by Ray Garton
She had climbed out of what was left of a window. As strong as it was, the wind felt good on her face after crawling through that nightmarish obstacle course. She looked around and spotted her Highlander. The deputy’s car was still parked behind her, but she didn’t care. She’d take care of that.
She’d gotten into the Highlander then and fished the keys from her pocket. There was an unpleasant sound inside the SUV, a thick crunching sound. She was grinding her teeth together. When she became aware of it, she stopped, but seconds later, she was doing it again.
She’d started the engine, put her seat belt on, then put the Highlander in reverse and stomped on the gas pedal. The SUV rocketed backwards and slammed into the deputy’s patrol car. With the gas pedal on the floor, the Highlander shoved the car over the mud. She’d turned the SUV around as soon as she had room, but not without hitting the rear of one of the other SUVs parked in front of the house.
“Cocksucker!” she shouted as she headed down the bumpy, narrow road. There was devastation on each side—trailers overturned, trees down. She had to drive off the road to go around a fallen tree. When she reached Emerald Canyon, she turned left.
She decided she would go home. Just drive back to Sacramento. She didn’t get the money, she’d nearly been killed, the whole thing was a waste of time and energy and money and it was all because she’d needed the money for that sick little fucker who was probably sitting on his ass in comfort right now while she risked her goddamned life to scrape up some money for the fucking tingling and numbness in his leg and arm and—
“You little shit box!” she shouted as she pounded a fist on the steering wheel repeatedly. “I’ll be home soon, fucker, and then we’ll see who gets to be comfortable, you goddamned waste of space!”
Memories flitted through her mind of the days when she had only herself to worry about, before she had children, when she had so much time and energy. She pressed harder on the gas pedal, telling herself she would have that again. Very soon.
“That looks like the end of the road for us,” Andy said as he stopped the SUV. He peered through the windshield at the mess up ahead. “In this direction, anyway.”
Just ahead, the road disappeared in what looked like a large pond. Just beyond that, a huge tree had fallen across the road.
“What are we gonna do, Dad?” Donny asked.
Andy was struck by how calm Donny was, while his own heart was still beating too fast and he was jumpy with tension. He put the SUV in park and it idled as he looked all around them through the windows.
The wind was still blowing detritus over the road and tossing the trees in what looked like throes of agony, and the rain was still pouring hard enough to decrease visibility, but the storm had lost some of its intensity.
“We passed a side road just a little bit ago,” he said as he put the car into gear again, made a U-turn in the road, and headed back.
“Where do you think it goes?”
“I don’t know, but it would be a good place to park for a little while. What do you think? Shall we park and wait for the storm to die down a little more, then we can go back the way we came.”
Donny’s back stiffened and, with a note of alarm, he said, “You mean back to that house?”
“No, not there. We’ll go home.”
The boy slumped in the seat and smiled a little, relieved. “Oh. Yeah. That’d be nice.”
Up ahead, a set of headlights was driving toward them, with another set right behind it. The first car crossed Andy’s lane to turn onto a side road, followed by the second. They were two large, black SUVs, luxury gas guzzlers.
“That’s the road,” Andy said. “Where those two SUVs just turned in.”
Andy slowed as he approached the road. He turned right and his headlights passed over a road sign that read OGDEN PASS. He was just in time to see the two SUVs turning left up ahead and driving into the woods.
“Maybe they live here,” Donny said.
“There are no homes in those woods. There use to be an old mental hospital somewhere in there, but it’s been abandoned for a long time. I don’t even know if it’s still standing.”
“I wonder why they’re going into the woods.”
“I’m sure they have a reason.” Andy made a U-turn on Ogden Pass before reaching the road the SUVs had taken, then pulled over onto the shoulder. He turned off the engine and killed the lights. “Okay, we’re just going to sit here for a little while.”
“Why don’t we just keep driving?”
“Well, to be honest, I’m a little nervous about passing by that house again. Ram is going to be coming out of there, if he hasn’t already. I’m probably being too cautious and a little cowardly, but I’d rather wait here. For a little while, anyway. The storm is receding, and if we wait awhile, driving will be easier and safer. Okay, buddy?”
“Yeah, sure. Can I turn on the radio?”
“Yeah, let’s find some music.”
Donny found an upbeat song that he knew and sang along to. But Andy didn’t know it, and he didn’t feel like singing, anyway. He didn’t want Donny to know, but he was still feeling quite nervous. No, that wasn’t true. He was still afraid.
Ram couldn’t stop laughing as he crawled through the rubble with his flashlight guiding the way, because what else could he do when the night had gone so crazily wrong? It had started out with Ram trying to do a favor for an old friend, and somehow, it had collapsed into nightmarish slapstick comedy.
He found his gun on the floor. It was near the bloody body of the man named Marcus who had been killed by a shovel. He picked it up, shoved it in the holster, and moved on.
Somebody was hurt somewhere. It sounded like two people—an adult and a child. But he wasn’t interested in helping them, only in getting out of there. He wondered what had happened to Andy and Donny. Ram had promised to drive them home and he was a man of his word, so he intended to follow through.
