by Terry Yates
“Asleep? Where?”
“There’s another room on this floor filled with nothing but cots. They’re small but they’re comfortable.”
“Wow, what don’t they have in this place?”
“So far, a way of communicating with the outside world. We haven’t been able to find any sort of communication room on any of the floors…other than in the lobby, and it only goes outside of the building. And of course, cell phones are useless.”
Kyler was puzzled. Rescue should only be hours if not minutes away. Why did they need to find means of communication? It was something to do, he guessed.
“What’s wrong, Dear?” Sylvia Morrison asked Samantha.
“Yeb…whathz wawn?” Gringo repeated, his mouth stuffed full of mashed potatoes.
They had both noticed that she was just nibbling at her food. She would sniff at each item, take a small bite, and then get an expression on her face that said that she wanted to barf.
“I don’t know,” she answered, returning an untouched celery stalk to her plate. “It just doesn’t smell or taste right.”
“Ooo oghta thry the shteak,” Gringo got out before finally swallowing two cheeks full of potatoes. “Fong cooks the best steak I’ve ever eaten. You oughta try the filet mignon? It’s unbelievable. These people that work down here eat well.”
“Yarg!” was all that Samantha could say.
She watched as her husband gobbled bite after bite. As she watched him, she began to notice that it wasn’t the meat that made her want to barf. As a matter of fact the meat looked quite tasty…succulent even. It was the smell of the grease and the batter that was wafting from Gringo’s plate, from everyone else’s plate, and from the kitchen. The aroma seemed more pungent than normal. Why did people fry their food? It didn’t make any sense. How could anyone enjoy that smell? She supposed that if she were going to eat meat, she would probably want it less cooked. Medium rare probably. Or rare. Or even…
“It’s just been too long since you had any meat. Here! Have some! You need to keep your strength up.”
“What for?” she asked, turning away from a forkful of chicken fried steak.
Gringo lifted his head from his tray for the first time since he had sat down. He looked carefully around him as if he had some big secret to tell or he was about to tell a racist joke and wanted to make sure no one was around to kick the shit out of him.
“Look what I’ve got,” he said, reaching into his pocket and carefully removing something. From under the table, he produced the camera.
“Where’d you get that?” Samantha asked, looking at it as if it were some ancient relic of evil.
“Potts dropped it,” he replied. “It’s got some great pictures on it, Baby.”
“You mean, it has the one where that thing took a bite out of my neck?” Samantha asked, becoming angry.
“I wish. But it’s got the one that I took where you were bent down next to him…nice tit shot, Baby, I gotta tell ya’.”
Samantha was livid. “After all of your begging and pleading for me not to die, after all of your apologies for putting me in danger, here you are, all of a sudden, Mr. Business Entrep…Entrup…Entrompa…Mr. Business Guy again!”
“I WAS sorry that I put you in that position, Baby. I’m still sorry, but look at you. You made it through just fine…and the helicopters’ll be here soon, so I figured why not make some money out of your ordeal? Imagine, you’ll be the talk of the town. You’ll be constantly sought out for your story. The news, late night talk radio shows like Art Bell and those guys’ll want you on their shows. Hey! Who know…maybe even Entertainment Tonight…huh? Huh?”
He did all but elbow Samantha in the ribs as he said it. She was having none of it. She pushed her plate of untouched food away from her as if it were contaminated, folded her arms and fumed.
“How could you do such a thing?” Sylvia cried from across the table.
“Hey! You got some really good pictures of the thing night before last,” Gringo told Sylvia.
“Really?” she asked, smiling now.
“Shit yeah. I seen ‘em. Potts took some that weren’t so hot, but yours were great!”
“Well…” Sylvia muttered, feigning modesty.
Samantha had had enough. She got up from the table and stormed out of the cafeteria.
“Here! Hold onto this,” Gringo told Sylvia as he handed her the camera. “If Potts finds it gone, I’m pretty sure I’ll be the first person he comes to. Put it away somewhere. That camera is our ticket to millions.”
Gringo’s charm was worming its way through to Sylvia. She had saved quite a bit of money over the years taking photographs of models and a celebrity here and there. She definitely remembered the night in ‘66’ when she took a slough of pictures of a certain member of the English rock group The Animals…and found out later on, after several glasses of champagne, that he was indeed an animal. If they could sell these pictures, she would probably have enough money to last her the rest of her life, however long that might be. The excitement of it all made her want to have a cigarette. She’d been good for the last several hours, not wanting to light up in front of everyone, but she was beginning to Jones something fierce.
She put the camera in her right pocket, while reaching into her left one, and pulling out her final pack of cigarettes. Without her glasses, she couldn’t tell how many were left in the pack, so she tore open the top of the pack and ran her fingers across the top of the filters and counted. There were seven. She would have one after her meal, and then sneak off somewhere a little later and have another one…or maybe two…and still have a few left when they got to Miami.
“She’ll come around,” Gringo told her, noticing that she had drifted off into thoughts unknown. “She always does.”
CHAPTER 46
“Where the hell are they!” Potts screamed.
