Peril

EDDIE

Who’s looking for her?

He heard the question but had no way to answer it. Mortimer? Was that a real person or someone the silver-haired man had made up?

“Who are you working for?” the man asked.

So far the man had not actually hurt him, but he knew that he was going to because the darkness and the fear and the long hours of being strapped to a chair hadn’t worked, and so the next step had to be taken.

The next step would be pain.

Suddenly he felt his body as something other than himself, the cage that held his soul. It was his body that would betray him, his body that would recoil at whatever was done to it and finally force him to say the name the voice demanded.

“Who are you working for?”

He wanted to answer, but he knew that it would do no good. It would be like answering his father when his father was drunk; it would only inflame him, egg him on to something worse than just yelling.

“Who are you working for?”

The name wailed like a siren in his mind, loud and jangling and demanding to burst from his lips.

Tony.

Just one name and it would be over. One way or the other it would be over.

Tony.

He wanted to say it. His body wanted him to say it. But what would happen then? He didn’t know. Nor did he know who the silver-haired man worked for, or what, exactly, he was after. He knew only that he wouldn’t tell him anything, and that by this silence he would protect Tony, and maybe Sara too.

He felt the wet towel cover his face, the silver-haired man behind him now, tightening it so that the wet drew in against his mouth and nose. He sucked at the cloth and tasted warm, salty water, sucked again, and felt the air constrict so that he could get only half a breath. He jerked his head right and left, but with each movement the cloth only tightened until half a breath became little more than a fruitless sucking at the wet, thick cloth. The pain began in his chest and seized upward like a sharp tool raked across the tender inner folds of his throat. His vocal cords throbbed and his tongue caught fire and the raw meat of his flesh hissed and boiled until his body suddenly convulsed and he felt the pulpy inside of himself like a gorge in his throat, rising like lava into the red cavern of his mouth, filled now, and spewing, but still locked inside by the suffocating cloth.

Then he felt the cloth go limp and drop from his face and the steaming vomit that filled his mouth spewed out and dripped in a warm, sticky stream down his naked chest and over his bare, trembling legs.

“Who are you working for?”

Tony’s name leaped like a flame in his brain and rose like a boil on his flesh and shook like a tattered shroud in the retching gasp of his breath, but still he did not speak.