Breaking Point
Authors: Kit Power
Breaking
Point
Kit Power
Also by Kit Power:
GODBOMB!
Further reading by the Sinister Horror Company:
CLASS THREE – Duncan P. Bradshaw
CLASS FOUR: THOSE WHO SURVIVE – Duncan P. Bradshaw
CELEBRITY CULTURE – Duncan P. Bradshaw
PRIME DIRECTIVE - Duncan P. Bradshaw
BURNING HOUSE – Daniel Marc Chant
MALDICION – Daniel Marc Chant
MR. ROBESPIERRE – Daniel Marc Chant
BITEY BACHMAN – Kayleigh Marie Edwards
THE BAD GAME – Adam Millard
TERROR BYTE – J. R. Park
PUNCH – J.R Park
UPON WAKING – J. R. Park
MARKED – Stuart Park
THE BLACK ROOM MANUSCRIPTS VOL 1 – Various
THE BLACK ROOM MANUSCRIPTS VOL 2 – Various
Visit SinisterHorrorCompany.com for further information on these and other titles.
PRESENTS
KIT POWER
BREAKING POINT
'Lifeline' First Published in 2014 by Kit Power
'The Loving Husband and the Faithful Wife' and 'The Debt' First Published in 2014 by Black Beacon Books
'Genesis' First Published in 2014 as part of the 'At Hell's Gate 2: Origins of Evil' anthology
Copyright © Kit Power 2014
Written by Kit Power
Edited by J R Park and Daniel Marc Chant
Published by The Sinister Horror Company
Cover art by Jorge Wiles and Vincent Hunt
The right of Kit Power to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
ISBN:
978-0-9935926-7-6
dedications
FROM THE ORIGINAL PUBLICATIONS
THE LOVING HUSBAND AND THE FAITHFUL WIFE
This publication is dedicated to my very own ‘London Girl’ - my wife, Sharon. Thank you for keeping faith with me. I love you.
LIFELINE
This one’s for my mum – a woman who knows a thing or two about survival. Thanks for your love, support and belief. It means the world.
FOR THIS VOLUME
In line with the two amazing women listed above, this volume is for Carole. Your constant support, enthusiasm and positivity remain a source of inspiration and encouragement. Thank you.
Let's get this out of the way upfront, because it's important; this is a reprint. Hopefully, you're reading this via the 'look inside' feature (or just conceivably actually looking inside a physical copy, and if you are, bless you and keep you), with your hard earned cash still safely in your pocket. If you've previously bought The Loving Husband and the Faithful Wife (with short story The Debt) published by Black Beacon Books, Lifeline, which I self published in 2014, and At Hells Gate Vol. 2: Origins of Evil, firstly, congratulations on your truly excellent taste, and second, there is no new content here other than this introduction, and an afterword where I discuss, as best as I can recall, the 'process' (ha!) that lay behind the writing of these stories.
What you hold in your hand represents the definitive edition of the first three stories I sat down to write – alongside a more recent piece, which provides an interesting either bookend or intro to my novel, GodBomb! (also available from The Sinister Horror Company). All four stories have been fully revised and edited, though I suspect nobody but I will notice the tiny tweaks I've made to try and make the prose flow just a bit smoother. Any lingering issues or errors that remain are, of course, entirely my fault.
If you are coming to these stories fresh, either having read GodBomb! or for that matter out of sheer curiosity, welcome! I hope you enjoy these dark little thrill rides. I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I wrote them (truth be told, I still don't), but in re-reading them for this volume, I think there's an energy and spirit to them, as well as some interesting thematic synchronicity that, all false modestly aside, I really enjoy. I hope, most of all, that you enjoy them too.
Time to join Frank on his bicycle ride. See you on the other side… and thank you, so much, for picking this book up.
KP
CHAPTER 1
The only fucking things I’ve got going for me are that it’s not raining, and Slipknot are playing on my MP3 player. Exactly that much is right with the world.
