by Greg Dragon
“She had help. The nurse at the hospital described a white woman speaking English who came to visit her just before my men arrived. She snuck her out the back door and into a car. They’re looking for them now.” He paused, then added, “I warn you: I suspect this is only going to get worse before it gets better, Mister Aston.”
The heavy man’s face grew redder than it already was. “How so, Mister Norstrom?” he asked, his voice rising in pitch. “How could it possibly get any worse?”
“Apparently, the doctors removed a bone fragment embedded in the woman’s leg when she was brought in several days ago. Fortunately, my men were able to recover the shard from the waste. It exhibited some unusual properties.”
Aston’s eyes narrowed.
“He’s no doctor, but to his untrained eyes, it appears that the bone fragment had already started to remodel. How does a supposedly dead piece of bone do that?”
Aston didn’t reply.
“Well?”
“Like you said, he’s untrained.”
“Even so, I just sent him to Wenbai for a closer look.”
Aston stepped forward. “You’ll do no such thing!”
“You listen to me,” Norstrom said, not backing away. “What your company did to those people is none of my business. But now we’ve got a girl running around out there who may have been exposed to it, maybe transmitting it.” He held up a hand to silence the other man’s protest. “What is my business is the danger you may be putting my men into. So, you need to start telling me exactly what was going on in that place.”
Aston’s face burned, partly with hatred at the man’s composure, partly with anger at how this whole situation seemed to be blowing up in his face, but mostly with fear that he was going to lose more than just his job. “There is no risk to your men, I can tell you that truthfully.”
Norstrom didn’t move. “I usually don’t ask for details. In this business, it’s better not to. But I’m going to make an exception this time. Tell me what I need to know, or else find yourself someone else to fix your mess.”
“Fine,” Aston finally said. He gestured to his car. “Get in. I’ll tell you what I can. And maybe then you’ll understand exactly why we need to get that girl back.” He stopped and turned. “And why we need her destroyed.”
Chapter Thirty Three
They arrived at the train stop up the hill from the factory at just past noon, and Angel went ahead on foot to check below. The place appeared as deserted as before, but as she’d discovered that morning, the impression had proven wrong. Jamie assured her that, other than the villagers, there had only been a few employees to oversee the daily activities on the work floor. “A couple medical people and a foreman. Most of the time I escorted the workers between the work floor and the nurse, though I wasn’t allowed inside the lab for their weekly medical checks, even though I was the only one who could interpret for them.”
“What else did you do?”
She had shrugged. “Most of the time, it was . . . boring. I sat at my desk and played video games.” She managed to look embarrassed.
Angel returned to the car several minutes later to find Jamie lying on the seat in a fetal position and moaning.
“Jamie?” she cried in alarm. “ What’s the matter? Jamie!”
“Just a cramp,” the girl panted. “I don’t know. They’ve been coming and going for the past couple of hours, since we left the hospital. I thought it was just something from the crash, but this seems—“
She cried out in pain and fell back onto the seat.
“Let me see!”
“No! Just get me down to the factory,” she growled. “There isn’t time!”
“You’re bleeding internally. We need to get you to a hospital.”
Jamie pushed her hands away and struggled back upright. Her face was pale and clammy, and her breaths came in hitches. But she shook her head. “It’s the infection.” She gestured at the road ahead. “There’s a laboratory inside with a microscope, a few machines. You need to find what’s inside of me.”
“I can’t, Jamie! Not without—“
“You said you were a doctor, right?”
Angel nodded. “But without an x-ray machine, diagnostic equipment, I’m helpless. A microscope is useless for viruses and nearly as useless for identifying bacteria.” She exhaled in frustration. “Assuming I can somehow, miraculously, figure it out. What then?”
“Then you fix me! And if you can’t . . . .”
Angel’s face went ice cold. She shook her head. Once more, she was beginning to wonder if the girl was mentally unstable. But then the image of her standing before her on the side of the road came back. If anything didn’t make sense, it was that, and yet she’d seen it with her own eyes.
“Just get us inside.”
“How?”
“K-keypad,” Jamie replied, and squeezed her eyes shut against another wave of pain.
“But you can’t even walk. It’s at least a kilom—“
“Just drive through the damn chain!” Jamie screamed. “It doesn’t matter anymore! Just do it!”
She’s dying, Angel suddenly realized, and she knew this with a certainty she could not explain. It didn’t matter what she did now. Something had happened back there at the hospital. Maybe a suture came loose. Maybe an aneurysm burst. A slow leak in her spleen widened. Something. She didn’t know exactly what was wrong with the girl, but it was obvious that it was bad.
“We need to go back, find a hospital—“
“No time,” Jamie whispered, and collapsed back onto the seat. “They did this to them. They must have some way to stop it. It’s in there, I know it. In a file somewhere, a fridge. Please, Angelique, I don’t want to die.”
