by Jack Heath
‘While you’re waiting,’ Fred says, ‘do you want to see where the magic happens?’
The young guy, Kyle, still hasn’t opened his mouth. He looks like I did when I aged out of foster care—dishevelled, tense, watchful. He forces a smile at me and then turns back to his phone screen.
‘Sure,’ I say.
CHAPTER 2
Keep me clean to avoid the police. Break me and you’ll cry. I’m soft on the outside, hairy on the inside. What am I?
Fred takes me through to the kitchen, which has a stone benchtop so big you could conduct autopsies on it, and the dining area, where someone has already added a seventh chair to the teak table. A bundle of yoga mats lean against a wall in the corner. These criminals do yoga?
A corridor to the right looks like it probably leads to the bedrooms and the stairs, but we go to the back door instead. Another electronic lock clicks and beeps behind us as we walk out into the December air. Fred has a little flashlight on his keys. He shines it at the dead grass as we walk.
No snow yet, but I can feel it on the way. The woods surrounding the house are dense, but the trees look dead, strangled by the frost. I guess Fred is taking me to the server room, where all the videos are stored. Servers need to be kept cool.
I’ve seen some of the recordings on Lux’s hard drive. A woman getting strangled in Tokyo, a man disembowelled in Mexico City, a teenager drowned in a bathtub in Manila, and many others which were far worse. I assume Fred is taking me to see even more.
‘I’ll get you to keep Abbey’s background on the down low.’ Fred’s breaths come out as plumes of steam. ‘The others don’t know.’
My mouth is too quick for my brain. ‘Her background?’ Fred clicks his fingers and points at me, like he’s shooting a pistol. ‘Perfect.’
Abbey Chapman was the young woman I rescued from Lux’s homemade prison. Lux was making videos of her and submitting them for Fred’s site. I have no idea what he thinks I know about her ‘background’.
We walk past a small greenhouse. It’s dark inside, but I can see red flowers—roses, or maybe poppies—touching the other side of the sweaty glass. There’s a vegetable patch here, too. A PVC pipe sticks out of the dirt nearby, maybe part of an underground composting system. On the other side of us, there’s a chest-high chain-link fence. Something is breathing heavily from the shadows behind it.
‘Back,’ Fred commands.
When the dog moves, I see it’s a big boxer—short fur and a square black muzzle, with the kind of jaws that clamp down and never let go. Long, muscular forelegs, stubbier hind legs. It sits, little tail flicking back and forth as it watches me. I have enough experience with dogs to know that a wagging tail isn’t always a good sign. A second dog slinks through the shadows further away.
‘They’re friendly … once they get to know you,’ Fred says.
When the boxer growls, I smell raw meat on its breath.
‘You okay?’ Fred asks.
I cough. ‘Yeah. Just cold.’
‘Sorry. I know you’ve had a rough night. We can do this tomorrow if you want?’
‘No, I’m good.’ I need to see the whole way around the house. There might be a way to sneak back to the car without anyone noticing.
Fred’s expensive hiking shoes leave faint patterns in the dirt. There are plenty of older footprints around in various sizes and facing various directions. Paw prints. Drag marks. Now the markings from my ill-fitting formal shoes are joining the mix. Everywhere you go, everything you say, everything you do leaves a trail. Those inspirational posts clogging up the internet—You matter! You make a difference!—are half right. Nothing matters, but everything makes a difference. The wrong person could notice those differences and decode them days or years later.
Which clues might lead the Guards to my real identity? The FBI never paid me with money, so there isn’t much of a paper trail to follow. The only agent I was ever close to, Reese Thistle, has quit, and fled from Houston. The Guards are unlikely to find any trace of me there.
But the FBI wasn’t my only employer. In addition to selling credit card numbers on Russian web forums and solving riddles for cash, I also worked for crime boss Charlie Warner, disposing of the bodies she left in her wake. Another of her employees might surface and blow my cover.
