The Soul Collectors dm-4

by Chris Mooney

  The helicopter's engine was growing louder and louder. She jumped to her feet and started spraying down her vest, catching sight of a searchlight sweeping across the treetops in the distance. She also saw, crowding the lit window next to her, the frightened faces of the elderly man and a woman dressed in a pink bathrobe with white hair wrapped tightly in curlers.

  The searchlight was now moving across the street, searching for the APC. Darby dropped the hose, her boots waterlogged and her soaked clothing clinging against her skin. She ran for the street, stopping near the APC and, shivering, looked up at the sky, waving her hands.

  The searchlight switched direction. The bright beam whisked across the street, heading her way, and then stopped as the copter began its descent. The spinning blades kicked up leaves, small pebbles and assorted street grit and trash, blowing everything into the air.

  The copter didn't have enough room to land. It hovered in the air so close she could make out the pilot.

  The hatch opened. Ropes were thrown into the air and she watched, with a growing relief, as four people rappelled to the ground.

  They all wore dark green hazmat suits with thick rubber boots and gloves tied off at the elbows, their gas masks connected to oxygen tanks strapped across their backs. They approached cautiously as the copter rose back into the air.

  Darby started moving towards them and the one in the lead put up both hands, signalling for her to stop.

  'Stay right where you are and keep the mask on your face.' The deep male voice had a mechanical echo over the mask's speakers. 'Where's Darby McCormick?'

  'I am.' Darby heard the words in her mask but not over the voice amplification system. The water must have shorted it. She tapped a finger against her chest.

  'We need to decontaminate you,' the same male voice said. 'Just stand there and stay calm.'

  A spray gun was pointed at her. Foam, thick and white, sprayed across her chest. It covered her mask and when she went to wipe it away she felt hands grip her wrists.

  'Stay calm,' the same man said, closer now. She wondered if it was Glick, the man she'd spoken to on the BU hotline. 'We're going to help you sit on — '

  'The prisoner is in the woods behind the house,' Darby shouted, praying to God one of them could hear her over the hiss coming from the spray nozzle and the copter's dying but still loud engine. 'He's in the woods — '

  Hands gripped her roughly. 'Stand still, we've got to cover — '

  'Listen to me. The prisoner is in the woods behind the house, about twenty klicks north. He's tied to a tree, and he's infected.'

  'We're going to help you to the ground.'

  She let the hands guide her down, shouting, 'He's one of them — one of the intruders from the Rizzo house. He's our only link, you've got to see if you can treat him.'

  Sitting, she felt a pair of rubber hands cradling the back of her neck.

  'Lie back, Miss McCormick.'

  'Did you hear what I said? You need to treat him.'

  She didn't get a response. Rough hands pushed her back against the ground and then she couldn't see, as a thick, shaving-foam-like substance covered her mask. She couldn't move either, pinned down by all these arms and legs.

  'Miss McCormick, can you hear me?'

  She nodded.

  'The hazmat van hasn't arrived yet,' the man said. 'I don't want to risk waiting, so we're going to have to undress you here and decontaminate you. I'm not going to lie to you, it's not going to be pleasant.'

  Her boots were pulled off her feet.

  Now her socks.

  'Miss McCormick, I need you to keep your eyes and mouth shut. Nod if you understand.'

  She nodded.

  Hands lifted her up and she stood, shivering.

  'Hold your arms out… Yes, like that.'

  Someone unbuckled her vest. Another pair of hands worked the buckle for her tactical belt.

  Come on, take off the mask so I can talk.

  Her wet trousers were yanked down across her legs as the mask was pulled from her sweaty face. She spoke quickly, her eyes closed.

  'The prisoner is in the woods behind the ranch home, and he's — '

  A pair of gloved fingers prised her mouth open. She grabbed the wrist and tore it away.

  'He's infected,' she screamed.

  'Where?' The leader's voice.

