In Fire and Blood

Kaye

The pain registered before he was barely conscious. A sliver of hot agony pierced his chest and shot up to his skull. He cracked open his left eye. Dark. He felt a presence beside him—heard a soft moan. He opened the other eye and saw the small dirty window, the stained chair, his shoe lying half way across the room. The last few hours came hurtling back, and the memories shoved him wide awake. Angry pieces of the more horrific moments tore at him like the broken glass they had used to cut his shirt away from his body.

He sat slumped against the cold basement wall on the damp concrete floor. His legs stretched out before him, tied together at the ankles. His hands were trapped above his head, handcuffed together, with a heavy rope looped through the links and pulled high—knotted around a hook. He’d lost feeling in both his arms long ago. He licked his swollen lips, cracked and hardened from dried blood. He counted to ten and tried to remember what day it was.

He thought it was probably Thursday, but the last time they had talked, the last time they had both been conscious at the same time, Hutch thought maybe that it had to be at least Friday. Starsky hoped he was wrong. That meant they had been trussed up like this for two days.

Two days and no closer to any answers. No closer to any questions, come to think of it. No one had ever said anything to either of them after they had been shoved down the stairs the first time. Not a word. Just the merry-go-round to and from the room which had ended . . . when? He didn’t know why it stopped any more than he knew why it had ever started. As a matter of fact, he really didn’t know a damn thing.

He forced himself to turn to the body that was slowly moving beside him.

“Hutch?” he croaked.

He couldn’t bear to look at his partner—it shattered his heart. For all the fun and games they had both endured, Hutch had taken the worst of it. Both his eyes were swollen slits, his blond hair matted with blood, and only one of his arms was tied up over his head; the other one hung limp in his lap, broken. Bad from what Starsky could tell. From what he could remember.

He shuddered and sucked in a shallow breath, as his stomach objected to the memory. After the last beating, Hutch had managed to kick the guy dragging Starsky back into the room. The sound of the snap had echoed round the walls when the guy with the baseball bat had hit a line drive through Hutch’s forearm. Hutch had screamed and then Starsky had screamed louder, the shock and pain transferring from Hutch’s arm straight to Starsky’s soul, and he did the only thing he could. He spit on the man, who then turned and knocked a single off Starsky’s ribs. When Starsky could breathe again, he asked the one question they had both repeated over and over since they had been taken.

“What the hell do you want?”