Take Me Back to Eden

Long time reader, first time writer. I've enjoyed so many stories on this site for so many years, and want to try my hand my one of my own.

This first part is intended to be a set-up chapter, and the content here will be important to the story.

Pain is a concept that most are familiar with, but very few truly understand. It is impossible to go through life and not experience it in some form. Loss, fear, love, even anger, can be forms of pain in the right circumstances. It can be physical, emotional, mental, or even spiritual, and all of them hurt in their own unique way.

Many people spend their whole lives in dedication to the study of pain. Doctors conduct years of painstaking research in attempts to find cures to the ailments of life. Therapists work slowly and inexhaustibly to unravel the traumas of scarred pasts and help their patients find relief. Those of faith study the teachings of their respective gods to find comfort and refuge from the pain of the unknown, and the absolution of perceived sins.

Pain is an incredibly vast and multifaceted feeling that can be real or imagined and often exists in and out of physical reality.

For Michael however, the pain was very much not imaginary and was, in all the worst ways, physical. It rolled across his body in never-ending waves, pulsing as though it were the backbeat of some demented song. At times it threatened to drive him unconscious, making his stomach roil and his body sweat. His muscles trembled under the stress they had been put under and every part of him ached.

Michael's head was swimming, a constant ringing in his ears, his thoughts sluggish and amorphous, as though there were shrouded in a fog that he could not quite see through. He struggled to remember how long he had been strung up, arms extended over his head, hands bound in harsh, yellow rope, hanging nearly naked, save for his underwear, from a hook set in the ceiling. His toes could just barely touch the bare concrete floor, enough to keep his arms from completely separating from their sockets after such prolonged suspension.

Long, shallow cuts, too numerous to count, crisscrossed his back in bloody groupings where he had been mercilessly whipped. His face was swollen and bruised, his eyes ringed entirely in black and purple, his lips split in several spots where his captors continued to strike him at their whim. Several of his teeth were broken and if he was not careful with his tongue, the exposed ends would throb in sharp agony. The puffiness around his eyes made it incredibly difficult to see, not that it mattered since he needed glasses to see anyways.

Michael's front had fared no better, with bites, claw marks and more recently, fresh burns, littering his torso as if he were some abstract painting still in progress. He could not be sure but he was reasonably certain that a few of his ribs were broken. His breathing, by necessity, was shallow, for taking a full breath only caused him mind-numbing agony in his sides.

The lower half of his body was in similar shape, though his captors had not yet shown it any particular focus. Most of the cuts and bruises he had sustained there had been more the result of incidental impacts than anything else. He did not, however, hold onto any misguided sense of hope that they would not hesitate to shift their attentions there if they felt it would get them what they wanted.

Which, for Michael, was the crux of the matter. What they wanted were answers to questions that he simply did not have. But no matter how many times he repeated himself, no matter how he screamed or shouted or pleaded with his torturers, they refused to believe him. His cries for mercy, regardless of how he fearfully or desperately he assured them that they had the wrong person, fell on deaf ears.

And so on it went. At first Michael had tried to keep track of how long he had been there, if for no other reason than to try and hold onto his sanity. But as one beating blurred into the next, and with no way to see outside, it quickly became impossible, and thus time became meaningless to him. All he knew was that every few hours, his captors rotated guards on shifts, allowing the ones watching and working on him to rest.

A liberty not afforded to their hapless subject.

One of his captors would whip him, leaving thin cuts from shoulder to hip while another asked their questions. When they felt the answers were not quick enough, they would jab him with an electric prod to hasten his responses. Every now and again, a metal rod would be heated until it glowed bright red, and they would threaten to lay it across his skin if he did not give them the answers they sought. But as he had nothing to give them, Michael was forced to suffer the agony of the rod's searing burn over and over again.

Their methods were far more sophisticated than just physical torture. They intermittently deprived their human prisoner of sleep with bright, flashing lights or by playing constant raucous music. Often they would place him in a thick, restricting hood while forcing him to contort into difficult and stressful positions which would be accompanied by a steady stream of verbal abuse. There was no subject off limits, no line they would not cross as they spat their words at him, breaking his spirit.

