Flash Point

by Colby Marshall

  Isaac tossed away his book and crossed the cell to kneel down beside the metal toilet.

  Shuffling feet, yells of, ‘Beat your feet!’ from the C.O.s came from outside Isaac’s cell.

  The first voice came again. ‘Car?’

  He couldn’t help but admire their discipline. Their ingenuity. The timing had to be deliberate. The racket of the head count covered the conversation completely. If the toilet hadn’t been empty, Isaac wouldn’t have heard a thing.

  Isaac licked his lips. Smiled. Knowing secrets one and two was going to make penitentiary secret number three – and what it could do for him – a piece of cake.

  Well, maybe not cake, but still, it would be oh, so delicious. After all, he was about to play a game as dangerous as any he’d played before. And yet, not a bone in Isaac’s body feared he was stepping wrong. Discoveries like these were tools he owned, and tools were made to be used.

  That was the part the C.O.s never got. The bigger picture was like a real-life, ultimate stakes game of Legions Ascending. As a teenager, he had become a master at stacking his deck. Isaac had perfected the art of figuring out what he wanted to accomplish, then leeching everything he could from the throwaway cards before they were discarded, collecting the perfect recipe of unique cards with powers that could combine to obliterate what stood in his path.

  That was the most vital penitentiary secret he had unlocked thus far, in fact. Many had tried, but most failed. Everyone thought that to break out of a maximum security prison, you needed help on the outside, allies on the inside, intricate knowledge of the prison and its routines, and a whole lot of fucking luck.

  He’d learned the layout and every single thing about the prison’s routines. He had someone on the outside, and a couple of people on the inside. He even knew the final secret he needed to stack his deck.

  The secret was, he didn’t need luck. He had something much, much better.

  Thirty

  The chopper set down on the hospital helipad, the airspace now cleared by the National Guard, F18s circling in the near distance. Scary shit.

  Jenna stepped out the open door, the wind from the chopper blades blowing her ponytail and the hair around her face into her eyes. Saleda was shaking hands with a man in a dark suit and sunglasses as well as with a cop who had greeted her and Teva when they stepped out of their own bird. Jenna stood behind and looked around, taking it all in. Even from the hospital roof, she could see lights flashing, crowds gathering. Police cars, ambulances. Areas taped off in yellow.

  Saleda motioned to the rest of the team, and Jenna and the others followed her through the door leading into the main hospital. From the briefing they’d received from Irv while in the air, they knew the main attack had taken place on the ground floor, mostly the emergency department and waiting area. Once they’d gotten Irv on the line and had Flint Lewis give him the log-in information, Irv had had the horrific task of watching the raw video so he could tell them about the slaughter inside.

  The whir of the elevator down to the floor above the emergency department was the only sound Jenna could hear other than the individual slow, long breaths of the team as they prepared themselves to enter what they knew would look like a war zone. This would be the only elevator that would open in the whole hospital thanks to the key the sergeant who had met Saleda and was now leading them inside held. The rest of the hospital was on lockdown, no one in or out. Unfortunately, too much time had passed between the attack and the first responders arriving for any lockdown to be effective. According to Irv, the attackers had been disguised as hospital workers: all in scrubs, faces masked. He was working on video feeds from every surveillance camera in the hospital, but the attackers seemed to have once again pulled the videos for their own purposes. He had footage, but only the raw attack posted on Black Shadow’s member website for their homebound disabled cohort, Ishmael.

  The image of the black figure with the machete-like knife jumping in front of the tall, skinny Mr Darcy as he tortured the young girl with his fillet knife in the bank flashed in Jenna’s memory. Atticus ending her life quickly, speaking fast, seemingly chastising words to Darcy on the silent video tape.

  The smaller, retching figure of Scout in the bank. The frail, clumsy Hester.

  A shade of blue blinked in too quickly for Jenna to catch it.

  They’d been chosen because their hearts had a reason. It was how they’d gotten in, and it was how Jenna would find them. They’d have left signs, just like before.

  And like before, they’d also left one witness alive.

