by Blake Crouch
He looked at her like she’d cut him but he answered without pause.
"An electricity bill, a cable bill, a cell phone bill, health insurance, life insurance, car insurance, homeowners insurance, VISA statement, Mastercard statement, Discovery Card statement, Mileage Plus card, AVIS card, mortgage, car payment, truck payment, line of credit, fifty hour work weeks, in-laws, accountants, annual physicals, multivitamins, Wellbutrin, Advil, a book club, a bible study group, rec center membership, golf club membership, a basketball game every other Thursday night, poker at my friend Jim’s every other month, four different stops on Thanksgiving and Christmas, sex twice a week, taxes once a year, waking in the middle of the night every night wondering how to keep everything afloat, and beautiful children who grow up so fast I can’t even look at them."
He hit the wine again—a long and focused pull.
His eyes shimmering.
"I used to live a half mile from here," he said. "I’ve taken siding from my old house to keep a fire going. This place was so vibrant. Kids always playing in the streets. Block parties. A great community."
"You were an autoworker?"
"I worked in the GM truck assembly plant for nineteen years."
"When did it close?"
"Six years ago, when GM moved the operation to Korea. Everyone lost their jobs. When the plant closed, this town just died. Like the old west come to Michigan. Eight months later, the bank took our house. I didn’t handle it well. My wife left, took my boys with her."
"I’m sorry," Violet said.
"When I got out of the institution, I came back here."
"Why?"
"It’s hard to explain. I just felt like this was where I needed to be."
"Don’t you think about all you lost though? Isn’t it thrown in your face here?"
"Of course. Every day. But after absolute loss, it still continues."
"What?"
"You. Consciousness. There is life after hope, you know."
The fire popped.
"And what does that life look like?"
"Not what you’d expect?"
"No?"
"You realize something," Matthew said.
"What’s that?"
"That you go on. That you can take so much more pain than you think. We’re built for it. It’s almost like that’s our purpose. We’re vessels that exist to be filled with pain."
"That’s depressing."
"No, that’s truth. And once you come to terms with it, it changes you. After everything is taken from you, you see that you still have control over so much. Control over how you cope with misery. You realize all the beautiful choices you still own. Like whether to love or hate. Or forgive."
Violet pushed against her knees and came to her feet. Walked over to the scrap-wood pile and loaded a few two-by-sixes into the fire that looked like they’d been torn from the side of a house. Outside, it was sleeting—the dry tick of ice pellets bouncing off the pavement.
"What kind of trouble are you in?" Matthew asked.
"I lost my husband a year ago."
"What happened?"
"He was murdered. My life has sort of...unwound...since then."
"You’ve lost a lot."
"I’ve lost everything."
Matthew struggled to his feet and shuffled over to his cardboard box which had once held a refrigerator. He dragged out a pillow and tossed it across the room.
"Sleep by the fire," he said. "Feed it when it gets low."
"Matthew," she said.
"Yeah?"
"Come here."
He staggered over.
Violet reached up and covered the earpiece, hoping her hand would muffle the microphone, if it was even activated.
"You ever see a man hanging around here?" she asked.
"In this building?"
"Shhh," Vi whispered. "No, I mean...what you called it earlier...the concrete barrens. This whole area."
Matthew sipped from his jug of wine.
"Like I told you, there’s bangers who come out here to do drug deals, initiations. People like me who try to live quiet and undisturbed. I mean there’s rumors, sure, but I never paid any attention—"
"What rumors?"
His brow furrowed, confused by her sudden interest. "Rumors of a man. They say he brings people here to torture them. It’s just an urban—"
"Who says this?"
"I don’t know. Just in passing by the people who live in or have reason to come to the concrete barrens. We hear things occasionally. Screams in the night. Hear about people dying, strange people around, but out here, everyone’s strange in one way or another. They chalk it up to some boogeyman, because I guess we need monsters, but the truth is, this is just a weird and sometimes dangerous place."
"What else do they say?"
"Just horror movie crap—he’s supernatural, he’s a demon, he takes your soul."
"You don’t believe it?" Vi asked.
"Of course not. Then again, it doesn’t mean I go wandering around the old GM factory after dark, or any time for that matter, but people just want to—"
"What’s special about the GM factory?"
"Nothing. It’s just a big empty building, and people say that’s where he’s from. The ruins."
"Do they have a name for him?"
"El hombre con el pelo negro largo."
"What is that, Spanish?"
"Yeah, the Latin Kings coined it."
"What’s it mean?"
"The man with long black hair."
A shard of ice trailed down the length of Violet’s spine.
"You’ll be okay right here?" Matthew asked.
"Yeah."
"Look, you’re welcome to stay tonight, but—"
"No, I understand. You’ve been very gracious."
The pillow smelled like spoiled cabbage, so she rested her head in the crook of her arm, facing the oil drum for the heat that radiated off the metal. Through tiny perforations, she could see the glow of the coals, pinpoints of sun-colored brilliance in the dark.
