by Blake Crouch
“And she leaves after this?”
“She leaves.”
I looked down at Violet in her immobilized terror.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
I put my hand on the dial.
“Actually, I do.”
Standing naked at the control panel and watching her struggle as the panels heated to two hundred and fifty degrees, something inside of me, deep beyond reckoning, began to fracture.
I didn’t look away.
I stared into her eyes as her face flushed a deep scarlet.
The woman I had loved in incomprehensible pain.
Screaming.
Begging me to make this stop.
Her tracksuit smoking and melting away.
There was a part of me that couldn’t take it.
I locked that part away to shriek and beat its head against a padded, soundproof room, and let the detachment flow through me.
No other possible way to move through this.
It was human suffering.
So what.
There was nothing more constant and guaranteed in human history—written and still to come.
This wasn’t novel or rare.
Suffering was the function of our design.
The end result of our advanced evolutionary programming—all those nerve endings connected to all those chemicals in suspension in our frontal lobes that we used to invent emotion.
After awhile, Luther’s long, white fingers moved mine off the dial and he took control.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Keeping my word. You’re going to cook her kidneys and boil her spinal fluid if you don’t shut it off.”
He zeroed out the dials, flicked off the master power.
She had blown her voice out screaming.
The smell and the sound—God.
Luther went to her arms and cut the nylon restraints with a Harpy.
Freed her ankles.
She lay there moaning, trying to move, but stuck to the electrodes.
Luther was coming back now.
He stood with me at the control panel.
“How does it feel?” he asked.
I was still so weak.
I didn’t know if I even had the strength.
“I don’t feel like myself,” I said.
“Or maybe this is how you were always supposed to feel.”
“Maybe,” I said.
He had put his hands on the cart to roll it away.
“Wait, Luther, you forgot something,” I said.
He was turning back to look at me when I struck him between the eyes with the ball-peen hammer.
Luther’s tracksuit was a size or two small through the waist, but several inches long elsewhere, and I kept stepping on the pant legs.
I carried her across the warehouse and through the open door, slow-going and still fighting intense pain despite my having shot both Violet and myself up with a couple doses of Oxycodone I’d found in a drawer under Luther’s control panel.
Outside, mist fell from the gray sky.
First daylight to reach my eyes in a good long while, and I fought a burning headache on top of everything else.
I loaded Violet into Luther’s windowless white van and closed the sliding door.
Limped around to the driver side and climbed in behind the wheel.
“It still hurts,” she moaned.
“I know.”
I cranked the engine, pushed the pedal to the floor, and accelerated across a vast, empty parking lot that seemed to go on for miles.
Soon, I was driving through an abandoned neighborhood.
A water tower in the distance bore the name of a city I’d never been to.
It was an urban ghost town.
Empty, sagging houses.
Abandoned cars.
Trash everywhere.
I glanced at Violet in the rearview mirror, sprawled across the metal floor.
She was awake.
In agony.
I’d examined her in the warehouse—third-degree burns on her arms, legs and back.
Excruciating.
“Am I going to die?”
It took me thirty-five minutes to find a hospital—a six-story block tower on the outskirts of a bad neighborhood.
It was already getting dark as I pulled under the emergency room overhang.
I slid out of the driver’s seat and stepped into the back.
Knelt down by Violet who was lying on the floor and moaning in some half-conscious fever state.
“Violet,” I said.
Her eyes were open but unfocused.
“Vi, look at me.”
She did, said, “It hurts, Andy.”
“We’re at a hospital.”
“We are?”
“I have to drop you off just inside. I can’t stay.”
“Why?”
“You know why. This is very...” Her eyes had left mine, wandering off into space. “Listen to me, Vi, this is so important.”
I framed her face with my hands.
“You can’t tell them anything. Nothing. Not about me, or Luther, or where you were.”
I couldn’t tell if she heard me, if she was comprehending any of this.
“Violet, do you understand me?”
She nodded. “Are you hurt, Andy?”
“Not enough to go in there.”
“Where’s Max?”
“He’s not here right now.”
She took a moment to register this.
“I don’t think you’re going to see me again,” I said.
Her eyes filled with tears.
“You understand, right?”
A nod.
“Never come looking for me, Vi.”
“I love you.”
“Never come looking for me.”
“I love you.”
“Andy Thomas is dead.”
“I love—”
“Stop, Vi. Let it go.”
Violet
SO much pain. She was drowning in it, and it occurred to her that if she lived through this, she would never be the same, just for knowing that pain like this existed.
He was carrying her toward the automatic doors, every footfall sending a spike through her body, the sleeves of his tracksuit rubbing against the burns across her legs and back.
She was crying, and Andy was hushing her, telling her she was going to be all right, she was going to recover from all of this, that beautiful things still lay ahead.
