Once again, illustration by me.
IOU
by Hardman
Behind them, two patrol cars with their lights flashing blocked one side of the street. Ahead, two more patrol cars were clearing the traffic, driving slowly down the long, gentle slope between venerable stone buildings and towers of glass and steel, forcing cars and cabs to move on, turn into side streets, or make a u-turn and head in the other direction. The senior guard looked behind him, then ahead, and raised his voice over the noise of the traffic still flowing on the other side of the street.
“Let’s get this done”.
Standing in the centre of the huddle of uniformed men, Richard Michaels was in no position to take in the view. A long, thick beam of dark wood lay across the nape of his neck and his shoulders, and his stretched arms were tightly tied to its underside and the wrist, elbow and upper arm, its weight forcing his head and shoulders down. The beam was longer than he was tall, and about six inches by four. Every one of its ninety pounds was pressing into his spine and shoulders. He could feel the roughness of the wood through the superfine wool of his $5000 suit and the best-quality cotton of his $400 shirt. He could only a few feet in front of him and was not even sure which way he was facing until two of the guards turned him 90 degrees and shoved him in the back to get him moving. The party of six then moved slowly down the cleared side of the street – the shackles on Michaels ankles clanking as he shuffled forward.
He kept his eyes on his hand-made leather shoes scraping on the road. He would not have looked up even if there was no beam pressing his head and shoulders down. He knew that if he did there would be faces he would recognise and that would recognize him - ex-friends, ex-colleagues at the firm, rivals from other firms. He could sense them there, pausing on the broad sidewalk to watch him shuffling towards his fate, or turning away to pretend they did not know him. He could hear their voices through the noise of the traffic. He knew some of them were standing on the sidewalk, looking, pointing, frowning, laughing, cursing, as he moved slowly and painfully by. They would read the large sign hanging from the loop of rope around his neck. “$200 M FRAUD” it said in large red letters.
He shuffled across the white markings for crossroads, over tyre marks, patches of oil smeared on the road, scraps of paper, empty food containers blowing across his path in the cross-breeze. He was breathing hard from the effort of carrying more than half his own weight on his back, feeling the splinters in the wood grind into his back and neck. Every now and then one of the guards shoved him in the back and he would stagger forward, straining his arms as he struggled to regain his balance. He was sure that, if he fell, the beam would snap his spine or crush his head like a melon.
He dragged his manacled feet on and on, the white lines in the middle of the street on his left, the sidewalk somewhere on his right. He was sweating heavily now. He could feel it streaming down the hollow of his back and soaking his shirt and even his suit. It trickled into his eyes, making them sting and redden, and he could neither wipe the sweat away nor shake his head to flick it off. Half blind and tiring badly, he staggered on, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, telling himself that this would ordeal would come to an end – and trying to put out of his mind what would happen next.
The road seemed to get longer with every step. He could not look up to see where they were. He could only guess from how many cross-roads they had passed – four, he thought, or was it five? That would take place them in the second-to-last block of the financial district, getting close to the invisible barrier where the smart part of town stopped and the poorer districts began – not so much poor as bohemian, filled with people who dressed funny and had no real jobs, no net wealth to speak of, people who would hate him for what he was and what he represented. If that’s where they were taking him, his life would be an even worse hell for the next five hours.
Another hundred yards and his right knee buckled. He stumbled and was saved from falling only by the guards grabbing hold of the ends of the heavy beam and holding him up. They slapped his head and his back and cursed him, yelling at him to stand up straight, to be a man and not a girl. Eventually, he straightened and staggered on. The weight bearing down on his upper back and shoulders was unbearable. His knees had turned to jelly, threatening to fold under him each time he took a step. And in the middle of the sweat and pain, he heard a guard’s voice: “We’re here, shit-face”.
They pushed and shoved him to the right, and he staggered forward until the edge of the sidewalk came into view. He sank to his knees, feeling the small stones and grit dig deep into his skin through the suit pants. He wondered if it would be better to topple forward and let the beam break his spine or smash his skull, but the guards made sure that didn’t happen, slashing the ropes that tied his arms to the beam, lifting the wood off his back and shoulders. He squealed as the blood rushed back into his arms, fell forward onto his hands, feeling the heat of the road surface through his palms.
Two guards pulled him to his feet, hauled him bodily up onto the sidewalk, his feet dragging behind him, his precious shoes scraping on the ground. To his left was one of those concrete troughs placed there by some optimist for a street beautification scheme, but never used except as an unofficial garbage can. Now it had another use. It had been filled with concrete and gravel and they had planted in it, not shrubs or flowers, but a vertical beam of wood like the one he had just hauled from the top of the street – only longer. It rose seven feet above the surface of the trough and the top six inches had been pared away into a peg. Two of the guards were standing up in the trough, lowering the beam he had carried onto the peg, making a T-shape.
