A medium sized group had actually moved closer to us. This group included the FBI tactical team, the US Marshals tactical team, a few guards, and more than a dozen inmates. It was surprising that despite us putting them behind these walls, they just believed we weren’t crooked or going to kill them for no reason. My eyes darted to Deacon Priest. He was hallucinating and not experiencing the effects of psychopathology. One was not significant without the other, but I wasn’t informed enough about his hallucinations to figure out why it was significant. I needed a doctor.
“You are growling,” Eric whispered to me.
“Hmm,” I answered him.
“Seriously, Aislinn, are you okay?”
“Yes and no, but now is not the time for that discussion,” I whispered to my brother. I wasn’t suffering a brain tumor, but I had been making vocalizations for a couple of months now without realizing it. The cause was just as undefinable as Deacon Priest’s hallucinations. Sometimes, I wondered if I was going crazy. Other times, I realized if I had been going crazy, I wouldn’t have been wondering about it. I was beginning to think there was an external cause. If there was a rogue Marshal or a few of them, was it possible they were somehow exposing me to a substance that was causing this situation? Chances were good, since we all lived in the same neighborhood. They might even live on my street. My mother had been withdrawn lately. Maybe that had something to do with this unknown agent.
I forced myself to turn my attention back to the room full of cops and killers. My mind wandering had become more pronounced. Unlike Deacon Priest, I was stuck in the darkness, not forced away from it. I sighed and motioned for Gabriel.
“If there is one or more rogue Marshals inside this prison, then that could mean there are one or more rogue Marshals in our neighborhood. Could some of the strange things that have been happening be connected?” I asked.
“Strange things that have been happening?” Gabriel frowned. “Like with you, Xavier, and Fiona?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not a doctor, but maybe.”
“When we leave here, we should talk to a doctor,” I told him.
“Should we be discussing this now?”
“Well, I keep forgetting things and I cannot seem to concentrate. Also, why is Deacon Priest sobbing? He is a big, bad, psychopathic looney, so he should have taken my blows in stride. I probably still would have had to help him here, but honestly, the breaking of his feet should not have stopped him. I should have had to kill him. How many of the psychopaths in here are either suffering like him and cannot go into the calm, or are stuck there like me?”
“And Malachi,” Gabriel added quietly.
“He suffered a trauma.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t entirely explain it. Green’s noticed some changes too, in both himself and Malachi.” Gabriel looked out over the crowd. I tapped Eric on the shoulder.
“Can you go all psychopathic?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Good, we might need that. I’m not sure all these guys can,” I told him. He looked at Deacon Priest.
“Not the badass you thought you were?” Eric almost smiled.
“Oh no, I’m still plenty bad ass, but Deacon certainly was not.”
“Oh,” Eric’s eyes widened. “Xavier once told me that psychopathic brain chemistry was very delicate.”
“It can be,” I answered. “Some are more prone to disruption than others.”
“I don’t like this,” Eric turned back around. “I say we grab them and just interrogate them.”
“Interrogate?” I raised an eyebrow. Torture was the word we were really looking for, but it would be wrong to torture all of them. Some or all might be innocent. Besides, once you started torturing people, it was hard to stop.
A commotion outside the cafeteria caught all our attention. Two serial killers, both bloody, were running for their lives. Malachi opened the door and they bolted inside. Malachi closed it behind them. I wondered at this sudden show of compassion. He turned to look at both of them. They opened their mouths and Malachi punched one in the face. He dropped to the floor, his eyelids fluttering, snoring emanating from his bloody nose. The second one held up a hand to ward off the blow that he knew was coming. It didn’t work. Malachi caught him in the face with his elbow. He too, landed on the floor.
“Someone, tie these two up and search them for weapons, someone not an inmate.” Malachi turned back to the door. We waited to see one of the giant psychopaths come down the hall. Instead, Patterson’s light steps and Green’s heavier ones were heard. The two were hurrying, but not running. There was a slight hitch in Green’s steps. Patterson’s gait was even. They rounded the corner and hurried towards the door. Malachi opened it again, letting both men in. This time, Patterson entered willingly. He pulled the door closed behind him, before Malachi could.
“We should just wait here for a few minutes.” Patterson nodded to Malachi. “You look good.”
“Caleb?” Malachi asked.
“They are going to breach the warden’s office.” Caleb exhaled slowly. “They have a bomb.”
“Who? Why?” I asked.
“Because they are stuck inside the Fortress and believe the warden holds the key to exiting,” Patterson told us.
“Okay, that’s a problem,” Gabriel said. “Even if the warden wanted to, he couldn’t lift a lockdown and as far as I can tell, we aren’t in lockdown.”
“Yes, we are.” Patterson looked at him. “I didn’t ask about the other woman earlier. Where is she?”
“Fiona is with the warden and if she gets injured, I’m going to hold you responsible,” I told my grandfather.
“Oh, that is a problem.” He looked at me.
Four psychopaths that I didn’t recognize practically skipped by us. One was holding a pipe bomb. How he had gotten a pipe bomb was a problem for another time.
“We go up, they come down,” I told Gabriel.
