Chapter 10: Under the Cleaver

Chapter 10: Under the Cleaver

The paralytic was a cold, silent flood. It moved through Eli’s veins with a chilling efficiency, a wave of liquid ice extinguishing every flicker of neural fire. He felt it begin in his fingertips, a creeping numbness that was not a loss of sensation, but a loss of command. His mind screamed at his fingers to clench, to claw, to fight, but they remained limp, unresponsive. The signal was sent, but the line was dead.

The cold tide washed up his arms, turning them into useless appendages of meat and bone. His legs went next, the heavy muscles of his thighs becoming dense, immovable weights. The paralysis climbed his torso, stealing his breath, forcing his diaphragm into a shallow, automatic rhythm. The last bastion of his physical self was his eyes, his ability to blink, to track movement. He was a disembodied consciousness, a ghost trapped in the machine he could no longer pilot.

Mike watched the process with the detached interest of a researcher observing a chemical reaction. When he was satisfied that the drug had taken full effect, he moved with methodical purpose. He unfastened the chains from the manacles on Eli’s wrists. For a heart-stopping moment, Eli’s arms swung free, and his mind, in its panicked delusion, thought he could move them. But they were just dead weights, and they flopped uselessly at his sides as Mike heaved him over one broad shoulder.

The world became a dizzying, inverted blur. The concrete floor, the dusty rafters, the glaring lights—all swirled together. He felt the scrape of his back against the rough, cold surface of the concrete slab—the very altar he had admired with such intellectual reverence. It was no longer a symbol of clean, philosophical control; it was a butcher’s block, and he was the sacrifice.

His mind screamed. A silent, unending shriek of pure terror echoed in the sealed vault of his skull. Control, control, control, the mantra of his life, was now a vicious taunt. He had no control over his limbs, his voice, not even the tears that now welled in his unblinking eyes and trickled, hot and stinging, into his ears.

Mike worked with a practiced, almost bored efficiency. He positioned Eli’s limbs on the slab and began fastening the thick leather straps. One across his chest, pinning him tight. Another across his waist. Then, with a grunt of effort, he straightened Eli’s left leg and cinched a strap tightly across his thigh, just above the knee, pinning it to the concrete. The rough leather chafed his skin. The cold of the slab seeped into his bones.

With Eli secured, Mike walked back to his neatly organized wall of tools. He began to whistle. It wasn't a tune of malice or triumph, but a simple, meandering, aimless melody, the kind a man might whistle while fixing a leaky faucet or tending his garden. The sound was a profound violation, a grotesque layer of mundane normalcy spread thinly over an act of absolute horror.

Eli watched, his eyes wide, as Mike selected his instrument. He didn’t reach for a saw or a delicate knife. He chose a meat cleaver—a heavy, square-headed blade with a well-worn wooden handle. Eli recognized it from his earlier tour of this monstrous workshop. He remembered seeing it hanging on its magnetic strip, admiring its brutal functionality. Now, its weight and purpose were directed entirely at him.

Mike returned to the slab, the cleaver held loosely in one hand. In the other, he carried a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a clean rag. He whistled his tuneless song as he unceremoniously yanked up the leg of Eli’s cheap trousers, tearing the fabric to expose the pale, thin stretch of his shin. He poured the alcohol onto the rag, and the sharp, antiseptic smell filled the air, a scent of sterile procedure that was a horrifying mockery of healing.

He began to scrub Eli’s leg, from the knee down to the ankle. The icy shock of the alcohol was a sharp, distinct sensation, a prelude to a pain he couldn't yet imagine. Mike’s touch was impersonal, firm, the way one would scrub a potato before peeling it. He was merely prepping the surface, ensuring a clean workspace.

When he was finished, he tossed the rag aside. He raised the cleaver, testing its weight, balancing it in his palm. He looked down at Eli’s leg, his eyes narrowed in concentration, not with rage or passion, but with the cool, appraising gaze of a carpenter measuring a piece of wood for a cut. He was calculating the angle, the force required. This was craftsmanship.

Eli’s mind fractured. All philosophy, all theory, all his arrogant, intellectual distance from the world dissolved into a single, primal, animal need: NO. The word was a silent atom bomb detonating in his head, a blast of pure negation against the inevitable. He strained against his bonds, his mind pouring every ounce of its impotent will into his paralyzed muscles. Nothing. Not a twitch. He could only lie there, a fully sentient mind, and watch.

Mike raised the cleaver high over his head. The polished steel caught the harsh glare of the floodlights, casting a blinding shard of light into Eli’s eyes.

For a moment, time seemed to stop.

Then, the blade came down.

It was not a clean, slicing sound. It was a deafening, wet CRUNCH. A sound of such profound, sickening violence that it bypassed his ears and seemed to detonate directly in his brainstem. It was the sound of his own tibia and fibula, the core structure of his body, shattering like rotten wood.

The pain that followed was not pain. It was a white-hot nova of pure sensory overload that erased all thought, all identity. It was a physical force so immense it felt as if the universe had been compressed into a single, screaming point inside his leg and was now exploding outward. It was the shriek of a billion nerve endings firing at once, a biological cataclysm that his brain had no framework to process. It was the end of everything.

His heart convulsed in his chest, a frantic, stuttering spasm. The edges of his vision dissolved into a crackling, black static. The buzzing of the lights, the whistling, the sound of his own silent scream—it all faded into a roaring abyss. His consciousness, the last thing he had, flickered and died. He blacked out, plunging into a blessed, silent darkness.

It didn't last.

He was dragged back by a shock of impossible cold. A splash of ice water hit his face, a brutal baptism back into the world of agony. He gasped, his diaphragm spasming, his body trying to pull in a breath it could no longer control. His eyes flew open, sputtering, his mind still reeling in the aftershock of the pain.

The agony was still there, a great, roaring fire where his lower leg used to be, but it was now a manageable inferno rather than an exploding sun. Through a haze of tears and water, he saw Mike standing over him, an empty bucket in his hand.

"Didn't want you to miss the finale," Mike said, his voice as calm and conversational as ever.

Dazed, confused, and drowning in a sea of pain, Eli instinctively tried to look down, to assess the damage. His eyes traced the line of his body, past his waist, down the length of his strapped-down left thigh.

And then he saw it.

His leg ended in a ragged, bloody stump just below the knee. The white of splintered bone jutted out from a mangled ruin of muscle and flesh. A horrifyingly neat line of stitches, thick black thread pulled tight through his skin, was already in place, a grotesque parody of surgical care.

His brain refused to process it. It was an image of impossible violence, a special effect from a cheap horror movie. It couldn't be real.

Then, he heard a wet, heavy thud.

He tore his gaze away from the stump and looked toward the sound. Mike was standing beside a large plastic bucket on the floor. He had just tossed something inside.

Inside the bucket, nestled against the grimy plastic, was his own severed leg. It lay there, pale and lifeless, his worn-out shoe still on his foot, the torn fabric of his trouser leg clinging to the calf. It was no longer a part of him. It was just a thing. A piece of meat in a bucket.