by Jason Parent
“I’m a federal agent investigating the criminal activities of this hospital and the mass murderer behind them. Dr. Horvat—”
“Now, I know you’re crazy. You? A federal agent?”
Link took a step back toward the door, shrinking a little behind Jimmy. “And Dr. Horvat? A mass murderer?” He scoffed. “She’s like the nicest lady in the world. She’s helped so many people, me included. I used to be a chain smoker. Not anymore.”
He took another step back. His shift in weight told Jimmy he was leaning against the door.
“Not another step,” the agent said. “Or I’ll have to shoot you.” He moved closer. “The way I see it is, you have two options—you can either let the kid go, get on your knees, and hope I’m a whole lot less crazy than you think I am, or I can just kill you now and be done with it. But if you move even one more inch, I’ll know you’ve gone with option two.”
Link let out a breath. It whistled through his nose and tickled Jimmy’s scalp. After about five seconds with no one doing anything, Link lowered Jimmy to the floor and slowly released his hold on the boy. He pushed Jimmy forward, maybe intending to push him into the gun, but the distance was too much. Instead, Jimmy staggered in front of the first stall and slid inside it to get out of the line of fire.
“Good,” the Bandage Man said. “Now, on your knees, hands behind your head.”
Jimmy could hear Link’s heavy breathing and assumed he was complying. He wondered what the Bandage Man’s plan was. They couldn’t exactly arrest Link, walk him right out the front door, then haul him off to prison. They had people to save and killers to stop. He looked around for a solution.
“Did she hypnotize you?” the Bandage Man asked.
“Yes, and I haven’t smoked a cigarette in like three months. She helped me with... another thing too.”
“And you never saw anything wrong with her taking people out of their bedrooms late at night and giving them off-the-books treatment?”
“Yeah, I know her methods are not normal. But she’s helped so many people. Like you and those bandages. You don’t need them anymore. Why you are wearing them still, I can’t figure out, but after she hypno—”
Jimmy broke the back cover of the toilet against Link’s forehead. The orderly toppled over then lay unmoving, blood trickling from a fresh wound.
“What the hell did you do that for?” The agent checked Link for a pulse, then sighed when he apparently found one.
Jimmy shrugged. “What else were we going to do with him?”
The Bandage Man rose and went to the sink. From the bag, he withdrew a small black phone, two ammo cartridges, a shiny badge that looked little different than a costume gag one might find at a thrift store, and a pair of handcuffs. He twirled the cuffs around a finger. “I could have used these.”
“Still can.” Jimmy smiled. “At least this way, he won’t be hollering for help for a little while. Or”—he yanked the whistle over Link’s head— “blowing on this thing.” He threw it in the toilet and flushed.
The agent sighed. He patted his clothes for pockets and places to stuff his equipment. Finding none, he kept it all in the bag except one of the cartridges.
“I guess I should thank you,” he said, loading the gun. “Not sure what he might have done had he known the gun was empty.”
Jimmy held out his hand. “Maybe you should give me that.”
“Like hell, kid.” The agent snorted. “Why would I do that?”
“You heard Link. You’ve been hypnotized by the doctor. You could be one of them, like Tessa, and not even know it.”
The agent’s brow furrowed. He tugged his lip. “I... I don’t remember that.” He seemed to consider handing Jimmy the weapon, then shook his head. “No, no. That didn’t happen. Anyway, if they got to me, they could have gotten to you too. And even if I am compromised, I’m not at the moment. If I think for a second that might change, you’ll be the first to know. And kid, if I start helping them, you’d better shoot me.”
Jimmy nodded. “Will do.”
The Bandage Man studied the unconscious man lying at their feet. “Well, looks like my cover is definitely blown.” He stuck out his hand. “Agent Matthew Pike, FBI. Nice to officially meet you, Jimmy.”
Jimmy shook his hand and nodded.
Agent Pike moved toward the door. “You ready for round two?”
Jimmy crept up beside him. “Let’s just find Mikey and get the hell out of here.”
