Page 11 of Love You To Pieces

To both my relief and horror, there isn’t yet another small cell-like room on the other side of the door. The area is open, like a warehouse, with no windows in sight. Instead, buzzing, bare light bulbs with moths swarming them dot the ceiling, casting unsteady light and leaving shadows that I immediately duck into, wedging myself under a worktable that’s open on both sides, allowing me to see as much of the nearby area as I can.

“Please! Just stop, please!” Scotty’s sobs are no longer muffled, and the note of hysteria in his voice is like nothing I’ve ever heard before. Lack of a better option and morbid curiosity have me edging forward, slinking within the shadows on the floor and staying flat against larger objects at the edges of the space. When the room opens up to what looks like a garage workshop, I see a tool bench and wall covered with more tools carefully tacked up places. My eyes stick there, going over drills and saws and power tools, all stained rusty red and spattered with a near-black substance that’s dried and probably ruined some of the inner mechanisms.

Heavy footsteps sound in my ears and I shrink back into the deeper shadows of the workbench I’m under. From here, I can clearly see Scotty, and the moment my eyes land on him, my whole body threatens to revolt.

I’m going to puke.

Or run.

Or scream.

Or, more likely, all of the above.

At first, I think his arm must just be out of view. That for some reason, it’s the only part of him not strapped to the angled table he’s strapped onto. But then my brain, unfortunately, makes sense of what I’m seeing, and I realize that it isn’t hidden.

His arm is gone.

A bloody stump remains, with bright red liquid streaming down the table from the jagged remains. If I had to guess, and I really don’t want to, the man probably used a hacksaw on him, and not the chainsaw sitting unmanned on the table nearby.

The heavy steps sound again, and jean-clad legs, material stained beyond any kind of washing, enter my vision. His boots are just as stained, to the point where I couldn’t guess their original color if my life depended on it.

Scotty’s eyes widen as the man comes closer, and I see the ties of a dirty apron as the man leans over him to grab his face in one filthy hand, turning his jaw from one direction to the other like he’s inspecting him.

More pleas and whimpers fall from Scotty’s lips, and tears run down his face, though they barely make a dent in the blood and grime already there.

The man moves without speaking, and as his other hand comes up, my stomach clenches when I see the dull sheen of metal. Just as I register that he’s holding a knife, his grip on Scotty’s jaw tightens. He leans in again, the knife just barely touching Scotty’s cheekbone, and even though I can only see part of what’s happening, it’s enough.

It’s way more than enough.

With a surgeon’s precision, the man slips the knife into Scotty’s eye socket while he wails; the sounds becoming more animalistic than human in his desperation. Scotty struggles against the straps holding him down, but there’s nothing he can do, nowhere he can go. So he’s forced to lie there and take it and wait while the man carves out his eye with a rusty knife.

The way it pops out of the socket has me pressing my hand over my mouth hard to stop myself from puking, as my stomach roils, threatening immediate eviction of everything I’ve eaten or thought about eating in the past decade. Scotty doesn’t stop screaming as blood pours from his eye socket, and with one last flick of the blade, the eye is severed, sitting in the man’s hand before he deposits it on a towel sitting on the workbench.

With my heartbeat in my ears, it takes me too long to realize I can hear something other than Scotty’s screams. It takes another few seconds for me to make out the man’s humming, and something about it sends a shudder through my body.

He doesn’t even care that he’s killing Scotty. That he’s chopping apart a living human like butchering a fucking cow, not even giving him a glance as he cleans the knife. My mind works frantically, looking for any escape, when he plucks a saw from the wall again, causing Scotty’s screams to become, if possible, that much more desperate.

When a phone rings, I jump and smack my head on the workbench above me, though luckily Scotty’s screaming covers any sound it might’ve made. Still, my eyes water at the sudden, sharp pain in my skull, and I bite back a hiss as the man cleans off his fingers with a towel before palming the phone that had been sitting near the chainsaw.

“Yeah?” he grunts, cradling it against his shoulder. Walking back over to Scotty, he suddenly backhands him across the face, causing him to go silent. “I can hear ya now. Go on.” He grunts a few times as Scotty whimpers, unable to take in enough air to scream, and finally the man sighs. “Right. I’ll do that.” Without another word, he ends the conversation, pockets the phone, and tosses the saw back onto the workbench.

As I watch, the man turns, nearly in my direction, and before I can even think of shrinking back or doing more than clenching my fingers more tightly on the screwdriver, he strolls out of the open workspace and slides open a heavy metal door to reveal concrete stairs leading upward. Light streams down, but before I can do more than look, the door slides closed with a heavy clang behind him.

Leaving me in what’s apparently a basement with only Scotty’s whimpers for company.

I wait for a minute.

Then two minutes. But without a better plan, I tell myself I have to move, to try to find another way out. My body disagrees, and the part of my brain that wants this all to be a nightmare says to stay in the shadows.

Surely someone, somewhere, will come save us, right?

Not if no one knows you’re missing, my brain whispers unhelpfully. But it’s an unfortunately good point. Everyone thinks we’re on a fucking road trip to a concert, and we aren’t scheduled to be back in Nashville for another eight days.

Eight. Fucking. Days.

There’s quite literally no way I can survive hiding in the shadows for eight days. I’ll be found, for one. My hiding place isn’t that good, and eventually, the man who was cutting up Scotty will realize I’ve escaped.

“Fuck this,” I murmur, and surge out from under the workbench, forcing my shaky legs to take me across the open space to Scotty.