Enough.” He must have been saying it for a while because he was very calm, and the room was hot as a car engine fresh from a circuit race. I got the feeling I’d been yelling for longer than I realized. “Enough. She’s dead.”
She was motionless, that was for sure. Her eyes were closed. Blood coated the entire floor; I looked down and saw I was standing in it. “She’s not dead,” I replied. “Look, her chest is moving.”
Like a light breeze, her chest moved up and down. You had to look hard to see it but it was happening.
“Holy shit. How can she take that much abuse and not die?”
“I want to go home,” I said, my adrenaline finally seeping away.
“I think my jaw is broken. Oh, man, it fucking hurts.”
“He’s going to kill us. We’re going to die and he’s going to torture us and kill us. Oh God, I don’t want to die.”
“Listen, my car is still parked out there. Someone will see it and call the cops if we can just last-”
“Lot of good that’ll do. We’ll be dead by then or at least wish we were.”
He hung his head down and sighed.
“We should have gone shooting at the other place.”
That pissed me off. Was he blaming me for this? I never expected this to happen. Hell, he was the freak with the arsenal. We’d never have been out here if he hadn’t gone Rambo while I was at college. “Fuck you, Tooth. Why did you have to be a hero? Why did you need to find this woman? What did you have to go and shoot the dog for?”
“Because it was trying to eat me. Fuck, Roger, I’m not blaming you.”
On the floor, our burnt cellmate started groaning. She actually sat up and rubbed her head.
“Easy,” I said. “Can you hear us?”
She looked up at me and I felt a renewed sense of hope. Maybe she could get us out of here after all. Maybe I’d shit gold bricks and marry Nicole Kidman, but still. . maybe. She looked like a giant slab of half-cooked bacon covered in ketchup, and I couldn’t believe I was even looking at her without puking. With a bewildered expression on her blood-soaked face, she put a hand in the gooey skin-fat-blood mixture around her ass and sat still. Her shirt, now burned away in back, hung loose around her.
“What’s your name?” Tooth asked her.
Her eyes drifted over to him and her mouth muscles attempted to form words but nothing came out.
“You need medical attention,” he said.
Medical attention? Shit, she needed a priest.
“If you can unchain us we can get you to a hospital,” Tooth continued. “Can you move?”
Her answer consisted of spit dribbling down her chin and some feeble rocking. It was hard to tell if she was trying to stand up or if she was just having a breakdown. It was an infuriating moment and I kept thinking she was trying to help us but somehow I knew she wasn’t going to do jack shit but sit and die slowly.
Then, like an infant, she struggled to her feet and stood, teetering. My heart leapt. Was she going to free us? Were we saved after all? Wonder Woman had nothing on this lady. This was the strongest female I had ever seen. She took a step toward us and wobbled.
“That’s it,” Tooth cooed. “You can do it.”
That’s when the door flew open and Skinny Man stepped into the room waving a shovel in his hand. It was a satanic stage entrance, our screams providing the background music. He ran in and kicked her in the stomach, shattering our hopes, and from the sound of it, some of her ribs as well. She landed in the goo and lay still. Then he hefted the shovel and turned his attention to us.
“This is for Sundance,” he sneered, and swung the shovel into Tooth’s thigh.
The blade slipped right through the flesh and bit into the bone, sticking there with a clunk. Tooth let loose with a scream that was pure blood and hatred. Dizziness washed over me, steering me toward a fainting spell, but I remained conscious somehow. Skinny Man left the shovel protruding from Tooth’s thigh and went and dragged the woman to the center of the floor in front of us.
“Now,” he said. “We’re gonna play a little game. It’s called-” And he started to sing. “The arm bone’s connected to the shoulder bone. The leg bone’s connected to the hip bone.” He flipped her onto her stomach and exposed a back so grotesque, so extensively burned, I couldn’t tell where the muscle ended and the skin began. Her entire lower-middle half glistened with third degree burns, and there was a small glint of white bone visible through it all. And the blood: so much of it I felt like I was looking through rose-tinted glasses.
“The hip bone’s connected to the-will you stop screaming?” he said to Tooth.
But Tooth had gone from screaming to blathering. It was an angry, cursing nonsense filled with a lot of “kill you” and “fucking die” phrases. Blood trickled from the shovel blade and ran down his leg and soaked into his white sock. I prayed it hadn’t hit the artery, but until it was pulled out we wouldn’t know for sure. Now neither of us could run.
Skinny Man gave me an I’m-not-playing-around kind of look and pointed at Tooth. “If he don’t shut up, I’m gonna put that shovel in your neck.”
I knew he was serious; hell, he was hoping for it to happen. I wanted to purge my tear ducts of everything inside but was too afraid of the consequences. “Tooth, please,” I mouthed around my gag, “I don’t want to die.”
I don’t know how, but he stopped making noise and composed himself. Tooth wasn’t so much tough as he was just crazy, a lost soul with nothing at stake. Right now, the look in his eyes would send Hannibal Lecter running. But he was also in tremendous pain and the fact he was able to calm down said a lot about his will power. He was going to live through this. I, on the other hand, was going to die like a bitch.
“That’s better,” Skinny Man said. “Noise makes me crazy, hurts my head. And stop calling me names! Acting like you didn’t have that coming, killing my dog and all. Lucky I didn’t shove it up yer ass. I done a girl that way once, split her right up the middle. Oh yeah, the asshole is a pretty flimsy invention, rips like tissue paper.”
“I’m gonna kill you,” Tooth said.
“I don’t think so. You’ve got a penance to pay. You shouldn’t have hurt my Sundance! He didn’t do nothing but try to protect me.”
“You’re a half wit.” Tooth’s mouth was full of phlegm and spit.
“No, I’m not. I’m an animal lover is all. I had that dog since he was a pup. Watched him grow up, him and his brother both. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”
“Why don’t you untie me and I’ll kill the other mutt, too, make everything even-Steven.”
Skinny Man didn’t like that. He gleefully wrenched the shovel from Tooth’s thigh and put it in the fire, the handle sticking out the little iron door. Not a peep came from Tooth.
“Boy,” Skinny Man said, “you in a lot of trouble.”
“We won’t tell,” I pleaded. “Just let us go and we-”
“Shut up, you twit, you’re not going anywhere.”
I glanced at Tooth’s thigh and saw blood gush out like a fountain. The artery had definitely been sliced, and without aid he would drift off into sleep and never wake up. Tooth knew it too; he was looking at his leg with panicked eyes.
Skinny Man cracked his knuckles and looked down at the woman. “Now, where was I?” There was renewed pleasure in his voice. “Oh yeah, our game.”
He went back out the door, up the stairs, and came back a moment later with the saw in his hand and his dog at his heels. The dog came over and sniffed at Tooth’s leg then started licking the blood from the open wound. His dog collar jingled as his tongue flicked up and down.
“Butch, leave him alone and come lay down.”
The dog looked back and forth from his master to the wound a few times, as if deciding which was of greater importance, and finally went and lay down near his bowls. Skinny Man took the saw and cut into the woman’s arm at the shoulder.
“The fuck!” I screamed.
“You son of a bitch!” Tooth said.
With a shit-eating grin, the man hacked through her bone, the sickening
