The Method

by Ralston, Duncan

  “Shit, Colby, I bet I can think of a few ideas.”

  “Watch the cussin’. Go on an get him on the back there, I gotta get L’il Miss Priss to the prom, don’t I, princess?”

  The man made her nod her head. Jackson uttered a high giggle.

  Frank had been staring at the out-of-place painting, focusing all of his fear and anger toward it when it suddenly fell from the wall and landed on its front, shattering the glass.

  Linda gave him a furious look as if he’d knocked it over via telepathy. He shrugged innocently, shaking his head.

  “What the heck was that?” Jackson said.

  The one-armed man, Colby, let go of Teri’s hair, and she slumped over her husband’s lifeless body as the two men raised their weapons.

  “Somebody in the cabin?”

  “I look like a redneck magician to you?” Colby asked. “Hustle your fat butt over there an’ go check.”

  Jackson kicked a patch of dirt and grass into the air in a huff and began trudging toward the cabin.

  “How the fuck did that fall?” Frank whispered.

  “We have to hide. Block the door. Something.” Linda scrambled to the other side of the cabin. “Get behind the stove.”

  “I can help.”

  “There’s no time. Just do it.”

  Begrudgingly, Frank dragged himself under the window and crawled between the stove and the wall.

  “I can still see your foot.”

  He drew his injured leg painfully close and felt a sharp pain in his ass. The needle still hung from the thread looped through his wound. He snapped it off and tossed it aside.

  Linda scrambled to find something heavy to put in front of the door. Pulling down one of the shelves or dragging the sewing machine over would be too noisy. She settled on the chair, brought it to the door, and wedged it under the handle.

  Jackson’s boots clomped on the creaky, busted porch. He moved past the window, no more than a dark blur through dirty glass.

  She pressed herself against the wall on the far side of the door.

  The handle rattled. A panel split as the big man threw his weight against the door, but the chair held firm.

  “What’s the holdup?” Colby shouted.

  “Door’s stuck!”

  “Well, push it, ya dang pansy!”

  “I am pushing it!”

  The porch groaned as he moved to the window and peered inside, tenting his fat fingers over his eyes. His shadow drew long over the dirty tiles.

  Linda held her breath.

  “Pitcher fell!” he shouted.

  “How come it fell?”

  “I look like a redneck magician?”

  “You look like a fat idiot, which is what you are.”

  Jackson muttered, “Fuck you” under his breath as his shadow and footfalls retreated from the window.

  Frank peered out from behind the stove. He saw Linda holding still against the wall, clearly not daring to move until she knew they were gone, and he shuffled as quietly as possible to the window to look out.

  The man called Jackson had stopped in the window directly above Frank, and he squinted up at something. “The shit is this? Aw hell, they got cameras!”

  He thrust the butt of his weapon upward. Plastic and glass crunched, and the hunter sidestepped as electronic parts rained down.

  “What are we gonna do, Colby?”

  “Hang on a dang second, I’m thinkin’. An’ watch the cussin’.”

  Frank couldn’t see Teri with the bearded guy taking up much of the window, but he heard her whimper.

  “Shut it!” Colby snapped.

  The sharp slap that followed silenced her.

  Linda scuttled over to the window beside Frank, risking a peek over the sill. She watched Jackson tromp away from the cabin toward his friend.

  “All right, only one thing we can do far as I can see,” Colby said. “Gotta recon that fancypants resort on the way back to camp. Make sure nobody seen what they got on that tape.”

  “What if they already seen it, Colby? What if they done called the cops?”

  “Would you calm the heck down? I’ll handle Gus, all right? Most important thing right now is we got to erase that video before some idjit puts it up on the innernet. All you gotta worry bout is gettin’ him on back-a the quad—”

  “—an get him back to camp. I’ll figger out the rest.”

  “Sarge gon’ be pissed, ain’t he?”

  “You just worry bout gettin’ this critter back to camp. Let me handle Sarge.”

