by Jeff Lindsay
Samantha looked straight at me and brushed the hair from her forehead. It was nice hair, a mousy brown color, but clean and shiny, and she looked for all the world like a normal teenage girl telling a sympathetic adult about something interesting that happened in French class—until she started talking again.
“I always knew I would do this someday,” she said. “Find somebody who would eat me. It’s what I wanted most. But I thought it would be later, you know, after college or—” She shrugged and shook her head. “But here he was, and Tyler and me are like, ‘Why wait?’ Why should I spend my parents’ money on college, when I can have what I want without it, right now? So we told Vlad, ‘Okay, totally, we’re in,’ and he takes us to meet the head of the group, and …” She smiled. “Here I am.”
“And Tyler isn’t,” I said.
Samantha nodded. “She was always lucky. She got to go first.” The smile got bigger. “But I’m next. Soon.”
And her apparent eagerness to follow Tyler into the cauldron dried up all my professional zeal, and I had nothing more to say. Samantha just watched me to see what I would do—and for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no idea what that would be. What is the correct facial expression to put on when someone tells you their lifelong fantasy is to be eaten? Should I go for shock? Disbelief? What about moral outrage? I was quite sure the subject had never come up in any of the movies or TV shows I had studied, and even though I am considered a clever and creative person in some circles, I could not imagine anything at all that might be appropriate.
So I stared, and Samantha looked back at me, and there we were: a perfectly normal married man with three kids and a promising career who just happened to enjoy killing people, staring at a perfectly normal eighteen-year-old girl who went to a good school and liked Twilight and who wanted to be eaten, sitting next to each other in a walk-in refrigerator at a vampire club in South Beach. I had been trying so hard lately to achieve some close approximation of normal life, but if this was it, I thought I would prefer something else. Outside of Salvador Dalí I really can’t believe the human mind could handle anything more extreme.
And at last even the mutual staring began to seem too strange, even for two dedicated non-humans like us, and we both blinked and looked away.
“Anyway,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?” I said. “Wanting to be eaten?”
She shrugged, an oddly genuine teen gesture. “Whatever,” she said. “I mean, they’ll be here soon.”
I felt like someone was tickling my spine with an icicle. “Who will?” I said.
“Somebody from the coven,” she said, and she glanced back at me. “That’s what they call it. The, you know. The group that, um, eats people.”
I thought of the file I had seen on the computer. Coven. I wished I had copied it and run for home. “How do you know they’re coming?” I said.
She shrugged again. “They have to feed me. Like, three times a day, you know.”
“Why should they?” I said. “If they’re just going to kill you, why do they have to take care of you?”
She gave me a you-are-so-dumb look, combined with a head shake. “They’re going to eat me, not kill me,” she said. “They don’t want me to get all sick and skinny. I gotta be, you know. Chubbed up. Marbled. For flavor.”
Between my job and my hobby I have to say without bragging that I have a pretty strong stomach, but this was putting it to a real test. The idea that she would cheerfully eat three healthy meals a day so her flesh would taste better was just a little too much before breakfast, and I turned away again. But happily for my appetite, a practical thought nudged its way in. “How many of them will come?” I asked.
She looked at me, then looked away. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s usually just two guys. In case, you know, I decide to change my mind and run. But …” She looked at me. And then down at her feet. “I think Vlad is coming with them this time,” she said at last, and it did not sound like a happy thought.
“Why do you think that?” I said.
She shook her head but did not look up. “When it was going to be Tyler,” she said, “he started to come with them. And he would, you know … do things to her.” She licked her lips but still did not look up. “Not just, you know … Not sex. I mean, not normal sex. He, um. He really, really hurt her. Like that was how he got off, and …” She shuddered, and at last she looked up. “I think that’s why they put stuff in my food, some kind of tranquilizer?” she said. “So it keeps me, you know, kind of calm and quiet? Because otherwise …” She looked away again. “Maybe he won’t come,” she said.
“But at least two guys will come?” I said.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Are they armed?” I said, and she looked up at me, blank. “You know, knives, guns, bazookas? Are they carrying any weapons?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I would.”
I thought that I would, too, and although it might have been uncharitable, I also thought that I would have noticed what weapons my captors were carrying. Of course, I didn’t think of myself as a banquet, and that would almost certainly affect my powers of observation.
So there would be two of them, probably armed, which probably meant guns, since this was Miami. And it might mean Bobby Acosta, too, who would have some kind of weapon, since he was a wealthy fugitive. And I was in a small room with no place to hide, and I was burdened with Samantha, who would probably yell, “Watch out!” at them if I tried to surprise them. On the plus side, my heart was pure and I had a bent tire iron.
It wasn’t much, but I have learned that if you examine the situation carefully, you can almost always find a way to improve your odds. I stood up and looked around the room, thinking that someone might have left an assault rifle lying on a shelf; I even made myself touch the jars and look behind them, but no such luck. “Hey,” Samantha said. “If you’re thinking, like, you know—I mean, I don’t want to be rescued or anything.”
