“Scream for me, old man,” said my captor, a tall, athletic woman in a half-faced monkey mask and what looked like yoga clothes.
I laughed. “You’ll have to do better than that,” I said.
The acrid smell of sizzling meat and burning hair filled my nostrils as she pressed the glowing brand into my flesh for the third time. Still I laughed.
It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt when she branded me. It did. Like a sonnuvabitch. But the burn I felt when she pressed the red-hot metal against my skin was nothing compared to the flaming torment of Hellfire I felt every time I died. And the cuts? The lashes down my back where she flogged me? The patch on my thigh where she skinned me and forced me to eat “old man bacon?” I’d had worse.
“Do you think this is funny?” she asked, and she dragged her razor-sharp blade from navel to penis. I felt the warmth of blood begin to trickle along my abdomen. “We can keep up the fun all night. I can make you suffer in ways you can’t even imagine.”
“Please,” I said between gasps. “I was at Auschwitz.” Misery was one thing but being upside down for a long time could still make it hard to breath.
“You’re from Idaho and you know it,” she said. “It said so on those dumb trading cards you had that my brothers wouldn’t let me touch.”
She released the lever holding my chains up, and I came crashing down onto the pile of broken glass she’d prepared for me. It was more a token display of torture by this point. She had dropped me onto the pile a few times already, usually when I quipped too wise and she felt the need to punish me. The worst shards had already broken into small bits and embedded themselves into my flesh, held in place by scabbed blood. The fall hurt more than the glass by this point in our relationship.
“I can make this all stop,” she said. “Put you out of your misery. All you have to do is ask.”
If only that were true, I thought. I knew she was definitely holding out on the kill until she broke me. She wouldn’t let me die before I begged her for it, but I was pretty sure she would “keep up the fun” a little longer than that, only letting me die once she’d run out of video tape. I refused to give her the satisfaction. Honestly, all of this torture had the strange effect of taking my mind off my crippling heroin addiction. You’d think I would have wanted to end it, to get that taste of opium in my veins again, but I didn’t. Instead it had given me so much focus.
I wasn’t kidding about Auschwitz. The 1940s were a bad time to be a Jewish woman in Germany, and a worse time to be undying. I still have nightmares of Mengele sometimes. This soccer mom, who would eventually get bored of torturing me in all the bland ways her suburban mind could think of, would kill me and would go home to her Pilates and her dream journals and her Real Housewives of Wherever reruns. She had told me so herself. This was my saving grace.
She was nothing in comparison. Garden variety evil who would kill me the once and go about her life. She wouldn’t perform a living autopsy on me over and over again, year after year the way he did. I would die soon enough, and in dying, I would survive this. I only needed to hold out long enough, endure enough misery and bodily harm that there was no way I would resurrect before she disposed of my body. She didn’t know who I was, who I really was, and that kept her from becoming truly monstrous with me. She thought she only had one chance to kill me, so she wouldn’t disembowel me just to strangle me with my own intestine and see which killed me first, the asphyxiation or the bleeding. I knew she wouldn’t do this because she was enjoying herself too much, and it would end her fun too quickly. She wouldn’t let insects eat me from the inside out “just to see what happens” because it was too hands off. The moment she discovered she had all the time and opportunity in the world, I was lost.
That’s why I would endure every ounce of torture she could throw at me, and I would do it with a smile. I would make her mutilate me, dismember me, cut me to shreds before I gave up the ghost. Anything to stay dead long enough to be good and buried before she noticed my body mending itself. If I died now, she would kill me many times more later. I would not die now. That was my focus.
She seemed to have grown tired of stomping me to into the glass shards. I had gotten lost in thought there for a moment, and almost forgot what she’d been doing. She must have noticed because she adjusted my manacles, binding hands and feet individually. Turning a crank, she hoisted me up again and left me dangling, limbs spread in all directions. It had been good to lie down and let the blood resettle. My ears were starting to go weird from being upside down so long. At least I was up straight now.
