Mr. Afton was married to revenge. For years, it was all he could think of. He fantasized about all the ways he could exact revenge. He considered his options. He could destroy the killer's life by taking a loved one away from him. He could capture him and torment him but keep him alive so he can continue to suffer. Or he could kill him himself. The options were plentiful and he wished he could turn back time so he could do all of them.
It all started with an accident. His newlywed wife Stephanie was biking to work one morning when a particularly brave black squirrel decided to run across the street. She swerved in fear of hitting it, and ended up getting hit by small business owner Andrew Sterling, who had been going twenty over the speed limit. The squirrel was unharmed, but Stephanie's unprotected head suffered irreparable damage. She was in a vegetative state in the hospital for four months before passing away.
Andrew Sterling pleaded guilty to dangerous driving and was sentenced to five years in prison without parole as well as having his license revoked until he retook all driving courses and passed the examinations again. During that time, his small business collapsed as he had been putting in eighty hours a week to keep it running. He had nothing to go back to after prison and would have to start from nothing, not that he would have to worry about that in the end.
Andrew Sterling was reported missing less than 72 hours after being released from prison.
Mr. Afton had been waiting for him outside of the prison. He followed him around the city with a fresh beard to disguise himself from the man who had killed his wife. He waited impatiently for the opportune moment to strike. Andrew struggled, but it wasn't enough. Unconscious and tied up, he was brought to Mr. Afton's basement, the last room he would ever see.
When Andrew came to, he found himself under a bright light and bound to a thick pipe coming out of the cement ground beneath him. His hands and feet were tied together, but each one of them was shackled to a different chain that stretched out into the uncertain darkness. He struggled to break himself free, causing the chains to rattle and announce his consciousness to whatever lay in the darkness.
“Good, you're awake.”
Mr. Afton emerged from the darkness with a clean-shaven face and a fresh smile on his face. He felt calm and reasonable, but anyone else would describe him as crazed and twisted.
“Who are you and what do you want?” Andrew cried out with deep desperation in his voice. He had watched enough television to know how situations like these usually turn out, and sometimes fiction is nicer than reality.
“You don't recognize me?” Mr. Afton replied in hurt surprise that quickly turned into a quiet and cruel anger. “I guess I got the wrong guy then. You can go.”
He walked behind the pipe that Andrew was secured to and cut the bonds tying his hands and feet together. Andrew immediately jumped to his feet and tried to make a run for it, but the chains on his wrists and ankles kept him from moving very far from the pipe. Mr. Afton's laugh harmonized with the clanging of the chains.
“Oh I'm just kidding. You aren't going anywhere. Not in one piece anyhow.”
“What do you want? I don't have much in the ways of money, and my family's not rich either,” Andrew repeated, trying to convince his captor that he's not worth kidnapping.
“Five years ago, you struck a woman with your car, causing irreparable brain damage that ultimately killed her,” Mr. Afton replied as he made his way in front of Andrew again, climbing through the tight chains.
Andrew's eyes went wide with the realization. “You're her husband, aren't you? Look, it was an accident, and I served my time for what happened. Justice has already been served. Let me go, and we can forget this ever happened.”
“If all of this were so easy to forget, don't you think I would have done that by now?” Mr. Afton responded as he pulled out a hunting knife. “True justice has yet to be served. One life for another, and all that, after all.”
“Please don't do this. I'm sorry about what happened, but killing me isn't going to make you feel any better or bring your wife back from the dead,” Andrew started to plead, but his words fell on ears that belonged to a heart consumed by revenge. All rationality in Mr. Afton had become twisted so that it all pointed to revenge without an ounce of doubt.
“Quiet,” Mr. Afton demanded, pointing the knife's tip at Andrew's throat.
In a desperate attempt to get on a psycho's good side, Andrew shut his mouth and silently prayed that he would walk out of this place alive.
“Good puppet,” Mr. Afton chuckled, pleased with domination over the man who killed his wife. “Now dance.”
He pulled a makeshift looking remote out of his pocket with several buttons on it and pressed one. The sound of gears churning echoed through the dark basement as the chain attached to Andrew's left foot pulls him towards the distant and impossible to see wall.
“I've spent years learning about mechanics and electronics to build all of this,” Mr. Afton proudly informed his prisoner. “Each one of those chains attached to you is secured to a mechanism on the wall that will pull and release you depending on what buttons I press. I could quarter you if I wanted to. Doesn't that sound fun?”
