by Ray Garton
The stairs opened on a corridor in the basement. The door was bent on its hinges and hung all the way open, unable to close. Delgado stopped and listened.
Somewhere in the dark, he heard voices. Or was it just one voice? It was coming from the left. He ambled down the narrow corridor.
“Hey, Bursell! Castillo! Ollie wants you guys up top.”
He stopped and listened again. The voice was closer, talking fast. Sometimes it sounded like more than one voice. Complaining, angry voices, closer still and getting closer.
Delgado kept walking.
Kaufman had no luck finding von Pohle’s car, but he found the new road that led to Springmeier. It had been cut off of Ogden Pass, a road that was closed years ago because, just a mile along, it had slid into a ravine and wasn’t there anymore.
While he was searching for von Pohle’s car, he’d had dispatch look up Ollie’s cell phone number for him. If he had a problem finding the road or getting onto the grounds, he would give Ollie a call. But Kaufman preferred to show up unannounced.
Large tree branches flew through the air and bounced across the road. Unidentifiable debris swirled and danced madly at high speeds through the night. There were moments when it felt like the wind was about to lift Kaufman’s car off the ground and toss it into the night like a toy. He drove slowly, but his wipers were on high, flapping back and forth at a blur.
The gravel road curved and his headlights passed over the hospital’s old boiler house, a dark, sagging structure that had already lost part of its roof. It was such a weary-looking building that Kaufman doubted it would survive the night. Parked near the boiler house were three empty vans.
Sudden movement in his headlight beams made him step on the brake pedal. The car jerked to a halt as a slender figure stumbled in from the right, struggling against the wind, then stopped and squinted at Kaufman. A skinny, black, androgynous figure with short hair, wearing a blanket around the hunched shoulders and some kind of long, baggy T-shirt, or something—
Is that a hospital gown? Oh, Jesus, a hospital gown? That can’t be good.
—which was now soaked and clinging like skin. The slight frame wavered against the force of the blowing storm, the bare feet shifting position. Then the figure seemed to lose interest and stalked farther into the light, crossing the gravel road with head low, shoulders slightly hunched.
“What the hell now,” he muttered as he put the car in park and yanked the parking brake. He opened the door, put one foot on the ground and stood with his right foot in the car and both arms on the car, one leaning on the top edge of the door and the other on the roof. The wind sounded like a thunderstorm in his ears. He reached into the car, flipped a switch on the steering wheel, hit a button on the console under the dashboard, then grabbed the radio’s mike. His voice was amplified over the speaker between the roof lights, which were now flashing red and blue. “This is the sheriff. Are you injured? Do you need an ambulance?”
Kaufman still couldn’t determine the sex, but the person was talking quite rapidly to him- or herself. He noticed the hands. They closed into fists, released, the fingers extended rigidly for a moment, then clenched into fists again. That was repeated over and over as he watched, then the arms came up and the hands clawed furiously at the air, as if scratching someone’s eyes out. They were thick wrists. He decided he was dealing with a very skinny man.
He lifted the mike to his mouth and depressed the button again, but he didn’t speak. He looked beyond the skinny man crossing the road and saw the hospital’s gate. It stood open outward, but not quite all the way, and it was bent and twisted.
A voice shouted from Kaufman’s right and he turned to see another figure similar to the first one—thin, wearing a denim coat over what might have been a flimsy hospital gown—was pointing at him. Behind him, another one appeared from a door in the boiler house.
Why are they coming out of the boiler house? Why are they in the boiler house? What the hell is going on here?
The man who was pointing at him was also shouting at him, but Kaufman couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly, he quickened his pace and when he was on the verge of breaking into a jog, Kaufman noticed that the man was not simply pointing at him, he was pointing a gun at him.
Kaufman moved to duck into the car a fraction of a second before the gun fired.
The bullet struck the windshield and a tiny web of cracks appeared, and Kaufman dropped the mike as he pulled his leg into the car. Then they were running toward him, both of the figures approaching from the boiler house. The one with the gun kept his arm extended and fired again as Kaufman pulled the door closed.
A crashed gate, strange people wandering around in a hurricane—there was definitely some kind of situation at Springmeier, and he needed backup immediately. He started the engine, then reached for the mike. It wasn’t in its holder. He’d dropped it as he was getting into the car. The cord stretched down to his legs. He clumsily reached for it, but the guy with the gun was now in front of the car and aiming at him.
Kaufman put the car in gear and slammed his foot on the accelerator.
The man jumped onto the hood as the car lurched forward and for the first time, Kaufman heard what he was shouting.
“—not gonna let you get away with it, you cocksucker! I saw her first, you son of a bitch! I saw her first!” He looked and sounded like an escaped mental patient, but this hadn’t been a functioning mental hospital in over a decade.
Kaufman remembered the voice of the woman who identified herself as Dr. Fara McManus talking about the virus they’d created and what it would do.
Kaufman hit the brake and the man on the hood slid off as another one began to pound on the passenger side window with something hard and heavy. Kaufman suspected a rock.
