Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

The next sound Hunter and Taylor heard was a loud thud, as a heavy metal object was thrown across the room to the other side and collided with the wall.

‘Now please, stand up and turn around,’ Lucien commanded.

They did.

Standing next to Lucien, holding a Heckler & Koch USP9 semi-automatic handgun, was a wiry and small man, a little like a professional horse-racing jockey in build, who looked to be only about twenty-five years old. He wore a crooked smile that seemed to bend in the same direction that he hunched his shoulder, giving him a skewed and somewhat menacing look. His head was completely shaven, and his blue eyes glowed with an intensity that was unsettling. He had a large, badly healed scar that ran from the left side of his chin, all the way to the back of his right ear, crossing his right cheek. Even from a distance, Hunter could tell that the scar had been made either by a blunt knife, or a thick piece of glass. Across the room he also saw the heavy-duty, 48" bolt cutter that Lucien had used to free himself.

‘Remember when I told you that it wouldn’t be hard for me to find an apprentice if I wanted to?’ Lucien said with a lopsided grin. ‘Well, I did want to, and just as I’d said, it wasn’t hard at all. So let me introduce you to Ghost.’ He gestured toward the shaved-headed man to his right. ‘I call him Ghost because he moves like one, so light and silent you won’t ever hear him coming. And due to his size and amazing flexibility, he’s able to hide in places you can’t even imagine.’ Lucien allowed his gaze to move to the cardboard boxes. ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but he was actually inside one of those.’

One of Ghost’s front teeth was chipped. Every few seconds he nervously ran his tongue across its jagged edge, giving him a very edgy look, as if he was about to lose control.

‘I like her,’ Ghost said, his gaze falling over Taylor as if she were naked. ‘And she’s got pretty toes. I reeeeally like that. Let’s just kill the big guy and take her with us. We can have some fun with her.’

Taylor didn’t shy away from Ghost’s eyes, the anger in her stare colliding with the desire in his.

‘Did you arrange everything the way we’d planned?’

Ghost nodded. His attention was still on Taylor.

‘I don’t want you to think that I’ve been lying to you all this time,’ he said, ‘because I haven’t. Why don’t you open that door, Agent Taylor?’ He indicated the gunmetal door. ‘And see what lies behind it.’

Taylor held Lucien’s stare for a while longer before turning around and pushing the door open. On the ceiling of the corridor beyond it, two very weak fluorescent tube lights flicked and hissed as if they were about to blow. Their light seemed to travel down the hallway in slow motion, and as it reached the end of it Taylor’s heart almost stopped beating.

Hunter had also turned to see what lay beyond the door.

The corridor was long and narrow. The walls were made of solid concrete, just like the shelter’s control room. There were several doors on both sides of the hallway and one directly at the end of it. All of them in the same dappled gunmetal color as the one Taylor had just opened. They were all shut, with the exception of the one at the far end.

The light that propagated from the fluorescent tubes wasn’t strong enough to properly reach the last room, so all they got was a sort of hazy silhouette, but even so, Hunter and Taylor had no problem identifying the shape of a naked woman’s body. She was sitting on a chair. Her head was slumped forward awkwardly. Her hands looked to be tied behind her back, and she didn’t seem to be moving.

Taylor felt a nauseating shiver start right at the pit of her stomach.

‘Ghost,’ Lucien said, ‘the lights.’ He nodded at the control desk.

Still with his attention locked on Hunter and Taylor, Ghost took a couple of steps to his right and flicked a switch on the old-fashioned control console.

Inside the room at the far end of the corridor, another weak light bulb struggled to come to life for a few seconds before finally engaging. It bathed the room in a pale yellowish glow, and right then every muscle in Hunter’s body tensed.

Madeleine Reed wasn’t dead. On the contrary, she was pretty much alive, but compared to the picture they’d seen of her inside Director Kennedy’s office just hours before, she wasn’t even a shadow of the woman she used to be. Her weight had drastically plummeted. Her smooth skin looked like it had aged forty years in just a few months, and it now clung to her bones as if she were a terminal cancer patient. The dark circles under her eyes were so intense they looked like surgical bruises. The eyes themselves seemed to have sunk into her skull just a little, but enough to give her a cadaver’s appearance. Her lips were dry and chipped, and her body looked weak and extremely fragile.

As the light inside the room came on, Madeleine blinked desperately several times, her sad and confused eyes struggling with the brightness after who knows how many hours of darkness. Focus took a while, but when it finally came, her drained brain had to battle to understand the images in front of her. She slowly lifted her head, and the look on her face went from puzzled, to hopeful, and then to pleading, before at last settling on desperate. Her lips moved, but if any words did come out, their sound wasn’t strong enough to reach anyone at the other end of the hallway.

With the room now under its own light, Hunter and Taylor could finally see the entire picture.

Madeleine was indeed naked, her hands were surely tied to each other behind the chair’s backrest. Her feet were tied to the chair’s legs.

As her eyes at last registered people at the other end of the corridor, she started shaking. Her breathing came in little gasps, as if there weren’t enough oxygen in the room.

‘Madeleine,’ Hunter said, reading the first signs of acute panic on her. He knew she’d been conditioned. She’d been tortured and scared for so long that her immediate psychological response to seeing anyone down in that hellhole was to flood her body with terrifying fear. Right now, to her, everyone was a threat, because everyone she’d ever met down there had tortured her.

‘Listen to me, honey.’ Hunter’s voice was as calm and as warm as he could make it sound. ‘My name is Robert Hunter, and I’m with the FBI. We’re here to help you. Stay calm and we’ll get you out of here, OK?’

Hunter felt so useless saying those words. He wanted to go to Madeleine, free her hands and feet, get her out of that fallout shelter, and reassure her that she was safe, that the nightmare was now over, that no one would hurt her anymore. But he couldn’t do any of that. All he could do was throw empty words traveling down that corridor, and hope that was enough to keep Madeleine from losing control.

Madeleine’s lips moved again; again, the sound of her words weren’t strong enough to reach anyone’s ears in the control room. But Hunter had no problem reading her lips.

‘ Please help me. . ’

Hunter quickly peeked at Ghost. He was standing by the control console, his weapon firmly in his grip, his stare burning a hole in the back of Taylor’s head. Lucien was standing just a step to his left, but his attention seemed to be everywhere — nothing would escape him. If Hunter tried anything, he’d be dead.

Lucien nodded at Ghost, who flicked a different switch on the control console. The door to the room Madeleine was in slammed shut, no doubt sending even more fear snowballing into every molecule in her body.

Reflexively, Taylor turned to face Lucien and Ghost. ‘No. Please, no.’

The suddenness of her movement caught Ghost by surprise, almost tipping him over the edge, his arm tensing even further and his finger half-squeezing the trigger on his gun.