by Ray Garton
The powerful wind buffeted her Toyota Highlander and the windshield wipers weren’t doing a very good job of keeping up with the pouring rain. During the entire drive so far, the woman on the news station had been telling people to stay indoors and stay off the roads. And it was too late for Latrice to take her advice.
Her phone began to play “Hangin’ Tough” by New Kids on the Block. People laughed at Latrice’s ringtone and her affection for New Kids. But it was genuine affection. Their music had loomed large in her youth and she’d become emotionally attached to it. She knew a lot of people who had Bruce Springsteen ringtones, but did she tell them she thought he sounded like a gorilla having a stroke and accuse them of having bad taste? No, she ignored it and moved on like an adult. She wished they would show her the same courtesy. One of these days, someone would make a crack about New Kids and her musical tastes and she would give in to the temptation to tell that person to kiss her taint.
The call was coming from her mother’s house. For a moment, her blood chilled. She feared the call was about Robert. He’d gotten worse, maybe. She thumbed the button on the phone in its dash mount and said, “Hello!” She had to shout to be heard above the din of the rain.
“Mom?” It was Tamara, her oldest. “Robert is being mean to me and Grandma won’t make him stop.”
“Sorry, honey, but I’m driving in a storm. Tell Robby if he doesn’t stop doing what he’s doing, he’ll lose Internet privileges for a week. Put Grandma on.”
“Grandma’s on the other phone.”
“How’s Robert? Is he okay?”
“He’s okay, he’s just being mean.”
“How’s his leg?”
“He says it’s tingly and it shakes sometimes. The same.”
“Well, if there’s no emergency, honey, I’ve got to go.”
“When are you coming home?”
“I’ll be back tonight, unless I’m in a terrible car crash because I’m being distracted by the phone.”
“’Bye, Mom.”
“Love you, honey!”
She looked down at the package in the passenger seat. It was a cardboard box wrapped in brown paper and taped up well. It was about the size of an old VCR, the kind her parents had when she was a kid, but not nearly as heavy. Latrice didn’t know what was in it, but she knew it was illegal. The only reason she was driving it from Sacramento was that she desperately needed the money she would be paid upon delivery.
The dark sky flashed with lightning. She felt the rumble of thunder as well as heard it. The Highlander vibrated with its force.
Latrice took in a deep breath, clutched the steering wheel tightly in her fists, and kept driving.
5
“Gotta go,” Emilio said, then put the phone in his pocket and stood up straight without taking his eyes from Fara.
“What are you doing?” Fara said, speaking deliberately and with quiet anger.
Emilio stared at her, his mouth open, as if frozen in place, like a giant child caught doing something wrong.
“I’m not going to ask the question again.”
“Are you going to call Dr. Corcoran?” he said nervously.
“Are you going to answer my question?”
“I’m here because . . . well, I thought you’d be gone longer.”
“What are you doing?”
“That’s a longer answer.”
According to protocol, she was to alert security and Corcoran immediately. But it was Emilio, the only person there with whom she’d had any friendly interaction. She’d felt comfortable around him because he was a funny, amiable man and she knew he was not involved in the work they were doing there for Vendon Labs and the government. But he obviously was involved in something.
“Who are you working for, Emilio?” she said.
“That’s . . . part of the long answer. I’m not here for any, uh . . . un-American reasons.”
“Un-American?” She chuckled without smiling. Everything they were doing there was un-American. She used to think so, anyway. Now she wasn’t sure. She was starting to think it might be very American. “You mean a foreign government?”
“Yeah. Nothing like that. Look, a lot of people are pretty suspicious about what you’re doing here. I probably don’t have to tell you that. I’ve been here long enough to know you don’t want to be here, Dr. McManus. I know you don’t like what’s going on here. Neither do I, and I’m not even sure exactly what it is yet. And neither will a lot of other people.”
She nodded once. “You work for that local guy with the paranoid Internet radio show? What’s his name? Renner? He’s talked about this place a few times.”
He stared at her silently.
Fara knew she should have security on the way by now and be on the phone with Corcoran, telling him to get his ass upstairs. But she didn’t move from where she stood just inside the door. Instead, she continued to stare at Emilio as she thought about what he’d said.
Before either of them could speak again, Fara heard movement behind her and spun around as Corcoran stepped into the open doorway.
“Fara, I’m going to have to insist that you come back downstairs with me until we’re finished,” he said, trying to sound firm and authoritative. It did not come naturally to him.
Fara turned to Emilio. “Dr. Corcoran says he gave you the job of preparing for the storm,” she said. “Is that true?”
Emilio frowned as he looked back and forth between them. “Prepare for the storm?”
“I think we’re safe, Fara,” Corcoran said. “This hospital is a fortress. Even after being abandoned for a decade, this place is solid as a rock.”
“Dr. Corcoran, nothing around here has been ‘solid’ the whole time I’ve been here.”
Corcoran licked his lips. His mouth was dry. He set his jaw and raised his voice slightly as he said, “Unless you want to lose this job and seriously damage the future of your career, you should come with me so we can get back to work.”
“Emilio and I are going to do what we can to prepare for this hurricane, Dr. Corcoran.”
