Net Cross

Disclaimer: the following story is a purely fictional account. Any relationship to any real person living or dead is coincidental. The narrative contains non-consensual torture and death. It is intended for mature readers who wish to view such material, and for whom it is legal to do so. The author in no way condones or promotes such acts in real life.

Copyright © 2002 by POW. For spam prevention, an animal name has been added to the author’s e-mail address. Remove the animal name to get the actual address: POWauthor zebra at yahoo dot com. This story may be freely copied and distributed so long as it is copied in its entirety, unchanged, including the author credit information and disclaimer. Other POW stories are available at https://powauthor.wordpress.com. The author welcomes feedback.

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“I’d like to turn myself in.”

The cop at the desk of the small-town police station blinked at me. This was apparently not a sentence he heard very often. He was probably more used to bringing the local rowdies in from the town’s two bars for a night of sobering up in a cell. Well-dressed urban types making strange announcements at ten in the morning weren’t anywhere on his checklist of situations. I waited, watching the thoughts churning through his head and across his face. Finally he came up with a reply.

“Umm… for what?”

“Murder.”

That got his attention. He rocked forward in his chair, bumping his elbow on his desk as he did.

I went on. “Well, I haven’t actually killed anyone yet. At least, I don’t think so. But I will.”

This confused the poor man even more. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“Well, um, if you ain’t killed no one, then why’dja want to turn yourself in for?”

“Well, because I will. Kill someone.”

Another long pause.

“And you want me to put you in protective custody or something?”, he said. Sharp as a tack, this guy.

I replied “No, that won’t be necessary. See, the murder’s already happening. I came to turn myself in and take my punishment.”

He was utterly baffled. After a couple false starts and more “um”s and “er”s, I took pity on him.

“Look, maybe it’s better if I just show you. Do you have a computer here?”

He did. It was some kind of fourth-hand PC running a three-versions-old release of Windows. He gestured me over to it.

“And does it have Internet access?”, I asked.

“No, it don’t. You need to get to the Innernet for something?”

“Yes. I want to show you the murder that I haven’t committed, but I need Internet access to do it. Is there any place in this town we can go for that?”

He fumbled around in his porcine way, and finally stumbled on the answer I already knew.

“Well, we could try over to the library. I think they might have some Innernet computers there,” he replied.

“Great. Let’s go.” I got up.

“Hang on there, son, just a sec here…” More time slipped by while he arranged for a buddy of his to cover the station while he was gone. Time wasn’t critical, really, but I was a little impatient to see how my boy was holding up. It had been almost three hours since I left him. I wandered around while we waited for his pal to arrive, looking at the wanted posters and the bulletin board full of cards for antique shops and auto mechanics. The charming trappings of rural America.

Finally the “deputy” showed up. Head Cop and I headed for the library, three blocks away.

Inside, we found four somewhat less aged computers, two of which were capable of connecting to the net. I sat down at one and typed in a web address, and we waited while the 28.8K modem laboriously made its connection. A 90-second eternity later, images started appearing on the screen.

“Holy shit,” the cop breathed.

The display showed a muscular young man, olive-skinned, with short-cropped dark hair on his head and a dusting of matching fuzz across his chest and leading down his belly. His arms were stretched out to his sides, held in that position by lengths of rope lashing his wrists tightly to the wooden beam behind him. Other ropes fastened his ankles to the vertical support, holding his shins nearly parallel to the floor and making it impossible for him to completely straighten his legs. He was crucified, hanging from his wrists with his head drooping down onto his chest.

As we watched, the picture changed – the image was video, although the crappy connection speed only caught snapshots of the whole scene. The crucified figure raised his head, and began to lift himself up. We saw bits and pieces of the scene as the sporadic updates came – a straining leg muscle, a knotted bicep, a face locked in a rictus of agony. When the image stabilized again, he was holding himself up using his thigh muscles, trying to catch his breath through clenched teeth and give his burning arms and chest a break.

“What the hell is this?” the cop demanded. “You tortured some guy on a cross and then you done gone and put pictures of it on the Innernet? Jeez, what the hell’s wrong with you? Is this the guy you said you killed?”

“Oh, no, officer, I didn’t kill anyone.” I said. This guy just didn’t get it.

“Well, if you ain’t the one strung him up like that, who did?” he asked.

“I’m the one who strung him up, yes. But I didn’t kill him. Yet. That picture is live. Real-time.”

