by Hadena James
“Sweat pants,” Gabriel pointed to them.
“I’m maybe 5 feet 3 inches tall with my boots on, your brother is taller than Malachi, since I can’t run in Malachi’s pants, I know I can’t run in those, even with the boots on.”
“I was going to cut them off, but I have to know how much. You can’t go outside in these pants.” He left the room and I slipped the sweats on over my pants. Which brought to my attention that I might be underestimating Raphael’s height by a bit. I was sure I could almost feed the legs back up them a second time and have the feet cinch around my thighs at the groin they were so long.
“How tall is Raphael?” I shouted to Gabriel.
“Very tall.” He shouted back and came back into the living area. He had a pair of jeans and a cord from a lamp or something in his hands. “Put these on over the sweats.” He handed me the jeans. I struggled to get into them, eventually sitting down on the couch because my movements were restricted by the extra two feet or so of material that had nothing in it. Once I was sitting, Gabriel put another pair of socks on my feet, over my own socks, and put my boots back on lacing them almost tight enough to restrict blood flow to my feet. I didn’t complain, I knew he was just making sure they were laced properly. Combat boots had high sides for a reason. The taut leather was supposed to provide support to your ankles with enough flexibility that you could run over rough terrain. For me it was mostly a fashion statement since I preferred not to run over any terrain. I held the belief that if I had to run, I had probably screwed up. Of course, since I wasn’t naive enough or narcissistic enough to believe that I never screwed up, I ran a few miles every week when I was able to get to a treadmill. I did not run outside. My hours were insane, and I attracted serial killers like pretty women attracted frat boys at a bar on half price drink nights.
Chapter Eleven
I FELT LIKE A LITTLE kid bundled up for a snow day. I had on multiple layers of scrubs and Raphael’s clothes. Gabriel had cut all his pants, so they would fit me in length better and I wouldn’t constantly be tripping over the two to two and a half feet extra.
We had worked out that despite the fact they were supposed to be paternal twins and therefore identical, Raphael was about seven and a half feet tall making him more than a foot taller than Gabriel and more than two feet taller than me.
Gabriel had also told me that he was the youngest by nearly twenty minutes. Once their mom had given birth to Raphael, they had needed to perform a C-section to get Gabriel out. It was strange to think about because with twins you just expect that both will come out the same way. I had met Gabriel’s father a few times and if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have known he wasn’t a Texas native.
Gabriel’s mother had passed away shortly after our case in Texas. All members of the SCTU and VCU had attended. She had been a fiery red head from Texas. I had met her twice before she died, and it was obvious that Gabriel had her fighting spirit. Sadly, the high spirited, spunky Texan lady had been a causality of a brilliant mass murderer who had worked out that some strains of Y. pestis didn’t kill their host and had managed to infect more than five hundred rats with bubonic plague. The CDC and NIH had attempted to contain the outbreak of plague and had done a pretty decent job. Less than 100 people had died from the highly contagious strain of plague that she had actually created in a lab in her garden shed. Tragically, Gabriel’s mother had been one of the 100.
At 76, she just didn’t have it in her to fight the antibiotic resistant strain of plague and they had lived close to the outbreak on a horse farm. Gabriel’s father had reported they had a rat infestation in their barn and within a few days, his mom was hospitalized with antibiotic resistant Y. pestis. They had coined a name for the new strain Dallas pestis. The scary part was that if you waited long enough, you could in fact watch as a strain of plague mutated. History had more than two dozen outbreaks of plague that didn’t follow the course it should have because Y. pestis had mutated during the early stages of the outbreaks and had become even more contagious and deadly as a result. Even the Black Death that everyone knew about from the middle ages had not been a pure form of Y. pestis. It had been a mutated form that had been even more contagious and spread from hosts other than fleas. D. pestis, as it was known, had indeed been more like the plague of the Middle Ages by not requiring parasites, like fleas, to transmit it.
