Extracted - Chapter 2 – Accidently On Purpose

 

Extracted

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 2 – Accidently On Purpose

 

(Five Years Later)

 

“Henry Marsh!”

Doctor Judith Rameriz looked up at her best friend and lover, Doctor Benjamin Folley.  “What?”

“The answer to your problem,” Ben replied.

“Marsh?” Judith asked.  “Marsh is my problem!”

“Yes.  But what if we could also make him your solution?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your idea.”

“What idea?”

“To use the soul capture system for revenge.”

Judith looked at him for a few moments, then sighed.  “Yeah, I’d really love to get back at that ass.”

“So do it.  We’ve been talking about doing another experiment with the system anyway.”

“Yeah but…”  She stared at him again for a moment before she said, “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“Just like you yourself said.  Marsh took your son and threw him in prison where he doesn’t belong, and he’s not letting him go.”

“Despite the fact that Josh is innocent!” Judith threw out.

“Exactly!” Ben agreed.

“But all I said,” Judith reminded him, “was that I’d like to take his son away from him and lock him away where he couldn’t see him anymore, just like I can’t see my son.  Revenge!”

“That’s not all you suggested,” Ben reminded her.

Judith considered that.  “Yeah.  I did say it would be fun to take his son and switch his soul with someone else so that Marsh got back something he wouldn’t be expecting.”

“And that he would probably never figure out,” Ben added.

Judith nodded reluctantly.  “True,” she agreed.  She held her hand up.  “And yes, before you say anything else, it would serve that sanctimonious asshole right.  We all know Josh is innocent.  There was no credible evidence at all that tied him to that murder, but Marsh still managed to get him declared guilty and sent away for the next fifty years!”  Her anger flared.  “I want to murder him so bad!” she shouted.

“Hence…” Ben said softly.

Judith considered it for a moment.  “Hence, we somehow kidnap his son, remove his soul, and replace it with someone else.  And then I guess, give his son back to him…or give back whoever, or whatever, that person…or thing…winds up being.”

“At the worst, as far as everything we know, his son would wind up in a coma.”

Judith nodded.  “Yeah.  His son would be there…but not there.”  She considered that again.  “Like Josh.  He’s there, but not so that anyone can really see and talk to him easily.  There, but not there.”

Ben nodded.  “You wanted to look for an experiment.”

“Yeah, but to duplicate what happened to Hector first.  One subject.  Pull his soul, then put it back again.  With lots of testing!”

“We can test,” Ben told her.  “All you want.”

“But what you’re suggesting, we wouldn’t be doing it to just one person, we would be doing it twice, to two different people.  And worse, we’d be trying to put each soul we collect, back into the wrong bodies!  What kind of disaster would that bring?  It could kill them!”

Ben shrugged.  “Maybe.  But most likely not.  Not from what data we were able to collect.”

“What little of it there was,” Judith reminded him.

“True,” Ben conceded.  “But still, the possibility is there.  For both the scientific study, and…”  He stopped, waiting for her to catch up.

“Revenge,” she finally said.  “Yeah, I seem to remember that Marsh has a son, and he’d probably make an excellent candidate for the experiment.”

“Not to mention, it’s all about getting revenge on him as well.”

“Yeah, of course,” Judith agreed.  “But who would be the second candidate?”

Ben shook his head.  “That of course, would be the bigger problem.”

The two of them spent the rest of the day discussing it.  Who would be a good candidate for the second person.  And more importantly, what type of person would be the best to swap with Marsh’s son.  Again and again, in order to get back at Marsh for what he had done, they discussed the best type of person to abduct.  Kidnapping a city gang member, a criminal mind, was high on their list.  It would be the perfect revenge solution for the overly righteous asshole that Marsh was.

It wasn’t until after dinner that Ben suddenly came up with a different solution.  One that might even be better.  “I know!” Ben suddenly said.

“Know what?”

“Who the second candidate should be?”

“Who?”

“Congressman Michael Stiller’s daughter.”

“Stiller?  He did everything possible to try and get the government to stop our water system from being approved and sold.”

“And in the end, we proved that there wasn’t one single thing wrong with it,” Ben reminded her.  “But he was still our biggest obstacle to getting it on the market.  And look where we are now.”

“A lot richer than even we expected,” Judith admitted.  “And yeah, Stiller was a real asshole in trying to get everything launched.”

“So…” Ben said.

Judith considered it again.  “Congressman Stiller has a daughter?” she asked.  “I didn’t know.”

“I think he has two,” Ben told her.  “I think one would probably be in her teens now, and the other a few years younger.”

“And how old do you think Marsh’s son is?  From the one time I saw him with his family, I would guess he was in high school somewhere,” Judith said.

“Ben nodded.  “I’d guess a junior or senior by now.  I’m not sure.  But if we’re going to go the kidnapping route, then we kidnap Marsh’s son and Stiller’s older daughter, and then make the switch.  Their ages would be similar enough.”

Judith considered that, but another possibility came to her.  “Or…” she said.  “We kidnap Marsh’s son, and Stiller’s younger daughter.”

“The young one?”

Judith nodded.  “Wouldn’t that make a more drastic statement for Marsh?”

Ben nodded.  “Probably.  If anything happens to them at all.”

“True,” Judith conceded.

Judith and Ben discussed it for several days before finally deciding to explore going ahead with the plan.  The biggest discussion revolved around whether they should bring in the rest of the original team to help them.  The team working on the water system had been expanded now, but the original members were the only ones who knew what had happened to Hector, and they all wanted to keep it that way.

While the new, larger team worked on improving the water system, trying now to make it smaller so it could more easily be used for villages where not as much water was needed, the original members now met twice a month to discuss what they should do about the soul extraction problem.  The original machine that had extracted Hector’s soul now resided in the basement of Judith’s new mansion.

The only original member who was no longer with the team was Hector himself.  After the process left him in a coma, his family argued against him working on it anymore.  The team still awarded him his share of the money they now brought in for the process, but Hector had quietly retired.  He was never told what happened to his soul.  He only knew that the wave generator had malfunctioned, and it put him in a coma for three months.

The biggest item on the original team’s discussion list now was if they should bring in a new member to their team to aid in their scientific testing for the soul extraction.  They all knew that having a medical doctor or at least a psychiatrist on the team, or both, would be a good idea, but the problem was, like with everything else about the project, did they dare let anyone else know?  The situation was simply that sensitive.

As to Judith and Ben’s plan for revenge however, in the end, Judith and Ben both agreed that they didn’t dare tell anyone else on the team what they were planning on doing.  Ben decided they would have to hire someone to kidnap both subjects for them, then he and Judith would handle the soul exchange themselves.  Then those same men could return the kidnapped kids to where they could be easily found.

One further development they decided to add was the addition of a ransom demand for the return of Marsh’s son.  If Marsh got Josh out of prison and had him declared innocent of the crime like he really was, they would do nothing but return Marsh’s son safely back to him…unharmed.  In the back of their minds, both Judith and Ben really hoped that Marsh would give in and free Josh, and none of what they planned on doing would take place.  But if not….  Neither of them knew what would happen when they tried it.  They could only hope.

Finding information on the kids they planned on kidnapping was easy.  Philadelphia’s District Attorney Henry Marsh had only one child, a son named Stephen who was seventeen years old and would be entering his senior year of high school.  U.S. Congressman Michael Stiller had two daughters, Emily who was sixteen, and Nancy who was only twelve and going into the seventh grade.  Finding that information was the only easy thing that Judith and Ben needed to do.

