Fortified Dreams

by James, Hadena

  “Did you notice that hole on the way down?” I asked anyone behind me. They all nodded. It had just been me. “Any ideas where it came from? The floors above it were not damaged by the bomb.”

  “My guess, a second bomb,” Gabriel said.

  “A second one,” I said the words slowly. My brother had better have finished collecting cell phones. “When did it happen?”

  “Several minutes ago,” one of the killers told me.

  “And you guys want in the cafeteria why?” Caleb asked.

  “Because someone brought bombs into the prison,” a killer by the name of Victor Neusom answered. “Bombs. They intend to blow the entire building up.”

  “That is ridiculous,” I waved off the thought. “You would need several hundred pipe bombs to do that. This place is very structurally sound in construction and design. It is meant to withstand riots, sieges, bombings, and just about anything else that gets thrown at it.”

  “It would also be pointless to blow up the Fortress. There’s a second one under construction and the first one is proving to be exactly what it was intended to be,” Patterson said.

  “Really?” I looked at him. “Did you bid on it too?”

  “Yes,” Patterson answered. “I actually got the bid too, but then I had to come deal with August, so I didn’t get to work on it.”

  “Do not kill him,” I muttered. “When I get out of here and I can stand not to kick walls in your presence, we are going to have a long damn talk.”

  “Good,” Patterson answered.

  “Fine, I do not think they are going to let you into the cafeteria as long as you are acting like lunatics. If you want to surrender, something might be arranged,” I told the mob.

  “We surrender!” One of them said. “We did not sign on for this. We were just told to make a little mayhem. We weren’t told about the bombs, assassination attempts, or the secure ward being released.”

  “Back up, told by who?” I asked.

  “By the strange guy. He’s been coming in here for a couple of weeks now. He’s even smuggled some stuff in to some of the inmates. Like Gui got a knife from him that Deacon Priest took off him after Eric punched a hole in his gut,” Victor Neusom answered.

  “How many people were visited by the strange guy and can you describe him?” Gabriel asked.

  “A dozen or so. He was very specific in the people he was meeting with. They were all people that had been captured by the SCTU or VCU in the last couple of years or they were guys in here that accepted payment for deaths.”

  “What did he look like?” Gabriel asked.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t come see me. Bill Phillips approached me. I think he approached Bill,” Victor answered. Bill Phillips had been captured by the VCU in May. He’d been pretending to be a werewolf in Indiana. His motive for this role-playing was still questionable. It seemed to involve a set of books and a psychic. He’d even taken wolf teeth and fashioned some strange dentures to shred his victims with. Unfortunately, they hadn’t fit in his mouth, so he’d had to put them on a set of homemade clamps, and he’d been using it to cover some very human bite marks that he had left on them. Needless to say, Bill Phillips was not among the more hinged serial killers in the prison.

  “Did he meet with Priest?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but Deacon didn’t want nothing to do with it. Said the strange guy wasn’t righteous.”

  “When did Priest get religion?” I frowned.

  “He didn’t,” Victor looked at me, his head cocked to one side.

  “Is there another meaning of the word righteous that I do not know about?” I asked.

  “You know, righteous, on the up and up. He said there was something weird about the dude and he didn’t feel right about it,” Victor answered.

  “Yet, he still tried to kill me in a cell earlier.” I raised an eyebrow and looked into the cafeteria.

  “That’s a vendetta,” Victor told me.

  “Oh, my mistake.” I dropped that thought line, realizing it would get us nowhere. “So, who has spoken with the weird guy, aside from Bill Phillips and Deacon Priest?”

  “I don’t know,” Victor answered.

  “Does anyone know?” I asked.

  “Someone that might know, if you can find him, is Schneider, that priest you guys brought in last year,” Victor told me.

  “Where is he?” Caleb asked.

  “I don’t know,” Victor answered.

  “Is that all you can say?” I snapped at him.