Well, OK, also I‘m at the top of the hill. This is a good bit: it’s a straight shot down now, and traffic is quiet this time of night, so with luck I’ll be able to get right to the far end of Oakfield Estate without even having to pedal. It’s exhilarating - this speed - and I try and throw myself into it, pushing hard with the momentum, flying forward, the shitty Playmobil identikit new build houses shooting past me in a blur. A forest of optimistic ‘For Sale’ signs seeming just a little desperate as one year vacant becomes a second, a tiny breeze becoming a wind, and it doesn’t feel too bad, in fact, it feels OK. I let a grin split my face as Slipknot scream about bloody vengeance in my ear, and I fly through the night, an object in motion, alive. My head is low, bent forwards in some half-assed attempt to be aerodynamic - a neat trick on a mountain bike - so I clock the guy later than I would have if I’d been sitting up.
He’s walking out of his house, a fairly ordinary looking young man with a close cut, almost shaved haircut, no-sleeve long white vest, baggy camo trousers, door of his house open behind him. That’s the real kicker, I think later - the fact that he’d obviously just come out of his house, not like he was just loitering in the street or the underpass, somewhere where your antenna would be up, right? But homeowners? Man, what kind of danger are
they?
Plus, my mind is already turning to the simple, dubious pleasures of the immediate future; nuking my meal, picking which DVD box set to crack open…
So I look up late, and see him standing on the edge of the kerb, and I clock his smile, and it happens so quick that the reply smile is still rising on my face when
WHAM!
It’s a gigantic blow across my arms - hard enough that the bike is wrenched out from under me. There’s an initial flare of pain across my chest and upper arms as I tip backwards. It’s a sickening feeling as my centre of gravity shifts and my bike, powered by its own momentum, separates from me violently. I hit the deck pretty hard. My leather jacket cushions part of the fall, and the helmet takes care of my head but jars my neck pretty badly.
I’ve landed on my back and it knocks the wind out of me, which is unhelpful. A precious couple of seconds tick by while I try and process what just happened. My mind replaying the scene slowly: me seeing the guy, the smile, my peripheral vision picking up shoulder movements, like the guy was swinging…That’s as far as the thought gets because the business end of a baseball bat blurs towards me, moving fast enough to make a noise as it cuts through the air before landing on my lower chest with a meaty thunk.
The leather jacket saves my life right then, I think, though it’s fair to say that’s not an upside I appreciate in the moment. The pain is immediate and intense - it feels like a high voltage current has gone through my spine, and I go rigid from boots to neck. My jaw clenches; I can feel the tendons in my neck lock, like I’m trying to scream, but I have no air at all, and I just make a creaky whistling noise. I’m screaming on the inside though. The worst pain I’ve ever had in my life prior to this moment was a toothache that couldn’t be treated for fourteen hours, and at the time I remember thinking I was some hot shit for getting through that. Yeah, not so much. My torso feels like there’s a band of flaming, crushing weight where the bat hit me, and it feels like it’s still on fire, and I’m trapped under it, burning. My cheeks start to flush, and I hear blood pounding in my ears, heart surging like it’s going to explode, like when I was a kid woken up by a nightmare, and when the guy starts dragging me, it takes a second to realise that I’m not passing out or having an out of body experience or something.
He’s got one arm under each of my pits, and he’s dragging me out of the street and up the pavement. I’m not dead weight because I’m still rigid from the pain, and he’s strong, so it’s not hard work for him, but his knees are bent, so when we reach the kerb my dangling hands hit it pretty hard, because he’s moving fast.
I don’t know if there’s a good way to discover that your arms are broken, but I do know this isn’t. I feel my skin instantly coated with sweat, and a huge wave of nausea starts in my stomach before rolling up my whole body. I have about a second to worry about what’s going to happen when it reaches my head, and then it does and my vision goes gray before fading out entirely, and I’ve passed out before so I know how it feels, and right now I don’t mind.