Even though the Dallas and Fort Worth areas had managed to get rid of most of the infected rats, cases still popped up from time to time. Sadly, the best cure wasn’t much of a cure. Antibiotic resistant bacteria could usually be killed by high fevers, but who wanted malaria to get rid of a bacterial infection. It was proof that sometimes the older and odder methods still worked, most opted for the other disease and prayed for the best.
The cure for D. pestis wasn’t new. They had used things like malaria to kill syphilis in previous decades. Also, Y. pestis, even an antibiotic resistant strain, rarely survived in people who had malaria, scarlet fever, yellow fever, or dengue fever. Of course, all of those diseases could kill a person, but given that D. pestis had a hundred percent mortality rate and the others didn’t, they were the better option until medicine could find an antibiotic that could kill D. pestis.
It was just more proof of how destructive a non-functioning psychopath could be. Even if that psychopath was now dead. I had been given a verbal reprimand for eviscerating her on tv, but given the destruction she had caused, it hadn’t been that serious of a reprimand. I had gotten in more trouble for theoretically losing Patterson. In reality, Patterson had escaped with help from somebody, but that somebody hadn’t been me. I was still trying to figure out who had set me up for that. I had suspicions, but it made my life seem like one giant conspiracy theory.
Of course, bundled up in the bunker feeling like someone was watching me didn’t do much to dispel the idea of a conspiracy. Neither did knowing there was a conspiracy that involved the death of my father and sister as well as my kidnapping as a child, and it was all somehow tied to Gabriel’s brother.
The lights flickered, and the forced air stopped moving. Once again, the smell of dust and sweat hit my nose. I had anticipated such an event as we had put Vladik in charge of hacking the bunker. It had taken him a while as he’d had to get closer. According to Malachi, they were less than a few miles from us, which was nice considering I was certain we were going to have to leave the safety of the bunker quickly. The smell of sweat was pervasive and made my nose itch. There was now no doubt that the movement Gabriel had fired at a few hours ago in the control room was a person in the ventilation system.
I had a suspicion that the person was Raphael and that he had managed to somehow force his way into the ducts from his prison once he had woken up. Oddly, time failed to exist in the bunker. It wasn’t that it had stopped, it was that it was hard to track. There was no natural light and the daylight LED bulbs that proliferated the recessed ceiling lights weren’t much of a substitute.
Suspecting it was Raphael in the air vents made me wonder again about the construction of the bunker. The floor between the two levels wasn’t very thick, and no matter how thin Raphael was, I just couldn’t see him climbing through ducts that ran through the floor. The hatch was only about 10 inches thick and while it wasn’t flush with either side of the floor, even if the floor was fourteen inches thick, it didn’t leave a lot of crawling room.
I had doubts that there was a second person in the bunker with Raphael, even if they had been hidden in the control room and scurried like a rat into the vents when they heard us trying to figure out how to open the wall to get in. If there was a second person, they were there to ensure that Raphael killed Gabriel and me.
Using Gabriel’s phone, I called Malachi back to see how they had managed to get so close so quickly. He informed me that the NSA had sent a drone over the entire area and found a helicopter in a field a few miles from the coordinates that he’d been given by Eric. They had landed there. The pilot of the helicopter had attempted to r
un, but the SCTU had captured him and he was being taken to a secure location in the closest city.
It would be an incredibly boring job to sit in a helicopter cabin and just wait for Raphael to return. Of course, people could handle a significant amount of boredom if the money was good enough. I wanted to talk to him or at least see him, because I had a foggy memory of a second person’s face while I was in the airplane or maybe it was while I was being moved into the airplane. I wasn’t entirely sure about the sequence of events since I could just vaguely remember bits and pieces. Nor was I completely sure they had happened at all. Some of the physiological changes in psychopaths meant that certain drugs affected us differently than they did the general population. Xavier was still compiling the list of medications we were extremely sensitive to.
