I consciously muttered under my breath all the way back down the staircase. Most of it was swear words that my mother would have been appalled to hear come out of my mouth. She had done her best to raise a lady, but she’d been unfortunate enough to be given a sociopath to work with. No one had ever accused me of being ladylike, even on my best days.
The men with me were staying a couple of steps behind. This included Patterson. Considering a portion of this mess was his fault, it was in his best interest to stay back. My boot had started to squelch a floor earlier. I had probably broken my toes and split a few of them open. I didn’t look to see if I was leaving bloody footprints. I rather hoped I was, because it would just prove how incredibly pissed I was at the elderly man.
If nothing else, we could have sent Fiona and them down the hidden staircase to join us. Or we could have used it to avoid running into the monster with the shotgun blasts to the head. It would have been great information to have, say, several hours ago, when we first made entry. We weren’t just in the lair of a serial killer; we were in their relocated homes with a US Marshal that was not on our side.
We exited the stairwell and found our path to the cafeteria was blocked. Almost none of them took notice of us, because they were beating on the secured doors, trying to get into the cafeteria. This meant there was something scarier headed our way. I wasn’t sure how much scarier things could get. Bombs were scary for a lot of reasons, but for me, I had a fear of burning to death.
Not dying of smoke inhalation, but actually burning to death. Some things leave impressions even on sociopaths. The worst thing I had ever witnessed was a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire as a form of protest. It took over a minute for him to die. He was rocking and praying, his outline visible through the flames. A few years later, I had learned about the Brazen Bull, a torture device made of bronze intended to roast the victim alive. There were many ways to die, but burning to death seemed like the worst.
“Where is the fire?” I shouted to get everyone’s attention. About a dozen serial killers turned to look at us, as if we had materialized from thin air. Several were registering looks of panic. Whatever the scary thing was, it was scarier than Malachi, Caleb, Patterson, Eric, and I all put together. I’d never seen serial killers look panicked. One of them pointed down the hall. I peeked around the corner.
To my surprise, the corridor was on fire. Not the walls themselves, but stuff that had been tossed from cells into the hallway. Black smoke billowed off it. There was also a hole in the wall with a piece of metal railing sticking through it. It was aimed by Fate, because on the end of it was a serial killer, quite obviously dead. I knew him as Jake Pannel, and his favorite method of killing women was to impale them. Karma had rebalanced her wheel a little bit by shoving the railing through his stomach.
“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.