by J. D. Heath
There’s a signpost ahead, a large green rectangle and I careen toward it. There’s towns listed on it with the miles to each spelled out beside them. I don’t know which one’s the biggest but I’m just aiming for whatever’s closest so it doesn’t matter.
Memories assail me as I speed past that sign, and no wonder. Déjà vu sets in and the memories keep coming no matter how hard I try to batter them back.
They won’t stop. The memories won’t stop. They swirl up in front of my eyes, toppling me right toward the brink of insanity, making me wonder if this freedom, this escape, is just a dream.
It is just a dream, some insidious voice whispers inside my brain. Any minute now you’ll open your eyes to find yourself right back in that box, the first box. Stop running. Just stop. There’s nowhere to go, all roads lead right back to the box.
I can’t stop, I can’t. If I stop I’ll die. I’d found the flaw in the trap and I’m out, just like I’d done all those years ago.
Back when I had my first run-in with Control.
This isn’t the first time I’ve run, barely sane and broken, from a trap Control set. This isn’t the first time I’ve gained freedom from those who would have killed me, wanted to kill me. My hands clutch down on the wheel. I don’t want to think about that now. I don’t want to remember the one I didn’t save.
Katy.
My twin sister.
I swore I’d go back, that I’d find her. I did go back. But they were gone and so was she. They’d razed the whole place to the ground and there was nothing to gather, nothing but my memories and my hatred.
I will find her. I’m determined to find her. Even though every part of me knows that the only thing I will ever find of her is just her bones I will find her. She’s dead. I know she’s dead. She has to be. But I want her bones. I will have her bones. She has to have some justice and she has to have some peace. She deserves to be remembered, to have her story known and those who caused her death should be punished, will be punished and if not by the courts—then by me.
I couldn’t save her, but I could and did save myself. I ran and I hid and I kept running for so many years. I’m still running. Nobody knows my real name. Nobody knows my face, not this one. It’s been fifteen years since I found a flaw in that trap and ran from a prison just as lethal as the one I’m running from now.
But this time, this time I’m not alone. I’m going to save Morgan, do what I couldn’t do for Katy.
This isn’t a dream. It’s not. Morgan’s right there, still breathing. I have to save him. I have to. Never mind what comes later. This is real, he’s real, and I’m alive.
I’m alive—and I finally have some solid proof that Control exists. I’ve only ever found their lesser members. I’ve only ever managed to get from them the names of people who don’t rank high in that organization. People who could to get me the names of those who would know what happened to Katy, where her body is—whatever’s left of it.
But now?
Now I have something real and solid, something I can use, will use, and be damned to the consequences. Control will fall. They have to. But first, and for now, I have to make sure that Morgan lives.
Ten miles down the road the two-lane becomes four. Cars and other vehicles appear as if by magic. I wipe tears from my face as I spot a building with a sign that tells me it’s a hospital. I pull in, right in front of the ER doors.
I stare at Morgan’s face with my heart aching. God I wish things were different. Morgan swore he’d look into that case and charge brought against me, swore I’d get a real hearing.
I can’t let that happen.
They’d lock me up and I’d be right back in a cell. I can’t be in a cell. I can’t. Because there’d be no escape from it.
I can’t be with Morgan, no matter how much I wish things could be different. He’s a cop, one who’s determined to bring killers to justice—and I’m a killer.
I was a killer long before I played the Dying Game.
I’ve killed a whole lot of people. I had to. Because everything always comes back to Control and Katy’s bones and justice.
I love him. I know I do. That’s why I didn’t let him kill Baumer. Because for Morgan justice is a whole and shining thing not yet gone dark and twisted like it did for me. I know what that kind of justice does to a person’s soul. Mine’s already charred and broken by what I’ve done in the name of justice.
I know he cares for me now, but how much will he care for me when he puts that last piece of the puzzle into place and comes up with an answer that will tell him exactly who I am?
I deliberately left the puzzle piece for him to find, and he will—and he will know.
Morgan’s eyes flutter open. Blood runs from his lip, a slender red thread. I bend my head toward his and lick that blood away, I kiss him, tasting more of his blood on my lips. I break that kiss off and leap from the truck, screaming for help.
They come. I step back, deliberately blending myself into a sea of dark-blue uniforms. I pluck a phone from someone’s unsuspecting pocket. By the time someone turns around to ask me what’s happening, I’m already gone, out of sight and on the phone, calling Morgan’s contact and boss. Parnham.
I toss the phone onto the sidewalk where, if spotted it will look like it fell from someone’s pocket. I’m not worried about them finding my fingerprints. They’re the fingerprints of a dead woman. My DNA is the DNA of someone who’s already dead, was written off as dead many years ago.
First Control killed me.
Then they made me into what I am today.
For that, they are going to pay, and pay, and pay.
CHAPTER 18: MORGAN:
The voice, familiar and commanding, says, “You awake yet?”
My eyes blink open and shut. Vision comes in, along with a grinding pain that centers itself in the middle of my skull then traces backward, along the muscles and bones in my neck. I wet my lips and grunt. “Water.”
