The Summer I Died

CHAPTER 12

She sat in a pool of blood that flowed from the stump at the end of her arm. Her hair, face and neck were stained with dirt and gore; fresh leaves stuck to her like reptile scales. She wore a pair of jeans and a button down flannel shirt. Her feet were bare.

As soon as I smelled her flesh cooking, I knew it was going to be bad. She was going to die horribly right in front of us. Considering her wounds, especially that ax in her head, she had little chance of surviving even if she escaped anyway, but to watch her burn to death was something I couldn’t stomach. Seeing her head get cleaved and her hand chopped off seemed far less cruel in comparison. Don’t ask me why, perhaps because those acts were quick and I didn’t anticipate them. This was different. We knew what was coming, and it was the waiting that was making us crazy. I could already feel the heat of the stove from where I was, a good ten feet away.

If only she would stay comatose, stay half asleep like she was, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe she would just melt away without a sound, peaceful, quiet. But she woke up. And the show began.

She blinked her eyes, as if pulled from a restful siesta by a strange noise, then lifted her head, trying to figure out where she was and what the hell was going on. It took a few tries to get her head level because the ax was throwing off her equilibrium. A snaky tendril of smoke rose from her back as her shirt started melting away. Then something sizzled and popped, and as if on cue, she went wild. Her scream was deafening, worse than any gunshot, like being slammed sideways in a high speed, metal-crunching car wreck. Tooth snapped to attention, worked his rag a little out of his mouth, enough to form words, and called to me. “Roger!”

“I’m fine!” I managed to yell around my gag. “But she’s burning to death. He lit the stove. We’ve got to stop it.”

We both struggled against our chains but to no avail. She was starting to bleed from her back, frantically trying to scoot away from the heat. The chains were just loose enough that she managed to open a small gap about a centimeter wide between her and the hot iron wall of the stove, but unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. The heat melted away her skin like candle wax. Desperately she kicked and rocked, but still her flesh singed. Blood fizzled as it ran down the stove and pooled beneath her. A gooey cream-colored substance joined the mix; either skin or fat, I didn’t know which.

The screaming was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was guttural. It raked my bones. She spasmed, shook, saw us watching her die; she shrieked at us. The ax swung about as she flailed, and the handle banged against the wall, keeping time to this hellish nightmare. A nightmare so unreal I couldn’t look away.

Neither could Tooth. He was watching with tears streaming down his cheeks, his puffy eyes beginning to slit open just a little. The smell of charred flesh was so awful it made me want to stop breathing, but the rag was so full in my mouth that if I didn’t try to use my nose I would die. Which meant I was forced to smell her body cooking. Tooth started screaming. I started screaming.

We all screamed. We all flailed. We were in Hell.

Then one of the chains gave. I couldn’t believe it. It just went slack. Skinny Man must have left a kink in it which she pulled loose. Not missing a beat, Tooth was yelling at her to move, quickly, to pull at the chain. I doubt she heard him but her gyrating, twisting body instinctively tugged away and pulled free from the slack. She slithered out from her binds, leaving a sickening trail of melted flesh and blood on the floor like snail mucus. Tooth was screaming at her, “Get up! Get up and untie us!”

But she wasn’t listening; she was out of her mind in pain. She flopped on the ground like a wind-up toy that had fallen over, her feet kicking slowly, and lay with her back against the wall so I couldn’t see what damage had been done. Tooth kept yelling through his swollen, purple face. I couldn’t stand it. She wasn’t getting up, and I fucking hated her for it.

“C’mon! Bitch, move!” I screamed.

Unbelievable, this was our chance to escape and it wasn’t going to happen because this poor woman, who by all rights should have been dead by now, who was suffering beyond all human endurance, wouldn’t listen to us. Still, I pleaded because what option did we have? “Get up! Please get up! Please, please, please!”

I kept chanting the “get up” mantra for several minutes before I heard Tooth’s voice. “Enough, Roger. Enough.” He must have been saying it for a while because he was very calm, and the room was hot as a car engine fresh from a circuit race. I got the feeling I’d been yelling for longer than I realized. “Enough. She’s dead.”

She was motionless, that was for sure. Her eyes were closed. Blood coated the entire floor; I looked down and saw I was standing in it. “She’s not dead,” I replied. “Look, her chest is moving.”

Like a light breeze, her chest moved up and down. You had to look hard to see it but it was happening.