  “Isn’t my fault you guys don’t have an inside line on this one. Someone from the Marshals has to be involved for him to get in and out of here. We thought you guys had brought in the bombs, but you look like you went through an explosion.” Victor shrugged.

  “We did,” Patterson answered. “Why would the SCTU bring in bombs?”

  “They don’t like serial killers,” Victor answered as if it deserved a duh at the end of it. My hand rubbed my forehead. It didn’t matter how much I liked or disliked serial killers, I wasn’t going to start blowing up buildings, especially the Fortress.

  Bill Phillips and Deacon Priest were both serial killers with a difference. They were delusional on the best of days. They were also dangerous as hell. Judging by those criteria, a handful of killers came to mind that the strange man might have met with. They weren’t suffering from the same sort of genetic abnormality that created men like Jeremiah, but they were definitely not playing with a full deck. Nick the Bomber would have been a good one to recruit, but he was dead, thanks to Eric. Eric and Patterson were as much targets as any of the other members of law enforcement.

  Brent Timmons was a nutjob, even by serial killer standards. He was more sadistic than Satan was and while he didn’t hear voices, he was a little delusional. He liked to tell people he was wooing me.

  However, if you are going to attack us, approaching the head of the Aislinn Cain fan club was a terrible idea. It was a long shot. Malachi was already on it. He yelled to Brent. Brent yelled back. Everyone looked at me. It was a no. So, our bad guy wasn’t just a mystery, he was smart. My eyes found Deacon Priest. Whatever had been done to him had been done deliberately and it had been done because he had refused the offer to make a little mayhem. I wondered what the prize was for such behavior. The US Marshals would deal with it harshly, so the enticement had to be huge.

  It was also another puzzle piece. Unfortunately, all we had were pieces and none of them seemed to fit, anywhere. The entire thing was just insane. First, the attacks on the federal buildings, second, the Fortress and it was a nightmare scenario for everyone involved. Suddenly, it hit me. The next target was lying practically unguarded because every insane person that lived there was here.

  They had left cheese at the door and we had waltzed right into the trap. How many law enforcement officials were going to fall to pieces if their families were attacked at a supposedly secure location? I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  “Oh shit,” I heard Gabriel and Caleb say in unison. They had obviously just had the same thought as me.

  Thirteen

  Malachi eventually let everyone into the cafeteria, with restrictions. The newest additions were tied up. I sat down at a table to think. There were too many variables at the moment and my brain didn’t seem to want to wrap around all of them.

  First, there was Fiona with the warden and the two US Marshals, whom could all be part of this giant conspiracy to bring down whatever it was that was trying to be brought down. Her safety seemed like a high priority at the moment. Not just because there were killers roaming the halls of the Fortress, but because there were traitors among us as well and we needed people we could trust. I trusted Fiona.

  Second, there was at least one person within the Fortress that was not loyal to the US Marshals. He had thrown his fellow law enforcement officials under the serial killer bus by allowing this to happen. Once he was found, I didn’t know whether to turn him over to his fellow law enforcement officials or the serial k
illers. Either was a decent option.

  Third, there was the strange guy. He had a partner on the inside, someone getting him in and out of the Fortress without bringing attention to himself. I was not entirely sure how that worked. I also was not entirely sure this strange guy wasn’t the figment of some delusional imaginations. To know for sure, I would need a non-delusional serial killer or mass murderer that had been approached by him and might be able to provide a description.

  Fourth, there was the attack on the FGN and FGA. There was no reason to lure law enforcement to the middle of nowhere to deal with the worst possible hostage situation ever, unless you were planning something even larger. The only way to get larger than the Fortress was the Federal Guard Neighborhood and Federal Guard Apartments.

  Finally, there was no real way to know the end game at this exact moment. However, that’s what I really wanted. If the guy was trying to eliminate my unit that was one thing, but if he was after something else, that was a totally different problem. Knowing that would probably help us figure out all the steps in this insane plan, we might even get ahead of him. Maybe I could hire Apex to find him. We’d have to work something out on the finder’s fee, since I wanted the pleasure of killing him myself, but I was almost convinced Apex was a reasonable man.

