by Joseph Kiel
‘I can’t do it,’ Eddie whimpered. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Do it!’ Floyd roared like a deranged psychopath, his steel words booming throughout the still air of the warehouse. He pushed the barrel of the gun into Larry’s head and the young man flinched, thinking he’d been shot.
An unfamiliar warm trickle slid down Eddie’s face and his lips tasted the salt. He’d never known such an awful feeling before in his life. He wished that the universe would now just end, that the entire world would explode into a ball of flame, taking away the dreadful decision that he had to make. Kill Meriadoc or Larry dies.
‘I can’t do it!’ Eddie pleaded.
‘Do it! Your friend is about to die!’ Floyd roared again as he fired a bullet into the ceiling.
As Eddie looked through his blurry eyes at Meriadoc, he limply raised the gun and rested it behind a pricked ear. The warm-eyed dog cocked his furry head, panting, panting, confused. The worry burning his brain.
‘I’m sorry, Meriadoc.’
Floyd smiled in delight as he waited for Eddie to shoot his own dog. Eddie stiffened his wrist. He closed his eyes, collapsed to the ground, wailing, a deluge.
Floyd rolled his eyes and licked his lips. ‘Oh dear.’
The horror suddenly turned surreal as the tune of I’m in the Mood for Dancing chirped out in an electronic arrangement.
‘Excuse me a second,’ Floyd said as he pulled out his mobile phone from his trench coat. He answered it, and casually ambled off across the warehouse.
Neither Larry nor Eddie registered anything of the phone conversation. Eddie just stared at the concrete floor as he continued to cry. Larry had his eyes closed and was breathing in quickly and sharply as though he’d been running a marathon in the Sahara Desert. Meriadoc whined. They had a reprieve but it wasn’t to last for long.
‘Sorry about that,’ Floyd said as he came waltzing back. ‘Right, where were we?’
He approached Eddie’s cell and brought out a key from his trouser pocket. Unlocking a door within the breezeblocks, he walked into the cell with the distraught youngster.
‘You fucking idiot. Do you really think I would give you a loaded gun? Pathetic! Go on, how about you shoot me with it? Got enough guts to do that?’
Eddie pointed his gun at him and squeezed the trigger. He didn’t expect there to be any bullets in the chamber, and there weren’t any.
Floyd shook his head. ‘You loser.’
The demon turned to the scrawny mutt who cowered backwards. ‘Here. This is how you shoot a dog.’ He raised his gun and shot Meriadoc in the hind leg.
Eddie screamed. Meriadoc collapsed onto his backside as he frantically tried to pick himself up again.
‘See that? You shoot them in the leg first just to wound them, so you can see the fear in their eyes and taste that sour charge in the air. You maybe shoot them once more…’
Bang! Another bullet lodged into Meriadoc’s back.
‘You turn the screw, so that the pain becomes excruciating and you get that desperate look in their eye. Please kill me. Please send me out of this meaningless life.’
Floyd shot him again in the head and Meriadoc made a resigned bawling sound as his eyes closed. He collapsed to the ground as a pool of blood spread out from his body. He flinched faintly one more time before his life evaporated away forever.
Floyd giggled as he left the room and locked up the door.
Chapter 13.2
Henry always knew this day would come. He’d tried to make his penance through Halo of Fires, and he’d tried to save his soul by finding the Akasa Stone, but neither of those forces could now save him. They were just part of the chains he’d been forging, and now that bastard Floyd was pulling on them, dragging them to the fate that had hung over his head for so many years.
Standing alone in his office, gazing through the window across the dead end town, Henry felt powerless. The heavens were fading, a thick pollution of rain clouds sealing away the sky. He looked to his desk instead and saw a tea stain on the veneer. Dust had started to settle on top of the filing cabinets. He felt like kicking them all over, pulling out all the papers and throwing them out the window. They were all meaningless now. It was all a failure.
He collapsed into his leather chair and clutched his neck. He felt for the clasp on the wooden beads and removed the imitation Akasa Stone so he could look once more at the fool’s salvation.
Just at that moment, the door opened. It was Jake. He silently approached the desk. His eyes were tired, his face unshaven.
