AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ignoring his taunts, I glance at Silas, who’s standing silently off to the side, his eyes blazing with his own anger on Cat’s and my behalf. “Wheel that cart over here, will you?” I ask him.
He immediately moves to the cart with a single gas burner. A pot sits on the burner with the temperature set as high as it’ll go. Kurt came in earlier to set it up so it was ready when we arrived.
Silas maneuvers the cart across the smooth concrete floor, careful not to spill the contents in the pot. He stops the cart beside Jimmy’s chair. Jimmy eyes the pot and his throat convulses when he sees what’s inside.
His eyes jerk back to me. He tries to hide it, but it’s not easy to fake bravery when everything in you is quaking in fear.
“No matter what you do to me, it’ll never match the pain I’ve caused you,” he says, his last ditch effort to force my hand prematurely.
“You’re right.” I grab a rubber oven mitt and slip my hand inside. “Nothing I or anyone else could do to you will ever give you even a small glimpse of what I feel every fucking day for what you did.” Picking up a ladle, I dip it into the boiling oil. Carefully, I lift it out and hold it over the knife still buried inside his thigh. His breathing, which was already labored from Cat stabbing him, becomes erratic. His eyes widen and his legs try to move beneath the tight bindings of the rope. He can’t move even an inch. “But I’ll fucking enjoy trying my best.”
His screams of pain rent the air when I start pouring the boiling oil over his bare thigh. I don’t keep it in one spot because the nerves die after a few seconds. I want him to feel as much as possible, so I make sure to coat his entire leg. After dipping the ladle in the pot again, I repeat the process on the other. He’s panting, and if I’m not careful, he’ll pass out from shock.
Dropping the ladle back in the pot, I look over at Cat. She’s leaning back against the wall, her face pale. If it wasn’t for the hard look in her eyes as she glares at Jimmy, I’d say this is too much for her. My first instinct is to get her out of here, but I decide against it. She’ll tell me if it becomes too much.
Turning back to Jimmy, I find his incensed stare on me. His jaw is tight as he clenches his teeth against the pain. His greasy hair is drenched in sweat, and his once red cheeks have turned ghostly white. Still, he’s fighting it. I want him scared and begging. Only when he’s a broken, slobbering mess will I finish him off.
I grab a small box from the table by the wall. It opens like a match box. Pinching one of the small three-inch sticks inside, I examine it as I slowly walk toward Jimmy.
“Bamboo torture was perfected by the Japanese,” I say absently as I twirl one of the sticks between my fingers. “They used it on American Prisoners of War in World War II. Bamboo grows fast. Up to several feet a day, and it can pierce through the toughest materials. Even concrete.”
I stop in front of Jimmy, his wary eyes fixed on the stick in my hand. He’s a smart guy. I’m sure he already knows what I’m telling him, which makes this more enjoyable because he knows what’s coming.
“It’s rumored that one method the Japanese used was tying a person down over growing bamboo. The sharp ends of the bamboo would slowly pierce through the person until it came out the other side. The torture was extremely painful and slow.”
Jimmy instantly starts wriggling in his seat, his grunts of pain filling the room from the pain of the nails pounded through his hands. His fingers are already spread out on the flat arms of the chair and he can’t ball them inward because the fat head of the nail was hammered all the way down.
“Fuck,” he hisses, knowing there’s not a thing he can do to stop what’s about to happen.
Holding his middle finger still, I press the bamboo tip under his fingernail. I push it in a quarter inch and hear his grunt of pain.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have the time or inclination to sit and watch that particular form of torture,” I continue, “so I’ll improvise.” Leaving him, I turn to grab a small hammer from the table and walk back. “Not as torturous, but still just as effective.”
I lightly tap the bamboo stick under his nail and it moves a centimeter deeper. Jimmy grunts louder. When only an inch remains on the outside, I stop tapping the stick. Plucking out another from the box, I set the tip under his ring fingernail and push until it stays when I let go. Likewise, that one is tapped in further. As I reach Jimmy’s thumb, having completed the other four fingers, his face has lost all its color, and his undershirt is drenched with sweat. Little rivulets of blood seep from the tips of his fingers and the pungent smell of piss intensifies.
“How am I doing so far?” I ask, pausing to look up at him. “Do you think I’ve come even close to the pain you’ve caused me and Cat?”
“Fuck you,” he spits through his heavy panting.
I chuckle, digging the stick beneath his thumb nail and start tapping. “Doesn’t matter. Everyone eventually breaks.”
“I’ll never fucking break.”
I shrug. “We’ll see.”
* * *
Jimmy lastedfor another thirty minutes before he was howling and pleading. Tears ran rivers down his ruddy face, while snot oozed from his nose, mixing with the slobber and blood seeping out of his mouth. He withstood all ten fingers being impaled with bamboo sticks, which was longer than I expected.
It was when I started stripping off layers of skin on his chest that he broke. His screams of agony filled my ears and it was fucking glorious.
Cat stayed throughout. After the first layer of skin hit the floor, I went to her and made her sit in a chair. She looked sick to her stomach, but when I asked her if she was ready to leave, she kept her eyes on Jimmy and shook her head. I let her stay. When Jimmy finally broke, the look on Cat’s face was serene. Her eyes were closed and her head was tilted back, an almost smile on her face. She looked like she got just as much enjoyment out of hearing Jimmy’s agony as I did. I didn’t doubt that she did.
In the end, I didn’t kill Jimmy. He’s still in the basement of Slate. To suffer until he dies, which should take only a few days at most. Afterward, he’ll be taken to the same pig farm that Henry was sent to.
At the moment, I’m driving Cat and myself home. She hasn’t spoken since we left Slate. I’ve allowed the silence because I know she’s still processing what happened. I have never hidden this dark part of myself from her, but I’ve kept her away from it. This is the first time she’s actually witnessed it. She’s seen the ugly the world has to offer through Jimmy and those boys, but she hasn’t seen it from me. It makes me wonder if she views me differently now.
We enter the house through the garage door. I drop my wallet and keys on the kitchen counter. While torturing Jimmy, I managed to keep most of the blood off of me, but I have a few splatters on my dress shirt and pants. Cat doesn’t have a speck of blood on her, but regardless, we both need a shower. First, I need to make sure she’s okay.
