Suffer No Fools

Your ears are ringing out as your eyes bounce around the room. The brick walls, damp concrete, and smudged-up rectangular windows let you know you’re in a basement. You see your arms and legs bound by duct tape, and you assume that's what's holding your mouth shut. The smell of shit is thick, clinging to the inside of your nostrils, and you see the heaping pile of manure on the floor to your left next to a crate of TNT. You grip the arms of the old wooden chair and try to free yourself, but it only brings about the unwanted attention of the man atop the stairs.

“Lookie who's finally come to. Was wondering when you were going to join the party,” the man says, flashing his snaggle-toothed grin.

You muster the strength to yell, and he leers at you through his beady eyes.

“By all means, air out them lungs if you must, after all, you’re a guest in my house.”

The bits of flesh dangling from his brass knuckles explain the burning sensation on the left side of your face. And you’re not exactly sure what it says about you, but you have an inkling, this isn’t the first time you've been tied up in some hillbilly’s basement. However, this degenerate pacing in front of you, Jedediah Dickinson, or Jed as you've taken to calling him, is no ordinary backwoods malfeasant. He's the self-proclaimed Patriot Prophet, whose sole existence is dedicated to spreading his gospel amongst his brethren, the domestic terrorist group known as the Knights of Dixie.

Like clockwork, each day from noon till 3 AM, he’s at his computer doing his bidding. He plugs into the machine and slithers out of his seat into the tangled interweb as a marionette tethered via Ethernet. Plundering the message boards with a myriad of mercurial musings, seeking enlightenment while further severing his cerebral cortex from reality. Staving off the full-frontal lobotomy of his torture porn addiction long enough to post his prophetic testimony on the schism of church and state.

You know all of this because you not only studied his every move over the last 15 years, but you wrote his case file, a dossier a mile high. Your head’s still a little fuzzy from that knock against the dome, but that copper taste of blood in the back of your mouth has you thinking your backup is merely minutes away from bursting through the door and freeing you from his clutches. He slides off his knuckles, snatches a rusty pruning knife off the workbench, and grabs your hand. You fidget and fight, slapping his hand away.

“Ain't ye the Nervous Nelly. Afraid I'm going to bite off one of them little digits? Don't worry, my chompers ain't what they used to be,” Jed’s teeth clink as he bites down on air.

You squirm in the chair to no avail as he leans in — the hot stench of putrid meat and cigarettes pelts the side of your face as he whispers in your ear, “I don’t know what kinda’ feller you take me for, but you gotta’ be nuttier than my auntie June’s peanut brittle if you think I’m letting you leave here alive. I’m going to ask you some questions, and for every dishonest answer you give, I’m going to saw off one of them grubby grabbers. And when all that’s left is a bloody stump, I’ll work my way on down to them little piggies you got scurrying around in them boots. Do we have an understanding?”

He reaches for your wrist, and you continue to slap away at his hand. “Dammit, boy, I ain’t got time for this tomfoolery. My congregation awaits.”

He plunges the knife into your soft belly just above the navel; the corroded piece of steel plucks away at your flesh like the serrated barbs of a fishhook as he pulls it out slowly.

“Ooh, that's got to hurt like a somamabitch. I’ll tell you what, I can leave you here and let you die a painful death. Where you either bleed out, or the bile from your gallbladder enters your bloodstream and poisons you from within. Or I can put you out, nice and easy like. The choice is yours.”

He begins his line of questioning, but you can no longer hear his voice; it’s as if your heart is beating inside your head. The throbbing puts you in a trance, and the pain slips away momentarily. You watch as he throws up his arms in angst and heads back upstairs, his plodding footsteps in unison with the war drums pounding inside your chest. Your skin’s numb from the thousand pinpricks of paresthesia — the tingling sensation of electricity surges through your veins, and you try to calculate how long before sepsis sets in.

You watch as the blood dribbles out the gaping wound slower than you imagined it would, and that's when you remember: no one is coming. That you were pulled off the case; you were getting too close. Against their wishes, you went rogue, took a leave of absence, tracked the sons of bitches to their hideout, joined their ranks, and infiltrated them further than the bureau would have allowed. Six months later, you had wiggled your way into their brain trust, where you were set to assist in Jed's magnum opus - blowing up the federal building downtown. You'd finally have the evidence to be able to take them down, but someone tipped them off to your presence.

The chair creaks as you shift your weight, rocking back and forth. You topple backwards, breaking the chair. The jagged chunks of splintered wood that dangle from your arms gouge your side as you frantically shuffle towards the workbench. You look back to see if they're coming down the stairs, and you hear him preaching aloud.

"Dear God, guide me through this darkness. Embrace me, for I am the sacrificial lamb doing your bidding, oh Lord. Take me into your arms, for I am but a soldier in your army."

You gather the sticks of dynamite next to the vise and twist the fuses together. You flick on the switch to the grinder and run it along the edge of the workbench. The blade skids across the diamond plate and spews a shower of metallic embers, igniting the bundle.

As the sizzling spark ticks on down the fuse, you can hear Jed's last sermon to his band of miscreants, “And God said unto thee, the unholy tyranny shall perish under thine own thumb. Can I get an Amen?"

Amen~

BIO: Peter Bertlessen was born of midnight movies, mixed tapes, and creased-spine paperbacks. While he ventures to say he writes, a more apt description would be that he stabs the pages to watch them bleed. His previous works can be found in Punk Noir, Starlite Pulp, Frontier Tales, Bristol Noir, Literary Garage, Blood+Honey, and random scraps of paper strewn atop the nightstand. The self-described counterculture enthusiast lives with his wife and their four boys in Southern California.

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