Fully Loaded Thrillers

by Blake Crouch

  “So is that really a guitar in that case?” Donaldson asked after five miles of silence.

  “What do you think?”

  “I’ll be honest with you, darlin’. You’re a bit of a mystery to me. I’ve been around, but I’m not sure what to make of you.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re young. But you’ve heard of Vietnam, I’m guessing.”

  “I loved Platoon.”

  Donaldson nodded. “Well then, you were practically there in the rice paddies with me, going toe-to-toe with the Cong.”

  He drank more soda. Lucy watched.

  “Took some shrapnel in my hip in Ca Lu,” Donaldson said. “Nicked my sciatic nerve. Biggest nerve in the body. Pain sometimes gets so bad I can chew through a bath towel. Do you understand pain, little girl?”

  “More so than you’d think.”

  “So you should know, then, opiates and I are friends from way back.” Donaldson took a big pull off the soda. “So spiking my drink here hasn’t done much more than make me a little horny. Actually a lot horny.” Donaldson turned to Lucy. “You’re about as musical as I am Christian. So you want to tell me what your game is, or do I take you over my knee and spank you right now like the naughty girl you are?”

  Lucy said, “It’s Oxycontin. Did they have that back in ’Nam, gramps? And you being one fat bastard, I squirted two hundred and fifty milligrams into your drink. I’m not some frat boy trying to roofie up a chunky freshman. I gave you the rhino dose.”

  She tested the weight of the Styrofoam cup. “Jesus, you’ve already gone through half of it? I’m actually more concerned you’re going to die of a drug overdose instead of the fun I have planned.”

  She reached across the seat and squeezed his leg. “Look, you will be losing consciousness shortly, so we don’t have much time. Pull the car over. I’d like to take you up on that spanking.”

  Donaldson stared at her, blinked hard twice, and stomped the brake pedal.

  Lucy’s seatbelt released and she slammed into the metal-reinforced dashboard. Donaldson shook his head, then swiped the zip tie from his pocket. He grabbed a handful of wool cap and the hair beneath it and yanked Lucy up off the floor. She fought hard, but weight and strength won out and he cinched her hands behind her back.

  Donaldson glanced through the windshield, then checked the rearview mirror. Darkness.

  Lucy laughed through her shattered nose and ran her tongue along her swollen upper lip and gums—two front teeth MIA.

  Donaldson blinked and shook his head again. Pulled off the road onto the shoulder.

  “We’re gonna have some fun, little girl,” he said. “And two hundred and fifty milligrams is like candy to me.”

  He ran a clumsy paw across her breasts, squeezing hard, then turned his attention to the backseat.

  The guitar case had two clasps, one on the body, one on the neck.

  Donaldson slapped the left side of his face three times and then opened the case.

  A waft of foulness seeped out of the velvet-lined guitar lid, although the contents didn’t seem to be the source—a length of chain. Four pairs of handcuffs. Three carabiners. Vials of liquid Oxycontin. Cutlery shears. A creepy-looking instrument with six blades at one end. A spotlight. A small spray bottle. Two coils of climbing rope. And a snowboarding helmet.

  The front passenger door squeaked open and Donaldson spun around as Lucy fell backward out of the car. He lunged into her seat, but she kicked the door. It slammed into his face, his chin crunching his mouth closed, and as the door recoiled, he saw Lucy struggling onto her feet, her wrists still bound behind her back.

  She disappeared into the woods.

  Donaldson took a moment, fumbling for the door handle. He found it, but paused.

  He adjusted the rearview mirror, grinning to see the blood between his teeth.

  “Should we let this one go, sport? Or show the little missus that there are things a lot scarier than a guitar case full of bondage shit?”

  Donaldson winked at his reflection, tugged out the keys, yanked up the brake, and shoved his door open. He weaved over to the trunk, a stupid grin on his face, got the right key in on the third try.

  Among the bottles of bleach solution, the rolls of paper towels, the gas cans, and the baby wipes, Donaldson grabbed the only weapon an upstanding citizen could legally carry without harassment from law enforcement.

  The tire iron clenched in his hand, he bellowed at the woods.

  “I’m coming for you, Lucy! And there won’t be any drugs to dull your pain!”

  He stumbled into the forest after her, his erection beginning to blossom.

  She crouched behind a juniper tree, the zip tie digging into her wrists. Absolute darkness in the woods, nothing to see, but everything to hear.

  Donaldson yelled, “Don’t hide from me, little girl! It’ll just make me angry!”

  His heavy footsteps crunched in the leaves. Lucy eased down onto her butt and leaned back, legs in the air, then slid her bound wrists up the length of them. Donaldson stumbled past her tree, invisible, less than ten feet away.

  “Lucy? Where are you?” His words slurred. “I just wanna talk.”

  “I’m over here, big boy! Still waiting for that spanking!”

  His footsteps abruptly stopped. Dead quiet for thirty seconds, and then the footsteps started up again, heading in her general direction.

  “Oh, no, please,” she moaned. “Don’t hurt me, Donaldson. I’m so afraid you’ll hurt me.”

  He was close now, and she turned and started back toward the road, her hands out in front of her to prevent collision with a tree.

