Once inside the farmhouse, Theia checked for exits and hiding places. At once she was met with a wonderful smell that made her think of autumn and childhood. The front door of the farmhouse opened to a large room with an eat-in kitchen on one side. The massive plank kitchen table could have seated at least twelve. Next to the table were stacked cases of generic beer, a tower of yellow cans.
The interior of the farmhouse was filthy, with the exception of the kitchen, which was dingy but spotless. High-end small appliances held sharp contrast with everything else inside the building. Two pies rested on a cooling rack on the large kitchen table. That was what she had smelled – peach and apple pies. More than likely from fresh local harvest, as it was August.
Noticing Theia’s eyes on the pies, Nathan jeered, “Ain’t that just great? I go away to prison for a few years and my brother turns into a faggot. Baking pies, Jesus! Such a pussy.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Donald growled.
“Don’t know why you don’t get some broad to cook for you. Hey, since Rose is out of the picture, maybe you can get one that can cook worth a damn,” Nathan continued.
Donald grunted and made a show of ignoring Nathan.
Straight ahead was an old, black cast-iron woodstove. The stovepipe had fallen through the ceiling long ago, and was no longer connected to the stove. Filthy, chewed up, rodent infested upholstered chairs and a sofa were scattered across the room with no apparent purpose. There were three closed doors on a side wall. Theia saw an exterior door in the back of the kitchen and made note of the windows. The doors and windows were possible points of escape. She just had to be ready if an opportunity came along.
Colleen and Lu were not in the main room. Theia looked at the closed doors and wondered if they were there, and alive. The only sounds in the house were the scurrying of rodents and the moronic jabbering of the brothers. Theia almost reeled from the strong smell of cheap beer in the room. They must have made a serious dent in their beer stash. Her stomach churned as she contemplated what they might do to her. After seeing Rose, Theia realized there were no bounds to their sadism.
Nathan elbowed Donald. “Just wait ‘til she finds out,” he said. “She’ll shit her pants.”
Her stomach rolled. If there was no escape, she hoped she died quickly.
“Okay now, we’re supposed to put her in a wooden chair, not one of those mousy chairs,” Donald said, scraping a kitchen chair across the floor. “Sit down, lawyer bitch.” He shoved her down, then tied her ankles to the legs of the chair and her wrists behind the back of the chair.
“I wanna do her,” Nathan leered.
“No, we’re not supposed to mess her up. We can have the others.”
“Just a taste. No one’ll know,” Nathan wheedled. Who were they talking about? Had they invited friends? Theia wondered, hoping they were not going to be gang-raped.
“No, goddamn it. Don’t touch her. If you’re horny, hop one of the others.”
The brothers opened one of the doors on the left wall, taunting as they entered the room. “Guess who’s back? Did ya miss me?”
Theia heard smacks then thuds, followed by groans. She tried to close her mind from hearing crying and pleading that sounded like Lu. Theia sobbed as she was forced to hear her friend being brutalized. She didn’t hear anything she could identify as Colleen, and hoped she was still alive.
Eventually the brothers left that side room, went to the kitchen and grabbed more beer. Donald went onto the front porch, leaving the door open and urinating off the porch while drinking his beer. “Hey, look Nathan! The circle of life! Pouring it in while I’m pissing it out!” he snorted.
Not to be outdone, Nathan swaggered to the porch and did the same. “Don’t cross the streams! Whatever you do, don’t cross the streams!” he yelled. “Ha! I’d like to see Bill Murray do that.”
The buffoons slapped each other on the back and got more beers. “Let’s go out and bring in our other toy, Donald,” Nathan suggested. “I think he’s had enough beauty sleep by now.” They shoved each other as they walked to the barn.
“Lu?” Theia asked quietly.
There was a pause, and a weak “Yeah,” came from one of the side rooms.
Theia then asked, ”Colleen?” No answer. The front door of the farmhouse was open, so Theia did not dare yell for Colleen. Please let her be alive.
