Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy

Yukon, Canada

Autumn 2004

Andy

EARLY October.

A cold, midnight rain pattering against the tin roof.

"We should be drinking whiskey," Violet said. "Something to warm our bones."

I set another birch log on the fire and crawled back onto the bearskin rug where Vi had sprawled with her wineglass.

"You’re already cold?" I asked.

"I’m a southern girl. I’m always freezing."

"Hate to say it, but that doesn’t bode well for you this winter."

"How cold does it get here? Worst case scenario."

"Fifty below. Sixty on a bad day."

"I won’t even get out of bed."

I sipped my wine, glanced at the fireshadows flickering in the rafters over the loft—what had once been my office now converted into Violet’s bedroom and her four-month-old Max’s nursery. He slept up there in bliss, the warmest spot in the cabin, where the heat of the fire gathered.

I studied the firelight flush across Violet’s face.

I’d shunned it, fought it, tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t deny what I felt in the pit of my stomach. I was falling...hard...for this woman.

"What is it?" Vi said.

"Nothing."

"No...you have this look."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

She smirked. "Are you crushing on me, Andy?"

I blushed through to the tips of my ears, wondering if she could see the color in the lowlight.

"Little bit, I’m sorry."

"No, it’s completely understandable. I’m adorable."

I laughed, my eyes closing only for a second, and when they opened again, Violet had leaned in so close I could smell the wine on her breath.

Her green eyes were flecked with black. This I hadn’t noticed before.

"Violet—"

"I want this."

"You’re sure? Because if you have any doubt—"

She shut me up with a kiss.

Soft.

Melting.

Melding.

I could’ve lived there.

We came apart, the corners of my mouth electrified with the taste of her. I ran my hand over the curve of her hip, wondering how far we were going to take this.

"I haven’t," I said. "Not in a long time."

"Haven’t what? What are you talking about?"

"Nothing, I just—"

"Wait." She recoiled. "You think we’re going to sleep together?"

"No, I just thought—"

"I’m kidding, we are."

"Why do you torture me?"

"Because it’s so easy?"

She set her wineglass on the floorboard and pulled me on top of her.

"Tell the truth," she whispered. "How many times have you imagined this moment?"

I smiled, feeling her thighs against my ribs.

"You’ve been through a lot, Vi."

"We both have."

"It hasn’t even been a year."

"It’s been long enough for me to know who you are. Stop trying to talk me out of this."

So I kissed her, my hands running over her body in some kind of wonder. The fire raged behind us and the rain intensified. I had imagined this moment, many times, since the beginning of summer at least and still it didn’t feel anything like my fantasies. I loved her now, and that made everything better.

"Do you want to move over to my bed?" I whispered in her ear.

"Yes, please."

And still I could barely bring myself to separate from her. Such a sweet and perfect place.

I got onto my knees and helped her up.

"God, you’re beautiful."

I would’ve undressed her right there in the firelight if it hadn’t been so cold. I wished we’d done this in the summertime.

"I’m just going to run up to the loft for a second," she said. "Go get under the covers and warm it up for us."

I stood and moved across the cold floorboards toward the nook under the loft where my bed sat in darkness.

The wine had gone to my head, everything so pleasantly humming.

Violet climbed the ladder toward the loft.

My heart pounded under my sweater.

Reaching the bed, I tugged back the covers, wondering if I should be naked waiting for her, or if maybe there wasn’t something implicitly sleazy about that.

I crawled under the blankets and opted to play it safe, stay dressed for now.

I could hear Violet moving around directly above me in the loft, the boards creaking, thinking how many nights had I lain here in the dark listening to her movements, hoping she felt what I did, that she might decide to creep down the ladder in the middle of the night and join me in bed. A part of me still didn’t quite believe it was about to happen.

It was cold under the blankets, and I was drawing them up to my chin to keep in the heat when Violet shrieked.

I bolted up.

"Andy!" she screamed.

I jumped out of bed, rushed over to the ladder.

"What’s wrong?" I asked, climbing.

"He’s gone."

I stepped into the loft.

Dark up here and nothing to see except where the firelight reflected off surfaces of metal and glass.

"Who?" I asked, but I understood the moment my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw Vi leaning over into the crib, shuffling through the blankets.

"Max," she said.

"There’s no way he could have crawled out?"

"He’s four months, Andy. He can’t even roll over."

I turned on a lamp and moved toward her.

"You put him down after supper, right?"

She nodded, wild-eyed, her pupils dilated, chest billowing.

"He went down fast. Ten minutes. Then I came down and we were talking by the fire for what? A couple hours?"

"Yeah."

Vi shook. "This isn’t right, Andy. This isn’t right."

I stepped around the crib toward the only possible exit from the loft—a two-by-two square foot window just under the pitch of the roof.

"Is it open?" she asked.

I knelt down, studied the hasps. "No. But it isn’t locked."

"Was it?"

"I’m ninety percent sure it...fuck."

"What?"

Vi hurried over.

I touched the floorboards.

"They’re wet." A cold, sinking blast of panic ran through me. "Someone was up here while we were down there."

She looked at me, her eyes flooding.

A lump swelling in my throat.

"He’s here, isn’t he? He found us and took my son."

I headed for the ladder.

Immediately, I could tell something was off—a softness in my knees that I realized was numbness.

"I don’t feel right," I said as I reached the ladder and started down.

Through her tears, Violet said, "I’ve been getting more and more lightheaded. I thought it was the wine."

I descended carefully, a tremor in my legs threatening to upend my balance. My mind redlined, the last sixty seconds such a nightmare I wondered if this was really happening. I’d had a dozen dreams in the last year that he’d somehow found us, and every time I’d wake sweating in the night, paralyzed by naked fear until that wash of relief would sweep over me, reality reinstated. I’d go to the kitchen sink, drink a glass of water, and wait for the nerves to recede.

My feet touched the floorboards at the base of the ladder.

Violet still cried hysterically in the loft and the numbness in my legs still grew, and I was still in this horrifying moment, either unable to wake, or worse, there was no nightmare to wake from.

My knees hit the floor beside my bed, and I reached underneath it.

Pulled out the shotgun, but it was too light, too small, and it wasn’t black metal but orange and green plastic.

I stared at the Nerf toy in my hands and said, "What the fuck is happening?"

My voice sounded strange, as if it had been relegated to some alcove in the back of my head. I turned and the room moved slower than the swivel of my head, the firelight leaving trails across my field of vision.

Violet stood at the bottom of the ladder, swaying on her feet.

"He drugged us," I said, and she responded but I couldn’t interpret her words, which dissolved in a swarm of echoes.

I staggered to the front door and pulled it open.

Rain fell through the sphere of illumination cast by the porchlight.

Unflinching darkness beyond.

My breath steamed in the cold, and I could feel the chill on my face, but there was distance from it—a chemical apathy getting stronger by the minute.

I stumbled down the steps into a puddle, the freezing water seeping through my socks, realized I still held fast to the Nerf shotgun. I threw it down in the mud.

My CJ-5 stood just beyond the light’s reach, and I moved toward it on rubber legs.

I kept a loaded hunting rifle in the back, had been hoping to shoot an elk that would feed us through the winter.

I collided into the door of the Jeep, fumbling for the handle.

It swung open and I climbed in, reaching back between the seats as the rain hammered the hard-top.

The Remington was gone.

He’d taken it, too.

I stepped back down into the mud and stared at the porchlight thirty feet away, blinding me through the rain.

My head felt heavy, fingers too, like they were trying to pull me down into the mud.

I could hear Violet sobbing in the cabin. It occurred to me that a loss of consciousness was imminent, and despite the effect of the drug, this recognition terrified me.

I wondered how long he’d been watching us, how long he’d been planning this night. He’d spent time inside the cabin—known how to take Max, the location of my shotgun, the rifle, and God knows what else.

I started back toward Violet, but after four steps, my face hit the frigid mud, and I stared sideways at the open door of the cabin, the interior walls awash in firelight.

Violet had gone quiet, now crawling toward the door.

I tried to call out to her but couldn’t muster my voice.

She slumped down across the threshold and didn’t move.

My eyes had begun to close of their own will, the porchlight dimming away until it was nothing but a distant star.

Now the white noise of the rain faded, and with it the cold, and as I slipped under, I held onto a final, horrifying thought—this wasn’t the end of anything, certainly not my life. This was possibly the last moment of peace I would ever know, because when consciousness returned, I’d be waking up in hell.

Violet

SHE opened her eyes and instantly shut them again.

The light was breathtaking, piercing.

Disorientation ruled her every sense.

She buried her face between her arms, but still the light crept in to scorch her retinas.

She thought, I’ve been in darkness a long, long time.

And then: Max.

She wept, and the quality of her voice suggested that she was outside.

The ground beneath her was hard and ungiving—pavement perhaps.

There was no sound. Certainly not the everpresent whoosh of wind moving through spruce trees to which she’d grown accustomed during the last year. She couldn’t recover her last waking memory, only the emotions associated with it—fear and loss.

Violet rolled onto her back and forced her eyes to open.

Thirty seconds of punishing brilliance, and then the world darkened and she saw that she was staring into a low, gray cloud deck.

She sat up.

Found herself in a neighborhood in the middle of a street.

Houses on either side.

She struggled onto her feet. Weak. Like she hadn’t stood in months.

So thirsty her head pounded.

