Chapter 12 - The Sting of the Past

The five Backstreet Boys sat around Nick’s living room nervously.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Nick whispered.

“We have to try,” Kevin murmured. “We have to try and deal with this. We may as well do it with each other.”

“So, what do we do?” Howie asked. “I mean, we’re not psychologists. What do we know about group therapy?”

“I thought of an idea,” Brian said slowly. “It won’t be easy, but I think it might help.” He swallowed as all eyes turned to him. “We all know what it was like before we got separated. But once we were apart, we have no idea what was happening to anyone else. I thought it might help if each of us gave a run down of a typical torture day.”

“I can’t,” Nick said immediately.

“You might be able to if we all go first,” Brian said gently.

“How is this going to help?” Howie asked anxiously.

“You can’t deal with something you won’t acknowledge,” AJ answered carefully. “It’ll just eat away at you until it kills you.”

There was a moment of silence.

“On that happy note, who wants to go first?” Kevin asked. He looked around at his brothers, seated in a rough circle. Each of them avoided his eyes. Kevin sighed. “All right, we’ll go in the order they first tortured us, then. That means I go first.” He took a deep breath, trying to gather his thoughts and keep himself calm.

~~~

Kevin

I sat on the cold floor, shivering. No way to tell the time. No windows at all. Harsh fluorescent light spilt in from the hallway through the small glass window high in the iron door. I wondered vaguely who on earth had built this horrible place.

I huddled in the corner, trying to keep myself warm and ignore the agonizing pain in my body. I saw movement in the light from the window. Guiltily, I hoped that they were not coming for me. Even though I knew that if they weren’t, one of my brothers would be tortured instead. The instinct of self-preservation sometimes defies all logic.

The door unlocked and swung open noisily. I squinted against the light, trying to prepare myself for resistance.

I didn’t have much success. Two or three men hauled me to my feet that would no longer support my own weight. I was half dragged, half carried down the hall. I prayed every time I left my cell that I would see one of my brothers. But that wouldn’t have coincided with their plan of torture, now would it?

I didn’t bother asking my usual questions about why they were torturing us and when or if they would stop. There was no point.

They brought me into the Torture Room. I wondered if we were all tortured in the same room . . .

I tried to resist their strength, but a few punches to my stomach and back put a stop to that. One wouldn’t think it possible, but each day hurt a little worse as they re-injured healing wounds. I have no idea how often they tortured me. Maybe it was every two or so days, with a little time in between for me to heal. If it had been every day, I would be dead.

Rendered helpless by their preliminary punches, they lifted me up onto a metal table and strapped me face down. That was my sign that they were going to work on my back.

But starting right away would have been too merciful. They kept me waiting for the first blow. My back literally twitched from the buildup of tension in my muscles as I waited. I couldn’t see them; they could keep me holding out as long as they liked. I tried to turn my head or watch the shadows on the walls for hints. But I could not see them or any indication of movement.

The first blow landed solidly, causing me to cry out in pain. The wait was over. They started punching me and hitting me with objects I could not begin to identify. Tears streamed from my eyes and nose, dropping noiselessly onto the polished steel table. Somedays I could concentrate through the pain on something else -- like prayer or my family. But somedays I couldn’t. Somedays the pain was all I could think about.

The cells were soundproof. But not the torture room. They designed it so we could hear each other scream from torture, but not hear the comfort and support we tried to shout back. It was done with some kind of intercom system. Pure brilliance on the part of our captors.

I tried to bite back my cries as much as I could, so the others wouldn’t worry about me. But as I explained, somedays it was just useless.

They would work me over for about fifteen minutes, then stop to give me a chance to recover. Somedays I prayed they wouldn’t stop -- that they would just kill me. I’d beg them to tell me about my brothers, but they would say nothing. I was the only sound in the room.

I’m not sure how long my “breaks” in between were. The anticipation was sometimes worse than the actual beating. Then when they were finished with me for the day -- which I’d guess was about five hours later -- they’d come in a put ice on the new bruises.

That in itself was a torture for two reasons. One, the ice provided little relief because it was so cold. It usually didn’t succeed in dulling the pain enough to be of any comfort to me. I suppose it helped the swelling, though. Two, receiving kindness from them was almost harder to bear than the torture. I didn’t want to be helped by them. I didn’t want healing and pain to come from the same hand. It only left me confused and angry.

After they iced me, they unstrapped me and let me eat, if I could. Sometimes I couldn’t keep anything down. I tried to eat to keep myself alive -- God knows why. What on earth did I have to look forward to except the possibility of seeing my brothers again?

