The Ackerman Thrillers Boxset

by Ethan Cross

  Something about the church didn’t seem right to Marcus. He was sure that it was a fine place to be a member or in which to worship, but it was nothing extravagant. It wasn’t unique or special in any way. It didn’t stand out, and he couldn’t work out why the Prophet would choose it for his magnum opus, despite the fact that its renovations meant it was closed at present. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they were in the wrong place.

  During the hours of waiting, Andrew had checked himself out of the hospital and picked up Marcus and Schofield in the Yukon. The three of them sat together and kept watch on the church. Marcus sat in the back. Andrew was behind the wheel. And Schofield sat in the passenger seat with his hands secured uncomfortably by a pair of plastic cuffs fastened to the handle next to the window, a handgrip which was used to let passengers pull themselves up into the high vehicle. The cuffs were yellow one-time-use models made from a polycarbonate resin. They employed a roller-lock retention system similar to that of zip ties and could only be removed by cutting them off.

  “We’re in the wrong place,” Marcus said.

  The other two men didn’t respond, but he knew that they were both thinking the same thing. And they all had something to lose. Schofield needed to save his family. Andrew wanted to save his friend. And Marcus wanted to find out what had happened to the woman he loved. He couldn’t stop his imagination from conjuring images of Maggie burning alive.

  The lives of many people were on the line, and Marcus and the others had no idea if they were even in the right location. He checked his watch. Less than an hour until the ritual, but there was still no sign of Jansen or Conlan.

  He closed his eyes and considered what he knew about the ritual.

  Conlan would want it to be performed somewhere isolated that could at least give him some assurance that they wouldn’t be disturbed. Somewhere on holy ground. But somewhere special. Everything that the killer had planned for was an extreme. The darkest, longest night. Schofield making the ultimate sacrifice. Committing the ultimate blasphemy against God by defiling a church sanctuary.

  The Prophet would want the location of the ritual to be extreme as well.

  There was something just on the edge of Marcus’s consciousness, something he had read or seen. But it was like a shadow in his peripheral vision that disappeared whenever he tried to catch sight of its source.

  What was he missing?

  Schofield’s words in the Prophet’s basement floated to the surface of his mind. The abomination standing in the holy place … The darkest, longest night in the highest place …

  The Highest Place …

  When Schofield had spoken the words, Marcus had just assumed that the Prophet was using highest as a term of spiritual significance, like a holy altar or a church of historical importance. But what if he actually meant the highest church?

  And that was when he knew where they needed to go.

  The skyscraper Chicago Temple Building was the tallest church building in the world, and at its top, four hundred feet above ground level, sat the Sky Chapel—the highest place of worship on Earth.

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  The Sky Chapel wasn’t a large sanctuary. It was quite the opposite. The intimate yet beautiful place of worship seated only thirty people and was used for prayer and reflection, weddings, and special services. Situated at the base of the steeple, it was octagonal in shape and was surrounded by sixteen stained-glass windows depicting various scenes from the Bible and the history of the Church. In the center of the ceiling, there was a large blue illuminated recess surrounded by golds and reds and Christian symbology. Backlit glass depicting rays of sunlight stretched out to each of the recess’s four quadrants, symbolizing the power of God reaching out to all four corners of the world.

  The Prophet had been here many times and knew that it was the perfect setting for the final ritual, the holy place where the abomination of desolation would soon stand.

  He and Jansen had rearranged the chapel’s small benches for their own purposes. The seats normally sat facing an altar adorned with an ornate and intricate wooden carving of Jesus staring out over the city of Chicago and weeping because the people did not know what brought peace. But now they had positioned the benches to sit at the five corners of a crude pentagram spray-painted in black on the center of the chapel’s floor. Each of the five sacrifices remained gagged and had been secured to the benches using specially constructed harnesses similar to straitjackets. The women’s faces were streaked with tears, and they moaned and sobbed behind their gags. A bench for the boy also sat in the center of the pentagram. A large black cloth covered the middle bench.