  The doors opened on the first floor, and the team exited. Saleda turned to face them.

  ‘Thirty-two victims, all DOA. One living witness. We’ve got a note, we’ve got missing video. We’ve also got a lot of blood,’ Saleda said.

  Jenna braced, knowing the colors would assault her again, a barrage of the different killers MO’s and how the victims had met their ends.

  ‘I want to interview the witness,’ Jenna said. She wasn’t trying to get out of walking the scene by any means, but like the bank, she thought she could be more prepared to enter the onslaught of hues if she had some sort of map of the attack to start with.

  ‘When Ms East was found under that storage cabinet in the ER lab, she was practically catatonic. She hasn’t spoken a word. She was taken over to building F and is resting now in our Behavioral Health facility,’ the sergeant said.

  Saleda nodded. ‘I feel confident if any investigator can get a useful interview from Ms East, Dr Ramey can, but we’ll give Ms East a little more time to rest before we pay her a visit.’

  OK, then.

  The sergeant held the stairwell door open for the team, and Saleda caught Jenna’s eye and cocked her head ever so slightly to come over. Jenna slipped past Porter, who’d paused to grab the tiny vial of vanilla extract he kept in his back pocket and dab some on his upper lip. Saleda stilled on the second stair, and Jenna took the cue to pass her. Easier for the person needing to talk to be behind.

  Jenna took each stair slowly as she strained for the hiss of Saleda’s whisper.

  ‘Suit guy upstairs is Homeland Security. So far, we’re a joint task force, but the subtle cues are there. They want us out so they can take over.’

  ‘But on US soil, it’s our jurisdiction,’ Jenna breathed.

  ‘Bigger things are at play here than rules,’ Saleda said, her voice barely audible. ‘Re-election coming up, and right now, the big guy’s approval ratings are lower than Porter’s patience threshold with Grey. He needs his media tide to shift big time.’

  ‘So, what?’ Jenna hissed.

  ‘Look, we all know the BAU are far more trained to take these asshats on. But the suits don’t know that. All they know is they liked how Boston looked. A big boom, chaos. Authorities swooped in, contained it, and the terrorists were down and out in less than five days. We’ve already got more attacks, more people dead—’

  ‘And a totally different group mindset, set of MO’s. We give what few details we have for this many perps, we cause a level of chaos, false tips, and mass fear that would render just about all the tactics we’re using to actually locate them useless,’ Jenna said, the dark green skin of a dill pickle flashing in. She couldn’t explain why she knew it other than the color, but she was sure Homeland Security wouldn’t gain an advantage. ‘It’d play right into Black Shadow’s hands. We’d send more members right to their cause.’

  They reached the first landing above the stairs to the door into the emergency department, currently under armed guard. Saleda paused beside Jenna.

  ‘You’re preaching to the choir. I’m holding things off as best I can, but we need to find these assholes fast.’

  Good thing your PTSD has never been officially diagnosed or you’d be seriously ignoring doctor’s orders right now, smart guy.

  Yancy’s eyes stayed glued to his screen, where he watched via his remote hookup to Irv’s network the raw hospital attack footage uploaded to the Black Shadow sp
oofed page. The virus technique that moved the URL from site to site left Irv and Yancy little hope of tracing its origin. One of Black Shadow’s members would have to have done something stupid, and unfortunately, when it came to this, it would seem they were all as smart as they believed themselves to be. So now, Irv had set up the video on loop for Yancy to hunt for anything they’d missed. Meanwhile, Irv dug through the Black Shadow site, which was currently piggybacked on the blog of some teenager who had downloaded a shady plug-in.

  Oboe scratched the back door and whined. Yancy glanced away from the video. ‘Oboe, I promise, I’ll take you out in just a few—’

  He stopped, grabbed the TV remote from his tiny, ugly coffee table. He’d left the TV on the news on mute, but now, it had caught his eye. ‘What the …’

  Yancy jabbed the volume up.

