The Big Finish

by James W. Hall

Thorn was holding another rock in his hand. He’d been encouraged by his old friends—or were they new friends?—to hurl this rock at the next window on the block that belonged to a pawnshop and gun store. But the black men who were surrounding him blocked his way. They were pissed.

  One of them had a bleeding cut on the arm.

  “What you doing, asshole?”

  “Who you think you are, throwing rocks through a window?”

  “My name is Thorn,” he said. “I’m new in town.”

  His friends told him to say that. Give his name to anyone he met.

  “This guy’s crazier than a shithouse rat.”

  “Somebody call Burkhart, put the asshole behind bars.”

  Someone tore the rock from his hand and hurled it away.

  “That was my rock,” Thorn said.

  “Yeah, what you going to do about it?”

  Thorn was experiencing something new, a form of X-ray vision. He could see through the clothes and the flesh of these men and see their skeletons and their internal organs. He could see hearts and livers and stomachs and intestines and other body parts he couldn’t identify.

  It was amazing. Like an excellent dream, a superman skill.

  Then somebody put their hands on him and turned him from the mob of angry black men. It was Laurie, the woman with ginger hair. He looked through her clothes, at her skeleton and her organs. Laurie didn’t seem to have a heart. He stared at where her heart should be and there was a black space.

  “His name is Thorn,” she announced. “He’s looking to stir up trouble.”

  “He got a good start on that,” one of the men said.

  “His name is Thorn,” she repeated, and led him away.

  The sounds of her words were echoing in his head. He heard them once and then a few seconds later he heard them again and then fainter a third time. Like he was wandering inside a very deep canyon.

  Behind the mob of black men, he saw a woman standing on the sidewalk. She was blond and Thorn recognized her. He had a pleasant memory of the woman from somewhere. He even knew her name. Mildred or Marlie, something like that. He waved at her, but she turned and hurried off.

  Oh, yeah, he remembered, the waitress who’d given him an inedible barbecue sandwich.

  “That’s Millie,” he said to his escort, the hard, thin woman with the fox face and the reddish hair and no heart.

  “You know Millie?”

  “I don’t know anyone,” Thorn said. “I don’t know where I am.”

  “What’s your name?” the woman said as she led him down the sidewalk.

  Thorn told her his name.

  “Yell it,” she said. “Yell it real loud.”

  “My name?”

  “That’s right. Yell your name. Right now, yell it out.”

  Thorn yelled his name. As old as he was, all those years of doing crazy shit, he couldn’t recall ever yelling his own name before. A first.

  “Good,” Laurie said. They were well away from the group of angry men. “Now yell ‘help me.’ Yell it very loud.”

  Again Thorn obeyed. It felt good to obey. To be relieved of his own decision-making duties. It felt odd but good. He was starting to like Laurie, this woman who was giving him orders. Maybe she was a former lover or a current lover. Maybe she was his sister. Though he didn’t have a sister. Yes, he did. He’d had one a long time ago but she was dead. What was her name? She’d been murdered, or maybe she got sick and died. He’d have to think about that later. Ricki, that was her name. Maybe he had two sisters. This one seemed to know him very well and she’d saved him from the pack of angry men. He hadn’t had to fight any of them. He believed he was a fighter, a pretty good fighter. But he felt sluggish and slow, so fighting probably wasn’t a great idea.

  A man appeared beside the woman. It was Webb again. Heavyset, ginger hair. Thorn tried his X-ray vision on the man but it had stopped working. Too bad. He was enjoying that.

  “Just spoke to Cruz,” he said to the woman. “Told her what was going on and she said to stop and take him back to the farm.”

  “Why? This is working. This is getting the word out.”

  “She’s worried we can’t handle him. He’ll escape, someone will snatch him from us.”

  “Fuck her.”

  “Fuck her,” Thorn said. “Fuck Cruz. She’s a liar. Don’t trust her.”

  “What do you know about Cruz?”

  “Fight on, fight on, ye brave,” Thorn said. “I know that.”

  “He’s useless,” the woman said.

  “Cruz’ll be here in an hour. Let’s take him back to the farm.”

