Authors: Mark Nykanen
Her nudity felt like a sickness as she stood with her soaking clothes at her feet. She shivered, not from the cold but from the threat of the scalding heat that rose from the furnace and crucible. The yellowish glow lit the salty beads that gathered on her face and arms and chest, and dripped to the floor. She imagined a puddle forming around her, and wished more than anything that it could be a moat, a magical ring of water to douse all the flames and the worst of her fears.
Stassler threw her a rag that had once been a towel, and told her to dry off. She did, not out of any wish to obey, but to try to stop the shaking that taunted her so. After she’d dried her legs, he pulled it from her and tossed it aside. Then he ordered her to lie on the steel table, and any thoughts she still had of magic or moats immediately surrendered to the hard shiny surface with its macabre arrangement of straps.
“Don’t do it,” Ry said.
“You,” Stassler turned on him with cruel calmness, “say one more word, and your hand will go in that.” He snapped a quick look at the glowing crucible, not ten feet away.
“Why do you want me on that thing?” Lauren had finally managed to speak, but with no real hope of an answer, only the penetrating knowledge that the liquefied metal was intended for her, to curse her with its bone-bending pain. To carve her to the core.
No matter what, she wouldn’t get on that table. She’d rather be shot or stomped or stabbed to death than let him do anything to her with twenty-one hundred degrees of liquid bronze.
He ignored her question, and waved his gun at the table.
“No,” she said flatly, and then she repeated herself.
He aimed the revolver at her leg. She expected him to grow angry, maybe strike her, scream, vent some of the fury that had to be pent up inside him. But he did none of these things, and he showed no emotion. Nothing. He simply fired the gun, and it was she who screamed as screeching pain ripped through her thigh, and blistering heat tore through her entire body. It was as if she’d touched an electric rail and couldn’t let go.
The foundry turned fuzzy and her ears rang as she staggered and collapsed on the other side of the table. Her leg had a scorching hole the size of a dime. How could such a small hole make such a horrible pain? She held this thought without the gentility of words, with the piercing clarity that the worst pain brings.
Stassler turned to Ry, who was standing beside him and shouting, remonstrating wildly. Lauren was sure Stassler would fire on him too, and that this time he’d shoot to kill. Despite spasms of agony, she grabbed her bundle of clothes, the whole big wet ball, and hurled it at the white hot crucible.
Ry saw this, and lunged for the steel table. In that startling instant, he must have remembered the warning she’d given him in the university foundry, when she’d told him to leave his water bottle by the door.
Stassler whirled around as Ry pushed the table on to its side, and launched himself over the upended edge. Lauren pulled him to the floor behind this makeshift barrier as the crucible exploded from the shocking assault of cold water.
A terrifying BOOM shook the foundry. Harsh, hissing sounds, like tracer bullets, whirled around them as molten bronze splattered against walls, tables, ceiling, shelves; and then the first of the fuel tanks for the acetylene torches exploded, the argon and CO
2
and oxygen—
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
—turning the tall steel canisters into the lethal missiles they so strongly resembled, blasting them through the brick walls as if they were made of tissue paper.
An anvil smashed into the end of the steel table with so much force that it whipped wildly away from Lauren and Ry, and he had to haul it back as the brick wall to their right crumbled. Seconds later the ceiling began to fall in sections, as each failure triggered the one that followed.
It felt like an earthquake. Support beams toppled, and walls cracked around them. Three thick wooden posts slammed down on the edge of the table, forming a crude triangular shelter as the ceiling continued to fall, and fires began to feed on the tools and workbenches and debris.
An insistent hissing crept above the sound of the flames.
“What’s that?” Lauren whispered, still worried more about Stassler than the collapsing walls and ceiling and flames and fumes.
Ry tried to climb to his knees to look over the edge of the table, but Lauren pulled him back down.
“The fuses,” she shouted, no longer caring about the other threats, for this one loomed so much larger. “The ones going into the mine! The ones he was checking.”
The hissing, sputtering sound raced on for five seconds, ten, as Ry draped her protectively with his body. Lauren felt his whiskery cheek next to hers; his face was pressed to the floor while hers looked up.