Shapes and the outlines of things start to come into focus. Everything’s mantled in white. My eyes ache from it. Parnham, the police commissioner and the man who sent me undercover, leans over the bed.
We go way back, me and Parnham. He’d been a detective once, and he’d been the man who’d found me in that crawlspace, and carried me from my house and outside into the clean air and away from the butchered bodies of my family.
“Here you go.” His face, ruddy and wide, fills my sightline. Something bumps my lips, scraping the bottom one. I hook my mouth around the straw and take a long sip. Parnham lets me have one more and then he takes it away.
I croak out, “How long have I been out?”
“Five days. They had to put you in a coma because you had a bleed on your brain and a concussion. You took a pretty bad crack to your skull. You’ve also got some broken ribs, a gunshot wound, and a knife cut that was infected. Dozens of bruises and abrasions.”
I manage to utter, “That’s…a lot.”
“I’d say. You’ll be here for a few more days, at least. You actually woke up last night but they gave you a lot of pain meds and knocked you back out. How’re you feeling?”
“Like shit.”
Parnham chuckled. “I bet. They found over a hundred bodies out there. You’re lucky not to be one of them.”
My eyes close, but not because I’m tired, because I’m trying to block out the horror. “Gina. Where she is?”
“There was a Gina Reynolds in the betting system. Is that who you mean?”
I try to nod but that pain in my head makes that impossible. “Yeah.”
“No idea. It had to be her that dropped you off and called me from the hospital. She gave me the directions to the Fortress and suggested I get to you before the bad guys did. I’m guessing she didn’t wait around after that.”
My eyes open again. My heart stands still. My tongue wets my lips. “If it wasn’t for her, I’d be dead.” A new concern. “Did you catch Norton?”
“He was pretty easy to catch, since
he was dead.”
Dead? My heart stops again then kicks into high gear. There’d only been me and Gina left, we were the last players of the Dying Game after she’d killed Tayne. If Norton was dead, Gina had killed him. So where the hell was she? “He’s dead?”
“Yeah and that why I’m here.” Parnham shifts his bulky body around a bit. “Morgan, his tongue was in his pocket and his throat was cut. It’s the same pattern. The Reaper’s signature.”
I can’t breathe. I literally can’t breathe. The machine hooked into my vital signs goes a little crazy, beeping wildly. Parnham asks, “You all right? You need a nurse?”
I can’t answer. It’s all coming clear now and I can’t breathe, much less speak. The tongue thing? That was a detail we never told the public. It never leaked either. It was hidden from the public because it was the signature, the thing the Reaper always did, and no copycat ever knew to do. Because we never even put it into reports in order to make sure that we had the right person we finally made an arrest.
When Norton shot me, Tayne was already dead.
Gina and I had been the last players alive. Everyone else had been dead, except for Norton, who’d been not just alive, but talking, when he shot me.
My eyes close. Gina’s face swims up in my mind. Her words, “I didn’t kill the guy they said I killed. I’m innocent of that.”
Those had been her exact and very telling words.
Parnham asks, “Morgan?”
My eyes snap open again. The hospital room comes back into focus. White walls, white sheets. My blood, running red through a plastic tube that is hooked into the big vein in the crook of my arm. I look at Parnham, trying to think past the shock. “Yeah.”
Parnham says, “I’m guessing Tayne killed Norton.”
No. Gina had already killed Tayne before Norton shot me. I knew that. I had to say so. Gina’s the Reaper.
Gina.
Is.
The.
Reaper.
How had I not known Gina wasn’t an innocent when it came to killing? She’d handled that knife with a deadly skill that I’d stupidly written off as luck and desperation when it was, in fact, a clue.
So was that tat she had, that inked half-moon, thin as a sickle, thin as a scythe, on her shoulder. The half-moon with the stars above it. Eleven stars.
A star for each of the Reaper’s victims.
My heart bolts into overdrive. She’d told me, over and over, who she was, and I hadn’t listened. I’d been too busy trying to survive the Dying Game, too busy falling for her, to really hear her.
The biggest thing I’d overlooked? She’d said, after Clark died, that some of the dead should never be allowed to speak.
That’s why she takes their tongues out. All serial killers have a signature and that’s hers. Once you know the reason behind the signature you know the killer.
Why is she so determined to leave her victims without a voice?
My voice breaks, then hardens. “I was unconscious so I can’t say for sure.” It’s the only thing I can say. It’s the only thing that’s true.
Parnham nods. “Well, I guess our worries over the Reaper are over.”
Not hardly. I’m doing the one thing that will guarantee someone will die, but I have to do it. I have to give her a head start. I owe her that. It comes back to me, the words she said after I killed Brallen. ‘Now I owe you. As long as we owe each other, we can’t kill each other, I guess. So until we’re even, we’re both safe.’
Are we even? Does my giving her this small chance make us even, or does it mean she owes me all over again? I can’t say for sure.
What I can say, without a shadow of any kind of doubt, is that one day we will meet again. Me and Gina, we will meet again. We have to.
Serial killers kill and it’s my job to make sure they’re brought to justice. I owe it to my parents to never let someone else suffer the same fate they suffered. I owe it to my five-year old self, to all the kids who will hide in a crawlspace listening to their parents die if I let those killers escape my grasp and the reach of justice.
