Sincerely Yours,
SA Martin Cundieffe
14
The pain in Stella Orozco's head pushed down on her for a shapeless eternity before it reminded her she was alive. She pushed this realization into a box and sat on the lid while she tried to negotiate with her ache, coax it into its own little box so she could get to unpacking the other. The pain churned between her ears like the sound of a chainsaw, sputtering and growling for long stretches, then firing up for a prolonged staccato attack on her temporal lobes, hitting sporadic peaks as it snarled on some critical synapse when she was trying to use it. The agony it caused her stopped her from even feeling the rest of her body, let alone surveying her surroundings, but Stella was an old hand at putting things into boxes: fears, disappointments, even her own imminent mortality. That's all it is, she told herself, a big loud noise, but it's outside you. Put it outside.
She made a plain, sturdy house with shuttered windows, walked inside and shut the door. Outside, the pain hurled itself at the door, at the walls, but they held, and slowly, slowly, the pain grew fainter. Now she could feel cold. Numbness in her toes. Hard, smooth surface against her side. Her left arm crumpled under her, mellow needles of oxygen deprivation percolating in her hand. Pain worrying at her walls, blunted but still blinding. She'd been drugged; a mild overdose of chloroform or ether would account for the ripping headache. Judging by the way her arm and bladder felt, she'd been lying here for several hours. Drugged—by the men who came to that old hermit's trailer, the old man who found Stephen, the one who…
Before the questions could run away with her, she put it all in another box and shut it up tight. The walls around her faded in and out of her mind's eye as the pain started to get in.
She made another door and crossed the room to it, closed it behind her, this one thicker still than the last, now she could begin to focus. The pain was just a wasp's angry buzzing. She could feel its undiminished force thrumming through her house, but she made things in the room to soothe her, familiar furnishings, soft violin music playing, a low fire glowing on the hearth. She camouflaged herself in creature comforts, and slowly, slowly, the buzzing faded to a sensation she could deal with. She discovered with relief that, if she held her head very still, she could move.
She slowly drew her legs up against her belly, then slid them out in front of her. Less than a foot away, they dangled out over empty space. She levered herself onto one buttock, bracing herself with her right arm, and stretched her legs out to touch the floor with her bare feet. Chill poured concrete floor under her toes. She clamped her jaw tight and lifted herself off the ledge, winced as blood gushed into her left arm and it burst into flame. Her house buckled around her, whining steely migraine-claws shredding the walls of her crackerjack shelter. The arm felt like a parasite in her hand, a dead thing that had attached itself to her and was filling her with its venom. She stood up in one swift motion. Tears started from her eyes, and for a split second she could see her headache inside her, and it was a tumor shaped like an atomic mushroom cloud, and it was still rising, rising, and she could feel how it hated her, how it wanted her to die. Stella fell back on the ledge, hunkered down in the animal guts of her brain's basest functions and mended her walls.
Slowly, over what might have been hours, the pain fell back, from a nuclear firestorm to a four-alarm blaze, to a chainsaw, to a gardener with a pesky leaf blower. Her right hand pumped her left until the last of the needles were worked out. When she could move it again, she rubbed her eyes, and found they were gummed shut with tears and sleep. They burned, but they worked.
She sat on a bare wooden bunk in a dimly lit cell, concrete walls stained with a sulfurous yellow glaze. A thick steel door with a small, double-paned window of steel-reinforced Plexiglas. A round steel air circulator was mounted in the ceiling, and an intercom speaker beside the door.
She was in a quarantine cell, a more spartan version of the one she'd seen on a tour of a hospital in Fresno. But this is not a hospital.
By the feeble light falling through the window, she could see that she wore a mint-green hospital johnny, with no stenciled hospital markings or manufacturer's tags anywhere on it. They'd left her undergarments, but they'd taken the bobby-pins out of her hair. She didn't wear jewelry, but as she looked at her hands, she noticed they'd cut her nails down to the quick, her toenails, too. An IV tube dangled from the crook of her left arm, terminated in a socket in the wall. Pumping her full of fluids, maybe vitamins, probably sedatives. This is a killing jar. These people take no chances. They expect me to try to escape, to try to hurt them. But they put me in a smock. And I'm not dead.
