Fortified Dreams

by James, Hadena

  “LA was organized. It was intended to look random, but it wasn’t. I believe the same thing is happening now. As soon as crippling blows can be brought down on the SCTU, VCU, Special Counsel, and the Fortress, I believe the serial killers and mass murderers will converge on a single location. Someone is organizing it.”

  “A Russian mobster told me that he had money stolen to pay for the hit on Lucas,” I told Apex.

  “That’s probably true. I know that someone has been trying to get a contract killer in the Fortress to take up the banner to eliminate some of the more dangerous serial killers within its walls,” Apex told me.

  “Eric and Patterson Clachan,” I said.

  “Not just them either. There’s a list of about sixty serial killers or mass murderers they want dead. There was a little chatter about it a couple of weeks ago. A friend of an associate told me that they were going to be approaching contract killers already on the inside to take out the targets. I didn’t catch all the names, but Eric and Patterson Clachan were on it. So were Brent Timmons, Mikhail Chivolokovic, Kellen Spears, Chad Varga, and Brian Hollaran. Do those names mean anything to you?”

  “Timmons is president of the Aislinn Cain fan club, but I do not have a connection to the others,” I told him.

  “Yes you do, you just don’t know it.” Lazar looked at me. “They’re all considered loyalists. For one reason or another, they work with the US Marshals Service to maintain a balance in the prison. They also cooperate with the SCTU and VCU from time to time. They are the best and brightest the Serial Killer and Mass Murderer community has to offer. Eric Clachan is kind of the ringleader of the loyalists; even though I don’t think they or him realize it. These are killers that are not going to take over the prison. If a riot breaks out, they are just as likely to take up arms against the other inmates, as they are the marshal’s service. Spears, Varga, and Clachan are all killers of killers. Timmons, Chivolokovic, and Hollaran are all followers by nature and they follow Eric Clachan because of his specialized skills.”

  “My brother has specialized skills?” I looked at Lazar.

  “Shortly before you were recruited to be a Marshal, they got a sadistic Marshal inside the prison. He took delight in tormenting them. One evening, he picked a fight with Clachan. He beat Clachan half to death. The warden started arranging to move the Marshal from the prison and have his badge taken, but before the transfer paperwork came through, Clachan escaped the infirmary. He found the Marshal in the common area and killed him with his bare hands. He ripped the guy’s bottom jaw off and pulled out his windpipe in front of a cellblock full of serial killers and mass murderers. It benefited the inmates as well as the Marshals, so the entire thing was hushed up. Clachan went back to the infirmary to heal, but after that, most self-respecting killers wouldn’t fuck with Eric Clachan. The cop killers go out of their way to avoid him and with good reason. He had seventeen bodies when he went in, but he has nearly forty now.”

  “So, I was recruited for multiple purposes,” I confirmed.

  “Cain, people have been watching with bated breath since you were eight years old. When your brother climbed that building, it just peaked even more interest. You were recruited as much for your connections as your skills. Lucas was willing to move mountains to get you a badge. His father thought you would be an asset to the VCU, a unit he was trying to form when his son died. It took a while for it to take shape, but once it was, they found Malachi Blake because they had been watching you. Then Lucas joined the SCTU and he would have killed to make sure you joined as well,” Lazar said.

  “How many people know about this?” I asked.

  “Not many,” Lazar said. “I know because I originally started in the SCTU. I moved out because Alejandro Gui moved in and I wanted nothing to do with that psychopath. Even then, Lucas was talking about making you a Marshal. He didn’t care about your connections, that was the higher ups. He wanted you because he recognized you were a highly functional sociopathic/psychopathic hybrid. It’s why you are so scary.”

  “That’s true,” Apex said. “Watching you and Lucas in New Orleans made me realize that you were not really a psychopath, but you weren’t really a sociopath either. Whatever that hybridization is, it has made you terrifying, even from a distance. I have no doubt that you could slit this man’s throat, carry your cousin out of here and once she’s safely checked into a hospital room with armed guards, go grab a burger and take a nap. I would say every psychopath and sociopath ever to cross your path is aware of your uniqueness and understand that it is what makes you so dangerous.”

