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 killers. 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 was 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.