Demonic Dreams

by Hadena James

  “Think it ever bothered Malachi that you guys were in the same grade?”

  “Oh no, that’s too linear of a thought process for our school. Malachi and I both went to a gifted school. We weren’t assigned grade levels. We were assigned classes based on our advancement. Like Malachi was taking advanced calculus while I was taking beginner’s algebra because math was not my strongest area. However, I was taking genetics and Malachi was in biology because science was one of those things I just got.”

  “That sounds expensive,” Gabriel said.

  “I’m sure it was,” I answered. “Back then I didn’t think about it, but there were kids on scholarship there. It was a full service gifted school, so there were dorms and things as well as class rooms, a built in tutoring place, and other amenities. Since Malachi and I were Columbia residents, we didn’t live in the dorms, those were for kids who didn’t leave anywhere close by. Eric, Isabelle, Malachi, Nyleena, and myself all went. Isabelle was a musical genius. She could arrange music and play several instruments that weren’t related, so like the violin and the trombone, and the flute and drums, that sort of thing. She also sang really well. When I met Patterson in person last year, I realized how my parents and Malachi’s mom could afford to send all of us to the school. None of us were on scholarship, although we could have been. I think Patterson paid for all of us, even Malachi, after all he was family to a degree to Patterson.”

  “Except Malachi and Patterson aren’t blood related.” Gabriel pointed out.

  “I don’t think they have to be to be family. My father had to get his sense of family somewhere, I think he got it from Patterson. The school recruits. In fifth grade they go to all the local elementary schools and give an exam to the students. If you score high enough on the exam, they talk to your parents and things move on from there. Once you finish sixth grade, instead of going to one of the local public junior highs, you can go to this school if your scores are high enough. So, I started seventh grade at this private school for gifted children. Malachi was already there, even though he was three grades ahead of me. Because of where I tested at, Malachi and I had some classes together, obviously not advanced calculus, I still have issues with math, unless the formula is a chemistry formula. That is the only time I understand algebra.”

  “I suddenly feel inadequate.” Gabriel told me.

  “Don’t. It isn’t like you don’t have other skills. For example, you are good with people. It is an area I know I am sorely lacking in, so I appreciate that you have the skill and it makes me realize why I would never be good at your job, or want it, so I have to keep you alive because Lucas has told me if you go down, I’m next in line despite his seniority.”

  “I’ve learned a lot about you today Ace. Maybe this wasn’t a completely bad thing.”

  “If you were in my position, you’d disagree,” I looked down at my leg.

  Chapter Eight

  “DO YOU WANT TO STAY or go?” Gabriel asked after he finished eating and we had been silent for a long time. I took his phone and dialed Malachi’s number. He answered on the third ring.

  “Progress?” I asked.

  “You got Gabriel’s phone,” he said.

  “With a little help from Apex we got my phone as well as Gabriel’s, but mine is dead and there’s not a charger around here for it. We got into the main living quarters of this place. It looks like Raphael has been living here for some time. I think we can hole up here and live on junk food for a few days if need be,” I told Malachi.

  “Well, at the moment, I would say that’s a need be situation. I tried the helicopter thing and your brother wasn’t lying. The down draft caused some kind of trap to spring up and fire at the helicopter. These aren’t just booby traps, they are military grade traps. Not all of them our military from what I can tell,” Malachi said.

  That sounds fun, so I’ll just sleep on the couch tonight since Raphael is still downstairs and I have no desire to deal with that. And there’s only one bedroom upstairs and it has Raphael cooties in it, so I’m not sleeping there.”

  “Aislinn it could be a couple of days. See if you can find some kind of control panel and turn any of these off.”

  “Will do,” I told Malachi and hung up. “Apex didn’t mention a control room, did he?”

  “No,” Gabriel answered.

  “Well I guess being rescued quickly is out of the question, Malachi came in on a helicopter and was going to repel down but was stopped by some kind of gun that was activated by the downwash from the blades and started shooting at them after springing from the ground.”

  “That’s not a homemade trap,” Gabriel said.

  “Malachi said he thought it was military and possibly not our military.”

  “Lucas and Xavier would be the experts there.”

  “He said it could be days,” I told Gabriel. “I think we need to go downstairs, gather up all the food, except maybe a few items, in case Raphael gets out of his room, gather up clothing, and get the hell back up here to wait this thing out.”

  “You sound a little spooked.”

  “I prefer serial killers to traipsing through the woods trying to avoid stepping on a land mine.”

  “I agree.” Gabriel went into the bedroom and came back out with both our Tasers as well as some of my knives and our handguns. I suddenly felt better. I had gotten used to wearing a weapon, being without it felt strange.

  “Food is the biggest thing,” I told Gabriel. “Let’s not spend hours looking for clothing in our sizes.”

  “We aren’t doing anything. You are going to stand at the top of the hatch on the top two rungs of the ladder and shoot my brother if he comes out of the room or the kitchen or anywhere. I can’t have you trying to race back up this ladder if something happens and Raphael gets out. So, I’m going to go down and gather supplies. I shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.” Gabriel opened the hatch. We both looked in it from a safe distance before moving over it. Once we did, there was still no sign of Raphael after several more minutes. Every moment was a moment wasted. He could be waking up at any time and possibly escaping. He’d been living here long enough to have figured out its secrets if need be.

