by Daniel James
“I’ll hold him down for you.”
Schecter hopped to his feet double-time, the promise of correcting their course adding some much-needed vigor to his morale.
“Thurman is bugging out, desperate to relive his glory days. I’ll go pinpoint Wyndorf’s GPS tracker and get an idea of the terrain. Move it, we roll out in fifteen,” Garland ordered.
Schecter slid down the ladder like his palms were greased. Garland held on a moment longer, thinking about the all the itchy, manic chaff sequestered below, waiting to meet his sickle.
Feeding Time
Alfred stood in a large study that was slowly falling into disrepair. It wasn’t a room of quiet respite. It was dedicated to his surmounted terror. He was surrounded by it at every turn.
Sus scrofa domesticus.
Pig.
He inhaled another steadying breath, a man tensing before the plunge into icy water. Pushing himself above his fear. The walls of the gloomy study held paintings of pigs rolling about in each other’s company, portraits of their wide, eternally hungry and simple faces. Small ornamental statues and models of the dirty things littered the dusty, empty bookshelves, the tables and windowsills. There was even a large stuffed boar mounted over the rough-hewn stone hearth, the log fire creating a malevolent blaze in its dead eyes.
Jensen puffed out his chest, proud but melancholic, rejoicing in his victory over the pig icons’ diminishing power. He walked amongst the artful sty, lit by the blaze’s hellish light, toward the windows, and saw the electric eyes of a van’s lights sweep around the courtyard of the decrepit private estate. He watched the dark figures pile out of the van below, only to look through them, becoming entranced by his pale deformity in the cool glass. His gaze was only interrupted by a polite and firm knock at the open door. Alfred beckoned Colquitt into the fire-lit study.
Colquitt entered halfway into the den of pig propitiation, his splendidly tailored double-breasted navy suit and coal black tie giving him an air of efficiency, a Swiss watch made flesh. “We have them, sir.”
“Isaac Reid and Curtis Roach.” Jensen spoke to his reflection, closing his eyes, his voice expressing something like wish fulfilment.
“We found the bonus prize during the collection. I think your stars must have aligned.” Colquitt watched as relief deflated the mangled surgeon, a man finally sighting the terminal station of a long and challenging pilgrimage.
Jensen silently turned toward Colquitt, unable to find the words, the crackle of embers and flaming wood filling the quiet. “You … found Michael Wyndorf?”
“He and Reid were beating the shit out of each other. Got there in the nick of time.” Blood trickled down from Colquitt’s saturated cuff, pattering on the old wooden floor, the firelight illuminating the perspiration on his face. Briefly he bared his teeth in a throb of pain.
“What happened?” Jensen glanced at the wound.
“Wyndorf had a friend with him, if you can believe that?” Colquitt clenched his jaw in fury at the huge son of a bitch who had managed to stick him and shoot his way out of there. “He won’t be a problem, though.”
Jensen drifted across the room toward his hired gun. “Any other complications? Police?”
“No police. I lost four men, though.”
“Their shares can be divvied up amongst the rest of you.” The surgeon paid no mind to Colquitt’s loss. They were mercenaries, after all. “Let me check the damage.”
Colquitt took half a step back. “That won’t be necessary, sir. I can take care of it. I’ll have one of my men prepare your other guests. We’ll be at the pen when you’re ready.” Colquitt faded into the shadows of the large landing.
“Thank you, Mr. Colquitt.” The doctor’s voice was stricken with a surge of emotion as he battled for composure. Dr. Velez had been wrong: he was open to happiness, but their definitions were night and day in comparison. He buttoned up his winter coat and replaced his armor of scarf and hat.
“Wyndorf … ’ Dark ecstasy leaked through the spongy folds of his brain. “Finally … the beginning of my end.”
Isaac felt the damp chill of the earth channelling through his kneecaps, making them ache, as if filthy ice shards were crystallising within the bone. His hands were bound tightly behind his back. The sack was torn from his head. His eyes exchanged one dark world for another. After a few seconds his eyes adjusted. Two other figures, similarly bound, were lined up in his row. Their bags were ripped off, too.
