by Reece Hinze
James supposed it was all designed to break his will. He had read the manuals and knew how to fight these techniques but it was not the darkness that tore at his soul. It was his fault.
While he rotted in this cell, Devreaux was undoubtedly using whatever he stole from that laboratory to hurt and kill. How could he have failed so badly?
IT WAS HIS FAULT!
His country and everyone in it were in danger. At least his kids were a long way away. His ex-wife had made sure of that. She had also made sure, like Attila the Hun, that she stripped him of anything of value in their divorce. He tore at his hair in the darkness.
HIS FAULT. HIS FAULT.
Maybe she was behind this? She had stolen everything else so why not his life as well?
He chuckled aloud but stopped almost as soon as he began. The excruciating pain in his shoulder forced him to roll to his side. James had been shot by Devreaux but he obviously still wanted him alive.
Why?
Unable to see even his hand in front of his face, James inspected the dressing on his wound with his hands. It was expertly done. He sighed. The sigh of a man with the weight of the world on his shoulder. A feeble attempt to free his mind from the guilt which shackled it.
He turned his head to the side. There it was. His only companion in the deep darkness. Childlike, he tried to hide his face from it.
On and off.
ON AND OFF.
Mercilessly regular, a tiny red light blinked on a camera attached above the door. On and off. It was the only break in the darkness yet it was worse than the black. It afforded no light and had not stopped blinking for…
For…
How long have I been here?
He rubbed the beard on his cheeks. His hair served as a rough estimate for time passed but James had little experience growing a beard, serving in the Army his entire life. A few weeks? A few months? His training taught him how important it was to keep his mind occupied but he had no true way of knowing what time or even what day it was.
The art of war.
He shot straight up. His palms smeared the grease on his forehead as if his hands could make sense of what his brain deduced. James was a thoughtful man. Not in the way of remembering birthdays and brining home flowers, he had failed miserably at those tasks while he was married, but thoughtful in the way of breaking things down to their simplest logic and basing his decisions on the result. In this way, he was similar to many of the great minds of military history. There could only be two options. He counted with his fingers as he thought. He was completely insane and dreamed up the entire exchange. Or, since he believed he still had control of his mind, there was only one other logical explanation for the events in that facility.
He was set up.
The Captain held his knees with his elbows, rocking back and forth as the thought soaked in.
He said it out loud. “I was set up.” His voice squeaked from nonuse.
He stared into the red flashing camera with a cockeyed expression. “You set me up,” he accused.
His knees cracked as he stood. Rage rose inside of him like the mercury in a thermometer. “You set me up! You killed those men. You set me up!”
James’ bare feet slapped cement as he ran for it, launching himself into the air and grabbing the camera with his good arm, hanging from it like Shaq after a game winning dunk.
“You set me up, you sons of bitches!”
He used his momentum to rock back and forth. Cement flakes fell around his face like a Christmas snow as the camera loosened from the wall.
“You set me up, you set me up, you set me up!”
He repeated it over and over like a war chant, swinging back and forth at each verse, spittle flying from his mouth like a rabid dog. Metal keys engaged in the metal lock. When the door opened, the dull incandescent lightbulbs burning in the hallway were enough to blind him, having been clothed in darkness for so long.
“Set me up, set me up, set me up!” James repeated with eyes closed tight against the light. He swung at the doorway and felt his cold feet collide with a warm face. The camera broke free of the wall. James seemed to hang midair. He opened his eyes in time to see the giant man with the scar on his face crash his shoulder into James’ stomach. His lungs voided of air. His mind expected a shooting pain as he crashed to the ground but once again, in this strange place, reality defied reason. He could feel the giant man, who murdered the policemen so brutally, place him on his back like a new born babe. The thought was soon lost as he sucked for air from his ransacked lungs. A boot to his ribs, courtesy of a squat bald man, did not help the effort.
