Bone Music

by Christopher Rice

  Now it’s just darkness.

  A minute later he hears barks echoing through the canyon; their ghostly distance does nothing to muffle their ferocity.

  Then the dogs go quiet, perhaps recognizing their owner. More darkness. More breathing.

  And darkness on the tablet that should be showing them everything Charley sees.

  With each passing second, Luke’s stomach gets a little bit colder.

  “Something’s wrong,” Marty whispers.

  “The lenses are working,” he says. “The signal’s live. It’s just . . .”

  “It’s not the lenses. It’s the drug. We’re not seeing anything ’cause she isn’t seeing anything.”

  “Give it a minute.”

  “The garage is ten paces from the house, Luke. They’re inside by now.”

  “Text your boys. See what they see.”

  Marty complies.

  A minute goes by with no response.

  And another.

  And another.

  “Nothing,” Marty says. “They’ve gone quiet.”

  “Bad cell service?”

  “We were fine at the surveillance point. We figure the casino down valley’s got extra towers. Luke—”

  “All right. Everybody. Guns out. Let’s go.”

  Rucker says, “What about the dogs?”

  “If they don’t sit when you say, shoot ’em.”

  “I don’t hurt dogs,” Rucker says.

  “Seriously?” Luke whispers.

  “Dogs didn’t abduct Charley. Men did.”

  “Then fire over their heads. Just not at one of us.”

  There’s no argument. Luke grabs the tablet from its holster. If it hasn’t come to life by the time they reach the gate, he’ll junk it and focus on his weapon, but God willing . . .

  Somehow they’re all following Brasher, who pumps his giant arms as he runs uphill. Later Luke’ll think the fact that Brasher somehow outpaced all of them is hilarious given the guy’s not exactly streamlined for speed. But he’s not sad to have a human tank in the lead; that’s for sure.

  And then suddenly the tablet flashes in his hand. A bright pulse of light that blinds him. He almost trips, finds his footing.

  The other men notice and turn.

  The tablet flashes more. Not flashes.

  Blinks.

  “She’s awake!”

  Two thousand feet above the Cleveland National Forest, Ed Baker stops reciting the report he was just given by Ground Team A and falls abruptly silent.

  A flash of light just pulsed through the helicopter’s passenger compartment, followed by another, then another, each one giving his face a ghoulish cast.

  For a few seconds, he and Cole blink their surprise at each other; then Cole pats the empty leather next to him, and Ed awkwardly settles his bulk onto the forward-facing bench seat so he can see what now fills the screen of the MacBook resting on Cole’s lap.

  Charlotte Rowe is finally opening her eyes.

  First she becomes aware of a deep, throbbing ache in her temples. As it lessens, she feels a second sensation stretching across her forehead. This feeling isn’t in her bones. It’s on her skin. It’s scratchy and rough.

  A strap, she realizes.

  These thoughts struggle against a narcotic haze. But it doesn’t feel like she’s rousing from a long nap. Rather, it’s like a chunk of time has been stolen from her. The exact same feeling she experienced when she came to after wisdom tooth surgery.

  Surgery.

  The word surges through her. The muscles in her neck tense, but they’re the only ones. That’s when she feels straps on her wrists and ankles. Leather, thick, securing her to the operating table. She’s blinking up into a bright glare; against it, she sees the outline of a bulging, transparent IV bag on a stanchion. There’s writing all over it—warning labels, she realizes—and one word bigger than the rest: ACETONE.

  While physical sensations are returning in stages, her emotions aren’t coming back as quickly, and she needs them to. Desperately. Instead her mind floats between a vague sense of alarm and a dull awareness of her situation.

  Something burns in her upturned right arm. Two IVs—one small, one large. Neither one is connected to the bag of acetone; the smaller one’s connected to a short cord, with a port for injections. Maybe he used that port to bring her back to consciousness.

