Out Cold

by William G. Tapply

  Twenty-Four

  I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing in pain and self pity, even though wallowing was an attractive option.

  I had to get away from there, and I didn’t think I had much time. When McKibben and Cranston came back, if I was still there, they’d kill me.

  I had to find a way to get the duct tape off my wrists and free my hands. If I freed my hands I could unwrap the rest of the tape. If I could get the tape off my arms and legs, I could climb and crawl and run, and if I could climb and crawl and run, I could find a way out of the stable.

  If I could get out of the stable, I’d run like hell and they’d never find me.

  I was sitting on the damp dirt floor with my taped-up legs sticking straight out in front of me. Faint gray light glowed from the small mesh-covered window high on the outside wall, but it wasn’t enough to enable me to see more than shades of black in the dark stall. My wrists were bound behind me, and my shoulders were leaning back against the wall. I found I could bend my knees a little. The one that Albert whacked with his blackjack shot hot darts of pain up my leg when I flexed it. Nothing I could do about that. By pulling up my knees and then pushing against my feet, I found I could slide my back up the wall. It was an inch-by-inch process, but after a minute or two I levered myself into a standing position supported by the wall.

  As I stood there I felt the blood suddenly begin to recirculate through my numb legs, and with the blood came the intense pain of reawakening nerve endings. I gritted my teeth and endured it for what seemed like hours, although it was probably no more than a couple of minutes.

  As the pain subsided, feeling and balance returned to my legs. I was standing on my feet. I could wiggle my toes. If I could get the tape off, I could walk.

  I inched my way along the wall in the darkness, shuffling my feet, which were bound at the ankles, using my shoulderblades and elbows to keep my balance. I was feeling for something sharp—a nail head would’ve been perfect. If I came to nothing as I slid along the wall, I remembered the latch on the inside of the stable door. I assumed Cranston and McKibben had made sure that lifting the inside latch would not open the door. I had noticed the large metal rods that served as deadbolts on the outside of all the stable doors.

  But the latch was about the right height to hook my taped wrists under, and if there were any jagged edges on it, I might get a tear started. That was all I needed. A small tear in the tape.

  So I emptied my mind of everything else and focused on finding a way to start that little tear in the tape on my wrists. I knew that my life depended on it.

  I inched my way along the wall, working toward the front corner of the stall, teetering uncertainly on my bound-together feet, feeling for a nail head, or anything hard and sharp. A couple times wooden splinters dug into my shoulders.

  Then I lost my balance and fell on the same shoulder that Cranston had smacked with his blackjack. Pain once again throbbed through my body. I was drenched with sweat. I was dead tired. Dehydrated. Nauseated.

  I lay there. I didn’t have any energy left. My whole body hurt. The hell with it. It was futile. I was getting nowhere. Soon Cranston and McKibben would come back to kill me. The easiest thing would be to accept that, to lie there and wait for it.

  The easiest thing.

  Since when did I settle for the easiest thing?

  After a while—one minute? half an hour?—I gritted my teeth, took a deep breath, and pushed myself up the wall into a standing position again.

  I resumed inching my way toward the front of the stall.

  Then I thought I heard something. I stopped. A minute later I heard it again. It was a soft sibilant sound, a quick movement of air, so faint that I wondered if what I’d heard was my own breathing, or my pulse pounding in my ears.

  I stopped, held my breath, kept my body still.

  And I heard it again. It was closer. The quick exhalation of a small breath. Somebody—or some thing, some animal, maybe—was out there in the darkness. A dog. A barn cat. A rat.

  Then a whisper. “Mr. Coyne?”

  I said nothing.

  Again: “Hey, Mr. Coyne. Where are you?” It was a woman’s voice, soft, not quite a whisper.

  I cleared my throat. It was dry. It hurt to swallow. “Here,” I rasped. “I’m in here.”

  “Can you tap on the wall? I can’t tell what stall you’re in.”

  I made fists behind me and rapped my knuckles against the wall planks.

  A minute later I heard the clank of the latch on my stall door. Then the door creaked open. “You in here?”

  “Right here,” I said.

  Suddenly there was a beam of light. She had a flashlight. It swept around the stall and stopped on me. She shined it in my face, and I clenched my eyes shut.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  I squinted at her. “Kayla?” I said. “Is that you?”

  “Yes. It’s me.”

  “What are you—”

  “Shh,” she hissed. “We gotta move. I’ve got a knife. Let’s get that tape off you.”

  She shined the flashlight over my body, then tucked it into her armpit. She went to work on the tape that bound my ankles together and soon had it off. I turned around and she freed my wrists, then cut through the tape that held my arms against my sides.

  I rubbed feeling back into my arms and legs. It felt glorious to lift and bend my elbows, to rotate my wrists, to flex my ankles. I took a few experimental steps. I was a little shaky, but I could do it. I could walk.

  Kayla was watching me. “How you doing?” she said. “You gonna be okay?”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “You’re limping.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay. Good.” She grabbed my arm. “Let’s go. We gotta get outa here. Follow me. I’m gonna turn off the flashlight. They might be able to see it from the house.”

  The light went off and it was all dark shapes and shadows.