CHAPTER 25
Michael blinked the sleep from his eyes. He awoke on a cart with plastic side rails under a high loft ceiling, his restfulness and comfort shattered by his strange surroundings and the memory of what had happened. The space was about the size of a studio apartment, but the walls and floor were bare, exposed wooden husks of pest-riddled wood. Besides another gurney to his left with Sam apparently unconscious upon it, Michael saw no furniture or anything of note except for a bucket in the corner. After seeing enough movies where people were taken hostage, kidnapped, or imprisoned in dirty shacks, he didn’t have to guess what the bucket was for, though he hoped they’d at least been courteous enough to leave him a TP roll.
He sat up. Aside from a thick steel door, which looked like it belonged on a submarine rather than affixed to the dying wood straining to support it, and the skylight letting in a hazy gray overcast, he saw no means of escape.
He checked his hands. Someone had put gloves on him, the stretchy plastic kind that cops and doctors used. His skin prickled as he wondered how they’d known to do that. His captors must have been confident in their ability to keep him locked up; they’d removed his wrist and ankle restraints. Sam stirred on the cart beside his. He hopped off the gurney and hurried to her side, where she thrashed as if in the throes of a nightmare.
Michael shook her arm, and her eyelids fluttered, briefly exposing blank white sheets. She groaned and rolled onto her side, her back to him. Sweat flowed in streams from her hairline down her face. He started to place his palm on her damp forehead but felt the heat emanating from Sam through his glove even before he made contact. She was burning up or burning off something, likely a side effect of whatever they’d injected into her.
His lips trembled. Come on, Sam. I need you. He thought about Dylan and Agent Spinney and Officer Tagliamonte, none of whom had been taken prisoner. A lump formed in his throat. The last he’d seen of Officer Tagliamonte, a masked woman had placed a gun against his head. As for Dylan and Agent Spinney, he didn’t know. Maybe they were alive and safe. Maybe they’d escaped and would bring help.
Maybe.
He jumped as a slot in the steel door slid open with a shick. It closed before he could see whoever was looking through it. Then the door opened. He sat beside Sam, taking her hand in his, eyes fixed on the person entering.
Dr. Mira Horvat was alone. Michael scanned the room for weapons, his mind formulating vague plans of escape even as the door closed tightly behind her. He fidgeted where he sat, his gaze still darting around the room for any symbol of hope and finding nothing. The doctor looked strong enough to take on four or five of him, but she was still just one woman. If he could get past her, get help—
“Even if you managed to escape,” Dr. Horvat said as if reading his thoughts, “he would only take it out on her. And although I mean no harm to her or you, my Carter would not be pleased. I would hate to see additional harm happen to either of you.”
Michael slumped forward. “Additional harm? Your boyfriend tried to kill me.” He sneered. “Somehow, I doubt he’ll stop before he succeeds.”
Dr. Horvat smiled and stepped closer. “True, he can be somewhat... unpredictable.”
“Unpredictable? He’s insane.”
“He can’t help it, Michael. He’s sick, like all the folks here in Ward D, some of whom have extremely violent proclivities. Imagine if we can help them to live normal lives. But I’m not there yet.
“Believe me, I’d rather be testing on them than those in prerelease, but the more unst
able the brain, the harder it is to reconfigure.”
Michael knew a bit about how treatments worked from his own brief conversations with psychiatrists, mostly to check up on his mental well-being after being nearly killed and taken hostage and injected with heroin. Depression could sometimes be treated through the patient’s efforts to almost restructure the way they thought with the help of therapy or a combination of drugs and therapy. So he had some idea what Dr. Horvat meant. Talking to strangers had never worked so well for him, and he was glad Sam hadn’t pushed the issue. But if it was no help to him, he found it hard to believe someone like Carter Wainwright could be “fixed” through a few casual chats. “You can’t fix that level of crazy.”
Dr. Horvat frowned. “True, those with more severe forms of psychosis can sometimes be managed the same way, but it’s not easy. To truly help them without a lifelong dependency on treatment? We’re working on that. You’ll see—Carter Wainwright will be my crowning achievement someday. I’ll make him better. But it’s as you Americans say—baby steps. It’s so hard not to sprint for the goal line once you see it within reach.”
