These Monstrous Deeds

by T. J. Hamel

  “Who won’t stay?”

  “Elliot.” Casey sighs, then yells, “Hey, you!” He raises his chin and snaps his fingers towards the guy by the bucket. The guy looks up with wide eyes. “Don’t be a dipshit. Eat the bread. They’ll come clean us soon enough.”

  The sick guy curls in on himself, tears falling down his bright red face. Carter prays that’s never him. He focuses on Elliot instead. He just met the kid, but his chest already aches thinking of what will happen to him after this cell. It’s going to be worse. He knows it. Whatever is next for all of them, it’s going to be so much worse.

  “Why is Elliot not going to be around long?” Carter asks, hoping Casey doesn’t judge him for the sadness in his voice.

  Casey doesn’t judge, but he does shrug like he’s unaffected by the whole thing. Maybe he is. Maybe Carter will learn how to be like that soon. “The little ones never linger. They’re in too high of demand. Harder to snatch a minor, ya know? Everyone looks for a kid.”

  “Maybe this time it’ll be different.”

  “Yeah.” Casey shrugs again. “Maybe.”

  But it’s not different.

  The guards come for Elliot two bread deliveries later. Him and another young boy Carter hadn’t noticed before. Elliot screams and sobs, reaching out for Carter and Casey as he’s dragged away. “Don’t let ‘em take me! Don’t let ‘em take me!”

  Casey turns to face the wall, pressing his forehead against it, his entire body trembling. Carter tries to fight. He shoves guys out of the way, pushing forward, hands outstretched, desperately trying to get to Elliot before they take him away. He manages to get his fingers to brush Elliot’s. Then a guard hits him in the temple with a baton, and everything goes fuzzy.

  Suddenly, Carter feels like he’s suffocating. Trapped. Bodies are pressing in, his vision not working properly, his lungs full of water instead of air, his feet and hands not obeying their orders to fucking move.

  Someone grabs Carter from behind. He gasps, trying to remember how to fight. All he can think is that this is it. This is when he’s going to die.

  But then his eyes focus, and his lungs recognize the air they’re getting, and the world tilts back to where it belongs, and Carter sees that it’s Casey who has him. The young man is running his hands over Carter’s skin, calming him. When Carter starts to sob, Casey pulls him in and holds him close. He lets Carter sob uncontrollably until he has nothing left inside himself. When they pull apart, he sees tears on Casey’s face as well. He thought maybe he’d feel better knowing Casey isn’t as unaffected as he pretends to be, but it feels even worse.

  Carter goes to sleep a while later, the thought in his mind that maybe it’d be nice if he doesn’t wake up again.

  But Carter does wake up.

  He keeps waking up.

  He watches more Elliots come and go, never mastering the art of unattachment. He feels each loss like they belong to him. In a way, they feel like they do.

  The one constant is Casey. Through all of the coming and going, the playroom visits, the stale bread, the shit bucket dumps, the needle-like washes from the power hose, Casey is there. Brave. Steady. Wise. Always giving part of his bread to whoever had been taken by the guards most recently, their bodies usually needing the extra boost to heal.

  Casey is always reminding the boys not to be idiots and try to fight the guards – Carter being one of them, more than once. Carter learns that Casey’s father is a police officer, something that immediately makes things about the young man clear. He would make his father proud. When Carter tells him that, Casey looks away and locks his jaw. It’s the second time since meeting him that Carter sees Casey cry.

  Casey’s biggest lesson for anyone willing to listen is four phrases.

  Keep calm.

  Breathe.

  Pay attention.

  Wait for your moment.

  They’re his tips for survival. Carter uses the mantra often, usually when the guards are pulling boys from the cell as they scream and cry for help. Keep calm. Breathe. Pay attention. Wait for your moment.

  Carter keeps playing his game, imagining future scenarios, but one thing has changed since Casey. When Carter plays now, he’s in it to win.

