by Jack Kilborn
“So why kill Wellington? Or was that fake, too?”
“That was… unfortunate. I would have preferred terrifying him, then milking him for metusamine like you and the others. But that’s the other half of the experiment. You’re obviously aware of who is funding this research.”
Tom thought back to the Butler House website, and who owned the property now. Unified Systems Association.
U.S.A.
“The government,” Tom said. “The feds?”
Forenzi shook his head. “No. My men impersonated the FBI when they approach you and the others. This is a military operation. There have been two previous attempts to create the perfect soldier. I’ve studied the research of my contemporaries, Dr. Stubin in Wisconsin and Dr. Plincer in Michigan, and I’ve learned from their errors. Serum 3, my metusamine blocker, when given to soldiers, renders them fearless. It also has an unusual side-effect that the army has a keen interest in.”
“It makes them homicidal,” Tom guessed.
“How is it said in software parlance? It isn’t a glitch. It’s a feature. Besides making killing easier, it also gives them a much higher tolerance for pain, sharper instincts, and even boosts their stamina and strength, as Mr. Torble demonstrated for you in the prison visitation room. Wellington was an example of my drug working a bit too well, I’m afraid. But it is good practice for the soldiers. Many of them have adjusted quite well to the program. I daresay they’ve begun to enjoy it. Hunting humans in an old, dark house is good real-world practice.”
Tom had previously dealt with megalomaniacs using science for evil, and Forenzi fit the bill. It never ended well.
“So why don’t you just scare people, get what you need from their blood, and let them go?”
Another sigh. “We tried. That area of Butler House where you were caught, with the fake body bags and rubber props, it was set up to frighten people without harming them. But that didn’t produce the levels of metusamine needed for my experiments. To get the higher concentrations, I had to induce real terror in my subjects. And after much trial and error, the type of fear that produced the best results was fear of the unknown. The stuff of childhood nightmares. Ghosts and demons and things that go bump in the night.”
“But now I know this house isn’t really haunted,” Tom said. “So you can let me go.”
Forenzi shook his head. “I still need to milk you. And I’ve discovered another way to induce fear. Sadly, it isn’t as effective as ghosts, but it is more sustainable over a long period of time. The fear of pain. I’ll be able to extract quite a bit of metusamine from you as Mr. Torble tortures you to death.”
Torble was at the wood burning stove again, checking how the branding iron was heating up. And, as Forenzi predicted, Tom experienced a spike of pure, adrenaline-fueled fear.
“People know I’m here,” Tom said.
“No, they don’t. We’ve done this many times, Detective. My men are very good at tidying up loose ends. You were a loose end, searching for your missing partner. It is doubtful anyone will come looking for you with the same fervor. But if they do—your old boss Lieutenant Daniels, perhaps, or your girlfriend, Joan DeVilliers, in Hollywood—they’ll be handled in the same way you’ve been.”
“You do know you’re insane, right?”
Forenzi laughed. “My dear Detective, I’m going to cure humanity of fear. Making any omelet requires breaking a few eggs. Take some comfort in the fact that your suffering will one day benefit all of mankind. But don’t take too much comfort in it. I need you to be good and terrified for the little time you have left.”
Forenzi pulled a length of tubing out of the machine, exposing the IV needle on the end.
“This machine is going to extract the metusamine from your blood, and then return it to you. I need to put these into your veins. If you fight me, I’m going to ask Mr. Torble to break both of your kneecaps.”
“Isn’t he going to do that anyway?”
“He might. But would you prefer that to happen immediately, or sometime later on?”
Tom could probably lash out and kick Forenzi, but that wouldn’t help the situation. And if he were going to try that trick, it would be with Torble when the psycho came at him with the branding iron. So Tom nodded, letting Forenzi insert needles into each of his triceps. The machine clicked on with a mechanical whir, and Tom watched his blood travel out of his left arm, through the tube, through the metusamine extractor, and back into his right arm.
