New Blood

by Shane Lusher

  Tuan was still talking. “I overheard him once, making a joke, only it didn’t sound like a joke. At least that’s what hit me onto him. He said something about how he’d never have gotten out of Germany like he did if he hadn’t learned to look the other way.”

  “Yeah, well,” Percy said. “Now he’s dead. And you told her all about it, didn’t you?”

  He looked over at Tuan, who avoided his eyes.

  “I have to find Maddie,” he said.

  “First we’ve got some unfinished business,” I said.

  Tuan laughed, and then coughed, hacked and spit onto the street. “That’s what she calls—this,” he said, raising his hand to the flames climbing into the night.

  “What?” I asked.

  “All the killing,” he said. “Unfinished business.”

  We went around Anderson’s house by turning left on West Street, right onto Main and then right again on Franklin. We were at the lane in just under three minutes, and though I’d told Tuan to watch the bridge we hit it full force.

  The plank structure buckled, and the bottom of the car hit the wood, but it held, and then we fishtailed halfway up the hill to the barnyard, the two deputies in their unmarked cars trailing along behind us.

  I opened the great sliding door of the machine shed and stepped inside, found the light, and switched it on. I’d sold off all the farm equipment a few years before, and now the room stood empty, the oil smell of the dirt floor rising musty into the waiting air.

  “Come over here,” I said, and began moving dirt aside with my foot. “It’s here somewhere.” I kicked a few more times, and the handle of a door emerged in the ground.

  “Bomb shelter,” I said. “My grandfather built it in the sixties. As far as I know, nobody has been down here in over twenty years.”

  I got the rest of the dirt off the door and opened it up. Rassi was next to me, peering down.

  “Why in the hell would anybody build a bomb shelter out here?” he asked.

  I looked over at Percy, who shrugged.

  Why, indeed? When you were born in the eighties, the Cold War was about as relevant as the War of Spanish Succession. Ten years made a hell of a difference.

  “Check it out,” I said, pointing to the stairs.

  We all went down and opened the weapons locker.

  “Jesus Christ,” Rassi said.

  “Well, my grandpa believed in being prepared,” I said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Rassi said. “How old is this shit?”

  “It’s fine,” Percy said. “We don’t need a goddamned arsenal.”

  We’d agreed that we didn’t have time to get back to Pekin and then return to Trueblood’s. It was very late, and Tuan had said that the Saturday night parties rarely lasted beyond two or three A.M.

  If we missed them, we would have to wait another two weeks, and who knew what might happen to whichever kid they had in Trueblood’s basement.

  “Usually it’s two or three kids,” Tuan had said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes it’s just one. That’s all that they—require. Then they spend Sunday recuperating and partying. The kids get out some time on Monday or Tuesday, depending on what kind of shape they’re in.

  “Trueblood keeps half a hospital in equipment down there. He makes sure that you don’t see anything physical before they go back to the home. Or to the foster family, or wherever.”

  Percy had asked him, in the basement, how many of the children were involved, and how many of the parents.

  “I’d say about a third,” Tuan had said. “A third of the kids in total, and then a third of the ones who get adopted.”

  Percy had been hard to convince. “I just don’t see it,” he’d said. “You’re talking major conspiracy. There would have to be fifty, seventy-five people involved. More.”

  It had been more the look in Tuan’s eyes that had convinced Percy than what he said: a deep sadness bordering on hopelessness, and a profound loss of faith.

  “Why do you think I’ve been sitting on this for thirty years?” he’d said.

  Tuan’s story had made me want to grab him, shake him, ask him why he’d waited nearly thirty years and even then, required the overt threat of torture to come clean.

  It had made the situation seem all the more urgent. All of that wasted time. It was the thought that some kid was down in that basement, being beaten and raped and God knew what else, since that was worse than you even wanted to think about, while we debated a course of action.

  It reminded me of the time I’d come home drunk one night to find my cat pinned between the windowsill and the frame, its back broken.

  How long had it suffered meaninglessly while I sat around getting wasted and filling my lungs with smoke?

  “Don’t take the pistols,” Percy was saying. “You haven’t trained with a handgun, you’re better off not having one. Take the shotguns. We got six, three with slug barrels. You two,” he said, indicating Rassi and me, “take one of each, and pack in as many slugs and buckshot as you can carry.

  “Anybody here have any military training?”

  I shook my head, and so did Rassi. Tuan didn’t answer. He seemed stuck in a world of his own, back at the fire or, more likely, still twelve years old, himself down in that basement.

  Percy hesitated, then handed him a twelve-gauge and a box of shells.

  Then he turned to the rest of us.

  “Don’t shoot anybody,” he said. “I don’t think my Dad is much of a hunter, but he does have an FOID and a .357. I’m not sure whether he has anything else; if he does, it’s not legal. But you don’t shoot,” he said. “Not unless somebody fires on you, and then you make sure you can actually see everything in front of you before you squeeze the trigger. We don’t want any kids to get hurt, and our goal isn’t to gun them all down. We may have decided that we’re all a bunch of vigilantes, but we’re going to try to do this thing by the book. Understood?”

