by Garton, Ray
Ollie was rubbing his jaw. “That woman is dangerous,” he said.
Then they heard her scream.
“Oh, Jesus,” Emilio groaned, limping to the door. He stepped outside and looked down the corridor in the direction Fara had fled, but he saw nothing.
He heard something, though. Rumbling. And crashing. He’d been hearing it occasionally for a while, but now it was becoming steady. He went back into the office and said, “What’s that noise?”
“Holy shit,” Ollie said. He went to the couch and clumsily, roughly pushed Sheriff Kaufman into a sitting position, saying, “C’mon, sheriff, we’ve gotta get outta here. Now. Everybody. Now! I think this fuckin’ building is coming down.”
Emilio didn’t stop to think about it. In spite of his aching balls, he helped Ollie. Flanking the sheriff, the three of them left the office and hurried down the corridor with only Ollie’s headlamp to guide them.
They turned left down the main corridor. Sections of the walls on each side were in flames.
The rumbling grew louder, like the whole world was falling in on itself.
Ivan turned to the man and his son and put a finger to his mouth, signaling them to be quiet. Then he leaned forward along with Jack as Leon cracked the window a couple of inches. Wind and rain blew into the van.
“Can I help you, officer?” Leon said.
The deputy grinned and said, “Yeah, you can let them out of the van for me, okay? My friend Andy and his son. They’re coming with me.”
“Well, I don’t think they want to get out of the van,” Leon said.
The deputy reached for the door handle to open it, but Leon quickly hit the lock. The grin did not go away as the deputy said, “You can be arrested for that, you know.”
Lights grew brighter on both sides of the van as more cars drove into the parking lot. One of them pulled up behind the deputy. It was another sheriff’s department patrol car. The passenger door opened and a deputy got out. He had a mustache and a puffy face.
“Hey, Ram, what’s going on?” he said.
“This man is holding a friend of mine and his son in his van,” Ram said.
The mustached deputy looked at Leon. “You want to explain?”
Leon said, “The man in the backseat says this deputy has kidnapped him and his son and he’s going to kill them. He also says this deputy has killed a lot of people tonight. Says he’s unbalanced. He’s asked us for help.”
Ram’s smile disappeared and was replaced by a look of outrage.
The mustache turned to him and said, “What’s going on here, Ram?”
Ram ignored him and continued to glare at Leon.
The mustache said, “Ram, what’s the—”
Ram suddenly bared his teeth as he lifted his gun to the window and pointed it at Leon, saying, “Let them out of the fucking van, asshole.”
“Hey, hey, Ram!” the mustache said, putting a hand on Ram’s gun arm and pushing it down. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Come here, come on, step over here with me.”
The mustache led Ram over to the car he’d gotten out of and began talking to him, standing close.
“Jesus Christ,” Leon said with a sigh. “I may have wet myself.”
“I’m telling you, he’s insane,” Andy said.
“What should I do when they come back, Jack?” Leon said.
“Just do what you’re doing. Answer the questions.”
“You don’t understand,” Andy said tremulously. “He’s dangerous. He’s got a gun, he’ll shoot you. Without batting an eye, he’ll shoot you.”
“We’re wasting time,” Jack said. “We should have a camera set up so we can catch this.”
“Maybe you should just go about your business,” Ivan said.
“You think?” Jack said.
“Yeah, just get out and do the stuff you’d normally do. Set up for your piece. And I should be getting this,” he said, taking his cell phone from his pocket as he watched the flames still burning in the two third-floor windows.
There was a gunshot and Ivan leaned forward to look out Jack’s window again, absently fumbling with his phone.
The mustache lay on the ground and Ram was heading toward them again, gun in hand, chin jutting, eyes narrowed.
“Holy shit, he shot the other cop!” Leon said.
“I told you, I told you!” Andy said.
Leon rolled the window all the way up as Ram approached, and the deputy shouted something at him.
Ivan raised his phone and started taking video.
Ram raised his gun, aimed it at Leon, and fired. The window shattered, and so did the back of Leon’s head as he was thrown to the side, into the boxes on the passenger seat. He rolled limply forward and his bloody head dropped toward the floorboard in front of the passenger seat.
“Jesus Christ!” Ivan shouted in horror.
Donny clutched Andy’s arm with both hands and said quietly but frantically, “Let’s go, Dad, please, let’s get out of here, let’s get away from him.”
There was an explosion of activity outside the van. Voices were shouting Ram’s name as car doors slammed.
“Ram!” someone shouted. “Drop the gun!”
Ram shouted something.
“Get out, get out,” the other man in the backseat said. “Now, now, get out and get away from the van.”
Ivan slid the door open and they quickly piled out as a flurry of gunshots erupted on the other side of the van. Andy held Donny in his arms as he hurried away from the van, running toward the gate. Ivan followed them. Once they were several yards away, they turned around.
Just in time to see the fiery explosion on the second floor.