There are other trails the Guards might follow. The real Lux was a teaching assistant—a profession I know nothing about—in the mathematics department—a subject I know nothing about. I thought I’d only have to impersonate him for thirty seconds before clubbing Fred in the back of the head with a hammer. I didn’t think I’d need to fool five other people for hours at a time, maybe days.
Did the Guards know Lux’s full name? Maybe not. But if they see ‘Shannon Luxford wanted for false imprisonment’ on the news, they’ll put two and two together. Particularly if Abbey agrees to any TV interviews, taking a network’s money in exchange for her tears.
Fifty yards behind the main house, slightly uphill, there’s another building. A barn, with metal walls and a huge padlock on the front door. Three big buckets are stacked next to the door, with organic dog food labels on the lids.
When I was homeless, I often broke into buildings like this for shelter overnight. No need to pick the locks; a pair of tin snips would cut right through the wall. But I guess no one is out here looking for computers to steal.
‘This place used to be a hobby farm.’ Fred pulls on some gloves and searches through a ring of keys as we approach. ‘That fenced-off area was the pig pen, and this was the slaughterhouse. But rumours surfaced about cruelty to the animals. Nothing was ever proven, but people stopped buying meat from the farm. Pretty soon the owners were desperate to sell. I got it cheap.’ He looks pleased with himself.
‘Uh-huh,’ I say.
‘I renovated the house pretty substantially. But this part has stayed largely the same.’
The back door of the house bangs shut. I turn and see Donnie running up the hill towards us, carrying a SIG Sauer P320.
I freeze, but Fred still seems relaxed. ‘No rush,’ he tells Donnie. ‘They’re not going anywhere.’
Donnie catches up to us and claps me on the shoulder with a big hand. ‘You excited?’
‘Hell yeah.’ My heart flutters. Why has he brought a gun?
As we reach the slaughterhouse, I hear something inside. A chorus of cracked voices shrieking, ‘Help us! Somebody, please! Help!’
I stop dead. Fred’s videos come from all over the world. I had wondered if he made some of them himself, but on the long drive here it never occurred to me that he would have live prisoners.
Fred takes a Halloween mask out of his pocket and unfolds it. It’s a witch’s face, with wrinkled grey skin, a long warty nose and white hair like spider silk.
‘I keep telling them that we’re miles from anywhere,’ he says. ‘Nobody can hear them. But they don’t believe me.’
‘Ha.’ I can hardly breathe.
Fred pulls the witch’s face on over his own, and hands a second mask to me. A vampire, with arched eyebrows and fake blood dribbling from rubber fangs. ‘Put this on.’
‘What are we doing?’
The witch stares at me through inscrutable black eyeholes. ‘The votes are in.’
I’ve never seen Fred’s website, only the videos on Lux’s hard drive. Lux himself told Abbey the site didn’t exist. Just the same, I have a sense of what he might be talking about. The dread is like quicksand, slowly swallowing me.
I pull the mask over my face. The eyeholes aren’t quite in the right places. My peripheral vision is gone. When I glance at Donnie, I find myself looking at Frankenstein. The square jaw and heavy brows go well with his thick neck.
As soon as Fred starts fiddling with the locks, the screaming stops. It’s as though the people inside can tell it’s him just from the way he unlocks the door.
The door groans as he drags it open and hits a switch. Fluorescent lights flicker on one by one, illuminating a stained concrete flo
or, rusting steel walls, a small space heater and a hulking machine, with a broad chute bolted to one side and a spout mounted opposite. Inside the chute I can make out jagged shapes designed to shred carcasses. I guess the machine is left over from when this was a functioning farm. Whole pigs go in one end, slop comes out the other.
Fred touches a second switch. Heat lamps come on, lighting up the rest of the slaughterhouse. It’s divided into several half-rooms, each with one wall cut away, like a movie set. There’s a fake pharmacy. An industrial kitchen. A hotel room. A cinema. A locker room. A church confessional. Some of the sets have foreign power outlets. Through one of the room’s phoney windows, I can see the Eiffel Tower.
There are three women and three men, each chained to a separate movie set. They keep their eyes to the floor, trembling as if current is running through their bodies.