“You barely whimpered when I beat you there,” she said with an exaggerated pout. “You’re taking all the fun out of this. If I weren’t getting ten grand for my efforts, it wouldn’t be worth it.”
She turned from me, and before I realize what had happened, she’d crushed my testicles with a vicious blow from a massive knot of rope known as a monkey’s fist. I yelped and cried out in agony. Years of experience with torture or not, a surprise blow to the nuts still hurt like you wouldn’t believe.
“That’s more like it,” she said and assaulted me again, just missing a direct hit. It grazed the old jewel bag, but after the torment of the last blow, I barely even noticed it by comparison.
“Your aim’s a little off,” I said through gritted teeth.
She flew into a rage at my words and hammered blow after blow on my body. It was like going fifteen rounds with Joe Frazier, only instead of the first fourteen rounds, it was nothing but the fifteenth round over and over, when you’re already tired and battered to hell. Several teeth flew across the room, and blood filled my reddening vision. I clenched my jaws, refusing to scream. Damn monkey’s fist. All pain, little damage. I needed lacerations, severed limbs, things that would take days to mend.
“I will give you this,” she said. “You are one tough nut to crack.” Her mouth and eyes went wide with a smile as she pointed to my bruised and bleeding crotch.
“Get it? Cracked nuts?” She punctuated the last word with another impact square to my tender bits, and I screamed again. “I am hysterical!”
I thought she was about to deliver another low blow when we heard her phone ring. She cocked an eyebrow. No, not her phone. My phone. “You won’t scream if I answer that, will you?”
“Of course not,” I said, but neither of us believed it.
“Well then,” she said with a devilish grin. “In that case…”
As she crossed to her table of torture implements, she let her words hang in the air as though she had chained them up right along with me. After considering her options, she selected a pair of pruning shears and grabbed a large kitchen knife she’d left heating in the fire. Good. A dismemberment. I needed that. Approaching like a blushing bride, she eased her way to my side, nuzzled my neck, and then cut off my testicles, cauterizing the wound with the flat of the glowing blade. Dropping the sheers and knife, she picked up my scrotum and wiggled it in my face.
“Wooo, wooks wike Mistuh Man got a vasectomy,” she said in what was perhaps the most obnoxious baby voice I’d ever heard. Granted, it may have been more the situation than the voice, but why split hairs?
“They call this a tea bag, right?” she said, draping my own testicles over my eyes. She snapped a Polaroid of her smiling beside me in my moment of shame.
“Wow, do they still make those? What is this the 1980s?” I asked, hoping to goad her into similar violence.
“If I learned nothing from all of these nude celeb leaks, it’s this. You can hack a phone and steal photos from the other side of the world,” she said, “but you can’t hack a Polaroid.”
She slipped on a pair of blue latex gloves and produced a shriveled sort of red pepper from who knew where, dangling it in front of me. “Do you know what this is?”
“What’s left of your dead and desiccated heart?”
“This,” she said with a flourish of her pepper, “is a Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper in the world. It averages over one poi
nt six million Scoville units and caps out at over two million.”
She took a blade to its blood red flesh and carved it open. Then, with the panache of an infomercial salesman, she presented the pepper to me, squeezed its juices into my many open wounds, then ground the pulp into the bloody mess where I once kept Dan Germany’s family jewels. The fiery anguish I feel when I’m dead is the worst burning I have ever known, but this was a pretty damn close second. Despite my best efforts to save my screams for the truly damaging stuff, I howled like a man possessed.
“Tell me,” she said, “does this feel like the average one point six or the full two million Scoville variety?”
Much though I wanted to spit out some witty retort, I couldn’t bring myself to stop screaming.
“Now what is it the kids said these days?” She stuffed my testicles into my still wide-open maw and duct taped my mouth shut. “Suck my balls?”
