Mind Games

by Moore, TJ

  Locked behind a set of steel bars that led straight into the dirt walls, the small pack of wolves moved toward the barrier, each growling at a unique pitch.

  There were five wolves in all.

  Three cubs. Two adults.

  The ten yellow eyes pierced through the steel bars.

  Rearing their heads, the two adult wolves stepped forward in front of the cubs that now let out a chorus of whimpers. The larger, male wolf hunched his shoulders behind him and paced along the edge of the steel bars. Then he swiped his paw out towards Cameron, bearing his teeth.

  Cameron and Amy backed away from the cage and continued down the tunnel. After turning past another set of winding corners, they came across another cage. Inside, a younger wolf bobbed its head side to side, walking in circles. During one pass around the cage, the wolf scratched its back against the bars. Then it tucked the edge of its shoulder blade in-between the steel barrier, rocking up and down.

  Amy aimed her flashlight at the dizzy wolf and examined it closer. The eyes of this wolf showed none of the colorful energy that the other wolves had displayed. Instead, the eyes seemed lost, even crazed. The pupils were dilated. Bloodshot. An extra, filmy ring coated the outer edge of the eye, almost like a slime that suggested blindness. This wolf did not make any noises. Only movements. The bobbing of the wolf’s head had now become a dull sway.

  Amy moved the light across the wolf to the back of its body. The tail swung in a lethargic motion, and a few patches of fur were missing from the end.

  Irritated by the light, the wolf approached the front of the cage and made eye contact with Amy. It didn’t reach out a paw or even crouch, but lifted the corner of its mouth, revealing a set of yellowed teeth. Although still sharp, the teeth weren’t glossy or reflective like the family of wolves in the other cage. These teeth were rotting from the inside out.

  Unlocking its lower jaw, the wolf salivated. Never breaking eye contact with Amy, the wolf rotated its under bite, letting its tongue hang out. Instead of pink, the tongue was a shade of gray from malnutrition.

  Stepping forward again, the wolf tilted its head. Then, in a jolt of sudden anger, the wolf rammed its head through the steel bars and extended its neck out towards Amy’s ankles. She jumped back as the set of razor-edged teeth snapped shut, catching only tunnel air in their grasp. The wolf clutched onto the sides of the steel bars with its paws and pressed its face even further out. It tried to squeeze its frail body entirely out of the cage, ferociously exhaling to decrease the size of its bony rib cage. But as the wolf hyperventilated, desperately trying to contract its body, the width of his torso repeatedly rammed into the steel cage.

  The wolf let loose a hoarse cry. He pulled his head back inside, closed his eyes, and aimed his head towards the top of the cage in a howling position. But as his neck extended, only an empty sound came from its jowls. It wasn’t a howl at all. The natural strength of the wolf’s resonant call was reduced to a sad murmur that echoed along the walls of the tunnel.

  Halfway through its ghostly call, the wolf hunched its head down into the dirt. He coughed. He choked. Then he scratched his pointed ears, letting them flap under the pads of his paw. Thoroughly frustrated by his failure to produce an adequate howl, the wolf turned down his head and wrapped his tail around his body, circling two revolutions in the dirt before tucking his head next to his matted torso.

  Fascinated by the wolf’s movements, Amy was drawn into a trance.

  Cameron pulled her away from the cage.

  Blinking to wipe the wolf’s misery from her mind, Amy turned the flashlight away from the cage.

  Wiping a glob of mud from her forehead, she pointed her light up. This time, the beam angle vanished into a large array of empty cages stacked just above them. The cages were welded together in a rectangular grid that balanced on several sheets of plywood placed across the top of the tunnel. Cameron reached up and felt the underbelly of the wooden platform. The moisture from the tunnels weakened the wood’s strength, warping it downward.

  They ducked underneath the wood and came to a chasm in the ground. The light from Amy’s flashlight was no match for the darkness from the sudden drop off. When she pointed it down, only a subtle glimmer reflected back.

  “Water,” Cameron said. “I think this is some kind of well.”

