Endurance (A Novel of Terror)

by Jack Kilborn

  She stretched, using her leg like a climbing pick, holding onto the cup and swinging the foot upward at the outcropping.

  It caught!

  Deb stopped sliding. She hung there, gripping her prosthetic, the metal barbs in the toe hooked around the protruding rock.

  Okay. Now I just need to get to it.

  There were no other handholds or footholds, so Deb had to slowly chin herself up. Her prosthetic wasn’t secure enough to hang from, but it was enough to hold her on this incline. She raised herself gradually, bit by bit, until she was able to get her fingers on the outcropping.

  From there, it was only a few inches to the seam. Once she had a solid grip, she put her leg back on, pressing the button for suction.

  This route was trickier than the other one. Steeper. Fewer decent holds. But this route didn’t have a cougar waiting for her, so Deb followed the seam, keeping away from the shelf where the creature perched.

  After five minutes, she found her rhythm. Hand hold. Toe hold. Hand hold. Toe hold.

  After ten minutes, the lookout station was in sight. Deb kept her emotions in check, but she was secretly astonished that she was actually going to make it.

  “Deb!” Mal yelled.

  Deb looked down. The cougar was a few feet below her, legs splayed out, clinging to the rock face. It thrust its entire body upward, its massive claws batting her artificial leg.

  Of course it can climb. That’s why they’re called mountain lions.

  Deb stuck her hand deep in a crevice, gripping the stone inside, waiting for the next lunge.

  The lion jumped again, coming up another two feet, its fierce jaws locking around Deb’s stump cup.

  Deb quickly reached down, hitting the release. Her leg came off.

  The cougar, losing its balance, fell from the rock face. It landed a few feet below, on the angled, sheer face where Deb had slid off all those years ago.

  Like Deb, the cougar couldn’t get a grip on the sheer rock. It spread out all four legs, claws scraping against stone, but couldn’t stop its inevitable slide.

  “How do you like it?” Deb shouted at the lion.

  It roared once—an angry, futile roar—and then the monster that had haunted Deb’s dreams for so long slipped right off the edge of the mountain, falling thirty long feet, smashing to the unforgiving ground below in a brilliant explosion of blood.

  And it felt pretty goddamn good.

  “You okay!” Mal called to her.

  “Yeah! Are you!”

  “I am! But it’s raining cats and dogs down here!”

  Deb smiled.

  Next time I have a chance, I’m going to kiss that guy.

  The rest of the climb, even with only one leg, was uneventful. Deb made it to the shelf, and crawled to the lookout post. It was unoccupied, but the rangers were kind enough to leave a door open for her, and a fully charged radio.

  “Hello, hello? This is Deb Novachek. I’m with Mal Deiter. We called earlier, and there’s a helicopter looking for us. Can anyone hear me?”

  “This is ranger base three. We read you, Deb. Over.”

  Deb practically wept.

  “I’m at a lookout station. The number on the radio is six-four-eight-seven-two.”

  “Roger that. We’ll send the chopper your way.”

  Deb found a stash of water bottles next to the radio. She twisted the top off one, drank the whole thing in a few gulps, and let out the biggest sigh of her life.

  Then she closed her eyes and waited to be rescued.

  Eleanor Roosevelt’s head hurt. She felt someone patting her cheek, and she opened her eyes, ready to tell whichever son it was to leave her alone.

  But it wasn’t one of her sons.

  “I’m thinking of a number from one to ten,” Maria said, staring at her. “Guess what it is?”

  Eleanor looked at her wrists. The strappado cuffs were on her.

  No. Not this.

  I’m royalty. I have presidential blood in my veins.

  They can’t do this to me.

  “The answer,” Maria said, “Is fuck you.”

  Then the man, Felix, kicked Eleanor in the face.

  Eleanor fell backwards, through the gate, off the edge.

  The next thing she knew, her head was hurting again.

  She looked around, saw she was on the first floor.

  Those fools. They must not have put the chains on correctly.

  My head still hurts. But other than that, I’m perfectly fine.

  Eleanor reached up a hand to rub her temple.

  It didn’t work, for some reason.

  She tried with the other hand, and that didn’t work either.

  Then she felt something drip onto her face.

  Looking up, Eleanor saw Maria and Felix, staring down at her. She also saw the two lengths of chain.

  Each chain had an arm attached to it. Each arm trailed veins and arteries and tendons and torn muscles that stretched down and were still tenuously attached to the torn sockets of Eleanor’s shoulders.

  Oh, lordy. Those are my arms.

  Then there was pain. There was amazing, excruciating, unbearable pain.

  Eleanor screamed through the pain for the entire four and a half minutes it took her to bleed to death. But to her it felt a lot longer.

  Felix pulled his eyes away from Eleanor’s death throes and turned to look at Maria, but she was gone. Before he had a chance to panic, she walked out of one of the bedrooms, a baby in her arms.

