Ashes, Ashes

by Charles Atkins

  ‘Let’s move,’ Barrett said, as she and Carla curled up inside the meal cart. Hobbs grabbed the M16 rifle, and followed behind as Justine pushed the heavy cart. ‘Jesus,’ she muttered, pushing with all her might. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to be able to move this. Could one of you maybe get out?’

  ‘There’s no way in hell I’m staying here,’ Carla whispered.

  Hobbs shouldered his rifle and helped Justine wheel the cart out of the room and down the hall.

  As they passed, one of the other Guardsmen yelled out at Hobbs, ‘Hey, man. We can’t leave our posts like that.’

  Justine held her breath.

  ‘Lady needs help,’ Hobbs said, and then in a conspiratorial voice, added, ‘She also told me where I can hook us up with some food. I’ll be right back, just keep an eye on my post. Cool?’

  ‘I can’t believe they haven’t sent around a food cart,’ Justine added. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ the guard said.

  ‘For all you guys do … I’ll find you something good. Give me ten minutes.’

  ‘You’re a peach,’ the guard said. ‘Let me get the door.’

  Justine kept her eyes down on the tiled floor as she and Hobbs pushed the heavy cart. ‘See if you can get some fresh fruit,’ one of the Guardsmen asked.

  ‘There’s some apples and oranges,’ Justine responded, mentally measuring the distance to the outer door of the locked ward.

  As they passed the TV, she meant to keep going, glad for the forward momentum. But Hobbs had stopped pushing.

  ‘Holy shit!’ he exclaimed.

  On the screen she saw a horrifying image of a dying man; his face was covered with open sores. At first Justine thought it was a dramatization of plague or small pox. But there was a red date stamp at the bottom of the screen indicating that what was being shown was just hours old. A newscaster grimly reported, ‘This graphic footage was just received by us. The sender states he is Richard Glash, and the man on the screen is reported to be Homeland Security official Martin Cosway, who was abducted by Glash less than forty-eight hours ago. It was earlier reported that Richard Glash, Martin Cosway and Dr George Houssman had all perished in a car accident; this is now being questioned as we take you to a live press conference with officials of Homeland Security.’ The scene shifted and she saw Corbin Zane, in a hazmat suit minus the helmet, attempting to field questions. He was sweating and on the defensive. ‘Yes, I’m aware of that videotape. And we believe that it was made in advance by Glash, as a way to confuse us.’

  ‘Isn’t it possible,’ one of the reporters shot back, ‘that what he faked was his death? And that in fact you’ve gotten everything wrong and Richard Glash is alive and well and in fact carrying out the mass murder which he began?’

  Zane stammered and struggled to be heard over the gaggle of reporters, each demanding to have their questions answered. An aide tapped him on the shoulder and whispered something.

  Justine froze at the sound of a telephone ringing from the far end of the hallway, from the room where they’d just been. She glanced at Hobbs, and much as they both wanted to hear what else Zane might say, they pushed on toward the outer door.

  ‘Can you buzz us out?’ Hobbs called back.

  One of the guards, his eyes fixed on the television, hit the button and they safely wheeled through.

  ‘This way … to the right,’ Justine said, pushing the cart down a darkened hallway that led into a wing of administrative offices.

  She looked around and then flipped up the plastic flap on the meal tray to free Barrett and Carla.

  ‘Did you hear?’ Hobbs asked Barrett, while quickly stripping off the bulky white suit. ‘The idiots.’

  ‘Maybe if we got through to them now …’ Barrett said, pushing up out of the cart.

  ‘They didn’t listen before,’ Carla said. ‘They’re just concerned with how the press is going to handle this.’

  ‘He’s got to be with his father,’ Hobbs said.

  ‘Of course,’ Barrett added, ‘that’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s been in constant contact with someone … I just realized something else.’

  ‘What?’ Carla asked.

  ‘Why Glash needed two hostages. One to write everything down and the other …’

  ‘To test the plague,’ Carla finished. ‘That was meant to be us … he was planning to infect me. That’s why he didn’t kill me.’

  They turned at the sound of a growing commotion coming from the locked ward.

  ‘Let’s move,’ Justine urged. ‘This way.’ And they all tore off in the direction of a side stairwell. Behind they heard the door to the unit slam open and excited voices. ‘There’s the cart!’ a man shouted.

