Frankenstorm

by Ray Garton

  Then he got the hell out of there.

  19

  The storm was rapidly getting worse and it was making Andy nervous. Ram’s police cruiser quaked under the growing force of the wind. Stray newspapers, bags, and boxes flew through the car’s headlight beams like missiles, and the heavy rainfall did not provide much visibility on the road. Ram’s police radio occasionally burst to life with voices, and then fell silent for a while before doing it again.

  “I thought the hurricane was supposed to hit tomorrow,” Andy said, realizing he was digging his fingers into the seat as if hanging on for life.

  “Nah, they changed that,” Ram said. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the rain. “Now they’re saying it’s going to hit sooner than they thought. Meaning tonight. Heard it on the radio earlier.”

  “When tonight?” Andy said, alarmed. He’d planned to be holed up in his house when the hurricane hit, safely tucked away on the far eastern edge of Eureka with plenty of candles, Dickens, and some beer, where he’d probably spend all of his time in agonizing worry about Donny.

  “They didn’t say.” He smirked. “Probably worried about getting it wrong again if they’re too specific. But don’t worry, I think we’ve got time to do what we’re gonna do and get you and your boy back home before the worst of it hits.”

  They were in Jodi’s neighborhood. The windows on all the houses they passed were boarded up and the residential streets were dark between the glowing halos of the streetlights. Ram took a right turn, drove a couple of blocks, then pulled over to the curb.

  “Jesus Christ,” Andy said when he saw her house. Bright light glowed from the windows, which had not been boarded. There were a few cars parked in front of the house. “Do they know there’s a hurricane coming?”

  “Okay, Andy,” Ram said, killing the engine, “are you ready for this?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Ram reached over, opened the glove box and removed a pair of black gloves. As he put them on, he said, “Don’t expect this to be easy. You might see and hear things in there that’ll piss you off and make you crazy. You’ve gotta keep your cool and just focus on getting your boy out of there as soon as possible so I can get to work.”

  Something about the words “so I can get to work” disturbed Andy, but all he said was, “Yeah, okay.”

  When he got out of the car, he was almost knocked flat by the wind. The cold rain hit his face like pebbles and stung his skin. He ducked his head down and struggled to walk up the driveway to the house.

  The thumping beat of loud music came from inside the house. The sound of a dog barking, then howling somewhere nearby threaded through the roar of the wind.

  The porch light was on and he and Ram cast long shadows backwards as they climbed onto the covered porch.

  Andy rang the doorbell, and, to be safe, knocked hard on the door, then waited.

  20

  In Fara McManus’s office, Emilio watched Ollie return his phone to its pouch on his belt. Before he could speak, the phone trilled and he put it to his ear again and said, “Yeah.” He listened, and then said, “Corcoran?”

  Fara looked up at him.

  “That’s the guy in charge,” Ollie said. “I want you to bring him here to—” He looked at Fara. “What’s your name again?”

  “Fara McManus.”

  “Bring him to Fara McManus’s office. He knows where it is. Bring him here and keep him here, along with Dr. McManus. And listen to me. Abort the mission. If you find anyone who’s being held here, do not—I repeat, do not set them free. They carry a virus. You need to—no, no, it’s not like that. You’re safe as long as you don’t get any of their blood or fluids on you, understand? Do not get their blood on your skin. Tell as many of the others as you can. And get Corcoran here right away.” He ended the call, went to the other masked man in the room, and stood close, whispering, “Stay here and keep an eye on these two, Craig. They do not leave this room.” The man nodded. Ollie turned to Fara. “I’ve got a lot of questions for you and your boss. I’ll be back.”

  After Ollie left, Emilio turned to Fara. “Is there someplace where I can get some ice? You should have ice on that.”

  “No ice,” she said. “We’re just going to sit here and talk quietly until your friend comes back.”

  “He’s not my friend.”

  “You obviously know him.”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s different than being friends. He listens to the show, calls in a lot, comes by to talk with Ivan sometimes. Especially since you guys got here and homeless people started disappearing. He’s been like a dog with a bone. I’m not surprised by this. He finally found something for his militia to do.”

  “What do you do for—what’s his name again?”

  “Ivan? I’ve got a few jobs. I handle some of the advertising sales for the website and his radio show. I’m also a researcher, and a doer of odd jobs. Like this one. This one’s pretty odd.”

  “Here’s another odd job for you. Go to my desk and open the bottom drawer.”

  Emilio went around her desk, opened the drawer, and knew immediately what she wanted. There was an unopened fifth of Jack Daniels in the drawer. He held it up and turned to her. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  “That’s it. While you’re over there, grab my purse.”

  He took the purse from the floor beside the chair.

  “Oh, and grab the ashtray, too,” she said. “I don’t have glasses, but if you don’t mind my cooties, we can share the bottle.”

  Emilio handed the purse and ashtray to her, sat down beside her on the couch, removed the cap, and handed her the bottle. She tipped it back, took a couple of swallows, then exhaled loudly.

  “None for me,” Emilio said when she offered him the bottle.

