by Blake Crouch
With each infliction of pain, I thought about what he’d done to me. To Violet, her husband, and son. To Beth Lancing. To his victims—the ones I knew about and those I didn’t.
I took a flashlight with me and followed the stairs that led from the warehouse down several flights into a basement.
Just exploring.
In search of Luther’s store of food and water, and of course, more drugs.
My light passing over old cinderblock.
Cobwebs amassed in the corners and there was rat shit everywhere, and occasionally the lightbeam would strike upon a pair of glowing eyes that would instantly vanish, followed by the soft scrape of rat feet scrambling off into the dark.
Fifty feet in, I stopped.
There was a noise coming from behind a door at the end of the hall.
I hurried down the corridor and pulled it open.
Shock.
Disbelief.
Never had expected to find this, and I stood speechless in the threshold, waiting for the mirage to evaporate, but it never did.
The room was tiny—an old janitor’s closet.
Against the back wall stood a crib, where two babies, one of them Max, lay crying at the top of their lungs.
I cleaned them up.
Changed their diapers.
Fed them from jars of baby food on hand and then held one in each arm, rocking and hushing them until they’d fallen asleep.
It was three in the morning when I pulled Luther’s van back up to the hospital’s emergency room entrance. The babies slept side-by-side on cushions in the same cardboard box which I’d jammed down between the front seats.
It was too cold and rainy to risk leaving them outside, so I carried the box through the automatic doors into the ER, and walked over to the sitting area where four people waited to be seen—a couple with a colicky infant and a young man who reeked of booze holding a bloody tee-shirt that had been wrapped around his left hand.
I said to them, “You might tell the nurse that a man just dropped off two babies, and that the mother of the little boy is a patient in this hospital.”
They stared at me, bleary-eyed, skeptical.
I set the cardboard box on the magazine table, started for the exit, and as the automatic doors slid open, I heard the mother of the colicky infant say, “Oh my God.”
I drove back.
Feeling so strange.
So anxious to return to Luther.
As the windshield wipers whipped back and forth and the van sped through the puddled streets, I kept trying to imagine Violet and Max’s reunion.
When she woke, the nurses would be there.
They would ask her if she had a son.
She would say yes, why?
They would ask her for the boy’s name and a physical description, and when Vi provided this, they would bring Max, now swaddled up in blankets, into her room.
And Violet would burst into tears.
Still in so much pain, but regardless she would sit up in bed, straining against the tubes and needles carrying medicine into her body, and reach out her arms to her son.
And when she looked down at Max, her tears would star his little cheeks and she’d touch his face and whisper, Mommy’s here, little man. Mommy’s here.
I ran through this scene several times, each one more emotional than the last.
More touching.
Violet happier.
The nurses crying.
Even a hardened doctor tearing up.
Mother and child together at last, on their way to a complete recovery.
But no matter how many times I played the moment in my mind, nothing changed.
I couldn’t feel a thing.
I only wanted to get back to the warehouse.
Back to Luther.
And all those beautiful things I could do to him.
It was on that second day that something switched. The rage and power had tasted good up until now, but on that second day, they became irresistible. Took on the ecstatic, bottomless property of addiction.
I felt joy at the sound of his screams.
Comfort at the sight of his blood running down the wood or boiling on the electrodes.
And there was no longer rage in what I did, only sadness.
It had crept in but was now expanding, filling my lungs like a deep breath of oxygen, and I knew why it was there.
One simple fact.
Eventually…this was going to end.
Luther was going to run out of blood and screams and die.
After forty-eight hours, in the midst of trying to bring Luther back to consciousness with a packet of smelling salts, I collapsed…
Revived on the concrete floor, no idea how long I’d been out.
I sat up and yawned, struggling onto my feet.
Luther was still unconscious.
I stood there looking down at what I’d done to him, trying to feel something.
For a moment, I wondered if he’d died, and this prompted only a remote sadness that I wouldn’t hear him in full voice again.
It was like sunlight, that intense emotion.
Something to counteract the emptiness.
I could imagine craving it.
I wanted to rouse him, but I was beyond exhaustion.
I left him to sleep and wandered through the warehouse until I found something resembling a place to sleep—the backseat of a minivan or station wagon, still in its plastic covering.
I curled up on the cushions and shut my eyes.
Wondering, as sleep descended, what I had become.
