The Jigsaw Man (14 page)

some sleep.

I reached through the ivy (or whatever the hell type

of plant it was), and gave the trellis a good strong tug.

N o t h i n g happened. It was made from some type of metal,

cold and hard to the touch, and from the way it didn't

even budge I could tell the trellis had been securely

fastened into the brickwork of the building. It would

hold my weight, no problem.

Maybe.

Before I had a chance to think too much, I swung

my legs over the ledge, and grabbed for the metal

framework with first one hand, then the other. Seconds

later, I was successfully onto the trellis. I h u n g there for

a minute as still as a display window mannequin, hardly

daring to breathe as I waited to hear the wrenching

noise of metal bolts breaking loose that would precede

my fifty-foot drop to oblivion. N o t h i n g happened, and

if the gods that watch over lunatics had decided to smile

on me tonight, I wasn't one to question their reasons. I

j u s t started up the makeshift ladder hand over hand,

foot over foot, as quickly and quietly as I could manage.

No doubt, I should probably be heading the opposite

direction, down the trellis to the ground and getting

the heck out of here, but I was too stubborn to do that.

Call me a fool, but I still wanted to get my hands (well,

hand, if I went through with this) on the money I'd been

promised. Until I had solid proof Dr. Marshall was

pulling a scam here, I wasn't about to let my vivid imag¬

ination cheat me out of my chance at being rich.

Scaling the trellis was easy, and getting into the fourthfloor room proved even easier. I'd expected to have to

wrestle with the bug screen, popping it off and trying

to catch it while dangling from one hand. Thankfully

there was no screen on this window, so I j u s t reached

over and stepped right in.

Inside, it was too dark for me to risk blindly stum¬

bling around, so I stood my ground and waited for my

eyes to re-accustom to the gloom. Soon, I could make

out enough details to guess I was in some sort of" large

storage room. There were several large bulky items ar¬

ranged along both outside walls, but the center of the

room was free of debris. Straight ahead, about forty feet

away, I could j u s t make out the rectangular-shaped

outline of what had to be the exit into the hallway. I

started walking in that direction, intending to find the

nearest stairwell, but I stopped dead in my tracks be¬

fore I'd taken my second step.

One of the bulky shapes against the wall to my right

began to move. Then my eyes caught another movement

somewhere over to my left. I remained calm, relatively

speaking, anyway, until I heard a sound that sent my

heart straight up into my throat. In that dark, suppos¬

edly empty storage room, someone began to snore.

Okfiuk!

I wasn't alone in this room. Someone was in here with

m e , still sleeping, obviously, but for how long? As my

night vision improved, it became evident things were

even worse than that. The bulky items I'd seen lining

the walls were all beds, and nearly every one of them

was being slept in. I counted ten, n o , eleven people sleep¬

ing around me.

My first thought was I'd walked into a room full of

security guards, slumbering in a barracks-type room un¬

til their shift in the morning. Something wasn't right

about the way the people looked, though. The bodies

looked weird somehow, far too small to be a group of

fully grown men.

The m o o n chose that moment to emerge from be¬

hind the clouds, bathing the room in a soft white glow

through the window behind me. I nearly screamed when

I realized what was wrong with the people lying in the

beds. They were fully grown men after all, but every

last one of them had had their arms and legs removed.

Clear plastic intravenous tubes were stuck in some of

their shoulder stumps, chests, or in the side of their

heads, and a dark fluid ran into several of the mutilated

men from small machines sitting on the floor beside

some of the beds.

What happened to these poor people?

I noticed the industrial-sized refrigerator with the

sliding glass doors on the front of it, and the stacks of

small liquid-filled bags separated into sections with la¬

bels like
A NEG
or
O POS.
Then I grasped the true

horror of what was happening here in this secret room.

The machines on the floor and the IV tubes weren't

giving
the limbless men the dark fluids—they were
tak¬

ing it.

My ears were ringing, vividly recalling how Dr. Mar¬

shall had said they had a problem keeping up with the

constant need for fresh blood for his experiments.

Sweet mother of God!

This awful room was the solution to the surgeon's

ongoing supply problem. They were his Bleeders: men

kept alive for the sole purpose of being continually

tapped and re-tapped for that most precious of human¬

ity's resources. This wasn't a room full of sick men—it

was Dr. Marshall's blood bank.

C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N

I couldn't move. I tried, but I couldn't. My feet felt like

they were nailed to the floor. I'd seen a lot of weird

things in my life, and I knew humans were capable of

committing copious amounts of cruel and vicious acts,

but I'd never seen anything as nasty as this. This was

cruelty so extreme my mind was short-circuiting, over¬

loaded trying to somehow justify what I was seeing. I

couldn't do it. This wasn't something that could be ra¬

tionalized. The only explanation for this was madness.

Taking a few deep breaths, I forced myself to calm

down. I needed to think, decide what this meant in re¬

gards to my situation, and then figure out what my next

move should be. I was j u s t getting focused, when a

strong, clear, man's voice said, "Hey, mister, you're not

a guard, are you?"

For a second time I nearly screamed, the booming

voice startling me badly, but at least breaking me out of

reverie. N o t having a clue who the voice belonged to, or

where this man was, I darted my head left, then right,

panic swelling inside me because I couldn't find him.

"Stop flapping your head around, boy, and get over

here. Behind you, second bed from the door."

