Warlord's Revenge (22 page)

“I think I’m being fitted for shoes,” Stone whispered through gritted teeth, as he didn’t want her to see or hear the kind
of pain he was in. “Said they’d gone to check if they had my size.”

“Well, these are a little tight, my asshole friend. In fact,” she said with a grunt as she found the release lever on both
the torture implements, “I’d say they’re making your feet bleed.” She gingerly pulled first one, then the other, device out,
so that the needles slipped carefully out of Stone’s skin. They’d only penetrated about a quarter of an inch, but as Scalzanni
had noted, the body had a shitload of nerves down there.

“Thanks,” Stone said as she sliced through the leather thongs that bound him with a scalpel she picked up from a table filled
with things that cut next to Stone’s hospital bed. “I was writing my will in my head—not that I have anything to give anyone.
Why did you come?” he asked as he swung his body around to the side of the board and carefully lowered his feet to the concrete
floor.

“I told you, I had enough of this place. I heard the scuttle when I hit the streets this morning—that they caught someone.
Someone big. I figured it would only be you. I heard of this place. Everyone has, but this is the first time I’ve actually
paid it a visit.” She shuddered as she looked around the room and saw the mind-boggling devices of pain that the others were
in. “Good God, I—I—” Even the toughest old whore this side of the Chicago Stockyards was taken aback by the sheer horror of
it all.

She walked over to the masked man and touched his shoulder gently. A groan was the only answer.

“I’m going to cut you free,” the whore said, hefting the scalpel again and releasing the man from his bonds. “I don’t know
if you can move or what but it—” Before she could finish, the torture victim sat up and swung his legs over the side. Peaches
almost puked when she saw the flood of blood sweep down out of the sides of the mask. She didn’t want to know what was going
on inside it.

Meanwhile Stone was putting his feet down on the ground as carefully as if they were made of eggs. They hurt like the blazes.
But not as much as they did a minute ago when the needles had still been in them. He stood up, and an involuntary scream escaped
from his dry lips. As Peaches moved on to the next man like some garishly made-up angel of mercy, Stone saw her suddenly look
over at him, about twelve feet away. He realized for the first time that he was stark naked and, in the midst of all the blood
and death, unconsciously threw his hand over his pelvic region.

“If you think I come all this way,” Peaches said with a laugh as she caught the motion out of her all-seeing eyes, “just to
see your wang, you got another think coming.” She kept talking to keep her spirits up as she walked toward the upright iron
maiden, the head in it staring back at her with dim, pain-swollen eyes. “ ’Cause, honey child, I seen more damn dicks in my
time than there are trees in the Rocky Mountains. Seen ’em the size of pencils, seen ’em the size of baseball bats; seen white
ones, and brown ones and purple ones; I seen straight ones and curved ones and broken ones; I seen…” She went on talking and
cackling like an insane woman, but Stone could see, as he hobbled across the cold concrete floor, that she was helping the
men. A few twitching smiles ran like currents across some of the other victims’ faces.

Stone found his things on one of a row of shelves in which all their clothes and weapons had been placed—for later use or
sale. He dressed as fast as he could, wincing again as he stepped into his boots. But he was so damn happy to still be alive—and
have some firepower—that he pushed the pain down and told it to go fuck itself. By the time he stood up. Peaches had released
four of them. They weren’t in good shape by a long shot. Stone was amazed that they could even move. But there they were—the
mask man, the coffin man, the one with nails driven into his head. Even the man who had been skinned alive was somehow sitting
up, all his exposed musculature pulsing and rippling with slime.

Peaches started toward the one suspended over the acid vat and reached out for him. How she could reach through one’s natural
disgust at the states of these men was incredible to Stone. But then, she had been dealing with men all her life. In her own
way, perhaps she had always been an angel to those she had served. She reached the hanging half-man and pulled the wheel-mounted
pulley system that held him over the vat back so that he was completely free of it. Even the others gasped—those who could
still see, anyway. He was a half-man. His intestines, everything within, showing within plain view. It was as if he had been
sliced in half by a guillotine and it was there for all the world to see. Only the fact that the chemical burning action of
the acid had sort of sealed the whole bottom kept what was inside from falling out onto the floor. Peaches held out a hand
to stroke his sweat-soaked forehead when the door swung open again, and before a single one of them could move, another guard
rushed forward with .45 in hand.