  I stood on the second to top rung and aimed the gun down the hall as Gabriel filled a bag he had found up here with supplies. His final stop was the kitchen where he came out lugging the Mountain Dew. He passed it up to me and I set it on the floor next to me.

  My muscles had tightened up during Gabriel’s foraging. I could feel the stress in my shoulders. Gabriel was up the ladder and the hatch was shut and locked without incident. I moved my head around to pop the ligaments in my neck and shoulders.

  Part of me had been sure that Raphaël was going to come busting out of that room like The Hulk at any moment. He hadn’t and that was great, but it had still been nerve wrecking.

  Now we had more food. I also had caffeine to stave off caffeine headaches. Gabriel was busy unloading the food into the fridge.

  “I left him the ham and cheese loaf, a small packet of cheese, and some crackers.” Gabriel said.

  “That works.” I stood up finally and made my way over there. He’d grabbed all the small bags of chips I liked. I took a sour cream and onion one and opened it.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “No, are you?” I asked back.

  “You’re eating a lot of chips.”

  “It’s the morphine. As my metabolism gets it out of my system, my body requires extra calories.”

  “Why did you ask if I was?” Gabriel took a chip from me.

  “Because your question was ridiculous.”

  “That’s logical, I suppose” Gabriel said.

  “If you were a nut building and possibly living in a two-story bunker underground and trying to hide it like it was a root cellar, where would you put a control room for traps laid around the property?” I asked Gabriel.

  “Same place as the security camera monitors.”

  “Yeah, that was my thought. Except I do
n’t see any security monitors anywhere.”

  “Me either. But he would definitely require some,” I looked around the room looking for cameras on this level. I hadn’t thought to look for them on the other level. My brain had still been foggy from the morphine.

  " What do we have around us, living room, another bedroom, another kitchen, yet another bathroom, and a gym. With the fancy filtration system there has to be somewhere to access filters, also this area doesn't seem as large as the basement. It's a bunker built by someone expecting the end of the world, there are probably a few secret rooms. We just need to find them. Why did you say it was disguised root cellar?"

  " The door is set at the angle, so it has to be at an angle outside, so despite the fact that it is metal, it would look like a root cellar, with a funky handle." I commented. “Of course, recycled materials could be used to explain the door, except for the fact that we are in the middle of nowhere. On the flip side, I don’t think people get close enough to notice the door.”

  “The question now becomes if you were building secret rooms in a secret bunker, where would you put the doors?” Gabriel asked and lit a cigarette. He handed it to me. The nice thing about the bunker was that even though the air was recycled it was cleaning the heck out of the cigarette smoke. As soon as we would exhale the plume of smoke, it would be sucked up into vents in the ceiling. You could watch it move. It almost made me want to light a smoke bomb in the room. I stared at those intake vents and exhaled again. Air went up in this room but came out from around the floor. Below us, air had gone up and come down. So, the filtration system had to have duct work in the floor above and below us, meaning this level really was the only place to put a filtration system.

  That narrowed it down a little bit and made it so we could avoid going back downstairs. I wasn’t sure if Raphael could get out of that room, but I was sure I didn’t want to find out. He’d already kicked my ass once this week and tried to eat part of my leg. Since it had burnt to a crisp in a skillet, I didn’t want to give him another chance to consume my essence, which sounded like kinky pillow talk between lovers when I thought about it like that. There would be no essence consuming of any sort if I could help it. I did not need to be that intimate with anyone in Gabriel’s family.

  If we lived another ten years, Gabriel and I might get into an argument over leadership decisions and I’d be pointing out to him that his twin had skinned and eaten part of my arm or something. I didn’t normally hold grudges, but cannibalism might be the deal breaker on being Zen in a relationship.

  Because despite the fact that we were not romantically involved and were not sexually involved, we were in a complicated relationship that both of us had to maintain in order to work together. Grudges would get people killed, so would bitterness, sulking, and dating. There were lots of rules for our work environment that were there to keep everyone mostly safe and alive. Breaking rules could endanger everyone. It was my only concern about Malachi. Up to this point, he’d been good as a leader, but he wasn’t known for following all the rules all the time and his ego could be problematic at times. It was why I was glad he had Caleb.

  Caleb’s relationship with Malachi was every bit as complicated as mine with Gabriel, for different reasons. I had learned that my ego didn’t always need to be stroked. I didn’t like being handled with kid gloves, which Lucas did anyway despite my feelings on the matter whenever I was injured. I was a sociopath and a psychopath after all. I could handle myself just fine, however, I understood that it was a need Lucas had. It was part of the reason he had stuck to glue with Xavier for all these years, he needed to be needed in a way, I guessed it had something to do with losing his own brother. He had adopted Xavier and I in his place and decided to take care of us as best he could. Or he was just like the rest of us, damaged goods in need of something like this job to prove his ability to save humanity from its own demented evolutionary tract.

