Velvet Rain - A Dark Thriller (31 page)

“I-I can pay,” the man pleaded. He squinted at the flashing bank of multicolored lights. It seemed to center him, at least in the moment. “I got a house. A car! A nice big Buick. I could sell it, I could sell it all—”

The depression of a red lamp lit three additional spotlights, illuminating a long utility table gleaming with various instruments of persuasion. They read like a checklist of camping items authored by some twisted Boy Scout: knives; more knives; three hammers, ball-peen, carpenter’s, mallet; two high-speed turbine dental drills; metal knuckles; flasks and bottles and jars holding dark and clear liquids; powders; cutting torches; screwdrivers; a cable ripper; drop lights; straps; chains; whips; razors; a half-dozen volumes on human anatomy; big and small saws; syringes; drugs; neat stacks of pressed white cloths; more knives; three car batteries and several cables; boxes of matches; tape; scissors; wire, thin and sharp; wire, thick and barbed; rubber tubing; long, coiled metal tubing; funnels with necks of varying lengths and thickness; clamps and pins and needles; lengths of rope; two vises; wire cutters; pliers. Several cartons of Gold Armor, stacked precisely.

Brikker surveyed the offerings quickly and found exactly what he had in mind. He was in a mood today, a very particular one, and with a sly hand slipping out of the deep—one could see just a hint of his crisp white lab coat—he selected a boning knife. Sometimes, the simplest tool was often the most effective.

“Wait a minute, what are you doin’?
What are you DOIN’?
”

Brikker moved swiftly. He slipped beside the control panel, although neither captive could know.

“
TwoSevenEightSeven,
” he said, saying it just like that. One simple word. He did not repeat himself.

“What … I … I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

The man in the chair looked at the woman—she cast him a helpless gaze that said,
There’s nothing you can do
—and then, eyes disbelieving, focused on the image of the man from Melbourne. He muttered something indiscernible, choking on his words, as if a small chunk of brick had been forced down his throat.

Brikker stepped toward the woman and stood just beyond the reach of the light. The blade of the knife slipped from the darkness, glistening.

“Shall we begin?”

~ 2

She surrendered a groan bent on acceptance. Tears streamed down her cadaverous face. Brikker was amazed she had any fluids left to give.

He raised the knife and turned it slowly, allowing the light to caress the virgin blade. He drew pause, grinning at the woman as if she were a fine cut of meat, and then, as if something had stirred his mind in a completely different direction, whisked round and retreated to the control panel. That dreaded click preceded the appearance of a new image, and when the physician emerged from the darkness where the wheelchair was, he stood cold, the blade at his side. The man was a lab coat. Shadows concealed his countenance, but when he crooked his head just so, just the way he did then, the light betrayed but a fleeting snapshot of humanity’s vileness: a sliver of dark lips curling up along pockmarked skin, a hint of yellow-brown teeth, barely an arc of eyepatch. It was there for an instant, if at all, like a face in the window you would swear had been there.

The man in the chair looked up at his captor. He had been staring, agape, at the grainy photograph of the stranger on the screen—shaved head, sunken eyes, thin scar on the right temple—and his lips began to quiver. For Ronald Jacobsen, that respectable self-employed trucker-slash-hustler out of Willow Springs, Missouri, a man who had a wife and three kids and a nice big Buick, a man who had put up with the looks and the laughter once his incredible story had hit the papers, a man who had tried to forget but could never
ever
forget, seeing the stranger again—younger, yes, perhaps ten years younger, but without a doubt the long-haired freak who had cheated him out of twenty bucks at stick—was akin to seeing a ghost.

Brikker heard the man’s thoughts. Saw them in his heart. They were practically clawing out of his throat in a scream.

The drifter who could do magic.

The good Doctor turned to the woman.

“That man … do you know him?”

She answered mechanically,
Yes,
as she had every time he had shown her the image.

“And his name?”

The woman wavered.

“I will not ask twice.”

