Through The Valley

by Yates, B. D.

  A hundred thousand different scenarios tried to push and shove their way into Emmit's head, but he blocked them out. Each time he began to form a picture in his mind's eye, a gruesome illustration of why Pup might not be able to feel his legs, he would mouth the word "no" and shake his head. He would do no good for either of them if he panicked and lost his shit now, when things were the direst.

  "You just stay still and stay quiet while I work on getting us out of here," Emmit said, flapping his elbows back and forth like some kind of injured bird. He could feel the spearhead slowly working its way down to his waiting hand, but he couldn't yet feel what direction it was facing. His tongue poked out between his teeth as he concentrated, tasting the salty sweat that had collected on his mustache.

  Pup began to moan again, shuddering his clenched teeth. Cocking his head, Emmit could just make out the shape of Pup, writhing in pain and arching his back off the wall he had been slung against. Each time his body thumped backwards, or one of his legs drummed against the floor, it sounded soggy. It sounded like Pup was sitting in a puddle of something wet and thick.

  Christ, don't lose it man. Don't lose it. You can't help him if you lose it.

  The ropes were beginning to bite into the flesh of his wrists, burning as if they were made of some sort of acidic thread. Emmit fought through the pain, thrashing and squirming, trying desperately to give the spearhead room to slide down.

  He was beginning to feel claustrophobic. The tip of his nose itched. His shoulders ached, the muscles stretching and over-stretching like hot taffy. Emmit growled and grunted, closing his weak eyes tight to help him concentrate.

  "My feet!" Pup suddenly wailed, scaring Emmit so badly that he jumped and felt the elusive spearhead dislodge from the folds of his sleeve and tumble, tantalizingly, between his raw hands. It clattered to the floor somewhere behind him.

  "Oh God, something is crushing my feet!"

  Emmit couldn't restrain his frustration; what precious little patience he had left was reserved for somehow finding the spearhead behind him with both hands bound. He kept imagining the door of Roy's meat locker swinging open, soaking them both with freezing air and blowing snow. Then Roy would see what he was trying to do and drive a hard boot right into the center of his face, knock him out cold again, and that would be the end of his story. Roy would not repeat the mistake of allowing him to live again. Pup's moans grew into warbling screams, reverberating off the dark wooden walls as if taunting Roy to come and investigate.

  "Pup, shut the fuck up before someone hears you!" Emmit bellowed, surprised at how loud he had let himself shout. It was like those scarce few times he had lost his temper with his son, usually during tantrums and meltdowns or on nights when he fought sleep (which had been daily when Deacon had been a toddler). First came the slow build up, then the volcanic release— and then the shame. He immediately regretted yelling at Pup, whose only crime was that he was alone, terrified, and in pain.

  He could hear Pup's breathless sobbing begin again, and then he said something that Emmit Mills never forgot. He was forcefully reminded that the kid was just so... so god damned young.

  "I just want to see my mom," Pup whimpered. He tried to repeat himself, but it was lost in a flurry of guttural breaths. His body shifted around wetly.

  "You will," Emmit said distractedly, rolling over into his back. His weight crushed his hands into the grimy floor, targeting every pressure point he had. One of his knuckles cracked like a miniature firework. Hot tears began to well up in the corners of his eyes, as much for Pup as for the excruciating pain throbbing in his wrists and forearms. "You'll see her soon, Pup."

  It was time to stop fucking around. Pain or no pain, he had already wasted too much precious time. Emmit's numbing fingers scratched and scrabbled around on the floor like an injured spider but found nothing. He had begun to cry too, letting his tears out through controlled, shuddery breaths that whistled through his cracked lips.

  Come on...

  His pinky, bent at an awkward and uncomfortable angle, nudged against something jagged and sharp. The knuckle of his ring finger snapped.

  Please, come on...

  His right hand flopped on top of the spearhead and Emmit rolled over on it, thinking nothing of the damage it might do if he landed on it the wrong way. It didn't matter if he got cut; what mattered was that he did not lose track of it again. His aching fingers wrapped around the splintered wooden end, his forearms boiling with lactic acid as he gingerly flipped it so that the sharp edge rested against the rope that held his hands together.

