Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  “Jennifer, my dear, surely even you are not so deluded as to believe that you are still a being of flesh and blood? Even you cannot possibly be that naive. Yes, the boy is right, to a degree. We are revenants, each one of us; ghosts, specters, spirits, call it whatever you will.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Mere semantics, and of no importance whatsoever. What is important is the vital research that we continue to do here.”

  “’Vital research,’ my ass!” Brandon yelled. “What you’re doing here is torture, and you’re nothing more than a sicko.”

  “How do you suppose it is that the frontiers of medicine are pushed back, you foolish little boy? Magic?” He barked out a harsh laugh. “We have seen how well that works today, with your friend’s oh-so-effective little magic spell, hmmm? No, it is the rigorous application of the scientific method, the ruthless repetition of trial and error, over and over again, that will give us the data we need in order to win the fight against this filthy, disgusting disease…and write the name of Marko von Spiessbach in the annals of medicine for all eternity, where it rightfully belongs.”

  “You’re not gathering useful information from the poor souls that you’ve kept trapped in this hellhole along with you!” I pointed out. “They don’t even have physical bodies, Spiessbach, they’re spirit beings. Spirit beings don’t contract diseases. They just can’t. All you’re doing is abusing and punishing their spirit bodies, over and over again, and if that’s not a definition of torture, I don’t know what is!”

  “Outrageous!” Spiessbach yelled, slamming a clenched fist down on the surface of the operation table. “I have seen inside their chests, have examined their lungs directly. They are infected!”

  “You’re seeing what you want to see. You know, projecting your own wants and needs onto them. Curing TB is so important to you, you won’t let anything get in the way of that, will you? But you’re an earthbound spirit, Spiessbach, and so are all of these guys.” I tried to gesture at the people on his team, but the huge dude still had my arms locked down hard so I used my head to point at them instead. “You can’t cure a disease that your patients don’t have, but you keep trying, over and over again. Do you know how many years this has been going on for?”

  “Irrelevant! The cure is within reach!”

  “Yes it is!” I shot back. “For the doctors today. It’s the Twenty-First Century, dude, not the 1980s any more. Your so-called ‘treatments’ went out with the Fifties and Sixties. They never worked in the first place, but you just had to keep on using them, didn’t you — sneaking them in, long after the real doctors had moved on to drugs and therapies that actually worked.”

  Well, that sure got a rise out of him. In a split-second Spiessbach was standing right there in front of me, grabbing me by the front of my shirt. I heard the slap before I felt it. It sounded as loud as the gunshots had done earlier downstairs. Then I felt the stinging warmth spreading across my face. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would.

  “I have done more for this country than you could ever achieve in a thousand lifetimes, you insufferable little wretch, and if I hear one more word out of you — just one word! — then you shall take the pretty little one’s place on the table. Do you understand?”

  Boom. Gotcha.

  “She won’t be going on the table, Marko.”

  Jennifer had spoken softly and without anger, but she couldn’t have made the atmosphere in the room get any more tense if she had taken the pistol out of Becky’s waistband and fired a warning shot into the ceiling.

  Spiessbach straightened up from where he was hunched over and trying to intimidate me, fixing her with his most menacing glare. As he turned away from me, I could see a deformity underneath his bandanna that had to be where the bullet had made mincemeat of what little brains he had.

  “What did you just say to me?”

  Jennifer didn’t back down. I was beginning to see where Becky got her backbone from.

  “I said that she will not be going under your knife, Marko. None of them will.” She softened her tone, sounding more resigned than adversarial now. “My grand-daughter and her friends are right. It is time for this charade to end.”

  Spiessbach seemed lost in thought for a minute.

  “On that, at least, we can agree,” he finally said. “Nurse Baker, Nurse Haywood…strap Mrs. Roderick to the table, if you please. It is long past time for her own surgical procedure.”