  Malachi and I were both motivated to do our jobs because we were good at them. There was little else I was good at. I could play trivia games really well, but it’s hard to make a living off that, unless someone can repeatedly get on TV for it, but I wasn’t TV worthy, unless I was covered in gore.

  I wasn’t sure if Caleb had the same motivation as Malachi and me. I had never asked him. It was quite possible that he was in this job for the exact same reasons I was. My father had been a cop. While being a member of law enforcement had never been my dream job, I had wanted to do something to honor his memory. Like me, Caleb’s father had been a law enforcement agent, and a damn good one from what I could tell. Nathan’s death was a loss to everyone, they just didn’t know it, would probably never know it.

  When Lucas and Xavier had first approached me about this job, I hadn’t thought about my father being a detective or a serial killer hunter. I had known those things, but they hadn’t been part of my conscious decision. Only after I had been working this job for a few months did it become obvious that I had followed in my father’s footsteps or perhaps progressed in my father’s footsteps, picking up where he had left off.

  That analogy was a little too close to home at the moment as the monster that had been part of my childhood was still the monster that haunted my adult years and had helped create the circumstances for my demise twice now. And because the Universe had a cruel and twisted sense of humor, both situations were more about my father than about me. I could prove he was responsible, just like Eric could prove I was responsible for the killing of Malachi’s stepfather.

  The proof had been with me all these years, just waiting to get out. Not my memory. That had always been there even if it hadn’t been entirely clear. No, the proof was in my book. A book that was neatly tucked away on a shelf at home. One that shouldn’t still be in my possession. A book that had been returned to me after Callow’s death from the Special Agent that liaised with the police department. He obviously hadn’t looked through the book before he gave it to me.

  In the back, scrawled in blood that wasn’t my own were the words “test this.” I had expected my father to find the book after Callow murdered me and he caught Callow. I hadn’t realized I would be fleeing the scene of a murder that wasn’t my own. I had left it there, in that little alcove. It had been catalogued as evidence. It had been given back to me once Malachi vouched that he had given me the book. The blood belonged to the director of the FBI. The reason he had demanded Callow get on with killing me was because he had attempted to do it and failed. Not because I had seen his face, but because I had a personality disorder already. When he had grabbed me, I had cut him with my nails, deep enough to draw blood. Callow had left me my backpack. That book had been in it. I had very carefully taken the book out with my teeth, trying not to the lose the blood I had drawn from him.

  He’d worn a hood, like one of those dorky black pointy hoods you see in movies about Satanists that aren’t actually Satanists but demonic conjurers attempting to bring forth the Antichrist or some nonsense. That hood had thrown me off. It had been in my memories, but I couldn’t put a name to a voice for a long time because of that stupid hood. It had been the focal point of that memory for some reason. Possibly because then, just as now, I thought it had been dorky and underwhelming as opposed to terrifying, which is what I believe the point of it had been.

  The book couldn’t be tested now. Even if the DNA could still be retrieved from the blood smears, it had left the custody of the police department and found its way back into my hands, which might have been part of his plan even back then. Before he realized that I was good with voices. I didn’t have super hearing like some psychopaths, but I was very good at identifying voices and sounds. It ranked up there with my trivia knowledge, skills I rarely needed or used and didn’t know why I had them.

  I exhaled the last drag off my cigarette and began walking, well limping really. The pain medication was wearing off and my leg was bothering me a bit. It did feel like someone had cut the skin off of it. It burned a little bit like rug burn and s
tung like a deep cut and ached all at the same time while throbbing with this intense sharp pain. I wanted to scream at my body to deal with it, it could pout later, when we were all alive and safe and I was in a hospital bed explaining to yet another doctor how someone had cut the skin and some of the muscle off my leg because he had been peckish.

  “Light another cigarette,” I told Gabriel as he followed behind me. I heard the match scratch the sandpaper strip and flare to life. Now I really wanted a smoke bomb with brightly colored smoke. If we could figure out which area had the strongest up draft for the intake vents, we could follow the vents to the secret filtration area, which I was willing to bet was also the control room I was determined to find.

  I put my cigarette butt into a soda can that was mostly empty. Gabriel did the same and watched me turn a full circle in the room. The vents stopped some six inches from the wall. This seemed rather close for some reason. To my eyes it just looked off. I asked Gabriel and he felt the same about it. Here the cigarette seemed to have found new life. It was smoking without Gabriel taking any drags off it to keep it alive. I stuck out my hands. Years of damage made it, so I couldn’t feel the updraft on my hands, but I could around my face. It wasn’t incredibly strong, but it was strong enough. I touched the wall. It felt cold under my fingertips. For a moment I wondered if it was actually as cold as it felt. Gabriel also touched the wall.

  “Walk in freezer?” He asked.

  “Computer server?” I countered with my own question. “Do the rest of the walls feel this cold?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gabriel stuck his hand out and touched another wall.

  “No,” he told me. I nodded as if this was some great revelation. It was, and it wasn’t. Either this wall was hiding something that was being kept cooler than the rest of the bunker or the other wall was hiding something that was warmer than this part of the bunker. It was a conundrum either way. Which wall held the key to getting into the control room.