Ann Marie's Asylum (Master and Apprentice Book 1) (8 page)

Besides the usual refuse and junk, Ann Marie spotted the distinct emerald green color of money in the mix of trash. Apparently her mom was doing her best to toss away a considerable number of twenty and fifty dollar bills. They were spilling out of a white envelope along with a handwritten letter. Lori tried to grab the envelope and finish its journey to the dumpster.

“What the hell are you doing! Mom, that’s money for God’s sake!”

Lori held the letter and envelope back from her daughter, who was trying to grab them.

“Hey!” objected Ann Marie when she noticed the name of the addressee. “That letter is addressed to me. That’s my money, mom!”

“Believe me, you don’t want this money.”

“Considering I’m the one paying the bills, maybe I do!”

“Fine,” her mom said in a tone of forfeit. “I’ll give you the money and letter and I’ll explain everything.” She started to hand her daughter the letter and stack of bills.

“Who is the letter from anyway? Is it from a rich uncle I didn’t know about?” The moment Ann Marie saw her father’s name on the return address, she looked straight at her mom and said, “Oh. It’s from him.”

Then, in a quick and somewhat violent maneuver, Lori Bandini grabbed the letter right out of her daughter’s hand. She started to rip it into tiny pieces. Her hands worked in a fury to tear the thing up before her daughter could stop her.

“What are you doing! Stop it mom!” Ann Marie tried to pull the remaining shreds of paper away but it was too late. The letter from her father had become a scattered mess in the breeze. Most of the money had spilled out and was starting to blow away.

“I’m sorry, baby, but I had to.”

“You’re crazy! You practically attack me to keep from reading something. What’s wrong with you!”

“I’m sorry, but I had to.”

“Bullshit! Why? How many letters has he sent that you’ve kept from me?”

“This is the first.”

“You’re such a liar, mom! I’m never believing anything you tell me ever again.”

“I understand,” said Lori soberly. “But, I had to.”

“Why? So you can keep me under control?”

“I’m sorry. But I had to.”

“You’ve been lying to me about my own father. For how long?”

“I’m sorry,” her mom said, gazing off at the night sky. “I’m doing what it takes to protect you.”

After that, Lori walked back into the apartment as though nothing had happened. Even with her daughter still asking questions, she poured herself a tall glass of bourbon and got out her pack of cigarettes. She had a vacant, dissociated expression. As she started to drink, it looked like she was on automatic pilot.

“Mom, are you OK?”

Lori just sipped from her glass as though she couldn’t hear the question.

“Mom, I’m not gonna just let this go the way I always do. I want you to tell me what the hell is going on here. Why did you tear up that letter?”

Lori didn’t answer.

“I know you’ve never told me the truth about him,” Ann Marie went on, sounding somewhat sympathetic. “I didn’t believe you when I was six, when you told me he was on a humanitarian mission in Ethiopia. I also didn’t believe you when I was ten and you told me he was part of a secret government space program and he was on his way to Planet Krypton but I let it go. I’ve let it all go. All the wild stories about him that don’t add up, I let you get away with it.”

Still silent, Lori took an even bigger swig of her bourbon.

“I let you go on all your bullshit because I always had the feeling that you were doing it for my own good. Now, that’s over. I am an adult and I earn a living for us. You’re going to explain everything to me right this second. Then we’re going to deal with it.”

Her face blank, Lori stood up from the table. Without even looking at her daughter, she picked up her glass of bourbon and walked into the bedroom. She slid the door closed. The last thing Ann Marie heard from her mother that night was the sound of the door locking.

...

Late the following afternoon, Ann Marie was working by herself in her lab when the security alarm in the hallway started to flash and roar. The Asylum’s automated computer voice called out into every hallway in the building, saying, “Security breach. Asylum Laboratory security breach. Lock down all labs and experiments. Intruder on laboratory grounds.” The last part of the alarm message in particular added to her anxiety. She closed and secured the door to her lab and walked out, toward the main entrance. All the lights in the hallways were flashing red.

