Mary slapped the clip back up in the gun. I trudged toward the opposite door, half-dragging Lanza with me.
“Where are you going?” Mary asked.
“Back the way I came in,” I said. “There’s a chute where they dump the Maruta.”
“Meruda?” Mary said.
“Ma-Ru-Ta. I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I shoved at the door. It wouldn’t budge. I pounded at it. Lanza gasped in pain and started sliding to the floor. I caught him, and Mary came up and put herself on Lanza’s other side. Together we propped him up on his unsteady feet.
“Here, take this,” Lanza said, out of breath.
Something was in his hand. I took it and saw it was Culling’s handheld Atman, smeared in blood.
“Took it off that bastard while he was choking on his own blood,” Lanza said, grimacing. “Might give us access.”
I swiped it at the reader next to the door, and there was a soft click. I pushed it open.
“Alright—ready?” I asked the two of them.
Both nodded. But I was distracted by movement in the left room. Something strange was happening. The men in the biohazard suits were still struggling with Fujimi. His one hand was free, and he was hitting himself in the face. Mary turned to look. She chuckled.
“That man’s completely lost his mind,” she said, shaking her head.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Quick, Mary. Turn off your Atman. Do it now.”
“Why?” she said.
“Just do it. Do it now. Please.”
“Fine.” She tilted Lanza’s weight onto me and raised her wrist.
She shrieked. The space where her Atman had been was raw and pink, a long row of angry stitches holding her flesh together in its place.
“What happened to my Atman?” she hollered.
“Thank God it’s gone. Watch.”
I nodded over at the window, because I knew what was coming next. Mary and Lanza turned to look. Fujimi was struggling against the white figures. But he wasn’t struggling for freedom—instead he smashed his Atman against his nose again and again and again, blood smearing his face. He collapsed back in the chair, exhausted by his efforts.
But the NBC suits did not move to pin him down. They had frozen in place. They stood stunned as he shifted over and unfastened the strap on his other wrist. The suited figures began to convulse—some falling to the floor, others banging on their helmets, others running at the door and slamming into one another. A few scratched at the flesh within their protective gear like wild, mangy animals. As they all hit the floor, a coughing-but-calm Fujimi loosened his ankle restraints. He freed himself and stood, glancing briefly at the two-way mirror. He walked out of the room.
“We should go kill him,” Lanza said, a rumble in his throat.
“Not now,” I said. “Not while we can still make a clean escape out of here.”
We went through the door. The long hallway window on our left showed a panorama of abomination: women and children in that waiting room struggled in the same death throes, same as the suited workers back in the laboratory. Bodies mid-seizure fell out of their chairs, women dropped infants, who tumbled hard on the carpet. Three young boys were slumped against the wall, blood dripping out their mouths, eyes staring at nothing. A roomful of healthy people died in front of our eyes.
“My God, Joe—what the hell is happening?” Mary said.
“Their secret project—the Tojo Virus,” I said. “A deadly germ disseminated through their Atmans. The Bureau of Wellness wasn’t waiting to deploy it after they got their land war in Asia. But I guess Fujimi had other plans, when he was about to become a guinea pig.”
Lanza coughed.
“Unbelievable,” the cop said, wincing as Mary let go of him to open the door. “Guess I owe you an apology.”
“Stop talking,” I said, grabbing him. “Keep walking.”
Mary swiped the Atman, a little light next to the handle turned green, and she pushed through, holding the door for us. But she stopped short, grunting as the door slammed on Lanza’s shoulder, making him groan in agony.
“Mary, can’t you hold the damned…” I started to say.
But my voice broke off. Up against the wall, just a few feet into the next hallway, sat the trembling form of Betty Bathory. Her eyes were open, she was breathing, but her face was blank, frozen.
“My God, Joe—is she…” Mary said.
“Well, she has an implant,” I said. “My guess is she’ll die.”
Mary started to cry, her face in her one free hand, gun hanging limp in the other one. I reached out and squeezed her shoulder.
“I wouldn’t cry for her too much. She’s part of it. She set you up with Abbud, helped fake the pregnancy, everything.”
