The Cage (9 page)

Ferris nodded slowly.

Without another word, they separated and began their journeys through the dark corridors of the old basement.

The water couldn’t have been as cold as it felt, and Ferris wondered if his shakes were born purely of adrenaline. “Hold this,” he said to Kendrick as he handed his shotgun to the doctor. Then he pulled off his guard’s cap. A mop of sweat-soaked strawberry blond hair cascaded across his freckled face.

The hue of his hair and his light skin had served as a bonding catalyst between himself and his father, a man who was normally distant and unfriendly, especially toward his five children. But the relationship had been different between the father and his youngest son. Ferris suspected that his egotistical father had taken a shine to him because, out of the five Ferris children, he had been the only one to bear any resemblance to the patriarch of the family. His brothers and sisters had the good fortune of inheriting olive skin and dark hair from the Italian roots on his mother’s side.

Swiping a hand through it, he slicked back the hair and replaced his cap. His hand came away covered in sweat and oil. He rubbed both palms against his uniform and wondered how he could be freezing and sweating at the same time.

“Okay,” he said, taking the gun back from Kendrick, who held it at arm’s length as if it were an alien object that would somehow contaminate him.

As they continued forward, Kendrick said, “I haven’t been down here since I was a child. This place used to give me nightmares. Once when I was around seven years old, my father asked me to retrieve some sheets from the storage area on the other side of the basement. He neglected to remind me that the door would lock behind me if I allowed it to close. I spent three hours down here with the ghosts before he finally came looking for me. The funny thing was that a key hung next to the door for exactly that situation. I had seen the key before; I knew it was there. I guess fear just has a funny way of affecting rational thinking.” Kendrick barked a nervous laugh.

Ferris didn’t respond. He kept his eyes focused on the path ahead. Kendrick issued another awkward laugh, and Ferris hoped that his boss was through with the stories. If Kendrick had been any other man, he’d have told him to shut the hell up.

The flashlight’s beam did a good job of illuminating their immediate surroundings, but had little effect on piercing the darker shadows farther down the corridor. He swung into the next room, the beam bouncing wildly as he checked the corners. An old metal examination table and an overturned chair rested in the water along one wall, but the rest of the room was empty save for the mold and a musty odor.

The sound of sloshing water in the next room drew his attention.

He quickly swung his shotgun in that direction. He had thought for a moment that he had heard a noise, but now it was gone. Maybe just his imagination.

He held his breath, listening intently for any sound, any movement.

Kendrick said, “You know, this reminds me of a time when my father took me fly-fishing. We went up into this—”

Ferris’s head snapped toward the doctor. “No offense, sir, but could you please shut your piehole before you get us both killed?”

The words immediately filled him with regret. They had come out much harsher than he had intended, but his nerves were taut with anxiety.

He expected Kendrick to be taken aback and offended, but the opposite was true. The man lowered his eyes, sufficiently cowed. “I’m sorry. I tend to ramble when I’m nervous . . . or frightened.”

Ferris again regretted his harshness. The man was just as scared as he was, probably more so—at least Ferris was trained for a situation like this. Kendrick was entirely out of his element. Thinking of the way David had comforted him, he placed a hand on Kendrick’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be—”

The noise again.

With trembling hands, he snapped the shotgun in the direction of the next room and stepped forward.

Within the comforting cocoon of the darkness, Ackerman crouched low in the water, waiting for his prey. He had been about to make his escape into the woods when the pair of guards and the good doctor had entered through his exit. The group of his hunters had been about as quiet as a bull on methamphetamines. He had considered rushing them, but to attack at that moment seemed impetuous, and he feared a lucky blast from their shotguns. So he had doubled back along his previous path to make the smart play.

He would wait for them in the dark and then take them by surprise.

He could feel them drawing near, but he had to wait for just the right moment. And when it came, he would do what he did best.

The smell of rotting wood and musty decay filled his nostrils, but to him it was not an unpleasant scent. He had always been oddly comforted by things that others found repugnant—sights, smells, actions, feelings—one example being his affinity toward the darkness. To most people, a pitch-black room signified the unknown, something to be feared, something over which they had no control. But when he was a boy, his father had held him in a room filled with the perpetual glow of a bare fluorescent bulb. The constant hum and piercing brightness had felt like needles burrowing into his consciousness. He had come to think of that light as a living entity that sought to torment him, and its absence filled him with a strange sense of comfort and warmth.

He supposed that his brain was simply wired differently from everyone else’s. Whether it was because of the tortures of his youth, genetics, or damage to the body’s control center, it didn’t really matter. He was different. He was broken, and he couldn’t be fixed.

