Imperium (Caulborn)

by Nicholas Olivo

  She smiled and gestured back to the monitor with Leevan’s picture. “What’s our next move? Do we get a fake warrant, or do you have contacts with the local police?”

  “Galahad tries to avoid involving the local authorities whenever possible,” I said. “He’s worried that they’ll get hurt, given the things we deal with.”

  “A fake warrant, then.”

  “No,” I said. “We’ll do this one under the radar. We’ll go back tonight and check the place out for ourselves.”

  “B&E?” Megan asked.

  “Yep.”

  Her dimple deepened. “I really like working with you, Vincent Corinthos.”

  Chapter 20

  To: Robert Maxwell

  Given more time, the ZN233 virus should make a suitable biochemical weapon. This presents a lucrative opportunity. Many nations and organizations would love a weapon like this, and would pay significant sums of money for it. I have taken the liberty of beginning the process to create weapon grade ZN233, and will notify you when the first batch is complete.

  -Email message recovered from Kira Leevan’s computer

  We waited until just after 10 p.m. before we went back to the clinic. We were both dressed in dark clothes, complete with gloves and rubber soled boots. The B&E uniform, as I liked to call it, was bullet proof, warm, and blended perfectly into shadows.

  We parked in the lot across from the clinic and made our way to the rear entrance. A security camera pointed down at the door. Megan looked at me. “Hack the camera?” she asked. “Video loop or something like that?”

  I shook my head. I reached out with the Urisk’s faith and called to some pigeons that were roosting nearby. They lurched into the sky, perched directly atop the camera and spread their tail feathers over the lens. Megan gave me a look of wonder and we hurried up to the door. She gestured at a numeric keypad affixed next to the door. “They’re not messing around with their security. It’s going to take some time to bypass this.”

  I smiled at her and placed my hands on the door. There was a click, and it swung open. “After you.”

  She gaped at me, but ducked inside. I followed, and the door clicked shut behind us. “How did you do that?” Megan asked.

  “It’s a talent I inherited from my father,” I said as I pulled out my flashlight. “I can open things. Doors, locks, windows. If it’s meant to be opened, it will open for me.”

  Megan’s eyes were wide. “But what about the alarms? Won’t the security systems detect that the door was opened?”

  Ah, now there was an excellent question. “Nope. Nothing to worry about there.” Megan raised her eyebrows at me. “When I Open a door like that, it tricks any sensors or electronic equipment into thinking the door is still shut. No one will ever know we were here.”

  “Well, that certainly makes B&E easier,” Megan said as she shone her flashlight around. The hallway we were in was dimly lit. Only every third or fourth overhead light was on. That was good; the clinic was shut down for the night.

  We moved quietly down the corridor and came into the lobby we’d been in earlier in the afternoon. The receptionist’s desk was empty, and the phones were blinking, indicating they were forwarding their calls. I relaxed a little. This might be easier than I thought.

  We stepped through another set of doors into a dimly lit corridor. There were three doors on our right, and a pair of double doors on our left. The left room was labeled ‘Patient Treatment.’ The rooms on the right were offices, and Leevan’s was the last one. We crept down the hallway, listening carefully in case someone had stayed late. But Leevan’s office was dark like the others, and the door’s lock couldn’t stand up to my powers.

  I shut the door behind us and flicked on the office’s light. Megan whistled as she surveyed the room. There were detailed sketches of skeletal and circulatory systems hanging on every wall. Not the generic kind you see in biology class, either. These were intricate, almost delicate, and had been hand drawn. Leevan’s signature was in the bottom corner of each sketch. There were tiny glass skeletons on shelves, and what looked like clay sculptures of lungs and hearts.

  “Okay,” Megan said. “This is just creepy.” I opened a closet and shone my light in.

  “It just got creepier,” I said. Megan moved over and looked at where the beam of my flashlight was pointing. There in the corner was a brain in a jar filled with liquid. “Millie von Hassen, I presume.”

  “Or Keri Greene,” Megan put in. “What is she doing with that?” she asked, a look of disgust on her face.

