"Not that fire from San Berdoo," Jim said. "This is a new one. Started up in the hills in Caldwell, some streets are toast now. It's skipping houses now and then. You know. It's like the hammer of hell coming down up there. Once you get on the boulevard, you'll see it."
Just as Trey closed the cell phone, and made a few zigzag turns, he saw the wall of flame up in the canyon. It was both magnificent and terrifying. "Holy shit," he said.
He pulled the car over for a second, and just looked at it.
It was as if the canyon would be gone soon. Up beyond it, the town of Caldwell. On the other hillside, about two miles away from where Trey had stopped, Darden State.
2
The sky had grown darker than night, and billowing clouds of black and grey smoke covered the sky. The air definitely was warmer as he drove up the side streets to the main boulevard to Darden.
He thought he heard the shouts of people nearby – and then he saw pedestrians out on the street, pointing to the hills. Trey looked up quickly in time to see a fireball explode in the darkness. Then, another, up on the burning hill.
Traffic on Jackman Boulevard, the main road that passed by Darden, was heavy as people were getting out of Caldwell and its surrounding areas. Lines of cars blocked the road, all of them with belongings tied to the roof of the car or bulging from overstuffed trunks that had been tied up with ropes. There was no sound of sirens at all. Trey assumed that was because it was unnecessary. The firefighters were probably up in the hills, doing what they could to contain the conflagration.
Trey imagined most of the houses on three of the hills, and the nearby arroyo, were just gone.
Parking in the Darden lot, he glanced back at the fire up on the hillside.
"Shit," one of the nurses said to another woman, as she passed him on her way in to work, "I can't fucking believe I have to come in here four hours after I just signed off shift."
One of the Senior Psych Techs from Ward C passed by, a man in his fifties named Dave Sledd, and when Trey asked him about his house up in the canyon, Sledd said, "We barely had twenty minutes to get out of there. We grabbed the kids, the wedding pictures, and the cat, and just ran out. My wife had cinder burns on her shirt."
"God," Trey said. "I'm sorry."
"Hey, if I think about it too much, I'm gonna start crying," the psych tech said, a crooked grin on his face that looked more grim than jovial. He sighed. "We got insurance. It'll just be a problem for awhile. My wife and girls are down at her sister's in Corona at this point. I can't believe that somebody started that thing. With all the fires over on the mountains, you'd think these firebugs would just get a clue. Sons-of-bitches. Almost six hundred thousand acres up in the mountains have gone. Now this, over here. There must be at least seventy or eight homes gone already, minimum. Including mine. And now, look at us, Trey. We're gonna somehow get more than a thousand psychos and sociopaths out of these buildings in the next five hours? You think? What a day we're heading into."
3
"Where are the buses?" Trey asked the security guards at the front.
"Somebody fucked up," one of them said. "They were supposed to get them from Riverside, but Riverside already had sent some over to San Bernardino and Pomona because of the fires over there. A lot of hospitals are in evacuation mode right now. We're just the newest one. This is happening all over –four fires off the freeway. We're just number five."
"When do we get ours?"
The other guard chuckled. "I suggested they try the schools. Get school buses. Get our guys in restraints and just move 'em out."
The hallways were a madhouse – and none of the patients were out of their rooms. It was all administrators and nurses and psych techs. Some of the psychologists had come in to help calm patients, but Trey began to feel that they'd be better off working with the administration. Nobody wanted to do what had to be done here – Trey had seen this kind of mess more than once, each time with a different administration. Nobody really planned for the big emergencies, and Trey wondered how they were going to get all the patients out, and even when they did, where to?
He pressed his way between staff – several of them people he'd never seen before in all his years at the job – and as he passed the patients' rooms, he saw most of them up and getting ready to move out. Just standing at their doors, staring out through the small windows, into the hallway.
He met up with Jim Anderson on Ward D, and Anderson took him through the checklist that "Marcus Weirdo" had set up. They went room to room – Susan Hannifin was already in, also going into each room to speak with the patients. "It's ballsy of her," Jim said. "She's operating on caffeine as far as I can tell. But she's doing the job none of the other doctors seem to want to do."
"She's good," Trey said. "Okay, let's go through this bogus checklist and make sure our Ward's all set. How's Program 28?"
"So far in its own lockdown for now. That was Brainard's call."
"He's here already?"
"Yeah, somewhere. But he called early and told Hannifin and all the directors to close down four of the Programs off the Wards because they could wait until the wards had gotten their all-clears. Everybody's in a rush to get this show on the road. I say burn them place down." Jim guffawed. "Okay, I'm just going nuts 'cause of lack of sleep. I think I got about four good hours in at the most."
"I don't think I even got three," Trey said.
"So, we got our marching orders, and most of the wards are in good shape, patient-wise, but not so good with staff. Surprise, surprise. We get D all hooked up, roll 'em out like a cattle drive, and then maybe we're home free."
