Widow Town

by Joe Hart

  It resembled the hatch of a submarine, its riveted face and crank handle having the appearance to withstand vast pressures.

  “What the hell is that?” Danzig asked, leveling the shotgun at the door.

  “I don’t…I don’t know,” the doctor said, bending to look at the horizontal entrance. “I’ve never seen this before.” He tipped his head up and looked from Gray to Danzig and then back to the hatch. Slowly he stood and put a hand against the wall to steady himself. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Have a seat, Vincent,” Gray said, guiding the doctor to the floor where he sat with his knees bent, glassy eyes staring at the pile of wheat.

  The shrill ring of Danzig’s cell phone burst from Gray’s pocket and they all jumped. Gray winced at the pain that radiated through his stomach with the tensing of his muscles and dug out the chirping phone. When he saw the number on the display he touched the answer button and put it to his ear.

  “Mary Jo?”

  “Who is this?” Mary Jo said, her voice sharper than he’d ever heard it before.

  “It’s Gray.”

  “Oh thank God you’re okay. Everyone said that you died in the fire. I saw that Danzig had called a couple times and I hoped that he was calling to say he’d found you alive. The lines have been tied up with people panicking all day.”

  “Why in hell are you still at the office? The fire’s coming right toward you.”

  “I know, I’ve got my car running outside the door, but I found out more about Clarence Drucker and his son.”

  “Okay.” Gray looked around the quiet silo and turned to see Danzig kneeling by the hatch, his hands on the handle. The shotgun rested on the floor beside him. Vincent still sat catatonic against the wall.

  “Clarence Drucker died when his son was ten years old and the boy went to live with a foster family that eventually adopted him. I had to dig and pry for a while but I eventually found his vaccination records and he was inoculated with the Line when he was eleven.”

  A short squawk came from the handle as Danzig turned it, pulling Gray’s attention away from Mary Jo’s voice.

  “Dan, wait.”

  But the giant was already lifting the heavy door. It came up without a sound on oiled hinges and opened into darkness.

  “What the hell,” Danzig said, rising to his full height. Gray stepped up beside him and peered into the hole. A narrow set of stairs dropped down and out of sight. A faint glow emanated from the very bottom, as if a light burned farther down below. Mary Jo’s voice brought him back as she repeated herself, asking if he was listening.

  “Sorry, Mary Jo, say that last part again.”

  “I said the boy’s name was Vincent Drucker and he took the last name Barder from the family that adopted him. Dr. Barder is Clarence Drucker’s son, Sheriff.”

  Something fell inside Gray’s chest with her words, a plummeting within that sent a chill racing across his skin. He dropped the phone and began to turn but Vincent was already there, Danzig’s shotgun leveled at the huge man’s back.

  The gun blast was deafening.

  It reverberated through the silo in breakers of sound. The pellets peppered Danzig’s back from less than six feet away and he flew forward, propelled by the force. He landed face down in the wheat chaff, his arms out to either side, fingers gripped into fists. His knees unhinged and he slid down until the gasmask peeled off his face and he moved no more.

  “No!” Gray yelled, bringing up the pistol, but Vincent was moving, his hand finding the barrel before Gray could aim. He pulled the trigger anyway. The gun bucked in his hand and the round tore past Vincent’s body and out the wall, leaving a hole as big as a baby’s fist in the steel. In one motion Vincent yanked the pistol and kicked Gray in the stomach.

  Pain exploded in his guts and he fell, the revolver coming free of his hand in a horrible instant that left him grasping at nothing. He tried to step back but there was only open air and he was tumbling backward, down the open set of stairs, sharp treads biting into his spine. The light exchanged for darkness in a sickening pinwheel as he flipped over and fell into a rushing curtain of black that enveloped him completely.

  Chapter 41

  Bitter aching cold and stabbing light filtered through Gray’s consciousness.

