Dead in a Minute

                It was late at night and the phone rang; a startling noise in the silence around me. Wondering who on earth would be calling at this hour, I padded my way across the wooden floors of the cottage and picked up the antique receiver.

                “Alex. Leave the house now. They’re coming,” A frantic voice whispered.

                Before I could even process the words, I heard a loud banging on the front door. They were here. The Federal Bureau of Investigation.

                The FBI.

                The unit shoved down the door and trampled through the cottage like a herd of elephants. Two of the heftier FBI agents seized me by the arms and handcuffed my wrists, as the remaining ten surrounded me, guns positioned in my direction.  Seconds later, I was hauled out the door into the static night, and hoarded into a shiny black van.

                Soon, I was escorted through the swinging glass doors of the clandestine quarters of the Bureau’s colossal brick building.

                Before I could utter a word of remonstration, the men took me into an undersized room with a two way glass window on one wall. Several people huddled outside the window to watch my execution. The men strapped me onto a gurney and inserted an IV into each of my arms. Today would be the day of my death.

                I had been held captive as a child. I had been at the grocery store with my mother. One second I was in the soup isle, holding her hand, and the next, I was in a large black sack in a truck. I had lived with my abductor from the age of six, till I was seventeen. The remaining ten years of my life were simply a reaction to the previous ones. The abduction gave me a grandiose demeanor, and an insatiable appetite for sadism. I was a sociopath. Killing the thirteen women was only an act to prove the control and dominance I possessed.

                The past two years, I had concealed myself in my cottage in the woods, only accepting calls from my partner, whom I had met while being held captive years ago. We had worked together and been an exceptional team. We had used lying, deceiving and manipulation to lure our victims, eventually killing each of them with large kitchen knives.

                Now the FBI had finally found me, and my end was near. I wouldn’t be hurting any more people any more. I felt no mercy or remorse as the lethal injection began to seep into my veins. They would first plunge the barbiturate, then the paralytic, and finally the potassium solution. I could feel the fatal drugs suffocating me. The faces of my victims flashed before my eyes. Seconds before I fell unconscious, my beautiful mother’s face appeared in my mind: an image from nearly twenty five years ago.

                Then suddenly, the world departed from me.

                 Alex Drake was no more.