The Andrew Mayhem Collection

Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) copyright 2000 by Jeff Strand

Slightly revised version copyright 2011 by Jeff Strand

Single White Psychopath Seeks Same copyright 2001 by Jeff Strand

Slightly revised version copyright 2011 by Jeff Strand

Casket For Sale (Only Used Once) copyright 2004 by Jeff Strand

Slightly revised version copyright 2011 by Jeff Strand

Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to "Shirley") copyright 2011 by Jeff Strand

All cover design by Lynne Hansen http://www.LynneHansen.com

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the author.

For more information about the author, visit http://www.JeffStrand.com

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GRAVEROBBERS WANTED

(NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY)

Author's Note

Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) was written in the late 90's and first published in 2000. That is why there are references to silly things like pagers and VHS tapes.

CHAPTER ONE

"I’m not going to tell you kids again to knock it off! If I have to turn this car around and cancel my stakeout, there’ll be no TV for the rest of the month!"

"It's July twenty eighth. The month’s almost over," said my daughter Theresa with a grin. She's been alive for eight years, and been a smart-ass for six-and-a-half of them.

"Don't be cute. Now I want you to behave yourselves. I bought you nice new coloring books and crayons, so use them!"

"Can I color on Kyle?" asked Theresa.

"No you may not."

"Even if I stay inside the lines?"

That didn't even make sense, but I didn't call her out on it. My wife Helen says that Theresa takes after me, and as happens more times than I can count, she's right. That’s why I try to let Helen handle as much of the child raising as possible. It's for the good of society.

"I’m not going to tell you again," I warned. Then I used language I shouldn't be using in front of children (at least, children with a tendency to repeat colorful phrases in front of their mother) as I realized that I’d just missed my turn. "Okay, that’s it. Tomorrow morning both of you are being shipped off to that munitions factory in darkest Peru."

"I didn’t do anything!" Kyle, my six-year-old, protested.

"Then you get to go to the factory where they’ll feed you every few days. Your sister has to scrounge up bugs."

If Helen were around, she'd have said something like "You’re only encouraging them." But she wasn’t here. This was a very good thing, considering that I was about to dump my children off with my irresponsible friend Roger Tanglen while I went to videotape an adulterous husband in the act. While I’ll admit that I'm not always the best judge of what activities Helen will and won’t approve of, this seemed like an above-average candidate for the "won’t" category.

But there was nothing else I could do. Helen was working at the hospital, and the babysitter canceled at the last second for an emergency appointment with her palm reader. So if I wanted to obtain proof that Jake Ballard was misbehaving with a woman three cup sizes too large to be his wife, I had to do something with the kids. Roger worked weekend shift as a customer service representative for a crappy airline and had nothing to do during the week except play computer games, so he was readily available.

I guess I could have postponed the job, but I desperately needed the money. I don't want to bore you with the details and reduce your opinion of me this early in the narrative, but suffice it to say that there'd recently been an event that involved the expiration of my car insurance, the accidental smashing-into of a very nice automobile, a frantic deal with the owner of the very nice automobile, and a wife who didn't know anything about it.

My kids were quiet for the rest of the drive, which was impressive even though it only lasted another three minutes. I pulled into a parking space in front of Roger's first floor apartment.

"I won’t be gone more than an hour," I said.

"Kyle’s a pig," Theresa informed me.

"He's not a pig. Now, if you’re both good, we'll go out for ice cream when I get done, okay?"

"Hooray!" shouted Kyle.

"I want both of you to try not to act like wild monkeys while you're with Roger. He likes his boring life."

"Kyle really is a pig, Daddy."

"I am not!" Kyle insisted. I was inclined to agree with him, since he was probably the thinnest first-grader at Chamber Elementary, but sisterly insults don’t require a strong adherence to logic.

"Yes you are. You’re a big snorty pig." Theresa made some amazingly skillful snorting sounds at him. Kyle began making snorting sounds back. It was a snorting extravaganza the likes of which I'd never heard.

"If I hear one more snort you can forget about ice cream," I said, raising my voice to what passed for Very Stern Daddy mode. "I have to get going, so please be good."

Theresa’s expression turned serious. "I’ll be good, Daddy. I was just playing."

"Thank you. That’s what Daddy likes to hear. Now give me a kiss."

After dropping them off with Roger, I drove out of the apartment complex and ten minutes later turned onto Webster Street. Webster Street is one of the nicer areas in Chamber, which is one of the nicer towns in Florida. It has about thirty-five thousand people, a couple of decent movie theatres, a bookstore where the owner calls me whenever a new Flip the Weasel cartoon collection comes out, nice schools, nice parks, nice restaurants, and a guy who mutters memorable television quotes while wandering the streets giving the finger to unsuspecting motorists. If you’re ever looking to relocate, you could do much worse.

As I passed the residence of Mr. Ballard, I noted that the only car in the driveway was a red Pontiac Grand Prix. So the Whoremobile (as Mrs. Ballard lovingly referred to it) hadn’t arrived yet, and wouldn’t for another fifteen minutes if his mistress kept to her lunch hour tryst schedule.

I drove four more blocks down and parked my car at the end of the street. I'd bought it a few years ago, and it was exactly like the sleek black convertible I’d always wanted in college, except that it was gray, boxy, had a roof that wouldn’t convert, a smashed front end, a floor covered with about an inch-thick layer of candy wrappers, and "Wash Me!" written in the dirt on the back windshield.

After scooping up Helen's video camera, I got out of the car and began to jog, cutting through a few backyards until I stood behind the Ballard residence. There were a couple of trees, one of which contained a treehouse that looked like I could bring it crashing to the ground by spitting on it. According to Mrs. Ballard, if I hid in this treehouse I'd have a perfect vantage point of the bedroom window where the escapades were to occur.

I glanced around to make sure nobody was looking, put the camera strap around my neck, and climbed the rickety ladder up into the treehouse. It was well-stocked with comic books, soda cans, and a custom-made Quadriplegic Barbie. Returning my attention to the bedroom window, I looked through the eyepiece of the camcorder and saw that as long as they didn’t close the curtain I was indeed going to have a great seat for the show.

About a quarter after twelve I heard a car pull into the driveway. About two minutes after that I saw Mr. Ballard burst into the bedroom with a certain "vicious, backstabbing, silicone-addicted slut" who was already half-naked. I began videotaping, feeling like an amateur pornographer. Not that that's such a bad feeling.

They were on the bed in no time, and decided to make my job even easier by staying on top of the covers. In the amount of time it takes me just to fumble out of my shoes, they were going at it. Good Lord were they going at it. The acrobatics involved were stunning, and both of them had to be double-jointed. I couldn’t believe I was witnessing actual human bodies accomplishing these miracles of flexibility. It was like a combination of performance art and freak show.

I've always been in pretty good physical shape, but this display made me feel woefully inadequate; a sexual doofus. Maybe on the way home I’d pick up some literature on the subject.

The problem is that while I was staring slack-jawed at the astounding feats taking place in the bedroom, I was neglecting other important elements in the situation, such as the three angry-looking guys who were now standing at the bottom of the tree.

"See anything good?" asked one of them.

I was so surprised that I dropped the camera. I let out a cute little noise, something like "Uugghck," as the strap did its best to strangle me. I got things quickly under control, but my upper hand on the situation was effectively shot to hell.

"Hello, gentlemen," I said, leaning out of the treehouse and trying to salvage a bit of dignity in my voice. "This is official business, so I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave the area."

The guys shared an amused look. "Which position are they in?" asked the one who’d previously inquired as to whether I was seeing anything good. He looked like he should be named Biff, so that's what I'll call him.

I shrugged. "Hard to say. It changes every few seconds." I had the evidence I needed, so I figured my best plan of action was to climb down and see if I could reason with these guys. Maybe offer them each a copy of the tape, after I added a classy soundtrack.

After I reached the ground, I realized that these guys were much larger seen up close. One of them was kind of skinny (I'll call him Winslow) and I could have possibly taken either of the more athletic guys one at a time, but if I had to fight all three I was in pretty big trouble.

They were all in their late thirties, about the same age as Mr. Ballard, so there was a good chance they were friends of his and not merely concerned citizens. "Okay, okay, you caught me," I said. "You probably think that I’m some kind of--"

Obviously they weren’t particularly interested in what I thought they thought I was, because the guy who wasn't Biff or Winslow (let's call him Hector) punched me in the gut. I doubled over and made another uugghck sound. Biff grabbed me by the shoulders and slammed me against the tree, while Winslow yanked the camera off my neck. He began to swing the strap over his head, lasso-style.

"You guys really ought to give me back the camera and let me go," I warned. "I’m a private investigator for the top law firm in the state. I can sic every lawyer in Chamber and its neighboring communities on your butts."

I was lying, of course. Not only was I not a private investigator for the top law firm in Florida, but I wasn't a private investigator at all. Though I thought it would be cool to be an official, fully licensed detective, at the moment I was nothing more than a friend of a friend of a friend being paid to make a dirty video. And if I didn't get the camera back, I wouldn't even be that.

"Do you want to guess how much that scares us?" asked Winslow, while Hector hit the tree with my body again.

"Ummm...more than getting a mosquito bite, less than total nuclear annihilation?"

Hector bashed me against the tree yet again. I was getting a little tired of that.

Then Biff punched me in the face, knocking me to the ground. This was substantially less comfortable than being bashed against the tree, and my ability to think up amusing comments temporarily disappeared.

I winced as Winslow swung the camera a couple more times, then let it hit the tree. Fragments of plastic, glass, and videotape sprayed everywhere.

"Ow, crap! A piece got my eye!" Winslow yelped, staggering away with his hands against his face.

"That was my wife's camera!" I shouted.

Biff slapped Winslow hard on the side of the head. "You jerk! We could’ve sold that thing! What’s the matter with you?" He slapped him again, knocking him to his knees.

Hector yanked me to my feet. "We don’t want to see your sorry butt around here ever again. You leave Jake alone. He’s got enough problems dealing with that frigid wife of his. If we catch you again, we’ll twist your legs off with a spoon. Got it?"

Though I couldn’t envision the actual process of twisting one’s legs off with a spoon, I nodded anyway. He punched me in the face once more just to show that he could, and then informed me that I was permitted to leave.

I walked back to my car, lacking a spring in my step or a song in my heart. I'd really needed the money from this job, and not just because of my little uninsured car accident. We weren’t going to end up on the streets or anything; Helen was a registered nurse, and her salary took care of most of the bills. But while she was semi-supportive of my decision to quit doing clerical temp work and try to earn money without getting a Real Job, her semi-support wasn't going to last much longer if I continued bringing home little or nothing in the way of actual income.

I returned to Roger's place and rang the doorbell. "Daddy! What happened?" asked Theresa as she opened the door.

"Nothing, sweetheart. Daddy just fell out of a tree."

"Are you okay? Do you need to go see Mommy at the hospital?"

"No, no, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. All Daddy needs right now is a kiss."

I received kisses from both of my children, as well as a painful hug from Theresa, though I was manly enough not to shriek.

"I'll be out in a second," called Roger from the library, which also functioned as the bathroom.

"No rush, we've got to get going," I said. "I'll hook up with you later." Preferably after my face healed, so he wouldn't be able to give me any grief about coming in fourth in the fight.

"Where’s the movie camera?" asked Kyle, after we got back in the car.

"It’s all over the place. Don’t worry about it. Now who wants ice cream?"

* * *

Helen came in around ten o’clock, while I sat in our bedroom reading a horror novel called Whose Heart is in My Popcorn? Characterization was a bit thin, but boy could that woman write dismemberments.

"Hi," I said. "How was work?"

"Work was fine," said Helen, remaining in the doorway. She’s a small woman, barely five-two, with straight brown hair and a plethora of freckles. With her thick glasses, she has a bookwormish, almost owlish look that in no way reveals the "screwing with me would be a bad, bad idea" attitude that rockets through her soul.

"That’s good. My day was fine too."

"I’m happy to hear it. Any special reason for that huge bruise on your face?"

I closed the book. "Oh, did that leave a mark?"

Helen folded her arms over her chest. Damn. Not a good sign. I was going to have to work quickly if I was going to get out of this without seeing The Gaze.

"Sweetheart, normally upon coming home and seeing my husband with an ugly bruise on his face, I would give you a hug and ask what I could do to make it better." Helen shifted a bit, and I knew I was going to get The Gaze. I just knew it. "However, I could tell from the second I saw you that you’re feeling guilty about something, and you know darn well you’ve got a bruise. So what happened?"

"It was nothing, really," I said, then cringed inwardly. Error! Error! A statement like that was a guarantee of receiving The Gaze. I was doomed!

Helen frowned and, yes, fixed me with The Gaze. It was a horrible look, a look that simultaneously said "I know perfectly well that you’re lying, Andrew R. Mayhem," and "You’re not going to have any degree of sex until you tell me the truth."

"Andrew, what happened?"

"It was just a punch," I said, standing up. "Well, two of them. Nothing to get upset about."

"And what exactly did you do to cause yourself to get punched?"

"Someone got annoyed because I was doing a little videotaping. No big deal. These things happen. And expensive cameras sometimes get broken, too. Can’t be helped."

Helen finally left her spot in the doorway and sat down on the bed next to me. "What were you videotaping?"

"Something for a friend. An athletic event."

"Andrew..."

I really wished I could lie to her. Make that, I really wished I could lie to her without getting caught. "I was videotaping a guy cheating on his wife. No big deal."

"Cheating on your wife isn't a big deal?"

Ouch, major point deduction there. "No, no, of course it's a big deal, but my taping it wasn't."

"It was a big deal if you got beat up because of it. What if the guy you were videotaping had chased after you with a shotgun? What then?"

"Believe me, if I’d thought there was any chance of me being chased by a lunatic with a shotgun, or any other large firearm, or even a chainsaw, I wouldn't have done it."

"Don’t make jokes," said Helen.

"I wasn’t making a joke."

"The chainsaw part was a joke. Don’t do that. This is serious."

"I’m sleeping on the couch tonight, aren’t I?"

Helen sighed. "Andrew, you know I'm trying to be supportive of you while you figure out what you want to do with your life. If you want to form a rock band, or become an actor, or a Hollywood stunt man, or a cartoonist, or an archeologist, or a professional baseball player, or any of the other things you've dumped after two weeks, I'm standing by you. But I don't want you getting involved in stuff like taking illegal videos of people cheating on their spouses! I just don't!"

"Got it. I’m sorry." I looked at the floor and felt suitably ashamed. If I'd gotten inside the treehouse earlier, the guys probably wouldn't have seen me, and none of this would have happened. This was all that stupid babysitter's fault for canceling on me. The next time we hired her the little brat was going to find her unlimited access to Popsicles cut off.

"Good. And now that we’ve put that behind us, let me make you all better."

CHAPTER TWO

About a week later, Wednesday night, I was sitting in The Blizzard Room with Roger. We sat in the back corner of the coffee shop, discussing such weighty topics as why we bothered to keep coming to the Blizzard Room.

"The coffee isn't all that great," I said, using my fingers to mark the number of negative points being made. "The service is slow and surly. There's a disturbing non-coffee smell in the air. There's not a table in the entire place that doesn't rock when you touch it." I touched the table, causing it to rock. "Why do we come here instead of someplace masculine, like a bar?"

"Because we're both deeply lame human beings. And I can smoke here."

"You quit."

"I like having options." Roger took a sip of his double mocha latte. I've known him since seventh grade, when we regularly sat next to each other in detention. In the years since then we'd alternated between me getting him in trouble and him getting me in trouble. We even roomed together in college, where he majored in psychology and I at various times majored in theatre, art history, creative writing, popular culture, and (on a dare) women's studies.

While I'm tall and of average build, Roger is short and slightly pudgy. His hair started saying adios, sucker! around the time he turned twenty-two, and his nose takes up much more than its share of facial surface area. Despite that, he's never had any problems attracting women, not with those sapphire blue, soulful, "awwwww, he's so adorable" eyes. I've always been jealous of his eyes. My eyes are kind of a dingy brownish color. It's really not fair.

In fact, it looked like Roger's eyes were getting him attention once again. A gorgeous blonde was doing a terrible job of pretending that she wasn't staring at us. Roger noticed this and waved to her. She smiled, picked up her coffee, and walked over to our table.

"Mind if I join you?" she asked.

"Not at all," said Roger.

As the woman sat down, Roger stuck out his hand. "Roger Tanglen. This is my friend Andrew Mayhem. He's extremely married."

I shot him a "shut the hell up" look, even though I'm far too married to even consider trying anything. It still would have been nice to see if she'd hit on me, even if I couldn't accept her advances. I hope that doesn't sound too pathetic.

"Pleased to meet you, Roger and Andrew. I'm Jennifer Ashcraft. Mind if I smoke?"

"Of course not. Here, I'll join you," offered Roger, whipping out a pack of cigarettes and offering her one. She took it and let him light it for her with his very cool koala bear lighter. (It's a lighter in the shape of a koala bear, not a lighter used for igniting koala bears, in case there was any confusion.)

Jennifer looked to be in her early thirties, with long wavy hair and a face that neither had nor required any makeup. She wore jeans and a black blouse that fit very tightly and seemed designed to send the message "Hey, everyone, we've got nudity under here!"

"You two look like nice, strong men," she said, glancing around to see if anyone was listening. "Would you say you consider yourselves open to new experiences?"

"Yes," said Roger, too quickly.

She stared me right in the eye. "And you?"

I made a play of scratching my forehead so that my wedding ring was blatantly visible, in case she'd missed Roger's "extremely married" comment. "Uh, yeah, sometimes."

"Good." She opened her pocketbook and removed an envelope. "Inside this envelope is five hundred dollars. What I’m going to ask is very unusual, and you may not want to do it. If you decide not to accept, the five hundred dollars is for you to forget all about me. Deal?"

"Sounds great," I said. "I’ll just pretend you were my algebra lessons in high school."

Roger glared at me as if my sparkling wit might scare her off. "What do you want us to do?"

She leaned forward confidentially. "I want you to dig up my husband's grave."

Roger and I simultaneously leaned forward as well. "I beg your pardon?" I asked.

"My husband was buried last night, and I want you to dig up the coffin."

It was clear from Roger's expression that he considered this task quite a bit less appealing than wild kinky sex. "You’re kidding, right?"

She shook her head. "I’m completely serious."

"Is this the kind of thing you usually ask people in coffee shops?" I inquired. "This isn't Andrew and Roger's Discount Graverobbing Emporium."

"I told you it was unusual."

"And you were damn right."

"Is this a no?"

I hesitated. "It's kind of a no, but it's the sort of no where I acknowledge that you haven't discussed payment yet. I seem to have left my exhumation price list at home." I hoped "exhumation" was the right word and that I didn't sound like an ass.

"Twenty thousand dollars."

Roger and I glanced at each other. That was incredible money for what basically amounted to an evening of illegal manual labor. It would more than buy Helen a new video camera and pay off the car damages...

No, no, what was I thinking? This was graverobbing! This was ghoulish behavior! This was sick, sick, sick! This could put me in jail or in an asylum. The best thing--no, the only thing--to do was tell Jennifer we were flattered she’d thought of us to fulfill her disinterment needs, but that we had to pass.

"Twenty thousand cash?" I asked.

"Of course."

"Answer this important question: Do you want your husband dug up for some sort of unholy ritual? Because I don’t do unholy rituals."

Jennifer smiled. "Don’t worry, there’s no witchcraft involved."

"And I don’t do college-style pranks, either. If you want him dug up to leave in the passenger seat of your mother-in-law’s car, find somebody else."

"I don't know, that might be kind of funny," said Roger. "If I had a mother-in-law."

"Shut up, Roger."

"It’s nothing like that," said Jennifer. "The body will never leave the coffin."

"Why, then? If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look all that upset for somebody whose husband just passed away."

"You’re very perceptive."

"Well, I have to warn you that after what happened to me last week I'm a little burned out on the whole pissed-off spouse thing," I said. "So tell me why you want this done."

Jennifer gave a casual shrug. "He had a key with him when he was buried. I want the key. Simple as that."

I guess that was quite a bit less weird than other possible reasons for wanting her husband dug up, though the idea still wasn't especially thrilling. "Where is it, in his pocket?"

"Maybe. It could be anywhere. It could be in his mouth, for all I know."

"In his mouth? You want us to reach inside a corpse’s mouth? And maybe even touch a dead tongue?"

"Are you turning down the job?"

"I still haven’t said that." I looked at Roger to see if he had said that. He hadn't. He was just sitting there looking confused. "How long do you think it takes a dead tongue to dry out?" I asked.

"I have no idea. Now do you want the job or not?"

"I have a couple thousand more questions first. Such as, I’m not an expert in the field, but aren’t caskets meant to be permanently sealed? Wouldn’t I need to bring along a jackhammer or something?"

"Cheap pine box. Shallow grave. Well-hidden area. A park, actually."

I stared at her for a long moment. "Not to be rude, but I find that a little disconcerting."

"I didn’t murder my husband."

"I never would have dreamed otherwise. How did he die?"

"Suicide. And I’d rather not discuss it."

"Fair enough. May I ask why he's lying in a cheap pine box in a shallow grave in a well-hidden area of a park rather than a state-approved casket in a designated graveyard burial site?"

"I'd rather not discuss that, either."

"Okay, how about an easier question. Why did you pick us?"

Jennifer smiled. "I've done my research." She glanced at her wristwatch and sighed. "Listen, I know men hate having to make a commitment, but I'm going to need one right now. Do you want the job?"

Twenty thousand dollars. Well, ten thousand for me. Plus the chance to add something new to my resume. But in terms of eliciting Helen's fury, it had the potential of making the videotaping debacle look like passing out toys to doe-eyed orphans at Christmas.

And yeah, I really needed the money, but spending time in jail for graverobbing would really look bad on a job application.

Ah, screw it. What's life without risk?

"What do you think?" I asked Roger. "It would pay for that trip to Vegas you've been wanting to take."

"Ummm...all right." Roger was never big on the concept of independent thought.

"Okay, Jennifer, you've got yourself a pair of graverobbers."

* * *

Helen was working night shift, and the kids spent every Wednesday night during the summer with Helen's parents. I love my in-laws and they tolerate me, but sending the kids over there on a weekly basis was most certainly not my idea. Have you ever tried to discipline children who've been allowed to stay up as late as they want and do whatever they want and whose blood sugar invariably tests six times over the legal definition of "wired?" It doesn't work.

However, not having my wife or kids around meant that I wouldn't have to be home until 6 A.M. Roger and I got in Jennifer's sleek silver sedan and went for a forty-five minute drive, during which she kept the radio volume loud and was unresponsive to our questions.

We ended up in Fleet Park, which is a decent little place located up north, in an area generally known as "way the hell out in the boondocks." Jennifer stopped her car in front of the closed gate and shut off the engine.

"So, are you boys ready?"

She was trying to maintain the casual attitude she'd had in the Blizzard Room, but it was starting to falter. Probably had a little to do with the whole digging up her dead husband thing.

I have to admit, I was feeling a bit queasy myself. "I guess so."

She reached down and pulled the trunk release lever, then handed me a folded piece of paper. "You'll find shovels, lanterns, working gloves, and beer in the back. These instructions will show you how to find where he was buried. It's about a mile away, and you'll have to cross through some thick brush. Oh, and there's also a snakebite kit in the cooler, just in case."

"That's very thoughtful," Roger said. "Aren't you coming with us?"

"If I didn't have a problem being near my husband's corpse, I wouldn't have hired you two." She handed Roger a cellular phone. "My beeper number is written on the instructions. Page me when you're done, and I'll be back to pick you up. Now go dig him up, get the key, rebury the grave just as you found it, and come back here. Then you'll get your money."

* * *

We climbed over the gate with no problem and then we were on a dirt path most of the time, so the walk wasn't so bad, except for the fact that Roger made me carry the cooler. After we had to step off the path and walk through moist brush, the fear of disturbing one of the numerous varieties of Florida snakes made things a little less pleasant, but we hurried through without encountering anything more fearsome than an armadillo. Though to be honest, the armadillo scared the hell out of us.

The grave was in a small clearing. Though the site wasn't marked with anything helpful like a sign reading "Dead Guy Below," the freshly turned dirt made it obvious that we were in the right place.

I set down the cooler and sighed. "Well, Roger, this is our last chance to wuss out. We're graverobbing for a woman who probably murdered her husband. Think it's worth the money?"

"I don't know. Let's not even think about it. Let's just dig."

* * *

The dirt wasn't difficult to move, and the digging went fairly quickly, though compared to professional graverobbers we were probably embarrassingly slow and lazy. About half an hour later, at approximately the stroke of midnight, we'd unearthed an area about two feet deep. Roger leaned against a tree, finishing a beer as he took his fourth break for the evening. He put the empty can back in the cooler. We may violate burial sites, but damn it, we don't litter.

"And so resumes the twenty-third annual Fleet Park Graverobbing Competition," Roger announced, using the handle of his shovel like a microphone. "It looks like our champion, Andrew Mayhem, is currently leading in the dirt removal process, but can he sustain such an incredible pace?"

"You're pretty cheerful for somebody digging up a coffin," I muttered. "Correction, you're pretty cheerful for somebody sitting on his butt watching me dig up a coffin."

"I'm not sitting, I'm standing."

"Shut up. You've been spending too much time around my daughter. Get in here and help me dig so we can get this over with. You may not be aware of this little tidbit of information, but if we get caught we're screwed."

I pushed down on the shovel, and heard a dull thud sound. "And he strikes casket!" Roger broadcast. "The crowd goes wild!" He mimicked a crowd going wild as I crouched down and began to push dirt away with my hands.

"Who the hell would drag a heavy coffin all the way out here?" I wondered aloud. "Why not just bury him in a garbage bag or something?"

"That would be disrespectful," Roger pointed out.

In a couple of minutes, I'd exposed half of the coffin lid. The only thing holding it closed was a padlock, which wasn't going to withstand a good smack with my shovel. I lifted the shovel to do just that, when Roger suddenly tensed.

"Did you hear that?"

"What?"

"I think somebody's coming! Hide!"

Roger hurriedly pressed himself against the tree, while I got down on my stomach and hid from sight in the grave. It occurred to me that if this was the police, and they found me lying facedown on a coffin at midnight, I'd be going away for a long, long time.

We waited.

Silence.

A couple of minutes passed.

"Maybe I was wrong," said Roger, stepping away from the tree.

I stood back up, brushing off my shirt, and gave him what I deemed to be a suitably dirty look. "Just for that, you're the one searching the corpse for the key. Put on the gloves."

"Let me give that idea full consideration before I reject it," said Roger. He pretended to think for a moment. "Okay, now I've rejected it."

"If we're dividing the money equally, we should divide the duties equally. And since I've done about seven-eighths of the digging, I think it's only fair that you should have to reach into a corpse mouth if it becomes necessary."

Roger shook his head. "Weren't you an archaeology major for a couple weeks? You should have no problem handling dead things."

"I'll flip you for it," I said, taking a quarter out of my pocket. "Call it in the air." I flipped the coin into the air.

"Heads."

I caught it. "Tails," I lied.

"You're lying."

"No I'm not," I lied again.

"Rock, Paper, Scissors," Roger suggested. "It's the only fair way."

"Oh, yeah, real fair. Like I haven't seen you make your selection juuuuuuuust a bit late before."

"How about we both search together?"

"Sure. Why don't we call in some friends, make a group project out of it?"

I picked up the shovel, lifted it above the padlock, and brought it down as hard as I could. There was a loud clang as the padlock broke.

"Now," I said, "I'm going to open this coffin, and one of us is going to have to get the key. I'll make you a deal. I'll get the key if you mow my--"

A bullet fired upward through the lid of the coffin, nearly grazing my ear. With a surprised yelp I leapt out of the grave as two more gunshots fired from within the coffin, splintering the lid.

Roger dove for cover. "What the hell?"

Then there was loud screaming. It sounded like attempts at words, but they were completely incoherent. As I scrambled out of the way of any more potential shots, whomever was inside began to pound on the lid.

Another gunshot.

More screaming.

And then I heard the lid fly open.

CHAPTER THREE

Michael Ashcraft--if this was him--sat up with the loudest shriek yet. He looked about thirty, with black hair that stuck out like a fright wig. His eyes were open wide, as he swung the revolver around wildly. He squeezed off another shot, but was obviously just firing at random, not trying to hit anything.

"Calm down! You're going to be all right!" I assured him, feeling oh-so incredibly stupid as I said it.

Michael's screams stopped and he began writhing back and forth, whimpering. Being buried alive is obviously not conducive to good mental health. Roger and I remained motionless for a long moment, unable to do anything but watch.

Finally I spoke up. "Michael, can you hear me?"

He began to violently jerk his head from side to side while speaking gibberish. He slammed the barrel of the revolver against the side of his head, but I couldn't tell if it was a suicidal impulse or an insane reflex.

"Listen to me, Michael," I said. "We’re here to help you."

He continued bashing the revolver against his skull. I flinched with each blow, but kept my voice calm. "Michael, can you understand what I'm saying? Stop beating the shit out of yourself if you can understand what I'm saying."

Michael dropped the revolver. Blood trickled from the lacerations he'd given himself. He made a sound that was either laughter or sobbing--I couldn't tell.

He looked at me. That is, he turned his head toward me, though his eyes remained wild and unfocused.

"Who did this to you?" I demanded.

He resumed shrieking.

"Michael, who did this to you?" I repeated, even though I could barely hear myself over his screams. He continued like that for another thirty seconds or so, then died down and began to whimper again.

"We need to get out of here," Roger whispered.

"We can't just leave him like this," I insisted. "You go get Jennifer, I'll stay here and see if I can get through to him."

"Think he has any more bullets in that gun?"

Michael lifted his hands and rubbed his eyes. I could see that his fingers were raw and bloody, the nails cracked, and a quick glance at the bottom of the coffin lid revealed that it was covered with deep scratches that hadn't even come close to breaking through. Once again he started in with those cringe-inducing screams.

Then, without warning, he curled his fingers into claws and ripped out his own eyes.

"Jesus!" Roger gasped.

My stomach gave a horrible lurch as I jumped up and rushed over to the grave. Michael's head lolled back, bloody sockets glistening, and he almost looked as if he were going to smile. Then he collapsed.

I could barely bring myself to touch him for fear that he might spring back to life, grabbing for my throat, but I worked up the courage to reach down to his wrist and check for a pulse. There was none. His heart probably gave out.

Roger's hand was pressed tightly over his mouth and I actually expected him to burst into tears. He just sat there, trembling.

"He's dead," I told him.

Roger gave an almost imperceptible nod.

"What do you think we should do?" I asked.

"I don't know."

I really needed something to drink. I walked over to the cooler and grabbed a beer. My motor skills weren't at their best, and it took me three tries to open it. I took a long gulp, draining most of the can. "Should we ditch Jennifer and call the cops?"

Roger shrugged.

"We need to decide something. Now, if we call the police, we're going to have some big-time explaining to do. And if we tell them what really happened, even if they don't accuse us of trying to kill him we're still in serious trouble."

"We'll have to lie to them."

"And say what? That we just happened to be passing through the park with our digging supplies when we heard a lunatic screaming underground and decided to give him a helping hand?"

"We could say...we could say...I don't know what we could say. Leave me to my nervous breakdown, okay?"

I cracked my knuckles. "We need to cover this up, literally. We need to rebury him. And then find out for ourselves what the hell is going on."

"We know what's going on! That freaky chick buried her husband alive!"

"Maybe. But why would she have us dig him up?"

"She probably thought he'd be dead by now."

I shook my head. "Why would she need us to get the key if she was the one who buried him? It doesn't make any sense."

"There may not even be a key! This whole thing could have been an assassination attempt on us!"

"Oh, sure. I know if I wanted to kill somebody there's no better way to do it than hire him to dig up a coffin holding an insane guy packing heat. C'mon, Roger, we have to be logical."

"I'm sorry, it's just that my sense of logic gets messed up when I watch somebody rip out his freakin' eyeballs! Jesus Christ! Can you imagine what it's gotta be like to be buried alive like that?"

I was trying not to. I closed my eyes for a few seconds to clear my thoughts, and then took a deep breath. Oxygen was usually beneficial in situations like these. "Okay, the first thing we have to do is search the body."

"You search the body."

"Fine. I'll search the body. You keep an eye out for anybody who might be coming to investigate."

I took another deep breath, then jumped down into the foot of the coffin. I tried to avoid looking at Michael's ruined face, but I didn't have anything to cover it with except dirt, and throwing dirt on the poor guy's face just seemed wrong.

The first thing I did was pick up the revolver and set it outside of the grave. What possible reason could he have for holding a gun? I tried to envision a scenario in which he'd been trying to kill somebody, who'd buried him alive in self-defense, but couldn't.

Okay, that wasn't important now. I needed to find that key, if it existed. I knelt down, knees wobbling a bit, and began to pat Michael's jeans pockets. The left pocket felt empty. The right pocket had something in it. It didn't feel like a key, but it could be a clue.

I slipped my fingers inside the pocket, still unable to shake the eerie feeling that Michael could lurch at me at any moment. With my other hand I checked his pulse again to be sure. Still dead.

I got a hold of what was inside his pocket. A piece of paper. I pulled it out and saw that it was the best kind of paper: cash. A twenty dollar bill. A perfectly normal thing to have in his pocket. I shoved it back inside, not wanting to steal anything from the dead that wasn't absolutely necessary. Yeah, yeah, I know that defiling a grave is much worse for the ol' karma than stealing twenty bucks, but I didn't want to push it.

Slowly, I unzipped his jacket, thankful that no blood had spilled anywhere I needed to touch. I opened it and checked each of the inside pockets, finding a stack of about ten business cards held together with a brass clip. In oozing red letters were the words "Ghoulish Delights. Michael Ashcraft, director," along with an address and phone number. I pocketed the cards, and then closed his jacket.

I grabbed hold of Michael by the waist and rolled him over. His neck made a sickening sort of cracking sound as something twisted that shouldn't have.

Once Michael was on his stomach, I patted his back pockets and found nothing, not even a wallet. Damn. With all the pockets searched, I was going to have to move on to less appealing possibilities.

But not his mouth yet.

I stood up. "I need your help," I told Roger. "I'm going to lift him up, and you look to see if the key is lying underneath him."

Roger walked over and crouched down next to the edge of the grave. I grabbed the top of Michael's jeans and grunted as I lifted him up, his body doubling over at the waist.

"Nothing there," said Roger.

I gently lowered Michael, and then sighed. "I don't know what to do. I'm not going to strip the guy naked to find this stupid key."

"Good. Let's get out of here," Roger suggested.

"Not quite yet." I bent down again and pulled up the left leg of Michael's jeans, exposing his white tube sock. Nothing hidden there. I untied his tennis shoe, set it aside, and removed his sock. Still nothing except for some blatant evidence that toenail hygiene had not been a major part of Michael's life.

I removed his other shoe, and something dropped out.

A tiny silver key.

"All right!" I said, picking it up. "Now let's rebury him and get out of here."

I shoved the key into my pocket and climbed out of the grave. With my foot I shut the lid of the coffin. It didn't close all the way, but Michael's angry spirit was just going to have to deal with it. Silently, Roger and I began to shovel the dirt back into the grave.

* * *

Jennifer's car was waiting at the gate, and she hurriedly got out as we approached. "Did you get it?" she called out.

"We'll tell you all about it after we put this stuff back in your trunk," I said.

"Yes or no, did you get it?"

"Hey, we're just a pair of graverobbers trying to relax after a hard night at the office. Give us a break. Do you have the money?"

"Of course. Do you have the key?"

"By 'the key,' you would be referring to a small silver object, maybe an inch and a half long, three triangular serrations on the end, smells heavily of foot odor, right?"

"That's the one," said Jennifer, obviously starting to lose her patience.

"I've got it, but I want some answers first," I told her. "How did your husband die?"

"I told you. Suicide. He blew his brains out, or did you not notice?"

"Is that so? Because I don't remember seeing a hole in his head. Seems like something I'd remember."

She frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm saying that he wasn't shot."

"That's ridiculous. Of course he was."

"Jennifer, sweetie, we just dug up his coffin. I saw his body. His head was intact. He didn't shoot himself. Now why don't you explain to me what really happened, and I'll decide if you deserve the key."

Jennifer chuckled without humor. "I have to say, you're a much better human being than I expected. I did plenty of research, and the impression I got was that you'd do anything for money except get a real job."

"What? Who told you that?"

"None of your business."

"Well, that's wrong," I insisted. "I didn't dig up your husband because I'm some money-grubbing jerk! I did it to keep my wife from finding out that I had to pay off the guy I hit without insurance! That's not greed, that's an honorable motive!"

"What did they say about me?" asked Roger.

"Quiet, both of you," said Jennifer. "Now what do you mean, there was no bullet hole? Then how did he die?"

I folded my arms in front of my chest and spoke slowly, milking every bit of dramatic impact I could. "Until shortly after midnight, he wasn't dead. Your husband was buried alive."

Jennifer's expression of shock certainly looked genuine. "He what?"

"He was alive, he'd gone completely insane, and he had a gun. He didn't kill himself with a bullet to the head; he ripped his eyes out and probably had a heart attack. So I'd like an explanation."

Jennifer looked as if she were going to be sick. "Oh, God...I need my inhaler." She opened her purse and fished around inside it for a moment.

But she didn't take out an inhaler. She took out a pistol.

"I don't have time for this," she said. "Give me the key so I can give you your money!"

It was the first time I'd ever had a gun pointed at me, if you don't count Michael firing through the coffin lid, and I'm pleased to report that I handled myself very bravely, in that I didn't wet or soil myself. But the feeling rushed out of my legs and for a second I thought I was going to keel over.

"Drop it!" shouted Roger, taking out Michael's revolver and aiming it at Jennifer. Her eyes darted toward him, but she kept her own gun pointed at me.

"Oh, give it up," said Jennifer. "I don't believe for a second that you'll kill me."

Roger shrugged. "No, but I might try and shoot the gun out of your hand, and my aim sucks."

"He's not kidding," I said. Actually, Michael had used up the last of the bullets during his little shooting spree, but I certainly wasn't going to tell that to Jennifer.

Suddenly Jennifer gasped as a bit of blood spattered onto her face.

An arrow protruded from her left shoulder. She let her purse fall to the ground and stumbled forward a couple of steps as Roger and I spun around to see where the arrow had come from. Whoever had fired it was hiding amid some trees near the gate.

Another arrow shot out of the darkness, striking Roger in the upper thigh and plunging deep. He let out a cry of pain and tried to make it to the sedan, but within a few seconds another arrow got him in the back. He went down.

I rushed toward a large tree close to the source of the arrows, trying desperately to reach it before I got pierced. An arrow sailed past my leg, missing by inches. After I made it to the tree, which provided sufficient cover as long as the assailant didn't change his or her position, I glanced back at Roger. He lay on the ground, unmoving, while Jennifer threw open the car door and got inside.

A moment later she slammed her fist against the steering wheel in frustration, and I realized that her keys were in the fallen purse. She got back out of the car, rested her right arm on the roof, and fired four shots into the darkness. I didn't hear any sound to indicate that she'd hit anyone.

For a full minute Jennifer and I didn't budge. I could see that Roger was still breathing, though he didn't appear to be conscious. I listened for footsteps, but heard none.

"Okay, Robin Hood, the game's over!" I shouted. "Come out and show yourself!"

Some footsteps approached. They couldn't be more than ten feet away. I figured the person was out of arrows, but I didn't want to test that theory by revealing myself.

"Listen to me," I said. "I'm just the hired help, and I'm perfectly willing to talk this out."

There was no response except for the footsteps getting even closer until I could tell that the person was on the other side of the tree. The idea that I might be slightly screwed occurred to me, but I tried not to dwell on it.

Okay, I had to do something besides stand there. If the Mad Archer did have more arrows, it wouldn't be difficult to get me into the line of sight and fire. So what I needed to do was leap out and get the element of surprise on my side.

I leapt out and was promptly hit in the side of the head by a metal chain, which surprised me. I would have reflected upon how much it hurt, but I was only conscious for a couple of seconds afterward.

CHAPTER FOUR

I put my serious drinking days behind me after I got married, but in college I'd found myself awakening in the occasional weird location. The meat display at a grocery store springs to mind, not to mention seven-and-a-half toilet stalls (the Morning of the Urinal was not one of my finer moments).

However, no matter how intoxicated I was on any given night, I'd never before woke up in a situation as undesirable as being tied to a chair with a burlap sack over my head, which is where I was now. My arms were tied behind my back with a thick, itchy rope, and the sack effectively prevented me from seeing any of my surroundings.

"Anyone here?" I asked after struggling with the rope for a few seconds.

No answer. Behind me I thought I could hear whispering, but it was so faint that I could neither make out words nor a voice.

"Hey, it's me, the guy tied to the chair," I called out. "Somebody wanna talk to me?"

Silence.

"Come on, people, let's get a little verbal communication going here," I said, doing a miraculous job of keeping the terror out of my voice. "My wife gets a really pissy attitude when I let somebody besides her tie me up, so we need to get this over with. Where's Roger?"

"He's fine," Jennifer replied. Her voice was coming from at least twenty feet away, and she'd obviously been doing a lot of crying. "Andrew, listen to me. You need to forget about everything that's happened tonight."

"You've gotta be kidding! I'm going to have a phobia of digging up coffins for the rest of my natural life!"

"I'm serious! If you want to live, you can't go to the police! You have to pretend that you never met me, and that this never happened."

"Let me talk to Roger, make sure he's really okay, and maybe we'll have a deal."

Jennifer began to sob, a sound that was quickly muffled. The next sound I heard was that of footsteps walking slowly toward me. Each footstep was accompanied by a creaking sound, as if from wooden floorboards.

Cold sweat ran down my sides as the person stopped directly behind me. There was dead silence for a long moment, during which I held my breath and squeezed my eyes tightly shut, half expecting a bullet to explode through the back of my head.

Something struck me. Not a bullet, a fist. My head jerked forward from the blow, but it wasn't a punch meant to do real damage. Then an open palm slapped my right ear, hard.

I didn't say anything as I nervously awaited the next strike, but it didn't come. Instead, I felt the tip of a knife blade slide underneath the burlap and scrape gently across my throat, not hard enough to break the skin but certainly hard enough to earn my frightened attention.

"I need to know that he's okay," I said.

The blade swirled around in a figure-eight, and then was removed. The person didn't step away.

"This would be a lot less awkward if you would say something. I thought people like you always had those voice disguiser gizmos."

No response.

"Look, I assure you that your whole intimidation thing has been a rousing success! I'm scared! I'll play along with your little game to keep you from slamming that knife through my neck! But you've got to give me some kind of proof that Roger is still alive."

I let out a grunt of pain as my captor punched me in the face.

"That wasn't proof," I explained.

Another punch, not entirely unexpected. I decided to shut up and let things run their natural course.

Whoever it was stood in front of me, motionless. I could hear nothing but a very soft breathing and Jennifer's muffled crying in the background. Finally, after about a minute, the person walked back to her.

Jennifer's sobs were suddenly much easier to hear; clearly she'd been ungagged. "Please, Andrew," she begged. "You have to promise that you won't involve the police."

I had to fight tears of my own as I realized that Roger was probably dead. I mean, was I really supposed to believe that I could just say "Scout's Honor" and be released? Even if my captor really did intend to let me go, nobody could be stupid enough to trust that I would simply return to my everyday life as if nothing had happened, not without proof that Roger was still alive.

"Okay, listen, Mystery Guest, you want the key, right? I'll give you the key. It's right here in my pocket. I don't want it. Take it."

I thought I heard a snort of laughter.

"Okay...so...you probably already took the key. I'm sort of stuck working with nothing but context clues here, so cut me some slack. If you've got the key, there's no reason to keep Roger. I don't know who you are and I don't care, so just free us and go unlock whatever it is you want to unlock!"

"Andrew, be quiet!" shouted Jennifer. "I have to read you a message. Pay attention. It says 'Your friend is alive, and if you ever want to see him again you won't go to the police. If you so much as look at a cop, believe me he will die and he will die slowly. Do you understand?'"

"Yes, I understand," I said.

I listened to the scratchings of pencil on paper for a few seconds, and then Jennifer began to read again. "'Do not test me, or your friend will end up like'...oh God no...!"

Jennifer let out a shriek of terror, which was cut off by the sound of a knife slamming into flesh. I'd never heard that sound before, but there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was. Jennifer made gasping and gurgling noises as the knife fell again and again.

After the final plunge of the knife, the room fell silent except for the sound of dripping. My ears rang and my fists were clenched so tightly together that my fingernails dug into the skin.

Then the killer walked toward me again.

I was so frightened I couldn't even blurt out a promise to keep quiet. The knife slid back underneath the burlap and moved across my throat the same way as before, this time slick with warm blood. A drop ran down my chest. I sucked in a deep breath as the tip poked a pinprick hole in my skin.

The knife moved away. I heard the sound of a cap being removed from a bottle, and then my nostrils burned as a chloroform-soaked rag was shoved against my face. Everything went blurry, and I returned to the world of unconsciousness.

* * *

I woke up in a ditch. There are much worse places to wake up, such as tied to a chair with a burlap sack over your head in a room with a brutal killer, but it's still not the most delightful waking experience. I was lying on my side in the mud, with a nice sharp stick poking me in the thigh.

To my great surprise, Roger was there as well. I could barely see him in the dark, but he was lying on his back with his eyes closed.

I sat up, letting out a small groan as my brain neglected to rise with the rest of my body. I reached over and prodded Roger's ankle. "Roger...?"

He moaned something that was probably "Huh?"

"You alive?"

"I don't know yet. I doubt it."

I pulled up my sleeve, but the face of my light-up wristwatch had been shattered so I couldn't tell what time it was. Since it was still dark, Helen wouldn't be off work and wouldn't have the entire police force looking for me yet.

"Do you think you can walk?" I asked.

"Ask me in a few minutes," he said, though I could barely hear him. "I'm still working on whether or not I'm alive."

I stood up, nearly losing my balance as my legs tried to give way beneath me, then stepped over to where Roger lay. I reached down and offered my hand. "Come on, we need to get out of here."

I pulled him to his feet. The arrow had been removed and his leg had been tightly wrapped with a cloth. "There's no way I can walk on my own," he said. "But if you'll be a pal and keep me steady I can probably come with you to civilization." He glanced around the area. "Wherever the hell that may be."

"Nowhere around here, that's for sure," I said. "How's your back?"

"Hurts. But there's something wrapped under my shirt, so I think the bleeding's been taken care of. If I start gushing I'll be sure to let you know."

We got ourselves out of the ditch and began to walk along the side of the road, with Roger holding onto my shoulder for balance. I guess it would have been more dramatic had I been able to carry him rather than merely assist him in limping along, but unfortunately my best friend wasn't a tiny woman.

And why was he here at all? Why the whole setup about not calling the police if Roger was just going to be dumped in the ditch along with me?

"I miss anything important?" asked Roger, as we walked along the lonely, deserted road.

"Yeah. Jennifer was stabbed to death."

"Jesus. You saw it?"

"I heard it." I filled him in on everything that had happened since I'd been bashed with the chain. Roger shook his head with disbelief.

"So I came really close to never waking up again," he said with a shiver. "I think I need religion in my life from now on."

"Well, I figure there are two explanations for you being released with me. Either something went really wrong, and the killer couldn't afford to keep you around, or he already got whatever he was looking for and didn't need you any more."

"Or else he has something worse in store," said Roger. "Who would have thought that the simple act of digging up a grave could get so complicated? And we didn't even get the twenty thousand bucks."

About fifteen minutes later, headlights washed over us as a beat-up pickup truck drove around a corner. I stuck out my thumb and it came to a stop beside us. The driver leaned over, threw open the passenger door, and gave us a look of surprise.

"Damn, you're exactly the kind of people my mom would've told me never to pick up!"

The driver was a heavyset guy with glasses and a thick gray beard. He wore a bright red baseball cap with "Kiss Me" written on it. He was in his sixties or seventies; it was hard to say for sure, because his face sort of looked like somebody had yanked his skull out through his mouth then shoved it back in slightly crooked.

"Well, my mother always said never to hitchhike, so I guess we're even," I said.

"Hop on in, you two," said the driver, patting the seat next to him. "Actually, lemme find a towel to put on the seat first. No offense, of course."

"None taken."

He fished around on the floor until he found a towel that didn't look much cleaner than we were and spread it out on the seat. I helped Roger in, and then sat down next to him, shutting the door behind me.

"Where're you headed?" the driver asked.

"To the nearest phone."

The truck began to move again. "What can I call you two?"

I pointed to Roger. "This is Roger Tanglen, and I'm Andrew Mayhem."

"Mayhem? That's an interestin' last name."

"Yeah, I think it explains a lot about my life. So what do we call you?"

"You can just call me The Apparition."

Roger and I exchanged a resigned look. With the kind of night we'd been having I guess it made perfect sense that we'd be picked up by a whack-job. "Any special reason?"

"Nope. Just like the way it sounds. You two are lookin' a little bit injured, if you don't mind my sayin' so. What happened?"

"A rampaging weed whacker got us."

"That's about what it looks like. I think there might be a rag or something in the glove compartment if you wanna clean up a bit."

I thanked him and found the rag. It appeared to have been used to clean heavy machinery, but I didn't want to be rude. I dusted my face off a bit, and then handed it to Roger.

"Looks like you took a few good hits," the Apparition noted, looking at me.

"Well, some of these marks are from last week's beating," I explained.

I began to straighten out my rumpled clothes. As I brushed off my leg, I noticed that something was stuck to the mud on my jeans. I pulled it off and held it up to examine it.

"What's that?" asked Roger.

"I'm not sure. Can I turn on the overhead light?"

"Be my guest," said The Apparition.

I flipped on the overhead light and saw that it appeared to be the corner of a playing card, though not from a traditional deck. It had the number 1 and depicted what looked like the end of a forked tail.

"I don't know what this is," I admitted. "Maybe it's Satanist currency. A Devil Dollar."

"I hate those damn Satanists," The Apparition muttered. "I haven't met any, but I sure have read about 'em, and what I've read I hate."

I put the corner of the card in my pocket. It probably wasn't important, but it also wasn't exactly going to weigh me down. And any clue might be helpful if I wanted to track down the killer...not that I was necessarily going to try and do so.

"Do you know what time it is?" I asked.

"The radio said it was about two-thirty, but I forget how long ago that was."

"Thanks," I said. I shared another look with Roger, and we made a silent pact to keep speech to a minimum for the rest of the ride.

* * *

The Apparition dropped us off at a convenience store and wished us luck in our future endeavors, especially if they involved bringing harm to Satanists. After finding out from the clerk that it was almost four and that we were thirty miles from Chamber, I went to the pay phone and dug out a quarter. I also thought to check for my wallet, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it hadn't been stolen.

"Andrew?" asked Helen, after one of her co-workers finally retrieved her. "Are you okay?"

"Um, no, not really. I'm here with Roger. Do you think you could get off early?"

"I'll have to do some pleading, but yeah, if it's an emergency of course I can. What happened?"

"I'll explain it all when I see you. By the way, could you be a sweetheart and bring stuff to help tend to a couple of arrow wounds?"

After giving the specifics on my location, I hung up and we went inside to buy a few Hershey's bars. The talk with my wife was not going to be pretty, and we were going to need a serious sugar buzz to get through it.

CHAPTER FIVE

When Helen finally made it to the convenience store, I gave her one of the candy bars as a peace offering, though I was pretty certain that the astounding female-soothing power of chocolate wasn't going to get me out of this one. She reacted to our injuries with no small degree of concern, and insisted on checking out Roger's wounds right there in the parking lot.

"What on earth happened to you guys?" she demanded.

"Maybe you should wait until you're done fixing him before I explain," I said. "I'd hate for you to make a mistake out of anger."

She regarded me suspiciously, and then agreed that might be a good idea and took off Roger's shirt. "Whoever did this certainly wasn't a doctor," she said, unwrapping the cloth. "Can you lift your arms above your head?"

Roger did so with a wince.

"It got you in the shoulder blade. A couple inches to the right and you could've been paralyzed for life. That's why you shouldn't hang out with my husband."

She cleaned out the wound and redressed it, assuring Roger that he was going to be okay. The leg wound was also not going to cause permanent damage, though Roger would definitely be on crutches for a while.

"And I'm driving you two to the hospital for x-rays, just in case," she said. "Don't argue."

I'm pretty stupid on a regular basis, but I wasn't stupid enough to argue.

As Helen drove us back to Chamber--Roger in the back seat, me in the hot seat--I told her the truth about what had happened.

Okay, that's a lie. If I'd told her what really happened, she would have been an absolute nervous wreck and I would have been dead from the stress of living with a woman in that state of anxiety.

I wanted to stick to the truth as much as possible, so I confessed about the graverobbing bit. However, in the censored version, we'd been caught by a couple of hunters before we could unearth the coffin. Things got seriously out of hand, things were said, arrows were fired, and we ended up getting the crap beat out of us.

The story sounded credible as I told it, but to be honest my thought patterns were so shaky by this time that I could have been telling my wife that a magical turnip had inflicted our injuries and it would have sounded logical. To Helen's credit, she allowed me to finish my story before freaking out.

"What in God's name were you thinking?" she demanded. "What kind of sick, twisted, demented, deviant thoughts were running through your minds to make you agree to do that? I absolutely cannot believe that the man I married, the father of my children, would do something so horrible!"

"I had no idea it was going to turn out this way," I said. "I thought we'd dig a hole, grab a key, and go home twenty thousand dollars richer. Nice simple evening."

"This is just...I mean...it's just...I mean...holy shit, Andrew!"

"I totally agree."

Helen took several deep breaths. "Okay, look, I am so mad at you right now that I can't possibly verbalize it without an aneurysm, but we're not going to get into that right now. You've had an incredibly traumatic experience and I don't want to make things worse for you. But once you're healed, things are going to be very bad for you."

* * *

The hospital visit revealed that I did not have a concussion and that if I wanted my face to continue to look nice I was going to have to quit letting people punch me. It also confirmed that Roger's leg and back were going to heal fine, and that he was totally incompetent at walking on crutches. Fortunately, Helen agreed not to call the police to investigate the abusive hunters, since we'd have to explain why Roger and I were in the woods.

Instead of dropping Roger off at home, we decided to have him sleep at our place. While Helen took a shower, I opened the foldout bed on the couch and spoke quietly with him.

"We obviously can't go the police," I said, "but we've got to investigate, see what we can find out."

"Why?"

"Because the killer's still out there!"

"Yeah, but he got what he wanted. There's no reason for him to come after us," Roger insisted.

"You're right, but, I dunno, there's some weird instinct inside me saying that somebody who buries a man alive and stabs a woman to death shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. What do you think?"

"My leg hurts."

"Look, you don't have to help if you don't want to, but I'm going to try and find out what the whole deal is. So what do we know? Our suspect is acquainted with either Jennifer or Michael Ashcraft or both. Probably both. Vicious right hook. Decent archer. What am I missing?"

Roger had nothing to add.

"Okay, so it's not much, but it's a start." I took the business card out of my pocket. "First thing tomorrow, I'll find out what this Ghoulish Delights thing is. Maybe we'll get lucky and the killer will be hanging around in bloodstained clothes."

Helen's shower ended. As I heard the hair dryer turn on, I quickly looked through the phone book and found Michael Ashcraft's name. I dialed the number and got his answering machine. It was a man's voice, presumably Michael's. He sounded a little different when he wasn't shrieking.

"Hi, you've reached the residence of Michael and Jennifer Ashcraft. We're going to be on vacation until the first of September, but if you leave your name and number at the tone we'll get back to you when we return. By the way, we have a state of the art security system and a couple of really vicious Dobermans named Rabid Assassin I and Rabid Assassin II, so any potential thieves may want to find a safer target, such as Fort Knox. Ready yourself, here comes the beep."

So nobody was likely to be looking for them. I hung up.

I sat on my bed and stared at the wall for a few minutes until Helen came out of the bathroom. "Honey, you aren't even undressed. You really should get some sleep."

"Well, I got a little bit of sleep after I was knocked unconscious."

Helen sighed. "Don't make jokes."

I took off my clothes and got into bed, even though in my spooked condition I figured there was no way I'd be able to fall asleep without an elephant tranquilizer.

As it turns out, I was wrong. I managed about three hours of sleep, though with the worst nightmares I'd had in my entire life. And I'm counting the recurring dream of Mr. Boogedy-Bones from pre-school.

* * *

After I got out of bed and showered the nightmare sweat from my body, I dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. I called the number on the Ghoulish Delights card and got another answering machine.

"Thank you for calling Ghoulish Delights, where we make your worst fears a reality," said Michael's voice. "Our office hours are by appointment only, but if you leave your name and number at the tone we'll get back to you as soon as possible."

I hung up, figuring I'd try back later.

So, what next? I had Michael's street address from the phone book, so I'd pay a visit to his house to see if there was anything of interest. After that, I supposed that I could find out the names of Jennifer and Michael's friends and family and just start going down the list, but what would I say? "Hi, I'm doing a survey on premature burial habits in the Chamber area. Have you or anyone you know buried a person alive within the past week?" I couldn't ask "Where were you on the night of August fourth, between midnight and 4 a.m.?" because anyone could say "I was in bed sleeping, fool," and it would be almost impossible to prove them wrong.

I left Roger asleep on the couch and set a note on the nightstand for Helen that read "Went out." At least that kept me entirely truthful.

As I was on my way to Halloway Street, where Michael lived, I came up on the Chamber Eastside Mall. Remembering that they had a game store inside, I decided to make a quick detour and see if the piece of card I'd found last night could be identified.

I pulled into the parking lot, went inside, turned down a free sample of nasty-looking Bourbon chicken from a vendor in the food court, and proceeded to Gamer's Castle.

"Hi," said the gawky teenager behind the counter. I nodded and briefly looked through the racks of role-playing game merchandise. There was Dungeons and Dragons stuff out the wazoo, and even kits for hosting your own murder mystery parties, should I ever grow weary of having my murder mystery needs satisfied by real life.

"Are you looking for anything in particular?" the teenager asked.

"Actually, yes," I said, approaching the counter and taking out the piece of card. "Could you tell me which game this belongs to?"

He took the card from me, glanced at it for a split second, the handed it back. "Oh, sure, it's a level one imp. It's one of the weakest characters in Prophecies of the Night. They're very common, not collectible at all."

"Prophecies of the Night? I've never heard of it."

"That's not surprising. It's really not very popular. It has a very weak character generation system, not anywhere near as realistic as the designer's last couple of games. But he was having personal problems and a tight deadline on this one, so it's understandable."

"Of course," I agreed.

"We returned a bunch of stuff to the distributor, but we have a few enemy decks left if you're interested. That's where the piece you've got came from."

"Well, if it has an unrealistic character generation system I'll probably have to pass. You wouldn't happen to know of any groups that play regularly, would you?"

The teenager shook his head. "Nah. Like I said, it's not very popular. Actually, you could check the bulletin board against the far wall in case somebody posted one and I didn't notice, but I'm pretty sure there's not."

I walked back to the bulletin board, which had a few index cards advertising gaming groups. I took a few moments to scan them, but the teenager had been right, there were none for Prophecies of the Night. Oh well. It was a long shot anyway.

I was about to thank the teenager and leave, but something stopped me. Okay, all I'd found was a tiny little piece of card stuck to my jeans. But unless it was already in the ditch, it had to have got there when the killer was moving me, and so there was a good chance that he was a player. And I'd read a few mystery novels, enough to know that it was usually the insignificant clue that solved the case.

I returned to the counter. "Actually, I'd like a deck of those cards, if you don't mind."

"No problem." The teenager left the counter and returned an instant later holding a small deck. He punched some keys on the cash register. "That'll be eighteen eighty."

"Say what?"

"Eighteen dollars and eighty cents, including tax."

"For a deck of cards?"

"Yeah."

"No, no, no, cards don't cost eighteen dollars and eighty cents," I explained. "Cards a buck or two."

"You're not a seasoned gamer, are you?"

"Obviously not."

"I can give you a ten percent discount if you join our Gamer's Castle frequent buyer club. It costs ten dollars and is good for a full year."

"No, thanks, I'll pay retail." I dug out my wallet and grudgingly handed him a twenty, hoping that these damn cards at least came with bubble gum. "By the way, you wouldn't happen to know a Michael Ashcraft, would you?"

The teenager thought for a moment. "Nope."

"Jennifer Ashcraft?"

"Nope."

"Okay. Thanks for your help."

* * *

Not being Sherlock Holmes has its disadvantages. While Sherlock would have been able to solve the whole mystery based on the composition of the dirt on the jeans I wore last night, I managed to pretty much bumble around for the next couple hours without learning anything of interest. I stopped at Michael's house, a fairly nice one-story place in the suburbs, but the neighbors on one side were having a yard sale, and the neighbor on the other side was out mowing his lawn, so I decided it would be best to postpone any serious investigating.

I returned home to find that my mother-in-law had just brought the kids back, so we sat down to a soup and sandwich lunch. I tried to be a cheerful daddy, but with everything that was on my mind it was difficult to be as immature as my kids would have liked, even while listening to Kyle's vivid description of yesterday's activities.

"An' we played Squish the Bug an' we--"

"It's Stomp the Bug, stupid," Theresa corrected in that special way big sisters have.

"An' we played Stomp the Bug an' Theresa was the bug six times an' I was only the bug four times an' then Aunt Marcia came an' she took us to get frozen yogurt an' I got chocolate vanilla swirl an' Theresa got regular chocolate an' she dropped her cone in Aunt Marcia's car an' Aunt Marcia got mad an' said not to drop her cone again or she wouldn't be allowed to have food in the car an' Theresa said okay."

"Wow, busy night," I said.

"Yeah. An' we watched The Elrod McBugle Show. Elrod drank a whole swimming pool an' everyone who was swimming got mad."

"Will you take us swimming, Daddy?" asked Theresa.

"I can't today, sweetie. Daddy has stuff to do. But I promise I'll take you pretty soon. Just play outside today, but remember what I said about staying away from the boy next door. Anyone who tries to feed you kitty litter is not a true friend."

"Are you going off to be a freeloader?" Kyle inquired.

Helen nearly choked on a spoonful of soup. "Where did you hear that?" she asked.

"Aunt Marcia. What does 'freeloader' mean?"

I decided to field that one. "It means your Aunt Marcia needs to keep her gigantic mouth--"

Helen cut me off. "It means Daddy is currently testing various career opportunities."

"Oh," said Kyle, nodding with understanding.

Roger grinned. "Testing various career opportunities. That's exactly the way I would have phrased it."

"Shut up," I said.

"Daddy, you're not supposed to tell people to shut up," Theresa informed me.

"Roger doesn't count. You can tell him to shut up all you want."

"Shut up, shut up, shut up," sang Kyle.

"Andrew, please don't talk to our children any more than is absolutely necessary," said Helen.

CHAPTER SIX

Around one, I called again.

"Hello, Ghoulish Delights, where we make your nightmares a reality. Rachel speaking. How may I help you?"

"Hi," I said. "I'm calling for Michael Ashcraft."

"Oh, I'm sorry. He's out of town. Is this something I can help you with?"

"Possibly. I was given one of your business cards, and I have to admit that the name sounds very intriguing. What exactly do you do there?"

"Do you like horror movies?"

"Love 'em."

"Then you'll probably like what we do. You know, if you want to stop on by, we'd be more than happy to give you a tour."

"Sure, why not?" I said. "I've got some spare time. When should I be there?"

"We should be hanging around until about five, so any time before that. Do you need directions?"

"Nope. I'll see you soon, then. Thanks!"

After putting on a new watch and assuring Helen about sixty-eight times that we were both feeling fine and that it wasn't necessary for us to stay at home to recuperate, Roger and I drove to the address on the card. Ghoulish Delights looked like somebody's house that had been converted into a business, bearing only a small sign in the same oozing letters as on the card.

After narrowly avoiding a serious crutch mishap, we stepped onto the porch and rang the doorbell. It was answered by a tall, athletically-built, dark-haired woman who wore a t-shirt with the Ghoulish Delights logo.

"Hi, I'm Rachel Mallory," she said, extending her hand. I noticed that she wore black fingernail polish, with a little eyeball drawn on each nail. It was pretty cool.

"Andrew Mayhem. This is my friend Roger."

"Pleased to meet you. Welcome to our lair."

We walked inside. The waiting room had a couch, a couple of chairs, a small table, and a wall that had every square inch covered with horror movie posters. One of the chairs was currently occupied by a skeleton wearing a pair of bunny ears and smoking a cigarette.

"That's our mascot, Calcium," said Rachel. "Have a seat on the couch and I'll introduce the others to you." She went over and poked her head into the adjoining room. "Potential customers are here! Everyone act your weirdest!"

Four other people marched out of the room. "Why don't you all introduce yourselves and tell these nice men what it is you do around here," said Rachel.

The first guy looked about thirty, wore thick glasses, had short blonde hair with a huge cowlick, and a very ruddy complexion with several streaks of acne. "I'm Carl Underall," he said, looking to the left of me instead of making eye contact. "Cameraman."

Next to him was a small, thin, red-headed, freckle-faced guy in his mid-twenties. He wore a Ghoulish Delights t-shirt like Rachel's, except that this one had a fake hand protruding from the stomach holding...well, a stomach. "I'm Farley Soukup," he said in a squeaky voice that immediately forced me to hate him. "Special effects."

The next guy was also in his mid-twenties. He had a dark complexion and was dressed entirely in black. His straight black hair hung over his shoulders, and he even wore black nail polish and a black dangling spider earring--a Goth boy through and through. It wouldn't have surprised me if he'd been wearing a set of vampire teeth. If I'd been holding a glass, the temptation to fling the contents at him and scream "Holy water!" would have been unbearable. "Dominick Griffin," he said. "Sound, story and occasional on-camera predator."

"And I'm Linda Hanson," said the girl next to him, who was obviously his girlfriend, judging from the arm coiled around his waist. She was also dressed entirely in black, but she added bleach-blonde hair and blood-red lipstick to the color palette. She was a little overweight, but her tight-fitting clothing indicated that she was comfortable with her body. She flashed me a cheerful smile. "Set decoration, lighting, and props. Welcome to our happy home."

"Thanks," I said. "So this is a movie studio, huh? Would I have seen any of your films?"

Rachel gave the others a wave to indicate that they could go back to their business, and then sat down on one of the chairs. "So, Michael gave you a card but didn't say anything about what we do here?"

"Actually, it was at a party a while back. I'd had a lot to drink and I don't really remember the conversation, but the name, Ghoulish Delights, sounded pretty intriguing. I've kept meaning to call, but this is the first day off I've had in a while. Some people call me a workaholic."

"Well, hopefully you'll think we're as cool as our name. You say you're a horror movie fan?"

"Sure," I said. "I love all that stuff. The movies, the books, the games, everything. Guess I'm just a sicko at heart."

"I can handle them if the characters aren't too stupid," Roger said.

"Let me ask you this," said Rachel. "Have you ever wanted to star in your very own horror flick?"

"Some days I feel like I already am," I told her.

Rachel leaned forward. "What we do here at Ghoulish Delights is create a short, custom-made horror film for you and your family and friends to star in, which we can tape in your very own home or anywhere else you want. We have a large selection of script templates, which are completely customizable to suit whatever strikes your fancy. If you'd like your family of four to star in their very own mad-slasher-in-the-house flick, we can give you the script, the stage directions, and all the blood and gore you could ever want. You're both too old to belong to a fraternity...no offense...but last week we pretended to kill off sixteen guys in their very own frat house. It's fun!"

"Do you get a lot of business for this sort of thing?" I asked.

Rachel shrugged. "We're doing all right. Our office is located here in Chamber, but very few of our customers come from this area. We head out all over Florida, to Miami, Tampa...and some occasional tourist business in Orlando, for people who want something a little darker than Disney World."

"So you just come to somebody's house and shoot it like a regular movie?"

"Pretty much. You could think of it as a slightly more offbeat version of family portraits. How it works is you would describe the locale you want and the number of actors you have, and then we'd show you our sample scripts. After you found one you liked, we'd revise it to make it a perfect match for your group, and then assign the roles. Don't worry, everyone gets a good part. We'd come over, and our director would work with your people while our guys set everything up, then we'd film until we got it right. It usually takes most of the day, and everyone has a great time. And when we're done you have a ten to fifteen minute video that's yours to keep."

"And there aren't any limits? You get to do whatever you want?"

"Oh, no, obviously we have both safety precautions and technology constraints. We're not going to film your three year-old daughter hanging out of a second floor window, and the only explosives we can get the insurance for are tiny squibs to simulate a gunshot wound."

"Squibs?" asked Roger.

"It's a balloon that's filled with stage blood and hooked up to a small explosive charge. When you set it off, blood sprays and it looks like you were shot. Some effects artists use a condom instead of a balloon, but since we often have kids around we try not to do anything that adds to their sexual confusion."

"That's very thoughtful," I said.

"And we do strictly below-the-neck squibs. So we do have a few restrictions that are simply for safety reasons, because a horror movie stops being fun when people really get hurt. And, like I said, there are things we simply can't do. We have people saying 'Why can't you show me transforming into a werewolf?' and it's because we don't have the resources. We do have a large supply of monster masks and costumes, and can do minor monster makeup, but you're not going to get state-of-the-art special effects--it's not feasible for what we're trying to do here. We can't show your son's head rolling down the stairs, because that involves making a cast, but we can certainly use camera tricks and makeup to simulate a decapitation. And Karo syrup is cheap, so you can have all the blood you want. So, have I frightened you off yet?"

Actually, I thought it was a pretty neat idea. But then, I guess I've always been kind of strange. There'd been many times when I'd been able to easily envision Kyle or Theresa turning into mass murderers, and it would probably be fun to see this captured on video. Yet somehow I just couldn't see Helen finding the idea to her liking. And it was probably expensive as hell.

Anyway, I wasn't here as a customer, I was here to gather information. "Okay, time to fess up," I said. "I didn't get your card from a party. I'm really a journalist. Have you heard of the magazine Dearly Demented?"

Rachel shook her head. This was good, because I'd made up the magazine and would have hated to be quizzed on the contents had it turned out to be a real one.

"That's not surprising, since our premiere issue is still four months away. Our target audience is comprised of those people who are interested in the darker side of life, but in a fun way, of course. And I think a feature article on Ghoulish Delights would fit exactly with what my editor is looking for."

"Really? Who's your editor?"

I gestured to Roger. "Him. He doesn't quite trust me out on my own yet."

It would have been more believable to say Roger was my photographer, but that kind of lie generally works better when the photographer is in possession of a camera.

"We've actually had a few stories done on us," Rachel remarked. "Mostly just local newspapers, though channel eight sent a camera crew out last Halloween and did a short feature. It was sort of slanted toward calling us a bunch of sick lunatics, but we got a couple of gigs out of it."

"Well, I can assure you that if Dearly Demented called you a bunch of sick freaks, it would be a wholehearted compliment."

Rachel smiled. "We'd be honored to have you do a story on our little outfit. Would you like a tour now, or would you like to set another appointment?"

"What would work best for me is if I could just talk to each person, find out exactly what it is they do for Ghoulish Delights. For example, what exactly do you do?"

"At the moment I'm doing my job and Michael's...that's Michael Ashcraft, our director...so I'd be absolutely overwhelmed if business weren't slow right now. Basically, I'm the producer, so I'm responsible for overseeing, well, everything. I do most of the interaction with the customer, from the interesting and informative sales pitch you just heard to making sure they're happy with the condition of their home afterward. And I'm responsible for all the financial aspects of the business, making sure we run things as cheaply as possible so we don't price ourselves out of reach."

"What does something like this cost?" Roger asked.

"The price varies substantially based on what options the customer requests, sort of like a new car."

"How much for a base model?"

Rachel smiled again. "To be completely honest, we prefer to wait until a customer is completely enraptured before springing the cost on the poor person."

"That bad, huh?"

"Well...it's more expensive than taking the family out to play miniature golf."

I nodded my understanding. It suddenly occurred to me that this whole reporter charade would work better if I actually had a small notebook or a tape recorder. I considered making a comment like "So, Roger, is the ol' photographic memory storing everything all right?" but that would have been stupid. I probably should have planned a cover story before driving over here. The idea that I really suck as a detective crossed my mind.

"So was this whole thing your idea?" I asked.

"No, it was Mike's. We were friends all through college,  and we'd rent maybe six or seven horror movies every weekend. We'd just sit in his dorm room and toxify our brains watching these things. We sort of went our separate ways after he graduated, partially because his girlfriend, now his wife, was jealous of all the time we spent together...not that you need to write anything about that." She suddenly looked worried. "You're not going to use that quote, are you?"

"Not if you don't want me to," I assured her.

"Oh, good. It sort of slipped out. Anyway, I stayed in Chamber and was working full time as a trainer at the gym, and Mike moved from place to place trying and failing to carve out a career as a filmmaker. We met up again two years ago just by coincidence. Some friends came from out of town and wanted to do the theme park thing, so I took them to Universal Studios, and there Mike was, working as a photographer. We met up later that night and he told me about this whole idea for making custom-made horror movies. Oh, by the way, can I get you some coffee?"

"No, I'm fine," I said.

"I just now thought of that. I'd hate you to start your article with 'Ghoulish Delights is run by Rachel Mallory, a woman who likes to talk and talk and talk and talk without so much as having the courtesy to provide refreshments.'"

"No, really, I'm okay. Roger's fine too. Please continue."

"Basically, I thought it sounded like a lot of fun, though I wasn't sure it was something we could actually make money at. Well, we couldn't get a bank loan to save our lives, so finally Mike swallowed his pride, called up his rich brother, and begged for the start-up money. He got it, we rented this place, and then he started calling people he knew wouldn't demand a regular paycheck. Pretty soon we had Carl, Farley, Linda, and Dominick, and we were set."

"And you're all making a living at this now?"

"Not a great one, but we do okay. To be completely honest, we don't make all of our money from Ghoulish Delights. We have to film the occasional wedding or bar mitzva, but overall we're not starving to death."

"What does Mike's wife think of Ghoulish Delights?"

Rachel shrugged. "I don't see her much. Every once in a while she'll come in here and turn up her nose at one of Farley's creatures, but that's about it."

"But she'd rather he take some steady-paying job, right?"

"Of course. I'm sure she makes more with her waitress job than he does here. But then, she's sort of a--" Rachel held her hands out in front of her chest, miming substantial breasts, "--impressive woman, so good tips probably aren't hard to come by."

I began to feel a bit uncomfortable. Rachel certainly felt no love for Jennifer Ashcraft. She didn't seem anything like the murderous type, but then again, John Wayne Gacy performed at children's parties as Pogo the Clown, yet still murdered thirty-three people. Of course, clowns can be pretty scary.

Michael could have been having an affair with Rachel, and it could have turned ugly. I wasn't sure what kind of ugly end to an affair might result in Michael being buried alive holding a revolver, but it was possible. Yet if Rachel was the killer, would she be sitting here confessing that she didn't like Jennifer? And she'd been genuinely friendly, not giving any indication that she might have tied me up last night and pressed a bloody knife against my neck.

No, it couldn't be Rachel.

Probably.

"Is it all right if I talk to the others now?" I asked.

"No problem. Let's go on back."

CHAPTER SEVEN

The main part of the house was a large room, maybe forty by sixty feet, that was simply jam-packed with neat stuff. One wall was entirely overtaken by a rack of costumes. Above the rack was a shelf upon which rested a long line of Halloween masks, everything from Frankenstein to an undead boy scout to Richard Simmons. Another wall display contained dozens of (I assume) fake weapons: axes, knives, spears, chainsaws, etc. The room was also loaded with camera equipment, videotapes, buckets of paint, blueprints, storyboard paintings, and one large table in the center. There was also a small doorway, minus an actual door, which led somewhere unknown. Carl, Dominick, and Linda were all huddled around the table, playing with Star Wars action figures, while Farley added some white paint to a piece of rubber.

Among the weapons, I noticed a crossbow.

"So, do we have another customer?" asked Farley, looking up as we entered.

"Actually, these gentlemen are from Dearly Demented magazine, here to do a story on us," Rachel told him. "Be nice to them."

"Never heard of that one," said Farley.

"Premiere issue is four months away," I explained. "But it's going to be flashy, don't worry."

Farley gestured toward Roger's crutches. "The magazine business is dangerous, huh?"

"More dangerous than you can imagine," said Roger. "Those computer terminals can be deadly. Hurt my leg typing an adjective."

"Anyway," said Rachel, "I want each of you to talk to the nice men, tell them what you do around here."

"Right now we're having a great battle between Chewbacca and a couple of Stormtroopers," said Linda. "This is what we get paid for. Life is good."

"Actually, they're blocking out a new plot scenario," Rachel told us. "Normally I'd be working with them, but I was busy sucking up to you two. Hey, Farley, why don't you show them what you're doing?"

We walked over to where Farley stood. There were several identical pieces of rubber spread out on the table in front of him. He finished adding a bit of white paint to the one he was working on, then set it down to dry. "What I'm doing right now is making generic wounds out of latex. These are throat wounds, as you can clearly see from the protruding windpipe." He tapped the protruding windpipe with his index finger to make sure we clearly saw it. "I've got all different kinds of wounds and scars, and when they're needed I just apply them to the actor with rubber cement, use makeup to make sure it blends with the skin, and then add a big dollop of blood. Instant carnage. Fun for all ages."

"Do you make these yourself?" I asked.

"Absolutely. There're a lot of places you can order them from, but what fun is that?" Farley gave me a wicked grin. "How would you like a torn-out throat?"

"Nah, I make it a point never to simulate throat rippings this early in the day, but maybe next time," I said.

"Oh, come on," said Farley, picking up one of the fake wounds. "If you really wanna understand the inner workings of Ghoulish Delights, you've gotta get a little dirty. Dominick, you wanna slide a chair over here and grab a sheet?"

"No, seriously, that's okay. I'm allergic to latex. That's why I have two kids. However, I'm sure Roger would love to have part of his neck removed, wouldn't you, Roger?"

"Huh?"

Dominick pushed a chair over to where we stood. "Have a seat, Roger," said Farley. "We'll get you messed up real good."

Roger started to protest, but instead settled for giving me a dirty look as he sat down in the chair. The others stopped playing with their action figures and watched with amusement. Dominick handed Farley a small white sheet, which he draped over Roger's chest like a bib.

"Be gentle with me. I'm crippled," said Roger.

"You'll be more than crippled when I'm done with you," Farley informed him. He began to apply a generous portion of rubber cement to the latex. "Tilt your head back. Further. Further. Good."

He carefully positioned the latex in the center of Roger's neck, and then pressed down on it firmly. I had another uncomfortable moment as I realized that with one violent push Farley could probably crush Roger's throat. I was getting seriously paranoid.

"Now you have to sit here perfectly still while it dries," Farley said.

"Oh, joy," Roger muttered.

"Don't talk, either. Okay, Andrew, you can move on to your next tour station. I'll call you back when we're ready."

I figured leaving Roger there unable to move as sticky stuff dried on his neck was suitable punishment for the many pranks he'd played on me over the years, so I walked over to Carl. "You're the cameraman, right?"

"That's right." Carl shrugged. "Not sure exactly what I should tell you. I point the camera where stuff is happening and try to keep it in focus, basically."

"Could I see your equipment?"

"Yeah, if you want." Carl led me to the other side of the room, where the camera equipment was stored. I had no real interest in seeing it, but I wanted to speak with Carl away from the others.

"So how did you get into Ghoulish Delights?"

"Mike Ashcraft asked me. He and Rachel were the ones who started this. He's our director but he's on vacation." Carl alternated between looking at me and the floor when he talked.

"Yeah, Rachel told me. So, were you two friends, or classmates, or did you work together on another project, or...?"

"Worked at the Legacy Six theatre together. Used to fight over who got to keep the good movie posters."

"So what's he like? I mean, what kind of person comes up with an idea like Ghoulish Delights?"

Another shrug. "He's a little askew, like the rest of us. Nice guy. Doesn't try to tell me what to do when I'm taping, so he's pretty easy to work with." He thought for a long moment. "Aside from that, I don't know what else to say."

I asked him about the cameras, just so he'd think I was interested. He spouted off some technical specifications that meant absolutely nothing to me, but I nodded as he spoke. When he'd finished, I thanked him and turned back to the throat ripping demonstration. "Is he ready yet?"

"Not yet," said Farley. "The actors always hate this part. I know I do. That's why I stay on this side of the special effects."

Roger didn't look like he was enjoying this much, which was all right. I walked back over to the action figure setup. "What exactly does this represent?" I asked Linda.

"This is just a scenario we're working on," she replied. "We have about twenty of them right now, but we try to add more whenever we've got some downtime. The more variety we have, the easier it is to find something that appeals to the customers."

"What kinds of scenarios do you have in your collection right now?"

"For the most part, they're just variations on the stalk-and-slash theme. We're not making movies for commercial release, so we don't need shocking plot twists or bold new concepts. Essentially a Ghoulish Delights movie involves somebody running around killing everyone else." She explained this in a remarkably perky voice, as if she were hosting a cooking show.

"Hey, that's all I need in a movie," I said.

"Most of the work is done after the customer has selected their scenario. Technically, one of the scripts could be filmed as-is--it has dialogue and everything. But since we never know where we're going to shoot it, and we can't possibly have a script already prepared for every possible combination of actors, we have to make a lot of small changes on the set. Plus, we're not dealing with professional actors here, so a lot of the time we'll have to tone down some of the dialogue or revise it to make it easier to deliver. Once we had a script comprised of nothing but screams and one line, 'Now you die!'  And the guy ended up forgetting to say 'you.'  Suffice it to say that we haven't started rehearsing our Academy Awards speech yet."

"Of course, my loving girlfriend here has just described my job," said Dominick with a  good-natured smile. "I let her help sometimes, so she occasionally forgets that I'm the one in charge of the script."

"Actually, he doesn't let me help, I bully my way into it," said Linda.

"That's exactly right."

"But he loves a dominant woman."

"I don't remember asking for one at Christmas."

"That's because I wrote up your list for you, being a dominant woman."

"That figures."

"Oh, is my sweetie being sulky? Nobody likes being around a person with a stinky attitude, even if they have a cute little dent in their chin like you."

"If you keep it up, that Roger guy is going to want his throat torn out for real," Dominick told her.

I was getting to that point myself. I was also starting to notice that Dominick smelled kind of weird, but I couldn't identify the scent.

"I'm so sorry, sweetie, did I steal your glory by telling about what you do, with my help? Here, you can tell them what I do now."

"No, that's all right, I wouldn't want you to stop being the center of attention."

"Good." Linda turned back to me. "I do all the set decoration and prop work, except for weapons, which Dominick does."

"What kind of set decoration?" I asked. "Doesn't it take place in people's homes?"

"Usually their homes, or sometimes outdoors. I make sure furniture gets rearranged to fit what we need for the scene, and if the scene calls for somebody to be making cookies, I'll set that up, and stuff like that."

"Doesn't sound like she does much, does it?" asked Dominick. "That might explain why she feels the need to keep invading my territory."

She swatted him playfully on the arm. "I also do the lighting, which is very important in that it allows people to actually see themselves on the videotape."

"Essentially, her job is to go from room to room and find out where all the light switches are," Dominick said. "Once she's done that, she goes back and makes sure that they all operate on the up-for-on, down-for-off principal. Occasionally her job will be made more difficult with a knob instead of a switch, but that's what she makes the big bucks for."

She swatted him again, also playfully but with a hell of a lot more force than last time. "Actually, I work with very large, powerful lights, which I have to set up out of sight of the camera. And I have to make sure that they don't burn down the customer's home, which tends to screw up our chances of a good referral."

"I can see where that would prove problematic." I was still noticing Dominick's aroma, which I suspected was some kind of funky Goth cologne. "This is off the subject," I said, "but what kind of cologne are you wearing?"

Dominick frowned, then lifted his palm to his nose and sniffed. "Oh, that. Catfish."

"The mighty sportsman was out terminating helpless fish this morning," said Linda. "Those manly impulses get the best of him sometimes. Normally he does a better job bathing afterward."

Farley waved to me. "If you've had enough of the lover's quarrel, I think he's dry."

I returned to where poor Roger sat. "How's it going, buddy?" I asked. He gave me the finger on the sly, which I thought was shockingly unprofessional for a magazine editor.

Farley began to brush on some flesh-colored makeup, hiding the edge of the latex and making it look like a natural part of Roger's neck. "We do almost entirely aftermath gore here," he explained. "It's pretty complicated to actually show a throat being ripped out, and it definitely takes more time than we've got when we're just visiting somebody's house for a day. And it's a little more gruesome than most people want anyway, the wimps. So we won't actually show anything really gross happening, we'll just show what it looks like afterward."

He took a couple more minutes to blend in the makeup, and then gave a satisfied nod at the result. "Now, if this were for real, I'd take longer to ensure that it looks more believable, but this is just a demonstration. Dominick, could you grab me the bottle of blood?"

Dominick took a large bottle from one of the shelves and brought it to him. "Show of hands," said Farley. "Little bit of blood, or lot of blood? All in favor of little blood?"

Nobody but Roger raised their hands. I certainly didn't.

"Lot of blood?"

Everyone else raised their hands.

"Okay, let's dump it on!" Farley poured a generous portion of the blood on Roger's neck. It was thick and looked unnervingly real. "Enough? Never!" He poured on even more, and I could see Roger cringe as it oozed down the side of his neck.

"Am I dead yet?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah, you're dead," said Farley.

"Okay, roll your eyes in the back of your head and let your tongue hang out," said Rachel, appearing out of nowhere with a Polaroid camera. Roger did as instructed, and she snapped a picture. She removed the photo from the camera and handed it to me. "Here. This could be the cover of your magazine."

"Can I get up now?" asked Roger.

"If you want, I could add a small demonic creature gnawing on your throat," Farley offered. "I don't make this offer for everyone, so take it or forever hold your peace."

"I'll hold my peace," said Roger. Farley held the sheet so that it caught most of the blood as Roger sat up.

"Oops, it dripped a bit," Farley pointed out. "But that wasn't your best shirt anyway, was it?"

"Too bad Helen isn't working right now," I said. "We could pay a visit to the hospital and freak her out." After about .0037 of a second's reflection, I decided that it was, in fact, a good thing Helen wasn't working right now.

"I'll give you a free severed thumb effect if you walk around town all day wearing that and a sign that says 'Ghoulish Delights was here,'" Farley offered.

"Thanks, but no," said Roger. "How about directing me to the nearest bathroom?"

Linda took him by the hand. "Here, I'll show you." She led him through the doorway. After a moment's consideration, Dominick followed.

"Could I look at one of the scripts?" I asked Rachel.

"Oh, sure, come on back to the waiting room," she said.

Looking at the script was just to satisfy my own curiosity. I really didn’t have much to go on toward figuring out who buried Michael and stabbed Jennifer, but I was pretty sure it hadn't been anyone in Ghoulish Delights. After all, could I really stand there and talk to the killer face-to-face without getting any kind of indication that he or she hated my guts?

Rachel took a binder off her desk and handed it to me. I opened to the first script and quickly flipped through the ten pages. Linda was really on to something when she said they weren't practicing their Academy Awards speeches yet.

Sample dialogue:

MOTHER:  Stay away! Stay away, you beast! Stay away!

PSYCHOPATH:  Never! You will die, as did my own mother, and as will all the mothers of the world when I'm done!

MOTHER:  But...but...it's Father's Day!

While I was perusing the script, Carl walked into the room and asked Rachel something very technical about a new tripod. She answered back with something equally technical and budget-related. Carl tried to explain in very technical terms why the budget-related answer wasn't what he wanted to hear, but Rachel quickly forced him to accept it, and he returned to the back room.

As I set the script back down, I noticed something resting on Rachel's desk that gave my heart a sudden jolt. A deck of cards. Prophecies of the Night.

"Oh, hey, Prophecies of the Night," I said, keeping my voice casual. "Do you play?"

Rachel rolled her eyes. "Oh, God, Carl is always trying to foist that stupid game on us. He plays it twice a week with his friends. He got everyone a deck for Christmas, and we all get a new deck on our birthday. I went with him once just to shut him up, but the game makes no sense."

"It is a bit confusing," I agreed, to keep her from giving me a pop quiz on the rules. "Is Carl the only one who plays regularly?"

"No, actually, I think Farley goes with him quite a bit, and Dominick and Linda will go occasionally just to mooch free chips and soda. I remember Mike saying something about shoving a fireplace poker through Carl's left nostril if he didn't shut up about that stupid game, so I don't think he's a regular."

"Do you know where they play? I've been looking for a player's group for a while, but I've never been able to find one."

"They play in the basement of Balder's Dash on Thursdays. As far as I know they're on for tonight, though you might want to ask Carl to make sure."

What a happy coincidence! I'd looked seven-to-one odds in the face and come out victorious!

"I don't think I'll be able to make it tonight," I lied, "but I might mention it to him some other time. So here're a couple of questions. First, could we possibly tag along when you're filming one of these things? And, second, is there some time we could meet, just us, to talk outside of work?"

"I hope you're not asking me out," she said. "I'm flattered, but I can very clearly see that little ball and chain around your ring finger."

"No, no, it's strictly professional. You look pretty strong, but my wife has access to a drawer full of kitchen knives and knows where I sleep. No, it's that whole human interest deal...what do the people who work at Ghoulish Delights do in their spare time?"

Roger walked into the waiting room with Linda, his throat intact again. "He's all yours," Linda told me with a wide grin.

"Thanks," I said. "Looking snazzy, Rog."

"I agree. Your throat has never looked better," Rachel commented. To me, she said "How about we meet tomorrow at Von's Gym, 6 A.M.?"

I'd heard rumors that such an hour of the morning existed, but thus far it had been unconfirmed. "Uh, okay."

"Great, six o'clock then. I assume you don't have a membership, so you'll need to tell the guy at the front desk that you're there to see me. And as for tagging along with us, we have an appointment tomorrow at noon, and if you show up here around eleven we'll be more than happy to have you."

We thanked her and left the house. "Why do you think she assumed I don't have a gym membership?" I asked Roger as I shut the door behind me.

"I guess she missed all those muscles bursting through your shirt," he replied. "A common problem, to be honest."

"Shut up."

"You asked, I told. Hey, what's that on your car?"

There was indeed something on the hood of my car, a bright red box, about one foot square, covered with yellow stars. When we reached the car we saw that it was a jack-in-the-box.

"Okay, so what the hell is this all about?" Roger asked.

It was a perfectly innocent-looking jack-in-the-box, but I wasn't sure we were going to like the answer.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"It's no big deal," I said, trying to sound casual. "Just a jack-in-the-box. Turn the crank, hear a catchy tune, see a clown pop up, squeal with delight."

"Uh-huh. So why is it sitting here on your car?"

"That I can't answer."

"You think the killer put it here, as a warning?"

"How should I know? I don't even think anyone in there is the killer! One of them, or all of them, probably just stuck it out here as a prank. We'll turn the handle and see a clown with an axe in his head or something."

"Or it could explode and kill us both," Roger pointed out.

"Now you're getting a little paranoid. Do you think the killer just happened to have a booby-trapped jack-in-the-box sitting around in case we showed up?"

"I don't know, but I certainly welcome you to turn the handle and see what happens. I'll be way the hell over there behind that tree."

"Okay, look, this is stupid. I'll pick it up, march right back in there, and demand to know who put it out here."

"It could have been any of them," said Roger. "Rachel could've done it while I was in the back being tortured, and anyone else could've done it while we were in the waiting room."

"If there's a back door, yeah. Farley could have snuck out unnoticed when Carl came out to gripe about his tripod. Were Dominick and Linda with you the whole time?"

Roger shook his head. "Dominick wasn't with me at all. And Linda was kind enough to give me some privacy while I took a leak. But if we go in there and raise hell over a jack-in-the-box, we're going to look really stupid."

"I never intended to raise hell," I said. "We'd just walk back inside and ask who left it. No big deal."

"I say we knock the stupid thing off your car with a stick and then get out of here," Roger suggested. "If the killer did leave it, he wouldn't have been dumb enough to let himself be seen going outside with it, and if we ask too many questions about it we're going to blow the whole reporter setup."

"You're right," I agreed. "But I don't think we should throw it away. It could be an important clue."

"Well, sure, when knives shoot through the sides at us, that'll be an important clue leading us to conclude that it was a trap!"

"Roger, it's a jack-in-the-box! A toy! Nobody knew we were coming! Who the hell keeps explosive knife-shooting jack-in-the-boxes around?"

"Who the hell buries people alive?"

"Okay, look," I said calmly. "It's there for a reason. If our friend wanted us dead, he would have stabbed us to death right after he murdered Jennifer. He would not leave a trap on our car. It's impractical. And unless everyone in Ghoulish Delights is in on it, having us die right outside of the house would immediately get him questioned by the police!"

"Everyone could be in on it," said Roger. "They were all pretty scary. That Farley lunatic enjoys his work a little too much, if you ask me."

"Now you're just being ridiculous," I said. "At the very least we need to quit standing around debating this and get out of sight in case somebody comes out to ask us what we're doing. Get in the car. I'll grab the box."

"You're actually going to touch it?"

"Yes."

"Suicidal whack-nut."

"Oh, get a backbone." I reached for the box...then hesitated at the last moment. Damn that Roger. Now I was scared to touch a children's toy. The stupid thing couldn't be a trap. There were so many better ways to get rid of us.

"Gee, Andrew, why are you pausing?"

"I told you to get in the car." I took a deep breath, and slowly extended my index finger toward the box. I made contact, and then pulled back as if I'd just touched a hot stove.

"Something wrong?" asked Roger.

"No, you've got me all freaked out." I forced myself to pick up the jack-in-the-box with both hands, revealing a small piece of paper underneath. Written in blood-red letters were the words "Bad graverobbers!"

This was not good.

I tucked the jack-in-the-box under my arm, picked up the note, and then got in the car. I handed the note to Roger as I set the box in the back seat.

"Oh, piss," said Roger.

"Yep. So, either the killer followed us here, or it's somebody inside."

"Or somebody else could know."

"Right, that too." I started the engine. "We need to find out what's in this box."

"Screw that. I say we take it to the police, let them check it out."

"Are you using your brain on a time-share program?" I asked as I backed out onto the road. "Did you forget that the whole reason we haven't gone to the police is that we got into this mess by agreeing to commit a crime?"

"We could make something up," said Roger. "Jennifer's dead, it's not like she's gonna contradict us."

I shook my head. "Even if we could come up with a convincing story that answers all the questions they'd throw at us, we don't have anything to give them but a jack-in-the-box. And we don't know what it means yet."

"So what do you suggest we do?"

"Find out what it means."

"I don't know, Andrew, this kind of reminds me of a really nutty decision made by some guys I used to know. They agreed to dig up a coffin for twenty thousand dollars. Where are we going, anyway?"

"To Merriam Lake," I replied. "I might be able to ease your worries."

* * *

"I can't believe we're doing this," said Roger.

I couldn't quite believe it myself. We were parked at the edge of Merriam Lake, standing outside and watching the water. The jack-in-the-box had been submerged for the past fifteen minutes. If Roger was so worried that it was going to blow up, I figured we'd dunk it for a while.

I don't know anything about bombs, so I had no idea if this would even do any good. And in fact, I was more inclined to believe that it was really, really dumb. But if it was something low-budget and gunpowder-based, soaking it might work. So that's what I was doing.

Finally I waded out and retrieved the jack-in-the-box. I brought it back to shore and set it down on the grass. "Are you happy now?" I asked.

"No. That couldn't possibly have been enough time to rust any knives in there."

"There aren't any goddamn knives! Do you see any place a knife could come through?" I tapped on the side of the tin box, causing Roger to flinch. "See? Solid. No knives. I'm just going to turn the crank and see what's inside. If you're going to keep being a big baby, you can go hide somewhere and I'll tell you what happened later."

I could tell that the idea was appealing to him, but to his credit Roger stayed where he was. "Okay, I'll watch you turn the crank. Just keep your head away from that top part."

"I was going to." I knelt down beside the box and firmly gripped the handle. I took a deep breath, braced myself, and then let go of the handle. "All right, I don't see any harm in pushing a big mud pile around three of the sides, to sort of block anything that might shoot out, do you?"

Roger agreed that he saw nothing wrong with the idea, so we scooped up some mud from the shore and built a protective barrier around the jack-in-the-box, covering everything but the lid and the handle. That finished, Roger returned to his position of relative safety next to the car and I gripped the handle once more.

I turned the crank. "Pop Goes the Weasel!" began to play. It occurred to me that I didn't know any of the lyrics to this song besides the "Pop Goes the Weasel!" part. I'm sure my brain chose to share that information with me just to distract me from the fact that I was excessively nervous.

Dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-DAH, dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah-dah-dah-dah...

I stopped turning right before the weasel went pop.

"Is it broken?" asked Roger.

"No, it's not broken. Leave me alone."

"I'd understand if you want to forget the whole thing."

"Don't talk--you're distracting me."

"From turning the handle?"

"Shut up or I'm yanking this thing right out of the mud and coming after you with it."

"Maybe we should soak it another fifteen minutes."

"No! Just be quiet! I'm going to turn it!" I continued holding the handle, but eased myself as far away from the box as I could and still reach.

Then I turned.

DAH!

Dah-dah-DAH-dah. Dah-dah, dah-dah...

The lousy weasel didn't even know when to pop. I continued turning the handle, and it went through the second verse of "Pop Goes the Weasel," the one that reportedly caused the songwriters to break up over creative differences.

This time, I didn't hesitate at the pop, and the lid sprung open. A cute little clown burst out, bobbing to and fro on his spring. A small wet envelope was taped to one of the clown's hands. I tore it off.

"Are you gonna cover that thing with mud, just in case?" Roger asked.

"No, I'm not going to...okay, I'll cover it up to make you feel better." With my foot, I moved a huge glob of mud over the top of the jack-in-the-box. Then, worrying that some kids might come playing around here, I pulled the box out of the mud and heaved it as far into the lake as I could. Nothing blew up and no dead fish rose to the surface, so I figured everything was cool.

I opened the envelope and removed the folded piece of paper inside. Roger apparently decided there was nothing to fear from it and walked over to join me.

On the paper, in the same blood-red letters was written:  "If you want to see Jennifer again, be at the Everlife Cemetery at midnight."

"Oh, now that's interesting," said Roger.

"That's impossible," I protested. "I heard--"

I stopped. I'd only heard her die. It certainly wouldn't be difficult to fake a death that I never got to see.

But why? Why would somebody kidnap Roger, threaten to use him as a hostage but let him go, then fake Jennifer's death, only to use her as a hostage...or something like that?

This whole situation was becoming slightly quaint.

* * *

We were both completely baffled, and so I made the decision for Roger to engage in some real detective work. Meaning that I told him to hide in the woods around the graveyard to see if he could learn the identity of the killer. For some odd reason he was not all that keen on this idea, but using my expert skills at encouraging others to obey my will ("Quit your whining and just do it, for God's sake!"), I managed to convince him. I dropped him off at his apartment with instructions to buy some more bullets for Michael's gun, drive to the cemetery, hide well, and not try to apprehend the killer himself. Not that he ever would.

I drove home to spend some quality minutes with my family before heading out again. Nobody was there, but I saw the light blinking on the answering machine. This pleased me, because Helen had insisted that the new message I'd recorded would cause people to decide they didn't really want us to return their call:

"Hi, you've reached the residence of Andrew, Helen, Theresa, and Kyle Mayhem. Because we've lost a number of close friends lately in telephone-related accidents, we're unable to bring ourselves to answer your call at this time. But if you leave your name and number at the tone, we'll get back to you as soon as therapy cures the problem."

I pressed the button, listened to the message, and immediately got back in my car and drove to the hospital.

CHAPTER NINE

I'm not right very often, but my constant warning of "If you kids don't pick those toys up off the stairs, somebody's going to trip and break their neck!" turned out to be almost true, except that Helen broke her right leg instead.

She was not in an especially good mood by the time I got there. She was also not all that coherent due to the gobs of medication they'd given her, but I was able to ascertain from her ranting that Kyle's Eye-in-an-Egg had been the culprit.

"I told you not to buy it for him," she snarled. "Didn't I tell you not to buy it for him? Didn't I? We were right there in the store and I said not to buy it, and you went ahead and bought it anyway, you son of a bitch!"

"Yeah, but you said it was stupid, not a health risk," I said, lacking the intelligence not to argue with a drugged-up pissed-off pain-filled woman.

"I don't care. I've always hated that Eye-in-an-Egg, and now because of it I get to spend the next few days in the hospital! Like I don't spend enough time here anyway! I don't see you doing all these hours of overtime! Did you get me flowers?"

"Not yet, but I will right away."

"Forget it. I'm going to sleep. Go away."

"I'll make sure that the Eye gets destroyed."

"See that you do."

I left the room and collected my children from our surly-looking neighbor. They were both pretty shaken-up, but I assured them that Mommy was going to be all right and cheered them up by promising them rides on her wheelchair. I made some phone calls, trying to find a place for the kids to stay the night, but nobody was available. I'd try again later.

By the time we ate a fast food dinner and got home, it was nearly seven. I wanted to go check on Roger, but I didn't want to risk blowing his cover, or listen to him gripe. Since I really didn't have much time before I wanted to be at Balder's Dash, I decided to simply lie on the couch and try to think things through.

Theresa and Kyle popped in the animated video Zany the Chipper Chipmunk. This video always brought out deep feelings of guilt because I wanted so badly to see Zany die. It didn't have to be a gruesome death, just a painful one.

I tried to put the various pieces of the puzzle together, but because I suck as a detective I fell asleep instead. I woke up as Zany was teaching kids the importance of flossing. My leg was being used as the weaponry fort for Kyle's Captain Hocker action figure (with Super-Spitting Action!).

"Grab some stuff to keep you occupied," I said. "Daddy's going to play cards."

* * *

Balder's Dash was meant to be a hangout for college students, but most college students thought it was pretty lame and went elsewhere. As we walked in the door, a movie was playing on a wide-screen TV where some greenish-gray alien was trying to devour some mega-breasted actress while at the same time making sure to jostle her around for maximum bounce. I didn't want my children to witness any more jiggle than absolutely necessary, so we hurried into the back room.

Several people were in there, sitting around a table with about six billion cards spread out in cryptic patterns. Both Carl and Farley were present, and Farley waved as he saw us enter.

"Hey, did you come for your own throat treatment?"

"No, actually I came to learn the game," I said. There was a small couch not being used, so I gave Theresa and Kyle each a kiss and bribed them with Skittles to sit on it and play nicely.

"You came to learn the game?" asked Farley. "I hope you realize this isn't Yahtzee. You're not going to pick up the rules for the first five or six weeks."

"That's fine," I said, pulling up a free chair next to Farley. "By the way, I apologize if I'm just barging in. You guys don't mind if I watch, do you?"

"No, no, we need all the players we can get," Farley assured me. Carl gave me a polite nod, but for the most part kept his eyes glued to the table, obviously planning out some intricate strategy. Introductions were made all around, and then they resumed their game.

I watched carefully for about fifteen minutes without saying anything. This was another case where being Sherlock Holmes might have come in handy, because maybe he would have had some faint comprehension of the rules to this game. One guy, Harold, was sort of the narrator, telling the other players where they were and what demonic beasts were trying to kill them or transform them into minions of evil. That part I got. But whatever they were doing with those cards sounded like complete gibberish.

I was lost. Baffled. Out of my element in society.

Carl set a card down, making the pattern of cards even more hopelessly complex than it already was. "I'll use my Boots of Divine Intervention with an additional three karma points and an additional two stealth points to cross the threshold." He bit his lip nervously as he waited for Harold to roll one of about twenty multi-colored, multi-sided dice. This guy took the game waaaaaay too seriously.

"Fourteen," Harold announced. "What's your Hero rating?"

"Twenty-nine."

"You didn't make it. You fall into the lava storm and lose..." Harold rolled another die, "...seven points from your Health rating."

Carl whitened. "I'll have to use my Cloak of Reconstruction to keep from falling into the Sleep of the Damned!"

"You can't use your cloak," another player pointed out. "It's still cursed for one more turn from my Wand of Dissatisfaction."

"But you're only holding it for six Curse points," said Carl. "So I'm going to use my +3 Reversal Armor to destroy the curse and then I can use my cloak."

"All right," said Harold. "You're currently floating in the lava. Your turn, Farley."

"I'll run down there and get Carl's head for my trophy case."

"Seriously, Farley, what do you do?"

"How many different points does this game have?" I asked.

"Sixteen points in each of the fields," Farley replied.

"How many fields?"

"There's the Field of Mind, the Field of Body, the Field of Might, the Field of Sorcery, the Field of Destiny, and the Field of Eternity."

"Gotcha. Somehow I missed the Field of Eternity."

"Now, I have a question for you," said Farley. "You're not here to learn the game, and you're not a real reporter. So who are you?"

The other gamers fell silent. Farley's squeaky voice and diminutive stature made him somewhat less than intimidating, but this was still not exactly a development I welcomed.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"I can tell by the way you're watching us. You're not watching to see how we play the game--you're trying to study us as individuals. What are you, some kind of FBI agent?"

I was secretly a bit flattered that he might have thought I was FBI material, but I didn't let it go to my head. "Okay, here's the real story. You're right--I'm not here to learn about the game. If I had an extra few hundred I.Q. points I could probably figure out how the hell the rules work, but the truth is that I'm a private investigator."

Carl stared at me, seriously annoyed. "You're disrupting our game because you're a private investigator?"

"That's right."

Farley's face lit up with fascination. "That is so cool! Which one of us are you investigating? It's Rachel, right? I always knew she was up to something shady."

"No, I'm here because your friend Michael Ashcraft has turned up missing. His wife hired me to find out where he is."

"Mike's missing?" asked Carl. "For how long?"

"Wasn't Michael Ashcraft that guy who stayed here for about ten minutes then called us all a bunch of geeks and stormed out?" asked Harold.

"He's been gone since last night," I told Carl. "The police won't help because he hasn't been missing for twenty-four hours, but his wife believes there may be some element of foul play."

"Wasn't he on vacation?" Carl asked.

"It fell through," I said.

Farley pushed back his chair and jumped to his feet. "I know who it was!" he announced, and then pointed at Carl. "It was you! You had the motive, means, and opportunity! You've always hated Michael because his mother liked him better than your mother liked you! It was you! Admit it!"

"Sit down, you little nerd," Carl muttered.

Farley's eyes widened as he pretended to have another shocking realization. "But wait! It could also have been...me! That's right! How silly of me not to think of it in the first place! I'm the one who followed Michael home last night, burst into his living room, beat him to death with a snow globe, chopped up his body with a set of Ginsu knives, then stuffed the evidence down the garbage disposal, following it with a slice of lemon to disguise the smell. That's it! I've done your work for you, Andrew Mayhem...if that is your name!"

"Yeah, that's my name. Look, I didn't come here to interrupt your game, but do you and Carl mind if I ask you guys some questions?"

Carl looked pained at the idea of leaving the game, but Farley nodded enthusiastically. "Sure, anything to help a private eye. By the way, how much do you guys make?"

"Millions," I said. "Movie stars get the fame, but we get the cash. How about I talk to you first, then Carl after we're done?"

"Fine by me," said Farley. He gestured toward the side of the room where Theresa and Kyle were playing. "Step into my office."

Theresa was sitting on a beanbag, so I sat down on the couch then hoisted Kyle up on my lap. Farley sat down next to us. "Have you ever shot anyone?" he asked.

Kyle looked up at me. "Have you, Daddy?"

"No, I've never shot anyone. That's all TV stuff. Most of a private investigator's work is really boring." I think I'd read that somewhere.

"Yeah, but do you take pictures of people cheating on their wives and husbands and bosses and that kind of thing?"

"I'm trying to get out of that field," I said. "Sometimes the emotions involved are just too intense. So tell me about Michael."

"You mean, does he have any enemies?"

"That would be a good place to start, yeah."

"I don't know if he has any enemies or not. I hardly ever see him outside of work. His wife's a babe, though, don't you think?"

"Kyle, why don't you go over and play with Theresa?" I suggested.

"I want to hear about the babe."

"Kyle, go play with Theresa."

Kyle reluctantly slid off my lap and went over to torment his sister. "Do you see Jennifer much?" I asked.

"You mean, do I see much of Jennifer?" Farley chuckled. The sleazy attitude seemed out of place coming from this little twerp. "Nah. She comes around sometimes and complains that Mike should be spending more time at home instead of at work, but that's about it. Most of us just ignore her. Especially Rachel, she can't stand her."

"I got that impression. Now, let me ask you kind of a strange question. If Michael had a safety deposit box, what would you say might be in it?"

"Is that the kind of question they train you to ask in private investigator academy?"

"Just work with me. What might be inside?"

"I have no idea. Maybe nude pictures of his wife."

"Do you know if he had any money stored away?"

"Nope. The only time money came into conversation was when he said we were spending too much on the videos. So do you have to take a test to become a private eye or can anyone do it?"

"A written test, and a psychological screening," I replied. "At least in Florida." That sounded good.

"Do you get to carry a gun?"

"Yes, but I usually don't."

"Why not?"

"I don't need one. Like I said, it's usually boring. Did Michael and Jennifer ever fight when they were around you guys?"

"You think she did something to him?"

"It's just a question."

Farley hesitated. "Can this be off the record?"

"Absolutely."

"I think she's cheating on him. That Mike is paranoid beyond belief, but this is one thing he may have been right about."

"Did he accuse her?"

"No, nothing blatant, at least not that I know about. But you could tell he didn't like having any of us around her. And when they were together, it was obvious that something was up."

"How could you tell?" I asked.

"I don't know--you're the one who's familiar with psychological testing. All I can say is that if you're going to keep asking around, that may be something to bring up."

"Thanks," I said. "That'll be helpful."

"So do the cops resent you for intruding upon their turf?"

"No."

"Do you think I could tag along with you one day, on a stakeout or something? I won't get in the way."

"Don't you already have a career in special effects?"

"I don't want to change careers, I just want to see what it's like to be a gumshoe. What kind of car do you drive?"

"A ratty old gray one."

"To be inconspicuous, right?"

"You know it."

"That is so cool. Hey, if you need anything else, feel free to ask. I'll go get Carl for you, if I can drag his obsessed butt away from the game."

"Thanks."

As Farley returned to the table I tried to figure out what to do with that new piece of information. Could Jennifer be behind this whole thing? If so, who was her accomplice with the knife? And once again, why?

Carl came over and sat down on the couch. "Do you think Mike's okay?" he asked.

"That's what I'm trying to find out. When was the last time you saw him?" This was a pretty obvious question that I should have asked Farley, but I didn't think of it due to the previously stated fact that I suck as a detective.

"Last week. He was all psyched about going to Europe."

"Was Jennifer with him?"

Carl nodded. "She picked him up at work."

"Did she come inside?"

"Just to tell him to hurry up."

"Do you think they're a happy couple?"

Carl shrugged. "Sure."

"What makes you think so?"

Carl looked uncomfortable. "I don't know, why shouldn't they be? Isn't Jennifer the one who hired you?"

"Yes, she is. I'm just trying to find out everything I can. Do you think she was faithful to him?"

"How should I know? She never asked me to videotape her sleeping around or anything, if that's what you're wondering."

"No, that's not quite what I was wondering, but thanks. Now here’s a fill-in-the-blank question:  If Michael owned a safety deposit box, it would contain what?"

Carl looked very confused. "Huh?"

I was giving serious consideration to dropping this question from future interrogations. "Just say the first thing that pops into your mind."

"Nothing pops into my mind." He thought for a moment. "Legal documents, backup copies of software programs, I don't know. Why are you asking?"

"Like I said, just getting information."

"I don't think I have any information. All I do is videotape stuff for Ghoulish Delights and occasionally help them with the new scenarios. Can I get back to the game?"

"Sure, have fun. Slay an elf for me."

"My character is an elf!"

I gathered up my children and we headed back into the main area. That same alien was trying to devour another actress who wore nothing to block Kyle's view of her jiggling capabilities, so I covered his eyes with my hand and led him outside.

We walked a block to an outdoor pay phone and I began to make more calls. My in-laws still weren't home, nor were either of the babysitters who hadn't blacklisted my children. "It's Thursday night, where on earth are these people?" I asked aloud.

"When can we see Mommy?" asked Theresa.

"Not until visiting hours start tomorrow," I said. "But we'll call her as soon as I find a babysitter."

"We don't need a babysitter," Theresa insisted. "I can watch Kyle."

"No, you can't!" said Kyle.

"Forget it, there's no way in the world I'm leaving you two alone," I said. "I'd come back and the house would have sunk like the Titanic. Who's that one lady who watched you that one time? The lady with that stupid dog with those foofy things on its tail?"

"Mrs. Denkle," said Theresa. "She moved."

"Is she still in Florida?"

"Maybe."

I decided I wasn't going to spend the rest of the evening chasing around a Mrs. Denkle who might still live in Florida. I made a couple more desperate phone calls, but came up empty. So the only person left to watch them was currently hiding out in a cemetery. Great.

I called Helen at the hospital and let the kids talk to her for two minutes each. Then I told her that the kids and I planned to spend the rest of the evening at home watching television. This wasn't the truth, and my lie would be probably be exposed the very next time she spoke with our children, but for now it was worth it just to keep Helen from worrying.

It was about nine o'clock. I herded the kids into the car and we drove the twenty minutes to the Everlife Cemetery. It was a large cemetery with no gates surrounding it. Though there were no hills, a couple of large mausoleums provided an excellent place to hide, along with the bordering woods.

"Okay, we're going to play a new game," I said. "It's called Car Hide and Seek. I want both of you to duck down as far as you can and hide. I'm going to step right outside the car, and when I get back in I'll see if I can find you. How does that sound?"

"That’s silly, Daddy," Theresa informed me.

"But silly games are the most fun, right?"

"No."

"Yeah!" said Kyle, most likely just to contradict her.

"Play Daddy's silly game and we'll play another game later. Now duck down. I don't want to be able to see any part of you when I'm outside the car."

They both squished down as far as they could, and I got out of the car. Since I was here almost three hours early, I didn't really expect the killer to be around anyway, but I wanted to take as few chances as possible.

"Roger! Hey, Roger! It's Andrew! You awake?"

A moment later I saw Roger step out from behind some trees at the far end of the cemetery. As he began to crutch toward me, I could see that he didn't look happy. Not that I blamed him.

"What's up?" he called out.

"Change of plans. I couldn't get rid of the kids."

"You mean I sat out here all this time for nothing?"

"Yep. Did you see anything?"

"Not a thing. You brought me food, right?"

"Uh, yeah, I think Kyle still has all of his green Skittles left."

"You suck, man." Roger reached me, slightly out of breath and covered with sweat and dirt. "What are we supposed to do now?"

"My guess is that you don't want to hang out here another few hours and meet our friend yourself, right?"

"Good guess."

"So we'll trade." I glanced back at the car to make sure the kids weren't peeking. "Hand over the flashlight."

He gave it to me.

"Take the kids to your place," I said. "I want them in bed by ten, and no sugar unless you absolutely can't get them to go to bed without it. Where's your car?"

"It's parked at a church about two miles away. Just follow the road that way," Roger said, pointing. "Enjoy the fact that you're not doing it on crutches."

"Thanks. I guess I'll get in touch with you later. Try and keep the phone line free, okay?"

"Are you sure you want to do this? There's no law saying you have to show up here just because some psycho killer left a message in a jack-in-the-box."

"Don't worry, I'll be careful," I assured him.

After we traded keys, I opened the car door, located my children, and gave them the usual instructions about not driving Roger to the brink of suicide. Then they left, and I headed for the cover of woods to wait.

CHAPTER TEN

Three hours waiting in a graveyard after dark starts to get to you. I don't know why. Maybe it's all the dead people hanging around underground. Whatever it was, by the time my watch said it was ten minutes to midnight, I had a major case of the creeps, the willies, and the heebie-jeebies. At least the flesh-eating zombies were keeping themselves hidden away.

I sat there for another ten minutes and the same nothing that had been happening all night continued happening. I wondered if the killer was hiding someplace else, waiting for me to drive by. Maybe without somebody acting as bait (which was to be my job in the original plan), he wouldn't show up. Regardless, I was going to wait at least another half hour before I gave up.

Then I heard a faint beeping, like an alarm clock going off. For a moment I thought it was my creeped-out, willied, and heebie-jeebied imagination, but a few more seconds convinced me that, yes, I was definitely hearing a beeping. You weren't generally supposed to hear beeping in a cemetery at midnight, so I had a pretty good idea that this had something to do with the reason I was here.

I surveyed as much of the graveyard as I could see, which was most of it. Nobody around. The killer could have left a beeper any time before our stakeout, maybe even before Jennifer hired us.

Reluctantly I emerged from my hiding spot, turned on the flashlight, and began to walk toward the beeping. It was hard to gauge exactly where it was coming from, but after a couple of minutes I pinpointed the spot and knelt down beside a small hole in the ground, about the size of a dime.

I stuck my finger in the hole and pulled away dirt until I'd exposed a small kitchen timer. I shut it off, and then removed the note that was taped to it. Once again, the same blood-red letters. "Find Jennifer Where You Find Love."

What was that supposed to mean? Find Jennifer where you find love? What was it, singles night at the Everlife Cemetery? Had I really sat around for three hours waiting for this?

Okay, stop it, I told myself. It obviously means something. Be a non-sucky detective. Get that brain into gear. Find Jennifer where you find love. Find Jennifer where you find love.

Love. My heart gave a jolt as I suddenly wondered if they'd involved Helen, but that was ridiculous. The killer certainly hadn't stashed Jennifer under her hospital bed.

Was I supposed to find love here, in the cemetery? This was entering some really depraved territory.

Lovers buried together? That was a possibility, but there had to be dozens of them around. Something left by a lover? Once again, there could be dozens of them. But hey, maybe the killer just wasn't any good at narrowing things down. It was worth looking.

I began to wander up and down the rows of tombstones, shining my flashlight on each one. Wherever I found flowers, I poked through them, but found nothing interesting. This was going to take forever.

And then I had a sudden brainstorm. There may not be many people around with the last name "Mayhem," but there were plenty with the last name "Love."

I picked up my pace, looking only at the names. Five minutes later, I stopped at a pair of small, cracked tombstones. Timothy and Karen Love. Both of them 1892-1954. "Died in each other's arms."

There was a basket of flowers resting in front of the tombstone. If this was wrong, I was going to feel like a total creep, but nevertheless I turned the basket over and shook it until something fell out. A picture in a frame.

It was not a nice picture. It was a picture of a woman screaming. Not Jennifer. I actually thought I recognized her, an actress from some zero-budget horror films. The picture was probably a shot from one of her movies.

The interesting part was the frame. It was one of those frames with a little speaker inside, so you can record a short message. It was intended to be something like "I'm thinking about you" or "You're always in my heart." I suspected that the message here was going to be something quite different.

I pressed the button and was treated to the sound of a female shriek, followed by some maniacal laughter that sounded like it had been generated from a computer. Then a sound bite that I recognized from The Exorcist, a demonic voice proclaiming "This sow is mine!"

A chorus of children:  "You're gonna diiiiie, you're gonna diiiiie."

A musical sting, the kind you hear right as the monster bursts out of nowhere.

An old man speaking in a careful, calculated tone: "True horror exists deep beneath the surface."

Another female shriek.

A hysterical man: "Blood! Blood everywhere! It covers the walls! It covers the ceiling!"

The Twilight Zone theme.

A whisper: "Look beneath...look within..."

The recording ended.

It took me several seconds to remember to breathe. Sweat was pouring down my sides, and I was getting the kind of headache I always got before a really difficult test in college.

"It's nothing," I said aloud. "Just some guy with a bit of a twist in his personality trying to mess with my mind, that's all."

"DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!"

I dropped the picture in shock, and then willed my stomach to untangle itself from my spinal column. Just a little bonus sound bite, like the hidden tracks you can find on some CDs. Nothing to keel over dead from.

But I also had nothing to go on.

Okay, "true horror exists beneath the surface" was probably a clue. I didn't like that clue, because it implied that I was going to have to dig up another grave, and I was trying to cut down. But where? The Love's site certainly didn't look like anything had been added to it recently. Was I going to have to wander around, shining my flashlight all over until I found a patch of ground that looked recently filled?

"Look beneath...look within..."

It had to refer to digging up another grave. Or else the tombstones of Mr. Beneath and Mr. Within. The only other thing I could look beneath was the picture.

I picked up the frame, half expecting it to tell me to DIE! DIE! DIE! again. I removed the picture and found another note behind it.

"Good guess. But wrong."

What a prick.

Okay, fine, it wasn't behind the picture. Where else was I supposed to look? I wandered around the nearby tombstones, searching for an area that might have something newly-buried underneath it, but there was nothing.

Maybe I was supposed to smash open the picture frame.

I turned it over. Better idea. Look in the battery compartment.

I pried open the compartment and saw four tiny batteries.

Then one of the batteries fell out, revealing a very small, folded piece of paper. I unfolded it and letters I could barely even see spelled out "OLE."

Ole? Spanish for "Bravo?" What was this, congratulations for not going absolutely berserk up to this point?

I shook the frame and the other batteries dropped out. Three more pieces of paper fell to the ground. After I retrieved and unfolded them, I had the following fragments:  "US," "MA," and "UM."

Great. Another puzzle. And I was the kind of person who cheated at Scrabble.

"Us" and "Ma" could refer to people, I guess, but what were "Um" and "Ole" supposed to mean? Was I supposed to be searching for a Mexican couple who lived with their mother and used verbal tags?

Maybe these could be unscrambled to form another name.

No! I had it!

With a little rearranging the fragments formed...MAUSOLEUM.

I headed over to the closest mausoleum, which was also the larger of the two. The door was chained shut with a shiny new padlock, but when I walked around to the back there was a patch of earth, about as long as a coffin, that, while firmly packed, could easily have been replaced recently.

Jennifer could be down there.

If so, she'd probably been there since last night.

This was not going to be pretty.

Now I decided that the best course of action was to run to the car, drive to the nearest phone, and get the police. If Jennifer was buried alive, every second might count, and I wasn't going to get very far trying to dig with my bare hands. But I took a moment to shine my flashlight around the area, just in case I'd missed something, and there it was. Another one of those notes, taped to the mausoleum wall near the ground. I tore it free and read it. "13 left, 27 right, 4 left."

I hurried to the front of the mausoleum and turned the dial of the padlock to that combination. It popped open, and I threw it aside. I pulled open the heavy wooden door, shined the flashlight inside, and immediately saw what I was supposed to find. Two shovels. A lantern. A Walkman. And yes, a note.

"Dig her up yourselves or suffer the consequences," the note read. "But you may want to hurry."

I grabbed one of the shovels, the lantern, and the Walkman and rushed to the back of the mausoleum. Opening the Walkman, I saw that the tape inside was labeled "Music To Dig Up Graves By." Oh, yes, this guy was certainly a prick.

I spent the next half hour digging as rapidly as I could. I kept the Walkman volume low so that I could hear if anyone approached, but I got to listen to songs like "Digging in the Dirt" by Peter Gabriel, Perry Como singing "Dig You Later," Randy Travis singing "Digging Up Bones," They Might Be Giants singing "Dig My Grave," and "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" by AC/DC.

Then I struck coffin.

I quickly removed more dirt until the lid was exposed enough that I could open it. This was made a bit more difficult because I was trying to keep myself in a position where I wouldn't get shot if bullets started firing through the lid.

I knocked on the lid with the shovel. "Jennifer?"

Silence.

I could think of so many things I'd rather do than open this coffin. Root canals, alligator wrestling, parent-teacher conferences...bring 'em on!

But I got the shovel in place, and then pried it open.

There was not a corpse inside.

There wasn't a live body inside, either.

The only thing inside the coffin was a video camera.

Great. I'd spontaneously generated six ulcers over a stupid video camera. I picked it up, and then shut the lid. It was an older model, heavy and clunky. Probably not something that would be missed if it were taken out of the Ghoulish Delights office.

I sat down against the wall of the mausoleum and examined the camcorder more thoroughly. I ejected the tape inside and saw that it was labeled "You'll like this." I stuck the tape back in, and then unplugged the headphones from the Walkman and inserted them into the headphone jack of the video recorder. I peered through the viewfinder and pressed "play."

A black-and-white image appeared. It was Jennifer, her hair much longer than when I'd met her. She wore a black leather outfit and high heels. As she walked onto the empty stage, the camera zoomed in on her face, and she gave a spank-me-you-bad-boy smile.

"Welcome to Ghoulish Delights," she said, sounding like she was on a commercial for a 1-900-DO-ME-NOW line. "I'm sure you'll looooove what we've got in store for you. But before we get to the good stuff, let's hear a word from our sponsor, Profit Jewelers. You know, nose rings, lip rings, navel rings, and a wide variety of other piercings are the fashion right now, but Profit Jewelers, always the innovator, has taken things one step further."

The camera panned over to where a woman I didn't recognize sat on a chair, smiling broadly and waving at the camera like a professional model. She was very attractive except for the ring protruding from her left eyeball.

"Yes, eye rings," said Jennifer. "They're what all the top stars are wearing, and as an extra-special bonus, they huuuuuurt when they go in." She purred these last words, but for some reason I still wasn't convinced to go get my eye pierced.

She began to scratch her back. "Don't you hate that one little spot on your back that you can never seem to reach? Usually somebody is here to scratch it for me." She made this sound like one of the most erotic acts imaginable. "But tonight I'm on my own, so I'll have to improvise."

Jennifer ripped off her left arm in a spray of blood, and then used it to scratch her back. Even with a one-inch, grainy black-and-white picture it wasn't a very convincing special effect.

"That's soooo much better," she told the camera. She tossed the arm off-screen. After a series of loud chewing sounds, a skeletal arm was tossed back to her. "Now, before we get to our main attraction, it's time once again for Cooking With Chef Pierre."

The camera followed her as she walked over to an oven, upon which rested a large metal pot. A man who had obviously been dead for quite some time was standing by the oven, tied to a pole so he wouldn't topple over. "This is Chef Pierre," Jennifer explained. "Master of culinary treats. So, what have you got for us today?"

Steam poured up into her face as she removed the lid. She inhaled deeply, and sighed with pleasure. "Ooooh, my favorite. Now, this creation is for those who love spaghetti, but don't find it quite hearty enough." She dipped out a spoonful of the contents. Intestines.

"I wonder if it's done?" Jennifer grabbed a foot-long segment of the intestine and flung it against the wall. It stuck. "Ah! Perfect!"

I shifted my position, wondering what I was supposed to be getting out of this. Maybe they wanted me to promote a new restaurant.

"And now, it's time for our feature presentation," said Jennifer. "His name is...well, you don't really need to know his name to enjoy it, so here we go!"

The scene switched to a bedroom. There was a young man on the bed, maybe in his mid-twenties, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. He'd been tied there, spread eagle, a gag over his mouth. The camera zoomed in close on his face, revealing eyes wide with terror. If this guy was an actor, he was good. But I didn't think he was an actor.

The camera pulled back from his face, and then began to circle him as the person taping this walked to the other side of the bed. The man watched it the entire time. There was no sound, but you could tell he was whimpering.

Then the camera operator's gloved hand came into the frame, holding a pocket knife. It was opened to a spork.

I pressed the fast-forward button just as the camera operator went to work on the man's upper leg. For nearly five minutes I watched what was happening, and even in speeded-up motion on the tiny screen it made me violently queasy. The spork was not the only tool used. The corkscrew was especially grisly.

I wanted to believe that it was all just special effects, but I knew that it wasn't. It was all one continuous shot, with no opportunities to replace the live actor with a Karo syrup-filled dummy. And when the pocketknife was upgraded to a hatchet, the man flailed around too much for his missing right arm to have been simply tucked out of sight.

No actor could maintain that level of terror and agony for so long.

This was real.

I took it off fast-forward as the man was finally allowed to die. The gloved hand, now drenched with blood, gave a thumbs-up sign to the camera. The screen faded to black.

Jennifer reappeared, smiling mischievously. "Ooooh, that had to hurt, don't you think? That's all for this episode, but let's see some coming attractions."

The picture cut to a young woman tied to a chair. The scene shifted four more times, showing two other women and two men, all tied up and ripe for the torturing. Then the scene returned to Jennifer.

"I hope you've enjoyed Ghoulish Delights, and I hope you'll come see us again some time."

She blew a kiss at the camera, then ran her tongue over her upper lip as the picture faded out.

I fast-forwarded to the end, but there was nothing else on the tape.

Now what?

That was an easy one to answer. I was going straight to the police.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I didn't bother to rebury the coffin. Screw it. The cops were going to get the full story. The whole situation had been out of control before, but now it was too much for me to handle. Let the police deal with the lunatic making snuff films. This stretched well beyond the death of Michael Ashcraft, and I was done with it.

I walked along the side of the road at a brisk pace, the video camera tucked under my arm. No cars passed as I made my way to the church where Roger had parked. I half-expected The Apparition to show up and offer me another lift. It had been that kind of bizarre evening.

The flashlight battery died about halfway there, forcing me to walk in total darkness. I found it hard to be surprised.

I got in the car and took a couple of minutes to compose myself before I started the engine. I didn't want to get in a wreck and leave my kids with two parents in the hospital, or one in the morgue.

I pulled onto the road and searched the AM radio stations until I found the easiest listening music on the dial. I needed a station that would advertise itself as "Music for the aging, comatose kind of guy." My nerves were in desperate need of soothing. I thanked God I'd never tried drugs, or this would have sent me into an acid flashback for sure.

I let the music calm me down for about two minutes. Then a phone rang.

Roger didn't own a cellular phone. Unless he'd bought one within the past couple of days and forgot to mention it, I had a pretty strong suspicion that this was not going to be a call I wanted to hear.

The phone rang again. It wasn't difficult to locate, wedged between the front seats. I picked it up, noting that it looked just like the one Jennifer had given me, extended the antenna, and answered. "Hello?"

"Having fun?"

It was a very low, computer-generated voice, spoken in a monotone. Apparently the killer had one of those voice disguiser gizmos after all.

"Who is this?" I demanded.

For a few seconds I could only hear a faint clicking, as if somebody was typing on a keyboard. Then the voice again:  "I'm the villain in your life story."

"Listen to me, you deviant freak, I'm not playing your game anymore. As soon as I hang up on your sorry ass I'm calling the police."

"Oh, don't do that. That's no fun."

"No, fun is taking my kids to an amusement park. Fun is not spending all night at a graveyard so I can dig up a coffin with a tape of America's Most Fucked-Up Home Videos!"

"You just don't know how to party."

"I'm hanging up now."

"I wouldn't."

"Why not?"

"People will die."

"Who?"

"You'll find out."

"I'm not playing around any more," I said. "Tell me who this is. Is this Jennifer?"

"Maybe."

"Okay, fine, I don't expect you to reveal your secret identity. Tell me why you're doing this."

"I have nothing to loss."

"What the hell does 'nothing to loss' mean? What was that, a typo?"

Silence.

"Jeez, Mr. or Mrs. Psychopathic Dipshit, you'd think if you were going to go to all the trouble of letting your computer do the talking you'd be more careful with your typing so you wouldn't sound like a complete moron."

Still no response.

"What's the matter, did you loss your voice?"

"It won't seem so funny when you're the one tied to that bed." It was the computer speaking. I'd hoped to make the killer mad enough to break in on the conversation, but no such luck.

"No, you're right, it probably won't," I conceded. "That's why I'm not giving it a chance to happen."

"People will die."

"You already said that. Are you using macros now?"

The typing grew louder and faster. "You listen to me, Andrew Mayhem. I have five people locked away who are going to die the same excruciating death you saw tonight if you don't follow my instructions."

"Yeah, right. How do I know you're not bluffing, like you did when you said you were going to keep Roger?"

"You'll get the tapes."

"Uh-huh. Sure."

"Don't push it, Mayhem. If I have to, I'll bring one of them down right now and you can listen to me rip her apart. Did you watch the tape all the way through?"

"Yeah."

"Then you know which five people I'm talking about."

It still could have been a bluff, but after seeing the tape, and after possibly hearing Jennifer stabbed to death last night, I decided it wasn't worth taking a chance. "Fine. You've got my attention. What's up?"

"I wanted to tell you that you're doing well."

"Really? Wow, you just don't know how much your approval means to me. My parents never thought I'd amount to anything, and hearing your words of encouragement has really brightened my night. Thank you so very the hell much."

A loud honk made me realize that I had drifted into the opposite lane and was heading toward a Volkswagen. I quickly jerked the steering wheel and got back where I belonged.

"You should be more careful," the killer's computer informed me.

"Chew me."

"Here are the rules, Andrew. Do not talk about what has happened. If you tell anyone, those five innocent people will die horribly. If you keep quiet and play along, they will be released. Do you understand?"

"When will they be released?" I asked.

"Soon."

"That doesn't cut it. Tell me exactly when they'll be released and maybe we've got a deal."

"Very soon. That's all I can say."

"All right. I won't talk to anyone."

"Good. But I want you to keep investigating. Learn all you can. Try to find out who I am. Play the game. Have fun with it."

"I don't see any potential for fun here, but I'll do my best. So why are you doing this? If you're some freakazoid who gets off on torturing people, that's your business, but why am I involved?"

"Soon it's going to be all over for me. As I said, I have nothing to lose. I'm going to die, and I want to be remembered for something big. I'm giving you the adventure of a lifetime so you'll make sure everyone else remembers me."

"Hell, if you quit right now I'll hire a skywriter."

"No, I don't want to quit before the real fun begins. Would you like a clue about who I am?"

"By all means."

"I'm not Jennifer."

"Well, I'll be sure to scratch her off my list of suspects."

"I want you to see her again. Not on video, in the flesh. Maybe you can save her."

"So she isn't dead?"

"Not necessarily. Pull over and stop the car. Make it someplace abandoned. Then tell me where you are, and I'll help you find her."

I pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall, and then drove behind the buildings. I stopped next to a garbage dumpster and shut off the engine. "Okay, I'm parked."

"Where are you?"

"Don't you know? I assumed you had helicopter surveillance or something."

"Do you want to find her or not?"

"I'm behind the Parnola mall."

"Much better. You picked a good place. She's very close. Now here's the game. There are five quarters hidden in Roger's car. Each one has a different date. In ten minutes, I'm going to call you back, and you're going to tell me all five of the dates."

"And what's the penalty in this little game?"

"Death. For each quarter you miss, one of the prisoners dies."

Like I needed any more pressure. "You said they'd be released if I kept quiet!"

"No, I said you had to play along. So play along. Jennifer will help you."

The killer hung up. I cursed loudly in multiple quantities, and then checked my watch. 1:47 A.M. Okay, fine, I'd play along. How hard could it be to find some quarters?

I turned on the overhead light, then did a quick visual search of the front and back seat and saw nothing. I pulled down each of the sun visors in case quarters were taped to them, but no luck. I opened the glove compartment and two half-empty bottles of aspirin fell out, along with a woman's severed hand.

"Oh, shit!" I screamed, recoiling against the driver's side door to get away from it. The hand rested on the floor, palm down. Some specks of blood had dried on the wedding ring.

I sat there for a moment, unable to move. Okay, get over it, I finally told myself. If you sit here trembling some people will die. Find those quarters.

I thought I'd caught a glimpse of silver as the hand fell, so I reached over with my foot and used the toe of my shoe to flip it over. In the palm rested a quarter. I tried to slide it off, but it was clearly glued on. I leaned down to get a closer look. Tails. To see the date, I was going to have to pull it off.

There was absolutely no time for squeamishness, so I ripped off the quarter and placed it on the seat. A tiny piece of flesh came off with the quarter, but I put that way the hell out of my mind and rummaged through the glove compartment until I'd searched it completely. No other quarters.

Under the seat was a good possibility.

Not that I'd be able to see where I was reaching.

Oh, I could think of so many things I'd rather be doing.

Still using my foot, I pushed the hand as far out of the way as possible, then leaned down and tried to look under the passenger seat. I couldn't see a thing.

I reached underneath, moving my hand slowly, praying I wouldn't find any more of Jennifer. The thought that the killer might have placed something like a mousetrap under the seat also occurred to me, in case the first thought hadn't been bad enough.

My hand slid against something wet.

I nearly tore the skin off my fingers in my haste to yank my hand out of there, and I nearly bit my tongue off in my effort not to shriek.

Doing my best to ignore the scarlet streak on the side of my hand, I checked my watch. Two minutes had already passed. I had to get over my reluctance and find those quarters right away. I could always find a nice comfy padded cell later.

I reached back underneath the seat, wishing that I were a boring, unimaginative person who was unable to visualize all the possibilities for what my hand was exploring.

Then I let out a small yelp as something bit me.

After yanking my hand free once again, I realized my mistake. It hadn't been a bite. I'd just poked myself on something--a protruding bone, most likely.

If there wasn't a quarter underneath the seat after all this, I was going to be seriously irked.

Once again I began the search. I felt my way around for a full minute before locating the quarter, which was hidden way in the back. I pulled my arm out and resisted the urge to wipe my hand on Roger's upholstery.

I moved to the other side and reached underneath the passenger seat. My hand made contact with something, and this time it was easy to identify. A foot. Two feet, actually, as I discovered when I moved my hand to the right. This wasn't nearly as bad as whatever had been under the other seat, and I found the quarter wedged between the little piggy who had none and the little piggy who went wee wee wee all the way home.

I looked at my watch again and realized that this had taken longer than I thought. Only four minutes left.

Okay, there was a definite motif here, so the quarters could only be hidden someplace large enough to hide a body part. The trunk was a logical place to check. I pulled the trunk release, got out of the car, and lifted the lid.

It was filled to the top with confetti.

Without hesitation, I thrust my hands inside and began searching through it as quickly as I could. I found the spare tire right away, but shortly after that my hand brushed against some hair. Long hair. I grabbed a fistful of it and lifted Jennifer's severed head out of the confetti.

I couldn't let the fact that I was holding a head distract me. I turned it all around, searching for a quarter that might be glued to it. Nothing. I ran my fingers all through her hair, and found nothing there, either. I checked the ears, in case it were some demented variation of the magic trick my uncle always liked to show me, but that was also unsuccessful.

A possible hiding spot occurred to me.

I shook the head violently, trying to jar loose anything that might be in its mouth. Nothing fell out.

Apparently I was going to find out how long it took a dead tongue to dry out, after all.

I reached inside her mouth. I can't describe what it felt like, because my hand went completely numb. But I found the quarter, underneath her tongue. It had been wrapped in cellophane, which was nailed down to keep it in place. I tore it free, dropped the head back in the confetti, and shut the trunk.

Four out of five. The fifth one was probably either under the car or under the front hood. I hurried back to the front seat to pop open the hood.

The phone rang.

I quickly scooped up the quarters I'd placed on the seat and picked up the phone. It rang again, but I didn't answer. I pulled the lever to open the hood, then ran to the front of the car and lifted the hood.

Nothing looked unusual. The phone continued to ring.

Damn it! I couldn't answer, or the killer would know that I only found four of the quarters. But if I didn't answer, all five of the prisoners might die!

I answered. "Yeah?"

"Did you meet Jennifer?" It was the same computer-generated monotone.

"Oh, yeah. That was real clever." I frantically began lifting hoses and looking anywhere a body part might be hidden.

"What's your honest opinion? Can she be saved?"

"Screw you." I had no time for wit.

"Tell me the dates on the quarters. You have ten seconds."

I tried to make my voice as casual as possible. "1994, 1980, 2001, 1976, and 1997."

There was a long pause on the other end, longer than the normal pauses for typing. "Not bad. Four out of five."

"What do you mean, four out of five? I found them all!"

"Only four were correct. So, Andrew, I'll be a sport and let you pick who's going to die. If you need to review the tape, feel free."

"Hell no! Now, you listen to me. I'm willing to play along with your game, but you have to stick with the rules you set up! If I found all five quarters, all five people get to live, and if you're not going to honor that I'll be talking to the cops before you can say 'I'm a psychotic asshole.'"

"There was no 1997 quarter."

"The hell there wasn't! I found one quarter in the glove compartment, one quarter under each seat, one quarter in the trunk, and one quarter wedged in the seat cushion in the back. That's five. If you disagree, get your ass back to elementary school."

"There wasn't one in the back."

"There most certainly was one in the back. Hey, maybe the quarter was already there, but if you were dumb enough to pick something that could have been in the car before you started, that's not my fault. I can't help it if you didn't check out the car thoroughly. Once I found the five quarters, I stopped looking."

There was a very long pause before the computer voice spoke.

"You're a lying bastard, Andrew."

I didn't respond. I just stood there, cringing.

"But I'm going to give you points for effort. None of the prisoners will die tonight."

I was astonished, but I certainly wasn't going to let it show. "So now what?"

"If you need to, get yourself cleaned up. If you didn't already find it, there's a towel and some rubbing alcohol on the left side of the trunk, under the confetti. Leave the car. It will be taken care of. A cab will meet you out front."

"And after that?"

"Try and find me. But remember what I said about not talking to anyone about tonight. And no cops. If the police come after me, I'll have plenty of warning time to kill the prisoners, and make it hurt. I could be anyone, so watch yourself. And like I said, have fun."

"Oh, gosh, how could it not be fun?"

"But make sure you get in that cab, or I'll have to make a new video. Good night, Andrew. I'll be in touch."

The killer hung up.

I didn't know what else to do. I opened the trunk again, got as much of the blood off as possible, and went out front to wait for the taxi.

* * *

"What happened to you?" asked Roger as he opened the door to his apartment.

"It was bad. Real bad." I stepped inside and saw Theresa and Kyle sleeping safely on the pullout bed. Until this whole thing was resolved, it was going to be difficult to let them out of my sight.

Now I was sort of in a bind. Could I tell Roger about the horrors of last night? For all I knew, the place could be bugged. The phone could be tapped. I didn't know what kind of resources the killer had, and honestly I didn't know enough about surveillance to know what degree of paranoia was justified. At the moment I was envisioning some eccentric billionaire with cameras hidden in every corner of Chamber, sitting in his cushioned chair in a room with five hundred monitors, stroking his ugly cat.

So I didn't want to say anything to Roger. What good would it do, anyway? He'd end up an even more reluctant partner than he already was. Nah, I'd shield him from the hard stuff for the time being.

"I can't talk about it," I said. "I will say that I'm not entirely certain you're ever going to get your car back."

"I beg your pardon?"

"It's either being cleaned or incinerated--I'm not sure which."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Just...ask later, okay?"

Roger didn't look particularly keen on the idea of not knowing what happened to his car until later, but he let it go. "So, if you're sworn to secrecy, what's next?"

"We keep investigating. I'm not going to be able to sleep for the next few months anyway, so I'm heading over to the Ashcraft place to see what I can find out."

CHAPTER TWELVE

I left my car alongside the road about six blocks from Michael and Jennifer's house. I was getting tired of all this walking around, but I wanted to cut down on the chances that I'd get busted for burglary. About three blocks from their house it suddenly occurred to me that my pockets were missing something vitally important, such as my car keys. After uttering one of the ruder phrases I'd spoken in my life, I jogged back to where I'd parked my automobile.

It was gone.

I used the word "shit" numerous times.

Then I realized that this wasn't even where I'd left it--I was still a block away. It was pretty clear that my mind was no longer the well-oiled, smooth-running piece of machinery it had been a little over a day ago.

I jogged over to the place where I'd left my car, and was actually surprised to find it there, fully intact. The keys were still in the ignition, and the doors were locked. I suppose I could've called a locksmith, but I didn't want to stand around waiting so I picked up a nice-sized rock and smashed open the passenger-side window, spraying safety glass all over the place. I leaned inside, retrieved my keys, and headed back to Michael's house.

Nobody was out for a late-night stroll and I didn't see anyone with their faces pressed against the neighboring windows, so I figured it was safe enough to hurry into the backyard. Once there, I saw a door that probably led to the garage, and a couple of large windows in the main part of the house.

I reached for the doorknob, mentally reviewing my plan of action should an alarm go off:

Stand in dumbfounded shock for exactly two seconds.

Run away very fast.

I tested the doorknob. Locked. I tested it again, in case some higher power had fixed the situation for me, but no luck. I'd left my lock-picking tools in a previous life, so my only choice now was a window.

I peeked through one of the windows, a sliding one which was up about five feet from the ground. Through it, I could see the kitchen. Hopefully they had beer in the fridge, because I was going to need a good drink after this. I pressed my hands against the glass and tried to raise it, but the window was, of course, locked.

I hadn't even realized that I was still holding the rock I'd used to break my car window. So, I'd have to test how heavily the neighbors slept.

I raised the rock to the glass and gave it a couple preliminary taps, as if the window might be kind enough to shatter quietly. I listened for a possible meteorite or exploding vehicle that might cover the noise, but none were handy.

I took a deep breath, and then hurled the rock through the glass, near the bottom. I was confident that if Michael's corpse had been buried in the backyard at that moment, the crash would have awakened him, but at least no alarm went off. I stood silently for a full minute, watching for lights turning on in the neighboring homes and listening for voices saying "Thelma, go fetch my shotgun!" but it didn't appear that my ruckus had disturbed anyone.

I reached through the hole and unlocked the window, then carefully raised it. I gripped the frame with both hands and pulled myself inside, knocking over a stack of dishes that had been resting on the counter. They fell to the linoleum floor and shattered with a sound that reminded me of policemen firing gunshots at suspected burglars, though I may have just been a tad edgy.

I hopped off the counter and took a moment to admire the kitchen. Neatly decorated, if a bit antiseptic for my tastes. I opened the refrigerator and found nothing to drink but bottled water, so I proceeded into the living room.

Nothing especially interesting in here, either, except for a couple of pieces of art that were so tacky I'm surprised the wall didn't come to life and fling them away. I think one of them was supposed to be a chicken, but it also might have been a portrait of Albert Einstein. A black cat, sleeping on the floor, looked up at me and meowed as if to say "Please remove your unworthy hide from my palace."

I walked down a hallway, which was decorated with framed photographs of Michael, Jennifer, and other people who I presume were relatives. There was a picture of Michael and Jennifer at their wedding, the happy couple shoving cake into each other's faces (an idea Helen had firmly vetoed well before our own ceremony).

The first doorway led to a bathroom. Frilly shower curtain, exotic soaps that I'm sure nobody was ever allowed to use, blue water in the toilet...high-class stuff.

The next doorway led to an office, which had been ransacked big-time. There were books and papers all over the floor, as well as a bunch of torn horror movie posters. The corners of some of the posters could be seen still taped to the wall. A desk had been overturned, and a chair ripped apart, with cushion stuffing scattered everywhere. All the drawers of a filing cabinet were open and the contents had been dumped on the floor in front of it. There was some computer equipment that looked like it had been smashed apart with a baseball bat.

I crouched down and began to sift through the papers, hoping to find something like a signed confession or coffin schematics. What I found were lots of papers with cryptic budget figures (I somehow skipped accounting as one of my majors), uninteresting bills, junk mail, warranties for major appliances, and other stuff that seemed to have no relevance to a man being buried alive.

I searched through the office for about ten minutes, and found nothing that seemed even remotely helpful. I wondered if the person who'd made the mess had ended up with the same result. It was going to take hours to go through everything piece-by-piece, and I decided I'd better at least check out the rest of the house before I resigned myself to that task.

When I turned on the light in the bedroom, it was immediately obvious what the search had been all about.

A large picture of Jennifer rested on the bed, the plastic frame cracked. A nail on the wall showed exactly where it had previously been hanging...covering your standard-issue wall safe. The door to the safe was ajar, and rather than being a combination dial it had been opened with a key.

Perhaps a key smelling of Michael Ashcraft's foot odor.

I walked around the bed and swung the safe door open all the way. Empty. That wasn't much of a surprise, since the killer probably hadn't been dumb enough to go through all this work and then forget the loot. I might have been dumb enough to do something like that, but not the killer.

A closer examination of the inside of the safe revealed a small hole in the back. I wasn't sticking my finger in that thing, so I returned to the office for a pencil. That done, I slowly inserted the pencil into the hole, encountering a bit of resistance right away. There was some sort of spring inside.

The significance of a spring-loaded hole inside a safe then became extremely clear to me, and I thanked whatever deity was handy that the booby trap hadn't been reloaded before I got here.

I returned the door of the safe to its original position, and then began to look around the area. A few seconds later I heard the front door open.

I hadn't even heard a car approach, which didn't mean much if the intruder had parked elsewhere like I had. I quickly moved around the bed on my tiptoes as the intruder shut the door behind him. I could either hide under the bed or in the closet. I picked the closet.

I opened the closet door and threw up my hands to defend myself against the pile of pillows and blankets that came crashing down upon me. The closet was absolutely packed. I had chosen poorly.

Before I could rethink my hiding place, I turned toward the doorway and saw The Apparition. I didn't much like seeing him again, but I liked seeing the gun he was pointing at me even less.

"Hands in the air."

I did as he said.

"Turn around."

I turned around. The Apparition stepped over to me and pressed the barrel of his revolver against the back of my neck.

"Walk to the living room."

I walked at a slow, steady pace, trying not to do anything, such as tumble forward, that might panic him and cause a large hole to be added to my neck. Once we were in the living room, he gave me a violent shove and I collapsed onto the sofa.

The Apparition remained in the center of the room. He scratched at his beard with the handle of the revolver then pointed the barrel at me. "Do you know what time it is?" he asked, irritably.

I shook my head.

"It's practically dawn, that's what time it is! What is it with you bein' out all night? How the hell am I supposed to get any sleep? I'm not as young as I used to be. I don't do well when I'm forced to prance all over town cleanin' up after people! Give it a fuckin' rest!"

"I'm a bit confused," I admitted. "Are you the killer I'm looking for?"

"No, I am not the killer. I work for the killer. I work long, ridiculously late hours for the killer because you won't go to goddamn bed! Do you know where I was when you tripped the silent alarm? I was asleep, dreamin' that I was in a hot tub with a half dozen Victoria's Secret models! Do you know how hard it is for me to get that dream? Do you?"

I shook my head.

"It's hard as hell!"

"I'm sorry."

The Apparition began to pace back and forth. "I mean, it's bad enough that I'm reburyin' coffins that you're too lazy to cover and getting' rid of cars with little pieces of people inside, but I should at least be able to get a tiny bit of sleep before I'm out here checkin' on you again! I know my boss is encouraging you to investigate, but why not stick to normal workin' hours, huh? Let me get some rest. How does that sound?"

"Who is your boss?" I asked.

"Oh, golly, you almost got me there!" said The Apparition, sarcastically. "With a cunning question like that I almost blew the whole thing! You're so damn clever I don't know why you haven't figured it all out already!"

"Hey, it was worth a shot," I said. "You can never underestimate how foolish people can be in stressful situations."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever. You know, I think I should just shoot you." He pointed the revolver at my face and took two steps forward. "Blow your head off then get myself some sleep."

"You're not really going to blow anybody's head off with that thing," I noted. "Even Dirty Harry exaggerated, and his gun was bigger than yours."

The Apparition glared at me. "Don't push me. I'm tired and cranky."

"Won't your boss be upset if you kill me?"

"My boss is welcome to pucker up and kiss my hemorrhoid-ridden butt."

"That's a poor work ethic."

"Be quiet. Anyway, if I were put in physical danger I'd be justified in shootin' you, and who's going to know if I shot you while you were sittin' peacefully on the couch or if you were lungin' at me with a crowbar?"

"Well, if my blood was all over the couch that might provide a pretty decent clue," I pointed out.

"It doesn't really matter either way. If I don't kill you, things proceed as planned. If I do kill you, your part transfers to your buddy Roger. No big deal."

"I don't know, Roger's pretty unmotivated."

"Then I kill him and it transfers to your wife. Still no big deal."

My insides tightened at that. "I'm the one who messed around in the graveyard and played Find the Spare Change in the Head. I think I've got some investment in this thing."

The Apparition nodded and lowered the gun. "You've got a point there. Maybe I won't kill you after all."

"Well, thank you. You're a kind and generous soul."

Then he shrugged and pointed the gun at my face again. "But to be honest, I'm already sick of you. I hope you can make peace with yourself in the next second and a half, because that's all you've got to live."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Okay, obviously I didn't die or I wouldn't be able to relate this tender little narrative. Unless, of course, I'm a ghost, writing these words through an Ouija board. That would be pretty cool, but also incredibly time consuming, and the human I was channeling through would probably try to steal all the credit. Plus, becoming a ghost at the hands of a man named The Apparition would just be too ironic. So I lived.

"I know where the money is," I blurted out somewhere around the half-second mark.

The Apparition hesitated. "What money?"

"The money your boss was looking for."

"What are you babblin' about?"

"Here, let me speak in a way that you might understand." I spoke slowly, enunciating each word, as if talking to a not-very-bright infant. "I know where the money is. And if your boss wants it, you'd be well advised not to shoot me before I tell you where it is."

"My boss isn't lookin' for any money. You're bluffin' to save your life."

"No, I'm not. Did you notice the ceiling?"

The Apparition glanced up for a second. "What about the ceiling?"

"It's the clue that answered the riddle. A neat little puzzle, actually. Your boss would appreciate it. Looks like Michael Ashcraft came up with some interesting stuff on his own. I didn't figure it out until right before you showed up, but it's pretty clever."

The Apparition looked up once more, and then quickly returned his attention to me. "There's nothin' on the ceiling."

"Sure there is. Look at the watermark."

"I don't see any watermark."

"Well, now, that's the trick. You've got to look at it from the right angle. I'll show you, but you have to promise not to kill me."

"I'm not promising you anything 'cept that I'm gonna shoot you the second this starts to bore me. And I'm gettin' very close."

"Okay, fine, just back up a couple steps."

Keeping the revolver focused on me, The Apparition took two steps backwards. "There's nothin' there."

"Look carefully at the way the light hits the whitewash. When you're in exactly the right place, you'll see what I'm talking about."

"I don't see anything."

"Well, gee, Mr. The Apparition, you must not be in exactly the right place, then. Would you like me to get up and show you?"

"You keep your butt planted to that couch or you're gettin' a bullet through the eye."

"Sounds good. Try one step to the left."

The Apparition took a step to the left, his foot coming down exactly where I'd hoped it would--on the tail of the cat. The cat let out a screech and latched onto his leg, claws and fangs moving like a feline garbage disposal. In the second that The Apparition was distracted, I lunged out of my seat and dove at him, my hands colliding with his throat and knocking him to the floor. I crouched down and smashed my knuckles into his wrist and ground into them until he released his grip on the revolver, then I snatched it up and pushed it against his nose.

"Please get this cat off me," he said.

"The cat stays," I informed him. "Who do you work for?"

"None of your business."

"Unless you want me to cure your nasal decongestion, you'll start talking."

"If you kill me, I won't be able to say a word."

"Then I'll shoot you somewhere that won't kill you."

"Then somebody'll hear the shots and call the police."

"Then you'll go to jail."

"I'd say that you shot me when I was tryin' to stop you from burglarizin' my friend's house. Could you please get this cat off me?"

I could see that getting any information from him was going to require extreme measures. I stood up, keeping the revolver pointed at him, and gently nudged the cat off his leg with my foot. It took off running down the hall, probably unaware that it had saved my life. Maybe I'd name it Reverse Snowflake.

"C'mon, Mr. App, it's time to start spilling your guts," I said. "After seeing that tape, you'd better believe that I'm going to do whatever it takes to get you to talk."

"Well then you should get started."

"I will."

The Apparition grinned. "Feelin' kind of tough right now, aren't you? I bet you don't get many chances to beat up a sleep-deprived old man."

"This is your last chance to answer some questions peacefully," I warned him. "There's a whole kitchen filled with utensils that will make the process much less pleasant."

"Hmmmm...let me see if you're scaring me yet." The Apparition pretended to think that over. "Nope, not yet. I'll let you know if things change."

"Fine," I said, motioning toward the recliner with the gun. "Why don't you have a seat?"

"Nah, I'm pretty comfortable here on the floor."

"I said, why don't you have a seat?"

"And I said I'm pretty comfortable here on the floor."

"Do you honestly think that after watching a guy being tortured to death with a spork I'm going to hesitate in shooting a sicko like you?"

The Apparition nodded. "Yeah, I do."

I hate confident people.

"Listen to me, you piece of shit," I said, hoping that profanity would indicate exactly how serious I was. "If you don't get up right now and park your ass on that couch, I'm going to push this gun against your kneecap, pull the trigger, and hope that our neighbors are heavy sleepers. Do you understand?"

"I understand, but I still ain't gettin' up."

This wasn't fair. I had the gun, so I was supposed to have the upper hand.

"I'm not kidding," I said.

"I never said you were."

Damn, damn, damn! Now I either had to make good on my threat or be seen as a nothing-but-talk weenie. And I didn't think I could work up the nerve to actually blow a hole through his knee.

Okay, if intimidation wasn't going to work at the moment, I'd just have to rely on good old fashioned brute force. I walked over, grabbed The Apparition by his shirt collar, and yanked him to his feet. Then I clamped my hand on the back of his neck and forced him into the dining room, where I slammed him down onto a chair.

"Stay there," I said.

I walked into the kitchen, keeping the revolver pointed at him at all times. He didn't move, so he obviously had some doubts about my unwillingness to shoot. I searched through some drawers until I found what I was looking for. Duct tape.

"Sure you don't want to talk?" I asked, twirling the spool of tape around my index finger. "You're about to become a lot less comfortable."

"You know, I'm tryin' to get scared, but for some reason I just can't. I dunno what it is."

Fine. The cheeky bastard was getting taped to the chair. I set the gun on the counter and prepared myself in case he should make any sudden moves. I punched him in the stomach to keep him from squirming, feeling like a complete dick. Then I wrapped the tape around each of his hands, fixing them to the arms of the chair. Once that was done, I wrapped the tape around his chest until the spool was empty.

"Comfy?" I asked.

He didn't respond. I went back to the drawers and picked up a meat cleaver. I wished I could do some fancy moves, tossing it in the air like a master chef, but I figured that accidentally chopping off my own hand would cost me some intimidation points.

"Okay, we're going to play a little game," I said. "It's called Tell Me What I Want To Know Or I'll Cut Off Your Fingers One By One You Psychotic Bastard."

"I'm not a psycho; I only work for one," The Apparition corrected.

"You're not taking this very seriously. Don't you like your fingers? Haven't they provided you with many years of service? Think about all the times you've had the convenience of being able to hold objects or wear rings. If you don't cooperate now you'll never be able to flip the bird at a bad driver ever again."

"I'll have to deal with it."

Why did he have to be so difficult? If I had to resort to genuine torture to get the information out of him, well, I'd do it! To save five innocent people I could certainly bring myself to sadistically torture one scumbag.

"Okay," I said. I pressed the blade of the meat cleaver against his little finger. "Say goodbye to Mr. Pinky."

"There's gonna be a lot of blood," he said.

"I've seen blood."

"Then don't let me stop you."

I applied a little more pressure to the cleaver, not enough to even break the skin, let alone chop through the bone. My stomach was beginning to churn, but I had to be strong. One finger gone and this jerk would tell me anything I wanted to know. I balled my other hand into a fist and raised it above the cleaver, preparing to slam it down.

"Last chance," I said.

"I consider myself fully warned."

I brought my fist down. But right before striking the cleaver I quickly changed direction and slammed my hand over my mouth. I darted over to the counter and promptly vomited in the sink. It was not a grand moment for my dignity.

The Apparition began to laugh loudly.

I wiped my mouth off on my sleeve and gave him the most evil look of which I was capable. It would probably have been more evil if I hadn't been positively sick to my stomach. I can pretty much handle snuff videos and people ripping their eyes out, but being the instigator of gruesome violence myself was way too much.

"Nice show, Mayhem," The Apparition sneered. "Glad to see I didn't misjudge you! Maybe for an encore you can piss your pants!"

I coughed a few times, and then turned on the faucet to rinse away the evidence of my inability to handle the rough stuff. I retrieved the meat cleaver from where it had fallen on the floor and placed it back against his finger. "Let's try this again," I said, my voice squeaking in a very feminine manner.

"Oh, give it up," The Apparition suggested. "What do you care if those people die, anyway? Face it, you ain't got what it takes to stop this. You're a loser."

"You think I'm a loser?" I asked, raising the meat cleaver. "Is that what you think? We'll see who's a loser after I slam this cleaver right through your skull!" I began to pace back and forth, swinging the cleaver wildly through the air. "I've had it with your bullshit! I've had it! You don't want to talk, that's fine! I don't care anymore! I'm done being your boss's freakin' puppet!"

I kicked one of the chairs as hard as I could, knocking it over. "You think I'm a loser, my parents think I'm a loser, my wife thinks I'm a loser, fine! You hear me? Fine!" I slammed the cleaver into the table, imbedding it in the wood. I started to pry it out, but it was stuck pretty firmly and I didn't want The Apparition to see me struggle with it. Instead I pulled open the top drawer with so much force that it popped all the way out, scattering utensils all over the floor with a huge clatter. I reached down, but grabbed a piece of a broken plate rather than a fork or knife.

"I've had it!" I nearly shouted. "I'm ending this whole thing right here, right now, starting with you!" I raised the broken plate like a dagger, and then smashed it against the side of the chair so that splinters of glass sprayed up onto his face. Then I pushed the tip of the remaining chunk against his throat, hard enough that a small trickle of blood ran down his neck.

The Apparition had gone completely pale. Apparently he'd decided that I was starting to become a threat to his personal safety.

He stiffened, made a soft gasping sound, and then slumped forward, motionless.

"Uh..." I said.

I reached over and pressed my fingers against his neck. No pulse. It looked as if I'd given the old guy a fatal heart attack. I was getting a little tired of watching these.

I stood there in shock for a long, long moment. Then I reacted.

"You son of a bitch!" I shouted at him. "You miserable prick! Where do you get off dying on me?" I resisted the urge to kick his chair over and settled for kicking the refrigerator instead. That hurt, so I quit.

I returned to the living room and plopped down on the recliner. Great. Just great. Wonderful. Super. Dandy. Delightful. Peachy.

Shit!

Reverse Snowflake walked into the room and hissed at me. I told him to shut up and go away.

Okay, technically I wasn't much worse off than I had been before I'd broken into the house, except that I was directly responsible for a dead body in the kitchen, and when the police eventually became involved I was going to have a bit of difficulty explaining it. The self-defense argument doesn't quite hold water when the victim is tied to a chair with duct tape.

I wondered how the killer would react to the news.

And then I brightened. Since The Apparition probably hadn't expected to spend the rest of his evening dead, maybe he hadn't gone to the trouble of covering his tracks. His truck was outside, and maybe he was even carrying a wallet. There might be a clue yet!

* * *

The Apparition was not carrying a wallet, and a thorough search of his truck provided nothing of interest...with the exception of a little black book containing the killer's phone number.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was lying there right on the seat. I quickly flipped through the book and concluded that The Apparition didn't have much of a social life--most of the pages were blank. There were listings for eight different pizza places, as well as addresses and phone numbers for Michael Ashcraft, Dominick Griffin, Linda Hanson, Rachel Mallory, Farley Soukup, and Carl Underall.

There was also one number, written on the bottom of the "A" page, without any description. I went back inside Michael's house and called it.

After three rings, somebody picked up, but didn't speak.

"Hello?" I said.

Silence.

"Is anybody there?"

A click, then a dial tone. Okay, it was kind of inconsiderate to be calling at this time of the night/morning. I would've hung up, too.

Less than a minute later, while I stood around trying to decide what to do with The Apparition, Michael's phone rang. I picked up the receiver and said nothing.

"Hello, Andrew," said the computer-generated monotone.

"Hi, Chuckles. How's it hangin'?"

"How did you get the phone number you just called?"

"It was the weirdest thing. I was trying to call Oswald Hankensnorker's Psychic Connection when my fingers slipped and I got you. Small world, huh?"

"Where's The Apparition?"

"He's safe, for now. But if you want to ever see his cute little beard again, I think we need to talk."

"We are talking."

"And I appreciate it. So, what do you think of a trade? I give you your buddy, you give me the prisoners?"

"He's not my buddy."

"Okay, then I'll give you your faithful employee, how about that?"

"Let me speak to him."

"No can do," I said. "He's kind of unconscious at the moment."

"What makes you think I care what happens to him? Go ahead and kill him."

"I didn't say I was going to kill him. But I'll bet you anything that once I start turning his life into an episode of Ghoulish Delights he'll lead me right to your place. Why not save us the mess?"

"You overestimate how much he knows."

"I bet he knows enough."

"Then get it out of him. Do you have any spiders handy? He hates spiders. Put a tarantula down the back of his shirt and he'll tell you anything."

"Well, thank you so much for the helpful hint. If I should happen to find a tarantula lying around I'll be sure to try it."

"It's almost time for me to hang up," said the voice. "When you start torturing The Apparition, tell him I said hi. You're doing fine work, Mayhem. Keep it up."

"Look, I've just about had it with your crap."

"Too bad. I have more crap to give you."

"Well, I'm getting pretty close to the quitting point. I want to know what the hell I have to do to make you let those people go."

"The same thing you've been doing, except that there's a new rule now. Don't visit any of our homes. You do, the prisoners die. By the way, I wouldn't want you to waste your valuable time, so I'll say right now that the phone number you called goes to the same cellular phone you used earlier. It's under Jennifer's name."

He was one hell of a fast typist. "Well, you're just filled with helpful tidbits tonight, aren't you?"

"Here's one more. You'll get another tape tomorrow. If you thought the last one was bad, this one will have your brain leaking out of your ears. Good night."

The killer hung up. I redialed the number and let it ring about twenty times before giving up.

* * *

After some thought, I took the lazy route and decided to leave Michael's house the way it was. The Apparition could just sit there taped to the chair being dead. I was eventually going to have to tell the whole story anyway, so there was no sense in covering my tracks, and it's not like he was a fine, upstanding member of the community who deserved the best care upon his untimely passing. Let him stink up the place.

I couldn't get Reverse Snowflake to come out from under Michael's bed, so I made sure he had plenty of food and water. I couldn't adopt him, for fear that he might shred my children, but I decided I'd make sure he found a good home after this whole thing blew over.

I left The Apparition's truck in the driveway and walked back to my own car. It was still there, so I drove back to Roger's place, borrowed a blanket and an alarm clock, and stretched out on the floor to get a couple hours of sleep.

* * *

The alarm went off at the unholy hour of five-fifteen. I got up off the couch, staggered around for a moment wondering what planet I was currently residing on, then used Roger's shower. The soap didn't jolt me into a state of euphoric alertness like the commercials said it would, but I felt a bit more human.

During my shower, I came up with a plan. Not necessarily a good plan. Possibly a very bad plan. Definitely a risky plan. Sort of a pray-your-instincts-are-right-because-otherwise-you're-100%-screwed plan. But a plan nevertheless.

I woke Roger up by dropping a few cubes of ice on his chest. Once in college when he'd been extremely hung-over I'd used an entire cooler's worth to wake him up, but now that we were mature adults a few cubes were sufficient. Theresa and Kyle weren't any more keen to get up than Roger had been, but I eventually got them dressed and into my car. The kids were too sleepy to even engage in much combat on the way to the gym, but once we pulled into the parking lot they both perked up.

"Ooh! Ooh! Can I play on the treadmill if they have one?" asked Theresa.

"Probably not," I told her. "I need both of you to behave and not get in anyone's way. These people aren't here to have fun, they're here to get in shape."

"I'm in shape," said Kyle, flexing what existed of a muscle.

"You sure are, Hulk. Now if you behave yourselves, we'll have pizza for lunch."

Is the frequent use of bribery to control behavior the sign of a bad parent? As soon as the killer was apprehended, I was going to have to work on that.

I'd explained to Roger that his job was to sit in the car and watch for anything remotely suspicious, particularly if it took the form of any Ghoulish Delights employees. He had no problem with that, probably because it didn't involve hanging around a graveyard for a few hours.

We went inside. "Are you a member?" asked the man behind the front desk. He had biceps that looked like a bowling ball had been surgically implanted in each arm, and gave me a look that showed he considered himself very, very strong while he considered me very, very weak.

"No, but I'm here to see Rachel Mallory."

"You should consider the benefits of membership. A strong, healthy body goes a long way toward protecting one's children."

"Wow!" exclaimed Kyle, dragging his attention away from the pictures hanging on the wall long enough to notice the man. "Are you Hercules?"

The man nodded. "Yes I am." To me, he said, "Membership is only thirty dollars a month, and carries with it the benefit that young children mistake you for Hercules. What do you say?"

"We'll see how things go with Rachel," I said. I noticed that Theresa was looking a bit starry-eyed, so I waved my hand in front of her face to bring her back to reality.

"Hey, Rachel!" the man called out. "Some guy is here to see you!"

Rachel walked into the lobby, wearing a blue spandex uniform that really showed off her athletic physique. "Wow!" exclaimed Kyle. "Are you Xena, Warrior Princess?"

"No, I'm Wonder Woman," Rachel told him. "Shall we start your workout?"

"Sure, that sounds great," I said, only so Hercules wouldn't mock me. We followed her back to the weight room. Only a couple of people were using it, a woman in incredible physical shape and a man who really needed to lift a few more weights before he'd be in good enough shape to attract the woman.

"I guess we'll start off with some stretches," said Rachel, leading us to a floor mat. "Everyone take off your shoes."

"This really wasn't supposed to be an exercise session. I just wanted to ask you a few questions about Michael."

"You can ask me questions while we get in a good workout. You need one. Get those shoes off."

Theresa and Kyle excitedly removed their footwear, and Theresa launched into some jumping jacks. I considered mentioning that I wasn't dressed for a workout, but then made the astute observation that she wouldn't care.

"Now, I want everyone to touch your right toe with your left hand." Rachel reached down and touched her right toe with her left hand, as if it were no problem whatsoever. I reached down and did the same thing.

"Don't bend your knees," Rachel said.

I tried to touch my toe without bending my knees and was not entirely successful. But I did better than Kyle, who tumbled forward and hit his face on the mat.

"He's missing a few motor skills," I explained.

"Must take after his father."

I reached down and touched my toe just to spite her. I refused to say anything about the sharp pain in my back.

"Now touch your left toe with your right hand, and alternate to the count of twenty. Andrew, you can ask your questions now."

"When did you last see Michael?"

"Two...three...last Thursday, right before he left for Europe...six...seven..."

"Was he acting unusual?"

"...eight...nine...no, not unusual in a bad way... twelve...thirteen...he was really excited about his trip... sixteen...seventeen...couldn't stop talking about it...twenty."

"So he seemed genuinely excited?"

"Sure. Wouldn't you be?" Rachel smiled at Theresa and Kyle. "Do you kids want to show me who can do the most push-ups?"

"Me!" shouted Theresa.

"Prove it!"

My children dropped to the floor and began doing push-ups.

Rachel grinned as she watched them go at it. Whoever the killer might be, I was sure it wasn't her. Not that any of the others seemed like killers, either, but for some unexplainable reason I just had a gut feeling that Rachel was innocent. Which was good, because this was a crucial element in my plan. If I was going to make any progress in finding the killer, I had to take this huge risk.

"So what's up with the questions about Mike? You sound like a cop, not a journalist."

"I'm not a journalist," I said. I motioned her to follow me to another part of the room, where my children couldn't hear us. "I take it Carl or Farley didn't get in touch with you last night?"

"No, I kept the phone off the hook. I don't like being bothered when I'm reading. So are you a cop?"

"No."

"A detective?"

"Rachel, I need to tell you something very important, but I need your promise that you won't share it with anyone, no matter what."

"I'd like to make that promise, but anyone puts red-hot spikes under my toenails and I'm blabbing."

Since that wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility, I let it go. "It's about somebody in Ghoulish Delights. At least I'm pretty sure it is. And I don't know who else I can trust."

"You don't know who else you can trust? Look, Andy, if you're trying out for an acting role in our movies, at least get some better dialogue first."

"This isn't an audition. And don't call me Andy."

"Sorry."

"Would you like some more clichéd dialogue? How about this:  Innocent lives depend on you helping me. And innocent lives are at risk if you repeat any of what I'm about to tell you."

"Whose lives?" Rachel asked.

"I don't know their names. Five people locked away somewhere, kidnapped by someone you work with."

Rachel stared at me for a moment, then looked over at Theresa and Kyle. "Hey, there are jump ropes in the corner if you want!"

"Hooray!" shouted Theresa, as she raced her brother to the corner and won.

"All right, Andrew, you've got me interested enough to give my promise. What's the story?"

"Michael and Jennifer Ashcraft are dead. Michael was buried alive, and Jennifer was stabbed to death then chopped into pieces that were hidden in my best friend's automobile."

"What?"

"I'm sorry, I should have eased into that. But I'm completely serious. They're dead, and the killer has me involved in some kind of sick game."

"What do you mean, some kind of sick game?"

I described my adventures in complete gory detail. The color drained from her face as I spoke, and by the time I'd finished she looked positively ill. "I'm sorry, I need a drink of water," she said. "I'll be right back."

I didn't really want to let her out of my sight, but it wasn't like I could prevent her from going anywhere. I desperately hoped that telling her had been the right thing to do, but to find out what was going on I absolutely had to get some sort of inside information. She left the weight room, and I went over to make sure my kids were playing nicely.

Rachel returned a couple of minutes later, not looking much better. She sat down on one of the weight machines, and I joined her.

"So you're sure it's someone at Ghoulish Delights?" she asked.

"Pretty sure."

"Any idea who?"

I shook my head. "That's why I need you. Do you know them all pretty well?"

"Sure. I mean, I don't consider them a second family or anything, but we know each other fairly well. At least I thought we did. I certainly didn't think any of them could be a murderer, especially not as sadistic as the way you described."

"We need to be careful, because I don't know what kind of resources the killer has," I said. "I'm sure he hasn't had a chance to put a bug on me or anything since my last complete change of clothes, but there's a good chance that more people are helping him, and they could be watching."

"You think it's a he?"

"No, it's just too hard to carry on a conversation and worry about being gender neutral. Anyway, that would only eliminate Linda."

"Or me."

"Well, I sort of already eliminated you, thus this whole conversation."

"And why is that?"

I shrugged. "I'm hoping it's because I possess a remarkable sense of character, and not that I'm a complete idiot."

"So what do you want to ask me?"

"For starters, who in Ghoulish Delights was closest to Jennifer, personally? I'm thinking maybe a lover."

"Jeez, I don't think I can help you with that one, either. I've never noticed that any of us were all that close to her. I wouldn't put it past her to have cheated on Mike, but I can't imagine it being with anyone at work. Dominick, maybe, but he and Linda are pretty serious. I don't think Carl's even kissed a girl yet, and who could be attracted to Farley?"

"No one in any universe I've ever inhabited," I admitted. "Do they all own computers?"

"I don't know. Carl and Farley definitely do. I think Linda does, but I can't say for sure. I'm sorry, I'm not being much help, am I?"

"Sure you are. Another question...does anyone in the group own a bow and arrow? Maybe a crossbow?"

"Yeah, Dominick does. He has an amazing collection of weaponry from what I hear, all kinds of stuff. But he also has a bunch of stuff that he leaves in the office, that anyone could have taken."

The Mad Archer hadn't really demonstrated any out-of-the-ordinary skill, so this knowledge didn't help much. "The guy I sort of scared to death last night, The Apparition, do you know him? Your name was in his address book."

"I don't know anyone socially by the name of The Apparition, but describe him."

"Old guy. Big white beard. Sort of a weird facial bone structure, a little off-center."

"That's Jake!" Rachel exclaimed. "We hired him right when we started Ghoulish Delights, but Mike fired him. I don't think he even lasted a week. I'd forgotten all about him. You say he had my address?"

I nodded. "Everyone else's, too. I need to know, have you ever gotten the impression that Ghoulish Delights is more than the part that you're familiar with? Because I think it's a cover for something a lot more profitable, and a lot more demented."

"The snuff video, right? I know I sound like I have no observational powers whatsoever, but if the Ghoulish Delights I know is a cover for a snuff film operation, I had absolutely no idea. How many tapes did you say there were?"

"I didn't. I've got the one I found in the coffin, and the killer said he'd give me another one today. But from Jennifer's introduction it sounded like part of a series. You've got the real-life murder part, and the fancy introduction...it's either a nice little treat for some depraved clients, or just a creepy way that Michael and Jennifer entertained themselves."

"If Michael even knew about it. So far you only have proof that Jennifer was involved."

"You're right. And him finding out about it could have been what started this whole--"

I stopped talking as I saw Roger crutch his way into the weight room. "Hey, our story is paying us a visit," he announced, as he was followed by Dominick and Linda. Neither of them appeared happy; Dominick furious, Linda distraught.

I glanced quickly at Rachel, who was looking a bit panicky. I hoped to God she wouldn't blow the whole deal.

"Do you mind telling me who you really are?" Dominick demanded.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"You must've talked to Carl or Farley," I said, keeping my cool.

"You're damn right," said Dominick, taking long, purposeful strides toward me. "Farley called me last night. You've got a lot of nerve pretending to be a reporter when you're just some pathetic excuse for a detective. Mike was a good friend of mine, and I can't believe you didn't tell us something happened to him!"

"It's for his own good," I said.

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure. How exactly does that work?"

"There's a lot more to the situation that Jennifer doesn't want me to discuss. I'm sorry, but she's my client and I have to respect her wishes."

"Where is she now?"

"That's confidential."

"Fuck confidential! I want to know what's going on!"

Dominick raised a fist as if to hit me. Linda put her hand on his shoulder to calm him, while Rachel stepped between us. "Settle down," she said.

"I don't want to settle down!"

"Settle down or I'll do it for you."

"You're sticking up for him?" asked Dominick, incredulous. "He lied to everyone! He should've been out there trying to find Mike instead of wasting our time with this Dearly Demented bullshit!"

"Tell me, Dominick," said Rachel, "are you currently a licensed private investigator?"

"What? No."

"Well, our friend Andrew here is. Which means he knows what he's doing."

Less true words were never spoken, but I certainly didn't jump in and correct her.

"So, if we want to increase our chances of ever seeing Mike again, we're going to have to trust him. Does that make sense to you?"

Dominick still looked like he wanted to squish my head between a pair of barbells, but he gave the faintest of nods and stepped back. Linda breathed a sigh of relief and took him by the hand.

"What's your next step?" asked Dominick.

"I'm currently following up on several leads," I said.

"Like what?"

"They're confidential."

"Don't give me that! I want to know what you're doing to find my friend. What are the police doing?"

"They're looking into it," I said. "But Jennifer wants this all kept as quiet as possible."

"Why?"

"She just does."

"That doesn't make any sense! Unless she was involved in his disappearance, why would she want it kept quiet? Does she think there's going to be a scandal or something? I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it."

"Sweetie, relax," said Linda, patting his elbow with her free hand. "They're doing what they can."

"Bullshit."

Rachel spoke up. "Dominick, I know you're upset. We all are. But I have every confidence that Andrew is doing everything possible to bring Mike back to us." Her voice cracked on the last few words.

I felt like a total cretin for standing here trying to boost Dominick and Linda's hopes when I knew full well that Michael wasn't coming back, but what choice did I have?

"I promise I'll let you know as soon as I find out something," I assured him.

"You said you already have a few leads. That's considered finding out something. Why not share those?" asked Dominick.

"Okay, that's enough," said Rachel. "Linda, could you please take your boyfriend home and find a way to relax him?"

"C'mon, sweetie, let's go." Linda started to lead Dominick toward the doorway. "If there's anything we can do to help, please call us. Are we still on for the taping today?"

Rachel glanced at me, and I gave her a light nod. "Yeah," she said. "I'll call Carl and Farley to make sure they know it hasn't been cancelled."

"Okay, see you then." Linda and Dominick left.

"So when do we tell them?" asked Rachel.

"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't know what the killer has planned besides giving me a second tape. He said something about it being too late for him, about not being around soon. Do any of the Ghoulish Delights people have medical problems that you know about?"

"Carl has asthma, but nothing serious. Certainly nothing terminal, at least not that they've said anything about. Have you checked hospital records?"

"That was on the agenda for today. My wife's a nurse, so I was hoping she'd be able to assist with that. Not that she can do much while stuck in bed with a broken leg, but I don't exactly have a long list of connections."

Rachel thought for a long moment. "I want to help you in any way I can, but I really don't know what else to tell you. Is there anything you want me to do?"

I shook my head. "Nothing. Don't go around asking questions or anything like that...I don't want to tip off the killer that I told you. If it's all right, I'm still coming to the taping today. Having everyone together in one place may be helpful, especially if the killer doesn't think you know what's going on. You might catch something that Roger and I miss."

"Sounds good." She wiped a tear from her eye. "Sorry, I'm still in shock. By the way, I meant to say this earlier, but if this is a prank, I will personally break every single bone in your body."

"I wish this was a joke, believe me," I said. "I'm going to head off now, because quite honestly if I don't get a bit more sleep the killer could juggle chainsaws at the taping and I wouldn't notice."

"All right." She gave me the address and wished me luck. I gathered my offspring and we walked out of the weight room and past the front desk.

"So, you becoming a member?" asked Hercules.

I couldn't come up with a single even remotely smart-ass thing to say, so I merely shook my head. This was bad. I really needed sleep.

And as we walked outside and saw the package resting on the hood of my car, I realized that I wasn't going to be getting any rest in the near future.

"Someone left us a present!" Kyle exclaimed. He started to rush forward toward the colorfully-wrapped gift, which was about the size of a milk crate, but I quickly scooped him up by the waist and held him back.

"It's not a kid present, it's a grown-up present," I said, dangling him upside-down to the accompaniment of a severe giggling fit. Realizing that I probably shouldn't be holding my son upside-down when I wasn't in the best physical condition, I returned him to his feet.

"How do you know?"

"I'm smart. I know everything. Roger, go grab the present, will you?"

I'd actually been joking, but Roger crutched his way over to the car and picked up the package. Nothing blew up and no knives shot out of the sides. We all got back in the car, and after a quick glance around to see if I could spot somebody walking away with wrapping paper and tape tucked under their arm, we drove home.

* * *

The kids had been sent to clean their rooms, which I figured would keep them busy for the next few dozen hours. Roger and I sat on the living room couch, while the present rested on the coffee table.

"So what do you think?" Roger asked. "It had to be either Dominick or Linda, right?"

I shrugged. "It's not tough to get a present on the hood of somebody's car. Everyone could have known we were going to be there today, so Carl or Farley could just as easily have been hanging around, too. And who's to say that The Apparition was the killer's only hired help? I don't think finding the present rules out anyone."

"Not even Rachel," said Roger. "She could have had Mr. Muscle put it there while we were distracted."

"Yes, but we're not going to discuss that." I leaned forward and tore off the bow. "Pretty big for a video tape."

"Plus it's too heavy for that to be the only thing in there."

"Are you sure you don't want to find a different continent to reside on while I open it?" I asked.

"Quit yapping and do it."

"I don't believe I've ever heard the word 'yapping' as part of your vocabulary before. Stress brings out odd things in people, I guess. I once knew this guy who got in a car accident and started to cluck like a--"

"Do it!"

I realized that I was babbling just to delay opening the package, so I apologized and ripped off the wrapping paper. This revealed a bare cardboard box. I used a knife I'd taken from the kitchen to slice through the tape on the lid, and raised the flaps.

Inside it was filled with confetti.

"Enough with the confetti," I muttered.

"Huh?"

"Sorry. There was confetti involved last night."

"And I missed it?"

I wasn't about to reach inside a potentially booby-trapped box and dig around for the tape, so I lifted it from the coffee table and poured the contents out onto the floor.

Confetti only accounted for about two inches on top. The next layer consisted of tacks.

"Good thing you didn't shove your face in there," Roger noted. "I had a really serious temptation to do that, and thank God I resisted."

"Har har." Next was a layer of those packing bubbles, which I can sit and pop for hours. I pulled that out and set it aside, revealing more confetti. There were probably more tacks under there, or something worse, so I dumped it out onto the floor with the rest.

"Damn it!" I shouted, as a quart-sized plastic sack of black ink tumbled out, landing on the tacks and splattering all over the carpet. The confetti blocked some of the ink, but not nearly enough.

I rushed into the bathroom and grabbed a stack of towels. Using the first towel as protection, I scooped up most of the tacks, then wadded up the towel and set it aside. I pushed the next towel tightly against the carpet, soaking up as much ink as possible, then repeated the procedure with the third and fourth towels. It wasn't wet anymore, but there was now a very large black splotch on our light gray carpet.

"I'm gonna kill him!" I said.

"Weren't those Helen's good towels?" Roger asked.

"She's gonna kill me!"

I picked up the towels and dumped them in the bathtub for the time being. I needed to focus on the problem at hand, not worry about the future agony to be inflicted upon me by my spouse. I returned to the living room, sat on the ruined carpet, and looked inside the box.

More confetti, but the corner of a videotape was sticking out. I took it out and saw a note taped to it, which I unfolded and read aloud:

"Dearest Andrew, I hope that your hands stop hurting, or that you didn't ruin anything expensive with the ink. I also hope that you enjoy this tape. I made it just for you. Watch carefully, because it will tell you who I am. Figure it out, and the game ends today. You get to be a hero. Have fun!"

"That sounds kind of promising," said Roger. "Maybe he's not such a bad psychopath after all."

I inserted the tape into the VCR and pressed "play," then sat next to Roger on the couch and turned on the television with the remote control.

We watched snow for about thirty seconds, and then a picture appeared. It looked like a setup for a puppet show, with a colorful wooden booth upon which was painted "The Gaggles and Boo-Boo Show!"

Cheery piano music began to play. The sound quality wasn't very good, as if it were coming from a tape player next to the microphone.

"Hey, kids!" said an excessively perky narrator. "Ghoulish Delights is pleased to present The Gaggles and Boo-Boo Show, starring your very best friends Gaggles and Boo-Boo!"

I couldn't recognize the voice for sure, but it kind of sounded like The Apparition.

Two skulls popped into view from behind the stage. Each of them looked like a regular human skull, except that their teeth were filed into sharp fangs. One of them wore a cowboy hat.

"Hi, Gaggles!" The first skull's mouth began to move, and a comically high-pitched voice spoke for it.

"Hi, Boo-Boo!" said the second skull, the one with the hat. It sounded sort of like Grover from Sesame Street.

"How are you today, Gaggles?"

"I'm fine, Boo-Boo! What do you want to do today?"

"I don't know. What do you want to do today?"

This was really a sad excuse for theatre. Their mouths didn't even match the words, like some badly dubbed Japanese monster movie.

"I asked you first."

"I asked you second."

"Well, Boo-Boo, why don't we eat somebody?"

"That's a good idea, Gaggles! I love to eat people! Who shall we eat?"

"I know! Let's eat the woman tied to the bed in the next room! Won't that be fun?"

"That sure will! You're my very best friend, Gaggles."

"And you're my very best friend, Boo-Boo!"

"Shall we sing the Friendship Song?"

"Nah, fuck that. Let's just chow down on the bitch."

The camera panned over to the other side of the room, where a woman in shorts and a tank top was tied to the same bed as the man in the first video. I couldn't be positive, but I was pretty sure this was one of the women I'd seen at the end of that video. She had a blindfold over her eyes and a gag over her mouth, and struggled violently against the ropes.

Gaggles popped up in front of the camera. "Mmmmm. Looks tasty."

Boo-Boo joined him. "Very tasty."

"What should we eat first?"

"I'm in the mood for a drumstick."

The skulls dropped out of sight, and the camera moved in close to the woman's leg. It stayed there for almost a full minute, when suddenly Boo-Boo burst into view. I could see the hand controlling him--covered with a black glove like the hand in the first video. The skull's mouth opened wide, and then the sharpened fangs clamped down on the woman's thigh.

I turned down the volume several notches at the sound of her scream.

"Mmmmm...yum yum yum..." said Boo-Boo.

Roger turned his head away from the screen. I wanted to do the same, but the note said that the killer's identity would be revealed, and I couldn't afford to miss anything.

Gaggles soon joined his friend. Cold sweat poured down my sides, and my leg began shaking, but I kept watching, even as I felt a dizzy spell coming on.

It went on for over ten minutes, during which Roger took occasional looks at the screen and I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the picture. Every once in a while, one of the skulls would turn toward the camera and laugh. At one point, Gaggles disappeared from the scene and returned wearing a bib.

The woman died about two minutes before the end of it. There was no doubt whatsoever that she was dead. None.

Boo-Boo moved up to the camera, opening his bloody mouth wide. "That hit the spot! Nummy nummy!"

The cheerful piano music started up again. The perky narrator said "We hope you've enjoyed the adventures of Gaggles and Boo-Boo, best friends to the end! Good night, don't let the bed bugs bite, and don't forget to buy United States savings bonds! Bye-bye!"

The picture faded to black.

I staggered into the bathroom and threw up.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Roger and I each had a tall glass of ice water before we said anything. I guess this tape hadn't been much worse than the first, but seeing it on a large screen, in full color, with sound, made it much more disturbing.

"Was the other one like this?" asked Roger.

I nodded.

"And you actually watched a second one?"

"I didn't have much choice." I hit the fast forward button on the VCR remote to see if there was anything else on the tape. "But I sure didn't see the killer's name anywhere, did you?"

"Not unless he's named Gaggles or Boo-Boo."

"What about the voices? To me it sounded like The Apparition might have done all of them. What do you think?"

"I think you're probably right," said Roger. "Even if it wasn't him, it didn't sound like any of our other suspects, so that doesn't help."

"Well, there has to be a clue somewhere. We'll just have to keep watching the tape until we find it."

"So we're still not going to the police?"

"We can't. I have to believe that if the cops show up, he'll be able to kill the remaining prisoners before they can stop him. Or let's suppose the police are actually able to figure out who he is, and arrest him at the taping today...he might never tell where the prisoners are being kept. If he thinks he'll be dead soon and has nothing to lose, why would he? We just have to figure it out ourselves and trust that it'll really be over today."

"It could end with a slaughter," Roger pointed out.

I pressed the pause button. "Did you see that?"

"What?"

I rewound for a few seconds, catching a momentary glimpse of something on the television screen. I pressed play, and then watched until the message flashed on the screen, pausing the tape before it vanished again.

Oooooh, this one's a toughie! Need an extra hint, Andrew? Go to 1214 Cruor Avenue. Alone, of course.

"Where's Cruor Avenue?" Roger asked.

"No idea." I pressed fast-forward again and watched the screen carefully in case more messages popped up.

"Are you going?"

"Not yet. Hopefully we won't need an extra hint if we can find out who he is from the rest of the tape."

We sat there for several minutes until the tape came to an end, with no other bonus hints that I noticed. I rewound the tape and we watched the section with Gaggles and Boo-Boo a second time. I paused it right before the first bite, not wanting to have to watch the torture again until I was sure the clue wasn't hidden in the introduction.

"What do you think?" Roger asked.

I sighed. "I'm not seeing anything that's pointing me in a specific direction. Maybe Gaggles and Boo-Boo are actual nicknames."

"What about the cowboy hat? That could mean something."

"It might," I agreed. "I wish there was some way we could safely get a copy of this to Rachel."

I suddenly had a paranoid mental image of somebody sitting outside in a van, listening to our conversation being transmitted from a bug that was hidden in the confetti. It was certainly possible. I hoped I hadn't doomed the rest of the prisoners.

We rewound the tape and watched a third time. I scooted up right against the screen, searching for hidden messages that might be in the background. Something about the way the skulls moved when they spoke seemed kind of odd--odd beyond the way their mouths didn't match their words.

I pressed the mute button so their voices wouldn't be a distraction, and continued watching.

"Look at that," I said, tapping the screen on the skull with the cowboy hat. "Which one is this, Gaggles? Look how his mouth moves compared to Boo-Boo's."

Roger watched silently for a moment. "It definitely seems like two different people are working them."

"Right. Gaggles is a lot more haphazard. Boo-Boo is almost moving like a robot."

I thought about that. It was an interesting thing to notice, I supposed, but what did it mean?

Maybe two members of Ghoulish Delights were working together. Dominick and Linda, or Carl and Farley. Or, it could just be another helper like The Apparition. Either way, this observation did approximately squat in terms of revealing the killer's identity.

We rewound the tape yet again, but the fourth viewing provided no new insights. A fifth viewing had the same result.

So the clue we needed could very well be hidden after the skulls started their vicious work.

I really, truly, wholeheartedly did not want to watch that part of the video again, but I had to. Considering that real people had gone through the agonizing torture recorded on the tape, and to stop it from happening again all I had to do was sit in the comfort of my living room and watch it, I really had no excuse.

I watched the death of the woman in its entirety.

No clues presented themselves.

I looked over at the clock on the wall. Almost eight. Four hours until we needed to be at the taping.

"Okay, Roger," I said, "you're not going to like this, but I suggest you sit here and study the tape while I go to that Cruor place."

"All right, I'll see what I can do."

"And I assume you know to keep the doors locked and be alert for people stalking the house."

"You assume correctly. But are you sure you really want to go there?"

I nodded. "I'll be okay. The killer has put me in some creepy situations since he dumped us in the ditch, but none of them were designed to put me in danger."

"So far. Be careful anyway."

"I will."

I went into Kyle's room and was pleased to discover that it was a full 2.5% cleaner than when he'd started. I did the usual hugs, kisses, and descriptions of punishment should he not behave, and then proceeded into Theresa's room, which looked nearly 4% better. Maybe my parenting skills weren't so bad after all.

After telling Theresa that no, she couldn't come with me, I went outside, got in my car, and pulled a map of Chamber out of the glove compartment. I looked up Cruor Street on the sidebar index and saw that it was located in square B-7, which meant it was way on the other side of town. No big surprise.

* * *

Cruor Street was part of Richmond Heights. The "Rich" part of the name was appropriate, because this was the wealthiest section of town. I drove past house after house that made my place look like a rotting hovel until I reached 1214. It was a green two-story place with a recently mowed lawn that had already been littered with toys. The roof was covered with three different antennas and a satellite dish. A car was parked in the driveway, but I couldn't tell what kind because it was hidden under one of those stupid car covers. It was probably a nice one, though.

I parked next to it, got out, and went up to the front porch and rang the doorbell.

"Hold on!" a voice called out. "I'll be there in a minute!"

It took about three minutes, but finally a well-tanned guy in his mid-forties opened the door. He wore denim shorts and a plain white t-shirt, had no remaining hair worth mentioning, and was in pretty good shape save for a small beer gut.

"May I help you?" he asked, smiling at me with perfect, unnaturally white teeth.

"Sorry to bother you," I said, "but could I ask you a few questions?"

"No, I don't want to be Saved," he said.

"Nothing like that."

"I don't need any magazine subscriptions, either."

"I'm not selling anything. Could I come inside?" I asked.

The man's smile faltered. "Is there some sort of problem?"

"You're not in any trouble or anything," I assured him. "I'm a private investigator, and I was hoping that maybe you might have some information for me."

Now the man looked downright uncomfortable. "I doubt I know anything. Are you sure this is the right house? Who are you looking for specifically?"

"Mr. Tandy." No great detective work there, I'd just checked the name on the mailbox.

"That's me, but I'm not sure what I can help you with."

"Have you heard of something called Ghoulish Delights?"

The man shook his head. "No. Never." He was so obviously lying that it was almost comical.

"Are you sure? Because it's my understanding that some very high-level people are looking for a Mr. Tandy in conjunction with Ghoulish Delights."

His tan seemed to pour right off of his face as he whitened. "Maybe you should come inside."

"Thank you."

We stepped into the living room, which was filled with furniture that consisted of either wildly expensive antiques or old junk--I couldn't tell which. He pulled the door shut behind me and gestured to the couch. "Please, have a seat. My wife and kids should be back any minute, so I'd appreciate it if you could make this quick," he said. "Can I get you something to drink?"

I wasn't in the mood to chug down an arsenic-laced lemonade or a root beer filled with razor blades, so I politely declined and sat down. I sank so far down into the cushion that for a second I almost thought it was some sort of death trap.

Mr. Tandy sat down on the fading recliner. "Now, what did you say you wanted to know about?"

"Ghoulish Delights."

"And what is Ghoulish Delights supposed to be?"

"You know darn well what it is," I said, giving him my own version of The Gaze.

"I'm sorry, I don't."

"Does the name Michael Ashcraft mean anything to you?"

"No."

"What about Jennifer Ashcraft?"

"No."

"Okay, then how about Victor Grunge? He's a six-foot-eight, three-hundred-fifty pound horndog currently sitting in the Chamber Jail waiting for a new cellmate to replace the one he broke last night."

"You're not intimidating me," said Mr. Tandy, wiping about a quart of sweat off his forehead.

"Boo!"

Mr. Tandy jumped a good two inches off his seat.

"I think I am," I said.

"I swear, I don't know anything about any Ghoulish Delights. I don't know where you're getting your information, but it's wrong. I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"I believe I'll stay."

"Okay." Mr. Tandy stared at the floor for a moment, and then began to check his fingernails for dirt.

I figured there were two ways that this guy could be involved. He was either working for the killer, or he was a Ghoulish Delights customer. And he seemed far too jittery to be a worthwhile employee, so I suspected it was the latter.

"Let me lay it all on the line," I said, leaning forward and looking him right in the eye. "I know that you have been purchasing a series of tapes depicting extended torture and vicious murders that are, how should I put it, not simulated. Am I correct?"

"No! I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh, really? Mind if I take a look around?"

"Do you have a search warrant?"

"I can get one."

"You can not. You said you were a private investigator, not a cop."

"I say lots of things to lots of people," I told him, mentally giving myself a solid kick in the butt for the search warrant gaffe. "And what I'm saying to you now is, you'd better tell me everything you know or you'll find yourself locked away from your wife and children for a long, long time."

"But I didn't do anything!"

"Then how about telling me what exactly it is you didn't do?"

"Nothing! I mean, everything! I mean...you know what I mean! I didn't do anything!"

"Do you want to hear what happened to Victor's last cellmate?"

"No!"

"It was mop city afterward, let me tell you."

Mr. Tandy stood up. "I said I don't know anything, and I'd like you to leave my house right now."

"Fine," I said. "I hope you've got your passport ready, because you'll be wanting to flee the country before the day is over. You're busted, Mr. Tandy, so I'd advise you to make it easy for yourself. Tell me what you know."

He sat back down and buried his face in his hands. "I don't know anything. I swear."

"You don't swear very convincingly."

He remained motionless for a moment, then removed his hands and looked up at me with wet eyes. "I didn't buy a series of tapes. Only one. That's all."

"And who did you buy it from?"

"Michael Ashcraft. I swear to you, I didn't hurt anyone! They did everything! All I did was fill out a form." Mr. Tandy's voice cracked. "That's all I did. I only watched. I didn't touch anyone."

"What was on the form?"

"You know, hair color, age, race, build..."

"Yours?"

Mr. Tandy stifled a sob. "No, for the victim I wanted."

Oh dear Lord, I thought.

Snuff films made to order.

It was all I could do to keep from walking over and punching the sick bastard in the face. But I remained calm, even as Mr. Tandy broke down completely.

"I swear, I didn't hurt her! They said I could help out, participate if I wanted, or maybe watch the whole thing live and keep the tape as a souvenir, but I didn't! I wasn't there! All I did was watch the tape! I didn't tell them who to kidnap!"

"And how much did you pay for the privilege of watching somebody die?" I asked.

"One hundred thousand dollars," Mr. Tandy replied in a quiet, almost inaudible voice.

"Well, I'm glad you're doing so well for yourself," I said. "That's a pretty big chunk of money for a tape, when you can rent Faces of Death for a couple of bucks at 7th Street Video. I guess even though you didn't kill her yourself, it gave you a nice little tingle knowing that she was dying because of you." I looked him over carefully, pretending to study him to figure out what his tastes might be. "Let me guess...you picked a redhead, maybe eighteen years old, athletic build, right?"

"No. She was forty. Brown hair. Heavyset."

"Well, to each his own." I cracked my knuckles. "Listen, what I should do is beat the shit out of you then haul you straight to the police station. But I'm not going to. In fact, things may work out all right for you, if you're willing to play along."

Of course, once the prisoners were safe I was going to make sure this guy was put away for a long time. But he'd find that out later.

"What do I have to do?"

"First off, you know the hundred grand you paid for that video? You're going to pay me twice that to keep quiet." If he thought I was nothing more than a blackmailer, he wouldn't question why I was letting him go.

Mr. Tandy nodded. "I don't have the money now. You don't know how hard it was to get it the first time without my wife knowing."

"You have exactly one week to get it. Remember, I know where you live. Now, I have some questions that I want answered."

Suddenly Mr. Tandy's eyes widened. "My wife's just pulled up! You've got to leave!"

"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "Tell her I'm an old friend, then we'll find someplace to talk in private."

Mr. Tandy lifted the bottom of his shirt and used it to wipe his eyes. The door opened and a woman entered, with three grade-school kids behind her, the youngest holding a box of doughnuts. I almost had to laugh when I saw her.

About forty. Brown hair. Heavyset.

"Oh, hello," she said to me. Her pleasant expression switched to one of concern as she noticed Mr. Tandy's distraught condition. "Ben, is something wrong?"

Mr. Tandy shook his head unconvincingly.

"I apologize for disturbing you," I told her. "I'm just here to speak with your husband about a financial matter. Nothing for you to worry about."

"I handle most of the finances," Mrs. Tandy said. "Should I be speaking with you as well?"

"No, I think we've got most of it covered. Really, it's nothing to concern yourself over."

Mr. Tandy stood up. "I'll be back in a second. I need to use the bathroom."

"Kids, go play outside," said Mrs. Tandy, ushering them out into the front yard. "Ben, are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine. Yes."

He walked into the hallway, moving like one of the living dead. I wanted to keep him in sight, but what was I going to do, tell him he couldn't take a leak? I heard the bathroom door close and turned to face Mrs. Tandy.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"It's a personal matter."

"I'm his wife. We don't have secrets."

Oh, was she in for a shock.

"I'm sorry, but this is between Ben and I. Whatever he wants to tell you, he can."

"I expect him to tell me everything. I hope you understand that it's very upsetting to come home and find a total stranger in my house and my husband looking like he's ready to kill himself."

Crap. That hadn't even occurred to me.

Forget letting the man urinate in peace. I rushed down the hallway and pounded on the only closed door.

"Mr. Tandy, open up!"

"Go away!"

"I mean it. Open the door. We need to finish talking."

Mrs. Tandy walked into the hallway after me, wringing her hands in what seemed more like agitation than nervousness. "What the hell is going on?"

I tested the doorknob. Unlocked. I threw open the door, figuring that it was well worth the risk of embarrassment if he happened to be merely sitting on the toilet.

He wasn't.

He was standing at the sink, a razor in his hand.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He'd taken a regular plastic shaver and broken the top to get at the blade, which he held pinched between his thumb and index finger.

"Stay away!" he said.

I rushed him, and he flung the razor at me. It bounced harmlessly off my chest as I grabbed him and easily pinned his arms behind his back. Mrs. Tandy screamed.

"Be quiet!" I shouted at her. "Don't make a sound! Now listen to me, I need your full cooperation, both of you! I'm only here to ask questions, nothing else! I just need you to--"

Mrs. Tandy vanished from sight, and I heard her footsteps running down the hall, probably toward the nearest phone. I shoved Mr. Tandy out of the way. His leg struck the bathtub and he fell to the floor. The razor was still on the floor, within his reach, so I gave it a good kick then followed his wife to stop her before she called the police.

I hurried down the hall, through the living room, and into the kitchen, where Mrs. Tandy stood next to a phone mounted on the wall. She held the handset in one hand and was punching buttons with the other.

I grabbed the phone from her and gave the cord a good yank, popping it out of the jack. "Do you want your husband to die?" I demanded. "Do you?"

She shook her head, tears spilling down her face. "No!"

"Then sit down and stay calm! If you don't do as I say you might as well slice his wrists yourself!"

I couldn't believe I'd said something like that, but this was no time for compassion. I sprinted back into the bathroom, ready for the sight of Mr. Tandy lying on the tile in a pool of blood, his wrists slashed wide open.

But he hadn't gone for the razor. He was sitting against the bathtub, his eyes vacant. "Why can't you leave me alone?" he asked.

"I apologize if I'm inconveniencing you," I said. "I know what a pain it is when somebody shows up uninvited and exposes you for the twisted deviant that you are."

"You just don't understand."

"No, I don't, and thank God for that. But here's your chance to redeem yourself. I need names. Besides Michael Ashcraft, who is involved in making the tapes?"

Mr. Tandy shrugged.

"Look, if you don't want your face plastered all over the front page of tomorrow's newspaper, you'll answer my questions. Now who's involved?"

"It was his wife," Mr. Tandy said. "And some other guy."

"What other guy?"

"He never told me his name."

"What did he look like?"

"Sort of creepy. Old guy. Big white beard."

Great. The Apparition. No help at all.

"Who else?"

"Nobody else."

"You're lying. There's somebody else working for Ghoulish Delights that you haven't told me about."

Mr. Tandy's voice abruptly switched from a pained whisper to a shout. "What do you think, they took me around and introduced me to everyone? I don't know who you're talking about! All I did was order the tape. That's all."

"Where'd they get the girl?"

He lowered his voice again. "I don't know! All they said was that they take people who won't be missed. Maybe she was homeless. I didn't ask. Why are you asking me all this stuff instead of bugging Michael Ashcraft? He's the one you should be talking to! I didn't do anything!"

I noticed Mrs. Tandy standing in the hallway, staring at us as her hands trembled. I shut the bathroom door in her face.

"I don't care what you did or didn't do," I told Mr. Tandy. "You're the one I'm talking to."

"But I don't know anything!"

"How did you find out about Ghoulish Delights?"

"The Internet. A chat room."

"Must've been some chat," I said with a dry chuckle.

"Hey, you don't know anything about me! You have no right to stand here acting all haughty and arrogant!"

"I'm going to make two points. One, 'haughty' and 'arrogant' mean the same thing. Two, because of you an innocent woman was tortured to death. I don't need to know anything about you to figure out that there's something seriously wrong with you."

Mr. Tandy buried his face in his hands and began sobbing. His shoulders shook, his head bobbed, and after a couple of minutes of trying to calm him down I had to accept that I wasn't going to get anything more out of him.

I opened the bathroom door. Mrs. Tandy stood there, her face pale and tight. "Please, tell me what's going on."

I ignored her and walked toward the front door. I knew the secret behind Ghoulish Delights now, but I couldn't see how this was supposed to help me find the hidden clues in the video.

As I stepped outside, I saw an envelope taped to the passenger door of my car. Forget searching for leads and interviewing suspects...I needed to just stay in my damn car all day!

I hurried over to the car, glanced around to catch a glimpse of the delivery person I knew would be nowhere in sight, then ripped open the envelope. It felt like it contained several pieces of paper. I have to admit, I was feeling pretty darn uncomfortable hanging around here, and I really didn't know what Mr. Tandy might be capable of, so I got in my car and sped off.

I drove out of the neighborhood and pulled into the parking lot of a small library, then carefully opened the envelope and removed its contents.

Five pieces of notebook paper.

One Trojan-brand condom. Ribbed.

I didn't even want to know what the condom was for yet, so I looked over the first piece of paper. In crayon, in a child's scrawl, was the following letter:

"Dear Gramma, I miss you. Arizona is fun. Mom sed that I could have all the soda I want during the trip. I love you. XOXOXO. Love, Amy."

The next letter was similar:

"Dear Gramma, I miss you. Its hot hear but I still lik it. We will be back soon. I love you. XOXOXO. Love, Amy."

There were three more letters, all to Gramma from Amy, all to basically the same effect.

Five letters and a condom. And somehow this was supposed to tie in with the tape.

I held open the envelope and looked inside to make sure I hadn't missed anything. And I had. A message written on the inside of the envelope read: "One after the creation of the other."

Huh?

I tore open the foil wrapper to make sure there was nothing else of importance hidden inside the condom. As I removed the condom and examined it, a woman walking past the car with an armload of books noticed me and picked up her pace. Looked like a normal condom. The kind I no longer had to wear ever since the birth of Kyle, when Helen decided that our child quota had been met and it was time for me to get a...but that's bringing up a horrible memory I don't want to discuss.

I unrolled the condom completely just in case the killer had written some sort of message on it, but no, it still looked like your standard-issue prophylactic. Wow, these things were huge when you unrolled them all the way.

Satisfied that this condom was in fact a regular condom, I rolled it back up as well as I could and stuffed it back into the wrapper. I returned all of the parts of the clue to the envelope, and began to drive home.

One after the creation of the other.

Wasn't the whole purpose of a condom to prevent creation? So "creation" had to refer to the letters.

A condom after the creation of the letters.

Was Arizona the important part? Or maybe it was the misspelled words, such as "sed" and "lik."

One after the creation of the other.

I was completely baffled.

Then my heart rate doubled as I saw the red and blue lights flashing in my rear-view mirror.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Oh, this was bad. This was really bad.

I glanced around quickly and saw that there were no other cars near me. The flashing lights on that police car were meant for me, and me only.

What was I supposed to do? If the killer or one of his flunkies was watching and saw me talking to a cop, that might blow the whole deal. Even if they were listening in somehow and I didn't say anything suspicious, they'd probably assume I'd relayed a message some other way.

I briefly considered flooring the gas pedal and testing my car chase skills, but quickly decided that would be a bad idea. If I got caught, I'd be taken in to the station, and then the prisoners would be doomed for certain. Besides, the officer had probably already noted my license plate number.

Wonderful. Just wonderful.

I pulled over to the side of the road and killed the engine. I looked up in the rear-view mirror and ran a hand through my hair. God, I looked terrible. The combination of big-time stress and lack of sleep gave me the appearance of an intoxicated zombie. Bloodshot eyes, bruises, rumpled clothes...I looked like somebody that any local cop would want to throw out of his town.

I rolled down my window as the officer approached. Naturally, he was tall, had a muscular build, and facial features that looked carved out of stone. Naturally, he had an expression that said "I've had a lousy day and I'm in the mood to stomp somebody."

Naturally, I patted my jeans and realized that with all the distractions this morning, I'd forgotten to bring my wallet.

The officer stopped at the door and leaned down toward the window. He had to lean a long way. "May I see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please?"

"Yes, sir," I said, opening the glove compartment. I thought about how interesting it would be if another hand dropped out, but there was only the usual assortment of receipts, useless papers, and various junk so jam-packed in there that it took a full two minutes to locate my registration and the auto insurance card. I handed it over. "I'm sorry, but I left in a hurry and forgot my wallet at home."

"Did you, now?"

"Yes. I can tell you right where it is on the kitchen counter, if that helps." I tried to smile.

"That won't be necessary." The officer looked me over carefully. "Do you know why I pulled you over?"

"No, sir."

"When you made that left turn after leaving the library, you failed to signal. That's very dangerous to other drivers, who cannot be expected to anticipate your moves."

"Oh, that's right. I'm sorry. I'm just tired, I guess."

"Perhaps if you're that tired you shouldn't be driving at all. Some rest would probably do you good."

I nodded. "I was on my way home."

"I see. Returning some overdue library books, were you?"

"Yes."

"I see. Please wait here in your car."

The officer walked back to his car and got inside, presumably to check on my registration and insurance information. I wiped my sweaty hands off on my jeans and tried to breathe calmly. If I played it cool, everything might work out fine. The killer might not even be watching.

I nervously drummed my fingers on the steering wheel.

A few minutes later, the officer returned. "Are you Mr. Andrew Mayhem?"

"Yes, sir."

"And this is your car?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you have any sort of picture I.D. on you?"

"No, I don't."

"Mind telling me how you got those bruises?"

The bruises? Well, you see, after digging up this guy who turned out to not really be dead, some psychopath hit me in the head with a chain and then tied me to a chair and punched me a couple of times. Yes, I know, it seemed a bit odd to me at the time, too.

"Two-by-four," I said. "My friend was carrying one on his shoulder when he spun around to look at something. Bashed me in the face."

"You should tell your friend to be more careful."

"Oh, I did, believe me."

"That's the whole problem. I don't believe you."

"Sir, I realize how bad I look," I said. "It's been a really rough couple of days. And I'm sorry I don't have my driver's license with me--things have just been so hectic that I forgot it. I don't know what I need to do to convince you that I am Andrew Mayhem and this is my car, but tell me what it is and I'll do it."

"Are you attempting to bribe me?"

"What? No! I don't even have my wallet!"

"I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to come with me to the station until somebody can verify your identity."

"That's not necessary, I'll--"

"Don't you tell me what is and what isn't necessary. I'm not completely convinced that this is your automobile, sir."

"When you checked my registration, was it reported stolen?"

"That's none of your business. Please step out of the car."

"I can't do that."

"Step out of the car immediately or you will be placed under arrest."

"Look, it's crucial that you listen to me. You can't take me in! Five...no, four people will die if you do!"

At this, the officer drew his revolver from its holster. "Place your hands on the steering wheel where I can see them."

I did so. "I'm not going to kill them, there's somebody else! I don't know who it is, but if you take me in he'll do it!"

The officer opened the door. "Step out of the vehicle," he said, pointing the gun at me. "Right now."

"Please, you have to--"

"NOW!"

I unfastened my seat belt and got out of the car.

"Put your hands flat on the vehicle and keep your legs apart."

I did as I was told. The officer frisked me, and then snapped a pair of handcuffs on me. He grabbed me by the shirt collar and began to lead me toward the police car.

"Wait!" I protested. "There's an envelope on the car seat! I need it!"

"It will still be there when you pick up the car from impound. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

"You have to listen to me!"

"Quiet! You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney..."

* * *

I quickly figured out that the officer wasn't interested in anything I had to say, so I kept my mouth shut during the drive to the police station.

Well, I'd screwed things up pretty thoroughly. If the prisoners weren't dead already, they soon would be. And I didn't even want to think about how much trouble I was personally in.

If this all blew over, I was getting myself a real job. Nine to five. I'd even wear a tie. I might wear a wacky one with cartoon characters once in a while, but damn it, I'd wear a tie.

I went through the booking procedure, got a couple of photos taken (at least with a mug shot I knew I wouldn't have my usual will-you-hurry-up-and-take-the-damn-picture-already smile), and was fingerprinted.

"Listen to me," I told the officer who was doing my fingerprints. He was a younger guy who barely looked old enough to be a college student. "I absolutely have to talk to somebody right away. I don't care who...any cop you've got is fine. But I cannot stress enough how vital it is that I explain what's going on. Some people will be killed. Maybe they already have been. Do you understand?"

"I'll see what I can do," he said, leading me over to a very tidy desk upon which rested a telephone. "You get one phone call, but make it quick."

I dialed my home number. "Hello?" said Kyle.

"Kyle, this is Daddy. Could you put Roger on the phone?"

"He's not here."

"What do you mean, he's not there?"

"He's in the bathroom."

"Knock on the door and tell him it's important, okay?"

"'Kay."

There was a loud thump in my ear and I flinched.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, Kyle?"

"The phone fell. I'll go get Roger."

A moment later Roger got on the line. "Andrew, what's up?"

"I've been arrested."

"Are you serious? You're kidding, right?"

"No. I'm at the police station."

"Aw, shit!"

"I need you to come down here and prove that I'm really Andrew Mayhem. Grab my wallet off the counter. Helen's keys are hanging up in the kitchen; you can take her car."

"All right. Did you find out anything when you went to that place?"

"I found what I was supposed to, but I don't have any idea what it means yet. Before you come to the station, I need you to drive to the Southview branch of the library. My car is parked a couple of blocks away...I don't remember the street, but it's a left turn after you pull out of the parking lot. I've got a spare car key hanging on the hook next to the refrigerator, so you can use that to get inside and grab the envelope that's on the seat. You have to hurry because they'll be sending a tow truck to take it away."

"No problem. Anything else?"

"Yeah, bring the tape. But don't show yourself outside with it. Have Theresa carry her bookbag, and put it in there."

"The other tape's still at my place. Should I get it?"

"No. They might be watching your apartment."

"Okay. We'll be there as soon as possible."

"Thanks, buddy."

I hung up. When I turned around, the young officer was standing there with a pair of black cops. They were both about thirty-five, heavyset, bald, had thick mustaches, and were identical twins.

"These are Sergeants Frenkle and Frenkle. They'll hear what you have to say."

* * *

I'd never been in a real interrogation room before, and this one looked just like those I'd seen in the movies. A long table, uncomfortable chairs, bright white lights, everything.

I told them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Except that I left out the people's names.

Now, I could have waited for Roger to show up with my I.D., convinced them that I was merely some tired driver who forgot to signal, and then left. But if the killer knew I'd been arrested, he'd naturally assume that I'd spilled my guts, whether I really did or not. So if I was going to be penalized anyway, I decided I might as well talk to them. It's not like I'd been able to figure things out all by myself. Let them have a shot.

I also considered leaving out the graverobbing, but quite honestly I was too mentally exhausted to come up with a good cover story as to how I'd become involved. And I didn't want them to catch me in any inconsistencies. Better to tell the whole truth and worry about the consequences later.

"That's quite a story," said Sergeant Tony Frenkle, who was distinguishable from his brother Bruce only by a small mole above his left eyebrow.

"If it's an excuse to get out of a traffic ticket, it's the best one I've ever heard," said Bruce.

"Do you believe me?" I asked.

Tony shrugged. "Not really. But you say your friend is on his way with the tape, so we'll have a look at it together and see if that changes things."

I checked my watch. Twenty minutes since I'd called Roger. He'd be here any second, as long as Theresa and Kyle weren't giving him problems.

"Please, you have to promise me that you're not going to do any investigating," I said. "He'll kill them."

"Your story isn't leaving this room for the time being," Tony assured me. "I am, to get some coffee, but your story stays here."

"Thank you."

Bruce asked me some to clarify some parts of the story while we waited for Tony to return. When he did, it was with three cups of the worst coffee I'd ever tasted. The stuff made my tongue want to leap out of my mouth and never return.

"While we're waiting, why don't you tell us your story again, to make sure we've got everything straight?" suggested Bruce. What he meant was, tell us the story again so we can try to catch you in a lie.

So I told them the story again.

After about ten minutes, I was starting to get a bit nervous. What was taking Roger so long?

After thirty minutes, I was more than nervous. I was frantic.

After an hour, I was terrified.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

After another fifteen minutes, there was a knock on the door. Bruce answered it and stepped outside to speak with somebody. Less than a minute later he returned.

"Your friend, his name is Roger Tanglen, right?"

"Yes! Is he here? Does he have my kids?"

"Maybe you should come with me."

"Why? What happened?"

"Just come with me."

I followed Bruce and another cop out into the front area of the police station. Tony walked close behind us. I made every effort to think positive thoughts, even though a voice in my head kept shrieking that my children were dead.

As we walked through the front door I saw about five cops crowded around something in the parking lot, partially blocking it from my view. We hurried over to the crowd as the policeman who'd spoken to Bruce shouted for them to clear a path. The cops stepped aside to let us through, revealing what they were gathered around.

Roger.

He was standing against a large plank of wood, about the size of a door. In fact, it probably was a door. Bands fastened his legs at the ankles, and another band wrapped around his neck.

His eyes were wide and frightened. Duct tape over his mouth looked like it was wrapped all the way around his head. Above his head, neon orange letters proclaimed that this was "The Dismemberment Game!" Smaller letters in black magic marker said "Starring Roger Tanglen and Andrew Mayhem." A note taped to Roger's chest read "Pigs, stay away! This is Andrew's game."

Fixed to the door were six machete blades, the flat edge of each blade on the wood. The bottom of each blade was attached to a mechanism that was clearly designed to swing it. A blade on each side of his head was positioned to lop off his arms at the shoulder, while blades on each side of his waist were positioned to lop off his legs. A blade next to his right shoulder was set to decapitate him. The sixth blade was at the very bottom of the door, resting on the pavement perpendicular to the door. Between Roger's legs there was an enormous slab of raw meat, probably a cow flank.

"Oh dear Lord..." whispered Tony.

"All right, everyone back!" shouted Bruce, waving his arms. "Clear some space! We need anything solid we could use to block those knives!"

I hurried over to the door. "Can anyone get a chainsaw or something to cut him free?"

The officer closest to the door shook his head. "Look at the back."

I did so. From behind, I could see that the door was propped up by two pieces of wood at the bottom. The entire back of the door was a maze of what must have been thousands of multi-colored wires. Connected to the door by several other wires was a laptop computer, which the cop who'd taken my fingerprints currently had balanced on his palm.

"We don't know which one of those wires will spring the machete blades," said the fingerprint cop. "If we cut the wrong one, it could go off." He extended the laptop toward me. "Take this. It's for you."

I took the laptop from him and looked at the low-resolution, black-and-white display. "GET ANDREW MAYHEM, THEN PRESS ANY KEY. YOU HAVE 43 SECONDS REMAINING." The countdown continued.

"Don't press it yet," said the fingerprint cop. "We need as much time as possible to figure out a way to get him out of this."

The wires were long enough that I could walk around to the front of the door while still holding the laptop. I looked up at Roger and asked "He's got Kyle and Theresa, hasn't he?"

Roger gave me a small nod, and then closed his eyes.

Only sixteen seconds remained on the display. I couldn't panic. I couldn't lose it. I had to stay calm, focus, and make everything all right.

When only three seconds remained, I pressed the space bar. A new message appeared:  "ENTER YOUR MOTHER'S MAIDEN NAME."

With my free hand I typed in KENDALL and hit return.

"BAD BOY, ANDREW. I SAID NO COPS. I'D PLANNED TO SAVE THIS GAME FOR A LITTLE LATER, BUT YOU'VE FORCED ME TO RUSH THINGS. TOO BAD FOR YOU. AND ROGER."

The screen went blank, then a new message appeared. "YOU MUST ANSWER FIVE QUESTIONS CORRECTLY. EACH TIME YOU MISS, ROGER LOSES AN APPENDAGE."

"My God, who is this guy?" asked Tony, looking at the screen.

"I don't know.”

The number 10 appeared at the bottom of the screen, and went down by one with each passing second. "PRACTICE QUESTION. WHO WAS THE TWELFTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES?"

"Who was our twelfth president?" I shouted. The cops began discussing it amongst themselves, and one counted on his fingers while reciting names.

"Hurry! I only have three seconds!"

"Tyler!" said the guy counting on his fingers. "No, no, Taylor! Zachary Taylor!"

I typed in T-A-Y...

"TIME'S UP."

The bottom machete blade swung upward like an enormous mousetrap going off. It split through the meat and smashed into the wood with a loud thunk! The top of the blade came less than an inch from splitting Roger's jeans and the sensitive parts beneath them. Then it swung back and returned to its original position.

There was a gasp of shock from the crowd of police officers. Roger's eyes were closed so tightly that his head looked ready to burst.

"QUESTION ONE. RIGHT ARM. WHICH SKULL WEARS THE COWBOY HAT?"

Which one? Gaggles or Boo-Boo? I couldn't remember!

No, it had been Gaggles, right?

Five seconds remained. No time to replay the video in my mind. I typed GAGGLES and hit enter.

"CORRECT. RIGHT ARM SPARED."

I let myself breathe a sigh of relief.

"QUESTION TWO. LEFT ARM. WHICH SKULL BIT FIRST?"

I definitely knew this one. Boo-Boo.

I typed in BOO-BOO. Enter.

"CORRECT. LEFT ARM SPARED."

If they were all questions from the video, I could handle this. I'd certainly been paying attention when I watched it.

"QUESTION THREE. RIGHT LEG. WERE THERE MORE OR FEWER THAN FIFTY BITES THAT KILLED THE WOMAN ON THE BED?"

I didn't know! Possibly more than fifty, but I hadn't counted.

I typed in MORE. Hesitated for a couple of seconds. Then hit return.

"CORRECT. FIFTY-EIGHT, TO BE EXACT. RIGHT LEG SPARED."

If that question ever popped up on Jeopardy I'd be set.

"QUESTION FOUR. LEFT LEG. IN MULTIPLES OF FIVE MINUTES, HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO CLEAN UP AFTER THE AVERAGE GHOULISH DELIGHTS MURDER-ON-TAPE?"

How the hell was I supposed to know that?

"Give that here!" said Tony to someone behind me. As he walked up to the door, I saw that he held a metal pipe, about two feet long. Bruce stepped forward and each of them took an end. "Left leg, correct?" he asked me.

"Correct!" Three seconds remained on the timer.

I typed 60 and at the last second hit enter.

"WRONG. THE CORRECT ANSWER IS 45. LEFT LEG SEVERED."

The blade positioned by his left leg swung with incredible force, striking the metal pipe with a loud clang. Bruce and Tony both let out a grunt as the pipe was wrenched out of their grasp. It slammed against Roger's leg with a sound that had to be bone breaking. Roger let out a muffled cry of pain.

The blade swung back to its original position.

Roger was badly hurt, but at least he still had his leg.

"FINAL QUESTION. NECK."

"The next one's going for his neck!" I shouted. Bruce and Tony quickly positioned the pipe so that it would block the blade, and two other cops joined to help them hold it.

"WHO AM I?"

If I knew that, I wouldn't have been in this situation to begin with! Carl, Farley, Dominick, Linda...maybe even Rachel...who could it be? I had a one in five chance of guessing correctly.

One in four, if I discounted Rachel.

Even if the pipe stopped the blade from cutting him, if I got this wrong my best friend was going to end up with a broken neck.

Five seconds.

I typed in CARL.

Three seconds.

I placed my finger over the enter key.

Two seconds.

No! The odds were too much against me!

Better to try something where I didn't know the odds.

I spun around and flung the laptop into the air as hard as I could. The wires connecting it to the door snapped.

The bottom blade snapped up, slamming into the wood between Roger's legs again.

A split-second later, the blade to the right of Roger's waist sprung. The cops spun the pipe downward, and the bottom of it passed in front of Roger's right leg an instant before the blade hit. Though there were four cops holding it, the pipe was still wrenched away from them, and crunched against Roger's leg in the same area as before, but at a new angle. Roger shrieked beneath the tape.

The blade to the left of Roger's waist sprung, slamming against the opposite blade.

The blade on the right side of Roger's head, the one intended to chop off his right arm, sprung, coming down upon the upper end of the pipe and crushing it into his shoulder. It was immediately followed by the blade on the left side of his head, which struck the right blade and elicited another shriek from Roger.

The blade aimed at Roger's neck sprung. It connected with the other two blades, giving the pipe against his shoulder a third slam.

And that was it.

Roger remained fastened to the door, probably with a shattered leg and shoulder. But he still had his head. He'd live.

"We need some saws and a metal cutter!" shouted Bruce, but somebody had already retrieved the metal-cutting shears. While the cop with the shears went to work on the band around Roger's right leg, Tony pulled out a pocketknife and began to cut through the duct tape.

He ripped the tape away from Roger's mouth, and Roger spoke in a weak voice. "Under my shirt...an envelope..."

I lifted his shirt to reveal an envelope folded into quarters and taped to his chest. I pulled it off, tore it open, and read the letter inside.

"So, how does your friend look without his head? Sorry that there was no correct answer to the last question, but I couldn't give anything away in case you made a lucky guess. You're probably wondering what happened to your kids. Are they still alive? Did I chop their heads off, too? Nope, not yet. I'll save that for later, unless you cooperate. We'll consider your involvement with the cops an unfortunate little detour that cost your friend his life. If you ever want your kids back, you'll proceed exactly as planned. Go home and relax, then come to the taping. Join the fun. Try to solve the mystery. Otherwise I'll add a new age bracket to the list of Ghoulish Delights stars. So you make sure those pigs stay out of it. I have insiders on the force, so don't try anything remotely sneaky. If I get the slightest bit suspicious, your son and daughter will be screaming in pain for days, and they'll be dead for months before you find them. Got it? Good."

I touched my hand to my cheek. I hadn't even realized I was crying.

"I'm so sorry, Andrew..." said Roger. They were having trouble getting the metal band off his arm, and it didn't look like he'd be free anytime soon. "I didn't see it coming."

"Do you know who it was?"

"No. I was knocked out with something, and when I came to I was in the back of a van. I couldn't see who was doing it...I was just dumped off here."

"Was it more than one person?"

"I don't think so. They used a cart or something, so one person could have done it alone."

I turned toward the crowd of police officers. "I have to go home," I said. "I have to find the person who did this on my own. He has my kids and he has four other prisoners. If he thinks there's any police involvement, any at all, he'll kill them. He doesn't want anyone else playing his game."

"That's crazy," said Bruce. "You've got it narrowed down to five suspects. We'll just round 'em up and bring 'em in!"

"No! If he sees any cops, my kids are dead! He'll kill them as soon as he sees you!"

"We at least can have people keep an eye on you," said Tony. "Plainclothes cops. They'll blend in. He'll never know they're there."

I shook my head. "Please, you've got to stay completely out of this. All of you." I pointed to The Dismemberment Game. "Look at what kind of stuff this guy sets up! I mean, do you honestly believe he'll hesitate to kill my children? I don't know what his resources are, I don't know who he has working for him, I don't know anything except that if there is any police involvement in this matter, I may never see my kids alive again. Please, let me do what I have to do."

A middle-aged man in gray pants and a rumpled dress shirt stepped forward. "My name is James Geldern, Chamber County Chief of Police. We'll get your friend out of there. Go get your kids."

"I mean it, you can't have me followed," I insisted.

"We won't have you followed. The mind that created a contraption like this is not the kind of mind I want to make angry. Now get the hell off police property before something like this happens again."

"Thank you." I looked at Roger. "You'll be okay, don't worry."

"I'm sorry, Andrew...I tried to do something but I..."

"Forget about it. It wasn't your fault."

I walked away from the police parking lot and onto the sidewalk. Theresa and Kyle would be okay. Everything would turn out okay. It had to.

In my mind I heard the delighted cackle of a wicked witch. "Would you like to see my little puppet show, dearies? Fifty-eight bites between the two of you! Don't forget, my puppets love it when you screeeeeeeaaaaaaaaam."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Two blocks from the police station I reached a pay phone. It had to be safe to call a cab...the killer couldn't expect me to spend a couple of hours walking home. After being told the cab would be there in about ten minutes, I leaned against the brick wall of a hardware store and waited.

Sharpened skull fangs, digging into Kyle's leg...

No! That wasn't going to happen!

I had to put my kids out of my mind and focus on the problem. Focus on the riddle.

One after the creation of the other.

Letters to grandma and a condom.

What did a letter create? Happiness. Knowledge. Waste paper. What else? A letter was a creation, not something that created.

What could possibly be the creation of a condom, besides something icky to throw away after it was used? A sense of security? A sense of protection?

How could any of this relate to the video?

I kicked the wall in frustration.

Okay, I had another problem to deal with. Should I call Helen and tell her that our kids were currently in the hands of a murderer?

All my instincts said no, absolutely not. Because Helen would certainly not sit in her hospital bed and wait for news. She might demand that the police try to find her babies. She might hop into a wheelchair and look herself.

No, I couldn't tell her. It was too dangerous.

If Theresa and Kyle died, she'd hate me forever.

No she wouldn't. She would never hate me.

I didn't think she would.

Anyway, none of this mattered because the kids were going to be fine. One hundred percent fine.

I had to stop thinking about them! The riddle was the important thing right now!

"What the hell does it mean?" I said out loud, not caring if anyone overheard me.

By the time the taxi arrived, I still had no answer.

* * *

The library wasn't quite on the way home, but it was a small enough detour that I felt reasonably safe in asking the cabbie to drive by where I'd left my car. If it was still there, I'd have access to the physical clues instead of having to rely on my memory.

It had already been towed.

I told the cabbie to take me home.

* * *

When I got there I was surprised to find that Helen's car, now sporting a shattered windshield and a broken passenger-side window, was parked in the driveway. At first I thought Roger and the kids hadn't even gotten away from the house before they were jumped, but then I noticed that there was no safety glass on the pavement. The car had been driven back here.

Theresa's bookbag wasn't inside, but the tape rested on the seat. The killer clearly didn't want me to be without my clue.

The first thing I did after I went inside was dial the number to Michael's cellular phone, hoping the killer would answer. He didn't.

I checked my watch. Eleven o'clock. One hour until I was supposed to be at the taping. One hour to either sit around the house and go absolutely positively totally freaking insane, or collect myself and try to figure out the clue.

The insane option sounded more appealing at the moment, but I forced myself to pop the tape back into the VCR, sit down on the couch, and watch the video again.

It was the same video, and my extra clues didn't provide any additional insights.

I leaned back, closed my eyes, and tried to relax. Maybe I was concentrating too hard. Maybe if I just lay there and let my thoughts flow freely, my subconscious might come up with something.

I tried that for about ten minutes. My subconscious didn't do squat.

I wondered if Theresa was sobbing now. Or screaming.

I watched the entire video yet again.

Nothing.

I paced around the house. Could the killer see me? Were Theresa and Kyle nearby?

And then it was eleven forty-five. Time to go.

* * *

Chamber doesn't have what you would call a slum, but the address was definitely in the poorest section of town. Didn't seem like the kind of area where the residents would have the extra income to pay to be the stars of their own horror movie.

I drove to the very end of the street, past some kids playing basketball using a hoop without netting, and into the driveway of a dilapidated two-story house that looked like it should be located next to an old graveyard at midnight.

There were no other cars in the driveway.

I checked to make sure I had the right address, and then got out of the car. Either everyone else was late, or there wasn't really a taping here.

Could everyone in Ghoulish Delights be in on it?

Or were none of them ever told to come here?

Nobody else had been around when Rachel gave me this address. It could have been a setup from the very beginning.

Well, I'd find out in short order.

I walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. I didn't hear any buzzing or chiming from inside, so I figured it wasn't working. Not a big surprise. I knocked loudly, waited about thirty seconds, and then knocked again.

No answer. That wasn't a big surprise either.

I tried to peek through the windows, but the curtains were drawn. I tested the doorknob. Unlocked.

Could Theresa and Kyle be in there? Could the killer have made it that easy?

I had to cancel that thought. Even if they were inside, I had a feeling that getting them back would be anything but easy.

I opened the door and stepped inside. If ever a house looked like a perfect site for a haunting, this was it. It had obviously been abandoned for quite some time, as there was a thick layer of dust over everything and cobwebs in every corner. Between the dust and the fading, I couldn't even tell what color the furniture was.

I took a step, and the floorboards creaked. I wondered if this is where I'd been tied to the chair. No, probably not...I hadn't noticed the thick musty scent before that I was smelling now. Even with the burlap sack over my head I should have been able to smell it.

The dust wasn't actually everywhere. A reasonably clean path ran from the doorway to the staircase, as if somebody had made several trips back and forth, enough to wipe away the dust. There were no individual footprints.

I could go ahead and explore the rest of the first floor, but it was pretty clear that if there was anything to find, I'd find it upstairs.

I flipped on the light switch, not really expecting it to work. I was correct. Even with the curtains closed, enough light streamed into the house that I could see where I was going, though upstairs would probably be a different story.

I began to ascend the stairs slowly, one at a time. They groaned with each step, but seemed sturdy and unlikely to collapse and send me plummeting into darkness beneath. A small pile of bones rested on the second-to-last step, possibly belonging to a bird.

At the top of the stairs, I turned left and found myself in a narrow hallway, with two doors on each side, and one door at the end. All of the doors were closed. There were no windows, and the light from downstairs provided only the faintest illumination. If only I'd known I'd be creeping around an abandoned house, I'd have brought a flashlight. I didn't even have Roger's lighter anymore. I could go buy one, I supposed, but there might not be much time. I'd have to make do with the little light available.

I slowly walked over to the first door on the right and opened it. The door made a horrible creak as it swung open, loud enough to awaken any slumbering ghosts. The room hadn't been entered in a long time. Dust covered the crib and the rattles on the floor.

I opened the door on the other side, wincing again at the creak. A bathroom. Vacant.

I continued down the hallway to the second set of doors. The first led to a bedroom. The mattress on the queen-sized bed had been torn apart, with stuffing flung everywhere. I couldn't see well enough to tell if the dust had been disturbed or not.

"Hello?" I called out.

No answer.

I listened carefully for a few moments. Total silence. Nobody was here.

I opened the opposite door, which also led to a bedroom. Once again, I listened and heard nothing.

Theresa and Kyle could be underneath the bed, blood pooling beneath their bodies as spiders scurry over their faces...

I almost had to hit myself to break the thought process. I turned to the door at the end of the hallway and opened it.

No creak.

It opened to a closet. Empty, except for a ladder leading up to the attic.

I stepped into the closet and looked up. No light at all.

I had to get a flashlight. Borrow one from a neighbor or something.

"Hello?" I called out. "Is anyone up there?"

Nobody responded.

"Theresa! Kyle! Are you there?"

Something in the attic rattled.

Then I thought I heard something else. Maybe a voice, but faint and muffled.

Screw the flashlight. I was going up there now.

I gripped the ladder tightly and began to climb. It held my weight fine, and I made it to the top without breaking any bones. The attic was completely dark, except for a tiny bit of light streaming in from underneath some curtains. The window was only a couple of steps away from the ladder, so I carefully put my foot down on the attic floor. It seemed like it would hold me. I walked the two paces to the window, and pulled the curtains, filling the attic with light.

It wasn't difficult to figure out what I was here to find.

The attic looked like a zoo that had fallen on hard times, loaded with cages but not enough animals to fill them. There were at least a dozen cages up here, but only four of them were occupied. And the inhabitants of these cages weren't animals--they were people. None of them were Theresa or Kyle.

Wrists and ankles bound by thick chains, the four prisoners suffered in cages barely large enough for a human. The captives seemed to be in their street clothes, except that their heads were completely covered with black leather masks, as if they were executioners who found themselves on the wrong side of the chopping block. The masks had openings over the nose, but no eye holes, and a closed zipper over the mouth.

I took a step forward. "Can you hear me?" I asked in a loud voice.

There was an immediate reaction of writhing and muffled groans. I knelt down next to the first cage, which held a dangerously thin woman whose blouse was covered with dirt and mostly unbuttoned. I rattled the door of the cage, but a padlock held it shut. There were padlocks around her chains as well. Fortunately, the bars of the cage were far enough apart that I could squeeze my hand through. I put my hand on her shoulder, and the woman flinched as if my hand was an ice pick jabbing into her flesh.

"It's okay," I whispered. "I'm here to help."

A zipper ran up the back of her mask. I twisted my arm into a good position, and then slowly, so as not to startle her, I unzipped it all the way and slid the mask off her face. The zipper caught on her tangled, dirty blonde hair, but I removed it gently and let the mask fall to the floor.

The woman squinted and let out a whimper as the light struck her eyes. There was an ugly bruise on her chin, but otherwise she seemed physically unharmed.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"My name is Andrew Mayhem. I'm going to get you out of here, I promise. But I need your help. Do you know who did this to you?"

She shook her head. "There was more than one. I never saw any of them." Her voice grew frantic. "Please, you have to get me out of this place before they come back! They've come and taken away most of the others already! Please! I can't stand it anymore!"

"I need you to calm down for me," I said, not raising my voice. "What's your name?"

"Tracy."

"Tracy, you'll be free before you know it. Now, what about the keys? Do you have any idea where they are?"

She rapidly shook her head.

"How long have you been here?"

"I don't know...days...weeks...the mask never comes off. It was so hard to breathe. I thought I was going to die. They take us out of the cages sometimes, once a day, I don't know, and let us walk around for a few minutes. They shove some food down our throats, give us some water, yank down our pants and shove us on a bedpan, but then we're locked up again."

"Would you recognize any of the voices?" I asked.

"No. They never talk in front of us."

"Okay, look, I don't have anything to cut the padlocks with, but I'm going to..."

I stopped in mid-sentence as I looked across the attic and saw a wood-chopping axe lying on the floor. Either a forgetful lumberjack had been in the vicinity, or that was what I was meant to use.

It seemed a little too easy. The killer had to have a surprise waiting.

But I certainly couldn't leave these people here, so I made my way across the attic and retrieved the axe. It was a nice, solid tool, which I was happy to note was not covered with blood. I stopped at the nearest cage, which held a man who sat pressed against the corner.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said. "I'm going to take that mask off, then I'm going to set you free."

The man nodded. I reached inside, unzipped the mask from the back, and pulled it off him. The man's face was a bruised and bloody mess. I wondered if he'd put up a struggle when he was kidnapped, or if they'd done it afterward.

"Thank you," he whispered.

I removed the masks of the other two people. Their faces were in about the same condition as Tracy's--a bruise or two, but nothing serious. All four of them were from the coming attractions segment of the first video.

I returned to Tracy's cage, lifted the axe, then brought it down as hard as I could upon the padlock on the cage door. The cage shook with a loud clatter, but the padlock remained in place. With the second swing, however, the padlock dropped to the ground and I pulled the door open.

The locks on the chains were going to be more difficult because I could only raise the axe as far as the top of the cage. And since they were right next to Tracy's ankles and wrists, there was always the chance of a nasty accident.

"Don't move," I told her.

"I couldn't if I wanted to," she said.

I slammed the axe down on the padlock binding her ankles, but it didn't break. I was too concerned about accidentally chopping off one of Tracy's feet to hit it with full force. In theory, much worse things than losing a foot would happen if I didn't get the prisoners out of here in time, but I couldn't help trying to be careful.

"Andrew?"

I froze at the sound of the voice.

"Andrew, are you here? It's me, Rachel!"

For a few seconds I allowed myself to feel relief that I now had somebody to help me free the prisoners, but that was immediately replaced with a sense of unease. After all, who had given me the location of the "taping" in the first place? Very possibly, I'd put my trust in the wrong person.

"C'mon, Andrew, I know you're here! I saw your car out front!"

How would she recognize Helen's car? I cautiously stepped away from Tracy's cage, still holding the axe.

"Andrew, talk to me! Are you here or what?"

Her voice was closer. She was on the second floor now.

There was silence for almost a full minute except for Rachel's footsteps. I eased my way over to the ladder, gripping the axe handle tightly with both hands, making sure I couldn't be seen from below. Then a flashlight beam shone on the ceiling.

"Are you hiding up in the attic? C'mon, I'm not gonna hurt you, for God's sake!"

They'd done well so far, and I prayed the prisoners would continue to remain silent.

"Okay, I'm coming up. Don't shoot me or anything, please."

The ladder creaked as Rachel began to climb. I stood by the entrance, just out of sight, axe poised and ready to strike.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Rachel's left hand came into view, and then her right hand, which held the flashlight as well as gripped the ladder. Then her head rose up above the entrance. Her eyes widened as she saw me holding the axe. "Whoa! Settle!"

"What do you want?" I demanded.

"Could you maybe put the axe down?"

"Not right now."

"Fine, but could you promise not to hit me with it as long as I don't make any sudden moves?"

"Sure."

"Can I come up?"

"I'd rather you didn't."

"Suit yourself." She glanced over her shoulder and for the first time noticed the prisoners in the cages. "Oh my God..." she gasped. "Are these the people you were telling me about? Sorry, dumb question, but Andrew, we've got to get them out of here!"

"That was my plan."

"Okay, look, it's pretty obvious what you're thinking. But listen to me, Andrew--I had nothing to do with this! Nothing! And every second you waste not believing me is time that we should be using to set these people free!"

"Why did you come here?" I asked.

"To check the place out before the taping. Nobody lives here, so I figured I could look around beforehand."

"Uh-huh. And how did you know it was my car?"

"There were toys in the backseat. Nobody in Ghoulish Delights has kids, and it certainly wasn't out of the question that you'd show up here, so I took a guess. C'mon, Andrew, let's not risk the lives of these people just because you're being paranoid."

"Okay," I said, stepping back as my stomach tightened at the mention of my kids. "You can come up."

She climbed all the way into the attic. "So what's the situation?"

"They're chained to the floor and I don't have the key. I'm going to have to use the axe to break them free."

"Why don't you let me try it?"

"Thanks, but no."

"Oh, for God's sake, Andrew, are you saying you can't trust me with the axe?"

"At this point I really don't trust anyone."

"Goddammit!" shouted Tracy from her cage. "Give her the fucking axe so we can get out of here!"

"Nobody asked your opinion," I informed her.

"Okay, how about this?" Rachel pointed to the far end of the attic. "You walk over there and set the axe on one of the cages, then you climb down the ladder to safety. That way I won't have a chance to chop your head off before I start bashing padlocks."

I stared at her for a long moment. "Ah, screw it," I said, and handed her the axe.

"Thank you." Rachel tested the axe's weight with both hands as she walked over to Tracy's cage. "I could have taken this from you in about two seconds, but I wanted to give you a chance to cooperate nicely."

"I appreciate that."

"Don't move," Rachel told Tracy. She took a practice swing in slow motion to make sure the axe was positioned correctly, then brought it down hard, breaking the lock that held her ankles.

"Oh, God, thank you!" said Tracy, as Rachel positioned the axe to break the lock binding her wrists.

"So did I miss any other developments?" asked Rachel.

"The killer has my children."

"What?"

She finished setting Tracy free, and I told her everything that had happened since we'd last met. Tracy could barely walk, so I helped her move around the floor, working her arms and legs to get the blood flowing again. By the time I'd finished the story, two more prisoners were free, leaving only the man with the battered face.

"One after the creation of the other," muttered Rachel. "What could that possibly mean?"

"I have no idea," I admitted.

"What kind of condom was it?"

"Trojan, I think. Trojan after the creation of the mail. Mail after the creation of the Trojan." I shrugged. "Doesn't help."

Or did it? What did the Trojans create? I only remembered about .007% of what I'd learned in history class, but I did recall the story of the Trojan horse.

"Something after the horse?" I said aloud. "Can you think of anyplace a horse might be important?"

Rachel thought for a moment. "Not off the top of my head, not here in Chamber."

"Wouldn't letters be more appropriate than mail?" inquired Tracy, massaging her ankles.

"Letters after the horse," I said. "Specifically, five letters after the horse. The fifth letter would be 'E.'  What could that mean?" Nothing sprung to mind. "Or maybe it's like one of those codes we used to do in grade school, where B means A, and C means B, and so on. That would make it...I, J, K, L, M for the first letter, giving us Morse, and then--"

I stopped as I had a sudden realization. That's why the skull's movement seemed so weird! "The skull is speaking in Morse code!"

"Are you sure?" asked Rachel.

"That has to be it! That's the answer!" My heart was pounding so quickly I thought it was ready to break out of my chest and onto the dirty floor. "I have to go somewhere I can look at the tape!"

"Go, then!" said Rachel, lifting the axe to break through the last of the man's locks. "I'll get everyone out of here and take them to the police."

"No, you can't do that yet," I said. Rachel smashed through the padlock and began to help the man out of his cage. "Take them somewhere safe, hidden away. Put them in your car and just drive out of Chamber, get as far away as you can. Give me until midnight to take care of everything, then go to the police."

Rachel nodded as she turned to the former prisoners. "Any objections to giving our friend a chance to get his kids back?"

They all shook their heads.

"Then get out of here," Rachel told me. "I'll see you later."

* * *

My jubilation at solving the riddle was tainted by a sick feeling that things were going to get a whole lot uglier before they got better. Because really, the killer had just handed the prisoners over to us. No challenge. Which meant that he had something much worse in store.

There was no way in hell I was going to speed after the results of my last little traffic violation, so I kept to the posted limit until I saw both of what I needed in a strip mall to my right. Pages-A-Plenty and Chamber Video World.

I hurried into the small bookstore and pushed past a young woman who was at the front counter with a stack of self-help books. "Sorry," I said to the cashier, "but this is life or death. I need a book on Morse code."

The cashier was a tall gentleman with wire framed glasses and hair that was gray at the temples. "I'm sorry, but you'll need to wait your turn."

"Listen to me," I said, leaning forward. "Direct me to a book on Morse code or I'm going to strip naked and dance in your front window."

"Books on Amateur Radio should be in the hobby section, back wall, middle shelf," said the cashier, quickly.

"Thanks. By the way, could I borrow a pen?"

The cashier handed me a pen. "Keep it."

I hurried to the back shelf and searched for a moment until I located Amateur Radio Made Easy. I flipped through the pages and found one that listed all of the letters and their Morse code dot-dash equivalents. I didn't have any money and I figured that stealing a book wasn't the best course of action to take at such a time when police involvement was considered to be a bad thing, so I scribbled the code down on my arm and left the store.

I proceeded to the movie rental place. A monitor above the checkout counter was playing that stupid Zany the Chipper Chipmunk video. There were only a couple of customers wandering the aisles and a teenage girl behind the counter.

"Hi," I said to her, setting the Ghoulish Delights tape on the counter. "I'm a private investigator for the state, and I need to commandeer your VCR."

"Huh?" replied the girl.

"I need you to play this tape for me."

"I can't do that. The manager tells us what movies to play."

"Is the manager around now?"

The girl shook her head.

"Then let's not worry about him. Play this. Actually, let me play it...I'm going to need to do a lot of rewinding." I stepped behind the counter and ejected Zany from the VCR.

"Sir, customers aren't allowed behind the counter," the girl insisted.

"I'm not a customer. I have no intention of buying anything." I inserted the Ghoulish Delights tape into the VCR and pressed play. "Can you mute the volume?" I asked. "I don't want the voices to distract me."

The girl nodded, picked up another remote, and shut off the sound. As the talking skulls came on, I focused all of my attention on Boo-Boo. Yes, his mouth was definitely moving in a series of long and short beats, with pauses that hopefully signaled a space between letters.

I rewound to the beginning of Boo-Boo's dialogue, and wrote down what I saw.

Quick bite, quick bite, pause, quick bite, slow bite, pause...

I lost the flow, rewound, and started again, confirming what I'd written and then picking up where I'd left off.

Slow bite, pause, quick bite, quick bite, quick bite, quick bite, pause, quick bite...

Dash, dash, pause, dot, dot, pause, dash, dash, dot...

"What movie is that?" asked one of the customers. "My son would probably enjoy that kind of garbage."

I ignored him. It took more than ten rewinds to get the entire message, but soon I had everything written down on my arm. Comparing my left arm to my right, I began to translate the message.

I AM THE MIGHTY HUNTER. COME AND GET ME.

It was Mr. Dead Fish Cologne himself. Dominick!

* * *

"Oh, hi Andrew, how's the search go--hey!!!"

Linda cried out as I wrapped my arm around her neck and pressed the edge of the just-bought kitchen knife against her throat. I pushed my way into the living room of the apartment and kicked the door shut behind me. "Is Dominick home?" I asked in a whisper.

"Yes."

"Call him out here."

"Dominick, honey, Andrew's here to see you!"

Dominick stepped into the room, a half-eaten Pop-Tart in one hand. "Oh, hi, Andy. Welcome to my humble home. Do you want the tour before or after you decapitate my girlfriend?"

"Where the hell are my kids?" I demanded.

Dominick shrugged. "I'm not sure. Probably the same place I stashed Michael." He grinned and took another bite of his Pop-Tart. "By the way, Linda, if Andrew doesn't end up killing you, please remember to get the frosted kind next time."

"I'll try, sweetheart," Linda said.

"Tell me where my kids are or I'll cut her!" I threatened. "I mean it! This isn't a joke!"

"Oh, that's right, I'm supposed to be taking this all very seriously," said Dominick. "Please forgive me, I have a tendency to behave inappropriately in certain social situations. So, let me get this straight, you want me to return your kids to you in exchange for Linda's life, correct?"

"That's the idea."

"And what makes you think I care if Linda lives or dies? Sure, she has some really cute dimples and a fantastic ass, but her personality is just loaded with defects."

I removed the knife from Linda's throat, and then poked the tip into the side of her neck. She cried out in pain as blood welled from the tiny wound.

"Hey, what the hell are you doing?" shouted Dominick, his eyes wide.

"I'm not kidding around here! Give me back my kids!"

Then I let out my own cry of pain as Linda stomped on my toes with her heel. It didn't hurt enough to make me drop my knife, but her next move, jabbing her elbow into my gut, was enough to double me over. Great. I'd seen a dozen movies where the woman escaped her captor by stomping his foot, and now it happened to me in real life. Real smooth.

I stood back up and grabbed her hair. Though she didn't have long, flowing tresses, I was able to get a good handful and yank her toward me. This time I pressed the knife against the back of her neck, and she froze.

Dominick was gone.

"Get out here!" I shouted. "I swear to God, Dominick, you don't want to mess with somebody as screwed up as I am right now!"

Dominick stepped back into the living room, now holding a crossbow pointed in my direction. I had Linda in front of me as a shield, but she didn't cover me completely. Hopefully his aim wasn't perfect.

"Drop the crossbow or I'll stab her," I said.

"You stab her and you get an arrow through the face," Dominick said.

"Where are my kids?" I demanded.

"I don't know. I didn't touch them."

"Bullshit, oh mighty hunter."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. All I know is that this was supposed to be a joke."

"It's no joke," I said. "My children have been kidnapped."

"By who?"

"Well, obviously I thought it was by you! Who told you this was a joke?"

"I was talking to Carl this morning. He said that you weren't a detective, you were somebody Michael hired as a practical joke and that we were supposed to play along."

"I think you were severely misinformed."

"I consider myself informed now. Why don't you let her go so we can talk this over?"

I shook my head. "You put down the crossbow first."

Dominick bent down at the knees and carefully set the crossbow down on the floor. He stood up and held up his hands to show that they were empty.

"Kick it over here," I said.

Dominick hesitated. "This bow was really expensive."

"Now!"

He kicked the bow. It slid across the floor, coming to a stop about two feet from me. I removed the knife from Linda's neck and she hurried over to Dominick. "Asshole!" she said, slapping him across the chest. "Don't you ever worry about how much your precious bow is worth when some maniac is attacking me with a knife!"

I wondered if this was the way I was going to solve the mystery, by threatening each of the potential suspects with sharp objects until one of them turned out to be the killer.

"So what brings you here?" asked Dominick.

"Some psycho has me running all over the place playing his game," I said. "The final clue was I AM THE MIGHTY HUNTER. That would be you, right?"

"Well, no, not really, I just fish," Dominick explained. "I have a huge weapon collection, but it's not used for hunting. I swear, I have nothing to do with whatever it is you're involved in." He turned to Linda. "Do you have any idea what he's talking about?"

"The son of a bitch is crazy," said Linda. "He probably murdered his kids himself."

"I'm not crazy!" I shouted, furious. I took a deep breath to calm myself down. "Okay, maybe I am a little, but I'm not lying about this. If Dominick isn't the mighty hunter, who is?"

Linda avoided my gaze.

Then a possibility occurred to me. The game--Prophecies of the Night.

"In Prophecies of the Night, is one of the character types a hunter?" I asked.

Dominick shrugged and glanced at Linda. "I'm not sure," she said. "There are so many I'd think there would have to be."

I tried to remember what I'd heard from the game. I stood there, concentrating, trying to recall any piece of conversation that indicated who might play a hunter.

A flash of dialogue ran through my mind.

"...I'll add his head to my trophy case..."

"It's Farley!" I exclaimed. "The mighty hunter is Farley! He has my kids!"

I turned and started to bolt for the door. "Hold on, wait a second!" said Dominick. "Should we call the police?"

"No police! That's the recurring theme of Farley's threats! I have to go after him myself!"

"Okay, we don't need to involve the cops, but I'll come with you!"

"You're not going anywhere!" Linda protested. "The guy is insane, can't you tell?"

Dominick shook his head. "There's always been something about Farley that creeped me out. I have no problem at all believing that he's a kidnapper."

"And a murderer," I said. "He buried Michael alive and chopped up Jennifer."

"Jennifer's dead?" Dominick took a few seconds to process that information then continued. "Okay, if what you say about Farley is true, then you can't just confront him with a kitchen knife. But you may also be completely wrong, so I'm not sending you after him without supervision. I mean, you could've really hurt Linda and she had nothing to do with this."

"I don't need supervision," I said.

"I think you do. And if you take me along, I can arm you to the teeth. I've got an incredible collection of weapons in the other room, not all of them legal, if you get my drift."

"Well then, why don't you tag along?" I suggested.

"Good idea. Let's go get some stuff."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

There were no cars in the driveway as we pulled up alongside Farley's home. It was a fairly nice place, if a bit small. Personally, I would've figured Farley to be the kind of guy who still lived with his parents.

The three of us got out of Helen's car. I'd told them the whole story on the way, to make sure they understood just how dangerous things could be. Linda had refused to let Dominick go without her, and all three of us were wielding crossbows. I also had a belt from which dangled two vicious-looking knives, and a quiver containing a combination of about twenty arrows and bolts, everything from one with an explosive tip to a razor-lined one that I was supposed to handle very, very carefully.

After we each placed a bolt into our crossbows and pulled them back, locked into place and ready to fire, we walked up to the front door and I knocked. "Farley, it's me," I called out.

No answer.

"I know that you're the mighty hunter," I said. "Open the door and let's talk."

Still nothing. I tested the doorknob and found it unlocked. "You guys ready?" I asked.

Dominick nodded. Linda shook her head.

I turned the knob and pushed the door open. "Come on out, Farley!" I shouted into the darkness. I reached inside and flipped on the light switch. The living room looked a lot like the Ghoulish Delights office--a shrine to horror movies. The walls were covered with posters, and all sorts of masks, models, creatures, and other assorted morbid props were carefully placed for maximum gruesome impact.

More interesting were the six or seven cables that stretched across the room just inches below the ceiling, one end of each fastened to the wall at our right, the other end disappearing into a hallway.

"Theresa?" I called out. "Kyle? Can you hear me?"

No response, not that I expected one.

Then I saw Boo-Boo. The skull was at the far end of the room, resting on top of a television set, an envelope in his mouth.

"I need to get that envelope," I said, pointing. "You two stay put. Cover me."

Dominick and Linda raised their crossbows into a position to best shoot any assailant. I moved my own slowly, from side to side, and then began to move forward. The first cable was only a couple of feet away.

Three steps later there was a loud squeaking sound, and then suddenly a corpse burst out of the hallway, hanging from a pulley attached to the cable. At least a dozen blades protruded from the body, and I barely jumped back in time to avoid being sliced. The corpse slammed against the wall and dangled there, bouncing and swaying like a flesh-and-blood puppet.

It was a man, and he'd been completely dismembered. The pieces were now held together with wire, with inch-long gaps in between each chunk. Except for the head, which hung a good six inches above the rest of the body.

I turned around. Dominick and Linda both looked ready to keel over, but neither of them screamed.

"I won't be offended if you want to wait in the car."

"Just get the fucking envelope!" Dominick snapped.

From this angle, I still couldn't see into the hallway. The toes of the corpse dangled about a foot above the floor, so it would be too dangerous to try to crawl over to the envelope if another body shot out. I took another step forward, then another, and then leapt back as I heard a second series of squeaks.

Another corpse burst out of the hallway. This time dodging was unnecessary, because the wire snapped and the body dropped in a heap on the floor. Only the head, adorned with several fishhooks, slammed against the wall.

Okay, I was wasting time. I braced myself, and then ran at top speed across the room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw four corpses shoot out of the hallway, one after the other. I reached Boo-Boo and snatched the envelope out of his mouth as the corpses bashed into the wall.

I looked at them. All had various weapons protruding from them, from a long spear to a non-running chainsaw. Two of the corpses hadn't been reconstructed properly, their body parts switched around in some appalling mix-and-match game.

"Welcome to the mind of Farley," I said. Dominick and Linda had nothing to say to that.

I opened the envelope, which was labeled "For Andrew," and read the note inside.

"Congratulations, Andrew! You've done great! Okay, I can't say that for sure--it may have taken you too long to find this, and I may have slaughtered your kiddies out of boredom. But for now let's pretend I haven't. It's time for the moment you've been waiting for. The final showdown. The big explanation. Fun, fun, fun for the whole family! Can you handle this much excitement??? Follow the enclosed map and see what happens! As usual, do it alone or I'll kill your kids, yadda yadda yadda. This time I mean it. Your very bestest friend in the whole wide world, Farley."

So really, Farley set things up so that I hadn't ever needed to solve that Morse-code-condom riddle. I could've just broken one of his precious rules and showed up at his house early. What a dickhead.

"What does it say?" asked Dominick.

I looked at the hand-drawn map. It was directions to a cabin, located not too far from the park where I'd dug up Michael in the first place. Probably the cabin where I'd been tied up and listened to Jennifer meet her demise.

"It tells where he is," I told him. "And I have to go alone."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Linda, not removing her gaze from the corpses.

"Watch yourselves," I said. "I'm heading back."

I ran across the room, expecting more corpses to come flying at me, but apparently they'd all been used in the first round. We left the house, closing the door behind us to keep any nosy neighbors from peeking inside. I really didn't need anyone else dropping dead of a heart attack this week.

"Is there anything else I can do?" asked Dominick.

I considered saying, "You can pray." But that seemed a little too melodramatic. So I said something that was more in tune with my personality. "Sure, you can reshingle my roof while I'm off saving my kids. I've got Popsicles in the freezer for when you take a break."

Dominick didn't smile. "Seriously, I hope things work out for you."

"So do I."

* * *

Farley may have been an annoying psychopathic little geek, but he did know how to draw a map. This meant less time that I had to drive around lost, and thus less time for me to envision Theresa and Kyle hanging from a cable, their heads switched around and not quite connected with their necks.

About six miles after driving past Fleet Park, I reached the unnamed road marked on the map. It took another three miles before I reached the windowless cabin, which looked barely able to sustain its own weight. Firewood was stacked by the door, and a white Chevrolet was parked in the driveway. A bumper sticker read "Grandma Went To Hell And All I Got Was This Lousy Bumper Sticker."

I parked Helen's car, got out, adjusted the quiver on my back, and slowly approached the door.

"Come on in!" Farley called from inside.

I pulled the door open.

"Before you try anything, make sure you take a good look at the setup here," he warned.

I stepped inside the cabin, crossbow ready to fire. Farley stood near the far wall, about twenty feet away. Theresa and Kyle stood next to him, one on each side, their faces tearstained. I was overjoyed to see that they were still alive, but that joy vanished as I realized just how bad the situation really was.

Farley held a brick in each hand with a wire wrapped around it. The wires stretched up to the ceiling, looped around a pair of hooks, then continued down to form something like necklaces for Theresa and Kyle. Necklaces lined with dozens upon dozens of razor blades.

"See what we've got here?" asked Farley, lowering one of the bricks slightly. Theresa's necklace tightened just a bit and she let out a soft whimper. "I drop these bricks, and your kids get shredded throats. So I'd say it's in your best interest not to make me drop the bricks. You can go ahead and shoot me if you'd like, but things will turn out very messy."

I set the crossbow down on the floor. "I won't do anything," I said.

"Good boy." Farley looked at Kyle and grinned. "Your daddy likes you. You should feel happy."

Kyle, frozen with terror, didn't say anything.

"I hope you were a smart guy, Andrew," said Farley. "If you brought any cops or other friends and I see them, these bricks are gonna fall. If you hired a sniper or something, you may want to call him off before he gets an itchy trigger finger."

"I'm alone," I said.

"Good. So we can talk. Care for a seat? Your kids and I can't sit down for obvious reasons, but that's no reason why you shouldn't be comfortable."

"I'll stand."

"Suit yourself. So I guess the big question is, why have I called you here? What's the meaning of all this nonsense with the riddles and the dismembered pieces of Jennifer in your friend's car and the charming videos and, oh, everything you've had to go through these past couple of days? Well, you're in luck. Here's where I explain everything."

I noticed that Theresa's leg was starting to wobble. "She's not going to be able to stand like that much longer," I said. "Let my kids go. You can take all my weapons. I won't be able to try anything."

Farley shook his head. "She'll be okay, we just got into place a few minutes ago, after you set off the sensors. But I'm going to let you in on a cruel little secret. Your kids are history. Whatever happens, I'll eventually have to drop these bricks, and the razor blades will do what they do best. It's gonna be bloody, believe me. You can beg, you can plead, you can bribe, you can threaten, you can do whatever you want, but in the end the bricks are going to fall. So really, you might as well just pick up that crossbow and take me down right now. But you won't do that, because you're going to be searching for a way out of this. Which means I get to talk."

I noticed a video camera on a tripod in the corner of the cabin. The red light was flashing. "Recording this for posterity?" I asked.

"Yep. This'll help you out in tying up any loose ends with the police, and this way you won't have to take notes. So, look around you, Andrew, because this is where the magic happens."

I glanced around the cabin. There were numerous bloodstains on the floor, and I recognized the bed from the videos. Various implements of torture were hung on the walls. A small shelf against the far wall contained videotapes, more weapons, and Gaggles, still wearing his cowboy hat.

"Yeah, this is where we brought the victims. I didn't have anything to do with the actual kidnappings--that was the work of The Apparition and a couple other folks, but once they were here and the cameras were ready to roll...ooohhh, baby, we had some good times. I was the guy who did the actual killings. Remember the spork? Good work, huh?"

"Sure, high quality all around," I muttered.

Farley was right...I was desperately trying to figure out a way out of this, but what could I do? Any action I took against him would make him drop the bricks, and then Theresa and Kyle would die. I could try to rush him, but was there any way to reach him before he let the bricks fall? I didn't stand a chance.

"Anyway, that's where the real money for Ghoulish Delights came from. We'd been socking it away, having ourselves a great time while we tried to save up enough to retire somewhere."

"Who's we?" I asked.

"Me, Michael, and Jennifer. Your buddies Rachel, Dominick, Linda, and Carl were all blissfully unaware of the real Ghoulish Delights. They probably would have been offended by the idea. Some people are so conservative."

Theresa's leg was wobbling even more. I wanted more than anything to hurry over to her, but that would kill her.

"So, everything was going fine, until one dark night Jennifer went snooping around in Michael's computer. And what did she discover but that her dear husband, who was in charge of all the client contact for our made-to-order snuff videos, had been hiding away a lot of money that he never told her about. Where's the sense of trust in marriage these days? So she confronted him, they fought, she stormed off, and then she came over to my place to tell me what he'd done. She was in a vengeful mood and I had nothing against the idea of getting laid for revenge, so we went at it until Michael showed up at my door. I'm sorry, is this story inappropriate for children?"

"A story involving you having sex is inappropriate for anyone without a cast-iron stomach," I said.

"Ooohhh, good slam for Andrew! Anyway, Michael was all bent out of shape and he threatened to turn us all in. Jennifer managed to calm him down, we all apologized, and Jennifer and Michael decided they needed some time alone, to work things out. So they set up a trip to Europe. Are you sure you don't want to sit down?"

"I'm fine."

"But Jennifer, of course, never intended to go to Europe. We decided we were going to kill her scumbag husband in the worst way possible. So, Tuesday night, I threw an unassembled pine coffin into the trunk of my car, forced Michael from his home at gunpoint, and drove him out to Fleet Park. I made him drag the pieces through the woods, and then I made him dig his own hole, build his own coffin, and get inside. Can you believe how much that must have sucked for him? Oh, I had a blast. Stretched the whole thing out as much as I could. But then he started begging for mercy. I mean, begging. It would've broken your heart. I don't know what happened to me; I just felt sorry for the poor guy. So I knocked him out with chloroform and tossed the gun in the coffin before I locked it shut and reburied it. That way, you know, if things were too unbearable he could always kill himself. I regretted it later, I mean, what a wuss thing to do, but don't say I never did anything nice for anyone."

"Does this mean if I start begging you'll let my kids go?"

Farley shook his head. "Nah, I'll just drop the brick sooner. Anyway, that should've fixed all our problems, but then we realized we didn't know where the key to his safe was. We tore the place apart, and no key. Finally we decided that he had it on him."

"That sounds like something you should have thought about before you buried him," I remarked.

