Ashes (5 page)

7

 

DR. EMANUEL KRANE MOVED nervously in his chair until comfortable then studied the office. There were several things about it he knew for sure. He knew it was approximately eighteen feet by sixteen feet. He was also certain that the ceiling fan circling above him—the one manipulating the specks of dust in the air—had been replaced somewhat recently. It had the familiar shades of off-white and fading, rusted edges, but there was something different about the way it hummed overhead.
So mechanical and precise.
Inhuman. He missed the noise of the other machine.

Krane could have sworn that the windows were once covered by colorless shades, lackluster attempts to match previously bland walls. Part of him kind of liked their pale blur, though. The color on the walls was so new he imagined he might still be able to smell the paint. It had some sort of eggshell finish by the look of it—the lines and blemishes hiding beneath the newness, almost undetectable.

What Krane noticed most about each surface, however, were the
cracks.
In certain spots, he could still make out the slight imperfections.
The places of life in the walls that someone had overlooked.
The places where a patient most likely broke some poor nurse's jaw with a good punch, sending her flying backwards enough to chip it some. He then pictured a guy resembling Jack Nicholson ripping a bolted chair out from the floorboards and using it to shatter the pristinely clean glass in front of him, yelling “Here's Johnny!” before succumbing to immediate sedation. That was one of the ways things and patients were handled at Salvation. Quickly.
And if possible, without incident.

In an era where countless psychiatric facilities were being abandoned and shut down, Salvation continued to expand. At times, the war for the human psyche had to be fought with extreme measures, here above all places. For in here, there existed an environment where apathetic loved ones could responsibly dispose of their
more fragile chain links
. At least, that was the euphemism Saul Hoven, Salvation's director of operations, had chosen. This was a place for the deemed criminally insane, a haven for the ones that wandered.

And he was right too. This place
was
a unique haven, a place constructed unlike any other. Sure, the surface world, this upper half that Krane stared at from the hovering office fixed inside one of the many corners of the building, was quite the usual asylum. Ex-convicts. Schizophrenics.
The occasional serial killer.
Menaces. But the other world—the world that existed beneath this one—was full of experimentation. It was a world for the prodigies
;
the beginning of something powerful.

It was easy to get lost down there.
To get swept up in research and study and
them
.
Was it possible to truly and wholly identify with them? Was it possible to really understand them?
 

Krane spent the next several minutes thumbing the leather-stitched sides in his chair, never coming to a conclusion, always circling back to the genesis of these wilting ideas. A full answer might come, but there was no telling when or in what form.
He shut his eyes
,
had to force them closed
. Keeping them open for such long durations was certainly taking its toll. Could he for a moment focus on something other than the imperfections? The problems?
The weak links in his own chain?
This wasn't some ridiculous homework assignment.

No
, his mind reiterated.
It's the future.

A sigh fled from his throat.
Just relax.
Being in this room felt like being in the disciplinarian's office. He instantly retreated to the fifth grade, when he grabbed Suzie's chest when she wasn't looking. He claimed it was a dare from one of his buddies, but everyone knew he didn't have any. There was a part of him—one not unlike the part of him that enjoyed locating mistakes and imperfections—that liked having that kind of control over something that wasn't his.

With weary eyes and sweat clinging to the armpit of his cheap shirt, Krane waited. The disciplinarian at this hour was Saul Hoven, a military man, aged more by his experience with violence than the number of years he'd endured in the world. He carried himself like a bloodthirsty general, and the people at Salvation mockingly gave him the title of God. It must have been born into him, a desire to have other people quiver in his presence. Maybe it was his way of silently letting everyone know that they weren't worthy to breathe the same kind of air he breathed.

 
“Care for a drink?” Hoven asked upon entering the room. “It's been a hectic morning. Not to mention I just got off the phone with the secretary of defense. Guy's a real class act.”

Krane was mute.

“How do you do it?” Hoven added. “You're down there in the Sanctuary close to twenty hours a day now. You just don't know how to rest.”

“Did I miss something? I mean
,
a man with your back-background must certainly understand dedication.”

“In my history of working with mad men, Doctor, there seems to be a fine line between dedication and obsession.” Hoven had that twisted gleam in his eye, one Krane never could quite calculate. It could mean anything. Then he broke into a slight chuckle, really prolonged and breathy, with a groan at the end.

“I'm busting your stones, Manny. You're exactly the kind of blood Salvation needs. Our own personal Victor Frankenstein.”

The doctor moved in his chair, slightly calmed. “I'll take that as a compliment.”

“Take it any way you like.”
 

“Well, I am rather conn-c-c-connected to my work. I l-love-love discovering new flaws in the code, something to be perfected yet.”

“I imagine it also frustrates you, though.
The cracks, the flaws.
But we'll get to that.” Hoven sipped the drink slowly then stirred the liquor before putting it up to his lips again. “But a brain like yours needs rest. One can only speculate what all that mess can do to such an
intellectual.
”

Saul Hoven stared down below at a sea of patients. “I want you to come over here for a moment.”

Krane got up and walked toward the window. Hoven put an arm around his shoulder, but the doctor didn't like it.

“Take a look. Tell me what you see.”

Krane stared down at a dirty first floor. Nurses and patients were walking; some exchanged words, others simply moved for the sake of movement. One patient with tangled, wiry hair kept fidgeting with his toenail. Another skulked back and forth, engaged in a heated conversation with his sworn nemesis, who was, in fact—as one of Krane's coworkers tried to convince him—nothing more than the patient's shadow.

