by Ray Garton
“Uh-oh!” Holly said with a throaty laugh. Her right hand had made its way below his waist. “Feels like Einstein’s got a new theory,” she said as she squeezed his erection through his scrubs. She slithered down his body until she was on her knees.
Oh, how Corcoran loved young Asian science chicks on their knees. Especially in the bathroom. Doing it in the bathroom just made it dirtier somehow, and the dirtier the better, Corcoran always said. He watched her in the mirror as she tugged on the tie of his scrub pants, and then pulled them down. His cock popped up out of the descending pants and she caught it in her mouth and pushed her face forward, making a little growling noise that he could feel to his balls.
Corcoran had taken the doctors’ lounge as his living quarters during his stay at the hospital. Others on the team rented apartments or houses, but he preferred to live where he worked, because his work was his life. Especially tonight. He began to thrust his hips forward, gently at first, smiling.
He looked down at her and watched her head move from above for a while, then turned to the mirror again. He was amazed by her fluid movements as she got off her knees and squatted in front of him with her legs spread wide without taking her mouth off of him, the way her hands constantly fondled and caressed him, the way her right hand snaked down between her thighs and clawed at the taut denim over her pussy. She was like a pro, like a porn star, and watching her only excited him more.
There was a quick knock on the door. Todd Hinkle walked in. He was a slightly nerdy lab tech. He froze, then pushed his black-framed glasses up on his nose and smiled. “Looks like the party’s in here,” he said.
Startled, Holly released Corcoran, stood, and turned around. “Oh, hi, Todd,” she said rather groggily. She turned to Corcoran, wrinkling her nose, moisture glistening around her mouth. “It’s hot in here. Or is it me? Is it hot in here? I’m hot.” She unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them down her legs along with her panties, then stepped out of them.
“Hey, Dr. Corcoran,” Todd said, “we’ve been hearing noises that sound a lot like gunfire.”
Corcoran smiled, anticipating a punch line, but Todd simply stared at him, awaiting a response.
“Wait, what?” Corcoran said. “Are you serious?”
“Well, that’s what it sounded like. They were outside at first, but what we just heard a few seconds ago sounded like it was inside the building.”
Corcoran realized he was standing there with his pants down and his erect penis pointed at Todd. He bent down and pulled up his pants.
“It’s just the storm,” he said. “There’s no gunfire around here. If there was a problem, security would be on it and somebody would have called me by now.”
“This room is too small,” Holly said. She went to the door, leaving her pants on the floor, and smiled as she gently patted Todd’s cheek. Then she left the bathroom.
Corcoran smiled. “Okay, now it’s a party,” he said as he followed her out.
There were half a dozen other people in the room, the same group that always showed up for his parties, a small segment of the staff, kindred spirits who enjoyed good company and a good, friendly fuck. Corcoran was glad Fara had not come—they all were—because she would have stifled the whole evening. He knew she wouldn’t, but he’d invited her, anyway. She couldn’t say she hadn’t been invited. And if she had come, they could’ve slipped something into her drink. She needed loosening up. He’d decided he’d had enough of her moralizing and stern disapproval. He intended to boot her off the team. She just wasn’t any fun.
Unlike, say, Eileen Waxner, a short, plump, adorable virologist with enormous breasts who’d already doffed her top and sat on Ira Goldman’s lap wearing only a bra and skirt. Ira, a fifty-four-year-old biochemist who was pretty plump himself, had a beefy arm around Eileen and was grinning like an idiot as he ogled her prodigious cleavage just inches from his face. The two of them made the recliner Ira was sitting in look overtaxed.
With a dramatic flourish of his arm, Corcoran said in a stentorian voice, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow, we get a hurricane!”
“The TV says it’s coming tonight,” Eileen said.
“What?” Corcoran said, dropping his arm.
“Yeah, just before I came, I had the TV on and the news guy said the hurricane is hitting earlier than expected. Tonight.”