She limped across the pavement toward the closest residence, then into the yard, through the tall grass, and up the creaking steps.

Banged on the front door.

"Hello? I need help please. Hello?"

Her voice sounded strange. Unused. She stepped back and waited. No footsteps forthcoming on the other side. No sound anywhere except the hollow scrape of an empty beer can rolling across the road behind her.

Maybe it was the fogginess in her head, but she’d completely missed it—the front windows held no glass. She approached the one right of the door and stared through the cobwebs into darkness.

Disintegrating furniture.

The smell of mold and must.

Decaying wood.

She headed down the steps and crossed the yard, stopping when she reached the sidewalk of the adjacent house. Didn’t even bother knocking on this one’s door, because the abandonment was obvious—same glassless windows into darkness, its entire frame listing.

Violet walked back out into the middle of the street.

Every yard was overgrown.

Every house dark.

"Hello!"

Her voice echoed down the street and nothing answered.

She started walking, then jogging.

After three blocks of crumbling factory houses, she bent over gasping. Her legs had no strength. They buckled and again she was sitting in the middle of an empty street, her arms wrapped around her legs—something, anything to hold onto.

She had to be dreaming. Nothing about this felt real.

A thought flashed through her mind—I’m dead. It explained the confusion, the weakness, the holes in her memory, these surreal surroundings. And she thought of her son and what that meant, a whole new string of questions erupting, and she wept again, deep, racking sobs and stinging tears, and she could have cried all day and into the night if one ever came, but she was abruptly silenced by a voice that started speaking in her head.

Andy

TOTAL darkness.

Day after day after day.

Strapped naked to a wooden chair lined with strips of freezing metal, leather restraints securing my ankles, wrists, and head.

Utterly immobilized.

No food.

No water.

No sound but the occasional creak of metal somewhere high above me.

The sole luxury a hole that had been cut out of the bottom of the chair, presumably so I wouldn’t get an infection and die of my own filth.

When my thirst became all-consuming and the desperation descended, someone would inevitably enter and approach in the dark. I’d feel a straw push between my chapped and cracking lips, and for thirty seconds I’d gulp down all the water I could take in. Sometimes, my captor would feed me cold soup or a wedge of stale bread, never speaking, and I would call out as their footsteps trailed away from me, begging for a word, an acknowledgment, something, but I was never answered.

In my waking moments, I obsessed over Violet and Max until the thought of whatever had become of them reduced me to sobs. I passed through phases of fear, boredom, terror, and finally, into madness.

It stalked me—I could feel it creeping up in the dark, scraping at the back of my skull, fueled by sensory deprivation. Often, I didn’t know whether I was awake or sleeping. Lights blossomed in the pitch-black, each display more intense than the one preceding.

Movies for a breaking mind.

I talked to myself.

I sang.

Mostly, I wept.

Then cycled through it all over again, until I finally arrived at a simple, overpowering wish to die. The pain of this immobilized consciousness, of lying in the dark waiting for something I knew not what, freezing and thirsty and hungry and confused and no concept of it ever ending was beyond any physical pain I’d endured.

And then it happened. I came shivering out of a fever dream and something was different—an object rested in my right hand—small, longer than it was wide, hard plastic, one side covered in rubber buttons.

A voice—soft, southern, and familiar—was suddenly in my head.

"You have a choice, Andy. This will be the first of many, and once done, it cannot be undone. In your right hand, you’re holding a remote control. If you want to see something, press the large button toward the front."

I realized I held a smaller device in my left hand.

"What’s in my other hand?"

"That’s for later."

"Where are Violet and Max? Luther? What have you done with them?"

He made no answer.

I sat in the dark fingering the large, circular button, savoring this first new sensation in days—the friction of the rubber against the ridges on my thumb.

I didn’t want to do it. I knew nothing remotely good could come from it, but anything would be better than continuing to sit here in darkness.

This, I couldn’t bear.

So I pushed the button.

Violet

"HELLO, Violet."

She brought her hand to the earpiece in her left ear, hadn’t even noticed it until this moment.

"Acknowledge that you can hear me."

"Where’s my son?" she asked.

"I’m holding him."

She took in a quick shot of oxygen, tears welling, her throat beginning to close.

"If you hurt him in any—"

"He’s safe—for the time being."

"I don’t believe you."

Max’s unmistakable cry blared through the speaker into her ear. She could have picked it out of a million.

"See, you just made me pinch him. There, there, little man. Hush now."

"Max, it’s Mama. I’m right here." She couldn’t hear him anymore. "Please don’t hurt him. I’ll do anything you want."

"So glad to hear you say that."

"Is Andy okay?"

"Andy...has been better. But he’s alive."

"What is it you want?"

"Get your ass up."

Vi came to her feet, made a slow turn, eyeing the abandoned factory houses up and down the street. She touched the earpiece again, gave it a soft tug. It didn’t budge, but she could feel her skin stretching.

"It isn’t coming off," Luther said. "Not without a scalpel. Start walking."

"Which way?"

"Toward the water tower."

She started walking.

"You can see me?" she asked.

He didn’t answer.

The water tower stood a quarter of a mile away, its silver tank dulled and heavily graffitied.

Still, she could read the palimpsest of the tower’s namesake.

"You’re feeding my son?"

"He’s being fully cared for, Violet."

"I need to see him."

"That can certainly be arranged."

"How?"

"Obedience, of course."

She was closing in on the tower now.

A chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounded the base.

"Up and over," he said.

She ran her hands through her hair which had been pulled into an off-center ponytail, then touched the fence, a heavy coating of rust on the metal. As she began to climb, she noticed she wore a pair of tennis shoes and a black tracksuit that had never belonged to her.

Near the top, she made a lateral move across the fence and swung her leg over between a gap in the barbed wire, caught the leg of her tracksuit on a stray jag of metal coming down, ripped a six-inch tear.

Gasped at the coldness of blood and the burn of torn flesh.

She hit the ground on the other side, turned, stared up at the tower—a hundred and seventy-five feet of rusted metal that should’ve been razed years ago.

It creaked, swaying visibly in the wind.

"There’s something for you at the top. Something you’re going to need."

"The top of the tower?"

"That’s right."

Violet saw where the lowest rung of the ladder stopped six feet above the concrete foundation.

"I can’t reach that."

"I’m sure you’ll think of something."

She stepped onto the broken concrete and stopped directly under the ladder. When she stood on the balls of her feet and reached her hands up, her fingers just grazed the bottom rung. Bending her legs, she jumped and grasped the lowest rung with one hand, then both, grunting as she pulled her eyes parallel with her blanching knuckles.

Her right arm shot up, fingers catching on the next rung and tightening around the metal.

She cried out, fighting through the next pull-up, the hardest she’d ever done.

Her knees slid over the bottom rung and she let her weight rest upon it.

Gasping.

Sweat burning in her eyes.

Violet clung to the rusting ladder, allowing her pulse rate to slow. When she could breathe without panting, she got her tennis shoes onto the bottom rung and stared up toward the base of the water tank.

"Is this safe?" she asked.

"Does it look or feel safe?"

She began to climb.

The ladder itself was impossibly narrow, a foot wide at most. As she stepped onto each new rung the weight of her footfall set the metal vibrating on a low and haunting frequency.

Forty feet up, and she still hadn’t looked down, maintaining a hyperfocus on each rung, down to the rust-speckled metal. It was all that mattered—making clean steps. Certainly not the world opening up all around her, or the perceptible leaning of the tower that grew more pronounced the higher she climbed, or the picture her mind’s eye kept conjuring—the bolts that held this ladder to the top slowly pulling out of their housings.

The wind pushing against her carried tiny ball-bearings of sleet.

Halfway up, she had to stop and make herself breathe.

Not breathless from exertion, but fear.

When she opened her eyes, she was staring down the length of the ladder between her feet, figuring it must be seventy or eighty feet to that concrete slab at the tower’s base. It moved back and forth, or seemed to at least, though she knew that was the tower itself swaying and a surge of bile lurched up her throat.

Hold it together. You’ve been through worse. This is for Max. For Andy.

"You aren’t freezing on me up there, are you?"

"No."

Her words thick in her throat, palms sweating, sliding too easily across the metal rung. There was a tremor in her right leg as she started to climb again. Exhaustion and fear and the adrenaline running out, leaving her muscles shaky.

But she kept climbing.

A freezing drizzle needled the side of her face.

The steps becoming slippery.

Vi looked up. Three more rungs. Almost there.

She pushed on.

Two more.

Then reached up, her right hand clutching the water-beaded railing, and pulled herself onto the catwalk that encircled the water tank.

It spanned twenty-four inches, but at least it had a railing, a flimsy semblance of protection.

A small camera, just out of reach, had been mounted to the water tank.

It aimed down toward where the ladder joined the catwalk.

Violet flattened herself on the cold metal, her heart beating against it. She didn’t want to do it, but she couldn’t stop herself from looking out across the urban wasteland that sprawled beneath her—block after block of derelict neighborhoods. A six-story housing project—black windows, a crumbling playset in what remained of the courtyard. She craned her neck. Abandoned factories loomed in the distance around the other side of the tower. A series of buildings. Brick chimneys, smokeless and soaring into a ceiling of slate. Everywhere, nothing but industrial decay. A ghost town. Only in the far distance, a mile or more away, did she discern the hum of automobiles, and further on, the feeble skyline of the city.

The speaker crackled in her ear.