"Yeah, well, I never claimed to be a criminal genius. Then the next night that bitch Jennifer decided to go behind my back and hire you to dig up the coffin. Really stupid on her part, but I guess the idea of digging him up herself freaked her out. So I followed her, and really you should be grateful because I ended up saving your life. She planned to kill both of you after you found the key, but my little rampage put a stop to that. So I brought all three of you back here--I'm stronger than I look, by the way--hacked up Jennifer, and figured I'd use Roger as a hostage until I got the money.

"But then everything turned to shit. I opened the safe, nearly got shot by a poisoned dart, and discovered that the only thing in the safe was a friendly little note. I don't know who was holding the evidence against us, but if Michael didn't get in touch with him by Friday night, tonight, everything was going straight to the FBI. Michael had babbled something about this while I was burying him alive, but I thought it was just a trick to save his life. I realized that I was, in a word, fucked."

"Not a great feeling, is it?" I asked.

"Ah, it's not so bad once you get over it. And that's when I decided, to hell with it. I'm not living my life as a fugitive, and I'm certainly not going to prison. I've had a pretty wild life, killed a lot of people. I figured it was time to, as the quote goes, die young and leave a beautiful corpse. But I wanted people to know who I was, what I'd done. I wanted to be famous like Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, all of those guys. So that's where you came in."

Theresa's leg was now wobbling so violently that I thought she was going to drop at any second. But what could I do? I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth and forced myself not to lunge forward.

"You were already involved," Farley explained, "so I figured I'd make you my personal spokesperson. I'd put you through an outrageous hell, give you the story of a lifetime, even let you be the one to kill me. I have to say--you did incredibly well. I did hide multiple clues at the graveyard to increase your chances, but still...kudos to you. And I got to reuse my favorite prop, the Dismemberment Game I built for a very special episode of Ghoulish Delights. The questions are really easy to program. I'll let you keep it if you want."

"No thanks."

"Anyway, I figured I'd turn your life into an absolutely crazy nightmare, and then my fame would be guaranteed, as would yours. You'd even get the better end at the deal. After all, I'll be dead, and all you'll have done is lose your children."

"You don't have to kill them," I insisted. "You want fame? I've gone through enough freaky shit in the past couple days to guarantee you a spot in the Psychopath Hall of Fame."

"I know, but it's just too good to pass up. Hear the story of Farley Soukup from the guy who watched his own children die."

"I swear, if you hurt them I won't say a goddamn word."

"Uh-huh. Yeah, right. What're you going to do, bury all the evidence? Hide the bodies of your children and pretend a wild dingo carried them off?"

Farley turned his wrist slightly, checking his watch. "You know, these bricks are starting to get a bit heavy. If you have any final dramatic statement to make, now's the time. Say goodbye to your kids, Andrew. Make it good. The camera's rolling."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

"You want this to be a game, right?" I asked. "Then give me a chance to try and set them free."

"You have plenty of chances," said Farley. "It's just that none of them will work."

I reached down and picked up the crossbow. "Give me two shots. One for each wire."

"You're going to snap the wire with an arrow?" Farley asked, tremendously amused.

"I'm gonna try."

"Oh, well, don't let me stop you! Hell, if you're that good of a shot you deserve your kids back! But you stay where you are. Come any closer and I drop the bricks."

"I understand." I held up the crossbow and peered through the sight, aiming it at the wire that connected to Theresa's razor blade necklace.

"I think there might be an apple somewhere around here, if you want to put it on her head," said Farley.

I ignored him, kept my arm as steady as possible, and pulled the trigger.

The bolt shot past the wire, missing it by about six inches. Better than I would've expected.

"Good shot!" said Farley. "Not good enough, but I'm still impressed. I would applaud, but I don't think you'd appreciate that. Oh well, I guess this means the girl's dead. Wanna try to save the boy?"

I took a bolt out of the quiver, pulled back the bowstring, and locked it in place. Then I took careful aim at Theresa's wire again.

"Oh, trying for the girl again, huh? I don't blame you. She's older, you've got more of an investment in her."

I placed my finger on the trigger, took a deep breath, and shot the arrow.

But not at the wire. At the last instant I jerked the crossbow upward, firing at the hook. The explosive-tipped bolt I'd gotten from Dominick hit the ceiling, creating a monstrous ball of fire and sending chunks of wood flying everywhere.

The noise was deafening. Farley dropped the bricks as he was thrown to the ground, and the hooks and wires fell with them, along with half of the roof.

I staggered backwards from the impact, accidentally dropping the crossbow, then immediately hurried forward. "Theresa! Kyle! Get out of here!" I screamed, shoving them toward the doorway. The kids rushed for safety, as Farley made a lunge to grab the wire that trailed behind Kyle.

I kicked Farley in the face before he could manage that. He rolled on his side as some burning wood pieces fell on his leg. I tried to kick him again, but he moved out of the way in time. He grabbed a piece of rubble and threw it at me, hitting my shoulder and instantly causing my arm to go numb. Then he got to his feet.

"Your kids are still gonna die!" he shouted. "You haven't changed anything!"

He rushed at me like a football player going for a tackle. As I dodged, I realized my mistake--Farley snatched the crossbow and a razor-lined bolt from the floor. I ran toward him, pulling a bolt from my own quiver.

He swung the crossbow, bashing me in the temple. I stumbled backward several steps and fell on a burning chunk of the ceiling. I cried out and rolled over, frantically batting at my shirt. As I beat out the flames, Farley snapped the bolt into place.

He fired. The bolt struck me, sinking half its length into my upper arm, not hitting bone but jutting out the other side. I couldn't even scream--I could only let out a series of frantic gasps.

Although the pain was so intense that I wanted nothing more than to just curl up into a little ball and cry, I forced myself to stand up again as Farley picked up another bolt and prepared to fire. This time he shot it into my right leg, inches below the waist. I fell back and crashed into the shelf in an explosion of videos and weapons.

Farley tossed the crossbow down and glared at me. He walked over to a small dresser beside the bed and opened one of the drawers. "You're lucky I didn't put it through your eye," he said, taking out a handgun. "But I still want you to live."

He strode toward the doorway. "What do I do now, huh? I guess I hunt down your brats, put a bullet in each of them, and then wait for the cops to show up to investigate the explosion. I can go down in a hail of bullets like Bonnie and Clyde. Not as good as my original plan, but what can you do?"

I moaned and tried to push myself to a sitting position. Farley rolled his eyes and pointed the gun at me.

"Oh, give it up," he said, pulling the trigger.

The bullet struck me in the chest, slamming me against the shelf. Had it been a few inches to the left, it would've gone through my heart. The taste of blood filled my mouth, and the feeling rushed out of my legs. I moved my hand around helplessly, still trying to push myself up, knowing only that I had to save my kids, knowing that I didn't stand a chance.

My palm poked against Gaggles' teeth, drawing blood.

"I'll see you in a bit," said Farley. "I'll be the one with your children's bloody corpses slung over his shoulder."

He walked over to the doorway.

"Farley..." I croaked.

He turned around. "Do I have to shoot you again?"

I was seriously injured, maybe even dying. I had only one chance to save Theresa and Kyle. Nothing mattered, not the pain, not the blood, not the fear...nothing but doing what I had to do. And with a shriek of agony as my arm felt like it was being wrenched from its socket, I flung the skull at Farley.

Gaggles' open mouth struck him perfectly--upper jaw through the chin, lower jaw through the neck. The cowboy hat stayed in place.

Farley stiffened.

Let out a gurgling sound.

Then fell.

My last bit of strength was gone. I couldn't even call out my children's names. I closed my eyes and hoped for the best.

* * *

"Andrew? Can you hear me?"

I opened my eyes. Either Bruce or his twin brother Tony was crouched in front of me.

"An ambulance is on its way," Bruce or Tony said. "You don't have to worry about your children. They're safe with Tony. They're badly shaken, but they're not hurt."

"How'd you..."

"Find you? We followed you. We weren't just going to let you waltz away from the police station without surveillance. You lost us for a bit, but the explosion led us right to you. Sorry about the fib."

"Asshole," I whispered.

Bruce smiled. "You just relax. Everything is going to be fine."

"Maybe...but...not after..."

"Shhhh. No need to talk."

"...not after...my wife finds out..."

EPILOGUE

If Helen was pissed, she didn't show it. I'd never been babied so much in my life.

Michael hadn't been bluffing about having to make a call by Friday. By Saturday the names of everyone involved in the snuff videos, from kidnappers to clients, had been made public. It only took about two weeks for the last of them to be caught.

Roger doesn't throw a Frisbee as well as he used to, but after a nice long hospital stay he was all right. My hospital stay was even longer, but I healed pretty well, too. Helen's broken leg did just fine.

Theresa and Kyle...well, there were a lot of nightmares at first, but they're subsiding. It's been six months now, and I think they're both doing extremely well considering what happened. Their psychiatrist is one of the biggest nerds imaginable, but he's good. And kids are tough. They'll be okay.

They say that any publicity is good as long as they spell your name right, but the crew disbanded Ghoulish Delights anyway. Rachel became something of a hero for rescuing the prisoners, but I think she squandered her fame on getting more people to buy gym memberships.

Reverse Snowflake has a nice home now. Roger has a few new scratches every time I see him, but he'll live.

Now I've been offered a generous amount of money to tell my story. I have to admit, there was some hesitation on my part. I mean, that's what Farley wanted. The problem is, his story got out to the public anyway, even with all the interviews I refused to grant. The former prisoners shared everything, and Farley's final tape (which miraculously survived my blowing up a large percentage of his cabin) seemed to be on television twenty-four hours a day. He got what he wanted.

But, what the hell? Here's my book. Here's a nice summer home for myself and Helen, and a college education for Theresa and Kyle. And I paid off the guy whose car I hit...though, unfortunately, Helen found out about it.

Yeah, this is what Farley wanted, but you know what? He's dead, and I'm not.

I may suck as a detective, but right now I feel pretty good.

The End

SINGLE WHITE PSYCHOPATH

SEEKS SAME

Author's Note

Single White Psychopath Seeks Same was originally published in 2001. That's why there are references to wacky things like video tapes (Ha ha! Those primates!) and not enough people have cell phones.

CHAPTER ONE

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just know it's going to be the kind of day where you end up tied to a chair in a filthy garage while a pair of tooth-deprived lunatics torment you with a chainsaw. So as I struggled against the ropes, I can't say I was all that surprised.

This was actually my second time being tied to a chair and threatened with a cutting instrument, which I think is pretty impressive for a guy in his early thirties. Last time I had a burlap sack over my head, and to be honest I really would have appreciated one this time around. I mean, I know it's what's inside that counts, but these guys were seriously ugly. And their combined breath could probably be used as a Drano substitute.

The larger lunatic, whose tee shirt was decorated in a fashionable tobacco stain motif, sighed with annoyance as the smaller lunatic gave the chainsaw cord yet another tug. They'd been trying to start it for about five minutes. "Maybe it needs gas," he suggested.

"I told you, it's got gas!" his partner said.

"Then tug harder."

"I'm tuggin' as hard as I can!"

"Here, give it to me," the lunatic offered, extending his hand.

"You keep your nasty hands off my chainsaw!"

"Then start it!"

"I'm tryin'!"

I guess it reflects poorly on me that I allowed myself to be kidnapped by these gentlemen, but I didn't get much sleep the night before. I'd been relegated to the couch for breaking the living room lamp. Actually, I didn't break it, my son Kyle did, but it was while playing basketball in the house, a rule that I was too busy watching television to enforce. Helen was less upset about the lamp than the fact that I encouraged both of our children to lie about the cause of its destruction. I really don't know what made me think a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old could carry off the ruse (which involved a stray Doberman), but it earned me a sleepless night on the Fold-Out Bed of Misery.

So, anyway, I was pretty much out of it when I stepped out of the house that morning. One chloroform-soaked rag to the mouth later, I awoke to find myself with my hands, feet, and torso tied to a chair in a filthy garage while a pair of tooth-deprived lunatics tormented me with a chainsaw.

"Try this," said the larger lunatic. "Put it on the ground and brace it with your feet, then yank the cord with both hands."

"Maybe you should grease the pistons," I suggested.

"You shut the hell up! Nobody asked you to say anything about greasing any goddamn pistons!" Large Looney was shaking with rage, his mighty beer gut wobbling to and fro like the waves on a beautiful moonlit Caribbean beach.

Small Looney set the chainsaw on the cement floor. "Why don't you read him the statement?"

"Because, you frickin' little twerp, we agreed to cut off his arms first to get his attention! That's why I need you to start that worthless chainsaw! You're making us look like a couple of idiots! That's how Andrew Mayhem is gonna die, thinking we're a couple of idiots! Real nice. That's just super. Makes my day."

"Actually, I was thinking that you were never Boy Scouts," I said, holding up my free hands.

Okay, no, I didn't really say that. Despite their chainsaw inadequacies, these two lunatics knew how to tie a darn good knot. I was struggling as much as I could, but it didn't appear that I'd get to use my clever Boy Scout comment any time soon. As sweat dripped into my eyes, I hoped I'd at least be able to say something wittier than "AAAHHHH!!! MY ARMS, MY ARMS!!! AAAHHHH!!!"

Small Looney placed both of his feet on the chainsaw, gripped the cord tightly, gave it a good tug, said an extraordinarily bad word, and landed solidly on his butt. Large Looney was too furious to recognize an example of outright hilarity when he saw it, and proceeded to kick his partner in the side.

He snatched up the chainsaw and tugged on the cord. The motor roared to life, and I found myself making unheroic, borderline feminine noises as he walked toward me. I continued to struggle against the ropes, suddenly realizing that I could turn my left wrist a little further than before. This information still left me totally screwed, but you've gotta appreciate the tiny victories in life.

He positioned the chainsaw blade inches above my left shoulder, and then said something very dramatic that I couldn't hear over the motor.

"What?" I asked.

He repeated it, louder, but I still couldn't hear him. Though I'm pretty good at reading lips, enunciation was not one of his stronger skills, nor was keeping his personal saliva contained within his mouth.

Large Looney shook his head with frustration. For a moment, I allowed myself to believe that he was so sensationally, spectacularly, stupendously stupid that he'd shut off the chainsaw in order to make himself heard. He wasn't and didn't. He lowered the blade toward my shoulder.

The roar of the chainsaw abruptly turned into the sputter of a dying chainsaw, followed immediately by the silence of a dead chainsaw. Large Looney stared at it for a long moment, and then touched the blade to my shoulder anyway. Not much happened.

Large Looney screamed out a rather confusing variation on the f-word, and then flung the chainsaw across the garage and against the wall. "You jerk!" shouted his partner, rushing over to retrieve it. "Maggie's gonna have my butt if I don't get the firewood cut tonight!"

"Why the hell do you need firewood?" Large Looney demanded.

"It's December!"

"It's seventy degrees out!"

"Maggie likes a warm house!"

"Maggie's a fat cow!"

"What does that have to do with liking a warm house? Why are you always saying things that have nothing to do with what we're really talking about? You're always doing that! Always, always, always! I oughta chainsaw your face."

I realized that I could now rotate my left wrist even more. If they continued arguing for the next three or four hours, I'd be home free.

Large Looney closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. "We need to focus," he said, opening his eyes again. "Let's just collect our thoughts and reflect upon our purpose. We're not here to fight with each other; we're here to kill him. So let's do it."

He walked over to a shelf and picked up a very large drill. I'm not really a drill expert, but this one looked more than sufficient to create a hole in my head. I hoped it would go the chainsaw route and refuse to start, but one quick push of a button and the bit began whirring in a menacing, your-skull-is-toast kind of way.

I repeated the variation on the f-word, which actually made perfect sense in a mindset of pure terror. And somehow I'd managed to contort my wrist into a position where I couldn't move it anymore. My morale was not high.

Small Looney laughed, picked up the chainsaw, and walked over to join his buddy.

"Okay, I think there's been a misunderstanding," I said, as Large Looney brought the drill slowly toward my face. He obviously appreciated the fine art of suspense.

"What about the statement?" asked Small Looney.

"Forget the statement. Let's just kill him."

"No, no," I said. "I'm terribly curious about the statement. If you went to all the trouble to write one up, it seems like a waste to—"

"Shut up," said Large Looney, continuing to move his drill forward. I now had less than six inches separating the very soft flesh of my face from the very unsoft bit of the drill. I wondered if I could bite it off.

Small Looney obviously wanted to help out, so he hoisted the chainsaw to chest-level and gave the cord a tug. Right after he did so, three things happened very quickly. First, the chainsaw motor started up again. Second, the brain of the lunatic registered surprise that the chainsaw motor had actually started. Third, the hand of the lunatic reacted to this surprise in the unfortunate manner of releasing its grip on the chainsaw.

The running blade bounced off his leg. While it didn't lop it off or anything like that, it created one doozy of a flesh wound. Small Looney fell to the floor, shrieking and scooting away from the chainsaw as if it were alive and might stampede after him like a wild predator. Large Looney hurriedly lowered the drill and rushed over to him.

Small Looney clutched at his leg and continued screaming. I stupidly wasted a couple of seconds struggling against the ropes, as if I might suddenly turn into Superman and snap them, and then proceeded to lean to the side, successfully tipping the chair over but hitting my head on the cement floor harder than I'd anticipated.

"You'll be okay, you'll be okay," Large Looney said over the screams. "It looks worse than it is!"

The chainsaw was on its side, still running, only inches from my right hand. I frantically worked my legs as hard as I could, trying to scoot toward it. Now, the art of severing ropes with a chainsaw is a delicate one, especially when the ropes are currently binding one's hands, but I was on a pretty tight schedule.

I managed to scoot another inch forward, half expecting three or four of my fingers to twirl up into the air. But instead, blade met rope...and blade won! It didn't cut all the way through, but with a Jimmy Olsen-like burst of strength I snapped what remained of the ropes and freed my left hand.

Large Looney looked over from his medical examination and noticed me. Then he picked up the drill.

I grabbed the chainsaw by the handle and quickly touched the blade to the ropes binding my other hand. This time I cut all the way through the rope and the top couple of skin layers of my wrist. Now both of my hands were free. If the rest of my body hadn't still been tied to an overturned chair and there wasn't a lunatic walking toward me with a power drill, I would have been in a celebratory mood.

Large Looney snarled as he walked out of sight behind me. Well, I couldn't actually hear him over the chainsaw and the drill, but it really did look like a genuine snarl. I let out a grunt as he kicked the back of my chair, and then promptly set to work trying to cut the ropes on my feet. I saw his hand reach over in an attempt to shove the drill into my side, but an intimidating swing of the chainsaw got him to reconsider.

As the ropes around my left foot fell away, the chainsaw died again. This allowed me to hear that Large Looney was drilling through the back of the chair.

While I'm not a weightlifter type by any means, I'm still in pretty good physical condition, and the adrenaline was pumping freely. I let go of the chainsaw, slammed my hands against the floor, used my free foot to brace myself, and shoved as hard as I could, trying to flip the chair over, thus snapping the drill bit and hopefully crushing Large Looney's fingers.

That didn't work. The chair didn't budge.

I grabbed the chainsaw again, swung it over my shoulder as hard as I could, and bashed Large Looney with it.

That worked.

He let out a yelp and I heard the drill hit the floor. I frantically began clawing at the ropes, trying to get myself free before...

I looked over and saw Small Looney limping toward me, his leg still bleeding.

He was holding a concrete block of the type used for building construction, elegant furniture for college students, and dropping on the heads of people.

Though I had two hands and a foot free, no way was I getting the rest of myself loose before he got in block-dropping range. I tugged on the chainsaw cord. It snapped.

This was certainly bad, but I'd been in a worse situation than this and came out alive. Not very alive, but alive nevertheless. And though chainsaws weren't known for their aerodynamic qualities, I'd have to give it my best shot.

I flung the chainsaw at him.

It didn't even come close.

But Small Looney had just been savaged by that very chainsaw, and even though it was a pretty pathetic throw by any standards, he still took a quick step back. Just a small step, but enough to slide his foot along the trail of blood he'd been leaking.

He slipped and fell, much as he did earlier when he'd been trying to start the chainsaw. That time, however, he wasn't holding a concrete block. He hit the floor, and the block hit him. I'm not going to tell you where. Just cringe on his behalf and be glad you didn't see it. He shrieked a few times, and then lost consciousness.

I didn't like Small Looney much, but there were tears in my eyes as I worked to untie the ropes. I could hear Large Looney whimpering softly, but he didn't seem to be coming after me anymore.

The door to the garage burst open, and two familiar figures entered, guns raised.

It was Sergeants Tony and Bruce Frenkle. They were identical twins, though you could identify Tony by the small mole over his left eyebrow.

"Freeze!" one of them shouted (I was too far away to see the mole). "Nobody...uh, move..." They stepped inside and glanced around the garage.

"Wow, Andrew, you messed them up pretty oh dear Lord in heaven what happened with that concrete block?"

"What is it with you guys?" I demanded. "Why can't you ever show up before the situation is taken care of? What, do you sit and wait outside for everything to be hunky-dory? I almost had a drill go through my back! Have you ever almost had a drill go through your back? I bet you haven't, have you?"

"Chill, Andrew," said Tony, crouching down to help untie me while Bruce took out his handcuffs and went to take care of Large Looney. "It wasn't easy to find you here. We had to follow—"

"I don't give a sweet shit," I said. "Just untie me."

"White people are so very rude," Bruce remarked.

Before long I was free and the bad guys were being loaded into an ambulance. I picked up the statement they'd planned to read me, curious as to their motive.

"Andrew Mayhem we hate u now your going 2 die."

Great. Sherlock Holmes got Moriarty, I got these guys.

Unfortunately, it wouldn't be long before I was reminiscing about the good old days when all I had to worry about were a couple of lunatics with malfunctioning power tools.

CHAPTER TWO

After the hospital staff decided that I was fine, if a bit obnoxious, Tony drove me home. I was pretty rattled from my experience, and was looking forward to some tender loving care from Helen.

"Oh, what a pleasant surprise!" she said as I opened the front door. "It's so nice that you were able to come home before noon. I'd hate to think of you being all miserable and actually having to put in the full eight hours at your job. Oh, wait, I almost forgot, you didn't go! But hey, the temp agency just called and said not to come back, so you don't have to worry about that inconvenience any more!"

"It wasn't my—"

"But that's okay. I'm sure the reason you played hooky was to help care for your children. Oh, no, wait, now that I think of it, it was me who got woken up by a call from Kyle's teacher to pick him up, not you! But hey, I work night shift, I'd gotten in a good twenty minutes of sleep already...why should I complain? It's all worth it to know that my dear husband had a good time with his friend."

"I wasn't with—"

"Oh, by the way, they shut off our water. I know how difficult it is to remember to write checks when they send those funny-looking pieces of paper in the mail, but some people in this country refer to it as paying bills. I suppose that since you rarely bring any money into this household it's naturally not going to be in your thoughts, but for five minutes a month even you should be able to handle it."

"Sorry."

"Yeah, well, sorry helps." She stormed out of the living room and into the kitchen.

Helen hadn't been in a sunshiny mood lately. A year and a half ago, I'd gone through a horrible ordeal that eventually involved our children being kidnapped and almost murdered, and me nearly dying from arrow and gunshot wounds. Helen already had a stressful job as a registered nurse, so this didn't help her ulcer situation. The silver lining to the whole nightmare came when I was offered a substantial amount of money to tell my story, which I then lost when my financial advisor fled the country with all of our money and a pair of lingerie models named Taffy and Booby. The fact that Helen had told me several times not to trust him did not go unobserved.

So I'd figured it was time to become an upstanding, responsible citizen. I'd registered with several temp agencies and gotten a job organizing filing cabinets for a horrible, horrible woman with fangs. I reported to work three unbearable days in a row, but then I decided that somebody who'd rescued his children from a vicious killer and broken up a snuff film production company didn't need to deal with some ghastly crone whining that McReady came before Madison. So I walked out and went to visit my friend Roger. Helen was not pleased.

The new assignment involved more filing. It sounded like eight hours of pure suck, but I swear that I would have gone and worked the full day if not for the "threatened by chainsaw-wielding lunatics" detour.

I've probably made Helen sound like she walks around in a bathrobe with her hair in curlers and beats the crap out of me with a rolling pin. Physically, she's not intimidating at all. Actually, she's a fairly tiny person. Over the past year she'd let her straight brown hair grow well past her shoulders, and before my book money completely vanished she'd traded in her thick glasses for laser eye surgery, yet she somehow retained her owlish appearance, which was kind of weird.

I almost followed her into the kitchen so I could give my side of the story, but I decided to let her simmer down a bit first. Instead I went upstairs into Kyle's room.

He was sitting on his bed, playing with his Captain Hocker action figures. He looked up at me as I entered. "Mommy's on the warpath again," he said.

"Shhhh...I've told you not to say that anymore," I reminded him. "It just makes her madder."

"Sorry."

I sat down on the bed next to him. He was small for a seven-year-old, though not quite into runt territory. I'd fought against his current buzz cut and been on the path to victory until he'd managed to get three whole pieces of chewed gum in his hair, so it all had to go.

Considering what he'd been through, the little guy was doing as well as could be expected. Not as well as Theresa, who now seemed mostly unaffected save for occasional nightmares, but not too bad. Upon the recommendation of several doctors, we'd put Kyle in a special school for emotionally disturbed children, but most of the time he seemed perfectly fine.

"So what'd you do?" I asked.

"Nothin'."

"They just called Mom for no reason?"

Kyle shrugged. Captain Hocker saved a planet from the dreaded Gleeker Force of Doom.

"C'mon, buddy, you can tell me."

"I spit."

"You spit?"

"Uh-huh."

"Where?"

"On people."

"How many people?"

He shrugged again. "A lot."

"Why did you do that?"

"I dunno."

"You just decided, hey, I've got some extra slobber, might as well share it?"

Another shrug.

I sighed. "Look, buddy, you know that stinky kid in your class that nobody likes?"

"Joey."

"Yeah, Stinky Joey the Skunk Boy. Well, spitting on other kids is kind of like smelling bad. People don't like it. And remember how I told you that they don't let stinky kids become astronauts because it messes with the oxygen system? If you spit, it floats around the space shuttle and gets in the gears and people die. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Kyle nodded.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"So you won't spit on anyone else?"

"No."

"You promise?"

"Yeah."

"Shake on it."

We shook hands, and then I gave him a hug.

"Andrew, get down here!" Helen called out from downstairs.

"She's on the warpath again," Kyle said.

"Don't say that anymore. I mean it."

"You said it first."

"That's exactly why I don't want you to say it!" I stood up and hurried out of his room and downstairs.

Helen was seated on the couch, holding an ice pack to her head. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't mean to yell, but it's just so frustrating. Where were you today?"

I shrugged. "Nowhere."

* * *

The next night was Wednesday, which meant Helen's parents took care of the kids. I tried to convince Helen to take the night off, so we could go out to a romantic dinner, but she was still mad at me for letting her yell at me for so long without explaining that I'd been kidnapped by the lunatics.

So I drove over to Roger's apartment. He greeted me at the door with three scratches that ran from his left eye down to his jaw. The ones on the other side of his face were healing nicely.

"I don't want that cat anymore," he told me.

"That's a terrible thing to say," I said, stepping inside. Reverse Snowflake lay sleeping peacefully on Roger's couch, the sides of which the black cat had lovingly shredded. "This precious animal saved my life."

"So you take it! It scratches me all the time. It sheds all over my furniture. It chews on my ears at night. I found cat hair in a carton of milk that I just opened!"

"Is my Reverse Snowflake a pretty kitty?" I asked, scratching him behind his ears. "Yes he is! Yes he is! Yes he is!"

"I'm serious, Andrew! There's kitty litter all over my bedroom! You're the one whose life it saved!"

"Yes, but because he saved my life, I was able to save your life, remember?"

"If that cat had been smart enough to let you die, my life would never have been in danger," Roger said. "Take it. For the love of God, take it."

"Helen's allergic to cats. And they scratch up everything...I mean, look at this place."

"I'm not kidding around! The cat meows all night and I think it's trying to impregnate one of my pillows."

"All right, all right, I'll see what I can do," I promised. "My in-laws might take him. But he's such a sweeeeeeet kitty!"

"You're a rotten person," Roger informed me.

* * *

We drove over to The Blizzard Room, a coffee shop where we usually spent our Wednesday nights complaining that we didn't have anywhere better to spend our Wednesday nights. The place had virtually nothing to recommend about it besides the fact that it wasn't on fire, and yet we almost never missed a week.

"Why do we come here?" I asked. "The coffee isn't any good, the table shakes when you—"

"Andrew, we go through this every time," said Roger with a sigh. "Every single Wednesday you sit there and count off everything that sucks about this place, and every single Wednesday we come right back."

"And don't you find that depressingly pathetic?"

Roger shrugged. "It's our destiny. Our path has been chosen, and there's nothing we can do to alter it."

"Yeah, I guess you're right." I took a sip of coffee. "Maybe next week we'll go bowling."

"We could get up right now and go bowling."

"Nah."

"Didn't think so."

After a few more minutes of intellectually draining conversation, Roger got up to use the restroom. I reminded him that the restrooms were far below average, especially the air hand dryer that was about as effective as having somebody pant on your hands. He informed me that he was well aware of the inadequacies of the restroom facilities and that it would please him greatly if I would keep my opinions locked up in my brain where they belonged. I said okay.

A couple minutes after he left, the door swung open and a woman entered. She looked about sixty. She'd obviously had a facelift, which was probably supposed to make her look younger but really just made her look like a sixty year-old with her skin yanked back. Her hair was blonde, too blonde, and piled high above her head. She wore an expensive-looking blue dress and high heels, and carried a blue purse that matched the dress exactly.

She scanned the coffee shop for a moment, clearly not impressed, and then saw me and walked over to my table.

"Andrew Mayhem?" she asked. I'd expected her voice to be the ultimate in snottiness, but it was actually quite soft and pleasant.

"Yeah?"

"May I have a seat?"

"Sure. Here, let me get you a chair with all four legs." I reached out and dragged one over from the next table. The woman took a seat and gave me a hint of a smile.

"Thank you. My name is Patricia Nesboyle. I'm a busy woman and I'm sure you're a busy man, so I'm going to get right to the point. I'd like to pay you to accompany me to a party tomorrow night."

"What kind of party?"

"A dinner party. A simple affair, just myself and four friends."

"I see. May I ask why you want to pay me for this?"

She nodded. "I've read about you, the way you handled that awful situation with those atrocious people. You're something of a celebrity amongst my friends. They would all be very impressed if you were there, and then you could protect me."

"From what?"

She lowered her voice to a whisper. "One of my friends plans to kill me tomorrow night."

"Just one?"

She leaned back, offended. I immediately realized what I'd said. "No, no, that's not what I meant. I was just asking if...okay, I was asking if it was just one, but not in a way that I meant it should be more, I mean, it shouldn't be any as far as I'm concerned, but—"

"Will you do it?"

"How do you know somebody wants to kill you?"

"It's very complicated. Suffice it to say that I overheard something I shouldn't have."

Something about her tone of voice made me suspect she wasn't telling the whole truth. Not that I would put much faith in my own instincts, being a bumbling incompetent and all.

"Okay, so, I'm not really sure what good I would do," I admitted. "I'm not a bodyguard."

"He's right, he's not," said Roger, walking up to the table. "You should see what happened to my body."

"I did," said Patricia. "It was quite grotesque. Would you mind excusing us?"

"Not at all," said Roger. "I was just about to sit by myself at that corner table anyway."

He left. I ran a hand through my hair and took another sip of coffee. "Look, Ms. Nesboyle, I'm flattered, but I'm really gonna have to pass. How much are you offering?"

"Five hundred dollars."

"And what exactly do I have to do?"

"Nothing," she promised. "Simply show up at the party. With you there, nobody will try anything."

"Why not just cancel it?"

"I can't. It's a...special party."

"Special parties are the best kind. But seriously, if your life is at stake, shouldn't you hire a real bodyguard or a cop or something?"

Patricia shook her head. "That wouldn't be as much fun, now would it?"

There was something deeply wrong with this lady. "So let me get this straight. I show up at the party. I mingle with your friends. I go home. Is that correct?"

"That is correct."

Around this time, my inner voice decided to speak up. "Hey, Andrew, buddy, this lady's completely nuts! Don't get involved with her! Remember last time you let some strange lady pay you for a favor? Huh? Remember it? You remember it, don't you? Wasn't all that much fun, now was it? If I were you, which I am, I'd tell her to MMMmmmpph!" I mentally gagged my inner voice and spoke up.

"Six hundred, plus one hundred for my friend to watch my kids."

She narrowed her eyes. "Five hundred, plus the hundred for your friend."

"Six hundred, plus nothing for my friend."

"Done."

"All right, sounds good," I said, offering my hand. She shook it, making only the lightest contact with my fingers.

"I need to be going," she said, digging a small card out of her purse. "Be at this address at eight o'clock sharp tomorrow night. Dress nicely."

"I can handle that," I told her, hoping I still had the suit jacket I'd bought six years ago during my half-week stint as a lounge singer.

"Very good. I look forward to seeing you."

She got up, nodded politely, and walked out the door. Roger returned and took her spot.

"Who was that?"

"Patricia. Can you baby-sit tomorrow night?"

Roger's eyes lit up. "Kyle will bring his Nintendo, right?"

"Of course."

"Sure, yeah, I can manage that."

"Plus I made you a hundred bucks." Damn guilt. That was a pretty darn generous babysitting fee, but I still felt bad that Roger never got the ten grand we were each supposed to make when I talked him into accepting the graverobbing gig last year.

Roger looked suspicious. "And what exactly are you doing tomorrow night?"

"Just a party."

"Just a party?"

"Just a party."

"You're not getting yourself into trouble again, are you?"

"No," I said. "I'm pretty sure I'm not."

CHAPTER THREE

"Andrew Mayhem, gigolo," said Roger, adjusting the radio station in my car. "Nice ring to that."

I slapped his hand away. "I'm not a gigolo. I'm a bodyguard."

"I dunno, I'm picking up some serious gigolo vibes from this whole setup." He waited for me to grip the steering wheel, and then began messing with the station again.

"She's probably sixty years old!"

"And you're a strapping lad of thirty-three! She's probably looking for somebody to stretch out more than her face."

"Don't be sick," I said, slapping his hand away. "It's just a party."

"It's a naked party!"

"Gee, I wonder where my seven year-old gets his immature behavior? I need to find a new babysitter."

"Are you going to tell Helen?"

"Of course I'm going to tell Helen!"

* * *

I would have told Helen, but there weren't any good opportunities aside from breakfast, dinner, and the hour or so we spent watching television before she left for work. After she was gone, I dug my suit out of the closet, decided against eating the chocolate bar that had survived in the pocket all these years, and drove Theresa and Kyle over to Roger's apartment.

Patricia's home was on the far west side of Chamber, Florida. The neighborhoods get richer and richer the further west you travel, and I became more and more self-conscious in my boxy grey sedan that was only a couple of notches up from something that required a wind-up mechanism.

At eight o'clock sharp, I pulled into the long, circular driveway of an immense two-story home with a well lit, perfectly maintained lawn and a huge fountain in the center that sprayed water in perfect rhythm to the classical music playing from speakers on the sides.

Then I checked the card Patricia had given me and realized that I was at the wrong place.

At eight forty-four sharp, I pulled into the long, circular driveway of an immense two-story home with a dimly lit, possibly well-maintained lawn and an ugly statue of a naked kid with a missing buttock. I parked behind five much finer automobiles than my own and hurried up to the front door.

After I rang the doorbell, Patricia answered. She glared at me. "I could be dead by now," she whispered.

"Sorry," I said. "I read the address wrong."

I entered the house and she led me to the exquisitely furnished study, where four other people were standing around having drinks. They all looked to be about Patricia's age, two men and two women. The men were dressed in suits that made my own feel like an old piece of burlap with dead moths pouring out of the sleeves.

"Our special guest is here," Patricia announced. "Everyone, this is Andrew Mayhem."

"The Andrew Mayhem," said a gentleman with bushy white eyebrows and a handlebar mustache. "How interesting."

Patricia took me by the hand and walked me over to him. "Andrew, this is Malcolm. He worked with my husband." She said this in a way that implied I was supposed to pretend I had some vague notion who her husband was, so I said "Ahh."

"Pleased to meet you," said Malcolm, shaking my hand. He gestured to the sharp-featured woman standing next to him. "This is my wife Donna."

Donna nodded politely at me, but it was obvious from her expression that she fully expected me to start picking my nose and igniting farts.

"Hi," I said, hoping my breath didn't offend her.

Patricia led me to the other couple. The man was extremely short and thin, but carried himself like a drill sergeant. "It's an honor, Andrew," he said, shaking/crushing my hand. "I'm Stephen."

"Vivian," said his wife, who stood a head taller than Stephen but appeared to be painfully shy.

"So Andrew, how much of what you wrote in your book was true?" Stephen asked.

"Oh, you've read it?"

He shook his head. "I wanted to hold off until I knew how much of it was true."

"Well, let's put it this way: if I'd made it up, I certainly wouldn't have made myself so stupid."

I grinned. They didn't.

I stopped grinning and returned my attention to Patricia. "Thanks for inviting me. You have a beautiful home."

While I'm not positive, I'm pretty sure I heard Donna whisper "Yeah, like he would know," to her husband.

"Thank you," said Patricia. "I hired the decorator myself. Would you care for a drink?"

I was tempted to decline on the basis that I'd just finished sampling some moonshine from my homemade still, but I didn't think she'd be amused. "Sure. I'll have whatever she's having," I said, gesturing to Donna.

Patricia went to the bar and poured me a glass of white wine. Temptation struck again, but I behaved myself and didn't ask for a straw. Messing with the minds of these people wasn't worth losing my five hundred bucks.

I ate weird crackers with salmon gook on them and made small talk with the guests for about fifteen minutes, during which I'm pretty sure I overheard the word "inbred" being used by Donna in two separate sentences. Malcolm was pleasant enough, I guess, but I was still far out of my social element. However, snobbish as they were, none of the guests seemed like a potential murderer.

Finally, Patricia clapped her hands for attention. "Shall we begin?"

"Certainly," said Stephen, and the others acknowledged their agreement.

"Wonderful. Let's head to the dining room, then."

Patricia walked out of the study and the other guests followed. I took up the rear, right next to Malcolm. He smiled at me, a glint of mischief in his eye. "Tell me, son, how much is she paying you?" he whispered.

I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be a secret or not, so I decided to play it safe. "She's not paying me anything."

"Oh, come now. You're not sleeping with her for free, are you?"

"I'm not sleeping with her at all!"

"Really? Then you're the first." He winked at me. "Don't worry, it won't leave this house."

Somehow I just knew that word was going to get back to Helen that I'd become a male prostitute who serviced middle-aged women. That's the kind of luck I have.

We filed into the dining room. A small circular table was covered with a black tablecloth, and there were five thick white candles burning. A larger rectangular table had been shoved against the wall, and was bare. This was apparently not a dinner party like I'd been told.

"What exactly are we doing?" I whispered to Malcolm.

"Didn't she tell you?" he asked. "We're going to have a séance."

Great. Just great. Not only was my life going to be ruined by a gigolo misunderstanding, but I was going to have people pissed at me from beyond the grave. I vowed never to return to the Blizzard Room.

As the guests took their seats around the table, I approached Patricia. "A séance, huh?"

"That's right."

"That seems like a tidbit of information you might have considered sharing with me last night, don't you think?"

"Whatever for?"

"What do you mean, whatever for? It's a séance!"

"Yes, and...?"

There was no debating that logic. I lowered my voice. "So what do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Just watch. Carefully."

She sat down. I didn't really want to sit at the table in case the ectoplasm started flying, but it didn't matter because there weren't any extra seats anyway. I leaned against the wall.

"Tonight, we contact my departed husband," Patricia announced. "Everyone take a deep breath to clear your mind."

They did so, and then joined hands.

At this point, I started to feel a bit queasy. Apparently the salmon gook hadn't agreed with me. If I got food poisoning from this job, I was demanding an extra twenty bucks.

After a few minutes of mind clearing, everybody closed his or her eyes, and Patricia began to speak in a firm, steady voice. "Charles. Charles Nesboyle. Are you there? Can you hear me?"

I was feeling incredibly sick now. I wiped some perspiration from my forehead and tried to focus on something else, like how ridiculous they all looked sitting there holding hands trying to conjure up ghosts, but all I could think about was how I desperately needed a lavatory.

"Charles Nesboyle, if you can hear me, speak! Speak to the others through me!"

She kept this up for another few minutes. My need was becoming more and more unbearable. If I didn't get to the bathroom very shortly I was going to have an accident right there on the dining room floor. They probably assumed I wasn't potty-trained anyway, but I still wanted to avoid that particular faux pas.

I was sure I could find it on my own, but I couldn't just walk out and leave Patricia there with her eyes closed and a potential killer sitting next to her. It wasn't likely that anybody could try something when all of them were holding hands, but I still had to give her some warning.

I managed to hold out another minute, and then walked over to Patricia and leaned down next to her ear. "Patricia?"

"Charles!" she gasped.

"No, Andrew."

She opened her eyes and gave me a dirty look. "What?"

"I'm sorry to interrupt, but could you direct me to the restroom?"

"Go back the way we came, down the hallway, and it's the first door on the left." She was staring at me in disbelief, as were the other guests.

"Thanks." I gave an apologetic smile to the others. "Sorry. Couldn't be helped."

I hurried out of the room and made it to the bathroom. I closed the door and prayed for sufficient soundproofing.

A few minutes later I felt much, much better. I flushed, turned on the fan, and washed my hands. My face was covered with sweat, so I turned on the faucet and splashed some water on it. I looked terrible. I wiped my face off on the towel, and discovered that it was the softest, most heavenly towel I'd ever felt in my life. I wiped my face again. I was in love.

I noticed that the first flush had only been about eighty percent successful, so I gave it a second one. My bliss from the towel suddenly transformed into raw, heart-stopping terror as the water began to move in exactly the opposite direction that I desired.

"No...no..." I said, clenching my fists as the water continued to rise. "Please, no. Stop...stop..."

It didn't stop. Two more inches until overflow.

I frantically grabbed a bath towel from the rack and threw it around the base of the toilet. The water was still moving upward...upward...forever upward...

"Oh dear God and all that is holy please, please, I will never ask you for another favor ever again if you do this one thing for me, just let the water stop, that's all I ask."

The water reached the seating portion of the toilet.

I cringed and awaited the moment of truth. The pounding in my temples was unbearable.

The water ceased its horrific ascent. The level remained steady for several seconds, and then began to sink. I almost wept with relief.

And then I heard a scream.

I immediately rushed to the bathroom door and tried to pull it open, but it wouldn't budge. I made sure it was unlocked on my side, and then tugged on it as hard as I possibly could. It wouldn't open.

"Patricia!" I shouted. "Patricia, are you okay?"

No response. Suddenly the door popped open, and I stumbled backwards, almost falling but regaining my balance just in time. A narrow strip of wood that had obviously been wedged under the doorknob dropped to the floor with a crack. I rushed out of the bathroom, down the hallway, and into the dining room.

Patricia and her four guests were still seated around the table, just where I'd left them.

The only difference was, all of them were missing their heads.

CHAPTER FOUR

I slammed a hand over my mouth and felt my knees go weak. Being sick from bad salmon gook was nothing compared to seeing five decapitated bodies all at once. I staggered away from the sight, doing my best not to pass out.

I bit the side of my cheek to force my senses back into sharp focus. The killer had to be close. Heads didn't just fall off by themselves without a darn good reason.

The front door slammed shut.

I rushed out of the dining room, down the hallway into the foyer, and threw the front door open. I quickly looked around the front yard. No sign of anyone.

No way in hell was I going out there. Maybe Patricia and the others had their eyes closed and maybe they were distracted by their séance babbling, but still...five heads neatly severed without them even moving out of their chairs...

I shut the door, locked it, and began searching for the nearest phone.

* * *

I sat on the couch in the living room while cops swarmed the house. Tony and Bruce Frenkle were also there; Tony on the couch next to me, Bruce in the easy chair.

"You certainly do get yourself into some peculiar situations," Tony remarked.

"Yeah, I'd say five missing heads qualifies as peculiar," I muttered.

"They aren't missing," Bruce pointed out. "They're on the floor."

"No, two of them are on the table," corrected Tony. "Well, they were before the one rolled off."

I shook my head in annoyance. "You two are evil incarnate, I hope you realize that."

"Just trying to help you cope," said Bruce.

"Yeah, well, you can help me cope by letting me go home."

"We still have more questions."

"You're not asking questions. You're making jokes about the heads."

"Those weren't jokes," said Tony. "Those were observations. Joking would be insensitive at a time like this. So, Andy, tell us again why you were here."

"Don't call me Andy."

"Sorry, Sir Andrew Mayhem The Third, Esquire."

"Patricia Nesboyle was going to pay me six hundred dollars to come to this party. She thought that one of her friends was going to kill her, and that if I were around it wouldn't happen."

"Was Patricia the head on the table or one of the ones on the floor?"

"On the table."

"So she's the one that rolled off," said Bruce. "It was a man's head that was still there when I left."

I told them the whole story again. Because I was in a lousy mood, I made sure I was as disturbingly graphic as possible about my adventure in the bathroom.

After about half an hour of questioning, they told me I could go home. "So am I a suspect?" I asked, getting up from the couch.

The Frenkle brothers exchanged a surprised look. "You?" asked Tony. "Andrew, buddy, I hate to be blunt, but we're looking for somebody clever."

"Bite me," I said.

"See, now, the individual responsible for these murders would have a much more clever retort than 'bite me.'"

"I'm going home."

As they walked me out the door, I heard a thump from the dining room. I really didn't want to know what it was.

* * *

Bruce called me the next morning. They hadn't found any fingerprints or any other sign of the decapitator. However, they had found a bottle of arsenic in Malcolm's jacket pocket, so apparently he'd been the one who wanted to kill Patricia, for what it was worth.

Because of my traumatic experience, it didn't seem like a good day to go out and look for a job. I also didn't think it was a wise idea to be scanning the classified ads in my weakened mental condition. It did, however, seem like a perfect day to sit on the couch and watch television, perhaps something educational.

Around the sixth extramarital affair, Helen came downstairs in her bathrobe and sat down on the end of the couch, propping her legs in my lap. "How're you holding up?" she asked.

"Not too bad. I do keep checking my neck to make sure it's still there, but I think that's probably a normal reaction."

"Probably. You haven't had such a great week, have you?"

I shrugged. "I'm getting in some good TV viewing."

"Well, I'm going to call off work and send Theresa and Kyle to stay overnight with my parents. It's going to be just you and me. We'll go out to dinner, then come back and relax." She smiled.

"Relax in what kind of way?"

"The best way."

"Oooh, I think I can work that into my schedule." I picked up an imaginary daytime planner. "Let's see, I think I've got some free time in between being mauled by a wild boar and getting carried away by a hurricane. Sound good to you?"

"Sounds wonderful. How about we make reservations at Hugo's?"

Hugo's was one of the fanciest restaurants in Chamber, a restaurant of such high caliber that the salad fork was a different size than the dinner fork. "Can we afford that?" I asked.

"Of course not."

"Works for me."

* * *

As we drove to Hugo's, we set the ground rules for the evening. There would be no discussion of work, children, kidnappings, or quintuple decapitations. Over salad, we discussed politics for about twenty-three seconds, upcoming movies we wanted to see for about forty-one seconds, and sex for about eight minutes, fifteen seconds. We both agreed that it was an activity well worth participating in that evening.

Though we did keep our voices as low as possible, I was still surprised that Helen was willing to have this discussion in a crowded restaurant. She was usually very uncomfortable talking about such things. And she was blushing like never before, but that didn't stop her from describing positions and actions. When she started describing spectators, I dropped my fork in surprise and splattered ranch dressing all over my shirt.

"I was kidding, sweetie!" she said through her laughter.

"I know," I insisted, wiping myself off with a napkin. "I'm just not used to my innocent little wife being this way."

She grinned, narrowed her eyes, and then began to eat her next bite of salad in a slow, sensual manner. Well, she tried, anyway. I mean, it was a forkful of salad—not a lot of eroticism to work with. Although by this point she probably could have dropped to the floor and started hacking up a chicken bone and it would have been a turn-on.

We skipped dessert and hurried out to the car. I had quite a bit of trouble getting the key in the lock, which I refused to view as an omen. As I started the engine, Helen leaned over and nibbled my ear.

"Let's go somewhere fun," she said. "Find a place where we can make out like teenagers."

My first thought was to drive her to a beautiful hilltop, where we could enjoy a glorious view of the city lights as we groped each other. But you don't get a lot of those in Florida. You do get a lot of beaches, unless you're in Chamber, which was a good two hours from any sand. Swamps were plentiful but not particularly romantic.

But then I got an idea.

Fifteen minutes later, we were parked behind the Chamber Planetarium. It was a large metallic building with white stars painted on the sides that seemed to twinkle in the lights. Not as romantic as real stars, but not bad on a cloudy night like this.

I shut off the engine and immediately leaned over to kiss her. My ravenous passion was briefly interrupted by the sharp tug that came from failing to unfasten my seat belt first. I felt like an ass, but that was okay, because Helen wanted us to make out like teenagers and I'd felt like an ass many times during those years.

We freed ourselves of the safety restraints and immediately wrapped our arms around each other and began kissing. She shoved her tongue in my mouth. I shoved my tongue in her mouth. Our tongues slapped against each other a few times, then returned to their mouths of origin.

"We need music," said Helen. I turned the key in the ignition, and then turned on the radio.

"Gonna bitch slap yo' momma, gonna bitch slap yo' sister, gonna bitch slap yo' ho'—"

I began flipping through the stations, finding nothing but commercials, talk radio, and religious sermons.

"What tape is in there?" Helen asked.

I pushed the tape all the way into the player. "Weird Al" Yankovic began singing "Eat It."

"I guess that'll have to do," Helen said, and then pulled the lever and reclined her seat all the way back.

* * *

"How's your neck?" Helen asked.

"It's fine."

"Are you sure? Do you want me to make an appointment with a chiropractor?"

"No, no, it's okay. It's more of a numbness than pain anyway. Now where were we...?"

* * *

"It's okay, sweetheart," said Helen.

"It's not okay. I'm too young to be having back problems like this."

"Well, it's a small car."

"It's not that small."

"Are you sure you don't want me to make an—"

"I'm sure! We just need to rearrange things a bit."

* * *

Helen winced as I touched the top of her head. "You're definitely going to have a lump," I told her. "Sorry."

"It's my fault," she said. "I got carried away."

"Should we head back home?"

"No. You and I are going to have sexual intercourse in this vehicle if it breaks every bone in our bodies! Now lean back down and don't move!"

* * *

"Whoa," I said.

Helen kissed me gently. "Do you think we flattened the tires?"

"I'm surprised we didn't break right through the transmission."

We kissed for a moment longer, then decided that as enjoyable as our escapade had been, there was no sense ending it on a sour note by getting arrested for nudity outside a structure of learning. We put our clothes on except for my boxers, which were wedged so far under the seat that they appeared to be lost for good.

"We'll have to do this again sometime," I said.

"Oh, we're not done," Helen informed me. "We've still got the bathtub and the kitchen table."

"The kitchen table won't hold..." I trailed off as I thought I heard movement outside of Helen's door.

"What's wrong?"

I put a finger to my lips. A second later something smashed through the passenger window, spraying Helen with safety glass. She shrieked and dove toward me, face bleeding from several small cuts.

A figure stepped into view. It was tall and dressed in black denim, with a mask that looked like it was made of thick spider webs. Though I couldn't see the face clearly, I could tell when the figure broke into a leering grin. It held up a large scimitar with red jewels on the handle.

I threw open my door and scrambled out of the car, Helen following right behind me. The figure lunged forward, thrusting the blade through the shattered window and missing Helen by inches.

The figure withdrew his scimitar and ran around to the front of the car. Helen and I moved to the back. The figure gave us a friendly wave, and then spun his scimitar like a circus performer.

He feinted to the left, and then rushed back around the passenger side of the vehicle. Helen and I darted back to the driver's side. The figure stopped at the broken window and waved again. We stared at each other for a long moment.

"What the hell are you supposed to be?" I asked.

"I'm your bestest friend in the whole wide world!" he said in a high-pitched, little-boy voice. Then he began to laugh, a maniacal cackle that probably would have shattered the window had it not already been broken.

I wanted to turn and run, but just based on the pursuit so far I could tell that this guy was fast. And if this was the same person responsible for the slaughter at Patricia's house, I didn't think highly of my chances to escape him.

I had to fight him.

He tossed the scimitar into the air. It flipped end-over-end a couple of times, and then he caught it by the handle. "Not too bad, eh? I'm gonna cut ya. Gonna cut ya all up!"

Helen was trembling and was breathing so rapidly I thought she might hyperventilate. I reached inside the car and removed the keys from the ignition.

"Whatcha gonna do with thoooooose?" asked the man, scratching his head with exaggerated confusion. "Can't drive the car without the keys! Nope, gotta have the keys or ya can't drive the car, that's the way the world works!"

I put my hand on Helen's shoulder. The man leaned his head through the window. "Guess what?"

"What?" I asked.

"That's what!" More laughter. The man pulled his head out and waved again. "Guess what?"

"What?"

"I'm gonna getcha!" He took off running around the car, as Helen and I sped in the opposite direction.

He was fast. And as he ran, he raised the scimitar above his head.

We darted around the front of the car. He was only a few steps behind us.

And then only a couple.

Then I could hear the swish of the scimitar, and caught a glimpse of the silver blade, flying toward Helen's neck.

CHAPTER FIVE

I slammed my hand against Helen's back and shoved her forward. She fell to the ground as the scimitar blade sliced through the air where her neck would have been.

I then tripped over Helen's arm and landed face-first on the ground as well. Without hesitation, I rolled onto my back and sat up. Helen frantically scurried away from the man, who stood over her, scimitar at his side.

He shoved his foot against her back, pushing her flat onto the ground, and then raised the blade above his head once again. I lunged at him as he brought it down with both hands.

There was nothing I could do to stop its descent. My only hope was to get between the blade and my wife.

I squeezed my eyes shut as I felt the warm metal connect with the back of my neck.

It didn't break the skin. He'd stopped his swing at the precise moment to avoid chopping off my head. I could almost feel the man staring at me through his mask, and then he lifted the blade out of the way and kicked me in the stomach. I collapsed onto my side, unable to believe that I was still the proud owner of a head.

The man returned his attention to Helen, now ready to slam the scimitar down like a spear. I dove at her again, and the tip of the blade scraped against my throat but still didn't draw blood.

"Get out of the way," he said. This time he wasn't using the little-boy voice.

I grabbed the dull edge of the blade with both hands, keeping it pressed against my neck. For whatever reason, he was going out of his way not to kill me, and I was going to use that to my advantage.

Helen crawled forward out of immediate danger, and then twisted herself around so she could see what was happening. She gasped as she saw my predicament, which I'm sure looked like I was struggling to keep from getting stabbed rather than trying to hold the weapon in place.

"Get out of here!" I shouted. "Run!"

The man gave the blade a sharp tug, but I held on as tightly as I could. Unfortunately, there was just no way to maintain my grip, and with his second tug the blade slipped free.

His head rocketed back as Helen punched him in the face. It was an unbelievable punch, one that made me vow to stay on her good side for the rest of my natural life. The man stumbled backward a couple of steps but didn't drop the scimitar.

"Now run!" I shouted. "He doesn't want to hurt me! He's after you!"

I couldn't be absolutely certain that was true, but it seemed like a safe bet. Helen took off running toward the car, while I charged at the man and slammed my elbow into his gut. He let out a groan and doubled over. I brought my fist down between his shoulder blades, knocking him to his knees.

Then I jumped back as he took a swing with the blade. It wasn't a very fast swing, but I had to revise my theory about him being unwilling to hurt me. Maybe he wouldn't sever my head, but perhaps a limb or two was at risk.

He pointed the blade of the scimitar at me, and then swung it again. I was well out of range, so it was meant to be intimidating rather than lethal. I was intimidated.

I glanced back at Helen, who opened the driver's side door and reached inside. The lid of the trunk popped open. That's exactly why I'd taken the keys in the first place...the trunk held the only thing in the vehicle that could pass for a weapon, besides Captain Hocker's submarine torpedoes.

The man got to his feet. I might have been able to knock him back down before he sliced me in half, but I wasn't certain enough about that to take the chance.

"Andrew!" shouted Helen. I held up my hand, and she tossed me the tire iron.

As it sailed through the air, it became obvious that this heavy object was much less likely to gracefully land in my hand than it was to bash in my skull, so at the last instant I stepped back out of the way and let it fall to the ground with a loud clatter.

The man stood there, his chest heaving as he breathed deeply. About five feet separated us. The tire iron was right in front of me.

"Is she really worth dying for?" the man asked.

"She has her moments."

Right after I said it I realized that my smart-ass answer to his question was certainly going to reduce the likelihood of future passionate romps in our car, but that's just the way my stupid mind works.

He pointed the scimitar at me. "I hope it won't bother you to end up like your friends at the séance."

"It probably will, but thanks for your concern."

We stared at each other for a long moment. I was tensed and ready to grab the tire iron, but he looked ready to strike and I wasn't sure I could beat him.

"Who are you, anyway?" I finally asked.

"You can call me the Headhunter."

"Not a bad name."

"Thank you."

"Are you sure it hasn't already been taken?"

The Headhunter shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't matter. Nobody who hears it gets to live long enough to look that up. So are we going do this or what?"

"I was waiting for you."

"No, pick up your weapon. I'll give you a shot at beating me. I love a good challenge. You've got to the count of three to grab it. One..."

I bent down for the tire iron.

The Headhunter turned and ran toward the car. Helen screamed. I cursed and snatched up the tire iron by the handle.

I saw Helen reach into the trunk. The Headhunter was almost upon her when she flung the car jack at him, smashing him in the face. He began to stagger toward me, free hand over his mask, drops of blood falling to the pavement.

I hurried forward, ready to deliver the final crushing blow, but the Headhunter tripped and fell. He lay on the pavement next to his scimitar and didn't move.

My first instinct was to mosey on over there and whack him seventeen or eighteen times with the tire iron, perhaps asking a rhetorical question like "How does that feel, huh? Huh?" while I did so. But I wasn't entirely convinced that he wouldn't spring back to life before the first whack, so instead I gave his body a wide berth as I walked over to Helen.

She threw her arms around me. "Do you know this guy?" she asked.

I shook my head. "I was hoping you did."

Seconds later, a sleek black car with tinted windows pulled around the planetarium and stopped behind my own less-than-sleek automobile. A short, heavyset man in a grey business suit got out of the passenger side and did a speedy waddle toward us. His movements sort of reminded me of those old toys called Weebles, which the commercials proclaimed would wobble but not fall down. When I was a kid I'd bet my next-door neighbor that I could get my Weeble to wobble and then fall down forever, but his mother had come in and canceled the bet before I had a chance to use the hammer.

"Is he dead?" he asked. "Did you kill him?"

"I'm not sure," I admitted.

"Oh God...oh God...oh God..." the man whimpered as he Weeble-walked over to where the Headhunter lay, wringing his hands nervously. Keeping a safe distance from the body, he knelt down and peered carefully at him.

A gentleman who looked exactly like the FBI agents in the movies—black suit, sunglasses at night, stone features, perfect hair—got out of the driver's side.

"Why is the cavalry always late?" I asked. "You know, there's this concept known as the nick of time that you might want to look into."

"Please control yourself, sir," said the gentleman. "I'm Thomas Seer, Federal Bureau of Investigation." He flashed his badge at me.

"He's still breathing, I think," said the heavyset man. "Thank God!"

"You're right, it would be a shame for a stand-up citizen like him to die," I said. "Think of all the children he has yet to teach the wonders of literacy."

"You don't realize what you're involved in," Thomas informed me, politely but firmly, "so I recommend that you keep the unprofessional comments to yourself."

I rolled my eyes and put my arm around Helen. Thomas reached inside his suit and took out a pair of handcuffs.

"Watch yourself, he's good with that sword," I said. "And he's probably faking. I wouldn't go near him."

Thomas motioned for the heavyset man to back away, which he did, and then began to slowly advance upon the Headhunter.

"I'm really serious," I said. "At least give him a good blast of pepper spray first!"

"I have something even more effective." Thomas took out a revolver and aimed it at the Headhunter.

"Sir, I have a .44 Magnum pointed at your head," he announced. "This is the exact same weapon that Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry uses, and while it can't blow your head clean off as discussed in the first movie, it can unquestionably be fatal. If you are not really unconscious, I very highly recommend you admit to it and spare yourself some unpleasantness."

The Headhunter didn't move.

Thomas took another step forward. "It's a trick," he said. "I'm putting a bullet in his leg."

"Okay, okay!" shouted the Headhunter. "Take a pill, for crying out loud! Damn, you people are uptight!" He raised his arms behind his back, allowing Thomas to handcuff him without incident.

* * *

I assumed we were heading over to the police station for yet more fun-filled questioning, but after loading the Headhunter into the back of his car, Thomas asked Helen and I to follow him to his motel.

"Shouldn't we go to the police station?" asked Helen, a woman after my own heart.

"Please, this is very important," said the heavyset man, almost whimpering. "I really need your help."

"Why?" I asked. "We already caught him."

"We'll explain everything when we get there," Thomas assured us. "And we need to get going."

I shrugged at Helen, and we returned to our car.

* * *

We followed them for about six miles to the motel, during which my conversation with Helen focused entirely on how much we both really, really, really needed a vacation.

CHAPTER SIX

I sat next to Helen on one of the twin beds. We both had our feet up on the mattress to keep the possibility of them being overrun by bloodthirsty cockroaches to a minimum. No matter whose standards you used, this was one incredibly lame motel.

Thomas had taken the unmasked Headhunter (blonde fellow, kinda dopey-looking) into the bathroom and shut the door, but not before I glimpsed a coil of metal wire and what looked like jumper cables resting on the sink. The heavyset man started to pace around the room, sweating profusely, constantly wiping his hands on his pants.

"So...what's the story?" I asked.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm just a little frantic, that's all." He took a deep breath. "My name is Craig Burgin, and I desperately need your help."

"You've said that."

From inside the bathroom, there was a cry of pain that was quickly muffled.

"What's he doing in there?" Helen demanded.

"He's getting information."

"So we're supposed to pretend like nothing's happening while the FBI tortures him in the bathroom?" I asked.

Craig smiled nervously. "He's not FBI. He's this private investigator who's helping me find my wife."

"Private investigator from where? What exactly is going on here?" I got off the bed and stood up, hoping my legs wouldn't be devoured.

"Just let me explain, okay? Please?"

There were some more muffled cries of pain from the bathroom, and then a dull thump.

"Forget this," I said. "We're outta here."

"No, no, I'm going to tell you everything." He took another deep breath, and then exhaled slowly. "About ten months ago, my wife Charlotte was kidnapped. No ransom note, no demands, no nothing. Some drops of blood on my kitchen floor were the only evidence anything had happened. The police got involved, the FBI, the IRS, we offered this huge reward for any information, and we found nothing."

"The IRS?" I asked.

"Sorry, no, not the IRS. Another one. Just let me talk, okay?"

He wiped his nose off on his sleeve. "One month to the day after she vanished, I got this videotape in the mail. It was a two-minute video of my wife, taken against this white backdrop. She was tied up and gagged...covered with cuts and bruises. There was this message on the backdrop that said 'She's still alive, but you can't have her.'"

Craig's voice cracked, and it took him a few moments to regain his composure. "Obviously we studied every second of the tape, but there wasn't anything to go on besides the postmark, which was from Los Angeles. The next month, I got another tape, this one with a Pittsburgh postmark. There she was, tied and gagged, her bruises and cuts healed. She had this copy of USA Today on her lap to prove it had been taken the week before. Same message on the backdrop."

I sat back down on the bed. Helen scooted close to me.

"It's gone on like this for almost a year now. Every month I get this video, every month Charlotte's got this newspaper, but every couple months they add to the message on the backdrop."

I waited expectantly, but he just went on pacing and didn't continue. "What did they add?" I asked.

"It was meant to be funny, I guess," said Craig, shaking his head. "After the first two months the message said 'She's still alive, but you can't have her. Nyahh, nyahh!' Two months after that they added 'Neener, neener!' Then 'Nanny nanny boo boo!'"

I stared at him in amazement. What kind of kidnappers were these?

"Money, I could understand," said Craig. "But turning it into this joke...that's just, it's just evil."

There were some more muffled shrieks from the bathroom, these much louder than the ones before. They faded out quickly, and I swore I could hear faint sobbing.

"Sounds like evil is being punished," I noted.

Craig shook his head. "It wasn't the Headhunter. He was strictly after you."

"Oh, well, that's reassuring."

"It's the truth. Let me back up. Three months ago, I got this call from Thomas, who I didn't know at the time. He said he had information that might help me find my wife. I didn't hesitate to meet him, of course, and he explained how he'd been helping this other client search for her missing sister. Her sister was heavily into drugs, and she was scared she might even be dealing, so she never called the police. Sadly, Thomas only managed to find her head."

The bathroom door opened. Thomas stepped out and closed the door behind him. "Have you explained everything yet?" he asked.

"Not yet, I'm getting there." Craig closed his eyes, clearly trying to get back into his train of thought, and then began speaking again. "Anyway, the story gets fairly involved, Thomas can fill you in on a lot of the details, but he ended up breaking into the Headhunter's car."

"This was in Manhattan," Thomas said.

"Yes, Manhattan. He only had a minute or so to search, but he found this letter. It was typewritten—"

"Not typewritten, printed out on a computer," Thomas corrected. "There was no name on it, but the letter was addressed to the Headhunter. It discussed how the person writing the letter looked forward to meeting him for the big party. Everything was purposely vague, but the closing of the letter was, and I quote, 'Until next time, nyahh nyahh and nanny nanny boo boo!' Now, that information as it related to Mr. Burgin's case had been withheld from the press, as things always are to filter out those unhappy individuals who confess to crimes they didn't commit, but I knew all about it. So I contacted Mr. Burgin and he graciously agreed to fund my investigation."

He checked his watch. "Pardon me, I need to get back to work. Please continue," he said, gesturing to Craig as he re-entered the bathroom, again closing the door behind him.

"So he tracked Ned—that's the Headhunter, Ned Markstein—for a couple weeks. He snuck into his apartment, went through his things, all that stuff. He found more letters, nothing that identified the kidnapper, but there was enough evidence in them to prove that the person writing them had Charlotte. Last week, he hacked into the Headhunter's personal computer and found this letter in progress. It's here somewhere..."

Craig opened a briefcase, flipped through a couple of files, and then took out a manila folder and handed me the printout of the letter inside.

"Buddy,

Time's getting close, isn't it? It's been too long since I've had a nice vacation. I'll definitely bring my share of the party favors, but I'll take it one step further, my friend. I'll bring you Andrew Mayhem and Roger Tanglen. And then we can"

"Can what?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. We never saw the finished letter."

"So how do two people like this meet? What, did he take out a personal ad? Single White Psychopath Seeks Same?"

"I think it started on the Internet, actually."

"It's always the Internet, isn't it?" I muttered. "So why the hell didn't you go to the cops? My wife and I almost got killed!"

"Thomas told me not to. He said we couldn't let the Headhunter know that we were on to him, or he wouldn't lead us to Charlotte's kidnapper. So we followed him down to Chamber."

"And let him kill all the party guests."

Craig bit his lip. "He wasn't easy to keep track of. We weren't expecting him to do anything like that. I think he was just trying to show off before he brought you to the kidnapper, make himself look better."

"You didn't even think to warn us?" I was furious. "My wife almost got her head chopped off, too!" A horrible thought occurred to me. "How do I know he didn't get Roger?"

"Oh, no, no, Roger's fine. Really, he wasn't going to kill you, just your wife. He needed you."

"This certainly makes me feel adored," Helen remarked.

Craig stared to reply, but seemed to sense that he was losing control of the conversation. He knocked on the bathroom door.

"I'm just a bit busy," said Thomas from inside, annoyed.

"I need you to explain the plan."

"You know the plan."

"But I need you to explain it to them."

There was a moment of silence, and then the toilet flushed. Thomas emerged, wiping his hands on a towel. We all stared at him.

"What?" he asked.

We continued staring at him.

"Oh, grow up. So what's the problem?"

"Just tell them what we need," Craig said.

Thomas tossed the towel aside. "Andrew, we need you and your friend Roger to serve as bait."

"You've got to be kidding me," I said. "First of all, if I understand Craig's story right, Helen and I acted as bait this evening, and we almost died."

"Not you, just Helen."

"You know what, this is starting to piss me off," Helen said.

"I apologize, ma'am, that was unprofessional. Here's the situation. Three days from now, our friend in the bathroom is supposed to meet the man who kidnapped Mrs. Burgin in New York City. Queens, to be specific, and he's supposed to have you—" he pointed at me "—and your friend with him. Naturally, he won't be showing up. I will. The kidnapper doesn't know what the Headhunter looks like, so I'll be playing his part. You and Roger will be safe in the car, pretending to be prisoners. Once I'm satisfied that he's the right individual, he'll find a gun in his face, and then he'll go through the same line of questioning the Headhunter did. He'll tell us where Charlotte and the others are, don't worry."

"Others?" Helen asked.

"Oh yes. Apparently there are several others. At least ten, though we don't know how many for certain. Most likely they all have families who are going through the same mental anguish that Mr. Burgin here is suffering. You can see what it's done to his ability to describe a simple plan."

"If you know all this is happening, why don't you go to the police?" I asked. "Why do this by yourself instead of letting the NYPD handle it?"

"It's bad enough that your wife has to know about it," said Thomas. "Listen to me, Andrew. I don't know who the kidnapper is, but I do know that he thinks this is all a big game, a way to have a few laughs. He doesn't care if Charlotte or the others live or die. But I can make him care. Believe me, the NYPD might not be able to get him to tell where the prisoners are, but I unquestionably will."

I didn't doubt that.

"Why does he want me?"

"Why wouldn't he? From what I understand, you were responsible for quite a few deranged individuals getting what they deserved. Maybe this deranged individual had a friend among them, or maybe he just wants to strike a blow for his fellow deranged individuals, I'm not certain. But I promise you, you won't be in any danger."

"Like behind the planetarium?"

"That was a less controlled situation," Thomas explained. "We were the ones in pursuit. This time the culprit is coming to us."

"Please," said Craig. "You've got to help us. I'll pay you anything."

"Naturally, my client doesn't have the financial resources available to pay you anything," said Thomas. "But you will certainly be generously compensated, and you'll get a free New York City vacation out of it, though naturally you won't be permitted to leave the hotel until after the meeting. But this isn't about money or vacations; it's about bringing these poor people back to their families. And all you have to do is sit in the car."

"Is it safe to sit in a car in Queens?" I asked.

"Not really," Thomas admitted.

I knew perfectly well that, left on my own, I'd end up accepting his offer. I'm not all that heroic, and I don't devote my life to the betterment of mankind, and I'll occasionally pretend that I don't have any change when the Salvation Army Santa Clauses are standing outside of shopping malls ringing the hell out of their red bells, but to refuse to help people who'd been kidnapped by an obvious sicko just wasn't going to cut it. I mean, it's not like I had to worry about missing work.

However, I made sure to get the opinion of the person who kept the Mayhem household supply of common sense. "What do you think, Helen?"

"I think you're going to do it no matter what I say." She turned to Thomas. "If you put my husband in danger, the guy in the bathroom won't be the only one looking to chop off your head."

"Understood."

"Thank you so much," said Craig. His tone of voice made me concerned that he might drop to the floor and start slobbering all over my shoes in gratitude, but fortunately he didn't.

"So what's the next step?" I asked.

* * *

I noticed that Roger had a new scratch as he opened the door. He frowned as he saw Craig and Thomas standing behind me.

"What have you gotten me into?" he asked.

"So, Rog," I said, giving him a reassuring smile, "got any plans this week?"

CHAPTER SEVEN

New York, New York.

The Big Apple.

The City That Never Sleeps.

Spider-Man's hometown.

I assume it's a pretty cool place to visit, when you're not stuck in a fleabag motel for three days cramming for finals week in the psychopath exams.

"Where were you born?" I asked for about the ninety-second time.

"Cleveland, Ohio," said Thomas, spitting out his answer like he was in basic training.

"What's your favorite food?"

"Ham and cheese on rye."

"When will this nightmare be over?"

"Two hours, twenty-six minutes."

"Can we quit now?"

"No we may not."

I set the stack of papers on the bed, which was almost completely covered with pages of personal information about Mr. Ned Markstein, alias the Headhunter. We'd been going over it non-stop. This would've been a pretty miserable experience regardless of the information involved, but it was made worse by the fact that we were mostly working with descriptions of grisly murders. Fourteen of them, counting the mass decapitation. How I longed for the good old days of biology finals. Except the dissections.

I did find out that whomever the Headhunter was corresponding with hated me because one of his close friends had been sent to prison because of me. He didn't identify the jailbird, not that it probably would have helped.

My own proposal was that instead of Thomas pretending to be the Headhunter, we should use the real Headhunter and make him very much aware that Thomas was pointing a gun at him, but Thomas said it was too risky. "One wink of his eye and the whole plan could be ruined," he explained, using a carefully calculated tone of voice to let me know that I was a blithering idiot.

So Thomas, Roger and I sat in a motel room making sure Thomas knew everything he possibly could about the Headhunter. The actual Headhunter was back in Florida, heavily drugged while being watched over and re-drugged by Craig. Roger and I weren't allowed to leave the room, because we didn't know if anybody was watching us. Thomas was scared of a bug or something being put on him, so the only place he went for food was the hamburger place next door, where the ketchup burned your mouth and the mustard had hard little chunks in it that hurt your teeth. I commented that our room was filled with so many bugs that one more couldn't hurt, but Thomas didn't find that comment particularly humorous.

The whole memorizing-every-detail-of-the-Headhunter's-life thing seemed like kind of a waste to me. I mean, if the kidnappers didn't know what the Headhunter looked like, how would they know his shoe size? I pointed this out, too, but once again it was explained to me that I was a blithering idiot, which is apparently not a good type of idiot to be.

"Day three," said Roger, speaking into his miniature tape recorder. "Morale is low. Television programs have continued to be poor, but we remain ever hopeful that reception will improve. Body odor maintains its downward trajectory."

"Put that away," I told him.

"Andrew continues to be a substantial penis," he narrated. "For the record, this is not new behavior, but it's rare that I have the agony of spending three days in his company without time for recuperation."

Roger had decided that he was going to take notes on our entire adventure. Because I got the big book deal last time, he figured it was his turn. I tried to explain that there would be no adventure, that we were going to sit in a car and do nothing, but his response was "Yeah, right," which was a little disconcerting since I was thinking the same thing.

About an hour later, Thomas opened a black briefcase. "It's time to go," he announced, taking out a pair of handcuffs. He proceeded to snap the bracelets around his wrists, and then held out his arms toward us. "If matters don't proceed as planned, here's what you do. Twist your hands in opposite directions like this, then pull your wrists forward like this." The handcuffs unhinged and fell to the floor. "Understand?"

"Do you have those in fur-lined?" I asked.

"Pink fur, if you've got it," Roger added.

"You know," said Thomas, "I used to be appalled at the workings of the minds of individuals like the Headhunter, but after being around you two I'm starting to understand the desire to kill."

"Hey, Thomas, you made a funny!" I said. "Congratulations! Welcome to humanity!"

"I wasn't joking."

* * *

After we each did a practice run with the trick handcuffs, which wasn't all that easy with our hands behind our backs, Roger and I were separately led out to Thomas' rental car. He was pressed up right against me, since if the kidnappers were watching it had to look like he was trying to hide the handcuffs from the general public. To anyone else, it probably would have looked like we'd had too much fun with the handcuffs, but fortunately the parking lot was empty.

Roger and I sat in the back seat, behaving ourselves, while Thomas drove us the half hour to our destination. I hadn't seen snow in quite a while, but it was pretty much the same as I remembered it (white) and the thrill wore off quickly. He parked outside of a large six-story brownstone with lots of chunks missing.

Thomas turned around to face us. "Okay, I would now like to apologize to you gentlemen, since I haven't been completely honest about the situation."

I frantically began twisting my hands in the trick cuffs.

"No, it isn't like that. The plan is exactly the same, merely a bit more involved. Not a lot. Barely at all. It's simply that the meeting is inside this condemned building, and you'll have to come with me."

"You turd!" I shouted.

Thomas frowned. "Did you seriously just call me a turd?"

"Sorry. I have a seven year-old. But yes, you're a damn bastard turd! What do you mean we're coming in with you?"

"Like I said, I apologize. I had no choice. Your wife wouldn't have let you come if she'd known."

"My wife hasn't been around for three days! You haven't even let me call her!"

"Right. Well, you might not have come either. I promise you, the danger is minimal. Almost non-existent. The situation has barely changed from the scenario that you both agreed to."

"Actually, I don't remember being given all that much choice, if we want to get picky," said Roger.

I sighed angrily. "So what other information have you kept from us? Should I learn how to defuse a nuclear warhead?"

"Nothing else, I assure you," Thomas insisted.

"And why should I believe that?"

"Because," Thomas said, pointing a gun at my face, "you don't have a choice."

"Aw, c'mon! Why would you do that?" I asked. "All this time I've been feeling pretty good about myself, putting myself at risk to help some poor guy get his wife back, and now you're forcing me to do it, which means I can't get any personal satisfaction out of it. Thanks a hell of a lot!"

Thomas lowered the gun. "I apologize. I just needed to ensure that you didn't walk out on me."

"I wasn't going to."

"Well, I'm putting the gun away, then."

"What good does that do?" I asked. "I still know it's there. I still know I'm being forced into this. You can't exactly give a Boy Scout points for helping an old lady cross the street when he's doing it at gunpoint!"

"There's no gun," said Thomas, holding up his empty hands. "I won't shoot you. You have free will. Go as you please."

"Just shut up and take us inside," I said.

"I for one would be happy with merely the outward appearance of free will," Roger complained.

"All right, let's go." Thomas unlocked his door, started to open it, and then looked a bit embarrassed. "Of course, I have to take you in there at gunpoint anyway to maintain the illusion. Sorry."

"Don't worry about it."

* * *

The apartment building may have been condemned, but it certainly wasn't vacant. Homeless people were sleeping on the floor, some with blankets, some with newspapers. Several fires burned in coffee cans, providing some light and warmth, but not enough of the latter. A couple of the inhabitants rolled over and groaned as Thomas shone his flashlight around the room, which had obviously been several rooms back in the days when it had walls. A pair of youths, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, were sitting on the stairs, ignoring us as they shared a hypodermic needle. I won't even discuss the smell.

"Should we double-check the address?" Roger asked.

"Quiet!" Thomas whispered, prodding us to move forward. There had to be at least forty people on the ground floor alone, sleeping or huddled together. Most of the ones who were awake watched us closely.

Thomas slid his foot along the floor, wiping away some shards of broken glass. "Kneel here," he said.

We did so without a word, and then waited.

A gray-bearded man under an Indian blanket rolled over on his back and began sobbing in his sleep. The man next to him kneed him in the side and he went silent.

"Place looks like it's about to collapse," muttered Thomas, a definite hint of fear in his voice.

We waited for a good ten minutes, not saying a word. My hands were freezing. I wondered if the kidnapper was in the room right now, watching us.

At the sound of footsteps, Thomas swung his flashlight toward a man in a dirt-covered, formerly yellow raincoat. He looked about forty, with a thick beard that hadn't been trimmed in months.

The man spoke when he was about ten feet away from us. "You're n-not here for n-nothin' good, are you?"

"We're just minding our own business," said Thomas.

"Okay, I know w-when I'm n-not wanted," the man said, coming closer. "I'm n-not here to h-hurt you, I was j-just hoping you could h-h-help me out a bit."

"Sorry, we don't have any money," Thomas told him.

The man broke out into a rotten-toothed grin. "Aw, s-sure you do. I don't n-n-need a l-lot, just a quarter or somethin', buddy."

"Sorry."

"Don't t-tell me you're s-sorry. You're not fuckin' sorry. You don't c-c-c-care about me. C'mon, buddy, one l-little quarter." The man walked up right beside Thomas.

"All right, let me see what I've got," said Thomas, digging in his pants pocket.

"J-just one quarter, I m-m-mean it's not that b-big of a deal. Just a quarter."

"Look, here's some change," said Thomas, holding out a small handful. "Now if you'll excuse us, we have important business to attend to."

"Thanks, buddy, I d-didn't wanna be a b-bother," the man said, taking the change with his right hand. His other hand moved before I had a chance to shout out a warning.

Thomas' mouth dropped open, a broken bottle sticking in his side. As Roger and I quickly got to our feet, the man grabbed Thomas' gun and yelped with delight.

"Bitchin'! Awesome p-piece, man!" He took off running toward the exit.

Thomas wrenched the glass out of his side, cursed loudly, and began to stagger after him.

I did the necessary hand twists and the handcuffs dropped to the floor with a clatter. I started to run after Thomas, but my foot came down on a large piece of glass, making me lose my balance and fall to my knees with a gasp of pain.

"I can't get my cuffs undone!" said Roger, desperately twisting his hands.

I pulled the piece of glass out of the bottom of my shoe. It stung a bit, but hadn't punctured deep. Thomas and the man were gone. I got up and glanced around at the people in the building, all of whom were staring at us now. If one of them was the kidnapper in disguise, we might be in some pretty serious trouble. Actually, even if one of them wasn't, our current situation wasn't exactly joviality and high spirits.

"Give me your hands," I told Roger. I twisted the cuffs the way we were supposed to, and then gave them a tug. They didn't come undone. "Aw, great."

"People are tryin' to sleep!" a woman shouted angrily.

I twisted the handcuffs again, but they still wouldn't open. "Okay, bit of a problem," I said. "Let's just get out of here."

As we turned to go, I saw that the two junkies from the staircase were now standing in front of the door. This didn't strike me as a good development.

We walked toward the door, hoping the junkies were just there to open it for us. Roger continued to struggle with the handcuffs while we walked. I noticed that a couple more guys to our left were moving toward us, one of them holding a baseball bat, the other holding a strip of wood with thick nails in it.

"Happy thoughts," I whispered. "Just think happy, happy thoughts."

We were almost to the door, and it was clear that the junkies had no intention of letting us go. "Hi there, gentlemen," I said in my most cheerful manner. "If it's all right with you, we'd like to go help our friend. He was the one who got the broken bottle stuck in his side. If that helps."

"You ain't goin' nowhere," said one of the junkies.

"Oh, give me a break," I said, trying to keep my voice calm. "You don't really think you can take me, do you?"

The junkie pulled out a switchblade. He snapped the blade open and looked very pleased with himself.

"Oh, give me a break," I said, trying to keep my pants dry. "You don't really think you can stab me, do you?"

"I dunno," the junkie replied, giving it a twirl. "What d'you think?"

"I think this is all ridiculous. We're all adults here...well, not you two, but you're close enough. There's no reason for violence."

"Not if you give us your wallets," the second junkie said.

I reached for my wallet, and then my stomach took a plunge. "Okay, you know what, even though you did present an extremely valid, workable solution to our conflict, unfortunately I wasn't really planning on making any purchases tonight, so I left my wallet in the motel room. Sorry."

The guys with the baseball bat and nail-laden wood walked up next to us. I couldn't see them clearly, but I was pretty sure the nails were rusty and would hurt going in.

"What 'bout him?" asked the junkie, nodding at Roger.

"Mine's at the motel, too. Right next to Andrew's on the dresser. I was going to bring it but I thought, no, I'm going to be handcuffed, I won't be able to reach it anyway."

"Then maybe we'll sell your blood," said the first junkie, waving his switchblade.

"Now you're just being silly," I said. "Nobody would buy my blood."

"I said, people are trying to sleep!" shouted the angry woman. "Don't make me come over there and kick your asses!"

"Let's just kill 'em!" whined the guy with the baseball bat. "Lemme break his head in!"

The junkie with the switchblade nodded. The guy raised his baseball bat, and then lowered it in surprise. "Holy shit! It's him!"

"Who?" asked three different people at once, including me.

"Him! That guy! You know those death movies? Those things? You know?" He began slapping his palm against his forehead, trying to concentrate. We all watched him. A moment later, his eyes popped open. "Anthony Mayhem! That's who you are!"

"Andrew Mayhem, actually," I corrected.

"Yeah, yeah! Remember those messed-up dudes who were makin' tapes of people gettin' cut up an' shit? He stopped 'em! I saw all 'bout that on TV! It was fuckin' sweet!" He began gesturing excitedly. "Dude, tell 'em what you did with that skull!"

"I'd love to," I said, "but I really need to help my friend."

"Your friend's cool, dude, he didn't get stabbed that bad. C'mon, tell about the skull!"

"Really, this isn't a good time, but—"

"Tell us," said the guy with the nail board.

* * *

"So I was climbing up the ladder," I said to the fifteen or so people seated in a circle around me. "Now, I didn't know what I'd find in that attic, but I knew it couldn't be anything good. I knew that this might just be the day that I died. Let me tell you, being confronted with your own mortality in that way, it really changes a man."

I checked my watch for the forty-fifth time in the past forty-five minutes. "I know I've said this quite a few times already, but can I go now? I'll come back to finish the story, I promise."

Thomas hadn't returned, which was disturbing enough, but the kidnappers would be here any minute. At least I had my new friends to protect me.

"Dude, quit interrupting yourself! I wanna know what happened!"

"Okay, so, I was being confronted with my own mortality. Then I—"

The door flew open and two men burst inside. "How's it going, you bunch of degenerates?" shouted the first, a tall, athletically built man in blue jeans and a heavy brown leather jacket. His short black hair was slicked back, and he had perfect movie star looks and a thin mustache. "Don't mind me, trolls! I'm just here to meet a friend!"

His partner was a bit shorter, a bit more muscular, and a lot uglier. He was bald, wore a parka, and was carrying what looked unnervingly like a semi-automatic rifle. He looked a bit embarrassed by his partner's behavior.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Nail Board demanded.

"I'm the Magic Man, I'm whoever you want me to be," the first man informed him. He looked around the room, and then held his nose. "Whoa! How many rotting corpses have you people got stored in this place? Haven't you heard of the Western tradition of burying your dead? Or does that not apply to druggies? I'm sorry, that was uncalled for, wasn't it? Please accept my apologies, trolls."

He continued surveying the room. I wanted to scoot away, but that would have drawn attention to myself. It didn't matter, because a moment later his eyes met mine.

"Ooooh, just the person I wanted to see. And Roger, too. And who might your captor be, hmmm?"

Nobody spoke. The man peered at the people around us, and frowned. "Speak up, speak up, whoever you are. Insane minds want to know."

More silence. The man shrugged, and then patted his partner on the arm. "Let's get them out of here."

The people who'd been listening to my story moved out of the way as his partner walked through them and pulled Roger to his feet. Without thinking, I quickly stood up. I glanced over at Nail Board. He gave me a slight nod, which I hoped meant, "Give me the signal, and I'll whup 'em."

The two men exchanged a confused look. Then the second man shoved Roger aside and pointed his rifle at me. The first man took a pistol out of his jacket pocket and also pointed it at me. I raised my hands in the air.

"You've got about two seconds to explain this," asked the first man. "Where's the guy who brought you here?"

"It's simple," I said, trying to subtly wink at Nail Board. He shook his head, set down his board, and stepped back out of the way.

"Then let's hear it."

I said the only thing I could think of. "I'm Andrew Mayhem, also known as the Headhunter."

CHAPTER EIGHT

"I beg your fucking pardon?"

"You heard me," I said.

"No, I'm pretty sure I missed something."

"I'm the Headhunter. I promised to bring you Andrew Mayhem, and I did. Just not the way you expected."

The man appeared completely flabbergasted. "So, what, you're saying that you're...him?"

"I'm him. He's me. We're we."

Yes, the "we're we" part was pushing it, but I had two guns in my face disrupting my concentration.

He shook his head. "No, that's not possible. That's completely ridiculous. There's just no way."

"I showed up for the meeting, didn't I?" I gave him my broadest smile. "Surprise!"

The man gestured at me with his gun. "I do believe we need to go somewhere to talk. Let's go."

I shrugged and headed for the door. The other man grabbed Roger by the back of the neck and roughly led him to the door as well. As we left the apartment building, I noticed that Thomas' rental car was still there. We walked along the sidewalk for a few feet, until the first man shoved me against the building (which miraculously didn't come crashing down) and pressed the barrel of his gun to my throat.

"Now, what do you mean, you're the Headhunter?"

"I mean, I'm the Headhunter. Fourteen victims in three years, the last dozen all killed by decapitation, and all by the same scimitar. I was going to call myself the Buccaneer, but that didn't sound quite as menacing. The highlight of my life was killing off all five of those decrepit partiers at once. My turn-ons include women with pierced tongues, the scent of vanilla, and road kill. My turn-offs include law enforcement officials, asparagus, and shallow people."

The man stared at me in disbelief. Then his expression changed to pure delight. "That is the coolest thing I have ever heard in my life! What a fantastic fake-out! Oh, wow, we have got some serious stuff to talk about, my friend." He removed the gun from my neck and extended his hand. "Daniel Rankin."

I shook it, which was a bit difficult since my hand was numb from the cold. "Nice to meet you."

Daniel pointed to the other man, who was still holding Roger. "That's Curtwood Foster." Curtwood didn't react to the introduction.

"And what's up with Roger here?" asked Daniel. "He didn't know about you, did he?"

I hurriedly tried to come up with a way to get Roger out of this, but how could I explain away the handcuffs? "Not a thing."

"That is so cool! Foster, put him in the van."

I avoided looking at Roger while Foster dragged him toward a parked black van. If I was going to be the Headhunter, I couldn't let any guilt show in my eyes. As it was, I could feel my legs trembling a bit, and my stomach acids were flowing like Niagara Falls. Things were without a doubt getting out of control, but any heroics at this point would just get both of us shot. I had to keep playing this out and wait for a chance to escape.

"I don't want him hurt," I said.

Daniel gave me a quizzical look.

"Not yet," I amended.

"Well, of course. Gotta keep him in good shape for the games, so we can really hurt him. But you'll learn all about that later."

Foster slid open the van door, shoved Roger inside, and got in after him. I flinched as he slammed the door shut, and prayed that Daniel didn't notice.

"Where's your suitcase?" Daniel asked.

Thomas had packed a suitcase, just for show. But it was in the trunk of the rental car, and Thomas had the key. "One of those bums stole it," I said angrily. "I would've gone after him and sliced his homeless head off, but I couldn't leave Roger. Why did you have me waiting in there, anyway?"

"Just wanted to get your vacation off to an exciting start. I promised you a wild time, and I aim to deliver. Did you lose anything essential?"

"Just clothes." I pointed to some spots of blood that led down the sidewalk. "Looks like he left a trail, though."

Daniel grinned. "Wanna go after him?"

"You better believe it."

"Race ya!"

Daniel started running down the sidewalk. I took a step and nearly slipped. I was wearing sneakers, which weren't the best footwear for sprinting down icy sidewalks. While my chances of getting the gun away from Daniel were better if we were out of sight of the van, it wasn't exactly credible that a serial killer who could decapitate five people so effectively couldn't run down the sidewalk without falling on his ass. I took another step, nearly lost my balance again, and decided to give it up.

"Nah, don't worry about it!" I called after him. "He's long-gone. Everything he took is replaceable."

Daniel slid to a graceful halt. "You sure? We could cause him some big-time pain. It'd be fun."

"I got here early, so it's been almost an hour. Actually, I'm freezing to death out here. I hope we're going someplace warm."

"I don't wanna wreck the surprise. Let's get in the van."

* * *

While I feel guilty admitting this, the simple truth is that I'm a darn good liar. Now, Helen does tend to catch me on occasion, and I know I'm caught when I'm treated to The Gaze, but when people who aren't my spouse are involved, I'm usually a fibber with the best of them. I am certainly not proud of this, and if I could change my ways I would, but the fact remains that I'm a good liar, and Daniel was buying my story.

Well, he acted like he was buying it, anyway. But he also made no secret of the fact that he still had a gun, as did Foster in the back. Even if I could wrestle the gun away from Daniel, which I probably couldn't, I'd end up taking a few rounds of semi-automatic fire from Foster. Some might say that it would serve me right for all that lying, but that's beside the point.

As Daniel drove, I explained how everything I'd become famous for was really a distortion of the truth. Yeah, I'd stopped the snuff film creators and distributors, but only because they tried to screw me out of my share of the profits. Nobody left alive knew the truth, not my wife, and especially not Roger. And I told them all about Ned Markstein, my second identity in Manhattan, complete with four (count 'em, four!) girlfriends. Then I told them about the murders. I'd spent three days quizzing Thomas, so the details weren't difficult to recall, though getting the attitude right was tough. I basically just tried to sound very proud of my accomplishments, as if I were talking about the time I caught sixty-three pieces of popcorn that were tossed across the room in my mouth, and really only missed the sixty-fourth because of a bad throw on Roger's part.

Roger remained silent in the back of the van. I sincerely hoped he knew I was making up the story to help us both get out of this, and not to save my own butt. He wasn't trying to sabotage my web of lies, so I assumed that he knew. I still felt like a total bastard.

"So why didn't you tell me who you were beforehand?" asked Daniel. "You almost got yourself shot!"

"I love surprises. Besides, you had something special planned for me, you weren't just going to shoot me."

"Yeah, but what if my hatred for Andrew Mayhem was greater than my admiration for the Headhunter?"

"Then I'd end up slicing your head off and might feel bad about it the next day."

"You don't have your scimitar."

"I have my ways."

Daniel chuckled. "I think we'll get along fine."

* * *

We ended up driving for three hours. I was exhausted, and a bit worried about blabbing my story in that state...I could make a continuity error and give myself away. So I reclined the seat and pretended to doze. Every so often I would steal a quick peek at Daniel, but unfortunately at no time was his gun resting on the dashboard with a little sign saying, "Take Me, Andrew!"

When we finally stopped, it was at a small, deserted-looking airport. I could barely even call it an airport, since it wasn't much more than a runway and a building about the size of a shed. I continued to avoid looking at Roger while we got out of the van. I wanted to give him some kind of signal that I had things under control (even if the signal would be yet another ridiculous lie), but it wasn't worth the risk.

There was only one small jet on the runway. "What do you think?" asked Daniel.

"It's nice," I replied, not sure how enthusiastic I was supposed to be.

"I own it."

"Really?"

Daniel nodded with pride. "I own a lot of stuff. You'll see it soon."

The door to the building opened, and three people exited. The first, a woman, rushed across the runway, ran the hundred or so feet over to us, and threw herself into Daniel's arms. They kissed passionately. I thought they were going to start chewing each other's faces off. It probably would have been a good opportunity to catch Daniel by surprise, but Foster had his gun out and pressed against Roger's back.

Daniel pulled away from the woman. She had black, curly hair, wore blood-red lipstick, and was just a tiny bit pudgy. She wore an orange halter-top and shorts.

"Andrew, meet my wife, Josie," said Daniel.

Josie regarded me closely. "Isn't that—?"

"Yeah. He'll explain everything later."

"Pleased to meet you," I said. "Aren't you cold?"

"Better than being hot."

The other two men walked over to us. The first was wearing a parka, had long, greasy hair, and looked like he'd shaved recently but missed quite a few spots. He wore a nicotine patch and had a carrot stick sticking out of the side of his mouth. He nodded at me. "Ain't that—?"

"Yeah. He'll explain everything later."

"Oh."

"Andrew, this is Stan Tringet. He's kind of let himself go over the past couple years, but he's still a good guy. How many hours without a cigarette, Stan?"

Stan gave him a lopsided smile. "We're back to minutes."

The second man was also in a parka, but also wore a hat, scarf, earmuffs, and heavy mittens. His wide face was red from the cold. "I'm Samuel Striker," he told me.

"Don't be a dick," said Daniel. "Give him your real name."

"How do I know he's not working for the cops?"

"If he's working for the cops, we kill him."

"Ooooh, that's your solution to everything," said Josie, slipping her hand seductively inside Daniel's jacket.

"Fine, fine. I'm Mortimer. Can we get on the plane now?"

"Are the other prisoners on board?" Daniel asked.

"Of course they are. Locked down and ready to get out of this place. So let's go!"

"Okay, then, let's go."

We walked toward the jet. Foster shoved Roger a lot more roughly than I appreciated, but I didn't let my anger show. "So now can I ask where we're going?"

"Seattle," said Daniel. "First."

"Then where?"

"Alaska."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. We're on our way to the Last Frontier. And that's where the real fun's gonna start."

* * *

"Welcome to Rankin Airlines," said Daniel into the microphone. "Before we take off, I'd like you to observe some safety precautions. One, please contain all firearms, knives, bludgeoning devices, and electric chairs in the overhead bins until we've reached our cruising altitude. Two, in the unlikely event of a water landing, your seat cushion functions as a floatation device. However, your seat cushion also has the scent of blood, so expect to be devoured by sharks shortly after impact. If you are seated next to one of the emergency doors, you will be required to assist the other passengers. Since I can see that Stan is seated next to one, it's fairly obvious that we're all screwed. Thank you, and enjoy your flight."

* * *

Roger had been taken down below, with the luggage. Daniel and Josie sat across from me, making out, while Mortimer leaned back and listened to his headphones as he slept. Foster was flying the plane, none too smoothly. Stan sat in front of me, holding his carrot stick between his index and middle finger while he stared out the window.

So, I was going to Alaska. Wonderful. I had nothing against Alaska, never having been there, but any control I had over the situation was pretty much gone. What could I do? Maybe I could swipe Daniel's gun while he was distracted, except that it was now inside his jacket and he'd most likely notice a third hand squirming around in there next to his wife's. I didn't know if Mortimer had a weapon, but I wouldn't exactly have time to do a thorough search before a few dozen bullets ripped through my face. And for all I knew, there was somebody else down below guarding the prisoners. Maybe several somebodies.

Of course, there was nothing stopping me from gathering more information.

"Hey, Daniel?"

Daniel spat out a mouthful of cleavage. "What's up?"

"How many prisoners have you got down there?"

"A few."

"Are they secure?"

"Nah, we've just got them running around down there with machine guns. Gee, I hope the bicycle lock on the door holds."

"Hey, I trust you," I said. "I just like to know how things stand."

"You're right, that's understandable. But don't worry about it. You're on vacation. Leave the details to me. Get some sleep."

I really wanted to ask if I could go down and check things out, but I didn't dare push the subject. Daniel resumed his slurping.

There was nothing I could do. I hated that. The only really smart course of action would be to move my seat far from its upright and locked position and get some sleep. I had a feeling the next day was going to be fairly eventful.

ROGER'S SIDE

Shit.

Sorry, I guess that's not the most eloquent way to start this, but it really does seem appropriate. If I had a notepad or something I could probably come up with something poetic, or witty, or...I don't know, I think "shit" pretty well sums it up.

Shit, shit, shit.

I've got a lot of intro stuff on my first tape, but that's back at the motel in New York, and for all I know nobody will ever find it, so I'll start over. I'm Roger Tanglen. Thirty-three years old. I would lie and say I'm this handsome stud muffin, but I'm sure they'll find some picture to go with this, so I'll be honest and say that I've got a big nose. Now that I think of it, if they're showing the picture, you don't need me to say that I've got a big nose, you'll be able to see it for yourself, so I've just wasted about twenty seconds of your life telling you this. But I'm not gonna rewind because I'm trying to keep this thing honest. So expect all kinds of babbling. Like what you're hearing right now.

The other people down here are giving me really dirty looks, so I need to get back on track. Right now I'm on a plane bound for who knows where. I'm sitting on the floor, and my feet are locked into these metal things...they're sort of, I don't know how to describe them...metal things that clamp over your ankles. I'm trying to think where I've seen them before. Well, it doesn't matter; all that's important is that I can't go anywhere. There's also a metal band around my neck, which is chained to the wall. The chain is starting to feel pretty heavy, to tell you the truth, but it's not really restricting my movement, though if I managed to get my feet free it would keep me from escaping.

At least my arms are free. The guy who locked me down here searched me, but was nice enough to let me keep the tape recorder. He's probably interested in hearing what I say. If I were really clever, I'd break it apart and make some sort of device to pick the locks, but I'm not all that clever. I don't even know what these metal things are called.

There are three other people here with me. One is next to me, but not close enough to touch, and the other two are on the opposite side. Actually, how about you all call out your names and where you're from? We never know where this tape will end up.

"I'm Mary Bendever, and I'm from Detroit."

"Susan Piccinini. Also Detroit. <sobbing>"

"My name is Rodney Telfare, and I'm from Phoenix, Arizona, and if my wife and kids are listening to this I want them to know that I love them, and that Daddy will be home soon!"

So that's the crew. My best friend Andrew is on the plane, I'm pretty sure. I still can't believe it. He was the Headhunter all along. And you know, I think I even suspected it, but I didn't want to admit it to myself. I feel like a total idiot. I can't believe he murdered my cat. My precious Reverse Snowflake, the best cat I ever owned, killed by that monster.

I don't want to talk about him any more.

I wonder if this flight will have beverage service?

CHAPTER NINE

"Ah, smell that fresh air," said Daniel, beating on his chest and breathing deeply. "That's the first thing that's gotta go."

We were in Alaska. According to Daniel, we were about thirty miles out of Fairbanks, not that I would have known if he was lying. Local temperature was ten below zero, just super for a thin-blooded Florida guy. It was two in the afternoon, but Daniel told me that darkness would be falling very shortly.

We'd landed at another small runway, almost identical to the other one. Then we'd divided into two vans, one with Foster and the prisoners, and one with the evildoers and myself. A long drive through some treacherous roads later, we arrived at our destination.

The centerpiece was a huge mansion. Patricia's place was undeniably large, but this was one serious mansion. It was two stories, and almost as big as the Chamber Mall. "Forty-eight bedrooms," said Daniel, as the iron gates swung open.

Behind the mansion was an immense metal structure, which from the outside sort of looked like an airplane hangar. A twenty-foot-high iron fence surrounded the entire area. A couple of dead birds lying in the snow next to it made me believe that it was electrified.

The gates closed behind us. Foster's van veered to the right, and a sliding door opened at the entrance to the metal structure. As Foster backed the van into the structure, Daniel drove us right up to the front doors of the mansion and shut off the engine.

"Home, sweet, home!" he announced. We all got out, and then he made the comment about the fresh air and how it was the first thing that needed to go. Nobody laughed. I think they'd all heard it before.

"Nice place," I said. "So what exactly is your day job, anyway?"

"I'm in the inheritance business."

"Ah. Good work if you can get it."

"No kidding."

Daniel entered a code into a keypad next to the door, and there was a loud click. He swung the double-doors open and gestured grandly. "Welcome to my humble abode! Please wipe your feet before you enter."

We walked inside. The foyer was enormous and elegantly decorated. There was a red-carpeted staircase leading upstairs that sort of looked like the one Clark Gable carried Vivian Leigh up in Gone With the Wind. There was a golden chandelier that sort of looked like the one in the Walt Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, though in real life and not animation. The whole place was overall very, very, very impressive.

"Wow," I said, indicating that I was impressed.

"I'll take you to your room," Daniel told me. "We'll eat dinner in about an hour, if that's okay."

"Sounds great."

Daniel led me upstairs and down a long, red-carpeted corridor. The walls were covered with a light gold-colored wallpaper. The doors were spaced about thirty-feet apart, so I assumed there was plenty of closet space.

"Do you get a lot of visitors?" I asked.

"Oh, sure. Not like you, of course. Most of my visitors are of the non-homicidal variety. That's why I've gotta keep things reasonably tasteful, at least in the mansion. But you get the special guest room."

We stopped at a door that looked much like the others. Daniel tapped it. "That's mahogany," he said, proudly. He swiped a yellow plastic card through a reader next to the door, and then swung it open. I stepped inside the room.

Every square inch of wall space was covered with pictures of corpses. Corpses in very bad shape. Some of the pictures were black-and-white newspaper clippings, while others were full-color and poster-sized. One of them looked like it was in 3-D. The four-poster bed had several fake heads resting on the pillows.

"Whaddya think?" Daniel asked.

"It's...it's nice."

Daniel patted me on the shoulder. "I know it's a bit much, but you're a virgin to this place and you've gotta get the whole treatment. Don't worry; we'll move you to another room tomorrow. Go ahead and take a shower, enjoy the Jacuzzi, whatever you want. There are bathrobes in the closet, but I'll bring you some clothes right before we head down for an early dinner. Is there anything else you need?"

"A vomit bag?"

"You'll be interesting to have around," said Daniel. Then his expression turned serious. "Now, I don't want you to take offense to this, okay?"

"Okay."

"You're new here, we only know each other through letters, so you'll understand if I have to take some precautions, right?"

I nodded. "Absolutely. It takes time to feel you can trust a homicidal maniac."

"Great. So don't freak out when I lock you in here, all right?"

"Not a problem. I understand completely."

"To make more bubbles, just turn the black knob to the right. Sometimes it sticks a bit, but you'll figure it out. See you in an hour."

Daniel left the room, shutting the door behind him. A soft click proved that I was now a prisoner, too.

* * *

When I was little, my dad used to say, "Son, guilt doesn't make a very fluffy pillow." It was not a statement that will ever make it into any of those best-selling books of quotes, but that didn't stop him from saying it on a regular basis. My mom would occasionally try to intervene, insisting that it was only confusing me, but my dad would explain that he was trying to teach me a lesson. It didn't really work.

The only long-lasting effect of his lesson is that, in times such as these, when I was wracked with guilt, I'll often think to myself "You know, Andrew, guilt doesn't make a very fluffy pillow." It's annoying as hell. I'm terrified that someday Kyle will misbehave and I'll say it to him before I realize what madness I've unleashed.

So, anyway, I had that stupid quote running through my mind while I turned on the water in the Jacuzzi. I had no intention of actually relaxing in it, but I hoped the noise of the whirlpool would cover the sound of me poking around, as well as convince anyone who happened to be listening that I was perfectly relaxed in my demented environment.

I did, however, take a hot shower. I felt guilty while I did it, since Roger no doubt was not currently enjoying a cascade of soothing water, but I couldn't exactly go downstairs to dinner reeking of nervous sweat.

After I was done, I turned on the whirlpool, took one of four white bathrobes from the closet, and then began to search the room, hoping to find either a weapon or an escape route.

I eliminated the escape route idea fairly quickly. No secret doors under the bed, under the rug, or in the closet. At least no obvious secret doors. I could possibly kick a hole through the wall, given sufficient time and better shoes, but I wasn't going to pursue that option quite yet.

Next I searched for weapons, something that could be easily concealed. The bedroom was a dead end. Some of the corpse posters looked like excellent paper cut material, and perhaps I could smother somebody with one of the fluffy pillows, but I needed something more substantial.

There was a shaving razor in the bathroom, but unfortunately it was electric. The best I could come up with was a pair of fingernail clippers. I slipped them into the pocket of the bathrobe. You never know.

In an emergency, I could break the mirror on the medicine cabinet and use the shards of glass, but beyond that I seemed to be pretty much stuck with the fingernail clippers.

I continued to search, and jumped when there was a knock at the door half an hour later. I waited as long as it would have taken me to get out of the Jacuzzi and towel off, and then went over to the door.

"Yeah?"

"It's Foster. I've got your clothes."

The lock clicked, and then Foster opened the door, holding some neatly folded clothes.

"Great, thanks," I said.

"No problem. Too bad yours got stolen."

"Yeah, well, things happen."

"Uh-huh. By the way, I don't believe for one second that you are who you say you are, and it will be my great pleasure to gouge your eyes out very soon. Then I'm going to rip out your throat and make you eat it."

"But you'll spare my nose, won't you?"

"Just keep thinking this is funny," said Foster. "Pretty soon it won't be."

He thrust the clothes at me, and then shut the door.

"What a prick," I said to the shirt.

I got dressed in the designer jeans and green polo shirt Foster had so thoughtfully provided. I transferred the handy fingernail clippers to my jeans pocket. I'd just tucked in my shirt when Daniel arrived to escort me to dinner.

* * *

"So, Andrew," began Mortimer, stuffing a bite of prime rib in his mouth, "what's the story? I'm talking about the whole Headhunter thing. Daniel explained part of it, but I'm still confused."

I shrugged. "Not much to tell. Have you read my book?"

"Yeah, actually."

"Lies. From beginning to end."

"You don't say." Mortimer thought about that for a moment. "So you actually worked for Ghoulish Delights?"

"That's right. They tried to rip me off, and I have it on good authority that they regretted it."

Daniel chuckled. "Excellent lobster, honey," he said to Josie. "You've outdone yourself again."

"Just call me Mrs. Domestic."

"And while you were with Ghoulish Delights, you were also going around killing people as the Headhunter?" asked Mortimer.

"That's right."

"Busy son of a bitch," muttered Foster.

"Idle hands do the devil's work."

"So, you're part of Ghoulish Delights, and you're the Headhunter," said Mortimer. "You've got this fantastic cover story that you're Andrew Mayhem, the family man who stopped a bunch of sadistic killers and their fans. Why would you tell anyone your secret?"

Thomas had posed that same question to the Headhunter. "Because," I said, taking a sip of my red wine, "Daniel here promised me one hell of a party."

"And you'll get it," said Daniel.

"Besides, who'd believe it?" I asked. "I'll just tell the press that you whackos kidnapped me." I laughed in what I hoped was a convincing manner.

"What about Roger? I thought you two were best friends from childhood."

I took a much larger sip of the wine. "We were."

"Then what happened?"

"Things changed."

"No kidding. They must've changed quite a bit for you to bring him here. What did he do?"

"Let's just say that when I came home early one day, I decided to be a little more creative than running for the shotgun."

Mortimer nodded his understanding. "Gotcha."

"Lost three wives that way," said Stan, not looking up from his dinner. Daniel had forbade him from smoking at the dinner table, but an unlit cigarette stuck out of the corner of his mouth as he chewed his steak.

"So when do I find out the big surprise?" I asked. "There's only so much suspense one guy can take, you know."

"Then we'll get right into the overview," said Daniel. "You've probably guessed that all of us sitting here at this table are...well, we're sickos. Just like you. Without trying to get into the psychological explanations and theories about our mothers and all that crap, it's safe to say that we all very much enjoy the acts of torture and murder. We like the suffering, we like the pain, we like the whole visual spectacle. Simply put, we're a bunch of freaks."

"Here, here," said Josie, raising her wine glass.

"The thing is, it's not the most convenient hobby to enjoy. The dangers are incredible. Even a sniper puts himself at risk, but we want the up close and personal element. We don't want it over quickly. We want them to know what's happening, and what's going to happen. Sometimes we even love to rub the family's face in it...not literally, though that would be fun, too."

Just keep smiling, I told myself. You like what he's saying...you like what he's saying...you like what he's saying...at least don't puke on the lobster...

"Anyway," Daniel continued, "I am, if you haven't already guessed, extremely rich. I did not murder my father to get my inheritance, I earned it the good old-fashioned way: lung cancer. So I had this wonderful house built. Like it?"

I nodded. "It's roomy."

"That it is. It's tastefully decorated, except for your room, of course, and quite frankly the type of place you'd feel perfectly comfortable using to entertain royalty. But I assume you noticed the other building?"

"Yeah."

"That's are where the fun begins. I have created what I like to call the Psychopath's Paradise. 'Psychopath' may not be the most accurate word, if you really get into the medical definitions, but it works well enough. A place where people like myself, and Josie, and Foster, and Stan, and Mortimer, and Andrew Mayhem the Headhunter can have themselves the most outrageously entertaining kill-fest imaginable, without worrying about all those annoying interruptions like family members walking in, or cops showing up, or having to constantly say 'Scream and you're dead! Scream and you're dead!' Let me tell you, Andrew, you're in for a treat."

Thirty years of pretending to love that disgusting, slimy fudge my Aunt Patty makes every year at Christmas wasn't nearly enough practice for the feigned delight I had to do at this moment.

"Sounds fuckin' awesome!" I said, hoping that gratuitous profanity would make my joy more believable.

"So, anyway, every year we're each responsible for bringing three victims, though Josie and I will usually snag some bonus prey. Those like myself, who capture them early, get the extra enjoyment of inflicting mental torture upon their families. Then there are losers like Stan, who wait until the last minute and nearly get themselves shot."

Stan hadn't been paying attention. He looked up at the sound of his name, shrugged, and returned to his dinner.

"And you invite a special guest each year?" I asked.

Daniel shook his head. "You're the first. So we have lots of special surprises for you, my friend. In fact, let's all finish up our meal so we can move on to the first."

I had absolutely no interest in finishing my meal. "What are we doing first?"

"What else, new guy? Initiation."

ROGER'S SIDE

This continues the sad, sad tale of Roger Tanglen. They still haven't taken away my tape recorder, not that I offered it to anyone, so I guess I'll just keep talking until they take it away, or they kill me, or my fellow prisoners tell me to shut the hell up before they beat me senseless.

"Shut the hell up before we beat you senseless!"

That was Rodney, my cellmate. As you can hear, we haven't completely lost our sense of humor yet. Which is good, I mean, if you quit laughing, you might as well be dead, right? Wow, that sounds profound. Laughter is the best medicine. Clown noses and whoopee cushions will get us out of this, I'm sure of it!

Yes, I'm babbling again. I apologize to whoever ends up transcribing this mess. Should that be whomever? Whatever.

Let me get down to the important stuff. Right now I'm in a room about...oh, a hundred square feet. Eighty, maybe. It's set up like holding cells at a jail, at least the way they look in the movies, since I've never had the pleasure of seeing one in real life. Five cells on each side. There are two doors in the room, one on each end, metal doors with a handle like the kind you see inside of a meat locker, I think. You know, one of those long handles that you pull down. Actually, I don't think I've ever been inside of a meat locker. I'm using movies for reference again. And I'm babbling again.

There are eighteen other people in here, mostly two to a cell. Like I said, I'm with Rodney Telfare from Phoenix, one of my co-passengers on the trip here. When I'm done I'll pass around the recorder and let everyone say their name, just for the record. I only have one other tape, so I hope I don't run out, but everyone deserves to have their name on the tape so there's some chance that their families will find out what happened.

Actually, I hope I do run out! That means I'm alive longer than the length of the tapes! I take back my previous comment.

Believe it or not, these cells aren't all that uncomfortable. There are two beds, with comforters and fluffy pillows. We've even got a water cooler. No refrigerator, though. Every cell has its own bookshelf, but every single title on ours is either a horror novel or true crime. Just getting us in the mood, I guess.

Oh, and I can't forget the inspirational slogan painted on the wall: "Today is probably the last day of your life." Cute, huh?

I think I'll hand this over to Rodney now, so he can...no, wait, I think somebody's unlocking the door.

[Sound of door opening. Footsteps.]

"Hey, dead meats, how's it going? I'm coming for one of you! One of you gets to die tonight! Whoever could it beeeee? I just don't know, there are so many fine candidates to choose from! Eenie, meenie, miney, moe, catch a tiger by the toe, if he hollers...oh, no, I like this one. Big and strong. What's your name, sir?"

"He asked you your name, asshole!"

"Now, Foster, that's no way to speak to a dying man. You really do need to learn some manners when conversing with people who are just moments away from a ghastly, hideous, unbearably painful death. Again, what's your name, sir?"

"Rodney Telfare."

"Rodney Telfare! Well, Rodney, YOU'RE GONNA DIE!!! I hope that hasn't ruined your evening. All right, Foster, get him out of here and bring him to the ring. I'll meet you there."

"Yeah, it would be a shame if you had to do anything around this place."

"Ah, quit yer dad-blasted bellyachin'. You love using that cattle prod and you know it."

"Yes, I do."

"Ta-ta, everyone! Keep looking over your shoulders! You never know, I could be coming for YOU next!"

[Sound of door closing.]

"What a dick. All right, Rod, you can make me work for this, or you can be nice. See this gun? One of your fellow prisoners gets shot for every second of annoyance you cause me, starting with your cellmate. Come over to the bars. Good."

[A cry of pain. Sound of a body falling.]

"Heh heh, look at him twitch. And if you don't want to be in his place, you just stay right back there where you are."

[Sound of cell door sliding open. Body being dragged. Door slamming shut.]

"Damn, what did we feed this guy?"

[Sound of door opening, then closing.]

Oh, God.

I'm...I just...I'm turning off the tape now.

CHAPTER TEN

This should have been the time where I got over being Mr. Cautious and did something. Maybe I could've grabbed a steak knife or a lobster claw and tried to use Stan as a hostage. I knew it wouldn't have worked, but I was still furious at myself for not trying.

Now, of course, I was in absolutely no position to try anything. Daniel and Foster had gone on ahead. Josie had blindfolded me, and she and the others led me to wherever we were going. They didn't say anything as we walked, and I didn't know whether to worry more about my upcoming initiation or the fact that they very well might have known all along that I wasn't who I claimed to be. For all I knew, I was to be their first victim of the season.

We walked for about ten minutes, stopping at one point for a door to be opened. There was a huge rush of cold air and wind as we walked outside, and then another door opened and we walked back inside, no longer on a carpeted surface. Two minutes later I walked onto what felt like sand, and after a few steps Josie put her hands on my waist.

"We're here, sweetie," she said.

She pulled off my blindfold, and I found myself standing in a scaled-down version of a Roman gladiator arena, maybe thirty feet across. The walls were about eight feet high, so there was no chance of climbing out, at least not without a few minutes of privacy. Josie left, closing a metal gate behind her. I saw Mortimer and Stan take their seats above. Stan held a bag of popcorn.

Daniel was directly above the far wall of the arena. He sat on a throne, wearing a king's robe and jeweled crown. Josie appeared above and sat down in the front row.

Daniel picked up a horn and blew into it, making spitting sounds but very little music. He set it aside, and then gestured grandly. "Welcome, filthy peasants, to the Initiation! This evening, Andrew 'Headhunter' Mayhem shalt prove that he is worthy to stand among us! He shalt battle a prisoner, a strong and mighty foe, until one of the two hath fallen dead!"

The gate on the far side of the arena opened, and a tall, muscular, but scared-looking black man was shoved forward. The gate slammed shut behind him.

"Come forth, Almost Initiated One, and choose thy weapon!" Daniel said, pointing to me. "Choose well, for it will be thy only source of defense!"

My legs trembled as I walked forward. Even if I were willing to fight an innocent man to carry off this ruse, I wasn't even sure I could beat him! My mind raced through every possible escape method, but save for somehow managing to kill all of the bad guys from my spot down here in the arena, there didn't seem to be one.

Daniel lifted a large brown box to the ledge. It displayed a sword, a mace, a short spear, some other bladed weapons I didn't recognize, and a stapler. "Choose now!"

"I choose the sword," I said.

"The Almost Initiated One chooseth the sword!" Daniel announced. He removed the sword from the display box, made as if he were about to throw it, and then grinned and put it down.

"Thy King rules that the Almost Initiated One isn't going to get off that easy!" he said. "He hath far too much experience with his weapon of choice. Choose again!"

"Hey, he's cheating!" I said, trying to sound amused. "What kind of crooked operation are you running here? Gimme the sword!"

"Thy King's word is final! Thou must choose again!"

"What, are you just gonna make me run through the whole box of weapons until I pick the one you want?"

"Nay, Almost Initiated One! Thy next choice will be thy weapon! Thou hast my word as King!"

"Then I choose..." I said, as a sudden idea came to me. "I choose as my weapon...knowledge of the periodic table of the elements!"

There was a long silence.

"I beg thy pardon?" asked Daniel.

"Any man can fight with blades of steel, or maces of...steel. But true wisdom is the finest weapon of all!" I pointed accusingly at the prisoner. "I challenge thee to a duel of wisdom, a duel in thy knowledge of the periodic table of the elements!"

Daniel looked utterly confused. Then, after a moment, he shrugged and sat down. "Okay, sure, go for it."

Now, of course, I had to hope that I still remembered. I'd wanted to be a chemist for about three weeks back in high school, but I'd had that stupid table hammered into my skull so deeply that it could never escape.

The prisoner looked even more baffled than Daniel. "Speak!" I shouted. "Prove thy worthiness at this battle of wisdom!"

"Uhhhh..." said the prisoner.

"Thy knowledge is miserable! Victory will be mine!" I flexed my muscles in glory.

"No, wait. It goes, H for hydrogen, He for helium, Li for lithium, Be for, uh, beryllium, B for boron..."

My mouth dropped open.

"...C for carbon, N for nitrogen, O for oxygen..."

I just stood there, flabbergasted, as the prisoner rattled off the entire list. As he progressed, his voice took on a singsong pattern, as if he'd memorized the elements using a song like the ABC's.

"...and Lr for lawrencium," he finished.

The spectators above exchanged questioning looks.

"Okay, well, I guess you have great wisdom," I admitted.

"All right, enough of this intellectual crap!" said Daniel, standing up again. "Let's see some blood! Andrew, pick your weapon!"

"But I won!" the prisoner insisted.

"You didn't win shit. He was just messin' with you. Andrew, weapon! C'mon, c'mon, let's move, his royal majesty is getting impatient!"

That annoying little voice in my head began to speak again, forcing me to consider the option of fighting to the death. After all, if I killed the prisoner, I'd earn their trust, and then I'd have a better shot at rescuing Roger and the others. One would die so others could live. It was a worthy sacrifice, wasn't it?

No. I couldn't do it. There had to be another way.

"The stapler," I said.

Daniel leaned over the side of the wall. "Okay, Andrew, I know I'm standing here dressed like some dipshit king and we're making this into a fun little game, and we're trying to be all silly by sticking a stapler in the weapon display case, but you do notice the element of danger here, right?"

"I notice it. I choose the stapler."

"Okay, whatever, it's your funeral. Stapler it is."

He removed the stapler and tossed it onto the sand next to me. I picked it up and held it in a menacing manner. I was still hoping to find some way to get out of this mess without either of us getting hurt. If the prisoner didn't feel he was in serious danger, maybe we could figure something out.

"Prisoner, choose thy weapon!" shouted Daniel.

"The sword!"

Damn. The annoying voice told me that now I was going to die so that the others could die, too.

Daniel picked up the sword and tossed it onto the ground next to the prisoner. I immediately rushed at him, arms outstretched. I had to keep weapons out of this as much as possible.

The prisoner moved out of the way, and then kicked me in the shin. I flew forward, landing on my stomach and ending up with a mouthful of sand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him pick up the sword.

I quickly got up, spitting out the sand. I wiped my mouth off on my sleeve as we stood there, six feet apart, trying to stare each other down.

"Gooooooooo Andrew!" shouted Daniel. "Staple him to death!"

"You can do it, Andrew!" Josie pitched in. "The Wench Brigade has faith in you!"

The prisoner stepped forward and took a quick swing with the sword. I moved back out of the way, wishing I had my trusty tire iron. And that my car was between us. And that one of us was back in Chamber.

I unhinged the stapler, ready to fire staples at the slightest provocation. I hoped I looked ridiculous, but the prisoner's expression remained serious and wary. Did he really think they'd let him go if he killed me? Had they even promised such a thing?

He dashed at me, and I let loose with a mighty storm of staples. I tried, anyway. The stapler jammed after the first one. I dodged his attack, and then fled to the other side of the arena.

Daniel cupped his hands over his mouth. "Boooooooo!!!"

"Release the lions!" shouted Josie.

It would not have surprised me if real lions suddenly rushed into the arena, but fortunately none appeared. I lifted my foot in the air and made comical kung-fu noises while I contorted my body into ridiculous fighting positions. I had to get this prisoner to relax. And I didn't want the others to know I was terrified.

"I'm rootin' for the prisoner," Stan declared, flicking popcorn into the ring at me. "Gooooooo prisoner!"

"Gooooooo prisoner!" Mortimer chimed in.

"Kiiiiiiiss my ass!" I replied.

The prisoner ran at me again. I stood there, arms casually folded, and then let myself drop just as he swung the sword. It smashed into the wall, and I quickly wrapped my arms around his legs. He fell to the sand.

I began pressing the stapler against his right leg. It wasn't working, but they probably couldn't tell that from above. "All fear the mighty stapler!" I shouted, trying to grab for the sword with my other hand. The prisoner rolled on his side and swung the sword, slashing my shoulder.

The sting was incredible. I cringed and reflexively pushed my hand to the wound. For a split second I felt nothing but pure fury. It faded instantly, but perhaps that was something I could use.

"I'll kill you!" I screamed, diving upon him and pummeling him with my empty fist. But I pulled my punches at the last instant, hoping it looked convincing from above. I was really hitting him, but he had to notice the effort I was making not to hurt him. The prisoner tried to swing the sword again, but I bashed his arm with the stapler, hard, sending another jolt of agony through my injured shoulder.

"You're dead! Dead! Dead! Dead!" I grabbed for his throat and screamed in his ear. "Dead!" Then I whispered "please stop fighting," followed by another "Dead!"

He seemed to get it. He made another halfhearted swing with the sword, which I easily blocked. I pretended to struggle much more violently than was necessary, and then wrenched it out of his grip. Then I tossed the stapler aside and began bashing on his head with both fists. I continued to pull my punches, but a couple were harder than I'd intended. We hadn't exactly rehearsed this.

Then the prisoner stopped moving. I assumed he was faking, but I couldn't be sure. I got up off him, then went over and picked up the sword.

"Yeah! Cut his head off!" Daniel shouted.

I lifted the sword above my head, screamed in rage, and then slammed the blade down into the sand next to him.

I stood there, panting.

"You, uh, missed," Daniel pointed out.

I looked down at the prisoner and kicked him in the side. "Forget it. He's no fun to kill like this."

Stan began to boo and fling popcorn again. "Whatta rip-off! G'wan, kill him!" Mortimer and Josie began to join in.

"No," I said, clutching my injured shoulder. "I'm not killing some unconscious guy. That's no challenge. You guys are here for fun, right? Well, let's chop him up when it's fun!"

"Booooooooo!!!"

"Quiet!" snapped Daniel. "If he wants to save him for later, that's his choice." He gestured dramatically. "Thou hast proven thyself worthy! Thou art Initiated! Welcome!"

He began to applaud. The others joined in, half-heartedly.

"Thank you, thank you," I said. The gate opened and Foster entered, holding a metal prod. "Long have I dreamed of joining such a fine—"

"No speeches," said Daniel, removing his robe. "I realize it's only about four, but it's bedtime. We all need to get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be one busy, exciting day."

Foster jabbed the stick against the prisoner. His body jerked as if electrified. Foster jabbed him again. I didn't think the prisoner was feigning unconsciousness this time.

I reached for the sword. "Leave it," said Foster. "I'll take care of it."

"I can help out," I said.

Foster took out his revolver. "Get the hell away from it. You're lucky I don't blow off your kneecaps anyway."

The gate behind me opened. "Whoa, Foster! Put the piece away! Show some respect to our newest initiate!"

"Yeah, whatever," said Foster, pocketing the gun.

Daniel patted me on the injured shoulder, none too gently. "Don't worry, it may hurt but it's not deep. I'll send Foster to your room with a first-aid kit."

As we left the arena, we stepped into a hallway that split off into three directions. "Take off your shirt," said Daniel. "Don't wanna drip blood all over the place."

I took off the shirt, trying not to gasp in pain. I pressed the cloth to my cut, and Daniel motioned for me to head down the hallway to the left. "Congratulations on your victory," he said.

"Thanks."

"Mind if I speak freely?"

"Not at all," I told him.

"I didn't want to make you look bad in front of everyone, but you really should have killed him. I know you may not think it's sporting to waste an unconscious victim, but I think you cost yourself some respect from everyone else. And I think you cost me some, too, for bringing you here."

"Sorry. That's just not the way I work."

We stopped at a door. Daniel swiped his card. The door opened and we stepped outside into the cold, behind the mansion. The next door was only a few feet away, and after Daniel opened it we were back in the red-carpeted hallway.

"I can understand that," Daniel admitted. "And your act was entertaining and all, but you've got to realize that these people don't know you. That karate stuff was kinda funny, a little, but there has to be a payoff. Beating the guy up doesn't cut it. You should've chopped his head off. You'd be a hero. Now they all think you're some fake."

My stomach did a flip-flop, but I tried not to let my anxiety show. I stopped walking. "I don't much appreciate being told who I have to kill."

"Oh, don't give me that, Andrew! These are games! That's why I invited you here! I kept the details secret, but you knew what was involved! We're supposed to be having fun! If you're going to let some ridiculous moral code get in the way of everything, you might as well go home. I'll have Foster fly you home tonight. How about that?"

The way he looked at me, I knew flying home was not an option, even if I'd been willing to leave Roger and the others behind. I put my hand to my shoulder. "I'm sorry. I really am. I'm not thinking right. I'm tired and my shoulder hurts like hell. I just thought it would've been more fun to kill him when he was awake to see what was happening, like you said at dinner tonight, but you're right. I should've killed him."

"Yes, you should have."

"I could run back there and finish him off, if you want."

Daniel appeared to relax. "Nah. We'll get him later. This was nothing, anyway, just a prelude. You'll have plenty of time to redeem yourself tomorrow."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I sat on the edge of the bed (having moved those phony severed heads to the closet, facing the wall) trying to look at something besides the corpse pictures. God, I missed Helen. And Theresa and Kyle. If I managed to get out of this, I was never going to leave my house again, so I couldn't get into trouble.

Well, that wasn't true—I got into all kinds of trouble without leaving the house, or even my bed, but at least not potentially fatal trouble.

Guilt or no guilt, I needed to soak in the Jacuzzi. No matter how dangerous it was, I was going to have to make my move tomorrow, so I had to be in the best shape possible. I turned on the hot water as there was a knock at the door.

I almost told Foster to get lost, but I did need the bandages. Of course, if he decided to make good on his kneecap threat...

The door opened. It was Josie, holding a first-aid kit. "Hiya," she said. "I come bearing gifts."

"Hey, it's just what I've always wanted," I said, crossing the room.

"Foster said that for all he cared you could bleed to death, so I volunteered."

"You're very generous." I reached for the first aid kit, but she held it behind her back.

"Don't you want me to patch you up?"

"Nah, I've got it covered."

"Oh, don't be silly. I know what sissies you men are. I'll do it." She closed the door behind her. "Nice wallpaper, huh?"

"Yeah. I'll have to buy some for the kids' romper room at home."

"Danny just likes to mess with his friends. You'll get used to it. Not for a few years, but you'll get used to it. Oooh, the Jacuzzi sounds like a good idea. Mind if I join you after we finish?"

"Danny might not approve."

She opened the first-aid kit. "Danny might not find out."

"And then Danny might not remove my heart with a can opener. I think I'll pass."

"Your loss. I'm scrumptious in the nude."

Now this was disconcerting. I wasn't sure if she was serious, kidding around, or if Daniel was waiting right outside the door to find out what I'd do.

"I'm sure you are," I said.

"C'mon, you're getting even with Roger, don't you want to get even with your wife, too?"

"I don't consider being slaughtered by your husband getting even."

"What if I told you Danny was okay with it?"

"I probably wouldn't believe you."

"You're not very trusting."

"If you provided me with a signed, notarized statement that he was okay with it, then I'd be perfectly happy to have you be nice and naked in my hot tub. As it is, the fact that I get locked in here when nobody's around indicates that we haven't crossed all the trust barriers yet."

"All righty, then." She patted the bed next to her. "Let's get that shoulder bandaged up."

"Really, you can just leave the kit."

"Andy, sweetie, you don't have to worry. I may bite, but I'm not venomous. The big, strong serial killer isn't afraid of a waif like me, is he?"

She wasn't exactly a waif, but pointing that out seemed like a really good way to get hurt. I sat down on the bed next to her, and she removed a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton swabs from the kit.

And then I realized that while I was standing there being extremely uncomfortable with her in the room, I was overlooking a perfect opportunity to strike. Daniel might be a horrible, vicious murderer...but he also might be willing to release the prisoners to save his wife. It was a risk, sure, but there clearly wasn't going to be an easy solution to my problems.

Josie pressed the alcohol-soaked cotton swab against my cut. I forced myself not to wince. Instead, I put my hand gently on her leg.

She continued cleaning the cut, but there was a definite hint of a smile.

I slid my hand upward just a bit as she set aside the cotton and alcohol and took out a bandage. I peeked into the kit. No scissors. No sharp objects. The rubbing alcohol wasn't even in a glass bottle.

I'd just have to do this without a weapon.

Now that the excess blood had been wiped away, my cut didn't look all that bad. It was barely even bleeding anymore. I wondered if Josie thought I was a complete wimp.

She tore open the bandage wrapper.

I slid my hand down her leg, and then up again, beginning to knead her flesh.

She gently put the bandage on my shoulder.

I pounced.

I slammed my hand over her mouth and wrestled her down onto the bed. I grabbed the first aid kit to bash against her head, but she got a handful of my hair and tugged hard.

Damn! Why hadn't I thought to turn on the whirlpool first, to cover the noise?

She bit down on my hand, but I pulled it away before she could draw blood. "Danny!" she screamed.

I got ready to slam my fist into her face, but the door burst open. Daniel and Foster entered; Foster with his gun.

I raised my hands in the air. "Don't shoot!"

Foster pointed the gun at my face, ready to do just that.

"No!" said Daniel. "Josie, come here."

Josie got off the bed and rushed over to Daniel, throwing her arms around him. Foster looked like he wanted to shoot me so badly that he could barely keep from wetting himself, but he didn't pull the trigger.

"What's the story, Mayhem?" Daniel asked.

"We weren't doing anything," I insisted.

"Oh, really? And what were you doing?"

"Look, I'm sorry, okay?" I said, getting to my feet. "She came in here saying all this stuff."

"What stuff?"

"That she looked good naked, and did I want her to join me in the hot tub? She said you didn't mind!"

"And you believed her?"

"No! Well, yeah. I mean, c'mon, Daniel. You built a freakin' gladiator stadium in your backyard so you could watch people kill each other. I figure somebody that depraved isn't going to get all bent out of shape over a little wife-swapping."

