The Beast in the Bone

by Blair Lindsay

  He writhed and shook as if in the throes of a bad dream, then settled back into his lassitude. She thought he looked a little paler than before and idly wondered how low his blood pressure was. He was taking only a few breaths a minute now. Soon, he’d stop completely, she was sure. Fentanyl was dependable that way, once you waded deep enough into it.

  Good, you motherfucker. Chew on apnea for a while and see how you like the taste.

  She edged forward and grasped the upper edge of the cellphone from where it now jutted from Pigpen’s back pocket.

  He sputtered, choking on spittle.

  Keller stilled herself, retaining her grip on the phone. Then, as he settled once more, she drew the device out and edged away again.

  She pressed buttons and the phone lit onto a lock screen with starscape wallpaper, and hope surged through her.

  I swear to god if I get out of here, I’ll find time to look at the stars again and walk on a beach somewhere.

  But another voice mocked her.

  Right, because that’s what you’ve wanted the last two years, to see the stars. Not the dope, not the high.

  She ran a hand through her hair.

  Concentrate.

  The lock screen stared back at her, the starscape demanding a passcode.

  But she didn’t need one, not for this number. She hit the Emergency Call button.

  No Service.

  She looked at the screen’s upper right corner. There was only half a bar on the phone’s service indicator.

  She bit back hard on the scream of frustration that threatened to spill out of her. “Fuck,” she whispered with as much energy as she had ever yelled the word in her life. “Okay…” She paced back and forth, holding the phone up, watching the signal-strength indicator.

  Get out, the other voice said. Get out, get the cops, get home, and get fucking high.

  She shook her head. No. Get help here.

  Because the phone was the Alpha and Omega. For her and whoever owned the cries she’d heard earlier.

  Pigpen was motionless now, splayed out like something spilled and spoiling in the sun.

  She held the phone up to the farthest wall and the half-bar went up to a single full one.

  “Yes…” In any other context, any other situation, she would’ve been embarrassed by the near orgasmic whisper. She pressed the Emergency Call button and held the phone up to her ear.

  Ringing.

  Ten

  “Nine-one-one. Do you require police, fire, or ambulance?” A woman’s voice, cold and dispassionate, like NASA Mission Control.

  “Can you hear me?” Keller heard a whimper in her question. “Can you?”

  “I hear you.” Some trace of emotion now. Experienced dispatchers became attuned to desperation in a caller’s voice. “What’s your emergency?”

  She took a gulp of air. She hadn’t planned this far ahead, didn’t know how to compress the horror and fear of the last hour into a 9-1-1 call. She responded to emergencies. She wasn’t supposed to be the emergency. “I’m a paramedic. Unit Two Alpha Forty-Four. We are Code 200. I say again, we are Code 200. My partner’s dead…” She took hitching breaths. “I’m in a farmhouse on the 570 about five klicks east of Highway 36. North side of the road. Ambulance out front.”

  “Okay, I’m—”

  “Wait.” How sure was she of all that? All she really knew was where they’d been attacked. Blood tacky but not dry. But still, she might be miles from there. “Can you get a lat/long on my cell? I might’ve been moved.”

  Using cell towers, dispatchers could pinpoint a phone signal to within a few tens of metres. This didn’t help much in dense urban centres, but way out here—as long as she was in range of at least two cell towers—they ought to be able to find her.

  “Stay on the line,” the dispatcher said.

  Where would I go?

  As Keller listened to the tap-tap of a keyboard, Pigpen’s eyelids fluttered and he clutched at the air with clumsy hands, like a drowning man trying to claw his way up out of the sea.

  “Sooner’s better,” she whispered.

  “Hang on.”

  More key-tapping. Once in a while dispatchers caught a call that demanded more than shuffling someone to police, fire, or ambulance dispatch. Once in a while, some desperate soul on the other end of the line was only seconds from being killed, and the dispatcher would signal to her companions that she needed to devote her energies to this single call to the exclusion of all others.