"Get up."

Vi wiped the rainwater out of her eyes and got back onto her feet.

"I told you I had something for you, didn’t I?"

"Yes."

"That was a lie. Not something. Someone."

Violet felt a vibration under her feet. She grabbed hold of the loose railing, didn’t like standing upright, the swirl of vertigo threatening.

She staggered back over to the ladder and looked down.

They’d only just started, but someone climbed quickly, with purpose.

"You’re coming up here?" she asked.

"That’s not me. Her name is Jennifer. She woke up here just like you, about an hour ago. Also like you, she’s a new mother. Her daughter, Margot, is sharing a crib with Max as we speak."

Vi could hear the woman’s footfalls clanging on the metal rungs.

"Why’s she coming up here?"

"Because she doesn’t want her daughter to die. I assume you feel the same way about Max?"

Vi felt a tightening in her chest.

"Whichever one of you isn’t thrown to their death in the next ten minutes can also rest assured their child will be safe a little while longer."

"Luther, for God’s—"

"Should be fun."

"I can’t do this."

"No one’s asking you to do a thing." Clang. Clang. Clang. "Just stand there for all I care, let her throw you off."

Violet backed away from where the ladder joined the catwalk.

Still, she had that lilting wooziness in her stomach, the height unnerving.

She leaned against the side of the empty water tank, her hands beginning to shake, listening to the woman approach.

And then the clanging was right there, and she saw hands grasp the railing and a head of dirty-blond hair lifting into view.

The woman climbed onto the catwalk and stood facing Violet. Ten feet away. She was a few years older, early thirties at most, wore a pink tracksuit and had about six inches on Vi. Deep, black bags formed half-crescents under her eyes, her skin molting with old mascara. The drizzle had flattened her hair. She looked sturdy, scrapy, angry, and scared.

"Hey," Vi said.

The woman just stared, but something was breaking inside of her.

"Oh, I should’ve mentioned," Luther said, "what with you being a cop and all your training, I gave her a knife. It’s only fair."

Violet said to the woman, "Let’s climb down. We don’t have to do this."

"He has my angel."

"I know. He has my son. But we can’t do this. What he’s trying to force us into."

"We don’t have a choice."

"Let’s go down," Vi said again. "We’ll figure something out."

The woman shook her head, tears already trailing down her face. She reached back and her hand reappeared grasping a large hunting bowie with a wicked point and a nasty, serrated blade that looked unnatural in her hand, her eyes constantly shifting down to look at it, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she held.

"I’m Violet. You’re Jennifer?"

The woman gave an uncomfortable nod.

"The only way he wins is if we do what he wants. If we don’t go after each other, he has no power."

The voice in her head said, "Not exactly true, Vi."

"Jennifer, I used to be a cop. Will you trust me?" Violet edged forward, extending her hand. "Just drop the knife, okay? We’re stronger together."

Jennifer’s lower lip trembled. "He’s going to kill my daughter."

"I won’t let that happen."

"You can’t make that promise."

Babies suddenly cried through the tiny speaker into Violet’s ear.

She and Jennifer shouted, "No!" in unison, both clutching their earpieces.

"Stop, Luther!"

"Please!" Jennifer screamed.

Vi took another step forward, her head spinning with the tiny, wailing cries.

"Look at me Jennifer!" she shouted.

The woman met her eyes.

"He wants this, okay? Do you understand that?"

"He’s hurting her!"

Jennifer swung the bowie at Violet, who leapt back.

Her impact sent a tremor through the catwalk, the metal vibrating, and Vi had to grab the railing to steady herself.

Her stomach burned. She touched her hand to the front of her tracksuit, and it came away red. The blade had passed through the nylon and cut a shallow streak across her abdomen.

She looked up at Jennifer who seemed stunned at what she’d done, fingering the blood on the knife.

Jennifer’s face broke. "I’m sorry," she said.

The babies still screamed through their earpieces, and Luther was saying something that was lost amid the cries.

"I have to do this," Jennifer said.

She stepped forward and Vi stepped back.

They both froze.

Jennifer rushed forward, and Vi rushed back.

Like some terrible dance.

When they stopped again, they were still six feet apart, both panting.

Jennifer faked a step and turned, sprinting in the other direction, disappearing around the other side of the water tank.

Vi stood motionless, listening. She could no longer hear the woman’s footsteps—nothing but the wobble of the railing, the pattering of the rain on the tank.

She could only see several feet in each direction before the catwalk disappeared around the curve of the water tank.

The sound of the crying babies had faded away.

Violet said, "Jennifer?"

She ventured three steps around the tank—nothing.

"Jennifer?"

She never heard the footsteps, only felt a new vibration in the catwalk, turned just in time to see Jennifer charging her in socks, the woman’s face overcome with a sudden ferocious flush, eyes gone cold and determined.

Predatory.

Vi watched the knife moving toward her, everything replaced by a diamond-hard streak of self-preservation.

Twenty-four inches of walkway left little room to parry the oncoming attack, and with Vi already pressed up against the water tank, she simply reacted without thinking, her right hand deflecting the knife thrust, clenching Jennifer’s wrist, and before she realized what she was doing, she’d simultaneously struck Jennifer’s arm above the elbow and jerked her wrist back against the blow.

The woman’s radius snapped and the knife clattered to the metal walkway and Vi drilled her chestplate with a palm-heel strike.

From Jennifer’s charge to this moment had taken the blink of an eye, Vi running on instinct and muscle memory. Vi lunged to grab the woman, her fingertips just missing the tracksuit as the backs of Jennifer’s thighs hit the railing, her momentum carrying her torso over the edge.

Vi caught a glimpse of the heels of her tennis shoes and then the woman was gone but for her fading scream—three and a half seconds of pure, vocalized terror.

She’d never heard anything to rival the sound of a human body slamming into a concrete slab from a hundred and seventy-five feet.

A thousand things breaking in the space of a millisecond.

Then silence.

Violet gripped the wet railing, staring down at Jennifer, sprawled far below.

She’d killed before, but they’d been monsters.

That woman was an innocent.

This felt...wrong.

She backpedaled into the water tank and sank down onto the walkway.

"Please don’t hurt her baby," she said. "Please."

"You are good," he said. "You are very good."

"Will you spare her child?"

"For no reason?"

"I’ll earn it."

Vi could feel herself coming unhinged, a psychotic refusal to acknowledge what had just happened.

"That could be interesting."

"Promise me."

"Head back down. We’ll talk when you reach the ground."

For several minutes, Vi sat there, unmoving.

The drizzle had become rain and it beat down on her head, a bitter cold beginning to fester someplace deep inside of her.

Andy

ON the screen, I watched Violet slowly working her way down the water tower’s ladder. The camera shot came from over a hundred yards away—handheld and constantly zooming in and pulling back to correct the focus. Condensation on the lens lent a foggy overlay to the picture.

I’d heard everything Luther had said. Watched the fight. Seen Violet throw the woman over the railing.

Now the screen went black.

Again, I sat in darkness, the thought crossing my mind that I had just dreamed all of this.

Sleeping was sight and picture and color.

Waking this unending night.

His voice convinced me otherwise.

"She’s amazing, isn’t she?" Luther said. "It must be something to know her. I mean, really know her. Do you really know her, Andy?"

"Whatever you want with Violet, use me," I said. "I’ll go along with anything you want, but please, let Violet and her son go. They don’t need to be a part—"

"You love her, huh?"

The question more painful than anything I’d experienced sitting in this chair.

Emotion swelling in my throat.

"I owe her," Luther said, "and still..."

His voice trailed off, and for a moment I could only hear him breathing, and the patter of rainfall on plastic.

Violet

HER feet touched the concrete slab, and despite the horror of the last fifteen minutes, the relief of being off that tower was palpable.

She stared over at Jennifer, fought off a surge of nausea.

Such destruction.

Pointless.

Vi climbed back over the barbed wire fence.

So tired. So cold.

Think, Violet. Think.

She scanned the houses and buildings in the distance.

Nothing moved in the gray, steady rain.

She had Jennifer’s knife hidden up the right sleeve of her tracksuit, the butt of the handle resting in her palm. It had made descending the slippery ladder more difficult, but now she had it, and she prayed he hadn’t noticed.

He was watching her, she was sure of it. Had to figure on surveillance cameras everywhere. Maybe someone helping him.

She could make a run for it, try to reach civilization, but he had her son. Had Andy.

Vi jogged across the road toward a brick building with a fifty-foot chimney on the far end.

Time to get out of this freezing rain.

"Turn left," Luther said.

Or not.

She veered away from the abandoned factory.

"Now run," he said.

She accelerated, the shuddering footfalls driving pain through her right ear, where she was beginning to suspect that Luther had stitched the earpiece into her skin.

Otherwise, it felt good to run, the exertion warming her against the chill.

She ran down the street for several minutes before he spoke again, passing ruined automobiles and more rotting houses.

"The housing project. See it?"

"I see it."

"That’s your destination."

The building loomed fifty yards away, rising above the oaks whose brown leaves had fallen and become rain-plastered to the pavement.

"What’s in there, Luther?"

Violet crossed the street and stopped out-of-breath where the sidewalk entered the courtyard of a six-story structure that resembled a crumbling L.

"Did I tell you to stop?"

She went on past a collapsed swingset and an overgrown sandbox, its only remnants the two-by-six board frame. A few toys had been left behind—a front-loader, a big-wheel missing its big wheel, plastic green army men scattered in the grass, casualties from some long-forgotten war.