"I'm missing where the 'swapping' portion comes into play."

"You know what I mean."

"I'm not sure I do."

"Come on, Daniel!" said Foster. "Why are we listening to him? Let me blow his face off."

"In a second."

At that moment, water began to spill over the top of the Jacuzzi. "Aw, for crying out loud," muttered Daniel, walking over to turn off the faucet. "Now look what you've done."

"Can I shoot him for that, at least?" asked Foster.

"No, you may not. Give me the gun. You're getting all worked up; you're gonna hurt somebody." Daniel walked back to the doorway and grabbed the gun out of Foster's hand. I lowered my arms.

"But he tried to kill Josie!"

"He didn't try to kill Josie, you jackass! He tried to get his rocks off! Get out of here for a minute, all right?"

Foster punched the wall, then stepped out into the hallway. Daniel closed the door, and pointed the gun at me.

"All right, look. I knew she was gonna come on to you, and I'm cool with it. Share the wealth, know what I mean? Maybe I don't provide her with a signed, notarized statement, like you said, but I'm happy to let her do her own thing. My only question for you is, why was my wife screaming my name?"

"Isn't that what you'd want?" I asked, trying to smile.

"This is not the time for jokes," said Daniel, keeping the gun pointed at me. "This is the time to think very carefully about one's own mortality, especially when one could very well end up with the other prisoners."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Really, I am. I thought she liked it a bit rough."

"Mmm-hmm. And did you ask her?"

"It's not something I'm used to asking."

"Well maybe you should consider it in the future. If you have one."

I leaned forward and cracked my knuckles. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"You invited a man who has killed fourteen people into your home. You did it for the express purpose of letting him help kill even more people. And now you're telling me you were expecting a well-behaved houseguest? Are you some kind of idiot?"

"Watch yourself," said Daniel.

"No, you watch yourself. You invite me here into this hedonistic serial killer paradise where we can do whatever we want, so hell yeah I'm gonna dive at your wife when she tries to seduce me. Now, I apologize for getting rough. I didn't hit her or anything; I just put my hand over her mouth. I won't do it again. But come on, Daniel, I turned my former best friend over to you for who-knows-what kind of torture...did you think you were inviting Mr. Rogers?"

Daniel pulled the trigger.

I flinched at the sound of the gunshot. I turned and saw that a bit of smoke billowed from a bullet hole about six inches from my head, in a color photograph of a skinned body.

"You've got a point," he said.

Josie started to protest, but he waved her silent. "I guess we need to go over some house rules. Do whatever you want to the prisoners, but respect the guests. Understand?"

"I understand."

"I'm sorry to say that you've cost yourself an incredible couple of hours. Believe me, I know what you're missing. But tomorrow we'll start fresh. How does that sound?"

"That sounds fine," I said. "Josie, I'm sorry. I got carried away. You should be a little less irresistible."

"Jerk," she muttered, opening the door and leaving.

"You're not making friends here," Daniel informed me. "I suggest you soak for a long time, then take a cold shower, get a lot of sleep, and hope things go better."

"They will," I promised.

"I'm counting on that. Sleep tight." He left. I heard the door lock, and then promptly rushed into the bathroom and vomited.

After I'd recovered, I reached into the hot tub and turned the knob to drain some of the water. The bathroom had plenty of towels, so I used those to soak up the spilled water.

Now they were going to be watching me even more closely than before. I'd screwed up my chance. Possibly my only chance. And I hadn't even gotten any use out of the fingernail clippers. Things had seemed pretty much hopeless before, but now...

I looked over at the bed.

No. No way.

I hurried over to it.

Yes!

A yellow card key. Josie must have lost it during our struggle, along with a stick of chewing gum.

Would she notice? If she stuck with Daniel, she might not need to use it. It had been a few minutes already. She could be in their bedroom. Or she could be on her way back.

Should I sneak out now, just in case, or wait for a better opportunity during the night, when everyone was asleep?

If they heard me leave, and there was an extremely strong likelihood of that happening if I went now, I'd be screwed. If she came back for the key, I'd be no worse off than I was before discovering it (which was pretty darn bad, admittedly, but I was trying to think positively). But if she didn't come back, I might be able to find the prisoners. Find Roger.

I decided to wait.

* * *

I spent almost an hour in the Jacuzzi, doing my best to relax. Nobody had returned for the key.

I got out and got dressed in the old clothes. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was about five o'clock Alaska time. If they got a full night's sleep, the mansion residents would probably be waking up to start their new day just after midnight. Appropriate.

An hour didn't seem long enough to wait, but I was scared to doze off for fear that I wouldn't wake up until they came to get me. An alarm clock would've been nice. Instead, I quietly paced around the room, breathing deeply, trying to get myself in a jolly state of mind.

The next hour passed very slowly, and I spent most of it checking my watch to see how quickly the hour was passing. Finally, I decided it was time to go. If the card worked.

I held the card up to the reader. There was a beep, followed by a click. I pulled the door open, carefully peered down both ends of the hallway, and stepped outside my room.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I had a cover story ready—Josie had dropped her card during our scuffle, and I got bored and decided to take a stroll—but if they caught me I probably wouldn't have a chance to use it. The usual variety of Andrew Mayhem screw-ups were no longer permissible. Bumbling incompetence would be fatal.

I shut the door behind me. I didn't know exactly where the prisoners were being held, but it was certainly in the metal structure and not the main house. The mansion was practically a maze, but I could probably find my way back the way we'd come earlier.

And, hopefully, locate a telephone along the way.

In fact, looking for a phone was probably the best place to start. My room hadn't been equipped with one, but the other bedrooms might have them. Probably any room that wasn't specifically intended to store homicidal maniacs who hadn't completely earned Daniel's trust would have a way to contact the outside world, right?

If I accidentally opened a door where one of the others was staying, I was dead, but that wasn't likely to happen. Not with this many rooms. Though that didn't mean somebody in a nearby room wouldn't hear me.

I decided to tiptoe to the end of the hallway before checking any rooms. I turned the corner and pressed my ear against the first door on the right. No noise from inside, so I waved my pass card in front of the reader.

The door unlocked. I took a deep breath, and then opened it. I stepped inside and shut the door behind me before turning on the light.

"Surprise!"

The colorful banner with that word hung across the bedposts. The floor was covered with balloons, though most of them were only half-inflated anymore. Wrapping paper littered the bed.

So not all celebrations in this house were completely demented. And they really needed a housekeeping staff.

I searched the room quickly, kicking balloons out of my way, but there was no phone. Nor any useful weapons, unless I wanted to use the balloons to smother somebody.

I shut off the light and exited.

I unlocked the bedroom next to it. It was similarly furnished, though without the surprise party decorations. No phone. Nothing helpful.

As I returned to the hallway, I heard a door open.

I ducked back into the room, closing the door quickly but softly. I considered hiding in the bathroom, but decided to stand by the doorway, ready to strike if somebody came in to investigate.

I stood in the dark for a minute.

Then five.

Then ten.

It didn't appear that they'd heard me...unless they were waiting outside the door for me to come out.

But I couldn't just stay in here all night. I had to get moving before somebody decided to check out my room.

I slipped back out into the hallway. It was empty.

I didn't like the idea of wandering around the mansion when there was a good chance that somebody else was roaming the halls, but I couldn't give up now. There had to be a phone somewhere. Or else a way to free the prisoners.

I continued down the hallway. I turned another corner, and saw a door much larger than the others, made out of different wood. I unlocked it and went inside.

It was a huge office. A black desk took up almost a quarter of the office by itself, and the walls were covered with maps of various cities. As I walked over to the desk I glanced at the bookshelf, which was filled with encyclopedias, almanacs, and numerous other reference works. I wondered what kind of work was done here.

The desk drawers were locked, so I couldn't get into them, but the top of the desk had all the usual office accessories: pens, pencil sharpener, tape, calculator, hole puncher, stapler...everything but a phone.

It did, however, have a fax machine.

I flipped on the power switch. It began to hum, a little too loudly for my comfort, and a digital message read, "WARMING UP...PLEASE WAIT."

This was perfect. I could write down all the necessary information and fax it right to the cops. I might not know exactly where I was, but this place was pretty big, and if they sent out some helicopters in a thirty-mile radius of Fairbanks they were bound to find it, sooner or later.

It would've been a foolproof plan if I knew their fax machine number.

Or any fax machine number.

I'd sent a few faxes during my temp jobs, but that was it. There was not a single fax number I knew off the top of my head. I couldn't even guess at them. The machine was useless.

But then I remembered something. One time at the corporate slave temp job I'd answered the phone and been greeted with an annoying high-pitched beep. The nose-picking guy in the cubicle next to mine explained that somebody was mistakenly trying to send the fax to my phone number, and that I should just forward the call to the fax machine.

Who could I send it to who would know to forward it?

It had to be a business. But I didn't have any business numbers memorized.

Except one.

Pudgy Pierre's Pizza, back in Chamber. They would fax their menu to you if you requested it. I'd gotten in trouble for having them send one to work.

Could I count on Pudgy Pierre?

No, no, no! I smacked myself in the forehead. I was making things too complicated. Just send it to 911! If you dialed 911 and didn't say anything, they'd still send somebody out to investigate, so the same might be true if I sent a fax.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen, Andrew Mayhem had a plan!

The display read "ENTER USER CODE."

There went the plan.

I tugged on the drawers again, in case they'd decided to unlock themselves. They hadn't. There was a small notebook on the corner of the desk. I picked it up, and saw that the pages were filled with various doodles, including smiley faces and naked cartoon characters. A handwritten note in the inside cover read: "Fax: 1113."

Finally, I was getting a break. I entered it.

"INCORRECT USER ID. PLEASE RE-ENTER."

Crap!

But maybe he changed it regularly and just didn't write it in the notebook. I typed in "1114."

"INCORRECT USER ID. PLEASE RE-ENTER."

1115.

"ENTER NUMBER."

Yes! Fantastic! I tore out a sheet of the notebook paper, grabbed a pen, and quickly scribbled: "Trapped 30 miles out of Fairbanks. Many people have been kidnapped. Kidnappers are armed and extremely dangerous. Please send help to a huge brown mansion, surrounded by fence, with a large metal building behind it. Owned by Daniel Rankin. This is not a joke!!! Andrew Mayhem."

I put the paper into the fax machine, punched in 911, and pressed the "send" button. Miraculously, the paper went through the feeder without crumpling up, which was the fate met by at least seventy-five percent of the pages I faxed at my temp job.

The machine beeped to show that it was ready to send the fax. Then another message showed on the display. "NO DIAL TONE."

I hit "cancel," then tried again.

"NO DIAL TONE."

I tried Pudgy Pierre.

"NO DIAL TONE."

I picked up the paper, crumpled it up, and shoved it into my pocket. The fax machine was useless.

* * *

I returned everything to the way it had been before I'd entered the office, and snuck back into the hallway. It was possible that some part of the mansion had phone service connected, but I needed to put that idea behind me and see if I could find the prisoners.

I quietly made my way through the corridors, finally reaching the staircase leading down to the main foyer. I felt extremely vulnerable walking down these stairs into such a wide-open area, but I didn't have a choice.

As I walked down, I couldn't help but glance at the front door. My pass card probably worked on it. I could get out of this place, go for help, and bring back the cavalry to rescue everyone.

It sounded nice and simple. If I had the keys to either of the vans. If I could get the electrified gates open. If I had any clue where to drive. If there wasn't a good chance of a mass prisoner extermination after I was discovered missing.

Without the van, I could possibly find a way to get through the gates. Maybe the part that opened and closed wasn't electrified, I wasn't sure. I didn't know much about electric fences. But running around in sub-zero temperatures in the dark this far away from civilization in the least-densely populated state in the union (I don't know where I remembered that factoid from) didn't seem likely to get me anywhere. And how hard would it be for them to follow my tracks in the snow?

Nope, exiting through the front door was a lost cause.

This line of thinking did make me wonder what exactly I planned to do with the prisoners if I was able to free them...but I'd worry about that later.

I crossed the foyer and walked down a short hallway, stopping at the sound of music. Country music that might have been halfway decent on its own, but was currently being sabotaged by the non-melodic voice of Mortimer.

It was coming from the dining room.

Though it was impossible to be certain, the way this place was set up, I was pretty sure I had to pass the dining room to get to the other building. Even if I didn't, I was getting really nervous about the amount of time I'd spent away from my room already. I had to get moving.

Very, very slowly I tiptoed over to the dining room entrance. Mortimer's singing got louder and worse.

"Oooooh, why you done left me, I just don't know, but when y'all come back, your head off I'll blow..."

Being as careful as humanly possible (for a loser like me), I peeked into the dining room. Mortimer sat at the table, back to me. In one hand he held an enormous turkey leg, in the other a Fudgsicle. Even from behind, it was not a pretty sight. I quickly darted past the doorway and continued on.

I followed some more winding corridors, not completely sure if I was going the right way but at least not feeling hopelessly lost. And then I reached the doorway to the other building.

I felt an incredible sense of relief, while at the same time my sense of terror cranked up a few notches. I waved the pass card, opened the door, and stepped out into the cold.

It was absolutely freezing, as well as snowing heavily. Though the short path to the other building had been recently shoveled, I had to keep swiping my foot back and forth behind me to remove my tracks. I waved the pass card in front of the reader, shivering.

Nothing happened.

I waved it again.

Still nothing.

Wonderful. My whole expedition had been a waste.

I tested the door handle, but unfortunately nobody had been brain-dead enough to leave it unlocked. Perhaps extra keys were stored someplace, but the mansion was just too big to search for them. I felt sick to my stomach as I turned around and returned to the other door.

My pass card didn't work on this one, either.

I tried it again with the same result.

Now this was really, really bad.

I folded my arms and blew out a cloudy breath. With all the potential for dying inside, I was going to end up freezing to death out here. Maybe I could find a window to break or something. Of course, even if nobody heard that, they'd see my tracks and know something was up.

Perhaps I should just walk around to the front and ring the doorbell. Maybe they'd be nice and shoot me instead of putting me through whatever else they had planned.

My best course of action would be to stand by the door and wait to ambush somebody as they came out. Except that I didn't think anybody was planning to come out for a few hours, and I wouldn't be able to move my hands in a few minutes. The best fight I'd be able to put up would be to topple over and let my frozen body shatter on them.

I tried the card once more. No good.

I wanted to just sit down and cry.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I stood there for a couple of minutes, just feeling sorry for myself. Roger and the others had it worse, undoubtedly, but after all I'd been through I deserved a bit of self-pity.

Then there was a sudden light to my right. I spun around and saw a flare on the far end, by the fence. The figure was much too far away to identify, but it was waving both hands over its head.

Who the hell...?

I was still concerned about leaving footprints, but it wasn't worth worrying about at this point. I began to run toward the figure, as well as I could through two feet of snow.

And as I got closer, I saw that it was Thomas.

He was wearing a parka and earmuffs, but as I ran up to the fence I could see that he had a huge gash over one eye, and his face was bright red. He'd been out here a while.

"Andrew! I can't believe it!"

"How did you find me?" I asked, but I knew the answer before I even finished saying it. It wasn't at all surprising that somebody so concerned about being bugged would have the resources to do it himself.

"I bugged both of you," he said, slurring his words just a bit, no doubt because his face was numb. "On your shoes. Where's Roger, is he all right?"

"Yeah. At least I think so. They would've told me if they did anything to him. They think I'm the Headhunter."

"You're kidding!"

"No." I gave him a thirty-second condensed version of the story.

"That's incredible. I've been staking out this place for the past two hours. I could hardly believe it when I noticed you coming outside through my binoculars."

"Yeah, well, seeing you was a nice surprise, too. But please tell me you've contacted the police. They know you're here, right?"

Thomas shifted a bit, looking somewhat uncomfortable.

"You told somebody, right?"

"There wasn't time."

"Oh, that is bullshit!" If there weren't an electrified fence between us, I would've punched him. "So tell me, did you intend for things to work out the way they did? You meant for them to take Roger and I away so you could follow us, didn't you? Where did you go after you got stabbed?"

"I swear, I didn't lie to you. At least not after I lied about having to go inside the building. I chased the man for a few blocks and then I had a dizzy spell and passed out. I woke up to a pair of prostitutes trying to steal my jacket. But I got here as quickly as I possibly could."

"Well, that's all fine and dandy, but why didn't you bring somebody!"

"I needed to investigate the situation beforehand."

"Look, I don't know what your frame of mind is, but it appears to me that you want to be some big-shot hero, and that's not what's gonna get us out of here! I'm locked outside the house, I'll be murdered or worse as soon as they find me, and they may very well execute all of the prisoners if they think somebody is on to them. So it would be really nice to have the cops or the military or the Justice League of America around here to save the day!"

"I understand that," Thomas said. "But there's a problem. I'm not used to driving in these conditions and my car went off the side of the road about two miles back. I had to walk here."

I squeezed my eyes shut in frustration. "You have a cell phone, right?"

"In theory."

"What does that mean?"

"I've got one, but the battery died. I thought I'd recharged it, but I've had a lot on my mind recently, as I'm sure you can understand, and—"

"Do you have a gun?" I interrupted.

"Yes."

"Do you have bullets for this gun?"

"Sarcasm isn't necessary. Yes."

"Good. Give it to me."

He shook his head. "I have a more effective plan. I'll pretend to be a stranded motorist."

"It won't work. They'll kill you."

"You don't know that. I just need to get over the fence."

"Have you tried the front gate?"

"Yes. It's the only part that's not electrified, but the bars are too narrow to squeeze through, and too slippery to climb."

"Maybe you could climb one of the trees and jump over," I suggested. "Even though you'd probably break your leg."

"I tried that. I shouldn't have tried to climb with mittens. I lost my balance, bashed my face into a branch," he pointed to the gash above his eye, "and fell. I can't tell because it's so numb from the cold anyway, but I think I broke my foot."

I sighed. "How are you possibly going to get over the fence with a broken foot?"

"I'm not sure. I'll figure something out. And even if I can't, if I stand by the front gate they're bound to see me."

"Not necessarily. And if they do, it'll be after you've frozen to death."

"I'll be fine."

I leaned my face closer to the fence. "Just give me the gun, Thomas. There are only five of them. If I can catch them off-guard, I might be able to take them out."

"No, I'll get in there. I promise."

"Thomas, I'll make sure you get your share of the goddamn glory! This is no time to be a hero! Now give me the gun!"

"You don't have experience with guns. I do. Trust me, I'll get you out of there. I promise I'll get you out of there."

"Your hands are going to be frostbitten! You'll barely be able to hold the gun, let alone shoot it accurately!"

"Andrew, I came here to do a job, and I'm going to do it."

"So, what, you essentially called me over here to say that you don't want my help? Me, the guy who's on the inside, who they all think is one of them. How can you possibly be such a stubborn jackass?"

"No, I didn't say that I don't want your help. I want all the information you can provide."

"What information do you need if your big plan is to pretend you're a crippled, stranded motorist and then start shooting?"

"I need the layout of the place, where the kidnapped people are being held, that type of knowledge."

"I don't see how that's going to..." I trailed off, and then decided it wasn't worth arguing. I told him what I knew, which wasn't much.

"Do you think you can arrange to be with them when they answer the doorbell, or at least when they go outside?" he asked.

"I'm supposed to be locked in the bedroom at this very minute. So no, I can't promise you that."

"Why are they locking you in the bedroom if they think you're the Headhunter?"

"They're not big on trust. Listen, why don't you try to get over the fence right now? If by some miracle I can get back inside, we can find the prisoners, then pick off the bad guys when they show up."

"How did you get locked out?"

"I have no idea! The card stopped working!"

"So it's an electronic lock?"

"Yeah." I held up the card for him to inspect.

"I had my tracking device on when you came out," he said. "Maybe it was interfering with the access system."

"Would it do that?"

"It's possible, I suppose. I'm not sure."

"Is that tracking device good enough to pinpoint an exact location? Like, could we tell exactly where Roger is right now?"

Thomas shook his head. "No. It's very general."

"Then why did you have it on?"

"Because if they discovered the bug and destroyed it, I'd lose the signal. I've just been making periodic checks."

"So you were just checking to see if we were still alive?"

"Well, your shoes, anyway."

"I am so glad I met you. How about you start climbing a tree, okay?"

Unfortunately, a couple of feeble attempts made it clear that there was no way Thomas was getting over that fence with a broken foot. As he landed on his back the second time, I almost fell to my knees. "Please, Thomas. Give me the gun."

"I'll make it over."

"No, you won't. Accept it."

I'd been out here way too long already. Though Thomas could conceivably provide some assistance—maybe they would think he was a stranded motorist and be taken by surprise—I had to assume I was on my own again.

"If the card works this time, I'll investigate the other building," I said. "Try not to kill yourself."

I waded back through the snow. The snowfall was getting heavier, so it would probably cover my tracks, but to help things out I kept pushing snow over them. It meant that the trip back to the door seemed to take forever, and by the time I got there my arms were completely numb and soaking wet, but if I was lucky things wouldn't seem too out of place.

I had trouble even getting the pass card out of my pocket, but managed to wave it in front of the door to the metal building. Nothing.

I tried it again. A beep and a click.

The problem may have been interference, or it may have just been a system glitch, but either way, I was in!

* * *

It did no good.

The first thing I encountered were two doors, one to the left and one to the right. Both of them had number pads instead of card readers. Keeping with my trend of self-delusional optimism, I tested the handles on each door.

I wasn't surprised when they didn't open.

I was soaking wet from the snow, which blew my cover story about just getting bored and going for a walk. I hadn't found anything useful in the mansion so far, and they could check my room any minute.

As much as I hated to admit defeat, it was time to head back and hope that a different opportunity presented itself. Or that somehow, despite his maddening stubborn streak, Thomas came through for me.

* * *

Amazingly, I managed to get back to my room without incident, save for an easily retraced wrong turn. I stripped out of the wet clothes and wrung them out as best I could, and then draped them over the hot tub. They probably wouldn't be dry before anyone showed up, but I'd just say that I'd taken Daniel's advice and went straight for the cold shower, not bothering to get undressed. It was weak, I know, but I'm sure they thought I was the kind of guy who would do something like that.

I debated long and hard over what to do with Josie's pass card. When she discovered it was missing, she'd know for certain it was in my room. I didn't think that trying to deny it would go over very well, and I probably couldn't hide it anywhere that they wouldn't find it. Somewhere else in the house, perhaps, but they'd have me locked up with the other prisoners long before I could retrieve it.

No, as much as it pained me to give it up, I had to pretend I'd never found the card. I set it on the floor, under the bed but poking out enough that anyone walking into the room would be able to locate it easily. I'd have to find another way.

I took a quick hot shower, toweled off, and got in bed. I was absolutely exhausted, and wasn't going to get anywhere if I started keeling over from lack of rest.

I fell asleep right away. It was a deep sleep, the kind I used to enjoy in study hall. My unconscious mind was generous enough to give me pleasant dreams out of deference to my conscious nightmare.

* * *

I awoke several hours later to a knocking at my door. It opened, and Josie stuck her head in.

"Rise and shine. You don't want to miss the fun."

I rolled over, groggily, and noticed that a fresh new set of clothes rested on the dresser, folded neatly. The old ones had been removed. I leaned over the side of the bed and saw that the card was gone. Since I wasn't presently dead, I guessed that they didn't think I'd noticed it.

I got up, stumbled into the bathroom, and took another shower. The hot water seemed to help a bit.

Then I jumped as if somebody had snapped a bullwhip right by my ear. Every last remnant of grogginess I felt vanished as I realized that I'd left the fax in my jeans pocket.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I wasn't going to panic.

I wasn't going to drop dead of a heart attack.

I was going to be fine. Perfectly fine.

I washed clothes with stuff in the pockets all the time. Almost every time I do laundry I wash some paper currency (this is but one reason Helen rarely asks me to do laundry). One time I ruined several of Helen's favorite shirts by washing them with a pair of Kyle's pants that had two full packs of bubble gum in the pockets.

They'd have no reason to check.

They probably weren't even going to wash the jeans yet.

I probably wasn't dead meat.

Yeah, right.

I shaved, got dressed, and paced around the room while I waited for somebody to show up. Five minutes later, Josie did.

"I really want to apologize," I told her as we walked out of the room and down the hallway. "I was a total jerk last night."

"Don't worry about it," she said. Her voice didn't sound completely like I shouldn't worry about it, but at least she was trying to be friendly.

We entered the dining room just as Daniel was stepping out of the kitchen, wearing a "Kiss the Chef" apron and holding a plate with an omelet on it, which he set in front of Stan. "Hi there!" he said. "I'm just making my world-famous ham and cheese omelets, without fingers this time, since the cannibal in our group has moved on to bigger and better things. Have a seat!"

I have to admit, it was an incredible ham and cheese omelet. If Daniel ever got bored with torturing and murdering he and Josie could open up a fantastic gourmet restaurant.

Conversation was relaxed, or at least as relaxed as it can be when you're in a room with five sadistic killers. Well, kidnappers anyway. I had yet to witness a murder. And I hoped I hadn't jinxed myself by thinking that.

There didn't seem to be any hint that they'd found the note or noticed the tracks in the yard. And I wondered if perhaps Josie had been the one to bring me new clothes, had discovered her card under the bed in the process of delivering them, and hadn't said anything to anyone for fear of pissing off Daniel. It was possible.

So where was Thomas?

Maybe dead under that same tree.

We finished our meal, and Daniel stood up. "All right, everyone, last night we had a successful Initiation, so now it's time to let the games begin!"

"'Bout time," said Stan, breaking the hook off of a candy cane and popping the long end into his mouth.

Daniel ignored his comment. "And guess what we're starting with?"

"Darts?" Mortimer asked, hopefully.

"Darts is correct! Let's go!"

* * *

It was still snowing as we stepped outside. I wanted to look over and see if there was any sign of my tracks, but I didn't want anyone to follow my gaze. We entered the metal structure, and after Daniel punched in a code we went through the door to the right.

Daniel, wearing a lightweight leather jacket, broke into a jog, and the rest of us followed as we headed down a corridor past the gladiator ring. We passed through a crossway, and then he opened another door and we entered a large room.

An immense clear plastic cube took up most of it, about thirty feet square and ten feet high. Inside it looked like a playground jam-packed with equipment: a slide, hanging bars, a climbing rope, a tire swing, etc. There were also about five large punching bags hanging from the ceiling. Several blue flags and several red ones were randomly placed throughout the cube. The side facing us had a clear plastic door with a sliding lock.

A man, about twenty-five years old with glasses and a black goatee, sat on the bottom of the slide, wearing a blue shirt. A blonde woman who was a few years older stood in the corner, sliding her hands along the plastic as if searching for a weak spot. She wore a red shirt.

Each side of the cube had what looked like two cannons mounted on it, like the kind in carnivals where you spray the stream of water to make your horse win the race. Each cannon was about ten feet from the nearest corner, with about fifteen feet separating the cannons that shared a side. Beneath each cannon was a small cardboard box. Daniel stepped ahead of us, and then turned around to face us and gestured for us to stop.

"And here we are at our first event, Darts. The rest of you know how the game works, but I'll explain it for Andrew's benefit. We're divided into two teams. Josie, Foster, and I will be the red team, and you, Stan, and Mortimer will be the blue team."

He approached one of the cardboard boxes and reached inside, pulling out a thin metal spike, about three inches long and half an inch thick. "These are the darts. You load them into the shooter as so." He slid the spike into a hole in the back of the cannon. "To fire, pull the trigger."

He pulled the trigger, and with a loud snap the spike shot across the cube, striking the far wall and dropping to the floor. "Nice and simple. The people inside, who can't hear us, by the way, have been told that the first one of them to collect all ten of their flags will be set free. They won't, of course. That's just to keep them moving. The game gets pretty boring if they just sit there."

"And, what, the object is to kill them before they can get the flags?" I asked, wondering how I could possibly put a stop to this.

"Of course not. That would be way too easy. As long as your person is still moving, you get a point every time you hit them. The object is to rack up the most points, which means you have to shred your person bit-by-bit. Hit a vital organ too soon and that'll cost you the game."

"Cool," I said, nodding my understanding. That nod was one of the hardest things I'd ever had to do in my life.

"Everyone grab a spot!" said Daniel. The others hurried to their places, Foster on the far side of the cube across from me, Josie and Mortimer to the left, Stan to the right. I took the spot next to Daniel. "It works like this," said Daniel, swiveling his cannon up and down, left and right. "Since you only have enough maneuverability to cover about half of the cube, you need to use teamwork."

I swiveled the cannon. If only it weren't fixed to the cube. "What if you hit the wrong person?" I asked.

"You no longer get to shoot, and your team loses five points. Don't do it."

I had to do something to stop this, but once again I was stuck with no options. At least no good ones. I did have a box full of the darts, but Daniel was fifteen feet away, and I assumed that he still had his gun. Could I stroll on over to him before I got shot?

Could I stab him with the spike and get a hold of his gun?

Or could I press a spike to his neck and force him to order the release of the prisoners?

The first option wasn't likely. Even if I could pull off the stabbing portion, there's no way I'd have time to go through his jacket before the others got me.

The second option didn't seem much better, but I had to do something. I could stand here all day, watching them kill off prisoners one by one, and never get a good opportunity. This problem wasn't going to be resolved by getting a prisoner to feign unconsciousness. If I didn't act, and soon, they were going to die excruciatingly painful deaths.

"The game of Darts is about to begin!" Daniel announced. "On the victim's side, being shot at by the blue team, unable to hear me but being introduced anyway, we have Trevor Winford!"

"Wenford," Foster corrected.

"I'm sorry. Man, that's tragic. The last time he'll ever be introduced and I screw up his name. Oh well. Let's hear it for Trevor Wenford!"

Everyone applauded with great enthusiasm. I joined them, while crouching down to pick up a spike.

"And being shot at by the red team, let's give a warm welcome to Susan Picci...Piccini...how do you pronounce it again?"

"Sounds like 'pitch-a-ninny,'" said Stan.

"Ah. Why the hell do you always kidnap people with such hard names to pronounce? Let's hear it for Susan Piccinini!"

More applause.

"All right, everyone, load your first dart!"

The others began to load their cannons. I clutched the spike tightly in my hand, wondering if I should just rush over there.

No. I couldn't be stupid about this. Daniel would be much more distracted once he was playing the game. They were purposely trying to avoid killing the prisoners, so I had some time. Not much, but some.

I slid the spike into the cannon, and then picked up another.

"Let me ask you something, Daniel," I said. "I know the money aspect isn't a problem, but how do you get something like this built? I mean, you can't just hire local construction workers, right?"

Daniel chuckled. "Actually, yeah, you can for a lot of it. Well, the designers weren't local, but a lot of the workers were. I just have to do my own modifications. For example, this thing was built to be a paintball game, and then I turned it into something a little more fun. As far as the construction crews know, I'm building the world's biggest indoor theme park...most of which is a haunted house. They just don't know that I've made it lethal. It's still a lot of work, even with an outside crew doing most of the manual labor. But wait'll you see what we've got underground. It's mostly functional but not completely finished yet, so it won't be part of this year's games, but it's amazing. You'll be astounded, I promise."

Daniel tapped the side of the cube. Trevor and Susan looked in his direction, and Daniel held up his hand, counting down on his fingers.

"Ready to begin in five...four...three..."

I looked across the cube at Foster, who was smiling at me, as if he knew how little I wanted to be here.

"...two...one...GO!"

The prisoners leapt into motion as there were five simultaneous snaps, and then loud slamming sounds as the darts struck the opposite sides of the cube. A spike tore across Trevor's upper arm and he cried out, though I couldn't hear it. I saw that Susan also had an arm wound, much worse than Trevor's, and a spike protruding from her thigh.

"Foster! What the hell are you doing?" shouted Daniel, hurriedly pulling out another spike. "You're gonna cripple her already!"

"The aim's off on mine!" Foster protested.

"Don't blame the cannon!" Another dart grazed Susan's shoulder. "Nice one, Josie!"

I quickly began to walk toward Daniel.

"What are you doing?" he demanded. "Stay by your cannon!"

"Mine's not working," I insisted.

"Just pull the trigger! C'mon, your teammates are counting on you!"

Trevor crashed against the cube right next to me, the bottom of his ear gone.

"Shit! You made me miss that hit! Who did that? Mortimer?"

"Hell yeah, baby!" Mortimer announced.

"You know damn well that you weren't aiming for his ear," Josie informed him.

"It's not the intent, it's the action!"

"Yeah, kiss mine!"

"I just need you to—" I began.

"Goddamnit, Andrew, you just pull the trigger! Don't make me shoot you!"

He returned his attention to the game, firing a spike that grazed Susan's leg, but I'd lost any possible element of surprise. I should've just rushed him...except that I'd have ended up dead.

I went back to my cannon. My heart nearly stopped as a spike struck the wall right in front of my face. Foster grinned and waved.

I had to play the game. Not well, of course, but I had to play. I had to shoot to miss, and pray that it would be over quickly.

Trevor had gathered three of the flags. I swiveled the cannon to the left, aiming it in his general direction but making sure it would miss, and then pulled the trigger. The spike struck the slide, twirled up into the air, then came down on Trevor's foot.

"Sweet!" said Daniel. "I know you're not on my team, but that was sweet!"

I reloaded the cannon and fired another spike that became imbedded in one of the punching bags. I flinched each time a spike hit the cube wall, even though most of the hits were nowhere near me. My head was pounding.

Susan fell to the ground, a spike protruding from her side. "That was Stan!" Josie shouted. "Stan hit her! He's outta here!"

Stan spat out his candy cane, smacked his palms against the cube wall, and stepped away from his cannon.

"Get her up!" Daniel shouted. "Foster, she's out of my range! Put a dart in her arm! Hurry!"

Mortimer fired a dart that took a chunk out of Trevor's lower leg. Trevor let out a silent scream and dropped his flags.

I aimed at Susan. If I hit her, I'd be disqualified and no longer have to participate in this horror.

But before I pulled the trigger, I realized that I couldn't do that. That was selfish and cowardly. Why should my whiny moral anguish be more important than the agony the prisoners in the cube were suffering? I had to do something else. Susan and Trevor were going to die. That was for certain. I had to make their deaths as quick and painless as possible.

A spike fired by Foster grazed Susan's arm. Sobbing, she got to her feet and staggered toward the closest flag.

I turned the cannon toward Trevor. He was in range, facing the other way. I aimed for the back of his skull and fired.

Instead, the spike sliced across the side of his neck. He clutched at the wound, trying to stop the bleeding.

"Nice one!" shouted Mortimer. "You guys don't stand a chance!" He fired a spike that missed Trevor and struck another punching bag.

I loaded another spike, aimed at the back of Trevor's skull again, and fired.

Trevor turned his head, and the spike ripped off his ear.

"Oh my God!" Mortimer shouted. "Both ears gone! Blue team rules! Blue team rules!"

"Yeah?" asked Daniel. "Well, watch this." He fired a shot at Susan that missed completely.

"Watch what?" Mortimer inquired. "I was watching, but I didn't see anything. Andrew, what were we supposed to watch? I guess I wasn't watching closely enough, because I just don't recall seeing anything worth watching."

A spike tore through Susan's thigh, close to where the very first spike had hit her. "How about that?" asked Josie.

"That doesn't even come close to both ears gone!" Mortimer insisted. "You guys are losers! Lo-ho-ho-sers!"

"All right, everyone, pay attention!" said Foster. "This dart is going to knock that other dart right out of her side!"

"Oh, yeah, right," said Daniel.

"Hey, support your teammates!"

"Sorry. Go, Foster, go! Shoot that spike right out of her side! Go, go, go!"

Foster fired. The spike sailed through her throat and slammed into the wall in front of Daniel.

"Foster, you jackass!" Daniel shouted.

Susan clutched at her throat with both hands. By now her entire body was covered with blood. She dropped to the ground and lay still.

"I told you, the aim is off!"

Josie stepped away from her cannon. "Nice going, jackass."

"It's the aim! Come over here and check it out!"

"Your cannon's fine, jackass," said Mortimer.

Foster made like he was going to walk over and hit him, but then grinned. "But that was a pretty good throat hit, huh? I'd like to see you try that."

"No way, it's seven to one, we still need more points to make up for Stan's dumb move," said Mortimer, putting another spike in his cannon.

Trevor had been staring at Susan in horror, and suddenly realized that he needed to continue gathering the flags. Mortimer's shot missed him completely.

I blinked and felt a tear trickle down my cheek. I hurriedly wiped it off on my sleeve before anyone saw.

Another shot by Mortimer lodged in Trevor's stomach. I had to put the poor guy out of his misery. I fired, missing his head yet again and instead striking his shoulder blade.

"Ooooh, vicious hit by Andrew!" Daniel declared. "That boy is dangerous behind the cannon!"

Mortimer fired. Trevor dropped to the floor, a spike jutting from his forehead. "Ooops."

"Smooth move, jackass," said Foster.

Mortimer shrugged. "We still would've won if it weren't for Stan. But that's okay. Daniel, Foster, Josie, I salute you. Very nice shooting Andrew, especially for a first-timer."

"Absolutely," said Daniel. "You did great. Should've put you on my team instead of the jackass."

The others applauded. I stood there, doing everything I could to hide how miserable and sick I felt. I looked away from the bloody corpses and stared at the spike in my hand.

I couldn't pocket it, not with everyone walking toward me.

I could certainly lunge at Daniel.

But no. I'd earned some respect. Maybe not a lot, but it might be enough. I had to play it smart. Now I'd just find a way to get Daniel alone. Then I'd break his neck, get his gun, and finish off the rest of them.

I tossed the spike back into the box.

"Mind if I pump a few more into 'em?" asked Stan. "For practice?"

Daniel shrugged. "Be my guest, you sick bastard."

"I'm up for a rematch," said Mortimer, coming around to our side of the cube. "How about you snag a couple more prisoners?"

"No, no, no," said Daniel. "It's time for the really gruesome, hands-on, one-on-one stuff. And we've got lots of new props this year."

Snap! Stan fired a shot, and then loaded another spike.

"Great! Who gets to go first?"

"It's Foster's turn this year."

Mortimer looked over at Foster. "I hope you're not going to take three and a half hours again. You know, there's a point where you just have to kill them and move on."

Snap!

"Then maybe I'll do four hours," Foster told him. "Maybe four and a half. Maybe, and this is only an unverified rumor, so don't say anything, but maybe I'll do five."

"Jackass."

"The jackass joke is long gone. Why don't you go with it?"

Mortimer started to say something, but apparently decided that his comment lacked the wit of the current conversation thread and decided against it.

Snap!

"However," Foster began, "I think Andrew should go first."

"Oh, no," I said. "I'd rather see how it's done. Whatever it is."

"It's nothing you haven't done before. This'll be your chance to prove you can do it well. What do you think, Daniel?"

"If you want to trade him spots, that's fine with me."

"Good. Yes, I'd like Andrew to go first. It should be interesting."

Snap!

"Don't I get any choice in this matter?" I asked.

"Nope," said Daniel. "New Initiates have no rights. C'mon, let's go make a mess!"

ROGER'S SIDE

Things aren't going well.

I've been trying to conserve tape, so I haven't been talking much, but things are getting really bad. A couple hours ago, the bald guy, Foster, came in here and took away Susan Piccinini and Trevor Wenford.

Ten minutes ago, he brought them back on a big cart. I couldn't even tell how many stab wounds they had, not with all the blood, and they had a bunch of metal things, about the size of pencils, sticking out of them.

Foster pushed the cart really slowly. And he was whistling.

He took them through the other door. I don't know what they're planning to do with the bodies. He was only gone for about half a minute, so I guess they're just storing them for now.

Then he took Charlotte Burgin.

That was five minutes ago.

I want to go home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Though nothing had been explained to me yet, I had a feeling that this next event was going to be far worse than the game of Darts.

I was in a small room with a white tile floor. An operating room, to be specific. The kind with the glass-enclosed spectator gallery above, which is where everyone but Foster was seated.

The walls were lined with eight different carts. One of them did indeed contain surgical tools. The others were filled with more different types of weapons and tools than I can even begin to list completely. There were the standards: hammer, screwdriver, nails, and wire cutters. Then hedge trimmers, a chainsaw, and a weed whacker. Knives of all shapes and sizes. Clubs. A blowtorch. A bottle labeled "hydrochloric acid." Lots of frightening instruments that I'd never seen before or even imagined existed.

And (I swear this is true) there was a lawnmower in the corner.

Foster wheeled in a gurney, upon which lay a woman I recognized well from pictures Craig Burgin had shown me. It was Charlotte, his wife. Physically, she was quite the opposite of her husband, tall and slender instead of short and chubby. She looked about ten years older than her photos, but I was pretty sure that wasn't because they were old pictures. Nevertheless, there was a definite sense of dignity about her, even now, that she'd somehow managed to retain for all these months.

I'd completely forgotten that the original purpose of my involvement was to aid in her rescue. I wondered what Craig was doing right now. Hopefully he wasn't being a slacker about keeping the real Headhunter medicated.

She was on her back, her wrists and ankles tightly bound to the corners of the gurney with leather straps. Her face was tearstained but I could tell she wouldn't be begging for mercy. Foster saluted, and then left the room, shutting and locking the door behind him.

"All right, Andrew," said Daniel, speaking into a microphone. His voice, blasting through speakers, echoed throughout the operating room. "This is your big moment. The fulfillment of a life-long fantasy. You have every kind of weapon you could possibly want. You have a helpless victim. You have a captive audience. Do your worst. Entertain us."

I was so appalled that I stood there staring at him for nearly ten seconds before I caught myself. "Sorry. What exactly am I supposed to be doing?"

Daniel rolled his eyes. "Use your imagination. Let it all out. Ruin her."

There wasn't truly every kind of weapon I could possibly want. What I really wanted was a trusty submachine gun, to take them all out. Or any kind of gun. But there wasn't one, and somehow I didn't think hurling a hammer through the glass was going to solve my problem.

"Okay," I said, wiping my perspiration-soaked hands on my pants. There had to be a way out of this. There had to be. If I could stall long enough, I'd find it.

"However, I think we're going to impose a new rule this year," said Daniel. "If members of the audience get restless, they will express their displeasure using the good old-fashioned thumbs-down. If this vote becomes unanimous, you will then have thirty seconds to regain their approval. If you don't, you die. Gunshot to the head. Bang."

"Say what?" I demanded. "Are you threatening me?" I tried to sound more angry than scared.

"Andrew, c'mon. We're just making things more interesting. This should be a cakewalk for you."

"I don't like being threatened," I said.

"Yes, well, Mr. Headhunter, you're down there and we're up here, and it's my lair of torture, and what I say goes. I have to say, you're not quite the party animal I envisioned."

"I'm not taking part in this. Open the door and let me out of here."

Foster held out his hand, giving me thumbs-down.

"Uh-oh, looks like you've got audience displeasure already. Might wanna get started."

"I'm serious, Daniel! Open the door!"

"I'm serious, too. Serious about fun! And you're not having any, so have some, willya? This place was expensive."

"This is your last warning!"

"Well, it looks to me like my dear wife has just given you your second warning, so I'd strongly suggest putting an end to the whining and start cutting! Or sawing, or burning, or poking, or something!"

Okay, fine. I'd keep them entertained while I figured something out. There was a solution to this problem. I just had to hope that my own substantially-less-than-flawless brain could work it out.

"I'm sorry," I said. "This whole thing is totally surreal. I wasn't expecting anything quite so elaborate; it's just got me totally weirded out."

"No need to apologize, my friend," said Daniel. "Just relax and enjoy yourself."

Well, the first part of his advice was good, at least. Relax. Relax. Relax. You're on a sunny beach, sipping a drink with multiple umbrellas in it, with Helen standing there in a bikini, the red one with the cutout—no, that's lewd, focus on the problem at hand.

At the very least, I could keep myself occupied for a while going through the weapons. And so I did, holding them up, inspecting them, and describing in great detail what I could do with them. There's no reason for me to share exactly what I said, but it was graphic and vile beyond belief. I don't even know what diseased part of my mind came up with those descriptions, but I had no choice.

The whole time, I kept trying to find a way out.

The door was locked. I had plenty of tools on hand, and given enough time and a little privacy, I could probably get out. But I didn't have time or anything resembling privacy.

Even without the glass barrier, there wasn't much I could do to the spectators, unless they all promised to sit there quietly and not move while I threw knives at them.

Of course, I could've killed Charlotte and been home free, but that wasn't even remotely an option.

She looked terrified to the point of shock.

I continued going through the weapons, chatting away. There was no way to escape, so I needed to figure out how to get Daniel to end the event without Charlotte's death, and without my own death immediately afterward.

How the hell could I get out of this?

A hostage. That was the only way.

"Y'know, now that I'm getting into this, it really is a fantasy come true," I said. "But I've gotta tell you, I've got an even better fantasy."

"And what would that be?" Daniel asked.

"I can't think of anything in the world more fun than to shred this beautiful, helpless woman with the assistance of another beautiful woman. And I think I see one right now. Josie, would you like to come down here and help out?"

She shook her head. "Sorry, Andrew, it's your show."

"Oh, come on! I'll take one end, you take the other! You can't tell me that won't be a thrill!"

"It probably would," she admitted. "But this is your moment to shine, sweetie. Show us what you've got."

"You're not seriously going to refuse my number one fantasy in the entire world, are you?" I looked over at Daniel for support. "Back me up here."

Daniel shrugged. "It's up to her."

"Sorry," said Josie. "Maybe next year."

"All right, fine. What about you gentlemen? Mortimer? Wanna grab a lawn mower and help me out?"

"Nah, I'm saving my energy for my turn."

"Stan?"

"Uh-uh. Not how we do it."

It wasn't even worth the effort, but I looked over at Foster. He gave me a second thumbs-down.

There would be no hostage.

"Guess I'm on my own, then," I said.

What could I possibly do? They weren't going to let me out of here until Charlotte was dead.

I continued looking through the weapons, trying to focus. There had to be a way. There just had to. Then, miraculously, the idea came to me. But for it to work, I'd have to distract the others.

And the only way to sufficiently distract them was to do some horrible things.

Charlotte would probably hate and be repulsed by me forever, but if this worked, she'd be alive.

I'd been talking for ten minutes. It was time for action, before they got bored.

"I feel bad about wimping out like this, with such a fine selection," I said, "but I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with that reliable old standard, the knife." I picked up one with a narrow, four-inch blade. "Now, where to cut, where to cut? Hmmmm..."

I looked up at the spectators. "You know what? We've got a really serious problem down here."

"And what would that be?" asked Daniel, annoyed.

"The victim down here. She's wearing far too much clothing."

Daniel perked up. "Then by all means, take care of the problem."

"Oh, I will."

Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut as I slid the dull edge of the blade across the side of her neck, and then cut her blouse down the front.

I was absolutely mortified while I did it, but I had to think of myself as a magician, drawing the audience's attention away from the secret of the trick. Because for this to work, I'd have to do something almost unbelievably idiotic in their eyes, and it had to look like an accident.

They had to be completely distracted, and what could be more distracting than getting Charlotte naked?

So I didn't stop with the blouse.

Or the bra.

When I was completely done, I spun the gurney around in a slow circle, giving everyone a perfect view. It was humiliating for me, probably excruciatingly so for Charlotte, but it was working. They were watching with appalling fascination. Even Josie.

"Much, much better," I said, forcing myself to choke out the words. And then I set the knife down next to Charlotte's shoulder and returned to the carts.

"What next...ooooh, how about a blowtorch? I know just where a blowtorch would be the most fun, too. But no, how about something even more painful? How about pliers?"

I picked up the pliers and returned to the gurney. "You are incredible," I told Charlotte. "I don't know about the rest of the audience up there, but I'm less interested in killing you than other things, if you know what I mean." I leaned down and bit her ear, hard enough that she let out a gasp.

Then I whispered to her.

I stood back up. "But, I've got work to do. Let's get to the action. It's time for this lovely lady to lose some fingers."

I opened the pliers, and held the jaws over Charlotte's index finger. "Whoops, gotta play to the audience." I unbuckled the strap binding her wrist, then held her arm up high for everybody to see. Then I got ready to close the pliers over her finger.

"No!" I said, my eyes wide as I pretended that an incredible idea had just occurred to me. "Forget the pliers! I wanna use the acid!"

I dropped her arm and turned around excitedly.

Then I tensed my whole body, praying both that Charlotte would act and that she would do exactly what I'd told her.

An instant later, I let out a howl as she plunged the knife I'd left on the gurney deep into my right buttock.

I stumbled forward, purposely knocking over the cart of weapons. The pain was too great for me to think clearly, but I did manage a bit of relief that she'd followed instructions. She could've stabbed me in the back.

I launched into a screaming fit of obscenities. Daniel and the rest were laughing so hard they could barely contain themselves. Perfect. I gave them all the finger and continued cursing.

I wrenched the knife out and threw it to the ground. "Lousy bitch!"

"Thumbs-up! Thumbs-up!" Foster declared.

"Yeah, yeah. Ha ha ha. Real hilarious."

"I think you and the toilet seat are going to have a very bad relationship for a while," said Daniel, laughing so hard that tears were streaming down his cheeks. "Oh, man, I'm sorry, but that's one of the funniest things I've seen in my whole entire life!"

"Yeah, well, do you think I could get some medical attention?"

"Don't you wanna finish her off?"

"Not standing here with my ass bleeding, no!"

Daniel tried to respond, but then he broke into another fit of hysterical laughter. It took several moments for him to control himself enough to gesture to Foster. "Go ahead, get him out of there. Oh, shit, I need a drink! I think we all do! I'd give anything to have been taping that!"

The others got up, still laughing. I was in a lot of pain, but this wasn't over yet. Because Foster was going to have to open that door, and I had a hell of a lot of weapons waiting for him.

Unfortunately, I couldn't conceal any of them. Josie remained in the spectator booth, watching me intently as she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. I picked up a machete, pretending like I was having trouble keeping myself from using it on Charlotte.

A couple of minutes later, Foster opened the door. He had a small plastic bag in one hand, and a gun in the other. Pointed at me, of course.

"If I got stabbed in the ass by a tied-down naked woman, I'd want somebody to put me out of my misery," he said. "Would you like me to help out?"

"Just get me a first-aid kit and shut up." I pointed to Charlotte. "And take her back to wherever you got her from. After I get patched up she's going to get a lot worse than a knife in the butt, believe me."

"Whatever you say." He wasn't lowering the gun.

"Could you put that down?" I asked. "I'm in enough pain without having you point that thing at me."

"I could, but you know what, I don't feel like it. I kind of like holding you at gunpoint. Makes me feel nice and powerful inside."

"Whatever makes you happy."

"It does, thanks. And it would also make me happy if you put back that machete. It's private property."

I set the machete back on the cart.

"Much appreciated. You know, I'm the one who has to clean up the mess you made in here. I should shoot you just for that."

"I'm sure Daniel would have something to say about that."

"You're absolutely right. He pays me well, and he lets me kill people. Wouldn't want to lose that gig. That's the only reason you're still alive, though I don't think that will last very long."

"And what exactly does that mean?" I asked.

"It's a surprise. I think you mentioned that you like surprises. Come on, let's go. Your ass is leaking all over the floor."

He stepped back as I walked out of the room, not letting me get close. He kept the gun pointed at me as I walked down a short hallway.

"In there," he said. I entered a small room containing nothing but a wooden bench and an overhead light. He tossed me the plastic bag. "There's gauze and tape in there. Enjoy."

He slammed the door shut.

So, was my situation better or worse? Obviously I'd lost some of their respect, but had I erased any of their doubts about me?

At least Charlotte was still alive.

And I had a plan.

When they brought out the next victim, I'd be sitting up there with the other spectators, and this time there wouldn't be a giant plastic cube separating us. I'd arrange to sit next to Josie. When the others were distracted by the show below, I'd put the knife to her neck, before any of them got a chance to pull those damn guns on me. Daniel wouldn't risk his wife for the sake of some prisoners. At least I didn't think so.

If I couldn't sit next to Josie, I'd go for Daniel.

If I had to, I'd use one of the others. I wasn't sure Daniel would surrender to save somebody like Stan, but I had to try. Regardless, no matter what, I was going to act.

I taped myself up, padding my pants with the gauze. It was too painful to sit, so I paced around the room, waiting for them to come get me.

Half an hour passed. They were probably still having convulsions of laughter. Bastards.

Another full hour passed before the door opened. Foster again, still holding his gun. "Let's go," he said. "We're about to have an emergency meeting."

* * *

I was taken back inside the mansion, to a large, nicely furnished den. Daniel shut off the wide-screen TV with the remote control as Foster and I entered. He was sitting next to Josie on a loveseat, while Mortimer reclined in an easy chair, sipping a bottle of beer. Stan sat on the floor, leaning his back against a small couch as he chewed on a pencil.

"Welcome back, Andrew," said Daniel. "How's the ass doing?"

"It's fine," I said. I glanced around the room approvingly. "Very nice."

"Thanks. Why don't you have a seat? We've got something to discuss."

"I'd rather stand, for obvious reasons."

"Yeah, I know, but I'd rather you sit."

Foster pushed a metal folding chair behind me. I sat down with a wince.

"Care for a beer?" Daniel asked.

"Nah, that's all right."

"Pop?"

"Excuse me?"

"Sorry, I guess that's soda to you southern folk."

"I knew what you meant. No, no soda, thanks."

"Bottled water? Anything?"

"I'm fine."

"You sure? Okay." Daniel leaned forward. "All right, Andrew, I'm going to be straight with you. I don't think this is working out. You're not enjoying yourself, and you're not fitting in."

I didn't say anything.

"I thought I was going to be giving you the vacation of a lifetime. I've put so much hard work and energy into this place, and I can't share it! It's frustrating. And so I leapt at the chance to bring in a new person, but I didn't think it through, and I've treated you horribly, and for that I apologize."

"I'm sorry, too," I said.

"We've all discussed this, and we feel it's best if we take you home. I'll let you decide what you want to do with Roger. I'd prefer that you leave him here for us, but that's up to you. Do you think we can end this without hard feelings?"

"Absolutely."

"Would you mind filling out one of our customer satisfaction surveys before you leave?" Daniel asked. "No, I'm kidding, but I do have one question. Did you honestly think we weren't going to find out that you've been lying to us all this time?"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

There were many possible responses to that query, but I went with the most generic. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Now, see, that's the kind of thing that really bugs me," said Daniel. "I'm not stupid, and I'd like you to respect my intelligence. You're not the Headhunter, you never were. You're Andrew Mayhem, happily married with two kids and a best friend you'd give your life for. I'm assuming you managed to get the real Headhunter to blab his whole story, and you thought that you'd pass yourself off as him to be a great big hero and rescue all these poor innocent victims. Now tell me, is that a reasonable assessment of the situation?"

I remained silent.

"I'm not playing around anymore. The games are on hold. I asked you a question, and I expect an answer."

"No, it's not a reasonable assessment."

"Is that a fact? Okay, then, Mortimer, would you like to show Exhibit A?"

Mortimer held up the piece of notebook paper I'd tried to fax. The writing was smeared, but still legible, even with my crappy handwriting.

"Exhibit A, found in the pants pocket of a Mr. Andrew Mayhem, one hour ago by Mortimer, who was so kind as to say yes when I asked him to throw some clothes in the wash. Not a very promising sign of your loyalty to our little group, now is it?"

"I can explain," I said. I desperately wanted myself to just shut up, but the lame comments kept spewing out of my mouth.

"I'm not interested in your explanation quite yet. Ready for Exhibit B?"

"I'm ready for Exhibit B," said Foster.

"Alas, there is no real Exhibit B. Exhibit B is simply the agreement by all of us that your story is complete bullshit. To be totally honest, you were pretty questionable from the beginning, to some of us more than others, but I think even without Exhibit A we'd still be in this same spot, having this same conversation. Without the references to Exhibit A, naturally."

"Or Exhibit B," Josie added.

"Right, though the gist of Exhibit B would remain, it simply wouldn't have been referred to as Exhibit B, since there would have been no Exhibit A to follow. Do you understand what I'm driving at, Andrew?"

"Just that you people are totally sick in the head."

Daniel frowned. "Now, that's another one of those things that really bugs me. I'm not asking you to throw yourself at my feet in tears or anything, but it wouldn't hurt you to be polite."

"You expect me to be polite while you're accusing me of this nonsense?" I'd developed such an unbearably bad headache that I now had an escape plan. I'd simply wait to my head to explode, and then use the distraction to flee.

"Okay, now we've gone past the point of things that bug me into the realm of things that piss me off. We've caught you, Andrew. You're dead. You're history. In fact, when you find out what we've got planned for you, you're going to wish you'd been one of those poor souls we tore apart with the darts."

"I wholeheartedly agree with that statement," said Foster. "Your death is not going to be a nice one."

"No, it's not," Josie added. "I've never considered myself a squeamish woman, but just thinking about what's going to happen to you makes me want to squeam."

Daniel chuckled. "So shall we get to it?"

"Whoa, hold on," I said, barely able to hear my own words. "Don't I get to tell my side of it?"

Daniel shook his head. "No. You do not."

"You can't do this. You can't drag me all the way to Alaska for your little party and then treat me like this."

Daniel slammed his fist against the armrest, making Josie jump. "You are not the Headhunter!" he screamed. "Stop insulting my intelligence! You are dead! D-E-A-D! And there's not a single thing that can save you! Do you understand?"

The doorbell rang.

"What the hell?" asked Daniel.

"People know where I am," I said. "Cops, FBI, the whole works. I've got a tracer in my shoe. They've known where I was from the beginning. So I strongly recommend that you behave yourself."

"Foster, check it out," said Daniel. Foster nodded and hurried out of the room.

"You'd all better just give up now," I told everyone. "Things are going to get ugly."

"Things are already ugly," Daniel informed me. "And you don't have to worry, no matter what happens I will make sure you die. And get your hand away from your pocket before I shoot it off."

I didn't have anything in my pocket, but he didn't have to know that. "I've seen your shooting at darts. I wasn't impressed."

Daniel's face darkened. "You can not possibly imagine how much I am going to enjoy what we've got planned for you."

There was a gunshot.

"Mortimer, Stan...see what the deal is," said Daniel. They quickly left the room.

"Gee, I hope Foster's all right," I said. "He was always my favorite. He gets those cute little dimples when he smiles. Doesn't he just light up the room when he enters?"

Another gunshot.

"Doesn't sound good, does it?" I asked.

"Foster!" Daniel shouted. "Hey, Foster! What the hell is going on out there?"

No answer.

"Mortimer?" he called out.

"I hope Morty's not dead yet," I said. "He was a good teammate."

Then I heard laughter. Multiple voices.

My heart sank.

Mortimer entered the room. "It's taken care of."

Foster and Stan followed, dragging Thomas. He was severely frostbitten, barely conscious, and had a bullet hole in his leg.

"Well, well, what have we here?" asked Daniel.

"I have no idea how he managed to get through the fence," Foster said. "He tried to pretend like his car broke down. Dumb fuck could barely hold the gun."

"Was he alone?"

"Looks that way."

"Take him to the operating room. Use whatever it takes to get the whole story. Don't be gentle."

"No problem."

This was the moment where I had to go for broke.

"Stan? Put Andrew to bed."

Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my neck. I plucked out a tiny dart, and then immediately became dizzy.

I lunged at Mortimer with my bare hands, but missed by a good three feet. I stumbled forward, hit the carpet without feeling a thing, and was overtaken by darkness.

* * *

When I woke up, I was in a large, chilly room with a dirt floor. The plaster ceiling was about ten feet high and held several fluorescent light bulbs.

I was seated in a wheelchair, wearing only my boxer shorts, strapped in so thoroughly that the only thing I could move was my neck and head. Roger was seated in a wheelchair next to me, fully clothed but also strapped in.

"Roger! I'm so sorry!" I said.

Roger nodded. "At least we get to see each other again. Makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, yeah, kissy kissy," said Daniel. He was in front of us, seated on an oversized pine coffin, next to which were a series of freshly dug graves. Josie, Foster, Mortimer, and Stan were standing around, while Thomas kneeled on the ground in front of them, duct tape over his mouth and his arms tied behind his back.

"This is the burial room," Daniel explained. "We don't use headstones, for obvious reasons, but this is where we keep the corpses when we're done with them. As you can see, our good friends Susan and Trevor are awaiting their last rites."

He gestured to a cart next to the door, where a pair of bloody, unrecognizable bodies lay. "I'm pleased to announce that we'll be adding to today's body count. Roger, we listened to your tape. Very entertaining, as we knew it would be. Nice attempt to cover for your buddy. I admire that kind of loyalty. Therefore, you get to watch your friends die, then we're putting you back in your cell. You'll die later, of course, but at least you can enjoy this plane of existence for a short while longer."

Roger didn't respond.

"Andrew, you're not going to get off quite as easily. But that's for later. First, I'd like to address the problem of our little intruder." He tapped Thomas on the back with the toe of his shoe. "Foster was so kind as to be our official gatherer of information. I personally would have been more vicious with my technique; after all, I'd think that a blowtorch on frostbitten fingers would be rather soothing, but Mr. Thomas Seer did speak freely when properly coerced. As you already know, Andrew, there are no reinforcements. Nobody knows you're here. Sucks to be you, huh?"

He took his revolver out of his jacket pocket. "As I admire Roger, I also admire Thomas. He put a lot of effort to get to where he is today, and therefore I have decided that his death will be quick and painless." He held the revolver against the back of Thomas' head.

"You don't have to do this!" I insisted.

Daniel lowered the gun. "I have no admiration for you, and I especially have no admiration for your asinine comments, so please do us all a favor and shut up."

"There are reinforcements. Didn't you see his tracer?"

"I know all about his tracer. I even know that it's stolen property. I know everything there is to know about the situation, even more than you do." He returned the gun to Thomas' head. "Ready to die, Tommy?"

Thomas' body shook, as if he were sobbing without tears.

"I've never been shot myself, but I expect that it won't be too painful. Should be over fairly quickly. But the whole suspense thing has gotta be pretty agonizing, huh? I mean, your life is going to be over any second now, but you don't know which second it'll be. Could be now. Could be...now. Man, oh man, that's gotta be rough."

"Please—" I began.

"Enough! One more word out of you and we're putting on a gag, okay? You're only making things worse for Tommy by stretching this out. Ooooh, I almost pulled the trigger that time. When, oh when, will it happen? Now? No. Now? Maybe. Could be now. Wait for it...wait for it..."

Then he lowered the gun again. "You know what? I'd like to hear what Tommy has to say about his approaching death. What do the rest of you think?"

The others murmured their approval. Mortimer had a hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter.

Daniel ripped off the duct tape. "So, Tommy, how are you feeling at this unpleasant moment?"

"I'm gonna kill you!"

"No, actually, you're mistaken. I am the one who will be killing you. And I lied. Nobody in my house gets away with a gunshot to the head." He tossed the revolver away, then reached behind the coffin. "Mr. Seer, meet Mr. Hatchet!"

He held up a small hatchet in his right hand, and then walked around in front of Thomas so he could see it, too. "Mr. Hatchet is nice and sharp, but he's kind of small. It will take a lot of work to get the job done. Good thing I'm not afraid of an honest day's labor."

Daniel walked behind Thomas again. "Now, now, where to chop first? Right here?" He touched the blade to Thomas' ear. "Here?" He touched Thomas' nose. "So many places. Decisions, decisions."

He lifted the hatchet high above his head. "I think I'll start...here."

Daniel swung the hatchet down, slamming it into Thomas' shoulder. Thomas let out a wail that echoed throughout the room. Daniel wrenched the hatchet free, and then slammed it down into the same spot.

I looked over at Roger. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut.

Thomas continued screaming.

The others laughed.

"Whooooo-weee!" exclaimed Daniel. "I'm gonna work up a good ol' sweat!" He brought the hatchet down again.

I closed my eyes.

Thomas' screams were deafening, but I could still hear every impact of the hatchet. And the laughter and cheering.

The hits and the screams continued. The hits came faster and faster, and the screams grew louder.

I can't even begin to guess how many times the hatchet fell before the screams faded.

Finally, they faded away completely. The hatchet hits continued.

When they finally stopped, I opened my eyes. Thomas was no longer recognizable as...anything. Daniel was completely drenched.

"That was fuckin' exhilarating!" he proclaimed, tossing aside the hatchet and whipping his head back and forth like a dog shaking itself off after an unwanted bath. "Don't ever say I don't know how to party!"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"You da man!" Mortimer proclaimed.

"Come on, it's Andrew's turn, let's do it," said Daniel, waving the others over to him.

"Don't you want to clean up first?" asked Josie.

"Not at all." He grabbed a handful of his shirt and wrung it out. "This is great. This is so great. I keep forgetting how much I love this."

Stan came up behind me and pushed my wheelchair forward. My body was completely numb. I couldn't have spoken if I'd tried.

"Okay, Andrew, we've got a special treat planned for you," Daniel said, wiping some blood away from his mouth. "We had planned this for when we thought you'd be showing up as the Headhunter's prisoner, so I'm glad it won't be wasted. When you ask people what kind of death they fear most, you'll get a lot of responses. Being eaten by a shark, dying of a lingering disease, getting chopped to bits with a hatchet—none of these are popular ways to go. But there's one that really creeps some people out, and I think you in particular will appreciate it."

"And what could that possibly be?" asked Mortimer, as if he were on an infomercial.

"Why, I'm glad you asked! The answer is...being buried alive!" Daniel gestured dramatically at the coffin. "What could be a more suitable punishment for a past graverobber?"

Oh, please God, no, I thought.

"Being buried alive is certainly a nasty way to go," Mortimer remarked. "But don't you have anything worse?"

"Worse?" asked Daniel, in mock dismay. "What could possibly be worse?"

"I don't know, but I'm not convinced that his death is all it could be. I'm afraid you'll have to do better than that. What do the audience members think?"

"Make it worse!" Josie shouted. Stan and Foster pitched in as well.

"But...but...but...I'm only a simple businessman! I can't possibly do anything worse than bury him alive!"

Josie, Stan, and Foster began to boo.

"Then I'm sorry, but we'll just have to let him go," said Mortimer, shaking his head sadly.

"No wait, let me think! There has to be a way!" Daniel snapped his fingers, sending a couple of drops of blood into the air. "By golly, I've got it!" He bent down and threw open the lid of the coffin. "It'll be a double occupancy!"

Inside the pine box was a partially decomposed corpse, its mouth frozen open in a shriek of unrestrained terror. Maggots chewed its eyes. It looked vaguely male, but I couldn't tell much beyond that from its grotesque appearance.

Thank God I couldn't speak. I wouldn't have been able to do anything but blubber for mercy.

"Andrew, meet Wesley. Wesley, Andrew. He was one of my own captures, but he was a very naughty little boy and we had to shoot him. It seemed like a waste at the time, but I think you'll be pleased to see that we're making good use of him."

Mortimer walked over to assist as Foster began undoing the straps on the wheelchair. "That thing is nasty," Stan said from behind me. "Sure glad I'm not the one being buried with it."

Daniel grinned and wiped his bloody hands off on his bloody jeans. "Look at those babies squirm in those sockets! I don't know how they'll be able to contain their excitement when they get nice, fresh, live flesh!"

And then I found my voice. I don't even remember what I said. It probably made no sense. But even though my conscious mind was telling me to shut up (Just shut up! You're only entertaining them!) I couldn't stop. I was babbling and whimpering and tears flowed down my cheeks and I couldn't make myself be quiet.

Have I mentioned that I'm incredibly claustrophobic?

I thrashed and flailed and screamed as Foster and Mortimer grabbed my legs, and Stan grabbed my arms. I struggled with every last bit of strength I possessed, but I couldn't get away as they lifted me out of the wheelchair and held me over the coffin. Daniel was saying something, but I couldn't hear him over my own screams.

Then they gently lowered me into the coffin.

On top of the corpse.

I could feel it giving way beneath me, the flesh of its chest splitting under my bare back. The smell was so far beyond putrid that I can't even describe it. My screams faded to an abrupt gasp as my head pressed into the corpse's face.

I felt cold teeth against the back of my neck.

I struggled to get free, but the lid slammed shut, giving me about an inch of room above my nose. As I worked my hands into a position where I could pound on the lid, I heard the click of padlocks snapping shut.

Things squirmed underneath my back.

I pounded and pounded as I felt the coffin being dragged forward. Then lifted, then lowered...dropping the last couple of feet with a jolt that drove me further into the corpse.

Then I heard a sound that could only be dirt being tossed onto the lid. Moments after that, my mind couldn't cope with the horror anymore...

...and I found myself thinking of my parents...

...and school...

...and the first time I met Helen, at the movies when she had to rush out of the theater during a special screening of The Exorcist...

...and Theresa being born...

...and Kyle...

...and........

DANIEL'S SIDE

What a cheap piece of junk. Who made this thing? You can't even tell if it's recording or not.

Ladies and gentlemen, I do believe we've heard the last of Andrew Mayhem. It's too bad the special guest thing didn't work out, but I've got only myself to blame for that. My lovely wife and my not-so-lovely associates warned me, and they were right. Oh well. Live and learn.

Hey, Mortimer, say something for posterity. C'mon! Oh, don't be such a chickenshit, just talk into the recorder! You people are so paranoid it's not even funny! Fine, fine. For those of you who are only listening to this, Mortimer has just made an obscene gesture and left the room.

I guess healthy paranoia is good. You can't be too careful. Foster is convinced that Andrew is gonna break out of his grave like some flesh-eating zombie, so he's hanging out in the burial area, just in case. He'll miss out on some of the fun, but hey, whatever floats his boat, right?

What? Oh, you can barely see it! It's not blood, it's water. Yes, I used the peach shampoo. Nag, nag, nag.

Again, for those of you who aren't really here, my lovely wife is getting all bent out of shape because my hair is dripping. If it were up to me, I'd still be covered in blood, but she's like "No blood in the house!"

Hey, knock it off! [Laughter.] My lovely wife is now grabbing for the tape recorder, but she's far too short and weak to succeed at such a task. Back! Back, you cur!

Uh-oh, she seems to be trying a new technique. Don't let the youngsters listen to this! So we'll finish up here, and then head back to the operating room! I can't wait to see what Stan has in store for the chick that gave Andrew that ass stabbing!

This is Daniel Rankin, of Rankin Bloodbaths, signing off.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Minutes later? Hours?

My eyes flew open and took in only darkness.

Calm down!

Forget being calm! I'm buried alive with a rotting dead guy!

I began to scream.

If you don't control yourself, you'll run out of oxygen!

Do I even WANT to stay alive down here?

The stench was so awful that I could barely breathe. I pushed up on the lid, knowing full well that it wasn't going to open. The corpse's ribs had broken away and I'd sunk into it deeply enough that I could feel its spinal column digging into my back.

And I could still feel its screaming mouth against my neck. I stopped pushing on the lid and brushed off the writhing maggots that were crawling up onto my stomach.

The coffin felt like it was shrinking around me, becoming smaller and smaller until it crushed me to death.

It was only my imagination, of course, but I also thought I could hear the corpse—Wesley—laughing at me, ready to bite down on my neck and rip out a huge mouthful of flesh.

"We're gonna die together Andrew you and me together forever so let's make the most of it shall we Andrew?"

Hell no!

I began pounding on the lid with both fists, screaming and blubbering like a child.

Stop it! Stop it! Control yourself!

I was not going to die down here! If I had to rip the lid of the coffin apart splinter-by-splinter I was getting out of this thing! I'd figured out a way to keep Charlotte alive, and I could sure as hell figure out a way to keep myself alive!

"Didn't do so well with Susan or Trevor, though, did ya?" asked Wesley. "And what about Thomas? He's in worse shape than I am!"

I continued pounding on the lid.

Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!

My situation wasn't hopeless. It was bad, it was really bad, but it wasn't hopeless.

Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!

I wondered what was happening to Roger. Were they killing him now? Was he strapped to the operating table at this very moment?

Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!

Crack.

I instantly ceased my pounding. Had I broken part of the lid?

I slid my hands along the top of the coffin, and then raised my legs to what little extent I could and began to slide them along the wood as well, gathering splinters but searching desperately for an imperfection. There didn't seem to be one.

I braced both hands against the lid and pushed up as hard as I could, pushing until my arms felt like they might snap in two. I could feel blood trickling from the cut on my shoulder.

Crack.

The lid had definitely split somewhere. The maggots and decaying flesh soaking my skin were abruptly forgotten. I continued searching for the break in the wood.

Then I found it. It was directly above my navel. I tested it with my index finger—it was small, but definitely there. Daniel should've invested a bit more of his fortune into the coffins.

I continued pushing on the lid.

No good.

I wished I had some kind of tool, but that didn't matter. I'd claw at that break in the wood until there was no skin left on my fingers, and then I'd keep clawing at it with exposed bone, if that's what it took.

Bone!

I felt along the corpse until I located its right hand. I tested each finger. They'd all been partially devoured by the maggots, but the middle finger was the closest to being completely skeletal. I wrapped my own fingers around it tightly, and then tried to bend it backwards. After considerable strain, the finger snapped off.

After a moment of blind panic where I was unable to locate the crack in the wood, I found it and pushed the finger bone against it. As a kid, I'd broken my arm once when I'd been standing too close to the batter while playing baseball, but this pine lid was nowhere near as sturdy as a wooden bat.

I pushed the tip of the bone against the crack, desperately hoping that the wood would break first.

The bone snapped in half.

I stared at it in dismay, even though I couldn't see anything in the darkness.

Don't scream!

I didn't scream. There were other bones. I had all the time in the world. Until I suffocated.

* * *

You wouldn't think that maggots squirming on your body were something a person could get used to, but I was so focused on the task at hand that it wasn't long before I didn't even notice them. With a twist of the corpse's rib, the wood began to break away. I was moving the bone slowly, deliberately, but the sound of wood splintering was enough to make me want to giggle with maniacal glee.

Then a small chunk of the wood broke, and I felt some dirt trickle in and pour on my waist. I set the rib aside and fingered the gap. It was about an inch square. I dug my thumbs into the dirt on the edge and tried to pry it apart even further.

* * *

My thumbs were raw and bloody, and I'd gone through three more ribs, but more bits of wood had broken away. Now the gap was large enough that I could fit all of my fingers into it.

As I struggled with it, there was another cracking sound. I slid my hand along the lid, and realized that a foot-long split had appeared, stretching from the square gap in a straight line toward my face.

I continued pulling on the edge of the wood.

* * *

It felt like it took forever, but I don't think it was more than a few minutes before I managed to break away a long strip of the wood. More dirt poured onto my chest.

At this point, I had to start being really careful. I wasn't sure how deep I'd been buried, and if too much dirt came crashing down the coffin lid might cave in and squash me like a...well, like a maggot.

Slow and steady.

My arms were agonizingly sore, forcing me to take a break. I rested them at my sides, closed my eyes, and tried to breathe easy.

I imagined Wesley snarling at me. "Get a move on, ya slacker!"

After a few minutes, I managed to break off another chunk of wood, and then began to vigorously scoop out handfuls of the exposed dirt and toss them to the foot of the coffin. Dirt was raining down on my face in small quantities, and I spit it out to the side.

* * *

I had dug as high as my arms would reach. The digging part was pretty easy, since the grave had just been filled in and the dirt hadn't had time to pack itself down.

Now I had more room to maneuver, and I set about breaking away more of the coffin lid.

* * *

Though it was hard to breathe, my spirits were high as I sat up, scraping my already-injured shoulder badly against a jutting portion of the lid, but certain that I was home free.

Sticky flesh clung to my back. I ignored it.

* * *

I'm going to make it!

I was filled with hope and energy. Despite this horrific ordeal, despite the fact that my chances of survival once I reached the surface might be slim, despite the fact that I might never see Helen, Theresa, or Kyle again, I felt recharged. I was getting out of here.

Sitting up straight, I dug with an incredible fervor. My arms could stretch almost to their full length over my head, so I had to be getting close.

I wondered if anybody was waiting above.

Would they bother to have somebody guard a grave?

There was only one way to find out.

* * *

My hand burst through to the surface. The cold air felt absolutely fantastic.

My other hand broke through, and I clutched the smooth ground above. It took several tries to work up the strength, but finally, I pulled myself out of the grave.

After being in complete darkness for so long, my eyes burned in the light. I just lay there, panting, completely exhausted.

I'd made it!

Then I heard somebody applaud.

"Now that was impressive. Nice work!"

Roger! It was Roger! But had he escaped, or was he still a prisoner?

I shielded my eyes from the light and turned around. "Rog!" I gasped.

"Ummm, nope, not Roger. Your traumatic experience has left you a bit delirious. This is your good friend Curtwood Foster."

And it was. Foster sat on a folding chair, a paperback novel in one hand, and a martini in the other.

I just collapsed to the ground.

"Aw...is the poor guy tired?"

Foster set his book and drink aside, and then stood up and began to walk toward me. He cracked his knuckles. "You are so, so, so very dead."

"You know, Foster," I managed to say, "you were always my favorite of the group."

"Isn't that sweet? You know, I could take you into the operating room, but I'm really an old-fashioned kind of guy at heart, so I'm going with the traditional beating to death."

I pushed myself up. A violent kick to the side sent me right back down. I groaned in pain and rolled onto my back.

"No, no, don't get up for me," Foster said. "I have to say, the whole time I sat there I was hoping you'd make it out somehow. I almost dug you up myself. Because I really wanted to do this." He kicked me in the side again. I wondered if my own ribs were going to look like Wesley's by the time this was over.

Foster stepped away from me and raised his fists like a boxer. "Let's make this fair. I'll give you a couple of moments to get up. Maybe I'll even give you a free punch. How's that sound?"

"How about you..." I had to pause to take a breath, "...give me your gun?"

"I might, I just might. Get up. Fight like man."

My muscles felt like they were being ripped from the bone as I got to my feet, but I couldn't just lie there and let him kick me to death. I raised my fists, and then lost my balance and fell back to the ground.

"Now that's just pathetic," said Foster, taking out his gun. "Maybe I oughta blow off your kneecaps like I said, huh?"

I resumed my effort to get back to my feet. "Sure, if you want to bring the others here."

"I don't know, I think this place is pretty much soundproof. Should we test it?"

My legs buckled beneath me, but I kept from hitting the ground. "I guess...if you don't think you can beat me."

Foster extended the gun toward my face, and then strode over to me, keeping it pointed between my eyes the entire time. Right before the barrel connected with my face, he smacked the barrel of the gun against the side of my head, hard. I accidentally bit the side of my mouth and dropped to the ground yet again.

"Having a bit of trouble with your balance, aren't you?" Foster asked. "Could be an inner ear problem."

I wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of my mouth and made another effort to get up. Though in my current condition, even if I could get a punch in it probably wouldn't be enough to knock a bird off its perch.

"You do have willpower, I'll give you that," said Foster. "Make you a deal. I'll end this. One shot to the gut, one shot to each leg, one shot to each arm, and then I'll put the barrel in your mouth and put you out of your misery? How's that sound?"

I forced myself to shrug. "Will Daniel...reimburse you for the...extra bullets?"

"Probably not, but in this case, it's my pleasure."

I stood up as straight as possible. "I don't mean to be rude, but..."

"But what?"

I motioned for him to wait while I caught my breath. "But why do you need a gun to fight me? Isn't that kind of sad?"

"Now, see, you're trying to convince me to throw away the gun to make this more of a challenge, but what you're not realizing is that I'm the type of person who's happy to torture and kill a helpless person strapped to an operating table. So while I appreciate your attempt, it's not going to work."

He lowered the gun so it was pointing at my belly.

"I wish you wouldn't do that," I said. "I've always been kind of proud that I have an outtie instead of an innie."

"Well, now, you'll just have to learn to be proud of your brand new, amazingly deep innie."

"Nah." I took a step to the side, and fell back into the open grave. My bare feet slammed down upon Wesley's jaw, but I withheld the scream as I pushed myself down as far as I could go while I hurriedly searched through the coffin.

"Uh-oh," I heard Foster say. "Andrew's hiding from me! Where could he possibly be?"

His head popped into view. "Peek-a-boo! I see—"

Thrusting upward with both hands, I slammed Wesley's rib into Foster's throat. It wasn't the most accurate hit, but there was no lack of momentum.

His eyes widened, he let out a weak gasp, and the gun dropped into my lap.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

A couple of minutes later, I stood above ground again. There I was, wearing nothing but boxer shorts with a revolver protruding from the waistband, totally covered with dirt, blood, and assorted corpse residue, a gory rib bone in one hand and Foster's martini in the other. Probably not my most attractive look, but not as embarrassing as my Prince phase.

After I gulped down the drink, I tossed the glass and rib aside and tried to untie Foster's shoes, but he'd used some mutant knot that refused to come undone. I patted down his pockets, with no success, but after I pulled off his jacket I found two pass cards, and a set of regular keys in the inside pocket. I also found a birthday card from Daniel, but I determined that to be somewhat less useful than the pass cards and keys.

I put on the jacket and flipped open the cylinder of the gun. Six bullets. One for each psychopath, plus two remaining for party tricks. I snapped it back into place.

Though time was certainly a consideration, I'd be in much better shape if everyone thought I was still buried alive. So I took a few moments to push Foster into the grave and fill it with dirt. Not exactly a nice, neat job, but passable.

I was still tired and aching all over, but I had to go. I waved the pass card in front of the reader, and then opened the door just a crack, keeping the barrel of the revolver pointed into the next room.

Cells lined each side of the room. This was where they kept the prisoners. And thankfully, there weren't any guards present.

I threw open the door and stepped inside. The first person I saw was Roger, directly to my left. He rushed over to the front bars of his cell. "Andrew! Oh my God!"

"Hi, Rog," I said. "I figured if I could survive your lasagna surprise, I could easily survive being buried alive."

Yeah, it was a weak joke, and I'm ashamed to admit that I'd actually thought of it back while I was searching Foster, but hey, any quip was impressive under these circumstances.

"You've got to get us out of here," Roger insisted. "They took Charlotte about fifteen minutes ago, but the hatchet guy said that if anything else goes wrong, they're just going to go ahead and execute everyone!"

"Don't worry," I said, holding up the pass cards. The first one was red, while the second was yellow like the one I'd borrowed from Josie.

Nothing happened when I tried the yellow card, so I held the red card up to the reader. After the click, I pulled Roger's cell door open.

"Do I French kiss you or beat the shit out of you first?" he asked, leaving the cell.

"I'll take the beating."

"Cool. We'll schedule it for right after you finish rescuing me. You have a fabulous plan for our escape, right?"

"Just to screw up as little as possible." I waved the red card over the next cell's reader. Instead of a click, we were treated to the sound of a blaring alarm.

The alarm was too loud for us to make the obvious comment about screwing up as little as possible, so we settled for exchanging a look that indicated we were both thinking that obvious comment.

I hated to leave the prisoners behind, but we had to get out of there quickly. With me in the lead, we rushed out of the cell area, leaving the door wide open, and into a hallway. The alarm stopped moments after we began sprinting down the corridor, passing the gladiator ring, and nearly colliding with Josie. Daniel, Mortimer, and Stan were right behind her.

Without hesitation, I threw my arm around Josie's neck and pulled her toward me, pressing Foster's gun to the side of her head. "Stop!" I shouted.

Daniel stopped, and waved for the others to do the same. I began to back away, putting about ten feet between us.

"I strongly recommend that you let her go," Daniel said.

"No, I strongly recommend that you let the others go," I told him. "Now! Open every one of those cells or I'll blow her head off!"

"And where does that leave you?" asked Daniel. "Holding my headless wife while I put a few bullets in your face." He pointed his gun at me.

"I'm serious, Daniel!" I took another step back, forcing Josie to follow.

"Oh, I'm sure you are. But I'm certain that you'll understand my position here. I can't let the prisoners go. It's just not going to happen."

He was trying to act casual, but it was obvious that Daniel was concerned. I pushed the gun more tightly against Josie's head.

"I'll pull the trigger!"

"Really? So will I."

Daniel fired a shot. It sailed safely past my face, but Josie gave a violent shudder and Roger pressed himself more closely behind me.

Mortimer and Stan raised their own guns.

"You're gonna get her killed!" I warned.

Daniel fired again, coming close enough that I could feel the air move as the bullet passed. "Let her go and I promise you can have your own coffin this time."

I couldn't believe this. Was he really going to let everyone open fire, blowing Josie away along with Roger and I? If I made it home alive, I was going to make it very clear that Helen could have done much worse in her selection of husbands.

Obviously, Roger believed that we were moments away from a bloody free-for-all, one where everybody took hundreds of slow-motion bullet hits and died with a chanting chorus in the background. He took off running in the opposite direction. "Come and get me, you chickenshits!" he shouted, rounding the corner.

Daniel glanced over his shoulder and nodded to Mortimer and Stan. "Take him out." They turned around and went down another path.

I took another step back. Daniel kept the gun pointed at me. "So, it's just us now," he said. "You have no idea how much it pains me to have to shoot you and your friend instead of doing something more elaborate, but you gotta do what you gotta do."

He fired another shot. I wondered how long I had before he tried to shoot at me through Josie.

I removed the gun from her head and pointed it at Daniel. Just as I squeezed the trigger, Josie smacked my arm away, and the shot went wild, hitting the ceiling. As we struggled with the gun, we stumbled through an open doorway.

We were in the Darts room. I was still sore and tired from the beating I'd taken from Foster, so while I fought vigorously against Josie, she kept moving me toward the clear cube. Another wild shot pounded into the floor.

Daniel followed us, but from his angle Josie was in front of me, and he didn't shoot.

Josie slammed me against the cube wall and the gun fell out of my hand. She wrapped her hands around my neck and began to squeeze, her eyes like a crazed animal, as we slid along the surface of the cube.

Then the wall ended, and I tumbled backward into the open entrance, pulling Josie back with me. We both struck the floor of the cube, sending a jarring memory of my butt wound tearing through my body, and continued our frenzied scuffle. Her hands were still firmly clenched around my neck.

Daniel slammed the clear door shut and fastened the lock.

When she heard this, Josie released her grip and turned around. Daniel slid a spike into the cannon, and motioned for her to get out of the way.

She did.

I followed.

Daniel swiveled the cannon toward us. I lunged for Josie, but she shoved me back with both hands. "Get away!"

The cannon was pointed right at me. Instead of going for Josie, I jumped the other way.

Snap!

A punching bag jerked forward as the dart struck it. While Daniel reloaded, I rushed back at Josie and tried to throw my arms around her. She took a swing at me that glanced off my shoulder, but since it was my injured shoulder the pain was excruciating.

Snap!

I don't even know how close the dart came, but the sound of it slamming against the wall of the cube was ten times louder from the inside. My ears started to ring.

Daniel was putting another spike in the cannon. Now, I could've kept myself alive for a while by just running from one side of the cube to the other, forcing Daniel to keep trading cannons, but I didn't see that as the most astute tactical decision. I had to keep myself as close to Josie as possible.

She punched my shoulder again and my eyes filled with stinging tears. But then I delivered an amazing blow to the jaw that knocked her against the slide. As she struck it with a clang, it occurred to me that my day's activities had included punching out a woman and stripping another one naked without permission. Chivalry was dead in the Mayhem household.

She got up and came at me, but I shoved another punching bag at her. She let out an ooommph and staggered against the slide again.

Snap!

I let out a yelp as the spike ripped across the top of my shoulder. The same freaking shoulder. Any doctor examining me was going to think I had some sick masochistic shoulder fetish. Daniel clapped his hands together and did some obnoxious cheer that I was thankful I couldn't hear, then flexed his muscles.

Hadn't Roger killed off Mortimer and Stan yet? I needed help!

As if in response to my mental question, Stan entered the room. Daniel said something to him, and he took a position at the next cannon. I began to reminisce about the good old days when all I had to worry about were a couple of lunatics with malfunctioning power tools.

Snap! A spike fired by Daniel struck the far wall.

Snap! A spike fired by Stan also struck the far wall.

I dove at Josie yet again, managing to get her in a bear hug. My shoulder hurt so badly that I couldn't even start to enjoy the sensation of being snuggly. I spun around, getting her in front of me, and then fell back against the slide, Josie ending up on my lap.

She began to claw at my arms with her fingernails. I gritted my teeth and refused to let go. Then she smashed the back of her head against my face. The second time she did that, I let go.

I made a grab for her leg as she tried to run off. I caught her thigh, lost it immediately, and then got a hold of her ankle. I yanked her toward me, and then lost my balance and toppled backwards.

Snap!

A dart struck Josie in the leg, plunging deep into her thigh. She let out a glass-shattering shriek, though unfortunately not a plastic cube-shattering one. Daniel stormed over and punched Stan in the chin, knocking him completely off his feet, and let loose with a barrage of shouted observations that I suspected might include some profanity.

Screwing up my chivalry status even more, I sat on Josie's back, wrenched the spike out of her leg and pressed the tip against the side of her neck that faced Daniel. If my body were to, say, engage in any sort of movement, such as the type that might occur when a fast-moving projectile struck it, the spike would be driven into her neck.

Daniel apparently got it. He reached into the cardboard box, took one spike in each hand, and went over to the door.

He said something that was probably very intimidating and dramatic, but of course I couldn't hear him. He switched the spikes to his left hand just long enough to unlock and open the cube door, and then stepped inside.

"All right, Andrew, it's just you and me," he said.

I shook my head. "Um, no, actually I've got Josie right here."

"Let her go."

"I'd rather not do that."

"Maybe we can work something out." Daniel slid the spikes against each other as if sharpening them.

"Oh, gee, what made you change your mind? Seeing your wife's blood? There's a lot of it here, huh? Watch out you don't slip."

Daniel's smile looked more like a grimace as he walked toward me. "I'm impressed. You can be just as cruel as we can. Are you sure you don't want to join us?"

"That depends. Does your insurance plan cover spouse and children?"

"But of course. You stand to make a good hundred grand in life insurance after we massacre them."

"Funny, funny, funny. Not the best negotiating tactic, though."

"I've decided not to negotiate."

"You asshole!" Josie sputtered.

"I really suggest you stop moving," I told Daniel. "You're gonna kill her."

"That's the chance I'll take." He was only a few steps away from us now.

I pressed the spike more tightly against Josie's neck. She let out a whimper, and Daniel stopped.

"Why'd you hesitate?" I asked. "Not quite the uncaring husband you'd like to portray, huh?"

"You know, I didn't mention this before, but those are some cute boxers," said Daniel. "Where'd you get them?"

He couldn't fool me. He was scared.

"Bloomingdale's," I replied. "They were kind of pricey, but the tag said they were burial-resistant, so I figured it was worth the cost."

"I'll have to pick some up."

"I'll sell you these if you want. Make me an offer."

"I'll going to have to pass, but I do appreciate your generosity."

"That's okay. Keep it in mind." I glanced at something behind Daniel. "Boy, Stan just doesn't learn, does he?"

I couldn't believe this actually worked, but Daniel spun around to see what I was referring to. Stan was standing outside the cube, nowhere near the cannon, massaging his chin.

I pulled the spike away from Josie's neck and flung it at Daniel. It twirled, end over end, directly at his face.

And to my astonishment, it struck him in the forehead.

This would have been cause for celebration, except that the side hit him and not the point. Still, his head flew backward, and the noise he made seemed to indicate that it really hurt.

I leapt over Josie and ran as fast as my pain-wracked body could move. Daniel still had his gun and he was far from mortally wounded, so I didn't try to tackle him. Instead I sprinted for the door.

I did, however, shove a punching bag at him, hitting him in the side. Those things were turning out to be darn useful.

Stan stepped into the doorway to block me. Before he could raise his gun, I slammed the door into him, knocking him out of my way. I got out of the cube and pulled the door shut just as Daniel fired a shot that would have went through my belly had the plastic not been there.

I took a swing at Stan and missed, but a blow with my other hand struck him in the chin, almost exactly where Daniel had hit. I could hear footsteps behind me...Daniel rushing for the door.

A brutal knee to the groin took away a good portion of Stan's savagery. He still held the gun, but didn't look like his aim was going to be all that it could be, so I hurried back to the cube door and fastened the lock an instant before Daniel reached it.

A bullet ricocheted off the door right next to me. I didn't see anybody in the hallway outside, but unless Roger had gone loopy it had to be Mortimer. I ran toward the wall and around the corner of the cube, cursing myself for it before I'd finished my second step. I should've fought for Stan's gun.

Mortimer entered the Darts room. "You take the left, I'll take the right," he said. Stan nodded weakly and began to limp around the cube in the opposite direction that I was running.

I ran around to the far side of the cube. No other exits except the way I came in. Armed bad guys moving in on each side. Bummer, bummer, bummer.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I think it's safe enough to say that I'd had my share of bad luck during this whole ordeal, so as I watched Mortimer and Stan move closer I decided that it was high time for a bit of good luck to come my way.

Of course, that's a really stupid thing to decide when you're in a situation like this. Sort of like the thunderstorm that always follows "So what else could possibly go wrong?" As soon as I thought it, I expected a suffer a fatal coronary, or for a slab of the cube wall to drop off and squish me, or for the floor to crack open revealing the pits of hell and six hundred and sixty-six demons ready to drag me down to my fiery demise.

As it so happened, I lucked out.

Roger entered the room, still uninjured. He saw my predicament, and began waving his arms over his head. "Hey! I'm still around! What's the matter, you can't find someone in your own place?"

Mortimer and Stan each turned toward the sound of his voice, but they didn't go after him.

"Damn it, Roger, forget about me!" I shouted. "Get out of here! Unlock the rest of the cells!"

Roger left the room.

Stan and Mortimer exchanged a concerned glance. For all they knew, Roger had the pass card. After a moment's hesitation, Mortimer went after him.

I truly hated sending them after Roger, but it wasn't like he could get out of here without my pass card. Okay, so, he could have somehow taken out one of the bad guys and got a pass card of his own, but still...it was a wise strategic decision.

And the fact that Mortimer had gone after him revealed an important piece of information. Even though the alarm had gone off and the second cell door hadn't opened with the pass card, they still believed we might have the means to get the prisoners out. So maybe we did.

I went around the corner on Mortimer's side just as he exited the room and just before Stan appeared on my end. I ran toward the door. Stan followed me, but he was still shaky from the gonad pounding and engaged in a lackluster pursuit.

Daniel was crouched next to Josie, wrapping his shirt around her leg, not really paying attention to what was going on outside the cube.

I left the Darts room, took a split second to recall the layout of the parts of the structure that I'd visited, and hurried down the hallway away from the cell area. After crossing through an intersection, I waved the pass card, opened the door, and stepped into the operating room.

Charlotte was strapped to the table, fully clothed this time. Her eyes widened as I shut the door behind me.

"I'm here to help!" I insisted. "I promise, I'm not some deviant rapist...despite my lack of pants."

"What on earth is going on?" she asked. "Who are you?"

"It's really kind of complicated," I explained, unfastening the straps. "I was sort of hired by your husband to help rescue you, but things worked out kind of goofy."

I cringed as I unfastened the strap binding her left wrist. Her arm was covered with five or six long cuts, stretching from the back of her wrist to her elbow. She noticed my concern.

"It's nothing, don't worry about it," she said. "You look a lot worse."

"Yeah, it hasn't been a good day for my body."

"I saw them wheel you through the place where they're keeping everybody. I take it they don't think you're one of them anymore?"

I shook my head. "It was nice while it lasted."

I finished the final strap and she got off the table. I knew we had to hurry, but we could most definitely spare a moment to gather some supplies. There were a lot of great weapons in here.

Charlotte grabbed a spiked metal club and a short spear. I went for the machete. "Could you take these?" I asked, handing a screwdriver and small knife to Charlotte. "I don't have pockets."

"Sure."

"Thanks. Let's get out of here."

There wasn't a window in the door, so I opened it as silently as possible and peeked out. The hallway was empty. We left the operating room and began to quickly but softly move down the corridor. Our first job was to get to the cell area and pray that Mortimer hadn't been able to catch up to Roger.

Hoping we wouldn't get lost, I turned at the intersection. I didn't particularly want to walk by the Darts room, and I assumed there was another way around. The cell area was on the far left side of the structure, so if I just kept heading that way...

A gunshot. One that sounded like it came from the far left side of the structure. I picked up my pace, and Charlotte followed.

Off in the distance, I saw Mortimer run across an intersection. He didn't see us, or even look in our direction.

We began to run even faster.

We reached the cell area. Roger immediately spun around and pointed a gun at us, but relaxed when he saw who we were. "Give me the card! Quick!"

I tossed the red card to him. He caught it in the air. The other prisoners were pressed against the cell bars, anxiously waiting to be set free.

"Are they right behind you?" he asked.

"Not at the moment, but pretty soon, yeah."

"What do you think made the alarm go off?" he asked.

"I have no idea. Try a different cell this time."

"If it goes off, what do we do?"

"We run. I've got some keys, and I'm pretty sure they belong to the vans that brought us here. We can smash through the gates and drive somewhere to get help."

"Then everyone else will die," Roger said. "I told you, they're going to execute the prisoners if anything else goes wrong!"

I didn't know what to say to that. "Well, there are four of them out there. Josie's hurt pretty bad. What about Mortimer?"

"I might have broken his nose," said Roger. "I knocked the gun away from him, but he ran away before I could use it."

"He could come back with something worse."

"You think?"

"Oh yeah."

"I've got a gun. There's only one way they could come in. We can keep them from getting in here, can't we?"

"But nobody knows we're here. They had Charlotte for months. They could just lock the place up, leave us to rot for a couple of weeks."

"Can we please stop talking and do something?" asked Charlotte.

"Try it," I told Roger.

He waved the card over a cell reader, across the path from the one that had previously set off the alarm.

The cell didn't unlock. The alarm went off.

"Shit!" Roger shouted.

"We've gotta get out of here!" I said. "Give me the gun!"

Roger handed it to me. I headed for the doorway, and then held the gun out to a redheaded man in the cell closest to the exit. "Don't let anyone through that door. We'll be back for you. I promise."

The man gave a grim nod and took the gun. Roger, Charlotte and I fled the room and ran down the hallway.

"Don't worry," I told Roger as we ran. "We'll get everybody out of here."

"Hell yeah, we will," Roger said. We ran without speaking for a few seconds. "Hey, Andrew?"

"Yeah?"

"Will you promise not to be offended if I share something with you?"

"Sure."

"You smell really bad. I mean, it's nasty beyond description. I'd almost rather be back in the cell."

"I've missed you, Roger."

"I missed you too, Andrew."

* * *

We reached the far right end of the structure, which stopped at a wide white door. The pass card worked on it, and we went through.

Beyond the door was a small garage. Surprisingly, it looked like any other filthy garage, although standard equipment like a vice certainly carried a foreboding aura.

The van was there.

"I think we're saved!" I said, unable to contain my relief even though it was far too early to relax. After a couple of tries I found the correct key on Foster's key ring, and we all got inside, me in the driver's seat, Roger and Charlotte in the back.

"Anything useful back there?" I asked, setting my machete on the passenger seat while I started the engine.

"Some chains, big metal clamps, something that looks like a cattle prod..."

I reached under the visor. There were two garage door openers. I pressed the button on the first one, and the door behind us began to open with a loud hum. It opened slowly, almost maddeningly so.

"Come on...come on..." I whispered, because you never know when a slow-moving garage door will hear comments like that and decide to speed things up a little.

"I'm not seeing anything good back here," Roger said.

"Come on...come on..." Charlotte said to the garage door, obviously working under the same theory I was.

I expected a pair of legs to become visible in the gap any second. Or, more likely, for the white door to fly open. I revved the engine. The door was about three-quarters of the way up.

The white door flew open.

I slammed my foot on the gas pedal. The tires squealed and the van shot forward. There was a horrible screech as the roof scraped against the rising door, but then we were outside the garage. I turned on the headlights and kept the accelerator floored.

I pressed the button on the second remote, praying that it opened the gate. Nothing happened. I pulled it from the visor, and then slammed on the brake. "It's got a code!"

"Just ram the gate!" Roger shouted. He scurried to the back of the van and peered through the rear window. "The front door's opening!"

The rest of the fence looked quite a bit less sturdy than the main gate, but I couldn't exactly work up any speed plowing through a couple of feet of snow. I fastened my seat belt, and then turned the van toward the main gate, backed it up about ten feet, and then floored the gas pedal again.

"Hold on!" I warned. Roger and Charlotte both grabbed something to brace themselves. I gritted my teeth, waiting for the impact.

The van smashed into the gates, safety glass from the windshield flying everywhere. The air bag inflated in front of me. The gates didn't budge.

I put the van into reverse and backed up again. "Three of 'em are coming out the front," said Roger. "And another one, the one whose nose I broke, he's coming out of the garage!"

"That's the whole party," I said.

"I'm not a weapons expert," Roger admitted, "but the things they're carrying look a lot like machine guns."

At that moment, there was a loud series of clanging and shattering sounds as machine gun fire ripped through the side of the van. Roger and Charlotte dove for the van floor, glass raining down upon them.

I returned my attention to the gate, ducked down as far as I could, and then floored the accelerator. It was hard to steer the van with the air bag in the way, but I managed as well as I could.

As machine gun bullets continued to hit the van, it struck the gate a second time. I heard Charlotte grunt as she smacked against the back of my seat. The gates held firm.

Then the machine gun fire ceased. After a moment, Roger peeked through the broken rear window.

"I don't want to be Mr. Doom and Gloom," he said, as the van's engine began to sputter and it began to sink on its deflating tires, "but they seem to be passing out grenades."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I put the van into reverse again. Even though I had the accelerator against the floor, it seemed to be struggling to hit five miles per hour. I wondered what my chances were of taking all four of our pursuers out via vehicular homicide.

Something slammed against the side of the van, followed by Daniel's charming voice shouting "You idiot, you missed the—!"

A huge explosion rocked the van.

I kept the accelerator down, and by some miracle the van kept moving.

I heard something land in the back. Something rolled along the floor.

"Move your head!" Charlotte ordered.

I did so. She flung the grenade out where the front windshield had been. It struck the gate, and for a heart-stopping instant I thought it was going to bounce back at us, but it dropped straight down to the ground and exploded.

No damage to the gates.

I swerved the van to the left, steering it back toward the garage. I couldn't run anybody over going this slowly, and the gates were a hopeless cause.

In what remained of the rear-view mirror, I saw another grenade fly into the back of the van.

Then a second one.

A third one sailed in as Roger grabbed for the first. Charlotte scooped up the second and threw it past my head again. It landed on the ground and exploded, sending a huge blast of snow into the air.

The van was picking up speed. Not much, but a little.

Roger threw his first grenade out the window. Charlotte began to frantically look around the rear of the van. "Where'd the other one go?"

"By your foot!"

Charlotte grabbed it and threw it again. But she was so frazzled that the throw went wild, hitting the top of the windshield, bouncing off the dashboard, and into my lap.

I'd played Hot Potato many times as a kid, but never a version with such high stakes. I grabbed the grenade and whipped it out the window. It exploded in mid-air, barely clearing the front of the van.

Then the machine gun fire started again.

I ducked down and blindly drove the van, hoping I wouldn't go off the mostly-cleared path and get us stuck. I was amazed that the van was still functioning, even at this fairly pitiful level. Another grenade exploded, but this one hadn't made it inside.

The machine gun fire didn't stop, so I couldn't tell if we were leaving them behind or they were running after the van. I sort of hoped they were running after us. Slipping on a patch of ice while firing a machine gun could cause one heck of a nasty accident.

After an endless minute, the van reached the garage. I attempted to turn into it, but instead crashed against the side of the doorway. While Roger and Charlotte climbed over the seats toward me, I grabbed the machete and scrambled through the front window and onto the smashed hood.

More machine gun bullets hit the van as the three of us hurried through the garage. I opened the door and we rushed back into the hallway. As I pulled it shut, the door began to twitch with the impact of machine gun fire.

"Any great ideas?" I asked.

"Run between the bullets," Roger suggested.

"How can you be a smart-ass at a time like this?" Charlotte demanded.

"We could die at any second," Roger explained. "I'd like my final words to be something clever."

We swerved down another corridor just as they began firing again. It was readily evident that this had been one of my typical bad decisions, because the corridor had a door at the end but no other options.

"Piss," Roger remarked.

I unlocked the door, flung it open, and we rushed through, finding ourselves in a small, dimly lit room. A small room with a bearskin rug on the floor, and nothing else. No windows, no doors, no portable teleportation devices, nothing.

"Piss piss," Roger added.

"Okay...problem..." I mumbled, shutting the door. Maybe we could smother them with the rug.

"I hope you've got your clever comments ready," said Charlotte.

Why was there a bearskin rug in an otherwise empty room anyway? I slid it aside, half-expecting it to try and bite my foot off. There was a trapdoor underneath.

Bullets began to tear through the door. The three of us dove to the floor. I unlatched the chain on the trapdoor and lifted it. It was too dark to see anything but a slide leading down.

"Looks good to me," said Roger.

Then I remembered what Daniel had said about his latest project, the underground one that wasn't completely functional but would be amazing.

"You know what, I don't think we want to go down there."

More bullets tore through the door.

"Okay, yeah, we do."

Roger jumped down into the trapdoor and vanished from sight. Charlotte followed. Just as the door broke apart from a violent kick on the other side, I went after them.

I slid down for about ten seconds, and then kicked somebody in the back as I landed. It was pitch black down here, as well as hot and humid, almost like I was back in Florida.

"Everyone still alive?" I asked.

"Not dead here," said Roger.

"Here either," said Charlotte.

I got to my feet. I couldn't see a thing except for a faint light from the trapdoor above, but if any of the others slid down here, they were going to run into the machete.

The trapdoor closed, cutting off all the light.

"Okay," I said, "our situation does not seem to have taken much of an upward turn."

"Why is it so hot down here?" asked Charlotte. "What is this place?"

"I don't know," I admitted, "but I don't think it's going to be fun."

"What's that noise?" asked Charlotte.

"Okay, I don't need questions like that," said Roger. "When you ask something like 'what's that noise?' it really makes me nervous, and I'm plenty nervous already, and I'd just rather you—"

"Shhh! Listen!"

We all shut up and listened. I couldn't quite tell what it was, but there was some sort of noise coming from the darkness ahead of us. Something too soft to make out accurately. Almost like a buzzing.

"We can't stand around here," Roger said. "If there's a way out, we've got to find it as soon as possible. How long do you think the other prisoners can defend themselves with that one gun?"

We spent a few minutes trying to find a light source. There was a wall right behind where the slide had dropped us off, but sliding our hands along it located no light switch.

"Forget it," I finally said. "We'll just have to do it in the dark."

Slowly, cautiously, we began to walk forward. I had my arms out on front of me, and assumed the others did, too. The floor was smooth, possibly cement. The sound got a bit louder as we moved forward, but was still impossible to identify.

Then I slipped on a wet patch and pitched forward, smacking into something at waist-level. It felt like one of the carts in the operating room. A second later there was a huge crash—glass breaking against the floor. I tried to move away and smacked into something similar. It also toppled over in an explosion of shattering glass.

There was a long silence.

"Smooth move," said Roger.

I could feel a large shard of glass pressed up against one of my bare feet. Now it was officially time to move very, very slowly, unless I wanted to leave large strips of my feet behind. I carefully slid my right foot forward, pushing away the glass in front of it. I did the same with my left.

The noise was much louder now, and this time I could identify it.

Rattling. And hissing.

I very much wanted to take off running across the room, screaming at the top of my lungs, but the presence of the broken glass made that a poor option.

"Are those fucking snakes?" asked Charlotte.

"Everyone stay calm," I warned.

The hissing continued, and now I could hear slithering coming from at least four places around me.

"What is the problem with these people?" Roger demanded, his voice panicked. "Who keeps rattlesnakes in their basement in Alaska? Where the hell did they get them? When do they feed them? I'm having a really difficult time with all of this!"

"Be quiet!" snapped Charlotte. "Just don't make them mad!"

I moved my toe forward, past something sharp and into something soft and wet. The open mouth of a dead snake. Unable to control myself, I rapidly stepped back, crushing a small, scaly mass that had come up behind me, and then I lurched forward again.

I bit down on my knuckles to keep from shrieking. Of course, with my knuckles muffling my shriek, I could hear the rattling and hissing and slithering perfectly well.

Then Charlotte shrieked for me.

"What? What happened?" asked Roger.

"It went over my foot! The snake went over my foot!"

There were loud pounding sounds that were apparently Charlotte beating the ground around her feet with the spiked club.

"Everybody calm down!" I said, pulling my hand out of my mouth. "If we don't get bit we'll be fine! Just keep moving forward!"

There was definite writhing behind me, and I was starting to think there were many more than four active snakes on the floor. I slid my foot forward, hooking my toe underneath the dead snake whose mouth I'd explored and flipping the creature out of the way.

The snake behind me brushed across the back of my foot. I hadn't killed it when I stepped on it, and it seemed to be freaking out, twisting back and forth wildly. Hopefully it would slice itself to death on the glass, or at least not dig its fangs into my heel.

I kept moving forward. There was a sudden stinging pain in my toe. I screamed.

"What? What?" demanded Roger.

"I got bit! One of the snakes bit me! I got me right—okay, no, that was a piece of glass."

"Listen to me, both of you," said Roger. "No more screaming. None!"

"Easy for you to say. You're not barefoot."

"I mean it!"

We continued walking. The glass on the floor thinned out quickly, but I still couldn't see anything in front of me. After a few more steps I stopped worrying about the snakes, though I figured I'd have plenty of other things to worry about before too long.

"Ow!" said Roger.

"What happened?"

"I bumped into the wall."

"Smooth move."

"Shut up."

I touched the wall as well. Now we had to figure out if we were in a completely sealed-off room, in which case we were totally screwed, or there was a way out, in which case we were only close to totally screwed.

"Hey, everyone, guess what I found?" asked Roger. "Let there be light!"

Nothing happened.

"I'm going to be really annoyed if you just released some wild animals into the room," I said.

But then there was a low hum, and some fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling lit up with a dim glow. A second later, they switched to full power, completely lighting the room.

The walls, ceiling, and floor were cement. There was a camera mounted in each corner...naturally, Daniel and his good friends would want to watch what was going on below. There were two other carts with glass aquariums containing rattlesnakes that I hadn't knocked over. I also observed that rattlesnakes hadn't been the only occupants—in addition to the snakes slithering through the broken glass, there were several tarantulas.

In fact, Charlotte had one on the back of her leg.

I tensed up, and then forced myself to relax and act casual as I walked over to her. "I need you to stay very, very still and very, very calm," I said. I held the machete out toward her leg, ready to scrape the spider off, hoping my spider-phobic hand wouldn't be twitching so badly that I severed her limb.

Charlotte glanced down at her leg, picked the spider up between her fingers, and tossed it with the others. "They're not venomous, you know."

"I know," I admitted. "But they're...big."

"The one on your leg isn't all that big."

I swear to God I almost chopped my leg off. I spun around a couple of times, searching for the dreaded arachnid. There was nothing, and I sighed with relief.

"Real funny," I said.

"It crawled up to your waist," Charlotte explained.

I came very close to ripping the boxer shorts right off my body in panic. But there was no tarantula there, either.

Charlotte shrugged and grinned. "Just in case I die now."

"I don't think that was very clever. But I'm glad we're keeping our sense of humor instead of getting all mopey. Now we should probably get moving."

There was a long tunnel ahead, with brick walls rather than the cement. It was about eight feet tall and six feet wide, but the light from this room didn't illuminate far enough for me to tell how far the tunnel stretched.

Walking side by side, we moved into the tunnel. There were two more video cameras, and numerous quarter-sized holes in the walls, irregularly spaced, and a sprinkler on the ceiling just ahead. The floor had a slight downward angle as it extended forward, and was completely covered with a thin layer of dry leaves.

"What do you think?" I asked, pointing at the sprinkler. "Death trap or safety precaution?"

As I took my next step, there was a sudden roar and I spun around to see the passage behind us closed off by a sliding cement door, casting us into complete darkness again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

"Let's look at the bright side," said Roger. "At least the rattlesnakes can't get at us."

We continued walking, the leaves crunching under our feet. Then a dart shot out of one of the holes in the wall, visible because of the unpleasant fact that its tip was on fire. The dart sailed across the tunnel, moving at a downward trajectory—it hadn't been shot with much force. It hit the ground and the leaves underneath began to burn. We stepped over it and moved on.

Hey, I'd survived the other dart room with its cannon fire, I figured I could handle some flaming darts.

The sprinkler activated above us. It was a powerful one, shutting off after a couple of seconds but managing to do a fantastic job of soaking us in that time.

Unfortunately, the liquid we were soaked with wasn't water, it was gasoline.

My nostrils burned and my various wounds (especially that damn shoulder) took on a searing new agony. Charlotte's sharp cry made it clear that the gasoline didn't feel much better on her cut-up arm.

Now flaming darts seemed a bit more problematic.

One of them shot out in front of us. Fortunately, this situation had a fairly obvious plan of action to follow. Run like hell.

Roger and I seemed to understand this in unison, and took off down the tunnel. Darts continued to fly at us with every other step, but they weren't firing quickly, and by running at top speed (or as fast as I could go in bare feet) we were able to avoid them. After a nice hundred-meter dash we reached the door at the end of the tunnel.

Unfortunately, Charlotte had elected for a slow and steady dart avoidance tactic, and we'd left a good dozen or so fires burning in her path.

A dart came so close to her that for a split second I had a hallucination of her bursting into flames.

"Just run!" Roger shouted.

Now the darts were firing more frequently. And faster.

Hot ashes from the burning leaves were swirling up into the air. How could we have been so stupid as to leave her behind? How could she have been so stupid as not to follow us?

And then I noticed a small control panel in the corner. I couldn't be sure it was for the darts, but there wasn't time to debate. I slammed the tip of the machete into it, sending out a flurry of sparks and half-expecting to be electrocuted.

The darts stopped firing. I remained unelectrocuted, though the gasoline fumes were making me sick and a little lightheaded.

Charlotte still stood there, soaked with gasoline in a burning hallway. There was no way she could avoid all of those ashes, so she hurried back the way we came. She leapt over the area where the sprinkler had drenched us, and I waited for it to go off, touching one of the flames and engulfing Charlotte in an inferno.

The sprinkler went off.

It touched one of the flames.

And Charlotte vanished into a huge inferno.

Roger and I stood there, absolutely stunned.

The ball of fire disappeared as quickly as it had come. And we saw Charlotte pressed tightly against the closed entrance, looking utterly freaked but miraculously devoid of sizzling flesh.

"Fuck both of you!" she shouted.

This appeared to be a fair statement, so we didn't argue. Charlotte got down on her hands and knees and began shoving away the leaf cover, creating a gap that would let the fires burn themselves out before they reached her.

"What next?" I called out.

"I'm not going anywhere for a few minutes," Charlotte replied. "You guys might as well go on ahead."

"You think that's a good idea?" I asked.

"Obviously I have no clue what's a good idea in this place. But if the two of you want to check out the next room, that's sure fine by me. I'll just hang out here."

I looked at Roger and he shrugged. "All right," I called out to Charlotte. "Follow as soon as it's safe."

My immediate concern was that another sliding door might seal her off, but that didn't seem likely since there was a regular door at the end of this tunnel rather than another open entrance.

I opened it. More darkness beyond. Wonderful.

"Enjoy yourselves!" Charlotte said, waving.

With the machete out of front of me, I walked into the next room. Another sprinkler went off, drenching us again. But this time it was ordinary water. Kind of refreshing, actually.

"How considerate," Roger remarked. "I guess they're not such bad chaps after all."

"Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be much fun if their victims passed out from gas fumes before the really nasty stuff could happen."

While it would have been nice to take some water back to Charlotte, we certainly had some explosive residue left on us and the risk of running back down the tunnel was too great. So we opened the door and walked into the next room.

As we entered, some lights came on. Bright, colorful lights. Carnival music began to play. The room was huge, and the first thing we saw was a large, multi-colored banner: "Welcome to Deathworld!"

"All the effort he must've put into this place, and the guy can't come up with anything better than Deathworld," Roger muttered. "What a sad state of affairs."

Two wooden poles held up the Deathworld banner. Each pole had an artificial corpse tied to it, the arms stretched out like scarecrows, the throats slit and the eye sockets hollow. There was a small yellow Post-It note attached to one of them.

I pulled it off and read it out loud to Roger: "Replace with the real thing."

"I don't think it's fair to make us beta test this place," said Roger. "We should file a complaint and ask to be let go."

"Hey, if we see them around, it's worth a shot."

We walked under the banner and into the main part of the carnival. It consisted of one sawdust path, with exhibits on each side of it. In the center of the path stood a life-sized plastic clown with oversized shoes, a purple and pink wig, and a big red nose. The clown was holding a wooden sign that said "Press My Nose!"

"I don't want to press its nose," said Roger.

"I think we probably should press its nose," I remarked. "It's all part of the game. Otherwise, we won't be able to get out."

"Make you a deal," said Roger. "You press the nose and I'll tell you what a good job you did."

There wasn't time to argue. I pressed the nose.

"Good job," said Roger, patting me on the back.

The clown's eyes lit up, and it let out a loud giggle as its head began to turn back and forth. "Hi there, kids!" said the clown in an incredibly annoying, high-pitched voice. "Welcome to Deathworld! I'm sure you'll have lots of fun if you follow a few simple rules. Rule number one: Don't litter! If you lose an arm or a leg or a head, pick it up and take it with you...leave Deathworld as beautiful as you found it!"

"I hate clowns," said Roger.

"Rule number two: No outside food or drink! You don't want to pass up our brain burgers, esophagus dogs, or blood shakes, now in type A negative! Rule number three: Watch your step, because at any moment you could..." The clown's head began to spin around three hundred and sixty degrees, and its voice transformed into a low demonic roar. "...DIE DIE DIE DIIIIIE!"

It laughed hysterically for about ten seconds, and then its head stopped spinning and its voice returned to normal. "If you ever want to leave, you'll have to get the four keys! Win them! Find them! Sniff 'em out! Have fun! Bleed well!"

The light in the clown's eyes went out and it stopped moving. I almost chopped its head off with the machete, but gratuitous destruction just seemed wrong. We started down the sawdust path.

To the left, a mechanical skeleton fired at a shooting gallery consisting of mechanical puppies and kittens. If I saw a Post-It on that one, I was going to be seriously outraged.

Suddenly the skeleton spun around and fired with machine-gun rapidity as Roger and I ducked out of the way. After a moment, the skeleton swiveled back around and resumed shooting at the gallery.

On the other side, there was another artificial—I think—corpse resting in the seat above a dunking booth. A sign read "Dunk The Stiff And Win A Key!" But it wasn't really a dunking booth...rather than water, the aquarium under the corpse was filled with spikes.

I assumed that corpse would be replaced with the real thing, too. And then I had a horrible thought. What if the actual keys weren't part of the exhibits yet?

Well, not worth worrying about until I found out for sure. Boards covered with needles to discourage cheating surrounded the area ten feet around the target. I picked up a baseball-sized squishy eyeball from the bucket next to the sign, leaving two more inside. "You want to try or should I?" I asked.

"You go first," said Roger.

I took aim, and then threw the eyeball as hard as I could. It splattered against the aquarium, missing the target by a good three feet.

Roger picked up the second eyeball, spent a ridiculously long moment planning out the perfect angle at which to throw, and then hurled it. It hit almost exactly where mine had.

"Stop distracting me," said Roger, taking the last one.

He threw the eyeball...and almost hit the target, but not quite. Appalling fake eyeball goo slid down the wooden display.

"Are we allowed to cheat?" asked Roger.

"I don't see why not."

He picked up the bucket and threw it, striking the target. The corpse fell onto the spikes and practically exploded into an outrageously disgusting display of reds and yellows that made me think it had been filled with water balloons.

There was a sound like a cash register opening, and then a small golden key dropped into a slot where the bucket had been.

"Wasn't so hard," Roger said.

We walked past a slow-moving carousel with a black canopy. Mechanical children were on the fire-breathing horses, their bodies shriveled and covered with cobwebs, and their echoing laughter sounding through a pair of speakers.

Next up was a Test-Your-Strength game. At the top of the pole rested a severed head. Maybe fake. A strong enough hit upon the plate would send a dagger sailing upward into the head's mouth. On the pole, the mallet hits were ranked as Goner, Dead Meat, Cooked Goose, Shit Out Of Luck, and Potential Survivor (But Probably Not).

"Time to cheat again," I said. Roger nodded, and on the count of three we both jumped into the air as high as we could and came down upon the metal plate with both feet, sending the dagger all the way to the top and ringing a bell. Another golden key dropped into a slot down by the plate.

"Half done already," I noted.

"We rock," Roger agreed.

On the other side was a "Guess Their Weight" display. About nine or ten hugely obese fake corpses were lying in a giant pile. Next to them was a small booth with a four-digit readout in red numbers, currently 0000. A metal joystick apparently let you raise or lower your guess.

"Where in the world does he buy all these corpses?" Roger asked. "These things aren't cheap, you know. I've priced them around Halloween."

I turned the joystick to the right, increasing the number on the display. Ten corpses at, what, four hundred pounds each? Of course, they didn't necessarily weigh as much as a real body, but I had to start somewhere. When the display read 4000 I pressed the button on the joystick.

And got an electric shock so severe I fell to the ground, gasping for breath.

After Roger helped me up, I saw that the display now showed an arrow pointing up. "Your turn," I told Roger. "Guess higher."

Roger took off his shirt, wrung it out, and wrapped it around the joystick. I nodded with approval. "Oh, sure, everybody knows electricity and water are a delightful combination."

He glared at me and put his shirt back on. "Fine, whatever." He increased the display until it read 5000, then pressed the button.

After his yelp, he ended up on the ground as well. The display now showed a down arrow.

"So what, we just do this until we're baked?" he demanded.

"We could wait for Charlotte."

"Wait for Charlotte to what?" she asked, scaring the absolute living shit out of us.

"Hey, in the mood for a nice refreshing electric shock?" I asked, when I could breathe again.

"I'm always in the mood for a nice refreshing electric shock," she replied.

We explained the setup to her, and she set the display to 4500. She pressed the button, and a third golden key dropped into the slot.

"I'm pretty sure that's not fair," Roger observed, flexing his aching hand.

At the end of the path was a large, gold plated door. There were four locks, one on top of the other, but we only had three keys.

We went back down the path, but as far as we could tell we'd hit all of the available games. The carnival probably wasn't finished yet. The shooting gallery skeleton tried to kill us again, but we were expecting it and ducked before the bullets came our way.

"So..." said Roger. "What next?"

"If we could get those overweight corpses rolling, we could probably break the door down with them," I said.

"Did anybody check to see if the door was actually locked?" asked Charlotte.

"Of course the door is locked."

"Uh-huh. I take night classes...well, I did a year ago when I had a life...and I've seen groups of twenty-five people standing outside of an unlocked classroom door because they all just assumed that the first person was standing there because it was locked."

"That's a fascinating insight into human psychology," Roger said. "I vote we test it out."

We returned to the gold-plated door. It was locked.

I inserted the three keys into their proper locks and tested the door again, but it still wouldn't open.

"So what do we do?" I asked. "It could be hidden somewhere around here, or it could just be missing altogether. Maybe when he adds the Bumper Car Bloodbath it'll have the fourth key."

"Maybe the clown knows," said Roger.

"Maybe you should..." I trailed off as I thought of something. "Maybe you're right! Remember what the clown said?" I asked, hurrying back down the path.

"He said 'die' a few times," Roger recalled.

"He also said to find them, to sniff them out." We stopped, ducked under the skeleton's fire, and stood in front of the clown. Its red nose popped right off. Inside was the fourth golden key.

"You are the coolest human being on the face of the earth," said Roger.

It fit the fourth lock, and we moved into the next area.

It contained only a small passageway, low enough that we'd have to crawl through it. Another fake corpse was standing over the entrance, so we'd have to crawl between its legs. I never wanted to see another artificial cadaver for the rest of my life.

Dripping red letters proclaimed "Welcome To The Fun-Filled Maze Of Amusement And Splatter!"

"I'll go first," I said in a moment of bravery that passed as quickly as it had come. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel. Roger followed, and Charlotte followed him.

I crawled for about ten feet, and then emerged into a very small room that allowed me to stand. The walls were a combination of heavily tinted Plexiglas and mirrors, and there were three possible exits. Colorful lights flashed from the ceiling, giving the place an atmosphere like a disco. I guessed that when the place was finished, Daniel would add the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever in the background.

We took the exit to the left. It twisted and turned a couple of times, and then broke off into two more possible paths.

I scraped an "X" on one of the mirrors with the machete. "So we'll know where we've been," I explained.

We followed the path to the left again. Through some of the Plexiglas walls, I could see other parts of the maze, but there was no way to tell at this point how large it was.

There was a knocking sound.

Daniel stood right next to us, separated only by the clear wall. He pointed at me, and then ran his index finger over his throat, letting us know that it was curtains time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

There was a loud rumble behind us. Daniel winked at me, then moved out of sight.

That was okay. I knew I was going to have to face him again, and better here than in a wide-open space where he could just mow us down with his machine gun, not that I noticed him carrying it. Much better to be trapped in a twisting, confusing maze.

At the next intersection, I scratched another "X" on the mirror and we took the path to the right. After about twenty feet and six turns, it dead-ended. We heard more rumbling.

"See if you can kick through the mirror," I suggested to Roger.

He kicked the mirror several times, and though the glass cracked it was clear that we weren't going to be able to break through. So we went back the way we came, returning to the intersection.

The "X" was gone.

"Did I miss something?" I wondered aloud. "I marked it, right?"

"You marked it," said Charlotte. "I know what that sound is. The maze is moving."

Okay, that was most definitely uncool, but again, I had to look on the bright side. Daniel and the others would be just as disoriented as we were. Maybe.

We continued to weave through the maze. At one point I could see Stan, enthusiastically smoking a cigarette about three panels of Plexiglas away. Seconds after that I saw Josie, limping.

Our next path twisted for approximately fifty feet without any new options. After rounding a completely mirrored corner we came face-to-face with a human-sized stone gargoyle. It was an imp-like creature with unnecessarily large fangs and clawed hands raised high over its head. As per the Daniel Rankin touch, it was also wearing headphones. There was just barely enough room to squeeze past it.

Three separate foot-long blades burst out, one from the gargoyle's head, one from the chest, and one from the leg, all in a vertical line, blocking the path. A second later, the blades snapped back and another set of similar blades burst forth, these about five inches to the left of the first set. As these retracted, yet another set popped out, followed by the original set, and so on in that delightful sequence.

Beyond the gargoyle, separated by a panel, I saw Mortimer, with dried blood under his nose. He noticed us as well, and shouted excitedly. "They're by the southeast gargoyle!"

If we turned back they'd probably have us trapped. So I moved as close to the source of the nearest set of blades as possible without getting in their way. The blades popped out. The instant they retracted, I moved forward.

I beat the second set of blades. They snapped out right behind me, grazing the back of my (well, Foster's) jacket.

And I beat the third set of blades, nearly falling over as I lunged into the next part of the maze.

I turned back toward Roger and Charlotte. "Just follow my lead and—"

"Look out!" Roger shouted.

I spun around, machete raised, and nearly ended up with a meat hook through my face. Stan held one in each hand, and lashed out with the second one, slashing across my cheek before I could deflect it. I took a swing with the machete, clumsily batting it against the maze wall since there was so little room to maneuver.

I wondered what happened to the machine guns. Most likely the van was easily replaceable, but Daniel didn't like the idea of damaging his precious maze of death.

Stan's next swing was a downward slice. Though I tried to move back, the meat hook tore through the jacket, slashing across my chest in the process, and became lodged in the material. Stan yanked on the meat hook, pulling me toward him.

I tried to jam the machete through some part of his body, but again there wasn't room. So instead I leaned forward and tried to bite him. He had the same idea at the same moment, and our teeth collided with a clacking sound.

We stared at each other, a little embarrassed.

Then he smacked me on the side of the head with the non-pointy side of the other meat hook, and shoved me toward the gargoyle. I tried to resist, but with my bare feet I couldn't get enough traction. I could hear the blades snapping right behind me.

I kneed him in the groin again. It seemed almost unfair to handle the situation in such a way, but these weren't exactly times to be worried about fighting honorably. As he moaned in agony, I twisted our bodies around, forcing him to be on the side with the gargoyle.

He punched me in the stomach. Hard. I doubled over involuntarily, dry heaving. And I looked up to see him raise the free meat hook high above his head.

Reaching over the gargoyle, Roger grabbed the meat hook and tried to tug it out of his grip. Stan refused to let go...and that's when the floor started moving. The entire section with the gargoyle and the rest of us shifted, throwing everybody off balance, and causing Stan to topple against the gargoyle.

The third set of blades burst forth, the center blade going right through his side. Stan opened his mouth, but no sound emerged. His lit cigarette dropped to the floor. As the blades retracted, he stumbled back another step and was caught by all three of the second set of blades. When those snapped back, his body fell onto the first set. While he should have fallen to the floor at this point, his meat hook was caught on the gargoyle's arm, causing the first set of blades to get him a good half-dozen more times before Roger freed it.

Stan was quite dead.

Another section of maze began to slide next to ours. I got the impression that the maze was set up like one of those puzzles where you slide one square piece at a time until you're able to correctly arrange them into a picture. Whenever I try to do those I end up with some kind of pseudo-Picasso surrealist nightmare.

Though this would have been a fine time to stand there and just gag for a few hours, we had to get moving. Roger squeezed his way through the blades, getting a nasty cut on his elbow but suffering far less puncturing than Stan. Charlotte made it through just as we saw Daniel running down our old path. Since the maze had shifted, he'd have to take a slightly different route to the gargoyle, but Stan was definitely visible through the clear walls from his vantage point.

We didn't stick around long enough to see his reaction to Stan's closed-casket-funeral body, though we did hear his scream of fury. We selected the center path of three and continued moving through the maze.

"You're dead, Mayhem!" Daniel screamed. "Corpus delicti!"

His words chilled me. Which was pretty weird, considering that after all I'd been through so far, the simple fact of Daniel informing me that I might perhaps be in a spot of trouble shouldn't have been much of a mood-breaker. Must've been his delivery.

After a couple more turns, we reached a narrow wooden door. I didn't especially feel like seeking out more keys, but this one didn't appear to have a lock. I opened it and immediately saw hundreds of razor blades falling toward me. I got out of the way right before the razor blade-lined ironing board fell. It was classic slapstick: the unexpected ironing board dropping out of the closet, smacking the poor bozo on the forehead. Thank goodness I'd been able to avoid the uproarious facial lacerations.

We retraced our path and moved on. The maze was undeniably disorienting, but I felt confident that we were at least moving in the same general direction. Well, until we found ourselves back at Stan's body.

Naturally, Roger had a smart-ass comment, but in his anxiety he completely messed up the timing and the phrasing, so it's not worth repeating.

"Okay, so, what do you think about splitting up?" I asked. "If one of us finds the exit, they can call out to everyone else, sort of guide them in the right direction."

"And give away our position," Charlotte noted.

"Right. But we have no idea how big this thing is, or where we're supposed to be headed. We could be wandering around for days."

"That's probably a good idea," said Roger. "As long as I've got my trusty meat hook, I should be okay."

"All right, then," I said. "Everyone pick a path."

I had a very strong temptation to give Roger a good-bye hug in case I never saw him again, but I resisted it. We each took our separate paths, myself to the right, Roger straight ahead, and Charlotte to the left.

My path quickly came to a dead end, so I cheated and went down Roger's path, just as he was returning.

"Yours a dead end, too?" he asked.

I nodded. Together we followed Charlotte's path, which very shortly separated into two. I took the right and Roger took the left.

I peeked at myself in one of the mirrored walls. Ugh. Not a glamorous sight. If Helen ever saw me like this, I'd be practicing forced abstinence for the rest of my life.

Two turns and a quick glimpse of Mortimer later, I was at another door. Now, past experience told me that I probably did not want to open this door, but then again, it could also be the way out. All these risks were doing wonders for my machismo. There wasn't room for me to stand to the side of the door when I opened it, so I settled for turning the doorknob carefully and easing it open inch by inch.

When I was satisfied that nothing sharp or heavy was going to drop out on me, I opened it all the way. Inside was a mummy. A pretty darn cool mummy, almost a dead-on replica of Boris Karloff in his dusty bandages, but it didn't seem to have any function beyond just standing there, being a mummy.

I closed the door and moved on, promptly walking into a wall. It was bound to happen with all these clear walls and mirrors, so I could only be thankful that it had happened while I was alone.

After another half-minute or so of wandering, the floor began to move under my feet. As it slid, it revealed another section of the maze...where Daniel stood.

I raised my machete, and he raised his revolver. The tip of my weapon was practically touching the barrel of his.

"Well, well," he said. "You're pretty damn impressive, I've gotta give you that. How'd you like the gasoline shower?"

"Is that was that was supposed to be? All it did was trickle a little bit," I said, just to piss him off.

Daniel frowned. "That's fine. It wasn't really completely ready to go yet."

"So where'd your fancy machine gun go?" I asked, trying to keep him occupied while I waited for a good chance to run for cover.

"The last thing I need is for you or your friends to get a hold of a machine gun, don't you think?"

"I thought you just didn't want to shoot up the maze."

"That too."

"So what's up with the mummy? Was it supposed to attack me or something?"

"It's a placeholder. That's where the rattlesnakes are going to go."

"Cool. I hope they weren't too hard to smuggle into Alaska, because we accidentally killed a few of them."

"Why would you kill innocent snakes in an aquarium?"

"It got knocked over. Sorry about that."

"As long as you didn't do it on purpose. So, have you formulated some brilliant escape plan while we've been sitting here talking? There's not a chandelier above my head, is there?"

"Nah," I admitted. "I'm pretty well screwed, actually."

"I'm sorry to hear that. And now I'm going to shoot you."

I instinctively held the machete in front of me, like a very narrow shield, as Daniel pulled the trigger.

