When the Levee Breaks
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie.
William Shakespeare
Warning: This chapter contains events unsuitable for the weak-minded. In fact, a few of the coming chapters probably will as well. You have been warned.
TWELVE
'Over here,' a voice called, and Hotch's head shot up. He had been searching for his missing agent for the better part of half an hour. He didn't think that finding her would take this long, and he was getting edgy. The voice had come from behind him, closer to the police station than the road on the other side of the trees. He ran back through the trees, branches slapping at his body. He ignored them.
The owner of the voice had been Officer Sternberg, a man Hotch hadn't yet had a chance to talk to.
'What is it?' asked Hotch, breathlessly.
Sternberg shone his torch at a spot on the ground. Blood. Hotch's heart skipped a beat. He examined the scene with a profiler's eye. Someone had been shot, but they didn't fall right away. A disturbance of the ground – that could have been a body hitting the dirt. They weren't dragged away. Carried, most likely – there were boot prints right next to the patches of blood.
'Someone stood next to the blood, and then walked back this way, and then back to the blood again.' He couldn't bring himself to say the work body, knowing full well whose body it would have been. 'Then...the prints – heavier, as if he were carrying something – walked in the direction of the road.'
Officer Sternberg checked the direction of the prints. 'They stopped at this tree,' he said, running the torch up the trunk. 'There's a hollow here.' He shone the torch inside the tree, and then assumed an expression of excitement. 'In here.'
Hotch saw what had gotten Sternberg so intensified. He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket, sure that the unsub wouldn't have left fingerprints, but careful nonetheless.
'Find something?' Rossi and Detective Walters had been searching at the opposite end of the trees, but they had heard Sternberg's call. In circumstances like these, you kept a wary ear for any news.
Hotch grimaced. It was a face Rossi had seen many times before, but never so dejected. He removed the objects from the tree hollow, showing them to Rossi; a service pistol, a cell phone, and a DVD case.
'The unsub's got her,' said Rossi with a melancholy understanding.
Emily woke up, thinking it was hours later. In reality it had been something like half an hour, but already, things were considerably different.
The pain had dulled a bit, and the fuzziness in her mind told her that she was at the very least on painkillers. She had been stripped to her underclothes; the bullet wound had been treated somewhat carelessly, as if by someone who wasn't quite sure what they were doing. She didn't see the reason in healing her just to injure her again. Though, she acknowledged, not all psychopathic kidnappers saw reason. She corrected herself subconsciously; this guy was more of a sadist than a psychopath, though there were psychopathic tendencies.
A blank face shone a light into her eyes. No, she corrected herself again. Not a blank face, a masked face. The unsub.
'Not so self-important now,' he muttered. She had heard the voice before, but wasn't quite sure where. Of course, that didn't exactly narrow it down much – if he had taken her, it was because she had pissed him off in some way, and that generally required some kind of meeting.
It was a conscious effort for Emily not to respond. Antagonising him would just piss him off even more.
'Do you know what this is?' He held up something that looked like a long rod. Her vision blurred, she couldn't quite make it out. The question was answered, though, when he pressed it up against her neck. The electricity arced through her body, and she tried to shut the pain out of her mind, difficult though it was.
'Cattle prod.' He answered the question for her. '5000 volts. 5000 can be fatal, but none of my victims have died from it yet.' He shocked her again, and she let out a half-moan. 'Well, not from the prod, anyway.'
He started to boast, and she took a few moments to clear her mind of the agony. She knew she could stand the torture, if she closed her mind to it. The problem was, she would destroy the humanity she had worked so hard to achieve.
It was a tough choice to make; humanity or sanity.
She still wasn't sure which she'd pick.
A/N: Okay. Ouch. I think torture scenes are fascinating to write, and I'll admit that that's half the reason I wrote this fic. However, my understanding of the human body and its limits is not quite up to scratch, so forgive me any glaringly obvious medical errors; it's fiction. Don't forget to read and REVIEW. Cheers, tfm.