She turned slowly toward him. All the color drained from her face.
“‘Fake the pregnancy?’” she said.
I stared at her. At that crucial moment, my voice failed me. And at that crucial moment, from far off somewhere, an alarm blared—loud, soft, loud, persistent. Lanza shifted his weight, grunting in pain.
“We have to get out of here,” he said. “Can you guys talk about this after we get out of here?”
“Fake the pregnancy?” Mary repeated, not moving.
“I was going to tell you once we were…” I started to say.
Mary shrieked and stooped. Betty’s hand was wrestling with the barrel of the gun, pulling the muzzle toward her mouth.
“Kill me,” the nurse hissed, black bile bubbling off her lips. “Just kill me.”
Mary jerked the gun free. She sobbed, shoulders heaving, a heavy wheezing from deep within. I touched her face, and she drew away.
“Kill me,” gasped Betty, face turning purple. “I killed…your baby… I…murdered it… So, the Project…could do…its test…”
Mary stood tall, towering above the traitor. She pointed the gun at the nurse’s face. Her finger quivered on the trigger.
“It was…a boy,” said the nurse, wheezing.
The gun went still. Mary flicked the safety off. She breathed hard.
“Yes…it was…a boy,” the nurse said. “I aborted it so we…could run…the experiment…use your body…”
The silence hung. Mary was completely still. I shuffled forward with Lanza.
“Mary,” I said softly. “She doesn’t deserve this.”
I glanced down. My free hand gently touched her trembling wrist. I nodded.
“She doesn’t deserve quick. She deserves to drown in her own fluids. Her organs liquefied. Slow. Painful. With agony.”
Trembling, Mary lowered the gun. Her head gave the slightest of nods. She clicked the safety back on. She got on the other side of Lanza. Betty’s eyes bulged, her death throes complete and utter torture. At least another few minutes of suffering left for her. I knew how the evil and conscienceless must feel as I smiled down at her.
“And good luck to you, Betty,” I said, stepping away. “Because you’ll need it in hell.”
“No,” she said, gasping. “Have mercy…”
We turned and walked all the way to the next door without looking back. We could hear the nurse’s death rattles, the anguished spasms. But we ignored it. Mary reached for the doorknob.
“Wait,” I said. “There were two big orderlies in there. You’ll have to shoot them.”
“Okay—stand behind me,” Mary said. “I got this.”
Counting to three, she slammed through the door, swinging the gun wildly from wall to wall. But the orderlies lay on their backs, eyes open, fresh blood smeared on their jaws, their large limbs twisted in impossible agonized contortions. The Atmans on their wrists flashed.
“Guess…most got…the big whammy,” Lanza said. “I wonder…how far it reached.”
“I wonder how many idiots have those things implanted in their bodies,” I said. Mary scowled at me, and I shrugged. “At least none of us has one anymore.”
Stepping past the corpses, the three o
f us made it to the soft landing pad where I had been dumped just an hour before, as far as I could tell. Propping Lanza against Mary, I pulled myself up toward the opening of the chute. I reached and felt along the sheer surface for any kind of handhold for climbing. But the surface was smooth and slick. I tried to claw my way up, but I slid back down into the soft padding. I stepped back and folded my arms.
“Any way to get up there?” Mary said.
“No chance,” I said. “They made it escape-proof.”
“And the rest of the hospital could be a war zone,” Lanza said, shaking his head.
“Maybe not,” I said. I pointed toward the orderlies’ contorted forms. “If Fujimi’s transmission went everywhere, then there are a lot of bodies up there. Probably a lot of the bad guys, along with the good. Only Fujimi was prepared for it.”
We went back the way we came, Mary with the gun drawn, checking corners, her steps military-precise. Lanza and I slouched after her. We passed Betty Bathory, whose eyes were crimson, filled with blood. Her breathing had stopped. Mary kicked at her leg, and the body slumped down to the floor. Mary spat on her old friend and kept going.
