Stirred (33 page)

Another round went off, cracking over my head. My legs went to jelly, and my baby began kicking like crazy, but I stood firm.

“You’re wrong, Jack,” Luther said, his voice a whisper. “I stopped being a human being a long time ago.”

H
e lies under a tarp on top of a building, watching her through the scope.

Jack looks so small from four hundred meters away, stumbling through the vast, empty parking lot like a lost soul crossing a desert.

Something undeniably heroic about her.

No question.

She’s been tested before—Alex Kork nearly killed her several years ago. Charles Kork,
Barry Fuller
, that trio of snipers, The Chemist, a fat slob named Donaldson—but Jack has always prevailed. He figures she must contain a carbon core. A soul as hard as a diamond.

So what happens when a diamond finally breaks?

He knows.

It’s spectacular.

Catastrophic change.

Nuclear fission.

And he’s the man to break her. The only thing that can cut a diamond is another diamond.

He says into his mike, “This is the only help you’re going to get from me, Jack. When you reach the door to the warehouse, there will be a keypad. What do you think the code is to get inside?”

“How should I…wait.”

He hopes she’s putting it together.

“Six-six-six.”

“Exactly.”

He watches her go, trailing her movement with just the barest movement on the bipod. Nothing rivals following someone through a high-end scope from a quarter mile away. The target’s next breath just a finger-squeeze away from never happening.

Back when he was first building this place, he’d occasionally come across a dealer or a foot soldier. The occasional heroin whore who’d made the mistake of wandering out into his urban ghost town to find a quiet place to shoot up.

He’d grab them, explain the rules, and cut them loose.

Supply a bottle of water and a two-minute head start.

If you lasted until morning, you got to leave.

To live.

He’d snipe them with his bolt-action Bor.

7.62 x 51mm rounds.

They’d only play after dark, Luther tracking his prey with night-vision from the top of the water tower, his goal to keep them running all night. The most enjoyable games were those that never even required him to shoot.

Just make them run until they dropped from exhaustion, then go and finish them with his hands.

When he closes his eyes, he can still see the gray-green graininess of the runners, out of breath, hunkered down behind a Dumpster in the pitch black, puking their guts out from sheer exhaustion as he puts another round through the metal beside their heads to keep them moving.

The fear in their faces. The abject fear. Nothing like it in the world.

An acquired taste, sure, but once acquired—pure addiction.

He’s so happy he bought this town.

Not the entire town. No need for that. It was abandoned. But he’d snatched up enough of the foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar, all the factories and warehouses for prices so low it was almost more criminal than the acts he carried out here.

This neighborhood belonged to Luther. Or rather, he owned the rotting carcass of what was once a neighborhood.

It starts with one inciting event. The auto factory dies.

Then the steel mill follows.

People move away.

The retailers, unable to stay in business, go with them.

Finally the state cuts off services and utilities, and all that is left is the decaying, empty homes and buildings.

A perfect location.

He was so lucky to stumble across it. So lucky that his financial situation allowed him to tailor it to his particular needs.

After all this time, all this money, all this effort, it’s finally happening.

Jack is almost to the first warehouse.

Luther leaves the Bor under the tarp and heads down to the control room to watch her on flat-screen, realizing as he descends the stairs that everything in his life—the good, the bad, the pleasure, and the pain—has all been a ramp-up to this moment.

To the next several hours.

It’s not joy he feels. He’s no longer capable of true happiness. But there’s a feeling of peace watching this all unfold that remains unmatched in recent memory.

And though he’s lived long enough to know it won’t last, that this sense of satisfaction will fade and die like everything else in this fallen world, he’s also lived long enough to know to enjoy it while it’s here.

To be fully, unapologetically, in the moment.

He hopes to teach Jack this feeling.

Even if it takes years.

I
punched in the code.

A green light blinked.

A deadbolt snicked open.

Standing outside the door, the noise on the other side was already loud, but when I finally pulled it open, it became otherworldly.

I paused in the threshold, coming fast to the conclusion that stepping inside couldn’t possibly be a good idea, but Luther was barking in my ear to move. I no longer feared him shooting me—it was terrifying to be fired at, but Luther had put in too much time and effort to kill me before I saw everything he wanted me to see.

But I had no doubt he’d hurt and kill my friends.

I stepped inside and the door slammed shut after me, coaxed in by a vacuum.

I shivered.

Total darkness.

Freezing cold.

Screaming wind.

Pellets of ice driving into my face.

I was in the thick of an indoor blizzard.

I spun back around, trying to find the exit, desperate to get out, already disoriented.

Stumbling into a wall, I groped for the door, felt it, but there was no handle on this side.

A jolt of claustrophobic fear shot through me—the panic of being trapped.

The noise became louder, the wind stronger.

I wasn’t alone. I heard moaning.

I took deep, slow breaths and willed myself to settle down. I couldn’t lose my head, my nerve. Must not let that happen.

There was a strobe in the distance—a cutting blue blink of light every few seconds that looked like electricity in a cloud.