Corcoran turned to Emilio. “I told you to bring in all the garbage cans and—”
“Emilio, we have this afternoon to board up windows, make sure our generator is in working order, and see that we have everything we need here before the storm hits.” Fara turned to Corcoran. “I’m afraid you’ll have to work without me today, Dr. Corcoran. Oh, and you have a party to attend tonight, don’t you? Have fun. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have work to do.”
Corcoran’s nostrils flared as he gave her a long, fiery glare. Then he turned around and left the office.
Fara closed her eyes long enough to take in a deep, steadying breath and let it out slowly. Then she turned to Emilio again and looked at him silently for a moment.
He said, “You’re not . . . turning me in? Throwing me out?”
She did not answer his questions. “I was serious about getting some work done around here. We’ve got a hurricane to prepare for and if we don’t do it, it won’t get done.”
6
“Shit,” Ivan said when his connection with Emilio was severed. He hung up the phone and sat back in his squeaky chair, hands locked together behind his head.
There were two quick knocks at his door and Mike Dodge walked in. Ivan nodded at the door and Mike closed it, then sat down in front of the desk.
“I was just talking to Emilio,” Ivan said. “He hung up. Abruptly. I think someone walked in on him while he was snooping around in a computer.”
“Oh, damn.” Mike leaned forward in his chair. “You gonna call him back?”
“No. Not yet. I’ll give him a chance to call again. I wasn’t able to tell him about Ollie before he hung up.”
Mike’s face darkened as he leaned back again. “What about Ollie?”
Ivan told him what Ollie had said during his visit earlier. Mike’s eyes slowly widened as he listened. “I think he’s planning something. I’m afraid he intends to do something at the
hospital.”
“He’ll probably get himself killed,” Mike said. “Is he that stupid?”
“He’s not stupid. But he’s extremely misguided.” Ivan reached for the phone. “I’m going to call Sheriff Kaufman. I think he’d love an excuse to put his foot down with Ollie. I was going to tell everyone to go home early today, but . . . well, stick around a little longer.”
Mike got up and said, “I’m not going anywhere until Emilio calls back.”
He left the office and Ivan called the sheriff.
7
After leaving Ivan’s office, Ollie drove a truckload of cots over to the Old Town Rescue Mission. Earlier, he’d delivered a load of folding chairs. They would be overrun with people taking shelter from Hurricane Quentin and would need all the help they could get. In spite of any evacuation attempts by the authorities, the homeless would hide away in their secret places until the weather got so bad that they needed some protection, and then they would converge on the shelters.
Now he was on his way back to the compound, driving through pouring rain and buffeting winds. He would have preferred to make the rounds to all the local homeless shelters—two in Eureka, one in Arcata—but he had more important things to do.
It wasn’t often that Ollie considered anything more important than helping at the shelters. Nearly everything he did was, in some way, connected to helping the homeless. But he didn’t think of it as charity, and he didn’t expect any praise. In fact, whenever someone commended him on his efforts for the homeless, he replied, “Thanks, but I’m not doing anything special here. I’m doing what we all should be doing. So why the hell aren’t you doing it?” But this was more important than usual
Once he arrived at the compound, he went to his quarters, cleaned up and changed his clothes. Then he made a call and ordered all the men to gather at the mess hall for an urgent meeting. He got in his pickup and drove over there, running the plan through his head again and again.
Because Ollie was an outspoken conservative on most issues, people expected him to complain about the homeless and call them bums and deadbeats. They expected him to say the homeless should get jobs and quit expecting a free lunch. But he didn’t say or think any of those things.
Ollie’s father had not been a bum or a deadbeat. He had not been a lazy man. He’d fought for his country in the Vietnam War and had forfeited his life doing it. He didn’t die in the war, but it killed him. He came home in one piece, but he was never the same. That’s what everyone had told Ollie, anyway. He’d been a baby when Dad went to war. But he saw firsthand what it had done to him. It made it impossible for him to relax, to feel joy, to express love. It left him with a constant, throbbing anger just below the surface, always ready to explode.
Ollie remembered nights when he woke to the sound of Dad screaming in the other bedroom, followed by Mom’s gentle voice and his sobs. He remembered the days when Dad’s anger would explode and he would break things, shout and roar. Dad usually left the house when that happened to keep from taking it out on them. But there had been a few times when he didn’t leave soon enough. Sometimes, Ollie still had nightmares about those times, though not as often or as vividly as he used to.
Dad had tried to fight those problems by drinking, but that only made him worse, of course. He’d left them when Ollie was eleven years old. He just disappeared. At first, Ollie had been glad. He’d come to hate and fear Dad by then. But Mom would not allow him to speak a word against his father in her presence.
“He’s broken,” she’d told him. “He was different before the war, I’ve told you that. He was kind and funny and he didn’t even raise his voice back then. But the war broke his mind. He had to do and see all kinds of horrible things. Ever since he got back, he’s been trying to learn how to live with those things. But he can’t. Because those things broke his mind.”