Three pig-masked lackeys stood quietly before them in the dark field, cattle prods at the ready. Behind them was a structure, a huge tunnel, looking like a monstrous worm that had broken halfway through the surface of the soil to sleep under the starless sky. The stench of undisturbed nature and the odiousness of aged, lingering animal shit choked him. From somewhere in that large structure emanated a faint, languid symphony of honks and oinks. The sound made Isaac shrivel inside.
It was the sound of avarice and hunger.
Isaac and Roach exchanged a troubled look, relieved to see each other alive, yet knowing the clock was rapidly running out. A fourth man, wounded but still clearly dangerous, stepped before them. Fortyish, black, bald, clean-shaven with mirthless eyes. Isaac recognised him from the Audi outside Mateo’s.
“You the wolf?” Roach asked the stranger.
“He works for Alfred Jensen,” Isaac answered.
“Jensen? That faggot still alive?” Wyndorf chuckled with cruel astonishment. His lenses had been lost during his abduction, and strands of his otter-slick hair had come loose, hanging into his eyes. “I’m bettin’ he’s camera-shy these days. So what’s your deal?” Wyndorf thought he was in the market and was ready to haggle. “This personal? Business? What?”
“Bit of both. Business primarily, but I just lost four men back there, so I’m taking that personally,” the pack leader answered, his voice deep enough to send tremors down their spines. “And the name’s Colquitt. I feel like we can now dispense with the mysteries.”
“Where are we?” Roach asked. He could make out a few barns and a creepy old farmhouse.
“Lockport. A former family-owned business Jensen was able to snatch up for a steal. Almost an hour from the city. So don’t expect any helpful strangers stumbling by to help.”
“Will we be seeing Jensen, or is this a quick and neat shallow-grave type of situation?” Isaac asked.
“He’ll be here shortly.” Colquitt winced momentarily, a splinter in his professional façade, a steady trickle of dark blood dripping from his temporary patch-up job.
“Look here, Colquitt, whatever burger-face is paying you, I’ll raise it. I got a solid connection with the biggest meth distribution network on the entire east coast. If you’re smart, you’ll take me up on what’s a very generous deal, and all I’ll ask in return is that you allow me to personally gut this bitch before we split.” His malevolent eyes sliced across Isaac.
Isaac wanted to tackle Wyndorf and tear his throat out with his teeth. He might not get another chance. But Colquitt and his two-man deterrent standing by would never stand for it.
Colquitt seemed to find the negotiation amusing. “My men and I are professionals; we do our research. Your cousin Cameron Beech and his associates can’t stomach you from what we’ve been able to piece together. Why else would a family member be working as some disposable low-level mutt instead of having a seat at the grown-ups’ table? You think he’s loyal enough to buy me and my men just to spare a fuck-up liability like you?”
Wyndorf took it with good grace. “Ah, can’t blame a guy for trying. Remember one thing for me, though: I offered you a way out of this. You see, I have new friends now. That guy who ruined your suit? He’s one of them.”
Colquitt seemed to pay no mind to the knife wound leaking in his shoulder. “A charming man like you? I’m sure you have lots of friends.”
“What the fuck were you thinking back there?” Roach said reprovingly, catching Isaac unawares. “Outside Monahan’s,” he clarified. “Twice in
one day you act like an impulsive dog chasing the mailman. It’s not you. Not who you were. You got a death wish?”
Isaac craned his neck to the left to look at him, but he couldn’t find a worthy answer. His attention kept slipping to Wyndorf, kneeling beside Roach.
“Do you?”
“Doesn’t matter. Looks like we would have wound up here one way or another,” Isaac answered.
“Death wish?” Wyndorf almost choked on his own words. “In case I was being too subtle back there, asshole, I’d be happy to kill you.”
To hell with the guards. Isaac went for it, but with hands bound by flexicuffs, his wrath was checked. He landed a kick on Wyndorf’s jaw, then collapsed on top of him. They both writhed and flapped about like gasping fish in six-pack holders, all expended effort and little else, but Isaac managed to land a nasty headbutt, chipping Wyndorf’s left incisor before two square-shouldered pigs separated them with their own occasional punch or kick. Roach shouted at them to leave Isaac alone, receiving a stiff jab for his trouble, almost doubling him over backward.
Wyndorf smiled through bloody teeth at Isaac. “I bet your dead wife hits harder than that.”
Isaac’s facial muscles contorted and he became fluent in a language of violent prehistoric beasts, one step away from foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.