  She took a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her purse, shook a cigarette out and lit it. “I stopped smoking almost five years ago. I come back here and bang, I’m a smoker again. How did you come to be a janitor, Emilio?”

  “Oh, I’ve been a janitor, a mechanic, flipped burgers and painted houses. I’ve been all kinds of things. When Ivan learned you guys were going to be using Humboldt Janitorial Services, he asked if I’d be willing to apply for a job there and see if I could get in. It was a long shot, but I got lucky. And here I am.”

  “Clever. But the joke’s on you. It’s not safe here. You’ve been in danger the entire time.” She took another puff of her cigarette, then tapped it over the ashtray.

  “Then why are you still here?”

  “I’ve been afraid to leave. It’s Corcoran.” She shook her head, sighed, then took another pull of whiskey. She held the bottle out to him and said, “Here, get it away from me. I’m such a lightweight, I’ll be drunk in no time, and I don’t need that. I just wanted a few sips of that because I’ve run out of fingernails to chew.”

  Emilio put the cap back on the bottle, took it to the desk, and returned it to the bottom drawer.

  “Unless you want some,” Fara said to Craig, the masked, armed man standing silently in the room with them.

  He shook his head.

  Fara said, “I got this job because an old professor of mine at Stanford told me about it and then pulled a couple of strings to help me get it. She said it would look good on my CV and I’d have the opportunity to work with the brilliant and renowned Dr. Corcoran. She’s known him for ages and said he’s always been crazy and infuriating, but brilliant. But she hasn’t seen him in years. She doesn’t know what a drug addict he’s become, what a . . . lunatic. The man is a mess. All he cares about is drugs and fucking. I’ve heard he holds orgies in his room. Can you believe that? That’s probably what that party was tonight. Must have been an interesting discovery for the masked intruders.” She laughed and shook her head. “The man’s a highly respected scientist in his sixties and he’s still trying to make up for being a geek in high school. But he’s still brilliant. What he’s done here is pretty amazing, if you ignore how immoral a
nd horrifying it all is. But he’s too careless.

  “The homeless people were his idea. Vendon Labs would never go along with something like that. Not officially, not on paper. But when you’ve got a star like Corcoran working on a project the government wants done ASAP, you look the other way and wash your hands of it. He didn’t want to work on rats or monkeys, which is what we’re set up for here. ‘We’ll be altering human behavior, not rat or monkey behavior, ’ he said. ‘If we’re going to have any hope of succeeding at this, we’ll need human subjects.’”

  She reached up and rubbed her forehead with four fingers, wincing a little in pain. “But we’re not set up to deal with infected people here, and it’s not like he could ask Vendon to equip us for people, because, of course, we had no human subjects here. So he’s got them on an observation ward on the second floor. They’re locked in, but there’s no security, there’s no—there’s nothing. I mean, this is a deadly virus we’re talking about, here, and they’re just up there, locked in their rooms. Everyone who deals with them uses protective suits, but that wouldn’t do much good if one of them decided to get violent and attack. And that’s exactly what we want to make them do. It’s insane.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not about to go up there and look around. I’ve tried to keep as much distance from it as possible. Corcoran was making noise about keeping the infected survivors of the tests to see what kind of long-term effect the virus had, but if that’s what he’s done, I don’t know where he’s keeping them. I suspect he’d put them in the basement, but I haven’t looked around down there to see, and I’m not going to.”

  Emilio took the phone from his shirt pocket. It was still recording, but he stopped it, then thumbed a few buttons and sent it to Ivan. He said, “I appreciate your talking to me like this and—”

  He stopped when the lights went out, and for a moment, they sat in the dark and listened to the furious storm outside.

  21

  Ty didn’t understand what he was seeing at first. It looked like a prank. It looked like a room in one of those Halloween spook houses. But they weren’t in a spook house and this wasn’t a prank.

  Large cages stood along three of the room’s walls, six on the right, six on the left, and four in the rear. Nine of the sixteen cages had people in them, one to a cage, and each was locked with a padlock. The occupants of the cage stood or squatted in back corners, silently watching Ty and Castillo. Harsh fluorescent lights glowed overhead, casting the interior of each cage in shadow.

  “What . . . the fuck,” Ty whispered as he and Castillo stood just inside the door, gawking at the cages.

  “Oh, man, these bastards,” Castillo said angrily through clenched teeth. “These fuckin’ bastards. You know, I didn’t believe Ollie at first, I thought maybe he was just being paranoid, but . . . fuck.”

  “We gotta let ’em out.”

  Castillo nodded slowly. “That’s why we’re here,” he said, as if to remind himself, calm himself. “Yeah. Okay, let’s get these things open and let them out.”

  They worked fast, using the bolt cutters on their belts to cut the padlocks. Because the cutters were small, it took some effort to cut through the shackles. As they worked, Castillo talked.

  “You folks are gonna be fine,” he said. “We’ve come to get you out of here. We’re gonna get you to safety, don’t you worry. You need any medical attention and we’re gonna get it for you, you hear? We’ve come to help you.”