  ‘Hey, Irv!’ he said into his headpiece as he stared in awe at the TV. That sure as hell looked like the exact footage on his – on Irv’s – computer screen. ‘I think they did it again. I think they gave the media—’

  ‘Yeah, I just got the memo. I’ll tune in to the E! True Hollywood story just as soon as I bust through this motherfucker of a firewall these beasts have up …’

  Duly noted. Yancy minimized the window of the Black Shadow website attack footage on loop and opened his own browser. A quick search on the Internet brought up the same video on several news media channels.

  Yancy played the footage on a couple of different sites, not sure what he was looking for exactly. Maybe they’d highlighted certain pieces they wanted the public to see more of or had strategically cut it like a propaganda campaign. But each time, it was the same footage he’d seen on the Black Shadow member site.

  He pressed play on one more rendering of the video, this time on a famous gossip website. Cringing, he watched from the usual high corner angle how chaos ensued as figures seemed to run both from and at people in every direction. Several attackers rushed past the nurses’ station in the center toward what Yancy knew were doors leading to the ER waiting room, slaying all in their paths. Others seemed to rush in from the same direction and fan out, seeking any life they didn’t know to be on their side. The blitz of every hallway, lab area, exam room, and supply station happened so fast that singling out many incidences was difficult. The angle ensured that many assaults were blocked from the camera by other bodies, murders in progress, backs turned. One nurse flung a rolling stretcher toward an assailant in an attempt to slow their progress, only to run into another coming from the other direction. A hospital employee nearby took a corner at full speed and skidded in a puddle of another victim’s blood, wiping out flat on her rear end before her attacker caught up to finish her.

  Yancy closed his eyes. Took a deep breath.

  How many times can you watch this, tough guy? You OK with this many nightmares?

  He shook his head. Opened his eyes and focused.

  You better be. You killed Denny Hoffsteader. Bad guy or not, you deserve this, tough guy. This is what you get.

  ‘Wait!’ he yelled out loud, not even meaning to.

  Yancy jabbed at his space bar to pause the gossip site footage, simultaneously reaching for his mouse to rewind the Black Shadow site footage on his computer when he realized it was on Irv’s screen and he couldn’t control it.

  ‘What, dude?’ Irv answered.

  Yancy narrowed his eyes, zoomed in on the spot where he’d paused the gossip site footage. ‘Go to the Black Shadow site footage again, start in at fifty-five, but let’s take it frame by frame. I think I’ve got something.’

  Jenna’s booty-ed feet trudged through the few tiny squares of tile not smeared with blood in the inner section of the emergency department. Having re-walked the carnage of both the lobby and the ED a second time, she kept coming back to this spot. Exam Room Six.

  Of all the patient exam rooms, something about this middle exam room on the wall across from the restrooms kept nagging at her. And not just the fifteen-year-old kid who’d twisted his ankle at soccer practice killed inside it.

  She turned and re-entered the room. The two bodies of father and son lay heaped together about two feet inside the doorway. Jenna winced as, once again, she laid eyes on the bloody handprint that had been left on the white privacy curtain as it had been half-ripped from where it hung.

  Charley! Have to get out … he was so pale. She had to be strong. Keep going. Get help for Charley. Just a few more feet …

  Jenna shook away the memory, forced herself to focus. Not now. This wasn’t the time.

  Never is the time.

  She pushed her feelings down hard, jammed in the internal cork she’d worked so hard to master to keep her own demons bottled, and again took in the bloody handprint. The owner of the handprint had, no doubt, used the curtain to try to stand and fight, which told Jenna it belonged to the father. The son’s hands were nearing the same size, but his fingers were much skinnier, and none were covered in blood.

  That, somehow, was the problem. Something about what had gone down in this room felt off, but Jenna couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. The surveillance video’s range wouldn’t have seen what had happened in here, though she intended to watch it back to see if anything caught her eye. But right now, all she had was the collapsed bodies and the damned colors that inevitably came and what she knew about them. And those didn’t make sense, even to her.

  The father had died farther inside the room. He’d been felled, seemingly, by sword wounds to the gut, as had the son. The ME was sure the dad had bled out from the stomach wounds; he couldn’t say yet whether those or a dagger wound to the neck had ultimately killed the kid.

