The Cage (8 page)

She stared at Bert’s body again and felt the familiar rage well up inside her. Her nostrils flared, and she gritted her teeth. Like a caged animal, she jerked against the grate in the wall, trying to pull it free. Her feet pressed against the wall for leverage, and she shook and pulled until her wrists became bloody.

But it was of no use. She would have to find another way. She had to escape.

She had placed her vengeance above the lives of everyone else. She had let the monster out of the cage. Somehow, she had to make it right. And the only way to do so was by killing Francis Ackerman Jr.

David and Ferris stood over the weapons and ammunition assembled upon the break room table. They each grabbed a shotgun and a Glock 9mm and strapped on as much ammo as they could carry. They were the last line of defense. Johnson’s team had reported in with their losses. Johnson was gone, and a few of the others had sustained serious injuries. All in all, David knew that it could have been worse, much worse. He could have lost them all. But with most of his guards out of commission, it was up to him and Ferris to take Ackerman down.

“I’ve got him, sir,” Banks said from the row of security feeds.

David rushed over. “Where?”

“He just entered the basement of the old wing. We don’t have any eyes down there.”

He analyzed this new information, considering the best way to move forward. He knew that Ackerman could simply make his way through the old basement and exit through the side door that the construction workers had been using. But the old wing was a maze littered with debris and chopped up by the new construction. Obstructions sealed off many of the corridors completely, and those that did go through took a circuitous route. If he and Ferris went outside and came in through the side door, they could backtrack through the basement and cut Ackerman off before he could escape.

He looked up to see the other three men in the room looking to him for guidance and direction. As he surveyed their expectant faces, he wondered if all of this would have happened if a more competent man had been head of security. Maybe that was why Jennifer had worked so hard to get him the job. Maybe she had used him from the beginning.

He had a chance here to make amends for abandoning his men in Iraq. He had a chance to stand up and be the hero. But all he wanted to do was run away. Run away and hide, abandon them all, just like he did his fellow soldiers.

The temperature within the room seemed to drop. The smell of charcoal, seasoned meat, peppers, and onions filled the air as a part of his mind flashed back upon the streets of Samarra, the site of his last battle in Iraq. Then the pungent odor of burning bodies and spent ammunition filled his nostrils.

A wave of dizziness swept over him, but he pressed against the rushing tide of the panic attack. He had built a cage inside his mind to contain all of the guilt and fear, but it was always with him, just at the edge of his consciousness. The faces of the friends he had failed were always shifting shadows glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Ferris, you’re with me. We’re gonna circle around and cut him off. Banks, get on the phone with everyone you can think of and call in the cavalry.”

“Mr. McNamara, we’ve discussed this! We can’t—”

“Dammit, Kendrick! This has gone far enough. Banks, get on that phone. If he tries to stop you, you have my permission to shoot him.”

He headed for the door with Ferris in tow close behind.

“David, wait,” Kendrick said at his back. “I’m going with you. I may be able to convince him to stand down without more violence.”

David shook his head but didn’t turn back to the doctor or slow his stride. “Suit yourself, Doc. But if I get a shot, I’m putting Ackerman in the ground.”

The blood ran down Jennifer’s wrists where she had tried with all her strength to pull the grate from the wall. Unfortunately, she had only succeeded in causing herself more pain. Abandoning the attempt to pull herself free, she had decided to change tactics and go for the key ring dangling from Bert’s belt.

She kicked off her shoes and attempted to weave her feet under Bert’s armpits in order to pull him closer, but she found herself unable to drag the dead weight of the man’s sizable bulk. She succeeded, however, in turning the body to the point where she could reach the belt with her toes.

She stretched out, the handcuffs stinging into the already ruined flesh of her wrists, her toes seeking the key ring. She could just barely feel the kiss of the metal against her skin. Bert’s blood soaked her feet from her efforts, but she tried to force the wet, sticky sensation from her mind. She paused a moment to center herself and then stretched out farther.

Lying out like a board, she stiffened as straight as possible. The handcuffs dug into her wrists with excruciating ferocity, and she tried to tuck in her thumbs and slide the cuffs farther onto her palms. She could feel freedom just outside her grasp. She let out a guttural, primal scream and stretched even harder.

Her big toe moved along the edge of the ring and then finally inside it. She forced the key ring farther down on her toe and carefully began tugging it.

The process seemed to take hours as she gently slipped the key ring from his belt while trying not to lose a grip that she might never regain. She could feel a cramp forming in the bottom of her foot, her wrists burned and ached, and an odd piercing tingle had taken up residence where her pinky finger had once been. But she willed the pain away.