The one who’d crossed the street had turned back and was pointing at him, glaring at him through the side window, and shouting at him in a hoarse, roaring fury.
He hit the accelerator again. The car surged forward and humped over something on the ground, first the left front tire, then the left rear tire. Up and over, up and over.
“Shit,” Kaufman muttered, his voice tight, as he thought of things like being fired, or charged, or sued, and the inevitable crucifixion in the media no matter what happened.
He reached down with his left hand and tried to find the mike. The curled cord ended at the bottom of the door. The mike was hanging out of the car.
“Shit!” he shouted.
Suddenly, two fists were pounding on the windshield and an upside-down face was screaming at him and suddenly Kaufman, whose nerves had been stretched tight, was screaming, too, and the car swerved to the right.
The patrol car crashed into the guardhouse.
“Bursell! Castillo!”
They had to be able to hear him because Delgado could hear them. Or him, if it was just one voice. He still couldn’t tell. But it was closer.
He’d passed a lot of doors, closed and opened. The beam of his headlamp finally fell on a wall up ahead as he approached a T intersection. The voices were coming from the left. He rounded the corner.
A face lunged toward him out of the dark, a face so white and stark that Delgado first thought it was a mime. Another emerged right behind it, and a hand holding a knife slashed across him diagonally, and Delgado felt the blade cut his skin as he jogged clumsily backwards and started to fall, mouth yawning open silently, arms flailing—
Don’t fall don’t fall that’s all just don’t fall don’t fall!
—and the hand slashed again and Delgado felt the blade cut, and he got his footing and threw himself to the left. Then he was running back the way he’d come.
They were behind him, chasing him, shouting angrily, cursing, even growling like animals, and they were fast, their bare feet slapping on the tile floor, fast enough to get closer. And closer. He fumbled for his gun as he ran, but his hand seemed to be a piece of dead meat at the end of his arm.
He came to the stairwell door and
pushed through it hard, then spun around and threw himself against it to shut it. It wouldn’t close. His two pursuers hit the door on the other side and shoved, gibbering furiously.
Delgado looked over his shoulder at the stairs. As soon as he stepped away from that door, they were coming through. He unholstered his Ruger, steeled himself, then turned and ran up the stairs, shouting, hoping they would hear him up there.
“They’re down here!” he shouted. “Down here!”
He made it up the first half, grabbed the rail and spun himself around to go up the second half, hearing their feet behind him. As he rounded that rail, he raised his right hand, aimed the gun in their direction and fired once, twice. There was a scream of pain behind him. He didn’t stop moving. Up, up, his shoes clopped on each step.
“They’re down here! Down here!”
Hands on the backs of his legs, grabbing his pant legs, clutching.
He was almost at the top, he could see the door up there, the door that opened on the corridor that led to Dr. McManus’s office to the left and the gathering at the intersection on the right.
“Down here!”
A hand got a solid hold and pulled hard.
Delgado tripped on the stairs and went down.
“Down here!”
They were on him and he felt the knife entering his back, his arm, his neck, again and again, the fist hammering, the blade stabbing into him—
“Down here!”
—pulling out, stabbing in, pulling out, stabbing . . .
PART FIVE
Chaos Theory
39
“I’m alone now, so I can speak freely,” Corcoran said as he leaned back in the chair again and put his feet back up on the desk. “Things have gone straight to hell. A disaster, top to bottom.”
“What kind of disaster?”
“Well, I told Sylvia about some of it, and—”
“You haven’t told me. What kind of disaster?”
“The worst. These, these, I don’t know what to call them, these lunatics, these vigilante militia lunatics come bursting in here and hold everyone at fucking gunpoint while they release the test subjects.”
“The monkeys?”
“No. The, uh . . . the off-the-books test subjects.”
There was a long silence on the line, then: “I see. And how did they know about them?”
“I have no clue! None!”
“None at all? You have no idea whatsoever how this could have happened?”
“Look, there are a couple of guys who do nothing but make trouble for us. Or try to make trouble for us. One is that Internet radio host I told you about. He does a show about conspiracies and, I don’t know, the Illuminati’s plan to enslave us all, or whatever, and he got it into his head that something suspicious was going on here at Springmeier because Vendon Labs and DeCamp Pharmaceuticals were involved with and have a long and fruitful relationship with the government, and—”
“Breathe, Jeremy. Are you high?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, I haven’t been doing anything.”
“I know you too well. That you haven’t been doing any drugs would be ridiculous. Go on with your story.”
“Well, the show is on the Internet, so it’s heard everywhere, but it stirred up all the paranoid nutballs here, and apparently this militia, this armed, paramilitary group of gun-loving thugs just broke in. As far as I know, they’ve killed our entire security team! Just killed them!”
“You’re sure about that? The entire team?”
“According to the leader of that mob. His name is Ollie. One of our janitors seems to know him.”
“Is that so? One of your janitors?”
“Yes. That’s not important, though.”
