Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1)

by Christopher Rankin

  He had left a piece of paper on her desk. She was puzzled because she couldn’t recall him being anywhere near that area of her lab. When she looked at it, she realized that he wanted her to cook up another complex organic chemical compound. He had drawn the structure out for her by hand. She wondered how he had conceived of such a bizarre chemical and couldn’t even imagine what it could be for. One thing was certainly clear to her as a chemist. This stuff wasn’t being used for drones.

  ...

  That evening, Ann Marie’s mom had agreed to meet her after work at the Pink Pelican Bar & Restaurant just down the hill from the lab. In her mom’s typical fashion, when she finally showed up, it was over an hour late.

  “Sorry I’m late, baby! I have crazy big news!” shouted Lori Bandini on the way to the table.

  Ann Marie had been sitting for quite a while, reading an article in a cell biology journal and nursing a diet soda. She had gotten very good over the years at entertaining herself.

  “Is there ever a time when you don’t have crazy big news?” She asked. When her mom hugged her, Ann Marie detected a faint whiff of alcohol. She went back to reading her article after giving her mom a judgmental glance. “I can see you already started celebrating.”

  “Don’t be such a bitch,” said Lori, dropping her purse on the table and picking up a menu. “What the hell did I ever do to you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry for being late,” her mom told her in a way that seemed totally genuine. “I think I may have met the love of my life today. This could end up being one of the most important days of my entire life.”

  “Did you meet Lancelot at the bar or the racetrack?” asked Ann Marie with a roll of her eyes.

  “What the hell did I ever do to you besides bring you into this god-damned world, feed you from my own damned tit and make you into the genius that you are!” She seemed determined not to be dismayed by her daughter’s attitude. “I just wanted to tell my only daughter, my best friend in the world, about the man I’m falling in love with.”

  “OK.”

  “Well, he’s a talent agent. I met him while I was walking to the drug store to get a pack of cigarettes. He was driving the nicest red Jaguar.”

  “Right out of a fairy tale.”

  “He asked me if I was Kyra Vanderpump, you know, that international model from TV. I think I do kind of look like her.” She took out her compact from her purse and stared at her reflection. “I don’t know,” she said, looking doubtful for a moment. “Do you think I do?”

  “I guess.”

  “Anyway, he gave me a ride to get cigarettes and we had a drink together and totally hit it off.”

  Ann Marie had stopped paying attention because she had spotted something out the restaurant window. Up the hill in the distance, two bright emerald-green headlights beamed down from the Asylum Laboratory. As the headlights descended the hill, Ann Marie started to recognize the vehicle. The truck looked like a six-wheeled tank. Apparently, Dade Harkenrider was on the move.

  “What are you staring at?” Her mom asked her.

  “I think it’s my boss. People hardly ever see him.” Ann Marie struggled to get a better look out the window. “The rumor is that he only goes out at night.”

  “Sounds like my kind of guy.”

  “It’s a good thing I wasn’t born with the same one track mind.”

  Lori finished off the remaining portion of her cocktail in one gulp. “I’m kinda bored,” she said. “I think we should go on a mother-daughter mission.”

  “What kind of mission?”

  “We follow your boss. You drive.”

  Ann Marie found the idea particularly appealing and, as crazy as it sounded, the plan had already occurred to her. “I don’t know,” she said. She felt compelled to be the voice of the adult in the partnership. “What if he sees us?”

  “We invite him out for a drink.”

  “Stop it.”

  Her mom dangled the car keys in the air. “If you don’t drive,” she said as she emptied the last drops of her cocktail down her throat. “I’m taking the wheel and I’m not taking any prisoners.”

  Ann Marie grabbed the keys back, saying, “Fine. I’ll drive but we keep our distance so he doesn’t see us. I know you don’t care about embarrassing yourself, but I do.”

  By the time Dade Harkenrider’s black truck finished its helical descent down the big hill, Ann Marie and her mom had their engine running. When the six-wheeled machine hummed past the parking lot at The Pink Pelican, they pulled out and started to follow him down the dark stretch of Beach Boulevard.

