Only the Strong

by Ethan Cross

  Pushing the memory aside and telling himself it had merely been a twisted dream, he concentrated on repairing his memory. But whatever drug he had been given was still clouding his thoughts, and the last several days seemed a jumbled blur of feelings and images.

  Jerrell felt around on the floor, which seemed to be swaying back and forth as if he was on a boat. In the blackness, he didn’t know which way was up or down. All directions seemed to become one spinning vortex of darkness and memory.

  He took a deep and calming breath, telling himself he was an undercover FBI agent. He had been trained for this. He had once been forced to take LSD to keep from blowing his cover. If he could fight his way through that strange trip, he could fight his way through a dizzying darkness.

  Hands searching and straining, he felt something. A small deviation in the smoothness of the cold concrete. The floor dipped downward toward a small impression, and his fingers felt the metal cover of what seemed to be a small floor drain. He knew what it was for. He had seen rooms where men were tortured and bled out into drains just like this one.

  Jerrell was only twenty-nine years old. The thought that he wouldn’t live to see thirty had never occurred to him, despite the dangers inherent in his line of work. He was a good agent. He didn’t take unnecessary risks, and he never tried to push himself deeper than was necessary. It was all about finesse and gaining trust. It took time and patience. And he had done everything right. There was no reason they should have suspected him. Unless there was a leak in the Bureau. He couldn’t imagine one of his fellow agents ratting him out for money, but it had happened before. He had seen firsthand the power of greed and how easily the promise of riches could corrupt a righteous person’s soul.

  And in this day and age, his betrayer needn’t be an actual person. Mr. King had the resources to crack FBI encryption and infiltrate the Bureau’s databases. Whether by greed or technology, the fact remained that his cover must have been compromised.

  He tried to remember their security protocols. How long would it be before his handlers came looking for him? Dropping out of contact for a few days wasn’t uncommon during such a deep-cover assignment, and so he figured he would be long dead before help arrived. His survival depended solely on his own initiative.

  But what could he do to help himself in an environment that spun like an amusement park ride and was so pitch black he couldn’t see his own hands a foot in front of his face?

  One small step at a time, he told himself. Explore the environment, discover your boundaries. He felt his way along the concrete until he reached an outer wall of concrete blocks. He followed that around to gauge the dimensions of the room, which was about twelve by twelve. Then he explored every inch of the walls themselves. In one wall, he found a four-foot-by-four-foot square of glass inset in the blocks. He pounded his fists and shoulder against the barrier as hard as he could, but in his confused state, he had no idea whether his blows held enough power to break a car window, let alone what he suspected to be reinforced glass or even bulletproof polycarbonate.

  As he slowly regained his faculties, a disturbing thought bobbed to the surface. He had heard the rumors about the Gladiator, who acted as Mr. King’s hatchet man. He had heard the horror stories of the Gladiator eliminating the crime lord’s enemies over days of torture and physical abuse and ultimately skinning them alive after defeating them in a sort of bloody combat reminiscent of what slaves endured in the Roman Coliseum.

  Was that to be his fate? Was he at the mercy of the Gladiator?

  Special Agent Jerrell Fuller didn’t have to wait long to find out. As he was exploring his small prison cell and searching for cracks in the defenses, light bombarded the room. Through squinting eyelids, he recognized that the source of the illumination came from beyond the glass partition. After a few seconds, his eyes adjusted, but what he saw caused him to stumble and fall backward away from the glass.

  It was the face of the monster from his nightmares, the shining skull of an otherworldly beast.

  His foggy brain recognized in that moment that he hadn’t felt a door to the room, and he wondered how the nightmare figure had placed him inside the claustrophobic concrete prison. Had he been dropped through the ceiling? Had the door been walled up after he had been deposited on the concrete floor?

  A disembodied voice, which was deep and electronically distorted, said, “Hello, Agent Fuller. That’s right. We know that you are a traitor, a Judas in our midst, and Mr. King pays me a substantial amount of money to deal with such unwelcome interlopers. His payments serve to finance my own pursuits, and your blood, if you are worthy, will further the same purpose.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” Jerrell screamed. “I was running one of Mr. King’s distribution centers. I didn’t do anything wrong. I would never steal from Mr. King. I would never betray him. Tell him that. I’m a loyal soldier. I’m thankful for all the opportunities he’s given me, and I would never betray that trust.”

  “We’re way beyond all that, Agent Fuller. Your mask has been removed. Your true identity and your insidious machinations have been exposed. Now is not the time to plead for your life or further taint yourself with more lies. Now is the time to prove yourself. To prove that you are worthy of survival. Worthy of being a member of a species which rules this planet in both mind and body. You will be tested, and if found worthy, you will face me in the Diamond Room.”

  One of the blocks near the floor fell inward, revealing a small panel of light. A paper plate containing a bloody steak, a baked potato, and a bottle of water dropped through the opening before it clamped shut.

  Jerrell rushed forward on shaking legs, trying to catch the panel before it closed, but he only succeeded in kicking his meal onto the concrete.

  The Gladiator said, “Eat. You’ll need your strength for the trials ahead.”