It took Ben almost a month to find someone who was willing to kidnap both kids for them, and he had to go into New York to find them.  It was going to cost Judith a lot of money, but because of their water system, money was no object.  After another two weeks of planning, they were ready.

 

--- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

 

They were professionals.  Not just criminals, but mercenaries who had spent a good part of their lives in the military.  Now the kind of jobs they hired themselves out for were a different kind of dangerous, and often illegal.  As long as it paid well, they didn’t care.

In the dead of the night, outside of Philadelphia, one of the three men picked the lock on the back door to Henry Marsh’s house and all three of them entered silently.  They had already disabled everything they could, so they weren’t overly worried about alarms.  With guns drawn and ready, they crept through the kitchen and found the stairs.  Silently they went up.  Henry Marsh’s son’s room was easy to locate since it had a large sticker pasted on the outside showing a rock band.  The door to his room was unlocked like they expected.  Still making no sound, they opened the door and went inside.  Stephen Marsh was asleep, as he should be.  In moments, there was no chance of him waking any time soon.  A hand was placed over his mouth to stifle any kind of scream, and a needle was plunged into his neck containing a drug that left him sound asleep for the foreseeable future.

With one man keeping his gun out in case of trouble, the other two carried Stephen’s large muscular body out of his room and down the stairs.  In moments they were out of the house and soon had him loaded into the back of a van.  They drove him to the specified pickup location where they transferred Stephen’s sleeping body into the back seat of a car.  Ben paid them the first installment and wished the men good night.

Ben drove back to Judith’s mansion where he and Judith struggled to get Stephen safely down to her basement where the water treatment system/soul extractor was located.  Stephen was put into a small room where his wrist was chained to the wall.  The chain was hopefully unneeded since they planned on keeping him asleep for the duration.

With that much done, Judith and Ben retired to her bedroom for some much-needed rest.

The next morning, Ben made a phone call, and the ransom note for Stephen went out to a server in the Bahamas, where it was then sent on to Philadelphia District Attorney Michael Marsh in the form of a simple email.  The note explained that his son Stephen would be returned in good shape if Joshua Rameriz, one of the founding members of the Planetary Eco Alliance group, was released from prison in the next two days and all charges against him were dropped.  To all appearances, the email looked like it might have been the work of the activist group that Josh did indeed belong to and that was responsible for a number of ecological scandals around the world.  Nothing in it tied it to Judith or Ben in any way.

That night, the abduction process was repeated.  This time, outside of New York City.  Several hours later, the mercenaries delivered U.S. Congressman Stiller’s twelve-year-old daughter Nancy into Judith and Ben’s clutches.  Nancy’s drugged and unconscious body was placed in the same basement room and chained to the wall where Stephen was.

Judith herself made sure that Stephen received injections every few hours to keep him unconscious.  Once Nancy was delivered into her care as well, she made sure that Nancy received the same drug to keep her asleep.

For the next two days, Judith and Ben studied the news.  They also had no choice but to talk with some police detectives who considered that they might have kidnapped Stephen since Josh Rameriz mentioned in the ransom demand was Judith’s son.  The police had no proof that Judith and Ben had done anything at all, so they were soon left alone, especially since it looked like the activist group was the real responsible party.  Nobody talked to them about Nancy at all.  Why would they?  Nancy’s abduction was a New York problem and had nothing at all to do with Philadelphia.

While they waited, hoping that Judith’s son would be released from prison, both Judith and Ben did as much of a thorough physical examination on both Stephen and Nancy as they could.  Both of them wished that they had gone ahead and brought a medical doctor into their special soul extraction team, but at the same time, they both knew that because what they were doing was so illegal, they could never dare tell anyone else.  Judith and Ben made very sure however that the drugs to keep both subjects unconscious were administered regularly to make sure neither of them ever woke up.

After two days, when it looked like Josh was going to remain in prison, the decision to move forward with their experiment was made.  Ben and Judith were both in complete agreement that they should do it.

Seventeen year old Stephen Marsh was placed naked into the water/soul extraction machine first.  His unconscious body was laid down in the final chamber and when everything was double checked and ready, the machine was turned on.  It took only seconds before Judith herself switched the machine off, but by that time, just as it had done with Hector, the machine indicated that something was in the small extraction canister, despite the fact that once again, there was no mass and nothing at all for the spectrometer to read.

Stephen’s comatose body was dragged from the machine and Nancy’s smaller body was placed into it.  A new collection canister was put into place, and the process was repeated.  They had now captured not just one human soul, but two.

Feeling the monstrous weight of what they were about to do, the canister containing Nancy’s soul was removed from the machine and the one containing Stephen’s soul was put in its place.  It took only minutes for them to reverse the magnetic field.  When all was ready, Judith looked to Ben and softly said, “Here goes.”

As before, when they had done it with Hector, only five seconds elapsed between the time that Judith switched the machine on and when she turned it off.  When they pulled Nancy’s body from the machine, they both heard her let out a small moan of distress before she lapsed once again into complete unconsciousness.  Judith and Ben looked at each other, then continued removing Nancy’s body.  They took it all the way back to the room where they had been keeping her and chained her to the wall again.

When they were done, they put Stephen back into the machine and put the canister containing Nancy’s soul in place.  As before, the machine was only on for five seconds before it was turned off.  Stephen’s body made no sound at all as they dragged it from the machine back to the room where they chained it to the wall.  The fact that Stephen had made no type of sound was something that neither Judith nor Ben commented on, but it concerned each of them.

For the next day, Judith religiously kept the drugs going into both Nancy and Stephen to keep them unconscious.  Neither she nor Ben knew what was going to happen with the switched souls.  They only knew for sure that both subjects were alive.  The drugs made it impossible to know if they were in any kind of coma as Hector had been.

Would Nancy and Stephen remain in deathlike comas for the rest of their lives?  Or would they both awaken as Hector had done and be perfectly fine?  Or, the thing both Judith and Ben were the most interested in learning, would either subject show any changes because of the swapped souls?  And if so, what would those changes be?

Only time, and waiting, and watching from a distance would give them any kind of clues as to what would happen.

 

--- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

 

That night, the mercenaries were back.  In a secluded meeting place, they collected the unconscious bodies of both Stephen and Nancy.

An hour later, Stephen’s unconscious body was found outside of a Philadelphia restaurant, still in the same pajamas he had worn to bed when he had been abducted.

It wasn’t until several hours later that Nancy’s body was found outside of a New York restaurant.

There was no security video of the return of either child.  Nobody had seen anything at all.  Both Stephen and Nancy were picked up by ambulances and transported to hospitals, but they were hospitals in two different cities and no connection between the abductions was made.

The next day, Judith and Ben watched carefully, but the return of both abducted kids barely made the news at all.  The only thing Judith and Ben learned was that as they expected, both Nancy and Stephen had been found unconscious, and that both kids were still unconscious when they reached the hospitals.  But then with all the drugs they had kept them on, it was going to be some time yet before either of those kids was going to wake up.

The only question was, what would those kids wake up to?  That is, if they woke up at all.

