Blister

by Jeff Strand

  And then, all of a sudden, Blister is no longer hiding away, and Allen thinks he's going to lose his mind.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Allen sounded like he was becoming more and more unhinged as he told the story. He seemed to be simultaneously repulsed by his own words and ecstatic to be finally sharing the experience with somebody.

  I didn't know what to say. It was bad enough when I thought he was just an angry gun-toting guy who wanted me to leave town. Now that I knew he was a full-fledged lunatic, I couldn't think of a way to reason with him. How could I explain that to somebody who'd mutilated an innocent girl that harming me would be a poor decision?

  "Is it okay if I talk?" I asked.

  "Sure."

  "Now that I've heard your story, it's even more obvious that you're blaming the wrong person. How can you not blame Brandon? He's the one who put you in that situation, and then he ran away! He left you to clean up the mess yourself. None of this is Rachel's fault."

  "I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Open the door."

  "I'll make you a deal. If you let me go, I'll leave town and I'll take Rachel with me. You'll never see either of us again."

  "You're going to kidnap her?"

  "No. She'd go willingly. I'm sure of it."

  Allen narrowed his eyes. "Why would you be sure of that? What's happening between you two?"

  This, ladies and gentlemen, was an example of saying the exact wrong thing. The madman holding you at gunpoint loathes Rachel? Tell him that you two are close enough that she'd run away with you! Well done, sir!

  "It's not about me," I said, hoping he couldn't see the desperation on my face as I tried to come up with a new angle. "Rachel hates Lake Gladys. Hates everything about it. I mean, she spends her time in a shed, so why wouldn't she hate it? She asked me to bring her to Jacksonville, and I said no of course, because we barely know each other, and I figured she was just trying to use me to get out of here, but I can tell her I changed my mind. You won't have to worry about either one of us."

  "Uh-uh," said Allen. "If I thought I could trust you, maybe that would work, but I know I can't."

  "You can," I insisted. "You've made it very clear, crystal clear, that you're not someone to mess with. If I'd known that before, I never would have—"

  "Shut up," Allen told me.

  I decided to shut up. Babbling and begging was not going to save my life. I knew that the second he let me go, I'd be on my way to alert the authorities, and he knew that too, so there was no reason to continue to insult his intelligence by pretending otherwise.

  "Open the door," he said.

  I pulled open the door.

  I'm not sure what I expected to see inside. Okay, that's not true: I expected to see a complete horror show. But I didn't know whether it would be a "pile of severed heads in the corner" horror show, or an "intestines hanging from the ceiling like party banners" horror show, or a good old-fashioned "floors soaked with blood" horror show.

  It was none of them. The cabin was mostly empty. There was a stained, torn, rat feces-covered mattress on the floor next to the far wall, and a wooden chair in the center. Some bungee cords were in a pile next to the chair.

  There was also a small coffee table. Unlike everything else in the cabin, this had been recently dusted. Upon the table, propped up against a folded white cloth to display them more prominently, were a straight razor and a blowtorch.

  I decided not to worry if I got shot. I spun around, hoping to grab Allen's arm and give it a really violent twist.

  I'm pretty sure he was anticipating my reaction, because he punched me in the stomach with his free hand, and then when I doubled over, he bashed me on the back of the head with the gun. I fell to my knees.

  I cringed, waiting for him to shoot me in the head, even though the razor and the blowtorch were a pretty clear indicator that he had far worse plans for me.

  I reached for his foot, thinking that I might grab his ankle and yank him off-balance. Instead, he stomped on my hand. I howled with pain. He pushed down harder with his foot, grinding my fingers between the bottom of his shoe and the wooden floor.

  Then he hurried over to the corner. There was a small cloth sack lying there that I hadn't noticed before.

  I couldn't tell if any of my fingers were broken. They certainly felt like they were, but none of them were bent backwards and there were no protruding bones.

