Agonal Breath (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 1) (29 page)

“Samantha.”

The nurse straightened herself up as though she had been slapped.

“I have a daughter named Samantha. Or at least, I did once…a long time ago. Now tell me
your
name.”

“Becky.”

Jennifer pulled the surgical mask down from her face, allowing it to dangle loosely around her neck, and then reached up and slowly removed the cap that covered her hair.

I winced.

A small, neat little hole spoiled the symmetry of her forehead, sitting right between her eyes. As she tilted her head slightly, I could see that the back of her skull had been blown outward, the gaping wound obviously caused by a bullet fired at very close range.

“My Samantha looked a lot like you, Becky,” Jennifer said quietly.

And then it hit me.

Jennifer.

Jennifer…
Roderick?

No way.

I looked back and forth between Becky’s face and Jennifer’s. Once you knew to look for it, the resemblance was definitely there. They both had the same sweeping eyebrows, the same gracefully curving jawline; heck, even the shape of their lips was the same.

Becky’s grandmother really
had
died at Long Brook Sanatorium, but she hadn’t been a patient; no, she had been one of the staff here, and she had stayed on after her death, assisting Spiessbach in his grotesque experiments and surgeries.

Now all of the pieces of this nasty little puzzle were starting to come together in my mind, and I didn’t like the picture that they were forming one little bit.

I saw Becky’s jaw drop in surprise as she finally recognized the nurse standing directly in front of her. Her mouth formed the shape of an ‘O’ as the light-bulb went off above her head too.

This
was the woman from the scanned photograph that she had shown us earlier, a photo that must have been taken in a much happier time; because Jennifer had been having an affair with the maniac who was standing maybe ten feet away from me now, absent-mindedly humming as he prepared his tools for the latest in a long line of patient dissections…a man with whom she had had an affair and conceived a child, only to have him shoot her in the face and then turn the gun on himself when it came time to pay the piper.

Becky had found her grandmother at long last.

This was
not
going to be a happy family reunion.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Why?” Becky demanded through floods of tears.

She pointed an accusatory finger at Spiessbach. “Why did you do it? You cheated on Grandpa with that…that…
thing
over there?”

It looked as if Becky’s sudden realization that Jennifer was her grandmother would be accompanied by a storm of angry recriminations.

Jennifer’s face softened, and so did her tone. I even thought that I could see the hint of a tear glistening in one of those black-within-black eyes, something I’d believed impossible: an evil spirit displaying a sense of remorse?

“It’s…difficult to explain, honey,” Jennifer began. “And I don’t have any excuses to offer you, just my reasons. They made some kind of twisted sense at the time, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about them since then. Things were not going well between your grandfather and I, Becky. He was a good man, but he wasn’t a perfect one. He hated the fact that I took a job here and put the children in daycare, said it wasn’t what a proper family did. That really came between us. Before I knew it, we had just grown further and further apart. It didn’t happen overnight, but one morning I woke up and realized that I didn’t love him any more, and I didn’t think he loved me either.”

“So you decided to put some spark back into your love life by
sleeping with a Nazi war criminal?”

Damn, that was harsh. Harsh, but fair.

Jennifer seemed unfazed.

“Marko and I had a connection, Becky. You have to understand that he isn’t a bad man, no matter what the rumors about him might say. He truly just wants to
help
people. He wants to be the one to cure tuberculosis, and that is a very noble goal.”

I really didn’t mean to laugh. It just sneaked out. I certainly didn’t mean for it to sound as cynical as it did.

“Ha! None of your patients even
have
tuberculosis! They’re dead, all of them. So are you, if you haven’t figured that out yet!”

“Dead? Don’t be ridiculous, boy.” Jennifer’s expression changed to one of confusion, as though she were thinking about the answer to a highly complex question. “I can touch. I can smell. I can
feel.
How could I do all that if I were dead?”

I realized that this might be an opportunity to try and get through to her with a little rationality, so I decided to push the issue. It wasn’t as though we had a lot to lose at this point.

“When was the last time you ate something? No, scratch that — when was the last time you were even
hungry?
” I demanded. “Or thirsty? How about tired? When did you last go to bed and sleep, huh? Or need to go to the restroom?”

A low muttering was starting up among the nurses and orderlies. Finally realizing that there was trouble in the ranks, Spiessbach looked up from sorting his equipment. It was so neatly laid out that the guy had to have some wicked OCD going on.

Jennifer turned to face him, folding her arms in a way that children everywhere knew as the universal sign for ‘look out — Mom’s on the warpath.’

“Marko, don’t you have anything to say about this? Tell them that we’re not dead. Tell them the
truth.
Most of all,
tell me.
”

Spiessbach sighed, making his surgical mask suck in and then puff out again in a way that would have been funny under normal circumstances. Now it just looked creepy.

“Jennifer, my dear, surely even
you
are not so deluded as to believe that you are still a being of flesh and blood? Even
you
cannot possibly be
that
naive. Yes, the boy is right, to a degree. We are revenants, each one of us; ghosts, specters, spirits, call it whatever you will.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Mere semantics, and of no importance whatsoever. What
is
important is the vital research that we continue to do here.”

“’Vital research,’ my ass!” Brandon yelled. “What you’re doing here is torture, and you’re nothing more than a sicko.”