She approached the double-doored entrance which had been leveled years ago, the building’s windows glaring down like a hundred black eyes.

Over the threshold into a darkness that reeked of mildew and decay.

Her wet shoes tracked over the peeling linoleum, and the farther away she moved from the entrance, the darker, more claustrophobic it grew.

Where the lobby intersected with the first-floor corridor, she stopped.

Up and down the hall—pockets of black offset by pockets of dismal light that filtered in from outside.

"Where am I going?" she asked, but no answer came.

She let the hunting bowie slide out of her sleeve and into her hand.

The fear paralyzing, all-consuming.

For a long time, she stood listening.

Water dripped.

The soft moan of wind pushing through one of the upper corridors.

And then...snapping. Cracking.

Woodsmoke.

Violet followed the smell into darkness and then out again.

Daylight passed through the open door of what had been an apartment and struck a wall covered in graffiti.

Clothes and toys and all manner of garbage littered the corridor.

The scent of woodsmoke was getting stronger and now she could see firelight flickering across the wall at the end of the corridor.

"Hello?" she said, and then softer, "Luther, is that you down there?"

Violet came to the end.

In an alcove, she saw the source of the firelight—an oil drum filled with scrap wood burning next to a busted window. Most of the smoke escaped outside, though enough had become trapped to lay down a foggy veil in the room. As she drew near, she could feel the warmth of the fire, and had just noticed the bedroll in the corner under a cardboard box when she heard the crunch of glass directly behind her.

Violet spun around and the first thing she noticed was the smell—rancid body odor laced with booze. She stumbled back, her heart in her throat, couldn’t see anything in the semidark but the shadow of this foul-smelling person advancing toward her.

"I have a knife," she said.

Her back touched the wall. Nowhere else to go.

Stood there clutching the knife and watching as a filthy man in layer upon layer of tattered clothes stepped into the gray light that filtered in through the window behind her.

He stopped when he saw the knife.

Vi could hear the rain striking the pavement outside and the fire hissing in the oil drum and nothing else.

The man’s face was all but hidden under a wild beard, but his stark blue eyes shone through the tangle, staring her down.

"What are you doing in my house?" he said.

"Your house?"

"My house."

Vi glanced over at the cardboard box lined with old newspapers, the shopping cart beside it.

"I was just cold, trying to get out of the rain," she said. "I smelled the smoke, so I came in here."

"You just want to get warm."

"That’s all."

He considered this, said finally, "Put your knife away, and come on over."

The man walked over to the oil drum. He knelt down and gathered a few scraps of wood and fed them into the fire, then held his hands over the heat.

Violet set her knife on the windowsill and joined him, extending her hands over the flames.

She felt lightheaded, attributed this to thirst, hunger, and the smoke she was breathing in.

"I’m Violet," she said. "I didn’t mean to intrude."

The man watched her. His beard was a deep, greasy black, and the few patches of skin that showed through, dirty but unwrinkled. Her first impression of him had been an old man, but now she reconsidered.

"What are you doing out here," he asked, "in the concrete barrens?"

Violet didn’t know how to answer that question, so she just stared down into the flames and the bed of embers underneath.

"Don’t you know it’s dangerous out here?" he continued. "Nothing but bangers and people like me."

In his words, Vi discerned an obvious intelligence.

"What do you mean, ‘people like me?’" she asked.

Now he stared into the flames, which had grown brighter.

Out the window, Vi could see the light draining from the sky.

Darkness falling with surprising speed.

"You shouldn’t be here," he said.

Luther spoke into Violet’s ear, "Tell him you want to stay the night. You have a lot to learn from him."

She didn’t say anything.

"Tell him or I will rip Jennifer’s baby apart right now."

"Can I stay here tonight?" Violet said. "I don’t have anywhere to go."

The man looked up from the fire and studied her.

Nodded.

"What’s your name?" Vi asked.

It took him five seconds to answer, as if he hadn’t said the word in ages.

"Matthew," he finally whispered.

It was full-on dark within the hour. They sat against the wall beside the oil drum, Vi ravenously drinking water from a milk jug.

Matthew rummaged through a plastic bag of snack food, finally withdrawing a packet of crackers. He offered the bag to Vi.

She didn’t know when she’d eaten last.

Reached in and grabbed a bag of potato chips, ripped them open.

"Thank you," she said.

They ate quickly and in silence.

When Vi finished, she stared longingly at the bag again, but didn’t ask.

"It’s been a lean month," Matthew said, "or I’d offer you more. I have to store up for the winter months."

"You’re going to stay here?"

"Where else you think I’m going to go?"

"What will you do?"

He pointed toward a stack of books in a corner of the room—must’ve stood six or seven feet tall.

"When it’s warm, I spend my days at the library, but it’s too far to walk there every day in the cold. I’ve been collecting them. I’m going to read them all, starting at the top."

"What kind of books are they?"

"Mostly philosophy. A few classic novels. Occasional comic book thrown in for spice."

"Philosophy, huh?"

"I think it’s really the only thing worth reading."

Violet studied the room. The squalor. Couldn’t imagine spending a night in this place. She knew the vast majority of the homeless suffered from debilitating mental illness, and wondered what storm raged behind Matthew’s vivid blues.

"I’m in a bad spot," Violet said, her voice just a few notches north of a whisper, wondering if Luther could hear her now. If he could see her.

Matthew wiped a few crumbs out of his beard and stared at Vi. He lifted a jug of Carla Rossi to his lips and took a generous pull. When he’d finished, he offered it to Violet.

"No thank you."

He drank some more, then rose and fed the fire from the impressive pile of scrap wood he’d lined up against the wall.

"All these abandoned houses," he said with a smirk, "keep me warm and toasty during the snows. An endless supply of firewood."

The wine seemed to have lifted his spirits, loosened his tongue.

"I have everything I need here," he said. "Warmth. Drink. Food. Books."

"What did you have before?"

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 the 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.

She stopped, reached forward.

A wall.

She’d come to a point where the corridor branched to the left.

Righting herself, she moved on, and ten steps later, the wall her fingers had been following came to an end.

She stopped and listened.

Water dripped in the distance and there was something above her now.

Sky.

Just the faintest orange tint of it.

The frame of the window sharpened into focus and in that weak light that filtered in, she saw that she stood in the ruins of a long, factory floor.

Her eyes pulling every possible detail out of the skylight.

Equipment everywhere.

The remnants of an assembly line.

Immense machines.

Broken-down robotic arms.

Conveyor belts that hadn’t moved in years.

She walked carefully down the line, glass crunching under her feet.

Her teeth chattering.

The smell of grease still prevalent.

The factory must have stretched two or three hundred yards from end to end, and as she neared the other side, she started seeing half-assembled cars on the conveyor belt—no wheels, no engine blocks, doorless, and all rusted into oblivion.

At the other end of the factory she stopped. Heard the rain falling on the roof fifty feet overhead.

She moved through a pair of double doors and before passing again into darkness, saw the first few steps of a metal stairwell in the shreds of light.

There was nothing to do but descend.

She gripped the wobbly railing and headed down.

Baby steps from stair to stair, her footfalls causing the metal to resonate.

She went down three landings before the stairs ended.

Standing once more in darkness—no light, no sound, not even the drip of water—and the smell of must and mold overwhelming. She staggered blind for three steps until the point of her knife touched a wall.

She coughed violently.

It took her several minutes to find her way out of the stairwell into another corridor.

She went on, the sense of disorientation growing stronger with every step, the pointlessness of this setting in: she was wandering in darkness in the lower levels of an abandoned building with not the faintest concept of where she was going, or that it might lead her to Luther and Max.

At the next break in the wall she moved through a doorway and out of the corridor.

She could go no further.

Whatever room she’d entered felt small and more confined based upon how it killed the echo of her coughing.

She walked into a table, then several steps later, some object that stood several inches taller than her and much wider.

A panel of glass.

Plastic buttons along the right side.

A vending machine.

This was a break room.

Violet crawled through the dark under one of the tables and unzipped her jacket, which she balled up into a sopping pillow.

She huddled there with her knees drawn into her chest, and it was a long time before she stopped shivering and longer still before her mind and body succumbed and sailed her off into sleep.

Andy

HIS voice was suddenly in my ear, but it wasn’t coming through the tiny speaker.

I could smell the lemon candy on his breath. The peculiar odor of Windex.

I hadn’t heard him enter this room, hadn’t heard his approach.

He’d simply materialized beside me.

"She ripped her earpiece out," Luther whispered. "Now I have to go find her. This is okay. Not as planned, but okay. You’ve been wondering about the control in your right hand, no?"

I said nothing.

"It isn’t on yet, but it will be soon. I have this thing I’ve been dying to try out. Well, two of them actually. A his and a hers. I can tell you think you love Violet, but have you ever wondered how much? How deep it runs? I invented a way to tell. It answers a very primitive question, Andy—do you love the ones you love more than you fear incomprehensible pain? Is there a point where the pain becomes so all-consuming, that if you had the choice you’d shift the agony to the one you love most? We’ll know shortly."

"Stop this," I rasped, and there would have been tears in my eyes but for the severe dehydration.

"Andy, I’m giving her the chance to see what she’s capable of. To see the darkness in her heart and not turn away from it."

A light clicked on, far overhead.

