The Burning Man

by Christa Faust

  The line went dead.

  Eric slammed the phone back into its cradle. It wasn’t that he didn’t know this day was coming, he just hadn’t expected it so soon.

  For more than two years now, he’d been engaged in an elaborate ongoing subterfuge with his financial overlords at Massive Dynamic, presenting one set of results to them while keeping the real nature of his work a closely guarded secret.

  Because he had discovered something staggering. Something that would change the world.

  He had invented and perfected a serum that worked in tandem with the unique chemicals released by the female Cortexiphan-positive brain, while it was deep in the roiling flux brought on by puberty. Cortexiphan needed to be administered to children, while their minds were still open, and his new serum had a similar restriction. It had to be given to adolescent females while their reproductive hormones were in flux, chaotic and wild and full of seething potential.

  But while Cortexiphan unlocked the powers of the mind, his serum enabled an unprecedented control over the very structure of human DNA. It harnessed the power of a newly blossomed woman, to create life itself. And through that power of creation, Eric hoped to father a new race of superhuman progeny who exerted total control over both mind and matter.

  And now—when he was so close to his most significant breakthrough—this narrow-minded interference from a bunch of corporate bean counters. He’d planned to run at least a month’s worth of additional tests before he attempted the delicate and crucial insemination of Olivia. Now, he’d have to distill his preliminary research down to the most critical steps, and move the big day up to the middle of next week, at the latest.

  Once he’d confirmed that fertilization had occurred, he’d submit a report regretfully detailing Olivia’s suicide through self-immolation, leaving behind no remains for an autopsy. He could let the other patients in the upper ward go without protest. While the Pagliuca girl had shown some excellent potential early on—including a level of voluntary control unmatched by any of his other subjects—he’d recently discovered that she possessed an arcuate uterus. Not a deal-breaker per se, since it wasn’t unheard of for such females to successfully carry a fetus to term, but it would be a crapshoot.

  A crapshoot Eric saw no reason to take, now that he had Olivia.

  37

  Olivia lay strapped down on a gurney with wires stuck all over her head and face. There was a monitor mounted on a flexible arm that had been positioned so that it was directly above her face, making it impossible for her to look anywhere but at the screen.

  “Okay, one more time, Olivia,” Doctor Lansen said. “When you see each image, say the first word that pops into your mind. Ready?”

  She didn’t bother to answer.

  She was getting so sick of this lab rat routine.

  “Right,” he said. “Here we go.”

  The first image in this latest series was a man helping a little girl learn how to ride a bicycle. He was smiling and beatific in a plaid shirt and jeans. She was blond, looking exhilarated and terrified and not unlike Olivia at that age. Her bicycle was pink. There was a word balloon above the dad’s head that read: be careful.

  “Bicycle,” Olivia said.

  A second image came up, this one showing a couple having an argument in a restaurant. The man looked like the villain in a Spanish soap opera, showing his nice white teeth like an angry animal. His word balloon read: YOU ARE STUPID. The woman was a little bit chubby, and was crying.

  “Restaurant,” Olivia said.

  The third image was a house on fire. A woman and her daughter were standing in the street in their nightgowns, with their arms around each other, and their shared word balloon said: OUR DOG IS INSIDE!

  “House,” Olivia said.

  “Come on, now, Olivia,” Lansen said. “You’re editing your responses again. You need to be honest, and say the real first thing that comes into your mind.”

  Olivia felt a hot rush of anger and heard a little cascade of corresponding beeps from the machine. She wasn’t stupid, and could easily see that these images had been designed to provoke an emotional response. She refused to be manipulated by this kind of ham-handed psychological strip search.

  The next image was a photo of Rachel and Randall. It had been taken on the front porch of their old house in Jacksonville, before the fire. Rachel was maybe four and was being held by Randall. He had a grip on her little arm and was making it wave to the camera. Her eyes were wide and scared, like she was about to start crying.

  “Oh, come on,” Olivia said, twisting her head away from the screen. “That’s a cheap shot.”

  “Last one,” Lansen said. “Please, try to stay open-minded and respond honestly.”

  That last photo was of Kieran, and looked like it had been taken by a surveillance camera in the Westley police station. His body language was pleading, desperate, his face anguished and still blotchy with the fading bruise. She couldn’t even imagine how worried he must be about her.

  She was suddenly desperate to see him, to be with him. She’d never felt such a physical and powerful connection to another person and before she could stifle it, a hot wave of aching emotion washed over her.

  There was another frantic symphony of beeps, ascending in pitch until the screen above her cracked with sudden static, and went black.

  “Fantastic,” Doctor Lansen was saying over and over as he fussed around his machines. “Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.”

  “Too bad your monitor broke,” Olivia said, anger smoldering in her belly. Anger at herself for giving that creep the reaction he wanted. “I guess this means we’re done.”

  He ignored her for another minute, still enthralled with whatever results he’d managed to trick out of her. Eventually he came to her side and removed the crown of wires from her head.

  “That was excellent, Olivia,” he said. “Please step into my office for a few minutes, if you’d be so kind.”

