by Erin Hayes
Isaac scoffed. “If it means stopping those sons of bitches, I’ll buy each and every one of them a bottle of aspirin after this is over.”
Torture
“YOU FUCKS! YOU SICK FUCKS! I’LL KILL YOU!” Declan’s screams rang in Trey’s ears and dragged him out of a hazy sleep. He was reluctant to follow the awful, hate-filled words to the world of the awake, mostly because the path was difficult to navigate and every attempt hurt more than the sweet sleep ever could.
When had waking up hurt so much?
Was this what people meant when they said “waking up dead”? It certainly felt that trying would kill him before it kept him alive.
Still, Declan never was one to keep quiet…
“YOU KILLED THEM! YOU… ALL OF THEM! YOU FUCKS! YOU SICK, TWISTED, UGLY MOTHERFUCKING FUCKS! I’LL RIP YOU APART AND—”
“There is nothing you could hope to try that we have not already survived,” a morbidly calm voice with a bees’ nest rumble of a German accent hugging each word. “And you will see soon enough that what we did to them was a mercy.”
Suddenly the pain of waking up seemed worth fighting against. Trey felt that it would be better for him to have his wits about him for whatever situation he’d found himself in.
“But you two,” another voice, almost the same but with enough difference in its pitch to know that they were in the company of both hybrids well before all Trey’s senses had returned to him. “You two have connections, yes? Connections to the blue-haired harlot and the dog that fucks her? Yes?”
The last word was spoken with strain and followed shortly after by a pained cry from Declan. Though he couldn’t see clearly just yet, Trey was certain the speaker had done something painful to entice an answer. But that answer would have to wait for the screaming to subside.
Something sounded then, like somebody smashing tiny rocks under a larger rock, and Declan’s screams doubled in ferocity.
“Yes?” the voice persisted.
“Y-ye-yes…” Declan more panted the word than said it, then chanted, “Yes, yes, fucking hell, yes!”
Sight returned to Trey, but he found himself still almost entirely blind to his surroundings. Then, with his heart pounding and breath coming out in terrified bursts, he felt the wave of reeking heat roll across his face with every exhale. Sweet with both old and new blood, the hot stink of broken teeth, and the festering of the half-cooked meat of a tongue scorched by a filthy soldering iron. It was his own breath. It was then that he realized he had a sack over his head, and the memories of what had put him to sleep returned:
They’d been captured… no, that implied some sort of effort. They’d been taken. Plucked up right out of the street before they’d even realized they’d been found. Nearly three dozen therions armed for bear, and the two hybrids had butchered them in something he couldn’t even justify as a blur. One moment they’d all been there, walking the vacant street near the shipping yard, and the next their numbers could have been counted on a single man’s fingers. A seven-fingered man, at that.
Then four.
Then three.
Their once proud little army of blood-thirsty therions was nothing more than a vast stretch of pooling blood and unraveling guts. They’d struck with tooth and claw at first, but with the first few therions to fall under their attacks they’d taken to using whatever they plucked off the dead to help them butcher the rest. Axes, knives, chains, and even their severed limbs. The sight of a jagged arm bone buried in the face of a stunned comrade, his single eye darting back-and-forth between them for some sign of how he’d come to that circumstance before, as though it had never truly been attached, his head rolled free from his shoulders.
The third had tried to run, made it four whole steps before his fifth step found him without a leg to stand on. By the time he’d hit the ground he didn’t have a left arm, either. An instant later the body didn’t have a head, but a pulpy mockery of what might have once been one.
Then it was just the two of them: Trey and Declan. But death didn’t come in a time-lapse of sudden death or even one of missing pieces or fatal wounds. The hybrids toyed with them a bit, though; taking the fingers off Declan’s left hand so quickly that he wasn’t sure exactly when he could last remember having had them. Trey, while checking both his own hands for any missing digits, had suddenly been painfully aware he was no longer on his feet. After a brief moment he’d come to the conclusion this was because he no longer had feet. By the time he’d hit the gore-drenched ground, flailing in a pile of a nearby ex-comrade’s viscera, a sharp pain and a series of bloodied fragments told him he’d taken a high-speed punch to the teeth that had broken many of them off in his head. That was around when sleep had come for the first time, he remembered; just as he’d felt the teasing of a horrible headache pull at the back of his left eye.
He’d flickered in-and-out a few more times since. Once to the screaming French kiss of the soldering iron on his tongue and a few more times to other screams and words. By that point, though, the screams were just lullabies and the words were even less than that—just white noise and nonsense.
Sleep had been easier then.
He couldn’t be sure how long he’d been out, but if the scent small bits of outside air that seeped through the sack over his head were any clue it wasn’t where they’d been.
They were somewhere inside; the stale air was ripe with the smell of mildew and death. And fear! Gods, it was like the entire place was perfumed with the stench. It took only one good whiff to come to the conclusion that this was where the hybrids had brought the three girls they’d tortured earlier.
