Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) (5 page)

J
acob had
stood witness while Brian murdered a man, as if it were no big whoop. He fornicated (or whatever he called it) with the woman who had ordered it done. The same woman who, whilst fornicating (or whatever she called it) had yelled out crazy stuff like “kill me” and “stab me.” Jacob had beaten her black and blue with a rubber club. They had a whipping wall in their room with an easy-to-clean concrete floor. And they were business associates (or whatever they called it) with Ernest Prescott, whose writing was so sadistic and hateful it turned my stomach in a way commonly reserved for Hallmark stores and vegetables. And now this same Jacob, willing participant to all that awfulness, wanted me to watch movies with him.

He slipped a DVD from a clear plastic case, confirming my worst fears.

“Home movies?” I said.

“Better,” he said, and put in the disk.

Strapped down and trapped, unable to scratch my itchy nose and wondering what would happen when I needed to use the bathroom, I sat in my chair and wondered what a guy like Jacob thought Ernest Prescott would find enjoyable.

The scene opened to darkness, then the cheerful sound of Brother Bones whistling Sweet Georgia Brown. Very creepy. Just as I wondered if it was simply a bootleg Globe Trotters’ video, the screen brightened and the camera zoomed in, leaving nothing to the imagination. What followed were depictions of torment and barbarism, savage and raw, exposing the limits of human endurance stretched to the breaking point. Unlike the events in
Sliced
, this was real. There was choking, there was pummeling and blood, there was violation and agony and humiliation and grief, each scene more shocking than the ones preceding it, building again and again to the same predictable climax where the victim was forced to hang his head while Jacob raised his fists in victory, howling like a maniac.

That’s right: Jacob was playing me his extreme fighting videos.
His
videos, because he was in every one.

“Wow,” I said at one point. “You sure hit
that
guy.”

Jacob faced me with a condescending smile. “Oh yeah, Ernest the karate fighter. Just be glad I wasn’t there when that asshole pulled his knife. I’d be in jail and he’d be dead, know what I mean?”

Coming from anyone else, I’d have figured it for bluster. With Jacob, it was probably the closest he came to modesty.

The video kept playing, fight after fight, and despite myself I was getting into it. It was something to do. Also, years ago, back when extreme fighting first got popular in the U.S., I’d rented the first five or so pay-per-view specials.

There’s something about two people battling it out that triggers our survival instinct. And even though I’m technically dead most of the time, my survival instinct carries with me, such that two people duking it out on the mansion’s big screen TV easily became the most interesting thing in the room.

In that respect it was a little like watching
Sliced,
and I wondered what that said about me, that I could enjoy the one while condemning the other.

Watching Jacob’s videos, I found myself flinching and wanting to punch the air, despite my restraints. But after a while, it got tiresome watching Jacob win every fight. I kept hoping for the other guy to choke him out, like Royce Gracie did over and over again in those early extreme fighting championships … but no, Jacob kept knocking everybody out. He was a hitter, not a grappler. He had no style or finesse, only brute strength and aggression. Royce Gracie liked to grab his opponents around the middle and hold on for fifteen minutes while they tired themselves out, beating on him with short ineffectual punches. Then he’d flip his leg up around the guy’s neck and do this weird jujitsu thing and the guy would give up, screaming in pain.

“Hey look at that,” Brian said, coming into the room with a plate of sandwiches and a six-pack of beer. “Prescott’s watching sports. How you liking it, man?”

“Fun fun,” I said, flashing him a thumbs-up, one of the few gestures I could do that didn’t require raising my arms.

Brian said, “Made them myself. You want roast beef or baloney?”

“Both,” I said. “I’m starved. Thanks.”

Then, despite being a big guy who liked to shoot people at the nod of my literary agent and captor, he proceeded to feed me. I’ll give Brian one thing: he made a mean sandwich. I downed four total, taking little swishes of beer in-between, even though I didn’t like beer.

“You sure you don’t want more?” he said, casting an amused glance at the last two sandwiches.