Brikker moved deftly. He snared the man’s right hand and steadied the blade above the thumb. The prisoner barely had time to fathom what was happening before cold steel sawed through flesh and bone. Blood gushed in great gobs as his thumb plopped to the floor, and he was still screaming bloody murder when Brikker turned to the woman again.

“I don’t know it!
I DON’T! … I don’t …
” She broke off in sobs.

“Lieberman,” Brikker said coldly, raising his voice. He waited for the man’s seemingly interminable wails to subside. “You believe his name was Lieberman.”

“Yes, I … I … no.”

“Which is it?”

He readied the blade on the man’s index finger. Blood streamed from where the thumb had been; only a reddened stump of bone remained. The man pleaded with him. Pleaded with the woman.

“I don’t think it was Lieberman,” she cried, her voice nearly breaking.

“Thompson?”

“No.
NO.
”

Brikker relaxed the pressure of the blade. “Do you know how long you’ve been here, TwoSevenEightSix?”

Her eyes fell.

“Do you know how long you
could
be here?”

The tears had stopped, but more welled in her eyes. Small sacs of fear ready to burst.

Brikker sawed through the index finger. The screams were incredible.

“I will not tolerate
deceit.
” He had to shout.

He set the blade above the next digit and felt the cold skin of the man’s fleshy fingers. Brikker abhorred surgical gloves; his sharpened nails made wearing them uncomfortable, unwieldy at the fingertips, and that second skin had always reminded him of fish, horrid creatures he detested not only for their rancid taste but for their scaliness. Yet above all (and despite his severe distaste for the mess), there could be no substitute for the warmth of another’s lifeblood flowing along his flesh and seeping through his fingers. The experience was almost sexual, sublimely satisfying. Like skinning a cat. Like a good cigarette.

“After your … encounter … where did he go?”

The woman’s eyes were glistening now, falling to the human wreck in the chair. His eyes met hers and stayed, begging. Her lips trembled as she tried to utter something, anything, that might appease her captor.

Brikker mocked her. “I suppose he simply vanished off the face of the Earth?”

“Oh my God …
oh my God oh my God oh
—”

The screams were ever more violent this time.
Vibrant,
Brikker thought,
like a desert sunset
. He often took long walks at dusk, walking for hours across the parched Nevada earth until the stars were the only light to guide him. He would walk tonight.

“Perhaps an easier one, hmmm?” Brikker paused to consider. “Did he ever speak of his family?”

“What … what?”

“Did he speak of his parents? Of his grandfather?”

“No. No.”

The truth. He was certain. Smart girl.

Brikker stepped away from the wheelchair. Precise in movement, mechanical to a fault, he cleaned the blood from his hands with a flawless white cloth and deposited it in a receptacle. He summoned another image. The man in the chair appeared as if he recognized it—at some indefinable level, at least—but could only manage to acknowledge this with a dull groan of agony. The woman strained to study it, clearly uncertain of just what it was she was seeing.

~

“Do you know what this is?”

Brikker granted her a moment. After all, she had never seen this image before.

No one
had.

“No,” she said desperately, and said it again in a rush. “Please believe me.”

Restrained in the very same wheelchair, Kain Richards sat low in the frame, slightly off center toward the left. His head was shaved. Dark bruises ruined his face. He wore plain gray clothing. His feet were bare. His head was tipped back slightly, his eyes cold and black; he held two fingers to his right temple. He had been placed outdoors on a summer day, a wide expanse of grassless flatland reaching far beyond him. The distant sky was starkly ebony, dominated by a pair of whirling gray funnel clouds. It appeared to be rippling, like a bed sheet stirred by a subtle breeze. In fact, several parts of the image seemed slightly out of focus, as if they too were rippling … as if some ungodly force had distorted them, perhaps at some unnatural atomic level. That fine white powder had only begun to appear; the lens had captured its random emergence in three small areas. What might have been a military vehicle sat overturned in the distance, and whether it truck or tank was impossible to know. A small town loomed on the horizon, and a radio tower, miles closer than the town, lay in ruin. At the base of the tower, several bodies, soldiers, perhaps, lay in equal ruin. A man in military khakis stood several feet right of the prisoner operating a UniveX 8mm cine camera, yet despite his training and mental conditioning, had forgotten himself in the moment, shifting his head from the camera in disbelief. The photographer, the good Doctor Brikker who had taken this still, had been sloppy. The shadow of the tripod and the long reach of his own lay just inside the frame on the lower right of the image. But no matter. This was not for publication in
Life.