Taking a seat opposite his Seraph he said: ‘So.’
‘I had to wake you…’
‘I haven’t been to bed yet.’
A weak smile briefly appeared on Henry’s lips and then faded. ‘Jake, I’ve had it.’
Jake stared at him then lowered his eyes, as if he’d just been told that Henry was dying of cancer. The muscles in his cheeks flexed and then Jake said: ‘No.’
‘It’s over.’
‘No,’ Jake repeated. ‘It’s not over. What’s that?’
Henry held up the stone. ‘Tyler’s treasure. It’s fake.’
‘He was right then. Vladimir. How the hell did you get it back?’
‘The Harbour Master.’
‘And Floyd knows?’
‘He’s taken our two apprentices.’
‘Did they find Devlan?’
‘They must have done. But instead of coming to me he just took them to Floyd.’
Jake rubbed his stubble. ‘Bastard.’ He stood up. ‘All right, let’s go sort them out.’
‘We’ll need to wait for…’ Henry began, before he realised that Clint was already standing at the door.
‘Standing by,’ Clint said. ‘But I don’t see the Boy Wonder yet.’
‘We couldn’t get hold of Vladimir,’ Henry said.
‘Shouldn’t we wait for him?’ Clint asked.
Jake started to make a move. ‘Come on. We’ll be fine.’
‘Look, I just think, whatever the plan is here, whatever shit on whatever fan, whatever lightning bolts The Harbour Master is going to send our way, it’s always useful having Vladimir with us. He’s our lucky charm, our amulet. I think it’s worth waiting just five or ten minutes longer.’
They weren’t listening to him. Wearily, Henry stood up. He rubbed his chest again even though he was no longer wearing the imitation stone. ‘Let’s go.’
Chapter 13.3
The dog had been dead for over three hours but Eddie had not stopped crying. He cradled him in his arms, his clothes soaked with blood. Meriadoc’s soul had departed but the youngster could not let go of the vessel that had contained it. Neither could he stop sobbing. An empty chasm had ruptured within him and he now knew that the world was a hopeless place devoid of compassion.
Larry had been thrown into the breeze-blocked cell with him. He sat against the wall opposite. All he could do was stare at his bleary-eyed friend.
He knew Eddie was unable to be fixed, especially right now. It had taken Larry seven years to begin to compose his own fractures again. Picking up the pieces only cut one’s fingers.
Besides, they were still locked up in this strange place with this sadistic lunatic Floyd. Any second now he would be back for more torture. Larry had tried to break the glass wall but despite throwing the set of drawers at it, despite throwing himself at it, the glass was evidently the same that was used in Hannibal Lecter’s cell.
Yet why was their psychopath on the other side of the glass here? Larry could not comprehend how Floyd was left running around in society, that someone who was obviously completely insane had escaped the shit filter.
Floyd wasn’t even worthy of being called a human, could not be of the same species as he and Eddie. How would someone like this operate in normal day-to-day life? How come nobody had noticed this man was a complete nutcase? Now he knew exactly why the Halo of Fires organisation existed. With sickos like Floyd, the world would be lost without someone out there to fight
them.
Eddie’s sobbing suddenly stopped and his head stiffened, as though his mind had suddenly been hit with a chilling premonition. ‘We’re gonna die.’
Larry shook his head. ‘No, Eddie. We’re going to get out of here. I need you to hold on.’
‘Why did they do this? What did we do to them?’
‘I guess maybe we should have opened that letter.’
Eddie nodded. ‘That was the test. You know, whatever I do, whatever choice I make, it’s always wrong. Every time. I can never win.’
‘We’re gonna win this time. Come on, dude, don’t give up.’
Eddie turned his head away. ‘He’s back.’
Larry heard clanking footsteps as heavy boots trampled across the concrete floor. The leathery-faced demon walked slowly up to the cell, his trench coat streaming behind him like black wings. He was accompanied by an icy-eyed thug with irises as grey as a frozen lake, and a gangly looking youngster who lingered in the background with a cold smile. Larry picked up on the genetic similarity between this lad and Floyd, although he couldn’t imagine him to be Floyd’s son. There was no way that any woman on the planet would want to reproduce with that monster.
