23
I wake up. It’s difficult. It takes a couple of tries. I’m so incredibly cold that staying asleep seems preferable to finding out why.
Eventually, though, I try to turn over, and the fact that my dick is stuck to the floor wakes me all the way up immediately. At first I think my dick has been nailed there, since it’s so numb it feels like a piece of leather that’s tethering me in place. Then I touch it and decide it’s been glued there. Then I realize it’s frozen to the steel floor.
I spit into my left hand—I’m rolled over on my right arm, and I don’t want to lie on my stomach again, even for a moment, to free it—and use the spit to de-ice my dick. It takes a couple of applications. It’s kind of like whacking off.
As I’m doing it, though, the blindness-panic sets in. Because I cannot see anything. Between spit applications I grind the knuckles of my free hand into my eyes. Those weird pixilated multicolored blossoms appear, which I decide means that my retinal nerves are still functioning. Also that, since my eyes themselves feel fine to the touch, it’s just completely dark in here.
Which is where, exactly? The moment my dick is loose I jump to my feet. My hospital gown, which has been bunched up around my chest, falls back down to cover the quarter of my body it’s supposed to. The bandages from my hand and neck, though, are gone.
I reach forward. Touch a steel wall a couple of feet in front of me. Step toward it and bash my front teeth on something hard and metal. The pain and surprise make me jump back, and I hit another bunch of metal things. Shelves. I move my hands over them like they’re a large-print version of Braille. Find dozens of bags of ice in the shape of blood units for transfusion.
I try the other side, then the back. Same thing. The front is a metal door, the handle of which doesn’t move at all.
I’m in a walk-in freezer about the size of a jail cell. A blood freezer.
Why?
Obviously I could die in here. I could also get brain damaged, like a sous-chef I once treated who had spent a full night locked in the deep-freeze of the restaurant he worked at. But for someone to use a deep-freeze to try to do either of those things intentionally seems absurd. It’s like the Joker leaving Batman in a sno-cone machine, then not sticking around to watch.
Though injecting feces into someone’s butt cheek seems a little odd too, when you think about it.
I do think about it for a moment, because it’s so disgusting. Then I move on. If I was going to die from toxic shock I already would have.* And in terms of long-term consequences, should I live to find them out, I’m already on every kind of antibiotic there is. Thank you, Assman: I have no idea what’s wrong with you, but I do stand by your treatment protocol.
Then I realize why I’m here.
They’re not trying to kill me. They’re trying to weaken me, like the six different kinds of a*sholes in Ferdinand who stab the bull half to death before the matador even enters the arena.
So that Skinflick can come in and kill me himself.
With his knife fighting, presumably. Where was it Squillante said Skinflick had been training? Brazil? Argentina? I try to remember if I’ve heard anything about the styles of knife fighting in either of those places. I can’t.
I do know that there are really just two underlying philosophies of knife fighting: the Realist School, which holds that any time you fight someone who knows what he’s doing you are going to be cut, so you should prepare for it (these are the guys you see wrapping their leather jackets around their left forearms before a fight), and the Idealist School, which believes you should devote as much energy as it takes to keeping yourself from being cut at all. By never, for example, having a nonstriking part of your body be forward of your blade.
Both schools follow a couple of basic rules. You have to remember to kick and punch if you get the opportunity, because knives are so scary people forget about the rest of you. And as long as you have a knife with an edge on it, you should never try to stab someone. Stabbing is a sucker move. It exposes too much of your body for too little possibility of damage. Slashing, meanwhile, should be done to any target that presents itself (such as the knuckles of your opponent’s knife hand), but ideally to the insides of his arms or thighs, where the larger blood vessels run. So your opponent bleeds to death, like animals attacked by sharks in the wild.
On principle—and because I have a tiny hospital gown instead of a leather jacket—I lean toward the Idealist School. Of course, I also lean toward having a knife, which at the moment I don’t. So I set about trying to change that.
First I explore the freezer. Naked socket, no bulb, in the ceiling. A lot of shelves of blood products.