  Then Special Agent Jerrell Fuller’s world plunged back into darkness eternal.

  ~~*~~

  Chapter Fifteen

  Special Agent Marcus Williams lay atop the motel room sheets with his eyes closed. His alarm would be going off soon. His girlfriend and fellow SO agent, Maggie Carlisle, slept peacefully beside him, but that kind of serene slumber had always eluded Marcus.

  He had fought insomnia for years, unable to turn down the volume on his brain long enough to sleep. Attempting to thwart the condition, which he hated to admit had affected his job performance, Marcus had tried music and reading, but neither seemed to work. If he listened to music, he would simply analyze the different instruments and tones for hours on end. If he read, he would simply finish the book. The only technique that seemed to work for him was something that the Shepherd Organization’s counselor, Emily Morgan, had suggested: a sensory deprivation chamber known as an isolation tank.

  The unit, which resided back at their base of operations in Rose Hill, VA, looked like an old iron lung. The chamber was a lightless, soundproof monstrosity filled with Epsom salts and water heated to skin temperature. It created a natural buoyancy where he achieved a sense of weightlessness coupled with total isolation from the typical waves of overwhelming input.

  Now, lying in this motel-room bed, he heard the noise of cars outside, analyzed the sizes of their engines as well as the possible makes and models based upon the unique growls and hums. He could hear the neon lights of the motel sign buzzing like a thousand wasps in his brain. He analyzed Maggie’s breathing to see if he could determine the nature of her dreams. Someone had a television running in an adjoining room. He couldn’t make out the details of the broadcast, but he guessed that it was a news program, a conjecture founded upon the beats and pauses of the muffled words and sounds pumping from the TV speakers.

  He had given up on sleep hours ago, and instead, he replayed the events of Demon’s escape, scrutinizing his every move and decision to determine if a flaw in his own thinking had led to the almost-disaster.
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  Even though Demon was now locked away in one of the world’s most secure prisons, Marcus felt they had failed in every way and were only playing out whatever demented scheme the madman had concocted.

  The Shepherd team had already spent two weeks analyzing, searching, and investigating in Oklahoma City, but just as Ackerman predicted, they had reaped nothing but a series of dead ends and wild-goose chases. Everyone was beginning to feel that they were barking up the wrong tree, even Maggie. The more they dug into the serial killer in custody in Oklahoma City, the more Marcus was certain he had made the wrong call, a decision that may have killed their chances of catching the Gladiator.

  Not wanting to dissect the case and his failure any further, his thoughts turned to other questions: Was he a good father? Should he have allowed his brother out of a cage?

  But it wasn’t long before the case crept back to the forefront. Unanswered questions were like thorns in his brain, and this case was all questions and no answers. He fought the urge to scream in frustration. He yearned for sleep, wondering why it had been so hard to keep his heavy lids from falling during the drive from Arizona. Why couldn’t he do the same now?

  Checking the time, he turned off the alarm ten minutes before it sounded and got up. He showered and threw on a black T-shirt and jeans. Several days of stubble poked out from the skin on his face, but he didn’t have the energy to shave and told himself it made him look tough, instead of merely lazy.

  The Director had called the night before and told him to be at the diner across the street at 5:00 a.m. for a meeting. The team had been working long hours, with every pursuit proving fruitless. They were all exhausted, but he hoped the old man had somewhere for their investigation into the Gladiator to begin. Making a command decision, he hadn’t informed the rest of the team about the early-morning rendezvous, figuring they could use the extra rest after the disappointments of the past two weeks. In truth, he was envious of their tranquil slumber, something which seemed so alien to him.

  He would have been better off working through the nights rather than lying there trying to pass out. But Maggie always wanted him to lie with her until she fell asleep. There were some nights when he would simply listen to her breathe in and out until she guided him down into dreams. But even those nights were filled with nightmares so vivid that he sometimes forgot whether his surroundings were real or imaginary. He had once caught himself dreaming about a case and then thinking the next day that the dream had actually happened.

  The diner across the street reminded Marcus of Mel’s Drive-in, which had been featured in the film American Graffiti. The 50s and 60s atmosphere alleviated some of the tension in his chest, reminding him of the simple pleasures of greasy food, ice cream, and another of his loves: classic cars. He spotted the Director and joined him at a booth in the corner.

  Noticing that two drinks already rested on the table, Marcus asked, “Who’s your guest?”

  The Director didn’t look up from the menu. “Val wants to speak with you. He’s in the restroom.”

  He hadn’t been expecting to see Special Agent Valdas Derus of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit again so soon. Val had been a member of the director’s former team at the SO, and then later, during the Judas debacle at Foxbury Prison, Val had run interference with the media for them. Marcus looked over the menu and tried not to worry about the FBI agent’s sudden appearance.

  As Val approached, Marcus analyzed the agent, as he almost involuntarily did with everyone. Val was Lithuanian by birth, but only a very slight accent remained to betray his country of origin. A very handsome man with flowing black hair and only a hint of gray, Val’s age was impossible to ascertain from his features, and the Director had explained that Val was a notorious flirt and always in search of wife number three.