As his eyes moved a little farther down the long stretch of hallway, they found a woman hitting her head up against the wall outside the public restroom, for the moment unwatched by anyone but Krane. She then reached into her pants, and her hand emerged full of feces. She began rubbing it on the wall then smelling it. The motion repeated. A guard took notice and came toward her, but when he did, she turned violent, clawing at his neck with her filthy hands until a group of orderlies rushed to his aid.

Krane took it all in with a mixture of disdain and understanding. The mind was a tricky creature, Morpheus was teaching him.
 

“I thought you'd react the same as I had. As I do, come to think of it. But why is all of this so screwed up? We deal with madness day in and day out. You'd think we'd become desensitized by it all the same. But there's still something in us that looks at a girl frolicking in her own excrement and labels it nuts.”

“They're misplaced, that's all. Insanity is a trick the mind plays on us. If w-we-we let it play too long, we g-get-get lost.”

“Yeah, we do, don't we? Makes me think, you know. They're all like little children. Uncontrolled, little children.”

Krane felt the expectation that he should agree, but he didn't fully.

“Manny, I'm aware your little underworld is a slightly different animal. Up here it's pure chaos.” Hoven sipped his drink. “And outside this facility isn't any different.” He pointed in the direction of the nearest highway a few miles up the road.

Krane remained attentive. That's what men like Hoven wanted—to be listened to, heard.
 

“You see, I've been meaning to talk to you, on a personal level, for quite some time now. You've been here for several years, yet we don't get all that much face time, do we?”

The doctor shook his head.

Hoven rubbed his chin. “Let me be blunt. What exactly is it you think you're doing down there in the Sanctuary?”

Krane kept quiet.

 
“You're probably thinking you're trying to discover new miracles. The scientific explanation for why there are unnatural phenomena in our seemingly natural world. How is it possible that some boy can summon flames from inside his body? This is the question you want answered, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“But not me. We have the Source, Manny. We've already cracked that egg and made ourselves an omelet. So where is it all going? Where will it end?”

“I-I-I do-do-don't know.”

“Wrong answer. You know more than anyone. There's always more. Always.”

Krane circled around back to his seat. Hoven's eyes lingered on the window, or better, the weak links below.

Silence. After a long wait, “We're on the brink of a regime change, Manny. Can you feel it? The movement is happening.
All around us.
I can practically taste it. We've been close for years, and now the madness will all collide. Change is coming, make no mistake.”

Krane hated when Hoven spoke of the future. The old man took a sick pleasure in it.

 
“We have the power controlled, for now, and we're studying it further. Providence. Destiny.
In the palm of my hand.
Feels invigorating. After all, what's the use in having a god if he never shows up and gives you what you want?”

Krane barely chuckled.

“Well, Doctor, our one goal is to replicate what we've begun.
To create.
These creatures hold the key to a future mankind has needed since the Almighty, in his
infinite
wisdom
, thought it prudent to baptize the human race with a little rain.”

Krane rubbed his thumbnail inside the chipping grooves of one of his teeth.

“We are so close to stepping beyond the boundaries your mentor left behind
.
But this is only the beginning. Just think twice before becoming like that old man. No attachments. No excuses…”

“No return.”

The left side of Hoven's face slid up into a half grin. “Right. A man after my own heart.”

Krane's stomach sank at such hollow words.

“As I was saying, Manny
,
we are getting closer to eradicating the imperfections. These abilities we bring to light aren't to be squandered. We are perfecting the gene in them, yes we are. Slow but sure. We're not ready yet, though. We're close, but we are still like them out there, little children—the weak links. We must be ready when it comes time. And when we are—” he sipped the last of the liquor “—all of this will be a blink.”

Krane had noticed Saul Hoven's sunken shoulders before, but now they seemed to slouch even more. In his old age, he was becoming like a vulture with a short spine. His hair was cropped around the ears, and crept wearily toward the top of his scalp to form a neatly brushed
flat-top
. Lines started at each side of his nose and snaked down to the corners of his mouth, forcefully. Hoven's eyes had a sick glow to them too, a look of possession, like a king gloating over a kingdom of plagued rejects.
Incurable, belligerent—a living dead.
Krane knew it was brilliant after all to have constructed the Sanctuary beneath this unshakable façade.

Krane scratched at his neck, and afterward, rubbed the bottoms of his long fingernails on his pants. “I s-sometimes wonder, sir, if there is an end,” he said.

“Just do what you do, Manny. Do what your mentor taught you, pathetic waste that he was.”

“He w-wasn't a waste,” Krane barely whispered.
 

Hoven didn't even acknowledge the comment. “You know, Manny, I never believed I'd see the day when human men became gods. But that day is coming quicker than we know. The Good Book is right, I gather. The world isn't what it used to be. Not anymore. The skies and the grounds are old and tired of us. We've slipped. We've strayed. We're zombies, like them. We're looking to start over. We're looking for a second chance.”

“From us?”

“From us,” Hoven said definitively.

Krane's eyes grew heavy, the silence of the moment calming him briefly. Hoven could conjure purpose all he wanted, but months had been spent and there was little to call successful. The dreams weren't delivering the sort of promise he knew his mentor had envisioned. They were too sporadic, too jumbled. They didn't explain enough. What was he missing? What could he do differently?