Maybe I can build a blood-product snowman, and nauseate Skinflick to death.
The shelves themselves are useless. They’re welded to their framework, which is made of thick iron L-bars that are in turn welded to square iron plates, about the size of coasters, which are bolted onto the floor and the ceiling. The bolts are all too tight to f*ck with, particularly since I’m quickly losing sensation in my fingertips, even the ones I didn’t spit on, and my hand that got cut is starting to stiffen at the palm. Hammering on the shelves, which is hard to do because there’s barely any room to raise my fist above them, makes more noise than is probably wise and doesn’t even dent them. The door handle doesn’t break off even when I put both feet on the door and pull.
I consider what it would be like fighting with just my hands and feet, both of which are starting to feel like steaks tied to the ends of my limbs. I think about strategy: whether I should stay near the door or not and so on.
But thinking without moving starts to shut me down again. I do another sweep of the room. It’s hard to be sure I’ve checked all of every shelf when I can’t see and my sense of touch is so bad, so I start using my forearm to feel with. The nerve density is lower, but the better circulation makes up for it.
Eventually I discover that the plate at the base of one of the bars has a sharp edge. The plate’s about six inches square and a quarter inch thick. If I could pry it loose with the bar still attached to it, I’d be holding a fairly awesome weapon. I try the trick with the feet against the wall again. No dice. Just a reminder that I’m weaker than I was half an hour ago.
I lean against the shelves to catch my breath. F*ck the fact that the metal is leaching heat out of me. I need to figure out what to do.
Or whether to do anything.
What difference does it make? If I get out of this, David Locano will just find me again, and kill me. And it’ll be while I’m working as a gas station attendant in Nevada. Standing around all day because nobody uses gas station attendants anymore, they just swipe their credit cards at the pump.
Whereas if I die here, there’s always a chance that Magdalena was right about there being an afterlife. Then a chance someone f*cks up and lets me in, and I see her again.
I’m starting to get both loopy and morose. Things are starting to seem abstract, and to not matter. I’m losing it.
I must stop losing it.
I must think of a plan.
I bang my head against the edge of a shelf. The pain wakes me up. Enables me to think, at least, of something.
Something so crazy and stupid, so incredibly unlikely to work, that I would never even try it except for one small promise that it makes.
That the attempt will make me suffer magnificently.
So much so that, if it works and I survive, I may even deserve to.
If you keep your heel on the ground and lift your foot toward the ceiling, then spread your toes apart (not that easy, I know—it makes you admit you’re a primate), you create a distinct channel along the outside of your lower leg, between the muscles of your shin and the muscles of your calf. This is the channel I’m hoping to cut into.
I drop to my knees by the floor plate, and press my right shin onto it so that the plate’s sharp corner jabs into the skin just below my knee. I would prefer to be doing this to my left shin, but that would be too hard to get to with my right hand. So it’s my right shin I push down and forward against the corner.
It doesn’t work. I’ve barely scratched myself. I must have let up on the pressure at the last moment, subconsciously preventing myself from raking the skin open.
I numb my shin out with an ice pack of blood, and this time when I run it over the sharpened corner I push down on my calf with my right hand, to keep the leg from bucking. Yeah, the leg tries to buck. But this time it’s too weak, and the skin rips.
The pain makes me roll over onto my back and grab my knee up to my chest while doing everything I can to keep from screaming through my eyes. But with my foot in that position I can feel that the top of it has turned instantly, completely numb except for the webbing between my big toe and the next one over. Which is great news: I’ve cut so deep I’ve severed the nerve that runs just above the muscle.
I wait a minute or so to see if I’ve also severed the artery that runs alongside the nerve—i.e., whether I’ve just killed myself, and can relax for the last few moments of my life—then I gingerly feel along the gash to make sure it’s long enough. It is: it runs about three-quarters of the way down to my foot. So I roll and press it against the icy floor to kill the pain a bit, and slow the bleeding. I can’t really tell if that works.
