AN:Thank you all for the reviews, I'm sorry I've yet to respond to them as I've been in the middle of finals and a change of jobs within the Battalion. Once again I don't own any of these characters as Bones is owned by someone else and the title of "Jungle Work" and the chapter titles comes from the amazing Warren Zevon song. Enjoy as the random streams of Booth's conciousness trend towards some dark memories at the end.
"Get up you lug!"
No mommy I don't want to get up today… Ow what the hell! Mom didn't smack you around but Dad did; is he already drunk this early- wait this is different. You don't smell the whiskey. Ow that was a boot! Who the hell is kicking you and why does your body feel like it's been run over with a car?
"Alright you little bitch you're gonna get it now!" Damn that person sounds really annoyed whoever it is, can't they just give you five more minutes?
Woah that hurts! It's funny in the movies they never really can act out what being hit with a taser really feels like. It's a bit of a mix of having every nerve in your body being wrenched out, stomped on, cut into a thousand pieces and then set on fire and being shocked by your little brother sneaking up and zapping you when he's wearing wool pajamas on a winter morning. You don't think that you're saying anything because you really don't trust your mouth to be able to control itself. For that matter why isn't the guy letting up on it? This has been going on for a bit now hasn't it? I mean you're flopping about like a fish out of water. Suddenly it all stops but you can't quite get a hold of your body yet. At least you're awake now. Maybe you can open up a shop after you retire from the FBI offering to taser people to wake them up. You'd put all those coffee shops out of business!
"Alright Larry give it up he's had enough for now. Grab him and let's get going or else we're all going to be late for roll call" Roll call? Where are you in school? If you are can you get a letter to be excused from class today?
"Come on Lou he's all nasty right now, can't we at least put on some gloves before moving him? I mean look at him he's gone and shit all over himself just now!" Well excuse me but for some reason you don't feel like that was really your fault. Hopefully you managed to piss on his leg a bit too.
"Forget it Larry, remember when Sid was late bringing that one guy out last week? They went and cleaned him off with the rest of the scum." Ok now you're just confused.
"Eh, alright let's get this sack of shit out with the rest of the bastards." Normally you'd take offense to that implication but it pretty much sums up how you feel at the moment. You don't think that you could protect yourself from a newborn kitten at the moment let alone try to escape from two rather large men with a proclivity towards beating helpless prisoners.
It's rather undignified but you just hang limply and drool as they drag your sorry carcass down some sort of stone tunnel. Hah you have them fooled! You're really scouting out the path of the place to plan your cunning escape! Unfortunately your eyes don't seem to want to focus and thinking coherently is rather hard at the moment so yo- *Wham!* Ow Fuck! You weren't expecting that! Doors have handles for a reason you ignorant klutzes! Anyway your cunning plan so far involves A. escaping and B. snogging B- whoops where did that thought come from! So it's quite clear that thinking straight at the moment will be a very difficult obstacle to overcome. Focus Booth focus! There has to be a way out of he- Goddamnit will they please stop using you to open doors?! Your head already feels like there's a brass band playing inside and use as an impromptu battering ram is not making it any more enjoyable!
"Hey Lou, Larry I see you got the FNG here. Toss him into line there, we're gonna clean them up real soon." FNG? You certainly haven't heard that term in a long time. Fuck that means this whole escape plan of yours probably is going to be much harder then you originally thought.
You blink as you realize that you're no longer indoors. A rather cold wind nips at all your exposed skin and since you're as naked as the day you were born that means the nipping is quite painful! You have no idea what time it is as the sky is still dark. You realize that you can only really see out of your right eye, for some reason the other one doesn't want to open. Dirt ground, scattered wood chips, and- wouldn't you know? Concertina wire fencing! A silent whistle escapes your lips as you realize that it's been triple-stranded and threaded with barbed wire and what looks like tripwires interspaced between the rolls. You haven't seen that since… well since a while ago.
You gaze out and see a horrific sight. About half a dozen other men naked, filthy, hurt, and bleeding like you all shivering in a line. Their faces are downcast and hair is wild; their eyes are haunted… dead… it reminds you of pictures from your history classes back in high school. Suddenly you see them all in ripped uniforms a harsh sun bearing down overhead… Your handlers shove you into line with the others and you discreetly scan the little clearing taking in the scene. You see a dozen goons all wearing ski masks and heavy thick clothing, military style but you don't think military issue. Only three of them seem to be armed with guns, the rest all have knives at the hips or clubs in their hands, but the ones with the guns made up for the rest in causing you to freeze in barely concealed terror.