  Something tugs at legs that still feel mostly numb. As if from a distance, she hears rustling sounds. Looks down at her body as much as she can without moving her head. It’s not rustling; it’s shredding. Pemberton stands over her. He’s lost the jacket and hat, and he’s slowly cutting up the right leg of her blue jeans with surgical scissors. The left one’s already been cut, the flaps primly laid aside so that her entire thigh is exposed.

  “Hello, Charlotte.” She’s blinking up at him as he traces a finger down the side of her cheek.

  He’s gone through her things; that must be how he knows her name.

  She goes to speak. She can’t. There’s a ball gag tucked in her mouth. Now that she’s aware of it, she can feel the saliva gathering around it, coating the back of her throat. She coughs, but it’s a weak effort that forces her nostrils to suck half breaths.

  With each new returning sensation, she prays for the return of terror, for the arrival of bone music. But it’s like grasping for hunger when your body knows it’s full. Somewhere within her the Zypraxon’s locked in a cage or stuck against a filter it’s too large to slip through. Undissolved. Untapped. Untriggered.

  “I assume you know who I am, or you’re figuring it out now.” He seems as steady and focused as if he’s prepping her for a common, beneficial procedure. With the first three fingers of his right hand, he presses down softly on her cheek, as if assessing the fat content, the durability of the skin. “And that means you’ve probably figured out what you’re going to become.” He smiles primly. “And you’re not panicking, which is either a side effect of the drugs or you think being strong will change the outcome of this.” He looks into her eyes. “It won’t.

  “You see, this face of yours, Charlotte. You realize what it is, don’t you? It’s just a collection of accidents, really. Genetic accidents that created the shape of your nose, your lips, your chin.” He grazes each feature as he references it. “So much of your life has been determined by this face. Granted to you by this face, by how people respond to it. But it doesn’t have inherent meaning, you see? It’s cartilage, really. Cartilage and privilege. What I do—now that gives it meaning. It gives you meaning, Charlotte Rowe.”

  He gives them all this speech, she realizes. This is what they all saw and heard before they died. He terrifies them like this on purpose. Because he is just like every other human monster, twisting truths and perverting philosophies to justify his desire to inflict pain.

  He traces a path down her upturned forearm, lingering at the IV injection site for a few seconds.

  “But I work with the whole body, you see. Your face, I give to the world. Your body stays with me so I can remember the amount of effort I put into it. Into you, you ungrateful little bitch. Tell me.” He bends forward, looks into her eyes. “Did you have any sense of the man I really was when you turned up your nose at me in that parking lot? Any sense of the magnitude of what I contain, of what I can do?”

  He keeps the bodies, she thinks. Then the bodies are here. The bodies are the evidence.

  She feels acutely nauseated now. The aftereffect of the blow he delivered to her head in the parking lot throbs persistently in her skull, rings in her ears. And that’s good. That means her body’s coming back. Rousing. Her thoughts are coming quicker, clearer.

  “No?” he asks. “Well, let me tell you what I’m capable of, Charlotte. I’m going to fill your system with acetone. It’s going to drive out your blood, replacing most of your body fluids, and it’s going to do it while you’re alive and awake and remembering this moment. The moment when you realized who I am. This moment, when you finally knew truth.
”

  She blinks, sees the IV dangling from the acetone bag, waiting to be connected to her arm. Her heart races at the sight. Something’s missing. The acetone goes in through the big IV, but her blood, her body fluids, how will he push those out?

  She feels the cool air—subterranean air, she realizes—kissing her exposed thighs, and that’s when terror sends rivers of ice through her body from head to toe. She remembers a term from one of Luanne’s hospital stays, when they’d needed to draw blood and the veins in her arm weren’t strong enough. A femoral stick.

  Pinpricks. Not from him. And then shaking in her bones. He sees it, mistakes it for pure fear, and smiles. He can’t hear the bone music, but she can.

  “They say beauty hurts. But trust me, Charlotte. Achieving meaning hurts so much more.”

  He turns to the supply table next to him. He gloves his hands, then picks up a loop of clear tubing that’s long, thick, and attached to some kind of plunger. There’s another waiting on the supply table. Two of them. One for each leg.