“Hey, I really think that was gunfire we heard,” Caleb Tan said. He was a twenty-five-year-old whiz kid aero biologist from Singapore who looked like he hadn’t started shaving yet. He stood by the table where all the booze was, making himself a drink.
“Yeah,” Ira said. “Sounded like machine gunfire. Some of it did. To me, anyway.”
The words “machine gunfire” cut through Corcoran’s high like a hot knife. “Machine gun. Are you serious?”
Ira nodded.
“That can’t be,” Corcoran muttered. “If there were something happening, someone would have called me, I’m sure.” He reached for his pocket to check his phone and make sure it was charged and operational. “Besides, that’s what we have security for.” He realized he was wearing scrub pants that had no pockets. “Has anyone seen my phone?”
Before anyone could answer, the door flew open so hard, it hit the wall with a sharp crack, and two men in black wearing ski masks and carrying guns burst into the room and aimed their weapons at everyone.
14
Hank Clancy hugged his knees to his chest in the corner of the small room, the tile floor hard under his bony ass. He squinted as he looked around at the walls. Had it grown smaller?
Don’t be an idiot, Hank thought. Rooms don’t get smaller.
He was cold and shivering and felt sick. He’d wrapped himself in the blanket from his cot, but it didn’t help. This had come suddenly only a couple of minutes ago and felt like a fever, like the flu, or something. Hank shook his head and chuckled. No, not the flu. It was probably something those bastards had given him with their needles and swabs, something they were whipping up right there in Eureka, right under everybody’s nose.
He’d seen them coming and going in their protective suits with their syringes, disappearing into one of the other rooms, then leaving. Later, they would come back and get that person and take him or her away. Once taken away, that person didn’t come back.
One of them had come to Hank’s room. He wasn’t sure how long ago, that was the scary part. With no windows, there was no day or night. With no clocks, time didn’t exist and he’d lost track of it a while ago . . . although, he didn’t know how long. But it hadn’t been too long—at least, it didn’t feel like it had been too long. He’d been given an injection, then the space-suited person had left. He’d been waiting for them to come get him, but no one showed up. He waited and waited . . . but he didn’t know how long.
Hank’s ears were ringing loudly and a headache was coming on pretty fast. He heard distant noises, but wondered if they were real or just part of the irritating ringing. Earlier, he’d heard what sounded like thunder, and then a sound like wind rising up and then falling away, over and over. But now he heard . . . popping noises. Like gunshots, maybe. But that didn’t make any sense. Unless he was hallucinating. Had they given him something to make him hallucinate?
Whatever it was, they’d given him something. The protective suits were pretty telling, as far as Hank was concerned, and they didn’t tell anything good. But it didn’t tell anything he didn’t already know, either. He knew what was going on. He knew the other people they’d brought in off the street probably were confused, scared, and wondering what the hell was happening to them, but not Hank. He’d seen all of this coming. No one would listen to him, of course. Who listens to anything a homeless old man says? What sane person in America would take a homeless old man seriously?
Hank regularly prowled the woods around the old Springmeier Hospital, sometimes living there for days at a stretch, and he’d seen all the activity as they moved in and began working on the place. The back half of it, anyway.
They’d breathed new life into that decrepit old hospital building, like some voodoo priest reviving a corpse. They’d carted in a lot of machinery and made a lot of noise, and then it was quiet again, but alive, working, breathing. Up to something. Hank didn’t know who they were, but they had erected an electric fence to keep people out or in or both, and they’d avoided attention by cutting a new road through the woods off of an old road that had been closed over a decade ago. They’d reawakened the dead building for their own purposes. He’d watched them bring it back to life, wondering what atrocities would be committed in its halls, never suspecting that he would be taken there and held like a criminal.
Hank suspected his son was behind the kidnapping. He’d tipped them off about Hank, targeted him, and they’d taken him right off the street in a ridiculous plumber’s van. Gifford, his son, had gotten tired of waiting for him to die. Living on the street gave Hank the freedom to pop up in Gifford’s life whenever he wanted, and disappear whenever he wanted, and Gifford didn’t like that. He used to tolerate it, back when he thought Hank would leave him some money. Once Gifford knew that wasn’t going to happen, he had no use for Hank, who had decided not to leave anything to anyone and revoked his will. That was when Hank decided to get off the grid.
