Veil (50 page)

Within eleven years, Veil pervaded the world.
Veil left its footprint on every aspect of life and, for good or
bad, permanently altered the landscape of the world’s culture.
Hell, he figured, the sickeningly overwhelming majority of the
entire planet already embraced the New Veil World in such a short
amount of time. How hard was it to imagine that the tide could
eventually change regarding that one policy? How hard was it to
imagine a social shift that could one day lead to the storage of
information transferred through the Veil Network, through the Veil
process itself?

For him, it wasn’t hard to imagine that at
all, and he could not have it; he could have no part of it. Not
only was he unwilling to risk being tracked through the network, he
was doubly unwilling to have his memories or experiences accessed
through the network or, worse yet, stored in perpetuity. That could
never and as far as he was concerned, would never happen. If it
meant relegating himself to the world of the Veilgrants, there was
no way he would give up access to himself. Hell, there was still a
part of himself he didn’t want to be able to access.

It didn’t start as one of those situations
where he expected to surprise himself. Then again, he figured, if
one expected to surprise one’s self, then it was really no surprise
at all. It must only be situations like the one in which he found
himself where one could truly surprise themselves. That thought
confused him more, so he decided it was best to keep focused on the
situation at hand. There was still some work to be done. Shit, the
majority of the work had yet to be done
.

After he retrieved the keys to the lab from
the target, he opened the door, stood in the doorway and took a
quick look around. It was a lot more open than he expected. You
didn’t really see many places like that, except maybe parking
garages. One huge open space with nothing but support columns to
break up the emptiness. It looked like the entire floor simply went
unfinished. It was so open. There’s no way he could’ve worked in a
space like that; it would’ve been impossible to concentrate. Too
much hollowness and echo.

He immediately spotted the setup on the far
left-hand side of hospital’s 13
^th
floor, about halfway
between the back and where he was standing. Even if he took every
bit of equipment that was used to make up Tsay’s lab and piled it
all together, he doubted it would take up a twentieth of the entire
floor. Damn, that was a lot of wasted space. He again wondered what
the original intent was for that 13
^th
floor.

After he propped open the door, he went back
to the target’s body. It wasn’t as clean a shot as he would’ve
liked, but it did the job. He didn’t consider himself a
perfectionist, but he did like things to go a certain way; he liked
things to go as planned. Some things you couldn’t prepare
for
,
so you simply had to improvise or
accept the outcome.

The most he would’ve reasonably expected was
for the doctor to reflexively put his hand up over his face as a
futile attempt at blocking. It was the body’s natural response and
he saw it happen dozens of times. The body itself didn’t know what
was coming at it was a
bullet
; it simply knew “block.” The
most he would’ve reasonably expected was a defensive wound through
the doctor’s hand. A hand that, of course, would’ve been completely
unable to stop a bullet.

However, when the target’s right hand, which
supported him after his fall, started to slip out from under him,
he instinctually moved to brace and lift himself with his other
hand, which was still latched onto the handle of his briefcase. As
he shifted his weight onto the briefcase, it slid against the
polished concrete and out from under him. The whole thing was a set
of quick, insignificant movements, but it still managed to send the
target’s head backwards and tilted up his chin. Such insignificant
movement, but it threw the target’s head back just enough.

The bullet he intended to send straight into
the target’s forehead instead entered the target at a sharp angle
at the top of the eye-socket near the bridge of his nose. Rather
than exiting directly through the back of his head, the bullet
instead exited at an angle through the top. All that before the
target’s briefcase even flattened on the ground beside him, with
his hand still clutched onto the handle. Not at all the clean shot
he hoped for but still a shot, nonetheless. It was enough for him
to consider at least that part of the job done.

He stepped over the target’s body to retrieve
the plastic sheeting he placed next to the elevator. He spread half
of the plastic on one side of the target and left the other half
bunched-up against the body. He rolled the target onto the
spread-out section and then pulled the remaining bunched-up plastic
through from underneath. With the body completely on the sheet of
plastic, he used it to pull the target over enough to allow the
elevator doors to close automatically; the doors remained open due
to the partial obstruction caused by the target’s body.

After the elevator departed from the
13
^th
floor, he took a deep breath
.
He knew it had begun: the clock began ticking. Soon,
the elevator would open on another floor and someone would see the
mess he caused. Someone would probably scream. If it opened on the
lobby, the fat security guard he distracted earlier that
morning—with a fucking rock of all things—would have to get off his
stupid fat ass. He’d have to run over to the source of the scream
and see what the fuck was going on. The thought made him smirk.

He pulled one short end of the plastic, the
side where the target’s feet rested, and positioned the target’s
body so he could slide through the door to the lab. He took a deep
breath and
,
as quickly as he could, used
the plastic sheeting under the target’s body to drag him through
the door into the 13
^th
floor, all the way to the
target’s lab setup. When he reached the lab, he let go of the
plastic and the target’s feet hit the ground with a thud. He took a
minute to catch his breath.

