I Am Death

Eighty-five

Hunter’s consciousness returned to him slowly and painfully. With every heartbeat, his head throbbed with an intense pain, like a spiked ball was pulsating at the center of his brain. He blinked a couple of times, but his eyelids felt too heavy for him to be able to fully open them, so for now he kept his eyes closed. He took a deep breath and as the warm air inflated his lungs, it seemed to also inflate that damn spike ball in his brain. Agonizing pain exploded inside his head like a furious thunderstorm and brought with it a second, searing and debilitating pain. This one ran the length of his arms, stretching and pulling at both ends as if his arms were about to be violently ripped from their sockets.

Hunter blinked again, but this time he finally found the strength to force open his eyes. Through the pain and the confusion, it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at — his bare feet resting on the floor, limp as if they belonged to a dead man. That was when he realized that he had been tied up in the exact same position they had found Alison Atkins inside that barn-like building. His arms were stretched high above his head. His wrists had been shackled together by a shiny steel chain and then looped around a metal pipe that ran across the ceiling. Two different padlocks kept it all in place. The chain was supporting the whole of his weight and it was biting deeply into his wrists. Thin lines of blood had run down his bare arms and over his shoulders.

Fighting the sickening pain in his head and arms, Hunter lifted his head and looked up. There was no way he was getting out of those shackles by himself.

‘I must admit that you’ve surprised me, Robert.’

The voice came from somewhere in the shadows in front of him. Hunter looked in that direction but saw no one.

‘I never thought you’d get here. I never thought you’d figure it out.’

Despite the voice sounding somewhat different from the one in the two 911 recordings he’d heard, Hunter was still able to recognize it. He’d heard it enough times.

That was why he showed no surprise when the man walked out of the darkness and stopped directly in front of him.

‘Hello, Robert.’