  “And when I’m done,” he says, “you will be very, very beautiful.”

  A distant, grating sound stills him.

  Dogs. Barking dogs.

  That’s when she quickly and silently pops her left hand free, as if the strap were suddenly made of paper. That’s when the strap across her forehead pops off as she goes to sit up, and that’s when Frederick Pemberton spins to face her.

  He’s so stunned to find her sitting upright, so stunned to find them eye to eye, he doesn’t notice when she reaches out and grabs his hand. She spits the ball gag she’s bitten in half onto her lap, and he looks desperately from it to his own wrist, now clamped in her impossibly strong grip.

  “You are a bad, bad man,” she whispers.

  The bones inside his hand crunch like popcorn. A miserable yowl seems to emanate from deep within his belly. It turns into a high barking when she snaps his wrist.

  She swings her legs off the table. His knees hit the floor. He’s shuddering, drool flying from his yawning, moaning mouth. Standing over him now, she finds her footing and squeezes down harder on his shattered wrist, drawing the limp and lifeless arm out from his body so she can keep him upright on his knees. Part of her is waiting for the same revulsion she felt when she broke Jason Briffel’s shoulder, but it’s not coming. All she feels is the bone music and, thanks to the terror in Pemberton’s eyes, the sense that she has become not darkness but a great fire, bringing a sudden, blazing end to it.

  “Did you give them all that little speech, Dr. Frederick Pemberton? Did you say it to them all so that you could see their fear?”

  Tears of agony spit from the corners of his squinting eyes. His breaths are wails. And the wet spot darkening his pants isn’t blood, she’s sure.

  She leans in close, until they’re nose to nose. He shudders. “Do you see any fear in my eyes, Doctor?”

  His answer is a trembling groan.

  Another bone, possibly his shoulder, snaps as she yanks him upright by his already injured arm. His head rolls on his neck; his feet graze the floor like a dangling puppet’s.

  “This is my meaning, Doctor,” she says. “This is the truth of who I am. I’m not here to show you fear. I’m here to see yours.”

  She releases his arm and gives his opposite shoulder a light shove that sends him stumbling backward into a coffinlike vessel sitting a few feet from the operating table. Now that she’s free, she’s seeing it for the first time. It’s a vacuum pump chamber—just like the one she saw online, the one he probably stole from the Bryant Center. The entire thing tilts away from her. From his wheezing breaths and glassy eyes, it’s clear the impact has stunned Pemberton as badly as his blow to the head stunned her in the parking lot. The chamber’s tilting. When it goes over to one side, he goes with it like a pile of bones.

  She starts toward him.

  The dogs are barking their asses off, but none of the men could give a shit. Later I’ll laugh about this, Luke thinks. They’ll all laugh about how they stood in the dark outside a serial killer’s gate, ignoring vicious dogs while they watched Charley beat the living shit out of Pemberton on a tablet Luke held in his sweaty, trembling hands.

  It wasn’t like they weren’t ready to break in. They were. The problem was, the damn gate didn’t have a pedestrian entrance. Just a sliding one for cars. So there was no lock to shoot off. They were trying to figure out how to distract the dogs while one or more of them jumped the fence, Luke trying to hide the tablet from the guys so they didn’t panic with each moment Charley didn’t fight her way free of the table.

  In other words, they were about to kill the dogs.

  Then Charley broke the serial killer’s wrist, and Luke started shouting at everyone to stop, and everything changed.

  And now they’re just standing there, watching. Watching what shouldn’t be possible.

  And Rucker’s saying the Lord’s Prayer under his breath.

  Or maybe it’s a Hail Mary; Luke isn’t sure. He’s never been religious.

  Maybe he will be after all this.

  Suddenly the dogs’ attention shifts. They start running toward the fence off to their left, the one that faces the downhill slope. It takes all Luke’s effort to look away from the tablet, and he has to blink in the darkness. It looks for a moment as if the brush on the far side of the fence has come to life. He thinks maybe it’s the guys from the surveillance post, the ones who stopped responding after they were fifteen minutes out.