  He gestured toward the doorway that led between the lab and his office. Olivia got up off the gurney and made a sour face.

  “Haven’t you had enough for one day?”

  “Almost,” he said with a condescending smile. “Just a few more minutes, and then you’ll be free to go back to the ward.”

  “Like I have a choice,” Olivia muttered, walking ahead of him into his office.

  She’d spent the last week obsessively trying to figure out some kind of ruse that would allow her a few minutes alone in there. Whenever she entered that office, all she could do was stare longingly at the telephone. So that day, like every other day, her eye went right to it as soon as she walked in. With Kieran still on her mind, she was dying to find a way to call him. Dying to hear his voice.

  She sat down in her usual chair, arranging her body into the most hostile, unreceptive position she could manage.

  “Tell me more about your relationship with Kieran McKie,” Lansen said as he sat down behind his desk.

  “We’re just friends,” Olivia said, still staring at the telephone.

  “Do you have a lot of friends?” Lansen asked.

  “Sure,” Olivia lied. “Tons.”

  “I see,” Lansen said. “And do you normally form such intense emotional attachments to all your friends?”

  Olivia wasn’t really paying attention to the doctor, because she’d suddenly noticed something right next to the telephone. She’d been so busy wishing she could use the phone that she’d never even noticed the stack of stamped outgoing mail sitting in a plastic tray marked out.

  Suddenly, Olivia had an idea.

  “Why do you keep asking me about my emotions?” she asked, just to keep him talking while she set up her plan of attack.

  “Well, Olivia,” he said, “I have reason to believe— and this latest barrage of tests seems to have confirmed my hypothesis—that the manifestations of your disorder are linked to intense emotions.”

  He was still talking, going on and on about hormones and her period and other gro
ss and embarrassing things she didn’t really want to hear, but she blocked him out completely and concentrated on making a meticulous inventory of the items currently populating the surface of his desk.

  A leather blotter. Telephone. Black plastic inbox on the left side of the desk, currently empty. An outbox on the right, containing the outgoing mail. A spread of papers, charts, and folders in the center of the blotter, along with a pen and a half-full cup of milky coffee that looked like it had been sitting there congealing for some time.

  Perfect.

  “So you see,” he was saying. “While I initially thought the onset of sexual activity might be your trigger, it appears that sexual thoughts or feelings, even if they haven’t yet been acted upon, are enough to...”

  That was enough.

  “You’re a pig,” Olivia said. “A disgusting, perverted pig!”

  She got to her feet and flipped the blotter up and into Lansen’s chest. Papers flew like startled pigeons and the coffee cup bounced off his shoulder, splattering its contents all over his lab coat.

  Just as she’d planned, the in- and outboxes remained undisturbed on either side of the blotter.

  Lansen let out a funny little cry of surprise, batting at the papers flying around his head, and then looking down at the spreading stain on his lab coat. In that precious moment of distraction, Olivia reached out and snagged the top letter in the stack, swiftly stuffing it into the top of the cast on her broken left arm.

  Then Lansen hit the panic button on his desk, and Larry was in the office in a flash, grabbing Olivia from behind and hauling her out into the hall. But she didn’t care. She had what she needed.

  She let herself go limp and compliant against Larry as he dragged her back to the ward and deposited her without protest in her room.

  She heard the sound of her door being locked, and Larry’s heavy footfalls moving away down the hall. She waited a full minute after he’d gone, and then pulled out the letter she’d stolen. It was addressed to BioCen Filtration and Separation Ltd, in Foxboro, Massachusetts.

  But that wasn’t as interesting to Olivia as the return address.

  S-CCGR

  Doctor Eric Lansen, Suite 301

  100 Red Oak Road

  Potsdam NY, 13676

  Potsdam. That’s where she was. The “suite” number on that address was the familiar number on the door of his office, so this was where she was now, not his home address.

  But why didn’t the address say something like “Whatever Hospital?” This was a medical facility of some sort, right?

  And what did S-CCGR stand for?

  Olivia went into her bathroom and closed the door, turning on the hot water full blast. As the sink began to fill with steaming water, she held the envelope over the steam until the glue loosened enough to allow her to open it.

  Inside was a terse letter complaining about a faulty replacement part for something called a Veronesi disk stack centrifuge, and demanding a refund. It was signed “Dr. Eric Lansen,” and featured the same mysterious address as the outside of the envelope.

  They weren’t allowed to have writing instruments in their rooms, but Annie had given Olivia a stolen marker as an inexplicable peace offering after that strange interlude in the janitor’s closet. She turned the letter over and wrote a swift message on the back.

  Dear Kieran,

  I’m being held against my will at this address. It’s some kind of psychiatric hospital, and they won’t let me leave or make any calls. There’s nothing wrong with me at all, just a broken arm, but this creep Dr. Lansen is doing all these weird experiments on me and talking about sex all the time. I need you to find a way to get me out of here right away. But don’t tell Rachel, okay? I don’t want her to be scared after everything she’s been through already.

  Please hurry!

