Grunting, Felix forced his pinky in deeper, bending his ring finger back, the broken phalange bones grinding against one another, his previous knife wound splitting open.
Too much. The pain overtook him, and the world swirled away. Felix’s vision dimmed at the edges, the darkness forming a tunnel that got smaller and smaller until he blacked out.
Felix awoke on his knees, hugging the pole, his face warm. He opened his eyes—
—and saw Ronald only inches away, his hot, feline breath blowing onto Felix’s face.
Felix felt the scream welling up, and then the cat’s massive paw shot out, catching his pelvis, spinning Felix around the pole by his cuffed wrists.
This seemed to amuse the cougar, because he batted Felix in the other direction, like a tetherball. Felix felt the rents in his hips, where the claws hooked flesh through the denim.
He chanced a look down at his bloody, ripped jeans.
Felix patted the material, feeling warm blood and torn fabric. The pain was twofold, both his ruined fingers and the gouges in his hip seemed to be in a contest for which hurt more. But there, under the heel of his hand—
Using his pinky and his thumb, he pinched the protruding handcuff key—
—and Ronald bit into Felix’s foot.
The bite wasn’t full force, the cat’s teeth not even penetrating the shoe. But the pressure caused a muscle cramp.
The cougar tugged Felix, pulling him across the ground, forcing his hand away from his pocket as his body extended.
And then Felix was fully stretched out, his cuffs around the pole, his body pulled taught by Ronald’s grip.
He squinted into the darkness, saw the key ring wrapped around his thumb.
Ronald continued to pull. The cuffs cut into Felix’s wrists. The pressure on his foot got worse, twisting Felix’s ankle. His spine screamed, joints reaching their limits, sockets beginning to separate, cartilage threatening to tear.
And then the cat released him.
Not stopping to celebrate his luck, Felix scrambled back to the pole, getting it between him and the mountain lion. Then, using his teeth and his lips and his two unbroken fingers, he managed to fit the key into handcuff lock—
—just as Ronald swiped at him again with his huge paw.
Felix’s world spun, and he rolled and rolled and came to rest on his back, staring up at the orange hunter’s moon. He wiped his sleeve across his face, clearing some blood from his eyes.
Felix didn’t bother to look for Ronald. He got to his feet, fighting ten different kinds of pain, and scrambled into the woods. When he left the clearing, the tree canopy covered the moon, making it impossible to see. Felix ran blind, his mangled fingers bumping off of trees, continuing forge ahead until he saw a light in the distance, a light coming up exceedingly fast.
That was Felix’s last thought before the truck plowed into him.
# # #
Mal stared at his hand. Jimmy was dangling it up over Mal’s face.
“The operation has been a success,” Jimmy said. “The patient has survived.”
Mal turned his head to see the stump of his wrist, one of the pointy bones still sticking out through the flesh. It wasn’t bleeding anymore—a quick dip in the white powder clotted the wound within seconds. But the pain was still there.
The pain went deeper than just Mal’s nerve endings firing off signals. The pain was also mental. The memory of what this monster had done to him—cutting the skin, snipping the muscles with scissors, using a hammer and chisel to get through the bone—that would haunt him for as long as he survived. Mal’s begging and pleading had devolved to incoherent bawling. Staring at the monster who had done this to him, the monster who gleefully held up his severed hand like a prize fish he’d just caught, was almost more agonizing than the physical hurt.
“Excellent work, my boy,” Eleanor said, setting down the camcorder. “Momma has to go check on the guests upstairs. But you might want to give your patient another examination.” Eleanor looked at Mal and smiled. “I think he may have some cancer in his feet.”
Eleanor patted Mal on the cheek, then waddled off, leaving through one of the operating room’s two doors.
“Foot cancer?” Jimmy said, his expression grim. “That’s a very serious condition. We’ll have to begin treatment immediately.”
Jimmy went to the instrument table, gripping a hacksaw in his oven mitt.
Mal cringed away, starting to babble again, knowing it wouldn’t do any good.
And then his arm, bloody and missing a hand, slipped out of the leather strap binding his wrist.
Without thinking, Mal thrust his traumatized arm at Jimmy as he inspected his saw, jabbing his protruding unla bone into the hunchback’s neck.
The pain was otherworldly. But the bone—sharp as a splinter from the chisel—cut deep into Jimmy’s flesh.
Jimmy grunted, stumbling backward, pressing both mitts to his wound. The blood gushed right through them.
“Laceration... to the... internal jugular vein... Need... QuikClot... to stop the bleeding...”
Jimmy reached for the bowl of powder on the instrument cart. Mal, his vision red with agony, thrust out and knocked the bowl away, upending it onto the floor. A plume of white dust hung in the air, then settled.
“Gone...” Jimmy’s red eyes grew wide. He stared at Mal. “You... knocked it over... The styptic…”
One of the hunchback’s hands stayed pressed to his pumping neck wound. The other picked up a scalpel.
Mal watched him stagger forward, the scalpel raised.
“You’re a doctor!” Mal managed to say. “You can stitch yourself up!”
Jimmy halted his advance. “Stitch...?”
“You can do it! You can sew up your wound! There’s a needle on the cart!”
Jimmy looked at the scalpel again, and Mal was sure the crazy son of a bitch was going to plunge it right into his heart.
But Jimmy didn’t. He dropped the scalpel, shook off the oven mitts, and grabbed the large, curved, surgical suture. He lifted the needle up, the thread dangling down, and stared at it.
“Do it,” Mal said. “Stitch up your neck. You can fix it. You’re a doctor.”
Jimmy nodded several times. “I’m... a doctor.”
Then he pinched the wound closed with his free hand and gouged the needle into his skin.
“Keep going,” Mal said. “You can do it. In and out, just like that.”
Jimmy pierced his flesh, again and again, showing a fair amount of enthusiasm. But enthusiasm didn’t replace
