The Watcher
Summary: They kept him alive the longest because they thought he was the weakest. But they didn't know they had turned him savage. Multiple Character Death.
Author's Note: First of all, my beta would like me to explain that if you don't like dead baby jokes, then you probably won't like this. Do not ask me where this came from, because I absolutely couldn't tell you. I wrote this a long time ago, showed it to LaughableBlackStorm, but never posted it, mostly because at the time, I was unsatisfied with it. But rereading it in an attempt to edit it, add to it, etc, I realized that it didn't need anything else. Still, something doesn't feel right to me about this story. Maybe because it didn't come out as twisted as I expected it to (Ha!) but for whatever reason, I don't know it, so I can't fix it, so I submit it for your approval. Maybe you can tell me what's wrong with it.
Vegas had always been an ugly city and Greg Sanders had always thought he had seen it at its worst. That was before the explosion at the prison. Killing guards and inmates alike, it blasted away the main wall and those who weren't dead or too wounded to walk ran out. It had been their job to discover what went wrong, and what caused the explosion. The FBI had enlisted their help in collecting the evidence. They weren't told why they were sent in there with a handful of officers on their own, without FBI escort. They didn't know that they were bait.
Greg remembered walking the halls as if it were a haunted house at a carnival. He had been smiling at the time in grim fascination, making the best out of a shocking tragedy. Grissom had been stoic, calm, and tall as he led the way down the deserted, dank corridors of the prison as they searched further into the slowly crumbling structure to see if any of the prisoners had left something behind. Sara and Nick were working by the new hole in the wall. Greg never knew what happened to them, unaware that his last words to them would echo in his head days later, when he was convinced that he was on his last breath. The rest of them had followed Grissom into the dungeon, which was now a tomb, cataloguing corpses and looking for anything suspicious.
Catherine had stridden confidently at his side, so close that he could hear her breathing, but that wasn't difficult in the echoing tunnels of the prison. Warrick had looked anxious standing closer to Grissom as he examined the walls. Greg remembered that he had commented about the stability of the structure, and whether they should be in there at all.
Grissom had been counting bodies. He had been distracted.
Warrick had been nervously and futilely checking the walls with his hands. He hadn't been paying attention to anything else.
But Greg knew he should have seen something, heard something, felt something, because one minute, he had been walking quietly beside Catherine, and the next she was gone. He'd noticed immediately, but couldn't understand why so he'd whirled around. He had seen the officers behind them raise their guns and he had waved his flashlight in their direction in time to see two shadows flicker across the stream, and then there had been three gun shots and all three of their body guards had fallen to the floor.
By this time, Grissom and Warrick had come away from their respective distractions and were staring in the same direction as Greg. He'd strained his ears and heard a strange whimper, like that of a drowning puppy dog right before it takes its last gulp of air. It had been disturbingly familiar, like the laughter of a dead friend that woke you up in a chilling dream. And something in him had known what would happen next.
And then, he was here.
He didn't know why he was here.
What he did know was that this wasn't a prison. At least, not the prison it pretended to be. The inmates were not the average rapists and murderers that inhabited a Federal Prison. They were far beyond that. The nation's worst offenders, all locked up together in a confine outside of America's own personal Sodom.
Vaguely, Greg remembered watching a piece on the History Channel on conspiracies of government sponsored torture rings on United States soil. Who needs a Guantanamo, the narrator had commented, when you have several prison camps hidden in your own backyard?
There was a laboratory beneath the prison that remained intact after the massive explosion, partially due to the fact that it was underground. Greg imagined that it hadn't always been under the rule of the inmates. But the lab rats had revolted. They'd bitten the hand that fed them and infected their torturers.
It had never been about ransom, or negotiating, or anything like that. These acts had been about the torture, pure and simple. They were doing it under the guise of revenge, but they merely used it as an excuse. Because the truth was, even if they weren't rapists and murders when the government sent them to this place, they definitely were now.
They had known from the start how to break each of their characters. For Grissom, things had been mostly psychological. Grinding his mind until he snapped. For Warrick, it was physical to the point that rapidly turned into a completely different build of flesh and bone, contorted and unnatural like a Picasso painting come to life. And for Catherine, so strong, so very strong, but Catherine was not strong enough.
It was impossible for Greg not to remember how they died.
Because they had exploited his greatest weakness, too, just as they had known how to break the others.
Grissom had barely known his own name. Greg had witnessed everything. Injections, pills, noise, darkness, electric shock… He was a shell of what he used to be. Greg had watched them drain him. Watched the eyes slowly scooped carelessly into a bucket, pink and red slime. They'd tried to feed it to him, but he'd thrown up first and knocked it to the floor. He had paid for that. They picked it up. And Grissom would always be inside of him after that. And not just his eyes.
Warrick had been barely living at all when they'd chosen to end him. That hadn't taken much at all. All they had to do was give him the gun. His brains still painted the white walls in the room he was in.
Catherine had been pale. Just so beautifully, porcelain pale. Cuts and bruises decorated her skin and when she'd been thrown for the last time into the room where Greg resided, the viewing room, she didn't even pretend to be modest about her lack of clothing. Greg had tried not to see her, more than any other torture. He had tried to look away every time, but they'd never let him. They'd laughed.
