by B. J Daniels
If it was the latter, then they might be back to finish the job. She watched Slade search the drawers of the desk, noticing the way he used his shirtsleeve, leaving no prints, realizing they were both wanted now. Him by the law. Her by monsters and mad psychiatrists.
Her gaze was drawn to another sound in the room. The computer. It was on. Using her sleeve to cover her fingers, she touched the mouse.
The screen flashed on. She stared at the words typed there and said, “Rawlins, you’d better come here.”
He was at her side in an instant.
“Look. I think it’s a confession.” It appeared Delaney had started to type it before he was killed. Whoever had murdered him must not have realized it because the computer had gone into standby mode, the screen dark.
“What the—” Slade read the words aloud.
To Whom It May Concern: In 1935, Hitler established a semi-secret breeding program called Lebensborn meaning the Fountain of Life. The main function of Lebensborn was to provide racially ideal women for breeding to members of the SS and other selected men. Women were kidnapped and children were separated from parents. Some children were rejected. Some were placed with other families and were brainwashed to believe they were the offspring of these parents.
Slade stopped reading to glance over at Holly, his eyes dark and troubled.
She nodded and swallowed as he continued,
Hitler’s programs put the government in the position of controlling people’s sex lives. “We regulate relations between the sexes. We form the child,” Hitler proclaimed. Selection, breeding and elimination was the key.
For more than thirty years, there has been a modern-day Lebensborn operating right here, only its methods are much more efficient, much more covert and insidious. Using the brainwashing techniques his father had initiated, Dr. Allan Wellington started his own superior breed. He formed a microcosm of what could be if babies were born only to the best possible couples. His sights were on the future of mankind. It wasn’t until I became involved with Carolyn Gray that I learned the extent of Dr. Welling—
The cursor blinked. The rest of the screen was blank.
“Sweet heaven,” Slade whispered.
All Holly could do was stare at the screen. She wanted to scream, to cry. “What does this mean? Is he saying our child was part of some experiment to create a master race? Or one of the ones rejected?” Eliminated?
Slade shook his head as he pulled her to him and stroked her hair.
“But Allan is dead! How could he…”
“I don’t know, Holly.”
She pulled back to look at him. Of course, he was as stunned and scared as she was—and just as shocked by the possible ramifications. For more than thirty years? Slade’s mother had been part of the Genesis Project. So had Holly. But at least his mother hadn’t married the crazy doctor. But Holly had! Even if it had only been for a few days. She realized how lucky she was that he’d died when he had. How had she gotten that lucky? It seemed almost too convenient. She shivered.
“I’m not sure what any of this means,” Slade said, “But let’s not jump to conclusions, all right?”
She wished that were possible. She watched him move back to the cabinets he hadn’t searched yet, unable to keep from thinking of babies that were deemed unacceptable.
Slade opened a cabinet and froze.
“What is it?” she asked, deathly afraid to find out.
He turned slowly, and she saw the mask he held in his hand. She recognized the monster face from the night of her delivery. “Delaney was one of them.”
He threw down the mask. “Let’s get out of here. If I have to, I’ll hot-wire Delaney’s Suburban.” He stopped and turned to look back at her, realizing she wasn’t following him.
She was still standing behind the desk staring at the words Delaney had written. Her movements seemed jerky as if she’d been somewhere cold for too long as she hit Print, then Save, and waited. When the machine finished printing, she folded the sheet and stuck it in her coat pocket and turned off the computer.
Only then did she look at him. “I’m ready.”
* * *
SLADE WATCHED her movements. Cold, calculating, a hardness in her expression. An anger. A resolve. He recognized it because he felt it just as strongly as she did. Holly was a fighter, and he was thankful for that. A weaker woman wouldn’t have made it this far.
He couldn’t even comprehend the extent of the Genesis Project. For thirty years these people had been playing God. He concentrated on only one thought: stopping them. He held little hope of getting their baby girl back. He couldn’t shake the horrible feeling that if it wasn’t already too late—it would be soon.
Hadn’t somebody once stated that the world will be saved by one or two people? He hoped he and Holly were enough. Then he realized, Allan Wellington had thought he was saving the world. Delaney and Carolyn Gray probably had thought they were, too.
Slade took Holly’s hand as they passed Dr. Delaney’s body and stepped out into what had become a raging blizzard. Wind whirled the falling snow, pelting them with stinging ice crystals that felt more like sand. Ice-cold sand.
“The garage,” Holly yelled over the wind. She motioned to the detached garage and the disappearing tracks that led from it.
Why would Delaney have put a vehicle in the garage?
Slade took Holly’s hand and ran through the drifting snow and cold to the side door of the garage. He felt around, found the light switch and flicked on the garage lamp. His pickup was sitting there, ice and snow melting beneath it, the keys in the ignition.
“Maybe Delaney really did put us into the bomb shelter for our own good,” Holly said. “Maybe he was trying to protect us. Hide us, just like he did the truck. But if he wanted to help us, why didn’t he just call the police?” she said, echoing his very thought.
“Because he was guilty as hell,” Slade said, realizing Delaney might have been planning to confess on the computer then skip the country—leaving him and Holly the pickup and the confession.