“You fucking ass hole!” The bald man kicked again. “I’ll teach you to…”
“Stop,” the big said with a tone that brooked no argument. “Return to your post immediately.”
The bald man hauled back and gave James a parting steel toed gift that doubled him over.
“Now!” the big man roared.
James looked up at the giant between gulps of breath. He thought, with the outline of the hallway lights illuminating the big man like a saint in an ancient Christian painting, he saw the man with the grisly scar running down his face, wink. The man pivoted his huge bulk as swiftly as any trained soldier, swooped down to pick up the damaged camera, and disappeared behind the door, slamming it home loudly.
The darkness returned.
James leaned his head back on the cement and closed his eyes.
Paul watched in horror as policemen, equipped with gas masks and automatic weapons, swarmed the crashed maroon minivan. A huge man, dressed in the khaki uniform of the Texas State Troopers, approached the driver’s side door at a crouch. The bright lights attached to his rifle danced this way and that as he ran. He aimed his rifle. Even though Paul couldn’t hear it over the braying of the car horns and angry motorists, he was sure the man was screaming at the driver to exit their vehicle.
A tiny and terrified Hispanic man opened the door, holding his hands high in the air. He was frantically trying to communicate something to the officer, pointing back to the vehicle several times, but the big man was unyielding. He signaled for his men to open the other doors. The driver panicked.
“What are they doing to that poor man?” Danielle complained.
“Quite!” Paul shouted, waving a hand in her direction.
A short officer, whose gut flopped out from underneath his body armor, slid the minivan’s door open. Another man, very similar to the driver, jumped out. His wrists were bound with a dirty rope and his mouth gagged with a rag. Another figure darted out of the smashed van right after. She had grey hair, a slumped back, and was tied like the other man. She jumped out of the van with agility that was astounding for her age. Every officer near the van shouted orders, but the two seemed confused. They gaped, open mouthed, at the flashing lights and guns and vehicles as if they had never seen such wonders before in their life.
The old woman turned in the direction of Danielle’s Cadillac. “Did you see her face?” She gasped. “Oh my God, she’s crying blood!” Danielle fumbled around in her purse. She found her cell phone and started taping. Paul saw the glows of phone screens in other vehicles. No doubt whatever happened here would be all over the internet in a few minutes.
Paul was sweating. The hair on the back of his neck, short and buzzed as they were, stood on end. Paul’s thoughts drifted to prison. Inside, you were either the lion or the gazelle. In order to survive you had to hone in on your basic survival instincts. Those instincts told him to get out of here and get out right now.
The big officer, the one giving the orders, frustrated at the two new occupants gestured for the others to apprehend them. An officer with scared white eyes big enough to be seen underneath his mask, moved towards the old woman with gun raised. She turned on him like a viper, brow creased and teeth bared, and charged. The officer fired several shots into the woman but her elderly legs charged still. She barreled into him with enough force to knock him flat on his back. She rebou
nded from the impact fast and straddled his much larger frame. She smashed her bound fists repeatedly into his mask, her bleeding face contorted in hatred. Snaps of light flashed as the other officers fired. After taking an impossible amount of gunfire, the old woman collapsed, twitching and convulsing.
Her companion, as if on cue with her death, launched himself at the large officer, hooking his bound hands behind the officer’s neck, trapping him in a terrible hug. The fat officer fired bullet after bullet into the back of the bound man. The large policeman staggered for a minute, his attacker hanging from his neck like a punching bag, before collapsing with his attacker still on top of him. The high power rounds ripped right through the small man’s body and hit the policeman. The large officer writhed about in pain. The driver of the minivan stood and shouted but gunfire took the life from his body before he could finish.
“Oh my God!” Danielle screamed. Car horns blared. Desperate motorists smashed their vehicles, desperately fleeing the gunfire and gridlock.
