He stopped and looked around, finally calling out. “Christie, kids?”
“They’re not here.”
He went up to Shana and wrapped a hand around her upper arm, squeezing. “Where the hell are they? Where’d they go?”
“Oh,
He squeezed harder.
“Starting to pinch, Jack.”
“Where the fuck is my family?”
“Not here, obviously. Wish you had accepted Ed’s offer. You could have such a good time here with us. Life, as they say, can be good.”
Jack’s other hand went to her throat. “I will ask you one more time, bitch—where is my
Her eyes moved slightly to the side. Jack sensed movement, then realized that she wasn’t alone in the room.
A stupid mistake on his part.
He released her arm, ready to grab the gun from his ankle holster, when a needle jabbed into the back of his neck.
“What?”
He spun around. A guard backing away, lowering his gun.
But already the syringe started to work.
Jack’s hand went to the back of his head, feeling the needle still sticking in there like a dart.
Looking forward, Shana turned blurry. No longer smiling. Her mouth open.
His last thought as he fell to the floor, and everything went black.
36
4:47 P.M.
Voices.
“Fuck it. We can eat, then come back and get to him. If Lowe lets us.”
Jack remembered the smell. He knew where he was. The charnel house, the cookery.
He wanted to open his eyes, but then those voices around him would know that he was conscious.
So he kept his head down, locked in the same position, his brain throbbing from whatever cocktail they had stuck into him.
One voice—the cook’s.
“C’mon, just leave that shit for now.”
Another voice, closer. “Think we can do it when we get back? Lowe won’t—”
Dunphy laughed. “Best not fucking guess what Lowe will or won’t do. Best you just shut up and cut when I say cut.
“Yeah. I … er … whatever you say.”
Another booming laugh from the cook.
Two of them. Leaving from the sound of it.
Jack tried to get a sense of what his situation was without any discernible movement.
On a hard back chair.
Hands tied tightly to the back. Another rope wrapped tightly around his chest. His feet pulled tight, each one tied to a chair leg.
Tied up, trussed, and ready to go.
He knew that the freezer was nearby.
He thought of Christie. The kids.
If they were … if they
Otherwise, he’d be dead already.
Lowe wouldn’t kill his only bargaining chip.
That’s what he told himself. The logic of it clear. But then other thoughts, a voice that said, does logic work here? Does logic and reason and empathy—does any of that human shit work in this hell?
“C’mon, asshole,” Dunphy barked one last time.
The sound of a door. A bit of air, then the air cut off. The door closing.
Jack sat there, head down. And waited.
Counting. To one thousand, so he would force himself not to rush.
Slowly, Jack opened his eyes, keeping his head in the same position.
The cookery came into view, his eyelids a slowly raising curtain.
Seeing it made the smells seem more intense.
Now to raise his head.
He did that slowly as well.
Until he had his head up and could look around at the place, turn his head and see the tables, now with fresh carcasses on them.
The angle bad. But one table had a larger body, an adult. The other, someone smaller.
Almost crying with the pitiful thought now.
He kept staring at the inert, partially dismembered bodies.
The adult. A woman. The shape round. Someone not too big, someone round.
Not Christie.
He thanked whatever had granted him his pleading wish.
Only then did he look over to the other table. A small body. Impossible to tell anything more than that.
Impossible from this chair.
For the next few seconds, his entire being focused on that one task, one that he refused to admit was impossible.
The chair stood near the table that had been his hiding place the night before.
A time that seemed weeks, months, a lifetime away.
He faced out, toward the main area of the cookery, facing the freezer.
He couldn’t turn and see behind him.
But he remembered crouching near here, and seeing the butcher’s knife on the floor.
Somehow a knife had slipped off the table and no one had seen it. Not in their alcohol haze, not with so many blades and saws arrayed on the walls of the room.
What’s one knife on the floor?
Would it still be there? No way to tell. Impossible for him to see.
He tried to think if he had other possibilities.
He had been tugging and wrenching at the ropes around his wrists. But they were tight; whoever had tied him up was competent. And the same went for the lashing of his feet to the chair legs.
