Kain kept his head down, teasing ever more intolerable seconds out of their showdown (he had to admit, he was rather enjoying making the kid squirm) and then finally surrendered a slight nod toward the mound. He looked squarely into the boy’s eyes. The young pitcher stirred uncomfortably. Concern there. Good. Slowly, almost mechanically (it was all coming back to him), he brought the bat up over his shoulder, delayed with another small waggle, and then signaled his readiness with a single, definitive swing, down low. Two decades and a Binghamton Triplets championship ago, he had infuriated pitchers with his audacity (and yes, more than once he’d been beaned on the next pitch because of it). It was his version of Ruth’s legendary “Called Shot” against Cubs hurler Charlie Root in the ’32 World Series. The kid could choke on it.
Ryan scowled. Still, not to be outdone, he gave a subtle shake of his head, as if reading a sign from some imaginary catcher—maybe he saw Rudy Burridge, the bunt king, crouched behind the batter—but then his eyes suddenly widened.
He glared at the drifter.
Glared at the small swirl of the bat.
Ryan dropped back from his perch. His face reddened. Hardened. At first Kain feared he had gone too far, had pushed one too many buttons (he’d come up with the trademark Jones Swirl at the very last instant, and hadn’t he laughed silently to himself at his cleverness), but then, just as he figured the boy would either storm off or hurl a flurry of hardballs at him, Ryan surprised him by stepping up on the mound. His head stayed low, no surprise there, but then it whipped up suddenly, and Kain found himself facing a pair of dark eyes boiling with intensity. The glove hand came up next, and in the pitching hand, the ball spun slowly but steadily. All bets were off.
Ryan slid into his delivery with all the grace of an elbow to the face. Still, he hurled a perfect fastball. Slower. Controlled. Down low.
Kain stepped into it. He was all over it. He swung hard and swung well, and an unforgiving crakkk seemed to resonate clear across the plains. It was the sound your head tells you when something’s precisely right: the sound of YES in your mind. The ball took flight—one of those rare beauties that grew the wings of the wind and you thought would never come down—and finally struck terra far beyond an unturned field a good two hundred and fifty feet distant. It bounced hard and long on the cruel parched earth, coming to rest beside the road in a ditch. Kain was not so much pleased as he was astonished. He couldn’t remember hitting one so sweet.
Running a replay in his mind, he forgot himself in the moment, and as he turned to the mound he had to wipe the grin he didn’t know he had off his face.
Ryan hadn’t bothered to follow the ball’s path. He stood there stunned, his head down, his arms dangling without purpose. He held this limp stance for what felt like minutes, and then, as if the world had suddenly fallen cold and black, he simply turned and walked off the mound.
“Ryan.”
The boy kept walking.
“Ryan.”
Ryan Bishop stopped. Didn’t turn.
“Drop dead,” he said, and lost himself inside.
~ 1
Imagine a dark place where even dreams cannot escape.
Imagine you are dreaming.
