The interviewer watched as tensions in the room began to bubble up for the three. She decided to take a break from interviewing until the atmosphere was a tad looser. They watched through the pile of untouched video tapes, one by one, getting fed up with the rationed food and the four Grey and white walls, speckled with warning signs stenciled on from a bigone era.

There were warnings against Communists, and the Taliban, and even the Koreans. Ted swore you could go on a tour of the times this bunker was used based on the paint colour alone. It was almost more eerie at night, with the silence looming over them and the corpses of various hit men being surprisingly effective scarecrows.

Unfortunately, while the warnings on the wall were shockingly contemporary, the entertainment systems seem to have crystalised at classic 80s movies and obscure 90s comedies.

At some point, rummaging in the back of the supply cupboard to the background music of a Robin Williams movie, someone found a bottle vintage liquor.

In articles and magazines, ten years from publishing, they’d all give conflicting answers on who suggested it, and where the drinks came from, but they’d all agree it was the right time to get shitfaced.

Whether it was an alcohol that ages well, or became worse over the years was irrelevant. A whiff from the bottle was enough to verify that it certainly wasn’t to be drank slowly, and it would need a mixer from the wall of tins and highly sugared artificial drinks determined to be ageless.

Between the four of them, they patched together a cocktail via the sickly syrups of the tinned fruit and the more transparent liquors stashed away. It might not have been the most chemically stable beverage, but when your life is on the line you tend to be less picky.

Besides, vodka was a sterilizer, right?

Irene braced herself, throwing back a tumbler of stale fruit syrups, water and vodka. It was barely a drink. She shuddered from the swill, popping her lips instinctively like she’d slurped a whole lemon, her eyes bulging and blinking.

In that instant she could understand why some liquors were used as cures in the Victorian era alongside the leeches and the random herbal soups. She certainly felt like her humours had been rebalanced and her “womanly hysteria” had fully disappeared.

“yowza that’s sweet! Bloody hell!” she said, chasing it with a glass of overfiltered lukewarm tap water. They’d tried to fix the atmosphere through strategic lighting, but all the sparkling lights and static fizzed screens in the world could never warm up the industrial, lifeless greys.

“Haven’t done that since I was a student” she barbled.

They went around the circle, everyone’s reaction worse than the last, the most extreme being the interviewer. You’d think a woman whose living was made walking in war zones recording the bloodshed would have a stronger stomach. “So” she said, spitting vodka from her syrup stained teeth as she tried to steer the conversation back. She’d made a big show of turning off the recorder hours earlier, but the dummy recorders in the corner were still scraping away getting every single detail. She’d have to edit aggressively if the audio was used for anything.

“So what’s the deal with that fella with the golden teeth? Rumour has it he eats people” the interviewer asked, her drunken idiocy half for show.

Irene and Ken gave each other a glance. “he’s not a cannibal no, the teeth are more for … recreational purposes” he answered, watching the interviewer’s eyes latch onto the dainty puncture wounds peaking out of his shirt’s top button. She was doing the maths, but petty sexual squabbles tended to be brushed to the wayside at a certain tax bracket.

The interviewer slurped up the last two fingers of mystery liquid like it was mouthwash. “So he’s sleeping with all his murder victims?” she asked candidly.

Irene tilted her head, holding back from giving the reaction she wanted. She burped a little, a demure hand in place to stop any breeches in dignity. This however, would be the last bit of dignity she’d manage before the booze and the sugars caught up to her.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“You-mean-fukkin’-Trevor?” she hickupped, the words crashing into each other like a water streams at the Trevi fountain.

“Fuckin’ IT fraud Trevor? Cyber crime Trevor? The blackmail king of Brooklyn heights?” she ranted, becoming gradually lucid that she shouldn’t be saying all this.

“That fucker’s no killer. He’s a keyboard warrior. Bit of a man-slag sure” She lulled back and forth. “But all his violence is done by sending emails to the cops letting them know he found someone with kiddie porn, or like threatening to tell a politician’s wife about his mistress” she gargled.