  “Okay, I have a set of GPS coordinates. Hang on. Help is on the way.”

  Great. Motivational memes.

  But Pigpen had fallen back into his toxic slumber and Keller knew cops were at least on their way, even if it might take them an hour to get out here.

  “RCMP are responding… Ambulance too?” The dispatcher’s voice was tight now, enunciating everything precisely, trying to keep her own voice professional.

  “Better send a couple of ambulances…” Keller slumped to her knees, clutching at the counter for support and tears flowing as she thought of Jonas lying in the road and the bloody mess the bullet had made of his head. “Fire too. Send fucking everything. There are other people here, captives. A girl was strangled, I think.”

  A sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line told Keller this was one of those calls that would become a legend in the close-knit world of 9-1-1 dispatchers. “Stay with me. Can you tell me more about the assailants?”

  “There’s just one, and he’s unconscious.” Keller caught herself. And how do you know that? “I mean, I’ve only seen one, anyway.”

  But there were more bad guys. Pigpen had said as much, hadn’t he? Right before he called her a palace cunt? “Just ’cause I don’t want to twist your titties don’t mean they won’t.” She had to find the other captives and get out, hide.

  “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Stay on the line.” The dispatcher seemed bound with her now. “I need you to keep talking to me. The assailant’s unconscious?”

  “Yeah…” The exact way he’d become unconscious seemed destined to provoke a plethora of irrelevant questions, so she left that part out.

  Pigpen was a drooling mess now, scarcely breathing and slack-muscled on his back like a dead bug. Was that enough? Should she try to find the shotgun and finish him off? Could she?

  “Okay,” the dispatcher said, “I know it’s bad. Help is coming. Tell me what you can. Are you hurt physically?”

  Her wrists were bloody but she’d tied the rag around the gash on her right one and the bleeding had halted. A heavy metal bass beat was still going on inside her skull, but the pain wasn’t getting any worse. “Not too bad. I think the others are, though.”

  “Okay. Three ambulances dispatched now. What’s your name?”

  “Ashleen… Ash Keller.”

  “Okay, Ash.” She heard a smile on the other end of the line, a connection. “I’m Ellie, and I’m going to stay on the line with you till help gets there.”

  A scream came echoing up the hallway.

  Oh no.

  Why now? She smelled smoke. No, not just smoke. This was the acrid scent of frying plastic. This wasn’t Pigpen’s pot burned dry. The house was on fire.

  She moved to the doorway, one hand on the wall to stave off dizziness. Grey tendrils of smoke floated in the shadows of the hallway. She looked for some sign of the girl she’d heard Pigpen strangle but saw nothing.

  More screaming now from farther down the corridor.

  “Ellie, the place is on fire. I’ve got to go find the others.”

  “Hanna Fire Department is on the way,” Ellie said. Whispers as she handed off information to a fellow dispatcher. “I need you to get out if you can, right now. If you’re able to exit the building, get out now and stay on the line with me. Get out now. Do you understand?”

  Ellie was handling her with kid gloves, practised in giving repeated, easy-to-understand requests in a purposefully unemotional voice. Panicked humans
often needed to hear instructions several times before they really heard them even once.

  Hanna Fire coming. Okay…

  There were lots of well-trained volunteer fire departments in Alberta, and Hanna FD was no doubt one of them, but volunteer responses took time. She imagined men and women roused by a pager, shuffling off sleep, and struggling into clothes, then running to their cars to race from home to the fire hall. It all took time. If she were lucky, the first truck would get here in twenty or thirty minutes.

  Too late.

  “I can…” Keller looked down the hall. She was pretty sure the nearest of the shadowy doorways had stairs, leading upward. But the screams came from beyond it.

  Get out? Bullshit.

  By taking down Pigpen she’d effectively caused the fire. The other captives would obviously be restrained, as she had been. There was no way she was leaving them to burn.

  “Just tell them to get here fast, okay?” A useless request since a Code 200 meant the driver of every emergency unit coming had the accelerator pressed to the floor.