~
Sarah-Jane Metherell—a perky part-time waitress at The Fire Pit, a greasy spoon just a stone’s throw inside Columbia, Missouri—uttered a crude, sobering cry. The rawness of it held the blackness of death. She looked like a sickly child neglected and abused since birth. The cold chain round her throat tightened, and she coughed up more blood. The same hard shackles that bound her by wrist and ankle, suspending her in madness, cut ever deeper as she struggled. She did not struggle long. She was naked. Days-old excrement, the result of the castor oil forced down her throat with a cold metal funnel so thick and so deep it had nearly choked her to death, lay caked on her legs and the floor. Dried blood, streaked along her shrinking breasts and abdomen, ended somewhere between her spread legs. Three men had shaved her down there, under orders, always under orders they had joked, and one, a brutish ape named Strong, had more than probed her with a fist. New blood overran old where the chains cut into her, yet these fresher wounds barely registered, for her entire body ran thick with agony. Her skin, once a healthy cream, was now ashen and shriveled and starved of moisture, as fractured as baked earth. Her unfinished nails wore like long, bloodied talons on her thin hands and even thinner feet. She had been sitting up in her bed dressed only in panties, doing them up, sex-pot red, part of her promise to herself of the new S-J that was never going to be, just before her bedroom door had blasted open and her dreary little world had turned inside out. Three of those unfinished nails had been ripped from the roots, one from the left big toe, hours or days or weeks ago; there was no way to know, not anymore. Dark blisters ran her arms and thighs, betraying the burns she had endured; these were garnished with delicious grape welts and bruises that had also been served “under orders.” Pinhole punctures formed a small uneven circle on the right side of her throat, others lay scattered along her left forearm, all tells of the syringes that had violated her. Her dark brown hair, once long and lovely (on those really good days, few and far between as they were, when she got it just right), had been cropped like chaff and shaved to the scalp. She mouthed something unintelligible, gibberish, really, found herself doing that more and more as time forgot her, and even when real words, real thoughts, came, she was not certain she had conjured them; they seemed impossibly distant, mere whispers from the dark. She’d had plans, Big Plans, FUCK-IT-I’VE-HAD-IT-I’M-JUST-GONNA-DO-IT plans—that was, until that night, when the four smiling black-suited G-Men she had served at The ‘Pit had followed her home, forcing her into that enormous trunk of their enormous car, that night that now seemed so very long ago—plans of catching the last train out of stinking, dead-end Rocheport, and finally moving in with her big sister in New York City. Her big sister, a flight attendant who could land her a good-paying job with Pan Am, her big sister who had always urged her to come, her big sister who had begged her to get out of there before she died there like their parents had years before their time, her big sister who had always looked after her and who was all she had left in the world, did not know of her plans. Her big sister might have called on the first of the month as she sometimes did, and when the call was missed as it sometimes was, she might call again in another month. Sometimes, she did not call for months.
Sarah-Jane Metherell, a good woman who had always had a kind word and a kind smile for those she knew and for those she didn’t, a good woman who, until very recently, had had big dreams for the first time in her small life, wept most silently.
~
A massive steel beast, the convex door received an electronic signal at the click of a square button, a blinking green lamp nearly fifty steps away. Its locks disengaged with a hiss from its pressurized seals. There was a soft hum from its automated drive system as it shifted forward, then left, along its curved support tracks, a solid thunk as its braking system engaged, and then nothing. It weighed three tons, was eight inches thick, as thick as the walls of the enormous sphere that it sealed. Though awesome in size, perhaps the volume of a spacious living room, the sphere itself was but a silver islet, lost in the black ocean that swallowed it. Indeed, this ocean was but one of many, a mere pond in the vast and intricate web of the Complex.
Two men, one named Christensen and one named Strong, moved without a word. They hurried past the door, and their footsteps echoed sharply as they entered the sphere. They worked quickly, Strong supporting the woman in a full nelson, Christensen fumbling with trembling fingers to release her feet. Strong, the bigger of the two burly soldiers, expressed his distaste for this particular part of the work, whispering sharply to Christensen to move his goddamn ass, she stinks like shit, she’s fucking bleeding all over me. Christensen, who had given three-to-one to Strong figuring the woman would be dead by now, fumbled with the chains. He sliced his thumb on a sharp edge of the clasp on her left ankle and stifl
ed a Fuck. It was another full minute before they freed her and dragged her from the chamber by the arms.
“Clean it,” Brikker told them, eyeing the blood they had messed the floor with. His chilling voice carried as if from nowhere, for the good Doctor stood where he always stood, just beyond the grasp of the light. In fact, save the gaping exit from whence the soldiers entered, there seemed no definable boundary to this shapeless place, a cavernous pit of misery which the men called the Crypt.
“All of it.”
They knew he meant the shit. The soldiers looked up from the steel chair they had slipped the woman into, shielding their eyes from the light with a raised hand. When Christensen didn’t move right away, Strong ordered him to move his goddamn ass again. They strapped the woman in by her arms and legs, and finished with a strap round her forehead and one round her throat. The hot light above the chair bled her skin white, and the blood along her body a muted watercolor reminiscent of faded paint. She seemed neither living nor dead, and Christensen, visibly shaken, lipped something that no one could hear. Strong prodded him, and they moved efficiently and effectively in true military magic, cleaning the mess. Strong mopped the blood and told Christensen to clean the shit from the floor and from the woman, and upon completing their tasks, they hurried to the exit without being dismissed. The orders were implicit.