  “No idea, but since she had it ripped from someone’s head, I’d say it can’t be good.”

  A computer sat on Leevan’s desk, the monitor displaying a screensaver of Da Vinci’s Virtuvian Man. I jiggled the mouse and was greeted with a message asking me for a password. “How are you at hacking?” I asked Megan.

  She shook her head. “Not good at all. Computers really aren’t my thing.” I nodded and pulled a CD out of my coat pocket. I flipped the case open with one hand and popped the computer’s optical drive open with the other. I put the disk in, closed the drive tray, and then shut the computer off. I looked at my watch.

  “What are you doing?”

  “This is a little something Gears put together for me a while back,” I said. “It’s a password cracker, among other things.” After fifteen seconds I turned the machine back on. “Computers aren’t really my thing either, but this makes it pretty easy.” The computer booted to an image of a gremlin sitting atop a computer monitor. The words “Welcome to Gremlinux” appeared on the screen.

  The screen changed to a list of options. I chose #4, Password Cracker, and listened to the disk spin as Gears’ program did its work. I glanced around Leevan’s desk some more. The doctor was an extremely neat person; everything was in tidy piles. It reminded me a bit of Leslie’s desk.

  “If that’s going to take a while,” Megan said, nodding to the computer, “then maybe we should check out the other rooms.” We left Leevan’s office and ducked into another office along the hallway. I flicked on the light switch and the overhead fluorescents snapped on immediately. The office was actually a small lab, almost a miniature morgue. There were two metal tables for examinations and a small desk. Two cabinets at the back of the room looked like they’d hold tools and other equipment. One of the tables was clean, the other was covered by a sheet. Going by the lumps under the sheet, there was a dead something on that table. I steeled myself and pulled off the sheet.

  A dismembered gremlin corpse was laid out on the table. “Axlesnapper,” I said, my heart sinking. “Gears is going to be crushed.” Her arms had been removed and they had been sliced open, with pins holding the flesh apart. Her chest had been cut open as well, and there were colored pins marking several of her vital organs. One of her eyes had been removed, even one of her ears had been peeled apart.

  Megan’s face turned green. “Oh, fiddlesticks,” she said as she dropped to the floor.

  “It’s okay, Meg,” I said as I crouched down beside her. “Put your head between your knees and breathe.”

  She did and after a moment some of her color returned. She leaned against me for a moment. “It was the eye,” she said. “I have a problem with eyes being poked out.”

  I nodded and helped her back to her feet. We snapped a few pictures of the grim scene, then covered the gremlin’s corpse back up with the sheet and moved over to the desk. There, in Leevan’s pristine handwriting, was a sheet of notes describing Axle’s muscular structure and a few drawings of Axle’s various bodily systems. I was already dreading telling Gears about this. We finished up in the morgue and moved on.

  The adjacent office contained a bunch of empty crates and cardboard boxes. Several of them bore the Antiquated Treasures logo. I gestured to these. “Golem parts,” I said. Megan nodded. There wasn’t anything else in the office, so we headed across the hall to the Patient Treatment room.

  The door was locked, but Opened at my touch. “Holy cow,” M
egan whispered as we pushed through the double doors. The room was filled with medical equipment. At the center of the room was a series of occupied hospital beds arranged in a circle. They surrounded a cluster of machines that blinked and chirped. The room’s lights were off, but the machines provided enough illumination for us to see. We cautiously approached the beds.

  “Justine Delion,” Megan whispered as she pointed to a woman on one of the beds. Justine was dressed in a hospital gown, and her skin looked too pale. Her breathing was shallow and if it weren’t for the monitors displaying her heart rate, I’d think she was dead. A series of wires and electrodes were attached to her forehead and at various points on her arms and legs. A machine that looked just like the toaster we’d found at Axlesnapper’s garage was positioned to her left. An IV of clear liquid was running into her left arm, while a series of tubes that weren’t connected to anything were running into her right. “And that’s her son, Casey,” she pointed to a boy on the next bed over. Even though Casey was probably stronger than me while in wolf form, I couldn’t help but wince when I saw all the tubes hooked up to his small body.