  'In the woods, about twenty klicks north,' she said, shivering. 'I tied him to a tree. Find him and treat him — he's our only link to what happened at the house.'

  The man didn't respond but she heard footsteps running away.

  Her long-sleeved T-shirt was pulled up over her head. Now someone gripped her bra and pulled it away from the skin. She felt the strap pop free; someone must have cut it. Another hand gripped the elastic band of her cheap Hanes boy-cut underwear and cut it free. She stood there, naked and shivering, and heard the hiss of the spray nozzle as foam shot across her bare skin.

  The person who had prised open her mouth did so again, and even though her eyes were shut she could make out the beam of a flashlight.

  'Miss McCormick,' a new voice said — feminine and clearly nervous. 'I need you to spread your legs apart, just a bit.'

  Darby did as instructed, too frightened to be embarrassed. Her imagination was racing with all sorts of grisly scenarios as fingers pressed against the lymph nodes underneath her armpits, then her groin. Her mouth was opened again and this time she felt a cotton swab rub its way across the soft lining of her cheeks. They were collecting a sample to see if she was infected. If she was, and if the toxin couldn't be identified in time, she'd soon be lying on the ground, convulsing and throwing up until her lungs finally stopped working.

  Her eyelids were pressed open by thick, rubbery fingers and held in place.

  'We're going to wash them out with saline,' the nervous woman said.

  The fingers held her eyelids open as a jet coming from a bottle of saline washed out her eyes.

  Then she was ordered to shut her eyes again. She did and now thick bristles moved across her skin with such force she thought she was being cut by razorblades. An angry voice ordered her to stand still. She gritted her teeth as the brush raked across her breasts and nipples.

  When the brushes finally disappeared, the woman said, 'Keep your eyes and mouth shut. We're going to escort you to the side of the house to be hosed off.'

  'Am I infected?' Darby asked.

  'I don't know.'

  15

  When the BU Biomedical vehicles finally arrived — two vans and a mobile trailer, Darby saw, each one sleek and black and peeling down the street — she was sitting on the grass with her knees pressed up against her chest, her wet hair and naked, shivering body bundled underneath several towels and blankets courtesy of the home's elderly couple. They had offered to let her inside, but the hazmat team wouldn't allow it. The old man — deadly scared and barely able to speak — said there were plenty of old towels and blankets on the garage shelves and they were more than welcome to help themselves.

  Hazmat members poured out of the vehicles. One of them was heading her way.

  'Miss McCormick, please follow me.'

  She stood, several of the towels sliding off her, and wrapped herself tightly in the blanket. She trotted in her bare feet behind the man, wincing in pain. It hurt to breathe. She didn't know if the pain was from the fractured ribs or if she was infected. Or both.

  The man helped her into the back of the mobile trailer. Before the doors shut, Darby saw the frightened expressions of the old man, his wife and what she assumed was the couple's grandson, a toddler dressed in footy-pyjamas and clutching a stuffed animal, as they were helped down their front steps by a pair of masked and gloved men. A bullhorn ordered them to a waiting van to be decontaminated.

  The heated trailer was packed with medical equipment, and also held three people dressed head to toe in hazmat gear. One was armed — state police, she guessed, maybe even army. He had an MP5 submachine gun strapped across the chest of his
hazmat suit and he kept his gloved hand on the stock, his eyes watching her.

  Syringes and vials glinted underneath the light. One of the unarmed people took a tentative step forward and said, 'You're having trouble breathing.'

  She nodded. 'I think I fractured a rib. Shotgun blast.'

  He helped her to lie down on a gurney. When he completed his poking and prodding with his gloved fingers and cold instruments — Darby nearly screaming when his hands touched her chest — he dropped a pair of scrubs on her stomach and told her to get dressed. She did, slowly, and after she finished he came back with a syringe. He didn't speak or answer any of her questions as he drew blood, filling numerous vials. She had stopped counting after six.