“I think that’s wonderful,” I said. “But I do.” I looked at her, sitting there hunched up in her blanket. “I don’t want to be eaten. I have a life, and a family. I have a new baby,” I said, “and I want to see her again. I want to watch her grow up, and read her fairy stories.”
She flinched a little bit and looked uncertain. “What’s her name?” she said.
“Lily Anne.”
Samantha looked off to the side again, and I could see her trying to swim through the doubt, so I pushed a little. “Samantha,” I said. “Whatever it is you want, you don’t have the right to force it on me.” I felt remarkably hypocritical preaching to her, but after all, there was an awful lot at stake, and in any case I had been practicing hypocrisy all my adult life.
“But—I want this,” she said. “I mean, my whole life …”
“Do you want it enough to kill me?” I said. “Because that’s what you’re doing.”
She looked at me and then looked away again quickly. “No,” she said. “But …”
“Yes, but,” I said. “But if I don’t get past the guys who feed you, I am going to be dead, and you know that.”
“I can’t just give this up,” she said.
“You don’t have to,” I told her, and she looked at me attentively. “All you have to do is let me escape, and you can stay here.”
She chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, how can I trust you not to, you know. Call the cops and come storming back here to get me?”
“By the time I could get back here with the cops,” I said, “they will have moved you someplace else.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding slowly. “But how do I know you won’t, like, drag me out of here and, you know. Save me from myself?”
I went down on one knee in front of her. It was melodramatic, I know, but she was a teenager, and I thought she would probably buy it. “Samantha,” I said. “All you have to do is just let me try. Do no
thing, and I won’t try to get you out of here against your will. You have my solemn word of honor.” There was no crash of thunder, not even the sound of distant laughter, and in spite of my recent epidemic of unpleasant emotions, I felt no shame. And I believe I did it very convincingly. In fact, I think it was the performance of a lifetime—I didn’t mean a word of it, of course, but under the circumstances I would gladly have promised her a ride on my flying saucer if it would get me out of here.
And Samantha began to look more than half-convinced. “So—I don’t know. I mean, what. I just sit here and like don’t say anything? That’s all?”
“That’s all,” I said. I took her hand and looked deep into her eyes. “Please, Samantha,” I said. “For Lily Anne.” Totally shameless, I know, but to my surprise, I found I actually meant it—and even worse, I felt moisture collecting in the corners of my eyes. Perhaps it was just a Method actor moment, but it interfered with my vision and was extremely disconcerting.
And, apparently, extremely effective. “All right,” she said, and she actually squeezed my hand. “I won’t say anything.”
I squeezed back. “Thank you,” I said. “Lily Anne thanks you.” Again, maybe a bit over-the-top, but there were so few guidelines for this situation. I stood and picked up my tire iron. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. I went to the door and tried to wedge myself in beside the frame, where I would be invisible if they looked through the small window first. I chose the side closest to the handle; the door opened outward, and it would be much easier for them to see into the other corner. I had to hope that they would not notice anything and, after glancing in and seeing Samantha in her place on the cot, they would simply walk in unsuspecting. Then with any luck at all it would be one-two, snicker-snak, and Dexter would go galumphing back.
I had been scrunched into my place for about five minutes when I heard voices coming faintly through the thick door. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and tried to make myself even smaller in my corner. I looked at Samantha, and she licked her lips, but nodded at me. I nodded back, and then I heard someone pulling on the door’s handle and the big door swung open.
“Sooo-wee, piggy,” somebody said, with a very mean-sounding chuckle. “Oink, oink.”
A man stepped through carrying a red nylon insulated bag. I brought the tire iron down on his head, hard, and he pitched forward without another sound. Like greased lightning, I stepped around his body and into the doorway, holding my tire iron up, ready for anything—
—except for the huge arm that was already swinging at my face and sweeping me back against the wall, and I had time for only one quick glimpse of the massive bouncer with the shaved head, as he pinned me with a forearm across my throat, and Bobby Acosta standing behind him yelling, “Kill the fucker!”
And then the bouncer swung a fist the size of a grand piano at my chin and I was gone into darkness.
TWENTY-NINE
I WAS FAR AWAY IN A PLACE WHERE TINY SPARKS OF LIGHT flittered through a great sea of darkness and Dexter swam through it with legs made of lead and arms that did not move at all with a very unpleasant buoyancy that seemed to float up from a queasiness in my center and there was no other thought or feeling of any kind except for mere being for a very long time until finally, from far away, an urgent sound came in to me and carried on its back a very strong idea that tumbled into focus in one crystal-clear syllable: Ow! And I became aware that “ow” was not a mystic word for use in meditation, nor a lost land of the Bible, but, in fact, the only way I could succinctly sum up the State of Dexter, from shoulders upward. Ow …
“Come on, wake up, Dexter,” a soft female voice said, and I felt a cool hand on my forehead. I had no idea whose hand, nor whose voice, and in truth it really did not seem nearly as important as the fact that my head was an endless ocean of pain and I could not move my neck.
“Dexter, please,” the voice insisted, and the cool hand patted my cheek a great deal harder than seemed to be polite, strictly speaking, and each little pat-pat sent an echoing wave of ow rolling through my head, and at last I found the controls for my arms and moved one up to brush away the hammering hand.