Orson and I are back at his cabin in the desert, only everything is different. We’re one. So linked we don’t have to speak. Every word, every emotion exchanged by thought.
We’re walking across the desert at sunset, no sound but the impact of our boots crunching against the hardpan. I’m doing all the talking—all the thinking. Telling him that I finally understand, that I’m sorry. Everything he put me through, he did out of love. I know this now. He knew me before I knew myself. He tried to show me and I threw it back in his face.
We finally arrive at the top of a gentle rise, the desert expanding around us—the view fifty miles in every direction.
The evening is warm and the sun, now perched on the horizon, feels good in our faces.
I love you, brother, I say, but when I turn to face him, I find that I’m alone.
I sat up suddenly on the bench seat in a cold sweat, tears in my eyes, and my leg on fire, realizing I’d dreamed of my brother. Orson had often haunted my dreams since that summer in the desert eight years ago, but this was the first time I’d ever woke up missing him.
Luther was awake. I could hear him moaning on the other side of the warehouse.
I could barely walk, my right leg stiff and hot and the raw flesh beginning to scab over.
I limped over to Luther, sprawled on the gurney but looking better than I would have imagined. I’d hurt him, but inflicted no broken bones, no life-threatening puncture wounds. My greatest fear had been losing him prematurely.
“You’ll never guess who I dreamed about,” I said.
“Who?”
“Orson.”
He managed a weak smile.
“He’d certainly be enjoying this.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what worries me. Do you think you can stand?”
“You haven’t even come close to hurting me.”
I walked over to the control panel, pulled open the bottom drawer, and took out a stainless-steel Spyderco Harpy that looked more like a talon than a knife.
Back at the gurney, Luther looked confused as I unbuckled both ankle restraints and one of his wrists.
“What is this?” he said.
I was walking away from the gurneys, out into the middle of the warehouse floor.
When I stopped and turned around, he’d already unbuckled the last restraint and was painfully prying his skin off the electrodes.
He finally broke fre
e and swung his legs off the gurney.
Naked, tall, pale, and covered in cuts, burns, and bruises.
He looked monstrous.
“What is this?” he said again.
I reached into my pocket, took out the Harpy I’d liberated from the control panel drawer.
Now I held a knife in each hand.
I swung my right arm back and sent the knife sliding across the concrete, until it finally collided into Luther’s bare feet.
“I can barely walk,” I said. “And you aren’t so pretty yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d say we’re evenly matched.”
“Not even.” He knelt and lifted the Harpy off the floor, opened it with a subtle flick of the wrist. “I’ll fucking take you apart.”
“Then let’s do it,” I said, opening my blade and starting toward him. “One of us has to die.”
HE doesn’t know how long he’s been chained up in darkness.
He barely remembers his own name.
Almost all of the time, he is cold.
All of the time, he is thirsty and hungry.
There is no day or night here, down in this cold, dank room in the basement of the factory. He thinks he may have been here for months, but it could be longer. Much longer. He fears that his mind has lost the ability to reason time. That years may have passed.
His beard is six inches long.
He is skin and bones.
The slash he received eons ago is now nothing more than a raised scar across his abdomen, and he fingers it obsessively, constantly replaying the knife-fight like a piece of botched choreography.
Every other day, his captor brings a pitcher of water and a plate of food.
Several times, he was asleep when the food arrived and awoke to find a giant rat feasting on his meal.
The first three times, he shooed it away.
The fourth, he crushed it and ate it.
His former life only visits him in dreams—bright, vivid, blue-sky dreams.
He has long passed the point of wanting death and he couldn’t effectuate such a plan regardless. He is forced to wear a helmet to prevent braining himself. The few times he’s tried to starve himself or go without water has resulted in force-feeding. In one paining session, his teeth were removed so he couldn’t bleed himself to death.
His captor has informed him that he intends to keep him alive for twenty years, and while he feels certain that his body will last, he wonders about his mind. Already, it is breaking down. To know and understand that you’re going crazy is perhaps the worst brand of torment he has ever withstood. He’d rather spend a year in the gurney.
And so he is essentially a soul trapped in an earthbound body.
His approach to living could almost be described as Zen.
The ten square feet where he eats and sleeps and shits is his world.
He has an intimate knowledge of the cracks and fissures in the concrete beneath him—studies their patterns like the word of God.
The space beyond his length of chain has become as mysterious and unreachable as the universe.
