Page 88 of Heartbreak Bay

I don’t know how to answer. I can’t tell if the knife is still on my belt. The shotgun’s gone. I don’t know if I have anything left to use at all.

“Three,” he says. “Two. One. We’re here.”

He stops pulling me, and I immediately roll right to try to twist his wrist, break free, but he isn’t surprised. He lets momentum carry me over to my right side, and I feel myself sliding forward as hethrowsme, like a bowling ball. I try to stop myself, but he steps back, and I feel his foot land firmly in the small of my back. I feel a tug and a small, sharp nick of pain. My hands are free. I try to push myself up.

He kicks me hard, so hard I feel all the air forced out of me, and then I’m sliding forward again.

Into the dark.

I hear the door slam behind me and locks being thrown. I hear my own panicked breathing, the frantic slap of my body flopping against the floor. Tile, I think. Burning cold. It’s absolutely black in here, exceptfor the pallid strobe afterimages my eyes are still remembering in chemical traces. I force myself to go still, to relax. He stayed outside. I’m alone in the dark. I just need to breathe andthink.

My hands and ankles are free. I can stand up. I just need to be careful not to bash my head against something, trip, break bones ... I’ve always had a low-key fear of the dark, but this is nightmarish. I don’twantto move. I just want to curl into a ball and hide. Instead, I force myself to take inventory. I’ve been cut, just a little. I can feel the wound throbbing on my wrist, but it doesn’t seem that deep. I feel for the knife, but the sheath’s empty. So is my shoulder holster. I reach for the backup ankle gun that I strapped in place, and remarkably, it’s still there. He didn’t find it. It’s a small .38, lethal at close range. I feel miles better with the light weight of it in my hand.

I look for the burner phone I stuck in my jacket pocket. It’s gone too.

It reeks in here, even worse than the last room. So bad I cough and choke and nearly throw up again until I steady myself.

It isn’t fish this time. I know this smell, this particular smell that the fish odor covers so well.

I’m in the room with death. Something large.

The lights suddenly blaze on, brighter than hope, and I find myself scooting violently backward until my back hits the metal door behind me, unable to take my eyes off what I’m seeing.

I’ve found Sheryl Lansdowne.

I scream. I can’t help it, it just bursts out of me like a blowtorch’s flame, piercing and desperate and horrified. My first thought is that she’s been broken like a china doll, only china dolls don’t bleed when their arms and legs come off. Her limbs are separated a precise distance from her torso. Her head’s still attached. She’s still dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans; the cuts to remove her arms and legs were so precise that the fabric was sliced clean.

It takes me a few horrific seconds to realize whatelseI see. Sheryl’s fingers and toes have a lifeless, bluish tinge to the flesh, and they’re actively decomposing, like they’ve been severed from her for hours, maybe as much as a day.

But her face and the exposed skin on her neck still look pink. Pale, but alive.

She opens her eyes.

“Hello?” She sounds drugged. Calm. Her pupils are enormous, like black holes. “Tyler?”

She’s alive. Somehow. Impossibly alive. And then I force myself to look at her body, at the places where the limbs were severed. The wounds are covered with some kind of plastic bandages. She’s still bleeding at the edges in a steady flow. There’s an IV hooked up to her body, line embedded in her neck. She’s getting plasma and some kind of clear liquid in a bag.

It’s painkiller. It has to be. Because she’s not screaming.

She smiles, like she’s been told a joke. Then her face twists, and her eyes fill with tears, and she says, “I didn’t want to.” As if she’s having a conversation with someone who isn’t there. I slowly, slowly work my way out of my paralysis and push myself up to a crouch, then to a standing position. I make myself look away from Sheryl and toward the rest of the room. It’s just a small, white room—tiled on all four walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. There’s a drain in the floor. Her blood is dripping down into it.

The only way in or out of the room, other than the small drain, is the door I came through.

There’s a small electrical outlet on the far wall, and—weirdly incongruous—a small speaker plugged into it. I catch a glint of glass sitting at the top of it: a camera.

Jonathan is watching.

“You have a choice to make,” his voice says. “You can sit in this room and watch Sheryl die. It’ll probably take a while. Her painkillers will run out soon, and her blood supply. It’ll be an agonizing way to go.”

I don’t know what to say. The tide of horror runs deep here, and I feel I’m being swept away. I finally manage a response. “You said there was a choice.”

“I left you the choice.”

I look around. There’s nothing, other than the speaker. The cord that connects it to the wall. The power outlet.

“You want me to electrocute her? Strangle her?”

He sighs, like I’ve missed the point. “No. That would be cruel.”

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