  The Prophet stroked Benjamin’s dark hair and, in his honeyed Southern tone, said, “Are you ready, my child?”

  “Yes, Prophet.”

  “Then lie down.”

  Benjamin lay back on the bench, and Jansen secured the restraint straps around the child’s body. The Prophet said, “Benjamin, you will be the spark that ignites The Great Fire. Like the legendary phoenix, you will rise from the ashes of this world and start a new one, a better one. It will be a glorious new beginning. Here, on the darkest, longest night in the highest place, you will become a god. Do you choose to accept your place as The Chosen?”

  “Yes, Prophet.”

  The Prophet squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “I’m so proud of you.”

  Then he and Jansen finished dumping the five gallons of lighter fluid over the sacrifices and the chapel.

  All that was left was to wait for the proper hour and watch the world burn.

  127

  The Chicago Temple was a five-hundred-and-sixty-eight-foot-tall skyscraper church located in the heart of downtown Chicago. The structure looked to Marcus like a strange amalgam of an office building topped by a Gothic cathedral. It contained the First United Methodist Church of Chicago as well as several floors of rented office space.

  As they pulled up to the building, Marcus glanced across the street at the distinctive red and brown facade of the Richard J. Daley Center which housed more than a hundred and twenty court and hearing rooms as well as the Cook County Law Library. Daley Plaza sat between Daley Center and the Chicago Temple and was currently home to the city’s official Christmas tree, a seventy-foot fir covered with red and green lights.

  Marcus pulled open his door and was nearly overwhelmed by the snow and wind. Sitting in the warmth of the Yukon, he had actually forgotten how cold it was outside.

  As Marcus began to slide out of the big SUV, Schofield said, “Wait. You said that I could help.” He tugged at his restraints and shook the seat.

  “I said that you could help save your family, and, hopefully, you’ve done that. Consider yourself lucky.”

  Marcus slammed the vehicle’s door, and he and Andrew pushed through the snow to the bronze entryway of the Chicago Temple. Once inside, they shook off the cold and examined the area. Andrew was the first to find blood behind the security desk. “We’re in the right place,” Andrew said. “Where to from here?”

  Pointing skyward, Marcus replied, “All the way up.”

  He pressed the elevator button, the shining bronze doors parted, and they stepped inside. The highest number on the control panel was for the twenty-second floor, but when Andrew pushed it, nothing happened. The button didn’t light up.

  Marcus swore and tapped a keyhole beside the button. “You must need a key to access it.”

  “What do we do now?” Andrew reached up to the ceiling and tried to find some kind of hatch.

  “It won’t open,” Marcus said. “It’ll be locked from the other side. But have you ever heard of elevator surfing?”

  “No. It sounds like an Olympic sport for stockbrokers.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll take the elevator up to the twenty-first floor, and I’ll get off there. You take the car back down to the twentieth floor and push the emergency-stop button to hold it in place. I’ll wedge open the doors and step out on top of the elevator car.”

 
“Then I take off the emergency stop and push the elevator up to the twenty-first floor?”

  “Actually, I’ll control it by using the maintenance panel on the roof of the car.”

  Andrew gave him a curious look and said, “It sounds like you’ve done this before.”

  “I grew up in a city with a lot of skyscrapers and plenty of time on my hands.”

  Marcus pressed the button for the twenty-first floor, and the elevator started to rise. The lights above the door cycled their way to twenty-one, and the door dinged and slid open. With a nod, he stepped out and watched the doors close.

  He waited a few seconds and then flipped out his knife. With the blade wedged between the two bronze panels of the elevator, he applied leverage until a crack appeared. Then he slipped his fingers into the crack and pulled the doors open the rest of the way.

  A faint buzzing sound filled the inside of the shaft, and it smelled of hydraulic fluids, grease, and rust. He flipped on a work light located on the right-hand side of the car. The walls were worn concrete. The shaft contained several tracks for additional elevators, separated by only a few metal beams running the length of the shaft at ten-foot intervals.

