“What about the compound?” She asked. “How are you going to take it?”
Dade held up a syringe containing the flickering liquid from under the hood. “I always inject myself once the tank is sealed,” he said as he prepared to submerge.
“Wait!” she stopped him. “How will I know if I need to help you or get you out? What if something happens?”
“Under no circumstances can you ever let me out before the experiment is over. No matter what I do. Even if I’m drowning, don’t open that latch until the computer tells you its OK.” He reinforced his point saying, “Don’t trust me. I can be weak. Trust the computer.”
She could tell he was serious. The gravity of the statement told her that perhaps the rule was for her safety.
“Promise me,” he told her. “No matter what I say.”
“OK. Fine.”
Ann Marie heard a splash and suddenly Dade Harkenrider was floating in the middle of the acrylic tube. Electric motors worked to close and seal the lid. A red digital readout announced his pulse and blood pressure. A graph on one of the computer monitors showed the noisy electrical activity in his brain. When the lid was finally sealed, a long beep followed a dull mechanical thud. He was sealed inside.
Across the acrylic, she watched his wisps of black hair toss and float in the fluorocarbon liquid. His expression looked relaxed. Suspended in the liquid, he lifted up his hand in a wave to reassure her. She could tell that his chest was moving and he was breathing the liquid. He nodded to her before sticking the syringe into the muscle of his arm.
With his eyes locked on her, he let the empty syringe go and it floated to the top of the tank. A tiny trickle of blood climbed out of the wound and formed tiny strands in the breathing liquid. It looked as though Dade was starting to have trouble keeping his eyes open. As he started to drift into the trance, the electrochromic walls of the tank began to darken. Eventually, the tank became a monolithic black can in the middle of the lab.
With Dade hidden away in the now black chamber, Ann Marie rolled over a desk chair and sat right in front of the massive apparatus. The biofeedback computer monitored Dade’s vitals and brain activity. It generated a green light above the tank to signal that the experiment was progressing normally.
She rolled herself across the lab, to the fume hood where Dade was growing his hallucinogenic chemicals. Inside the flask of liquid, a transparent shard of crystal flickered like a disco ball. She had never seen any compound with such bizarre optical properties. The material itself seemed to be responding to her very presence at the fume hood. The flashes seemed to contain information somehow, as though the chemicals were flying semaphore flags.
After a couple of minutes of staring at the odd substance, her curiosity got the better of her. She lifted the front lid of the fume hood just enough to get her hands inside. With a kind of mastery from years spent in the chemistry lab, she slid on a pair of latex gloves the way a seasoned boxer climbs into the ring. Then she grabbed a glass pipette and started to draw some of the red liquid out of the beaker. The fluid seemed to respond to her and started to blink more vigorously.
“You’re a strange one,” she said. Then she smiled to herself because she was speaking out loud to a glass beaker. “I guess I’m the stranger one,” she went on, “because I’m the one talking to the lab equipment.”
After the timer clicked down to zero, the walls of Dade’s chamber started to go clear. His suspended body was becoming visible. His blood pressure and pulse rate seemed extremely low to Ann Marie, but the computer readout stated that everything was normal. He looked dead, floating behind the acrylic like a bodily organ on a medical school shelf.
His brain activity, displayed as lines on a graph, told a very different story however. Ann Marie didn’t understand the data on the machine, but it seemed to be going crazy like the stock ticker during a frenzy on Wall Street.
As Dade opened his eyes, his brain waves started to calm down and life crept back into his body. For the first time Ann Marie had ever seen, Dade smiled at her. It brought her more comfort than she imagined it should. The feeling had her beaming back at him, even waving like he had just arrived at the airport.
After a few moments, Dade reverted to his usual expression, which wasn’t exactly a scowl but more like the look a master gives a chess opponent. It was Dade Harkenrider’s default look.
