Wings of a Hummingbird

Chapter Three

It took some time to figure out who he kept screaming at all the time – Lloyd, the head encased in a jar. I think Lloyd accused him of being a traitor, then gave him the silent treatment. This could be a comedy skit, had the situation not of been so grave. He called Lloyd a cruel friend. Lloyd wanted to know if I am what he gave his life for: silly meanderings of love? Crude fumblings of teenagers in the backseat of their parents car? Lloyd demanded he hurt me...but he...loved me? After all these years, it's a lunatic who professed his love for me. How is that possible? What was the quixotic attraction ? I'm not anyone special. I've never seen love like this, but I'm certainly no expert. Yet if he loved me, maybe I had a chance – to live? So I lay there as his inner-self argued with Lloyd, challenging each other to an imaginary dual. A duel no one could possibly win or lose. He turned Lloyd's face away from me, as punishment to him.

***

In bits and pieces, I harvested his story, the one I'm relaying to you, as ours intertwine. The overpowering stench assaulted the nose before opening the door to his barn. An old barn, with warped and missing planks. Originally painted a vibrant red, pelting rain and harsh temperatures faded it into a depressing, washed-out grey. Rusty hinges protested loudly when he summoned the courage to open the door. He knew what he'd find inside.

"What was inside" ? I asked.

Never having been near a decomposing body, he couldn't imagine the rotting odor that saturated his senses. Not even the moldy hay inside suppressed the decay that infected her body.

"Whose body?" I asked.

He often wondered how long he could keep her without becoming disgusted. The aroma didn't get to him per se, but the maggots crawling out of her mouth, nose, and pussy sure did. Slimy little creatures, which made having sex with a dead body, well, nauseating, even for him. She's the one who started his sadistic proclivities. I have nothing to substantiate his word, but it makes sense: how one marches down the path of killing, mutilation, raping, and God knows what else. I couldn't imagine doing that to someone because they broke your heart, even if she did cheat on him with his brother. The same brother he slaughtered with a machete and chainsaw, then slung chewed up body parts all over the state, more out of rage than any real design. Maybe his love intensified so much it blinded him, shocked his conscience so he had none? I do not claim to be a shrink, nor to condone his behavior, but one must wonder...why?

After he killed his brother and girlfriend? Ex-girlfriend? Dead sexual partner? He wondered why the guilt didn't weigh on him more – make him sickened by the act. But he liked it. No, more than that – he claimed it thrilled him...immensely. So he killed again – introducing Lloyd, the one on punishment, facing the other wall as he bobbed like an apple inside formaldehyde. Lloyd got chosen walking to the bus stop while our abductor took out the trash, a fairly innocuous chore that altered the lives of many... including mine...forever.

He dragged Lloyd into the basement without any thought to noise, if anyone saw it, or anything else, except torture.

And then, he went on a nonsensical tirade of how torture became a loss craft while I posed provocatively on the bed for him. Virginal blood leaked from where he fucked me, and stained an odd, textured fabric beneath me, that covered a beaten up mattress. But I lay there, limp, as I listened to an analogy of torture and the lost city of gold. How the CIA and foreign governments used torture, the ultimate artform, to exact the right amount of pain, obedience, and understanding from a subject you have no intention of killing.

He stroked his still awakened manhood next to me why a video played of Lloyds last living moments, I listened to Lloyd, who seemed like a decent enough fellow when he was still whole, tell his and my captor how he'd been at the same job for ten years. Of his young daughter, Alexandria, Emma his wife, and a beagle called Spencer. Lloyd wanted nothing more than to see his daughter, whom he like to call Alex, even though his wife despised the shortening of the girls name, to have a better life than he did.

Once he ejaculated, leaving my bitten and hard nipples aching in the cold room, he went and turned Lloyd's jar around. I agreed with him, Lloyd did seem more repentant to me, too. In the video, the soles of Lloyd's feet got scorched with a blowtorch; it sickened me. Lloyd, in his ghastly pain, prompted by more pain, confessed and mumbled, incoherently about his wife not wanting to have sex anymore after Alex came along. Poor Lloyd, who didn't even get an occasional hummer, was forced into the humiliation of jacking off in the shower each night like a sexual deviant. Even I felt sorry for Lloyd at this point! Finished with torturing -– helping Lloyd, his death scream resounded across the room like a standing ovation to my tympanic membrane as Lloyds final breath escaped his bluish lips. If I thought the taped scream sounded loud, he assured me, in person they cracked glass jars. Only then did he decide to move, move closer to me, where our fates melded together.

***