  “But this is so much fun,” Laurie said. “I’m digging this.”

  “Back to the farm,” Webb said.

  “I like farms,” Thorn said. “You got any tractors? I like tractors.”

  Somewhere, deep inside Thorn’s smoke-filled, hazy brain, a speck of light was shining. Another Thorn was waking up from a long sleep, blinking his eyes, stretching, letting go of the dream he’d been having. Deep inside, not fully awake. But that light had a voice and it was speaking to Thorn. Speaking in a whisper, saying, “You’re drugged. You’re fucked up and in trouble. Go with this, but look for a chance to escape. You’re drugged. These people are the enemy.”

  “Are you the enemy?” Thorn said to the woman who was leading him across the street.

  “Where’d you get that idea? We’re your friends. See how friendly we’re being, helping you get away from that mob.”

  “Yeah,” Thorn said. The light down in the basement inside him was shining brighter. The voice that sounded like his own voice was whispering, “Go with it. Go with it, but look for a chance to make a break. These people are the enemy.”

  “I think he needs another hit,” the woman said to the man.

  “Can’t risk an overdose.”

  “All I gave Rodrigo was that one tablet. This guy can handle it. He’s got to be close to two hundred pounds, at least one-ninety. Two won’t kill him. Just to be safe. To keep him docile.”

  “How much do you weigh, Thorn?” Webb asked him a question.

  Thorn said he didn’t know.

  “You never weighed yourself? Come on, how much?”

  “I’ve put on a few pounds. Getting older, hard to lose it.”

  “He’s useless,” Webb said.

  Laurie was digging in her purse. She came out with a clear plastic envelope the size of a postage stamp. A red pill inside.

  “Give it to him, Webb.”

  They’d walked across the street and were standing beside a car. Thorn was looking into the car. He remembered it. A Taurus, very well kept. It ran fine. This was the car he couldn’t get inside. It was the complicated car. He looked inside and the upholstery was rippling the way the air above hot pavement could ripple.

  “Take this,” said Webb. “Open your mouth, Thorn.”

  Inside Thorn the pinpoint of light was expanding. Inside the light a voice told Thorn to refuse the pill.

  “I refuse the pill.”

  “You’ll do what I tell you. If I say jump, you’re going to jump. If I say shit in your drawers, you’ll fill ’em up. You got me, pal? We understand each other?”

  “Okay.”

  “So open your mouth and take the fucking pill.”

  Thorn opened his mouth.

  The man pinched the pill and moved his fingers to Thorn’s open mouth.

  Don’t take the pill, the voice said inside him.

  The man slipped the pill onto Thorn’s tongue.

  Thorn bit down hard on his fingers, very hard, and he spit the pill out.

  “No pills,” Thorn said.

  The man howled, holding his finger, and he hunched over, stamping the ground. He cursed and swung around and hooked a fist at Thorn. Thorn watched it coming, watched it coming and coming through the sluggish air, and the voice inside him said, “Duck, asshole, duck.”

  But Thorn kept watching the fist, the knuckles taking a big arc toward his chin, the
big man putting his weight behind the punch. Not much of an athlete, this guy. Thorn had seen better punches. This one was molasses slow, still coming, still coming. Then against a black sky he saw an explosion of bright, electrified crisscrossing comets. Colored stars and beautiful arcs of sparks like a willow tree on fire and there was another flaming willow tree beside it, sizzling branches, red, yellow, fiery green. A forest of blazing willow trees.

  You should’ve ducked, the voice said. I told you to duck.

  It was dark. Thorn’s teeth were aching. It was black dark.

  I told you to duck. Listen to me next time, idiot.

  TWENTY

  THORN WOKE TO AMMONIA FUMES and the screams of children. No, not children. People were being tortured. Lots of them. Bellows and shrieks, war cries and groans. He squirmed and shut his eyes tighter to push the sounds away. A nightmare, it had to be.

  But as he drifted to consciousness, the howls continued, a gruesome chorus close by. He tried to recall where he was, how he’d gotten here. But he was empty headed, his memory inaccessible. He opened his eyes and shut them quickly. The wails and snorts and blubbering continued beyond his door. It wasn’t children. Not human voices.

