When she got outside, the chrome beehive edifice of the building looked fiery red in the afternoon sun. She admired her strange new workplace, a far different lab than the squat, dull grey university buildings or industrial warehouses she had seen in her short but auspicious scientific career. The Asylum building looked like the work of a mad entomologist that had won six lotteries.
Her mom had promised her the night before that she would be there on time with the rental car. The idea of being stranded after her first day, standing in front of the building like a hitchhiker, reminded her too much of growing up. She had pleaded with her mom to, just this once, view time the way most other people on Earth did. Lori Bandini had agreed to arrive at four-forty-five just to ensure that her daughter’s departure would go smoothly.
It was five-fifteen and there was no sight of the rental car in the nearly empty parking lot. Ann Marie set her bag down and dialed the phone.
“I’m on my way, baby girl,” her mom answered in the middle of the first ring. “I’m still on time, right?”
“Yeah, you’re OK. I’ll be out front.”
“I can’t believe how beautiful it is here,” said Lori Bandini with the sound of rushing air in the connection. “We have hit it big. My little genius. My baby.” She sounded so proud. “This place really beats the hell out of Philly.”
“The road up here is really dangerous, mom. You shouldn’t be driving on the phone. We should really hang up.”
When the rental car finally made it to the top of the hill and pulled into the parking lot, Ann Marie experienced an odd sensation. It was as though someone was standing right behind her but checking revealed only empty space. Some impulse told her to look up toward the top of the Asylum building, to the peak of the beehive. Holding back some of the glare with her palm, she thought she saw someone on the top balcony. She saw two dark spots waving in the sun before realizing they were actually the lenses of sunglasses. Two hidden eyes stared down at her. She wondered if it was Dr. Dade Harkenrider.
“That is one weird ass building!” shouted Lori Bandini through the car window to her daughter. “Honey, are you working for extra terrestrials?”
As Ann Marie walked to the car, she looked up to find whoever it was gone.
When she got inside, her mom told her, “I can’t believe my daughter works in paradise.” As they drove away, Lori Bandini went on about how extravagant and beautiful the houses were in the beachfront community of Palos Verdes. “I have a feeling you’re going to work your way up in no time. Pretty soon, we’ll be living at the beach. You know, you make more in one month than I made in a year at my last job. I always knew you being a little genius would pay off for us.” She lit a cigarette and rolled down the window an extra inch when she remembered how the smell irritated Ann Marie.
“The place is weird,” said Ann Marie, looking out the window, over the guardrail, at the wake of a pleasure boat in the Pacific.
“I’m such a bad mom,” said Lori. “I forgot to ask you about your first day.”
“It’s fine.”
“Don’t play that game with me.”
“It’s wonderful, I guess,” said Ann Marie. “For a frightening hellscape. It’s like being inside some kind of cold machine. I think I’m one of four, maybe five people in that entire building. I guess the two I met seemed nice. But weird. The security guard was straight out of the old west and I met a famous scientist that I thought died. Those are my new coworkers.”
“What about the boss?” Asked her mom. “That’s important. If the boss is an asshole, you’re screwed. I remember working for this prick manager named Brian at MacAvoys. Made my life miserable.”
“Didn’t meet him today.”
“Probably a good sign.”
“I can’t believe I have to go there everyday. I never wanted to work on weapons. I never wanted anything to do with weapons.”
“You must be kidding me, girl,” her mom gently chided. “An opportunity like this. To make a pile of dough at your age, to be able to take care of the both of us, it’s incredible. You should realize the gift you’ve been given and stop being such a self-centered brat.” Then Lori smiled and grabbed her daughter’s leg. “Working is our lot. I’m sorry I never got around to setting up that trust fund.”
Chapter 2
Dr. Death
Ann Marie’s first two weeks on the job consisted mostly of surfing the internet and wandering the hallways. The only duty her new job brought was what seemed like endless online security training. The only person she ever ran into was Dr. Hoo, a man who talked to himself nearly all the time and made no effort to hide it. A few times, Ann Marie heard him down the hall, asking himself questions about quantum tunneling and the Jahn-Teller effect. It seemed as though working so long by himself was beginning to take a toll on the man.
The boredom was beginning to get to her too. She found that time was moving slower every day that she did nothing at the strange place. All the hallways looked the same. Nothing but microprocessors and mechanical robot arms behind just about every door.
One part of the building did interest her. On the third floor, a small army of fully automated factory robots were working all the time to assemble the corporation’s suite of special attack drones. She couldn’t see much through the small window in the hallway. It looked like the robots were sticking together mechanical spiders with long metal tails.
She was too afraid to enter the hallway next to the drone factory. It was marked: Dr. Harkenrider Only and it was the only hallway lit with red lighting. It was also narrower than any other hallway in the building. When Ann Marie passed by, she tried to stare to the very end.
It was difficult to see anything so far away and in such dim red lighting, but she thought she saw something on a few occasions. When she would strain her eyes to see all the way down that particular hallway, it looked like there might be dogs and cats running around.
