Man of Wax (34 page)

Maybe—and here’s where we really have to hope—they even had the volume turned up on their speakers and could clearly hear the Kid’s voice right before the screen cut to black.
 

“Game over, motherfuckers.”

EPILOGUE

It’s been four weeks since that first morning, the morning the game officially started. It’s been three weeks since our little raid at the Paradise Motel. Three weeks since I stood in that room and watched them open the caskets.
 

They were empty, both of them. For the longest time nobody said a word. Then I broke down, fell to my knees and just started crying.
 

Eventually I got myself together. I wiped at my eyes, sniffed back more tears. Stared down into each casket, then glanced up at Carver, who hadn’t left the room yet, unlike David and Ronny who went to gather all the computer equipment to later give to the Kid.
 

I said, “What does this mean?”
 

Carver stared down at the caskets. “It means they’re still alive.”
 

“But how ... how do you know?”
 

“I don’t,” Carver said. His eyes shifted to meet mine. “Neither do you. But like you told me in Chicago, we can’t give up that hope. It ... it’s the only thing they can’t take away from us.”
 

When interrogated the girl gave us nothing, not even her name. It seemed the act she’d pulled with Carver before was just an act. She’d been scared, maybe, but she’d just woken up and couldn’t think straight. She refused to tell us anything, especially who Caesar was. In the end Carver broke her neck and left her dead body next to Kevin’s.
 

We debated about calling the police, the media, even taking some pictures, but decided none of it would matter in the end. Besides Bronson and Carver’s son, we left the rest of the bodies to be cleaned up by someone else. In the manager’s office Carver wrote a note on Paradise Motel stationary that said,
Caesar, I’m coming for you
. He tacked the piece of paper to Simon’s bloodied chest.
 

So we left the Paradise Motel. With Bronson and Carver’s son wrapped in the motel’s white sheets in the back of the van, we drove and we drove and we drove. Eventually we came to the place Carver and his men sometimes stayed. First we buried Bronson in the backyard. Then Carver asked the rest of us to leave him alone for a while. We went into the house to give him his privacy, but still I watched him from the second floor. I watched him bury his son all by himself. I watched him say a prayer. Then I watched him break down crying.
 

Drew Price—who’d been standing in for Carver—showed up later that day. The Kid never did show up. He went back to his basement decorated with posters of Terry Gilliam films and continued his work. Fighting the good fight, he’s told me over the phone, but I’m not so sure anymore.
 

Two days later the Kid informed me that my house back in Lanton had burned down. I’d wanted to return to it at some point and take whatever I could that would forever remind me of my family—Jen’s quilt she’d knitted one year, Casey’s worn copy of
The Little Prince
or her
Shrek 2
poster—but now there was no point. The house’s demise, the Kid said, was reportedly from an electrical fire, which killed the family living inside. Where the bodies came from and how they managed to pass as us I’ll never know. But for those who cared, Benjamin Anderson, his wife Jennifer, and their daughter Casey were dead.
 

To add insult to injury, Lanton had recently lost another painter. My old friend, Marshall Gibson, and his wife Lydia, died in a car accident Tuesday evening one week before. The same Tuesday I was busy driving through Nevada.
 

The only good news the Kid could provide was that Casey’s preschool was still standing.
 

After hearing all of this news I had gone outside to be alone. Eventually Carver came out and sat down beside me. He didn’t speak. Finally I cleared my throat and asked the question I’d been holding back.
 

“Just how deep does this go?”
 

“What do you mean?”
 

“You know what I mean. You told me back in Chicago this wasn’t some conspiracy. That it was just a bunch of people having a good time. But now with Caesar? And about how this guy is going to soon change the world?”
 

For the longest time Carver didn’t say anything. Then he looked at me, took a deep breath, and said, “I have no idea.”
 

The next day Carver had a black eye.
 

“Who gave you that?” I asked.
 

“Drew. I can’t say I blame him. I deserve it. I’ve already talked with the rest of the guys and now I need to talk to you. I’ve been putting it off long enough.”
 

“About what?”
 

“How I owe you an apology. I ... I wasn’t completely honest with you—with any of you.”
 

“Ronny told me none of you keep secrets from each other.”
 

“I’m not proud of what I did. Simon ... he just kept taunting me with the idea that my son was still alive. I never even knew for certain that he was. But I wanted to believe it so badly that it became true to me, and I decided I would do whatever it took to get him back.”
 

“And now he’s dead,” I murmured, and instantly hated myself for saying it.
 

Carver stared hard at me, his eyes cold, before he nodded slowly and whispered, “Yes, he is.”
 

There was a long silence, and then Carver asked me if I wanted to stay with him. He said he couldn’t promise me anything, but he would try his best to help me find my wife and daughter.
 

“But what if they’re already dead?”
 

“Do you believe they are?”
 

I said nothing for the longest time. Then I told Carver I might as well stay with him and his men because it didn’t look like I had any choice. He said that wasn’t true, we always had a choice, and right then I had an idea. Carver wanted to get me trained but I told him there was something I needed to do first. I explained my idea, then we talked to the Kid via Skype to get his opinion.
 