Pain.

It ruled his world, and there was no room for anything else except pain. In the beginning, he had tried to fight it. His fear and desperation turning to anger and frustration. He had protested, even tried to fight back where he could. His captors thoroughly disabused him of that notion. Left with no way out, a sense of helplessness had overtaken him and it slowly turned into bottomless despair and then to mindless acceptance.

Everything blurred together and he now only reacted to each new fresh source of pain, his mind retreating deep within itself in a hopeless attempt to hold onto what little of himself remained. He could now only manage to repeat the same three words over and over again, like a mantra or a prayer to higher being for salvation.

"I don't know"

As his mind floated in numb emptiness, he vaguely recalled once again how he had been grabbed, as though the memory were stuck on repeat. He had just gotten back from work, just after four in afternoon on Thursday. It was a short drive from the office where he worked, to his small house set just outside the city. He remembered pulling into the driveway and stepping out of his car when he heard a high-pitched screech of tires behind him. No sooner had he turned to face the direction of the sound than a massive figure, covered heads to toe in plain clothes, barreled into him, knocking him onto the ground.

The impact had driven the air out of his lungs and left him unable to cry out, though in hindsight he realized there would not have been anyone there to help even if he had. Before he could even think to fight back, his arms were seized in a vice like grip, far stronger than any human could ever be, and his hand were cuffed behind his back. A rough sack was quickly thrown over his head and the drawstring cinched tightly around his neck.

He had then been dragged quickly down the driveway before being thrown onto the floor of a vehicle, a van he assumed since the door had audibly slid shut. The last thing he remembered was a painful jab to his neck before feeling extremely drowsy, and a rough baritone voice saying "Mark secured, on route to rendezvous," before falling asleep.

When he had next woken, he had found himself as he was currently. Stripped, strung up, and limbs stinging from his rough ride in the van. He was no longer hooded, but was instead gagged by some sort of cloth stuffed in his mouth with tape to secure it. As he tried to survey his surroundings, he realized that there was very little light in the room.

Michael could tell the space was not particularly large and that it was an empty basement. He could see wood paneling on the walls and ceiling, and that the floor was completely bare. A draft made his skin feel cold, though he had no idea what the temperature actually was. It smelled musty, as though water had been stagnating somewhere in the room before someone had attempted to air it out.

As he looked around the room, he noticed that his captors sat in metal folding chairs loosely arranged around the room and that they had remained completely covered. A few of them passively observed him while others looked down at their phones in complete disinterest.

Micheal felt his heart beginning to speed up, his mind racing as he tried, poorly, to control his rising sense of panic. He tried to think of everything that had happened in his life recently that might give him some clue as to why he was in his current situation.

He was not a criminal by any stretch of the imagination, he had never even gotten so much as a parking ticket in his life. Nor did he work in any sketchy professions, or with clients that would be considered suspicious. He was a data analyst, he looked at numbers in excel sheets and put tables into word reports. It was not a high adrenalin job but it was steady work and it paid the bills.

As far as he knew, he had never crossed anyone important, or had a confrontation with someone that would warrant something like a kidnapping. For the life of him, he could not piece together what someone would want with him, and why they would need to go to these lengths to capture him.

He hung there in completely silence, for how long he did not know, trying to answer a seemingly unanswerable question. None of his captors spoke, apparently patient to wait for what he also did not know. Several more minutes had passed before he was startled by a loud bang of a door slamming open behind him.

Loud, heavy footsteps made their way closer and closer to him before its source stepped around in front of him. It was a large canine anthro of some sort, with black, white and brown fur. It's face was covered with small lines of missing fur which Micheal recognized as scars, and it's right ear had a long notch in it.