Christensen—a private who held wild dreams of making Captain or Major, but knew in his heart that, despite his complete discretion and his certainty that no one was the wiser, in This Man’s Army he would attain neither rank, for he was not averse to taking a good dick up the ass or down the throat now and then—a private who had been told to report for duty a week ago this morning, on the orders of some fat-cat named Albrecht down at Area 51—a private who until a week ago this morning had believed that the world was black and white, and that time travel was an even bigger pile of horseshit than UFO’s—had nearly made his escape.
“Christ doesn’t save queers.”
The words had come from no discernible source, and Christensen, whose throat had suddenly found itself as dry as the Nevada hellhole he now called home, somehow managed a girlish Yes sir and summarily made his way into the back of Strong. Strong, a seasoned lieutenant who just three weeks ago had taken the reigns from one Lieutenant James Riley (apparently the thirty-five-year-old Riley had a change of heart regarding the Project, blowing his brains out like that over the handling of this pitiable waitress from Missouri), glared at the private. Christensen began to ramble on about how he wasn’t a queer, sir, not me, no way, sir, and Strong told him to shut the hell up, just bolt the fucking door. Later, while masturbating in his bunk to the salacious mental image of blowing Strong, Christensen would climax, and at that precise moment would wonder, as he had all day, how the good Doctor could possibly have heard him say Christ. It had been more thought than whisper, he had barely heard it himself.
A wide bank of multicolored lamps blinked randomly in silent rhythm, betraying some sort of control panel. Suddenly there was the strike of a wooden match and a flare of flame beyond the lights. At this the woman’s eyes shot open, only to narrow from the intensity of the spotlight; she could only peer into the blackness now. Her breathing had grown sharp and desperate. Her lips trembled. Her mouth sat slightly open, revealing a dark gap where three of her top teeth had been pulled from their roots.
A hint of smoke from the spent match lingered in the air. It breached the edge of the darkness as it passed her, only to be swallowed again. She seemed to settle a little, but then her eyes widened as a glowing red ember grew and shrank like a beating heart, as her captor drew on the cigarette.
A cutting cough rattled her, its bite seeming to strike from all directions. The sound was sickly.
Somewhere … a clock ticked.
Time stilled. That pulsing heart stopped and faded to black. Brikker extinguished the cigarette in a container that, among the throng of spent cancer sticks, held three toenails and the bloodied left lateral and two central incisors of an adult human female. He paused to study them, amazed at the surprising will of the woman. She was remarkable, truly. If only these peons like Strong and Christensen were half as strong as she. He flipped the lid closed. He would break her. He would fill this thing if need be.
Brikker stepped to her left. Every sound seemed highly tuned and amplified, sharp yet indefinable.
“So … what do we know? Hmmm? What do we know.”
The woman stiffened. Her eyes darted as those elusive footfalls came again.
She uttered a small shriek when Brikker touched her.
“Shhhhh.” He was right behind her now, whispering from the dark. He stroked her scalp with an ochred finger stained from a lifetime of smoking, let it run along the imperfect form of her skull; let it trace the four black digits tattooed there. Someone—Richards, he supposed—might have found her attractive. He found her repulsive. Most women were.
“Shhhhh,” he whispered again. “That’s better. Perhaps you’d like something to eat, hmmm?”
The woman tried to nod, but her bonds prevented such an act. She uttered a yes that was hardly discernible.
“Soon,” Brikker told her. “As much as you want.”
The woman squirmed, trying to hold it in. Finally, she urinated. Her piddle dribbled over the edge of the chair and pooled at her feet.
“Do you know what day it is?” The words circled in the darkness with every step.
There was no reply. The eyes told him no.
“The month?”
His voice rose slightly.
“Tell me your name.”
There was some hesitation, but then the words came dutifully, if dismally—four digits—not a syllable more. He grinned.
“Do you remember Sarah? Sarah-Jane?”
No reply.
