40
Khane
My brother was on the warpath and rightfully so. The love of his life had been gunned down by our father, the devil that turned us into death soldiers.
I stared into the face of one of the few left of the fifteen that were my father’s keepers and instrumental in setting him free. It had taken Arjen and me three weeks to find them all because our dedication to avenging Mecca had been that strong.
The men’s loyalty to our father had cost them their lives. Time didn’t matter. Who they were associated with didn’t matter either. We weren’t going to stop our deathly rampage until they were all dead.
The screams were music to my ears. I relished the sound of death, the incredibly unnecessary actions one would take to prevent that which was inevitable. Arjen was feeding my sinful connection with a death straight from the pages of the devil’s playbook.
We had hunted high and low, near and far until we found the man with the accent. He was someone me and Arjen knew. He was who had hired the assassins that facilitated the highway ambushes on Mecca and us.
Adrik Morozov was my father’s long time Russian associate. Adrik was the closest thing my father had to a best friend and my father’s connection to all sorts of illegal business in Russia. Now, his loyalty to our father had Arjen, the Lord of Untimely Death, peering down at him.
The man had suffered at Arjen’s hand for the past week as he fed him pain to extract the information we needed to find most, if not all of the members of our father’s loyal rescue party.
Arjen had the man on his knees in the prayer position with his face tilted down. It wasn’t so much the position that was the kicker, it was how Arjen had staged the man’s face.
He began asking questions, and each time the man gave an answer he didn’t want to hear, he’d force him to open his mouth and bite the pointed edges of the stone wall before him. The man resembled a mouse biting into a too big wedge of cheese.
His mouth was wide open, with the jagged edges of the gray stone wedged between his teeth. His shrill yells bounced off the walls like invisible yo-yo’s, the sound waves almost tangible.
Each day, Arjen would come up with a new horror to put the man through, siphoning information from him each time. Now, he had a tight grip of the man’s hair, controlling his head.
“How many of you are left?”
Blood drizzled down the man’s chin from the stone pushing at his teeth and biting into his tongue.
“We are it. Fifteen.”
Fifteen was the answer we had gotten from each man we had tortured, and I was starting to believe it as the truth because we were down to the last two, and the answer hadn’t changed yet.
“I don’t believe that shit.”
Arjen pressed the man’s face into the jagged edges of the thick chock of stone until a nasty crunch sounded, breaking his nose. Blood poured from the man’s face.
“Open your fucking mouth and bite the rock,” he ordered. The sight was horrific enough to make the devil proud. Once the man had his mouth wide open, Arjen shoved his face into the stone so that a wide wedge was back between his exposed teeth. The pressure that was put on the back of the man’s head had his jaw stretched alligator wide.
A sickening crunch sounded before teeth went flying in different directions from the sudden punch Arjen delivered to the back of the man’s head. I had witnessed horrific shit, most of it delivered by my hands, but Arjen was earning his nickname this day.
Piss leaked from the screaming man’s pants. Arjen jerked the man’s mangled mouth from the rock as blood and teeth continued to fall from his face. He leaned down next to his ear, telling him something I couldn’t hear.
The man’s lips were so damaged that his begging words were nothing more than bloody mumbles. Mercy was not on his side tonight as his mouth was placed back on the stone, his jaw even wider as his cries and whimpers, and trembling and begging groans were ignored.
A deep squint tightened my eyes when Arjen held the man’s head in place with a hand pressed to the back of his head. His arms were long enough that he stepped back from the struggling man and sent a powerful kick to the area where his hand had been.
The man’s face was crushed into the stone. The rest of his teeth, along with his jawbone, shattered as the red of blood mixed with the ebony of bone and teeth fragments poured from what was once his face.
A gaping opening was left where his mouth and nose used to be. His convulsing body slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood and tissue behind until he hit the floor.
Arjen didn’t even stay to survey the damage he had done as he was on to the last man. For once, I was worried about my brother’s mental state when he was usually the one that worried about mine.
The man before him now was stripped naked. His bulky body hung heavily from thick iron chains that rained rust and sang a squeaky song with each movement. Biting metal gripped his wrist as he hung swinging listlessly about for our entertainment.
We had killed them all except the one hanging in front of Arjen in the secret basement prison under my house. Since my house sat in the middle of nowhere, on the peak of a mountain, the basement dipped into a stone cavern of openings and pathways that I had converted into an inescapable prison.
Arjen was playing human piñata with the last man, using a spiked baseball bat that would have made the character, Negan, from the show, The Walking Dead, proud.