Dead Mann Running (9781101596494) (31 page)

When we reached the warehouse district, I made a left and saw the gargantuan tin box I’d called home. Before I slowed, I scanned the alleys and roofs for our missing player. Nothing. The brakes gave off a final mouse squeak. I took a long last look before stepping out.

“End of the line, end of the world,” I said. “Everybody out.”

Booth exited, but not wanting to touch them, waited for his men to yank Green and Maruta from their seats. Trucks and a few cars appeared down the road. A helicopter swooped over the warehouse, its light shining down on us.

Booth answered the question before I could ask. “They’re ours. All of them.”

“Can I call my people now?” Maruta asked. “This is not the sort of operation you want to delay any more than absolutely necessary.”

Booth shook his head. “We’ll wait for the CDC to unpack. A Dr. Alice Dixon will be coordinating.”

“Dixon’s second rate!” Maruta said, her voice like the bark of an annoyed lapdog. “Tell them, Colby, tell them she’s no good.”

But Green was sniffling and peering guiltily at Nell. He looked…hollow.

As the rest of the good guys pulled up and Maruta’s protests fell on deaf ears, I walked over to Nell. “You want to tell me exactly what happened with you and Colby? Some new perversion didn’t sit right?”

“Just leave it,” she said.

Nell wasn’t talking to me, so I went up to the leader of the chakz. Jonesey had taken to watching and chuckling. Between that and Green’s quiet sobs, we were running the gamut of human emotion. There’d been something bugging me about him, anyway.

“Hey, I’ve got a sense of justice, or at least revenge, that keeps me going. You already know there’s no cure in those vials. What’s keeping you from going feral?”

He raised his eyebrows, a fleck of something fell off,
hair or skin. “You already know the answer to that one, Hess.”

I gave up. “Right. Kyua. Look, Nell says they’ve got like chak refuges north of the border. Doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Maybe when this is done you can herd your merry rebel band up that way.”

He shook his head. “Thanks, Hess. But Kyua will not disappoint.”

He reminded me of the guy stuck on his roof during a flood. A raft, a boat and a helicopter came, but he refused their help, saying God will provide. After he drowned, he went to heaven and asked God why He didn’t provide, and God said, “What are you talking about? I sent you a raft, a boat and a helicopter.”

By then the CDC trailer and mobile lab had arrived. They put plastic sheets, inflatable tunnels and filters over the outside of the building. It was hard to tell who Dr. Dixon was, since they were all wearing the same heavy bio-safety suit with hood and gas mask. They even forced the rest of us into those suits—chakz, too, for fear we might be carriers. Every time someone pointed Dixon out I lost her in the crowd until I realized she was the one with the big red X on her back.

ChemBet’s boffins were on their way, but Dixon didn’t think it was a good idea to wait for them. Once Maruta and Booth were suited up, I was given the nod.

I entered the puffy plastic bubble covering the entrance, then pulled the door open along the wheels. The metal squealed long and loud. All sorts of lights pierced the interior.

“Welcome to Shangri-la,” I said.

Inside, the only guardians of humanity’s destruction were some water rats. They scampered into the remaining shadows, their fat bodies followed by flashlight beams.

“We’ll have to exterminate once we’re finished,” one of the suits said. “The whole block at least.”

Looking like the Pillsbury Doughgirl in her suit, Maruta shoved her way next to me. “I hope you didn’t just leave them lying around, Detective. You did use some sort of cushioning?”

Rather than answer, I made my way to the cinder block where I’d left the vials. I tried to stick my hand in, but the gloves made it impossible. Dixon handed me a set of tongs and cautioned me to go slowly. I poked it in, felt around…

And found nothing. My eyes popped wider than they’d been since I’d died.

“Gone?” Maruta said, sounding genuinely flummoxed.

Booth stared at me. “You sure this is the right place?”

“Yes!” I said.

Booth grabbed Maruta, loosening the seals on both his suit and hers.

“Did you take it?” he said. “You bring us here to ambush us?”

“Excellent idea,” she said with a girlish giggle. “If I’d known the vials were here, I might have thought of it.”

He spun back my way. “Who else knew about this place?”

“You, me, Penny, and Green, but I doubt he’d have shown up personally to kill me if he had the vials to play with. Bad Penny followed me to Green’s thinking
I
still had them.”