I recognise some of the sets from recordings on Lux’s hard drive. Fred isn’t getting these videos from all over the world at all—he’s just making it look like he is.
Donnie walks into the slaughterhouse, hands behind his back. His footfalls are slow and measured, like he’s browsing in a furniture shop, trying to decide which sofa to sit on. The soft scuffles echo through the space. Each prisoner looks terrified as he approaches and relieved when he strolls past. Then he reaches the other end of the slaughterhouse and turns around. They all tense up again.
‘The votes have been counted,’ he says, his voice muffled.
Someone whimpers.
My breaths are hot inside the mask. I glance at Fred. He’s leaning against the wall, his face hidden behind the witch mask.
‘Scammer,’ Donnie says finally.
A man in a dirty white coat, middle-aged, Asian American, hunchbacked, starts weeping into his claw-like knuckles. There are sweat patches under his arms, despite the cold. ‘Oh, no. Please, God, no …’
Donnie walks over and grabs him by his greying hair. The man screams.
‘The people have spoken.’ Donnie raises his voice to be heard over the sobbing. ‘Scammer’s time is up.’
He doesn’t sound like he’s talking to me. I look up. A bundle of cameras and microphones are mounted on the ceiling, nestled in a web of cables. Each lens is pointed at a different set, a little red light glowing underneath.
When I look back down, Donnie has the gun against Scammer’s temple.
The chains jingle as the man raises his hands. ‘Please! Can you at least just—’
Bang! The muzzle flash lights up a sudden spray of red on the wall. The other prisoners scream. The man goes limp, and Donnie drops him. He hits the concrete floor face first. When a second shot goes through his heart, he doesn’t even twitch.
A woman in a tattered evening gown, handcuffed to the door of a priest’s confessional, starts weeping.
Fred is watching me closely. This was a test. A cop—or any decent person—would have tried to intervene. At the very least, they would be horrified. But I just stood there and let it happen. I was thinking about how to get myself out of this. It didn’t even occur to me to try to save anybody else.
‘Cool.’ I hold out my hand for the weapon. ‘Can I do the next one?’
If I was armed, I could leave. I’ve never fired a gun before, but the Guards don’t know that. I could bluff my way out.
Donnie doesn’t give me the P320. He just laughs and looks at Fred. ‘Your boy’s keen.’
Fred steps away from the wall and stretches. ‘After voting closes, sure,’ he tells me. He looks around the room at his whimpering prisoners like he’s counting them.
A new plan starts to form. One that suits me better.
‘Thanks, man. I appreciate it.’ I put a hand on Fred’s arm and give it a friendly squeeze. It’s nice and firm. Fred is one hundred and eighty pounds of lean meat. Donnie is maybe two twenty. What would be the total if I added the others back at the house? A thousand pounds or more?
Without a vehicle or a gun, I can’t think of a way to escape.
But maybe I’m right where I need to be.
CHAPTER 3
I cut and cast. You roll with me even though I’m fatal. Who am I?
‘That’s what expertise is,’ Samson says, throwing some crushed garlic onto the carrots and onions in the frying pan. ‘You know more and more about less and less, until eventually you know everything about nothing.’
I nod thoughtfully, as though he’s said something profound rather than just spouting nonsense, and hand him the freshly washed spinach. There’s no meat in the stir-fry yet, and I’m getting concerned.
‘Thanks.’ He takes the dripping leaves from me and drops them into the pan with a splash of water.
Samson is about my age—maybe slightly younger, thirty-one or thirty-two. His clear blue eyes and perfectly straight teeth give him a movie star smile. Despite the cold, he’s wearing a tank top and shorts. I can smell his sweat from a recent workout. He’s pre-salted.
‘Got a hand towel?’ I ask.
‘Over there.’
I volunteered to help with the cooking largely so I could examine the utensils. So far, I’ve found a cleaver, a carving knife and a nice big freezer.
The hammer is still in the back of my pants. I don’t have anywhere safe to hide it.
As I dry my hands, Samson notices that I only have nine fingers. ‘What happened to your thumb?’
