tw: cutting, blood, restraint, manipulation, mind control, cult
2300 words
“Stop, please! Please don’t hurt me!”
“Ah shoot, sorry.” The boy drops his scalpel like it’s gone red hot. It clinks awkwardly onto the linoleum floor next to my leg, catching the light from a nearby rune.
Confused, I blink up at him. I don’t have many other options, in terms of body language, at this point, with my hands chained above me, close enough I can brush my pinkies against one another, and my legs splayed on either side of the new kid, the pants damp with the humidity and my own blood. Nice cell, as far as they go, but the tile floor’s a real germ trap and even after a quick wash the night before, most of my blood is still congealed on my body.
“I-I’m sorry.” He picks up the scalpel with trembling fingers. “I didn’t mean to drop that. Let me try this again.”
He places the tip of the blade against my skin, then holds it there without enough pressure to draw blood while he consults a piece of paper, creased all over from a million folds and written in cramped handwriting. Did he… did he write down what he plans to do to me? What kind of serial sadist is this? “I’m just going to give you a few cuts,” he murmurs, at last leaning onto the blade and carving a line down my arm.
I don’t mind the hot flash of pain—much—but he was so funny the first time so I make my eyes roll back in my head and crack my voice. “P-please!” The sound echoes in the lofty space.
“I could concentrate better if you didn’t speak.” Another line joins the first. He’s close enough I can lean forward and see the piece of paper that’s so enthralled him, including the shape he’s drawn there: a name, I think, maybe two. That’s hardly unusual. I’ve have names carved into me in writing systems that don’t even exist anymore.
I change tact. “What are you going to do to me?”
Serial killers, they like that question. Puts you completely in their power, strokes their egos, the whole nine yards. The boy, though, and I can’t imagine he’s over twenty years old, not with hair that floppy and poorly styled, doesn’t react with pleasure or even annoyance that I’ve spoken. Instead, doubt flickers across his face, and then he blushes, a little red to his cheeks that I would’ve missed if the dungeon lights were but a shade dimmer. “I’m going to hurt you a little bit,” he says, tongue between his teeth as he finishes carving his shape into my arm. He’s not practiced at this and the wounds are all different levels of deep.
“Why? I never hurt you.”
“Because I want to.”
He looks like he’d rather be locked in a room somewhere putting together a two thousand piece jigsaw puzzle but hey, sometimes you’re chained to the dungeon wall, sometimes you’re doing the chaining, it’s all about rolling with the punches.
He stands, tugging at the chains above me so I’m forced to my feet, leaning heavily when one foot goes completely to sleep. You’d think that would be less painful than the still-bleeding wound on my inner arm, but you’d be wrong. Knives have a beauty to them, a finesse that simple circulation lacks. “Okay.” He says it like he’s psyching himself up. “I’m going to… I’m going to hit you, I think.”
“Are you asking me or telling me?” It just slips out. Look, the first couple sadists leave an impression and after that, I stop grading on a curve. He wants me intimidated, he should be more intimidating.
It irks him, though. He tugs down the bottom of his shirt and straightens. “Yes. I’ll… I’ll beat the backtalk right out of you.” Given it takes him thirty seconds to figure out how to put the brass knuckles on, I don’t exactly have high hopes. Plus, his posture’s all off. After he punches me once and nearly throws himself into the wall, he switches to a cane and sort of whacks at my ankles.
In a better mood, I might try to dodge, but he’s so weak, he’s not going to break anything. “I’m your first, aren’t I?”
“Shut up.” He gets the cane caught between my legs—I swear I wasn’t even trying to get in the way—and drops it.
“Here I thought I’d be the one kneeling at your feet.” He glares daggers up at me, costing him precious time padding about for his cane. “While you’re down there, you could give the ol’ boots a good lick, eh?” I’m barefoot and wiggle my toes a bit to prove it, but he shoots up like someone fired him out of a canon.
“I will never bow to you.”
I pout. “Whatever you say, big dog.”
The anger makes his beating, if anything, more sporadic. I think the wall’s in more pain than me when, panting, he takes a step back to surveil me. “That felt better, I think. They’re right, it can feel good.”
“Who’s right?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“If you tell me, I will show you how to use a cane to properly cause someone pain.”
“Like you’d know,” he sneers, mopping sweat off his brow. The cane’s about to fall from his hands unless he takes a rest, I figure, and he concurs, slumping to the floor well out of reach and going for a water bottle. Proper hydration: very important for the enterprising serial sadist.
Though now that I’m here, I’m beginning to doubt the serial part of that title. So much for ridding the city of its serial killer on the first try, huh? If Archer beats me to a win by going the legal route, I’m going to throw myself into the ocean.
After a bit of R&R, he’s ready for another go, but it’s cautious interest I see in his eyes. “Well?” he demands, tapping a foot. The arms crossed could be a good look, but he should’ve put the cane down first. “Tell me, then.”
“First tell me who they is.”
His eyes narrow but he’s never taken a negotiation course—such courses generally indicate that the party who is chained to the wall has less bargaining power—because he folds right away. “The other Mu-9s.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“You said you’d teach me.”
“All right, then. You see that table?” I have to nod towards it, my hands being where they are. “It’s for strapping people to.”
“It’s too short.”