When it flashed, I could see a wall of swirling fog ahead of me.

What the hell? How much money had he spent building this—whatever
this
was? Over the years, I’d had more than my fair share of encounters with monsters, and they all had warped fantasies that prompted their actions. But Luther’s fantasies were way off the charts. This guy had built his own psychopath Disney World.

I forged ahead into the storm, holding my left arm out to protect my face.

It reminded me of the worst Chicago winter storms—those handful of times when I’d been forced outside with the snow pouring down and the wind ripping through the trees, and nothing to see beyond five feet in front of your nose but the manic flakes.

I must’ve made it fifty or sixty steps into the warehouse—I lost count—before hands suddenly grabbed my shoulders.

I screamed and pulled back, but they didn’t let go, the cold, wet fingers digging through my windbreaker.

In the burst of strobe light, I saw a woman in a gaudy evening gown, her hair twisted up and styled as if she’d been on her way to a costume ball. Tears and the frigid water had drawn lines of the heavy mascara and eyeliner down her gaunt, pale face.

“Help me!”

A chain ran down from a leather collar with a metal box attached to it.

“Where’s the way out?” I shouted back over the roar of the wind.

“Get me out!”

“I’m trying! You have to tell me—”

“He’s gonna kill us!”

“How many people are in here?”

“Four! There’s a girly in the cage!”

I got closer, caught a glimpse of her chest. Hanging around her neck was an engraved plaque, the writing edged with frost.

CIRCLE 2: LUST
You have to accept the fact that part of the SIZZLE of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered.

I recognized the Camille Paglia quote, as I’d read all of her books, but I didn’t understand its significance in this case.

“What’s your name?” I shouted at the chained woman.

“Patricia Reid!”

“How did you get here, Patricia?”

“What?”

“How did you get in this room?”

“I was on the bus!”

“What bus?”

“The bus!” she said, nodding frantically.

I remembered Andrew Z. Thomas’s website, ALONEAGAIN posting in the forum.

Luther can do anything. He once swallowed a bus.

“What bus?” I screamed, but my words were drowned out by a sound that surpassed even the roar of the wind.

A deep, awful creaking.

Metal grinding against metal, like the sound of an old, rusty gate being opened.

Or a new, frozen gate.

A way out?

Patricia turned toward the sound, her face barely visible in the fleeting streaks of blue light that resembled lightning through the fog.

Up to this moment, the screams had been difficult to hear against the backdrop of wind and whatever machines were producing it. But the scream that rose up twenty feet away hit me loud and clear.

I’d never heard anything like it.

Human. Female. Beyond terror.

And so much pain in it.

A sharp, rusty taste coated the back of my throat.

I had started to open my mouth to ask Patricia if she knew the way out when I saw something slowly emerge out of the icy fog.

My first thought was
Luther
, but this couldn’t possibly be him.

This thing was huge, moving on all fours, lumbering like a bear…

Holy shit.

Not like a bear.

This thing
was
a bear.

The wide, waddling beast stalked toward us with strings of bloody drool escaping its jaws, which still chewed on something.

From fifteen feet away, it looked enormous.

No black or brown bear. This had to be a grizzly.

Patricia hadn’t said there was a
girly
in the cage. She’d said
grizzly
.

Luther had actually gotten a grizzly bear.

Patricia bolted off into the fog, the coil of chain at my feet unwinding, and then I heard a cry and a thump as it arrested her forward momentum and slammed her to the floor, the chain taut.

The bear took notice of her, its giant head swiveling her direction, and then rushed forward three steps and pounced.

It clamped its jaws around Patricia’s neck as her limbs flailed around her.

There was a terrible
CRUNCH
, and then Patricia was still.

The bear put a paw on her chest, tugging its head back, ripping her throat open. Then it stared back at me.

In the oncoming gust of wind, I could already smell the odor of its musk—wet fur and pungent urine and fresh blood.

I backpedaled into the mist, slowly at first, not wanting to incite a chase, but the bear accelerated to a lope, its great haunches pumping up and down, and I thought,
I can’t believe I’m going to die like this. I’m from Chicago, for chrissakes.

The bear stopped.

In that erratic blue light, I could see its black nose wrinkling, catching competing scents in the swirling dark. The fur all down its neck was matted and slicked with gobs of gore.

I kept retreating, one step at a time, my heart thundering in my chest.

The monster lowered its head and looked at me, staring for a long, eerie moment through those beady eyes—eyes that reminded me of a pig’s. Around its neck was a thick, leather collar, with a metal box attached to the underside.

Then its head dropped, and I had a terrible premonition of what was about to happen.

I was right.

It charged with the deadly speed of a rolling barrel, surprising me that something so massive could move so fast.

I whipped around and ran as hard as I could, full bore into the freezing wind, one hand cupping my stomach as ice pellets drilled my face, my body. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing, even when the strobe sliced through the cloud.

If I’d blinked at the wrong time, I would’ve missed seeing the ladder.