Chapter 8: The Butcher's Toll

Chapter 8: The Butcher's Toll

The rat was a greasy, savory memory. Alex had skinned it with his small, dull knife, the process clumsy and gruesome. He had laid the strips of dark meat on a large, clean-looking shard of the shattered toilet tank and had eaten it all, raw. The act felt less like a meal and more like absorbing the very essence of the labyrinth, a bloody communion that left him feeling heavy and alive in a way the brittle insects never could. For a full cycle of sleep, his stomach was blessedly, miraculously quiet. It was the first time he had felt something akin to satisfaction since he’d walked into this tiled hell.

The satisfaction did not last. The price for his feast began as a low, insistent thrum in his right hand. The two small puncture wounds, which he had cleaned as best he could, had swollen, the skin around them turning an angry, purplish red. The pain was no longer the sharp sting of a fresh wound but a deep, radiating ache that felt like his very bones were on fire.

By the next waking cycle, the thrum had become a pounding, agonizing drumbeat. The swelling had crept past his wrist, his whole hand puffing up into a grotesque, useless paw. He couldn't make a fist. He couldn't even hold his knife properly. A fever had taken root, beginning as a shiver in the constant, cool temperature of the room before blooming into a raging furnace. One moment he was trembling with a bone-deep cold, the next he was drenched in sweat, the filthy water on the floor feeling like a cool balm against his burning skin.

His mind began to fray at the edges. The unwavering hum of the fluorescent lights warped, sometimes sounding like whispers, sometimes like the distant, muffled dialogue of the horror movie he’d been watching with Chloe. The wrecked bathroom would occasionally shimmer and twist, the broken porcelain momentarily rearranging itself into the red velvet seats of the cinema.

He saw her, sometimes. A fleeting hallucination in the corner of his eye. Chloe, standing by the undamaged sinks of a different room, a different time, frowning at him. “Alex, what are you doing? You’re a mess. Come on, the movie’s over.” He would reach out with his good hand, a strangled sob catching in his throat, and she would dissolve like smoke.

The Survivor’s cold pragmatism was melting in the inferno of the fever. Alex Thompson, the man he had tried to bury, was screaming to the surface, bringing with him all the terror and grief he had suppressed.

He lost all track of time, adrift in a delirium of pain and memory. He only knew the fire in his hand was spreading. He pushed up the sleeve of his tattered shirt and saw it, a faint red line, no thicker than a thread, snaking its way up his forearm from his swollen wrist.

He knew what it was. He’d seen it on one of the survival shows, a dramatic re-enactment of a man bitten by a venomous spider in the Amazon. Blood poisoning. Sepsis. The narrator's voice, grim and authoritative, echoed in his fevered mind: “It’s a race against time. Once the poison reaches the heart, it’s over.”

He stared at the red line, a creeping fuse of his own mortality. It was moving. He was sure of it. An hour ago—or was it a minute ago?—it had been at his wrist. Now it was an inch further up his arm. The labyrinth wasn't just going to let him starve or go mad. It had given him a new clock, a new executioner, and it was living inside his own blood.

A terrifying, lucid clarity cut through the fog of his delirium. It was a simple, brutal choice, the kind this place specialized in. He could lie here and let the poison creep through him until it stopped his heart. He could let the fever cook his brain until he was nothing more than another babbling ghost. Or he could cut the poison out.

He looked at his right hand. It was a foreign object, a bloated, discolored piece of meat attached to his arm. It was the source. It was killing him.

The decision was not born of courage. It was the last, desperate act of a cornered animal chewing off its own limb to escape a trap.

He stumbled to his feet, his body screaming in protest. Using his left hand, he retrieved his knife. He then ripped a long, thin strip from the hem of his jeans, the tough denim resisting before tearing with a ragged sound. He sat on the floor, his back propped against the one remaining intact stall, and laid his swollen arm across his lap.

His hands were shaking uncontrollably, not just from the fever but from the sheer, monumental horror of what he was about to do. He wrapped the strip of denim tightly around his forearm, just below the elbow, fashioning a crude tourniquet. He twisted it, using one of his keys as a handle, until the pressure was immense, the circulation to his lower arm all but cut off.

He looked at his bloated hand, at the two blackening puncture wounds just below his ring finger. The finger itself was the worst of it, swollen to twice its normal size, the nail bed a dark, ugly purple. That was where the venom, the filth, had concentrated. That was what had to go.

He placed the tip of his small, inadequate knife against the base of the finger, where it met the hand. He took a deep, shuddering breath, the air burning in his feverish lungs. He thought of Chloe’s hand in his, a memory so clear and painful it was like a physical blow. He thought of the ring he had hidden in his sock drawer, waiting for the right moment.

He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, to whom he did not know.

And then he pushed.

Pain. Not the dull, throbbing ache of the infection, but a sharp, clean, blinding explosion of pure agony. It was a white light behind his eyes, a scream that had no sound. He gritted his teeth, a low groan tearing from his throat, and sawed at the flesh. The blade was dull, designed for opening boxes, not for butchery. It snagged on skin, on tendon. He had to force it, rocking it back and forth in a sickening, wet rhythm.

Tears streamed down his face, mixing with the sweat and grime. He refused to stop. The red line on his arm was his mantra. Cut it out. Cut it out or die.

The blade grated against bone. The sound was the most horrific thing he had ever heard, a dry, scraping noise that vibrated up his entire arm. The knife couldn't cut through. It was too weak. Panic, cold and sharp, pierced the veil of pain. It wasn't working.

With a final, desperate roar, he bent the finger back, putting all his weight and strength into it. There was a wet, heavy snap that echoed in the wrecked room. The bone broke. A few more frantic, sawing cuts through the last remaining threads of skin and sinew, and it was free.

He collapsed backward, his head hitting the stall wall with a dull thud. His vision swam. The pain was a physical presence, a roaring ocean that threatened to drown him. He stared, unblinking, at his right hand. It was a mangled, bloody mess, but it was a hand with only four fingers. The stump of the amputated digit pumped blood in a dark, rhythmic pulse, held in check only by the tourniquet.

He couldn't pass out. He knew if he passed out, he would bleed to death.

Fighting against the waves of nausea and pain, he fumbled for another piece of his tattered t-shirt. He pressed the wad of cloth against the bleeding stump, applying as much pressure as he could. His entire body was slick with sweat. The world was a blurry, humming tunnel.

He stayed like that for an eternity, kneeling in the filth of his own creation, clutching his mutilated hand, riding out the waves of agony. Slowly, miraculously, the bleeding subsided, the pressure of the makeshift bandage doing its work. The sharp, clean pain began to recede, leaving the familiar, throbbing ache of the infection in its place, though even that felt somehow diminished, less venomous.

Hours later, or perhaps minutes, he dared to look at his arm again. The red line had not advanced. It even seemed fainter, less angry.

He had done it. He had paid the butcher's toll.

He looked at his hand, now wrapped in a dirty piece of cloth. A permanent, grisly testament to the lengths he would go to survive. The fever had not broken, but the delirium had receded, leaving behind a state of profound, bone-deep shock. He was no longer the man who had screamed when cockroaches swarmed his arm. He was no longer the man who had hesitated to eat. He was the man who could cut off a piece of himself to live.

He was a monster, carved into a new shape by the unfeeling chisel of this white hell. And for the first time, looking at his maimed hand, he didn't feel fear or disgust. He felt a strange, terrifying calm. He had met the labyrinth's challenge, and he had won. But he knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his marrow, that the man named Alex Thompson had not survived the operation.