A man and woman in paramedic’s uniforms ran to the two downed officers. The officer who was assaulted by the grandmother, ripped off his mask and staggered towards the barricade, arms held wide, dazed and disgusted. His blood soaked uniform was more red than brown. The large one started to violently convulse with the bloody corpse still on top of him. The paramedics, with the help of the fat cop, flipped the corpse off of the convulsing man’s chest. The male paramedic took off the man’s gas mask and unbuckled his vest while the female shoved a Popsicle stick into his mouth.
Suddenly, the big officer lurched from his back with arms raised like a George Romero zombie on the last rep of a hard set of sit-ups and sprayed a fire hose of bloody vomit. He looked at the paramedics with confused eyes. Red eyes. Full of blood and something deeper. Anger.
The medic, overcame the initial shock of being sprayed by bloody vomit and turned to flee. The officer grabbed a handful of their shirts and slammed them into each other. Paul heard the thuck of them smashing from inside the Cadillac. It resembled a man swinging a baseball bat into a Christmas ham. The female with half of her face smashed and bleeding, fell backwards into the trooper’s lap. She screamed when he shoved his thumbs into her eye sockets. The male medic, with a bloody nose and growing wet spot between his legs, scrambled away on all fours. Before he got away, the trooper grabbed his boot and yanked hard. The medic squealed with terror. He slammed his limp fists into his attacker’s chest. Paul averted his eyes as the big officer grabbed hold of the paramedic’s head and smashed it hard into the pavement. His head burst like a watermelon, squirting grey matter on to the pavement.
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Paul said, frantically searching for a way out of the mayhem. Danielle gazed with wide eyes and open mouth. Her phone forgotten, she squeezed Paul’s hand. Her knuckles were white, as if she hung over a precipice.
Other officers, hidden by the doors of the vehicle barricade, shouted confused orders. Their former superior stood and stared at them. He wore a blank expression on his cocked head as if noticing their presence for the first time. Blood ran out of his eyes and nose and down his chin to his gory uniform. The beaten female paramedic twitched and convulsed at his feet.
The cop with the undersized body armor, hobbled back and forth like a sumo wrestler, unsure where to go, his stomach wobbling like jello. The big man slowly shifted his bloody red eyes in the direction of the movement and took off like a spring. He tackled the fat man before he could raise his rifle, straddled his chest, and swung mighty two handed blows at his masked face. His relentless fists knocked the gasmask eschew. He kept pounding, with frantic shouting in the background, until he pummeled the man’s bulbous nose into the back of his skull. All that remained was a battered crater between a receding hairline and double chin.
The men behind the barricade opened fire. Paul couldn’t help but think of Tony Montoya at the end of Scarface as bullets ripped through the big officer. He just didn’t want to go down. The ping of a ricochet flew by the Cadillac. Paul heard glass break and the hard blare of a car horn. He looked over to see a business suit type in a hot sports car laying with his ruined skull on his steering wheel.
The blinded female medic shot to her feet sprinting in the direction of the gunfire. Her blood matted hair swung back and forth with her hips. Automatic rifle fire gunned her down. She came to a skidding stop into a road flare, her whole body igniting with alarming speed.
Paul was too close to the car in front of him to pull out so he put the Cadillac in reverse and threw his arm over the seat. As he looked behind him, his blood ran cold. Out of the woods, cleared to about twenty yards on either side of the highway, a horde of screaming mindless bloody psychopaths sprinted full tilt towards the gridlocked highway. The red glow of brake lights outlined their bloodied faces. Those who had clothes were soaked to the bone with blood while those without sported grotesque injuries. Yet they came and they came fast.
Paul reversed until he heard a crunch and shifted into drive turning the wheel towards the grass median that separated the highway from the access road. Paul flinched as insanely loud booming echoed across the highway. He stared in horror as the soldiers on the back of the Humvees swung their .50 caliber machine guns back and forth, shooting anyone and everything.
Chug, chug, chug, chug.
The machine gun’s steady report was deafening. Danielle reached for her phone.