The two guards holding him dragged him twenty feet along the sidewalk until they got to the trough. The guards standing up there reached down and grabbed his arms. They pulled and the other two pushed, heaving him up until he was standing unsteadily two or three feet above the sidewalk, facing away from the street, his back to the upright beam. People were walking past or stopping to watch, people in t-shirts and shorts or jeans, grinning, staring, pointing. The guards took the FRAUD sign off and began to strip him, dragging off his suit jacket roughly and tossing it onto the sidewalk, bending to pull his shoes off and then his socks, standing again to drag the knot of his tie down and slip the expensive length of silk over his head. They popped the buttons of his shirt and ripped it off, then undid his pants and shucked them down, slipping them over his heels and tossing them onto the growing pile of expensive clothes below.
Rough hands grabbed his wrists and lifted his arms until the back of his wrists were level with the crossbeam. Thick white roles were produced and one of the guards tied his left wrist hard against the beam, and then the right. Richard Michaels was fit but not muscular, medium height, pale skin, not deep-chested but with pecs that were well-defined, a hint of abs under the thick treasure trail that led down under his briefs, strong legs and butt. Women giggled, men stared, a few had something to say – variations on how the mighty had fallen, laced with profanities. One of the guards grinned at him, elbowed the other guard. They both laughed and the first one crouched and slowly slid the young man’s dark briefs down to his knees, the helmeted head and veined shaft of his medium-sized cut cock springing out, then his balls, clutched tight against his pelvis. Then the guards jumped down and joined the others, standing, looking up at their handiwork. The naked man’s face was bright red. He was staring at his reflection in the window of the nearest building, at the image of his own naked body, spread-eagled on a cross on a city sidewalk. One of the guards crouched to chalk something on the front of the trough and when he had finished, most of the people standing around looked at their watches and some drifted away.
For the next 30 minutes or so, he became a street attraction, passers-by bringing their friends, people coming out of stores and offices to take a look and the naked man with his underwear around his knees, his gear hanging out for all to see and comment on. A few of the bolder voyeurs came to close, and were chased away by the guards – for now.
Michaels could feel the cross-breeze waft between his bare legs, through his pubic hair, and it all felt wrong. He had stopped blushing but could not bring himself to make eye contact with the people swirling around him. A guy with a dyed Mohawk had stopped to look and laugh. Two women in jeans and t-shirts stopped to taunt him, some 1960s bullshit about capitalist pigs. One of them slipped behind the trough and managed to grab a handful of his bare ass before the guards chased her away. Men in suits came down the block to look from a more discreet distance, and he knew some of the faces and voices.
He was wondering how long this could go on when the guards on the sidewalk gathered together. Suddenly the crowd swelled, all along the sidewalk to his right and left, people crowding the windows of the office in front of him, people standing around the corner, on the edges of the street, even behind him. There was a buzz of anticipation, even excitement, the predatory sound of excited voices. The guards below him looked at their wristwatches again, nodded to one another, and two of them clambered up onto the trough.
There was a ripple of applause and a ragged cheer. Michaels began to breathe more rapidly, his chest rising and falling, flat belly clenching hard. Until now he had pushed the thought of the end game out of his mind, but now there was a uniformed man standing beside him holding a huge hammer and a long, long gleaming nail. Michaels swallowed, and gasped making a strange muffled squeak in the back of his throat. He turned his head to the left, away from the guard forcing his hand open and strapping it in that position, fingers spread, against the rough wood. He turned away from his reflection in the office window in front of him.
He had convinced himself that this would not hurt as much as he feared and breathed out slowly, determined not to scream and yell. That all changed when he felt the tip of the nail pressed into the center of his palm, breaking the skin. He winced, bit his lip, feeling his balls clench and try to crawl inside him, his dick shrinking back into his pelvis in sympathy. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the backswing of the guard’s arm and then heard a dull metallic sound. A fraction of a second later, a tidal wave of pain surged up his arm and he heard himself gasp in surprise and then cry out. There were echoing shouts and jeers from the crowd and the hammer blows kept on falling, each one sending another bolt of agony up his arm. He threw his head back, mouth open, strings of spit between his lips, his eyes bulging, strangled grunts issuing from his throat, as the blows fell and fell. And no sooner had it stopped than it began again in his other hand, the metal spike invading his flesh and tearing through the back of his hand to sink into the wood. His whole body shuddered as he tried to hold it all in, but as the nail sank deeper into the beam, the agony overwhelmed him and he screamed and screamed, the crowd mocking him by yelling along with him, then laughing and cheering.