  “Here’s Lucille,” I said, gesturing to another bed. “What the hell is going on with this?” Next to Lucille was another bed; I didn’t recognize the man lying in it. Both Lucille and the man had tubes coming out of their arms. The tubes were connected, and blood flowed between them. Several pieces of equipment blinked and chirped quietly around them.

  “Some sort of simultaneous blood transfusion?” Megan asked.

  I looked at the tubes and frowned. “Well whatever it is, I doubt it’s good. I don’t dare touch this stuff; I might hurt them. We’ll need Doc Ryan for this.”

  Megan nodded and swung her flashlight around to an eight-foot cylinder in the corner. We walked over and found another brain in a jar. A series of electrodes connected the brain to a computer, which was running mathematical calculations at an astounding rate. I looked at the cylinder. It was solid metal, and cold to the touch. It looked old. I was about to say something when a sound in the hallway brought both our heads around.

  Shit. I wish I’d thought to post pigeons as lookouts. The room had lots of places to duck behind, but once the overhead lights were on, we were hosed. I looked up. The room had a high ceiling with exposed metal beams. Industrial strength lights hung at regular intervals. Wonderful.

  I grabbed Megan close and whispered, “Hold on.” Then I reached out and telekinetically latched onto a beam between two of the lights. I pulled as hard as I could. We shot straight up into the air, as if pulled by an invisible wire. I grabbed onto a vertical beam with one hand and managed to get my feet onto the lip of one of the cross beams.

  Megan clung to me for a moment. Her hair smelled like flowers. In her surprise, she’d wrapped her legs around my torso. I swallowed hard, and it had nothing to do with her weight. She slowly slid off of me, getting purchase on the beams. A moment later the lights snapped on.

  As I’d hoped, the lights were extremely bright. Anyone who looked up would probably be blinded, so that bought us some cover. Dr. Leevan had entered the room, and behind her were a pair of men in hospital whites. I closed my eyes and searched for some rats.

  I found hundreds of them nearby. I called out to one that was just outside the clinic and looked through its eyes. There was an ambulance with its lights off in the back parking lot, where Megan and I had come in. A driver sat in the ambulance, hands on ten and two, looking straight ahead. The door to the clinic had been propped open. I had the rat run inside and look at Leevan’s office. The door was still shut.

  I released my hold on the rat. We had to get out of here before Leevan realized someone had been in her office. I focused my attention on Leevan and the men below. Leevan was making adjustments to the tubes connecting Lucille and the other man.

  “Now then,” Leevan said. The acoustics were eerie. I could hear Leevan as if she were standing right next to me, instead of twenty feet below. She pulled something from her pocket and began speaking into it. “Test Case 27. Subject is Caucasian male, age thirty-two. Afflicted with a severe case of Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura. Traditional treatments have failed. Subject is connected to the vampire, which has recently been fed the subject’s blood type, A positive. It is now 22:43, and the purification process has been running for nearly three hours.” She flicked some switches on the machines behind Lucille.

  The machines chirped and warbled like some deranged R2 unit. Ten minutes passed as Leevan watched the monitors hooked up to Lucille. She spoke into her recording device. “The vampire is processing and purifying the subject’s TTP infected blood. ADAMTS13 enzyme activity is increasing.” Her voice was excited. Blood continued to flow between the two unconscious forms. Another ten minutes passed before Leevan spoke again. “The patient’s original blood is now flowing back into his body. Observational notes will now be made every twenty minutes.”

  Megan and I frowned at one another. Part of me wanted to confront Leevan right now, but that might get one of the innocents killed. We needed to get out of here, tell Galahad what was going on and come up with a rescue operation. I looked around the room. Leevan’s orderlies were standing in front of the door we’d come in, but another door was in the back corner of the room. Great. I tapped Megan on the shoulder and gestured toward the door. She nodded at me, and I reached out with my telekinesis and flicked off the room’s lights. Then I grabbed Megan again and dropped us to the floor.