  — Olivia

  She folded the letter and put it back in the envelope, and then resealed it and stuck it back into the tight space between her arm and her cast. The next step would be to try and score a bottle of correction fluid from the nurses’ station so she could change the BioCen address to Kieran’s address at Deerborn. Then, once she managed that, she’d need to find a way to slip the doctored letter back into the outgoing stack, and hope that nobody bothered to look at each envelope in the bundle before dumping it into the mailbox.

  Or if they did, that they didn’t know who Kieran McKie was, or care why Doctor Lansen would be writing him a letter.

  It wasn’t the best plan in the world, by any means, but it was better than no plan at all.

  38

  Kieran sat on the edge of Rachel’s bed. Boys weren’t normally allowed in the junior girls’ dorm, but the residence supervisor had made an exception for Kieran, since he was the only person she would talk to since she got back from being debriefed by the authorities.

  She’d been refusing to eat, or even get out of bed, for the past few days, and Kieran was really starting to worry about the poor kid. Not that he was doing all that much better himself.

  “But where is she?” Rachel was asking for probably the dozenth time in the past hour. “Where? Why doesn’t she call us?”

  “I’m sure she’d call us if she could,” Kieran said.

  “You think she’s dead?” Rachel asked, squeezing his hand way too hard. “Is that what you’re saying? If she was alive she would call, right?”

  “I don’t know, kid,” Kieran said. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  Rachel started crying again, and Kieran felt his own tears welling up to match. He couldn’t stop blaming himself for not staying by Olivia’s side, no matter what—for being a coward, just like always, and letting her down when she really needed him. She’d told him not to follow her when she ran away, and so he didn’t. But he should have, because now she was gone and he might never see her again.

  His girl, his beautiful Enigma.

  She needed him, and he had let her down.

  In an effort to make up for it, he’d spent nearly every waking hour pestering various officials to find out what had happened to Olivia. He’d worn out his welcome at the local police station, called every law enforcement agency in the state of Florida, and even made an attempt to contact the FBI. All that happened was that he got transferred around to various people who had no information of any kind, and no inclination to help him whatsoever.

  He was on his own and out of ideas.

  So now, all he could do was try to be there for Rachel. He knew that Olivia loved her more than anything else in the world and that if—god forbid—she really was dead, Kieran felt that she would have wanted him to look out for her kid sister. It was a daunting task—terrifying really, because he’d never been very good at taking care of anyone, not even himself. But he owed it to Olivia to do his best.

  Was she dead? Wouldn’t he feel the loss of her somehow, somewhere deep inside his defective heart? He loved her so much that it seemed impossible for her to be dead, when he could still feel the brush of her hair against his skin and her warm palm pressing against the center of his chest.

  But that line of thinking was way too painful. So he just let Rachel hold onto his hand, tried to get her to eat some of her favorite candy, and told her stupid jokes to make her smile.

  39

  Operation liquid paper was in full swing.

  It had taken several days to fully case the nurses’ station and formulate a solid plan. The station had a door, which was generally open. To the right of it, there was an open, glassless window through which the nurse on duty could keep an eye on what was happening in the lounge. When Olivia peered over the edge of the window, she saw a desk directly on the other side.

  On the desk sat a cup of pens, a pad of adhesive notes, a roll of tape, and the coveted bottle of correction fluid. It was too far for her to reach without help, though.

  So Olivia had used her teeth to tear one of the ties out of her hospital gown, and fashioned it into a little lasso. She’d been practicing using it to
pick up a variety of small, lightweight objects, and felt as if she had her one-handed technique perfected. The only difficult part was the little flick of the wrist that tightened the loop around the object. If it wasn’t fast enough, it would knock the bottle over before the loop could tighten.

  Once the bottle was on its side, it would be impossible to lasso, and she would have to wait until the nurse came back to the desk and set it right, then wait for her to turn her back again. If it happened more than once, the nurse would become suspicious and put the bottle away in a drawer, where Olivia would have no hope of ever getting it.

  She just had to time the strike perfectly, and get it right with the first attempt. Failure was not an option.

  When Olivia entered the lounge, the nurse on duty was Mrs. Andrada, a petite older woman from the Philippines. She was tiny and sweet faced, but ferociously strict, with dark, predatory eyes like a hungry mink. Olivia considered waiting until the next shift change, but that would be nearly four hours away. Which would mean that she couldn’t get her SOS into the mail until the following day.

  Every minute that she spent in this creepy medical prison was one too many. She had no choice. She had to act now.

  When she sidled up to the nurses station, Mrs. Andrada was sitting at the desk, reviewing a file folder full of paperwork. The second Olivia got within six feet of the window, Mrs. Andrada looked up and clocked her, eyes narrow and wary.

  Olivia looked away, trying to appear nonchalant, and leaned against the wall as if she was lost in thought. Mrs. Andrada watched her for a full minute, but Olivia forced herself to stay Zen under her scrutiny. Eventually, the nurse went back to her paperwork.

  Then, a lucky break. The phone rang.

  The phone in the nurses’ station was on the wall on the other side of the door. In order to answer it, Mrs. Andrada had to get up and stand with her back to the desk.