  He opened his eyes again and blinked them clear, backhanded his face. Lying flat on his back, he stared up at a concrete ceiling. He reached back and traced his fingertips across the rough fabric he was lying on. It seemed to be a camp cot without a mattress.

  His back was aching, his jaw too. He shut his eyes and tried to recollect the last thing he remembered. All he could dredge up was a biscuit with teeth. On a sign, a biscuit smiling.

  He wasn’t in Key Largo, that was clear. This place stunk like a cooped-up barnyard. That ammonia reek was burning his throat. He sat up and his stomach shuddered and clenched, but Thorn tipped his head back and drew a few cautious breaths and after several seconds his nausea backed off.

  The walls were concrete. The door was a dull gray metal. A cell.

  Everything was gray. Or maybe that was him, maybe the gray was springing from his own diseased mind. He was projecting his sad inner grayness on everything.

  He rubbed his eyes again and groaned as he settled his feet on the floor.

  No, the gray was real. The windowless walls, the floor, a rough, unpainted concrete. A storage room converted to a cell. Just him and a cot.

  No, he wasn’t alone. Across the room, lashed to a chair, was a small Mexican man. He wore white boxer shorts with red valentines on them. His head was slumped forward, drowsing or unconscious.

  Thorn began to remember. He remembered the Happy Biscuit Café, yeah, that was it. Pine Haven. And all of it swirled back, an unsequenced hailstorm of images. A picture postcard, an endless car drive with strangers, a burger joint on fire, a man named X-88, an uneaten waffle, a dry and tasteless barbecue sandwich, dead fish floating in a river, a cell phone hidden in a trunk, a heavy rock in his hand, the Lorelei, some kid wanting to take his photo, a woman who invited him to squeeze her breasts.

  He needed to halt the chaotic slideshow and piece the images back together in some reasonable order if he was to understand his predicament, how he arrived at this cell, what it meant, what to do next.

  From beyond the gray metal door came more shrieks and squeals and the clang of steel like prison bars slamming shut. Men speaking Spanish with a Mexican lilt. The grunt and shuffle of animals.

  Okay. He was in a barn. On the other side of that wall, that heavy door, there were pigs, lots of them from the sound of it.

  He rubbed his head and looked around at the gray.

  He’d been drugged. He couldn’t remember who’d done it or why. There’d been an angry mob. Thorn babbled at them and someone, a big man he didn’t know, punched him in the jaw, then shoved him into a car and drove him into the countryside, and that same big man hauled him out of the vehicle and dragged Thorn through a barn where truckloads of squealing young pigs were arriving, trotting down ramps, herded by small dark-skinned men with sawed-off bats and cudgels until the pigs were crowded into storage pens.

  Thorn hadn’t fought back against any of it, which seemed strange. He believed he was a fighter. He didn’t know why he’d complied so willingly as the big man pushed Thorn, stumbling, into a room. This room. This gray room.

  His jaw hurt. His mouth and throat were parched. The drugs were still acting on him, in his system, causing the gray haze in his head. Surely it had to be the drugs, a hangover. Surely this was not how he felt all the time or how he would continue to feel. Who could live like this?

  The pigs bleated and shrieked in primal outrage and banged against the metal bars of their pens, their new home. Not where they belonged, restless, frightened, and wanting out. Their misery was Thorn’s misery.

  The Mexican was awake and eyeing Thorn. He went over to the man and stripped the duct tape off his mouth.

  The man thanked him, taking deep breaths.

  “Avúdeme,” the man said. Help me.

  “Brother, we both need help.”

  He untied the man’s hands and his legs, but the man was too weak to stand. There was blood on his undershorts, a stripe of dried blood running the length of his right leg. Looked like torture.

  “I’m searching for my son. His name is Flynn Moss, he looks something like me, younger. Have you seen him?”

  “Es su padre?”

  “Yes, his father. You’ve seen him?”

  He spoke in slow, simple Spanish.

  “He come to my trailer, him and others. They give me watch.”

  “A watch? Reloj?”

  “Si, un reloj especial.”

