Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

Taylor never had a chance.

Hunter quickly turned back to face Ghost, whose aim had now moved to Hunter’s face.

‘Make a move, tough guy, c’mon, make a move, and I’ll blow your brains all over her rotting corpse.’

Hunter felt every fiber in his body go rigid with anger, and he had to use all his willpower not to lunge at Ghost. Instead he just stood there, his breathing labored, his hands shaking, but not from fear.

‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ Ghost said. ‘Not so tough after all, are you?’

‘WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?’ Lucien shouted. He looked even more surprised than Hunter was. ‘Why the fuck did you shoot her, Ghost?’

Ghost kept his weapon trailed on Hunter. ‘Because the bitch was getting on my nerves,’ he replied in a serious but unconcerned voice. ‘You know I hate when anyone talks about me that way.’

Lucien took a step back, running a hand across his forehead.

‘The foulmouthed bitch got what she deserved.’ Ghost shrugged, as if all he’d done was throw a dart at a dartboard. ‘What does it matter anyway? They were both going to die, weren’t they? They’ve seen our faces, Lucien. You and I know that they would never walk out of here alive. And all this chit-chat bullshit was pissing me off, so I just sped things up for her.’ He nodded at Hunter. ‘And you know what? I’m just gonna do the same for him.’

Ghost’s face burned with sadistic desire, and Hunter saw the same determination of moments ago flood Ghost’s eyes.

There was no time for a reaction.

Another squeeze of the trigger.

Just like before, the bullet found its target with amazing accuracy.

Sky above the city of Milan, New Hampshire.

Forty minutes earlier.

Inside Bird Two, Agent Brody and his team were starting to lose hope.

Their plane had been circling the outer perimeter of Berlin’s municipal airport for several minutes now. The pilot had already told Brody that he’d need a plan of action soon. The plane had enough fuel for another thirty to thirty-five minutes of flight time, but if they weren’t landing in Berlin, they would need to land somewhere else and refuel before flying back to Quantico. That meant turning the plane around and flying to a different airport.

The nearest airport to Berlin was Gorham municipal airport — about five to ten minutes due south depending on the wind. As a precaution measure, the pilot always allowed an extra ten minutes of flight time in case of landing traffic or some other unforeseen circumstance. That left them with a maximum of another ten, maybe fifteen minutes’ circling time. After that, the pilot was turning the plane around and heading toward Gorham.

Brody had his cellphone on the table in front of him. He was staring at its dark screen as if hypnotized. When he finally checked his watch, another seven minutes had passed. Three more minutes and this operation was over. He had to call Kennedy.

As he reached for his phone, it rang.

This wasn’t the first time Hunter had stared down the barrel of a gun. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a life or death situation either, but Ghost was too far away for Hunter to be able to get to him in time, and he was too close for Hunter to be able to dive away from the bullet.

This time there was no way out.

In that split second before Ghost squeezed the trigger, all Hunter could think of was how sorry he was for not being able to protect Taylor, and for not fulfilling the promise he’d made Jessica all those years ago while he held his fiancée’s mutilated body in his arms.

Despite what he was facing, Hunter didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t even blink. He would not give Ghost the satisfaction. His gaze stayed on Ghost’s face. And that was how he was able to see his head explode.

It was a perfect shot. The bullet hit Ghost on his left temple. Its hollow-point cavity was immediately filled with fluids and tissue, forcing it to mushroom as it began traveling past the cranium wall and across Ghost’s brain, savagely ripping apart everything in its path.

The mushroom effect of a hollow-point reduces the bullet’s velocity considerably, and in most cases there will be no exit wound. The bullet will generally lodge itself within its target. But again, at such close range, the power of a .45-caliber round was more than enough to propel the bullet all the way across Ghost’s shaved head.

When it occurs, the exit wound of a .45 mushroomed Civil Defense bullet is impressive. In Ghost’s case, it was the size of a grapefruit. Half of the right side of his face, from his ear to the top of his head, exploded out as if an alien being had hatched out of a large egg. Bone, blood, brain matter and skin splattered against the wall and the control console to his right, covering everything in a sticky, gooey red mess.

The terribly loud sound of the fired shot made Hunter jerk, but he still kept his eyes open. He saw the anger, the determination and the evil dissipate from Ghost’s eyes, before his whole body was basically lifted from the ground by the force of the shot’s impact. It slammed against the control console and flopped to the ground like an empty flour sack. A pool of blood quickly began to form around his head.

His gun also hit the console, but it slid away to the other side of the room, ending somewhere behind the cardboard boxes.

Hunter’s heart was racing like a Drag car. Adrenaline had flooded every vein in his body, making him shake. His gaze finally moved to Lucien. He could still see a thin plume of smoke traveling in the air from Lucien’s shot, but again, before Hunter could react, Lucien had already aimed Taylor’s gun at him.

‘Stay right where you are, Robert. I really don’t want to, but if need be, I’ll put a bullet right through your heart. And you know I mean it.’

Hunter stared at him, unable to hide his surprise for what he’d just done.

‘I’ve never liked him anyway,’ Lucien explained in his usual matter-of-fact manner. ‘He was just a dumb, sadistic kid with no purpose, who was traumatized when young, and because of that he loved torturing and killing people just for the fun of it.’

Coming from Lucien, Hunter found the comment very rich.

‘And he just outlived his usefulness,’ Lucien moved on, not even a pinch of remorse or pity in his tone. ‘Like all the previous ones. They all do eventually, so I just find myself a new little helper.’

Hunter’s focus was on Lucien’s gun.

‘Believe me if you like, but I had no intention of killing Agent Taylor, unless I absolutely had to, but unfortunately she touched on a very delicate subject when it came to Ghost. You see, he came from a very dysfunctional family. Both of his parents abused him physically and psychologically in ways that are hard for even me to imagine. They forced him to walk around the house naked all the time, and they made constant fun of him, especially of his manhood, calling him a series of derogative names. Would you like to guess one of them?’

Hunter breathed in. ‘Pencil-dick.’

Lucien nodded once. ‘That’s the one. Unfortunately, the same name Agent Taylor threw at him.’

For a deeply traumatized and disturbed person, a single word, a sound, a color, an image, a smell. . a multitude of simple things can easily reopen a terribly painful wound. Usually the person’s reaction is highly unpredictable, but in the case of a violent person, violence is almost always present within the reaction. In the case of a psychopath like Ghost, that violent reaction is usually fatal.

‘When Ghost was seventeen years old,’ Lucien added, ‘he

finally had enough. He tied his father to a bed, castrated him, and left him to bleed to death. After that, he used a baseball bat to beat his mother’s head into a paste. He was too damaged. I knew I’d be getting rid of him soon anyway.’