“Lu? When did you last hear Colleen?”
“Not for a while.”
“Damn.” Theia worked on the rope tied around her wrists. They had done a sloppy job of tying her, so she was able to loosen the ropes a little. “We’re going to get out of this.”
“Yeah, right,” answered Lu.
“We are,” Theia insisted. “We have to. Are you shackled or tied with ropes?”
“Ropes. Hands and feet.”
“Same here. I’m tied to a chair, and they didn’t do a very good job of it. See if you can work yourself loose, even part way. What are you tied to?”
“An old bed frame. No mattress, just springs sticking me in the back. They hurt like hell, but they take my mind off of … “ she trailed off.
“We’re going get out of this, Lu, I swear. Try to untie yourself or rub the ropes against something. Shit! Here they come. They’ve got Jack. We’d better be quiet.” She continued trying to work her bonds loose. Her hands could not quite reach each other. Twisting against the ropes was chafing the skin off of her wrists.
They dragged Jack and dumped him into a chair. He started to fall off. His eyes were nearly swollen shut from recent punches to the face. At least his head wounds had not started bleeding again.
“Get some damn rope, Nathan,” Donald bellowed. They trussed Jack into a chair, then pulled Lu and a semi-conscious Colleen into the room and tied them to chairs as well. “Now, let’s make sure he has a good view of the ladies. We want him to enjoy this as much as we will. Hey hero boy, you don’t look so good. Maybe the Ice Princess won’t want you no more since we uglied up your face for you.”
Nathan poured a cooler of ice water over Jack to rouse him back to consciousness. Jack shook his head, looked around the room, blinking, then moaned in pain. As his eyes started to focus, he saw the women and became enraged, which made the brothers chuckle.
“Oh, this is gonna be fun!” Nathan said. “Which one do we do first, Donald? And this time, I go first, not you.”
Donald’s face no longer bore a smile. He stared in shock out the open front door, where a long black car had just pulled up. Nathan glanced at Donald, then looked outside. “Shit! He’s early.” He started muttering the ABC song under his breath and fumbled in his pockets for his arrowhead, a cherished souvenir from a childhood trip to the Grand Canyon.
“Shut up, Nathan. Just shut up. Let me do the talking. And cut out that weird shit.”
“No one tells me to shut up,” Nathan became belligerent.
“Shut the fuck up or you’ll get us both killed,” Donald whispered. His face was pale. Nathan gulped and swallowed, and kept his mouth shut, humming the song as softly as possible.
The angle of the sun was such that Theia could see the silhouette of the man who emerged from the car, and not much more. The silhouette looked vaguely familiar. Despite the heat, he was wearing a long hunting coat and a hat pulled low over his face. The hat looked like the kind Coach Bear Bryant used to wear, but in solid black.
He reached into the back seat of the car and pulled out a black leather bag with small handles.
He stopped outside, between the car and the house, staring through the open doorway at Theia. Silently, he jerked his head toward Donald’s truck. Donald and Nathan scrambled out of the house toward the truck.
“Take them with you,” he said quietly but firmly, never taking his eyes off Theia. “And dispose of them.”
With shaking hands, Donald and Nathan quickly untied Lu, Colleen and Jack and shoved them out the door. The man stood outside patiently, waiting until Donald and Nathan had their prisoners at the truck. He slowly nodded once, still staring at Theia.
The stranger walked toward the farmhouse without looking to the right or the left, mounted the rickety wooden stairs and kept the same pace, as though he was on a moving sidewalk. With four paces he crossed the porch and stood in the doorway.
“It can’t be!” Theia whispered, staring at him open-mouthed. “This isn’t happening!” She felt dizzy with shock.
The man looked amused at Theia’s astonished face. He walked into the room and over to the kitchen, where he set the leather bag on the table, then turned and faced her.