  Valdas moved his coffee to the same side as the Director’s and slid into the booth. In stark contrast to his virile former teammate, the Director had been on a noticeable decline for months. Marcus guessed that some disease ravaged the old man’s body even now, but personal information wasn’t something the Director shared with his underlings. His superior’s behavior shouldn’t have surprised him, considering the Director was a man who insisted on being called by title alone. He had only learned the Director’s real first name because of Ackerman’s hacking of the SO’s personnel files. Marcus wondered what other secrets his brother had learned while poking around in the digital shadows.

  Val said, “Good to see you, kid. Although I wish it was under better circumstances.”

  The waitress arrived and took their orders. Marcus opted for coffee and the Elvis Scramble—three scrambled eggs loaded with chorizo, green chili peppers, and Monterey Jack cheese.

  When the waitress was gone, Marcus said, “You should know as well as anyone, Val, that we don’t have better circumstances than these at the SO. Just blood and death.”

  “That’s depressing. I don’t remember it that way during my tenure.”

  “Why are you here?”

  The Director said, “Marcus, show some respect.”

  “Sorry. Why are you here, sir?”

  Valdas chuckled. “He reminds me of you, Philip.” The comment earned an eye-roll from the Director, but Val continued, “The bureau needs your team’s help, Marcus. We had an undercover agent recently go missing in San Francisco.”

  At the mention of the city they should have been in during the past two weeks, Marcus’s stomach flipped as if he had just boarded a rollercoaster. Before he had even heard the details, he could sense that this missing agent wouldn’t have been missing if it wasn’t for Marcus choosing the wrong Mr. King.

  Cursing under his breath, the anger rising, he said, “And let me guess, this relates back to our other Mr. King possibility. How recently did your agent go missing?”

  “He failed to check in two days ago. And yes, our agent, Jerrell Fuller, was attempting to infiltrate a crime syndicate led by a man known only as Mr. King.”

  Marcus withstood the urge to break something. “What can we do to help?”

  “We believe most of the mutilations to be gang related, but the corpses’ appendages and skin were removed, and so the police have been unable to identify all of the bodies.”

  “Dental records?”

  “What’s left of the head is usually just a completely shattered skull and a mound of flesh. There are no teeth to identify.”

  Marcus thought about that, imagining a skull splitting. How much force would that require? From somewhere deep in his brain, the face of a scientist saying “a skull fracture requires five hundred kilograms of force. A man would have to weigh five hundred kilograms to fracture a skull by stepping on it.” He made the conversion in his head. That would equal about eleven hundred pounds. Another memory from a visit to Ripley’s Believe It or Not told Marcus that the heaviest person in medical history was Jon Brower Minnoch.

  Marcus didn’t specifically memorize those minor details, but his memory was like a series of detailed mental snapshots that he could refer to later. In his mind, he traveled back to that memory and conjured an image of the small metal plaque containing the information. From the plaque, Marcus learned that Minnoch weighed nine hundred and seventy-five pounds.

  The laws of physics told him that it was nearly impossible for a human to exert enough force to crack a human skull. Break the jaw, cause internal damage to the brain, sure. But to actually crack the skull . . .

  He said, “What did he use to smash the heads?”

  “The examiners think it was a sledge hammer.”

  Marcus didn’t need to remember any figures. He knew a sledge would get it done. He’d seen it before, back in his days with the NYPD.

  Valdas continued, “The case is getting a lot of political heat. No one wants the public to believe that America is susceptible to the kind of violence seen south of the border. But there’s something we haven’t
shared with the press.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “The autopsies show that the male victims were always severely beaten prior to their deaths. These people fought for their lives.”

  “Why is that unusual? They could have been tortured for information or tried to escape.”

  Val shrugged. “Possibly. But we have been able to identify a few of the bodies who we can’t tie back to anything illegal or gang related. A marine was identified by some shrapnel wounds and a boxing champion by some pins in his shoulder. We can’t find any reason those men would be targeted by King.”

  Marcus shrugged, but his mind was starting to make the connections. “Could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Val added, “Except there’s one more thing. Before Agent Fuller went missing, he recorded a conversation between an unknown party and King’s righthand man, Oban Nassar, during which Nassar refers to ‘The Gladiator.’”

  Pulling out a cell phone, Val played an audio file for Marcus. He had to hold it up to his ear to hear the one-sided conversation and the exotic accent of Oban Nassar.

  . . . Hello. Yes, sir . . . I understand . . . That is very unsettling news . . . Decisive action is certainly required, sir. He’s already seen too much. He must be dealt with quickly, in order to mitigate the damage . . . With all due respect, sir, I don’t believe this is a job that would require the services of the Gladiator . . . I wouldn’t argue that, sir, but you know how I feel about the prices that the Gladiator and his handler have been charging for their services . . . Do you think it’s wise to send this man to the Diamond Room? . . . Of course, sir . . . I understand. Consider it done . . .

  Marcus’s body went rigid as his mind wove the various threads of the investigation into an intricate pattern. “So we know Demon’s organization is built on turning serial murderers with a special talent into killers for hire. And now, you think that King has the Gladiator on his payroll and these dismemberments are being carried out by the Gladiator on Mr. King’s behalf.”