Singularity (23 page)

“No, the false wall was here. I noticed the inside proportions didn’t match the outside one day and measured when no one was around. My father was an architect, so I know a little about buildings. Out of curiosity I cut a hole in the wall and found the space. I’m not sure if it was a mistake or purposely built. Thought it might come in handy, so I covered the hole with the plywood. No one knows about it but me.”

Sullivan rubbed his eyes, and there was nearly no difference in his sight as he blocked out his vision. “Why? What’s this place for?”

Everett
sighed. “I guess you could call it my thinking room. I come here sometimes after shifts, sometimes during, and just sit and go over everything that’s in my mind. My memory’s kind of bad, so I write everything down in those journals over there.”

Sullivan’s head involuntarily turned toward the stack of books, although he couldn’t make them out. “I don’t understand. What do you write down?”

“Things that might help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“Help me find my brother.”

Silence hung between them, as thick as the darkness. The wheels of Sullivan’s mind spun for a moment, and then caught. “
Everett
, what’s going on here?”

He heard the other man shift on the floor, into what he could only guess was a more comfortable position. “My brother Alex—well, my half brother, I should say, same mother, different fathers—went missing here a year and a half ago. He was in corrections just like me. This was his first position. He got into the program about five years after I did. He was like that since we were young, always following me around, trying to do what I did. I thought he’d grow out of it, but—”
Everett
stopped. Sullivan couldn’t tell if he was considering his thoughts or fighting to keep his voice steady.

“He was so proud when he got the call for the job here. We went out and celebrated. I was working at the state penitentiary in
Iowa
at the time. I got a call a month later from the local police, saying that Alex hadn’t shown up for work one evening. That fuckup
Jaan
you met earlier said he must have run off on his own. I didn’t buy it for a minute. Alex was
dedicated,
he got top marks in his graduating class. He loved being in corrections. He wouldn’t just walk away from his first break for a woman or another opportunity, like everyone said. I knew him. Something happened to him and I had to find out. Have to find out.”
Everett
’s voice faded away and was replaced with the renewed tapping of rain on the metal roof above their heads.

“So you came looking for him,” Sullivan said, waiting and listening to
Everett
’s steady breathing.

“Yeah.
We have different last names and no one knows me around here, so I used that as an advantage. I know his disappearance has something to do with this place, I felt it the moment I saw it for the first time. Something’s wrong here.”

“It’s too quiet,” Sullivan offered.

“
Yes,
and the guards themselves are strange. I’ve only met a few of them that acted really normal, and they were brand-new like me. The personnel are cliquey and closed off. The warden’s the only one that’s been truly honest and forthright with me. I had seniority when I transferred here, so I started higher than most others and became Andrews’s right hand. Like I said before, any information I found concerning Alex I wrote down in my journals and kept them out here. The shed’s close and relatively safe, so it doesn’t raise any suspicions.”

“Have you found any information about your brother’s whereabouts?” Sullivan asked.

Everett
shifted on the floor again. “No.
Nothing.
It’s like he dropped off the face of the earth.”

Sullivan shook his head, Barry’s face flashing through his mind. “Have you done any research to see if this has happened before?
Any other disappearances of employees or inmates?”

“Yes, I checked. One other guard vanished about five years ago, a woman named Susan James. Almost the same situation as Alex, and there’s something else.” Sullivan heard the guard fumble for something in the dark, and then the flashlight came back on, shielded by
Everett
’s palm. “The top journal over there, there’s a newspaper clipping inside of it.”

Sullivan turned in the cramped space and pulled the uppermost journal from the pile. Inside the cover was a folded article from
USA Today
, dating four months earlier. A smiling picture of a balding middle-aged man in a dark suit hung above bold text that read
Nuclear
physicist still missing
. Sullivan scanned the article below, which named the man in the picture as Dr. Arnold Bolt.

“He went missing from a US Department of Energy conference in
Minneapolis
four months ago. His hotel room had been broken into and he was gone.”

Sullivan studied the article for a few moments in the dim light before tilting his face up to
Everett
’s. “What does this have to do with what’s happening now?”

“A few days after that article came
out,
I swear I saw two guards leading the man in that picture into the basement of the prison.”
Everett
punctuated the end of the sentence by snapping the LED off again, leaving Sullivan to blink at the eclipsing darkness.

“You saw him?”

“I think so. I just caught a quick glimpse of him as Bundy and Johnson led him downstairs. For some reason his face rung a bell, and then I knew why. I’d seen it in that paper only a couple days before.”

“Did you follow them, see where they put him?”

“Not right away. I realized who he was a few hours later, and when I went down to the solitary level, there was no one there.”

Sullivan rubbed the newspaper between his fingers, the rasping sound barely audible above the constant patter above them.

Everett
’s voice came out of the dark again, startling Sullivan with its raw emotion. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask before I go completely nuts: what the fuck was inside Amanda? I mean, Jesus, I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, and I killed her. I shot her in the head.”

Sullivan heard the panic rising in the other man’s voice, hysteria begging to be set free. He knew the feeling well. The thoughts
so
clear as they played across the mind, over and over, faster and faster, until a person couldn’t discern what had truly happened and what hadn’t.

