Frankenstorm: Deranged (5 page)

“Aside from the guys in the cafeteria, who are we missing so far?”

“Nobody’s seen Bursell and Castillo. I mean, not since we
got
here.”

“Anybody know where they went?”

“They came in through the tunnel, and when the others came up, they stayed down there to look around. And nobody’s seen ’em since.”

“Jesus Christ. Bursell’s pretty easily distracted. Go down there and see if you can find them. Bring them back up here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you don’t want to go alone, pick someone to take with you.”

“I don’t mind going alone.”

“Report back to me when you’re done. And stay the hell out of the subbasement.”

“Well, they were going to check that out, too.”

“Bursell and Castillo?”

“Yes, sir. Those were your orders.”

“Well, on second thought, they weren’t very good ones. If you can’t find them in the basement, come back up here and I’ll send a couple more guys with you. I might even go myself. If what I’ve been told is true, I want plenty of cameras down there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And listen to me, Delgado. If you find anyone locked up down there, do
not
let them out.”

“Yes, sir.”

Fara thought he sounded like a boy, a teenager. When he hurried away, he moved with eagerness and youth.

Emilio returned carrying a large case of individually wrapped pairs of latex gloves. He put the cardboard box on the floor beside Fara and Ollie joined them as he tore through the tape and cardboard to open it.

“No one should deal with an open wound without a pair of these on,” Fara said. “The gloves aren’t a guarantee, but they’re a good safety precaution.”

“They’re already wearing gloves.”

“Then they should wear these under them.”

“I’ll make sure of it.” He took a package of gloves from the box, turned to his men, and held it up. “These are latex gloves. You are not to go near blood or an open wound without a pair of these on your hands. Listen very closely to this because your life depends on it. When dealing with the homeless pe—uh, the people we came here to—the, uh, test subjects, when dealing with the test subjects, do not, I repeat,
do not
get their blood on your skin. They are carrying a deadly virus. If their blood gets on your skin, you will contract the virus.”

He lowered his head a moment, cleared his throat, then continued.

“This isn’t a garden variety virus. It was manufactured by the fine folks from Vendon Labs to be used as a biological weapon. The test subjects were infected with the virus. We released the test subjects. Now we, uh . . . we don’t have any choice. We have to kill them. To be safe, I want everybody to put on a pair of these latex gloves under the gloves you’re wearing. Once you’ve done that, Rubens, I need you to go down that corridor there. I’m not sure who it is, but somebody was bitten and he’s wounded down there and needs some first aid.”

Rubens peered into the black cave that was the corridor Ollie had indicated and said, “He’s just bitten? Well . . . can’t he come here?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine, quit talking about me like I’m not here.” The voice came out of that dark cave, and it was followed shortly by one of Ollie’s masked men.

“Aguilar?” Ollie said.

“Yeah.”

“You were bitten?”

“On the arm.”

“Did it break the skin?”

“Break the—well, yeah. Why?” He stared at Ollie a moment, then said, “Why, Ollie? Should I be worried?”

“Uh . . . c’mon over here and let’s talk,” Ollie said, waving him over.

Emilio moved to Ollie’s side. “You want us to stick around, or should we go back to the office?”

“You’ve got guns, why don’t you stick around and help us? We could use all the help we can get.” He nodded toward Fara. “And she knows her way around this place, which would be a
big
help.”

“Okay. What kind of help do you need?”

Ollie laughed and shook his head as if it were a stupid question. “The hell do you think? We need help killing them.”

Jeremiah Delgado was happy to be doing something by himself. He was happy to be going down a dark stairwell to the dark basement of an abandoned mental hospital because it meant he wasn’t in a drunk tank, or an alley, or a gutter.

He was not a veteran like most of Ollie’s men. Delgado was nineteen and had been rescued by Ollie at a low point in his life. His mother had given him an ultimatum: Get out of the gang or don’t come home, and if he tried to come home while he was still gangbanging, she would shoot him. Then she changed the locks on the doors. He didn’t want to be in a gang anymore, but he was afraid to quit. He’d known guys who quit and got killed for it. His mother wouldn’t let him in the house and would start shooting at him if he showed up, he didn’t want to go back to the gang, and he had nowhere else to go. So he went to the streets and just blended in and disappeared. Ollie found him in a sweep of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and brought him to Eureka. For that, Ollie had Delgado’s undying loyalty. He also had a valuable resource in Delgado, who Ollie said was the smartest, sharpest, most intelligent person he had brought to the compound. His sixth-grade teacher had told Delgado that he had something called an eidetic memory, and ever since Ollie learned that fact, he’d called Delgado his brain.

