The Flesh Cartel #3: Choices

might be on the other side of that door. Mat, come to rescue him, to get him out of here—
    The inner door swung open with a seal-cracking fft, the refrigerator door noise of rubber on rubber being pulled apart, and light rushed in like a weapon cleaving right through his skull.
By the time the pain eased enough for awareness to creep back in, he was being dragged, blinking and squinting, through a maze of hallways and into a large garage. Into, of all things, a motor home—one of those super fancy expensive ones, big enough to sleep a dozen people. From there, through a false panel of cupboard doors and into a padded, windowless room nearly identical to the tomb he’d just come out of, only half the size.
No. No, not again not again not again . . .
He couldn’t help it—he fought.
It hardly seemed to matter, though. They barely even had to hit him once before they’d shoved him inside and locked the door behind him.
He threw himself against it, pounding with fists and feet, begging and screaming through the gag. But of course, nobody listened. Nobody cared. And why should they? He was just one more dead thing for the living to bury and forget.

    “Ugh,” someone said, presumably at Mat.
Someone new.
No time to think about it, though: a gush of ice-cold water hit him in the head, knocking the breath and thought right out of him.
At least he wouldn’t smell like piss anymore.
“C’mon, get up,” the new man said, and then he stooped down, hooked something beneath the ties at Mat’s wrists, gave a tug, and cut them away. “Time to go. Bet you can’t wait to see the backside of this place.”
“Fuck you,” Mat groaned, but did manage to roll onto his newly freed hands and knees. The man offered him a hand, but he didn’t take it. He ended up having to crawl over to the doctor’s examination table and use it to help himself up, but at least he wasn’t voluntarily grasping at some asshole who was probably five minutes away from raping him.
Standing, now—well, leaning against the table for dear life—he was finally able to take the new man in.
Definitely not one of this place’s guards. He was handsome, but older, maybe in his mid-forties. Leaner than any of the guards. Had a soft, inscrutable expression, no real trace of cruelty in it. Dressed in a suit. The buyer? No, he was . . . he was wearing a collar, like Mat was. Except nicer. More refined. Not what you’d put on the vicious dog you kept to guard your junkyard, like Mat had been reduced to.
“Who are you?” Mat asked, hating the hope swelling in his chest that this man, whoever he was, would take him away from here.
“Your new best friend. Come.” He turned to go, clearly expecting Mat to follow without a fight.
Mat almost gave in that easy, but stopped himself just in time. They hadn’t broken him yet. He wouldn’t let them. “Where are you taking me?”
The man’s answering laugh took him completely by surprise. “I used to be like you, kid. Been a lot of years for me, but I know how one of those—” he waved at Mat’s ass, at the horrible expanding plug the guards had shoved back in him when they’d finished raping him the last time “—feels. And the other stuff they did to you here, too. I haven’t been given permission to take pity on your sorry ass, but right now I really am the closest thing to a friend that you’ve got.”
“If you were any kind of friend to me, you’d find my brother, and you’d let us both go.” But he was following. Just like he was expected to. God, walking hurt with that plug jacked so wide.
“I’m not that kind of friend, kid, and I don’t think you’ll ever find that kind of friend again, so I’d stop looking before it costs you your tongue. And I already found your brother, so if you want to see him again, you’ll come quietly.”
So he did.

    Dougie’s hallucinations were getting worse. It didn’t help that he knew now how very real monsters were, that terrors did lurk in the dark, though so far they’d all come in human form. That skittering in the corner, that scritching near his ear . . . he tried to tell himself it was normal, a perfectly reasonable reaction to being alone in the cold silent dark for so long. He tried to tell himself they weren’t real.
    It didn’t help.
He’d given up trying to stomp out the unseen skittering creatures. Given up trying to unfasten the gag or even trying to yell around it. Given up feeling along the walls for some kind of latch or