  I recognized the nasty old hag that had confronted me in my nightmare. Haywood was younger, and a guy. Between them, they grabbed Jennifer by the arms and started to muscle her down onto the operating table.

  Smiling the smile of the truly insane underneath the surgical mask, Doctor Spiessbach reached out for his favorite scalpel.

  “I am afraid that this is going to be really rather painful…”

  “Becky, run!” Jennifer screamed.

  She was thrashing like a tigress who was fighting for the life of her cubs, which I guess she was, in a sense. I think the blinders were finally coming off after all the years spent carrying out Spiessbach’s will, inflicting so much unnecessary pain and torment on helpless people.

  “I’ll be back with help!” Becky yelled, ducking out of the male orderly’s grip and darting between the two goons that were still holding both Brandon and I captive. She slammed through the double doors and was gone before any of the ghost nurses and orderlies could think to grab her.

  Spiessbach sent two of them after her.

  “Either bring her back with you, or pitch her off the roof. It makes no difference to me.”

  “No!” Jennifer roared. She knew how to fight dirty, that’s for sure; one of her feet lashed out and kicked Nurse Haywood squarely in the face, breaking his nose with a crunch that was really satisfying to hear. Both hands flying up to cup his nose, Haywood groaned and staggered backwards two or three steps, slamming into the metal tray of surgical tools and sending them flying in every direction.

  Pushing her luck a little further, Jennifer drove an elbow into Nurse Baker’s belly. The dried-up old bag doubled over; I could hear the air leaving her lungs with a whoosh. I’m sure you can imagine my total lack of sympathy. Served her right.

  Taking full advantage of the distraction caused by the sudden outburst of mayhem, Brandon stamped down hard on his captor’s foot. In their solid form, the ghosts of Long Brook could be surprised and hurt every bit as much as a living person could be. The orderly instinctively released his grip on Brandon’s arms, allowing our resident Krav Maga champion to pivot on the soles of his feet and shove him towards me.

  Hard.

  Brandon must really put his back into that shove, because the nurse slammed into the one holding me and both of them went down like the pins at a bowling alley. Luckily, I was able to keep a firm grip on the lantern.

  “Dude, let’s get out of here!” He slapped me on the back, and I didn’t need any more convincing to follow him out into the corridor. The ghost of Jennifer was right on our heels, but she wasn’t the one I was worried about — that was Spiessbach, who was striding toward us with a scalpel in his hand and a look of murder in his eyes.

  We all knew that he was more than capable of carrying out a murder or ten.

  “Come on, boys,” Jennifer urged, breaking into a trot. After what she’d done to Spiessbach’s goons back there, I instinctively trusted her — at least, trusted her enough to follow her the hell out of here right now. We’d figure out the rest later.

  “You don’t have to tell me twice!” Brandon agreed enthusiastically.

  The ghosts of Long Brook’s dead were still peering out of their rooms on either side of the hallway as we ran, providing some of that spooky blue light to augment the small circle of harsh white that the lantern was putting out.

  We hauled ass along the hallway, and I struggled to keep up with the athlete and the dead woman, huffing and puffing by the time we reached the stairwell to the next wing.

  Brandon was the first to
barrel through, slamming the door back hard against the wall.

  “Oh, crap.”

  “What, what?” I wanted to know. But then I saw for myself.

  The stairwell was full of smoke; thick, dark smoke, rising up from below and making my already-stressed lungs want to hack up their contents like a TB patient would. It was also really warm in there, much too warm for the normal differences in temperature to explain away.

  Smoke. Heat. I cursed.

  “The building’s on fire.”

  Brandon’s eyebrows shot upwards. It looked pretty comical in the lantern-light. “How did that happen?”

  “Well, let me think,” I said snarkily. “Do you think it might have anything to do with the meth lab in the basement? You know, the one where we were involved in a gunfight earlier?”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  Jennifer’s answer left no room for argument. “Now we try one of the other stairwells. Come on, follow me.”