He doubted they would ever know what Delaney really had planned for them. Holly climbed into the front seat of the pickup, and he hit the garage-door opener. He climbed behind the wheel. Delaney was dead. Carolyn Gray was out there somewhere. That still left one monster unmasked. Slade knew they had to find him—before the two remaining monsters found them.
He put the pickup in four-wheel drive and backed out into the storm.
Snow had drifted across the road, but he could still see distinct tracks where someone had broken a trail in—and out again. The elusive Carolyn Gray? Or the third monster? And what if there were others involved in this? How could there not be? And yet, he knew something like this couldn’t have been kept a secret for more than thirty years unless only a select few knew.
“Rawlins?”
“Yeah?” He burst through the last drift and hit the snow-packed highway, headed for Evergreen Institute. That’s where the answers had to be. Someone had destroyed the lab. Trying to destroy evidence?
He glanced over at Holly when she didn’t say any more, half afraid that he might have lost her again. “Holly?”
“I just remembered something. I was thinking about the bomb shelter…cold, damp, concrete places…” Her gaze swung to his in the glow of the dash lights. “I know where I delivered our baby!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was late enough that the hospital parking lot was almost empty. Slade put his arm around Holly’s shoulders as they hurried through the snowstorm to the front door.
The admitting nurse wasn’t at her desk. As a matter-of-fact, all hell seemed to be breaking loose. Holly saw Head Nurse Lander rush by, a grimace on her face. From down the hall came a familiar braying voice.
“Inez,” Holly said, immediately moving toward the sound.
The door to Inez’s room was open. Nurse Lander had pushed her way in and was trying to raise her voice higher than Inez’s.
“What seems to be
the problem here?” Nurse Lander was demanding.
Inez began telling her, but stopped abruptly at the sight of Holly and Slade.
“I’d like to see my sister-in-law alone, please,” Holly said to Nurse Lander.
The head nurse looked so grateful that Inez Wellington had finally shut up, she just gave a curt nod and motioned for the other nurses to leave with her.
The moment the door closed, Inez said to Slade, “I thought I fired you.”
Slade was moving around the bed to the side opposite Holly, who calmly demanded, “I want to know where my baby is.”
Inez rolled her eyes. “Oh, you aren’t going to start—”
Slade laid a hand on the older woman’s shoulder. “She asked you where her baby was.”
Inez’s eyes glittered maliciously. “Dead. Just like my brother, the man you killed!”
“He died of a heart attack!” Holly said, trying to keep her voice down.
“There was nothing wrong with his heart. Nothing!” Inez spat. “Until he married you.”
Holly shook her head. “He had to drug me to get me to marry him. What about that?” She waved away the question. “Evergreen. Tell me about his Genesis Project. Tell me about the babies. What did he do with the babies he stole from the mothers?”
Inez looked at her blankly.
“Dr. Delaney told us. I know what Allan was doing, using mind control to build what he considered a superior future generation.” Inez started to protest, but Holly cut her off again. “Dr. Delaney is dead, but he left a confession.”
Inez paled. The monitor beside her bed started to beep loudly. Slade reached over and unplugged it. “Whoever took over for your brother stole our baby. I don’t think I have to tell you to what extremes we will go to get the truth.”
Inez’s eyes widened. She tried to ring for the nurse, but Holly grabbed the call button and moved it out of her reach.
A nurse stuck her head in the doorway, obviously alerted by the monitor suddenly going off.
“Everything’s fine in here,” Slade said, keeping a restraining hand on Inez’s shoulder.
“Help me, you stupid bitch,” Inez yelled at the nurse.
“My sister-in-law is a little distraught,” Holly said. “Just give us a few moments to calm her down.”
Inez started to protest, but the nurse shot Inez a call-me-a-bitch look and left, closing the door firmly behind her.
“You’re going to kill me,” Inez whined. “I’m a sick old woman.”
“Yes, you are,” Holly agreed.
Inez narrowed her eyes, anger making her nostrils flare. “My brother saw what was happening in the world. Stupid, lazy, ill-equipped people having child after child, children who would do nothing but become burdens on society, dependents of dependents, multiplying at staggering rates, the useless conceiving more of the useless.”
Holly stared at her. “Who did he think he was that he got to decide who had children and who didn’t? No wonder Delaney compared him to Hitler.”
Inez looked shocked. “Allan was a brilliant doctor who was trying to save this planet. How dare you compare him to Hitler? My brother wasn’t a racist. He was a realist.”
“What did he do with the children?” Slade asked, his voice deadly low.
Inez turned her head to look at him. “The desirable ones got good homes with desirable parents who would provide the right kind of environment. It was the Wellington legacy to the future world,” she said proudly.
“And the undesirable babies?” Holly asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Inez slowly turned to look at Holly again. “They were disposed of.”
Holly felt her heart crush under the weight of the words. “Slade’s and my baby? Which was it?”
“Do you even have to ask?” Inez said, seeming to have trouble breathing. She reached again for the call button to ring the nurse, looking small and weak in the large hospital bed.