  When Carter plays now, he’s playing for freedom.

  ◆◆◆

  The guards come for Casey.

  Carter is in the middle of helping a little boy calm down from a panic attack, rubbing circles on his back as he promises things that he knows are lies. Casey is slumped in the corner nearest to them, half-asleep as he tries to heal from his last round of playroom torture. He had just finished coughing up blood.

  It’s Scarface who opens the heavy metal door. Two others are behind him. One grabs a man in his late twenties, yanking him into the hallway. The other points at Casey.

  Casey, who hasn’t even been back in the cell long enough for bread or water.

  Casey, who is still bleeding between his legs.

  Casey, who can barely stand on his feet when Scarface summons him.

  “No!” Carter yells, panic rising in his chest. He steps in front of Casey, ignoring his friend when he tells Carter it’s not worth it. “Take me. Just – just use me. He can’t take any more.”

  Scarface sneers at Carter. “Get out of the fucking way, Beckett.”

  Carter refuses. “Take. Me.”

  “Carter,” Casey rasps, his trembling hand touching Carter’s shoulder. He tries to give Carter a smile. It’s weak. Maybe Carter would buy it better if Casey didn’t start using Carter’s body to hold himself up. “You’re gonna be okay, Car.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about.” Carter looks at the guard who had pointed at Casey, narrowing his eyes. “I won’t let you take him.”

  The guard looks at Scarface, the both of them smirking before breaking out into awful laughter. The sound echoes in Carter’s chest until he feels small and insignificant. He stands his ground, though. This is Casey. He won’t let these men take him. Not without a goddamn fight.

  “Please,” Carter begs, hating the way his voice cracks. “Just take me.”

  Scarface comes forward, his bulging veins and wild eyes making him look like a comic book villain. Carter gulps, but he doesn’t back down. When Scarface grabs Carter’s bicep in a painful grip, Carter is insane enough to feel relief. He might be in for a world of torment, but at least he saved Casey from having to endure it in the state he is. That’s something.

  That’s enough.

  But then Scarface uses the grip to tug Carter off to the side so the other guard can come forward and grab Casey.

  Carter panics. He forgets everything Casey taught him.

  Instead, Carter fights.

  He fights with everything his poor body has. He hits and kicks and screams. He catches Scarface by surprise, clawing his nails across the bastard’s face hard enough to draw blood. It leaves three angry marks opposite the cheek with the deep, purplish scar. Carter finds great satisfaction in that. He takes advantage of the man’s temporary shock, bringing his knee to his groin. When he doubles over with a grunt, Carter brings his knee up one more time, connecting with the asshole’s nose. An awful crunching sound comes from the man as bright red blood bursts from his face and splatters all over Carter’s bare skin.

  Carter grins.

  Then Carter is being grabbed from behind, an arm around his neck to choke him, his knees buckling with panic. He sees Casey, a third guard dragging him down the hall already. Casey looks half-asleep as he stumbles along. He sees the younger boy he had just been helping with a panic attack, now crumpled on the floor as a guard kicks him in the side. Another guard is hitting boys with a black baton, not even looking as he swings wildly.

  “See what you’ve done?” the guard holding him growls in his ear, his arm getting tighter around Carter’s throat. Cries erupt around them. Screams. Sobbed pleas. The sound of boots and hands and sticks hitting defenseless skin. “Time you learn a lesson, whore.”

  Carter runs out of ai
r then, his world turning into a swirl of chaos and pain, all of it his fault, his fault, his fault… until everything is blissfully black.

  ◆◆◆

  When Carter wakes up, he’s disoriented. Uncertain. Things are… different. He’s not in the cell. The place is too cold. Too dark. Too quiet. There aren’t bodies pressing against him, damp with either sweat or ice-cold water depending on when they last had a visit from the hose. There’s no single string light bulb from the hall illuminating their hell in a sickening yellow glow. There aren’t whispers or whimpers. No cries. No, “I’m scared.” No, “I don’t understand.” No, “They can’t do this to us.”