~~~

Brian

I tried to pray. Every second of every day, I tried to pray for the safety of my brothers, my family, and lastly myself. I prayed for mercy, rescue, relief, sometimes even death. I prayed when I could manage to concentrate through the pain. It was probably a good distraction; if I’d just sat there thinking about the pain, I would have lost my mind. Maybe that was their real intention, to drive us insane. They certainly tortured us psychologically as well as physically. And of course their greatest torture was lack of motive. They never explained why they did what they did.

I laid on my back, trying to keep still. Whenever I moved, I inevitably caused pain in my arms or legs. The bandages stopped the burns from getting infected or getting any worse. But I doubted if they were really healing either. When the door swung open, I didn’t move. Sometimes I would shut my eyes and wish I were dead so they’d leave me alone. They grabbed my arms and pulled me upright. I let them handle me; any movement on my part only increased the fire racing up and down my extremities. I tried not to cry out yet. I knew my voice would be strained once they actually started my torture for the day.

“What are you doing to the others?” I demanded feebly. “Where are they?”

They ignored me.

“Please, stop this,” I begged, nearly losing my balance altogether. “You’ve got nothing to gain by senselessly torturing us . . .”

Instict took over as we reached the Torture Room. I pulled away with all the strength I had -- which wasn’t much. Again, they ignored my efforts and shoved me through the doorway and onto the chillingly familiar steel table. As they strapped down my wrists and ankles, I wondered why they bothered; it wasn’t like I could have escaped if I had tried. I was left staring at the ceiling; it was completely uniform cement and provided no distraction for me while they tortured me.

I didn’t bother to stop myself from shaking violently as they unwrapped the bandages on my legs. It’s like when you’re getting a shot and they put the alcohol on your arm first. It’s a sign of impending pain.

Somehow, they always managed to find patches of skin they hadn’t touched. One of them flicked out his silver lighter and carefully held it against my ankle, right above the strap. Tears stung behind my eyes as I screamed. He held down my leg with his other hand, of course leaning on the previous burns. He held the flame against me so long, I thought he’d managed to burn down to the bone.

I tried not to think of the effect my cries had on the others. But I couldn’t help it as sobs racked my body. My tormentor found another patch of skin he hadn’t yet touched. As he held the flame against my calf, another man put some kind of cream on the newest burn. Incredibly, it caused it to sting more, not less.

I can’t really remember what happened next. My memory is blurred by the pain that exploded in my head. It blocked out all other thought. That’s usually how my sessions went: I remember the first few minutes and the rest is a blur. Maybe I even ended up yelling at them or something. I just can’t remember.

I came back to my senses in my cell, hours later. My stomach hurt marginally less than it did earlier, so I presumed they somehow got some food into me. My legs hurt so much I nearly passed out again. I forced myself to stay conscious long enough to drag myself away from the door a little and try to stretch out. I didn’t want to wake up with muscle cramps from sleeping in an odd position.

As I prepared to embrace oblivion once again, I heard Howie crying out. I tried to sit up, but couldn’t quite manage it.

“Howie!” I shouted, trying to get him to hear me. After a couple tries, I realized once again that it was useless. I think I fell for it every time. No matter how many times I heard my brothers cry, I would try to help them. There was no way to quench the instinct inside.

I tried to lay still as I cried quietly, waiting for exhaustion to get the best of me once again.

Howie

I laid on my stomach in my dark cell, waiting for the fever to pass. My thoughts drifted wildly through the mild delirium. I tried to think straight, tried to find something to concentrate on, but I couldn’t manage it.

I hadn’t heard anyone being tortured in a while. I had a sinking feeling it would be my turn very soon.

I heard the door creak open behind me. I sat up and tried to move away from my tormentors, but the sudden movement only caused a wave of dizziness. Instead, I had to fight to keep myself from throwing up as the room spun around my head.

They could easily tell how disoriented I was, so one of the larger men stepped forward and swung my body effortlessly over his shoulder. I was too confused to even struggle. I considered throwing up all over his back as an act of defiance, but decided that might only make them torture me more.

