30 Day Image Prompt Competition - August

Day 25 Prompt 2 - The Interrogation Room

The general walked towards the brick and concrete building on the edge of the compound and opened the steel door. He grimaced as the damp and musty smell hit him before he crossed the threshold. Even though they had been there for nearly a week the smell was still as strong as the first day of their occupation.

He strode down the corridor, lit by the harsh yellow glow of the strip lighting placed at regular intervals on the ceiling. There was no air conditioning in the building and he could feel the build-up of heat cause a thin trickle of sweat to inch its way down his spine. Open doors led into grey rooms, some lined with shelves and cabinets, others with basic cots and dirty mattresses. Some rooms were windowless, black holes that threatened to swallow anyone who entered their boundaries others had small windows covered with thick, steel bars.

He paused at the entrance to a room that had obviously been used as a medical centre. The hospital beds, with mattresses covered in bloodstains of old, had been pushed to one side whilst the locks to the medicine stores had been forced and the various medicines were being carefully packed into marked crates. A young lieutenant stood supervising the operation, a clipboard in his hand as he recorded the contents of the crate.

“General McCallister,” he said when he saw the general in the doorway. Despite his tiredness from a long day spent in the airless room, the lieutenant snapped off a quick salute, closely followed by the other soldiers as they recognised their visitor.

The general returned their salute and nodded to the soldiers. “At ease, men.” The soldiers continued with their work whilst the general turned to the lieutenant. “How goes the packing?”

“We’re a few minutes ahead of schedule, sir. These are the last of the crates for this room. Pedro is going to take the medical supplies to the medical centre in the village. He says that Murad denied them medicines for their people unless they worked in the fields for him.”

“Good. It will be nice to see some good come out of this mess. Make sure you have everything packed in the next thirty minutes. The Alhambra will be arriving in the harbour and sending over a couple of boats. I want everyone and everything on the dock, waiting. I don’t want to spend a moment longer on this island.”

“We’ll be ready,” the lieutenant vowed, prepared to help out his men if necessary to meet the general’s deadline. None of the soldiers wanted to be in the compound longer than necessary. The horrors they had discovered had sickened even the toughest soldiers amongst them.

“Where is he?” McCallister asked, nodding his head towards one bed that was still in use. An off-white sheet covered the mattress whilst a wheeled trolley with medical supplies and monitoring equipment stood to one side.

“He headed down towards the room a few minutes ago. Do you want me to get someone to bring him back here?”

“No, you carry on here. I’ll go and find him.”

With a nod to the lieutenant, General McCallister stepped back into the corridor and headed down towards a set of double doors. He acknowledged the brief salutes of soldiers as they emerged from rooms, some carrying boxes whilst others pushed laden trucks into the corridor. The raid had uncovered so much information on Murad’s empire. It was a shame that the slippery bastard had managed to elude capture as they had stormed his compound.

Going through the doors he came upon a small corridor with just four rooms off it. One was a small suite of rooms that had been occupied by the guards when they had stormed the building. Two rooms were some sort of prison cell with no windows or light and the doors carefully constructed so as to not allow even the finest chink of light to enter.

It had been the final room that had turned the stomachs of his soldiers. Lit only by a powerful electric light in the centre of the room, it had revealed itself to be some sort of interrogation/torture chamber. The light shone directly over a wooden chair, bolted to the ground with arm restraints hanging from its arms. A desk sat facing the chair, a whip with small metal pins embedded in it lay coiled on the desk along with papers filled with notes from interrogations.

On the bare brick walls, hooks had been placed so that restraints could be attached to them, securing a prisoner for whatever treatment his captors had in mind. From the dark stains on the wooden floor, those treatments had not been nice. A table sat to one side of the room, its scratched surface covered with various knives, some rusty from never being cleaned, and pincers of differing sizes.

When they had entered this room they had found one man tied to the chair, his face so swollen and bloodied it was hard to imagine that he was even human. Both of his arms were broken from being hit with a hammer and his ribcage revealed bruising of varying shades indicating that the torture had been on-going for days.

The other occupant had been so still they had believed him dead initially. He had been hanging from the hooks at the side of the room, his head lolling against a torso devoid of any spare flesh. His back had been a bloody mess, crisscrossed with deep welts from the whip on the desk, flaps of skin hanging off the edges of some of the welts. His face had also been battered beyond recognition and there was evidence of more beatings on his body. Both men had been starved so much that their bodies were little more than skeletons with a skin covering.