She jolted at the sight of a bloody, bronze hand reaching over the table, gripping it tightly. And then she saw Stassler’s head rising too, his eyes on hers, his features parboiled with the liquid metal. It coated his cheek and lips, and had melted off half his nose. A hollow had been carved into his temple, and she spotted a small circle of exposed bone above his ear.
All of his ghastly wounds had been cauterized by the extreme heat of the bronze, which now contained gruesome swirls and splotches of blood, dark red spottings that appeared frozen despite the smoldering metal.
Stassler’s mouth, no more than a rigid oval from its sudden casting, issued a grunt that she couldn’t understand. His other hand now inched above the table, and it still held the gun. He pointed it straight into her face. She watched petrified as he nodded, and though his mouth couldn’t move, and his eyes were dark with pain, he smiled. She was sure of this, smiled and slowly wrapped his finger around the trigger. She squeezed her eyes shut, refusing to accept that the last vision of her life would be the horribly mangled face of this murderer.
An explosion nearly shattered her eardrums.
She feared she’d been shot again—the same painful ringing shook her ears—and didn’t know better until her eyes opened to a powerful blast ripping through the remains of the foundry. It leveled the last of the brick walls, and sent debris flying hundreds of feet into the air.
Beneath them the earth rumbled as loudly as the thunder that had chased her hours before. She felt the implosion of the main shaft, and feared that at any moment the earth would open up and swallow them too.
Rocks and soil and bricks and glass poured down on their crude shelter; and she became aware, though only dimly, that the rain itself continued to fall, and that it had been warmed somehow by the explosion.
Stassler’s hand still gripped the table’s edge, but his head was gone, decapitated by the blast, and what she saw now would never leave her: a fountain of blood sprayed from the stump of his neck, and she realized that the warm drops that fell on her face were not the rain at all.
She wiped madly at her skin, forgetful of her own pain, then saw Stassler’s body slump. The movement seemed ponderous amid the explosion’s furious aftermath. But his fingers still clung to the table, and now she saw why: they’d been moist with molten bronze when he’d grabbed it, and now were welded to the surface where he’d tortured all of his victims.
Ry moved the beams that had formed their rough shelter, their crude triangle of life, and they saw that every wall had fallen. Flames flared from an opening in the floor where the furnace had stood only minutes ago. Several smaller fires burned around them, lighting the darkness with a frightening red glow, while the flames themselves seemed to sneer at the weak insult of rain.
“I want to get out of here,” Lauren said in a voice so shaky it might have been shattered forever.
Ry placed his hand on her back, as if to reassure her; but she felt his fingers trembling, and knew he was scared too.
Another rumble raced beneath them, shaking the earth, shaking them. It was as if the hollow ground were once again preparing to swallow them whole. Thirty feet away, where the entrance to the mine had received the bodies of so many men and women and children, the earth belched a great cloud of caustic black smoke.
In seconds it drifted over Lauren and Ry, and they started to cough. He took her hand, and she climbed to her feet, weighting her good leg. She was naked, bleeding, and blackened by the dust and smoke. Her thigh no longer shrieked for attention, but the pain was severe, and she held it for a moment to try to ease the agony. She couldn’t.
She hobbled with Ry’s help, unaware of the tears that streaked her dark face. She was far too concerned with navigating the rubble-strewn floor of the foundry, stepping over beams and bricks and twisted, charred canisters.
“We’re getting out of here,” Ry said. “We’ll be okay.”
She wanted so much to believe him, and might have if she hadn’t looked over and seen Stassler’s head lying but a few feet away.
Lauren fell fully into Ry’s arms, and screamed for the first time, a harrowing sound that could have been heard for miles. The pain in her throat had given way to a pain so much greater. Her fingers raked his back as she stared at the sky and screamed until her voice grew weak.
Even then she could not shake her final sight of Ashley Stassler: the blast had sheared off the side of his skull, and driven lengths of bone as thin and sharp as knitting needles into the dark knots of his exposed brain.
Her hands clutched her stomach as the smell of his seared flesh filled her nose, and before she understood what was happening, Ry picked her up and carried her away. She might have heard a groan, an expiration, and while she knew it could never have come from Stassler, she didn’t feel safe denying this fear either. So much was dying right then that it would have been impossible to say exactly what had made that haunting sound. The earth itself had not fully sealed, and its secrets were still escaping.