  A glint of light up ahead—the Honda’s windshield catching a piece of moonlight.

  Lucy emerged from the woods, her hands throbbing from circulation loss. She stumbled into the car and turned around to watch the treeline.

  “Come on, big boy! I’m right here! You can make it!”

  Donaldson staggered out of the woods holding a tire iron, and when the moon struck his eyes, they were already half-closed.

  He froze.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but fell over instead, dropping like an old, fat tree.

  Donaldson opened his eyes and lifted his head. Dawn and freezing cold. He lay in weeds at the edge of the woods, his head resting in a padded helmet. His wrists had been cuffed, hands purple from lack of blood flow, and his ankles were similarly bound. He was naked and glazed with dew, and as the world came into focus, he saw that one of those carabiners from Lucy’s guitar case had been clipped to his ankle cuffs. A climbing rope ran from that carabiner to another carabiner, which was clipped to a chain which was wrapped around the trailer hitch of his Honda.

  The driver-side door opened and Lucy got out, walked down through the weeds. She came over and sat on his chest, giving him a missing-toothed smile.

  “Morning, Donaldson. You of all people will appreciate what’s about to happen.”

  Donaldson yawned, then winked at her. “Aren’t you just the prettiest thing to wake up to?”

  Lucy batted her eyelashes.

  “Thank you. That’s sweet. Now, the helmet is so you don’t die too fast. Head injuries ruin the fun. We’ll go slow in the beginning. Barely walking speed. Then we’ll speed up a bit when we get you onto asphalt. The last ones screamed for five miles. They where skeletons when I finally pulled over. But you’re so heavy, I think you just might break that record.”

  “I have some bleach spray in the trunk,” Donaldson said. “You might want to spritz me with that first, make it hurt even more.”

  “I prefer lemon juice, but it’s no good until after the first half mile.”

  Donaldson laughed.

  “You think this is a joke?”

  He shook his head. “No. But when you have the opportunity to kill, you should kill. Not talk.”

  Donaldson sat up, quick for a man his size, and rammed his helmet into Lucy’s face. As she reeled back, he caught her shirt with his swollen ha
nds and rolled on top of her, his bulk making her gasp.

  “The keys,” he ordered. “Undo my hands, right now.”

  Lucy tried to talk, but her lungs were crushed. Donaldson shifted and she gulped in some air.

  “In...the...guitar case...”

  “That’s a shame. That means you die right here. Personally, I think suffocation is the way to go. All that panic and struggle. Dragging some poor sap behind you? Where’s the fun in that? Hell, you can’t even see it without taking your eyes off the road, and that’s a dangerous way to drive, girl.”

  Lucy’s eyes bulged, her face turning scarlet.

  “Poc...ket.”

  “Take your time. I’ll wait.”

  Lucy managed to fish out the handcuff keys. Donaldson shifted again, giving her a fraction more room, and she unlocked a cuff from one of his wrists.

  He winced, his face getting mean.

  “Now let me tell you about the survival of the fittest, little lady. There’s a...”

  The chain suddenly jerked, tugging Donaldson across the ground. He clutched Lucy.

  “Where are the car keys, you stupid bitch?”

  “In the ignition...”

  “You didn’t set the parking brake! Give me the handcuff key!”

  The car crept forward, beginning to pick up speed as it rolled quietly down the road.

  The skin of Donaldson’s right leg tore against the ground, peeling off, and the girl pounded on him, fighting to get away.

  “The key!” he howled, losing his grip on her. He clawed at her waist, her hips, and snagged her foot.

  Lucy screamed when the cuff snicked tightly around her ankle.

  “No! No no no!” She tried to sit up, to work the key into the lock, but they hit a hole and it bounced from her grasp.

  They were dragged off the dirt and onto the road.

  Lucy felt the pavement eating through her trench coat, Donaldson in hysterics as it chewed through the fat of his ass, and the car still accelerating down the five-percent grade.

  At thirty miles per hour, the fibers of Lucy’s trench coat were sanded away, along with her camouflage panties, and just as she tugged a folding knife out of her pocket and began to hack at the flesh of her ankle, the rough county road began to grind through her coccyx.

  She dropped the knife and they screamed together for two of the longest miles of their wretched lives, until the road curved and the Honda didn’t, and the car and Lucy and Donaldson all punched together through a guardrail and took the fastest route down the mountain.

  An introduction to “The Newton Boys’ Last Photograph”

  The introduction to this story will be longer than the story itself. That’s because “The Newton Boys’ Last Photograph” is an example of hint fiction, a term coined by writer Robert Swartwood, who edited the 2010 W.W. Norton anthology HINT FICTION, of which this story was a part.

  Hint fiction is a story that hints at a larger work, a larger world. One of the most famous was Hemingway’s 6-word masterpiece: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” You get the idea.

  The idea for the 25-word story you’re about to read was originally encapsulated in a poem I wrote in college. When the opportunity to be a part of Mr. Swartwood’s anthology presented itself, my mind instantly returned to that poem, called “Whitewater.”

