Singularity (16 page)

With one motion he lunged forward and kicked out. Henry tried to spin to the left, the tentacles snapping angrily in the air, but wasn’t fast enough. Sullivan’s shoe caught the prisoner solidly in the solar plexus. He heard the air whoosh past the tendrils as his attacker flew backward and connected with the wall. Henry’s skull cracked audibly against the concrete, but Sullivan didn’t hesitate to see if the injury would drop him to the ground. He took two steps and dove for his handgun, catching it and rolling back lightly to his haunches in a crouch.

Henry was coming at him full bore, arms outstretched, multiple tongues finally stilled, their points all directed at Sullivan. He fired twice. The gunshots in the enclosed hallway were louder than anything he’d ever heard before. He saw two holes open in the man’s chest and matter fly out the back of Henry’s jumpsuit. The impact of the hollow-point slugs didn’t throw the prisoner backward but only stopped his forward movement. Henry stood up straight, his feet sliding together as his featureless eyes gazed at Sullivan.

Through the smoke that still curled from the barrel of the gun, Sullivan watched the prisoner topple to the side, like an ancient tree finally succumbing to gravity. Henry’s body hit the floor with a sound like a wet sack being dropped. Without taking his eyes off of the man or the things that were beginning to recede into his mouth, Sullivan stepped closer. He trained the muzzle on Henry’s head and resisted the impulse to pull the trigger again. The last few inches of the mouth-snakes retreated out of sight and Henry’s jaw closed as his eyelids slid shut over the silver eyes. One last hiss of breath, or whatever resided within the man’s body, and Henry was gone.

Sullivan felt his muscles pull excruciatingly tight and then loosen. He let out the stale breath he’d been holding since firing the shots, and saw edges of black eat at his vision before swimming away.

“Oh God,” he gasped and leaned against the wall. He turned and looked down the empty hallway. Where was everyone? Certainly they’d heard the shots. Why wasn’t an army of guards descending upon him from up above? Slowly he calmed his breathing, and made his way to the far end of the hall. After jamming on the locked handle of the door, he jerked the keycard from his pants pocket with a shaking hand, and saw the light below the reader flip from red to green. He exploded out of the hallway and ran toward the main desk.

A young officer with his hat pulled down over his eyes dozed in a chair, his feet propped on something beneath the counter.

“Hey!” Sullivan yelled, and had the presence of mind to holster his weapon as he approached. The guard started and batted his hat up his forehead. “I need
help,
I just shot a prisoner in the hallway!” Sullivan skidded to a stop, his hands grasping the corners of the large kiosk.

“What?” The guard looked at him dumbly, as if he’d never seen another person before, much less heard one speak.

“I was attacked by a prisoner in the hallway and I shot him!” Sullivan waited for something to register behind the younger man’s eyes, and when he made no move for the phone near his right hand, Sullivan reached across the desk and gripped him by the collar of his uniform. “I just killed a man in the hallway!” he yelled into the guard’s face. This got the young officer moving, and he dropped the phone twice before bringing up to his head while dialing furiously with the other hand.

Sullivan turned away from the desk as he heard the guard begin stammering into the phone for help. The clatter of feet running on the other side of the main holding door could be heard, and soon it opened, spewing out a crowd of prison officers into the lobby. Sullivan waved them toward the door on the far side of the room and walked in the same direction. His heart sank when he saw Mooring among them. Sullivan stopped just outside the door and watched as several guards filed through, their guns drawn and their eyes darting left and right. Mooring stopped a few feet from the entrance and made no move to follow the rest of the officers.

“What’s going on?” Mooring asked.

“I was attacked by Henry
Fairbend
and was forced to shoot him in the hallway. There was something—”
Inside of him,
Sullivan almost finished. Mooring raised his eyebrows under the bill of his ever-present hat. “There was something wrong with him,” Sullivan said instead. “I woke up a few minutes ago and agent Stevens was missing from our room. When I went to look for him,
Fairbend
attacked me.”

