Rampage

by John Sandford

  Barely looking at him, she thrust a thumb over her shoulder and said, “That way. Take a right at the first hallway—that’ll get you to the elevators.”

  All too easy, Danny thought as, ignored by everyone, he walked down the hall, caught the elevator, and swaggered outside.

  —

  By nine-fifteen, they were set to go. Cruz looked at Shay and grinned, muttered into her ear, “Maybe later we can make out in the bleachers.”

  Shay was wearing shorts and sneakers and a red-and-gold sweatshirt from Berkeley High with a GO JACKETS insignia across the chest. She looked younger, harmless.

  “How can a jacket go anywhere?” Twist wanted to know.

  “We’re the Yellow Jackets,” Shay said. “You know, like bees.”

  She’d gotten a Cal Bears hoodie for Eight—the hospital was a half mile from the university—a pair of board shorts, and flip-flops. All the clothes were loose-fitting enough to cover a range of sizes, and the flip-flops would fit almost any adult.

  Harmon looked at his watch, nodded, and Shay pulled on her backpack. The bolt cutters inside weren’t the industrial-sized cutters she’d needed to break Fenfang’s chains, and thinking about that now…and about the messed-up way Fenfang’s life had come crashing down…made her ready.

  Cruz and Twist would both park in the emergency room lot, five seconds from the ER door and twenty seconds from the front entrance.

  “Twenty seconds is forever when you’re in trouble,” Harmon said. “If there’s a problem, we’ll try to call ahead, tell you where we’re coming out.”

  Twist said, “If worse comes to worst, hide. Bathroom stall, linen closet. The biggest problem would be if you get tangled up with the local cops—they could have a lot of people here in a hurry.”

  “If there’s a Singular security man in there—or somebody from the next layer of Singular, whatever that is,” Cruz said, “he could have a gun.”

  Harmon nodded. “Good thought.” He chewed his lip for a moment, then said, “I didn’t want to take a gun in. That gets us in deeper trouble if we’re stopped by the local cops.” He looked at Shay. “Where’s your piece?”

  “It’s in my pack,” Shay said.

  “Then you carry. I won’t. You look like such a child….If we get in trouble with the locals, ditch it,” Harmon said. “If we run into somebody who looks like Singular, give it to me.”

  Shay slipped the pistol inside the waistband of her shorts, beside her knife, on the way over, Twist driving, Harmon riding shotgun. In the parking lot, Shay looked up at the sky: a clear, cool night, but the stars were washed out, nothing like the diamond stars in the desert.

  Harmon muttered, “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  As they got out of the truck, Shay could feel it in her stomach and smiled despite herself.

  Harmon asked, “What?”

  She shook her head and said, “Nothing,” as they walked across the parking lot toward the door.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You’re starting to like it, aren’t you?”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “It’s not exactly like that.”

  Harmon said, “I’ll tell you something, kid. It gets addictive. You don’t exactly like it, but you can’t stay away from it. That’s what Sync was getting at the other day.”

  “I just want to finish high school,” Shay said.

  “More bullshit,” Harmon said. He pulled open the emergency room door. “Now behave yourself.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  —

  Inside the ER, nobody asked where they were going. A young couple on a couch talked in Spanish to a sick child; a man sat by himself, holding a wet towel to one eye. They walked down the hall toward the cafeteria, took the elevator to the second floor, walked down the hall to the stairway to the third floor. Two cops were standing at the nurses’ desk behind them. They weren’t paying much attention, but still.

  “On the way out, we better go all the way down, if we can,” Harmon said.

  On the third floor, they listened at the secure door, then Harmon punched in the code and they eased it open. The ward was only dimly lit, all the beds now behind the privacy drapes. Televisions were turned on behind a few of the curtains, but there was no sound, except at the far end, where they could hear the laughter from a talk-show audience.

  Without speaking, they counted down four beds and pulled the drapes apart, cringing at the unexpected noise of metal hooks scraping over the metal rod like a shower curtain. Eight was sitting there, propped up, light from his television shining on his face. He put his finger to his lips. Then he gestured forward and whispered, “There is guard. I think on last bed.”