It was almost 6:00 in the evening. They had all eaten, showered, and shaved and there was still no sign of a rescue plane, boat, or chopper.
“Maybe things are so bad in Miami that they haven’t even had time to think about us yet,” Sam Fong threw in. He was sitting behind a large desk with several different security monitors lined up in front of him. They had found some sort of control room and Sam, along with Potts and Locklear O’Hearley was trying to figure out its main function, the problem being that the whole consol was blank. There was no writing anywhere on it, no labels, no engraved letters on the knobs or buttons. It was just blank.
“Bullshit!” Potts yelled again. “I’ve said it a dozen times now. No one is going to let this place stand empty for too long, hurricane or no hurricane! There’s something going on and I want to know what it is!”
Potts and Sam looked at one another for a moment. Then, as if by telepathy, the two men turned to Locklear.
“What?” Locklear asked, a puzzled look slowly making its way across his face.
“You work here,” Potts said, moving toward the scientist. “You must have some idea what they’re up to here.”
“Actually, I don’t. They don’t tell me things here. I’m basically a computer geek who’s given a piece of paper and told to compute certain chemical formulas.”
“What about your wife? She works here, too.”
“Yes, but I really don’t know what she does?”
“You don’t know what she does?” Potts exclaimed moving even closer to the much taller Locklear. “So, tell me, Professor, when you come home at night, don’t either one of you ever talk about your day?”
“Actually, no…we’re not allowed,” Locklear answered. He seemed to be getting smaller with every loud word that Potts uttered. The colonel was literally cutting him down to size.
“You’re not allowed?”
“No, and I’m sorry, Colonel, but knowing you the way I do, I would surmise that you wouldn’t discuss classified information with your family either…if you had one.”
Potts looked over at Sam who gave him a “gotcha there” look.
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br /> “Your wife’s a shrink, isn’t she?” Potts asked.
“Yes.”
“Why would they need a shrink in a building like this?”
“I don’t know. There might be a chemical or a gas or any number of things that they could be working on here. It could be some kind of experiment where only someone with a strong mental stamina could undertake. It might be a spaceship or a rocket or something that takes a certain mental stability…but I’m telling you, Colonel…I don’t know.”
“Boy, dinner at your house must be a real gabfest,” Potts said, walking away from him. “What did you do today, Dear? I can’t tell you. And how was your day, Sweetheart? Sorry, that’s classified. Let’s eat. Great idea!”
As much as he felt for Locklear, Sam couldn’t keep from smiling. Watching Potts so animated was probably a once in a lifetime treat. He wanted to take advantage of it and not miss a moment.
“There’s got to be some sort of communication somewhere. If whatever in here is that important…which it obviously is…there would have to be some sort of line to the higher ups,” Potts said, his back now turned to both men.
“Maybe, the higher ups are here,” Sam interjected. “Maybe it goes no further than here.”
“Yeah,” Locklear chimed in. “How about Area 51? They won’t even let the President go in there. The commander-in-chief himself isn’t allowed to fly Air Force-1 into Groom Lake. Why couldn’t it work that way here?”
Potts stayed silent for a moment. Sam and Locklear watched as he lowered his head and rubbed his eyes. After a moment, he turned around and walked over to the console where Sam sat.
“How did you two get an extra floor out O’Hearley’s cardkey?” he asked.
“I’m not really sure,” Sam answered, looking at Locklear.
“We accidentally over rode something, I think?” Locklear said. “It was basically a happy accident.”
“Well, retrace your steps and see if you can make it happen again and get more floors out of that card,” Potts told them. “There’s got to be a communication room on one of them.”
Sam and Locklear looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
“We could try,” Sam said. “Though I’m not exactly sure how we did it.”
“Me either,” Locklear added.
“Like I said…retrace your steps and see what you come up with. If worse comes to worse, we might have to figure out a way to break down the fire exits. Gentlemen.”
With this, Potts walked out of the room, leaving Sam and Locklear staring at one another.
“Do you remember how we started?” Sam asked.
Locklear thought for a moment, closing his eyes and raising his index finger in the air. “We started by trying to figure out passwords.”
“Right, but that proved futile,” Sam said, his eyes now closed as well.
“Can I ask you something?” Locklear asked, opening his eyes and now looking at Sam.
“Sure…anything…as long as it’s not the one about where babies come from.” Sam laughed at his own joke, but Locklear was oblivious.
“No, that’s not it,” Locklear told him, as Sam opened his eyes, his smile gone. “I just wondered how a man with your obvious intelligence and resourcefulness…”
“Became an island hospital maintenance engineer?” Sam interrupted.
“No…well, yes. I don’t really understand it.”
Sam folded his arms over the back of the chair, and then rested his chin on his hands.
“My father was a hard working man,” he started. “I mean, hard working.” He accentuated his sentence with a clenched fist. “He came from China as a young boy.
“I thought I heard someone say that you were Hawaiian,” Locklear interrupted.
