Endurance

by Jack Kilborn

  Behind Georgia, Tom Gransee predictably paced around the fire, tugging at his wifebeater T like it was an extra skin he wanted to shed.

  These were kids society had given up on, sentenced into their care by the courts. But Martin—and by extension, Sara—hadn’t given up on them. That was why they created the Second Chance Center.

  Sara finally rested her gaze on Martin. The fire flickered across his handsome features, glinted in his blue eyes. He had aged remarkably well, looking closer to twenty than thirty, as athletic as the day she met him in that graduate psych class. She looked down at her son in the baby sling—a miniature version of Martin—and absently rubbed his back.

  “On this dark night six years ago,” Martin continued, “this group of eight people took a boat onto Lake Huron. The SS Minnow.”

  Sara smiled, knowing she was the only one old enough to have caught the Gilligan’s Island reference, the boat the castaways had taken on their three hour tour.

  “They had some beer with them,” Martin said. “Some pot…”

  “Hells yeah.” Tyrone and Meadow bumped fists.

  “…and were set to have a big party. But one of the women—there were four men and four women, just like us—got seasick on the lake.”

  “I hear that.” In her oversized jersey and sweatpants, Cindy looked tiny, shapeless. But Sara noted she’d gotten a little bit of her color back.

  “So they decided,” Martin raised his voice, “to beach the boat on a nearby island, continue the party there. But they didn’t know the island’s history.”

  Tom had stopped his pacing and was standing still, rare for him. “What history, Martin?”

  Martin smiled. An evil smile, his chin down and his eyes hooded, the shadows drawing out his features and making him look like an angry wolf.

  “In 1862, done in secret, Rock Island Prison was built here to house captured Confederate soldiers. Like many civil war prisons, the conditions were horrible. But this one was worse than most. It was run by a war profiteer named Mordecai Plincer. He stole the money that was supposed to be used to feed the prisoners, and ordered his guards to beat them so they wouldn’t stage an uprising while they starved to death. He didn’t issue blankets, even during the winter months, giving them nothing more to wear than burlap sacks with arm and leg holes cut out, even when temperatures dropped to below freezing.”

  Sara wasn’t a history buff, but she was pretty sure there was never a civil war prison on an island in Lake Huron. She wondered if Martin is using Camp Douglas as the source of this tall tale. It was located in Chicago near Lake Michigan and considered the northern counterpart to the horrors committed at the Confederate prison, Andersonville.

  Yes, Martin has to be making this up. Though that name, Plincer, does sound familiar.

  Martin tossed one of the branches they’d gathered earlier onto the fire. It made a whump sound, throwing sparks and cinders.

  “But those starving, tortured prisoners staged a rebellion anyway, killing all of the guards, driving Plincer from the island. The Union, desperate to cover up their mistake, stopped sending supplies. But the strongest and craziest of the prisoners survived. Even though the food ran out.”

  “How?” Tom asked. “You said there are no animals on this island.”

  Martin smiled, wickedly. “They survived… by eating each other.”

  “Oh, snap.” Tyrone shook his head. “That shit is sick.”

  Sara raised an eyebrow at her husband. “Cannibalism, Martin?”

  Martin looked at her, for the first time in hours. She searched for some softness, some love, but he was all wrapped up in his menace act.

  “Some were cooked. Some were eaten raw. And during the summer months, when meat would spoil, some were kept alive so they could be eaten one piece at a time.”

  Sara did a quick group check, wondering if this story was getting too intense. Everyone appeared deadly serious, their eyes laser-focused on Martin. No one seemed upset. A little scared, maybe, but these were tough kids. She decided to let Martin keep going.

  Martin stood up, spreading out his hands. “Over the last five decades, more than a hundred people have vanished on this part of Lake Huron. Including those eight men and women. What happened to them was truly horrible.”

  The crickets picked that eerie moment to stop chirping. Sara noticed a brief flash in her peripheral vision. Lightening? No, the weather was fine. Besides, this seemed to have come from the woods. She scanned the woods, waiting for it to happen again. They stayed dark.

  Cindy eventually broke the silence. “What happened to them?”

  “It’s said that these war prisoners became more animal than human, feeding on each other and on those men unlucky enough to visit. Unfortunately for this group of eight partiers, they were all doomed the minute they set foot onto Plincer’s Island. When their partying died down, and everyone was drunk and stoned and passing out, the prisoners built a gridiron.”

  The word gridiron hung in the air like a crooked painting, blending into the forest sounds.

  Tyrone whispered, “They built a football field?”

  Martin shook his head. “The term gridiron is used for football these days, but it’s a much older word. It was a form of execution in ancient Rome. Coals are spread over the ground, stoked until they’re red hot. Then the victim is put in a special iron cage, sort of like a grill, and placed on top of the coals, roasting him alive. Unlike being burned at the stake, which is over in a few minutes, it takes hours to die on the gridiron. They say the liquid in your eyes gets so hot, it boils.”