“Anyone else? Anyone who knew you well enough to guess how you’d play it?”

I thought about it. Flashes of my long-lost assistant stepping from a taxi outside this very warehouse appeared in my head.

“Just…Misty. She could second-guess me easy. But why would she…?” She wouldn’t, unless someone lied to her. And then I realized…“Penny was hiding with me when she called. We struggled over the phone. She could have seen Misty’s number, called her to try to get to me.”

I felt for my cell phone, but didn’t have it anymore.

Booth pulled out his. “What’s her number?”

“I don’t know…I can’t remember,” I said.

“You
have
to remember!”

“I can’t.”

“Wait a minute,” Jonesey said. “I’ve got it.”

The bio-safety suit pointless now, he pulled it half off and fished out his phone. His face was lit an eerie blue by the screen as he checked his contacts. “Whoa, haven’t used that one in a while. But it’s still three on the speed dial.”

He pressed the number, then tossed me the phone.

Two rings later, a shaky voice answered. “Jonesey? I heard what you’ve been doing. I want you to know you’re right. It’s all going to be okay. I’ve got it. I’ve got the cure. I’m going to see Chester again.”

“Misty…”

“Hess?”

“Where are you?”

“Where am I? Where have you been? You abandoned me!”

“Long, long story. Listen carefully. That blue stuff is not a cure for anything. It’s
extremely
dangerous. Put it down and get away from it.”

She gave off a tired laugh. “Too late for your fairy tales, dead Mann. Kyua already warned me you’d say something like that.”

The line didn’t go dead, but a thud told me Misty dropped the phone. That tired laugh came again, then grew fainter. I screamed her name until the sound of her laughter faded completely.

Y
ou’ve got to love resources when people know how to use them. The CDC had been tracking the call since Jonesey dialed. Misty’s cell was located before Booth ripped the phone out of my cold dead hand. Dixon handed Booth a touchpad with a map grid. Misty was a blinking red light in the middle.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“Looks like the woods,” Dixon said. “The closest building is labeled Tuke’s. I’m not from around here. Does that mean anything to you?”

I knew the name, but before I could answer, Rebecca Maruta gasped. She slapped a smile on her face and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but her lips twitched as if she were working hard to keep the grin in place.

We all stared at her, but I asked the question. “Something you want to tell us?”

She gave a single quick shake of her head, no.

“You really think this is a good time for keeping secrets?”

No reaction. I doubted torture would work. She might enjoy it. Regardless, there wasn’t time to get it out of her. The longer we waited, the farther Misty would get from her phone.

We ran back to the cars, Booth driving this time, speeding actually. Green hadn’t moved fast enough, so Jonesey wound up stuck next to Maruta in the back, making for an even more awkward couple. Booth had one hand on the wheel, using the other to radio commands to whoever would listen.

I wasn’t going to stop him, except to say, “Make sure they understand she doesn’t know what she’s doing, Tom. It’s Chester, it’s the drugs. Go easy on her. We both know who Kyua is.”

“Fucking ninja midget. You were with her how long before you finally figured out she was a liveblood?”

Maruta shivered again and this time spoke up. “The raggedy you brought from the overflow camp? She was with you in the lab?”

I wheeled back. “What do you know? You really want a world full of chakz? Help us!”

Her face went blank, her eyes defiant. I started fishing, hoping to hit a nerve. “You didn’t even know she was a liveblood. Too many subjects to look each one over? She knew the lab well enough to think she’d get in and out. Disgruntled employee? Do you have any
gruntled
employees? She military? A lover? Part of your bedroom antics with Travis? One of your experiments?”

Nada. I listed back into the passenger seat, my gut vibrating like it was filling with boiling oil. I looked longingly
at Booth’s half-full bottle of Mylanta, wishing antacid could work on the dead.

Once we left Fort Hammer, the road was lightless. Everything else, like my body, was a shade of gray. Maruta had closed her eyes, pretending to sleep, but not doing a good job of it.

There were two possibilities, one bad, the other worse. Either Penny didn’t know what the vials were, or she did. What was her angle in this? What was she?

An experiment. I’d said it by accident, but it made sense. Penny was sure as hell unusual. Was she one of those liveblood volunteers Maruta said was so hard to come by? Had they turned her into something in between dead and alive?

