“You are where you are because I called the people who just rescued you,” Mr. Krystal said. “The place was crawling with those things the moment you went inside.”
Phoenix had an aversion to well-meaning people who did as they pleased when they pleased, oblivious to whether or not those they helped wanted helping. Like somebody he knew who once threw away his Journey’s Greatest Hits record, one of the few vinyl ones left, and surprised him with a CD that not only sounded worse, but didn’t have the songs in the right order. Phoenix just smiled when he’d been handed the new CD, swearing through his lily white teeth he’d find a way to make the gift-giver pay for his crime.
Phoenix secretly cursed Mr. Krystal, even though he had saved his butt back there at the funeral home. A call beforehand would’ve been a nice touch.
“Why didn’t you call me earlier?”
“To late for that. Dr. Carson has been taken – underscore the word taken – to a temporary CDC site just southeast of Nashville. You need to get him out of there and get him back to his lab.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“Use your imagination, think synthetically,” Mr. Krystal said. “And don’t worry about Alaia – I’m sending her a text as we speak. She’ll know what to do when she gets to where you’re going.”
“And this virus can be stopped?”
“Absolutely – as long as you can get Dr. Carson---”
“I know, I know – back to the lab.”
“Just don’t get used to your little hiding place,” Mr. Krystal said. “It’s going to be a long road to Franklin, and you’re really going to have to push it because the deadly stuff will be airborne soon.”
“What?”
“You heard me correctly, Phoenix. You don’t have much time. Anybody still left alive forty-eight hours from now, or thereabouts, will no longer have to worry about drinking water or being bitten by an infected person. Death will be in the air.”
Mr. Krystal disappeared into silence. Phoenix pressed End, and slipped the phone back into his front, right pocket.
Thirty minutes later, and after a few turns to the right and one to the left, the vehicle slowed down and turned right. The car picked up speed, slowed down again, and rolled over a speed bump. Phoenix checked his GPS. He was somewhere just off Elm Hill Pike close to I-24. He felt his body leaning to the right, and he knew the vehicle had turned left once more. It came to a stop. The engine was shut off, and he could hear the sound of doors opening and slamming.
After a few pops from somebody’s handgun, Phoenix listened. Nothing. Not another gunshot, not another voice. A half minute later, he heard the doors at his feet click, like somebody grabbing a handle on a car door, and the hinges groaned, barely audible. Somebody spoke, and Phoenix tried to make out what was being said. He felt the casket being jerked unexpectedly and violently in the direction of the voices, and he felt his body shift suddenly towards the head of the casket. His head bounced violently against the pillow a split second later, accompanied by a kidney-jolting thump. The casket must have been dropped.
A few minutes passed, and then nothing. Not a voice, not a gunshot, not anything. He sat in the box with the corpse, feeling the air around him getting warmer by the second, wondering if there was anything he could say that would get him out of his tiny box. If not for a puff of cool air coming through the opening he’d cut into the lid, he probably would have started screaming like a banshee and pounding on the casket like a child stuck in an old clothes hamper. Instead, he reached for his knife, slowly raised it into the hole he’d cut earlier, and started widening it.
“Will you get that guy out of the coffin – you moron?” someone said. “Please? Just do what you’re told to do, okay? Thanks.”
Phoenix removed his knife from the opening and tried his best to raise his head enough to see through the hole he’d cut. Then he yelled, “Hey, get me out of here!”
“How are we going to get him out?” another man said. “We left the crank back at the funeral home!”
For a second, Phoenix’s fear became so intense that he felt like he was about to black out, but all he did was brown out, the kind of thing you did when you thought you were dying but snapped back out of it just as you began to fade. The idea that he was trapped irretrievably in a coffin with somebody – something? – that was technically considered to be aged meat, terrified him. He grabbed his knife, stuck it out through the hole, and said, “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just get myself out. And yes, you are morons.” He went to work on the coffin lid, slicing into the thin metal on every forward stroke, much like someone would use a hacksaw blade. A moment later, he heard the hum of a grinder, somebody cursing, and a loud, high-pitched whine as someone somewhere began cutting into something.