  They flew down the stairs. Barrett shouted back, ‘One of us should stay and try to make them listen.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Justine said. ‘What’s the address for the father’s store?’

  Hobbs didn’t break pace as he shouted it and also the cell phone numbers for both his supervisor and FBI agent Anderson. ‘Try them both,’ he said. ‘Somebody has got to believe us.’

  Above them, footsteps raced closer, clomping down the stairs. A voice shouted, ‘Stop, now. This is an order!’

  Barrett landed first on the ground floor. In front of her was a red-and-black painted door with a sign that read Alarmed, for Emergencies Only.

  She threw her hip against the release lever, a piercing siren went off and she, Hobbs and Carla sprinted into the street.

  Thirty-One

  Chained to the cot and still naked under the tarp, George Houssman knew his time was running out. He averted his eyes from Cosway’s ravaged body and looked over to Richard Glash, at the distant end of the cellar working on his computer.

  Cosway had died about half an hour ago in a fit of coughing that had brought bright red blood gushing out of his mouth. It had pooled on the floor, as Cosway gasped, with lungs that no longer functioned. George had watched helplessly. The final look of wide-eyed panic on Cosway’s face as he’d tried to breathe, but instead choked on his own blood, stayed seared in George’s mind.

  ‘Richard,’ Houssman gently called across the space, the words muffled by his mask. ‘It’s not too late. You don’t have to do this. I could even help you get away, so that they wouldn’t put you back in prison.’

  Glash stiffened and turned. His face contorted and a scream rattled the dust and the spider webs. ‘You lied to me!’ he shrieked.

  George pressed back on the bed. The hatred on Glash’s face drew his thoughts back to those horrible visits at Albomar. The little boy clinging to his legs, kicking him, screaming, inconsolable. As Glash now shrieked ‘Liar!’, George wondered if he’d gone too far. He prepared for the worst, ready to die, wondering if being shot or bludgeoned to death might not be preferable to the nightmare Glash intended to release.

  ‘You lied to me! You lie now. You’d lock me up. You’d make them shoot me. I see the things you’ve written about me. You lie.’ Glash stood; he seemed unsteady, as though the blood wasn’t making it to his head. He pointed at Houssman. ‘You were supposed to be my father.’

  Houssman shuddered as he got a clear look at Richard’s face and the cracking flesh of his hands. ‘You’re sick, Richard. You need to get to a hospital … you need antibiotics. It’s not too late, Richard.’

  Glash stared at him. He went back to the worktable and retrieved a sketchpad and a fistful of charcoal pencils. He stuffed the pencils into the breast pocket of his denim shirt and pulled up a chair directly across from Houssman. With his mouth contorting, as though deep in concentration, he drew at a furious pace. He ripped off the first page – a line drawing – and let it fall face-up at the old man’s feet. ‘Don’t touch it,’ he warned.

  George stared down. The artwork was incredibly clear for something drawn in seconds. It showed University Hospital and on the broad marble steps that led up to the main entrance a huge pile of bodies. The detail was amazing, down to a ra
t that peeked out from the corner of the building.

  ‘You can’t become infected … not yet,’ Glash said, his fingers smudging the charcoal on the page. ‘Anyway, you’re already old; you’ll die soon. I think your heart will break as your daughters and your grandchildren get sick and die. I have their phone numbers,’ he continued, not looking up from his pad. ‘I called Stephanie just this morning to be certain that she and little Faye haven’t left town.’ He ripped the next page, already with a new drawing, from the pad; he threw it next to the first. ‘They hadn’t.’

  ‘No,’ Houssman gasped, his heart pounding, feeling as though it were being ripped out of him. ‘I’m begging you, please don’t do this.’ He stared at Glash’s image of his granddaughter’s face, her normally pudgy cheeks drawn and covered with sores. Her lips had cracked and the capillaries in her eyes had burst. She was clutching a Raggedy Ann doll.

  ‘Did you talk to her?’ George asked, terrified at the level of detail Glash had about his family.

