Rogue Angel 53: Bathed in Blood

by Alex Archer

  Annja climbed shakily to her feet and hurried over to the door. A glance out the window showed her she was just in time; a woman in a white lab coat carrying a specimen collection tray was coming down the hall. She was only a few yards away and would have seen Annja peering through the glass if she’d been looking up and paying attention rather than scanning the paperwork on the clipboard in her other hand.

  One should always watch where they were going, Annja thought with a grim smile as she flattened herself against the wall next to the door, sword at the ready.

  The nurse wasn’t expecting to find anything but a helpless prisoner, and so she took several steps into the cell before she seemed to realize that the room appeared to be empty.

  It was almost too easy. Annja pushed the door closed as she came out from behind it, the sword in her hands already swinging toward the woman’s skull.

  For her part, the woman must have sensed something at the last moment, for she turned in Annja’s direction, her mouth hanging open in a look of surprise that might have struck Annja as amusing in some other less-threatening situation.

  As it was, all she felt was a flash of satisfaction as the flat of her blade struck the woman along the side of her head, sending her toppling to the floor of the cell. The small basket of supplies went skittering in all directions as she lost her grip.

  Annja brought the blade back up, ready to deliver another blow should it prove necessary, but she needn’t have worried. The woman was unmoving against the floor, down for the count from Annja’s first strike.

  Ignoring the unconscious woman for a moment, Annja stepped over to the door and glanced out through the window, wanting to be sure that the sound hadn’t carried and reinforcements weren’t on the way.

  The hallway outside her cell was still empty.

  Satisfied that she had a few moments in which to make her escape, Annja sent her sword away, then returned to the woman’s side and quickly searched her. The pockets of the woman’s lab coat were empty, but Annja found an electronic key card hanging on a lanyard around her neck. She took that and the lab coat itself, knowing she was going to need both to get out of here. Then she dragged the body against the wall so it couldn’t be seen easily from the door.

  Satisfied with her preparations, she used the key card to unlock the door, slipped out into the hall and pulled the door shut behind her.

  She found herself in a narrow hallway with doors on either side identical to the one she’d just passed through, right down to the window and key card–operated locking mechanism. Unlike her room, all of the others were dark. She continued past them without looking inside, quelling her curiosity in favor of finding her way out.

  At the end of the hall was an elevator. She pressed the call button several times, but it didn’t illuminate. Closer examination showed her a slot below it that was just large enough to accept the key card in her hand.

  Annja gave it a try.

  The card was sucked out of her hand by some internal mechanism, and for a moment she thought she’d lost it, but then the unit buzzed and spit the card back out. Moments later she heard a hum from behind the wall, indicating the approach of the elevator.

  Please be empty.

  It was.

  There was only one button on the control panel—Up, presumably—and so Annja pressed it.

  After a moment, the doors closed and the elevator began to rise.

  24

  If Annja had to guess, she would have said that the elevator went up only a floor, maybe two, but she really had no way of knowing how fast or how far it traveled.

  When the doors slid open, she found herself looking out onto another hallway, one that reminded her of a medical facility or hospital corridor more than anything else. With nowhere else to go, she headed down it at a brisk walk.

  Doors were spaced evenly along the corridor, and when she peered in through the windows she found either offices or lab units. Lights were on in a few of them, but she didn’t see anyone moving about inside, and the few doors she tried were all locked. She thought she might be able to gain access with the key card but didn’t see a benefit to delaying her escape just to have a look around. She’d come back with some help once she gained her freedom.

  The hallway ended in a T intersection, and when she reached it Annja paused, glancing up and down the hall. Both directions looked the same as the corridor she’d just come from, and for a moment she was uncertain which way to go. Then she was reminded of the old adage about always turning left in order to get out of maze, and she figured that was as good a move as any other.

  Annja had moved down two more hallways in the same manner without encountering anyone when she was startled by voices coming from somewhere ahead of her.

  She stopped and listened.

  After a few seconds it was clear that they were getting closer.

  A glance down at her disheveled appearance didn’t make her confident that she could pass scrutiny, especially not if the staff were small enough to know one another. She needed to get out of sight, and she needed to do it quickly.

  Annja moved to the nearest door and tried the handle.

  Locked.

  This door, like all the others before it, had a key card access slot. Without hesitation she swiped her card. After a moment, during which Annja thought she might need to resort to more active measures to get the door open, the control beeped softly and the lock clicked open.

  Annja opened the door and slipped inside, closing it behind her as swiftly as she dared. She called her sword to hand and stood off to one side, her gaze locked on the door handle. If it started to turn, she’d have to act quickly to keep from being discovered.

  The voices grew closer...closer...closer still, until it was clear they were on the other side of the door. She thought she recognized Radecki’s voice, though she couldn’t be sure. It took all her will not to open the door and confront him then and there, but she knew that if she did she would drastically cut her chances of escape.