It took a couple of years for that to begin to sink in. Watching some documentaries about the Vietnam War on TV helped. What he saw in those movies gave him nightmares, but Dad had experienced it up close; he’d been in it. He’d lived it. The older Ollie got, the more he understood Dad’s behavior, the less he hated him, and the more he pitied him. And even missed him.
A year after Dad disappeared, Mom got sick. Lung cancer. She got worse fast and Ollie went to live with Aunt Joan and Uncle Edward in Tiburon, a suburb of San Francisco. Aunt Joan was Mom’s sister, and she took him to visit Mom often. With each visit, she looked thinner, paler, sicker, and there seemed to be less of her personality left, too.
During one of those visits, Mom told him that she had tried to keep track of Dad. Last she knew, he was living on the street in San Francisco, homeless and drunk, possibly addicted to drugs, as well.
“I want you to always remember,” she told him that day, “that he loved you once and was so proud of you. Before he was broken. If you can, try to keep track of him. And if he’ll let you, try to take care of him a little.”
He’d been clinging to the hope that Mom would get better, but when she said that, he knew she was going to die.
Aunt Joan and Uncle Ed had no children of their own and they welcomed him into their lives warmly. They had a much larger, nicer house and lived in a much better neighborhood because they had a lot of money. Even so, it never quite felt like home to Ollie, even in the years after Mom died.
After he graduated from high school, Ollie went to San Francisco to find Dad. It didn’t take long. He looked a lot like Mom had before she died, only older and greyer and with fewer teeth. He didn’t recognize Ollie at first, but once he did, he quickly displayed a variety of emotions. First, he got up from the sidewalk and stood in front of Ollie bouncing like a little boy on Christmas morning. He hugged him and cried through his smile, thrilled to see his son. But that stopped abruptly and was replaced by horrible shame and sadness and an inability to look at Ollie. That finally passed as he became calm and asked about Ollie and his mother in a tone that was more like himself, almost familiar to Ollie. When he learned his wife had died, he collapsed sobbing to the sidewalk.
Ollie tried his best to care for Dad. He got him a room and some clothes and tried to get Dad to settle down and make a home for himself. He wouldn’t do that. He stayed for a week and then disappeared. His broken mind had been so eaten away by drugs and booze that he couldn’t even pretend to function in a conventional way. He could not take care of himself, but he could not let anyone else take care of him, either.
The last time Ollie had seen his father, he was running down Eddy Street screaming his head off, flailing his arms. Ollie returned to San Francisco several times to search for him and finally found someone who knew him. Ada, who ran a halfway house, told him Dad had shown up a few times over the years, but never stayed long. The last time he’d shown up, he’d died in his sleep on a porch swing.
Ollie had been devoting his time and energy and most of his resources to helping the homeless ever since. Jesus said to take care of the poor, and these, Ollie decided, were exactly the people he was talking about. He focused on homeless veterans because they were twice fucked. They were homeless and penniless, and they were veterans of wars that had broken them for a country that kept trying to come up with ways to do less and less for them in return. Ollie didn’t care if they were men or women, what color their skin was, whether they were liberals or hebes or fags or atheists or feminists. If they were homeless and they were veterans, they were his helpless brothers and sisters. They were his helpless father. He would do everything he could for them.
That was why he’d called the men to gather in the mess. They were going ahead with Operation Vendonectomy, and they were doing it that night.
With the weather so bad, the cops were going to be busy, and everyone else would be huddling at home to wait out the hurricane, unless they lived in an area that had been evacuated, in which case, they weren’t going to give a good goddamn about a dark old hospital in the woods because they had enough problems. There would be heavy duty security, of co
urse, but they were prepared for that. They had been planning this for months and they were prepared for everything.
The government and military could experiment on all the soldiers and citizens they wanted to, just like they could do anything else they wanted and there wasn’t a goddamned thing Oliver Bradley Monk, Jr., or anybody else could do about it. He knew, he wasn’t that naive. He’d almost come to peace with the fact that his government wasn’t his government anymore—it was in business for itself and he and everybody else were just useful meat. As long as he was left the hell alone, he could come to live with that. It sucked, it spelled the end, every bit of it was biblical retribution that people managed to bring on themselves, but he wasn’t going to succumb to the demons of his father, let the weight of all of it crush his mind. He’d chosen to enlist and go to the Gulf so he could see and live what his father had seen and lived, what had broken him and so many others, and tell it to go fuck itself. He had no qualms about telling everybody else the same thing, including the government, and going his own way. But when they came into his town and set up shop and started kidnapping homeless people so they’d have somebody to torture . . .
Well, that was a different fucking story altogether.
On the hardwood floor of the mess, the men’s footsteps were a low rumble that gradually decreased until there was utter silence. They stood between and around the long tables. A tall, slender, pot-bellied man leaned against the buffet wearing a white apron and chef’s hat, arms crossed over his narrow chest, his long, silver hair in a net below the cap. He had bushy black eyebrows and eyes set deep in his craggy face.
“We’re going through with our plans this evening,” Ollie said. “We’ve been going over and over this for months, and we’re going to do it exactly as we’ve planned. It’s after three right now, which means we’re going to have to get moving. Team One, the tree.”