Now, if somebody had said to me last week, "Andrew, guess what? You're going to be standing in a big maze, and the main bad guy is going to have a gun pointed at you, and you're going to gab for a while, then he's going to fire. But you'll have instinctively held this machete in front of you, and not only will the bullet hit the machete right around where you heart would've been, but the bullet will ricochet off the blade and hit the main bad guy in his gun-shooting arm. Oh, yeah, and you'll really look like crap," the only part I would have believed was the part about me looking like crap.

But it happened. Daniel fired. The bullet struck the machete blade, knocking the flat edge against me with painful force, and then ricocheted off and struck Daniel in the upper arm. His hand opened, and the gun dropped out of his grip.

I was, to put it lightly, pretty darn surprised. Almost too surprised to take a swing at Daniel with the machete. Unfortunately, with my hands throbbing violently from the fact that they'd been holding the machete when it took a bullet, it wasn't a very good swing.

It was, however, a good enough swing to convince Daniel that he needed to get out of there. And so he turned and ran through one of the maze paths. I picked up his revolver, trying to count how many times we'd played musical guns since the vacation began.

The maze split off into two paths again, but I could hear Daniel's footsteps to the right. I followed him, smacking into a mirror this time, but continued the pursuit.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Not only did I have the sound of Daniel's footsteps to follow, but he was also emitting a stream of outrageously creative profanity, so I was able to keep on his trail.

A door opened and slammed shut just ahead.

I promptly hit a dead end, but quickly retraced my path, took the other branch, and found the door. Though the plan was to regroup at the exit, I didn't want to lose my chance when Daniel was on the defensive. So I let out one of those piercing whistles I used to love so dearly in elementary school silent reading time to help guide Roger and Charlotte in the right direction, and then opened the door.

The next room was the largest one yet, and looked like nothing so much as an underground warehouse. The room was probably two hundred feet square, and filled with piles and piles of machinery, vicious-looking implements of torture, and props. There was a stack of artificial corpses that must've been fifteen feet high.

I saw Daniel duck behind an electric chair and fired, but the bullet struck the arm of the chair. Keeping a safe distance in case he'd somehow armed himself, I ran to the side to get a better shooting angle, but he was gone.

A three-foot scorpion flew through the air at me. Without thinking, I blew the plastic creature away, which had obviously been Daniel's intent. I had three bullets left, at the most, so I had to be careful.

A slightly larger octopus was launched at me from behind a display of ballerina bodies impaled on lances. It landed on the ground in front of my feet with a splat. "Dude, you're throwing rubber mollusks," I pointed out. "It's time to give up."

"Not a chance!" Daniel shouted as he hurled a football over the display. I didn't get a very good look at it, but I'm pretty sure it had squished roaches stuck to it.

The football hit the ground and black smoke began to pour from each of the ends. I hurried away from it, taking cover behind a medieval stretching rack with a large replica of Gumby on it.

The door opened, and Mortimer entered. As he shielded his eyes from the smoke, I took aim and fired. And missed. Mortimer turned toward the rack in surprise, and I pulled the trigger again, only to be rewarded with a click.

"He's out of bullets!" Daniel shouted from behind the smoke cover. "Get him!"

Mortimer, holding a butcher knife, ran toward me. I tossed the gun aside, stood up and grabbed the first thing I could use as a shield, a very large teddy bear with a slashed-open stomach and innards that were most definitely not made from cotton stuffing.

"Hello, I'm Bernard the Bear!" said a jolly voice. "Will you be my best friend in the whole world?" Three-inch claws burst out of the bear's paws. "Or do I have to mess you up?"

I swung the bear around just as Mortimer arrived. His knife got Bernard in the chest. I lunged with the machete, missing, but twisted Bernard so that his claws slashed Mortimer's arm. Mortimer struck with the butcher knife again, stabbing Bernard in the face.

"Be my friend, yes sir-ee, or I'll hunt your family..." sang Bernard in a voice that sounded suspiciously like Daniel's.

My next swing with the machete missed, and Mortimer got in a rock-solid uppercut to the jaw that sent Bernard and I stumbling backwards, smashing into the stack of corpses.

"Hey kids, have you ever wanted to take a bath with Mr. Hair Dryer?" asked Bernard.

I tossed Bernard aside as Mortimer charged at me. Though he stopped well out of range of the machete, he threw the butcher knife. I moved my head out of the way and the knife stuck in the nose of an unfortunate artificial cadaver.

I was distracted enough by the knife that I wasn't able to stop Mortimer before he pounded his fist into my chest. I bashed against the corpse stack again, flinching as one of the plastic hands goosed me.

Then I slammed my head forward, connecting with Mortimer's forehead. In the movies, this only hurts the defensive head and leaves the offensive head in tip-top shape, but in real life it makes the offensive head feel like it was about to split open like Humpty Dumpty.

However, Mortimer was certainly in pain as well, and he backed away, hands to his forehead. I lashed at him with the machete, getting in a great hit that slashed across both of his upper legs. He went down, howling.

Then I realized that I had a very big problem behind me. I hurriedly got out of the way as the stack of corpses began to topple. Mortimer tried to scoot out of the way, but with his injured legs he simply couldn't move fast enough. The fifteen-foot pile of plastic carcasses came crashing down upon him. The last thing I saw before turning away was an extended corpse hand slamming into his open screaming mouth.

I had a very strong feeling that Mortimer wouldn't be getting up.

Bernard the Bear chuckled. "Remember, kids, that rabid squirrel and your sister's sock drawer are a perfect match!"

"Come on out, Daniel," I shouted. "It's just you and Josie left, if she's not already dead, too."

Daniel came on out, holding a flamethrower. I got the hell out of the way as he let loose with a burst of flame that sent Bernard to his fiery demise. The machete had served me well up to this point, but it wasn't going to be much of a match for a flamethrower, so I ran.

I passed several interesting props as I fled, including a full-sized guillotine, a dentist's chair, an iron maiden in the shape of Snoopy, and a bubble gum machine filled with eyes, noses, and ears. I ducked behind a bullet-hole riddled baby carriage with a tentacle protruding from it.

As Daniel came my way, I saw that he'd ditched the flamethrower in favor of a lawn edger. A lawn edger more appropriate for Jack's yard after the giant beanstalk sprouted, but a lawn edger nevertheless. I shoved the carriage at him, catching him off guard, and wove my way through some piles of boring old lumber.

I heard the door open. Was it Roger, Charlotte, or Josie?

"Is he in here?" a voice demanded. Josie.

"He's back here!" Daniel replied. "You cover the left, I'll cover the right."

I'd reached the end of the room, which contained a small pit, maybe eight feet deep, the bottom covered with mud. Six feet above this pit, hanging from a crane, was the most wicked-looking instrument of shredding I'd ever seen in my life...and I'd seen plenty of those things. It was essentially a wrecking ball adorned with drills, spikes, circular blades, pinchers, knives, corkscrews, and too many other things to count. It was overkill the likes of which I'd never witnessed.

"You like that?" asked Daniel. "I'll be happy to give you a demonstration!"

I hurried across the edge of the pit. A shot rang out and a porcelain doll head shattered before I could tell for sure if it had vampire fangs. I couldn't see Josie, but she could certainly see me.

Daniel pulled a handle on the crane. With a loud whirr, all of the drills, blades, and pinchers on the wrecking ball came to life. I made a mental note to avoid falling into the pit if at all possible.

I climbed behind a catapult with a large boulder in the cup, but it clearly wasn't going to provide sufficient cover. Another shot splintered the wood right in front of my face, and I scrambled away from it behind another pile of lumber.

Josie came into view. Behind her was a full-size dressing mirror with a cute picture of Satan drawn in lipstick, and a cardboard box that looked like it was filled with handy weapons. At least, there were quite a few sharp edges poking out of the top. "I just killed your boyfriend and your girlfriend," Josie informed me. "You know, all you would've had to do is chop up one person in the operating room and we would've continued thinking you were the Headhunter. How does it feel to be so stupid?"

I had nothing to say to that. I didn't know whether to believe her about Roger and Charlotte or not.

I could see Daniel circling in front of the catapult, his lawn edger ready for action. I picked up some pieces of broken lumber and tossed them over the pile, hoping to hit Josie through blind luck, or else get her to waste a bullet like I had with the scorpion. I didn't get either result.

I was going to be trapped very quickly, so I scooted out from behind the lumber pile and back behind the catapult again. Daniel's edger was immediately thrust toward my face, but I batted it back with my machete. With my other hand, I began to turn the winding wheel. If I could somehow get on top of the boulder, I might be able to catapult myself to safety. Yeah, I'd probably crash-land in a barrel of red-hot coals, but my options at the moment were limited.

Another shot splintered against the wood. There was no possible way I was getting on top of that catapult. My only hope was that Josie was standing right where the boulder would land. Daniel's bullet hitting the machete had been a pretty nice miracle, and maybe I could squeeze in a second one.

I pulled the release cord. At least I hoped that's what that thing was. It could very well be the let-the-rock-drop-on-whoever-is-underneath-it cord.

The arm of the catapult flew forward, heaving the boulder about fifteen feet across the room, sailing well over Josie's head. It struck the top of the Satan mirror, causing the bottom to swing forward and send the box of weapons airborne. Lots of silver things flew through the air. Josie spun around and was treated to a half-dozen of them smacking into her, including the circular saw blade that took a cue from the Headhunter's decapitating scimitar.

Daniel gaped in horror as his wife dropped to the ground, hitting at three different times.

He let out a wail of grief and fury. I quite honestly couldn't help but feel a tinge of sorrow for the guy, though that in no way stopped me from rushing out from behind the catapult and rushing at him while he stared at Josie's remains.

I swung the machete back and forth, as fast and hard as I could. Daniel tried to parry with the edger, but my swings came too furiously, and he continued to steal glances at Josie. With one particularly intense blow I knocked the edger out of his hand. He continued backing away.

This was over. Now.

He looked over his shoulder and saw that he was dangerously close to the pit. But before he could move out of the way, I tackled him, hoping to knock him right over the edge.

Daniel kept his footing, grabbed a handful of my hair, and yanked. Then he drove his other fist into my throat. I tried to gasp for air, but I couldn't breathe, and I felt Daniel turning us around, putting me closest to the pit.

I could feel my bare feet start to slip. I still couldn't breathe. Daniel threw another punch at my throat, but I blocked it, grabbed hold of his wrist, and squeezed tightly, trying to dig my fingernails into his skin.

My heels slipped over the side of the pit.

I continued to struggle in vain for oxygen. My left foot dangled in mid-air.

Then, using every last bit of strength I possessed, I forced Daniel's wrist up into the air as high as I could. Right into one of the twirling corkscrews on the wrecking ball.

Before he could even finish his scream, I pushed myself out of the way, and then slammed my elbow into his back.

Daniel pitched forward and fell into the pit, landing face-first in the mud.

He got up and trudged through the mud, screaming in fury. I was able to suck in the faintest breath as I staggered toward the crane.

Daniel put his hands on the edge of the pit and began to pull himself out.

I pulled down the second lever on the crane.

The wrecking ball began to lower.

"You son of a bitch!" Daniel shrieked, frantically trying to climb out in time. But the wrecking ball lowered quickly, and within seconds Daniel had to pull away to avoid it.

"You're dead!" he screamed. "You'll never get out of here! Never!"

And then the wrecking ball hid him from sight.

I walked away quickly, not wanting to hear the gruesome sound as Daniel Rankin met his doom.

EPILOGUE

It took about fifteen minutes of very annoying calling back and forth to guide both Roger and Charlotte to the exit of the maze. Josie had been fibbing about killing them, but I think she'd learned her lesson about always telling the truth in the future.

It didn't take long to find an exit to the warehouse, though it did involve crawling up a spooky dark tunnel with some sort of unidentified insect life present, as well as a possible shrew or two. At the end we emerged from a trapdoor into the garage.

"Let me have your card key," said Roger. "I'm going to check on the prisoners."

"I'll see if I can find a phone," Charlotte offered.

"I'm just going to sit here for a few days," I said, handing Roger my pass card, and then grabbing a lawn chair from the corner and unfolding it. "Bring me food and water every once in a while, will you?"

"Don't worry, I'll round up some medical supplies too," said Roger. "Sit there and be a good boy until I get back."

"Does comatose count as good?"

Roger and Charlotte left. I sat down on the chair, closed my eyes, and remembered my vow to never, ever leave the house again if I got out of this. That sounded good. I'd swipe some of Daniel's furniture, sell it, buy myself a state of the art computer, take some lessons, and telecommute for the rest of my life. When Kyle was old enough to drive we'd send him out for groceries, but until then we'd survive on pizza delivery. Pudgy Pierre had twenty different toppings, so we'd have all the variety we needed. Ah, yes, life would be good.

A wooden plank struck me on the back of the head, knocking me out of the chair.

"You think I'm gonna die in my own trap?" demanded a mud-covered, bloodied Daniel, kicking the chair out of the way. "I've got escape routes all over this place!"

I gripped the bottom of the tool bench and slowly pulled myself up. Daniel chuckled without humor, and then wedged the plank under the doorknob so that nobody could get inside. He waved his hands around like a magician, and then did a not-very-good job of making a hunting knife with an eight-inch blade "appear" from his sleeve. "Think you'll be able to see inside your stomach after I feed you your eyes?"

The only weapon within reach was a small screwdriver on the table. I grabbed it, though with my double vision it took two tries to actually touch it. Daniel picked up a tin of lighter fluid and squirted it at me, hitting my chest. "Too bad I don't have a match," he said, altering the angle.

The lighter fluid hit my eyes. The burning sensation was incredible. I consciously knew that rubbing my eyes was the worst thing I could do, but I couldn't stop myself. When I finally forced myself to pull my hands away, my vision was a complete blur. I was effectively blind.

I grabbed the tool bench to steady myself. "What's the matter? Something in your eye?" Daniel asked. I could tell that he was walking toward me, and I could make out a faint figure, but I certainly wasn't going to be able to fight him with any skill.

I threw the screwdriver at him. Daniel snorted a laugh. "Oh, give it up. This one's for Josie."

I couldn't see it, but I could hear something swishing toward my face. I threw my hand up to defend myself.

The burning in my eyes was forgotten as the knife tore through my palm, burying itself all the way to the hilt.

Believe me, I made some noise. I could see the blurred tip of the knife protruding through the back of my hand, coming close enough to my eye to scrape the lashes.

I was blind, I was in excruciating pain, and I had a psychopath right in front of me.

But now I had a weapon.

I twisted my hand around, forced my fingers to wrap around the handle of the knife, and slammed it forward.

It definitely hit something.

Ignoring the pure agony, I pulled the knife free and slammed it forward again.

Daniel made a faint gasping sound.

With the third hit, he slid off the blade and fell to the floor.

* * *

I stood with my head in the sink, warm water rushing over me as Charlotte held my eyes open. Just getting to the door to the mansion had been a struggle, but I'd made it, got the plank out of the way, and called for help right before I passed out.

"How's it feel?"

I pulled my head out of the stream and blinked a few times. "Better."

"Can you see?"

"Not perfectly, but yeah. Thanks."

"No, thank you."

The rest of the prisoners were free. After a few tries, Roger had figured out that only one cell door would ever open at a time, so he had to close the last one before setting the next prisoner free. The former prisoners were currently raiding the kitchen. I planned to join them very soon. After a hot shower.

It had taken a while, but finally somebody had located a cell phone. A helicopter was seeking out the location of the mansion at this very moment. Personally, I would've liked to see them bring a battering ram or some dynamite to wipe out the front gate, but I suspected that they were going to try to get over it rather than destroy it. Oh well.

"Your turn," said Roger, entering the bathroom and holding the cell phone out to me.

I thanked him and called Helen.

* * *

"So who saved who in this situation?" asked Roger, taking a gulp of root beer while we sat on the couch, watching a bad situation comedy on the wide screen TV.

"I saved you," I said.

"I don't think so. You would've definitely died behind that big cube thing if I hadn't shown up."

"And you would've participated in one of their games if I hadn't been working to get you free. I don't even want to know what special events I missed."

"Okay, point taken, but let's think back and consider how much danger I would have been in if you hadn't dragged me into this whole thing to begin with. Hmmmm...how about, none?"

"You're wrong. I saved you from a couple days of attacks by Reverse Snowflake," I pointed out.

"You're going to take that stupid cat, right? You promised."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Are you two just going to sit there and argue until they find us?" asked Charlotte. She was trying to sound annoyed, but knowing that she was going to be reunited very soon with her husband had made her giddy beyond belief.

"Of course," Roger said. "What else would we do?"

"You could shut up and let me watch TV in peace," I said. "My hand hurts, and my shoulder hurts, and my eyes hurt, and I'd rather you just went someplace else."

"I love you," Roger told me.

"I love you too. Go away."

Roger patted me on the non-injured shoulder and left the room. I leaned back, closed my eyes, and dozed until I heard the rescue helicopter overhead.

ROGER'S FINAL WORD

Hey, I found the tape recorder! It doesn't look like there's much tape left, so I'd just like to say that we made it. Not all of us, I'm sad to report, but most of us.

I really don't know what I should say to sum up this whole adventure. There were quite a few moments when I didn't think I was going to make it out alive. It really does give you a new perspective on things, coming that close to death.

Actually, I do know what I want to say, if you'll forgive me getting all deep and meaningful. All of you out there, please, make a promise to yourself that no matter what happens, no matter what path your life takes, you'll never forget that the most important thing—

[Tape ends.]

The End

CASKET FOR SALE

(ONLY USED ONCE)

CHAPTER ONE

If you are reading these words, then I am dead.

Well, okay, maybe not. I guess it's just as likely that some doofus screwed up and sent this out early. So let me clarify: If you're reading these words, I might be dead, but there's also a strong possibility that I'm very much alive and extremely annoyed.

Anyway, my name is Andrew Mayhem, and a couple of weeks ago I'd returned to my Florida home following an adventure that can best be described as "really truly seriously totally completely messed up in a big freakin' way." Not to be whiny or anything, but after an experience where you fight for your life against a half-dozen psychopaths and sustain injuries including but not limited to a direct knife hit to the right buttock, is it really so much to ask that the rest of your year be an improvement?

It wasn't gonna happen.

In fact, as I pushed open the wooden doors and walked down the menacing corridor, I knew deep within my soul I was about to face my most terrifying experience yet.

My blood ran ice-cold as I entered Human Resources.

"Have a seat, Mr. Mayhem," said the elderly woman after I introduced myself. "I'm Ms. Bennett."

I almost sighed with pleasure as I sat down. It wasn't an especially comfortable chair, but I'd finally healed enough from the aforementioned buttock injury that sitting was no longer painful, so I was enjoying the experience as much as possible. You don't realize how many times you're required to sit in any given day until you've been stabbed in the rear. And because injuries to that particular region are inherently hilarious, nobody gives you any sympathy. It's a lose-lose situation all around.

While Ms. Bennett looked over my job application, I tried not to fidget. It wasn't the most impressive resume in the world, but even if none of them lasted more than two or three weeks, the quantity of my previous jobs had to count for something, right?

I nervously scratched my cheek, and she noticed that my left hand was wrapped in gauze. "Oh, what happened there?" she asked.

"Knife accident," I replied, shrugging it off.

"Really? Did you have to get stitches?"

"Yeah, a few. It's fine, though."

Ms. Bennett held up her thumb. "I had to get three stitches when I cut myself on a soup can lid. How many did you have to get?"

"Twenty-four."

"Twenty-four? My word!"

"Well, twelve on each side."

She set down the papers. "On each side?"

"Yeah, the hunting knife went all the way through my palm. It kind of hurt, but it's okay now. I can move it; it just looks a bit gross. The doctors said it'll be good as new."

"How on earth did you get stabbed through the palm with a hunting knife?"

"Uh, well, this guy did it. He's dead, though."

"He's dead? How did he die?"

"It's a long story. Self-defense...you know how it goes."

Ms. Bennett glanced uncomfortably down at my application, but then tried to force a smile. "So, Mr. Mayhem, have you killed anybody else I should know about?"

"Yeah, a few," I admitted. I could feel the potential success of this job interview draining away.

Her smile vanished. "Seriously?"

"Uh-huh."

"How many other people?"

"Not too many. One guy died of a heart attack while I was threatening him with a piece of a broken plate, but that probably doesn't count. I threw a skull with sharpened fangs at a guy who kidnapped my children, but he shot me first, so I think it's justifiable."

At this point, it was pretty obvious I wasn't getting the job, so I figured, the hell with it. "I poked another guy through the neck with a rib bone, which actually makes two deaths by bone products, an interesting piece of trivia if you're into that kind of thing. One guy died from being stabbed by a booby-trapped gargoyle, another guy died when a pile of fake corpses fell on him, and a lady died from being hit by a box full of really sharp weapons, but in all of those cases my involvement was indirect."

Ms. Bennett was silent for a long moment.

"Anything else?" she finally asked.

"No, that's it. And really, I think you can only count the skull, the rib bone, and the self-defense stabbing of the guy who put the hunting knife through my hand. So I guess I've only killed three people total. I'm surprised you didn't hear about any of this on the news."

"I avoid the news, Mr. Mayhem. Too violent."

"Yeah, I don't blame you. The news sucks."

Ms. Bennett leaned back in her chair. "I'm afraid that with your history of...er, justifiable homicides, this is probably not the best place for you to seek employment."

"I can assure you, I'll try my best not to justifiably kill any of my co-workers," I said, trying to keep things lighthearted.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Mayhem. I'll keep your resume on file."

* * *

After I got into my car, I cursed and smacked my palm (not the stabbed one...I learned that particular lesson the hard way) against the dashboard. I should have taken the interview much more seriously. I'd vowed to "straighten up," as it were. I was thirty-three years old and it was time to finally become a responsible human being. Get a real job. Be a better father and husband. Quit accepting money from strangers to perform tasks that went terribly, terribly, terribly wrong.

Oh well. I'd find a real job soon/eventually. And the lady in Human Resources had said she'd keep my resume on file, right?

I drove away from the building and listened to lousy music on the radio for a few minutes until I noticed red and blue flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. Great. I pulled over, rolled down my window, and tried to think of a good excuse for whatever it was I'd done.

The cop exited his vehicle and hurried over to mine. "Andrew Mayhem?" he asked.

"Yes."

"We've got an APB out for you. I'm going to have to ask you to come with me. It's an emergency."

"Is there a problem?" I asked. Considering the officer had just pulled me over and told me it was an emergency, it was pretty safe to assume there was, in fact, some sort of problem, but I've never claimed to possess intelligence.

"Yes, a big one. Please come with me."

* * *

There were several police cars and an ambulance outside of Hector's Subs-N-Suds, a beer and sandwich shop, as we drove up. I've only eaten there once. It was okay, although they were stingy with the black olives and my daughter refused to eat more than a bite of her sub because the roast beef had that weird rainbow sheen thing.

As soon as I got out of the police car, Lieutenant Bruce Frenkle walked over. He'd been promoted from Sergeant last week, and his identical twin brother Tony, who remained a Sergeant, still wasn't speaking to him.

"Andrew! Glad you're here, man."

The cop had briefed me about what was going on during the drive over. I looked over at the restaurant, but I couldn't see anybody through the glass doors. "Are they still in there?"

Bruce nodded. "Yeah, they're hiding. He's not talking anymore, but we haven't seen anything to indicate the situation has changed."

"How's the woman?"

"I think he cut her pretty good."

I winced. Considering what this guy was capable of, though, the woman had little reason to complain. Most of his victims ended up headless.

Bruce put his hand on my shoulder. "You don't have to go in there, you know."

"It would be nice if that were true."

I guess technically it was true. The guy inside of Hector's Subs-N-Suds was Ned Markstein, otherwise known as the Headhunter. I don't want to overwhelm you with my past history of encounters with psycho killers, so let's just say the Headhunter was trying to capture me to deliver to another group of psycho killers as part of a fun-filled weekend of Games-o-Death, but he ended up being captured, tortured, and stored in a bathroom while I impersonated him during the games. If you haven't read about my previous wacky adventures, you're just going to have to trust me on some of this.

Now he was holding an innocent woman hostage and demanding I be brought in for a chat. Really, it would've been well within my moral rights to say "No offense, anonymous innocent woman, but I'm staying way the hell out of there!"

Unfortunately, though I may be an irresponsible slacker, I'm not the kind of irresponsible slacker who can stand back and let somebody die like that.

While a cop fitted me with a comfy bulletproof vest, Bruce touched a button on his cell phone. "I'll let him know you're here," Bruce told me.

"I can't believe he's making you use your daytime minutes," I said.

Bruce didn't acknowledge my joke, which didn't bother me because he never acknowledged my jokes. "He's here," he said into the phone. He listened for a moment, nodded, and glanced at me. "He says you can go right in. But you don't really have to do this."

I ignored him and walked over to the front doors.

It's okay, I told myself. You're not breaking your vow to quit being stupid. This is bravery, not stupidity. This is honorable. Stupidity remains far in your past. You're a smart, responsible individual now.

I opened the door and walked inside Hector's Subs-N-Suds. The Headhunter stood up from behind a counter at the back of the restaurant, holding a knife to the throat of a young woman with puffy red eyes and a tearstained face. He was wearing orange prison garb and didn't quite have the same look of malicious glee he did when I encountered him before.

He giggled maniacally. "Glad you could make it," he said in a high-pitched voice. "Oh, yes, it's always such a pleasure to see my favoritest friend Andrew!"

"Why are you doing the goofy voice thing? I already know it's an act, remember?"

"Oh, yeah," he said in his normal voice. "Glad you could make it anyway."

"No problem. I'd been wanting to see your new fashion statement. That orange suit really brings out the evil in your eyes."

He sneered. "Aren't you going to ask me to let the woman go?"

I gave a casual shrug, even though sweat was pouring down my sides. I couldn't let him know how nervous I was. "Would you do it?"

"There's only one way to find out."

"Okay. Would you care to let the woman go?"

"Sure. Come over here and take her spot."

I shook my head. "I hope you don't think I came in here just to let you kill me. That would be nutty."

The Headhunter pressed the knife more tightly against the woman's throat. "You want her to die?"

"C'mon, Ned, I know you're not stupid. You kill your hostage and those cops outside will mow you down in about three seconds. Why didn't you just run? You haven't even gone to trial yet, so why go to all the trouble of escaping from prison just for this kind of revenge nonsense?"

"I've gotta be honest with you. The whole 'bring me Andrew Mayhem' thing is only because I got stuck here and needed a way to buy myself some time."

For the briefest of moments I was actually kind of offended. "So, what now?"

"Now? Well, I've had some time to think things over, and revenge nonsense really does sound like a good idea." He shoved the woman out of the way, dropped his knife, and kicked it across the floor toward me. "One-on-one. Let's see what you can do."

I picked up the knife. It had some blood and mustard on it. "I don't want to fight you."

The Headhunter grinned. "This is your chance to beat me fair and square. I don't even have my sword. We'll find out if you're really as tough as you say you are."

"I never said I was tough."

"Yes, you did."

I shook my head. "No, I didn't."

"I'm sure you did."

"Nope. Not something I would say."

The Headhunter looked confused for a moment, and then shrugged. "Either way, it's time for a rematch. This time you don't have your wife to protect you. You and me, Mayhem. You with the knife, me with my bare hands. May the best man win."

We stared at each other.

"You've gotta be kidding me," I said, casually stepping out of the way. A gunshot rang out, shattering the window, and the Headhunter dropped to the ground, screaming and clutching his bleeding leg. Within moments, several cops burst into Hector's Subs-N-Suds, their guns pointed at the fallen kidnapper.

Wow. The Headhunter, a savage serial killer who'd come terrifyingly close to murdering my wife and I, had turned into a complete idiot.

I smiled to myself. If even a lunatic like the Headhunter posed no real threat these days, then my vow to stay out of trouble would be no problem to uphold.

CHAPTER TWO

Six months later...

Wednesday nights were typically spent hanging out with my friend Roger Tanglen at the Blizzard Room, which was the lamest coffee shop in Florida and possibly the world. Most of our conversation was devoted to the low quality of the coffee. It was a long-running, if pathetic, tradition.

But the Blizzard Room was no more. It had burned to the ground (faulty wiring) last week. We'd actually noticed a few sparks the last couple of times we were there, but thought they were meant to be decorative.

So now we sat in the Java Joint, an upscale, modern coffee shop with tables that didn't wobble if you breathed near them and a menu selection longer than my children's combined Christmas lists.

I took a sip of my cappuccino. "Wow," I said. "It contains heat."

"And the foam doesn't make your tongue numb."

"And the cup actually retains most of the coffee."

We drank in silence for a long moment.

"Now what do we talk about?" I asked.

"I dunno."

We drank in silence for a longer moment.

"We could talk about our relationships," Roger suggested.

"Pass."

"I just don't understand why you don't like her."

"I said, pass."

"C'mon, Andrew, she's a nice person. She's gorgeous, we get along great, and I'm learning more about menstruation than I ever thought possible."

"Don't even joke about that. Your continued emasculation is a serious problem."

"I'm just saying, she's the best thing that ever happened to me. She might be The One."

The horrid creature in question was Samantha. Samantha Tracer. Samantha the Demon Monster from Planet Wretch. He'd met her maybe a month ago, and she'd immediately latched onto him the same way that crab thing latched onto John Hurt's face in Alien. I half-expected a phallic-looking extraterrestrial to burst out of his stomach at any moment.

Even though he's a loser like me, Roger dates fairly regularly. He's short, kinda pudgy, losing his hair, and has a big nose, but he's got these beautiful blue eyes (so I'm told, since I'm really not the best judge of beautiful blue eyes) that just about bring women to their knees. I'm taller, have more hair, more muscles, and a nose that's in proportion, but my eyes are a non-bringing-women-to-their-knees dingy brown color. We both dress like slobs.

So I wasn't surprised when Roger started dating Samantha, who is admittedly, for all her life-sucking evil, a blonde bombshell. I was surprised it got so serious so fast. My best friend shouldn't be talking about "The One" after a month of dating, and he certainly should not have reached the point where phrases like "we could talk about our relationships" came up in our man-to-man conversations.

"She's not The One."

"She might be," Roger insisted.

"She's not."

"I'm serious, I don't get this. Why don't you like her?"

"Because she's Satan."

"Be more specific. What about her makes her Satan?"

"I don't know, it's just...it's just this Satan-vibe I get from her."

Roger glared at me. "That's not good enough. If you've got a problem with my girlfriend, I want to know what it is. Don't give me this vague Satan-vibe crap. What don't you like about her?"

"She's needy."

"She is not needy! She's one of the most independent women I know! And I've dated plenty of needy women you've liked. C'mon, Andrew, you've gotta do better than that."

I sighed and took a drink of my coffee. The honest truth is I didn't know why I disliked Samantha so much. It was a purely emotional response, based on nothing I could describe, but I wanted her out of my and Roger's life.

"She has head lice," I said.

"Damn it, Andrew, you're really starting to piss me off. Do you want me to stop seeing her? Is that what you want?"

"Yes, please."

"Well, it's not gonna happen, so you'd better get over whatever issues you've got with her. You're supposed to be happy for me. You've got a wife and kids. Maybe that's what I want, too."

"I don't think she has child-bearing hips."

"Okay, you know what, you seem pretty determined to be an asshole tonight. I'll talk to you tomorrow." Roger pushed back his chair, got up, and walked out of the Java Joint, leaving his obscenely overpriced coffee behind.

Fine. If he wanted to continue with that fatality-laden train wreck of a relationship, he could do whatever he wanted. He could marry her for all I cared. Have six or seven hellspawn. But when he came crawling back to me, shriveled and burnt and coughing up flames, I'd just invite him to pucker up those scorched lips and kiss my—

"Hi," said a woman, sliding into the seat Roger had just vacated.

"Uh, hi," I responded. She looked to be in her early twenties, with flowing black hair draped over her shoulders, lipstick a good six shades too red, and sexy wire-framed glasses.

"You look lonely."

"No, I'm fine."

"Just so you know, I'm not here to hit on you. You're Andrew Mayhem, right?"

"Yeah."

"I have a proposition for you."

"No," I said.

"Hear me out. I'm willing to offer you—"

"No."

"It's a lot of—"

"No."

"But—"

"Nooooo," I said, singing the word.

"I don't think you—"

"No, no, no, nope, nein, nix, negative, nyet, non, nada, nein...I already said nein, didn't I?...no, no, no. No."

"Nada means 'nothing.'"

"Same difference."

The woman frowned. "May I ask why you're turning me down?"

"You may."

"Why?"

"Because these days I'm a responsible citizen. I no longer accept money from strange women in coffee shops to do things that end up getting me almost killed. Twice I've done it, and twice I've regretted it. I'm done with that. You're looking at the new, improved—"

"One hundred thousand dollars," said the woman.

I tried to say nada, but the word stuck in my throat.

"One hundred thousand dollars to deliver a suitcase."

Don't ask what's in the suitcase, I silently pleaded with myself. Don't ask what's in the suitcase. Don't ask what's in the suitcase.

"What's in the briefcase?" I asked, overcoming my mental pleading on a technicality.

"You don't need to know."

"Where do you want it delivered? Antarctica?"

"Arizona."

"That's pretty far."

"It's for a hundred thousand dollars."

Do not, under any circumstances, accept this offer. This one deserves the big N-O. Run screaming out of the coffee shop with your hands over your ears if you have to, but do not, I repeat, do not, I repeat again, do not agree to deliver this briefcase. Don't do it. Really.

"I can't," I said, momentarily surprised that I listened to common sense. It felt kind of neat.

The woman stared at me for a long moment, and then shrugged. "Have it your way."

"I will. But I appreciate the offer."

She nodded and left. I took a sip of my coffee, enjoying the feeling of being an intelligent, responsible—

Holy crap I just turned down a hundred grand, what the hell is wrong with me?

—adult.

This was the new Andrew Mayhem. The most responsible guy on the block. The guy you'd call if you needed somebody to hold your ladder steady while you changed a light bulb. The guy who always had jumper cables in the trunk of his car. Even my Christmas cards were going to be on time this year.

Now if only I could talk some sense into Roger, everything would be perfect.

* * *

The next day, I drove home from work whistling a merry tune. I'd held my job in the mailroom of a heartless corporation run by sinister men in dark suits for over three months now, and today at lunch my boss' boss had nodded and half-smiled in my direction. My future was looking bright.

I opened the front door of my two-story suburban home and saw my children crouched on the floor, their backs to me. They were very excited about something. Something that was snorting.

"Is there a pig in the house?" I asked, shutting the door behind me.

"Daddy!" shouted Theresa, getting to her feet and rushing over to give me a great big hug. She was nine and going through an Affectionate Phase. Now, she'd always been an affectionate child, but these days she'd hug you while you were walking up stairs. She'd even taken to hugging her little brother without the intent of crushing him to death.

Kyle, my seven year-old, stayed crouched on the floor, petting what I saw was not, in fact, a member of the swine family but rather a dog. A pug. One of those tiny flat-faced bug-eyed curly-tailed wrinkly-foreheaded things. It snorted happily.

"Why is there a pug in our house?" I asked.

"That's Joe," Theresa informed me.

"Hi, Joe. Why is there a pug in our house?"

"He's mine!" Theresa said with a big grin.

"He's mine, too!" Kyle shouted.

"Is not!"

"Mom said you could only keep him if we shared!"

"We're keeping him?" I asked. "He's a permanent pug?"

Theresa nodded. "Uh-huh."

Joe snorted some more.

"Where's your mother?"

"Upstairs. See, Misty is moving, and she said she'd have to get rid of Joe and maybe even put him in the pound, and she asked if I wanted him, and Misty's mom brought him over and Mom said we could keep him."

"He's mine, too!" Kyle insisted.

"Shut up. I didn't even say anything about that!"

"Well, he is!"

"No duh, stupid."

"Don't call your brother stupid," I said. "And don't tell him to shut up. And isn't Misty that kid who always shoved paste in her ears?"

"It was Play-Doh."

Joe continued to snort.

"Is he supposed to be that ugly?" I asked.

"He's not ugly, he's cute."

The pug, released from Kyle's petting grip, hurried over and began to sniff my feet, snorting all the while. I reached down to scratch his head. I'd always liked dogs, although my tastes ran in the direction of big manly dogs instead of tiny little porcine ones.

"I'm going upstairs to talk to your mother," I announced.

"She doesn't feel good."

"Obviously."

I walked upstairs and down the hall into our bedroom. Helen was sitting in bed, on top of the covers, propped up against a couple of pillows.

"There's a pug in our house," I told her.

"I know."

"The kids said you said they could keep it."

"I know we should've discussed it first, but it's okay, isn't it?"

I shrugged. "It's fine. I just kind of figured we'd consult each other in pug acquisition decisions."

Helen was looking somewhat pale. She's an adorable, petite woman with long brown hair and freckles, who despite her small size has an aura of scary strength about her. But at the moment that aura wasn't present.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking as if she were near tears.

"No, no, it's fine. No big deal. I mean, you usually make the parental decisions anyway. Theresa said you're not feeling very good...what's wrong?"

"It's hard to explain."

What could it be? The flu? Guilt? Menopause two decades early?

"Are you okay? Do I need to call a doctor?"

She shook her head. "Actually, it's not hard at all to explain. Andrew, I'm pregnant."

CHAPTER THREE

"Ah," I said.

Let me give you a bit more information than you probably want to know about the creation of my offspring. Theresa was conceived during our honeymoon. Forms of birth control used at the time: The Pill and condoms (ribbed, but without spermicidal lubricant). The condom broke while The Pill was on its lunch break, and whammo...Helen was pregnant with our daughter.

Kyle was conceived two years later, when Helen's parents took Theresa for the weekend. We had a lovely, romantic dinner where we discussed how nice it was just being the two of us for a change, a comment that obviously had Fate cackling with malicious glee. Forms of birth control used at the time: The Pill, condoms (with spermicidal lubricant), a diaphragm, and through coincidence, the rhythm method.

After the birth of Kyle, Helen decided that perhaps she was remarkably prone to pregnancy, and suggested a more effective solution than all of our previous attempts at birth control combined. I spent three weeks whimpering, coming up with excuses, and keeping my legs defiantly crossed, but finally relented and underwent the dreaded V-word.

"I swear I didn't cheat on you," Helen said, a tear trickling down her face.

"I know."

"There's a less than one percent chance of a vasectomy failing, but it does happen. And you know there were complications..."

"Please don't talk about the complications."

"We could do a test if you really wanted to be sure."

I climbed onto the bed and sat next to her. She leaned against me and put her arms around me, now crying openly.

"Sweetie, I trust you completely," I said, meaning it.

"I just got so scared when I found out...I thought maybe you wouldn't believe me..."

"I believe you."

She looked up at me, eyes glistening. "Are you sure?"

"One hundred percent."

"Thank you so much."

We just sat there, holding each other for several minutes. Helen's sobs subsided, and she wiped her eyes off on her shirt. Then she smiled. "So are you happy about it?"

Now we had entered the ultimate danger zone. The mother of all trick questions. I had voluntarily allowed somebody to slash at my testicles with a scalpel, and now I was being asked if I was pleased it had been for naught.

However, it was the same question I'd been asked when the birth control pills and condoms failed, twice, and though I'm far from the most intelligent guy on the planet I'm also not usually a complete idiot.

"Of course I am."

She hugged me tighter. "I'm so glad. I love you."

"I love you too," I said, since it was a more politically wise thing to say than the "Oh, shiiiiiiit!" I was thinking.

I knew what had caused this. It was Roger's sudden desire for children. That bastard's brain waves had infiltrated my scrotum, reconnecting my vas deferens and causing me to impregnate my wife, allowing him to vicariously experience the joys of new fatherhood. I was going to kick his ass the next time I saw him.

"How far along are you?" I asked.

"Five weeks."

We were silent for a moment, each of us lost in thought.

Andrew Mayhem, father of three.

Dear Lord.

"So," I said, "do you think the pug will like the new baby?"

* * *

We went downstairs to find Kyle and Joe playing tug-of-war with one of my best clip-on ties. "Hey, knock it off."

"Joe started it."

"Don't blame the pug." I tried to get my tie back, but Joe wasn't about to give it up without a fight, so I let it go. Joe looked at me, clearly annoyed that I'd ended the game after such a feeble attempt, and barked.

"Zip it," I told him.

Joe snorted some more.

"Your mother and I have a family announcement to make, so everybody gather on the sofa," I said. We all sat down on the sofa, joined by Joe.

"Are we going on vacation?" asked Theresa.

"No."

"Aw."

"I wanna go to Stinky Blinky's World," said Kyle.

"Too bad, that's not what this announcement is about. Are you ready?"

Theresa and Kyle nodded.

"I'm going to have a baby," Helen told them, beaming.

"Yay!" Kyle shouted.

"I thought Daddy was snipped," said Theresa.

Helen looked simultaneously horrified and way-too-amused. "Theresa!"

"You said he was, that one time when I asked why I couldn't have a baby sister."

"Why are you telling her these things?" I asked Helen. "What's wrong with the stork?"

"Daddy, I'm nine," said Theresa. "Duh."

"What was snipped?" Kyle asked.

"Nothing," I told him. "They're both crazy in the head."

Kyle twirled his index finger in a circle around his ear.

"I thought that since Daddy was snipped, you couldn't have a baby," said Theresa.

"The doctors didn't snip hard enough," Helen informed her.

"Were their scissors dull?"

"All right, enough!" I demanded. "You kids go walk the dog. I don't like the way he's sniffing the carpet."

Finding the leash and putting it on Joe was a tremendous but unsurprising ordeal, but finally my children went out the front door. I sank back into the couch. My stomach hurt.

"Are you sure you're happy?" Helen asked.

"Quite."

"You know, taking a vacation really isn't a bad idea. We haven't taken a family vacation in over a year, the kids are out of school for the summer, and this may be our last chance for a while. We could rent a motor home and do some camping."

"That sounds like fun."

"If you wanted we could even invite Roger and Samantha."

I stiffened. "What do you mean, Roger and Samantha?"

"What's wrong with that?"

"Why is Samantha automatically included? You make it sound like they're a couple."

"Aren't they a couple?"

"No, they're just dating. There's a difference. They aren't 'Roger and Samantha' yet."

"I don't understand why you don't like her."

"It doesn't matter."

"She's very nice."

"Can we talk about something else?" I asked. "Here, let's chat about my failed snipping again. Remember that one time I had a vasectomy and you still got pregnant? I thought I was gonna laugh myself into a seizure over that one."

Helen stood up. "If you don't want to do the vacation thing, that's all right. I just thought we could use some fun, that's all."

"No, you're right, you're absolutely right. Let's do it. We'll camp out, roast marshmallows and weenies, sing campfire songs, feed our children to bears if they get out of hand...it'll be great!"

Helen grinned. "Why don't you give Roger a call to see if he can get the time off?"

"Sounds good." I gave her a kiss, went into the kitchen, picked up the phone, and dialed Roger's number. He answered on the fourth ring. "Hey, how's it going?" I asked.

"Hi," he said, sounding distant.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine."

I frowned. "Are you still mad at me?"

"Shouldn't I be?"

"Do you see what she's done to you? You're still mad! You never would've still been mad before!" Roger and I argued all the time, and the extent of our reconciliation had always been an exchange or two of the word "Dude." This vile menace needed to be stopped. Roger's sanity depended on it.

"I'll call you later," he said.

"No, no, hold on a second," I said. "I was calling to invite you on a camping trip. You and Samantha. Both of you."

"Really? When?"

"Soon. Whenever you can get off work."

"Well, I can get off work anytime, but I'll have to check with Samantha."

Maybe everything would work out. Maybe Samantha wouldn't be able to take time off from her job (she did something with clothing, or maybe it was seafood) and Roger would be free of her foul tentacles for a week or so. That might be long enough to break her mental grip. Perfect!

* * *

As is typical in my life, things did not work out perfectly. Samantha was willing and able to take a few days off from whatever she did with clothing or seafood, and a week later I found myself behind the wheel of a gargantuan motor home, Roger in the passenger seat, Helen, Samantha, Theresa, Kyle, and Joe in the back. Helen and Samantha were playing cards. Theresa and Kyle were playing "Strangle the Sibling." Joe was snorting.

We'd left early in the morning and were on our way to Wreitzer Park in Georgia, which Samantha had highly recommended. I could only assume this meant it was laden with rattlesnakes, tarantulas, locusts, and second-tier demons, but both Helen and Roger thought it sounded great so I relented.

Helen and I had originally decided to wait until after the camping trip to share the news that she was pregnant. However, we then realized the secret was already known by Theresa and Kyle, two individuals with a poor track record in the secret-keeping business, and so we told Roger and Samantha as soon as we'd finished packing the camper.

Samantha squealed with delight and threw her arms around Helen. Roger looked confused.

"I thought you had a vasectomy," he whispered.

"I did. It didn't take. I'm so darn masculine that even a ghastly medical procedure can't stop my tadpoles from swimming." I flexed my muscles and growled.

As we crossed the border from Florida into Georgia, we stopped the camper at a rest area and each had a ceremonial peach. The kids went off to walk the pug while the women headed for the restroom.

"This is nice," said Roger, cracking open a Mountain Dew. "I don't know why we don't take vacations like this more often."

I stretched my arms over my head and yawned. "You're right. I think we need to schedule at least one non-psycho-killer-related vacation a year."

"Deal."

Roger was silent for a moment, and I was sure he was going to make some unwanted comment about his relationship with Samantha. But he didn't, thank goodness. However, a couple of minutes later his eyes lit up as he saw her walking back toward the camper.

"How're you holding up with the driving?" she asked me when she returned. She was holding an assortment of six chocolate bars she'd bought from the vending machine.

"Fine. I'm enjoying it, actually."

Okay, I'll be honest with you. Samantha was absolutely stunning. She had long, curly blonde hair, an awesome figure, and a killer smile. Of course, since she was probably able to take on other forms at will, why not pick one that was physically attractive?

(You know, it just occurred to me that some of you may be reading this and thinking I'm some kind of aluminum foil-wearing freak. So let me clarify that despite my numerous comments, I didn't really believe Samantha was Satan, an alien, or a shape shifting beast. It's just my sense of humor. Really. I apologize for any confusion.)

Samantha flashed me her killer smile and tossed me a candy bar. "Energy for the road."

"Thanks."

I should also share that Samantha didn't know how I felt about her. At least Roger claimed never to have told her ("She doesn't need to know you're an idiot") and she certainly didn't act like she knew.

The children returned and Samantha provided each of them with a candy bar as well. Nothing like sugared-up elementary school-age kids to add some excitement to a road trip, but hey, I wasn't sitting back there with them.

When Helen got back, we piled into the motor home and resumed our drive. It was uneventful until twenty minutes later, when Samantha walked up and leaned behind us.

"You can get off at this exit," she said.

"That's not what the map says," I told her.

"I know. This is a shortcut."

"No shortcuts."

"It'll save us about half an hour."

"I don't care. We're sticking with the map. I no longer accept money from strange women in coffee shops, and I certainly don't take surprise shortcuts."

"She's good with directions," Roger insisted.

I glared at him. "Do you remember being locked in a cage to be hunted for sport?"

"Yeah, but that was because we accepted money from a strange woman in a coffee shop, not because we took a shortcut."

"No shortcuts."

"That's fine," said Samantha. "No big deal."

"Thank you."

Samantha returned to the main part of the camper.

"That was pretty rude," said Roger.

"No shortcuts. No exceptions. My name is Andrew Responsibility Mayhem."

Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the map-approved exit.

Fifteen minutes after that, we were driving down a narrow, creepy dirt road through the woods that sort of made me wish we'd taken the shortcut.

CHAPTER FOUR

A run-down, barely standing store had a faded sign that read "Last Chance 4 Gas." (The word "chance" was barely visible, but identifiable through context clues.) Fortunately, our gas tank was seven-eighths full. There would be no running out of gas in sinister locations during this trip. No way.

"Joe needs to go potty," said Theresa.

"You just walked him at the rest area."

"He needs to go again. He's walking funny."

"Okay, fine." I pulled the camper into what passed for the parking lot. There were no other cars, not even one for whoever worked there. Maybe nobody did.

"I'm going inside," said Roger, getting out of the vehicle.

"Why? Do you have to go potty too?"

"I want to check the expiration date on their beef jerky. I'm guessing late eighties."

"Doesn't it hurt to be such a geek?" I asked.

"You can't say you aren't curious. Samantha, Helen, you coming with us?"

"I think we're fine," said Helen.

"We'll send a search party in ten minutes," Samantha added.

Roger and I walked inside the store, careful not to slam the door and cause the entire structure to come crashing down to the ground. The aisles were narrow, the scent was interesting, and an elderly man sat behind the front counter, glowering at us as he paged through a tattered sports car magazine.

"Got any beef jerky?" Roger asked.

The old man coughed. "Yeah, but you don't wanna eat it."

"I'll trust you on that one," said Roger, looking through the candy rack for unusual and ancient selections. I noticed the magazines on the rack were at least a year old, unless a certain celebrity had gotten re-married and re-divorced without my hearing about it.

"Where're you headed?" asked the old man.

"Wreitzer Park," I told him, looking uncomfortably at a doughnut that had cherry filling leaking from the side with an ant imbedded in it, like those fossilized bugs in amber.

"Not the safest place to be."

"Really?"

The old man nodded. "Bad elements there."

"What kind of bad elements?"

"Dangerous ones." He coughed. "Deadly ones." He coughed again. "You don't want to be anywhere near Wreitzer Park, trust me on this."

I stared at him, trying to figure out if he possessed great wisdom or great senility.

"What kind of bad, dangerous, and deadly elements?" I asked.

"Just stay away from Wreitzer Park." He returned his attention to the magazine.

"Got it."

"I bet these M&M's are worth something in the collector's market," said Roger, taking them off the rack. He bought the candy, along with a spooky pickle, and we left the store.

"I think we should camp someplace else," I told him.

"Why?"

"Because a creepy old man just told us there are deadly elements there. That, to me, is a good reason to find another place to camp."

"Aw, c'mon, Andrew. He was a nutcase."

"Yes, but nutcases are often the best people to trust."

"Samantha said this park is an abandoned paradise. Nobody ever goes there! We'll probably have the entire place to ourselves!" Roger considered that. "Hmmmm, maybe that's why the dangerous elements decided to go there."

"At the very least we're going to tell Helen and Samantha about it. If we do go to that park and something bad happens, I don't want them finding out later we didn't heed some creepy old man's warning."

Theresa and Kyle were helping Joe run in circles around a tree, so Roger and I approached the women.

"Slight problem," I said. "Apparently Wreitzer Park has a bad element."

"Meaning?" asked Samantha.

"I don't know. It was a vague warning. Something about it being deadly."

"I see."

"I'm not necessarily saying we should find another camping option, I just wanted to point out there's been a warning about our current plan of action, and if there are other options readily available, maybe we should consider them."

"What exactly did you hear?" asked Samantha.

"The old man is right inside. Go in there and tell him where we're going."

The women exchanged a confused look.

"So, you're saying we should go someplace else?" asked Helen.

"Yes."

"Roger?"

"I'm sticking with the 'Looney Old Man Babbling Nonsense' theory, myself."

"I'm not suggesting we cancel the whole trip," I insisted. "I'm just saying that if our choice of parks has been classified as deadly, that maybe we should pick another one that hasn't been classified as deadly, that's all. It's not like there aren't other parks. It's, what, one o'clock? We've got plenty of time to find another place. What do you say?"

"If you're really not comfortable going there, then yeah, we should find another place," said Samantha. "We've got the Georgia guide, I'll look through our options while we head back to the highway. What do you think, Helen?"

"I'm fine with it if everybody else is."

"I think it's kinda stupid," said Roger. "But I got my antique M&M's, so we can do whatever you want."

"Great," I said. "Let's get out of here."

We called the kids back to the camper, started the engine, and pulled out of the parking lot, heading back the way we came. Yeah, I felt like a total wuss, but total wusses tend to stay alive. I had my children and pregnant wife with me, and I wasn't going to take any chances whatsoever with their safety. Andrew Responsibility Mayhem. That was me. Yep.

"He probably just wanted the best fishing spot for himself," said Roger.

"Probably."

"I have to wonder if perhaps you're taking this responsibility thing a bit too far. Maybe there's, you know, a middle ground."

"I am on the middle ground," I said. "I could have us all wearing life preservers."

"I guess you're right."

"Wreitzer Park didn't sound all that great anyway. I hear it's overrun with earwigs."

Roger shrugged. "Yeah, but apparently Joe back there is a fearless earwig hunter."

I was silent for a long moment. "We have some dumb-ass conversations, don't we?"

"This was a conversation?"

We'd backtracked about two miles before Theresa and Kyle started to fight over the final chocolate square from one of their candy bars. Theresa claimed she'd been saving it for future consumption, while Kyle's counter-argument was that he, not Theresa, had been the one with the foresight to ration his chocolate, and the final square contained his personal tooth marks on the edge as evidence of his decision.

"One of you is lying, and they'd better fess up," Helen said, using the version of her don't-mess-with-me voice she directed at children, which was substantially less frightening than the version she directed at husbands.

"It's mine!" Kyle insisted.

"Should we pull over for DNA testing?" asked Samantha.

Helen gave Samantha her please-don't-encourage-my-easily-encouragable-children look.

"I think the store had a DNA test by the jar of pickled eggs," said Roger.

Helen gave the same look to Roger.

I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut.

"Give me the chocolate," Helen ordered, holding out her hand.

"But it's mine!" said Kyle.

"I don't care. If you're going to fight over it, nobody gets the chocolate."

"But then she gets her whole candy bar and I don't get all of mine because she's a liar!"

"I am not!"

"Are too!"

"Am not!"

"Are too, asshole!"

Whoa! Kyle's first curse word. I was glad to be there for a truly memorable parental moment. I stopped the camper and turned around in my seat, not wanting to miss this.

"What did you say?" Helen demanded.

Kyle looked surprised and terrified, as if the word had escaped from his mouth without his consent. "Nothing," he said in a small voice.

"What did you say?" Helen demanded again. It seemed peculiar to want him to repeat a word he was in big trouble for saying in the first place, but I wasn't about to call her on that.

"He said the a-word," Theresa pointed out, helpfully.

"You be quiet," Helen told her.

"But he did!"

"I know what he said."

"Then why did you ask?"

"All right, I've had enough of this! I don't want to hear a single word out of either of you until we get to the campground. If I hear one word, even one, you will both be in more trouble than you can imagine!"

Theresa and Kyle sat back in their seats to glare at each other.

I resumed driving.

Vague threats like "more trouble than you can imagine" really weren't Helen's style. She was usually capable of describing potential punishments in such minute detail they seemed to be the work of weeks of preparation. I wondered if she was genuinely shaken up by this third pregnancy.

"See, Roger, all of this could be yours," I said.

Roger just grinned. To be perfectly honest, though my children drove me absolutely bonkers on a regular basis, I really had gotten a good deal, considering what they'd been through. It had only been about two years since Kyle and Theresa were kidnapped and almost killed. It was my fault, the direct result of a horrific mess Roger and I had gotten ourselves into. Theresa recovered fine, but Kyle had spent a year going to a school for emotionally disturbed children.

That said, most of the time he was a perfectly happy little kid, and if the worst we had to deal with was him calling his sister an asshole, Helen and I were extremely fortunate.

We rounded a corner, and then I applied the brake. A large dark-green truck was stopped in the center of the road, about fifty feet ahead, blocking our path.

"What's he doing?" asked Roger.

"I don't know." The truck was filthy, the front grille covered with unidentifiable gook. I could see that somebody was in the driver's seat, but he didn't appear to be moving.

We waited for about ten seconds.

"Honk at him," Roger said.

"I'll decide when to use the horn, thank you very much," I told him. I gave the horn a light tap.

The truck didn't budge. The driver didn't even react.

"I don't think his engine's on," said Roger.

Samantha moved up to the front and looked through the windshield. "What's up with this guy?"

"Is he awake?" Roger asked.

"Yeah, his eyes are open," said Samantha. "Honk at him again."

"I will make all decisions about the use of the horn." I waited for several seconds to prove I was making the decision on my own, and then honked at the truck again.

No response.

"Jeez, I hope he didn't have a heart attack or something," I said, putting the camper into park. "Everybody wait here, I'll go see what the deal is."

I got out of the vehicle and walked toward the truck. The engine was on. The driver was a guy in his late thirties or early forties, with at least a week's worth of beard growth and unkempt long black hair. As I got closer to his truck, it was clear that he was very much conscious and watching me closely.

But as I walked up to the driver's side of the truck, he stared forward, watching the camper. "Hi there," I said, waving to get his attention.

No reaction.

"Hello? Sir?"

Nothing.

What was wrong with this guy? I hesitated for a moment, and then knocked on the door. "Sir?"

He didn't move.

Now, I could tell the guy was watching me when I approached the truck, so why was he ignoring me now? "Sir, I really need for you to move your truck over a bit. We can't get around you."

Again, no response. Now I was starting to get irritated. I knocked on the door again, harder this time. "Hey! I need you to move the truck, okay?"

Very slowly, the man turned his head to look at me. He narrowed his eyes, and then very slowly returned his attention to the camper.

I got ready to pound on the door, but decided that perhaps this was a gentleman I didn't want to make mad. Did I really want to piss off a guy who was acting this strange, and who could easily have a shotgun resting on his lap?

We could always return to our original plan and drive back the way we'd been going before the wimp-out. Of course, there wasn't nearly enough room on the road to turn the camper around until we reached the store. I wasn't quite comfortable enough driving the motor home to relish the idea of driving in reverse for three miles, but what was I gonna do, throw open the door and drag this jerk out of his truck?

I knocked once more. "Sir? Is something wrong? Do you need me to get help?"

He looked over at me and rolled down his window. "Quit touching my goddamn truck." He said these words in a surprisingly articulate manner.

"Sorry about that, but you're in the way."

"What way?"

"The way of my camper. We need to get past you and you're in the middle of the road."

"No kidding."

"Uh, right. So could you move?"

The man opened his door and slowly climbed out of the truck. He was wearing filthy blue jeans and a t-shirt bearing the faded slogan "Quality Counts!" He was tall, at least six-two, and lean but muscular. He had an ID badge clipped to his pants pocket, which featured his picture and the word "Goblin."

"You can't go down that road," he informed me.

"Yes, I realize that. That's what I've been saying. Your truck is in the way."

"I know my truck is in the way."

I wanted to grab him by the shoulders, give him a good shaking, and scream "Then move it!" but wisely refrained. "Okay, well, since we're both aware of that, maybe you could move it? Just a bit?"

"A tree fell, about a mile up ahead. It's blocking the road. It's right as you go around a corner, and I didn't want you to crash into it."

"Oh. Well, that's very nice of you. Maybe we could help you move it."

The man (Goblin?) shook his head. "The tree's too big."

"We have a couple of people in the camper who could help," I said. Technically, Helen wasn't nearly far enough in her pregnancy to be exempt from manual labor, but regardless, I wasn't going to let her engage in any. "It's just a tree, right? We should be able to get it off the road."

"Nope."

"C'mon, four people should be able to move a tree." Actually, never having moved a tree in my life, I had no idea how much manpower was required, but none of the trees close to the road seemed anywhere near large enough to provide much difficulty.

"What did I just tell you? It's too big of a project. Go back the way you came."

"There's nowhere to turn around."

"That's not my problem. You bringing an oversized vehicle into this narrow road doesn't constitute an emergency on my part."

Clearly, I wasn't going to get this guy to move. "All right, well, thanks for not letting us crash into the tree."

"Not a problem."

Goblin got back in his truck while I returned to the camper. "What'd he say?" asked Roger as I shut the door.

"He says there's a fallen tree blocking the road, and we have to turn back."

"So why was he just sitting in his truck like that?"

"Because he's an extremely odd individual. I think his name is Goblin, by the way."

"Goblin?"

"That's what his badge said."

Roger stuck out his lip in a mock pout. "Everybody else gets all the cool names."

I turned around and spoke to Helen. "I'm gonna have to drive backwards until we get to the store, so I'll need you to watch through the window and let me know if I'm getting too close to the side of the road."

"I'll watch, too!" said Kyle, excited.

"What did I tell you about talking?" asked Helen. "Not one word!" She got up and walked to the back of the camper to look out the rear window. Samantha opened one of the side windows and stuck out her head.

I put the camper in reverse and slowly applied the gas. This really sucked. Stupid store owner and his stupid warning. This was my punishment for being responsible.

"You're okay on my side," Samantha announced as we backed up.

"Yeah, you're fine," said Helen. "Just keep going straight and...oh, crap, someone's coming."

In the side-view mirror I saw a truck drive up behind us. A filthy dark-green truck identical to the one in front. It continued moving toward us until it was no longer visible in the mirror.

"The creep stopped two inches from our rear!" Helen informed everybody.

Then the truck in front of us began to move, driving forward until it was practically touching the front of our camper.

We were boxed in.

CHAPTER FIVE

"Everyone just stay calm," I said as I turned off the camper's engine. "They've got identical trucks, so they're probably just part of the same...I don't know, fallen tree warning squad or something. Helen, what's the guy in the back doing?"

"Nothing. He's just sitting there."

"Does he look homicidal?"

"Not really."

"Good."

I honked at the truck in front of us, trying to get Goblin to back up. He didn't move.

"Okay, let's just wait and see what they want," I said.

We all sat there for a moment, trapped between the two trucks, waiting for something to happen. The drivers just stayed in their vehicles, silently watching us.

"Do you want me to get out?" Roger finally asked.

I shook my head. "Helen, make sure the kids aren't near the windows."

"I'm scared," said Theresa.

"You don't have to be scared, honey," I assured her. "It's just that these people are acting kind of goofy, that's all. Everything will be fine, I promise."

Samantha picked up her purse and reached inside. "I think we should call the police."

"Good idea," said Roger. What a brownnoser.

Samantha took out her cell phone and punched a couple of buttons. "Damn it! The battery's dead. Roger, I thought you said it was charged!"

"I plugged it in last night!" Roger insisted.

"Did you plug it in right?"

"Yes, I plugged it in right. I'm pretty sure I did. I don't know. I've never plugged one in before. I don't like cell phones."

Helen got her own purse and retrieved her cell phone. She looked at the display in disbelief. "My battery's dead, too!"

"Are you serious?" I asked.

"No." Helen gave a half-smile and dialed.

Something else Helen never did was joke during moments of stress. I got in trouble all the time for doing that. This personality change was starting to become scary.

A few seconds later, Helen's half-smile disappeared. "I'm not getting a signal."

"Nothing?" Samantha asked.

Helen held up the display for her to see then tried again. "No signal. It's not working."

"How can that be?" I asked. "We're not that deep in the woods, are we?"

"Maybe the camper's too tightly insulated or something," said Helen.

I frowned. "A camper wouldn't block cell phone reception, would it?"

"I don't know!" Helen snapped. "I'm just saying it isn't working! Where's your phone?"

"It's...I left it at home," I admitted. "It's on the counter. Next to the spatula." I'd only owned the stupid thing for three weeks, and I avoided its use as much as possible.

"Damn it, Andrew, I thought you were going to try to be more responsible!"

I couldn't believe this. "I am being more responsible! Look, the gas tank is almost full! I turned away from Wreitzer Park on the word of a crazy old man! So I forgot my cell phone...we had two others in the camper! If you're going to get mad at somebody, get mad at Roger! He forgot to plug in Samantha's phone!"

"It was a funky plug!" Roger insisted.

"Then you should have asked!" Samantha said.

"It looked like it was working!"

"Stop fighting!" Theresa shouted. "You're acting like babies!"

All of the adults shut up. Yes, a nine-year-old who only a short time earlier had been at war over a tiny block of tooth-marked chocolate had successfully put us in our place.

"Let's get the kids out of the way," I suggested, quietly.

Samantha took Kyle's hand. "Here, Kyle, why don't you come up and snuggle with your Aunt Samantha in the top bunk?"

When did she become "Aunt Samantha?" That woman didn't get to appoint herself an honorary aunt without my permission! Who did she think she was? Dear God, if Roger stuck with her he would be whipped beyond all reasonable human—

I put that out of my mind and focused on much more pressing matters, such as, say, the lunatic truck drivers. Samantha helped Kyle onto the upper sleeper, and then climbed up there with him, while Helen huddled down with Theresa on the floor. I left the driver's seat and walked to the rear of the camper to get a look at the guy behind us.

Like his buddy, he was unshaven and had long dark hair. However, this guy was morbidly obese, a fact that was obvious even with most of his body hidden from view. I couldn't make a weight estimate, but he was clearly enormous.

He stared at me, looking almost bored.

"I think Roger and I should go out there and talk to them."

"Andrew, no!" said Helen.

"Maybe they're just playing a joke. Seeing how long we'll sit in here. I mean, what else could they possibly be doing? They're not attacking us or trying to steal our camper or anything like that."

"Maybe they're waiting for somebody else."

And then the guy behind us began to back up. He pulled back nearly ten feet then stopped.

"He's moving," I announced.

"The guy up here is saying something," Roger informed everybody. "Not to us, he must be talking into a walkie-talkie or something."

"It damn well better not be a cell phone," I muttered.

The truck in front of us honked. "Roger, switch places," I said, and we crossed paths in the middle of the camper as I returned to the driver's seat.

The truck honked again.

I honked back and gave him the finger.

Goblin grinned. It was not a grin that left me with a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

I started up the engine. "I think he wants me to back up," I said. What I really wanted to do was floor the gas pedal and knock the grinning prick off the road, but even though our vehicle had the size advantage it would never work, at least not without wrecking the camper.

I slowly backed up. The truck moved forward to match my progress.

"The guy behind us is backing up, too," Roger told me.

We continued moving, blocked between the two trucks. Maneuvering around the first corner was tricky, but I did it without us going off the road.

"What do we have in the way of weapons?" Samantha asked from above.

"Not much," I said. "Unless somebody packed a machine gun without permission."

"Stay up here, honey," Samantha told Kyle, before jumping down. "I'll see what I can find. We've at least got the fishing poles if we get really desperate."

"They're packed at the bottom," said Helen.

Fishing poles. The weapon of choice for the traveler in distress. We also had lots and lots of marshmallows. Maybe we could immobilize these guys with sticky gooey goodness.

It was a long, scary drive. Roger moved back up to the front while Samantha gave us reports from the rear. Helen and Theresa moved up to the top bunk with Kyle. Joe slept on the floor. The trucks maintained their close proximity to us, never giving me an opportunity to slam on the gas and speed ahead of the one in front, even if there'd been room to get past him.

"You know, we could've handled the Wreitzer Park earwigs just fine," Roger remarked, forcing a smile.

"I think we're almost back to the store," said Samantha. "Do either of you remember if there was a phone inside?"

I glanced at Roger. He shrugged. "We're not sure," I admitted.

"I can't imagine that there wouldn't be." Samantha looked through the open window on the left side of the camper. "When we get just a little bit closer, I'm gonna jump out and make a run for it."

"The hell you will," said Roger.

"We have no idea where they're taking us or what their plans are. What if they're just forcing us to some abandoned area to butcher us? This may be our only chance to get help."

"What if they have guns?"

"I've gotta risk it."

Roger took a deep breath, looking distressed. "You're right, we have to try something. But I'll do it."

Samantha shook her head. "I can run the fastest. Don't worry, I'll be okay. I promise."

"You should take my cell phone," said Helen. "Maybe it'll work outside the camper."

"No. If something happens to me, you'll need it."

"But nothing is going to happen to you."

Samantha considered that, and then took the cell phone. "Thanks."

I have to admit, sending our phone along with the woman who would soon be in serious danger didn't sound like a very good idea, but I didn't protest.

Samantha gave Roger a quick kiss then placed her hands on the window sill and prepared to leap out. "Andrew, when I tell you to, stop the camper just long enough for me to jump."

I felt sick to my stomach. Sure, I didn't like Samantha, but I certainly didn't want her to put her life at risk! Though she could technically make it into the woods in just a few strides, it would be at least another twenty or thirty feet before the trees became thick enough to hide her.

Roger looked as if he wanted to grab her arm and hold her back, but after a moment of indecision he went to the rear of the camper.

"Stop!" she said.

I applied the brake.

Samantha immediately leapt out of the camper.

Without hesitation, Goblin braked to a halt.

He reached down for something.

Samantha darted toward the woods.

"The one in back has a gun!" Roger cried out.

Goblin raised a gun of his own. A shotgun. He pointed it out of his passenger side window and quickly took aim.

Samantha hurried off the road.

I slammed my foot on the gas pedal.

The camper bashed into the truck, throwing me against the steering wheel. The shotgun fired, but the shot went wild.

Another gunshot went off behind the camper.

I put the camper into reverse.

"Shit!" Roger screamed.

I slammed the gas pedal again. The camper smashed into the truck behind us as a third gunshot fired.

"Did he hit her? What happened?" Helen demanded over Theresa and Kyle's screams. Joe ran from one end of the camper to the other, barking furiously.

"He got her!" Roger shouted. "Oh, God!"

I glanced out the window, catching a quick glimpse of motion in the woods and a blur of red. Then I looked at the truck in front of us and put the camper back into drive.

Goblin had his shotgun pointed at me.

I ducked down as he fired, shattering the front windshield. Glass sprayed all over me.

"Andrew, reverse!" Roger shouted.

Staying ducked down, I put the camper into reverse once more. Another shot fired from behind us, not quite as loud as the shotgun blasts. It was followed by two more before I could send the camper rocketing backward again. As we collided with the truck, I kept the gas pedal floored, trying to push that maniac right off the road.

More bullets fired, slamming into the seat above my head.

The camper suddenly felt like it was going to topple. I let up on the gas and applied the brake.

"Is everybody okay?" I asked. I could hear Theresa and Kyle sobbing, but it didn't sound like either of them had been hurt. "Helen?"

"I'm fine," she said. "We're all fine in here."

"Roger?"

"I think she made it," he announced, sounding out of breath. "They shot her in the arm, I don't know how bad, but she got away!"

I put the camper into park. Joe pressed his flat face against my leg, whimpering.

Now what?

"That was really stupid," Goblin called out. "There's nobody out here who'll help her, and she'd bleed to death before she found them anyway!"

I hoped he wasn't just cleverly trying to psyche us out. The store owner could certainly be in on it...but for now I'd remain optimistic.

If Samantha did get in touch with the police, how long would we have to defend ourselves against these psychos before help arrived? We'd never even found the fishing poles.

I waited silently for a few moments. I couldn't hear any activity outside. Maybe they were conserving ammunition. Maybe their guns were empty. I wasn't about to pop my head into view to check it out.

Then I heard another vehicle approach from the rear.

"Is this bad?" I asked Roger.

"Real bad," he informed me. "Three more trucks."

Maybe they were coming in peace. Maybe they'd talk some sense into the other two, we'd all have a nice chuckle over this silly misunderstanding, and we'd get together for a late lunch and a friendly pillow fight.

Or maybe not.

"Forget this," I said. "We're getting out of here. I'll plow right over one of these trucks if I have to. Everybody hold on."

I floored the gas pedal.

And then I very quickly realized that this had been an extraordinarily bad idea, right in line with many of my other extraordinarily bad ideas of the past. The camper began to topple to the right.

As everybody else screamed and I held onto the steering wheel as tightly as I could, the camper fell onto its side with an almost deafening crash.

CHAPTER SIX

I tumbled out of the driver's seat and smashed against the other side of the camper as glass rained down upon me. Joe landed on my side with a yelp.

How could I have been so stupid?

The answer was simple: It was me.

I could hear sobbing and screaming in the back of the camper, which was a hell of a lot better than corpse silence. "Everybody talk to me!" I called out.

"We're all alive," Helen said.

"You suck, Andrew!" Roger informed me.

I twisted myself around and got to my feet. On the other end of the overturned camper, the bathroom door was hanging open and swinging next to Roger as he tried to move past it.

I was sore and a little dizzy, but I crouched down and made my way back to the main part of the camper, walking on top of the refrigerator door. Helen was crawling out of what had been the upper bunk. She had a nasty gash on the side of her head but looked otherwise unharmed.

Helen grabbed Theresa's arms, and I grabbed Kyle's, and we quickly helped our children out of the bunk. I gave Kyle a tight hug, trying to forget for a moment that we were still very deeply screwed.

"What was that all about?" Goblin shouted. I heard a door slam, as if he'd gotten out of his truck. "Do you think this improved your situation?"

"Bite me!" I replied, proving my spirit wasn't yet broken but that I was too shaken up to think of anything more clever to say than "Bite me."

Then I thought, oops, I should've shut up and pretended to be dead. What a dork.

"We're not here to kill you," Goblin said, "but we'll do it if we have to, no problem."

"What's our other option?" I asked.

"Come out and give yourselves up."

That didn't sound like a very good option. On the other hand, if their master plan had been to just blow us all away, they wouldn't have bothered with the whole trap-us-between-two-trucks thing.

There had to be a way out of this. Quite honestly, I was more comfortable with the idea of sprinting toward the woods and dodging bullets than surrendering.

Joe barked.

"We'll even let the dog go," Goblin promised, and the others chuckled. They sounded close.

Unfortunately, with the camper on its side, our methods of escape were limited. Climbing up through the windows on top was a sure way to get a shotgun blast through the skull, leaving only the broken front windshield and the rear window. The rear window had shattered in the fall but so much of our camping junk was piled in front of it there wasn't room to climb out.

At least, no room for anybody but Joe. Yet somehow I didn't see this particular pug as one that would perform Lassie services for our family.

"Are you sure we can't settle this through a bribe?" I asked, silently ushering Helen and the kids toward the front windshield. "We've got marshmallows."

"Sorry. Ogre might go for it, but not the rest of us."

I wondered who Ogre was. Probably the huge guy in the second truck.

"What if we toast them first?" I asked.

"I'm not here to perform a fuckin' comedy routine with you," Goblin said. "You've got ten seconds to come out here before things get really ugly. Nine...eight...seven..."

"My wife's leg is broken!" I said. "She can't move."

"...six...five..."

"It's pinned under some suitcases! She can't go anywhere!" I moved over to the rear of the camper, where Roger was hurriedly moving our gear out of the way.

"...four...three...two..."

"I'm serious!"

"...one. Time's up. How about we toast those marshmallows for you?"

Seconds later, a bottle fell through the broken window on what was now the camper's ceiling. A bottle with burning cloth stuffed into the neck. The Molotov cocktail struck the wood paneling and burst into flames, separating me from my family and forcing Roger and I more tightly against the rear of the camper.

As the camper quickly filled with smoke, Joe rushed around the flames, barking loudly, over to where Roger and I stood. I could barely see Helen on the other side, her arms wrapped tightly around Theresa and Kyle.

A second Molotov cocktail fell right where the first had landed. I'd been in worse situations in my life, but this sucked pretty intensely.

I picked up the closest weapon: Kyle's Wiffle bat.

Roger found one of the fishing poles.

A third Molotov cocktail shattered against the wood, which kind of seemed like overkill by this point. The camper was now so filled with smoke I couldn't see my wife and kids anymore, though I heard Helen coughing.

Joe squirmed underneath a blanket.

Obviously, we couldn't stay in the camper any longer. I crawled out through the rear window, coughing as well. Though my eyes burned and my vision was a bit blurry, the shotgun barrel two feet from my face was perfectly clear.

Roger followed me. He immediately was confronted with a shotgun barrel of his very own.

A woman held the shotgun pointed at me. She had dirty black hair cut short, and looked about forty. Her blue jeans had holes in the knees and she wore a white lab coat with a few dried bloodstains. Her ID badge identified her as "Witch."

Roger's new buddy, "Troll," was also in his forties. He wore shorts and a light blue t-shirt, which showed off dozens, maybe hundreds, of scars on his arms and legs. There were also four or five fresh cuts. A large knife with a serrated edge dangled from his belt, and he wore a rather nice tie that matched his shirt.

Smoke billowed from the overturned camper, and I couldn't see Helen, Kyle, and Theresa behind it.

"Look at this mess you made," said Goblin, gesturing toward the camper and damaged trucks as he walked over to us. "That was pretty damn stupid. I should have Troll cut you up for that."

Troll flashed me a rotten-toothed grin.

Helen stepped into view from behind the camper, staggering a bit. She held Kyle and Theresa's hands. The big guy (five hundred pounds, at least) I assumed was Ogre was behind them, along with a kid who looked about twenty.

"Oh, yeah, he could cut you up real nice," said Goblin. "Make you look as bad as he does. Do you have a special attachment to any of those fingers of yours? How about your nose?" He flicked my nose with his index finger. "Would you mind so terribly if he sliced off your nose?"

I didn't respond.

"What about the kids' noses? Would you like that?" He looked over at Theresa and Kyle, and then back at me. "They're yours, right? They kind of look like you. Let's just hope they grow up with better problem-solving skills than you."

Goblin didn't seem particularly worried about any other vehicles approaching, so clearly they'd blocked off the road. He also didn't seem concerned about Samantha's escape, which probably wasn't a good sign.

"Don't you have anything clever to say?" Goblin asked me. "You were pretty clever in the camper. You made the marshmallow comment, remember? Joking in the face of danger. Pretty brave. Say something clever now."

"A husband and wife were both fortune tellers who desperately needed money, so they decided to have a kid. Do you know why?"

Goblin frowned. "Why?"

"To make a little prophet."

Goblin just stared at me.

"I made that up," I said.

"Just now?"

"No. But I thought it was pretty clever. Your turn."

Goblin smiled. "Sure. Troll, do me a favor and slice off his hand. Is that clever enough for you?"

Troll handed his shotgun to Goblin, keeping it pointed at me, then withdrew the knife from his belt.

Then Joe ran out of the camper, still covered in the blanket. It was, in fact, Kyle's blanket, featuring the children's television abomination Zany the Chipper Chipmunk. The poor dog ran in circles, desperately trying to get untangled.

Goblin and the others watched with amusement.

"Don't hurt Joe!" Kyle wailed.

"Don't hurt Joe?" Goblin asked. "How about I put Joe out of his misery?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Helen move. She kicked Ogre exactly where I'm sure he least wanted to be kicked, where he had no blubber to protect him, and she kicked hard. The behemoth dropped to his knees and howled in agony.

In a flash, Helen, Theresa, and Kyle fled toward the woods, followed by the kid.

I swung the Wiffle bat as hard as I could, smacking Witch on the side of the head. You'd be amazed what kind of impact you can get with one of those things. Though Witch didn't drop her shotgun, she definitely felt some pain.

Roger smacked Troll with the fishing pole, which snapped in half.

Goblin spun around and aimed the shotgun at Helen.

Fired.

As I lunged at him, he spun the shotgun back at me, hitting me in the face with the barrel. I fell to the ground.

Troll stabbed at Roger with the knife, missing by millimeters.

Goblin pressed the barrel of the shotgun against my chest.

I glanced over and watched as Ogre got to his feet and hurried off into the woods with surprising speed for somebody so large. I couldn't see Helen, but I could hear her shouting for Theresa and Kyle to run faster, shouting with far too much energy for her to have been shot.

Goblin pushed down hard on the shotgun, grinding the hot barrel into my chest. I let out an involuntary yelp of pain.

Something happened to Roger. I didn't see what. He fell to the ground next to me.

A gunshot fired in the woods.

Then another.

"What do you think? I bet that second one went through your daughter's fucking skull!" Goblin sneered, raised the shotgun barrel just a bit, and then slammed it back down onto my chest. "Maybe the first one only wounded your wife. Maybe she'll bleed to death. Sound good to you?"

Another gunshot.

"Oooooh, I bet that one got your son. His brains are probably splattered all over one of those trees. Wanna go see?"

Witch laughed and kicked Roger in the side.

An agonized scream sounded from the woods.

Joe, finally free of the blanket, hurried after Helen and the kids.

Goblin frowned. "Was that Ogre?"

Witch nodded. "Sounded like him."

"Troll, go see what's going on."

Another agonized scream, but not one of physical pain.

Troll rushed toward the woods, then stopped as Ogre emerged from behind the burning camper, holding the kid in his arms. The kid was limp, his shirt soaked with blood. "She got Ghoul!" Ogre screamed. "The bitch shot him!"

Goblin turned away from me but kept the shotgun in place. "Oh, Christ, no. How bad is he hurt?"

Ogre was almost in tears. "I dunno...I think he's dying...she got him really bad..."

"Cover them," Goblin said to Witch as he hurried over to the others. "Hey, Ghoul, can you hear me? You can hear me, right? You're gonna be okay, I promise!"

Ogre crouched down and gently set the kid down on the ground. Goblin pulled up his shirt to examine the wound. "Aw, shit! Shit!" He ran his hand through Ghoul's hair. "It's fine, you'll be fine, we'll get you help."

Witch looked like she desperately wanted to go over and help out, but she kept her shotgun pointed at Roger and me.

"Get me something to stop the bleeding!" Goblin gestured frantically. "There! Get that blanket the dog was in!"

Troll grabbed Kyle's blanket and tossed it over to Goblin. Goblin pressed the corner of the blanket against Ghoul's chest. I couldn't see Ghoul's face, but he certainly didn't seem to be moving.

Goblin kept one hand pressed against the blanket and wiped his eyes with the other. "What the hell is the matter with us today? We lost four of 'em, Ghoul got shot...this is bullshit!"

Ogre glared at me. "We'll make those two suffer."

"Oh yeah," said Goblin. "We'll chop them up. We'll cut them down to the molecular level. Troll, go after the wife and kids. But be careful, it sounds like she has a gun."

Troll shook his head. "I'm staying with Ghoul."

"I didn't say it was optional!"

"I'll get them," said Ogre. "I'll rip her head off. She won't get very far with two little kids."

"Fine, you go then. But hurry!"

Ogre ran off into the woods.

"How's he doing?" Witch asked.

"He's coughing up blood...I don't think he's going to..." Goblin trailed off. "Aw, Christ."

"What?"

"I think he's dead. Yeah, he is. He's gone."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

Witch cursed under her breath as her eyes glistened.

I kicked her in the shin as hard as I possibly could and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun. Roger jumped up and lunged for the weapon as well, quickly wrenching it out of her grip. Before Goblin could open fire, Roger had the shotgun jammed against Witch's back.

"Drop your gun or you'll lose another one!" Roger shouted as Goblin pointed the shotgun at me.

"Just blow him away!" Witch demanded.

Goblin hesitated.

We stood in silence for a long moment. I couldn't help but cringe, expecting Goblin to pull the trigger at any instant.

Finally Goblin chuckled. "This has been one unproductive day."

"Drop the shotgun or I'll kill her!" Roger shouted. "I mean it!"

"Really?" asked Goblin. "You're the kind of guy who would shoot a woman in the back, huh?"

"If I have to, yeah."

"And what if I call your bluff?"

"Then we might have another four dead bodies here."

Goblin considered that. "So you're saying you and I would end up killing each other at the same time, right?"

"That's right."

"Seems unlikely. I think the more realistic scenario is three dead bodies, not four."

"Maybe. But if I shoot you before you shoot me, I'll take out your friend back there, too. That's four."

"But you only have two shells."

On one hand, I wanted to call for an end to this ridiculous conversation, but on the other hand, it was keeping me alive.

"One last time," said Roger. "Drop the gun."

Goblin shook his head. "I'm not going to drop the gun. You know that. I'm fully prepared to take this as far as it will go."

"So am I."

"Then there's a lot more blood to come. But let me make a counter-offer. Let Witch go and I'll let you go. I don't care how we do it...you guys can slowly back into the woods and keep your gun pointed at her, it doesn't matter to me, but you might want to speed it up a bit, because I'll wager Ogre isn't too far behind your friend's wife and kids if he hasn't caught them already."

Roger glanced at me. I nodded. Sure, I didn't trust these guys, but I definitely wasn't in favor of a shotgun blast to the stomach.

Roger backed up a couple of steps, keeping the gun pointed at Witch. I backed up as well. The others watched us carefully.

We backed up a few more steps, more quickly now.

It really did look like they were going to let us go.

And then the damn camper exploded.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A piece of shrapnel, I'm not sure exactly what, slashed across my cheek as Roger and I were thrown to the ground by the force of the blast. I struck the dirt hard and my shoulder instantly went numb.

Roger's shotgun fell out of his hands and went off, putting a huge bloody hole in the side of one of the lunatics. Unfortunately, that lunatic was Ghoul, who was already dead.

Goblin, Witch, and Troll hit the ground as well, but they were recovering quickly. As we all started to get back up, it was clear that our best bet was to rely upon the age-old tradition of getting the hell out of there as fast as we could.

There were only two options: Run into the left side of the woods, following Samantha, or run into the right side of the woods, following Helen and the kids.

Since we were already on the left side of the road, going after Helen would've added a few more seconds to our dash, almost guaranteeing we'd be shot down.

Roger ran to the left.

I followed him.

We made it into the woods right before the first shot went off, striking a tree just inches from my head. Several more shots fired as we sprinted amongst the trees, emitting obscenities at an almost supernatural rate.

I knew we'd have to circle around and go after my family, but for now our only chance to stay alive was to run.

Though the gunshots continued, nobody seemed to be pursuing us.

After about a minute, they stopped shooting.

After about five minutes, we stopped running.

"Are you sure it's safe?" asked Roger, as I slowed down to a walk.

I shook my head. "It's probably not. But we can't afford to get lost, not with everybody else still out there."

Roger suddenly looked crestfallen. "Do you think Samantha's okay?"

"She's probably riding a tank to our rescue right now."

"I'm sure Helen got away," Roger assured me. "And, hell, if they did catch her, you know they'd regret it in a big way."

I smiled, although it was more than a little forced. "Yeah, all she'd have to do is give them The Gaze and they'd run screaming like babies."

"Absolutely."

We walked in silence for a moment. I ran my finger across the cut on my cheek and found it wasn't bleeding too badly. At least I had that going for me.

"Oh, and I paid extra for insurance on the camper," I finally said. "Good call, huh?"

"You're the man."

"This is the new Andrew Mayhem. Yeah, I'm still spending half of my life pursued by homicidal deviants, but I'm doing it knowing the damages to the camper are fully covered."

"I always knew you had it in you to become a responsible citizen."

I sighed. This joking around really wasn't helping me feel any less terrified about what might be happening to my wife and children.

"Maybe we should call out for Samantha," Roger said.

"That'll give away our position."

"Yeah, but I don't think they chased us. She might need help."

I nodded. "You're right."

Roger cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted Samantha's name.

Silence.

And then, distantly: "I'm here!"

She was to our left, in the direction of the store. Roger immediately took off running and we sprinted toward the sound of her voice.

She called out once more as we ran, and it took three or four minutes to reach her. Or at least where we thought she was.

"Samantha?" Roger called out.

"I'm here!" she said, sounding extremely close. "Down here!"

Down here? That didn't sound good.

And it wasn't.

Samantha had fallen into a pit, about six feet square and six feet deep. She was pinned against the side, her hair messed up, her face contorted with pain, and her shoulder covered with blood.

Her arms were fully extended and her hands were pressed tightly against a large vertical wooden board, the same size of the pit and about two inches thick. Dozens of wooden spikes were imbedded in it. From the gash on Samantha's right hand, it looked like one of the spikes had ripped across her index finger as she blocked the board.

The board was on a giant spring that protruded from the site of the pit. Clearly, when she'd fallen into the pit, the spring had released, hurtling the board at her. A bunch of dirt and some crumpled cellophane showed how they'd hidden the trap.

Roger crouched down next to the edge of the pit. "How long have you been holding that thing?"

"I'm not sure...a few minutes..."

"Just keep holding on. We'll get you out of there."

"I don't know if you can," said Samantha, her voice trembling. "I'm only still alive because my foot got wedged under it."

I glanced down. Indeed, her right foot was extended and stuck underneath the board. It looked excruciatingly painful.

"How bad is it?" Roger asked.

"Broken, for sure. I might be able to pull it out, but if I do, I won't be able to hold this thing back."

"Don't worry, you'll be fine," Roger insisted. "It really doesn't look all that bad from up here."

Some sweat trickled into Samantha's eyes and she blinked it away. "You're cute when you lie."

I grabbed a branch off the ground, broke it in half, and tried to wedge it between the wall of the pit and the board. It was too long to fit. I broke off a piece of it, tried again, and it dropped to the bottom. This is why I failed shop class in high school.

Roger placed his hands against the top of the board and tried to push. "I can't get any leverage."

There was no way sticks were going to work. I leapt down into the safe side of the pit, gripped the top of the board, and tried to pull it back. It refused to budge. Roger jumped down and helped me, and with the two of us working together, pulling as hard as we could, we managed to move it just a bit...

But just a bit is all. And what would happen when Samantha got her foot free?

"Guys, I can't feel my arms, I'm not sure how much longer I can hold this."

Roger let go of the board. "Pulling isn't working. We'll have to push."

I'd really hoped he wasn't going to suggest that. We quickly climbed out of the pit and moved back to Samantha's side. Though her face was firm with resolve, her arms were shaking. Her breath began to come in quick gasps.

"Roger, I love you..."

Roger swung his legs over the side of the pit.

"What are you doing?" Samantha demanded.

"I've never had the chance to experience a good old-fashioned spiked pit," said Roger, leaping down all the way and bracing his arms against the board. "Andrew, get me stuff to wedge against the bottom."

I gathered up several branches and dropped them down into the pit. Roger kicked the cellophane away and used his foot to try and shove them underneath the board as best he could.

It didn't look like anything was going to hold.

Roger looked up at me, his face already covered with perspiration. "When she gets her foot free, pull her out of here."

Samantha gave a couple of hard tugs. "It's not coming loose." She tugged several more times in rapid succession, gasping in pain with each one. "Roger, get out of here! I mean it!"

"You can do it," Roger insisted. "Keep trying!"

"It's not coming free! Damn it, Roger, you're going to die!"

I can't believe I'm going to do this, I thought.

"If I get poked by so much as one solitary spike, I'm kicking both of your asses," I said, dropping into the pit.

I crouched down, accidentally scraping my face against one of the spikes. It was the same side that had been cut by the shrapnel from the exploding camper. Nice.

I reached down and grabbed hold of Samantha's lower leg with both hands, trying to ignore the spike that was ready to fly right through my eye, then pulled back as hard as I could.

Her foot popped free.

The board moved back an inch. While none of them broke the skin, spikes were now poking me in at least four places. To keep a sunny outlook on things, I noted that none of those places were my eye. I stood back up and pressed my hands against the board.

"My, this was a splendid idea," I proclaimed, using my foot to try and wedge more branches underneath the board. "Wouldn't it be hilarious if the bad guys showed up right about now?"

There was virtually no room to maneuver, but I managed to turn myself around with only a few nasty scrapes, and then pulled myself out of the pit.

"Give me your hands," I told Samantha.

"Go ahead," said Roger. "I've got it." He didn't sound convinced.

Samantha hesitantly lifted her hands. Roger let out a loud grunt at the additional strain but managed to keep the spikes out of his body. I grabbed Samantha's wrists and pulled her out of the pit.

His girlfriend was safe, but Roger was still in a bit of a pickle.

"These branches aren't going to hold it," Roger said, voice cracking.

I quickly sat down on the edge of the pit. "Maybe we can hold it with our legs." I braced my feet against the board and then tightly gripped the edge of the pit with my hands to hold myself in place.

"Have you got it?" Samantha asked.

"I think so."

"I'll help." She sat down on the other side of Roger and placed both of her feet against the board. Her right shoe was completely red.

"Roger, on the count of three, let go and get out of there," I said. "One...two...three!"

Roger let go of the board and turned around.

I felt my knees begin to bend.

Samantha let out an agonized whimper.

Roger spun around and tried to scramble out of the pit.

My grip was beginning to loosen.

Roger was halfway out.

"Hurry up!" I said, as if he'd been lollygagging.

Just as Roger got his legs safely out of the way, I lost my grip. The board hurtled forward, pushing Samantha and I off balance, and slammed into the wall of the pit.

"Whoa!" Roger shouted.

"Whoa," I said in agreement.

Tears were streaming down Samantha's face. I couldn't imagine how badly her foot must hurt. Even hellspawn feel pain. "Are you okay?" Roger asked, putting his arms around her.

She nodded, and then turned her head and spit out some blood. "I bit my tongue trying not to scream."

I stood up, still breathing heavily. "Is there any chance that you can walk?"

"No, but I can hop with the best of them." She suddenly looked horrified. "Helen and the kids! Where are they? Are they okay?"

"I don't know. I...I'm sure they are, but I don't know. I need to go on ahead in case they're already at the store. Were you able to call the police?"

Samantha shook her head. "I dropped the phone when I got shot. I'm sorry."

"Crap." I should have protested when Helen offered to give her the phone. Of course, I also should have avoided tipping the camper on its side. "Well, I'm going on ahead. You two stay here, out of sight." I quickly stripped out of my shirt and handed it to Roger. "Here, use this to help clean up her foot and shoulder."

"What, you're not donating your jeans, too?"

"You're lucky you got the smelly shirt."

"Thanks, Andrew," said Samantha. "You'll find Helen and the kids, I promise."

"Be careful out there," Roger told me. "I've heard rumors that there are spiked pits in these woods."

I nodded and ran off in the direction of the store.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I watched the ground carefully as I ran, which caused me to smack into no fewer than three different branches. Fortunately, though, I didn't fall into any spiked pits, get caught in any bear traps, get struck by any poisoned darts, or bash into the gates of Hell.

Finally the woods thinned and I emerged next to the store. There were still no cars in the parking lot.

I cracked my knuckles nervously. Hopefully Helen and the kids were inside. And hopefully the old guy in there wasn't involved with this whole mess. I had several dozen other "hopefullys" I could think of, including one about machine guns and expensive armor dropping from the sky, but I decided to stick with those two for the time being.

I considered going around back to find a way to sneak in, but I'd already wasted too much time at the pit-o-spikes. I'd just have to be really, really careful.

I walked over to the front door, took a deep breath, then opened it and stepped inside.

No hailstorm of bullets ripped my chest apart, which was a promising beginning. The old man still sat behind the counter, reading his magazine. He looked a bit startled to see me.

"Forget something?" he asked. "Like maybe your shirt?"

"Do you have a phone?"

He shook his head. "No need for one."

"No need for one? How can you run a place of business without a phone?"

"Got a wireless modem on my PC in the back room. I can use the Internet to place all of my orders quickly and efficiently."

"Ah. Has anybody else been here since me?"

"Since now or since the first time you were here?"

"The first time."

"Nope."

"Can I borrow your computer for a minute? It's an emergency."

"Nope. It's a fancy piece of equipment and it's not for customer use. You'll be downloading that damn pornography and getting my machine all filled with viruses and I'm not gonna let it happen."

"No, I just need to contact the police."

The old man chuckled. "You went to Wreitzer Park anyway, didn't you? I told you—"

"No, we were taking your advice but we got ambushed. These people in trucks blocked our way and the camper tipped over and I got separated from my wife and kids and I desperately need to use your computer."

The old man stroked his chin thoughtfully. "You sure are anxious to look at pornography."

"I'm not interested in pornography! My family is in danger!"

"Now, I'm not saying I don't enjoy a good nudie magazine every now and then, if the breasts are natural," the old man informed me. "I just don't want any of that stuff on my computer."

I gaped at him for a moment. He was definitely part of this whole mess. That was their modus operandi, to be as annoying as humanly possible.

I wasn't in the habit of beating information out of old men (I usually just tied them up and threatened them with broken plates), but perhaps I could give it a shot just this once.

A vehicle pulled up outside.

The old man looked me in the eye. "I'm not the kind of fellow to tell somebody their business, but you may want to hide."

I quickly moved away from the counter and ducked into the aisle at the far end of the store. I pushed a box of cereal out of the way, allowing me to peek through the shelf and watch the front counter.

Now I was getting more than a bit confused. So, was the old man aware of what was going on, but he was actually a good guy? Or maybe he genuinely was concerned I might use his computer to access pornographic images or videos.

I looked around for something to use as a weapon. As in the camper, my options were limited, although the cat food, hurled in sufficient quantities, looked like it could do some damage.

The door opened.

"Hey, Charlie, how's it going?" asked a voice I was pretty sure belonged to Troll. As he walked up to the front counter I saw it was indeed Troll, he of the scarred legs.

"It's going fine. How've you been?" asked the old man. "I haven't seen you around here since you shoplifted this morning."

Troll sighed. "It's going like complete shit, Charlie. We lost Ghoul."

"Better get out there and find him."

"We didn't lose him lose him, dumb-ass. He's dead."

"Are you kidding?"

I considered moving down to the other end of the aisle so I could make a break for it, but if I was lucky, Troll and Charlie wouldn't waste too much time talking and I'd get my chance to contact the police.

Troll shook his head. "Completely serious. He could be a pain sometimes, but I really liked that kid, and it's never good to lose a member of your team, y'know?"

"It certainly isn't."

Troll withdrew his hunting knife from its leather sheath. "And to top it all off, every one of 'em got away. I mean, even the frickin' dog. I'll tell you something, Charlie, I think this team is falling apart."

Troll began to scrape the knife against his leg. It appeared to be an absent-minded action, but I couldn't be sure.

"Well, you'll get them," said Charlie. "You always do. That's what the traps are for, right?"

"No, the traps are to give me something fun to do in between hunting sessions so I don't get bored out of my mind sitting around this dump. The specimens aren't even supposed to make it out of the car until we're ready. But yeah, they're probably dead. Hopefully chopped in half. I just think maybe we need new management, if you know what I mean."

"Yep, I know what you mean."

"So have you seen anybody in here since you reported the family?"

"Not a soul."

"If you do, let us know ASAP."

"Will do."

Troll slid the blade of the knife against the back of his leg. The cut wasn't deep, but a trickle of blood ran down his skin. He let out a soft moan of pleasure.

"What was that for?" asked Charlie.

"What?"

"That sound you made."

"It was nothing."

"Aw, jeez, Troll, are you cutting yourself again? Don't do that in my place. I'm not saying this is a respectable establishment, but I at least don't want that masochistic crap going on here. Cut yourself someplace else."

"Lighten up. I'm not gonna get any blood on your precious floor."

"I can mop the floor. I just don't want your nasty self-mutilation bullshit happening in my place of business. Knock it off."

Troll defiantly held up his left arm and very slowly slid the blade across it. He chuckled as Charlie grimaced.

"Get the hell out of my store," Charlie said, waving him away. "Come back when you learn to stop acting like a messed-up freak of nature."

"Got a Band-Aid?"

"Go on, get out of here, you whack-job. Go mourn your buddy."

I pulled back quickly as Troll looked over his shoulder in my direction. "Can I kill your guest first?"

"Aw, no, no, no!" Charlie protested. "Don't mess up my place!"

I stood up. My instinct was to run, but I'd be much better off if I stood and fought this particular whack-job, especially since Helen and the kids were probably heading this way. If I could get rid of Troll now, we'd be much more likely to ride off into the sunset for our happy ending.

I walked backwards as Troll joined me in the narrow aisle, grinning and holding the knife out in front of him. "Hey there. How've you been?"

"No, Troll, no! I mean it!" Charlie shouted. "No splatter on the merchandise! No splatter on the merchandise! That's the deal!"

"You really should adhere to your agreement," I suggested. "Getting banned from a store like this is a blot on your permanent record that will haunt you for the rest of your life."

"Oooooh, funny guy," said Troll.

"Really? I thought that joke was kind of lame. You must be easily amused."

"Oooooh, funny dead guy." Troll switched the knife from his right hand to his left. "Want me to carve some smiley faces on your chest?"

"No, but speaking of carving, what's the deal with cutting yourself? I mean, did you, I dunno, have a sexy French maid who cut you as punishment when you were a kid and it became some kind of fetish?"

Troll shrugged. "It's just my thing."

"It's a dumb thing. Really, it is. You look stupid when you're doing it. Chicks love scars, but not when they're self-imposed. I mean, I'm all for freedom of expression and all that, but what you're doing just isn't cool."

"Are you finished trying to distract me?"

"Almost."

Troll flicked the tip of his knife against his chin, drawing blood. "Maybe you should give this a try. You might like it."

"Nah, I've never been into that. I've always been a bludgeoning man, myself. So, do you use antiseptic in bulk, or is infection part of the whole allure?"

"Do you ever stop talking?"

"Not generally, no. How about this? You look like a pretty tough guy. Why not put down the knife and make this into a fair fight?"

"Why the hell would I want to do that?"

"To be honest, I have no idea. I'm just reaching at this point."

Then, without warning, he rushed at me. I instinctively grabbed for the closest object available, a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips, and used it to deflect his knife. The blade tore through the bag, releasing a shower of chips.

I punched him in the face as hard as I could. Troll flew back against the shelf, knocking several canned goods to the floor. He put a hand to his face where I'd punched him, smiled, and began to breathe heavily, almost panting.

Panting in a sexual way.

I truly hoped he didn't enjoy the punch.

He lunged at me with the knife again, and I stepped out of the way, crunching some chips underneath my foot. I punched him again, slamming my fist into his shoulder, and he let out a groan of pleasure.

"Not in here!" Charlie shouted, stepping into the aisle. "Some of us have to make a living!"

Troll rubbed his shoulder, pursed his lips, and said (and I quote): "Ooooooooh."

I lowered my fists. "Okay, no offense, but this is seriously messed up."

Troll grinned. "C'mon, give it to me again, big boy."

I grabbed a large can of tomato soup from the shelf and swung it at him just as he swung his knife at me. Tin can met stainless steel blade, and both lost. The can fell out of my hand and the knife fell out of his.

I punched him in the face with my other hand, knocking him back a step. He didn't throw back his head and scream "Yes! Oh, yes!" but his expression implied he was thinking it.

"You're paying for the damage, Troll! I'm gonna take inventory of every cent!"

"Shut up!" Troll shouted at him. "You're ruining this!"

This was so very wrong. How could I be expected to fight under these conditions?

Troll threw a punch of his own. It hit me in the chest, a glancing blow that was not even remotely pleasurable. Instead of punching back, I slammed my hands into his shoulders and gave him a hard push, shoving him to the floor. He landed on cans and potato chips, and this time his reaction was more of pain than pleasure, which was a relief.

I snatched up the knife.

Troll sat up and used the tip of his tongue to lick some of the blood trickling down the side of his mouth.

I held up the knife in what I hoped was a terribly intimidating way. "If you want to live, contact your buddies and tell them to call off the hunt."

"Why would I want to do that?"

"Because I just told you to. I don't think having this knife go through your eyeball will quite give you that happy-happy feeling."

"Couldn't tell you. I've never tried it." Troll slowly got back up, brushing potato chip fragments off his pants. "Hey, I've got an idea. Why don't you put that knife down so we can have a fair fight?"

"Okay," I said, flinging it at him.

I've never had much knife-throwing practice, but I hoped the blade would strike his throat, heart, or eyeball. It didn't. It struck his upper arm. He stared at the blade as it jutted out of his flesh, buried an inch deep.

He gasped.

Then gasped again.

Then let out a high pitched squeal of delight that was the single most disturbing noise I have ever heard in my entire life, and in the past couple of years of my life I've heard some really disturbing noises.

I rushed at him and punched at the knife, bashing it with my fist and jamming it even further into Troll's arm. He closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath. A horrified glance downward revealed a bulge in his pants that was even more disturbing than the squeal.

"What the hell is the matter with you?" I demanded. "You're...you're...you're...you're wrong! You're just wrong!"

I wrenched the knife out of his arm and smashed the handle into his face. Troll hit the floor again, his head striking the large can of tomato soup. He let out a soft groan and then was still.

"Wrong!" I repeated.

I wiped my hands off on my shirt. My whole body felt icky.

I realized Charlie was still standing in the aisle, watching me. His eyes widened and he hurried away as I took off after him.

CHAPTER NINE

Catching Charlie wasn't difficult. I grabbed him by the back of the collar just as he reached the front counter and yanked him to the ground.

"It wasn't my fault!" he insisted. "I tried to keep him from hurting you!"

"No, you tried to keep him from sullying your merchandise with my blood. Tell me, were you lying about the phone?"

"No, I swear!"

"Were you lying about the computer?"

"Yes, I swear!"

"How were you going to contact them?"

"A walkie-talkie. It's behind the front counter. But I wasn't really going to contact anybody."

I dragged Charlie with me behind the counter. The two most notable things underneath the counter were a huge stack of porno magazines and a walkie-talkie. I grabbed the walkie-talkie but refrained from commenting on the magazines.

Charlie coughed. "Don't kill me. I wasn't going to rat on you, I swear. I hate helping these people, but they forced me to do it and they don't pay me much!"

The walkie-talkie had a hell of a lot more knobs and buttons on it than any walkie-talkie I'd ever used as a kid. "How does this work?" I asked.

"Press the big black button on the side."

I pressed the button. "Hello?" I said into the receiver.

A moment of silence, and then: "Charlie?"

"Nope, this is Troll's captor. You may remember me from the exploding camper incident. To whom might I be speaking?"

"It's Goblin."

"Hi, Goblin. Look, I want to cut a deal. I've got Troll. You let my wife and kids go, and I'll let your friend go."

"How do I know you've really got him?"

I gestured at Charlie with the walkie-talkie. Charlie leaned into it and spoke. "It's me. Troll is unconscious on my floor."

I thought I heard a soft curse on the other end.

"I've already lost two of my closest friends," I said, hoping that if he thought Roger and Samantha were dead they wouldn't look for them, "and you've lost one. Now, we can keep whittling down each other's numbers, or we can cut our losses and call it quits right now."

"What do you mean, you lost two?"

"Exactly what I said. Call off the hunt and let us work out some kind of truce, or I'll slit Troll's throat with his own knife."

"Well, you see...who am I talking to, anyway?"

"Andrew."

"Well, Andrew, you see, we've got a bit of a problem here, because Ogre tends to have a lack of respect for my title, and he always got along really well with the boy your wife killed, so it seems unlikely that he'd listen to me even if I did ask him to give up the chase."

"I'm not screwing around here," I said. "I'll kill him."

"I wasn't accusing you of screwing around. But, Andrew, another problem we've got is that Troll was never one of the more popular associates in our little group. I don't want to disrespect the poor guy when he's this close to death, but he actually made the rest of us kind of uncomfortable. Did you see that knife thing he does?"

"Yeah. What's up with that?"

"No idea." Goblin sighed on the other end. "You do what you've got to do, Andrew. I can't honestly say I want you to cut his throat, but I'm afraid it's not possible for us to work out a deal. I would like to leave you with one last thought, though: Now we know exactly where you are."

The door opened.

I spun around to see who it was, and caught a flash of Troll running out of the store.

Damn!

Before I'd even finished thinking the word "Damn," I heard another vehicle approach.

"Is there a back way out of here?" I asked Charlie.

He nodded.

I didn't think the old man would make a very good hostage. Most likely, they'd happily blow a hole right through his chest if I were standing behind him.

Keeping the walkie-talkie and the hunting knife with me, I rushed into the back room. It was filled with approximately eighty-seven tons of raw clutter and no computer. I spent a few seconds looking for a weapon but had no luck, so I threw open the door and ran outside, shutting the door behind me.

I'd made it about a hundred yards into the forest before I heard the door open again. I looked back and saw both Troll and Witch emerge. They immediately followed me, although Troll didn't seem to be quite as energetic as Witch.

I sprinted as quickly as I could. If I could get just far enough ahead that they couldn't see me, I'd try to loop around to the front of the store and steal one of their trucks.

Please don't trip, I told myself, since this seemed like the most appropriate moment for me to trip.

I didn't turn back but I could hear Witch's footsteps behind me. It sounded like she was gaining.

Then the footsteps stopped.

A gunshot fired, and several leaves flew into the air from the branch it struck. I'd thought I was running as fast as I could, but I picked up my pace nevertheless.

Another gunshot. This one seemed further off the mark, yet somehow I didn't feel like dancing a merry jig. My mind turned to other important matters, like the fact that I could fall into a spiked pit at any moment.

I glanced down, and promptly smacked into a branch.

Hard.

Though the branch didn't poke out anything, it was a violent enough blow that I found myself momentarily dazed. I stopped running and leaned my arm against the tree to keep my balance.

Just ahead I could see a tree much larger than the ones surrounding it. I'd hide behind it and pray they didn't find me. I stumbled over to the tree and cried out as a noose closed around my feet.

I was immediately yanked upside-down, causing me to drop the knife and walkie-talkie. I dangled there, about four feet off the ground, swaying back and forth.

Okay, this was pretty bad.

But it was important not to be cynical. After all, it was entirely possible that Troll and Witch might walk past without noticing the shirtless guy swinging upside-down from a tree. Or perhaps the blood rushing to my head might increase my powers of thought, allowing me to come up with an unbelievably creative solution to this whole problem involving tree sap, magnetic fields, and my own perspiration. Or I might look so pathetic hanging here that Troll and Witch would take pity on me and let me go.

If you really took the time to think about it carefully, getting caught in this trap was probably the best thing to happen to me all afternoon.

Definitely.

I heard Witch approach and moments later she stepped into view, smiling—as quite naturally she would since she wasn't the one hanging from a tree. Troll joined her, looking way too peppy for a guy who was still bleeding from being stabbed in the shoulder.

"Well, well, well," said Troll. "I'm glad to see my hard work setting up all of these traps paid off."

"Did you make all of them?" I asked.

"Yep."

"What's up with the spiked pit? Why take the time to set up that whole spring and board thing? If you'd put some spikes on the bottom it would've worked just as well."

"I have a lot of down time."

"Makes sense," I said, starting to get dizzy.

Witch took her walkie-talkie off her belt. "Goblin, you there?"

Goblin's voice crackled over the speaker. "Sure am."

"Troll and I have one of them. Do we kill him or bring him back?"

"Is it Andrew?"

Witch looked at me questioningly. I gave her an upside-down nod.

"Yeah," she said.

"Then definitely bring him back."

"You've got it. Witch out." She clipped the walkie-talkie back to her belt, and then turned to Troll. "I'll keep you covered. Get him down."

"Don't worry," Troll told me. "Pretty soon your body will be hurting a hell of a lot worse than your pride. Which is saying a lot."

He walked around the tree and out of sight. A moment later, I let out an embarrassing yelp and dropped to the ground, just barely managing to cushion my fall with my hands.

It was a close race, but yes, my body was indeed hurting worse than my pride. Of course, he probably wasn't referring to the fall, but rather fun stuff to come after the fall.

I pushed myself up. Maybe I could try the old throw-a-handful-of-dirt-into-the-bad-guy's-eyes-and-kick-them-in-the-stomach-while-they're-blinded trick.

Or maybe I could admit defeat.

"Look at me," said Witch.

I did.

"See this gun? We were told to take you back alive, but neither of us will be written up if that fails to happen. So if you try another stunt like you did back at the camper, or anything else, anything, I'll shoot you in the leg. If you try again, I'll empty the rest of this gun into your head. Do you understand me?"

I nodded.

"Say it."

"I understand."

"Good."

"Hey, looky here!" said Troll, wandering over and picking up his knife. "I've really missed this." He fondled it, flicked the tip against his leg, and then walked toward me. "Maybe I'll slice him up before we take him back. Just a little."

"Fine with me, if you do it quick," said Witch, keeping the gun pointed at my head.

I didn't even try to gather a handful of dirt. That would simply get me shot. As much as I hated to admit it, the only way I'd stay alive and possibly see my family again was to concede defeat.

For now.

CHAPTER TEN

Helen's Side

It's finally my turn.

My name is Helen Mayhem. I've been married to Andrew for a decade now, and I've had to put up with a lot. But you already knew that.

While I don't feel I've necessarily been misrepresented on these pages, give or take a few misquotes, I do think having only one point of view makes me appear quite a bit less sympathetic than I actually am. I'm not going to dwell on this, because I'm primarily referring to my husband's first two books and not this one, but I did want to suggest that if you've ever found me to be overly grouchy, demanding, and/or overbearing, that you stop to consider whether that attitude may have been justified.

The fact is, if you were married to Andrew, you'd think such an attitude was essential to your very survival.

I could probably go on for a couple of books of my own presenting my side of these adventures, but I don't want to interrupt the forward momentum any more than absolutely necessary. So I'll pick up where we left off, with me kicking Ogre in the testicles and fleeing into the woods.

I knew right away that simply running for our lives wasn't going to work, not with a seven and a nine-year-old in tow. We had to find a place to hide as quickly as possible. As we ran I looked for large overturned tree trunks, piles of branches, anyplace I could hide my children.

A shotgun fired. I'm not sure what it hit, but it wasn't me or my kids.

I grabbed Theresa and Kyle's hands and screamed for them to run faster. I could hear somebody following only steps behind us, so we ran with every ounce of energy we could muster.

He had to have a gun. All of them did, didn't they?

As far as I knew, we were only still alive at this moment because our pursuer had an aversion to shooting a woman and her children in the back.

The man behind us was gaining, and as close as he was he didn't have much more to gain. So I let go of my children's hands and came to a sudden stop, almost in the style of a Warner Brothers cartoon character.

I spun around and swung my fist. I didn't punch him so much as he ran into my fist with his jaw.

You know, it doesn't look that way on television, but it hurts to slam your fist into somebody's face. It hurts like you wouldn't believe. There's not a whole lot of cushioning in the jaw area, and I've got tiny little hands. For a second I almost thought my hand had popped off from the impact.

The man (who was about twenty, and too young for me to think of as a "kid," despite how others have described him) was knocked off his feet and his gun flew into the air.

I'd like to say I caught it in the dramatic fashion of an action movie star, but I didn't. It hit the ground next to him. I scooped it up.

The man grabbed my arm.

I shot him in the chest.

I'd never killed anybody before. Never even injured anybody. Thus far in my life, I'd never delivered physical trauma more severe than a spanking, and I felt guilty for weeks over the spanking, even though Andrew deserved it.

Okay, I'm sorry, I shouldn't make a joke in the middle of this. I'm not as good at being witty as my husband, so I'm going to stick to a more or less straightforward telling of this narrative as much as possible. It's just that I feel somewhat compelled to use a lighthearted tone to help get me through this.

Because this time...well, things got really bad.

Blood splattered against my face.

I knew I'd have some hard times dealing with this later, but for now I was a pregnant woman defending her children and I was glad to shoot this son of a bitch.

His fingers tightened around my arm. I yanked away. His arm flopped to the ground.

Ogre, whose five hundred or so pounds had apparently recovered from the groin kick, came into view. He looked absolutely horrified.

I took a shot at him and missed.

I turned around. Kyle and Theresa were standing there, silent, almost in shock.

"Run!" I screamed at them, and then I quickly followed.

We raced through the woods. I prayed to God that Andrew was still alive, but I had to protect my children first.

Behind us, Ogre howled in grief.

We'd only been running for a couple of minutes before Kyle fell. I pulled him to his feet and tried to get him moving, but he fell again.

"Sweetheart, you have to get up," I insisted. "Do it for Mommy!"

Theresa looked back over her shoulder. "I hear Joe!"

I listened. I did in fact hear the dog barking. "Joe's going to be fine," I said. "We just have to keep running. Theresa, keep going!"

Theresa ran. I suddenly caught a reflection of light. My stomach gave a lurch, and I screamed: "Theresa, stop!"

She stopped.

I hurried over to her. There was a fishing line running between two trees, about six inches above the ground. I looked up in the tree and saw something metallic that was mostly hidden by the branches. I couldn't be sure what it was, but this whole thing definitely had the appearance of a booby trap.

I held out my hand and called Theresa back. "I'm going to hide you two, okay? I'm going to put you up in a tree where it's safe, and I'll be right here if anything happens, but I need you to be completely quiet, no matter what. Can you do that?"

"Yes, Mommy," said Theresa. Kyle nodded.

I watched the ground, now paranoid there might be traps lurking everywhere, and hurried over to a nice-sized tree with a low first branch. I hoisted Kyle up.

"Climb up a couple of branches and hide as much as you can. I'll let you know if I can see you or not."

As Kyle began to climb, I took Theresa to another tree about ten feet away and did the same.

I walked back and looked up into Kyle's tree. He was slightly visible, but only if you knew where to look. Once Theresa was equally well-hidden, I climbed a tree in the middle of the two and hid myself.

I didn't feel safe having myself and my kids trapped like this, with no way to escape, but I felt even less safe about running through booby-trapped wilderness.

Please let Andrew be okay, I thought.

And Roger.

And Samantha.

At least I knew Joe was doing okay. I could hear the dog barking as it ran.

What if Joe gave away our position?

"Kyle, Theresa, no matter what, do not say anything! Not a word! Not a noise!"

However, Joe's barking sounded pretty far away. He must've been going in the wrong direction. Not much of a tracker dog.

I was very proud of Theresa and Kyle. I couldn't hear any sign of them. I desperately hoped they'd get to meet their new little brother or sister.

I fidgeted with the gun in my hand. I wished I knew how many bullets I had left, but I wasn't exactly sure how to expel the clip and I didn't want to risk messing anything up.

I'd just have to make sure every shot counted.

We continued to wait. I wasn't wearing a watch, so I couldn't be sure how long we waited, but it was at least fifteen minutes and probably more.

Then I saw Ogre.

He was doing sort of a half-walk, half-run. He looked more insanely pissed than anybody I have ever seen, in real life or the movies. And he was coming our way.

How come the dog was off-course but the human was walking right toward us?

I carefully pointed the revolver at him. I didn't like the idea of being a sniper, but I could do it.

Mentally, that is. In terms of gun skills...well, I had none. I knew you pulled the trigger to fire and not much else. Yeah, I could shoot somebody in the chest when they were lying on the ground right in front of me, but beyond that my marksmanship skills were questionable.

I'd only shoot if absolutely necessary. The last thing I wanted to do was fire, miss, and discover I was out of bullets.

I held my breath as Ogre continued to move toward us.

Maybe we'd get lucky and he'd walk right through the booby trap. That would be nice.

I wished I'd climbed higher into the tree, but it was too late now.

He kept moving, belly jiggling with each step. His breathing was labored.

Then he slowed down, eyeing the trap. He gave the fishing line a wide berth, and then picked up his pace again, heading right for the gap between my tree and Kyle's.

He stopped right between them.

I hadn't heard a peep from Kyle. Maybe Ogre was just taking a break at an outrageously inconvenient location.

He looked up into the tree.

I stifled a whimper.

Ogre walked around to get a better look.

That was it. The big guy had to die. I pointed the gun at him and willed my arms to quit shaking so I could be absolutely, positively certain not to miss.

I held my aim steady. He was going to get it in the back of the head.

I squeezed the trigger.

The click sounded so loud that I was positive it had echoed throughout the entire forest.

Ogre spun around and looked for the source of the sound. Our eyes met, even though I was mostly hidden in the branches, and I knew he saw me.

Especially after he waved.

But though the gesture was lighthearted, Ogre looked no less furious.

I pulled the trigger several more times, hoping it had been a weapon malfunction and not that the gun was empty, but was rewarded with several more clicks.

While it seemed like a guy his size was unlikely to be up to the task of climbing trees, he could certainly call for reinforcements.

He removed the walkie-talkie from his belt and put it to his lips.

I leapt down from the tree.

He wasn't expecting this, but he still moved faster than I anticipated, and I landed feet-first on the ground instead of on his skull.

Then he punched me in the stomach so hard I thought his fist was going to rip through my back.

Mouth open, unable to catch a breath, I doubled over but somehow sustained my footing.

"That is for the kick to the crotch," Ogre told me. Then he clamped his enormous hand around my neck and lifted me back into a standing position. "This is for Ghoul."

He threw me into the air. I struck the ground and lay there, tasting blood, still unable to breathe, not sure if I'd ever be able to take a breath again.

"Where are your kiddies, Momma Bear?" Ogre asked, looking up in the trees. "It's been a while since breakfast, and I'm famished."

I tried to sit up, but I couldn't move. My body was paralyzed.

Ogre pointed up into Kyle's tree. "I see you, little boy! Do you want to know why they call me Ogre? Because I eat little boys just like you!"

I tried to scream for Kyle to climb higher, but I couldn't get my voice to work. I felt like I was going to suffocate right there.

"Why don't you come on down, little boy, and be my lunch? You know what the best part is? The nose. Yeah, I'll just bite your wee little nose right off."

I saw movement in the branches. Kyle was climbing.

"Oh, now, don't run away, little boy! It'll only make the fall hurt all that much worse."

With that, Ogre flung the walkie-talkie up into the tree. Kyle cried out and I saw the leaves flutter as he fell.

He grabbed onto the lowest branch and swung there, legs dangling.

With a powerful intake of breath, I sat up.

Kyle struggled mightily to pull himself up out of harm's way, but Ogre grabbed his leg.

"Leave him alone!" Theresa shrieked.

Kyle kicked Ogre in the face with his free foot. Ogre didn't even flinch.

He yanked my son free of the branch. Kyle fell into Ogre's arms, screaming in terror.

I got to my feet.

My vision was blurred, but it shot into sharp focus as Ogre opened his mouth, leaned his head down toward Kyle's upper arm, and took a bite.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Helen's Side

The pain no longer mattered. Even hundred-pound metal chains wrapped around my entire body wouldn't have mattered. I was going to get my child away from that son of a bitch.

Kyle let out a wail that ripped through my heart. Ogre looked over at me and grinned a scarlet grin. A thick rope of blood and drool dangled from the corner of his mouth.

"Mmmmmmmmm..." he said. "Nice and fresh."

I let out a howl of rage and rushed at him. I was going to tear him apart with my bare hands if I had to.

Ogre casually used his free hand to cuff me on the side of the head. I fell to the ground again.

"Mommy it hurts it hurts it hurts!" Kyle screamed. He began kicking violently, repeatedly slamming his feet into Ogre's gut, but the behemoth didn't even seem to feel it.

"I'm gonna grind your bones to make my bread," Ogre informed Kyle.

I got back up.

"Ooooh, Momma Bear's still got some fight left in her. She must love you a lot, little boy. Or maybe she wants to eat you herself, what about that?"

"Put him down!" I shouted.

Ogre licked the bloody wound on Kyle's arm in response.

I picked up a large branch, about three feet long, and rushed at him again. I held out the branch like a lance, intending to jam it right through his eye.

Ogre knocked the branch out of my hand then backhanded me across the face. Once again I hit the ground.

"Mommy!" Theresa screamed.

This time, Ogre wasn't going to let me get back up. I saw his huge foot coming down toward my face and rolled out of the way. I tried to sit up but couldn't...his shoe had landed on a large chunk of my hair.

I strained to pull free. I was willing to yank out every strand of hair on my head if that's what it took.

Ogre raised his other foot.

As he looked down at me, a blob of his blood-drool spattered against my cheek.

Kyle's hand suddenly wrapped around Ogre's face, clawing at his eye. "Leave Mommy alone!" he screamed.

Ogre momentarily lost his balance. His foot slammed down inches from my face. His feet were now straddling each side of my head.

I reached up between his legs, grabbed tight, and squeezed as hard as I could, using my fingernails.

Ogre cried out.

And then began to really lose his balance.

I hurriedly moved out of the way as he lifted the foot that was pinning my hair. He stumbled forward, and then started to fall.

Kyle was going to be crushed beneath him.

They say things move in slow motion during moments where every split second counts, and I found this to be absolutely true. I reached for the arm holding Kyle and raked it with my fingernails, trying to break his grip on my son before he fell.

Ogre's grip did not loosen one iota.

Slow motion transformed back into regular speed as Ogre dropped to the ground.

Landing on his knees and not on my son.

For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to tumble forward onto his stomach, but this time he sustained his balance. Kyle frantically but unsuccessfully tried to pull himself free.

I raked Ogre's arm with my fingernails again.

Kyle leaned down and bit deep into Ogre's flesh.

"Ow, shit!" Ogre screamed, finally letting Kyle go. He shoved him away. "You goddamn little cannibal!"

I punched Ogre in the face as hard as I could. This time he seemed to feel it.

"Kyle, run!" I shouted as Ogre slammed his hands against my shoulders. He stood back up, lifting me along with him.

"How about I grind your bones, bitch?" he snarled, squeezing his hands together.

My arms were pinned, but I kicked him over and over. And by now I was filled with so much adrenaline that these kicks were taking their toll. Ogre let me drop then grabbed the back of my neck.

He slammed my face into his gut and pushed hard.

The smell of rotten sweat was almost unbearable.

I couldn't breathe.

Dear God, I was going to suffocate against the belly of a five-hundred pound maniac.

I tried to push away but couldn't. My face was pressed so tightly against his belly that I couldn't open my mouth to bite him.

I landed several blows with my fists that did absolutely no good.

I could feel myself starting to black out.

"You little shit!" Ogre shouted, although his voice seemed to be miles away. "I'll tear your tiny little—"

I could suddenly breathe again.

"—head off!"

As I pulled away, Theresa jabbed the branch into Ogre's ribs once again. He swatted her aside, only to be met by another branch in his other side, wielded by Kyle.

Though neither of the branches had poked right through his body, Ogre had spots of his own blood on his shirt .

Theresa jabbed him again.

So did Kyle.

In one smooth motion, Ogre swung his arms together, catching each of my children and slamming them into each other.

He tossed their dazed bodies aside as I grabbed my own branch and lunged at him again. This time it tore across the side of his head, still missing his eye.

He snatched the stick out of my hand, picked me up, hoisted me over his head like a professional wrestler, and then tossed me into the air. I landed hard next to Kyle and Theresa, sure I'd broken something.

Ogre wiped the blood off the side of his head. "I'm gonna eat all three of you right up," he said, enraged. "I'm your death. I'm the bogeyman." He stepped towards us. "And I like little girl meat the best of all."

My every muscle was aching. My bones felt like eggshells. My blood felt like ignited kerosene. But I still got back up—not in a fluid ballerina-like motion, but back up nevertheless—and put myself between this monster and my children.

Ogre raised his fists and smiled. "You really think you can take me?"

I raised my own fists and gave him a steel-eyed gaze. "No."

"Good. Then we're in agreement."

He stepped toward me and I stepped toward him. We began to slowly circle each other like boxers.

Ogre spat out some blood.

I spat out some of my own.

He was almost five times my size, but I wasn't going to back down.

"I'll hand it to you, you've got some spark," said Ogre, leering at me as if a fight weren't the only thing he had planned.

"I'm pregnant," I told him.

A moment of uncertainly flashed in his eyes.

"That's right. You're beating up on a pregnant lady. I bet that makes you feel like a real man, doesn't it?"

The leer returned. "You know, I said little girl meat was my favorite, but I was wrong. Do you know what really tastes the best? Do you know what I most like to feel rolling around on my tongue?"

I ran at him, claws extended, before he could finish.

He batted me aside.

"Yeah, you know what I'm talking about," said Ogre. "Maybe I'll just suck it right out of your belly for dessert."

I felt like I was going to vomit. But no. I couldn't let him get to me. They were just words.

Ogre made a vulgar slurping sound.

I ran at him again.

This time, instead of hitting me, he grabbed my arm and twisted it around my back. I cried out in pain.

"Shhhhh...not so loud, you'll wake the baby," said Ogre.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw something running toward us.

Joe.

The pug latched on to Ogre's foot and thrashed around, biting and snarling.

Ogre gave it a kick. Joe let out a high-pitched squeal then attacked his leg again.

It was enough of a distraction. I reached around and grabbed a handful of blubber, digging my fingernails into Ogre's gut.

Theresa, who I hadn't even seen get up, slammed a new branch into Ogre's side.

Ogre released my arm, grabbed my other hand, and pried it off his belly.

Theresa jabbed him again. The tip of the branch broke off in his side.

A second kick, a second squeal, but Joe kept fighting.

Ogre lurched his head down toward my face, mouth wide open, giving me a full blast of his fetid breath.

I leaned out of the way.

He lurched at me again, moving his mouth in an animalistic biting motion. His red teeth clacked together over and over, so viciously I thought he might shatter them.

I swear he growled.

He pushed Theresa out of the way, but she came right back at him, stabbing the branch several inches into his side.

Ogre spun around, practically roaring, and reached for my daughter. I leapt up onto his back, wrapped both of my arms around his neck, and squeezed.

He grabbed my arms and tried to pry them off, but I refused to budge.

Nothing could make me budge.

I squeezed and squeezed, trying to crush his throat.

Ogre staggered away from Theresa, swinging around as he tried to dislodge me. It wasn't going to happen.

I put everything I had, every last bit of strength I possessed in the entire world into breaking his neck.

"I'll kill you!" he screamed.

I wasn't squeezing hard enough if he could still scream.

"I'm gonna...gonna..."

He let out a disgusting choking sound.

He continued to stumble around. My strangulation efforts were clearly doing some good. I couldn't possibly squeeze any harder, but I sure as hell wasn't going to let up.

He moved more and more erratically, swaying back and forth. And in a moment of raw horror I realized where our struggle had taken us.

I let go of him and slipped off his back.

His foot snapped the fishing line.

A long metal spear sailed down from the trees, striking the upper left side of his skull. The tip burst out through his right thigh.

Ogre stood in place for what felt like an endless moment, and then fell.

I stared at him in shock.

Now the forest animals could eat him.

I turned away from the gruesome sight and Theresa rushed into my arms. I gave her a tight hug despite my aching limbs, and we hurried over to Kyle, who still lay on the ground. The bite on his arm was deep, but he wouldn't bleed to death.

I snapped my fingers in front of his face. "Kyle? Are you with me?"

He nodded.

I hugged both of my children. Joe didn't want to be left out, and licked my hand.

"Is the bogeyman dead?" Kyle asked.

"He wasn't the bogeyman," I said. "He was just a big fat loser. And yes, he's dead."

Kyle nodded his understanding.

"You were both very brave," I told them. "And I need you to keep being brave just like that. We're going to help your father. I've got a plan."

CHAPTER TWELVE

It's Andrew again.

"One for you," said Troll, giving me a quick cut on the leg, "and one for me." He cut himself on the leg in the same spot. "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me."

"Okay, that's enough," said Witch, wrinkling her nose in disgust. "Let's get him back to the truck."

"One for you..."

"I said, that's enough!"

"Sometimes I think you don't appreciate the finer things in life."

"It's a wonder you have any skin left."

"You should see me naked."

"All right, enough! Let's get moving."

Witch kept her gun pointed at me while Troll stood up and pulled me to my feet. "Ready to go for walkies?" he asked.

"No, but I'm ready to crap on your front lawn."

"We don't really have a front lawn."

I almost offered to crap on his shoes, but there have to be minimum standards to even this type of conversation. With Witch keeping me very nicely covered with her gun, I got up and we headed back toward the store.

"So, Troll, is that your real name?" I asked.

Troll chuckled. "Do you always ask such dumb questions?"

"No, I just thought that might be how you guys met. Maybe at a party or something. 'Hi, I'm Troll.' 'No way, I'm Witch!' 'Wow, your parents hated you too, huh?' 'Oh yeah. So, do you want to get together and hunt innocent vacationers in the Georgia shrubbery?' 'Sure, why not?'"

Troll snorted. "Like I said, you're a funny guy."

"Did you get to pick your own names?"

"Yeah."

"That's cool. Otherwise somebody could've gotten stuck with Orc or something. You just don't want to go around saying 'Hi, I'm Orc.' Or maybe Pixie. Why didn't you pick Dragon, though? Dragon would've been much cooler than Troll. When I think Troll, I think of a weasely little hairy thing living under a bridge eating goats."

"You know, Andrew, the only reason I'm letting you yammer on like this is because you're a dead man. Might as well get all the talking in while you still can."

"I disagree," said Witch. "Shut the fuck up."

"You heard the lady," Troll told me.

I stopped talking for the rest of the walk.

* * *

We reached the store and went inside. "Oh, hell no," said Charlie, emerging from the far aisle. "Don't bring him back in here again!"

"He'll be good this time," Troll assured him. "All we want is some duct tape."

"Yeah, right. You shove any more of those candy bars in your pockets and I'll shoot your self-mutilating ass."

"Oh, waah, waah, waah. Quit being such a baby. When was the last time you had a customer in this place? Jeez, you've got gallons of milk in the cooler that are completely solid. I've seen 'em."

Witch held her walkie-talkie to her mouth. "Goblin, you there?"

"Yeah."

"We're at Charlie's place."

"I'm right around the corner. I'll be there before Troll can steal a pack of Rolos."

"Gotcha. Witch out."

Troll took a new roll of duct tape off one of the shelves and unspooled an armlength of it. "Put out your hands," he told me.

I obliged, if only because Witch hadn't stopped pointing that gun at me. Troll wrapped the duct tape around my wrists several times, binding them together.

"Put some over his mouth," said Witch.

"I don't think they make a roll big enough for that."

"Just do it."

Troll put a long strip of duct tape over my mouth.

A truck pulled into the parking lot outside. The motor turned off, and then Goblin entered the store.

"Oh my goodness," he said, looking at me. "You're looking kind of humble there, Andrew."

I said something amazingly brilliant that was muffled by the duct tape.

"I'm very glad to see you again," said Goblin. "As I'm sure you know, I've had a really miserable day, and I can't think of any better way to improve it than to watch you get strapped to a table and have your body parts replaced with..." He put his hand over his mouth in mock realization. "Ooops. That's supposed to be a surprise, isn't it?"

"We've got some good ones lined up," said Witch. "Maximum pain."

"That's what I want. I mean, sure, we could just throw him down to the floor right now and stomp him to a bloody pulp, but then, what progress would we have made?"

"You're not stomping a damn thing into a bloody pulp here," said Charlie.

Goblin waved dismissively at him. "Go organize some stock or something."

Charlie opened his mouth as if to say something, but settled for glaring.

"So, Andrew, I'm sorry to hear about your friends," said Goblin. "I hope it was quick."

I said something equally brilliant that was equally muffled. Troll ripped off the duct tape, and I grimaced in pain.

"What was that?" Goblin asked.

"I said, bite me."

"Good one."

Troll slapped another strip of duct tape over my mouth.

"Anyway, I think we've hung out in this squalor long enough. Let's deliver our new friend Andrew to the lab, shall we?"

Goblin's walkie-talkie crackled. "Is anybody there?" asked a voice I instantly, and joyously, recognized.

