The elevator jerked and clanged when it hit the first floor, and the doors opened up in the hall near the main entrance. Men and women, all of them wearing lab coats, hurried back and forth through the lobby, filling it with an undecipherable techno-babble.
Phoenix just stood in place, waiting for his guards to take the first steps. Three seconds later, long enough to sit, twiddle, and think about anything, Phoenix stepped off the elevator. The guards followed him out. “The MRI room, I think, fellas – and then you’d better start praying.”
The two guards hurried Phoenix through the lobby, making a bee line diagonally towards a set of double doors, and walked through them. Phoenix counted off one, two, and then three doors which opened to the left. The guards took the third one and walked straight down the hall towards another set of double doors. Then they fobbed their way into a lab. Another door on the right said MRI and, sitting next to that door, with his head slumped over on his chest, sat another guard dressed in black. His weapon, an AR-15, was lying on top of a desk. One of Phoenix’s guards kicked him lightly, and he jumped up, rubbing his eyes.
“Crap, Billy,” one of the guards said. “You’ll be relieved in an hour. Just do your job so we can get out of here.”
Billy looked at Phoenix briefly, then his eyes panned the room quickly. “Why don’t we just go now?” Billy whispered. “I want to get out of here – let’s just go. Who’s going to stop us?”
“Just watch the door,” the guard said, and he looked at Phoenix. “If anybody leaves, shoot them.”
“Like hell I am,” Billy said. “I’m not killing anybody, so bite me.”
The guard shook his head. “Just stay awake.” He looked at Phoenix and motioned for the door. “No, I wouldn’t shoot you, either. But I want this paycheck.” The guard paused and looked into Phoenix’s eyes. “Is what you said true? Do you think this thing is going to go airborne?”
The other guard and Billy looked at Phoenix.
“I think the virus is mutating. When it does, we’re all going to be like – well, you’ve seen them,” Phoenix said.
“Let’s just go,” Billy said, as he picked his weapon up off the desk.
“Your paycheck is going to be worthless after tonight,” Phoenix said with a crooked smile. “And you didn’t ask for gold upfront?”
“My thoughts, exactly,” the guard said.
Phoenix looked at the door. “The guy in this room? He’s got the answers. But all the puzzle pieces are back at his lab in Franklin. You may want to look the other way when you feel like you need to be looking the other way. Know what I mean?”
The guard opened the door and motioned for Phoenix to kindly incarcerate himself behind a door designed to lock people out.
Phoenix grabbed the lever and flipped it back and forth. “This is brilliant, utterly brilliant. Now I know we’re doomed when somebody lets me lock them out.” He stepped into the room.
The door clicked quietly shut behind him. Phoenix heard a cough, more like somebody purposely clearing his throat than an actual cough, and he looked over to the right. A man sitting in a chair near the wall stood up, and he held a pack that looked like the one the guards had taken from him earlier.
“A gift from Ms. Jones,” Dr. Carson said, as he flung the pack to Phoenix. “You missed her by just a few seconds.”
Chapter 29
Dr. Patrick Carson, wearing a dark blue suit blotched with shades of gray dust, smiled and looked at Phoenix. He recognized him instantly. “And why you’re here, I cannot begin to guess,” he said.
“I’m the cure, if you can believe that,” Phoenix said. “Didn’t they tell you?”
“Of course you aren’t. But that’s not why you’re here.”
Phoenix said not a word. Instead, he rummaged through his dark green pack. “Everything except the gun,” he said. He dug through the pack again, like a woman on a first date looking for a Tic Tac, and found his phone sitting beneath the halo he’d picked up back at the prison. He pulled out the phone, waved it in front of Dr. Carson, and turned it on.
“Who sent you?” Dr. Carson asked.
Phoenix looked at Dr. Carson. The question was an invitation to pry him open like the tin of rotten fish he believed him to be. “Tell me about Phillip Mercer,” he said. “And why did you photoshop a Krystal’s coupon onto his shirt?”
“Because that’s how I remembered him,” Dr. Carson said. “No reason, other than that. I did it years ago.”