  Then a man’s gravelly voice: “Is somebody here? Hey. Is somebody here?”

  A minute later, they were both under the bed, as Danny had been.

  The guard, whoever it was, walked down the aisle along the line of beds. From where they were, they could see only the cuffs of a pair of dark pants and two heavy shoes. He paused at the end of the line, then walked back to where he’d been, and they heard a bed creak. The guard, Shay thought, was either sitting or lying on a bed, watching television.

  Harmon pushed her gently on the back: Out.

  Shay crawled out and took the pack off her back, unzipped it. Harmon slipped the bolt cutters out. The leather restraint looped around Eight’s ankle turned out to be a problem. Instead of cutting through it, the bolt cutters chewed on it.

  Shay held up a finger, reached to the small of her back, and pulled her knife out of its sheath. Harmon lifted an eyebrow but took the knife and sliced easily through the leather, exposing the steel cable. Shay took the knife back, and Harmon cut the cable with the bolt cutters.

  Eight eased off the bed, and Shay took the new clothes out of the pack. A minute later, Eight had pulled on the Cal Bears hoodie, the board shorts, and the flip-flops. Shay flipped the hood up over the bronze-colored terminals on his head.

  Shay gave him a reassuring smile, even as she thought, He’s probably going to die….

  Harmon put the bolt cutters back in the pack, and Shay pulled it on again. They were about to leave when a cell phone rang and the guard answered it.

  “Yeah?…No, everything’s okay here….No, nobody came through the door….I don’t know, I didn’t actually try to open it. Sure, I can check. I’ll call you back.”

  Harmon gestured for Eight to get back in bed, and they pulled the sheets up over him and yanked down the hood so nothing showed but his mutilated head. Eight closed his eyes to feign sleep, and Shay and Harmon got back under the bed.

  Crouched over and barely breathing, they could hear the guard pulling drapes back from around the beds as he walked down the line. As he drew closer, Shay noticed that Eight’s hospital gown was lying on the floor next to the bed. She reached out and pulled it under just as the drapes were jerked open. The guard checked Eight, who seemed to be sound asleep, and moved on to the next bed.

  At the back door, he rattled the door in its frame, then opened it, apparently looked down the stairway, pulled the door shut, rattled it again, and walked back up the hall, pulling the privacy drapes back across the beds.

  When he got to the end, he made a call. “I checked and they’re all asleep or watching TV. The door was shut and locked….Yeah, that was me….Yeah….Well, if it happens again, call me. I got nothing else to do.”

  —

  Shay slid out from under the bed, followed by Harmon. Eight sat up and dropped his feet to the floor. Harmon caught both of them by an arm and pulled them close and whispered, “There’s a silent alarm on the door. There must be an extra code to clear it once you’re in. When we go, we have to go quickly.”

  Eight nodded and pulled up his hood. Shay knelt and looked out from under the privacy drape. She couldn’t see any feet on the floor.

  They crept to the door, and Harmon quickly punched the code into the interior keypad, quietly twisted the handle, then eased the door open. As he was easing it clos
ed behind them, they heard the guard’s phone ring again. Harmon closed it the rest of the way, then said, “We gotta run. Hurry, now, all the way down.”

  They ran down a flight of stairs to the second floor and were running down another, to a landing above the first-floor door, when the door popped open above them and the guard shouted, “Hey! Hey, there! Stop! Stop!”

  They went through the first-floor door and hurried toward the ER entrance, and Harmon called Twist and said, “They’re coming after us, meet us at the ER door,” and then told Eight, “Go ahead of us—hurry, there’ll be a car waiting for you….”

  Eight moved fast down the hall, and Harmon said to Shay, “Take my hand.”

  “What?”

  “Hold hands with your daddy. And keep your head down. Don’t look up at the cameras.”

  She took his hand and he pushed her close to the corridor wall as they walked toward the ER; a second later, the guard burst out of the stairway door, spotted Eight walking away, shouted, “Hey!” and ran after him.

