Victims
Introduction:
A lesson taught is rehashed and learned inevitably
This story contains some socially unacceptable ideas and themes, so if you prefer a lighter hearted romp through rainbows and unicorns try a different story. Continue on if it floats or sinks your boat. Thanks for your patronage!
~WP
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“I have brought you all here for a reason” the stocky tall guy yelled from the front of our smaller sized room. Twenty of us laid out bound at the wrists and ankles on a hard cement floor. He walked through our crumpled contorted masses and began to shout directions to unseen assistants. The nonchalant comment to “throw them in the truck” as myself and a few other friends were hoisted up off the unfinished floor and carried towards an exit into the darkness of night. Our bodies were lifted and tossed like bags of luggage and before long concealed the wooden palates cushioning us from full impact with the metal bed of the vehicle’s interior.
We began to move not too long after being loaded inside towards an unknown destination. There were frequent turns and bumps along what I believed to be a dirt road and an indeterminable amount of time later the truck came to a halt. The men stepped around each of us forming an assembly line, passing us down along their sets of hands and off the truck onto a mattress I felt my body hit. My girlfriend was crying her eyes out and was slapped, sternly told to “shut her fucking mouth or she would be killed ‘swiftly and slowly’ “. I wanted nothing more than to show this person just what I was capable of. Anyone who has spent a decade locked up in a mental institution and intravenously fed a methodically predetermined plethora of narcotics, who now discovers life on the outside without that security of a drug fueled trance is not the person to have their patience tested.
Our captors unbound our ankles and forced us each to walk an estimated hundred paces. I smelled death. A stagnant musky scent with the realization of now treading across an unfinished hardwood floor. Steps brought us to the basement where that decaying aroma introduced itself to the scent receptors in my nostrils. The covering over my head was leathery and didn’t allow for oxygen to flow quite so well. We were allowed to see one by one with the removal of our blinders. I struggled to adjust to the barely noticeable glimmer of light down the corridor that I identified as a type of kiln. Losing my life was never a matter I considered so why should it be now? The life I once knew had ended and this served as a well needed distraction from the dormancy of suburban existence.
Our hands were freed also but the stocky man warned “no funny business or I make you into feed for the animals”. Even the suggestion that the droning on of his voice wouldn’t be a memory and silence was a wisecrack away tempted me to speak up and test this poor fellow. He turned to grab the back of another guy’s neck lifting him clear off the floor and was whispering something I couldn’t make heads or tails of, but what response he received I enjoyed. It was a smart aleck retort that got a backhand. My hands joined in unison giving an audible applause to the brave pupil of this cruel attempt at controlling our actions. “Bravo!” I shouted happily smiling from ear to ear and whistling with my fingers. Two guys moved towards me telling me to shut up but I refused. This disturbed the rest of our group and created quite the raucous of detached patients from the local loony bin that we were.
“Come on! Try and shut me up you dumb piece of shit! Fucking try something you waste of flesh and bones!!” I teased giving both of them this frantically emotional expression, clicking my tongue and chattering like an ape jumping around excitedly. The thud of a shovel to the back of their leaders cranium erupted the scene. Blood coated the floor around his massive body driving Reese, a somewhat burly dark skinned male to show just what being made to watch his parents be murdered while he hid inside a closet in their bedroom really does to affect the psyche. His arms lifted the shovel dropping it suddenly on the neck of the criminal standing right in front of me, taking it one step further. A crunch announced his success in chopping off the fucker’s bulbous noggin from the thick stump of a neck it was supported by. Sandra decided it was showtime ripping open a captor’s shirt knocking him onto the ground. She is a blond girl of only fifteen who was raped repeatedly by an entire football team. Getting the courage to report a few of the members she not only was expelled from school but was made to conceive the product culminating from this and denied the right to legal counsel by the high priests of the local church in their one horse town. Her parents put her away in the institution after giving birth to the child and threw away the key, knowing the abuse didn’t end at the asylum by any means. Some of the football players fathers worked there and saw to it Sandra would receive only the best treatment where no law’s ever were enforced
Her teeth dug out a wound of nearly a fists width in his chest. She reached inside and tore the still beating heart clean out of the reddened cavity it once resided crushing its fragile composition in one hand. With spots of red on her shirt I saw the life return to once dead windows to her soul and an eerie grimace poured out more rage than an ocean held water, chomping the other captor’s ankle hard. He sobbed falling forward submitting to the circling of us around his crippled frame. “I want you to feel exactly the way you have made us feel”, said another girl Jane who after graduating high school had her parents house burned down overnight in which they died. She was rescued by two strange men during the night that held gasoline cans. Realizing that her sister must have been upstairs caused a mental break to damage her mind in a severe way. The police found her in a tree mumbling incoherently “I’ll save you Katie!” over and over to the sister that had perished in the inferno. Thomas talked in the direction of the helpless man cowering on the floor beneath us, “you need to be dissected like a frog for all the world to see!”. His siblings were abducted over one day at school and had been tortured weeks without end, then dropped off at the school in a cardboard box sectioned and quartered several times. The sickest part of the ordeal was the red bow tied around the box and a ransom note formed by pieces of a newspaper’s lettering on the cardboard of the box spelling out the victim’s name and age.
