Chapter 4: A Pound of Flesh

Chapter 4: A Pound of Flesh

The coppery smell of blood was thick in the air, a sickening new layer over the basement’s familiar scent of dust and damp concrete. Tod clutched his forearm where I had cut him, the thin red line a stark accusation against his skin. It was a wound of my making, a debt paid to the malevolent entity in the box. I dropped the utility knife, its blade now twice-tarnished, and it clattered on the floor next to the ragged clumps of Nadia’s dark hair. She hadn’t moved. She just stared at the wall, her expression utterly blank, a refugee from her own mind.

My token’s glow faded, the game’s focus shifting with an almost audible hum. We all knew whose turn it was next without looking. The sickly green light began to pulse from Tod’s square on the board.

He flinched as if the light itself were a physical blow. His face, usually a canvas for easy smiles and charismatic energy, was a mess of sweat, guilt, and raw fear. He was breathing in short, shallow gasps.

“Tod, just… do what it says,” Rupert said, his voice a low, gravelly rasp. He was nursing a split lip from their brief, pathetic scuffle, and his eyes held a cold, reptilian fury. He no longer cared about escape, only about survival. The game had boiled him down to his most basic, selfish instincts.

With a shaking hand that seemed to belong to a much older man, Tod reached for the deck. The card he drew felt heavier than paper, weighted with unspoken dread. He stared at it for a long, silent moment, and a strangled noise, a mix between a sob and a gasp, escaped his lips.

“What?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “What does it say?”

He read it aloud, his voice cracking, each word an indictment. “The hand that opened the box must pay the price. Break it against the wall.”

A profound, chilling silence descended. This was a new escalation, a leap from cuts and psychological warfare into the realm of permanent, crippling injury. The game wasn’t just scarring us; it was dismantling us, piece by piece.

Tod looked at his right hand—the hand that had lifted the dusty box from an attic, the hand that had pried open the lid, the hand that had doomed us all. It was, as the card so cruelly stated, the hand that had opened the box.

“Don’t,” Nadia whispered, the first word she had spoken in what felt like an hour. Her voice was a fragile, papery thing. “Please.”

But Tod was already moving, shuffling toward the bare concrete wall beneath the useless window. He looked like a man walking to his own execution. He was trapped not just by the game, but by his own crushing guilt. This was his penance. He saw it in those terms; I could see it in the grim set of his jaw.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, let out a raw, guttural yell that was more animal than human, and swung his arm.

The sound was not loud, but it was the most obscene thing I had ever heard. It was a wet, percussive crack, a sound of living tissue and brittle calcium giving way to brute force. It was the sound of a thing breaking that was never meant to be broken.

Tod screamed, a pure, piercing shriek of agony that clawed at the inside of my skull. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his wrist to his chest. His right hand hung at an impossible, sickening angle, a useless appendage of mangled flesh and shattered bone. He was sobbing now, great, heaving, pain-filled gasps.

I started to move toward him, to offer some useless comfort, but a flicker of movement on the table stopped me cold. The card Tod had placed on the board was changing. Like a time-lapse video of ink seeping into parchment, new words were materializing beneath the first horrifying command.

My blood ran cold as I read them aloud. “A shared burden is a lighter one. Now, break somebody else’s hand.”

The room, already thick with pain, became unbreathable. This was the game’s true genius. It wasn’t enough to force self-mutilation. It had to make the victim an accomplice. It had to turn the tortured into the torturer, ensuring that no bond, no shred of empathy, could survive.

Tod looked up from his private hell of pain, his eyes wide with horrified disbelief. “No,” he moaned, shaking his head. “No, no, I can’t…”

“He has to!” Rupert spat, scrambling to his feet. He pointed a trembling finger at Nadia. “Do it to her. She’s half-gone anyway. It’d be a mercy.”

The cold-blooded pragmatism of it was monstrous. He was treating our friend like a damaged asset to be liquidated for his own benefit.

“Shut up, Rupert!” I yelled, stepping between him and Nadia.

Just then, the same toolbox that had offered up the knife slid forward again with that same unnatural, scraping sound. The lid creaked open. Lying there on a grimy rag was a heavy claw hammer, its head dark with rust, its wooden handle stained and worn. The instrument had been provided. The sentence had been passed. All that was left was to choose the victim.

Tod stared at the hammer, his face a ruin of tears and sweat. The physical agony of his broken hand was nothing compared to the torment twisting his features now. To be forced to inflict that same agony on one of us… it would be the end of him.

I looked at my friends. No, not my friends anymore. We were inmates on a sinking ship, fighting over the last scraps of driftwood. Nadia, catatonic and fragile, would be shattered completely. Rupert, the viper, deserved it, but I knew he would fight, and the game would likely punish us all for the struggle. That left Tod, already broken and now being forced into the role of monster. And me.

A terrible, cold clarity washed over me. This wasn't about fairness or friendship. It was about variables. It was a strategic problem from hell. If I wanted to maintain any semblance of control, any say in how this horror played out, I had to make the choice myself.

I took a deep breath. “Tod,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady. “Do it to me.”

He stared at me, his one good eye blinking through a film of tears. “What? No, Ethan…”

“Listen to me,” I said, walking toward him, my steps feeling strangely distant, as if I were watching someone else move. “Rupert will fight. Nadia can’t take it. It has to be me. You have to do it, or the game will do something worse to all of us. You know it will.”

I knelt down and picked up the hammer. It was heavy, a solid, brutal thing. I placed it in his left hand, his good hand, closing his trembling fingers around the worn wood.

Then, I went to the wall and knelt on the cold concrete floor, right beside the spot where he had knelt moments before. I laid my right hand flat against the gritty surface, palm down, fingers spread. The hand that I used to draft blueprints, to build models, to create.

“Ethan, please,” Tod sobbed, looming over me, the hammer hanging from his grip like a pendulum. “I can’t.”

“You have to,” I said, looking up at him. I tried to pour every ounce of our decade of friendship, every shared laugh, every late-night conversation, into that one look. “It’s okay, Tod. Just… make it fast.”

His face crumpled. He was no longer a person, just a vessel for the game’s will, a puppet of profound cruelty. He raised the hammer. I saw the tremor in his arm, the utter self-loathing in his eyes. For a fraction of a second, we were no longer victim and tormentor, but just Ethan and Tod, two friends at the end of the world.

Then he brought the hammer down.

The impact was a white-hot nova of pain that vaporized all thought. It was not a crack like his had been. It was a wet, dense crunch. I felt the bones in my hand—the delicate metacarpals, the phalanges—give way, splintering and collapsing under the force of the blow. The world narrowed to a single, roaring point of agony.

I didn’t scream. The air was punched from my lungs in a silent gasp. I collapsed onto my side, cradling the mangled, bleeding ruin that had been my right hand. It was a grotesque sculpture of flesh and bone, bent at an angle that defied nature.

Through the blinding haze of pain, I saw Tod scramble backward away from me, dropping the hammer as if it had burned him. He stared at his own hands, both the broken one and the one that had held the hammer, as if they were alien things. He looked at me, his face a mask of such utter horror and despair that it was barely human.

The friendship we had shared was a casualty, another broken thing on the basement floor. The game had won. It had finally forced us to cross the last line. He was the tormentor, and I was his victim. And in the awful, ringing silence that followed, the green light on Tod’s token finally, mercifully, faded out.