Brian Freeman - The Night Bird

Ping.

She whipped her fingers across the screen.

You have five minutes.

Frankie punched back her reply in capital letters.

WHERE ARE YOU?

The seconds ticked. One, two, three, four. She rolled down the window, and rain poured inside. Where did he want her to go? What did he want her to see? She leaned out and looked up and down the street. She was alone.

Ping.

Another e-mail.

Only you can save her.

“I know that!” she shouted out the window. “Don’t you think I know that? Tell me where you are!”

Her fingers trembled as she typed a message.

I will come to you. Please. I will do whatever you want.

One minute of her five minutes was gone. Frankie cried; sobs wracked her chest. That was what he wanted. To torture her. And this was how he did it. Not by laying hands on her body, not by feeding drugs into her brain. He made her sit in the truck, impotent and desperate. He let the time go by, until there was no time for her to stop what came next. To pry the knife out of Lucy’s hands.

Ping.

She read the e-mail through her tears.

Look up.

Frankie pushed her head out of the window of the SUV and craned her neck to stare at the cloud-layered sky. It was night. Lightning flashed. Silver curtains of rain descended.

“What am I supposed to see?” she shouted.

But then she saw it.

She was across the street from a four-story white stone building. It looked like a government palace airlifted out of Washington DC. Columns divided the rows of windows. A balcony jutted out from one window, as if Evita might stand there, waving to adoring crowds. But this building, like everything also around her, was abandoned. Dirt marred the white stone. The windows were covered over. Everything was dark.

No, she realized as she looked closer. Not everything.

Where she’d seen nothing before, now a pinpoint light blinked on the top floor. It flashed behind the center window, on, off, on, off. A message. That’s where he was.

That’s where she had to go.

She threw open the door of the car.

Frankie climbed out, slammed the door shut, and ran.

Frost climbed into the open window frame. He braced himself against the walls on either side and delivered a kick to the diagonal plank that was nailed across the space. The first kick splintered the wood, and the second dislodged it from the side of the building and sent it spiraling to the ground. Behind him, Jess shouted, but Frost simply took a step forward and jumped.

The ground didn’t look far from the second-floor window, but it felt far as he dropped. He picked up speed and landed on his feet with an impact that shuddered through his spine. One leg crumpled under him, and he collapsed to the ground, which was a rocky slope of dirt and weeds. He got up and half limped, half ran toward the locked gates.

Jess yelled from the window. “What the hell are you doing?”

Frost pointed at the white building on the far side of the street, where Francesca Stein was disappearing inside. “There!”

He reached the property gates, which were eight feet high but free of barbed wire. He dug his shoes into the mesh and climbed. His fingers slipped on the wet netting, and spasms shot up and down his legs. He reached the top, wobbled, and basically let his body fall to the street on the other side.

“Frankie!” he shouted, but she was already out of sight.

He dragged himself toward the building’s main door at the street corner. A block away, he heard police officers sprinting to catch up with him. He limped up the outside stairs to a boarded door, which flapped open and closed as the wind blew. He wrenched it open and saw elegant marble steps in front of him, making a spiral toward the upper floors. Concrete dust littered the stone. Picture frames hung askew on the walls.

Heels tapped over his head, climbing the stairs.

“Frankie!” he called again. “Stop!”

She stopped, but not because he’d called to her. She stopped because at that moment, a guttural scream filled the entire stairwell. It came from speakers; it came from everywhere. High above him, and right beside him, he heard a man’s wail, throaty and terrible, begging for mercy that never came. It began, cut off, and began again, and died away into the gasp of someone laboring to breathe. It was a scream he’d never heard in his life, but there was no mistaking what it was.

It was a scream of death.

Frankie heard the scream. She froze halfway between the second and third floors of the building. The agony of it made her cover her ears. She fell against the railing and couldn’t take another step. The sound pushed through to her brain, no matter how much she tried to keep it out. If you came to the end of the road and saw the devil standing in front of you, that would be the howl of despair baying from your throat.

She wanted to turn back, but a woman’s voice rose over the scream. It was Lucy. “No, no, make it stop!”

Frankie shook off her fear and bolted up the last few steps. She found herself in a long hallway, with closed doors stretching the length of the building. The noise came from everywhere; she didn’t know which door to choose. She tried the first one, and it was locked. They were all locked. She went from door to door, shouting Lucy’s name.

Halfway down the hall, she found an open door, and she burst inside.

Her heart stopped.

Whiteness overwhelmed her. What she’d seen on her phone didn’t compare to the dazzling shock of white above, below, and around her. She had to stop to adjust to the brightness. It made her want to shield her eyes, as if she were looking into the sun. White room. White lights. Every window covered in white.

The room was large, at least a hundred feet from end to end. The ceiling was low. Video projectors — all white — had been mounted in intervals around the entire room. The walls were screens; the ceiling was a screen; the floor was a screen. She realized in an instant that this was a room that could be turned into anything. Any scene out of the pit of your imagination. Any dream come to life. It was a room where all your deepest fears could come true.

There were three people in the torture chamber.

In the corner, twenty feet away from her, was Todd Ferris. He was alive. He sat on the floor, knees pulled up to his chest. He had his fingers laced together, his hands against his chin, as if he were praying. As she ran into the room, his head swiveled, and he stared directly at her, but he didn’t act as if he recognized her. His winsome face looked dazed. His eyes were wide, unblinking circles of disbelief. She thought he was drugged. Like Lucy.

Lucy Hagen stood in the center of the room. Her mouth hung open. Her breathing was loud, as if she couldn’t drag air into her lungs fast enough. Her legs were slightly apart, and Frankie could see them trembling. She had the pretty face that Frankie remembered, but the face didn’t even belong to Lucy anymore. She looked like someone else entirely. Someone who’d been thrown onto an island alone.

One of Lucy’s arms hung limply at her side. The other held the long-bladed knife. Her elbow was cocked, and Lucy clenched the black handle as if it were part of her body.

The blade of the knife wasn’t silver anymore.

It was soaked in blood.

Lucy stood over the body of a man. He was the third person in the room. He lay back, draped across a chaise that was an exact match for the one in Frankie’s office. This was her office, taken to a violent extreme. The man’s arms and legs sprawled off the chair; his fingers and shoes grazed the floor. The gruesome, grinning mask half covered his face.

It was Darren Newman. She recognized the wild, bright colors of his clothes. He wore a bright-yellow dress shirt, but the yellow was dyed crimson where he’d been stabbed multiple times. His chest heaved. Blood seeped from his body onto the white chair and onto the white floor, dotting it with red beads. He was on his last, gagging breaths. Bile spat from his lips. His skin grayed as oxygen fled.