Extracted - Chapter 1 – I Was Just Joking

 

Extracted

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 1 – I Was Just Joking

 

(Five Years Earlier)

 

The first time was an accident.  Their process had proven to be far more dangerous than anyone had considered.  Afterwards, it had taken three months of careful scientific study before anyone came up with the slightest clue as to what had happened…not to mention achieved.  Even then, the solution had been made in jest.  It was nothing but a small joke.  Until they had tested it.  No one was jesting about it now.  No one!

The system was supposed to be the most advanced water treatment process on the planet, and it was certainly that.  It not only worked, and well, but the entire development team now wondered if maybe it didn’t work a bit too well.

They tested the system with all types of water, mostly seawater, but hundreds of tests had been done on dirty and contaminated water of all types and from all parts of the world.  Each time, the process quickly pulled out every single contaminated particle, separated and collected those particles, and then spat nothing but perfectly clear, clean, drinkable water out the other end.  What’s more, those collected contaminants from the original water could often be kept and either used for something else…or sold!  It’s amazing how many different elements are dissolved in seawater alone, including very minute trace amounts of gold and rare earth elements.

Substances like common salt were easy to extract and the process didn’t even break the salt down, it simply pulled the sodium chloride particles out of the water and collected them.  The salt was pure enough for your kitchen table.  From there the water went through a series of other chambers, each time subjecting the water to the altered frequencies and magnetic fields that made up the process.

The treatment chamber of their development model was basically a large pipe about thirty inches in diameter, allowing huge amounts of water to be treated quickly as it passed through the various chambers.  In each chamber the water was subjected to not just a specific soundwave frequency, but also a massive magnetic field.  The combination of the two powerful forces was enough to break down anything.  The process simply changed the wave frequency the water was subjected to as well as made slight variations in the magnetic field to target the combination of desired molecules and elements that could possibly be in the water.  One by one, those elements were pulled out and transferred into collection chambers for each of the targeted processes.  The final process targeted those elements that were the most rare, usually collecting nothing at all, or almost nothing.  Still, it was part of the entire process, guaranteeing pure, clean, drinkable water in the end.

The problem with the system didn’t show up until there was an accident.  A very unforeseen accident.  Hector, one of the developers, had crawled into the pipe and was working on the final chamber, trying to make some last-minute adjustments that would pull any possible gold or rare earth molecules into the collection system, which in this case was the smallest collection chamber in the entire system.  He finally finished installing a new, and hopefully improved sonic wave generator into the chamber.

“Okay,” he yelled.  “Switch it on.  See if it works.”

As he laid in the pipe, one of the other team members turned the system on, activating the entire process.  It was something they had done not just hundreds, but thousands of times before.  Nothing was different, except the new wave generator.

Judith, the leader of the team and the woman at the control panel, saw the LED lights come on indicating that everything appeared to be working perfectly.  Two seconds later she heard a short scream.  Not knowing what had happened or what the problem was, she looked around.  The other team members appeared to be just as confused.  She quickly shut the machine down to check further.  It took them only seconds before they discovered that Hector, inside the pipe, was unconscious.  Nothing they could do seemed to bring him around.

Hector was taken to the hospital, where eventually the doctors declared him to be in a coma.  They ran test after test on his unconscious body, but never once found anything the slightest bit wrong with him.  All tests showed him to be physically in perfect health, except he was unconscious, and it looked like he was going to be staying that way, possibly for the rest of his life.

The team fretted horribly over the problem.  What had gone wrong?  They had all been inside the pipe many times at various stages of the development, including doing exactly what Hector had been doing.  But what had gone wrong this time?  Nothing at all that they could see.  Since the final section where Hector had been only targeted gold and a few rare earth elements, nothing should have happened to Hector at all.  It didn’t make sense!

The strangest thing however was that close examination of the system showed that something had been pulled out and stored in the collection canister for that final extraction chamber.  However, all measurements of that something indicated that whatever was in there was nothing at all.  The spectrometer sensor inside the canister was completely flat showing that there was nothing at all there, yet the pressure had gone up indicating that something was there.  But what?  Until more testing could be done to figure it out, the collection canister was left sealed and simply removed from the machine.

The new sonic wave generator was removed and tested, and found to be defective.  The signal that it emitted wasn’t what they had programmed it to put out.  The generator was emitting a much higher frequency than it was supposed to, and the wave was completely out of phase with the rest of the wave generators in that section.

A new wave generator was installed and tested, and the defective one was put on a shelf and carefully marked as defective.  Now they were left with a machine that could do exactly what the world needed, yet they didn’t dare put it on the market or do anything else with it until they solved a few problems first.  One, since that chamber only targeted gold and rare earths, what exactly had happened to Hector in there?  The second thing was something that really confused them all.  What had they extracted when Hector had been injured?  Nobody still had a clue.  And finally, why was Hector still in a coma when the doctors could find nothing wrong with him?

They worked and studied everything they could for three months, finding nothing that could give them any answers at all.  And that’s when the jest was made.  The joking comment that not only solved it all, but sent shivers of horror through each one of them.

The joke had suggested the impossible.  Yet as time went on, all five remaining members of the team began to wonder if it was indeed possible.  Had they done that?  How?  The existence of such a thing had never been scientifically proven.  It was one of the world’s greatest debates.  But had they now actually solved that debate and come up with proof?  If so, it would radically affect every known fact of mankind’s existence.

But they were scientists, every last one of them.  They had to know.  No one wanted to believe it was possible.  It didn’t even make sense, yet they had to test it to find out.  But how?  How do you possibly, scientifically, test for such a thing?

There was only one answer to that.  It was the only experiment they could conceive of to find out.  But if it worked, they would have their proof…without a doubt.

What they proposed to do was illegal.  No doctor, lawyer, or anyone else would condone such a thing, but they saw no other way.  The implications of what they might discover, or not discover, were simply too huge for any of them to ignore.

The first step was to carefully measure once again everything they possibly could.  But it was the second step that began to move them into illegal territory.  In the dead of the night, a plan was implemented to smuggle Hector’s unconscious body from the long-term care facility he had been placed in, and bring it back to the lab where they were working.

Most of the team had doctor degrees, PhDs, but none of them were medical doctors.  Still, they checked Hector as thoroughly as possible.  As a final safety precaution, Hector’s hospital gown was removed along with all the wires and tubes that had been attached to him to help keep him alive.  Hector was as naked and pure as they could make him.

Very carefully, they placed his body in the center of the final chamber of the pipe.  To further help the process, both ends of the pipe were sealed tightly.  The team had made two other changes to the process.  The original defective wave generator had been put back in place to duplicate the original wave signal, and the final piece of the puzzle was that the magnetic field that was generated in that chamber was reversed, so that instead of pulling at the desired particles, it would remove them from the collection canister and insert them into whatever was in the pipe instead.  In this case, Hector.

When they were ready, all five team members looked at each other.  Nobody knew what was going to happen.  Would they cure their beloved friend and colleague, Hector, or would they kill him instead?  Or…the most likely outcome…would nothing happen to him at all?  That’s what they all expected.  That’s what they all hoped would happen.

With one final prayer, Judith, the head of the team, turned to the control panel and switched it on.  Five seconds later, she switched it off.  As soon as the rest of the team deemed it safe, the end of the pipe was opened and all five of them crowded around.  Hector’s body was just as they had left it.  Unchanged.  Just what they all expected.  For a moment, they were all silently relieved…until Hector let out a small moan.  They all stared in both wonder and horror.  But the body in the pipe continued to lay there, completely unconscious.  Hector appeared to still be in a coma, yet they had all heard him moan.

