Memento Amare

by G. D. Cox

  "Come on, then," he growls, flaunting rows of bloody teeth behind a split lower lip. "Stop wasting my time."

  He's still cackling as Gray-Eyes steps back while two other men also in dark green fatigues approach with their meaty fists and steely eyes. He gets no warning before they're letting those fists loose upon his face and torso, taking turns every few minutes without so much as a word to each other. They don't hold back. He feels each punch all the way down to his toes in his Italian leather shoes. One brutal blow to his left cheek snaps his head back and rattles his teeth and makes black stars speckle his vision. Another brutal blow, then another to his chest has him wheezing and biting back a long groan. He curls up as much as he can with his arms and legs bound to the chair. Fuck, those hit him directly where the kukri had stabbed through him, fuck, that hurts -

  You're a tough bastard, sir. This is nothing. You came back from the dead after being stabbed clean through with a kukri. You can survive anything, babe.

  He vomits the contents of his belly onto the cement floor after a swift volley of punches to his abdomen. He feels a flicker of satisfaction when some of the vomit splashes onto the boots of the fuckers beating him. The emotion doesn't last long, not when they go for his ribs this time and it feels like he's being stabbed by that kukri all over again.

  Maybe it's him thinking about Clyde and hearing Clyde even now when Clyde is dead that fucking hurts so much. Maybe it's him knowing now that there are some things he can't survive.

  Either way, the pain won't last forever. It won't.

  Blood trickles from his nose and mouth as he huffs and hunches forward as much as the ropes permit during a lull in the pummeling. He stares down blearily at the crimson spots and streaks staining his dark gray trousers. He tastes and smells iron. He hears the bastards moving around in the cell. He hears the metallic squeak of hinges, as if a metal box is being opened. He hears straps and buckles being fastened. He hears water sloshing in a metal bucket.

  He manages to suck in a breath before icy water is tossed on him. It drenches him from head to toe and soaks through his ripped dress shirt and trousers. Well, shit. He knows what's coming. He's read enough reports by other agents about this particular method of torture. Just a matter of time until he himself experiences it, really.

  "Oh," he mumbles when he sees the intimidating, weaponized gloves two other terrorists are now wearing, studded with large metal knobs along the fingers and attached to wires and some sort of portable battery pack strapped to the upper arms.

  "You killed many of us, last time you come here," Gray-Eyes says in the background, staring at him all the while. "You and your dog."

  He's not a dog, Cole thinks, glaring right back with fearless eyes. He's a man.

  "One of those you killed was Enre's brother." Gray-Eyes tilts his head at one of the giant bastards wearing those gloves. "And Enre is, how do you say, unhappy. He wants you to feel unhappy too."

  Cole swivels his eyes towards Enre, a hairy mammoth of a man with a baby-like face and the eyes of a mad animal. Oh, Enre is mad all right, those massive paws clenching and unclenching, nostrils flaring.

  With water rolling down his forehead and cheeks, Cole stares up at him and nonchalantly asks, "So, which one was your brother? The ugly one I shot like a dog? Or the uglier one I kicked into that big grinder?"

  He doesn't bother to say that he'd had absolutely no choice but to kill that terrorist with a shot to the head, seeing as the guy was trying to shoot him in the head at the time. He doesn't bother to say that it'd been much more bad luck than a premeditated kick for the other bastard that that unidentifiable, enormous machine with grinding gears and metal teeth had been right there when the guy went over the safety railing of the platform they were battling on.

  Enre lets out a loud, rumbling growl and charges forward to grab the folds of his ripped and drenched dress shirt. Enre tears it off his shivering torso. He can feel many eyes upon the scars on his chest, upon that bumpy, three-inch-long, vertically straight scar inches away from his right nipple.

  Oh. He's in real trouble now. The scar may as well be a target blinking with neon-glowing, capital letters: "Hit me here. Hard."

  The weaponized gloves make a high-pitched, whining noise as they power up.

  "Do not stop until he is screaming," Gray-Eyes says. "Until he pleads for mercy."