"Who is this?" asked Goblin.

"I'm Momma Bear. How about we make a deal?"

Goblin laughed incredulously. "What's with all the deals? You'd think we were brokers or something."

"Shut up and listen. Your large friend here fell down and went boom. What do you say we make a trade?"

"Could you describe this particular friend for me?"

"A quarter ton and lying unconscious at my feet."

"Is that so?" asked Goblin. "Now, you're a petite little thing, aren't you? How exactly did you manage to take out Ogre?"

"I had help. A seven-year-old, a nine-year-old, and a pug."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm having a bit of trouble with that scenario. The klutz dropped his walkie-talkie somewhere, didn't he? I think I'm going to need some proof. Describe the birthmark on his right shoulder."

A few seconds of silence.

"It looks sort of like a deformed butterfly."

"Uh-oh," Troll whispered.

Goblin frowned. "Okay, you've got my attention. What is it you want?"

"I want my husband and my friends back. You let them go, and I'll tell you where to find your buddy."

"I'm afraid I have some bad news for you," said Goblin. "Apparently two members of your party are deceased. Your husband's okay, though."

"Let me talk to him."

"That can possibly be arranged. First, let me hear Ogre."

"He's unconscious."

"I know. But he snores loud enough to wake the dead. Let me hear it."

"He isn't snoring."

"Now, see, we have a bit of a continuity error here, because Ogre always snores. Therefore, he must be..." Goblin trailed off as he apparently realized exactly what this meant. "...aw, shit."

Troll slammed his fist against one of the shelves. "What the hell is the matter with us today?"

"Shut up," Goblin snapped at him. He spoke into the walkie-talkie. "I want to share some important information with you, Momma Bear. You're not getting out of these woods, I promise you. I don't mean that as a vague threat, I mean you aren't getting out, case closed. But I'll make you a deal of my own. We're at the store where you all stopped not too long ago, and dear Andrew currently has all ten of his fingers. Every five minutes, the number of fingers will be reduced by one. Then we're going to put a gun in his mouth and make him pull the trigger with one of his bloody stumps. So you've got fifty minutes to get yourself over here and save your husband's life. Does that deal work for you?"

"Let me talk to him."

Troll tore off the tape again. Once more and I was sure the tape would take my lips with it. Goblin held the walkie-talkie to my mouth. I shook my head and refused to speak.

"Say something," Goblin demanded.

I remained silent.

Goblin shrugged, and then kicked me in the leg. I couldn't help but let out a grunt of pain.

"Did that sound like him?" Goblin asked into the walkie-talkie.

"Helen, stay away from here," I said. "They'll kill you. Are the kids okay?"

"Yes, we're still together."

"Don't come anywhere near the store. It's a trap. Get Kyle and Theresa to safety."

"Well, of course it's a trap," Goblin said. "The point was to see if true love would get her to risk her life to save yours. Tell me, Witch, has it been five minutes yet?"

"No, but we can cheat."

"Well, we don't want to cheat. That wouldn't be fair. Instead let's tweak the rules and say the clock started at the beginning of this conversation. Troll, find a pair of wire cutters."

"Don't worry about that, I've got my knife."

Goblin shook his head. "It'll be easier with the wire cutters."

"Why make it easy?"

"Because you won't be cutting off his finger." Goblin looked me in the eye. "He'll be doing it to himself."

"Oooooh, kinky," said Troll, laughing as he walked over to the far aisle.

"If you get blood on any tools, you're paying for them," Charlie said. "I mean it."

"Helen, don't come here, no matter what," I said. "Let me talk to the kids!"

"Aw, this is so touching," said Goblin.

"Daddy...?" said Theresa, hesitantly.

"Yes, Theresa, it's Daddy. I love you, sweetheart."

On the other end I heard Theresa burst into tears.

"This is gonna make me sick," said Witch.

"You're right, enough of this sappy crap. Troll, are you going to get those wire cutters or do I have to gnaw his finger off myself?"

"Right here," said Troll, emerging from the aisle, waving a pair of wire cutters still in the package. "Nice and new."

"Who said you could open new merchandise?" Charlie demanded. "This is my store! You people don't get to just help yourselves to whatever you want!"

"Give it a rest, Charlie," said Goblin. "I mean it."

"Hey, we're in my store, and nobody tells me to—"

"Now!"

Troll glanced at the back of the package. "Oh, wait, it says here 'Not For Use On Human Fingers.' Doesn't say anything about toes, though."

Goblin snatched the wire cutters out of his hand. "Grow up. Get his hands free." While Troll used his knife to cut the duct tape binding my hands, Goblin removed the wire cutters from the packaging and held them in front of my face. "Well, Andrew, the clock is ticking, so we'd better get started. Are you left handed or right handed?"

"Right." No sense lying.

"Good man. Then I'll let you pinch off your left pinky." He handed me the wire cutters while Witch kept her gun pointed at my face. "Open the jaws."

His expression made it clear he wasn't playing around. I was feeling utterly sick to my stomach, but I opened the jaws of the wire cutters.

"Put them over your finger. All the way down at the bottom."

I wondered if I could slam the wire cutters into Goblin's face without being shot by him, Witch, and/or Troll. It seemed unlikely.

"I'm not cutting off my finger for you," I informed him.

"Oh, I think you will. And your family is going to hear the screams." He jiggled the walkie-talkie.

"Forget it. I'm not doing it."

"Hmmmm...bullet to the face, or missing pinky? I think you'll make the right choice. I'm going to give you until the count of ten. And though you probably remember this from the countdown to the Molotov cocktails in the camper, let me be perfectly clear on something, Andrew: I'm not the kind of person who will say nine-and-a-half."

I believed him.

"So let's get started before it's already time for you to cut off a second finger. Ten...nine..."

The psycho was absolutely serious. If I didn't chop off a finger, I'd be shot in the face.

"...eight...seven...six..."

I put the jaws of the wire cutters over the little finger on my left hand.

"...five..."

I looked Goblin straight in the eye. "I'll kill you for this."

"...four..."

I began to squeeze the handle of the wire cutters. A drop of blood pooled on the blade.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I type using hunt-and-peck anyway, but losing a finger is a pretty big deal. I winced, sucked in a deep breath, and then...

...the wall of the store exploded.

Well, it didn't really explode, not the way the camper exploded. It's more like it broke apart, sending merchandise flying everywhere, as a direct result of the green truck plowing right through it.

Roger was behind the wheel. Samantha was next to him.

A whole bunch of things happened at once, but to be completely honest, I couldn't tell you exactly what they were. I could vaguely sense Troll ducking for cover, and Charlie diving to the floor, and Witch swinging her gun in the direction of the truck, and Goblin nearly getting hit in the face with a jar of baby food.

For myself, the surprise of having a large truck suddenly burst through the wall of the store just in the nick of time to save me from being forced to slice off my pinky caused me to tense up and squeeze the handles of the wire cutters, slicing off my pinky.

"Oh," I said, because sometimes that's all that really needs to be said.

My little finger dropped onto my lap.

Now, I think I've clearly established that I'm not the finest strategist in the world. However, even in my state of shock I knew to take advantage of this situation. I stood up, scooping up my severed finger as I did so, and then threw a punch at Witch with the fist that still had five fingers.

It was a good one.

I rushed toward the truck, which Roger was quickly backing out of the very large hole he'd created in the store. I felt the blade swish next to my back as Troll took a swipe at me with his knife. As I ran past the passenger-side door, Samantha threw it open, bashing Troll in the chest. She slammed it closed again as I leapt into the back of the truck.

As I ducked down I heard a gunshot and the sound of shattering glass. I took a split second to think about how much my finger stump hurt. I was bleeding all over the place, but at least it wasn't my truck to clean.

The truck pulled out of the store. For an instant I thought I was home free, a pleasant if laughable idea that vanished as soon as Witch jumped into the back of the truck with me.

I immediately dove at her, knocking her off her feet. She punched me in the face approximately as hard as I'd punched her, which was pretty damn hard. Then she swung her gun at me, but I deflected it by grabbing her wrist with my incomplete hand, pinning my severed finger between our body parts.

We struggled for a long moment, me on top, both of us gritting our teeth hard enough to do serious enamel damage, and then a squirt of my blood got her right in the eye. She cried out and instinctively rubbed it while sharing her unladylike vocabulary. I used my other hand to try to wrench the gun out of her grasp, but it wasn't working.

We were now speeding down the dirt road toward Wreitzer Park, a wise decision since the other direction was sort of blocked by an exploded camper and a couple of wrecked trucks. Over the tailgate I could see the other green truck was following us, about a hundred feet behind. The road curved and I lost sight of it.

Finally the gun, now slippery with blood, popped free of both our grips. It slid down the bed of the truck and smacked into the tailgate.

I got in another really good punch.

So did she.

The truck hit a bump, causing Witch's head to bounce up, and then strike the truck bed. Sadly, the hit wasn't hard enough to do anything but piss her off even more.

"You fork!" she screamed. I'm pretty sure that's not what she meant to say, but that's what came out.

Then my finger slipped out of my hand and dropped into her open mouth. Witch did not take this well, gagging and choking and frantically trying to spit it out.

Holy shit, she's going to swallow my finger, I thought, horrified. Surgeons might be able to reattach the digit, but not if it went through her digestive system!

I reached inside her mouth with my good hand, trying to pinch my severed pinky between my index finger and thumb. I could see it at the back of her throat.

Witch bit down.

I cried out in pain and tried to tug free. I couldn't.

Then I clamped my bloody hand over her neck, pushing my thumb into her throat until she let up with her teeth. I pulled my fingers free, but my severed pinky was still in her mouth.

We exchanged another couple of punches.

Witch closed her mouth and I could see her jaw working. She was chewing on my finger. This time I clamped my fingers over her nose, trying to force her to open her mouth to take a breath.

The truck took a sharp turn, and I lost my balance and tumbled off of Witch. She sat up, spat out my finger, and picked it up. Then she cocked her hand back as if preparing to fling it out of the moving vehicle.

I grabbed her hand and squeezed tight to make her drop it. She pulled free and elbowed me in the gut, but I quickly tackled her again.

Her forehead bashed against the side of the truck, hard.

She fell over, unconscious.

I picked up my finger and wiped it off on my pants. Despite a few tooth marks, it seemed to be in relatively good shape, at least by severed finger standards. I shoved it into my pocket then scrambled over to the tailgate and retrieved Witch's gun.

Both Witch and I were completely covered in blood, and now that the fight was over I had to admit that I was feeling more than a little dizzy. I crawled back over to Witch, giving a halfhearted smile to Samantha, who was watching me through the rear windshield...and removing her shirt.

Was this supposed to be a reward for vanquishing my foe?

Samantha reached out of the open passenger window and handed her blouse to me. "Wrap up your hand!" she shouted over the sound of the engine.

I took the shirt from her and wrapped it around my injured hand as tightly as I could.

We turned onto a longer stretch of road, and then the other green truck came back into view, close enough that I could see Goblin, Troll, and Charlie inside.

I wondered if they'd be so kind as to let me borrow a cooler in which to store my finger.

Now the dizziness was starting to become a real concern, along with a sudden nausea. At least Roger was the one doing the driving. Perhaps I could take a short nap...?

As we rounded a corner, the brakes squealed.

The tires burst.

And as we careened off the side of the road, I saw we'd driven over one of those "Severe Tire Damage" things with the spikes. The truck took out quite a few bushes and assorted plants before smashing into a tree and coming to a halt.

We had to get out of there. Run into the woods as fast as we could and try to...

Nope. With Samantha's mangled foot, we weren't going anywhere. It wasn't like we could outrun them with Roger carrying her.

Damn.

The other green truck came to a stop right before the tire shredder. Behind me, I heard Roger roll down his window. "So now what?" he asked.

I hoisted Witch's unconscious body into a sitting position and pressed the barrel of the gun against the side of her head.

Goblin and Troll got out of the truck, about thirty feet away from us. Goblin sighed deeply and ran a hand through his hair. "We're playing the hostage game again, aren't we?"

"Uh, yeah," I admitted, sheepishly.

"You have got to be kidding me."

"So, you know, if you come any closer I'll kill her and all that, and I want you to let my wife and kids go."

Goblin looked at me, looked at the ground, looked at Troll, sighed deeply, and then looked at me again. "You know what? Fine. That's fine. This isn't worth it anymore. We quit."

"You quit?" I asked, surprised.

"Yeah, we quit. I want to forget this ever happened. We won't hurt your wife and kids. You can even keep the truck, for all I care. Just give us Witch back and get the hell away from us. We won't follow you."

He looked totally serious. Were bad guys allowed to just give up like that?

"How do I know I can trust you?" I asked.

Troll grinned. "We could pinky swear. Oh, wait, I guess not."

Goblin glared at him. "You think this is funny? Does it amuse you to screw up so badly? Because from where I stand, it's pretty damn humiliating."

Troll shrugged. "Whatever."

Goblin returned his attention to me. "So what do you think? Let's just put this all behind us."

"Sounds good to me. But I want my wife and kids back with me first."

"Gee, you think?" Goblin asked, rolling his eyes. He pressed a button on his walkie-talkie. "Momma Bear, are you there?"

"What did you do to my husband?" Helen demanded on the other end.

"Nothing, he's fine. Look, we're just going to call this whole thing off, if that's okay with you. It was a bad idea from the start, and we're all going to cut our losses."

"Let me talk to Andrew."

Goblin extended the walkie-talkie toward me. "Do you want me to toss it to you?"

I couldn't very well catch it with one hand wrapped up in bloody cloth and the other holding a gun to the head of an unconscious psycho. "Uh, no. Roger, you wanna catch the walkie-talkie for me?"

"Have him throw it by the side of the truck."

"It'll break," said Goblin.

"The dirt doesn't look all that hard over here."

"This is a fragile piece of equipment," Goblin insisted. "If I throw it on the ground it might break or the settings might get all messed up and you won't be able to talk to her and we'll never get this resolved."

"Okay, okay, fine." Roger got out of the truck. "Throw it."

Goblin tossed the walkie-talkie over to him. It nearly bounced out of Roger's hands, but he managed to keep a hold on it without looking like too much of an idiot. Then he climbed into the back of the truck with me.

"Here, I'll handle her," he said, trading me the gun for the walkie-talkie. He kept Witch propped up with the gun to her head.

"Helen?" I asked.

"Andrew! Are you okay? What happened?"

"Nothing, this whole thing was just a big misunderstanding. They actually wanted to try to interest us in a multi-level marketing scheme, but they got mixed up and tried to kill us instead."

"Andrew, don't joke."

"Sorry. I think we're okay now. What I need you to do is very carefully lead the kids toward the road. Watch out though, because there are some booby traps out there."

"Believe me, I know."

"How far are you from the road?"

"I'm not sure. Not too far, I hope."

"Let me know when you can see the road, but don't show yourself," I told her.

"Okay. I love you."

"I love you too."

I extended the walkie-talkie toward Goblin, and then, on second thought, drew it back. "Can I keep this for now?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever."

Charlie got out of the truck, apparently satisfied there wasn't going to be any upcoming violence. "You're going to pay for what you did to my store," Charlie shouted, pointing accusingly at Roger. "You don't just drive a truck through a man's place of business and expect to get away with it! You'll be cleaning up my place, and you'll be doing it without any fingers on your hands, I promise you that!"

"Shut up, Charlie," said Troll.

"I don't have to shut up! That store is my livelihood! It's bad enough that I've got you shoplifting all the damn time and I have to watch your unnatural perversions, but now my store is ruined! Did you miss the truck breaking through the wall? Did you see how much merchandise was damaged? You think I get that stuff for free? You think some delivery guy just stops by and says 'Here you go, compliments of the house,'? You think I don't have bills to pay? Debts to settle? Pets to feed?"

Goblin pointed his gun at Charlie's head. "Okay, I'm not in the mood for you right now. Shut up."

"You shut up! You think what you're paying me to help you guys out is going to cover the damage to my store? I'm tired of this! This is horseshit! Hell, I probably won't even be able to get it fixed because you whack-jobs will kidnap and murder the laborers! Screw you all!"

Troll took out his own gun. "Charlie, I highly recommend that you give your mouth a rest."

"All of you! Screw you!"

Goblin and Troll both pulled their triggers at the same time. Goblin's bullet hit him in the forehead, while Troll's struck him in the nose...or maybe it was the other way around. Either way, there wasn't much left of Charlie's head as his body dropped to the ground.

"Shut...the...fuck...up!" Goblin shouted, firing a bullet into Charlie's lifeless body in between each word. "What the hell do I have to do to get you to shut up?"

"That may have worked," Troll noted.

"I know the truck broke through his store! I saw it happen! We all have problems today! Give me a break!" Goblin wiped some spittle off on his sleeve. "I should've stayed in bed this morning."

Roger and I just gaped at him.

"What are you looking at?" Goblin demanded.

I pressed the black button on the walkie-talkie. "Helen? Still try to be careful of booby traps, but you might want to hurry."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"How's your foot?" I asked Samantha.

"Hurts," she said. "How's your hand?"

"Hurts."

"Sorry."

"Me too."

I avoided turning around to look at her. Something about having my best friend's well-endowed girlfriend sitting behind me wearing only a bra made me a bit uncomfortable. It seemed odd that I was bruised, battered, cut, missing a finger, covered in blood, and yet still unnerved by an awkward social situation, but there you go.

At least I could still joke about it.

"So, she's wearing my pants and I'm wearing her blouse," I said, holding up my wrapped hand to show Roger. "Not many best friends are as generous as you."

Roger chuckled. "Yeah, well, don't try cutting off another finger to see more."

I shrugged. "It might be worth it."

"Guys, I'm right here," said Samantha, amused.

I was keeping tight pressure on my hand and was pretty sure I wouldn't bleed to death if we managed to resolve all of this unpleasantness soon. The idea that I had my own finger in my pocket seriously creeped me out, so I tried not to think about it.

"I know we're supposed to do a lot of macho posturing," said Roger, "but I'm really glad you're not dead."

"Thanks. I'm glad you're not dead, too."

"Thanks."

"I do sort of wish Goblin and Troll were dead."

"That's understandable."

Goblin and Troll were sitting in their truck, looking generally unhappy.

"So how did you get the keys to the truck?" I asked.

"We didn't. Samantha hotwired it."

I turned around to glance at her through the rear windshield. "You know how to hotwire a truck?"

She nodded. "An important skill in the fashion business."

I turned back to Roger. "Wow. I'm impressed."

"Well, she's a pretty special lady," said Roger, giving me a look.

I wanted to say don't give me that look, but I couldn't with Samantha around. She really was a pretty special lady.

Suddenly, sitting in the back of a wrecked truck with one of my fingers newly severed and Roger sitting next to me holding the gun to the head of an unconscious psychopath, I realized why I didn't like Samantha.

It wasn't that she wasn't good enough for Roger. It was that she was perfect for him. I didn't dislike her. I was just scared she'd take Roger away from me.

I was worried that instead of hanging out with me at the Java Joint on Wednesday nights, Roger would be stuck at home, hanging up laundry and giving foot massages.

I didn't have introspective moments very often (apart from those involving television shows), so this was a rather amazing revelation.

It was an amazingly pathetic revelation.

I mean, I had a wife and two frickin' kids, with a third on the way, and I still found time to bum around. What was I worried about?

"It's going to be okay," I told Roger, giving him a look, although a different look than the one he'd given me. "Everything."

"Everything what?"

"You know. Everything."

Roger stared at me. "Huh?"

"Never mind."

"Okay."

"So what made you decide to follow me?"

"We thought you might need help. It happens a lot."

"It does not."

"Sure it does."

I shook my head. "Actually, if I remember correctly, and I think I do, it's you who generally needs saving."

"That's not true."

"Which one of us got strapped to that machine that was going to chop off his arms, legs, and head?"

"Which one of us was responsible for me being strapped to that machine that was going to chop off my arms, legs, and head?"

"We weren't discussing responsibility. We were discussing the need to be rescued."

"You were trapped in that giant plastic cube with the darts," Roger pointed out.

"You're right. That cube sucked."

"Anyway, Samantha and I decided we weren't doing any good just sitting around, so I carried her back to the store. We saw that you were in deep ka-ka and decided to save you."

"By crashing through the store."

"Yep."

"Did you consider the possibility that by doing that, you might run me over?"

"It was an irony I was willing to accept," said Roger with a grin.

"Well, that's soothing."

"I thought you'd like that."

"You know what else is ironic? The last time we were at the Java Joint, this lady offered me a hundred thousand dollars to deliver a suitcase to Arizona. I turned her down. I thought it carried the risk of causing problems in my life."

"You turned down a hundred grand without asking me first?"

"I was being responsible!"

"Screw responsibility! Responsibility gets your pinky chopped off. Take the money."

"Well, I know that now." I nodded toward Witch. "How's she doing?"

"Still zonked."

I pressed the black button on the walkie-talkie. "Helen, how's it going?"

"I think we're getting there."

"Sounds good." I set down the walkie-talkie.

Goblin got out of the truck and stepped over the tire shredder. "We've got ourselves a bit of a problem, gentlemen."

"What's that?"

"The alert signal just went off. Somebody's coming down the road."

"How far away?"

"About five minutes. We all just need to play it cool. Whoever it is, we'll tell them everything's all right, we've already contacted the police about your accident, and we'll let them drive on through."

"Sounds good," I said, gesturing to my blood-covered shirtless body. "They'll never suspect a thing."

"There's some bottled water under the seat," Goblin told me. "Get yourself cleaned up as much as you can. This doesn't have to turn into a bloodbath if we all play it right."

"What about the camper?"

"Crap. That's right." Goblin thought for a moment. "We'll just send them back the way they came. Tell them a tree fell or something."

Goblin turned around and motioned for Troll to get out of the truck. Together they began to move the tire shredder off to the side of the road.

"What should we do about her?" Roger asked me, gently tapping his gun against Witch's head.

"Do we have anything to cover her with?"

"I could keep up with the trend of the day and use my shirt."

"You know, that's a great opening for a fat joke, but actually you've lost a bit of weight since you started dating Samantha."

"You noticed?"

"Yeah, but I didn't want to say anything because, you know, we're guys and stuff."

Samantha reached out of the truck window and handed me a bottled water. "Just carry her out into the woods."

"We can't leave her," I said. "What if she wakes up?"

"Then don't leave her. Hide out there with her."

I unscrewed the cap and poured the warm water over my shoulders and chest. "We can't leave you, either."

"Then don't leave me," said Samantha, as if speaking to a remarkably stupid child. Many people have spoken to me in that tone of voice over the years. When we finally made it home I'd have to look into improving my intelligence level. "We'll all hide out there."

"Okay," I said, emptying the rest of the bottle. There were still streaks of blood on me, but that wouldn't matter if we were hiding out in the woods. "Roger, you carry her out there, and I'll keep our friends covered with the gun. Witch should be okay for a minute while you come back and get Samantha."

"Sounds good," said Roger, handing me the gun. Goblin and Troll had dragged Charlie's corpse out of sight and now Goblin was in their truck, driving it off to the side of the road so the approaching vehicle could get past. Troll scattered dirt on the remnants of Charlie remaining on the road.

Roger got out of the truck, and then reached into the back and picked up Witch, putting one arm under her knees and one behind her back.

Had she stirred just a bit?

Nah.

Roger lifted her out of the truck and walked toward the woods.

"What are you doing?" Goblin demanded.

"We can't have her just lying in the back of the truck," I said.

"This part of the woods is loaded with traps! If you want to march through there, be my guest, but if you try to bring her with you the deal is off. I didn't swallow my pride just to have her ripped up by three dozen rusty poison darts."

Roger hesitated.

Troll looked at his watch. "You'd better decide either way. We don't know how fast they're driving."

"Let's put her inside the truck," said Roger. Samantha opened the door for him and he not-so-gently set Witch inside in an upright position. Then he and I got into the truck as well, brushing safety glass off the seat from the shattered windshield, the four of us tightly squeezed together. I looked over my shoulder and saw Troll get into his own truck with Goblin.

"Shouldn't we have worked out a cover story first?" asked Samantha. "What if the people stop and want to know what happened?"

"I think we're going to have to wing it," I noted, as I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching.

Witch twitched.

Then coughed.

The vehicle, a dirty but impressive black limousine, came around the corner. It began to slow down.

Roger grabbed Witch by the collar and yanked her down, bashing her forehead against the dashboard. She jabbed him in the side with her elbow, and he yanked her down again, bashing her forehead once more.

The limousine came to a stop right next to our truck. The windows were tinted, preventing us from seeing who was inside.

"I'll kill you!" Witch screamed, lashing out at both Roger and Samantha. They struggled to keep her under control.

I reached past Roger and pushed the gun into her side. Witch seemed unaware of it and kept up her violent flailing.

The limousine's door opened.

"Stop it or I'll shoot!" I whispered.

She didn't seem to hear me.

"Stop it or he'll shoot!" said Samantha, taking her own turn at bashing Witch against the dashboard.

Witch seemed to hear that one. She settled down just as the driver got out.

It was a woman. Early thirties. Attractive. Wearing a red blouse and skirt. Red sensible shoes. Perfect hair and makeup. She grabbed a red leather purse as she exited the vehicle.

Our bloodied, dismembered, mangled, bruised, sweaty, and exhausted group tried to look nonchalant.

"Is everything...okay?" the woman asked.

I nodded and leaned out the window. "Everything's cool. We just had a small accident. We've called the police and they're on their way."

"Looks like a big accident."

"Well, yeah. But it was an old truck."

The woman bit her lip. "Look, I don't want to intrude on anybody's business, but are you sure everything's okay? I mean, I saw what happened with...you know, what happened to the woman."

I tried to force a smile. "They were just roughhousing. It's a dysfunctional family."

"I guess."

"Really, we're okay. Just waiting for the cops."

"It's kind of hot for all of you to be crunched together in the truck like that."

"Yeah, but the bugs were eating us alive out there."

"Oh. I have a first aid kit in my trunk. All of you look like you could use some patching up."

"That's all right," I insisted. "Like I said, we're just waiting for the cops."

I glanced over at the other truck. Goblin and Troll were watching the scene, carefully.

"You don't even want to borrow a bandage?" the woman asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

I heard a pair of doors open. I looked over and saw Goblin and Troll getting out of their truck.

"Actually, a bandage would be great," I said, opening the door to our truck and sliding out.

"Oh my God, what happened to your hand?" asked the woman.

"Lost a finger."

"Oh my God! Do you still have it? Where is it?"

"In my pocket."

The woman gaped at me. "You have your finger in your pocket?"

I nodded.

"You can't do that! You have to keep it clean! I've got a small cooler in my car with a couple of Cokes, so we'll put it in there until the police get here. What in the world were you thinking?"

Goblin and Troll were walking toward us.

"Ma'am, I appreciate your trying to help, but we're fine. Really."

"You're not fine! You're probably in shock. You need to lie down. I'll get my first aid kit and we'll fix you up as much as we can."

I was feeling myself begin to panic, so I gave her a cold stare. "Ma'am, please, mind your own business," I said, trying to sound threatening.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Get out of here. We don't want your help."

The woman looked over at Goblin and Troll and seemed to realize her help was, indeed, not wanted. "Okay. I understand." She unzipped her purse. "Let me at least give you a Band-Aid, for God's sake. I've got one in here."

"I don't need one," I said.

"Don't be rude," Goblin told me, walking up right next to the woman. "Let her give you a Band-Aid."

Troll ran his finger along the blade of his knife.

"Ma'am, please get back in your car before—"

I saw the gun an instant before it went off.

The tiny dart, a red one, protruded from my stomach. The pain was absolutely incredible, instantly searing through my entire body like a fireball. Without hesitating, the woman walked out of my line of sight.

Some commotion, a scream from Samantha, and two more shots.

I fell to my knees. The pain quickly gave way to numbness.

"Nice shooting," said Troll with a grin as the woman walked back in front of me.

"Thanks," said the woman, not returning his grin. She calmly placed the dart gun back into her purse and straightened her skirt.

My arms and legs were completely stiff. I couldn't even move my fingers...those that were left.

The back door of the limousine opened.

Troll's grin vanished as the occupant stepped out and walked around the front of the car. He was a tall, well-built man in his forties, wearing an immaculate gray suit.

He did not look happy.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The man stroked his thin, black goatee and looked first at me, and then at the wrecked truck. "Do they have any weapons?" he asked Goblin.

"The guy in the truck has a gun," Goblin said. "But I can explain—"

"And you will. Surprised it was me and not a new set of victims, were you? I heard some very interesting things over your walkie-talkie chatter. Medusa, retrieve the gun."

The woman in red nodded and calmly walked over to the truck.

The man regarded me with distaste. "He looks pathetic."

"Yeah," said Goblin, trying to smile. "We took care of him pretty well."

"You took care of nothing!" the man said, pointing an accusing finger at Goblin. "Where are Ghoul and Ogre?"

Goblin was silent for a moment. "They're...I mean, you've already heard, right?"

"I want to hear it directly from your mouth."

"They're dead."

"And who killed them?" The man gestured to me. "Him?"

Goblin shook his head. "His wife."

"Oh, his wife, was it? Well, at least you took care of the problem. Please, direct me to her corpse so I can spit on it."

"Mr. Burke—"

"I'm 'sir' to you right now."

"Sir, it wasn't our fault."

"Oh, I'm glad to hear that. I can only assume the hand of God Himself reached down and pulled her to safety."

Medusa handed the gun she'd taken from Roger to Mr. Burke.

"This is one of yours," he said, glancing down at the weapon.

"Yes, sir."

"Have we decided to start arming our victims? Is that it?"

"No, sir."

"Let me explain something to you, Goblin. I do not like being forced to micromanage what you are doing out here. When I am forced to leave my lab to clean up your messes, it wastes my time and causes me to become extremely annoyed. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"From what I understand of this ill-fated project, there were six people in the camper you ambushed. How many of them did you bring to me?"

Goblin was silent.

"How many?"

"None."

"How many of their corpses did you bring to me?"

"None."

"And how many of them were young, helpless children?"

"Sir, I—"

"Answer the question."

"Two."

"Two young children. And yet through your incompetence, your staff has now been reduced by forty percent. I don't like that kind of attrition, Goblin."

"I'm sorry."

"In fact, there's very little I do like at this moment. I'm terminating this branch of the project, effective immediately."

Goblin didn't bother to protest.

I desperately tried to make my body work...any part of it...but I remained a human statue.

Mr. Burke furrowed his brow. "Is that Ghoul's body?" he asked, pointing at the corpse by the side of the road.

"Uh, no," Goblin admitted. "It's Charlie."

"They killed Charlie, too?"

Goblin started to nod, but then apparently thought better of the lie. "No, sir, we did."

"We?"

"Troll and I."

Troll shifted uncomfortably.

"You murdered one of our accomplices?"

"Yes, sir."

"Would it be terribly inconvenient if I asked you why?"

"He wouldn't shut up."

"I see. He did like to ramble on. So essentially, you're telling me that under your management, excessive talking is an infraction punishable by death, correct?"

"Sir, we weren't thinking straight."

"That doesn't matter. As a good manager, I have no doubt you accept full responsibility for your actions. And you're telling me you consider excessive talking a fatal offense, correct? One worth terminating a member of your own team?"

"He wasn't really part of the team."

"A vendor, then. You'd terminate a vendor for excessive talking. That does leave me to wonder about the appropriate punishment for a manager who screwed up a project so badly it left two of his associates dead and none of his goals achieved."

Now Goblin seemed close to tears. "Sir, please, I'll go after the woman and children myself. I'll personally bring them to you, I swear."

"And you'll bring Ghoul, Ogre, and Charlie back to life?"

Goblin seemed unsure how to respond.

"How about just Ogre? If you'll bring Ogre back from the dead, perhaps I'll show you some mercy."

"Sir, I can't—"

"I don't like to hear the word 'can't,' Goblin. You know that."

"Just give me one more chance."

"I don't think so. Consider yourself downsized."

Medusa swiftly removed the dart gun from her purse and fired a shot into Goblin's neck. He dropped to the ground.

Mr. Burke crouched down next to Goblin. "Enjoy the lack of sensation while you can. I am going to make you hurt so badly you'll wish your mother had been skinned alive by your father before they had a chance to conceive you."

Troll looked terrified. Mr. Burke stood up and glared at him. "I'm not going to hold you accountable for the incompetence of your supervisor," he said. "But understand me, if you screw up again, you will not find the pain pleasurable."

"Yes, sir," said Troll, visibly relieved.

Witch walked into my line of sight, legs wobbling a bit. "Sir, I am so very sorry."

"I'm not impressed by apologies," said Mr. Burke. "And I'm particularly unimpressed by employees who are kidnapped by their own prey. I'll decide your fate within the next two minutes."

Witch lowered her eyes and nodded.

"Now, let's see about tying up some of our loose ends, shall we?" Mr. Burke unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt, turned a dial, and then pressed the black button on the side. "Is anybody there?"

"Who is this?" I heard Helen say.

"This is Officer Trevor Clemens from the Georgia State Patrol. We've managed to subdue the assailants who attacked you and your family, but your husband has been very badly injured. Could you give us your location?"

"What happened to him?" Helen sounded frantic.

"He's been cut. He's been cut bad, ma'am. We can't move him until the ambulance gets here. Are you near the road?"

"I'm...I'm not sure," Helen admitted.

"Are you lost?"

"I think so."

"That's not a problem, ma'am. We'll get you out of there. Do me a big favor and give us a shout, okay?"

A moment of silence.

I wanted to scream for her to remain quiet, but I couldn't move my lips.

"Let me talk to him," Helen said.

"Ma'am, he's unconscious and losing blood fast. I'm not trying to scare you, and I promise we're doing everything we can, but he may not have much time left."

"Shout out to me," said Helen. "I'll follow your voice."

Mr. Burke lowered the walkie-talkie. "Helloooooooooo!" he shouted. He lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth again. "Did you hear that?"

"No. God, we must have gotten turned around somehow."

Mr. Burke reached down and picked up Goblin's gun. He fired it into the air. "What about that?"

"Yes, I heard it."

"Are we close?"

"No, but that helped. I know which direction to go at least."

"Then hurry. Get here as quickly as you can. We'll send a search party after you if you're not here by the time reinforcements arrive."

He released the button on the walkie-talkie, and then turned to Troll. "I assume your truck is still in working condition?"

Troll nodded.

"Did you suddenly turn into a mute?"

"No, sir. I mean, I meant yes, sir. The truck works, sir."

"Then put everybody in the back. Including your ex-supervisor."

"Yes, sir."

Troll put his hands underneath Goblin's arms and began to drag him toward the truck. He seemed very pleased to be doing it.

Mr. Burke knelt down next to me. "Creepy, isn't it? Not being able to move like that? I tested it out on myself once and it freaked me out."

"Oh, shit!" Troll exclaimed as he reached the truck.

"What?"

"The signal just went off. Somebody's coming. Same direction that you came."

"Busy little road today. But that's fine. Without incompetent management running the show, we should be able to take care of them without much effort. Medusa, Witch, I want our three test subjects propped up against the truck," Mr. Burke said. "Based on what they've seen so far, they probably think we're all bumbling idiots, a joke. I want them to see very clearly that we are no joke."

Medusa and Witch dragged me over to the truck. I was unable to feel a thing as I slid over the dirt.

Within a couple of minutes, Roger and Samantha were sitting next to me.

I had to do something to save the people who were coming, but what? I couldn't even wiggle a toe.

It seemed like hours before the car, a small white sedan, arrived. It stopped behind the limousine.

Mr. Burke walked over to them. "Hi there," he said, as the driver rolled down his window. "We've had a bit of bad luck and I was wondering if we could get your assistance."

"Of course," said the driver, a cheerful-looking blond guy in his late thirties. He was badly sunburnt and wearing sunglasses. "What's the problem?"

"Car trouble."

"Oh, man, that's always miserable. This is, like, our first vacation without a flat tire or running out of gas or something like that." The driver grinned. "We probably cursed you. Sweet limo you've got there, though."

Don't get out of your car don't get out of your car please don't get out of your car. The blond guy opened his car door and got out.

"Right over here," said Mr. Burke, leading him past the limousine. Two more doors opened on the sedan, and a beautiful woman, probably the guy's wife, got out, along with their son, who looked eleven or twelve.

Please no...

The blond guy frowned a bit and removed his sunglasses as he saw Roger, Samantha and I propped up against the truck. We had to look like zombies, or at least stoned out of our minds.

"What happened to them?" he asked.

"Shock," said Mr. Burke. "As you can see, there was a terrible accident. We tried to call the police, but we seem to be having trouble with our cell phone."

The blond guy was joined by his wife and son. "We've got one in the car. Alex, why don't you go grab it?"

"No, that won't be necessary," Mr. Burke said. "I'd just like to give you a brief preamble, if I may. What you're going to see in a moment will frighten you very badly, and if you scream, you will die. So don't scream."

Medusa casually pointed Goblin's gun at the family. The mother gasped but didn't scream.

"Excellent. You're off to a good start. Two of my associates will see that the noise and struggling are kept to a minimum, so please cooperate."

Witch and Troll quickly bound each of the family members' hands with duct tape. They also covered the woman and boy's mouth. After they were done, Mr. Burke nodded his approval and walked over to the family. "What's your name?" he asked the blond guy.

"Jim," he softly replied.

"Full name, please."

"Jim Kenyon."

"James, correct?"

"Yes. James Kenyon."

"And is this your wife?"

"Yes."

"Her name?"

"Heather."

"Pleased to meet you, Heather. And this must be your son. His name is Alex, right?"

"Yes," said James, his voice quivering.

"Was Alex born in wedlock?"

"Yes."

"Good. Heather, Alex, please drop to your knees."

Heather and Alex, both crying and shaking with fear, did as they were told.

I focused every possible bit of mental energy I possessed on trying to move my body. A finger. A lip. Anything.

"Heather looks like a fine woman, James," said Mr. Burke. "Is everything working out? No problems in your marriage?"

"Yes."

Mr. Burke chuckled. "I apologize. That wasn't a very well-phrased question. Are there any problems in your marriage?"

"No."

"Good, good. How about with young Alex there? Is he doing well in school?"

"Yes."

"Is he into sports? He looks like he'd be into sports."

"Yes."

"Which one?"

"Basketball."

"Really? He seems a bit short for that. I would have thought baseball or soccer. Does he get a lot of game time or does he spend most of it on the bench?"

"He plays."

"Very impressive. You look like a nice, happy family. You're a very lucky man, James, to have such a wonderful wife and son. That does bring up the important question, though: Which of them do you like better?"

"What?"

"I'm not going to beat around the bush here, James. One of them is going to die within the next minute or so. You're going to make the choice."

Move, damn it, move! I could beat whatever had been in the dart. Mind over matter. I'd break free of this. I focused so hard it felt like my brain was going to burst inside my skull.

"Now, before you speak, I know exactly what you're going to say. You're going to ask me to kill you instead. I hate that. I'm sick of it. If you try to be a martyr, I'll kill both of them. If you don't make the choice in a timely fashion, I'll kill both of them. My hope is that you won't be the type of coward who would let both his wife and child die because he couldn't make a simple decision."

"Please don't do this," said the man in a soft, scared voice.

"It will be a bullet to the back of the head, execution-style. Painless, as far as I know, not having been through that experience myself. Which one dies, James? Heather or Alex? Make the choice."

"I can't..."

Move move move!

"Make the choice, James. Be a man."

Heather and Alex were both sobbing.

"Five seconds until they both die. And you're going to be really disappointed if you think I'm bluffing."

James let out a whimper, and finally choked out the word: "Her."

"Her?"

James nodded, tears gushing down his face.

"Her meaning Heather? You want me to execute Heather instead of Alex?"

Heather let out a muffled wail.

James nodded.

"Say it," Mr. Burke told him.

"I can't."

"Yes, you can. Say 'I want you to kill my wife Heather.'"

"No!"

"You were man enough to make the choice, James. Don't fuck it up because you won't speak the words."

My finger moved. I swore my finger moved.

"I...I want you to...I want you to..."

"It's not that difficult, James."

"I want you to..."

If I could move a finger, I could move my whole body. I could tackle that sadistic son of a bitch and rip his heart out of his chest.

"Say it, James, or they both die!"

"I want you to kill Heather!"

"See, that wasn't so hard, now was it?" Mr. Burke grinned and motioned to Medusa.

She shoved the barrel of her gun against the back of Alex's head, not Heather's...

I can break free of this I can break free I can I can I can!

...and pulled the trigger.

I couldn't look away. I couldn't even blink.

The twelve year-old boy pitched forward onto the dirt.

"Do you see what we did, James?" asked Mr. Burke. "We killed your son instead. Now you get to spend the rest of your life with poor Heather knowing you didn't pick her. You think there'll be problems in the marriage now, James?"

Troll laughed.

James didn't respond. His eyes looked dead.

Mr. Burke raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth and pressed the button. "Did you hear that shot?" he asked.

"Yes, it still sounds pretty far," Helen told him, "but we're moving as fast as we can."

"Very good." He lowered the walkie-talkie and stroked his goatee. "I'm not a completely inhuman gentleman, James. I know that what you must be feeling now is a million times worse than any physical agony I could inflict upon you. So, I'm going to show you some mercy. Instead of making you live with your choice, I'm going to finish both of you off in a horrific and painful manner. Sound good?"

"Can I do it?" asked Troll, holding up his hunting knife.

Mr. Burke considered that. "Yes, but you only get five minutes to do both of them."

"Mind if I slit his throat and spend the rest of the time with her?"

Mr. Burke nodded. "That's fine. But slit his throat at the end of the five minutes so he can watch."

"I can do that."

"And tape his mouth. Let's avoid noise pollution as much as possible."

Troll turned toward me, smiled, and waved his knife in front of my face. "Watch how creative I can be."

I watched it all, screaming at my body to move the entire time.

Mr. Burke was feeling generous and gave Troll an extra minute.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Helen's Side

"Chocolate cake with about a gallon of chocolate syrup poured over the top," I said. "What about you, Kyle?"

"I don't know."

"Sure you do. You can have anything in the entire whole wide world to eat when we get out of here. So what sounds really, really good?"

"Nothing."

I was desperately trying to keep my children alert and happy. Word games hadn't been effective, so I'd switched the subject to food.

We walked slowly through the forest, Theresa following right behind me with her hands on my waist, and Kyle completing the human chain with his hands on his sister's waist. I tried to keep my tone of voice cheerful, but I also kept a close eye on every single step we took, watching for traps.

Joe ran alongside of us. I'd carried the pug for a while, but he'd gotten too heavy and I let him go. On one hand, I didn't want my children to be traumatized by the sight of their beloved pet getting killed in a trap, but on the other hand, I'd rather have Joe accidentally run into a trap than us. And at this point, what was one more trauma for the collection?

"C'mon, Kyle, any food in the world. If you don't pick one, I'll make you eat broccoli!"

"Yuck," said Theresa.

"That's right, yuck. And it will be the biggest piece of broccoli you've ever seen. Covered with turds."

I was not the type of parent who normally joked about excrement with her children, but I really needed to keep their minds occupied.

"Mommy, my arm hurts," said Kyle.

"I know it does, sweetie. I promise, we'll get you to a doctor who will make it all better. For now you just have to be my brave little boy, okay?"

"Okay," Kyle said without enthusiasm.

"Now are you going to pick a food or do I have to cook you a turd-covered piece of broccoli?"

"Maybe a mammoth," said Kyle.

"A wooly mammoth?"

"Yeah."

"Do you want mammoth steak or mammoth stew?"

Kyle thought for a moment. "I want mammoth pizza."

"All right, it's a nice wooly mammoth pizza for Kyle as soon as we get out of here."

What frightened me was that I didn't know when that would happen. We were admittedly taking it slow, but still, we'd been walking for an awful long time to not have reached the road yet. I wondered if we were lost.

"Can I have mammoth pizza, too?" asked Theresa.

"Sure. Have you ever seen a mammoth? Even Kyle couldn't eat a whole mammoth pizza all by himself."

"And he's a big snorty pig."

"I am not!"

"Are too!"

For the first time in my life, I welcomed a conversation like that from my children. But it stopped as Theresa's voice turned serious. "Mommy, are we going to die?"

"No," I told her. "We're not."

"I'm scared that we are."

"It's okay to be scared, sweetie. But we're not going to die, I promise you."

"What if the man who bit Kyle had diseases?"

"Theresa!"

"Well, what if he did?"

"Theresa Mayhem, stop talking like that. Your brother is going to be fine. The man didn't have any diseases, and he'll never come after us again, and none of us are going to die."

"Do you think I have rabies?" asked Kyle.

"No! Damn it, Theresa, see what you did? Kyle, you don't have rabies. You don't have any disease. Your arm got bit really bad, and I know it hurts, but it's going to be fine. There are no diseases you can catch from a human bite."

As a parent, I tried to never lie to my children. Sure, Andrew and I did the whole Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, and Tooth Fairy thing, but for the most part I tried to speak honestly and directly with them. This wasn't one of those times. I was scared shitless that Kyle might have caught something from that monster's bite, but I couldn't let my son's overactive imagination go rampant right now. I had to keep them calm.

But when Kyle finally did make it to a hospital, he was going to get every test in existence.

"I don't think you know," said Theresa, softly.

I successfully—but only barely—fought back tears.

The walkie-talkie crackled.

"Is anybody there?" an unfamiliar voice asked.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"This is Officer Trevor Clemens from the Georgia State Patrol. We've managed to subdue the assailants who attacked you and your family, but your husband has been very badly injured. Could you give us your location?"

"What happened to him?" I tried not to sound frantic.

"He's been cut. He's been cut bad, ma'am. We can't move him until the ambulance gets here. Are you near the road?"

"I'm...I'm not sure," I admitted.

"Are you lost?"

"I think so."

"That's not a problem, ma'am. We'll get you out of there. Do me a big favor and give us a shout, okay?"

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I almost did it. I opened my mouth, took a deep breath...and then drew the obvious conclusion that I might not really be talking to an Officer Trevor Clemens.

"Let me talk to him," I said.

"Ma'am, he's unconscious and losing blood fast. I'm not trying to scare you, and I promise we're doing everything we can, but he may not have much time left."

"Shout out to me," I told him. "I'll follow your voice."

I listened carefully.

Nothing.

"Did you hear that?"

"No."

Now a gunshot, far off in the distance.

"What about that?"

"Yes, I heard it."

"Are we close?"

"No, but I know which direction to go at least."

"Then hurry. Get here as quickly as you can. We'll be waiting."

There was something vaguely sinister in the way he said "We'll be waiting." My gut told me I wasn't speaking to a police officer. I'm sure I could've asked some appropriate questions and figured this out for sure, but then I'd risk letting him know what I knew...or at least suspected.

But whether I was talking to a killer or a cop, one thing was certain: Andrew's situation was not good.

Was he really cut and bleeding to death?

Or perhaps already dead?

I needed to put that out of my mind. Andrew was one hell of a resilient guy. He'd be fine. He could be superglued to a nuclear warhead and he'd find a way out of it. I had to worry about getting Theresa and Kyle to safety.

But I also wondered if I should leave them behind. Find a good hiding spot for them and head off on my own. I could move more quickly that way (though still carefully) and not run the risk of taking them right back into the hands of the killers.

What if I couldn't find them again?

They'd be found. We'd call the police, have search helicopters fly overhead, and rescue them. We couldn't possibly be that far into the woods.

What if the killers found them first?

Or even a wild animal?

I couldn't do it. I couldn't leave them behind. Kyle had almost been taken from me, and I wasn't going to let him out of my sight again. Hell, aside from restroom and shower breaks, he might stay under my watchful eye until he was eighteen.

We continued walking. Though I did my best to stop obsessing over it, I was too distracted with thoughts of Andrew to continue playing word games with my children, so we walked in silence.

At least I knew we were going the right way.

* * *

Just as I was starting to unconsciously grow comfortable walking through the woods, I saw another fishing line. We gave it a wide berth.

Something moved next to us.

I gasped and stopped in my tracks. Theresa walked into my back. "Mommy!"

"Shhh!" I listened carefully.

"What was that?" asked Kyle.

"Shhh!" I repeated.

"Is it them?"

"Kyle, be quiet!" We stood there, listening.

Branches crackled.

My stomach lurched.

The deer bounded past, about thirty feet away. It was gone before I could even get a clear look.

"What is that?" Kyle asked, his voice on the verge of panic.

"It was just a deer," I assured him.

"I didn't see it! Are you sure that's what it was?"

"I'm positive. Theresa, did you see it?"

"Uh-huh."

"Tell Kyle it was just a deer."

"It was just a deer, stupid."

"Oh," said Kyle, uncharacteristically ignoring the "stupid" comment.

"I hope it doesn't get killed in a trap," Theresa said.

"It won't. It'll be fine. Come on, let's keep going."

We continued walking through the woods.

I kept my hands in front of me so that my kids couldn't see that they were trembling.

* * *

"Is that the road?" Theresa asked.

It looked that way. I had to force myself to maintain our careful pace. It felt like we'd been walking for hours, though I was sure it wasn't nearly that long, and I didn't want to get us killed in a last-minute rush.

But as we got closer, I could see that yes, we were indeed approaching the dirt road.

Or a dirt road, anyway.

A few minutes later we emerged from the woods. I couldn't tell for certain, but it did seem to be the same dirt road we'd been on before. I raised the walkie-talkie to my lips and pressed the black button. "Hello?"

No response.

"Hello?" I asked again. "Is anybody there?"

Still nothing.

That didn't really mean anything. I could be out of walkie-talkie range, or the cop/murderer might not have it on him.

At this point, there wasn't much we could do but walk along the side of the road. At least now we could pick up the pace without worrying about death traps.

"Where are we going?" Theresa asked.

"We're going to try to find that store," I told her. "I'm sure they'll have a real phone there."

"Are we going the right way?"

"Yes," I said, even though I wasn't one hundred percent sure. But I was pretty sure.

We walked for a few minutes, Joe bounding happily along beside us.

Then I heard a car approach.

We quickly got off the road and back into the forest. As Joe ran past my legs, I scooped up the pug and carried him with me as we moved about fifty feet into the woods and ducked down out of sight.

This was the tricky part. We wanted somebody to help us, but we couldn't trust anybody. At the bare minimum, though, we needed to stay out of sight until we made sure it wasn't a green truck.

It was a black limousine.

It seemed pretty darn unlikely that anybody associated with the killers who were after us would be driving that kind of car, but I remained hidden.

The limousine was driving slowly. Almost too slowly. And though I couldn't yet see who was inside, I could tell the windows were down. On this hot, bug-laden road, there wouldn't be many vehicles driving slowly with their windows down unless they were looking and listening for somebody.

So the question was, was this somebody I wanted to find me?

Just as the car crossed in front of us, Joe barked.

I immediately slammed my hand over the dog's mouth.

The limousine stopped.

The door opened, and an unfamiliar woman got out. She was dressed entirely in red, and certainly didn't look like part of Ogre's team. But she also wasn't a police officer.

Who was she?

Maybe she was an innocent driver who just happened to be passing through, and the police recruited her to help out while they took Andrew to the hospital.

But why would anybody drive a limousine to a campground?

Of course, I didn't know that this road led only to Wreitzer Park. It could lead to a top secret government facility, for all I knew.

"Helen?" the woman called out in our direction. "Helen Mayhem?"

We stayed silent.

"I just heard from the police. Your husband is in stable condition. He's going to live."

She shut the door of the limousine and began to slowly walk toward the woods.

Could I trust her?

If I didn't trust somebody, the kids and I could end up walking around forever.

The woman paused at the edge of the woods, peering intently.

It didn't feel right.

She let out a whistle. "Here, doggie!" she called. "Here, doggie doggie! Good doggie! Come here!" She whistled again.

Joe struggled in my arms. Rotten disloyal pug.

"Heeeeeere doggie! I've got a treat for you!"

Joe was struggling too much. If I didn't let him go, he'd attract the woman's attention.

I released him and Joe ran toward the road. I placed a reassuring hand on Kyle's shoulder so he wouldn't call out.

Joe ran out of the woods and over to the woman. She knelt down, scratched his head, said a few baby-talk words I couldn't quite hear, and picked him up. She opened the limousine door and put him inside. Then she shut the door and looked back in our direction.

"Helen?" she asked again.

"Stay right where you are," I whispered to Kyle and Theresa. "If I tell you to run, run back into the woods, but don't move until I tell you, okay?"

My children nodded.

I stood up and slowly crawled away from them, not toward the road. Hopefully I'd make it a safe distance from them before the woman saw me, and there was enough cover that if she decided to whip out a gun and open fire, I'd be reasonably well-protected.

If she came after me...well, I'd beaten Ogre, and I could beat her.

I crawled for a couple of minutes, until I heard the limousine door open again. Then I stood up. "Hey!" I shouted.

The woman closed the door and turned back to look in my direction. "Helen?"

I waved at her. "Who are you?"

She walked toward the woods. "My name is Tracy. Gosh, am I glad to see you! I can't tell you what a messed-up day it's been!"

"Don't come any closer!" I warned.

She stopped. "That's fine, that's cool. I'm just here to take you into town. Where are your kids?"

"How did you get involved?"

"Just driving through, minding my own business."

"In a limo?"

She shrugged. "Picking up a client. One of those rich schmucks who go camping with satellite TV and an Internet connection."

"When will the cops be back?"

"No idea. They're pretty incompetent around these parts." She glanced at her watch. "Look, I know you're suspicious and stressed out and all that, but I'm getting eaten alive by these damn bugs and I'm gonna lose my job if I don't get you to the hospital and then pick up my client."

She seemed nice enough, but this didn't feel right. I've always had a really good internal bullshit detector (an absolute necessity when you're married to Andrew Mayhem) and though it wasn't sounding a red alert, it was definitely doing some beeping.

I couldn't trust this lady.

So now what?

I cautiously backed away, and then screamed in surprise and agony when something snapped shut over my ankle. As I fell to the ground, dropping the walkie-talkie, I saw it was a wolf trap.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Helen's Side

Though the rusty jaws of the wolf trap were flat rather than jagged, the pain was so intense that I couldn't stop the scream.

I blinked the tears away, gripped the jaws of the trap tightly, and tried to wrench it open. The trap opened most of the way with a creak like teeth against a chalkboard...and then popped out of my grip and snapped shut over my foot again.

My reaction was not quiet.

The trap was attached to a chain wrapped around the base of a large tree, mostly hidden by leaves. Doing everything I could to force the excruciating pain out of my mind, I pried the trap open once again and withdrew my foot.

It snapped shut with a loud clang.

I didn't know if my foot was broken or not, but I did know I wouldn't be running on it anytime soon.

I stood up, bracing myself against the tree, and looked back at the road. The woman had entered the woods. She was holding a gun.

I wanted to call out to Theresa and Kyle, to scream at them not to move, but that would let the woman know where they were. I just had to pray they would stay put.

I quickly moved behind the tree, even though the pain shooting through my foot was worse than giving birth. It wasn't likely that this tree could hide me for long, but it gave me a few seconds to figure out what to do.

Those few seconds passed without any grand revelation.

I could hear the woman approaching. She wasn't coming straight toward me, but rather to the side, probably trying to get a good shot without putting herself into harm's way. If I were lucky, maybe she'd step into a wolf trap of her own.

A flash of red clothing to my side.

I pulled out of the way just as a shot fired. It wasn't a loud gunshot, but more of a swish. Another shot, and a dart slammed into a tree next to me.

Still no brilliant plan of escape.

I sure as hell couldn't outrun her. The only thing I could do was try to climb the tree. Fast.

I reached up as high as I could, grabbed the lowest branch, and pulled myself up. I braced my feet against the trunk and "walked" up, which hurt worse than if Theresa and Kyle had been born simultaneously, but it didn't matter even if I was shattering every single bone in my leg. If I wanted to survive, I had to climb.

I screamed a lot, though.

I got my feet onto the lowest branch, and then pulled myself up onto the next one as quickly as I could. I could almost feel the adrenaline rushing through my veins as I climbed.

Swish!

A dart struck the branch inches from my right arm.

I continued climbing. I glanced down and saw the woman running toward the tree. There wasn't nearly enough branch cover, and I wasn't high enough for her to miss unless she was a seriously crappy shot.

I pulled myself up to the next branch, and then my foot slipped. I hung there helplessly for a few seconds.

Swish!

The dart struck the bottom of my shoe. My uninjured foot, on the heel. It didn't break through to the skin.

I lifted my foot to the nearest branch, careful not to put my heel on it and push the dart in deeper. It remained wedged in my shoe. I continued to climb.

I heard the woman curse beneath me.

"Come down from there!" she shouted. "Don't be suicidal!"

She sounded frustrated. Maybe this meant she was out of darts.

I pulled myself up higher, scraping the hell out of my arm against a particularly sharp branch.

"Helen, this is ridiculous! You can't get away!"

I looked down. She was standing directly underneath me, probably thirty feet below. She cursed again, kicked the base of the tree, and then reached for the lowest branch.

Outclimbing her was going to be a bitch.

More than a bitch. Impossible. Even if I had a fire hose pumping adrenaline directly into my bloodstream, it wasn't gonna happen. I was still exhausted from my encounter with Ogre, and now every movement of my foot shot waves of pain all the way up my leg.

But I still kept climbing. I was about halfway up the tree, and it was starting to feel quite a bit less sturdy.

"What do you think you're going to do, Helen?" asked the woman. She was only a couple of body-lengths behind me. "Climb the air after you've run out of tree? Come on down and let's settle this without me having to knock you to the ground."

I didn't answer her. I couldn't waste any energy by speaking.

The next branch I grabbed broke off in my hand and I momentarily lost my balance. I flailed, snatched another branch, and managed to prevent myself from saving the woman the effort of knocking me to the ground.

But what was I going to do when I got to the top of the tree?

I looked to the side. The next climbable tree was about ten feet away. There was no way I could jump straight across, but if I got in a really good leap I might be able to grab one of the lower branches as I fell.

I pulled myself up to the next branch. The woman continued climbing behind me, gaining quickly. She was directly beneath me, which suddenly gave me an idea.

I slammed my good foot against the branch. The dart in my shoe stayed in place. I slammed it once, twice, three more times, and then the dart came free.

The woman gasped.

I watched the dart fall.

It dropped past her arm and harmlessly hit the ground below.

The woman seemed more than a little upset by this near-miss, and began to climb after me with renewed energy. I reached for the next branch, which bent in half instead of supporting my weight. I grabbed another one, which also bent but not quite as badly.

I eased myself a couple of steps out onto the branch I was standing on. It wobbled beneath me. I swore I heard a cracking sound. If I was going to jump, I had to do it now, without thinking about it.

Of course, I'd already thought about it.

The branch beneath me snapped.

I let out a squeal as I hung there. I stretched out my good foot, trying to find something to stand on, but no branch was within reach.

As I struggled to pull myself up, the branch I was holding began to bow downward.

The woman reached out and grabbed for my bad foot. I swung it out of the way. She grabbed again, this time getting a handful of shoelace. She pulled my foot toward her then wrapped her fingers around my injured ankle and squeezed. I shrieked, shut my eyes as if that would block out the pain, and lost my grip on the branch.

Freefall.

But only for a second. My butt smacked the next lower branch. I involuntarily leaned forward and continued falling, arms flailing wildly.

I struck the next lower branch with my shoulder.

The next with my knee.

The next one broke my fall. I scrambled to get myself oriented again, and then began to climb down the tree while the woman followed me, our chase now reversed.

Getting down required a lot less energy, and I tried to favor my good foot as I dropped to each lower branch. Again, the woman was gaining. Quickly.

When she was only one body-length away from me, she slammed her foot down on my hand. I let out yet another scream and fell. This time no branches broke my fall, and I plummeted about fifteen feet to the ground, landing once again on my ass.

I just lay there for a moment, dazed.

The woman hurriedly climbed down after me.

I tried to sit up but couldn't. I couldn't move.

Oh, God, what if I'd damaged my spinal column?

A lifetime of paralysis was a scary thought, although a useless concern, since if I was paralyzed I wouldn't be surviving the next couple of minutes.

The woman dropped to the ground at my feet. She wiped her hands off on her shirt and regarded me with disgust.

"I hate manual labor," she said. "It's a waste of my skills. When I have to chase you up and down a tree, all it does is make me think that instead of bringing you in alive like I'm supposed to, I should just kill you."

"Please," I said, hating myself for begging. "Just let—"

"Stop it. I don't want to hear it. If you think I feel any sympathy for a pathetic helpless female, you're wrong in a big way. Now, here's the question that determines whether you die quickly and painlessly, or slowly and miserably: Where are your kids?"

"Fuck you."

The woman sighed. "Okay, let me accentuate that last point. This is the question that also determines whether your children will die quickly and painlessly or slowly and miserably. Where are they?"

I wanted to spit in her face, but my projectile spitting skills weren't that advanced.

"Oooooh, steel resolve. I like that. I know they're around here somewhere. Probably close. You wouldn't leave them out in the middle of the woods by themselves. I sure hope you found them a good hiding spot. Maybe your dog will help me track them down, what do you think?"

Joe hadn't proven himself to be much of a tracker, but the woman was absolutely right. Theresa and Kyle were close. If she went out looking for them, she'd find them.

"Theresa! Kyle!" I screamed. "Run away! Run as fast as you can! Do it now!"

The woman spun around.

I grabbed the chain fastening the wolf trap to the tree and yanked on it as hard as I possibly could, nearly wrenching my arm out of its socket. As the woman turned back to face me, the wolf trap bashed into her chest, knocking her to the ground.

I forced myself to stand up, but immediately lost my balance and fell to my knees. I could see my children fleeing deeper into the woods. "Run!" I screamed again. Better to risk the booby traps than to have the woman catch them.

I raised the chain over my head and swung it again. This time it felt like my muscles were ripped right off the bone. The wolf trap flew toward the woman but she rolled out of the way and it struck the ground instead.

She got back up.

I scooted backward on my aching ass. I just had to stay alive long enough for my children to make it to safety.

The woman crouched down and pried open the jaws as far as they would go, setting the trap. Then she picked up the trap and walked toward me.

My hand brushed against something.

I threw the dart at her. It stuck in her leg.

She looked down at it in shock. Then she smiled. "What, you think there'd still be tranquilizer in there?" She plucked out the dart and tossed it aside.

Then she dropped to her knees.

Blinked a couple of times.

"You bitch," she said, tossing the wolf trap at me.

It landed between my legs, bounced once, and hit my upper thigh. The jolt in my heart was so great that for an instant I thought the trap had sprung.

The woman came toward me, still on her knees, arms extended, her eyes wide with fury even as her movements slowed.

I picked up the trap and slammed it against her face.

It sprung.

I turned away quickly, not wanting to see the results. Her body dropped onto mine, and I rolled her out of the way. I wiped her blood off my cheek, grateful it wasn't an eyeball or something like that. After all I'd been through, I didn't need to be wiping other people's eyeballs off my cheek.

Despite the gruesome sight right next to me, and despite the continued pain in my ankle and countless other parts of my body, I couldn't help but laugh. We now had a limo. We could get out of here. Drive away and find help. Rescue Andrew.

"Theresa! Kyle! It's safe now!" I shouted as loud as I could while being almost completely out of breath. "You can come back!"

I listened for their response.

Nothing.

"Theresa?"

I forced myself to stand up. My leg tried to buckle beneath me, but I held steady. "Kyle? Honey? Come back!"

Still nothing.

Where were they?

Oh, God, where were they?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I woke up, not even realizing I'd been unconscious.

The drug in the dart had obviously worn off because I could move again. That is, I could have moved again if my arms, legs, and torso hadn't been duct taped to a metal chair. They'd used a ridiculous amount; I practically looked like a duct tape mummy. My left hand had been bandaged up, which I hoped meant they planned to keep me alive for a while.

Roger and Samantha were similarly bound to my right, while Goblin was to my left. Goblin had received a black eye sometime between my loss of consciousness and now, and he looked scared and pitiful. He was the only one of the four prisoners who wasn't wearing a tight cloth gag.

We were in a large room with white tile floor and lockers lining the walls. There was a door on each side. The centerpiece was an operating table, surrounded by lights, and another table covered with what appeared to be a combination of medical equipment and home improvement supplies.

Witch was wiping down the operating table with bleach. Mr. Burke, Troll, and Medusa weren't around.

"Come on," Goblin pleaded. "You can't let them do this to me. I was a good boss, right? You were always my favorite. You know that."

Witch avoided looking at him and focused all of her attention on cleaning the operating table, looking sick to her stomach.

"Don't ignore me! It doesn't have to happen like this! You can just tell them I got free!"

"How?"

"I don't know. Make something up!"

"Yeah, right. Then I'll be on this table in your place."

"We can both go. Let's just leave. He'll do you next, you know. If he's disbanding our team there's no reason for him to keep you and Troll around. You'll die next. I promise you'll die next."

Witch shook her head. "No, I won't."

"You will, I swear. Witch, we're a team. You don't let this kind of shit happen to your teammates."

"We were never a team. You were the leader and we were the followers. You said that all the time." Her voice cracked. "And if you don't shut up I'll gag you."

Goblin lowered his head and began to weep softly.

A door behind me opened. Somebody walked into the room, and I felt a light slap on the back of my head. "Wakey-wakey!" said Troll, moving in front of me. He was soon followed by Mr. Burke. Troll was wearing green surgical scrubs, and Mr. Burke was in a white lab coat.

"Well, well, well," said Mr. Burke, rubbing his hands together. "Some lovely specimens we have here today. Who shall I work on first?"

"Do Goblin first," Troll suggested.

"Yes, that sounds like a fine idea. But let's take care of some other business before we get started." Mr. Burke looked at me, reached into the pocket of his lab coat, and removed a finger-sized object wrapped in tissue. "This was found in your pocket. Now, Andrew, do you really think proper storage of a severed digit includes keeping it in your filthy pocket?"

If I'd been able to speak, I probably would have said something along the lines of "It was the next best place to Witch's mouth." Then again, I might not have.

Mr. Burke unwrapped my finger and shook his head sadly. "I don't know. Even with the amazing advances in laser surgery, I doubt this finger is in a sufficient state to be reattached. I think we're just going to have to give it the goldfish treatment."

He walked over and opened the door to my right, which led to a small bathroom. He held my finger over the toilet at chest-level, let it dangle for several seconds, then dropped it. It landed with a small splash.

"Adios, dear finger," said Mr. Burke. He flushed the toilet and watched happily. "Going...going..."

I wondered if this was payback for his being dunked in the toilet once too often by bullies in school.

"Going..." He frowned. "Aw, shit, it's still there. Fuckin' low-flow toilets." He flushed again. "Ah, there we go." He left the bathroom and shut the door behind him. "I'm afraid you won't be seeing your finger again."

I told him to mmmphhh mmmmmmphh himself. I hadn't really counted on being able to save my finger anyway, but still, you never want to see your pinky get flushed by a madman.

"Let's hope it doesn't grow in the sewers like one of those alligators," said Troll. "It could come back for revenge."

"Indeed it could. We'll all just have to be careful."

Troll winked at me, and then ran his hand through Samantha's hair. He looked at Roger. "How did a babe like this ever end up with a dork like you?"

Roger's response was muffled but easy to translate and quite vulgar.

"Y'know," said Troll, still stroking her hair. "I wouldn't mind having some fun with this one myself."

Mr. Burke shook his head. "I want her alive when it's her turn on the table."

"I won't kill her."

"I've heard that before."

"No, really, I won't."

"I don't want any parts of her cut off, either."

"I won't."

Mr. Burke nodded. "All right. But if you betray my trust, the consequences will be severe."

"Am I allowed to break anything?"

Mr. Burke considered that. "Nothing vital. And do it in the other room. I don't want you distracting me."

"Ooooh, privacy. Even better. How about I drag her boyfriend in there with us to watch the show?"

"I think you're beginning to violate basic human decency, Troll," said Mr. Burke. "He needs to see what happens in here. Don't get greedy with your sadism."

Troll chuckled and walked behind Samantha's chair. As she screamed through her gag, he tilted her chair backward, and then dragged her across the floor in front of Roger and I, the chair making a horrible screeching sound as it scraped across the tile. Roger struggled violently but fruitlessly, shouting muffled curses the entire time.

Troll reached the door, opened it, and dragged Samantha into a dark room. When she was out of sight, he stepped back into the doorway and waved to us. "Have fun, everybody! I know I will."

Roger screamed in muffled fury.

"What's that you're trying to say?" asked Troll. "She likes it rough? Thanks for the tip, buddy."

He closed the door.

"Don't let yourself be excessively stressed over this," Mr. Burke told Roger. "She'll still be at least seventy percent okay when he's done with her."

Roger gave him an absolutely chilling look.

Mr. Burke clapped his hands together. "So, let's get started, shall we? Goblin, are you prepared to pay the ultimate price for your failure?"

Goblin lifted his head. "Sir, please, I know I screwed up, but you have to give me another chance!"

"Oh, I have to, do I? Did you suddenly become the one in charge? Did I miss Promotion Day?"

"That's not what I meant, I just—"

"Then say what you mean, Goblin. Don't pretend I have any obligations to you or to anybody else."

"But I—"

"Stop speaking. Witch, gag him. No, on second thought, cut out his tongue. Use something inefficient to do it."

I didn't watch. But I had no way to cover my ears.

"Oh, now, that's cheating," said Mr. Burke, a couple of minutes later. He tapped me in the face with something sharp. "Open them."

I opened my eyes. He was holding a scalpel.

"Please keep your eyes open," he said, tapping the scalpel on each side of my nose. "You're being extremely rude, and I'd hate to have to slice off your eyelids."

I kept my eyes open as Mr. Burke and Witch lifted Goblin onto the operating table and quickly restrained him with a series of ten leather straps. He was making a hell of a lot more noise than when he'd been pleading for his life, but it was a much less coherent noise.

It was almost loud enough to block out the sound of Samantha screaming in the next room.

"Let's see, what's the best makeover for such a loyal employee?" Mr. Burke wondered aloud. "Oh, I know where to start. Witch, get me a left and right from locker 14."

Witch nodded sadly and went over to one of the lockers. She opened the door, revealing several sets of steel claws hanging inside. There was no palm to them, just five curved, pencil-sized blades welded together with a spike at the bottom. She took down a pair and placed them on the table.

"Ah, perfect," said Mr. Burke, putting on a pair of safety goggles. He picked up a handheld device with a circular blade. "Don't worry, Goblin. In just a moment you're going to look extremely cool."

He turned on the device. The motor hummed and the blade began to spin. Flesh, muscle, and bone separated with ease.

"We've got a bleeder," Mr. Burke announced, speaking loudly to be heard over the shrieks.

I was terrified I was going to vomit under my gag and choke to death.

Mr. Burke replaced Goblin's hands with the claws, using the spikes to fix them in place.

I thought he might try to flush Goblin's original hands down the toilet, but Witch deposited them into a convenient waste receptacle.

I looked over at Roger. He was watching the door with Troll and Samantha behind it.

"Locker 27," Mr. Burke announced. "Let's give this gentleman a bionic eye."

"What color light?" Witch asked.

"How about...green?" Mr. Burke looked at me as if for my approval. Not knowing what else to do, I nodded. "Yes, green."

"Dark green or light green?"

"Dark green."

"Flashing?"

"Oh yes."

Witch opened another locker and removed a small metal circular object. She handed it to Mr. Burke, who flipped a switch on the side and held up the dark green flashing light for my approval. "Nice, isn't it?"

This time I didn't nod.

"Normally I'd remove the organic eye first," Mr. Burke explained. "But I think we'll skip that step and just wedge this one in as best we can."

Mr. Burke did so, though it took some effort. Goblin's screams and thrashing began to fade halfway through the process.

"Ah, yes, that looks great. I don't think you two can see it from where you're sitting, but trust me, that is a cyborg eye to die for. Now for the feet. Locker 2."

Mr. Burke went to work on Goblin's feet. This process didn't seem to be quite as easy as removing his hands, but it was completed in a quick and efficient manner.

Goblin's feet were replaced by wheels. He couldn't appreciate it, because by then he was dead.

Mr. Burke and Witch added some more enhancements. A row of copper spikes running down the sides of each leg. Bolts protruding from his neck, Frankenstein-style. The words "Cyber-Goblin 3000" burnt onto his chest.

"Excellent!" said Mr. Burke, wiping his hands off on a white towel. "Perhaps not one of my masterpieces, but a more than worthy addition to my collection."

Mr. Burke and Witch lifted Goblin's corpse onto a gurney. "Hose him off and prepare him for display," said Mr. Burke. Witch nodded and wheeled him past Roger and I and out the door behind us.

"See, I'm really not such a terrible individual," Mr. Burke told us. "It's not like I'm merely hacking up your bodies, mangling them for sport. When you were a child, wouldn't you have loved to look like the Cyber-Goblin 3000?"

He wiped off his face and neck, and then realized something. "Oh, I got so caught up in my work that I forgot to check in with Medusa. That's why it's so wonderful to be the boss: I'm allowed to screw up."

He picked up the walkie-talkie from the equipment table and pressed the button. "Medusa, come in."

He waited.

"Medusa?"

He set down the walkie-talkie and shrugged. "That's a promising sign. If she's shut off communications, your wife must be falling for her ruse. You know, Andrew, just between you and me, I could arrange to have her mouth replaced with a vacuum cleaner, if you know what I mean." He gave an exaggerated wink.

Not being able to slam his face into one of Goblin's metal claws was an unbearably frustrating sensation.

"Actually, though, that's not in the plan. You see, I enjoy making my precious cyborgs, but right now we're just in the design phase. They look spectacular, but they don't really do anything because they're dead. But I've been wanting to test a special little something and this is the absolute perfect opportunity." He smiled. "I think you'll find it very, very interesting."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Mr. Burke brought the scalpel toward my face again, but this time he cut away the gag. "I probably should have untied that rather than cut it," he admitted. "I'm already over budget for the quarter. So what do you think so far? Be honest."

"I think you're a joke. What, you're making human action figures? How pathetically geeky is that?"

Mr. Burke chuckled. "Ah, Andrew, that comment would be much more devastating if you weren't so obviously terrified. You don't think I'm a joke. And I can tell that your friend here doesn't think I'm a joke. How about I check on his piece of tail?"

He walked over to the door Troll had taken Samantha through, opened it a crack, and peeked inside.

I wanted so badly to see Samantha's fist pop into view, punching Mr. Burke in the face, that for a moment I did see it.

But then I returned to reality. Mr. Burke closed the door and walked back over to us. "She's alive," he told Roger. "Though the word 'ouch' is probably appropriate. That Troll, he's a unique one, I'll give him that."

Witch returned to the room. "How does Goblin look?" Mr. Burke asked.

"Fine. Still leaking."

"Good, good." Mr. Burke picked up the walkie-talkie again and pressed the button. "Medusa?" Nothing. "Oh well." He set the walkie-talkie down then turned back to Witch. "Give Andrew here a quick shot so he doesn't wiggle so much."

Witch retrieved a hypodermic needle from the table. She jabbed it into my arm, and...

...I was suddenly on the operating table, strapped down by my wrists and ankles. A few tugs verified that I wasn't going anywhere. I could feel Goblin's blood, wet underneath me.

"Ah, good, you're awake already. That was quick." Mr. Burke held up a small camera, about two inches square and remarkably thin. "This is a wireless digital webcam," he explained. "The distance isn't great, not more than five hundred yards, but it'll do."

Witch turned on a blowtorch and began to heat up a thin strip of metal, also about two inches square with a pair of clamps on it.

"We'll get near-DVD quality picture and sound with this thing, so hopefully you'll provide sufficient entertainment value."

"I don't know what the hell you're babbling about," I said.

"You'll figure it out. What we've got for you, Andrew, is a very special serum. It's untested, so for all I know it could kill you the second we inject it, but let's hope it doesn't. That would be a waste. It's sort of a chemical cocktail, mixed with hallucinogens and paranoia enhancers—not the technical term—and all sorts of fascinating ingredients."

"I'm ready," said Witch, lifting the red-hot metal with a pair of tongs.

"Then I'm sure Andrew is, too. You may proceed."

Witch pressed the metal, clamps-side-up, right above my solar plexus. My entire body tightened up as I cried out, not even pretending I was going to deny Mr. Burke the pleasure of an extreme reaction. Witch pressed the metal more tightly against me and I could smell burning flesh and chest hair.

I strained against the leather straps, wanting desperately to rip the hot metal off my body.

"Ah, yes, that should stay in place quite nicely," said Mr. Burke, observing Witch's handiwork with satisfaction. "We'll just let it cool a bit and then attach the camera."

I found myself frantically blowing on the metal, as if that would help. Mr. Burke and Witch seemed to find this terribly amusing.

I could see that Roger was still struggling to break free of his chair, but making no progress.

"I think we're ready for the injection," said Mr. Burke. He leaned over me and spoke tenderly. "Now, this is going to hurt just a little bit, sort of like having your flesh shredded with a cheese grater from the inside and then microwaved. But don't worry, it's not addictive."

Witch patted my forearm to get a vein.

I struggled with every ounce of strength I could muster. In all of the times I'd been tied up or strapped down or otherwise prevented from enjoying freedom of movement, I'd never successfully managed to break free through the use of superhuman strength, and I was due. I visualized myself breaking free. I visualized Roger breaking free. I visualized Samantha breaking through the door and breaking us free. I visualized Kyle breaking through the ceiling in a superhero cape and breaking us free.

I remained strapped to the goddamn operating table.

Witch held up the hypodermic needle, squeezing some liquid out to avoid injecting an air bubble into my bloodstream. She brought it down slowly toward my arm.

I started to become concerned that my final thought in this world might be something stupid like my seven year-old son breaking through a ceiling in a superhero cape, but I couldn't force myself to think of anything else.

Witch slid the needle into my skin.

A warm, almost soothing feeling began to flow through my arm.

Followed immediately by the most devastating pain I'd ever felt in my life. A dozen times worse than, say, chopping off my finger or having a red-hot piece of metal pressed against my chest.

I screamed and screamed and screamed.

Then, for a change of pace, I shrieked and shrieked and shrieked.

I may have said "Ow!"

It really, really hurt.

"My, my, listen to Andrew scream," said Mr. Burke. His chuckle echoed throughout the room.

It didn't really echo, did it?

Yes, it did. In fact, it was still echoing. And getting louder. I heard it in stereo.

Mr. Burke smiled, revealing oversized teeth.

I looked at my straps and gasped in horror. They'd transformed into...well, they were still leather straps, but they were unexplainably scary leather straps.

"Is it working, Andrew?" asked Mr. Burke, his voice dropping an octave or two. "How do you feel?"

"I hurt."

"How does your mind feel?"

"I don't know. I think it hurts."

Mr. Burke held up his hand in front of me. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Three," I said. Suddenly that seemed amazingly funny. Three fingers! He was holding up three fingers! Right in front of my face! I giggled.

Giggling was so much more fun than screaming. But screaming had its positive aspects, too, like giving your lungs a workout and keeping them healthy, and alerting people to your presence who might otherwise ignore you, and...

I giggled some more.

I raised my back as much as I could. "I think something is swimming in Goblin's blood," I informed Mr. Burke.

"And what do you think that might be?" he asked.

"I dunno. You tell me." I giggled at my joke. "I think it's a little man swimming in there. A tiny little man swimming in Goblin's blood. I hope he doesn't pee in it."

"I hope he doesn't either," said Mr. Burke, still smiling at me with those oversized, way-too-white teeth.

"You've got funky teeth" I told him. "Pull them out for me."

"I'm afraid I can't do that."

"Oh. Bummer."

I looked over at Roger, who looked hilariously miserable. He almost looked like he was going to cry. And he was a grown man!

I laughed at him.

I suddenly realized that I didn't hurt anymore. And that there were now several tiny little men swimming in Goblin's blood. One of them was doing the breaststroke.

"You know," I told Mr. Burke, "it takes a lot of work to kill a man with paper cuts, but I'm patient."

Mr. Burke kept smiling. All of his face was gone except for his teeth.

"You know what?" I asked.

"What?"

"That's what." I frowned. "That wasn't funny. You know what?"

"What?"

"That's what." I laughed hysterically, and then I slammed myself against the table a couple of times to crush the millions of tiny little men swimming in Goblin's blood.

"Tell me, Andrew, are you afraid of demons?"

"Dee-mons! Dee-mons!"

"There are demons everywhere, you know."

"Spooky scary demons!"

"There's one in this room."

"Creepy crawly demons!"

"You hate demons."

I nodded. "Demons suck."

"Indeed they do."

"Yanking off a hangnail with a staple remover is overrated."

"Indeed it is."

"Doesn't it hurt just having teeth for a face? What if you have to blow your nose? I just don't understand how it works, I'm sorry."

"Look over there," said Mr. Burke, pointing. "Do you see the demon?"

I did indeed. It was a female demon, wearing a white lab coat spattered with blood. She was one serious babe, even though she had red scaly flesh and eyes that literally smoldered.

It was clearly a succubus. Or was it an incubus? I always got those two confused. It was a continual source of shame and embarrassment.

The demon hissed at me. I hissed back.

"You want to kill it, don't you?"

"Nah."

"Andrew, it's a demon. Aren't you the mighty demon slayer?"

"What kind of dumb shit are you talking about? Demon slayer, hemon slayer. I need to slay more hemons. What's a hemon? I'm hungry."

"The demon is looking into your soul, Andrew."

My God. He was right. The demon was staring right into my soul. It was learning my secrets, laughing at them, mocking them, sharing them with its demon brethren. The demon's evil was exploring inside me, wriggling around like worms, devouring its way into my heart.

"Make it stop," I begged.

"Only you can make it stop."

"It's scaring me!"

"Scare it back."

"It's going to eat me! Don't let it eat me!"

"You're being tested, Andrew. You can pass the test. You must learn to hate the demon, not fear it."

"I hate how scary it is!"

"Hate. Hate is the key. Control your hate. Control your rage. Don't let the demons win. Can you do that? Can you truly, deeply hate?"

"I...I think so."

"That's not good enough."

"Yes, I can."

"There are demons in the woods, Andrew. They're lost demons trying to find their way back home. Three of them. A mother and two children. Can you hate them?"

"Yes."

"Can you kill them?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to give you a knife. Can you slam it into the bodies of those foul creatures, no matter how much they scream, no matter what tricks they try to play on you? Because demons will lie to you. They'll change form. They'll pretend they love you. Can you kill them?"

"Yes."

"Then I shall release you."

I could feel the hatred flowing through me, just as the pain had flowed through me before. The hatred felt good.

Really, really good.

* * *

I rode in a chariot of gold, pulled by two fire-breathing steeds that were the most beautiful animals I'd ever seen in my life, even when they started ripping out chunks of each other's flesh.

The world was cast into darkness, but the sun burned my eyes.

I smiled at my hatred. At my rage. That's what kept me strong. Demons were weak. Their compassion was their weakness, and I'd exploit that until their severed heads rested at my feet. Granted, the knife I'd been given really didn't seem sufficient for a demonic decapitation, but I'd worry about that when the time came.

The chariot stopped.

"You must go now," Mr. Burke said. "You must fulfill your destiny."

"Will I ever see you again?"

"Yes. I will give you this beacon." Mr. Burke extended a sparkling silver object toward me. He affixed it to the metal plate burned into my chest, my mark of honor. "This will let us find you, and bring you home."

"Will you be watching over me?"

"I won't, but your guardian angel will. I'll watch the recording after you're back all safe and sound."

"Thank you." I hugged him as if he were my father.

Then I began on my journey.

I wandered for days. No, not days, but months. Years. For years I wandered the dirt path, fearful of the horrific noises emanating from the forest on each side but not letting my fear show.

I cradled my precious knife in my hands.

I realized I hadn't eaten or slept in years. That was kind of weird.

To help the months pass, I decided to make up a song. The Demon Song.

I am the demon hunter named Andrew. Whose exploits will...What rhymed with "Andrew?"

Andrew, Bandrew, Candrew, Dandrew...

I am the demon hunter named Mayhem. Whose exploits will...

Damn.

Demons, demons, time to die. For I will poke you in the eye. And then you shall begin to cry. As I sing your fatal lullaby.

I grinned at my own cleverness.

"Daddy!"

I spun around. A horrid creature emerged from the woods, its scaly skin as red as Red Vines brand original licorice twists.

The little girl demon.

The creature was so repulsive, so gag-inducing, I wanted to fling my knife at it and end its vile life right now.

But I wasn't that good at knife throwing, and I didn't want to lose my weapon. Anyway, demons were tricky creatures, and so I had to be careful.

It was running toward me.

"Daddy! Daddy!" it repeated.

This demon looked somehow familiar...

I hated it.

I wanted to rip its head off of its tiny shoulders.

It was moving quickly.

Don't fear it, don't fear it, don't fear it. No demon could harm me.

Nothing could harm me.

A tree looked like it was eating somebody, but it may also have been bathing them.

I held my ground as the demon rushed at me.

Yes, I knew this one! Its name was Theresa!

Dumb name for a demon.

The demon stopped a few feet away from me. It bit its scaly lip as if unsure about something.

"Daddy? Are you okay?"

I knew I'd be a lot better if this piece of crap demon stopped calling me "Daddy." I wasn't the parent of any hellspawn.

The demon backed away.

Did it really believe I was its father?

It couldn't possibly. But its tone of voice was so convincing.

Demons were tricky creatures.

I could be tricky, too.

"I'm fine," I said, in my most soothing voice as I hid the knife behind my back. "Come here. Come to Daddy."

The demon walked toward me.

Slowly, untrusting.

I had to bite my own lip to keep from laughing.

"Daddy, what's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong, Theresa."

"Did they hurt you?"

I nodded. "They hurt Daddy bad. He needs you to comfort him. That will make everything okay."

The demon walked up to me and wrapped its filthy arms around me. I wanted to gag.

I pushed the monster away.

"Daddy...?"

I slammed the knife into it, laughing as its warm blood spattered against my bare chest.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Helen's Side

Where could they be?

"Theresa!" I shouted, loud enough that it made my throat burn. "Kyle! Where are you?"

I had horrible visions of my children caught in wolf traps, impaled by spears, dangling from meat hooks, and worse. Much worse. Grisly supernatural deaths at the hands of ghouls and ogres. Pretty much any tragic fate that could befall my children, possible or impossible, flashed across my mind as I wandered through the woods.

I couldn't go through all this only to lose them now. It just couldn't happen. I cried out for them once more, not caring if I was alerting more killers to my presence.

Then I remembered the limousine.

I limped toward the road, drenched with sweat, each step feeling like a great white shark was chomping on my ankle. I fell twice, but I doubted I could make even this much progress if I'd broken anything, so as far as I could tell my ankle was seriously messed up but still in one piece.

I fell again when I reached the dirt road. I knew I had to be a sorry sight. A pregnant woman who'd been beaten half to death. It would be a miracle if I hadn't lost the—

NO NO NO NO NO!!!

The baby was fine! I was absolutely positive that the baby was one hundred percent completely perfectly fine.

I wept for it anyway.

I got up and staggered toward the limousine. I opened the driver's side door and Joe happily jumped up onto the seat. He wasn't exactly my favorite canine at the moment, but it's hard to stay mad at a pug.

Kyle sat in the front seat.

"Kyle! Oh, thank heavens, sweetie!" I climbed into the car and reached for him, giving him a smothering hug that he returned. "I was so worried about you!"

My son buried his face against my belly and cried.

But my relief was short-lived. "Where's Theresa?" I asked.

"I don't know," said Kyle, his face still pressed against my belly.

I pushed him back and looked him in the eye. "Did you see her?"

"She brought me here. She told me to stay in the car. She said she was going to help you."

"Are you sure? I didn't see her out there. She didn't answer me. What exactly did she say?"

"I don't know."

"Kyle, think. Where's your sister? Did she say she was going to help, or to get help?"

"I don't know!"

I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths to calm myself, and then opened them. "It's okay, we'll find her. Stay in the car and see if you can find a phone or walkie-talkie or anything like that. If you find a gun, let me know, but don't touch it."

Kyle nodded.

"I'll be back in five minutes. Promise me you'll stay in the car."

"I will."

"Good." I gave him another hug and a kiss on the cheek.

There was a plastic bottle of water in the cup holder with pink lipstick smears on the rim. I grabbed it, gulped down half of the contents, and gave the bottle to Kyle. "I love you, honey."

"I love you too."

"It'll all be fine."

I returned to the woods and called out Theresa's name again and again. Where could she have gone? I couldn't imagine she would have taken the time to get her brother to safety but then run off in a blind panic.

I searched for the full five minutes, my foot hurting worse with each passing minute, and finally returned to the limousine. Kyle handed me the bottled water as I got in on the driver's side and I quickly drank the rest of it.

"Did you find anything?" I asked him.

Kyle had a red purse pressed between his knees and he'd poured the contents out onto his lap. "A phone. But it didn't work."

I took the cell phone from him and dialed. No signal.

"Did you find anything else?"

"These," he said, holding up a strip of condoms.

"Let's put those back in the purse," I said, taking them from him. "And these, too." I replaced the tampons. Joe was on the floor, chewing on a tampon like a bone, so I took it from him and put it in the purse as well.

"Can I have a piece of gum?" Kyle asked.

"Yes, you can have the whole pack."

Kyle looked at the gum sadly. "I'll give Theresa the rest when we find her."

I shut the limo door. The keys were still in the ignition, so I started the motor. "I need you to watch out the window and look for your sister."

"Which way do you think she went?"

"I don't know, honey. But we're going to be going really fast, so watch as closely as you can."

I applied the gas and we sped down the road. I slowed down when we went around corners, just in case my daughter was wandering in the middle of the road, but apart from that I floored the gas.

"Try to dial 911 again," I said, handing Kyle the phone. "Is there a signal?"

He shook his head. "No."

"Just keep trying."

We continued to race along the dirt road.

"I'd like a piece of that gum," I told Kyle. He unwrapped a piece and I popped the strawberry gum into my mouth. I'd never been much of a gum or candy person, but this tasted absolutely delicious. I even blew a bubble.

Two minutes later, we still couldn't get a signal.

"Do you think Theresa walked this far?" Kyle asked.

"No, I'm sure she didn't, but I just want to find a phone signal so we can call for help. I think we're getting close to the freeway, and we'll definitely be able to get a signal there."

Kyle nodded and pressed redial again.

"It's working!" he shouted. "It's working!"

I grabbed the phone from him and pressed it tightly to my ear. A ring on the other end. And then a cheerful female voice: "911 emergency."

I applied the brakes, harder than I'd intended. "Oh, thank God, my name is Helen Mayhem and there's been an accident and my family has been very badly injured!"

"Ma'am, please give me your location."

I gave her the directions as best I could. I didn't want to tell her about the killers, for fear that she wouldn't believe my story, but at the same time I couldn't risk letting the police come in unprepared.

So I told her everything.

She seemed to believe me.

I turned the limousine around (not an easy process) and then sped back the way we came. I lost the signal moments after that. With renewed energy, I drove off to find my family.

* * *

I found them.

I was so astonished at my good fortune that I nearly squealed with delight, and I'm not a squealer. Standing there, right in the middle of the road up ahead, were Andrew and Theresa, locked in a tight hug. I could see he was holding a knife. Hopefully a bloody knife that had slit the throats of the bastards who attacked us.

"It's them!" I squealed, proving that I am a squealer in the right circumstances. "It's Theresa and Daddy!"

They were alive!

They were safe!

I felt a sudden pang of concern as I realized Roger and Samantha were nowhere around, but I was overjoyed to see my that husband and my daughter were both alive.

And then Andrew pushed Theresa away and stabbed her in the chest.

I immediately knew I hadn't really seen that. Maybe I was so overwhelmed with elation I wasn't seeing straight, or maybe this whole experience had finally driven me to insanity, but I knew for certain I hadn't just seen Andrew stab our daughter.

And I didn't see him laugh as she fell to the ground.

And I didn't see him crouch down over her body and raise the knife.

"Mommy!" Kyle's shriek was so loud it snapped me out of my state of disbelief and made me realize what I was seeing was completely real.

Better to have gone insane.

I floored the gas pedal and the limousine rocketed forward. Andrew looked up at the car, still holding the knife in the air. I slammed on the brakes right before I reached him.

"Stay in the car!" I wailed at Kyle as I threw open the door and got out. "Andrew! Stop!"

He looked at me, confused. His eyes were wild and unfocused.

Theresa was bleeding badly, gasping for breath, and clawing at her wound.

"You don't scare me," Andrew said.

I walked toward him, slowly, carefully, trying not to set him off. If he chose to plunge the knife into Theresa again, I wouldn't be able to stop him.

"Andrew, please, look at me."

He grinned. "I am looking at you! What, you got problems with those demon eyes of yours? Maybe you should pop 'em out and put in a new pair!" He gestured at Theresa with the knife. "Wanna try hers?"

I spoke slowly, calmly. "Please, Andrew, you don't want to hurt your daughter."

"I don't have a daughter. I'm a freeeeeeee demon slayer!" He let out a joyous whoop.

What the hell had they done to him?

"Mommy..." said Theresa, weakly, reaching her arm out toward me.

"Please, let me take her," I said. "She'll bleed to death."

Andrew ran his index finger across the stab wound and held it up, looking at it closely. "It looks like oil. You demons bleed black oil. That must be why you live in fire."

"She's not a demon. She's your daughter."

"She's not my daughter!" Andrew shouted. "She's a disgusting, rotting creature! And I'm not scared of you!"

But he was. His fear was obvious. Was he really seeing demons?

I took a step forward. "That's right, she is a demon. And if you touch her, I'll destroy you."

Andrew snorted. "I'm not scared."

"GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER OR I'LL DRAG YOU INTO THE PITS OF HELL!" I screamed.

Andrew cried out in fear and scrambled away from her. I could now see he had something that looked like a camera attached to his chest.

I strode forward and raised my arms to become more intimidating. "YOU'LL BURN WITH US!"

"No!" Andrew got to his feet. "I'll kill all of you!"

He rushed at me with the knife.

I moved out of the way, but then I twisted my foot and fell to the ground.

Theresa's breathing was rapid and frantic.

I got up as quickly as I could, just in time for Andrew to thrust the knife at me. It tore across my side, cutting deep.

I punched Andrew in the face.

He put his hand to his cheek and stumbled away. "Oh, shit, it burns!"

I let out my best approximation of a demonic roar. Under any other circumstances I would have felt completely ridiculous, but now, in the moment, I felt like I truly was a demon.

"I'll eat you alive!" I screamed.

Andrew lunged at me with the knife but missed.

I heard the car door open behind me.

"Daddy, stop!" Kyle screamed.

"Kyle, get back in the car!"

"Daddy, don't hurt her!"

Andrew swung at me again. The tip of the blade sliced across my chest, but it was just a scratch.

"Kyle, breathe fire!" I shouted. "Breathe fire on him! Burn him! Burn his eyes out!"

Andrew raised his arm to shield his eyes.

I punched him in the stomach. He doubled over and staggered away, groaning. The knife fell out of his hand and he reached down to pick it up.

I rushed for the weapon, and our hands met upon its handle. We struggled for a moment, but it was quickly clear he was going to win. Our gazes locked. As I lost my grip on the knife, I stared into his eyes, trying to see if there was any hint of recognition, anything I could use to bring my husband back to reality.

Nothing. Just pure fear.

I glanced down. It was a camera mounted on his chest. I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled as hard as I could.

Andrew cried out as the metal plate affixing the camera to his chest started to tear free. The flesh underneath was red and blistered and bloody and I realized with horror that the plate had been burnt onto him.

He slapped me, hard, but I didn't let go.

The camera ripped free, taking pieces of skin with it.

Andrew howled with pain and pressed his hand to the wound. "My beacon!" he shouted.

I flung the camera toward the woods as hard as I could. It smacked into a tree and fell to the ground.

Andrew got to his feet, whimpering. "Where is it? What did you do with it?"

"Andrew, please! You're not in your right mind! They did something to you!"

"Where's my beacon?"

"Your name is Andrew Mayhem. Andrew Mayhem! It's a goofy name, but it's yours!"

"I know what my fucking name is!"

"And I'm Helen Mayhem. I'm your wife."

"I don't have a wife."

"And Theresa is your daughter. Kyle is your son."

"Shut up!"

"Andrew, I love you!" I said, somehow managing to stand back up. "We all love you!"

Andrew slammed his hands over his ears. "Shut up!"

"Andrew, please, come back to us!"

It was working. I could feel it working.

"I said shut up!"

I stepped toward him. My leg wobbled and I nearly lost my balance, but I did it.

"This isn't you."

"You don't know who I am!"

"I know exactly who you are. You're the man I married."

Andrew stared at me.

Was that a flash of recognition in his eyes?

A flash of love?

"Helen...?" he asked.

"Yes, it's me!"

His voice cracked. "Helen...what have I done?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

"It wasn't your fault," it said. "They did something to you."

I nodded. "Yes, they did something to me."

Blood gushed from where the demon had ripped off my beacon. It was pouring out like a waterfall. I didn't even know I had that much blood, but yet it gushed out, quickly soaking into the ground as it hit.

The larger demon took another step toward me. I forced myself not to cry out in fear or disgust. I had no idea what trick this creature was trying to play by insisting it was my wife...my wife, if such a revolting thing could even be imagined...but maybe if I played along I could defeat it.

"Where are Roger and Samantha?" the demon asked.

I shrugged.

"Are they alive?"

Yes? No? What was the best answer? Did this demon fear them? Did this demon need them?

"I don't know," I said.

The demon stepped away from me. Its scaly, slimy skin glistened in the sunlight. "I'm taking Theresa," it said.

It crouched down next to the fallen demon. I couldn't let it do this. I'd be punished if I didn't slay them. I had to kill them as quickly as possible.

"I'm going to send help for you," the demon said. "Everything will be okay, I promise."

The demon scooped up the smaller creature in its wretched arms.

Blood continued to pour from my chest. And then it squirted from my eye. I wasn't sure how I could see blood squirting out of my eye, but I could. Suddenly it was squirting out of both eyes.

"Stop it!" I demanded, rubbing at my eyes to block the flow. "I need that blood in me!"

The blood that had soaked into the ground began to bubble to the surface, quickly rising over my shoes.

The demon had cursed me.

I saw faces in the blood. Screaming faces. Laughing faces. Crying faces. All of them looking at me.

I turned and ran.

I didn't care if I'd be punished. I didn't care if the demons got away. I just had to escape from this place, get out of here before I drowned in my own blood and the faces sunk their fangs into me.

I ran into the forest. Sap oozed from the trees, trapping birds and squirrels and other forest animals within. Razor blades flowed in the sap, slicing the poor things without mercy.

I smacked into a tree, knocking my face off. It hit the ground, face-down. I continued running, leaving it behind.

Trees reached for me with their branches, ripping off my arms and legs, which were quickly replaced with new arms and legs for the trees to rip off. I'd never realized I had so many arms and legs.

I wished my chest would quit bleeding. This was starting to get ridiculous.

As I ran, I glanced behind me (without turning my head, which was odd) and saw a giant pile of my twitching arms and legs. I could also see a tongue flapping around in there, even though my own tongue was clearly still in my...oh, nope, wait, it was gone.

I ran out into a dirt clearing. An infinite clearing, where the trees couldn't detach any more of my limbs.

In fact, the clearing was kind of boring.

I twiddled my thumbs.

I twiddled my tongues, since I now seemed to have two.

That demon had looked kind of familiar, now that I thought about it. Maybe I'd tried to slay her in some other plane of existence. Maybe we'd dated. It seemed unlikely that I'd ever dated a demon, but I'd done some experimenting in college.

I heard a sound like a squeaky faucet handle turning, and the blood flow from my chest grew weaker and weaker until it stopped altogether. With a sound like a zipper closing, the wound healed back up, leaving only a scar that read "Do Not Pry Open."

The ground began to rumble.

Earthquake!

Or a tornado with ground-rumbling properties!

Tornado with ground-rumbling properties. That was just silly. I laughed at my own foolishness, which was difficult with seventeen or eighteen tongues in my mouth.

And my severed pinky. I wondered how that got in there.

Something was emerging from the ground in front of me. I hoped it was a bag of gold instead of a zombie.

The object broke free to the surface.

It was a tombstone. The inscription read "Graverob This, Asshole."

Another tombstone burst out of the ground: "R.I.P. Andrew Mayhem." Then another: "R.I.P. Helen Mayhem." Theresa and Kyle Mayhem followed.

Now hundreds of tombstones were bursting through the ground. One emerged directly underneath my feet, knocking me to the ground. As I fell I hit my head on a tombstone, knocking off the top half of my skull.

I lost consciousness for a few years.

When I recovered, I yanked off my new beard and realized I was surrounded by millions of tombstones. They were so close together that the people had to be buried standing up, or several bodies deep. Or else they were really tiny people.

I bellowed in terror, just for the hell of it.

Goblin made his way through the tombstones. My arch-nemesis was looking bad, his face a patchwork of scars and gashes, but I had to admit his cyborg makeover did look pretty cool.

"Andrew," he said, nodding politely.

"Goblin," I said, returning his nod.

"Why aren't you digging?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Dunno."

"Don't you know where you are?"

I looked around without moving my head. The iron gates read "Sanity Cemetery." "I'm in Sanity Cemetery," I replied. "Duh."

"Your sanity is buried here, Andrew," Goblin informed me.

"I'm insane?"

"Yes."

"That sucks."

"Surely you don't think all of this is real, do you?"

One of my tongues popped out of my mouth and oozed along the ground like a speedy slug. "Dunno."

"You must dig," Goblin said. He peeled off one of his scars like a sticker. "Dig deep."

"With what?"

Goblin pointed to my right arm. It had become a shovel.

"Ah, thanks," I said.

"Dig."

Okay, I'd dig. Digging was fun.

A tombstone in front of me read "Casket For Sale (Only Used Once). Serious Inquiries Only, Please." There was a glowing red X in the dirt in front of it. I wondered if this could be some sort of sign.

I began to dig. It wasn't easy, because when you're digging with a regular shovel you use your feet to slam it into the ground, but I couldn't do that because the shovel was my arm, and so it was pretty awkward at first and it was kind of hurting my back, not to mention the whole weirdness factor of having my own arm be a shovel, I mean, the tongues were weird, too, but at least they were just multiples of a standard body part, while a shovel was a completely foreign appendage to the human body.

At least the ground was soft.

"Gonna dig that grave, gonna dig it deep," I sang, as a chorus of souls in torment accompanied me. "Gonna dig my sanity right out of the dirt."

"He's gonna dig his sanity right out of the dirt!" sang the tormented souls.

Helen Mayhem. Why did that name sound so familiar?

Oh, right. Because she had the same last name as me.

I dug and dug and dug. Worms squirmed out of the sides of the hole and recited non-rhyming poetry to me.

Theresa Mayhem sounded familiar, too.

Oh, right. The last name thing again.

The hole was now well over six feet deep. That damn tombstone better not have been lying about the casket for sale.

Kyle Mayhem. That name also rang a bell. I couldn't quite put my finger on why it rang that bell, or what particular bell it rang, but...

Was he my son?

My arm-shovel struck casket.

I crouched down and brushed the dirt away. It was a pretty nice casket. I wondered why somebody would sell it.

I threw open the lid.

My brain was inside.

I picked it up, being careful to use both hands so I didn't drop it. It was lighter than I expected.

Helen. Theresa. Kyle.

Where was I supposed to put this brain? I did a quick check and saw that the top of my skull was still missing. "Hey, Goblin, watch this!" I said, tossing my brain up into the air as high as I could.

Helen in my arms, the baby in her womb...

My brain sailed back down to earth. I positioned my skull just right.

Helen almost breaking every bone in my hand during labor with Theresa...

Almost there...almost there...

Kyle, the most beautiful baby ever born in the entire world, even with that gook all over him...

Perfect catch!

"I'm sane!" I cried out. "In your face, multiple tongues!"

I began kicking tombstones out of the way as I did my victory lap. They scattered to the wind like playing cards. "Goooooooo Team Mayhem! Woo-hoo!"

I smacked into a tree.

Then I threw up.

I tried to spit the extra tongues out of my mouth, but they weren't there.

My finger hurt. At least the stump did.

I braced myself against the tree and vomited again. What a horrible, horrible nightmare, but it was already starting to fade...

No, it wasn't. Nothing was fading but the visions.

I wasn't a demon slayer. I was a husband and a father and a best friend.

And a madman.

I'd tried to kill Helen.

I'd stabbed Theresa.

The reality of the situation hit me with such force that for several long moments I could do nothing but stand there, gasping for breath.

One of the tombstones fluttered past my ear and faded away.

I bent over, but there was nothing left to vomit. I dry heaved a few times, and then wiped off my mouth and desperately tried to figure out what to do.

It didn't take long to come up with the answer. Of course, it was a vague answer, not particularly helpful, and without a plan of action attached to it, but at least I knew I had to get back to my family and get them to safety.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I hadn't gone far into the woods, and as I emerged onto the road Helen had just finished getting Theresa into the limousine. She looked over at me. It was going to take crates of chocolate, truckloads of roses, and the combined efforts of Hallmark's most heartfelt greeting card writers to get me out of this one.

"I'm fine now," I said, keeping my distance. "I swear I'm fine now."

"How do I know that?"

"Well...you won't hear me babbling about being a demon slayer anymore."

Helen didn't respond.

"They gave me some weird drug," I said. "I don't know what it was, but they injected me with it and it turned me into a...it turned me into somebody who would do what I did. But it wasn't me."

"I know," Helen said.

"Is there a gun in the car?" I asked. "Duct tape, maybe? Some way for you to be sure I won't hurt you? I won't, I swear I won't, but I don't expect you to believe me. I could ride in the trunk."

"There's duct tape."

"How's Theresa?"

"You hurt her bad."

I forced myself to fight back tears. "She'll be okay, right?"

"I have to get her medical attention as soon as possible. I've patched her up with what I could find but she lost a lot of blood. Andrew, I have to go."

"No! I need to go with you! Helen, I know you don't trust me and I don't expect you to, but Roger and Samantha are still in serious danger, and we have to save them! And the rest of the maniacs could be here any—"

Witch came around the corner.

She was walking, holding a revolver, and looked completely beat.

"Don't move," she said, pointing the gun at me as she walked. "Just stay where you are."

I raised my hands in the air. Helen looked uncertain about whether she should take the risk of trying to get into the limousine.

Witch stopped about ten feet away from us. "This is all bullshit," she said, her voice a monotone. "We're not getting out of this one, I can feel it. I had to help kill a man who didn't even know I loved him. I just don't care anymore." She shook her head sadly. "All of you can run. Maybe you'll get away, maybe you won't, but either way, it's not my problem."

She turned the revolver away from me and put the barrel in her mouth. Then she closed her eyes and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

She pulled the trigger a couple more times, removed the barrel from her mouth, and opened her eyes. "Well," she said. "This is awkward."

"Do you, uh, want to borrow a knife?" I asked.

Witch shook her head.

"I could give you directions to a spiked pit. That would do the trick."

"Nah, I'm just going to head back to my truck, I guess. If they catch me, they catch me." She sighed, and then turned around and started walking back the way she came.

I was pretty sure she wouldn't let us use her as a hostage again, so I returned my attention to Helen. "We have to get out of here," I said. "Roger and Samantha could still be alive."

Helen nodded. "You can ride with us. Theresa and Kyle will be in the back. You know that if you make a move for them, I'll have to kill you."

"I understand."

"I mean it."

"I believe you," I said, hurrying over. "I'll drive. You get in the back with the kids."

Moments later I was behind the wheel and we sped off, only to slow down again. Witch was in the middle of the road, walking slowly.

I honked. She didn't seem to even hear it.

I wasn't sure what to do here. Should I just run her over? That seemed kind of extreme, considering that she was basically harmless at this point and her body would most likely get wedged underneath the limousine and delay our escape.

I honked again.

She moved slightly to the left, giving me just enough room to get around her. I floored the gas pedal and we sped off.

"Andrew, your finger!" Helen exclaimed, looking at me from the back of the limo.

"Yeah, it got flushed," I said. "What happened to your foot?"

"Wolf trap. What happened to your face?"

"Flying debris from the camper when it exploded, a few thousand punches, I smacked into a couple of trees..." I glanced up at the rear-view mirror and noticed Kyle watching me carefully. "Kyle, I'm really sorry about this," I said. "They forced Daddy to take medicine that screwed with his brain, but I would never, ever hurt you."

"You hurt Theresa," he said in a quiet voice.

"I know, but it wasn't really me. It was the bad men."

Kyle turned away and looked out the window.

"How's Theresa doing?" I asked.

"She's unconscious."

"Is there a cell phone back there? Maybe we can get a signal now."

Helen brightened just a bit. "I did! The police are on their way!"

An explosion nearly sent the limo careening off the road. I quickly regained control of the vehicle and kept up the rapid speed as I glanced over at the source of the explosion. Something huge had blown up in the woods.

"What was that?" Helen asked, moving to the other side of the limo to peer out the window.

"I'm guessing it was their lab," I said, feeling utterly sick to my stomach. That is, even more utterly sick to my stomach than I was already feeling. "They must know that the cops are on their way. They're probably getting out and trying to cut down on the evidence."

"Do you think Roger and Samantha were...?"

"They're fine. They have to be fine." Unless Mr. Burke and Troll had gone suicidal like Witch, they probably weren't in the lab when it exploded. And they might have brought along Roger and Samantha, if only as hostages.

I'd gone through too much on this crappy vacation to lose my best friend. It was possible I'd never be able to reconcile with my family, but at least they were going to get out of this alive, and damn it, so were Roger and Samantha. I hadn't vowed many things in my life, but I was vowing this.

We continued speeding down the road, kicking up clouds of dirt in our path. This is what I'd always envisioned driving a limo to be like.

Because of the way my screwed-up mind works, I thought of several amusing and insensitive comments to make about our current situation, but I didn't think they would be taken in the "mental defense mechanism" spirit in which they were intended, so I kept them to myself.

I had to keep slowing down around corners because of potential tire shredders, but apart from that we were making great time.

And then, up ahead, was a semi truck. The back of it didn't contain a helpful sign reading "Looney Cyborg Makers, Inc." but I was pretty sure this was a good development. Now I just had to hope my friends were inside.

The semi was going fast, but the limo could go faster and I drove up right behind it, doing about fifty.

Now what?

"Helen, I need you up front," I said. "You'll have to drive."

"Why?"

"Because I'm getting out."

Helen climbed over into the front, wincing in pain as she bashed her injured foot against the seat in the process.

I didn't want to let the semi out of my sight, but I also didn't want to do something dumb like crash in the middle of a tricky driver-switch maneuver, so I applied the brakes gently enough to avoid catapulting Theresa onto the floor and brought the limousine to a stop. Helen and I switched spots, and then we took off after the semi again.

"What exactly are you planning to do?" Helen asked.

"I'm getting onto the semi."

"How?"

"Still working that out."

"Andrew, you don't even know if they're in there!"

"They're either in there or they were in the explosion. I'm just trying to hope for the best."

It took about a minute to catch up to the semi. I wasn't sure if the occupants knew they were being followed.

"Get as close behind it as you can without actually ramming it," I instructed.

"You're not going to jump, are you?"

"Still working that out. But yes."

"No!"

"I'm not letting Roger die in there! You have no idea what they're doing to people, even their own people. They're turning them into cyborgs."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Cyborgs. Half-human, half-machine."

"I know what cyborgs are, I just mean...I beg your pardon?"

"I'll explain it later." I rolled down the passenger-side window. "Okay, I'm going to climb out on top of the limo and then out onto the front hood. When you get close enough to the semi, I'm going to jump onto the back."

"Andrew, that's crazy!"

"I don't have any choice!"

"Sure you do." Helen applied the brakes. "Let me stop the car, and then you can get on the hood."

"Oh. Yeah. That's much better. Thanks."

When the car stopped, I threw open the passenger door and got out. Joe barked in what I assume was support for my cause. "Make sure the kids know never, ever to do this," I said, shutting the door and climbing onto the front hood.

Helen resumed driving. None of the insane things I'd done in my life up to this point including jumping from moving vehicles, so it would be nice to add a new experience to my resume.

It wasn't long before we caught up to the semi again. I inched my way closer to the edge of the front hood, not feeling particularly secure in my balance. I hoped my missing pinky wouldn't be a liability.

I waved for Helen to move closer to the semi. Now about two feet separated the two vehicles. If the driver of the semi suddenly decided to slam on his brakes, I was going to be extraordinarily squished.

Okay, you'll be fine, I told myself. You can do this. You've seen it in hundreds of movies. The only thing those actors have that you don't are stunt doubles and CGI effects.

Helen got closer. I moved into a squatting position, promptly lost my balance, and very nearly took a dive right off the front of the limousine. I managed to steady myself and recover from my heart attack, and then I got myself back into the squatting position.

It really wasn't that bad of a jump. Hell, if she got any closer, I could just step across. No problem. Piece of cake.

And then either the semi slowed down or Helen sped up. The front of the limousine hit the back of the semi, not hard enough to do any damage but hard enough to give the limo one hell of a jolt.

I tumbled backwards, breaking my fall with my hands. I'd never ridden in a semi truck before, so I didn't know for sure, but I assumed they'd be able to feel a limousine ramming into their back.

I glanced back at Helen. She looked apologetic.

The semi didn't seem to be slowing down or swerving or anything, so I got back into my jumping position. If they knew we were back here, it was even more crucial than ever that I get Roger and Samantha to safety as quickly as possible.

Helen brought me closer to the rear of the semi again. I took a deep breath, imagined myself as Indiana Jones or James Bond or even Buster Keaton instead of the Stan Laurel that I really was, and made the leap.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Making the jump onto the semi was surprisingly easy. Almost too easy, making me think that perhaps the back half of the semi was going to topple over and crush me.

Now, the big question was, if I were a hostage in this truck, where would I be? If Roger and Samantha were up front, that was going to force me to climb up onto the semi's roof, crawl to the front, and do some sort of daring maneuver to get into the front seat, after which I'd probably get shot. Hopefully they weren't up front.

I'd check the back first. It was closer.

We sped past a faded wooden sign reading "Wreitzer Park." Though I only got a quick glance, I had to admit the place looked pretty nice. Savage killers notwithstanding, Samantha had made a good choice.

I crouched down, not having much room to crouch, and grabbed the handle that unlatched the sliding rear door.

It wouldn't budge. I pulled as hard as I could, but the handle held firm. I noticed a keyhole in the lower corner of the door. Damn.

Helen had fallen back, so I waved for her to drive closer again, and then motioned for her to roll down her window. "I need the keys!" I shouted.

Helen stuck her head out the window. "What?"

"Keys!" I made a key-turning-in-a-lock motion. "I need Medusa's keys!"

I wasn't sure if Helen knew who Medusa was, but she nodded her understanding and went to work, presumably detaching the limo key from the rest of the keys on the ring.

She held up the key ring. "Throw it!" I shouted, reaching out with one hand while holding on to the semi with the other.

Helen got as close to the semi as she could without ramming it again, and then tossed me the keys.

I caught them.

And then they bounced out of my hand.

I lunged for them, momentarily losing sight of the fact that I was hanging off the back of a speeding semi truck, and fell forward. I caught the keys as I fell and both of my hands slammed onto the front hood of the limousine.

Now I was stuck between the two vehicles in a push-up position. Nice.

We hit a bump, and my feet slipped off the back of the semi. My shoes scraped the ground, and for a second I was terrified I was going to be pulled underneath the limo.

Helen quickly slowed down.

My shoes scraped against the dirt road a few more times as I frantically struggled to climb all the way up onto the hood of the limo. With the keys in my right hand I couldn't get a solid grip, and my hand slid down the front hood, scraping the paint job along the way.

I let go of the keys and got a better grip. As the keys slid toward me, I slammed my face against the hood and caught them in my teeth.

I got my feet back safely on the hood and gave Helen a thumbs-up sign. She gave me an incredulous look.

She picked up speed again, and I did another leap onto the back of the semi. I bent down, took the key ring out of my mouth, and tested the first key of about fifteen.

Nope.

I tested the second key.

Nope.

I noticed she had a keychain depicting Medusa from Clash of the Titans. Cool.

The third key didn't work, either.

The semi took a sharp turn that forced me to grab hold with both hands, but I didn't drop the keys. The woods were thinning to my left, and I realized we were about to enter the freeway.

The semi picked up speed. I regained my balance and tried the fourth key. Nope.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh keys didn't work, either.

The eighth key slid in perfectly.

And then broke off in the lock when I turned it.

The semi merged onto the freeway and picked up speed.

I tried to turn what was left of the key, but there was no way that was going to work with just my fingers. I needed pliers or tweezers or nail clippers.

Helen probably had nail clippers.

I motioned for her to drive up close again. I leapt back onto the front hood, ignoring the horrified expression of the elderly woman in a red Saturn next to us, and crawled up to the windshield.

"Fingernail clippers!" I shouted.

She picked up a red purse from the seat and tossed it into the back, saying something to Kyle I couldn't hear. I waited less-than-patiently for a few moments, and then Kyle passed something up to Helen. She reached out the window and handed the fingernail clippers to me.

I jumped back onto the semi, feeling like a professional at this point.

We had to be doing about seventy by now. If I lost my balance and fell off, I'd be a nice long smear across the pavement.

I opened the fingernail clippers, managed to get them around the broken key, and turned. The key began to turn...slowly...slowly...

Success!

I stuffed the fingernail clippers into my pocket in case I needed to clip somebody with them, and then pulled on the handle to release the sliding door latch. This time it moved.

I grabbed the handle on the door, strained for a few seconds, and then raised the door a couple of feet, hoping all of this hadn't been for nothing.

I pushed it up all the way and was met with a blast of freezing cold air. I looked inside.

Corpses galore.

There were dozens of them. Some were strapped to the walls of the semi, while others dangled from a huge contraption running along the center of the semi like clothing at a dry cleaners.

All of them were cyborgs. There were corpses with guns for hands, corpses with body armor, corpses with flashing lights on their bodies, corpses with robot heads, two corpses welded together like Siamese twins...a huge horrific variety.

Some of them seemed relatively fresh. Others were mostly rotted away.

Troll ran toward me.

I moved out of the way just in time, grabbing onto a cold and clammy dead arm to keep from falling out of the semi.

I ran past the dangling corpses toward the front of the vehicle, which was lit from above. At the far end, my heart leapt as I saw Roger and Samantha, seated side-by-side, strapped to their chairs, both of them alive!

Samantha's face looked unharmed, but her clothing was marked with spots of blood. Lots of them.

"How stupid can you be?" Troll asked from behind me. I spun around and saw him coming toward me with his trusty knife. "You could've been home free. Let me tell you, buddy, I spent some quality time with that bitch, and she's not worth saving."

I clenched my fists.

Troll rushed at me again. I pushed through a pair of dangling corpses into the aisle on the other side then quickly looked around for something to use as a weapon.

Well, hell, there were plenty of possibilities.

But Troll found one first. He grabbed the wrist of one of the cyborgs and pointed it at me. I ducked back into the row of dangling corpses as a gunshot went off.

These corpses were loaded!

He fired again, hitting the arm of a corpse next to me and sending a squirt of what I assumed was formaldehyde into the air. I grabbed the closest corpse arm, but it was outfitted with a calculator that didn't look especially helpful.

I ran back toward the rear of the vehicle. The limousine was no longer behind us.

I looked over at a corpse strapped to the wall. Half of its face had been hollowed out and replaced with an abnormally large steel-toothed grin. Its eye sockets were empty. Its hand was a small cannon.

Before I could unstrap its arm, I heard the roar of a motor. Troll burst into the aisle, pushing a cyborg corpse on wheels. One of its arms was entirely metal, extended in front of it, and contained a running chainsaw.

Troll rushed toward me at top speed, the chainsaw severing various protruding corpse body parts as it rolled down the aisle.

I pushed my way into the other aisle, watching as the corpse rolled out of the back of the truck and landed on the hood of a Volkswagen behind us. The car swerved away as the chainsaw blade tore through the hood, sending up a shower of sparks.

Troll pushed his way into my aisle. I used a good old fashioned corpse fist to punch him in the face.

"Ooooooh," he said with an excited grin. I really, really hated Troll.

I dove at him and we both hit the floor, inches away from the open rear of the semi. Troll rolled me over, and we found ourselves underneath several dangling corpse feet, one of which had metal shoes lined with razor blades.

We rolled again, into the other aisle. I put my hands tightly around Troll's neck, trying to strangle him. With my luck, the sick freak was into asphyxiation, too.

I squeezed hard, hoping his eyes would pop right out of their sockets.

I'd forgotten he still had his knife, but I saw the flash of the blade an instant before it would have plunged into my side. I released his neck and rolled off of him. Troll slammed the knife toward me, the tip striking the floor of the semi.

I kicked him in the face with a corpse foot.

Troll got up and quickly began to unfasten another dangling corpse. I took that opportunity to push back into the other aisle and hurry toward Roger and Samantha. "Any suggestions?" I asked.

They both shook their heads.

Troll appeared at the end of our aisle, holding a corpse in his arms. Well, half a corpse. This one was gone from the waist down. It had been a woman. Her hands were comprised of several blades, each about half a foot long, arranged like propellers.

The blades began to spin.

I reached over and unfastened the nearest corpse, which dropped into my arms and was a hell of a lot heavier than I expected. I managed to keep it in an upright position, and slid it down the aisle toward Troll.

Its head lolled back, looking at me upside-down. I pushed its head forward again.

"Cyborg corpse fight!" Troll shouted gleefully. I lifted my corpse's arm, which was a standard-issue dead arm, and tried to punch him with it. The arm went into the blades and within seconds was gone up to the elbow.

Troll thrust his corpse toward me. The blades ripped through my corpse, chopping through flesh and bone. As the blades came through to the other side I released my hold on my useless cadaver and got the hell out of the way.

Troll cackled with laughter, but stopped as he realized my corpse was wedged on one of the blades. He had to put both bodies on the floor and brace mine with his foot to get the blades out. They popped free with a shower of embalming fluid.

I made a move toward the other side, but realized that Troll's next act might be to use the blades on Roger and Samantha. I freed another corpse, this one with metal plating on its torso.

It was way too heavy to keep upright and I dropped it to the floor. I briefly reflected upon the fact that I was showing some severe disrespect for the dead, and then proceeded to show more disrespect for the dead by unlatching another cyborg.

I pressed a button on its back. An electronic voice boomed: "Suicide sequence initiated. Twenty seconds to self-destruct."

"Get it out of here!" Troll screamed. "I'll help you!"

Together we dragged the corpse to the rear of the semi. Two cars were behind us. "Get the hell out of the way!" I shouted, waving for them to move.

The cars moved.

We tossed the corpse out the back. It exploded as soon as it struck the pavement, sending body bits twenty feet into the air and covering the automobiles in the other lane.

"Don't press any more buttons," Troll told me.

"I won't."

Troll tackled me, and we smashed into one of the corpses still strapped to the wall.

"Suicide sequence initiated," boomed an identical electronic voice. "Self-destruct in twenty seconds."

"Get it out of here! Get it out of here!" Troll shouted. We hurriedly unfastened the straps, dragged the corpse to the edge, and shoved it over the side.

That explosion was red and much more disgusting. Apparently it was a fresher corpse that hadn't been embalmed. A nearby car's windshield was drenched, and the vehicle scraped against the center divider for a few seconds until the driver regained control.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Goblin strapped to the wall, next to the corpse with the hollowed-out face.

I punched Troll in the chin. "Are any more of these rigged to explode?"

"Six, I think."

I punched him again, knocking him back several steps. Then I grabbed the cannon hand of the corpse with the hollowed-out face, took aim at Troll, and pulled the trigger.

A huge stream of flame jettisoned from the cannon, missing Troll but hitting an entire row of the dangling corpses. As their dead bodies caught on fire and the back of the semi began to fill with smoke, I decided this had probably been another one of my less-than-completely-desirable moves.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Helen's Side

After Andrew made it inside the semi, I swerved into the next lane and sped up alongside the front of the truck. The driver looked down at me and nervously stroked his goatee.

I wasn't sure what to do at this point. It wasn't like I could ram the semi off the road. The best I could do is keep up with it and be ready to help out when it finally came to a stop, or when Andrew (and hopefully Roger and Samantha) were ready to jump back onto the hood of the limousine.

I hated feeling so useless, but what else could I do?

"Kyle, how's your sister?" I asked.

"She's breathing funny."

"Theresa, can you hear me? How do you feel?"

"I hurt..." Theresa groaned, so softly I could barely hear her.

"It's okay, sweetie. We're going to get you help. I promise." I tilted the rear-view mirror so I could see her. "You're being very brave. I'm very proud of you."

This news didn't seem to make Theresa feel any better.

I reached over and picked up the cell phone. If I let the police know exactly where we were, maybe they could—

"Mommy watch out!"

I swerved, slammed on the brakes, and tried to remember if I'd fastened my seat belt. Like a television with its electrical cord yanked from the outlet, my world shut off.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Burning corpses in the back of a semi = not good.

Not fragrant, either.

Troll was on the side with Roger and Samantha, so I hurried to the front, expecting to find him hovering over them, knife raised, face contorted into a sadistic grin.

Which is exactly what I saw.

But I'd gotten to the point where rushing at a knife-wielding maniac didn't seem like that big of a deal. I grabbed his maniacal knife-wielding arm and slammed him into another of the corpses strapped to the wall. This one didn't inform us that it would be self-destructing.

The semi swerved abruptly, knocking Troll and I back into the aisle with the burning corpses. Sparks were flying from several of them.

"You've ruined it all!" Troll shouted. "Mr. Burke is gonna shit a brick sideways!"

He slashed at me with the knife, missing completely. The smoke was starting to burn my eyes and it had to be affecting Troll as well because his next two slashes were even further off the mark.

He screamed in frustration and flung the knife at me. I heard the thunk of the blade hitting dead flesh behind me.

Troll coughed.

The flames were growing larger and more intense. Letting Roger and Samantha burn to death after all of this was simply not an option.

I let out a howl of primal rage, or what I figured was primal rage, and ran at Troll. I punched him in the face with my good hand and then my bad hand, not even feeling the pain.

Troll seemed to enjoy the first punch. The second punch, not so much.

I punched again and again, doing the primal rage howl thing with each one. I pummeled him with force I didn't even realize existed inside of me.

Troll spat out a large mouthful of blood. "Truce...?"

I grabbed him by the collar and rushed down the aisle, dragging him along the burning corpses as I did so. This son of a bitch was taking a leap out of the back of a speeding semi. Troll cried out in protest and struggled, but he couldn't get away.

As we reached the edge at a high rate of speed, I let him go.

No witty comment was necessary.

But Troll didn't fly out onto the pavement as planned. As he fell, his foot wedged behind one of the metal steps and he pitched forward onto the freeway.

He tried to use his hands to break his fall. It was not pretty. Troll found himself being dragged face-down behind a semi going about seventy, and not much more needs to be said about that.

There were no cars behind us to witness the gory sight. Presumably a smoke-billowing semi truck was not something other drivers wanted to linger around.

I returned to the back, wincing as a particularly nasty shower of sparks got me in the arm. I could now barely see Roger and Samantha through the smoke, but I felt my way over then removed Samantha's gag.

"Are you okay?" I asked her, as I began to unfasten the straps.

"Better than I was ten seconds ago."

"I don't know if this will help," I said, "but Troll's face is currently marking out a new lane divider."

"Actually, that does help."

"Good."

After I got her free, I went to work on Roger. "I bet you thought I wasn't coming back for you," I said.

"No, I thought you'd be here sooner."

"Sorry. I got distracted."

"What happened after they took you away?"

I stabbed my daughter and had a great time doing it...

"Nothing."

Samantha helped me unstrap Roger from his chair, and before long they were both free. Roger scooped Samantha up in his arms and the three of us quickly moved to the open end of the semi. The fire had spread and now included all of the hanging corpses in the center.

"I'm, uh, sure you've got a splendid escape plan," said Roger.

I knelt down, yanked Troll's foot out from where it was wedged, and set what was left of his body free. "You haven't had anything to do for the past few minutes. Didn't you think of one?"

"Extend the ramp," said Samantha.

I unlatched the metal ramp and Roger and I pushed it out to its full length. It scraped against the pavement with a sound even more hideous than the smell of burning flesh.

"This isn't going to work," Roger insisted. "Even without the fall, if we hit the pavement going this fast we'll be killed!"

"Well, we can't stay in here!" I said, gesturing to the burning corpses. Where the hell was Helen when I needed a limo to leap upon?

One of the corpses exploded behind us, causing several others to drop to the floor.

"This whole truck could blow up!" Samantha shouted.

"We can get off this thing," I said. "We just need some kind of padding."

"What kind of padding?" Roger asked.

I looked over at the corpses strapped to the wall.

Roger shook his head. "Oh, no way!"

I stood up and began to unfasten the corpse of a heavyset male with crossbows for hands and numerous wires protruding from his skin. "You look for some fluffy pillows. I'll take down the dead guy."

Instead of arguing, Roger helped me unfasten the corpse. "Oh, jeez, this is gonna be gross."

"At least they're not maggoty."

"Shut up. I mean it."

"Samantha, Goblin is hanging up on the other side. Try to tear off his feet."

"Say what?"

"They're wheels! Do it!"

Samantha nodded and left, scooting along on her knees.

"This is wrong on so many levels," said Roger, as we released the body. It fell to the floor, landing on its belly. Pushing as hard as we could, we managed to shove it over to the ramp.

"Here they are." Samantha handed me Goblin's foot-wheels. I slammed one of the bloody spikes between the heavyset corpse's shoulder blades and another into its lower back.

"We need more," I said, pointing to one of the fallen corpses. "That one has wheels, too."

Roger hurried over to it and tried to pry off the feet. "They won't come off! There's a metal band around them!" He glanced around and lifted the arm of another corpse. Its hand was a hacksaw. "You probably don't want to see this."

Moments later he returned. I pulled the meat off the wheels and tossed it aside, and then slammed the next two spikes into the corpse's back.

Another explosion, this one spraying us extremely well.

The semi swerved violently and dangling burning corpse legs just narrowly missed my head.

"Let's turn him over!" Roger, Samantha, and I all turned the corpse onto its back, and then maneuvered it over to the top of the ramp, head-first. It didn't roll easily.

"No way in hell is this going to work," said Roger.

"It'll be fine," I insisted. "We'll just all hold on tight and go for a ride. You take the front, Roger."

Roger climbed onto the corpse and sat on its chest.

"Oh, God...oh, God..." he said. "I can think of so many things I'd rather be doing right now."

The semi swerved again, and Samantha and I momentarily lost our hold on the corpse.

It was long enough to ruin our plan. The corpse rolled down the ramp as Roger frantically turned himself around and tried to reach for my arm.

"Shiiiiiit!" he cried, as the corpse rolled off the ramp and onto the freeway. Two of the wheels immediately went flying in opposite directions. Roger pressed himself down against the body as it slid across the pavement, its head bouncing up and down and its arms flapping.

The other two wheels popped out from underneath the corpse, but it continued to slide. Roger remained on top.

As the corpse slowed and we sped away, I could see that Roger was going to be fine.

Samantha and I were still screwed, though.

"Y'know, call me optimistic, but I think Corpse Surfing is going to be the next big fad to sweep the nation," I said.

Samantha just gaped at me.

"It worked, though, didn't it?" I asked. "So let's just find another cyborg and some more wheels and get the hell out of here, too!"

The semi turned slightly as we went off an exit. This could either be really good or really bad, depending on whether or not Mr. Burke decided to slow down to a reasonable speed or to just plow through everything doing seventy.

Since I didn't detect any reduction in speed, it appeared the latter was going to be the case.

"If we die," said Samantha, "I just want you to know I've always felt you were a really great person. Roger is lucky to have you as a friend."

"I've always felt the same way about you, too," I said, somewhat annoyed that my potential final words on this earth had to be a little white lie.

We took down another corpse. This one wasn't as big as the first and was unlikely to provide as much padding, but we had to make do with what we had. And with the thick smoke and dangerous flames, we also wouldn't be finding any more wheels.

There was a huge jolt as the semi smashed through something. A moment later I saw it had been a thick wooden fence.

The pavement turned to grass.

The semi began to slow down.

We were saved! Even without a handy corpse for protection, we certainly could handle a jump onto grass. What were a few more bumps, bruises, and open wounds at this point?

I saw Mr. Burke rolling on the grass, obviously just having leapt out of the vehicle. That probably wasn't good.

Another huge jolt.

And then suddenly our view of the grass became a view of the clear blue sky as the semi tilted at a forty-five degree angle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Samantha and I slid to the back of the semi, past the burning bodies, and smacked into the rear wall. The ramp dropped back into its chute with a loud crash.

The tilt of the semi increased. We hurriedly pressed ourselves into the corner as the burning bodies that had fallen slid down the floor toward us. I held on to the leg of the corpse strapped to the wall next to me and kicked the bodies away from us.

"It's okay, no problem," I said. "We're just hanging over a cliff or something."

The dangling corpses above us swung violently back and forth, and burning debris fluttered down upon us. It hurt to look up through the smoke and I launched into a fit of uncontrollable coughing.

As Samantha tried to crawl up the slope, the tilt increased yet again, creating an almost vertical climb, and she tumbled back against the far wall.

"It's okay, really," I insisted, when I could speak again. "They've got to have helicopters around, or maybe Roger flagged somebody down who has a rope, or maybe—"

"Andrew, stop trying to make the best of this!"

One of the hanging corpses came loose. It dropped and hit the far wall with a thud that caused the semi to shift a few inches.

"We can still get out of this! We can...we can...we can climb the bodies!"

"What?"

"We can climb up the bodies that are strapped to the wall!"

"I can't!"

"Yes, you can! I'll be right behind you." I grabbed her hand and placed it on the waist of the closest cyborg.