"Makes sense," Trey said. "Okay, well, where do we start?"
"I guess we use the emergency drill procedures, and hope for the best," Jim grinned, slapping Trey's arm lightly with the clipboard.
"More coffee, first," Trey said.
Chapter Thirty
1
Outside, the fire burned along the canyons and arroyos. The morning sky, black with smoke, the smell of burning mesquite and sage and rubber and fresh wood and dried grass and gasoline from cars that had been blasted with flames. The fire department had helicopters flying overhead to bring water to part of the canyon that could not be reached, but these only arrived once every hour or so because they were being used as well with the fires up in the San Bernardino mountains to the north.
The buses rolled in and out to the Darden State grounds. Boxes of files were being transferred into SUVs that were lined up along the residency halls; the psychiatrist and psychologist parking lots were full as the professionals got in to save their computers and work and take out the family pictures in their offices. The psych techs had been recruited to stand alongside the patients, many of them in leg hobbles and wrist restraints, waiting to board one of the buses that had yet to be filled with patients. Nurses worked along side some of the patients in wheelchairs or those needing special assistance, and with the exception of the lockdown in Ward D, things on the outside of the hospital looked as if they were moving well toward evacuation of the buildings at Darden State. Every single employee of Darden State – from the janitors to the work crew to the techs and orderlies and guards – were called in to assist in the evacuation.
No one with an official identification card was refused admittance, although the security guard who checked at the front gate did not always notice the expiration date of the card itself, nor were most of them scanned into the system as would be the normal procedure.
Mary Chilmark walked up the sidewalk to the guard who sat in his black and white SUV at the gate, near the now-closed sentry area. She showed her I.D., and thought it was the identification badge of a woman named Patty Mullen who had not worked at Darden State in nearly five years or so, the guard waved her through, along with several other staff members from various departments, from the night shift, from the three a.m. swing shift, from the day shifts, many of whom had never seen each other before, who had parked out on the street and walked up to the
entry to the grounds.
In Mary Chilmark's hand, a small grocery bag. If anyone asked her, she would tell them it had her uniform in it. As nonsensical as that might seem for a woman coming to the grounds of a hospital threatened by fire, she felt that it would have to do, because if she told them what she had in the bag, they would most likely stop her.
But she'd been waiting a long time for this.
She had spent years planning how she'd return to Darden State.
How she'd perform the operation that would be her and her son's greatest work.
And it moved the way she had dreamed it would. It moved with a rush of excitement within her, as she began to see the world again as one that had a clear and urgent purpose. Her mind felt revived by the smoke in the air and the hushed, yet excited talk among those who were headed into the facility.
She floated above all of them – she was the wind itself, driven to this place, this present moment, and her son, waiting for her, probably watching for her to come and protect him from the fears that crawled in the dark.
And her boy's father there, too.
The one who had made her a promise so many years ago, broken, but not discarded.
The promise lived in her heart.
He would feel what she had felt.
He would come to understand it.
2
There was an old bungalow-style building behind the residency hall, and within it a gardener's toolshed. It was kept locked at all times, because of the potential for patients to find weapons – known in the hospital parlance as "sharps" – and Mary Chilmark had a set of keys that her late husband, Dr. Massey, had in his possession at his death. In fact, she had keys to nearly every building in Darden State, because her late husband had gathered them for her one by one over the years they were together – and whenever he wanted to touch her, he had to bring her a key. It was a game they played, and it made their love life exciting. They played so many games together, and she missed him. He had played games with their son, too, not the naughty kind, but the ones that involved the cage. He had been the only man who had ever understood what went on in her mind, and she had loved him for it. She had loved him, and had been truly bereft after he had the accident in which he died.
After he had taken a scalpel to his own wrists one night, in a warm bathtub.
One night when she was with her son, holding him to chase away the fears.
She had kept the keys, labeling each one with a code so she would know where it fit. Where the secret places were at the hospital. Where she would find what she needed.
It had been to this very tool shed – really just a small room of the bungalow that had been used for storage for years– that she and her various lovers might go when she was young and in love with a handful of doctors at the hospital.
3
Inside the toolshed, she bypassed the shears and the pitchforks, in favor of a large metal cabinet, full of spades and trowels and small pots for plants. The cabinet was not one she had ever seen before, but it didn't surprise her that it was there.
She slipped her fingers behind it, and drew the cabinet back from the wall. Slowly, she pulled the cabinet and then shoved it a bit to the left and outward.
Behind it, a short wide doorway, shut tight and padlocked.
But she had more keys, and after she tried several of them, one fit — the padlock clicked and opened.
She drew the door back – which was not more than four feet high – open.
A warm gust of mildewed air came back to her.
She crouched down, feeling with her hand along the wall within the room. When she found a switch, she flicked it up.