CHAPTER 2
It’s like being underwater. Sound is distorted and… washy. To start with there’s just noise, and my brain is too scrambled to make sense of it. I become aware that the entire surface of my skin is slick with sweat and hot, like when you wake up under a heavy duvet on a summer night. My head is pounding in time with my pulse, which is also thudding in my ears. The noises are starting to unscramble - I’m detecting a rhythm, at odds with my heartbeat, and the shrieking resolves itself slowly into the sound of a guitar and a voice. My hips, arse, and legs send me a signal - I’m sitting down on a hard surface, and the message from my upper back suggests it too is propped against something flat and solid. Feeling seems to be flowing back to me from the edges, and I become aware of my own heavy, ragged breathing just as the noise starts to coalesce into a song I know that I know. It’s still too fucking loud (or my brain is still too fried) to make it out though, as I take that moment to try and slow my breathing by taking a slow, deep breath.
Fuck me that hurts.
As soon as I become aware again of my stomach, the breath flies out of me in a gasp. A million miles away, I feel tears force their way into my squeezed-shut eyes, and I feel (but cannot hear) a whimper, like a dog whine, pass my throat. I feel like there is some monstrous iron strap across my lower chest, one that has been ratcheted so tight that it has crushed the bottom of my rib cage. The pain is utterly unyielding and ferocious, and I don’t want to breathe in deeply.
I don’t want to breathe. The memory of the pain of the last inhalation is burning in my brain, and I don’t want to breathe. I’m not sure I can. Seconds tick by - at a rate of one every thousand years - and I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe. It’s the craziest thing; the habit is so utterly natural and ingrained that I keep finding myself about to anyway. It’s exactly like when you try not to cough when you have a tickly throat. Only with blinding pain. I want to breathe. I need to breathe. I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe. Round and round, seconds drip, drip, drip…
My lungs start to ache, and my head, only just clearing, begins to fade again. At that point, as I feel the edges of consciousness become slippery again, the involuntary impulse steps in (
breathe, fucker
) and I inhale, too sharply and too deeply, and a bolt of savage pain stabs my gut.
Motherfucker that hurts.
It hurts (tears in my eyes, a coppery taste in the back of my throat, oh, please, please, me, don’t cough) but I’m more awake again, not that I particularly want to be, and it occurs to me that the pain is predominantly in the bottom of my lungs. Experimentally, I draw a very slow, shallow breath from the top, trying to will my ribs not to move, my diaphragm not to engage. It still hurts; there’s a warning, a groaning, creaking (cracking?) feeling, but it’s bearable, and I’m drawing air again in small, shallow breaths. I feel like a tiny rodent exposed in sudden moonlight, or one of those fucking rabbits in Watership Down going
tharn
in the middle of the fucking road with a truck coming full bore. But I’m sucking air.
I’m still alive.
I concentrate on this feeling and, as my screwed-shut eyes slowly relax into being merely closed, the ear-splitting noise resolves itself. It’s Wolfmother, ‘Joker and the Thief,’ at a truly sickening volume. The instrumental has ended, and we’re back into the verse riff. I have time to wonder if I’ve somehow jammed up the volume on my MP3 player, but it’s clearly external in source. My player doesn’t go that loud, and I can feel the bass rumble through my mercifully undamaged legs.
OK, situation report: I can breathe, just. My stomach is fucking killing me and fuck knows what internal bleeding feels like, but this is a busted rib. Has to be. That’s why breathing hurts. What kind of a designer creates a protector for your internal organs that can fuck them up so badly when broken? Intelligent design, my entire arse. Okay, so I’m left shallow breathing like a fifteen year old virgin at his first ‘confession’. Lovely. What else? I’m sitting on the floor, leaning against a wall. My upper back is pretty straight, and my head is resting upright. My neck feels okay, but fuck if I’m moving a millimeter to test anything. The memory of my head smacking off concrete (and thank fuck for my helmet) and the following jolt… yeah, let’s not push it.
Okay, what else? Arms. Oh fuck, yeah. There’s a horrible, sick throbbing just above both elbows. The pain there is a snarling, slavering, cancerous rabid junkyard pit-bull, growling long and low and deep.