“I am,” Sam said, trying to continue. “My grandparents were from Hong Kong. They decided to try their luck in San Francisco…Chinatown, obviously. They tried a laundry business, but there were probably already thirty-five of them in Chinatown alone, not to mention the rest of San Francisco. They tried their hand at the restaurant business, but they had the same luck that they had with the laundry business. There were just too many of them. Do you ever wonder where stereotypes come from? Well, every stereotype has some truth behind it, whether you’re white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, gay, a geek, or a dumb blonde…there’s a reason for the stereotype.”
“I never thought of that,” Locklear, said as if he’d just had an epiphany. “The way they say that most black men are criminals, or all Jewish people are cheap, or all Asians…” Locklear caught himself in mid sentence, truly not meaning to offend.
“Know karate?” Sam asked.
“No, I was going to say drive badly.”
Sam let out a hardy laugh. “Well, a lot of us do…but so do many whites, blacks, Jews, and what have you.”
“What do they say about geeks?” Locklear asked.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No.”
“You were never called names growing up? No one ever yelled “geek!” or “nerd!”
“Sure, but I thought that they were just terms of endearment.”
“No one ever got mad at you in class for ruining the curve? No one ever beat you up in the back of the bus because you reminded the teacher as the last period bell rang, that she forgot to assign the class homework…and it was Friday?”
“I never took the bus. We had…”
Locklear stopped speaking. Sam, who had been looking down at floor, looked up when Locklear went silent.
“What is it?” Sam asked, turning around and looking at the monitors as Locklear slowly moved up to one of the screens. It was a security camera monitor that intermittently showed the same hallway on floors nine through thirteen. All the cameras had this function. One monitor showed the elevator door on floors nine through thirteen while yet another showed a room, which looked to Sam like some sort of interrogation room on each of the floors.
“What?” Sam repeated, almost annoyed with Locklear’s silence.
Locklear looked at the screen for a moment. “I thought I saw…”
“You thought you saw what?” Sam asked studying the same screen.
“Nothing,” Locklear said still looking at the screen, his eyes slit in concentration and his mouth open.
To Sam, he looked as if he’d just seen himself walking down the hallway. After a moment, Locklear came to and looked at Sam.
“Now why did you’re father leave Hawaii?” he asked.
CHAPTER 47
Shelly Dixon walked down the long hallway. She was already clad in her clean nightgown. The fatigues had made her uncomfortable. She was still sore from having the twins and the nightgown didn’t encumber her at all. She supposed that the rescuers would just have to get a free peep show. Marcus would put a stop to that. He was probably with the rescuers at that very moment. As a matter of fact, he probably found the rescuers and was leading them there. That’s what she wanted to believe. That’s what she had to believe. She had pretty much come to terms with the fact that her baby boy was dead. She had cried until she couldn’t cry anymore. As the years went by, she would convince herself that he was stillborn. But Marcus couldn’t be dead, because if he were, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to handle it. It would shatter her very sanity, so she had convinced herself that he had survived the storms and the werewolf and would be with her and Kayla at any moment.
She walked into the ladies room where the lights immediately came on when she crossed the threshold. That happened in every room they had entered so far, except the giant room where they would all sleep if they’d had to stay the night. That was the only room with light switches because when people were ready to go to sleep, they needed to be able to turn off the lights.
There were ten stalls in the ladies restroom and Shelly went to one in the middle. She looked at the floor, which was shining. How could someone keep a bathroom this large so clean, when it took her every bit of effort just to keep her tiny one to
the point of barely passable?
When she finished, she exited the stall and walked to one of the four sinks that lined the restroom wall. She turned on the faucet and wet her face. She was dreading Kayla’s next feeding, because her breasts were sore and it just zapped every ounce of strength out of her. At her last feeding, she’d hardly been able to stay awake. She would’ve probably dropped the baby if it hadn’t been for FranAnne who was watching Kayla at the moment.
As she left the restroom, the lights went off behind her. How did they know she was leaving, she wondered. Would the lights still have gone off if more ladies were in there? How did it know she was the only one?
As she headed back down the long hallway, she noticed that it seemed darker than when she had first come down it on the way to the restroom. Maybe she had to use the toilet so badly that she hadn’t noticed. She wished she had at least worn some shoes, because the tile was cold against her bare feet.
After a moment, she looked up. She hadn’t realized it, but she had been walking with her head down and when she had looked up, nothing was familiar. Sure, all of the hallways were just alike, bright white walls and bright white floor tiling, but she knew it wasn’t the same one. When she had left the sleeping area, she had gone right, then left, then right again. She must have missed a turn somewhere on the way back.
She turned around and walked back until she found another corridor and began to walk down it. It was definitely darker than the other hallways. She was starting to feel the first sensations of panic. The room wasn’t that far away, yet she couldn’t find it. As she continued down that hallway, she noticed that it came to a dead end. She let out a small moan, the panic starting to firmly grip her.
As she was about to turn around, she noticed a movement in one of the corners. That was impossible because the corridor dead-ended. She stood frozen to the spot peering into the corner. Even though she had just finished relieving herself, she felt as if she were just about to let her bladder go again.
“Who’s there?” she asked softly. “Is anyone there?”