Another body fell. This one felt like it knocked the semi back a couple of feet. A couple of rounds of what sounded like automatic weapon fire went off as it hit, but I didn't feel any new holes in my body.

Samantha pulled herself up onto the corpse and I stayed behind her, trying to hold her steady. She screamed as she used her mangled foot to push herself up. I was worried the noise might have an avalanche effect and send the semi over whatever precipice it was hanging over, but I was in the mood to scream, too, so I didn't think she could stop herself.

She climbed up onto the second body in the cyborg ladder. I followed.

Two bodies fell at once. The impact jolted the semi enough that I let out a scream of my own, but we both held on to the corpses and continued climbing.

"You know, people pay good money to go mountain climbing on vacation," I said, hoping my sparkling wit would distract her from her agony and terror. "This is a lot better. This is going to be the new theme park ride at Universal Studios." Samantha didn't tell me to shut up, so I figured that was a good sign.

Then she grabbed a cyborg part that wasn't meant to have somebody climbing on it. It came loose and she lost her grip. She fell down to my corpse, grabbed it, failed to hang on, and crashed to the bottom.

"That's okay," I said. "Let's just try it again."

She didn't respond, and I could barely see her through the smoke.

What if she'd broken her neck?

I climbed down and knelt down next to her. "C'mon, Samantha, you can do this."

She shook her head. "No, I can't. He tortured me...I mean, he really...his knife...I just can't do it. I've got nothing left. Get out of here. Please."

"Not without you."

"You can't carry me! Please, we don't both need to die here."

"Look, I don't have time to get into the details, but one of the few ways for me to get a happy ending out of this is for me to bring you safely back to the love of your life. So we're getting out of this together. Don't argue."

"How are we going to do it if I can't climb?"

I considered that.

"I don't know. I'm still sort of hoping we'll be rescued."

The semi shifted and moved back at least two more feet.

"Maybe it's a really tiny cliff," I said. "We may be stressing out over nothing."

"Yeah, I'm sure Mr. Burke jumped out so he could drive the semi over a really tiny cliff."

"Don't be so pessimistic."

"Sorry."

"If we can't climb, we'll just have to..."

I left that sentence unfinished for a long moment.

Fly out? Teleport out? Wake up from a bad dream?

Shoot our way out?

Which of the corpses was it that nearly shot my foot off when it fell? I searched through the burning bodies as well as I could, yelping in pain about eight times, and found an arm with a machine gun on the end. Sweet.

I also found an axe with which to lop it off.

I did so quickly. Then I picked up the machine gun, let out my ninth yelp, and dropped it. The damn thing was hot.

"Sorry about this," I told Samantha as I took off my shoes and jeans. The next time Kyle questioned that whole "Make sure you have on clean underwear" parental command, I'd have an anecdote to share with him.

Using my jeans to keep my hands from getting burnt off, I picked up the machine gun, pointed it at the wall of the semi, and pulled the trigger.

The semi was filled with a deafening ratatatatatatat of machine gun fire and clangs as the bullets struck metal. Streaks of light burst through the holes.

I hate to admit it, but standing there wearing only my underwear, firing a machine gun, made me feel incredibly manly.

The bullets continued to chew away at the semi wall.

The semi began to slide backward.

I kept firing, hoping nobody was on the other side (unless it was Mr. Burke).

The machine gun finally ran out of bullets and I tossed it aside. We now had a really scary-looking opening with jagged edges that didn't look large enough to climb out without slicing ourselves to ribbons, but, hey, beggars can't be choosers.

The semi was still sliding. I looked through the hole and saw that we were indeed dangling over a cliff, that it was an extremely long drop to the ground, but that we'd smashed through a metal fence that was now twisted and within our reach. "You first," I told Samantha.

She wasted no time. She crawled over to the hole and I quickly helped her through, removing a long strip of her left leg in the process. She grabbed hold of the fence and began to scoot toward solid ground.

The semi slid again, taking the fence out of my reach.

I frantically began to climb the corpses.

"Andrew!" I heard Samantha scream on the other side.

I didn't respond because that would have used up valuable climbing energy. I tried to think happy thoughts. Happy climby thoughts.

I climbed up the third, fourth, and fifth bodies. Only about a dozen left. No problem.

As I got about halfway there, the semi began to pick up speed. So did I.

Helen, Theresa, Kyle, Roger, and Samantha were all alive, and damn it, I was going to join them. I climbed as fast as I could, eyes feeling like they were sizzling from the smoke, lungs burning, but not stopping.

I reached the second-to-last corpse.

Don't lose your grip. Don't lose your grip. Don't grab anything detachable. Don't grab anything detachable. I reached for the top corpse and accidentally stuck my hand in its open mouth, but pulled myself up anyway.

And then I was at the top.

And then the semi fell over the edge of the cliff.

And then I jumped.

The semi smashed into the riverbank about a hundred feet below. I hung from the cliff face, holding nothing that felt remotely firm enough to sustain me. My fingers dug into the grass but I could tell I was seconds away from a nice long fall onto a semi filled with burning cyborg corpses.

Samantha thrust her hand at me. I grabbed it.

As she pulled, I tried to use my feet against the dirt cliff face to give myself some leverage. It wasn't really working. But since I hadn't died in all of the other times I'd vowed I wouldn't die, I sure wasn't going to die here.

With Samantha's help, I pulled myself most of the way onto solid ground.

In the distance I saw Mr. Burke limping toward us.

I was pretty sure he was holding a gun.

"Samantha! Watch out!"

A shot rang out.

I tasted several drops of Samantha's blood in my open mouth.

And then I fell.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Helen's Side

I opened my eyes to red and blue flashing lights.

"Where are my children?" I demanded, sitting up in a panic. I was on a stretcher.

"It's okay, they're both in the ambulance," the paramedic assured me.

"My daughter was stabbed! You have to help her!"

"It's under control. You've been in an accident, but the other driver wasn't hurt. Please try to relax, ma'am."

"I can't relax! My husband, have you seen him?"

"Ma'am, there wasn't anybody else in the vehicle."

"I know! He was in a semi."

The paramedic's eyes widened. "Okay, we've got police cars investigating that situation right now. But there's nothing you can do, so just relax." He gave me an injection. "Just relax."

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

So here's what happened.

I didn't plummet down onto the semi, shattering my bones into a million pieces and burning my flesh in the flames within. Instead I slid down the cliff face, scraping the hell out of my arms and chest, and managed to get myself steadied about halfway down.

It was way too steep to climb back up without the aid of a corpse ladder, so I was forced to stay there, helpless, until I heard vehicles approach overhead.

When the cops pulled me to safety, they were loading Samantha into an ambulance. I hurried over there as best I could, trying to see if she was dead.

She'd been hit in the shoulder.

Mr. Burke was nowhere to be seen.

I let them load me into the ambulance.

As we sped down the freeway, the paramedic gave me the news. Helen, Theresa, and Kyle were all being rushed to the nearest hospital. They were all alive.

Roger was also in an ambulance on his way to the same hospital.

"Will she be okay?" I asked, looking over at Samantha.

The paramedic nodded. "She'll live. But what on earth happened to you people?"

I didn't answer.

* * *

Roger got released first, and his job was to bring us huge amounts of fast food instead of the crap they had available at the hospital.

Samantha regained consciousness in the middle of the second night. I got the news while I was sitting in Theresa's room, staring at my daughter, hating myself.

Kyle sat in the room with me, his arm bandaged up. "She's going to wake up," he said, knowingly.

"Yes, she will."

He scooted his chair closer to mine. "I know you didn't mean to do it. I know they gave you drugs."

"You're right," I said. "They did."

"I'm never, ever, ever going to use drugs."

I managed a smile. "Good for you, kiddo."

He looked at me, his expression solemn. "Daddy, if you want to cry, it's okay. I promise I won't tell anybody."

I held him tight and did just that.

Theresa regained consciousness three days later and couldn't remember anything that happened.

* * *

Mr. Burke got away. He must have hitchhiked or stolen a car at gunpoint, but as I write this the police still haven't caught him. Personally, I hope right now he's making cyborgs in hell.

* * *

Witch was found sitting on the side of the road, muttering incoherently to herself. The last I heard, she still hadn't spoken to anybody at the psychiatric ward.

* * *

Most of the corpses were identified by their dental records, at least those who still had teeth. They'd been missing over a period of three years.

Roger had ridden to safety on a man named Herschel Eberhardt, whose family issued a statement saying how proud they were that Herschel had saved a life six months after his death.

* * *

Samantha wouldn't tell us exactly what Troll did to her behind the closed door in the lab, but of course the doctors told us about her injuries. You don't want to know. Trust me.

* * *

The doctors admitted there wasn't much they could do to reattach a finger that had been flushed down the toilet. I kept trying to encourage a cool nickname like "Nine-Finger Mayhem," but nobody embraced that idea.

* * *

Joe the Pug was perfectly fine.

* * *

A few days later, Samantha and Theresa were transferred back to Chamber Memorial Hospital. And two weeks after the whole ordeal began, we had a huge "Welcome Home!" party for Theresa, which included balloons, cake, pug tricks, and fun for the entire family.

Helen stroked my arm tenderly as we sat on the couch, watching Theresa and Kyle fight over who loved Joe the most. I'd apologized to her approximately 1,837,612 times for what I'd done, and after a couple of days she seemed convinced I wouldn't have a relapse.

That night, we lay in bed, sweaty from our lovemaking. It was the first time we'd had sex since before the vacation, and though we were forced to be extremely careful because of our injuries, it had been a wonderfully pleasant experience, even with that stupid pug scratching at the door the entire time.

"I love you so much," she whispered. "I don't want to ever lose you."

"You won't." I kissed her gently on the lips. "I promise."

Theresa screamed.

I threw on a bathrobe and we rushed into her bedroom. Theresa was sitting up in bed, sobbing.

"What's the matter, sweetie? What's wrong?" asked Helen.

"Daddy! Daddy's trying to kill me!"

* * *

I lay on Roger's couch, unable to get comfortable. His couch sucked. Quite frankly, his apartment sucked, too. He needed to just move in with Samantha already. She had a much nicer place.

His cat, Reverse Snowflake, jumped up onto my chest and began to lick my face. "Your cat has very foul breath," I informed Roger as he walked into the living room.

"That's only because he pukes a lot."

I sat up and Roger sat down on the couch next to me. "What time is it?" I asked.

"Middle of the night."

"That's what I figured."

"Samantha told me all about what happened in the back of the semi."

"You mean when I took off my pants?"

"No, when you wouldn't leave without her."

"Oh, that. I was drunk."

"It means a lot to me. I'm serious."

"Well, you would've done the same for Helen."

"Yeah, I probably would have. So I guess we're even." He grinned. "Anyway, thanks for getting her out of there."

"No problem."

"So is it okay if she hangs out with us at the Java Joint next Wednesday?"

"Sure."

"I'm kidding, Andrew."

"Oh. Good."

"Get some sleep."

"I will."

I lay back down and closed my eyes. I still couldn't sleep, so I pushed the cat away, got up, found a notebook, and started writing.

And now I'm just about done.

It felt good to write this all down, but I'm not sure I want anybody to read it, except for Helen, who filled in some of the gaps.

I'm going to lock it away with instructions not to publish it until after I'm dead.

Or maybe I'll publish it after I get a happier ending.

So if you're reading these words...well, let's pretend it's the latter. I'm feeling optimistic.

EPILOGUE

Helen and I gazed up at the sonogram monitor, which featured bizarre shapes that looked like nothing identifiable as a human or even alien child. The sight brought tears to our eyes anyway.

She'd taken a beating, but she hadn't lost the baby. She was one strong mother and she was going to have one strong kid.

"Is it a boy or girl?" Helen asked.

The doctor smiled. "Both."

My eyes widened. "Oh my God! The kid's a hermaphrodite?"

Helen laughed and playfully swatted my arm. "No, you goof. He means we're having twins." The realization of that fact quickly sunk in and her voice became somewhat less chipper. "Twins."

"Actually, no," said the doctor. "Triplets."

Helen swatted my arm again. This time it wasn't quite as playful.

The End

LOST HOMICIDAL MANIAC

(ANSWERS TO "SHIRLEY")

Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to "Shirley") copyright 2011 by Jeff Strand

Cover design by Lynne Hansen http://www.LynneHansen.com

Pink fingernailed handcuffed fist by Sally Bosco http://www.SallyBosco.com

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the author.

For more information about the author, visit http://www.JeffStrand.com

PROLOGUE

A Parent's Cruel Wish Fulfilled

I was born late and painfully. Though I didn't grow up to be an abnormally huge guy, I was a very large infant, and my mom insisted that my birth hurt worse than any other baby who'd ever popped out of its mother in the history of the known universe. I'm sure this isn't true, since it's not like I had claws or spikes or anything, and she didn't have any other personal childbirth experiences with which to make a direct comparison, but that was her story.

From birth until age two, I was the most well behaved kid in the world, I'm told. Lots of smiling, no colic, and a good eater. Then, when I hit the terrible twos, I made up for my brief lifetime of positive behavior by turning into the loudest, most hyperactive kid who had ever existed. (Again, I believe this was exaggerated to make whatever point my parents were trying to make each time they brought it up.)

By age five, apparently my mom and dad were allowed to eat in restaurants again, though the plan to produce a sibling had long since been abandoned.

I can't remember for sure, but I think I was seven when my parents first suggested that it was going to be really, really funny someday when I had kids who acted just like me. My response was that these would be most charming children indeed, though I was being a smartass when I said it.

As I raced toward my teenage years, the threat of having offspring of my own intensified to something that my parents insisted would drive me to an early grave, similar to the one I was driving them toward.

"You're going to have a son just like you, and he's going to leave the freezer door open all night just like you, and he's going to ruin a hundred and thirty dollars' worth of meat just like you, and the stress is going to kill you," said my mom, after I'd missed an important step in the process of properly obtaining a bowl of ice cream in the middle of the night.

My thought on the matter was, no, I wouldn't, because unlike my own mom and dad, I'd been sufficiently warned. I wasn't going to have any kids. For that to happen I'd have to get married, and that was only for total losers. I was a free spirit! Ain't nobody gonna tie Andrew Mayhem down!

I got in trouble for using the word "ain't."

I honestly don't think I was a problematic teenager. Okay, I wasn't great in school, and this was during a time when parents would actually discipline their kids for bad grades instead of yelling at the teacher for making the tests too hard. And there were the occasional calls home because of an "attitude problem," and, yeah, detention was not unknown to me, and I tended to treat my curfew as a recommended guideline, and...all right, I was not a flawless model. But I never had parties that involved the house being trashed, I never did anything illegal except for some moderate trespassing, and any random drug test my parents might have sprung on me would have come back negative.

And despite the "You'll have kids of your own someday!" promises, I did not impregnate any of my (very few) high school girlfriends. It helps when most of your romantic experience comes from dating a girl named Charlene who vowed to wait a) until marriage, or b) until a football player named Joey casually hit on her at a party, whichever came first.

I did a lot of drinking in college, but I was living in a dorm, so my mom and dad didn't have to witness it. I called them every Monday night without fail, except when I was drunk. Most of the conversations were about how much they loved me, and, oh, yeah, since they were making a substantial financial contribution to my college education, could I try not to flunk any more classes?

When I was twenty-one, my dad got a new job and they moved up to the Florida panhandle. It was only about three and a half hours away, but I'll admit it: I cried a little bit.

I drove up there for Thanksgiving, a visit that was delayed because my laughable excuse for a car broke down and I didn't have any money and I'd maxed out my one credit card. They were more than happy to bail me out. Then, through a series of events that involved not one, not two, not three, but four poor judgment calls on my part, I burned up most of their backyard. Oh, I wasn't drunk; I just thought I'd found a way to cook the turkey that was superior to my mom's original plan of "put it in the oven."

"So what do you want to do with your life?" Dad asked, as we sat in the den, watching a football game that interested neither of us.

The question had come out of nowhere. Mom was usually the "What are your hopes and dreams?" person.

I shrugged. "Lots of things."

"Are any of them practical?"

"I want to start a band."

"Not practical."

"I might want to go into marketing."

"Did you take any marketing classes?"

"No, but I think I will."

"I'm not trying to be a pain, son, but don't you think that taking marketing classes in your last semester of college is a bit late?"

"Last semester?"

"You're graduating after next semester, right?"

"Ah. Yes. I think I am. I'm sure I am. Yes. Sorry, I misheard the question. Yes, I'm pretty sure I'm graduating next semester."

Dad closed his eyes and sighed. "Does your mother know you aren't graduating?"

"I am graduating. I was distracted by the game—I mean, the commercial that's on, so I didn't hear what you said. I have to pay attention to commercials if I want to be successful at marketing."

"All right. Just remember, son, that guilt doesn't make a very fluffy pillow."

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. "I know that."

"I love you, Andrew."

I gaped at him, horrified. Dad was not one to just randomly hurl out an "I love you" without it being said to him first. "Are you dying? Do you have leukemia?"

"No. Your mother and I are just worried about you. We understand that you're still young, and some flowers take longer to blossom, but you should have some sort of life plan by now, don't you think?"

"None of my friends have life plans. Roger doesn't."

"I'm not saying that you should have a detailed map. Just maybe a general direction. A very general direction. Something. Your mother and I support you in everything you do—I mean, assuming you don't start selling pot or anything like that—but am I telling you anything you don't know when I suggest that disaster follows you around?"

"No, I'm aware of that."

"I do not have leukemia. I do have an ulcer. Your mother and I need to know that you're going to be okay, so if you could just give us a tiny bit of a hint that you have some sort of plan, we'd sleep better at night."

"I guess...I, uh, guess I'm going to take those marketing classes and see how they go. And then graduate next semester for sure."

"Okay. I hope they go well."

"They will."

"You'll have kids someday, son, and you'll realize how hard it is to be a parent. We just worry. Do you understand?"

"It can't be that hard. It's not like I live at home."

"Trust me, son. It's hard."

When I was twenty-three, I graduated college with a major in Theatre and married Helen. Since Helen was approximately eight hundred and fifty-six million times more responsible than me, my parents were elated. Helen was a couple of years older than me, a registered nurse, and we planned to enjoy five years of domestic bliss and career establishment and then start a family.

She got pregnant on our honeymoon.

Mom thought this was funnier than I did.

Despite the drive, Mom and Dad were a huge help with our daughter Theresa, showing up at least once a month to see their granddaughter. They did the same thing after Kyle was born.

Mom told me all the time how proud she was of me. And then she laughed her ass off whenever I told her dirty diaper and baby barf stories.

A couple of weeks before Kyle's third birthday, Dad had a stroke. It wasn't fatal or massively debilitating, and after he got out of the hospital I spent several weeks with them (fortunately, I was between jobs at the moment; unfortunately, that wasn't an unusual state for me) helping them get back to their normal lives. But after that, Mom and Dad didn't travel much.

I called them on a regular basis, sharing more tales of mischievous children. Sometimes I used the word "bratty." I'm not proud of that.

As my kids got older, I called less often than I should have. Most of the time Mom would call me, and lightly scold me for going so long without calling, and I'd gently remind her that she also owned a telephone device that was not only capable of receiving calls but making them as well, and she'd say that she knew I was under a lot of stress and didn't want to call at an inconvenient time, and I'd concede her point and promise to call more often in the future.

When I told Mom that I'd had a vasectomy, she laughed and told me that Dad had had one, too, about twenty-five years ago. That kind of hurt my feelings. Mom suggested that Dad and I should compare notes, which we did not do because my father and I did not have the kind of relationship where we could openly discuss things like vasectomy experiences.

It turned out to be a botched vasectomy, which is to say that I went through all of the anguish and leg crossing and discomfort and embarrassment so that I would not be able to impregnate my wife, yet I still impregnated my wife. You can guess how happy I was about that, though I'll admit to a brief moment of masculine pride.

When I called Mom and Dad to tell them that Helen was pregnant with our third child, Mom did not let out the tornado of hysterical laughter that I would have anticipated. The first thing she said was "Are you going to be okay?"

I assured her that I was.

Then lots of horrible things happened, and I wasn't so sure.

* * *

Helen and I gazed up at the sonogram monitor, which featured bizarre shapes that looked like nothing identifiable as a human or even alien child. The sight brought tears to our eyes anyway.

She'd taken a beating, but she hadn't lost the baby. She was one strong mother and she was going to have one strong kid.

"Is it a boy or girl?" Helen asked.

The doctor smiled. "Both."

My eyes widened. "Oh my God! The kid's a hermaphrodite?"

Helen laughed and playfully swatted my arm. "No, you goof. He means we're having twins." The realization of that fact quickly sunk in and her voice became somewhat less chipper. "Twins."

"Actually, no," said the doctor. "Triplets."

Helen swatted my arm again. This time it wasn't quite as playful.

God, I wanted my mother.

CHAPTER ONE

As I drove us home from the doctor's office, our already fragile minds strained to process the bombshell.

"Triplets?"

Helen nodded in a most zombie-like manner.

"Three of them?"

"Yeah."

"But that's...that's..." I applied the brakes a bit too firmly at the red light. "That's a two hundred and fifty percent increase in our children!"

"One hundred and fifty."

"From two to five..." I did some mental calculations. "Okay, you're right, but it's still a shitload of kids!"

"I know."

"We're dead."

"We're not dead."

"I think we can both agree that we're dead."

"We'll get through it," Helen said. "We always do."

"Yeah, we always get through it, but we're all messed up when it's over!" I held up my left hand, which was missing the pinky because of the last event we'd gotten through. "See?"

"I wish you'd quit showing me that."

"You're supposed to love me, despite my grotesque mutilation."

"I do love you, but it doesn't mean I always want to look at your missing finger."

"It's not the finger, it's the stump."

"Do you think we could return to the serious conversation?" Helen asked. "The light's green."

"I know." I drove through the intersection, wondering if there were legal restrictions that prohibited somebody from driving after learning that his wife was going to have triplets. There should've been, because quite honestly the idea of participating in an eighteen-car pileup didn't sound all that bad right now.

Okay, no, that wasn't true, but still...three more kids?

If this is your first time reading about my madcap escapades, you may be thinking "Yes, five children is perhaps a bit more than absolutely necessary, but it's not all that out of hand. What's the big deal?"

The big deal is that I'm a freakin' neodymium magnet for trouble—often in the form of depraved murderers—and I've been unable to keep the two kids I already have out of it.

It was bad enough when they were both kidnapped. Theresa was eight and Kyle was six. I came out of that situation a lot worse than they did (ask to see my extensive scar collection), but still, there was some damage.

The really bad stuff happened during the grand adventure that cost me my pinky. I've already written about it in almost too much detail elsewhere and I don't feel like dwelling on it here, but under the influence of a hallucinatory drug, taken involuntarily, I almost murdered my daughter. She was still having nightmares four months later. I didn't live at home because of it.

I'm not saying that Theresa saw me as a knife-wielding monster or anything like that. I visited my kids almost every day, and Theresa would talk to me and give me hugs and ask me to help with her homework and treat me like a normal dad. But until she stopped waking up in the middle of the night screaming that Daddy was trying to kill her—and whether it was my fault or not, I had tried—Helen didn't think I should sleep in the same house.

I didn't agree with this approach. I thought it would be much healthier for Theresa if I were there to comfort her after those dreams. But Helen wanted me out of the house after bedtime, and though I'm one dense guy, I do understand that the pregnant woman gets her way.

And though Helen never said it, and even though the root cause of my actions had been clearly defined, and even though there was no hint that I would ever do such a horrible thing again...I kind of think Helen was worried that there could be a reprisal. Maybe like an acid flashback. When your wife is concerned that you might slip out of bed and sneak into your daughter's bedroom with a butcher knife, you kind of have to respect her request to sleep elsewhere.

Anyway, since I was apparently unable to successfully care for the ten-year-old and the eight-year-old I had now, how was I supposed to take care of a trio of zero-year-olds?

I was thirty-four years old. When I was in my fifties, I'd have three teenagers in the house. Oh my freaking God.

Another problem: typically, the aforementioned depraved murderers that always seem to pop up in my life end up in pieces, or at least with lots of puncture wounds in their dead bodies. Mr. Burke, the head honcho of my last unpleasant experience, got away. He wasn't happy when we parted ways. There'd been no sign of him since, even with an ongoing FBI investigation, but in the back of my mind there was always the concern that he'd be seeking revenge.

So, things weren't great in my life. However, they were about to improve.

I'm kidding, of course.

* * *

Four months later...

Let's pretend you acquired a cat. A black cat that you named "Reverse Snowflake." With all due respect to the feline lovers reading this, Reverse Snowflake was not an awesome cat. Though you hesitated to call him the worst cat in the world, this cat, quite simply, sucked.

Now let's pretend that you dumped Reverse Snowflake on your best friend. We'll call him Roger Tanglen. You used the excuse that your wife was allergic to cats, which is the truth, but if she wasn't you would have come up with some other excuse, like "I'm worried that he'll steal my children's breath in the middle of the night." Roger didn't want the damn cat. He was quite vocal about this. Every time you went over to his apartment, Roger would share some ghastly tale of deviant cat behavior and politely request that you take the beast back.

Instead of being sympathetic to your best friend's plight, you were amused by it.

Now let's pretend that you were now living in Roger's apartment and sleeping on his couch. Every night, Reverse Snowflake tried to chew on your ears, mate with your scalp, and claw your eyes out if you made any sudden moves, forcing you to sleep with a blanket pulled over your head like a little kid frightened of the Boogeyman. This often happened while you could hear Roger engaged in enthusiastic lovemaking with his gorgeous girlfriend in his cat-free bedroom.

Welcome to my life.

"Rise and shine, Sunshine Buttercup," said Roger, poking me in the side.

I pulled the blanket away from my head. "What time is it?"

"Six-fifteen."

"Please burn in hell."

"C'mon, today's our big day! Where's the excitement?"

"You need to get rid of that cat."

"No. I like him now. Get up."

"Five more minutes."

"Uh-uh. It's time to get up."

This conversation went on for two minutes longer than the five minutes of extra sleep I'd requested, but trust me, you don't want to read a complete transcript. Roger eventually won, and shortly after that I stood in the shower, trying to make the scalding hot water and invigorating scent of soap wake me up.

I stood there for quite a while. I was not invigorated.

Roger was right, though. It was a big day for us. All I needed was eleven or twelve cups of coffee, and perhaps a buzz of electroshock therapy, and I'd be fine.

I got out of the shower, dried off, combed my hair more nicely than usual, and put on my snazzy new dress clothes. I looked in the mirror and decided that, yes, if I were seeking the services I was offering, I would hire myself.

When I walked out of the bathroom, Samantha was seated on the couch. I hadn't liked her when she and Roger first started dating, but that's mostly because I was being a jealous whiny little baby, and I'd gotten over it. I suspected that she was more than ready for me to stop living in Roger's apartment, though because I had rescued her from an unspeakably horrific death she wasn't inclined to be rude about it.

"Where's Roger?" I asked.

"He went to get bagels." Samantha smoothed out her light blue bathrobe. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

Aw, crap. "Sure," I said. There was plenty of room on the couch, but I'm not ashamed to admit that her incredible blonde beauty still made me kind of nervous, and I sat on the recliner. "What's up?"

"I know that Roger and I have only been together for a few months, but I've been thinking about it a lot, and I don't feel like this is...temporary."

"He's a good catch," I said, because when women start talking about relationships and stuff I get uncomfortable and make lame comments like "He's a good catch."

"He's not great at expressing his feelings, but I know he loves me, and I love him so much, and I want us to share the rest of our lives together."

I nodded. "I'm really happy for you two. And don't worry, if you're going to move in I'll clear out. Not that you would want to live here. This place kinda sucks. You two would obviously get a better place. I'll leave, either way."

"Well, I was thinking about more than just us living together."

It took me a moment to figure out what she was talking about, and then I couldn't help but smile.

"Really?"

"Yeah, really. What do you think?"

"Samantha, are you getting my permission to ask Roger for his hand in marriage?"

She laughed nervously, which was surprising and kind of cute because Samantha never got nervous. "Actually, I am, sort of. Yes, I was going to propose to him."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah. Girl asking the guy. Would that completely freak him out?"

"I have no clue," I admitted. Though we'd been friends for almost twenty years, since high school, I didn't know his attitude about non-traditional marriage proposals. He certainly hadn't discussed the idea of them getting married with me. Still, there was no question that the two of them had fantastic energy together, and they'd been through some unbelievable trauma without their relationship crumbling, so as far as I was concerned they should join together in holy matrimony.

"What do you think about the idea?" she asked. "I don't want to scare him away."

"I don't think you'll scare him too badly," I said. "Have you two talked about getting married?"

"No. Not at all."

"You're not going to do one of those things where you ask him on a Jumbotron at a baseball game or something like that, are you? He's not good under pressure."

Samantha shook her head. "I was going to make him dinner at my place tonight, and ask him there."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"What are you making?"

"Spaghetti."

"That's good. He loves spaghetti."

"With green olive sauce."

"Oh, he hates—" An alarm bell went off in my brain, screaming Shut up, dumbass! Shut up, dumbass! Shut up, dumbass! and I stopped in mid-sentence.

"He hates green olives?"

"I honestly don't know his opinion of them."

"He said it was the best spaghetti he'd ever...oh, God, are you telling me that he was sparing my feelings?"

I vigorously shook my head. "No, if he thought your spaghetti was garbage he'd tell you, I promise."

"I can't believe this."

"There's nothing to worry about."

"I've made it for him on every special occasion."

"He loves it."

"He's a much better liar than you are."

"He's not a liar," I said, knowing that my voice and body language were giving off every possible signal by which interrogators could determine that a suspect wasn't telling the truth. I decided to stop lying and start pleading. "Please don't not propose to him over this. It's a good kind of lie. It's a 'Does this dress make my butt look big?' lie."

"Did he say my—?"

"No. Absolutely not."

She sighed. "Maybe I'll do meatballs."

"Meatballs are awesome."

The door opened, and Roger walked into the living room, holding a brown bag. He gestured to it with the dramatic flourish of a circus ringmaster. "Who wants...bagels?"

Samantha gave him a dark look that I'd received from Helen many times. "Are they green olive bagels?"

* * *

"Why do I get in trouble for being polite?" Roger asked, as we drove through town. "If I had said 'Hey, I don't like green olives' on our first date, there wouldn't have been a second date, right?"

"Right," I agreed.

"She should be saying 'Wow, you've eaten that nasty slop six or seven times out of love.' I should be praised for this, not condemned."

"I totally agree."

"It's almost as if there are differences between men and women. Vast differences. But there's no scientific research to back that up."

As far as I knew, the proposal was still on. I can be dumb, but I wasn't so dumb as to say "So, Samantha, does this whole green olive thing mean that you're not going to ask Roger to marry you tonight?"

We pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall, which contained a movie rental store with an "Everything Must Go!" sign in the front window, a nail salon, a sandwich shop, three empty spaces available for lease, and then, at the very end, in a space smaller than our college dorm room, the office of A/R Tasks & Investigations.

I thought the name pretty much sucked, but I'd been outvoted 3-1. Though I'd pushed for the word "Mayhem" to be included in the name of our new business, Roger, Helen, and Samantha had suggested that we should use a name that implied that we solved problems rather than creating them. They had a good point. After coming up with approximately 583,219,037 possible names, we'd settled on A/R Tasks & Investigations.

Yes, Roger and I were starting our own business.

And, yes, I completely understood why some people might think this was a terrifying idea.

CHAPTER TWO

So here's the reasoning behind our business venture: Roger and I were always getting into trouble. Much of it was because of our own poor judgment, as in the instance where we agreed to dig up a coffin. We shouldn't have done that. But we also had just plain bad luck, as with our recent family camping trip. It's not like we ignored the warnings of a crazy old man who said "Don't go to Bloody Death Splatter Mountain. Bad things happen on Bloody Death Splatter Mountain." We simply ended up in a really bad mess.

When this kind of madness keeps happening to you, at some point you think "How can I legally profit from this?" I'd acquired a little bit of fame from my adventures, yet it had never really translated into sustainable fortune. There'd been some recent interest in doing a reality show, but Helen had violently nixed the idea on the grounds that she was not going to parade our children around like some sort of freak show. It was hard to argue with that.

I still had my office job, which wasn't so bad except for the whole "sucking away my life like a parasite that feasts on souls" element. I'm no egomaniac, but being Andrew Mayhem, The Guy Who Went Through All That Stuff And Lived had to be worth something more than this, right? I didn't need a mansion, or pillows stuffed with the feathers of endangered species, or a diamond-studded dachshund; I just wanted to be able to provide for my family without battling the constant urge to knock myself unconscious against my cubicle wall.

Then Samantha suggested that Roger and I go into business for ourselves.

Not quite a detective agency. More of a problem solving service. The basic concept was "If we can survive numerous encounters with psycho killers, we can handle your task." (Though that was not our official slogan. Our official slogan was "We solve weird problems.")

Obviously, our expectation was not that clients would come into our office and say "Aaah! There's a guy with an axe chasing me! What's your hourly rate to stop him?" We just figured that with our notoriety, we'd get...I don't know, somebody with a crop circle issue, maybe. We weren't sure what to expect, but the rent at this dying strip mall was ridiculously cheap, our furnishings came from Goodwill, and instead of a multimillion dollar advertising campaign we had a few fliers around town that I'd printed out at work before I gave my notice. So if this business was a spectacular failure, at least it would be an inexpensive spectacular failure.

We put up the "Now Open!" sign, took pictures of each other standing in front of the door, went inside at the stroke of eight o'clock, turned on the lights, and sat down.

"A couple of my Twitter followers said they'd be in today," said Roger.

"Awesome."

"Most people probably don't have problems until ten or eleven, so it's okay if nobody comes in for a while."

"Roger, we've been open for thirty seconds. We don't have to start making excuses yet."

"I know, I know. Just throwing that out there in case you were worried."

"I'm not," I said, lying my butt off.

This is probably a good time to point out that Helen was not entirely cool with this whole idea. When you look at it from her perspective, which involves her husband quitting his day job to start a hastily conceived business with his irresponsible best friend, using money borrowed from her parents, at a time when she is three months away from delivering triplets, her lack of enthusiasm is perhaps understandable. My defense was that it would allow me flexible hours and thus more opportunities to care for our new spawn, and potentially more money than I was bringing in, and it would keep me from going absolutely stark raving nutzo berserk insane.

I probably should have left out the "stark raving etc." part, considering that I was not living at home, making it hard for Helen to be sympathetic with my level of stress compared to hers. However, being a total sweetheart, she did not say "If you do this, I will divorce you, and you will wake up under several dozen tons of cement."

We worked this out by me swearing that by the time the babies arrived, I would be bringing in as much income as my day job had provided, or else I'd crawl right back there. I hadn't told anybody off or ignited anything before I left, so crawling back and begging for my old job would be feasible. Still, I hoped to avoid that.

So this was one last shot at being my own boss before I gave it all up, handed my barely beating heart over to The Man, and became a corporate drone until my body and spirit had completely shriveled up into my own Prune of Destiny.

"Are you sure we shouldn't do cold calls?" Roger asked.

"We're not going to become telemarketers. People hate those jerks. We're here to help the community and provide a service that people want and need."

"I know, but clearly telemarketing works, or else they wouldn't do it. If everybody hated apricots, they'd stop selling them in stores. Somebody has to like apricots, right?"

"Quit using the apricot metaphor. If we're going to become douchebag telemarketers, why don't we take it one step further and go around town causing problems, and then offer to solve them? We could steal a bunch of dogs and then magically find them."

"That's actually not such a bad—"

"Let it go."

The first hour of our first day involved a great deal of unproductive sitting. In the second hour, we upgraded to pacing. But in the third hour, a car parked in one of our designated spaces. Roger hurried out the back exit, as per our plan.

A heavyset, middle-aged woman came inside. I set down the encyclopedia I was pretending to read and gave her a friendly smile.

"Hello," I said, standing up and extending my hand. "Welcome to A/R Tasks and Investigations."

She shook my hand. "Not a very catchy name."

"It bites, doesn't it? I was outvoted. I'm Andrew Mayhem."

"Gerta Williams."

"Thank you for stopping by, Ms. Williams."

Roger walked in through the front door. "Oh, hello, sorry to interrupt."

"No problem at all," I said. "This is my partner, Roger Tanglen. Roger, this is Gerta Williams."

"Nice to meet you," said Roger, shaking her hand. "So, Andrew, how was the chicken taco last night?"

I frowned. "How did you know what I had for dinner?"

"Your left shoe has a new scuff mark. It's hard to see, but the evidence on display makes it abundantly clear that it was produced by the gravel driveway at Melena's Mexican restaurant. There are three other restaurants within an eight mile radius—the most you would be likely to travel for a casual meal—that could produce a mark with that particular shade of gray, but the depth and length could only come from Melena's."

"That's amazing!" I proclaimed. "But how did you know what I ordered?"

"You are a thrifty man, not accustomed to needlessly wasting money, and the lack of a bag of potato chips on the desk indicates to me that you had a full meal last night. From there, it was easy to deduce that you'd taken advantage of the two-for-one chicken taco special."

"Incredible," I said. "As always, you got every detail right."

"It's my job."

Gerta did not seem as impressed as we'd hoped. "So you're the problem solving guys, right?"

"We certainly are," I told her.

"Well, I've got a problem. My neighbors have this miserable dog, and it's always taking a dump in my yard. They don't clean up after it. They don't even care. They just let the damn thing run loose."

"We're not really in the dog killing business," I said.

"No, I just need you guys to put up a fence. Can you do that for me?"

Roger and I looked at each other. "Uh..." I said. "That's not...uh, well, I guess...uh...sure."

* * *

"I think there's a flaw in our business model," said Roger, holding the fence post as I pounded it into the ground.

"Well, we are A/R Tasks and Investigations. Some of them are going to be tasks, and some are going to be investigations."

"Yeah, but they're supposed to be cool tasks."

"I know, I know. We should have said no. It's hard to turn down our first customer."

"Hey!" shouted Gerta from her front porch. "I'm paying you to put up a fence, not stand there jabbering!"

"We're working while we talk!" I said.

"Pick up your pace or you ain't getting any lemonade!"

The lemonade had a not-so-refreshing battery acid-esque flavor, and our mood was not particularly joyous as we drove away from the newly fenced yard. But we had made some money, minus a deduction for the glass Roger dropped, and in some cultures there would have even been the satisfaction of a job well done. We went back to Roger's apartment and took showers so as not to scare off potential clients with our foul odor, changed into new sets of professional clothes, then returned to the office and collapsed into our chairs.

"That sucked," said Roger.

"It could've been worse."

"Well, yeah, anything can be worse. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck."

"But it's better than sitting around all day with no clients."

"True."

We sat around for a couple more hours with no clients. Our posted office hours were eight to five, and at four fifty-eight I checked my watch to make sure it matched the time on the clock.

"This is kind of a bummer," I said.

"Yeah."

"Maybe we should hang out for a while longer. A lot of people get off work at five, and they may need some evening tasks or investigations."

"Sounds good."

We waited for another half hour.

And then she walked into our office.

It was like a moment out of a private eye movie, except that there were no saxophones playing in the background, nobody was smoking, and the lighting was adequate. The woman looked like she was in her early-to-mid forties; not devastatingly beautiful, but she definitely took care of herself. She had short black hair with visible gray roots, and the pinkest nail polish I'd ever seen. (My daughter loved, loved, loved pink nail polish, so I was well acquainted with intense levels of pinkness.)

She wore tan slacks and a white blouse and looked like she came from a hard day of work at an office job. I could easily picture her wearing a headset and telling somebody that the boss was in a meeting with an important client.

"Hello," I said, as the glass door swung closed behind her. "Welcome to A/R Tasks and Investigations, where we laugh at your problems."

Roger glared at me. I gave him a "Why are you glaring at me?" look, and then realized that I'd screwed up and used the wrong greeting. The message conveyed was supposed to be "We laugh at the ease with which we will solve your problems," but during the brainstorming session we'd realized that most people would not interpret it that way.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "What I meant was, we laugh at the ease with which we will solve your problem. Which is not to downplay your problem. We're not saying that your problems are laughable, just that we're good at solving them. We solve weird problems. That's our official slogan."

Roger did not punch me in the face to stop me from talking, though it would have been justified. "Please, sit down," he told the woman, gesturing to one of the chairs in front of our shared desk.

"Thank you," she said. We all sat down.

"My name is Roger Tanglen, and this is my intern Andrew Mayhem. How can we help you today?"

"Is it okay that it's after your closing time?"

"Absolutely. We're always happy to stay open for important clients," said Roger. He gave me a warning look, as if he thought I might try to say something witty.

"I appreciate that," said the woman. Her purse rested on her lap and she stared at it instead of looking us in the eyes. "You two have been part of...strange things, right?"

I nodded. "One time I had to find a quarter in the mouth of a severed head."

"My name is Shirley," she said. "I think I may be a serial killer."

CHAPTER THREE

"I see," I said, nodding thoughtfully. "Please continue."

"Do you have a privacy clause?"

"We're not attorneys or priests, but I promise that everything you say will be held in the strictest confidence," I assured her, which of course I knew would be a total lie if she confessed to multiple murders.

"I just don't know where else to go," said Shirley. She sounded less like a potential homicidal maniac and more like somebody who was having difficulty finding a decent place to get deep-dish pizza.

"You came to the right place," I assured her, though despite our marketing angle, Roger and I had hoped to avoid things like having serial killers walk into our office. There had to be a pleasant middle ground between putting up a fence and dealing with a psychopath.

Shirley continued to stare at her purse. "I don't know if I did. But I'm here. I mean, I need to talk to somebody. Maybe I didn't do anything. Maybe I'm the victim. I just can't go to the police, you know?" Now her voice was starting to show some emotion.

"I don't want to be disrespectful," said Roger, "but would it be okay if we checked you for weapons? It's nothing personal; I just think that if somebody comes in here and says they're a serial killer, we should at least make sure they don't have a meat cleaver."

She looked up at him, shrugged, and opened her purse. She held it up for his inspection for a few seconds. After Roger nodded, she held it open toward me. It seemed to be mostly filled with the usual stuff that women keep in their purse. No meat cleaver, butcher knife, hand grenade, or hangman's noose was visible, though there was a pair of handcuffs. I didn't inquire about them.

"Satisfied?" she asked.

"Yes, that was great, thanks," said Roger.

Shirley stood up. There were no supernatural forces at work, but I swore her shirt suddenly became two sizes smaller. "Do you need to pat me down?" she asked. She wasn't flirty or sarcastic about it. Instead, she seemed genuinely interested in giving us the peace of mind that she wasn't going to stab us to death.

Roger shook his head. "No, no, that's okay. You can't fit a meat cleaver in those pockets."

"I could fit a pocketknife in them, though. That's why it's called a pocketknife."

"Nah, we're good. It's just that if you did start slashing at us, I would have felt kind of silly for not having checked you for weapons, since you did say you might be a serial killer."

Shirley glanced at me. "Are you fine with this, too?"

"Totally. So why don't you start at the beginning?"

"When I woke up this morning, I was in a bathtub of blood with intestines wrapped around my legs like writhing snakes."

"How interesting," I said, remaining professional.

She sort of smiled. "I'm kidding."

"Ah, good."

"That was a dream I had. The snakes were translucent. I could see sperm inside of them."

This is when I realized that A/R Tasks and Investigations had been a terrible idea. We should just drag the furniture out to the curb, leave a sign on the door thanking our loyal customers for their many hours of support, and get out. If Roger and I had even a single functional brain cell ping-ponging between us, we would not let ourselves get involved in what would certainly become a nightmarish web of murder, betrayal, and deceit.

Then again, Shirley might be an innocent, scared woman who we could help. What kind of people were we if we cast out the first potential lunatic who walked through our door? We should at least hear her out.

"Translucent snakes," I said. "Got it. How long have you been dreaming about them?"

"It was just that one dream. I dream of all kinds of things...dark, squirmy shapes that I can't even recognize, but that's been happening since I was a little girl." She broke eye contact and looked back down at her purse. "Sorry. I promised myself I wouldn't be creepy."

"It's fine," said Roger. "Be as creepy as you need to be."

"For as long as I can remember, I've had impulses. Nothing intense, nothing serious; just things that I wanted to do that I knew I shouldn't. I never acted on them. My father would take me out fishing, and I might spend extra time cleaning the fish, and I might cut it in more places than I needed to, but I never strangled the neighbor's cat or anything like that."

"Did you talk to anybody about this?" I asked.

"Yes. I mean, no offense to either of you, but you're not the first place I'd go for help. I spent some time as a kid talking to a therapist. He thought I was just a regular mixed-up girl who was confused over getting breasts or something like that. It was only a few sessions. Therapy was expensive."

"But did you think you had the potential to kill somebody?" Were these the right questions to ask? I really had no idea how to go about this whole thing.

"No. I was a regular little girl with no friends. I never thought I could hurt anybody."

"So when did you start to think that you were...?"

"More homicidal than other girls?"

"Yeah."

"About a year ago, I was out of town on business."

"Where were you?"

"It's not important. If it turns out that I haven't done anything wrong I'll tell you."

"Okay."

"Anyway, I had room service, got one of those pay-per-view movies—not porn—and I watched about the first fifteen minutes. Then suddenly the credits were on and I didn't remember anything about the rest of the movie."

"Which movie?" asked Roger.

"I can't tell you that. You'll pull up records of hotel pay-per-view renting and try to find out where I was."

Actually, I was pretty sure that Roger was just curious about which movie she'd been watching, but I didn't say anything to diminish Shirley's opinion of our awesome investigation skills. "So you fell asleep?" I asked.

"It wasn't like falling asleep. It was like an instant blackout. I was still sitting up in bed, wearing the same nightgown, but my hair was damp and I could smell my coconut shampoo. How can you take a shower and not wake yourself up?"

"I think people can do all kinds of weird things when they sleepwalk," I said, though taking a shower seemed like a bit of a stretch. "Were you on any medication?"

"No."

"Was there any blood around?"

"Not that time."

"Please continue."

"It started happening about once a month. I'd be reading a book or watching TV or something, and suddenly it would be two hours later and I'd be freshly showered. The doctor told me not to worry about it. He said it was stress."

"Seriously? Your doctor dismissed it like that?"

Shirley shrugged. "He ran a couple of tests. But, yeah, basically he said that there was nothing wrong, and that I should get more exercise. Can you believe it?"

Actually, I wasn't sure that I did, but I didn't say anything.

"Then, maybe the fourth or fifth time this happened, my hands were sore. Like I'd washed them in scalding hot water and rubbed them raw. I didn't understand it. What could I possibly have done that I needed to scrub my hands like that?"

Her hands looked fine now, so at least Shirley wasn't sitting in our office fresh from a post-murder shower.

"I didn't get too worried about it, because ultimately all I knew is that I was washing my hands really well. Sleepwalking could've just unlocked some OCD."

"It's possible," I said, not having any clue if that was possible or not. The thought I am dangerously unqualified to be doing this kind of work popped into my brain.

"It happened again a couple of weeks ago. I was on another business trip. The next morning, when I went to put on deodorant, I noticed dried blood on my armpit." She held up her arm to provide a visual aid for the body part she was referencing.

"Odd spot for blood," I said.

"I know."

"Are you sure it wasn't yours?"

"There were no cuts. But, yeah, I assumed that I'd scratched myself somewhere and the blood got on my armpit. It wasn't covered with blood. Just a little streak. Enough to concern me but not enough for me to think that I'd killed somebody."

She paused. The word "until..." was unspoken but implied.

"And then?" I prompted.

"I had another blackout last night. In my own home."

"Was there more blood on your armpit?" Roger asked.

"No. My armpit was blood-free. But this time, unlike any of the other blackouts, I had memories. Not full memories, just flashes of memory. Flashes of doing something awful. Flashes of bones drenched in red, and eyes out of their sockets, and wet clumps of hair attached to skin but not a body."

I wasn't sure what to say. "I can see how that would be unnerving."

"But the clearest image, the only one I could keep in my mind for more than a split second, was a house. An old brown two-story house. I got in my car and I drove all night but I couldn't find it. I went to work, had a normal day except for being completely exhausted, clocked out at my usual time, and then drove right to it. It's the house I remember. I'm positive. And then I drove here to talk to you two."

"Why us?" Roger asked.

"Saw your flier."

"Sweet."

"So you didn't go inside?" I asked.

Shirley shook her head. "I couldn't. Not alone."

"What do you think is in there?"

"Proof."

"You mean proof as in...?" I trailed off, purposely not finishing my sentence because I didn't want to create an awkward moment if she didn't really mean "mutilated corpses."

"Dead bodies. I think that the people I killed during my blackouts, if I did in fact commit murder during them, may be in that house."

"Gotcha."

"Even the ones you may or may not have killed on out of state business trips?" Roger asked.

"No, not them. I would have noticed a head in my luggage. We don't need to put all of the pieces together right now; the reason I'm here, if I haven't made it clear already, is that I want you two to accompany me to the house and see what we can find."

I glanced over at Roger. He nodded. I couldn't decide if I should nod back or not. Yes, the whole basis for our business was to deal with weird crap like this, but why did there always have to be dead bodies? Why couldn't we be like Encyclopedia Brown and investigate somebody cheating in a 100-meter dash or something?

We shouldn't take this job.

Then I remembered getting chewed out in front of all of my co-workers for using plain Arial instead of Arial Bold in a spreadsheet ("Does that font look thick enough to be Arial Bold? Does it?"), and decided that, yes, I was going to take The Case Of The Crazy Lady And Her Possible Corpses.

"One more question," I said. "Let's say that we go inside the house and, yep, there's a torso on the floor. What's step two?"

"You call the police."

"Really?"

"I don't want to get away with any murders. If we find anything, I'll accept whatever punishment I deserve, whether it's prison or an asylum. But you can understand why I don't want to tell the authorities that I killed somebody until I'm absolutely sure, right?"

"Of course," I said. "Everybody can relate to that."

"And I want to be handcuffed to one of you."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I don't know how I'll react if we do find bodies. I might try to get away. So I need one of you to be handcuffed to me to make sure that doesn't happen."

"I'm going to let Andrew take on that duty," Roger said. "I don't think my girlfriend would appreciate me being handcuffed to another woman."

"You do remember that my wife is pregnant with triplets, right?"

"I remember no such thing."

"What if we refuse?" I asked Shirley.

She blinked in surprise. "What if you refuse? I'm not blackmailing you guys. I'm trying to pay you for a service. Accept it or decline it. Jeez, do you have any social skills at all?"

"They're very limited," I admitted. "Okay, we'll investigate the house with you, and I'll wear the cuffs to make sure you don't escape. We're using the pair you've got in your purse, right?"

"Unless you have a comfier pair."

"Nope. All right, let's go hopefully not find a house full of dead bodies."

CHAPTER FOUR

Shirley offered to drive us in her car, but Roger and I thought it was best if we took his car, since we knew that his vehicle was not equipped with a hidden button that you could press to make spikes burst out of the seats. Not that we thought Shirley's car had the spiked-seat feature, but it could have something ghastly, like a cobra compartment, and it just seemed like a wise idea not to let the possible serial killer drive.

I could tell that Shirley didn't want us to ask any more questions, and I knew that even though she'd given us a cash deposit, she could still cancel our agreement if we continued to prove that we were idiots. So we talked about hamburgers. I'm not going to pretend that it was an endlessly fascinating discussion about hamburgers or that any book-worthy observations were made, but it passed the time in a pleasant enough manner.

Twenty minutes later, we took a left into one of Chamber's less-than-great neighborhoods, and after a couple more turns we pulled into the driveway of the last house on a dead-end street. Though it was still daylight, the house was remarkably spooky. If Shirley had said that we were actually there to investigate a haunting, I would have believed her.

"Okay," said Shirley. "We're here."

Roger shut off the engine. We all sat in the car for a moment, nobody quite willing to be the one who said "All right, everybody, let's go find some carnage!" I stared at the house, trying to figure out why it was spooky in the daytime. There were no twisted trees with branches that looked like claws. The architecture wasn't "off" in any manner that I could identify. Yeah, the lawn needed mowing and the bushes needed trimming and the house could desperately use a new coat of brown paint, but the same could be said of my own home.

"Does anybody live here?" I asked Shirley. This seemed like a much more intelligent question than the many unintelligent questions we'd asked back at the office.

"I don't think so."

"But you're not sure?"

"If you'll recall, I don't even know for certain that I've ever been here."

"I do recall that. Fair enough. Let's go check."

We all got out of the car. Nobody had any immediate forward momentum toward the front porch.

"Does this house creep you out?" I asked Roger.

"If there was a pumpkin patch, it could be a complete Halloween House," he said. "There's probably a young deformed child locked in every closet."

"But why does the house look spooky from the outside? It's not as if the windows look like eyes."

Roger shrugged. "Actually, I was humoring you. I don't think it looks all that spooky. I'm way more concerned about finding Shirley's souvenirs."

Shirley opened her purse, giving me a momentary jolt of horror where I thought she might pull out a souvenir ("This lower lip belonged to a waitress. I preserved its original piercing.") but instead she took out the handcuffs. She snapped one of the bracelets around her wrist then looked at me. "Put out your hand."

"I'd like to keep the key," I told her.

"Not a problem." She handed me the key and I tucked it into my front pocket.

I wasn't a big fan of handcuffs, even when used in private in a locked bedroom as part of a committed marriage when the kids were staying with their grandparents for the evening.

"You're okay with me not having a pinky on that hand, right?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Just checking. Some people might not be."

I held out my arm and Shirley snapped the other bracelet around my left wrist. We gave them a gentle tug. Very solid. This was a top-notch product.

"We should get inside before somebody sees us standing out here in handcuffs," Shirley said.

"Agreed."

The three of us walked up onto the front porch, and I tested the doorknob. Unlocked. Since I've written at length about our bumbling incompetence at this line of work, I would like to point out in my own defense that we had brought along a set of lock picks, even though we didn't need them. We weren't just going to kick through a window and alert the neighbors.

I opened the door, which let out a nice horror movie-style creak, and we stepped inside. The first thing I noticed was that I didn't smell any rotting flesh. That was awesome. When your first reaction upon entering a home is not to gag and rush off to puke in some bushes, your exploration is off to a grand start.

I turned on the light, illuminating the living room. Either nobody had lived here in quite a while, or the residents were able to move around without disturbing dust particles. Pretty much everything was coated in a thick layer of gray. There was, however, a nice straight path leading through the living room into the dining room. Not footprints. A path.

"Somebody could have dragged a body through there," I noted.

"Crap," said Roger.

"None of this looks familiar," said Shirley. She reached up to scratch her forehead with her cuffed hand, taking my own hand along for the ride. "But I might have done it in the dark."

"Well, let's see where the path takes us," I said. We walked across the living room, being alert for any severed arms or legs that might be strewn about, and into the dining room. It also had a musty but not stomach-churning aroma. Everything was tidy, as if the owners were just on an extended vacation.

"We should check the freezer," said Roger, pointing to the kitchen.

"Be my guest."

"I meant that Shirley should check the freezer."

Though I didn't want to open it myself, I knew we'd have trouble generating positive word of mouth for A/R Tasks & Investigations if we displayed cowardice in front of our clients. "I'll do it," I said.

I decided to take the "do it quickly, like ripping off a bandage" approach, an approach that was admittedly responsible for a pretty big scar on my right knee. Shirley and I walked over to the refrigerator and I immediately opened the freezer door.

Empty.

I opened the refrigerator as well.

Also empty, except for a box of baking soda.

"Okay, we're off to a pretty good start," I said. "If the rest of the house is as empty as the refrigerator, we're in excellent shape."

"I apologize for trying to pass the freezer opening on to you," said Roger.

"It wasn't just a try. You did pass it on to me."

"And I'm sorry. I'll open the next thing."

"You know, I feel kind of relieved," said Shirley. "Like maybe this was all in my head. Don't get me wrong, the fact that it's in my head is still upsetting, but I feel okay right now. I don't think we'll find anything."

I hoped she was correct. That would be fantastic. If our business involved just going to houses and not finding evidence of slaughter, it would be the greatest job ever. I could do that all day long, whistling the entire time.

Of course, everybody knows the old adage: "An empty refrigerator does not a corpse-free house make." I closed the fridge and looked around the kitchen. "I guess Roger should check the cabinets."

Roger quickly checked all of the cabinets. They would have been a ridiculous place to hide anything felony-related, but we couldn't not check them. There was nothing inside but neatly stacked dishes.

"So far so good," I said. "Let's see what's upstairs."

We went upstairs. These stupid handcuffs were already starting to chafe my wrist, and I was looking forward to getting rid of them in the next couple of minutes. Admittedly, there was an element of counting chickens before they hatched involved in my "next couple of minutes" prediction, since there were still plenty of places that bodies could be hidden. Or, for that matter, sitting out in the open with "Surprise!" written on the floor in their blood. But like I've always said, it's easier to count eggs that are just lying there in the nest than baby chickens that are running all over the place.

Actually, I've never said that, and I sort of wish I hadn't even typed it just now. Oh well.

Anyway, I was cautiously optimistic as we slowly walked upstairs as a trio. The stairs creaked with each step, reminding us that we were in a spooky house.

The dust was even worse up here. It was inconceivable that anybody had walked around the upstairs for at least a couple of weeks...or, I don't know, a while, anyway. I'm not an expert on dust accumulation rates.

We wandered around upstairs for a minute or so, just to say we did, and then headed back down the stairs, satisfied.

"So what do you think?" I asked Shirley. "I mean, we haven't torn the place apart, but it sure doesn't seem like much has happened in here."

"I'm not sure." Shirley closed her eyes. "I really don't think we're in the wrong house. The outside looks exactly like my mental image. It's possible that two houses look the same, but why would I have driven right here after work?"

"You wouldn't have," said Roger. "It's definitely the same house, and I think it's clean. We went upstairs and everything."

"Do you mind if we just stand here for a few minutes?" asked Shirley, keeping her eyes closed. "I want to see if I can remember anything. I want to be certain."

"Oh, absolutely," I assured her. "No problem at all."

We stood there for a moment. Had I not been handcuffed to her, I would have meandered a few steps away, just to keep things from getting awkward, but I had no choice but to stand there, awkwardly.

All things considered, it wasn't such a bad first day for our new business. Two paying jobs. One sucked and the other didn't involve us accomplishing much of anything, but still, it was an okay start.

Roger wandered off into the kitchen, because as a non-handcuffed individual he was permitted to do such a thing.

Shirley opened her eyes.

"Oh, no," she whispered.

"What?"

She sighed.

"What?" I repeated. "What were the sigh and the 'oh no' for?"

"Floorboards."

"What about them?"

"I just got an image of floorboards."

"What's wrong?" asked Roger, walking back into the living room.

"She had an image of floorboards."

"Oh, no."

"Let's not overreact," I said. "This could mean a lot of things. Floorboards have plenty of other uses besides covering dead bodies. Maybe you have an appreciation for quality wood."

"He didn't mean that in a penis way," Roger assured her.

"Quiet for just a second," said Shirley. "Let me focus." She closed her eyes again. We all stood there for a while.

Finally she re-opened them. "Lost the vision. But I definitely saw floorboards."

"Okay, that's fine, no big deal," I said. "Let's just check out the floorboards in this place and ease everybody's concern."

Now I was feeling quite a bit less comfortable about the fact that the majority of the living room floor was covered by a light green oval-shaped rug.

We slid the rug aside, and it didn't take a private investigator, even a lame one like myself, to clearly see the slight gap where the floorboards didn't perfectly fit together.

"You know," I said, "we keep dwelling on the negative. But how do we know that we aren't actually searching for buried treasure? There could be sacks of money down there. There could be gold bricks."

"Sure, instead of a thrill-killer she could be a highly paid assassin," said Roger.

"Shut up, Roger. I'm just saying, we should stay optimistic until we know for sure that our lives are going to start sucking."

"Let's get this over with," said Shirley.

The floorboards came up easily, leaving a gap in the floor big enough for two people to squeeze through. It went down about three feet, to a cement bottom. The three of us peered down into the hole, but it was too dark to see anything that wasn't illuminated by the living room ceiling light.

"I'll go get the flashlight," said Roger. He hurried out of the house and returned a moment later, holding a flashlight he'd taken from our utilities kit. Yeah, we had a utilities kit. Admit your jealousy.

He turned on the flashlight, smacked it a couple of times to make the light come on, and then shone it down into the gap.

"There's a cooler down there," he said. "No, wait...four of them."

CHAPTER FIVE

Roger didn't have to actually squeeze down into the gap to get the coolers. The first two he was able to reach by just putting his arm down there, and for the other two we merely had to promise that we would pull him to safety the instant he started shrieking.

Four white plastic coolers. Each large enough to hold a twelve-pack of soda.

"Do these look familiar?" I asked Shirley.

"No."

"Maybe they aren't yours, then. Maybe the hidden treasure I was being so optimistic about is beer."

(Note: I did not actually believe this to be the case.)

"So which one should we open first?" I asked.

"Who cares?" asked Roger. "They're all going to be unpleasant!"

"We don't know that."

"Yes, we do."

"Okay, we probably do," I admitted. "That said, even if we agree that there's a way above-average chance that there are bad things in these coolers, we've been in much worse situations than this. This is nothing. We should be yawning right now."

"You yawn. I'll wait in the car."

"C'mon, this is no big deal. Worst-case scenario, there might be...I dunno, a head in there. Somebody's severed head. You know what? I've held a severed head before! The one that I mentioned back in the office. I'm not saying that I enjoyed the experience, but in the grand scheme of things, there's nothing in that cooler that can be worse than anything we've encountered in our lives thus far."

"Except a bomb."

"We've dealt with worse things than bombs."

"If it blows off half of our skulls, it would be worse than anything we've encountered in our lives thus far."

"You're a dick."

"Please be professional around our client."

"I'm just going to open it," I said, grabbing the handle of one of the cooler lids. "We're getting all worked up over nothing."

I lifted the lid.

Inside were a couple of small bags of ice that had melted, and a dead armadillo. It had been stabbed several times along the back and the tail.

"Well," I said. "Okay, then."

Roger looked over at Shirley. "Do you have any memory of murdering an armadillo?"

"I'm...I'm not sure."

Knowing there was probably not a severed human head inside made it easier to open the second cooler. This one also had melted bags of ice, and a stabbed-to-death squirrel.

"Jesus," said Shirley.

I forced a smile. "This is a little demented, but it could be a lot worse, am I right? Shirley, when you came into our office saying that you might be a serial killer, wouldn't it have made you feel better if we'd said 'Oh, no, all you did was kill an armadillo and a squirrel'?"

"Open the others," she said.

Roger made no move to open another cooler. It wasn't fair of him to let me do all of them, but we'd already bickered far too much in front of our client.

I opened the third cooler. Inside: a rat.

"I feel like I'm going to throw up," said Shirley.

"That's okay," said Roger. "Just lean down into the hole if you need to."

"Why...why would I stab a rat?"

"Why wouldn't you stab a rat?" I asked. "Rats are pieces of crap. If you'd stabbed a monkey, I'd judge you, but it's not like you're killing house pets."

I was fibbing, because somebody who would stab a rat and keep it in a cooler was not somebody I wanted to invite over for cookies and milk. Still, though PETA's collective head would explode over this, I didn't think there were any actual crimes being committed. Well, except for trespassing, but I was doing that, too.

"Do we even need to open the last one?" I asked.

Shirley nodded. "Yes. I have to know."

Damn. I'd hoped we'd get to quit while we were ahead, but of course that would be irresponsible. We'd had a seventy-five percent success rate so far in not finding human heads or kittens, so we should trust that fate was smiling upon us and open the last one to eliminate any doubt.

Roger didn't offer to open the last one, either. We were going to have to discuss this inequitable distribution of labor sometime in the near future.

I lifted the lid of the last cooler.

"Aw, man," said Roger. "I like birds."

The robin had been stabbed three or four times in its red breast. Having had poultry for dinner last night, I knew my moral outrage was misplaced, but still...it was a darn cute robin.

"So," I said, "it appears that you stab animals and hide them in coolers under floorboards in the living room of a stranger's home. Would you like some of our fliers to give to your friends?"

"Are you sure that's everything?" asked Shirley. "Let me see the flashlight."

Roger handed it to her. She leaned into the hole, shining the flashlight in a circle.

"There's another one," she said.

"Really?"

"Yeah. It's pushed up against the wall."

I took the flashlight from her and looked for myself. Yes, there was indeed another cooler down there. A much larger one.

This still didn't mean there was something sinister afoot. Perhaps it had been pushed out of the way because Shirley was more concerned with people stealing her booze than her dead animals.

Roger took the flashlight, looked where we had looked, and sighed. "Of course there's another one," he said, his voice glum.

"I think it's directly under that bookshelf," said Shirley. "You'll have to crawl down there and get it."

"Why?" asked Roger. "We can just move all the books...then move the shelf...then get a crowbar...then pry up the floorboards...oh, all right, one of us will have to crawl down there and get it. Dammit."

"Not one of us," I told him. "You."

"Why me?"

"Because I'm handcuffed to Shirley."

"So?"

"It's a little more difficult for two people handcuffed together to crawl underneath the floor. It's, what, twenty feet? You can do it."

"I vote that you unlock the handcuffs."

"Actually, yeah," I said, giving them a gentle tug. "That's a better idea."

"No," said Shirley. "I might still run. I need you to keep me here. What if I rush right out and kill somebody else? Do you want that on your conscience? People with their eyelids hacked off? Do you want that?"

I patted my pocket, felt nothing, then reached in and dug deep. "Where's the key?"

"Don't be mad," said Shirley.

"Where's the key?" I repeated.

"You promised you wouldn't be mad."

"I didn't promise anything! Where's the key?"

Shirley held up the key between her thumb and index finger. "I took it. But it's only because I didn't want you to unlock us before we finished searching the place."

"Are you saying that you handcuffed us to make sure you didn't try to flee, but you stole the key for yourself?"

"Yes."

"You understand that this logic is not airtight, right?"

"If I were trying to run away in a panic, you'd be able to stop me from putting the key in the lock. At least I assume you would. I'm sorry. Sometimes I just swipe things."

"Give it back."

"You'll unlock us."

"Correct."

Shirley popped the key into her mouth.

"Don't swallow that."

She swished the key around in her mouth.

"I'm serious," I warned her. "Don't swallow it."

"Promise you won't get mad if I do."

"No! I promise the opposite!"

Great. She was even crazier than we'd thought. What was I supposed to do, jam my hand into her mouth? That was a good way to lose another finger.

She let the tip of the key poke out of her mouth for a split second, then slurped it back in.

"Are you just messing with us?"

"No."

"Give me the key."

"No."

"If you swallow that thing, I swear I will Heimlich Maneuver the shit out of you."

"No, you will not. Because I am a client, and I expect you to provide the services for which you were hired."

"Handcuffs weren't part of the deal."

"They most certainly were."

"Yeah, but I was supposed to keep the key."

Shirley shrugged. "The customer is always right," she said. "Think of this as exceeding my expectations."

She swallowed the key.

"Aw, come on! Really? Really? You truly believe that was the way to go? For real?"

"Listen to me, Andrew Mayhem," said Shirley. "You said you could help. It's right there on your goddamn flier: We solve weird problems. Well, I'm your weird problem for today. Solve me."

"Is that...are you being...was that a sexual comment?"

"No. I want your partner to get the other cooler. That's all I want."

"Should I get the lock picks out of the car?" Roger asked me.

If she struggled, dealing with the handcuffs would be far more trouble than it was worth. Easier to just do what she wanted. "Nah," I said.

"What about a laxative?"

"No. Crawl down there and get the cooler."

Roger looked as if he wanted to argue, then looked as if he decided that it was in his best interest not to argue. "All right, all right. I'll do it. But next time I get to be handcuffed to the armadillo killer."

He took the flashlight and crawled down into the hole.

"I'm sorry," said Shirley.

"I'm sure you're not."

"You can say 'Surely you can't be serious.' I'm the one person who won't ask you to stop calling me Shirley."

I tried to understand her comment and failed. "What?"

"That was a joke. From Airplane. The movie."

"Oh. Yeah. Any other time I would've gotten it. You know, you really shouldn't swallow keys. It was a small one, but it wasn't that small. If it spins around in your digestive tract you're going to have problems."

"I'll be okay."

I wanted to say "Also, it could unlock your stomach and all of your food will fall out," but I remembered that I was not talking to my eight-year-old son, who had at various times swallowed a magnet, a marble, a fun-sized Snickers bar whole in the wrapper, and an eraser that he swore he thought was a gummi eraser.

"Crap," said Roger.

I leaned my head down into the hole. "What's wrong?"

"I'm stuck."

"Shine the flashlight on yourself."

Roger did. He was only a couple of feet away from the cooler, but he was indeed wedged in tight, with his leg stuck underneath a copper pipe.

"How the hell did that happen?"

"I don't know!" he said. "Maybe it's because my beloved business partner made me crawl down here!"

"That's an amazing achievement to get that stuck that quickly," I informed him. "That's something a cartoon character would do. I commend you."

"I think the ceiling curves down on this side."

"You mean the floor."

"If I'm stuck underneath it, it's the ceiling. So you're seriously going to just look at me and make jokes, huh? I hope there are rats down here dripping with plague and you have to be the one to go home and tell Samantha that the flesh bubbled off my body while you laughed. That's what I hope."

"Are you two always like this?" Shirley asked.

"I think we're being a little more childish than usual."

"It wouldn't upset me if you toned it down."

"I totally understand." I looked back down at Roger. "Can you get out?"

"Oh, sure, I only called out because I wanted you to see me at my moment of grand dignity."

"Let's all try to be a bit less sarcastic."

"I'm stuck under the floorboards in a creepy house next to a cooler of dead bodies. This is not the time to ask me to get rid of my defense mechanism."

"Do you need us to come down and get you? I'm asking this in a completely sincere manner."

"Nah, I guess I'm okay. I just need to move my—son of a bitch. Made it worse. Let me try to—son of a bitch. Yeah, I'm really wedged in here. I could use some help."

"Well," I said, rattling the handcuffs chain, "I'm glad there's nothing that would make that task inconvenient."

"You're already being sarcastic again," said Shirley. "It hasn't even been fifteen seconds."

"I apologize."

"Even that was sarcastic!"

"No, that was legit. Look, I'm not a finger pointer, but the handcuffs problem is on you. So do we crawl down there with them on, try to pick the lock first, or gnaw?"

The front door opened.

A man entered with a gun.

CHAPTER SIX

Both of them—the man and the gun—were very large.

I'm no scrawny stick-man, and during those times when I'm not in the hospital recovering from psychopath-related injuries, I'm in pretty good physical shape. But this guy...I'm sure he wasn't really seven feet tall, but he sure looked like it. He was totally ripped, and he wore a tight short-sleeved dress shirt that was clearly selected for its muscle-highlighting properties.

He had short black hair, wore sunglasses, and as I've previously mentioned, he was holding an extremely large handgun that I assumed shot extremely large bullets at an extremely rapid velocity.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

There were thousands of incorrect ways I could answer this, so I took a moment to gather my thoughts. "Are you a concerned neighbor?"

"No."

"Okay," I said, holding up my handcuffed hand. "I'm a married father of two, and my wife is pregnant with triplets, and this woman is not my wife, and we snuck into this abandoned house for some bondage sex."

"Is that so?" the guy asked.

Shirley nodded. "We're total kink-wads."

"Generally, when you're in the BDSM lifestyle, you don't handcuff yourselves together. It's one of you handcuffing the other, the whole point being that one of you takes a dominant role and the other takes a submissive role."

"Thank you," I said. "I did wonder why this felt so wrong. We're amateurs. In fact, right before you came in, my mistress said 'Oh, crap, we should have taken off our clothes before we put on the cuffs, because the cuffs are going to make it a lot more difficult to get undressed.'" I laughed at our merry foolishness.

I kept waiting for the moment where Roger called out "Guys? What's going on up there? Guys? Guys?" but it didn't happen. Apparently the deep valley of our ineptitude did have a bottom.

"We really don't know what we're doing," said Shirley. "If you wanted to give us some pointers, we'd be all ears."

"I suppose my first recommendation would be not to do it around a bunch of reeking dead animals," said the man.

"Yes," I said. "Excellent point. It's not a good fetish. We both know it."

Shirley nodded. "Whatever you think of us can't compare to the shame in our hearts."

"We puke ourselves to sleep every night," I added, because it's the little details that make a lie sound convincing.

The man switched his gun to the other hand. "Look, I appreciate your efforts. I really do. It amuses me that you think I'd believe that you were rotting animal and bondage fetishists. But, ultimately, my job is to keep an eye on you, and I'm not so cool with you wandering around places like this."

"You're keeping an eye on me?" asked Shirley, looking horrified.

"No. Not you. Him."

"Me?" I asked, because apparently I thought he might be referring to the deceased squirrel.

"You."

"Do you work for Mr. Burke?"

The man looked mildly surprised. "Not bad, not bad. It speaks well of you that you could narrow your enemies down so quickly."

I felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach with a steel girder. Even when you're pretty sure that an insane millionaire is going to eventually try to hunt you down seeking vengeance, it's not a warm happy feeling to get proof.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Don't worry, I'm not here to kill you. Unless you give me a reason to do so. I am empowered to kill you if necessary, make no mistake about that, but at the moment I'm only here to watch you."

"Where is he?"

"I'm not going to tell you where my boss is. It was a dumb thing to ask. Please don't ask other things like it. What I need you to do is stay out of trouble. I'm not saying that you can't go out and earn a living—we've all got mortgages—but when my job is to keep an eye on you, it causes stress for me to have you in a situation where you could be incarcerated or injured before Mr. Burke is ready for that to happen."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I just explained it. I want you to stop messing around this place."

"No, why did you say anything about Burke? You could have lied. You could have said 'Hey, you two, get out of my house!' and we would've run like scared kids. There was no reason to tell us anything."

The man grinned. "It's possible that there may have been an attempt to instill fear."

"You know that your boss is a sadistic killer, right?"

"Yes, in fact, I did know that."

"He murdered a child."

"Now, let's play fair. 'Child' is pushing it. 'Kid' I'll accept. It was a teenaged boy, so don't act like he shot a toddler in the head. But the things you've seen him do? Trust me, I've seen him do worse. I've seen him do things that would make you renounce God if you're a religious person and find God if you're not. Trying to convince me that I'm working for a bad man is not going to be an effective approach."

"All right."

"My name's Markus, by the way."

"Uh, hi, Markus," I said, not sure if I should offer to shake hands.

"I like you, Mayhem. I have for a while. You have your defects, but overall I think you're a pretty cool guy."

"Thank you."

"No problem."

We all just stood there for a moment. I'd assumed that him saying that he liked me was the prelude to "but..." and a vicious threat, yet no vicious threat seemed to be forthcoming.

"Anyway," said Markus, "I need you to clear out of here. Take these coolers of animal sludge with you if you want, but get out."

"And if he refuses?" asked Shirley.

"Then I will kill you both. Not in an excruciatingly painful manner. I'm not about putting bullets in people's kneecaps and watching them slowly bleed to death. Two shots, two foreheads punctured, no pain, the end. But you don't want that, do you?"

I shook my head. He was correct. I did not want that.

Markus continued. "I know that even apart from Mr. Burke you've dealt with several people who enjoy inflicting suffering. That's not my style. I'm not that guy. Again, Mayhem, I could see us going out for drinks, playing darts...oh, wait, you had a bad experience playing darts, didn't you?"

"Yes. Ghastly."

"So not darts. Have you had a ghastly billiards experience?"

"No. Billiards has been fine so far."

"Then I could see us getting together, having a few beers, and playing billiards. Not that we're going to ever do it. Essentially, all I'm saying is that I have no personal animosity toward you whatsoever, but I won't hesitate to kill you—painlessly—if necessary. So help me do my job and get the hell out of here."

Did he know that Roger was down below? Should I tell him? Should we leave Roger behind for now? He couldn't be permanently stuck, and we did still want to get the last cooler...

"Okay," I said. "I guess we'll be on our way."

Shirley and I began to walk across the living room, away from the gap.

"Are you kidding me?" Markus asked.

"What?"

"You're not taking Roger with you?"

"Uh..."

"There are two possibilities here. One, you're leaving your friend behind to save your own skin, which is reprehensible. Two, you think that I'm so bad at my job that I didn't know Roger was under the floor, and you were trying to pull a fast one on me. I complimented you under circumstances where compliments are not usually given, and you insulted me. You slapped me in the face. I came to you with good cheer and a reasonable attitude, and you stood right there and thought that I was so monstrously stupid that I would leave the Roger element unresolved. So which is it?"

"We were going to leave him to die," I said.

Markus frowned. "Are you trying to be funny?"

"I guess. I mean, not laugh out loud funny, but sort of." I really wished he'd put that gun away. It was severely disrupting my ability to carry on a conversation.

"I don't like having my intelligence insulted," said Markus.

"I wasn't trying to insult you."

"I tried to be a nice guy. I don't expect you to kiss up to me or anything, but come on, really? Give me one good reason why I shouldn't put a few bullets through the floor and take your friend out right now."

"Please don't shoot!" said Roger from below. "I'm stuck! I can't defend myself!"

"Look at this from my point of view," I said. "If you were in my position, wouldn't you want any possible edge you can get, no matter how much of a long shot it was? Would you actually have respected me if I'd told you about Roger and you hadn't realized he was down there? If I were you and I did that, I would have said 'What a complete and utter moron!' and killed me. You seem like the kind of guy who cares about the gene pool, and I didn't want to come off like somebody who should be put down for the sake of our future."

Markus considered that, then shrugged. "All right, I'll buy that. However, let me be very clear: You try to fuck with me again, and I won't shoot you, I will sandpaper your teeth down to the gums. Got it?"

"Yes, sir."

"There is no hyperbole in that threat. I mean that I will literally purchase some sandpaper, put your head in a vice, and rub the sandpaper against your teeth until they've been worn down to the gums. Think about that carefully. Summon up a nice clear mental picture of a piece of sandpaper being vigorously rubbed against a whole row of exposed nerves in your teeth. Is that a sensation you would like to experience?"

"It is not," I said.

"Then I think we've accomplished something. I feel very good about our talk." He raised his voice. "Roger, you can come out now."

"I can't," Roger said.

"Yes, you can. Everybody understands each other now."

"I'm stuck."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm stuck down here."

"How the hell did you get stuck?"

"I was bigger than the space I squeezed myself into."

"If I dropped a rattlesnake down there, do you think you could become un-stuck?"

"No. I've been trying the whole time you've been talking, after the part where you got mad because they didn't tell you I was down here."

"Is this a trick?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Markus cursed and pointed the gun at my face. "Go get him."

"I'm handcuffed."

"So unlock it."

"She swallowed the key."

Markus was silent for a very long moment. "I'm sorry," he finally said. "I come from a world of competence. The idea that you could be handcuffed to somebody who accidentally swallowed the key while your friend was stuck—"

"She swallowed it on purpose," I clarified.

Markus looked as if he wanted to just sit down and weep. "Brains come very soft in these parts," he said.

"We never claimed to be smart."

"Yes, you did," said Shirley. "You said you could solve my problem! That's implying that you're smart!"

"Shut up! Both of you! You're depressing me! Jesus Christ, Mr. Burke having a vendetta against you is like devoting his life to destroying a rodeo clown."

"I'm sure we can pick the lock on the cuffs," I said. "We've got a kit out in the car."

"No. Just get down there and tug your friend free."

"But we're handcuffed."

"I know you're handcuffed. This is not new information. I knew from the moment I opened that door and saw you two with the goddamn handcuffs around your wrists that you were handcuffed. Now get your friend out."

It was not my personal policy to continue to argue with gun-wielding individuals doing a slow burn, but...

"We'll get stuck."

"I will kill you if you get stuck. Is that enough motivation to make sure it doesn't happen?"

I nodded.

"But before you leave my sight," said Markus, "I'm collecting cell phones. Hand them over."

I suddenly noticed that my pocket felt lighter than it had when we came into the house. Shirley looked apologetic as she opened her purse. "I didn't mean to take them," she said. "I can't help myself."

"How did you even do that? What are you, a pickpocketing sorceress?"

"I'll take that," said Markus, grabbing the purse from Shirley. He fished through the contents and took out my cell phone. He dropped it onto the floor, then stomped on it, breaking it apart on the first try. He took out a pink cell phone and stomped it, then did the same thing to Roger's. At least now that we had our own business, they were tax deductible.

Without further ado, Shirley and I squeezed down into the hole.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Shirley pressed her mouth against my ear and whispered: "Do you think he's going to kill us anyway?"

"No," I whispered back. "But I do think he'll sandpaper our teeth."

We crawled across the cement floor over to Roger, who was facing away from us, his arm stuck between two pieces of copper pipe.

"Wasn't it your leg?" I asked.

"Yeah. I got my leg free but then my arm got stuck."

"You'd think this place was a matrix of pipes. There are, like, four of them."

"I'm not good at agile crawling, all right? There's no shame in that. Anyway, my arm isn't stuck that bad; I just can't get any leverage."

I shoved his elbow forward, and his arm popped free.

"Thanks."

"No problem."

Now what? It seemed kind of weak to just crawl out from under the floorboards. Shouldn't we devise some sort of incredible plan to gain the upper hand?

I reached up and tested the boards. They seemed pretty sturdy, but if we crawled directly underneath Markus, and then all three of us bashed up at once, the wood might break, giving us a chance to grab Markus's foot and pull him off balance. The gun would fall out of his hand and slide across the floor, just out of his reach, and Roger would quickly scramble to the surface, grab the weapon, and then hold Markus at gunpoint until Shirley and I made it to safety.

That plan had a possible success rate of about .07%. More likely, the end result would be a loud but completely unproductive thump, and then we would have to sheepishly explain to Markus that, yes, we'd thought we could break through the floor underneath his feet. Then he would kill us all.

Based on that analysis, I thought it was best not to propose the plan to Roger and Shirley.

"Do you think he's bluffing?" Roger whispered. "I don't think he's allowed to kill us. Do you really believe that Mr. Burke would let him just shoot us?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"If all he cared about was us being dead, he could've done that a long time ago. He has an investment in us. Mostly you. I think Markus likes to give the impression that there isn't another layer of management in the decision to kill us. I say we let him come down here and get us."

"That's the worst plan ever."

"It's not the worst plan ever."

"I'm not going to piss this guy off. What if he goes after Helen instead? Or Samantha?"

"Okay, you're right. Worst plan ever. Let's go back up."

Dragging the cooler behind us, we crawled to the gap in the floorboards, and then out into the semi-fresh air of the living room. Shirley and I hoisted the cooler, which was surprisingly heavy, out of the hole.

"More dead animals?" asked Markus.

"We're not sure," I said. "We'll just take it out to the car and get out of your way."

"No, no, I want to see what's in there."

Markus kept the gun pointed at me as I lifted the lid. Usually in these situations I hoped that things I was about to open weren't booby trapped, but this time I was rooting for a booby trap that was slightly misaligned, missing me and hitting Markus. For example, some sort of contraption that lobbed a grenade past my head and into Markus' open mouth would be appreciated.

That did not happen.

The cooler was filled to the top with dead possums.

A couple of them had been stabbed to death, but one on the top was missing its arms and legs. Another had been skinned. One had a tiny noose around its neck, one had an arrow through its head, and one looked like it had taken a bullet to the chest, point-blank.

Roger and I recoiled. Shirley stared at it without emotion. Markus leaned in for a closer look.

"That is truly demented," he said. "I think I like the one with the noose best."

There had to be nine or ten of them in there, each killed in a different manner. As queasy as I already felt, I got even queasier as I noticed the scrape marks on the bottom of the lid. One of them had been put in there while it was still alive.

"Do you remember doing this?" Roger asked Shirley.

She bit down on her lower lip and a tear trickled down her cheek. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."

"Do you really dislike possums?"

"No, I just...I don't know why I did it."

"Look how flat that one's head is," said Markus. He laughed. "Did you press it in a book or something?"

"Go to hell."

Markus's smile vanished. "Please don't forget that I have the gun. It may be better for my career not to kill Andrew, but that most assuredly does not transfer over to you."

"Maybe I want to die."

"Makes sense. I'm at peace with what I do, but I can see why a sweet girl like you would want to die after she found out she was a possum strangler."

"Then shoot me."

Markus shrugged and aimed his gun at her head. Everything inside of me screamed He's really gonna do it!

"No!" I said. "Don't! She doesn't know what she wants! She's indecisive!"

"She can make the call," said Markus. "What do you want? Bullet through the head? It'll make the madness go away."

She stared at him, their eyes locked for several seconds. Then she blinked and looked down. "No, I don't want you to shoot me."

"The lady gets what she wants," said Markus, lowering his gun.

"I need time to process this. Can I have a minute alone?"

"You could if you weren't handcuffed to Andrew. But you are, so no."

Shirley dropped to her knees, and then she gave me a look that I couldn't quite translate. My wife Helen is incredibly skilled at conveying elaborate messages with one piercing gaze (such as "I truly hope that you did not just walk into this house without an anniversary present, because I suspect that you forgot, and if my suspicions are confirmed and you missed the seventy-three hints I've dropped in the past week, this will be a dark, dark night in your life"), but Shirley's look, sort of a quick glance with a raised eyebrow, didn't make sense to me.

She tipped over the cooler. Red water and dead possums spilled out.

There was going to be a human part underneath the possum mess. I just knew it. Probably a forearm wrapped in aluminum foil.

Shirley began to sift through the possums, picking one up by the scruff of its neck. She held it up for inspection then tossed it aside.

Roger gave me a look that was quite easy to translate: What the hell is wrong with her, and when can we go home?

She picked up one that had been bludgeoned to death, then discarded it as well.

A bomb? Did she have a bomb hidden in one of the dead possums? Was that her secret plan?

Probably not, but that would be awesome.

"Okay, enough playing with the roadkill," said Markus.

"It's not roadkill."

"Close enough."

She picked up a particularly bloated possum and gave it a squeeze. "You disrespect me when you call it roadkill."

"Oh, well, shit, I'm sorry, your highness, I wasn't speaking literally. But, seriously, enough playing in possum gunk."

"It's beautiful..." said Shirley. "So...beautiful..."

She gave me that look again.

Then she shoved the possum's head into her mouth and bit off its entire snout.

Roger gagged, Markus gaped, and I realized that I was supposed to take advantage of the distraction.

I dove at him, nearly popping my arm out of its socket when I yanked Shirley along with me. I knocked Markus to the floor before he could shoot me in the face, then punched him in the jaw.

Roger kicked the gun out of his hand. It slid across the floor, striking the bookshelf, and Roger hurried over to retrieve it.

Markus punched me in the face so hard that for a second my vision went completely black.

Shirley grabbed a possum by the tail and slapped it into Markus's face. It burst like a guts-filled water balloon. Regardless of the amount of depravity Markus had participated in during the course of his life, there's no way that his expectations for this evening included the act of having a possum splatter against him.

"Get out of the way," Roger said. I didn't look back at him, but I assumed he was pointing the gun at us and trying to get a clear shot at Markus.

Without wiping the sludge off his face, Markus punched me again. It hurt. Then I caught a flash of silver and saw that he had a switchblade knife.

As he swung it at me, I grabbed him by the wrist. But he was a hell of a lot stronger than me, and the blade of the knife didn't slow enough to make me think It's okay, I'm sure that thing won't plunge deep into my eye socket.

Shirley squeezed another possum into his face, turning it back and forth like juicing an orange.

The knife fell out of his hand.

Shirley picked it up, then gave me a violent shove that I wasn't expecting and that knocked me off of Markus. Shirley mounted him, snatched up the knife, and then slammed it into his chest.

She wrenched it out, then stabbed him again.

Then again.

Over and over, she plunged the switchblade into his chest. Even when he stopped moving, she kept stabbing.

I reached out and touched her shoulder. "Hey, I think you can—"

"Don't touch me!"

I didn't know what to do. Try to overpower her? Once you got into the double digits, did it really matter how many more times she stabbed him?

I turned away as she kept going.

Roger looked horrified and sick to his stomach. "I had the gun," he told her. "We could have used it to, you know, keep him at bay."

Shirley glanced back at him but didn't stop stabbing. "I don't want to hear anything from you, either."

Now she'd moved away from Markus's chest. His face had already looked bad, but now it looked significantly worse.

Anybody who worked for Mr. Burke deserved a good stabbing, but when a crazed woman is jamming a knife into a corpse over and over and over and over, at some point you've got to stop her, right? What was the appropriate behavior model in this circumstance?

"Shirley...?"

"Shut up."

"Shirley...?"

"Stop talking."

"Shirley...?"

"You're distracting me."

"Look, Shirley..."

"Do you want a knife in the face?" she asked me. "Do you? Have I not made it clear that I'm good at stabbing people?"

"Oh, very clear, crystal clear." Actually, I thought her skills were an example of quantity over quality, but I didn't say this.

She kept stabbing.

"This needs to stop," I said.

She shook her head. "No, it doesn't."

"Yes, it does. It really does."

She slammed the knife against his forehead, but it didn't go through the bone. Instead, the slippery knife bounced out of her hand. "See what you made me do?"

"Please stop," I said.

"He hit you."

"That doesn't mean you have to stab him eight hundred times."

"He was going to kill us all!"

"Maybe! I get that it was self-defense. I'm glad he's dead. That's totally okay with me. But unless you think he's going to be possessed by the spirits of the undead, I don't think total bodily dismemberment is necessary!"

Shirley wiped some blood out of her hair. "I suppose you're right."

"So what next?" asked Roger, his voice so quiet I could barely hear him.

"We need to search him," I said. I was going to mention that this task would have been much more pleasant sixty seconds ago, but at some point you just have to accept that mistakes were made and quit harassing people about their stabbing sprees.

"For what?" asked Shirley. "Exposed intestines?"

"Clues. A phone, a business card, anything that can lead the FBI to Mr. Burke."

"Oh. I guess I should have let you ask him some questions. If you'd said something..."

"Let's just move on," I said, looking at Markus's body. He was totally covered in blood, so much that I couldn't even see the slits of his pants pockets. Three years ago, I wouldn't have been able to reach into somebody's bloody pockets without lots of whimpering and psyching myself up for the task, but I was mostly over that now, and I slid my hand into his right pocket and took out his cell phone.

I tried to turn it on. Nothing happened.

"I think the blood ruined it," I said.

"If you leave it in uncooked rice for a couple of days, the rice will absorb the liquid," Roger said. "That's how I fixed my iPhone after I dropped it in the toilet."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Yes. People like us joke around when we're trying to avoid insanity."

Suddenly I perked up. "Did you hear that?"

"What?"

"Sounded like a car door."

Outside, a car engine started. I dragged Shirley over to the front door and looked through the peephole in just enough time to see a small truck speeding down the street away from the house.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Do you think that was a good guy or bad guy?" Roger asked.

"It was probably our guardian angels, getting out of here before the shitstorm begins." I took a couple of deep breaths to calm myself. "We'll be fine," I said. "We'll find a neighbor and borrow a phone. Helen will be home with the kids right now, so I'll call her, then I'll call the police, and they'll get everyone out of harm's way, and we'll all go hide in an underground bunker somewhere."

"I told you we should have changed our identities," said Roger.

"Maybe we'll do that now. Witness protection program. Andrew Chaos."

Shirley pulled me back into the house. I was stronger and could have resisted, but I also realized that it might complicate our efforts to get help if somebody saw us standing on the front porch, drenched in blood.

"What do we do?" Shirley asked.

"We call the police."

"No, we're not doing that."

"Of course we are! My wife and children could be in danger."

"I can't have the police investigating me! You saw what I just did!" She pointed at Markus's corpse. "I'm not going to prison for him!"

"Then let's just get these handcuffs off and go our separate ways."

I wasn't expecting her to yank me up against her, though I'll admit that I really should have been better prepared for the switchblade against my throat.

Roger pointed the gun at her. "Let him go."

"Drop the gun!"

"I'm serious! I'll shoot!"

I really, truly, wholeheartedly did not want to see what would happen if Roger tried to shoot Shirley while she used me as a human shield.

"I said, drop the gun! I'll slit his throat! I'll do it!"

"If you do, so help me God I will put a bullet in your head!" Roger threatened. "You won't live one single second longer than him!"

Now that the discussion centered around plans for after my demise, I thought it was time to let my own feelings be known: "Roger, drop the frickin' gun!"

Roger dropped the gun. I think he was relieved.

"Kick it into the hole," Shirley said.

Roger did as he was told. Once we talked Shirley into a more reasonable state of mind, we'd go get it. A large gun would probably come in handy.

"Now drop the knife," Roger said.

"Not yet."

"Drop the knife or I will go back down under the floorboards, get the gun, and shoot you with it."

"I would like you to stop threatening me. I can't focus when you keep talking about shooting me. We'll get through this. I just need some time to think."

"There isn't any time!" said Roger.

Shirley flicked the tip of the knife against my neck, making a quick cut. I yelped.

"Listen, Shirley," I said, trying not to sound panicked, "We're not going to turn you in. Let's just go deal with our own crises. There's no reason our destinies need to be intertwined."

"My car is at your office."

"That's fine. We can drop you off, or you can take a cab back, or however you want to handle it."

I couldn't see Shirley's face, so I wasn't sure if she was considering that idea or not. "No," she said after a few seconds. "I might need hostages."

"Hostages?" I asked. "Seriously? You're going to make us into hostages?"

"Possibly. It hasn't come to that yet."

"Okay, I'm sure you're very confused right now, and it's only natural. But this isn't the way to deal with it. And, no offense, but a middle-aged woman with a switchblade isn't exactly the greatest peril I've ever faced."

"I don't care what you've survived in the past. Nobody wants a knife in the belly. If you really feel like you need to make a move, be my guest, but I will stick this thing in you."

I was definitely going to make a move. Soon. With Helen, Theresa, and Kyle in danger I wasn't going to sit around, waiting for the most opportune and safest moment to strike. That said, attacking while she was on high alert would probably get me disemboweled, so I'd at least wait for a slightly better moment.

"Fine," I said. "If you're the kind of person who would let a pregnant woman and two children get murdered, I guess there's nothing I can do to stop you." I hadn't really used it in the past, but "guilt over the deaths of pregnant women and children" seemed like a good tactical approach.

"We need to hurry," said Shirley, ignoring me. "Let's rinse some of this blood off and then get out of here."

"I wouldn't use the water in the coolers," said Roger.

Shirley dragged me into the kitchen. She turned on the faucet, then gestured at me with the knife. "Get the blood off your face."

What she should have said, to be more sinister, was "Get the blood off your face or I'll add new blood to your face." Or, you know, something with that basic concept. But she didn't, so I grabbed a dishtowel, held it under the water stream, then rubbed the blood off my face with it. I rinsed the rag, then held it out toward Shirley.

She stared at it for a moment and frowned.

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Difficult to pick up a rag while you're holding a knife?"

"None of your business."

"I can wash your face for you if you want."

"No. Just let me think."

"If we weren't handcuffed you could handle your own personal hygiene."

"Stop talking."

"I could fill a glass with water and splash it on your face. Or, we could call a time out and I'll let you hold your head under the faucet until the count of ten without trying anything. How does that sound?"

"I'll just have to stay bloody," she said, heading back toward the living room and tugging me along.

"Are you sure? It's really kind of a gross look on you."

"Shut up or I'll cut you," she said, in such a way that I felt I should shut up or she would cut me.

We hurried out of the house, leaving the dead animals out to create a welcoming neighborhood aroma. "You're driving," Shirley told Roger. "We're sitting in the back."

Roger got into the driver's seat while Shirley and I got into the back seat. She kept the knife pointed at me as she got in, then realized that she couldn't use her left hand to close the door while it was pointing the knife at me.

"Roger," she said. "Close my door."

Roger got out of the car, did his chauffeur duties without a comment, then got back in and started the engine.

"Where to?"

"I don't know. Just drive. No, wait...get out of this neighborhood and then take a right on Greenveil Avenue. We're getting out of town."

Roger backed out of the driveway. There was a mild jolt as he drove over the curb, but it wasn't enough to make me think it was a good moment to leap at Shirley.

"I'm going to make another plea for you to be reasonable," I said. "Keeping us around is making things worse for you, not better."

"I'm not looking to be reasonable right now."

"You should be. You know the guy you repeatedly stabbed? If his boss finds out you did it, I can't even describe the kind of revenge he'll take."

"Try."

"Okay, feet chopped off and replaced with wheels. That's the kind of freaky shit he does."

"I deserve whatever happens to me."

"No, no, you don't. You could beat an orphan to death with a dead nun and not deserve what will happen to you if Mr. Burke catches us. I don't want to overhype him, but the man is mentally unhinged!"

"You've made your point. As soon as we're out of town, I'll decide what we should do."

"Any chance I could take out my wallet and show you pictures of my kids?"

"No."

Reasoning with somebody who is completely whack-nut bonkers is never an easy thing. For all I knew, Mr. Burke's associates had already gone after my family. Hanging out with Shirley while she sorted out her personal issues didn't fit with my plan for the rest of the evening.

I grabbed for the switchblade.

Missed.

And then Shirley had the tip of the knife pressed against my chest, so that one little thrust could push the blade into my heart.

I apologized.

"Do you think I'm joking?" Shirley asked. "Let me be very clear about this: I will kill you. I will cause a geyser of blood to spew forth from your body. Do you understand? Do I need to jam this goddamn knife into your heart so that you posthumously get my meaning?"

I explained that, no, that was unnecessary.

"Do I have to sit here with the knife like this, or can you be trusted?"

"You can trust me," I said, even though I was going to try again to take the knife away from her the first chance I got.

She pulled the knife away. "Good."

I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief. How come I was able to overpower the large man with a gun but not the tiny woman with a knife?

"You guys are okay now, right?" asked Roger. "I wasn't sure if I should keep driving or not."

"We're fine," I said.

"Yeah, we're fine," Shirley agreed. "I just need time to figure some things out, and then we'll go our separate ways."

"There's something else to consider," I said, watching Shirley closely for my next moment to strike. "You're talking about using me for a hostage, but if Mr. Burke's people find us before the police do, they'll be after me, and that makes you the hostage. Why would you purposely put yourself in a situation where you're the hostage?"

"You look like you're thinking about lunging at me again," said Shirley.

"No, I wasn't."

"You're tensed up. I'm serious, if you try to get this knife, I'll kill you and then use your partner as my hostage."

"I wasn't tensed up."

"I can see that you're tensed up."

"Well, I'm stressed! It was tension over my family being in danger, not my body tensed up to strike! You can't expect me to act like I've just had a massage!"

"Don't go for the knife."

"I'm not going for your stupid knife!"

Would she expect me to go for the knife at the exact moment that I said that I wasn't going for it? I considered that for a split second and then decided that, yeah, I'd get stabbed.

"I'm watching you," said Shirley.

"Yeah? Well, I'm watching you, too," I said, immediately realizing how lame of a comment that was. For an encore, I'd have to tattle to Roger that she put her index finger on my side of the seat.

We sat in silence for a few moments, watching each other carefully.

"I'm sorry about all of this," said Shirley.

"Jesus, can't you just stick to one personality?" I asked. "Be a cold-hearted sociopath if that's what makes you happy."

"That was almost a little pouty," she said, with a hint of a smile.

"Are you seriously trying to make lighthearted comments? I don't need you to be an enigma right now. It's pissing me off."

"Guys...?"

I looked up at Roger. "What's up?"

"I think a couple of cars are following us. Don't look back. They may just be going the same way, but that YouTube video said that a good private investigator relies on his gut, and my gut says that we're being followed."

"So take a quick right turn," I said. "Don't signal."

Roger turned right, tires screeching.

"I didn't mean into a Burger King parking lot," I said.

"Sorry."

He went through the drive-thru lane, which was mercifully empty, and then around the building and onto a side street.

I looked back. Two silver cars turned onto the street.

"Are those the ones?"

Roger glanced at the rear-view mirror. "Yeah."

"Okay, yes, we're being followed. Wonderful."

"What do we do?"

"Drive like an absolute maniac and try to lose them."

CHAPTER NINE

"Does he know how to do a high speed chase?" Shirley asked me.

"Nope. Our car will probably explode."

Shirley ignored me. "Roger, do you know how to do a high speed chase?"

He glanced back at her for a second. "Do you see how much I'm sweating! I can barely drive at normal speeds!"

"Then let's not get ourselves killed! Isn't there a way to outsmart them?"

"Well, sure," I said, "if we were smart."

"I'm not good with speeding," said Shirley, sounding more than a little anxious. "The speed limits are there for a reason. Cars aren't meant to go fast."

"I suppose we could paint the side of the car to look like that grocery store up there, and then we could park in the exact spot so that we blend in."

"Don't make fun of me."

I looked back. One of the silver cars was tailgating us. The windshield was tinted so I couldn't see the driver, but I assumed he was some sinister-looking scumbag.

"Do they look like they might pull out guns and start shooting?" Roger asked.

"I can't tell. There's no evidence that they won't. If they're Burke's people, they probably have a slingshot that shoots chainsaws, so we need to get out of here. Floor it."

"Don't floor it," said Shirley.

"Floor it," I repeated.

Roger floored the accelerator. We shot forward. There were no pedestrians to leap out of the way and no garbage cans to knock over, but Roger did fly through a yellow light that turned red midway through the intersection.

The two silver cars ran the red light and sped after us, removing any possible doubt that the whole "we're being followed" thing was a wacky misunderstanding.

Fortunately, there wasn't much traffic for Roger to weave around. He switched lanes to avoid a minivan, then took a sharp left onto a side street.

Shirley looked terrified.

Which meant that, even though I didn't want to distract Roger during his driving duties, now was the time to get that rotten freaking knife away from her.

She'd be watching my free hand more carefully than my handcuffed one, so...

I threw a punch. This jerked her right hand before I could land the punch, and she countered with the switchblade more quickly than I'd anticipated, despite my previous observations about her strength and agility.

I've had a knife go through my hand before. Stings like hell. In that particular case, having the knife protruding all the way through my palm gave me an advantage, because it meant that now I had the knife. It was not a strategy I ever wanted to employ again, because...well, it involved getting stabbed through the hand, which is not awesome.

This time it wasn't quite so drastic. The knife hit the middle knuckle of my middle finger and bounced off the bone. I don't wish to be crude, but it hurt like a damn shit fucking son of a bitch. Not as bad as the one that went all the way through my palm, but still, ow.

I threw another punch. Missed.

She jabbed the knife at me, going for my eyeball. I grabbed her wrist and tried to dig my fingernails into her skin, wishing I had nails like hers (though not pink).

Roger took another sharp turn. Had it been a left turn, the momentum might have smacked Shirley against her door, but it was a right turn, so the blade sliced across my cheek and ear.

I punched again, and this time I connected with her jaw. There's no satisfaction in hurting a woman, even one who is currently trying to murder you, and her cry of pain made me feel like a complete cretin, though it wasn't enough to stop me from punching her again.

She spat out half of a front tooth.

Another sharp turn, which smacked me into the door. The door handle, to be specific. It didn't break any vertebrae, but it did not feel soothing against my spine. The back of my head whacked against the window.

She stabbed at me again, and I deflected it with my arm, though by "deflected" I mean "got cut."

"Knock it off, you two!" Roger shouted.

I grabbed the knife by the blade. It didn't break the skin, at least not until Shirley pulled it free. Then it broke the skin quite efficiently.

I threw another punch. She blocked it with her handcuffed fist, which then smacked into her face. I did not ask "Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?" though if I hadn't been bleeding so much I might have considered it.

She screamed with rage.

Taking advantage of her open mouth, I reached up and flicked her broken tooth with my index finger, hard.

The volume of her scream increased by a few decibels and the pitch rose to an ear-mangling frequency. I yanked my finger out of the way in time to avoid having it bitten off.

"I can't drive while you're fighting back there!" Roger shouted.

"Stop the car!" I shouted back. "Help get this psycho off of me!"

Shirley held the knife above her head, smacking the roof of the vehicle, then slammed it down.

We crashed.

Shirley and I were both thrown against the back of the front seats upon impact. The knife went into the seat cushion, buried to the hilt. Glass sprayed everywhere. A car alarm blared.

We were in the parking lot of a small arts and crafts shop. Roger had crashed into a black sedan. He turned around, a thin trickle of blood running down his forehead.

"You okay?" he asked.

My shoulder was definitely bruised but there didn't seem to be any new lacerations or broken bones. Shirley was dazed but not unconscious. I grabbed the knife and snapped the blade back into the handle.

"I'm fine," I said, because in my world "fine" often meant "at least my jugular vein wasn't severed."

The two silver cars pulled into the parking lot behind us.

I threw open the door and scrambled out, dragging Shirley behind me. Fortunately, she was alert enough to mostly move on her own, so I wasn't pulling dead weight.

A man got out of each car. They were dressed entirely in black, except for their orange facemasks, which were decorated like jack-o-lanterns with evil grins.

They both had sub-machine guns. Yes, actual sub-machine guns. I couldn't believe it.

We really should have stayed in the car.

The door to the arts and crafts shop opened and an old woman, probably in her seventies, eighties, or nineties, stormed out. She gaped at her damaged car. "What did you do to my...?" She trailed off as she noticed the blood-covered handcuffed couple, the guy with the head injury, and the men in jack-o-lantern masks.

For a moment she just stood there, mouth open, staring at us. Nobody moved.

Then one of the jack-o-lantern men turned to the other, who gave him a thumbs-up sign.

They spun their sub-machine guns around, pointing them at the old woman, then opened fire.

Two diagonal red paths tore across her body. The woman, mouth still open, stumbled backwards as dozens more bullets pounded into her, shredding her chest.

Her dead body dropped to the ground.

The men returned their attention to us.

I have never wanted to utter the words "Oh, shit!" more in my life, but I was unable to speak.

It's not like we were in the middle of Disney World, but this wasn't exactly a discrete place for a sub-machine gun slaying. Were these guys suicide gunners? Were they even trying to get away with it?

Faced with twin sub-machine guns pointed at us, I wasn't sure what to do, so I raised my hands into the air, forcing Shirley to raise her cuffed hand as well.

I was terrified, but getting mowed down like that old woman seemed like too quick of a death for this to be Mr. Burke's revenge. There was no way he'd let me get off that easy.

Unless, thanks to Markus's untimely death, this was Plan B.

God, I hoped it wasn't Plan B.

One of the men in the jack-o-lantern masks silently beckoned to Roger.

Roger did not look like he wanted to walk over to him.

The man fired a few bullets into the air, then pointed the gun at Roger and beckoned again.

I watched in horror as Roger approached the man.

The man pressed the barrel of the gun between Roger's eyes, held it there for a couple of seconds, then removed it and used the barrel to bash Roger in the side of the head. He dropped to his knees, but before he could collapse completely, the man grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to his feet.

I desperately wished I had some sort of weapon, but all I had was the...no, damn, I didn't even have the switchblade anymore. What the hell? Had Shirley really been able to swipe it from me?

The man dragged Roger over to the closer of the two silver cars and smashed him against the side. He pressed the barrel of the gun against Roger's back while he took out a set of keys. The trunk popped open as he pushed a button on the remote control.

Shirley and I stood there helplessly as the man quickly got Roger into the trunk and slammed the lid shut.

At least I was right: they weren't planning to just shoot us. Though I could easily envision a near future scenario in which I was wailing "Oh, why didn't they just shoot us?"

Or, perhaps, they simply weren't planning to shoot Roger. Mr. Burke probably liked him better.

The jack-o-lantern-masked man whose gun was pointed at me silently beckoned.

Shirley lowered her arms, stepped behind me, and held the knife to my throat.

"Do you want to keep him alive for your boss?" she asked. "Do you?"

The man didn't respond. He kept the gun pointed at us.

"You let us go, or I swear I'll cut his neck wide open! I'll do it! Don't think I won't do it!"

"You won't be able to escape if you're handcuffed to a corpse," I told her.

"Don't talk!" she told me. To the men, she said "Lower your guns! Lower your guns now!"

The men did not lower their guns.

"You have until the count of three! I know you want him alive! I don't care if you shoot me afterward; I will kill this man just to ruin your day!"

The men exchanged a glance. Though I couldn't see their expressions through the masks, they were clearly a bit unsure about whether or not Shirley would actually slit my throat. This was good. This was our one advantage. As long as they didn't decide that it was okay to turn both of us into taco meat, we could use this.

"She's insane!" I told the jack-o-lantern men. "You've got to help me!"

Shirley pressed the knife more tightly against my neck. "Shut up."

"This crazy bitch is going to kill me!" I shouted.

I was trying to sell the idea that they needed to back off and let Shirley kidnap me, or else risk having to deliver my dead body to their boss. Unfortunately, as the jack-o-lantern men adjusted their aim, I got the very unnerving impression that they were going to try to shoot Shirley out from behind me.

Maybe they were so skilled with those sub-machine guns that they could knock a mosquito off somebody's arm. Or maybe Mr. Burke's requirements for my physical condition upon delivery were not very strict. Either way, whether they were confident or uncaring, I didn't see any way they could take out Shirley without at least putting a few bullets into my shoulder.

Shirley took a step back toward Roger's car, bringing me with her. "I'm serious! You need to get right back in your cars!"

No way in hell were they going to do that. And no way could they let this drag out much longer, not with so many shots fired and a dead woman in front of the store. The police would be here any minute.

The jack-o-lantern men began to walk toward us. The closer they got, the better their chances of only pumping bullets into Shirley became, and maybe they felt that she could only cut my neck a little before they had the chance to blow her away.

"Stay back!" she warned them. "Stay back or...okay, you've ruined it for yourselves!"

When they were about seven or eight feet away, she pulled the knife away from my neck and immediately slammed it into my back, several times, rapidly. I quickly realized that though it hurt, it did not feel like an actual knife blade puncturing my flesh, but rather somebody pounding me in the back with a knife handle.

She shoved me to the ground.

I struck the pavement, yanking Shirley down with me. Hopefully I was covered with enough of Markus's blood that they wouldn't notice the lack of a hole in the back of my shirt. I gritted my teeth and waited for the spray of sub-machine gunfire.

But apparently the jack-o-lantern men were surprised enough that Shirley had gone through with it that they didn't instantly react, and the closest one was also not expecting something along the lines of, say, a man who'd been stabbed several times in the back to suddenly grab his legs.

I pulled him off-balance and he hit the ground.

Shirley and her long fingernails went for his crotch.

The jack-o-lantern man who was still standing aimed his sub-machine gun at the pile of struggling bodies on the ground, hesitated...then ran back to the car with Roger in the trunk.

The man whose crotch was being treated poorly howled in agony. I punched him in his crooked painted-on one-toothed smile. Shirley punched him in the stomach.

Shirley grabbed for the sub-machine gun. They fought over it for a few seconds, until I punched him in the stomach as well. The gun popped out of his grasp.

Without hesitating, Shirley spun the weapon around and pulled the trigger, obliterating the front of his mask.

"Holy crap!" I said, because even when you're relieved that the bad guy is dead, it's never pleasant to see somebody's face get wiped out by a sub-machine gun.

The silver car sped out of the parking lot. Shirley and I stood up and she opened fire, shattering the rear windshield.

"Don't!" I shouted. "You'll hit Roger!"

She kept firing. As a line of bullets struck the trunk, I smacked her on the shoulder.

"Stop it!"

"What's the matter with you?"

"Roger's in the trunk!"

"I can't aim this thing very well yet."

"You might have killed him!"

"He's fine. Sorry. I couldn't hear you over the machine gun." She was breathing deeply, almost panting, and had a huge grin on her face. "Oh my God, this is so much better than a knife!"

CHAPTER TEN

Say it with me: cuckoo, cuckoo.

I chose to believe that Roger was still alive. I hadn't been able to see whether the bullets actually went through the trunk, and if they had, that didn't mean they'd hit him, and if they had, that didn't mean he'd been fatally wounded. My best friend might be in the trunk right now, cursing up a storm as he clutched his bleeding thigh, but he had to still be alive.

I hadn't let Roger die the three or four other times he'd been kidnapped, and I wasn't going to let him die this time, either.

The silver car nearly crashed into an ugly green Jeep, then sped off. A couple more cars passed the shop, the drivers apparently making the wise decision not to mess with the blood-covered handcuffed sub-machine gun-toting madwoman.

She gestured toward the dead man with the barrel of the gun. "Should we take off his mask?"

"Why the hell would we do that?"

"To see who he really is."

"He's not Spider-Man! The only thing under that mask is bloody pulp!"

"I still want to see it."

"His partner is getting away with Roger! We have to stop him!"

Shirley pointed the sub-machine gun at my face. "You're right, you're right. The other pumpkin needs killing. Let's give the old woman a proper burial and then we'll head off."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Of course I'm kidding. There's not even anyplace around here to bury her, unless you've got a jackhammer. Why can't you stop being so mopey and enjoy the adrenaline burst?"

I started to make another comment about how she was insane, then decided not to waste my breath. I noticed another old woman looking through the window from inside the shop, staring in pure horror at the carnage in the parking lot, and I waved for her to get away.

Shirley glanced over as the woman disappeared from sight. "Why'd you shoo her away?"

"Why do you think?"

"Andrew, I'm not going to go on a killing spree. Villains only, all right? Villains and maybe people who get in our way. But I'm not going to murder an old lady. I'm not like that."

"Good to know. Let's go."

We hurried over to the remaining silver car. "You're driving," she told me.

I opened the door and started to get in, then realized that with my left hand cuffed to Shirley's right, the seating arrangement was going to be tricky.

A siren began to blare in the distance.

"Just shoot the chain," I said.

"Yeah, I'm sure you wouldn't try to escape while I was distracted doing that." Shirley climbed into the driver's seat and then over into the passenger seat, keeping the gun pointed at me as I scooted in with her.

The keys were still in the ignition. I couldn't really do anything with my left hand, which was stretched across my chest and onto Shirley's side, but I started the engine with my right hand and put the car into reverse.

"How far away do you think the cops are?" asked Shirley.

"I don't know."

"Guess."

"I'm not good at calculating siren distance."

"Guess!"

"A few blocks, maybe?"

"Damn. Does this car have automatic windows?"

"How would I know?"

"Look to see if there's a window control switch, you jackass!"

"Yes, there is," I said, as I waited for a taxi to pass so our path onto the street would be clear.

"Roll mine down."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?"

"I'm not going to let you shoot at the cops!"

Shirley smashed the gun against the window. The glass spiderwebbed but didn't break. She pulled the trigger and squeezed off a few shots, and the window shattered.

"Wow, that was loud," said Shirley. "My ears are ringing."

Mine were, too. After the taxi drove past I pulled out onto the street and floored the accelerator. "Why are you wasting ammo? When we catch up to Roger we're gonna need to shoot the guy in the mask!"

"There's still plenty."

"Based on what? You didn't even look at the clip!"

"Machine guns hold way more bullets than what we've shot so far, don't they?"

"I don't know! I don't go around shooting them! If you want to confuse them with the everlasting machine guns you see in movies, then yes, our ammo level is perfectly fine!"

"If you'd rolled down the window, I wouldn't have had to shoot it."

"I can't let you shoot at cops!" I swerved past the taxi. Driving one-handed was okay for now, but if we got into heavier traffic or had to make any sharp turns, which I suspected we would, we were going to be screwed.

"Being stubborn about the window was not going to save any cops, Andrew."

"Can't you just postpone unleashing your inner gun nut for another hour or so?"

"Screw that."

"Then at least let me go."

"You're not any less valuable of a hostage than you were the first time we discussed this. I'm not going to let you go, so quit asking."

"Do you really want to go through all of this and then die in a car wreck? Because that's what's going to happen if you won't even let me drive with both hands."

"Lots of cool people have died in car wrecks."

I realized that this conversation wasn't getting me anywhere, and that my time could be better spent focusing more closely on trying to drive this stupid car.

There was an intersection ahead.

The light was, of course, not the beautiful shade of green that I would have appreciated. Nor was it a less beautiful but still acceptable amber color.

"Don't brake!" Shirley shouted.

I wasn't going to brake. I did a quick check for any semi trucks that might plow into us and send us hurtling into Georgia, braced myself, and then prepared to race through the intersection.

Shirley looked as if she wanted to grab something for support, but to do so she would have to put down the sub-machine gun, so she settled for tensing up and looking extremely nervous.

Aside from an ice cream trunk honking at us, we sped past the red light with no near misses. I couldn't get too relaxed, though. There would be plenty of other red lights.

And, joining them, there were now some red and blue flashing lights in my rear-view mirror.

"Don't even think about slowing down," said Shirley, jabbing me in the ribs with the barrel of the gun. "If I see that speedometer drop below...whoa, you don't need to be doing seventy in a thirty-five!"

Another police car pulled onto the street behind us, about a block away, lights flashing and siren blaring.

"We're going to be fine," Shirley assured me. "It's only two cop cars. Anybody can outrun two of them. Chamber's not a big town—these won't be well-trained New York City cops. We'll be fine."

"I hope you don't think you're soothing me."

"I'm trying to soothe myself."

"Well, do what you can." Another red light intersection was coming up. "Any chance you could buckle my seat belt for me?"

Shirley didn't answer, which was fine because I didn't actually expect her to helpfully reach over and do anything to prevent me from flying through the windshield upon impact.

Of course, if I slammed on the brakes without warning, Shirley might smack against the dashboard, giving me a chance to disarm her. I was confident that I could explain the situation to the police officers before they decided to reboot the Bonnie and Clyde franchise.

(That was my actual thought. In retrospect, I am completely aware that Bonnie and Clyde was never an actual franchise, just one movie, but at the time I was mostly focusing on the fact that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were shot by many, many bullets.)

On the flip side, slamming on the brakes also seemed to carry pretty high odds in favor of Shirley squeezing the trigger. In which case, the car would go out of control and Shirley would probably be killed, but I honestly didn't think she cared all that much right now.

If I focused my attention on trying to escape from Shirley, we'd lose Roger for sure. So my best bet was to keep up the chase.

Not that I could even see the silver car. It could be eighteen blocks away in a different direction by now.

The police cars were going quite a bit faster than me, and now they were only a few car-lengths behind. Shirley glanced back at them, then pointed the sub-machine gun out of the window.

As she pulled the trigger, I swerved the car a bit to the side to throw off her aim.

"Drive straight, dammit!"

She fired again and I swerved again. I wasn't going to let her murder some cops if there was any possible way I could help it.

"Do you want to die?" she asked me.

"Nope."

She fired off another set of bullets, squeezing the trigger for several seconds. I swerved again. In the rear-view mirror, I saw both police cars come to a screeching halt, though neither of them seemed to have been hit.

Shirley pulled the gun back inside the vehicle and cursed. "What was that all about?"

"What the hell do you think? Do you really want to be a cop killer?"

"We don't know those guys. They're probably corrupt." She pointed the gun at my head. "I wasn't bluffing."

"If you kill me, you'll die."

"We've got airbags."

"Uh-huh. If I go through the windshield, you're coming with me. Or else you're losing an arm. If you really want to shoot me, go ahead, but shooting your driver is one of the stupidest possible ways anybody could ever die."

"I guess you're right," she said, though she didn't lower the gun.

There it was! The silver car—okay, a silver car, but it looked just like it—a few blocks ahead. Maybe the man in the jack-o-lantern mask was respecting the rules of traffic better than we were!

I sped through an intersection with a lovely green light and continued the pursuit.

"Do you think they'll send a 'copter after us?" Shirley asked.

"I don't think Chamber has a helicopter."

"That would be a way to go. It would be worth giving up just to be taken out by a guy shooting from a helicopter."

"I totally disagree."

I swerved around a slow-moving Volkswagen. There were fewer businesses along the street now, and I couldn't see another traffic light. These weren't ideal circumstances for the chase, but they were slightly better than what we'd had so far. Since we hadn't been struck while speeding through a red light yet, we might very well avoid it altogether.

Now we were close enough to the silver car that I could see the line of bullet marks on the trunk and the shattered rear windshield.

"That's the car!" said Shirley.

"I know."

"I can't believe how lucky you are!"

"That's not a word I'd use to describe myself."

"I would. That car should have been long gone by now. Clearly you've lived a wholesome life."

"You're right. Today has been one lucky break after another."

"I'm just saying."

"Whatever."

"How are you going to pull it over?"

"I'm not sure."

"You don't have a plan?" Shirley asked. "Are you going to ram them?"

"Not my first choice."

"Then what's the plan? You can't drive after somebody like this without knowing what you're going to do once you catch them."

She had a good point, but I didn't much want to listen to constructive criticism from somebody whose decision making process so far seemed to be "What can I do that's more insane than the last thing I did?"

I had no idea what I was going to do when we caught up to the silver car. How did the authorities pull over a car? They pretty much just flashed their lights and the driver obligingly pulled over to the side of the road. Or they set up a roadblock (not practical in our current situation) or used one of those tire-popping things (equally impractical).

"I'm going to need you to shoot out their tires," I told Shirley. That was the answer. Duh.

"Oh," said Shirley, sounding very uncertain. "Okay."

"What, do you suddenly have a moral issue with murdering rubber?"

"No, it's fine. It's a good plan. We'll do it."

What was wrong with her? Was she worried about wasting bullets on things that didn't spurt blood?

Then I figured it out: she was out of bullets and didn't want to say anything.

Crap.

Or, not crap, from the perspective of her no longer being able to hold me at gunpoint, but right now I'd rather she had the ammo.

Should I reveal that I knew her gun was empty?

I didn't know it for sure. I wouldn't want her to disprove that theory into my skull.

Okay, I'd worry about actually catching up to the car first, then I'd worry about the bullets issue.

A couple of blocks ahead, the car made a left turn on a green arrow. The arrow switched to yellow. So, if I didn't want to risk losing Roger, I was going to have to make a left turn on red across traffic at seventy miles per hour with only one hand. This was going to freaking suck.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A second after deciding that this was going to freaking suck, I realized that it was flat-out impossible. I was no Hollywood stunt driver. I would have to complete this daring task at the more reasonable speed of fifty miles per hour.

"We're going to have to cooperate," I told Shirley. "I can't make this turn with one hand."

"Do you need me to help you turn?"

"No, I just need you to stretch your arm out so I can use both hands." This would leave her vulnerable to any arm-breaking maneuver I might attempt, but it wouldn't prevent her from keeping the gun pointed at me.

She nodded and twisted around in her seat. I put both hands on the steering wheel, in the proper ten-and-two position, and prayed that she really was out of bullets, because centrifugal force was not a great thing when somebody was awkwardly situated and still had their finger on the trigger.

A bus was in the opposite lane.

No, wait...two busses.

Screw that.

I slammed on the brakes and we stopped right before the intersection. Being deceased would not help Roger's cause.

"Why'd you do that?" Shirley asked.

"Didn't want to die."

"Makes sense."

We waited for a few moments. I could hear sirens coming from at least two different directions. The light turned green and I floored the accelerator again.

Now we were in a residential area. There was no sign of the silver car, but I did see an angry looking man in his front yard angrily gesticulating while speaking to a woman, so there was an excellent chance that somebody had sped through here way too fast for his liking.

The man shook his fist at me as we sped past. I believe the phrase "irresponsible jerkface" was used.

"Keep an eye out for little kids," I told Shirley. "Watch for anything that might cause us a lifetime of guilt."

She nodded and remained sideways in her seat so that I could continue to use both hands to steer. It was very generous of her. If she'd stop threatening to kill me, perhaps we could even be friends someday.

There was an overturned garbage can ahead, still rolling on the side of the street. Another good sign. We sped past a stop sign without making the requested stop.

"Can you tell if the sirens are getting closer?" Shirley asked.

"They don't seem to be. I don't know if they're directly following us or not."

"Maybe we're safe."

"Surely you can't be serious."

"Ha."

Up ahead, in the middle of the road, was a flattened poodle. More evidence that we were going the right way.

No...not a poodle. A wig. I hoped never to meet the person who wore a wig that could be mistaken for a poodle. What on earth was it doing lying in the middle of the street?

Forget it. I had much more important concerns.

"That's one ugly wig," said Shirley as we drove over it.

The street ended up ahead. Left or right? There were tire marks to the right. No guarantee that they were recent, but they did seem to indicate a dangerously fast rubber-burning turn. I don't completely suck as a detective.

I turned right. I sped down the block and saw that it ended in a cul-de-sac. Wrong turn. Dammit.

I turned us around and we sped back the way we came.

"Is that him?" Shirley asked, pointing forward with the sub-machine gun.

"Not unless the car turned purple."

"Don't be a smartass. I mean in front of that one."

"Yes! That's him! Fantastic!"

I sped up, then slowed back down as I saw a little kid riding a tricycle on the sidewalk. Where were his parents? Didn't they know there could be serial killers with sub-machine guns racing down their street?

After I passed the kid and got over my moment of moral outrage, I sped back up.

"I'm going to pass them on the left, and you shoot out the tires," I told Shirley.

"How do I know you won't attack me?"

"Because I really want their tires shot out!"

"Okay," said Shirley, sounding very uncertain.

"Are you out of bullets?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Then shoot out their tires when you get a chance." We were now close enough to see the shattered rear windshield again. "Please don't hit the trunk."

I assumed that the jack-o-lantern masked man didn't know we were following him, because he could've been going a lot faster. It seemed to be more important to him not to smash into cars parked along the street than to not get caught by us.

"Get ready to shoot!" I said.

"I'll do it when we get closer."

"We're almost there!"

This was not a good time to take advantage of the fact that she was holding me hostage with an empty gun, though if the opportunity presented itself after the silver car was successfully stopped...

I was now directly behind the silver car. I could see the driver's orange head glance up at the rear-view mirror, and then the car sped up.

I swerved to the left, missing a parked car by less than a foot. I was going to have to ram it. Crashing a car that had Roger locked in the trunk was not a low-risk venture, but it was certainly better than letting him be delivered to whatever hell Mr. Burke had planned.

As I pulled up alongside the car, it swerved to the right, bouncing up over the sidewalk and onto somebody's front yard. I swerved to the right as well, and we both sped across a neatly mowed, well-kept lawn.

I didn't think the jack-o-lantern man would shoot at me while he was driving, so I at least had that going for me. And if he did decide to open fire, well, Shirley was closer to him.

He swerved around a tree, and then we crossed into the next yard. He looked over at me, and though I couldn't see his expression through the mask, I was pretty sure he wasn't suggesting that we should work out a non-violent resolution to our dispute.

I spun the steering wheel to the right, just barely missing the other silver car, and then bashed into a tire swing. Wow. Kids still had tire swings in this neighborhood. That was refreshing. The tire swing thumped against the roof of the car, but fortunately there had not been a young child enjoying it at the time.

I sped up alongside the car once more. We were going to run out of yards after a couple more homes. I swerved to the right. He swerved to the right to avoid me, lost control of the vehicle as the rear tires lost their purchase on the grass, and smashed into the side of a one-story light blue house.

I slammed on the brakes, leaving deep twin marks running across the length of the poor owner's lawn. I hoped like hell that he didn't have a machine gun.

"Is that what you meant to happen?" asked Shirley.

"More or less."

"It worked."

I put the car into reverse and sped back, ruining the lawn even more. The other car had plowed right through the wall and stopped halfway into the house. The trunk didn't seem to have any new damage.

Hopefully nobody had been sitting on the other side of that wall.

I hurriedly threw open the door. I saw that Shirley was distracted by the sight of the car imbedded in the house, as most people would be, so I tugged on the handcuffs to get her to come with me.

I'm not quite sure why she would have interpreted this as an aggressive move. Most likely, she panicked upon realizing that she'd been paying closer attention to the destruction than to me, and then thought that I was yanking her toward me in order to punch her again and try to steal the gun. To be totally fair, I might have tried that if I hadn't known the gun was out of bullets, because I think that I could have put a sub-machine gun to better use during the Roger-rescue process than her.

Regardless of what was going on in her head at the time, her response was to spin around toward me with the gun. She truly looked like she was going to pull the trigger, and I wasn't one hundred percent completely absolutely without question no possible doubt certain that she'd used up the entire clip, so my own response was to attempt to bat the barrel of it away.

She did indeed pull the trigger.

My prediction that the weapon was out of bullets, which was based on solid evidence and observation, turned out to be incorrect.

It was low on ammunition for sure. By my count, the final spray of bullets consisted of only three. It might have been four.

They shattered the driver's side window.

Before that, though, they ripped through the pinky of my right hand.

It didn't come off completely. Instead, it flopped over, hanging by a small strip of flesh and pointing at the floor, accompanied by a generous spurt of blood.

"Son of a bitch son of a bitch son of a bitch!" I screamed. The blood didn't stop at that first spurt. I'd lost my other pinky! Holy frickin' crap, I'd lost my other pinky!

Shirley dropped the gun.

I clutched my injured hand with my other hand, trying to stop the flow of blood. I'd never even gotten used to only having four fingers on my left hand, and I was right-handed!

It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt.

She shot off my finger!

She shot off my finger!

She shot off my finger!

It wasn't completely off, but still...she shot off my finger!

To her credit, Shirley was not wringing her hands together in maniacal glee and cackling with laughter. She looked rather shocked.

Even though I had experience with such matters as losing fingers, it's not something you get used to. You don't just say "Oh, dear, there goes another one." A truly heroic individual might have let out a manly snarl and beat Shirley to death with the flapping digit. I was not a truly heroic individual, and so I spent the majority of the next few seconds going berserk.

"Why the hell did you do that?" I wailed.

"You were attacking me!"

"No! You're so wrong! Ow! Shit!"

Shirley began to unbutton her blouse. "Here," she said. "Use this to stop the flow of blood." She untucked her blouse, removed it most of the way, and then realized that she couldn't completely take it off while we were still handcuffed.

Despite my intense pain, I had the presence of mind to look over at the house to make sure there wasn't a jack-o-lantern man coming toward us. There wasn't. But I was certain that more than a few neighbors were peeking through their windows or had come outside to see what was going on.

Good. Hopefully this place would be swarming with cops soon. I was no vigilante; I was perfectly content with the idea of letting the authorities go after Mr. Burke and having my injuries cared for by a trained medical professional.

Shirley had removed her shirt as much as possible without being able to slip it off her right hand. She was wearing a pink lacy bra that exposed much of her large, full breasts. There were times in my life when it would have been an awe-inspiring sight. However, even if you take the whole "two kids and a pregnant wife" element out of the situation (and I am not for one second suggesting that you should; this is purely hypothetical), I'm not all that attracted to the sight of breasts that are stained with blood that has soaked through the blouse of a woman who stabbed somebody to death. Also, it was hard to get horny so soon after my finger had been shot most of the way off.

She took the blouse, which was still on her arm, and started to wrap it around my hand. I would have appreciated her kind gesture more if she hadn't been the one to mangle me in the first place.

I made a couple more comments about my finger being shot off that I don't quite remember, though the basic gist was that I was quite unhappy about it.

"Dammit!" I said.

"What?"

"You have to line up the finger with the stump before you wrap it!" I pressed my finger into its original position and held it tight. It didn't look like it was going to stay.

Shirley tore her blouse off her arm, yet another gesture that under less gory circumstances would have been enjoyable to witness. She started to wind it around my finger, but it came loose again.

"Do you have any tape?" she asked.

"Why would I be carrying tape around?"

"I don't know! To lift prints! To bind suspects! You've lost a finger before; why would you assume it was a one-time deal?"

I pressed my finger back in place. "Just wrap it carefully."

She wound the blouse tightly around my hand. "Is it still on?"

"Not so tight!"

"It has to be tight!"

"I think you broke another thread of skin!"

"Stop being such a baby!"

The blouse, which hadn't exactly been blood-free to start with, was now completely soaked. I don't want to downplay my own mental and physical trauma, but after a while you do start to get used to this kind of grisly bloodshed.

She finished wrapping my hand and tied it off. It was not a high quality job, but it offered the possibility that I might not bleed to death.

Still no cops. What was taking them so long? I was definitely in the market for their services.

Shirley opened the passenger-side door. "Come on," she said. "We have to get going."

I shook my head. "We should wait here," I said, feeling a bit dizzy. "We'll be okay. Nothing's going to explode."

She gave a hard tug on the handcuffs. It pinched the skin on my wrist and made me yelp, even with the other pain to distract me. "Don't argue with me!"

I tugged back on the handcuffs, even harder. She couldn't keep me as her hostage anymore. The sub-machine gun was empty, and she didn't have the...did she have the knife? I couldn't remember what happened to it. We must have lost it. Crap. Either way, I was done being her prisoner. All I needed to do was keep her from murdering me until the cops arrived, and all would be well.

No! Roger was still in the trunk! If the machine gun fire had hit him, he could be badly injured in there, and every second could count. And I didn't know what was going on with the jack-o-lantern man. He could be walking toward the trunk with an oversized pickaxe at this very moment!

I had to focus. I was nowhere near out of danger yet. I had to put the pain and panic out of my mind and make sure that my best friend didn't die just because I was hanging out in the car for a couple of extra minutes.

I climbed out of the car after Shirley. She tried to run in the opposite direction from the damaged house, but I jerked on the handcuffs, nearly pulling her off her feet. She jerked back, making a large welt on the back of my wrist. I jerked once more and heard a crack, but I don't think it was any bones breaking.

"Do that again," said Shirley. "Do it. See how many fingers I bite off."

"I'm not leaving without Roger."

"Roger's fine."

"And I'm not leaving without getting revenge on the guy who did this to him," I said, trying a tactic that might be more in line with Shirley's passions. "The guy in the mask could still be alive."

"Okay. I'll go for that."

We hurried over to the wrecked silver car. There was no sign of the jack-o-lantern man in the front seat and the door was open, so that wasn't promising.

I knocked on the lid of the trunk.

CHAPTER TWELVE

No response.

I knocked harder. "Roger?" I asked, letting him know it was me in hopes that he might be playing dead with the intent of springing to life and surprising whatever dastardly foe might open the trunk.

Still nothing.

An anvil of emotions crashed upon my head, but I couldn't let that impact me now. Roger might just be unconscious. I had to keep it together until I knew for certain that he was dead, and then I could let out a bellow that echoed with the tragic sounds of misery and loss. Until then: optimistic thoughts only.