Just like every time someone asks, I find myself flexing the missing digit. I can still feel it there, as though it’s invisible rather than gone. ‘I chewed it off to get out of some cuffs,’ I say.
He inhales, preparing for a laugh, and then realises I’m not kidding. ‘For real?’
I nod.
‘That’s hardcore. Why didn’t you just dislocate it, like the Navy Seals do?’
I frown. ‘Huh. Never occurred to me.’
He does laugh now. ‘Shit, I wish we had a video of that. It would get into our top ten, for sure.’
‘Uh, thanks.’
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying that?’
A considerate killer. ‘It’s all good.’
‘I saw a lot of dislocated thumbs at the hospital.’ Samson crumbles a cube of vegetable stock over the pan. ‘Looked painful. Maybe you made the right call.’
Samson—never Sam—used to be a triage nurse, or so he claims. His mother was a pharmacist and his father a physiotherapist, so it was inevitable that he’d end up doing something medical. Even his older sister was a dental receptionist.
At the hospital, Samson sat behind a glass panel from ten pm to four am six days a week, getting shouted at and spat on by parents who refused to believe that their child wasn’t sick enough to need a doctor. During his breaks he’d be on the receiving end of stern reprimands from doctors and administrators about the patients he did let through who had wasted their time.
And then there was that girl with the headache.
‘She didn’t tell me about the nausea,’ Samson says. ‘She didn’t say anything about the loss of appetite. And her parents didn’t mention her neck had been sore until much later.’
I don’t suggest that it might have been his job to ask those questions. ‘Meningitis?’
He looks at me sharply. ‘Are you a doctor?’
‘What? No. I dropped out of high school.’ The response is automatic. Then I remember that Lux had a math degree. ‘I mean, I went back, but—’
Samson has already turned back to the stove. ‘Yes, it was meningitis.’
‘Did she die?’
He ignores the question. ‘Hospital made me quit when the parents started talking about a suit. That’s what I mean—those lawyers have no idea what it’s like on the front line. And can you believe that girl’s parents? I mean, take some responsibility.’ He snaps his fingers, and I pass him the pepper grinder.
His own parents, he tells me, had been ashamed of him since he was a teenager. He doesn’t say why. But after he quit the hospital, the relationship got worse, and they kicked him out. He enrolled for an MBA
, then gave up on it. He hasn’t spoken to them since.
‘So how did you meet Fred?’ It’s risky asking questions like this, since it might be something I’m supposed to know already. But I figure it’s more suspicious to say nothing.
‘Well, after I dropped out of college I had a lot of time on my hands. I was on the dark web, and I saw someone posting about the Guards and how horrible they were. I just wanted to take a look. And the first inmate I saw was the stepfather. You know, the video with all the broken glass?’
I don’t. ‘Sure.’
‘And it was great.’ Samson takes the lid off a pot of rice and spoons it into some bowls. ‘Watching someone like that getting what he deserves. Plus, I’d spent so long trying to heal these bastards, and it had been such a pain in the ass. So watching the opposite, someone getting hurt … it was extra satisfying, I guess.’ He says this with a frown of introspection, but no shame.
‘Right,’ I say.
‘So I sent a message to Fred to thank him, and he said I could help out if I wanted. I needed to prove I wasn’t a cop, obviously. I still had my old ID, so I stole some ketamine from the hospital and mailed it to him. Then he invited me here, and … shit, hang on.’ Samson opens the enormous oven, where some herb bread is getting scorched. He pulls out the tray and puts it on the bench then starts hastily chopping some spring onion for a garnish.
What he deserves. ‘What did the stepfather do, again?’
‘He suffocated his kids with cotton balls. You don’t remember?’
‘Oh, I thought he might have been the guy with the tattoo,’ I say, improvising.
‘I don’t remember any tattoo.’
‘Maybe it was just a birthmark.’
‘Wait, do you mean the one who broke his girlfriend’s neck?’
‘Oh, yeah, that’s who I meant.’ Apparently Fred has made plenty of videos I haven’t seen. And it sounds like he doesn’t choose his victims at random—he takes killers. Not unlike me.