A half hour later, now completely soaked in sweat, Phoenix emerged from the coffin. His body ached, his joints were stiff, his head felt like a recently-used anvil.
The man with the grinder helped him out, and then the guy looked back into the coffin. “Ooh, just look at that, will you? They just threw you in there? Just like that?”
Three men, all in black army gear – why was it always black? – approached Phoenix. They each carried an open bottle of beer, chugging it as they came.
When the men stopped in front of Phoenix, he looked at them and asked them to point out the man in charge. The two men nodded towards the short, slightly chubby, balding guy standing in between them.
Phoenix gave him the once-over and laughed. Dark brown tufts of hair grew out from the side of his head on both sides, like saddle bags hanging off the side of a horse. The very top of his head, smooth, slick, and as shiny as any piece of new leather Phoenix had ever seen, looked like something somebody had ridden across the Wild West.
“My name is Juan Martinez,” he said. “And you are my---”
Phoenix looked over the man’s shoulder, not hard to do when somebody was about as tall as a water fountain, pointed across the way, and said, “You’d better hurry, because---”
Juan turned to look.
Phoenix, with his left hand cupped, and with every last ounce of traumatized strength he had left in his tired body, swung his arm and hand at the man’s right ear. He connected perfectly. The loud, angry pop, cupped-hand against vulnerable flesh and fragile hearing components, testified to the force of the blow he’d landed on Juan Martinez’s ear.
Phoenix stepped back. “That’s for locking me in that coffin.”
Juan Martinez came towards him, his dark eyes wobbling in his head. He staggered off to Phoenix’s right and then in the opposite direction. He looked up into the sky once and collapsed onto the pavement. The two other men, alarmed by the attack, but also apparently amused, backed up, drew their pistols, and aimed them at Phoenix. One of the men, a younger guy, relieved him of his phone and his knife and cuffed him.
Chapter 25
“A hospital,” Phoenix said softy. “This makes sense.”
The large, gated courtyard in the rear of a light tan, three story building was stirring with activity. Two sets of double metal doors, their paint chalky and blotched, swung open and slammed shut as people came and went, shuttling cartloads of equipment into the hospital. To the right of a Penske truck, a row of bagged bodies, fifteen in all, waited their turn for a ride out and to wherever it was they were going to be dumped.
Phoenix, with Mr. Baldy and his two jack-booted thugs in tow, hurried across the white concrete. Three more Black Ops guys and a woman in a lab coat were standing off to one side. They smoked and laughed, the men with their rifles slung, the woman with a folder under her arm. Phoenix eyed them, and they turned and saw him. Their smiles faded quickly away.
This wasn’t a military facility. It probably had very few security features; and it had plenty of windows and doors: Phoenix would find a way out.
The woman, a girl of thirty, maybe, with short black hair and a rather attractive smile, hurried over to the door and told Baldy and company to tak
e Phoenix inside and up to the Sleep Disorder Clinic on three. She opened the door and stepped aside.
The stock room of the hospital buzzed with activity and hummed with people talking and shouting orders. A loud bang of something falling and shattering into a million brilliant shards of glass made the woman jump.
Phoenix turned to look and lost his rhythm. Baldy, having just lost an eardrum, and who now found it extremely difficult to stand upright, used his rifle but on Phoenix’s lower back, dropping him to the floor.
The woman stopped and grabbed Baldy by the collar and slammed him up against the wall near a closet door. “Do that again in my facility and I will make you sorry, do you understand me?”
Baldy pulled himself away from the woman, his eyes slit and his mouth pursed. He’d have gladly shot her had they been on the street somewhere – that’s what his eyes said – and maybe he’d have a chance to do that anyway in the not-to-distant future.
Phoenix, because his hands were cuffed, had a bit of a struggle getting back up onto his feet.
“Get him off the floor, now,” the black-haired woman said.