  “I’m fine with that,” I answered. “Now, are we talking about a repeat of what happened in LA?”

  “Yes,” Apex looked at me. “You’ve bought some time, but not much. Whoever is organizing this has serious clout and skills. I’m not exactly cheap or listed in the phone book, yet he found me. And if what you say is true, he managed to steal a lot of money from the Russian mob without leaving a trail.” Apex’s phone went off. Lazar jumped as did the man tied up in the chair. He looked at it, the corners of his mouth turning down. “Maybe I was wrong, maybe you haven’t bought any time. Take Ms. Clachan and get the hell out of here. You have a serious problem, both of you.”

  “What?” Lazar asked.

  “The Fortress has gone dark.” Apex stood up and produced a handgun. “Seriously, you should leave. You don’t want to be witnesses.”

  “What if he can help us?” Lazar asked.

  “He can’t,” Apex answered. “You never tell the hired hands more than they need to know to do their job. Think of this man as lower management. He was paid to kidnap Nyleena Clachan. The job is done, so he is expecting to be paid. That’s what he was waiting for, a call or someone to show up with a bag of cash. Once I kill him, I’ll keep a watch on the place for a day, but I imagine the moment she leaves this building, they are going to know it didn’t work and no one is going to show up.” Apex gestured to Nyleena. “You know, I always thought it was a cop that organized LA.”

  Apex

  His eyes watched the Marshals leave. He had been right. Aislinn Cain picked up Nyleena Clachan and carried her out. It didn’t matter that Aislinn was the shorter of the two women. He would have to watch out for her. Not that he had learned anything new about her, except that she could appreciate someone who was definitely a wanted man. She was all contrasts and contradictions. She had also been swallowed by her own demons.

  This was something he knew a little about. Everyone had demons and hers were not keeping her awake at night. If anything, they were reading her bedtime stories and lulling her to sleep. Her status as a hybrid did make her more dangerous. Nature had done some interesting things with psychopaths and sociopaths. He had no doubt that sociopaths with their inability to feel empathy were the worse of the two, but they didn’t have the super human powers that psychopaths had. Aislinn Cain had both. She’d been mildly bleeding while they talked, he had smelled it. He’d also smelled burnt gunpowder. It wasn’t a stretch for him to believe that she had sealed the wound by setting it on fire. Finding Nyleena Clachan alive had been more important. The man in the chair really was lucky that he had found him first. Sooner or later, Aislinn Cain was going to discover Nyleena’s wounds and there would be consequences.

  “Well, I’m sure this is pointless, but I’ll ask anyway. Do you have any information to provide that might be worth letting you live?” Apex asked. He waited while the other man made noises, attempting to talk past the duct tape. “No, I figured not. We rarely know who hires us. Any final words instead?” He ripped the tape off, wanting to hear the man’s voice. He rarely got to get up close and personal with a kill. It was refreshing to be able to see this one’s eyes, to hear his voice, to know that he was the thing the man feared most at this exact moment.

  “No, but he’s supposed to come by here in an hour,” the man shouted as soon as the tape was removed.

  “Interesting,” Apex sat down. “To pay you or kill you?”

/>   “To pay me,” the man sounded indignant.

  “Do you honestly believe that?” Apex raised an eyebrow. “Men like you get screwed over, not bags full of cash. You realize if I let you live, Aislinn Cain is just going to hunt you down, right?”

  “That bitch doesn’t scare me.”