As carefully and quickly as possible, Hector was smuggled back into the facility they had taken him from only hours earlier.  The ones who carried him back into his room didn’t see any sign that anyone had even noticed he had been gone.  As they laid him in his bed however, Hector let out another slight moan, yet he didn’t wake up.  Frightened, the men left him and hurried out, reporting the second moan to the others as soon as they were safely away.

The care facility discovered that something had happened to Hector when the morning shift came in to check on him.  They discovered that the wires and tubes had been removed from his body, but more than that, the moment they began hooking him up again, Hector moaned a third time, and then opened his eyes, scaring the workers.

“He’s awake!” one of them shouted.

Hector was immediately transported back to the hospital.  Several hours later, the doctors declared that the only thing wrong with him was that his muscles needed a bit of exercise to get them going again.  The three months of coma he had been in had weakened them somewhat.

Hector’s entire family was ecstatic.  The entire scientific team that he had worked with was ecstatic as well, although not one of them let anyone else know what they had done, even though they had done the absolute impossible.

What was that absolutely impossible thing?  Something no one had ever imagined could be done.  They had not only proven the existence of the human soul, but they had captured that soul, stored it, and then put it back where it belonged.

The implications of such a thing were incomprehensible!

But more than that, those implications were nothing but frightening.  So frightening that they all had to wonder, did they dare tell anyone?  To a person, they all decided that for now the answer had to be no.  No one else in the world could be told anything at all about what they had done.  They would all have to discuss it for a long time before they even dared let any such knowledge out.  The implications of such a thing were simply too staggering.

To capture a human soul and return it to the body.  It was a godlike process.  What dangers could it possibly bring?  The answers to that were too numerous to count.

The very idea of it was…frightening!

Here We Go Again

 Hi everyone!

I really hope you enjoyed The Last Jeskey.  I know I enjoyed it.  I enjoyed writing it too.  But…well…here we go again.

Okay, there’s the bad news and the bad news.  The first bad news is that I’m going to inflict yet another story on you (evil laugh).  But the second bad news is that once again there’s nothing that I consider to be kinky stuff in it at all.  To the best of my knowledge, just like The Last Jeskey, this next story is safe for work.  In my opinion anyway.  Don’t quote me on that.

Before I tell you about the next story, I’d like to say a big thank you to all of you who stuck with me and read this story, and an even bigger thanks to those of you who have checked in on me for years.  THANKS!  I appreciate it!  I also very much appreciate the few comments I get once in a while, letting me know what you think.  So to those of you who have commented, another big THANKS!

Oh!  And if you ever feel so inclined, please go to Amazon Kindle and check out the books I have for sale.  They’re listed under Karen Singer.  Just a bit of a reminder.  Thanks again!

Okay, the commercial is over.  As they sang on the Bug’s Bunny Show – On with the show, this is it.

This next story is called Extracted.  Yeah, a weird title, I know.  Deal with it!  I wasn’t planning on writing anything at all, yet this thing crept up on me, grabbed my brain, and refused to let go.  I had no choice but to write it.  And I hate to say it, but it may be one of the more fascinating stories I’ve ever written.  Writing it was just like old times.  The words seemed to fly off my fingers faster than anyone would believe.  In fact, I wrote the entire thing in about three weeks!  I lived, breathed, and slept this story.  It obsessed me that much.

But you don’t care about any of that.  You want to know what you’ll be getting into if you take a chance and read the thing.  Okay.  Fair enough.  First of all, when I started writing it, I wondered if maybe I was writing my first actual horror story.  But that quicky turned out to be not the case, even though what happened was certainly a horror to the main characters.  What it is though, is something much different.  The only way I can describe this novel is that it’s the story of…let’s say the fallout to the innocent victims from an act of revenge.  As much as I hate to say it, that’s the best description I can give it.  I do know that in reading through it, there were a lot of times I didn’t want to stop reading it.  It was that fascinating.

So what else can I tell you about this story?  As usual, that’s like Mission Impossible for me.  Strangely, the opening line to a song the Beetles released back in 1967 comes to mind.  A song with lyrics written by the great John Lennon.  What song?  A simple oddity called The Walrus.  The song opens with:

 

I am he
As you are he
As you are me
And we are all together.

As intended, the words are confusing…just like the characters in this story are confused.  However, if we were to really try to apply these lyrics to the story we would need to make some slight alterations to something more like:

 

He is she
And she is he
As you are me
And we are all together.

 

Yeah.  Much more appropriate here.  If you analyze that it should tell you a lot about this next book, because she is he and he is she.  Yeah, it’s already getting confusing.  I promise, reading about it is a lot easier.  As you can tell though, it’s a body swap story, and a gender swap story, and…a few other things as well.

As I said earlier, I consider this to be a very fascinating story, but that’s my opinion.  As always, your milage on that may vary.  Still, I think it’s a good one.  Maybe a really good one.  And it all starts with an accident that even some of the brightest minds in the country couldn’t figure out.

Twenty-seven chapters, but many of them are longer than the chapters in The Last Jeskey so I had to break them up to keep my posts to about the length I want.  I think it’s about forty-five posts total.  Another thing you don’t care about is that the total number of pages in this story is almost exactly the same as in The Last Jeskey, so the two stories are about the same length despite this one having fewer chapters.  And strangely enough, this story and The Last Jeskey are about what I consider to be the optimal length for a novel.  But I know, you don’t care.  Tough!  It makes me happy.

In the words of John Lennon who wrote in the lyrics for The Walrus:  “Goo goo g' joob.”

Extracted – Chapter List

Chapter 1 – I Was Just Joking

Chapter 2 – Accidently On Purpose

Chapter 3 – Scotty, Engage Warp Engines

Chapter 4 – Increasing Warp Speed

Chapter 5 – Warp Ten Achieved

Chapter 6 – Welcome To My World

Chapter 7 – The Psycho and Delic Hallucination

Chapter 8 – Absolutely Bonking Freaking

Chapter 9 – That’s Who I Am

Chapter 10 – Hello Mudda’

Chapter 11 – Round One and Round Two

Chapter 12 – Hello, It’s Not Me

Chapter 13 – How Many Eggs Does It Take

Chapter 14 – Like Sheep to the Slaughter

Chapter 15 – Have You Met Yourself

Chapter 16 – Please Don’t Hate Me

Chapter 17 – The Party’s At The Pool

Chapter 18 – Can I Ask You A Question

Chapter 19 – Friends and Lovers

Chapter 20 – Do Guys Have Periods Too

Chapter 21 – Out Of Sorts

Chapter 22 – Sign Me Up

Chapter 23 – Psst!  I Can’t Tell You This

Chapter 24 – Come File With Me

Chapter 25 – Slings and Arrows of Being a Quack

Chapter 26 – Aliens Explains Everything

Chapter 27 – Where’s Ponce de León When You Need Him

 

Yeah, goo goo g' joob is right!

Extracted starts with my next post.  Hopefully.

Love to you all,

Karen

The Last Jeskey - Chapter 49

 

The Last Jeskey

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 49

(Epilogue)

 

Freaky

 

All that was a long time ago now.  All that is ancient history.  It’s all water under the bridge.

