Dark Reckoning by James Axler

“Again,” the sergeant said, and another bucket of icy water was thrown over the prisoner. Most of the blood was sluiced off his lean body.

“Now me,” a sec man growled, and a whip cracked.

Jak flinched as a white-hot pain hit his wounded shoulder, the flesh swelling red immediately.

“Gonna take his eyes,” a sec man growled. “He cut off Digger’s balls with that fucking knife. I want his eyes!”

“Digger still alive?”

“Christ, no. I blew his brains out. Had to, he was my bud.”

“Fucking mutie,” a corporal snarled, slamming a knee between Jak’s legs.

Pain filled his world until the teenager couldn’t hear or see anything. Swirling clouds of red cloaked his vision. Slowly, the mists faded and Jak vomited on the floor, heaving and retching.

“Make you eat that later,” the sergeant growled. “Better yet, make the freak eat some glass and watch him die from the inside.”

“Just set him on fire!” another man snarled.

“Talk, mutie!” a sec man demanded. “What are you doing here? Stealing food? Trying to free the slaves? Ace the baron?”

“Are there any more of you?”

Summoning strength from somewhere, Jak pursed his bleeding lips and started to whistle a happy tune.

Infuriated, a corporal slapped him in the face.

“Call your sister,” Jak mumbled around the puffy lips. “Or small child. Either hit harder.”

Grabbing a chair, the sec man charged forward, but the sergeant shoved him aside. The furniture smashed on the brick wall beside the teenager, splinters spraying from the crash.

“You fool! How are we going to ask a corpse anything?” the sergeant bellowed. “Get out of here and get a kid.”

Smiling at the suggestion, the blue hurried from the room, glaring at the prisoner as the door slowly closed.

“As for you,” the sergeant said, grabbing an ear and hauling Jak around, “you’re going to tell us what’s going on, or we’ll have to get nasty.”

Jak said nothing until the sec man returned with a small kid in tow.

“We lost most of the slaves to a mutie attack,” the sergeant said, stroking the trembling child. “But not all. We found her hiding under a pile of rags. Too small for cooking or sex. What are we going to do with a little kid? Got no use for her.”

The little girl looked at Jak with eyes of terror as the sergeant leveled a blaster to the child’s head and clicked back the hammer. “Talk,” he said.

Jak slumped in the chains. He had been tortured many times before, but this was a new tactic and one he had no defense against. He couldn’t talk. It would mean the deaths of his friends. The child was a stranger, and his first allegiance would always be to his friends.

“Talk!” the sergeant roared in unbridled fury.

Jak looked him straight in the eye. “No,” he said with as much conviction was he could muster. Maybe, if they thought it was hopeless, they’d wouldn’t chill the child. It wouldn’t serve any purpose then.

The blaster roared, and something wet slapped the wall.

“What a mess,” a sec man roared. “Blame yourself, Whitey. We didn’t have to chill her. You made us.”

Staring at the monsters, Jak put every ounce of strength he possessed into a long string of gutter curses, damning them in every way he knew, his ruby eyes staring at the men and radiating a savage intensity that almost broke their nerve.

The sergeant pulled out a knife with a serrated edge, turning it so that the jagged steel caught the lantern light and threw a rainbow of colors across the tiny room. “I’ll make him sing.”

REACHING THE LARGEST brick building in the compound, the companions watched a tall man in a blue shirt leave the building through an electric fence and head into the darkness with a gangly stride.

Ryan pointed the SIG-Sauer at the insulated wires touching the fence and fired twice. The coughs were lost in the gentle mountain wind, but a pair of wires fell from the sky, sparking briefly at the contact, then stopped.

A guard stepped from the shadows, zipping up his pants at the noise and walked closer. Mildred fired from the ground, and the man staggered backward with the feather end of an arrow jutting from his jaw, the rest of the shaft going through his mouth and pinning it closed. Ryan fired again, and the corpse sat on the ground and stayed there, as if he were merely tired and taking a rest.