Lies.
And then they were inside the hospital—central heating for the first time in days and the burning glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, and she was trying to say his name, but a heavy darkness was falling and if it contained a single breath of relief, she couldn’t bring herself to fight it.
When she came to, she was draped across a chair in the waiting room and Andy was gone and the pain was back.
A young doctor with wire-rim glasses was squatting down in front of her, two nurses behind him, and though his lips moved, she couldn’t hear a thing.
Andy
NIGHT had dropped and that made finding my way back to the concrete barrens infinitely more challenging.
The Oxycodone was wearing off, the pain of my flayed right leg, stretched muscles, and joints intensifying with each passing moment.
It was that water tower that finally guided me home—its red aviation light blinking through the mist.
8:27 p.m. when I pulled into the parking spot outside the warehouse.
I killed the engine, climbed out from behind the wheel.
The pain in my leg was blinding.
I limped across the broken concrete to the entrance and unlocked the door.
Took all of my remaining strength to cross the length of the warehouse to the cart, my hands shaking as I pulled open the drawer and grabbed a vial of Oxycodone.
The urge to double up the dose was strong, but I resisted.
Hit the vein and slammed 40mg.
The
relief was instantaneous.
Euphoria.
“Andy...Andy...Andy, look at me.”
I stood smiling in the warehouse. Letting the narcotic joy wash over me.
“Andy...”
So many consecutive days of pain and fear, and now this.
Relief.
Power.
“Andy...”
Violet safe. Sweet Violet.
“Andy...”
And rage.
“Andy...”
“Yes, Luther?”
I put my hands on the cart and rolled it across the floor toward the gurney I had strapped him to several hours prior.
“Andy, please, listen to me.”
I flipped the power switch and his chair began to hum.
“I’m listening.”
It went on for two days.
I never stopped, never slept.
I burned him, stretched him, froze him, cut him.
I did everything but kill him, and not once did he beg me to stop. I wanted to hear it—the abject terror in his voice that I’m sure he’d heard in mine and countless others—but all he ever did was scream.
With each infliction of pain, I thought about what he’d done to me. To Violet, her husband, and son. To Beth Lancing. To his victims—the ones I knew about and those I didn’t.
I took a flashlight with me and followed the stairs that led from the warehouse down several flights into a basement.
Just exploring.
In search of Luther’s store of food and water, and of course, more drugs.
My light passing over old cinderblock.
Cobwebs amassed in the corners and there was rat shit everywhere, and occasionally the lightbeam would strike upon a pair of glowing eyes that would instantly vanish, followed by the soft scrape of rat feet scrambling off into the dark.
Fifty feet in, I stopped.
There was a noise coming from behind a door at the end of the hall.
I hurried down the corridor and pulled it open.
Shock.
Disbelief.
Never had expected to find this, and I stood speechless in the threshold, waiting for the mirage to evaporate, but it never did.
The room was tiny—an old janitor’s closet.
Against the back wall stood a crib, where two babies, one of them Max, lay crying at the top of their lungs.
I cleaned them up.
Changed their diapers.
Fed them from jars of baby food on hand and then held one in each arm, rocking and hushing them until they’d fallen asleep.
It was three in the morning when I pulled Luther’s van back up to the hospital’s emergency room entrance. The babies slept side-by-side on cushions in the same cardboard box which I’d jammed down between the front seats.
It was too cold and rainy to risk leaving them outside, so I carried the box through the automatic doors into the ER, and walked over to the sitting area where four people waited to be seen—a couple with a colicky infant and a young man who reeked of booze holding a bloody tee-shirt that had been wrapped around his left hand.
I said to them, “You might tell the nurse that a man just dropped off two babies, and that the mother of the little boy is a patient in this hospital.”
They stared at me, bleary-eyed, skeptical.
I set the cardboard box on the magazine table, started for the exit, and as the automatic doors slid open, I heard the mother of the colicky infant say, “Oh my God.”
I drove back.
Feeling so strange.
So anxious to return to Luther.
As the windshield wipers whipped back and forth and the van sped through the puddled streets, I kept trying to imagine Violet’s and Max’s reunion.
When she woke, the nurses would be there.
They would ask her if she had a son.
She would say yes, why?
They would ask her for the boy’s name and a physical description, and when Vi provided this, they would bring Max, now swaddled up in blankets, into her room.
And Violet would burst into tears.
Still in so much pain, but regardless she would sit up in bed, straining against the tubes and needles carrying medicine into her body, and reach out her arms to her son.
And when she looked down at Max, her tears would star his little cheeks and she’d touch his face and whisper, Mommy’s here, little man. Mommy’s here.