  “I’ve never seen a truck so fancy,” her mom told her. “Six wheels. Badass. I want to meet this guy.”

  “You’re not meeting him. He’s my boss.”

  After nearly an hour of driving, they were starting to wonder if Dade Harkenrider had any sort of destination in mind. He had taken them on what seemed to be an entirely indirect route to South Central Los Angeles. He circled some of the worst residential and industrial areas. He seemed to be looking for something in the neighborhoods, something on the telephone poles and in the graffiti. The truck would occasionally slow to a crawl at what seemed like random points in the journey. At one point, it stopped next to a vacant lot with overgrown grass and weeds taller than a man.

  It was after ten and Lori was beginning to get drowsy. “Let’s go home,” she told her daughter as her eyelids started to close in the passenger seat. “He’s probably looking for a hooker.”

  “That’s not what he’s doing!” argued Ann Marie. “He isn’t like that. He’s a scientist!”

  “He’s still a man.”

  Ahead of them, the road was bathed in the red glare from Harkenrider’s brake lights. His truck sat motionless in front of a telephone pole. Ann Marie stopped her car about a block behind him and shut off the headlights. Next to her, he mom was now fully asleep with her mouth hanging slightly ajar.

  Ahead of her, down the inhospitable street, Dade Harkenrider stared at a tacked-up sign on the telephone pole. He took out a camera and photographed it, sending a bright flash into the seemingly abandoned neighborhood. Then he got back in the truck and quickly started back on his strange odyssey. Before Ann Marie knew it, the truck and all signs of Dade Harkenrider were gone. She was alone with her drunk, sleeping mother.

  When she walked over to the telephone pole, she became more confused than ever. The only things on the surface, other than splintering wood, were signs for lost pets.

  Flyers for missing dogs spanned most of the reachable area of the pole. One read: Please return Ben to us. He is our beloved family member. It looked like it had been scribbled by a small child and just been tacked up. The messaged seemed strange to her. It was as though the puppy hadn’t been lost but abducted. Dozens of pets had gone missing in the past several weeks according to the dates on the flyers.

  Ann Marie heard a voice behind her. “It’s trouble,” she heard as she turned around to find Dade Harkenrider standing in the moonlight. He was wearing his sunglasses.

  “Dade. I mean, Dr. Harkenrider. What are you doing here?”

  “Until now, I was worrying about the person following me all night.”

  “Oh. That. My mom and I were having dinner and we saw your truck drive by. We happened to be going the same way and we were going to say hello but you were driving too fast. It was all very confusing.”

  “I know you’re only young but I don’t see much of a career in deception ahead of you.”

  “What are you doing here?” She asked him.

  “Good. Deflect,” he said. A smile appeared on his face before quickly dissolving away. “I came out tonight to investigate something that’s been bothering me.”

  “Does it have something to do with all the lost pets?”

  “They’re not lost. These pets were kidnapped for a specific purpose.”

  “Why would someone go through all the trouble o
f stealing pets?” She asked him. Then, immediately, a gruesome idea fought its way into her head. She wondered if the animals were stolen for some kind of illegal animal testing. “Why would whoever-it-is go through all the trouble and risk of stealing pets when they could just buy lab animals off the internet?”

  “Who indeed?” Dade asked, looking toward the stars in the sky as though inquiring to them. “They couldn’t use lab animals because they need something that was loved, something that was part of a family. The history is important.”

  Behind them, snoring broke out from the passenger seat of the rental car. Lori Bandini’s mouth was hanging wider than before and her body was twisted into an awkward position. It was the sort of sleep that would never work without alcohol.

  “That’s my mom,” Ann Marie said. “She’s had kind of a long night.”

  “You better get her home. This city is no place for a human being.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Who is stealing the pets and why do they have to be loved?”