A pale blue light flickered on and then went out. When she toggled the switch again, it came up, and she saw the slender stairs downward into the uppermost level of the hospital's underground.
It had been the place where she had made love to her son's father for the first time. Down in the secret spaces where only certain personnel had access.
Down among the Night Cages, where he had lain her back on the table, and she had wrapped her legs around him and given herself to him in a way she never had for any man before.
Risen to meet his thrusts, all the while feeling the shadows of the dead around them, and knowing that above them in the world of light, the hospital continued.
Knowing that the promise he made to her was real, and would last forever.
4
Mary Chilmark stepped down into the blue-lit stairwell at six a.m.
Chapter Thirty-One
1
By seven a.m. prison buses from Chino had come out, and then the lining up and loading up of the wards began. The best that anyone could do was house the patients down in Riverside, at the Parkside Community Hospital in a new wing that hadn't yet been filled. Ward D – the maximum security ward – would have to be shipped out to L.A. County and their prison hospital that was new and not yet filled up. So Ward D would go last, and probably wouldn't get the final patients out until about eleven.
Lance Victor got through with his cameraman Carl, and was in the administration director's face, having hauled ass out of the hotel over in San Bernardino to get a "on-the-scene report as the Darden State Hospital for the Criminally Insane attempts to evacuate it's patients within three hours before a raging fire descends from the hills." When Trey passed by him, Lance sidled up to him and said, "I just want some footage of the Wards."
"They're nearly empty," Trey said. "What good's that gonna do you?"
"Please," Lance said. "You won't notice Carl or me."
"Just you," the security guard behind them said. "Not both of you. If you want to go get some pictures for your show, only one of you goes through."
"Yikes," Jim laughed. "Don't let either of them in. This place is circus enough."
After nearly all the wards were clear, with only Program 28 left to escort out, the worst thing happened.
Somewhere between the nurses running around with hypodermic needles full of tranquilizers, psych techs having to hold back patients who had begun getting the idea that this could turn into a free-for-all, and the administration's complete lack of understanding that they had a city full of psychopaths who, if their meds weren't quite kicking in, would be happy to tear out some eyeballs and rip some throats just because they got excited by doing it, Trey, as he had begun talking to the other techs and guards in Ward D about a calm and peaceful procedure, an alarm pen sounded from one end of the nearly empty ward. The way the alarm pens worked was every staff member on Ward D had one, and once the button at the top of the pen was punched, a brief clanging alarm sounded for a duration of about three seconds, followed by a strobe effect of lights along the corridor, leading right to the person who set off the alarm.
And this meant, in a matter of five minutes, a lockdown, unless it could be determined that none was necessary.
"Jeez Louise," Jim said. "Lance Victor's gonna love this."
"At least the ward's pretty clear," Trey said.
The strobe lights came up on the ceiling, moving like lightning along the corridor. Trey, Jim, and two of the guards began walking swiftly, past the thick of nurses and other staffers going the opposite direction. As they went further down the corridor, the ward seemed empty of all but a few stragglers from among the staff.
PART FOUR
Chapter Thirty-Two
Jane Laymon tried to call Trey on his cell phone. When that didn't work, she attempted to reach him through the main switchboard at Darden; but she could not get through.
When she'd been called back up to the rented house on Third Street in Caldwell – the techs felt they had to make sure that the place had a last going-over, in case the fire spread up toward that end of the hillside – she had sifted through the evidence and found a detailed layout of Darden State.
And worse, a layout of the basement level of the hospital, with rooms marked: Night Cage. Several of them.
Another area – an upper floor of Ward D –
was marked with just the words: His Office.
With traffic backed up on the hillside, and plumes of darkness coughing from the burning canyon, Jane drove alone down toward Darden State, determined to find out if Bloody Mary might be traced right back to the place where she had worked, where she had met her husband, and where her son was being held.
Chapter Thirty-Three
1
When Trey rounded the first hallway in Ward D, he saw something near the elevators. The strobes continued to flash on and off, and what he found inside the elevator, it's doors open wide, nearly made him drop to his knees and scream.
Lara, Susan Hannifin's assistant, lay face down on the floor in a pool of blood.
In her hand, she still clutched the alarm pen that she'd punched to set off the warning.
Trey crouched down to feel her pulse.
She was gone. He touched the back of her neck. Right at the base of her skull, someone had jabbed a knife of some kind into her.
Jesus. Lara. Jesus, he thought.
"Jim! Hurry up!" he called out. Jim Anderson came up behind him, cursing under his breath as he saw the dead woman.
2
Down several hundred feet and to the right, at the entrance to Program 28, Mary Chilmark, still clutching her grocery bag in one hand, had the other pressed into Dr. Robert Brainard's spine.
Brainard waved themselves past the guards, and said, "We're going to escort Chilmark to a special transport. I'll send someone else down for the others."
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 53