The lab wasn’t really at all what he
expected. That did create a bit of a problem since, going off all
the information in the dossier, he came unprepared for disposal of
the body. The problem wasn’t a complete game ruiner, merely a
mildly frustrating inconvenience. A game changer. He could figure
something out; he dealt with worse. That was, until he heard a
groan.

“Oh you gotta be shitting me,” he said out
loud as he circled the body. He stopped when he reached the
target’s head
.

He looked pretty damn dead. Maybe it was one
of those post-mortem, creepy ass sounds some bodies made. Careful
to avoid any of the mess
,
he knelt and put
his fingers on the doctor’s neck. He detected a goddamn
motherfucking pulse.

“Damnit!” he barked into the empty floor. As
he suspected earlier, the word seemed to echo for an eternity.

He mulled over his options. Suddenly there
were two clocks working against him: one for getting his ass out of
the building as quickly as he could and one for figuring out what
the fuck to do with the not-so-dead-yet target. Why couldn’t some
people just die like they were supposed to?

There was nothing he could make use of in the
lab to assist with disposal of the body. It’s not like he expected
to come up there and find a huge vat of acid to dissolve it
in
,
or a giant wood-chipper he could use
to obliterate it into tiny pieces. Hell, all he needed was a way to
dismember and store or wrap the parts so he could deal with them
later. That was the least he expected. It was a medical lab for
christssakes
,
and he was pretty damn
inventive.

It would’ve been fucking awesome if the lab
just so happened to present a convenient way to dispose of the body
on the spot
.
However, he didn’t bank on
that and would’ve simply settled for being able to pack the body
up
,
so he could deal with it at a later
time. Like a time when there weren’t swarms of personnel trying to
figure out from where and whom that mess in the elevator had
come.

Not even a plastic tub. People would be
amazed by what some people could do with a damn plastic tub,
especially in his situation. Not only would it provide a place to
store the body but toss in the plastic sheeting to wrap the pieces
up, and he could store it
and
contain the stench of decay
effectively enough. A plastic tub and something to cut with—that
didn’t seem like asking for too much. He was willing to deal with
the mess. He did it plenty of times before.

He couldn’t simply wrap the body up in the
plastic and leave it. When he came back, he’d still have to deal
with the body, which meant unwrapping it. Or at the very least,
dismembering it while it was wrapped up. Since he’d have to wait
for rigor mortis to dissipate, the decay and stench would be
unbearable
,
and there was no way he was
going to deal with that. Nope.

No fucking way.

That was when the “barely a blip on the
radar” target groaned a second time, which led to the idea that
surprised himself.

He flashed back to a story he heard in
college about some railroad worker way back in like the 1800s or
some shit who ended up getting a metal rod shot into his head
during an explosion. Damnit, he couldn’t remember that dude’s name.
All he remembered was that the dude survived, although his
personality changed. However, what mattered to him was the dude
survived. He took another look around the lab, that time from a
different perspective, and the temporary albeit surprising solution
presented itself.

Approximately two and a half hours later, he
left the lab and pressed the button for the only operating
elevator.

The doctor was still lying on the floor in
the lab, still on the sheet of plastic. He had enough training to
make use of the life-support equipment already in the lab and he
positioned the machines next to the doctor. Based on what he
remembered from the story about the dude who survived the metal rod
in his head, he assumed something about having the rod stuck in his
head somehow helped save him. Maybe it sealed off the arteries or
whatever and stopped the bleeding.

Who knows
?

He figured it couldn’t hurt to try, so he
removed a metal pole from one of the examining tables and shoved it
through the wound in the doctor’s head. He left some sticking out
from both ends. He cleaned up the wound some. He only cleaned as
much as he felt like cleaning, which wasn’t very much. He wrapped
gauze around some of the target’s head and covered as much as he
felt like covering, which also wasn’t very much. What the fuck did
he care, since there was a pole sticking through the bastard’s
head.

It didn’t necessarily matter how long the
target lasted like that; he merely hoped he lasted long enough to
avoid being forced to cut up a horribly decaying corpse within the
next few days. If the target only lived through the night, that was
better than nothing. On the elevator ride down, he tried as hard as
he could to remember the name of that damn dude from the
railroad.

It was driving him crazy and he laughed at
himself. He got out of the elevator, walked straight through the
main entrance of the hospital
,
and headed
to his car. When he got in his car, he took his cellphone out of
the glove compartment and, still unable to remember the dude’s
name, opened the internet and searched the term “railroad head
injury.”

“Phineas Gage!” he shouted and smacked the
steering wheel. He laughed at himself for thinking he’d ever be
able to pull that name out of his ass. He clicked on the first
result and started reading. He discovered that he was dead wrong;
the rod didn’t remain lodged in Phineas Gage’s head. In fact, it
shot straight through the man’s head and, according to the article,
landed thirty yards away.

He punched the steering wheel.

“Shit!” he grumbled as he looked out the
windshield and up toward the top four floors of the hospital, which
was all he could see from where he was parked.

Oh well, he figured, nice try anyway.