I squinted.

A brightly backlit silhouette of a girl stood in the opening. The edges of her light-blond hair beamed, glowing like tendrils of light. She wore big, dark aviator sunglasses, with shiny frames. Her hair was pulled up into a messy bun. I have no idea how girls do that, but it looks like both chaos and order at the same time.

She wore a white t-shirt and a pair of denim jeans. She was cute, and seemed close to my age. In another time and place I would have been interested. But at the moment I was...a little busy. Might even use the phrase “under duress”.

She held out her hand palm up, like she was holding a sandwich. Holding a sandwich in my direction.

“Guys,” she said. “You broke him.”

“He’ll live.” Leftie said.

“Such a fucking edgelord,” she muttered. Her hands went back to her hips. “Where’s the stuff?”

Coffee still in hand, Rightie nudged a black bag underneath the foldable table with his boot.

The girl cocked her head. “That’s the table?”

“You said to get a table.”

“Yeah,” the girl said, “But it’s for—you’ve got coffee on it!”

Rightie shrugged. “And? We’ve been up all night.”

“Come on, guys!” The girl said. “You know what it’s for. It needs to be...stable.”

With slanted eyes, Rightie splashed the rest of his coffee out onto the cement and tossed the styrofoam cup. He grabbed the table with both hands and wiggled it. Coffee sloshed out of the top of the coffee maker and splattered across the surface of the table, running off of it.

“See? Stable.”

“Great.” The girl said, arms folded. “Now go get some soap, we need to sanitize it, now.”

Rightie swaggered past her, toward the stairs. “Always acting like you’re the boss.”

“Apparently, I need to be…” she muttered. She turned on Leftie, who was still leaning against the table. “Get those hands out of your pockets. Go get a drill and some zip ties.”

“My lady,” Leftie said. He sauntered toward the steps, square-toed boots clacking on the cement, echoing in the space. You’d think he was on the way to broker a billion-dollar deal.

“Get that smirk off your face.” The girl said, watching him go.

She stood in the middle of the garage, seemed to take a deep breath. Then, the girl turned on me, like a turret swiveling toward a new target. She leaned forward, hands on her knees, face level with mine, affording me a generous view of her cleavage—one that I exerted a good deal of self-control not to take advantage of. Any situation can always get worse. Instead, I held my gaze with hers.

My jaw was tight. I tried not to blink. Go on. Look. See all there is to see. Just a junkie in over his head.

Her face was placid, focused. Then, several emotions seemed to travel across her expression. I didn’t know what it meant, but I had the feeling it wasn’t good. There was a sense of recognition, there. Or at least bias, like she had already decided who I was, what I meant.

Then, it passed, and she straightened, apparently done sizing me up.

“Wow, they really did a number on you,” she said. “What the hell did you say to them?”

I sighed. “Nice to meet you, too.”

The other two had drugged me, kidnapped me, and beat me. Somehow, I had felt safer with them than I did alone with her.

Thankfully, Rightie soon returned with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of cleaning spray. He unplugged the coffee machine and moved it off the table. He sprayed the table down and wiped it.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

The sound of Leftie’s boots announced his return. He held a battery-powered drill in one hand and a cylindrical container of zip ties in the other. Following the girl’s instruction, he drilled four holes in the table. Two pairs of holes, each pair several inches apart from the other.

The girl picked up the black bag and put it on the table. She pulled a pair of blue nylon gloves out of the bag and put them on. They made loud snapping sounds as she pulled them tight.

“Bring him over.” The girl said. As the two henchmen stepped toward me, she was rummaging around inside the bag.

Maybe it was the drugging and lack of sleep, but up until this point I had been watching the table activity with a level of absentminded dissociation, like it was happening to somebody else. It hadn’t clicked that this was specifically relevant to me. But there was something about those gloves and the holes that got my attention.

“Guys. What’s happening?” I said. “Guys?”

They were moving quickly. Rightie leveled his gun at me.

“Guys, we’ve had some good times, haven’t we?” I said, glancing at the uncomfortably close barrel of Rightie’s handgun. “Remember when you guys threw me down the stairs? That was...classic!”

“I remember it like it was five minutes ago.” Leftie said. His voice was cold, distant and focused. He began sliding me toward the table.