  This was, presumably, my opportunity to get the hell out of there, but after a punch to the stomach and blow to the skull I wasn't feeling particularly mobile.

  Allen set down the gun and quickly picked up a small clear bottle and unscrewed the lid. He poured some liquid from the bottle onto a rag as he rushed back to me. I tried to fend him off, but he got the rag over my nose and mouth.

  I didn't know what chloroform smelled like, if anything, but this wasn't it. This smelled like nail polish remover, which Allen must have decided would work just as well.

  He may have been right. My nostrils burned and I couldn't breathe. I tried to cough but he had the rag pressed too tightly against my mouth. My eyes watered. He splashed some more liquid onto the rag, and I thought I was going to choke to death.

  Finally he removed the rag.

  I tried to crawl away, but I couldn't get my bearings. Everything was a blur. I was gasping for breath and then coughing and thinking about how I needed to force myself to stand up and run but I couldn't even manage to crawl.

  Allen clubbed me again with the gun.

  I remained conscious but useless. He grabbed me by my injured hand and dragged me across the floor. I struggled, somewhat, though not in such a way that it prevented Allen from getting me over to the chair.

  He gave my hand an extra squeeze, then lifted me into the chair. This would have been a prime opportunity to elbow him in the ribs, or turn around and try to take a bite out of his throat, but instead I just sort of flopped around.

  As I blinked away tears, he shoved the wet rag back into my face. If Allen wasn't careful, he was going to kill me before he got to disfigure me.

  I got in a weak punch, but it didn't stop him from strapping three bungee cords around my chest. My chance to run away was gone. I was tied to a chair. In a cabin. By a maniac.

  "Don't," I said.

  Allen was not persuaded by the poetry of my speech. It took a couple of punches to get the job done, but soon Allen had strapped my arms and legs to the chair as well. He also put a gag in my mouth, though thankfully it wasn't soaked in nail polish remover. Apparently his extra planning time allowed him to do better than just stuffing a rag all the way into my mouth.

  He knelt down in front of me. "We're in no rush," he said. "I'm going to step outside for a few minutes to give both of us a chance to calm down and catch our breath. I'll be right there, so if you try to get away, I'll hear you."

  I wasn't sure exactly what punishment was implied by this warning. Was he going to do something even worse?

  Allen stood up, walked toward the door, then stopped and turned back around to face me. He looked like he wanted to punch himself. He squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds, then opened them again.

  "I can't do that. I can't leave you alone in here. Not even if you're tied up and I'm right outside."

  It wouldn't have mattered to me—I had no plan for escape.

  Instead, Allen walked over to the mattress, brushed off a clean spot, and sat down on it. Then he just stared at me.

  This wasn't calming me down.

  So what was my escape strategy, if I worked under the assumption that I couldn't talk Allen out of this? These bungee cords were painfully tight. Even if I was able to discreetly scoot the chair a bit, it was right there in the center of the room, and it wasn't as if there was a giant nail jutting from the wall that I could use to cut the cord.

  For the next few minutes I reviewed my available options, and I came up with the following plan: hope that somebody showed up to rescue me.

  Or, if that failed, die of
a heart attack before the really nasty stuff began. I felt like I was on the verge of cardiac arrest anyway. Honestly, I was proud of myself for not simply slipping into a catatonic state.

  "Are you ready?" Allen finally asked.

  I shook my head.

  He stood up. "This is going to be horrible for you," he said. "While I'm doing it, I want you to remember that you brought this on yourself. You had a way out."

  He walked over to the coffee table, and pointed his index finger back and forth between the straight razor and the blowtorch, as if trying to decide which one to select. It looked like something he'd practiced in the mirror, right down to the quizzical facial expression.

  Then he picked up the razor.

  "I couldn't talk when I did this to Blister, and it stole a lot of the fun away," he said. "But now I can talk all I want. And nobody is going to come looking for you here, so I can bide my time. I can watch you sweat. Watch you squirm. Are you thinking about how it's going to feel when I cut your face open, or are you already thinking ahead and worrying about the blowtorch?"