  “So, we have to jump over it,” Amy said, taking a step back.

  “Looks that way.”

  Amy flicked the light along the edge of the chasm, trying to judge the distance across.

  “Cam, this gap has to be at least fifteen feet across. Maybe this is a dead end.”

  “Could be.” Cameron walked up to the edge of the well and kicked a chunk of dirt. Two and a half seconds passed before he heard the pebble hit the water. “We definitely don’t want to fall down there.”

  Amy took another step back.

  “Help!”A mournful cry seemed to be coming from the bottom of the well.“Hey!”Louder now, the voice reverberated off the curved dirt.“Down here!”

  “Max?”

  “Help! Someone!”

  “Hold on,” Amy said. She shined the flashlight into the darkness once more, but couldn’t see anyone below. Then she turned to Cameron and quieted her voice. “Does that sound like Max?”

  “It’s hard to tell.”

  “Cam, maybe he’s on the other side of the well.”

  “Don’t leave me here!”The voice called again.

  “No,” Cameron said. “The acoustics are playing tricks on you.”

  Amy pressed her hand against the tunnel wall. She dug her feet into the ground and tried to push. “There has to be a way around this.” She brushed off her hands. “You want to help me?”

  “We need some rope or something to get down there.”

  “Hmmm. Wait, Cam. You’re want to go down there? No. If anything, we need to find a way to get whoever is down there up here.”

  Cameron took off his jacket. He balled it up around his fist and hung it over the edge of the well.

  “Are you sure...”

  He slowly lowered his arm into the well.

  Suddenly, a layer of blue light swiped across his arm, causing the dark tunnel on the other side of the well to lurch towards them. And as it did, they heard the sound of gears turning, rotating a large platform across the chasm. Amidst the grinding of the gears, the yells from below increased in volume and frequency. The man was thrashing now in the water below, and they could hear a set of shackles clink as he moved.

  Cameron stood up, backing away just as the mechanism secured the ramped platform across the well, creating a functional bridge. Now, with the well sealed shut, the cries from the prisoner below became muffed and weak, a haunting reverb that followed Cameron and Amy as they crossed the platform.

  “Was that...”

  “An illusion? Must have been,” Cameron said, squirming back into this jacket. Jen must have painted that platform to look like the rest of the tunnel.”

  As they stepped off the covering of the well, the same gears, though out of sight, interlocked until the platform returned to its original position, this time, blocking them in from the other side.

  Amy sighed. “Looks like we’re not going back that way.”

  She panned the flashlight across the tunnel walls and saw they were painted a slick coat of black. The reflective surface resembled a waxy chalkboard.

  Almost every inch of the smooth texture was covered with chalk writing: mathematical formulas, chemical equations, and finely detailed drawings of human anatomy.

  The equations were extremely organized, showing near-perfect alignment from top to bottom. And near the end of each math problem, an answer was circled, then underlined twice. Arrows were drawn connecting several of the mathematical solutions in what looked like an elaborate constellation.

  The chemical equations followed a similar pattern. However, there was a notable difference between the two areas of work.

  Scattered over the wall like the map of a choral
reef, the chemical questions formed a variety of complex shapes that resembled bioluminescent creatures of the deep. And although they remained drawn onto the walls, the diagrams of chemical compounds seemed to move under Amy’s light.

  Cameron and Amy then studied the third column of drawings. With incredible detail, Jennifer had fleshed out a wide range of anatomical depictions including several cross-sections of a human brain and nervous system. In one of the diagrams, she labeled each section of the spinal cord that led into the base of the brain. But among all of the drawings, the different lobes of the brain took up the most space.

  Cameron stood in awe at the complexity that his wife had produced on the black walls. He began to wonder just how many hours Jen spent in this place with a piece of chalk in her hand.

  Then Amy said, “You hear that?” She whipped the light around and walked past the rest of the drawings.

  A faint hum oscillated throughout the tunnel. The sound chugged along as if caused by a powered motor or generator.