  It even smells too good to be the cell. Instead of the lingering scent of piss and shit and vomit, the air is only damp and musty. It smells like nothing more than an old basement.

  Carter rubs at his eyes, trying to see better. It’s no use. Wherever he is, it’s nothing but black. Pure black. There aren’t shades of the color, like when you wake up in the middle of the night and your eyes are adjusting. There aren’t any shadows. It’s just… dark. The kind of darkness that wants to swallow a person whole.

  The kind of darkness Carter could get lost in.

  Head pounding, thoughts muddled, Carter tries to piece things together. The guards had come. They wanted Casey. Carter had begged them to take him instead.

  He had fought.

  He had lost.

  Someone was choking him.

  He must have passed out.

  Idiot, Carter hears Casey say inside of his mind, the boy’s gruff voice annoyed but fond. What did I tell you about fighting?

  Carter hadn’t listened. He had acted impulsively. Recklessly. Not only did he get himself choked out and relocated, but he also didn’t even manage to save Casey. In fact, he made things worse, getting all the others in the cell in trouble too. He can still hear the sounds of them as they were attacked because of him.

  The cold in this new place is awful. It makes his bones ache within minutes, his teeth chattering until he worries they might break.

  It isn’t until Carter tries to combat the temperature by curling his body into a tight ball that he discovers something else that’s new. He has a collar around his throat. Tight. Heavy. Metallic. It’s colder than the air around him. Carter brings shaking hands up to touch it, feeling around until he finds a ring at the front. There’s a chain link attached to it. The thick, sturdy kind of chain if Carter’s fingers are telling him the truth. Stomach churning, heart in his throat, Carter uses his hands to follow the chain down, down, down until he finds a matching ring like the one on his collar bolted to the floor. He feels around to confirm his fear. He’s chained down, with nothing more than a few feet of slack.

  Carter tries to stand up.

  The chain doesn’t let him advance past a squatting position.

  Feeling like an idiot, Carter whispers into the darkness around him. “Hello? Is… anyone there?”

  Nothing.

  He had figured, but that doesn’t mean the confirmation doesn’t hurt.

  How long will he be kept here? Surely they won’t leave him too long. They have to feed him. Water him. They won’t let him die. Not after all of their “Beckett whore” talk. Not after Scarface keeping him safe from the playroom. There’s something about Carter that means something to these men. They won’t leave him here to die.

  Just to suffer.

  Deciding he should see if there’s anything useful in here that he can reach, Carter tugs at his chain until he’s as far away from the ring as he can get, then slowly begins to circle around it. He reaches his arms out as far as they’ll go, taking his time so that he doesn’t miss anything.

  He does this twice.

  There’s nothing. No cracks in cement – which is what he’s thinking this room is made out of, considering the feel of it. No possible weapons. No food or water bowls. No bucket to go to the bathroom in. No drain either. Carter can touch two walls with his fingertips, so he must be bolted down near a corner, but that doesn’t help much. He can’t even use the walls to rest his body against. They’re just far enough away that the chain chokes him when he tries.

  Eventually, Carter winds up back near the ring so he can relax his body. He lays down and curls himself into the tightest fetal position he can manage. Even though it’s dark, he closes his eyes. At least then he can pretend like it’s his choice to be blind.

  As the cold bites at Carter’s skin, he finds his mind drifting to his game. He had shared it with Casey a while ago. They had played together, after Casey made it very clear that he thought it was a bad idea. He thinks Casey had enjoyed it, though. He had a fantasy about being purchased by some sexy business guy who wears fancy suits and just wanted a slave for convenience, not for really fucked up or painful shit. He wants there to be a pool at the house he’s brought to, and he wants his new owner to be kind enough to let him swim in it sometimes. Casey had been on his college swim team. He was good, not that he said so. Carter could tell just listening to him talk about it.

