Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [10]
An acute scream soared above the music. I sat up and listened. Another scream ruptured the night. Clutching the iron bars, I turned my eyes on the desert, but saw nothing save miles of moonlit sagebrush. Again, a scream — a woman’s, closer than before.
Fifty feet away, a figure stumbled through the desert, choking for breath. When it was halfway past the window frame, a second, larger figure entered on the left side. It lunged upon the smaller figure and drove it into the ground at the foot of a greasewood shrub.
I heard a female voice, crying, shriller screams, pleadings, but the words were indecipherable when they reached my ears. The larger figure kicked at the ground. Then it knelt down, thrusting.
More screams, the loudest, most piercing yet. Silence.
Now only the large figure stood, staring at the ground. In a measured pace, it walked back in the direction from which it had come, pulling by long black hair what it had chased through the desert. I heard the footsteps and what it dragged sliding through the dirt, the woman’s legs still twitching.
Suddenly, it turned and looked in my direction. Moonlight, bluish and surreal, streamed across the stranger’s face.
I froze. My brother, Orson, stood smiling on the desert.
5
A stiff purple dawn unfolded on the desert, ending a terrible, sleepless night. I realized from here on out, whenever I closed my eyes, I would always see a man on a moonlit desert, dragging a woman through the dirt by her hair.
At the approach of footsteps, I sat up in bed. A dead bolt turned and the door swung open, revealing a man of my proportions: same thin, muscular build, same stark blue eyes. Similar but not identical, his face looked like the ideal of mine, more handsome in its superior proportionality. He stood grinning in the doorway, and in contrast to my unkempt graying hair, his crew cut shone a perfect brown. In addition to black snakeskin boots and faded blue jeans, he wore a bloody white T-shirt with sweat marks extending down from the armpits. I wondered fleetingly why he perspired so profusely before the sun had even risen. His arms were stronger than mine, and as he leaned against the door frame, he took an aggressive bite out of a large burgundy apple.
I couldn’t speak. It was like seeing not the ghost of a loved one, but the demon. Tears burned in my eyes. This is not real. This cannot be my brother, this terrible man.
"I have missed you so much," Orson said, still hovering in the doorway. I could only stare back into his blue eyes.
Orson had disappeared from Appalachian State University our junior year, my last image that of him standing in the doorway of our dorm room.
"You won’t see me for a while," he had said. And I hadn’t, from that day to this. The police had given up. He’d just vanished. My mother and I had hired detectives: nothing. We feared he was dead.
Now he apologized. "I wouldn’t have had you see that last night. The consequence of using old rope, I guess." I noticed fresh scratch marks on his neck and face. Specks of glitter glinted on his cheeks, and I wondered if they’d come off the woman’s fingernails when she struggled. "You want breakfast?" he asked. "Coffee’s brewing."
I shuddered, repulsed. "Are you kidding me?"
"I wanted to keep you in here for several days before bringing you out and revealing myself, but after last night…well, there’s really no use is there?"
Sweat slid down my sides.
As he bit again into the apple, Orson began to walk up a short hallway. "Come on," he said.
I climbed down off the bed and followed him out of my room, heading toward the front of the cabin. My legs felt unstable, like they might sink right down into a puddle on the floor.
"Have a seat," he said, pointing to a black leather sofa pushed against the left-hand wall. As I walked into the living room, I glanced behind me. At the terminus of a narrow hallway, two rooms, side by side, constructed the backbone of the cabin,