  Cole gets just one more second to glare at Gray-Eyes, to say fuck you with his eyes. Then the first punch hits. It pounds him directly on that scar on his chest, a sledgehammer upon knitted flesh. The pain from that is bad enough, but the current of electricity that quakes through his body is a hundred times worse. He feels like every cell in his body is on fire, exploding from the force and pain. He convulses on the chair, his limbs straining against the ropes, his head flung back, the tendons of his neck bulging, his teeth bared in an agonized grimace. The contact lasts only seconds but he feels every one of those seconds stretch into a thousand years each.

  They don't even let him catch a breath before he's punched again in the same spot, making him convulse even harder.

  I love you, Clyde, he thinks with each strike, biting his lips bloody to rein in his screams.

  I love you, he thinks, when the punches hammer into him over and over and over and he can't take it anymore and does scream. I will always love you, Clyde.

  He hears Gray-Eyes demanding to know where their mind-fucking device is and what the GATF is doing with it from far, far away. He dry heaves and pukes bitter bile on himself and on the ground. He thinks he manages to spit blood onto Gray-Eyes' face even while his muscles are jittering out of control and the ropes are about the only things making him stay upright on the chair.

  He convulses and dry heaves and screams many more times before they're through with him for the day.

  Not once does he plead for mercy.

  He topples off the chair and onto coarse cement in an ungainly, juddering mess after they untie him. Someone grabs one of his ears to lift his spinning head off the ground and then someone's looping rope around his neck and then he's being dragged bodily across the floor and out the cell and down a fluorescent-lit, stone-walled hallway to another room. He chokes and claws at the noose around his neck, grappling at the rope behind his head in a futile effort to ease the pressure. The fuckers snicker and kick him in the sides and legs.

  He's still shuddering from the continuous electric shocks he'd received when they drop him in the middle of a much smaller, darker cell and remove the rope from around his neck. They slam the cell door shut behind them and lock it with a reverberating clang. He lies sprawled on his left side. He may have pissed on himself at some point during the torture. His face hurts like hell. He pants and tries to suck oxygen into a chest that's hurting like hell. He's sure he has fractured ribs. The ribs on the right side hurt far more. His heart is beating oddly, out of rhythm, fluttering for seconds and then resuming a more normal pace and then fluttering again.

  If they put him through the same torture soon, his heart may not be able to tolerate it. He may suffer a heart attack. He may really die then. And the thought is ... comforting.

  I love you, Clyde, he thinks in the shadows, curling up as much as his battered torso will allow, his bruised eyes half-shut, his breaths shallow and quivery and deafening in the silence. I hope you're okay.

  Hours later, Gray-Eyes returns with Enre and three other terrorists. They drag him back to the same spacious cell with a rope looped around his neck again. They wallow in his ragged gasps and his struggling with the rope. They kick him in the belly and on his back when he tries to fight back in the hallway. Enre, the stupid asshole, gets too bold and careless and comes close enough for Cole to burrow his teeth into Enre's ugly baby-face and rip off a huge chunk of it. He'd been aiming for Enre's carotid artery.

  Enre is far beyond mad now, bleeding profusely from his fucking ugly baby-face and shouting Croenian curses at him while being barely restrained by the other three terrorists. Gray-Eyes has the rope of th
e noose wrapped around one fist. He barks some orders in Croenian at them, and they haul Enre out of the cell, leaving a kneeling and still gasping Cole alone with Gray-Eyes. Cole spits Enre's blood out of his mouth.

  Well, then. Looks like Gray-Eyes has something else planned for him today.

  He knows it's going to be bad, real bad, when Gray-Eyes steps back and two other cronies hurriedly enter the cell and attempt to manhandle him down flat onto the coarse, grimy cement. There's a part of him that's berating him, telling him to just go along with things and stop fighting, stop fighting and just give up. There's a much bigger part though that just won't quit, that instructs his body and arms and legs to ferociously attack with decades of experience of physical combat.

  He shatters the forearm of one of the fuckers with a precise kick. The fucker's scream is shrill and drowns out Gray-Eyes' hollering as he slams his elbow into the throat of the other fucker. He's about to whip his arm around the fucker's neck and twist his head to snap said neck when his own neck is abruptly throttled by callous rope.

  Fuck! The rope around his neck!