“I’m going to give these back to you, try not to take any before dark.” Gabriel held out the bottle of Percocet. My leg was more of an annoyance than in actual pain at the moment but traipsing through the woods could change that. Standing on it didn’t bother it, but walking required more muscle movement, especially in the calf, and since Raphael had been nice enough to take muscle along with skin, there was a chance that walking, particularly on uneven ground, was going to cause pain to flare up in it. Once it healed, I was going to have to start stretching it regularly. The burn scar had been bad enough on that calf, but for some reason, I was pretty sure this was going to be worse. For starters, even though the burn had healed ages ago, the muscle was still sore once in a while because while burns heal, the area that was severely burnt never forgot that wound and would cause pain every now and again. I was pretty sure that coupled with the new damage to the muscle the result was going to be a touch more pain in my everyday life.
There was no doubt, though, that Raphael had achieved what he intended. Even if I lived through this and he didn’t, he wasn’t going to be someone I forgot and every time my leg ached a little from the damage, he would cross my mind. That single fact was almost as annoying as the ache in my leg. I would forever be reminded of Gabriel’s psychotic twin brother and what he had done to Gabriel and me.
Even in my worst narcissistic moments, I wouldn’t think this had happened to me and me alone, Gabriel and I were bound by this experience. I was sure Gabriel would feel guilty for the rest of his life about me being down here and Nathan Green being murdered by his brother, and he would blame himself because he had blocked out the fact that his twin had attempted to kill and eat him when they were much younger. It was a burden he would carry regardless of how many times he was told it was fine and it wasn’t his fault. I knew this just like I had known that Gabriel would prefer to lock his brother in a room than kill him in the kitchen when he had the chance. Mostly it was because Gabriel was a decent guy, a good guy, the kind of guy you wanted on your team. His life had been fraught with hardships that most people couldn’t imagine, and his soul bore the scars of it, and yet, he had still turned out to be a good guy.
But that was why I existed. I had enough anger for both of us. I could be angry for Gabriel so that he could live peacefully and happily despite everything that had happened. I didn’t mind carrying the rage for him. At least it gave my rage a sense of purpose. It focused my anger and made it practical and useful, instead of letting it consume me and smother me in its destructive arms. That was where most psychopaths and sociopaths lost control of themselves. The rage they carried all the time consumed them until there was nothing left and no reason to do anything but try and sate the blood lust that rage craves as retribution for the injustices it perceives.
Gabriel and I stood at the door that we had assumed lead outside the bunker. I could hear him breathing, like he was expecting the boogeyman to be on the other side of it, just waiting for us to open the door so it could devour us. I didn’t blame him. Part of me had apprehensions about leaving the bunker as well. I didn’t feel there was some great beast on the other side of it, though, judging by the trials the team had gone through before arriving at a spot they could safely land a helicopter, it seemed the defense systems of the bunker were more than an adequate deterrent. However, that didn’t guarantee that there wasn’t a guy in a tree with a rifle aimed at the doors just waiting for someone to walk out.
After all, there were people in positions of power that required me, and now Gabriel, dead in order to continue their lives, without interference. And if there wasn’t someone waiting for us, to ensure that Raphael had gotten the job done, they might be there to ensure that Raphael didn’t live to give evidence. Even inside my head I sounded callous, this was Gabriel’s twin I was casually dismissing as a member of the dead man walking club. Mostly I was just a realist, this guy had already murdered several people to keep his lifestyle a secret, one or two or even a half dozen more wouldn’t mean anything to him.
Therein lay the rub of functional psychopaths with a taste for blood. They were more interested in keeping their secrets than dysfunctional psychopaths. It was all about image and their own pursuit of happiness, even if that came with collateral damage.
Chapter Twelve
COLD AIR RUSHED INTO the room when Gabriel pulled open the door we expected to be the exit. The warmth was sucked from the interior of the bunker instantly. Thanks to the layers, I didn’t shiver, but the temperature change was immediately noticeable. Some part of me expected to see my breath when I exhaled. When I didn’t, I tried to hide my surprise. Maine in March seemed terribly cold. I didn’t know why serial killers couldn’t gravitate to warmer climates during the winter months. I had plunged into Lake Michigan in the winter and gone to Alaska in March because of serial killers, now I was in Maine in March and it didn’t feel much warmer than Alaska had. I was sure it was, but it didn’t feel like it.
