Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

by George C. Chesbro

  "What about gel capsules to put the dosages in?"

  "I'm having three gross delivered at ten."

  "Bailey, when was the last time you slept, and for how long?"

  "I really don't remember," he replied curtly. "Now, pay attention as I go down the line. When I weigh out each ingredient, you make a note of that weight. Scoop it out with one of the spatulas you'll find in each bin, drop it into one of these little plastic cups, move on to the next ingredient. When you get down to the end of the line you'll have a dose, which you place in a separate pile on the butcher's paper. We'll load them into the gel capsules when they get here. Oh, and add three drops of ether to each dose; it speeds the binding process. Then go back to the other end of the table and start again." He paused, and I could see a glint of amusement in his black-ringed, bloodshot eyes. "It's just like making cookies, Frederickson."

  A man's voice behind me said, "The test kitchen's closed, boys."

  I wheeled around as I grabbed under my parka at my left armpit— and, just like in the taxicab, there was nothing there but my left armpit. My Beretta and shoulder holster were still home in my safe. The village idiot in me had struck once again. Lulled into complacency by the relative inactivity of the past week and a half, distracted by the disaster that was looming closer and closer, and spurred by excitement, I had once again popped out of the brownstone unarmed. Not that it would have made much difference if I'd had a bazooka strapped to my back; the two men who'd come in through the open delivery door and were aiming automatic pistols in our direction clearly had the drop on us, due to the fact that I'd been too absorbed in Bailey's wondrous accomplishment to give a second thought to the many people who might not think that what Bailey had done was so nifty. If my lapse hadn't been so criminally stupid, it would be laughable; while I had been breathlessly chugging along through the early morning streets, the two men who had undoubtedly been sitting in their car across the street from the brownstone had simply put their car into first gear and lazily tooled along behind me at a crawl, undoubtedly most curious as to where I was going in such a hurry at that hour of the morning. They'd walked right in behind me, skulked about while Bailey and I had chatted, and now, voila. At the least, I should have made sure the door was locked behind me. Bailey Kramer wasn't supposed to think of such things; I was. While it was true that, even if I had locked the door, the men would have had us trapped inside, I might have grown a few IQ points by ten o'clock, when the gel capsules were to be delivered, and taken a few precautionary steps. Now it was too late. Now a lot of people could die because of my stupidity. I was within two bullets of snatching defeat from victory, and I found it all very depressing. The fact that the two gunmen were not bothering to cover their faces was not a good sign. Bailey and I stripped off our goggles and pulled down our masks, and I heaved a deep sigh.

  They made an odd-looking couple, indeed, like Before and After figures in a diet commercial. They were both about six feet, but one had an enormous belly and must have been over three hundred pounds, while the other was so thin he looked like he might disappear if he turned sideways. After appeared to have what looked like a permanent sneer on his face, while Before's expression could be charitably described as blank. The Glocks they carried were identical twins.

  Without a word, Before turned slightly, pressed the trigger of his Glock, and began spraying bullets through the array of bubbling retorts, plastic tubing, and Bunsen burners on two of the three stone-topped tables. Bailey and I both ducked and covered our faces as glass, plastic, and chemicals flew through the air. By the time the fat man had emptied his clip and stopped to reload, there was nothing left on the tables but ruined machines, glass and plastic shards, and one forlorn Bunsen burner that was still bravely burning away as if in memory of its lost companions, having somehow survived the fusillade. I slowly backed away along the length of the mixing table until I came up against a wooden storage rack filled with chemicals in various types of containers. Bailey backed away in the opposite direction as Before approached the table and looked down at the piles of drugs in their plastic bins and the tiny mounds of the pale brown compound Bailey had so carefully prepared. The skinny gunman took up a position to my right, keeping his Glock trained on me while he leaned on one of the glass-strewn worktables and lit a cigar that looked almost as thick as he was from the surviving Bunsen burner.

  "Sorry, gentlemen," I said, struggling against the crippling despair I was feeling, "if you're here for the free urine and bad-breath tests, that offer has expired."

