Thirty-Nine / Torture Porn
Meyer had found the rest of Tripper’s rope, and Voorhees was now secured to the chair in the living room, blind eyes looking out on a smoky sky through open windows.
“Smell that?” Meyer called, rummaging through the kitchen. “They’re never gonna find you. You’ll be ash… they’ll never know what happened today. But we will.”
He walked into the living room with a stack of ragged towels bearing various pieces of cutlery. Setting them on a small table beside Voorhees, he knelt and slapped the cop across the face. “You haven’t gone deaf now, have you?”
“You’re going to die,” Voorhees snarled.
“Strong words for a cripple.” Meyer picked through the selection of knives he’d brought out. “Quick story. When I was a lad up north, my father used to take me to a place where you could pay to carve up rotters. They’d have ‘em strapped down to a table or lashed to a post, and you could put your name on a snapping undead’s forehead or carve a heart into his backside. They had old buggers tied down with years of abuse cut into their flesh — it was a way to let off steam, you see, to turn the tables for a change.”
“Sounds like your father was as sick as you,” Voorhees said.
Meyer smiled and, holding his hand out, flicked his wrist. A long gash appeared in Voorhees’ cheek. The cop gasped in pain.
“Back when they still printed books,” Meyer continued, “a lot of folks predicted this sort of thing. Using zombies for torture and sex — entertainment. Some said it could never go that far, that we were better than that. Boy, we showed them. Mankind hit rock bottom pretty damn quick.
“But, as I was saying, we used to go down to this place and we’d buy a few hours with one of the fresh rotters. My dad used to carve limericks into their backs. It was fun, sure, but there just wasn’t anything satisfying about parting that bloodless flesh. It split under the slightest pressure and nothing came of it. You could plunge a knife right through a rotter’s adam’s apple and it would keep grunting and fighting and trying to get at you with its teeth. They didn’t feel what we were doing.
“I guess that’s why I started cutting myself. I wanted to see blood, you see. I’d slash up my arms and suck on ‘em. Sometimes I’d cut my tongue just so I could taste the blood without anyone noticing. I had to hide it, because the old man would never have understood. I started cutting my toes — he wouldn’t spot that — and I’d fill my shoes with blood as I walked to market with him. I loved him, I did, but he just didn’t get it. Man lived every day of his life in the same miserable shithole, doing the same old thing. Downing a few pints and slicing up rotters didn’t cut it for me, pardon the pun. After a while, bleeding myself didn’t do it either. I wanted more. And I got it, didn’t I?”
He pressed a paring knife against Voorhees’ neck. “I won’t go back to the existence of my childhood. I’ll get out of here, get to Chicago. But first, I want to watch you bleed.”
He drew the tip of the blade straight down, spilling only a tiny amount of blood. Voorhees gritted his teeth and fought the urge to scream.
“Hmm.” Meyer dug the blade into the flesh beneath Voorhees’ left eyebrow. He started peeling the eyebrow away. Voorhees couldn’t hold it in any longer, and he howled and thrashed in the chair. Meyer straddled him and held his head still until the job was finished.
“Got a lot left to go,” Meyer breathed. “Lots of blood left in you.” He stabbed the knife into Voorhees’ forehead, grinding it against his skull. “Bleed!”
He tossed the paring knife aside and selected a serrated blade. “Here we go.”
He began sawing into the bridge of Voorhees’ nose. The cop screamed loud and long, his voice becoming a nasally rasp as Meyer sliced down through his nostrils and peeled the nose away, leaving a gaping red cavity. Voorhees choked as blood poured down his throat. He spit up on Meyer’s chest. The gangster laughed.
Getting off of Voorhees, Meyer wiped himself off and contemplated the severed nose in his palm.
Voorhees leaned forward to let the blood run down his face. “FUUUUUUCK YOOOOUUUU!”
“You really are tough as nails, Officer,” Meyer said. “Gonna take a lot more work to break you.” Cutting a small strip away from one of the towels, he wadded it up and stuffed it into Voorhees’ nasal cavity. Voorhees swooned from the pain. “Stay with me,” Meyer cooed.
“Hmm.” Without so much as a flinch, he slashed the top of his own wrist. He pressed the wound to Voorhees’ lips. “Taste it. Go on.”
Voorhees bit into Meyer’s flesh and wrenched his head to the side. A chunk of skin was torn away. Meyer yelped. Then a grin spread across his face from ear to ear.
Voorhees spit the flesh from his mouth and screamed again. Meyer held his bleeding arm up to the light. He watched the blood run for several minutes, as Voorhees’ sounds of agony became more subdued. Then he went back to work.
He stuck the knife through Voorhees’ upper lip and pinned the cop’s head to the back of the chair. “No struggling now. I want this to be a clean cut.” He pressed his full weight down on Voorhees and sliced the pink flesh away.
“Now for the bottom one.”
Voorhees swung his head violently, and the chair rocked beneath himself and Meyer. He growled like an animal, even as Meyer’s knife found purchase and dug through his lip into his gumline.
Meyer tossed both lips aside with a triumphant yell. He threw the knife across the room and staggered back. “Oh! God!” He ran over to the table and looked over his remaining knives. “We’re having fun now, aren’t we?”
The cleaver was small for what it was, not too unwieldy. He pressed the razor-sharp blade against the lower knuckles of Voorhees’ left hand. “What do you think? All of ‘em? Just the first two? Maybe just the whole hand.”
He raised the cleaver high and whooped as it came down. CRACK! As the blade bit into the wood of the chair’s arm. Voorhees’ four fingers flew into the air.
The cop’s head sagged. Meyer slapped him hard. “Stay awake! It’s no good if we can’t both feel it!”
He licked the wound on his wrist and chopped playfully at the remainder of Voorhees’ hand. Blood speckled both their faces and rained on the floor. Voorhees’ head came up, and he moaned; then it dropped again.
“No!” Meyer grabbed him by the chin. “You stay awake, you hear me? I’ll fucking wait for you if you pass out on me! Fuck!” Meyer wrapped a towel around the ruin of Voorhees’ hand. “You’ve hardly lost any blood, you pussy. I thought you were harder than this, Officer!”
Meyer stalked back and forth across the room, muttering to himself. Then he ran at the cop and slammed the cleaver into his leg, just above the knee.
Voorhees sat bolt upright with a shriek. The fabric shot out from his nasal cavity, followed by a shower of blood. He spat and gagged and gnashed his teeth within a lipless mouth. Meyer withdrew the cleaver. He started cutting the ropes.
“This’ll make things interesting, yes?” The ropes fell to the floor. Meyer pulled Voorhees from the chair and cast him onto the floor. “Now GET UP! You’ve still got fight left in you! Get on your feet!”
Voorhees just lay there, panting. Blood pooled around his face and leg.
Meyer hacked into the meat of his buttock. “UP!”
Voorhees barely made a sound. Meyer was losing him.
“Fuck it then.” Meyer threw the cleaver at the chair and sighed. “Guess I was wrong about you.”
His teeth clenched. He swung his foot into Voorhees’ stomach, again and again and again, causing the cop to cough up more blood before falling still.
“Fuck you, man.” Meyer opened the apartment door. “I’ll just leave you for the rotters.”