Jack Ketchum - The Passenger

The whole first floor had been completely gutted, the walls knocked down to expose rough support beams that reached twenty-five feet all the way to the ceiling-a ceiling draped and webbed thick with a canopy of chains. At intervals they dangled to the floor. Six feet or so up one of the support beams a naked brunette dangled too, suspended by ropes wrapped around her wrists and elbows. She looked drugged out of her fucking gourd and like she’d been up there quite a while. There were bloody welts along her tits and thighs and the blood was already drying. Everybody just ignored her.

They moved through the crowd toward the bar, Emil first with her behind him and then Ray and then Billy behind Janet bringing up the rear. Some asshole head- banger music was pouring off the speakers. The floors were long wide slabs of polished hardwood, expensive as hell she bet. By contrast the bar was crude and cut of rough naked oak with the bark still attached where it wasn’t planed down smooth and it crawled the whole length of the room all the way to the open staircase in back like a living thing. The six beefy guys who were working it were dressed in formal white starched shirts and black ties. Directly across from the bar a fire blazed in an open stone grate cut into the wall like the huge open mouth of hell. It must have been over a dozen feet across. Considering its size it didn’t seem to throw much heat, just the smell of wood smoke.

She guessed that on the air-conditioning bill alone this place could probably buy and sell her.

She saw bright primitive murals on the walls, scenes she recognized right away from Revelations. Daddy? Momma? You’d just love this shit! The Dragon. The False Prophet. The Great Whore. The Beast. The Woman in Scarlet. Religion? In this joint? Between the murals meat hooks polished to a high sheen, dozens of them, substituted for what-in someplace less bizarre than this-might have been stuffed moose or deer or bobcat. Somebody’d painted the words BILGE RAT next to one of them. Under another, MEN ARE NECESSARY FOR THE GODS. Huh? Beside a third, the numbers 666. She sure as hell knew what that meant.

Jesus, she thought, who are these people?

She glanced back at Janet. Janet was looking decidedly twitchy and tense, eyes darting around the room as though she expected somebody to come out after her with a goddamn meat cleaver. Poor baby.

Their bartender was a neatly dressed Jabba the Hut made flesh.

“Heineken,” said Emil. “Five of ’em.”

The bartender reached for the beers and popped them.

“We need a car,” said Emil. “First we need a place to stay tonight and tomorrow we need a car.”

The bartender shrugged. “You don’t get anybody too pissed off at you, you can stand right where you are till you drop dead or hell freezes over, whichever comes first. I could give a shit.”

“What about the car? We need a car.”

“You can pay? Got money?”

“We can pay.”

She wondered how much Emil did have. Billy and Ray seemed freaked about the whole money thing.

She watched the bartender walk the length of the bar and stop in front of a black man who looked like the twin of the suited guard who’d pointed them toward the house-right down to the shaved bullet-shaped head and the assault rifle slung across his shoulder. The bartender spoke to him and the man nodded and turned toward the staircase and the bartender waddled back to his post.

“You’re Rothert, right?” he said.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“You’re the news tonight. Shot a cop. That gives you three whole minutes of glory. Enjoy yourself. I could give a shit.”

She heard a sudden commotion behind them, raised voices and heavy footfalls and clanking, grating sounds and felt the crowd shift around her and turned and saw two big men in studded boots and leather pants and vests hauling a woman off the floor by a chain attached to a pulley twenty feet away. The woman wore police cuffs and nothing else and the look in her eyes was drugs and fear and then pain shooting through her wrists as the men tugged the chain through the pulley and she could see that somebody’d shaved her completely, both head and cunt too.

They hauled her five feet or so off the ground and then slipped a link of the chain through a hook set into the floor and she hung there and the men were smiling and saying something to one another and then they weren’t smiling, they were all pissed off all of a sudden. With the pounding tide of music she couldn’t hear what it was they were saying but they were pissed off all right and the crowd was moving back in her direction even though some were laughing as though the two men arguing were the center of an oncoming twister.

One guy had a short goatee kind of thing and the other didn’t but they were matched pretty well physically, she thought, big raw biceps and beer bellies so goddamn hard that when the bearded guy gut-punched the other she could hear it over the music like a basketball smashed down from a hoop. He doubled over and the man kicked him in the face and sprayed the crowd with blood and spit. The man went over backward and scrambled across the floor and came up with a length of chain, stood and started flailing, catching the bearded guy across the back and then the shoulders and then the head as he fell, going for the head over and over again-and the crowd was wild by then and so was she. She could barely fucking breathe. The bearded guy’s head was a mess but he must have had something amazing left inside him because his hand swung up from the floor and he took the other guy’s balls in his great big hand and squeezed. Then they were both rolling groaning along the floor.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, she thought and she couldn’t help it, she giggled like a goddamn little kid and as the pair of guards in combat gear parted the crowd and dragged the two men away across the bloody floor a skinhead with tattoos of a swastika and a bolt of lightning on his arm prodded the shaved naked woman hard in the ribs with his rifle as though it were her fault all this had happened so that she jerked away in pain, more pain, and Marion finished her beer and set it on the bar and turned toward where she hung and started forward.

Janet watched her move through the crowd. The others didn’t seem to notice she was gone.

“You want this?” Emil said.

He pointed to her beer on the bar. She shook her head. The last thing she wanted was a beer. He upended it and she watched his throat move. The man is nervous, she thought. Fine.

“Just four this time,” he said to the bartender. The bartender set them on the bar. He passed one to Ray and one to Billy and only then did he realize they were missing somebody.

“Where’s Whatsername?”

He sounded more annoyed than she’d have expected and there was something else there too. Fear? From Emil? If so, fine again. The only question was as to why.

“Let’s go,” a voice behind them said.

The black man in the suit. The first guard’s twin.

“Where to?” said Emil.

“We got to go deal for your transportation, my man.”

Not quite so well-spoken, she thought.

“Wait a minute. I can’t… listen… just hold on a second, okay? Have a beer.”

He handed the man his beer and started pushing his way through the crowd.

“Hey! What the fuck? Fuck you, asshole! ” The man slammed the beer down on the bar and moved after him. Ray took her by the arm and then they were moving through the crowd too with Billy trailing behind. They heard somebody scream ahead, throaty and then shrill. Marion?

I should be so lucky, she thought.

She spotted Emil and the guard at the edge of the crowd and then saw Marion standing beneath the woman, staring up. A thin line of blood ran from the woman’s rib cage to her navel. The neo-Nazi skinhead had his arm around Marion’s waist boyfriend-and-girlfriend-style and was gesturing toward the woman with a broad, sharp-looking knife like an instructor working a blackboard with his pointer. Like the woman was some sort of math problem.