  Now that I'm exhausted and my hands are broken, he thought sarcastically, the real work begins.

  He moved his hands in a masturbatory motion, keeping the spearhead's blade pressed into the rope as he rocked it back and forth with his wrists and fingers. He couldn't tell if he was making any progress or not. The rope Roy used around camp had been multicolored because it was made from clothing, and clothing would not cut as easily as an aged hemp rope might. His blind sawing was the furthest thing imaginable from surgical. It was panicked hacking.

  He dragged the spearhead against the tough rope until the pain was too much to bear, then, gripping the broken handle as tightly as he could, forced his hands apart. There was no give. Only the red, raw sting of the friction burns in his flesh.

  "God DAMN it!"

  "I don't want to die," Pup said softly. "I don't want to die. I don't want to die."

  "You're not going to," Emmit huffed, grinding his teeth together so hard that he could hear them creak. His forearms felt like he had dipped them into a vat of burning oil, but he would not stop. He could not stop.

  He felt the spearhead slip out of his grasp and nearly dropped it. It was time for a quick breather. He lay on the floor like a crippled dog, listening to the creak and howl of the wind outside as old man winter curled his long and frostbitten fingers around the little shed, doing his best to crush it.

  Alright. Again.

  Emmit counted to three silently, steeling himself for the pain that would come when he tried to break his binds again. The patches of missing skin on his wrists had begun to bleed. He crossed his wrists, then yanked his hands apart.

  They flew away from each other like ricocheting pool balls, rebounding only slightly as the frayed rope between them held on. Emmit had been so prepared for failure that he almost didn't notice the progress he had finally made. He paused for a minute, considering it, then giggled maniacally and whipped his arms apart again. Again. Again. He could hear a diminutive shredding sound each time he did it. The god damned bastard of a rope was giving way. He was escaping.

  Almost almost almost almost—

  He now had enough room to bring his knees to his chest and pass his savaged arms around them. Rolling over to sit on his ass, he brought both feet up, and rested the dirty soles of his shoes on the frayed rope. He mule kicked out while pulling his arms behind him like a rower—

  PLEASE—

  The rope snapped, allowing his stiffened arms to swing free. He gave himself a few seconds to rub his aching muscles, which were quickly filling with blood as the circulation returned to nooks and crannies that he hadn't even realized had gone numb and cold. He pawed at his wrists, wiping away the slimy sheen of blood, and felt small flaps of skin tug and sway under his fingers like old couch leather.

  No time.

  Emmit brought the spearhead down between his ankles and began furiously stabbing and sawing at the ropes that held his feet. It was worlds easier when he could see—well, almost see—what he was doing. He made short work of them, weakening and unravelling the threads before kicking his legs like an Olympic swimmer and severing them neatly in half. He stood, finally, after what felt like a years-long struggle, and in that moment, he sort of did feel like a superhero. Or a shitty magician, at the very least.

  The fire.

  The tiny flame in Roy's small fire pit was suffocating and starving at the same time, flickering weakly as it threatened to go out
. He needed it; he needed it for warmth, and he needed it for light. But a bigger fire meant more light and more smoke, which could mean more attention that he didn't want or need. He had to take the risk. If he had a little more light, he might be able to focus his defunct eyes and find something better than a broken spear to arm himself with.

  He started with the remnants of the ropes, gathering them up and tossing them into the firepit in a tangled wad. He stood for a second to make sure they were flammable and enjoyed seeing them catch. The hungry flame first nibbled at them and then swallowed them entirely, reducing them to dark ribbons of ash that curled and drew in on themselves like salted slugs. The dim red glow of the room swelled to a brighter orange, but it was still too dark to do much good. He needed more.

  Emmit dropped to his knees, swiping his hands around the sooty floor beside the firepit. There had to be more wood for the fire, right? Roy was too organized, too anal, to leave his secret shed unprepared. What better place to store firewood than near the fire pit? His eyes wide and unblinking, Emmit scoured the area around the firepit in widening circles. Finally, his palms brushed against a small pile of chopped logs and branches that had been stacked into a tidy pyramid in the corner. Emmit hugged as many as he could hold against his sweat-drenched body, stumble-walked on his knees to the recuperating flames, and dumped them in all at once. A glittering whirl of red sparks burst up and were sucked out of the smoke hole like a backwards drain, and with a hasty and loudening crackle, the fire roared back to life. The inside of the little meat locker filled with a yellow, white-hot light that was so bright and lively that Emmit shielded his eyes from it.