Tortured…
Trey trembled and heard his own whimper muffled from the sack. Somehow the two knew that they’d been closer to Zoey and Isaac than the others. And while Declan’s involvement with them was anything but pleasant, Trey couldn’t boast the same. He’d had nothing against them from the start. In fact…
The sack was ripped from his head then and he blinked in the searing glare of a light that snapped on in his face an instant later—the powerful bulb close enough to begin cooking the flesh of his nose. Turning to face away from the light, he found the entire left side of his face blind to the brightness. Knowing that he’d at least be able to see the phantom glow of such a powerful beam behind a swollen lid, he came to the only possible conclusion: they’d taken out his left eye.
“So you’re sweet on the blue-haired vampire, eh?” one of the hybrids, the smaller one, asked with an amused tone. “Does her fuck-dog know?” He cocked his head, and though Trey could barely see past their silhouettes he got the impression that the speaker was grinning at him. “How do you think he’d take it if he did?” he asked.
Trey didn’t answer.
Then he screamed and twisted his head downward, finding five toothpicks suddenly buried in his left thigh. The denim surrounding the five points began to soak up the red until it was a single stain that covered most of his upper leg. How the hell had they put them in there so fast?
Oh yea…
“He asked you a question,” the other hybrid said, catching enough of the light for Trey to see a toothpick clenched between his teeth.
A bloodied toothpick…
Another glance at his thigh confirmed that one of the five was missing.
“A-Ah…” Trey flinched around his own words, realizing that speaking with broken teeth and a burned tongue was nearly impossible. “Ah djus’ daut che ‘as ‘ute.”
It wasn’t a lie. He had no reason to lie, neither before nor now that it made no difference. He had thought Zoey was cute. Nothing more. He was certain that Isaac could see that much, though, from the way he couldn’t stop staring or the way he perked up whenever she talked to him. Isaac was a lucky therion. First to even have the eye of someone like Delilah and then to win the heart of somebody as sweet and unique as Zoey. But Isaac knew what he had. Trey could see that from the get-go; he didn’t take it for granted and, for that, he was certain Isaac wouldn’t blame
somebody for seeing in Zoey what he saw—appreciating her the same way that he did. It wasn’t like he could’ve taken Zoey from him, even if that had been his intention. There were few things in nature that he’d seen fit together so perfectly.
He took some comfort in knowing the two of them would be avenging this moment soon enough.
These monsters would get what was coming.
The bigger one made a sound that was like a scoff stripped of any humor or intrigue and turned away to retrieve something off a nearby table.
“Obviously we’re expecting too much by asking you to speak,” the smaller one went on, offering a chuckle with all the humor the bigger one had been lacking. “So we’ll make this simple: no talking. That includes begging.” Without looking he put out his left hand and, at that same moment, the bigger one slapped something small and white—save for several speckles of blood stains—into his palm. Opening it for Trey, he saw that it was an old egg-timer, which the hybrid then cranked the dial before setting it between several of the toothpicks in Trey’s thigh. “You have just over ten minutes on that timer. In that time my brother and I are going to play, and, for every sound you make, we’ll add another minute to timer. We’ll grant your death—which you’ll be eager for, believe me—when the timer goes off. If you understand, nod.”
Trey didn’t move.
The hybrid reached town and turned the dial a little further before slamming the timer down on several of the toothpicks, driving them further into the muscle of his thigh.
“DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND?”
Trey nodded, realizing he’d been wrong: he should’ve stayed asleep; should’ve allowed himself to simply wake up dead.
“Don’t insult us by screaming too early,” the larger hybrid said as he turned to face him then, slamming a battery pack into the handle of a power drill he’d pulled out of the darkness beyond the searing light in Trey’s face. He gave the trigger a few testing pulls, turning the spiraled bit into a screaming blur in Trey’s periphery. “I promise it won’t be as bad as it can be.”
Ezra and Jerrick had been taught at an early age to hate humans. That was how they remembered it, or, rather, the only way they could remember it without allowing their hatred to turn inward and eat them alive. The reality that neither of them dared to acknowledge was that their parents had never taught hate—never wanted hate to be a part of their lives—but instilled at a very young age an understanding that humans could be dangerous. They were not raised to hate them, no; they’d been raised to be cautious of humans. And while their parents’ intentions had been for the purest and most righteous of reasons—the world had enough hate as it was, after all—it would ultimately serve to be what led them to live a life with more hate than they believed another being capable of.
Even before they’d been connected through Messiah and his psychic talents, the two brothers had shared a connection that, at times, felt close to what they’d later receive. Born in a small and humble hut on the outskirts of an equally small and humble village in Bergen. While there had been a dark cloud looming over the whole of Germany even then, it had been disregarded in large part—or, at least, they put on a good show for the sake of not panicking the two of them—as “human ugliness.”
“Hatred,” their mother had explained in her native tongue, “is doing some very ugly things even as we speak. And that human ugliness will take many, many lives, I can assure you. Life is sacred, children, you must remember that. And remember that I know you will, for only hatred can make you forget. And…” she’d trail off then to lead them into an all-too-familiar family motto.