The younger soldier, just a kid, bent over and picked Phoenix up and steadied him.
Phoenix looked at the woman and said, “Thanks.”
“They’re a loveless bunch of SOBs,” she said, not caring who heard her. “And just keep your mouth shut, Phoenix Malone.”
“So we’re on a first name basis,” Phoenix quipped. “You know, beautiful women call me Phoenix. But you can call me Detective Malone – that is, until after you get a tummy tuck and a face lift.”
The woman shook her head and kept walking.
Phoenix and his posse left the stockroom through a single door, walked out into a large atrium, and proceeded to a bank of elevators on the left. The atrium, done in earth tones and bronze, must have been the main entrance to the hospital. The atrium went straight up, three dizzying stories, and a staircase served both upper floors. Hallways on either end of the foyer near the front glass doors ran right and left.
Phoenix looked at everything. Anybody could get lost in a hospital this size – probably even carry on a well-fed existence with a family – and nobody would know they were here. That’s how big this place was. All someone would have to do is grab a lab coat, steal an access card every few days, and nobody would know a thing.
When they reached the third floor, Phoenix and his entourage stepped off the elevators and went right, then right again, and then right again. The black-haired woman stepped through an open door. The small, black and gold sign on the wall, just to the right of the door said, Sleep Disorder Clinic.
Phoenix looked at the woman and said, “Hey, you.”
The woman turned and looked at him, clearly agitated, her eyes boring holes through his skull like a drill in the hands of a surgeon.
“We don’t even know each other’s names, and were heading straight to the bedroom? We haven’t even had a drink.”
The woman, without a moment’s hesitation, slapped him across the face. But he rolled with it, taking the edge of it, and that made her even madder.
Baldy pushed Phoenix along with the butt of his weapon, and everyone stepped into the large, perfectly-decorated office space. They passed three bedrooms, entered into a hall, and passed through a lab full of diagnostic equipment. The door at the end of the lab opened up into another large area, an area with four open doors, behind which sat three spacious offices and a kitchen.
Phoenix was ushered into the office on the right and made to sit on a blue plastic and metal chair, his hands still cuffed behind him. A woman sat across from him, behind a desk, but Phoenix didn’t bother to look at her. He just looked down at the floor.
Baldy and his lackeys left the room.
The woman behind the desk, probably expecting something different from Phoenix, maybe some question about why he was here, said something to the black-haired woman. Maybe she’d spoken the woman’s name – Victoria, maybe – and Phoenix felt Victoria’s hand come up under his chin and raise his head. He looked across the desk and into the eyes of the woman sitting across from him: gray eyes, set into a tired face, framed with tired, gray hair; and she was about to say something equally gray, tired, and grim because, behind all of that gray death, Phoenix could sense uneasiness. Victoria removed her hand from under Phoenix’s chin and he held his head up.
Phoenix looked at the gray woman, grinning at her sardonically, and said, “Can we make this quick? Or does your intellect walk along on a cane, too?” He tilted his head over to one side and smiled crookedly. “Because I have to be out of here and on the road in five minutes.” He nodded, hoping the extra motion might push what he’d just said a little deeper into the woman’s skull.
The gray woman, with a soft, gentle, and persuasive smile, made Phoenix feel utterly foolish. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you, Phoenix Malone? Leave us, Victoria.” She waved her hand.
Phoenix’s brows came together and he leaned forward in his chair thinking he saw something he recognized, maybe not in the way the gray woman looked, which wasn’t all that bad, but in her calm demeanor and in the musical qualities of her voice. But no. He didn’t know if he’d ever seen her before.
The women, without losing her smile, said, “Turn your head---”
“And cough?” Phoenix said, suddenly remembering, and he grinned. He felt a chill shoot through him that started on the top of his head and ran down, tingling, into his stomach. Ms. Jones, Central Junior High, guidance counselor. He could see her now, plainly; and he startled when the memories kicked in.