Floyd walked up to the glass and then crouched down to speak to his captives, like a boy about to feed his frightened hamsters to the cat.
‘Now then, children. Here’s where things start to go downhill. Last night was a bit like going to Tesco. You go out for something, but then you see the offers on the end of the aisle, and with a three for one deal you know that it’s something you can’t possibly do without. So here’s the bad news for you: I only really need one of you. Only one of you gets a chance of living, and even that is a bit of a thin chance in all fairness. But the other one is definitely going to die, and it’s going to be really, really nasty for them. So you’ll have to decide between yourselves in the next minute which one of you gets to live and which one gets to die.’
He sprouted up again and darted away. Larry looked back at Eddie, as the next sickening twist to their ordeal sank into the murky waters of his mind like a lifeless body sinking into a pond. There was nothing in Eddie’s face though, his eyes cloudy like marbles; there was only one person that he would choose to survive. Eddie wouldn’t even fire an unloaded gun at that stray mutt to save Larry’s life.
Larry closed his eyes and shook his head. He realised that his mind was only equipped for going out drinking, shooting pool, and handing in essays too late. There was no place in his mind for this sort of stuff. He didn’t even know this shit took place in his world, at least not in this backwater of a town.
He heard squeaking wheels and the groan of rusty metal. The demon and his cohorts were now wheeling in some strange piece of machinery. This one definitely wasn’t a fairground ride.
‘So then, children, can any of you tell me what this little contraption is? I got it from an old business associate who used to run a pet food factory not far from here. I’ve never got round to using it yet. Waiting for the right moment. But it seems that moment is right before us. This here machine is a meat mincer. Nice and big, as you can see. Just about big enough to pass a human through. So, which one of you is going to be the one to test it out for me?’
‘I think the fat one!’ the grey-eyed thug squealed as he banged his fist on the glass next to Larry.
Closer up to him, Larry could see that his manky brown teeth had most probably never seen a toothbrush in his life. His droopy eyes and his splodge of a nose made him look like his whole face was melting, as though his body couldn’t even be bothered to hold itself together. Greasy, receding hair. Scraggly stubble. He was probably fifteen years younger than he looked. He wore muddy Wellington boots like he’d just stepped out of a farmyard. Not that he would have been working there, most likely fucking the goats all day.
‘You’re not killing either of us!’ Larry shot back at them, his angry words spitting out like volcanic lava.
Eddie sat in a forlorn heap on the ground, his eyes staring past the floor to the hell that was supposed to be beneath him.
‘Let’s take the fat one!’
‘You come in here and get me you sick sack of shit!’
Floyd approached the glass, glowing with pleasure at the fiery agitation he was creating. In contrasting calm he said: ‘Come on, children, you’re supposed to be deciding which one of you tries out my mincing machine.’
‘You’re not putting us in that thing, you sick bastard!’ Larry screamed back at him, hammering his fists on the impenetrable glass.
He stared into Floyd’s dead eyes like a boxer waiting for the bell. When Floyd came in the cell he would lunge at him and tear his eyeballs out with his fingernails, bite his nose off, smash the sick bastard’s face into the wall.
‘What do you think then, Zero?’ Floyd asked the thug. ‘Want to get rid of the less pretty one?’
‘Yeah!’ he replied.
‘What about you?’ Floyd asked the gangly milquetoast who continued to float around in the background like a grinning imp. He just nodded back to him. Evidently he was incapable of speech.
‘The fat one it is,’ Floyd said as he reached into his trench coat for his gun. He walked round to the corridor and as soon as he opened the door, Larry ran at him with his arms outstretched like a zombie, reaching for the demon’s throat. He didn’t care anymore about getting shot. He didn’t care about dying.
Floyd fired a bullet that whizzed past Larry’s head. He thought he’d been shot as a confusing pain rang in his ears. Larry clutched his head.
Zero the thug grabbed Larry’s elbow to drag him out but Larry flung his arm and sent him flying into the wall.
