because while he was talking, he wasn’t cutting pieces off him. He still had the thinnest of hopes that he was going to be saved, that there might be enough time and enough luck for his group to come back and save him, and put this crazy fuck in the ground like his father. “Yeah, it’s that town. He’s either cooking or at the bar. Doesn’t spend much down time anywhere else. You get me down and help me back to the edge of the woods where my truck is, and I’ll take you right to him.”
Matt got up close to his face. “You do realize that when I have this mask on, it means that I am here to murder someone, correct? How many other people were here today? If you gave up the man in charge, you aren’t giving up much more by giving me the other names.”
“Yeah, I’m not trying to be a fucking saint here. It was James and Schmidt. Most the work got done by Ramsey. I hit him over the head, but Ramsey did almost everything else. I swear by my hand to God.”
Matt said, “Ramsey, James, and Schmidt. Anyone else you want to give a death sentence to? Now’s your chance; any uncles that played with your fun basket you want to leave Earth?”
“No—Jesus no, you sick fuck.”
“So there’s nothing else that I need to hear from you, correct?”
Moon stopped talking and weighed what he was saying. “What do you mean by that?”
Matt walked along the row of items he had laid out, finding a pair of pliers and a new knife. This one was dull and rusted. He smiled, not that Moon would know. Matt turned around, still holding the other knife. “If we’re done talking, then let's go ahead and take off that one piece you aren’t going to need anymore.”
Moon clenched his mouth shut. Matt flipped the other knife around that he wasn’t going to be using for a few minutes and rammed it into Moon’s shoulder. He tried to keep his mouth shut, but screamed until he lost his voice. Even after he’d lost it, he couldn’t stop trying to scream. Matt gripped his chin tight, sticking his pliers into his mouth before Moon could close it. Matt clenched down the pliers and pulled his tongue out two inches past where it should have been able to come out.
Matt said, “You should have never fucked with my father.”
He brought the dull knife out, slowly going back and forth. Blood and saliva covered the blade. Moon screamed and cried as his face tried to shake. Matt smelt something horrible, backing up a bit to see that whatever Moon had eaten, had just been shit out onto the ground. “That wasn’t polite.”
Moon watched, shaking uncontrollably and as Matt’s fingers went white from squeezing the pliers so hard. Moon was begging him not to do it, but Matt hushed him and said, “You can beg as much as you like, all of this is goin
g to happen. One fucking piece after another.”
By the time that he was done, blood had drenched his hand. Matt took one index finger, staring into Moon’s eyes, and ran it down the mask, across the already present cross, and then the face and lips. He showed Moon the piece of tongue and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “You doing okay, there?”
Moon tried to say but could only mumble, “Ju...h kiw… me… kiw… me, you fu..kh!”
Matt stood back. He took off his mask, holding it, and got within an inch of Moon’s face, until his eyelashes were touching the other man’s. “Didn’t you and your friends burn my father? Stick around. We should probably get that out of the way early on, I think. I’ll be right back. I don’t want you passing out on me.”
Matt smiled, sliding the mask back on. He walked up the hill to the house and returned a moment later with a fire poker. The daylight was beginning to fade and the dusk was setting in. The poker glowed, reflecting on the mask. Moon mumbled as blood made its way down his face. “Moh’… ‘he… ‘he fa… fa’e, moh’... ‘he—‘he fa’e—p’e...ase, ‘on’.”
Matt waved it slowly in front of his face, letting the fire poker lightly graze his skin. Moon screamed, bucking and screaming again from the pain in his almost severed leg. The poker instantly made his face begin burning. His five o'clock shadow sizzled from the glowing edge of it. When he removed it, Moon began to shudder.
Matt walked around him and said, “You realize you probably did something wrong by now, didn’t you? If I had to guess, you might think that maybe—just maybe—you should have let someone else stay up here to keep an eye on what you thought was going to be the greatest spot in the world. Just one thing to remember as I do this: everyone else in your group is going to be remembered for decades to come, and the one they call The Stranger is going to be written into history as the deadliest, most sadistic killer that has ever graced the Earth.”
Moon didn’t understand what was coming, mostly because he’d never fathomed this before. Because no normal man would think of an act of torture so intense. Matt walked behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder, patting it gently and then squeezing down on it as hard as he could.
“Try to relax, maybe it will help.”
Moon tried to look behind him, but a pain, one that he had never before experienced nor knew was possible, raced throughout his entire body, starting between his legs. He tried to look between his legs to see what in the hell had happened, only to feel a bubbling-like burning going on in his innards all the way down to his asshole. Matt stood back, looking at the poker sticking out of his anus and wondering if he had achieved a new height in his torture.
Moon’s screams filled the coming night, and when he looked like he was going to pass out, he took hold of the poker and ripped it from his insides. A smoldering stink filled the air. Everything that had been in its way had been burnt to an inoperable mush and followed the poker on its way out. His intestines and stomach lining had burnt to a crisp and connected themselves to the top of the poker, which was cooled by the stomach acid. Matt held up the poker as Moon’s final moments in life were very quickly ticking off. Moon was praying for a death now. He truly believed that when Paul had said the Devil was coming, there was no way he had been lying.