  The pain slammed into him as if he’d fallen a dozen feet to the ground. The wracking throb of it ebbed and flowed through him, making his teeth grind against one another. His ribs were lines of agony in his back, the sensation of rending flesh and tissue with each breath. His brain was too large for his skull. It was pressing against the bone and seeping from his ears, he was sure of it. His side felt as if it were bleeding again and when he tried to reach to the wound he found that his hands were bound together. Prying his eyelids open, he looked around.

  He was in an operating room.

  He sat in a straight-backed chair in its center. Smooth, stainless steel manacles were fastened to both his wrists, a thick piece of chain linking them together. His ankles were locked in similar fashion and a short length of chain attached the two bindings. He blinked and took in his surroundings.

  Sterile whiteness everywhere. The room itself was circular with a portholed door to his right and another, wider entrance straight ahead that was blocked by what looked like two elevator doors. Shelves and cabinets lined the walls and an operating table took up the center of the space, electronic monitoring equipment stood around the bed like mourners. The floor was tile and slanted in the center where it met a large drain. A tray of surgical tools rested on a wheeled cart several steps away. The instruments shone with clear purpose, their tips and saw teeth grinning.

  Gray yanked on the shackles, straining until he was out of breath. There was no give whatsoever. He tried to stand but made it only inches before he realized he was bound at the waist to the chair. A strap gouged into his wound and he hissed with the burning that filled his midsection. As the pain abated he opened his eyes and noticed a small camera mounted in one corner of the room, its black pupil unmoving. He stared back at it for some time until he heard movement from behind the door to his right.

  Vincent Barder strode into the room wearing a pair of blue operating scrubs. His unkempt hair had been smoothed to one side and a small smile rested on his lips.

  “Ah good, you’re awake,” he said, approaching Gray.

  “You sonofabitch.”

  “Yes, it’s something, isn’t it?” Barder kneeled down, balancing on the balls of his feet so that he was more on Gray’s level. “I bet you’re more than a little confused as well as banged up. I did do a preliminary exam of you while you were out. You have two cracked ribs, possible concussion, a broken nose, and your gunshot wound looks like it may be infected, but I’m only responsible for those first two.” The doctor smiled and a predatory shine flashed across his eyes. Gray studied him for a moment and realized something was different. The entire set of the man’s face had changed. The harried look the doctor always carried with him, as if he were constantly late, was gone. A strange relaxation had taken its place.

  “Who are you?” Gray asked, his eyes still running over the other man’s face.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  The doctor stood and walked to the tray holding the surgical instruments. He picked up a long curved blade with serrated edges at its end and came back, holding the tool beneath Gray’s chin. With a flick of his wrist Barder opened a shallow cut on his jaw and Gray jerked away, clenching his teeth.

  “That is who I am, Sheriff. I am pain and pleasure, the constant need for satisfaction of the primal necessities. You pull away from the knife’s touch because it is painful, the cutting of skin, tissue, bone. You do this because you require the comfort of having your body whole and untouched. Freud, he was a brilliant Austrian—”

  “I know who Freud is.”

  “Ah, someone who enjoys history as much as I do, excellent. I’m so glad I shot your friend and not you, Sheriff.”

  “I’m going
to kill you.”

  “I find that highly unlikely, and besides, we’re getting off track with threats and whatnot. Moving on, Freud believed in something called the id. The id is what I just explained to you; our most basic desires and needs that are there from birth. Instant gratification. It is beautiful chaos that each one of us is born with. Inherent knowledge, right here.” Barder tapped his temple once. Gray watched him as a drop of blood beaded and fell from his jaw to his thigh. Barder turned away and set the tool back onto the tray without bothering to wipe it off.

  “That is what this has taken from us.” The doctor pulled up his sleeve, revealing the line of orange dots on his shoulder. “What was almost taken from me.”

  “The Line turns off the murder gene, it doesn’t rob us of anything except psychopaths such as yourself.”