“I’ve been watching you, dollbaby,” the man said evenly. “Watching you go to court and play the whore by working with men in a man’s profession. And I finally caught you sleeping around on me. Oh, don’t deny it, you slept with that piece of trash,” he tilted his head at the truck. “Now I’ll have to punish you. The way I always told you I would. You know what I mean.” His eyes gleamed as he looked down at his medical bag.
Theia gulped air rapidly as her terror swirled out of control. She thrashed about in the chair, screaming, “Help me! Come back here and help me!” at the departing truck.
“There’s no one to hear you, my dear,” he reached out to stroke her face but she flinched away.
“This isn’t happening. You’re not real. I’m having one of my nightmares.”
“I assure you, this will be your worst nightmare ever. And your last.”
Theia shuddered, overwhelmed with emotion. In the same day, she had seen Rose’s corpse, and now her long-dead husband had come back to kill her. This was too much. Even she could not handle all this, despite her experience in the art of staying alive. The one thing she thought she could count on – that Foster was dead – wasn’t true. Was anything she believed to be true actually reliable? And why do good people like Rose have to die and evil people like Foster get to live?
She wondered how Foster survived his injuries. Is it harder to kill evil people? If so, what did that say about her? She has been hard to kill. Did that mean she was evil, and she hadn’t realized it before? But then, does anyone, no matter how low and despicable, think they are evil?
She was just trying to survive. Maybe that was all Foster was trying to do, too. Maybe there is no such thing as evil, just survival. Perhaps we are all merely dressed up animals fighting to survive and deluding ourselves that we are somehow morally superior to animals in the wild for whom killing is a matter of survival. She had to stop this train of thought, focus on how to survive this moment, and worry about the morality later.
“This can’t be you,” Theia gasped. “You’re dead. The police told me you were pronounced dead at the hospital.”
“The police are idiots. To buy myself some time, I switched places with another patient, and bled him until he died. By the time they figured out the truth, I was well on my way.”
“So you just walked out of the emergency room? No one realized you were a patient?”
“I do know my way around an emergency room, sweetheart. I went into the on-call physician’s room and stole some poor sap’s clothes. Guess he had to wear scrubs home.”
“But you were injured!”
“They had already cleaned me up and taken the bullet out of my leg. On my way out of the ER I shot some painkiller in my leg so I could walk on it, and stuffed a wad of pain pills in my pocket.”
“But I saw you, you were shot in the head in my front yard!”
“Just grazed my head, darling.”
“You had convulsions.”
He smirked. “Do you know how many times I’ve seen convulsions in emergency rooms? They’re not difficult to imitate.”
The man took off his hat and coat and carefully folded and draped the coat over the arm of a mouse-eaten upholstered chair, setting the hat on top of the coat. She saw the scar on the side of his head as he walked out to his car.
Her heart raced and she started to hyperventilate. Sweat trickled down her back. No, reacting like this would get her killed. She had to get herself under control. Tamp down the fear. Feel nothing, only think. Think of a way to survive.
He brought in some medical equipment from the trunk and removed paper surgical garb from the bag. Something shiny caught her eye. On his left hand was the plain wide gold band she had given him on the day they married. Without a word, he slipped the paper booties over his shoes, put on the cap, mask, and gown.
Oh God. Just like in the nightmare. Just as he had described to her. Her mind leapt back and forth between scenes from the nightmare and the scene that was unfolding in front of her. She had to look away from the scalpels or she would start screaming and not be able to stop. She had to keep him talking while she thought of something. She could not die this way. Talking calmly had been the best things when he had schizophrenic episodes during their marriage. She had to find a way to sound calm and keep him talking. Clearing her throat and sniffling back unshed tears, she gave it her best effort. “So, Foster, where have you been for the last five years?”
“Underground, recuperating. When I was well enough, I made my way to South America and worked until I could come and reclaim my bride.”
“What kind of work were you doing?” Theia asked. No matter how disturbing the answer, she had to keep the conversation going.