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Every person on Ice Island has an agenda—some understandable, some convoluted, some downright sadistic. Evelyn Hawthorn is a case in point. I’ll tell you about them all later… if we make it that long.
Ice Island is home to violent psychopaths too dangerous to be housed in a normal penitentiary. They are experts at murder. They are adept at finding ways around the system—and the people who run it. Most of them have managed to slip out of high-security prisons.
Luckily for the public, Ice Island is inescapable. Unfortunately for the doctors working today, a brutal winter storm just barreled into the island. They have no power, no phones. They’re running low on supplies. There will be no assistance from the mainland—boats are no match for the icy waves.
But the patients on this island don’t want to be rescued. They’re hunting. And the only prey they’re interested in are the doctors who have kept them locked up all these years.
The patients on Ice Island want blood.
Enter case #281762: Evelyn Hawthorn. The woman is a genius, driven, but brutally dangerous to every single person on the island. Especially herself.
Evelyn is seeing and hearing things that aren’t really there. She can’t remember the crimes that led to her being locked up. And she’s the one who cut the power, trapping all of them inside the asylum.
Without the most dangerous woman in the compound and the information she has locked inside her brain, not a single person will escape Ice Island alive—without Evelyn, a woman who couldn’t remember her own name until four hours ago.
If you love unreliable narrators, locked-door thrillers, whodunnits with surprising endings, and well-developed characters that bleed straight onto the page, dive into Mad Broke Cold today! An intense and addictive read for fans of Gillian Flynn, Freida McFadden, and Lucinda Berry.
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“Dark, mind-bending, twisted, and disturbing, this gripping psychological thriller will have you questioning everything! A master of storytelling, O’Flynn expertly unravels the island’s secrets in a manner that will shock you to your core. An epic and addictive must-read.” ~Bestselling Author Emerald O’Brien
CHAPTER 1
There’s an unofficial categorization tool at psychiatric hospitals, whispered among the shrinks: Mad, Broke, Cold. If outsiders knew about it, they’d gnash their teeth and rant about the political incorrectness of it all, but they’ve never purposefully surrounded themselves with those who’d like to stab their eyes out. Sure, we’ve all met at least one person who has considered how our skin might look stretched over a fashionable armchair, but that’s beside the point. Stories like this one can’t go forward without transparency.
So… Mad, Broke, Cold.
Mad, so named for the Mad Hatters. Severe, persistent conditions do not respond to the kind of therapy that twentysomethings reference on social media in quips that start with “OMFG, my therapist said.” The Mad require medications and monitoring, while dementia or schizophrenia eat holes in their gray matter. They’ll leave this world as insane as the day they were admitted to Ice Island—formerly Iverson Estate, then Iverson Sanatorium, more recently Iverson Psychiatric Hospital, though they might as well call it “Nothing Left to Lose Manor.” Welcome home, sick-os.
But I digress, as my father warned me I’ve a tendency to do. This is only one reason I spent much of my childhood locked away, where he did not need to listen to the grating tone of my voice or endure my long-winded nonsense.
Speaking of, I’d rather not prove him right.
Onward.
Broke, despite the moniker, has nothing to do with money. Trauma has severed the Broke from their old life, leaving them clawing at the walls as if they might unearth who they used to be before “it happened.” There’s help for the Broke—the Broken if you want to be pedantic about it. Pharmaceuticals, therapy, EMDR, shock treatment, oh, yes, there is hope for the Broke.
Of course, so long as there’s hope, it’s easy to believe that the problem is you. I always thought that if I just worked harder, I could figure out what I was doing wrong—that I could chase my demons away and be like the “normal folks” flaunting their “normal lives” like an endless parade of my own failings.
But demons don’t go easy. They burrow into your soul and violently resist exorcism. So long as you have hope, you have pain. I learned to cope over the years—I’m a bit of an asshole, but a rather well-adjusted, even likable one, if I do say so myself—but most are not so lucky. I’ve come to believe that unrequited hope, or hope for an impossible “normal” life, is a fate worse than death. Especially for those locked up here.
On Ice Island, Mad and Broke mean the same as the terms tossed around in mainland hospitals.
Cold is a different matter.
On the mainland, the Cold are looking for “three hots and a cot”—psychiatric admissions that peak in early February before the ground thaws. These are the people no one notices on the street except to skirt their outstretched palms. Veterans, useless to the government once they’ve given up a limb to the cause; those with no access to medications or therapy until they open their wrists and force too-brief emergency room treatment; lonely chaps with no loved ones to notice when they lose touch with reality. But losing one’s grasp on reality doesn’t necessarily make one dangerous.