  When Ty opened each cage, he looked in at the occupant and found they were all doing the same thing: squatting in a corner looking tense and ready to spring to their feet and flee. Some were muttering to themselves rapidly, even angrily. By the time he opened the last one, it occurred to him that maybe they weren’t ready to run away—maybe they were ready to attack.

  When they were done, Ty and Castillo turned and looked at the open cages. No one had come out.

  “If you can walk, it’s okay to come out,” Castillo said. “If you can’t . . . well, let us know and we’ll help you out of—”

  The lights went out.

  “Oh, shit,” Ty said under his breath as he stood in complete darkness, unable to see anything. As he reached up to turn on his headlamp, there were quiet sounds of movement all around them.

  The people in the cages were coming out.

  Ty turned on his headlamp and found himself face to face with a pale, bony woman whose face had a skull-like appearance. An instant later, Castillo turned on his headlamp and illuminated more faces, all standing close.

  “Don’t worry,” Castillo said, “the power’s out, that’s all. We’re still going to get you out of—hey, don’t do that. You need to come with us and—hey!”

  Ty turned to see one of them attacking Castillo, all flailing arms and dancing shadows in the light of Ty’s headlamp. Castillo raised his gun, but it was knocked out of his hand.

  The faces moved in fast.

  Both men were shouting when their headlamps were knocked off, and Ty fired his gun into the dark.

  After that, there was only shouting. Then screaming.

  PART THREE

  Category 8

  22

  The barrel of the shotgun looked like a gaping black mouth about to close on Latrice’s head. Her umbrella slipped from her suddenly slack right hand while her left arm hugged the package.

  “Leland sent me,” she said, frozen in place, afraid to move. “Leland Salt. In Sacramento.”

  “Where’s Leland?” the man said. “He’s supposed to be here.”

  “He had to leave the country.”

  “He had to—the fuck you mean, the country?”

  “I . . . I mean . . . well . . . the country. He had to go to another country to live. That’s what I mean. And he had to do it right away. He asked me to bring your package and said he’d let you know I was coming.”

  The man slowly lowered the gun. “Goddammit, Leland!” he said with more frustration than anger. “He’d let me know, huh? Well, he didn’t let me know.” He took the package from her. “Who’re you?”

  “Latrice Innes.”

  “You Leland’s girlfriend, or somethin’?”

  “No, just friends. I work in the bail bonds office he frequents.” She stood between her Highlander and another SUV, somewhat protected from the wind, but she was getting soaked by the rain.

  “I guess you should come on in outta the rain. Unless you got somewhere else to go. The hurricane’s gonna hit tonight and they’re tellin’ everybody to take cover. It’s all over TV.” He reluctantly turned around and headed for the house, glancing over his shoulder to see if she was coming.

  Latrice bent down and groped for her umbrella on the muddy ground. She found it, but got her hand muddy. She didn’t care, was too scared to care, and shook the mud off. She’d never felt such strong wind in her life. Had she opened her umbrella, it would have been destroyed.

  The first things Latrice saw upon entering the house were two dark, beefy pit bulls rushing toward her out of the dark, their claws clicking on the hardwood floor. She held up her hands defensively and started to back up when she saw their pink tongues flopping from their snouts and heard the excited, puppylike whining sounds they were making. One reared up, put his paws on her hip, and tried to lick her face while the other rolled over on her back and peed a little as she excitedly wiggled over the floor.

  “Get down,” the man ordered the dog as he closed the door. He leaned his shotgun in a corner, stomped his foot, and shouted, “Go on, you two, get outta here!” When the dogs ignored him, he kicked the one rolling on the floor. “Get the fuck out!” The kicked dog squealed and scrambled to get out of the foyer. The other followed and tossed back a single wounded glance on the way out. He shouted, “Hey, Marcus! Put the dogs in the garage, will ya?”

  She heard movement deeper in the house then and a man’s voice called the dogs.

  “Take your coat off,” her host said, nodding at the coat
tree as he removed his own. “Sorry about the dogs. They always get excited when we have company. They’re not very good watchdogs. Somebody broke in here to rob the place, they’d probably just play with him.”

  He was tall and somewhat pear-shaped. He pulled back his hood as he removed the coat to reveal a thick shock of red hair, which matched the freckles on his round, puffy face.

  It was cloyingly warm in the house and Latrice wanted nothing more than to remove her coat, but she didn’t want to stay.

  “Look, I’ve really got to get back home to my kids,” she said. “If you could pay me, I’ll just get back in my car and—”

  “Pay you? The fuck you talkin’ about, pay you? For what?”

  Latrice felt panic swelling upward from her gut. It had never occurred to her that she might not get paid. She’d trusted Leland. But at that very moment, she had no idea why she’d trusted him because she hardly knew him.

  The only thing you know for certain about Leland Salt is that he’s a charming old fart who wants to fuck you, and that’s all. You’re too damned trusting, always were. Mama always said that. And you never listened because how could you take her seriously while she was married to that asshole? But she’s right, you’re just too trusting, too fucking trusting. Now, how long have you been standing here staring at this angry ginger like you’re in a trance?