Some of the welts had been old ones, full of infection and ripped open once more by the studded whip. The smell of infected flesh had been overpowering in the small, still room and McCallister hadn’t been surprised to see one or two of his soldiers with green faces. His own stomach had been rather queasy over their discoveries.

In the doorway to the torture chamber stood a tall man, leaning against the doorframe whilst one hand held onto a walking stick with grim determination. The general studied him for a moment, noting the evidence of padding beneath the light blue denim shirt he wore. The new jeans that had been found for him only just managed to stay on his bony hips courtesy of the leather belt with the new holes drilled into it. He didn’t look up or acknowledge the general’s approach even though the general knew he was aware of his presence.

“We’re ready to move out in a few minutes. They’re just loading the trucks up.”

The man didn’t move from where he stood staring into the room. The general wondered whether he had heard him or if his mind was shattered by what had happened to him. It would not be a surprise to him, if he had lost his mind, for Murad’s torturers were known to be among the best and most merciless in the world.

“Seventeen hours I’d sit in that chair, some days. Seventeen hours where they’d try and get me to tell them secrets about the task force or the DEA units in the area.” His voice was rough from non-use and dehydration. “Sometimes, they would put Paco in the chair and tie me to the rings. Always using one of us to try and force the other to talk.”

McCallister stood silent, not knowing what to say that would make the horrors of what had gone on in this room go away. He knew, though, that there were no words that could change things for this man.

“They would work on one of us, torturing or beating us whilst goading the other one to talk so that the treatment would end. It was hard to keep quiet but we managed it, just.”

“I wish I’d been able to track you down sooner. Every time we thought we had found you he would move again and we would have to go back to the beginning.”

“How is Paco? They whisked him out of the medical room as soon as he was stabilised.” He looked at the general, his face still showing the stark evidence of the numerous beatings he had endured as well as the latest bruises from his last session.

“He’s okay. They’ve set his arms, dealt with his internal injuries and got some nutrition in him. You’ll see him on the ship in a bit. We would have taken you but the weather stopped any further forays out to the ship.”

“As long as he’s alright, that’s my main worry. He’s saved my ass too many times to count.” He looked back into the room, his face haunted as he remembered how Paco had volunteered to be the punch bag rather than him. Paco had always said that it was because he was the stronger man but there had been times when he would have questioned Paco’s assertion about his character.

“Well, he should make a full recovery,” McCallister added. “As should you if you obey my chief medical officer. I’m told you’re refusing the pain medication?” At his nod, McCallister continued, “And you’re refusing to stay where they leave you. I really don’t wanted to lose another friend, Luke.”

Luke sighed, a shaky, drawn out breath that his body protested against making. He was in agony, his body felt as weak as a new-born kitten and a part of him was ready to give up. The simple words of a man who had been like a father to him since he had joined the military revealed more than what they said and struck something deep inside him. McCallister had risked a great deal coming after him, that much he had learned whilst the medical team had patched him up. He wasn’t about to waste the chance that the general had given him.

“I’ve had worse pain, staying here, believe me. And the bed is too lumpy to sleep on.” He smiled at the general, a faint ghost of humour shining in his blue eyes. “I’ll have plenty of time to sleep when I’m on the boat, Mac.”

Mac nodded, reading more into what Luke had said. His friend had always been able to sleep anywhere, no matter how lumpy the bed. Sleeping here, in this place of torture and death, was not something he could accomplish, no matter how exhausted he was.

“What are you going to do with this place?” Luke asked, changing the subject before questions were asked that he couldn’t answer.

“Well, I’ve heard Lieutenant Rizzo say that he’s going to provide the villagers with enough kindling and firewood that they won’t have to chop any trees for at least a year,” Mac replied as another lieutenant walked through the double doors carrying a box filled with explosive equipment.

The lieutenant grinned as he set his box down on the floor. “Definitely at least a year, sir,” he said as he started to pull out a ream of fuse wire. “Just need to attach the fuse wire then we’re good to go.”

“Good. Luke, shall we leave Riz to his work before he starts attaching fuse wire to us?”

Luke watched the lieutenant fix the wire to the small bricks of C4 that had been placed in the room earlier that day. There was enough explosive to turn the entire compound into a pile of matchsticks. Mac was making sure Murad could not come back to use his compound after they had gone.

“Sounds like a good idea to me. Blow it sky hire, Riz,” he said before heading back down the corridor and the freedom that awaited outside.