Luther held a spoon to my mouth.

"You’re going to need every bit of your strength," he said. "Eat."

It smelled like rancid apple sauce, but I was so hungry.

He fed me four bites out of the baby-food jar, and I had just begun to suspect that it wasn’t apple sauce after all, but some other putrid fruit or vegetable, spoiled beyond recognition, when he set the jar aside.

"Yum," he said. "Right?"

I was fighting the urge to vomit.

"It’s amazing. What is it?" I asked.

"Beets."

I threw up all over myself.

"That’s disgusting, Andy."

"Honestly, Luther. Did you kill him?"

"Kill who?"

"Max. Her child."

He just smiled.

I stared into his face for the first time in over a year. His hair was shorter than I remembered, only down to his shoulders, but still a coarse, pure black that held an unnatural, quasi-purple sheen, like the skin of a black snake. His face also shone with a preternatural paleness and his teeth were rotting. He popped a lemonhead into his mouth.

"I think it’s great that you’re writing again," Luther said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Your manuscript. I found it in the cabin. I’m considering trying to get it published when I’m done with you. Good title, Desert Places. My only fear is that no one will believe what you went through if I try to pass it off as non-fiction. Wouldn’t make a bad potboiler though. Who was your agent?"

I just glared at him.

"Come on, Andy, this book could be huge. Set me up for life. Help me complete my renovations here. You’re a celebrity."

"If I agree to help, will you let Violet go?"

"Oh, I’m sure I can come up with some other way to elicit your cooperation that’s fun for me. Speaking of..." He smiled, spit the white lemonhead pit across the floor. "We should give Violet a little help in finding us. This is a big factory, after all."

Luther walked across the room toward a waist-high cart with a control panel on top the size of a laptop. On the side of the cart, a rack of tools had been mounted to the metal frame.

"I kidnapped this brilliant engineer," Luther said over his shoulder. "He not only built and wired these chairs, but he was their first occupant. I’ve got plans for this entire place—there’s so much potential—but for now, meet my new toy."

He wheeled the cart toward my chair.

This was the most light my eyes had seen in I didn’t know how long, and I drank in my first decent glimpse of the place—a warehouse of sorts, ten or fifteen thousand square feet, with a high ceiling.

Across the room, I noticed another chair like mine. A bulky coil of cables extended out from the underside of the wooden gurney, and then the package spliced—one group running into the control panel, another disappearing through the wall.

My chair, I realized, was identical.

Luther stood at the control panel, smiling down at me.

"You truly cannot imagine how fun this is. I told my IT guy I wanted a device that could establish immobilization and then deliver heat, cold, electricity, perforation, abrasion, blunt force trauma, pressure—all the elemental forces. Imagine if the Inquisition had had the benefit of electricity? So Andy..." He was turning a knob now, something beneath me beginning to hum, a subtle vibration in the chair. "What’s your pleasure?"

Violet

SHE realized that she was awake.

Still shivering.

Still lying on a hard floor in the pitch-black.

Her right ear throbbed, and when she touched it, her fingers grazed a swatch of dried blood and skin that had begun to scab over.

Her stomach ached.

"Max," she whispered. "Oh, God."

She fell apart and wept, realigned herself to the horror that had become her life, and then gathered herself together again.

She’d shifted in her sleep and it took five minutes of walking into walls before she finally stumbled out of the break room and back into the corridor.

She stood there for a moment, waiting to see if some image might emerge out of the dark, but nothing did. A disconcerting hum, like the sound of wind moving through a tunnel, broke the silence, though it seemed a great distance away—far above her.

She went on as before, the knife out front, one hand trailing along the wall, figuring she must have slept for hours, because her clothes were almost dry.

The corridor ended in another stairwell, and she climbed several flights until she reached the top and pulled open a door.

Light streamed in.

She stood at the entrance to a large room sectioned by cubicle space. The light was weak and gray and still it burned and she had to stand there for several minutes, letting her retinas grow accustomed to the onslaught of daylight.

Through the maze.

Depressing partitions of long-vacant workspace.

Cheap desks and chairs. Rogue paperclips. Stray power cords.

She stopped in one cubicle and stared at a calendar still pushpinned into the fabric wall—six years out of date.

Light slipped in through wide, narrow windows near the ceiling that gave no view but of the sky. The hum was loudest here and the sound was of wind blowing through those glassless windows, passing through the room like breath over an open bottle top.

Andy

IN the end, Luther still decided.

He shaved my leg with a straight razor below the knee and scrubbed the skin with warm, soapy water.

Dried it with a towel and put on a pair of plastic safety glasses, my stomach already in knots.

He unholstered a high-powered soldering gun and a roll of 21 gauge 60/40 solder from a rack that contained a variety of high-end tools—pliers, augurs, slate cutters, drills, shears, even a ball peen hammer.

The first sensation was the liquid-metal burn of the solder.

My skin blistered, and I didn’t scream at first, having endured real pain before, and knowing it ebbed and flowed.

But this just kept coming, and with it the rush of panic, of trying to handle something I couldn’t stand or stop, and after he’d laid three inches of melted alloy onto my leg, my throat finally gave voice to the scream it had been dying to unleash, and I raged against the restraints only to confirm my complete immobilization. Only my fingers and toes could move.

Luther didn’t even look up, just kept at his work as tiny coils of smoke lifted off the solder, and he didn’t stop until he’d reached the top of my foot.

Already the metal was cooling, bonding to my skin, and though the pain of the brilliant heat was fading, the nerves in the newly-traumatized flesh had just started to sing.

He made three lines down my right leg, each approximately sixteen inches, each a searing revelation of pain.

When he’d finished his work and I’d worn myself out screaming, I watched him reholster the soldering iron as sweat ran down into my eyes.

I couldn’t believe it, but I registered the briefest moment of relief. Of hope.

The pain, still mind-blowing, was abating, and I’d survived it.

Luther pushed the cart that held the control panel and the tools away from my gurney and started across the room.

"This," he called out, "I have to keep far away from the electronics and other tools. You familiar with neodymium?"

Violet

SHE continued on, soon passing out of the room of cubicles and into a short hallway that accessed larger offices.

A noise stopped her.

She cocked her head to listen.

Nothing but the softer hum of the wind.

Two steps later, there it was again.

So faint, but was it...screaming?

Max.

She rushed toward the end of the hallway and a closed set of doors, and when she pulled them open, the day’s first hit of adrenaline entered her bloodstream.

That wasn’t a baby.

Those were the screams of an adult.

A man.

Andy.

Andy

HE was coming back now carrying a briefcase.

When he reached the gurney, he set it down on the floor and flipped the hasps.

"It’s a rare earth metal," he said as I tried to crane my neck, though my head was strapped into place. I was desperate to see what he was prying out of the hard black foam. "Neodymium is used to make the strongest magnets on earth." He ran a finger down the first line of solder he’d laid into my skin. "I think we’re good," he said, holding up a small, U-shaped magnet—smooth, shiny, and silver. "Hardest part was finding the right solder. I needed an alloy that would bond to skin cells. My friend, Javier, taught me this method, showed me the right brand. Jav runs with the Alphas in the southwestern border towns. Very bad news, that one. I think you’d like him, Andy. Quiet guy. All business. Total psychopath."

Luther quickly lowered the ends of the magnet toward my leg.

They locked down on the solder.

He was smiling now through those brown, disgusting teeth.

"So," he said, "can you guess what’s going to happen next?"

Violet

SHE was standing just inside another factory, this one without the benefit of windows, though it didn’t need them. Globe lights shined down from high above, casting everything—the concrete floor, the strange and varied machinery as far as she could see—in a harsh glare.

She kicked the door-stops down with the toe of her tennis shoe and propped open the doors.

It felt like something physically held her back from proceeding, but Violet broke through and pushed on, tightening her grip on the knife.

There were more machines than she’d ever seen in one place, her hands grazing the cold metal and congealed grease.

It all looked ancient.

Derelict.

Giant drill bits.

The dulled blades of circular saws that hadn’t spun in years.

Massive planers and boring mills.

Machines that fixed machines.

The screams were getting louder, and they tore her guts out, so much agony behind them that she finally stopped and knelt down and plugged her ears and prayed.

It was a long time before she stood up again, and when she did, silence flooded in.

She glanced back over her shoulder, now a hundred and fifty feet away from those double doors.

She went on, got another fifty feet before the noise stopped her.

Somewhere in the factory—the tiny, helpless wail of her son.

"Max!" she shouted, spinning around.

She made her way toward him, pushing through a series of wheel presses, the cries getting louder.

"Max, I’m coming!"

He sounded in pain, but her heart was soaring because he was alive.

A vertical milling machine, twenty feet tall, stood against the far wall, and it sounded like Max’s cries were coming from the top of the machine.

Vi reached the base of the mill and scrambled up onto the table, grabbing the overarm and straining to pull herself up. Digging her shoes into the cutter, she hoisted herself on top of the machine, Max’s screaming now right in her ear.

She wiped the sweat out of her eyes and looked for him in the lowlight.

"Max!" she yelled. "Max!"

And then she saw it, and her heart stopped.

A small, digital recorder stood several feet away on the top of the machine. Violet crawled over and lifted it, staring down at the speaker her son’s voice was coming through.

She threw it as hard as she could and it disappeared among the machines and shattered.

For three seconds, everything was silent again.

The doors behind her slammed shut.

