by Dave Bowman
They found a candle on the floor, standing upright in its own wax from a previous use. Jack lit it with a cigarette lighter he had taken from the convenience store.
“Well, that really spruces the place up,” Brent said. “And hey! Look what I found!”
Brent grabbed a stool from the corner and presented it to Naomi. She accepted it with a smile.
“Thanks,” she said. “I guess this isn’t going to be a stay at a five-star motel.”
“Not even one star,” Brent said.
“I just hope there aren’t too many rats,” Naomi said, shuddering. “I mean, I’ll take rats over death from radiation. But a girl can still dream.”
“You two stay here,” Jack instructed. “I’m going to check the other rooms and make sure the plywood is covering all the windows.”
“We’ll hold down the fort,” Brent said as he took a seat on the floor.
Jack walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. He went down a short hallway, which opened onto a living room. There were two windows, both boarded up. He checked the plywood. It was secure.
He looked around, his eyes straining in the dark, searching for anything that might be useful to them. The house was littered with debris from squatters and drug abusers from months or years past. The place was in squalor.
It wasn’t going to be a pleasant two days in this house, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that they had found shelter.
Jack could scarcely believe their luck. With only minutes – or even seconds – to spare, they had found this place. It was dark, filthy and disgusting.
But it would keep them alive.
Jack moved on to the second bedroom. It was larger, but it had more windows – and more chance of exposure – than the other bedroom. Besides, the room where Naomi and Brent waited was in the middle of the house. It provided more protection from the fallout than the bedroom where Jack now stood, which was in the corner of the building.
Jack kicked around some items scattered on the floor, looking to see if he could find any more candles. There were a few rags. They were filthy, but they could be used to stuff in the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door where the three of them would take refuge for the next couple of days.
He was just about to turn around and return to the bedroom when he heard it.
A sound that made his heart seem to stop for a moment.
Somewhere in the house, there was an unmistakable metallic noise.
It was the sound of a pistol being cocked.
Following that sound, there was a quick burst of movement – a reaction.
Jack grabbed his gun. He tried to steady his breathing as he silently moved toward the source of the sound: the bedroom where he had left Naomi and Brent.
A strange voice filled the silent, dank air of the house.
“Get up, leave the food, and get out. Or I’ll shoot you.”
Jack crept along the hallway, avoiding a spot on the linoleum that had creaked the first time he passed through.
“Don’t make me say it again,” the voice spoke. “This place is mine now. Get out.”
Jack took another step forward. He could see the outline of a person standing in the doorway. A man.
The guy stood holding his weapon straight out, pointing it at Naomi and Brent.
Jack had no choice. He knew exactly what he had to do.
“Don’t shoot,” Naomi pleaded with the guy from within the bedroom.
“I’m going to count to three. On three, you’re dead.” The guy in the doorway took a breath and steadied his gun.
“One.”
Jack took one last step forward.
“Two.”
Jack exhaled, steadying himself.
Hearing the breath, the guy looked up.
His head snapped toward Jack. His eyes widened for just an instant.
He saw the pistol pointed at his head.
Jack pulled the trigger.
The deafening crack of the gunshot filled the hallway. The man, shot cleanly in his head, fell to the floor.
His pistol dropped at his side, hitting the linoleum of the hallway with a dull thud.
Jack picked up the pistol and switched on the safety, keeping his eye on the man the whole time.
A steady pool of blood flowed from the wound in his head and blended with the darkness of the hallway. He was motionless. Dead.
Jack flicked the safety on his own gun.
He ran a hand through his hair and blew air out unevenly through his lips to calm his nerves.
He had killed a man.
20
It was Annie’s second night at Dan’s house.
Dan had said goodnight to her and Charlotte over an hour ago. Charlotte lay on her couch, fast asleep. Annie pressed an ear to the door that led to Dan’s room. It sounded like he was asleep, too.
But Annie couldn’t sleep.
After lying in bed for a while, she got up and lit a candle.
That bad feeling had returned.
That feeling she’d always had around Dan. The uneasiness.
Out of necessity, Annie had talked herself out of her distrust of Dan that first night. After the bomb had exploded and the time was running out to find a shelter, she’d had no choice but to stay with him.
But the next day, the distrust had slowly returned.
It didn’t help matters that he seemed different the next day. He had started to treat the two women differently. It was subtle, but it was there. His grin seemed bigger when he looked at Annie. Scarier.
And overall, Dan seemed more and more unstable.
At one point, during the long hours after lunch, he had even made a startling suggestion.
“What do you ladies say we take a walk down to the lake? It’s such a lovely day out there.”
Annie and Charlotte had stared at him for a moment, speechless.
Finally, Charlotte said something.
“Dan, there was a nuclear bomb yesterday. We have to stay inside and wait out the radioactive fallout.”