One day, she stopped by Dr. Hoo’s office to ask about it. He told her that the hallway led to the elevator that takes you to Dr. Harkenrider’s personal laboratory and the building’s top deck.
“What’s it like up there?” Ann Marie asked.
“Oh I’ve never been up there.”
“You’ve worked here for decades. How is that possible?”
“When Dr. Harkenrider needs me, he finds me. I’ve never had any need for going up there.”
...
It took another three weeks before she received the first communication of any kind from her new boss. The email read:
Dr. Bandini,
Please use those amazing technical skills to synthesize me 1 gram of the following compound (Please see included structure sketch). I will send Dr. Hoo to ensure you have the necessary supplies and equipment. Please exercise extreme caution with handling the final chemical compound. Do not allow it to make contact with your skin.
Regards,
D. Harkenrider
There was an included drawing of the molecule. What he wanted was strange but Ann Marie thought that she might know how to make it. With her brain humming along with the sound of building’s recirculated air, the necessary chemical reaction steps started to become clear to her.
The only thing she couldn’t figure out was what anyone would want with a chemical like the one that Doctor Harkenrider was asking for. She opened up her notebook and started to redraw the various carbon rings and single and double bonds in her own writing. Then she drew in the chemical functional groups like ornaments on a Christmas tree.
Whatever the boss wanted her to synthesize wasn’t any known explosive or chemical weapon she knew of. Still, the unknown nature of the chemical made her nervous. There was no materials safety data sheet in the world for whatever it was. No one in the world had ever observed its effect on plants, animals or humans.
Over the next few days, she performed the necessary chemical reaction steps in her lab. She kept everything safely contained under the explosion-
proof fume hood in the corner. When it was time for the final step, she used one of the automated robot arms to dump one vial of liquid reactant into another. She stood on the other side of the room and actually jumped back when the two were mixed.
There was some bubbling and a little bit of cobalt blue gas hissed from the reaction vial. Ann Marie had never seen anything like it. Shimmering blue and white crystals were starting to form. She ran over and switched off the lights to the lab.
Inside the vial, it looked as though tiny lightning bugs were twinkling. Then they started to collect and eventually fuse together. When it was over, there was a pulsating blue crystal about the size of a pearl sitting at the bottom of the liquid.
...
On a Friday evening a few days later, Ann Marie was sitting at the kitchen table, putting checks into envelopes for the rent and electric bills. It was her seventeenth birthday and there was a half-eaten birthday cake in front of her. Her mom was on the phone in the living room talking to one of her old friends from the bar where she used to work back in Philly. With a gin and tonic and cigarette skillfully contained in one hand, Lori Bandini howled with laughter as she revisited an old story with a guy she called Big Mike.
“Mom, I’m going to go in the other room to do the bills,” Ann Marie said. She collected all the paperwork into a folder that she had organized for the household.
“Good,” said Lori, holding her hand over the phone for a moment. “I’m glad you’re finally getting out a little.”
“You didn’t hear me. I said I was just going in the other room to do the bills.”
“Don’t be out too late, baby,” Lori said before quickly devoting her attention back to the phone. Then she started howling with laughter again. She sounded like she was beginning to get very drunk.
It was a bit quieter in the adjacent room of their apartment but Ann Marie could still hear her mom’s drunken voice and all the laughter. After she finished with the household bills, she sat for a moment at the window. It struck her how far away she and her mom were from home.
It also occurred to her that her mom had received regular calls from friends back home while Ann Marie hadn’t gotten a single phone call or inquiry about her new job from anyone. Philadelphia had always loved her social butterfly of a mother but after just a few months, the city had forgotten her entirely.
To take her mind off that and her mom’s drunken laughter, Ann Marie put on her headphones and took to the internet. She had been quietly obsessing about a certain name for several days. Dade Harkenrider had been playing in a loop in her head as though the syllables were endowed with special powers. She kept hearing the name and even caught herself mouthing the syllables out subconsciously. It felt strangely exciting just to say the name to herself. She chalked it up to her compulsive nature.
She entered “Dade Harkenrider is Dr. Death,” into the internet search engine.
She felt her heart beat in her chest when she saw all the thousands of webpages and articles spring up in a fraction of a second. “The Antichrist Lives in Southern California!” read one of the headlines on an internet conspiracy page. “Dr. Death and the Laboratory of Doom,” caught her eye as well. She clicked on: “Is Harkenrider the Son of a Prominent Southern California Witch?” To her disappointment, the site had been closed with no further information.
“The Definitive Dr. Death Archive,” seemed the most comprehensive, with articles, photos and videos related to the mysterious scientist. At the top of the webpage, Ann Marie read:
Dade Harkenrider was born under mysterious circumstances to a known leader in the occult and witchcraft community, Elaine Harkenrider. There is no record of a birth certificate. We believe these records were destroyed either by his mother or the man who would later become his guardian, Dr. Bernard Mengel. Dr. Mengel raised Harkenrider from age six after his mother’s disappearance. Mengel is a known murderer and war criminal and we believe his sick scientific experiments go all the way back to the nazis. He currently holds a “special advisor” role at the Asylum Corporation.
