Again Eddie shook his head vigorously and screamed against his tape. He was duct-taped fast to the little metal folding chair. Kai had practically mummified him. Shiny, gray strips, two inches wide, wound up Eddie’s legs to the kneecaps and covered his torso from shoulders to waist. Gil avoided looking at his eyes, tried to forget that Eddie had once been his best friend. He took the drill, aimed it at Eddie’s kneecap, and pushed.
“MMMmmphf! MMMMMmmmmphf!” The tape around his mouth was not enough to mask the cry of agony that pealed from Eddie’s lungs as the drill bore through skin and muscle into cartilage and bone, spraying blood and skeletal fragments. Skin and meat wrapped around the bit like the skin of a fruit around a peeler. Eddie jerked and convulsed, nearly toppling the chair, but the duct tape kept him firmly in place.
“Oh shit! Look at him! He’s freaking out!”
But Gil wouldn’t look at him. He didn’t want to see the pain Eddie was experiencing. He didn’t want to see what he had done.
“Use the sander next! Skin that motherfucker!” The enthusiasm in his son’s voice made Gil feel even more wretched. This wasn’t right. None of this was right. It had gone way too far, but now, stopping wasn’t an option either.
Gil was in a fugue state as he put the gore-covered drill down on the floor between Eddie’s legs and picked up the palm sander. There was a piece of fifteen grit sandpaper on it. Extra coarse. Gil ripped off some of the tape covering Eddie’s torso, unraveling it until part of his chest and stomach was visible, but enough tape remained to keep his arms immobile and his back tight against the chair. Then Gil took the sander and placed it to Eddie’s nipple. Blood and skin spattered Gil’s face as he abraded the skin and fat from his friend’s pectoral muscle. Eddie’s nipple disappeared in seconds. The sander sheared it away millimeter by millimeter while Eddie screamed and thrashed, eyes bulging from their sockets, wild with terror and anguish. The sandpaper was now soaked with blood.
Gil paused to wipe the blood from his face, change the sandpaper, and pick out the pieces of flesh and gore that threatened to clog up the sander.
Once he’d cleaned it out and affixed it with a new sheet of sandpaper, he took a deep breath. It was time to hurt Eddie some more.
Gil closed his eyes as he stood. His hands were shaking again. Eddie was moaning and shivers ran through his bloodied and battered form like he was in an ice bath. Gil bit down like a dog trying to bite through a rawhide chew toy. His eyes were still closed as he tried to block the sounds of Eddie’s torment from his mind and clear his thoughts to prepare for more carnage.
He brought the sander down on Eddie’s forehead. Eddie thrashed and bucked in the chair, but Kai was already behind him, holding him steady as Gil sanded the skin from his best friend’s skull, spraying blood, skin, and flesh in a red mist onto the wall behind him and all over Gil’s face, arms, and upper body. Eddie thrashed violently against his bonds, trying to avoid the sander, but the duct tape held him fast until the sander shredded through the tape around the lower part of Eddie’s brow as it continued to rasp away his skin. Eddie’s screams were horrible, even with the tape still in place.
Blood washed down Eddie’s face in a steady stream, obscuring his features and blinding him. Gil watched Eddie gag, sputter, and spit his own blood to keep from choking on it, gasping for air. His nostrils were caked in blood. He was being water-boarded with his own fluids.
Kai grabbed Eddie’s head, one hand on his jaw and one on the top of his skull to hold him still, when the sander cut the remaining duct tape away from his forehead and Eddie jerked his head away from Gil. Gil was having a hard time trying to hold him.
He brought the sander from Eddie’s forehead down to his face, grinding away on his right cheek. When he finally released him, Eddie looked like something from Dawn of the Dead. All the skin was gone from his forehead and the white bone was visible, as was his right cheekbone. Gil felt a wave of nausea wash over him. He dropped to his knees and began to vomit.
Gil staggered back to his feet, picking up the roll of tape. He walked back over to Eddie and began to wind the tape around him again, replacing the tape he’d removed or cut with the sander, once again securing him firmly to the chair.
