by Chelsea Cain
Archie didn’t think anyone was still alive, but he didn’t have time to check. He could see Karim and Susan twenty feet up ahead, against the wall across from the bathroom that Gretchen had hid in. Susan’s ear was red with blood. She was looking right at Archie, her face twisted in desperation. Karim adjusted the knife at her throat, his eyes on Archie and Leo as he repeatedly jabbed a button on the wall with his elbow.
The elevator.
Archie stepped over a body, his gun raised at Karim, not looking down, feeling his way with his foot, not stopping for anyone, not caring about anyone but Susan.
“Let her go, Karim,” Leo ordered.
Karim made no sign of hearing him. As Archie got closer, he saw that the textile hanging on the wall had been moved aside like a curtain, revealing the hidden elevator’s steel doors. The doors parted silently and Karim twisted Susan around to push her inside. But as he shoved Susan forward, she let out a scream and scrambled backward. Karim threw her against the wall next to the elevator, as a figure stumbled out between the steel doors, his hands at his throat. The figure took a step and then fell to his knees.
Archie recognized the yachting jacket.
“Jack?” Leo said.
The sirens had reached a fever pitch. They weren’t getting louder anymore. They were here.
Karim looked around wildly, and then pulled Susan from the wall. She howled as he twisted her arm behind her, and Archie could see by the shape of her shoulder that it was dislocated. Karim threw her into the open elevator as both Archie and Leo ran for the steel doors. Jack was on the floor in front of the elevator, sputtering, spurting blood, and Leo dropped to his knees next to him. Archie dived for the elevator, but couldn’t get his hand between the doors in time. In that last second, as the elevator doors closed, Archie caught a glimpse of Susan, at Karim’s feet, doubled over and clutching her shoulder, her face contorted in pain. She didn’t look up.
Archie punched the elevator button and it lit up. “Where does this go?” he demanded from Leo.
Leo had pulled the jacket off his father and was trying to press it against Jack’s bloody, gaping throat. He seemed not to hear Archie.
Someone was pounding at the front door, shouting.
“Leo!” Archie said sharply.
Leo looked up. “The new tunnel system,” he said. “It opens up in a large storage room. There’s a hall off it that leads to some offices and some more storage rooms. The door at the end of that hall leads to the tunnel under the lake and comes up in the basement of a house on the other side of the road.”
The elevator doors slid open.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Leo asked, his father unconscious in his arms.
“Stay here,” Archie said, looking back toward the front door. “Tell them what’s happened.”
“What has happened?” Leo asked.
Leo’s bare feet were wet with the blood they had walked through. His father was dying. Archie knew he was desperate for answers. But he didn’t have time to elaborate. Archie stepped into the elevator. “Karim killed Lisa Watson,” Archie told Leo. “The dead guy in the office was shot while he was shooting me. Gretchen killed everybody else.”
An arc of blood spatter looked like a letter C on the back wall of the elevator. Jack’s throat had been cut in here. There were two floor buttons inside the elevator. The top one had a 1 on it and the bottom one had a B on it. Archie pressed the B button.
Leo was rocking his father in his lap. But as the elevator doors started to close, he looked up. “Archie,” he said. “Keys!” He fumbled in his father’s pocket and managed to toss a set of keys to Archie just as the steel doors closed. Archie caught the keys and put them in his jacket pocket.
The elevator began to descend, and the sensation made Archie’s head swim.
“Going down,” said a woman’s crisp automated voice.
A red digital readout above the elevator doors showed a number 1 with a downward-facing arrow on either side of it. Archie kept his eyes on the readout. He waited for it to change, but the 1 stayed up despite the fact that he could feel the elevator moving. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t just moving between floors—the elevator had to pass through the house’s actual basement and then through dirt and shale to the subbasement. Any minute now, he told himself. Finally the digital readout disassembled and re-formed as the letter B. The elevator bounced slightly as it settled at the bottom of the shaft. Archie took a breath, stepped to the corner of the elevator just inside the doors, and raised his weapon.
“Lower level,” the woman’s voice announced pleasantly.
The doors opened.
Archie blocked the doors open with his foot and did a quick scan outside the elevator with his weapon. There was no sign of movement. He pivoted out of the elevator and backed against the wall, gun raised.