  Kayla slid her hand down my arm, found my hand, held it tight, and tugged me along behind her. She led me out of my stall and then we shuffled down the wide aisle, staying close to the inside wall. There were more windows there in the open part of the stable, and in the gray light up ahead the shape of the Lincoln SUV materialized.

  When we got to it, Kayla squeezed my hand, a signal to stop. She put her mouth close to my ear. “The other truck’s right outside,” she whispered. “Albert always leaves the keys in the ignition. Do you think you can move quickly?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  She opened the door to the Lincoln, and the dome light suddenly lit the area. She reached in, snatched the keys from the ignition, shoved them into her pocket, then eased the car door shut.

  “What’re you doing?” I said.

  “We don’t want Albert following us. We’ll take the van.” She looked at me. “Ready?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  We went out through the side door. The area outside the stable was illuminated by outdoor floodlights. The panel truck with the bear logo on its side was parked there on the other side of the garage door.

  “I’ll drive,” she said. “Get in.”

  I went to the passenger side, slipped inside, and latched the door shut without slamming it.

  Kayla got behind the wheel. “Ready?” she said.

  “Ready.”

  She turned the key in the ignition. The engine started with a roar. Without turning on the headlights, she put it in gear and headed down the driveway, which wound around the barn and alongside the house, then curved down a long slope through the woods.

  When we got to the end of the driveway, Kayla turned on the headlights.

  And then we were moving. It was snowing hard, and the road hadn’t been plowed in a while.

  She glanced sideways at me. “You don’t have a coat. I’m sorry. I should’ve brought a coat for you.”

  “I’ll be all right when the heater kicks in.”

  “They took you
r boots, too?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well,” she said, “let’s hope we don’t have to walk in the woods.”

  Kayla drove fast, and it was immediately apparent that the panel truck did not have four-wheel drive.

  “You better take it easy,” I said. “If we go off the road we’re screwed.”

  “I just want to get away from here,” she muttered.

  She leaned forward, tense and alert, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. The snow in the headlights was blinding.

  “So what’s going on?” I said. “What’re McKibben and Cranston up to?”

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “I don’t understand all of it. They bring girls…girls like me…up here. Street girls, I mean. Runaways. Girls with no families, no friends. Nobody who’ll miss them. Albert finds them in Boston. He’s got somebody down there who scouts around, helps him identify likely prospects. He promises the girls money, a warm bed, good food. It’s a chance to do some good, he says. To make a contribution. It’s for science. It gives meaning to our lives. He’s very convincing.”

  “Does it?”

  She turned her head. “Huh?”

  “Does it give meaning to your life?”

  She blew out a quick, cynical laugh.

  “You don’t buy it?” I said.

  “Me?” She shook her head. “I mean, I did at first. It sounded good. But I don’t now.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “Lot of reasons.”

  “You said someone in Boston helps Cranston find girls.”

  “A couple of the other girls mentioned it,” she said. “I don’t know who it is. A doctor, I think. A friend of Dr. McKibben.”

  “Dr. Rossi?” I said. “Does that ring a bell?”

  “I know her,” said Kayla. “She’s nice.” She hesitated. “I guess it could be her. I just went with Albert. He talked to me, made it sound good. Maybe Dr. Rossi told him about me and he tracked me down. Maybe that’s how it works. I don’t know.”

  We came to a stop sign. Another narrow two-lane road intersected the one we were on. Kayla turned left onto it.

  “Where does this go?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “South, I think. I don’t know where the hell I am. This road looks like it was plowed recently, that’s all. We can move faster. We’ve got to get away from here and ditch this van.”

  This new road may have been plowed, but we were still driving through a blizzard on a layer of hard-packed snow.

  “Dana Wetherbee was pregnant,” I said. “She came up here, she got pregnant, she ran away, and then she died. Can you explain that?”

  “Everybody who comes up here gets pregnant,” said Kayla. “As far as I can see, that’s the whole point. That girl Dana wasn’t the only one who died.”

  “You mean these men—”

  “It’s nothing like that,” she said. “It’s not about sex. They get us pregnant in the laboratory.”

  “What laboratory?”

  “In the basement of the house. It’s got all kinds of equipment and instruments and stuff.”

  “Why? What are they trying to prove?”

  She shook her head. “They don’t explain it to us.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “Me?” She laughed quickly. “Not yet. I’ve only been here since last Tuesday. They do a lot of tests first. They take your blood, take your urine, check your blood pressure and heart and everything. They were gonna do it to me next week, I think.”

  We were rounding a curve. Kayla downshifted. I felt the rear end of the truck begin to slip, but she pulled us out of it.

  “You came here voluntarily?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “So why are you leaving?”

  “Escaping is the word,” she said. “You come here voluntarily, but you can’t just leave. They give you drugs. Downers. Tranquilizers. You lose your will to do anything. I faked it, didn’t take them. I know how they work. I would never have tried this—what we’re doing—if I was swallowing their pills.”

  “I don’t understand why you came up here in the first place,” I said.

