Read Online Katja from the Punk Band by Simon Logan - Free Book Online Page A

expansive room the door opens onto, obviously the main work area back when the place was still a working garage. The ramps that would have once jacked the cars up so engineers could look at their undersides remain in place and a number of pale, spidery-limbed girls and boys are variously leaning and lying on them.
    Kohl ascends a metal staircase to the second floor, watching the way the Melting Man’s flesh moves hypnotically with each step.
    He thinks of little pins and screws. Of curved and L-shaped edgings. Of hexagonal mouldings. And if he just keeps thinking of these, he won’t think about why Szerynski has summoned him there and what it might mean.
    He hears the sound of chains as they approach the doorway to another workshop, of chains clanking together as if something wrapped within them is moving. He hesitates when a groan emerges from within and the Melting Man turns to him with a grin on his jiggling face. The grin says, I know you don’t want to go in there and I know you realize you have to.
    Kohl is shoved inside and the smell of spices washes over him. There are about a dozen people gathered inside, mostly milling around in small groups next to an oil drum burning cool, green flames. The room is as tall as those downstairs, and he realizes the clanking sounds are coming from a pulley system of some sort being tended to by a couple of bare-chested, tattooed men.
    Kohl is led to the other side of the shadowy room, to a medical gurney partially surrounded by a dirty plastic screen. Szerynski is naked and laid out on the table on his stomach. A woman in a tight white latex uniform stands behind him, a two-inch hook in one hand and a wad of redstained cotton in the other.
    Szerynski looks up, notices Kohl and fixes his eyes upon the other man.
    The woman in latex rubs a point on Szerynski’s back with the cotton, smearing the dark substance Kohl takes to be iodine. Then she pinches his skin between her thumb and forefinger, shoves the hook into it and it stretches the skin for a moment before popping and the hook goes straight through him.
    Szerynski barely flinches, just keeps looking directly into Kohl’s eyes.
    Then he says, “Kohl.”
    As if they’re just sitting around in his office or one of his labs. As if he’s not lying there with six hooks perforating him along either side of his spinal column.
    As if this was normal.
    Kohl tries to play along.
    “I was told you wanted to see me.”
    “Indeed.”
    Szerynski flinches a little as another hook punctures him, this time farther out toward his shoulder, where his deltoids meet his infraspinatus muscles. Little tears of blood trickle across his skin, weeping for him because he will not.
    Kohl’s fingers are entwined. He’s trying to fight back the anxiety caused by the open wounds, fresh blood, and rusted metal. He thinks he hears bugs or rats in the walls.
    Half-inch washers. Three-quarter-inch ones.
    Arrange the coils according to age, not size. How will he know how old they are? So according to their condition, then.
    No, too subjective.
    “Kohl.”
    And Kohl snaps himself out of his daydream. Szerynski is waving him to one side, the latex nurse standing behind the gurney now. Kohl steps aside and she pushes the prostrate, punctured man past and toward the gurney the tattooed men are still working on.
    The rest of them, the others gathered there, are turning now, preparing themselves for what is to come.
    Kohl’s stomach clenches.
    He goes to Szerynski’s side once more and wonders if this is some sort of twisted warning.
    “I have some information,” Szerynski tells him as he is swung around on the bed. The tattooed men pull on the chains and Kohl sees sturdy metal loops on the end. “Dracyev is onto something new. He’s cooked it up already.”
    One of the men pulls the nearest hook up toward the metal loop he holds in one hand, stretching Szerynski’s skin out several inches until it is spread thin enough that Kohl can see the blood