  But these are not the guys from the surveillance post.

  These guys are outfitted for war.

  The first dog goes down with a high-pitched whine. Felled by something swift and silent. Not a bullet, some kind of dart. Apparently Brasher’s not the only one averse to hurting dogs. Then the second and the third. As soon as the barking fades, Luke hears a growling, chest-rattling sound. Realizes it’s coming from above.

  There’s a blast of air and a blaze of light, and suddenly the four of them are grabbing on to each other and stumbling backward as a giant helicopter barrels down on them, runners extending in the moments before it touches earth. The downdraft deafens him. Marty’s gray mane has come loose from its ponytail. It dances up into Luke’s face, forcing him to bat it away.

  The chopper lands in such a way as to pin them in between the gate and wherever the thing’s spinning blades end. He’d love to know where the fuck that is exactly. They all would, so they keep stumbling backward toward the gate. Just then there’s a fireworklike blast off to his right. The falling spikes of the steel gate force them all to jump back in the direction of the chopper, which causes Marty to scream, “Jesus Fucking Christ. Make up your goddamn minds, assholes!”

  The soldiers from the brush are streaming across the house’s yard now, automatic weapons raised. Helmets, visors, maybe even night vision goggles, Luke can’t be sure. He counts five or six of them at least. And not a single one has the insignia of a law enforcement agency.

  Then the door to the helicopter opens, and the man who steps out looks vaguely familiar. He’s dressed in a long black trench coat like something out of The Matrix—a powder-blue button-up, collar flapping in the wind—and big, chunky black boots that are probably some designer’s expensive imitation of Doc Martens.

  Cole Graydon, CEO of Graydon Pharmaceuticals. He read about him in the file Kayla brought.

  Cole approaches him. For a delirious second, he thinks the guy’s actually about to shake his hand. Three SUVs pull up behind the chopper. At least seven men emerge. All military-grade scary. Not combat ready like the guys who just took down the dogs and poured across the yard. But they’re packing. And maybe that means if Luke doesn’t shake the guy’s hand, he’ll end up with one right between the eyes.

  “Your passkey,” Cole Graydon says.

  Luke’s genuinely stumped.

  Cole points to his own eyes and gives Luke a broad smile.

  Luke digs into his pants pocket, hands Cole the digital key.

 
Cole takes it, extends his other hand.

  The tablet. He wants the tablet.

  He wants their connection to Charley.

  As if reading his mind, Cole says, “Don’t assume the worst of us. It will serve no one.”

  “Too late,” Luke says.

  Cole laughs. “How’s this? Stay out of our way, and no one will die.”

  Behind Cole, three of his guys part their windbreakers, revealing Glocks in hip holsters.

  Luke hands over the tablet.

  “Thank you,” Cole says with a smile; then he turns and starts walking over the fallen gate toward the house.

  “I wouldn’t mess with her if I were you,” Luke calls after him. “She’s in kind of a mood.”

  “Oh, I won’t.” Cole turns. “Far from it. Quite the opposite in fact.”

  Then with another smile as gracious as the one he probably gives at board meetings, he starts for the house, his own private army on his tail.

  “Where is Elle Schaeffer?” she asks him for the fourth time.

  She’s not sure if his spine is broken. She’s not sure if she cares.

  He’s sprawled on the toppled vacuum chamber, still blubbering like a baby. The pleasure’s going out of it for her. The delight she’s been taking in his misery is fading. She toys, briefly, with the idea of trying to provoke him in some way. To draw out some evidence of his evil so she can pounce on it. Pounce on him. But he’s broken. If not physically, then mentally. She’s never seen someone truly snap, never borne witness as another human loses his mind in the course of one swift and devastating episode. How many victims of the Bannings did just that during their confinement and rape, yards from where she ate, slept, and daydreamed?

  Does this square that terrible debt in some way?

  She’s been prodding his face. Grazing it. Treating it just the way he treated hers. Now she grips both sides of his chin in her open palms. Gently. But even that makes him shudder and sob.

  “Where is Elle Schaeffer?”