---

We were starting to draw a crowd. The cop swore, then stabbed the power switch on the computer and grabbed me by the arm. He led me out of the library and back to the station, leaving a crowd of puzzled onlookers behind us.

When we got there, he shoved me into one of the two cells and locked the door. I could hear him in the next room calling the state police for help on what he should do next. They obviously gave him some suggestions – the first thing he did when he hung up the phone was come in and ask me where the guy was.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”

“Oh, you sure can. Where is he?”

“No, if I tell you, you’ll go rescue him, and then I’m a liar. I told you I came here to turn myself in for murder, right? If you rescue him, then that’s a lie. An’ mah momma din’ raise no son a’hers to be a laaaahhhr.” This last in a scornful imitation of his West Virginia accent. It got the desired response – the cop’s chubby face turned beet red.

We’ll skip over the next few hours, which I spent lying on the bunk in the cell, occasionally interrupted by visits from Head Cop, then the staties. I was happy to tell anyone who asked anything they wanted to know, except the location of the victim.

“His name’s Chas – what kind of a Yuppie name is ‘Chas’, huh? He’s 23 years old. I picked him up in a gay nightclub in Georgetown, DC. I brought him to a nice private place and set him up in the basement. I’ve got a great rig down there – state of the art A/V equipment and a high-speed access link. The site is capable of streaming video to several thousand viewers at once. Oh, and I posted links on several appropriate message boards and interest groups. You’d be amazed at the number of sickos out there who want to watch this stuff – people into crucifixion, torture, death… What a world, huh?”

“Chas had been hanging like that for about three hours by the time I confessed to Officer Porky here. How’s he doing? Still holding up well, I hope?” Having not seen him in several hours, I had to assume he was still putting up a fight. They’d have lost their sense of urgency if he wasn’t.

Finally the feds arrived. I heard the noise of their chopper as it buzzed overhead and landed nearby. They were more professional than the local rubes, but I didn’t give them anything more to go on. It was mid-afternoon when they packed me up in the helicopter and we headed back to DC.

A helicopter ride! I hadn’t counted on this unexpected bit of fun. Cheerful at the turn of events, I tried to engage the two agents in conversation during the flight. “Hey, guys, you’re FBI, right? You think I could get to meet David Duchovny? This would qualify as an X-file case, wouldn’t it? Although, maybe it wouldn’t. If I’d used a St. Andrew’s cross, then it would, but this is a Roman T-cross. You guys got any cute agents working in your T-files division?” Sadly, they just weren’t interested in banter.

We arrived, and they spent half an hour with me in a dim, dingy room while we went over the same old ground again and again. At this point, I hadn’t had a look at Chas since the grainy 256-color image in the Hicktown library, and was itching for a fix. I told them this: if they set me up with a decent computer and high-speed access, I might – might – tell them where he was before it was too late. If they didn’t, I wasn’t saying another word. “Oh, and I can let you talk to him, if you want.” That did it – we left the dingy room and soon I was in a bona-fide FBI office with a comfy chair and everything.

“OK, point the browser to this address”. One of the two agents with me typed, and soon Chas appeared in all his glory. I was thrilled – he was doing better than I had expected. He was drenched in sweat, with pools of it in the hollows of his shoulders and little rivers running down his taut skin. He was in an “up” phase, standing as best he could with his weight on his bound ankles, every muscle tensed. His head was thrown back, grinding into the wood of the upright. Best of all, this system had sound! I could hear the whistle of his breath as he as he sucked air in and out of his lungs. The two agents and I watched, captivated for a minute or two.

“Jesus.” one of the agents said.

“No, Chas.” I answered.

---

He had lost all sense of time. The pain was overwhelming. There was only the endless cycle of lift, fall, lift, fall.

The last thing he could remember before this was at the bar. He didn’t think he had had that much to drink, but suddenly, the room started spinning. He got one last fuzzy look at the face of the weird guy who had bought him his last round, the guy who was trying so hard to pick him up. Then everything went black.

When he came to, he was lying face up on some kind of wooden platform. He tried to move his limbs, but discovered they were tied securely in place. Just then, the whole wooden frame started moving, tilting, lifting up into the air.

He yelped, but there was no way to get loose. His weight shifted as the frame rose, until he was completely vertical, hanging from his wrists.