  Dade looked frustrated. She quickly realized that he was upset with himself for having said too much. He told her, “Please go home, kid.” His truck, labelled Asylum One on the front bumper, came around the corner toward them.

  “Who’s driving you around?”

  “It has an autopilot mode. Don’t need anyone.”

  “You’re by yourself a lot. Do you ever get lonely?”

  He looked at her like she had just said something completely ridiculous. “It hasn’t been a problem so far,” he told her.

  “Are you mad that I followed you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then why won’t you talk to me or tell me anything?”

  “Kid, you’re a genius. There’s no doubting that but I would like to see a greater instinct for self-preservation. Now, please take your mother out of this hellscape and go home. We have work tomorrow.”

  He waited while she got into the car and started to pull away. From her rearview, Ann Marie saw Dade get back into his truck and disappear in the opposite direction.

  ...

  The next morning, when Ann Marie showed up to The Asylum, Dr. Lin Hoo was passing through the lobby reading a Chinese text that looked ancient. When she asked him where she could find Dade Harkenrider, the old scientist looked up from his book and told her, “He’s in the conference room scaring the new CEO.” Then he went back to his book while he circled the hallways and discussed the subject matter with himself.

  Behind the double doors of the Asylum’s main conference room, she found Dade alone as he faced a floor-to-ceiling screen. There was a pleasant looking bald man in an impeccable suit on the video conference system. When Dade saw her at the door, he waved and encouraged her to come inside. The CEO couldn’t see Ann Marie when she slipped into a seat in the back.

  The executive on the screen spoke to Dade very carefully. The man made sure to always smile and choose his words like he was cutting wires to a bomb. “We do have some concerns about the latest batch of DeathStalker drones,” the CEO said. “It isn’t that they aren’t functioning well. It’s that they just don’t always...” He tried to think very carefully about how to describe the issue. “It’s just that they don’t seem to follow orders all the time.”

  “I never said they would follow your orders. I didn’t design my DeathStalkers to function like a remote control child’s toy. You wanted the next generation of artificial intelligence. You got it. Sorry if you don’t like their personalities.”

  “Dr. Harkenrider,” the CEO said, “it’s not that we’re being critical of your work. It’s that we have customers that require a certain level of control over their drones. They don’t like the idea of a robot making decisions in the field.”

  “What they don’t like is that my DeathStalkers refuse to kill unarmed people.”

  “Well,” said the CEO, turning his smile over. “That’s kinda the issue here, Dade. I mean Dr. Harkenrider. We are all hoping you could make some modifications and allow the customers more control over the drones.”

  “How long have you been working here? I don’t keep track of the executives at this place.”

  “Dr. Harkenrider,” the CEO said, “I was on the board for three years before taking over this job on Monday.”

  “Then you’ve been here long enough to have heard the rumors about me, long enough to know my history.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then it’s very surprising that you would choose to waste my time.” Then Dade hung up on the man and the screen went to just the Asylum logo. “I am really beginning to detest those things,” he said quietly to himself. “Regular humans are bad enough.”

  Ann Marie stood up and met him in front while he gathered his things. “Your DeathStalkers don’t kill people?” she asked, surprised.

  “Oh they’ve killed their fair share of people,” he answered. “It’s just that my DeathStalkers won’t kill unarmed people, innocent civilians or children. You can understand why management isn’t pleased.”

  “That’s admirable,” she told him. “I didn’t know that about you. I thought DeathStalkers just killed everything in sight.”

  “I’m a regular humanitarian,” he said before leaving the room.

  Chapter 3

  Lost Pets

  At The Pink Pelican Restaurant, Ann Marie’s mom was already on her fourth drink by the time their entrees arrived at the table. Lori had her attention spread quite unevenly between Ann Marie and two forty-something suits sitting across the bar. “They look like a million bucks,” she told her daughter as she sipped her cocktail. Then she shot a brazenly inviting smile at the men.

  “Eww,” remarked Ann Marie, scrunching up her face.