She closed her eyes.
Cold creeping in from every side except where the heat lapped at her face.
His voice came through the earpiece: "Violet? You asleep? Violet..."
"I’m awake," she whispered.
"You sound tired, but I’m afraid your night isn’t even close to over. You handled yourself well up on the tower. That was fun to watch, but in all fairness, purely self-defense. Kill or be killed. Tonight, I want to see another facet of Violet King, specifically, just how cold your blood runs."
"What are you talking about?"
"I’m talking about the knife, Violet. I’m talking about Matthew. About you killing him while he sleeps."
"No."
"No?"
"I can’t, Luther."
"Matthew reminds me of a dear, departed friend."
"Luther, please."
"My mentor. A man named Orson, who, very much like Matthew, escaped into homelessness to find himself."
"I do not have that in me."
"Well, that is very bad news for Andy and little Max. Andy you there?"
"Violet?" Andy’s voice.
"Andy."
"Luther, please," Andy said.
"Would everyone stop begging me already? I didn’t bring you into this, Andy, for you to plead for me not to do what has to be done."
"Then what?"
"I just thought you might advise Violet. You’ve been in this situation before, right? You’ve murdered an innocent to save yourself and others. Tell us, Andy, did it change you?"
"Fuck you, Luther."
"Tell us, Andy, did it change you?"
"Fuck you."
The wail of a baby filled Violet’s earpiece.
"Andy stop!" she whispered.
"Yes, Luther, it changed me."
"For the better?"
"Hardly."
"You still think about them?"
"Sometimes."
"And this pains you?"
"They were some of the worst moments in a life filled with bad ones."
"That’s because you’re weak, Andy. I never understood what Orson saw in you. You should’ve emerged from that experience stronger. Harder. A pure human being."
"So that’s what you’re holding yourself out as, Luther? A pure human being?"
"Violet," Luther said as she wept softly into the sleeve of her tracksuit. "Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not rushing you. We’re going to leave you now, so you can have this moment. Please believe me when I say that it can be revolutionary. Life-changing. If you let it be. If you’re strong enough."
"And if I don’t?"
"Aren’t we past the threats, my love?"
Andy screamed something and then the line went dead.
She could hear the freezing rain coming down again, feel the shudder of her heart against the filthy floor. She lay there in the dark and the cold. Waiting. For something to change. For reality to break through and end this nightmare.
But the rain kept falling and the fire dwindling and the cold sinking in.
After awhile, she came to her feet. The knife blade reflected the firelight. She stared at it, then picked it up.
"Throw some wood on the fire," Matthew grumbled from his cardboard box.
"Sure."
Violet walked over to the scrap wood heap, grabbed several pieces of crown molding flaking off dark paint, and tossed them into the oil drum.
"You were talking to yourself," Matthew said.
Violet moved slowly across the floor to the foot of the cardboard box and squatted down by the opening. As the new flames licked up out of the drum, she saw Matthew in the lowlight sprawled under sheets of old newspaper, lying on his back, his eyes open, blinking slowly—glassy from the wine.
"How do you live like this, Matthew?" she whispered.
"Always wanted to live in nature," he said. "Someplace pretty, you know? Now I do. This is my wilderness. I think the concrete barrens are beautiful like the desert is. Empty and quiet. Those abandoned buildings, that water tower...they’re my mountains. Sometimes, in the evening in the summertime, I’ll just go walking through the ruins. It reaches some part of me. Some itch I was never able to scratch."
"Don’t you miss your family?"
She saw his Adam’s apple roll. "The man I was when I was home was nothing I was proud of. So compromised." The corners of his eyes shone with wetness. He looked at Vi. "It’s hard, isn’t it?"
"Yeah."
She gripped the knife behind her back.
"Is it supposed to be so hard you think?"
She couldn’t see anything through the sheet of tears. "And sometimes harder."
Vi could feel the momentum building inside of her, the adrenaline push, lifting her toward something.
"I want to think," Matthew said, "that there’s some benefit to this road I’m on, you know? That I’m...gaining something. Something no one else has. That enlightenment is right around the corner."
"Something to make it all worthwhile."
"Exactly."
"Do you ever just..." Her hand sweating onto the leathered handle of the bowie. "...want it all to end?"
"Yes," he said. "God yes. Death is...all I think about."
He shut his eyes and he kept them closed as he continued to speak.
"Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal. A man awaits his end dreading and hoping all. Many times he died, many times rose again. A great man in his pride confronting murderous men casts derision upon supersession of breath. He knows death to the bone. Man has created death. Isn’t he lovely, Yeats?" His eyes were still closed.
Violet could scarcely breath. She was thinking of Max and nothing else, Matthew looking serene for the moment, and he was asking her if she had any poetry under memory that she might share with him, just a verse or two to rattle around in his head while he drifted off to sleep.
She told him that she did.
She was thinking of Max.
Her heart racing and her mouth running dry.
She started one she’d memorized in high school that had always stuck.
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on."
Matthew whispered, "I love this one."