  “What’s going on?” Leevan demanded. “I swear, if those gremlins had anything to do with this, I will unmake them. Get the lights back on,” she barked at one of the men. He moved toward the light switch. Megan and I moved quietly across the room to the doorway. I Opened it and we ducked inside.

  Into a room filled with neo-gremlins.

  Chapter 21

  To: Robert Maxwell

  Gottfried Herrscher’s condition is unique in that the TTP only surfaced while he was using his domination powers. Once he stopped, his body was able to recover. As he aged, it appears his body could no longer revert to a normal state after dominating a paranormal. Over time, his TTP became more and more acute until he was forced to cryogenically freeze himself until such time as he could be healed.

  I believe that time is now. My research is complete, and my most recent test subjects have no traces of TTP in their bloodstream. I will begin the revival process immediately, administer the treatment to Herrscher and notify you as soon as he regains consciousness.

  -Email message recovered from Kira Leevan’s computer

  I had a telekinetic wall up between the creatures and us when I realized they weren’t reacting to our presence. The neo-gremlins looked like they were asleep on their feet. The room was lit by an unsettling green glow that was coming from tubes that ran all along the walls, and some of those tubes were connected to the neo-gremlins’ arms. Thick plastic cylinders were stacked at the far end of the room, and Megan moved toward these when she bumped into my wall. She tentatively reached out and pressed against the invisible barrier. I dropped it.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Reflex.”

  “Feeding tubes, maybe?” Megan asked, looking at the green goo.

  “It’s probably healthier than all the garbage Gearstripper eats,” I said as I looked around. “Do you see another way out of here?”

  “Holy cow,” Megan said as she examined one of the cylinders. I stepped up next to her. It was filled with a thick blue fluid that gave off a dim light. Floating inside it was a six inch neo-gremlin. “She’s growing the things,” Megan said.

  “That’s great, Meg,” I said. “But we need to get out of here.”

  Megan grabbed my arm and pointed at the floor just beyond the gremlin growth tubes. There was a large metal plate, textured so you wouldn’t slip on it. A red line had been painted around it. “Elevator.”

  “Good eyes,” I said. “Now, if we can get into the basement, there’s probably another door we can get back out through.”


  “What about the disk you left in Leevan’s computer?”

  There was an angry yell from the other room. “Someone’s been here! In my office! Get the trackers and find out who was here!”

  “So much for that,” I said. Gears wasn’t going to be happy with me for losing a Gremlinux disk, but maybe we could recover it later. Megan and I stepped onto the metal platform and pressed the down button. The platform shuddered and began descending. I had expected this sort of elevator to make a lot of noise, but the thing was silent. I gave a sigh of relief. We might make it out of here undetected after all.

  The door flew open and one of Leevan’s orderlies appeared. He flicked on the lights and blinked when he saw us. “Intruders!” he hollered as he pressed a green button next to the door. The neo-gremlins connected to the glowing green tubes blinked and began to stir. I saw some of them disconnecting the feeding tubes from their arms, then the elevator dropped below the floor.

  A metal plate closed over the elevator shaft before any of the neo-gremlins could jump on us from above. We descended for about twenty seconds and then the elevator ground to a halt. Megan pulled her alien ray gun from thin air and blasted the control panel. “That should slow them down,” she said. Above, tiny claws skittered over the metal plate, and then I heard the squeal of twisting metal.

  “Let’s go.” We headed down a long corridor lit by bare light bulbs. Unlike the bright, modern upstairs, this was your typical old building basement. Everything was concrete, everything was hard lines and angles, and the air had a musty, damp smell to it. There were three doors on our right, the heavy metal kind with small reinforced glass windows. The room opened up into a bigger, open space that had the strong scent of rock dust, and a section of the far wall was done in brick instead of concrete.

  I quested out for my rat sentry, and sensed dozens more of the creatures directly below us. We must be above the sewers. My sentry had left the building, and I could see that while the ambulance was still there, the driver was gone. He’d probably come inside at Leevan’s orders.