“I should definitely have read it more carefully.”
“What did you say?” shouted the thug from across the room. In another time and another place, he was leading man material. His hair was perfectly shaped and styled. His suit was crisp and trendy. His teeth were the whitest Sarah had ever seen. Then he turned and you could see the large gash that someone had tried to take out of it. She wasn’t sure of the story exactly but someone had decided to have playtime with a meat hook down one side of his face. She didn’t know his name, just that he was “The Scarred One” that had picked her up from her home earlier that night.
He grunted at her as she didn’t reply to him. He turned and busied himself with what he was doing. What he was doing was polishing a long thin, sharp piece of metal. Some sort of weapon that she hadn’t seen before. The room was full of weapons and implements and devices she could not even figure out. About ten minutes earlier he had asked her to pick her favourite. As if she had a favourite. She was a divorced, almost middle-aged school teacher and the most violent thing she had done in her life was run over a squirrel, which she had done completely by accident.
But tonight she found herself in this hellish room, full of sharp and dangerous objects being asked to pick one for God knows what. “I suggest something on that wall.” He pointed to the wall of knives. Apart from the knife block in her kitchen, she hadn’t ever really put too much thought into the world of knives but this wall opened up her eyes to the most unimaginable pain you could consider inflicting on someone. She reluctantly picked a small normal looking knife. “I personally would have picked something more menacing but hey, little lady, little knife.”
She fidgeted with it in her hand not quite sure what to do with it. Should she place it in her pocket, should she hold it out in front of her, should she hide it in her ponytail? She had no idea but no one around her seemed to care that she was completely useless when it came to menacing and causing harm.
The Scarred One grabbed her arm and pulled her into the hallway. It was long and dark, exactly what you would expect of an old factory…if you were watching a slasher pic. The events that had led her to this night, to this corridor, were things she could not have possibly ever imagined. And signing that contract 48 hours before was the last thing she ever wanted to do but she needed the money so desperately she would have sold herself if anyone was buying.
He let go of her arm so he could pull the bolt down that kept the huge door in front of her locked. He pushed the giant iron door into the wall and revealed what her task was for the evening. The room was a huge empty, square. You could tell by the patterns of dust and marks on the floor and the walls that until quite recently there were very large pieces of equipment here. She’d seen this factory a million times from the road and had never paid any attention to what it might have been used for. For as long as she had remembered it was abandoned. Tonight it most certainly wasn’t.
She’d seen him as soon as the door had slid open but her eyes and her mind both tried to avoid the fact he was there because it made what she was about to do come to life. It was an epiphany that really bad s**t was about to go down. She’d known since the moment the pen had hit the paper that it would but now there was no getting away from it.
“He knows s**t we need to know. You need to get it out of him. You have about 3 hours.”
“And then what?”
“What do you think?” The Scarred One said as he walked to the other side of the door and started to pull it closed. The sound of the metal door hitting the wall and the bolt coming down echoed in the empty space.
She looked at her victim, that was what he was about to become and had no idea what she was supposed to do, what she was supposed to learn or how she was supposed to get it out of him. Obviously they wanted her to use the weapon but she couldn’t do that to this poor man, whoever he was. She had no idea if he was good or bad. If he had done the gang wrong. If he was an innocent just caught in the crossfire of something bigger. And also, how was this an effective use of resources to tell her to try to learn something and not even give her a clue.
She looked at the little knife that she had picked. What am I going to do with you? It was a question that she asked herself what seemed like a million times in the two minutes from when the door locked to when it happened. They wanted her to hurt this man and even though she didn’t want to, she had to. The contract had basically said to do anything they asked of her for the money she needed. One hundred and seventeen thousand pounds. It was more money than she could ever contemplate but her mother needed this, she needed her mother. This was a simple mathematical equation, a business transaction, an extreme source of income. In those two minutes something in her changed. So she just did it.
The knife went into his leg so easily. He made a strangled moaning sound that reminded her of a wounded animal. For the first time she really looked at his face and realised that he had already been broken. She wasn’t the first to visit this room. The reason the sound he made was so strange was because he had no tongue. There was nothing this man was going to tell her tonight, nothing he was going to be able to tell her…ever.
My Verdict: Today I had a fifteen minute time limit but I will admit I didn’t feel I could resolve what I was doing so I gave myself a cheeky extra 5 minutes which is cheating but I’m happy that I did. And I’ve fessed up to it now so no one can hold it against me.
xx woeful writes xx
Comments, critiques and encouragement welcome below 🙂
Woeful Writes 