  The first thing he was able to see was another strand of Roy's custom rope, stretched from wall to wall across the fire pit like a rainbow spiderweb. No, not a spiderweb... a clothesline. It resembled a clothesline because there were things hanging from it, but those lumpy, lozenge shaped things weren't clothes. They were long, fatty strips of glistening meat, draped over the rope like raw bacon and left to absorb the smoky flavor of the fire. Emmit swallowed hard. It took everything in him to turn and face the rest of the room, which now seemed as bright as the high-speed supernova he'd watched with the Rev.

  Of the four walls of the cabin, one served as the entrance, two served as wall-length counters, and the rear wall, the one the fire pit sat beside, served as a weapon rack. The weapon rack had been made from saplings, cut and painstakingly tied together with knotted lengths of rope. They formed a squared wooden grid that reminded Emmit of the industrial dishwasher they had had in the dingy kitchen of his old job, the trays lined with compartments and prongs to keep the various utensils separated and sorted. Roy had stockpiled more weapons than his small band could ever use; there were rows of axes and hatchets, knives and spears, mallets and clubs. He couldn't help but marvel at the craftsmanship, the human ingenuity, straining his burning eyes to scan the punji pit of deadly points that thrusted up towards the ceiling like stalagmites. Each of them had been carved and sanded and shaped by hand, designed by a psychopath to be as deadly as possible. Emmit reached out and selected two knives for himself, dragging the pad of his thumb across the edge of one of their dimpled stone blades. He could hear the soft scuffing sound it made against his flesh. Razor sharp.

  And easy to conceal.

  Pup began to cry out again, and Emmit heard a saturated thud as the boy toppled over.

  "Alright Pup, I'm coming, I'm gonna hel--"

  His words were choked off mid-sentence as he took in the view of Roy’s prison shack. It was nothing short of a torture chamber; a stone age butcher's shop, where the hunted and defenseless were taken to die and be portioned out. He gasped, then clamped his tongue between his teeth hard enough to draw blood. Anything he could do to stifle the scream that had been seconds from alerting anyone and anything within a mile of the camp that he was awake, aware, and horrified.

  The counters than ran the lengths of the walls were made from entire tree trunks that Roy had somehow managed to chop in half lengthwise, sanded down to be reasonably smooth and resting on pairs of X shaped sawhorses. The pale wood inside the ragged half-trunks had once been a creamy white, but now, even by the ebb and flow of the firelight, Emmit could see that it had been stained to a muddy brown.

  One counter looked like it had been pulled right out of a novel of the pioneers and log cabin days; it was Roy’s kitchen. The tabletop held a neat line of bloodstained knives and hatchets, arranged by length and purpose, and stacks of wooden bowls and platters. At the far end of the counter was a battered log bucket, the cracks in its sides and bottom leaking syrupy gore. There were coils of rope, miles of it. If he trained his ears, Emmit could hear the faint pat pat pat of fresh blood, trickling slowly from the countertop and onto the floor.

  Emmit made himself turn and take a few nervous steps to the other side of the room, not allowing himself to look at Pup. Not yet. He had to take in one thing at a time, or his mind would collapse in on itself like a damaged submersible freefalling in the Mariana Trench. A giant godlike fist, not unlike the fist of Roy himself, held his sanity in a tight and unrelenting grip. At any moment that fist would clench, closing around his shocked brain and crushing it like an overripe orange. Emmit rubbed at his eyes, trying to clear debris that wasn’t actually there, and forced himself to look. Once he had, the vomit was up and out before he could stop it. It spurted from his lips, hot and tart, and splattered across the floor. It was mostly stomach acid, which he was grateful for. He didn't want to see partially digested human remains intermingled with his puke.

