30. Vitali

THIRTY

Vitali

M y shirt sticks to my back with the sweat coating my body and I can’t breathe. There’s something covering my face but my hands tremble as searing pain shoots up from knee, through my thigh, and incapacitates me. My breathing is harsher, battling the obstruction, but it only pulls the material closer to my mouth.

It takes me a few minutes to get my bearings enough to realize I’m laid on my side. The concrete floor beneath my fingers brings back the sound of the drill, the whirring and my bone splintering as it pushed through my skin. How my skin burnt against the metal heating up and it caught in the grooves of the drill bit.

My lack of movement works in my favor and there’s no sound to disturb the distant voices.

“You know the rules,” one hisses. Male. His voice is deep, raspy, and I can recognize anger.

“He doesn’t have eyes everywhere,” the other says. His voice dips like he’s holding his breath, and he doesn’t believe his own bullshit.

Their heavy footsteps vibrate through the floor I’m lying on and the lack of my sight fucks with my sense of smell. Piss, shit, and vomit with a heavy stench of rotting flesh like some twisted cunt has made a cologne out of the worst possible smells.

Little pricks of light come through the material over my face where the fibers have thinned, it’s like a modified pillowcase and fits snugly against my neck. The tremor hasn’t left my hands and I pinch my eyes shut to get the sound of the fucking drill to leave. A scream is building inside of me, but I can’t allow it to escape. It’s a weakness.

I’ve gone too long without the pills and all the pain is flooding back in with a vengeance as the pair walk closer. Their heavy boots slam against the concrete and my feverish body turns to ice as one says, “We’ll get one free, the other when she’s conscious will have to be recorded.”

She.

Stasi.

Fuck.

I try to lift my hands, but the tremor travels up my arm and it only pushes my face closer to the hood over my head. My nose is flattened against it and stretches the material out. I can make out blobs, no features, a figure laid on their side in the middle of the room.

My girl looks so small and vulnerable. I can’t reach her as black-clad legs break up the blurred image. The drugs in my system, or lack of the ones I need, disorient me and I can’t make out what the blobs are doing as the black bars of legs move.

One person stops between Stasi and me. Two lines become one and then she slides across the floor. It’s not until they place their foot back on the floor that I realize they’re kicking her. Both of them boot her across the room and she doesn’t move.

My breathing echoes in the hood and shadows creep at the edge of my vision. Pain erupts from my knee as I force myself to fucking move. To stop them. I stumble as I manage to get on all fours and my head spins. I’m going to throw the fuck up.

They don’t pay attention to me, and I can’t call them with the assault taking over inside my body. They’re too busy excitedly kicking the shit out of my woman.

Len’s voice echoes around my skull, breaking up the taunts in the room.

“Weak. Useless. Pathetic.”

My arms quake no matter how much I tense, and he doesn’t shut the fuck up. He’s dead, but he’s there. Always fucking there to hinder me.

Metal claps together and I still at the distinctive sound of a belt buckle. It’s followed by a zipper being lowered and those shadows fully take over.