  Amy walked into a medium-sized room furnished with stainless steel appliances: a fridge, microwave, double-stacked ovens, and a 3D plastics printer. A layer of sterile, white tile now covered the dirt that covered the previous tunnels. Bare fluorescent bulbs installed into walls opposite the fridge lighted the room.

  “The hum must be coming from these lights,” Cameron said.

  “No.” Amy scanned the room with her flashlight and listened closer. “The hum is stronger in here.” She followed the low sound until she came to a set of swing-style doors just next to the plastics printer.

  Upon opening the doors, Amy saw a bizarre contraption.

  Mostly concealed in chrome, the boiler room contained only one device. It was circular in shape. Clear tubes overlapped each other, pulling water from an opening in the ceiling. The device pumped the water into a group of parallel chambers.

  As the contraption churned the water through its cavities, the levels continually changed, causing the amounts of water to shift from one chamber to the next.

  Amy looked up to the widest set of clear tubes. “Where is this water coming from?”

  “Here’s a guess,” Cameron said. “I’ll bet it’s from the pond.”

  “If it’s coming in from up there...” Amy stepped around the water-pump and walked through another set of swinging doors. She scanned across the line of tubes with her eyes, tracking the flow of water across the walls as it sloshed into the perimeter of the next room.

  This area was much larger than the boiler room, yet it still felt confined. The extra space was filled with a render farm of blinking computer servers.

  Cameron pointed near the end of the tube where it branched off into an array of much smaller capillaries. These thinner tubes spread across the different servers, pooling the water inside small pads. With each pump of water, tiny bubbles formed inside the plastic capsules.

  Amy pressed her hand against one of the pads. “The water from the pond must be used as a coolant to keep the computers from overheating. It looks like a closed system.”

  Cameron walked in-between the rows of servers and flicked on another set of fluorescent bulbs. And as they lit up, the bulbs revealed a cored-metal, spiral staircase that led further underground.

  They reached the bottom of the staircase and stopped.

  Larger than any of the previous rooms combined, the underground area seemed especially cavernous. Long plastic sheets hung from the ceiling, separating the hideaway into different sections. Even so, the space felt very open since the ceilings were much taller than the tunnels above.

  Within the first section of plastic sheets, a series of plasma screens displayed the same style of security footage Cameron saw Jen present to the cottage workers as The Leader. However, Cameron could already tell the number of angles shown on these screens far outnumbered the ones he’d seen before. He walked close to one of the plasma screens, letting it engulf his peripheral vision.

  “She must have expanded since...”

  “You’ve seen this before?” Amy watched as the angles on the grid of security footage changed again.

  “She must have found a way to tap into more cameras.”

  “So, these are...live?”

  “Yes,” Cameron put his hand up to one of the people in the video squares. The feed was pulling from a laptop camera shooting out the window of a suburban house. A father played with his children in the back yard. Then, the camera angle switched to the man’s living room. A teenage girl read a book on the family’s sofa. Cameron immediately thought of Sarah. “These are real families, Amy. Jen’s looking for potential criminals.”

  Amy walked past the changing screens and peeled back a layer of hanging plastic. The huge room ahead of her appeared to be nothing less than the lab of a mad scientist.

  A small bookshelf lined the wall. Included in the library of titles was a row of indexed textbooks:Advanced Chemistry, Criminal Psychology, Modern Neuroscience,andThe Complete Guide to Circuitry and Electricity.Amy noticed how the bookshelf seamlessly blended into a raised, wooden balcony on the far side of the room. Since it loomed a full twenty feet above her, she could not see past the railing of the balcony. A layer of blue smoke billowed from above.

  The ominous, blue light flared from a tall Tesla-style coil wrapped in a thick coating of copper. Just against the back wall, the coil was installed in the far corner of the balcony.