“Holy shit. How can she take that much abuse and not die?”

“I want to go home,” I said, my adrenaline finally seeping away.

“I think my jaw is broken. Oh, man, it fucking hurts.”

“He’s going to kill us. We’re going to die and he’s going to torture us and kill us. Oh God, I don’t want to die.”

“Listen, my car is still parked out there. Someone will see it and call the cops if we can just last-”

“Lot of good that’ll do. We’ll be dead by then or at least wish we were.”

He hung his head down and sighed.

“We should have gone shooting at the other place.”

That pissed me off. Was he blaming me for this? I never expected this to happen. Hell, he was the freak with the arsenal. We’d never have been out here if he hadn’t gone Rambo while I was at college. “Fuck you, Tooth. Why did you have to be a hero? Why did you need to find this woman? What did you have to go and shoot the dog for?”

“Because it was trying to eat me. Fuck, Roger, I’m not blaming you.”

On the floor, our burnt cellmate started groaning. She actually sat up and rubbed her head.

“Easy,” I said. “Can you hear us?”

She looked up at me and I felt a renewed sense of hope. Maybe she could get us out of here after all. Maybe I’d shit gold bricks and marry Nicole Kidman, but still. . maybe. She looked like a giant slab of half-cooked bacon covered in ketchup, and I couldn’t believe I was even looking at her without puking. With a bewildered expression on her blood-soaked face, she put a hand in the gooey skin-fat-blood mixture around her ass and sat still. Her shirt, now burned away in back, hung loose around her.

“What’s your name?” Tooth asked her.

Her eyes drifted over to him and her mouth muscles attempted to form words but nothing came out.

“You need medical attention,” he said.

Medical attention? Shit, she needed a priest.

“If you can unchain us we can get you to a hospital,” Tooth continued. “Can you move?”

Her answer consisted of spit dribbling down her chin and some feeble rocking. It was hard to tell if she was trying to stand up or if she was just having a breakdown. It was an infuriating moment and I kept thinking she was trying to help us but somehow I knew she wasn’t going to do jack shit but sit and die slowly.

Then, like an infant, she struggled to her feet and stood, teetering. My heart leapt. Was she going to free us? Were we saved after all? Wonder Woman had nothing on this lady. This was the strongest female I had ever seen. She took a step toward us and wobbled.

“That’s it,” Tooth cooed. “You can do it.”

That’s when the door flew open and Skinny Man stepped into the room waving a shovel in his hand. It was a satanic stage entrance, our screams providing the background music. He ran in and kicked her in the stomach, shattering our hopes, and from the sound of it, some of her ribs as well. She landed in the goo and lay still. Then he hefted the shovel and turned his attention to us.

“This is for Sundance,” he sneered, and swung the shovel into Tooth’s thigh.

The blade slipped right through the flesh and bit into the bone, sticking there with a clunk. Tooth let loose with a scream that was pure blood and hatred. Dizziness washed over me, steering me toward a fainting spell, but I remained conscious somehow. Skinny Man left the shovel protruding from Tooth’s thigh and went and dragged the woman to the center of the floor in front of us.

“Now,” he said. “We’re gonna play a little game. It’s called-” And he started to sing. “The arm bone’s connected to the shoulder bone. The leg bone’s connected to the hip bone.” He flipped her onto her stomach and exposed a back so grotesque, so extensively burned, I couldn’t tell where the muscle ended and the skin began. Her entire lower-middle half glistened with third degree burns, and there was a small glint of white bone visible through it all. And the blood: so much of it I felt like I was looking through rose-tinted glasses.

“The hip bone’s connected to the-will you stop screaming?” he said to Tooth.

But Tooth had gone from screaming to blathering. It was an angry, cursing nonsense filled with a lot of “kill you” and “fucking die” phrases. Blood trickled from the shovel blade and ran down his leg and soaked into his white sock. I prayed it hadn’t hit the artery, but until it was pulled out we wouldn’t know for sure. Now neither of us could run.

Skinny Man gave me an I’m-not-playing-around kind of look and pointed at Tooth. “If he don’t shut up, I’m gonna put that shovel in your neck.”

I knew he was serious; hell, he was hoping for it to happen. I wanted to purge my tear ducts of everything inside but was too afraid of the consequences. “Tooth, please,” I mouthed around my gag, “I don’t want to die.”