With considerable struggle, after hefting aside pieces of the shattered house, Ram finally got out by climbing through what was left of the same window through which Latrice had exited. He stood up straight and got his bearings.
When he saw his car, he shouted, “Son of a bitch!”
One of the other vehicles obviously had gotten out by backing into his car and moving it. Most of the driver’s side of the car had been smashed in. It made Ram angry, but it was to be expected from the subhuman trash that lived here. He didn’t have time to worry about it now.
Standing in the rain and wind, he turned around, faced the house, and shouted, “Andy! Hey, Andy, are you in there? Donny? Andy?”
No answer. But he hadn’t really expected one. They’d probably been crushed inside the house.
He slopped through the mud to his car, went around to the passenger side and unlocked the door. He got inside and grabbed the radio microphone.
“This is one-oh-three, one-oh-three,” he said. He gave his location and said, “The Clancy house has been mostly flattened by a tree with people inside. I’m going to need an ambulance, and a ride out of here because my vehicle is out of commission.”
He listened for a moment and the reply came: “Copy, one-oh-three. We have a unit nearby on the way to Springmeier. One-oh-one has been injured at Springmeier and needs backup.”
“Springmeier? The hospital?”
“Ten-four. There’s trouble over there.”
“Well, have someone come by and pick me up and we’ll go over there.”
A moment later: “A unit should be there in minutes, as long as the way is clear.”
“Ten-four. I’ll be here.”
He replaced the mike and stared at the radio. What the hell was Kaufman doing at Springmeier? And what was going on over there?
He settled back in the seat and waited, searching the darkness for the oncoming headlights of his ride.
53
“You understand that if this turns out to be nothing, our relationship is over,” Jack Bembenek said. “No more appearances on the news to co
mment on weird stories.”
Ivan and Bembenek sat in the backseat of a KIEM news van being driven by Bembenek’s camera man, Leon. Ivan had told him everything on the phone, from the initial suspicions to getting Emilio into Springmeier, and everything they’d learned since about what Vendon Labs was doing in the old hospital.
Bembenek was in his late twenties, with thick black hair and a long face. He seemed unusually nervous.
“Yeah, I understand that,” Ivan said. “But it’s not nothing. You’ll see.”
“I’m not on great terms with my boss right now. I don’t need any trouble. I like this job. And this area. I’d like to stay here. If I get fired, I could end up anywhere. I don’t want to have to move to some town in Wyoming or Nebraska.”
Ivan laughed. “Jack, you’ve got nothing to worry about. This story is going to make you famous. But you’re not the only one coming.”
“What? You called someone else, too?”
“I had to. If it’s just you, me, and your cameraman, we may never be seen again. The more newspeople, the better. It’s protection.”
“Who else did you call?”
“An old friend of mine works at KGO in San Francisco. I talked him into sending someone. But it’s a four-hour drive from there, so I also called other local stations. KVIQ, KBVU, and KAEF in Arcata.”
“Jeez, that’s everybody.”
“But I don’t know who will show up.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“Didn’t have to. Like I said, Sheriff Kaufman’s there and he’s pretty badly hurt from what Emilio said. They’ll have cops out there soon enough, if they don’t already.”
“I hope you’re right. We didn’t check the van out, we just got in and left. If this turns out to be nothing, some people are going to be pretty pissed about us going out after midnight in a hurricane.”
“The storm is passing.”
“Look at it out there!”
“It’s not as bad as it was.”
Bembenek nodded toward the driver. “Well, if it weren’t for the fact that Leon, here, owes me a lot of favors, I probably wouldn’t have managed this.”
Leon was a rotund man with long brown hair in a ponytail under his baseball cap. “I didn’t come because I owe him favors,” Leon said in a deadpan voice, glancing over his shoulder at Ivan. “I’m a rebel.”
“I don’t think you guys have to worry about getting in trouble for this,” Ivan said. “You’ll probably win an award for it.” After a moment, he added, “If we live through it.”
It occurred to Fara as she sat at her desk, listening to the sound of occasional gunfire in other parts of the building and watching Emilio doze in his chair with his feet on the desk that she had agreed to go on a date with him when this was all over. She didn’t date often because she found it to be an odious ritual. Simply calling it a date gave rise to a host of expectations and worries. She liked Emilio and probably would enjoy going out with him, but after their experience at Springmeier, she wasn’t sure she would ever be entirely comfortable with him.
She wanted to put this whole experience behind her. It was the only way she would be able to live with herself. That would be impossible, of course, once Emilio’s recording and the details of what they were doing the night of the hurricane—hunting and killing kidnapped homeless people they’d deliberately infected with a deadly virus—were made public. She was afraid that Emilio would be a vivid reminder of all of it, that every time she looked at him, her mind would flood with horrible memories and strangling guilt. She was fairly sure that Emilio would not hold it against her—that was one of the reasons she liked him so much—but she would. Forgiving herself felt like an impossibility.
Of course, if Ollie was right—and in the part of her mind where she kept the things she did not directly admit to herself, she knew he was—Vendon Labs was sending a team of thugs to kill them all, making the details of her social life quite irrelevant.