“Let’s get our girl,” Gabriel agreed. He began speaking to Fiona, who sounded flustered over the coms. I wanted to tell her not to worry, but I also did not want to lie to her.
“Eric, collect all the cell phones in the room. Brent, help him,” I told my brother. “If anyone refuses, knock them out and take the phone.” Suddenly, several people were digging out their phones. Using psychopathic killers was effective. My understanding of my role in the SCTU became much clearer.
Eleven
In a prison full of killer sociopaths and psychopaths, knowing who can be trusted is tricky business. I did trust Eric. I did trust Brent. The reasons for this trust were completely different. I also trusted Patterson and Caleb Green, who were accompanying Gabriel and me were on our rescue mission. Malachi was in charge of the door and supervising Brent. There was no reason for him to supervise Eric. Eric was more likely to kill Brent than Malachi was.
The hallway was empty. Knowing that some of the inmates had a bomb completely explained why everyone was avoiding certain areas. Most serial killers and mass murderers were not interested in being blown up. For that matter, neither was I. I hated bombs. However, these were not bombers with a cause. They were just serial killers with a goal. There was a difference and that was good. I could deal with serial killers having a goal.
Patterson was now in possession of my baton. It seemed everyone was going to get to use it at this point. I kept wanting to point out that I wanted it back.
“If you were going to enter the warden’s office, would you blow up the door?” I asked Patterson.
“No, but I’m not them,” he told me.
“How would you do it?”
“I would have threatened to detonate it at the cafeteria,” Patterson informed me. He had a point. There were more than four dozen law enforcement officials in the cafeteria and at least that many inmates. It was the better hostage negotiation situation.
“How’d they get a bomb?” Gabriel asked him. Patterson looked at the SCTU team leader and shrugged.
“They don’t i
nclude me in their plans of mass destruction. I was supposed to be dead hours ago.” He opened the door to the staircase. We stopped talking and began moving, sweeping the stairs and landings as we came to them.
A pipe bomb required a trigger. A trigger required someone to be holding it. We needed to recover the bomb and disable it. It might help us figure out who was in charge on the inside. While I figured it was a cell phone, there was no guarantee of that. It could have been a couple of different things. The only thing we knew for sure was that the person with the trigger was inside the Fortress. There was shielding that kept signals from going in and out of the building. Some of them were electronic and some were mechanical. The walls had steel plates in them and there was a large electromagnet in each of the towers that could be turned on. It was why we could talk to Fiona, but not Xavier or anyone else on the outside.
I felt the concussive force of the bomb. My chest felt like it had caved in. My lungs exhaled all their air and my diaphragm refused to refill them. My ears were ringing. My face felt warm. Wet trails were dribbling down my arms and cheeks. If my ears heard it, I did not remember the sound. The stairwell smelled of metal, blood, and gunpowder.
It took several blinks for my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting caused by dust floating through the air. They felt gritty. Gabriel was next to me, his mouth moving, but no words were coming out. I did a quick assessment. He was bleeding, but it did not seem heavy. A chunk of cinder block had landed on Patterson’s leg. He was tugging at it. Caleb was helping him. The door said we were on the fourth floor. I was sure we had been on the fifth a moment earlier.
My injuries were superficial, all my body parts still moved. An arm lay next to me, the hand missing fingers, but the elbow was still there and it was slightly bent. I looked at the arm. The cloth was burned, but I could see that it was yellow. No one except Patterson had been wearing yellow in my group. I did another check of Patterson and found both his arms still attached.
“Aislinn!” Gabriel was inches from my face. His voice was muffled, but I could hear him. “Are you alright?”
“Yes,” I said. He stared at my lips, as if he couldn’t hear me. I realized he couldn’t. We were both suffering from hearing damage. I put my fingers in my ears and attempted to pop them. My communication earpiece was missing. I grabbed Gabriel’s head. His earpiece was gone as well. I shoved him away from me and crawled towards Caleb. He’d been behind me, but now he seemed to be in front of me. I wasn’t sure how that had happened. I yanked on his sleeve, grabbing his attention and then checked his ears. His com piece was still in. I sighed.
“Can you hear Fiona?” I shouted at him.
“What?” He shouted back.
“Fiona!” I shouted.
“What?” He asked again. I forced him to look at me, and his eyes found my lips.
“Fiona, can you hear her?” I asked, hoping his synesthesia included lip reading.
“I can’t hear anything,” he answered. It had worked. With my help, we moved the block from Patterson’s leg. It looked broken. It was bleeding through his dirty yellow jumpsuit. I tore the fabric. The bone was not sticking out, but a small piece of rebar was. I grabbed it and jerked. The bleeding increased, but not significantly. I nodded. He nodded back. Gabriel was standing.
His eyes were skyward, staring into the dust. There was a skeleton of a staircase left. About six inches of each stair jutted out from the wall. The door for the fifth floor was there, but looked like it had been damaged. The sixth floor didn’t have a door. The landing had less than six inches of it left and it was mostly rebar with tiny bits of concrete still attached. The seventh floor had fared better. The blast had traveled out and down, more than up. In the haze, I could make out the figure of a person.
