Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“Trick or treat, motherfucker!”

The voice hissed behind his back. Galvanized, Broker yanked against Jolene, who clung to him. So he had to fling her aside and spin, raking back his left elbow, cocking his right fist.

His elbow swept empty space and he thought he glimpsed a grotesque smile on Earl Garf’s bruise-streaked face.

He heard Amy scream, turned to find her, which was a mistake, because Earl clubbed the butt of the.45 down behind his left ear and it all went black.

Amy had screamed, “Look out,” but the man had already stepped across the doorway and struck Broker from behind. Broker’s knees gave out and he crumpled to the porch. Coming forward, she recognized the belted black leather trench coat Earl had worn in the barn earlier today, except now it had an empty sleeve and Earl Garf had his left arm in a sling.

Earl sneered and commenced to kick at Broker who was trying to push himself up off the porch. When kicking didn’t satisfy him, he bent over and swung the pistol again, and the steel hitting Broker’s skull sent a sickening slap into the dark. Broker fell forward and lay still.

Jolene grabbed Earl’s good arm and screamed, “What’s he doing here?” Seeing Jolene moving to intervene, Amy had the racing contextual thought that this was more of the same from earlier-the hostility between the two men carried to absurd lengths.

And Earl looked crazy right now, with his bare chest red with cold against a torn hospital patient’s robe under the heavy coat. When he aimed a kick at Broker she saw his bare ankle between the cuff of his jeans and his Nikes.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Jolene yelled, pushing forward.

Earl swung the pistol at Jolene, backed her off, and yelled, “Just shut up and do what I say.” Then he lunged across the porch, his eyes burning up with cold, and she saw what Jolene had seen. There was someone else out there.

Suddenly, Amy knew she was next.

Immediately she set her feet to bound back into the lodge. She’d been raised up here. She’d played in this building as a child. She knew where Uncle Billie kept his guns-in the closet in his bedroom-and she knew there’d be a twelve-gauge pump and she knew how to use it.

But Earl pointed the pistol at her face and her feet wouldn’t move fast enough, which gave him time to snake out a foot and trip her. Then, as she tried to regain her balance, he shoved her roughly against the doorjamb and forced her to her knees.

And in that moment, with her face smarting like a red pincushion and the air all freezing needles, she saw the other person heave into the light.

“What the hell,” Jolene blurted.

“It’s cool,” Earl reassured her.

Allen Falken stood over Amy with a syringe in his hand. In the other he held a black medical bag. In an open space between two sliding plates of panic, Amy noticed he was wearing latex gloves and he needed a shave.

“How’re we doing?” Allen asked conversationally as he stepped over Broker. Then, as he knelt, he said, “Earl, take hold of Amy, would you; I want her absolutely still.”

Through another window of shock, Amy recognized the calm authority of a surgeon greeting his team as he entered the OR.

She scrambled to escape, which prompted Earl to grab her around the waist with his good arm. Earl smelled like spoiled meat and disinfectant.

“Hello, Amy,” Allen said. “This will sting a little but then you’ll find it quite pleasant. Five hundred milligrams of Ketamine will produce a hypnotic effect. But you know all about that.” He jabbed her in the thigh, right through her jeans.

Amy’s panic immediately lost its jerky gallop and she rolled out and up with the graceful thrust, and she was alone and poised in a slow-motion dive into a wide pool of peace. A beautiful vertical entry. No splash. A perfect 10.

* * *

Allen quickly drew another shot from a stopper bottle and injected it in Broker’s thigh. Then he addressed the shock on Jolene’s face as he took out a box of rubber gloves. “Put these on, please.”

“Wait a fucking minute here,” Jolene said, looking to Earl.

Allen smiled at her. “How’s Hank? Has he been blink-talking any more? Giving away any more family secrets?”

“How do you. .?”

“In a minute,” Allen said. “Right now, let’s drag her inside and shut the door. It’s cold out here.”

He and Earl manhandled Amy through the doorway and laid her on the wooden-plank floor near the fireplace.

“Earl? What’s going on here?” Jolene demanded.

“There’s three of us now,” Earl said. “He’s got the plan and I’ve got the gun and you better have the smarts to go along.”

“That’s clear as mud,” Jolene said.

Allen continued to smile patiently. “We’re going to put Hank back to where he was before he started this blinking business.”

“He hasn’t stopped blinking that I know of,” Jolene almost shouted.

“I’ll get to that later. First we have to deal with her,” he pointed to Amy, “and him.” He jerked his head toward the door.

“Deal?” Jolene said.

“Kill, okay?” Earl said. “Only Allen is going to do it nice, not sloppy like you had in mind.”

Jolene slumped her shoulders. “Jesus, how’d we wind up here ?”

“We arrived one step at a time,” Allen said. He pointed at Earl. “Him.” Then he pointed at Jolene. “You.” Finally he tapped his own chest. “Me.”

Jolene shook her head.

Earl tried to explain. “Jolene, he knows everything. He saw Broker and Amy together when they took me to the hospital, so he went to the house and heard you three guys doing the alphabet thing on the baby monitor, then he went in back and heard you on the cell phone calling me.” He turned to Allen. “Just tell her straight-out. Trust me, it works better that way with her,” Earl said.

Allen nodded, then gently explained. “Killers, plural, remember. Earl is one killer and I’m the other.” Allen spoke in the factual tone he used when discussing a patient’s case with family members. “In the hospital, when Hank was in the recovery room, I gave him the wrong medication when I found him unattended. No one saw me, and when I realized what I’d done I assumed it would look like a respiratory arrest caused by a sloppy nurse-anesthetist and a lazy nurse. So I turned off the alarm on the monitor and left the room.”

Why, you fucker , Jolene was careful not to say.

“See, nothing but cool,” Earl did say.

“At first I thought it was a mistake, that I was confused from fatigue. But the more I thought about it I realized I don’t make mistakes of that magnitude. So, on some level, I must have been acting deliberately. The crude explanation is that I allowed my personal feelings to intrude on my relationship with a patient. It’s always been obvious I’ve been very attracted to you, Jolene. And I saw how Hank didn’t appreciate you. And it’s been hard, watching you go through this ordeal.”

“Wow,” Earl said, starting to grin again.

“You did that to Hank?” Jolene balled her fists.

Allen went on in his patient voice. “And Earl did that to Stovall and you were ready to do it to Amy and Broker. And here we all are.”

“Jolene, listen,” Earl said, “he’s got this really cool idea. We hide the bodies in plain sight.”

“And the Ketamine only gives me ten to fifteen minutes to set it up,” Allen again offered them the box of Latex gloves.

“Set what up?” Jolene asked.

“Her suicide. See, she feels so bad about what she did to Hank, she just can’t live with it. Allen will stage it with drugs and stuff to make it look exactly the way an anesthetist would do it,” Earl said.