In the bright room, with the music playing, Tom felt less frightened.
But he couldn’t relax enough to sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that poor, scarred, three-armed slave. And thought of his partner, Roy.
Mililani, Hawaii
Fran
Fran stood in the safe room with her family, watching the porch monitor. The two men who stood at their front door looked around when Josh hit the intercom button and spoke.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
“Mr. VanCamp?” They still couldn’t find the camera. “We’re from the FBI. We want to talk to you and your wife.”
Josh glanced at her, and Fran gave her head a small shake.
“We’re not interested,” Josh answered. “Go away.”
“It’s an opportunity for you to each earn a million dollars.”
“Two million bucks?” Duncan said. “Mom, that’s a crapload of money.”
“And probably a crapload of trouble,” Josh added. “Hon?”
“No way,” Fran said.
“If you’d let us in,” the man on the porch continued, “we could explain in detail. It will only require a day of your time. It’s a government-sponsored experiment.”
Josh snorted. Fran saw the incredulity in his eyes. She felt exactly the same way. She’d jump off a cliff onto a bed of nails before trusting the government.
“You have ten seconds to get off of our property,” she said into the intercom. “Or we’re going to shoot you.”
One of the men on the monitor reached into his pocket, and produced some folded papers. “We have all the information right here.”
“Five seconds,” Josh said.
“We’ll, um, leave it here for you.”
Fran watched the man stick the papers in the door jamb, and then they left. She followed them, monitor to monitor, until they walked off the grounds.
Duncan stared over at her, his eyes wide. “Would you really have shot them, Mom?”
Fran didn’t answer. But her thoughts went back to Safe Haven. To all the friends she’d lost. To all the horror she and her family had endured.
Would she have shot them? Hell yeah.
No one will ever have a chance to harm her, or her family, again.
Not as long as Fran still had the strength to rack a shotgun and pull a trigger.
Cleveland , Ohio
Mal
“It’s just for twenty-four hours,” said the FBI agent in the doorway. “You’ll arrive, have a meal, get examined by a doctor, then be locked in the Butler House overnight, and closely monitored to study how you react to fear.”
“So they’ll be purposely trying to frighten us?” Deb asked.
Mal had tucked the gun into his bathrobe pocket, and his wife was holding his hand so hard she was cutting off his circulation.
“It’s a fear study,” the agent said. “You both have had unique experiences that make you ideal candidates.”
“And we live with those experiences, every day,” Mal said. His apprehension had been fading since they answered the door, and was slowly being replaced by anger. “You have no right to come here and make this offer.”
After all he and Deb had survived, why would they willingly expose themselves to even more horrors, real or convoluted? To even ask that of his wife made Mal’s blood pressure skyrocket, and there was no way in hell he’d ever allow—
“Can we think it over?” Deb said.
Mal stared at her, unable to hide his surprise.
“Deb?”
“I didn’t say we’ll do it, hon. But I think we should talk about it.”
Mal didn’t understand. Sure, two million dollars was a lot, but they were doing fine financially. Why would Deb even consider this?
The agent who’d done all the talking reached into his jacket and handed Deb some folded papers. Mal detected the tiniest smirk in the corner of the man’s mouth.
“The experiment begins this weekend. Good evening to you both.”
The Feds left, and his wife closed the door, locking the various latches and deadbolts.
“Debbie, you’re not serious.” He searched her pretty face. “Are you?”
“I think we should at least discuss it, before you make a decision for the both of us.”
“I don’t understand.” Which was as true a statement he’d ever made. “I thought—”
“That’s the problem, Mal,” she snapped. “You thought, but didn’t ask me.”
“Is it the money?”
“I wasn’t even thinking about the money.”
“So what’s there to discuss? We can’t sleep as it is. You want to go someplace where they’re purposely trying to terrify you?”
“It’s a fear study, Mal. Something you and I suffer from, every single day.”
“Exactly, so—”
“So maybe a doctor who studies fear could somehow teach us how to deal with ours.”
Mal was about to object, but caught himself. They’d both had psychiatric treatment since the Rushmore Inn. Hypnotherapy. Exposure Therapy. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Interpersonal. Group. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. And a pharmacy’s worth of drugs, from sleep agents to SSRIs to beta-blockers to anti-psychotics.
Nothing seemed to work. In fact, some of the treatments worsened their condition.
“You remember exposure therapy,” Mal said.
“Of course.”
They’d been subjected to shocking images of mutilations and congenital malformations in order to desensitize them. Deb had freaked out during a session, crying so uncontrollably they’d had to quit, and later that night Mal had gone to the ER, unable to stop hyperventilating, convinced he was having a heart attack.
“This seems even worse, Deb. They’re not just going to show us pictures. They’re going to try to scare us.”
“We’ll get through it,” Deb said, reaching for him again. “Just like we got through the Rushmore. But maybe we’ll learn something this time.”
Mal chewed his lower lip. The worst part about fear wasn’t the dread, it was the helplessness. The FBI agents said they’d be able to bring any items they wanted to with them for the weekend, including weapons. But the gun in Mal’s robe didn’t make him feel any safer. Quite the opposite. The very fact he owned a gun was a constant reminder of what he was so afraid of.
“I don’t know, Deb…”
“Can we discuss it, at least?” She moved a step closer to him, the hydraulic cylinders in her prosthetics whirring softly.
Mal didn’t want to discuss it. He wanted to run away, someplace where it never got dark. Where nightmares didn’t exist, both the ones in his head and the real ones.
But the longing in his wife’s eyes made his heart hurt.
“Of course, Deb. If this is something you want.”
“It is.”
Deb moved in for the hug, and he reluctantly embraced her, a thought bouncing through his mind and forcing out all others.
Be careful what you wish for, because it may come true.
Solidarity, South Carolina
Forenzi
Dr. Emil Forenzi could barely hear the phone ring above all the screaming.
“It’s okay,” Forenzi told his patient, giving him an affectionate pat on the cheek. “It’s all going to be okay.”
The screaming didn’t abate. Forenzi gave him a dose of traumesterone and the noise went down to a hoarse wheeze.
Forenzi answered the phone, located on the wall next to the EKG machine.
“I’m with a patient,” he said into the receiver. Which was unnecessary, because he was always with a patient. Even at ungodly hours like this. Who could sleep when there was so much to do?