He’d just finished trying out for the eighth-grade flag football team, and he’d been chosen for the first string. Ms. Jones had been in the stands that day, watching the tryouts, sipping on a can of Coke through a straw – he’d seen her there, watching him, but hadn’t thought a thing about it. After the tryouts, Ms. Jones, hurrying down from the stands, approached Phoenix and asked him to follow her to her office. When they got there, she ushered Phoenix inside, looked up and down the hall, and then locked the door behind her.
“The statute of limitations doesn’t expire on that,” Phoenix said.
“I’d do it again in a heartbeat, jail or no jail,” Ms. Jones said, looking over the rim of her chrome glasses, her eyes alight with something like joy.
“You followed me from Central Junior High all the way to Trinity High.”
“Where you played tennis – I came to every game. You seemed to like the arrangement.”
“I did,” Phoenix said with a smile. “And I never hurt you, nor would I.”
Ms. Jones stood up. “Which leads us to the present crisis.”
“What, that you’re going to hurt me?” Phoenix’s smile didn’t fade. They’d joked before. He knew he needed to play this thing through to his advantage. “The best thing you can do is get me out of here, Ms. Jones.”
“I’m sorry, Phoenix, I really am,” she said, her voice soft and believable.
“I can see that you are.” Phoenix rattled his cuffs against the chair. “Any chance we can get these things off?”
Ms. Jones smiled, and she leaned over and looked out through the doorway. “I’m not the one to make that call, Phoenix. But I can tell you that we have Dr. Patrick Carson here and that we have good reason to believe you have antibodies that can save us from this virus.”
“I’m the cure for the virus?” Phoenix said, rolling his eyes. “There is absolutely no way that I---”
Ms. Jones touched her chin, looking across the room at a picture on the wall, and then she came around the desk and leaned forward, putting her face in close to Phoenix’s. She seemed stricken, like she always did those many years ago, and she had that familiar look that said once more, I’m never satisfied. She looked flushed. “But we cannot get Dr. Carson to cooperate. In case you don’t know, Dr. Carson is behind this virus, lock, stock, and barrel. And I am dying to press my mouth against you.”
Phoenix licked his lips because
he knew it was coming. “I’ve sworn off women.”
“But those other women haven’t followed suit, have they? You’ve been cheating on me, haven’t you? Who were they, Phoenix?”
“My wife, for one.”
“But I was your first and only wife – I compromised you. You’ve been mine all these years. The others? They’re whores, nothing more and nothing less.” Ms. Jones eyes lit up, and she moved her face within an inch of Phoenix’s. She backed off and then came forward again, kissing him softly, her lips barely touching his, and she pulled away. “And would you say yes to my yes?”
Phoenix did a head-tilt backwards and towards the left. He didn’t smile like he used to. Instead, he bit his lower lip and looked away from her, holding his eyes on the chair next to him. “That would all depend,” he said, as he looked back up. “The bottom line here is---”
“I know what the bottom line is, Phoenix,” she said. She walked back to her desk, fished a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, and lit it up. She sat back down behind her desk.
“You think you do, Ms. Jones, -- or do I call you Bobbie, now?”
Ms. Jones leaned back in her black office chair and blew a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling.
“The bottom line, Bobbie, is that this virus, which you know nothing about, is transmitted through contact – but that’s about to change.”
Bobbie took another drag on her cigarette, blew more smoke across her desk towards Phoenix. “Tell me the honest truth, Phoenix.” Her voice sounded a bit higher-pitched than before and a little shaky. The cigarette had done nothing for her, apparently, but maybe she needed to burn it down to the nub before the nicotine kicked in. “Am I going to be the guilty one again? I mean, for what happens between us today?”
“Bobbie,” Phoenix said, leaning forward in his chair. “This virus is going to mutate and go airborne very, very quickly. I don’t suppose Dr. Carson has told you that, has he? And I don’t know who told you that I have the cure for this thing in my blood. But I assure you all of that is nonsense.”
Time Clock Hero Page 18