  Next she felt a cold swab of alcohol on her upper arm, followed by the sting of a needle.

  'What's that?'

  'Something to help you with the pain,' he said. 'This way.'

  Darby followed the man to the far wall, which held three doors. He pressed a code on the keypad and then she heard the hiss of the air-locked door opening.

  It led to a stainless-steel room no bigger than a closet. A quarantine chamber, containing only a toilet.

  Darby didn't move. The sight of any confined space made her uneasy.

  The doctor, standing behind her, spoke for the first time: 'It's only temporary, until we know whether or not you're infected.'

  'How long?'

  'Until we know if you're infected? The blood work will take some time — it will go faster when we can isolate what, exactly, has happened here. Until then, we need to quarantine you. It should be only a couple of hours, then we can take you to the hospital.'

  Darby still didn't move. The guard, sensing that she might put up a fight, had stepped up beside the doctor.

  Finally she went inside. The door shut and she flinched when she heard the bolt slide home.

  The space was warm, and she had a view, courtesy of the small, square Plexiglas window. One of the vials containing her blood had been placed in some sort of separating unit. She could see the device sitting on a worktop, and as she listened to the tiny whirl of the motor she watched the doctor, who was sitting with his back to her and typing on a computer keyboard. She could make out part of the monitor but was too far away to read the words on the screen.

  She heard the sound of the heavy back doors swinging open. Footsteps thumped across the floor and then a masked face revealing only a pair of blue eyes and dark bushy eyebrows flecked with grey filled the tiny window.

  Then the face moved away and Darby watched the man step behind the doctor. There was no talking — at least nothing she could hear. The man seemed to be consulting something on the computer screen. He stepped away, disappearing from her view.

  A moment later she heard the ceiling speaker crackle.

  'How are you feeling?'

  The voice of the hazmat man she'd first encountered.

  'So far, so good,' Darby replied. 'Can you hear me, Sergeant-Major Glick?'

  'I can hear you fine. Any problems breathing?'

  She nodded. 'I think I fractured some ribs.'

  'We'll give you a chest X-ray and then treat them when we get you to our hospital. What about nausea?'

  'No. What's the army doing at BU?'

  'Consulting.'

  'On what?'

  'Various governmental matters that don't concern you.'

  'Then maybe you can tell me about the man I left in the woods. What's his condition?'

  'I wish I could tell you.'

  Darby swallowed. Her eyes narrowed. 'If you want my cooperation, you better drop the bullshit and — '

  'No, you misunderstood me,' Glick said. 'I can't tell you anything about it because we didn't find him. We didn't find anyone in those woods, Miss McCormick, not a single person.'

  16

  Mark Rizzo started to drift back from the darkness of his mind only to encounter a new kind of darkness, one that was pitch black and smelled dank and musty. Something cold and hard and flat pressed up against the bare skin of his chest, thighs and arms. Every inch of his skin felt cold. Then he knew: he had been stripped of his clothes.

  He turned his hand and his fingers felt rough stone.

  A stone floor, damp and dirty.

  Chilly air.

  Dark air that smelled dank and musty.

  No… Oh dear God in heaven please don't let this be true.

  Adrenalin shot through his weary heart, flushing his skin and then… then it died. His muscles were unresponsive, and, while his mind felt thick and clogged, his thoughts sluggish, he had memories, fragments of them, and he remembered choking on the tear gas filling his bedroom and watching SWAT officers rush in and thinking, Thank God, oh thank God it's over. But one of the SWAT officers had a syringe and he remembered feeling the needle sink deep into his neck. Remembered trying to break free of the restraints binding him to the chair when he heard the first gunshot -

  Mark Rizzo blinked the image away. He knew who had him now — and they were somewhere here in this pitch-black darkness. He could hear breathing.

  A voice boomed through the darkness:

  'Welcome home, Thomas.'

