Break You

by Blake Crouch

  Her stomach ached.

  “Max,” she whispered. “Oh, God.”

  She fell apart and wept, realigned herself to the horror that had become her life, and then gathered herself together again.

  She’d shifted in her sleep and it took five minutes of walking into walls before she finally stumbled out of the break room and back into the corridor.

  She stood there for a moment, waiting to see if some image might emerge out of the dark, but nothing did. A disconcerting hum, like the sound of wind moving through a tunnel, broke the silence, though it seemed a great distance away—far above her.

  She went on as before, the knife out front, one hand trailing along the wall, figuring she must have slept for hours, because her clothes were almost dry.

  The corridor ended in another stairwell, and she climbed several flights until she reached the top and pulled open a door.

  Light streamed in.

  She stood at the entrance to a large room sectioned by cubicle space. The light was weak and gray and still it burned and she had to stand there for several minutes, letting her retinas grow accustomed to the onslaught of daylight.

  Through the maze.

  Depressing partitions of long-vacant workspace.

  Cheap desks and chairs. Rogue paperclips. Stray power cords.

  She stopped in one cubicle and stared at a calendar still pushpinned into the fabric wall—six years out of date.

  Light slipped in through wide, narrow windows near the ceiling that gave no view but of the sky. The hum was loudest here and the sound was of wind blowing through those glassless windows, passing through the room like breath over an open bottle top.

  Andy

  IN the end, Luther still decided.

  He shaved my leg with a straight razor below the knee and scrubbed the skin with warm, soapy water.

  Dried it with a towel and put on a pair of plastic safety glasses, my stomach already in knots.

  He unholstered a high-powered soldering gun and a roll of 21 gauge 60/40 solder from a rack that contained a variety of high-end tools—pliers, augurs, slate cutters, drills, shears, even a ball peen hammer.

  The first sensation was the liquid-metal burn of the solder.

  My skin blistered, and I didn’t scream at first, having endured real pain before, and knowing it ebbed and flowed.

  But this just kept coming, and with it the rush of panic, of trying to handle something I couldn’t stand or stop, and after he’d laid three inches of melted alloy onto my leg, my throat finally gave voice to the scream it had been dying to unleash, and I raged against the restraints only to confirm my complete immobilization. Only my fingers and toes could move.

  Luther didn’t even look up, just kept at his work as tiny coils of smoke lifted off the solder, and he didn’t stop until he’d reached the top of my foot.

  Already the metal was cooling, bonding to my skin, and though the pain of the brilliant heat was fading, the nerves in the newly-traumatized flesh had just started to sing.

  He made three lines down my right leg, each approximately sixteen inches, each a searing revelation of pain.

  When he’d finished his work and I’d worn myself out screaming, I watched him reholster the soldering iron as sweat ran down into my eyes.

  I couldn’t believe it, but I registered the briefest moment of relief. Of hope.

  The pain, still mind-blowing, was abating, and I’d survived it.

  Luther pushed the cart that held the control panel and the tools away from my gurney and started across the room.

  “This,” he called out, “I have to keep far away from the electronics and other tools. You familiar with neodymium?”

  Violet

  SHE continued on, soon passing out of the room of cubicles and into a short hallway that accessed larger offices.

  A noise stopped her.

  She cocked her head to listen.

  Nothing but the softer hum of the wind.

  Two steps later, there it was again.

  So faint, but was it...screaming?

  Max.

  She rushed toward the end of the hallway and a closed set of doors, and when she pulled them open, the day’s first hit of adrenaline entered her bloodstream.

  That wasn’t a baby.

  Those were the screams of an adult.

  A man.

  Andy.

  Andy

  HE was coming back now carrying a briefcase.

  When he reached the gurney, he set it down on the floor and flipped the hasps.

  “It’s a rare earth metal,” he said as I tried to crane my neck, though my head was strapped into place. I was desperate to see what he was prying out of the hard black foam. “Neodymium is used to make the strongest magnets on earth.” He ran a finger down the first line of solder he’d laid into my skin. “I think we’re good,” he said, holding up a small, U-shaped magnet—smooth, shiny, and silver. “Hardest part was finding the right solder. I needed an alloy that would bond to skin cells. My friend, Javier, taught me this method, showed me the right brand. Jav runs with the Alphas in the southwestern border towns. Very bad news, that one. I think you’d like him, Andy. Quiet guy. All business. Total psychopath.”

  Luther quickly lowered the ends of the magnet toward my leg.

  They locked down on the solder.

  He was smiling now through those brown, disgusting teeth.

  “So,” he said, “can you guess what’s going to happen next?”

  Violet

  SHE was standing just inside another factory, this one without the benefit of windows, though it didn’t need them. Globe lights shined down from high above, casting everything—the concrete floor, the strange and varied machinery as far as she could see—in a harsh glare.

