“Move, damn it…” Mike murmured. As if having heard him, the car began to vibrate slightly—and suddenly the motor died again with an unpleasant metal clang. A clear smell of burned insulation added to the cadaveric stench. Engine failure? As if that wasn’t enough!
“Hey!” the young man shouted into the darkness. “Hey, there’s a problem! Get us out of here!”
The light flashed, lighting up again the headless body hanging ahead of them, absolutely motionless. And suddenly the hands of the cadaver stretched to the terror-numbed passengers, blindly rummaging in the air and narrowly missing their faces. From somewhere above came a grinding noise and the chains shook and began to move, dragging the ugly hulk even closer…
Jane recoiled, then tried to jump out of the stuck car, but the tightly fastened safety bar, as durable as on “Sky Ship,” held her to the seat. Mike hammered his fist on the metal nose of the car as if hoping to jolt the motor to life. Certainly, it was useless. But when the hands of the corpse were just about to touch them, gear wheels clanged above, pulling the chains up and the body crept upward, still clenching and unclenching its fingers in vain attempts to seize the people remaining below. Right then the turntable turned the car again and the recovered motor carried them forward.
Only now Mike realized how fast his heart was beating. “Phew, nonsense!” he confoundedly thought. “After all it’s just a doll! Very realistic, but…”
Actually, exactly these attempts of “the cadaver” to seize them should have acted to calm him at once. A headless body can’t wave hands. At least, not at this stage of decomposition. So, all this is not real. To tell the truth, after the first corpse he had subconscious doubts—that body looked so… natural…
But the stench? Obviously, also a trick. As well as the smell of the burned insulation, intended to convince them that the motor was malfunctioning.
The darkness was pierced by screams again, this time a man’s, and light appeared left ahead—not bright white but dim crimson. The light came from a niche inlaid with stones; the car passed it by at reduced speed, but this time without stopping, and the passengers saw a scene which probably represented a torture chamber of the Middle Ages. An emaciated man was stretched on a vertical rack and the executioner, naked from the waist up and in a round red cap hiding his face, methodically ripped off the prisoner’s skin with big pincers. And it wasn’t a static scene at all… The head of the unfortunate man was already skinned completely, having become a wet-gleaming crimson globe; Mike saw in horror how the absolutely round eyes, deprived of eyelids, were moving in eye-sockets, watching the passing car; from a lipless mouth, together with shouts, blood splashed out—apparently, the man’s tongue had been ripped out. The executioner meanwhile flayed the victim’s hand, pulling the skin off like a long glove. When the car had almost passed by, the executioner momentarily interrupted his business, suddenly turned back and waved to the passengers with the pincers. Jane screamed, having realized that his red cap actually was the skin just ripped off the head of the victim and turned inside out…
Again they moved in complete darkness with an accompaniment of screams and moans; then from the right, very close to them, came a sound like a dental drill. But, when black curtains opened near the car, it appeared to be a much larger tool.
A young man, probably even a teenager, was nailed to a wooden cross. More precisely, not even nailed. Screwed. He got more than Christ: in his arms and legs not less than two dozen huge screws were fastened. And the one who did it—a well-fed man in blood-splashed coveralls—wasn’t going to stop: at that moment he used an electric drill to bore the victim’s knee caps. The victim couldn’t even shout: a wooden gag was hammered into his mouth and fixed with nails through his bottom jaw.
The car moved further. A new scene: a kitchen table covered with a cheerful cloth, to which a heavily pregnant young woman was tied by thin wire which ripped the skin of her wrists and ankles. Her bottom jaw was completely torn off; the fallen-out tongue—unexpectedly big from the point of view of those who have never seen before a human tongue as a whole—resembled a fat dead mollusk. And a slovenly hairy and bearded man furiously used a long, sharp-ended kitchen knife to stab, stab, stab her huge pregnant belly. With each blow, from the torn-apart hole which once was the woman’s mouth a blood clot splashed out. But this was not the most terrible. It was clearly visible as under the skin of her belly, tightly straining it now here, then there, large bulges convulsively moved. The fetus was still alive—though, in principle, even a single stab should have been fatal—and each time when the knife pierced in, the fetus writhed and wriggled. Now a hand, then a foot stretched the mother’s belly so much that it appeared just about to burst—especially taking into account that it already had cuts which drew as crimson holes; and at the moment when the car started moving again, Mike distinctly saw through the skin the features of a face with a wide-open mouth, pressing from within…
Nausea was rising to his throat, but the young man still couldn’t look away. When they dived into darkness again, Mike closed his eyes and decided not to open them till the exit. But when almost at his ear a strange sucking-squelching sound was heard, he couldn’t restrain himself and looked.
At first the beam of light was very narrow, and Mike saw only a tender girl’s belly, pierced by a steel spike. This way the girl was nailed to a concrete column. Sweat flowed down her pale skin, mixing with blood below the spike. Then the beam slipped up, and the passengers of the car saw why the victim could neither scream nor even groan: her mouth and nostrils were tightly sewn up with rough thread. In order to let the unfortunate being breathe, her throat was pierced by a tube, like for a tracheotomy; this tube was the source of that sound. She began to breathe faster when she saw that the car stopped very close to her; her eyes looked at Mike and Jane with entreaty. It seemed to Mike, according to the movement of her shoulders, that she tried to stretch hands to them… and then the beam became wider, and the passengers of the car saw with shudder that she had no hands. Her right arm was chopped off almost up to the shoulder, the left one—a little above the elbow. Her legs had been cut asymmetrically as well—only there the longest stump was the right one, reaching the knee. The skin on the ends of the stumps was pulled together by the same rough thread. The victim stretched the remnants of her limbs in a vain attempt to touch Jane who was sitting closer to her; Jane involuntarily recoiled as far as the narrow car allowed. However, the stumps lacked several inches of reaching her anyway.
And then steps were heard from behind. Someone approached in a shuffling plod. Mike and Jane turned their heads round. At first they could not discern anything; then in the gloom a bulky silhouette appeared. From somewhere below smoldering crimson light beamed up; the face of the figure remained shadowed, but it was possible to clearly distinguish heavy boots, dirty jeans under an apron (once white, now covered with brown spots) and, the main thing, an ax on a long handle at the end of a brawny arm. An ax from which something seeming almost black in such lighting was dripping…
Strangely enough, seeing this person who was without any haste approaching the motionless car, Mike felt calmer again. A maniac with an ax, what a trite cliche… they could think up something more original… He looked at the heavy figure with a smile, even when the latter came very close and brought his ax over his head…
And then the ax fell upon Jane.
Everything happened in fractions of a second. The girl desperately screamed. Mike clumsily jerked, moved by opposite reflexes—to intercept the heavy edge falling on his girlfriend and to move as far away from it as possible… but in any case from such a position—pressed to a seat by the safety bar and turning his head back—he could do nothing. A bump, a wet crunch of a split bone, Jane’s shriek…