  A metal railing had been placed around the top of the elevator car but it was only about three feet tall and provided little obstruction to prevent anyone from falling down the shaft. The roof was made of flat gray metal and featured a few blue conduits, the tarnished blue sheath containing the hydraulic ram, and a yellow control panel the size of a shoebox. A red light glowed on top of the box.

  Marcus stepped onto the top of the car and bent down to the control panel. He twisted a toggle and pulled out a red button to put the car into inspection mode. This transferred control of the car’s movement away from the inside panel to the switches on top of the car. Then he flipped the control switch up and rode the elevator to the doors leading onto the twenty-second floor.

  The inner side of the doors had a lever near the top that the car would trip to slide open the panels when it reached the proper floor. He placed his palm against the bottom of the lever and pushed it up. The doors parted slightly.

  As he had done previously from the other side, Marcus slid his fingers into the crack and started to pull the panels open.

  But unlike before, this time he was immediately greeted by a silenced black pistol pointing at his face.

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  Marcus jerked back quickly from the opening as the heat of a subsonic round passed close to his face. His hand shot into the gap and closed around the suppressor attached to the gun’s barrel. He yanked hard, throwing his whole body weight into pulling the gun away.

  A large object slammed into the outside of the elevator doors as he jerked the weapon. There was a muffled cry of pain, and then the gun came free. Marcus’s momentum and the force he had put into the movement nearly caused him to topple head first down the elevator shaft.

  He dropped the gun and steadied himself against the low railing. The sound of the gun clanging off the concrete walls of the shaft echoed up to him, producing a feeling of vertigo.

  Turning back to the doors, he found a hulking man shoving the panels the rest of the way open. Erik Jansen’s eyes were ablaze with fury, and the big man screamed as he shot forward onto the top of the car. He was charging, and Marcus knew that he couldn’t withstand a frontal attack by the larger man. Jansen had to be at least six foot five inches tall, probably weighed two hundred and seventy-five pounds, and had fists the size of cement blocks.

  Marcus dropped as low as he could and placed his back against the low railing to keep from being knocked from the car. He tried to use Jansen’s momentum against him to send the big man careening over the edge. But Jansen quickly recognized the danger.

  He kept low as well and threw his momentum into pounding both his fists down onto Marcus’s back.

  With his weight already shifted forward to accept a head-on charge, the blow knocked Marcus flat against the roof of the car. Jansen wasted no time in grabbing him from the floor and slamming him face-first into the concrete side wall near the elevator doors.

  Marcus felt pain surge down the side of his face as his flesh grated against the wall. But Jansen was far from done with his assault. He continued by pounding his meaty fists into Marcus’s kidneys and back.

  The pain was immense, and it shot down through Marcus’s legs.

  Then Jansen grabbed a handful of Marcus’s leather jacket and, lifting him from the floor, threw him into the open elevator shaft.

  129

  Marcus felt weightless for a second, as though gravity had suddenly lost its hold. Then the pull kicked back in and dragged him downward into the shaft. The darkness of twenty-two stories and several hundred feet of empty air clawed at him, but his instinct for survival was quicker than any rational and calculated action could be.

  His hands found the steel hoist cable in the adjacent shaft, but his weight continued to pull him down. The friction between his palms and the cable burned like fire as the metal dug into his skin. He screamed in pain, the sound echoing through the depths of the concrete pit. But, after dropping a few feet, he was able to halt his fall.

  He looked back up at Jansen. The big man stood grinning on top of the elevator car. A meaty fist wagged an invitation. The gesture’s meaning was clear. Come get some more.

  Gladly, Marcus thought.

  He considered reaching for the .45 pistol resting inside his jacket. But the thought of dangling over the precipice, holding on with one injured hand, thwarted that idea.