  Concentrate on getting out of here, she told herself. Deal with him later.

  It was good advice and she might have even taken it, if she hadn’t turned at that moment and looked through the large plate-glass observation window that formed the rear wall of the conference room in which she stood.

  What lay beyond drew her attention like a moth to a flame.

  The observation window overlooked a large room that was lit by massive overhead banks of electrical lights that left nothing in shadow. Portable beds, the kind one might see in an emergency medical ward, were arranged in four different pods throughout the room, five beds to a pod. Monitors and other medical equipment were arrayed in clusters at the head of each bed. Annja recognized the standard telemetry units for measuring heart rate, blood pressure and respiration, but there were quite a few others with which she wasn’t familiar.

  Fourteen of the twenty beds were occupied. It looked as if all of the patients were women, though it was tough to tell from here. Technicians in white lab coats moved back and forth between the pods, tending to the patients.

  Though the lights were off, Annja was worried that one of the technicians might look up and see her, so she made sure to stay several feet back from the observation window. This, of course, limited her view of what was going on, something she found increasingly frustrating the more she watched.

  The voices in the hallway finally moved on, but Annja was too wrapped up in what was going on below her to leave yet. She stood there watching for several minutes, trying to get a sense of what the technicians were doing to the patients under their care. Something about the scene didn’t seem right. It wasn’t any specific action she could point to, just a vague sense of unease that seemed to linger over it all. It was as if the patients were all screaming in her head, though she could see that they weren’t making a sound.

  It was creepy, to say the least.

  Annja stepped a little closer to the glass and that was when she realized she wasn’t alone in wa
tching the happenings below. A light was on in another office, overlooking the medical facility from the opposite side, and a woman stood by the window, gazing downward.

  Annja recognized her immediately—Diane Stone.

  Seeing her, Annja was reminded of Stone’s earlier comments about the extraction process and being behind in the production schedule.

  The question was what, exactly, were they extracting from these women?

  Annja was determined to find out.

  Stone suddenly raised her head and looked in Annja’s direction.

  Her instincts told her to duck away, but Annja did just the opposite, holding herself rock steady, knowing that moving now would invite discovery. She reminded herself that she was surrounded by the darkness of the room and was standing back far enough from the window that the lights below shouldn’t give her away. A sudden flash of movement would ruin that illusion.

  She can’t see me. She’s just feeling the weight of my stare. Stay calm and she’ll look away.

  After a moment, that was exactly what Stone did. She turned away from the window and walked to the desk behind her. Annja watched her for a few minutes more, but she didn’t want to press her luck. If the woman began to feel uncomfortable, she’d likely send someone to investigate, and that was the last thing Annja needed.

  The clock was ticking; eventually her disappearance would be noticed and the halls around her would be full of guards trying to track her down. If she was going to get out of here, now was the time, but she couldn’t bring herself to abandon the women below, not without knowing what was going on.

  She needed to get into the medical ward without being seen.

  As she stood there, pondering how she was going to manage that, the technicians began to gather at one end of the unit, near a large nursing station that appeared to serve as the command center. The handheld tablets they’d been using to make notes and examine patient charts were pushed into docking stations set into the desktop, most likely to recharge them for the next shift. The staff stood around chatting for a few more minutes, then began making their way to a set of stairs at the far end of the ward.

  Moments later that same group passed by the conference room in the hall outside.

  Annja smiled. If they could get to the hallway so quickly, she could make her way to the ward even faster.

  She glanced at Stone’s office. It, too, was dark. At some point in the past few minutes, Stone had apparently slipped out.

  It was time for Annja to make her move.

  She stepped over to the conference room door and listened for a moment. When she didn’t hear anything, she cautiously opened it and stuck her head out into the hall.

  The coast was clear.

  Making her way to the end of the hall, Annja quickly located the stairs the staff had used and descended to the medical ward.

  25

  The medical staff had dimmed the lights when they’d left, but Annja was able to see well enough to make her way across the room. She ignored the nursing station and its collection of tablet computers for the moment and moved over to the first cluster of patients.

  As she approached, Annja expected one of the patients to turn her head and look at her, but none of them did. They just lay there, unmoving. Not a twitch or a sigh or even a restless limb.

  Annja felt a chill pass over her; if she hadn’t just seen the technicians tending to the patients, she would have thought they were dead.

  Neither was a particularly pleasant thought.

  She moved closer until she stood right next to one of the beds, and nearly recoiled when she saw the state of the patient resting within.

  The woman was horribly gaunt, her flesh stretched tight across bones that stuck out like daggers. Her eyes were sunken in her head, her lips shriveled to nothing more than thin gray lines and her skin was the color of a New England November sky. Much of the woman’s hair had fallen out, and Annja could see bandages wrapped around the woman’s fingertips, most likely where she’d begun losing her nails.

  If it hadn’t been for the steady rise and fall of the woman’s chest, Annja would have been sure that she was dead. As it was, she wondered just how much longer she had to live.