Angel started the engine and began to drive toward the crest of the hill, and when she reached the chain barrier, she didn’t stop. The motor whined as the chain tore into the grill of the car. One of the headlamps exploded in a shower of glass. The tires slipped on the rocky surface of the road, spraying pebbles and dust out behind them. Smoke began to rise from the engine. She pressed harder on the accelerator, even as a new scream rose from Jamie’s throat. It peaked before fading away again, leaving in its place an angry machinegun rattle coming from beneath the hood.
“It’s not going to—!” Angel shouted, but with a sudden pop the post on Jamie’s side tore free of the ground and whipped around the front of the car. It swung back and slammed through the window behind Angel. Both women screamed. But the car was already moving again, leaping down the road. As they passed the crest of the hill, the loose post was yanked back out of the car. It took the rear window with it, along with a chunk of the door frame. Angel’s scream turned to a cry of desperation as she tried to regain control. They spun to one side, hit a rock and bounced. For a moment, it seemed to her that they were going to roll. She twisted the wheel around and righted the vehicle, bringing the front end around again.
Black smoke was pouring out of the engine compartment by the time they reached the flat area surrounding the building. With little time to despair over the damage to the car, Angel drove them around the other side and skidded to a stop. It wasn’t worth hiding it at this point, as the damaged barrier would immediately warn anyone arriving that they were here.
“What’s the code?”
She hurried over to assist Jamie, but the girl kicked open her door and stumbled out on her own. She wasn’t quite able to stand fully upright.
“Let me help you.”
“I got this!” She brushed Angel’s hand away and staggered over to the panel and punched in her access code. There came a beep and a distinct click from inside. Angel grabbed the handle and pulled it open, bracing herself for the possibility that someone might be standing there. But the entryway was empty.
Everything was painted the same flat gray. The walls were unadorned. The only light illuminating them came from the window behind them. Two doors, one in the right hand wall and the other straight ahead, gave access to the
interior of the building. Both also required a code for entry.
“Which way?”
Jamie gestured weakly to the one on the right, and Angel helped her over with an arm around her waist. Once again, the girl entered her code, and again Angel was surprised when the lock disengaged.
“The other door gives access to the work floor,” Jamie explained. “This way goes to the offices.”
The door pulled away from the frame with a hiss, as if the hallway beyond were pressurized. Jamie reached over and flicked a switch, and the lights came on. To Angel, the air smelled strongly of paint and plastic, but there was an organic undertone as well, something she couldn’t place.
They made their way down the short hall and came to the end without meeting any doors. They turned left. Once again, the walls were plain, though someone had taken the opportunity to paint the upper halves in a sort of beige. It did little to brighten the mood. Instead, it just seemed to strengthen the impression Angel had of being inside a submarine. Without windows, the hallway felt claustrophobic.
“Where’s the lab?”
“Second door on the right. Third, I mean. Third door.” She grunted from the effort, stumbled, and fell to her knees beside the first office.
Angel tried to hold the girl up, but she ended up slipping to the floor with her. A small name plaque with Jamie’s name on it was pasted just above the knob.
“Tell me what you think we’re going to find.”
“Something . . . . I don’t know. Antidote. Medicine.” Her voice was fading, as was her strength. “Have to . . . figure out—“
She lurched forward and gagged, but only a thread of drool dripped out of her mouth. The water she’d taken in along the way had already been absorbed into her body.
Angel placed a hand against the girl’s abdomen and pressed and was alarmed at how hard it was. If there had been any doubt before that she was bleeding internally, it was now gone. She needed a transfusion. She needed surgery to repair the leak. But she was going to get neither, which meant she was going to die.
“Are you sure your code will work?”
Jamie didn’t answer at first, just remained there on the floor on her hands and knees with her mouth open. After a few seconds passed, she pushed back to a sitting position and rested her head against the wall. “I-I don’t know. I think so.”
Angel stood up. “Stay here. I’ll give it a try.” She looked down at the girl, alarmed at the swiftness of her deterioration, and was ashamed at herself for not doing what she knew was right and taking her somewhere for help. If anyone knew the seriousness of her condition, it was she, with all of her medical training. But the promise of answers was a much stronger pull, and she knew that this was likely to be her last chance to get them.
Better hurry. She’s not long for this world.
She ran down the hall, her feet padding softly on the thin carpet. She had watched Jamie typing in her code the previous two times, so she had the number memorized. She punched it in to the new keypad with shaking fingers and waited, but nothing happened.
Slower. Take a deep breath—
She tried again.
And again nothing happened. The code didn’t work.
Her gaze drifted back down the hallway to where Jamie was slumped against the wall, but stopped short when her eyes caught on the door jamb, just below the plaque with the words MARIA SORVINO. There were deep scratches beside the knob. Tiny spirals of gray paint still clung to the metal. Angel bent down for a closer look, and when she did, her shoulder bumped the door. It swung open with a soft crunch. The door had been jimmied, the latch broken.
A soft noise from inside the room jolted her upright. She swung around to see a man sitting behind a microscope at the bench in the center, maybe three meters away. He looked just as surprised as she was, but he was quicker to react. He pushed away from the stool, which clattered to the floor behind him, and stood to face her.
Angel immediately recognized him as one of the men from the hospital. Before she could move, the man swung his hand up. In it was a pistol, and it was aimed directly at her forehead.