His vital signs and brain waves were within the safe limits, so the computer unlocked the latch on the top of the tank. It was strange, she thought, that the only safety feature on the machine trapped Dade inside. She wondered what he was protecting the world from.
He floated up to the top, where Ann Marie climbed the small staircase to meet him. His body was trembling and he mumbled something strange. She couldn’t tell if it was even English.
She draped his soaked right arm over her shoulder. Her legs nearly buckled under the weight of his body. “I got you,” she said as she helped him stumble across the lab to the table. “Don’t worry. I got you.” When he was all the way on the table, she took his grey robe with the corporate logo and laid it over his body to keep him warm.
He closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep for a few moments. Then he started to mumble again. “I’m bleeding so much,” he whispered. He grabbed at the old scar on his chest over his heart. “Am I dying, Bernard? Did she kill me?”
“Who is Bernard?”
“Did she kill me?” Dade asked in his trance. “What am I, Bernard? Please tell me what I am. What’s happening to me, Bernard?”
“Please be OK, Dade,” she whispered as she reached over to lay her palm on his cheek. “I mean Dr. Harkenrider.” She let her hand rest against his cheek and studied his face. “Is there anything I can do to help you? Just tell me.”
He slowly opened his eyes and saw her standing beside him. “Thank you,” he told her, sounding much more like usual. “It’s nice not to wake up bleeding on the floor for a change.”
“See what good can happen if you just let someone help you,” she said . A beaming smile started to break out on her face. “You were just talking about the strangest things. Do you remember?”
“No. Not at all.”
“You were saying something about bleeding and some guy called ‘Bernard.’ It was really weird.”
“That happens sometimes,” he said, sitting up from the table.
“Now that I’m helping,” she said, as she went across the lab to get him a glass of water, “maybe you can tell me what these experiments are all about.” She sat down in a rolling desk chair across from the table and waited for him to say something.
“Kid, it’s hard to explain.”
“Again, I’m not an idiot. Try.”
“There’s an invisible world around us,” he told her. “In fact, there are many invisible worlds. The drugs are a way to move and communicate between them. These worlds surround us all the time but they’re hidden in the noise. The tank forces your mind to see what the drugs are trying to show you.”
“What’s it like to experience?”
“Depends,” he explained. “Different formulas, different effects and different knowledge. Sometimes it’s exciting and sometimes it’s more horrible than anything you can imagine.”
...
Later that night, when Ann Marie pulled up to the garage of her apartment building, her mom was lugging a bag of trash out to the dumpster. The chore had always belonged to Ann Marie because her mom’s self-diagnosed allergy to trash.
“Taking the trash out for once,” Ann Marie shouted out of the car window. “Is it my birthday again already?”
When the headlights cast a beam over Lori’s face, Ann Marie knew immediately something was wrong. She put the car in park, got out with the engine running and went over to check. Instead of answering, Lori tried even harder to get the trash bag in the dumpster. She attempted to get it swinging and heave it into the bin. Her odd behavior had Ann Marie’s heart beginning to race.
“What the hell is wrong, mom? What are you doing?” She got a good look at her mom’s face in the headlight beams. She didn’t recognize the expression. It looked like tremendous anxiety blended with guilt, like Lori was getting rid of important evidence.
“You worked all day,” She finally answered, almost breathless with her voice quivering. “I thought I would help out a little.” Lori avoided making eye contact with her daughter and told her, “Go ahead in. I’ll take care of this.”
“You’re acting weird.”
“I am not,” said Lori Bandini, sounding more suspicious this time. “I’m just taking the garbage out. You worked all day. Go ahead inside and I’ll take care of it.” She started to swing the trash back to build up some momentum for a big throw into the dumpster.
“I’ll help you.”
“I can handle the damned trash myself,” said Lori Bandini as she released the trash bag into the air. It sailed straight for the rim of the dumpster. The plastic bag burst open, sending all the glass vodka bottles and microwavable dinner boxes all over the apartment complex driveway. “God damn it!” she shouted, throwing her arms straight up in the air in frustration. “I can’t believe this fucking day! Even the fucking garbage is out to get me today!”