  "Watch your mouth, Frederickson," After said, puffing on his cigar.

  "Who sent you? Lorminix or the CIA? Or are they splitting costs on this one?"

  "Where are the others, Frederickson?"

  "What others? Other whats?"

  It seemed After the talker and Before the shooter were used to working together; without any word of warning or any discernible signal from his partner, the blank-faced fat man half turned and casually pumped a bullet into Bailey's left thigh. Bailey cried out and clutched at his wounded leg as he collapsed into the narrow space between the end of the worktable and the wall. I started toward him, stopped, and retreated to the storage rack when Before swung his gun around and pointed it at my chest.

  I said, "Let me put a tourniquet on his leg."

  After waved away the suggestion along with the cloud of blue-gray cigar smoke that hung around his head. "You needn't worry about him bleeding to death, pal. If I don't get the right answer this time, you can watch while my associate over there starts shooting your friend to death, one little pop at a time. I imagine the next bullet will go into the other leg, probably in the kneecap."

  "Take it easy. Dr. Stephens and two of her patients are back in my house, but you can't get to them. The place is well guarded."

  "We didn't see any guards."

  "They're inside. There are two of them, and they'll eat you and your guns for breakfast. I'm telling you this because I wouldn't want to see either of you get hurt. I don't know where the rest of the patients are; they're still out somewhere walking around the streets."

  "No problem," After said, grinning around his cigar. "We'll just pick them up tonight."

  My dismay and disappointment must have shown on my face, for the emaciated man's cigar-punctuated grin grew even wider. "We nabbed one of the loonies," he continued, "and she told us all about the little Christmas Eve reunion. Touching. Now, what were you and the shrink planning to do with the two you've got?"

  I glanced back and forth between After, who, apparently satisfied that the situation was under control, had laid his Glock down on the table and was leaning on the marble, enjoying his cigar while he bantered with me, and Before, who still had his gun aimed at my chest. The expression on the fat man's face had gone all the way from blank to bored, and I had the distinct impression that he was waiting for the good part, the killing, to begin.

  "Dr. Stephens and I were going to drop them off with the cops before we went to Rockefeller Center to pick up the others and bring them to the cops," I said, watching as the fat man casually brushed his forearm across the butcher's paper at the end of the table, sweeping onto the floor all the dosages Bailey had spent so much time and effort preparing. Then he proceeded to walk the length of the table, giving the same treatment to the plastic bins and their contents; the crashing of the plastic trays on the tile floor was like a fusillade of cannon shots aimed at my heart. Some of the powdered drugs remained suspended in the air, drifting like motes of dust. I pulled my mask up over my nose and mouth, at the same time turning my head slightly to get a glimpse of what was on the storage rack behind me. "The police were going to escort all of us to the hospital. Now, when

  I don't show up, Dr. Stephens is going to call the cops and have them come to the house."

  "That's pure bullshit," After said, dragging a toe through the fine residue of powder that had fallen at his feet. "If you were planning on going to the cops, you'd have done it before. And you wouldn'
t have gone to all the trouble of cooking up this shit. I think my associate is going to have to put a slug in your friend's other leg."

  As Before brushed powder off the front of his shirt and started to point his gun at Bailey, I cringed and half turned toward the storage rack, at the same time groaning in exaggerated horror as I pointed toward the fat man's powder-coated hands. "Jesus Christ, big guy, if you're going to shoot anybody, you'd better do it fast, while you've still got feeling left in your trigger finger. Didn't anybody tell you not to touch or breathe in any of that stuff you've got all over you? The next time you try to take a shit, it's going to be your balls that fall into the toilet."

