Widow Town (30 page)

“You did a horseshit job pinning that on Hudson.”

“Yes well, my boys were in charge of that. Also I predicted that Hudson
, being as unstable and drug addled, would kill whomever went to investigate him, but once again you triumphed, Sheriff. Bravo.”

“So I assume you saw the same opportunity with the women from Widow Town. You chose the ones who had no close relatives and wouldn’t be investigated thoroughly if they went missing,” Gray said.

“Sheriff, I applaud your deductions. You really were getting somewhere.” Barder moved to the instrument table again and donned a pair of latex gloves. “But I didn’t see an opportunity in Widow Town. I
created
it.”

The smile that crawled across Barder’s face was something reptilian. Comprehension punched Gray like a horse
kick to the chest.

“You-you cau
sed the explosion in the mine.”

Barder nodded. “I did a lot of research on the families that lived in the development. Most were far from home without ties to the community. They were vagrants of the working class, traveling wherever the jobs
were. They were perfect prey.”

“Rachel’s husband, he
got blamed for the accident, but it was you. And you’re wearing his cologne right now, aren’t you?”

For the first time, Barder seemed surprised. He cocked his head
at Gray, appraising him again.

“Astute,
Sheriff, astute is the word for you. Yes, I was able to persuade Ken that evening to set up the charges specifically to create a cave-in. He complied, but what would you expect a man to do when the other scenario was me shooting him and then returning to his house to kill his wife and unborn child.” Barder smiled again. “And I did fancy his cologne.”

“You’re a fucking monster.”

Barder shrugged. “I am, that is all. That’s all any of us are, Sheriff.”

“You should do yourself a
favor and put a bullet through your brain now so it saves me the trouble of killing you myself.”

The doctor laughed, a hearty sound
that rang throughout the room.

“I really like you,
Sheriff, I do. You’re something of a renaissance man; part detective, philosopher, historian, but you need to get in touch with your own id, I have a feeling you’re a lot darker on the inside that you think. Most people are.”

Gray clenched his fists and then released them. His temples pounded like drums but the strength was slowly
returning to his arms and legs.

“Are they dead? Joslyn, Rachel, Siri,
their children?”

“Weren’t you listening,
Sheriff? My whole purpose was to bring back what the world had lost, the ones like me. So what better place to start than a development full of women without husbands, children without fathers. I may take another woman from Widow Town, but for now Joslyn, Rachel, and Siri will all be our Queens so to speak. My sons will impregnate them whenever they’re eligible to carry another child, I’ll deliver the babies and then begin their training when they’re of age. Joslyn’s son as well as Rachel’s will be the first of the next generation of my experiment and I expect it to go well. I’m preparing them just as I did my own children. They will experience all the wonders I have to offer them and when the time comes, their first victims will be their own mothers.”

The door banged open and Darrin followed by Adam came into the room wheeling a tall, rectangular frame of steel with casters bolted onto the bottom of its supports. It was almost eight feet tall and twice as long as the medical bed against the wall. From its center
, Joslyn and Rachel dangled upside down from their ankles, their heads inches from the floor. They wore scrubs that matched Barder’s, and their hands were bound similarly to Gray’s. Lengths of rubber hose gagged their mouths. They swung and swayed like turkeys on a slaughterhouse conveyor line. Joslyn made a soft whimpering sound in the back of her throat but Rachel was stoic, taking in the sterilized room along with Gray seated in the chair.

The two men brought the apparatus holding the women over the large drain and stopped it there, locking its wheels. Without a word they exited the room and return
ed moments later. Darrin pushed a cart that carried two little boys, their eyes wide and staring. One of them Gray recognized as Ken, Rachel’s son, but the other was a bit larger and unfamiliar to him. Both kids were silent and watched their mothers dangling before them. Adam entered the room and Gray’s heart stuttered. The huge man had Lynn by the shoulders, guiding her like a child. When she saw Gray a look of relief and then horror flooded her features.