At what point I’d started sweating, I wasn’t sure, but I suddenly felt abnormally wet. Cold beads clung to my forehead like barnacles.

A lifetime ago, my aunt—Eva to most, but always Evelyn to me—used to have me throw out the dead mice that stepped onto the sticky traps in the barn. Sometimes it happened while I was out there, working. There was something so disturbing about it. Partly because the death sentence wasn’t instantaneous, like with snap traps. It was a process. A process made worse by the fact that the mice didn’t understand what was happening to them. They would shriek and wriggle, further trapping themselves, sometimes breaking their own limbs and back in the process.

Once my chair was against the table, there was a snap as Leftie cut the zip tie he’d used to bind my wrists not long ago. He duct taped my left arm to the chair. My right arm was grabbed, laid flat and palm up on the table, in between the drilled holes. From under the table, Rightie ran zip ties up through the holes, zipping them, pulling them deep and tight into my skin, holding my arm against the table.

The girl rummaged in the black bag and pulled out a small leather pouch. Inside was an array of small scalpels.

A gutteral sound came out of me—something between a panicked scream and a low growl. I felt a burst of manic energy. I pulled. I wriggled. I was wriggling.

“Hold him!” The girl barked.

The other two pushed against the table, pinning it to the wall.

I was panting fast, exasperated gasps. Each gulp of air felt like it was coming in through a straw.

I pulled, as if I could wrench my arm free. It wouldn’t budge.

“I’d try not to budge so much if I were you,” the girl said. She leaned over the table. The scalpel hovered near my arm-flesh, like an orbiting satellite, then descended, then made contact. It sank easily, like hot metal parting a bar of butter.

Molten pain lanced through me. There was no way to categorize it. It was beyond getting punched, or kicked around, or convulsing on a tile floor—

We interrupt this regularly scheduled program to bring you a message from Kit’s forearm—

“JESUS!” I screamed. “JESUS FUCK!”

My eyes never left the blade. It moved slowly, delicately, forming a small slit in the middle of my forearm. Blood welled quickly, like a waterfall bubbling in the rocks. It ran down the side of my arm and pooled on the surface of the table.

“I think I’m gonna hurl,” Rightie said. His hands fidgeted on the edge of the table, as if to avoid the approaching tide.

“Just don’t do it on the table.” The girl said. Her brows were furrowed in tense, focused lines. She set the scalpel off to the side and grabbed a curved pair of tweezers out of the leather pouch. She lowered the curved end toward the gash in my forearm, like a crane being lowered into an oceanic ravine. Only there wasn’t any valuable wreckage in there. Just...me.

What the hell is she…

Pain cut that line of thought off, again. It was sore and excruciating. The tip of the tweezers dug around inside the incision, searching.

“Tanya.” Leftie said, warningly.

Tanya?

“Tanya” shot him a deadly look.

“That’s a lot of blood.” Leftie said.

“Silly me,” Tanya said. She held up one of her elbows. It was caked in a layer of blood, like a shiny, red velvet glaze. There were splotches of red on her gloves, her forearms, even a small spot on her left cheek. She looked like a painter. “I guess I hadn’t noticed. Do you want to keep distracting me, or should I go ahead and finish this?”

Leftie went silent.

I was starting to feel lightheaded. I couldn’t tell if this was from the blood loss or the fact that I was starting to pay attention to the blood loss. Or the fact that I was panting like a dog in the midday, summer sun. I could hear my own yelps and ragged breaths echoing back in the tinny space.

Was no one else supposed to hear this? Wouldn’t there be neighbors or joggers wondering what the hell was happening inside this garage?

Then the tugging sensation happened. It was a pulling, scraping feeling, and it didn’t feel much better than what had come before. No sir, not at all.

Tanya yanked, and the tweezer tips emerged from the incision, holding something in its grasp. Blood gleamed across the surface of it. It was flat, thin, and rectangular, with little grid-like protrusions. Some kind of...computer chip?

My feeling of lightheaded uneasiness grew.

It was such a small object, nickel-sized in diameter. But to my eyes—I watched as Tanya gently set it flat on the surface of the table, glinting like a blood-drenched doubloon—it seemed enormous. Such a massive thing to be oblivious about, to not remember.

Who… why…

My neck lolled. Darkness cut in on my vision, like a hole opening. I fell in.