But we came to the first door in the hallway—and it would not open. It had a numeric key pad, and a biometric reader with a red laser light in a black oval. I tried the passcode 137. I tried 731. I tried my hand, my thumb, my iris—but nothing worked. Lanza tried it, too—but to no avail. I howled in frustration for minutes. Then I had an idea. I went back to Betty’s body and I dragged it back toward the reader, and smugly scanned her fingerprints, her limp hand, her lifeless eyes. Nothing worked. Minutes more passed. I realized I would try everyone in those rooms of death. Going around, I dragged the individual bodies around the corner to the reader. None worked. Then I went through each and every finger on each and every body. And when I reached Cullen’s pinky finger, it clicked.
“Leave it to the Project to make some murderous nurse’s little finger the skeleton key,” I said.
“So we go up and through the hospital—and just walk out the front door?” Mary said.
“That’s the plan,” I said, shouldering Lanza’s weight again. “But we need to go quick—keep us covered.”
We went down the hallway, where the children and their mothers were all dead, like a horrific still-life. We went through the room where I had been held prisoner. Culling and Abbud’s messy bodies lay in the right room. Everyone had died in the left, with the remains of the NBC-suited workers scattered around the corpse of Wetherspoon. But no Fujimi. We moved forward. Mary swiped Culling’s Atman, and after a second, the light turned green, and she pushed the door gently open. We stepped through.
Three bodies lay in the white hallway, red smears on the walls around them: a nurse, an orderly, another figure in an NBC suit. Mary looked back and shrugged. I was baffled. I had never seen any of this wing of the hospital. But Wetherspoon’s office would be at the far western part of the basement, probably somewhere dead-ahead, as far as I could tell. We just had to push through the chaos. I pointed forward. Mary checked around each doorway. Most of the doors were closed, but the few in the row which were open showed cadavers on gurneys, in various stages of dissection, wet organs bloated on hanging scales. Staff members lay dead all around.
It was an abattoir. Nothing more. No medical science to speak of—just death and depravity. I took a deep breath, swallowing the panic and fear and hatred coursing through me.
“What in the name of all hell…” Lanza said.
“Let’s just push through as fast as possible,” I said.
But one room stopped me. No body lay on the table, but there was a strange shape at the far edge. It was covered with a white shroud. I stopped, took a step, stopped again. Curiosity won out. I called out for Mary to stop too, and I propped Lanza up against the wall. The office was one in a straight row of autopsy rooms. Dread overcame me as I stepped closer to the draped cloth. But I crept forward. It looked like a jar underneath. As I neared within a step or two I noticed wires running out from underneath the shape to a tiny Atman that lay on a table next to it. I walked over and touched it, but recoiled as it burned my hand. I picked up a scalpel and tapped at the touch screen with its handle. Brainwave monitoring on a horizontal, like an EKG, waved across the screen. But no heart rate—no breathing rate. I tapped the screen once more, and with a quiet ping, a name appeared.
Esmeralda Foyle. The name of the girl glowed on the screen, with the mugshot I had come to know in my daydreams and nightmares, the green eyes and the tattoo of the yellow rose on her arched neck. How could she be here—was this entry old, some kind of error? I paused. I steeled myself. Reaching out with a shaking hand, I yanked the sheet off.
And there she was—at least a part of her. Esmeralda’s pretty head was frozen in a roiling cauldron of fluids, with the wires running through the jar and into the base of her neck. It had been perfectly, surgically severed just below that beautiful flower.
I stared. My hands balled into fists. Leaning forward, I stared into those young eyes. Those eyes I had sought for weeks. I felt the impotence of having lost another patient through this whole sordid ordeal—the cataclysm which had consumed my life and my dreams. I had failed this patient, too. I had never even had a chance, but I had failed. And this girl had never had a chance once she fell into the evil machine of the Bureau of Wellness and their experiments. Tears of rage fell down my cheeks.
The head blinked. I leapt back. The eyes flicked in my direction, and the mouth inside the fluid moved, but emitted no bubbles in that churning fluid. The severed head was forming words, but not in any human language. Horror twisted the face, in a way that was no longer human. It tilted toward me, the cloudy eyes boring right through me. I lunged forward, pulled the plug connecting the Atman to the jar, and tossed the sheet back over it. I staggered backward, back toward the hallway where Lanza and Mary were waiting. They had seen nothing.