  “Her parents are dead,” Maria said. For someone who had been through hell, she looked positively radiant. “I want to keep her.”

  The baby was adorable. And Maria was beaming.

  But this isn’t right.

  Felix shook his head sadly. “Don’t you think we need to do something else first?”

  Maria’s smile vanished. “What do you mean?”

  Felix took her hand, which hurt like hell for him. Using his thumb and pinky, he placed Maria’s pear-shaped engagement ring on her finger, the one he took off of Eleanor when he was cuffing her wrists.

  “There,” he said. “Now we’re ready to start a family.”

  They kissed, lightly because they were both so injured. Then the three of them held each other until the helicopter arrived.

  Deb had never been so terrified in her life.

  A sea of eyes watched her, judged her. Deb turned and looked at Letti, who gave her an intense stare and a nod. Beside Letti was Maria, who mimicked Letti’s gesture.

  Deb’s throat was dry. Her heart was beating so fast she felt ready to faint. The oppressive silence hurt her ears.

  Then someone sneezed. A child. Deb glanced at the audience, saw it was the baby Maria and Felix had adopted, sitting on Felix’s lap. Next to them, Kelly was leaning forward in the pew. Kelly spoke silently, urgently, mouthing the words so Deb could read her lips.

  “Say it!”

  Deb looked down at her ridiculously expensive dress, the long train covering her prosthetics, making her appear completely normal. She looked at the minister, who was smiling patiently at her. Then she looked at Mal. So handsome in his tuxedo. So much love in his eyes.

  And suddenly, Deb wasn’t scared anymore. With him by her side, she didn’t think she’d ever be scared again.

  “I do,” she said.

  Then she kissed him before the minister even had a chance to pronounce them man and wife.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the talking booth at West Virginia’s Northern Correctional Facility, waiting for his visitor. Franklin missed life on the outside. He missed the food. He missed sex with women. He even missed his job as hotel manager in Monk Creek. But most of all, he missed his Momma, and his kinfolk.

  Prison life wasn’t so bad. The state gave him monthly transfusions, though they weren’t nearly as much fun as the ones he used to get at the Rushmore Inn. Franklin ran a tiny black market store within the walls, selling cigarettes, drugs, tattoo supplies, candy bars. After the Rushmore Massacre, as
the papers had called it, Franklin inherited a tidy bit of money from his many dead siblings. And that didn’t count all the money Momma had stashed away. It was enough to hire a hotshot lawyer, who got his charges reduced from Murder to multiple counts of Accessory. Franklin got eight years, but would be out in four for good behavior.

  Franklin’s mood brightened when Chester walked over and sat across from him. Chester B. Arthur Roosevelt was one of only five brothers still alive. The other four were wanted by the police, and had to stay in hiding. But Chester had bought hisself a swell fake ID, and the law couldn’t touch him.

  “You find a place?” Franklin asked.

  “Boardin’ house. Southern Georgia. Deep in the woods, outta the way. Big ole basement. Perfect for us.”

  A boarding house? That would be easier to run than a bed and breakfast. Franklin never really warmed up to Momma’s plan for making the next President. All he really cared about was the fun he had with the women they caught.

  At the prison, Franklin learned there was some newfangled chemical enzyme that turned regular blood into type O negative. That meant they didn’t have to be so picky and choosy. Now they could grab whoever they wanted.

  “You buy it yet?” Franklin asked.

  “Got the deed this week. Should have ‘er up ‘n runnin’ real soon. Be all ready for you when you get outta here. Have a nice bunch of sweet honeys all tied up and waitin’ for you.”

  Franklin smiled. He’d already done a year of his sentence.

  With this to look forward to, the next three would just fly on by.

  In 2007 I wrote a horror novel called AFRAID under the pen name Jack Kilborn, and that landed me a two-book deal. My publishers wanted a book similar in tone to AFRAID, so I pitched them the idea for a book called TRAPPED and wrote the first few thousand words. They placed an excerpt for TRAPPED in the back of copies of AFRAID, hoping to release the book in the winter of 2009.

  Unfortunately (for me), my editors hated TRAPPED when they read the whole thing.

  Personally, I liked it. The novel was more intense than AFRAID, and probably a little meaner and gorier (maybe more than just a little), but I believed it kept to the same theme and tone of the first Kilborn book. Namely, regular people in a dark, confined setting, confronted with an overpowering, horrible threat.

  Since I wanted to get paid, I rewrote TRAPPED according to the editorial notes I’d been given. I don’t believe it made the book better, but it did make it different. I toned down a bit of violence and sex, added a bit more violence in other areas, changed a few characters, cut a sub plot, and wrote a new ending.

  My editors hated the new version as well. So I put TRAPPED away, figuring it would find readers eventually, and instead wrote ENDURANCE, the third Jack Kilborn book in my two-book contract. My editors liked ENDURANCE, but wanted me to make some significant cuts. Having been down that road before, I told them no, and I pulled ENDURANCE from publication.