“
Everett
, listen to me. I don’t know what that was, but I can assure you this: that was not the woman you knew in there. That was not human in any way. There’s something inside of the staff, a parasite or something. It was inside
Fairbend
and Shelly too, and I think it’s all connected to Alvarez’s murder.”

Sullivan listened to
Everett
’s panicked breathing and hoped the calmness in his voice would help soothe the other man. He considered telling
Everett
about being chased through the woods outside the wire, but thought it might be too much for the guard to absorb at that moment. Sullivan remembered the bottled water nearby, and after a few seconds of feeling around blindly, he found the topmost case, which had an opening in the plastic wrapping. He pulled two bottles free, which were surprisingly cool, and turned back to
Everett
.

“Here,
have
some water,” Sullivan said, holding one bottle out in the darkness. The guard reached for it and took it from his hand. Sullivan opened his bottle and tipped it to his lips, savoring the feeling of the liquid on his parched tongue. After a moment, he heard
Everett
break his seal and drink also.

“Better?” Sullivan asked.

“I think so,”
Everett
finally answered. His voice was still shaky but had lost the edge of distress. “Christ, what’s going on here? Are we both losing our minds?”

“I wish. I could have convinced myself earlier that I was, but now that you’ve seen the same thing, that theory doesn’t hold up anymore.”

“What do we do now? I just killed a woman, and we don’t know who we can trust.”

Sullivan drained the rest of his water and set the container on the floor. “We need to get help. Do you have a cell phone?”

“
Dammit
! No, I left it inside. Forgive me, but I’m not going back in to get it.”

Sullivan snorted. “Don’t blame you.”

“This fucking rain!”
Everett
said.

Sullivan tried to sort all of the events of the past days into separate pieces and align them into a semblance of pattern or repetition. After straining against the unreality of it all, he sighed and let his thoughts fall back into the jumbled mess that they became without strict concentration. It was as if he were trying to assemble a puzzle in midair, and just when a picture began to take shape, the pieces would crumble apart and he would have to start over.

“I suppose we could try getting into
New Haven
without being seen. See if their communications are still down,” Sullivan offered.

Everett
breathed out a long hiss of air. “Yeah, that’s probably our best bet. Hand me another bottle of water before we go, the vending machine inside was out when I checked and I didn’t get a chance to come out here today.”

Sullivan began to reach for the container of bottles when he stopped, his vision locking on the place where
Everett
’s words came from. “You only drink bottled water?”

“Yeah, every time I’ve tried to drink the well water from Singleton I get an allergic reaction. It happened the first day I was here. I took a sip of water from one of the fountains and my throat almost closed up. I got dizzy and lightheaded and had trouble sleeping. I couldn’t figure it out, until I took a drink again the next day. I asked the warden about it, and he thought it might be the higher iron content in the soil.”

Sullivan swallowed a lump in his throat and felt his heartbeat speed up. “Did you have any dreams that night after you drank the water?”

Silence met his question, and before
Everett
spoke Sullivan knew the answer. “How did you know?”

“Because the night Barry disappeared I had one. It was so vivid it felt real.”

“The barren land full of smoke and dust?”

It was Sullivan’s turn to be dumbstruck. “We had the same dream.”

“Did you see it? Did you see what was over the edge of the cliff?”
Everett
asked. His voice was thin and full of holes where his words became whispers.

Sullivan shivered despite the warm air around them. “Not really, but I was afraid.”

“What the fuck is happening?”
Everett
asked again.

Sullivan was about to reply when a memory from the day before surfaced like a body in a swamp. The straitjacketed mental patient in the hallway of
New Haven
, the man’s
breath
hot against his throat. Words, quiet and only for him to hear:
Don’t drink the water.

Sullivan shot to his feet, and he heard
Everett
recoil in surprise. “Let’s go,” Sullivan said.

Everett
stood but didn’t move toward the makeshift doorway. “Where are we going?
New Haven
?”

“Yes,” Sullivan said. “There’s someone there that has answers for us.”

==

The water was much higher than when Sullivan walked the road that morning. Its surface rippled in the night air with the dropping rain from the canopy of trees. It licked and talked only a foot from the edge of the road, and Sullivan estimated it would cover the ground he and Everett walked on well before daybreak.

They slunk in the deepest shadows, as near to the forest as they could without getting their feet completely soaked. Every so often they would stop and listen for the sounds of pursuit, footsteps behind or in front of them. At these times Sullivan would stare off into the woods, knowing that the fence was there, wondering if something beyond it was looking back.

The gate grew out of the road before them, and
Everett
stopped a few feet from the card reader, glancing over his shoulder at Sullivan. “We should run the rest of the way. If someone’s watching the access notices in the surveillance room, they’ll see that this gate is opening. It would be good to get inside and back out of
New Haven
before they get here.”

Sullivan nodded and readied himself. His body still ached from the various bruises and cuts, but the pain sharpened his senses. Any impression of wariness was gone; his body was a battered shell of soreness but on full alert.

Everett
scanned the key across the reader. The gate lumbered to the side. “Go!” he barked.