Scrolling down, she saw a rough digital photograph showing someone, purportedly Harkenrider, appearing in two locations roughly twenty feet away from one another. The caption read: Has Dr. Death cloned himself?
There was another grainy photo of Harkenrider standing in front of an old church consumed in flames. Even though the shot didn’t have much detail, Ann Marie could see the black hair and steel features. He was wearing black sunglasses even though the photograph had clearly been taken at night.
In the background of the picture, there was an odd vehicle, a six-wheeled armored machine that looked like a cross between a tank and an invading spaceship. It looked like the thing had the Asylum Corporation logo on the side. The website claimed the thing was Harkenrider’s personal vehicle, a one-of-a-kind military assault prototype. The website also alleged that the burning church had been the headquarters of a massive human trafficking ring.
“Who’s that guy, baby? He’s hot,” her mom said, standing behind her and pointing to the screen. Quite drunk by that point, she had to balance herself on Ann Marie’s shoulders. “I thought you were going out tonight.”
“Like I said,” her daughter told her, “I was going into the other room to do our bills.” She added, “I noticed that nobody had done it while I was at work.”
“Sorry baby but you know how bad I am with numbers. I would just screw it all up. Besides, you’re so good at it!” After that, Lori’s phone rang again and she started in a new conversation with another one of her old friends. She poured herself another drink and sat back down at the kitchen table.
Ann Marie noticed one last video at the bottom of the Dr. Death Internet Archive. When she opened it up, the sound of a man screaming his lungs out was so loud that it made the speakers on the computer crack. Ann Marie nearly jumped out of her seat. Her hand dove to the volume to lower it.
The video was taken in the dark, in what looked like one of LA’s many post-industrial nearly demilitarized zones. The man screaming was also flying through the air. It looked like he had been tossed by a catapult. Below him was the vague outline of a man. It certainly could have been her new boss.
...
After Ann Marie pushed the last thumbtack into the drywall, she took a step back and admired the artwork in her new, very own, personal laboratory. Her room at The Asylum now had some personal flavor. She hoped that the thirty-six by forty-eight inch poster of a rapper yelling into a solid gold microphone wouldn’t get her into trouble with the corporation. She suspected that there had to be some rule at some level that restricted her expression on the walls. However, she remembered some sage advice from her mother, who had told her, “Honey, it is much better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
The rapper in the poster, ThugLUV, had a rather notorious reputation with the police and called openly for killing some of them. The more Anne Marie thought about it, the more the poster seemed like a bad idea. She hadn’t even met her new boss and didn’t know what to make of his reputation. She thought she was pushing her luck by just having her job at age seventeen. She started to pull one of the thumbtacks out to take down the poster.
“Why are you taking that down?” Asked Dr. Dade Harkenrider. He was standing in the frame of the door.
The first thing she noticed was the pair of black sunglasses he wore inside the building. Underneath, striking features made up a rather boyish face. He was certainly handsome but there was something vaguely threatening about it. She wondered if he was younger than her mother, who was only thirty-two. His long, black lab coat was buttoned all the way up and ran down to his feet. Ann Marie had never seen one like it.
She had forgotten that he had asked her a question. When he took a step into the room, she realized that he wasn’t built like the scientists she knew. He was tall and imposing, with shoulders and arms like the plastic toy action figures she remembered her boy cousins playing with.
“I
apologize,” said her boss. He seemed to be making an effort to tone down the substantial authority in his voice. “I should have properly introduced myself before just barging in on you. I’m Dade Harkenrider and I’ve been very excited to meet you. I’m grateful that you made the long trip out her from Philadelphia. I bet that wasn’t the easiest thing in the world.”
“I didn’t leave that much behind.”
“I see,” he said as though he understood something about her. “Well,” he went on, “back to my question that I asked you earlier. Why are you taking down your poster? You should want to make your new lab your own.”
Ann Marie stumbled before saying, “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think it was appropriate.”
“Appropriate for what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sounding nervous. “I didn’t want to do anything wrong when I’m just starting out.”
Harkenrider suddenly took on a look as though he was about to say something of grave importance. He asked her, “Is it because ThugLUV promotes drug use, crime and general lawlessness?”
“Do you want me to take it down?”
“Of course not. I like it. Besides, it’s your wall to do with what you like.” He changed the subject, asking, “Have you finished with your online security training?”
“Almost done,” she answered. “I only have another four hours to go. The corporation seems to be preparing us for a full-on-assault by super advanced Martians or something.” Ann Marie was smiling and nearly rolling her eyes as though she found the training excessive and perhaps silly.
“Take it seriously,” Harkenrider told her. “Don’t listen to anyone who tells you it isn’t important.”
For just a split second, Ann Marie glanced back at the poster on her office wall before responding. “I promise,” she said just as she realized he was gone.
Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) Page 2