  The woman was wired into a variety of monitoring devices, with electrodes attached to her head, face and chest. Two different IV lines were pumping fluids into her left arm, but the IV bags themselves didn’t indicate what medication they contained.

  As she stepped away from the IV bags, a loud click came from the other side of the bed. The click was followed by the hum of activating machinery.

  Curious, Annja walked around the bed to investigate.

  What she saw brought her up short.

  A pumping device, similar to those used to remove the fluids from a body during the embalming process, sat on a small cart. Tubes running from the pump and filled with a pinkish fluid disappeared beneath the sheet covering the woman’s lower body. Another tube, this one filled with a deep red liquid, ran back out from under the sheet to a collection container resting on the lower level of the cart.

  An image of the strange puncture wounds on Marta Vass’s thigh sprang to mind, and Annja reached forward and lifted the sheet that was covering the woman’s body with trembling hands.

  Just as she’d suspected, the first tube ran from the machine to a plastic port set into the woman’s inner thigh, right about where the femoral artery would be. The second tube ran from the same spot on the woman’s other thigh back to the collection unit.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening. The device was pumping some clear-looking fluid into one side of the woman’s body and forcing her blood out the other. From the bruises Annja could see up and down the woman’s legs, it was clear this wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  Stone’s question rang in her head: When will the harvesting procedure begin?

  From the next bed in the pod came a click similar to the one she’d heard moments before, followed by the same hum of machinery starting.

  Then another. And another and so on until there was a humming sound coming from each bed in the group.

  With growing horror, Annja turned and looked at the other patients lying in the beds nearby. All of them were in similar condition, gaunt and skeletal, like starvation victims, except here their life and vitality were being stolen away by the ticking machines at their sides.

  Annja wanted to tear the tubes out of their flesh, but she didn’t dare. Who knew what would happen if the pump was abruptly shut off?

  She stood there, frozen in place, uncertain as to what to do.

  It took her a moment, but she managed to shake off her paralysis and turn to face the next pod of patients. Afraid of what she would find but knowing that she had to look anyway, Annja headed in that direction.

  This group wasn’t as bad as the first, though Annja would have been hard-pressed to call them healthy. Their skin was jaundiced and appeared tight in some places, mostly around the mouths and eyes, but there was none of the sunken, wasting-away look that characterized the first group of patients.

  Annja stepped over to one of the beds. It was occupied by a blonde woman who looked to be in her early thirties. Her hair was brittle, but she still had most of it and she seemed to be breathing a little bit easier than the others.

  Annja bent down next to her.

  “Hello?” she said. “Can you hear me?”

  There was no response from the woman. Not even a twitch of recognition that someone was close by.

  Annja tried again, a little louder this time.

  “Can you hear me? I’m here to help you.”

  Still nothing.

  Reaching out, Annja took the woman’s hand in her own. Her skin was cold, as if she had ice water running through her veins.

  The woman didn’t respond to her touch.

  Annja was starting to have some suspicions about just what was in those IV bags. Sedatives fed directly into their bloodstreams on a regular basis were sure to ke
ep the patients—cut the nonsense, she thought, call them what they are: prisoners—unconscious and therefore under control at all times.

  It would also keep them from protesting their own slow but steady deaths.

  A white-hot rage burst into flame deep inside Annja. Not only was someone murdering women, but the victims were also being tortured to drive a company’s profits.

  She was going to put a stop to this or die trying.

  Annja gently laid the woman’s hand back down on the bed and was about to turn away when something about the patient in the next bed caught her attention.

  She frowned and stepped closer.

  The woman looked familiar...

  Annja racked her brain for where she might have seen her before. The woman was dark haired with sharp features made all the more angular from what she was experiencing at the hands of her captors. Annja guessed her age at about twenty-five. The woman’s eyes were closed, but Annja had the feeling they’d be a deep brown...

  Her eyes. That was it!

  Annja had seen this woman staring out of a photograph in Novack’s file. The image had been a haunting one, the photographer capturing the woman’s mournful expression at just the right moment, and it had stuck with Annja as a result. So had the woman’s name—Belinda Krushev.

  Belinda was one of the woman Novack had claimed were missing. The police, of course, disagreed. According to the official report, she’d most likely run off with her boyfriend, who’d gone missing at the same time. Since they were both over the age of eighteen, the police had told the families there was little they could do. That had been the status quo for almost a year until Novack had come along and added her to his list as a possible murder victim.

  Looking down at her now, Annja was pleased that Novack had been only partially correct. Belinda might have fallen victim to foul play, just as Novack had suspected, but there was still time to keep her from the list of those Stone and company had killed.

  Having found one of the women on Novack’s list, Annja guessed there were probably more. She moved from bed to bed, staring at the women’s faces, trying to match their features with her memories of the photographs in Novack’s files. She’d managed to identify five other matches when she came to the bed containing the ward’s newest patient.