I distinctly remember though that it seemed like an army of people were there at the farm, driving back and forth into those woods for a very long time.

Pamela came out one day to tell me that the D.A. had decided not to even think about pressing charges against me for killing Gary.  “I think he actually considers that you did the world a favor,” she told me.

“Why in the world would they arrest her?” Shantel demanded.  “He was gonna kill not just her, but all of us.”

“It’s probably best if I don’t go into that,” Pam had said.  “Just know that you’re all in the clear.  You can all get on with your lives.”

“Isn’t that what we was doin’?” Shantel had replied.

Aunt Kathy started to visit me once in a while, often bringing some of her kids with her so I could get to know more of the family, but there were other visits where the two of us just visited, going out for lunch together or getting a mani-pedi, something she seemed to enjoy quite a bit.

Pam, Natalie, and my Aunt Kathy started paying Lisa and Shantel a lot more money and they wanted to give me a big weekly allowance too, but Lisa wouldn’t let them give me more than a hundred dollars each week to spend on myself.  She said I needed to learn how to handle the money better first and a hundred dollars a week was probably too much for me already.  Money still confused me at that point, but I was starting to get the hang of it.  I did discover though that buying things was fun!

Shortly after I had killed Gary, all three of us became even happier when they came and installed a new washing machine and dryer for us.  Although I still hung most of my clothes on the clothesline behind the house because I simply liked the way it made my clothes smell.

And then there was the day about a year later when Pam, Natalie, and Aunt Kathy came back to see me again.  They sat down with all of us at the table and laid things out for me.  I thought I knew a lot about money by then.  I thought I knew a lot about a lot of things, but I was only just then beginning to realize how much there really was to learn.

“There was a lot of money that was found under that hidden space in the closet,” Pam told us.  “Fifty-thousand dollars.  That’s the money you’ve all been living on so far.  And then they pulled two million six hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of that place under the old water pump.”

“Million!” Lisa had exclaimed.

“Two million,” Pam had confirmed.  “And when they got that safe open that they found in the woods, it contained four million, eight hundred thousand dollars.”

“Four!” Shantel exclaimed.

“And now,” Pam had continued, “the legal battles over the land that you should have inherited from your father and grandfather have finally been settled.  There are several Knoxville area councilmen who are now in very big trouble for the dealings they made with the land developer who bought it, and one former police chief as well who decided to simply have you declared dead long before he should have in order to receive a cut of the proceeds.  Not to mention that one of those politicians is in big trouble for seizing all of your father’s money from the bank in the name of the area council and having it transferred directly into the council’s budget, then taking it out the same day to pay a company that he owned for a contracted job he simply made up, essentially laundering the money so there would be almost no trace of it.”

I had been told about the investigations going on shortly after I killed Gary, but at the time I hadn’t understood any of it.  Several months later, Pam had told us of the court proceedings that were taking place about what was found.  I didn’t really understand any of that either, but I was trying.

“Because there was so much money mishandling going on,” Pam told us.  “The courts had to look into it all and come to a conclusion as to how much, if anything, you should be awarded from it.  Since it should have been all your money to begin with, we were pushing hard for you to get every last penny you should have been owed.  Unfortunately, the courts only partially agreed with us.  I think giving you everything that everyone made off that money would simply have caused too many problems down the line for a lot of different places and people, not just the ones who are probably going to wind up in jail.  However, we think the court was fairly generous towards you.  While you didn’t get as much of a settlement as we had hoped, they still awarded you fifteen million dollars.  As I said, the rest would have simply hurt the local area economy too much.”

“Fifteen million?” Lisa exclaimed in disbelief.

“Yes,” Pam said.  “The money the developer made off of those two large farms was more than anyone imagined.  Well over a hundred million dollars.  Your fifteen million cut is actually nothing but a drop in the bucket.  All totaled, between that and the money that was illegally seized from the bank, and the money that was found around here, that’s a little shy of twenty-three million dollars.  And since Bo, Ben, Steve, Dave, and Gary are all dead, the only remaining heir for it all is you.”

“Damn!” Shantel exclaimed  “Twenty-three million dollars!”  She looked over at me.  “Girl, you ain’t just rich, you is filthy rich.”  The truth though was that it meant nothing to me.

“We’re going to have to sort the taxes out still,” Pam had told us.  “Plus, there’s our fee that we’ll take.  But you’re still going to be left with quite a lot.”

Taxes was a subject I was currently trying to struggle with.  Lisa had told me that pretty much everyone else struggled with it too.  But as much money as that was, I didn’t really care.  I was happy and content living just the way I was in that house with my two best friends at my side.

Lisa filed for divorce and soon no longer worried about whether she loved her abusive husband or not.  Shantel simply told her it was about damn time!  Of course, Shantel was getting busier and busier as she started going to different churches with the reverend to give concerts.  A few years later, she finally married her beloved reverend.  Despite that, she still comes out to the farm, day after day, to help out where she can…whenever she isn’t touring somewhere with her music.  But Lisa stayed with me, having no interest at all in finding another man.  The two of us are simply happy living here together.

I eventually got my high school diploma, and later did a few years at the local collage, but I never got a degree.  I wasn’t interested.  I had other things to occupy my mind.  Important things.

Eight years after I killed Gary, we broke ground on a new building at the farm.  A very large building that was designed to have everything we thought we could possibly need.  It took over two years to finish that building, but when it was done, the Jeskey Women’s Shelter was born, with Lisa and I both running it together.  That was what we had decided to do with our time and my money.  Money that I was now fully in charge of, and I felt like I actually understood.

But as far as I was concerned, killing Gary was the real end of it all.  There was just one other little thing that happened that kind of put the period at the end of the sentence of it all for me.  And that something happened back shortly after Gary had died.

Shantel was sitting and playing her new guitar and singing for us again like she did most nights.  At the end of one of the songs, I said, “Shantel, I never really thanked you for saving my life when you hit Gary with your guitar.  Thank you.”

Shantel had just looked at me, then had gotten up and came over to stand right in front of me.  “Honey Pie,” she said.  “You have given me my life back.  I can never thank you enough for that.  I got a decent place to live, and I got the music back in my life, and most of all I got God back on my side.  I owe you my life child.  I owe you and God everything I have, everything I am, and everything I ever will be.  You need something, you just ask, ‘cause I’m all yours.  I love you to death Baby Doll.”  With that, she hugged me tightly.

When she sat back down though, there was something important that was still on my mind.  “Nobody seems to like my name,” I told both Shantel and Lisa.

“Honey Pie,” Shantel said, “If’n you like it, that’s all that matters!  And to hell with what anyone else thinks.”

“Yes,” Lisa had said.  “All that matters is what you want.”

I considered that for a moment then said.  “I’m wondering if I may have lied a bit,” I told them. 

“About what?” Lisa asked.

“I do sort of remember a man and a woman when I was real young.  But like I told everyone, I really don’t know who they were.  They’re just images.  But when my…grandfather was here that day, and he asked me if I remember being Brian, I told him no, I didn’t.  Which was pretty much true at the time.  I didn’t really remember it at all.  But what he said kind of brought something back to me.  Something that used to be kind of a nightmare for me.  I started remembering Bo taking me somewhere once, and being tied down to a table, and some woman doing something to me between my legs.  I remember hurting a lot for a while, but it’s all so vague now that I really can’t tell you anything about it.  But because of that, and what my grandfather asked, I’m thinking that maybe when I was real young, maybe I was a boy…somehow.  And maybe back then, my name really was Brian.”

