CHAPTER Three

CHAPTER THREE

A hot jet of liquid hit Sam in the back of the head. He gasped and started to hyperventilate.

“No, please . . . don’t,” he said in a high pitched voice. He hated the way he sounded, but he still begged. “Please, please don’t. Oh God don’t.”

Nothing happened.

He ground his teeth and waited for the first blow.

It didn’t come.

This was worse than torture.

“Just do it, okay. Just fucking do it!”

“Sam?” it was Jimmy’s voice.

Sam opened his eyes and stole a glance at Jimmy. The back of Jimmy’s head was dripping with viscera.

The lock up was dead quiet. Something was wrong. There were thick gobs of blood and torn flesh on Sam’s shoulders. He could feel it dripping from his man bun down the back of his neck.

“Jimmy,” Sam said. “Are you okay?”

“I think so, how about you?”

“I dunno, are you sure you’re okay? The back of your head is covered in blood.”

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure none of its mine. You?”

“They never touched me. I kept waiting for them to do something, but they never did.”

“What happened to Ashkan and the others? Why are we covered in blood?”

“I don’t know.”

Sam rocked back and forth to turn his chair round and get a better look at the lock up. The floor was slick with blood and his feet skidded. It smelled of fear and blood, like an abattoir.

The whole lock up had changed colour. It was now a deep crimson. All the walls and surfaces were covered in blood. It was raining down in fat drops from the ceiling. Much of it had congealed into the thick puddles filled with heaps of pulverised flesh and bone.

What the hell had Ashkan and his men done? Where the hell had they gone? He looked about the room and saw tiny scraps of clothing that he recognised, in amongst the gore. Then it slowly hit Sam. He was looking at them. This was all that remained of his tormentors.

This was humanity broken down into its essential components. This was what lay beneath the skin of everyone. This is what happened when you tore out the insides of a person and ground them into little pieces. Raw, fragile and utterly ruined.

None of his captors’ violence or selfishness justified this. This was something no human being should ever have to suffer. Sam felt his stomach lurch. He bent his head and emptied his guts onto the blood soaked floor.

“You okay?” said Jimmy.

“Yeah,” said Sam. “Must’ve been a bad pint.”

Jimmy laughed at this. A short high pitched giggle that was more hysterical than anything.

“The hell just happened man?”

“I have no idea, had my eyes closed the whole time.”

“Me, too.”

“This is sick man, this is un-fucking-believable. This is worse than anything we saw on that footage. They’ve been butchered, all of them.”

“Is that even them? I mean, shit, that doesn’t look like any human remains I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen enough photos by now, so have you. They look like ground pork, like someone’s put them through a meat grinder.”

“How is that even possible? This sort of damage should take hours. I wasn’t timing it or anything, but I swear we only had our eyes closed for five or six minutes.”

“I dunno, maybe it’s the drugs.”

“You think?”

“Ever been this high on meth or coke before?”

“Shit no. How could I? I hardly do that stuff.”

“Well I do, and this is hardcore. Who knows how much it’s fucking with our brains. We might have been in here for days for all we know.”

“No I don’t think so.” Sam shook his head and sprayed blood on his chinos.

A long, thin strip of human skin peeled off the ceiling above them and landed with wet slap on the floor.

“So who do you think did this?” said Jimmy. “I mean they didn’t do this to each other, that’s insane.”

“I haven’t a clue. It’s beyond me. I can’t imagine what sort of person is capable of this.”

“Why didn’t they kill us? How come we were spared?”

“Maybe they didn’t see us.”

“How could they miss us? We’re right in the middle of the place.”

“We probably don’t matter to whoever did this. Maybe it’s some gangland thing, a reprisal or whatever. They saw us taped up and realised we weren’t a threat. Plus we had our eyes closed so we can’t identify anyone.”

“What if they come back to finish us off? Tie up loose ends and stuff?”

“Haven’t they cleared off before the cops get here?”

“Are the cops coming?”

“They must be.”

“Who’d call them? It’s totally remote here, no-one would have heard a thing.”

“We’re in the middle of a city. Someone must have heard.”

“I’m not sure I want the cops here.”

“Why? They can’t pin any of this on us. We’re the victims here.”

“We’re the only ones left alive, I don’t think they’ll see us as victims. Besides, what if it comes out that we were gonna offload a serious amount of blow? We could do a lot of time for that.”

“We didn’t actually sell any drugs though.”

“No but I told a lot of people we were going to.”

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“I was trying to build up a client base. It’s called basic marketing.”

Sam sighed as another rush went through him, making his skin tingle. “It doesn’t matter now. We need to get out of here before anyone else comes.”

“Easy for you to say, I’m kinda taped to a chair, remember?”

“Think I can fix that,” said Sam.

The duct tape went around his chest and arms and both his ankles, holding him to the chair. His cardigan was quite baggy and Sam was pretty sure he could get his left arm out. He was taller and skinnier than Jimmy, so he that gave him more room to manoeuvre. Ashkan had only wanted to scare them, so Faisal hadn’t been too worried about Sam and Jimmy escaping when he taped them up.

This said, Sam nearly dislocated his shoulder getting his left arm free. He leaned a bit too far to the right getting it out of the sleeve and his chair toppled over. He expected to get a face full of blood as he cracked his cheek on the floor, but there didn’t seem as much of it as he thought. When the shooting pains in the side of his head had subsided, he saw there was only a thin smear of blood on the ground. He’d thought there was more. Maybe it had soaked into the concrete.