Suddenly his nakedness did not matter, nor the crowd jeering at him as he writhed from the agony surging through his body. All he knew now was the unbearable throbbing in his hands, deep pulses of pain that invaded every part of his body, and the terrible knowledge that he was now nailed to the beam like a carcass, helpless, friendless and alone in the middle of the cheering, jeering crowd. He had closed his eyes against the rows of hostile faces, trying to suppress the great sobs that racked him, desperate to master the pain, to deny the baying crowd its entertainment. He barely felt the guards raise his right leg and tie his ankle tight to the upright, but when they pulled his left foot off the ground, his body slumped and the movement jerked at the nails through his palms, sending fresh waves of pain through his body, making him groan and whimper. He lashed out with his free leg but they were ready for him, one guard ducking away while the other darted in and got an iron grip on his victim’s balls that took the wind out of the struggling man. Michaels shrieked as the big hand squeezed hard, stopped struggling, hung there helplessly as the second guard tied the other ankle hard against the upright. They slipped his briefs right down to his ankles, holding his knees apart for a minute or so, pointing at his cock and balls, grinning and posing for the cheering crowd, then hanging the sign that announced his crime around his neck once more.
When they jumped down to take up position on the sidewalk, standing at ease at the base of the trough, he was alone up there on his cross, raised three feet above the heads of the pointing, laughing crowd, nailed and naked, his body squirming and twitching as the pain attacked him from every direction, the deep throbbing in his hands now joined by the growing pain in his arms and shoulders as his body dragged on his elbows and shoulder joints and pulled at his upper chest, shoving his rib cage forward, distorting the shape of his torso. In a few minutes the terrible dragging sensation grew worse than the pain in his hands, and instinctively he used his strong legs and butt to heave his body upwards a few inches, taking some of the strain off his shoulders. He held himself up there as long as he could, until he felt the long muscles in his thighs begin to tremble, and he eased himself down again, groaning as the weight came back on his arms and shoulders.
He repeated the steps of this barbaric dance over and over, hanging with his full weight dragging on his arms until the pain in his joints and the intense ache in his arms and shoulders became unbearable, then heaving himself up with his legs and butt muscles until they too began to shudder from the effort and he slumped once more with a groan of utter despair. He lost track of time as the pain and the struggle consumed all of his energy. He lost interest in who might be standing on the street watching him suffer, aware only of blurred figures passing by, stopping to stare and point, or laugh or taunt him. His whole world had shrunk to the white heat pain of the nails through his hands and the relentless drag of his own weight trying to pull his arms and shoulders apart. His chest muscles began to cramp after the first hour and the breath hissed out of him at the pain they caused. An hour later and his legs joined in, his calf muscles clenching into tight knots that made him scream and beg them to take him down, over and over. The guards at his feet did not even turn to look. This was par for the course, a day’s work, a script they were accustomed to. At some point in the next hour - 90 minutes tops - he would ask them to finish him off and stop the pain. And they would ignore him. When the screaming got irritating, they would think about supporting his upper arms with straps, but only when his shoulders were on the point of dislocating.
All of these things happened in their time, the young man’s screams bringing people out of the office in front of them to ask if they could keep the noise down, glancing up at the naked young man writhing and roaring with pain, hurrying back to their comfortable workplace. As the day dragged on, some of the bolder passers-by asked if they could climb up onto the trough and have their photographs taken next to the crucified man. The guards were used to this too, and helped people to clamber up and pose next to the cross, watching as they gave a thumbs-up sign for the camera, or leaned against the man’s body, or even grinned and pointed at his cock and balls. One of them had to jump down quickly, breathless and laughing, when the crucified man let out a stream of pungent piss.
The naked man showed no sign that he even knew they were there. He was beyond shame at his nakedness in this bustling street, beyond humiliation at this very public punishment. All he knew was agony, pain he never imagined was possible that racked his body and flooded his brain. The only conscious impulse left to him was the desperate need to heave himself upwards to gain a few seconds relief for his tortured arms and shoulders. And when he tried, the camps came back, stronger than ever. He screamed and yelled as the muscles clenched and knotted, screamed until he had no energy left to cry out, his mouth open in a silent, spit-flecked scream.
Only when he began to convulse did the guards scramble up onto the trough, waiting until the spasms grew less violent before looping the supporting straps under his upper arms, taking some of the terrible strain off his arms and shoulders. The guards began to look at their wristwatches after that, looking up at the naked body hanging up there, slumped and still as death, then at their watches again. The cross had done its work. The young man’s face was gray, his eyes dull, his body unresponsive save for a few pathetic attempts to push himself up. Occasionally the cramps would be so strong that his torso and hips twisted and squirmed, making his cock bounce on his thighs, strange squeaks and groans issuing from his parched mouth and throat.
Time passed slowly, but it passed, and as the shadows on the street lengthened a crowd gathered again to watch the final act, the cutting of the ropes around his ankles, the screech of the nails as they were yanked out, the wrist ropes cut, the lowering of the pale, limp body down to street level, the gurney, the unmarked ambulance driving away, and the guards taking down the crossbar and cleaning up the mess. They could never be sure when it would be needed again. maybe tomorrow, maybe next month - not if, but when.
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