“You don’t think so? You’ve had a catastrophic security breach and your janitor is friends with the man who leads the team that pulled it off and . . . you don’t think that’s important?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t think—”
“That’s becoming a problem, Jeremy, the fact that you don’t think. The fact that you do drugs and throw sex parties and you’re becoming more and more careless all the time. I’m afraid we’re going to have to reevaluate your relationship with Vendon Labs, Jeremy.”
Corcoran laughed. “Be serious. Where are you going to find anyone who can do what I can do for you? Nobody else could have done for you all the things I’ve done over the years. That includes this. Yes, this project may be fucked, but I’ve been doing what you were paying me to do, and with more time, I would have finished. What do you care if I do drugs or have a party now and then as long as I get the job done?”
“Getting the job done includes maintaining the security and safety of your facility, you know that. I strongly suggested that you let me send someone in to manage things, but you wouldn’t—”
Corcoran lowered his feet to the floor and sat up straight in the squeaky chair. “I don’t work under anyone. After all the years I’ve—with the career I’ve had, you want me to—I shouldn’t have to work under anyone.”
“Are you done sputtering?”
“Well, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable to think that someone of my status—”
“Your status, Jeremy, is as follows: You are a sixty-eight-year-old man who still tries to pass for sixty-five, who’s rapidly falling apart, but who insists on living like a twenty-year-old and who takes drugs like a rock star. All of those things have begun to outweigh any talents you have. Talents that are slipping, I might add, because the drugs are destroying your brain. And your mind. You used to have a few leadership qualities in addition to your talents as a scientist, but not anymore. You’ve made that clear with this disaster.”
“You are not going to lay this at my feet! The biggest problem here from the beginning has been Fara. And now she’s talking about going public with her story. She claims she’s sent some recording to that radio host I told you about. If you want to blast somebody on this team, it should be her.”
“She’s not in charge of the project. You are. You should stop thinking of yourself as irreplaceable. You’re not that Dr. Jeremy Corcoran anymore.”
“Then . . . then what Jeremy Corcoran am I? I’m still the Jeremy Corcoran who did all those great things for you, those things others laughed at when you told them what you wanted. And some of those things . . .” He leaned forward, put an elbow on the desk and his forehead in his hand. When he continued, it was in a whisper. “Some of them were terrible things. What I did to those people in that little Italian village. The things you’ve had me do to our own soldiers. And those children. My God, what you had me to do to all those children you kept in cages. Cages! I mean, Jesus, it’s almost funny, it’s almost hilarious”—he giggled—“that you’re ragging on me for doing some drugs!” More giggling. “It doesn’t make sense. You guys? Children in cages, drugging people, messing with their minds without their knowledge, putting things in the water supply. Me? I like drugs and I enjoy sex with one or more people at once, as much of it as possible, preferably while using drugs. But I’m the bad guy here? Me?”
“You’re looking at it the wrong way. No one is saying you’re a bad guy. We never minded the drugs as long as you remained useful to us. But now the drugs have destroyed in you whatever it was that was useful to us. Do you understand? It’s simply a matter of . . . moving on. And there’s plenty of young talent out there, don’t make the mistake of thinking there’s not. Most of it is coming from Asia, but it’s out there in abundance. You are no longer able to fulfill our needs, so we have to look elsewhere. In fact . . . I think it’s time for retirement, Jeremy.”
Gooseflesh crawled across Corcoran’s shoulders and upper back and the small hairs on the back of his neck stood erect and his scrotum shriveled up tight until his testicles were snugly tucked away. He had been working for these people most of his adult life. He’d done plenty of other work as well, of course, but working for Vendon and DeCamp was how he’d made most of his money, and it was on
that work that most of his reputation was based. He knew these people, he knew how they thought, how they worked. He knew about enough of the cold, cruel things they did to get what they wanted to know that all the stuff he didn’t know about was far worse.
When dealing with these people, the word “retirement” could be taken in more than one way.
“What, uh . . . what kind of retirement do you mean . . . exactly?”
“What kind of retirement do you think I mean, Jeremy?”
When he did not respond, the voice at the other end chuckled.
“Have the test subjects been contained in the building, Jeremy?”
“As far as I know. So far.”
“Encouraging. That must be the goal of everyone there, do you understand? Keeping those people inside the hospital until we get there.”
“We? You’re coming here? When?”
“You’re in the middle of a hurricane right now, but the moment the weather calms down sufficiently, we’ll be sending in a team to solve the problem and . . . clean up this mess.”
Corcoran found that he had no saliva left in his mouth. He rolled his tongue around, then tried to swallow, but gulped loudly instead.
“The problem?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Which . . . problem?”
“The problem we’ve been discussing, of course. You see? You’re difficult to talk to when you’re on drugs, Jeremy. It makes you . . . foggy and unreasonable. You can no longer afford that.”
Drugs had nothing to do with it. Corcoran was paralyzed with fear. He was wondering if they would be sending a team to solve the problem of the released test subjects . . . or the problem of Dr. Jeremy Corcoran.
“Is there anything else you want me to do until you get here?” he said.
“Just keep everyone inside. Including yourself, Jeremy.”
The connection was severed.