Somehow they’re all following Brasher, who pumps his giant arms as he runs uphill. Later Luke’ll think the fact that Brasher somehow outpaced all of them is hilarious given the guy’s not exactly streamlined for speed. But he’s not sad to have a human tank in the lead; that’s for sure.
And then suddenly the tablet flashes in his hand. A bright pulse of light that blinds him. He almost trips, finds his footing.
The other men notice and turn.
The tablet flashes more. Not flashes.
Blinks.
“She’s awake!”
Two thousand feet above the Cleveland National Forest, Ed Baker stops reciting the report he was just given by Ground Team A and falls abruptly silent.
A flash of light just pulsed through the helicopter’s passenger compartment, followed by another, then another, each one giving his face a ghoulish cast.
For a few seconds, he and Cole blink their surprise at each other; then Cole pats the empty leather next to him, and Ed awkwardly settles his bulk onto the forward-facing bench seat so he can see what now fills the screen of the MacBook resting on Cole’s lap.
Charlotte Rowe is finally opening her eyes.
First she becomes aware of a deep, throbbing ache in her temples. As it lessens, she feels a second sensation stretching across her forehead. This feeling isn’t in her bones. It’s on her skin. It’s scratchy and rough.
A strap, she realizes.
These thoughts struggle against a narcotic haze. But it doesn’t feel like she’s rousing from a long nap. Rather, it’s like a chunk of time has been stolen from her. The exact same feeling she experienced when she came to after wisdom tooth surgery.
Surgery.
The word surges through her. The muscles in her neck tense, but they’re the only ones. That’s when she feels straps on her wrists and ankles. Leather, thick, securing her to the operating table. She’s blinking up into a bright glare; against it, she sees the outline of a bulging, transparent IV bag on a stanchion. There’s writing all over it—warning labels, she realizes—and one word bigger than the rest: ACETONE.
While physical sensations are returning in stages, her emotions aren’t coming back as quickly, and she needs them to. Desperately. Instead her mind floats between a vague sense of alarm and a dull awareness of her situation.
Something burns in her upturned right arm. Two IVs—one small, one large. Neither one is connected to the bag of acetone; the smaller one’s connected to a short cord, with a port for injections. Maybe he used that port to bring her back to consciousness.
Something tugs at legs that still feel mostly numb. As if from a distance, she hears rustling sounds. Looks down at her body as much as she can without moving her head. It’s not rustling; it’s shredding. Pemberton stands over her. He’s lost the jacket and hat, and he’s slowly cutting up the right leg of her blue jeans with surgical scissors. The left one’s already been cut, the flaps primly laid aside so that her entire thigh is exposed.
“Hello, Charlotte.” She’s blinking up at him as he traces a finger down the side of her cheek.
He’s gone through her things; that must be how he knows her name.
She goes to speak. She can’t. There’s a ball gag tucked in her mouth. Now that she’s aware of it, she can feel the saliva gathering around it, coating the back of her throat. She coughs, but it’s a weak effort that forces her nostrils to suck half breaths.
With each new returning sensation, she prays for the return of terror, for the arrival of bone music. But it’s like grasping for hunger when your body knows it’s full. Somewhere within her the Zypraxon’s locked in a cage or stuck against a filter it’s too large to slip through. Undissolved. Untapped. Untriggered.
“I assume you know who I am, or you’re figuring it out now.” He seems as steady and focused as if he’s prepping her for a common, beneficial procedure. With the first three fingers of his right hand, he presses down softly on her cheek, as if assessing the fat content, the durability of the skin. “And that means you’ve probably figured out what you’re going to become.” He smiles primly. “And you’re not panicking, which is either a side effect of the drugs or you think being strong will change the outcome of this.” He looks into her eyes. “It won’t.
“You see, this face of yours, Charlotte. You realize what it is, don’t you? It’s just a collection of accidents, really. Genetic accidents that created the shape of your nose, your lips, your chin.” He grazes each feature as he references it. “So much of your life has been determined by this face. Granted to you by this face, by how people respond to it. But it doesn’t have inherent meaning, you see? It’s cartilage, really. Cartilage and privilege. What I do—now that gives it meaning. It gives you meaning, Charlotte Rowe.”
He gives them all this speech, she realizes. This is what they all saw and heard before they died. He terrifies them like this on purpose. Because he is just like every other human monster, twisting truths and perverting philosophies to justify his desire to inflict pain.
He traces a path down her upturned forearm, lingering at the IV injection site for a few seconds.
“But I work with the whole body, you see. Your face, I give to the world. Your body stays with me so I can remember the amount of effort I put into it. Into you, you ungrateful little bitch. Tell me.” He bends forward, looks into her eyes. “Did you have any sense of the man I really was when you turned up your nose at me in that parking lot? Any sense of the magnitude of what I contain, of what I can do?”
He keeps the bodies, she thinks. Then the bodies are here. The bodies are the evidence.
She feels acutely nauseated now. The aftereffect of the blow he delivered to her head in the parking lot throbs persistently in her skull, rings in her ears. And that’s good. That means her body’s coming back. Rousing. Her thoughts are coming quicker, clearer.
“No?” he asks. “Well, let me tell you what I’m capable of, Charlotte. I’m going to fill your system with acetone. It’s going to drive out your blood, replacing most of your body fluids, and it’s going to do it while you’re alive and awake and remembering this moment. The moment when you realized who I am. This moment, when you finally knew truth.”
She blinks, sees the IV dangling from the acetone bag, waiting to be connected to her arm. Her heart races at the sight. Something’s missing. The acetone goes in through the big IV, but her blood, her body fluids, how will he push those out?
She feels the cool air—subterranean air, she realizes—kissing her exposed thighs, and that’s when terror sends rivers of ice through her body from head to toe. She remembers a term from one of Luanne’s hospital stays, when they’d needed to draw blood and the veins in her arm weren’t strong enough. A femoral stick.
Pinpricks. Not from him. And then shaking in her bones. He sees it, mistakes it for pure fear, and smiles. He can’t hear the bone music, but she can.
“They say beauty hurts. But trust me, Charlotte. Achieving meaning hurts so much more.”
He turns to the supply table next to him. He gloves his hands, then picks up a loop of clear tubing that’s long, thick, and attached to some kind of plunger. There’s another waiting on the supply table. Two of them. One for each leg.
“And when I’m done,” he says, “you will be very, very beautiful.”
A distant, grating sound stills him.
Dogs. Barking dogs.
That’s when she quickly and silently pops her left hand free, as if the strap were suddenly made of paper. That’s when the strap across her forehead pops off as she goes to sit up, and that’s when Frederick Pemberton spins to face her.
He’s so stunned to find her sitting upright, so stunned to find them eye to eye, he doesn’t notice when she reaches out and grabs his hand. She spits the ball gag she’s bitten in half onto her lap, and he looks desperately from it to his own wrist, now clamped in her impossibly strong grip.
“You are a bad, bad man,” she whispers.