He fired without saying a word, at the first person he saw move in the torture room, which happened to be Peaches. The slug
slammed dead center in her forehead, drilling through a wall of brain tissue and then out the back. She stopped dead in her
tracks, frozen like an ice sculpture, and then toppled backward and flat onto her back, as dead as all her relatives. The
guard turned sharply, a wild look in his eye as he saw the dead body of his compatriot on the floor. But as he leaned forward
and let the gun drop for a second, a shape launched itself from the other side of the door. Stone, who had hidden from the
guard when he burst in, came at the murderer from the right. As the man turned, trying to level his pistol, Stone came into
him with his shoulder like a linebacker making a crunching block. The guard’s .45 flew into the air as he careened sideways
across the floor. He screamed as he saw what was coming but was unable to do a goddamn thing to stop it. He hit the metal
rim, and the whole top part of his body flew over the side and into the acid.

There was a terrific commotion with hands flying around in the air and the burning liquid foaming like a boiling stew on the
top of the vat. But not for long. Within seconds the guard was still, his waist draped over the side of the steel vat, as
if he were washing his face. Stone walked over to the motionless body now that the waters had calmed down a little. He gripped
his hand around the lower back of the man’s jacket and pulled. And what came out was not something even the devil dared dream
about.

Stone let the faceless and handless thing fall to the floor as he walked over to Peaches. She was as dead as you can get,
her eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling, already drying out as her body began losing moisture, cooling and beginning
to rot.

“You old whore,” he whispered with tenderness in his voice, reaching down and closing the eyes with his hand so they didn’t
have to be extinguished by being exposed to such harsh light. “You’re the bravest damn woman I’ve ever met.” With that, he
turned to see what was left.

Not much. The little group of should-be-dead men were gathered together waiting. Waiting for what, Stone couldn’t imagine.
Not one of them even should have been alive. He walked over to them, and those that could, stared back at him with barely
opened eyes. One guy with his head in a spike-filled mask; one guy with his body in a coffin piercing him from neck to groin;
one guy with nails hammered into his head so he looks like a bloody ice-cream cone with three-penny sprinkles; one guy with
all his skin peeled off so he looked like an overgrown, peeled grape: and one guy with only the top of him left, and all his
guts ready to spill out over the floor like a broken garbage bag. Just the kind of crowd Stone loved to hang out with.

“All right,” he said suddenly, taking charge. Whatever they looked like, however long they had left on this earth. Stone had
to get them and his own ass out of there—and fast. Scalzanni could be back at any minute—or a contingent of guards. “We’re
getting the hell out of here, right now. You!” he said, grabbing at the sleeve of the nail-headed fellow. The man’s eyes swiveled
around like a cow’s, as empty and dumb as the dirt beneath its feet. But he let Stone lead him over to the half-man, who hung
as if in a swing from the mobile pulley system.

“You push,” Stone said to the huge fellow, who seemed to have lost just about everything that had once been stored inside
the brain. Still, he allowed his hands to be guided to the sidebars of the pulley and nodded once with a spit-dribbling smile,
as if indicating that he knew what was expected.

“You!” Stone said, pointing to the coffin man, who, with his legs outside the knitting-needle-filled box, was apparently able
to walk, albeit in tremendous pain. He looked almost comical, like a turtle with a huge wooden shell on its back. But Stone
didn’t laugh. “Lead him.” He reached out and placed the right hand of the marked victim on the coffin man’s shoulder.

Stone turned and asked the skinless man, “Can you move?” To Stone he was the worst of the lot, even more horrific than the
half-man. But he made himself look fully into the torture victim’s pain-shattered eyes. Only mucus, red and wet, and veins
and tendons that seemed to undulate like a million little worms over his body covered him now. The face, too—carved down to
the muscles of the cheeks, the tendons that operated the jaws and mouth long and leathery. Yet amazingly it could talk.

