In which Robin finishes whatever the fuck he was writing about before;
Where the fuck was I with this?
The basement. Cellar. Dungeon. Whateverthefuckyouwanttocallit.
Right.
Cold. It was cold.
Of course it was cold it's practically fucking winter outside. Never mind that it's nearly bloody April.
Concrete floors don't help that. There's a little drain, like the kind you find in boiler rooms or old laundry rooms, rusted round little drain with holes in it.
There's a bit of pipe, big metal pipe, running along the wall above me. It's got those little C-shaped brackets holding it in place and then it heads up into whatever is above I suppose. Wall's pretty cracked. Old building from the looks of it. Old or not taken care of. Frost damage, or just wear. Fractures around the brackets.
I'm handcuffed to it. Just the one hand. Honest to god handcuffs.
Guess they couldn't find the zip ties? Pockets are empty. Which is a shame.
I can do handcuffs. Zip ties would have been a bit of a problem.
Long story, I had a friend in police foundations.
The plumbing looks... old. It's not copper. I don't think they make copper piping this big. Not old enough to be lead but it's black under the dust, like one of those old-school frying pans, or the stereotypical wood burning stove. There's a busted, rusty water heater over to one side of me and an old beat up washer and dryer on the other side. Furnace on the other side of the water heater. The whole place can't be much more than 7 x 9, low ceiling. The door's pretty low too. Maybe it's under something else?
Don't have my phone, so I don't know how long I'm waiting there. Time does that... stretching thing. Footsteps. Some fucker in a mask opens the door. Big white mask, no mouth, sort of shield shaped? Really pointy chin. Tall guy, big black coat on the shoulders, pinstripe suit.
He reaches up to brush the snow off with his hand and...
Oh god. His hand. His hand is... it looks like it's just flayed skin but that's not right. That can't be right. It's not really a hand. It's a claw. His hand is a claw. A mangled, broken why is it so red. Red like... raw meat. Makes you want to throw up just looking at it.
There's another one with him. Shorter, lanky. Still taller than me Fucking hockey mask. Like he's Jason Fucking Voorhees. Big, baggy, beat-up sweater hanging off of them... kid? Holes in it. Pinstripe doesn't do any talking. Just stands there, for all the world acting if he were the grim fucking spectre of death itself.
The kid? The kid
Ha. Solved that problem, didn't you? Solved it quite well. Don't look at me like that, the bastard had it coming and you know it. This jog any memories?
"Going to fly away little bird?"
Posturing. He's fucking posturing. The fucking bastard.
"Can't run now!" Laughter.
"Not so tough now!" More laughter. kick in the gut. More laughter, and a few more kicks. ribs ache.
"Scared little birdy. We're going to clip your wings." Laughing again. Like a cut-rate villain. Don't think he was all there.
And then he fucked up.
"You know what happens next?" Laughing. Getting closer. "We find your family. And we cut them all- wait." He pauses. You can hear the grin in the voice. "Yours is dead, isn't it?"
That seems like a mistake to me.
"Poor little bird, all alone."
He made to kick me again. Grabbed his other leg by the ankle with my legs. Don't think he saw that coming. Tripped up fell backwards like he'd had a carpet jerked out from under him. Skull made a nice cracking sound when it hit the floor. Not sure if I was grinning by this point.
Not sure what happened next.
Well no, that's a lie. We can infer some things that happened between A and B. By the time you came to, the unlucky bastard was a bloody wreck on the floor, and there was a bloodstained pipe in your hand.
No, still not over that?
Excuse me while I take the opportunity to attempt to empty my already empty stomach a second time.
You said "wreck" right?
I did. It's more that he's a loosely connected set of chunks that have been smeared across the floor. Connect the dots, it's not hard. I imagine it is pretty hard to laugh when you're spitting your teeth out onto the floor. Harder if you're coughing up blood. And I would suppose it's pretty much impossible to laugh when you're dead.
Some people just have no class.
His buddy with the fucked up... hand-thing, must have fucked off. There's a big hand-shaped smear on the wall near where he was standing. Not sure what it's made of, not going to bother finding out. Still needed to get the handcuffs off, but that's less of a problem now.
Plenty of tools. Didn't take much work to get free.
They had a pretty good set-up here. It's an old shop of some sort. Maybe did auto work, judging by the big doors and the lifts. Maybe a chop-shop. Has that kind of feel to it. Grungy, sketchy. The bits of car might be mine. Found a couple odds and ends that look like they were mine. There's a few things that look like graves out back. Doubt I'm the first to have wound up here.
Murdering fucks. Deserved what they got.
Someone's been living here, judging from the cot, the wi-fi and the shitty netbook. Can't find my laptop. Not like there was anything important on it.