Forenzi regarded him. “I must say, Detective, I expected a bit more out of you. Your partner, Roy, fought with all he had. You seem to have given up rather quickly.”
Tom stared the man down. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
The doctor’s brow wrinkled. “Who said that?”
“I did.” Tom’s lips twisted into a grin. “And I’ll be coming for you, Forenzi.”
“And my little dog, Toto, too?”
“No,” Tom said. “Just you.”
“Save your strength for Mr. Torble, Detective. He’s been in prison for a long time, and has a lot of bottled up aggression he needs to let out.”
“Lots of aggression,” Torble said, smiling. He took the branding iron out of the fire, its end glowing orange, and Tom’s metusamine production kicked into overdrive.
Mal
He’d managed to outrun Blackjack Reedy, but then Mal got lost in the labyrinth. One tunnel looked like the next, and Mal couldn’t tell if he’d been going in circles, or was kilometers away from where he began.
Mal stopped jogging, sweaty, aching, terrified for his wife, and then he heard a sharp crack that he thought was Blackjack’s whip. But it was quieter, and different somehow. Instead of running from it, he tried to follow the sound. Maybe it would lead him in some direction other than—
He turned the corner and froze, unable to comprehend what he was seeing.
It was Franklin. Just as Deb had insisted. Older, thinner, but undeniably the man who’d caused them both so much pain.
He was poking a long stick at someone Mal couldn’t see, cackling as he did so, the stick making bright sparks to coincide with the cracking sound.
And then Mal heard a yelp. Soft. Hoarse.
But recognizable.
Deb.
He rounded the corner, and realized that Franklin was poking his wife with some sort of electric prod. Deb was crying, hysterical, feebly trying to slap the prod away with her back against the tunnel wall.
Mal froze.
It all came back to him. The helplessness. The fear. The feeling that all hope was gone, and there was nothing he could do to regain it.
That was the Rushmore Inn’s legacy. It had rendered Mal useless. Forever weak. Forever afraid.
What a pale shadow of his former self he had become.
“Hey! Asshole!”
Mal wasn’t sure who had spoken. He was about to turn around and look when a startling realization seized him.
That was me. I said that.
Franklin stopped tormenting Deb long enough to leer at Mal. “Well, lookee who came by. It’s the coward who—”
Mal was on him in three steps, hitting him in the jaw so hard that Franklin spun around, the cattle prod flying. Then he had his fingers wrapped in the man’s hair and Mal introduced the bastard to his knee, Franklin’s nose exploding with all the juice of a squashed tomato.
Franklin howled, and Mal got behind him, still holding his hair, and bent his head back to expose his neck.
“Deb! Now!”
His wife didn’t hesitate. Like a deadly ballet, she pivoted her hips, swinging her right prosthesis around in a reverse hook kick, connecting solidly with Franklin’s adam’s apple.
Mal released him and he slumped to his knees. He was no longer a threat. They’d all heard the man’s windpipe crack.
Then Deb was in his arms, pressing her lips to his, her tear-soaked cheeks rubbing against his face.
“Don’t you ever leave me again,” she said.
&nb
sp; “I won’t.”
“We’re a team.”
“The best team ever.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“We’re going to get out of this, Mal.”
“Goddamn right we are.”
Another kiss, and then Deb squatted down and picked up the prod.
Franklin was turning an unnatural shade of blue, clawing at his neck in a futile effort to suck in air.
“You’re suffocating,” Deb told the dying man. “Point us to the exit, and I’ll help you.”
Mal was impressed by his wife’s compassion. Apparently, so was Franklin, because he quickly pointed down the tunnel.
“Thanks,” Deb said. Then she took off in that direction at a quick jog.
Mal ran after her. “What about helping him?”
“I did,” Deb said between breaths. “I helped him get to hell faster. Besides, do you want him and six of his brothers to show up at our doorstep a year from now?”
She had a point.
