No shelter, p.9
No Shelter, page 9
He stopped and stared at the mess while he caught his breath. It wasn’t enough.
Hank stopped breathing when an explosion of sound came from somewhere outside the ward. It sounded like gunshots.
Gunshots again. Am I hallucinating? Or is something happening?
He went to the window in the front of the room. The reinforced glass looked out on the round ward outside, with a small, derelict nurses’ station in the center, like the hole of a donut. All around the large circle were rooms like his with windows looking out on each other. To Hank’s right, an archway opened on a short hall, and at the end of that hall was a door, but he couldn’t see it from that angle.
That was where the sound was coming from. And it was gunfire. There were a few pops, some shouting and then the loud, sustained sound of a machine gun, followed by a big crash. Then two men dressed in black and wearing ski masks, each with a pistol in hand and one with a compact black machine gun strapped to his shoulder, rushed into the ward.
Hank felt weak and leaned against the wall as he looked out the window, trying to retreat as much as possible so they wouldn’t notice him. Still thinking he might be imagining things, he rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of both hands, then looked out the window again.
They talked quietly, then one of them reached beneath his black jacket, still wet from the rain outside, and produced a small camera.
Had they come to execute him? Torture him? Experiment on him?
Fear and adrenaline coursed through him and swirled with his growing anger, and his lips peeled back over his yellow teeth as his entire body tensed. Hank would not go without a fight.
5
Tyler Bursell adjusted his headlamp as he and Edgar Castillo descended the narrow, dark staircase that went below the basement.
They had entered the hospital through the underground tunnel from the boiler house. While the others were to go upstairs and spread throughout the building to look for the missing homeless people, Tyler and Castillo had been instructed to stay behind and explore the basement. The first thing they found was a room with a large rectangular window that looked into a much smaller room with tile on the walls and floor, a drain in the center of the floor, and cameras mounted on the ceiling.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Castillo had said.
“Me, neither.”
They moved through the entire basement but found nothing else of interest except the stairs to the subbasement. But the stairway was dark and the light switch by the door produced nothing, so they turned on their LED headlamps.
Ty hadn’t been with Ollie as long as Castillo (who was in his thirties) had, about ten years ahead of Ty, but he was every bit as loyal. He came home from Afghanistan to learn that his wife was divorcing him to move in with his best friend, he couldn’t get a job, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think straight because of all the noise in his head, and he couldn’t get through the iron bureaucracy of the Veterans Administration to get the help he needed. Once he started self-medicating, his descent was swift and blurred by drugs and alcohol. During a brief moment of clarity, he realized he was living on the street, that he’d become one of those crazy-looking street people he always tried to avoid. He would have died that way if it hadn’t been for Ollie.
Ollie had a friend who ran a rehab clinic in Eureka and all of his addicted recruits were sent there, including Ty. Once he’d gotten through the nightmare of withdrawal, which would have been much worse had it not been for that doctor and his staff, Ty was presented with a choice. Go back to life on the street or commit to “Monk’s Militia” until he got back on his feet and could function on his own. There was no conflict for Ty, who gladly signed up. Ollie helped him clear up his problems with the VA and he was able to get the medical attention he needed. He got back into shape while going through Ollie’s training program and working at and around the compound, and he had a reason to wake up in the morning.
“Hope there’s lights down here,” Castillo said. They’d been speaking in whispers since they’d arrived.
Grit crunched under their feet on the concrete stairs. At the bottom, a doorway opened on the right. Castillo found the light switches and started flipping them, but nothing happened.
“You gotta figure,” Ty said, “this place has been abandoned for a decade, and who knows how long before that they stopped using the subbasement for anything?”
They walked over an uneven dirt floor as their headlamps cast light across the pipes overhead, the concrete floor someone had never finished pouring, the rusted old file cabinets against one wall.
An explosion of squeaks and squeals made Ty freeze and look down in time to catch several long, skinny rats dashing away from his light and running for cover in some dark crevice or hole.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Ty shouted as a he stumbled backwards, away from the fleeing rodents.
“Shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Hey, the Lord shouldna made rats. I fuckin’ hate rats.”
Castillo turned off his headlamp and told Ty to do the same.
“What the fuck for? Didn’t you see them rats?”
Castillo reached over and turned off Ty’s headlamp, and a moment later, he saw why.
On the other side of the spacious subbasement, beyond the pipes and pillars and long-abandoned crates, a faint glow came through a small square glass.
They turned their headlamps back on and unholstered their Ruger SR40s, then headed in the direction of the light. Things skittered away from them in the dark outside the reach of their headlamp beams. The light came through a small window in a door. When he looked through it, Ty saw a clean room with a tile floor, a table, some chairs, a refrigerator, a sink and counter. But that room was dark. The light was coming from an open door on the other side of that room.
Ty and Castillo held very still and listened. There was a sound coming from somewhere beyond the door, and probably beyond the door through which light was shining. Someone was wailing, possibly a woman’s voice, a high and hopeless wail of misery.