  “All right then.” Jackson scooped up Neville’s limp corpse and hauled him up over his shoulder.

  Teri lunged at them on her knees, crying out, and sprawled prostrate in the grass.

  Colby sidestepped her fall and turned the movement into a little jig, wearing a gleeful grin. “Aw, beautiful, I’d love to, but you know my dance card’s all full!”

  Jackson lowered Neville’s body onto the back rack. Neville’s limbs hung limply over the sides. The big man let them hang and mounted the seat.

  “Bungee cord him or he gon’ fall off,” Colby instructed.

  Jackson climbed off in a huff and strapped Neville to the back with the bungee cables already hanging from the bars. “Anything else, your highness?”

  “Yeah, why don’t you go on and kiss my butt for me real quick?”

  Jackson flipped him off and jumped back on the quad. He revved the engine, tore up clumps of dark earth, and roared off toward the trees.

  Colby slapped dirt from his cargo pants. “I apologize for my associate’s language. He hasn’t been housetrained.”

  “Fuck you!” Teri screamed.

  “Now what kind of way is that for a lady to talk?” The man tutted and grabbed her around the waist, scooping her up under his arm. He carried her kicking and screaming toward the woods.

  Frank slammed a fist against the floor. “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck!” He shouted until his hand bled, and he drew it to his chest with a wince.

  “There was nothing we could do, Frank.”

  “Who the fuck were those maniacs?”

  Linda shrugged, a steady unpleasant throb in her temples. “Hunters. Some sort of backwoods militia group maybe. Whoever they are, they’re too dangerous and too well armed for us to deal with.”

  He was looking at the floor where his fists had unsettled years of dust.

  “Frank. Frank.”

  He looked up at her.

  “We can get help. We just need to get to a phone.”

  Frank looked far less convinced than she felt, but he nodded, and Linda thought that was something she could build on.

  “This fucking painting,” he said suddenly, and scuttled across the cabin to the broken frame. “What’s this?” He flicked aside shards of glass.

  “What?”

  “It’s a notebook.” He showed it to her, a small pad with a worn green cover. “You need to see this.”

  She came to his side and saw what someone had written neatly in ink on the cover:

  HK + JD = PAIN

  “Same thing we saw on the tree,” she said.

  “Except they solved the equation. What does it mean, you think?”

  Linda frowned, thinking. “What’s Dr. Kaspar’s first name? Do you remember?”

  “I don’t think anybody told us. I mean, if they did, I don’t remember.”

  “H.K.,” she said. “H. Kaspar. Herbert, Hans, Heinrich . . .”

  “Why was it hidden behind the painting? And then it just falls off the wall on its own?” He thumbed through the pages, every bit of space filled with small, neatly penciled letters, but he could only understand the first two words underlined at the top of the first page: DIE METHODE. “What language is this?”

  Linda snatched it from him. “I recognize some of these words. Das, die, ein. Didn’t Kaspar’s family come from Austria before the war? They speak German there.”

  “Is ‘die’ the same in German as it is in English?”

  “It mean
s ‘the,’“ she told him.

  Frank considered it. “All right, but that doesn’t help us, does it? We still need to get back to the lodge and get the police involved.”

  “But it does help. The trap, the initials, the chain . . .” She shook the notebook excitedly. “H.K. plus J.D. equals pain.”

  “Fuck,” Frank said as it dawned on him.

  “This whole thing is a trap. That’s why Trevor and Dillon and the Lumleys’ friends were all banged up and bruised like they said. They didn’t get in an accident, Frank. They were fighting for their lives.”

  “We can’t trust anybody here. Can we?”

  “Just the two of us,” she said.

  10 — FUBAR

  Frank tapped his fingers impatiently while Linda sewed up the second wound, so keyed up thinking about everything that the pain barely registered.

  “I don’t think the painting fell by accident,” he said as she closed the wound.

  “You think . . . what?” she said, the needle clenched between her teeth.

