“You just told me General Ben Raines is sending people in here to help us, right?”
“That’s the word I get, yes.”
“When and how?”
“That, child,” Lois said with a smile, “is something you beside’ not know-not at this date. Believe me, it’s for the good of everybody you not know.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“With all my heart, honey-you know that. But Sam Hartline is an expert at torture. He gets his hands on you, Peggy, you’ll tell everything you know and even make up stuff, just to get the pain to stop.”
Peggy started to protest, but the older woman waved her still. “Peggy … listen to me. You wouldn’t want to tell, but you would. Ever’body has their breaking point, you, me ever’body. Sam Hartline would get it out of you or me or anybody.”
Peggy nodded her head in agreement. She was very frightened of Hartline. “When will the people from General Raines’s camp be here?”
“Soon. I don’t know just when, and that’s the truth. For now, you stay in this basement and don’t you stick your head out for nothin’. Sam Hartline has said when he finds you, girl, he’s going to torture you for days
until you’re beggin’ him to let you die. And he means it, honey.” She smiled. was “Cause you shore did a number on that white man’s cock. You didn’t bite it off, but you shore skin it up good.”
“I tried to bite it off.”
Lois laughed softly, the sound muted in the semi-darkened basement of the old farmhouse. “I shore would have liked to seen it. I really would have. I don’t know if I’d’ve had the courage to do what you done.”
“I’m afraid of that man, Lois. I will admit I am scared to death of him. He’s … twisted all up in his mind. He’s … he’s
…”
“Evil,” the older woman finished it.
“Where is Peggy Jones?” Hartline asked the tortured man.
“I don’t know.” The man gasped the reply. He spat out a mouthful of blood.
Hartline looked at another man in the room and nodded his head. “Pull out another tooth.”
The tortured man screamed and fought the leather straps that held him. At a silent signal from the husky man wearing a blood-splattered butcher’s apron, the victim’s mouth was pried open.
A man wielding pliers leaned forward, a smile of satisfaction on his thick, wet lips. His crotch bulged from sexual arousal. The screaming in the small room became hideous.
Sam Hartline left the room, disgust obvious on his face when the tortured man passed out from the intense pain. He walked down the hall to another room and opened the door.
A dark-haired young woman was strapped to a table; the table was bolted to the floor. The woman was naked. She was strapped belly-down on the table, her legs spread wide and her ankles attached to straps run through thick metal rings bolted to the floor. Her eyes were dull from the pain and humiliation. She had been beaten, raped and sodomized. Vivid marks crisscrossed her flesh from the savage lashings with leather belts and whips.
Hartline looked at her through cold, emotionless green eyes. “Are you ready to cooperate with us now, Miss Brinkerhoff?”
Tears dropped from the young woman’s eyes. They splashed on the cold metal of the table. “I don’t know anything.” She choked out the words.
A man, naked from the waist down, with a huge erection in his hand, stepped behind the woman. He penetrated her anally with one brutal lunge. She screamed in pain as he worked his way deeper.
“I don’t know anything!” she cried.
She was telling the truth. She did not know the whereabouts of Peggy Jones. She had never even heard of Peggy Jones prior to Hartline’s mentioning her name. She did not know anything about any resistance movement. She was a newcomer to this area. She knew nothing about any upcoming confrontation between Ben Raines’s troops and the IPF.
Her attacker’s hairy belly slapped against her buttocks. She screamed in pain and degradation.
Hartline and the other men in the room smiled. All were sexually aroused by the sight and sounds of the attack.
It would have been much easier had Hartline simply
given her a polygraph or PSE test; he could have used any of a number of truth serums at his disposal. But Hartline and the group of questioners-men and women-enjoyed seeing people tortured, enjoyed listening to them scream and beg and pray and promise anything and everything if only the pain would stop.
Hartline became sexually aroused when that happened. Hartline and his group of interrogators shared a great deal in common with Hitler’s SS and Gestapo agents. Many SS and Gestapo agents used to enjoy slowly strangling young men to death. Just before the final death throes, the naked victims would usually gain an erection followed by their final climax. The SS or Gestapo agents so inclined could then take the penis in their mouths.
So much for the master race.
Sam Hartline would have been at his dubious glory as an SS or Gestapo officer.
He would have experienced shivers of ecstasy had he been commandant of a concentration camp during Hitler’s reign of terror.
Hartline would have been the perfect mate for the Bitch of Buchenwald, that lady (referring only to her anatomical gender) who made lamp shades out of human skin taken from her victims while they were still alive and conscious. Said she just loved tattoos.
Hartline pulled the man away from the woman’s buttocks. Blood dripped to the floor from her mangled anus. He picked up a small whip from a rack and began beating her back and buttocks, smiling at her screams.
He beat her for a few moments, dropping her almost to unconsciousness. He ordered a bucket of
water to be thrown on her, reviving her.
Smiling as he spoke, Hartline said, when he was certain the woman was conscious enough to understand, “If she hasn’t talked in twenty-four hours, take her down into Missouri where the mutants gather. Strip her and tie her to a tree. They’ll find her.”
“No!” she screamed. She had seen the mutants before.
Hartline tossed the short whip to the floor and turned his back to the woman. He walked out of the room. Her screaming intensified as the perversion gained new heights.
Gen. Georgi Striganov knew of Hartline’s inclination toward torture. One of the reasons he wanted the man on his team. Striganov was not opposed to torture, he just did not personally want to be a party to it. He had found, years before, when he worked for the KGB, that drugs were much more effective and a great deal neater. And one did not have to listen to the shrieking and yelling or put up with the vomiting and all that other disagreeable mess that was associated with physical torture.
Georgi had known many men and women who enjoyed administering torture. He had closely observed them during the act: the quickened breathing, the glazed eyes, the sexual aspects of the torture act itself. He did not want to become one of those perverted types of people.
Besides, physical torture made him ill.
The Russian compartmentalized the issues before him, and took from one section of the mind the matter
of Ben Raines, placing the matter of Sam Hartline in another niche. A darker corner of the mind, where the mercenary could squat and pick at himself.
Ben Raines worried the Russian. Georgi knew the man was going to make a military move against him. He had placed informants in the ranks of Raines’s civilians and Emil Hite’s idiot grouping months back-but their information was sketchy, at best. And nothing of any use had come out of the camp of Emil Hite. Which was, according to the Russian’s way of thinking, perfectly understandable. In his mind, Georgi had already written off Hite and his foolish band. They might be of some limited use at a future date, but the Russian could not possibly think of how that might come to pass.
What kind of move was Ben Raines planning? When would it take place? And how would Raines go about it?