Colquitt received a text message, neatly slipped his phone back in his pocket. “Okay, get them up.”
The armed pigs hauled their three prisoners to their feet, keeping enough distance between them to nix any further bright ideas with a quick cattle prod shock. Isaac trudged behind Colquitt, their death march leading them across the moon-clouded field to the huge pen. The excited scoffs and snorts grew steadily in volume the closer they got.
At the maw of the tunnel, Colquitt flicked a switch on the wall. A series of flickering strip lights revealed a flight of metal steps leading up to an elevated bridge that extended the entire length of the tunnel. The walkway was suspended over a large walled-in enclosure, at the heart of which came the excited noises of hunger. In the light, the dark pig masks became livor mortis red and rotten apple green. Isaac knew very shortly he, like Roach and Wyndorf, would be nothing more than another dead pig.
Colquitt climbed the steps, each clang like a spoon banging against a pan. Isaac was pushed forth. The dark beneath the bridge seemed hungry. Colquitt stopped the procession in the middle of the walkway. Walking toward them from the opposite end was a beaten and dishevelled old man, wearing nothing but his white briefs, another pig-man prodding him on toward the submissive gathering.
Robert Ludlow: bruised but alive.
A few paces behind Ludlow’s guard was another figure, taking deep, soothing breaths, moving from electric light to brief shadow, to light to shadow. Isaac knew who he was, but couldn’t recognise him at first glance, at least not until the figure removed his flat cap and scarf. Alfred Jensen’s visage was enrapturing, so much worse without all the blood to mask the finer details of Wyndorf’s handiwork. A bad slasher movie come to life. Isaac side-eyed Roach and noticed a similar look of awe and shame on his face. Wyndorf cackled in disbelief.
Through swollen raccoon eyes Ludlow stared at Roach and Isaac with a combination of paternal support and sorrow. “Curt, Isaac, you boys okay?”
Colquitt kicked Ludlow in the back of his bare knee, dropping him painfully into the bridge’s metal grating. Colquitt and his men, and Jensen, their director in all this, made a looming cluster about him.
“Jensen,” Ludlow whispered, swollen lips puffed up like a squashed rosebud. “Jensen, you don’t need Isaac or Curt. I told you, it was my plan.” His venomous gaze tried to strike down the other man, recognising him as Wyndorf. “This cocksucker, though—I know you’re going to have plans for this sick sonuvabitch. Me and him,” he beseeched, “we’re the only two you need. Let the others go.”
Jensen stepped closer, the electric light and shadows making interesting and atrocious peaks and troughs in his redesigned face. Ludlow’s lamentations carried on for several more moments until Colquitt kicked him in the stomach.
“You have the gall to beg, and make demands of me?” Jensen’s voice was empty, his inflections and cadences left far behind in his coma. “The four of you tear my fucking heart out and now expect lenience? Mercy?”
Ludlow got his coughing under control. “I told you, it was me and that cocksucker Wyndorf who’re responsible. Isaac and Curt tried to stop him. They tried to stop me, too. Tried to talk me out of ordering it. I didn’t listen. I refused to. I couldn’t sit there as you left my Jeanie to die.”
Jensen nodded. “Of course, these two just wanted to kidnap my wife and daughter. Not that big of a deal, I suppose. And what then? Kill them after I’d served my purpose? Dump them in the lake?”
“No! Never! They would have been safe. I would have released them and turned myself in. I just needed to see that Janine was okay.” Tears ran freely down Ludlow’s bruised palette of a face.
“You really are just a bunch of misunderstood saints, aren’t you?”
“None of this would have happened if you weren’t such an egotistical piece of shit,” Isaac spoke up. “Your precious surgical record is more important to you dick-measuring assholes than a patient’s life. You’re just as much of a fucking murderer as this cunt.” He tilted his head and spat at Wyndorf, trying to dive at him again, once more blocked by quick, brutish hands.
“You dare compare me to him? I didn’t make the system what it is! I only worked within it. There shouldn’t be ratings. Patients shouldn’t have access to our records. Insurance companies shouldn’t be keeping their greedy little eyes on our successes and failures. If you had a problem with that, then you should have taken it to the medical board. Not sent your barbarians to come and pay me and my family a visit one night!” Jensen screamed, some life returning to his dead, slumbering voice.