  However, Fiona came first. I stood up from the table and stretched. My body had gotten stiff from sitting. I imagined it had something to do with the explosion in the stairs.

  “Are you…” Eric looked at me and stopped talking. I shook my head at him. I was fine; I just needed to go get Fiona. I grabbed Patterson by the arm and began pulling him towards the back of the cafeteria. We stopped at the blank back wall. Judging by the thickness, it was the only wall that could hold a staircase of any kind. The windows were set too far into the cinder blocks for it to be a single row. Patterson shook his head at me, frowned, and walked down the line of blocks. When he reached the corner, his hand shot out and touched the wall.

  “How do you open it?” I asked.

  “From the inside,” Patterson told me. “It’s an emergency exit.” I kicked the wall with my already damaged foot.

  “Can anyone reach Fiona?” I asked.

  “No,” Malachi answered.

  “How do I get her to come down the staircase if she does not know it exists?” I asked Patterson.

  “You go up and get her and it isn’t really a staircase,” Patterson answered.

  “You just told me I could not get inside,” I told him.

  “No, you asked how to open it.” He took my baton and slammed the head against the cinder blocks. A small hole appeared. I stepped back. If someone was going to lose an arm over this, it was going to be his sneaky ass, not me. He hit it again, six times. A hole large enough for him to put his hand in had been broken out. He reached in, did something that required him to twist his elbow at a strange angle, and the wall moved.

  A door, about five-feet-tall and two feet wide appeared. The stairs were really rungs set in the cinder blocks on the backside of the wall. They were also unnecessary, as the entire opening was a shaft smaller than an elevator. I was certain I could spread my legs and touch two walls.

  “Seriously?” Gabriel stuck his head in and looked up. “I hope you aren’t afraid of heights.”

  “Just make sure no one sets this thing on fire,” I told my boss and began climbing up.

  Once I got about twenty feet up, it was dark. Holding a flashlight and climbing seemed dangerous. They had thought about creating it, but not putting emergency lighting in it. Brilliant. I would have to point the mistake out to Patterson when I got Fiona back to the cafeteria. Another twenty feet and my hands were starting to sweat. No one thinks about climbing metal rungs for long durations. It sucks. The palms sweat, not just from exertion, but also from contact with the metal. This makes the rungs slippery. A headlamp would have been a Godsend at the moment. Anything that would allow me to see where the button was once I reached the top, if there even was a button. I didn’t know if the upstairs opened from the inside or not. If it didn’t, I was going to kill my grandfather. I didn’t care what information he might have.

  My hand reached out into darkness and found nothing. The rungs had been evenly spaced. Now, there didn’t seem to be another one. I carefully wrapped one arm around a rung and reached for my phone. I turned on the flashlight. I was at the top. There was a button to my left. I hit it. My phone slipped out of my hand and went tumbling down into the darkness. The light danced and made dizzying patterns as it fell.

  Whoever had designed the shaft and its entrances had definitely not meant for this to be a point of ingress. There wasn’t a rung over the door. There wasn’t a handle anywhere. There wasn’t a foot hold. I was going to have to reach through the hole, grab hold of the wall, and pull myself through, while hoping no one chopped off my arm.

  The thought of plunging to my death suddenly became very real. If something went wrong, I would fall the length of the shaft, the walls and rungs brutalizing my body before it slammed into the hard concrete below and split me open like a squished caterpillar. This thought triggered the realization that I had another fear; dying in vain. If I plunged to my death, I would not save the princess from the big bad monster and would essentially have died in vain. Others would die because I had died. The monsters I was capable of stopping would go unchecked, free to continue their killing. My legacy would be lost as my blood flowed from my ruptured organs.

  This was the reason I did not talk about my father. He had died in vain. His killer had been released to kill again. My father had been a psychopath. His death had not just been in vain, it had been the destruction of a good psychopath, a psychopath working for law and order. I didn’t need Lucas to tell me that was why I was determined that when I died, I was taking one or two of the serial killer kind with me. Falling down this shaft would not do that.