  And yet, something about the dad being farther inside the room bothered her. Their positions didn’t make sense. The boy was practically in front of the doorway. The dad had used the curtain for leverage, but he wouldn’t have been the person seated on the exam table. Even if the dad had tried to hold off the attacker so the kid could escape, how did the boy with a probably-broken ankle get off the table and around two fighting men – one brandishing a long sword – only to end up with a sword wound that entered from the front just like his father’s? A light khaki yellow color flashed in Jenna’s mind. Something seemed out of place. Unless Marius had the power to clone himself, things just didn’t match up. And why was Marius now carrying a dagger? That was new, too.

  Had Marius somehow had trouble? Maybe the kid put up a fight and another of the assassins had stepped in to save his sword-wielding ass.

  ‘I’ve had about enough of this emergency room to last me a lifetime,’ Saleda said, appearing in the door. ‘Dr Oscar up in acute psychiatric had me paged.’

  ‘She’s ready to let me talk to Margeaux East?’ Jenna asked.

  Saleda frowned. ‘I wouldn’t count on it. OK with going up on your own? I’m hesitant to leave the main scene with our friends from Homeland just waiting to swoop in.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘My phone’s on me if you need it. I’m going to check in and see if any of the team have anything new, then I’ll probably send at least Dodd and Teva back to Quantico to piece together more on the profiles as Irv is able to round up some victim information for them. Maybe there’ll be dots to connect. What do you want me to do with Grey?’ Saleda asked.

  Shit. For a second in the commotion, Jenna had forgotten that this case involved Grey, like the piece of gum she couldn’t get off her shoe.

  ‘Don’t turn her loose,’ Jenna said, as much as it pained her. ‘Have her shadow Dodd. That’ll at least keep her from scratching Porter’s eyes out.’

  ‘You’ve got it,’ Saleda said, turning to find the other team members.

  Jenna took one last look back at the father and son before she left, then walked down the hall, staring at the red-streaked floor where the attackers had stalked their prey with blades dripping with the wounds of others before them.

  The image of Scout, her hands on her knees as she dry-heaved in the bank popped
into Jenna’s mind again.

  These people weren’t born to be killers.

  The shade of blue that she’d missed when it had flashed in earlier reappeared. Then, right away, the light khaki made another appearance.

  ‘Something’s just not right,’ Jenna mumbled to herself, and she headed for the stairs.

  ‘You can look in on her, but I’m afraid I have to put my foot down on this,’ Dr Oscar said, leading Jenna down the corridor. ‘Dr Ramey, I know you’re good at what you do. I in no way mean to insult you. But it wasn’t long ago that she worked up here on this very floor, and while I didn’t know her, I think of her as one of our own. I know she has a long road ahead, and I want to preserve what little security she’s managed to tuck herself into feeling.’

  Jenna bit back her argument. It was no use. Even though Black Shadow had left another note threatening more coming attacks, and even though Jenna knew there was more to the message inside the head of the nurse resting in the room before them, the sharp-nosed, graying psychiatrist beside her wasn’t a profiler.

  Jenna glanced in the square glass window into the room. A petite blonde woman, still wearing the same blue scrubs she had been when she’d come in to work that day, sat in the lone, floral-fabric chair in the room’s farthest left corner, her knees bent up to her chest, feet planted in front of her rear end in the chair seat. One lily-white arm wrapped her legs, holding them to her, the other elbow propping her right arm on the armrest, her hand half-holding her head up. The other hand ran through her long, silky strands of hair the color of a pad of butter.

  ‘Has she said anything coherent at all? Maybe repeated a phrase or even just a word?’ Jenna asked, not particularly hopeful.

  Dr Oscar shook her head, frowned. ‘She’s been like this ever since they found her folded up as tiny as she could get inside that cabinet. It’s door was pulled shut and taped with the medical tape she’d had in her scrub top pocket. She’d been clutching a—’

  ‘A pair of medical scissors,’ Jenna said, a faint blue color she couldn’t place flashing in like it had every time the scissors were brought up. ‘I heard.’