Paranoia ✓

XXVI: Joe - Terror Towns (Part 2)

Joe had to give Khalif credit—the man could take a beating. But every man is only elastic up until a certain point. Sooner or later Khalif would break.

He didn't break, however, when he had water saturated with chili pepper poured down his nose. That should've been enough to make him admit to anything. His inner brain would be on fire, his throat would swell making it difficult to breathe, and his stomach would roar with acid building up towards his esophagus causing the worse heartburn a person could ever experience. But Khalif held out.

He didn't break when Joe took a knife to the man's foot and started to peel off its soles, one of the most sensitive parts of the body. The slightest prick should've had him screaming for mercy, but Khalif was built to withstand such methods of information gathering. This only made Joe more eager to find out what was going on. What secret was worth keeping after this?

He didn't break when he borrowed a technique from the ghoul that he killed in the cell earlier and added a little spice of Joe to it. He took some pliers and tore off Khalif's fingernails. The man would cry out in pain had he not lost his voice from doing so already. As for the spice of Joe, Joe managed to find a couple of nails to jab in the soft tissue spots that were once protected by Khalif's fingernails. But Khalif was like a machine. His loyalty was prestigious, and Joe admired it so much that he aspired to see that loyalty shattered to pieces.

So now he sought to unveil his fourth tactic. Now this one screams barbaric (as if the others didn't already), but he had no choice but to resort to this crazy method. He got the idea from watching a travel show when he was younger. The host of the show toured the world and ate some weird foods from different locales. He had tried everything from dog intestines to goat testicles. But one thing that stuck out was when the host ate a pair of pig ears. Out of all the things he tried on that show, the man thought the pig ears tasted the worse. They were still filled with earwax from the pig's ear, and it wasn't properly cooked. Either way it was gross.

So if cooked pig ears taste bad, imagine what raw human ears would taste like. Now for the torture part, what if those human ears were your human ears?

Joe kneeled down before Khalif and gave him one last chance to redeem himself. "Listen to me—you hear that? It's the sound of my voice. This will be the last thing you'll ever hear unless you tell me where you got the supplies to make that device, what the hell the device does, and who is in league with your conspiracy to take out innocent American lives?"

Khalif shook his head and heaved out in a hoarse whisper. "Kill—me."

"Oh, not until I get what I want." Joe pulled out a sharp blade and motioned towards Khalif. Within seconds Joe had sawed through Khalif's ear and the room rang with an awkward, piercing silence. Khalif seemed to be losing consciousness and blood was pouring from the hole where his ear used to be.

"That's why I brought this baby," Joe reached for a blowtorch. Khalif stood lying against a metal table and Joe turned on the blowtorch and applied the heat towards the open wound. The heat cauterized the area, but not without such excruciating pain on Khalif's end. The pain was enough to black him out for hours.

Joe, at first, was mocking Khalif by talking into his severed ear. "Can you hear me now?" However, Joe had no more time for this, so he decided not to opt for the other ear, considering he'll need Khalif to at least hear him when he continued asking him questions later on.

But, whenever Khalif woke up, he would find himself alone in a jail cell— starving—with nothing to eat but a plate of odd food resting on the floor with a sign next to it saying: Bon Appétit.