Phoenix stepped closer to Dr. Carson, coming to within a few feet of him, staring at every feature of his face. “Where is Phillip Mercer?”
“As you know, he’s---”
“He’s dead? And you don’t know where Phillip Mercer is?”
“We buried him at---”
“Did you have Phillip Mercer’s body exhumed a little over a week ago?”
Dr. Carson took a deep breath and nodded his head. “I had him exhumed – and I took him. Just a little payback. That hardly matters now. I did what I had to do.”
Payback? For what?
“Does the virus come from your lab?”
“I have the cure for it. I think that answers the next question.”
Dr. Carson turned and walked back towards his chair, a wooden one, sitting next to another chair pushed up under a matching wooden table. He grabbed a bottled water, Evian, and came back and handed it to Phoenix.
Phoenix removed the lid and slipped it into his pocket. He drank the bottle down to a third and said, “How can you live with yourself?”
“But you’re not here to ask that question – though I will answer it,” Dr. Carson. “And I will do so by asking you a question.”
Phoenix took another drink.
Dr. Carson, with all the seriousness of a man self-assured, said: “A wife screams for her husband to step on a roach – screams, mind you – but he says and does nothing because he’s too busy worrying that he will mess up his new dress shoes.”
Phoenix stopped drinking and slowly lowered the bottle away from his lips. He became as still as stone and felt just as cold.
“And all he has to do is look down and step,” Dr. Carson said, pointing his finger towards the floor. “One simple act and the problem is solved – history is changed. Tracy does not slip on the stairs when she tries to flee from said flying roach.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” Phoenix answered, shifting on his feet.
“Nonsense? Hardly.”
“You can’t possibly know that.”
“But I do,” Dr. Carson said. “Now, can you answer the first question, the one you asked me? How can you live with yourself after what you let happen to Tracy?”
“How can you possibly know about that?”
Dr. Carson waved the last question off with a wave of his hand. “Stay focused. Now, Eric Sawyer,” he said. “Who could’ve seen it coming? He asked me if such a thing as Psyke, the drug Marcus Cain had ingeniously come up with from the top of his head was real and if it would be easy to make. He reassured me his interest in it was all hypothetical, of course – and I said to him, ‘This is how I would do it.’”
“Mariela Diaz,” Phoenix whispered.
“Six words,” Dr. Carson said, “that changed the world – this is how I would do it.”
Phoenix nodded.
“The real what-might-have-been for me and her,” Dr. Carson said. “I loved her, you know. And so I assume you reference that episode when you ask me how I am able to live with myself.” He paused and shook his head. “I’ve spent every year since Mariela’s death trying to erase what happened. But really, you can’t hope to erase such things. In the end, you hope to forget them. But not really. You just keep hoping that all of the good you’ve done will be enough to make up for it.”
“And the Psyke Virus – or whatever it is – it belongs to you, doesn’t it?”
“If I say yes, will my answer change anything?”
“You can cure it. You said you could. You can turn this around.”
>
Dr. Carson grimaced. “If I could save the present world tonight, I would. But if you can get me back to my lab, and get me into the vaults, I can save mankind.”
“There’s a difference between trying to save one and the other?” The phone, which Phoenix stuffed into his front pocket, vibrated. He pulled it out and swiped the call icon. “I’m here.”
Dr. Carson leaned forward and said, “Hello Phillip, you gutless coward.”
Phoenix jerked his head back, moved away from Dr. Carson, and said in a soft, shaky voice, “Phillip Mercer?” Phoenix held his hand up against his opposite ear. “Yes … uh, huh … no, no, no – I’m in here … you just heard him, didn’t you? You keep … I said you keep breaking up – yes … now I can hear you.”
Dr. Carson returned to his seat and picked up a book while Phoenix did more listening than he did talking. A minute or two later, and after Phoenix had walked from one end of the room to the other and back, the call ended; and Phoenix slid the phone back into his front pocket.
“I figured he’d call you sooner or later,” Dr. Carson said.
“Phillip Mercer isn’t dead then, is he?” Phoenix said. “You lied to me. There was never a body in that casket, was there?”