  True to her word, she cut through the nearest patient room, pushing aside and ignoring the frightened old man who cowered in the doorway, trembling.

  “Excuse us, sir,” I said politely, as I stepped right through his transparent body. I felt a sudden wave of coldness flood through my body as my flesh and blood form briefly shared the same space as his spirit body, and then I was through, out the other side, and it was over.

  I broke into a jog to keep up with Jennifer, who by now was out on the balcony.

  “Six floors up,” she said, obviously reading the part of my mind that was considering the possibility of jumping to freedom. “You’d die on impact. Trust me, I’m a nurse; and I used to be a damned good one.”

  I didn’t doubt that for a minute.

  Bracing myself against the safety rail, I leaned out to look over the parapet.

  “Oh, that is so not good.”

  Most of the ground-floor windows were venting out more of the same dark smoke that we’d encountered in the stairwell. Not the light, wispy gray kind you saw from your campfire; this was the black, ugly kind, which meant that something man-made was burning — in this case, that ‘something’ was probably the basement and ground level of Long Brook Sanatorium.

  “We might still be able to make it down,” said Brandon doubtfully, his head appearing over the parapet next to my own. I wasn’t so sure. The flames seemed to have taken hold along pretty much the entire lower level of the building. In between the occasional gaps in the smoke, spiraling fingers of orange flame licked up and under the tops of the window-frames.

  The fire was growing, and growing fast.

  “Quit dawdling, boys. Pretty soon this place is going to be toast, and you don’t want to get grilled along with it.”

  Jennifer was right. She broke into a jog, and we followed her eastward along the balcony, heading towards the doorway that would lead to the main staircase. I tried to ignore the jagged, red-edged hole in the back of her skull, where the bullet from Spiessbach’s pistol had obviously exited when he took her life.

  It was heartbreaking to have to ignore the pleas from the patients who were now crammed into every room we ran past, but what exactly were we supposed to do to help them? Becky had tried to take down Spiessbach, had given it her best shot, but in the end it hadn’t been enough.

  We were losers. We had failed.

  Smoke was starting to reach our level now, filling the sixth-floor balcony. The air was getting warmer and harder to breathe, despite the fact that we were partly outdoors.

  Glancing into one of the rooms on my left, I could see wisps and tendrils of smoke starting to push their way greedily through the cracks in the floor, filling the room with a light haze of smoke, like the mist on a cold winter’s morning. If that’s how conditions were on the sixth floor, how bad must they be on the floors further down below us?

  That question was answered when we finally made it to the main staircase. Man, but it was hot on that landing, and the smoke was so thick and choking that there was just no way we were going to be able to get down.

  “There’s no way we’ll make it down through that,” Brandon said, his words muffled. He had pulled his tee-shirt collar up over his nose and mouth in a game effort to filter out some of the smoke.

  “Not alive, anyway,” I agreed. “I guess the only place left to go is on up to the roof.”

  “I’ll go first,” said Jennifer, and just like that she was away, climbing the stairs and disappearing into the smoky haze.

  I was starting to sweat; how much of it was because of the steadily rising temperature, and how much of it could be put down to pure fear, I couldn’t rightly tell you. Either way, this staircase was a dangerous place to be, and getting worse all the time.

  I looked back down the staircase, and saw nothing but smoke and darkness.

  The only way was up.

  To say that what we found on the roof was a huge surprise would be the understatement of the year.

  I almost fainted with relief when I saw that Becky had made her way up there after her escape. She was standing next to her grandmother, frantically waving us over towards a wide, flat spot that was located pretty much plumb in the center of the roof. Looking down, I saw that she had chalked an uneven circle, maybe ten feet wide, on the flat stone that made up the rooftop.

  “Danny! Brandon!” She was practically jumping for joy. I knew just how she felt. I couldn’t keep from breaking out into a broad grin, and that was perfectly OK with me; we were stuck on the roof of a burning building out in the middle of nowhere, on the run from a team of angry ghosts, and right now I’d take any little ray of sunshine I could find.