“Honey Pie,” Shantel said.  “Leese and me knew there was things that was wrong with you from the time we had you in that shower back at that women’s shelter.”

“Natalie also told me a bit about what the doctor said that one time you had been examined after they first found you,” Lisa told me.  “Shantel and I both know you can’t have sex like a normal woman, but as far as we’re both concerned, since it’s not hurting you, then there’s no sense in worrying about it.  According to Natalie though, you just need to keep taking those vitamin pills you take every day.  In your case, they’re actually good for you.”

“If you was a boy back then,” Shantel said.  “You for sure ain’t one now.”

I nodded.  “Thanks,” I said.  Then I pressed on, trying to get to what I really wanted to talk about.  “Back then,” I said.  “Back when all that started, Bo never actually gave me a name that I know of.  They all only ever called me the freak.  And that’s what kind of stuck.  So I’m wondering if maybe a better name would be a good thing for me now.”

“You want a better name?” Lisa asked.  “Freaky is fine, but as you said, people do look at you funny when they hear it.”

“What did you have in mind?” Shantel asked.

“I don’t know,” I told them.  “Something…nicer that people won’t look at me strangely for.”

Lisa and Shantel started throwing out names, making suggestions.  A lot of those names we all actually liked.  And then Lisa suggested another name.  A name that kind of struck something in me.  A name that I knew instantly was the one.  It was a name that I finally chose because it would forever remind me of who I was, and where I had come from.  A name that was…me.

As I said though, all that was a long time ago.  And so at the urging of Lisa and Shantel, I’ve written this story in the hopes that this little slice of my life can inspire others who have been downtrodden to find the courage to overcome their circumstances, as I truly believe they can.

Yes, I know that the first thing you’re going to say is that I had money.  But it wasn’t the money that made the difference.  In fact, Lisa and I still live in that same old house on the farm where we’ve always lived, and other than fixing it up to make it more comfortable and look better, the house is basically the same as it was.

But the truth is, the money had nothing to do with helping me.  What it took was time, determination, hard work, and mostly the help of some very good friends who were also my teachers.  As Shantel often says, “It took all three of us, to pull all three of us, out of our own individual hell holes.”

And that idea is the driving force behind my women’s shelter.  All the women helping each other to overcome whatever hell hole they’ve gotten themselves stuck in.  Yes, we have a couple of psychologists on staff, but the real work is done by the women themselves, helping each other.

So that’s my tale.  That’s a little bit of the story of my life.  I came from the worst circumstances possible, and I built a place where I could help others find the courage to move on from whatever problems they have.

I’ve made arrangements so that the women’s shelter will live on long after me.  The name of the shelter will eventually be the last reminder of my family name and who I was.  Hopefully it will be a place that people will associate the name of Jeskey with something good instead of the horrors of Bo Jeskey.

I am the last of the Jeskey line.  There will never be another Jeskey of my line after me.

With that I’ll simply say, love to you all.

Brianna – the last Jeskey.

 

The End

The Last Jeskey - Chapter 48

 

The Last Jeskey

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 48

 

(Day 13 – Tuesday)

 

Sheriff Cobb

 

“You look like hell!” my wife said as I walked back into her hospital room the next morning.

“Gee thanks!” I said as I plopped my weary body down in the chair.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I no sooner got home last night,” I said, “when my damn phone rang.  To make a long story short, Freaky killed Gary last night.  Shantel hit him over the head with her guitar and Freaky grabbed his gun and shot him in the face.  And to make matters that much worse, I’ve got another dead deputy.  Gary shot him before he broke into the house.  I’ve been up all night with this mess.  I haven’t even been to bed yet.”

“How are those women doing?” Nat asked.

“I think Lisa and Shantel are more than a bit rattled by what happened.  Scared too.”

“I don’t blame them,” Natalie said.  “I would be too.  And Freaky?”

“As far as I can tell, shooting Gary in the head didn’t affect her much at all.”

“You know,” Natalie said, “that psychologist we talked to at that behavioral center said he was struck by how little Freaky seemed to care that Bo, Ben, and Steve had been shot and killed right in front of her.  And that was beside the fact that Freaky always seemed to defend them all anytime anyone tried to criticize what they’d done to her.  She told everyone over and over that she was so grateful to them because without them she wouldn’t be alive.  Maybe there was more hatred in her than we thought.”

“Could be,” I agreed.  “Who knows.  For now, she seems to be dealing with what she did just fine.”

“You didn’t arrest her did you?  I would think it was self-defense.”

“No.  It was clearly a case where Gary had gone in with the intention of killing her, and I’m sure the other two as well.  I’ve been so busy since then that I haven’t even called the D.A. yet to let him know what happened.”

“You might want to do that soon,” Natalie suggested.

“Yeah.  I’ll get to it, along with a thousand other things.  He can wait a few minutes.”

“Who was the deputy that died?” she asked.

“Paul Shultz.”

“I don’t think I know him.”

“He’s young.  Very young.  In fact, I’m pretty sure he still lived with his parents.”

“So at least he doesn’t have a wife and kids,” she noted.

“No.  At least there’s that.  Not like Simpson.  He had a wife and a young boy.”

“I heard,” she said.  “When’s the funeral?”

“I don’t know.  I haven’t had a chance to do anything with any of it yet.  And now I have to tell Paul’s family that he’s gone.  Before this happened, I’ve been trying to spend as much time as I can right here with you.”

“Thanks,” she said.  “I appreciate it.”

“Since you’ve been in here,” I said, “I think it’s the most time we’ve spent together in a long time.  I like it.  Not that you’re hurt.  I just like getting to spend a bit of time with you.”

She held out her arms and I moved in for a hug and kiss.  When she pulled away she slapped at my chest.  “Will Cobb,” she chastised.  “There’s a family out there wondering why their son hasn’t come home from work yet.  Don’t you think they deserve to know sooner rather than later?”

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “I guess sitting in a chair with you for the rest of the day is going to be out for now.”

“Will, I’m fine.  I’m getting better.  I’ll be out of here in a few days.  You’ve got a job to do, so go to work.  And give my condolences to the family.”

“Yeah.  Sure,” I told her.  I leaned in and kissed her again.  “See you later.”

“Go to work!”

Back in my car, I called the station and got the address for where Paul Shultz lived with his family.  As I headed there, I couldn’t help but think that I had just gone through this for Simpson.  But with Simpson, Russ had already done the notification deed.  This time I was going to have to do the dirty work myself.  But that’s what they paid me the big bucks for.  And I wished they really did pay me some big bucks.  Lately, things had been more than my little salary was worth.

The Shultz house was in one of those decent residential areas where we rarely needed to send a deputy out at all.  That wasn’t the case today though since I was there.  I parked in front of the house and was heading across the front lawn when one of the deputy cars pulled up and parked behind my car.  I waited where I was and saw Amanda get out.  “What are you doing here?” I asked as she walked up to me.”

“Russ assigned me to arrange the funerals for both Simpson and now Paul.  Since you’re here now, I take it nobody has told them yet that he’s dead?”

“Not that anyone told me,” I said.  “Stay here or come with me, the choice is yours.  It’s gotta be done though.”