So?
So if you don't fuck it up, you might live through this.
She held herself very still and heard violin music, willing herself to get up and go to the intercom. Her head bobbed on her neck like a half-empty helium balloon, weak from hunger, she could still feel the pain rolling around in her skull like a wrecking—no, a pinball, a little BB, getting smaller all the time…
She was halfway to standing up when a shadow flitted over her. A silhouette at the window, all eyes. Glint of reflected light off a bald skull, contours of a broad, chiseled jaw, corded neck. One of the soldiers. She held up one open hand, to let them know she was awake, pointed feebly at the intercom. The soldier stepped away from the window. Stella leapt to her feet and half ran, half fell across the cell to the intercom. Her right thumb stabbed the send button, and she screamed, "Hey, pindejo, come talk to me!"
Through the window, she could see the soldier standing in a room lit by hanging bare bulbs, the walls and ceiling lost in shadows. He stood next to a bulky, androgynous woman who held a clipboard and regarded Stella with an utterly neutral gaze. They both wore fatigues with the kind of chocolate-chip camouflage pattern the Army wore in Desert Storm, with no insignia. They had the same severe, white-walled haircut. If they could hear her, they didn't seem inclined to respond.
"Hey, where am I?" We could tell you, but we'd have to kill you, she thought. "What's going on? Where's a doctor? Can you hear me?"
They just stood there watching her, like she was a stray dog barking as they put her to sleep. Her pain was coming back for her, let in by her shouting. She clenched every muscle of her body against it as it carpet-bombed her brain. The window swam in and out of focus, the soldier and the mannish woman with the clipboard disappeared, then another soldier ran past with a rifle, and she thought she heard noises that might've been shots, then she swooned, and the wall slammed into her forehead, and the floor kicked her ass.
She knew some time had passed since her collapse because her eyes were gummed shut, and her bladder and stomach protested their respective fullness and emptiness with dire urgency. Still, her head felt better. She could see without the curtain of free-floating animosity for the world that only serious headaches can evoke, and her dizziness had given way to a keen lucidity. She figured they'd pumped her full of stimulants in preparation for something. An interrogation. Good. It was high time these assholes explained themselves.
Stella went to the window. The bare bulbs still glowed, but she had to strain to the left to see anyone. A soldier sat on an examination table with his back to her. Over his shoulder, Stella could make out a silvery, crewcut head—the bulldyke with the clipboard—doing something to the soldier's chest. His shirt was off, and it looked as if the woman was stitching him up. He jerked more than once, and Stella saw the woman's mouth working as she ordered him to sit still. Stella learned to read the lips of whispering foster parents, social workers and bullies before she learned to speak English herself. Be a man, the dyky woman snapped at him.
Presently, the soldier stood and buttoned his shirt, but not before Stella saw the puckered furrows running from his clavicle down to his navel, and the rows of Y-shaped nylon staples holding the wounds together. With a downcast look, he reached out and placed his hand on the woman's shoulder, mouthing the word Sorry over and over again. She shook it off as if it
were a parrot that'd just shit on her, and pointed forcefully towards Stella's cell. Quarantine, she was saying, and she reached for an intercom mounted in the wall beside the corridor door, presumably to call an armed escort. The soldier picked up his ruined tunic and stalked towards Stella. She ducked away from the window, saw the doctor follow the guard past her window and out of sight. Stella guessed the soldier was being locked in a quarantine cell just like hers. "And leave the goddamned staples alone!" the woman shouted loud enough for Stella to hear.
