For better or worse, it was time to make their move.
Chapter Fourteen
Ryan awakened to the sound of his own voice screaming, to terrible pain and pressure below his good right eye. He tried to twist away from the hurt, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs.
“Leave the rad-blasted eye alone,” someone above him growled.
After a second, the horrible pressure lifted. Blinking away tears, Ryan opened his eye and saw a cal-lused thumb with a filthy jagged nail pulling back from his right cheek.
The owner of the thumb, a man with a round face and dirt-caked black stubble of beard, smiled down at him. There was fresh blood smeared on his cracked yellow teeth.
“Leave the eye, so he can watch,” the voice said. “We’ll eat that for dessert.”
Ryan twisted against his bonds, throwing his head back in a vain attempt to locate the speaker. He did see that the room was smoky and low-ceilinged with heavy wooden cross beams. A fire raged in the stone hearth a few feet away. Another look around told Ryan he was lying on a crude wooden table, and that he had no clothes on.
Beneath his bare back, the tabletop was sticky and wet.
It smelled of blood, and worse.
“The trick, you see,” the voice continued, “is to keep him alive and conscious right up until the end. Right up to the moment when one of us takes a big bite out of his beating heart.”
A murmur of approval stirred in the hazy, overheated room. There were others along the walls, many others just out of sight. Ryan strained harder against the ropes that held his wrists and ankles, and felt them give a little. At the edge of his vision, tankards of ale were being passed around. Refreshments for the party.
Then a shadowy form leaned over him. The face was upside-down, the silhouetted hair wild and stiff with grease. “I claim the honor of the first taste,” said the now familiar voice.
Breath from the grave gusted over Ryan’s face, and something slimy and warm splattered his neck drool, swaying from the upside-down face.
Clenched in a grubby fist, a long knife reflected dancing firelight. Its blade had been sharpened so many times that it had been reduced to a mere sliver of steel.
Ryan slipped his right hand free of the rope and lunged up from the table, grabbing hold of the can-nie’s wrist before he could strike. The sensation of grasping a solid form lasted only an instant, then it gave way. As if he had seized a rotten fruit held together by the thinnest of skins, the wrist collapsed with a wet pop under his fingertips.
The cannie squealed and jerked back as the severed hand and knife dropped onto Ryan’s heaving stomach. Fat worms crawled out of the hand’s gooey stump, white, segmented worms with shiny, blind heads. They wriggled excitedly on his skin.
“Get him back down!” the cannie cried.
Before Ryan could get hold of the knife, a dozen cannies rushed in, grabbed him and pinned his shoulders to the tabletop. The cannie wildman loomed over him again. Undaunted by his injury, he picked up his severed hand and, using his bare teeth, unclenched one by one the dead fingers locked around the blade’s handle. When the dead claw dropped to the floor, he took hold of the knife in his surviving hand.
“A bit of thigh for starters,” he told the others, “a juicy medallion just here, I think”
Ryan bucked against the weight that held him down. He couldn’t escape the knife. He felt a searing pain inside his left leg, but refused to give his torturers the pleasure of hearing him cry out, biting his tongue to keep from screaming. Above him, the leader of the pack chewed noisily and with obvious relish.
“A most agreeable flavor,” the cannie announced to his band. “Just a hint of gaminess that is not at all unpleasant.”
Ryan didn’t want to die spread-eagled on some cannie’s buffet table. Summoning all his remaining strength, he threw himself against his captors. It accomplished nothing. With both ankles and a wrist still tied down, there was very little he could do. They waited until he had exhausted himself before they began to feed.