CHAPTER 12 FORSAKEN #2
“For now,” his dad said. “When you’ve shown me your skill with the animals…
maybe I’ll start bringing you other practice subjects.
But you will stay here until I say you can leave, do you understand me?
If I catch you anywhere near the woman while she is pregnant, I’ll kill you. Don’t think I won’t.”
The boy just looked at him, eyes empty of fear. “I know you will.”
···
“But he didn’t butcher the bitch after she spit out Henry,” the deputy whispered against Gabe’s ear, his breath hot and stale as he panted, stroking Gabe’s dick.
The man’s crotch pressed firm against Gabe’s thigh, his cock stiff inside his pants.
“They became a fucking family… while he kept me hidden away in that filthy little cabin— for years.”
The deputy’s words sounded disjointed, fractured, as if spoken through a thick pane of ice, barely piercing the deafening roar of the cold that had seized Gabe’s naked body.
An invisible vise clamped his chest, crushing the air from his lungs, making each shallow breath a desperate, futile gasp.
He registered the man’s fist around his cock only as a distant pressure, a phantom touch—a horrifying mercy in the face of encroaching hypothermia.
Every fiber of his being screamed to spit, to claw, to unleash the impotent fury curdling in his gut, but his jaw was locked, a frozen vise, mirroring the paralysis that had claimed his limbs, his will.
The man’s whines about “Henry” ruining his life were just background noise, a lunatic’s static, indistinguishable from the screams in his own mind.
“But I had a secret for him,” the deputy murmured, his breath quick and hot against Gabe’s temple, a sickening contrast to the pervasive cold.
He jerked Gabe’s dick, limp and unresponsive in his fist, bumping his own crotch, a grotesque, self-contained act of depravity.
“When I told him, he didn’t believe it. But I believed it.
I still do. Because there ain’t no fucking way—”
“Enough,” the madman barked, his voice slicing through the haze, a whip-crack of authority.
He approached, his shadow falling over Gabe like a shroud.
“He isn’t going to cum for you,” he muttered with disdain, his words dripping with contempt.
“He’s half frozen. Cage him.” The man’s eyes, dark and fathomless, bored into Gabe’s, and a deep, primal satisfaction, chilling in its purity, resonated forth, a silent pronouncement of ownership.
“Let him sit and think about what is… and what will be.” The words echoed, a promise of endless torment.
The deputy scowled, a petulant child denied his toy.
He unfastened Gabe’s hands, the chains clinking like a death knell, and Gabe’s arms dropped, heavy and useless, dead weight that pulled at his shoulders, sending a severe, radiating ache webbing through his back and chest. Roland shoved him toward one of the cages, his bare feet slapping against the freezing, wet concrete, each contact a jolt of pain, a reminder of his degradation as he stumbled forward.
The deputy pulled open the rusty cage door with a piercing, metallic screech that seemed to tear at the very fabric of Gabe’s sanity, then forced him inside.
The heavy padlock clanged shut, the sound reverberating through Gabe’s bones, sealing him in.
The deputy squatted, gripping the flaking bars, his grin wide and predatory, the face of a lunatic.
“Get some rest, Gabey. Don’t think too hard about your dead friends…
or Henry and the others, when they found them.
” He winked, a gesture of sickening intimacy.
“I’m sure they’re coping just fine… what do you think?
” He chuckled, a low, guttural sound that scraped against Gabe’s raw nerves, then stood and left the spacious room, pulling the heavy metal door closed behind him with a final, echoing thud that swallowed the last vestiges of light, casting the entire area into a suffocating, absolute blackness.
The scraping echo of the door shutting vibrated not just through Gabe’s bones, but through the very core of his being, a final, definitive severing from the world.
Convulsing shivers racked his ice-cold body, each spasm a testament to the horror that had taken root within him.
In the suffocating darkness, he slid his trembling hands across the floor of the cage, the gritty grime and sharp rust flakes burrowing beneath his nails, a grotesque communion with his prison.
His fingers brushed against coarse fabric.
Shaking so violently that his teeth chattered, he grabbed the cloth and dragged it to him.
It reeked of rot, mildew, and something else…
something metallic and cloying. He gagged, the pungent odors assaulting his senses, but desperate for any meager comfort, he ignored the stench, pulling the nasty, stiff blanket around his body, huddling into a fetal ball, trying to cover his legs, to reclaim some shred of warmth.
He pressed into the far corner of the cage, hugging the filthy cover to his freezing body, and stared into the pervading darkness, so thick it pulsed with a life of its own, a malevolent entity breathing down his neck.
He tried, with every ounce of his shattered will, not to see beyond the black void, to keep his mind from wandering into the abyss that awaited.
But the images were there, unbidden, intrusive, a relentless horror movie playing on a loop behind his eyes, each turn growing more terrifying, more visceral than the last.
Cole, Dane, Devlin… Angel … their faces, their screams, the sickening discovery of the bodies in the park… Savannah, Maddy, Abel… brutally raped and butchered. The words, the names, were a litany of torment, each one a fresh, agonizing wound.
A low, keening wail, thin and reedy, squeezed up Gabe’s throat, a sound torn from the deepest chambers of his soul.
He closed his eyes so tightly they ached, pressing his knuckles into them, desperate to block out the relentless reel of horror that continued to roll behind his eyelids, a private hell he could not escape.
It’s over, he thought, a cold, desolate certainty settling upon him.
Everyone is dead… even those who were still breathing. He was dead. They were all dead.
How’s your faith, son-in-law? Still believe in God?
Gabe opened his eyes to the blackness, and warm tears spilled down his chilled face.
My God…My God… why have you forsaken us?
The silent plea, a raw, guttural cry from a spirit utterly broken, echoed unanswered in the suffocating dark.