Dan stood there looking at her with a blank expression for a moment. Then, his face twisted up in a grin and he burst out laughing.
“Of course, of course!” he said between guffaws. “I was only joking. You should’ve seen the looks on your faces.”
Charlotte laughed politely, but Annie felt anxious.
It certainly hadn’t seemed like he was joking.
It seemed like he had forgotten about the bomb the previous day. And if so, there must have been something wrong – very wrong – with his mental state.
It put Annie on alert. And the day had seemed to drag on forever.
Dan had insisted on staying with the two women the entire time they were awake. He talked to them for hours about his court cases. He gave them lectures on the law and legal procedures.
To be polite, Annie and Charlotte listened attentively. But it was more than politeness that made Annie pay close attention to him.
She sensed that the slightest wrong move would upset him. If they didn’t laugh quite enough at his jokes, or if they didn’t ask enough follow-up questions, he seemed hurt.
And when he was hurt, he was frightening.
His face turned dark red. The veins bulged from his forehead. His eyes turned intense and brooding.
Watching his face turn dark like that sent a chill down Annie’s spine. It looked like a storm was brewing under the surface.
Annie couldn’t believe she had to stay another night in his house.
She stopped her nervous pacing.
Annie looked at the painting nearest to the candle. It was an idyllic scene. Farm animals and a shepherd on a peaceful field in the country. It depicted a perfect sunny day.
Sure, it looks perfect. But what’s under the surface?
Annie assumed the painting had been another possession of Dan’s parents. The library was full of books, art, and interesting objects from all over the world. And it had all belonged to Dan’s family.
&
nbsp; There’s something strange about the whole thing.
There’s this picture-perfect house filled with things Dan’s parents collected. And his brother lives just three hours away. So why did Dan inherit everything?
And why does Dan never answer a question about his family?
Annie had tried asking him about the family whose presence was in every object in the room. But Dan refused to say more than a few words about his family. It seemed like a sore subject.
Perhaps Dan had a strained relationship with his brother. Perhaps he just didn’t like talking about the brother or the parents. But somehow, Annie thought – she felt – that there was more to it than just standard family drama.
She carried the candle to the bookcases and began to skim over the titles. If she couldn’t sleep, maybe she could find something to read and kill time. Nearly an entire wall of books was dedicated to art, travel, and history.
Nearby, a bookcase was filled with law books. She pulled a university textbook off the shelf. It was two or three decades old – when Dan probably would have been in law school.
So these are Dan’s books.
The shelves were lined with not only law books, but also some of Dan’s notebooks from law school. The bottom shelf had some high school yearbooks and a few paperbacks on various subjects.
Annie sat on the floor with her candle. She grabbed a small stack of the paperbacks – some science fiction novels, some self-help books.
I guess he’s got eclectic taste.
She sorted through them and didn’t find anything to her taste. She was about to reshelve them when she noticed a small booklet that had been placed behind the stack on the shelf.
Annie took the booklet out. Dust went flying, and she fought the urge to sneeze.
It looked to be some sort of pamphlet, produced on a small scale by an operation involving a typewriter and photocopier. The cover was blank.
Annie opened the pamphlet. The title page read, Modern Studies of Torture.
Her heart began to pound out of her chest. What had she found?
She turned the page, skimming through the introduction, and moved on to the pages that followed. She felt the bile rise in her stomach as she flipped through the illustrations and diagrams.
This was not an academic examination of torture.
It was a how-to book.
The pages contained drawings of torture devices, paired with instructions on how to construct them. The author included what he claimed were true-life stories of his own experiences using the methods on his own victims.
Annie suppressed the nausea that rose in her core. She kept turning the pages, transfixed and sickened at the same time.
She came to a page with a drawing of a person in a torture device. She gasped, horrified and disgusted.
Next door, she heard Dan snort in his sleep.
She suddenly panicked. What if he had woken up? What if he were to walk in the library and find her looking at the book he’d wanted to keep secret?
Frantically, she replaced the pamphlet, returning it to its former hiding place. She put the paperbacks in front of it, careful to return everything just the way it had been.
She took the candle and moved away from the bookcase, afraid that Dan would suspect her if he were to catch her anywhere near it.
She waited, holding her breath, listening for any movement from the room next door. Finally, she heard the sound of Dan snoring again.
Annie had gotten lucky. Dan hadn’t woken up and caught her looking at his books.
She wasn’t sure if Dan had ever used any of the information he learned from the pamphlet.. Maybe it was simply an interest of his and nothing more.
But even if he had never tortured anyone, it was not the kind of interest healthy people had. Normal, healthy people didn’t collect books on building human torture devices. The graphic image of the person in the torture chamber haunted her.
She and Charlotte had been lucky so far. They had made it a day in this house.
What if their luck was about to run out?
Annie was certain of one thing. They couldn’t stay there any longer.