She followed me to the front door where I knocked.  “Sheriff,” she said as we waited.  “You know you look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I told her.  “You’re the second one who’s told me that in the last hour alone.”

The door was opened by an older man.  He let us inside, and everything went downhill from there.  When the crying had mostly subsided, Mr. Shultz asked, “How did it happen?”

“He was shot in the line of duty,” I told him.  “More than that, I’m afraid I can’t say.  The investigation has just started.”

He nodded then said, “Paul called us last night and said he’d be spending most of the night out at the Jeskey place guarding some women in case Gary Jeskey showed up.  I’ve heard time and time again that the Jeskey bunch are all big trouble.  So was it Gary who shot him?”

It sounded to me like Paul had said a bit more than he should have, but really, there was no big secret as to what Paul was doing out there.  “When we arrived last night, we found Gary’s pickup parked in the middle of the road leading to the Jeskey farm.  It looks like he parked it there then cut through the woods and fields and snuck up behind your son.”

“And shot him.”

I nodded.  “Unfortunately.”

“Do you think there’s any chance of finding Gary?” he asked.  “According to Paul, you’ve been after him for some time now.”

“We found him, in a manner of speaking,” I admitted.  “Rest assured, your son’s murderer is dead.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“Me?  No.  It wasn’t me.  Someone else.”

“At least you got him.  Paul would have been proud to know that one of his friends avenged his death.”

“Yeah.  There is that,” I said, even though that hadn’t been the case at all.  He didn’t need to know that though.

As Amanda and I were walking back to our cars I said, “I need to talk to those women out at that farm again, especially Freaky.  Want to come?”

“Sure,” Amanda agreed.

“We’ll stop at the station then and drop off your car, you can ride with me.”

“No sheriff.  We’ll drop your car at the station, and you can ride with me.  You’re the one who looks like hell.”

“Point taken,” I agreed.  “You’re not another one who’s going to be after my job are you?  Cause if you are, that’s fine.  You and Russ can duke it out together.”

“No Sheriff,” Amanda said with a slight grin on her face.  And Russ isn’t after your job.  He’d never get it, and he knows it.  You’ve been around too long and there’s too many people who like you.”

“Thanks,” I told her.

“Russ is looking for a sheriff position somewhere else.”

“Nice of him to tell me,” I noted.

“I want his job.”

I looked at her.  Yeah, she could definitely fill the bill.  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I told her.  “If Russ ever finds a job somewhere else.”

It wasn’t long before I was sitting in her car and letting her drive.  I closed my eyes for the brief bit of rest it might bring me.

“What do you need to talk to the women about now?” Amanda asked.

So much for the chance to close my eyes a bit.  “Follow up to get each of their stories on what happened last night.  You can take one or two and I’ll do the others.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to wait a day or so?” she asked.  “I’m guessing you haven’t been to bed, and I doubt they got much sleep either.”

“Normally you’d be right,” I told her.  “But everything that happened is pretty clear already.  We just need the paperwork to show we did our jobs.  Besides, there’s another reason I need to talk to Freaky.  An important one that I haven’t gotten to, and I should have.”

“What’s that?”

“The first time Freaky showed us those hiding places in the barn we were a bit too overwhelmed by it all for me to get a chance to talk to her later.  Then she showed us another hiding place in the house, and later that big one under the pump.  Both times we were overwhelmed by the amount of money in them.  Both times I never had the chance to sit down and talk to her afterwards about the most important thing.”

‘What’s that?” she asked.

“Are there anymore.”

Amanda was mercifully quiet for a while and I chanced closing my eyes again, but all I could think about was Freaky and the fact that she had shot Gary.  With Gary dead now, that left Freaky as the sole remaining Jeskey…as far as we knew.  The Jeskey clan had always been big trouble.  Huge trouble!  I was guessing it was something in their genes.  The psychopath gene.

Since Freaky was a Jeskey too, I couldn’t help but wonder if she had inherited that gene as well.  I remembered that so far, Freaky wasn’t acting overly worried or remorseful about shooting Gary.  And Natalie had told me earlier that even though Freaky was forever grateful to Bo and his boys for the fact that she was alive, she hadn’t shown any kind of remorse or sorrow that they were gone.  Did that mean that she was another psychopath like the rest of them?  I could only hope not.  I was guessing though that time would tell.  But then all those Jeskeys had always been really good at hiding what they had done.  If Freaky was that way, there was a good chance nobody would ever know.

As we approached the farm, I noticed that someone had taken the time to move Gary’s truck out of the middle of the road.  I saw it parked next to all the other Jeskey pickup trucks in front of the house.  I briefly wondered what was going to become of them all.  I put that thought out of my mind.  Not my business, and I didn’t really care.  As I got out of Amanda’s car, I noticed that the false water pump bunker was still open.  Nobody had bothered to close that up yet.  It needed to be closed and locked for a while, but just then I didn’t care about that either.

We went up onto the porch and knocked.  The door was opened soon after by Shantel.  “Sheriff,” she said.  “Come on in.”

Amanda and I went inside.  “Anybody get any sleep last night?” I asked.

“Not much,” Lisa said from her seat at the table where she was sitting with Freaky.

I walked over to see what they were doing.  “What’s up?” I asked as I leaned over the table and saw a piece of paper with a few numbers written on it.

“We’re learning a tiny bit of math,” Lisa told me.  “Freaky, show him.”

Freaky didn’t exactly look happy.  “I hate math, and I hate numbers!” she said rather vehemently.  “This is supposed to be men’s business.”

“Freaky…  What did we say about all that?”

Freaky closed her eyes.  “It’s women’s business too.”

“Now show the sheriff please what you just learned.”

Freaky sighed and spread her fingers out.  If I count this finger, plus this finger,” she said as she pointed to her fingers, then that’s two fingers.  And if I add those two fingers to the other three, then that’s five fingers.  My whole hand.”

“We’re just starting,” Lisa explained.  “She doesn’t know any numbers past number five yet, but we can still do a bit of adding with just that much.”

It seemed overly stupid to me, but I didn’t really care.  “We need to talk to each of you about last night and get your individual stories about it.  It’s just routine, so don’t worry.  This was a crime of self-defense.  None of you have any reason to worry about anything at all.”

“Worry?  I ain’t worried about anything,” Shantel said.  “I broke my guitar over that bastard’s head, and I’d do it again every time!”

I nodded.  “Amanda, why don’t you take Shantel first.  I’ll talk to Freaky.”

“Can I get out of doing all this number stuff?” Freaky asked me.

“For now,” I told her.  “Let’s go out to the porch to sit where we can talk alone.”

The two of us went outside and sat in some of the wooden Adirondack chairs that graced most of the front porch.  “Freaky,” I said.  “I know you told us most of what happened already, but I need to go over everything again…for our records.  Do you understand?”

All I got out of her was a shrug as if she didn’t care.

“Now what exactly happened last night?” I asked.

We were sitting listening to Shantel sing,” she said.  “Oh, it’s probably nothing, but while she was singing, we heard this little bang, but none of us knew what it was.  Shantel didn’t even stop singing so we didn’t worry about it.  Then all of a sudden, Gary rushed into the house and pointed a gun at us.  Gary pointed the gun right at me, right close to my face and started talking about getting revenge against me and then roasting me over a fire again so he could eat me.  I just knew that Gary really wanted to not just hurt me bad, he wanted to kill me too.  All the way this time.  And then there was this big crash when Shantel hit him with her guitar and broke it into lots of pieces.  Gary fell down and seemed to be sleeping.  Shantel used some of her guitar strings to tie him up.  When Gary woke up, he was shouting about revenge and stuff, and killing me and…I shot him.”

