The Dragon and His Wrath
Part 3 of 5
Disclaimers in part 1
This time Kreegan held the gun – the real gun – while Olaf entered the cell with a sledgehammer.
"Just give me a reason to shoot you," hissed Kreegan.
Methos lay quiescent, watching Olaf warily.
Olaf hefted the sledgehammer with surprising ease and smashed Methos's left shin.
Methos screamed, then bit back the cry.
Olaf swung at Methos's other leg, and Methos jerked away. The blow fell upon his thigh, and Joe actually heard the bone snap.
Methos didn't bother to try to suppress this cry. His howl echoed off the ceiling and concrete walls.
Kreegan grinned as Olaf backed out and drew the dart gun.
Kreegan put away his own gun, and pulled the squeaking golf cart into the cell. He took a deep breath and waited until Methos's howls died down to gasps. "I've been wanting to try something for some time, now," he said calmly. "I've been studying how best to kill an immortal so that he neither heals faster than it takes him to die, nor dies so fast he escapes the pain. It's been a largely intellectual exercise, of course. Torture is not one of my hobbies, and this particular experiment is difficult to recruit volunteers for. I'm sure you see the problem." Kreegan pulled from the golf cart an implement which looked like a barbed trident. He placed this against Methos's abdomen. "I think a gut wound is best. A very severe gut wound." He stabbed, with vicious energy, into Methos's stomach. Once in, he ripped with the prongs.
Joe cried out, involuntarily, but his cry was lost in Methos's.
No blood poured from Methos's mouth, this time. Instead his eyes widened in agony and horror as blood, intestines, and feces spilled from his abdominal cavity onto the cement. The smell, hot and overpowering, made Joe heave. He barely made it to the trough before he lost his orange and oatmeal.
When he could look again, Kreegan was glaring at Methos's form. Methos, Joe was glad to see, was definitely dead. MacLeod was collapsed too, which puzzled Joe for a moment until he saw Olaf reloading the dart gun.
With both immortals out of it, Joe abandoned all pride.
"Please stop this," he begged. "Please! For the love of God … these men have done nothing to you. Stop this, please."
Kreegan wiped his hands fastidiously on a cloth supplied by the ever-prepared Olaf, and wrinkled his nose. "You know nothing about what he has done," he replied shortly.
"I don't care!" Joe cried. "He's my friend. He isn't like he was then. And he just got that tattoo a year or so ago. You can tell how new it is!"
"He died too quickly," Kreegan complained. "I haven't got this right, yet. When he's weaker, I'll take him to the house." Stepping carefully around the stinking mess, Kreegan exited the cage. This time, as he and Olaf departed, they turned out the lights.
Despair and fury set in on Joe, then. He thought longingly of where he should be now, and what he should be doing. He thought of his plans for the future. He thought how unfair this was, and how he didn't want to die. He even let himself cry tears of frustration, there in the dark.
Methos actually revived before MacLeod did. The drug used in the dart gun must have been immortal-strength. Methos groaned softly and Joe heard a strange clicking sound which he guessed was of bones reknitting.
"Adam?" Joe queried into the darkness.
"Yeah," Methos breathed.
Joe didn't have anything to say, really. He just wanted to use his voice to make the connection with the other man.
He heard the tap turn on, and remembered the gruesome sight of intestine material amid the blood on the floor. The splashing sounds and clinking of the chains told Joe that Methos was cleaning up.
"I can't believe how you … heal from that." Joe's horror infected his tone.
"Umph," was Methos's response. Then, perhaps relenting, he added, his voice strained, "It'll be a day before everything works properly again, but I wasn't planning on eating, anyway."
"I'm so sorry, man."
"MacLeod?" Methos asked.
When no response came in the dark, Joe said, "They shot him with the drug."
"Oh." Clinking chains. "Joe, I want to rest while I can. Did they say …?"
"When they're coming back? He said when you're weaker, he'll take you to the house."
"That may mean a few days, then. Would you start keeping track of the days? We're going to need that."
"Right." Joe paused. "Adam?"
"Yeah?"
"Does it still hurt, after you're alive again?"
For a moment there was silence. Then, quietly, "Not for too long. Get some sleep, Joe."