  ‘No, just heard her voice … I do that sometimes. I used to do that with you and your wife.’ His hands never stopped. ‘When I was at Albomar they’d let us use the phone for fifteen minutes every week. I’d call you up. I never spoke, because I knew you’d lie and then they wouldn’t let me call. They’d say it wasn’t therapeutic; it wasn’t in my best interest.’ He tore off the next page, it showed Barrett, dying in a hospital bed. Glash snorted as he pulled a reddish pencil from his pocket. His hands flew in broad strokes over the pad. The image he now hurriedly completed was more cartoonish and less detailed, but the scene was clear, a favorite of photographers and painters: a long view up Fifth Avenue through the marble arch at Washington Square Park. It showed a man in a medieval cap and tunic ringing a bell in the foreground. Behind him, stretching for infinity uptown, lay piles of corpses. Rats scurried from heap to heap and below the image Glash had written in block letters BRING OUT YOUR DEAD.

  ‘Son,’ Peter Glash called from the top of the stairs. ‘It’s time. I’ve got the van.’

  ‘Coming,’ he said. He looked down at the pad, and coughed. He turned from Houssman as convulsive bursts wracked his body. George watched his face turn bright red; he couldn’t catch his breath. ‘One more,’ he whispered. He pulled out two pencils, one dark gray and the other red.

  George watched as Glash feverishly, for a second time, drew University Hospital. In front grew a monstrous mound of bodies. Next to it, he drew himself, staring straight out of the page and holding a lit torch that had just ignited the arm of Faye’s Raggedy Ann doll. With a final flourish Glash crushed the two pencils tight in his fist and wrote ASHES, ASHES. He covered his mouth, as though another fit of coughing were about to start. He waited and then stood, letting the sketchpad slip to the floor. He looked at George. ‘There is a two thirds probability that I will die.’

  Houssman said nothing.

  ‘If I don’t, I intend to get married …’

  George just stared at him.

  ‘She told me that she’d marry me … Mary will marry me. If I invite you, will you come?’

  ‘Of course,’ George said, grasping at the bizarre glimmer of hope, that perhaps this Mary could prevent the nightmare in Richard’s drawings from coming true.

  ‘Richard!’ Peter shouted down from the stairs. ‘It’s time.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Richard,’ George said, keeping his voice low so that it wouldn’t be heard by Peter, ‘why not increase the probability that you’ll survive? We could get you to a hospital. We could get you treated. Wouldn’t you rather get married … maybe even have a family? That’s what you want. That’s what you’ve always wanted; I didn’t see it before; I didn’t know. Yes, I’ll go to your wedding. I’ll be happy to go to your wedding. And so would Faye and Stephanie and Alice, and her two boys. You wanted a family. You wanted me to be your father. I really screwed up. People do that. Let me make it better now. Let me be your father. Let me give you a family.’

  Glash paused, seeming to consider George’s words. He looked up the stairs at his biological father, Peter. ‘The probability that you’re lying to me, to try and save yourself and everyone else, is very high. It’s nearly one hundred percent. I am going to be very famous. You will write about me, and if I survive, I will invite you to my wedding.’

  Thirty-Two

  Barrett’s rubber-soled slippers pounded the pavement of Seventh Avenue; she was running flat out, pushing past startled pedestrians and not caring that she probably looked like an escaped mental patient in her ripped trousers and pajama top. Hobbs, with the guard’s M16 slung across his back, was a few yards ahead and she couldn’t stop to see how far behind Carla had fallen. With all Zane’s incompetence she’d felt she had no choice but to ignore the warning bullets and chase after Hobbs.

  She’d heard Justine try to hold back the Guardsmen at the hospital. That had bought them a tiny bit of time, and the fact that the guards were impaired by their bulky suits was in their favor, at least for the first few seconds.

  ‘We need to split up,’ she shouted, catching a glimpse of a camouflage-painted humvee pulling out of the chain-link-fenced parking lot across from the hospital.

  ‘All roads lead to Delancey,’ he yelled back as he sprinted left down West 12th Street.

  She realized he’d played the gentleman and had given her and Carla the more direct option of Greenwich Avenue, which made a hypotenuse through the Village to Sixth. She was running on pure adrenalin after days with little sleep, and a sickening fear that either they were too late or … She glanced behind as sirens roared to life.

  There was no way she’d be able to outrun them. She tried her best to blend in, just another crazy New Yorker out for a run in the middle of the morning. Of course, that she was wearing a pair of ripped navy pants, hospital slippers, and a light-green pajama top with PROPERTY OF UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL emblazoned on the back didn’t help.