  The hole illuminated a small square within the shaft. No shadows moved in front of it. I took my chances, reached through the hole, and found nothing to grab except the wall. I steeled myself, it was my goal to save the princess, defeat the evil overlord, and move to the next level. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any extra lives in my pocket in case I screwed up. It felt as if I had entered limbo as I moved from the rungs to the small opening. I hurled my torso through before gravity had a chance to raise some objections. I was in. The area outside the warden’s office was quiet and calm. No thugs were hanging out, looking sinister, as they attempted to salvage some enigmatic plan hatched by a mysterious mastermind. I beat on the door to the warden’s office, announcing my name. Surely, if they had gone back up after the explosion, they would have taken refuge in the one place the killers couldn’t get them.

  There was a commotion on the inside. The door opened despite protests. Fiona’s face was covered in soot. Her hair had been singed and had fallen out of the bun she normally wore. Her shirt had tiny holes in it. However, I saw no blood. This made me release air that had been trapped in my lungs without my knowledge. In some ways, I needed Fiona. In some ways, she needed me. We were finding more and more common ground.

  “Have you noticed any female serial killers running around?” She asked.

  “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “I haven’t either. I know the Fortress houses some. Where are they?”

  “That is an interesting question. One that we should find an answer for.”

  “Yeah.” Fiona looked past me. “The warden said that it the women’s ward was the first cell blocks to lose cameras.”

  My stomach dropped. Most male serial killers killed women. It was just the nature of the obsession. Most female serial killers were less picky about their victims. It seemed odd to leave them locked up. It also seemed weird for those cameras to be the first to malfunction. Perhaps the reason we had met with very little resistance was that they were busy in the female cellblocks. Mentally, I added it to my immediate to be done list. Unlike other prisons, the Fortress was co-ed. The women’s block w
as near the very back with a whole lot of security to get to it. However, the situation was not normal and there was no telling what had happened.

  Fourteen

  The climb down was much easier than the climb up. Even when I hit the button as I stepped back onto the interesting steel ladder that looked as if it belonged in a 1980s movie than an actual building. The door closed behind us, concealing the secret. One US Marshal was going down at break neck speed. I kept checking to see if he was going to fall as the rest of us moved. He didn’t. He reached the bottom a good three minutes ahead of us. His shadow disappeared, leaving the opening visible again.

  Well, I had rescued one princess, but the quest was still going and there were a lot more princesses to be saved. I wasn’t entirely sure who to drag on that mission. Getting to the area would not be fun or pleasant if the serial killers from the men’s ward had gotten in there. Although, there was a very high probability that I’d get to kill someone. The thought almost made me smile. Which proved there was a high probability that I also needed some good therapy. For the moment, I would blame my overwhelming blood lust on being trapped inside the Fortress. If it continued when I got out, I would have to hunt down Lucas and have an honest conversation about the deterioration of my mental wellbeing.

  We got to the bottom. Fiona and I were the only two not out of breath. I guessed chasing serial killers kept us in better shape than babysitting them. Or perhaps our common history assisted with our decision to remain mobile.

  “Got any family in here?” I asked her before we exited the hole.

  “Yeah, in the women’s ward,” she answered. I nodded in understanding. Fiona’s family tree was just as gnarled, broken, and rotten as my own. Slowly, she’d been confiding in me that her aunt wasn’t the only lunatic to have a branch. She came from a long line of killers, including her own mother, who had murdered the neighbors when Fiona was fourteen because their dog had peed on the fence. Her mother had been far less subtle about it than her aunt was though. Instead of poisoning the neighbors, as most vengeful women would have done, she set their house on fire and shot them with a shotgun when they ran out. She had let the dog live, because it was just an animal that didn’t know it shouldn’t pee on fences. Her mother was not the individual in the women’s ward however, as her mother had died in a standoff with the police after taking her own family hostage and trying to explain why the neighbors had been killed.