Joe stayed silent, to let Methos rest, but he didn't sleep a wink. He tried to think of pleasant things, in order to dispel the horrible vision of Methos's guts spilling on the cold concrete. He practiced getting around on his hands and thighs, a humiliating posture he would never have tried in the light. The night was very long. By the time dawn came, he felt exhausted and wretched.
MacLeod stirred at the first touch of light, and rose from the floor.
His defenses battered by the events of the night, Joe felt keenly the envy he usually buried deep. MacLeod had a magnificent warrior's body. If anyone could save them from this spot, it was he.
He and MacLeod met gazes for a moment, then they both looked at the cell between them. Methos lay asleep, his more trim physique already appearing wan and stressed. Very little gore remained on the floor, for which Joe was grateful.
MacLeod nodded to Joe, then knelt by his faucet and drank and washed. He then began a series of slow, concentrated movements which reminded Joe of Tai Chi Chuan.
Joe also washed and drank. He rubbed a hand irritably across his stubble, but resigned himself to growing a beard.
Methos woke when Olaf brought Joe's breakfast. Joe was ravenous, and eating only a few mouthfuls was one of the hardest things he'd had to do in a long while. It was made a little easier by the knowledge that MacLeod was carefully not watching him, while Methos carefully was.
The food came on a plastic tray which could slide into the next cell by way of the indented trough. Methos's chains just barely allowed him to reach the tray from Joe's side of the cell, and slide it through to MacLeod's cell.
Watching Methos pass the food along untouched was a different kind of hard, for Joe.
MacLeod accepted the tray with a dark expression, and ate the remaining food with a kind of reverence. None of them spoke much.
So the days passed. Joe jumped every time the outer door opened, fearing Kreegan had returned, but the immortals, of course, knew Olaf came alone. Joe's hunger grew to be a constant torment, though something in his metabolism shifted to where hunger was a looming ache instead of a sharp pain. Joe fantasized about food, and dreamed of his next meal. He lost fat, he noticed, though not in the places he would have preferred to, and the results left his flesh baggy.
MacLeod persuaded them to play imaginary chess with him, a game which took so much concentration that it actually caused Joe to forget his fears for a time. Joe tried to write songs in his head, but the conditions of dread he existed in did not seem conducive to creativity. He yielded now and then to pleas from the others to perform acapella. MacLeod exercised mornings and nights, and spent much of the days in deep meditation. He took care to lie down, weakly, whenever Olaf came, while Joe took care to sit up and try to look healthy and alert.
Methos, of course, faded. He lay mostly unmoving, his head by the water trough. Already thin, fasting made him look skeletal. He seemed to shrink as he lost muscle mass. Three times a day, he moved Joe's food tray across to MacLeod. Joe couldn't imagine how hard it must be for him to do that.
They never talked about Kreegan's inevitable return.
Kreegan returned at night on the twelfth day. Under the harsh light of the bare bulbs, he and Olaf bound Methos and took him out. The oldest immortal was a dead weight in their hands, and Joe didn't know if that was an act or not. MacLeod pounded the bars in frustration.
They sat glumly through the night, Joe trying to keep his imagination in check. The things Kreegan could be doing! And when he grew tired, Kreegan might just take Methos's head. Joe mourned all the things he had never asked the 5000 year old man, and all the stories he had cut the man off from finishing.
Kreegan and Olaf returned Methos intact just before dawn. Joe got over his relief at Methos's return quickly, though, while Olaf was attaching the manacles. Methos was in agony, and Joe couldn't see why. He thrashed and gasped and moaned and cried out. Kreegan looked down at him with a satisfied smile, said something contemptuous in a language Joe didn't know, spat, and left, Olaf right on his heels.
Joe slid to the adjoining bars, aching to help somehow. MacLeod pressed against Methos's cell on the other side. Methos seemed unaware of them, lost in a world of pain.
"What is it?" Joe cried.
"I don't know!" MacLeod said.
"Why doesn't it heal?"
"Methos. Methos. Answer me. What did Kreegan do to you?"
Methos remained insensible, groaning and thrashing. He started scratching his legs feverishly, scratching, tearing, ripping his flesh bloody.
"Adam! Stop it!" Joe cried.