Michael scoffed. “I don’t think that man has any interest in getting better.”
“The sick can’t always tell what’s in their best interests.” The doctor sat on the empty gurney. “Anyway, he no longer wishes to harm you. And I’m doing my best to keep him thinking that way. It’s different now that he knows what you could do”—she pointed at Sam— “or at least what she claims you can do. I have to admit, I’m skeptical. But if there’s one thing my studies have taught me, it’s that the extent of what the human brain can do and how it can be manipulated are well beyond the capacity of most of my simpleton colleagues to understand.” She grinned and blushed. “My Carter... at least he has an open mind.”
“He’s a psychopath.”
“I can see why you might think that.” She sighed. “And you’re not entirely wrong. But there is more to him than he lets the world see. And would you discard him so easily due to a disease inflicting his mind? Would you turn your back on your foster mother or your friends if they were similarly afflicted?” She didn’t wait for an answer, and Michael had no intention of giving one.
The doctor folded her hands in her lap. “He is sick. Plus, most only see his methods, not his end goals. His ideals are grandiose. If you could only see the bigger picture...” She sighed again. “We are both slaves to our ambitions, he and I. Most visionaries are misunderstood at first.”
Michael rolled his eyes and grunted his disgust. “Visionary? You think he’s a visionary.” He scoffed. “Well, then you’re just as batshit crazy as he is.”
Dr. Horvat stared at her hands. “Crazy?” She stared into space as if considering the notion for the first time, then summarily dismissed it a moment later. “No, not crazy. And we don’t use that word around here. I’m not mentally ill, either. A little naïve, perhaps—” She straightened. “No, that is just my insecurities talking. We’ve accomplished so much already. So much. I just need to be patient.”
Dr. Horvat stood and produced a needle from her coat pocket. She raised it before her eyes to check the level of the solution inside. Michael shrunk back, but she circled to the opposite side of Sam’s bed and gently grabbed her arm, prodding her inner elbow with gloved fingers, searching for a vein.
Michael bounced on his toes and clenched his fists, but before he could summon the courage to make a move, Dr. Horvat had found a vein and was depressing the plunger. She seemed not to notice his feeble opposition.
“This will counteract some of the aftereffects of the initial dosages I gave her. The second stage is always a little volatile, but no worries. It just gives her flu-like symptoms and causes no permanent damage. She will be fine by nightfall, and we can move into the next phase.”
Michael winced at the thought of a next phase, whatever that might entail. “Why are you doing this?”
Dr. Horvat fixed him with a not entirely unsympathetic gaze. But any feeling that exuded from her pursed lips and softening demeanor was undone by the lifelessness that came over her eyes. “We are not monsters, Michael.”
Still holding the needle, she circled the bed then sat at its foot, while Sam moaned and kicked in her sleep. “I don’t wish to harm you. In fact, I’d love to help you, if you’d let me.”
“The last stranger who wanted to help me shot me up with heroin. And with that needle in your hand, you’ll have to forgive me when I say I think you’re full of shit.”
“I know how this must all seem to you, and I can’t blame you. But our work here is so important. With Carter’s funding, we are so close to achieving the impossible. None of this could have been done through the usual channels, at least not in my or even your lifetime. Too much red tape—clinical trials, bureaucratic approvals from small-minded, risk-averse cretins, etcetera.”
She gently reached for his arm. The gesture was harmless enough, but Michael retreated nonetheless.
She tried again. “I know all about you, Michael. Our work here would have prevented people like your father from doing what he did to your mother and himself, maybe even kept your birth mother from having her affair in the first place. Imagine all the pain and heartache of your life avoided at its outset, allowing you to grow up in a more positive, nurturing environment. A happy one.”
Michael wondered how she’d found out about his childhood, but it didn’t matter. His brow furrowed. “You don’t know me, and you’ve got no idea what I’ve been through.”