The woman—presumably the medic for this militia, or whatever they were—could've passed for a man, if not for the broad, flattened swell of her bosom and chubby, button-nosed features, which put Stella in mind of Mrs. Claus in the old Rankin-Bass stop-motion Christmas specials. She'd always suspected Santa Claus was a white supremacist, but this woman was nobody's wife. Stella's hand went to her gaping mouth as the doctor removed her own shirt and stood with her back to a full-length mirror on the wall opposite Stella's cell. Her breasts were mashed down by a sweat-streaked sports bra. Her broad, fishbelly-white back was well-muscled underneath a stubborn sheath of hereditary flab, the tone of one who'd struggled for years against the genetic programming for obesity.
A deep gash grooved her right shoulder, scant inches from the delicate plumbing in her throat. Instantly, Stella recognized the wound type and understood what had happened after she'd fainted. In the panic she'd observed before, someone or something had badly gouged the soldier, who'd accidentally grazed the doctor as he tried to shoot it. What it was that attacked them, Stella could well guess. Seth Napier, or whatever he'd become. They had him here, maybe in the next cell. The idea sparked a moment of pure panic as the implications tumbled together into some sort of prognosis. They were waiting for her to change, too. And for all that she felt better than she had in a long time, who was to say what would happen in twenty-four hours? Would the soldiers have to be called to put her down, too?
She went to the intercom and jabbed the button. "You going to stitch that up yourself?"
The doctor looked her way, reached for her fatigue blouse and threw it over herself before she approached and pressed her send button. "How long have you been awake?"
"If you let me out of here long enough to use the restroom, I'll stitch that up for you. I'm an ER nurse. And I'm human."
The woman only stared at her for a moment, then went to a utility drawer and fetched a chrome tool that resembled a staple gun. Returning to the mirror, she applied the surgical stapler to the gunshot wound and slammed a staple into one end of it, wincing a bit but gritting her teeth and proceeding down the length of the injury, ten staples in all. It wasn't as tightly clamped as it should've been, but she looked at Stella defiantly as she returned the stapler to its drawer. Here was a woman who fought her own inner inferiority with every action, thwarting real or imagined rivals was the sole source of her tenuous self-esteem. Stella understood her instantly.
She adjusted her tone to something calculated to open her jailer up. "We never had anything like that at the ER in Bishop. Is it Army-issue?"
The doctor shrugged her blouse back on and buttoned it up with her back to Stella.
"Listen, I'm not going anywhere, so I'd appreciate it if somebody could tell me why I'm in this box."
When the doctor turned back, her face was carefully composed to flat neutrality. She switched on the intercom outside Stella's cell and, taking a deep breath, began firing off questions. "You visited the Radiant Dawn Hospice Community. Why?"
Stella suppressed the urge to answer back with her own questions. She'd told no one about the visit, so they had the place, had her, under surveillance. Her greatest fear was of others holding her life in their own hands. She knew only a patient's meek, forthright demeanor would earn her any points here, but she wasn't prepared to give them any more control over her than they already had. "One of their residents was brought into the ER. He was hit by a train. They came and took him back. I was just following up. What was wrong with him?"
"Why did Seth Napier contact you instead of the police?" Stella gathered from the line of questioning that they'd seen her at Radiant Dawn, followed her, tapped her phone, and sent out their commando teams to collect Napier and her. Because they'd had contact with Stephen, who ran away from Radiant Dawn…
The doctor tapped on the glass. "You still awake? Answer the question."
"I spoke to him at the hospital. He trusted me. This is about Radiant Dawn, isn't it? They're doing something to people."
Silently, the doctor nodded once.
"You're with the government, right? Army? CIA? That's what this place is, isn't it? A secret government installation out in the desert, to keep people from finding out what they're doing there?"
The doctor heaved a mighty sigh and closed in on Stella, looking, really looking, at her for the first time. Stella tried to appear to lay herself bare for inspection, felt her defenses pushing her face into the fierce scowl with which it always met the scrutiny of strangers, especially strangers in authority. Perhaps that was exactly what the doctor was looking for in her, because she let slip half a smile. "We're not with the government, and we're not trying to protect Radiant Dawn. You went to Radiant Dawn to apply for treatment."
