Gregg Hurwitz - The Survivor

— keep, keep bleeding -

He turned his head and spit out the pills onto the cheap linoleum, leaning on the table, coughing.

His cell phone rang.

He said, “Cielle.”

He darted across and snatched it from the counter. “Hello?”

An accented voice said, “Remember me?”

Nate’s insides turned to ice. He looked down at the brown puddle dotted with pills. “Number Six.”

“Go to your bedroom.”

Nate could barely hear his own voice over his thundering heartbeat. “Why?”

“Something you must see.”

Nate reached across and locked his front door again. Keeping the phone pressed to his face, he walked back, his steps slowed with dread. The room was as he’d left it, the bed neatly made, but one pillowcase was, oddly, missing. The striped ticking of the pillow stared up at him nakedly.

He halted in the doorway, gaping.

The voice jarred him. “Now look out the window.”

His legs had turned to water, but he got himself across and parted the curtains. “There’s nothing there.”

“Just wait.”

Something slipped over Nate’s head, blotting out all light. Fabric yanked tight across his face, suffocating him. The last thing he sensed before dropping into a pool of black was that it felt an awful lot like a pillowcase.

Before consciousness there was pain. In the thick soup of his head; in his feet, cold and numb; in his thighs, bitten lengthwise as if by a band saw. The sockets of his shoulders, tendons screaming. And his wrists, overhead. Oh, his wrists.

Nate’s eyes opened tentatively. Vast, dank room, perhaps a warehouse. Little light. His own biceps crowding his field of vision. His arms, suspended above. His teeth chattered. It was colder than seemed reasonable for indoors, each breath frosting the linings of his lungs.

When he looked down, it seemed that his lower half had disappeared. Incredulous, he realized that his legs were, bizarrely, encased in ice. Claustrophobia crowded in on him, and he tried, stupidly, to lift his feet, to kick, to run, but there was nothing except the cold cast, enveloping him to the thighs.

Quick breaths, panic sweat freezing on his face. When he tried to wipe the beads off his cheek with his sleeve, he saw that his hands above were trapped inside matte black handcuffs and snared on a meat hook. The chain holding the hook rose several feet before vanishing into darkness-the ceiling might be ten feet above, or a hundred. Bands glittered at his wrists where the skin had been rubbed raw. And beneath everything else, pulsing like a heartbeat, was the dull pain of the stab wound in his shoulder, straining the stitches.

He will make you pay in ways you can’t imagine.

He blinked rapidly several times, a trick he’d learned in the army that was supposed to hasten nighttime vision. First the rectangle of ice around his legs came clear-on its side, the size of a refrigerator. Mist rose from its surface, making the air waver as he peered into the darkness. Pallets. Boxes. Scattered tools. A rescue saw, like the one used to cut through the steel of the bank vault.

At the fringe of visibility, he became slowly, chillingly aware of four human forms standing idly apart, studying him with cocked heads. He gave a startled shout and reared back, the lip of ice biting his hamstrings, the meat hook’s chain giving off a rusty abattoir rattle that scratched through the huge space and clawed its way back off the walls.

His vision clarified further, the men’s facial features unsmudging. The tallest he recognized as the face in the crowd outside the bank-the man with the lantern jaw and mashed nose. Broad shoulders like a yoke. Stubble bristled on his bullet-shaped head. Beside him stood a stocky man with a red-and-white-striped Where’s Waldo? sweater, frayed at the sleeves and collar. Rather than hanging regularly from his frame, the sweater sloped out a few inches over the shelf of his muscular chest before falling. Nate took in the next, a slender man with sharp features, shiny dark hair secured in a tight stub of ponytail.

And there, stepping forth for a closer look, was Number Six, the crew leader from the bank. Nate recognized his bearing-the short form with wiry muscles and a low center of gravity, built for fighting. He looked younger than Nate might have guessed. Blond hair carefully arrayed in a dated style, something just shy of a seventies bowl cut, and a forehead that, Nate noted with a stab of satisfaction, bore a bloody nick where he had nailed it with the empty gun. The puckish round face with blue eyes called to mind that of a youthful sailor from a Soviet propaganda poster, full of confidence and purpose and yet unnervingly flat, scrubbed of uncertainty.

He approached Nate, drawing disturbingly close, until Nate could feel the man’s breath against his cheeks. Those blue eyes picked across Nate’s face.

“He will stay conscious now,” Number Six declared, the accent sounding more clearly Russian to Nate’s ears.

Nate took it as a bad sign that they had not bothered to wear masks. “Who are you?”

The crew leader returned his focus to Nate. “We are Tyazhiki. Shadow people. We are not here. We do not exist.”

“But you have names.”

“Ah, yes. I did not introduce myself before. I am Misha. You wonder why you are here?”

“No,” Nate said.

“He must collect from you. From your body, perhaps.” Lazily, he touched Nate’s chest with a finger and pushed. The chain creaked above, the ice again bit the back of Nate’s legs, and he couldn’t help but grunt.

He clenched his jaw to stop the chattering. Needles of pain pierced his bloodless arms. What they were going to do to him would no doubt be horrific, but in the end there would be death. He blew out a breath, trying to find that place of fearlessness he’d captured inside the bank. “Will you lower my hands, please?”

The man in the striped sweater spoke up: “Not yet.”

“Look, Waldo, there’s four of you, and I’m wearing ice-block pants,” Nate said. “If I make a move, I think you got me covered.”

The man looked confused. “Waldo?”

“He is called Dima,” Misha said. “With the ponytail, Valerik. And he”-a flick of the hand to the huge guy from outside the bank-“is Yuri.” Despite the accent, his diction was perfect, if formal.

“His hands stay hooked on chain,” Yuri declared. “More pain.”

But Misha leaned close and unhooked Nate’s wrists, their faces inches apart. He smelled of soap. Yuri sucked his teeth and looked away, displeased but unwilling to press the matter. The other two shifted uncomfortably, pretending not to notice Misha’s power play.

Lowering his arms hurt more than Nate could have imagined. His shoulders throbbed. He fought off the pain, then asked, “Russian?”

“ Not Russian,” Misha said. The first fragment of anger. “Ukrainian.”

Nate gestured with his chin. “What’s with the ice?”

“Just wait.”

Nate looked down helplessly at the freezing block. “You say that a lot.”

“Do not wear yourself out,” Misha said. “It is frozen solid around your legs. We chipped the hole, lowered you in.”

“It take all four of you to think this one up?”

“A sense of humor. Impressive, given the circumstances.”

“I’m ready to die,” Nate said. “There is nothing you or your boss can do to me.”

In response Misha smiled. The grin was all upper gums, as if someone had carved the slit of his mouth too high on his skull.

A bang of metal on metal boomed through the warehouse, Nate stiffening atop the block of ice. An unseen door slid on rusty hinges. Footsteps tapped slowly toward them through the darkness, Nate’s apprehension growing with their proximity. And then a light flared, a directed beam, making Nate squint. Blotting the tunnel of light, the perfect silhouette of a male form. Standing still. Arms crossed high on his chest.