“DO YOU REMEMBER SARAH-JANE?” The words blasted from the blackness like bullets.
“No.”
She was lying. He could smell deception, as if it were a rotting carcass splayed before him. He stepped into the light, his formlessness becoming form in silhouette. He paused, and then he slapped her with brutal force.
The woman wept. Her breath came as a thin whistle through the wide gap where her upper teeth had been. Her eyes, bulging from her emaciated face, gave her the appearance of a humanoid insect.
The physician retreated to the console. He pressed three lamps, red-yellow-red in precise order. There was a slight delay, and then a projector lamp switched on, giving life to a grainy black-and-white image on a large viewing screen.
The subject was a handsome Aryan, no older than fifteen. He was once a violinist, a virtuoso from Braunschweig whose performances brought tears to the eye. And yet, like the Australian, and later, the American, he had been skilled in so much more.
The boy, clearly frightened, was on the verge of tears.
Grinning behind the lens, Brikker took the woman’s photograph, then distanced himself from the reliable oak tripod that supported a green 4 x 5 Graphic camera. It was a solid military model, the workhorse of the press photographer and madmen.
“Do you recognize this child?”
“No … yes.” She did not look away. She had learned the lesson well, to keep her eyes trained on the images.
Brikker pressed a red lamp, summoning a second image of the boy. Bruises and cuts had ruined his Hollywood looks. Once he had tried to escape, had tried to Turn to a time prior to his capture—indeed, all had tried—and like the others, had failed. Like the others, he had been sedated for nearly eight weeks upon arrival, a duration too far, even for Richards’ godlike power. Unlike the sedatives, the experimental mind-enhancing drugs had been designed to elevate their abilities, and while there had been the expected setbacks and suffering, all valuable lessons, he had met with great, if mixed, success. Their Sense had sharpened to a fine edge, their skill of Turning to a precise duration had become second nature, their capacity to recover quickly had vastly improved, but their ultimate reach had been reduce
d to mere minutes—impressive, certainly, yet not nearly acceptable to Albrecht—nor to Brikker. Still, despite the current limitations, he was certain that in time he could control the Turn, as easily as one could the winding of a simple clock. Perhaps extend the reach—his reach—to a time of his choosing.
“And him? Do you know him?”
“Know him? I don’t—”
“Have you seen him before?”
“On-on the screen. In a picture.”
A new image, full in length. The boy was starkly naked. Burns and welts and bruises ravaged his shriveled frame. His head was shaved. Wires and sensors snaked across his body. His eyes were open, only barely; they were black from beatings. Still, they remained obedient, focused squarely on the lens.
“Do you know his name?”
The woman struggled to remember. “Two, I think.” The last word came out shink.
Another image. A close-up of a fine scar near the young man’s temple.
“Have you seen this mark before?”
“No. No.”
A press of the lamp produced a fifth image, but not of the boy. The man appeared unharmed, although it was clear he was under some kind of duress. He was deeply tanned, clearly weathered, in his late sixties or early seventies.
“And this one? Have you seen this man?”
“In a picture,” the woman said. Her eyes faltered a moment, then shifted back to the image. “On the screen.”
She acknowledged she did not know him as the other photographs followed. The last image lingered, hovering in the blackness like a horrifying nightmare that strains the mind long after you have bolted awake. The one of the dairy farmer from Melbourne—the Australian who had cast his magic to save two little girls from a runaway bushfire back in 1938, the one who would save the very same twins eleven years later—the one with the shaved head and dead, dead eyes. The one with his throat slashed.
Another lamp, green and pulsing, turned solid as Brikker pressed it; he knew its location without looking. More silence ensued, save that damnable ticking, and then a wide door—not the bolted one through which the soldiers had fled, but another, on the opposite side of this seemingly boundless tomb—opened like a great mouth, sliding upward into an imperceptible wall. A deep hum accompanied its laborious movement. A dim light in a corridor revealed a brute of a man standing behind someone in a wheelchair. Strong wheeled in the chair and set it into position between a pair of red hash marks, set the brake, and without a word, was gone. Brikker depressed the green lamp, and that yawning maw in the darkness slid closed.
Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller Page 23