“S
LOW DOWN!”
K
ERRY SMASHED THE
dash with her fist. She wanted to smash Diamond Girl, but not with this crazy chick driving niney-five miles an hour down a rain-slick, storm-whipped highway.
“Stop trying to get out,” Diamond Girl responded coolly, “and maybe I will.”
“What do you think I’m going to do? Jump out and kill myself? Slow down!”
Kerry
had
tried to open the door the second she’d seen who’d stopped for her; but Diamond Girl had thrown the childproof locks and floored the accelerator, forcing them into a wild, fishtailing sprint to ninety miles an hour. Kerry had spilled onto the floor mat, and been forced to concede, if only to herself, that flight, at that point, was fruitless and no doubt fatal.
But she hadn’t given up. A half hour later, when Diamond Girl’s attention flagged, and her foot eased up on the gas pedal, Kerry tried the door again.
Diamond Girl glanced at her, shook her head as if she, Kerry, were hopeless, and sped back up to the ninety to one hundred mile an hour range.
Kerry had also tried screaming,
screaming
at her to stop the goddamn car and let her out; but this had brought a response that made her want to smash her head, along with her fist, against the dash: Diamond Girl had looked at her with the same vacant expression, and in a voice wholly devoid of emotion, said that Kerry didn’t really want to leave her.
“You have fun with me. I’ll bet it’s more fun than you’ve ever had,” Diamond Girl said as she eased up on the speed long enough to execute a U-turn across all four lanes.
“Fun? Fun!” Kerry slammed her elbow into the door so hard she bruised herself and didn’t care. “I didn’t have fun. We were in a goddamn cage. I had to watch three people get murdered. Your own mother! Your brother. Your father. What the hell was fun?”
“I didn’t want all of that stuff to happen, but fucking with Ashley’s head was great.”
Kerry blinked hard, not once, not twice, but three times. She could hardly believe what she’d just heard, and had to think that if her ears were deceiving her, then her eyes could not be far behind. A hallucination, of course. But no, Diamond Girl was right where she’d been all along, behind the wheel, and the words she’d said were as real as the rain.
“So now you’re fucking with
my
head? Right? Tell me that. Tell me you’re just fucking with my head?”
Diamond Girl looked over and put her hand on Kerry’s knee. “Don’t you dare!” Kerry pushed it away. “Don’t even think about it. That was an act, remember? To get him in the cage. You … you …” Kerry stammered, enraged and appalled at how completely in control Diamond Girl appeared. “… you
are
doing it to me now. You’re fucking with my head. You were doing it then, and you’re doing it now.”
“You and Ashley, if you really want to know the truth.”
“That’s bullshit! I was trying to help you get us out of there.”
“Poor girl. And now you feel … violated?”
Diamond Girl shook her head and exhaled audibly, as if she’d been challenged by an especially unruly child. Which infuriated Kerry all the more. She’d put up with that bi-girl routine to try to lure that … that
asshole
from hell into the cage, so maybe they could beat his balls blue and escape. But the whole time they’d been gaming Stassler, Diamond Girl had been gaming her too.
Kerry had hung out with some outrageously cool bi-girls, riot grrl chicks like herself, but none of them had been insane, until Diamond Girl.
“Sometimes things start out to be one thing, and turn into another.” Diamond Girl spoke as evenly as ever. “Just ask Ashley.” A smile crept across her lips.
The hand again. The knee. Kerry groaned, and threw it off.
“This didn’t turn into anything. Nothing. You hear me?”
Diamond Girl stared at her. The eerie green of the dashboard lights reflected off her eyes.
“The road,” Kerry said nervously. “Look at the goddamn road!”
The Jeep hit the shoulder. Pebbles rattled the undercarriage. Diamond Girl didn’t seem to care. She kept staring at Kerry with the same blank expression.
Kerry launched herself across the seat and grabbed the wheel. The car skidded as she turned it back toward the road, and the rear wheels started to swing around until the Jeep felt like it was sliding sideways down the wet shoulder.