Serial (4 page)

Lucy emerged from the woods, her hands throbbing from circulation loss. She stumbled into the car and turned around to watch the treeline.

“Come on, big boy! I’m right here! You can make it!”

Donaldson staggered out of the woods holding a tire iron, and when the moon struck his eyes, they were already half-closed.

He froze.

He opened his mouth to say something, but fell over instead, dropping like an old, fat tree.

Donaldson opened his eyes and lifted his head. Dawn and freezing cold. He lay in weeds at the edge of the woods, his head resting in a padded helmet. His wrists had been cuffed, hands purple from lack of blood flow, and his ankles were similarly bound. He was naked and glazed with dew, and as the world came into focus, he saw that one of those carabiners from Lucy’s guitar case had been clipped to his ankle cuffs. A climbing rope ran from that carabiner to another carabiner, which was clipped to a chain which was wrapped around the trailer hitch of his Honda.

The driver-side door opened and Lucy got out, walked down through the weeds. She came over and sat on his chest, giving him a missing-toothed smile.

“Morning, Donaldson. You of all people will appreciate what’s about to happen.”

Donaldson yawned, then winked at her. “Aren’t you just the prettiest thing to wake up to?”

Lucy batted her eyelashes.

“Thank you. That’s sweet. Now, the helmet is so you don’t die too fast. Head injuries ruin the fun. We’ll go slow in the beginning. Barely walking speed. Then we’ll speed up a bit when we get you onto asphalt. The last ones screamed for five miles. They where skeletons when I finally pulled over. But you’re so heavy, I think you just might break that record.”

“I have some bleach spray in the trunk,” Donaldson said. “You might want to spritz me with that first, make it hurt even more.”

“I prefer lemon juice, but it’s no good until after the first half mile.”

Donaldson laughed.

“You think this is a joke?”

He shook his head. “No. But when you have the opportunity to kill, you should kill. Not talk.”

Donaldson sat up, quick for a man his size, and rammed his helmet into Lucy’s face. As she reeled back, he caught her shirt with his swollen hands and rolled on top of her, his bulk making her gasp.

“The keys,” he ordered. “Undo my hands, right now.”

Lucy tried to talk, but her lungs were crushed. Donaldson shifted and she gulped in some air.

“In… the… guitar case…”

“That’s a shame. That means you die right here. Personally, I think suffocation is the way to go. All that panic and struggle. Dragging some poor sap behind you? Where’s the fun in that? Hell, you can’t even see it without taking your eyes off the road, and that’s a dangerous way to drive, girl.”

Lucy’s eyes bulged, her face turning scarlet. “Poc… ket.”

“Take your time. I’ll wait.”

Lucy managed to fish out the handcuff keys. Donaldson shifted again, giving her a fraction more room, and she unlocked a cuff from one of his wrists.

He winced, his face getting mean.

“Now let me tell you about the survival of the fittest, little lady. There’s a…”

The chain suddenly jerked, tugging Donaldson across the ground. He clutched Lucy.

“Where are the car keys, you stupid bitch?”

“In the ignition…”

“You didn’t set the parking brake! Give me the handcuff key!”

The car crept forward, beginning to pick up speed as it rolled quietly down the road.

The skin of Donaldson’s right leg tore against the ground, peeling off, and the girl pounded on him, fighting to get away.

“The key!” he howled, losing his grip on her. He clawed at her waist, her hips, and snagged her foot.

Lucy screamed when the cuff snicked tightly around her ankle.

“No! No no no!” She tried to sit up, to work the key into the lock, but they hit a hole and it bounced from her grasp. They were dragged off the dirt and onto the road.

Lucy felt the pavement eating through her trench coat, Donaldson in hysterics as it chewed through the fat of his ass, and the car still accelerating down the five-percent grade.

At thirty miles per hour, the fibers of Lucy’s trench coat were sanded away, along with her camouflage panties, and just as she tugged a folding knife out of her pocket and began to hack at her ankle, the rough county road began to grind through her coccyx.

She dropped the knife and they screamed together for two of the longest miles of their wretched lives, until the road curved and the Honda didn’t, and the car and Lucy and Donaldson all punched together through a guardrail and took the fastest route down the mountain.

BLAKE:
I know it must be a great thrill getting to work with me, probably the real reason you wanted to become a writer in the first place. Did the experience live up to the dream?

JOE:
I can’t remember where we met for the first time. I think it was Jon Jordan (editor of the
Crimespree
zine) who gave me one of your books and said, “Read this, this guy is sick like you.” He was right. But to answer your question, yes, the experience lived up to the dream. I’ve collaborated on stories with several authors (Henry Perez, Tom Schreck, Jeff Strand, F. Paul Wilson) but nothing ever came so fast and furious, with so little need for revision. We cranked out almost 8000 words in something like five hours. This might be a good place to talk about our co-writing process.

BLAKE:
You pitched this idea to me in an email: “Now, let’s consider hitchhiking. You aren’t supposed to go hitch hiking, because the driver who picks you up could be crazy. You aren’t supposed to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be crazy. Now if we were to collaborate, I write a scene where a driver kills someone he picked up. You write a scene where a hitchhiker kills the guy who gave him a ride. Then we get these two together…”

I was immediately hooked. As I recall, we each wrote our sections in isolation, and we didn’t share them with each other. When they were as good as they could be, you emailed me 200 words to kick off section 3, and I wrote back the next hundred words or so. You write much faster than I do so you pretty much just harassed me until I would email you back with my scene, or rather, my response to what your character had done. Do you remember the ground rules we came up with for writing section 3 together? I don’t think we had an end in mind when we started. Didn’t we just let it flow organically and hope it came out all right?

