by Ray Garton
“Yes, I’m afraid it’s an unpleasant reality,” he said. “But I refuse to believe it’s one that did not occur to any of you until now. You had to know that this project could not be completed without human testing. You also knew what this project was when you joined it and you don’t seem to have any moral struggles with it or else you wouldn’t be here.”
“We’ve all done government work,” Ira Goldman said. He was still seated in the recliner, although Eileen Waxner was no longer in his lap. “We know most of it is dirty work that it ends up doing harm to others. We could sit on our hands and avoid the jobs, but they pay well and it’s good work, and if we didn’t do it, somebody else would. It would get done, and any harm it could do would be carried out. We console ourselves with the fact that it will be used on our enemies, on people determined to hurt us.”
Corcoran smiled. “I see you have all your justifications nicely lined up. But somehow, I’m the bad guy? I’m the villain?”
“You took people off the street, Jeremy,” Eileen said.
“Kidnapped them,” Caleb added with disgust.
“I worked on a couple of projects that tested on prisoners,” Eileen said. “They volunteered and were fully aware of the risks, and most of them were on death row, so they didn’t care much about the risks. But we didn’t kidnap them and imprison them and intentionally make them sick against their will.”
“What have you been doing with them?” Todd said. “Infecting them with the virus?”
“And recording the results,” Corcoran said with a nod.
Todd turned his head slowly from side to side. “That’s . . . horrible.”
“Where’s Holly?” Corcoran said.
Eileen said, “In the bedroom. She wasn’t feeling well.”
“That’s a shame. Holly has been assisting Dr. McManus and me in the entire testing process.”
Corcoran sighed as he spread some more cream cheese on a Ritz, slapped a slice of salami on it, and ate it. He took a napkin from the stack on the coffee table and slowly wiped his fingers as he spoke.
“You have no moral difficulty helping to build weapons that kill and maim countless human beings,” he said to Ira. “You have no ethical qualms about experimenting on human beings who volunteer only because it’s marginally more interesting than sitting in their cells knowing they’re one day closer to being electrocuted,” he said to Eileen. To Ira: “You say the weapons will be used against our enemies, and that makes the work acceptable for you.” To Eileen: “You say the death row inmates volunteer and are fully informed and will be executed, anyway.”
He took a handful of olives from a bowl and ate them slowly, one at a time.
“Well, I have chosen the homeless on whom to experiment. These are people who have been reduced, for whatever reasons, to living on the street. And that’s where they will die. They’re addicted to drugs, alcohol. Most of them suffer from any number of diseases, and if they don’t, they will soon. They’ll die in alleys and gutters and in homeless shelters.”
“That excuses it?” Eileen said.
“I haven’t said that. And I’m not finished. These people will die meaningless deaths, most of them slow and painful. I’m giving them a chance to add meaning to their lives and their deaths by contributing to the development of a weapon that will save the lives of untold numbers of American troops and effectively disable the enemy by turning its people against each other.”
Eileen said, “And . . . that excuses it. Right?”
“I’m not trying to excuse it. I’m simply explaining to you how I see it. The same way you’ve explained to me how you choose to see something you’ve done that might be met with . . . disapproval from others. And I am suggesting that you look at this the way I look at it, just as I’m choosing to look at the things you’ve done the same way you look at them. At the very least, it certainly would make our current situation a little more tenable, don’t you think?”
They watched him eat his olives. He waited for Ira or Eileen or Caleb or Todd to say something, but they didn’t make a sound.
“They were human beings,” Ziggy said quietly. “They may be homeless and at the end of their ropes and living on the street, but they’re still human beings, most of them are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, they have families. They’re human beings who are supposed to have all the same rights and freedoms as everyone else.”
Corcoran nodded. “Yes. I fully agree with all of that. I’ve simply told you how I choose to look at it, and suggested that everyone adopt that view because we’re going to have to cooperate. We’re going to need each other. We have a problem that is much more urgent and dangerous than moral dilemmas, I’m afraid.”
“Something that directly affects you, I would imagine,” Eileen said.
“No, something that affects all of us. The powers that be . . . uh, Vendon Labs, that is . . . they’re very unhappy with what’s happened here. Uh, by the way, do all of you know what’s happened here?”
“I’ve gotten a couple calls,” Ziggy said. “Last I heard, all your infested test subjects are loose.”
“Infected,” Corcoran said.
“Whatever. I’ve been advised to keep them here for their safety, so that’s what I’ve done. Have you been infected, Dr. Corcoran?”
“Me? Of course not! Ollie’s men are hunting them down.”
“To kill them,” Ira said.
“Yes, of course. We have no choice.”
“What were you saying about Vendon Labs?” Todd asked.
“The people in charge are pretty upset about this situation and—”
“Which is your fault,” Ira said.
“No. This is not my fault. I had nothing to do with Ollie and his men—”
“Better security would have helped. We weren’t even prepared for the hurricane, which you knew was coming. You were responsible for buying the generator. Is it used? Rebuilt? Did you pocket the difference? That’s why you do jobs like this, Corcoran. You’d do a lot worse than kidnap homeless people if it meant a job with good pay. You need the money for drugs, don’t you? Pretty desperately, I’d guess. You’d experiment on your own mother if they told you to, and . . . like all of us . . . you’d find some way to justify it.”