Jonesey’d been remarkably quiet, probably focused on
bearing witness
. He was looking curiously at the end of his arm where his hand used to be, his eyes filled with the opposite of my father’s shame.

Please don’t look at it.

“Tuke’s mean anything to you, J? Some kind of Kyua holy spot like Stonehenge?”

He rotated the stub into a new position, fascinated by the dangling shards of dry flesh. “Nah. Kyua works in some fucking mysterious ways.”

Minutes later, two tapered columns and the angled roof between them broke up our view of the stars. When I first heard the name I thought Misty was planning on committing herself, but the Samuel Tuke’s Psychiatric Hospital would be a pretty weird choice for a lower-class city girl.

Pilgrim State in New York was the world’s largest. Tuke’s came in fourth or fifth, booking ten thousand patients
in its heyday. New drugs, coupled with the personal-responsibility ethos of the Reagan era, reduced Tuke’s population to a few out-of-their-mind relatives that the wealthy wanted to keep out of sight.

Ahead and to the right its weighty shadow loomed, but before we reached the grounds, Booth, following the signal, pulled off the road. He grabbed the touchpad and I snagged a flashlight from the glove compartment. As Jonesey and Maruta exited, a weaving line of lights and vehicles stopped behind us. We didn’t wait for them.

He walked. I followed. The water vapor from his mouth was thick as cigar smoke. We climbed over fallen trunks and branches left over from the last storm, and crunched the frozen leaves that had the blessing of being allowed to turn back to dirt.

A large entourage developed in our wake: police, the CDC, and all our special guests. Maruta glided along stiff-backed, exhaling in regular puffs, obviously struggling with something inside. I guess every pain fascinated her equally, including her own. Green’s breath dribbled from closed lips. The cold seemed to have braced him. At least he wasn’t sobbing anymore. Nell was a graceful ghost, her skin the same color as the stars. Jonesey could’ve been a Boy Scout on a hike. Like me, no vapor came from their mouths. When we chose to breathe, it went out as cold as it went in.

The woods ended with a vengeance in a flat, open area bordered on the far end by the massive bulk of the hospital. The space was cleared on purpose and kept that way. I couldn’t figure out why the hospital would need such a large field until my foot landed on something hard
and rectangular. Aiming the flashlight I saw a small stone etched with a date and a number. A burial marker. Looking around, I realized it was one of thousands. We were in Tuke’s graveyard, its disenfranchised patients buried without names.

Booth stopped, bent down, and scooped up Misty’s phone. He pressed some buttons on it.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Last few were from an Unknown Caller, otherwise, Jonesey, you, O’Donnell, and a Mary Sanford.”

“Mary was her sponsor,” I said. “I don’t see her knowing much about any of this.”

He dialed a number, asked for a trace on the line, and got an answer in under a minute. “The unknown calls are from a prepaid phone, purchased three nights ago at a convenience store back in Chambers. I’ll have some men get ahold of the owner and check the security cameras, but we already know who made the calls.”

Most of the hospital windows were dark, but a few were glowing yellow, so I trudged toward the light. When everyone hesitated, I called back, “Where else would she go?”

The nearer we got, the more Maruta slowed. I slipped from the lead and went dead until she passed. Coming up from behind, I gave her a shove I hoped would startle her.

“Hello, Detective,” she said without looking.

“Afraid you’ll wind up a patient, or is there someone in there you don’t want to see?”

“Push me harder,” she said.

I did, nearly taking her off her feet, making her lab coat and blouse bunch up. “The sadomasochistic foreplay may make Booth uncomfortable, but I’m a chak,
remember? No sense of shame or sex, thanks to your late husband.”

“You’d be surprised how little you know about yourself,” she said.

Before she could finish adjusting her clothes, I shoved her forward again.

“Wouldn’t be the first time, but there’s lots of chakz and only one of you. Makes you the bigger mystery. Does cutting up chakz get you off because it makes you feel in control, or is that dominatrix thing a mask for something else?”

She sighed. “When a child tears apart a bug is it cruelty or curiosity? Maybe I think if I keep peeling things back, I’ll find something worthwhile.” She spun to face me. “Want a peek under the hood?”