  She kicked the door-stops down with the toe of her tennis shoe and propped open the doors.

  It felt like something physically held her back from proceeding, but Violet broke through and pushed on, tightening her grip on the knife.

  There were more machines than she’d ever seen in one place, her hands grazing the cold metal and congealed grease.

  It all looked ancient.

  Derelict.

  Giant drill bits.

  The dulled blades of circular saws that hadn’t spun in years.

  Massive planers and boring mills.

  Machines that fixed machines.

  The screams were getting louder, and they tore her guts out, so much agony behind them that she finally stopped and knelt down and plugged her ears and prayed.

  It was a long time before she stood up again, and when she did, silence flooded in.

  She glanced back over her shoulder, now a hundred and fifty feet away from those double doors.

  She went on, got another fifty feet before the noise stopped her.

  Somewhere in the factory—the tiny, helpless wail of her son.

  “Max!” she shouted, spinning around.

  She made her way toward him, pushing through a series of wheel presses, the cries getting louder.

  “Max, I’m coming!”

  He sounded in pain, but her heart was soaring because he was alive.

  A vertical milling machine, twenty feet tall, stood against the far wall, and it sounded like Max’s cries were coming from the top of the machine.

  Vi reached the base of the mill and scrambled up onto the table, grabbing the overarm and straining to pull herself up. Digging her shoes into the cutter, she hoisted herself on top of the machine, Max’s screaming now right in her ear.

  She wiped the sweat out of her eyes and looked for him in the lowlight.

  “Max!” she yelled. “Max!”

  And then she saw it, and her heart stopped.

  A small, digital recorder stood several feet away on the top of the machine. Violet crawled over and lifted it, staring down at the speaker her son’s voice was coming through.

  She threw it as hard as she could and it disappeared among the machines and shattered.

 
For three seconds, everything was silent again.

  The doors behind her slammed shut.

  She looked back across the forest of machinery, eyes locking in on him.

  Oh God.

  A man with long black hair stood in front of the double doors, and even from this distance, she could see that he was smiling.

  Lines of sweat trailed down her sides and her head was swimming and the taste of metal on the roof of her mouth.

  Neither of them moved for what seemed ages.

  Violet could hear the hum of the lights overhead.

  Despite the distance between them, she could see that he wore a black tracksuit and black shoes. His face, so pale it bordered on luminescent, seemed to have its own light source.

  He turned away from her and reached toward something beside the door, Violet squinting to see what he was doing.

  At first, it sounded like another door slamming, but the sound accompanied the first row of lights at the other end of the building winking out, the noise echoing through the factory, ricocheting between the walls.

  Then came the next row, and the next, and the next, Vi watching in horror as the lights above her head went dark, everything beginning to dim around her, and then the final row of lights at the far end of the factory shut off, leaving her stranded in darkness.

  Vi eased off the edge of the vertical mill and lowered herself onto the table.

  When she finally reached the floor, she extended her hands and slowly turned a complete circle, grasping for a tactile sense of her surroundings, to set her bearings, but all she accomplished was losing track of which direction she was facing.

  The panic and the sheer darkness overwhelmed her, and she dropped to her knees and crawled across the concrete, through puddles of old grease and rat droppings until her head impacted the metal facade of some invisible machine.

  Blood ran down the bridge of her nose from a gash in her forehead.

  She still couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but when she reached up, her fingers touched a metal roof just inches above her head. Steel legs surrounded her—she’d crawled under a machine.

  Far across the room, she heard a sound like hanging chains clanging against each other.

  Then footsteps.

  “Violet?” he said, just a voice in the dark, still on the far side of the factory. “There’s eighty thousand square feet of floor space in here. I just locked the doors behind me. You could still escape through the doors on the other end, though that’s doubtful. Did you hear Andy screaming?”

  She shut her eyes, trying to reorient herself and realizing there was no conceivable chance she might find her way to the other end of the room without inflicting serious bodily damage. She’d have to hunker down. Stay put. If she didn’t make a sound, he couldn’t find her. He was as blind as she—

  The lights returned.

  Darkness followed.

  For a split-second, she saw the fading negatives of the machines all around her.

  Then nothing, her eyes zeroing out the afterimages.

  Again, the hanging globe lights burned down above her.

  Again, she saw the machines under the harsh and sudden glare.

  Darkness.

  Afterimages.

  One of them was Luther, still far back in the warehouse, his profile a frozen negative.

  At first she mistook it for a gunshot, but it was only the sound of those lights cutting on and off, and in that blink of illumination, she glimpsed Luther coming down the ruins of an assembly line toward where she crouched under the machine.

  He’d seen her.

  Darkness again.

  Frozen afterimages.

  The patter of Luther’s footfalls on the concrete as he moved toward her.

  Lights.

  Vi crawled out from under the machine and clambered to her feet.

  Darkness.

  Footfalls.