Keyword: necessarily.
I should clarify this up front: “psychopath” is not equivalent to “murderer.” Antisocial personality disorder ups the chances for homicide, the warrior gene trips aggressive tendencies into overdrive, but it’s childhood trauma that flips the—forgive me—“kill” switch. Either the Mad, Broke, or Cold might be triggered to bathe in your blood. Convince any person that they can’t survive unless they do awful things, and they’ll pick up a blade. If you’re lucky, they’ll use it on themselves.
If you’re not so lucky? Well.
No one on Ice Island is literally cold, and this is for the greater good. The Cold want your skin stretched over that armchair, your entrails braided into a delicate pull cord, your fat used to fuel the fire in their hearth. Barring this, you’re as useless to them as the homeless are to you—those you ignore because “he might spend it on liquor” or whatever moral justification helps you sleep. The Cold have similar justifications for the things they’d like to do to you, and neither of you is more right—or wrong—than the other. Perspective is a funny thing, is it not?
Anyway.
If you inadvertently meet someone Cold on the mainland, you might be fine. We all know at least one person we’d call a “psycho,” and half of us are probably right. But on the mainland, most Cold have learned to behave. They can flip their “kill switch” off; they care about consequences. They still have things to lose.
But unlike you, clomping down the street in your snow boots, pretending no one else exists, the Cold on Ice Island don’t skirt outstretched palms. They’ll grab your hand, yank you into whatever hell they deem fit. You’ll never see them coming—never see them go, either, unless they screw up.
Which is why they’re here.
Make no mistake: despite whatever error got them caught, those locked up on Ice Island are viciously smart. Smart enough that the powers that be refuse to lock them in prisons due to risks to other murderers, refuse to put them anywhere they might escape. And an island off the coast of Alaska is as close as it gets to inescapable, as it was designed to be—as Alcott Iverson’s family ensured it was.
But dear Alcott is a story for another time, as are the stories of the patients who reside here. Their case files, histories, police reports, hospital records—I have them all. I’ll transcribe them for you, word for word, as they become relevant. It’s interesting stuff, I assure you, without a single embellishment. Every person in this facility has an agenda, some understandable, some endearing, some convoluted, some downright sadistic. I’ll tell you all about them later…
If we make it that long.
CHAPTER 2
This story begins, as all stories do, at the beginning. Over six months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. Picture me with a flashlight aimed under my chin campfire-style. I think it helps to set the mood.
It smelled of lavender in the doctor’s conference room.
The white coats all sat around a large mahogany table, circular to facilitate teamwork during patient meetings. They could have called those meetings “Shrink Sync” or “Freud and Friends,” even “The Brainy Bunch.” Instead, they deemed them “Roundtables,” aggressively unimaginative, as if the years of puttering about in people’s heads had broken their funny bones. Today, said “Rorschach Roundtable”—See how easy that is?—only forced them to look into one another’s tense eyes.
Well, mostly tense. Dr. Zachary Miller, his white coat hanging low on his lanky frame, was strangely cheery that morning. I’ve always thought of him as “The Piano Man” for reasons that will soon become apparent. Cheeriness is a positive trait for a shrink under normal circumstances, but the doctors in that room didn’t need cheery. Nor did they need Sydney Thompson—AKA “Bitch Ariel”—leaking salt all over her sky-blue sweater, the same hue as her eyes.
No, they did not need cheeriness or tears. The doctors around that table needed strength.
Their hospital was under attack.
Dr. Benjamin Bennett cut his gray eyes toward the window—“Dr. Ben,” if you’re nasty and old enough to remember Janet Jackson. On any normal day, you could see snow-capped mountains spearing the heavens in stark relief against the pewter sky, the dark water speckled with floating ice. Today, the only thing beyond those panes was pure white. The storm hadn’t so much rolled in as it had smashed into the island like the Kool-Aid Man, and it had since held us all hostage.
But I’ve always felt a bit like a prisoner. I’m not a patient—I swear, I’d tell you if I was—but humans rarely need barred cells to feel trapped. Some of us are born this way, stuck inside our own heads. Especially those of us who started life trapped in a dark room.
There’s that long-winded tone again. My apologies.
“So, Dr. Bennett,” Dr. Miller purred—one of his incisors was chipped. “I’m trying to be optimistic, but I have concerns. As I imagine we all do.”