  Sara stood up. Martin should have known not to go there with the gore. “I think that’s enough, Martin. You’ve succeeded in freaking everyone out.” She forced joviality. “Now who wants to roast some marshmallows?”

  “I want to hear what happened to those people,” Tom said.

  “And I want to be able to sleep tonight,” Sara replied.

  Sara’s eyes met Martin’s. She saw intensity there, but also resignation, and something else. Something soft and happy. Eventually his lips curled into a grin.

  “But we haven’t gotten to the part where I pretend to be dragged off into the woods, kicking and screaming. That’s the best part.”

  Sara placed her hands on her hips, feeling herself smile. “I’m sure we would have all been terrified.”

  Martin sat back down. “You’re the boss. And if the boss wants to do marshmallows, who am I to argue?”

  “I thought you’re the one who created the Center,” Laneesha asked.

  Martin glanced at Sara. There was kindness in his eyes, and maybe some resignation, too.

  “Sara and I created it together. We wanted to make a difference. The system takes kids who are basically good but made a few mistakes, sticks them into juvee hall, and they come out full blown crooks. The Center is aimed at giving these kids positive direction and helping them to change.” Martin smiled sadly. “Well, that was its purpose.”

  “It’s bullshit the man cut your program, Martin.” Meadow tossed a stick onto the fire.

  “It sucks,” Cindy added.

  There were nods of agreement. Martin shrugged. “Things like this happen all the time. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more for you kids. Sara, Jack, and I are a small family, but you guys are like our—”

  Martin screamed in mid-sentence, then fell backward off the log, rolling into the bushes and the darkness.

  Excerpt from LOCKED DOORS by Blake Crouch

  THE headline on the Arts and Leisure page read: “Publisher to Reissue Five Thrillers by Alleged Murderer, Andrew Z. Thomas.”

  All it took was seeing his name.

  Karen Prescott dropped The New York Times and walked over to the window.

  Morning light streamed across the clutter of her cramped office—query letters and sample chapters stacked in two piles on the floor beside the desk, a box of galleys shoved under the credenza. She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffi
c now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below.

  Leaning against a bookcase that housed many of the hardcovers she’d guided to publication, Karen shivered. The mention of Andrew’s name always unglued her.

  For two years she’d been romantically involved with the suspense novelist and had even lived with him during the writing of Blue Murder at the same lake house in North Carolina where many of his victims were found.

  She considered it a latent character defect that she’d failed to notice anything sinister in Andy beyond a slight reclusive tendency.

  My God, I almost married him.

  She pictured Andy reading to the crowd in that Boston bookshop the first time they met. In a bathrobe writing in his office as she brought him fresh coffee (French roast of course). Andy making love to her in a flimsy rowboat in the middle of Lake Norman.

  She thought of his dead mother.

  The exhumed bodies from his lakefront property.

  His face on the FBI website.

  They’d used his most recent jacket photo, a black and white of Andy in a sports jacket sitting broodingly at the end of his pier.

  During the last few years she’d stopped thinking of him as Andy. He was Andrew Thomas now and embodied all the horrible images the cadence of those four syllables invoked.

  There was a knock.

  Scott Boylin, publisher of Ice Blink’s literary imprint, stood in the doorway dressed in his best bib and tucker. Karen suspected he was gussied up for the Doubleday party.

  He smiled, waved with his fingers.

  She crossed her arms, leveled her gaze.

  God he looked streamlined today—very tall, fit, crowned by thick black hair with dignified intimations of silver.

  He made her feel little. In a good way. Because Karen stood nearly six feet tall, few men towered over her. She loved having to look up at Scott.

  They’d been dating clandestinely for the last four months. She’d even given him a key to her apartment where they spent countless Sundays in bed reading manuscripts, the coffeestained pages scattered across the sheets.

  But last night she’d seen him at a bar in SoHo with one of the cute interns. Their rendezvous did not look work-related.

  “Come to the party with me,” he said. “Then we’ll go to Il Piazza. Talk this out. It’s not what you—”

  “I’ve got tons of reading to catch up—”

  “Don’t be like that, Karen, come on.”

  “I don’t think it’s appropriate to have this conversation here, so…”

  He exhaled sharply through his nose and the door closed hard behind him.

  Joe Mack was stuffing his pink round face with a gyro when his cell phone started ringing to the tune of “Staying Alive.”

  He answered, cheeks exploding with food, “This Joe.”

  “Hi, yes, um, I’ve got a bit of an interesting problem.”

  “Whath?”

  “Well, I’m in my apartment but I can’t get the deadbolt to turn from the inside.”

  Joe Mack choked down a huge mouthful, said, “So you’re locked in.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which apartment?” He didn’t even try to mask the annoyance in his voice.

  “Twenty-two eleven.”

  “Name?”