The guy from the bar walked around from behind him and smiled up at him. “Hi, Chas. Just so we’re clear right up front – you’re here to die. Slowly and painfully. Feel free to beg all you want – I’d enjoy hearing you grovel, especially after the snobby way you treated me last night. But there’s no way I’m letting you down from that cross.”

Is that what the frame was? A cross? Dear God, what was happening to him?

The guy went on. “I’ve put too much time, money, and effort into setting all this up. There’s going to be thousands of people watching you suffer. I’m sure many of them are going to get their rocks off from the dance you’re about to do. I can’t disappoint them now, not after promising them all such a good show. So as you hang there, keep in mind – every move you make is for an audience. Good-bye, Chas.”

The guy left. Chas started yelling. “Hey! Come back! You can’t leave me here! Wait!” The only answer was a closing door and fading footsteps. He tried to look around the small room he was in, but the bright lights in his face made it hard to see anything else.

He started exploring the limits of his confinement. His arms were both securely lashed to the wooden cross beam. He tugged at them, but the ropes were too tight to permit him to slip free.

He suddenly became aware of a pain that he hadn’t noticed before. He looked down…

---

I was pleased at how the video looked, artistically. The lighting was perfect – Chas’s muscular body was fully illuminated without any glare, and that’s hard to do unless you’re a professional. The sound was crisp, and the image resolution was so good it was like being there. The agents began to notice some of the smaller details in the scene.

“What’s that there?” one of them asked the other. “See there, under his crotch?”

“That’s a bucket,” I replied. “It’s hanging from his balls. If you look closely, you’ll see a sheath over his dick, with a tube that leads into the bucket. Every time he pisses, it gets a little heavier.” I was proud of that little touch. “And that tube near his head? That’s so he can get as much to drink as he wants. It’s not just water, it’s got glucose and electrolytes and all that crap marathoners are always going on about. It’ll help him keep his strength up, keep him alive and kicking as long as possible. Of course, all that extra water is going to wind up in the bucket eventually, but he’s going to get awfully thirsty during his workout, and I don’t think he’ll be able to stop himself from sucking on that tit.”

Right then, Chas slowly and inexorably, like a building collapsing under its own weight, lost the strength in his thighs and sank until he was hanging from his wrists again. Clear as a bell, his raspy voice came through the speakers: “Oh, God, it hurts. Please… please…”

---

For the first few minutes, Chas was more worried about the bucket hanging from his balls than he was about being crucified. He knew that crucifixion was a method of execution, but he was a little vague on the details of how it actually worked. It seemed pretty easy – all he had to do was stand there on the ropes holding his ankles in place. As long as the water held out, all he had to worry about was starvation, and that took weeks, right? Plenty of time for someone to find him and rescue him. The ball weight, though, was going to be a problem. That bucket was going to fill up fast, especially if the drank the water.

After a few minutes went by, though, he began to have second thoughts. It had seemed like an easy task to bear his weight on his legs, but they were starting to get a little sore. The ropes wouldn’t let him straighten his legs fully, so he had to keep his muscles tensed all the time. They were starting to wear out.

He decided to give his legs a break, and pulled with his arms until he was supporting his weight that way. Piece of cake – just keep alternating between the two, and he could keep it up for days…

Now, hours later, he was exhausted. He hadn’t realized how much the constant effort would sap his strength. And he hadn’t known that it would be impossible to breathe unless he used some muscles, somewhere, to lift himself up. If he just relaxed completely and hung from his wrists, he would suffocate. There was no way to rest. He was forced to labor to keep himself alive. This was undoubtably what the weird guy had meant when he talked about the dance Chas would do.

Thinking of the weird guy reminded him of something else the guy had said: this was all being seen by thousands of people? Behind the lights, he could barely make out the lens of a camera, pointing straight at his naked, bound, suffering body. He thought about thousands of sick perverts, watching him squirm and getting off on it while he was powerless to do anything to stop it, and a scream of rage and frustration tore from his throat.

---

The agent at the keyboard turned on me. “You said we could talk to him. How?” he demanded.

I gave him a second address to type into another window. It brought up a password screen – I didn’t want just anybody to be able to chat with my guy. I told the fed to type “ChasWillDie”. Next up was a bland little window, just a plain white text box and a ‘Send’ button.

“Just type into the box, hit Enter, and the system monitoring Chas will tell him whatever you type. Be careful with your spelling, OK? The system is likely to make mispronunciations if you goof up. Don’t want to confuse the poor boy, do we?”