He’d lived outside the law his whole life. He’d been born outside of it. His pappy had been a moonshiner, a thief, and a pimp, and his mother had been one of the old man’s girls. Hank didn’t know anything else. He discovered early that he had some talent as a thief and a liar, and he built on those. He started out as a cat burglar, but by the time he was twenty, he’d moved up to stealing cars, then selling and distributing them. Later, he added guns to that. Then drugs. He was reluctant to get into the drug trade, but it was too tempting. He was so good at it that he abandoned all the other stuff and focused exclusively on drugs.
It all ran beautifully for so long. Smooth, quiet, no trouble, lots of money. Then Hank started dipping into the inventory. Some told him that was the biggest mistake he ever made, but Hank disagreed. It changed his life. Marijuana, cocaine, acid, meth, ecstasy—he tried it all, then kept using the stuff that made him see the world so differently, so clearly. The story was that drugs ruined Hank Clancy’s life, but that wasn’t true. Seeing things clearly ruined his life. He saw too much, and the horror of what he saw only made him want more drugs.
He saw two different worlds existing simultaneously. There was the world most people lived in, where everybody got their news on TV, found out what to wear on TV, what to think, who to hate—and thought it was real life. The other world was made up of what was really going on, the stuff that didn’t get reported on the news, the real life that was occurring all around them but out of their sight. Because it wasn’t on TV.
Then the Internet came along and was supposed to make all the information in the world instantly accessible and improve everyone and everything. But that didn’t happen. What did happen—and Hank saw it instantly—was that everything bad about life on planet earth escalated. People started becoming more divided, more isolated, and all the insanity in the world seemed to move to an express lane. That’s when he began thinking about getting out of the asylum.
Gifford thought he was crazy, of course, and said the world was only getting better. Like he was under hypnosis, or something. Like everybody else. In a trance. Gifford was too preoccupied with being a big shot to pay any attention to the world.
He hung around with lowlifes he could ingratiate himself with, then use. Gifford had always worked for Hank and as long as his instructions were clear and thorough and not delivered too fast, he was pretty reliable. But that changed when Hank started giving him more responsibilities and teaching him the business. Then he started bringing his friends around, showing off to them, giving them drugs, letting them crash at the house, playing the big shot. Hank had never met Gifford’s friends before, but he recognized them—punks, all of them, nothing but trouble. He’d been trying to avoid people like them as much as possible his whole life, and he didn’t want them around now. He kicked Gifford out, and his friends with him. Gifford just moved into the mobile home Hank had behind the house for guests. It wasn’t some trailer park dump—this one was big, and as mobile homes went, pretty damned luxurious. Gifford and his friends turned it into a dump in three months.
Useless prick and his useless prick friends. Nothin’ but punks and whores who can’t hold their drugs and want ’em for free, sons-a-bitches.
Hank felt a surge of anger as he thought about Gifford and his friends. He still felt cold and shivery and was starting to ache everywhere, but he stood and paced the small room. He was angry and tense and he couldn’t remain still any longer.
Shortly after the incident with the mobile home, Hank started tucking his money away in small neighborhood banks all over northern California using phony identities. Some people collected stamps; Hank collected phony identities. He made his preparations quietly and went on with business as usual, which included arguing with his son. It was all they ever did.
“You’re crazy, Dad,” Gifford would say. “We all know where computer technology came from.”
“I just seem crazy to you because, like everybody else, you don’t recognize sanity anymore. You know, it wasn’t very long ago when all this stuff was science fiction! Computers, iPads, the Internet, cell phones, all of it. Then out of nowhere, it exploded ! Where do you think that came from? You really think some geeks in garages whipped up all that shit?”
“What’s so crazy about that? Somebody invented the lightbulb, the telephone, the car—why not all this other stuff?”