There was an emergency exit, but it was on the outside of the building. It took one out, down a couple of flights of stairs, and onto the roof of one of the cellblocks. From there, you had to climb down a ladder into the field. At this moment, it seemed like a faulty design. I wasn’t sure it was operational during a lockdown. I looked at Patterson.
“How did we get into lockdown? We managed to enter the building!” I shouted at him.
“There’s a special button in the secure ward. I hit it!” Patterson yelled back.
“Did you know it was there before you entered the secure ward?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How?” I looked at my grandfather.
“I helped build this place,” he answered. “There is an emergency station outside the Fortress that contains the release button.”
“Jesus Christ,” I kicked the wall, “they let a serial killer help build the Fortress!” I kicked it again and again and again.
“They didn’t know who I was. They just thought I was an engineer, one of many, that worked on this place. I designed the secure ward and the central pillar system for this area. There’s an emergency lockdown button in the warden’s office too, but he wouldn’t have used it. So I did it for him.”
“You locked us in here with a rogue US Marshal and a bunch of killers who want us dead?” I glared at him.
“When you put it that way,” Patterson looked at me. I kicked the wall again.
“You’re going to break your foot.” Caleb gently touched my arm.
“It is either my foot or his face,” I told Caleb.
“I did it for your protection,” Patterson told me.
“You protected me by locking me in a prison full of serial killers that do not like me and at least one US Marshal who is giving bombs to whack jobs. Please, explain how that works?” I looked at him.
“How much do you want to bet there’s at least one contract killer on the outside waiting for you to exit this place?” He looked at me. I kicked the wall again. He was right. If they wanted to eliminate us, there was at least one contract killer on the outside just in case we didn’t die in here. I kicked the wall one more time for good measure. If my foot was broken, I didn’t know it.
“Okay,” I breathed in deeply and let it out slowly. “How do we rescue Fiona?” I asked him.
“We use the back stairs,” he answered.
“What back stairs?” I looked at him.
“The ones hidden in the cafeteria that comes out in the waiting room outside the warden’s office. It doesn’t have any other doors.”
“Why did you not tell us about this before we were blown up?” I asked.
“Because I was hoping we could get the bomb and find out who was holding the trigger.” I kicked the wall one last time. It was irritating as hell to think like my serial killing grandfather.
“Ace,” Gabriel said my name softly.
“No, just no. Do not talk to me. Do not touch me. Do not even look at me.” I began down the stairs. The others came with me. They were stealthier, their weapons still drawn. I was mentally begging for some asshole to come across us and give us a hard time. It might ratchet down my irritation level.
Twelve
I consciously muttered under my breath all the way back down the staircase. Most of it was swear words that my mother would have been appalled to hear come out of my mouth. She had done her best to raise a lady, but she’d been unfortunate enough to be given a sociopath to work with. No one had ever accused me of being ladylike, even on my best days.
The men with me were staying a couple of steps behind. This included Patterson. Considering a portion of this mess was his fault, it was in his best interest to stay back. My boot had started to squelch a floor earlier. I had probably broken my toes and split a few of them open. I didn’t look to see if I was leaving bloody footprints. I rather hoped I was, because it would just prove how incredibly pissed I was at the elderly man.
If nothing else, we could have sent Fiona and them down the hidden staircase to join us. Or we could have used it to avoid running into the monster with the shotgun blasts to the head. It would have been great information to have, say, several hours ago, when we first made entry. We weren’t just in the la
ir of a serial killer; we were in their relocated homes with a US Marshal that was not on our side.
We exited the stairwell and found our path to the cafeteria was blocked. Almost none of them took notice of us, because they were beating on the secured doors, trying to get into the cafeteria. This meant there was something scarier headed our way. I wasn’t sure how much scarier things could get. Bombs were scary for a lot of reasons, but for me, I had a fear of burning to death.
Not dying of smoke inhalation, but actually burning to death. Some things leave impressions even on sociopaths. The worst thing I had ever witnessed was a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire as a form of protest. It took over a minute for him to die. He was rocking and praying, his outline visible through the flames. A few years later, I had learned about the Brazen Bull, a torture device made of bronze intended to roast the victim alive. There were many ways to die, but burning to death seemed like the worst.
“Where is the fire?” I shouted to get everyone’s attention. About a dozen serial killers turned to look at us, as if we had materialized from thin air. Several were registering looks of panic. Whatever the scary thing was, it was scarier than Malachi, Caleb, Patterson, Eric, and I all put together. I’d never seen serial killers look panicked. One of them pointed down the hall. I peeked around the corner.
To my surprise, the corridor was on fire. Not the walls themselves, but stuff that had been tossed from cells into the hallway. Black smoke billowed off it. There was also a hole in the wall with a piece of metal railing sticking through it. It was aimed by Fate, because on the end of it was a serial killer, quite obviously dead. I knew him as Jake Pannel, and his favorite method of killing women was to impale them. Karma had rebalanced her wheel a little bit by shoving the railing through his stomach.
Fortified Dreams Page 9
