The Survivor

hours at least, so if you could come by my place late…?” He hung up. Walked across. Unlocked the front door for Abara. Now. Now he was ready.

Sitting again at the kitchen table, he reached for the bottle of bourbon, but another hand gripped it suddenly from the other side, the fingers caked with blood and sand. Charles sat in the opposite chair, his torso a gruesome scramble. “They say suicide is a coward’s way out.”

Nate pulled the bottle irritably from Charles’s grasp. “I’d like to see them stand eleven stories up and look down at the spot their body’s gonna mark with a Rorschach.”

Tendrils of black smoke lifted from the edges of his charred flesh. “Christ, you’re touchy.”

“Look, all I wanted to do is jump off a building.”

“I get it. You got served a shit sandwich. Any way you slice it, you gotta eat the fucker. But still. I don’t think you have to go all Jane Austen.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the Bell Jar chick who offed herself.”

“That was Sylvia Plath.”

“Whatever. I’m just saying, look at the bright side. For the first time in your life, you can say and do whatever the hell you want.”

“The bright side? I’m dying, I’ve still got PTSD or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days as evidenced by … well, you. Plus, I’m one signature away from divorced, and my kid hates me.”

Charles crossed his arms over the hole in his chest and did his best to look bored. “I won’t sit here and listen to you whine. You can do that to a wall.”

“I am doing that to a wall.”

Charles shook his head with disappointment. “I’m outta here, then. I’m not sticking around for this.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.” But Charles remained, looking away like a pouty child.

Nate banged down the bottle. “Look, I have to do this while I’m still up for it. Do you have any idea how pathetic it feels to be too depressed to kill yourself?”

“You’re still sitting there talking to me. Which means you want something.” Charles spread his arms, releasing a waft of smoke. “What do you want, Nate?”

Nate stared at the pills arrayed before him. “I want to die well,” he said.

When he finally lifted his eyes, Charles was gone.

Leona Lewis had come on the radio, all soulful runs and sultry beat, a just-audible church organ running beneath the melody like bedrock.

Nate slid the pills neatly off the table into his hand and stared down at them. His heartbeat skipped, his brain spinning, throwing images. Janie’s skin, pale beneath seawater. Cielle’s baby gums, suckling his knuckle. The car- wash polo, her name embroidered at the breast. His daughter’s education-her whole damn future. How could he not make sure he provided for that? His mind landed on the million-dollar life-insurance policy he was about to void with a single swallow. No payout for Janie and Cielle-his beneficiaries-in the event of suicide.

All he had to do to assure his daughter’s future was put down the pills and die horrifically, one agonizing minute at a time.

His daughter’s voice rang in his head: I don’t want anything from you. He remembered as a child finding his mother’s hair, too much of it to be stray, clumps and clusters like the residue of some violent act, loose on the pillow, twined in the teeth of her comb, lining the inside of that snug terry cap she wore. Cielle again, turning her back: Die somewhere else.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He palmed the pills into his mouth.

On the radio Leona kept bleeding, she kept, kept bleeding.

The pills melted on his tongue, bitter and toxic.

He reached for the bottle, unscrewed the lid.

He thought of Cielle working at that car wash and its still not being enough.

The bottle was at his lips.

— You cut me open and I-

The bourbon pooled in his mouth, smoke and sweetness, the pills swirling.

A million dollars. All he had to do was suffer.

— keep, keep bleeding-

He turned his head and spit out the pills onto the cheap linoleum, leaning on the table, coughing.

His cell phone rang.

He said, “Cielle.”

He darted across and snatched it from the counter. “Hello?”

An accented voice said, “Remember me?”

Nate’s insides turned to ice. He looked down at the brown puddle dotted with pills. “Number Six.”

“Go to your bedroom.”

Nate could barely hear his own voice over his thundering heartbeat. “Why?”

“Something you must see.”

Nate reached across and locked his front door again. Keeping the phone pressed to his face, he walked back, his steps slowed with dread. The room was as he’d left it, the bed neatly made, but one pillowcase was, oddly, missing. The striped ticking of the pillow stared up at him nakedly.

He halted in the doorway, gaping.

The voice jarred him. “Now look out the window.”

His legs had turned to water, but he got himself across and parted the curtains. “There’s nothing there.”

“Just wait.”

Something slipped over Nate’s head, blotting out all light. Fabric yanked tight across his face, suffocating him. The last thing he sensed before dropping into a pool of black was that it felt an awful lot like a pillowcase.

Chapter 12

Before consciousness there was pain. In the thick soup of his head; in his feet, cold and numb; in his thighs, bitten lengthwise as if by a band saw. The sockets of his shoulders, tendons screaming. And his wrists, overhead. Oh, his wrists.

Nate’s eyes opened tentatively. Vast, dank room, perhaps a warehouse. Little light. His own biceps crowding his field of vision. His arms, suspended above. His teeth chattered. It was colder than seemed reasonable for indoors, each breath frosting the linings of his lungs.

When he looked down, it seemed that his lower half had disappeared. Incredulous, he realized that his legs were, bizarrely, encased in ice. Claustrophobia crowded in on him, and he tried, stupidly, to lift his feet, to kick, to run, but there was nothing except the cold cast, enveloping him to the thighs.

Quick breaths, panic sweat freezing on his face. When he tried to wipe the beads off his cheek with his sleeve, he saw that his hands above were trapped inside matte black handcuffs and snared on a meat hook. The chain holding the hook rose several feet before vanishing into darkness-the ceiling might be ten feet above, or a hundred. Bands glittered at his wrists where the skin had been rubbed raw. And beneath everything else, pulsing like a heartbeat, was the dull pain of the stab wound in his shoulder, straining the stitches.

He will make you pay in ways you can’t imagine.

He blinked rapidly several times, a trick he’d learned in the army that was supposed to hasten nighttime vision. First the rectangle of ice around his legs came clear-on its side, the size of a refrigerator. Mist rose from its surface, making the air waver as he peered into the darkness. Pallets. Boxes. Scattered tools. A rescue saw, like the one used to cut through the steel of the bank vault.

At the fringe of visibility, he became slowly, chillingly aware of four human forms standing idly apart, studying him with cocked heads. He gave a startled shout and reared back, the lip of ice biting his hamstrings, the meat hook’s chain giving off a rusty abattoir rattle that scratched through the huge space and clawed its way back off the