Although it numbed the pain, the drug did nothing to stem the blood-loss Debbie suffered. She remembered reading in a history book about a form of execution known as “Death by a thousand cuts” where the victim would be subjected to their skin being sliced over and over until the succumbed. That, she realised, was what was happening to her, although she doubted that it would take a thousand pieces of flesh carved from her prone, crucified body to finish her off!

It no longer seemed as if there were any logic or order to who was allowed to make their selection from her remaining meat, or it could be that there was some hierarchy within the village that she was not aware of and, in her current state, drugged into near-insensibility and her vulnerable young teen body going rapidly into shock, was incapable of working out. It was no long before the first pieces of meat, which had been diligently watched and turned by the crouching women to ensure that they cooked evenly without burning, were ready to eat and those who had selected them were called back to receive them. Debbie managed to focus enough to see how her meat would be served, observing with interest that it was folded onto thin wooden skewers before being handed to the recipients.

Once all the villagers, old and young alike, had taken their first cut from Debbie, the rest of Gustav’s crew were invited to partake, coming up one at a time and monitoring each other’s equipment. Then the cycle began again with the Matriarch taking up the knife once more and cutting herself a piece of thigh. The second and third rounds seemed to come in no particular order, people just cutting more meat for themselves as they desired it.

All of Debbie’s lovely rump was gone now, and in places her thighs were flayed right down to the bone. Someone even cut away a piece of her left cheek then another, a young man, encouraged her to open her mouth and pulled her tongue, gripping it between thumb and forefinger, stretching it out then slicing it as far back in her mouth as he could reach. Debbie gagged on the blood that ran down her throat. A few more minutes passed with more leg and arm meat cut before a women forced her right eye open with her fingers and pressed the tip of the knife into it before levering it out and cutting the optic nerve. Debbie felt incredibly grateful for the drug since, although she felt discomfort as her eye was plucked out and instinctively resisted, it did not hurt anywhere near as much as she knew that it should. It was only seconds after this, however, that she lost consciousness and slumped on the cross, meaning that her death would inevitably occur within minutes.

Trying to lift herself to take breaths had become harder and harder as her flesh, and the working muscles it contained, was stripped away and, her chest burning and all senses feeling as if she were submerged in boiling water, Debbie breathed her last. Since part of the fun of the tradition for the villagers was to keep their meat alive for as long as possible, they had up until then been a little careful of how much they cut from her at a time. With it confirmed, however, that she was no longer breathing, the butchery began in earnest, with her taught stomach slit open to get to the tasty organs within as well as great slabs of her belly meat cut away.

Soon her other eye was gone too, as was her other cheek as well as her lips and chin. Using the knife as a lever, villagers broke off her ribs and set them to cook with the meat still on the bone. By the time they were finished and all had eaten their fill, including Gustav and the rest of his team, Debbie’s corpse no longer resembled the pretty teenager she had been but instead appeared as some kind of grotesque, bewigged scarecrow, an effect amplified by the way her inedible viscera had been gathered up from the floor and draped around her and over the crucifix like Christmas garland!

Now that the meal was over, it was time for the next part of the ritual. The precious cooking stone was moved aside and the embers beneath it doused with water than the villagers began to collect chopped logs from the stacks between the huts, each household contributing some of their own supply, to build a pyre around the bottom of the crucifix which was then packed out with twigs, brush and dried leaves to help the fire to spread faster. By that time, it was dusk, and the fire would burn long into the night with villagers taking it in turns to watch it long after the others had gone to sleep as it was part of the ritual that it must be allowed to burn itself out or be extinguished by nature rather than by any human intervention.

Once again it was the Matriarch who was given the honour of initiating the ritual, approaching slowly, still supported by her young assistant who this time carried a burning torch. Everyone fell silent and Gustav checked his monitors to ensure that they had every angle covered as the elderly woman took the torch from the young girl, held it aloft and said some words in her own language which sounded either like a prayer or a blessing then lowered the torch and, instead of holding it to the kindling as Gustav had expected, thrust it deep into pyre.

The orange flames bloomed from within, spreading almost instantly in all directions at once, as the Matriarch stood back triumphantly, watching for a few minutes before turning and shuffling away once more towards her seat at the edge of the festivities. The dancing was even wilder this time as the villagers circled the fire which quickly rose up to engulf the entire crucifix, blackening the skeleton which hung from it as the last scraps of meat burned up and fell away. Eventually, the crucifix itself would collapse into the fire, the skeleton smashed to pieces and burned up. In the morning, the ashes would be collected up and thrown into the river and there would be no trace left of Debbie, other than her clothes and shoes that were packed away among the film crew’s kit, ready to be returned to her family, and the footage that Gustav and his team had captured of her final hour.

The film, as Gustav has hoped, became a viral sensation, leading governments around the world to bow to pressure from their citizens and sign treaties allowing the lands on which the people it depicted lived, as well as all others like them known to the outside world, to be off-limits to any kind of development except that which came from within their own culture in perpetuity. Debbie herself gained quite the following of fans, many of whom admired the sacrifice she had made to help these people whose way of life was in peril but with others simply loving the opportunity to watch a pretty, naked teen slowly cut to pieces and eaten before her remains were burned. Eighteen months after the initial filming, a big-budget Hollywood movie was released, telling her story, ensuring that her legacy and cultural impact were greater than anything she could possible have achieved otherwise, even if she had gone on living until she was a hundred years old!

For his part, Gustav’s suddenly found himself far more in demand with studios, both film and television, effectively offering him effectively blank cheques for his next project and so, wondering how he could ever top the film he had made with Debbie, he set his mind to working out what that could be!


The End… for Debbie at least!