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+--- Thread: House of pain (/showthread.php?tid=188537)
House of pain - Geno - 06-15-2021
It hurt. It hurt like being born all over again.
You don't understand "back to the wall" until you find your back against a real cement wall smeared in your own blood, kicked and tortured by bulky meatheads three times the size of you, ready to revive your pained, failing senses with ammonia and cold water until you would either provide everything you know to Lord Hermandez from House Hermandez and to the local Cretans or accept your fate as being accused of being a spy sent by the Maltese, and with it your very own five-meters-long spear to have your pretty little chest pierced from one end to the other. The Cretans seem to take pride in their savagery in horribly torturing and/or dismembering anyone from Malta, so much in fact that they've made it their own... tradition to hoist anyone related to Malta itself on the very same spears they chose, and then lifting their squirming and contorting bodies in an unfathomably cruel position that makes them glare at the green nebulae dotted with stars hovering above them, forcing them to look at their thousands of light-years away home for one last time.
I could only see those hundreds of rotted spears by a cliff once my bleeding body was brought out of the interrogation room. I figured that they didn't want to leave a bag on my face so that they could all see their latest form of entertainment passing by them, my ruffled long hair darkening my pained expression on my face coated in my own blood and my every step blurring my vision as I would try to suppress a yelp of pain in order to not anger the two tribal guards escorting me out of the Vigilantes main building of the Curacao district. A really funny name, considering that name is being used for what is known to be the nearest thing we can ever hope to have to Heaven itself, while I'm down here stuck in Crete, being accused of supplying deadly DNA-splicing drugs to the locals of this God-forsaken system at the edge of the known universe.
I tumbled down, eating some sand. My legs were really not able to sustain all the baton hits they landed on my ribs and on my nose, and just when I thought my tear ducts were completely empty, my vision began to blur, whether it was desperation or a plea for help, I can't tell. One of the guards squatted down in front of me and looked at me with his crap-eating grin and his impressively muscular shoulders contracting. I had seen enough of that face to know that he was about to hit me in my groin again, and just when I was about to use my arms to lift myself from the sandy gravel, he swept my weak arms with a robust kick, making me eat dirt again. <<How do you like that now, you Maltese pendejo?>> said the other guard, while laughing at my misery. I had neither the strength nor the courage to speak up against them until they pulled me back up and brought me along that cliffside road that would bring us back to Hermandez's place.
<<An escape pod, you say?>> Asked Hermandez in an inquisitive tone, revealing an unexpected layer from his bristled, rugged and aging face. <<Si, capo. This cojon thought he could fool us by thinking that he's a victim that just landed in our planet, and-- AAAARGH!>> I turned around to see one of the two torturers groaning in pain to the floor in front of Hermandez's desk, revealing a burning hole in his left arm, and even though I've been eating nothing and somehow vomiting at every knee to my spleen area, the smell of burning blood made me bilge in my stomach again. <<What do I pay you for, you crap for brains pendejos?>> yelled Hermandez from his side of the desk, with his EG-44 Liberator still smoking in his left hand. <<But sir, he admitted he was a Maltese himself.>> Hermandez put down his cigar at that remark in particular, and got up from his chair to take a closer look at me.
The hands that held up my chin were soft and muscular, and my blood froze in my veins all the same. That man was someone who held lots of blood money in his grasp. If he could nearly kill one of his men over a petty disagreement, he could cleave my head off with a machete on his desk, enacting justice for something I didn't even do. The old man looked at my pained expression with an undecipherable charitable smile of pity that sent down burning saliva down my throat.
<<What's your name, boy?>> <<It's... it's Sollow, sir. Jesse Sollow.>> I answered, hoping he wouldn't reach his right hand back to the still-smoking Liberator on his desk. <<Sollow, eh? You're not from around here, why are you on my turf?>> <<M-my escape pod crashed, sir. I was performing r-reconnaissance, sir.>> <<Ah, recon... so you are a spy, after all.>> <<N-no... I'm not with the Core if that's what you're wondering. Neither am I with your sworn Maltese enemies, worthy of all your hatred and disrespect->> I couldn't finish my sentence before the other guard keeping my hands tied decked me to the face, making me tumble over to the stone floor, my head hitting on a thousand years old rock, making all the pain I felt until now feel like a joke. <<You don't speak about them in here.>> <<Esteban, mi amigo. Did I ever give you permission to talk?>> <<No, Padron... I just wanted to remind him w-who's the boss-->>
Sirius' most annoying grinner fell to the floor with a burning hole in his skull, eyes still wide open in bewilderment and shock. And while his head didn't split like a melon on the second it hit the floor, I could no longer suppress the urge to vomit and cry and yell and beg for help and feel all the pain I held back until that moment. Hermandez seemed to share an ounce of pity and untie me from my bindings that made my wrists bleed for days on end, and ultimately decided to send me packing on a shieldless, weaponless Startracker back to Valravn. I bowed and cried in front of Hermandez for a little while, but he valued other people's lives much less than I valued my own. And for that, I was shot at while climbing on board of the lend-lease hunk of junk he gave me.
Yes, I was tasked with performing recon in Core space, but I happened to have been derailed by a Corsair patrol on the orbit of Crete. Quite a dangerous place to pass by, all things considered. With my feet barely functioning and my own dried blood sullying the piloting cloche, I set route for the nearest Freeport to have a medical checkup, hoping they wouldn't ask about the nature of my cranial augmentations and other such microprocessors scattered around my body as per request of the Auxesian HC.
I will never again in my entire life ever rely on the pity of a Cretan.
Jesse Sollow, signing off.