She brought the knife around, had intended to drive it straight down in a single, fluid motion, but seeing the blade poised over Matthew’s chest stopped her.
She kept telling herself do it do it do it do it, but nothing happened.
She couldn’t move.
A droplet of sweat fell from her brow and struck a piece of newsprint covering Matthew.
Several seconds had passed since she’d finished the line of poetry and any moment now his eyes—
Matthew’s eyes opened—a flicker of contended calm before he saw the knife and what must have been a visage of primal terror staring down at him.
Do it do it do it do it do it do it.
Matthew’s lips parted, as if to speak, but instead he started to sit up.
Violet stabbed him through the chest—the blade buried to the hilt, and she was on top of him and leaning all her weight into the knife, twisting, and she could feel his heart knocking frantically against the blade, the vibration traveling through the steel and leather up into her hand—four perceptible beats and then it stopped and Matthew let out a stunned gasped.
For a long time, she didn’t move.
Just stared down into Matthew’s eyes, watching the intensity of life recede into a glazed emptiness.
She couldn’t stop trembling.
At last she rolled off of him.
Already, his blood was pooling on the cardboard and soaking through the right knee of her tracksuit. She crawled out of the box and got three steps toward the oil drum before she spewed her guts across the floor, stood bent over retching until she could produce nothing more than dry heaves.
"I did it," she said, gasping. "You hear me you son of a fucking bitch, I did it."
She spit several times. The acidic tang of bile burned her throat.
"I want to see Max," she said, her body quaking with the malevolence of what she’d done. "Luther. Luther!" she screamed.
Luther didn’t answer.
"Luther!"
"You have a lot to learn," he said.
"What are you talking about?"
"Trust. Specifically, when not to give it."
Her son screamed through the earpiece.
Violet’s legs failed and she was suddenly on her knees and screaming, her fingers raking through her hair. Luther was still talking, but she didn’t hear a thing. Everything drowned out by the rage and the cries of Max.
"Please, Luther!" she begged. "I did what you asked. Please!"
Max’s wailing intensified.
She jumped to her feet and wiped her eyes, rushed over to the cardboard box and took hold of the knife, pulled it out of Matthew’s chest, the blade lacquered in blood. She wiped it against her pant leg and hurried out of the alcove and back into the corridor. The darkness so perfect she had to trail her hand along the wall for a guide and brace against the garbage that covered the floor.
Thirty seconds later, she stumbled out into the lobby and through the ruined double doors into the rain.
Her son still screaming, and she screamed back, "Stop hurting him!"
The crying became louder, like someone driving a nail through her eardrum. She couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand the thought of what Luther was doing to him.
"I’m going to kill you!" she screamed.
Violet grabbed the earpiece, ripped it out.
Immediately, a flash of searing pain and the heat of blood streaming down the side of her neck.
She dropped the earpiece and stomped it into pieces with the heel of her tennis shoe and ran out into the night.
The rain pelted her face and the sky flushed with the pinkish tint of city-glow from the lights of downtown.
Across the concrete barrens, just darkness and t
he slightest silhouette of things—the water tower, trees, smokestacks.
She ran through an abandoned neighborhood, her shoes soaked through to her socks.
Gulping air.
The weakness in her legs growing more pronounced by the moment as the freezing rain poured down on her.
Under the pink sky, the profile of factories loomed in the distance.
She broke out of the neighborhood, found herself running across a wide expanse of fractured concrete—a parking lot treed with old light poles.
By the time she reached the first building, her heart was screaming in her chest, and her eyes burned with sweat—a moment’s reprieve from the cold.
The building stood fifty feet tall. Brick. Graffitied and with giant, multi-pane windows, mostly emptied of glass. Vi jogged along the side of the building until she came to a pair of double doors.
She struggled to drag them open against their rusted hinges, then slipped inside, out of the rain.
As the doors eased shut behind her, she stood dripping and panting and straining to see, waiting for her eyes to adjust, to begin to work again.
Darkness.
Her pulse thrumming against her eardrum.
She wiped the sweat and rainwater from her eyes and blinked against the sting.
Already, she was cooling down.
Drenched through, the chill beginning to muscle in.
She couldn’t imagine walking back out into that freezing rain, but continuing on into this building, in complete darkness, seemed no better.
She crumpled down onto the floor, her sobs echoing down some corridor whose terminus she could not see.
Her son was at that monster’s mercy.
She’d killed two people in the last eight hours.
And the man she loved was in all likelihood going to be killed horribly.
By the time she’d gotten back on her feet, she was shivering violently, her fingers barely able to grasp the knife.
The skin behind her right ear sang with agony, blood still pouring down her neck.
She started forward into the black, one slow and shuffling step at a time, the knife outstretched in one hand, the other trailing along the wall. She kept thinking she’d suddenly see something, that the darkness would dissolve away, but it held.
Twenty steps.
Thirty.
Forty.
She stopped counting after a hundred.
Then the point of the knife touched something hard.