“I’m still waiting for room service, but other than that, I can’t complain. How about yourself?” Jones paused for a second. So much had happened during the last couple of hours, he wasn’t sure if Greene’s presence was good or bad. “Oh, yeah! That’s right! You’re one of them, you bastard!”
He ignored the insult. “I came to get you out of here.”
Jones’s eyes widened in the dim light. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I came to get you out. Let me see your hands.”
This wasn’t something that Jones was expecting. When Payne had first warned him about Greene, he was skeptical. He couldn’t believe that the Buffalo Soldier was playing for the enemy. But after thinking things over, it started to make sense. The broken guns, Sam’s death, Greene’s escape. Everything fit into place. Greene had been pulling their strings from the very beginning, treating them like wealthy tourists in a game of three-card monte. And now this. One minute he’s Benedict Arnold, the next he’s a hero. “Are you serious?”
“You heard me. Turn around and let me see your hands. Be quick about it!”
Despite his skepticism, Jones leapt off the mattress and turned his back to Greene. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
“This!”
With a quick burst, Greene forearmed Jones in the back of the head, sending him face-first into the corner of the cabin. Before Jones could gather his senses, Greene pounced on top of him, pummeling him with a series of vicious blows to his ribs and kidneys. Punch after punch, elbow after elbow, landed solidly on Jones’s back, causing him to gasp in agony.
“You have to be the most gullible brother I’ve ever met! Did you actually think I was gonna set you free?” Greene punched Jones again, landing another blow to the back of his head. “What good would it do if I let you go? As far as I can tell, you’ve already chosen a life of captivity. David Jones, house nigger for Jonathon Payne!”
Greene chuckled as he stood. “Of all the people in this world, I hate your kind the most. You’ve been given so many advantages that other brothers would kill for, yet you squander them by working for a white man. You take his charity. You call him boss. You kiss his ass!”
He cleared his throat and spit a giant wad of saliva on the barely conscious Jones. “You make me sick. Absolutely sick!”
The large man turned and walked back toward the door. When he opened it, he was surprised to see Ndjai standing nearby.
“Is everything all right?” Greene asked.
The African glanced past his boss and looked at Jones, who appeared to be a few blows short of a coma. “Did he cause you any problems?”
Greene glanced at his hands for a moment, then smiled. “My knuckles are sore, but other than that, things went fairly well.”
Ndjai nodded his head in understanding. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes. I understand that you currently have my good friend Nathan in the Devil’s Box.”
His eyes lit up with pride. “Yes, sir! Would you like to see him now?”
Greene shook his head. “How’s he doing? I don’t want him to die, you know.”
“Yes, sir, I am quite aware of that. We monitor his health frequently, and he is very much alive. He is a little bit swollen from a run-in with some fire ants, but other than that, he is fine.”
“Can he talk?”
“Not very well. He is too dehydrated to speak.”
Greene pondered things, then grinned. “Pump him full of fluids over the next few hours. I want to talk to him later today, and it won’t be fun if I can’t understand him. All of the others had a chance to speak to their guests, and I want the same opportunity with mine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One more thing. Why don’t you move Payne to the Devil’s Box while you’re taking care of Nathan? It’s supposed to be such a lovely day. I would hate to keep him away from the summer heat. He is a guest, you know.”
Ndjai smiled at the possibility.
Let the torture begin.
CHAPTER 36
PAYNE
had always loved the sun. Whether he was golfing, swimming, or reading, he always tried to catch as many rays as possible. He couldn’t explain why, but there was something about the sunshine that made him feel good about himself, something that made him feel healthy.
Those views quickly changed as he baked in the Devil’s Box.
“What the hell was I thinking?” he moaned. “Winter is so much better than this.”
With his uncovered forearm, Payne tried to wipe the large beads of sweat that had formed on his cheeks and forehead. Unfortunately, since his hands were shackled to a metal loop in the floor, it was impossible, requiring the flexibility of a triple-jointed circus freak.
“Snow, ice, hypothermia. That stuff sounds
so
good!”
When Payne was initially dragged across the length of the island and up the slope of the hill, he wasn’t sure what to expect. The possibility of a lynching entered his mind, but for some reason, he had a hunch that the Plantation was more about torture than death. He wanted to ask the guards who were towing him, but the four men weren’t speaking English, mumbling instead in an African dialect.
After reaching the hill’s summit, Payne was actually relieved when he saw the Devil’s Box. No guillotine, no electric chair, no gas chamber. Just a box, a simple four-foot wooden box that had been anchored to the ground. Shoot, he figured, how bad could it be?
Then they opened it.
The figure that emerged was something from a horror movie, a grotesquely deformed zombie breaking from the constraints of his wooden tomb. Haggard and obviously dehydrated, the man’s skin practically hung from his bones, like a suit that was two sizes too large. Payne wanted to turn from the scene-no sense getting a mental picture of the personal horror that was to come-but he knew it would be a mistake. He had to study the prisoner, investigate the guards, analyze the device. He needed to know what may be in store for him, if there were any loopholes in the system. It was the only way he could plan an escape.
The first thing Payne noticed was the prisoner’s size. Despite his malnutrition, the man was quite large. It took three guards to lift his massive frame from the tiny device, and even then it took a concerted effort. In fact, the prisoner was so big, Payne was amazed that the guards had been able to squeeze him into the cube to begin with. His limbs seemed too thick, too long to contort into such a confined space, but it brought Payne some optimism. He figured if they could fit the giant in there, then there should be plenty of room to maneuver.
Once hauled from the box, the victim tried to stand on his own, but it was a foolish mistake. He had been imprisoned far too long to stand unaided. Atrophy and disorientation took over, forcing him to the ground with a sickening thud, his once-proud body melting into the rocky soil that surrounded him.
The memories of the tortured man, shivering and trembling at the feet of the guards, made Payne flinch. So much so that it snapped him back to the real world.
He had been in the device for several hours, and the intense heat of the Louisiana sun was already forcing his mind to wander. And he knew things would only get worse as time wore on. The more he sweat, the more dehydration would occur. The more dehydration, the higher his body temperature. The more heat, the more illusions. And so on. It was a vicious ride, one that he desperately wanted to avoid.
“Hello!” he yelled, hoping to find a savior. “Can anybody hear me?”
But the only reply was the sound of the breeze as it coyly danced around the Devil’s Box.
Payne leaned his head against the oaken interior and stared at the bright sky above. The tiny slits of the lid’s lattice pattern gave him a limited view of the world, but he wasn’t about to complain. He figured things could be worse. He could be rotting in a freshly dug grave right about now. Still, his current situation didn’t offer much hope.
At least until he heard the sound.