“Might work, might not,” the Kid said. “I mean, if he wants to do it, I’ll post it wherever I can. What the fuck.”
 

Yes, what the fuck.
 

I’ve been writing for six days straight now. Only stepping away to eat or move my bowels or sleep. But I don’t like sleeping, because I toss and turn too much. I keep thinking of where Jen and Casey might be right now, how scared and confused they must feel. It’s been hell to relive that particular week of my life but I figured I had no choice. This story needs to be told, needs to be posted wherever it can be posted across the Internet.
 

I keep thinking about the quote from Edmund Burke, about how all that’s necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. The only problem I see is that there are no real good men in the world, not really. We’re all flawed, each and every one of us, we’re all imperfect.
 

Yet somehow, evil hasn’t yet triumphed.
 

So why am I writing this? You might think it’s so that these people can be exposed for the scum they truly are, that the proper authorities will finally do something about it. But that’s not it at all. It’s impossible to point fingers and tell who these people are. They’re out there, yes, they’re everywhere, but just like Carver said, stopping them is impossible. It’s a virus that will continue to spread and there is nothing that can be done about it.
 

But this isn’t for those people. This is for Sandra and Leon Ellison. This is for those residents and employees at the Hickory View Retirement Home. This is for James Henley and his wife and their unborn twins. This is for Gerald and his family, for Juliet. This is for each and every person who has either died or suffered for the sake of not just my game, but for all the games. People who never had a choice in the cards they were dealt, who were brutally moved around the game board of life as disposable pawns for the sake of entertainment.
 

Mostly though, this is for Jen and Casey.
 

Simon had asked me what the last thing was I’d say to my wife and daughter if I had the chance. I had told him it was that I loved them and it still is. But I’ve also come up with something else. Not the last thing I’d say to them, but the first thing I’ll tell them when I finally see them again. After I’ve hugged them and kissed them and wiped their tears away.
 

For Casey, it’s that recently I’ve been going outside every night and looking up at the sky, asking aloud, “Has the sheep eaten the flower or not?” And while I haven’t yet heard the five hundred million bells, I know they’re ringing. At the moment, I think that’s enough.
 

As for Jen, it’s this:
 

Last night I dreamed of Michelle Delaney again. As always I’m at the college party and bored, ready to leave. I go outside, start back to my dorm, but then hear her screaming, crying for help. And I rush around the building to find her there with her boyfriend, who just continues beating her and beating her and beating her. It’s all like it always is, the night and the leaves and the chill of the wind. Just like when it first happened.
 

Except this time it’s different.
 

This time, I take a step forward.

A
BOUT
THE
A
UTHOR

Robert Swartwood is the
USA TODAY
bestselling author of
The Serial Killer’s Wife
,
The Calling
,
Man of Wax
, and several other novels. His work has appeared in
The Los Angeles Review
,
The Daily Beast
,
Chizine
,
Space and Time
,
Postscripts
, and
PANK
. He created the term “hint fiction” and is the editor of
Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer
. He lives with his wife in Pennsylvania. Visit him online at
www.robertswartwood.com
.

To stay updated on Robert’s latest ebook releases, sign up for his
newsletter
(you’ll immediately receive an exclusive ebook) or follow him on Twitter:
@RobertSwartwood
.

Continue reading for an excerpt from
The Inner Circle
, the second book in the Man of Wax Trilogy

1

We were headed south on I-95, about forty miles outside Miami, when the Kid called.
 

It was Saturday night, just past eleven o’clock. A heavy rain was coming down, the dark clouds occasionally illuminated by a scattered flicker of lightning.
 

Carver reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, put it on speaker.
 

“What’s up?”
 

The Kid said, “We got a problem.”
 

I was driving the Corolla we’d picked up the day before in Atlanta. It was a small four-cylinder thing that still reeked of cigarettes and coffee from its previous owner. I’d paid one thousand dollars for it, cash, and now here we were, Carver in the passenger seat, the radio off, neither of us saying a word.
 

A quarter mile ahead of us was Ronny and Ian in the SUV. A quarter mile ahead of them was the target. The target was driving a black Crown Victoria, a camera set up in the foot well of the passenger seat so those who wanted to could see what the man looked like behind the wheel of the car, instead of getting the view of the highway from the mini-camera in his glasses. The target was listed simply as The Racist. He was a large bald man with a thick goatee and tattoos of swastikas and racial slurs all over his body. He’d only been in the game for less than forty-eight hours and had already killed someone.
 

“What’s the problem?” Carver asked.
 

“Another link appeared five minutes ago. I started saving it right away, and ... ah, well, you just gotta see it. I’m emailing it to you now.”
 

Then the Kid was gone.
 

I said, “Should we call Ronny?”
 

“Not yet.”
 

Carver had already replaced the phone in his pocket, was now reaching in the backseat for his bag. He pulled the MacBook from the bag, along with the wireless card. Then he had the computer on his lap, opened the lid, pressed the power button. Seconds later the Apple logo appeared and the main screen came up and then Carver was working quickly, opening the web browser, opening his email account, then opening the email the Kid had just sent.