  Carter hopes Casey gets his businessman with the pool.

  As far as Carter’s future is concerned, he’ll just be happy to survive this new place he’s been locked up in. Anything after that is too much to even consider.

  And freedom? Freedom sounds nearly impossible at this point.

  He can’t believe he ever let himself dream otherwise.

  ◆◆◆

  At some point, Carter starts to claw at the floor and walls. Even when he breaks his nails. Even when they start to bleed. He claws and claws, determined to find some sort of escape. He’s desperate. Terrified. There has to be a crack somewhere. Some way to get just a sliver of light. Or sound. Or something. Just… anything. Any goddamn thing.

  He needs some proof that he isn’t trapped in a black world where only he exists.

  But there’s nothing. For all Carter knows, he’s dead, and this is his hell.

  At least there are smells now. Familiar ones even. Carter has been in this new place long enough to shit and piss, which he did as far away from his ring as possible.

  Carter’s lips are cracked and bleeding. His throat is raw. Whenever he swallows, he swears he tastes blood.

  He needs water at the very least. Someone has to give him some goddamn water.

  “Please!” Carter cries, gasping and coughing right after as his body punishes him for the sound he forced from it. He smacks a hand against the cement floor, the movement lethargic and weak. “Please…”

  Nobody comes.

  He’s starting to think nobody will ever come.

  ◆◆◆

  Carter took a literature class his freshman year of college. They had to pick a poet from the time-period they were studying and do a presentation on them. Part of this assignment was memorizing one of the poet’s poems – or an excerpt from the poem, if you chose a large one – and reciting it to the class. Carter had chosen William Wordsworth. Being someone who is terrible at public speaking, Carter worked tirelessly at memorizing his poem. It was only 20% of the presentation grade, but that’s not what he cared about. He cared about all the eyes on him. Heavy. Itchy. Just waiting for him to fail.

  So, Carter memorized that poem.

  He memorized the shit out of that poem.

  He memorized that poem so well that here, now, in the freezing cold depths of darkness, his body shutting down from lack of water and nutrition, Carter can recite that poem perfectly. He does so in his mind only. This partly has to do with him having very little confidence in his ability to make sound anymore, but it’s also because the poem feels intimate to him. It’s all he has anymore. The one thing they can’t take from him.

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils;

  Carter wonders if he should drink his own piss. It’s been a long time since he’s had to go, considering there’s nothing left
in him, so all he has is the old stuff in the corner. It’s probably cold, though he’s not sure if that’s a positive or negative thing. He’s also not sure if it’s still safe to drink, or if bacteria manifests the longer it sits out. In fact, he’s not sure if it’s safe to drink at all, fresh or not. Was the whole drinking your pee thing a myth? Those survival stories where people drink their own piss could be false. It could have the same effect as seawater to thirsty sailors. Things might just get worse.

  God, he’s thirsty.

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  Carter lays back down and sighs, his body thanking him for giving up before wasting any more energy. It wasn’t on board with his drinking urine plan. It wants him to just stay the fuck still and try to keep warm. His fingers and toes are beginning to go numb. He hopes that doesn’t mean anything too serious.

  Continuous as the stars that shine

  And twinkle on the milky way,

  They stretched in never-ending line

  Along the margin of a bay;

  Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

  Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

  Will Carter ever see the stars again? He’s starting to think he’ll never even experience light again, let alone something as magnificent as the night sky. His best hope is during transport, he supposes. If he’s not blindfolded. Or dead by then.

  The waves beside them danced; but they

  Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

  A poet could not but be gay,

  In such a jocund company:

  I gazed – and gazed – but little thought

  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  Carter closes his eyes. He remembers figuring out in his analysis that Wordsworth was drawing all of the imagery from his memories, the man in fact lying on a couch with his eyes closed the whole time. Maybe that’s what Carter’s problem is. Maybe he needs to close his eyes. Maybe then he’ll see what Wordsworth did.