John Saul: Black Lightning

Finally he found the spot: a narrow road, one he’d used before, but not for years. A half mile through the trees and he emerged into a clearing next to a fast-moving stream. He looked around.

He was alone.

Now he began his preparations.

First, he stripped naked, folding his clothes neatly and stowing them in the drawer beneath the queen-sized berth at the motor home’s rear.

After pulling on a pair of rubber surgical gloves, he covered the bed with a sheet of plastic and moved the unconscious woman onto it.

He continued working with the sheets of plastic, methodically lining the entire interior of the motor home; one of his prime rules when carrying out an experiment was that nothing must be contaminated.

Finally he was ready.

Undressing the woman, he gazed at her naked body for a few moments, savoring the life that seemed to radiate from it even as she slept.

Her breasts moved rhythmically up and down as she breathed, and when he lay his fingers gently on her neck, he could feel the pounding of her pulse.

He laid out the tools he knew he would need, then picked up the instrument he’d purchased the day before for this specific experiment, and squeezed its trigger.

It squealed shrilly as its blade began to spin.

The man began his work.

The blade of the cordless saw sliced through skin and flesh, parting the woman’s sternum in a single quick cut up the center of her chest.

Setting the saw aside, the man spread her ribs apart and closed off the largest of her severed blood vessels with some of the surgical clamps he’d bought years before, when the research was still in its planning stages.

The worst of her bleeding stanched, the man slipped his fingers into the cavity within. He felt the woman’s lungs — still working strongly — and nodded in satisfaction. Once more he’d succeeded in making the primary cut so perfectly that the subject’s diaphragm remained undamaged.

He slid his fingers deeper, working them around the lungs until both hands rested against the gently moving tissue. He paused, thrilling to the sensation of life pressing against his palms.

But now the woman’s breathing was beginning to falter. Time was running short.

The experiment must begin.

His fingers probed deeper, until at last he felt the familiar contours of a human heart. Time seemed to stand still.…

When he emerged from the motor home an hour later, the man’s hands were covered with blood. More of the glimmering red fluid oozed from the body he carried in his arms, drizzling slowly down his torso and legs, dripping onto the ground he trod. He carried the body into a thicket of woods, waiting only until he was fully screened from the clearing before dropping it unceremoniously to the ground. He gazed angrily at the woman’s remains.

Her organs were all there, but no longer in their original positions, for when he’d realized that once again the experiment had failed, a dark rage of frustration had come over him, a rage he’d released by plunging his fingers furiously into the woman’s lifeless body, tearing her heart loose from its veins and arteries, then pulling more of her organs through the incision in her chest as he searched for the reason for his failure.

Now he glared down once more at the lifeless body, its chest torn open to offer the world an obscene view of the carnage within.

He turned his back and walked away, finally abandoning the subject for whom, only an hour ago, he’d had such wonderful hopes.

Emerging from the trees back into the clearing, he went to the river and plunged in, letting the rushing water wash the blood from his skin and cool the burning rage that failure always caused him. Only when he was certain no trace of the woman’s blood remained did he emerge from the river and return to the motor home, where, still naked, he carefully began folding the sheets of plastic in upon themselves. Soon the vehicle’s interior was again pristine, all evidence of his experiment wrapped in the sheets of plastic, which in turn he placed inside a large white plastic garbage bag.

The man went back to the river and washed once more, then dried himself, dressed, and drove the motor home out of the clearing. Leaving it on the edge of the pavement, he returned to the clearing, broke a branch from a tree and swept it methodically across the ground, obliterating every tire print the motor home had left.

The branch he’d used to whisk away his tracks joined the soiled plastic sheets in the large trash bag.

As he started back down the highway, the man glanced at his watch and was pleased: there was still plenty of time to stop for an hour or so of fishing before he went home.

And as he fished, he would begin thinking about the next experiment.…

The cracked white face of the clock stood in stark contrast to the institutional green of the wall upon which it hung.

Nine A.M.

Three hours before noon.

High noon.

As the phrase went through her mind, a scene from the movie she still vividly remembered from her childhood came into Anne Jeffers’s mind, and she saw again the black-and-white image of two men facing each other on a dusty street. She’d sat riveted in her seat at the old Coliseum Theater in Seattle as Gary Cooper, photographed from a low angle to make him seem even taller than he really was, had faced down …

Who?

Who had Cooper executed at high noon that day?

Though she still remembered the scene almost as clearly as if she’d seen it last week instead of more than three decades ago, she could not remember who played the bad guy. In those days, back when she was a little girl, it was the sheriff everyone had cared about, not the villain.

The question wasn’t whether the villain deserved to be shot, but whether Gary Cooper would get him before he got killed himself.

Justice, pure and simple. Good guy versus bad guy, with everyone rooting for the hero in the white hat.

But today, when high noon came, there would be a different kind of showdown. This was no movie; this execution was going to be real. Further, the state of Connecticut had decreed that its first execution in almost forty years be carried out in the middle of the day, rather than in the dead of night — a decree Anne suspected was deliberately intended to remind the people that though they had the right to execute one of their fellow citizens, they couldn’t expect to have the action carried out clandestinely behind the dark cloak of midnight. Nor would there be a Gary Cooper for her to root for today. Instead, there would be only a nameless, faceless man throwing a switch.

Then another man — someone whom Anne felt she had known for a very long time — would be dead.

Anne shuddered, and felt instantly ashamed. At forty-two, after spending the last twenty years working for the Seattle Herald reporting on everything from fatal apartment fires to the AIDS epidemic, there shouldn’t be much left to make her shudder. She’d seen people die before; her own mother had passed away five years ago while she had held her hand, and Anne could still feel that last surge of strength that ran through her mother’s body, giving the dying woman just enough power in the last moments of her life to offer her a final smile and an encouraging squeeze of her fingers.

Anne hadn’t shuddered that day; indeed, as her mother’s last breath emerged from her crumpled lips in a soft sigh of relief, and her wasted body finally retired from its long battle against the cancer that had inevitably defeated her, Anne felt only a quiet sense of gratitude that her mother’s pain had mercifully come to an end.

Nor was her mother the only person Anne had watched in the last moments of life. She had sat helplessly with friends as they succumbed to the plague of AIDS, and she’d stood by in mute horror as victims of gang shootings died in the emergency room of Harborview Hospital.