  Cameron saw a large table off to the side of the lab. A variety of scientific apparatus covered the wooden surface: graduated cylinders, beakers, rows of bottles, wood glue, scissors, scalpels, remotes, springs, screws, Bunsen burners, colored liquids, old-fashioned ink pens, scattered staples and paperclips, a box of striped and multicolored wires, loose batteries, syringes, and several rolls of black electrical tape.

  Above the wooden lab table, a row of glass panels were covered in white markings. The equations, formulas, and diagrams had been carefully extended from the black walls above the lab onto these glass panels. The anatomical drawings pictured on the glass explicitly detailed fold lines across the cerebral cortex of the brain. And posted next to the drawings, a colorful smattering of brain scan readouts was taped to the glass. The drawings detailed the brain imaging scans with impeccable accuracy.

  “You brought your friend.” Jen’s voice suddenly came from beyond the wooden balcony. It was calm, even seductive. “I am sorry about your friend, detective.” Then she appeared from behind the balcony railing. Jen leaned over the railing and crossed her arms. “I made sure to change the filter on the water pump. There was a chance his body could haveclogged the pond. And I can’t afford to let the servers over-heat.”

  Cameron’s body tensed up. “Jennifer.”

  “Cameron, wasn’t I right about Sarah? She’s fine, isn’t she? By now, she’s probably all safe and warm back at Aunt Beth’s...waiting for us to come home.”

  “You killed Vince, Jen.” Cameron stepped closer to Amy and widened his stance. “You killed our partner.”

  “Oh, get over it. I know you two never really liked him anyway. Besides he was the one making threats.” Jen tapped her finger on the wooden railing. “You forget, Cameron. I lost something too. I loved that milk truck.”

  Amy reached for her holstered gun.

  “Don’t even think about it, Amy. If you kill me now, you won’t understand what all of this is really about. And I wouldn’t want you to miss the show.”

  Jen typed a code into a touchscreen pad attached to the balcony railing. And with a mechanical hiss, the balcony split apart, moving the railing down and away just as a chrome platform extended forward. With the railing removed, Cameron and Amy saw the exposed floor of the balcony.

  Straight down the middle, a conveyer belt came to life, rolling over the chrome platform, carrying along a medical gurney. The conveyer belt moved further away from the balcony until it stopped just above Cameron’s head.

  Amy circled around the extended gurney while Cameron backed up for a better view.<
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  Jen pressed a few more buttons. And upon her command, the entire conveyer belt tilted upright, exposing the contents of the gurney: Max.

  Fastened between the sheets, now suspended in mid air, Max twisted his head, murmuring through the wad of cloth that gagged him. Thick sweat poured from his head. His arms and legs were strapped to the gurney’s mattress. And as Max tried to shift his body in the straps, the points of bondage maintained their rigid hold.

  “Max.” Cameron felt the name slip from him on a cold breath. Jumping into the air, he tried to reach for the platform, but it was too high.

  Amy turned to Jen. “So, you fished him out of that well while we were snooping around?”

  “No, that wasn’t Max down there,” Jen replied. “I would never keep him in the well.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “Amy, you should know by now.He was your primary target.”

  “Tell me...”

  “You’re going to like this: I keepWilson in the well.”

  “Wilson?”

  “Are you jealous, Amy? Tell me you aren’t just a little jealous that I captured him first. I ordered some guns from Stefani to get closer to their illegal weapons business. At the time, I had no idea Wilson was the San Fran Bomber. But you can understand my urgency to stop him once I knew. He was going to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. He’s better off down there. And I’ve already given him something...the first stage of the treatment.”

  “Treatment?”

  “The wolves handled it alright, and since Wilson is basically an animal...the medicine should affect him about the same way.”

  “Jen, listen to me,” Cameron said. “You need to release Max. We’re taking him with us.”

  “Are you now? Oh, I see. You and Amy are on some kind of rescue mission. So, he’s the reason you came all the way out here? For him? I could never release him to you the way he is now. He’s far too unpredictable.”

  Cameron walked closer to the balcony, speaking up to Jen. “You lied to me for years. You lied to everyone. And for what? The greater good? How is spying on innocent people going to clean up the city?”