I somehow held onto the hope that they would give me the antidote for whatever they’d given me last time. Maybe they’d let me have a day’s rest without some weird chemicals swimming in my bloodstream . . .

What kept my optimism alive I’ll never know. It’s strange what your mind does to protect itself.

I was dumped unceremoniously onto a steel table and tied down. I prayed fervently that they’d find somewhere else to inject the drugs besides the crook of my arm. It was bruised and swollen from all the previous injections.

The one voice I heard was the same I’d heard all along: the man who had come to torture us in the first place, when we were all still together.

“This might clear up the poison we gave you the other day,” he said, jabbing the needle into my purple skin. “Or it might just kill you instead.”

I hated that voice -- that voice that only served to fuck with me psychologically as the drugs fucked with me physically.

“Please,” I begged. “The others -- where are they?”

He chuckled softly as I felt unconsciousness creeping in. “The only way you know they’re still alive is if you hear them being tortured. I guess we’ll just have to keep torturing them, then.”

“Don’t!” I pleaded, fighting against the drugs. I never knew if I’d wake up again if I fell asleep. “Just leave them alone . . .” My words began to slur and my vision grew fuzzy around the edges.

“You should wake up in about an hour,” he told me. “If you don’t, it’s not a big loss.”

I heard them all leave the room as my vision blurred completely. I closed my eyes, spilling tears that ran down to my temples.

“I don’t wanna die . . .”