  Harmon turned to look when the guard shouted. The guard ignored them—a fortyish man with his daughter—but as the guard ran past, Harmon lashed out with a hammer fist, striking him on the nose. The guard screamed and went down on his knees, blood exploding from a broken nose, and cried, “Help!” Harmon and Shay hustled down the hall. They saw Eight go through the exit and a nurse hurrying toward them.

  Harmon turned his face away from her and pointed. “That guy was yelling. He needs help….”

  The nurse shouted something back at her colleagues and then ran. An orderly burst through a door from the ER’s working area and followed after the nurse. Five seconds later, Shay and Harmon were crossing the sidewalk and climbing into the Range Rover with Twist and Emily.

  “Eight’s with Cruz and Danny,” Twist said, calmly pulling out. “Everything go okay?”

  Shay looked at Harmon, then shrugged and said, “Yeah, pretty much. But I wouldn’t stop for that traffic light.”

  Harmon laughed.

  They were back in Los Angeles as the morning light was breaking over Mount Wilson. They’d taken turns sleeping and driving during the trip back but were still cranky, stiff, and tired when they arrived.

  Eight had talked with Shay and Harmon for part of the ride, but the experiments had left his mind grievously wounded. As he’d told them on the ship, he felt he might have been a soldier. Harmon asked whether he knew anything about QBZ-95 assault rifles, a trick question of sorts, and Eight proceeded to explain everything from how to load a thirty-round magazine to the improved ejector port on a later version.

  “You’re a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army,” Harmon declared. “That’s the primary firearm they use. You left-handed?”

  Eight wasn’t sure. Harmon dug a pen and a small notebook out of the console and asked Eight to write something. “One to ten, anything,” he said.

  Eight started with his right hand, made some complicated lines, then switched to the other hand and made the same complicated lines more elegantly.

  “That’s what I thought,” Harmon said. “The ejector port you mentioned, it was moved in part to help with lefty shooting.”

  Eight smiled. “It is good to know something about me.”

  The reality was, he had few life memories, though when he was sleeping, he’d said, he sometimes dreamed of growing up in the back of a small grocery store. The store had a telephone where people came to make calls, and it rang incessantly in his dreams. He thought the store might have sold a lot of rice: his dreams were accompanied by the pleasant, earthy odor of grain.

  They’d told Eight about the Chinese diplomats.

  “I want to show them what they do to me,” Eight said. “I want to go home.”

  “We’ll get them back to the hotel,” Harmon said. “You can decide then whether you want to go with them.”

  Eight said there was no need to think it over, and then he fell into a deep sleep. Ten miles from the hotel, his eyes popped open and he said he would like to answer more questions because it made him feel alive. Shay said that something very important was still unknown to them.

  “On the ship, at the very end, did any more prisoners come aboard?” she asked him. “We went to hide before the ship began to move….Did they bring any new people down to the hold?”

  Eight shook his head.

  Interesting. It had been the arrival of a Singular convoy of three RVs holding experimental subjects that trapped them on the ship.

  Shay said to Harmon: “The prisoners in the RVs…if they didn’t get them on the ship, they must have put them back into the RVs and driven away. They’re still out there.”

  Harmon said, “They wouldn’t take them to any known Singular facility.”

  “New Mexico?” Shay said.

  Harmon nodded and said: “Maybe. Or maybe they…got rid of them. If we’ve spotlighted all their major labs, maybe they’d have no way to finish their experiments.”

  “But we haven’t. They still have labs in North Korea, and they might be in other countries we don’t know about. They could be hiding them in New Mexico until they can get someplace else.”

  Harmon thought that sounded plausible.

  “We gotta get down there,” Shay said.

  “Somebody does,” Harmon said.

  “What do you mean, ‘somebody’? Dash is a U.S. senator on the Intelligence Committee. You think the FBI is going to poke their nose in there on our say-so?”

  “Probably not,” Harmon admitted. “Not without a lot of preliminaries, which would give Dash time to move everybody out.”

  “It’s on us,” Shay said. “It’s on us.”

