Ernest ignored him and instead tilted Nolan’s head back and inserted small metal tubes into each nostril. Nolan’s breathing became whistling gasps, and his mouth popped open to breathe.
“He’s waking up,” Caleb yelled, bending low and holding on tight to Nolan’s head.
Dipping two metal turkey basters into the pot, Ernest filled them with the liquid and rushed back.
Before Ernest even touched him, Nolan responded, crying out and bucking on the table.
Ernest yelled at the camera to be heard above Nolan’s steady stream of guttural and hysterical cries. “Level Four! Pour liquid into nasal passages!”
Nolan fought, spit and sweat and blood flying everywhere, horrible grunts and animal growls erupting from his destroyed body. Placing the tips of the basters into the tubes, Ernest injected the boiling liquid into Nolan’s nasal passages.
Inhuman screams poured out of him, seeming to come from some other level of existence. He strained against the ropes securing his body, fighting and stretching so spastically and furiously that sinewy cords snapped up and down the length of his body.
Blood gushed from deep ruts in his skin. Then he passed out.
Ernest collapsed. “Oh my god,” he panted. “Level Four complete. Did you get all that, Ian?”
Ian’s heart pounded and his head thudded. “I feel sick.”
“We’re almost done. Hang in there.”
“Can’t,” Ian said. “Gonna be sick.”
Ernest said, “We can’t stop now and leave him hanging. We have to put him out of his misery. Take a deep breath. Get a fucking grip, man.”
The three stood around Nolan. His once not-quite-handsome face was now a gnarled and hideous ruin, a distorted parody of his former self. Metal patches stuck to his skin and hair. His cheeks were open sores, oozing pustules of flesh and exposed bone where metal had leaked through. The lining of his nostrils were two solid metal caves. Blood trickled out of the corners of his eyes and mouth.
Ian gently squeezed the nose and felt the soft metal shift beneath his fingers, felt the spongy mass of tissue give beneath his touch. His stomach flipped, and he wished he’d ignored that strange compulsion to touch Nolan.
“Level Five,” Ernest said. “We end this. See what sort of resolve or strength this freak has left.”
Caleb listened to Nolan’s chest with the stethoscope. “His heart’s strong, I guess,” he said, licking his lips, stepping away from the body. “It’s still beating, anyway.”
“I thought he’d be dead by now,” Ernest said, staring off at nothing. “Let’s do this. Final level.”
He grabbed a length of tubing from the tray. “This is flexible, like a garden hose, but it’s metal. Coiling of some sort. I snagged it from the garage, when the mechanic wasn’t looking. Open his mouth.”
“His mouth?” Caleb asked.
“His fucking mouth!” Ernest shrieked.
Caleb tipped Nolan’s head back and pried open his mouth. Ernest fed the tube down his throat.
“Write this down: eight pm. About to attempt Level Five. Tubing has been fed into subject. The tube acts as a sort of trachea. Get ready, guys. This is it.”
Ian nodded and licked his lips. His heart pounded so fiercely his temples ached.
“Hold him tight, Caleb!” Ernest placed a funnel at the end of the tubing in Nolan’s throat. He turned back to the pot and filled a quart-sized metal measuring cup, and he then dumped the molten metal down the tube and into Nolan’s throat. He pulled the tube out as the throat and mouth filled with the liquid, the neck and throat bulging.
“Level Five!” Ernest cried, a look of triumph filling his eyes and spreading into an enormous grin. “Subject appears to be suffocating. His eyes are—”
Nolan’s movements were lightning-fast and unexpected; in the throes of his mindless, adrenaline-powered paroxysm, he broke through the last of the thick cords and bolted upright, his head whipping. Blood poured from deep gashes across his body where moments before he’d been restrained. His arms and legs pinwheeled and struck out in every direction at once, searching for help, his brain now mush, his actions primal, mouth gasping for air.
Metal, blood, and vomit flew everywhere, coating the walls and the young men. Nolan’s pupils disappeared, and he searched and pawed blindly, trying to scream through the terrible obstruction in his throat, trying to pull it out, gasping and retching, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and reaching down his throat, his body trying to vomit out the foreign objects.
Nolan was free from his restraints but his actions were primal and desperate. His bulging eyes had focused enough so that they trained on a terrified Ernest, who was now trying in a blind panic to remember where he had left the exit.
Nolan grabbed Ernest from behind, searching for help, a desperate young man tortured beyond recognition, searching for someone to save him from his living hell. So it was his fortunate luck, and Ernest’s pisspoor luck, that he was able to exact his revenge without even knowing it.
For in his final moments, Nolan — weighed down by the metal filling every major cavity in his body — gurgled and sputtered his final gasping breaths, falling forward, impaling Ernest’s tailbone, piercing major organs with what was possibly the world’s hardest and sharpest dildo.
This contorted mess of twisted body parts fell forward into the table, crashing to the floor. The metal-filled pot overturned, spilling its boiling contents on Ernest’s head. He howled, arms flailing, the liquid hardening into a layer on his head and shoulders, the skin beneath bubbling and dissolving off his bones.
He died melting like a crayon in the sun, his colon impaled by his very own test subject, who was dead as well.
Some time later, Ian pulled himself up off the floor. In a daze he extinguished the light and pulled the door closed, shutting the carnage in behind him. His mind was numb, his body trembling.
He remembered earlier walking through a series of doors and now just walked down the passageways shell- shocked, trying to recall the way they had come just a couple of hours before. It felt like he had been down there for days. He realized it would be years before the bodies would be found, if ever.
When he reached the third door, Caleb was sitting on the floor. Ian shined the flashlight beam in his glazed eyes.
“I forgot about you, man,” Ian said, sitting on the floor beside him. “When did you sneak out here?”
“Right after Nolan fell on Ernest. I got the fuck out of there. I thought you fainted or something.”
“They’re both dead. What are we going to do?”
Caleb exhaled and ran his hands through his hair. “Do? We’re royally fucked, Ian. Unless you know the combination. Look.” He shined the flashlight in the air and the beam fell on the lock, a keypad with the series of numbers 0–9.
Ian stared at it, remembering only that the combination was seven digits long.
“Oh, shit,” he squeaked, quickly getting up and entering random patterns of numbers into the keypad. “We can figure this out. I mean, how many combinations can there be?”
Caleb raised his eyebrows. “Are you serious?”
Ian pounded away at the keypad. He wailed on the solid oak door as well but only succeeded in smashing his knuckles and cutting the fleshy pads on his hands.
“What are we gonna do?” he cried, kicking Caleb, who stared into the darkness.
Ian searched the basement for an exit, a window, a crawlspace. All he found was hallway after hallway of solid rock.
Two weeks later the food supply was rotten beyond even their desperation. Every last drop of dead blood — their only source of liquid besides the small reserve of bottled water and their own urine — had been consumed.
Starving now, Ian, whose fingernails were bloody pulps from his efforts to tunnel through solid rock, his throat raw from screaming for help hour after hour, wondered how long he would be able to survive on Caleb’s dead body.
Caleb was wondering the same thing … only he wondered if Ian would last longer if consumed while still alive. Wondered if the body parts would heal, providing Caleb with an endless food supply. Wondered what warm blood tasted like.