Her eyes glazed over for a moment, and she blinked. “You see, I was orphaned at a young age too. My father suffered a psychotic break when I was a mere girl of seven. We were a happy family of five with the means to live comfortably in Lithuania. Father had been diagnosed as bipolar and was on medication for it. He was the kindest, sweetest man until one day, he wasn’t. He caved in my mother’s skull with a tire iron and my little brother, too small and weak to defend himself, he beat to death with his fists. Newborn Alyssa, still swaddled in her blanket, he threw into the fireplace. Hearing their screams, I hid in a closet until a police officer pulled me out the next morning.”
Dr. Horvat again stared blankly into space, a slight quiver to her lips. After a moment lost in her thoughts, she took a breath and rose. She tapped Sam’s other arm and splayed out her fingers, palm up. Giving Michael no time to react and no hint at what the second needle might contain, she injected its contents into a thick blue vein.
“Anyway, my father was arrested, calmly drinking vodka at our dining room table. He claimed the government had ordered him to do it through a device they had wired into his jaw. His teeth—the antennae, he claimed—sat on the table beside his glass with the pliers he’d used to pull them out. Said he was okay then, that he’d taken care of the problem.”
Michael listened, mouth hanging open with horror. Cold indifference had reestablished itself behind the doctor’s eyes as she stared at him. She seemed suddenly bereft of humanity, a soul, or anything resembling a spark of life.
He sat on his gurney, all his wind gushing out of him, taking his strength with it. In a hushed voice, he asked, “Why are you telling me all this? Do you expect me to care about you?”
“No, child. I wouldn’t expect you would. I suppose I just want you to understand, not only that I mean you no harm, but that I want to help you and people like you. You’ve seen enough in your own life that makes me believe you want to see people made better—the people who have hurt you, and your friends in here. It’s a hard, cruel world we live in. Sometimes, difficult choices must be made if we want to improve it. Sadly, if you live long enough, you’ll see that the springs of hope run dry with the fall of youth. The remaining drought dampens only with blood and tears.”
“Very poetic? Who said that? Dr. Seuss?”
Dr. Horvat clicked her teeth and cast him a motherly, pitying look that stripped him of his defenses, tempered his cynicism, and left him feeling like a small boy with a bruised knee. “Anyway
, after what happened to my family, I lived with my uncle—a safe life but not a good life. We moved around a lot—Russia, Ukraine, Georgia. We even spent some time in what is now Montenegro. He sent me to university, and I continued my studies through multiple doctoral programs.” A flicker of a flame appeared in her dead eyes, enough to alight her entire face.
“But my true passion, my raison d’être, is to bring about the complete eradication of mental illness through agile psychological treatment, behavioral readjustment, hypnotherapy, and chemical—”
“By brainwashing people to be normal?” Michael squinted. He thought he was getting the picture. Those people in masks—they weren’t necessarily bad people. They were just victims, brainwashed by Dr. Horvat and that whackjob, Carter Wainwright. And their experiments had gotten at least one good person killed.
“In a simplistic sense, yes.” She smiled like a proud teacher. “It’s no different than using subliminal messaging to bring about desired behavior, conditioning like that of Pavlov and his dogs, and using hypnotherapy to eliminate nicotine or sugar cravings. With my formula, I can make the subject vastly more susceptible to suggestion, outright behavioral correction even. And I am on the verge of a complete breakthrough. Can you imagine the implications? No more violent personality disorders, no more homicidal thoughts or tendencies, delusions, hallucinations—hell, no more depression. Beyond that, no more racism, hate, bigotry, evil, which means no more war, needless death, genocide. Every undesirable behavior can be corrected in every individual. We are marching toward a future that will be nothing short of a utopia!”
At the last point, she shook her fist in the air. Michael had seen this sort of zealousness before. Victor Suarez had explained away his gang’s violence as acts of social justice or some other bull Michael hadn’t cared enough to grant his full attention. Dr. Horvat was just another misguided idiot using the greater good as an excuse to justify her wicked deeds.