Holly buzzed the nurse for her and dropped the call button on the bed beside Inez as she turned and walked away, afraid of what she’d do if she stayed a moment longer.
“Tell me who took over after Allan died,” Slade demanded. “Tell me who is responsible for our baby’s…theft.”
“Go…to…hell,” Inez wheezed.
“I will destroy the Wellington name, yours, your brother’s and your father’s,” Holly heard Slade say to Inez. “The Wellington legacy will be a disgrace, dishonor and disgust.”
“You won’t live that long,” Inez managed to utter. “And neither will Holly.”
Then the hospital-room door closed, and Slade joined Holly in the hall. Holly could hear the clatter of a code-blue cart and the scurry of nurses. She didn’t look back.
“We need to find the basement,” she said, no longer sure she wanted to see where their baby had been born, but realizing she had to. She prayed it would make her remember something that would help them find their baby. If nothing else, she had to prove what the monsters had done and stop every last one of them once and for all.
* * *
SLADE FOLLOWED Holly down the hall, too shaken to speak. He’d wanted to throttle the truth out of the old woman, but he knew Inez would take it to her grave.
Holly had told him about her memory of the birth room. “It had to be close to the hospital, right? A room that was virtually soundproof, accessible and yet close enough that if something went wrong, they could get the mothers to the hospital quickly.” He’d agreed. “What about under the hospital? My father was a bricklayer. He helped build the new hospital. I remember him telling me that they built the new one over the old one. Just like Seattle built over the city below it. It wasn’t all that unusual back in those days.”
Now all they had to do was find a way to access the old part because he believed Holly was on to something.
“I’m sure there is an outside entrance somewhere,” she said now. “But there also has to be a way to access it from inside the hospital. A way to make it easy to bring patients in and out.”
They found the door to the basement. It was locked. Of course. He pulled out his lock-pick kit. It only took a few moments while Holly stood guard. The door swung open and he pulled her onto the landing at the top of the concrete steps. Below them was nothing but darkness and cold.
Cold. Holly had been suffering from hypothermia, as if she had been outside.
“Carolyn Gray probably had a key,” Holly said next to him.
“Yeah,” he agreed as he fumbled around for a light switch. A long line of lights blinked on, illuminating a short set of stairs. With Holly right behind him, he descended the steps to find a long hallway running north. At the end of the hall was another door.
It too was locked—but only temporarily. As it swung open, Holly let out a gasp. “This is it. The hallway I remember from my dream.” She started down it, passing up several doors.
He hurried after her, passing rooms stuffed with boxes and old furniture.
“This part of the hospital isn’t directly under the other,” he said more to himself than Holly.
“Soundproof,” Holly said. “No one would be able to hear a woman scream.”
Her words sent a chill through him. He ached at the thought that Holly had given birth down here.
“Rawlins?”
They were almost at the end of the hall. He heard only that one word and the sound of Holly’s voice breaking and knew she’d found something.
She stood in one of the doorways, her body rigid, her face pale.
He moved to look past her into the room. It was bare except for the large hospital bed at its center—and a hospital bassinet. It was obvious that the room had recently been cleaned.
She stepped in, then stopped. “This isn’t the room,” she said, turning to look at him, then her gaze moved past him to the last room, the one across the hall.
He could see from her expression that she was thinking the same thing he was. This would have been the room the other woman gave birth in. Holly moved p
ast him, out into the hall. Slowly, she opened the last door. He heard her let out a small cry.
The room looked exactly like the other one, and he realized it too had been cleaned. There would be no evidence that Holly had given birth here. Nor any proof that the other woman had either.
“Is this the room?”
She nodded, but he couldn’t see how she could be sure. The rooms looked identical to him.
He stood just inside the door, almost afraid to move, his heart pounding wildly as he watched Holly walk to the bassinet as though in a trance. He tried not to imagine what she must be reliving. The room was so cold, so remote. As he stared at the bassinet, he fought hard not to think about what had happened here. Or would happen again if they didn’t stop it.
“Oh damn, Rawlins,” he heard her say. He swung his gaze from the bassinet to her. She was standing beside the bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Slowly, he followed her gaze. The paint had cracked at the corner of the ceiling just above the bed, leaving dark lines in the shape of something unimaginable. A monster.
Behind him, he heard the distinct scuff of footsteps on concrete. He spun around, realizing he had no weapon.
Holly turned at the sound as well. A figure stood in the door. “Rawlins, that’s the woman! The one from the cemetery!” The woman wore a blue housekeeper’s uniform, her face ashen, her hands clutched over her chest as if in prayer. “Where is my baby?” Holly cried, lunging toward her.
The woman’s eyes widened, then rolled back into her head. Slade barely reached her before she hit the floor. He caught her in his arms and carried her over to the hospital bed.
“That’s her,” Holly said, staring down at her. “She’s not…dead is she?”
“No, she just passed out.” The woman’s name tag read Gwen Monroe. She appeared to be in her early thirties, but she could have been much younger. She was one of those women who had a lot of miles on her, and it showed in her face. Her hands were rough and red, the nails chewed to the quick. “Do you know her?”
Holly shook her head. “The first time I saw her was at the cemetery. That is, as far as I can remember.”