by Lyle Howard
Mr. Sandman
By
Lyle Howard
Mr. Sandman/Lyle Howard
All rights reserved. Copyright © 1994 Lyle Howard
Reproduction in any manner, in whole or in part,
in English or in other languages, or otherwise
without written permission of the publisher is prohibited.
This is a work of fiction.
All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional,
and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Contact: [email protected]
Also by Lyle Howard
Mystery and Suspense Crime Thriller
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A Thrilling Supernatural Mystery
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For my wife, Riva, my mother, Anita, my family and friends, and everyone else who believes in me … thanks!
To Tali, Eric, and J.R., I couldn’t have done this without you.
A very special shout out to all the students who’ve put up with me all these years!
Mr. Sandman bring us a dream
Give him a pair of eyes with a come-hither gleam
Give him a lonely heart like Pagliacci
And lots of wavy hair like Liberace
…Mr. Sandman Lyric
Table of Contents
Part 1: Out of the Ashes
Prologue
Part 2: ColdBlooded
Part 3: A Storm on the Horizon
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY ONE
TWENTY TWO
TWENTY THREE
Part 4: “If it Lasts That Long”
TWENTY FOUR
TWENTY FIVE
TWENTY SIX
TWENTY SEVEN
TWENTY EIGHT
TWENTY NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY ONE
THIRTY TWO
THIRTY THREE
THIRTY FOUR
THIRTY FIVE
THIRTY SIX
THIRTY EIGHT
THIRTY NINE
FORTY
Part 1: Out of the Ashes
Prologue
March 12, 1965
A military installation somewhere in the Mojave Desert…
The quarantined operating theater that had been built two levels beneath the mess hall had been purified five times in the three days prior. Now all that was left to do was to immerse the operating room in a concentrated antiseptic solution to eliminate any chance of foreign infections. The technicians that methodically sprayed the room wore heavy, white rubber suits with squared-off hoods. Each hood sported a clear plastic patch across the eyes, about the size of a dollar bill, for the technicians to see through. It was obvious by the way the two workers stumbled awkwardly around the operating venue that these suits were built for safety and not for comfort.
From inside one of the two scuba-looking tanks the technicians wore on their backs, a thick white foam erupted through hand-held nozzles. The dense foam clung to the aqua-colored tile walls as long as it possibly could, until gravity got the better of it, slowly allowing it to slide into a waiting drain on the operating room floor.
The taller and darker of the two technicians, Willy Blanchard, could feel the tanks on his back growing lighter by the second as he dispensed the noxious cleaning agent. Feeling the sweat flooding out of every pore on his body, he turned his attention from the walls to the stainless steel operating table in the center of the room. The table reminded him of the long, silver counters on which steer carcasses were carved, back in the packing houses of his native Wisconsin. If there hadn’t been a pair of stirrups protruding from the end of this slab, he would have been tempted to look beneath the table to see if it had been manufactured by the same company that made the slaughtering counters. Willy pulled the trigger on the nozzle and within seconds, the cold steel operating platform was buried beneath a layer of gummy, white foam.
“Switch tanks!” came the muffled instructions from Willy’ s partner, Harry “Shaky” Weldon. Everyone that worked on the top-secret Sandman Project just referred to Weldon as Shaky because of his nervous disorder and his hyperactive personality.
Willy walked over and twisted off the coupling that connected Shaky’ s hose to his foam tank, and reconnected the line to the second tank on his back. Then Willy turned around and Shaky did the same for him.
“How many more times are we gonna have to do this?” Willy asked from beneath his thick rubber hood.
Shaky couldn’t see the look of boredom on Willy’s face, but he sure as hell could see the tedium in his dark brown eyes.
“The rumors I’ve heard are that if she doesn’t go into labor in the next three hours, they’re gonna induce the contractions medically.”
Willy shook his head as he shifted the tanks on his back. “That’s amazin’,” he muttered to himself.
“What?” Shaky yelled, “I didn’t hear you!”
“I just said,” Willy screamed back, his voice echoing off the tiled walls, “that I think it’s amazin’ how they can do that kind of stuff. When I was growin’ up on the farm, all we could do was just sit around and wait for the baby to pop out in its own good time!”
Shaky’s wiry body twitched as one of his uncontrollable seizures attacked his nervous system. It was the same type of minor spasm that struck hundreds of times each day, but it never affected his work or his lighthearted disposition. “It’s a new day and age, Willy,” Shaky groaned. “A new day and age!”
Willy nodded in agreement and opened the valves on the nozzle in his hand. A wide stream of green disinfectant bathed the walls and washed any remaining foam onto the floor. The last remnants of the foam spiraled into the saucer-shaped drains as the pungent odor of pine filled the operating theater. Left to dry on its own, the room would be ready in the allotted three hours’ time.