  The opposite counter was lined with fresh meat, laid out like a deli display case. There were giant hunks of purplish flesh that looked like marbled sirloin steaks, stacked on top of one another like gruesome flapjacks. There was a row of long strips that trailed fat and tendon, lined up in a row like sausages on a hot griddle. Emmit willed himself to lean in, just a little closer, and saw a tiny dish filled with tiny gobbets of meat and gooey fat that resembled chicken gizzards. Next to a bloodied stone mallet was a pair of filthy and disintegrating shoes, placed side by side as if Roy had kicked them off after a long day at work and placed them on the shoe rack like a thoughtful husband. Several pairs of sweat stained socks were stuffed inside them. Beside the shoes, also placed side by side in a neat pair, were two severed human feet. The cuts just above the heels of the whitish-gray feet were clean; no bone poking out of the ragged stumps where calves had once connected.

  The bones, pink-smeared mosaics of fractures, had joined a nauseating bundle of others in another of Roy's handmade buckets that rested against the legs of a sawhorse. It resembled a pack of macabre cigarettes. Some of the longer bones, human femurs, had been sharpened into crude points like dinosaur teeth. Roy had even been trying to find a use for the bones of his victims.

  He broke the bones to make the legs easier to amputate.

  Emmit plastered a black hand over his mouth, then promptly vomited between his fingers.

  "Papa," Pup sighed weakly, and Emmit closed his eyes. Those shoes: they were black and white gym shoes, perfect for a high school Phys Ed class. Emmit couldn't make out the finer details, but they looked to him like the sort of shoes a kid's parents might have to buy for a school supplies list. The kind a kid kept in his cluttered wreck of a locker, to change into before class. Did that mean...

  Were those Pup's feet? Is that Pup's...

  Emmit opened his leaden eyelids, telling himself that he would have to look at what Roy had done to the kid if he had any hope of saving him. His neck was taught and resisted movement, the cords and muscles grinding like rusty chains. He would have vomited again, had anything been left in the shrunken apricot pit that served as his stomach. He stared down at what was left of the kid called Pup.

  Pup's slender body looked more like a crumpled-up paper doll than a functioning human form; a paper doll that a careless child had taken a pair of scissors to. His arms were lashed viciously together behind his back, tight enough to wrench hi
s shoulders nearly out of their sockets. The muscles bulged like metastasizing tumors against the skin. His left shoulder was bruised, and, judging by its angle, partially dislocated. His skin was deathly pale, and his half-lidded eyes were ringed with dark purple circles that made him look like he hadn't slept in years; Emmit guessed that was probably because of the amount of blood he had lost while Roy was amputating both of his legs.

  Emmit could only stare, shocked into petrification.

  Roy had severed Pup's legs just above mid-thigh. Pup's pants had been cut off into tattered shorts, and the stumps that protruded from them were a nightmare vision. They looked like uncooked sausages, the shredded skin pulled tightly into a loose balloon knot around the glistening muscle and cleaved bone beneath it. Twin tourniquets, made from more of Roy's famous clothing rope, were cinched savagely tight above the amputations, biting into the remaining flesh and giving each destroyed thigh the look of a half-used toothpaste tube.

  Pup was breathing heavily, pausing only to unravel his swollen tongue and try to wet his lips before his mouth gasped open again. Occasionally his entire body would seize and tense, his teeth snapping together as waves of agony tore through him. He sat in a tacky lagoon of his own blood that had begun to resemble old tar. When he tried to lift what was left of his legs, Emmit watched streamers of cloth and skin alike pulling out of the drying blood as if Pup had been plopped down on a giant piece of flypaper.

  Emmit felt the urge to roar and the urge to cry rip through him at the same time, but it didn't take much thought to understand what Roy was doing; why he wouldn't just kill Pup and end his misery. He was keeping him alive as long as he could, keeping his heart beating and the remainder of his blood circulating. Keeping a supply of meat that preserved itself. Food that he didn't have to freeze or throw away because it rotted, and it would always be fresh.

  Next would probably be Pup's arms, although they were rail thin and little more than skin and bone. Emmit could only hope that Roy would have killed Pup before starting on his chest, his back, his buttocks...