  Glittering silver--

  a shock of water

  moves behind them

  tearing down the

  slender, gray-walled gorge

  Three smiling

  sun-burned faces

  sunglasses reflecting

  the burly, white-bearded hiker

  holding their camera--

  one last picture before putting in.

  And they could not know

  standing there

  adrenaline showing

  through their white teeth

  arm in arm

  shirtless

  careless

  that the faint grumbling

  of distant thunder

  hardly registered by their ears

  above the screaming rapids

  means a torrent of summer rain

  miles upriver--

  a body of living sky water

  races towards them.

  In Roger’s sunglasses

  you can see the tail end

  of the gear-laden raft--

  a red cooler

  a mildewed canvas tent

  three fishing poles

  and the enormous, waterproof

  backpack they’ll find--

  which will hold the camera

  which holds the film

  which holds this

  beautiful eerie moment--

  when the Fulton County

  Sheriff’s Department dredges

  the terminus of the

  gray-walled gorge

  for their bodies.

  I like the poem, but it takes too long to get across the idea of how utterly oblivious we are when it comes to what our future holds. This anthology gave me the chance to revisit that idea, clarify it, and boil it down to its essence.

  the newton boys’ last photograph

  Their sunglasses reflect the backpack on the raft which will hold the camera, which will hold the film, which will hold this eerie, smiling moment.

  An introduction to “The Meteorologist”

  I’m a weather geek. Always have been. Snowstorms, hurricanes, extreme cold...I’m not sure why, but they move me in some way. I’m never happier than when watching a blizzard rage outside the window. Maybe it has something to do with the raw power of nature—I don’t know.

  For years I’ve been attracted to writing a character who shared that love of weather, but who might also take that obsession to a dangerous, even self-destructive place. What if there was a man whose life’s mission was to experience weather in all its extremes, because it was the only way he could come close to feeling alive? More interesting...why was he this way, and how did he get by in the world?

  “The Meteorologist” is the culmination of that idea. In some ways, this is a gentle story, the polar opposite of something like “Serial.” But it’s still very much me, brimming with emotion, and close to my heart.

  the meteorologist

  Summer of the year two thousand and six found him on the plains of west Kansas, veering onto the off-ramp at Exit 95. Hoxie (pop. 1200) lay sixteen miles due north of the interstate, the blaring inconsequence of the town only underscored by its station on the prairie. It was a black freckle on the roadmap, the sort of place one passes through in wonderment that people actually live there.

  Peter secured permission from the owner of Hoxie’s only motel to squat in their parking lot for fifteen dollars a day. Paid for three in advance and emerged from the small office into an evening that had failed to release the preceding hours’ blistering store of heat. Across the empty parking lot, slats of sunlight glinted off the chrome hubcaps of his ’87 Winnebago Chalet. Peter considered the microwave inside and the TV dinners in the freezer, any of which he’d had twenty times before. It had been a long day behind the wheel—492 miles—and since the thought of eating dinner alone in the RV depressed the hell out of him, he started walking.

  The downtown went for three blocks, and as he moved along the sidewalk, he kept glimpsing prairie—down alleys between the buildings, beyond the dirt streets lined with shabby houses. The sun struck all that grass in glancing blows, and the color changed as the wind blew across it. Green to gold, back to green again. Endless.

  Where the business district stopped, he eased down onto a bench and stared sixty or seventy miles to the south at a supercell creeping silently across the plains like an atomic sunset.

  Bad lighting. Jazz so easy-listening he couldn’t help but to think of that single video of soft-core he kept behind the respectable DVD collection in the RV—a bride and the best man trapped in an elevator the day of her wedding.

  The waitress was wiping a table in the back, and she cal
led out, “Sit wherever you like!”

  He slid into a window booth as a trio of skateboarders rolled by, his eyes following their movement, then catching on the bulbous, powder-blue water tower that loomed behind the school. It felt good to be out of the RV. He stretched his legs under the table, let his heels rest on the cushion of the opposite seat.

  Voices slipped through a cracked door in the rear wall of the restaurant, and he thought it might be a waiter calling out rapid-fire orders to the chef, but considering he was the only customer, that seemed unlikely.

  He left the table and walked over to the door and nudged it open.

  “B-eleven.”

  “Hit.”

  Peered into a private room half the size of the main dining room. A crowd of thirty or forty sat transfixed by two men on a makeshift stage, absorbed in a fierce game of Battleship.

  The waitress came up behind him, ice rattling in the pitcher of water she held.

  “It’s a very important match,” she whispered. “They’ve been having this tournament every Friday for the last few months. Tonight’s the championship.”

  Peter chuckled. “Seems pretty intense in there. Money on the line?”

  “Actually quite a lot.”

  He returned to his table and let the waitress stumble through the longest description of a dinner special he’d ever endured—basically chicken-fried steak in two hundred words.

  When she finished her spiel, he decided to splurge—ordered the special and a glass of Woodbridge from an unspecified vintage. The waitress disappeared into the kitchen and returned with his wine and a basket of steaming bread.

  “You didn’t just move here, did you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What is it?” She’d told him her name when she first brought the menu, but he hadn’t really been paying attention. In fact, he hadn’t even looked at her until now.