“Lead on, Moses,” the bloody lips intoned hoarsely. “Deliver me to the Promised Land.” It laughed, and the motion made stuff
fall off its face and arms, a pulsing gelatinlike substance that sprinkled onto the floor.

“Okay, fellow torturees, let’s get the fuck out of here,” Stone said as he started carefully toward the door, his Uzi in his
hand, ready to spray out a wall of death. He moved carefully through the door, surveying the darkened hallway that led off
it. He walked down the hall in slow, peculiar steps, as his feet still felt like his socks were made of glass. He could feel
the blood that continued to ooze out from the myriad little holes in the soles of his feet, making his boots produce an obscene
sucking sound.

Behind him it was the brainless leading the blind, leading the ugly, or something like that. The bizarre crew made its way
down the flat cement corridor. They pulled and pushed and wheeled one another down the hall, making all kinds of wet sounds
mixed in with the continued groans and little squeals of pain that emitted from one or another of them every few seconds—as
their own personal pain device dug a little deeper into them from the motion.

Stone moved about twenty feet ahead as they came to a larger hall that from the sudden draft of air he knew must lead out.
He had barely taken two steps down it when he felt something land around his neck, and before he knew what was happening,
he was being pulled backward off-balance. By the sharp pain that dug into his throat Stone knew instantly what it was—a garrote.
He and his father had practiced with the damn little loops of wire enough times for him to know what the hell they were. And
he had been suckered into one. He also knew that there was no return once they got you firmly noosed—that he would be dead
in another ten seconds. The wire bit into Stone’s throat like a loop of fire, and he saw everything bursting with explosions
of red all around him as his eyes nearly popped out of his skull.

Suddenly the wire loosened and he was gasping for breath. He turned as consciousness flowed back into his blood-starved brain
and raised his Uzi, which was still in his hand. But there was no need. The others were already upon the guard. The multilated
men were all around him, pulling him back and down, their bloody hands reaching out and clawing at him. When they stepped
back a minute later, there wasn’t a hell of a lot left of the bastard.

“Come on,” Stone said hoarsely when he at last had regained his breath. He edged forward again, this time his eyes darting
back and forth like a lizard’s, as he sure as hell wasn’t about to allow himself to be jumped a second time. But the way was
clear along the basement corridor, and within a couple of minutes they reached a ramp that led up and into an open space.
Stone searched around at the top of the ramp, but though there was a chair leaned back against the wall, no guard was in sight.

“We’re out,” Stone said as he motioned for them to come up the ramp. Pushing each other, grunting and breathing like dying
men, they somehow hobbled up the incline after him. Stone unlatched a steel gate and let them file past in their mobile freak
parade before he closed it again. No sense in letting the bastards know in which direction the escapees had gone. They hightailed
it—or as fast as a crew of the walking falling-apart can go—into the shielding woods. Stone led them into the increasingly
thick pockets of trees for about ten minutes, until they were at least momentarily safe.

“Well,” Stone started to say to the ragged, bloody crew with their masks and nails and flesh dripping off and what all, but
the half-man, of all people, spoke up as he dangled from the pulley cart, the blank-faced nail head still pushing from behind.

“You don’t have to say anything,” the half-man croaked out, hardly moving its lips at all, its eyes only open as wide as razor
slits. “There is nothing to say. We’re all dead men. But at least we’ll die free—and not in that stinking room. Thank you.”

“Thank you, thank you,” mumbled the others who could still talk. Even the soon-to-die wanted to go out on their own terms.

“Now go,” the half-man commanded Stone as he pointed to push him deeper into the comforting woods. “Go, for you are still
of the world of the living. We are not!” Stone knew that it was true. There wasn’t a man among them who would see the next
moonrise. He had done what he could—as little as it was.

“Then God—God help you,” Stone said softly. He stood and watched silently for about half a minute as they lurched and crawled
and led each other deeper into the dark woods, which stood cold but loving, ready to take them all into its earthen bed.