The Flesh Cartel #1: Capture

heap of fuck you at the camera. It didn’t hurt. Just warmed the skin a little.
    The next strike landed hard enough to rock him forward, but it still wasn’t so bad. He knew it was stupid to antagonize them, but then he figured what fucking difference does it make? and growled, “You’re kidding, right? I get beat up for a living .”
    The doctor, shuffling through some papers, said without looking up, “You throw drunks out of a bar for a living.”
    Fuck you, asshole.
    “And from now on, you’ll do as you’re told for a living. Or should I say: to keep living. Harder”—that must’ve been to the heavies, and then clearly to Mat, “I said, let them hear you.”
    Strike three came down with enough force to make him bite his tongue, but he was done making noise for these assholes, of any kind. Done talking. Done shouting. They obviously wanted a reaction from him one way or another, so he’d be like a hateful fucking statue. If they wanted noise, they’d have to tear it from his fucking throat.
    Resolved in his decision, the next strike, though it was the hardest yet, barely got a wince out of him. But this was shaping up to be like the worst kind of fight, the ones where your opponent outweighed you by fifteen pounds and outclassed you by several levels, the ones where he’d get you pinned against the cage wall or the floor and just whale and whale away until the ref stepped in or the bell rang or, God for-fucking-bid, your cornerman called it. Thing was, there was no ref here, no bell, no cornerman, and they were hitting him with a fucking 2x4 or some shit, not a gloved fist, and he couldn’t block and he couldn’t move and he couldn’t throw it in and the scream was building in his chest, welling and spreading and pulsing until the urge to let it free was too strong to resist—
    One shout. One . He’d thought it would make him feel better, maybe make the heavies stop, but neither happened. Hadn’t the doc said six minutes? This felt like years .
    “Three minutes,” the doc said, like he’d read Mat’s fucking mind. But he was talking to the heavies, probably—he didn’t strike Mat as the type to do a kindness, to let him know he was halfway done.
    The beating stopped. Mat blinked sweat out of his eyes and swallowed back a moan, part misery, part relief.
    Short-lived, though. A moment’s shuffling behind him, and whatever they hit him with next was a thousand times worse than what’d come before, sharp and deep and burning and Jesus Christ there was no fucking way that hadn’t split his skin like some overripe fruit and it hurt so fucking much he couldn’t scream, stunned breathless and silent, fingers clenched numb around the chains that held him.
    Three minutes left. Three minutes left. Three minutes left. He told himself that, but rather than finding comfort in the knowledge that it was half over, it made him feel like he was facing a new eternity. He might as well be chanting Five more years. One more decade. Twelve more centuries. He wished he didn’t know. Wished he could pretend every stroke might be the last, but every time he tried, three more minutes rose up in his mind, and he knew there was more to come.
    He bared his teeth. Ground them. Reached up, rotating his wrists, and clutched at the chains he was hanging from. Another strike. Another. Whuffed out a miserable breath and thought, for the second time today, that dying would be so much easier. It shamed him in ways not even the vibrator and the masturbator and the camera had been able to, and he shoved the notion far, far away. Another strike, relentless. His bare toes curled against the tiled floor, and when his eyes squeezed shut, tears leaked down his cheeks. How much longer? A minute? Thirty seconds? He prayed to a god he’d never believed in that they weren’t doing this to Dougie too. Bargained. Made promises. I’ll let them do this to me until they kill me if you just make sure he’s safe.

    A second of blackness. No pain. No thought. No shame.
    “Exquisite,” someone said. Someone nearby. Dougie’s back and ass started to tingle, and then to burn, like electricity running over his skin.
    The doctor. The chains. The . . . the . . . whatever he’d been getting hit with before he’d passed out from the pain.
    It all rushed back, every sensation and memory and feeling from fear to shame to helpless arousal to hopelessness, crystallizing into one high, almost inhuman wail.
    “Shhh,” the doctor soothed,