“Because it’s too big a leap. They’ve been working on this stuff for a long time, since Roswell, deconstructing the alien technology, then putting it back together again. Then they dumped it on us, made everybody love and crave it, and they’re gonna use it to control us all.”
“You gotta lay off that shit you been doin’, Dad. It’s fryin’ your brain.”
“My brain’s fine! Your brain’s been washed.”
When he was finally ready, Hank just disappeared. He felt safer alone in the woods in the middle of the night than he felt on the street in broad daylight. He preferred wild animals in the dark to human beings in any light. He knew how to deal with animals in the woods, but he was never sure with human beings. Hank believed that living with other human beings caused insanity, that all of them were carriers of the disease, and all of them, in one way or another, suffered from it, gave it to each other in a long cycle of people driving each other and themselves monkeyfuck crazy that went all the way back to whatever witch-cursed pond humanity crawled out of. He preferred isolation and detachment, and that made all those insane people think he was crazy. It was a fucked-up world.
He shivered and hugged himself as he paced unsteadily, sweating now, and angry that he was cold. Really angry. He was breathing heavily and clenching his fists. His skin felt too tight. He felt ready to explode.
Hank stopped pacing and threw himself at his cot. He tore the thin mattress from it and threw it across the room, knocking the pillow to the floor. He picked up the cot itself and threw it against the wall.
He stopped and stared at the mess while he caught his breath. It wasn’t enough.
Hank stopped breathing when an explosion of sound came from somewhere outside the ward. It sounded like gunshots.
Gunshots again. Am I hallucinating? Or is something happening?
He went to the window in the front of the room. The reinforced glass looked out on the round ward outside, with a small, derelict nurses’ station in the center, like the hole of donut. All around the large circle were rooms like his with windows looking out on each other. To Hank’s right, an archway opened on a short hall, and at the end of that hall was a door, but he couldn’t see it from that angle.
That was where the sound was coming from. And it was gunfire. There were a few pops, some shouting and then the loud, sustained sound of a machine gun, followed by a big crash.
Then two men dressed in black and wearing ski masks, each with a pistol in hand and one with a compact black machine gun strapped to his shoulder, rushed into the ward.
Hank felt weak and leaned against the wall as he looked out the window, trying to retreat as much as possible so they wouldn’t notice him. Still thinking he might be imagining things, he rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of both hands, then looked out the window again.
They talked quietly, then one of them reached beneath his black jacket, still wet from the rain outside, and produced a small camera.
Had they come to execute him? Torture him? Experiment on him?
Fear and adrenaline coursed through him and swirled with his growing anger, and his lips peeled back over his yellow teeth as his entire body tensed. Hank would not go without a fight.
15
Tyler Bursell adjusted his headlamp as he and Edgar Castillo descended the narrow, dark staircase that went below the basement.
They had entered the hospital through the underground tunnel from the boiler house. While the others were to go upstairs and spread throughout the building to look for the missing homeless people, Tyler and Castillo had been instructed to stay behind and explore the basement. The first thing they found was a room with a large rectangular window that looked into a much smaller room with tile on the walls and floor, a drain in the center of the floor, and cameras mounted on the ceiling.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Castillo had said.
“Me, neither.”
They moved through the entire basement but found nothing else of interest except the stairs to the subbasement. But the stairway was dark and the light switch by the door produced nothing, so they turned on their LED headlamps.
Ty hadn’t been with Ollie as long as Castillo, who was in his thirties, about ten years ahead of Ty, but he was every bit as loyal. He came home from Afghanistan to learn that his wife was divorcing him to move in with his best friend, he couldn’t get a job, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think straight because of all the noise in his head, and he couldn’t get through the iron bureaucracy of the Veterans Administration to get the help he needed. Once he started self-medicating, his descent was swift and blurred by drugs and alcohol. During a brief moment of clarity, he realized he was living on the street, that he’d become one of those crazy-looking street people he always tried to avoid. He would have died that way if it hadn’t been for Ollie.