It wasn't a question, and there was no denying it. Anyone who could tap her phones and spirit her away to a hermetically sealed hole in the earth could easily have ferreted out the news of her cancer. She nodded. "They turned me away. I don't want to die, doctor. I don't want to die from cancer, and I sure as hell don't want to die here."
"Your quarantine will last twenty-four hours. If you show no sign of infection—"
"You'll let me go?" The sneer in her voice would've shut up a lesser woman. The doctor didn't flinch.
"When this is over."
"You can't just keep me here! You're not the goddamn government! It got out earlier, right? You were exposed to it too, you and that jarhead. Why aren't you in a can?"
"I'm not going anywhere." The doctor pointed to the outer door. It was like a bank vault or a hatch on a submarine, set into a massive collar of steel, with double-paned, wire-reinforced glass in a porthole, through which Stella could just glimpse another hatch just like the first. An airlock. This sick bay was designed to deal with contagious diseases. To deal with…this.
"My name's Stella. Stella Orozco, but I guess you found that out when you tapped my phone."
The doctor released a chuckle, as pained by it as if she'd farted. "Delores Mrachek. We're going to be here together for awhile, but I'm not very good company, I'm afraid." Mrachek turned and busied herself with a stack of files on a countertop. She began laying them out as if she were playing solitaire, noting the color-coded tabs on the edge of each before laying it down.
On the well-founded principle that few people are too busy or introverted to argue, Stella pressed. "So, what is this gang you're in? Are you a militia? Paramilitary Nazis? KKK? What?"
Mrachek didn't look up from her busy work as she answered. "We are an army, a very small one, fighting a very big war."
"Against a cancer treatment hospice. Against terminally ill people."
"They aren't people anymore. You saw that much."
"Whatever they are, they aren't dying of cancer anymore."
"No. They don't have cancer anymore."
Stella gave a barking laugh as she thought now that she understood. "Is that all this is, then? Two tribes of crazy white assholes fighting over the cure for cancer?"
Mrachek did look up now, a dogmatic fire in her eyes. "No, dear, we're fighting to cure the world of them. They've ceased to have cancer. They've become cancer."
Her hand went up to forestall any further questions. "Now if we're going to be together for twenty-four hours, we shouldn't exhaust the only conversation we're liable to have in the first hour, should we?" And she got up and shut off the intercom, then returned to her files.
Stella shouted at her for awhile, indifferent that the intercom was of
f; just trying to be heard gave her anger somewhere to go besides back into her head, where she'd kept it in check for far too long.
About an hour after she'd yelled herself hoarse, Mrachek came back over. Stella went to the intercom, thinking she was going to reopen the lines of communication, but she merely fiddled with something beside the door, and Stella suddenly felt very cold and dizzy. In the time it took for her to realize what she'd done, it was too late to rip out the IV, the cell was spinning, and she staggered into the only stable axis, the barren anchor of her cot, and flopped onto it. Her anger spilled out of her even as her bladder let loose, but she was already asleep.
15
SPECIAL MEMORANDUM
FOR: Special Asst. Dir. Wendell Wyler,
Counterterrorism Section, FBI HQ, Washington D.C.
FROM: SA Martin Cundieffe,
Counterterrorism Section, Los Angeles Field Office
RE: Softkill Technology
Attached please find the requested comprehensive list of private contractors with softkill weapons development programs (File Document OC171-08A). I have separated domestic from foreign corporations, as well as those with electromagnetic antipersonnel programs. As I perused them, I was disturbed by the large number of contracts with foreign powers of a totalitarian or otherwise ideologically oppressive nature. While a foreign power would have little motive for an act such as China Lake, it would be well within the bailiwick of an extremist group, perhaps with foreign or radical third party domestic financial backing, which might have purchased the technology from a corporation, perhaps even an American one. With SA Hunt's approval still pending due to his disposition in the field, I took the liberty of assigning twelve division and main force Bureau personnel to further investigate the research and financial records of the domestic, and a short list of the most suspect foreign, corporations.
Radiant Dawn Page 14
