Would the poor soul occupying the underground prison know that I wasn’t their captor? Did they remember Floyd? I knew that they could attack me or run and turn me in, but that didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter. I wouldn’t just leave someone down there to die, essentially turning Floyd’s torture bunker into an oubliette.
I had to get over my pathetic fear and go inside. After clearing away the remaining leaves, I got one moment of relief from the dread that threatened to make me swoon. There was a chain across the door and it was affixed by a padlock. I didn’t have to open the door just yet.
Had it been a combination lock, I probably could have convinced myself to walk away and just phone in an anonymous tip to the police when I was done dispatching the boys Kevin had sent me to kill.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Trixie, and she cocked her head to one side. “I’m so concerned about saving whoever might be on the other side of that door, yet I’ve committed myself to murdering three boys.” She pushed her muzzle into my hand and I petted her head. “I’m trading the life of three young kids for one girl. Why? Because I have an emotional connection to her? How is that moral?”
“Oh, don’t worry, Billy Boy. If you don’t do what I want, a lot more people will die. You’ll have so many deaths on your hands that it will eat at you for the rest of your life. If you survive.” Kevin appeared a few hundred feet away in the tree line.
It had startled me but not Trixie. I was surprised that Trixie wasn’t afraid of Kevin, and it dawned on me that she never had been. Even back at the trailer, she hadn’t cowered in his presence. I’d always believed that dogs hated ghosts and evil spirits. Maybe he’d been gone by the time I let her out? I couldn’t remember.
“Don’t think on it too hard. You’ll hurt yourself,” Kevin said.
“You’re not what you say you are,” I said. The words came out of my mouth before I had time to process them. The thought was pure instinct. It was intuition.
“And what is it I told you I was?” Kevin asked with a chuckle.
That stumped me. He’d never said what or who he was. I named him Kevin because of who he looked like, but the truth was that Kevin was a complete mystery. Still, I’d formed some sort of vague idea in my mind of what I’d thought he was. There was a niggling feeling that I was wrong, but I couldn’t put a finger on how.
“What’s in there?” I asked and pointed at the door, but Kevin was gone.
Chapter Sixteen
Olivia
Liv pulled into the parking space next to the cabin. Good memories of playing there as a child washed over her before she even had her car door open. She could smell the cookies her grandmother would bake in her mind, and Olivia was glad that she’d stopped at the store to buy the ingredients.
Normally, she kept a very strict diet. A heathy body was required for a healthy mind in her opinion, but on this occasion, she felt the need for a splurge. Perhaps the extra glucose would be what she needed to fuel her breakthrough. There was also the little matter of it possibly being the last chance she’d ever have to eat a fresh-baked cookie.
Olivia shuddered to think about how the world would change if she couldn’t find a solution. No more cookies. No more air conditioning in the summer. No more job. Everyone she loved would be dead most likely, and Olivia knew that she would probably be too.
She was on the front lines. If the virus jumped the way the models projected, her whole department would be the first to die. Olivia shook her head. That wasn’t true. They had protections and protocols in place. The visions of them all dying were just bad dreams.
No, Olivia’s fate would be worse. She’d be locked in the lab for god only knew how long. Contained. Doomed to live out the rest of her days in miserable isolation while her team rationed the food to drag out their dismal lives as long as possible. She wouldn’t even be able to kill herself because of what they’d do. They’d put her in cold storage until they could dispose of the body, but eventually the food would run out...
“Stop it,” Liv chastised herself and got out of the car.
She had to keep her thoughts light. Anxiety and depression would block her creativity, and she needed every available scrap of it.
The inside of the cabin was as she’d expected. The cleaning lady she’d hired came in once a month to keep things tidy, so it wasn’t even that dusty.
Very little of the furniture that had filled the cabin when she was young had made it that far, but her grandmother’s kitchen table still stood there like a window into a softer past.
She flipped on the lights and set her bag on the IKEA sofa that sat in the middle of the cabin’s living area. If Liv closed her eyes, she could still see the plaid pattern of her grandparent’s couch. They called it a davenport.
“I still can’t believe you’re going to be a doctor.” Liv could hear her grandfather’s words and smell his pipe smoke with the memory.
They’d come up to the cabin to celebrate her acceptance to medical school. Not only had she been the first in the family to go to college, she’d busted her ass until she had the grades and a scholarship she needed to go without taking out any loans.
“I should sell this place.” Her grandfather’s face turned grave. “I should sell it and help you pay for school.”
“No, Grandad. You worked your whole life to pay for this place. It’s our family treasure. It stays with us,” she’d said.
Liv was glad that she’d convinced her grandparents to keep the cabin. Right now, it was the only thing standing between fate and the end of humanity.
“It’s too much,” she said. “I can’t be responsible for this.”
But she was. Olivia had never practiced medicine a day in her life. She’d fallen in love with infectious disease research in medical school. Right after graduation, she’d been recruited by the military. Several years and what felt like a hundred labs later, she still worked for the government. Only now there was no name on the outside of the lab where she worked. No particular agency, at least none that she knew the name of, claimed her or her work.