I had forgotten about Gary being tied with the steel guitar strings.  That fact would do more than muddy the waters.  If he was tied well enough, there was no real need to kill him.  Freaky could go to jail for that.  Damn!  Was that another sign of those Jeskey psychopath genes coming out?  I decided not to press that issue…for now.

“Thanks Freaky,” I said.  “There’s just one other thing that I needed to ask you about.”

“What?” she asked.

“You showed us those hiding places in the barn, and then later you showed us the hiding place under the old water pump.  I need to know, are there any more hiding places that you know of?”

I watched as she seemed to consider that and think about it.  Then she said, “Maybe.  But I’m really not sure.  I’ve never actually seen where it is.”

“But do you think you can find it?”

“Maybe,” she said again.  “I don’t even know if there’s anything there.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it’s where they always punish me.  Since I’m in the ground and I can’t turn my head that far, I can’t see what they’re doing behind me.”

“Behind you?”

“Yeah.  Once in a while, after they bury me, I can hear them doing something behind me for a while.  But I have no idea what.”

“And where is this place?” I asked.

“In the woods.”

“Where in the woods?”

“I told you.  Where they punish me.”

“And where is that?”

She shrugged.  “Deep in the woods.  That’s all I know.”

“If we take you there, do you think you can find it?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Do you think you can at least try?”

“No!” she said firmly.  “I never go into the woods.  Bad things always happen to me there.”

“Bad things?  Like what?”

“The only time I ever go into the woods is when they take me and punish me.  Bad things!”

“Yeah.  I can see that.  But Freaky, they’re all dead now.  They can’t hurt you.  And we’ll be with you every step of the way.  You’ll have nothing to worry about.”

“There’s still the bears,” she said.  “Lots of bears.  Especially there.”

“Okay,” I said.  “We’ll bring some guns, just in case.  Will that do?”

“Maybe!” she replied.

“How long a walk is it?” I asked, trying to get some idea about it.

“We never walked.  They always stuck me in the back of one of their trucks and drove me there.”

“It’s that far?”

She shrugged again and I was guessing she didn’t really know.  Could she even find it?  I figured it was worth a look anyway.  And if she couldn’t find it, at least we’d have a general area as to where to start another search.

When I went inside, Amanda had already finished with Shantel and was just finishing up with Lisa.  When they were done, I told Amanda, “We’re going for a bit of a ride.”

“Where to?” Amanda asked.

“The woods.  Freaky is going to show us her punishment spot.”

“That might be a good idea,” Lisa said.  “She needs to see it and come to grips with the fact that she’s never going to get punished there again.  I think that will help her a lot.”

That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but I couldn’t argue with it.

“Yeah,” Shantel agreed.  “And because of that, we all need to see it so’s we can talk to Freaky about it later when she needs.”

It sounded like Freaky was having issues that I didn’t know about.  I ignored that possibility though.  I had other more important things to think about.  “Okay,” I said.  “But please stay out of the way.”

“Not a problem,” Lisa told me.

All three women stuffed themselves in the backseat of Amanda’s car and we took off.  Freaky pointed us to a different road leading into the woods than the one I had followed.  I couldn’t help but notice that the woods were dark and thick, with areas that were blocked with vegetation and other areas between the trees that were fairly open.

“I think it’s somewhere around here,” Freaky suddenly said.

Amanda kept going, but she drove slower.

“Just past here I think,” Freaky said.

“Where?” I asked, not seeing anything.

“Stop!” Freaky said.  Then she pointed to the thick bushes at the side of the road.  “I’m pretty sure it’s right there.  You’ve got to open it up.”

I looked and didn’t see anything.  “Open what?”

Freaky got out of the car and I went with her.  She walked up to one of the trees and started poking around.  “I think it’s here somewhere,” she said.  “I’m pretty sure this is where they always go.”

I noticed that most of the vegetation in that area was dead.  That clued me in.  I took a closer look at the tree and found a hidden gate latch.  I flipped it and chanced pulling on it.  The entire large section of bushes between two of the trees swung open like a gate, revealing another road.  As I kept pulling,  I noticed that the bushes that the gate was made of were brushing the ground.  They would pretty much erase any tracks showing where it was.  Once again, Bo Jeskey’s handwork had been ingenious.

We got back into the car and followed the new road.  We kept going and going.  I was fairly sure we were no longer on the Jeskey property, but that fact didn’t matter much.  It was all woods, and I was betting that nobody ever came out here, not even to hunt.

“Here!” Freaky suddenly said.  “This is it.”

We all got out and looked around.  “See,” Freaky said.  “That’s the tree where they hung me from last time.”

I looked and saw a thick piece of rope still hung over one of the big branches.

“And here’s where they keep burying me,” Freaky showed us next.

I looked.  There was a rough hole in the ground.  I could easily imagine someone being shoved in there and buried with nothing but their head sticking out.

“Sheriff….” Amanda called.

“Yeah?”

She wasn’t looking at the hole in the ground.  She was about twenty feet away staring over the side of a hill.  I went to take a look.  I couldn’t believe what I saw.  “Holy mother of….”  I stopped myself right there.  The entire area was filled with vehicles.  It looked like one big junkyard.

I started walking down the hill for a better look, when something snapped in the dirt under my feet.  I stopped for a look and saw something white sticking up from the leaves that covered the forest floor.  That something white though was pretty easy to identify.  It was a bone.  A leg bone from a human.

We had found the Jeskeys dumping place for not just the vehicles, but all the bodies.

“There’s a bear over there,” Amanda pointed out.

I looked.  She was right.  “There’s another one over there,” I showed her.

I didn’t say it out loud, but it looked to me like the Jeskeys had dumped the bodies out here and simply let the bears eat them to get rid of them.  Identifying any remains was going to be nearly impossible.  There was one other fact about it that hit me as well.  Dead bodies that had been left to the bears to dispose of meant that those bears were probably used to eating human flesh.  No wonder there were a lot of bears in this area.  And if they were used to eating human flesh, that made every one of them a maneater.  They would all be far more dangerous than anyone thought.

I looked around for Freaky, but she was nowhere near us.  I saw her, Lisa, and Shantel looking at a pile of bushes back behind where that hole was.

“I’m going to get the rifle from my trunk,” Amanda said as I headed for Freaky to see what she was doing.

“Good idea,” I told her.

I went over to see what the women were looking at.  “Is this where you heard them doing something?” I asked Freaky.

“I think so,” she said.  “I couldn’t ever see though.”

I started looking around with her, and I finally found another one of those gate latches.  I pulled and immediately noticed that while everything moved, it was very heavy.  With a bit of effort though, a much larger section of bushes than the one that formed the gate hiding the road swung out.  But behind those bushes wasn’t another road.  What we found instead was a cave.  A cave with a rather large opening.  And inside that cave, was a truck.  A truck with a flatbed.  And on that bed was something large that was covered completely with a tarp.  It was all strapped down like it was ready to go down the highway.

I climbed up on the back of that truck and pulled up the tarp at the back.  Under the tarp, I found exactly what I was expecting to find.  One ginormous safe.