I raised my knife and pushed it into the naked flame. I held it there and turned to the prisoner. His eyes were on the blade. He was a skinny white man with tattoos covering every portion of his body. He had beady black eyes that made him look like a rat. He seemed to have a perpetual frown stretched across his face even through a gag.
'This is the sort of person you would expect to be a sex trafficker.'
I shrugged. "You know, all you have to do is tell me if you are with a group."
I heard muffled sounds of protest under his gag. "I'm sorry, but my hearing is not that great. You are going to have to speak clearer than that."
'This bastard tried to escape the moment he woke up. I don't care what he wants to say. I need him to understand the message that we aren't messing around. The information he gives us had better be correct or he will have to go through something far worse than what I am about to subject him to.'
I took the knife from the flame and then I flicked it in front of the man's eyes. His pupils enlarged and his head jerked back. "It would be so easy to say something. Where is your mind? Way out there swimming? Come back to me."
I pushed my knife into his arm and his flesh sizzled. The smoke from his arm smelled bad and his screams hurt my ears, but I smiled.
'That's what you get for trying to steal my shit.'
I moved my knife from his arm up to his gag and I cut through it and continued on to his cheek. There was more smoke and the lingering smell of flesh and cloth. He screamed again. I grabbed the now loose gag, and I pulled it off his face. "Come on, don't be such a wimp."
Tears began to streak down his face as he opened his mouth. "You crazy fucker! I would have told you everything I knew!"
I sighed and shook my head with a smile. "After stealing my car, how do I expect you to tell me the truth?"
My face became serious, and my tone turned venomous. "I'm doing this because I know you will talk. I want you to understand that whatever I'm doing to you now would pale in comparison to the horrors I would wreak upon your body if you told me a falsehood. Do you understand me?"
He spat on the ground. "And would you let me live?"
I nodded. "I would."
He sighed. "Fine, I was in a gang. We were in a basement planning a hit on another gang when everything went to shit. Our building was the one at the end of the block. There are five others. The most they have are handguns."
I smiled. "Thank you kindly."
I lifted the knife above his head and slammed the pommel down against his temple. He crumpled down to the ground like a ragdoll.
'He definitely has a concussion now.'
I walked from the small room we were detaining him in and into the living room where Zane and the others were eating on couches. The kid looked at me. "Were you torturing him?"
I shrugged. "I was just making him watch a horror movie."
I turned to Zane. "He was in a gang at the end of the block that I was looting. He said that there's five others. I kinda wanna go over there and kill them all. They're too close to our territory. After we have killed them all, we should broadcast our location. We need people, but not gangsters."
Zane sighed. "That seems a bit too radical. Why do we need so many people? Why do we have to kill others?"
I looked him in the eyes. "There is no more civilization. Do you really trust your bunker that much? The world is out there and if we don't go and put it in a stranglehold, this will be our grave. Do you want a future for this kid right here? We have to become powerful."
He rubbed his eyes. "Fine, let's go. We kill them, we keep our land safe, we broadcast our signal, and we build our empire."
I smiled "Good. We are on the same page now."
After arming ourselves, we headed out. Zane gave me two hand grenades, they should definitely be helpful and I would not use them sparingly.
Zane brought me to his nice jeep. My car was extremely low on gas and the windshields were shattered, so we decided on his car.
As we drove down the road, we were both silent. We were on a mission to murder. We had accepted there would be no one to interfere.
'We will take our lives in our hands and end others as we deem fit.'
In thirty minutes, we arrived. Zane drove off into the woods, so they would not see our car, and then we began to run towards the far house.
'We don't know where they are. They could be looking at us, even now. It's better this way.'
As we ran in front of their door, I brought my foot up and smashed it in. I heard a scream and I saw stairs. I motioned to Zane to go in that direction. He did. I went the opposite direction. I heard Zane's gun go off. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG I heard a smaller caliber go off. BANG. BANG. Zane's AK buzzed off two more shots. BANG. BANG. After that, there was silence.
I cleared the rest of my part of the house and found there was no one there. After doing that, I yelled out to Zane. "I'm coming down to your side Zane! Have you got five heads?"
"Travis, hurry on down."
'Well, I'll find out.'
I did not become complacent. I still held my gun in my hands. If there was another, he would die by my lead. I turned a corner. 'No one.'
I entered the room. There was Zane, but he was wounded. It looked as though a bullet had nicked him in the arm. He was using a piece of cloth to cut the blood flow from his arm. I saw five bloody bodies on the floor, all with holes through their skulls.
'Damn, Zane made this a party house. They surely danced their last bit.'
I nodded to Zane. "Nice."
He shrugged. "The fucking asshole sitting on the toilet hit me by suprise."
I glanced over, and I held back a chuckle. There was a man with his pants pulled down slumped just off from the toilet where he had been taking a crap. He had a hole in each eye socket.
After Zane had readied himself, and I had picked up the three desert eagles from the room, we went outside to check for any spare vehicles. Surely enough, I found a nice truck. It was old, but it was actually the same model as mine, just not red. It was green.
'Maybe even better? Time will tell.'
Zane nodded. "Well, go grab the keys from the dead fuckers and lets drive home."
I nodded. "Can you drive home with one hand?"
He stared at me deadpan. "Can you jerk off with one hand?"
I chuckled. "Oh, you're funny. But no, I can't because my dick is too thick."
He snorted. "Whatever."
I went inside, took the old keys from the dead gangsters, and went to drive my new truck home. It had been a good day.