Anyway, there’s no time like the present. I sit back on my ass. My scrotum, which was already tight, yanks tighter so fast it feels like it’s going to sling my testicles up into my skull. I sink the fingers of both hands into my leg wound.
A whole new type of pain rips into me, this one reaching up into my hip, and I realize: I will not be able to try this again. So I force my fingertips down between the hot and ropy muscles.
Which, as slippery as they are, contract like steel cables, almost breaking my fingers. “F*ck you!” I shout, and pull them apart by force, working the fingers of my right hand in deeper. I can feel the pulsation of the artery against my knuckles.
Then it happens: I touch my left fibula.
The fibula and tibia, as I believe I’ve mentioned, are the equivalent of the two parallel bones of your forearm. But, unlike in the forearm, the smaller of the two—the fibula—doesn’t do nearly as much as the larger one. Its upper end forms a minor part of the knee, and its lower end is your outer ankle bone. The rest of it is totally useless. It doesn’t even bear weight.
So I shove my fingers through the membrane that runs between the fibula and the tibia, and grab hold of the bone. It’s about three times the thickness of a pencil, but it isn’t cylindrical. It has sharp edges.
And now I need to break it. Ideally without wrecking my ankle or knee. The very thought makes me turn my head away and vomit down the left side of my chest. Not much comes out, but hey—it’s warm. And no way do I let go of my fibula.
How the f*ck am I supposed to break it, though? It’s essentially made of stone. Any hit strong enough to break it might also shatter it. I think of kicking it into the sharp edge of the lowest shelf, but that’s more likely to hurt the tibia, which forms most of the shin.
Then it comes to me. I scoot forward and put my shin up against the edge of the shelf as gently as possible, as close to the ankle as possible. I work my grip higher toward my knee. Then I yank the bone forward, snapping the lower part off just above the ankle and wrenching the upper part free of the tangle of ligaments that hold the knee together.
O Pain.
O Pain.
You know when you’re entirely greasy with sweat even though you’re in a deep-freeze that you may have taken things too far.
Or when you’re holding a knife you’ve just made out of your own shinbone.
Eventually the door unlocks, then opens, and someone says, “Come on out.”
I don’t move. I’m backed up against the rear shelf, trying to keep my streaming eyes open to acclimate them as quickly as possible to the light, which right now is a roaring wall of pure white. I’m holding the knife hidden behind its cousins in my right forearm.
A man with a gun appears in silhouette and says “I said, Come...Jesus Christ!” Then he says, “He’s back there. But he’s covered in blood, Mr. Locano.”
A crowd of other men with guns appears behind him to look in. “Oh, f*ck,” one of them says.
Then Skinflick speaks. I recognize his voice, though it’s rougher than it used to be. Both deeper and with a strange new whistle to it.
“Get him out of there,” Skinflick says.
No one does anything.
“It’s just hepatitis,” I say. “You probably won’t catch it from touching me.”
Everyone backs away from the doorway.
“F*ck all of you,” Skinflick says.
He steps into sight. I can’t see him too well because he’s silhouetted and my eyes are still freaking out. But he doesn’t look good. In fact he looks like someone gave an Adam Locano kit to a four-year-old, when it’s recommended for ages nine and up. His entire head is potluck.
I should talk. I’m naked, except for the blood. My own and the extra bag I needlessly smeared all over myself to draw attention away from my right leg, and the tourniquet there that I made out of my hospital gown. There’s blood all over the room.
I can’t tell if it bothers Skinflick. He comes in waving his knife, held backhand. The blade is serpentine, with a pattern on the side, so it’s probably Indonesian.
Skinflick’s not bad. He keeps the knife going constantly, in a kind of electron cloud of defense. Idealist School all the way. But the moment he sees my knife—proud product of my own flesh and blood—he stops and flinches away in fear and surprise, exposing his entire right side to me.
“Jesus, Skinflick,” I say.
I stab him just below the right side of his ribcage, angling upwards through the natural hole in his diaphragm, so that the jagged end of my fibula punctures his aorta before coming to rest inside his beating heart.
Beating till that moment, I mean.