“Damn right we do,” snapped a voice from the back side of the table. The wan gray light cast the scars that covered half of Luther Carter’s face into stark relief, pits and crevasses that no one would use to upholster furniture. Dr. Luther Carter—“Unsexy Deadpool”—and his mountain range of craggy flesh was proof that the Broke didn’t need to be Cold to hurt you.
“We’re outnumbered,” Dr. Thompson whined. She swiped her red curls from her face along with the salt on her cheeks. “I just want to go home.”
Dr. Ben Bennett kept his gaze on the window to ensure she couldn’t see him roll his eyes—did she think the rest of them didn’t want to go home? He was in charge, the head of this damn hospital, but he could be the king of Ice Island, and it wouldn’t matter. The power outage had locked the building down, trapping patients and doctors alike within its walls.
The Iversons had been smart. When the hounds unearthed a pile of bodies behind their Juneau estate, they didn’t turn their eldest son—dear Alcott Iverson—over to the police. No, the horrors of that house were only discovered after the estate sold, which I suppose is the way it goes when you’re rolling in big oil money.
No one knows precisely where the Iversons got the money to invest in oil in the first place, but they used it well, building Alcott a grand stone castle on this pile of rock. You can say they did it for “public safety,” but I think only so many housekeepers can vanish before the law comes knocking, and however they made their money, it wasn’t by being stupid.
But I digress, as I’m sure you’ve noticed I’m prone to do. The point is that when Jacob Iverson built this house for his son, he did it with captivity in mind. And as the years went on, as Iverson Estate became Iverson Sanatorium and then Iverson Psychiatric Hospital, security evolved with it.
Hence, the problem for the head of a castle turned asylum turned prison for the criminally insane. From its inception, the stone walls were built to keep people in. If safety protocols were disrupted, not even the staff could escape. The governmental bodies who regulate such things would rather sacrifice a few doctors than allow the residents of Ice Island free rein. You might be thinking something saccharine like “even one innocent life is one too many,” but you’d be wrong.
Would it change your mind to know that at the time of that meeting, only a fifth of those who had begun the storm with breath in their body remained breathing? They’d lost the majority of the staff. There were no more guards.
And ten patients were more than enough to overpower the five nervous white coats in that conference room.
So, as Dr. Ben stared out at the storm, he pondered their options—was there a way to get out of that building? But like Alcott, who had tried to escape hundreds of times in his day, Dr. Benjamin Bennett came up with nothing. The only way out was a set of two keys turned simultaneously, keys possessed by two different staff members, a failsafe that might have worked in a perfect world—in a world where those in this room possessed the keys.
Alas, they did not. Both keys were missing. One had been taken from the desk drawer in his office, the other yanked from the body of the first doctor to succumb when the lights went out.
Dr. Ben swallowed hard, belly churning, seeing Dr. Aliza Cunningham as she’d been yesterday at the bottom of the stairs, throat gaping like a second mouth, a chasm of ripped tendon glistening in the glow of the frosty skylight. Evelyn had been lying on the floor beside her, head surrounded by blood. He’d thought Evelyn was dead, too, until he heard the gurgling hiss of her breath.
Ben finally turned, blinking, the room dim after the blinding white of the snow. “We’re not outnumbered on the main floor,” he said. “And Lincoln has been cackling for three hours. I don’t think he’s going to attack from his wheelchair.”
“He’s probably laughing at us mere mortals, stuck here like fish in a barrel,” Dr. Carter said in a voice like gravel, those angry vocal cords another gift from the flames that had stolen his beauty. They’d all met patients who believed themselves to be gods or Jesus, kings or Hitler, even Joan of Arc. A self-proclaimed “God of Fire” was responsible for Dr. Carter’s face. Delusions of grandeur are dangerous—unchecked power always is.
“I don’t trust him,” Dr. Carter finished.
Dr. Ben nodded slowly, taking in the redheaded Dr. Thomson, leaning against the wall, sobbing quietly; skinny, bald Dr. Miller, worrying a raw spot behind his left ear; Dr. Carter around the back of the table. And the last doctor, the biggest among them, standing just behind Burning Man.
“You’re right,” Ben said. “I’ll increase Lincoln’s meds. We don’t need him upsetting the rest.”
They needed all the help they could get. They were in trouble. Big trouble. Broke-Cold trouble.
“This isn’t how this facility is supposed to function,” Dr. Thompson whispered. She sucked snot back into her throat.