  “That’s because you’re an idiot. Did you notice her hands? There was blood under her fingernails. She had a burn mark on her leg. Her bulletproof vest had several holes in it. She smelled of blood and burnt gunpowder. Her deodorant wasn’t even detectable, meaning she had swept a building full of goons, killed a few and hadn’t even broken a sweat. How do you think she got blood under her fingernails? I doubt she was clawing at someone, since none of her nails was broken. My guess, she dug into the wound of some poor soul, most likely to get this address. One of your idiot thugs gave it to her. I’m guessing your little club is pretty concerned with loyalty, so what would make one of them break and give you up to a sociopathic hunter for the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit? It wasn’t a threat of prison, because that wouldn’t have been enough. How much torture do you think she inflicted before he broke?”

  “You’re crazy,” the man shouted.

  “Yes, I know, but I think we are all a little crazy, don’t you? Granted, some are crazier than others are. On a scale of one to ten, you are about a four, whereas I’m more like a nine. The bitch you claim doesn’t scare you is about a fifty. I kill people for a living and she scares me. If every psychopath and sociopath on the planet were like her, no normal person would have a chance. They’d be exterminated, like cockroaches. I imagine your kind would go first, those who are too stupid to live, I mean. Even the Russian mob is willing to give her information in hopes she won’t come after them. Yet, she doesn’t scare you. I almost pity you. I probably would if I was capable of empathy, but I’m not, so I don’t. Not really. It’s just something said to be polite.” Apex looked at his watch. The second hand ticked by slowly, mocking him. He had things to do, people to see, people hopefully never to see again. He doubted that last one was true. She had given him a pass for now, not eternity. “What should we do while we wait for your mystery boss to show up and give you what you deserve?”

  “He’ll kill you,” the man said.

  “That’s highly improbable. I’ll smell him before he gets through the door. I’ll hear his car the moment it gets within a hundred yards of this building. It’s very hard to get the drop on someone who is highly sensitive to smells and sounds. If you were a sociopath, you’d understand. However, I’m betting you wear boots because you can’t even master how to tie your shoelaces.”

  “Why would a hitman be working with the SCTU?”

  “That is the most perceptive and intelligent thing you have asked today.” Apex nearly applauded. “Simply put, it’s about loyalty. Many years ago, I made a promise and I’m keeping it. Besides, if one is smart, one does not make enemies of law enforcement officials who gut people in front of reporters for the national news. It shortens your life span, much like you have done with yours.”

  “How does a hitman become loyal to the SCTU? Who did you make a promise with that required you to be friendly with cops that break the law?”

  “Cops that break the law?” Apex smiled. “You should have read a little in the last thirty years. I’ll explain it simply, have you seen the movie Dredd with Karl Urban? We live in a society similar to that, only with limitations. That limitation is that it only applies to the SCTU. You’d be amazed the sorts of things they can legally do. For instance, you raided a federal building in a raiding party and kidnapped a prosecutor. Now, even if you didn’t pull the trigger and kill any of the people that were dead in that building, you would be tried under the Serial Killer and Mass Murderer laws, because you participated in a mass murder and kidnapping. The SCTU had every right to walk in here and put a bullet in your head simply because the kidnapped prosecutor was in your custody.” Apex looked at his watch, again. “I’m beginning to think your boss was actually expecting that exact thing to happen. His hour is up, and yet, there’s no sign of him. So, do you think he was really going to pay you for this job?”

  “You can’t kill me, you need me.” The man sneered.

  “No, I don’t,” Apex stood, held up the handgun and squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered the skull of the man he’d been talking with. Blood, hair, flesh, and brain matter blew out the back and coated a piece of plastic that hung up. He fired a second round into the man’s chest, just to make sure his bullet was found. He wanted everyone to know that Apex had been here. He giggled quietly, envisioning his name with a Kilroy drawing in the man’s blood on the plastic. That would shock the hell out of the workers that found him.

  He exited the back of the building. No sirens were wailing his way. Either Cain and Lazar had kept their promise or they had set a trap for him. He imagined it was the first. Cain couldn’t exist without Nyleena, at least not the way she did now. Lazar would keep their secret as well, not because he had some sort of strange attachment to either of the women, but because he was a Marshal, entering a war, and he knew who he could trust. If he stuck with Cain, he’d live through it. For a fleeting moment, Apex wondered if he would live through it.

