Life Extension

    Finally, the girl reopened her eyes.  She had been unconscious for a full hour this time.  She looked at the man in the surgical mask with renewed fear as she saw the power grinder in his hand again.  She had become numb to the pain hours ago when she began to drift in and out of consciousness, but nothing could stifle the horror she felt inside as she watched her body becoming more and more mutilated. 
    When she first awoke in this room, alone and naked and strapped to a cold metal table in total darkness, she was so overcome with fear that she could not think clearly, but then when the light finally flickered on, what she saw filled her entire being with a panic she had never experienced before.  The light came from a single naked bulb hanging on a metal chord from the ceiling in the middle of the room.  The mildew and moss that was growing on the cinder block walls made the room appear darker than it actually was, and the shadows cast by that single naked bulb made it appear that she was surrounded by a hundred demons.  There was a long metal table sitting along the wall on her left that was littered with rusting hand-tools.  In front of her was a large metal door with a single window, about 8” square, in the upper center.  The window appeared to have been blacked out from the outside.  As she turned her head to the right, she noticed a rusting metal shelving unit, 8 shelves tall, half-filled with large glass containers laid in neat rows along the shelves.  Inside the glass containers, as best as she could tell, were severed human heads.
    The man who called himself Doctor X watched her regain consciousness with a certain pleasure he only felt in this circumstance; watching his patient regain consciousness for one final go.  Along with the sudden pleasure, he also felt a certain rush of guilt.  Not guilt for his patient, he never felt that, but guilt that he could not have extended the patient’s life any longer.  He could always tell when his patients weren’t going to make it through another round, and he could see the emptiness in this girl’s eyes now.  There was still terror, but in that terror was absolute resignation; she had given up on the last shred of hope that had been keeping her alive.
    He would wait for at least 20 minutes before pushing her into the warm hands of death and letting her mind sink into the deep state of relaxation he knew awaited her.  He wanted her as awake as possible so he could watch the life leave her body.  He sat the grinder on the table beside her and walked to the work bench to grab the Polaroid.  His rubber boots squished in the puddle of blood on the concrete floor and left a fresh trail of brownish-red footprints leading from the table to the bench.  He grabbed the camera and snapped a final living picture of his newest patient.  He had always kept a picture journal of his work.  When the photograph slid out of the camera, her wrote the date and time in the lower left corner in red ink, the color of blood.
    Dr X called his work the “Life Extension Game”.  The goal was to keep his patient alive for the longest amount of time possible between when the torture was started and the actual time of death.  After he selected and captured a victim, he would strip them down naked and strap them to his work table with long leather straps that buckled like a belt, and then the game began.  He always started with a rough dose of torture.  Once, he ripped out all of a young male’s teeth, one by one, with a set of vice grips; although he did have to stop part way through to remove the man’s tongue with steel shears, as his piercing screams were becoming too much.  Another time he started by sticking the business end of a rusty wood burning tool into a woman’s eyeballs.  He expected the eyeballs to liquefy and seep out of the sockets; he did not expect the fluid in the eyeballs to boil, causing the entire eye to explode.  A drop of hot liquid had splattered onto his lips, allowing him to experience the taste of pain, and that was just an added bonus. 
    His current victim had been started by using a hand-held power grinder to grind off her nose.  It was incredible how fast her soft brown hair became crusty and red.  The whirring sound of the grinder mixed with her screams, barely audible from behind her dirty socks that had been stuffed into her mouth and the duct tape that covered it, was a perfect blend of raw power and emotion that made him feel like God.  To have complete control over another life form was something special that was only granted to a few brave souls.  He thought about using the wood burner on her next, but he could not bring himself to ruin those piercing blue eyes, so he grabbed the wire brush, and went to work on her genitals, not stopping until what was left was nothing more than a jumbled mess of flesh and blood.  He continued like this off and on for hours, stopping only when she was unconscious and when it became necessary to stop the bleeding lest she slip away from him too early.  And now it was almost over.  He was only minutes away from finishing her off completely and adding her head to the collection on the rack.