“And a heart filled with hatred is a heart that’s already dead,” they’d recite in unison, voices bored and humoring while their eyes began rolling in their heads. Then, with a playfully scolding glance from their mother, the brothers would giggle and scamper off to see how long it would be before she’d magically appear in front of them to catch them.
Because it had been magic to them then.
So much had been magic to them then.
Even they, themselves, were something magical and unique in their own right. Born of a sangsuiga mother and a theriomorph father, a coupling that, without the help of human hatred, was saturated in more than enough hate from their own kind. Vampires hated therions. Therions hated vampires. It was only natural that their parents union would met with the same hatred from both sides, and so too was the product of that love: their children. But Ezra and Jerrick would know nothing of that until later, as well. At that time, a time of blissful ignorance and uninterrupted magic—a time of playing tag with a mother who could somehow be in the kitchen and then with them in the woods before the first bark of laughter escaped their mouths; a time of trying to hide from a father who could sniff out a single mouse in a mile’s worth of grain—they knew nothing of hatred. But in a time when hatred had become the way of the world, being raised without a shred of understanding of its true workings was dangerous.
And that danger found them.
Without their mother’s speed they appeared and without their father’s senses they sniffed them out, and in a single night of fire and blood and screams it was all gone and they’d become prisoners of hatred.
Prisoners of war.
Prisoners to the Nazis.
And the newest subjects of Doctor Friedrich von Schneider.
For four long years…
“GUTEN TAG UND HALLO, MEINE HAUSTIERE!” von Schneider’s cursed greeting—‘good day and hello, my pets—echoed through the meticulously polished interior of the only room Ezra and Jerrick had known for the past…
How long had it been?
With no windows to follow the passing of day and night and the room buried somewhere in whatever wretched facility it occupied there was no sounds or smells to offer any clues. One would easily say something they’d think clever and fitting, something like “too long,” but the brothers knew that such a thing meant nothing. “Too long” in this place began precisely fifteen minutes into their first day. When von Schneider and his team had first started cutting.
If their “meal”—if the bagged mess of fluids that were hooked directly to their stomachs—was, in fact, a once-a-day occurrence as the “good doctor” (as he liked to be called) claimed, then by their lazy count they were somewhere into their third year.
In either case, von Schneider’s cursed greeting echoed through the room, and the sudden break in silence dragged Jerrick from the closest thing he’d come to know as sleep and sent his heart into a panicked frenzy.
He knew this for certain.
He could see it.
Just over his chest, now swaying lightly from the spike of activity, was the small hammock of narrow medical fibers that held his heart—the network of arteries and veins stretching back into the gaping chasm that was his body. Surrounding that were other hammocks like it, some bigger and some smaller, each holding its own organ like a passionate lover. It had become something of a fascinating thing to Jerrick, watching each and every one of his insides hanging just over his body like that. It hadn’t always been, of course. At first the sight of all his parts on display like that—watching them go about their strained workings as though unaware that they weren’t where they belonged—had sent him into a frenzied effort to tear himself free of them. The horror of it compelled him to escape from the scene, though he was well aware that doing so would kill him. At that point he’d been wishing for death (and they’d both been wishing for death every second since then), but the “good doctor” and his team were eager to do whatever it took to keep that from happening. Straps, binds, sedatives, and even magic—leave it to the Nazis to turn something as spectacular and wonderful as magic into something awful, right?—were at their disposal to keep their subjects alive and well despite their greatest efforts to not be. But, over time and with the growing of what Jerrick was certain was madness, the sight became something of a distraction. Until the “good doctor” arrived and started in with his experiments, of co
urse.
Jerrick watched his heart drum rapidly a few more times as his lungs, which neighbored his heart but hung slightly higher, expanded and contracted, expanded and contracted. He felt lulled by the sight, that sweet thing he believed to be madness washing over him along with whatever drugs von Schneider was pumping them with, and he played with the interactive display. Breathe in. Lungs expand. Breathe out. Lungs contract. And again, a longer inhale this time; nice and slow… and out again. He felt himself distance from the sight, forgetting without actually forgetting that they were his lungs, and taking some strange pride in being able to will the strange things to grow and shrink like that at his whim.
And, as if fascinated by the sight, as well, he saw that his heart had stopped beating so fast. Though the hammock it occupied still swayed a bit.
Back and forth
Expand and contract.
Von Schneider’s steps drew Jerrick away from the show of his own organs’ performance and looked up as the old man in his perfectly white coat stepped between the slabs that were, with the exception of that meticulously polished room, the only thing they’d known as a home. He glanced between them, eyeing their working parts with the same sort of fascination that he had, before turning to Jerrick and poking at a series of staples that traveled across the length of his hip.
I’m displeased with how these are healing, he’d informed him in German, as though the wound were nothing more than marks on a performance he’d had ample time to prepare for. If I don’t see more improvement by tomorrow I’m going to have to go back in with a different dose.
Ezra tried to fight then. He always did when von Schneider focused any of his attention on Jerrick. They were twins, celebrating the same age on the same birthday for as long as they’d been alive, but that Ezra had been first to breathe the air had become an excuse to assume the role of the older brother. And as far as he was concerned, whether it was by seconds or by years, an older brother protected the younger.