“How do you suppose it is that the frontiers of medicine are pushed back, you foolish little boy? Magic?” He barked out a harsh laugh. “We have seen how well
that
works today, with your friend’s oh-so-effective little magic spell, hmmm? No, it is the rigorous application of the scientific method, the ruthless repetition of trial and error, over and over again, that will give us the data we need in order to win the fight against this
filthy,
disgusting
disease…and write the name of Marko von Spiessbach in the annals of medicine for all eternity, where it rightfully belongs.”

“You’re not gathering useful information from the poor souls that you’ve kept trapped in this hellhole along with you!” I pointed out. “They don’t even have physical bodies, Spiessbach, they’re
spirit beings.
Spirit beings don’t contract diseases. They just
can’t.
All you’re doing is abusing and punishing their spirit bodies, over and over again, and if that’s not a definition of torture, I don’t know what is!”

“Outrageous!” Spiessbach yelled, slamming a clenched fist down on the surface of the operation table. “I have
seen
inside their chests, have examined their lungs directly. They are infected!”

“You’re seeing what you
want
to see. You know, projecting your own wants and needs onto them. Curing TB is so important to you, you won’t let
anything
get in the way of that, will you? But you’re an earthbound spirit, Spiessbach, and so are all of these guys.” I tried to gesture at the people on his team, but the huge dude still had my arms locked down hard so I used my head to point at them instead. “You can’t cure a disease that your patients don’t have, but you
keep
trying, over and over again. Do you know how many years this has been going on for?”

“Irrelevant! The cure is within reach!”

“Yes it is!” I shot back. “For the doctors today. It’s the Twenty-First Century, dude, not the 1980s any more. Your so-called ‘treatments’ went out with the Fifties and Sixties. They never worked in the first place, but you just
had
to keep on using them, didn’t you — sneaking them in, long after the
real
doctors had moved on to drugs and therapies that actually
worked.
”

Well, that sure got a rise out of him. In a split-second Spiessbach was standing right there in front of me, grabbing me by the front of my shirt. I heard the slap before I felt it. It sounded as loud as the gunshots had done earlier downstairs. Then I felt the stinging warmth spreading across my face. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I thought it would.

“I have done more for this country than you could ever achieve in a thousand lifetimes, you insufferable little wretch, and if I hear one more word out of you — just
one
word! — then you shall take the pretty little one’s place on the table. Do you understand?”

Boom.
Gotcha.

“She won’t be going on the table, Marko.”

Jennifer had spoken softly and without anger, but she couldn’t have made the atmosphere in the room get any more tense if she had taken the pistol out of Becky’s waistband and fired a warning shot into the ceiling.

Spiessbach straightened up from where he was hunched over and trying to intimidate me, fixing her with his most menacing glare. As he turned away from me, I could see a deformity underneath his bandanna that had to be where the bullet had made mincemeat of what little brains he had.

“
What did you just say to me?
”

Jennifer didn’t back down. I was beginning to see where Becky got her backbone from.

“I said that she will not be going under your knife, Marko. None of them will.” She softened her tone, sounding more resigned than adversarial now. “My grand-daughter and her friends are right. It is time for this charade to end.”

Spiessbach seemed lost in thought for a minute.

“On that, at least, we can agree,” he finally said. “Nurse Baker, Nurse Haywood…strap Mrs. Roderick to the table, if you please. It is long past time for her
own
surgical procedure.”

I recognized the nasty old hag that had confronted me in my nightmare. Haywood was younger, and a guy. Between them, they grabbed Jennifer by the arms and started to muscle her down onto the operating table.

Smiling the smile of the truly insane underneath the surgical mask, Doctor Spiessbach reached out for his favorite scalpel.

“I am afraid that this is going to be really rather painful…”

“Becky,
run!
” Jennifer screamed.

She was thrashing like a tigress who was fighting for the life of her cubs, which I guess she was, in a sense. I think the blinders were finally coming off after all the years spent carrying out Spiessbach’s will, inflicting so much unnecessary pain and torment on helpless people.

“I’ll be back with help!” Becky yelled, ducking out of the male orderly’s grip and darting between the two goons that were still holding both Brandon and I captive. She slammed through the double doors and was gone before any of the ghost nurses and orderlies could think to grab her.

Spiessbach sent two of them after her.

“Either bring her back with you, or pitch her off the roof. It makes no difference to me.”

“No!” Jennifer roared. She knew how to fight dirty, that’s for sure; one of her feet lashed out and kicked Nurse Haywood squarely in the face, breaking his nose with a crunch that was really satisfying to hear. Both hands flying up to cup his nose, Haywood groaned and staggered backwards two or three steps, slamming into the metal tray of surgical tools and sending them flying in every direction.

Pushing her luck a little further, Jennifer drove an elbow into Nurse Baker’s belly. The dried-up old bag doubled over; I could hear the air leaving her lungs with a whoosh. I’m sure you can imagine my total lack of sympathy. Served her right.

Taking full advantage of the distraction caused by the sudden outburst of mayhem, Brandon stamped down hard on his captor’s foot. In their solid form, the ghosts of Long Brook could be surprised and hurt every bit as much as a living person could be. The orderly instinctively released his grip on Brandon’s arms, allowing our resident Krav Maga champion to pivot on the soles of his feet and shove him towards me.

Hard.

Brandon must really put his back into that shove, because the nurse slammed into the one holding me and both of them went down like the pins at a bowling alley. Luckily, I was able to keep a firm grip on the lantern.