Chapters (59)
The lash of the whip had cracked against his back and he had sucked in a deep breath, forced to go on hands and knees the long way back through the tunnels, while the guards beat him and prodded him with whips and clubs. By the time he was returned to the tiny cell, his hands and knees were shredded and bleeding, and his back and ribs ached where the whip had flayed him.
Panting for breath, sucking in huge gulps of fetid air to fill his laboring lungs, Steve had crouched on the cold rock floor of his cell like the dog they had named him.
Like before, only his pride sustained him, that and a stubborn will to live. This time he was better prepared for what lay ahead. He had learned through the years that compromise was not the same thing as surrender, that if a man lived to fight another day, it was a victory of sorts.
The other two men in his cell moved slightly, silently, as if conserving their energy just to breathe. He had been like that once, had almost willed himself to die. Had even tried to kill himself rather than submit to a fate worse than death. That he had failed at it had been a triumph he had not then recognized.
He did now.
For he was still alive, and the doctor who had brought him to the point of suicide was long dead—killed by one of the young men he had forced to submit to his advances, gutted like a fish and left to die in his own blood.
A fitting end for a man who had caused so much misery and death.
“Men who live by the gun, die by the gun,” his grandfather had told him too many times to count. Maybe he’d end one day as the doctor had ended, dying the way he had lived. But for him it would be with a gun in his hand.
But not now. No, not now, by God!
“Amigo,” came a whisper in the dark, “there is water to wash your cuts here….”
It was an offer out of despair, an act of humanity in an inhumane place. Steve looked up, saw in the fitful light that filtered through the bars of their cell the face of his cell mate, and nodded.
“Gracias, amigo….”
As his cell mate gingerly washed his back, sluicing a small amount of their precious drinking water over the raw cuts, Steve reflected on his situation.
It was all too familiar to him, the dark days of tedious back-breaking labor deep in the mine shafts. All he had to do was wait. He would have plenty of time to do nothing but think and plan. Like before, he would escape. And like before, he would kill the man who had put him here.