“Go take the sheet off the table and do your thing.”
When I walked across the room, I noticed the cameras. Four of them. In each corner of the room. Amy was watching from every angle.
After giving her the middle finger, I lifted the sheet off and found a dead woman. The source of the smell that had woke me. Now that I was closer, it was even sweeter. It strangled my stomach.
I retched before I even realized what Amy wanted me to do, little strands of vomit clinging to my lips.
Then I read her message: “Would you rather have sex with a family member or with a dead body?”
The noise I made sounded inhuman. Anger and disgust blended together. “Now how the hell do you expect me to do that?”
If she had cameras, I figured she had recording devices, too. That she could hear my voice.
And I was right. In less than a minute, I had my response: “You just took Viagra. It’ll work. Give it time.”
Fuck fuck fuck. Motherfucking fuck.
What if I had chosen differently? What if I’d chosen the family member? Would they be tied up and thrown in front of me? I didn’t want to think about it. Any of it.
My mother in ropes. The elderly woman on the table with a knife sticking from her spin. The girl (?) that pretended to be my friend for months before setting up this psychotic plan.
I just wanted it to be over it.
But I had to wait for my ‘medicine’ to kick in, and I used up the time with tears. I drew my legs up to my chest and bawled into my knees. Thick, wet sobs that I hoped my mother couldn’t hear. She was in the room with Amy, but please, God, I hope she wasn’t making her watch.
When my pants grew tight, I pulled myself together and did what I had to do. I closed my eyes – tight, tight, tight — and pumped, careful to clench my fingers around the table’s edge so they wouldn’t graze the corpse.
I don’t want to give anymore details about that part. I don’t want to yank the mental picture back into my mind.
“What’s the next question?” I asked the air after I’d finished. The sobs were back, but I talked through them. “I don’t remember it.”
Three down. Two to go. More than halfway done. That was the only consolation. I was almost finished. This nightmare would be a memory soon.
I was bent over, trying to slow my heart rate and end the tears, when her next message came through: “Would you rather cut off your own arm or gouge out your own eye?”
There was a knife sticking out of the elderly woman. Did she expect me to use that? Did she expect me to cut through bone?
“Oh, come on,” I said. “That’s impossible and you know it. This isn’t Saw.”
A few minutes passed without a reply. Then a video came through. Of my mother.
From off-screen, Amy rested a blade across my mom’s arm and seesawed it until it sliced. My mom screamed, the sound sharp, even through her gag.
The banner across the video said: “At least try. Hit the bone and I’ll be happy.”
So I grabbed the knife handle and wrenched it out of the woman. Flecks of flesh stuck to the blade, but I wiped it on my wifebeater and then placed it against my arm, a few inches above the elbow.
After a quick prayer to a God I never believed in, I cut.
All I heard was a high-pitched ringing, a piercing sound, like needles in my ears. Warning me to stop. Abort. Abort.
It was the type of pain where you’re suddenly aware of fragments of your body you never knew existed, of nerves that were buried too deep for you to ever uncover. The type of pain where you’re convinced death would taste sweeter. I had the urge to shove the blade through my chest, directly into my heart — but I wouldn’t let my mother die. I would do whatever Amy told me.
So I kept moving. Back and forth, through the blood and the veins and the tendons. Back and forth.
