Free Katja from the Punk Band by Simon Logan Page B

opportunity to wield Kohl’s desperation to his own end and install him as one of the first who would deal out of his arcades.
    The crowd below are caught between cheering as they would were they watching a band perform and silently appreciating as they would in an art gallery.
    They don’t know what Szerynski is and he likes that. He closes his eyes and lets himself drift toward the whitespace again. It’s a mother’s womb and the calmness of suicide and more, but already it’s starting to shiver and fade. It flickers like the last frames of an old movie and he concentrates on holding it steady but it moves, it moves in his grasp and he knows he can’t hold it if he has to think about it so he stops thinking and then it slips further.
    And he fluctuates like this for some time, bobbing up and down on the tide of some great white ocean that refuses to swallow him or spit him out.
    He thinks perhaps he will stay there until Kohl arrives with the vial.
     

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
     
    But eventually the undulations cease and he is broken from the moment by a grating, cranking sound. It takes him time to realize it is the noise of the pulleys working.
    He is being lowered to the ground once more. It must be over.
    The crowd, for the most part, has waned, although he has no idea how long he has been suspended up there. What is left of those gathered regard him with only a vague interest and it seems as if they’ve forgotten why they came.
    What exactly had they been expecting to see? Szerynski wonders.
    His body aches all over except for the points where the hooks puncture his skin.
    In these places there is a certain numbness, a dullness void of feeling or unfeeling, and even as he presses his finger against them, there is no response. Mina, his fetish nurse, helps him onto a gurney and checks over his wounds with disinterest.
    He feels as if he has lost something vital to his very being and she knows this.
    “How long was I up there for?” he asks her.
    “Three hours,” she tells him. “Just like you asked.”
    “Are you sure? I wasn’t brought down early?”
    She takes out the hooks one by one. Squeezes congealed blood from them.
    “You ask for three hours, you are up there for three hours. You did not get anywhere?”
    Neither of them know where it was he had been heading but wherever it was, he hasn’t made it yet again.
    “No,” he snaps.
    Mina removes the final hook with a satisfying pop from the stretched skin and Szerynski sits up.
    “We’ll try it again in two nights,” he says, and Mina doesn’t respond.
    She has left him, walked off into the darkness at the edges of the room, her job complete for the night.
    Szerynski remains on the gurney, his legs dangling into the darkness below him, and for several moments he is captured by the intense feeling that if he were to drop himself down into it he would fall forever.
    He looks up when someone emerges from the shadows of the now-silent room.
    This man, Drago, is thick and full of meat like an overstuffed sausage. His fingers flex nervously as he stands before the naked chemical lord. He is holding a robe.
    Szerynski steps into the garment and walks away without saying anything. Stops when Drago tells him that someone has been trying to contact him on his private line.
    “Who was it?” Szerynski demands irritably. He is aware of the stigmata tears of blood trickling from each of his wounds.
    Drago tells him, keeping a certain distance between himself and Szerynski.
    “What did he want?”
    “He wouldn’t say, specifically. Wanted to talk to you. Tonight.” Szerynski isn’t in the mood for that. Isn’t in the mood for anything now.
    “I’m going to Czechmate,” he tells Drago, striding past him, the robe flowing in his wake.
    “What if he calls again?” Drago says.
    But Szerynski is already through the door and doesn’t slow his pace until he reaches his personal quarters on the third floor. He changes quickly, feels little jolts of numbpain