DECOY

© Christopher Jacobsmeyer

  David lay on the torture rack drawing in ragged breath after ragged breath. Adam stood over him. "We can do this the easy way,” he began, "or we can do it the hard way." At this, Adam ran a wickedly curved blade underneath David's skin. David screamed in agony, unable to bear the pain any longer. Trying to focus on anything but the pain, David thought back to a few hours earlier...

   David inched his way across the warehouse, pausing periodically as the camera turned his way. He only had to make it to the far side of the room before he reached his objective: a circuit breaker that would allow him to cut the power, thus enabling a strike team on the outside to gain admittance.

  Something nagged at David. He couldn't quite make sense out of the positioning of the breaker in relation to the entrance to and exit from the room. Edging forward, still trying to put a finger on it, it struck him: the cameras never once turned toward the doorways. One camera was trained on the breaker at all times. By the time David's senses screamed that it was a trap it had already been sprung. Gas issued up from the grates in the floor...

  "Just tell me the location of the BlackDie schematics and I may let you go. Ignore me, and the pain will become more excruciating." Without waiting for an answer, Adam flensed more flesh from David's body. He secretly wished that David would not give up the whereabouts so that he could continue to enjoy his gruesome hobby.

  David struggled to retain consciousness. "D-D-Diana...,” he croaked. In reality, he had no clue where the location was. Hell, he didn't even know what BlackDie was. Adam would believe what he wanted anyway. There was nothing that David could convince him of otherwise.

  A gasp from Adam brought David up out of his misery. "What in the blazes is this?" He held up a microchip for David to see, blood dripping from it to the floor. David was just as puzzled. He never recalled something as big as that microchip being injected into him back at Base. "No matter,” Adam muttered. He turned and walked to a scanner. Within seconds, the lights in the torture chamber flickered and went out completely. Adam started screaming. "You blasted dogs set me up!" David lost consciousness before he could hear more.

   Two days later...

  David walked out of the conference room, disgusted. It had been a set-up! And he was left out of the loop! Vowing never again to work for WINCHESTER, he made his way out of the building. He grudgingly admitted one thing: it worked. It gods blasted worked. As much as he hated to think about it, he would have done the same thing had he been in his superiors' shoes. He never did figure out what the true objective of the mission had been. It didn't matter, though. He was through.