“I’m willing to admit I’ve been . . . lax . . . in some ways . . . and that I could have handled this project better. But I will not take responsibility for a group of paramilitary zealots that manages to break in here and—”
“Zealots?” Ziggy said. “Hey, that’s not true. We got some Baptists and Methodists and Catholics, a few Mormons, a few Muslims, we got a couple atheists, and we even have an Amish guy. We’re all religions in Ollie’s group. But . . . now that I think about it, I don’t think we’ve got any Zealots.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Corcoran groaned as he let his head fall forward. He stayed that way for a moment, staring down at his feet. Finally, he lifted his head and said, “As I was going to say, Vendon Labs will be sending a team out here to clean this up. They’ll come as soon as the weather calms down a little. Maybe sooner. They’re going to be eager to remove all evidence of the project, make sure all the test subjects have been eliminated, and they’ll want to make sure word doesn’t get out. They definitely want me, but it will be in their best interests to wipe you out, too. All of you. Everyone here. But I could give you some leverage.”
“Leverage?” Eileen said. “Why would you give us leverage? Against what?”
“Did you hear what I said? They’ll probably come in here with machine guns and flamethrowers. Maybe gas, I don’t know. If you have something they want, you might be able to bargain with them. Or at least slow them down until you can come up with a better idea.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Ziggy said. “It won’t get that far. We won’t let it. Ollie won’t let it.”
“You have a lot of confidence in Ollie, but you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
Caleb said, “You’re telling us that Vendon Labs is
going to send a team in here to kill all their employees?”
“Haven’t you been listening?” Corcoran said. “You’ve all become liabilities. It won’t be the first time Vendon has done something like this, and Vendon sure as hell isn’t the only company that does this sort of thing. I’m telling you in advance so you can prepare, come up with a plan, so when they get here—”
“I think you’re just trying to come up with reasons for us to protect your ass,” Caleb said.
“I’m saying that if you do it right, you could use me to—”
Eileen said, “That’s what it sounds like to me, too, Caleb.”
“I don’t think you should be in here, Corcoran,” Ira said. “I think you should be out there with them. With the people you’ve infected. The people who now have to be killed because of what you did to them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Corcoran said.
Ira stood. “I’m not being ridiculous.”
“I’m inclined to agree with Ira,” Todd said.
Ziggy unholstered his gun. “I think you should leave.”
“And go out there?” Corcoran said, pointing at the door. “Are you insane?”
“I don’t think it’s fair for you to be in here,” Ziggy said, bending his right arm at the elbow and aiming the gun at Corcoran. He started to move toward him, saying, “Not after what you’ve done to them.”
“You’re crazy,” Corcoran said, backing away from him. “Crazy.”
Ziggy arced around the coffee table, then came toward Corcoran again, sending him in the direction of the door.
“You want me to go out there . . . or you’ll shoot me, that’s what you’re saying?” Corcoran said, still moving backwards. His heart was pounding furiously again and he felt nausea rising in his stomach.
“That’s right.”
He turned to the others. “Jesus Christ, are you going to let this happen? I’m trying to tell you, dammit, you can use me when Vendon Labs gets here.”
“I don’t think they want to use you, Dr. Corcoran,” Ziggy said. He had not stopped advancing.
Soon, Corcoran was backed against the door.
“I’ll count to three,” Ziggy said. “If you’re not out by then, I’ll shoot.”
Corcoran feared he would hyperventilate if he did not calm down.
“One.”
“You don’t understand, they’ll kill all of you!”
“Two.”
He reached behind him and found the door’s handle. He unlocked it, pushed it down, then stepped forward as he opened it.
“Three.”
Corcoran slipped out the door, alone and unarmed, and into the blackness of the windy corridor, resisting the urge to scream.
50
The subbasement of the Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital was like a horror movie set and Ollie didn’t like it, but he shoved that deep down inside of himself and ignored it. After finding Delgado in the stairwell, he’d gotten three of his men to accompany him down to the basement, and they weren’t going back upstairs until every test subject down there was dead.
He’d brought McCoy, Baker, and Axelrod because they hadn’t hesitated to follow orders when they were outside getting the sheriff. When Baker had found the test subject lying in the road—Kaufman had later told Ollie he’d run over the man with his car—trying to crawl away, he’d shot it without pause. He needed men like that with him down in the basement, especially the subbasement, which he had expected to be everything it turned out to be.
Axelrod had already shot one of the test subjects in the basement and their adrenaline was pumping. They were ready for more.
Ollie tried to keep his adrenaline under control as they slowly made their way through the damp darkness, their feet crunching over the rocky dirt floor. He had put his ski mask back on and was glad of it because the light from his headlamp kept glinting off of cobwebs, and with the mask on, he could walk through them without feeling their tingling, sticky touch on his face.
Ollie was about to tell the men to break up and cover more ground, but not to get too far apart, when there was a loud crash that made all four of them jump. The sound was immediately followed by an angry voice, and it was coming from somewhere in that inky darkness ahead of them, a darkness so thick that it was heavy and created an almost physical pressure as it closed in from all directions.