  The expression on Before's face was no longer blank, or bored. His eyes went wide with real horror as he looked down at his hands and dust-coated belly. Then he turned his attention to the task of vigorously rubbing his left hand on his pants leg. I turned my attention to the rack of chemicals behind me. I grabbed a beaker of ether off the shelf and hurled it at the big man. The glass stopper came out of the beaker as it sailed through the air, and it hit him on the shoulder, spilling its contents over his head and body. Then I quickly ducked down as After grabbed his Glock off the table and fired at me. The bullets flew over my head, smashing the storage rack and everything on it. I was sprayed with a variety of foul-smelling chemicals; I didn't care how bad they smelled, just as long as they weren't as flammable as the ether. Keeping low so that After couldn't see me, I moved along behind the worktable, and then, in a single motion, leaped up, grabbed the single surviving Bunsen burner by its base, and hurled it at the stunned, obese, ether-soaked figure standing a few feet away. The rubber tubing connecting the burner to its gas source popped loose, but the heat at the burner's steel nozzle was sufficient to ignite the ether, and the man suddenly erupted in a plume of bluish flame that rose up and licked at the ceiling. The first sound he'd uttered since walking into the laboratory was a keening scream.

  After commenced firing again, but I had already dropped back down behind the solid worktable. I headed back the way I had come, knowing that if I guessed wrong, I was dead. His Glock held a seventeen-shot magazine, and he had to be running low—but it would take only one bullet to kill me. I reached the end, peered around the corner down toward the other end, where the pile of trash Bailey had collected had started to burn. I just caught a glimpse of After's bony rear end as he sneaked around the other end of the two-table setup, looking for me. The fat man's remains were cooking in the middle of the lab floor. The air was filled with the smell of seared flesh and the acrid stench of burning chemicals, which were ablaze in tiny, flaming pools all around the room.

  "Hey!"

  After popped back around the end of the table, fired off another burst at the spot where my head had been. He was a bit quick on the trigger, but considering the fact that he had to get past me to get out of a room that was rapidly filling with flame and poisonous gases, I could understand his impatience.

  We played a few more rounds of ring-around-the-table, with After firing every time I let him see the whites of my eyes, until I finally heard the recoil mechanism on his empty Glock click open. Then I came around my end of the table and walked toward him. He was wide-eyed and his mouth was hanging open, his gaze darting back and forth between me and the flaming corpse of his partner, as he groped inside his jacket pocket for what I presumed was an extra clip of ammunition. What he got was my foot in the face as I leaped into the air and drove the heel of my right sneaker into his larynx. He dropped the gun and sat down hard on the floor, his eyes gaping with horror as he clutched at his throat with its crushed larynx that would no longer admit air into his lungs. He stared back at me as he began to turn blue and die.

  The lab itself was heavily insulated, but there was no sprinkler system because water was contraindicated for many chemical fires, and there were enough flammable chemicals in the area to keep things cooking for some time. However, the greater danger at the moment was gas, which seemed to be overpowering the heavy-duty automatic venting system that had cut in. Keeping low, I darted around the flaming, blackened mound that had been the obese gunman. I got to Bailey, who had managed to pull himself to his feet by grabbing the edge of the table next to which he had fallen. He was standing on one foot, gasping for breath. I grabbed hold of his belt, and with him hanging over me we managed to hobble together to the delivery door and out of the lab. I eased him down onto the gravel driveway, then took his right hand and pressed his thumb down on a pressure point just above the bleeding bullet wound in his thigh.

  "Just keep pressing here, Bailey," I said. "Don't pass out. I'll be right back."

  "Mongo, you can't go back in there! The gases—!"

  But I had already bounded back up the steps to the delivery door. I sucked in a deep breath, held it, shut my eyes, and went back in. Relying on my memory of the layout and my sense of touch, I felt my way back along the short corridor to the testing area, stopped when I felt intense heat on my face and heard the wheezy, crackling laughter of flames, almost drowning out the whir of the giant ventilation fans. Still holding my breath, I dropped down to my hands and knees and opened my left eye to a slit. Almost immediately the eye began to sting and tear, but I had seen enough to get my bearings and the lay of this flaming land. I closed my eye again and began to crawl toward what had been the mixing table, which was about fifteen feet away, to my left. When I bumped my head against the table, I put my left shoulder against it and scampered to the far end, where the prepared dosages had been swept to the floor. I put my face close to the floor, opened my right eye slightly. There, literally in front of my nose, was a residue of the light brown powder that meant life to a dozen people, and presumably one more whom I had no interest in saving. I closed the eye as it began to tear, then used both hands to sweep the floor around me, gathering up as much of the compound as I could. I scooped up what amounted to half a handful and put it into my shirt pocket. I had no idea whether the drug would now be effective; it had been "unmixed" and contaminated by other drugs and chemicals, but I figured that what I had collected was better than nothing.