When Ann Marie got outside the building, a man she had never seen before was pointing a shotgun and crying. The shotgun was aimed right at Dade Harkenrider. Twenty-five heavily armed security men from the corporation had the entire scene surrounded. The soldiers were ready to shoot the gunman dead on the spot. She realized it was Dade telling them not to shoot.

“Don’t kill him!” shouted Harkenrider to the halo of security around. “Let me talk to him.”

The intruder kept his gun fixed on Dade and walked a few steps closer. “El Diablo!” he shouted at Dade while sobbing. “El Diablo!” The man held the sight of the gun up to his face to get a better bead on Dade. The Spanish-speaking man was dressed in rags and looked like he had just crossed the entire Pacific Ocean. He had makeshift shoes made out of various layers of duct tape. “El Diablo!”

The Sheriff pushed his way through the armor cladded security force and pointed his chrome revolver at the man. “Dade,” he started to ask with his gun aimed at the intruder, “what are you doing? Let us take this guy down.”

“No,” snapped Dade, who kept an unrelenting eye contact with the armed intruder. He noticed Ann Marie across the courtyard and told The Sheriff to protect her. “Take care of the kid,” he told him. “Keep Ann Marie safe. Everything is fine here.”

The Sheriff directed five members of the security team to surround Ann Marie. The ring of soldiers encircled her so tightly that it became difficult to even see the man with the gun. She yelled, “Please don’t shoot!”

“Dade,” called out the Sheriff, “you know that I’m not going to let this guy shoot you. If he doesn’t put that god damed gun down in about ten-seconds, we’re gonna unload on him.” At that point, flying security drones started to spin overhead like miniature helicopters, sending red laser beams over the gunman’s body.

Then Dade Harkenrider did something that shocked Ann Marie. With his eyes fixed on the barrel of the intruder’s gun, he sat down on the grass in front of him. The armed man didn’t know what to do. It seemed clear that he wasn’t ready to execute a man on the ground. He tried to keep the gun aimed but one could see the trepidation.

“What seems to be the trouble?” Harkenrider asked him calmly while he crossed his legs on the grass like a relaxed yogi. He even took off his sunglasses.

“My daughter!” the man shouted as he remembered the gun in his hands. “She disappear! You take her and make her like others!”

Dade softly nodded as though he understood the man’s accusation.

“She has become black eyes!” the man shouted. “Not my daughter! Black eyes! She tried to hurt her own mother!” Through his tears, he studied Dade’s face and found something that made his grip on the gun relax. “So many disappear! So many change!”

“I know,” Dade told him. “I know something is happening. I’m sorry about your daughter but I’m not the one you’re looking for.”

“She was so sweet, so good,” the man said before he started crying so hard that he couldn’t keep the gun pointed.

The Sheriff and the rest of the security force started to close in. “Weapons down!” shouted Dade. “Don’t hurt him!” Dade’s voice got quiet and took on a sympathetic quality. He told the man, “The sweet, the good, that’s what it’s trying to destroy. I’m sorry that it got to your daughter.”

“What can I do for her? I will do anything.”

“Never go near her again,” Dade answered. “She isn’t the same.”

“Do you know who did this to her?”

Dade nodded to the man, saying, “I’m working on it.”

The Sheriff came up from behind and slipped the shotgun out of the man’s hands. The crying man barely noticed and just stood there staring at Dade. “I hear bad things about you,” he said. “I heard you were demon or Brujo.”

Dade smiled for a moment and said something that left the man shaken. He said, “I don’t think either term is appropriate. I’m just a monster.”

...

After it was all over and the Sheriff let the man go, Ann Marie went upstairs to find Dade in his lab. He was at his computer, paging through electronic copies of news articles about local disappearances.

“What the hell was that all about?” She asked him.

“Oh. That. It’s a problem.”

“Do you know what happened to the man’s daughter?”

He considered the question carefully. “I’m afraid I do,” he said. “You know how I have my secret life with the tank. Well, there are others. Only these others don’t care about what we care about. They aren’t looking to the other side for answers. They’re only looking for power.”

“Like an evil sorcerer or something?”

“Something like that.”

She told him, “I guess that makes you one of the good ones. A white sorcerer.”