This was nothing like the tunnels Gretchen had led him through. It looked like an industrial-grade warehouse or some kind of secret government facility. The ceilings were low, but the room seemed to go on and on in every direction. Pallets were stacked almost to the ceiling in places, creating the illusion of walls. Panels of fluorescent lights radiated overhead along with what looked to be a state-of-the-art sprinkler system.
Archie checked the concrete floor for traces of blood and saw what looked like a partial footprint in front of one of the pallet stacks maybe twenty feet out. He heaved himself toward it, clutching his side, but when he reached the footprint, he didn’t see another.
The low hum of the air recirculation system echoed off the concrete walls. Archie listened for footsteps, anything, but he could feel his senses slipping from him. The periphery of his vision was blackening. His hands had gone numb.
Archie leaned against the tarp-covered stack of pallets next to him and groped in his pocket for the amber pill bottle Jack had given him. He popped the white cap off and shook some of the small white pills onto his palm and then brought them to his mouth. He was so thirsty that he could barely manage enough saliva to choke them down. His hand tasted like blood, and the pills coated his tongue with a bitter paste. He looked at the floor, willing the pills to take effect, to give him just enough relief to keep moving. Don’t think. Don’t stop. Just move. His eyes were still on the floor when the toe of a shiny white pump stepped into his sight line. He followed the white stockings—now threaded with runs and speckled with drops of blood—up her shapely leg, her face a picture of compassion.
She took the amber plastic pill bottle from his hand, snapped the childproof white cap back on, and tucked the bottle back into his jacket pocket. Her white dress was soaked with blood. The cape and the hat were gone. “You’re looking peaked, darling,” she said.
Archie struggled to find the strength to speak. He couldn’t let Gretchen distract him. He didn’t care if she went back to jail. He didn’t care if she made a fool of him again. He just wanted to get Susan back alive. “Where are they?” he asked her.
Gretchen’s eyes were jubilant. “I told you I’d find you a serial killer,” she said. “It’s really been quite a bit of fun.”
Archie glowered at her. Karim might have a knife to Susan’s throat, but Gretchen might as well have put it there. She owed him. “If he kills her,” Archie said, “I’ll make you pay.”
Gretchen batted her lashes at him, looking hurt. “I think you’re being rather mean.”
“Tell me where they are,” Archie said. It twisted his insides to talk, to breathe. Each word took so much effort he had to pause between them.
Gretchen cocked her head, studying him, her eyes landing on the blood that had soaked through his shirt and pant leg. “You shouldn’t be bleeding that much,” she said, and Archie thought he detected a flicker of distress in her voice.
“Shot,” Archie said with a cough.
Gretchen’s bearing stiffened. She reached to open his blazer, but he pulled away. “No,” he said. “Tell me.” He’d lost too much blood. He was getting too weak too fast. “Hurry,” he
said.
Gretchen pointed across the room to a hallway.
It was sixty feet away. In Archie’s condition it might as well have been the English-fucking-Channel.
He glanced back at the elevator.
“I disabled it,” Gretchen said. “I found a maintenance panel. All I had to do was cut some wires. Looks like we’re on our own for a little while longer.”
He was out of time. Susan was out of time. He had to try. Archie pushed himself off the pallets and staggered toward the hallway that Gretchen had indicated. He couldn’t stand upright. He had to walk bent over, or the pain would overwhelm him. His left leg had started to drag.
He hadn’t made it more than a few steps when Gretchen caught up with him. “Do you want my help?” she asked, flitting at his elbow.
Archie set his sights on the next block of pallets. “No,” he said. His pants were so blood-soaked that the fabric stuck to his thigh as he walked. His left hand was bloody up to the elbow. He could feel his body failing him, his breaths growing shorter, his muscles weakening. He was so thirsty. But he pushed on, the gun clenched in his hand. Ten steps. Fifteen. Thirty. Fifty. He had passed four stacks of pallets. When he got to the fifth, he had to stop and lean against it to gather his strength. The hallway was only ten feet away, almost within his grasp. But he wouldn’t make it. He was too weak.
He had to hear Susan’s voice.