  Rassi and I looked at him and nodded, slowly. We’d talked most of it through while we were waiting for Tuan to wake up.

  There were motion sensors on lights all around the house. Percy would go forward and get the lights to turn on. Once that happened, he would duck behind a tree. Then we would watch the house and wait to see if anybody came to check. If someone did, we would wait until the lights went out, and one of us—Percy, he was the smallest, and, we thought, the quickest—would run around the side yard and make noise with the garbage cans.

  Then we would wait until someone came to check. Our idea was that they would think raccoons had been in the trash, and forget about it.

  We were to hang back while Percy went in with the two deputies, Jacobs and Conover. I didn’t like that part of it, but Percy had been adamant. Our presence during the operation was to be more or less observers, and, in a worst-case scenario, backups.

  “And for Christ’s sake,” Percy continued as we went back up the stairs into the barn. “Don’t fucking shoot each other.”

  I followed him up to the dirt floor and thought about the fact that twenty-four hours earlier I was lying naked with Kelly, feeling my arm going to sleep, content, and then cuddling with Erin.

  “Now,” Percy said. He was holding up a long plastic dowel with a wad of cloth on the end of it. “Everybody run this down your barrel once or twice. Who knows how much shit has grown in here since Kennedy was president?”

  We laughed, finally, together, and then my phone rang, and when I picked it up, the bottom dropped out of the world.

  Fifty-Four

  “Erin’s gone,” Kelly said. “Dana, she’s gone!”

  I could feel bile rising in my throat as I tried to remain calm.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Maybe she just went to the bathroom.”

  “She’s gone, Dana,” Kelly said again. “She’s gone. She was here just an hour ago, and now she’s gone. The window in the bedroom is wide open.

  “They left a note. It says ‘Hartman’.”

  My throat had gone tr
y. I tried to speak, and for a moment, I couldn’t.

  Percy was looking at me. He gave me a questioning look and then I found my voice.

  “Is Casey there?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Kelly said. “Dana, where are you-”

  “Listen, Kelly,” I said. “Some things are going down, and I don’t have time to tell you about them. I know where Erin is. I am going to go get her. I’m with Percy and Dave. We know everything now. We-”

  “Dana, I want you to come here!” she said. “I don’t give a-”

  “Kelly,” I said as calmly as I could. I gestured toward everyone else, and ran toward the door to the machine shed. I heard their footsteps echoing against the empty walls behind me.

  “Take Casey. Go down to the basement and lock the door. You stay awake. Anybody comes through that door who isn’t me or Dave or Percy, you shoot them.”

  I had the door to the car open.

  “Dana, you’re not making any sense.”

  Percy grabbed the phone away from me.

  “Kelly, listen up. We’re going to get Erin. You need to take Casey and get out of there. Drive over to Applebee’s. They’re open twenty-four hours. I know it’ll be hard, but you go in there and wait.

  “We’ll come get you,” he said.

  Kelly said something into the phone and Percy shook his head and cut her off:

  “There’s no time for that,” he said. “Trust us.”

  He hung up the phone and stuck it in his pocket.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  We got into the car, and I looked at him, my shotgun cradled between my knees with the barrel up.

  “This is the worst-case scenario, Percy,” I said as we pulled out of the barnyard. “I’m not your back-up right now. I’m going in with you.”

  Percy started to say something when we drove over the creek, but then he nodded and looked away.

  Fifty-Five

  She was walking behind the outermost row of corn along Springfield Road, her arms coated in the acrid-sweet smell of the gasoline, the look on the old man’s face still fresh in her mind as she’d walked in with the carcass of his dog and thrown it down on the table.

  He hadn’t begged. He hadn’t offered any protest, any excuse. He hadn’t tried to fight back. He was an old man with a limp, and when she came in he simply sighed and sat down in his chair, sipping contentedly from his glass of scotch. He’d known why she was there.

  He’d sunk within himself at the end, his ancient body already given over into whatever came next, his eyes closing even before death curled itself around him, as if he were going to sleep.

  In a way, he’d seemed to welcome what was happening to him. A long life lived in depravity borne of a depraved generation in a depraved country.

  Sweeney had taught her that you can’t escape that, once life had set its mark on you.

  She looked up at the moon on the horizon, nearly full over the waving tassels whose seed had already begun to wither in the July sun, their mission nearly complete.

  When the three cars passed by and she recognized Tuan’s pinched face pressed up against the glass behind the driver, she knew that her business was finished.

  She stood there for a moment, listening to the car doors slam, to their shouted voices climbing into a crescendo until someone shushed them and they fell mute, their whispering masked by the continued popping of the infernal corn.

  She took one last, deep breath, stepped out into the road, and walked back in the opposite direction.

  Fifty-Six

  Tuan sat in the back seat behind Percy Trueblood and watched the emotions playing out along Hartman’s jaw line, the muscles rippling as he clenched his teeth and ground them down against one another.

  It was helpless rage. Tuan knew it well. It was the main emotion he’d felt most of his adult life. It was what had paralyzed him into not moving, collecting instead a record of transgressions that had been, and would probably remain to be, of no use to anyone except for himself.