For the last two years she’d been the one attempting to create unstoppable weaponized viruses. So, when her superiors came to her and asked her to do the opposite, it was a shock. Someone very good at creating killer diseases had beaten the United States to the punch.
At that moment, the virus was just a flu that spread like wildfire. No one was alarmed. No one even knew that a time bomb had been released in their midst.
The design of the disease was as simple as it was elegant. Olivia wanted to kick herself for not thinking of it first. The problem was that she hadn’t thought of it first. The virus’s next mutation was already programmed into its genetic material, and it would be the last. Liv could see it coming like a freight train, but she hadn’t yet figured out how to throw the switch and save the world.
She knew she was close. The answer was there, just under the surface of her conscious mind. It was something she could feel, but it was just out of reach.
That’s why she’d come to the cabin. Liv hoped that fresh air, quiet, and long hikes would allow her to get out of her own way. She needed the answer to emerge from her mind.
But first, she needed a shower. How long had it been since she’d had time to take a long, hot shower? As of late, most of her personal care had been done at sprint speed so she could get back to work in the lab.
Liv gathered her things and went into the cabin’s bathroom. She set her clean clothes on the counter and put her toiletries in the shower before turning on the hot water.
It was a bit chilly in the bathroom, so she sat on the toilet lid and waited for the water to get hot. Once the steam began to fill the small room, she stripped off her clothes. What Olivia didn’t notice was the trio of boys, who stood on the woodpile outside the window, looking in at her.
Chapter Seventeen
A Camping We Will Go
Evan had nearly pissed his pants with excitement when he saw the sedan pull up next t
o the cabin. When the slender, pale woman with a mound of dark curls piled on top of her head in a messy bun got out of the car, his body buzzed.
He’d felt it down in his marrow that this camping trip would give him his first, and he’d been right. Despite the fact that the woman was a full-grown adult, she was smaller than Evan. He and the other boys would be able to overpower her easily. Well, he and Lyle could take her.
Evan wasn’t sure about Chris. That little punk might still be a problem. He wasn’t quite like Evan and Lyle. Chris was easy to manipulate, but Evan wasn’t sure how far he would go. They might have to make him second.
Once the woman was inside the cabin, Evan led the boys down the small hill that separated them. At first, the other two stayed back while Evan looked in the windows. He knew it was risky, but if she caught them, he’d just take her right then.
It wasn’t the way he wanted to do things, but it would be good enough. What he really wanted was to take his time with the woman. He wanted to experiment with her flesh and see what he could do. Evan needed to know if he could make her whimper like the animals, and he craved the sound of her voice begging for mercy.
If he had it his way, that mercy would never come. She could beg until he cut out her tongue, and he wouldn’t care. He couldn’t care. There was nothing inside of him that even knew how to process such a thing. That didn’t bother him one bit because the woman did make him feel things.
It was as if he were blind and she’d given him sight. Her reward for that gift would be as much pain and suffering as Evan could inflict before he tortured her to death.
Chapter Eighteen
The key ring that contained the key to the cabin had a second, smaller key. I knew as soon as I’d seen the padlock that my reprieve would only last long enough for me to walk into the cabin and grab the keys.
I gave myself a little more time by feeding Trixie and giving her a fresh bowl of water. Briefly, I’d considered tying her up or shutting her in the cabin to keep her from following me into the bunker outside. Butafter everything she’d been through, that felt heartless.
“You need to stay back if I tell you,” I said, and Trixie cocked her head to the side again.
We walked back out to the door and I knelt to use the key. It slipped easily into the padlock, and my heart sunk even deeper when I heard the little click of the mechanism’s release.
The only thing that would have been worse than finding a living victim would have been finding a dead one. “Okay,” I said and opened the door.
Stench rolled out of the bunker. I gagged and quickly turned to the side in case I threw up. Puking on the concrete steps and then having to walk down them would have made the entire situation worse.
I couldn’t see the bottom of the stairs because it was so dark. Since I didn’t have a flashlight, and I knew that if I went back into the cabin I’d lose my nerve, I took out my phone and used a flashlight app I’d installed during the last storm.
As I swept the light across the base of the stairs, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was a blood pool off to the right. I also saw a light switch on the wall at the bottom. At least I knew there would be light if there was still power to the bunker.
After pulling the neck of my shirt up to cover my nose and mouth, I began to slowly walk down the steps. The stench got heavier and heavier, and I had to steady myself once I’d reached the bottom.
I flipped the light on and wretched hard, but thankfully nothing came up. There was no one but me in the basement. Even Trixie had stayed at the top of the stairs.
“Thanks a lot,” I said to her. “Some guard dog you are.”
She barked at me, but did come to me. I felt a pang in my chest when I realized that while there was no one down there at the moment, there very recently had been. Floyd had most likely killed them when I called in order to prepare for me.
