Before Cassie could ask questions about what would happen to her, she would have to answer some very awkward questions from her captors. As she had taken her decision to silence the women she had not thought very far into the future. It had been all about instinct and a ferocious need to protect herself. She wasn't prepared for the interrogation that she now faced.
She sat at a desk opposite the Captain and Sam. Cassie had a glass of water next to her and some food. They were treating her well so she assumed that her story about being a reluctant member of the gang was being believed. The military man started by asking her how she had got mixed up with the raiders in the first place.
"I was on my own and scared and they found me. I thought I would be better off with a group of people and by the time I learned what they were like it was too late." At this point Cassie managed to squeeze out a tear before she carried on. "The men would take turns to sleep with the women and because I was not scarred, they all wanted to use me." She paused to let her revelation sink in.
The Captain asked if she had ever tried to escape and she explained that they were always confined and guarded. Sam then started talking about the murders of the women and children. Who had killed them and why? Cassie almost stumbled over her words as she told her next lie.
She began her sentence with "Dan, the leader..." and then stalled. She was just about to accuse her deceased lover of committing an atrocity. She had used his name and now she had to carry on.
In for a penny in for a pound Cassie thought as she improvised her story. She could blame Dan for everything. She told Sam and the Captain how he planned his ruthless attacks and subjected everyone in the gang to random acts of violence. He had murdered that poor girl from the village and had even joked about how he got "two for one" when he had seen she was pregnant.
He had always seemed a bit unhinged and when the gunfire had started, he had snatched up a knife and gone on the rampage through the house. She had been in the first room he entered and had seen him strike down two women and a child. Cassie had managed to get out of the room and had ran into the nearest unoccupied room and hidden.
The tears flowed as she spoke about the terrible choice she had to make. Should she try to warn the other women or should she save herself. Dan would be hot on her heels and she knew that she would not have enough time to go to the other two rooms, convince the occupants of the danger and get them to leave. The gunfire that they could hear was adding to the confusion and asking them to leave the supposed safety of the farmhouse would have been a hard sell.
Her interrogators considered her evidence and then asked more questions. Why did she think that Dan had acted in that way? This whole thing was beginning to get tedious thought Cassie. How the hell would she know what he was thinking? What he would have been thinking had he actually committed the murders. She was running out of ideas and couldn't be bothered to think up a reason for his actions.
A note of irritation crept into her voice when she replied. "I don't know what he was thinking. People like Dan do stuff that cannot be explained. He was mad I suppose."
"Was he mad as in angry or deranged?" Sam wanted her to clarify her statement.
"Both." Cassie said. She gave examples of when he had killed or hurt people before. The instances she described were in reality things that she had done.
The Captain listened to her stories of Dan's violence and then commented. "It sounds to me as if he was a psychopath. What do you think Sam?"
Sam gave a definition of the characteristics of a psychopath. They were uninhibited and bold and showed no remorse for their actions. They could not empathise with others and behaved in an antisocial manner. It certainly seemed likely that Dan was displaying the signs of a personality disorder.
The two men left Cassie alone after thanking her for answering their questions. They could see that it had been difficult for her to talk about what had happened. Sam spoke to the Captain once they were outside the room saying that they should keep an eye on their prisoner in case she showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Cassie's mask dropped as soon as she was left alone. She hated having to snivel and act like a feeble woman in front of these men. The interrogation had been most unpleasant. She had been forced to come up with lies on the spot and had ended up letting Dan take the blame for her actions. It didn't matter because he was dead but she was alive and needed to convince her captors that she was an innocent bystander.
The talk about the definition of a psychopath had been most enlightening. Cassie went through the things that they had said and applied them to herself. Bold and uninhibited, that was certainly true. She didn't show remorse for her actions and couldn't begin to understand why she should do so. Empathy, which she thought was something to do with imagining how others felt, simply wasn't applicable. Antisocial behaviour, well she thrived on that.
Rather than being horrified at being described as a psychopath Cassie was quite pleased with her diagnosis. Her feeling of superiority had just gone up another notch. She had escaped the plague, as her scar free body illustrated, and now she had a new distinctive categorisation. Psychopath. She tried out the word a few times in her head and then said it out loud. "Cassie Ford, immune and a psychopath." She was laughing.