I don’t know how, but he stopped making noise and composed himself. Tooth wasn’t so much tough as he was just crazy, a lost soul with nothing at stake. Right now, the look in his eyes would send Hannibal Lecter running. But he was also in tremendous pain and the fact he was able to calm down said a lot about his will power. He was going to live through this. I, on the other hand, was going to die like a bitch.

“That’s better,” Skinny Man said. “Noise makes me crazy, hurts my head. And stop calling me names! Acting like you didn’t have that coming, killing my dog and all. Lucky I didn’t shove it up yer ass. I done a girl that way once, split her right up the middle. Oh yeah, the asshole is a pretty flimsy invention, rips like tissue paper.”

“I’m gonna kill you,” Tooth said.

“I don’t think so. You’ve got a penance to pay. You shouldn’t have hurt my Sundance! He didn’t do nothing but try to protect me.”

“You’re a half wit.” Tooth’s mouth was full of phlegm and spit.

“No, I’m not. I’m an animal lover is all. I had that dog since he was a pup. Watched him grow up, him and his brother both. He didn’t deserve to die like that.”

“Why don’t you untie me and I’ll kill the other mutt, too, make everything even-Steven.”

Skinny Man didn’t like that. He gleefully wrenched the shovel from Tooth’s thigh and put it in the fire, the handle sticking out the little iron door. Not a peep came from Tooth.

“Boy,” Skinny Man said, “you in a lot of trouble.”

“We won’t tell,” I pleaded. “Just let us go and we-”

“Shut up, you twit, you’re not going anywhere.”

I glanced at Tooth’s thigh and saw blood gush out like a fountain. The artery had definitely been sliced, and without aid he would drift off into sleep and never wake up. Tooth knew it too; he was looking at his leg with panicked eyes.

Skinny Man cracked his knuckles and looked down at the woman. “Now, where was I?” There was renewed pleasure in his voice. “Oh yeah, our game.”

He went back out the door, up the stairs, and came back a moment later with the saw in his hand and his dog at his heels. The dog came over and sniffed at Tooth’s leg then started licking the blood from the open wound. His dog collar jingled as his tongue flicked up and down.

“Butch, leave him alone and come lay down.”

The dog looked back and forth from his master to the wound a few times, as if deciding which was of greater importance, and finally went and lay down near his bowls. Skinny Man took the saw and cut into the woman’s arm at the shoulder.

“The fuck!” I screamed.

“You son of a bitch!” Tooth said.

With a shit-eating grin, the man hacked through her bone, the sickening zzz zzz echo of the saw filling the sweltering room. I closed my eyes and muttered some kind of prayer even though I wasn’t sure I was even speaking English. Butch started barking, and through all the noise I heard the dog get up and start padding about. I heard Tooth screaming profanities. I heard Skinny Man grunt like he was having trouble getting through the bone. And when I opened my eyes, I saw the arm separate from the body.

I choked back bile. A numbness floated into my mind, a drunk co-pilot taking the helm. My brain just couldn’t wrap around what it was seeing. It just wasn’t real; I would wake up soon. I knew I would because this stuff only happened in dreams.

Skinny Man took the arm and licked the blood flowing from the hacked shoulder. It dribbled down his chin and he laughed like a goblin. He rushed at me and grabbed my face and kissed me, smearing blood all over my mouth. His slick tongue lapped thick, bloody saliva on my eyes. Every bump on his tongue, every whisker on his chin, scratched itself across my face.

Butch was going wild, running and jumping up to get a taste of the arm. He tried to snatch it out of the man’s hands and got a smack for his troubles. “Hold on two secs, will ya?”

Taking the saw again, the madman cut the arm in two and put the pieces in Butch’s dishes. The dog tore at the flesh, shaking his head back and forth until the chunks of flesh pulled away. Then, like a vacuum, he inhaled the meat.

“That is a nasty wound you got there,” Skinny Man said to Tooth. “Lucky for you, I fancy myself a bit of a doctor. Got my first aid badge in the Cub Scouts.”

He bent down and yanked the ax from the woman’s head. It came loose with a gurgling fart as the pressure from the internal bleeding escaped.

And that was enough for me, my brain pulled the plug.

The last thing I saw before I passed out was Skinny Man taking the glowing shovel out of the stove and placing it flat against Tooth’s wound. I heard a sizzling pop of flesh, Tooth’s bloodcurdling scream, and then all was black.