Occasionally, screams trickle down from the warehouse several floors above, but mostly, there is only silence and darkness.
Recently, his captor brought down an antiquated typewriter and ten reams of paper.
A sick joke, but more and more he’s considering writing if for nothing more than the diversion of something new to pass the hours.
He talks to Orson all the time.
He tells himself stories that he may one day write.
In the strangest of them all, none of this is really happening. He’s just a character trapped in the twisted story of a semi-famous writer who lives on a lake in North Carolina. He keeps trying to finish the story. To write in some weakness in the chains, some error in judgment on the part of his captor that might allow him to escape, but nothing ever seems right.
At last, on the story’s hundredth incarnation, he arrives upon the answer.
A character returns unexpectedly to the warehouse and saves him.
As the story closes, he’s lying in a luxurious bed, drifting in and out of sleep.
He hears approaching footsteps and smiles.
Because the covers are warm.
Because he feels no pain.
Because those footsteps belong to Violet.
She’s coming to nurse him back to health.
Momentarily, she’ll be through the door.
And she’ll sit on the bed and feed him from a bowl of steaming soup, and when she’s finished, crawl into bed with him and run her fingers through his hair and whisper that he’s safe now. That the pain is behind him, behind them both, and in this warm, soft bed—everything that matters.
2005 — The events in JA Konrath’s novel Bloody Mary, featuring Jack Daniels and Barry Fuller, occur next…
Start with a tough but vulnerable Chicago cop. Stir in a psychopath with a unique mental condition that programs him to kill. Add a hyperactive cat, an ailing mother, a jealous boyfriend, a high-maintenance ex-husband, and a partner in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Mix with equal parts humor and suspense, and enjoy Bloody Mary—the second novel in the funny, frightening world of Lieutenant Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels.
When Jack receives a report of an excess of body parts appearing at the Cook County Morgue, she hopes it’s only a miscount. It’s not. Even worse, these extra limbs seem to be accessorized with Jack’s handcuffs.
Someone has plans for Jack. Very bad plans. Plans that involve everything and everyone that she cares about.
Jack must put her train wreck of a personal life on hold to catch an elusive, brilliant maniac—a maniac for whom getting caught is only the beginning…
2006 — The events in JA Konrath’s novel Rusty Nail, featuring Jack Daniels and Alex Kork, occur next…
Jack’s back, and once again she’s up to her Armani in murder. Someone is sending Jack snuff videos. The victims are people she knows, and they share a common trait—each was involved in one of Jack’s previous cases. With her stalwart partner, Herb, hospitalized and unable to help, Jack follows a trail of death throughout the Midwest, on a collision course with the smartest and deadliest adversary she has ever known.
2007 — The events in Blake Crouch’s novel Snowbound, featuring Javier Estrada, occur next…
For Will Innis and his daughter, Devlin, the loss was catastrophic. Every day for the past five years, they wonder where she is, if she is—Will’s wife, Devlin’s mother—because Rachael Innis vanished one night during an electrical storm on a lonely desert highway, and suspected of her death, Will took his daughter and fled.
Now, Will and Devlin live under different names in another town, having carved out a new life for themselves as they struggle to maintain some semblance of a family. When one night, a beautiful, hard-edged FBI agent appears on their doorstep, they fear the worst, but she hasn’t come to arrest Will. “I know you’re innocent,” she tells him, “because Rachael wasn’t the first…or the last.”
Desperate for answers, Will and Devlin embark on a terrifying journey that spans four thousand miles from the desert southwest to the wilds of Alaska, heading unaware into the heart of a nightmare, because the truth is infinitely worse than they ever imagined.
2007 — The events in JA Konrath’s novel Dirty Martini, featuring Jack Daniels, occur next…
Homicide Lieutenant Jack Daniels is in some serious trouble. Her boyfriend wants to get married. Her partner wants to transfer. Her dead father may not be dead after all. And a brilliant sociopath known as The Chemist is poisoning Chicago’s food supply, killing hundreds of people.
Truck Stop
Wisconsin, 2007
-1-
Taylor liked toes.
He wasn’t a pervert. At least, not that kind of pervert. Taylor didn’t derive sexual gratification from feet. Women had other parts much better suited for that type of activity. But he was a sucker for a tiny foot in open-toed high heels, esp
ecially when the toenails were painted.