I ran through this scene several times, each one more emotional than the last.
More touching.
Violet happier.
The nurses crying.
Even a hardened doctor tearing up.
Mother and child together at last, on their way to a complete recovery.
But no matter how many times I played the moment in my mind, nothing changed.
I couldn’t feel a thing.
I only wanted to get back to the warehouse.
Back to Luther.
And all those beautiful things I could do to him.
It was on that second day that something switched. The rage and power had tasted good up until now, but on that second day, they became irresistible. Took on the ecstatic, bottomless property of addiction.
I felt joy at the sound of his screams.
Comfort at the sight of his blood running down the wood or boiling on the electrodes.
And there was no longer rage in what I did, only sadness.
It had crept in but was now expanding, filling my lungs like a deep breath of oxygen, and I knew why it was there.
One simple fact.
Eventually...this was going to end.
Luther was going to run out of blood and screams and die.
After forty-eight hours, in the midst of trying to bring Luther back to consciousness with a packet of smelling salts, I collapsed…
Revived on the concrete floor, no idea how long I’d been out.
I sat up and yawned, struggling onto my feet.
Luther was still unconscious.
I stood there looking down at what I’d done to him, trying to feel something.
For a moment, I wondered if he’d died, and this prompted only a remote sadness that I wouldn’t hear him in full voice again.
It was like sunlight, that intense emotion.
Something to counteract the emptiness.
I could imagine craving it.
I wanted to rouse him, but I was beyond exhaustion.
I left him to sleep and wandered through the warehouse until I found something resembling a place to sleep—the backseat of a minivan or station wagon, still in its plastic covering.
I curled up on the cushions and shut my eyes.
Wondering, as sleep descended, what I had become.
Orson and I are back at his cabin in the desert, only everything is different. We’re one. So linked we don’t have to speak. Every word, every emotion exchanged by thought.
We’re walking across the desert at sunset, no sound but the impact of our boots crunching against the hardpan. I’m doing all the talking—all the thinking. Telling him that I finally understand, that I’m sorry. Everything he put me through, he did out of love. I know this now. He knew me before I knew myself. He tried to show me and I threw it back in his face.
We finally arrive at the top of a gentle rise, the desert expanding around us—the view fifty miles in every direction.
The evening is warm and the sun, now perched on the horizon, feels good in our faces.
I love you, brother, I say, but when I turn to face him, I find that I’m alone.
I sat up suddenly on the bench seat in a cold sweat, tears in my eyes, and my leg on fire, realizing I’d dreamed of my brother. Orson had often haunted my dreams since that summer in the desert eight years ago, but this was the first time I’d ever woke up missing him.
Luther was awake. I could hear him moaning on the other side of the warehouse.
I could barely walk, my right leg stiff and hot and the raw flesh beginning to scab over.
&nb
sp; I limped over to Luther, sprawled on the gurney but looking better than I would have imagined. I’d hurt him, but inflicted no broken bones, no life-threatening puncture wounds. My greatest fear had been losing him prematurely.
“You’ll never guess who I dreamed about,” I said.
“Who?”
“Orson.”
He managed a weak smile.
“He’d certainly be enjoying this.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what worries me. Do you think you can stand?”
“You haven’t even come close to hurting me.”
I walked over to the control panel, pulled open the bottom drawer, and took out a stainless-steel Spyderco Harpy that looked more like a talon than a knife.
Back at the gurney, Luther looked confused as I unbuckled both ankle restraints and one of his wrists.
“What is this?” he said.
I was walking away from the gurneys, out into the middle of the warehouse floor.
When I stopped and turned around, he’d already unbuckled the last restraint and was painfully prying his skin off the electrodes.
He finally broke free and swung his legs off the gurney.
Naked, tall, pale, and covered in cuts, burns, and bruises.
He looked monstrous.
“What is this?” he said again.
I reached into my pocket, took out the Harpy I’d liberated from the control panel drawer.
Now I held a knife in each hand.
I swung my right arm back and sent the knife sliding across the concrete, until it finally collided into Luther’s bare feet.
“I can barely walk,” I said. “And you aren’t so pretty yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d say we’re evenly matched.”
“Not even.” He knelt and lifted the Harpy off the floor, opened it with a subtle flick of the wrist. “I’ll fucking take you apart.”
“Then let’s do it,” I said, opening my blade and starting toward him. “One of us has to die.”
Epilogue
HE doesn’t know how long he’s been chained up in darkness.
He barely remembers his own name.
Almost all of the time, he is cold.
All of the time, he is thirty and hungry.
There is no day or night here, down in this cold, dank room in the basement of the factory. He thinks he may have been here for months, but it could be longer. Much longer. He fears that his mind has lost the ability to reason time. That years may have passed.