Archie mustered all his strength, swallowed hard, pressed his wound with his hand, lifted his head, and hollered her name.
“Susan!”
His despairing voice bounced off the concrete walls, echoing through the room, reverberating down the hall.
“I’m here!” Susan yelled back. She was cut off abruptly, forcibly silenced. But it was enough. Even with the basement acoustics Archie was certain that her voice was coming from up ahead. It was the motivation he needed.
Adrenaline pulsed into his fists and he heaved himself off the pallets and hobbled, grimacing, toward the hallway’s beckoning rectangle of light. His breaths came in pants now. He could still only move hunched over, hand pressed against his wound. Ten steps—each footfall a painful blur.
Then he was there. He had made it. He leaned up against the wall and lifted his gun. His shooting arm trembled as he pointed the weapon down the empty hall. The fluorescent lights cast a greenish glow. There were two doors about halfway down the left side of the hall, and a steel fire door at the end of the hall, thirty feet dead ahead.
“That door leads to the tunnel off the island,” Gretchen said from behind him. She stepped next to him and pointed to the fire door. He didn’t know where she’d come from, if she had caught up with him again or if she had been there all along. She smiled at him. “But Jack lent me a key.”
Archie struggled to understand—he had Jack’s keys. He grasped for them in his jacket pocket with his bloody hand. But Gretchen stopped him, holding up a brass key of her own.
“I took the master,” she explained. “Jack was kind enough to point it out to me.”
She’d slaughtered Jack for that key. But why? Then it hit him. “You locked the door,” Archie said. She had sealed Karim’s only escape off the island. They had him trapped.
She leaned across the doorway close to his ear. “The first door,” she whispered in his ear. “That’s where Karim has Susan.” She directed him to look where she was pointing. “Can you see it?”
Archie peered down the hall at the first door. His vision was spotty. But when he concentrated, the door came into focus and Archie saw that it was very slightly ajar.
He could do this.
He could get to her.
Karim was cornered.
Archie raised his gun again. He couldn’t hold it very high—it was too heavy suddenly, too cumbersome—but he could get it up enough. He took a step forward. And another. The darkness at the corners of his vision swirled in and out of his sight line. He squeezed his eyes shut a few times, and rubbed them with his bloody hand. But he kept moving. Another step. His legs felt like jelly. The hallway seemed to tilt and stretch around him—he had to brace himself against the rough concrete wall. He checked the door. It was still a good dozen steps away. He had to summon another burst of energy. But he was too weak to call out to Susan again. A crushing pain cut through Archie’s spine. He staggered a few more steps, supporting himself on the concrete wall, and then looked back at the trail of blood his palm had left on the wall’s slick white paint. It was the same blood pattern that marked the fatal path Razor Burn had taken to Jack’s office. The floor shifted suddenly. Archie tried to recover his balance, but the wall seemed to pull away and he sank to his knees on the floor. He was sweaty and cold, his heart pounding in his chest. He had lost too much blood. He wasn’t going to make it. He was worthless. Get up, he said in his head. He looked at the first door: an arm’s reach away, a light on inside, the shuffle of movement. Archie had found them. He was so close. Get up, he pleaded. He made a deal with himself. I’ll do anything.
Gretchen’s face materialized next to him. Her skin shimmered, bathed in a silvery slight. A golden glow framed her head like an aura. Her expression was serene, like a painting of a saint. This was all proof, he thought, that his brain was shutting down. “Do you want my help?” Gretchen asked again sweetly.
Archie pulled away from her and tried once more to stand, but he was so shaky and feeble it was no use. He sank back to the floor, useless and weak. He couldn’t do it. But he had to get to Susan. No matter what it took.
“Yes,” Archie said in a voice barely above a whisper.
“What’s that, darling?” Gretchen asked.
“Yes,” Archie said.
He groped for the wall, and his hand found it this time. He leaned into his palm, trying to get enough leverage to stand, and he managed to get a foot on the floor in front of him. The seams and eyelets of his brown leather shoe were caked with mud and blood. The shoe looked foreign to him, like it belonged to someone else’s foot. Tiny drops of blood dotted the toe. He blinked and the dots swam before his eyes.