As if sensing the very real danger of me saying
yes
, Jacob reached over and snagged one. There was one left. A baloney. But I could tell Brian wanted it, so…

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’m full.”

Brian smiled and said, “Don’t mind if I do.”

So there we were, three killers watching extreme fighting on TV, eating red meat and drinking beer. And out of nowhere, despite being lashed against my will to a wheelchair, I didn’t feel so lonely.

When you’re a dead guy, you make do.

After finishing his sandwich, Jacob hit pause and said, “Gimme a minute.” Then he walked out.

Brian watched him go, then said, “Hey, man, I want you to know: I appreciate you being cool about what went down yesterday. Lana made me check on that house we found you at.”

“That house?” I said, hoping against hope.

“Yeah,” he said, giving me a significant look. “As far as I’m concerned, nobody lives there. Cuz you cool. Maybe someday you’ll do
me
a favor. Know what I’m saying?”

Yeah I knew what he was saying: he was keeping Sandra and her family safe. My throat tightened and I’m sure my face flushed. Relieved beyond measure, I wanted to dance or cry.

“Thank you,” I said, not pretending at anything for once. With every fiber in me, I meant it, and I wanted him to know that.

Brian nodded. Cuz I was cool.

Seconds later, Jacob returned.

“Yo, Brian,” he said. “You and me in the gym, when Ernie and Lana are getting their freak-on, what do you say? Teach you a few moves.”

Brian frowned at the mention of
freak-on
, but it passed quickly. He gave me a final significant look and said, “Sure, man. Maybe I’ll teach you something, too?”

H
ours later
, after we’d sat through all of Jacob’s victories, Lana walked in dressed in a dominatrix getup. She wore black high-heel boots strapped up to her calves, with glinting chrome spikes sticking out in every direction. She was a big one for spikes—her patent leather corset pushed her small breasts up impossibly high, spearing the room with razor tips where the nipples should be. Her lips were dark maroon, almost black. Her nails, about an inch long, were arterial in their redness.

Instead of a cat o’ nine tails, she carried a bedpan.

Brian and Jacob threw each other knowing looks, like they had pressing business somewhere else, then cleared out.

“How’s my poor little patient doing?” Lana said, stroking my face lovingly. Gone was the nervous tension she’d shown tending to me upstairs in the bedroom. She was in her element.

“Just watching TV.”

“I have something far more entertaining in mind,” she said. “But first, we need to get you out of those clothes.”

“You think guys like me fall for lines like that?” I said.

Lana arched her neck, trying for seductive. Then she laughed, trying for throaty. But again, though beautiful in a technical sense, she didn’t seem sexy to me. She seemed tired, burned out inside, all ends and no candle. Furious at something indefinable, and I wondered if even she knew what it was.

She flourished a knife and grabbed my shorts.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I said.

With her tongue poking out of her mouth, she proceeded to cut my shorts and underwear away, leaving me exposed and a little colder than I had been.

“You’re going to have to raise yourself,” she said, a hint of exasperation in her voice.

“Hey,” I said. “Seriously, I’m fine. That thing with the shower was just … you know, after effects from last night. I’m ready to get back to normal.”

Lana threw me a curious look and said, “That’s what we’re doing, Ernest. Now lift!”

She flicked her knife near my nether regions, nicking my inner thigh and causing me to jump—then slipped in the bedpan.

“Hey!” I said. “Easy with the knife, okay?”

Lana stood up straight—posing for me, it seemed like, while leering at my nakedness. Then she frowned. “Do you want me to assist you?”

When it dawned on me what she meant, I shook my head and said, “I’d rather you get me a new pair of shorts.”

Lana’s eyes flashed dangerously. She stepped behind me, kicked the blockers open on the chair and jerked me angrily backwards, then forward, rolling me down one of the wings I hadn’t explored.

This was it—she was going to torture me. That’s what the bedpan was for, in case I messed myself. I’d never been systematically tortured by a psycho who got off on pain, and she could torture me until I got kicked—about three weeks from now—or until she screwed up and killed me, whichever came first.