  So now I had two intense horror novels, ready to publish. All I had to figure out is what to do with them.

  During the 18 months I’d been working on TRAPPED and ENDURANCE, I’d turned some of my older books (written under my real name, J.A. Konrath) into ebooks. To my surprise, they sold like crazy. Rather than pursue traditional print publication, I decided to do it alone and release TRAPPED and ENDURANCE myself.

  I like ENDURANCE. So much, that I didn’t want to see it diminished by what I felt were unnecessary edits. Though it isn’t as horrific as TRAPPED (I don’t know if I’ll ever write anything as horrific as TRAPPED ever again) there were certain creepy elements to this book that weirded me out. In fact, the whole reason I wrote this book was because of an idea I had while on vacation.

  We were renting a cabin in the woods in northern Wisconsin, and I was sitting on the bed when a disturbing thought hit me. What if the cabin’s owners were watching us, right now?

  In fact, if you were a psychotic voyeur, it would be pretty easy to rig your house with hidden passages and peep holes, and then rent it out to unsuspecting guests.

  I immediately became paranoid, and looked at the closet, the bathroom, the stairs, wondering if I was being spied on.

  Then I heard something creak under the bed.

  Could someone actually be under there?

  No one actually was. But I kept thinking about awful it would be to stay in someone else’s house and suddenly realize someone was under your bed.

  Of course, what could be even worse than that?

  Someone under your bed, and you don’t have legs so you can’t run away.

  I hope you had as much fun reading ENDURANCE as I had writing it. If you did, I encourage you to check out AFRAID, TRAPPED, and my J.A. Konrath books, which also have some good scares in them.

  And if you’d like to see a sequel, email me. I may not listen to my publishers, but I always listen to my readers…

  April 13

  Chicago, IL

  J.A. Konrath is the author of seven novels in the Jack Daniels series, along with dozens of short stories. The eighth, STIRRED, will be available in 2011.

  Under the name Jack Kilborn, he wrote the horror novels AFRAID, ENDURANCE, TRAPPED, SERIAL UNCUT (written with Blake Crouch) and DRACULAS (written with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson.)

  Under the name Joe Kimball, he wrote two novels in the TIMECASTER sci-fi series, coming in 2011.

  Visit Joe at www.JAKonrath.com.

  JA Konrath’s Works Available on Kindle

  Whiskey Sour

  Bloody Mary

  Rusty Nail

  Dirty Martini

  Fuzzy Navel

  Cherry Bomb

  Afraid

  Origin

  The List

  Disturb

  Shot of Tequila

  55 Proof (Short Story Omnibus)

  Jack Daniels Stories (Collected Stories)

  Crime Stories (Collected Stories)

  Horror Stories (Collected Stories)

  Truck Stop

  Suckers by JA Konrath and Jeff Strand

  SERIAL UNCUT by Blake Crouch and Jack Kilborn

  Floaters by JA Konrath and Henry Perez

  Dumb Jokes & Vulgar Poems

  Trapped

  Shaken

  Draculas by JA Konrath, Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson

  Banana Hammock

  The hunter’s moon, a shade of orange so dark it appeared to be filled with blood, hung fat and low over the mirror surface of Big Lake McDonald. Sal Morton took in a lungful of crisp Wisconsin air, shifted on his seat cushion, and cast his Lucky 13 over the stern. The night of fishing had been uneventful; a few small bass earlier in the evening, half a dozen Northern Pike—none bigger than a pickle—and then, nothing. The zip of his baitcaster unspooling and the plop of the bait hitting the water were the only sounds he’d heard for the last hour.

  Until the helicopter exploded.

  It was already over the water before Sal noticed it. Black, without any lights, silhouetted by the moon. And quiet. Twenty years ago Sal had taken his wife Maggie on a helicopter ride at the Dells, both of them forced to ride with their hands clamped over their ears to muffle the sound. This one made a fraction of that noise. It hummed, like a refrigerator.

  The chopper came over the lake on the east side, low enough that its downdraft produced large eddies and waves. So close to the water Sal wondered if its wake might overturn his twelve foot aluminum boat. He ducked as it passed over him, knocking off his Packers baseball cap, scattering lures, lifting several empty Schmidt beer cans and tossing them overboard.

  Sal dropped his pole next to his feet and gripped the sides of the boat, moving his body against the pitch and yaw. When capsizing ceased to be a fear, Sal squinted at the helicopter for a tag, a marking, some sort of ID, but it lacked both writing and numbers. It might as well have been a black ghost.

  Three heartbeats later the helicopter had crossed the thousand yard expanse of lake and dipped down over the tree
line on the opposite shore. What was a helicopter doing in Safe Haven? Especially at night? Why was it flying so low? And why did it appear to have landed near his house?