Locked Doors

64

THE generator shuddered to a halt.

Andrew Thomas sat motionless in the chair, candy-scented smoke rising from his arms and legs, bellowing out of the skullcap.

In the new silence, soft sizzles could be heard emanating from his body.

Luther put an ear to Andrew’s heart and listened.

After a moment, Rufus said, “We good?”

Luther grinned.

“If it is beating, I can’t hear it and it won’t be for long.”

Luther started unbuckling one of the wrist restraints but Rufus said, “Just leave him, son. We don’t have time to mess with…where’s Violet?”

Vi was running through a pitchblack corridor, her hands and mouth still duct-taped, praying again for the soul of Andrew Thomas.

She stopped and took five deep breaths through her nose.

The generator was silent now and somewhere in the black maze she heard the Kites coming.

And she was running again-straight into a door.

The way out.

She kicked the door open and moved through into a place of awful-smelling darkness.

The old woman’s voice echoed down the tunnel.

Vi closed the door with her foot, eyes desperate for even a sliver of light.

All around her burgeoned the fetor of death.

Just keep walking. This is the way out.

She walked headfirst into someone’s chest.

The person moved away and she jumped back into someone else.

She shrieked through the tape as the door behind her burst open.

A lantern illuminated the room and what she saw in that firelit semidark brought Vi to her knees.

There were perhaps ten of them, hanging by chains from the ceiling, in various stages of decay, their feet just inches off the floor so they appeared to stand of their own volition.

Why have You sent me to hell?

Though she knew the Kites were standing in the threshold behind her, blocking the only way out, Vi couldn’t resist the impulse to look at the faces all around her.

Some had been there for a long long time and they’d disintegrated into carrion, rags, and bones.

The boy who’d tried to save them dangled in a mangle of damage in a far corner.

The ones she’d bumbled into were still swinging-two men near where she knelt, their clothes and wounds still fresh, heads drooped down, masked in gloom.

She peered up at their faces-wrecked.

One of the men was large and mustached.

The other was thinner, taller, younger, and something fluttered in Vi’s brain.

The duct tape arrested her screams but she managed to bash her head into the stone wall three times before Luther came over and dragged her away.

She’d seen the dead man’s long soft hands, recognized the wristwatch, and she knew the pinstripe button-down, rent by buckshot, because she’d given it to Max for his last birthday.

“That’s a bad girl,” Luther told her. “Don’t you do that. You’re precious. He’s gone, and you’re never going to see him again, so what’s the use in crying?”

Luther knelt down and stroked her cheek.

He took a syringe from his pocket and jammed the needle into her arm.

“You make my insides taste like sugar,” he said. “I’m gonna love you up so much.”

“Guess it’s time,” Rufus said.

Luther lifted Violet in his arms and the Kites walked together out of the hanging room, through the basement corridors, past the electric chair, and up the creaking stairs.

They emerged from the front door into a bible black predawn, Violet asleep now, in the arms of Luther, in the arms of the drug.

And the yellow rind of a moon was sinking into the sound, the live oaks wrenched and gleaming, frost murdering the beach grass, as they piled into the ancient pickup truck and fled their crumbling house of stone.