Visions (Hell Portals, Book One)

Chapter Seven: Arse over Elbow

JACK, CONSUMED BY DARKNESS, FELT HIMSELF TUMBLING TO A STOP. At least he would soon wake up in the morgue, and Farnsworth, although sarcastic and shaming, would also encourage and comfort him and Nate, the two absolute failures for human beings.

Except as the fog cleared and Jack started to regain consciousness, he saw he was not in the morgue. He was laying on a concrete floor, chest down, ass up, and face pressed on its side. Every bone and joint in his body was screaming in pain, especially his snapped right arm.

He could see the room was darkly lit in deep tones of red, and could hear some kind of dark, electronica nightclub music rhythmically beating from another room.

Jack felt a warm liquid running down his forehead. When it reached his mouth he tasted blood. He tried to move but was in too much pain. This was not good. The morgue and Farnsworth and even processing the remains of the dead was preferable to this shit. Holy fuck, what now, he thought.

A door opened and Jack was able to move his head slightly to see what was coming in. Two husky men lumbered in, one on each side of Nate, dragging him into the room. Jack could see Nate's feet, the toes of his boots lifelessly skidding across the concrete. The two men slumped Nate into a chair and began to use zipcuffs to fasten Nate's wrists and ankles to the chair legs. Nate's head flopped to the side, his face a puffy, bloody mess. Jack couldn't believe what was happening, and his pity for Nate turned to boiling anger. He started to put all his effort into uprighting his body, but the two thugs, seeing this, turned their attention to Jack.

"OK, OK, asshole. You're not gonna be able to do anything about this," The stocky one with a blond buzzcut said to Jack as he walked around him and firmly grasped Jack's left shoulder and arm. The other thug, a taller, more physically fit guy with dark, neatly styled hair, moved around to Jack's right side, similarly grasping Jack's arm and shoulder. They hoisted jack up and onto a chair next to Nate, and Jack's broken arm screamed in pain. He gritted his teeth, flared his nostrils, and let the pain wash over him and turn into deeper anger and motivation to kill these guys.

Nate was semi-conscious and moaning in agony. Jack could tell he had been beat up pretty badly. As the thugs zipcuffed Jack to the chair legs, he figured he was next for a beating. Although with the blood streaming down his face, and having just awoken from being blacked out, perhaps he had already taken his beating. He hoped so.

Jack heard the clacking of high-heeled shoes as someone else entered the room. As the figure emerged from the shadows he saw it was a woman. A redhead. She looked to be in her late 40s or early 50s, with a classic beauty not unlike the starlets from the 30s and 40s cinema. She folded her arms and wore a smug smile as she looked at the boys. Tabitha entered the room after her, looking like she'd been beat down to some degree. Tabby wasn't happy at all to see the boys and was acting scared and hesitant. Jack figured this new redhead, obviously higher up on the food chain, had perhaps come down on Tabitha for allowing him and Nate to live and to find her and almost capture or kill her.

"Well hello, boys. I'm Rosie. I own this establishment. It's so delightful to meet such resourceful, robust men," she said with a glimmer in her eyes and a low, raspy yet sexy voice that probably came from years of smoking a few packs of cigarettes a day. Jack pictured her using a long, ornate cigarette holder made from black enamel and ivory.

For a moment, Jack saw her phase into a gruesome thing with deep black circles around her eyes, red irises, pale leathery skin, and a missing nose. He winced, but then she was back to resembling a sweltering Susan Hayward or Maureen O'Hara.

"Tabby here told us she'd carved you into a number of fine cuts of meat the other day. But here you are. Was she lying, perhaps?"

Jack thought quickly. "What do you think. Of course she's lying. We took off after blasting a nice hole in her friend Durk's head."