I turned and finally saw him. A tiny little b u m p of

meat hidden under a blanket with his seemingly large

shaven head turned on its side watching me. He looked

wide-awake, alert, and a little tense. Probably had been

watching me for a while, maybe scared at first, wonder¬

ing who I was, and why I was sneaking around in the

middle of the night. Judging from his rough, gravelly

voice—and from the way he'd addressed me as "boy"—I

figured he was an older man, maybe sixty, but from what

was left of his ravaged body, that was only a guess.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked, once I'd walked

over to the foot of his bed.

He was talking too loud, so I hurried to answer him,

more to shut him up than because I wanted to chat. "My

name's Michael Fox," I whispered, "and n o , I'm not a

guard. I'm just a guest, and I'm not here to hurt you, sir,

so quiet down a little, okay?"

"Quiet down?" he spoke in the same loud tone.

"Why? For these veggies, you mean?" sweeping his

eyes around the room. "You don't have to worry about

bothering any of these fellas. Trust me. Their cabooses

are still here, but the rest of the trains left the station a

long time ago, if you catch my drift. The only one who's

somewhat with it is Charlie, the guy snoring his head

off over there, but he fades in and out. The rest, well,

they're in a better place, I hope."

Quieting down a little regardless, perhaps for my

sake, he said, "You can call me Lucas, Mr. Fox. Okay if

I call you Michael?"

"Sure. Make it Mike."

"Fine. N o w that we've been introduced, j u s t what in

blazes are you doing here?"

"Well, I couldn't get my room door to open," I lied,

stumbling to find an explanation that wasn't totally idi¬

otic. "It must be j a m m e d , or the lock might be broken.

It's the middle of the night, and I didn't want to bother

anyone, so I tried my window and noticed—"

"No, no," he interrupted. "I don't give a damn why

you're here in this room. Why are you
here,
in this

godforsaken hell house?"

Hell house?

"Oh, I'm here to help Dr. Marshall with, ah, one of

his experiments. He's paying m e — "

"Let me guess?" Lucas interrupted again. "A million

dollars, right?"

"Two million, actually. Already been wired into a

bank account in the Cayman Islands. W h a t do you know

about it?"

"Two
million? Wow. The stakes sure are going up. And

you can forget the Caymans. You might have thought all

that malarkey with the secretary and fax machines was

real, but it was bullshit, Mike. They play that game with

everyone. W h e n I arrived, must be nearly two years

ago, I was stupid enough to agree to six hundred thou¬

sand. Mind you, that was only for my right hand, Char¬

lie, he was the one who said he'd signed for a million. I

think that was for one of his legs, but I can't remember

for sure now.

"Doesn't matter. N e i t h e r does the money. Doesn't

matter what body part you agree to donate, or for how

much. Hell, Doc Marshall could've promised you two

billion
dollars for y o u r toenail, M i k e , you won't see a

dime."

My ears were hearing the words this partial man was

speaking, but I was having a hard time m a k i n g sense of

them. After building up my hopes and dreams for a

better life for my daughter and me, it was difficult let¬

ting myself believe what my heart had been trying to

tell me all along. It was a lie. All of it. Dr. Marshall

never had any intention of paying me for my arm. I had

all the proof I needed lying all around me.

This revelation, although I'd had my suspicions and

this was exactly the evidence I'd gone searching for,

still hit me like a ton of bricks. A major part of me had

desperately wanted this to work out, for something to

finally go my way, j u s t once. I should have known bet¬

ter. I bowed my head, stunned into silence.

"What are you supposed to be giving up?" Lucas

asked.

"My right arm. I'm left-handed, and I figured, I j u s t

figured ... ah fuck! I don't know what I figured."

"Listen to m e , boy. Listen good. Dr. Marshall will

take your right arm, but he won't stop there. He's been

trying this shit for years, and it never works. N o t the

way he wants it to, anyway. The donor parts don't last,

or they don't function right after a few weeks. He prob¬

ably told you he's setting all these records for keeping

body parts alive, but he's bullshitting you. He replaces

the parts with new donors, and pretends it's the same

one. He's crazy, man.

"He's not even a real doctor. N o t anymore. From

what I hear he was once a damn good one, but he lost

his mind around the same time he lost the use of his

legs. Something snapped and he ended up losing his li¬

cense because he was caught doing unethical research.

They nailed his ass to the wall, but he had family money

to fall back on. Eventually he opened this place and

hires all the failed surgeons and discredited nurses he

can round up. T h i n k about ic W h o else would work for

a bastard like h i m ? "

I had no idea. My mind was spinning too fast to

think straight. W h a t a nightmare. Maybe I—

"Don't do it, Mike. Don't you give that crazy man

anything, you hear me? He'll cut you to pieces, boy, just

like he done me. First your arms, then your legs, then

one day when you're of no further use to him, you'll end

up in this room with me. Run away, right now. Run as

far from here as you can, and never come back. Never!"

N o d d i n g my understanding to the old man, I knew it

was time to leave. I'd seen and heard enough. Dr. Mar¬

shall might be a brilliant surgeon, and an incredibly

smart man, but somewhere along the line his obses¬

sions had pushed him over the edge. He wasn't bug-eyed

crazy, j u s t psychotic, a man driven to succeed at any

and all costs. No sane man could justify the crimes he

was committing inside this room. There was no way I

was going through with the operation now. This room¬

ful of Bleeders was more than enough to convince me it

was time to pull out of D o d g e , get as far away from this

crazy place as I could.

And I'm taking my arm with me.

Turning on my heel, I started back toward the open

window, intending to climb down to my room long

enough to quietly gather my stuff, then use the trellis