The Sanctuary

31

HE DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been out, only that he wasn’t dead. And that he’d been brought back to consciousness by water thrown on his face.

“Wake up, you idiot. Payback time.” The captain’s voice.

Danny opened his eyes. The concrete ceiling of the terrible room where he’d spent two days slowly came into focus. He was in deep meditation. The place of torment.

But he was alive, which could only mean that the warden had stopped Randell from killing him as he lay unconscious in the hard yard. This was what Danny had hoped for. Death wasn’t Pape’s objective. His world revolved around compliance and punishment.

But what of Randell?

Danny turned his throbbing head and saw that he wasn’t on the ground. Or on the wall. He lay on his back, arms and legs strapped to the wooden table, dressed only in loose shorts.

Bostich stood over him wearing a slash for a grin. Sweat beaded his forehead and darkened the armpits of his uniform.

“Wakie, wakie.”

A doctor from the infirmary stood in the corner, dressed in a white smock. There was a black medical bag at his feet. The man was tall and gaunt, with high cheekbones and a balding blond head. He watched Danny, emotionless, hands clasped in front of his waist.

The door opened, and the warden stepped into the room like a sloth, slow and deliberate. He closed the door behind him and straightened his black suit jacket.

Danny saw then that they’d strapped down his shins and thighs as well as his ankles. The low-wattage incandescent bulb on the ceiling flickered once, then remained lit, casting its glow about the room.

Marshall Pape slid one hand into his pocket as he always did, and stepped into the middle of the room. There wasn’t a hint of kindness on his face.

“You disappoint me, Danny. You saw what they did to that poor boy. Slane was the kind of person other prisons keep paroling back into society to prey on the weak. The kind who took my family. I’m trying to fix that, and I’d hoped to get a little help from a priest. I was wrong.”

But Danny’s mind was more on the straps holding his legs. Why? A tinge of fear leaked through his bones.

The warden nodded at the doctor, who bent for his black bag.

“Did your father ever send you into quiet time when you were a child, Danny?”

He cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“Think of the hole as a kind of quiet time. But if you keep breaking the rules, things get worse. The next time, your father might take away privileges. Then swat your hand. Then maybe give you a good whipping.”

No, but Danny said nothing.

“You may think of this as your good whipping. I hope it’s your last.”

He stepped aside as the doctor placed his black bag on the table. From it he withdrew a white cloth, which he placed next to Danny, then latex gloves, and something that looked like a silver electric toothbrush without the brush. A small jar of disinfectant and several cotton swabs were next.

The warden continued in a calm voice. “Don’t worry, he’s very clean. It’s important that you don’t develop an infection.”

The doctor removed a small white case, which he opened. From it, he selected a very thin six-inch needle that went into the end of the device. Or was it a small drill bit, like those used by dentists?

Sweat began to seep out of Danny’s pores.

The doctor connected a small air tube to the silver wand and set it down on the white cloth. Taking the disinfectant, he wiped a four-inch section of Danny’s shin.

No one spoke now. Bostich stood with his arms crossed, wearing a smirk. The warden watched, hand in pocket, frowning. The doctor calmly went about his business.

“The advantage of this particular form of punishment is that it will leave only a very small mark,” Pape said. “The needle will reach into your bone and grind at certain nerves. There will be no permanent damage, but you can expect the pain to be quite intense. It doesn’t compare to eternal fire, but you’ll get the general idea.”

The doctor felt along Danny’s shin bone with his thumb until he found what he was looking for. Keeping the thumb in place, he reached into the black bag and turned on a power source. A small air pump.

He lifted the drill and Danny closed his eyes. The device whined once, then twice as the doctor tested it.

“We’ve only taken one other member this far,” Pape continued. “Slane was terribly stubborn when he came to us, and now he’s dead. Such a shame, but some people just can’t be rehabilitated in their time. As for Peter’s suffering, it was short. Yours will last two days. We’ll talk then.”

He stepped away. The door squealed open, then closed behind him.

Bostich pressed a thick strip of rubber against Danny’s mouth. “Bite on this. You don’t want to chew off your tongue.”

He accepted the piece, bit into it, and marshaled all of his focus to one end: shutting down his mind. The brain controlled pain. The nerve endings might be stimulated, but unless their message was properly interpreted by the mind, the pain would be lost. There was no way to avoid the warden’s punishment, but he could endure it by minimizing that pain.

This Danny knew, but he had never felt a thin, whining drill grind into his bones before. The device screeched to life.

“Try not to move,” the doctor said. “We have a long way to go and I don’t want to tear up your bone marrow.”

It was with that word marrow that Danny’s resolve began to fade.

The tip of the drill touched his skin and a sharp sting shot up his leg. But not so much that he flinched. Then it struck his chin and the sensation swelled, a biting, excruciating pain that brought with it spreading heat as his flesh rebelled.

This too, Danny could manage for some time. He bit down on the rubber with more force and pushed his thoughts into submission, searching for the solace that he’d learned to find beyond them.

But then the drill broke past the surface of the bone and struck a tangle of nerves that shattered any notion he could endure such torment. The pain was not localized; it slammed into his whole body at once, like a thundering wave crashing onto the shore.

Nothing could have prepared him for such intense agony. His body began to tremble from head to foot. His head snapped back, and he clamped down on the rubber, desperate for relief.

“Hold still,” the doctor said. “It gets worse with time. Just try to relax.”

Danny’s jaw snapped wide and he began to scream.