Gregg Hurwitz: You're Next

She remembered her father’s words – I will come back for you - but she couldn’t remember his expression when he’d said it, and she realized that soon she might not remember his face at all. And then the words might blur, too – what he’d said and what she thought she remembered – and it hit her with horror that one day, one day she’d really become Katherine Smith of San Diego.

He’s coming , she told herself. He swore it.

She looked down at the pickle jar, her little secret that no one else had seen, the girls’ sneers returning: Just as long as it’s not a ugly moth.

It had spread its wings against the glass, and even here across the road from the streetlights she could see the tiny patterns, beige against chestnut, like a masterfully inlaid floor.

She thought about the disappointment and cackling that would ensue once the girls discovered that their butterfly was a common moth, and she ran her thumb across the sharp spots on the lid where breathing holes had been gouged with a screwdriver or a knife.

You’ll learn .

With a savage twist, she removed the lid and held the jar aloft. The moth hesitated there on the side of the glass, and then it flicked once and cleared the mouth of the jar. She watched it jerk its way around the nearest tree trunk, rising, rising, and finally losing itself against the pitchblack sky.

No more than twenty feet away, among the trunks of the trees, an orange dot flared to life.

She froze, zeroing in on the point of light, suddenly aware of the silence, her isolation, the charcoal air that had blanketed the shadows at the edge of the yard. The faintest crackle of burning paper rose above the evening hum.

A cigarette.

Now gone.

Suddenly sweating, one uneasy foot half set down on dirt, she squinted at the grainy air beneath the dip of the branch, unable to discern much in the gathered darkness by the trunk. Whoever was there, she had come right up on him. Her breathing had gone all jerky.

The ember burned back to life, illuminating a sliver of face – edge of chin, cheek, temple. And a uniform collar. A police uniform. The man went with the cop car. She didn’t recognize his face and didn’t know what he was doing there in the dark.

No one can know anything about you .

The cherry died, the face vanishing back into the deep dusk.

Kat took a quick step toward the house, her sandal catching on a bulge in the asphalt. ‘Oh.’ She laughed nervously, trying for casual. ‘I didn’t see you for a long time.’

A voice came at her from the darkness, calm and low. ‘Longer than you think.’

The words froze her.

‘It’s okay, sweetie. I’m a cop. I patrol this area. Make sure everyone’s safe. You’re new here, right? What’s your name?’

She forced her mouth to work. ‘Katherine Smith.’ She managed a polite smile and took a step back, and then another.

‘Now, smile pretty.’ A camera flash blinded her.

She turned and broke for the house, breath firing her lungs. Something in the act of running stoked the terror, and she sprinted blindly, with abandon, her ankles throbbing, her chest burning. The trail up to her lawn, fifty yards away, might as well have been a mile. When she reached the rear door, she stopped, panting, and finally risked a look back. The yard was still.

An instant later the cop car roared to life at the curb. It pulled out, its headlights strafing the fence and casting a swath of broken light across the now-empty space between the tree trunks.

First there was sensation. His head pulsing, filled with so much blood it seemed it might explode. Dust on his tongue. A slab of cushioned plastic shoved to his face, mashing his features to one side. A scent of decay, drawn into his mouth with each rasping inhale.

Then sound, strained as if through a filter. Water sloshing. Shuffling boots. William’s voice – ‘I got the technique down. I been rewatching that C-SPAN Senate inquiry. Why? What do you prefer?’

And then Dodge. ‘Fingers.’

‘Knuckle by knuckle, like Sharky’s Machine ? No, we should give this a try. I mean, military-perfected, right?’

None of this seemed to be related to Mike; it was as though he were listening to an old-time radio show, fictitious characters discussing fictitious outcomes. He forced his eyelids to part. The movement, however minuscule, sent daggers of pain back through his head. But finally: sight. It was like being reborn, acquiring one sense at a time.

The room rotated on its axis for a while, and slowly it dawned on Mike that he was lying supine on a downward slant, his face turned to one side. It took a few minutes longer for his eyes to adjust to the dimness and sharpen the focus on the whitish blob five feet away, staring at him. It was Hank’s face, paled to an ashen white. His lips were bruised and mottled, puckered out as if for a last kiss.

His daughter’s name roared into his head: Kat. I have to scrub the memory of her location from my brain so no matter what they do to me, I’ve got nothing to tell them.

When he shifted, fire roared through his chest and arms. His bound hands were a knot in the small of his back and his head screamed. He twisted his wrists and noted through his mind-numbed stupor that the restraints rubbing against his raw skin felt like cloth. He appeared to be at a forty-five-degree angle, his knees visible above. His thighs burned, and his calves and feet were installed into a contraption of some sort. Gradually, he recognized that he was hooked into an incline sit-up bench.

The voices continued, a calm rumble. Dodge and William were behind him?

With great effort he rolled his head, the dark ceiling scanning by, and faced the other direction. He was in a big concrete box of a cellar, the only light thrown through the open door at the top of a splintering wooden staircase. Standing between Mike and the stairs, visible only as a slice of shoulder, cheek, forehead, was Dodge. Mike blinked a few more times, the cellar coming clearer, William resolving from the darkness at the big man’s side. They were huddled, conferring. Mike’s gaze pulled to a square of burlap spread on the concrete floor, various tools laid out like devices on a medical tray. Beyond the burlap was a large, old-fashioned dunking-for-apples wooden tub. The water filling it to the brim looked black and forbidding.

Dust trembled in the column of light thrown from the open door above.

‘Oh, you’re up.’ William came toward him, making lurching progress, an empty plastic milk jug floating in each hand.

Mike turned his head away, the only movement he could muster, bringing him again face-to-face with Hank. His sprawled body lay at an odd angle to his neck, a plastic drop cloth already cocooning his lower half. One foot protruded, the worn black dress sock incongruous here, in this context. The line of flaking white skin showing at Hank’s ankle underscored the awful tableau, the frailty of this life, of any life, which, despite all the sweat and work and best-laid plans, could end in a windowless cellar, half rolled in a strip of plastic sheeting.

Beside the body was another drop cloth, which Mike realized had been reserved for him.

When he turned back, Dodge loomed above him, winding a piece of terry cloth the size of a gym towel around his hand. His shirt was unbuttoned, curled back from a wife-beater worn to near transparency. William crouched, letting out a little pained moan, and began to fill the gallon jugs with water from the tub. The bubbles gave off a faint, comic-book repeat: glug glug glug .

‘Okay,’ Mike said, still trying to grasp what was happening. ‘All right.’