  He pushed the thought away. A promise was a promise. He made that promise all those years ago without hesitation. He had never regretted it, still didn’t. Even staring into the eyes of the devil herself, he had not flinched. If she had ripped his throat out, at least he would have died a loyal man.

  As he drove away, he dialed a number on his other phone, his real phone.

  “Well?” The man on the other end sounded cranky.

  “Cain, Clachan, and another Marshal left over an hour ago. Clachan is alive, but her kidnapper is not. He couldn’t lead me back to the financier.”

  “What about the rest of them?”

  “I don’t know. My guess is they are all alive. The Fortress went dark though.”

  “I know. We are working on it,” the man snipped. “Does Cain know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn it to hell,” the man said. “I don’t think Cain should enter that prison.”

  “I don’t think you could stop her with a .50 caliber and a car bomb. Her brother and grandfather are inside that prison. She is going to go. Besides, the SCTU and VCU will be the best at taking the prison back if it really has been lost.”

  “I know,” the man sighed. “We just got Malachi back and we’re going to end up losing him all over again.”

  “Nah,” Apex said. “Cain’s living in the darkness. If Malachi goes into that prison, she’ll kill everyone in there to get him back.”

  “You know, I even had the church picked out where they would get married? Then she had to go and screw it up by being her. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing at the moment.”

  “I’d say it’s a good thing.”

  “I owe you,” the man said.

  “We owe each other and I stopped keeping score a long time ago.” Apex paused for a moment. “Peter, I promise that Malachi will be safe if he enters the Fortress. Cain isn’t going to let anything happen to him.”

  “This is a clusterfuck,” Peter sighed into the phone. “A real cluster fuck. I can’t believe we have spent over a decade trying to figure out who is behind this without any leads.”

  “We’ll get them this time,” Apex said.

  “You sound very sure of that.”

  “Last time, the SCTU and VCU didn’t exist, remember?”

  “I wish I was as certain as you.”

  “You trust Malachi?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then trust it to get done.” Apex hung up. It really was a cluster fuck.

  Five

  Nyleena was getting her own secure room at the hospital, just as soon as they stitched her back up. I had smelled the blood in the car. It had been dry, smelling of iron and decay. I hadn’t been able to see the cause though, because even I was not rude enough t
o start undressing my cousin in the back seat of a car while a man she did not know drove. Besides, dry had been good. It meant she was not going to bleed to death.

  Now though, I could see the full extent of her injuries. If I had a number for Apex, he would have gotten a call. I would have stopped him, driven back to that building and tortured her abductor.

  Few things made me really hate someone. Rape was near the very top of the list. I had no doubt that Nyleena would recover physically and mentally. She was a Clachan and like the rest of my sick, warped, twisted clan, she was a survivor.

  “She won’t be having children,” the doctor said to me.

  “She was not going to be having children anyway. She is nearly…” I thought for a moment. I could not remember how old she was. “She is nearly too old for such a thing anyway. What I need to know is once everything has healed, all the stitches have come out, all the therapy helped with her mental state, will she still be able to enjoy sex physically?”

  “Um, well, uh,” the doctor looked puzzled.

  “My cousin enjoys a good romp in the hay. She uses it as stress relief. If she cannot physically enjoy it, she could become depressed. That is a concern. Did he cause a female castration or excessive nerve damage?”

  “No, she did not suffer from a castration and the nerve damage will be minimal.” He gave me a look, as if he was confused.

  “Please excuse my daughter. She does not understand the physical side of sex,” my mother interrupted. “Her concern is that Nyleena might not be able physically to enjoy sex due to scarring and nerve damage. However, since most of the trauma was vaginal, it should not have affected her clitoris, correct?” Elle shook her head.

  “Did grandma just say clitoris?” Cassie asked.

  “Yes, she did,” Elle answered.

  “No, there was not much external damage done to her sexual organs. It was mostly internal. That is why we did the emergency hysterectomy,” the doctor said.