  The man’s head rocked back, his eyes closed. Thorn came to him and shook his shoulder.

  “Have you seen him after that? Do you know where he is?”

  The man shook his head. He tried to rise to his feet but was too weak and settled back in the chair.

  In a quiet voice he said, “La pelirroja.”

  “A red-haired woman?”

  “Si.”

  “There was a redhead with my son. You’ve seen her?”

  He motioned at the wall.

  “She’s here? She’s next door? En el cuarto al lado?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Dos puertas más.”

  Cassandra, or some other redhead, was two doors away.

  Rocky and weak, Thorn eased from one side of the room to the other, ten feet across, then retraced his steps. Circulate his blood, accelerate his heart, work the shit out of his system. He circled the room, once, twice, another time.

  When the dizziness began to stabilize, he tried to jog in place, lifting his knees, bouncing on his toes, but felt heavy, and the dizziness returned with a wallop and he had to stop and steady himself with a hand against the wall. When he’d recovered, he circled the room in the opposite direction, breathing hard.

  The Mexican man was watching him, blinking and mystified.

  Thorn halted at the door, examined it. A slab of heavy metal, as solid as any door could be. He tried the doorknob but it was locked from the outside. The doorknob was aluminum, cheap conventional hardware. A vulnerability.

  It was an odd arrangement, locked from outside, no keyhole inside. Thorn could think of no good reason for it except to use the room for confinement. A time-out space to punish lazy or disobedient workers, a chamber of horrors.

  He pressed his finger against the tiny release button on the edge of the sleeve, but his fingertip was too blunt. He needed a tool, a screwdriver would be nice, a knife, even a nail of any size. He checked his pockets. Nothing but lint. He looked around the room.

  Only the bare walls and the camp cot with a rough fabric sling, three crossed legs. Easily folded up, easily stored.

  He flipped the cot upside down, examined the legs. Aluminum, with the joints held together with screws and washers. His heart was thumping, he was sweating. This was a workout, just moving a few feet this way, a few feet that. But the dull gray room was coming into better focus and it was brightening
. The gray walls were changing to a light blue, the floor an off-white.

  For no reason, he recalled an earlier scene. Some indeterminate moment when he’d been in the kitchen of a restaurant. A waitress, what was her name, he knew it but couldn’t recall, she was telling Thorn he’d been drugged, the vegetable kid in the back had slipped something potent into his sandwich, and she’d even told him the name of the drug though he couldn’t remember it. Millie, that was her name. A daughter named Emma. That was some time ago, but Thorn had no way to calculate how long. It felt like weeks had passed.

  With the cot upside down, he worked from one leg to the next, testing the tightness of the bolts until he found one that gave a little. He twisted, got it going, unscrewed it thread by thread. Hard work. Whatever deftness his fingers normally had was blunted by the dope.

  Out in the barn, the pigs were squealing again as if all of them had realized at the same instant their dire circumstance. They would grow from pigs to hogs in that big room, live there until their final day, no sun, no breezes, no smell of the soil, lying down in their own feces.

  Thorn’s cell was coming into sharper focus. The world returning. There were no shelves, no decorations, no attempt to dress up its bare walls. The Mexican man was still sitting but stretching his arms now, trying to revive.

  Thorn got back to work on the cot’s hinge, managed to unscrew the nut, then he drew out the bolt that acted as a hinge. Fatter diameter than he hoped, but it might work.

  He went to the door, tried it on the release button, pressing it down, got nothing. Then he cocked it to the side so its edge made better contact. The bolt was a fraction of an inch too big. It didn’t penetrate deep enough. Thorn experimented with different angles, tilting it to one side and stabbing it into the hole, stabbing it harder. That did it. The aluminum knob came loose.

  Good. But there were more layers to break through, several more.

  He drew off the knob, set it on the floor. He was sweating more heavily, a feverish wave was rolling through his body, and he was starting to shiver, a tremble in his hands. It was probably in the low fifties, sweater weather. Damn cold by Thorn’s standards, but his shirt was soaked. Had to be the drug. His sweat smelled like the fumes of some sour industrial chemical and trickles of it were running down his forehead, burning his eyes.