A distant corner of my mind noted that I could very faintly hear someone screaming my name.

~~~

As it spread, I passed out from the pain. When I woke up again, I was back in my cell, half-lying in a puddle of vomit and shivering like crazy. I broke into unrestrained sobs and prayed that I would live through the night.

Nick

I kicked against the iron door of my cell, begging hoarsely for water between coughs. I’d been coughing for almost a half hour straight with hardly any time to breathe. I knew I was really sick -- with what I didn’t know. I begged them every day for medicine, but they refused. I was scared that their real plan was to kill me slowly.

I stopped kicking, trying to breathe slowly. I managed to get one breath in, but the second sent me coughing. The cell door swung open abruptly and I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit. One of the men looming in the door bent down and handed me a small glass of water.

I grabbed it, but forced myself to drink it slowly. My immediate coughing ceased, but my throat still ached terribly. Once I finished, I put the glass down and stood up willingly. I had no desire to be roughed up before being tortured.

“It always makes things easier when you cooperate, Nicky,” the man who had handed me the glass said with a sneer.

I bit back a nasty retort. The two men each held onto one of my arms as we walked down the hall. As soon as we reached the freezer, I rebelled, pulling away violently.

“Let go of me!” I shouted, even though it hurt my throat. “Let me see the others!” Why I bothered demanding things from them, I’ll never know. I just couldn’t stop resisting completely; that would have been like admitting defeat or something.

“You can’t see the others,” one of them shouted into my ear as he wrenched my arm behind my back. “Howie’s dead, Kevin’s close, and the other two begged us to torture you more so they can get off easy.”

“You expect me to believe that shit?!” I cried, trying to brace myself against the doorway. “Brian and AJ wouldn’t do that!”

“Wouldn’t they?” he asked, even closer to my ear. “You’d be surprised what people will do under pressure. Why would I lie to you?”

He and his partner succeeded in shoving me inside the freezer and locking it.

I kicked the steel door. “They wouldn’t do that! They WOULDN’T! And Howie’s not dead! He can’t be!” I stopped shouting; my throat was killing me. Somehow they always managed to rile me up enough to scream at them. Bastards.

I shivered as the room started to drop in temperature. I sighed and curled up in my usual corner. I remembered reading somewhere that you can’t actually catch a cold from just being cold. You have to catch a virus. I wondered, not for the first time, if they had deliberately infected me somehow. Sticking me in the freezer only made my symptoms worse.

I tried to hug myself for warmth, but it didn’t help much. Although I couldn’t feel it, my fever began to rise. Since I couldn’t think straight, the man’s words from before started to make sense in my mind.

Howie’s dead, I thought. He can’t be . . . this can’t be happening . . . we all have to make it out of this alive. We’re in it together . . . I started to cry and as the temperature continued to drop, my tears froze on my cheeks.

“Brian,” I whispered. My feverish brain imagined him and AJ telling them to torture me more so they could rest. “You wouldn’t,” I whimpered. “You wouldn’t . . . you couldn’t have . . .”

“Just think, Nick,” came a voice from an intercom somewhere over my head. “At the rate we’re going, we’ll kill them all . . . and you’ll be the only one left. We’ll have all that time to spend on you.”

“You can’t kill them!” I somehow managed to scream. “YOU CAN’T!”

The voice from the speaker laughed at me. “We certainly can. Unless you’d die to spare one of them.”

I owe them that, I thought. They were all willing to endure more torture to spare me. I should be willing to do the same.

But I couldn’t force the words out of my mouth. I was too scared to die.

The voice chuckled softly. “I knew you were a coward.”

“Leave them alone!” I sobbed. “Just leave them alone!”

“Then tell me I can leave you in there for an extra hour,” he replied. “That should get your heart rate down nice and low . . .”

I started screaming -- the fever had made me completely delirious. I can’t remember what I screamed, if I even managed words. Of course, all the while, my throat got worse and worse.

The temperature in the room continued to drop until I could barely move. I could feel my heart and breathing slow down. Just when I was sure they’d left me to die, the hum of the freezer stopped. They’d turned it off. I was going to live.

I closed my eyes as more tears trickled down my cheeks and froze into crystals. But if I’m alive, that means one of the others might pay for it . . . They might take it out on one of them . . .

I heard the door to the freezer open and a blanket was thrown over me. I couldn’t move my arms to wrap it around myself. I just had to wait. Sometimes getting warmed up hurt more than getting frozen. I wished I could move enough to bang my head against the floor and knock myself out so I wouldn’t have to endure it. I didn’t want to accept their help, but I had no choice.

The bigger of the two men bent down and picked me up. He seemed to enjoy my helplessness. He carried my back to my cell and laid me down. They put heating pads over my body. I wished I could feel the warmth from them. A couple minutes later, the first thing I felt was pain. I whimpered as feeling slowly came back to my extremities, followed by a hot itch. God, I hated that feeling. It was the kind of itch you long to scratch, but don’t because you know it wouldn’t do any good. I stopped myself from crying out. I wondered if that’s what Brian felt after his burns started to heal -- that crazy, burning itch and pain.

The thought of Brian only caused me to start crying again. My tears felt extremely hot as they dripped down my face -- at least in comparison to my cold skin.

“Can you move?” the man who had carried me asked gruffly.

“Yeah,” I answered, sitting up very carefully and pulling the blankets closer around me.

He handed me a mug of tea and I sipped at it eagerly. He set a plate of food down beside me, then left, locking the door behind him. I knew he’d be back in a couple hours to collect everything, leaving me with nothing. I would still be cold; I always was. I think for a while I forgot what it was like not to be cold.

I sneezed loudly and groaned as my throat became raw again. That was one body part I wished I still couldn’t feel. Well, that and my brain. I wish that would have shut off for a couple hours. All I did was feel sorry for myself, get mad at myself, and worry about the others. It would have been nice to turn all that off for a while.

~~~

AJ

I came to as water splashed over my face. I coughed as someone tilted my chin up and forced me to drink. I tried to push them away, but I lacked the strength. After a minute, I gave in to my thirst and drank slowly. Whoever was holding me gently pulled the bottle away after a minute.

“You can’t have it all at once, Alex,” a woman’s voice told me. “You know, that wasn’t very smart -- trying to kill yourself by refusing food and drink.”

I blindly reached out for the bottle again. My vision was extremely blurry. The woman let me have it and I sucked on it eagerly. My body was definitely getting the best of me.

“I know why you did it,” she went on as I drank. “You refused food as a form of torture, since we won’t touch you.” She jerked the water bottle from my mouth. “Try it again and we’ll only hurt them more.”

“Don’t,” I whispered, since I had no voice left. I’d screamed myself hoarse in the last few days. “Leave them alone, please . . . let me have my turn.”

“This is your turn, Alex,” she said, almost laughing. “Your torture is staying in one piece while you listen to rest of them suffer.” She slid my head from her lap and stood up. She picked up a plate of food and set it beside me. “Now remember, eat up, or we’ll hurt them more than we are now. And we’ll tell them exactly who to blame.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll eat,” I conceded, sitting up too fast and nearly falling over. “Just leave them alone, please.”