My last ride had been a sick bastard who got off torturing dogs and posting videos of it on the Internet. Vile, heartbreaking stuff, and even though I hadn’t found any human victims in his computer files, I’d killed him for it anyway. Was this, now, my punishment? Because animals supposedly didn’t have souls?

We came to a closed door on the right—single, not a French door like the bedrooms all seemed to have. About fifteen feet down was another single door, also on the right.

Lana pushed open the closest one and wheeled me in. The room was muted, with fabric on the walls like they have in movie theaters to muffle the sound. Scattered in the room were three sofa chairs—the reclining kind, judging by the little levers poking out the sides.

Along the left wall, where the movie screen would be, hung dark red curtains.

Lana left me where I was, went over to the nearest chair and tugged it out of the way. Then she got behind me and pushed me into the previously occupied spot, facing the curtains.

“Are you going to torture me?” I said at last, unable to bear it any longer.

“Only if you want me to,” she breathed.

“I’d rather you let me go.”

She laughed. “Now why would I do that? What’s in it for me?”

“We could go have sex.”

Any port in a storm…

“Come now, Ernest,” she said. “Aren’t you a little bit curious about your muse?”

Lana walked over to the wall and pulled a rope, drawing the curtains wide, revealing another room separated from this one by a plate glass window. There was someone inside, naked on a gurney, strapped down like me except on her back—pitiful and afraid, and very alone.

“I’m disappointed in you,” Lana said. “All those demands: dark hair, big boobs, good teeth, young, and as requested—
pregnant
. Ready to burst. The boys worked very hard to find her. She’s a pretty little sow. Pristine. It was all I could do to keep Sean off of her, but he’s no longer a problem.” She laughed harshly. “The news is obsessed with her disappearance, which is why we simply don’t have time for you to get over whatever the hell’s wrong with you.” She walked up to the window. “We need
Sliced 2,
and soon, before they forget about us. And when we’re done, the world will weep with the certainty they never had souls.”

Still staring at the poor woman, feeling nothing but pity for her, I realized what was going on. She was the
muse
I’d been hearing about—the inspiration for Ernest’s next sad little book. I wondered how many muses he’d had over the years.

I shook my head, for once at a loss for words.

“Jacob actually had a good idea for once,” Lana said, eyes dancing. “If the baby lives, we could raise it ourselves, just the three of us. A new mind untainted by the world, fresh for us to mold. Our own little apex fiend.” She laughed her real laugh, hoarse and desperate. “Think of the possibilities!”

“No,” I croaked out, but she wasn’t listening. Too lost in the possibilities.

“Sorry about the bedpan,” she said, staring hungrily through the window at the woman. “I still don’t trust you, and once I start cutting … well, I have to control the bleeding. I can’t be running in here if you have to pee. I’ll make it up to you when it’s over, I promise. All night, if you want. I’ll even save some of her blood.”

She flicked a switch I hadn’t seen on the wall and suddenly I could hear the quiet sobs of the woman in the other room playing in surround-sound.

Shaking my head, I shouted, “Let her go! Don’t do this! You don’t need to do this!”

This couldn’t happen. I couldn’t let this happen. No way could this happen. If I could just get free…

Lana glanced back at me. “You’re not yourself. I want my Ernest back.”

Then she was out the door, shutting it firmly behind her, leaving me to stare helplessly through the window at that sad, lost woman and her doomed child.

Refusing to give up, angry and desperate and willing to try anything, I closed my eyes and bowed my head.

And made my case.

“
L
isten
,” I said, under my breath. “I know you’re there. You’re always there, and I know you can hear me. I can’t see why you chose me or even what you want most of the time. But if you don’t do something to stop this, right now, help me get out of this goddamned wheelchair, then we’re
through
. I mean it—never again. I’ll stay in my hole and rot for eternity, no matter how many portals you send for me.”