  “Um…I’m not the tenet. I’m Karen Prescott’s friend. She’s the—”

  “Yeah, I get it. You need to leave any time soon?”

  “Well, yeah, I don’t want to—”

  Joe Mack sighed, closed the cell phone, and devoured the last of the gyro.

  Wiping his hands on his shirt he heaved himself from a debilitated swivel chair and lumbered out of the office, locking the door behind him.

  The lobby was quiet for midday and the elevator doors spread as soon as he pressed the button. He rode up wishing he’d bought three gyros for lunch instead of two.

  The doors opened again and he walked onto the twenty-second floor, fishing the key ring containing the master from the pocket of his enormous overalls.

  He belched.

  It echoed down the empty corridor.

  Man was he hungry.

  He stopped at 2211, knocked, yelled through the door, “It’s the super!”

  No one answered.

  Joe Mack inserted the master into the deadbolt. It turned easily enough.

  He pushed the door open.

  “Hello?” he said, standing in the threshold, admiring the apartment—roomy, flat-screen television, lush deepblue carpet, an antique desk, great view of SoHo, probably loads of food in the fridge.

  “Anybody home?”

  He turned the deadbolt four times. It worked perfectly.

  Another door opened somewhere in the hallway and approaching footsteps reverberated off the hardwood floor. Joe Mack glanced down the corridor at the tall man with black hair in a black overcoat strolling toward him from the stairwell.

  “Hey, pal, were you the one who just called me?” Joe Mack asked.

  The man with black hair stopped at the open doorway of 2211.

  He smelled strange, of Windex and lemons.

  “Yes, I was the one.”

  “Oh. You get the lock to work?”

  “I’ve never been in this apartment.”

  “What the fuck did you call me for—”

  Glint of a blade. The man held an ivory-hilted bowie. He swept its shimmering point across Joe Mack’s swollen belly, cleaving denim, cotton, several layers of skin.

  “No, just wait just a second—”

  The man raised his right leg and booted Joe Mack through the threshold.

  The super toppled backward as the man followed him into the apartment, slammed the door, and shot the deadbolt home.

  Karen left Ice Blink Press at 6:30 p.m. and emerged into a manic Manhattan evening, the sliver of sky between the buildings smoldering with dying sunlight, gilding glass and steel. It was the fourth Friday of October, the terminal brilliance of autumn fullblown upon the city, and as she walked the fifteen blocks to her apartment in SoHo, Karen decided that she wouldn’t start the manuscript in her leather satchel tonight.

  Instead she’d slip into satin pajamas, have a glass of that organic chardonnay she’d purchased at Whole Foods Market, and watch wonderful mindless television.

  It had been a bad week.

  Pampering was in order.

  At 7:55 she walked out of her bedroom in black satin pajamas that rubbed coolly against her skin. Her chaotic blond hair was twisted into a bun and held up by chopsticks from the Chinese food she’d ordered. Two unopened food cartons and a bottle of wine sat on the glass coffee table between the couch and the flat-screen television. Her apartment smelled of spicysweet sesame beef.

  She plopped down and uncorked the wine.

  Ashley Chambliss’s CD Nakedsongs had ended and in the perfect stillness of her apartment Karen conceded how alone she was.

  Thirty-seven.

  Single again.

  Childless.

  But I’m not lonely, she thought, turning on the television and pouring a healthy glass of chardonnay.

  I’m just alone.

  There is a difference.

  After watching Dirty Dancing, Karen treated herself to a soak. She’d closed the bathroom door and a Yankee candle that smelled of cookie dough sat burning in a glass jar on the sink, the projection of its restless flame flickering on the sweaty plaster walls.

  Karen rubbed her long muscular legs together, slippery with bath oil. Imagining another pair of legs sliding between her own, she shut her eyes, moved her hands over her breasts, nipples swelling, then up and down her thighs.

  The phone was ringing in the living room.

  She wondered if Scott Boylin were calling to apologize. Wine encouraged irrational forgiveness in Karen. She even wished Scott were in the bathtub with her. She could feel the memory of his water-softened feet gliding up her smooth shinbones. Maybe she’d call and invite him over. Give him that chance to explain. He’d be back from the D
oubleday party.

  Now someone was knocking at the front door.

  Karen sat up, blew back the bubbles that had amassed around her head.

  Lifting her wineglass by the stem she finished it off. Then she rose out of the water, took her white terrycloth bathrobe that lay draped across the toilet seat, and stepped unsteadily from the tub onto the mosaic tile. She’d nearly polished off the entire bottle of chardonnay and a warm and pleasant gale was raging in her head.

  Karen crossed the living room heading toward the front door.

  She failed to notice that the cartons of steamed rice and sesame beef were gone, or that a large gray trashcan now stood between the television and the antique desk she’d inherited from her grandmother.

  She peeked through the peephole.

  A young man stood in the hallway holding an enormous bouquet of rubyred roses.