“Mac!”

“It’s okay, honey, it’s okay.”

Adam half walked, half carried her to the medical bed and amidst her protests, strapped her to
it with wide, Nylon bands.

“Thank you, boys. Have either of you checked on the fire?” Barder said, his eyes
floating over his new audience.

“The wind shifted and slowed it down, it’s about a mile from here. The planes and helicopters are still flying but there’s no visibility over
a hundred feet with the smoke,” Darrin answered, looking at Gray with what bordered on hunger.

“Good. I want you both to go to the house and gather up the rest of the food. I had it partially packed in the trunk of th
e car when the good sheriff interrupted me. Bring some of it down here and some to the root cellar. If a rescue crew decides to take a peek in our shelter it will look like that’s exactly where we survived the fire.”

Darrin nodded and motioned Adam toward the door but stopped be
side Gray’s chair on the way.

“I don’t know how you managed to get out of that house
but it didn’t do you much good did it, Sheriff?”

“We’ll have our dance once I
get out of this chair, junior.”

Darrin shifted his gaze from one of Gray’s eyes to the other and then snorted, walking awa
y from him and out of the room.

“They’re still learning restraint and how to be careful,” Barder said, walking to the instrument tray. “Eventually they’ll understand tact.” He selected a shining tool with two handles and a round hole lined with dual blades in its center. It looked like a miniature tree pruner. “We’re going to do our own experiment today, my friends. It will be an experiment in empathy.”

Gray watched him pick up the long saw again and pace to the stand holding Joslyn and Rachel.

“Empathy interests me to no end, mostly I suppose since I seem to lack it completely myself. I tried, I really did, to experience it while I was working with my subjects. I tried to feel something for them or what I was doing to them. I tried to feel sorry then and after they were dead, but
—” Barder shrugged. “Nothing.”

Barder examined the woman’s bin
dings holding them upside down.

“Are you familiar with ‘sawing’,
Sheriff?”

“I’m guessing not in the sense
that you’re referring to, no.”

“Sawing is an ancient method of torture and execution that came out of Rome and Persia over fifteen hundred years ago. What it entails is the condemned is hung upside down like our two ladies here and then sawed in half lengthwise from the groin to the throat. Now the key,
Sheriff, is how the person is positioned. Being upside down keeps the blood in the brain and makes it more difficult to pass out from the pain. In our case, so will the adrenaline shots I’ve given both of them.”

Joslyn began to cry in earnest, tears dripping up over her eyebrows and onto her forehead before falling to the drain beneath her. Rachel’s nostrils flared but her
eyes never left her son’s face.

“Don’t you touch them,” Gray said just above a whisper.

“Now here’s where the empathy experiment begins, my friends, or I suppose we can call it a game,” Barder continued. “You and your lovely ex-wife are going to be the contestants. You’ll be calling the shots, Sheriff, you’ll be controlling fate. To start off I’m going to remove one of Lynn’s fingers with this,” he said, squeezing the shears in his hand. The hole containing the blades spread apart and then snapped together with a shushing sound.

“Take my finger, do it to me,” Gra
y said, offering out his hands.

“Ah, that’s where the empathy portion comes in,
Sheriff. I know you’re the hero type and would endure a massive amount of pain, I mean look at what you’ve been through already. But there’s no fun in that, no interesting results. I want to see what you’ll choose. Now after I remove Lynn’s finger you have a choice to either let me take another one from her hand, or if you can’t stand to see your beloved in agony, I’ll saw one of the other women in half and Lynn will live.”

“She’ll live to be imprisoned here, raped by your two psychos, and eventually murdered by her own child,” Gray said through gritted teeth.