When nobody said anything, I shouted, “Do you hear me? Help me now or it’s over! Do you hear me?
Do you?
”

When the walls didn’t reverberate with a ghostly voice saying help had arrived, when the straps on my arms didn’t rot away like I needed them to, I hung my head in defeat, cursed with the knowledge that God or something like him existed and didn’t actually care for us at all.

Fuming, I decided the Great Whomever could take a flying … no, scratch that. I wasn’t calling him that anymore. I had a new name for him.

“You hear that!” I shouted. “How do you like your new name, asshole? You’re now the
Great
Who Gives A Shit!
”

Because when you’re sitting with your pants off perched on a bedpan, about to watch a crazy woman start cutting pieces off an innocent pregnant lady, and you can’t do anything but shout insults, you shout insults.

Just when I’d nailed down my new name for the Great Wherever, almost as if someone was tired of all the whining, my olfactory senses flooded with the smell you get after a hard punch in the nose, and everything turned upside down and sideways. Seconds later, I got kicked again, leaving me dizzy and blinking at thousands of little lights trailing everywhere.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s not what I meant.
Help
me, dammit! Don’t kick me out!”

In the room with the sobbing woman, Lana flipped a switch on the wall and the plate glass pulsed with the sound of grinding death metal: chaotic, hellish, and loud. Shocked by the sudden cacophony, the woman began to scream.

Rocking to the almost non-existent tune, Lana wheeled over a tray of glittery surgical instruments and pushed it near the table with the screaming woman.

The third kick hit me so hard I thought I’d pass out, but didn’t.

In all my rides, I’d never felt a fourth kick before, and I didn’t this time. All I knew is I was sitting on a bedpan one moment and the next I wasn’t.

D
an stands
in the entrance to an apartment building. He hears a chuckle from behind him, then feels intense pain as a knife slams in under his ribs. He bends over, trying to breathe, but can’t. No—he’s breathing, it’s just not helping. Pant pant pant, all for nothing. His chest seizes up on him, and then—

He’s falling. The wind whips past his face in a roar of sound. The world is a spinning tube of black and white and black and white. His tumbling levels out enough that he catches sight of an enormous span, far above him. A suspension bridge. He hits the water, and then—

He looks up from his cell phone in time to see the back of a pickup truck rushing toward him, and then—

Bullets slam into him. He drops his gun, but the police keep firing. “Wait,” he gasps, but the police choose not to, and then—

He’s bouncing down a flight of stairs. His hands aren’t where he needs them to be and he watches helplessly as hard tiles hurtle up to meet him in a looming, life-ending faceplant, and then—

He dies in another car crash.

He slips on slick tiles and strikes his head.

Another crash.

Dan screams forever over the course of countless deaths, his voice changing with each successive ride: high, low, raspy, shrill, smooth. Sort of like in that “wazaaap” commercial everyone was imitating way back when.

He dies in an empty hospital room, choking on his own congestion.

His last breath exhales in a cloudy plume in a forest, cold and dark, his body numb and drowsy.

Something like glass stabs him in the chest again and again, and the last thing he sees is the comforting face of a child with enormous blue eyes. She’s smiling at him like she knows him. She leans down as if to whisper something in his ear … but he’s gone before he can hear it.

Dan flails about, grabbing or dropping or leaping or twisting each time, hoping for anything to pull him out of the death cycle, but all he does is die, die, die.

Another heart attack and he dies.

Another car crash and he dies.

He dies.

He dies.

A slaughter of deaths later, Dan’s hands close around something warm and meaty and he squeezes desperately for dear life. He knows he’s fighting—not dying—and so he fights back with everything in him, and wonder of all: he lives.

I
fought
.

We were on the ground. Myself, a black guy with powerful arms, sweating and breathing heavily, and someone else, a white guy, also big. I had him around the neck from behind, with my legs wrapped around his waist. Though I held on tightly, I wondered if maybe I should let go and run off. Somehow I’d popped into another body, but I couldn’t dwell on that astonishing fact.

