FicWad

Nothing is true and everything is permitted.

It was a fine motto, and one that many members of the
Syndicate took advantage of as best they could. Jack was no
exception to this, and tried to thoroughly enjoy everything he
did.

It was a fun job, being the torturer for the Nightshade
Syndicate, but it ate up a lot of time. Currently, he was
backlogged. He preferred to do people one at a time, but he'd have
to make an exception if anyone brought in a new subject in the
next few days.


Braids and Dylan wanted everything going swimmingly. They
were the highest-ranked members of the region, and they directed
all Syndicate activity for the purpose of making money. The duo
was fiercely territorial, and anyone else caught doing illicit
deeds on their turf were punished.

These past few subjects, though, had been brought in not
by them (or rather, not just by them) but by nearly every pack in
the Syndicate. As far as Jack knew, there was some kind of
fundamentalist Christian rally nearby, and not just any
fundamentalist Christian rally but the worst kind of
fundamentalist Christian it was possible to get. From what he'd
heard, they ran a website called godhatesfags.com, and they were
scum.

Like most of the Syndicate, Jack had a strong disdain for
religious types, but fundamentalist Christians were, in his
humble opinion, the worst. The problem with torturing them was
that some of them were so damn stubborn. Most people wanted to see
them begging for mercy from him, ultimately rejecting their God.
Quite a few did so nicely. But some were too damn stubborn and
kept singing hymns. Until, of course, their tongues were cut out.

Jack was part of the well-oiled machine that was the
Nightshade Syndicate. You want someone to suffer? Find your
Syndicate guy, and he'll hook whoever it is up with old Jack.
People paid for others to die slowly and painfully. And not just
in money. The Syndicate had more than a few loyal informants,
honorary members, and simple slaves that had been gained simply
because they couldn't pay the price right away.

There were cameras all around Jack's "entertainment"
rooms. The sale of the films was handled by a man named
Starkweather, whom Jack had never met. He just knew that if people
wanted to get footage of someone being butchered, they went to
Starkweather. If the people had specific wants in their film,
Starkweather would relay those wants to him via the Internet, and
Jack would be more than happy to oblige.

Those people were usually fetishists. Jack himself didn't
get any sexual thrill from killing, but sometimes he pretended to.
Sometimes it made the people more afraid. Oh, he'd done some
pretty deranged things. As per a request from a client, he and
some friends had defiled a dead woman once. Most of the time,
though, it was the friends that did the fucking, and Jack that did
the cutting.

Jack was not feeling his best tonight. He had a sore
throat and a headache, and every time he moved, his skin
felt...unpleasant. He had the feeling that even if he went to take
one of the many sex slaves the Syndicate owned out for a spin, he
just wouldn't have the drive to really do anything. He'd
considered just calling Braids and letting her know he was sick,
but those Christians weren't going to just kill themselves,
unfortunately. They'd been stewing in their cells for a few days
now, and those cell blocks were full. It was time to go to work.
There had been no requests from Starkweather, so he could dispose
of his charges in any manner he pleased.

As he neared his primary "entertainment" room, he saw a
friend of his, Liza, standing near the doorway. He waved
halfheartedly to her.

"You look pale," she said instead of greeting him. "You
feel okay?"

"I've been quite a bit better in the past. You feel like
helping me out tonight?"

"No problem," she replied. "I brought in a couple of these
bastards, and I feel like seeing 'em go. Fucking scumbags think
they own the world."

"Crying shame," he said absentmindedly as he entered the
room. Liza walked in behind him. "Got any preference as to which
one goes first?"

"There's a bitch in a red dress that was going on and on
and on about how only the white believers are going to Heaven and
everyone else deserves Hell. Saying that God should be praised for
giving people AIDS, and that all niggers are sodomites and should
be killed. You mind doing her?"

"It'd be my pleasure."

Liza was one of the few black Syndicate members, and to
Jack that was a testament to her drive and cunning. The majority
of black or Hispanic criminals were in pathetic street gangs, the
ones that the Syndicate manipulated from the shadows and destroyed
on a whim. As far as he knew, the Syndicate was color-blind, but
Caucasians were a definite majority. Braids had once remarked
that, oddly enough, the majority of the slaves owned by the
Syndicate were white too. Jack wasn't too sure about this, as he
didn't concern himself with the slaves too much.

The woman that Liza had mentioned was in the second cell
Jack peered into, and looked like she was half-mad. The cell was
totally dark, sound-proof, and very cramped, both to save space
and electricity, and because it was almost, but not quite,
complete sensory deprivation. He opened the door and dragged the
starving woman back to the room.

Liza was sitting on one of Jack's surgical tables and
grinning. Jack strapped the woman down to the table and gave the
woman a bit of water to wet her throat and let her speak.

"Jesus..." was the only word that Jack could make out.
Liza laughed.