Floyd fired his gun again. This time Larry was hit in the shin. He collapsed to the ground in such a pain that he didn’t know could exist. He screamed as though his entire body was on fire.
Through his roars he could see Eddie staring back at him, almost calmly. He didn’t seem to care, just looking on like he was watching it all taking place on television.
‘They’ll miss you more than me,’ Eddie said to his friend. He stood up and stepped towards them. He removed his baseball cap and tossed it onto the ground. ‘Take me.’
Floyd looked at him for a moment while the cogs trundled in his head. He then grabbed Eddie by his neck and they dragged him out of the cell.
‘Eddie! Eddie, no!’ Larry hopelessly roared through his screams.
The grey-eyed brute stood behind Eddie and wrapped his arms around him as though he was about to lift up the carcass of an animal. Floyd switched on the machine and it whirred into life.
With the help of the gangly thug, Zero lifted Eddie off the ground. Eddie then began shouting: ‘Wait! You’re going to shoot me first, aren’t you? Fucking Jesus! Fucking kill me first!’
Larry saw Eddie kicking his legs frantically, the two brutes edging him closer to the machine. A couple of items began to slip from Eddie’s jeans pockets as though they were fleeing the approaching mouth of the mechanical beast: a bunch of keys, some coins, a green yo-yo that bounced along the ground with its trailing string.
‘Larry! Shit, help me! Larry, tell them to shoot me!’
Larry closed his eyes. He couldn’t watch. As he heard the tone of the machine turn a higher pitch and Eddie’s piercing scream fill the building, he knew what was happening.
He heard the slopping of flesh as Eddie was fed in feet first. All of the psychopaths laughed as they slowly pushed him down into the revolving metal cutters.
With his legs cut to shreds, the screams got even louder, and Larry’s whole body shuddered. They held him there for a few moments and then pushed his midriff into the grinders. The screaming became gargled, blood gushing out of Eddie’s mouth.
Larry opened an eye. He saw them push the rest of Eddie’s body into the machine, and the screaming soon stopped. Red flesh piled out at the other end, mixed up with strands of fabric from his clothes and shards of black rubber from his shoes. They were his indoor football boo
ts that he’d bought a couple of weeks ago for their five aside matches.
It had only taken a matter of seconds to turn Eddie into nothing more than a splattering of flesh, blood and bones. Larry felt his body going into spasm as his throat wretched up the contents of his stomach. He hadn’t eaten anything all day, and so only spat up stinging bile which jetted all over him, the fire and the venom that burned within.
That pile of blood was his friend. That poor, luckless lad called Eddie. He was now a pile of shredded meat. Dog food. Larry felt such a hollow feeling inside. In this living hell, life had no value at all.
A worn out, blood-splattered Floyd sat down next to the glass as he caught his breath. He was spent.
‘Fucking brilliant,’ he panted out.
‘You sick son of a bitch,’ Larry spat.
‘Ain’t it great?’ Floyd replied, turning to him. ‘Just you and me now, fat boy. How are you liking your stay at the Chamber of Fun so far?’
‘I’m going to come back for you. I’m going to slaughter you mercilessly and you’ll burn in hell for eternity!’
‘Now, that’s bullshit, boy,’ he said knowingly. ‘You know where I’ll be going if you kill me? You’ll be sending me to heaven. Everyone goes to heaven. Right now Hitler’s up there partying with six million Jews. Osama Bin Laden’s eating hotdogs with three thousand World Trade Centre workers.’
‘What’s with you? Are you some demented Bible freak or just fucking insane?’
‘I’m as sane as you are, boy. You know what The Harbour Master says? He says good and evil share the same realm. They serve the same purpose. They come together like old friends. You dumb fuckers at Halo of Fires, you’re neither one nor the other. You walk some midway line in a no man’s land and it don’t achieve a thing. But evil? Evil is good’s best friend because it powers it. Without evil there is no good. Evil is just good in another form. God loves me for what I did just now. And you know what? It’s much more fun than being good.’
‘You’re sick,’ Larry shouted once more, but he knew his words were pointless. His anger and his insults only seemed to feed the demon before him.