It was my fault. As I looked around at the small concrete space, I tried to console myself. I told myself that he would have died anyway eventually, but I knew there was no way I could know that for sure. If given a day, hell even five minutes more, whoever he was, he might have been able to escape. Or, on a different day, Floyd could have drank himself to death or died in a car crash. I couldn’t shake the feeling of responsibility.
“But think of how many you saved.” Kevin’s voice startled me.
I hadn’t even seen him appear in front of the blood-stained mattress that sat in one corner of the closet-like room. I bristled at his words. I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I didn’t want to give myself that kind of excuse.
“What happened to him?”
“He’s buried out there,” Kevin said, and I assumed he meant the forest. “If it makes you feel any better, we cut his suffering short. Floyd had plans for him that you don’t want to know. But do know that you spared him some horrific abuse.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better. We cut his life short. He had a chance before I came along.”
He had no chance.
I looked around the room, but I was alone again. There wasn’t much in the room beyond the mattress. In the other corner was a bucket. The contents of which I did not want to know. There was also a dirty blanket draped over half the bed.
When I couldn’t handle the smell or the feeling of claustrophobia anymore, I made my way back up the stairs. I felt like I should stay down there longer as penance for causing someone’s death, but I knew that wouldn’t do anyone any good.
Chapter Nineteen
Olivia
She thought she wanted cookies, but once Liv was done with her shower, the extent of her exhaustion hit her. It felt like someone had tied lead blocks to her limbs.
Her stomach rumbled, and she debated whether or not to take a fifteen-minute power nap before fixing something to eat. In the end, hunger won.
She dug through the grocery bags that still sat on the kitchen table. Her prize was a box of Velveeta Shells and Cheese. It was not something she ate regularly, but it was a meal that her grandmother had made for her many times. If the world was going to end, she was not going to die without one last giant bowl of mac n cheese.
Liv pulled the long lighter out of the drawer and used it to light the burner. The electric ignition had been out for a while, but she still needed to get to Lowe’s and buy a new stove for the cabin. It hadn’t been a priority since the delivery to the cabin would cost three times what the stove cost, and it still worked as long as you had a lighter to ignite the burner.
Once she was sure that it wouldn’t blink out, Liv filled a pot with water and set it on the burner. Suddenly, she found herself overcome with grief. Looking around the cabin at everything she loved hit home. It was the end. Unless she could do something miraculous, her world would end. Everyone’s would.
After her belly was full, Liv grabbed a blanket from the closet and curled up on one end of the sofa. She knew she should probably just go to bed, but if there was a chance that the day could still be somewhat productive, Liv needed to believe that it was just a nap.
She was dead asleep in less than a minute. She didn’t even hear the doorknob turn.
Chapter Twenty
Over the River and Through the Woods
Evan was so close he could taste it. All he had to do was walk into the cabin, and the woman was his for the taking. But the light was fading. If he didn’t follow his father’s instructions, they wouldn’t be able to go hiking alone again the next day. It would ruin everything.
“Let’s go back,” Evan whispered.
“I thought we were going in,” Lyle said with a hint of disappointment.
Evan noted the other boy’s enthusiasm. It gave him the confidence that they would be able to carry out his plan. He just had to bide his time and hope that Chris kept his coward mouth shut.
“Tomorrow. We’ll come back,” Evan said as he started to walk away.
As they made their way back to the campground, Evan could hear the other boys talking, but his mind would not f
ocus on what they said. He was too lost in his fantasy world. It was much easier to imagine what he wanted to do to the woman now that he had a clear mental image of his first victim. It had all been conjecture to that point, but he could barely breathe because it was finally real.
“Hey, Evan.” Chris’s voice cut through his fantasies.
“What?”
“What are you planning with that woman?”
“You’ll find out tomorrow. Trust me. It will be fun.”
Evan couldn’t chance telling Chris too soon. If he got scared, he could snitch to Evan’s dad.
“Don’t be such a baby, Chris,” Lyle interjected.
Chris shot him a look. They’d just been discussing the matter, and Chris didn’t like that Lyle betrayed him. Chris didn’t want to think about Evan’s plans too closely, but he couldn’t help it.
He’d hoped that he’d been overreacting. People had told him that Evan was a psychopath, but Chris wanted to believe that Evan was just a misguided weirdo. That would make them kindred spirits.
People talked about the things Evan did to animals. It had to be rumors, though. Chris had convinced himself that no one came forward because it was just stories and not because they were afraid of Evan.
Chapter Twenty-One
“She’s there,” Kevin said and pointed across the lake.
He waited just outside of the bunker for me. His face lit up with a satisfied smile. My gut clenched because I thought he had chosen another victim for me. We needed something from the woman, and I would have to kill her.
“Who is there?” I asked dumbfounded and nauseated.
“Her name is Olivia. She’s a virologist. Those boys you don’t want to kill are planning to assault and murder her tomorrow.”
“So, why don’t I just warn her. Why do I have to kill children?”
Dark Ends: A Horror Collection Page 14