by Blake Crouch
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 w
ired 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.
