Posted 12:52 PM by Alfred

Edgar was a bloody mess when Dark arrived. One eyelid had been completely torn off, and Tony had been squirting lemon juice on the exposed pupil periodically throughout the day. Still the little fucker hadn't squealed. That was fine, just fine. The tougher the nut, the more enjoyable the final crack.

"Well your lunch break is over now, Bryant. Mr. Dark isn't going to be nearly as nice to you as I've been." Tony was crouched in front of Edgar, who was strapped to a wooden chair with reinforced leather straps and a couple layers of barbed wire. Duct tape had been wrapped around his mouth. "You got anything to say before my esteemed colleague starts going to work on you?

Bryant nodded his head.

"Well! Maybe this asshole's finally wised up." Tony ripped the tape off of the man's mouth quickly, bringing a soft yelp out of the victim's small frame.

"Well? What you got for us buddy?" Tony looked at Bryant intently, hoping he could take credit with the boss for getting some information out of this particularly stubborn little man.

A faint smile crossed the visage of the bald man, barely visible among all the cuts and gashes that had been inflicted across his face. A thin line of drool was slowly seeping down the left side of his chin. "Fuck your mother."

Now the smile was on the face of Tony, but it wasn't a faint one. Tony was grinning from ear to ear, like the joker in a deck of cards. He'd heard much, much worse remarks from victims in his years of torture work, and had only let himself lose it a couple of times. "You dumb motherfucker. You just got to do things the hard way, hmmm?"

Without another word, Tony left the room, headed toward their equipment stash in the adjoining chamber. The torture was being conducted in the basement of an old abandoned book factory, which Don Scalari owned, although the paperwork from the building could never be traced back to him. The whole bottom floor had been completely soundproofed, which had really only necessitated soundproofing the ceiling, as the two large rooms were completely underground.

As Tony rummaged around in the next room, Dark looked at Bryant without saying a word. Unless he was asked to do so, Dark never interfered in another torturer's methodology. Torture seemed to work best as a one-on-one encounter. The intimacy that this provided usually generated a deeper, more pure, fear in the victim than could be created with a large group of people. Bryant did not say a word, either. This was his third straight day of constant pain and agony, and he knew the routine. During the first few shift changes when Dark relieved someone else working on Bryant, he had tried to beg or plead or offer exorbitant amounts of cash if only he could escape somehow. Now the little man just sat there like a whipped dog. Not quite so whipped, though, that he didn't have a little shit-talking left in him, apparently.

"Now we'll see how fucking funny this pile of shit thinks he is," announced Tony as he came back into the room. He was carrying a hacksaw and an acetylene torch. "What do you think, Dark? Put the tape back over his mouth or should we listen to this little bitch scream?"

"It's your party, Tony."

"I think it would do my heart good to hear this canary sing, as long as he ain't gonna talk." There was a definite gleam in Tony's eyes. He was really into this one.

"You want to give me a hand, Rion? This is gonna get a little messy."

"Sure thing. This is technically my shift anyway." Dark knew what Tony had in store, he just wasn't sure which limb, and how much of it, was coming off. The hacksaw was for removal. The acetylene torch for sealing the wound. Not exactly hospital quality, but this was going to be a very different kind of surgery.

read the prelude at busblog

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