57

“How does it feel, Spawn of the--arrgh!”  The cold, sly voice broke off.

Kendra stepped into the room where Daniel and Alex were being held, and vomited immediately.  The air stank of charred flesh and something long dead.  What was left of Daniel’s naked body lay on one of two heavy metal tables in a huge room that looked like a cross between an OR and a torture chamber.  Wooden stakes, manacles, and variety of cruel-looking swords and axes hung on the white walls.  A long square stake protruded from Daniel’s chest.  His head had been hacked off.  A clotted lake of purple blood had formed around his torso.  Another spread on the floor under the dripping stump of his neck.  

Akhom held over his head a sweaty, shirtless elder statesmen.  Kendra wiped her mouth, and squinted at the man.  So he was the owner of the cold, sly voice.  He had to be the head of American Missile, but she recognized his balding head and frowning visage from the little bits of news that had made its way into her insular academic life over the years:  the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheever, struggled to escape Akhom’s grasp.  

Below that weird tableau, Alex lay naked and chained to the other table in the room.  He had small cuts, each glinting with silver, all over his body.  A nasty hole, two-inches square, gaped in his chest, right over his heart.  

A large wooden mallet fell from Cheever’s grip.  Akhom shook him until a wooden stake clattered to the floor too.  Its tip was soaked with Alex’s blood.  Kendra felt woozy, and turned toward the door.  It could not slide shut.  Vampires crowded into the torture chamber, wanting to see, but no one was willing to leave the small landing.  Kendra assumed that the gore of Daniel’s remains did not affect the vampires, but even they did not wish to walk down the few steps to the cruel room’s main floor where they would be close to the dangerously enraged Akhom.

Kendra wiped her mouth, and looked back at Alex’s chest.  The puncture was already smaller.  He opened his eyes, found hers, and smiled sadly.  She felt circulation return to her head and hands.  The faintness faded.  She stood straighter.

“You can help him,” whispered William.  “Pick the silver out of his wounds.  It will burn him until removed.  We cannot do it without protective gloves.”

She nodded once.  He took her hand, descended to the main floor, and led her around the periphery of the room.  They each kept an eye on Akhom, who then choked the Vice President with one hand, while the other drew back, preparing, it seemed, to plunge into the Cheever’s chest.

“Wait,” Alex called weakly from the table.  

William and Kendra froze.  Akhom did not release his choke hold, but neither did he impale the VP.

“You can’t kill him.”

William moved to a glass and metal cabinet, and searched it in a soundless blur.  He returned to where Kendra waited shivering in the aftermath of her own adrenaline.  William shoved gauze pads and a pair of tweezers toward her, then pushed her gently toward Alex’s feet.  Akhom glanced at her, and nodded briefly.  For once the giant did not pull on Kendra’s thoughts.  

She hurried to Alex’s feet, and timidly picked at the silver in a long cut across the top of his foot.  The silver had melded to flesh.  It lay like solder in the wound.  She couldn’t pick it off without tearing some of Alex off too.

“You won’t hurt me,” Alex whispered.  “Please hurry.”

Kendra gritted her teeth, dug one of the tips of the tweezers under the silver scab.  She closed the tweezers, squeezed, and pulled hard and fast.  The silver ripped out of the wound.  Alex grunted, then sighed with what sounded like relief.  She dropped the silver into a gauze pad, and moved to wipe the wound with a fresh pad, but saw no blood.  

“Aurelius, why should I not kill this murderer?” Akhom asked, and shook the VP, whose glasses slipped off one ear to hang crookedly across his purple face.  

“Loosen your grip, Akhom.  We need him alive,” Alex said, then grunted as Kendra removed another silver scab.  

“Loose my chains,” he pled, his voice rough with pain.

“Of course,” Kendra felt like an idiot for focusing on silver splinters when broad swaths of Alex’s skin smoldered faintly under the silver that bound him. She knelt to see how the chains were fastened under the metal table.  “The chains are padlocked to clamps here,” she said.  “The locks look sort of like bicycle locks.”