  Barder chuckled. “It’s an illusion, my friend. A false wall that society hides behind while they continue to murder, cheat, and lie. They tell themselves that they’ve defeated a great evil, yet they haven’t. Man isn’t in control of life any more than an ant is in control of the sun. Life will always find a route to circumvent man’s attempts at control.”

  “And you’re this miracle? Tell me how torturing and murdering people is some sort of wonderful phenomenon.”

  “It’s balance, Sheriff. When people started getting injected with this poison, the world lost something crucial. There have always been hunters, since the dawn of time. Herod, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, the list goes on and on. They were visionaries of their time, using their ids to better society as they saw fit.”

  “They were butchers.”

  “That may be, greatness does have its benefits. But my own aspiration is no less noble or ambitious.”

  “And what is that?”

  Barder came close to him again, leaning down so that Gray could smell his cologne, something smoky mixed with citrus.

  “I’m going to resurrect the psychopathic mind from extinction.”

  Gray lunged forward, trying to head butt the doctor in the face, but the restraint at his waist held him back. Barder stepped away nimbly and chuckled again.

  “I’ll hand it to you, Sheriff, you’re tougher than some I’ve had the privilege of getting to know in rooms like this.”

  “Like those people buried in your father’s field?”

  “Ah yes, you found my depository. What a strange coincidence too. I knew someday they would be unearthed, but during your short reign as sheriff, how fortuitous for you, or unfortuitous considering where you are now. Yes, I used that place when I was young, coming of age you might say, or becoming in my case.”

  “What do you mean, becoming? You said you were this way from birth.”

  “I was, that being another dealing of fate. My father didn’t believe in the Line, he thought much the same as I do but his reservations about the inoculations were more naturalistic, simpler. He didn’t think we should meddle with nature. So he kept me from getting the shots and only started to worry when he found me disemboweling our pet cat. Of course he was only concerned for about ten seconds before the heart attack took most of his attention away. All I had to do then was wait until he quit breathing to call the emergency services.”

  Gray shook his head and looked around the room.

  “You don’t even know how crazy you are, do you?”

  “Insanity is an objective term, Sheriff, you know this. We wage wars and kill millions of people in the name of peace. We allow slavery, rape, and murder to transpire for extra money in bank accounts. I would put any of these under the label of insanity, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  Barder paced across the room and looked out of the porthole in the door. He grinned and came back, his face slowly losing its cheer. His lips turned down at the ends and his eyes began to look not at Gray but through him.

  “My adopted family wouldn’t hear of me not having the Line. I’ll never forget that day. I didn’t know what would happen to me, the real me, when they gave me the shots. Because you see I had my mask that all hunters wear and even then I knew I was special, maybe one of a kind. To my family I was the doting adopted son, upbeat, loving and thoughtful. So when I went into the hospital that day I wasn’t sure of my future. It turns out I needn’t have worried. The id abided.”

  Barder came close to him again, staying out of range of another attack.

  “Instead of dissolving who I truly was, I became two people, Sheriff. Two. The Line affected me differently and I’m still not sure if it was the late age at which I was injected or not. My persona, my mask grew stronger. Who I truly was receded, almost into nothing. Violent thoughts were as close as I came to myself for years, and I was confused. I remember being and then un-being, if that makes sense? There was before the Line, and after.”

  Gray stared at him, transfixed in spite of himself.

  “Your personality split.”

  The doctor seemed excited. “Precisely my thoughts but I can’t say for sure. All I know is that over the years I, the real me, emerged more and more. I’d find myself staring at the back of a boy’s head in class and wonder what it would be like to crush his skull. To hear the bone break beneath something hard. It excited me. Soon I had my first emergence, I’d call it. I became aware, completely and totally. I butchered the family dog that night. Led him into the woods behind our house and slit his throat. I played in the blood for hours.”

  Gray couldn’t help but grimace, but held the other man’s gaze.