She heard a loud crashing sound somewhere in the building. It wasn’t the first. She’d been hearing sounds like it for a while, and they seemed to be coming from the front of the hospital. Had another tree fallen on the building? Maybe the initial crash they’d heard in front—the one that sounded more like an explosion and then went on for a while—was the cause of it. The oak tree in front of the hospital was an enormous old thing with fat branches that reached out in all directions. And the building, of course, was old. Well over a hundred years.
The door opened and Ollie stomped in. He carelessly slammed the door behind him and Emilio jerked awake and dropped his feet from the desk. Ollie approached the desk, looking at the sheriff as he passed the couch.
“How’s he doing?”
“We’re still waiting for Corcoran to come back with a painkiller,” Fara said. “For all I know, he’s left the building.”
“He’s not coming back. He’s dead.”
Fara leaned forward in her chair. “Corcoran?”
Ollie nodded. “One of the test subjects got him. Probably more than one, I’m guessing. Really tore him up. A great loss to humanity. Is the sheriff going to be okay?”
“I think he might be asleep. I hope. He could probably use a couple stitches.”
“By our count, there are three of them left,” Ollie said. “And one of them’s got a goddamned Uzi.”
“What?” Emilio said, standing.
Ollie went on talking, but Fara didn’t hear him. She thought about Corcoran. Done in by his own lab rats. She agreed with Ollie’s sarcastic remarks. A great loss to humanity, indeed. He was a sadistic bastard, a narcissistic drug addict. It was a well-deserved death.
But for the past year and a half, Fara had been standing by his side, working with him. Helping him. Being like him. With a deep chill in her bones, she thought she deserved to be next.
“We need to start thinking about getting the hell out of here,” Ollie said. “The storm’s not as intense as it was, I think it might be subsiding. I’ve got vans outside the fence. Now that the gate’s open, I’ll have them brought to the back. My men will be getting into them. I strongly suggest you join us.”
“You’re going to leave those test subjects here?” Emilio asked.
“Don’t worry, they’ll be taken care of. Probably soon. We need to get out of here so we aren’t taken care of, too. Get everything you need together and be ready to leave.”
“I have a car here,” Emilio said.
“So do I,” Fara said.
“Then what the hell are you doing here? Get in your cars and go. Before you wish you had but can’t.”
After Ollie left the office again, Emilio said, “I think he’s serious. You ready to go?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been ready to go for the last eight hours.” She gestured toward the door. “I’m just not sure I want to risk going out there to get to my car.”
Latrice was unaware of how fast she was driving. She was too lost in her own thoughts, too busy telling herself what she was going to do when she got home. She hardly decreased her speed at all as she drove around branches and splashed through large puddles.
“Gonna be some fuckin’ changes, I can tell you that right now. No more of this shit, drivin’ all over the goddamned country because that fuckin’ little shit’s got some tingling, like I got nothing better to do with my time and money, money I earned, money I worked for, money—”
She interrupted herself to start pounding her fist on the steering wheel. She hadn’t noticed yet how swollen it had become, couldn’t feel how much it hurt. Her whole body ached, but she’d lost track of that, too. The vibrating rage inside her head overwhelmed everything else.
Latrice would not have noticed the police car going in the opposite direction if it had not turned on its roof lights just as they passed each other. That got her attention.
She looked in the rearview mirror and saw the white car make a slow U-turn, then speed up as it pursued her. Its siren began to wail.
Latric
e pressed harder on the gas pedal.
54
“Did you see that?” Ivan said as Leon turned off of Ogden Pass onto the new gravel road that led through the woods to the old mental hospital. “There was a guy with a little kid in that SUV parked back there.”
“Yeah?” Jack said. “What about it?”
“Well . . . I don’t know, maybe they broke down, or something. I don’t like the idea of a kid being here. We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“What are we supposed to do, stop and tell them to go away?”
“No, but—oh, wow,” Ivan said, leaning forward in the backseat to peer through the windshield.
As Leon drove slowly around the body in the road, Ivan looked ahead at the gate. A sheriff ’s department car was parked by the guardhouse, and the bent, mangled gate was standing open. It didn’t look like the storm had done that damage, it looked like someone had driven through the gate in a hurry without bothering to open it first. Leon stopped the van just outside the gate and put it in park.
Leon steered around the police car and the headlight beams shone through the open gate, revealing bodies sprawled all over the gravel parking lot.
“Shit,” Jack said. “I don’t suppose you brought a gun.”
“I was about to ask you the same question,” Ivan said.
“We may not want to go in there unarmed.”
“Hey, to be honest, I don’t want to go in there at all. But . . . we have to.”
“Don’t worry,” Leon said. He leaned over, opened the glove box, removed a snub-nose revolver and held it up so Ivan and Jack could see it clearly. “We’re covered.”
“Do you have a permit for that?” Jack asked. He didn’t appear too happy to see that Leon had a concealed weapon in one of the station’s news vans.
“No.”
“Then what the hell are you doing with it?”
Leon stared at him a moment, then said, “There’s dead people on the ground and that’s the thanks I get for being the only one with a gun?”