  Fist over fist, Marcus pulled himself back up to eye level with Jansen. Then he swung his legs and used the momentum to kick at his opponent. Jansen jerked back enough for Marcus’s feet to clear the railing and reach the top of the car.

  Jansen lunged forward again, but this time, Marcus was ready for him. He dodged to the side, and in a blur of motion, he slammed his elbow into Jansen’s temple. He followed the blow with four strong punches to the other man’s acne-scarred cheeks.

  Blood poured from Jansen’s jaw and stained the top of the elevator. But the giant turned swiftly and grabbed Marcus in a vicious bear hug. The massive muscular arms wrapped around his torso and started to crush him. It felt like a large truck had just backed over his chest. He gasped for air, but none could be squeezed into his compacted lungs. His heart pounded, and he could feel the blood flow throbbing through his skull.

  His fists hammered, driven by panic, against Jansen’s back and head. His legs kicked out ineffectually against the man’s shins. He could see Jansen grimacing in pain, but there was no sign of him letting go. Marcus’s attacks were accomplishing nothing except expending his own limited supply of oxygen.

  He could feel his ribcage compressing, cracking, separating.

  The words he often preached to Maggie came back to him. Anything can be used as a weapon. And not just any object in your surroundings, but also any part of your body.

  Marcus couldn’t gain the necessary leverage to deal a brutal enough blow to get Jansen’s grip to relent. At least, not with his arms or legs. But anything could be used as a weapon.

  He had learned long ago that human beings have short jaws with thick masseter muscles and blunt, chisel-shaped incisors. With that knowledge in mind, Marcus sank his teeth deep into Jansen’s cheek and bit down with all the force the human jaw could attain.

  Jansen screamed, and the pressure lifted from Marcus’s chest. He came away with a chunk of flesh in his mouth, but he quickly spat out the foul metallic, salty taste as he gasped for air.

  With both hands clamped over the side of his face, Jansen stumbled to the back of the elevator car’s roof.

  Marcus didn’t hesitate.

  His hand flew inside his jacket and came back out holding the Sig Sauer pistol. He fired a shot into each of Jansen’s kneecaps, dropping the big man to the metal ceiling of the elevator car. The blasts echoed like thunder down the shaft and made Marcus’s ears ring as the smell of burnt gunpowder filled the ai
r.

  Jansen rolled around in agony, and Marcus wiped the blood from his mouth onto his black shirt.

  “That was for me,” he said. “And this is for Vasques.”

  Marcus fired one more shot into Jansen’s skull and then kicked the body over the edge of the elevator car. He watched as it twisted into the darkness of the shaft. A wet thump came a few seconds later.

  Marcus bent down, took the elevator out of inspection mode, and stepped through the doors onto the twenty-second floor. He pressed the elevator call button and waited as the car came up. The doors dinged open.

  Andrew looked him up and down, taking in Marcus’s injuries and the blood staining the area around his mouth. Then Andrew said, “What took you so long?”

  130

  There was a large glass entryway on the twenty-second floor that had already been unlocked. It led up a set of stairs to a tiny white elevator. With their weapons at the ready, Marcus and Andrew climbed inside and rode it all the way to the top. They exited into a darkened foyer that had four tall windows behind a set of monstrous wooden beams in the shape of an X.

  Another set of stairs with dark gray carpeting and red and gold walls ascended to the Chapel in the Sky. The stairs curved up to a landing, and Marcus walked up quietly backward, so he could watch the railing above them. He clung to the outside wall with Andrew following close behind.

  They scanned what they could of the chapel from their vantage point and then moved up one final set of stairs into the sanctuary. The room’s natural, soothing tones—pinks, golds, blues, creams—radiated an aura of elegance and serenity. The women bound and crying at the points of a crude pentagram quickly shattered that illusion.

  Marcus scanned the entire room, staring down the sights of the Sig Sauer, but there was no sign of the Prophet. Maybe he had slipped past them somehow? Or maybe Conlan had convinced others to do his dirty work as he had in the past?