Kai stood by, watching.
There was an old coffee maker in the corner, sitting in what once had been the break area. Even the old water cooler was still there. Empty water bottles were strewn haphazardly around it.
“Make us some coffee, Kai.”
“What? In that old thing? It’s filthy. It has dust and spiderwebs in it. I don’t think there are any filters or anything in it either, and where am I supposed to get coffee? You want me to go to the grocery store?”
Gil locked eyes with his son. “Just boil some water, please.”
Kai nodded slowly, and a predacious smile slithered onto his face as what Gil was planning, or some version of it, filled his imagination. Gil didn’t like that expression. It was wrong. Where there should have been horror and revulsion, there was mad glee. It could have been a defense mechanism. Certainly revenge feels good. Even Gil was feeling rather proud of himself for avenging his daughter’s assault, but he also felt sick to his stomach, disgusted by what he’d done to his friend and what he was about to do. Whatever Kai was feeling, didn’t appear quite so ambiguous.
Kai brought the coffee maker over to an old rusted utility sink in the corner and began to fill it up. Once it was full, he plugged in the coffeemaker and sat on a work bench, waiting for the water to boil.
Gil was surprised the electricity was still on. As far as he knew, the place had been closed for years. Someone must have still been using it for something. He didn’t know what and didn’t want to know. If it was something illegal, that was even better. It meant they had probably taken care to keep the place off the police radar and wouldn’t be eager to call the cops if the owners did happen to stumble across this violent little scene. It might also mean whomever owned this place now would want to kill all three of them, but Gil didn’t think that was likely.
“The water’s hot.”
“Bring it here.”
Kai handed Gil the coffee pot and Gil walked over and poured it directly onto Eddie’s face, scalding his open wounds and searing his skin with third-degree burns.
“Arrrrrhhhhh! Arrrhhhhh!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Gil handed the pot back to Kai. Eddie’s face was red and puffy. The skin was blistering up like bubblegum and looked loose on his face, like it could slide right off. Even his eyelids were scalded, suppurating with little translucent bubbles of cooked skin. Gil wondered what was wrong with him that he could do this to another human being.
He hurt my daughter. That’s what’s wrong with me. I’m just doing what any father would do. But he wondered. Would any father do this, or would they have just called the police and let them handle it?
But leaving it to the police felt almost cowardly. At best it was impersonal. It didn’t show his passion for his child, his love, his fury that someone had dared use her, dared hurt her. Gil thought about all the women he’d known over the years. All the women he’d been in a relationship with. All the women he’d fucked. As many as three out of five had been raped or molested at some point in their lives, including his wife, Natalie, and it had left scars on them. It had wounded them and, in many cases, had utterly broken them. Most became extremely promiscuous. Some were submissive, looking for a daddy to take control of them, and continue the abuse they had come to believe they deserved and had learned to enjoy. Some had become drug addicts and alcoholics, manic depressives. Some had bipolar disorder or some other psychological issues. All had low self-esteem. None had survived the experience intact.
Maybe doing this will spare Selma from that life, Gil thought. Maybe she wouldn’t wind up spreading her legs for every swinging dick who showed her an ounce of kindness or begging some sadistic fuck to spank her or whip her or shove his entire fist up her twat like some girls he’d met. Maybe she woul
dn’t go looking for a daddy in the men she dated, because she would know how much her real daddy cared. He had tortured a man for hurting her. Daddy loved her that much.
“What are we going to do to him now?” Kai asked.
“Nothing,” Gil said, turning away from Eddie’s mutilated visage and his own thoughts.
“Nothing? But—”
“We have to go home. If we disappear and Eddie’s missing, people will put two and two together. He’s not going anywhere.”
“But what about Little Eddie? We can’t just leave him here.”
“Yeah, I thought about that. He can’t talk yet. He wouldn’t be much of a witness. We could bring him with us. Say Eddie asked us to watch him.”
Kai shook his head. “But Mom knows what Eddie did. Mom will know we did something to him if we show up with Little Eddie and Eddie ain’t with us.”