With a click, the key ring came free.

She released a long sigh and then fought against her own sense of urgency as she slowly carried the ring back to her hands. Flipping onto her back, she brought her bloody feet up toward her outstretched fingers.

As the key ring and her blood-drenched feet passed overhead, a drop of the liquid fell to her face and landed at the corner of her mouth.

She spit the drop away and shook her head violently from side to side. It may have only been her imagination, but she thought she tasted copper in her mouth and nearly threw up.

A rattling sounded, and the tears threatened to fall as she realized that she had dropped the keys to the floor. A small mewling escaped her lips. Her eyes settled upon the ring’s resting place against the wall, and she realized that her feet wouldn’t be able to stretch back enough to reach it.

Only one option remained, but despite all that she had seen and done, her brain threatened to shut down at the thought of what was to come. If she couldn’t reach the keys with her feet, she would have to pick up the bloody ring with her mouth and bring it up to her hands.

She told herself that she could do it. She had come this far and couldn’t stop now. Using the meditation techniques she had learned during her PTSD counseling, she tried to distance herself from the situation.

Pretending that she was bobbing for apples, she closed her eyes and craned her neck toward the floor. Her lips found the metal, and her teeth wrapped around the ring.

She tried to imagine the warm metallic taste in her mouth was only a handful of quarters, but it was of no use. The bile burned her throat, and she nearly gagged the keys out from between her clenched teeth.

But then the keys were in her hands, and it was over.

David had only entered the Chamber of Horrors a handful of times, and only out of necessity. Even then, with the fluorescent lights burning and daylight shining through the barred basement windows, the place had seemed somehow cold and frightening. Now, with the power to the wing switched off, the place seemed even more menacing, a macabre dungeon tainted by the tortured screams of the victims of the old hospital’s brutal procedures. The most popular of these had been the lobotomy, an operation carried out by plunging an ice pick through the thin layer of bone at the back of the eye socket. The cruel practice caused irreparable damage to the person’s brain, but left them in a more docile, controllable state.

During a slow period on one of his shifts, David had read a book on the hospital’s history. It stated that by the end of the 1940s, hospitals across the United States performed around five thousand lobotomies annually. He had always found the procedure bar-baric and inhumane, but being in close proximity to Ackerman had made him rethink a lot of his own assumptions. If anyone deserved to be lobotomized, it would be Ackerman, although a shotgun blast to the head still seemed a more humane punishment.

The dark hallways and rooms of the Chamber of Horrors had hardly been touched since the 1950s, when the area had been closed off. Once the hospital’s new wing was built and the cost of renovating and up-dating the space exceeded that of building anew, the old basement fell into disrepair, and the hospital’s administration had been more than content to close the doors and forget about the dark deeds carried out within the crumbling treatment rooms.

Although some portions were used for storage, much of the basement remained in the same state it had been a half-century before, when patients were dragged there kicking and screaming. Some rooms still contained old examination tables, chairs, and equipment. He imagined that the walls and tile floor were once an antiseptic white, but they had grown darker over the years and now the space seemed dingy and gray, the colors faded into that of a black-and-white movie.

He shook the rain from his head and shoulders and walked reluctantly down the steps and into the nearly three feet of water flooding the basement floor. He had considered simply sealing off the back doors or waiting for Ackerman to come to them. But he feared that they would push the killer back into the hospital and more innocent people would be harmed. It seemed a better option to seek him out in the least populated area and bring him down before he could make his escape into the woods surrounding the hospital.

As he surveyed the possibilities before him, he didn’t like his options. At the bottom of the back steps, the entryway served as a security station and the path split into two separate corridors, each sealed off by a set of iron bars. Unfortunately, they had no idea which route hid the killer. They would need to split up.

And he liked the odds of three on one much better than the reality of what they were about to do.

“Ferris, take the doc with you and check out the right corridor. Stay in constant contact over your radio. If you see anything, don’t try to take him on by yourself. Just contain him and call me over there. We’ll bring him down together. You understand?”

Ferris’s body shook with a perpetual shiver, causing his shotgun to rattle against his belt buckle. David looked into the man’s face, and Ferris seemed somehow younger and more fragile than he’d ever noticed; his second-in-command reminded him of a little boy. But he wondered if it was only his own fears and insecurities reflecting onto his partner.

He placed a hand on Ferris’s shoulder. “We’re going to get through this. Just keep your head, and you’ll be fine.”

He wished that he believed the words, but a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach countermanded the hopeful lie. Still, he tried not to let his own doubts show through. He needed to bolster Ferris’s resolve, even if it was a false confidence.