Thicker Than Blood - The Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy

by Blake Crouch

  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.

&
nbsp; 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.