“Given the circumstances, my lie is of such insufficient weight as to be meaningless,” Dr. Carson said. “Phillip Mercer – how should I say it? – conducts himself rather elegantly these days, as you will soon find out.”
“Soon?” Phoenix said. “How soon?”
“As soon as you get us out of here and get us both back to the lab,” Dr. Carson said. “That’s why you’re here, aren’t you?” Dr. Carson put his book down, folded his large hands, and set them on his lap. And he just sat there, with his head up and his eyes boring straight into the skull of Phoenix Malone. The look on his face, stern, and his jaw, hard and rigid, seethed with accusation. It looked like a mother’s face as she waited for her child’s confession that yes, it was he who’d set a match to the laundry hamper, and that’s why the entire house had burned to the ground.
Phoenix looked away from Dr. Cason and checked the time. Alaia would be here in an hour, guns blazing and a vehicle ready – that’s what Phillip Mercer had said – and then he and Dr. Carson would have to make a run for it. He heard a snap and looked back at Dr. Carson, who had his hand up in the air.
Did he really just snap his fingers at me?
“You really aren’t oblivious, Detective Malone,” Dr. Carson said. “You’re just hiding everything in those dark recesses of your mind. Dark recesses. I like that term. Your whole being, all that you are, you keep in one big room. Every morning you wake up and walk down that awful hallway where the plaster is falling out of the ceiling, and you go to that room – loving it and hating it at the same time. You hate it because you know what’s in it, and you love it because you think the truth of who you are is nicely tucked away and out of sight where it will never hurt anybody. And so you go about your business or – what was it you asked me earlier? – you live with yourself. Or should I say, the illusion of yourself?”
Phoenix smiled crookedly. He was conversing with a mad man.
“And it never occurs to you that maybe, just maybe, the reason someone might want to throw back the shutters to your little hideaway is because they genuinely want you to see what’s really there – the dust, the cobwebs, the trash – all of it. And maybe they’re doing it, not because they want to laugh at you and belittle you – or even accuse you – but because maybe they want to help you clean it all up.”
Phoenix pulled out his phone again and looked at the time.
“Do you believe in second chances, Detective Malone?”
“Are you offering me one?”
Dr. Carson yawned and looked at this watch. “What time are we leaving here?”
“Hour, give or take.”
Dr. Carson leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Wake me up in thirty minutes, won’t you?”
Phoenix walked over to the door with his lips pursed and, as he walked, he looked back at Dr. Carson. He shook his head, almost said something, but turned away. But then he stopped. He just stood there looking through the glass pane in the door, greatly shaken by what Dr. Carson had said and by what he hadn’t said. All those words, words about his wife Tracy, hurt him. How did he know? And if Dr. Carson knew that, he knew of her surgery and how it had all gone terribly wrong and how she’d ended up in a coma. Did he know that she’d contracted – no, that wasn’t the right word for it – that someone had injected her with the Psyke Virus? That he’d gone to see her and ended up putting a bullet in her skull? Cobb must have been working for Dr. Carson.
Phoenix walked to the door, reached up, and locked it. Then he sat down, leaned back, and closed his eyes. A feeling of cold darkness, a despair so deep and consuming, settled over him like a cold blanket. He closed his eyes and tricked his mind into not caring, and he fell asleep.
Chapter 30
An explosion, a crackling, rolling thunder, rattled Phoenix from his sleep. Particles of ceiling tile, like snowflakes, fell from the ceiling. An overhead light fixture broke free, dangled by its wires on one end, and came crashing down in a shower of sparks. It landed on top of the MRI machine and tumbled to the floor. The hospital alarm, a loud, throbbing noise, sounded. Phoenix jumped to his feet, looking frantically around the room. Dr. Carson had gone. He picked up his pack and flung open the door.
Dr. Carson was standing just outside the door, sipping on an Evian. “Seems like our guards aren’t anywhere to be seen. Seems lucky if you ask me.”