“Go ahead and try to move fucker, and I’ll eat your fucking bollocks.”
I am profoundly disinclined to disbelieve it. Nevertheless, I allow my brain to send exploratory signals, passive, down my arms. The report back doesn’t fill me with joy. Below the faultlines in my upper arms, giving off the certainty of agony at any muscular twinge, things seem undamaged. But the feeling is slippery, untrustworthy, in part because of the distraction of the pain above, but also because my hands are still, I think, gloved, and also, unless I’m completely off base, bound together. It’s hard to be certain. You try to hold your hands behind your back, with gloves on, and then fracture both arms, and see if you could be sure. But there are times when the gut knows. And fuck my luck, man, because I’m sure. Whoever was dragging me when I passed out has put me on the floor and tied my hands behind my back, and leaned me up against the wall. I have time (so, so fleetingly) to be grateful that I wasn’t conscious for that particular horror show of agony, but the moment passes almost before it arrives, because, well, fuck. There was a baseball bat, and my arms and ribs are broken, and I’m tied up, and someone has done all this to me and is now trying to deafen me with Wolfmother. Which is pretty funny, because so was I basically, if you take the long view, but still.
While my mind has taken this little journey, my still too-shallow breathing has begun to slow, which is nice. Did I read somewhere once that you only need fifteen percent of your lung capacity to keep functioning? For sure people live with only one lung, so having two firing even at one quarter capacity should be enough to keep me going, surely, as long as things don’t get too strenuous? That’s a thought I shy away from very quickly. A word you don’t want to consider too deeply with your broken arms tied behind your back is ‘strain.’
Point is, the pain has leveled out. It lies there in my arms and gut, coiled, ready to strike at the slightest provocation (and still throbbing sickly with every beat of my heart), but it is somehow, miraculously, manageable, in the moment, moment to moment. And as ‘Joker and The Thief’ gives way to ‘Colossal.’ I decide it’s time to grow a pair and open my eyes. I let my eyelids peel apart slowly, lashes stuck together loosely with sweat, and blink a few times.
The room swims into focus. Bare floorboards stretch to a plain wall rising in front of me. There’s space for a window, but has been bricked up from the inside. Recently, to judge by the clean red of the bricks and the faint smell of cement. There’s a single light source in the ceiling, artificial and bright, but fuck if I’m checking that shit out right now. The deafening noise (ha, ha) is coming from either side, and again, I’m not engaging my neck to get any more detail than that.
Besides, there’s someone in the room with me; leaning against the fresh brickwork in the non-window. He’s a little taller than me; his dark hair shaved so close he’s practically a skinhead. Eyes dark brown, almost black, hooked, boxer's nose, thin mouth, vague baby's bum chin, clean shaven. Sleeveless plain white vest shows off some muscle; more than is strictly necessary. Baggy combat trousers, camo pattern, white Adidas trainers.
Nothing, not a single thing about his appearance recommends itself to me. I’m surprised my body chemistry has room within it to feel anything other than pain, but somehow it does. The skin on my balls contracts and my mouth dries up. I am in deep, deep shit here.
My eyes travel back up to that face, those eyes, to try and take the measure. There’s intelligence and curiosity in that face, and it strikes me even capacity for humour. But I see no compassion, no empathy, and, I think, no conscience.
He raises an arm, and I make out a remote control device of some kind. He points it at me, or close to me, and I’m too stupid even to flinch until after the moment has passed and in the meantime Wolfmother suddenly dies down to, well, not a whisper, but somewhere just below background din.
A smile flicks briefly across his face.
“Hello,” he says.
CHAPTER 3
To be exact, what he says is “’Ello.” The voice that says it is smooth, just a touch higher than you might expect from such a masculine frame. It’s a London accent. North, East, fuck knows - the common one, whatever that is. Fleeting train about whether it was over compensation for that slightly feminine voice that might have led to… this.