“Let … go … man … can’t … breathe…”

Though his voice was strained and raspy, I recognized him—it was Jacob!

Somehow, I’d come back as Brian, and we were sparring together like Jacob had suggested earlier. He’d offered to teach Brian a few moves. I remembered it perfectly, like all my rides after I’d been kicked out, with the perfect memory of the dead.

Rather than let him go, I held on tighter—and
squeezed
. With everything in me, I choked the sonofabitch. Because I also remembered what Lana had said about the woman on the gurney:
The boys worked so hard to find her.

When Lana had entered the TV room, wearing her weird outfit with all the spikes, Jacob and Brian had cleared out quickly. Brian had pulled an unpleasant face at the mention of Lana and me getting our
freak on
. He’d known something of Lana’s plans.

Jacob thrashed spastically while I continued to squeeze, both with my arms—like I’d seen in those videos years ago—and with my legs, to keep him from getting away. Maybe Brian was in the process of learning something, or teaching something, because he was in the exact place needed for me to take over. A good thing, because after seeing Jacob’s victory videos, I knew there was no way I could go toe-to-toe with him in a fair fight.

Somewhere in the house, Lana was arranging her scalpels and saws, getting ready to do the unthinkable. Unless, of course, the Great Whomever (his name provisionally restored), had brought me back too late.

One of the peculiar perks of having a perfect memory is I can count things and events from various rides very quickly. Between one gasp from Jacob and a ragged pant from me, I knew exactly how many times I’d died in that terrifying smokestack of death.

My heart sank. Each death had lasted as many as a few seconds. Strung together, my time away had been close to thirty minutes. Long enough for Lana to have done anything she wanted to the woman on the gurney.

Jacob gave a last-ditch attempt to break free, and I responded by squeezing with all I had, throwing all my rage and disgust into it—at Ernest and his stupid writing, at Lana’s ugly soul, and at myself, for watching TV with
the guys
and having fun like I belonged somewhere.

Moments later, Jacob was limp in my arms. I didn’t know if I’d killed him or not, but he didn’t appear to be breathing. With no time to check, I got up and scanned the room—a home gym with mirrors everywhere, workout machines in the far corner, and wall-to-wall wrestling mats.

I noticed a black lump over near the door, just to the side. Brian’s gun, in a hip holster. I pulled it out and racked the slide back, sending a shell flying out. That was fine, I’d only need a few, and it had a high-capacity magazine.

Gun in hand, I rushed through the house hoping for that special moment when I saw something I recognized and stopped being lost. There were no windows in any of the rooms, so I began looking for staircases, figuring I was in a basement. After bursting into an indoor shooting range that smelled of frequent use, I turned back and pretended I’d gone right instead of left after leaving the gym. This took me to a lounge with an enormous bar and a dance floor. On the other side was an opening to a marble staircase leading up.

It struck me as funny that Lana would buy such an extravagant house. I wondered if it belonged to her dead husband.

When I got up the stairs, I was standing in the main hall. To the left, I knew I’d find the big foyer with the fountain in the middle. I took that in the direction of the TV room where Brian had fed me sandwiches, then followed the same path that Lana had wheeled me through, eventually arriving at the doors to the torture room and the viewing room. One of them, the closest, held Ernest. Loud death metal howled and screamed from the other.

I tried the door with the music and found it locked. It seemed solid and strong. Worse, it opened outward, into the hall, so I couldn’t use Brian’s big muscles to smash it in. Rather than doing all that, I knocked loudly and hoped to cut through the music. No reason for her not to open it.

Lana, however, didn’t answer.

One thing I wouldn’t do was shoot through the knob, for fear of hitting the woman. So I knocked again, harder, more insistently. I needed that door open, but again nobody answered.

I ran back to Ernest’s door and opened it up. The death metal intensified, blaring from the speakers Lana had turned on before leaving me trapped there.

“Brian!” Ernest shouted angrily, a confused expression on his face. “Get me out of this chair, dammit! What’s going on?”