  “You’re not as young as you think you are.”

  “We’re both too young for those geriatrics. They’re gross.”

  “What do you know? You’re a kid. You’ve never even been on a date.”

  One of the men waved and Ann Marie’s mom returned a coy smile. “Be on your best behavior,” Lori ordered. “They’re coming over. Don’t embarrass me.”

  “I know you’ve got that handled,” said Ann Marie, rolling her eyes.

  The two men, who were wearing fancy tailored suits, brought their martinis with them and asked if they could sit down.

  “You both look like trouble,” said Lori. She sipped some vodka and cranberry out of the tiny red straw that was meant to be a stirrer. “But my little girl and I can handle any trouble that comes our way.”

  The two men sat down and asked about buying another round.

  “You see,” Lori said to Ann Marie, “men are gentlemen here on the West Coast.”

  “I’m underage,” said Ann Marie, looking the man across the table straight in the eye.

  The other man, who was seated uncomfortably close next to her, said, “It’s OK, honey. I’ll order for you. No one is going to say anything to us.”

  “I’m underage,” she retorted. She rolled her eyes in a manner that made it clear to everyone at the table. “And not thirsty.”

  “She’s a real spitfire,” said the man to Lori Bandini. “You two look more like sorority girls than mother and daughter. Are you sure you’re not putting us on?”

  While the men brought three more rounds of martinis and gin and tonics for themselves and Lori, Ann Marie did her best not to make eye contact with the men. She kept her eyes either out the window, toward the black ocean or on her phone, which she repeatedly checked for no apparent reason. She burned through a half-dozen glasses of diet coke.

  After a while, the two men gave up trying to make conversation with her and became totally focused on her mother. Lori was becoming more lively with every sip of cocktail. The three of them got up from the table for the bar, leaving Ann Marie alone with her diet coke.

  While her mom was busy flirting, Ann Marie decided to step outside to be by herself. Outside the Pink Pelican, she could still hear her mother
laughing over the sound of the tide. She stared out along the coastline, letting her eyes climb the hills of Palos Verdes until she saw the lights of The Asylum at the pinnacle. The lights inside the laboratory seemed to twinkle. She wondered what Dade Harkenrider was up to.

  A few minutes later, her mother stepped out of the bar, laughing with an arm draped over each of the suits. She shouted over to Ann Marie. “What are you doing, girl? Where did you go?”

  “I was bored,” answered Ann Marie without looking at them. She was still staring up at the Asylum.

  “My new friend, Donald,” Lori said as if only guessing at the man’s name, “has a house on The Hill nearby.”

  “Good for him.”

  “These two fine gentlemen have invited me for a night cap.”

  “You can’t drive,” said Ann Marie. She knew where the conversation was headed and was already annoyed.

  “Oh, Donald is going to drive me,” her mom said. “That is, if he doesn’t mind driving my crappy rental car.” Apparently, she had momentarily forgotten the other man’s name, so she said, “Handsome over here is going to follow us in his car.” The nameless man’s tiny red sports car was too small to accommodate the three of them.

  “How am I supposed to get home?”

  “Come with us,” Lori said, pulling the men in closer with her arms. “Donald has one of those pools that looks like they’re pouring out into infinity. I’ve always wanted to swim in one of those.”

  “It’s heated,” the nameless man added.

  “No thanks,” said Ann Marie, turning away from her mother and toward the empty road along the cliffs. She looked as though she intended to hitchhike.

  Lori Bandini’s mood darkened and she looked at her daughter like she was ashamed. “Fine,” she said. “I don’t know why you have to be such a little bitch about everything.” She got into the car with the man and rolled her window down to say one more thing to her daughter. “You’re not a bitch,” she added. “I shouldn’t have said that.” She turned on the man’s car stereo and happened to find a song that reminded her of her senior year of high school. Singing along, she threw her arms around the driver and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Onward and upward,” she said, laughing as both cars left Ann Marie alone in the restaurant parking lot.