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When I come to, I feel a searing pain in my shoulders and back. Shaking my head, I attempt to regain my vision and my bearings. It takes only a few seconds to realize I’m hanging by my wrists by something that looks like a meat hook. It’s attached to a concrete ceiling panel. I’m completely naked and my pistol is gone.
When my eyesight returns, I can make out the pile of clothing set on an old metal chair. The room is three-sided by old damp concrete walls, while the front is covered in iron bars like a prison cell. Only this isn’t your garden-variety prison cell. It’s more like a sanitorium or an asylum. That’s when I realize, I’ve been here before. The Poughkeepsie Prison for the Criminally Insane. Or, that’s what we quote...patients...unquote, used to call it before the state was forced to shutter it.
As my eyesight goes from opaque and blurred to clear, I can make out a rusted drain beneath my feet. It handles the piss that will inevitably drain from my bladder. Maybe my dark crimson blood will circle it. I have no idea what these creeps have in store for me.
To my right, are some old stainless-steel cabinets and counters mounted to the walls. The glass on the cabinets has been shattered, the drugs long ago stolen or sold on the black market. To my left is a bed of metal springs. There are two thick black leather straps attached to the bed. A metal mobile cart is positioned beside it. The cart houses a small generator that produces an electrical charge powered by an automobile battery. A set of jumper cables is attached to the machine. I’m no stranger to those jumper cables.
Jesus, get me out of here...
I make out the sound of moaning. It’s getting louder and louder. Two voices to be more precise. A man and a woman, moaning loudly, their sounds reverberating throughout the mostly dark prison walls. Cocking my head over my right shoulder, I make out Jenny. She’s got both her hands pressed on the stainless-steel counter while Matthew is fucking her from behind. Her shorts and black panties are wrapped around her ankles, her T-shirt and bra pulled up over her pale, naked breasts.
His jeans are wrapped around his ankles, the tails on his button-down covering half his naked ass. He’s pounding away at her like this is the last time they’re ever going to fuck.
“Oh my God, I’m so there, Matthew,” Jenny moans.
“Me too, baby,” he says, his voice strained and high-pitched.
“Remember,” she says. “No fucking babies. Pull out.”
“Okay, okay,” he says.
When he pulls out of her, I turn away. The last thing I want to see is them finishing their biological business. It’s bad enough I had to witness any of their dog-like mating at all. My arms are burning. The burn pulses down the center of my back, from the top of my spine to my ass. I try to swallow, but my mouth is parched.
“Let...me...down,” I say. But my voice sounds like a hoarse whisper.
“Our boy is awake,” Matthew says. “Get dressed, Jen. We need to make the ending to your novel. Then we can collect the rest of our million dollars.”
“Goodie,” she says.
“Goodie,” I whisper. “Did you just say goodie?”
“Easy, Martin,” Matthew says as he approaches the generator. He turns it on by flicking a switch on the back of the unit. You can hear the electricity in the machine buzzing. As Jenny joins him, he picks up both ends of the jumper cables...the positive and the negative...and he touches them together. They create sparks that fly into the stale air and drop down onto the blood-stained concrete.
For a split second, I'm reminded of the things I witnessed inside this prison all those years ago. Half-naked men hung from the same meat hooks I’m presently hanging from. The prison guards dressed in hospital white administered shocks to the body with the same set of jumper cables while a medical doctor looked on. Their reasoning behind the torture? To tame the wild beast. To make them obey. To teach them right from wrong in the form of corporal punishment. We were criminally insane, after all. We needed our balls cut off.
I’ve seen men strapped so tightly to the metal beds they couldn’t possibly move while their brains were fried from electric shock therapy. I’d seen men beaten to within inches of their lives, their broken teeth mixing with the blood and saliva that circled the drain. I remember the screams and the weeping, the begging for it all to stop.
To say this place was a hell on earth would not have been doing it justice. But I can say this much: it taught me never to do anything so bad going forward that it would land me here again. Not long after I was released from my incarceration, “60 Minutes” or some such news program did an expose on the Poughkeepsie Prison for the Criminally Insane, exposing their atrocities against their inmates. The place was closed and a whole bunch of the guards and so-called doctors were sent to state prison where many of them were systematically taken out by the prison population. Whether they knew it or not, by having been sentenced to life inside a maximum security penitentiary, they’d been handed a death sentence. But I’m sure that in the end, not even the devil wanted to accept their black souls into his fiery kingdom way down south.
Now here I am again, about to be tortured, so these two sick fucks can finish the book they stole from me.
“Let’s poke him with that and see what happens, Matty,” Jenny says, a big beaming smile painting her cute, teenage-looking face.
“Yeah, let's see how he reacts so we can write about it,” he says. Then, his face going south. “I just thought of something, darling. What if we can’t write? What if we need Martin to finish the book he wrote for us?”
“I never said we have to kill him,” she says. “I just said it would be cool to end the book inside the cray-cray prison he was once sentenced to. The prison that made him more insane than he already was...or is.”
“Okay then,” Matthew says, his Cheshire Cat grin having returned. “I get it now. We torture the fuck out of him, and then we make him finish the book.”
“We have his gun,” she says. “My laptop is in my bag. We can make him finish the book tonight, right here inside this prison cell. But let’s have a little fun first.”
“Let’s, darling,” Matthew says.
He approaches me with the jumper cables.