---

A sudden voice pulled him out of the fog of pain. It wasn’t a human voice – it sounded computer-generated, like that thing Stephen Hawking had to talk with. “Chas, can you hear me?”

“What?” he croaked. “Who are you? Help me? Please?”

There was a long delay. Chas started to get panicky – the thought of someone coming to his rescue only to disappear seconds later was too much to bear. Finally the voice returned.

“Chas, it’s going to be OK,” it said. “My name is Agent Kenfield. I’m with the FBI. We’ve caught the man who did this to you, and we’re going to get in there as soon as we can and get you down. Do you understand?”

“Please help me. I can’t feel my hands. I can’t feel them at all.”

“OK, Chas. I know you’re hurting. We’ll be there soon, understand?”

“Yeah. Hurry, OK? It hurts so bad.”

“We’ll be there as soon as we can, Chas. Hold on.”

---

The little interchange seemed to give Chas a new burst of energy. I could see the new resolve on his face as his torture changed from something he had to face for the entire rest of his future into something to be endured for just a little while longer, like a few more laps at the track or a few more lifts at the gym. He set his jaw and stoically pulled himself up for another round of breaths.

The agents tried to usher me out, but I reminded them: no watchie, no talkie. Grudgingly, they let me keep my seat.

The typist, Kenfield, kept up a steady banter with Chas, asking him to describe the room he was in, what he could see, what he could hear, etc. All the questions were designed to see if Chas could help them locate him, which, of course, he could not. What could he have seen, drugged and in the trunk of my car? But they didn’t want to let Chas know that they hadn’t a clue where to find him. Which was fine by me – his false hopes were driving him to more beautiful strugglings.

Once Chas asked if he could ask me a question. They hadn’t told him that I was watching every move he made – he assumed they were relaying messages to me. His question was “Why me? Why did you pick me to do this to?” I answered that he was the most conveniently available guy who fit my specifications for height, weight, age, and musculature. They didn’t want to tell him that, though. I guess they thought it would damage his fragile psyche to tell him that the man who caused the worst suffering he had ever endured didn’t really care a whit for him as a person, but only as a piece of meat. Instead, Kenfield told him I refused to answer.

The other agent, Bryant, worked on me while his partner chatted. He called me names (“sick bastard”, “goddamn lunatic”) and used all kinds of threats and pleas to get me to spill the location. No dice. It was kind of tedious, actually. I was trying to watch the show.

The hours wore on. Chas did the dance of agony very well. Over and over he rose up on his exhausted legs, using his tiring arm muscles to help, gasped a couple of painful breaths, then slid back down to dangle again. His face was a perfect portrait of misery. Pain was deeply etched in all his features. Nothing but a big, muscular suffering machine.

At one point Kenfield slammed his hands down on the desk and practically wept. He shouted “Damn it! I can’t stand this. We can see him, we can talk to him. Why can’t we can help him?”

He lunged across the table at me like he wanted to shake the answer out of me. Bryant stopped him. “Hey! Easy. We’ll get him. We will. But right now this guy is our only clue. You can’t beat him unconscious just yet. Just wait.”

Waiting didn’t help.

---

“Chas?”

“Chas?”

“Can you hear me, Chas?”

Chas’ consciousness returned, slowly, as from a great distance. His words came out slow and broken from his inability to take complete breaths. “Hello? Is someone. There? Please. Help.”

“Chas, it’s Agent Kenfield. Chas, I need you to tell me again what you can see from where you are. It’s very important.”

“Oh, God, it hurts!” he screamed. There was no pain where he had been. Why was this invisible person calling him away from there? All the hurt was flooding back into his tortured body.”I know it hurts, Chas. And believe me, we’re going to get there as soon as we possibly can and get you down. But Chas, I need you to tell me what you can see.”

Through the haze of pain, Chas put the pieces together. He pulled himself up, inch by agonizing inch, and shouted “You guys don’t have the slightest clue where I am, do you? You’re just messing with my head, telling me ‘yeah, yeah, we’ll be there soon’ and you won’t, will you? Because you don’t know where to go. You don’t know where I am. You don’t know a damn thing oh God I’m gonna die here.” He broke into sobs, his body sagging back down until his arms were once more fully stretched against their restraints.