The stairs opened on a corridor in the basement. The door was bent on its hinges and hung all the way open, unable to close. Delgado stopped and listened.

Somewhere in the dark, he heard voices. Or was it just one voice? It was coming from the left. He ambled down the narrow corridor.

“Hey, Bursell! Castillo! Ollie wants you guys up top.”

He stopped and listened again. The voice was closer, talking fast. Sometimes it sounded like more than one voice. Complaining, angry voices, closer still and getting closer.

Delgado kept walking.

 

 

Kaufman had no luck finding von Pohle’s car, but he found the new road that led to Springmeier. It had been cut off of Ogden Pass, a road that was closed years ago because, just a mile along, it had slid into a ravine and wasn’t there anymore.

While he was searching for von Pohle’s car, he’d had dispatch look up Ollie’s cell phone number for him. If he had a problem finding the road or getting onto the grounds, he would give Ollie a call. But Kaufman preferred to show up unannounced.

Large tree branches flew through the air and bounced across the road. Unidentifiable debris swirled and danced madly at high speeds through the night. There were moments when it felt like the wind was about to lift Kaufman’s car off the ground and toss it into the night like a toy. He drove slowly, but his wipers were on high, flapping back and forth at a blur.

The gravel road curved and his headlights passed over the hospital’s old boiler house, a dark, sagging structure that had already lost part of its roof. It was such a weary-looking building that Kaufman doubted it would survive the night. Parked near the boiler house were three empty vans.

Sudden movement in his headlight beams made him step on the brake pedal. The car jerked to a halt as a slender figure stumbled in from the right, struggling against the wind, then stopped and squinted at Kaufman. A skinny, black, androgynous figure with short hair, wearing a blanket around the hunched shoulders and some kind of long, baggy T-shirt, or something—

Is that a hospital gown? Oh, Jesus, a
hospital
gown? That can’t be good.

—which was now soaked and clinging like skin. The slight frame wavered against the force of the blowing storm, the bare feet shifting position. Then the figure seemed to lose interest and stalked farther into the light, crossing the gravel road with head low, shoulders slightly hunched.

“What the hell now,” he muttered as he put the car in park and yanked the parking brake. He opened the door, put one foot on the ground and stood with his right foot in the car and both arms on the car, one leaning on the top edge of the door and the other on the roof. The wind sounded like a thunderstorm in his ears. He reached into the car, flipped a switch on the steering wheel, hit a button on the console under the dashboard, then grabbed the radio’s mike. His voice was amplified over the speaker between the roof lights, which were now flashing red and blue. “This is the sheriff. Are you injured? Do you need an ambulance?”

Kaufman still couldn’t determine the sex, but the person was talking quite rapidly to him- or herself. He noticed the hands. They closed into fists, released, the fingers extended rigidly for a moment, then clenched into fists again. That was repeated over and over as he watched, then the arms came up and the hands clawed furiously at the air, as if scratching someone’s eyes out. They were thick wrists. He decided he was dealing with a very skinny man.

He lifted the mike to his mouth and depressed the button again, but he didn’t speak. He looked beyond the skinny man crossing the road and saw the hospital’s gate. It stood open outward, but not quite all the way, and it was bent and twisted.

A voice shouted from Kaufman’s right and he turned to see another figure similar to the first one—thin, wearing a denim coat over what might have been a flimsy hospital gown—was pointing at him. Behind him, another one appeared from a door in the boiler house.

Why are they coming out of the boiler house? Why are they
in
the boiler house? What the hell is going on here?

The man who was pointing at him was also shouting at him, but Kaufman couldn’t make out the words. Suddenly, he quickened his pace and when he was on the verge of breaking into a jog, Kaufman noticed that the man was not simply pointing at him, he was pointing a
gun
at him.

Kaufman moved to duck into the car a fraction of a second before the gun fired.

