by Smith, Bryan
The doctor’s gloating was so overt Livia couldn’t help wondering whether she might be the true instigator here. It was clear she and the warden were closer than she’d ever known. Perhaps she’d been whispering mean things about Livia in Ms. Wickman’s ear for a while, slowly and subtly setting the stage for a night like this.
In that scenario, the doctor’s recent coldness toward her made more sense, though she still had no idea what she might have done to upset the woman so much. In the end, though, understanding wasn’t necessary. All she cared about was getting some payback.
Revenge, however, would have to wait.
Livia shifted position and lowered her face to the bowl. She opened her mouth wide to take one of the bloody scraps between her teeth. Tearing loose a chunk of the meat required the use of at least one hand. She feared that doing so would earn her another rebuke or smack, but this didn’t happen as she took that first bite. Her tormentors were apparently satisfied with the simple appearance of eating from the bowl like a dog. The raw meat had a vaguely unpleasant, gamey taste, but, again, it could have been worse. It wasn’t repulsive enough to trigger her gag reflex. She kept working at it until she’d downed every last bite of the stuff.
At that point, she had no choice but to take a drink of the water. Her throat felt raw from all the blood. She put her face to the water bowl and drank it in the expected way, lapping it up like a dog. The first cold taste of it was heavenly as it began to flush the blood down her gullet. This impression did not last long, however, as she began to perceive another underlying taste. It took her a few moments to realize she was tasting urine. The water had been diluted with someone’s piss.
She gagged and spat up the water.
A round of hearty laughter ensued from above. Then came another smack to the head. “Look at the mess you made, dog!” Helga leaned forward, grabbed a handful of Livia’s hair, and pushed her face to the floor. “Bad dog! Bad dog! Bad dog!”
Livia was openly sobbing now. She couldn’t help it, regardless of how badly she wished to hold on to some small, tarnished shred of dignity. Any hope of that was out the fucking window now.
Just as she began to believe there would be no end to it until the night was over, the electro-goth music was interrupted by the voice of an announcer. “Ladies and gentlemen,” intoned a man with a pronounced German accent. Whether it was real or affectation, Livia had no idea. She’d met no actual native Germans since coming to Prison 13, but it certainly sounded authentic. “Thank you for coming out to Berlin 666 tonight. As always, we appreciate your patronage. As some of you already know, tonight is a very special night for this establishment.”
Some drunken cheers went up. Belatedly, Livia realized a crowd of some significance had assembled during her time of kneeling at the warden’s feet. Most of the booths along the walls were now occupied. This was larger than the usual Berlin 666 crowd by a considerable margin. She wondered what could possibly bring out this many people. Whatever it was, she hadn’t caught wind of it beforehand and that bothered her. When something special was brewing, she usually knew about it well in advance.
The pressure at the back of her head went away. After a brief hesitation, she risked glancing up at the trio of women above her. It was immediately clear they were no longer paying her even the scantest attention.
A spotlight appeared at the center of the main floor, near the canvas-draped structure. Seconds later, a man holding a microphone stepped into the spotlight. The man had short blond hair and was wearing a tuxedo. For a long moment, he held the microphone at waist level as he stared at the floor, his expression conveying intense contemplation of…something.
Then he lifted his gaze and put the microphone to his mouth. “What you are about to witness has been a long time coming. We here at Berlin 666 are always striving to provide a unique entertainment experience for our valued patrons. Tonight we unveil a spectacle sure to awe even those with the most jaded sensibilities.”
Another, louder round of cheers went up at this proclamation.
“But first,” the man in the tuxedo said, acknowledging the cheers with a nod and a wave of his hand. “A word regarding what you’re about to see. A word about inspiration. Inspiration can come from all sorts of things. In this case, it springs from this institution’s forthcoming return to core third Reich values. I can think of no finer embodiment of that than what we’re unveiling here tonight.”
Livia frowned.
Forthcoming return? Huh.
Some indecipherable grumbling from above suggested the warden and her dinner companions were also puzzled by the man’s phrasing.
The man in the tuxedo went on after another round of cheers died down. “Are you ready to see what lurks beneath this shroud?”
The loudest cheers yet filled the club.
The tuxedoed man pumped a fist in the air and screamed, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…the inferno oven!”
Livia frowned.
The what?
There was a swelling of recorded symphonic music. Somewhere a switch was thrown and the pulley system went into action, lifting the heavy canvas shroud away from the structure it covered. Again, Livia had gotten caught up in the excitement of the moment, but what she felt in the next instant was a deep sense of anticlimax.
The structure didn’t look like much. About ten feet high, it was a simple red-brick thing, consisting of four large, arched pillars at the corners. Set several feet apart, the pillars supported an open, crown-like top piece, also of red-brick construction. Resting within the brick circle was a thick, circular slab of black iron. Beneath the structure, a piece of the floor slid away, revealing what looked like a massive sewer drain. Heavy lengths of chain dangled from still more overhead pulleys. Livia saw that the position of the chains aligned with four iron hooks protruding from the brick circle at the top of the structure. Obviously the thing could be hoisted up to the roof when it wasn’t in use.