  She’d made it to West 10th when she glanced back to see a humvee turn the corner east on to Greenwich.

  ‘Shit!’ She ducked under the awning of what looked like a large gay club. Inside was dark; she tried the door anyway. To her relief it opened. She looked at the bar and the empty dance floor. A cleaning crew was vacuuming. A muscular man in a tight tee-shirt emblazoned with the club’s logo was behind the bar, checking the stock. He looked up at her.

  ‘We’re closed,’ he shouted over the roar of the vacuum and the sirens that were now screaming down Greenwich.

  ‘I’m being followed,’ she said, ‘is there a back way out?’

  As though he’d heard this a thousand times, he pointed toward an exit sign at the far end of the dance floor.

  ‘Thanks.’ She ran, came to the back door and gently pushed it open. She peered out on an alley that opened on to Sixth Avenue. The busy thoroughfare seemed broad and exposed. She heard sirens to the north heading east. She figured they were after Hobbs. So how could she get across the avenue without attracting a posse of her own? Still hidden, she ducked back inside. A door to her right had a sign – EMPLOYEES ONLY. She tried the handle and let herself into a small break room. She grabbed a Yankees cap from an open locker and felt a pang of guilt as she helped herself to a distressed and well-loved bombardier jacket and threw it over her top.

  She went back to the exit, took a deep breath, jogged the length of the alley, and keeping her eyes straight ahead, began to cross the avenue.

  ‘There she is!’ a woman’s voice shouted.

  Barrett’s heart sank as her head whipped around. She saw Carla running flat out a block south on Waverly. The Guardsmen were in hot pursuit of her, but that maybe would buy Barrett a bit of time. She somehow got safely across Sixth and tried to figure the route. With cops both to the north and south she couldn’t see a lot of options. Still over a mile from Glash’s building on Delancey, she had an awful feeling. This was never going to work. As she started to jog east on Fifth Street, doubts flooded her. What if Hobbs was wrong and Glash wasn’t wi
th his father? What if we’re too late?

  Her eye caught on a bread delivery truck parked in front of Emilio’s restaurant. The driver, his arms laden with two large brown paper sacks of rolls and loaves, was being led inside. Barrett sprinted to the driver’s side. She checked the ignition – no key. Her hand flew up to the sun visor.

  ‘Hey, lady!’ a voice shouted. The driver, a young man dressed in white, ran over. ‘What you think you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’m desperate,’ she said, taking in the stocky, dark-haired young man in his tee-shirt, apron and baker’s pants. ‘I have to get to Delancey.’

  ‘You ever heard of a cab? Stealing trucks is kind of hardcore – you don’t look the type.’

  Sirens turned off the avenue and headed toward them.

  ‘Please,’ she pleaded.

  ‘What did you do?’ he insisted, blocking her exit with his body.

  ‘Listen, Richard Glash, the nut who plans to spread plague, is holed up in Delancey Street,’ she blurted. ‘No one believes me, and I’ve got to try and stop him.’

  The smile faded from the young man’s face. ‘Even if you’re shitting me, I’ll take you. Move over.’

  ‘Thank God!’ She shifted over to the passenger’s side, and then pressed back into the seat, lowering the cap over her face as two police cars with lights and sirens blaring slowly cruised past.

  The driver turned to her. ‘They’re really looking for you, aren’t they?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes, please hurry.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, pulling the ignition key from his pocket.

  ‘Barrett.’

  ‘I’m Marco, Barrett.’ He checked the mirrors and pulled out behind the last cruiser. ‘You sure you’re not an escaped mental patient?’ he asked, as they inched with the heavy traffic down the block.

  Barrett could barely breathe. The bread truck seemed too exposed; all it would take was for one of the cops to turn around. But then again, did they even know what she looked like?

  ‘It’s a fucking zoo!’ Marco said as the light changed. ‘Shit!’ He turned right and they were met by a hurriedly erected police blockade that stretched across Sixth. Pedestrians were quickly gathering, making a thick circle around the frantic redhead, who was surrounded by Guardsmen in hazmat suits and uniformed police. Carla was screaming, ‘Richard Glash isn’t dead. He’s staying with his father on Delancey Street!’ She could be heard yelling out the address, as the armed personnel closed in on her. ‘You’ve got to believe me!’