  He’d started out intending only to do something good with what he had, and instead he’d created Maddie, whose life was going to be over before she even knew what it meant to live.

  He laughed to himself.

  Percy stopped talking. He’d gone through the plan three times now, and Hartman had asked him to stop. They’d just crossed Route 9 on Springfield Road and Percy hit the gas hard, shooting off toward Broadway.

  “Something funny, Nguyen?” Percy asked, looking at him in the mirror.

  “No,” Tuan said. “Nothing funny about any of this.”

  He hadn’t created Maddie. Someone else had. He just hadn't bothered to do anything about it.

  That was the difference between him and Hartman. Because Hartman was actually about to do something about it.

  I’d understood the words that Percy was saying, but the meaning had been all but lost. We were to hold to the plan we had before. We had to be cautious. Rushing in would just wind up getting people hurt, maybe getting people killed.

  He kept saying “people,” probably knowing that if he said “Erin,” I wouldn’t be able to focus.

  I couldn’t focus as it was. I kept seeing her in my head, chained to a cold concrete wall, Trueblood or his ape of a friend Big Red running his hands all over her naked body, and that would switch to me holding Jake, already brain dead, as I held him and sang that song Van Diemen’s Land because it was the only one I knew how to sing and hadn’t bothered learning anything else to sing to him.

  By the time I knew I should have, it had been too late.

  When we parked in the ditch at the top of the hill that led down to the juncture of Springfield Road and Broadway, all I wanted to do was kill Trueblood.

  I jumped out and started to run, but Percy grabbed my shoulder and spun me around.

  His eyes shown cold in the moonlight.

  “Look at me,” he said. “You want to get her out. Alive. I don’t give a shit what else happens. But you are not going to get her by going in there and firing that gun.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “Fine,” I said. I looked down at his arm and shook it off. “Fine,” I said again. “Then let’s go. Now.”

  We tripped the first light when we stepped off the road and into the ditch at the base of Trueblood’s property. We all hit the ground. The lights gave off a whining noise in the air amongst the trees, a buzzing, like a flock of mosquitoes.

  I waited as long as I could, and then I rose up on my knees.

  “Wait,” Percy hissed. I dropped back down and bit my lip until I could taste blood. I could see the row of cars parked in the driveway. They were the same ones that had been there a few nights before, only now it seemed like more.

  The lights went out.

  “Go,” Percy said. “Now.”

  We got up and the lights came back on. We made it thirty feet and Percy yelled, “Down!”

  We all hit the ground again, hiding behind trees, and watched. The house was dark, and when the lights inside failed to turn on, Percy said:

  “Again. All the way this time.”

  We made it up to the side of the house, which was windowless, and then, moving over to the door, Percy pulled out a pocketknife and started working on the lock.

  “It’s got glass,” I said, and though he tried to stop me, I pushed hard against it until it popped, reached my hand inside and unlocked the door.

  We all slipped into the darkened garage and stood there, listening. We could hear music coming from the stairwell below. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like Rocks Off by the Rolling Stones.

  “Be right back,” Percy said. “Stay here.”

  He went down the stairs as quickly as he could without making any noise, and just then the lights outside in the yard switched off, and we were standing in darkness.

  I felt Percy standing next to me then. “The door’s steel,” he said. “The knob’s unlocked, but there’s a deadbolt.”

  I peered into the darkness in the d
irection of his voice, and gradually my eyes adjusted.

  “We should have brought a battering ram,” he said.

  I pulled the Ruger out of my waistband. “Think this would do it?” I asked.

  Percy looked at me, and then at the gun. Then he turned to Tuan, who was standing, clutching the 12-gauge by the barrel, pointing it up at the ceiling. “Tuan!” he hissed. “Tuan!”

  Tuan turned, his face blank, and said, “What?”

  “You with us?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good,” Percy said. “Tell me about the basement.”

  “What about it?”

  “Is it split up into rooms, one big space, got a cubbyhole somewhere, what?”

  I could feel the bodies of the two deputies moving closer to Percy, in front of me.

  “Oh,” Tuan said. “It’s just one big room, with support columns—just the bare steel pipes—a third and two-thirds into the room, in the middle.”

  “We go through this door, what are we going to see?”

  “The shackles on the right, some benches and chairs on the left. A fridge with drinks. The camera’s-”

  “Good,” Percy said and then turned to me. “Give me that,” he said, and after a moment’s hesitation, I handed over the Ruger.

  “Now, come on.”

  We all followed him down the stairs and stood next to the door. The music was louder here, and we could hear snapping sounds and the high-pitched noise of a scream that had been cut off.

  I shouldered one of the deputies out of the way and lunged at the door, but Percy pushed me back against the cinder block wall.

  “We’re going to be in there in ten seconds,” he said. “You keep it cool.”

  I couldn’t see him, but I felt him fumbling around. He touched each one of us on the arm, one by one, I thought, and then he said:

  “I’m going to blow the door. It will take me a second to toss the Ruger and get my shotgun up.