  “Will do, Ash. Are you outside yet?”

  The smoke was thickening in the hallway and she heard the crackle of flames from somewhere overhead. The house would be a funeral pyre by the time anyone arrived.

  “Ellie, I have to go…”

  “No. Ash, don’t. We’ll have—”

  “There’re children in the basement.”

  “Ash, you have to get out.” There was emotion in the voice now, certainly. “The firefighters will rescue whoever else is in there. Get out of the house now, okay?”

  The cries from the unseen girls were frantic and constant now. Keller edged into the hallway to find the ceiling already awash with twisting whirlpools of acrid smoke, and she bent low as she moved.

  The phone chirped and she looked down to see there were no bars. Ellie was gone.

  Swearing, she ripped the dirty washcloth off her wrist, wrapped it over her mouth, and moved into the smoky darkness.

  Eleven

  Keller found a light switch and flicked it up and down. Nothing. Had the fire eaten into the house’s electrical system? Or was this by design, blanketing the lower levels in constant darkness to keep captives disoriented?

  “Hello? Anyone?” She paused as the nausea crested in her again. Yelling intensified it, and the heavy metal band in the back of her skull was playing hard now. “Keep shouting. Help me find you!”

  Incoherent shrieks rose in response, leading her on. She passed two shadowy doorways, seeing shapes of beds and dressers, then a bathroom with a murky nightlight illuminating a rust-stained washbasin and a cracked mirror above it. She was about to pass by then caught sight of the shadow of an arm, cast against the dingy green porcelain of the bathtub.

  Heart pounding, she leaned into the doorway.

  The girl lay in the tub, eyes open and staring at the ceiling. Her face was slack and cyanosed, and the flesh around her neck was swollen.

  “Jesus,” Keller bent and felt for the girl’s carotid pulse, knowing it was a futile gesture, knowing the girl was long gone, but needing to be sure. There was no sign of life and her skin was already cooling.

  From upstairs came the sudden shriek of a smoke detector. Late, but maybe the smoke was just reaching some upper level. Keller backed out of the bathroom, wondering if the noise would rouse Pigpen from his narcotic haze?

  The smoke curling down from the ceiling was thicker now, so she crouched as low as possible despite the vertigo it induced. The upper tiers of the house would soon be uninhabitable if they weren’t already, adrift with killing heat and toxic smoke. She felt some of that heat herself, radiating down from above like a vengeful sun.

  To her right, in the last doorway, a stairway led downward. A weak light shone from below.

  She moved down the stairs. There was no handrail, so she braced her bloody hands against the rough, unfinished walls. “Hey! You down here?”

  “Yes! Here! Help, please.” Three different high-pitched voices.

  Keller stumbled and fell down the last few stairs into the basement proper, the rocky landing like a nail driven into her skull.

  “Sweet Jesus.” It was a weak whisper, and then she was vomiting, spilling the warm liquid remnants of the cola and burger that had been her midnight snack onto the dirty concrete floor. The act of retching twisted the pain in her head into realms of agony she’d never imagined, and she leaned forward on her elbows, drawing long, shuddering breaths in a fight to stay conscious.

  From somewhere overhead came a soft thump that she recognized as the fire eating its way through some wall or ceiling far above her.

  “Hey! Wake up, lady. Wake the fuck up!”

  She gritted her teeth and raised herself up onto her knees, using the wall to drag herself to her feet.

  The scene in the basement was a nightmare illuminated by two low-watt ceiling bulbs.

  A cage in the centre of the room was butted up against a furnace on one side and a fuse box on the other. It was crudely constructed from chain-link fencing secured to a welded rebar frame with heavy-duty pipe clamps. Inside, tattered blankets and thin mattresses covered the floor. Buckets lay in one corner and the room was thick with the scent of urine and feces. Burger wrappers and cans of Pepsi were strewn all around.