  “After that I began to plan and emerge more from inside the shell of my other personality. By then I was old enough to stay out later at night. I followed a woman for two weeks who walked home after her job ended at a grocery store. She was my first and I made it last. I kept her alive for three days inside an abandoned factory.”

  Barder’s gaze was reverent, a glossy stare of a child looking through a window at Christmas treasures. His eyes refocused and he moved to the hospital bed, rolling it backward until it was close to the wall along with the surrounding equipment.

  “The differences between the real me and Dr. Vincent Barder are so defined and so real, my boys always knew who I was when I entered a room. Whether I was their loving, hardworking father, or—” Barder smiled. “Who you see now. They knew from a young age whom they could speak to freely and which would have run screaming from the house if they were to tell him what they did to the missing pets around the farm. I was always aware of my other side, the family man side, but he was never fully conscious of me. That rift opened wide when I dismembered that woman in the dusty factory. Her screams were the purest music I’ve ever heard.”

  Barder grinned again.

  “After her, I knew what I needed to do. Are you familiar with the tabula rasa, Sheriff?”

  Gray moved his feet around, the chains binding his ankles clinking together.

  “It’s the theory of the blank slate, that all human beings are born with a mind that’s unwritten.”

  “Very eloquently put, Sheriff. If I didn’t have other uses for you I’d keep you around just to chat. Yes, you’re correct. I researched the subject continuously after I graduated high school and believed in it wholeheartedly. I still do. The notion that every child is born without true preference, hatred, or knowledge of love, is undeniable. This is what drove me, what gave me a path and focused my purpose. You see, Sheriff, when I had my children, my entire intent was to see if I could mold them into sociopaths even though they were inoculated with the Line.”

  Gray watched the doctor return to the tray and pick up a long, finely toothed saw. He ran a thumb over the ragged blade until blood seeped down its edge.

  “You wanted to turn your own kids into psychopaths?”

  “Precisely. And I did it. Well, at least I succeeded with Darrin and Adam. Ryan on the other hand resisted, which I must say, still troubles me and which regrettably led to his death by the hand of your young deputy. But no experiment is perfect.” Barder paused as if considering a minor inconvenience and then
continued. “It was my hope that even though the sociopathic gene was nulled by FV5, I could use the tabula rasa and change them from the get go. The key, I found was beginning early with the children. I began all their training, so to speak, very young. I made them watch me cut myself, then I cut them, then I eventually moved them on to animals and only recently did I graduate them fully.”

  “The Olsons,” Gray said.

  Barder laughed and shook his head. “No, Sheriff. The Olsons only came after both Darrin and Adam had tortured and killed here in the root cellar I mentioned earlier. Both of their subjects were vagrants, men that no one would miss, but Ryan’s was special since I saw he was resisting on some levels. I needed something unique to break through to him. Fate brought me Miles Baron.”

  Gray looked away from the doctor and studied the porthole in the door, watching for movement or shadows on the wall outside.

  “You did a horseshit job pinning that on Hudson.”

  “Yes well, my boys were in charge of that. Also I predicted that Hudson, being as unstable and drug addled, would kill whomever went to investigate him, but once again you triumphed, Sheriff. Bravo.”

  “So I assume you saw the same opportunity with the women from Widow Town. You chose the ones who had no close relatives and wouldn’t be investigated thoroughly if they went missing,” Gray said.

  “Sheriff, I applaud your deductions. You really were getting somewhere.” Barder moved to the instrument table again and donned a pair of latex gloves. “But I didn’t see an opportunity in Widow Town. I created it.”

  The smile that crawled across Barder’s face was something reptilian. Comprehension punched Gray like a horse kick to the chest.

  “You-you caused the explosion in the mine.”

  Barder nodded. “I did a lot of research on the families that lived in the development. Most were far from home without ties to the community. They were vagrants of the working class, traveling wherever the jobs were. They were perfect prey.”

  “Rachel’s husband, he got blamed for the accident, but it was you. And you’re wearing his cologne right now, aren’t you?”