The bullet struck the windshield and a tiny web of cracks appeared, and Kaufman dropped the mike as he pulled his leg into the car. Then they were running toward him, both of the figures approaching from the boiler house. The one with the gun kept his arm extended and fired again as Kaufman pulled the door closed.

A crashed gate, strange people wandering around in a hurricane—there was definitely some kind of situation at Springmeier, and he needed backup immediately. He started the engine, then reached for the mike. It wasn’t in its holder. He’d dropped it as he was getting into the car. The cord stretched down to his legs. He clumsily reached for it, but the guy with the gun was now in front of the car and aiming at him.

Kaufman put the car in gear and slammed his foot on the accelerator.

The man jumped onto the hood as the car lurched forward and for the first time, Kaufman heard what he was shouting.

“—not gonna let you get away with it, you cocksucker! I saw her first, you son of a bitch!
I saw her first!
” He looked and sounded like an escaped mental patient, but this hadn’t been a functioning mental hospital in over a decade.

Kaufman remembered the voice of the woman who identified herself as Dr. Fara McManus talking about the virus they’d created and what it would do.

Kaufman hit the brake and the man on the hood slid off as another one began to pound on the passenger side window with something hard and heavy. Kaufman suspected a rock.

The one who’d crossed the street had turned back and was pointing at him, glaring at him through the side window, and shouting at him in a hoarse, roaring fury.

He hit the accelerator again. The car surged forward and humped over something on the ground, first the left front tire, then the left rear tire. Up and over, up and over.

“Shit,” Kaufman muttered, his voice tight, as he thought of things like being fired, or charged, or sued, and the inevitable crucifixion in the media no matter what happened.

He reached down with his left hand and tried to find the mike. The curled cord ended at the bottom of the door. The mike was hanging out of the car.

“Shit!” he shouted.

Suddenly, two fists were pounding on the windshield and an upside-down face was screaming at him and suddenly Kaufman, whose nerves had been stretched tight, was screaming, too, and the car swerved to the right.

The patrol car crashed into the guardhouse.

 

 

“Bursell! Castillo!”

They had to be able to hear him because Delgado could hear them. Or him, if it was just one voice. He still couldn’t tell. But it was closer.

He’d passed a lot of doors, closed and opened. The beam of his headlamp finally fell on a wall up ahead as he approached a T intersection. The voices were coming from the left. He rounded the corner.

A face lunged toward him out of the dark, a face so white and stark that Delgado first thought it was a mime. Another emerged right behind it, and a hand holding a knife slashed across him diagonally, and Delgado felt the blade cut his skin as he jogged clumsily backwards and started to fall, mouth yawning open silently, arms flailing—

—and the hand slashed again and Delgado felt the blade cut, and he got his footing and threw himself to the left. Then he was running back the way he’d come.

They were behind him, chasing him, shouting angrily, cursing, even growling like animals, and they were fast, their bare feet slapping on the tile floor, fast enough to get closer. And closer. He fumbled for his gun as he ran, but his hand seemed to be a piece of dead meat at the end of his arm.

He came to the stairwell door and pushed through it hard, then spun around and threw himself against it to shut it. It wouldn’t close. His two pursuers hit the door on the other side and shoved, gibbering furiously.

Delgado looked over his shoulder at the stairs. As soon as he stepped away from that door, they were coming through. He unholstered his Ruger, steeled himself, then turned and ran up the stairs, shouting, hoping they would hear him up there.

“They’re down here!” he shouted. “Down here!”

He made it up the first half, grabbed the rail and spun himself around to go up the second half, hearing their feet behind him. As he rounded that rail, he raised his right hand, aimed the gun in their direction and fired once, twice. There was a scream of pain behind him. He didn’t stop moving. Up, up, his shoes clopped on each step.

“They’re down here! Down here!”

Hands on the backs of his legs, grabbing his pant legs, clutching.

He was almost at the top, he could see the door up there, the door that opened on the corridor that led to Dr. McManus’s office to the left and the gathering at the intersection on the right.

“Down here!”

A hand got a solid hold and pulled hard.

Delgado tripped on the stairs and went down.

“Down here!”

They were on him and he felt the knife entering his back, his arm, his neck, again and again, the fist hammering, the blade stabbing into him—

“Down here!”

—pulling out, stabbing in, pulling out, stabbing . . .