  “I came here,” said Kayla, “because I wanted to do something good for once in my life. Albert makes it sound good. Important. Misty and Zooey, they tried to talk me out of it. Misty kept saying it was wrong. She said it was evil, but I didn’t think she knew what she was talking about. I figured it was just Misty being selfish, wanting us to stay together. We were a good team, me and Misty and Zooey, you know what I mean?”

  “Friends,” I said.

  “Best friends.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So you came here voluntarily. But now you want to leave. What happened?”

  She was silent for a minute. Then she said, “I snooped. I always snoop. I’m a nosy person. They don’t watch you very closely, and they’re not careful about what they say in front of you. They think we’re all dumb robots because of the drugs they give us. So it wasn’t hard, snooping, eavesdropping. I overheard things they were saying. Albert and Jeanette and the doctor. The girls all die. I heard them talking about it. They say it’s for science. When they’re done with you, you die—they give you drugs that kill you—and they bury you out back. That girl Dana got away, but it didn’t matter. She died anyway. And Albert, I heard he killed some homeless woman because she knew something. They’ll kill anybody.” Kayla hesitated. “I think they wanted to kill Misty.”

  “They did,” I said. “Misty was murdered.”

  She turned to look at me. “It’s true?”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  She pounded the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. “Son of a bitch. I’m gonna—oh, shit.”

  We were rounding a bend, and headlights suddenly appeared ahead of us, coming in our direction. The vehicle seemed to be driving right down the middle of the narrow road. Its high beams were blinding.

  Kayla hit the brakes. Too hard. We skidded, spun, and the rear end of the truck slammed into the snowbank.

  About then a blue light began flashing on the roof of the on-coming vehicle. It was a police cruiser, and it was coming toward us.

  Our engine had stalled. Kayla muttered, “Shit…damn it.” After a minute, she got the engine started. She stomped on the accelerator, and the wheels spun. But we were stuck.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she muttered. “I’m sorry.”

  The police car stopped beside us. Chief Nate Harrigan stepped out from the passenger side, and a uniformed officer got out from behind the wheel. They were pointing flashlights and pistols at us.

  The officer yanked my door open. “Get out,” he said.

  I started to slide out. Not fast enough, apparently. The cop grabbed my arm and yanked me. I staggered, lost my balance, and sprawled on the snowy road.

  He was on me instantly. He pushed my face into the snow and wrestled my arms behind me. I felt handcuffs click on my wrists.

  “Take it easy, Howard,” said Harrigan. He came over and squatted down beside me. “You all right?”

  “No.”

  He grabbed my arm and helped me onto my feet.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Brady Coyne,” he said, “you’re under arrest for attempted kidnapping.” He started to recite my Miranda rights.

  “Hey, asshole,” said Kayla. “He wasn’t kidnapping anybody.”

  “Watch your mouth, sweetie,” said the uniformed cop.

  Harrigan repeated the Miranda for me. “You understand?”

  “Gotcha,” I said. “Nice job.”

  The other cop said, “Hey, Nate. That guy don’t have any boots on.”

  “There you go,” said Kayla. “He’s kidnapping me with no boots or coat. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Where’s your boots?” said Harrigan to me.

  “Albert Cranston took them,” I said.

  “Cranston and McKibben,” said Kayla. “They had Mr. Coyne tied up. They hurt him.”
<
br />   Harrigan cocked his head and looked at me. “That right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Cranston hit me with a blackjack.”

  Harrigan’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “That’s some story,” he said. He opened the back door of the cruiser. “Get in, please.”

  I bent to get in. He guided me with his hand on the top of my head.

  The other cop led Kayla over and pushed her in beside me. Then Harrigan got in front and the other cop got behind the wheel.

  Harrigan pecked out a number on the cruiser’s car phone. “Yeah, it’s Nate,” he said. “Sorry about the hour on a Sunday night, but we got a vehicle in the snowbank on Dawson Road, couple miles south of the Dry Run intersection…. Yeah, bring the wrecker. It’s Dr. McKibben’s…. Yeah, a Chevy panel truck. I don’t know if it’s running. You might as well just tow it to his house. Keys’re in the ignition.”

  “Where are you taking us?” said Kayla.

  “I’m bringing you back to your uncle,” said Harrigan.

  “My uncle? What’re you, stupid? Why won’t you listen to anyone?”

  The uniformed officer—Harrigan had called him Howard—turned and looked at us through the wire mesh that separated the front from the back. “I told you, young lady,” he said. “You better watch the way you talk to a police officer.”

  “You guys should open your eyes,” she said. “You’re supposed to be cops? Mr. Coyne isn’t the criminal here. It’s them. They’re a bunch of lunatics. McKibben and Cranston. They’re conducting experiments on human beings. They’re killing girls, for Christ sake.”

  “The doctor said she was paranoid,” said Howard to Harrigan. “She’s on medication.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” said Kayla. “They were torturing Mr. Coyne. They were going to kill him. Right?” she said to me. “Tell them.”

  “They don’t want to hear it,” I said.

  Harrigan turned in his seat and looked at me through the mesh that separated us. He started to say something, then shook his head and turned back.

  A minute later we turned onto the curving driveway that led up to McKibben’s house and stopped at the front door.