CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I AWOKE TO a rushing sound in my ears that went on and on, like wind howling through high-tension wires. My shoulder joints felt like they were being torn apart. I was hanging by my wrists against a concrete wall with my weight on my arms. Even though my head was hanging down, and I was staring down the length of my body, it took me half a minute to realize, or to care, that I was wearing nothing at all. My attire, or lack thereof, wasn’t my top priority.
I groaned. My head pounded wickedly. Every beat of my heart echoed as a drumbeat in the back of my skull.
“Mort.”
Kayla’s voice, muffled as if coming through fog. I lifted my head, which hurt—a lot. It took tremendous effort, all I could muster. My eyes wouldn’t focus. A blurred image of her swam in my vision. She was wearing black silk panties, nothing else. She had two heads and three breasts, then four breasts, then three again. She was directly across from me, ten feet away, tied against the opposite wall with her hands over her head, feet flat on the floor.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I tried to answer, but couldn’t. The pain in my arms and joints was incredible, searing. I put weight on my legs, lessening the tension in my arms, which helped. My legs felt wobbly, so I leaned against the wall for support. I tried to move my feet together, but couldn’t. I looked down, squinting, trying to get my eyes to work properly. My ankles were thirty inches apart, lashed by nylon ropes to eye hooks screwed into concrete anchors in the wall. Like the walls, the floor was plain concrete, cool and musty. The air was chilly.
“Mort?”
“I’m…okay.”
It didn’t sound very convincing, even to me. I was anything but okay. The drumbeat in my head went on and on. One Kayla was superimposed over another, shifted a few inches. I tried to get them to sync together, but they wouldn’t. A new pain made itself known, a throbbing in my back like a bad tooth. I remembered Winter standing behind me in the hallway.
Then…nothing. Until this.
“They got you,” Kayla said in a despairing voice.
I lifted my head and looked up. Yep. They certainly had. Like Kayla’s, my wrists were up over my head. Whoever tied them had looped the middle part of a nylon rope twice around one wrist, then tied a square knot behind my wrist, then a series of square knots that went up another ten inches, higher than my fingers could reach. It looked like macramé. Maybe it was. My other wrist was held the same way. After the last square knot the ends passed through a huge eye bolt screwed into a beam in the ceiling. There was no way to reach the uppermost knot of the series that began behind my wrists, which was where I would have to start if I hoped to loosen the mess. A separate length of nylon cord formed a figure eight around my wrists. The middle part of the eight was a square knot, and the ends went around my other wrist and ended in a second square knot, locking my wrists together like handcuffs. Hopeless, but I scrabbled at the knots anyway, twisted my wrists, tried to reach back, get hold of something, anything. I couldn’t get the slightest bit of purchase with my fingers on any of it.
I stood there, spread-eagled. It felt nightmarish, which gave me the feeling that I wasn’t yet awake, that this was a vivid dream. My head weighed a hundred pounds. It started to sag. I felt darkness rising up around me. My legs started to give way again.
“Mort!” Kayla’s voice and the pain in my shoulder joints brought me back.
“Yeah.” I straightened my legs an inch and tried to lift my head.
For a moment she didn’t say anything, as if there was nothing to say. Where we were and the way we were tied said it all, yet it also said nothing. Finally Kayla said, “I’m sorry,” then she began to cry.
My throat was dry as dust. I desperately wanted water. “What’s… what’re they doing, Kayla?” Not a razor-sharp question, but I wasn’t at my peak.
“They’re crazy, Mort. Just crazy.”
I had no answer to that.
Tears glistened on Kayla’s face in the harsh light of a sixty-watt bulb in a ceramic fixture, ten feet off the floor. A wooden door was diagonally across the room from me, several feet from Kayla. A gray-painted, scarred workbench with a big vise was against a wall to my right on my side of the room.
The room was rectangular, twelve by twenty-five feet. It had the musty smell and earthy chill of a basement. The floor sloped almost imperceptibly toward a corroded circular drain by one of the walls. I didn’t like the look of that. The room could probably be cleaned out with a hose if things got messy. A wooden beam identical to the one above me ran the long way across the room opposite, forming the highest part of the wall by the ceiling over Kayla’s head. The beam was wider than the wall. A three-inch overhang jutted into the room, its lower edge eight inches below the ceiling. Several big eye bolts were screwed into the overhang. Kayla was tied to one of the eye bolts as was I, wrists together, each wrist held in a double loop that rose up into a lattice of square knots that terminated at an eye bolt—half-inch steel, heavy enough to have hoisted a marine diesel, no problem.
I didn’t see any weakness in the arrangement. Those two broads