Ludlow stayed quiet, hunched over in defeat, his old anger spent. He couldn’t argue with Jensen. Too many years spent in doubt and contempt for what he’d set into motion. He thought about their shared grief and emptiness, and tried to find the humanity in the face of a man who had had his humanity stripped away from him.
Jensen squatted down before Wyndorf, examining him like he was a bug. “I only have vague flashes of that night. One thing I am keenly aware of is that this”—his fingers caressed his ruined face almost proudly—“was only superficial. Hard to believe, I know. Sutures had to be applied to the incisions in the musculature, iodine spread across the expansive wound edges to prevent infection. A drape had to be taped to my face to keep the skin aligned and sterile.” His voice took on the tone of a medical lecturer as he used his hand to mimic the procedure in question. “I declined reconstructive surgery … much to the chagrin of friends and colleagues. It felt wrong somehow, like I was trying to forget what happened. How could I?” His lips peeled back to show white teeth. “You see, the blow to my head was considerably worse than this skin-deep horror. You know, there are reports of some people awakening from comas telling of endless dreams they lived through. It all depends on which region of the brain suffers the trauma. For six years I was chased, and mauled, by stinking, squealing, laughing pigs. Feeling an endless dread as my wife and daughter screamed … cried … died somewhere in that haze. Over … and over … and over again. Always out of my reach. Six years. Six years of porcine dreams.”
Wyndorf locked eyes with his long-suffering victim. “Well, you look great.”
Isaac expected Jensen or Colquitt to lunge at this jester and inflict some much-deserved pain, but the room was still. Instead, Jensen stared at Wyndorf for what must have been fifteen seconds, until Wyndorf started to get angry at the silent inspection.
Jensen, not remotely intimidated by Wyndorf’s unpredictable temperament, grew bored. He paused a moment to search for the fear in Ludlow’s blackened eyes. The swine noises had grown deeper in pitch, suggesting animals larger than Isaac had at first assumed. The enclosure beneath th
eir feet seemed to mock and shun the strip lighting, swallowing it, hors d’oeuvres before the main course.
Jensen took a few steps over to a small, wheeled surgical tray positioned next to an opening in the railing. The tray held some type of bulky tool, looking like an alien hairdryer with a lime green handle and dark gray barrel. The trigger cinched it. The trigger, and the cardboard box with STUNNER LOADS and .25 CALIBER printed along the side of it. It was no child’s toy or grooming product.
Jensen picked up the penetrating captive bolt gun, emotionless in the face of his big moment, his power fantasy subdued to nothing more than cold, empty method. He stared at Ludlow, watching the former king of thieves sway through exhaustion and head trauma on the edge of the drop-off, Colquitt’s hand the only thing steadying him.
Ludlow sighed, his voice filled with weary resignation. “So this is your courtroom? Your method of balancing the scales? I can guarantee you this won’t bring the peace you’re searching for. It won’t make sense of all the agony and the emptiness.” Head bowed, his toes over the edge, he stared down at the roiling murk. “This isn’t the answer, but I’m ready to prove that point for you. Do what you must to me and Wyndorf, but please let the others go. They can be better men.”
“Fuck you!” Wyndorf launched into a short-lived tirade toward Ludlow, bowing at the knees as a pig guard’s thick trotter slammed into his right kidney.
Isaac waded about, lost and directionless in the blind, violent rage he harbored for Wyndorf, and realised he was not about to live up to Ludlow’s hope that he would be a better man. He stared at the choices scrolling behind Jensen’s dark eyes. Ludlow didn’t glance at his judge. Instead he looked over his shoulder at Isaac and Roach, his stare full of sorrow and regret, but most of all penitence.
“Drop him,” Jensen ordered, passing his wolf the gun.
Colquitt placed the bolt gun just above Ludlow’s knee and squeezed the trigger, the gunpowder round blasting the bolt deep into bone and muscle with a splash of dark red like a burst paintball. Isaac and Roach cried out as they watched Ludlow fall fifteen feet, landing badly onto the cold, hard muck. The pig-faces pushed their hostages against the railing, shining torches into the gloomy pit, the beams like cold searchlights pinning Ludlow. He lay there, groaning in agony, hands pressed to his ruined leg, spilling blood like a faucet.