Gretchen was crouched next to him, her shoes even bloodier than his. She shifted the deadweight of his arm over her shoulder and Archie surrendered, letting her support his weight. She held his hand by his wrist against her breast. He could see the gun in his hand, the barrel pressed against her dress, but he couldn’t feel his own fingers around the grip. His hands were too numb. Gretchen moved her other arm around his waist. Her blond hair brushed his forearm, and through everything, through all of the pain and the shakiness, he could still feel that—he could feel the gentle thrill of Gretchen’s hair against his flesh. She tightened her hold on his wrist.
“This is going to hurt,” she whispered.
He inhaled sharply as she lifted him to his feet. The pain from the gunshot felt like the crack of a whip. Even his tears stung. His vision blanched. His stomach turned. His legs felt bulky and anesthetized. But when his vision came back into focus, he was upright. The toe of her bloody white pump pressed against the outside curve of his shoe. She loosened her grip on his wrist and he lurched for the wall with his hand, to help stabilize himself. He was sweaty and fighting for breath, his body ringing with pain. They were standing, bodies still entangled. Gretchen’s face was flushed from the effort of lifting him. She smelled like blood, like a slaughterhouse, or maybe, Archie thought, he was the one who smelled like that. Her expression was one of gentle patience, the devoted caretaker.
Archie’s arm was still slung over her shoulder, his gun hand resting against her breast. He cleared his throat and lifted his chin, honing in on the open door that was now so close. He could feel a pulse where Gretchen held his wrist, but he couldn’t tell if it was his heartbeat or hers.
As he focused on the pulse, he began to make out sounds coming from behind the door—drawers being opened, papers thrown, the sound of glass breaking on the concrete floor. Whatever Karim was doing in there, he was leaving a path of destruction.
Archie started t
oward the door. Gretchen held him up, taking all of his weight, their bodies moving together. Underneath the destructive ruckus, Archie could still feel the pulse that beat between them. It was louder than the shattering glass, louder than wood cracking. It was the beat that kept him moving. He could feel it in his body. The pulse was rapid and thready and he knew it must be his. Tachycardia. Hypovolemic shock. Gretchen knew it, too. He could feel her fingers pressing into the soft inside of his wrist, monitoring him.
They were four steps from the door. Karim was cursing on the other side, throwing objects against the wall. Gretchen paused. Archie’s momentum was so committed to moving forward that he nearly fell over, but she caught him and then turned him and set him gently against the wall. Archie didn’t understand. They were so close. He needed her help, the rhythm of their pulse.
But then she let go of his wrist, and the rhythm stopped. His body went quiet. He knew that the concrete behind his back was supposed to feel hard, but it felt doughy, formless, like he could sink right through it. Gretchen touched his ear. Her face took up all the space in his vision. There was no one and nothing but her. He could still hear the havoc behind the door, but inside—in his head—all was mute. It was like he was physically disassociating from himself. He wasn’t going to make it through the door. He wasn’t going to get to Susan. He was going to die, as he always knew he would, at Gretchen’s feet. Archie smiled at the irony, as his head lolled back.
* * *
Gretchen is on top of him, straddling him, and he is deeper inside her than he has ever been in anyone. He gazes up at her, his senses painfully exquisite. Her hand is knotted in his hair, pulling so hard at the roots that she has bent his head backward into the pillow. He can barely breathe. Strands of her own sweat-soaked hair stick to the sides of her face, but she has never looked more beautiful to him. The bedroom window is open, and he can hear the wind moving through the dry leaves in the trees, the box spring moaning beneath them, each time Gretchen catches her breath. His skin prickles with heat. Pain blazes where her fist meets his scalp, blotting out his guilt and self-doubt. There is just the pain and her and sex and the black wall of bliss that slices through him like a blade. Her face comes in and out of view. Her hard nipples graze his chest as her breasts swing forward, then back. Her mouth is open, the upper lip twitching as her breathing quickens. Her skin glows. Her eyelids flutter. She grinds against him harder, knotting her fist tighter in his hair as she does, so that the pain and pleasure intermix until they are indistinguishable. He drives himself even harder and deeper inside her, desperate for relief. He can see her shoulder move as her other hand works her clitoris. She opens her mouth wider and moans and spots of color appear on her cheeks.