SERIAL UNCUT (17 page)

"
Lucy? Where are you?" His words
slurred. "I just wanna talk."

"
I'm over here, big boy! Still waiting
for that spanking!"

His footsteps abruptly stopped. Dead quiet
for thirty seconds, and then the footsteps started up again,
heading in her general direction.

"
Oh, no, please," she moaned. "Don't
hurt me, Donaldson. I'm so afraid you'll hurt me."

He was close now, and she turned and started
back toward the road, her hands out in front of her to prevent
collision with a tree.

A glint of light up ahead--the Honda's
windshield catching a piece of moonlight.

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 the flesh of 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.

EPILOGUE
The Next Day, Location
Unknown

The TV droned on in the background.

"...
is Gregory Donaldson, age 56, who
was in the news a week ago for assaulting a police officer in
Wisconsin. He's been linked to over fifty homicides going back
thirty years, and found hidden in the upholstery of his vehicle was
a large collection of Polaroid pictures, apparently showing him
viciously murdering numerous victims. The woman chained to
Donaldson, as of yet unidentified, is described as a
person of interest
by the FBI.
They've just released a statement suggesting that fingerprint and
DNA evidence could point to her being a serial killer. A task force
has been formed to try and close the books on dozens of unsolved
murders spanning nineteen states that this duo may have been
responsible for.

"
This is the arresting officer in the
recent Marshal Otis Taylor case, Chicago Homicide Lieutenant
Jacqueline Daniels, who encountered Donaldson eight days ago at a
Murray's truck stop on Interstate 39 in Wisconsin during her
confrontation with Taylor."

The scene on the television changed from the
trench-coated reporter standing in front of the hospital to an
attractive woman in a pantsuit being mobbed by reporters in a
parking lot.

"
There are predators out there," the
cop said. "We've been lucky to nail three in a week. But there are
others. Many others. Recreational killers are incredibly hard to
catch, but even the smartest of them screw up
eventually."

Hmm
, Luther
thought, turning his attention from the television set to the
crying, bleeding man hanging from the ceiling.

Jacqueline Daniels... I really should look her
up.

For the continuing adventures of Mr. K, read
Shaken, the 7th Jack Daniels thriller by J.A. Konrath.

For the continuing adventures of Orson and
Luther, read Desert Places and Locked Doors by Blake Crouch.

For the continuing adventures of Taylor,
read Afraid by Jack Kilborn.

AFTERWORD
In Which
Blake and Joe Interview Each Other About the Experience of Writing
Serial and Serial Uncut.

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 (Jeff Strand, Henry
Perez, Tom Schreck, 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
ending planned, 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:
I'm about
eight years older, so I've loved beer longer than you have. 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, very much like
the Taylor section of this novella.

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 Andrew Thomas, who gets
pulled into a nightmarish world even worse than the ones he writes
about. My latest book, SNOWBOUND, is coming out June 2010.
It
deals with human trafficking, a missing
mother/wife, the Alaskan mob, and an elite Mexican ex-paratrooper
group who are muscle for the drug cartels (they're real and they
are so freaking terrifying I don't even call them by name in the
book).
Want to talk about all the negative reviews
SERIAL has gotten?

Joe:
Man,
people sure are vocal in their hatred of this story. There have
been hundreds of negative reviews on Amazon, Sony, B&N, and
Apple, saying how sick and disgusting the story is, and how we're
both monsters for writing such a thing.

First of all, it's a horror story. Horror is
supposed to push boundaries and freak people out. What did they
expect downloading a story about serial killers? Dr. Seuss?

Second, SERIAL was free, for heaven's sake.
It's not like anyone was ripped off by us. They get it for nothing,
then tear it to shreds because they don't like horror. If I didn't
find it so funny, I might be a little hurt.

Blake:
There
have been some classic negative reviews. Clearly, a large group of
people just downloaded SERIAL because it was free, without reading
the explicit and redundant warnings you and I both went out of our
way to post. The woman who wrote that she wanted to have a priest
bless her Kindle and sprinkle holy water on it after it had been
infected by SERIAL was my personal favorite. Did you notice that a
new word was created in some of the reviews? I noted several people
wanted to "unread" it.