“Babe, he’s called the golden vampire because of a computer software. There’s a part in the code where the repeated Gs look like teeth” She ushered trying to sit up.

Ken began his husbandly duties, making sure his drunk wife was okay, and that she wouldn’t say anything stupid or dangerous. He ushered her back to the creaking military bunk beds and left her to sleep, glass of water by the bedside and a pack of ibuprofen that was still in date, What this place lacked in charm, it made up for in medical supplies.

He slumped back in the chair, watching the glow of the TV static, before turning it to a pixelated and pale impersonation of a fireplace roaring. “She’s not wrong though” he said, “Those corpses aren’t his doing,” He glanced over to the half awake investigator, as she sorted through her notes in the far end of the room.

“He’s like 26, he’s not a killer. He’s a kid who hacked a few bank accounts.” Ken justified.

If he could get the poor sod off the hook he’d have made this trip worth while. Naturally he neglected to mention Tanya, who was in fact bloodsoaked and far older than her plastic surgery body looked.

“I mean think about it, why would he off someone he slept with?” Ken baited.

“Maybe they know too much” the interviewer responded.

“They don’t, they’re local floozies. Someone shot them to send a message to him,” Ken proffered.

“You mean he hacked the wrong bank account and pissed off the wrong bully? That’s still getting them killed even if he didn’t press the trigger” she taunted, knowing in this state he’d be far closer to taking the bait.

“Its still a mile away from ‘Harlem man eats local prostitutes’ though, and I’ve only ever seen him take care of his girls, and his fellas” Ken abridged. Biting down the temptation to feed her more details.

“Are all crime families this … open to their options?” she asked, picking at him verbally.

He didn’t dignify that with a response, so she tried again to chide him, beginning to realize her childish games and dirty tricks weren’t getting the answers she was hoping they would.

“So where have you been hiding all these years? You seem to have a habit of making noise when you can. Retirement? Or maybe you just don’t have the spark anymore?” she needled, keeping her voice flat so as to not wake the lighter sleepers.

Irene may have plastered herself into a coma but Ted seemed to have been trying to keep his palette clean. She could half empathize with that, better to keep your wits about you, even if she tended towards liquid courage herself on more than one occasion of her documentary career. It’d become a running joke among her crew, she’d overheard them once talking about her trusty flask and how her hands shook with the microphone.

He groaned at her, not rising to the bait. “Back in ‘99 I’d have someone threaten a family pet for that kind of accusation” he told her. “You’re lucky we need you.”

She blinked, “I’m sorry, I’m just tired” she half-apologized.

“I’m not used to hospitality from my participants – my subjects are usually already dead, or wild animals” she acknowledged.

There was a dither where she went to add something, and stopped herself, instead opting for a softer approach. “I did look you up before the project though, There was a tip off that day at the airport” she told him.

He turned to her, trying to get a read for how real that comment was. “It was back in my radio days, I was working a little segment on killers, crooks, and criminals back in the day” she admitted.

“nothing detailed, just puff pieces, whispers around the docks, planes not arriving. That kind of thing, I’m pretty sure at one point we did a week on monster sightings. It was all very Scooby Doo” she chuckled, not quite fizzling out the tension as well as she’d hoped.

Ken groaned as he got up from his chair, his once devilish mature charms becoming sour from the attention. He may as well be a tiger at the zoo, the public gawking at him like that, he looked at her before he began to leave, not impressed by her at all.

“If you’ve been publishing all this for decades, why don’t I recognize you?” he asked, getting one last question in.

It was her turn to be put in the spotlight. She closed her file and began to get off the floor slowly,

“maybe you’re not a big newspaper reader” she deflected, like a highschooler pointing blame.

He glowered at her, “I’ve been arrested twice, once in 2002, once in the 80s. I got to know the crowds very well, learned to say whatever they needed me to” he remarked. “If you were writing about me, I’d know about it.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that. It wasn’t aggressive, it wasn’t a confession, it was a statement of fact, as flatly delivered as a funeral invitation. After a second, she didn’t need to. He got up from his armchair and joined his wife in the opposite bed.