Incredibly, after following the tunnel a hundred meters, they were back to the concrete stairs. Mal had taken so many twists and turns down there that it hadn’t occurred to him to try a straight course.
Deb stormed the stairs like a champ, and then they were jogging down the hall and heading for the front door.
“Keep your eyes straight ahead,” Mal warned her, wary of Wellington’s headless corpse/cattail vase. “Focus on the door.”
Mal positioned himself between Deb and the circle of chairs, and when they reached the front doors he paused. The last time he opened them, Mal had run into that giggling freak in the gas mask.
“Floor is slippery with blood,” Deb said, placing a hand on Mal’s shoulder.
“I’m opening the door. Get ready to run. Either outside, or back into the house if something bad is out there.”
“Got it. What about the others?”
“Once we find the car, we’ll drive until we get a cell phone signal, then call the police. We’ll make them send the entire National Guard.”
“Mal?”
Mal had his hand on the door knob, but he paused. “Yeah, babe?”
“Coming here… you were right. This wasn’t my best idea.”
He smiled. “Are you serious? I’m thinking we do this every weekend. We rent a car, you send some psycho to hell… it sure beats the hell out of therapy.”
And the crazy thing was, it really did. There were no guarantees they’d live through the night, but Mal felt better than he had in months.
So it was quite a nasty shock when he opened the doors and found himself face-to-face with two people holding machineguns.
Moni
This guy was definitely not Luther Kite.
Kite had enjoyed making Moni suffer. It had been a turn-on for him. More than that, he’d considered it an intimate act, drawing it out while asking her mundane questions about her life. When he had finally broken her, he hadn’t bothered to finish the job and kill her, leaving Moni in a state of shock so deep it took her weeks before she could speak again. It was almost as if allowing Moni to live had been a testament to his art.
This guy, with the black eyes, was going through the motions. And what he was doing hurt Moni, no doubt about it. Getting pierced with an antique medical device was fucking awful. But after a dozen lacerations his heart just didn’t seem to be into it.
And surprisingly, Moni wasn’t terrified. She was actually more angry than she was frightened. Like this was a bad BDSM session that wasn’t working out.
In fact, the more she thought about it, the less she feared for her life and the more she got pissed off. This jackass didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
And she was just the person to tell him that.
“You’re pathetic,” she said, using her dominatrix voice.
The wannabe Luther Kite stopped poking with the artificial leech and stared at her.
“You’re a pathetic, worthless, sissy boy. Take off your pants right now.”
He remained still, his expression confused.
“I told you to take off your pants!” she ordered.
As dommes went, Moni was good at her job. She had a deep, commanding voice that scared the crap out of guys, and she knew what the little perverts wanted. In a sick sort of way, Luther Kite had saved her life. After her ordeal with him she’d kicked heroin and stopped being a victim. No more street tricks. No more pimps. She took control of her life, and her clients paid her well to be a dominant man-hater.
“Take off your pants, and show Mistress Moni what you’ve got. Now!”
Incredibly, the freak began to unbutton his pants.
Just as Moni had suspected. He wasn’t a top. He was a bottom.
“Show it to me.”
He did. And with his dick out, he was a lot less frightening. Even though she was tied up, Moni felt the balance of power shifting from him to her.
“Get over here and put it in my mouth,” she ordered.
Naturally, he complied. What guy wouldn’t? And this was most certainly a guy, not a ghost. Not a demon. Not even a serial killer. Just a worthless little worm who wanted to hurt her, like so many men had before him.
But Moni had other plans.
As she worked her lips and tongue, she gave him just enough to make him want more.
“I can make it better,” she said, deep and breathy. “But I need my hands free.”
Without hesitating he undid the buckle on her right hand. Then Moni did something she’d been fantasizing about ever since she turned her first trick at sixteen years old.
She bit down, hard as she could.
It didn’t come off as easy as she’d thought. Sort of like chewing through a tough steak. A tough, bloody steak, with lots of gristle. But she used her incisors, grinding and tearing, protecting her head with her hand as he screamed and beat at her with both fists.