  —

  At the hotel, Twist put Eight in Cruz’s room and assigned Cruz the role of Eight’s full-time shadow. Before they all broke up to shower and sleep, Twist told them, “I’ll call the Chinese consulate, see if we can set up another meeting this afternoon. Until then, don’t talk to me. I need a nap.”

  Odin said, “We should talk before the Chinese get here.”

  “Studio at noon, then,” Twist said. “Good night.”

  —

  Shay hadn’t had a chance to talk privately with Cruz since she’d left his room twenty-four hours before. Now they walked down the hall together, and Cruz said, “I really want to get together again.”

  “Me too.”

  He kissed her temple, then led Eight on to his room while Shay headed to hers. Emily was coming out of their room with a towel and a bottle of soap. “Shower, then sleep.”

  “Just sleep for me,” Shay said, and was out in a matter of seconds.

  —

  Shay was up at eleven, hit the shower, got dressed, and walked out to a Starbucks for a straight cup of coffee for herself and a grande no-fat, no-foam latte with a double shot for Emily, along with cranberry and blueberry scones. Emily opened her eyes when the smell of the coffee hit her. “You really are a princess,” she said. “I was wondering how I’d make it to the stairs without caffeine. I hope to God you got a double shot.”

  “Of course,” Shay said. “Better move your butt, though. Meet in twenty.”

  —

  More like forty, with the group drifting into the studio, scraping chairs into a circle, yawning, still sleepy, several of them with cups of bad coffee cadged from the cafeteria. Twist said, “I got an answer from the consulate. They’ll be here at two.”

  Shay filled them in on what Eight had said—that the experimental subjects they’d seen around the RVs before the firefight at the dock had not been put aboard the ship.

  “So there are still a bunch of people out there, unless—Harmon mentioned this—Singular killed them. But I think there’s a good possibility they’ve been taken to New Mexico. As far as we know, it’s the last Singular property in the United States.”

  “It’s hard to believe that they’d do that—just kill them,” Emily said. “I mean…it’s hard to believe.”

  “That’s because you haven’t been
with us on this whole trip,” Odin said. “What they’ve been doing to these people…” He glanced at Eight and shook his head.

  Eight looked at Emily and said: “We are nothing to them. After they do this to me”—he gestured at the knobs on his scalp—“they take me for examination and they laugh and talk like I am a rat. Not like I am a man, but like I am a rat.”

  Emily nodded and looked away, wiped a tear off her cheek.

  Shay said, “If there’s a chance there are more experimental subjects there, I think we need to go. To see if we can rescue them. Or at the very least to document that they are there—on Senator Dash’s property. But we need to go soon—before it’s too late.”

  “We have no idea what we’d be walking into,” Twist said.

  But Shay cut him off. “So let’s figure it out.”

  They talked about it for more than an hour. Cruz got one of Twist’s drawing pads and began making a list of equipment they’d need.

  Much would depend on the terrain around the ranch. Odin and Cade were tapping on their laptops, talking to each other about the maps they were reviewing.

  Odin: “The land around the ranch houses is pretty flat—it’s a long floodplain along the Los Lobos River, that’s where the landing strip is. But it’s a V-shaped valley, with mountains on both sides, narrowing to the V where the mountain ranges hook up. The mouth of the valley to the south, that’s pretty open and flat….”

  Twist eventually called a halt to the planning: “We can get back on it later this afternoon. The guys from the consulate will be here soon.”

  —

  Three Chinese diplomats arrived precisely at two o’clock: the two who’d come before, plus an older, gray-haired man, whom Mr. Dang and Mr. Guan treated with deference. The kid working the front desk escorted them up to the studio, where the group was waiting.

  When introductions had been made—they learned that the gray-haired man was Mr. Shen, but his title was not given—Twist gestured at Eight, who was still wearing his Cal Bears sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his scalp.

  “Gentlemen, this is the man we believe is one of your citizens,” Twist said. “He does not know his real name but has been going by the name Eight since the American authorities took him off the ship. Eight escaped from the hospital in San Francisco last night, where they are holding the experimental subjects.”