  The afterimage of Luther less than a hundred feet away.

  Lights.

  She turned and started to run in that brief illumination, and when the lights went out, she dodged the negatives of the machines until even those had faded into darkness.

  She squatted down behind a large planer and waited for the lights to come again.

  Her mouth running dry.

  Gasping for breath.

  Lights.

  Luther had stopped twenty feet away, and he stood at the engine lathe where she’d taken cover just moments ago, peering underneath it.

  Darkness.

  She stared at his frozen afterimage, and when the lights came back, Luther was moving slowly toward her.

  Vi ducked down.

  Her hands sweating and she wiped them off on the nylon shell of her tracksuit to get a better grip on the knife.

  His footsteps stopped.

  Couldn’t have been more than eight or ten feet away now.

  For three cycles of light and dark, he didn’t move.

  She knew what she would do.

  Lights.

  She peered over the lip of the planer.

  There he was, his back to her now.

  Quietly, she stood, letting her eyes take everything in, branding the machinery in her immediate vicinity and Luther Kite into her brain. When the lights went out, all she had to do was step two feet out from the planer and rush four steps to his afterimage in that narrow corridor of open space between the machines.

  Stab him in the dark.

  But don’t kill him. You have to find out what he knows. Max could still be alive.

  She was altering her grip on the knife when the lights died.

  Go, Violet.

  His afterimage appeared—a perfect negative of Luther standing with his back to her, and she could even see that he held something in his right hand which hung at his side.

  Now.

  She took two careful steps out from the planer and cocked back the knife in her right hand and rushed him.

  Four quick, soft steps, and then she stopped where she imagined he stood and brought the bowie down in a hard, fast blow into the dead center of his back.

  She had braced herself against the expected impact, so when the blade passed through air, her shoulder nearly came out of socket and she staggered forward into nothing.

  Oh God.

  The lights blazed down and her eyes burned.

  He wasn’t there.

  As far as she could see, nothing but the machines and—

  Out the corner of her right eye—movement.

  Violet spun around, fumbling with the knife, struggling to regrip it.

  He was right there, two steps away and already swinging a blackjack in a wide, fast arc.

  There was no pain when it connected with the side of her head, but her knees melted, the strength retreating from her extremities in a rush of emptiness.

  Then she was sitting in the floor and staring up at Luther as the lights winked out in that gunshot of sound, and she kept staring at his negative, could’ve sworn she saw his smile frozen in the humming-white afterimage.

  He struck her a second time in the black—a savage blow to the back of her head—and this impact hurt, but only for a second.

  Andy

  WHAT broke me out of the agony was the sound of a door opening somewhere behind me. After several seconds, Luther emerged into my field of vision, carrying Violet in his arms across the concrete floor of the warehouse.

  “What have you done?” I screamed.

  He laid her limp body down upon the wooden gurney that stood ten feet away from mine, and I watched as he buckled in her ankles and wrists and secured her head to the board with a leather strap that ran across her forehead.

  Then he came over and cinched down the identical restraint across mine.

  “When we begin,” he said, “the first thing you’ll do is try to knock yourself unconscious. That would be a crying shame, as they say.”

  “Luther.”

  “What, Andy?” He stared down at me through those soulless, bl
ack eyes.

  “What are you going to do to her?”

  He looked over at Violet’s gurney and cracked the faintest smile.

  “I love her, Luther,” I said. “I know you cannot possibly understand what that means, but there is nothing more powerful in this world—”

  “I think I might disagree with you,” he said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that fear and pain trump everything. Those are the elemental building blocks of humanity.”

  “If you honestly think that, how have you not killed yourself?”

  Luther looked down at me.

  “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.” He patted my hand. “A German theologian named Jacob Boehme wrote that beautiful sentiment, which your brother shared with me many years ago in the desert. Can you not imagine that in the same way nature and love speaks to the hearts of most people, that this—” he swept his arm, gesturing to the warehouse, the control panel, Violet, the three canyons of scourged flesh down my right leg—“speaks to me?”

  He turned away and walked across the warehouse, disappearing through a door I hadn’t noticed before, near where the control panel stood.

  Two seconds later, the lights went out.

  Her voice came to me through the darkness—terrified, confused, pained.

  “Andy?”

  “I’m right here, Violet.”

  “Where?”

  “About ten feet away.”

  “I can’t move.”

  “We’re strapped to gurneys. Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “He hit my head with something. I have a crushing migraine. I heard you screaming.”

  Though the pain in my legs had receded, it was still all-consuming. I could barely handle it.

  “I’m okay,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “What was he doing to you?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “I’m sorry, Andy.” She was crying. “I came back here to find Max and you. Where’s Max?”

  “I don’t know. I’m so sorry.”

  “He’s going to kill us, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what he wants,” I lied.

  “I killed this homeless man,” Violet said, and I could hear the tears in her voice.