“Put that Goddamn thing away,” Paul shouted, slapping the device out of her hand. He was angry. Angry at the time he wasted in prison. Angry at a good night, ruined by this chaos. Angry at…
He opened his mouth to speak but was sprayed by a thousand shards of glass as the windshield shattered. A .50 caliber round tore through the Cadillac at Mach speed, travelling right between the two and shattering the rear doors. Tiny cuts streaked across Paul’s face and arms and chests, ripping his shirt. Danielle screamed.
Automatic gunfire thumped on without mercy. Paul slammed the gas. Something thudded at the rear of the vehicle as they bounced recklessly across the grass median. He looked into the rearview mirror. It dangled on a thread of the remaining windshield, bouncing up and down with the S.U.V. Paul’s saw, as the mirror bounced, frantic red eyes coming towards him. Paul threw Danielle to the baseboard. A torn coat sleeve grasped at him but couldn’t get a firm grip with the bouncing of the vehicle. When they hit the access road, the road evened out, and the arm wrapped around his neck like a vice grip. Danielle screamed, shrill and loud. Paul tried to speak but failed, the words coming out in a choking gasp.
Somehow, as the arm slowly squeezed the life out of him, he kept the wheel straight. The headlights pointed into the dark sky as the Cadillac shot off the access road and down a steep embankment into to the dark forest. Rancid breath warmed his neck. He fought to keep control. His vision blurred. He glanced towards Danielle and vaguely saw her screaming but heard her only in the background muffled, like cotton balls were in his ears.
Time slowed.
The S.U.V. raced towards the menacing trees, mouths wide open, ready to swallow them whole. Paul was on the precipice of the black, ready to give in, when he felt the weightlessness.
The Cadillac launched into the air. Danielle floated like an astronaut until she smacked into the roof and fell like a stone. Paul felt the rush of life as his attacker’s firm grip lightened. The man in the shredded suit launched through the front window. Paul gulped and coughed and saw the red eyed business man crash into the hood of the S.U.V. with bone crushing force. Paul watched, somewhat in shock, as the man twitched and contorted on the hood like a bug stuck in a hot grille. The trees grew frighteningly large as they rushed forward. Paul slammed the brake, over and over, but the pedal was unresponsive. Unable to bear the sight of the crushed man in front of him any longer, Paul swung the steering wheel back and forth. The man fell off but left a smeared signature of blood behind.
They were right on the forest now. Paul slammed the brake pedal frantically but the slo
pe only made them roll faster. Paul screamed, “Hold on!”
Danielle lay limp on the floorboard, a mess of brunette hair and red lipstick. The truck flew into the woods at breakneck speed. Branches thrashed and cut Paul through the shattered windshield. He saw a huge oak directly ahead and flung the wheel to the right. The tree took his side mirror but he recovered too hard and threw the truck into a perilous roll. He smacked his ragdoll head on the side window and the steering wheel while the truck rolled and rolled. The blackness, so narrowly avoided seconds earlier, encompassed him. The Cadillac came to a crashing rest, upside down in a puff of smoke.
Paul hung alone, limp in his seatbelt.
Chapter IV: Despair
Captain James Lasko fought, like he always did, when they came for him.
When he saw the gurney, with its menacing straps and buckles, a wild look washed over his lined face. He had given up long ago that he would ever leave this hellish place but he would fight them to the end. He would never give up. That’s just who he was.
He kicked until his legs were strapped.
He punched until his arms were immobilized.
He bit and spit until they pinned his head down and covered his mouth.
Only after they pulled the straps tight did James resign himself to the lonely ride. He used the ride to build up his mental defenses for the torture that was sure to come.
A pox scarred face with a hideous yellow smile replaced the moving florescent lights above James. The bald man, at least that is what James called him since he refused to tell him his name or rank, asked, “Why do you struggle Captain? Why waste your strength? You know you will lose every time.”