Livia was still pondering what exactly it was supposed to be when the spotlights abruptly blinked out, returning the club to its normal dimly-lit state. The symphonic music ceased playing. A period of near silence ensued, one thick with palpable expectation and excitement. There was a buzz of muted, whispered conversation, but nothing more. The women seated above Livia weren’t talking at all.
From somewhere nearby came the thwack of a drumstick against a snare drum. Livia’s head turned in the direction of the sound, which she thought was coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the unlit stage. As she stared in that direction, a spotlight came on, illuminating an open door to the side of the stage.
A man dressed all in black and wearing a black hood over his head came through the door. A snare drum dangled from a strap around his neck. Clutched in a black-gloved hand was a single drumstick. He hit the snare again as he took another step into the club. More hooded men in black followed him through the doorway. These men were not percussionists. Instead they carried black-painted baseball bats with spikes driven through them. Livia wasn’t sure what the point of the hoods was, other than perhaps to make the proceedings seem more ominous. This was Prison 13, after all, where staff members openly perpetrated acts of torture and murder on a daily basis. Identity concealment had never been much of an issue.
The man in the lead continued to hit the snare drum in that slow, ominous way as he wound his way through the middle of the club. He was clearly headed for the so-called “inferno oven”, as were the men following in his wake. In another moment, one last hooded man in black came through the doorway. This man was significantly larger than the others, possessing the bulk and musculature of a barbarian in one of those old sword-and-sorcery movies.
Wound around one of this man’s big hands was the end of a length of heavy chain. The rest of the chain trailed behind him, dragging on the floor. Soon Livia saw that it was attached to a nude, shackled man who came shuffling through the doorway some dozen or so feet behind the barbarian. The shackled man look
ed like a broken, defeated thing. He was scrawny and his body bore telltale marks of recent beatings. His thick gray hair was a frazzled mess, sticking out in all directions. He stared emptily ahead of him as he allowed the barbarian to drag him into the bowels of the club.
The shackled man was not alone. He was the first in a chained procession of nude men and women. All shuffled forward with similar blank looks on their faces, as if they’d all visited the blackest depths of hell and had been rendered permanently numb. More spotlights came on, illuminating the entire procession.
Livia was confused by the presence of the men. They were outnumbered by the women in the procession by a factor of about three-to-one. Still, this was exclusively a women’s prison. Its sole purpose, so she’d been told during her recruitment and throughout her early training, was to house and punish “troublesome” women. So who were these men and why were they here?
The hooded men spread out as they arrived at the brick structure, the ones with the bats taking up positions at the corners while the percussionist moved off to the side and stood in place as he continued to slowly beat the snare drum. The chain rattled on the thing that looked like a sewer grating as the barbarian stepped through one open side of the structure and kept going until he emerged through the other side.
Then he stopped and turned to face the procession of chained men and women standing on the opposite side of the structure. Now all the spotlights converged on the structure and the surrounding area. The beating of the snare drum ceased as the tuxedoed man reappeared.
He cleared his throat as he brought the microphone to his mouth. “We are about to begin. Warden, you and your party may approach for a close-up view if you wish.”
A brief bit of whispering ensued above Livia. The trio of women then rose from the booth and began to move around the table. Helga now held the looped end of Livia’s leash. As the women began to walk away from the booth, Livia started to rise, but Helga gave her a hard, unfriendly shove.
“Hands and knees, dog.”
A heretofore unexperienced level of embarrassment assailed Livia as she trailed after the other women on her hands and knees. She felt eyes on her from every direction. The people assembled here were her co-workers, her supposed equals, and now they were watching as she was being dragged across the floor on a leash. She trembled with rage.
Helga yanked hard at the leash several times, making Livia gag and splutter. The hard floor was rough on her knees. By the time the group of women arrived at the structure, there were several rips in her stockings. As directed, she sat at Helga’s feet and waited for whatever the next part of this was.
The tuxedoed man approached them. “Hello, warden. It is an immense honor to have you with us tonight, as we stand on the brink of a great change. We will begin at your command.”
He held the microphone out to her.
Ms. Wickman frowned, clearly perplexed by some aspect of what the man had said, but she leaned close and spoke just a single word: “Begin.”
The tuxedoed man moved away, saying nothing else as the attention of everyone present shifted to the mysterious structure. Livia sat on her knees less than ten feet away from where the barbarian stood, his end of the chain now wound tight around both of his big hands. She felt a flush of heat an instant before flames leapt up through the floor grating. The flames rose high enough to lick the underside of the iron slab.
Some oohs and aahs went up from the crowd. This was no surprise to Livia. Pyrotechnics always got a crowd going. The nature of the event didn’t matter. It could be a rock concert, a holiday festival, or a decidedly non-traditional celebration like this one. People in general liked to see things burn or explode.