She looked back across the forest of machinery, eyes locking in on him.

Oh God.

A man with long black hair stood in front of the double doors, and even from this distance, she could see that he was smiling.

Lines of sweat trailed down her sides and her head was swimming and the taste of metal on the roof of her mouth.

Neither of them moved for what seemed ages.

Violet could hear the hum of the lights overhead.

Despite the distance between them, she could see that he wore a black tracksuit and black shoes. His face, so pale it bordered on luminescent, seemed to have its own light source.

He turned away from her and reached toward something beside the door, Violet squinting to see what he was doing.

At first, it sounded like another door slamming, but the sound accompanied the first row of lights at the other end of the building winking out, the noise echoing through the factory, ricocheting between the walls.

Then came the next row, and the next, and the next, Vi watching in horror as the lights above her head went dark, everything beginning to dim around her, and then the final row of lights at the far end of the factory shut off, leaving her stranded in darkness.

Vi eased off the edge of the vertical mill and lowered herself onto the table.

When she finally reached the floor, she extended her hands and slowly turned a complete circle, grasping for a tactile sense of her surroundings, to set her bearings, but all she accomplished was losing track of which direction she was facing.

The panic and the sheer darkness overwhelmed her, and she dropped to her knees and crawled across the concrete, through puddles of old grease and rat droppings until her head impacted the metal facade of some invisible machine.

Blood ran down the bridge of her nose from a gash in her forehead.

She still couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but when she reached up, her fingers touched a metal roof just inches above her head. Steel legs surrounded her—she’d crawled under a machine.

Far across the room, she heard a sound like hanging chains clanging against each other.

Then footsteps.

"Violet?" he said, just a voice in the dark, still on the far side of the factory. "There’s eighty thousand square feet of floor space in here. I just locked the doors behind me. You could still escape through the doors on the other end, though that’s doubtful. Did you hear Andy screaming?"

She shut her eyes, trying to reorient herself and realizing there was no conceivable chance she might find her way to the other end of the room without inflicting serious bodily damage. She’d have to hunker down. Stay put. If she didn’t make a sound, he couldn’t find her. He was as blind as she—

The lights returned.

Darkness followed.

For a split-second, she saw the fading negatives of the machines all around her.

Then nothing, her eyes zeroing out the afterimages.

Again, the hanging globe lights burned down above her.

Again, she saw the machines under the harsh and sudden glare.

Darkness.

Afterimages.

One of them was Luther, still far back in the warehouse, his profile a frozen negative.

At first she mistook it for a gunshot, but it was only the sound of those lights cutting on and off, and in that blink of illumination, she glimpsed Luther coming down the ruins of an assembly line toward where she crouched under the machine.

He’d seen her.

Darkness again.

Frozen afterimages.

The patter of Luther’s footfalls on the concrete as he moved toward her.

Lights.

Vi crawled out from under the machine and clambered to her feet.

Darkness.

Footfalls.

The afterimage of Luther less than a hundred feet away.

Lights.

She turned and started to run in that brief illumination, and when the lights went out, she dodged the negatives of the machines until even those had faded into darkness.

She squatted down behind a large planer and waited for the lights to come again.

Her mouth running dry.

Gasping for breath.

Lights.

Luther had stopped twenty feet away, and he stood at the engine lathe where she’d taken cover just moments ago, peering underneath it.

Darkness.

She stared at his frozen afterimage, and when the lights came back, Luther was moving slowly toward her.

Vi ducked down.

Her hands sweating and she wiped them off on the nylon shell of her tracksuit to get a better grip on the knife.

His footsteps stopped.

Couldn’t have been more than eight or ten feet away now.

For three cycles of light and dark, he didn’t move.

She knew what she would do.

Lights.

She peered over the lip of the planer.

There he was, his back to her now.

Quietly, she stood, letting her eyes take everything in, branding the machinery in her immediate vicinity and Luther Kite into her brain. When the lights went out, all she had to do was step two feet out from the planer and rush four steps to his afterimage in that narrow corridor of open space between the machines.

Stab him in the dark.

But don’t kill him. You have to find out what he knows. Max could still be alive.

She was altering her grip on the knife when the lights died.

Go, Violet.

His afterimage appeared—a perfect negative of Luther standing with his back to her, and she could even see that he held something in his right hand which hung at his side.

Now.

She took two careful steps out from the planer and cocked back the knife in her right hand and rushed him.

Four quick, soft steps, and then she stopped where she imagined he stood and brought the bowie down in a hard, fast blow into the dead center of his back.

She had braced herself against the expected impact, so when the blade passed through air, her shoulder nearly came out of socket and she staggered forward into nothing.

Oh God.

The lights blazed down and her eyes burned.

He wasn’t there.

As far as she could see, nothing but the machines and—

Out the corner of her right eye—movement.

Violet spun around, fumbling with the knife, struggling to regrip it.

He was right there, two steps away and already swinging a blackjack in a wide, fast arc.

There was no pain when it connected with the side of her head, but her knees melted, the strength retreating from her extremities in a rush of emptiness.

Then she was sitting in the floor and staring up at Luther as the lights winked out in that gunshot of sound, and she kept staring at his negative, could’ve sworn she saw his smile frozen in the humming-white afterimage.

He struck her a second time in the black—a savage blow to the back of her head—and this impact hurt, but only for a second.

Andy

WHAT broke me out of the agony was the sound of a door opening somewhere behind me. After several seconds, Luther emerged into my field of vision, carrying Violet in his arms across the concrete floor of the warehouse.

"What have you done?" I screamed.

He laid her limp body down upon the wooden gurney that stood ten feet away from mine, and I watched as he buckled in her ankles and wrists and secured her head to the board with a leather strap that ran across her forehead.

Then he came over and cinched down the identical restraint across mine.

"When we begin," he said, "the first thing you’ll do is try to knock yourself unconscious. That would be a crying shame, as they say."

"Luther."

"What, Andy?" He stared down at me through those soulless, black eyes.

"What are you going to do to her?"

He looked over at Violet’s gurney and cracked the faintest smile.

"I love her, Luther," I said. "I know you cannot possibly understand what that means, but there is nothing more powerful in this world—"

"I think I might disagree with you," he said. "I’ve come to the conclusion that fear and pain trump everything. Those are the elemental building blocks of humanity."

"If you honestly think that, how have you not killed yourself?"

Luther looked down at me.

"It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness." He patted my hand. "A German theologian named Jacob Boehme wrote that beautiful sentiment, which your brother shared with me many years ago in the desert. Can you not imagine that in the same way nature and love speaks to the hearts of most people, that this—" he swept his arm, gesturing to the warehouse, the control panel, Violet, the three canyons of scourged flesh down my right leg—"speaks to me?"

He turned away and walked across the warehouse, disappearing through a door I hadn’t noticed before, near where the control panel stood.

Two seconds later, the lights went out.

Her voice came to me through the darkness—terrified, confused, pained.

"Andy?"

"I’m right here, Violet."

"Where?"

"About ten feet away."

"I can’t move."

"We’re strapped to gurneys. Are you hurt?" I asked.

"He hit my head with something. I have a crushing migraine. I heard you screaming."

Though the pain in my legs had receded, it was still all-consuming. I could barely handle it.

"I’m okay," I said through gritted teeth.

"What was he doing to you?"

"It’s not important."

"I’m sorry, Andy." She was crying. "I came back here to find Max and you. Where’s Max?"

"I don’t know. I’m so sorry."

"He’s going to kill us, isn’t he?"

"I don’t know what he wants," I lied.

"I killed this homeless man," Violet said, and I could hear the tears in her voice.

"I heard everything," I said. "That wasn’t you. He forced your hand with Max."

"We’re going to die," she said. "Aren’t we?"

I couldn’t bring myself to answer that.

"There’s this part of me that thinks we’re still up in the Yukon," she said. "Living in those woods. Just you, me, and Max. And that this is all a terrible nightmare. We could’ve been so happy."

"I know."

"We could’ve been a family."

Tears ran down the sides of my face.

"No matter what happens," I said, "when he comes back, just hold onto this—I love you, Violet."

"I love you, Andy."

"There is nothing he can do to touch that."

Violet

OUT of the darkness, a light appeared, shining down into her face from the ceiling thirty or forty feet above her head.

Her first instinct was to crane her neck to the left so she could finally see Andy, but she couldn’t move her head.

It made no difference.

If she stared straight ahead, an enormous mirror leaning against the wall reflected the two of them, ten feet apart and strapped to identical wooden gurneys.

Andy was naked.

His skin held a sickly, gray pallor, and his right leg was covered in blood.

Beside the mirror, a door in the wall swung inward.

Luther appeared.

She felt an anticipation not dissimilar to the fear she’d always known sitting on the thin sheet of paper in the doctor’s office, waiting on the doctor to arrive.

Luther stood at a control panel mounted to a small cart, equidistant from the chairs.

As he turned several knobs, Violet felt her chair begin to vibrate.

Luther approached.

He set a small remote control in her left hand and positioned her finger over the single red button.

Said, "Don’t drop this now. No matter what."

"I did exactly what you told me. Where’s Max?"

He said nothing, just stared down at her.

"I want to see my son!"

"I understand that."

"Well?"

"That might be a touch difficult to arrange."

Her stomach fell away.

"What are you talking about?"

"Max is with his new mommy and daddy now."