“Chas? Chas? Chas, trust me, we’re trying as hard as we can to get to you. OK? Believe me. We just need you to be patient for a little while longer. Chas?”

---

“Chas?”

“Chas?”

Kenfield kept typing, but it was useless. The screen showed that poor Chas was in no condition to pay attention to him. He just hung there, lost in his suffering. Only a a little twitch in his taut abs showed that he was still breathing. A soft sound rasped from the speaker: “please… it hurts… please help… it hurts so bad…” over and over.

The two agents turned back to me once more, and seeing the look on their faces was almost as fun as watching Chas’ arms grow another inch longer: anger, hatred, and disgust at me combined with sympathy and sadness for Chas, and frustration at their own helplessness.

Kenfield tried to play the pity angle with me. “He’s dying there.” He acted like that was supposed to be news to me or something. I just looked blankly at him. Finally he turned back to the screen with a pathetic whimper. “I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe this.” He almost sounded like he was going to cry.

Bryant tried the tough cop act for a while. “You know, if that kid dies, I am going to make sure that you spend the rest of your life, and I hope it’s short, in the worst hellhole I can find for you. Tell me where he is. If we can still save his life, I’ll try to make things go easier on you. But if he dies, I’m pulling no punches.”

I pretended to consider his rather vague offer. We bantered back and forth for a while, dickering about the specifics of what my punishment for my horrible crime would be. I strung him along for a long time. All the while, we could hear little whimpers from the computer speaker: “please… please help… please…” Chas wasn’t pushing himself up very often any more. He spent most of the time hanging limply from his arms. He had started with a lot of endurance, but it looked like he was nearing his limit at last.

He wasn’t sucking from the water nipple, either. No matter. His ball bucket was completely full already. Any more liquid would have just spilled over the edge. His ball sac was a dark purple, and was stretched out at least six inches lower than where it used to hang. Even if they did get him off that cross right now, Chas would be needing prosthetic testicles and hormone injections.

Bryant and I finished dickering and came down to his final offer: I tell them where to find Chas, and he charges me with assault, kidnapping, and a bunch of other minor stuff that I really didn’t pay attention to. But no murder. Gee whiz, I could be out of jail in a mere decade!

I quit toying with him. “Nope. Sorry, no deal.”

“What?!?” he acted like he honestly couldn’t believe I was turning him down.

“See, I’ve got this incurable disease? I know it’s kind of corny, but the doctor tells me this tumor in my head will kill me inside of a month. So you know how they say ‘live every day as if it were your last’? Well, that’s what I’m doing. Living each day as if it were my last. All the stuff I missed out on when I had a job and a mortgage… boy, I gotta tell you, this sense of freedom is exhilarating. You can charge me with whatever you want. I’ll be dead long before any trial.”

Just then the door opened. It was another agent. She called Kenfield and Bryant over and they discussed something in low tones. I faintly heard the words “power grid” and called over to them. “Excuse me? Were you trying to narrow down the location by turning off the power to various areas? That’s so cute. You know, I knew that backup generator would come in handy.”

---

Agent Kenfield was staring at the screen. He kept doggedly typing into the little white box, and through the speaker came the faint computer-generated voice. “Chas, can you hear me? Chas, talk to me.” He couldn’t elicit any response from the crucified figure on the screen.

It was almost 9:30 in the morning. Chas had been hanging on his cross for a little over 24 hours. Despite Kenfield’s persistence, it was pretty clear to both agents that there was no hope of getting to him in time. In fact, it was probably already too late.

Bryant turned from the corner where he was brooding and said to me “Well, you won. You sick bastard, you won.” I didn’t answer.

More time passed, with only the tapping of Kenfield’s keys disturbing the silence. A while later, the female agent came in again.

“We’ve got another problem. One of our guys stumbled across another web site.”

A long silence.

“Another one like this one?” Kenfield asked.

“Similar,” she replied. “Not quite the same. On this one, the guy’s stretched out on a medieval rack.”

All three agents turned to me.

“Wow,” I said. “You know, in all the excitement, I completely forgot to mention him. I hooked him up right after I did Chas. The rack is motorized, set to steadily increase the pull by one inch per hour, with a sudden one-inch slipback every three hours. Let’s see, 24 hours later, that would be a total of… well, whatever.”

“You guys might not want to bring up that web page. I have a feeling that after this much time, you won’t like what you’ll see.”