“Ow,” I said out loud, and it sounded like the distant cry of a large and weary bird.
“You’re alive,” the voice said, and then that damned hand came back and patted my cheek again. “I was really worried.” I thought I might have heard that voice before, but I couldn’t say where, and it wasn’t a high priority at the moment, considering that my head was filled with flaming oatmeal.
“Owww,” I said again, with a little more force. It was really all I could think of to say, but that didn’t matter, since it summed things up so nicely.
“Come on now,” the voice said. “Open up your eyes, Dexter. Come on.”
I thought about that word: “eyes.” I was pretty sure I knew that one. Something to do with, um—seeing? Located somewhere in or near the face? That sounded right, and I felt a dull and dim glow of pleasure; I got one right. Good boy.
“Dexter, please,” the female voice said again. “Open up, come on.” I felt her hand move again, as if to pat my cheek, and the sheer annoyance of that idea sparked a memory—I could open my eyes like this. I tried it. The right one popped open while the left fluttered a few times before finally coming open to a blurry world. I blinked them both several times and the picture settled into focus, but it did not make any sense.
I was looking straight up at a face only a little more than a foot away from my own. It was not a bad face, and I was pretty sure I had seen it before. It was young, female, and creased with concern at the moment, but as I blinked at it and tried to remember where I had seen it, it broke into a smile. “Hey, there you are,” she said. “You had me so totally worried.” I blinked again; it was an awful lot of work, and it was just about all I could manage. Trying to think at the same time was just too hard, so I stopped blinking.
“Samantha,” I croaked, and I was very pleased with myself. That was the name that went with that face. And her face was so close to mine because my head was resting in her lap.
“The one and only,” she said. “Nice to have you back with us.”
Things were slowly filtering into my throbbing brain: Samantha, cannibals, refrigerator, giant fist.… It took some work, but I began to connect the separate thoughts and the picture came slowly together into a memory of what had happened—and it was far more painful than my head and I closed my eyes again. “Owww …” I said.
“Yeah, you said that already,” Samantha said. “I don’t have any aspirin or anything, but this might help—here.” I felt her turn a bit under me and I opened my eyes. She held a large plastic water bottle up and twisted the top off. “Take a sip,” she said. “Slow. Not too much, you might hurl.”
I sipped. The water was cool, with a very faint taste I couldn’t identify, and as I swallowed I realized how parched and sore my throat was. “More,” I said.
“A little bit at a time,” Samantha said, and she let me take another small sip.
“Good,” I said. “I was thirsty.”
“Wow,” she said. “Three whole words together. You’re really coming around.” She took a sip, too, and then put the water bottle down.
“Could I have a little more?” I said, and added, “That’s six words.”
“It sure is,” she said, and she sounded happy with my wonderful new talent for using multiple words. She held the bottle to my lips and I took another sip. It seemed to ease the muscles in my throat and brought a slight relief to my headache, as well as a growing awareness that things were not entirely as they should be.
I turned my head to look around, and was rewarded with an electrifying stab of pain running from my neck right up through the top of my head. But I could also see a little bit more of the world than Samantha’s face and shirt, and the picture was not encouraging. There was a fluorescent strip light overhead, and it lit up a light green wall. In the place where reason said a window migh
t have been, there was a plain, unpainted piece of plywood. And I could see nothing else without moving my head some more, which I very definitely did not want to do, considering the searing pain I had just experienced moving it this far.
I slowly rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to think. I did not recognize my surroundings, but I was no longer in the refrigerator, at least. I could hear a mechanical rattle nearby, and I knew it, as any Floridian would, as the sound of a window air conditioner. But neither that nor the plywood told me anything important.
“Where are we?” I asked Samantha.
She swallowed a sip of water. “In a trailer,” she said. “Way out in the Everglades somewhere, I don’t know. One of the guys in the coven has like fifty acres out here with this thing on it, trailer, for hunting. And they brought us here, like, totally isolated. Nobody will ever find us out here.” She sounded happy about that, but at least she remembered to look a little guilty about it and tried to cover it with a sip of water.
“How?” I said, and it sounded croakish again, and I reached for the water bottle. I took another swig, a bigger one this time. “How did they get us out of the club?” I said. “With nobody seeing us?”
She waved a hand, and the movement jolted my head—a slight jolt, but a much larger pain. “They rolled us up in rugs,” she said. “These two guys in overalls come in and carry out the rugs, with us inside, and dump ’em into a van, and just drive us out here. ‘Gonzalez Carpet Cleaners,’ it said. Easy.” She gave a half smile, half shrug, and took a sip of water.
I thought about it. If Deborah had still been watching, seeing two large bundles carried out would certainly have made her suspicious—and, being Debs, if she got suspicious she would have jumped out with her gun drawn and stopped them right then and there. So she had not been watching—but why not? Would she really abandon me, her own dear brother? Leave me to a fate worse than death, although certainly including it? I didn’t think she would, not willingly. I took a sip of water and tried to think it through.