But I owe Gina as well.
Parnham says, “I know you need another day to get your head together but when you do I’m going to need your report.”
I swallow hard. “Sure. Did they get the files?”
“Files?”
“Norton’s files.”
“The space that held the computers and tech was blow sky-high. To make matters worse some parts of the bunker caved in on top of it. Norton must’ve seen the end coming and decided to blow it.”
That explained the fire flashing down the tunnel, the sound of a distant explosion. The explosion Gina and I had, wrongly, thought was Tayne getting blown to bits. Wait. Did he say…“Bunker?”
“Yeah, looks like it was built to hold the world’s best and brightest in case the nukes fell. The state cops say there’s probably hundreds of those bunkers out there in that desert. The government built them and then abandoned them. Apparently those out there are outdated so they built new places to hide out in when the apocalypse finally comes.”
I groan. “Dammit. Is there anything at all left of the tech? Anything you can piece together? Norton had to have some kind of backup system, no way would he have blown the place if he didn’t.”
Parnham said, “I was just thinking the same thing. Maybe he had a cloud storage.”
Norton would never have trusted his money and blackmail-worthy lists to the cloud. I know that. I feel it in my bones. I say, “Maybe.”
“I…” Parnham chews at his lips for a second. “I should never have sent you under. Not for this. I almost got you killed.”
“I volunteered for it. I knew there was a possibility it would all go bad. It’s no different than taking on a narc role.”
“Playing a dealer doesn’t usually involve you getting locked into an old nuke bunker and being forced to fight off serial killers and pro hit men and other assorted psychos.”
“You’re clearly out of touch if you think there’s no killers in the drug game.”
The machines beep and chuff. Parnham shuffles his feet again. “I’m not going to lie to you Morgan. What happened out there was wrong, but I, for one, am going to sleep better at night knowing so many killers will…damn.”
I echo Norton’s words. “It’s a moral dilemma, I suppose. It’s murder, all right, but look at who’s being murdered and it feels a lot more justified.” I add, “But that doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t. It’s not justice, it’s murder, even if it was just a case of saving a few states the expense of breaking out the needles and the executioners.”
I’m a murderer now too. True, I killed in self-defense, but blood on your hands is blood on your hands. Guilt nudges upward into my heart then spreads all the way through it. I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life. I don’t know, but I’ll have to.
Parnham says, “You did good work out there Morgan, real good work.”
The faces of those I killed fill my mind, bringing fresh guilt and a slow, burning pain. I manage a smile. “Thanks.”
“There’s something we need to talk about Morgan. We may never know who the people betting on the game were, not without those files. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be worried about you knowing who they are.
“When you showed up they just checked you in as a John Doe. You’re still a JD. We’ve kept it quiet, that Fortress and what we’ve found out there, no press as of yet. But the players behind that game, they have to know it went south. They’ll be looking to cut their losses and cut off all the hanging strings. You showed up here right after, and I’m betting that it won’t take much to put a John Doe and that bunker together and come up with a survivor.”
“What are you talking here?” My eyes go past him, to the door. There’s a uniform there and my stomach flips hard. I’m being guarded. Of course I’m being guarded. Parnham’s right. The members of Control have no idea if I know their names or faces, and they’ll want to make s
ure I don’t live to tell if I do.
His eyes won’t meet mine. “WP.”
Witness Protection? “Hell no. I didn’t live through that just to run now.”
“You might not have a choice.”
No. I might not. But there’s Gina to worry about. I have to get to her, and I need to try to figure out where she might have gone. I can’t run. I can’t. Not from this. Not from whatever damage I’ve just allowed to be done by staying silent.
There’s no sense fighting about it. I feign falling asleep and listen as Parnham heads out. I lie there, eyes still closed, wondering what happens next. I’ve survived the Dying Game, but now I have to live through the pain and guilt that’s eating away at me. There will be much more of that to live with if I don’t find Gina fast, before she can kill again.
The soft scrape of a shoe on tile makes my eyes swivel to the right. An older woman, wearing nurse’s scrubs, comes into the room. She’s holding a vase filled with flowers. She says, “Someone’s sent you a get well gift!”
I stare at the blossoms; roses and carnations all red and velvety. The nurse sets the flowers, springing upward from a dark vase, on the table and moves the table closer to the bed. “Here’s the card.”
She plucks the small white envelope up from the arrangement and hands it to me before saying, “Let me get you some water, you must be thirsty. Those meds can make your mouth really dry.”
She takes the plastic carafe and heads to the bathroom while I examine the envelope. John Doe and a room number are printed on the paper. My fingers shake as I open it. There’s a card, and a USB. I leave the USB in the envelope as I read the words printed in black ink on good, heavy stock paper. The words, computer printed onto the heavy card stock, read:
Why does the Reaper, reap?
Control.
It’s always been about Control.
The sound of water running in the bathroom cuts off. The nurse reappears. I gasp out, “Who brought these?”
The nurse says, “The florist delivery guy, I guess. He usually just leaves them on the nurse’s station if all of us are busy.”
I look back at the envelope. “Has anyone been here or called here asking after me?”