“What?” Mary said, gun raised, scanning in both directions. “What did you see?”
“Nothing,” I said, wiping my face. “Nevermind. Just keep going.”
We reached the last door. Mary swiped the card and pushed through.
We found ourselves in the main hallway just outside Wetherspoon’s office. We had come through an unmarked door I had never noticed before. I must have walked past it a thousand times, but never taken notice. I turned us left and to the stairwell, where we pushed through another exit. Two more bodies—doctors this time—were splayed out on the stairs, limbs discolored and contorted. The three of us stepped around them, careful not to slip on the blood spatter. Mary led the way to the first-floor door. She pushed through quietly. She stopped suddenly, hands limp at her sides.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“What? What is it?” I said.
But she didn’t need to answer. A vision of hell opened before us. A line of bodies strewn along the hallway led to the front lobby of the hospital. At the far end, underneath the bright lights, was a lumpy mountain of…something. Two men in black were moving around it. It looked like they were dancing. The pile stretched at least halfway up to the forty-foot ceiling.
“Jesus, we have to go through there,” Lanza said. “Every other exit is locked.”
“If we have to go through, let’s try not to shoot anybody we don’t have to,” I said.
Mary flicked the safety off the gun, chambered a round. She nodded.
“Let’s break it down, Barney-style,” she said. “Keep it real simple.”
We stepped forward.
Corpses lay every few feet in the hallway—the same twisted and bloody faces, and the same contorted limbs. A few lights flickered overhead—perhaps the electronic virus had also infected the power grid. We proceeded forward, slowly, waiting for an ambush. I glanced into the faces of the corpses we passed every few feet. Two nurses, a janitor I’d known for my entire career, a half-dozen patients. Even Paddy McDermott, the trauma surgeon, lay motionless next to a vending machine, his sneer as con
trarian in inglorious death as it had been in life.
“Goddamn, Paddy,” I whispered. “Not you too.”
“At least it was fairly quick,” Lanza said, grimacing, squeezing his shoulder tight. “I can tell you from personal experience: bleeding to death ain’t fun.”
Lanza’s foot slipped in a puddle of urine on the tiles. I caught his weight just before he could tip over. Using all my strength, I straightened us both.
“You’re not bleeding to death,” I said. “A real hospital will patch you up. Just hold on.”
Mary had reached the entryway to the lobby. She froze. My eyes couldn’t immediately focus on what the mountain was. But then, after some moments, I saw a small hand and an upturned face…within the mound. And I understood.
It was a pile of bodies. Limbs tossed, discolored, piled on like so many bundles of sticks. Mary lunged at some waiting-area chairs and retched, like her morning sickness sounds. I stared at the unmoving heap. It was an image that belonged in Wetherspoon’s book on the 20th century: those horrifying pictures of a girl crying, bodies being bulldozed into ditches. I saw heads and hands and feet and naked shoulders and ankles. The two black-clad forms came from around the sides of the pile, splashing liquid in huge arcs from metal cans they held in two hands. Their movements were rhythmic, almost jolly. They were completely engrossed in their work, headphones jammed in their ears.
I deposited Lanza over on the chairs near Mary. The waterfall next to the entryway wasn’t gushing water—it trickled a pinkish sanguinary ooze. Lanza groaned, and he slumped toward the floor. I went over to Mary, who was still retching. Blood was in the puddle beneath her. I rubbed her back and spoke into her ear.
“Just hold on for a minute, Mary,” I said, sliding the gun from her hand. “I’ve got to get us through that door. I’ll be right back.”
“You remember how to use that?” she said, between blood-stained teeth, between heaves.
“You taught me. Our dates at the gun range,” I said.
“Shoot to kill. There’s no backup, and the police ain’t coming,” Lanza mumbled, leaning his head to indicate his shoulder camera. “And remember to take the safety off.”
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