  “A trick hanger, maybe. Like in those poltergeist prank videos.”

  “They would’ve had to know exactly what was going on at that exact moment.”

  “There was a camera outside. We never checked in here. This place could be wired just like the lodge.”

  “You’re right.” She frowned. “But if they’re in on it, then maybe . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel right. You know?”

  He nodded. None of it felt right. Not since what had happened last night with the TVs in their bedrooms. If the whole thing had been part of The Method . . . how could they be sure what just happened with Neville hadn’t somehow been faked?

  Yeah, like the moon landings, he thought derisively, gritting his teeth against the pain as Linda pulled his flesh together. The 9/11 conspiracies. Roswell. It’s all a great big social experiment by some clandestine government agency.

  He let out a guttural chuckle, and Linda looked at him queerly.

  She bit the thread and tied it off. Looking over her handiwork, she felt satisfied with it, hoping it would hold up to the trek ahead. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She helped him out of the chair, and he tested his leg. The stitches creaked, but the wounds remained closed. They walked to the door with his arm over her shoulders.

  “Wait here,” she said once they reached the porch.

  Avoiding the broken railing beam, Frank leaned his weight against a post while Linda went around the front to check the area. She found Neville’s fedora in the grass. Blood had spattered its cream fabric.

  Nearby, a wallet lay open in a bare patch of grass. She bent to examine it.

  The driver’s license belonged to a man named Jamal Reed. The man had Neville’s charming smile, the same dazzling green eyes, and the rest of his very familiar face.

  Curious, she flipped through the rest of its contents.

  Sixteen dollars in the billfold. A US visa issued to a Jamal Reed from Canada tucked in behind the cash.

  In the wallet slots, she found more proof of fraud or deception. What she didn’t find was any evidence that Neville Lumley or Jamal Reed or whoever the hell he really was also happened to be a millionaire businessman.

  “You all right?” Frank called from the cabin.

  She said she was fine, though she felt woozy, honestly, and returned to the porch with the wallet.

  “Whatcha got there?”

  “Turns out Neville wasn’t really Neville.”

  Frank gave her a confused look. She showed him the driver’s license in its clear plastic slot. “Jamal Reed?” He shrugged. “Maybe he changed his name.”

  “Look at the rest.”

  He flicked to the back. “Not a lot of cash for a supposed millionaire.”

  “No. And no platinum credit card either. Looks at the rest.”

  Frank pulled out a $10 Starbuck’s gift card with the PIN reveal scratched, a Cineplex points card, a debit visa, an organ donor card, and a card for his low-tier healthcare plan.

  Lastly he found Jamal’s Screen Actor’s Guild card. “He’s an actor.”

  Linda nodded. “That’s why I recognized him. I must have seen him in something and just assumed we’d met before.”

  “But you saw him get shot.”

  “Maybe . . . I don’t know. But maybe it was like those things they use in the movies.”

  “A squib? You think so?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore.” She leaned against the window and shut her eyes against the sun. “Could this . . . this whole thing, could it be part of The Method?”

  “A trick, you mean?” Frank jumped at it, eager to have his theory confirmed, despite what it might mean. “Like what happened with the cameras in our rooms?”

  “It just seems like everything is linked. The trap was real, and the dogs . . . but was Neville or Jamal . . . ? We never saw them shoot those rifles, Frank.”

  Frank closed the wallet and tucked it into his cargo pocket alongside Kaspar’s notebook. “That way of thinking could get us killed if you’re wrong,” he said. “This isn’t a game, Linda. Not until somebody says ‘olly olly in come free.’ If we don’t treat it like a real threat, we could die in this fucking place.”

  The desperation in her eyes as she nodded showed him the sentiment had sunk in.

  “We’ve got to get to the road, but that means we’ll probably have to go to the lodge. We’ve to be careful about this. Jungle warfare, Lin. Stealth and vigilance. You hear anything, you give me a signal.”