JOE:
We had no end, and we weren’t allowed to get into our character’s thoughts. It was a straight third-person observational point of view, with no head-hopping. Sort of like a screenplay. The action had to be on the page.

BLAKE:
What made this so fun for me was that it was like playing chess with words. I created my very evil character and gave her a certain MO. You created the vastly demented Donaldson and gave him an MO, however as we began to email back and forth the text for section 3, we didn’t know anything about each others’ characters. In fact, I tried to get my girl to sit in the backseat, but you wouldn’t let her. You insisted she sit up front. I didn’t know why, but I knew it couldn’t be good.

JOE:
It was like we were really trying to kill each other. Which was fun to do with you, because you’re just as twisted as I am. You were writing LOCKED DOORS at the same time I was writing RUSTY NAIL, and we both wound up with a similar gimmick independent of one another; all serial killers have families.

BLAKE:
You and I share a similar sensibility in the darker side of fiction. There have been other instances when we were working on projects that had similarities. Like in AFRAID and SNOWBOUND when we both wrote scenes with wolves and bear traps. We also both love beer.

JOE:
Might be worth doing a brief bio here, for those who haven’t read us before.

I write thrillers under the name JA Konrath, about a cop named Jack Daniels who chases serial killers. The books have some laughs, but also contain a lot of dark, scary parts. Over the years I’ve gotten a fair amount of mail from fans, asking if I would ever do a scary book without any jokes. AFRAID was the result. Because it’s no-holds-barred horror, I used a pen name, Jack Kilborn.

BLAKE:
My first two books featured suspense writer Andy Thomas, who gets pulled into a nightmarish world even worse than the ones he writes about. My new one, ABANDON, which comes out this July is about a mining town that vanishes in 1893 in the Colorado mountains. This was fun, Bro! Until next time!

The Jack Daniels series by JA Konrath

Whiskey Sour

Bloody Mary

Rusty Nail

Dirty Martini

Fuzzy Navel

Cherry Bomb

Under the pen name Jack Kilborn

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Serial
by Blake Crouch and Jack Kilborn

The hunter’s moon, a shade of orange so dark it appeared to be filled with blood, hung fat and low over the mirror surface of Big Lake McDonald. Sal Morton took in a lungful of crisp Wisconsin air, shifted on his seat cushion, and cast his
Lucky 13
lure over the stern. The night of fishing had been uneventful; a few small bass earlier in the evening, half a dozen Northern Pike—none bigger than a pickle—and then, nothing. The zip of his baitcaster unspooling and the plop of the bait hitting the water were the only sounds he’d heard for the last hour.

Until the helicopter exploded.

It was already over the water before Sal noticed it. Black, without any lights, silhouetted by the moon. And quiet. Twenty years ago Sal had taken his wife Maggie on a helicopter ride at the Dells, both of them forced to ride with their hands clamped over their ears to muffle the sound. This one made a fraction of that noise. It hummed, like a refrigerator.

The chopper came over the lake on the east side, low enough that its downdraft produced large eddies and waves. So close to the water Sal wondered if its wake might overturn his twelve foot aluminum boat. He ducked as it passed over him, knocking off his Packers baseball cap, scattering lures, lifting several empty Schmidt beer cans and tossing them overboard.

Sal dropped his pole next to his feet and gripped the sides of the boat, moving his body against the pitch and yaw. When capsizing ceased to be a fear, Sal squinted at the helicopter for a tag, a marking, some sort of ID, but it lacked both writing and numbers. It might as well have been a black ghost.

Three heartbeats later the helicopter had crossed the thousand yard expanse of lake and dipped down over the tree line on the opposite shore. What was a helicopter doing in Safe Haven? especially at night? Why was it flying so low? And why did it appear to have landed near his house?

Then came the explosion.

He felt it a moment after he saw it. A vibration in his feet, as if someone had hit the bow with a bat. Then a soft warm breeze on his face, carrying mingling scents of burning wood and gasoline. The cloud of flames and smoke went up at least fifty feet.

After watching for a moment, Sal retrieved his pole and reeled in his lure, then pulled the starter cord on his

7.5 horsepower Evinrude. The motor didn’t turn over. The second and third yank yielded similar results. Sal swore and began to play with the choke, wondering if Maggie was scared by the crash, hoping she was all right.

Maggie Morton awoke to what she thought was thunder. Storms in upper Wisconsin could be as mean as anywhere on earth, and in the twenty-six years they’d owned this house she and Sal had to replace several cracked windows and half the roof due to weather damage.

She opened her eyes, listened for the dual accompaniment of wind and rain. Strangely, she heard neither.

Maggie squinted at the red blur next to the bed, groped for her glasses, pushed them on her face. The blur focused and became the time: 10:46

“Sal?” she called. She repeated it, louder, in case he was downstairs.

No answer. Sal usually fished until midnight, so his absence didn’t alarm her. She considered flipping on the light, but investigating the noise that woke her held much less appeal than the soft down pillow and the warm flannel sheets tucked under her chin. Maggie removed her glasses, returned them to the night stand, and went back to sleep.