"I don’t understand—"

"Max’s cries were previously recorded. I sold him, Violet. Four days ago. For seven thousand dollars. I’d have taken five."

"To who?" She shrieked the words.

"His name’s Javier, but that’s really neither here nor there. Just think of it this way...now he’ll grow up with a daddy, too."

Violet wept from her core, and Luther just watched her, soaking in her misery like it was sunshine.

"Tell me about it," he said finally.

"What are you talking about?" she cried.

"Killing Matthew."

"There’s nothing to tell."

"Well, he’s dead, right?"

"Yes."

"So how’d he get that way?"

"Don’t pretend like you weren’t listening to every word."

"You better make a fucking effort here."

"I stabbed him through the heart."

"Okay."

"And he died right away."

"Did his blood get on you?"

"Yes."

"Did you taste it?"

"No!"

"It’s worth trying for the experience. Did you look into his eyes while he died?"

"What?"

"Did you look into his eyes while he—"

"Yes."

"You watched the emptiness come into them."

"Yes."

"Do you know that’s the moment I live for? Not saying there’s isn’t much fun to be had arriving at that emptiness, but the moment it comes....holy fuck. I hope it wasn’t lost on you. What else?"

"What else what? I don’t understand what you want to hear!"

Andy said, "He wants to hear you say you liked it."

Luther turned and glared over at Andy, then reached under Violet’s armrest and disengaged something.

She felt the armrest come loose.

Luther swung it around so her left arm was stretched back behind her head.

He performed the same operation on the right armrest.

In the mirror, she watched as he knelt down at the base of the gurney and slid out a steel platform which housed a system of cables, gears, and pulleys. This, he locked into place just behind her wrists, and resecured them with a pair of nylon restraints that he cinched down so hard the tips of her fingers began to tingle with blood loss. He clipped the new restraints into a locking carabiner.

Next, he attended to her ankles, trading the padded-leather restraints for nylons.

She wanted to ask what he was doing but feared the answer.

When he’d finished with her, Luther moved Andy into the same position and then returned to the cart between the two of them.

He stared down at the control panel for a moment before turning his attention to Violet.

"Are you familiar with the rack?" he asked.

She was.

Discovery Channel.

Several years ago.

A special on the Inquisition that, in spite of her profession as a homicide detective, had given her nightmares for a week.

"Torture isn’t what it used to be," he said. "Somehow, the infliction of pain has gotten a reputation as barbaric. And I think that’s tragic. We learn about ourselves through all intensities, not the least of which is pain."

Luther turned something on the control panel, and Violet felt the nylon restraints begin to tighten.

The vertebrae in her spine cracked, the pressure building as the quarter-inch gauge cable tugged her arms and legs in opposing directions.

The tension had just become uncomfortable when the gears stopped turning.

"Just so we’re clear, you both understand the concept behind the rack?"

No one answered.

"Andy?"

"The purpose is to pull the appendages, stretching them until dislocation occurs." Violet detected the strain in Andy’s voice. "Once the joints are separated, severe muscle damage occurs. Many victims of the rack, who weren’t subsequently executed, never had the use of their arms and legs again."

The unstoppable weight of terror pushed into Vi.

"I did what you asked," she said. "I killed that man."

"Yes, you did, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now you’re both holding a remote control in your left hand, and I took the liberty of placing your thumbs on the buttons. Only one of the racks can turn at a time. Andy, we’ll start with you. When the pain becomes too much, you can stop the stretching by simply pressing that button. But you must know that when your machine stops, Violet’s starts. Violet, when the pain becomes too much for you to bear, feel free to transfer your agony back to Andy."

"Luther," Andy said. "Please—"

"Don’t you dare beg this piece of shit," Violet said.

Luther laughed. "There’s the girl I love."

Andy

IN the mirror’s reflection, I could see the gears begin to turn beneath the gurney.

So, so slowly.

The pressure-build almost unnoticeable.

Gentle even.

Then my bare feet began to point toward the wall and I felt my lats elongating.

Still no more painful than an early-morning stretch.

Only a stretch that never eased.

The muscle- and joint-tension continuing to build, and now the first impulse to fight against that steady pulling overcame me, and I tugged against the cables, my elbows and knees bending slightly at the joints.

The tension relieved for three beautiful seconds, and then the relentless pull of the cables straightened them back out.

God.

Now there was pain.

Manageable, but growing, and for the first time in the last few hours, I forgot what Luther had done to my leg.

The sensation was of my calves and the muscles in my back beginning to rip, but that pain was almost instantly eclipsed by the incomprehensible pressure in my knees and elbows.

Joints extending and then hyperextending.

I heard myself grunting.

Saw Violet’s face in the mirror, watching mine.

Beyond terror.

She was speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear her. Couldn’t hear anything over the straining in my voice getting louder with each passing second.

"Luther," I said through my teeth. "All right, turn it off."

Sweat trickled down into my eyes and now I felt what could only be the cartilage beginning to stretch, and the pain was like a thousand needles sliding into my joints.

"Please!"

Through the sheet of tears, I could see the blurred image of Luther standing between the gurneys, watching me.

Each micron of time, the pain and the pull intensifying, and I realized I was screaming, and that nothing I had ever experienced had approached this level of complete agony.

Press the button, it’ll stop.

Press the button, Andy.

You’re being ripped apart.

You’ll take the pain back from her, but you just need a moment of relief.

A moment to think.

I felt my finger depress the button on the remote control.

The noise and hum beneath my gurney stopped, and that bright, cutting pain retreated.

I was gasping for breath, and I looked at Violet in the mirror, saw her watching me, tears running down her face as the cables began to stretch her feet.

"Push the button, Vi," I said.

"No."

"Vi—"

"I can take it, Andy."

"No, you can’t. Give it back to me."

I pressed my button, but nothing happened.

I could hear Vi straining now, fighting against that first uncomfortable tug.

In the mirror—her face the definition of dread.

"Luther, what do you want?" I said.

"This."

"But this will be over soon."

"Define soon."

"You know what I mean. Eventually, we’ll be dead."

"Please shut up, Andy. I’m trying to enjoy—"

"You want more than this, Luther."

Violet groaned.

Her head was still immobilized and she stared into the ceiling, eyes bulging with disbelief.

Her groan became a high-pitched squeal—she was screaming through clenched teeth.

"Luther, stop it!" I screamed, and then, "Violet, push the button!"

Her scream became full-voiced, and it entered me like a knife in the gut, and then the thought came as a prayer, I just want to die.

The pain returned, somehow more brilliant than before, the machine vibrating beneath me as the gears resumed their terrible revolutions.

Now Vi was shouting my name, begging me to give back the pain and everything in my being was screaming for my thumb to push the button and oblige her, to stop these cables from tearing me apart.

The words must have been buried deep in my subconscious—I couldn’t recall having ever thought them—but suddenly I was scream-shouting, "I’LL BE HIM, LUTHER! PLEASE GOD STOP THIS! I’LL BE HIM! I’LL BE ORSON! I’LL BE MY BROTHER! I SWEAR TO GOD!"

I must have blacked out.

When I opened my eyes, my arms and legs burned but the tension was gone and the gurney no longer hummed beneath me.

I blinked through the tears.

Luther’s face was inches from mine.

Pale. Unblemished. Ageless.

His black eyes brimming with something I’d never seen in them before—real emotion.

Rage.

Confusion.

A bottomless sorrow.

"You miss him, don’t you?" I asked.

"Are you fucking with me?"

"Luther—"

"You think this is pain? I can break your mind."

"Listen to me. Do you know what my life has been these last several years? What Orson, what you have tried to make me? And I fought it and I fought it and I fought it…and now I’m done. Fucking done. We were twins, Luther. Do you understand that bond? Since his death, I’ve felt Orson inside of me, and he’s just been getting stronger."

"You’d say anything to escape this pain."

"Maybe that’s true. Or maybe what you said about pain is true. How it can make us learn about ourselves. And I’ve experienced nothing from you and my brother in the last eight years but pain. Physical, emotional, psychological."

Vi said, "Andy, nothing you say is going to—"

"Shut the fuck up! Do you remember, Luther, what you said to me in the desert all those years ago?"

He just stared at me.

"You told me, ‘We all want blood.’ And you know what? You were right."

I could see the wheels beginning to turn.

Traction.

I said, "You miss him, don’t you?"

"Yes." He said it with no emotion but for the faintest glimmer of heartbreak in his eyes.

"You think my twin and I don’t share some core, elemental chemistry?"

"You’re lying."

"Have you read my books?"

"They’re just that, Andy. Books. And how long did you scream that they didn’t reflect what was really inside of you?"

"You think it’s easy coming to terms with this?"

"You’re lying."

"Let me prove it."

This provoked a smile.

"You think this is bullshit?" I asked.

"I kind of do."

"I won’t kill her."

"Excuse me?"

"I won’t kill Violet," I said. "But I’ll hurt her. Bad."

His black eyes bored into me.

"This is real, Luther. This is happening. I know you’re lonely. There aren’t many out there like us. Who share our view of the world. It’s hard. But I’m there with you."

"No one’s with me."

"Well if you never trust, then you’ll never know."

"I’ve never trusted anyone, Andy. Not even your brother."

"But you loved him. As much as you’re capable of loving anything beyond your own gratification."

He looked at Violet.

I told myself as the words streamed out of my mouth that it was all a lie. The only way to save us.