It's face was the only part that was uncovered, and it was drawn in an angry snarl, letting out a menacing growl that made his heart race even faster in fear. The anthro's hand suddenly snapped forward to grip the tape and ripped it off in one quick movement. Michael drew in a shocked breath through his nose as the cloth was pulled out of his mouth.

The same hand shifted down and clamped down around his throat, cutting off his breath as he was pulled nose to nose with the angry canine. Its lips curled up around its sharp teeth, its breath less than pleasant as it stared him in the eyes.

"I will ask you this once, and only once," he said, for it was most certainly a male, it voice a slightly raspy baritone, "if you do not tell me what I want to know, if you attempt to lie or deceive me, I will hurt you. And I will keep hurting you until you give me what I want. Is that clear?"

Michael nodded his head frantically in the anthro's grip, desperate to give him whatever he wanted to escape this situation.

"Where. Is. He?" the canine with the scared muzzle growled.

Michael looked on at him in absolute bewilderment at the question. "Where is who?" he asked.

The canine snarled as he drew back his fist and sent it flying straight into his stomach, driving the air out of his lungs with a pained whoosh. Michael let out a sound not unlike a person vomiting as he tried to regain his breath.

"Wrong answer," scars replied as he reached down and grabbed the human's chin in his gloved hand, yanking his head up. He slapped him on the side of the face hard, forcing him to refocus and look him in the eyes.

"Tell me where your boss is, now!" he shouted, shaking Michael roughly in place.

"I don't know! Maybe at his office? But he works from home on Thursdays and Fri-"

The same fist slammed straight into his left side, right on the ribs. Michael cried out in agony as he felt something crack, his breath leaving him once again. He ground his teeth, his eye squeezed shut as he tried to bear it.

"That cute. 'At his office,' like this is some kind of every day, run of the mill business for you people," scars replied, his voice tinged with the sound of false humor. He stepped to the side and snapped his fingers, holding his arm outstretched as another figure calmly walked up to him and deposited a bag into his waiting hand.

"You want to play this game? Alright, sounds good to me. I've got time. All the time in the world. But you? This is as far as you go. I've broken men far harder and far more experienced. You and I are about to get to know each other really well."

He set the bag down and unzipped it, fishing around inside it until he found what he was looking for. Standing, he allowed the black and tan bullwhip to uncoil until it's length dragged across the floor. Slowly, he started to walk around Michaels side until he could no longer see the canine.

"Sir please," he pleaded, "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know who you're after. You have the wrong person I'm telling you, please you have to believe me."

The canine snorted derisively, "No. No I don't have to believe you. And I don't think we have the wrong person at all. In fact," he said, "our intel was very good this time. You popped right up in our database. Once we knew what to look for that is."

The only warning Michael had was the sudden swish of air as his captor reared his arm back and struck his back with the whip, laying the skin open from his right shoulder to his left hip. The pain was blinding. He screamed, his voice breaking as he tensed in his restraint, his feet nearly leaving the ground until the pain of being suspended completely by his arms overruled the pain in his back.

"It is strange to me how it often seems to be the one's you'd least expect," scars said as he walked back in front of his prisoner. "But I suppose that's how you've go so unnoticed for so long."

"PLEASE!" Michael shouted, desperation begging to color his voice, "I don't know who you're after! I haven't done anything wrong, why are you doing this to me?"

Scars rushed forward, grabbing him by the neck again, the tips of his claws beginning to poke through the thick gloves that he wore. "I don't believe a word coming out of your mouth," he hissed angrily. "You're going to tell me where Dricus is, and if I have to beat the answer out of you one letter at a time then so be it"

Michael shook his frantically as the canine moved and disappeared behind him once again. "I don't know who that it is! I've never met tha- AHHHH" he screamed as the whip slashed against his back again.

"Where is Dricus Aubert?" the canine said in a loud and methodical voice.

"I don't know!"

The whip sounded again, followed by a renewed scream.

"When was the last time you saw or contacted Dricus Aubert?"

Michael clutched at the rope binding his wrists, holding on for dear life. "I've never talked to that person, please!"