  My lungs were bursting, and I knew I had only a few more seconds before I would pass out—and die. I remembered an old diver's trick I had read about, and I swallowed, allowing the tiny amount of air that had been trapped in my throat and larynx to enter my lungs. Then I got to my feet, opened my eyes, and sprinted through the flames and clouds of gas and smoke, down the narrow corridor, and out the back door. I collapsed onto my knees on the gravel, gasping for air while at the same time resisting the impulse to rub my eyes, which were both flooded with tears.

  I could hear the wail of approaching police and fire sirens, and I knew I could not afford a lot of recovery time. Still gulping in great drafts of air, I got to my feet. I peered around me until I could see the blurred figure of Bailey Kramer, went over to him.

  "Bailey, I've got to get out of here," I croaked, wiping tears from my cheeks but still being careful not to touch my eyes, which were continuing to cleanse themselves quite nicely. "You'll be all right. The bullet didn't hit an artery, and the police and firemen will be here any moment. They'll call an ambulance to get you to a hospital."

  He clutched at my sleeve. "Mongo?! What should I tell them?!"

  "The truth. Tell them everything that's happened—except about where I am, the patients with me, and the rendezvous at Rockefeller Center. They'll take you to the hospital for treatment before they start questioning you, and that will take some time. When the police do start to question you, ask to speak to Captain MacWhorter personally. He's clued in on most of what's been happening. String him out until dusk, and then you can tell him everything."

  "The killers knew about the rendezvous. There could be more of them waiting for you there."

  "There'll be a regular contingent of cops at the rink and around the plaza. I'm counting on the hunters not to know what specific individuals to look for, while I will. If there's an army of uniforms over there, I'm
afraid it might scare the other patients away. I think MacWhorter will agree. If he does decide to send extra people to the rink, and he almost certainly will, tell him to make sure they're in plainclothes, and they shouldn't interfere while I'm gathering up the patients. I'd also like to see some cops at the hospital, after nightfall. I don't know when we'll be there, but we will be there. Thanks again for everything, Bailey, and I can't tell you how sorry I am for leading those two jokers to you. Talk to you later."

  "But Mongo—!"

  I didn't wait to see what else Bailey had to say, because I had too much else to do and I didn't want to waste time evading questions from the police and being fussed over by paramedics. I pushed through the knot of people that had gathered at the head of the driveway, reached the sidewalk just as two police cars and a fire truck pulled up to the curb. I headed south, and, with my breathing labored and tears still streaming from my eyes, walked as fast as I could the few blocks to my brownstone. By the time I got there my eyes had stopped stinging and tearing, and I could breathe easier. I hurried through the front entrance, past the open office door. A startled Francisco looked at me and spilled his morning coffee.

  "Mongo? What . . . ? Your eyes are all—"

  "Call upstairs and tell the women to meet me up in my living room," I said, and started up the stairway.

  When I entered my apartment I found Michael, still in his pajamas, sitting stiffly in a chair by the window, staring out through a crack in the blinds. He didn't turn to greet me, and I went directly into the bathroom, where I turned on the tap and began carefully rinsing out my eyes. After a couple of minutes I looked at myself in the mirror; my eyes were still very bloodshot, but I could now see clearly, and I did not think there had been any permanent damage from the gases in the burning laboratory. When I came back out into the living room, Sharon Stephens, Margaret, and Emily were waiting for me, standing in the center of the room next to Michael's sleeping bag, worried expressions on their faces. Michael was still sitting, unmoving and with his back to us, at the window.