They walked around damp pillars and stacks of rotting cardboard boxes and old wooden crates and decayed office furniture and piles of unidentifiable material that formed menacing shapes in the murkiness.
Ollie spotted the source of the noise up ahead. One of the piles of junk had collapsed and someone had been in the way. Even a filing cabinet had toppled over onto the mess. Now there was movement as someone crawled out, chattering angrily.
They gathered on one side of the pile, where an arm was reaching out, pale, bare, and covered with cuts and scratches. Then a head. It was a woman, short and stout. As she rose from the mess in her grimy hospital gown, their headlamp beams revealed a horrible wound in her neck where flesh had been torn away. It had been there a while and was swollen and infected.
“Oh, Jesus, Vera,” Ollie said when he recognized her.
She held up a hand against the light and said, “Who’s that?”
Vera Washington had been homeless for years. Her story was a heartbreaking one, but not uncommon. She’d lost everyone and everything in her life by the time she was forty—her husband, her two children—and after that, she’d forgotten how to live life, how to function properly throughout the day, and she kind of fell apart. She hadn’t spoken to her aging parents for years because they’d refused to attend her wedding and acknowledge her husband, who met with their disapproval. They had no interest in helping her. She lived on the street for a while, then started taking advantage of the local shelters. But she did more than eat and sleep at the shelters; she started pitching in and working at them, helping out, doing whatever needed to be done. Now, that was her life. Working mostly from the Bayview Homeless Shelter, she organized blanket drives and food drives and fund-raisers for all the local shelters. The homeless shelter had become her home and her life. It had given her something around which to build a new life. She had become productive and was the busiest person Ollie knew besides himself who worked for the homeless. She still considered herself a homeless person and always looked like one as she roamed the streets in third-hand clothes looking for new people to bring to the shelter.
“Who is that?” she said.
“Oh, Jesus, I’m so sorry, Vera,” he said, shaking his head.
“Ollie?” Her face screwed up as she craned her head forward and squinted at him, shading her eyes from the light with her upheld hand. “Is that you, Ollie?”
He turned his head away from her for a moment. He was afraid she might recognize his eyes. He didn’t want her to know it was him because she’d think he was there to help her.
“You!” she said, pointing a finger at him. “You, Ollie! You were the one who did this to us! You were behind this, weren’t you?” Spittle flew from her mouth as she spoke.
“What?” Ollie whispered as he watched her face turned into a mask of hatred that was focused on him alone. “I didn’t—”
“You son of a bitch bastard you should die for doing this to us you fucker!”
As she launched into a screaming rant, she swung her left arm back. Her hand was clutching something as she lunged forward and swung the arm in the other direction, slashing at Ollie. It caught his upper arm as he lurched backwards, and hot, searing pain rose in that spot.
Vera kept slashing so fast, he couldn’t see what she had in her hand, but it was sharp enough to draw blood. He felt hot moisture spread immediately on his arm as she caught him across the chest.
The others raised their guns but Ollie shouted, “No!” as he kept jumping backwards to avoid her hand. But he wasn’t talking to them. “I did not do this! I came to stop it!”
“Lying sack of shit,” Vera
growled as she stabbed and slashed at Ollie with what he could now see was a filthy, rusted, old box-cutter. “Fucking killer and a liar and a—”
Ollie watched her mouth move furiously to form the words, her round, flat face twisted into a venomous look of hatred. For a moment, he was with his father, his gibbering, wasted father who would not let Ollie help him, who would not accept a home, food, money, who angrily rejected everything in favor of his own addiction and insanity. A burning rage rose up in Ollie, hot, bilious frustration and disappointment and guilt lodged in his gullet and he fired his gun. But he fired it again, and again, shouting, not forming words, just releasing all that anger and frustration.
Three bullets put her down.
Ollie said nothing, just stared down at Vera’s body.
“You okay?” Axelrod asked.
Ollie was glad, once again, that he was wearing his mask. They couldn’t see the hot tears running from his eyes.
A rumbling, crashing explosion occurred somewhere in the hospital. It was big, though, big enough for Ollie to feel it in the dirt floor under his feet. It went on for a while and all four of them stopped to listen, looking at each other with concern.
“Sounds like this place is falling apart,” Baker said.
“Jesus Christ,” Ollie said. He coughed, took a deep breath, and said, “I’m gonna have to go up and see what that was. Get the rest of them that are down here and come back upstairs when you’re done.”
“What about Bursell and Castillo?” McCoy said.
“If you find them and they’re okay, bring them up with you. If they’re not okay, then . . . do not bring them up with you.”
“What the hell was that?” Emilio said after the rumbling and crashing stopped. He was seated in a chair in Fara’s office.
Fara was getting a blanket from her closet for Sheriff Kaufman when it happened, whatever it was. She stepped out of the closet and said, “That was in the front part of the hospital. It sounded a lot like the last one. A tree.”
“Are there trees in the front?”
“Two huge oaks. One is in the middle of the parking lot, the other’s right in front of the hospital.”