As quietly as possible, Annie moved through the room. She put a few items of food and drinks in a cloth bag. She added the shoes she had let Charlotte borrow and Charlotte’s medication to the bag.
It had been about thirty hours since the nuclear blast. Annie knew it was still too soon to emerge from hiding. But at least the radiation would have decreased greatly in strength after the first day.
Maybe they wouldn’t have to be outside for that long. Maybe they could find shelter with one of Dan’s neighbors. And if they could wash themselves before entering a new shelter, their chance of contamination would decrease.
But no matter what, she’d rather take her chances with the fallout than with the psychopath sleeping in the next room.
She sat beside Charlotte on the couch and gently shook her. Charlotte sleepily opened her eyes, looking confusedly up at her friend.
Annie held her finger to her lips.
“We’ve got to be very quiet,” Annie whispered. “We can’t wake him up.”
Charlotte nodded and sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“We’ve got to leave,” Annie said.
Charlotte rubbed her eyes, then sniffed and yawned. “You’re not serious, are you?”
“Dan’s not mentally stable,” Annie whispered. “Did you see how crazy he was acting today?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Come on, Annie. This is ridiculous. Let me go back to sleep.”
Annie took a deep breath. “I know this sounds crazy. But you just have to trust me. I saw a book Dan had about torturing people. It was really bad. Sick. “
Charlotte frowned. “You want to go out into the fallout because Dan has a weird book?”
“It’s not just the book. It’s more than that.”
“What then? What exactly would make you want to go out there in the middle of the night?” Charlotte asked, annoyed.
Annie glanced back at the closed door connecting the two rooms. “He’s going to hurt us if we stay. I don’t know how I know that. But I know.”
Charlotte sighed and pursed her lips together. “What about the fallout?”
“We’ll try to find shelter somewhere close,” Annie whispered. “It’s not ideal, but the radiation isn’t as strong the second day as the first. And we can decontaminate when we get to a new shelter.”
Charlotte narrowed her blue eyes a little. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?”
“I know, but my craziness has gotten us this far. If it weren’t for me, you would’ve stayed back at that restaurant downtown, remember?”
Annie handed the shoes to Charlotte.
“Fine, I’ll go. I still think it’s crazy,” Charlotte said as she slipped the shoes on her feet. “But you’re right. Your instincts have kept us alive so far.”
Annie smiled and helped Charlotte to her feet.
“I just hope this time you don’t get us killed,” Charlotte whispered.
With the candle, Annie led the way. The two women tiptoed across the room.
Annie took a deep breath and reached for the doorknob. She turned it slowly, then pulled the door open without a sound.
They turned left down the hallway Dan had led them through the first night. Annie was hoping to make their way back to the garage. She was pretty sure Dan had put his car keys in his pocket. But maybe they would be lucky and find a spare set.
They walked slowly, terrified to make any sound and wake up Dan.
The hallway seemed longer then she remembered, but maybe that was because Annie was afraid for her life. They passed door after door in the hall, each of them closed.
Annie didn’t want to know what was hidden in those rooms.
Her palms grew sweaty. Her breath was ragged and uneven.
There were so many ways this could go wrong. So many ways to die: at Dan’s hands, from radiation poisoning, from other violen
t people out on the street.
Finally, they arrived at the door they had entered the night before – the door to the garage.
Annie turned the doorknob, but she was met with resistance.
The door was locked.
The walls seemed to close in on them. Annie started to panic.
“He must have the keys on him,” Charlotte whispered.
Frantically, Annie weighed her options. They could return to the room and try to find the keys. But how? That would involve fighting Dan. Maybe they could find some kind of weapon.
“I told you this was a bad idea,” Charlotte hissed. “Let’s just go back to the room and act like nothing happened.”
“I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”
The sound of Dan’s voice made Annie snap her head around.
He had found them.
“Looking for these?” Dan asked. He held up a set of keys and jangled them.
Charlotte laughed nervously. “We weren’t, uh – we were just –”
“Trying to escape?”
The candle Dan held illuminated his face from below. A wide, crazed grin slowly spread across his face.
He began to walk toward them, slowly.
Annie felt her feet frozen to the floor, paralyzed. What could she do now?
The adrenaline soared through her veins, snapping her out of paralysis. She sprang from where she stood, pushing off down the hallway with a sudden burst. She ran straight toward him.
For a moment, it seemed like it would work. She would tackle him, knocking him to the floor. Then she would use the brass candlestick holder to hit him over the head.
But just before her shoulder could slam into his trunk, he grabbed her. He swung her around and contained her with one arm around her shoulders.
She fought and kicked against him, but she couldn’t break free of his grasp.
With his other arm, he swiftly unlocked the nearest door. He kicked the door open and pushed her inside the door.
She fell to the floor of this new, pitch-black room. She could hear him lock the door from the hallway.
She was trapped.