Pulling my phone from the pocket of my discarded trousers, she pursed her lips in mock disappointment. “Oh hum,” she said. “You’ve made me miss the call. Now I’ll have to call them back.”
I let out a groan through the testicles and tape, more to keep her bloodthirsty than anything else and not because my wounds still burned beneath the fiery touch of pepper. When it came to torture, I had to confess she was more creative than I gave her credit for.
Waving me off to silence me, she turned and walked away, dialing as she went, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the thousand little miseries to keep me company. I could just barely hear her outside the cabin.
“Hello?... Who?... No, I found this phone by the side of the road… Boston… Yes, Massachusetts… I’m sorry to hear that…”
I took the opportunity to look around the cabin, anything to take my mind off the vile sensation of sweaty, hairy testicles in my mouth instead of where they should be. It was large for a cabin. One room. Old. I was more than a little impressed at the effort she’d put into turning this lovely summer cottage into a quaint torture chamber, especially considering she probably did all the work herself. The adjustable pulley and winch system that could easily be rigged to hang me spread eagle like I was now or dangled from a single point like earlier. She had many well-crafted shelves fully stocked with all manner of torture devices, and I’d been tortured enough over the millennia to recognize a true, thorough multicultural approach to inflicting pain and humiliation when I saw it.
She even took proper care of the fireplace so the flames got plenty of oxygen and could burn their hottest, keeping brands and pokers glowing red for wound after wound. As someone who had spent many unfortunate occasions in places like this, I knew firsthand the impact a poorly maintained fire had on proper poker heating. You had to have someone watching it constantly to keep the flames going and even then, your torture implements wouldn’t hold a good burn for more than a couple of pokes. I could rest soundly knowing this woman was no mere torture enthusiast, but a dedicated student of the arts. Lucky me.
All the while, she continued having her conversation of lies just outside. “I didn’t know who to turn it in to so I thought I’d just reset it and give it to my son… Well, if you give me your address I can mail it back to you… Uh huh… No problem… You’re welcome… I hope you find him… Bye.”
She poked her head in the door. “That was your friends,” she said. “The good news is they care very deeply for you and are worried sick about you. The bad news is they think you’re in Boston, so…”
She bobbed her hands as though weighing scales and scrunched up her face, exaggerating the ethical dilemma she was pretending to have.
I said something mean, trying to get her back in the appendage-severing mood, but with a pair of balls taped into my mouth, I could pretty much only speak in variations of the letter M.
“Yeah, I know,” she said, feigning empathy with the sort of pouty faces you saved for children and puppies. “But here’s some more good news for you. You get a little break because it’s two fifteen, and I have my Pilates class soon, and then I have to pick up the kids and take them to soccer practice, but I’ll be back after I’ve made dinner for the family and seen everyone off to bed.”
After pausing the video camera, she stepped out and shut the door behind her. I was about to begin what would no doubt be a series of brutal, but futile efforts to escape when she popped her head back in the door.
“Oh, and in case you get hungry, I left you a snack.”
With that, she was gone again. I looked around at the table, the fireplace, the floor. Nothing to eat and no way to get to it if there were. Then I realized what she meant. Already disgusted and humiliated, I lurched into dry heaves, saved from choking on my own vomit only by the fact that the only thing I’d eaten since yesterday were a few small flayed strips of my own skin.
With her gone, my strength crumbled. There was no one here to take satisfaction in my pain and suffering, no one here to decide she had savored my screams enough to kill me. All the misery and anguish I had kept pent up for the past day and a half came flooding out. I screamed into the tape and testicle gag. I raged against the chains that cut deep into my ankles and wrists. Overly salty tears flooded my face, filling the dozens of cuts she’d inflicted. It didn’t burn like the Carolina Reaper, but it was a new pain, and new pain always hurts. Part of me wanted to die, to break down and collapse into the burning void of death, and once I came out on the other side, enjoy the sweet release of heroin, but I knew how that ended. She would discover my secret, and the next few days of torture would stretch out into decades. What I wouldn’t give to die like everyone else.