Andrew, afraid that anything he would say would only fuel the murderous fire of Mr. Afton, stayed completely silent. Mr. Afton smiled at him and faded back into the shadows. A loud click resonated through the darkness. After a moment of eerie quiet, pale and cold fluorescent lights illuminated the low ceiling. Andrew took a horrified look at the machinations holding him in place as the lights grew brighter. Large, sturdy looking gears covered the walls, interconnected, save for some breaks to allowed the separate limbs to be pulled individually. The chains themselves were woven between the gears, with no clear way to free them. Each set of gears had a hand crank attached to the final gear, a manual system for torture just in case the electronics fail.
“It's impressive, isn't it?” Mr. Afton said proudly after Andrew had enough time to properly admire his work. “I had considered keeping you in the dark during the process, but I built all of this for you. It would be... disappointing if you did not get to bear witness to it. I will, after all, dismantle it once we are done here.”
“Please, just let me go... It doesn't have to be this way...” Andrew pleaded once he realized that silence will do nothing but support his bloodthirsty captor.
“No, it didn't have to be this way,” Mr. Afton corrected him as he walked over to his prisoner, a sharp look in his eyes. “You didn't have to be speeding that day five years ago. You had a choice then how things would turn out. You made your choice. And your choice cost me my wife! She was everything to me! When I lost her, everything stopped making sense. I stopped feeling anything but grief and anger. I couldn't live without her, but I couldn't die without sating my anger. You have no idea what you've done to me, and you have no right to say how things have to be.”
Up until that point, Mr. Afton had been cold and calculating towards Andrew. In that moment, it made sense to Andrew. Something had broken in him that day. He was human once, or rather empathetic, but the accident took away all the beauties of life and humanity from him. Andrew knew there was no convincing a psychopath to have empathy for someone he is determined to end, or even pity for that matter, but Afton's continued adoration and care for his late wife gave him an idea that could have saved his life.
“What would your wife think of this?” Andrew cried out, his desperation masked by the challenge.
“You will not talk about her! You do not have the right!” Mr. Afton screamed. He threw the hunting knife in Andrew's direction, just barely missing him. His eyes ablaze, he pressed down on the large button in the center of his remote. The gears churned noisily from all around the cement basement, pulling Andrew in four different directions.
Unable to move, but unwilling to give up, Andrew attempted to get through to Mr. Afton's residual humanity again.
“Do you think she would want you to kill a man for her? Do you think she would be proud of you for this, or think you've become a monster?”
An unsettling silence followed the outcry. In the bright florescent light, Andrew could see every detail on Mr. Afton's face, and nothing on it suggested that he was doubting himself. There was a brief moment where it seemed he was going to yell in return, but instead he suddenly calmed down. He just stood there, making uncomfortable eye-contact with his prisoner, a cold look in his eyes.
Slowly, with his thumb, he pressed down on the button in the center of his remote once more. All four of the gears began churning. The chains dragged Andrew out into an outstretched position, almost lifting him off of the ground by his arms alone. But unlike before, Mr. Afton did not release the button. The discomfort quickly turned to pain as Andrew's limbs were pulled away from his torso. His pleads for freedom and forgiveness transformed into unintelligible screaming. For a short while, the pain plateaued and the gears nearly stopped moving. And then the ripping came. His skin was the first to rip apart at the shoulders and then in his groin. Soon the muscles started ripping apart and the sound of cracking bones filled the basement almost as much as Andrew's screams.
The screams stopped with the splitting.
In the illuminated basement, all that could be heard was the dripping of blood from multiple places and faint breathing. Witnessing what he had done, Mr. Afton could do nothing but stand and stare at the gore and blood. As a child, he would faint at the sight of blood, but now he'd sought it out. He turned off the lights and quietly walked upstairs, shutting the door behind him.
Four hours later, he came back down the stairs, turned the lights back on, and detached Andrew's body from the four chains that had pulled him apart. He collected the pieces of Andrew and placed them in a heap in the corner. Using the manual cranks, Mr. Afton reset the whole contraption for one more use. One by one, he attached himself to the gears until he was standing in the pool of Andrew's blood in the center of the room fully attached. Remote in hand, he held down on the center button and the gears churned one final time.
Mr. Afton and Andrew are found almost a month later. A concerned neighbour had noticed Mr. Afton's disappearance and called the police, worried that something had happened to him. The investigating officers found that the front door was unlocked, and so walked right into the house, immediately smelling the sick stench of death that had filled the empty spaces of the house in his absence. After searching the main floor and the second floor, the two officers cautiously made their way down into the basement to find two severely decomposed corpse, one hanging from chains and another ripped apart and thrown into the corner.
While Mr. Afton was using his contraption to end his suffering, the remote malfunctioned. He had left the key for the chains by one of the manual cranks and was tightly held in place by the chains. With no hope for escape or rescue, Mr. Afton had to stand there, chained to the walls by his own contraption, until he died from a long and painful death.
-Zero
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