“I’m not killing a kid.”
“I didn’t say kill him. I just said we can’t take him home and can’t take him to our house either.”
“I’m not just going to turn him loose to wander the streets and get molested by some pervert or something.”
“Someone like his father? For all you know, Eddie could have been molesting his own kid,” Kai said.
Gil shuddered. The thought repulsed him, angered him, almost as much as the thought of that piece of shit messing with his daughter. That sick fuck!
Taking Little Eddie by the hand, Gil led him outside to the car. Kai followed close behind.
“Put him in his car seat. I’m going back in there to clean myself up. There’s a bathroom in the back. You’ve got blood all over you too. When I come out, you should probably go in and get cleaned up.”
There were so many things Gil still needed to figure out. Revenge was more complicated than just fucking a guy up, especially if he wanted to stay out of prison. There were so many loose ends to tie up. Any one of them could be the thing that led the cops to his doorstep.
A small utility sink was affixed to a wall in the corner. When Gil worked there years ago, when it was an air conditioning company, this sink had always smelled like urine. His manager had vowed to catch whoever was pissing in the utility sink. He never did, as far as Gil knew.
Gil took off his shirt and washed it. He splashed water on his face, neck, chest, and arms, scrubbing away his best friend’s blood.
“I need to go to the hospital, Gil.”
Eddie’s words were gurgled through a mouthful of blood. Gil wondered how Eddie had managed to avoid choking on it. The duct tape had fallen away from his mouth and was draped around his neck like a bandana. There was too much blood for the adhesive to stick.
“Shut up, Eddie. I ain’t taking your ass to the hospital. You’ll stay right here until I get back.”
Eddie looked like shit. A quarter of the skin and muscle on his face had been sheared away by the sander. His forehead had been ground down to the bone. The rest of the skin was covered in blisters. A cascade of red washed down his face from the various wounds. Eddie’s pupils were completely dilated and he was shivering. He was going into shock. If his blood didn’t clot soon, he’d bleed out. As it was, he was almost definitely going to get an infection. For a brief moment, Gil considered taking him to the hospital, but he was in no hurry to go to jail. He was feeling a little guilty for what he’d done. Eddie had been his friend. But friends didn’t rape other friend’s children.
What if he didn’t do it?
The thought burst into his mind like a thought bubble from a comic strip. It seemed to hang in the air between the two of them. Gil tried to ignore it. He put the question out of his mind. Madness lay in the entertainment of such thoughts. He was already fully committed. There had been no reason for Selma to lie about it. That wasn’t the type of thing a five-year-old would have just made up. How would she even know people did such things unless someone had shown her? Unless what she said Eddie did was true.
“I didn’t do it, Gil. I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”
Gil rushed over and grabbed the coffeepot again. He grabbed Eddie by the head, feeling his fingers slip against the bare, bloody bone of Eddie’s forehead, and then poured the remaining boiling water down Eddie’s throat and nostrils, water-boarding him. Eddie was screaming, struggling for air, gurgling up the scalding fluid, drowning even while his mouth and nose boiled. When Eddie ran out of water, he threw the coffee pot across the room, shattering it against the wall, and then wrapped Eddie’s swollen mouth in duct tape again. He had to go around several times, sticking the tape to itself more so than to Eddie’s skin, of which there was less to use.
“You think I expect you to fucking confess, motherfucker? Of course you’ll lie. Why the fuck would you tell the truth? Either you’ll go to prison or I’ll murder you. You know that. You have every goddamn reason to lie. That’s why I don’t want to hear shit you have to say. You just sit there and keep your fucking mouth shut until I get back!”
Gil rinsed his shirt out a few more times, but it was hopeless. The blood wouldn’t come out. At this point, prison was practically inevitable, but Gil planned to delay the inevitable for as long as possible. He walked out to the truck and rooted around in the back for his gym bag. He found an old T-shirt that had probably been there for weeks. It was stiff with dried sweat and smelled like the essence of a used jockstrap, concentrated and distilled. It was overpowering, but Gil had no choice. Either he smelled like a homeless person or looked like a serial killer.
