a moment. Just a moment. And in that fraction of time, he enjoyed being with his sister. He let go of the wire and felt it slap against his bare arm. “Son of a bitch!”
Jack dropped the bow and held his arm. He expected to see a deep gash when he lifted his hand away but found only a wide red mark where the wire had hit his skin and slid across his arm. Insignificant compared to many of his skateboarding injuries, the red welt embarrassed him more than it stung. He stormed toward the house.
“Jack,” Julie called, her voice full of humor.
“Leave me alone,” he shouted back.
“But look!”
It wasn’t the reply he expected. He looked over his shoulder and paused. His arrow sat in the center of the target, next to his sister’s.
“You see,” Julie said. “Big sisters are good for something.”
The faintest of smiles crept onto Jack’s hardened face. “Yeah, guess so.”
He rejoined her on the improvised archery range, and for the rest of the week while his parents were on vacation, he and Julie forged a temporary truce. By the end of the week his aim was keen. Things went back to normal with the return of their parents, but it had been one of the first times in his life he appreciated his sister. He remembered her with fondness.
She gave him strength.
He needed it now.
The memory faded, replaced by seizing pain. Trained to reduce the agony of torture by escaping from the body and entering the often parodied “happy place,” King turned to his sister for help.
It didn’t work.
King’s involuntary scream ripped through the tent’s thin green fabric and met a wall of trees and foliage that muffled the noise and sent the sound waves back to the earth where they were absorbed and silenced. No one outside of the small VPLA camp would hear his anguish. Bound tight, hands over head, to a tall stake stretching toward the tent’s ceiling, King could do nothing to ease the pain. Not much could.
Eight hundred thousand volts of electricity coursing into a human body tended to have that effect. That the general was placing the stun gun against King’s temple increased the agony tenfold. A three- to five-second charge could bring a man to his knees, causing loss of muscle control and disorientation. King had received eight separate jolts in the past three minutes . . . to the side of his head, his chest, and the back of his neck. All from a handheld, battery-operated stun gun any jerk could pick up on eBay for minimal cash. Cheap, affordable torture.
With deep breaths, King fought to regain control of his spasming muscles. Hot sweat poured down his shirtless chest and back. They’d stripped him from the waist up and confiscated his outbreak meter before binding him to the stake. The carved muscles beneath his skin bounced to an unheard rhythm, slowing after a few seconds. The port-wine stain reaching up his back glistened deep purple. After his muscles stopped twitching madly, the tight pain subsided. But it would be ten minutes before full control returned. And Trung would be back before then. He fell forward. With his hands bound above his head, his weight pulled his arms back at a painful angle. Having no strength left he could do nothing to right himself.
King had been trained in withstanding torture. To keep his mouth shut under duress. To die if need be. And he knew he would. The problem with his training was that it didn’t cover this scenario, because he wasn’t being asked any questions. Trung was like a kid with a magnifying glass over a hill of ants. The smile on his face confirmed it. He was enjoying himself.
“You got a hard-on yet?” Queen noticed, too. She was strapped to a stake next to King’s, also shirtless, her breasts exposed, her six-pack abs even more impressive than King’s. Like King, her outbreak meter had been taken, no doubt being inspected in another tent. Her chin and clavicle were stained red from blood. But it was not her own. The man who’d removed her clothing attempted to fondle her breasts. She nearly took his nose clean off with her teeth.
Trung had the undisciplined man shot for his actions. Their torture began shortly after.
Not a word had been spoken since.
Other than King’s screams the only sound in the tent was Sara’s weeping. She’d been tied to a chair. Her clothes remained on. Her body untouched. As King used what