I posted about some beta reader feedback regarding the inclusion of a torture scene in one of my WIPs. Comments were aplenty, ranging the full gamut of possible responses, so I figured it might be helpful to just include the chapter. Spoilers ahead for BASTION/BLackstone III, but only moderate spoilers. It’s from halfway in the book. (the violence is at the end, you’d practically have to read the whole book for full context)
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Anne Grief did not strike Clyde as the leader of a criminal organization. She was older, with grey in her curly hair and a bend to her back. She didn’t meet him in some grand office behind layers of security, but in a chinese-style diner. Her fingers looked like the blood had been sucked out of them, leaving wrinkles of skin and iron bones. She was also better with chopsticks than anyone Clyde had ever seen, snapping up bits and pieces of the sauced stir fry until she looked him over. “Ah, the unfortunate one,” she said, wiping her mouth off with a napkin.
There was no other chair at the table, not even for her pair of bodyguards. They seemed young, possibly her grand children. Clyde stepped in front of her and took off his void mask. “I suppose I should thank you for the temporary employment.”
Anne waved a hand. “Kill the damn music, would you?” she mumbled, and the quiet sitar music stopped. Then she looked back at him. “The work was nothing. You earned your pay plenty, Mr. Bondsman. In fact, I think of that as a sort of try out period for you. You passed.”
“I’m flattered,” he said, his voice flat.
Anne grinned and gestured at a girl not yet old enough to be drafted. “See that?” the old woman asked. “That’s called adult behavior. He has emotions, but he’s not acting on them. He isn’t controlled by his impulses like a child. Though… you can tell by his tone that he’s making an effort. Nobody’s perfect. You could remember that too. Now then, Mr. Bondsman. I think you have an inkling of what my organization is like, but certainly not the whole picture.”
“Nor do I want to.”
She laughed. “Good answer. The important thing is that our desires…” she gestured with her chopstick, forming a circle between her and him, “They align quite well at the moment. You know? You want justice, I want CEO Dixie dead. You’re an able bodied man with nothing to lose. I have the resources necessary for you to get something in exchange for your life. You do realize that acting on this vengeance is a one-way trip, don’t you?”
He couldn’t return her grin. The mirth didn’t exist inside him. “That’s fine. I wouldn’t be the first man to do something like this.”
“No! Of course you wouldn’t be. Men have been doing this for the last three thousand years, maybe longer depending on your antediluvian beliefs. That’s what makes you a known quantity. I wouldn’t be gambling on you otherwise. However, I do need to know how you made it back. The rumor mill was rather bleak in their whispers.”
Clyde’s hand went to his side, where the blades still hung from his hip. Rather, the one did. The guards had taken the micro-blade and left him the other with a scoff. “I got help from a very isolated man. That doesn’t matter. I was lucky, nothing more to it. Now I’m here. You have Dr. Forez, don’t you?”
“What kind of man was he?” Anne asked.
“A one-eyed kook.”
She stared at him, hands and face unmoving. “And… is he where you got that sword? Or did you pick that up after getting back to Bastion?”
Clyde shifted on his feet, glancing at the guards. Both of them had tensed, and their hands probably rested on concealed guns. “He gave them to me, yeah. He had plenty of spares. I think he loots bodies, when soldiers get killed out there, you know? The blighted don’t scare him in the least. Like I said, a kook.”
“Well…” Anne shook her head. “I believe that would be quite the story, if we had the time to tell it. On the bright side, you didn’t make a mess getting your weapons, so the police won’t be looking for you already. Zarah says your neural implant is broken too, yes? Nothing to track?”
“Nope, I’m a ghost. It’s like I died out there.”
“Keep that mask on, from now on. I don’t want you taking it off for anything. Only eat in safe houses we tell you about, understood? If EVE ever, and I mean ever, sees you with it off, she will be able to identify you with the mask on. What you’ll be doing will be way higher profile than the usual punks in masks. They’ll bring out all the stops once they realize you’re winning, you ghost.”
Clyde cocked his head to one side and frowned. The Heartstel tower was like a fortress. A security company couldn’t afford to have a break-in tarnish their reputation. “If you say so,” he said.
“I do say so, and if you want to cut off Dixie’s head, you’ll listen to what an old woman has to say, yes? Now, Carlos, take our ghost to the visitor’s room. He has some catching up to do.”
Clyde followed the young man she indicated and let his breath out when Anne couldn’t see him any longer. They went through the back of the diner and into another series of stairs, tunnels, and passages. Eventually, the two of them passed through door after locked door and stepped into a small, blacked out room. The interstice of structure had excess padding, enough to muffle the world and isolate them the old, mechanical way. No noise-cancellers were needed, just raw material between them and the city so no one could hear what was said, or what was screamed and pleaded.
Dr. Forez sat strapped to an old hair salon chair with the headrest ripped off. They had strapped his ankles, waist, and wrists down, leaving him at their mercy, but so far uninjured. The only sign of distress was the lines of sweat and hair dye running out of his scalp. The guide sniffed and shook his head. “You’re the one that worked there,” the criminal said, looking at Clyde. “Maybe you know the right questions to ask.”
Dr. Forez looked up, breathing hard and hardly able to focus his eyes. He had to blink a few times to settle his gaze onto Clyde and wrangling his fat lip to speak was a chore, but nevertheless he said, “Aw, fuck.”
Clyde took a moment to look at the bloody man. He stared and he thought about the role that Dr. Forez had to play in the grand scheme of Heartsteel. The man was a neurist. He hadn’t killed anyone, but he was the primary man responsible for installing that program in their heads. He was the reason Heartsteel employees saw colors and danger instead of people–instead of underaged kids in over their heads. Clyde decided that was culpability enough. He knelt down and grinned inside his void mask. “Hello Dr. Forez. Nice to see you again.”