He looked up in the front seat where Kai had the radio blasting an incoherent rap song in thick country slang.
“Turn that down and go in there and wash the blood off your hands. And don’t touch Eddie! You understand?”
Kai nodded and smiled. “Yes, Dad. I won’t.”
Kai had always been such a good kid. He was smart, well-mannered, obedient, and could even be charming and funny when he thought it was worth the effort. But there was a coldness to him, an emotional detachment that had always felt like a barrier between them. Gil had thought it was his fault, his own failure to connect with his son. He often wondered if he’d been too hard on the boy when it came to discipline and if that was what had kept them from connecting, but he had seen Kai display the same apathy toward his mother and even his sister. And seeing the ease with which he embraced the idea of torturing Eddie, the delight he seemed to take in it, Gil questioned if Kai could connect with anyone. He knew what he suspected his son of having: an antisocial personality disorder . . . in other words, a sociopath, but why did he think that? Because the kid was quiet? Kept to himself? Or because he brought the kid with him to torture a guy and Kai didn’t hesitate, and even enjoyed it? For all Gil knew, Kai may have been trying to bond with him right now, through this act of violence. It was demented but possible. They had never built a tree house together or spent a weekend camping and fishing. This was the most personal thing the two of them had ever shared and probably would ever share, and that was truly fucked up.
Gil looked at his son with new affection and a bit of sorrow and regret as the boy lumbered out of the warehouse in his burnt-orange Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt and black, skin-tight Aeropostale skinny jeans, looking like any teenage boy anywhere, except that there was a smear of blood on the T-shirt and Kai’s eyes looked glassy and hollow. He had seen too much. At seventeen years old, he had already seen too much, lost his youth in one blood-soaked afternoon, and it was Gil’s fault. This day would change Kai forever. It would change them both.
“We need to go shopping for some new shirts before we go home. These shirts need to go in the trash.”
“Jesus! Is that you?” Kai said, as he climbed into the truck and the smell of fermented sweat assailed his nostrils.
“I accidentally left this T-shirt in my gym bag. It’s probably been in there for a couple weeks.”
“Aw! That smells awful!”
“Okay. I’m driving to the outlet mall right now.”
“Ugh!
They may not even let you in stores smelling like that, Dad. Open a window!”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Seriously?” Kai waved his hand in front of his face and then hung his head out the window.
Gil started to laugh, and Kai began laughing too. They chortled and snorted as the absurdity of it all overtook them.
“Come on. Give me a hug!” Gil said, wrapping his arms around Kai and pulling him tight.
“Ewww, don’t! Awww! That’s horrible! I can’t breathe!” Kai said, desperately trying to pull away from his father. When Gil let him go, Kai stuck his head out the window again and panted like a dog.
“That wasn’t funny! That was awful!” Kai said, in between laughter.
Gil laughed harder. Tears squeezed out the corners of his eyes and his stomach ached. He started the car and together they pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the freeway. Behind them, Little Eddie began to cry.
“Shit! I almost forgot about him. What do we do with him?”
Gil’s laughter stopped. He reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror so he was looking directly at the kid’s face. There was so much of Eddie in the child’s features. Same slightly slanted eyes and high cheekbones but with skin that was slightly darker, owing to his mother’s Cuban background, and full lips and curly hair that made him look more like a light-skinned black kid than Korean or Dutch or Cuban or Swedish or whatever else his parents were mixed with. His parents’ nationalities had blended into a child that looked like it could have been Kai’s younger brother. He could have been Gil’s own son.
“Fuck.” Myriad scenarios ran through Gil’s head, but they all resulted in some type of injury to the kid or, at the very least, the possibility of it.
“We could leave him at a fire station or a hospital?”
“What?”
“In school, they told us that fire stations, police stations, and some hospitals are safe havens. You can legally drop an unwanted child off there and they take them in,” Kai said.
Gil considered it. He remembered hearing something similar. “But someone would see us. They would have cameras or something. We’d get caught.”
Something Terrible Page 4