“Au contraire. It’s not for waterboarding, it’s for foot torture. Move it over here. Yep, until it’s touching the wall, good. Okay, let’s see if I still have the abs for this.” I clench my fingers around the manacles and haul myself up and sideways, half over the table. He sees what I’m trying to do and helps me the rest of the way, still holding the cane even after it bops him in the forehead. “Now you’d traditionally strap my ankles to the corners.” What a relief, not to have to stand anymore. When I get a choice, I’ll sit through a torture anytime, even if the table feels kind of rickety. As an added bonus, I’ve earned a little slack in the arm chains, so I could feasibly start unlocking them, were I inclined. “The feet have as many nerves as the hands do and unlike other parts of the body, they don’t acclimate to repeated beatings, so the hundredth lash hurts as much as the first. You want to strike closer to the arch than the heels or toes, and at an angle. Yes, hold the cane like that. And then twist all the way around and think about activating your stomach muscles as you-ah! Yeah, like that.”
At my cry, his grip loosens and he almost drops the cane again. This kid, I swear.
“You need to be careful with foot torture. I can walk on anything that isn’t broken but regular folks, any more than fifty or so and they won’t be able to walk on them. You also always want to-ah, yes. Thank you for that. You want to make sure-ow, see, that was my toe. Do you want to break bones or do you want to cane me? Make up your mind, kid.”
His shoulders are heaving. For a second, I think he’s going to stab me with the blunt end of his cane but he takes a step back and composes himself. “I should know this,” he whispers. “I should understand this.”
I take a stab in the dark. “Is that what they told you?”
“They said evil people like me, we would like it. They told me… this was what I was made for.”
“You know what that sounds like?”
“No.” He looks up, all curious-like. Maybe twenty was an overly optimistic estimate for age.
“Sounds like someone is trying to mind control you.”
“What?”
“Just in general, if someone is telling you you’re evil, that’s a sign they’re manipulating you.”
“I am evil. I’m a Mu-9.”
“Ri-ight.”
“I-I’m hurting you! I cut my name into your arm!”
I glance at the wound. “Is that what it says? Niklo? Is that your name?”
“It doesn’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter.”
“I showed you the foot caning, didn’t I? Tell me about these people.” Since we’re settling down, now, I use the slack in my chains to unscrew the pin holding the manacles around my left wrist in place. Careful practice means I snag it before it can fall open. “They’re not Mu-9s, right?”
He whacks me again, on the knee, which is not how I showed him and doesn’t particularly hurt.
I make a few educated guesses, based on the size of the dungeon and how often he references a group of people. “You’re not the only or first one they’ve sent here to torture someone, right?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Mu-9s are, what? Some sort of torture school? And they’re letting you practice on the sorts of people no one will miss?” Torture schools are all the same—the grey sisters used to snag orphans and widows to practice on, if the dungeons ever got too empty.
“We’re evil.”
“Says who?”
His chin is wobbling as he collapses against the wall, fingers loose enough that the cane rolls away and clatters across the floor. “It’s a gene, right? The Mu-9 gene? It makes people sadists, psychopaths.”
We’re about to have a chat, so I stop holding the manacles shut and place my hands in my lap. “Do you know what a gene is?”
“It’s in your DNA.” If he’s noticed I’m no longer tied up quite so well, he doesn’t let on.
“A gene tells your proteins how to-tell you what. You ever folded paper to make an animal?”
Everyone in this city has; the cranes decorate every other street corner.
“A gene is like the instructions to make a paper animal. A single gene can’t make you a psychopath, nor can they create a world with embedded moral laws and a black and white system of ethics.”
“What?”
“‘Evil,’” I scoff. “What’s that mean? Who decides?”
“I guess I don’t know.”
“Exactly. Tell me more about these folks who are mind controlling you.”
“They tested us at school.” His gaze goes up and over my left shoulder. “They took all the Mu-9s away, said since we were evil anyway, we might as well put it to good use. I didn’t kidnap you. I didn’t even want a, you know.”
“I do not.”
“A woman,” he mouths. “I wouldn’t normally hurt a girl.”
I snort. How kind.
“They told me where to find you, gave me this.” He gestures at his bag of pain-inducing equipment. “Said I’d know what to do.”
“So you found a woman tied up in a dungeon and decided to carve your name into her arm?”
“They had us plan it first. The therapists, they ask us again and again. What would you do, if someone was in your power? And whenever I said I’d never hurt them, she says of course I would, I’m evil, what would I do? She wouldn’t stop asking so I made it up, I said I-I’d carve my name into their arm and then I’d beat them and she asked me again and again everyday until I had it memorized, and then she made me write it down…” Futily, he waves the paper in my direction. “Maybe I’ve done this before. I don’t even know.”
“I’m going to hazard a guess that this is, in fact, your first time.”
He starts to cry. You know what’s worse than a proper good caning? When people cry in front of you, and this culture says women are supposed to be all motherly and caring too, so I know he expects me to help him out.
Sighing, I say, “You’re most likely not evil. You are being mind controlled, though, so I’d recommend doing something about that.”
“I can’t leave. I can’t. They said… they said if I left, the regs would kill me. They can see what I am.”
Fuck me, it’s a cult situation, isn’t it? A torture murder death cult. Just my luck. “Uh huh.”
“This is the only thing I’m good at,” he whispers, standing again and going for the cane. “If I can’t show them I’m good at this, they’ll make me leave and the regs will burn me alive. I need to be good at this.”
“If—”
“And you,” he snarls, “need to shut up.”
I mime zipping my lips. He realizes, for the first time, that my hands are free. I’d like to say the beating I got in punishment was nice, but it was average at best, and I could’ve done without the angry tirade. He leaves me an hour later, bruised and bleeding, still sitting on that wobbly table, but I see a logo on the wall outside before he shuts the door: SomatiCorp.
Cult victim convinced he needs to become a sadist to survive, windowless dungeon with gross tile floor, and a company name in camel case.
