Page 2 of Captive

You know, wanted to make things easy on me, relatively speaking. I’m a five-foot-tall woman who stopped growing back in sixth grade. There’s no way I could take on multiple people at once.

My heart beats wildly in my chest, and I hold my breath when I hear the bedroom door get pushed open further. Someone else is definitely here, and I get an eyeful of shadows as someone moves across the room. Someone big, someone tall. That someone, whoever they may be, goes to stand beside the bed, next to Brock Hard.

It’s next to impossible to see what he’s doing, since the guy is also wearing all-black, but I’m pretty sure I see him reach into his pocket for something, and then he pulls it out and brings it to Brock Hard’s face.

Brock wakes, but he fights for only a few seconds before he becomes still. Didn’t help, of course, that his body is beneath the sheets. He was basically a sitting duck for this other random guy.

Seriously, what the hell is going on?

The guy standing next to Brock Hard speaks, “It’s done.” His voice is low and rough, scratchy in all the right ways. It takes a few seconds for it to hit me, though: he wouldn’t say something like that to himself.

Which means he’s not alone.

Triple shit. This is going from bad to worse with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Suddenly, the light in the room is flicked on, and though I’m only looking through the slats of the closet door, I’m still blinded and have to blink multiple times for my vision to adjust. By the time I’m not blinded by the light, a second man in all black stands near the first, and this one is even taller.

First man has a thick head of charcoal gray hair, but the thing is, he didn’t sound too old. Second man has short blond hair, but beyond that and the black clothes they both wear, that’s all I can discern. A strap of something goes around both their heads, and my immediate assumption is they’re wearing masks.

“That was easy,” the first man says. “Let’s—” He moves, and before he can say anything else, his foot kicks something that is apparently not shoved under the bed far enough.

My bag.

My heart beats fast for a whole different reason, and I bite my bottom lip as I watch the first guy bend over and pull out my bag. Since Brock is apparently unconscious, he’s unhurried in picking it up and placing it on the edge of the mattress, and he flips open the flap on it and starts to pull out my stuff.

And that’s when I notice both newcomers are wearing leather gloves, just like me.

“What’s that?” the second man asks as he leans closer to the first.

“I don’t know.” As he says that, he pulls out my knife. My knife. That knife glimmers in the light of the room. “Looks like a kill bag or something. Do we know if this guy is a killer, too?”

Second guy shakes his head. “Hawthorne didn’t say anything about that.”

“Hmm. Doesn’t matter. Let’s tie him up so we can get this show on the road.” He sets my knife in my bag and puts it aside, on the small, modern nightstand next to the bed, while the second guy goes to retrieve a bag he must’ve left near the door. When he returns, he’s carrying rope.

Wait. Rope? This can’t be. They can’t be…

The longer I’m in the closet, watching what they do, the more obvious it becomes. The men are wearing masks, old hockey masks, to be precise, and they work in unison, each of them fixing one side of Brock Hard to the bed with multiple pieces of rope, stretching his limbs as far as they would go, until Brock is an X on the bed, arms and legs stretched to the extremes.

Holy crap. I’ve seen this before. Well, not in person, but still. There’s no mistaking it. The way these two guys work, how quickly they do it, like they’ve done it before… because they have.

Only when Brock Hard is tied up does the second man retrieve something else from their bag: two saws. The old-fashioned kind, the kind you need to put in some elbow grease if you want to cut anything up with them. He hands one over to the first guy, and he keeps the second one to himself. Then he pulls out two plastic aprons, which they cover themselves in.

Oh, my God.

Wait, no. Who am I kidding? God isn’t here. This is a bedroom full of killers and one very bad man who likes to drug women and take advantage of them.

Before they make their first cuts into Brock Hard’s body, I know who they are. I know who these guys are and I just can’t believe it. The news has it all wrong. D.D.K. isn’t a single man. No, it’s so much more than that.

The Downtown Dismemberer is a whole-ass team of serial killers.

The sounds of them sawing through flesh doesn’t get to me. How could it when I planned on doing the same thing to Brock Hard? Of course, I didn’t have chloroform or whatever it is they used to knock him out. I preferred the knife to the heart method, but to each his own.

I just can’t believe it. I really can’t. I’m speechless in that closet as they saw away at the man on the bed.

D.D.K. dismembers his victims—or their victims, I guess I should now say. The main joints on the body: the shoulders, the elbows, the hands, where the neck attaches to the torso, the hip bone, the knees, and the ankles. I always assumed taking people apart like that took a lot of time—and when you do it by yourself, it does.

It takes so much time. Like, a ridiculous amount.