Old-school Thompson sub-machine guns with big nasty snail drums clipped to the bottom. You thought that those went out with the Korean War and black and white Gangster movies. .45 caliber bullets pumped out at 800 rounds a minute with a bare modicum of accuracy? That gives you the shudders. Those weapons are designed to kill and in some of the most gruesome ways possible. .45 bullet has an exit wound the size of a dinner plate and even a graze can knock a 200lb man on his ass. Those guys really look bored though; totally convinced of their authority here; maybe you can use that to your advantage?
But what about the third guy, the one with a holstered pistol and not a machine gun? He looks like the guy in charge here. Kind of small though but with a hard square jaw and an "I eat nails and piss napalm for breakfast" scowl that any Drill Sergeant that you've known would envy. You swear but he looks like an extra from an old WWII movie, grey great coat and… holy shit is that a Luger? You'd laugh at the incredulity of the whole situation except you're worried that he'd shoot you with it. The worst thing is his eyes. Ice blue and totally devoid of human empathy set into a stoic skull formed of granite. Bones would laugh at the idea of a skull being made from stone. Unless it was from some sort of ancient burial site like that thing over in London; she called it "ossified bone" or something.
The stone dude starts to walk down the line of beaten captives glaring at them as he passes. You notice that your fellow captives all flinch and seem to shrink till they're shorter than the, for lack of a better word "warden." As you ponder the significance of this he passes in front of you, oh shit he snaps his head and stares you down. Wow no wonder his eyes are so ice blue! His left eye is made of glass and the other one is just plain scary looking. What the hell is he saying? It sounds like German but not really. Whatever it is you guess it means pain for you in the near future as two goons are heading towards you holding small bats. Thinking about the two muzzles which are suddenly staring you down you remember the wisdom of "Discretion is the better part of Valor."
"Youse Zeke! Filthy little shite! Tovarisch over there don't like you da?!" Ok you let out a verbal groan there because shin bones are very sensitive to wooden bats smacking them. And what's with the Russian accent? Is this some sort of stereotypical bad guys convention here with them all comparing methods of hurting people? The stone face guy is yelling something else now and some of the lackeys are running over to some sort of shed. Hey the sun is coming out that's good! Hopefully it will warm you up a bit…
Ok Seeley bad news, the little traces of the dawn also allow you to see a bit more which means that you can see them hauling over a fire hose…
"Fucking Zekes all shite covered da! Bath time!"
Oh merciful mother of G-
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You take a brief moment to take a break from… well sitting around brooding in your filthy cramped little stone cell. Looking back on the last hour or so you can sort of tell that you've done something to piss of God and he's having some sort of payback mood at the moment; of course what sort of sin did you have to commit to deserve getting sprayed down with a high powered hose of ice water? Not that it got you that clean as the force knocked you down on the ground; bastards had fun moving you around the ground like a fucking hockey puck. Considerate of them to at least allow you a modicum of hygiene; last time- don't think those thoughts Seeley, don't remember that. They fed you, sort of. Being force fed oatmeal and what you desperately hoped was mud and getting some water isn't exactly your favorite Diner but it beats what you saw one of the other captives doing. He discretely found and ate some sort of bug which was crawling around in the dirt; you dimly register that Hodgins would know what it was.
As the sun went up more the layout of the open area became much easier to scout out. Judging by the rocks and trees it looks like they've built this place somewhere in the mountains. Other than the wire and some rickety shacks and what looked like an old barn there were no structures in sight. You did notice the cut into the hill side where the entrance of your wonderful tunnel of fun and excitement starts. You noticed a more level area a little ways away from where you were but couldn't get a close enough look, its most likely that the entrance and a vehicle path is over that way.
From what you could tell from the guards they are all definitely some sort of mercenaries. They tended to gather in small groups with each group speaking a different language; Russian, German, something like German but not quite, a smattering of some east European languages, and a lot of bad English. They didn't all seem to be from the same… unit, for a lack of a better word. The only unifying figure was that cold stone faced bastard. You got a better look at him and noticed his face was a mess of burns and scars. Dude looks like he's been through hell and wants to make sure that everyone else gets to enjoy his experience.
You'd sigh and lean your head back against the wall but given the swelling and bruising its more likely to agitate you than be relaxing. This whole thing is confusing the hell out of you. I mean you know that there are plenty of criminals that want you dead but locked up and tortured? Well some might want to torture you but they'd probably kill you soon thereafter. Mercenaries, fortified and isolated location this whole thing is totally crazy. You first thought it might be the mob but they wouldn't have the resources to do this; Capone in his heyday could establish fortresses in the city but wouldn't hire mercenaries and establish underground caves of torture chambers.