“So you shot him? You couldn’t just restrain him? Yell and wait for help?” Mooring’s eyes darkened. Sullivan detected no compassion on his face. In fact, he saw suspicion rising.

“Yell for help? No one heard the two fucking shots I fired, and I should have yelled for help?” Sullivan imagined his face becoming a warming burner on a stove, his anger twisting a knob inside him to high.

“I’m
gonna
need your weapon,” Mooring said, holding out a palm.

“Fuck off,” Sullivan replied. The words were automatic, as a snapshot of
Fairbend’s
mouth straining open to accommodate whatever had been inside him flashed through Sullivan’s mind.
Still
inside him.
Sullivan’s eyes widened. He had to warn the guards. He made a sudden move toward the door, groping for his keycard, and saw
Mooring
pull his own sidearm free. Sullivan stopped short and was about to tell the guard that the rest of his team was in trouble when the door burst open from the other side.

The guards walked back out into the lobby, their narrowed eyes taking in the scene before them. Sullivan stood grasping the plastic card, while Mooring’s handgun pointed directly at his head a few feet away. The last person to step through the door was a bleary-eyed David Andrews. The warden wore a plain blue pair of pajama pants, with a threadbare robe tied loosely around his narrow chest and shoulders. To Sullivan, the man looked ten years older than the night before.

“What’s the meaning of this? Jesus, Agent Shale. What happened to your head?” Andrews asked.

Only then did Sullivan feel the warm wetness coursing down from the left side of his head and onto his shoulder. As if in a dream, he reached up and touched the spot where he’d been driven into the wall. When he looked at his fingers, they were slick with blood.

“When
Fairbend
tackled me, I hit my head,” Sullivan said, rubbing his fingers on his slacks.

Now, it was Andrews’s turn to squint at him. The warden blinked a few times and then motioned to Mooring, who was still keenly training his weapon on Sullivan. “Did you say Henry
Fairbend
attacked you?” Andrews asked.

Sullivan nodded. “Agent Stevens is missing and when I went to look for him,
Fairbend
hit me in the hallway.”

The guards formed a circle around Andrews and Sullivan, and now they were exchanging glances, their hands hovering close to the weapons on their belts.

“I’m sorry, Sullivan, but that’s really not possible. Henry
Fairbend
died late last night from an epileptic seizure. The doctor thinks it was brought on by his prior injuries.”

The words were like a string that would not thread through the eye of a needle. As Sullivan tried to make sense of them, they slid away from him, the writhing mass in the prisoner’s mouth taking precedence until he pressed a palm to his left eye, which came away bloody.
“Dead?
Can’t be.”

“I’m afraid so. Son, maybe you should sit down,” Andrews said and pointed toward a wooden bench against the nearest wall.

Sullivan shook his head and licked his lips, realizing he still desperately needed to pee. “If he’s dead, then who’s lying in that hallway?”

Andrews shared a look with Mooring, and then turned his gaze back at Sullivan. “Son, there’s no one in the hallway.”

==

He didn’t remember brushing past the guards who tried to hold him back or scanning the key against the reader. The impossibly empty hallway became everything. He walked numbly to the spot where
Fairbend
attacked him. The red smear where his head had hit the wall was there, as well as two gleaming shell casings that lay a few feet apart. The smell of gunfire was still in the air too, a tangy scent that illuminated memories within him without effort, the cordite acting as an olfactory photo album. But none of this concerned Sullivan. What did concern him was the absence of the body he’d left lying in a gathering pool of blood.

He stared at the area where
Fairbend
had fallen. There was some blood there, but not much. Not enough for a full-grown man to have lain there after being shot twice in the solar plexus. His mind convulsed as it coughed up images of the tendrils poking from
Fairbend’s
mouth. The way they’d whipped around and searched him out. He closed his eyes and nearly cried out when a hand came to rest on his shoulder. He turned and found Andrews looking at him, concern evident in the creases beside his mouth and the furrows in his brow.

“I don’t know where he went. He was right here. He had something—”

“Sir, don’t you think we need do something about this?” Mooring interrupted from over the warden’s shoulder.