  In fact, I was so happy that when we took turns to hug Becky, I didn’t even mind that Brandon got to go first; I was just so relieved that all three of us had made it through the night in one piece.

  So far, at least.

  Ironically, it took Jennifer — the dead woman, who had two more holes in her head than she had been born with — to bring us crashing back down to Earth again.

  “As much as I hate to break up this genuinely touching reunion, I have to point out that Marko is not a man that reacts well to failure.” Jennifer’s transparent body pulsed a brighter blue for a second, as if her comment had touched off some thought or emotion buried deep within her. “I don’t think you have much time to prepare.”

  “Prepare?” I blinked, confused. “How are we supposed to prepare? We’re trapped up here. It’s not like we can just climb down or jump, is it? Not from six floors up. If Spiessbach’s coming to get us, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it…and even if he doesn’t find us up here, which is pretty freaking unlikely at best, there’s the small matter of the whole damn building burning to the ground!”

  I was starting to get hysterical, I have to admit. Even I could hear it in my own voice. It was almost as though somebody else was speaking through my mouth. My mood had turned on a dime, changing from delight to despair in less time than it took to flick a switch.

  For the second time in as many minutes, Jennifer became the voice of reason. She cupped my face gently in her hands, so tenderly that I hardly even noticed the coldness of her long-dead fingers.

  “Danny, you have to listen to me. We may not have had much time to get acquainted, you and me, and even then the circumstances weren’t exactly the best…but you’re a friend of my grand-daughter’s, and that makes you practically family, so you’d best listen up.

  “What you’re feeling right now…I’ve seen it before. Hell, I’ve lived it before. I’m not going into details, but this place — Long Brook — it gets under your skin, without you ever even realizing it; seeps into your damn bones, and when it’s there it won’t let go. It’s like a cancer. Once it has you, it wants to keep you. And it wants to grow.

  “I know you have to be feeling pretty low right now, Danny. We’re all in a very bleak place. But that voice you’re hearing, deep down inside you…it’s not the real you talking. All of the despair that these walls hav
e seen, for years and years, it didn’t just go away, you know…some of it remained here. I’m starting to realize that Marko uses it for his own ends — to help him keep control of people like me. He’s been doing that since the day he put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger.”

  “Grandma, it’s okay.” Becky hugged her from behind.

  The effect of Becky’s solid arms wrapping around Jennifer’s see-through body looked a little weird, like some CGI out of a movie. Jennifer sighed and closed her eyes, letting her hands fall away from my face.

  “Thank you, honey,” she said quietly. A single tear streaked down her face. “You have to understand…it’s like the blinders have finally been taken away after all these years. I really thought I was helping those people, you have to believe me…”

  “I do believe you, Grandma.We all do. Don’t we, boys?”

  Brandon and I both nodded solemnly.

  “He brainwashed you, Jennifer. That’s the only word for it,” I said.

  “Oh, he did far worse than that, young man. For all the lives he ended on that operating table — and we tried to save them all, we really did — the one I can’t ever forgive him for is the one life he ended before it had ever even begun.”

  She placed a hand gently on her belly, and the faraway look in her eyes made me suspect that Jennifer was looking backward towards a past that might have been, but was never allowed to happen.

  I coughed. The smoke was starting to get noticeably heavier, coming up not only from the stairwell but also from both sides of the roof.

  Suddenly the despair I had been feeling was replaced with something new: I was angry. Angry at the meth dealers who had been brewing up their poison in the cellar; angry at the disease that had caused so many people to have to come here in the first place, and die at the hands of old-school medicine; and most of all, I was angry at that monster named Spiessbach. He was the focal point of my growing rage, that smug face and annoying ‘hmmm?’ mannerism which just made me want to punch him over and over again.