Akhom had stood Cheever on the floor.  He gripped the VP’s arm too tightly for the bone to be intact.  Kendra could see that the skin around Akhom’s fist had already swelled and turned purple.  Cheever writhed in pain.  Though she knew he was a cruel man, Kendra couldn’t help but wince at the VP’s pain. Akhom tore the pants off his prisoner in one swift move.  He tossed them to William, who quickly shook two keyrings out of the pockets.  He handed both to Kendra, who easily found the necessary cylindrical key, and knelt to unlock each of the three locks.  

The chains had stuck to Alex's flesh.  She would have to pull each one off him.  She started with the one across his chest.  He screamed when she lifted the first half off him.  All the vampires except Akhom clapped their hands over their ears.  Kendra was too short to reach across Alex.  She carried the freed chain with her, taking care to keep it off Alex, as she walked around the head of the table.  It was heavier than she expected.  Her arms trembled with the weight of it.  Akhom stepped out of her way, pulling with him the VP, who screamed and then fainted.  

On the other side of the table, Kendra found the proper angle from which to pull away the last half of the chain.  It was encrusted with charred blood.  Kendra dropped it to the floor, and hurried to free Alex’s legs.  That chain lay just above his knees.  Without as much flesh involved, Alex only moaned as Kendra pulled it free.

The third chain was a different matter entirely.  It lay across his pelvic bones.  As she bent forward to grab the end of the chain, Kendra’s eyes fixed on Alex’s penis, a thing she had managed to ignore after her first glimpse of him when she entered the room.  She couldn’t help but look at it, so pale and small.  Uncircumcised, it had withdrawn entirely beneath the foreskin.  She felt incredibly moved at his complete vulnerability.  

With tears in her eyes, Kendra glanced at Alex’s face to find him looking at her.  His expression was calm and more.  Though he was in pain and vulnerable, his eyes understood and utterly accepted of her need to take a moment to come to terms with this bit of sexuality.  

She smiled sadly then.  He was too wise, too patient and good for her.  He shook his head a little, seeming again to know what she felt, and rejecting it.  He smiled with such warmth in his eyes that Kendra had never felt more right with the world.  She felt ready to hurt him again, to do what must be done.  He nodded once.  She lifted the first half of the chain.  

Alex screamed.  The vampires, ears still covered, flinched.  

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to Alex.  “The chain’s too short.  I can’t carry it around the table.  I’ll have to lay it on you--” her voice broke.  She glanced at Akhom, who had a strange look on his face, as if he wished to mourn for something too long lost to recall.

“Do it,” Alex whispered, his voice weak and hoarse. 

Kendra laid the first half of the chain above the second.  Alex hissed with pain.  She was so short that she had to toss the last bit of it to the other side.  Alex swore in a language that she did not recognize.  She ran to the other side of the table.  The length of chain she had laid on him had already blistered the skin around it.  As she watched the red skin darkened into charred flesh.  Tears ran down her face as she grabbed the looped end and pulled.  She couldn’t pull hard enough to tear the doubled chain off him.  

“William,” she shouted, “help me!”

Hands over his ears, he winced.  “Don’t shout.”

“Sorry,” Kendra gasped.  “Put your hands over mine and help me pull, please.”

She felt William’s arms wrap around hers before she’d finished speaking. 

“On three,” he whispered.  

Alex sucked his breath and held it.  

“One, two, three.”  As William spoke ‘three’, he and Kendra pulled.  The chain came off with a lot of flesh attached. 

Alex screamed more loudly than he yet had, then panted and trembled on the table.  Akhom shook the VP, who, still unconscious, flopped in his grasp like a rag.  Kendra looked for something to do for Alex.  She wanted to give him some cover or comfort, but she found the means for neither in the unforgiving room.    

The giant vampire tossed his prisoner to Ponytail, and to Kendra’s surprise, moved to the head of the metal table, opened his own wrist and held it over Alex’s lips.