  He took her hand and squeezed it. She looked at him. He stood in silhouette, but her vision adjusted to the light, and the fire in his eyes reminded her of how he’d looked as they’d planned their run through the endurance event they’d participated in years ago.

  “We’ve got this,” he said, just like he’d said then.

  Only this isn’t a game, she thought. This is real. Lives are at stake.

  “We can make it, Lin. I know we can.”

  And we never beat the endurance event. We crapped out at the electroshock.

  Linda managed a weak nod, if only to bolster his courage.

  It took over an hour to find Lone Loon Lake through the bush, and they’d had to backtrack another twenty minutes once they’d reached the main bay and realized they had been following the shore in the wrong direction.

  Frank had dunked his head in the water and rinsed fresh and crusted blood from his leg. Linda had squatted for a pee in the bush before splashing her armpits and the back of her neck under her hairline to cool off. By the time they reached the lodge, it was well past noon. She had peed twice, and Frank had sweated through his shirt and the crotch of his shorts, his leg throbbing and itching like crazy.

  They stood hunched in the woods and surveyed the area. The dock swayed lazily on a light current. Their hatchback and the Lumleys’ shiny SUV remained in the lot. Three four-wheelers stood near the side door.

  The grounds themselves appeared deserted. No movement inside or out.

  “Where is everyone?” Frank said.

  As if on cue, the side door swung open. Frank dropped behind a felled tree, pulling Linda down with him. Its bushy branches provided adequate cover, but they could still see through the needles in some spots, well enough to watch the new guy who’d emerged from inside.

  The man leaned against one of the vehicles to light a smoke, dressed in a cowboy hat and a long brown duster which, combined with a goatee, reminded Frank of Walker, Texas Ranger, although Frank suspected Chuck Norris didn’t smoke. The man had no visible weapon, but if he was with the men they’d seen at the cabin, he was likely to have at least a single handgun holstered under the jacket.

  “We’ve gotta lure him away from the door,” Linda whispered. “We need to get to that phone.”

  “The SUV’s got an alarm.” Frank nodded toward it. “It went off when I was getting rid of the weed. Could we throw somethin
g at it? Would that set it off?”

  Linda shook her head. “It’d have to be something big. It sounds like it might be a proximity alarm, but it probably also has motion sensors. A piece of gravel or something small like that won’t do it.”

  Frank hummed, deep in thought.

  “What about . . .” She paused to weigh the options. “What if I ran over there, set off the alarm, and ran down to the dock to hide?”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “Well, you can’t do it, not with your leg. I’d at least have a chance. Then you could hobble over to the door while they’re looking for me.”

  “And leave you trapped outside? No way.”

  “It’s the only chance we’ve got. You get to the phone, lock yourself in the office, and call the cops.”

  “No.” He watched Walker take another drag on his cigarette. “It’s too dangerous. Let’s just follow the road. Go find help. Maybe that cop’s still out there in the speed trap—”

  “They could all be dead by then. What if those guys have men out on the road waiting on the police? I love you, Frank, but you’re louder than a moose limping around on that leg of yours. There’s no way we could outrun them.”

  “We’re gonna go in there up against three heavily armed dudes, maybe more? You said it yourself. We don’t stand a chance.”

  “Neither do Alex and Teri. Or the other people here. These guys aren’t heavily armed, Frank. The fat guy has a single-shot rifle. The other guy’s is bolt action, but he’s only got one arm to shoot, cock, and reload. We don’t even know if the guy in the long coat is armed or not.” She was determined now. Fear and excitement pumped her limbs full of adrenaline, perking up her senses. “I’ve already seen a man die today. I’m not gonna hide in the bushes while those motherfuckers slaughter everyone else. At least we’d have the element of surprise.”

  Frank studied her face. She had a wild look in her eyes, like in those first few years of their relationship when they’d sneaked off to screw in various public places just barely hidden from sight.

  “I’m not asking your permission, Frank. I’m telling you to be ready to run. Hobble. Whatever. I’m asking you to be strong for me.”