With a little more wriggling Sam got his right arm free and was able to set the chair back up on its legs. Then he went to work on the tape round his ankles.

“You okay?” said Jimmy.

“Got a sore face and shoulder,” said Sam, as he found the corner of the tape and began peeling it of his right ankle. “But I’ll live.” His left ankle was more difficult, he couldn’t get it loose.

“Sam look,” said Jimmy, nodding his head towards a load of crates nearby. In front of them, in a pool of blood on the ground, was a Stanley knife. It must have fallen out of one of the men’s pockets.

With his left leg still stuck to the chair, Sam stood unsteadily up and moved over to the crates, dragging the chair along with him. He picked up the knife and chopped through the tape round his ankle.

“Thanks,” Jimmy said, as Sam sliced the tape holding him to the chair. Jimmy was shorter than Sam by a good two or three inches, but he was broader across the shoulders and had a stockier frame. This made it harder to get him loose. Jimmy’s winced as Sam sliced through the tape and into the back of his jacket, nicking his skin as he went.

“Ow, watch it,” Jimmy cried,

“Sorry, think I ruined your jacket too.”

“Just get me out.”

Sam cut the rest of the tape and Jimmy got to his feet, stretching his arms and shoulders and stamping his feet to get the life back into them. Sam expected him to send up splashes of blood, but it seemed there was less of it on the floor than ever. It had stopped dripping from the ceiling too. Sam looked up and saw only a thin film, where previously it had been soaked.

The piles of diced flesh and bone looked smaller too, as though they’d shrunk inexplicably. Sam shook his head. The drugs had obviously affected him more than he realised. He dropped the knife and headed towards the large metal doors that led out of the lock up.

“Wait,” Jimmy called out after him. Sam turned. Jimmy was pointing at the laptop. “What about this?”

“What about it?”

“We can’t just leave it here.”

“Of course we can.”

“It’s a potential goldmine.”

“A what?”

“A goldmine. Have you ever seen anything sicker than this footage?”

“Err, take a look around you.”

“I mean on film?”

“I couldn’t watch most of it.”

“Exactly, and we shoot this kind of thing for a living.”

“But the stuff we shoot is all make up and effects.”

“And sometimes people can see that. You’ve read the write ups.”

“So we’re not Tom Savini, so what.”

“We could be, with this. No-one’s seen anything like it. This is more extreme than American Guinea Pig or anything.”

“No,” Sam was incredulous. “No fucking way! Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“No, hear me out. There are a lot of sick fucks out there that would pay through the nose to see this.”

“No-one could sit through the whole footage. We couldn’t take it and neither could Ashkan or his cronies and those guys are killers.”

“So we don’t use the whole footage. We cut it up into little clips, just enough to really freak people out, and we build a whole story around them.”

“I can’t believe you’re suggesting this.”

“Think about it from an economic point of view. After the kit, make up and effects are our biggest expense. We don’t need much kit to shoot a story around this footage and we won’t need any make up or effects. It’ll take our budget down to nothing.”

“Well nothing is all we have at the moment.”

“At least we no longer owe fifty grand to a bloodthirsty loan shark.”

“Well, there is that.”

Sam looked at the flesh heaps, trying to work out which one had been Ashkan. He could have sworn they’d gotten smaller still. His resistance to Jimmy’s idea was also shrinking. In a strange way, Jimmy was making a warped kind of sense.

“Would it work though?” Sam said.

“We could make it work. Please Sam, I need this.”

“You need this?”

“I need something good to come out of this. Shit, look at us, look at this place. It’s covered in blood, we’re covered in blood.” Maybe the blood had congealed, but Sam noticed Jimmy didn’t seem quite so covered anymore. Jimmy continued: “This is worse than getting jacked by that coke dealer. This is worse than anything.” Jimmy’s mouth started to twitch and he let out a sob.

“Keep it together man,” Sam said.

Jimmy picked up the laptop and held it to his chest, like a comfort blanket. “I need to make something positive come out of this. Otherwise what’s the point of living through it?”

“Does there have to be a point?”

“Yes there does.!”

“But we survived, that’s all there is to it, isn’t that enough?”

“We won’t survive though. I won’t survive, not emotionally, not mentally. You know my history man, you know what happened with Jennie. I need something to get me through this.”

Jimmy was starting to get loud and shrill. Sam held his hands up to quiet him. “Okay, okay, take it then.”

Sam glanced round the lock up one last time. His eye fell on a bunch of cardboard boxes piled up against the wall. He went to check them out. The lock up was full of dodgy goods, some of them stolen, some seized in lieu of debt.

He wasn’t sure why he ignored the voice at the back of his mind screaming for him to leave, but he began to rummage in the boxes. He thought about Ashkan and the things he threatened and Sam felt a wave of anger. Fuck that prick, he owed them this.

“What you doing?” said Jimmy joining him.

“Look at this,” Sam pulled a Sony XDCAM from the bottom of the box. The mic cover was missing, but apart from that it was fine.

“PMW-300, professional quality, nice.”

Sam and Jimmy exchanged a look. Geeking out over cameras felt almost normal. Maybe they could salvage something from this after all.

“Come on,” said Sam. “Let’s get out of here.”

As they headed for the exit Sam tried to ignore the fact that half the blood had disappeared from the ceiling and the floors.