MacLeod also cried out in dismay, but nothing they said would stop Methos from stripping his legs of skin. Then he put them under the running tap. He lay back, his legs in the trough, still twitching as if he were being bitten and crying out piteously, and began rending the flesh from his arms. His movements, Joe thought, had more purpose now, and less desperation, though a man flaying himself could hardly seem sane.
Joe looked to MacLeod in shared shock, and saw the expression on the immortal's face. Knowing horror. Recognition. MacLeod turned grey beneath his captivity wrought pallor, and Joe feared he would waste that valuable food by upchucking it.
"What is it, Mac?" he asked.
MacLeod turned away, not to be sick in the trough, but distancing himself from the other men.
"Mac! Tell me, please!" Joe cried. He looked at Methos, a bloody mess hugging the water faucet, now scraping his torso raw. "Adam? Adam." Joe repeated the name like a mantra, clinging to it. MacLeod did not turn around.
Eventually reason began to return to Methos's eyes, and he seemed to be in less pain.
"Joe," he gasped.
Joe stopped repeating his name.
"Scratch my back," Methos begged.
"Like that?! No! I can't!"
"Please, Joe, please!" Methos turned his unmarked but bony back to Joe, and moved as close to Joe's cell as his chains would allow. "Get it out of me!"
"Do it, Dawson!" MacLeod commanded, back on their side of his cell. "Scratch him hard!"
Trembling, Joe reached out to touch Methos's back. "What is it, guys?" he begged.
"Salt," Methos gasped.
Oh my God.
"Kreegan let the wounds heal over the salt," MacLeod said, loathing in every word.
Shit. Shit. Joe summoned some strength he hadn't had to use since 'Nam, and scratched hard. He had to try three passes before he managed to rend skin. It was ghastly, but he told himself that Methos's cries were of relief. It might even have been true.
He didn't have much of the back skin torn when Methos moved away from him to wash beneath the water. "MacLeod?" Methos asked.
MacLeod kneeled down and gestured. "Come here."
Methos gave his back to MacLeod, and the Highlander was brutal. Joe watched in horrified fascination. MacLeod's lips were pursed and his eyes were red. That startled Joe. MacLeod was crying.
Methos finally returned his blood covered back to the faucet, and MacLeod continued crying. "I should have let him take your head," he said, passionately.
"Don't think that," Methos sputtered, with surprising vehemence, coming out from under the tap. "Don't ever think that. It's okay. I'm okay." He disentangled his chains and limbs from the water trough, and flopped down. "I'm just tired."
And hungry. Joe thought. He was hungry, MacLeod was hungry, certainly Methos was hungry. They were always hungry. It really wore at the spirit. He had to beat back the surge of anger that hit him.
MacLeod wiped his eyes hastily, then sank against the back wall, his head back and his eyes closed.
The days wore on. Methos grew too weak to sit up. He lay his head by the water trough and sucked water that Joe and MacLeod splashed to him. It was an eerie evening when Methos began hallucinating. Convinced that there was an extra tray of food in his cell, just beyond his reach, he asked Joe to push it to him. He accepted stoically the testimony of the other men that it wasn't there. Twice that night he asked Joe if he heard the golf cart squeaking, approaching the door. Both times it wasn't there. After that, Methos kept his hallucinations to himself, but more than once Joe heard him in the dark gasping at some imagined threat or tantalizing mirage. Joe resolved to be ready to be skeptical about any irrational perceptions of his own, should he reach that stage. He was eating very little, and could feel life in his body fading.
The waiting grew nearly unendurable. Joe felt certain he was waiting to die. Though MacLeod continued his exercise regimen, Joe could see that his endurance was fading. A swordfight in the league that immortals fought in – it was like asking an Olympic athlete to compete while on a restricted diet.
One day MacLeod lost it, refusing to eat, and ordered Methos to eat Joe's dinner. Methos ignored him, and it fell to Joe to talk MacLeod back from that precipice. That's when Joe realized that MacLeod felt it too – the certainty that he would lose.
If Methos felt any failing of faith, he never showed it. When MacLeod begged him to eat, he turned his head away. He pushed Joe's food to MacLeod three times a day. Often it was almost the only movement he made in a day.
On the twentieth day, Kreegan returned for Methos. Olaf unchained him and carried him, unbound, over a shoulder. Joe prayed he would see the old immortal again.