“Well, we can’t put everyone in the basement,” Dr. Sharp snarled from his place at the far side of the table, finally joining the conversation.
If you crossed an American flag, a military-grade assault rifle, and a walrus mustache, you’d get Dr. Raymond Sharp, and he’d been irritable since the power went out. You could tell what he was thinking by the set of his jaw: He should be banging the redhead in his office right now, or—less appealing—having a Valentine’s dinner with his bitch wife, maybe even vacationing somewhere that wouldn’t freeze his balls off. But under no circumstances should he be stuck on this godforsaken island. His gaze dropped to Sydney’s breasts, then back to her tear-streaked face. Maybe he could talk her into a stress-relief fuck.
“We just have to convince the patients to cooperate. One of them has the keys,” The Piano Man said, running a hand over his shorn head with a grating bristly sound.
That much was true—the keys were their only hope. The phones were dead, like the electricity. By design, there had never been cell service on Ice Island, but not all designs have a positive end. And that was precisely what the Mad, Broke, and Cold were counting on.
Ben frowned when he caught Dr. Sharp shooting bayonets from his eyeballs squarely at The Piano Man. It wasn’t Dr. Miller’s fault. He hadn’t given Evelyn those keys.
But someone had. Evelyn Hawthorn was manipulative with a capital M. Ben knew as much from experience. Plus, she’d been here longer than anyone else, save three—long before Ben himself.
Though the others didn’t know it, Evelyn was the reason Dr. Bennett had come to Ice Island in the first place. And now he was stuck here.
He didn’t want to die here.
“Evelyn knows how they escaped last time,” Dr. Thompson said, swiping her fingers beneath her puffy eyes. “She has to.”
Those patients had made it out of the building, but most had frozen in the icy water. Evelyn hadn’t set foot in the water, of course; whether she was smart enough to get out of the building, her sister had drowned when they were children—she even refused to take baths.
“There has to be a way,” Dr. “Ariel” Thompson finished. “Evelyn knows how to get out.”
“She’s dangerous, but we need her if we want to get off this island alive,” Dr. “Deadpool” Carter agreed.
“Maybe a few hours in a rubber room will help,” Raymond Sharp said.
Dr. Ben was already shaking his head—introspection would not help Evelyn, not after what had happened yesterday—but Dr. Thompson interrupted, “Quiet Rooms.”
Dr. Sharp turned that dagger glare her way. Why did Sydney have to keep talking, softening his hard-on? They all knew the nomenclature. Quiet Rooms. Personal Safety Rooms. Whatever they called them, it did not make them any less Solitary Confinement.
“Most of those rooms are full because of Edward,” Dr. “Piano Man” Miller said, then, in a lower murmur, “That psycho.”
“They’re hunting us,” Dr. Thompson whimpered. “And if we can’t figure out where they hid those keys…”
Dr. Thompson was not hysterical, despite the way Raymond Sharp was glaring at her tear-streaked face. There were no tears in war, and Dr. Sharp was sure that Ice Island was now a war zone. None of them had anticipated this when they’d woken yesterday morning to the storm.
The room went black, the generator blinking off.
A scream cut the ozone, bloody and shrill.
The room vibrated with thunder, every one of them feeling the tension like the cracking of ice on water—snap, crackle and pop, pop, pop. The jaundiced lights flickered back.
Dr. Benjamin Bennett looked around the room at his colleagues, their eyes hollow above their white coats. They were scared. The razor’s edge tension in the room might explode into hysteria with a single wrong word—Dr. Thompson was already leaning that way. It was up to him to keep the peace, to get them out alive.
But would he succeed?
I was rooting for him. He was on the side of right—had good intentions. That hadn’t always been the case, but who among us is perfect?
Everyone has good in them when the world is good and right and just. When life goes bad, any human can go bad. And that day, every single person on Ice Island was vulnerable. They had already suffered horrific losses. The food stores would not last the week. And this carefully calibrated escape plan put into motion by a group of villainous patients included a guaranteed lack of assistance from the mainland.
Those on this island would not wait for the storm to break—the Mad, Broke, and Cold did not want to be rescued.
They wanted blood.
Dr. Thompson was right: those in that room were being hunted. They had four days at the very most. Four days to find a way out, or they were all dead.
And without the most dangerous woman in the compound and the information she had locked inside her brain, none of them would escape Ice Island.
Without Evelyn, a woman who couldn’t remember her own name until four hours ago.