Moon’s world began to blur and Matt walked up, taking an axe. He wrapped his massive hands around the wood handle of it and Moon—who was on the verge of death—welcomed what was coming. Matt brought it down, using every single ounce of hate that he possessed—which of course was an impressive amount—and buried the maul end of the axe into Moon’s skull, crushing it in one hit, and embedding it in the bone.
Matt let go of the axe handle, watching as it stuck out straight from his face. He thought about the Pyramid Head character for a moment, thinking that if it had been a metal triangle, the son of a bitch would be a dead ringer. He picked up his knife and began cutting.
Chapter 15
Schmidt was packing cans of chemicals into crates. He was already thinking of ways in which to spend the money that he had not yet earned or seen. The rest of the men had been asking where the new shop was, but Ramsey had advised early on that if you didn’t have a job to do with the cooking, you didn’t need to worry about an invitation to the new to be facility. He couldn’t have been prouder and knew the earlier that they got supplies out there and got some things figured out, the sooner they’d be able to make money.
“Hey, Schmidt, why don’t you do something useful? How about you do me a favor?” Ramsey ordered.
“Uh, you sure you don’t want anyone else to do it? I can probably think of ten other guys that would be okay helping you, Ramsey. You see now… it isn’t that I don’t wanna help you. It's just that I don’t want to do whatever it is you are going to ask. I’m sure that you could find someone else to-”
“Schmidt?”
“Yeah, Ramsey?”
“Would you shut the fuck up? I mean, just for once in your life, please shut up before I stick my foot in your ass and break the damn thing off.”
He tossed a set of keys to one of their run trucks. “This thing is packed. I want you to take it out to our new spot. There’s more than one load so don’t ya’ll go planning on being back anytime soon.”
“If you ain’t noticed, there ain’t a lot of muscles going on here, Ramsey,” he complained, pointing to himself. “You definitely picked the wrong motherfucker tonight. I could walk back and forth all night and all you’re gonna do is find me dead in the woods from a heart attack.”
“That’d just break my heart. You take this here satellite phone and report to me as soon as you know anything. I'm sure by now, the Devil has either decided to come for Moon or not,” Ramsey said with a smile.
“Don’t be joking none about shit like that, Ramsey, I get the creeps out in the woods. You gonna let me take someone with me? I mean, you know how my back is,” Schmidt pleaded.
“I know how your balls are. Last time I heard, they aren’t between your legs. At least that’s what Jennifer told me. Take someone if you want. I figured you’d want to be riding bitch, anyway.”
“Bitch?”
“I got a four-wheeler on the trailer; so if you wanna take someone with you, then one of you are going to need to ride bitch. I’m pretty sure no one you take with you is going to be down with walking while you ride on the four-wheeler.”
Schmidt smiled, thinking about that. The idea that he’d be out in the creepy woods didn't treat him well, but at least being on a four-wheeler, he thought that he’d be able to get away from anything that was after him. The old man’s words hadn’t fallen on deaf ears and he’d spent the afternoon looking up old news articles about the man they’d taken out, and by news articles, it meant he’d watched videos.
He hadn’t spoken to anyone about it, but felt like they’d done something good in the woods today. He wished that they could’ve just shot the son of a bitch or slit his throat; the torture was a little more than his delicate stomach could handle. Schmidt had been about three sheets of white when he’d stopped home, and had done a horrible job convincing his wife that he was okay, and that he’d just had some bad Mexican food in town with the boys.
When he’d turned down a quickie, he’d gotten a twenty minute talk from her that he needed to stop doing certain things in the shower. After explaining the discount burritos he’d eaten for lunch, she’d let him off with a warning.
“Yeah, I don’t give a shit where I sit on that four-wheeler, so long as I don’t have to go by myself. I’ll make do with it, no worries. Can I take Lang with me?” Schmidt asked.
“You want to take Billy Lang with you? Did you hit your head? There’s no way in hell the two of you are going to fit onto that damn four-wheeler. Why don’t you get James? You know he ain’t doing shit.”
James overheard them talking and asked, “You two talking about me?”
Ramsey, who did not scare easily, responded promptly without missing a beat, “Yeah, we sure are. You got a
fucking problem with that?”
“Nope, just making sure. You need something?”
Schmidt leaned over towards Ramsey shaking his head slowly no. “I ain’t taking him with me.”
“The two of you would at least fit on the damn four-wheeler. Is there a reason you need to take Billy with?”
“To tell you the truth, yes, yes there is. He’s a big mother fucker, and as long as I’ve had that guy out with me while I’ve been collecting, not one time has anyone ever thought about—well, they probably thought about it, but they sure as shit haven’t had the balls to try to rob me. Yeah, I'm sure I want to take Billy with me, if he’ll go.”
Ramsey yelled, “Billy, you want to work all night or you want to take a ride in the woods with Schmidt?”
“You need him to come back, or am I supposed to get rid of him?”