Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

Karen implored her body to move. She tried to gather together all the strength she had left inside her, all the will-power she could muster, but it simply wasn’t enough. Her body just wouldn’t respond, no matter how hard she willed it to. She tried screaming, talking, pleading, but her tongue still felt like a huge hairy moth inside her mouth.

Slowly and skillfully, Lucien used the scalpel to rupture the skin at the top of Karen’s shoulder blade. The first blob of blood came out, and he used a piece of gauze to clear it up. He proceeded to gradually slice and very carefully pull the skin off her arm.

Karen’s head had been paralyzed in a sitting-up sleeping position, slumped forward and slightly to the right. Her chin was low and almost touching her chest. Lucien had placed her in that position deliberately. He knew that once the drug had taken effect, Karen wouldn’t be able to move her neck, only her eyes. He wanted her to be able to see.

And so she did.

As Lucien moved closer, her eyes shot right and she saw the scalpel pierce her skin and the blood come out of her arm, but she was so scared that the pain effect was delayed. It took several seconds for a sharp and deep penetrating pain to finally hit her, releasing an animal-like, guttural growl that came from deep inside her.

The skinning, together with Karen’s contagious fear, filled Lucien with a mind-numbing satisfaction he couldn’t explain. Much better than any drug he could think of.

The entire process didn’t take him very long, and at the end of it Lucien was floating on air, high on the chemicals his brain had released into his bloodstream. He would’ve completed the skinning in half of the time, but Karen could only manage a few minutes before she passed out. Lucien wanted her awake, he wanted her panic, and so he interrupted the skinning process to bring her back to consciousness before starting again. That took time.

When he was finally done, he waited for Karen to come to again and lifted the bloody, tattooed piece of skin to show her.

Her internal organs weren’t paralyzed, and as her eyes caught sight of what used to be part of her upper right arm, her stomach shot half of its contents back up her esophagus and she vomited all over herself.

‘Don’t worry, Karen,’ Lucien said as he began to clean her up.

Karen shuddered inside at his touch.

‘That’s the only tattoo I want from you. I will not be taking any of your other ones.’

Karen had five tattoos in total.

‘But I do have a surprise for you.’ Lucien got up and disappeared into the shadows for a moment.

Karen heard a muffled scratching metallic sound, as if Lucien had begun dragging a beer keg across the floor. When he reappeared, she finally saw what he was dragging, and it was no beer keg. Lucien had with him a couple of metallic tanks, very similar in appearance to the large oxygen tanks one would find in hospitals. But somehow Karen knew that the contents of those tanks wouldn’t be oxygen.

At the top, a hose was attached to the nozzle of each tank. Lucien placed the tanks about five feet in front of Karen’s chair before returning to the shadows. Seconds later, he resurfaced, bringing with him a telescopic boom microphone stand that had been specially adapted. The alteration was that the stand had two boom arms instead of one.

He placed the stand in between Karen and the tanks before adjusting the two boom arms — one up, one down. The up one was leveled at Karen’s chest, the down one at her waist.

Karen’s eyes were following every movement with anticipation and an enormous sense of dread. She could almost feel her organs trembling inside her.

Lucien proceeded to hook a tank hose to each of the boom arms, so both hoses were now pointing directly at Karen.

‘I have a question for you, Karen.’

There was nothing Karen could do but just stare at him.

‘Have you ever heard of a LIN charge?’

He twisted both tanks so that their labels were facing Karen. As she read them and understood what their contents were, her heart froze.

Taylor had frowned at Lucien’s question, but Hunter knew exactly what he was talking about.

LN 2, LIN and LN are all known abbreviations used for liquid nitrogen. A LIN charge is a supercooled liquid nitrogen blast. It became known as a LIN charge because the military had created liquid nitrogen grenades and explosive charges that could be magnetically attached to structures like doors, walkways, bridges and so on. Their main purpose was to hyper-freeze anything — alloys, metal, plastic, wood — making them extremely vulnerable and easy to breach. The real problem comes when a LIN charge hits human skin.

Liquid nitrogen grenades differ from all other known types of grenade in one simple way. Their charge doesn’t need to break or penetrate the skin of the target in order to kill them.

The premise behind their effectiveness is based on the special chemical properties of the most abundant mineral on earth — water.

Water is the only naturally occurring substance on the planet that expands when cooled. If a human body is struck by a blast of supercooled liquid nitrogen, it will become very cold, very fast. When that happens, blood cells will freeze instantly in what is known as a ‘shock freeze’. The real messy part comes because blood cells are made of approximately 70 percent water, and the water in the blood cells will begin to expand very, very rapidly. The result of all those water molecules in one’s bloodstream expanding so quickly is total body hemorrhage. The subject will bleed from just about everywhere — eyes, ears, mouth, nose, nails, sexual organs and through the skin.

Because of the supercooled charge, the molecules’ expansion doesn’t stop, and in consequence every single blood cell in the human body eventually explodes. It’s an excruciating death, and a totally horrifying sight.

For Taylor’s sake, Lucien briefly explained the entire process.

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Lucien said to Hunter and Taylor. ‘What happened to her body once I blasted it with liquid nitrogen was hell-scary, even for me. It was like everything inside her exploded, and all that blood came pouring out through. .’ He sighed deeply and scratched his beard, sweeping his eyes over his barren cell. ‘Everywhere, really. I spent four days just cleaning and disinfecting that shack so wild animals wouldn’t take over once I was gone.’ Lucien paused, remembering. ‘My friend back at Yale told me that they were performing this experiment on a live frog in one of the labs. It involved liquid nitrogen. When he told me what had happened, I just tried to imagine how a human body would react. But even my fertile imagination didn’t reach as far as reality.’

If Hunter or Taylor had any doubts that they were sitting before pure evil, those doubts had just vanished in the last few minutes. Neither of them wanted to hear any more details.

‘The location, Lucien?’ Hunter asked. His voice was steady and reasonable. ‘Did you bury her around Lake Saltonstall?’

Lucien ran a finger around the grooves surrounding one of the cinder blocks on the wall to his left. ‘That I did. And I have a surprise for you. I revisited that site four more times after Karen, if you know what I mean.’ He pursed his lips in a ‘What can I do?’ way and followed it with a careless shrug. ‘It was a good site, well hidden.’

‘Are you saying we’ll find five bodies at the site, instead of only one?’ Taylor asked.

Lucien held the suspense up for a moment longer before nodding. ‘Uh-huh. Would you like their names?’

Taylor glared at him.

Lucien laughed. ‘But of course you would.’ He closed his eyes and breathed in as if his memory needed an extra burst of oxygen. When he reopened them again, they looked dead, emotionless. He began.