"You can call him all you want, but he won't hear you.
This is the punishment you deserve, bitch. You think God loves you
and wants to save you? Then keep calling him. He won't save you.
Nobody will." Liza clenched her fists and struck the woman in the
mouth a couple of times. She wasn't all that strong, but the
effects of malnutrition had made the woman's body weak.

"How do you want her done?" asked Jack. "Sharp or blunt?"

Jack knew torture. And there were two types of weapons in
the world, edged ones, that would could cleanly slice through a
person's flesh, and the hard, heavy ones, that crushed a person's
bones. It was hard to tell which was more painful, but both looked
good.

"Blunt," was Liza's reply. "Make it good, Jack."

"Jesus will come!" the woman sputtered as Jack approached
her with a hammer held tightly in his hand. "The faggots and the
unrepentant sinners will burn in Hell!"

She was silenced as Jack brought the hammer down hard on
her kneecap. She howled in agony as the bone shattered, and her
leg bent in an unnatural angle. The area around where her knee was
now had no definite lump, but rather a series of fragments
floating around the bone.

"You like that?" Liza asked as she smirked a few feet
away. "Because old Jack here has plenty more where that came
from."

"You a virgin?" Jack asked of the woman. Finding that an
answer was not forthcoming, Jack shrugged. "Pass me those
scissors, Liza." She did so, and Jack began cutting up the woman's
pant legs, occasionally accidentally-on-purpose jabbing her with
the scissors. Eventually, he'd cut her pants off, and cut off her
underwear as well.

Jack hated older women. They were revolting, in his
opinion, and this woman was no exception. Just looking at her
privates instilled him with the need to puke, but he held it back.
"You a virgin?" he asked again.

"I am not a sinner like you are!" the woman shrieked. "I
am pure, filled with the Lord's love!"

"Then this will hurt even more than it would otherwise,"
Jack said as he tossed the hammer behind him. He turned and picked
out a crowbar from among his many tools. "Say 'ah.'"

He jammed the crowbar deep into the woman's pussy, and the
cold titanium tore her sensitive flesh as it went. Blood seeped
out of her, and most certainly not due to her hymen breaking. The
crowbar was about a foot long, and about eight inches had gone
into the woman. Jack shoved the tool in and out of her, listening
to her scream as he did so. There was no pleasure in this, just
pain. After all, the tool had ripped her open the first time, and
as he forced it in again, it only made those lacerations deeper
and wider.

As he plunged the crowbar deeper and deeper into the
woman's crotch, he took the scissors with his other hand and
pierced the woman's right breast with them. The screaming became
deafening to someone who wasn't used to it, and Jack was pretty
sure that Liza would be covering her ears.

As he shoved the crowbar in faster, he noticed that her
left breast was bouncing quite nicely, while her right, held in
place by the scissors, stayed stationary, pinned to her torso.
This lack of symmetry annoyed Jack. He took the crowbar out of the
woman and examined it. Aside from blood, it was covered in
gobbets of meat, including what might have been a piece of the
woman's cervix. With a bemused expression, he shoved it in the
woman's face. "This came out of you. What d'ya make of it?"

The woman opened her mouth to scream, so Jack shoved the
gory end of the crowbar into her mouth, taking out a couple of
teeth as he did so. He left the woman to splutter the meat out of
her mouth as he picked up his discarded hammer and got a nail few
long nails from another table.

"This was bugging me," he explained as he held a nail over
the woman's left breast, lined it up with her nipple as best her
could, and pounded it in until her breast was stuck fast to her
torso. Looking up, he saw Liza holding up the crowbar just in time
to cover his eyes for the coming impact. The woman's head caved
in at the force of the blow, and she twitched for a while as Jack
lowered his arm, now splattered with more blood than before.

Liza was breathing very hard and gazing at the bloody mess
she had made. Jack approached her and gently took the crowbar
from her hand. "Is that..."

"The first time I killed someone, yeah," Liza said, still
not lifting her gaze from the corpse. "I mean, I've seen people
die, but that...I got a real charge out of it when I swung, you
know?"

Jack put a comforting arm around her shoulders. "I don't
know how you'll take this, but that was a hell of a shot. You
might be good at this if you wanted to learn."

She locked gazes with him and took his arm off her. "Did
you start like this? Just that charge you feel when you do it
fast?"

"How I started this," he replied, "is not a story I feel
like telling. But that's how it starts for most people. You know,
Starkweather pays well."

"I'll bet he does," Liza said, biting her lip in thought.
She started for the door. "I'm gonna need some time to think about
this, Jack. But if you ever need or want an...intern...call me
up."

"My door's always open," he said, a pleasant little joke
about the wrought iron door and its heavy handle. Liza didn't
laugh as she walked out, deep in thought. Jack smiled pleasantly
to himself and made for the opposite end of the room, towards the
cell blocks. Back to work.