Taken in northeast Texas in 1953, where one hundred and eighty-two perished from recurring tornadoes (the official number; twenty-two military personnel were conveniently declared MIA in Korea to their families), the image very nearly ceased to exist. Like a false memory, photographs taken before a Turn went the way of everything else in the new timeline. The solution? Brikker had interrupted his test subjects on several occasions; strong injections had put them out cold. It had been difficult work capturing the images, timing had been critical. There seemed a fine edge where one could still physically function and where one couldn’t, and to get to Richards a mere instant too late would condemn those trapped within that incredible sphere of energy to the horrors of its wrath. With this photograph, Brikker had been exceedingly fortunate. He had never captured a Turn so late in its coming … that defining moment before hell on Earth.

“
Tell me what you have seen.
”

Brikker said this to the woman, not as request but as order, just as he placed the edge of the blade above the man’s next-to-last finger of the right hand. It was quite an unpleasant mess about, what with the fingers and blood; he would have the homosexual, Christensen, take care of it. And afterward, just because he could, he might place the queer in the chair.

“I don’t know what this is,” the woman said. Her eyes begged to be believed.

“Of course you do. Look at him. Look at his feet.”

The man in the wheelchair groaned. “I … I can help you.”

“
Can
you?”

Brikker severed the finger. The man screamed in a series of wild fits, and without emotion or hesitation, the physician moved the knife to the pinky, the way a master chef might move his blade to the next carrot.

“The feet,” Brikker demanded.

The woman squinted hard at the image.

“You’ve seen it before … haven’t you.”

“No … it’s a cloud … a cloud or something.”

“And where have you seen it?”

Her gaze turned to the man, a man she knew only as TwoSevenEightSeven. It held there, stilled like a frozen dream, and then, as if slamming a door to this hellish plane where white was black, she closed her eyes and seemed to drift within her own precious thoughts. As if doing so might somehow click her heels and place her back in Kansas.

Brikker grunted his displeasure. He retreated to his table of tools and slammed down the knife. He took up a large bottle containing some kind of caustic agent, unscrewed it, and proceeded to cauterize the gaping wounds of the man’s hand. There was a sharp hiss among the subsequent shrieks, shrieks that lasted well into minutes, and a lingering reek of charred flesh. He stewed silently in the dark, lighting up and ingesting the pleasing poisons of a cigarette, and when he finished, when the wailing had fallen to tolerable whimpers, took up the blade and moved swiftly to the
other
side of the chair.

“I’m afraid you won’t be shifting gears anymore,” he said. “Perhaps an automatic for you, hmmm?”

He set the blade above the man’s thumb and turned to the woman.

“You’ve seen the mist,” Brikker told her, and she opened her eyes obediently. He paused to study her. A wisp of a skeleton, she would surely break. He had considered she was telling the truth, that Richards
had
kept his secret from her, but there remained a burning question only she, and that demon, Richards, could know. He had asked her before, but she had given no cause to believe her. Even Richards was human, with all the frailties that came with it.

He asked her.

Her silence astonished him.

The first time he had asked—over four weeks ago—he had burned her six times with his cigarette. He had screamed at her in fury, burning her time and again, had very nearly come to killing her in his rage. He could feel it rising in him now, and at that moment, wondered if it felt that way in Richards when the Turn rose in him. Fire and ice, all at once. Something so powerfully wicked it terrified. And
seduced.

Uncharacteristically, he asked again.

The woman whimpered
No.

Brikker hacked off the thumb. In his rage, he did not saw it coolly and deliberately as he had the other digits; he chopped it in pieces. It refused to come off cleanly, enraging him further, and through every plea and every screech, he continued to hack at it with brutal strokes, until a crimson mash of flesh and bone slipped to the floor in sinewy rags.