Another stripe adorned his back as the crack of the whip sounded.

"Where is the holding facility for the captured beings?"

"I don't know," Michael cried, arching his back as he tried to escape the whip that he knew was coming. It did him little good.

"What name is on Aubert's accounts?"

Whip

"What is the next target date for the kidnappings?"

Whip

"How is Dricus getting through the barrier?"

Whip

"Who is helping him get concealment?"

Whip

"When was the last time you saw Dricus Aubert?"

Whip

"When was the last time you saw Dricus Aubert!?"

And that was the pattern that their conversation took. The canine would ask, Michael would fail to answer, and the pain would come. As time went on, scars traded out with the other members of his team to continue working over their human prisoner, but most of the time it was scars. The memory slowly came to a close as his eyes opened ever so slightly.

It was one of rare moments where he was not being worked on, and nothing was being used to forcibly keep him awake. But there was no rest for him to find, the layers of agony piled on top of his body would not permit it. He shivered, his head hanging forward limply as he focused on keeping his balance on his toes. A simple task that consumed his every waking moment.

He shifted in and out of conscious thought, brought back only by the unbearable tugging sensation in his shoulders when he sagged down to far. It was as though it were a solo dance, silent and terrible.

Then there were footsteps, loud and measured. Scars then. It had to be. Michael lifted his head and saw him walking closer, a cigarette in his mouth, hands on his hips. Scars pointed with his chin once and two of the other team members, who Michael had taken to thinking of as red and black, because of their shoes, stood and grabbed his arms and began to untie his wrists.

Michael gasped as the pressure was released from his shoulders, though it was short lived as his hands were quickly bound behind his back. Unable to walk correctly after having hung for so long, he was half dragged half carried a few feet away, and forced to lay down flat on the ground.

He vaguely noticed that his head lay over a drain, though what that meant he hardly knew. Red and black stayed crouched down beside him, pinning his back to the ground with their strong hands.

Scars slowly walked into view again, this time carrying a white towel and a large container of water. The gears in Michaels mind slowly started to turn and a fresh sense of panic began to wash over him as he realized what was about to happen. He tried to turn, struggling in red and black's grip, but to no avail.

"No...please...please...I don't...I...I don't," he stammered weakly, trying to find purchase with his feet to push away.

Scars tossed the towel to red who unfolded it and forced it flat across Michaels face. He felt his body suddenly straddled by a heavy weight and heard the cap be removed from the water. Two strong hand pressed down on his shoulders, pinning him even further.

"You refuse to give me information, I hurt you Michael. That's how this works," scars said. "How much you want me to hurt you, depends on you."

Michael, try as he might, could not twist away from their iron grips. Could not buck the weight sitting atop his body. His breathing started to speed up as fear and adrenalin both rocketed through his system. He knew what was about to happen, but felt powerless to stop it. He had only ever heard of waterboarding, but knew that it was considered one of the worst forms of interrogation.

"I don't know, I don't know, I don't know!" he said pleadingly, his voice muffled as tears began to well up in his eyes, unbidden.

"No, you're holding out on me, I know you are!" scars spat back. "You know where Dricus Aubert connection is. You've met him before and you know how he get's concealment. Tell me how and where and I will end this!"

"No I don't know! Please!" Michael tried to kick his legs, to do anything to get free, to escape his hell.

Scars sighed and tipped the jug of water, allowing it to slowly splash onto the towel that was forced down around Michaels face. He screamed as he tried to turn his head, but no matter what he did, the water followed. He tried to hold his breath but the weight on his stomach made it so much harder. After a few dozen seconds, he was forced to let it out, and that's when the water came in.

Try as he might, he could not spit it out, could not swallow it and could not get enough air around it. It clogged his nose, causing it to sting and burn. It ran down the sides of his face and into his ears, distorting the sound around him. It forced its way down his throat, slowly and inexorably drowning him, even as he fought to take a breath that would not come. All the while, scars continued to ask him questions that he could no longer comprehend.