I screamed until I began to choke on my own testicles, and I realized if I wasn’t careful, I would die. Then she would come back to find me recovered and ready for a whole new sort of game. Unacceptable. My mouth was too full to work the duct tape off, so I couldn’t spit them out. I closed my eyes, gave myself five seconds to be furious, and then I began to chew.
My stomach couldn’t decide if it should revolt against my meal or be grateful for anything it could get. I ran my tongue against the inside of the tape as best I could to loosen it, trying to ignore the gag reflex brought on by pubic hair stuck in my throat. I was only barely able to work the tape free before the vomit came. At least I didn’t drown in it. Again.
The rattle of chains held a steady dialog with my pathetic whimpers as I pulled at my iron bonds. Blood ran from my wrists and ankles and pooled around the restraints, but so far hadn’t done a thing to grease up the manacles and ease my escape. Flesh tore. Bones dislocated. Still I was no closer to being free than I had been when my captor left. For a while I considered in all seriousness trying to gnaw my own arm off, but I would bleed out and die soon after. Even though I would still be dead when that psychopath returned, a number of my smaller wounds would have healed, and she would probably notice that I had more arm left on my body than I should. The stump half way down my bicep wouldn’t match where the dangling arm cut off at the shoulder. A few hours weren’t enough time to grow an arm, but it was plenty of time to grow suspicion.
I wondered if maybe the Marquis was right when he said TheRealTruth.org was full of lies. If the government was watching, listening in on everything we did and said, tracking our every movement, surely, they would have figured out that I had been kidnapped by a crazy monkey woman and tortured for the past two days straight. I imagined the government didn’t have time to get involved with every little crime, but this seemed a bit severe for them not to be paying attention, not to send help. Maybe they weren’t invading our privacy like a Big Brother police state, monitoring every word and deed of every man, woman, and child in America. Maybe the technology didn’t even exist, and it was all Hollywood. I felt like an idiot for ever having believed it.
My will to live crushed beneath the weight of all that had happened, I was alone, hanging chained and nude and dismembered. Humiliated. Blistered. Digesting my own genitals. I was alone with the torment of severed body parts and of scalding peppe
rs rubbed into countless wounds, deep and shallow, precise and jagged, and beneath that the bite of grime, sweat, and tears washing at the smaller cuts and abrasions, and deeper still, the dull throbbing ache of a body more bruised than not. All of this pain, all of this agony built on a foundation of eighty years of hard living, countless broken bones, and the usual aches of growing old, coupled with the howling, all-consuming rage of an unfed heroin addiction. Auschwitz nearly destroyed me because it was long, because I could see no end, nothing but torture for all eternity. My own living Hell. But moment for moment, this won hands down.
I wanted to die. I wanted to die so badly, and not just so I could let the drugs wash away the pain and injury. I just wanted to die. A singular thought, my entire being focused to a pinprick on that one, self-destructive desire. But I couldn’t. I would have cursed God, but I didn’t believe in Him. Not after this long. I had been saintly for centuries. I’d even been sainted several times, but Heaven would not take me. I had been vicious and brutal. I had been selfish and cruel, but Hell would not keep me. I had met my end in battle countless times, but never had I found myself in Valhalla. How could I believe in reincarnation when I had died and been resurrected thousands of times, but I had never been reborn? Not really, at least. I had never been to yomi or communed with the kami. I had never stood in the Hall of Two Truths and had my heart weighed against a feather. And when I died, I suffered. I burned. How then could I believe that there was nothing after death? I couldn’t even believe in nothing. How could I believe anything?
The despair only made it worse, and all the while, scratch scratch.
Please, if there is any power out there, be it one god or many, aliens or man, please let me die.
The Daredevil Corpse (The Departed Book 2) Page 12