Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) (26 page)

The man in the trucker hat fought as hard as he could to escape but the blood made the door latch too slippery to grasp. Ivy just looked at him for a moment. Then she smirked at him, saying, “You’re going to help me practice.”

The man in the trucker hat fought even harder to get out the door but everything was too slippery. He tried screaming for help.

Ivy closed her eyes and put her palms together in a sort of meditation. She started to hum a tune like the one that Bernard had taught her earlier. The man started calling out for God to save him.

At that point, Ivy’s entire body started to fade and become transparent. There was a loud snap and she was gone.

Suddenly, the man in the trucker hat exploded into bloody bits and a fine mist. A tropical rainstorm of blood painted the entire inside of the truck. Ivy had teleported inside the man and now, she was bursting through what was left of his body. When she realized what she had accomplished, her bloody face radiated a sense of accomplishment.

“I did it!” She shouted, wiping pieces of the man off her face. “I teleported through matter! Even Dade Harkenrider can’t do that!”

The little boy covered his face with his hands. He was petrified beyond the effort for a third escape attempt. The dead man’s son just cowered in the far corner of the truck. When Ivy looked at him, he began to hyperventilate. Just as he opened his mouth to let out a tidal wave of a scream, he fainted.

Ivy picked him up and brought the passed out little boy out of the truck on her right shoulder. She was amazed at her new physical strength and the ease with which she picked up the boy. Blood was draining from the doors of the truck onto the pavement. She cradled the boy in her arms.

Holding the thirteen-year-old boy like an infant, she walked down the dilapidated stretch of LA road, toward the oversized moon on the horizon. “You don’t need to be afraid anymore,” she whispered to the kid. He was still fast asleep. “I promise that we’re going to take good care of you. My King and I are going to make everything better. I promise.”

The boy suddenly woke up, saw Ivy’s face and began screaming. She set him down and he ran away as fast as he could without looking back.

Chapter 15

Hydrofluoric

The following evening after work, Ann Marie met her mom at the Pink Pelican. Lori Bandini was already waiting, sitting in their usual booth when her daughter arrived. A storm was headed toward Palos Verdes and the wind was throwing chunks of palm tree around outside. In the distance off the coast, lightning lit up the guts of black clouds. When Ann Marie sat down, she heard a crash of a wave followed by the loud hiss of the surf coming up the beach.

“Wow,” she said to her mom. “The ocean sounds like it’s going to come into the restaurant any second.” She looked out the window, toward the black ocean. Her mom wasn’t paying attention and was instead focused on a message coming through on her mobile phone. “Is it the mystery man?” Ann Marie asked her. “Normally you at least notice when I sit down.”

“I’m sorry,” Lori said without looking up from the phone. “He’s just so funny. The man has the most devilish sense of humor.”

“Does this mean you’re in love?” Asked Ann Marie in an unsmiling tone. “Again?”

“This is different. Not like those jackasses Bobby and Petey. They were little boys. It’s a whole different thing being with a man, an actual man.”

“I take it that you’re serious with this guy then.”

“I want it to be,” Lori said, “but I don’t know how he feels. We’ve been seeing a lot of each other but,” she hesitated, “it’s been very physical. Very physical. The man is obviously hot for me but I don’t know where we stand.”

Ann Marie had no direct experience to guide her in giving advice, so she decided to just ask basic questions. “Have you talked to him about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because we haven’t had time.”

“Huh?”

“He never takes his hands off of me long enough to ever talk about anything.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Ann Marie, not hiding her disgust at the imagery. “Maybe that’s the problem.”

Lori Bandini considered her daughter’s point before taking a swig of her vodka tonic. “I don’t know where the time with him goes. Sometimes it’s like a dream. I have to remember to force myself to bring it up next time.”

“How hard is it to remember to bring up the status of your relationship?”

“It is quite hard when he starts doing what he does.”

“Stop it, mom.”

“I think I might be in love. I love the way he talks. I love how smart he is. I love everything about him. I even love his dog and I don’t even like dogs. Some kind of strange breed. Goes with him everywhere. I don’t remember what he called him. Cutest little thing. He wants to take us all over the world, baby.”