The older man stared at Sullivan as he spoke to the guard. “We will,
Everett
. Let’s get him to medical, he’s losing color. All of it’s on his shirt.”

Sullivan blinked and touched his brow again, which was still alarmingly wet. He began to say that he was all right, but stopped when the floor tilted like the deck of a ship beneath his feet.

“But sir, don’t you think he should be contained? Can’t we—”

“
Everett
, we need to get him to Amanda. Grab his arm.” Despite Andrews’s frail appearance, the man had steel in his voice, and after a moment Mooring came to Sullivan’s side and slung the agent’s arm around his shoulders. Andrews gripped Sullivan’s left bicep, and they began to walk.

The distance between the hallway and the infirmary became a blur.

Sullivan sagged at times, and kept blinking as encouraging words filtered into his ear from the warden’s side. Then, he was being laid on a bed and the ceiling came into view. Amanda’s pretty face hovered over him and a flashlight glared into his eyes. The world dimmed a little and he felt a floating sensation, as if the bed beneath him was rolling across an oiled floor. The prick of a needle brought him racing back to himself, and for a moment he wondered if he was lying in the same bed
Fairbend
had been in earlier. The thought was enough to clear the rest of his senses, and he tried to sit up while nausea did a two-step in his stomach.

“Whoa, big guy.
Let’s just lie back for a minute, shall we?” Amanda put her hands onto his bare shoulders and pressed firmly. Sullivan looked around the room, his eyes wide, but he allowed himself to be pushed back onto a soft pillow. Amanda leaned over him, surgical gloves encasing her delicate hands.

“Did I pass out?” Sullivan asked.

“I think you flickered for a second,” Amanda said. A hint of a smile played at her lips as she rattled something on a steel tray to his left. “You lost quite a bit of blood. Your temporal artery was open, and I think your black shirt hid a lot of the blood.” Her hand came back into view, holding a pair of hemostat pliers, which in turn grasped a wickedly curved needle. A length of thread hung from the dull end of the needle, and as Amanda smiled, he realized he would be feeling a little more pain before the day truly dawned.

The stitches didn’t hurt as much as he’d feared, and while Amanda cleaned up the mess of bandages and supplies beside his bed, he rubbed the area around the wound. It still felt numb and enormous, partly from the swelling, he supposed, and partly from whatever agent she had injected him with.

“Thank you,” he said, dropping his hand onto the bed.

Amanda smiled crookedly and continued putting away the unused instruments. “There’s some water on the table,” she said, motioning toward a plastic pitcher and stacked cups.

Although Sullivan’s throat burned with thirst, his bladder was currently winning the battle for his attention. “I’m going to use the bathroom,” he said, sliding off the bed and onto his bare feet. Someone had removed his shoes and socks. He glanced around the room to make sure no other guards lingered nearby. His vision doubled, and then steadied while he paused, balancing as if he were standing on a narrow beam.

“Let me help you,” Amanda said, stripping off her gloves.

“I’m good. Just needed to get my bearings,” he said, and muscled himself toward the open bathroom door to the right. Slowly, his legs began to feel like his own and the slight nausea receded.

After closing the door and releasing what felt like two gallons of blazing urine, he bent before the sink and splashed cold water onto his face. After drying off, he stared at his reflection in the harsh light of the single fluorescent. The cut on the left side of his skull was crisscrossed with fine black thread. The white scar just beneath it looked like a longer twin dressed in white. He fingered both wounds, one old, one new. What was the old comic he used to read when he was a kid?
Spy vs. Spy
? One long-faced bird-looking character dressed in black, and his counterpart in white. Now he had something akin to them on the side of his head. Scar vs. Scar.

He laughed under his breath and walked back out into the room. Amanda had finished cleaning up and was at her desk against the far wall. He stopped next to the bed and watched her. He liked the way she leaned over her work and how she braced her forehead with her left hand while her right scratched down notes on a tablet. A length of hair had fallen free of her ponytail, and he had the sudden urge to cross the room and gently tuck it back behind her ear.