I still couldn’t see a thing beyond the light’s reach, so I used the direction of his voice to guide me.
Twenty feet on, shivering against the chill, my flame passed over a small island in the swamp. I stopped to stare. It couldn’t have been more than fifty square feet, and the concrete blocks that formed it only rose an inch or two above the surface of the water.
Two people lay draped across each other on top of it, unmoving.
“Hello?” I called out to them. “Can you hear me?”
“They’re dead,” the man in the distance said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“He made them fight.”
The firelight flickered off the wet steel of a blade still in the hands of one of the dead.
I held the torch closer, watched the light play off their faces.
Young men. Arms covered in gang tats.
Both wearing collars, which no doubt Luther had used to do his persuading.
I went on, and after another minute, the torch began to illuminate something straight ahead, the light glimmering off the chains that held a man crucified to a concrete wall.
“I see you!” I called out. “I’m almost there!”
My legs were cramping from the effort it required to move through the mud, but I persevered, waddling the last thirty feet, and then crawling up the concrete embankment to dry ground.
A tall, thin man stood before me, chained shirtless to the wall like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, completely covered in mud except for the whites of his eyes. He was standing, feet together, arms splayed out.
I knelt down on the floor and took a moment to steady my breathing.
Numbness streaking through my hands and feet.
I didn’t know how much more of this I could take.
“Are you injured?” I asked.
“My shoulder…I think it’s out of place. I don’t know how long I’ve been down here. Do you have any water?”
I shook my head, realizing how thirsty I was as well. “What’s your name?”
“Steve.”
I looked him over, the thought occurring to me that none of the poor souls I’d encountered in these circles of hell had survived. Luther didn’t want me to save them. He wanted me to watch them suffer and die. But Steve wasn’t wearing a collar. I hoped this was a promising sign.
“I’m going to try and help you, Steve, but first I need to find a way out of this room. There should be a door and a keypad somewhere around.”
I struggled up onto my feet.
His eyes had begun to shimmer with tears. “If you want to leave this room, you have to kill me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You have to kill me.”
“I’m not going to do that, Steve.”
“There’s a bow saw hanging on a nail behind me.”
“Steve—”
“You don’t understand…if you don’t do this, he’s going to torture me to death. I’ve been on his machine. I can’t go back.”
“Listen to me—”
“Cut my throat, and then—” He gestured with his head. “—you can…you can open the door behind me.”
I made out the faint outline of the rusty door he was chained across. The knob was near Steve’s side.
Luther didn’t want me to just kill Steve. His hands were chained on either side of the doorway. His ankles were chained together to the bottom of the door itself.
I couldn’t open the door without hacking off Steve’s arms or legs.
“No way,” I said, taking a step backward.
“Please, Jack. I—”
“No!”
“—deserve this.”
“No, you don’t. No one deserves this.”
He was crying now, breaking down. “I killed a man,” he blubbered. “Three years ago. I’ve carried it around with me all this time, and now I just need you to know that I want this! I’ve thought about ending myself a thousand times, but I never had the guts.”
“Well, I’m not going to do this. I can’t, Steve.”
“Do you understand what Luther will do to me?”
I’d killed before. But even with someone irredeemable like Alex Kork, it hadn’t been easy. Not pulling the trigger. And not living with it after the fact. I couldn’t imagine ever bringing myself to murder an unarmed man chained to a wall, no matter what he’d done in his past, no matter how desperately he was begging me to end him.
“Please, Jack!”
“Shut up for a second. Let me think.”
I moved closer, studying the door. No hinges, so it pushed inward. I tried the knob, put some weight on it. The door moved an inch, the chain tightening around Steve’s ankles.
“Can you hop backward?”
“I can’t even feel my feet. They’re so cold.”
“I’m not doing this, Luther,” I said.
My earpiece didn’t reply. I looked around for a camera, saw one on the wall, ten feet up. I waved at it.
“You hear me, asshole? I’m not going to—”
Then the door behind Steve jerked inward, pulling him off his feet. Steve screamed, his weight falling onto his arms, his legs being pulled back. The door only opened a few inches, but an arm snaked through.
A man’s bare arm, covered with scars.
It snagged the bow saw hanging on the door. Then two eyes peeked through the opening.
“Well, lookee here. It’s Jack Daniels. Been a long time.”
I didn’t recognize the misshapen face. But the voice…
I could never forget that voice.
From the truck stop, years ago.
Donaldson.
“I’ve been dreaming about seeing you again, Jack. Of cutting off bits of your face and feeding it to you. And now, all that’s between me and my dreams are a few limbs.”
He brought up the bow saw, placing it through the crack in the door onto Steve’s bare wrist.
I reached for the other end, my heart pounding in my ears, my baby kicking wildly, trying to pull the saw away, but the tug of war—the back and forth—that ensued was essentially doing what Donaldson wanted, cutting through skin and bone as Steve screamed, and then my legs went wiggly and the world began to spin and blackness crept into my vision.
No!
Not a seizure!
Not now!
I fell onto my butt…Steve’s voice disappearing…the whole world disappearing…the dark swallowing me up.
The man chained to the door died too fast. Without a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, he was unconscious within a minute and dead shortly thereafter.
Lucy had felt the old, familiar thrill at his cries, and a pang of loss when he finally stopped breathing.
It took her and Donaldson almost five minutes of sawing and pulling to get the door open, and there was no fun in it. By the time they were through, all Lucy wanted was a Norco and a nap.
But D had other ideas. He was standing over the unconscious pregnant woman, his scarred features twisted into a hideous grin.
“It’s her, Lucy. It’s Jack Daniels.”
“We don’t have time for this.”
“Yeah, we do.”
She touched Donaldson’s arm. “We didn’t come here for her. We only needed her to find that bastard who did this to us.”
“So? This is like a bonus. An appetizer before the main course.”
Donaldson descended with the saw, but Lucy pulled him back. He spun on her.
“What the hell? You getting squeamish on me?”
“Of course not. I’m tired, and in pain, and I want to save my energy for the man who tortured us and scarred us and turned us into…this.” She spread out what was left of her hands.
“I want to kill Luther Kite as much as you do, Lucy. But we deserve to have a little fun. This one here, she’s like a serial killer’s dream victim. Doing her will be the highlight of my career.”
For a moment, Lucy wanted to plead with him. To remind him of whom they were looking for, and why. But she saw the bloodlust in Donaldson’s eyes, knew that there would be no talking him out of this.
“Fine,” she said, releasing his arm. “Do what you want. I’m going to keep looking for him.”