  PART TWO

  The Cross

  17

  Darby lay propped up in the hospital bed with her hands folded behind her head, staring across the room at the clear Plexiglas door. Beyond it was a small, square-shaped area of spotless white tile. It covered the floor, walls and ceiling. The door in there was made of steel.

  Two doors, both locked, both secured by keycard readers. You needed a card and a separate code for each door. Each person who came in here had a different set of codes. Some punched in three numbers. Others had six. One doc had seven.

  She had stopped thinking about how to mount an escape. Even if she managed to grab a keycard from one of the docs or lab technicians who came in here to draw blood and then pump a cruiser-load of dope into her system, there was still the issue of the codes, and even with those there was the problem of whatever lay beyond these two doors. The BU Biomedical building, where she was currently quarantined, no doubt had top-notch security. A stolen keycard (and the codes, don't forget the damn codes) would get her only so far; they wouldn't open whatever doors separated her from the outside world. Then there was the staff to deal with, and guards — army boys, probably.

  Would they shoot her? Unlikely. Would they Mace her or use something like a Taser? Most definitely.

  Escaping wasn't an option.

  Her thoughts shifted to the reasons why she wanted to leave here: the staff refused to let her use the phone to call someone on the outside. They refused to bring her a newspaper (although they brought her celebrity rag mags in droves and said she could read anything she wanted; she had asked for, and was given, Jane Austen's complete oeuvre). The TV in here had cable but they had blocked out all the news stations. They refused to tell her what she had been infected with and why they kept drawing her blood and shooting her full of drugs. Orders, they said, from the man sitting high on the mountaintop, Sergeant-Major Glick.

  Even more infuriating was the fact that no one would tell her when she'd be released. She was still showing no sign of infection. No nausea. No problem swallowing and no problem breathing. Well, it did hurt to breathe, but that was caused by her ribs. There was a lot of talking about her lying down and resting, and for the first few days she had complied.

  Not one single symptom and yet they were keeping her imprisoned here, and refusing to explain why.

  She wondered what time it was. There wasn't a clock in here.

  A lot of things weren't in here. A lot of things.

  That was going to change. Right now.

  Darby yanked back the rough white sheets and scratchy wool blue blanket, sat up and swung her legs off the bed. She didn't hop off, just sat with her fingers digging into the edge of the mattress, waiting for the dizziness to pass. It always took its sweet goddamn time about leaving, and when it finally did she had to deal with how
her head felt afterwards, this throbbing cement block on her shoulders that kept screaming at her to lie back down — a side effect, she assumed, from the pain meds. The shotgun blast had fractured not one but three ribs, tearing a considerable amount of cartilage. Thankfully, the damage ended there. Her lungs and spleen had been spared.

  The dope they were giving her, though, had another, more serious side effect: it clouded her memories. Some were fuzzy; others were, well, black holes.

  She had no problem recalling the details of everything she'd seen and heard inside the Rizzo house. And she remembered, quite clearly, what had happened in the woods behind the old couple's home and what had happened after she'd been locked inside the mobile trailer's stainless-steel quarantine chamber, bumping into the smooth, cold walls when the trailer got moving, driving her, the elderly couple and their grandson all the way back to Boston's BU Biomedical lab. She remembered being escorted inside some sort of plastic-looking tube and into a painfully bright room of white tile, where two women dressed in biohazard gear stood by a gurney. One gave her another injection as the other informed her she had to go through a second decontamination process, this one more thorough. The sedative would make her relax and help with the pain. Both women removed her scrubs and strapped her down into the cold gurney. The last memory Darby had was one of staring up at the ceiling's humming fluorescent lights, watching as they whisked past her, blurring together, growing brighter and brighter.

  Whatever had happened after that was lost.

  When she woke up, alone, in the hospital bed where she now sat, the first thing she noticed was her skin. It had been scrubbed raw and gave off, along with her hair, some sort of medicinal smell that brought to mind the disinfectant and germicidal solutions used in funeral homes. Nasty odours used in treating the dead.