The lights flickered and dimmed to half-light, hovering somewhere between tipsy and drunk. A few seconds later, they went out. The emergency exit lights engaged, casting their scant but useful light near the exits.
“Nothing’s ever this easy,” Phoenix said, as he scanned the room for a weapon. He shouldered his pack, grabbed an IV stand, and took it apart. Shouting came from the long hall to the right. Hiding in the darkness wouldn’t be too hard but, more likely than not, Black Ops were on their way; and they’d be here soon to secure their two packages.
Just as Phoenix started leading Dr. Carson through the double doors on the left, the doors crashed open. Phoenix pulled Dr. Carson back, throwing him off balance, just before the doors hit him. Alaia came charging into the room, her shot gun in one hand, an AK in the other. She handed Phoenix her shotgun and offered the AK to Dr. Carson.
“I could never kill anyone,” he said. “So I think you’d better hold onto that.”
Alaia set the gun down and slid her pack off of her shoulders. “These people you need to be killing aren’t just anyone,” she said, with her voice low; and she pulled out two of the pipe bombs and a lighter.
“So that’s what we just heard?” Phoenix asked.
Alaia scrunched her eyes. “No time to talk.” She put her pack back on and slung the AK over her left shoulder. “Van’ll be up in a few seconds. Let’s move.”
They turned to leave. A loud crash came from down the hall behind them, and they heard a number of men yell, “Freeze!”
Phoenix raised the shotgun and took out the emergency light above his head. He hurried everyone through the door, then pulled out his flashlight.
“Wait,” Alaia said. She smashed the glass on a fire extinguisher box, lit a pipe bomb, and carefully balanced it behind the fire extinguisher. Convinced it wouldn’t fall over, she told Phoenix to turn out his flashlight and follow her down the hall towards the yellow, flickering glow of the blazing front entrance. She stopped at the corner and told everyone to get down. “Watch the rear, Phoenix.” Alaia leaned forward and looked around the corner. “Heck of mess out there, that’s for sure.”
The doors leading to the MRI area opened slowly, and three men, with their weapons raised, stepped into the hall. One of them saw the sparking of the pipe bomb fuse and cried out just as the bomb, sitting at chest level, exploded in a brilliant burst of white light and smoke. The fire extinguisher hurtl
ed through the air and slammed into the sheetrock on the opposite wall. The men retreated, and the door snapped shut behind them. The overhead sprinklers kicked in, sending a fine, cold, drenching rain down upon everyone.
“At least we won’t burn now,” Phoenix said. He aimed the semi-auto twelve gauge down the hall, released the safety, and fired off two rounds. The buck slammed into the doors, probably perforating them with holes as big as a man’s head. “That’ll keep ‘em back for a few seconds.”
“Let’s go,” Alaia said. “Deep breath everybody.” She stood up into a half-standing, half-crouching position and hurried around the corner. She moved as quickly as she could in the drenching downpour, in the direction the main exit, the one she’d so beautifully just destroyed.
Gray, acrid smoke, nearly opaque, as thick as any storm cloud, hid them from sight as they made their way forward. Broken glass, pieces of wooden chairs, a door ripped from a door frame, lay at their feet. The muted glow of fire, darkly orange, like fire from a garbage can full of burning plastic, rose up like ghosts to their right and left.
Alaia, in her hurry forward, caught her foot and fell over, landing on something soft and mushy. Dr. Carson helped her up and reeled, staggering backward in horror when he saw Alaia and his hands covered with bits of blood and torn flesh.
“Hurry,” Phoenix said. “No gawking or puking.” He nudged Dr. Carson past the body and then guided him over another. He was glad he couldn’t see the faces of the dead and wondered if they had any faces at all.
More voices came from up ahead. Voices yelling orders, others acknowledging them – and the sound of a water hissing through a large fire hose.
Alaia stopped, handed her wet pipe bomb to Dr. Carson, and unslung her AK. Up ahead, just near the exit, part of the ceiling and wall collapsed, bursting into flames, sending a lethal cloud of smoke and dust floating in their direction.
Dr. Carson looked at the pipe bomb and threw it to his left.
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