Ty expected the door to be locked and was surprised when Castillo opened it with ease on the first try. They turned off their headlamps as they entered the room. Castillo led the way in, and as they passed through the room with the table and chairs, he gestured to the right.
Ty saw the half-open door Castillo had pointed out and went to take a look. It was a small, empty bathroom. By the time he was done, Castillo was already passing through the doorway into the lit room, and a moment later, he groaned, “Oh, Jesus! Oh, my God Jesus Christ!”
Ty hurried to join him.
6
“This is a bad idea, Ollie,” Emilio said.
“No names, please.”
“No names? Fuck no names, Ollie. You lost my courteous side when you did that,” Emilio said, pointing at Dr. McManus, who lay on the lumpy couch in her office. He’d put her there after Ollie had knocked her unconscious and placed a cold cloth on her forehead. She had a bump just above her temple, but it wasn’t bleeding too badly. Emilio stood beside the couch, facing Ollie and feeling his anger growing. “Which was totally fucking unnecessary, by the way. What the hell was that, hitting her with your fucking gun? She was trying to tell you—”
“Hey, hey,” Ollie said quietly, stepping up close to Emilio. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because you know us, you’re one of us. You’re not. You’re still on the wrong end of the gun, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re not here to take prisoners—we’re here to free ’em.”
“And you’d best put the brakes on that idea because they’re not prisoners, they’re test subjects. Stop and think about what that means, Ollie. I don’t think you have yet. I don’t know exactly what they’re working on, but I know it’s some kind of weapon, a biological weapon, and it’s probably contagious. I don’t know how it spreads—or even if it spreads because I don’t know the details yet, but she was giving them to me when you and your posse rode into town.”
“What kind of weapon?” Ollie said. His eyes had narrowed, though, and Emilio could tell he was frowning beneath the ski mask.
“You need me to say it again? I don’t know the specifics. But I know what I’ve told you. A bioweapon. Are you starting to do the math?”
Ollie nodded slowly.
“Then what the hell you waiting for? Can’t you—”
“I know the specifics,” Fara said.
Emilio turned to Fara as she sat up on the couch, conscious now, but groggy. The cold cloth dropped off her head to the floor.
“It’s a virus,” she said, looking at Ollie. “It alters behavior.”
Hoping no one noticed, Emilio reached into his pocket and removed his phone, holding it down at his side as he started recording. Then he slipped it into his shirt pocket, hoping it would pick up their conversation better there than in his pants pocket. He was afraid if he kept holding it, someone would notice.
“The virus creates and maintains a state of violent rage and paranoia,” she continued. “It’s not airborne, but it’s not like most blood-borne viruses. An exchange of bodily fluids isn’t necessary. You get the blood of a carrier on your skin, the virus is absorbed quickly.”
“Through the skin?” Emilio said, frowning. He didn’t think that was possible.
“Yes, through the skin. That’s what sets this apart. The virus works swiftly. It will turn you into an enraged psychopath. If you let those people out, you will let the virus out.”
Emilio turned to Ollie. “Holy shit, man, stop ’em.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m calling.” Ollie reached into a rear pocket, took out a cell phone, thumbed a couple of buttons, and put it to his ear.
Emilio realized how fidgety he was. He was shifting his weight back and forth from foot to foot, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. He went to the couch and sat down beside Fara.
“How you doing, Dr. McManus?” he said.
Blood was drying in her hair and on her temple. “Call me Fara, for Christ’s sake. We’ve bonded.”
“How’s that cut?”
“It’s nothing. He nicked me. But he gave me one hell of a headache.”
“I was gonna beat him up for it.”
“Oh, no, please, not in the office. You’ll break something.”
Emilio looked over at Ollie, who was pacing across the room, talking quietly but urgently into the phone. He stopped abruptly. “Hello? Hello? Jesus Christ, what the hell is—” He took the phone from his ear and switched it to speaker, then turned toward Emilio and Fara.
Two sounds: gunfire and screaming.
7
There was no shouting, no rushing around—one look at those guns and nobody moved. Corcoran was vaguely relieved by that, but he was too busy trying to control his own terror to give it much thought.
“Who’s in charge?” one of the masked men said.
Corcoran had to swallow a gasp when he saw each of the people at his party point a finger at him without hesitation.
The man who had spoken stepped over to Corcoran and aimed the gun at his face. “Who are you?”
He stammered his name.
“You’re in charge of this place?”
Mouth hanging open, he nodded.
“Where are the homeless people you’ve taken off the street?”
Corcoran snapped his mouth shut. He couldn’t stir up enough saliva to swallow. He kept his eyes on the gunman, but he heard the rustle of movement that passed through the small group as everyone turned to him. Most people at the facility were unaware of the test subjects, and even Fara McManus didn’t know about the ones in the subbasement.
“The-the-the… the what?” Corcoran said.
“You know who I’m talking about.”
“No, I-I don’t.”
“We’re not alone. The rest of our team is moving through the hospital right now. We’re going to find them. If you tell me now, maybe it’ll keep some of your people from getting hurt in the process.”
