Justice for the Damned by Ben Cheetham Read Free Book Online Page A

like a balloon. Her tongue protruded. Her eyes bulged. Bloated veins wormed their way across her forehead and temples. But even worse than the pain was the fear. The room was swimming before her eyes. Blackness was seeping in from the edges of her vision. Soon, she knew, she would lose consciousness, maybe never to regain it. Every instinct, every thought screamed at her to beg her captor to stop. But somehow, calling up some reserve of strength she never knew she possessed, she resisted and resisted, until darkness came crashing down on her. And suddenly she was no longer scared, and an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be fine spread warmly through her.
    As rapidly as it had come down, the darkness receded. Air swelled Melinda’s lungs in a huge gulping gasp. She woke up to the realisation that she was lying in an awkward heap on the mattress. Her eyes roamed the room like those of a lost little child. Where am I? she wondered. How did I get here? Then the gimp mask loomed into view and she remembered and all the fear came rushing back.
    ‘That’s it,’ said her captor, his voice tauntingly soft. ‘Breathe, breathe.’
    Melinda sucked in another lungful of the fetid air. She barely had a chance to exhale before the chain jerked taut again. This time unconsciousness was almost instantaneous. She had a strange feeling that time was moving past her blurringly fast. A jolt hit her like a hammer. Streams of blood-red light split the darkness as her pupils rolled back into view. It seemed to her that she was waking from a long sleep. Again came the thought, Where am I? What’s going on? A figure was straddling her, hands clasped one on top of the other, compressing her chest.
    ‘Welcome back,’ said the gimp. ‘I thought I’d lost you for a moment there.’
    He gave Melinda a few seconds to get some oxygen back into her body, which was trembling now no matter how hard she tried to control it. Then he reached for the chain again. She quickly lost count of how many times he choked her out and revived her over the next few minutes or hours or whatever it was. All she knew was that at the end of it she was still alive. And she was in pain beyond bearing. Despite her best efforts, tears streamed silently down her cheeks.
    ‘Well, well,’ said her captor. He didn’t sound angry any more. He sounded amused and pleased. ‘You’ve got more about you than I thought.’ He rubbed his leather-encased hands together, like someone eagerly anticipating a challenge. He left the room, returning after a moment with a bottle of water, a towel and some other items. He tilted the bottle against Melinda’s lips. She drank, but coughed most of the water back up her raw, swollen throat.
    ‘Slowly, or it won’t stay down,’ cautioned her captor as she drank again. He dampened the towel and began dabbing away the blood trickling from the dozens of tiny puncture wounds on her body. When he was done, he unlocked the padlock that secured the collar to her neck, unscrewed the top from a tube of antiseptic cream and gently rubbed it into her sores. ‘There now, doesn’t that feel better, hmm?’
    Shudders of fear and confusion racked Melinda’s body. In some strange way her captor’s apparent concern was more terrifying than his anger. She at least had some slender grasp of why he tortured her. But this… this was beyond her comprehension. Didn’t he intend to kill her after all? Or was he simply keeping her alive to play with later? Like a cat toying with a little bird. He reached into the holdall. She went rigid, expecting him to reveal some new implement of torture. But instead he took out a pre-packaged cheese and ham sandwich. ‘Are you hungry?’
    Melinda nodded.
    Her captor pressed the sandwich into her hand. ‘Don’t try to eat it right away. Your throat’s too swollen.’
    He locked the collar back on to Melinda, then unlocked the cuffs from her wrists and ankles. She stared at him, her eyes shot through