And then her teeth met, and he fell away from her.
Moni spat his cock on the floor as he sprayed blood like fire hose. While he knelt down with his hands between his legs, wailing and trying to stop the hemorrhaging, Moni undid the other buckles holding her to the rack, pulled out the hefty metal bar used as a crank, and hit the son of a bitch hard enough on the back of the head to see brains come out the split.
They sort of looked like grits.
Wiping off her mouth and spitting several times, Moni got her shit together. She was free. For the moment she was safe. Now she needed to get the hell out of there.
Moni left the torture chamber, metal bar still in hand, and found herself in some sort of mine shaft. The floor was dirt. The walls braced with logs. Lights were bare bulbs, hanging from old rafters.
She spat again, hurrying down the tunnel, stopping when she heard talking.
“You, Jebediah Butler, are are are a jerktapus. That’s a jerk multiplied by eight.”
It sounded like Dr. Belgium. Moni snuck up to an open door, saw the doc was bound to a table. Some guy was standing next to him with a mallet. The mallet guy was covered, head to toe, with blood, but he didn’t seem injured at all.
Another fake ass ghost.
The bloody guy hit Frank with the mallet, right on his arm, which was all twisted and swollen up to twice its normal size.
That son of a…
Moni rushed up to him, angry and pumped, and brained the bastard with the metal bar. He went down, and she kept hitting him, over and over.
“Looks like you invited the wrong goddamn dominatrix to your little party, bitch!”
His head was harder to crack open than the Luther Kite wannabe, but she kept at it until she got the desired results.
“Moni!” Frank said, smiling at her. “Your mouth is bleeding.”
“I bit a guy’s dick off.”
“Great! That’s great!”
She undid Frank’s straps, wincing when she saw his arm. “Jesus, Doc. Doesn’t that hurt?”
“I’m medicated,” he slurred. “Tell m
e something… how hard is it to buy heroin?”
“It’s all about who you know.”
“Great great great!”
“Is that what you’re on? Heroin?”
“Yes. I believe it’s your stash. It’s awesome.”
He’d be singing a different tune when withdrawal kicked in, but Moni saw no reason to bring that up.
“I have to go and save Sara,” Belgium said. “Want to come with?”
“Sure.”
Frank picked up the mallet in his good hand, and then they were back to prowling the tunnels.
“Doc?” she asked.
“Yes yes yes?”
“We’re not going to get our million bucks each, are we?”
“It’s not looking too promising, Moni.”
Moni frowned. The dozen or so lacerations on her body hurt like crazy, but the fact that she’d been played for a fool felt even worse.
“Doc?”
“Yes?”
“When we find everybody, let’s burn this fucking place to the ground.”
Josh
Fran had been on edge since they landed in Charlotte. While he and Duncan had slept most of the trip, his wife had trouble relaxing on planes. A twenty-two hour flight in coach was stressful enough to make even Gandhi want to shoot someone.
But unlike Gandhi, Fran already had done so. A perimeter guard, when they’d driven up to the Butler House gate, had drawn his sidearm and fired at them as they drove up. No warning. No provocation. While Josh was driving the rental van, Fran had used her night scope to put a tight grouping of three into the guard’s chest from thirty meters.
Josh had expected an unwelcome reception, but nothing so blatant and aggressive. It only confirmed what he and Fran had suspected when they’d received the invitation; Butler House was a front for something very bad.
They pulled up to the house and parked in front, the element of surprise gone. Fran and Josh wore full body armor with chest trauma plates, and tactical ballistic helmets, as did Duncan. Woof had on a custom-made bulletproof dog sweater, which boasted a small saddle for Mathison. The capuchin didn’t like to wear body armor because it restricted his movement, but he did don a plastic army helmet that belonged to an old GI Joe action figure, simply because he didn’t like his family all dressing up without him.