Impressions on Iron Gates Chapter Twenty-Eight
Impressions on Iron Gates Chapter Twenty-Eight
Terror-Driven Live Dismemberment and Disfiguring Termination
Each of the chapters in Iron Gates have two sides to them, from one classification analysis. There are the stated facts, the descriptions, the aura of military knowledge, of a practical bend to the point of utilitarian cruelty, made crueler still by cynicism and predatorial incitation. Beyond that there is the shock factor, which can be either explicitly fleshed out or induced in the style of “surface tension”.
In the case of chapter twenty-eight, the story, or rather the excuse to portray gruesome acts of cruelty, which also reveal the things that modern armies have done, especially those of the victors and conquerors of the planet we have come to know as the “Allies”, is that of an intelligence extracting operation from captured enemy scouts. The scouts are scraggly resisters, outnumbered, out-muscled, and out-gunned.
The real meat and bones, the only point of the chapter, in truth, is to take energy from you, dear reader, to feed on it, to munch on it, as you crumble, as you feel the terror, or the anger, or the fear, whatever it is, and you feed it to the book, the monstrosity that is this book.
After much technical detail, technical to the point someone who is at least conversant in terms and operations of military personnel, one of the interrogated enemy scouts is tied to a post in full view of but some distance away from his fellows. Then, a shock trooper high on drugs, body filled with tattoos of violence, child rape, and whatever other psychotic American dream, saws off a limb, then another, then the rest.
The tortured man is kept alive and conscious by a gag with chemicals inserted into his mouth, and by the sockets where the limbs used to be being cauterized with torch fire, an extremely painful procedure that nonetheless seals the wounds.
To finish the operation, another shock trooper moves in and empties clip after clip upon the trunk and head of the scout, still tied to the post, while the other two watch in wailing desperation. We are not told whether these two reveal any important information, it is not important, the whole setup is an excuse for scenes of torture and desperation.