There was almost no effort in what Joshua did. He brought the two handles together in front of Riggs’s thighs, switched them to the opposite hands, and then pulled them away from one another. Cole couldn’t even tell if the motion made a sound over his own muffled pleas.
Riggs’s face remained frozen for a moment, then his face twisted up in confused concentration, almost as if he were fighting to place a smell. Cole tried to breathe through his nose as Joshua stood back and began rolling one of the handles in the air, sucking the other one up to it.
The real horror didn’t begin until the goon by Riggs let go of his mouth and reached for the purple bag. Riggs struggled against his restraints, grunting. One of his thighs came away from the rack.
His boot didn’t.
Cole gaped in sick disbelief at the lower half of his friend’s two legs, both of which were still strapped to the rack. There seemed to be a long delay before the thighs began jetting blood, splattering the boots and running down the steel toward the drain. The thighs kicked even more as Riggs writhed in horror. Cole’s head filled with a dull roar—his own moans reverberating through his skull, back into the steel rack, then echoing in his ears. It gave his rage a metallic tinge, like fear and hate wrapped in foil.
He could barely hear Riggs scream as the goon began slapping purple goo on the ends of his stumps. Thick pulses of blood sprayed through the man’s fingers before he could get it stopped. It came in rapid, forceful spurts, a visual measure of Riggs’s racing heart.
After what felt like minutes of struggle and abject terror, Riggs’s head finally fell forward, his jaw slumping to his chest. Blood continued to leak out of his legs; the man tending to them paused for a moment, licking some of the purple goo off the back of his hand.
The man holding Cole’s face let go and stepped away. Cole tried to suck in a lungful of air, but before he could, he heard his own disbelieving wail leak out, the last of his held breath forced into a whimper vying to become a scream:
“What the flank? What the flank!”
Part XII – Lessons Learned
“The surface confounds with its visibility.
Truth always lurks beneath.”
~The Bern Seer~