His arms were chained above his head. Handcuffed, he thought. He didn’t know how long they had been locked up there. It felt like forever. He couldn’t sit down; the cuffs held him too high, too tight. The best he could do was lean against the wall beside him, and he could only barely do that. His legs were so tired; his knees ached and throbbed. He was so weak he wouldn’t have been able to stand—except that he had no choice. He was chained into position; no matter how badly he wanted to move, to sit, to lie down—he couldn’t.
And he was naked. He was certain of that. He didn’t know when he had lost his clothes or who had taken them, but he was absolutely certain they were gone. He was exposed, vulnerable.
And he was blind. Not permanently, he hoped. There was something draped over his head, something that extended down past his neck. He wasn’t sure what it was. It felt hot and scratchy. It let no light through, none whatsoever. It was hot and stifling; it made it hard to breathe.
He had no idea where he was. He seemed to be standing on a tile floor. He thought the wall on his right side was tile also, but he couldn’t be certain. He could only touch the wall with his shoulder, which made it hard to reach a certain conclusion. He felt nothing on his left side. Nothing but open air.
He didn’t know how long he had been here, how long he had been chained up like a slab of beef in a meat factory. It felt like days, weeks even, but he knew it had probably not been that long. He had had no company, no interaction, no food or water, since he had come to his senses. Nothing to help him measure the passage of time. Nothing to connect him to the world of the living.
It seemed his captor wanted it that way.
That was his best guess anyway. And all he could do was guess. Why hadn’t the man killed him already? What was it he wanted? Was it the penknife?
“Come and get me, you bastard!” Tyrone shouted suddenly. He didn’t know what had come over him. It had bubbled forth all at once, an uncontrollable rage, like a cyclone. “Talk to me!” he screamed. “Talk to me!”
Was it his imagination, or did he hear the soft impress of footsteps somewhere in the distance? It wasn’t much, barely more than the beating of his heart. But it was something, wasn’t it? Or was it just that he so desperately, desperately wanted it to be something …
A door pushed open. He heard the turning of the knob, the brush of wood against carpet. It was something. No, someone. Someone was coming.
Someone was coming!
His elation faded almost instantaneously as the sound of the footsteps told him the approaching figure was off the carpet, walking on tile. Very close.
“Get me out of here!” Tyrone shouted. “Now!”
There was no response.
“I know you’re there, you son of a bitch! Don’t pretend you’re not!” He was breathing hard and fast, causing the bag over his head to cling to his lips. “You don’t have the right to chain me up like a dog!”
He paused, sucking in air, trying to calm his trembling. But there was still no response. Not a word.
“Unchain me, you sick bastard!” Tyrone was shouting at the top of his lungs, giving it everything he had. “Do you hear me? Take these goddamn—”
He never got to finish the sentence. Tyrone heard the swift rush of air followed by an explosion in his groin. He tried to cry out, but there was no air left in his lungs. His knees crumbled, but the cuffs held his wrists up fast, giving him no release.
Second and third shock waves of pain coursed through his body. It had been a direct kick to his exposed and vulnerable genitalia, and it hurt like nothing he had ever before experienced in his entire life.
“Wh-why?” he whispered. His body was like a dead weight, threatening to pull his arms out of their sockets. The pain would not stop, and there was nothing he could do.
He heard a squeaking noise and suddenly it was raining. Raining hot water.
It was a shower! That’s where he was; that’s why the wall and the floors were tile. His wrists must be cuffed to the showerhead.
The elation of discovery soon faded to the threat of imminent danger. The water was pouring down on him. Hot water. And getting hotter …
Much hotter. Tyrone screamed. The water was scalding him, sizzling his skin. He pushed back onto his feet and danced around, trying to escape the fiery rain, but there was nowhere he could go. The water burned down on his exposed skin, on every part of his body. He felt as if his flesh was melting, then slowly peeling away.
“Stop!” Tyrone cried. “Please—stop!” He flung himself against the wall, but the showerhead held him tight. Maybe if I bash my brains out, he thought to himself, maybe if I just kill myself now. I have to end this. I have to escape the pain somehow—
“You’re killing me!” he screamed, but then he realized that that might well be the point of the exercise.
The water continued to burn down. It had to be boiling temperature now. His body felt cooked, ruined, like it had been dipped into the sun. He felt weak and destroyed, and he knew he couldn’t last much longer.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain ended.
“Oh, thank God,” he said, breathless, pressed against the wall. “Oh, thank God.”
And then he heard the squeaking noise again.
“No! Please, no!”
This time the water was cold. Ice cold. At first, it was almost comforting, soothing—but that didn’t last long. The frigid water seemed to paralyze him, to send him into shock. He was trembling out of control, losing consciousness. His body couldn’t adapt to these drastically changing temperatures. He could feel his heart doing flip-flops, breaking down under the pressure.
He wanted to scream, but he didn’t have the strength. He just hung there, motionless, and the cruel water pounded down on him, freezing his veins and the flow of blood and everything else that made his body work. This was the end, he knew. The absolute bitter end. He couldn’t possibly survive this. No one could. No one—
And then the water shut off again.
Tyrone was hyperventilating, gasping for air. “Puh—puh—” He tried to stop stuttering, but he was so cold. He never felt so cold before. “Wh—what do you want? Why are you doing this?”
But there was no reply. Until—
Tyrone heard the swish of air just seconds before the blow landed. It smashed into the soft part of his stomach, pummeling him back against the tile wall. His body had been stretched to its limits when the blow landed, making it hurt all the worse. Tyrone instinctively tried to clutch his middle, but his wrists were still cuffed.
His stomach ached. He felt as if something had been severed, some tendon or muscle. He wondered if he wasn’t bleeding internally. For that matter, he might be bleeding externally, for all he knew. He could see nothing.
The next blow came mere seconds after the first. It hit near the same soft place as the first and was even harder. His cuffed arms were twisted to one side, wrenching his left arm almost out of its socket.
He couldn’t scream anymore, just couldn’t do it. Everything that had been in him, every bit of fight, of resistance, had been sucked away. Instead, he cried. He wept. He was embarrassed, but he couldn’t stop. Once he started, the tears tumbled out of his eyes in an unending stream. He felt pathetic, humiliated. But he couldn’t stop.
“Please,” he said, barely above a whisper. It was all he had left. “Please stop.”
But the attack did not stop. The next blow came to his head. The sharp sudden impact of a fist drove like a hammer into his face. His sore, aching, scarred, soft putty face. Tyrone felt his nose split open and explode, cartilage and blood flying, and not a second later, he felt the back of his head slam back against the tile wall.