This whole thing, the whole set up, hell even the language and methods that these guys are using screams "military." Concertina wire is tricky and nasty stuff to work with; civilians would never even try to work with that stuff because it's so dangerous. Double pronged and razor sharp blades evenly spaced out protruding from the wire and then wrapped around with two other strands of wire makes an almost impregnable barrier for a person to get through without a vehicle or heavy duty wire cutters. The barbed wire and cans full of rocks which rattled in the wind were just little flourishes which only made it more impressive; somebody with experience handling that and setting it up could have made that fence. Hell even calling you an "FNG" was a slip which told you that these guys have probably been through some sort of service. You remember being called that when you first got to Battalion, and you remember welcoming replacements with that same moniker; Fucking New Guy, means that those other poor bastards who got washed down with you have been here for a while. No wonder they look dead their spirits are broken.
You saw that same sort of look when you were in Guatemala. You told Bones that you went there to shoot a man through the heart but that was only half the story. That bastard, Héctor Chaves, was a piece of work. During the civil war there he made a habit taking hostages and torturing them to get ransoms out of their families; he got greedy and took some foreign nationals hostage which earned intervention. You can still remember the faces of the people that the police extracted after you eliminated Chaves; they had witnessed horror and it had all but destroyed their humanity. Two of them committed suicide right after getting freed and another was actually arrested for murdering and torturing another victim five years down the line. There is only so much a person can do when they are forced to witness the deepest depravities in the human psyche. Some are broken forever and lose their will to live, even going so far as to take their own life. Others become that evil; their souls aren't broken by despair but twisted by evil and reenact their pain upon others. You shudder to think that either of those things might happen to you if you're stuck here long enough.
You never had an urge to die after you were rescued before. You can't really remember what you felt but never an urge to give up or commit suicide. Of course that was when you were being rescued, the pain was going to stop and you knew it. While those… bastards… were breaking the bones in your feet, burning you with irons or breaking all the teeth of your buddies while forcing you to watch; you hate to admit but you just wanted the pain to end. When they would come into your cage in the middle of the night and whisper in broken English that they were going to execute you in the morning there was a small part of you that welcomed that sense of release…
You really regret that Bones had to see your x-rays. She shouldn't have to know what happened to you "Over There" or at least you wish that you could have at least have had the option of telling her rather than her figuring it out. It really is kind of amazing how she could figure out so much just by glancing at your file; of course everything she does is incredibly amazing even when it does tend to annoy and frustrate you at times. You don't want to admit that she's really grown on you since when you first met. The ghost of a smile fades as you think about how much those x-rays left out. Bones figured out that your feet had been broken by rubber hoses and sticks but did they tell her what they did after that? Did those x-rays tell her that they ground your broken bones together to put you in agony as they grinned and laughed at you? Did they tell her about what happened to your battle buddy that you were trying to protect? Of course not. No x-ray in the world could have told your brilliant partner what happened to him. You can still hear his whimpers and cries in the darkness at nights. Half the reason you drink coffee so much is to make up for the fact that you still can't sleep at night without hearing Vandercook's screams. He was the first one of your team to die only his death took too long, far too long. They dragged it out, they took turns whipping him, cutting him, taking rocks and crushing his fingers and bones. They told you that they'd impaled his body and flayed him as a warning. Your dark reverie is lightened by the small thought that it was Vandercook's body which allowed for the rescue to take place; marking the entrance of their damn lair was a terrific irony. Vandercook got the Silver Star, posthumously for that. He deserved far more than that.
You're thankful that she put down your records when you asked her, you don't know what you'd have done if she'd delved deeper in your file to find out the other injuries that you'd had inflicted on your body. At least you don't think that she's looked any deeper in your records. A few times when you've been more withdrawn or if you have a case which involves someone getting really hurt or tortured you've caught Temperance glancing at you with a look of almost sorrow; like she knew what had happened to you but is too unsure to ask you what happened. You suddenly get a strong feeling of remorse for not telling her and you don't know why.
There's no way to tell time in this cell, your stomach tells you it's time to eat but you suspect that they're not going to feed you all that often. No windows in the walls make it impossible to gauge the sun, the only source of light leaks through the cracks around the door. Small tiny slivers which tease you with promises of escape from the darkness; the only problem is a barrier between you and that goal, a barrier you know you can't cross but your hope keeps telling you to try to find a way through or around it. A vision of beauty flashes before your eyes but you squelch that thought. You put that line there, you both did. There's no way you can cross it.
It's probably best if you try to sleep now, there's no telling when something might happen and you need to try to recover your strength if you're going to find a way out of here. Also if you try to sleep now you can hopefully avoid them playing those noises again…
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Curled up in a ball covered in mud and filth fitfully sleeping, minute murmurs and whimpers escaping his lips at odd intervals. His face grimaces in pain yet he's still asleep. All of this that hidden camera captures, recording it.