"Don’t tell me this isn’t what you want, Luther. A connection with someone else like you. You aren’t completely inhuman."

The pain was flowing back into my legs and arms.

The strap across my forehead digging into my skin.

"You’re going to hurt her," he said.

"Yes."

"You’re going to do exactly what I tell you."

"Yes. And then you’ll let her go."

"But she’ll come back. She’ll look for this place. For me and for—"

"No," I said. "I promise you. She will never come back."

I could barely stand. It had been days.

The muscles in my legs as taut as steel cables.

He’d just jammed a syringe-full of painkiller into the side of my leg, and the effect couldn’t come quickly enough.

Luther had to help me across the concrete floor, ice-cold against the bare soles of my feet.

We stopped at the side of Violet’s gurney, and I stared down at her.

Heard her grunting against the pull.

"Andy," she said. "I love you."

"I love you, too."

I looked at Luther as the drug hit my bloodstream.

The pain evaporated.

Clarity.

I stood on my own now. I stood taller.

"Don’t move from this spot," Luther said.

He walked back to the control panel and pushed the cart over.

I reached down and touched her face, tears shimmering on the surface of her eyes like pools of liquid glass.

"Andy." He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me over to the control panel and the rack of tools.

He guided my hands onto what resembled a mixing board.

The dials and equalizers were grouped in sections identified by white labels scrawled upon with black Magic Marker.

HEAT.

COLD.

PRESSURE.

ELECTRICITY.

PERFORATION.

ABRASION.

"Hurting the one you love," he said, "takes real strength. Ask her what she’s most afraid of."

"What are you most afraid of, Violet?"

"Andy—"

"Here are your options: heat, cold, pressure, electricity, perforation, abrasion."

"Andy, what are you doing?"

"He’s embracing what he’s been fighting his entire life."

"What’s that, Luther?" she asked.

"Truth."

"This isn’t truth, Andy."

"Do you want to live, Violet?"

"Yes."

"Then I have to do this."

"This is just one more game of his. Neither of us are going to survive this."

"I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry you ever met me. That I came into your life. I mean that. Now choose."

She closed her eyes, her body shaking with sobs.

"Choose for her," Luther whispered in my ear.

"Fine. Heat," I said. "How does this work?"

"These ten dials manage the conduction of heat to the electrodes in the gurney—two per leg, two per arm, one on the head, a big panel flush against her back. They can heat to eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Turn a glowing orange. Beyond eight hundred, the heat panels can’t stop the wood from igniting."

I looked up at Luther.

Lightheaded, weightless.

"You want this," he said to me. "You’ve always wanted this."

"Andy, please," Violet wept.

"It’s time, Andy."

My hands shook. I couldn’t even recall the last time I’d seen daylight. It could’ve been a year.

"And she leaves after this?"

"She leaves."

I looked down at Violet in her immobilized terror.

"You don’t have to do this," she said.

I put my hand on the dial.

"Actually, I do."

Standing naked at the control panel and watching her struggle as the panels heated to two hundred and fifty degrees, something inside of me, deep beyond reckoning, began to fracture.

I didn’t look away.

I stared into her eyes as her face flushed a deep scarlet.

The woman I had loved in incomprehensible pain.

Screaming.

Begging me to make this stop.

Her tracksuit smoking and melting away.

There was a part of me that couldn’t take it.

I locked that part away to shriek and beat its head against a padded, soundproof room, and let the detachment flow through me.

No other possible way to move through this.

It was human suffering.

So what.

There was nothing more constant and guaranteed in human history—written and still to come.

This wasn’t novel or rare.

Suffering was the function of our design.

The end result of our advanced evolutionary programming—all those nerve endings connected to all those chemicals in suspension in our frontal lobes that we used to invent emotion.

After awhile, Luther’s long, white fingers moved mine off the dial and he took control.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Keeping my word. You’re going to cook her kidneys and boil her spinal fluid if you don’t shut it off."

He zeroed out the dials, flicked off the master power.

She had blown her voice out screaming.

The smell and the sound—God.

Luther went to her arms and cut the nylon restraints with a Harpy.

Freed her ankles.

She lay there moaning, trying to move, but stuck to the electrodes.

Luther was coming back now.

He stood with me at the control panel.

"How does it feel?" he asked.

I was still so weak.

I didn’t know if I even had the strength.

"I don’t feel like myself," I said.

"Or maybe this is how you were always supposed to feel."

"Maybe," I said.

He had put his hands on the cart to roll it away.

"Wait, Luther, you forgot something," I said.

He was turning back to look at me when I struck him between the eyes with the ball-peen hammer.

Luther’s tracksuit was a size or two small through the waist, but several inches long elsewhere, and I kept stepping on the pant legs.

I carried her across the warehouse and through the open door, slow-going and still fighting intense pain despite my having shot both Violet and myself up with a couple doses of Oxycodone I’d found in a drawer under Luther’s control panel.

Outside, mist fell from the gray sky.

First daylight to reach my eyes in a good long while, and I fought a burning headache on top of everything else.

I loaded Violet into Luther’s windowless white van and closed the sliding door.

Limped around to the driver side and climbed in behind the wheel.

"It still hurts," she moaned.

"I know."

I cranked the engine, pushed the pedal to the floor, and accelerated across a vast, empty parking lot that seemed to go on for miles.

Soon, I was driving through an abandoned neighborhood.

A water tower in the distance bore the name of a city I’d never been to.

It was an urban ghost town.

Empty, sagging houses.

Abandoned cars.

Trash everywhere.

I glanced at Violet in the rearview mirror, sprawled across the metal floor.

She was awake.

In agony.

I’d examined her in the warehouse—third-degree burns on her arms, legs and back.

Excruciating.

"Am I going to die?"

It took me thirty-five minutes to find a hospital—a six-story block tower on the outskirts of a bad neighborhood.

It was already getting dark as I pulled under the emergency room overhang.

I slid out of the driver’s seat and stepped into the back.

Knelt down by Violet who was lying on the floor and moaning in some half-conscious fever state.

"Violet," I said.

Her eyes were open but unfocused.

"Vi, look at me."

She did, said, "It hurts, Andy."

"We’re at a hospital."

"We are?"

"I have to drop you off just inside. I can’t stay."

"Why?"

"You know why. This is very..." Her eyes had left mine, wandering off into space. "Listen to me, Vi, this is so important."

I framed her face with my hands.

"You can’t tell them anything. Nothing. Not about me, or Luther, or where you were."

I couldn’t tell if she heard me, if she was comprehending any of this.

"Violet, do you understand me?"

She nodded. "Are you hurt, Andy?"

"Not enough to go in there."

"Where’s Max?"

"He’s not here right now."

She took a moment to register this.

"I don’t think you’re going to see me again," I said.

Her eyes filled with tears.

"You understand, right?"

A nod.

"Never come looking for me, Vi."

"I love you."

"Never come looking for me."

"I love you."

"Andy Thomas is dead."

"I love—"

"Stop, Vi. Let it go."

Violet

SO much pain. She was drowning in it, and it occurred to her that if she lived through this, she would never be the same, just for knowing that pain like this existed.

He was carrying her toward the automatic doors, every footfall sending a spike through her body, the sleeves of his tracksuit rubbing against the burns across her legs and back.

She was crying, and Andy was hushing her, telling her she was going to be all right, she was going to recover from all of this, that beautiful things still lay ahead.

Lies.

And then they were inside the hospital—central heating for the first time in days and the burning glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, and she was trying to say his name, but a heavy darkness was falling and if it contained a single breath of relief, she couldn’t bring herself to fight it.

When she came to, she was draped across a chair in the waiting room and Andy was gone and the pain was back.

A young doctor with wire-rim glasses was squatting down in front of her, two nurses behind him, and though his lips moved, she couldn’t hear a thing.

Andy

NIGHT had dropped and that made finding my way back to the concrete barrens infinitely more challenging.

The Oxycodone was wearing off, the pain of my flayed right leg, stretched muscles, and joints intensifying with each passing moment.

It was that water tower that finally guided me home—its red aviation light blinking through the mist.

8:27 p.m. when I pulled into the parking spot outside the warehouse.

I killed the engine, climbed out from behind the wheel.

The pain in my leg was blinding.

I limped across the broken concrete to the entrance and unlocked the door.

Took all of my remaining strength to cross the length of the warehouse to the cart, my hands shaking as I pulled open the drawer and grabbed a vial of Oxycodone.

The urge to double up the dose was strong, but I resisted.

Hit the vein and slammed 40mg.

The relief was instantaneous.

Euphoria.

"Andy...Andy...Andy, look at me."

I stood smiling in the warehouse. Letting the narcotic joy wash over me.

"Andy..."

So many consecutive days of pain and fear, and now this.

Relief.

Power.

"Andy..."

Violet safe. Sweet Violet.

"Andy..."

And rage.

"Andy..."

"Yes, Luther?"

I put my hands on the cart and rolled it across the floor toward the gurney I had strapped him to several hours prior.

"Andy, please, listen to me."

I flipped the power switch and his chair began to hum.

"I’m listening."

It went on for two days.

I never stopped, never slept.

I burned him, stretched him, froze him, cut him.

I did everything but kill him, and not once did he beg me to stop. I wanted to hear it—the abject terror in his voice that I’m sure he’d heard in mine and countless others—but all he ever did was scream.

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’s 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 free 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."

Epilogue

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.