There had been nothing left in her eyes. She looked at him, not even seeing at all, a blind Cassandra. She knew and could not change her fate. She didn't even scream when they sliced the line down her chest to her naval. A live autopsy. And she didn't even scream.
Finally, it was his turn.
But just like all the others, Greg Sanders was not the same person that had entered the ruins of that prison. They kept him alive the longest because they thought he was the weakest. But they didn't know they had turned him savage.
The remnants of his mind had gone through the steps one by one. He had been flexing his muscles, itching for his chance, and he saw it on the horizon. It had never been about escape. It had only ever been about vengeance, pure and simple.
They thought he was weak, and that was their grand mistake. They sent in one man, who unbound him from his chair, let Greg rise to his feet, which did not shake as they supported his weight. If the man had bothered to look into Greg's eyes, he would have seen that they were as empty as Catherine's had been.
But this was a different sort of empty.
The man was struck hard across his face, prison tattoos and all, and it probably wouldn't have worked if he'd been expecting Greg to pull something like that. But he hadn't been. They'd thought that they had broken him. Greg knew that he was broken, but not the way they wanted.
He brought up his knee, all those Tai Chi classes and toning his muscles paying off, and he used some moves from his shattered memories before he seized the knife that had been used to cut his binds and thrust it with as much force as physically possible into the man's gut before he twisted it.
It wasn't long after that before the lights to every underground lab went out.
But Greg was used to the darkness. They had plunged him into it before, and he navigated the corridors like a snake, slashing at another inmate he found at the hall, stealing a gun, rounding them up, tossing them in the viewing room, leaving the majority of them alive, but injured.
He scoured the dungeon until he found them all, every last rat, driven by rage, adrenaline and no will to survive at all. He took risks he might have never taken if he'd expected to escape with his life. Greg Sanders would go down fighting, because he had inherited the spirits of those who came before him, and he felt their restless souls inside of him, and he was a man possessed. And everything fell into place as if karma had laid the way for him, as if this were destiny, as if they all deserved what he wanted to do to them. The fact that a single man could take down an army of the nation's worst didn't seem unusual to him. The fact that he was that man seemed even less strange.
He was the Angel of Death and he would bring the carnage.
He stood behind the glass and flicked the lights on and off to catch their attention, but said nothing. He had already seen the vials. It was one of many that his eyes had flickered across in the room beyond the glass. He knew if he ever had the chance, he would see what it did. He plugged the vial into the gas feeder and turned it on.
They knew what was happening. The wounded and dying were the first to understand. They backed away towards the wall, and Greg watched.
And he watched.
The gas worked slowly, but the chemical interfered with the firing of their synapses. Some of them began to throw up. Others held a voracious glint in the whites of their eyes. Some were stalking the wounded like animals in the wild. But soon enough, all of them were attacking each other, biting each other, using the blades Greg had left in the room with them to skin each other and lick the wound like candy or swallow the skin whole. They bit into each others' flesh, and devoured each other, like ravenous wolves. Their appetite was insatiable, as Greg knew it would be by the very name of the vial he held. "The Wendigo Compound."
He did what they had taught him to do best. He watched. He bore witness, unaffected, as they stripped flesh off of each others' bones. Even when they were walking skeletons, they were still eating, always eating, always screaming, and none of them were individuals anymore. They were one massive, bloody organism, breathing as one, feeding off of itself until soon there would be nothing left. And Greg stayed until there was nothing left.
The spirits that had possessed him then dissipated, dissolving into the night air, and his purpose fled with them. Thoughtlessly, he wandered upward, not knowing where he was heading, but reaching for the light.
But it was dark outside when he climbed through the ruins. Still, to see the stars, it was as if he had stepped into another world. There was crime scene tape and abandoned other vehicles and not a sound, but there was her, there was she, standing beside a tent, and his movement in the rubble caused her to look up.
He wasn't sure whether to embrace her or snap her neck.
He had forgotten how to be human.
"Greg!"
Her shriek ran out across the grounds, piercing the night sky and she was running to him. She flung her arms around him and squeezed and he made up in his mind that it would probably be best to return the embrace, though he did so mechanically, without feeling.
Her call had roused someone from inside of the tent and this person was jogging over to them now, burly and bold, an Adonis compared to the monsters he'd seen below ground. And she was a goddess, radiant and alive and pale, it was true, but alive and sweet-smelling and her eyes held a shine to it that had long abandoned Catherine.
They were asking him where the others were, but he could not give them an answer. They were in the Hell that lived and died beneath their feet. Or perhaps they were elsewhere. Perhaps they had soared up into the velvet night sky and joined the ranks of the glittering stars. Perhaps he was fated to join them soon.
He hadn't expected to survive. He was a ghost, walking in the realm of gods, and he belonged to the underworld, the domain of demons.
His hands fell away from the goddess he clung to, because he could not be a part of her world anymore. The Adonis called his name several times, even dared to seize Greg's arm, but he turned and hissed at the man like a bobcat before proceeding to the tent.
He saw it there, on a table inside Nick Stokes' holster and he smiled at the old friend, his savior reborn.
He took the gun and mimicked Warrick, gripping it between his teeth, and then there was nothing.