On their way out, both technicians gave the room a meticulous going-over to ensure that it was spotless. The last thing either of them wanted to do was run afoul of Dr. Xavier again. The last time they missed scrubbing down an instrument table, they were both given two weeks of kitchen patrol. This time he had written down his instructions for them on three-by-five index cards. “This was no walk-through,” he had sternly told them both in his office. “This time we are prepping for the real thing.”
Willy and Shaky nodded to each other when they were convinced that the room was in pristine condition. Willy pressed a large metal button that was situated hip-level next to the airlock, and waited as the inside door hissed open. Both men stepped inside and turned to look behind them as the inside door hissed shut, sealing off the room from the germs of the outside world. When the door was sealed, a red light flashed above their heads warning them to shut their eyes. Over the next few seconds, a blinding yellow light radiated throughout the chamber, killing any vagabond germs that might have tried to hitchhike on Willy or Shaky’s protective clothing.
Stepping outside into the changing quarters, Shaky removed his hood and rolled his head from side to side to relieve the tension that had built up in his neck. Pulling at the buckles on his shoulder straps, he slowly lowered the tanks off his back. “Do you want to grab a bite for lunch?”
Willy already had his tanks off, and was sitting
on a wooden bench in front of his opened locker, working his bootstraps. “Is it lunchtime already?”
Shaky spun the dial on his combination lock and yanked open the hasp. The green metal locker door opened to reveal the latest month’s pinup taped to the inside. It would be the closest that the scrawny, withdrawn little man would ever come to anyone of the female gender. He removed his gloves and tossed them across the room into a garbage-can-looking receptacle designed for that purpose. “Yeah, I think it’s that time. I think I have about forty-five minutes before I have to start cleaning up that storage room on level three.”
Willy stood up and tossed off his gloves into the same trash bin. One swished inside while the other bounced off the wall before caroming in. “Two points, any way you slice it!” he mused.
Shaky had one leg out of his rubber suit when he began shuddering violently. Willy was used to his friend’s seizures, but he could never remember one this serious. He bounded over the wooden bench with the top of his suit dangling around his waist and grabbed Shaky by the arms to steady him. Shaky’s tongue flapped out of his opened mouth like a flag caught in a windstorm. Willy slammed his friend’s back against the row of lockers in an effort to relax some of the convulsing muscles. Spittle sprayed from Shaky’s mouth as he fought the seizure with every ounce of inner strength he could muster. His body writhed and contorted as all the electrical stimuli in his nervous system went haywire.
In two minutes, the spell passed and Shaky’s muscles finally relaxed. He fell forward, limp and exhausted into Willy’s outstretched arms.
“I ain’t never seen one like that before, Shaky,” Willy admitted.
Shaky plopped himself down on the wooden bench and rested his face in the palms of his hands. His thinning gray hair was matted with perspiration against his forehead and he sobbed, “I forgot to take my pill this morning.”
Willy took a deep breath and sat down next to his friend. He didn’t want to reprimand Shaky, but he knew he had to be firm. “How many times has the doctor told you that you can’t skip pills like that? What would have happened if you’d been driving?”
Shaky nodded in agreement. “You’re right, as always, Willy. I just wasn’t thinking.”
Willy massaged the back of Shaky’s neck and could feel a few muscles still twitching. Shaky’s neck was so thin and atrophied that Willy was sure that he could have snapped it with two fingers like the thinnest of twigs. It might have been a blessing if he could ever summon up the courage to put his friend out of his misery. They both knew that Shaky was wasting away from some unknown illness, but neither of them dared speak of it. “Why don’t we go and find the most fattening thing on the chow line and each have three of them!” Willy taunted.
Shaky put his hand on Willy’s leg, gently squeezing his knee, and nothing more was said about the incident.
At 4:28 P.M. on March 12, 1965, Nancy Reiter was wheeled into operating room number six, fifty-eight feet below the shifting sands of the Mojave. Her pregnancy had proceeded normally for the past 273 days, but in the end, labor had to be induced chemically.
Her bulging frame was lifted gingerly by two male nurses from the padded gurney onto the cold stainless steel operating surface. A bank of a dozen floodlights shone down on her, causing her eyes to blink and water unmercifully. Classical music was being piped in through the sound system to soothe her, but Nancy would have been more relaxed listening to rock and roll.
“Now, I’m going to slip this mask over your face, Nancy, and I just want you to breathe normally,” came a disembodied voice from somewhere behind her head.
As she began to breathe in the numbing anesthetic, her mind drifted sluggishly back to a cool autumn afternoon a little less than a year ago.
By all outward appearances, the Xavier Clinic looked like any of the half-dozen others that Nancy had visited since her problem had been diagnosed. The fact that it was located on the Air Force base made her feel a bit uncomfortable, but if the experimental new procedure was everything Xavier had promised, then she could live with the uneasiness.