“Well, Sheriff, I never said the options were perfect, but at least she’ll be alive. And besides, you don’t even know these other women, they’re nothing to you when compared with how you feel about Lynn, I’m sure. I’m making quite a trade here, my friend. I’m giving up having the pleasure of watching one of my small protégés here eventually execute their own mother. Can you imagine it? The feat of changing someone from a typical path of dreary sameness to something wholly unique? It speaks volumes about what I’m trying to understand about empathy if I’m willing to give that up. In fact, I’ll make you a deal right now. Say the word and I won’t even touch Lynn, I’ll just saw Joslyn or Rachel, whichever you choose. No one outside of this room will ever know, Sheriff.”

“I’ll know.”

Barder straightened. “Ah yes, the inimitable conscience, the enemy of the id. Last chance, Sheriff. You can save Lynn right this moment and as an added bonus I won’t put you through hours of torture, I’ll have Darrin shoot you and be done with it. One decision and you can spare yourself and Lynn untold amounts of pain.”

Gray sat silent, eventually bringing his gaze to Lynn’s. Her jaw trembled as she watched him but finally her mouth formed a solid line and she nodded, once imperceptibly.
Gray brought his eyes to his own feet and sat still.

“
All right, it appears you’ve made your decision. At any point you can tell me to stop, Sheriff, and I will bandage Lynn’s wounds and shift my attention to one of the other women. If you say nothing, I’ll keep cutting until she’s dead.”

Barder turned on his heel and strode to where Lynn
lay. She tried to struggle again, to hide her hands beneath her but the doctor brought her left arm out, grasping it by her slender wrist. She balled her hand into a fist but slowly Barder worked it open, splaying her fingers with his own.

“What do you think,
Sheriff? The ring finger has some symbolic significance I would say.”

Barder slipped the shears over Lynn’s third f
inger and squeezed the handles.

There was a sharp clack and blood flew in a
crimson ribbon down the length of the medical bed. Gray made a strangled grunt as he lunged forward again, the chains at his ankles and wrists snapping tight. Lynn held onto her scream for a heartbeat and then let it peal out, the room ringing with misery.

“You bastard,” Gray growled, settling back into the chair. There was a singeing sound like an egg hitting a hot pan and Lynn cried out again, her back arching against the restraints. Barder turned and strode to Gray’s chair,
holding something in his hand.

“Don’t worry
, Sheriff, I cauterized the stump so she won’t bleed out but I thought you might want to hold this.” He tossed Lynn’s severed ring finger into Gray’s lap. Her nail polish was the same color as the blood leaking from its opposite end.

Gray looked up at the doctor, the smugness of the other man’s face a
solid mask.

“Doc?”

“Yes?”

“Fuck you.”

Gray clapped his boots together and the knife blade shot through the bottom of his sole.

He p
istoned his legs out, kicking Barder’s knee. The knife sliced beneath and then through the other man’s kneecap, cutting the flesh, cartilage, and tendons like they weren’t there. Barder’s eyebrows went up as he looked down and saw the four inches of steel protruding from his leg.

Gray twisted his feet.

The knife turned and tore out of the doctor’s leg, gouting a cupful of blood onto the pristine floor. Barder tried to take one step and then toppled, a howl crawling up out of his throat as he hit the floor.

Both of the
little boys began to cry in their cart, their small arms waving as tears rolled down their cheeks. Lynn’s eyelids fluttered and she turned her head, looking in Gray’s direction. Gray put both feet on the ground and pushed. The handle of the knife slowly rose from the top of his boot and he sat forward, straining to reach it. The pain in his stomach built to a crescendo and hot blood leaked down his side and into his lap. He reached farther and snagged the handle, pulling it free of his boot, the whole time keeping his eyes on Barder.

The doctor gasped as he cradled his knee, fleshy white lumps of sinew poking between his fingers. He blinked, first looking at the ceiling and then bringing his vision down to where Gray sat with the knife in one hand. Barder’s mouth was a spittle-slick O that trembled like a fish
pleading for water. He let go of his knee and began to slide himself toward the instrument tray.