  Gray-Eyes yanks him onto the ground like a leashed, rabid dog about to be shot dead. He goes down hard, cement smacking his right shoulder and hip, stomped down on his contused chest by a foot in a black, leather boot. Gray-Eyes sneers down at him as more cronies jump on him and flip him onto his bare belly and chest even as he thrashes and snarls at them. One of them presses his head down, crushing his right cheek against cement. Two more hold down his arms. He feels Gray-Eyes sitting on the back of his thighs and one of Gray-Eyes' hands on his bare lower back.

  Then Gray-Eyes leans forward and brandishes a blade before his eyes.

  It's a pocket knife with a four-inch-long, stainless steel Bowie-style blade and a contoured, stone-wash handle. It's soiled. It fits in Gray-Eyes' hand as if it's an extension of its possessor. It's a small blade but it will do damage.

  Oh god.

  "Ah, Agent Cole, this is nothing new to you," Gray-Eyes says as if commenting on the weather.

  Cole stares at the knife and tells himself to breathe, breathe.

  "Tell us where the device is, and what you are doing with it."

  "Fuck. You," Cole says slowly and purposefully. Blood sprays onto cement from his mouth.

  "No, fuck you," Gray-Eyes says.

  Cole feels the tip of the knife on the left side of his lower back, between his kidney and spine. Then the tip pierces him and then more and more of the blade sinks into his flesh and pure agony becomes his god, his whole universe. The blade keeps going and going through his split skin and into him. He hears someone laughing, a demented and boisterous sound but it isn't him, no, because his face is so contorted that his eyes are squeezed shut and he's screaming and screaming.

  "Tell us, and I will stop," he hears Gray-Eyes say when Gray-Eyes is done laughing, when his voice cracks and he can't scream anymore and can only wheeze and quake on the floor and try pitifully to get away from the hands pressing him down, from the blade.

  Oh god, oh god, when he'd been stabbed with the kukri, it had been so swift and vicious that his brain could not process it immediately, that the agony hadn't struck immediately. When it did strike, he'd been conscious for seconds, for a minute at most. He had Clyde holding him in those strong, muscular arms, keeping him safe long after he blacked out. But this stabbing is something else entirely. This is a calculated and slow mutilation of his body, intended to hurt him as much as possible.

  There won't be a team of GATF medics to save him this time.

  No, Clyde won't be here to find him and bring him home this time.

  "I can move this blade through your meat without ever mortally harming you. I have much practice," Gray-Eyes says as if commenting on the beauty of blood-red flowers. "I can do this all day."

  Cole feels no shame in screaming again as Gray-Eyes drags the knife through his flesh and rends it like melted butter. It hurts so fucking bad that he can't even move anymore. He can only shudder violently from head to toe under unyielding hands and let his eyes and nose run, and wish he's already and truly dead.

  He hears Gray-Eyes demand answers again. He says nothing. He doesn't care that the fuckers are laughing at him and reveling in his suffering as he weeps and screams on and on. He doesn't know how many more times Gray-Eyes drags the blade through the flesh of his back. All he knows is that it hurts, it hurts and that his blood is flowing hot from his back and over his flanks to puddle on the floor.

  And he says nothing.

  The pain won't last forever. It won't. It won't.

  "Truly, Agent Cole, you live up to your reputation."

  He blacks out when Gray-Eyes finally wrenches the knife from his bleeding, mangled flesh.

  He awakens an indeterminate time later on the floor of the smaller, darker cell. It takes his pain-addled brain an eon to realize that his lower back has been sloppily bandaged. He finds this funny. He almost laughs aloud at it, wondering what the point is even of these fuckers doing that for him. The knife was clearly unclean, rife with bacteria. His wounds must be infected for he very much doubts that they would have bothered going as far as to disinfect them.

  He's going to die. Probably within days. The thought is still comforting. Perhaps more comforting than ever.

  It takes him another eon to notice the transparent, plastic bowl of water placed on the floor and out of his reach. The water appears unexpectedly clear and fresh. A part of him is telling him to just stay where he is to conserve his energy. A bigger part is telling him to get to the water and at least drink some of it.