  Three girls stood inside the cage, fingers entwined in the wire. Keller guessed the youngest to be about twelve, the oldest perhaps sixteen. Two were Indigenous and one Caucasian. They were ragged and dirty, their clothing torn and their faces streaked with blood and tears. Welts that looked to have come from belt strikes covered their arms and legs.

  “Let us out!”

  “Let us out, lady. Please.”

  Keller stumbled forward, fighting pain and the constant storm of vertigo raging through her. She tripped and fell against the cage. Rattle of cold metal. The scent of human waste rose in her nose and she held an arm across her mouth and willed herself not to vomit again. “I’m going to get you out… Help’s coming. Police.”

  The sensation of heat from above was stronger and she found herself coughing more and more, an acid sting in her throat and a burning sensation in her chest. Five minutes, maybe ten, and they’d all be dead of smoke inhalation and cyanide poisoning.

  The girls crowded around her, lacing their fingers through the chain-link and over her own. Three sets of desperate eyes met hers from between the hashtag crisscross of fencing. Crying, smiling, already thinking they were free.

  Two of them were, anyway—the youngest ones. The older Indigenous girl with long black hair was yelling something at her, something her muddled brain couldn’t quite decode. She blinked, trying to focus on what the girl with the deep-brown eyes was saying.

  The cage door was secured with a padlock.

  No, no… Fucking no.

  Her brain felt like it was in a blender. Too many things happening at once.

  No excuses. It doesn’t matter what’s happening. Do better or die.

  “Think things through,” her dad would’ve said. “You’re on the wrong algorithm.”

  She reached to the small of her back and drew her trauma shears out of their holster, still bloody from where they’d sliced her wrists while breaking her ties. She set them into the shackle and tried using them as a lever.

  “That’s never going to work,” the dark-eyed girl said, her faced pinched.

  When you’re right, you’re right. “Where’s the key?”

  “He has it,” she hissed, her gaze moving upward.

  Pigpen. Shit. Should’ve taken those keys, you idiot.

  Keller turned back to the stairs. The smoke was thicker and she could hear the snapping and crackling of flames, like circling predators closing in.

  Twelve

  The Fixer was just less than a kilometre away from the farm when he saw the glow in the sky. Ten minutes earlier, his radio had begun crackling with call-outs to the place. Fire. Police. Ambulance. Ten codes and excited voices, calls for backup and additional
responding units.

  Something had gone terribly wrong. Big surprise.

  He cursed through gritted teeth. Oakes had always been the weak link in all this. He had begged Kapp to get rid of the drunken idiot long before, but Hunt wouldn’t hear of it.

  For a few minutes he persisted on his course over the rough gravel roads separating him from Oakes’s farm, running hard, hoping he might arrive on scene soon enough to ensure no one left the farmhouse alive. Now he accepted he would never make it in time but hoped that maybe the fire had done his job for him. As he approached, he saw that the upper portion of Oakes’s house was engulfed in flames.

  A fire truck raced along the highway, only a hundred metres from his position, the siren keening through the Doppler scale as it passed. But he could see that the farmhouse was a lost cause, too far gone to save. Everyone inside would be “crispy critters,” as firefighters said, by the time the blaze was extinguished.

  Oakes was therefore the only loose end. If he’d survived the fire, the police would no doubt have many questions for him about the charred human remains they would find inside.

  The Fixer paused, considering his options while listening to the emergency-radio traffic.

  A hot scene. Confusion. Bad things still might happen in the hue and cry.

  Smoke inhalation and asphyxiation had some similarities. He could make it appear as if Oakes died in the fire. Or if that proved too difficult to arrange, maybe the Fixer could get him into one of the outbuildings and shoot him in the head, make it look like suicide.

  The Fixer was grateful he always parked his own car on a side road about two hundred metres from the entrance to Oakes’s farm. No one would notice it if his luck held… and if it didn’t, he had his bug-out bag in the trunk—a bag with his passport, several thousand in cash, and credit cards in three different names. He had long ago memorized the daily flights that would get him to Costa Rica—a country with no formal extradition agreement with dear old Canada—within twenty-four hours.