He didn’t
want
to be fixed.

Beyond the walls of the basement, he could hear the rain beating against the already-saturated earth. The whispering rumble reminded him of the night when he had first met Jennifer and her family.

He had played a game with them, and they lost.

Jennifer’s words from earlier in the evening came back to him.
Why did you murder them but leave me alive?

He had asked himself that very question many times. The memories of that night were still so vivid. The oak china hutch filled with expensive dishes. A grandfather clock in the corner, its hands no longer turning. The round table surrounded by green high-backed chairs. Dark wainscoting. Flowery wallpaper. Jennifer’s mother’s screams. The look of rage in her father’s eyes. Their fear palpable in the air.

And then there was Jennifer.

She had been about his age. Her auburn hair fell around a smooth and angelic face. Her eyes shone like emeralds speckled with tiny flecks of golden caramel and possessed a strength that he had found arresting.

In that moment, he had felt something for her, a stirring of some still-human part of himself that his father had been unable to filter out entirely. In that moment, he had loved her. At least he
thought
that was what it was. The emotion had been so alien to him that its true source was unknowable.

As he had stared into her eyes, foreign feelings swirling inside his mind, a part of him had wanted her to grow up and be happy, to live a normal life and be afforded the opportunities that had been stolen from him. He loved her, and although he knew the emotions would never be reciprocated, he wanted someone else to know what he felt in that moment. He wanted her to look into someone else’s eyes and feel that same stirring. Then, in a way, it would be like she was experiencing the strange emotions in regard to him, since he had given her life and the opportunity to live it.

But now he knew that by murdering her family he had stolen from her any hope of normalcy in the same way that his father’s actions had affected him. They were forever conjoined through their shared pain of an ordinary life lost. The thought filled him with sadness. He was truly a monster, just as he had been told over and over again.

The sound of someone splashing through the water and heading in his direction interrupted his thoughts. With Jennifer still vivid in his mind, the men approaching seemed unimportant. But he pushed away the memories and focused on the task at hand.

It was time to play.

David pressed forward down the shadowy corridor. Debris from the crumbling walls littered his path, and he’d seen trash left by the work crew floating by in the beam of his flashlight. He tried to move as soundlessly as possible, but he knew that anyone listening in the darkness would hear his progress and be warned of his approach, if not his exact location.

Then a noise echoed from behind him.

He immediately clicked off his light and ducked into an open doorway. With his back pressed against the wall, he listened for movement and readied his shotgun.

Another sound.

A bumping of debris?

He reasoned that the sound was the collision of two floating items. The impact could have been entirely innocuous, but it could also have been a disturbance in the water caused by a person’s movement.

He waited in the darkness, in the silence. He heard only the normal white noise of the basement, the gentle swirling of the water, and the hiss of the rain.

Realizing that he had been holding his breath, he exhaled slowly. The danger could have been imagined; he had no evidence to indicate otherwise. But the soldier in him wondered if a deadly enemy stood just out of sight, waiting for him to make a mistake and give away his position. If that was the case, the most patient hunter would win.

But it could be nothing, and he had no way of knowing for sure. Indecision racked his brain. He felt his chest tightening, dizziness closing in around him.

Not now
.

The panic attack danced at the edges of his mind, but he fought hard against the onslaught. Images from Samarra swept over him. Blood pounded in his ears. A recurring vision of one of the soldiers under his command flashed before him. Lying only five feet away, wounded and dying, the man’s eyes begged for help; his hand reached out to David for salvation.

But he hadn’t saved him. He had hidden and then run.

Gritting his teeth, he shook the images away.

And then it came: another noise.

This sound suggested movement through the water, and a shadowy figure walking past his doorway confirmed the conjecture.

So as not to draw attention with the movement, he slowly raised the shotgun, sighted in, and caressed the trigger. Sweat poured down the side of his face, and his heart thundered against his rib cage. It was now or never.

He began to squeeze back on the trigger.

But he hesitated. Something didn’t seem quite right.

Keeping the gun trained on the doorway, he let the shadow pass. After a few seconds, he swung into the hallway, flicked on his light, and took aim at the dark figure.

“Don’t move!” he shouted.

Within the beam of the flashlight, Jennifer cringed. She issued a surprised yelp and raised a pair of trembling hands.

He quickly pointed the shotgun away. “Dammit, Jennifer! What are you doing down here?”

“Banks told me what happened, so I came to help. I want to finish what I started.”

He shook his head and cursed under his breath. “You’re not going to be satisfied until you get yourself or all of us killed, are you?”