Jack Kilborn - Endurance

Then she closed her eyes and waited to be rescued.

# # #

Eleanor Roosevelt’s head hurt. She felt someone patting her cheek, and she opened her eyes, ready to tell whichever son it was to leave her alone.

But it wasn’t one of her sons.

“I’m thinking of a number from one to ten,” Maria said, staring at her. “Guess what it is?”

Eleanor looked at her wrists. The strappado cuffs were on her.

No. Not this.

I’m royalty. I have presidential blood in my veins.

They can’t do this to me.

“The answer,” Maria said, “Is fuck you.”

Then the man, Felix, kicked Eleanor in the face.

Eleanor fell backwards, through the gate, off the edge.

The next thing she knew, her head was hurting again.

She looked around, saw she was on the first floor.

Those fools. They must not have put the chains on correctly.

My head still hurts. But other than that, I’m perfectly fine.

Eleanor reached up a hand to rub her temple.

It didn’t work, for some reason.

She tried with the other hand, and that didn’t work either.

Then she felt something drip onto her face.

Looking up, Eleanor saw Maria and Felix, staring down at her. She also saw the two lengths of chain.

Each chain had an arm attached to it. Each arm trailed veins and arteries and tendons and torn muscles that stretched down and were still tenuously attached to the torn sockets of Eleanor’s shoulders.

Oh, lordy. Those are my arms.

Then there was pain. There was amazing, excruciating, unbearable pain.

Eleanor screamed through the pain for the entire four and a half minutes it took her to bleed to death. But to her it felt a lot longer.

# # #

Felix pulled his eyes away from Eleanor’s death throes and turned to look at Maria, but she was gone. Before he had a chance to panic, she walked out of one of the bedrooms, a baby in her arms.

“Her parents are dead,” Maria said. For someone who had been through hell, she looked positively radiant. “I want to keep her.”

The baby was adorable. And Maria was beaming.

But this isn’t right.

Felix shook his head sadly. “Don’t you think we need to do something else first?”

Maria’s smile vanished. “What do you mean?”

Felix took her hand, which hurt like hell for him. Using his thumb and pinky, he placed Maria’s pear-shaped engagement ring on her finger, the one he took off of Eleanor when he was cuffing her wrists.

“There,” he said. “Now we’re ready to start a family.”

They kissed, lightly because they were both so injured. Then the three of them held each other until the helicopter arrived.

One Year Later

Deb had never been so terrified in her life.

A sea of eyes watched her, judged her. Deb turned and looked at Letti, who gave her an intense stare and a nod. Beside Letti was Maria, who mimicked Letti’s gesture.

Deb’s throat was dry. Her heart was beating so fast she felt ready to faint. The oppressive silence hurt her ears.

Then someone sneezed. A child. Deb glanced at the audience, saw it was the baby Maria and Felix had adopted, sitting on Felix’s lap. Next to them, Kelly was leaning forward in the pew. Kelly spoke silently, urgently, mouthing the words so Deb could read her lips.

“ Say it!”

Deb looked down at her ridiculously expensive dress, the long train covering her prosthetics, making her appear completely normal. She looked at the minister, who was smiling patiently at her. Then she looked at Mal. So handsome in his tuxedo. So much love in his eyes.

And suddenly, Deb wasn’t scared anymore. With him by her side, she didn’t think she’d ever be scared again.

“I do,” she said.

Then she kissed him before the minister even had a chance to pronounce them man and wife.

# # #

Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the talking booth at West Virginia’s Northern Correctional Facility, waiting for his visitor. Franklin missed life on the outside. He missed the food. He missed sex with women. He even missed his job as hotel manager in Monk Creek. But most of all, he missed his Momma, and his kinfolk.

Prison life wasn’t so bad. The state gave him monthly transfusions, though they weren’t nearly as much fun as the ones he used to get at the Rushmore Inn. Franklin ran a tiny black market store within the walls, selling cigarettes, drugs, tattoo supplies, candy bars. After the Rushmore Massacre, as the papers had called it, Franklin inherited a tidy bit of money from his many dead siblings. And that didn’t count all the money Momma had stashed away. It was enough to hire a hotshot lawyer, who got his charges reduced from Murder to multiple counts of Accessory . Franklin got eight years, but would be out in four for good behavior.

Franklin’s mood brightened when Chester walked over and sat across from him. Chester B. Arthur Roosevelt was one of only five brothers still alive. The other four were wanted by the police, and had to stay in hiding. But Chester had bought hisself a swell fake ID, and the law couldn’t touch him.

“You find a place?” Franklin asked.

“Boardin’ house. Southern Georgia. Deep in the woods, outta the way. Big ole basement. Perfect for us.”

A boarding house? That would be easier to run than a bed and breakfast. Franklin never really warmed up to Momma’s plan for making the next President. All he really cared about was the fun he had with the women they caught.

At the prison, Franklin learned there was some newfangled chemical enzyme that turned regular blood into type O negative. That meant they didn’t have to be so picky and choosy. Now they could grab whoever they wanted.

“You buy it yet?” Franklin asked.

“Got the deed this week. Should have ‘er up ‘n runnin’ real soon. Be all ready for you when you get outta here. Have a nice bunch of sweet honeys all tied up and waitin’ for you.”

Franklin smiled. He’d already done a year of his sentence.

With this to look forward to, the next three would just fly on by.

AFTERWORD by Joe Konrath

In 2007 I wrote a horror novel called AFRAID under the pen name Jack Kilborn, and that landed me a two-book deal. My publishers wanted a book similar in tone to AFRAID, so I pitched them the idea for a book called TRAPPED and wrote the first few thousand words. They placed an excerpt for TRAPPED in the back of copies of AFRAID, hoping to release the book in the winter of 2009.

Unfortunately (for me), my editors hated TRAPPED when they read the whole thing.

Personally, I liked it. The novel was more intense than AFRAID, and probably a little meaner and gorier (maybe more than just a little), but I believed it kept to the same theme and tone of the first Kilborn book. Namely, regular people in a dark, confined setting, confronted with an overpowering, horrible threat.

Since I wanted to get paid, I rewrote TRAPPED according to the editorial notes I’d been given. I don’t believe it made the book better, but it did make it different. I toned down a bit of violence and sex, added a bit more violence in other areas, changed a few characters, cut a sub plot, and wrote a new ending.

My editors hated the new version as well. So I put TRAPPED away, figuring it would find readers eventually, and instead wrote ENDURANCE, the third Jack Kilborn book in my two-book contract. My editors liked ENDURANCE, but wanted me to make some significant cuts. Having been down that road before, I told them no, and I pulled ENDURANCE from publication.

So now I had two intense horror novels, ready to publish. All I had to figure out is what to do with them.

During the 18 months I’d been working on TRAPPED and ENDURANCE, I’d turned some of my older books (written under my real name, J.A. Konrath) into ebooks. To my surprise, they sold like crazy. Rather than pursue traditional print publication, I decided to do it alone and release TRAPPED and ENDURANCE myself.