There was no snow on the ground like there had been in Alaska, but the ground was frozen under my feet. I could hear both of us walking on the remnants of last years’ fallen leaves and twigs. They crunched and snapped under our feet.
“Which way?” I asked Gabriel. He shrugged and dialed Malachi. They spoke quickly as I turned a circle and surveyed the surroundings. It was a decent place for a bunker. There were trees on every side and while it sat in a bit of a clearing, tiny saplings were starting to grow over it. The stairs leading to the door for the bunker and the exterior fan system looked out of place in this landscape. They seemed to surreally float on a sea of dead leaves and grass. Stumbling upon them would have been as shocking as stumbling upon a body way out here.
“The group is west of our position,” Gabriel told me. We started walking towards them. We weren’t particularly quiet about it, both of us figuring if someone was out here we’d hear them about the same time they heard us. Sound echoed under the canopy of barren branches and wide trunks of massive pine and fir trees. Besides us, the only sounds came from something small that was running very quickly through the frozen wasteland.
Even with Gabriel next to me, I felt alone in the woods. I had never been a huge fan of wandering around forests. There were too many hiding places, and while most people didn’t think about those kinds of things, the thought was constantly lodged in my brain. It was hard to get lost and enjoy nature when you attracted serial killers like I did. It was as if I produced a pheromone that attracted them to me.
This made things like forests and lakes more frightening than enjoyable. Especially considering I was of the mindset that someone had dragged Lucas’s brother underwater and held him there until he drowned, and the only way that was achievable was if said person was wearing a dive kit complete with air tanks and masks. It could have just as easily been Lucas as his brother. There was evidence to support the notion. When Lucas’s brothers’ body was recovered, there were marks on one of his ankles along with some bruising. Those in charge attributed them to a tree branch that his brother might have gotten his foot caught in and couldn’t get loose from, but there wasn’t any bark or scratches with the bruises. When Nathan had showed me the autopsy findings and pictures, even I had though
t I was jumping at shadows at first. But the more I read it, the less sense it made.
Both boys were strong swimmers and both boys were playing near each other. Lucas had even attempted to pull his brother out of the lake. Even as the younger of the two, Lucas had been stout, and with his brother’s help, he should have been able to dislodge his foot from any impediment that had simply snagged his foot. Lucas had attempted to free his brother from the water, but the lake had been too murky to see. He claimed it felt like rope and an anchor were around his brother’s foot. Yet no rope or anchor had been pulled up from the lake when they pulled up the body. The coroner had agreed the bruise looked like it could have come from rope, so they had dragged the lake three days after the drowning and they had not pulled up any rope or any anchors nor had they pulled up any tree branches. As a matter of fact, the manmade lake was about the cleanest lake anyone had ever seen. It wasn’t big enough to boat on or to party on, and it was privately owned. Which made his drowning more suspicious, not less. However, I had told Lucas’s father about the second person I had heard in Callow’s house. It took a few years for me to put a name to the voice, but I had told Lucas’s father before telling my own because I had known my father wasn’t always the most compassionate person on the planet, and because even though my case had been solved and I had been returned, Lucas’s father had always had questions regarding the details surrounding how I was taken. He didn’t believe a single person could have done it on their own. I was a fighter, and according to my statement, I had fought like a crazed wolverine to get free, including drawing blood from my kidnapper.
However, during the door to door search for me, Callow didn’t have any scratches or bite marks on him, both of which I had done in an attempt to get free. But I had also not seen his face when he abducted me. He’d worn a mask. I knew from Nathan that Agent McMichaels senior thought someone else had abducted me and then given me to Callow. It sounded like a conspiracy but given I was wandering through a forest in March in Maine looking for a rescue team and hoping I was wrong about it being Raphael in the vents at the bunker, none of it seemed farfetched anymore. Meaning my paranoia and anxiety was justified and had been my entire life.