“Find them? Who are you? What do you want?”
“I told you what we want. You took them. We’re here to take them back.”
“Back? Take them… back?” The initial shock was wearing off and Corcoran’s head reeled with questions. This was the gunfire they’d heard. Where was security? What did they want with the test subjects? Could this man mean they want to set them free? Is that why they’d come? He couldn’t let that happen. “Take them back to where? To what?”
“What is he talking about?” Caleb said to Corcoran, barely above a whisper.
Eileen frowned at him. “What homeless people?”
He ignored them.
“Where are they?” the gunman said.
Corcoran took in a deep breath, tried to steady his voice. “Look, um, listen to me, you can’t… those people can’t leave here. They’re test subjects. They’re infected.”
Eileen slipped off of Ira’s lap and stood. “You’re using human test subjects?” she said after a collective gasp from the others.
“Infected with what?” the man said.
“A virus. A virus that I created, that we developed here. If you let them out, that virus… it’ll spread. You can’t do that.”
“What virus?”
Corcoran was horrified to hear himself laugh. It was a tense, frightening sound. “We don’t have time to go into that now. You have to stop your team. They can’t let those people out or we could all get the virus.”
The man tossed a glance at his companion. “Should I call him?”
“Call him, dammit,” the other man said. “Right now!”
The man turned away from Corcoran as he got on his phone.
The other man turned to Corcoran and said, “Where are they?”
“Second floor.”
Corcoran finally steeled himself and looked at his party guests. They were all staring at him in shock. Not at the men with the guns, but at him, at Corcoran, as if he had eclipsed the fact that they were all being held at gunpoint.
Corcoran said to the masked man standing in front of him, “You say your team is going through the whole hospital?”
“Yes.”
“Does, uh… does that include the basement?”
“Already there. The basement, subbasement.”
“Jesus Christ, the subbasement?” Corcoran said in a tremulous whisper.
The man’s attention was on his partner, who was speaking quietly on the phone.
“You’ve got to stop them,” Corcoran said. “Keep them from going into the subbasement. You have to!” The man did not seem to be paying that much attention to him. “Do you hear me? I’m serious, you can’t let them—”
The man turned on him angrily, raised his gun, and touched the barrel to Corcoran’s cheek. “I will shoot you.”
Corcoran found himself out of breath, as if he’d been running. He turned to his party guests and met their shocked gazes, their looks of condemnation.
He turned away from them and lowered his head.
He wasn’t sure how or why, but suddenly, everything seemed to be falling apart.
8
Hank quickly turned off the light in his room, got down on his knees and peered over the bottom edge of the window. He hoped they wouldn’t notice him right away so he could watch them, see what they were up to.
As the man with the camera turned slowly and captured the whole ward on video, the other man shouted, “We’ve come to help you! You’re the reason we’re here. We’ve come to get you out of here. Please cooperate so we can get you out of the building as quickly as possible.”
Help? They’d come to help? Well, it seemed to Hank, as he shuddered at the chills that passed through him in waves, that these boys were just a tad fuckin’ late. And the way that guy was talking, you’d think he expected them to do a happy dance because they were there. Who the fuck did they think they were, anyway? Shooting their way in after Hank had been there for—
He didn’t know how long he’d been there. Others were already there when he arrived. Some of them had been taken away by the people in the protective suits and had never come back again. Who knew how long they’d been locked up in this place, given pills and injections, treated like some kind of deadly poisonous snake. Hank didn’t think these guys were going to be too popular in the ward.
The man who had spoken went to the first door on his right and discovered it was locked with a simple dead bolt. He turned the latch, opened the door, then went to the next one. He made his way all the way around the donut to Hank’s room.
No one came out of the rooms. They were in there, Hank could see some of them, dark shapes in the small, shadowy rooms, but they didn’t come out. Not yet.
Hank dropped down below the window and drew his knees to his chest, his back to the corner.
The lock made a clack sound, and was pushed open. But no one came inside.
Hank waited and listened as his fingers dug into his knees.
One of the men made an inarticulate sound of surprise, then said, “Oh, no, no, wait, we’re here to help you. We’re not going to—Hey! No, wait, don’t-hey! Call for some backup!”
The other man was already talking to someone. His voice stayed low at first, so Hank couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he spoke to someone rapidly.
The first man shouted, “Hey, no, no, NO! Goddammit, you’re gonna—”
He fired his gun once, then screamed. It was high and shrill and full of terror first, then pain, too, and it seemed it would go on forever, until it came to a strangled halt.
The other man began to shout. “Just get somebody up here now for Chrissakes right now or we’re gonna—” Then he cried out in pain and there was another gunshot, and another. He screamed for a moment, but his voice was cut off sharply.
There was a rush of movement then, and a bit more screaming, although it sounded garbled and distorted. And shuffling, rattling sounds. Hank suspected they were taking all the weapons from the men in black. That was what he would do. It went on for some time, but he had no idea how long. It went on until it stopped.