Chapter Thirty Four
”The train crash was planned?” Norstrom asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
The tires juddered over an exceptionally rough patch of road, making an immediate response impossible. So the two men sat side by side and stared at each other, one smug in his superior position, the other showing the first cracks in his stony exterior. Aston took satisfaction in the look of surprise on Norstrom’s face, in knowing that he had finally struck a nerve in the otherwise emotionless man. Oh, but he’s so goddamned righteous in his indignation, isn’t he? The man has probably murdered ten times as many people as me, and yet he sits there all high and mighty and thinks I’m some kind of monster for speaking the truth.
“You’re telling me this was part of some planned . . . experiment?”
“The accident was planned, yes,” Aston replied. “But the extent of the destruction wasn’t. It wasn’t supposed to be so . . . devastating. Something happened that we hadn’t foreseen. We’re still not sure what.”
He exhaled heavily and shook his head, as if he personally felt the weight of each death on his shoulders. He did honestly regret that so many people had perished, though not for the souls that had been lost; rather, he lamented the time and data the company would never recover, and the millions they had spent on setting it all up over the past sixteen months. Going forward, the miscalculation was likely to set their R and D program back by weeks, if not longer.
“There were never supposed to be any casualties,” he explained. “Or, rather, not many. A few were to be expected.”
“You . . . expected people to die?”
“We accepted that there was uncertainty in the experiment and that death was a possible outcome. We did our best to calculate the effects of the train’s speed and momentum, the number of people in each car, etcetera, etcetera, but we couldn’t control everything. The randomness of their positions— where they were sitting or standing, for example. We could have erred on the side of caution and designed the crash to avoid all fatalities, but then we wouldn’t have been testing for the full range of trauma, would we have?”
“The full range of trauma?” Norstrom sputtered in disbelief. His mask had completely fallen away. “You designed the crash to test trauma?”
Aston rolled his eyes impatiently. It was clear that Norstrom was simply incapable of seeing the Big Picture, much less the intricacies of such a large scale undertaking. Nevertheless, he was determined to try and explain it to him as much as possible. After all, the experiment had been his personal brainchild. And, privately, he hoped Norstrom would eventually see the genius in it and be forced to accede that he’d misjudged.
“We needed a large test group with a full continuum of injuries ranging from minor bumps and scrapes to broken bones and lacerations. We wanted to see organ damage, even serious head trauma and amputations. A crash was the quickest and most efficient way to achieve it at this scale.”
Norstrom’s jaw dropped. It was a primal reflex in a moment when he was completely unaware of himself. He suddenly realized that he was breathing the same air as a true madman. Those victims were nothing but lab rats to these people! He wanted to wrap his hands around the man’s fleshy neck and squeeze until his eyes popped out of his skull. Instead, he quickly collected his thoughts and forced his mouth shut. It took all his strength to turn away.
“We had always planned to validate the efficacy of our product under real-life conditions.”
“And what exactly is your product?” Norstrom asked, his voice now flat. “I was told you manufactured computer components.”
“Oh, that’s what we tell people. But the truth is we make revolutionary medical devices to improve human health. The specific details are, of course, completely confidential. If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” He chuckled wetly as Norstrom stared at him, the stone-faced mask now firmly back in place.
“Joking, of course, but I am under NDA not to divulge any specifics. You understand the necessity for secrecy, I’m sure.”
“Is it a field trauma system?” Norstrom pushed. “Is that what you’re talking about? I’m just trying to understand the scope, as you say, Aston. And why not use animal subjects? Wouldn’t they have worked just as well?”
“Five minutes, sir,” came the voice of the driver over the intercom. Aston flicked off the privacy switch to thank him. Then he turned it back on.
“Animal tests wouldn’t provide the answers we need. Besides, the product is designed and coded for humans. It would take years to reengineer it for another species.”
They had been on a secondary road for the past ten minutes, a cut-off from the main highway bisecting the northwest part of Inner Mongolia from the southeast. Norstrom had become quite familiar with this stretch of it, having spent the better part of the past four days traversing it while prepping the second site.
At the road’s end was a small, remote settlement of abandoned yurts, and just beyond the village were the railroad tracks. This was where the fake crash had been staged. The structures were now occupied by a dozen people, each one fully prepped for the inevitable questions the Chinese government’s accident investigator would ask them.
“Look, Norstrom,” Aston said, “all you need to know is that the fatalities weren’t planned. They were an unfortunate, although not entirely unforeseen, consequence of the nature of the experiment. The crash itself was necessary.” He paused for effect. “I know it’s hard for you to understand, especially without possessing all of the key details. Very few people would be able to, certainly not the general public. That’s why your particular brand of expertise was required, to keep it from getting out to the general population. If word got out, they’d come here and shut us down in a heartbeat, and that would be a terrible setback for all of us.”
They came over a rise and looked down into a valley. Smoke curled out of the roof openings of several of the yurts. About a hundred sheep foraged in the grass to the right, tended by a young boy. The scene would have been postcard perfect if not for the wreckage that lay beyond.