  Maybe ... maybe it isn't water. Maybe it's some kind of poison. Maybe the fuckers are curious to see what he's going to do, see if he's going to give up and just wait to die or fight some more.

  He stares at the bowl of liquid with slitted, swollen eyes. He breathes with shallow and quivery inhalations through parted, blood-stained lips.

  It takes him yet another eon to simply shift his arms. To drag himself on his belly with his hands and arms inch by inch across the floor to the bowl. His lower back and ribs feel like they're steeped in a sea of flames by the time he can touch the bowl with shaking fingers. Cold sweat rolls down his temples as he pants and shivers and tugs the bowl nearer to his face.

  He still smells and tastes only iron as he dips his head and slurps up the liquid. It's cool and quenches his thirst. It assuages the fissures of his lower lip, many of them caused by his own teeth.

  He collapses back onto his left side after several mouthfuls. He lays his unwieldy, aching head on the floor, letting his eyes shut. He doesn't know how much time passes, but he doesn't suffer any more pain than he already does. He doesn't die.

  Clean water. A tiny mercy.

  When Gray-Eyes returns again with his cronies, they have no mercy or questions for him anymore. Cole doesn't know how long he's been their prisoner or what day it is. He doesn't know if Nate and the GATF are still searching for him or think him already dead.

  The fuckers don't bother dragging him to the other cell this time. They switch on a light bulb in the cell and they string him up by the wrists with ropes to a metal hook dangling from the ceiling, the tips of his shoes grazing the floor. He doesn't care that he's letting out piteous noises as they do so, roughly stretching his arms up and making his whole chest throb a hundred times worse.

  This time, they use expandable batons to beat him. Only once does he cry out, when one of them clobbers his lower back, directly on the bandaged, deep gashes there. He's voiceless otherwise. He doesn't have the energy to react anymore to the waves of pain, no matter how many times they strike him.

  I can't remember your laugh anymore, Clyde, he thinks as he's whacked in the belly yet again. I only remember his and not yours.

  Gray-Eyes stares at him all the while from the shadows, silent and stiff like a corpse.

  "I am going to throw your body into the sea, Agent Cole," Gray-Eyes says to him after many more eons as he dangles from the hook and swa
ys, his head bowed and chin lolling on his chest. "And your body will lie on the seabed, food to its vermin in the dark."

  Cole somehow dredges up the strength to raise his head to look his captor in the eye. He somehow dredges up one last dart of spirit and launches it at Gray-Eyes in the form of a grisly, insolent smirk.

  Fuck you, pal. Thanks for the free ride to hell.

  Gray-Eyes stares at him with those corpse-like eyes from a corpse-like face. Gray-Eyes says nothing.

  Eventually, he's released from the hook. He falls to the ground in a bruised, gory heap. He feels nothing. With his temple pressed to cement, he stares with almost shut eyes at Gray-Eyes' polished boots as Gray-Eyes stands over him and stares down at him. Gray-Eyes does nothing else.

  After many, many more eons, Gray-Eyes walks away and out of his sight. The door of the cell slams shut and locks with a reverberating clang again, but he doesn't hear it. He doesn't hear anything. Not his breaths, not his heart (but then, he stopped hearing it months ago, after removing his wedding ring and necklace from around his neck). He can't feel his legs anymore. He's going numb all over and what's left of his reasoning mind tells him that this is bad. He thinks he's burning up from a fever. He's cold and yet not shivering. He's bleeding and bleeding from his lower back and it's bad, real bad.

  Yeah, he's in real trouble this time. No one's going to come in time. No one's going to come to save him this time. And he's ... just fine with that.

  He doesn't remember shutting his eyes. When he peels them open again, there's a transparent, plastic bowl of water on the floor, set even farther out of his reach than before. He stares at it with slitted, swollen eyes. He breathes with shallow and quivery inhalations through parted, blood-stained lips. He stares at it and doesn't move at all.

  A fresh rivulet of blood trickles from the side of his mouth. It drips onto the cement under his face. A lake of it is growing under his body.

  He's tired. So tired. He just ... wants to sleep. He just wants to stop tasting and smelling iron. To stop hurting, stop thinking, stop feeling anything and just ... sleep.