Besides the usual refuse and junk, Ann Marie spotted the distinct emerald green color of money in the mix of trash. Apparently her mom was doing her best to toss away a considerable number of twenty and fifty dollar bills. They were spilling out of a white envelope along with a handwritten letter. Lori tried to grab the envelope and finish its journey to the dumpster.
“What the hell are you doing! Mom, that’s money for God’s sake!”
Lori held the letter and envelope back from her daughter, who was trying to grab them.
“Hey!” objected Ann Marie when she noticed the name of the addressee. “That letter is addressed to me. That’s my money, mom!”
“Believe me, you don’t want this money.”
“Considering I’m the one paying the bills, maybe I do!”
“Fine,” her mom said in a tone of forfeit. “I’ll give you the money and letter and I’ll explain everything.” She started to hand her daughter the letter and stack of bills.
“Who is the letter from anyway? Is it from a rich uncle I didn’t know about?” The moment Ann Marie saw her father’s name on the return address, she looked straight at her mom and said, “Oh. It’s from him.”
Then, in a quick and somewhat violent maneuver, Lori Bandini grabbed the letter right out of her daughter’s hand. She started to rip it into tiny pieces. Her hands worked in a fury to tear the thing up before her daughter could stop her.
“What are you doing! Stop it mom!” Ann Marie tried to pull the remaining shreds of paper away but it was too late. The letter from her father had become a scattered mess in the breeze. Most of the money had spilled out and was starting to blow away.
“I’m sorry, baby, but I had to.”
“You’re crazy! You practically attack me to keep from reading something. What’s wrong with you!”
“I’m sorry, but I had to.”
“Bullshit! Why? How many letters has he sent that you’ve kept from me?”
“This is the first.”
“You’re such a liar, mom! I’m never believing anything you tell me ever again.”
“I understand,” said Lori soberly. “But, I had to.”
“Why? So you can keep me under control?”
“I’m sorry. But I had to.”
“You’ve been lying to me about my own father. For how long?”
“I’m sorry,” her mom said, gazing off at the night sky. “I’m doing what it takes to protect you.”
After that, Lori walked back into the apartment as though nothing had happened. Even with her daughter still asking questions, she poured herself a tall glass of bourbon and got out her pack of cigarettes. She had a vacant, dissociated expression. As she started to drink, it looked like she was on automatic pilot.
“Mom, are you OK?”
Lori just sipped from her glass as though she couldn’t hear the question.
“Mom, I’m not gonna just let this go the way I always do. I want you to tell me what the hell is going on here. Why did you tear up that letter?”
Lori didn’t answer.
“I know you’ve never told me the truth about him,” Ann Marie went on, sounding somewhat sympathetic. “I didn’t believe you when I was six, when you told me he was on a humanitarian mission in Ethiopia. I also didn’t believe you when I was ten and you told me he was part of a secret government space program and he was on his way to Planet Krypton but I let it go. I’ve let it all go. All the wild stories about him that don’t add up, I let you get away with it.”
Still silent, Lori took an even bigger swig of her bourbon.
“I let you go on all your bullshit because I always had the feeling that you were doing it for my own good. Now, that’s over. I am an adult and I earn a living for us. You’re going to explain everything to me right this second. Then we’re going to deal with it.”
Her face blank, Lori stood up from the table. Without even looking at her daughter, she picked up her glass of bourbon and walked into the bedroom. She slid the door closed. The last thing Ann Marie heard from her mother that night was the sound of the door locking.
...
Late the following afternoon, Ann Marie was working by herself in her lab when the security alarm in the hallway started to flash and roar. The Asylum’s automated computer voice called out into every hallway in the building, saying, “Security breach. Asylum Laboratory security breach. Lock down all labs and experiments. Intruder on laboratory grounds.” The last part of the alarm message in particular added to her anxiety. She closed and secured the door to her lab and walked out, toward the main entrance. All the lights in the hallways were flashing red.