What happened next was more impressive and at last the buildup to the spectacle began to seem justified. The barbarian started pulling on the length of chain, dragging the procession of men and women closer to the flames.
Now Livia understood. This thing actually was an oven, one intended for the simultaneous cooking of multiple human beings. She flashed back to Ms. Wickman’s reference to an “expanded” menu becoming available later. These people weren’t just being put to death. They were being prepared as food.
Livia considered herself pretty inured to nearly all forms of human suffering. As a general rule, she had no respect for the supposed sanctity of human life whatsoever. She definitely did not care whether these men and women lived or died. Cannibalism, however, was a line she had not yet crossed. The thought of ingesting human flesh made her stomach twist. This, however, was a product of helpless instinct. On a more objective, theoretical level, of course, she knew that breaking this taboo should not be a big deal. Meat was just meat, after all, whether it came from a pig or a cow or…a wrinkly, broken-down old man.
Livia’s stomach knotted again.
The barbarian’s muscular biceps bulged as he gave the chain another titanic pull, bringing the procession of doomed prisoners closer to the flames. The appearance of the flames had shaken the chained men and women out of their state of deep apathy. Those thousand-yard stares were all gone. Most of them were screaming and together they resisted the pull of the barbarian, planting their feet on the floor and pulling at the length of chain.
The belated attempt at resistance succeeded only in slowing the inevitable. The hooded barbarian continued to draw them inexorably closer to the flames each time he pulled on the chain. The old man at the front of the procession was now just a few feet away from being drawn into the fire. He cringed away from the flames, extending his head backward as far as he could. His naked body was drenched in sweat from the heat.
The screams of the others got louder as the barbarian pulled on the chain yet again. This time the old man’s flesh was seared by flickering tongues of flame. For a moment there, his screams were the loudest of all, but these died away shortly after he was dragged all the way into the fire.
The old man remained upright within the flames for another moment, the dark outline of his body briefly visible through the dancing columns of orange and crimson. Livia gasped, feeling a deep awe at the macabre beauty of this sight.
Others in the chained procession dropped to their knees or went prone on the floor, a desperate, last-ditch effort to forestall fiery death by overwhelming the barbarian with their combined deadweight. This latest attempt at resistance also had no perceptible effect on delaying the inevitable. They were a dozen in number, but they were no match for this one man. Granted, he was a specimen of unusual size and strength, but that made it no less impressive to Livia.
The other hooded men came away from their positions at the corners of the inferno oven and used their spike-studded bats on the resisters. There were more screams and useless pleas for mercy as sharp metal pierced vulnerable flesh. The assault lasted only a few moments as the barbarian continued to draw the men and women into the flames. Though they were all prone and bleeding from multiple puncture wounds, none of them died until they were drawn into the fire. Their moans of misery as they neared their demise were pitiful and, Livia thought, beautiful.
In a few more moments, the last of them had been pulled into the flames. The fire continued to blaze hotly for another minute as the heavy stench of cooking meat filled the air, an odor so strong it made Livia’s eyes water. Then a loud, metallic clack emanated from somewhere and the flames disappeared, leaving the pile of black, smoldering meat lying atop the grating as a sweet-smelling smoke wafted through the club.
Livia leaned a little closer, squinting at the blackened forms inside the oven. Most were still and obviously dead, but a few were twitching. A solitary weak moan rose up from somewhere within that twisted pile of human wreckage. Hearing this made Livia smile. Someone in there was still alive. Maybe more than just one someone.
Livia thought herself a connoisseur of human suffering. The pain of those still alive had to be incredible, almost beyond fathoming. She again experienced that sense of deep awe, as well as one of gratitude for having be
en allowed to bear witness to a spectacle as devilishly delightful as this one.
She felt a tug on her leash and glanced up to see Helga peering down at her. “Enjoy the show, dog?”
Livia nodded. “Yes. Very much so.”
Helga smirked. “Just remember to always be a good dog. Otherwise it might be you being dragged through those flames one day.”
Livia frowned.
She wished someone would just tell her what she’d done to warrant this treatment. There had to be something she was forgetting about. Some subtle thing. No explanation seemed forthcoming, however, and she was damned if she could think of the answer.
The announcer reappeared, stepping into a new spotlight several feet away from where Livia knelt next to Helga and the other women. He put the microphone to mouth and said, “Who’s ready to eat?”
A roar of approval suggested the entire crowd was more than ready for this very thing. Livia was astonished to find herself surrounded by such enthusiastic cannibals. She wouldn’t have guessed so many of her co-workers would be so eager to taste the long pig. Then again, these were all people who had been recruited for possessing a certain moral malleability. It was the nature of the place. In thinking about it, she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised at all.
“As promised, expanded menus will be circulated shortly,” the tuxedoed man continued once the thunderous applause had subsided. “As you might expect, it will take some time to cut and prepare the various entrees. We appreciate your patience as we work to ensure a fine dining experience for all of you. In the meantime, please enjoy the next part of tonight’s entertainment.”