The police refused to act in his case because there wasn’t adequate evidence for them to follow and no leads because no witnesses lived to tell about it. A local meat butcher was ticketed for speeding and had the tools of his trade laying in the backseat of his truck smeared in blood. He joked about that day being a “tough day” and guffawed the way someone would at their own comedy, which was never thought to correlate to the crime occurring days earlier in that week. Thomas stood there with an ice pick staring blankly down at their prisoner shaking in fear. Billy, a brown haired guy of about twenty found his parents murdered in their living room staged to look like a suicide pact between the happily married pair of wealthy forty somethings. There wasn’t evidence that either of them were depressed, neither took medication, and the worst thing was that none of them possessed a gun. Two shotguns were the biggest evidence which was handled by the entire police force and excluded from being an eligible piece of evidence, leading the case to go cold.
“What is the reason you brought us here officer?” I growled like the uncaged beast I felt I was. “Can you talk or do I have to tear your tongue out? I repeated murderously. He wanted to die so strongly that I saw the emotion flow in the sight receptors remaining open. Reese leaned the spade on the cop’s chest laughing maniacally. He told me about another guy that was his dad’s best friend and used to sleep with his mother on occasion. They fooled around together and soon Reese’s dad wanted nothing more to do with the man trying to insert himself into their peaceful lives. This is the same person that killed both of his parents, but no one used his testimony though they made short work of posting Reese’s name in the papers and spreading it along the other members of the police and fire department. Many of them wanted revenge on the son for muddling the “good reputation” of the town’s only emergency response team and rallied to put him in an institution.
The twenty of us dragged the guy toward the smoldering metal stove down the way from our location, bathing in our sudden enthrallment hearing the desperation in the policeman named Doug Myrtle who wanted now to live so badly. He has two daughters and a son my age. We went to school together what seems like an age ago. We even attended the same parties before my unfortunate mishap. I had been medicated heavily until this point in time, at which I wanted and craved some retaliation. My hands fumbled with the door to the oven, its flames jumping from the introduction of oxygen and heat escaping outward. The cop just looked into the red heated cavern praying to an unseen god, deity or whatever these kinds of people want to put faith in.
Reese and Thomas picked up the guy’s ankles and guided them into the flames listening to the blood curdling screams that reverberated off the walls of this place. The rest of us watched ready to help the guys keep up their applaudable work. Our eyes reflecting the angry orangish blaze consuming the sap now inserted to the waist. His clothes burned off rather quicker than I had imagined it would happen as we all struggled to push the guy in the rest of the way and pulled back the fingers of each hand defeatedly wanting to pull out the stump of a torso he retained, shutting the metal door and seeing the leader of sick and twisted persons in power get nice and crispy.
We searched together roaming the lengthy hallways for an exit and finally found it. Their vehicles sat, motors running in the hopes that they would have needed to escape quickly. I stepped inside the patrol car and got behind the driver seat seeing a few of the aforementioned people and a few more getting into the backseat. Sandra sat up front with me smiling for the first time because a huge burden had been lifted. No, it didn’t bring any of our deceased family members back but at least the people responsible had met their untimely demise at the hands of their victim’s children and siblings.