  He walked over to me, slowly. Too slowly. It was almost comical. He was trying way too hard to be menacing. I'm not suggesting for an instant that he wasn't being successful at it, but if I were an uninvolved spectator, I'd be laughing at his effort.

  "You like Blister, huh? Think she's fun? Think she's neat? Maybe you should be more like her. What do you think about that? Maybe you should be more like the person you admire so very much." He held the razor up to my cheek and pretended to consider what to do next. "Wait a minute...I've got it! Maybe you should look like her."

  Allen said this as if it were a great big shock, even though I'd figured out where this was headed long ago. I wished I weren't the one about to be mutilated, so I could scoff at his technique.

  He placed the corner of the blade against my right temple.

  Muffled by the gag, I begged him not to do this.

  Allen grinned and very slowly slid the blade down the side of my face. It wasn't that deep of a cut, as far as I could tell, but it definitely hurt and I could feel the blood trickling down my cheek.

  He cut all the way to the bottom of my jaw.

  He held up the bloody blade for my inspection, then licked it. That is, he pretended to lick it. I'm not sure if he didn't want to taste the blood or if he didn't want to cut his tongue, but either way, he didn't quite lick the blade.

  Again, it would've been amusing if I didn't have blood running down my face.

  "Another cut?" he asked.

  I vigorously shook my head.

  "I agree. Let's mix it up. When I did Blister, it was cut, cut, cut, burn, burn, burn, but it's more interesting to go back and forth, don't you think?"

  He placed the razor back on the coffee table, then picked up the blowtorch.

  I screamed and struggled against the cords, but it wasn't doing a bit of good. If Allen wanted to mangle and burn me beyond recognition, that's what was going to happen.

  He held the blowtorch up to me. "Maybe you'll luck out," he said. "Maybe it won't have any fuel. Maybe I didn't bother to make sure it was in working order before I dragged you all the way out here."

  Allen turned it on. He looked at the small blue flame and smiled. "Oh well. At least you had those few seconds to fantasize about a better outcome, right?"

  I'm not ashamed to admit that, by now, I was crying. Not a stoic single tear, but terrified, panicked, please God don't let this happen to me sobbing. I wasn't sure how Rachel had made it through this experience with her sanity intact, and I hadn't even felt any of the true agony yet.

  He held the flame up to my eye for several seconds.

  "Nope," he said, lowering it. "I wouldn't want to burn out your eyeball. Then you'd only have one eye left to watch me with. I wouldn't want you to miss anything."

  He slapped me in the face, on the side that he'd cut. "Stop thrashing around so much. You can move around all you want after I send you back out into the world, but while you're in my chair, stop moving."

  I stopped moving.

  Allen wiped up some blood with his thumb. "Sorry to have aggravated your wound. You know, when Rachel was in your situation, I thought of this thing where I wanted to tell her how considerate I was, because I was going to cauterize her wounds for her. Just a special little service I could offer. I'm really excited that I finally get to use this line, five years later. So, Jason Tray, because I am a friendly and considerate host, I am going to cauterize your wound, free of charge."

  He placed his free hand tightly over my neck to hold my head in place. Then he held the blowtorch up to the top end of the cut and pressed the flame to my skin.

  I'd been burned before, of course, but it was always: touch hot stove, recoil, apply ice. Sustained burning was simply not something I'd ever experienced. Though I wasn't a strong believer in the afterlife, I could suddenly understand why the fear of an eternity of hellfire influenced some people's daily choices.

  I'm sure there was worse pain in the world, but at the moment I couldn't think of anything more unbearable than what I was experiencing right then.

  Allen giggled as he moved the flame down the entire length of my cut.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When he finished cauterizing the wound, Allen turned off the blowtorch.

  He was no longer giggling, or even smiling.

  He stepped away, and let the blowtorch fall to the floor.