“Far from it,” argued Dade. “I practice neither black nor white magic. What I do is a technology that I use for my own individual purposes. I don’t strive to be a member of a club.”

“Do you know anything about who’s behind it?”

“It’s a group of some kind. It’s extremely rare to find a shaman powerful enough to do this all on his or her own.”

“Like the group I saw on my first day. They had a little boy floating in the air. There were maybe a dozen of them.”

He said, “Those are the suspects at the top of the list.”

“The woman in the woods,” remembered Ann Marie. “She said something about a man teaching them.”

That got Dade’s attention. “What did she say about him?” He asked with some insistence. “Did she call him by name?”

“No,” she said. “You ask that like you have someone in mind.”

“There’s someone that I hope it isn’t.”

“You’re scaring me,” Ann Marie told him. “The woman also said that he was going to
teach
me, whatever that means.”

Dade couldn’t hide his concern but he reassured her. “There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.”

Chapter 5

The Camel Spider

Bander Al Zahrani stared at the ceiling tiles above his small, rickety cot. The grey light of morning was starting to sneak through the gaps in the wooden planks that boarded up the mosque windows. His head was spinning. He had no idea how he had ended up in the strange place. He wasn’t Muslim and this was his first time ever inside a mosque. The only reason he figured out it was a mosque was the Arabic writing and artwork on the walls. He was all by himself in the place, which had to have been abandoned for years.

He tried to figure out how he had arrived, but the effort just made his head throb. It took quite a bit of concentration to even grasp the syllables of his own name. Had someone drugged him? The last thing he remembered was talking to a pleasant older gentleman at the bar by his apartment. The man had a fedora hat and hummed some kind of old-sounding tune. That was all Bander could remember.

Suddenly, just outside one of the boarded-up windows, he heard what he thought sounded like rats scurrying around. The noise got scratchier and more intense as he focused on it. Then the scratching was everywhere. It sounded like an army of termites trying to chew its way inside. The strange noise climbed the walls around him and intensified.

Something was trying to break inside the mosque. It was ripping through one of the boards on the window by his cot. Just as the window became compromised, a ruby-red line of laser light scanned Bander like an item in the grocery store. Then all the wooden boards started dropping off the side of the mosque. Something was ripping them out by the nails.

The blinding morning sun came pouring in. Along with the sunlight, a blur of what looked like rat-sized black preying mantises started to fill the floor of the mosque. He thought that he might be hallucinating the metal scorpions but the Asylum Corporation drones were indeed all around him. Twenty or so of the little metal creatures linked arms and formed a chain. They wrapped up Bander like a spider’s meal.

He screamed, “No! Please! I didn’t do anything! I was just at a bar and woke up here!”

One of the DeathStalkers positioned itself by Bander’s ear and started playing an audio recording of the president of the United States. “You have been convicted of acts of domestic terrorism,” said the recording. “You have waived any right to a trial, contact with a lawyer or any investigation.”

“Please! I’m not a terrorist!” Bander shouted at the machines.

The recording went on, “The United States of America apologizes if you have been unfairly charged. However, there is no process for appeal. We apologize for any loss or inconvenience our error might cause. The Asylum Corporation assumes no liability in event of an error. Your country appreciates your commitment to freedom.”

“No!”

The drones put a black hood over his head and tied it snuggly around his neck. Another twenty or so little creatures lifted their quarry above their heads. Bander was taken out of the room like he was crowd surfing.

...

At the Asylum Laboratory, a motorcade of ten military vehicles pulled up to the front. A small platoon of soldiers exited and started to secure the area. The agent in charge told the Sheriff, who was waiting in front, “I need to speak with Dr. Harkenrider immediately.”

The agent had been sent by the Central Intelligence Agency to take charge of the interrogation of Bander Al Zahrani. The session was to take place in one of the laboratory’s special experimental interrogation facilities.

“The kid stays,” Dade said firmly to the commanding intelligence agent when they met in the secure conference room a few minutes later. Ann Marie even stood up and offered to leave, but her boss was quite insistent that she remain. “If you want me to cooperate and not get in the way of whatever plans you have,” he told the agent, “the kid stays.”