The woman in the other room was pleading, barely loud enough to make out: “No, please let me go. Please!”

Ignoring Ernest, I looked through the window and saw Lana consulting a thick book resting on a stainless steel table, her back turned toward me.

Somehow, the woman on the gurney was free from harm. But Lana had been busy in my time away. Across the woman’s belly and breasts, and at various places along her arms, legs, and face, Lana had drawn surgical lines with a black magic marker.

Why would anyone…?

Lana shut the book, apparently satisfied with whatever she’d been looking at. Then she put the magic marker down and picked up a scalpel from a tray with a bunch of clamps and odd tools I didn’t recognize. She smiled down at the sobbing woman and waved the scalpel dangerously close to her tear-streaked face. Then, with a sadistic smirk, she traced the scalpel down the woman’s cheek and neck, languidly across her chest, then down and around her exposed belly.

Lana’s face appeared almost … not motherly, exactly, but enraptured. Fascinated by every scream or shudder or sign of terror she managed to elicit from her victim. She was savoring it, drawing it out like the world’s most demented foreplay.

“No!” I shouted, but Lana didn’t hear me.

I didn’t know if the gun had been loaded with hollow-points or not. If not, they’d pass through the window mostly straight, even if I hit it from an angle. Though I could name every head-of-state in the last hundred years, I wasn’t a ballistics expert, or even a ballistics novice. For all I knew, hitting the window with a hollow-point would shoot pieces of metal everywhere, and possibly hit the woman on the gurney.

“Brian!” Ernest shouted. “What are you doing with that gun? Come help me!”

When Lana lowered the knife to a point just below the woman’s bellybutton, along one of the black lines, I pointed the gun away from both of them and shot through the glass.

The glass cracked into a million little pieces. This would have worked out perfectly, but the glass stayed mostly in place except for a three-inch circle where the bullet had passed. Now my view through the window went from a clear view of Lana and the woman to a hazy, fractured view of something tall and black next to something white and horizontal.

With the window compromised, the death metal blared louder than ever, but not so loud as to occlude the woman’s wails of terror … wait, no, that was Ernest. I couldn’t hear much else through the ringing in my ears from the gunshot.

Heedless of cutting myself, I bashed the gun hard into the broken glass, widening the hole. When I looked through it, the door was open and Lana was gone.

The woman’s stomach was bloody.

No, please!

I ran into the hall and saw Lana stumbling as fast as her stupid dominatrix boots would carry her. I hesitated, locked between two decisions: try shooting at her or help the woman. Lana glanced back once, and the look on her face wasn’t fearful or shocked. It was hateful, livid, unholy.

Lana turned the corner, and I went in to check the pregnant woman.

Her belly had a jagged cut along the side, as if Lana had been startled by the gunshot and jumped. She was bleeding, but not a lot. Trying not to panic, I felt along the cut with my fingers. The scalpel had sunk a quarter inch in one spot, but no farther. She’d need stitches to close it. The bleeding worried me because, slow as it was, I didn’t know if it would stop.

The woman said something I couldn’t hear over the music, which was driving me nuts. I found the switch on the wall Lana had flipped and turned it off.

“—don’t kill me!” the woman shouted, too loudly in the now quiet room. “What did I do? Why am I here?”

I wanted to ask her who brought her here. But with a crazy dominatrix on the loose, I needed to stay focused.

It didn’t help that Ernest kept yelling, “Jacob! Lana!” and “
Get me out of this fucking chair!
”

Ignoring Ernest and the crying woman, I glanced around for something to stop the bleeding. There weren’t any bandages in Lana’s surgical tray. From Lana’s warped perspective, I figured, the more blood the better so long as the woman didn’t bleed out and die too soon. Probably what those clamps were for. I didn’t know how to use them without causing more damage, so I took off my shirt, bunched it up, and pressed it against the cut. After holstering the gun, I worked the leather strap holding her right arm until she could pull her hand free.