It had been a lonely time since the accidental death of her husband on a training mission. She remembered back to that overcast May 16, when she received the fateful telegram from the Air Force, and the obligatory visit from the base commander. It was a miserable conversation that she would relive over and over again every night, as she tossed restlessly on the mattress that she suddenly felt was much too big.
It was soon after that dreaded sympathy call that she swore that she’d never step foot on the base again. She banished herself into a self-imposed exile from the other wives and families whose very existence seemed to depend so much on keeping those damned deathtraps flying. But after three wretched years of staring through the bottoms of Scotch bottles and popping handfuls of nameless pills, her anger had dulled and she realized that she couldn’t live the rest of her life alone. Marriage wasn’t the answer for her, because she had made a vow to herself that she’d never allow anyone to let her down the way her husband had.
Then, on a cool winter evening while sitting alone on her porch swing, after countless months of soul-searching, she decided to permit the ringing of laughter into her life once again. She was still young and vital and had a great deal to offer someone who would need her as much as she needed them. There was only one catch in the formula as far as she was concerned. The love she needed to receive in return had to be all-encompassing and totally unconditional. She wanted the love that only a child could give to her. Not an adopted baby, but her own child.
It was then, when she thought she had hurtled every obstacle to her happiness, that fate dealt one last losing card into her hand: her reproductive system betrayed her. She suddenly found herself barren, unable to conceive. It was a devastating blow to her newfound self-esteem, but one that she was determined to overcome. Then, her regular doctor mentioned the extraordinary research going on at the Xavier Clinic.
Perhaps it was time for some sort of cosmic compensation, she figured, as she sat quietly by herself in the clinic’s sterile-smelling waiting room. She always believed that the world turned in mysterious ways. The Air Force had taken the only man she had ever truly loved in the starting days of the war, but now they were promising to deliver her something just as valuable in return. Not an even swap by any stretch of the imagination, she contemplated, but one that would have to do.
Reaching down into her handbag, she withdrew the compact mirror that her husband had given her two years ago. It was all part of an ornate pewter matching set: mirror, comb, and brush. Her hand was trembling as she held the reflective glass up to her face. Having just celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday, she was wearing her light brown hair bobbed short these days, and she noticed that her gray eyes had a twinkle in them that she hadn’t seen for months.
“The doctor will see you now,” a middle-aged nurse announced through the small, half-opened pebble glass window.
Nancy slipped the mirror back in her purse, and the issue of Life she had been browsing through back into the magazine rack that was bolted to one of the waiting room walls. The same prune-faced nurse that had summoned Nancy inside, held the door for her as she passed into the hallway that bisected the examining rooms. The old woman tried her best to smile as Nancy walked by, but it would have taken a hammer and chisel to crack any modicum of a grin on her granite countenance.
Nancy was directed into the third room on her right and was told to make herself comfortable and wait for the doctor, who would be in shortly. The nurse once again attempted a feeble smile and closed the door behind her. As Nancy lifted herself up onto the tissue-covered examining bench, her eyes gazed around the room, taking in all the posters that were thumb tacked onto the wood-paneled walls. The various billboards displayed the female reproductive system drawn or photographed from every conceivable angle. It was a good thing that Dr. Xavier had warned her not to eat before her appointment.
Nancy was letting her legs dangle and rock over the e
nd of the bench when the door slowly creaked open. A slump-shouldered man in his late forties entered the room, never looking up from the medical chart that he was studying. Doctor Adolph Xavier wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses whose frames curled behind a pair of ears that were entirely too large for his head. His salt and pepper-colored hair was receding in a horseshoe-shaped arch above each eyebrow, and he scratched at his goatee beard as he continued to peruse Nancy’s chart. With his mouth always twisted in a threatening scowl, he was an evil-looking man, but immensely respected in his chosen field of genetics.
“Very good … very good …” he mumbled to no one in particular.
Nancy frowned as she watched the doctor move around behind her. She turned her head, trying to keep the odd-looking man in her line of sight. He continued nodding in agreement with a voice that only he seemed to be hearing.
“Is everything okay, Doctor?” she asked, apprehensively.
“Hmmm?”
“I asked, is everything all right?”
Xavier flipped the metal lid closed on the chart and smiled. “Oh yes, my dear. Everything is more than all right. You’re the perfect candidate for our little procedure.”
Nancy winced a bit. “There’s no pain involved here, is there, Doctor Xavier? I’m kind of skittish when it comes to pain.”
The doctor removed his glasses and looked deep into Nancy’s face. His eyes were dark, calculating, and unblinking. If Nancy hadn’t known better, she would have thought that he was looking right through her head at one of the posters on the wall behind her. “The procedure is perfectly safe, my dear. You won’t feel a thing during the implant, and your pregnancy should proceed like any other woman’s would.”
Nancy pouted. “But you’re going to want me to hang around the base though, right?”