When Ann Marie got outside the building, a man she had never seen before was pointing a shotgun and crying. The shotgun was aimed right at Dade Harkenrider. Twenty-five heavily armed security men from the corporation had the entire scene surrounded. The soldiers were ready to shoot the gunman dead on the spot. She realized it was Dade telling them not to shoot.
“Don’t kill him!” shouted Harkenrider to the halo of security around. “Let me talk to him.”
The intruder kept his gun fixed on Dade and walked a few steps closer. “El Diablo!” he shouted at Dade while sobbing. “El Diablo!” The man held the sight of the gun up to his face to get a better bead on Dade. The Spanish-speaking man was dressed in rags and looked like he had just crossed the entire Pacific Ocean. He had makeshift shoes made out of various layers of duct tape. “El Diablo!”
The Sheriff pushed his way through the armor cladded security force and pointed his chrome revolver at the man. “Dade,” he started to ask with his gun aimed at the intruder, “what are you doing? Let us take this guy down.”
“No,” snapped Dade, who kept an unrelenting eye contact with the armed intruder. He noticed Ann Marie across the courtyard and told The Sheriff to protect her. “Take care of the kid,” he told him. “Keep Ann Marie safe. Everything is fine here.”
The Sheriff directed five members of the security team to surround Ann Marie. The ring of soldiers encircled her so tightly that it became difficult to even see the man with the gun. She yelled, “Please don’t shoot!”
“Dade,” called out the Sheriff, “you know that I’m not going to let this guy shoot you. If he doesn’t put that god damed gun down in about ten-seconds, we’re gonna unload on him.” At that point, flying security drones started to spin overhead like miniature helicopters, sending red laser beams over the gunman’s body.
Then Dade Harkenrider did something that shocked Ann Marie. With his eyes fixed on the barrel of the intruder’s gun, he sat down on the grass in front of him. The armed man didn’t know what to do. It seemed clear that he wasn’t ready to execute a man on the
ground. He tried to keep the gun aimed but one could see the trepidation.
“What seems to be the trouble?” Harkenrider asked him calmly while he crossed his legs on the grass like a relaxed yogi. He even took off his sunglasses.
“My daughter!” the man shouted as he remembered the gun in his hands. “She disappear! You take her and make her like others!”
Dade softly nodded as though he understood the man’s accusation.
“She has become black eyes!” the man shouted. “Not my daughter! Black eyes! She tried to hurt her own mother!” Through his tears, he studied Dade’s face and found something that made his grip on the gun relax. “So many disappear! So many change!”
“I know,” Dade told him. “I know something is happening. I’m sorry about your daughter but I’m not the one you’re looking for.”
“She was so sweet, so good,” the man said before he started crying so hard that he couldn’t keep the gun pointed.
The Sheriff and the rest of the security force started to close in. “Weapons down!” shouted Dade. “Don’t hurt him!” Dade’s voice got quiet and took on a sympathetic quality. He told the man, “The sweet, the good, that’s what it’s trying to destroy. I’m sorry that it got to your daughter.”
“What can I do for her? I will do anything.”
“Never go near her again,” Dade answered. “She isn’t the same.”
“Do you know who did this to her?”
Dade nodded to the man, saying, “I’m working on it.”
The Sheriff came up from behind and slipped the shotgun out of the man’s hands. The crying man barely noticed and just stood there staring at Dade. “I hear bad things about you,” he said. “I heard you were demon or Brujo.”
Dade smiled for a moment and said something that left the man shaken. He said, “I don’t think either term is appropriate. I’m just a monster.”
...
After it was all over and the Sheriff let the man go, Ann Marie went upstairs to find Dade in his lab. He was at his computer, paging through electronic copies of news articles about local disappearances.
Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) Page 6