The neurist looked between him and the others in the room, only to see Anne Grief’s people leave. He recoiled against his restraints, only to learn anew how tight they were. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but I’ve already been through this. I’ve already said what I can say!”
Clyde laughed. It seemed appropriate to drive the fear deeper. Whether that would make Dr. Forez tell a deeper truth, he didn’t know. He didn’t care either. “You’re a sinner, you know that, Doctor?”
“I’m an installation tech! Not a programmer. I can’t tell you anything about what they did.”
Clyde stopped looking at the man’s face. He looked at his hands, how they cringed and squeezed, gripping the old chrome armrest. Part of Clyde’s mind began thinking about questions, what he could extract from the neurist’s mind. Maybe he couldn’t find out what Heartsteel had programmed, nothing that would be actionable in a court. He came up with a few ideas that mattered though. The man was repeating himself, stating over and over again why torture wouldn’t work or wouldn’t help him, or something like that. Clyde slid his hand around Dr. Forez’s skull, pressing his thumb to the man’s forehead and squeezing. “I think you should understand that I’m a very hurt man.”
The neurist grew quiet, his head trembling in Clyde’s grasp. He tried to stare him in the eyes but only saw the abyss of the mask. “I didn’t… Whatever happened to you, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Clyde squeezed until it felt like his fingers would rip off patches of skin and his arm trembled and his muscled ached. “No, you can’t bring my family back,” he agreed, letting go. He huffed and tapped his finger on Dr. Forez’s wrinkled forehead. “And I have to take care of this, don’t I? The things you can do, they’re in that brain of yours. I’d love to beat you bloody, but that might hurt your brain and I do concede I need that. On the other hand–”
Dr. Forez had never worked a trade job. He had never toiled in construction or stuffing his fingers through soil to farm. There were a thousand things the soft doctor had clearly never done, and the result was a certain softness and looseness in his body. When Clyde took his finger and bent it back , it almost seemed like the bone bent rather than snapped. The flesh resisted as the doctor recoiled, then it twisted. A moment later, Dr. Forez threw his head back and howled.
Clyde looked at the bent digit, quickly swelling and bruising. He grinned. “That’s not your brain though, is it?”
Dr. Forez bottled up his pain and spat it out at Clyde. “You fucking asshole! You’re a goddamn amateur at this, aren’t you?”
“So what if I am?” Clyde asked, and grabbed another finger.
Before he could snap it, Anne’s boy stuck his head back into the interrogation wing and waved him over. Clyde snapped Dr. Forez’s middle finger before he rose, and left the neurist screaming and swearing. The thug held up a plastic bag with one black pill inside it. It was an unlabelled hexagon about the size of his pinky finger’s nail. “You know what this is?” the kid asked.
“Is that CZAR?”
“As far as you’re concerned, it’s a truth serum,” the kid asked, and put the bag into his hand.
Clyde took the bag and stared at it. In his hand, he held one of the most illegal things in all of Bastion. The most common of contraband at least. If a SWATBot were to show up, it could legally paint the walls with his brains for holding it. He laughed.
“What? Afraid of it or something?” the kid asked.
“You have no idea,” he said, and turned back to Dr. Forez. The neurist was still hissing in pain, trying to pull himself out of his restraints as he glared at Clyde. Force feeding the doctor the pill was a mere matter of grabbing him by the cheap hair plugs, twisting his head back till his mouth opened and dropping the black pill into his mouth. He had heard it tasted bad, so Clyde clamped his hand over the doctor’s mouth and held it there as he jerked and struggled. After a few minutes, he let go. Either it had been swallowed, or it had dissolved.
“The fuck was that?” Dr. Forez demanded, spitting the filth from his mouth.
Clyde took hold of the doctor’s ring finger. “No need to talk yet. Drugs take a while and I don’t really care yet. You see, my mother died and I still haven’t really processed that. It’s just a thing that happened and I want to make other people hurt because of it. You had a role to play in it, so–” He bent the doctor’s third finger back.
The wailing of pain went in one ear and out the other. He stared at Dr. Forez not like a man, not like an animal, and only somewhat similar to the examination of an insect. He couldn’t think of it as looking at trash because the thing of flesh before him moved and spoke, it just didn’t think in a way he could respect. He searched inside himself for empathy and came up empty. So he stomped his heel on Dr. Forez’s foot until he felt the arch break. Feet and fingers weren’t needed to answer questions. It was fifteen minutes more of abuse when he figured the drug had taken effect.
The symptoms were curious and obvious both. The screaming of pain stopped, even when Clyde snapped another finger and twisted the bone until it ripped out of the neurist’s skin. He had heard that was an effect of CZAR, the ability to make pain a rational thing rather than an emotional impulse.
“Are you ready to talk?” He asked.
“If I talk, will you let me go?” Dr. Forez asked, his words dull.
“I don’t know, they might. I’ll tell you for sure that I’ll move on to hurting someone else if you just help me get them.”
Dr. Forez rolled his head back and heaved a few breaths. He snorted and spat out a wad of blood and phlegm so he could breathe through his nose again. “You worked for Heartsteel, didn’t you? Do you still have your User ID?”
“I don’t have an implant anymore. I’m dead as far as their system is concerned.”
“Then yes,” Dr. Forez said. He licked the blood off his lips and grimaced. “I can tell you exactly how to be invisible.”
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If you liked the look of that chapter, check out my debut novel : BASTION/Blackstone I : Faceless https://mybook.to/jiBQwI
Or its sequel, BASTION/Blackstone II : Gamma Coin https://mybook.to/1xPpQrC
James Krake 