I tried to focus, so I could see her face, but I didn’t manage it. She left me without an answer and slammed the door behind herself. I reached for the plate of food and nearly blacked out in the process. I willed myself to stay conscious and slowly ate the contents of the plate.

The food didn’t make me feel any better. I was still incredibly dizzy and weak, since I’d refused food for two or three days. Actually, I had no idea how long it had been. The days bled together.

I heard Kevin crying softly through the intercom system. I tried to hold back my own tears, but gave up after a minute. They must have known this would be the perfect torture for me, I thought. I covered my ears, trying to block out Kevin’s soft cries.

~~~

I jumped to my feet and started kicking the door as hard as I could. I kept at it for a full minute before I collapsed from dizziness. Fucking drugs. I laid still and waited for sleep to claim me. Maybe I’ll feel better when I wake up . . .

~~~

Right, I thought. This’ll make the pain go away . . . Now I can hurt like the others do. This is fair.

Unafraid, I held the knife in my right hand and grazed it over the back of left. I smiled as pain shimmered across my nerves. Now I won’t be the only one not hurting . . .

I can’t really remember what I did next. I just remember cutting and cutting . . . each one making me hurt less inside. I probably passed out from the pain or blood loss. When I regained consciousness, the knife was still beside me. But my wounds had been cared for. I guess, for some reason, they didn’t want me to get infected.

I rolled over onto my back, picking the knife up and looking at it gratefully. I kissed it gently, tasting steel and dried blood. My blood. My life, spilt all over my clothes and the floor.

But the pain in my heart wasn’t gone. So I started working on my right arm.

~~~

As the five remembered, so they told, with many emotional pauses. No one made it through their own story -- or any of the others -- without crying.

Once AJ was finished, he leaned over and hugged Howie, who was sobbing softly.

Nick hadn’t stopped crying since the stories had begun and had only made it through his own with constant coaxing from Brian. The blond continued to cry quietly in Brian’s arms.

Kevin waited a minute, shivering himself, then started to speak again. “Okay. Now we know what happened. We know our own pain and we know each other’s pain. We know why we feel the way we do.” He paused to swallow, trying to keep his own tears to a minimum. “Does anyone want to say anything to each other?”

There was a slight pause.

“Howie, when you passed out and you heard someone faintly screaming your name, that was me,” AJ said carefully. “I remember that ‘cause I heard you say, ‘I don’t wanna die.’ And then there was nothing. I was sure they’d killed you.”

Howie nodded and hugged him again.

“Kev, I don’t want you to feel guilty about wishing it wasn’t your turn,” Nick managed to say over his tears. “There were days we all felt like that. Since we all felt the same, we shouldn’t feel guilty about it. It was only natural.”

Kevin nodded, feeling a weight lift from his shoulders.

“AJ, your torture was as bad as any of ours,” Brian said. “Don’t feel guilty because they didn’t physically hurt you. Your pain equaled any of ours.”

“Yeah, I can kinda see that now,” AJ answered. “I just couldn’t then.”

“They were fucking with your head,” Howie added.

The five were silent again, this time for a few minutes.

“Why?” Nick whispered. “Why did they do this?” He buried his head in Brian’s shoulder, sobbing. Brian stroked his hair soothingly.

“You’ll drive yourself nuts if you keep asking yourself that, Nicky,” Kevin told him gently. “Somehow, we have to let it go. We have to accept what happened and move on.”

“How are we going to do that?” Howie asked.

“I think we should turn it into something positive,” Brian suggested.

Everyone looked at him.

“Hear me out,” he said quickly, before they could jump on him. “I think we should take everything we feel and channel it into something creative. Anything. A poem, a song, artwork, anything. I think we should each do something alone and work on something together.”

“How can we write a song about this?” AJ asked.

“No one else has to hear it,” Brian said quickly. “It’s just for us. I think it’ll help.”

“I think you’re right,” Nick agreed.

“You’re just full of good ideas tonight, huh?” AJ joked, standing up to get a drink.

“And we should pray, too,” Kevin said. “Every night. Together.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Howie consented.

Chapter 13
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