  "This isn't how it was supposed to be," he said, almost pouting. "This isn't fun. There's nothing fun about this. Shit!" He kicked the blowtorch. It spun across the floor and struck the wall.

  I should've felt relieved, but the pain blinded me to any other emotion.

  Allen began to pace. "It's not fair. This isn't working right. Why didn't you just leave? I asked you to leave. Why didn't you do it? Now look at us! Look at what you did to us!"

  He walked over to the cabin door, and now I could focus enough to hope that he might walk out and leave me here. Instead, he stared at the door for a moment, fist clenched, as if considering punching it in frustration. I hoped he did and shattered his hand.

  He didn't. He continued pacing.

  "Why couldn't this have worked out? Why can't anything ever go right for me? Why does everything get fucked up every single fucking time?"

  I had no answer for that, and not merely because I was gagged.

  Allen sat down on the mattress. For a moment I thought he was actually weeping, but he didn't go quite that far.

  Was he going to simply quit torturing me? That level of good fortune seemed unimaginable. Raging psychopaths didn't just wuss out, did they?

  I tried to spit out the gag, because maybe this would be my actual opportunity to talk some sense into him, but it was on too tight.

  Now Allen was whispering something to himself. I couldn't tell what he was saying, but it didn't sound motivational.

  He began to chew on the end of his index finger. Not just the nail, the actual finger.

  He stood up, took a couple of steps toward me, then changed his mind and sat back down on the mattress.

  "Shit!" he said.

  Allen closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, as if he were trying to psyche himself up. Finally, he opened them again and looked over at me.

  He let out a sheepish laugh.

  "What the hell was that, huh?" he asked. "That is seriously humiliating. I don't know what happened. I just lost it there for a minute."

  He stood up.

  "It won't happen again," he assured me.

  My panic returned in full force as Allen went over and retrieved the straight razor.

  "Do you know what Blister has that you shouldn't have?" he asked. "A nose. We'll fix that." It was another line that sounded rehearsed, but that didn't make it any less frightening.

  He walked over to me, waving the razor back and forth in a menacing manner but still looking completely freaked out. If he hadn't planned out his sinister dialogue beforehand, I doubt he
would have been able to say anything clever.

  I didn't want to lose my nose. I really, truly, wholeheartedly did not want to lose my nose.

  Allen stood in front of me. He feinted a swing at my ear, forced a smile, then leaned his face down right next to mine.

  "Is there one last thing you'd like to smell before I do the deed?" he asked.

  There were probably a lot of amusing answers I could have given him, but I wasn't in the right mindset for quipping. I did realize that in Allen's anguish, he'd made one pretty big mistake.

  He'd left himself open to a head butt.

  In action movies, there's an interesting biological phenomenon that when two heads collide, the party who initiated the head butt is immune to the effects of two skulls crashing together. This was not an action movie. To counter the damage to my own cranium, I had to aim for a softer target.

  Allen shouldn't have threatened my nose.

  My forehead smashed into his face, and the crack was as satisfying as the sound of popping open a can of beer on a hot summer day. Allen howled and stumbled away, hands over his nose, blood already spurting between his fingers as the razor clattered on the floor.

  I jerked myself to the right, tipping over the chair. I didn't need it to completely break apart—I just needed to damage it enough to loosen the cords.

  I struck the floor, hard.

  As far as I could tell, all I'd done was cause the right arm of the chair to swivel a bit. I tugged my arm as hard as I could, and it began to slide free.

  Allen was on his knees, wailing.

  I pulled my right arm free, and then reached over and frantically worked on the cords binding the left.

  Blood had run down Allen's face and neck, and was gushing onto the front of his shirt. I had seriously messed up his nose. Not as bad as slicing it off, but it would be several days before he stopped talking funny.

  As I got my left arm free, Allen removed one hand from his nose. Did it hurt more to have your nose broken or to have the side of your face burned? I thought that the fire had to be worse, but Allen was reacting even more poorly to his injury than I had to mine.