Already, she was cooling down.
Drenched through, the chill beginning to muscle in.
She couldn’t imagine walking back out into that freezing rain, but continuing on into this building, in complete darkness, seemed no better.
She crumpled down onto the floor, her sobs echoing down some corridor whose terminus she could not see.
Her son was at that monster’s mercy.
She’d killed two people in the last eight hours.
And the man she loved was in all likelihood going to be killed horribly.
By the time she’d gotten back on her feet, she was shivering violently, her fingers barely able to grasp the knife.
The skin behind her right ear sang with agony, blood still pouring down her neck.
She started forward into the black, one slow and shuffling step at a time, the knife outstretched in one hand, the other trailing along the wall. She kept thinking she’d suddenly see something, that the darkness would dissolve away, but it held.
Twenty steps.
Thirty.
Forty.
She stopped counting after a hundred.
Then the point of the knife touched something hard.
She stopped, reached forward.
A wall.
She’d come to a point where the corridor branched to the left.
Righting herself, she moved on, and ten steps later, the wall her fingers had been following came to an end.
She stopped and listened.
Water dripped in the distance and there was something above her now.
Sky.
Just the faintest orange tint of it.
The frame of the window sharpened into focus and in that weak light that filtered in, she saw that she stood in the ruins of a long, factory floor.
Her eyes pulling every possible detail out of the skylight.
Equipment everywhere.
The remnants of an assembly line.
Immense machines.
Broken-down robotic arms.
Conveyor belts that hadn’t moved in years.
She walked carefully down the line, glass crunching under her feet.
Her teeth chattering.
The smell of grease still prevalent.
The factory must have stretched two or three hundred yards from end to end, and as she neared the other side, she started seeing half-assembled cars on the conveyor belt—no wheels, no engine blocks, doorless, and all rusted into oblivion.
At the other end of the factory she stopped. Heard the rain falling on the roof fifty feet overhead.
She moved through a pair of double doors and before passing again into darkness, saw the first few steps of a metal stairwell in the shreds of light.
There was nothing to do but descend.
She gripped the wobbly railing and headed down.
Baby steps from stair to stair, her footfalls causing the metal to resonate.
She went down three landings before the stairs ended.
Standing once more in darkness—no light, no sound, not even the drip of water—and the smell of must and mold overwhelming. She staggered blind for three steps until the point of her knife touched a wall.
She coughed violently.
It took her several minutes to find her way out of the stairwell into another corridor.
She went on, the sense of disorientation growing stronger with every step, the pointlessness of this setting in: she was wandering in darkness in the lower levels of an abandoned building with not the faintest concept of where she was going, or that it might lead her to Luther and Max.
At the next break in the wall she moved through a doorway and out of the corridor.
She could go no further.
Whatever room she’d entered felt small and more confined based upon how it killed the echo of her coughing.
She walked into a table, then several steps later, some object that stood several inches taller than her and much wider.
A panel of glass.
Plastic buttons along the right side.
A vending machine.
This was a break room.
Violet crawled through the dark under one of the tables and unzipped her jacket, which she balled up into a sopping pillow.
She huddled there with her knees drawn into her chest, and it was a long time before she stopped shivering and longer still before her mind and body succumbed and sailed her off into sleep.
Andy
HIS voice was suddenly in my ear, but it wasn’t coming through the tiny speaker.
I could smell the lemon candy on his breath. The peculiar odor of Windex.
I hadn’t heard him enter this room, hadn’t heard his approach.
He’d simply materialized beside me.
“She ripped her earpiece out,” Luther whispered. “Now I have to go find her. This is okay. Not as planned, but okay. You’ve been wondering about the control in your right hand, no?”
I said nothing.
“It isn’t on yet, but it will be soon. I have this thing I’ve been dying to try out. Well, two of them actually. A his and a hers. I can tell you think you love Violet, but have you ever wondered how much? How deep it runs? I invented a way to tell. It answers a very primitive question, Andy—do you love the ones you love more than you fear incomprehensible pain? Is there a point where the pain becomes so all-consuming, that if you had the choice you’d shift the agony to the one you love most? We’ll know shortly.”
“Stop this,” I rasped, and there would have been tears in my eyes but for the severe dehydration.
“Andy, I’m giving her the chance to see what she’s capable of. To see the darkness in her heart and not turn away from it.”
A light clicked on, far overhead.
Luther held a spoon to my mouth.
“You’re going to need every bit of your strength,” he said. “Eat.”
It smelled like rancid apple sauce, but I was so hungry.
He fed me four bites out of the baby-food jar, and I had just begun to suspect that it wasn’t apple sauce after all, but some other putrid fruit or vegetable, spoiled beyond recognition, when he set the jar aside.
“Yum,” he said. “Right?”
I was fighting the urge to vomit.
“It’s amazing. What is it?” I asked.
“Beets.”
I threw up all over myself.
“That’s disgusting, Andy.”
“Honestly, Luther. Did you kill him?”
“Kill who?”
“Max. Her child.”
He just smiled.
I stared into his face for the first time in over a year. His hair was shorter than I remembered, only down to his shoulders, but still a coarse, pure black that held an unnatural, quasi-purple sheen, like the skin of a black snake. His face also shone with a preternatural paleness and his teeth were rotting. He popped a lemonhead into his mouth.
“I think it’s great that you’re writing again,” Luther said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Your manuscript. I found it in the cabin. I’m considering trying to get it published when I’m done with you. Good title, Desert Places. My only fear is that no one will believe what you went through if I try to pass it off as non-fiction. Wouldn’t make a bad potboiler though. Who was your agent?”
I just glared at him.
“Come on, Andy, this book could be huge. Set me up for life. Help me complete my renovations here. You’re a celebrity.”
“If I agree to help, will you let Violet go?”
“Oh, I’m sure I can come up with some other way to elicit your cooperation that’s fun for me. Speaking of...” He smiled, spit the white lemonhead pit across the floor. “We should give Violet a little help in finding us. This is a big factory, after all.”
Luther walked across the room toward a waist-high cart with a control panel on top the size of a laptop. On the side of the cart, a rack of tools had been mounted to the metal frame.
“I kidnapped this brilliant engineer,” Luther said over his shoulder. “He not only built and wired these chairs, but he was their first occupant. I’ve got plans for this entire place—there’s so much potential—but for now, meet my new toy.”