A bright ball of fire blossomed out of the window and took the window with it, along with a hefty part of the wall. Plaster and wood and glass and more fire exploded into the night and rained down on the ground below.
Halfway through it, Ivan turned his cell phone toward the flames.
Debris rained on several people who came running out of the entrance, shouting and waving at them.
A rumbling sound grew after the explosion had fallen silent, a low, pounding, crashing sound from somewhere in the building.
“Whassat noise, Dad?” Donny asked.
“I’m not sure but I think we should stay back here.”
Still aiming his phone at the building, Ivan said, “I think we should get farther back than that.”
The rumbling grew to a crescendo as, from apparently nowhere, clouds of dust billowed upward, swirling in the wind, some of it rolling toward them.
“Jesus, the building is collapsing!” Ivan shouted as he turned to Andy and his son, throwing an arm around each and pushing them away from hospital and toward the gate. He vaguely noticed that three other cars had just arrived, all sheriff’s department patrol cars.
As the old hospital’s collapse grew louder, dust and smoke and fire billowed outward in all directions.
Everyone in the parking lot turned and ran toward the gate, away from the burning, collapsing building. They gathered there as all the noise died down.
All they saw was a pile of rubble where an empty mental hospital was supposed to be.
Epilogue
“Welcome to this special Red Pill Radio podcast. I’m Ivan Renner.
“What you’re about to hear is a recording of Dr. Fara McManus. She was part of the team working in the old Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital for Vendon Labs. This recording is a confession. In it, she explains what they were really doing at Springmeier. The official story was that they were developing new antibiotics to fight antibiotic resistant infections. That was not true.
“I have given this recording to Jack Bembenek of KIEM News, and it will be picked up by other news outlets, I’m sure.
“Some of the people who died during last night’s hurricane did not die because of the hurricane. They died because of what was done to them by others. When you hear why, I hope you’ll get angry. It’s happened before. And
if you don’t get angry and do something about it . . . it probably will happen again.”
Hurricane Quentin had torn its way up the coast through Del Norte County and into Oregon, all the way up through Lane County, past Eugene, before it began to dissipate.
The official death toll had not yet been tallied when news of Ivan’s recording and the story behind it began to spread the next day. The story was picked up by every major news outlet in the country, and soon, in the world.
Two days later, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department released a statement expressing suspicion that Deputy Ram von Pohle had somehow contracted the virus created in Springmeier. Sheriff Mitch Kaufman stated that it was the only reason he could imagine for such an upright family man and a sheriff’s deputy of long standing to suddenly murder his wife, his children, and a neighbor, then do the other things he apparently had done.
The day after that, Andy Rodriguez’s attorney held a press conference to announce that the sheriff was mistaken, that Ram von Pohle was a cold-blooded murderer.
The story captured local attention immediately and became a preoccupation.
Ollie had taken twenty-four men into Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital. It seemed like too many at first, but he wasn’t sure where the homeless people would be inside that big hospital and he figured more men would find them faster.
Nine of his men came out of the building.
Ollie quickly became a TV personality, thanks to his appearances on the news. When asked by a CNN reporter why he’d risked his life and the lives of his men to rescue the homeless people being held inside the hospital, he said, “Because that’s the kind of thing a good American does, and whatever you might have heard, I’m a good goddamned American.”
The work done in Springmeier Neuropsychiatric Hospital quickly overshadowed the story of the hurricane and became the topic of conversation in and outside the United States.
Vendon Labs denied that they knew what Corcoran was doing and expressed outrage over the revelation. A statement was released admitting that Dr. Corcoran had been having difficulties with addiction lately, but no one at Vendon Labs knew how severe the problem had become. The company maintained that the aim of the project had been to develop new antibiotics to fight antibiotic-resistant infections and at no time were they working on a weaponized virus.
No one believed them.
The White House released a statement claiming that Vendon Labs had no connection whatsoever to the Pentagon or military.
No one believed them.
But the only evidence that such a government-funded project had taken place was Dr. Fara McManus’s recorded statement. She could not back that up because she was dead.
No one believed Vendon Labs or the government . . . but no one knew what to do about it.
Donny had nightmares. Andy was sure he would for some time. Maybe the rest of his life. He had explained to the boy what had happened to his mother. Donny took the news quietly, then dismissed himself and went to his room.
It would take time. But Andy had plenty of that, and he was willing to give all of it to his son.
Early Saturday morning, Latrice was placed in the morgue of St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka as a Jane Doe. She was put there with the other Jane and John Does who had been left behind by the storm. Statements were released asking anyone who may have information about the Does to please come forward.
Latrice had left her purse in Giff’s house, so she had no identification on her. No one knew she carried a deadly virus. She had been shot to death.
She lay in her drawer, waiting for someone to come take her home.
PINNACLE E-BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2014 Ray Garton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3406-2
First electronic edition: February 2014