"We need a crowbar," I said.

"Why not just pull the lever on the inside of the car?" Shirley asked.

I nodded. "That's a much better idea." I wish I could have blamed that moment of poor judgment on my finger injury.

I glanced inside the house. The car had crashed into an entertainment center, toppling over a huge wide-screen television, a stereo, and dozens of DVDs. Nobody was in the living room shouting "You bastards, you've damaged my home and possessions!" so apparently the owner either wasn't home, or was wisely hiding under a bed.

No sign of the jack-o-lantern man. He must have slipped out the back door.

There was an opening in the destroyed wall that was sufficiently large for Shirley and I to squeeze through. Though the driver's side door was blocked with rubble that would take too long to move out of the way, all of the windows were shattered, so I could just lean in and pull the trunk release.

The sirens were close enough that I was pretty sure the cops were in this neighborhood.

As I started to lean in, the jack-o-lantern man stepped back into the room. I was disappointed to see that he was still holding his sub-machine gun, and that it was now pointed at us. There was a big splotch of red on the left side of his mask.

"Did you get lost?" I asked.

"Looking for hostages."

"Oh. Bummer that you didn't find any."

"Shut the hell up. I'm not even supposed to talk. Get over here, Mayhem."

I wasn't confident that I could squeeze back out of the house before he started shooting and my head met the same fate as my pinky, so I'd have to do as he said. So, really, I was right the first time: trying to find a crowbar would've been the way to go. I'm honestly not sure why I tried to blame that suggestion on the pain.

We cautiously stepped forward.

"Just you," said the man.

I held up our hands. "We come as a pair."

"Unlock it."

"She swallowed the key."

"Why the fuck did she swallow the key?"

"I asked her the same thing. I'm totally with you on that one. Not today's best decision."

The jack-o-lantern man sighed. "Goddamn it," he muttered. "All right, both of you. Hurry."

I didn't really want to hurry, considering how close the police were, but then he fired a few shots over my shoulder and that provided the encouragement I needed.

He obviously was supposed to bring me in alive...but what would he do if the cops burst in right now? Surrender and let me live so that one of Mr. Burke's other associates could nab me?  If I wasn't close enough to provide hostage services, would he just shoot me?

It actually seemed like it might be in our best interest to get closer to him.

Or, I could try to get Shirley in front of me. Why was the jack-o-lantern man the only one allowed to use a human shield? How was that fair?

No. Even though Shirley was far from my favorite person in the world (she was bottom ten, easily) I had to maintain a minimum level of humanity. Also, and much more importantly, any bullet that passed through her body first might have less momentum when it struck me...but I'd still probably get shot up and die. He could get the job done even if I regressed into savage self-preservation.

Then again—not to be indecisive or anything—perhaps this truly was a situation where "run like hell and hope for the best" was appropriate. If Shirley took the majority of the bullets, well, hey, I think my conscience could deal with it.

What would somebody smart do?

I should give myself up to the jack-o-lantern man, and trust that the police would be able to take him out with a sniper or something.

We walked over to him. I tried to look like somebody who would make a good hostage.

"You're a prick," he told me.

"Oh," I said. I wasn't sure how to respond. I would've expected a much harsher statement than that.

"You're a piece of human waste. You're not worthy to breathe the same air as Mr. Burke."

He really should have put more thought into this. Telling me I wasn't worthy to breathe the same air as Mr. Burke was, frankly, kind of weak.

Then he reached under his chin and pulled off his mask.

There was no surprise revelation. He wasn't my dad or anybody else I might recognize, and he didn't have a horribly disfigured face that would haunt me until my dying day. He was older than I expected, maybe in his forties, and actually quite handsome.

Why had he taken off his mask? That was bad. That was really bad. People like that only took off their masks when they wanted their victims to see their true visage before they died. I didn't want to see his true visage! I wanted him to put the mask back on before the cops got here! I wanted to scream "Hide your true identity! Hide your true identity!"

Shirley also seemed to realize that this was bad. There was a flash of "Oh, crap!" on her face, which quickly transformed into serenity and acceptance.

Screw serenity and acceptance! I didn't want to die!

"We all get cyanide capsules," said the former jack-o-lantern man. "I was never in favor of them, but I've got one, just like everybody else, and I'm ready to use it if necessary."

Was he really going to pop a pill? That would be fantastic.

"There's also a much worse exit, one that Mr. Burke's associates aren't supposed to know about, and I'm ready for that, too."

"Okay."

I could hear a couple of police cars (or ambulances; hopefully at least one of them was an ambulance) pull up in front of the house. The car buried in the side of the home was probably a pretty good clue for them that they'd found the right place.

"Not much longer," the man said.

"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing," I admitted. "Do you just bite down, or do you need me to get you a glass of water, or...?"

"All you need to do is think about Hell."

"Okay. Thinking."

The man smiled. "Enjoy being able to be obnoxious like that. It's not going to last long. People who are shrieking in eternal misery aren't usually very clever."

I didn't think my comment had been obnoxious or particularly clever, but I wasn't going to argue with the guy with the machine gun.

"My part's over," said the man. "But you've got lots of suffering to do. Have fun."

He turned the sub-machine gun sideways, and then pressed the barrel against his chin.

Oh my God, was he really going to...?

He pulled the trigger. Several rounds pumped into his head before he dropped the gun. His face barely existed anymore, though one eye continued to stare at me in the few seconds before he collapsed to the ground in a gory mess.

Shirley and I gaped at his body for a moment. Then Shirley began to scream, so loud that it hurt my ears even though I was still half-deaf from all of the gunfire today.

Really? All of this bloodshed, much of it contributed by her, and now she's horrified enough to start shrieking? She was one strange lady.

A voice spoke through a megaphone: "Put down your weapons and come out of the house immediately with your hands in the air."

I recognized the voice. It was either Lieutenant Bruce Frenkle or Sergeant Tony Frenkle. They were identical twins who worked on the police force. Our paths crossed every once in a while when I got myself into trouble, and they were nice guys but generally unimpressed with me.

I elbowed Shirley in the ribs. "Stop screaming."

"Did you see what he did?"

"Yes! I was right here! How could I miss it?"

She resumed her shrieking.

"Be quiet!"

Shirley stopped in mid-shriek. "I'm sorry. It's just the way his eye stared at me while the rest of his face turned to mush."

"I repeat, surrender yourself immediately. You have ten seconds to comply, or we will be forced to come in after you."

"Tony?" I called out.

"No," said the megaphone-enhanced voice. "It's Lieutenant Bruce Frenkle. Is that Andrew?"

"Yes!"

"Are you in danger?"

"Not anymore!"

"Then get your dumb ass out of there before we come in with the tear gas!"

I started to walk. Shirley didn't follow, and resisted when I tugged on the handcuffs.

"What?" I asked.

"I'm not going out like this."

"Like how?"

"This."

"They're not going to shoot us! I can vouch for Bruce. He's a good guy. These are the real police, not Mr. Burke's psycho henchmen. You'll be fine." I was fibbing a bit, since she'd no doubt end up in prison or a sanitarium for the rest of her life, but she'd be fine from the perspective of not getting killed in the next couple of minutes.

She looked way too longingly at the gun the man had dropped.

I tugged again. "Don't even think about it."

She thought about it. Shirley lunged at the gun, but though she was more insane than me, I was still stronger, and I tugged hard enough to pull her off her feet, which hurt both of us. My wrist didn't look as bad as, for example, my missing finger or my cut palm, but it was still rubbed raw and there were a few tiny beads of blood.

Shirley sat up in a crouch, looking almost feral, then leapt at me. I did not punch her in the face. I merely held up my injured fist to defend myself and her own velocity did the rest.

I could probably save a lot of time by abbreviating "It really hurt" to IRH. In this case it would be IRRRRRRH.

I wasn't positive, because nothing had dropped out of the blouse, but I was pretty sure my pinky had come off the rest of the way.

If I'd had the opportunity, I would have sat down on the floor and just wept for a while. Though I'm not one to wallow in self pity, I was really getting tired of this day.

I picked up a bowling trophy that had fallen off the television when the car crashed through the wall and smacked her in the side of the head. It was a cheap plastic trophy that popped off its base, but Shirley stopped attacking me for a moment.

"Knock it off," I told her. "I swear I will smother you with a couch cushion if you don't settle down."

She attacked me again.

I twisted myself around and got my arm around her neck. I squeezed as hard as I...well, not as hard as I could. I didn't really want to strangle her with the police about to burst in on us at any second. But hard enough to encourage her to stop being such a pain in the butt.

"Help!" she was able to scream, proving that I wasn't squeezing hard enough. "Rape!"

"Aw, c'mon, seriously?"

"Rape!"

I didn't really believe that anybody would see us like this and assume there was an attempted sexual assault in progress. Still, you never want to hear that particular word shouted when all you're trying to do is choke her.

"Freeze!"

We both glanced over and saw a police officer pointing a revolver at us.

Shirley stopped struggling.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"What the hell, man?" asked Bruce, walking into the house. Shirley had behaved herself for approximately the past thirty seconds, so it was safe. "How come I never see you doing anything normal?"

"Watch out," I said, pointing to Shirley. "She's batshit bugfuck crazy. You have my total permission to take the shot if you need to."

"I think we'll avoid that."

"I need you to call my wife and make sure she's okay."

"We did that already and she's fine. A car's on its way to pick her up."

"What about Samantha Tracer? She's Roger's fiancée—I mean, girlfriend. I don't remember her number, but Helen would have it."

"We'll track her down. I like you, Andrew, so I hope to God you didn't murder that gentleman on the floor in cold blood."

"It was suicide."

Bruce chuckled. "Funny guy as always."

"I'm serious."

"Wow. That is somebody who really wanted to get the job done. So you're driving people to machine gun suicide these days, huh? Figures. You're not going to bleed to death on my shift, are you?"

"I might."

"There's an ambulance on the way. Could you do me a favor and get down on your knees and put your hands on your heads? Just so I know we won't have any problems."

Shirley and I did so as best we could. A couple of other cops were in the house now, though one of them saw the corpse, turned around, and quickly exited. I could hear him heaving.

"I need you to check the trunk," I said. "My friend Roger is in there."

"His luck's as bad as yours, isn't it?" Bruce nodded to one of the other cops. "Cover them."

The officer pointed his dinky little only-one-measly-bullet-at-a-time police force-issued revolver at us.

I felt sick to my stomach as Bruce opened the driver's side door, leaned inside, and pulled the lever to pop the trunk. The trunk opening sounded like a gunshot.

He walked back through the rubble, out of sight.

Roger was alive. I knew he was. We'd survived too many adventures together for him to get shot in the trunk of a car. When we finally died, it was going to be something spectacular, like exploding in the vacuum of space.

"I'm sure Roger is okay," Shirley whispered.

"Why are you being reassuring? Is this one big practical joke? Are you like a psychology major making the world your own little test lab? Just stop talking, get off my wrist, and get out of my life."

"I will as soon as I can."

Bruce walked back in the house. "All right, I'm not going to keep you in suspense because I can see that you're very disturbed at the moment. Roger's okay. He's unconscious but he's breathing fine."

"Oh, thank God." I thought I might start crying.

"You don't need to cry or anything. I think he whacked his head on something. He seems like he's in much better shape than you are."

"Can I talk to Helen?"

"No, Andrew, you may not. I trust you and all that, but I hear we've got a sweet little old lady, a great-grandmother, who got shot up while somebody who I'm pretty damn sure was you was at the crime scene. I figure I should probably do some cop work before I let you off the hook."

"She could be in danger."

"I know, I know. We're having a lovely conversation here, but I promise you we're taking this seriously and we won't let anything happen to your wife and kids. She's pregnant, right?"

"Yes."

"Does this mean I'm going to be bailing out Mayhem kids before I retire? Lord have mercy."

I wanted to point out that, as always, he hadn't bailed me out of anything. Bruce and Tony Frenkle were the masters of showing up just as I'd finally dealt with the situation. They were complete aftermath guys. Granted, in this particular case I was still handcuffed to a psychopath and was extremely grateful that the cops were here, but still, he hadn't exactly saved my life. It would have been a lot more helpful if he'd shown up while we were looking at the dead possums.

I didn't say that, though. Instead, I passed out.

* * *

I woke up in the back of an ambulance, lying on the gurney. A paramedic stood over me, bandaging up my hand. I didn't feel any better, so they hadn't given me any drugs, which was good. Once I was in the hospital and I knew Helen, Theresa, Kyle, and Samantha were safe, I'd soak up as much morphine as they could squeeze into the IV tube.

As my vision cleared, I saw that Bruce was in the ambulance with me. Shirley was on the bench next to him, sitting upright but with her eyes closed. The handcuff bracelet was still around my left wrist, but the chain had been cut. Ahhh. I'd never thought it could feel so good to not be handcuffed to a psycho killer.

My initial thought was that Shirley really should be handcuffed, although it should be her hands cuffed together and not one hand cuffed to the hand of another unfortunate human being. But from a potential lawsuit point of view, I was probably as much of a suspect as she was, and if he handcuffed her he'd have to handcuff me. Both of our wrists were in terrible shape, so it was best for me if I didn't make any suggestions.

"You recovered quick," Bruce said.

"Why are you here?"

"Don't be rude."

"I didn't mean it in a rude way."

"I thought I might ask you and your mistress some questions. You know, do some investigating. The taxpayers like it when I do that."

"She's not my mistress."

"I didn't mean you were cheating on your wife. I meant the sado-masochism kind of mistress. Either way, I was joking." He leaned over and patted me on the shoulder. "Trying to keep your spirits up, buddy. If you want me to go all serious, let me know. You're the one with another missing finger."

"It came all the way off?"

"Yeah. Sorry. Thought you knew."

"Wonderful."

"Maybe this one can be sewn back on."

"Maybe." My finger had not exactly been what medical practitioners would call "cleanly severed," so I figured there wasn't much chance of that. Oh well. At least now both sides of my body were equally balanced.

"Your wife was home with the kids, so they'll meet us at the station."

"Not the hospital?"

Bruce shook his head. "Not yet. The hospital isn't safe enough until we know exactly what we're up against. If it really is that nutcase Clarence Burke coming after you, and he's sending men after you who don't have a problem shooting up random people, I don't want to have a lot of innocent patients around."

"Makes sense."

"They haven't been able to get in touch with Roger's fiancée—"

"Girlfriend."

"—girlfriend, but don't worry about it, I'm sure she's fine. We'll get everything sorted out, and we'll get you and your family someplace safe, I promise."

"Thanks. How's Tony?" There were unquestionably more important topics we could be discussing right now, but my brain was not functioning at full capacity.

"Tony is Tony. He and Monica are having troubles, and by troubles I mean that they're getting a divorce. Best thing for him in the long run."

"I don't think I've ever met her."

"Lucky you. That woman is shrill."

I looked over at Shirley. "Is she drugged?"

"Naw, I think she's just keeping her eyes closed so we don't know she's awake. Trust me, I'm watching her. Now that we've got the small talk out of the way, do you mind telling me what you were doing handcuffed to her, or are you going to make me wait until you have a lawyer present?"

"Roger and I started a private investigation business. Not licensed or anything—we just solve weird problems. She came in, and said that she thought she might have..." Though my blood loss was making me loopy, it occurred to me that it might not be the best idea in the world to blab to Bruce that a woman came into our office and said she thought she murdered somebody, and that we chose not to alert the proper authorities.

"Might have...?" Bruce prompted.

"Killed some animals."

"As in, slaughtered a cow, or a Chihuahua?"

"Do you want to tell him?" I asked Shirley.

She kept her eyes closed. "No."

"We found a variety pack of dead animals."

"I see. Is it safe to assume that the story of how you came to be handcuffed to her and chased by killers is too long for this ambulance ride?"

"Probably."

"There's a lot of blood on her. A lot. I guess some came from your hand, and some came from the fool who shot himself in the face, and some might have come from the poor old woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a dab might have come from the other man who got shot up next to her, but still, it's a lot of blood."

"Squirrel blood," said Shirley, still not opening her eyes.

"There was a third guy," I told Bruce. Why would I lie to protect Shirley? That would be silly. "Well, technically a first guy, since we met him before the other two. She stabbed him to death."

Bruce shrugged. "Sounds like he deserved a good stabbing. So the lovely lady here was protecting you?"

Had she been protecting me? I couldn't even really remember. "Yeah, pretty much. I mean, she's not noble or anything, but she did murder a bad guy."

"I'm sure it's just that I'm missing some pieces, but it seems to me that it's a pretty big coincidence that you're out with somebody you described as—pardon my use of the words 'fuck' and 'shit'—bugfuck batshit crazy when all of this other stuff went down."

"I think it was the other way around."

"Bat then bug. Either way, you don't quite seem like the best of friends. Weird coincidence. An odd one, you know? Suspicious."

He was right. What were the chances that I'd end up with somebody like Shirley at the same time that Mr. Burke's master plan for revenge went into effect? How convenient that Shirley took Roger and I out to that abandoned house, where Markus could find us without any witnesses around. No way could this be a coincidence. Perhaps she didn't work for Mr. Burke directly, but there had to be some connection between the two of them.

But what?

There was a slight resemblance...

No.

It couldn't be.

His daughter?

I tried to look at Shirley more closely, but the paramedic was bandaging up another one of my wounds and he was in the way. How could I not have seen this from the beginning? It all made sense now.

No, wait. I was totally wrong. I couldn't remember Markus's exact comment, but I think he'd tried to shoo us out of the house because he thought we were going to get into trouble before Mr. Burke's vengeance plot had a chance to go into effect. He'd probably been following me for weeks, or even months. So he'd watched us go into the house, realized that this could screw up my life before Mr. Burke got a chance to do it, and showed up to deliver his friendly little warning. After Markus got killed, Mr. Burke either went to Plan B, or accelerated the timeline for Plan A.

Yeah. That made a lot more sense than Shirley being his daughter.

"No," I told Bruce. "There's no connection. I think Mr. Burke just rescheduled things when he saw that I was about to step in more crap."

The ambulance swerved.

"What was that?" I asked, sitting up.

"Relax," said Bruce. "It's an ambulance. They swerve all the—"

I couldn't tell exactly what happened, but the ambulance swerved again, there were two loud bursts that I was relatively certain were left side front and back tires being destroyed, and then we went off the road. I braced myself for the vehicle to crash or even flip over.

Instead, the ambulance came to a screeching halt.

"They can't be attacking us," said Bruce, standing up and taking out his revolver. "We're right in the middle of Main Street!"

Some blood spattered on my new hand bandage as a bullet came through the window, hitting the paramedic in the chest.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Get down!" Bruce shouted. I slid off the gurney and onto the floor, while the paramedic, clutching his chest but making no noise, fell next to me.

There were two shots at the front of the vehicle. These didn't sound like machine gun fire, but rather shotgun blasts. Though I couldn't see exactly what happened to the driver, at least one of those shots hit him. It was enough. He slumped over in his seat, dead.

The window with the bullet hole shattered as something struck it (was that an axe?). A second later somebody threw a metal canister through. It hit the floor and spewed yellow smoke.

My eyes immediately burned and we all began to violently cough. I had no previous experience with gasses that made your eyeballs feel as if they'd been tossed on a griddle with some butter, but this was potent stuff.

I could barely see anything through the smoke and the tears blurring my vision. Why weren't the shattered windows providing better ventilation?

Shirley fell off the bench and landed next to me.

Bruce shouted something about needing backup at 4th and Main, right away. I don't think he was speaking to me, but it was hard to tell because I was coughing so much.

Something else happened that I sort of realized should be very upsetting to me. I disregarded it as something that I'd imagined in the confusion, and focused my attention on crawling toward the back doors of the ambulance.

There'd be very mean people waiting for us outside of the ambulance for sure, but we obviously couldn't stay in here. My only optimism came from the fact that none of my flesh had started to sizzle off.

Shirley and I crawled over to the rear doors. They flew open as soon as I touched it. Not because of any telekinetic powers I'd suddenly discovered, dammit, but because somebody else had opened it.

Three men in flak jackets and gas masks stood outside. One had a shotgun, and two had the sub-machine guns. I wondered how they decided who was a shotgun-wielding employee and who was a sub-machine gun-wielding employee. Was there a social pecking order, like people who worked at Space Mountain versus those who worked the Dumbo ride?

I wanted to struggle as they dragged us out of the ambulance, but it was difficult to fight while in the midst of a hardcore coughing fit.

There was an armored car parked beside the ambulance, though I suspected that it was not there to accept a delivery of cash from a banking institution. Bruce was correct; we were right there on Main Street, plenty of traffic, lots of gaping onlookers.

Two of the men led Shirley and I into the armored car. Shirley lost her balance and fell, tugging on my wrist as she hit the ground.

My handcuffed wrist.

What the hell?

I sort of remembered that happening in the ambulance. Now I was too disoriented to do anything except wish none of this were happening as they threw us into the back of the armored car.

Through my blurred vision, I could vaguely see one of the men raise his shotgun and point it into the ambulance.

Bruce was still in there!

The man pulled the trigger.

Oh, God, no!

Then bullets were fired from inside the ambulance. Unfortunately, none of them appeared to have struck and killed any of Burke's men.

The doors to the armored car slammed closed, casting us into complete darkness.

Still coughing, I crawled over to the doors. "Why are we handcuffed again?" I demanded.

"You're the one they want alive!" said Shirley. "I need to stick with you! If your cop friend had cuffs right there on his belt, why wouldn't I use them? That would be stupid of me!"

I wiped my eyes with my bandaged hand, which didn't help a bit, and tried to get the doors open. They wouldn't budge.

"What are you doing?" Shirley asked.

"I'm trying to stop them from murdering Bruce!"

Another gunshot outside.

"How?"

"I don't know! He's a friend! I'm not going to just sit here with you and let them—"

The door opened, and two of the men in gas masks tossed Bruce into the back with us. The doors slammed shut again, and within a few seconds the armored car was in motion.

For a moment, Shirley, Bruce, and I just sat in the darkness. Bruce was trying to talk, but he was coughing a lot more than we were at this point and he couldn't get any words out.

"Andrew," he finally said. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, man."

"It wasn't your fault. If anything, this is my fault."

Bruce coughed and spat out some phlegm. "Yeah, I'll go with that."

I shifted my position, rattling the chain.

"Are those my handcuffs?" asked Bruce.

"Yeah," I said. "Shirley swiped them."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Nope."

"Christ. I don't even have the keys for those anymore. We use PlastiCuffs now. I just like to carry them around for nostalgia."

"Nostalgia for what?"

"Handcuffing people. What do you think?"

I sighed. "Why do you think they brought you?"

"I don't know," said Bruce. "Maybe they draw the line at cop killing. Though they're willing to blow away two paramedics right in the middle of town, when it's not even dark out, so that's probably not a good theory."

"Do you think anybody will be able to follow us?"

"I hope so. There sure wasn't any lack of eyewitnesses. I just have to wonder what else this guy has up his sleeve if he's willing to take risks like that."

I didn't like that thought. I needed to think of a much better thought. Something with beautiful flowers or charming pandas.

"So what's the plan?" I asked.

"Aren't you supposed to be the professional problem solver these days?"

"Yeah, but I'm terrible at it. You're the cop. I'm the fraud."

Bruce didn't answer.

"That said," I continued, "if all three of us were right next to the door, ready to pounce the instant it opens, we might be able to take them by surprise. They can't stop all three of us at once, can they?"

"With the kind of firepower they're packing? They most certainly can stop all three of us at once."

"Crap."

"Any other thoughts?"

"Check around for anything that might be useful? I couldn't see very well when we got thrown in here."

"It can't hurt," said Bruce.

We all stood up and did a quick search of the back of the vehicle. It was completely dark, so in theory we could be overlooking a giant-sized rocket launcher in the middle of the floor, but as far as I could tell there was nothing inside but steel walls.

"I guess we can't hide somewhere and jump out unexpectedly," I noted.

"I guess not."

"What about you, Shirley?" I asked. "Got anything to contribute?"

"Fake a seizure?"

"What?"

"They still want to take you in alive, right? If they open the doors and you're lying there having a seizure, maybe they'll be distracted enough to let us kick them in the face or something."

My first thought of "What a stupid idea!" was quickly replaced by the thought of "Maybe that's not such a stupid idea." "What do you think, Bruce?" I asked. "Is that plan so crazy that it might just work?"

"It's a brilliant plan," he said, "unless they've ever watched a movie in their entire lives, since prisoners are always faking medical conditions to fool the guards. In my opinion, if they open up those doors and see you twitching around on the floor, they're going to start executing the expendable folks until you knock that shit off."

"Then let's not do that," I said.

"I hate to take a passive approach," said Bruce, "but we're not going to get the jump on these guys with some half-assed surprise. We need to accept that for the moment, and only for the moment, we're completely boned. We should wait for a better opportunity."

"What if there isn't one?"

"You need a real answer for that?"

"No." I sighed. "Do you think Helen and the kids are all right?"

Bruce didn't answer for a moment. "I don't know what to tell you, Andrew. I'm good at providing phony reassurance, but is that what you want?"

"Yes. Actually, I do."

"Okay. Then I promise you that they're fine."

"Thanks."

We all sat quietly for the next few minutes. I hated not coming up with some kind of plan, but Bruce was right, what could we possibly do to take heavily armed men by surprise? It wasn't as if they'd open the doors and then bend down to tie their shoelaces. They'd be prepared for us to make some kind of aggressive move, so what could distract them?

Nothing.

Except...

"What if we were all naked?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Hear me out. What if, when they open the doors, we're all right there, stripped completely naked? Wouldn't that take them by surprise? Don't you think that would buy us a few extra seconds?"

"Are you telling me that your master plan to save our lives is to make them think they interrupted an orgy?"

"It's not a foolproof scheme."

"Is that really how you want the Andrew Mayhem legacy to be remembered?"

"You don't think it could work?"

"You are a ridiculous man."

"I am most definitely not getting naked with you guys," said Shirley.

"You're telling me that if you opened the doors to this truck, and you saw a black naked cop there with two white bloody naked handcuffed people, you wouldn't be taken aback?"

"What does me being black have to do with it?"

"It's interracial! It's an extra visual image! What kind of porn are you people watching that this would have no effect on you?"

"I'm not saying it wouldn't turn my stomach," Bruce explained. "But I wouldn't just drop my weapon and stare."

"Three seconds. This wouldn't capture your attention for three seconds?"

"I'm not doing it," said Shirley. "I mean it."

"Maybe it's just because I've been humiliated more than anybody else," I said, "but I really believe this could work. It's not like they have to drop their guns and start taking pictures. If one guy for one second thinks 'Whoa, I wasn't expecting that!' we could use it to our advantage. If it doesn't work, how are we worse off?"

"We're worse off because we're naked," said Bruce. "Instead of getting shot in the ass, we get shot in the bare ass. Also, the lady ain't going for it."

"It could just be us, then."

"Not going to happen. And before you ask again, I repeat: not going to happen."

"What do you have to hide?"

"I knew this would eventually get to dick size. As soon as you started talking about this idea, the second your gums started flapping, I knew it was headed there. Only a matter of time. You can try all you want to shame me, but though I am glad not to have seen your junk, I assure you that I will win in a side-by-side comparison. Assure you."

"But maybe compared to other black males you're nervous."

"Are you bringing race into this again? For real? I promise you, when I could be minutes from death, I'm not sitting here stressing out over what they might think of my equipment. You need to just chill."

I decided to chill. I still thought it was a pretty good plan. I mean, not an ingenious plan, but even if it increased our chances of survival by half a percentage point, it was worth doing, right? When unauthorized video of our nude corpses made it onto YouTube, Helen and the rest of the world would assume it had been a post-murder undressing anyway—I mean, nobody would strip nekkid in the back of an armored car after they got kidnapped, right?—so what was the big deal about protecting my legacy?

Maybe I wouldn't chill. "I'll do it by myself, then," I said.

"Doesn't matter to me," said Bruce. "It's completely dark in here. Won't harm my eyes."

The armored car slowed and then stopped.

Shit.

"What are we gonna do?" I asked.

"Just stay calm," said Bruce, not sounding very calm. "If they turn rock-stupid and it looks like we might have the chance to make a move, we'll take it. Otherwise, we stick with the idea that they don't want to kill us yet."

I nodded, though he couldn't see me.

The doors opened. It was starting to get dark outside, so the sudden burst of light didn't force me to squint. We were on a single-lane dirt road in what seemed to be a pretty secluded area. Trees on both sides.

Three men stood there. All of them were wearing the jack-o-lantern masks. The one on the left and the right each held a sub-machine gun, while the one in the middle held a wood-chopping axe.

It was clearly not in our best interest to make any sudden moves.

"Sorry about the detour," said the one with the axe. "Word from the home office is that they want more intimidation, so we've stopped here to murder the cop."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"I'm not going to let you do this," I said, getting in front of Bruce.

"Yes, you are. We're supposed to make this quick. Cop, get out here."

"Don't do it," I said.

The man with the axe took a cell phone out of his pocket. He tapped the screen a couple of times with his thumb and then held it up. "Recognize this special little eight-year-old?"

It was a picture of Kyle. There was duct tape over his mouth.

I forced myself not to scream.

"You want a picture of him with today's newspaper, we can do it. You want me to switch to a live video, we can do it. But if you force that hand, he won't look as good when you see him."

"You son of a bitch," I said. "If you hurt him, if anybody hurts him, I will kill you."

The man shrugged. "Noted."

"Take me instead," said Shirley. "Don't kill the cop. Kill me."

The man stared at her for a second, then chuckled. "Very nice try, but no. I don't think anybody will be too upset when you're dead, which sort of defeats the whole purpose."

"I murdered one of your partners."

"We know. I was the one who drove away after you killed him. There's very little you can blurt out that we don't know. He'll be avenged, don't worry. It's all under control. You'll be dead soon. Right now, we're here for the cop."

"Fuck you," said Bruce.

"Gonna make us torture an eight-year-old kid, huh? Eh, no skin off my nose. They can skeletonize the little brat for all I care. Give me a second to call it in and we'll get the show started."

What was I supposed to do? Beg Bruce to sacrifice himself on behalf of my son? Push him out of the truck?

"You don't have to kill anybody to send a message," I said. "The cop is innocent."

"No cop is innocent. But we're not trying to send a political or social message. Our message is: Do not fuck with us, even if you're Lieutenant Bruce Frenkle."

"Take my arm instead," I said.

"What?"

"This is all about me, and I know Mr. Burke wants me alive, so instead of killing the cop just cut off my arm. That'll send your message."

The man ran his finger along the edge of the axe blade. "Well, that's interesting. Lop it off, use a lighter to cauterize the wound, and leave it on a slide at an elementary school playground."

"Exactly."

"I like the way you think, but that is most definitely not going to happen. My job is to kill the cop. And if he's not out of there in five seconds, your son's eyeballs will be gouged out and stepped on."

Bruce pushed me out of the way and climbed out. The other two men kept their guns pointed at him.

"You're taller than I thought," said the man with the axe. "Get down on your knees."

I couldn't see Bruce's face, but I got the clear impression that he was staring the man down. Then he very slowly and deliberately got down on his knees.

"Nothing good can come from hanging out with Andrew Mayhem," the man said. "But I think you already knew that."

"You just gonna talk all day?" asked Bruce.

"No. I am not. What I am going to do is show you mercy and try to do this with one hit."

I slammed my bandaged hand over my mouth as the man raised the axe over his head, then brought it down hard upon Bruce's skull.

The blade sunk in deep.

The man wrenched the axe free, and Bruce's lifeless body collapsed.

I wanted to scream in rage, but instead I just wept. Though Shirley looked sad, she had a strange kind of sad expression; I couldn't tell if she was upset that Bruce had been killed, or was disappointed that she hadn't been the one to swing the axe.

"We're going to do some awful things to his body," the man with the axe told me. "But I'm going to show you more mercy, and you don't have to watch them."

He slammed the doors closed.

* * *

The engine started and we began to drive again less than a minute later. Either the desecration of Bruce's body was a quick process, or the jack-o-lantern men weren't all in the same vehicle. They probably didn't have his corpse up front with them, so there must have been a second truck.

They had Kyle. And if they had him, they probably had Helen and Theresa, too. Once again, my family was in the hands of a madman. Jesus. They were better off without me. Everybody was.

"Were you friends?" Shirley asked.

"Don't talk to me."

"I would have gone through with it. I would have made the trade. His life for mine."

"You think I'm going to be impressed by that? Touched? You make absolutely no sense to me, and I don't mean that in a good way. I really need you to stop talking."

"Okay. I can do that."

We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, as I tried not to think of all the horrible things Mr. Burke could be doing to my wife and children at this very moment. He wasn't going to let them go. Not a chance. Even if he got his revenge against me, even if he chained me to a wall and tortured me for thirty years, he wouldn't let them go. The best I could hope for is that we'd get to die together.

Nothing good can come from hanging out with Andrew Mayhem.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Dead on.

I should've just left the state months ago. When my daughter started having nightmares about me, I should've realized that they'd all be much better off if I moved away completely. Be the kind of father who just sent checks. Maybe I shouldn't have even stayed in the United States. I could have picked a charming little village in Ireland, improved my beer drinking skills, and lived out the rest of my life in happy obscurity.

"Andrew Mayhem? That guy who brought misery to everybody? Oh, last we heard he was making his own jewelry. He's not very good at it, but it keeps him out of everybody else's lives, so we buy a piece every once in a while just to keep him occupied."

Why hadn't I left? Why had I spent all of those weeks sleeping on Roger's couch being tormented by his rotten cat when I could've just hopped on a bus and let it deposit me someplace away from the people I loved?

Well, for one thing, Helen would have been heartbroken and furious, and I feared her wrath more than Mr. Burke's...

Not a good answer. That was a joke answer. If I was going to make peace with myself before my death, I needed to not make jokes, even if they were just in my head.

It was because I loved her. She was the mother of two of my children and would be the mother of three more. I loved her with all of my heart, loved her in a stupid, selfish way where I couldn't leave her even if it was the best thing for her.

If I weren't such a bumbling doofus, I could say that I'd stuck around to protect her. But that would imply that I had any abilities of any sort to even protect a dog.

To be fair, our dog was still alive.

As far as I knew.

I scratched my scalp, tugging on the handcuffs harder than necessary because I was in a bad mood. This sent a bolt of pain through my wrists, putting me in a worse mood.

"Ow," said Shirley.

"I'm sorry, but only because it hurt me, not because it hurt you," I said.

"What are you, six?"

"They're going to murder my son."

"That doesn't mean you have to be pissy. If you want to kill me, kill me. Do it right now. Break my neck."

"Don't tempt me."

"This is a legitimate offer. I will tilt my head back, and you can punch me so hard that it breaks my neck. Then I won't be your problem anymore."

"Actually, Shirley, since we're handcuffed, you would still be my problem. So thank you for the offer, I'll keep it under consideration, but for now, please shut up."

"Okay. Just let me know if there's anything I can do."

"You know what you can do? You can gnaw your hand off. That's what I'd like, if you really are serious about trying to make me feel better. Just get down in there and gnaw your hand right off. Make it a birthday present. You can even do one of those cheapskate things where you combine a birthday present and a Christmas present. Any gift giving occasion for the next ten years, you can combine into the single present of gnawing your hand off for me. Is that okay? Will you do that for me, Shirley? Surely you'll do it. In fact, I will start the process off with the first two bites. I will take two great big bites out of your wrist to get things started, and I even volunteer to bite through the bones, even if it wrecks my teeth. How does that sound? Do we have a deal? Ready to gnaw?"

"You're a jerk."

"I sure am. Stop talking." I didn't care if I was being a jerk. I wasn't interested in improving my social graces right now.

What was Tony going to do when he heard his twin brother had been murdered? I hoped that I'd be able to talk to him, to let him know that Bruce went out with courage.

I had to admit that I never thought Bruce was a very good cop, but he was a good man, and it made me physically ill to know that he'd died because of me.

Not you. Because of Mr. Burke. Sitting here wallowing in guilt isn't doing you or anybody else any good. Get over the whole "Waahh, waahh, the world is better off without me!" attitude and figure out something you can do to get out of this mess!

But what could I do?

"I promise I'll shut up soon," said Shirley, "but let's say that Mr. Burke does carry out his whole plan for revenge? What exactly are we talking?"

"I don't know."

"Ballpark estimate."

"I do not know what Mr. Burke has planned for us. I watched him cut apart one of his own men and replace the parts with...you know what, I don't even want to talk about it. It's going to be bad, okay?"

"Okay. Worse than being set on fire?"

"If you can imagine somebody taking an acetylene torch and burning your body to a crisp, starting at the toes and slowly working their way up, then, yes, that's within the parameters of what I'd expect from him."

"I can't handle being burned."

"Then you'd better hope they aren't listening in, because if they are, you'll be burned to death for sure."

I wanted to punch myself. What kind of rotten thing was that to say, even to a homicidal maniac? I was better than this. I was a bumbling incompetent, but I was no sadist.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "That wasn't cool. Maybe they don't even want you. Maybe they'll let you go." Okay, now I was taking it too far in the opposite direction.

"Yeah, right," she said.

"It's unlikely, I know. Bruce got an axe to the head. That's not such a bad way to go, all things considered. It was over in a second. Probably didn't even hurt."

"Right. He would have died instantly."

"He didn't even have that long to be scared before it happened. It's not like they stood there and made him wait. It could have been a lot worse."

"Infinitely worse. Everybody wants to die in their sleep, because it's the best way to go, but if you compare an axe in the skull to drowning, cancer, or even a heart attack, it's really not such a bad thing."

"Is it better than a heart attack?"

"I've never had one, but there are chest pains. I guess an axe in your brain would be worse than one of those heart attacks where you suddenly drop dead, but it would be better than one where you have chest pains and can't catch your breath and die on the way to the hospital."

I nodded. "So maybe you'll get the equivalent of an axe to the head. Does that make you feel better?"

"I know you're kidding, but in some deranged way it actually does. Thanks."

"No problem."

Once again, the armored car stopped.

I felt a mild chest pain, although I'm pretty sure it was psychosomatic.

"Maybe they just stopped at a red light," said Shirley.

"Maybe."

"We can try the nudity thing if you want."

"Nah."

The doors opened. It was only two men this time, including the one who'd murdered Bruce, although he didn't have his axe. He was holding a rifle.

"We need to change trucks," he said. He pointed the rifle at Shirley and pulled the trigger. A dart struck her in the chest. She plucked it out, but her eyes already rolled to the top of her head.

"If it were up to me, I'd treat you like adults and not have to do this," the man said, casually reloading the rifle. "But the boss is a big believer in tranquilizers, so we use tranquilizers."

Shirley fell onto her side.

"Anyway, it's nice for you because you'll get to sleep for the rest of the drive. I have to listen to an audio book. When you wake up, we'll be there."

He finished loading the new dart, pointed the rifle at me, and fired, hitting me in the chest almost exactly where he'd hit Shirley.

My vision immediately went fuzzy and I didn't bother to try to fight it. I fell over on top of Shirley and disappeared into a dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I woke up in a pit.

In one of my previous nightmarish misadventures, I'd been thrown into something called The Pit, which was not, in fact, an actual pit but rather a regular-shaped room. "Pits are concave," I'd argued. They didn't care.

This was an actual pit. Maybe eight feet deep, with dirt walls, and just enough room that I could lie flat on the ground without bending my knees.

Shirley lay next to me, snoring. We were still handcuffed together, because for it to be otherwise would imply that acts of mercy still existed in the world. I sat up, then prodded her with my foot.

"Wake up," I said. She let out a groggy groan but didn't open her eyes.

The light actually wasn't that bad down here. I could see that my bandages had been changed, and new ones had been applied to my various wounds. Shirley was bandaged up as well. How considerate of our captors. Now we didn't have to worry about bleeding to death while we waited to die.

I poked her in the ribs. "Seriously, wake up."

Shirley rubbed her forehead then opened her eyes. "Where are we?"

"I don't know. A pit somewhere."

She sat up. "Have you seen anybody else?"

"No. I just woke up."

"Think we can dig our way out?"

I ran my hand along the dirt wall. It was tightly packed. The odds of us being able to tunnel our way to safety were about as good as the odds that a magical butterfly would flutter down here and carry us to safety, but I didn't want to rule out any options yet.

"Climb up on my back," I said, facing the wall. "See where we are."

I couldn't do much to help hoist her up, since I had a severely injured hand and the other was cuffed to her, but Shirley was able to climb up on my back and get herself high enough to peek over the edge of the pit.

"Shit," she said.

There was a loud whack that sounded exactly like Shirley being kicked in the face, and then we both fell backwards onto the ground. I tried not to land on her but did a terrible job.

We lay there for a moment, stunned, and then Mr. Burke looked over the side.

The son of a bitch was nicely dressed in a dark blue suit. The son of a bitch still had the black goatee, though it seemed to have acquired a lot of gray since I saw him last. In fact, the past few months had aged the son of a bitch significantly; he now looked at least fifty. The son of a bitch smiled at me.

"Well, well, well. Andrew Mayhem. You don't know how long I've been waiting for this."

"Actually, I know exactly how long you've been waiting for this," I said, getting back up. "The wait started from that one time I made you look like a complete dipshit."

"Don't confuse wasting my work with humiliating me. My dignity is completely intact. Yours won't be."

"Where's my family?"

"Let me think. Who's been accounted for? Kyle? We do have Kyle. That's all you need to know for now."

"I want to see him."

"I don't think so."

"I'm dead serious. Let me see my son."

"You can see pieces of him now, or all of him later. Your choice."

I gave him what I hoped was a stare that would scare him to the very core of his being, though it probably wouldn't.

"That wasn't rhetorical," said Mr. Burke. "Make the choice, or I'll interpret your silence as wanting to see pieces of him now."

"All of him later," I said.

"Wise decision. That's what I would have picked if I had a son. Since you're my prisoner, I think it's only fair to let you have one phone call." He took a cell phone out of his pocket and held it up for me to see. "I can't let you pick who you call, unfortunately, and if you try to call somebody else, Kyle will be dead before the first ring, but best of luck to you."

Mr. Burke tossed the phone down to me. I caught it with my bandaged hand, dropped it because it's hard to catch things with a four-fingered heavily bandaged hand, then picked it up. I looked at the display. "Are you kidding me?"

"You have one minute. Make the best of it."

I pressed the call button and held the phone to my ear. I knew Mr. Burke was sadistic, but this was just plain cruel.

"Yo," said Harry McGlade.

Harry McGlade, a private investigator from Chicago, was with me when I got thrown into The Pit that wasn't a pit. Generally when I've become entangled in situations that suck, it's been my own fault. In that particular instance, I was minding my own business running an emergency errand for Helen, and I had happened upon McGlade breaking into somebody's home, and within, oh, thirty seconds or so everything turned to crap.

Most of what we have written about that evening was a total lie designed to sell books, but we were definitely telling the truth about how we didn't get along. I'm not going to pretend that I don't annoy some people. I know I do. I've never tried to deny it. Yet I had never encountered anything remotely resembling the nails-screeching-against-a-blackboard-while-cats'-tails-are-pulled-and-dentist-drills-whirr nature of McGlade's personality.

To be fair, if I had to choose between collaborating on another book with Harry McGlade and being in this pit waiting to die, I'd pick the collaboration, but making McGlade my lifeline out of here was just flat-out evil.

"Harry? It's me."

"Penelope?"

"Andrew Mayhem."

"Oh, now you call. You couldn't be bothered to stay in touch when I kept asking to borrow some money, but now that I'm not asking for money all the time you call. Real nice."

"Harry, I need you to—"

"I didn't even want the money. It's just fun to ask for it."

"Listen, Harry, I'm in a lot of trouble right now! Life or death! My whole family is in danger!"

"That sounds pretty serious."

"It is! I need you to—"

"I heard you started up your own private eye business. Why didn't you call me for a few pointers? For example, if a lady with big boobs comes into your office, you can't just wet them down with a squirt gun, because certain lawmakers have—"

"Harry! Listen to me!"

"Just because I called you to ask for money doesn't mean you have to yell."

"Harry!"

"My pants are moving."

"Are...are you stoned?"

"I was stoned, but now I think I'm more drunk."

"I need you to send help."

"Send help, or actually help? Sending it would be a lot easier than doing it."

"I've been kidnapped by Clarence Burke. He's got Kyle for sure, and—"

"Who's Kyle?"

"My son."

"When did you have a kid? Who allowed that to happen?"

"He's got Kyle for sure, and probably Helen and Theresa. I don't know where I am—"

"Oh, that's going to be a problem."

"—I don't know where I am, but I'm in a pit—"

"That's the pits! Heh. No, wait, say that again and I'll come up with something better. Actually, don't say it again, just remember that you said it. You're in a pit, well, I'm on the pot!"

"Harry!"

"It's funny because not only did I smoke some pot earlier, but you called while I was taking a dump."

"Please, Harry, I need your help!"

"Yeah, right. If you needed help I'd be about the three hundredth person on your list, and there's no way the other two hundred and ninety-nine people weren't home."

I tried not to let Mr. Burke see my exasperation, since of course that was the whole point of this exercise in hellish futility. "Sorry I bothered you," I said.

"Wanna write another book together?"

"No."

"Whoops, my pants are getting tighter by the second. Gotta go." McGlade hung up, robbing me of the satisfaction of hanging up on him.

I resisted the urge to throw the phone to the ground and stomp on it. That could be bad for Kyle.

"That doesn't sound like it went well," said Mr. Burke.

"Are you surprised?"

"Not at all. I've always felt that the small torments can be as entertaining as the large ones. The phone signal isn't traceable, so you don't have to worry about him finding you here and joining you in the pit."

"He wouldn't come after me. He's not very ambitious."

"Please toss the phone back to me."

I tossed the phone back up to him, resisting another urge: to fling it at his smirking face. For now I had to be polite and play along.

"Thank you," Mr. Burke said. "I apologize for having a laugh at your expense. You've been a good sport, so I'll let you see your kid. Be right back."

I tried to keep myself calm. Kyle was fine. He had to be. There was no possible way Mr. Burke was going off to fetch pieces of him. It just wouldn't happen. I was going to see my son alive and well. Scared, but alive and well.

Mr. Burke returned less than a minute later. Standing next to him, with duct tape over her mouth and more tape binding her wrists together, was Theresa. Her face was red and her eyes were puffy and she'd clearly been sobbing for a long time.

"Do you recognize him?" Mr. Burke asked her, ruffling her blonde hair. "That's the mean man who hurt you. That's the man who gives you nightmares. It sure would be scary to be trapped down in a dark pit with him, wouldn't it? And the woman he's with? She kills people. But don't worry, Theresa, we'll only leave you down there for a day or two."

Mr. Burke placed his hand tenderly on her back, then shoved her into the pit.

Thank God Shirley and I both reached for her at the same time, or she might have hit the ground head-first, and I have no doubt that Mr. Burke would have left me down there with a dead little girl.

It wasn't a good catch, but we caught her.

Mr. Burke disappeared from sight. Then the lights went out, leaving us in complete darkness.

For a moment I just hugged her with my free arm. Theresa didn't hug me back. Her entire body shook with the force of her sobs, but at least she wasn't trying to get away from me.

I ran my fingers along the tape that was over her mouth and found the edge. The last thing in the world I wanted right now was to hurt my daughter, so I peeled it off very slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time.

I could tell that it still hurt.

She didn't say anything as the tape gradually uncovered her lips. It wasn't until I tore off the last bit that she said "Daddy, I'm scared!"

"I know you are, sweetheart," I told her. "It's okay. I promise you that nothing bad is going to happen to you."

Was I already lying to her this early in our reunion?

"I want Mommy," she said.

"I want Mommy too," I told her. "I'm sure Mommy is fine. We'll get back together with her soon."

"I want her now!"

"Honey, I swear to you, I will do everything I can to get us back with Mommy. And I won't let that man up there hurt you."

"What about the lady down here?"

"She won't hurt you, either. She's nice." Another whopper of a lie. I hoped Shirley wouldn't expose the lie in any way, or I'd strangle her with the handcuffs before she so much as scraped Theresa with her pink fingernail.

"I'm very nice," said Shirley.

Theresa sniffled into my shirt.

"Did the man hurt you before he threw you down here?" I asked.

"No."

"Did he hurt Mommy?"

"Not him."

"Did somebody else?" I asked, trying to keep the anger out of my voice.

"The police came to our house," said Theresa, crying so hard that I could barely understand her. "We all got in a car, me, Kyle, and Mommy, and then these other cars came, and there were men in masks that looked like pumpkins, and then..." She pressed her face tightly against my chest, unable to continue.

"It's okay, it's okay," I told her. I didn't want to keep pushing an emotionally distraught ten-year-old for information, but I really needed more details about the "Not him" comment. "Did any of the men hurt Mommy?"

"They pulled her out of the police car by her hair," she said. "And they hit Kyle."

I clenched my fists. "Are they okay?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen them since the men in masks took me away."

"Okay. We'll find them, I promise."

"Who's going to feed Joe?" Joe was our pug. Lovable, snorty, and not too bright.

"Don't worry about Joe. A neighbor will feed him."

"He's going to starve."

"He's not. Everybody knows we're gone, I'm sure it's all over the news, so somebody will know to come in the house and feed him. I promise you that nothing will happen to Joe. If there's one thing in the entire world that I know, it's that nothing will stop Joe from getting food."

Theresa hugged me.

"And you know that I won't hurt you ever again, right?"

Theresa let go of me.

"You know that, right? That man up there, Mr. Burke, he's the one who made Daddy do that. It's just like we talked about. It's just like you talked about with Ms. Hurlen. It wasn't the real me. No matter what Mr. Burke says, you know that, right?"

"Uh-huh."

I patted her arm and she flinched.

Because there was no light of any sort, our eyes couldn't adjust to the darkness. So I couldn't tell for sure, but I thought Theresa was touching the scar on her chest.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"How long do you think it's been?" asked Shirley.

"I don't know. An hour, maybe?"

"Feels longer."

"Could be longer."

"I have to go to the bathroom," said Theresa.

I considered calling out for Mr. Burke to let him know that we needed a restroom break, but I couldn't bear the idea of being separated from Theresa.

"If we ask him to take you out of here, he might not bring you back," I said. "I'll dig you a hole and you can go there, okay?"

"I have to go, too," said Shirley.

"You can dig your own hole."

The dirt was very tightly packed and my hands were in sorry shape for digging, but the handcuff bracelets finally provided a useful service. We used them to dig a small hole next to the dirt wall, and though it was dark we politely turned around while Theresa relieved herself.

* * *

Another hour later we were still down in the pit.

Even though there was no conceivable way that the pit wasn't being monitored, it was seeming more and more ridiculous that we didn't try to climb out. What if somebody had escaped? Roger could be up there right now, causing a major distraction, and we were just sitting in this pit, waiting for something to happen.

"I vote we try to get out of here," I said. "There's probably a night vision camera on us or somebody waiting up there, but we don't know that for sure, and if they've put this much effort into whatever their plan is, they aren't going to kill us for trying to escape."

"What effort? Digging a hole?"

"I think we can safely assume that there's more to it than this. Maybe he's going to leave us down here until we do something."

"I'm not climbing out," said Shirley.

"Why not? What if it's our only chance?"

"You know that he's not going to kill you right away. I don't have that same luxury. Unless he is the single stupidest person alive, and so far it doesn't look like he is, there's no way he hasn't considered the idea that we might do something mind blowing and unexpected like try to escape."

"Again, just like my nakedness idea, it's not a foolproof plan. But I need to at least try."

Shirley rattled the handcuffs. "Well, good luck climbing out of here by yourself."

I wanted to call her the b-word, but not in front of my daughter. "So we sit and wait, then?"

"A little while longer, anyway," said Shirley.

* * *

I think another hour passed. It was becoming difficult to keep track of time.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Burke! What's going on up there? Did you forget about us?"

No answer.

"Let us out of here!" Shirley shouted. "Somebody, help! Help us!"

Still nothing.

"Maybe he's dead," I said.

"We could never be so lucky."

"Here, we'll turn this into a democracy. I vote we try to get out. Theresa, what's your vote?"

"A nine-year-old girl doesn't get a vote," said Shirley.

"She's ten. Theresa...?"

"You could put me up there, and I could try to find Mommy and Kyle."

"Not a chance. But your vote is to get out of here, right?"

"I guess."

"Do a real vote. Aye or nay?"

"Aye," she said.

"The ayes have it."

"I never said I was going along with the vote," said Shirley.

"Too bad. You're still outvoted. When it's time to finally pass that key, don't you want the chance to do it in comfort?"

"It'll be less comfortable to do that if I'm dead."

"That doesn't even make sense. Weren't you saying that you were fine with dying? You keep flip-flopping between 'I deserve to die' and 'I don't want to help you guys get out of here because of the chance that I might die' and it's making me absolutely nuts! You're like a politician! Not the partisan ones who won't change their mind on an issue no matter how ridiculous their stance is, which I guess is most of them, so that was a bad comparison, but we need to get out of this pit. I'm not going to be passive anymore. The time for action is now. There's no gain without risk. And you were outvoted."

"Okay," said Shirley.

"Okay?"

"Okay. We'll climb out. If you think we should try to get out of here, we'll do it. If I am killed because of this, your daughter will be a witness that it was all your fault."

I stiffened. "That's not funny."

"It wasn't supposed to be."

"Don't say something like that again."

"Or else what?"

"Or else nothing. Just leave Theresa out of this, okay?"

"No. Clearly there are some messed-up issues between you two, and I'm not going to pretend they don't exist. If you ask me to climb out of here, you're putting my life at risk, and if I die because of it, Theresa knows that I died because of you. Just throwing that out there."

"I would rather she know that I got you killed than know that I just sat here and let us—" I started to say "starve to death" but that would have conjured up images of Joe the Pug so I did an immediate course-correction. "—rot in this hole."

"Stop fighting," said Theresa, sounding as if she was going to start crying again.

"I'm sorry," I told her. "The mean lady and I won't fight any more. We won't try to get out."

We sat there in the darkness for a while.

"All right," said Shirley, "we'll do it."

"Are you effing kidding me?" I asked.

"What? I had a change of heart."

"You won't be satisfied until I twist a corkscrew into my brain to make the agony stop."

"I could change my mind back at any time."

"Then let's go. We'll climb out first, and then we'll reach down for Theresa. Theresa, I promise we won't leave you down here alone. We'll pull you up the second we get up there, okay?"

"Okay."

I worked my handcuffed wrist against the dirt wall. "I'm going to carve out a couple of small footholds," I told Shirley. "When you get up there, if you can just help pull me up, this shouldn't be too difficult."

"So I'm going up first, huh?"

"Unless you want me to climb up your back."

"I would like you to go first."

"Okay." I didn't mind being the first one up there; it would just be a lot easier if she was already up there to help ease the strain on my hands. But I wasn't going to keep arguing with the crazy lady.

I finished digging the grooves. "This is probably going to really hurt me," I informed Shirley and Theresa. "So if I scream, don't be alarmed."

I wedged the toe of my right shoe into the first groove, then reached up and grabbed the edge of the pit with the hand that had been less recently been mangled. As Shirley sort of helped, I pulled myself out of the hole.

I got to the top, turned myself around while Shirley held her arm in the air (I think the important lesson to take from this is: handcuffs make everything more difficult), then reached down and helped pull her out of the hole.

Nobody shot us. Always a nice thing.

"Daddy...?"

"Don't worry, honey, we'll get you right out."

"I still can't see a thing," said Shirley, wandering off.

I don't mean that she wandered off a couple of miles or anything like that. She crawled a couple of feet away...which was enough for her to fall. And since I was in the middle of crouching and adjusting my position so I could reach down for Theresa, my center of balance wasn't all it could be, and after a sharp tug on the handcuffs I stumbled back and fell with her.

We fell about eight feet and struck the bottom of a dirt floor.

I was in a lot of pain. Fortunately, the source of this pain didn't seem to be protruding bones or a cracked skull. I rolled off of Shirley and onto my back, where I stared up into the darkness for a moment.

"Are we in another fucking pit?" I asked.

"Yes, I think so."

"Of course we are." I raised my voice. "Theresa, are you okay?"

"I'm scared!"

"I'm sorry, honey. Daddy had a glitch. We'll get you out right away."

I crawled to the other side, careful not to fall into an even deeper pit, until I reached the other dirt wall. I stood up, and a quick walk around the perimeter showed that it was basically the same kind of pit we'd just escaped.

"I apologize," said Shirley. "It was dark."

"Did you break anything?"

"I don't think so. I hurt my leg but I don't think it's broken."

"If we need to run, will you be able to?"

"I should be okay."

"No, no, no. I need to know the truth. If we have to make a break for it, are you going to be able to run or am I going to have to drag you like a sled?"

"It hurts pretty bad."

"Dammit."

"But I really don't think it's broken. Might be sprained. I can run on it, though, if we get chased or anything."

"Daddy!"

"We're coming! We just have to climb out of another hole."

"Aunt Shirley made a boo-boo!" Shirley called out.

I lowered my voice to an angry hiss. "First, ten-year-olds have outgrown the term 'boo-boo.' Second, do not under any circumstances ever call yourself Aunt Shirley again, not even to be cute. Got it?"

"If we're going to spend this much time together, she should start to think of me as family."

"Don't do it again. I mean it."

"Touchy."

I called out various soothing and reassuring things as Shirley and I scraped grooves into the wall of the second pit. I wondered if Helen, Kyle, Roger, or Samantha were in pits like these? They hadn't made any noise, but maybe they were gagged with duct tape like Kyle had been. Helen could be pressed up against a wall three feet away.

After only two or three minor mishaps, we climbed out of the second pit, and I reached down into the first. "Give me your hand," I told Theresa. "If you can, grab my wrist instead. I've got a bandage on my hand—it's soft and it's a little wet, and if you can not grab that, Daddy will be thrilled. He'll give you a great big kiss. Do you think you can do that?"

"Yes," said Theresa, grabbing my bandaged hand and squeezing it in panic.

I very slowly, very carefully, and very politely urged my daughter to squeeze my wrist instead, which she eventually did. Shirley and I pulled her out of the pit, and then I gave her a hug.

"It feels like your hand is bleeding," said Theresa.

"Yeah, Daddy does a lot of that. I'll be okay."

I gave Theresa a piggyback ride as Shirley and I walked side by side in the darkness, one tiny step at a time, taking every possible precaution to avoid falling into another pit.

We walked about ten feet, the most cautious ten feet I'd ever walked, before we reached another edge. I stood there and listened carefully. No sound down below.

"Is anybody down there?" I asked.

Nobody answered. There was no sound at all.

"If you're down there, and you're gagged or something, make some kind of noise."

Normally, this would be the time that my imagination would start messing with me, and I'd think that maybe I heard something in the pit, but I couldn't be sure if I'd really heard it or if I'd just imagined it. Then I'd have to go down into the pit, knowing that the sound was probably only my imagination yet not being willing to take the risk that it wasn't and that my wife could be down there with duct tape over her mouth.

Not this time. It was completely silent.

I might have voted in favor of searching the pit anyway, just in case, except that instead of my wife, the pit could just as easily be filled with bear traps.

We resumed walking. We made it about another ten feet before we reached a concrete wall.

We moved along the wall until we found a door.

I carefully turned the doorknob. It was locked.

The entire room lit up.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

We all winced, recoiled, and squeezed our eyes shut to block out the blinding light.

After it became safe to open them again without the sensation of my retinas sizzling, I opened my eyes into a squint and looked around.

There wasn't much of anything. It was about the size of a racquetball court, with bare concrete walls and four pits.

A tinny voice, not Mr. Burke, spoke over an intercom. "Please step away from the door."

I decided that obeying the voice was probably a good idea, so we stepped away from the door.

"Further, please. Go to the other corner."

We walked to the other corner. Shirley was limping a bit, which was simply wonderful news. I was able to peek down into two of the pits as we walked past, and they were both empty.

We reached the far corner and stopped.

"Thank you," said the voice.

The door opened.

Mr. Burke stepped through the doorway, accompanied by a man in a white dress shirt and a tie. This man wasn't wearing a jack-o-lantern mask. He had a lean build, short blond hair, and green eyes that even a heterosexual such as myself could have appreciated had he not been a bad guy. Instead of a sub-machine gun, rifle, or axe, he kept it simple: just a pistol.

"I see you took some initiative," said Mr. Burke.

"Is that good or bad?" I asked.

"Good. I would have let you starve down there. I'd like to introduce you to my assistant Vic. You'll be seeing a lot of him."

Vic nodded politely.

"Send your daughter over here. I have something to give her."

"No," I said.

"Vic, kill his daughter."

Vic immediately raised the pistol and pointed it at Theresa.

"No, wait, she'll do it!" I gave Theresa a gentle shove. "Go over to them. I promise they won't hurt you."

"That's a strange thing to promise," said Mr. Burke, "since you have no idea what I'm going to give her."

"If you hurt her, I'll kill you."

"Does that mean I should kill you for hurting her? Good thing you didn't have a knife down there with you. There's no telling what you might have done."

My mind flashed on the image of squishing his head into a blender and making myself a blood smoothie.

"Why isn't she moving yet? I didn't withdraw the order to kill her."

"Go, Theresa," I said, pushing her a bit more firmly. Crying, she ran over to Mr. Burke and Vic. Vic kept the pistol pointed at her the entire time.

"Good girl," said Mr. Burke. He handed her a white letter-sized envelope. "Go take this back to your father."

She ran back, buried her face in my shirt, and gave me the envelope. Whatever was inside was soft and flimsy.

"Go ahead and open it," said Mr. Burke. "I promise it won't explode."

I tore open the envelope. Inside, each bound by a rubber band, were four locks of hair. Two of them were several inches long, while the other two were only about an inch.

"Recognize them?"

I did. Helen. Kyle. Roger. Samantha.

"This doesn't prove anything," I told him.

"Really? I think it proves that we cut off pieces of your loved ones' hair. Smell Helen's hair. A good husband would recognize her brand of shampoo."

"Why don't you just take me to them?"

"Because, Andrew, I like watching you squirm. Are they alive? Are they dead? Do I have anybody else? You don't know. Are there any of them you don't like as much as the others? If you had to rank them, how would it go? Kyle, Helen, Roger, and Samantha, right? Child before spouse, buddy before buddy's girlfriend. That's the way it should be. Do you want to swap any of them?"

I didn't respond.

Mr. Burke shrugged. "You can rearrange them later."

"Why don't you just kill us and get it over with?" asked Shirley.

"Now I know that you are at the bottom of the list, so if I were you, I'd keep my mouth shut and not do anything to call attention to myself. Just a suggestion. Anyway, we're wasting time. Let me show you to your new home for the next three months."

He walked out of the room. Vic gestured at us with his gun to follow.

What else were we supposed to do? We walked across the pit room and through the doorway.

We stepped into a short hallway with wood paneling. Mr. Burke opened a door and walked into a room. With Vic's not-so-subtle encouragement, we followed.

And entered Roger's apartment.

Not his real apartment, but a pretty good approximation. The same wallpaper, the same couch, the same TV. Not all of the details were right (there was no picture of Samantha on the wall) but it was at least seventy-five percent accurate.

"Look familiar?" asked Mr. Burke.

"What the hell is this?"

"I wanted you to feel at home. This is your home, isn't it? Sleeping on Roger's couch?"

The shade of the couch wasn't quite right. They hadn't taken Roger's furniture out of his apartment; they'd just bought items that were close to the originals. I hoped that stupid cat wasn't here.

"Congratulations," I told Mr. Burke. "If your goal was to completely baffle me, you've succeeded. I'm baffled. I don't have the slightest freaking clue what any of this means."

"Have a seat on the couch. We'll chat."

Shirley, Theresa, and I sat on the couch, which I don't mind saying was wonderfully comfortable after our hours in the pit. Mr. Burke remained standing.

"Ask your question again," Mr. Burke told Shirley.

"What question?"

"About killing you."

"I changed my mind about that."

"Ask the question."

Shirley shifted nervously on the cushion. "Why don't you kill us and get it over with?"

"Because I'm not going to kill you. If nobody makes any waves that force our hand otherwise, all of you will walk out of here three months from now and return to your lives."

"Why three months?" asked Shirley.

My stomach sank as the significance of that timeline hit me. "You're keeping us here until the triplets are born?"

"Very good," said Mr. Burke. "You've been extremely patient, so it's time for me to explain everything to you. After you ruined my pet project and killed several good employees, I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to get revenge. I came up with plenty of ways to torture you to death. Hundreds. I even put them in a spreadsheet, which I'll show you at some point. The problem with torturing somebody to death is that even if it takes hours, even if it takes days, even if it takes weeks, hell, even if I'm so good at it that I can drag it out for months, it eventually ends, and you're off the hook. I already knew Helen was pregnant, of course, but imagine my delight when I discovered that there were going to be three new Mayhem babies in the world."

"You'll have to—"

"If you're going to tell me that I'll have to kill you before you let me hurt the babies, don't bother. You won't have the opportunity. You are going to live here for the next three months. Helen, who you will not see during that time, will receive excellent prenatal care. Those babies will be born healthy, I promise you. Roger and Samantha will live here as well, but they'll mostly serve as incentive not to make me angry. Try to escape, Roger loses a leg. Try to escape again, Roger becomes a torso. Try to escape once more, Samantha has all of her skin scraped off. Their role is simple enough, do you agree?"

"When do I get to see them?" I asked.

"Are you really interrupting me while I'm explaining what the next three months have in store? Don't you want to know? Do you want me to throw you back in the pit until Helen gives birth?"

"No."

"Then save your pointless questions until the end. Anyway, Helen will give birth to three beautiful children. She will be allowed to kiss each one tenderly on the forehead. Then they will be removed from her room and taken into a different room, where you, Theresa, and Kyle will each be waiting in front of a pot of boiling water. You will be given a son or daughter, Theresa and Kyle will each be given a sister or brother, and then you will drop these babies into the water like lobsters. When they are sufficiently cooked, you will scoop them out of the water, place them onto a serving dish, and then you will each eat your assigned child down to the bones." Mr. Burke smiled. "And then, your debt repaid, you will all be set free and will never hear from me again."

It doesn't matter how much evidence you have that somebody is sadistic, evil, and criminally insane; when you hear a plan like that, the only possible response is to stare at them in a state of absolute bewilderment.

"I stabbed armadillos to death and stored them in a cooler," said Shirley, "and even I think that's truly fucked up."

I kept staring at him. Was he serious? Even for somebody like Mr. Burke, who had...well, no, actually, it wasn't all that surprising that his mental process went in the direction of baby-eating.

"I will never do that," I told him.

"Yes, you will," he said. "And you'll use silverware and proper table manners."

I shook my head. "No. It's not gonna happen. Not a chance in hell."

"It's easy for you to take a pro-life attitude now," said Mr. Burke, "because you haven't spent the past three months being given just enough food to keep you alive. When the blessed occasion arrives, and you drag your emaciated bodies into the kitchen, the meat will look quite tasty."

"There is no possible way."

"I disagree."

"You're beyond sick."

"To people Theresa's age, 'sick' means 'good.' Watch what you say. She might think you're giving me a compliment and that you're on board with the idea."

"I'll kill you."

"Of course you will. Tell me that I'll never get away with this."

"You'll never get away with this."

"Tell me that somebody will find you. Tell me that I can't keep you locked away for three months without somebody coming to your rescue."

"You can't."

"Wrong! I can keep you and your family here for years if I want to. I can do exactly as I please. Do you know what we did with your dead cop friend's body? It's scattered in chunks across the front lawn of Theresa's school, just to show the world that I'm one psychotic guy. And no matter how much you tell yourself that you'll beat me in this battle, I promise you that in three months you will walk out of here with a belly full of your own offspring."

"Okay," I said. "You win. We'll see what happens."

We had three months to figure out a way out of this. Even if I made the dozens of mistakes that I always do, Mr. Burke would have to screw up sometime in the next three months, right?

"I'll give you a sneak preview," said Mr. Burke. "Theresa, do you like chicken?"

She didn't answer.

"Theresa, when I speak to you I expect an answer, or else I will hurt your mother. Do you like chicken?"

"Yes."

"Fried chicken?"

"Yes."

"What if I handed you a whole dead chicken, raw, with the feathers still on it? Would you want to eat that?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Well, you're all going into a much deeper, colder pit, and you're not coming out for three days. Then we'll see how hungry you are for chicken."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

If Shirley and I had taken a comical spill into the new pit, there would have been shattered bones for sure. It was about twenty-five feet deep, with stone walls, and Vic forced us down the ladder at gunpoint. When all three of us reached the bottom, he pulled up the ladder and shut off the lights.

And then he left us there for three days.

Lest you think that Mr. Burke was an entirely unpleasant gentleman, I should point out that once a day Vic lowered a care package bucket with bottled water, fresh bandages, and glow sticks.

Much of our time was spent trying to get out of the handcuffs. We didn't have anything to pick the lock except for Shirley's fingernails. You'd think that with three days to work on it, you'd eventually be able to pick handcuff locks with fingernails like that, but, nope, we had no luck. Nor were we able to break the chain by repeatedly stomping on it, and it also didn't do any good to vigorously scrape the chain against the rock wall, moving it back and forth until our arms ached, hoping to wear it down enough that we could snap it.

Shirley did pass the key she'd swallowed, in a moment that does not rank high on my list of best memories, but of course it was the key to the other pair, and they were not interchangeable.

She confessed to a small level of regret that she'd snapped Bruce's handcuffs onto me without my permission.

I spent a lot of time assuring Theresa that we'd be fine. The horrible man would be punished just like all of the other horrible men who'd tried to hurt us. (I excluded myself as an example in the conversation, though I certainly hadn't lacked for punishment.) Mommy was fine, Kyle was fine, Uncle Roger was fine, and Aunt Samantha was fine.

And I told her stories. All of her favorites. We hadn't done actual bedtime stories in a couple of years, not since she informed me in a very serious voice that she was too old for such a thing and that bedtime stories were for little kids, like Kyle. But now, the eighteen quadrillion readings of such books as Hector Glues His House, wherein Hector uses too much glue on a school project and accidentally glues his house to the neighbors' house, and then to all of the nearby houses, until the entire neighborhood is one big pile of glued-together houses, served me well. A lobotomy couldn't have gotten that book out of my head.

I also made up some stories. Happy stories. Sappy-sweet girly stories. And tales of fantasy in which super-hawt elves went on quests to save fair maidens (who could kick plenty of ass themselves, so be warned, orcs!) from evil wizards.

Shirley offered to tell a story, and I explained that stories were a precious bond between father and daughter, and that if she started to tell a story I would be forced to tickle her to death. "Tickle" was code for "bludgeon," and I think Shirley got the point.

We also talked about food a lot.

The fact is, you're not going to starve if you go without eating for three days. In my case, the pain of my shot-off finger sort of overwhelmed the hunger element. When you're being chased by psychos with machine guns, it's not that difficult to focus on other things besides missing appendages, but when you're stuck in a dark pit with nothing to keep you occupied, a lot of time is spent thinking about how much it hurts.

Though I didn't want to fall asleep, the exhaustion was simply something I couldn't overcome. I held Theresa tight, comforting myself with the knowledge that Shirley didn't have a weapon, and if she switched over to a "Gotta kill a little girl!" personality, I didn't think she could actually do anything without waking me up, in which case I would make use of the rock walls and the fact that they were more durable than her skull.

By the third day, we weren't doing much besides just sitting there. I tried to keep the conversation going, but I know I faded a few times, and certain picture books from Theresa's childhood were combined into an incoherent medley.

I only knew it was the third day because that's when Mr. Burke looked down into the pit, holding a clear plastic bag with a dead chicken in it.

"Everybody still alive down there?" he called down.

"Alive and well," I shouted. Or wanted to shout. My throat was too dry to actually project my voice, so I said it in a soft croak that I don't think he heard.

"I bet you're hungry. I just had a lovely meal of Ribeye steak; a baked potato loaded with butter, bacon, sour cream, and chives; cinnamon apples; and a bowl of vanilla ice cream with whipped cream and hot fudge for dessert. I can't even describe how delicious it was. That's the nice thing about being rich: you eat well."

I said something shockingly obscene in my mind.

"I promised that you'd be fed after your fasting period was over, and it's over. Watch your head."

He dropped the plastic bag. There wasn't much room to dodge and our reflexes were weak, so the chicken landed on my foot and the plastic burst open, sending a couple of feathers flying into the air.

It hurt like hell, but I wasn't about to let Mr. Burke see me reacting to the pain of having a chicken fall on my foot, so I gritted my teeth and didn't make a sound.

"Eat up," said Mr. Burke.

Hunger does dark things to a person. When you're ravenous enough, the human body will do whatever it takes to survive. Food that would normally churn your stomach looks positively mouth-watering when you've gone so long without so much as a grain of rice.

But screw that. It had only been three days. No way was I eating Burke's chicken. This nasty raw chicken was about to fly right back up at his ugly face.

Shirley pulled away some plastic and then tore out a handful of feathers.

"Are you really going to do that?"

"I'm starving," she said.

"So you want to go through all of this to die of salmonella?"

She jabbed her fingernails into the side of the bird.

"We could be making a statement here, you know."

"You make a statement. I need to eat."

And she did, scooping out several big chunks and popping them into her mouth. At least she looked queasy as she did it.

After a few bites, she slid it toward me.

"Sorry," I said. "I don't eat chicken that's been on the ground."

"Theresa?"

"She's not eating it, either. How did you enjoy the flavor? Get any maggots stuck in your teeth?"

"They tasted great. Extra protein."

I looked away from Shirley, mostly so I didn't have to see the blood around her mouth, and turned my attention to Theresa. "Do you want to help me throw this disgusting chicken back up at that creep?"

"Yes," said Theresa, nodding enthusiastically.

We stood up. I picked up the chicken by its leg. "I don't want you to have to touch this, so your job is to help push my arm when I throw it, okay?"

"Okay."

I threw the chicken as hard as I could. (Theresa's assistance was really more about moral support.) It was a pretty damn good throw for an injured guy who'd been left starving in a pit for three days...although my distance was better than my aim. The chicken struck the wall about two feet from the top, bounced off, then plummeted back toward us.

Fortunately, it didn't hit me, which would have forced me to stand there looking sheepish as I wiped chicken gunk out of my hair. Instead, it hit Shirley. Nobody laughed, but it was quite clearly the single funniest incident in the entire history of humankind.

She didn't even flinch when it hit her in the head. It fell to the ground, landing on one of the discarded glow sticks, and she gave me a look that said "I am calmly accepting this moment of humiliation, but when you fall asleep tonight, you will not wake up."

"I guess you've proven your point," said Mr. Burke. "I'm certainly not going to force feed you the chicken. You win. Are you ready to come up?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Then I'll lower the ladder."

As I glanced down at the chicken, it suddenly occurred to me that I'd had some success in the past using a bone as a weapon. More success than the average person for sure. Granted, it had been a human bone that saved my life and not a tiny chicken bone, but still...

I crouched over the carcass, hiding it from Mr. Burke's view, then dug around until I found a bone, which I snapped off. Of course, I now had to explain why I was digging around in the dead chicken, so I tore off a small piece and stood back up, keeping the two-inch rib bone concealed in my bandaged hand.

"Hey, Burke! Thanks for the present." I tossed the chunk into the air and caught it in my mouth. I gave it a couple of quick chews so I wouldn't choke on it, gagged, then swallowed it.

"I hope you proved whatever it was you were trying to prove," said Mr. Burke.

"Just showing that you aren't the boss of me."

"How did it taste?"

"Not as good as your spleen will."

"Amusing. There's still plenty of time to break your spirit, but for now, go ahead and keep the threats coming. I'm always looking for new ideas."

Mr. Burke's associate (Vic must have had a personal day) lowered the ladder down to us. This guy was no longer wearing his jack-o-lantern mask, but from his muscular build I was pretty sure I was looking up at the man who murdered Bruce.

"Did you kill Lieutenant Bruce Frenkle?" I called up to him.

The guy, an ugly fucker, smiled. "Yeah."

I had nothing else to say.

My strength was a fraction of what it had been before our days in the pit, and climbing a ladder while handcuffed to a psycho and protecting a little girl was difficult enough without the lack of nourishment, but we managed to do it.

There wasn't much else to this room but the pit.

The henchman who'd killed Bruce didn't have a gun. Why didn't he have a gun? Was it because he was so freaking strong and we were so weak that a weapon was unnecessary? That was almost certainly accurate, but still, did this mean Mr. Burke was getting slightly overconfident?

"Drop the chicken bone, please," Mr. Burke told me.

"What bone?"

"The bone in your hand. Drop it."

I thought about lunging at the muscle guy with it, but that was too pathetic even for me. I dropped the bone.

"What were you going to do with that, anyway?" Mr. Burke asked. "Stab somebody to death?"

"No, I thought I might pick the lock of the handcuffs with it."

"Oh. That's more reasonable. But, no, I think you two look good that way. You make an attractive couple, all beat up and bloody. Shall I take you to your new home?"

The reproduction of Roger's apartment was right across the hallway. We stepped inside, and once again Mr. Burke invited us to sit on the couch. The cop killer folded his arms across his chest and gave us a menacing stare.

"This is where you will be staying," Mr. Burke said. "Feel free to rearrange the furniture any way you'd like. It's your home, so do whatever is most comfortable for you. However, do not try to get free. You're welcome to pound on the door or try to break through the walls as much as you want—you won't get through them. But when my associates stop by to bring you food or to check on your medical condition, please do not waste my time trying to kill them or get past them, because you won't be able to escape."

"If you say so," I said, not sure what I hoped to accomplish by saying that.

"During your long stay here, you may also come up with the idea of using one of my men as a bargaining chip. I would like to discourage that." He walked over to the counter and picked up a small remote control. He held it up to show us, then pushed the red button.

The muscle man twitched as if he'd received an electric shock to the stomach. Then he doubled over and threw up all over the carpet.

He stood back up straight and looked over at Mr. Burke, who pointed a gun at him. "Don't move. Just let it happen."

For a second the man looked as if he might charge at Mr. Burke anyway, but he decided against it. For five minutes we just sat there, confused and horrified, watching the man clutch at his stomach and whimper in pain.

I held Theresa close, shielding her eyes. In a rare show of mercy, Mr. Burke did not order me to make her watch.

The man apparently decided, the hell with it, he was going to attack. He only made it two steps before Mr. Burke shot him in the leg. He howled and fell to the floor, clutching his bleeding wound.

We watched him for another five minutes as he crawled across the floor. When he got too close, Mr. Burke casually walked to the other side of the room.

Then he began to cough.

After a couple minutes of that, he began to cough up blood.

Twenty minutes after Mr. Burke pressed the button—and Shirley and I watched every second of it—blood was streaming from his mouth and nostrils. And when he threw up again, this time it wasn't his lunch that spilled out onto the carpet.

We watched in complete revulsion as the man vomited up partially liquefied internal organs. Not long after that, he stopped moving.

"Unpleasant, isn't it?" asked Mr. Burke. "And I liked him."

If the message he was trying to send was "I am not one to be trifled with, because I will sit here and watch one of my own men die an agonizing death just to send a message about how I am not one to be trifled with," then the message was clearly received.

"I'll leave you to settle in," said Mr. Burke, heading for the door. "Sorry about the mess."

CHAPTER TWENTY

The first thing we did was take a very quick tour of the apartment. The refrigerator and all of the kitchen cabinets were empty. No knives or forks to use in picking handcuff locks or jamming into psychopath's eyes. The TV in the living room was not a real TV, just a non-working plastic facsimile that Mr. Burke probably thought was hilarious.

The bedroom hadn't been decorated with the same attention to detail. It was basically just a mattress on the floor, though in my current state of exhaustion it looked like it could provide the comfiest, fluffiest, most exquisite night's sleep of all time.

The bathroom had a shower. My first thought was that the water probably didn't work, as a cruel joke, but when I turned it on to test it not only did the shower work, it had hot water.

I wondered if Helen had a shower with hot water.

She was fine. She had to be. Mr. Burke's whole sinister plan relied on her being in good health. And Kyle was probably with her, the duct tape over his mouth having been carefully removed. Roger and Samantha were probably in their own room, fornicating to ease the stress.

Before a shower and sleep, though, we needed to get these wretched handcuffs off. We carefully searched the apartment, looking for some sort of blade, paperclip, or professional-grade lock picking kit like the one we'd left in Roger's car ages ago that could help. Nothing.

The bookshelf was glued together, not nailed. Same with the drawers and every piece of furniture. The cabinet doors were screwed on, but Shirley's attempt to use her fingernail to unscrew it just gave her a cracked nail.

However, there was a lamp next to the couch.

I unscrewed the light bulb, carefully smashed it with my foot, and, presto, thanks to the coil inside I now had a very feeble tool with which to pick the lock.

We sat on the couch, and I went to work.

After about thirty minutes, I quit in frustration. The stupid coil wasn't sturdy enough to do anything to the lock mechanism.

Shirley took over. After about twenty minutes, she quit in frustration.

"Can I try?" asked Theresa.

I handed her the coil and she inserted it into the lock. She bit her lip as she wiggled it around in intense concentration.

After about five minutes, she quit in frustration. Believe me, I would have been totally cool with the embarrassment of having a terrified ten-year-old girl accomplish what I could not.

We searched the apartment some more. I looked through the bookshelf (the contents of which seemed to have been purposely selected for their crappiness) hoping that they might have overlooked a spiral-bound notebook, but, alas, no.

There had to be something. It wasn't as if we were in an empty padded room in an asylum. All we needed was...

A carpet staple?

I pulled Shirley over to a corner of the living room carpet and crouched down. Yes! It had been stapled down!

I broke two fingernails and Shirley broke four trying to pry it out, but we eventually got it. We returned to the couch and I went back to work.

Approximately one minute before I was ready to give up in frustration again, there was a click. I pulled the bracelet open. I managed not to be overcome with emotion, though I felt the urge to fan the air in front of my eyes and say "I promised myself I wouldn't do this!" like a beauty pageant winner.

I got in a couple of minutes of happy free arm flexing before the door opened. Vic entered, holding a gun and a shiny new pair of handcuffs.

"Congratulations," he said. "Sadly, Mr. Burke fell in love with the idea of you two being handcuffed for the next three months, so you'll need to put these on."

* * *

Theresa got to take the first shower. Shirley took the second one, with me standing outside, my hand stretched just inside the shower curtain. It was a transparent curtain, so her blurred naked body was visible, and I politely looked the other way, because if I was going to be a perv, it certainly wasn't going to be over a homicidal maniac.

I didn't want to rip off my shirt, so I showered with it on. I could tell that Shirley was staring at me through the curtain, though fortunately I couldn't see her expression, which I assumed was kind of creepy. I almost told her to look creepily at something else, but if we really were going to be stuck here for the next three months we'd have to get over the idea of it being improper for her to see me without pants, so I focused on the refreshing spray instead.

It didn't last long. Theresa and Shirley had used up most of the hot water, dammit.

After I'd dried myself and gotten dressed back into my stinky, bloody pants, the three of us lay down on the mattress and went to sleep.

* * *

The next morning—if it was actually morning—Vic brought us one strawberry Pop-Tart each for breakfast. And Roger.

I'd seen my friend looking bad before, but never like this.

He looked as if somebody had been beating on him for the past three days, which was an entirely feasible scenario. I'm not saying that he was unrecognizable as Roger or now looked like a misshapen creature, but he wore only a pair of boxer shorts and was covered head to toe with bruises, welts, burns, and small cuts.

Vic shoved him to the floor then left us.

The three of us all immediately crouched down next to him. "Roger, are you okay?" I asked.

He rolled onto his back, wincing in pain with the effort. His severely bloodshot eyes lit up as he saw my daughter. "Theresa! Oh, thank God. I didn't know what they did with you. Give your Uncle Roger a very gentle hug."

Theresa gave him a hug that wasn't as gentle as it could have been, but Roger didn't protest.

"What did they do to you?" I asked.

"Hit me a lot. A few kicks. Some cigarettes. Other stuff. I don't really want to talk about it."

"That's totally fine," I said. "Can we get you anything? A new body?"

"Couch would be nice."

We very carefully helped Roger up, walked him across the living room, and eased him onto the couch. It was already badly stained from Shirley and I sitting on it, so we didn't bother to put out a towel.

"Have you heard anything about Samantha?" he asked.

"Nothing. I was hoping you had."

Roger shook his head. "For all I knew, I was the only one of us still alive. These people are out of their freaking minds. I don't think they even care if they get caught. They murdered four cops—at least four cops—when they kidnapped me."

"Did Mr. Burke tell you about his plan?"

"I haven't seen that asshole yet."

I hesitated, trying to decide if I should send Theresa out of the room. But she'd already heard Mr. Burke's plan, and what could I possibly be shielding her from at this point? If anything, I needed to emphasize that it was Mr. Burke, and not her dad, who was the evil one.

I told him the entire story of Mr. Burke's revenge. He just stared at me for a while, then hung his head. "I need a shower."

"We've got one."

"Good to see you're living the high life." He looked around the apartment and then did a double take. "Is this supposed to be my place?"

* * *

We pretty much just spent the day hanging around the apartment, desperately hoping that Kyle and Samantha would also be brought to join us. Neither of them were.

The idea that Vic probably couldn't kill all four of us if we were to suddenly charge at him did cross my mind several times, but of course I wasn't going to make any moves that involved "acceptable losses." All four of us were going to live through this.

All seven.

All ten.

Two days earlier, while a couple of the men were punching Roger, one of them had made an offhand comment to the other that made Roger think we were in Costa Rica. I'd always wanted to visit there, although the whole kidnapping/torturing element made this a less than ideal holiday experience.

That night, Vic delivered a tray of TV dinners for everybody. They were pretty nasty, but we gobbled them up as if they were the most delicious pizzas ever made.

We gave Roger and Theresa the mattress. Shirley slept on the couch. I slept on the floor next to the couch, cursing at Shirley every time she rolled over and yanked me awake.

The bathroom situation is best left without detailed description.

Vic arrived the next morning with another box of Pop-Tarts. Blueberry this time, because it's important to maintain variety in your diet.

He stood there at the door, arms folded, watching us eat.

When we'd finished, he pointed at me. "You're coming with me," he said. He pointed at Shirley. "And you too, obviously."

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Come here and ask me that again."

"Okay, no questions. I get it."

"I said, come here and ask me that again."

I reluctantly walked over to Vic. He looked me in the eyes, smiled just a bit, then punched me in the face, knocking me to the floor. Theresa screamed.

"Don't ask questions," Vic said.

Shirley helped me up, and I wiped some fresh new blood off the corner of my mouth. "I thought I felt some saliva on your fist," I said. "Are you sure you're not a thumb-sucker?" I sort of wished I hadn't said that, but I've always found it difficult not to be a smartass to people who punch me.

"Are you asking for another one?"

"No. Just wanted to let you know that I'm cool with the whole thumb sucking thing." I sort of wished I hadn't said that, either.

"Let's go."

* * *

Vic led us back to the room with the six pits. "Walk," he said.

"Where?"

"Around. Get some exercise. I'm supposed to make sure your muscles don't atrophy."

"That's very considerate."

"Don't fall in to any of those. I don't feel like dragging the ladder over."

Shirley and I walked around the perimeter of the room, keeping up a good pace. Vic stood by the door, holding his gun and watching us closely yet looking somewhat troubled.

After we'd taken six or seven laps, Vic began to walk right behind us, which made me kind of nervous. Had there been a change of plans? It felt like he was ready to put a bullet into the back of my head.

"Mayhem, you a decent actor?" he asked.

"I guess."

"I'd like you to not react to what I'm going to say. Can you handle that?"

"Sure."

"I want to help you get out of here."

It was difficult not to react to that, but I kept a poker face. "Are you serious?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because he's going to make you eat babies. I didn't know about that when I signed on for this. I found out about it a few minutes before you did. I am one cold-blooded killer, but I can't get behind the idea of making a man eat his own babies."

"I'm very happy to hear that," I said.

"If I could, I'd shoot Mr. Burke between the eyes and be done with it. But he's got relatives, powerful relatives, and I can't let myself be on their shit list."

"Are you saying that if we get rid of Mr. Burke, I'm going to be pursued by even worse people? Are you kidding me? And if I beat them, do those relatives have even worse relatives than them? When does this all—?"

"Worry about that later. Stop reacting."

"Sorry."

"The only way you're going to get out of here is with a hostage. And if by some bizarre twist of fate you captured me or anybody else who works for him, Mr. Burke would let us die without a second thought. You could have a knife up to his wife's neck and he wouldn't deviate from the plan."

"He's married?"

"Yeah. She's not here. It was just an example."

"So you're saying that the hostage needs to be Mr. Burke."

"Exactly. But he's not going to put himself in a position where that can happen."

"And I take it you're not offering to deliver him to us?"

"Nope."

"Then what do we do?"

"Here is what you have going for you: Mr. Burke has his heart set on the baby-eating plan. And I get the impression that he's completely sincere. If you eat the triplets, you get to go home, and he'll never bother you again. If you can live with yourself afterward, then that's the easiest option for everybody."

"I'll take the harder option."

"Mr. Burke doesn't want you to die. If you did, the backup plan is that Roger takes your place at the dinner table, but that's a distant second place. However, if you did have to die, if there was no way around it, at the absolute minimum Mr. Burke would want to make absolutely sure that he got to kill you himself."

"Okay, so, I need to create a situation where he thinks he needs to kill me, and take advantage of it. Sounds cinchy."

"You try to escape, somebody shoots you with tranquilizers. You fake a stroke, somebody shoots you in the leg to test it. You slash your wrists, you bleed to death before you get much accomplished."

"Are you basically saying that you'd love to help me out, but escape is impossible?"

"Nope. That's not what I'm saying."

As we continued walking, I tried to figure out what he was trying to say.

When I did figure it out, I didn't like it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After we got back, Theresa was taken out for exercise. When I protested, Vic punched me in the face. When I continued to protest, he threatened to throw her into the pit by herself for another three days. I relented.

He brought her back, so there was no need for me to attack him in a murderous rage.

After Vic left, the four of us sat on the couch.

"Do you think Samantha would marry me?" Roger asked, rubbing at his left eye, which was badly swollen.

"Stop rubbing your eye."

"It itches."

"Don't touch it. Yes, I do think she'll marry you."

"I don't think she will."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because look at what keeps happening to us! Under these circumstances, I wouldn't blame her if she didn't even want to be a friend with benefits. Marrying me would be like saying 'Hey, I'm cool with disembowelment!'"

"That's not true," I said, though quite honestly I thought his logic was sound. I certainly wouldn't blame Helen if she packed her things and said "You know what, Andrew? This life of constant danger isn't working out for me anymore. Seeya."

Should I tell him that Samantha had been planning to ask him? It might lift his spirits. Give him a reason to quit rubbing his eye and risking permanent blindness.

On the other hand, it would truly suck to get out of this mess only to get in trouble because I ruined Samantha's surprise. I'd just settle for reassuring him.

"I think you should do it," I said. "If Vic brings her in here, don't even hesitate, just pop the question."

"Wait for Vic to leave first," Shirley suggested. "Otherwise it would spoil the moment."

"I don't mean this in a rude way," Roger told her, "but you would kind of spoil the moment, too."

"Why?"

"I dunno. Never mind."

"I take back what I said," I said. "Don't pop the question right away. If Vic brings her here, we'll wait for him to leave, then the rest of us will go into another room and leave you and Samantha alone except for the security cameras. Then you can propose."

"That sounds like a lot of pressure," said Roger.

"You should give her a flower," said Theresa.

"Do you have one?"

"Make one out of paper. I'll help you."

"How about we do the paper flower for sure, and feel out the whole marriage proposal idea. The timing is probably bad. I'm looking pretty grotesque right now."

"You look fine," said Shirley.

"Andrew, do I look fine?"

"You look like roadkill."

"Maybe a proposal this close to when we could be killed would come off as insincere, like finding religion on your deathbed."

"Hmmm," I said, because I really wasn't sure if the gesture would come off as the true romance of two hearts longing to become one, or just a guy who didn't want to die single.

"I'll play it by ear," said Roger. "If her first reaction is to puke, I'll postpone."

* * *

Vic did not bring Samantha to us.

* * *

The next morning's breakfast, cherry Pop-Tarts, also included a pill.

It was white, made of plastic, and about the size of a marble. Inside was a small electrical device that, if activated with a remote control, would cause the shell to break apart, spilling the contents into the unfortunate stomach. Those contents would then proceed to turn your guts into mush.

There was an antidote, for those never-occurring cases where Mr. Burke decided at the last minute that he didn't want his associate to die a gruesome agonizing death. I did not, however, have this particular antidote yet. If I followed through with the plan and Vic let me down, there was the very real possibility that I'd be wiping my esophagus off my lips.

This is when your mind starts saying things like "You know, people are out there searching for you. They don't let a bunch of cops die without trying to catch the guys who did it. You've got three months before the babies are born. And Theresa and Kyle were both born late, so you've got that wiggle room, too. Maybe the whole dissolving-your-internal-organs scheme isn't the best way to go."

I'd taken some extreme measures in the past, but they'd always involved external injuries.

That said, even if I left this world as a foaming pile of bowels, it would be worth it if my sacrifice allowed my family and friends to escape from this place.

Though if I died and they didn't escape, it would be the suckiest thing ever.

I had to do this. I couldn't sit around and wait for Mr. Burke to choose my destiny as a cannibal. I didn't have any clever metaphors for the risk I was about to take, but sometimes in your life you have to do really stupid stuff that you desperately hope turns out to have been really smart stuff.

I'd rather have waited a few hours/days/weeks to work up the courage, but I couldn't live with myself if I waited five minutes and then Vic said "Oh, yeah, we were ordered to kill Kyle five minutes ago."

Even though they were supposed to act casual, everybody was looking at me.

Vic left the apartment without a reassuring wink.

The pill, which was surgically imbedded in the stomachs of all of Mr. Burke's employees and which they thought was a tracking device in case of emergencies, did not need to be activated with a remote control. You could just chew and swallow.

I popped the pill into my mouth and bit down on the plastic. My mouth was instantly filled with the foulest taste imaginable, the way I imagined a rotting corpse would taste if I ever had to lick one, and my gag reflexes kicked in. I successfully swallowed most of it and it burned all the way down like moonshine mixed with battery acid. I swallowed the rest and grimaced like I'd never grimaced before.

And then, much like a drunk after a weekend bender, there was the feeling of regret. Was it really in my best interest to risk hollowing myself out?

Oh well. Too late now.

"How do you feel?" asked Roger.

"I can't even make a joke about it."

"You don't have to joke. Just tell me how it feels."

I clutched my stomach and nearly lost my balance. No matter how much I'd braced myself for the pain, I hadn't expected it to be so intense that I just wanted to die.

I maintained my focus. This would be a spectacularly stupid way to expire if I gave up now.

"Everybody get away from me," I said, waving Roger and Theresa over to the couch. They didn't look happy to be leaving me, even if it was only across the room.

I'd planned to exaggerate the impact of the poison for the security cameras, but it was unnecessary. I couldn't have downplayed it if I'd tried.

After one of the most miserable minutes of my life, the door burst open and Vic came in, accompanied by two other men, both of whom had those delightful sub-machine guns. "What's wrong with him?" Vic asked Shirley.

"I don't know!"

Vic and the men stood there and watched me.

I had lines here, but it required my most intense concentration to remember them. "Tell your boss that I've won!" I said in what was supposed to be a victorious shout but was instead a gasp.

"What are you talking about?" Vic asked. I wished he'd quit trying to play thespian and just contact Mr. Burke.

"I'm going to—" I was hit by a burst of stomach pain that doubled me over and cost me yesterday's Pop-Tarts.

Vic removed a small walkie-talkie from his belt. It was approximately eight trillion hours before he pressed the button on the side and spoke. "Mr. Burke? I think we need you in Mayhem's room."

He thought we needed him?

"I'm not completely sure," Vic said into the walkie-talkie. "I think he's trying to opt out. Yes, sir. We'll wait here." He clipped the walkie-talkie back onto his belt and resumed watching me.

My tombstone: Andrew Mayhem. He survived knives, chainsaws, guns, and being buried alive. Then the dumbass drank poison.

Fortunately, it only took another minute of sheer agony before Mr. Burke walked in the door. He was wearing a neatly pressed gray suit, and it did not surprise me that he was holding a gun.

"What's going on?" he demanded.

As if on cue, I coughed up a thin mist of blood. I wished I'd been able to plan that as an actual theatrical cue, instead of legitimately coughing up blood at that moment.

"I don't know," said Vic. Would it really have killed him to say "I think Andrew swallowed one of your death pills"?

"Are you faking?" Mr. Burke asked me.

"Do I look like I'm faking?" I asked back. I stuck out my tongue to show him the blood on it. "Did you click your remote or something?"

"Vic, go get the antidote, just in case," said Mr. Burke.

Vic nodded and left the room. I almost hoped that he would deviate from the plan and actually bring the antidote. It was a dumb plan. We still had three months to find an opportunity to bash a guard over the head with a lunch tray.

I'm sure there are plenty of things in this world that might cause greater physical pain than the stuff I drank, but I couldn't think of any of them. Getting a third-degree sunburn and then rolling around on a bed of fishhooks sounded like more fun.

"So what's going on?" asked Mr. Burke.

"You tell me."

"It looks to me as if you're experiencing some physical discomfort."

"Yeah."

"Did you swallow one of the tracker pills?"

"Maybe."

"Why would you do that? You did see what happened to Treck, right? Did that look enjoyable?"

It's hard to grin when you're wracked with pain, but I did my best. "Sort of messes up your master plan, doesn't it?" I said through my grin, which had quickly transformed into an even more intense grimace than the one I'd worn right after drinking the stuff.

"How so? Vic will give you an injection. You will be severely beaten and thrown into the pit for a week. Theresa's fingers will be cut off to match yours. And then everything will proceed as planned."

I spat out some blood. "I guess you win, then."

"I guess so."

"Unless I refuse the injection."

Mr. Burke chuckled. "So that's your brilliant scheme? Kill yourself in the worst way possible just to annoy me? How many nights of sleep do you think I'll lose if I don't get to see you drop your baby in the boiling water? Roger can do that just as well."

"I'll never do that," said Roger.

"You won't need to. Your friend, your stupid, brain-dead, mentally deficient, borderline retarded friend thinks he's going to somehow refuse to accept the antidote. Except that it's delivered through a tranquilizer gun. You should have just slit your wrists."

Vic walked back into the room. "It's gone."

"What are you talking about?"

"It's not in the drawer. Somebody took it."

"Are you sure you looked in the right place?"

"Yes, sir."

Mr. Burke clenched his jaw in anger. "All right. Then something has gone very wrong, there's a possible traitor in our midst, and we'll have to do a full investigation. No time to salvage Mayhem now. I guess we watch him die."

He just stood there. I couldn't help but be extremely disappointed by this.

"Gonna let somebody else do your dirty work?" I asked.

"You seem to think that I wouldn't consider driving you to suicide to be a victory. You understand what's happening, right? Most of what's inside of you is going to come out for everyone to see. It's not the ideal revenge, but it's a very good one."

I shrugged. "All right. But it's not your revenge. It's mine."

"Believe whatever you want. You won't even get to discover my extra little surprise. I'm going to enjoy the show."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I'll admit it. What I did next was kind of a dick move.

That said, remember that Vic's moral compass only wavered at the idea of eating newborn babies. He was okay with all of the other stuff. And he liked to punch me. So it's not like I was selling out a dear friend who'd shown me nothing but loyalty during our lifetime of companionship.

"Vic's your traitor," I blurted out. "He set up everything. He knows where the antidote is."

For a split second Vic looked hurt, almost sad, as if he were a stray puppy who'd been shooed away from a warm house on a cold winter night. But it was just a flash, and he quickly recovered. He let out a very convincing derisive laugh. "Bullshit."

"Andrew's telling the truth," said Shirley. "I was there."

"So," said Mr. Burke, thoughtfully, "do I trust my victims, or my second in command? Would Andrew have any reason to tell a wee little fib? I don't know. Except for being minutes away from death and trying every possible way to save his life, I can't think of a single reason he might not tell the truth."

"Can I punch the lying sack of shit?" asked Vic.

"If you wait a few minutes, your fist will go right through him. That will be more entertaining."

Okay, if I had to die today, and it appeared that I did, I wasn't going to go out like this. Let them shoot me down to protect their boss—I was going to make a grab for Mr. Burke.

I charged at him.

Shirley, who I'd thought would follow my lead, did not. As the handcuff chains went taut I was jerked off my feet and onto my ass. I spat up some more blood as I hit the floor.

I hate to send a cynical message, but sometimes life sucks.

"By the way," said Mr. Burke, "Don't die thinking that you almost pulled one over on me. I know exactly what was going on, and I know exactly where Vic thinks the antidote is. I'm not a big fan of internet lingo, but imagine this with the hashtag Mayhemfail."

I believe Mr. Burke meant for there to be a dramatic pause as the totality of my defeat sunk in. However, Vic seemed to be thinking ahead to the next step, where he would be joining me on the floor to die a painful gooey death.

He fired a shot that hit the unnamed guard in the forehead. Well, I'm sure he had a name, but I didn't know it. Before the guard who wasn't yet dead could react, Vic shot him through the nose.

"Shoot Mr. Burke!" I urged.

Instead, Vic pointed his gun at me. "Tell him that you lied!"

"What?"

"Tell him! I had nothing to do with this!"

"Then why the hell did you shoot those two guys?"

"Tell him!"

Clearly Mr. Burke had enough information about Vic's backstabbing scheme that nothing I could say would absolve him from any guilt, but since Vic was clearly a bit unhinged at the moment, I did as he asked.

"I made it up," I said. I pointed to the body of the guy who'd been shot through the nose, who was still a little alive but not much. "It was him. He gave me the pill."

"Only my most trusted associate, my confidant, my number two guy, knows about the pills," said Mr. Burke. "Because I am not a trusting boss, some of my underlings may have been led to believe that the surveillance in some rooms in this house only picks up video and not sound, which might have led them to believe that they could help you escape. That was incorrect."

Mr. Burke didn't seem very concerned that Vic might shoot him next. To me, it was exactly the kind of thing you would worry about in this situation.

"I'm sorry," said Vic.

"I'm sure you are. Now please kill yourself."

Vic shook his head. "No."

"Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger."

"No!"

"You don't have a choice. Do as I say."

Violently shaking his head and almost weeping, Vic put the barrel of the gun into his mouth.

"Go on," said Mr. Burke in a soothing voice. "Kill yourself like you're supposed to. I'd prefer not to have to use the trigger word, but if you're not going to be mature about this I'll do it."

I watched this in a state of shock that was momentarily interrupted as I realized that a thin trickle of blood was pouring out of each of my nostrils.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Roger had gotten up off the couch. Mr. Burke noticed this as well, and pointed his gun at him. "Sit down or I'll shoot the little girl."

Roger sat back down.

Mr. Burke returned his attention to Vic. "Well? Are you going to do it?" When Vic didn't promptly shoot himself, Mr. Burke shrugged. "All right. Cyborg."

Upon hearing what I assume was the trigger word, Vic squeezed his eyes shut, let out a soft whimper...then pulled the gun out of his mouth and ran out of the room.

I suspect that, had he been given the opportunity, Mr. Burke would have rolled his eyes, pointed the gun back at us, and said something like "Oh well, that's why it's called experimental brainwashing." Or maybe he wouldn't have. I don't know. Either way, the distraction provided by not having his second-in-command blow his brains out gave me the chance to lunge at him again.

Now, this time I was lying on the floor with blood trickling out of my mouth and nose, so the most notable problem with my lunge was that it did not actually reach Mr. Burke. It's difficult to tackle somebody and wrestle their gun away from them when your attack comes up two feet short.

However, though Shirley hadn't been great at following my lead in similar situations in the past, this time she did, and before Mr. Burke could shoot any of us she'd knocked him to the floor.

Roger jumped up off the couch.

So did Theresa.

I called out for her to stay where she was, and a great big blood bubble formed on my lips.

With one quick move, Shirley and I got our arms around Mr. Burke's neck, and pulled the chain of the handcuffs tight across his throat. It wasn't a very long chain, so we couldn't wrap it around his neck or anything, but we got the chain and bracelets into a good strangulation position.

Roger stomped on Mr. Burke's hand and grabbed his gun. Then he tossed that gun aside and picked up one of the sub-machine guns instead. He pointed it at Mr. Burke. "Do I kill him?"

"Yes!" Shirley said.

"No!" I said. "We need him!"

"Kill him!" Shirley shouted. "Who are you going to listen to, me or Andrew?"

Roger lowered his weapon. "Should I give Theresa a gun?"

"Yes!" said Shirley.

"No!" I said. "Are you crazy?"

"I wouldn't give one to her normally, but...never mind. You're right."

I coughed, spraying some blood on Mr. Burke's nice gray suit. I was sure I hadn't really felt my lungs slide up into my trachea, but it was a disturbing sensation nevertheless.

Shirley pulled harder against Mr. Burke's throat. His face had turned red and though he was trying to say something (probably unkind) he couldn't get the words out.

"Don't kill him!" I said.

"Are you sticking up for him?" Shirley asked.

"No! We still need him! You can kill him later!"

Roger pressed the barrel of his gun against the back of Shirley's head. "Stop choking him!"

Shirley reluctantly loosened the chain.

Roger pulled the gun away and then peeked out into the hallway. He said "Shit!" and quickly slammed the door shut.

"Two of 'em," he said. "Get away from the door in case they shoot through it!"

Shirley and I dragged Mr. Burke a few feet to the left, while Roger stood next to the door, ready to pump several bullets into anybody who opened it and entered the apartment.

I hurriedly patted Mr. Burke's pockets. "Where's the antidote?" I demanded.

"There is no antidote."

"Where is it? If you knew what I was planning, you'd have brought it. Where is it?"

"Tell us or I'll scalp you," said Shirley.

"Don't scalp him," I said, throwing open Mr. Burke's suit jacket and taking the tranquilizer gun out of his inside pocket. "Where do I shoot myself?"

"In the throat!" said Mr. Burke. "Right in the middle of your throat!"

I felt that he was being insincere. I pointed the gun at my stomach. The pain was so intense that it overwhelmed any concerns I might traditionally have had about shooting a tranquilizer dart point-blank into my chest.

Somebody kicked the door open.

Roger held his position, ready to fire.

I squeezed the trigger, but it wouldn't budge.

"Don't do anything stupid!" shouted a man from the hallway.

"Don't make us!" Roger shouted back.

"Roger! It's me!"

Samantha!

I continued trying to squeeze the trigger. The gun wouldn't fire. What was I doing wrong? What did a guy have to do to be able to shoot himself in the stomach?

"Don't make us kill her!" said the man we couldn't see.

Drops of blood pattered onto the floor as I struggled with the damn gun. Why wouldn't it work?

"Don't hurt her!" said Roger. "We'll do whatever you want!"

Mr. Burke tried to say something, but we squeezed the cuffs into strangulation mode again, just in case he was going to say something like "Kill her."

Ah. The safety was on. Of course.

I flipped off the safety and squeezed the trigger. The dart shot right into my gut, and after a loud gasp I found myself unable to breathe.

"Let Mr. Burke go!" shouted the man in the hallway.

Roger looked over at us, desperation in his eyes.

I tried to say something, but I couldn't speak. Though I'd hoped the pain would simply disappear all at once and make me feel like I was snuggling in a blanket hot out of the dryer, that turned out to not be the case. I wanted to pluck the dart out of my stomach, and yet I also wanted to make sure I got all of the antidote out of it, so I left it there.

"Let the girl go or we'll slash his throat!" shouted Shirley. I truly didn't want her to be in charge of the negotiations, but there wasn't much I could do while I couldn't speak or breathe.

What if the "antidote" was really an accelerant? What if my lungs were shriveling up? That's the kind of crap Mr. Burke would pull.

"If Mr. Burke is not out here in ten seconds, Samantha will die! If we kill her, we still have the rest of your family! Who else do you have?"

"What do I do?" Roger asked me. "I can't outshoot these guys!"

"I'm going to kill him," said Shirley, tugging on the handcuffs. "I'm going to turn his face turquoise. Think you can keep me in a pit? Is that what you think? Huh? You think you can do that to me? How tough do you feel now?"

Roger looked unsure whether he should leave his spot by the doorway, or hurry over to prevent Shirley from strangling our potential ticket out of here.

"Shirley!" I said, finally finding my voice. But that was all I could get out. Not very helpful. God, having that dart sticking out of my stomach was upsetting.

"Ten!" shouted the man in the hallway. "Nine! Eight!"

"Don't give yourself up!" Samantha said. "They'll kill you anyway!"

"Shut the fuck up!" the man told her.

Samantha let out a scream of pain.

Mr. Burke's face was now turning purple. The antidote seemed to be working, since blood was no longer trickling out of my orifices, and I could probably give Shirley a halfway decent punch, but I also didn't want Mr. Burke to get away.

"Seven! Six!"

Roger looked utterly frantic.

"Shirley, stop it!" I managed to say. "We need him!"

"He left us down in the dark!"

"Stop it!"

And then Theresa, who I hadn't really been watching, picked up the gun Mr. Burke had dropped and pointed it at Shirley. "Do what my Daddy says!" she shouted. It would have been more intimidating if she hadn't burst into tears before she finished the sentence, but Shirley stopped tugging on the handcuffs.

Though I wasn't happy at all that my daughter now had even more psychological trauma to work through, I was glad she'd made Shirley quit it.

"Stop counting!" Roger shouted. "We can work this out! We're not going to kill your boss, I promise, but we've got a complex situation happening here and we need some extra time to work it out!"

"Bring him out or she dies!"

"We're bringing him right out."

"You have six more seconds."

I realized that Mr. Burke was not moving, nor did he seem to be breathing.

I pressed my index finger to his neck and searched for a pulse. I couldn't find one. But my whole body was wracked with pain and warm blood had dripped on my fingers and I wasn't sure I was doing it right.

Roger set the sub-machine gun down on the floor. "I'm going to show our good faith and come out with no weapons so we can talk this out," he called out. "There's no reason for anybody to get hurt."

"Roger, don't!" I said.

"I have to. You don't think they'll really kill her?"

"They'll kill you, too!"

"No, they won't." He put his hands in the air, palms out to show they were empty, and then stepped out into the hallway.

I wiped some blood off my face and continued prodding at Mr. Burke's neck. C'mon, there had to be a pulse somewhere! Shirley hadn't been choking him long enough to kill him! He had to be faking or—

His fist slammed into my stomach an instant before my brain processed the idea that he might have been faking. Considering how often I got out of scrapes by feigning unconsciousness, I really should have seen that coming. The dart popped out.

Theresa pointed the barrel of the gun away from Shirley and toward Mr. Burke.

"Don't shoot anybody!" I told her. "Keep your finger off the trigger!"

Mr. Burke grabbed a large handful of Shirley's hair and slammed her head against the floor.

He was surprisingly strong for a middle-aged white guy in a business suit, and I wasn't exactly in top-notch physical shape at this moment. But Shirley went into complete wild animal mode, clawing at him with her fingernails and raking them across his face.

"Honey, throw me the gun!" I said to Theresa. "Carefully throw me the gun!"

She tossed me the gun. I didn't catch it, thanks to being maimed, but I did snatch it up before Mr. Burke or Shirley was able to grab it. I pressed it against the side of Mr. Burke's head and he stopped struggling.

"Tell them that you're not dead," I told him.

Mr. Burke gave me a bloody grin and said nothing. I smacked him in the face, making him a bit bloodier.

"Tell them!"

"I'm all right," Mr. Burke called out.

"If you hurt..." I'd tried to shout this, but my lungs weren't quite working right, so I spoke to Shirley instead. "Tell them that if they hurt Roger or Samantha or anybody else, he dies."

Shirley raised her voice. "If you hurt Roger or Samantha or anybody else, Burke dies!"

"Or at least gets badly disfigured," I said.

"Or at least gets badly disfigured!"

"Do not harm Roger and Samantha," Mr. Burke ordered. "Enact Scenario 14."

I pushed the gun more tightly against Mr. Burke's head. "What's Scenario 14?"

"It's on a need-to-know basis."

"What's Scenario 14? I'll shoot you. I mean it."

"You're not going to shoot me over that. Just because you have no intelligence doesn't mean you shouldn't respect other people's. I'll admit it—you have the advantage right now, but do you really want to squander it over this?"

"If you hurt my wife and son, I'll make sure Shirley gets to spend as much time with you as she wants. You'll be her plaything. When she gets done messing you up, you'll wish that somebody like you had done it instead."

Mr. Burke nodded. "You know, I have to respect that."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

"Scenario 14 has nothing to do with Helen or Kyle. Does that make you feel better?"

I didn't feel that much better, since I was relatively certain that Scenario 14 was not "Set out fresh daisies for the houseguests." But I couldn't worry about that now.

"Tell your men not to kill anybody," I said.

"But I want them to kill somebody."

I wanted to wrap my remaining fingers around his pinky and pull it back until the bone snapped, both to make him do as I said and because it would be enjoyable. But with Theresa standing there watching her father in action, I decided to give Mr. Burke a few more seconds to comply.

"Tell them! I'm one step away from complete whack-job bonkers insanity right now so you'd better do whatever the hell I say!"

"Don't harm them yet!" Mr. Burke called out.

"Tell them to send Roger and Samantha back in here."

"I'll compromise," Mr. Burke told me. "Send Roger back in here!"

Roger stepped back into the doorway, though he didn't come all the way back into the apartment. His hands were still in the air.

"We're all walking out of here," I said to Mr. Burke. "We're going to gather up Helen and Kyle, and your men are not going to try anything that would get you killed. Do you understand?"

"Sure, why not?"

Carefully, with me keeping the gun pressed tightly against Mr. Burke's head, the three of us stood up. I felt more than a little woozy but refused to succumb to the desire to drop back down to the floor.

Mr. Burke did appear to be somewhat concerned about his personal safety, which made me feel better.

Shirley looked over at me. "If you steal my chance to kill him, I'll kill you in his place."

"Sure. Fine. However you want to handle it."

Suddenly Shirley looked positively horrified and sick to her stomach. "I can't believe I said that. I...I...I'm not that kind of person. I'm not a killer. I remember now."

I took a step toward the doorway, but Shirley didn't follow.

"When I had those blackouts on the business trips, I'd go out hunting for animals. But I never caught them. Except when I was home. I had a trap. I caught lots of animals. Squirrels. Possums. I'd catch them, and I'd kill them, and I'd keep them in a cooler."

"Can we do this later?" I requested.

"That house...I used to play there when I was a girl. My friend Jessica and I would hide under the floorboards. But I never killed a person. I pretended that the animals were people, but I never killed a person. I didn't kill anybody until I stabbed that man in the house." She looked at me with an accusatory rage in her eyes. "You turned me into a killer!"

"I tried to stop you from stabbing him!"

She considered that, then gave the same look of accusatory rage to Mr. Burke. "He worked for you! You sent him there! You turned me into a killer!"

"That's right," said Mr. Burke. "Join me. Kill Andrew right now and I'll give you the opportunity to kill more people than you can imagine! Embrace it! This is what you were meant to be!"

"Blow me! You threw me in a pit!"

"To give you a chance to blossom!"

"Blow me! I'm not going to forget about the pit! If I'm going to kill, I'm only going to kill assholes! And you're an asshole!"

"Okay, okay," I said, trying to keep my voice calm and reasonable. "So we're back to the idea that you're going to kill Mr. Burke after this is over. That totally works. Let's just get my family back first."

"All right."

"We're coming out with your boss!" I shouted, thankful that my voice was working better.

Roger picked up the sub-machine gun he'd set down earlier. There was still another gun left, but I didn't want Shirley or Theresa to have it.

I didn't feel entirely comfortable stepping out into the hallway, since Mr. Burke wasn't nearly large enough to hide both Shirley and I if they decided to take a shot. But with a handgun to their boss's head, I hoped they wouldn't try anything too risky.

"What kind of guns do they have?" I whispered to Roger.

He gestured with the sub-machine gun he was holding.

Good. If they had a sniper rifle they might try to kill us out from behind Mr. Burke, but they wouldn't do it with unwieldy weapons like those.

Granted, I was trying to analyze the tactical process of people I had never met who were trying to protect an insane mass-murdering millionaire. Still, it seemed reasonable.

We moved toward the doorway. Being a chivalrous individual, I did not try to arrange it so that Mr. Burke was covering more of me than he was of Shirley.

"We're coming out!" I said.

"All right," said the man in the hallway. "We won't shoot."

I looked over at Theresa. "Do not come out of this room for anything, okay?"

She nodded. God, I hoped I hadn't broken my daughter.

We couldn't delay any more. Shirley, Mr. Burke, and I walked out into the hallway.

Samantha was right there, facing us. She'd definitely been slapped around, but at least she hadn't been severely beaten like Roger.

Two men were behind her, about ten feet away, both of them pointing guns in our direction.

One of them fired.

The back of Shirley's head practically exploded as two or three bullets pounded into her forehead and made a gaping exit wound on their way out.

A couple more bullets whizzed past my own head.

Samantha dove to the floor.

I pulled Mr. Burke back into the apartment as Shirley dropped next to us.

Roger poked his gun out and opened fire. He did not let out an intensely masculine Rambo-like roar as he did so, but I could see that it was happening in his mind.

Then he lowered the gun and rushed out into the hallway.

I gave the barrel of my gun a little twist to remind Mr. Burke that it was still there. I quickly glanced at Shirley. She was definitely dead. And, of course, still handcuffed to me. That was going to be mighty inconvenient.

I looked out into the hallway. Two men lay on their backs, lots of bullet holes in their bodies. Roger helped Samantha to her feet. They embraced.

Though I hated to spoil their reunion with my own concerns, I spoke up: "Helen and Kyle are still in danger! We have to find them!"

"I know where Kyle is," said Samantha. "He was with me." She noticed Shirley's corpse lying next to me and gasped. "Who was she?"

"Our second client."

Roger let go of Samantha and pointed the sub-machine gun at Mr. Burke. "Where's Helen?"

Mr. Burke didn't flinch. "You won't shoot me. You still need me."

"Apparently not," said Roger. "It sounds like you've told them not to negotiate. From my point of view, that makes you kind of worthless."

"They saw an opportunity and took it."

"Andrew, unless you tell me not to, I'm going to empty a few rounds into his kneecaps."

"Go for it."

"I'll take you to her," said Mr. Burke. "She's to the left."

Roger picked up the other sub-machine gun and gave it to Samantha. He kissed her on the lips.

"Kyle is the other way," Samantha said. "I'll go get him. I'll be okay, I promise."

"I'm not leaving you," Roger told her.

"You have to. We don't know who else is left. Find Helen, then we'll all get out of here."

"Okay," said Roger, though he definitely did not sound happy about it.

"Roger, will you marry me?"

Roger looked as shocked as if he'd...well, been given an electric shock. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open and after a moment of dead silence he said: "I...I...I don't...I can't...uh, no, not right now."

"I'll go get your son," Samantha told me, with no visible reaction to what Roger had said. She hurried off with the gun.

"You can't keep a gun to his head and drag Shirley along at the same time," Roger said. "I'm going to stick with you."

"Stay right next to me," I told Theresa. "We're going to get Mommy."

We stepped out into the hallway and moved to the right. Keeping a gun pressed against Mr. Burke's head while handcuffed to a dead body that Roger was helping me drag with one hand while holding a heavy sub-machine gun in the other was going to be tricky.

"You said no?"

"I..."

"What the hell, dude?"

"I'm stressed out right now! I can't think!"

"You really should have said yes."

"Why did she ask me? That's not the way it's supposed to work!"

"You were going to ask her!"

"That doesn't mean she was supposed to ask me! How do I know she just doesn't want to die single?"

"You're an idiot!"

"I'm sorry! It was a weird time to ask! She messed with my mind! I can't be expected to give the right answer when she just throws the question at me like that!"

We'd return to this issue later. We continued to drag Shirley's corpse behind us, and it was slowing us down in a big way, as dead bodies tend to do.

How could she weigh so much? We'd barely eaten in the past few days!

"This isn't going to work," I said. "You go on ahead."

Roger let go of Shirley's arm. It flopped to the floor. "Where's Helen?" he asked Mr. Burke.

"Do you really believe there's still time to save her?"

Roger did the finger-breaking move that I'd wanted to do earlier. Mr. Burke screamed. "Where's Helen?" Roger repeated.

"She's dead."

"Want me to break another one?"

"If you wish."

Roger broke another one.

Mr. Burke screamed again, but his scream quickly transformed into a laugh. "I'm not taking you to her," he said. "You're going to have to kill me, right in front of young impressionable Theresa."

He pulled away from me and began to run down the hallway.

Roger and I both shot him.

Mr. Burke tumbled forward, blood spurting from several places in his legs.

"We don't have to kill you, moron," I told him.

Mr. Burke rolled onto his side, bellowing in a great deal of (but not enough) pain.

I wasn't thrilled that we couldn't keep Mr. Burke with us anymore, but nobody had come out after us since Roger killed the other two guys. Maybe Mr. Burke had run out of associates.

A man in one of the jack-o-lantern masks came through a door at the end of the hall, toting a shotgun. Roger immediately fired off about three dozen rounds, most of which went wild and bounced off the walls, but two of which punctured the man's mask. The man stood motionless for a moment, as if his body was trying to decide if it had been mortally wounded, and then he fell.

"It's not good news when your men are worried about protecting their identity in your own place," I told Mr. Burke. He was too busy rolling around and getting blood on his hallway carpet to respond.

Roger went up ahead as I dragged Shirley's corpse over to the closest door and tested the knob. Locked. Of course.

I pounded on the door. I thought I heard some sort of noise from inside, but couldn't tell what it was. Voices? Sounded like it could be.

I dragged Shirley back over to Mr. Burke. "Where are the keys?" I asked him.

"Shirley swallowed them."

I shot him in the leg again.

"In my pocket!"

I kept the gun pointed at his chin as I crouched down and patted him. There was a ring of six or seven keys in his left pants pocket. Come to think of it, I'd felt them when I was searching for the antidote. It was probably unnecessary to have shot him again. Oh well.

Roger tested two other doors at the end of the hall. "Both locked," he said.

I dragged Shirley's dead body back to the first door. "Cover me," I told Roger as I tried the first key. It slid right into the lock. Lucky break.

"Don't open that!" Mr. Burke shouted. "You won't like what you see!"

I opened the door and looked into the room. Just as our living quarters had been a semi-accurate replica of Roger's apartment, this room looked very close to my living room at home.

Helen was inside.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A young Mexican woman stood in front of Helen as if protecting her. She waved her arms and shouted something at me in Spanish.

"Andrew!" Helen, who looked scared and sleep-deprived but physically unharmed, moved out from behind the woman. "It's okay, she's my nurse, she's a prisoner, too!"

She started to rush toward me, then stopped as she saw that I was handcuffed to a woman whose brains had been blown out.

"It's fine," I assured Helen, wanting to sob with relief. "I mean, it's not fine, she's dead, and she wasn't evil or anything, but she wasn't good, either, and I lost my other pinky, but it's all fine now, I love you, how are you?"

"Mommy!" Theresa rushed into the room and gave Helen a big hug.

"Daddy!"

I spun around. Kyle stood in the doorway, holding Samantha's hand.

I couldn't believe it! Everybody was safe!

I hugged my son. He had a bruise on his face that wasn't there in the video, but otherwise, he looked fine. Roger and I had sustained the worst injuries of everybody by far. Well, if you didn't count Shirley.

"Do you know how to get out of here?" I asked Samantha.

"No. But we'll find our way out; I don't think the place is that big."

The seven of us walked out of the room. Roger, Samantha, and I kept our guns up, ready to fire, so we were pretty well covered.

"Where's the exit?" I asked Mr. Burke.

"There is no exit."

"I'd like you to stop that," I said. "You've gone from an intimidating monster to an annoying bleeding little helpless loser, and it's time to quit the games. I don't know why you think we won't kill you."

"Because you think you're better than that."

"I've killed other bad guys, and I like you way less than some of them. So give me a straight answer."

"There is no exit."

"You're going to make Roger break another finger, aren't you? What the hell is the matter with you? Did your mind just completely shut down when you realized that we won?"

"What makes you think you've won?"

"Look at yourself. Do you think you've won? That's a pretty crappy victory."

Mr. Burke wiped some blood off his pants leg. "I'm not saying that I hoped this was the way things would work out. Clearly it isn't. But think about your losses."

"You cost me another finger, but you know what, I got used to having nine fingers and I'll get used to having eight. I've been hurt worse than this, and I'll heal. Roger will heal. Our babies are going to be fine. You murdered a lot of innocent people, and Bruce was a friend, but my family is safe. You lose."

I left my children's psychological trauma out of my speech. Hell, maybe this whole ordeal would bring Theresa and I closer together than ever before. Wishful delusional thinking, but...

"I suppose you're right," said Mr. Burke. "You've won. I concede victory." He pointed to one of the doors Roger had checked. "That's how you get out."

Now I was unsure how to proceed. Since Mr. Burke had said that was the door to freedom, did that mean we should use any other door?

"Cover me," said Roger, taking the key ring from me. He walked over to the door and unlocked it, standing off to the side just in case somebody behind the door decided to shoot.

He turned the knob and carefully pushed the door open.

We all waited. Nobody breathed.

He peeked inside.

Then he recoiled.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Vic. He ended up blowing out his brains after all. It's all over. You don't want to see...oh, shit. Oh, no. Please, no."

I stepped forward, dragging Shirley along the carpet again.

"Andrew, stop!" Roger said. "Don't come over here. Helen, don't let him come over here."

I kept moving toward the door. "What's wrong?"

Roger had tears in his eyes and I'd never seen him looking so frantic. "Goddamn it, Andrew, stay where you are, give me a second, okay?"

Helen put her hand on my chest to encourage me to stop. "Just wait. Roger, what's going on?" She walked over to the doorway, looked inside, and immediately burst into tears.

Mr. Burke chuckled.

No way in hell was I going to wait. I yanked the handcuffs so hard that I thought I might rip Shirley's dead arm off, went to the doorway, and looked inside the room.

Vic was indeed dead. But he'd killed two other people before himself.

"Mom...? Dad...?"

EPILOGUE

Nobody killed Mr. Burke in a fit of fury.

As I wept for my dead parents and Helen consoled me, Roger decided that Mr. Burke needed to be kept somewhere safe until we could get help. The monster cackled with psychotic glee as Roger dragged him to the deep pit where Shirley, Theresa and I had spent three days. He stopped cackling after he struck the bottom.

Samantha found a knife in what we assumed was Mr. Burke's private office. She threw a sheet over Shirley's corpse and went to work on the lock. I cried the entire time. Even when the bracelet popped open and I pulled my hand free, I just couldn't stop crying.

Eventually I did. And I hugged my kids and my wife and I promised them that from now on, everything would be better. I wasn't completely sure what I even meant by that, but it felt good to say it.

* * *

We walked alongside a long Costa Rican (we thought) dirt road. Nobody had been able to find a cell phone, and the huge white house we'd been in was apparently way the hell out in the middle of nowhere.

Helen's caregiver had gone up ahead. The rest of us walked together. Slowly.

"We never really have great victories, do we?" asked Roger.

"Nope."

"The weather's nice, though. Sunny. We could be walking out here in the pouring rain and that would really suck."

"You're right," I said. "The weather is very nice."

"And you could still be handcuffed. Can you imagine having to drag Shirley through the mud?"

"I would have stayed behind if that were the case."

"So, it's nice that you didn't have to stay behind."

"Yep."

"I'm sorry," said Roger, "but could everybody do me a huge favor and stop walking for a minute? I don't know if this is even remotely the right time to do this kind of thing, and it probably isn't, but..." He dropped down to one knee in front of Samantha. "Samantha, I know I don't have a ring or anything, but will you marry me?"

She gazed into his eyes for a long moment.

Then she blinked and looked away.

"I don't think I can. I can't go through this again. I'm sorry."

"But it's all okay now, right? Mr. Burke probably broke his neck when he fell in the pit. I heard a snap. It might have been his legs, but it might have been his neck, too. Either way, he's not coming after us again. It's all okay."

"It's not just him. I...I need to think about it."

Roger stared up at her, looking positively heartbroken.

"No," he said. "That's not the answer I want. You asked me to marry you, and it wasn't a great time for me, but as far as I'm concerned the offer is still on the table. So, yes, Samantha Tracer, I accept your proposal."

"It doesn't work that way."

"It's not traditional, no, but we don't do much that is. Yes, I'll marry you. Thank you for asking."

Samantha knelt down as well and gave him a gentle kiss on the lips. "Roger?"

"Yes?"

"I love you dearly, but let's work this out another time."

"Yeah, I guess you're right."

They both got up and we resumed walking. Roger was going to have to do something big and bold, something out of a wacky romantic comedy, to win her back. Maybe I'd help him brainstorm ideas.

After Mom and Dad's funeral.

I almost hoped that Mr. Burke hadn't broken his neck in the pit, because if he was still alive when he was delivered to justice, it was going to be very bad for him. I wondered if Tony Frenkle knew yet what had happened to his twin brother, and what he would do if he had the opportunity to confront Mr. Burke.

Probably nothing. He couldn't just murder him or anything. Still, it was nice to think about.

But Mr. Burke hadn't won. He'd taken a hell of a lot from me, but if you put our encounters onto a great big flashy scoreboard, it would still say Mr. Burke 0, Andrew Mayhem 2.

I was in a lot of pain and the poison had probably done some damage to my insides and I didn't expect the next few weeks to be the finest of my life. But as I held Helen's hand and walked along the dirt road with Theresa and Kyle next to me, I had to agree with Roger, the weather was pretty nice.

The End

AFTERWORD

I didn't want to spoil the Harry McGlade cameo before you read the book, so this is where I'll thank Joe Konrath for letting me use his beloved character. In case you missed it, Andrew Mayhem and Harry McGlade's paths first crossed in the novella Suckers, which you can snatch from...

http://tinyurl.com/cuwu7dc

And you can visit Joe's very, very, very robust website at http://www.joekonrath.com

Remember: Readers who leave reviews deserve great big hugs!

Subscribe to Jeff Strand's free monthly newsletter (which includes a brand-new original short story in every issue) at

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Books By Jeff Strand

Bring Her Back. A tale of revenge and madness.

Sick House. A home invasion from beyond the grave.

How You Ruined My Life (Young Adult). Sixteen-year-old Rod has a pretty cool life until his cousin Blake moves in and slowly destroys everything he holds dear.

Everything Has Teeth. A third collection of short tales of horror and macabre comedy.

An Apocalypse of Our Own. Can the Friend Zone survive the end of the world?

Stranger Things Have Happened (Young Adult). Teenager Marcus Millian III is determined to be one of the greatest magicians who ever lived. Can he make a live shark disappear from a tank?

Cyclops Road. When newly widowed Evan Portin gives a woman named Harriett a ride out of town, she says she's on a cross-country journey to slay a Cyclops. Is she crazy, or...?

Blister. While on vacation, cartoonist Jason Tray meets the town legend, a hideously disfigured woman who lives in a shed.

The Greatest Zombie Movie Ever (Young Adult). Three best friends with more passion than talent try to make the ultimate zombie epic.

Kumquat. A road trip comedy about TV, hot dogs, death, and obscure fruit.

I Have a Bad Feeling About This (Young Adult). Geeky, non-athletic Henry Lambert is sent to survival camp, which is bad enough before the trio of murderous thugs show up.

Pressure. What if your best friend was a killer...and he wanted you to be just like him? Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Novel.

Dweller. The lifetime story of a boy and his monster. Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Novel.

A Bad Day For Voodoo. A young adult horror/comedy about why sticking pins in a voodoo doll of your history teacher isn't always the best idea. Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Young Adult Novel.

Dead Clown Barbecue. A collection of demented stories about severed noses, ventriloquist dummies, giant-sized vampires, sibling stabbings, and lots of other messed-up stuff.

Dead Clown Barbecue Expansion Pack. A few more stories for those who couldn't get enough.

Wolf Hunt. Two thugs for hire. One beautiful woman. And one vicious frickin' werewolf.

Wolf Hunt 2. New wolf. Same George and Lou.

The Sinister Mr. Corpse. The feel-good zombie novel of the year.

Benjamin's Parasite. A rather disgusting action/horror/comedy about why getting infected with a ghastly parasite is unpleasant.

Fangboy. A dark and demented fairy tale for adults.

Kutter. A serial killer finds a Boston terrier, and it might just make him into a better person.

Faint of Heart. To get her kidnapped husband back, Melody has to relive her husband's nightmarish weekend, step-by-step...and survive.

Mandibles. Giant killer ants wreaking havoc in the big city!

Stalking You Now. A twisty-turny thriller soon to be the feature film Mindy Has To Die.

Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary). First in the Andrew Mayhem series.

Single White Psychopath Seeks Same. Second in the Andrew Mayhem series.

Casket For Sale (Only Used Once). Third in the Andrew Mayhem series.

Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to "Shirley"). Fourth in the Andrew Mayhem series.

The Andrew Mayhem Collection. All four novels for one low price!

Suckers (with JA Konrath). Andrew Mayhem meets Harry McGlade. Which one will prove to be more incompetent?

Gleefully Macabre Tales. A collection of thirty-two demented tales. Bram Stoker Award nominee for Best Collection.

Elrod McBugle on the Loose. A comedy for kids (and adults who were warped as kids).

The Haunted Forest Tour (with James A. Moore). The greatest theme park attraction in the world! Take a completely safe ride through an actual haunted forest! Just hope that your tram doesn't break down, because this forest is PACKED with monsters...

Draculas (with JA Konrath, Blake Crouch, and F. Paul Wilson). An outbreak of feral vampires in a secluded hospital. This one isn't much like Twilight.

For information on all of these books, visit Jeff Strand's more-or-less official website at http://www.jeffstrand.com