“I’m glad you’re happy, mom. You deserve something nice coming your way.”

“I do. Don’t I.” She answered. “I guess I never really thought that I deserved a nice man. I was convinced they died out in the eighteen hundreds. You’re not going to be mad if I get married. Are you?”

Ann Marie tried not to show her discomfort at the idea. Instead, she used the opportunity to take a break from the conversation. “The waitress is taking forever,” she said. “I’m gonna go to the bar for my soda.”

When she got to the bar, the young man behind the counter seemed to recognize her. Her mom had made her a regular at the place apparently. He smiled, saying, “It’s the genius girl.”

It made her uncomfortable and her eyes shied away from him. “Not so much, sometimes,” she said over the bar noise.

“What’s it like,” the young man started to ask, “working for Dr. Death?”

“He’s not...” She started to argue before abandoning the effort. “It’s OK. It’s a job.” She grabbed her diet coke. Something wanted her to keep Dade Harkenrider all to herself.

...

In the middle of the night, Bernard Mengel strolled across the grounds of the Asylum Corporation’s lower campus with his DeathStalker following close behind. Its eyes beamed red at Bernard as it studied his every move, waiting for Bernard to step even an iota out of line. The old man turned to face the drone and scowled at the machine in disgust. The drone seemed to shoot him a challenging look back, flashing its eyes in a way that certainly looked aggressive.

“I hate you, you god damned machine!” Bernard told it. “If only you were flesh and blood, I would take you bloody apart.”

A long, white spark shot out from the DeathStalker’s tail and struck Bernard in the scrotum. This sent him into a rage and he teleported ten feet away. He was met in a fraction of a second by the DeathStalker. Its red eyes peered back at Bernard as if to say:
you’re going to have to do better than that, old man
.

“You craven little bastard!” Bernard shouted as he reacted to the electric shock. “You’re as bad as your bloody creator!” He stopped in the middle of the courtyard and looked around at the neighboring black buildings. Bernard’s mind seemed to be calculating something. He looked at the drone, saying, “I’ve had about enough of you getting in the way of my fun.” Then he was visited by an idea that made a smile creep up in the corner of his mouth. The sign in front of him pointed to the Asylum Corporation Computer Foundry. He said, “Follow me, you infernal device.”

The microelectronic foundry was totally automated and, during that late hour, the machines were busy processing silicon wafers. Mechanical arms were dunking the fledgling computer processors into various chemical tanks. The shiny wafers, each about the size of a vinyl record, were passed between robotic stations like relay batons. It looked like the machines were performing a nighttime circus for the entertainment of no one.

Bernard walked through the automatic doors with the DeathStalker following only a few inches behind him. The drone scanned the room, catching every moving part of the factory. This sent its mantis-like head into a whirlwind twirl of motion. The DeathStalker checked back on Bernard every so often, but it seemed as though the factory environment had it confused.

“Follow me,” Bernard told it as he weaved through the photolithography machines and chemical tanks. His path seemed to lead nowhere. The DeathStalker’s eyes followed every move in the factory but stuck close to him. He stopped in front of a clear plastic tank of hydrofluoric acid, where silicon wafers were dunked for surface etching. The tank stood five feet above the floor. It had a mechanical lid that opened every fifteen seconds for the robot arms to submerge the wafers.

While Bernard stood in front of the hydrofluoric acid bath, one of the factory robots rolled over with a stack of silicon wafers. The lid to the tank flipped open to reveal the rather harmless looking clear liquid. Signs all over the area testified to the danger of the tank’s contents.

A long syringe with a needle thick enough for knitting was kept in a glass cabinet for the unlikely event of an exposure. The sign by the syringe read:
calcium gluconate, take within 2 minutes of exposure to avoid death
.

Just before the lid to the tank started to close, Bernard grabbed the DeathStalker by the kicking legs. It stung him with electric shocks all over his body. He kept a tenuous hold on the thing and very quickly, he got it to the top of the tank and dropped the drone inside. The lid closed and Bernard jumped onto the top of the tank. He held the lid closed with the entire weight of his body while the DeathStalker fought to free itself from the acid bath.

It splashed and kicked, before eventually sinking to the bottom. Bernard watched it through the clear plastic as its red eyes flashed with fury. It tried to rip through the walls but the acid had already circumvented its armor. The hydrofluoric acid was eating away at the DeathStalker’s microprocessor.

It stared back at Bernard as its red eyes grew evermore faint. Then, it just rusted at the bottom like wrecked ship.

Chapter 16

SpiderWebFace

“It’s probably just a glitch,” Ann Marie said to Dade as Asylum One drove them to the microelectronic foundry down in the lower grounds. She could tell he was frantic over his DeathStalker and wanted to make him feel better. “Maybe it’s just an antenna problem.”

“It’s a Bernard problem,” answered Dade without looking at her. “I know it.”

The truck pulled through the security checkpoint as they made their way to the computer factory. Dade didn’t take his eyes off the road. He seemed fanatical enough to teleport out the window before the truck even came to a stop.

Ann Marie asked him, “Do you really think Bernard could have gotten away from a DeathStalker? He couldn’t be fast enough? Could he?”

“If anyone could, it would be that bastard,” said Dade. Then, nearly growling, he added, “I pity Bernard if anything happened to my DeathStalker.”

When they arrived to the factory entrance, the moment the truck door opened, Dade disappeared. Ann Marie ran as quickly as she could to keep up with him, but his short teleporting bursts turned him into a nearly complete blur. When she made it through the various corridors, Dade had already found the DeathStalker. He was starting to sob as he pulled the top off of the hydrofluoric acid tank. Ann Marie had never seen him like that.

“Are you OK?” She asked him.

Without answering, Dade reached his entire arm into the tank of acid and pulled out the corpse of the DeathStalker. The acid immediately started turning Dade’s arm fire engine red but he didn’t even notice. He grabbed some tools from one of the benches and started to do surgery on his machine.

Ann Marie ran over shouting, “What are you doing! That’s HF! You’ll die!”

Dade opened one of the panels on the DeathStalker’s smoking metal underside and took out the battery. It was corroding and leaking red liquid. His hands started to shake. Then his entire body looked like it was going to spasm from the hydrofluoric acid exposure.

“You’re dying!” she yelled in a panic. “The acid is pulling all the calcium out of your body. You’re heart is going to stop!” She looked around and noticed the glass cabinet near the tank with the antidote.

Ann Marie broke the glass and removed the long, heavy gauge syringe from inside. “It’s calcium gluconate,” she said before jamming the needle into his shoulder.

At that point, Dade already looked pale and was starting to lose consciousness. Still, he wasn’t giving up on his machine.

“Thank you,” he said, realizing that he had just been stabbed with the antidote. His hands began to move more quickly with the tools. The normally shiny chassis of the DeathStalker had taken on a grey patina from the acid. Most of the inner components were badly damaged. It looked like a prehistoric insect, pulled dead out of some amber swamp. Its legs sprawled awkwardly on the table, the DeathStalker was still smoking from acid burns. Dade’s hands sped into a blur while he worked on the thing. Ann Marie stood by him, barely breathing.

For a moment, the DeathStalker’s red eyes flashed and Ann Marie got excited.

“I shielded the microprocessor for nuclear radiation,” Dade said, looking optimistic. “I think it could have stood up to the acid.” He connected a portable power supply to main onboard computer in the thing’s belly.

Suddenly, the DeathStalker’s eyes flared back to life and its legs started to kick in the air. With Dade’s help, it managed to flip itself upright. Its eyes flashed and its head whipped around as it calibrated to its environment. It scanned Dade and Ann Marie, making a pleasant chirping sound like a raccoon. Then it entered the final stage of its reboot. It remembered its mission and its target, Bernard Mengel. Still somewhat rusty and not fully reassembled, the DeathStalker leaped onto the floor. It looked like it intended to carry on with its mission right away.

“I don’t think so,” Dade told it. “You’re still in sick bay.”

“Bernard is unguarded,” said Ann Marie.

“I know.”

“He isn’t
that
dangerous, is he?”